I’ve been meaning to check this out for a while, and to be honest it wasn’t bad, give or take the fairly weak story line. Musically, I think the soundtrack manages to strike a good balance between modern and nostalgic, with more callbacks to the original run of 90s games happening in the gameplay rather than in the audio. On the downside however no particular artist here stands out, especially as I pored over the closing credits looking to remind myself of stand-out contributions and composers, none sprung to mind as worth noting down, which is a shame. Hey, it’s a good soundtrack. It just didn’t really excite me, personally.
I guess the best way to describe this would be to say that it is Troma’s take on the Rambo era of War films. Beginning uncannily in the same fashion as the pilot (lol) episode of Lost, Troma’s War quickly descends into a jungle-fever drenched bullet fest, with a dashing of casual racism and exposed breasts for completions sake. Did I really care what the fuck was going on? No. Did I enjoy watching it? Yes, absolutely.
Arnie in the Hunger Games, basically. Insert fire asf female accomplice, terrible bad guys and a pile of one liners and cigars, oh and the chief detective guy from Homicide: Life on the Street, and you’ve got The Running Man. Really, it kinda feels shitty to summarise it like that, but this is an 80s Arnie action movie, and its best to just watch the thing. Or not. LOL.
This has to be one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. I love watching awful movies (that is the whole point of this venture!) but this just fails to entertain. I mean, in all rights it should; it’s a tale about a boy (?) called Sukeban who looks like a girl so he goes to a girls school, dressed – rather convincingly – as a girl. There he meets a whole array of bizarre characters that are have no hesitation getting naked and violent. It is verrry weird, up to the point where his friend Kanko gets her legs chopped off by a masked female, and then it gets even weirder. A topless villain starts shooting bullets out of her tits. Similarly, Kanko’s stumps turn into guns and she starts gunning people down too. Sukeban grows tits (2020 edit: I think the actor already has tits to begin with but still). Everyone else has their tits out too. A bunch of naked chicks tie everyone up in chains and then a bunch of people die. Did I mention there were tits involved? All of this happens in under an hour, and by all rights it should be massively entertaining, even with the lack of English subs. Unfortunately however, the entire thing is so drab and badly edited that it is almost excruciating to watch. The lighting is awful and the choice of locations (almost entirely within a school) is dark and musty, but in the worst, most amateur way possible. The acting is (unsurprisingly) beyond saving and the fight choreography looks like it was cobbled together by the type of people who wear fedoras, drink lots of Monster energy and enjoy playing with toy lightsabers. Even for exploitation filming, this is abysmal. All DVD copies of this should be fired into the fucking sun.
