N-GIRLS VS. VAMPIRES (1999)

[Update 02/21/2021: need to redo this entire review and fix the screenshots.]

It says Takashi Miike on the credits, but you wouldn't know it just from watching it...all three fucking hours of it!!!! 

The story idea is pretty exciting: some teenage girls find out that a local modeling agency is run by vampires...vampires that only feed on the blood of virgins! That, plus Takashi Miike should equal awesome, but it isn't. It's pretty much terrible. First off, it's a TV movie(!) and secondly, there's giant chunks of time wasted on these girls just babbling on about God only knows what. It was torture.

There's no violence, the special effects are painfully horrible, zero tits, very little cussing and the performances by the actors are all shitty. The only saving grace of the entire disaster is there's numerous scenes shot out on busy city sidewalks and you can see pedestrians staring at the camera and just acting confused. I found that kinda funny, but not funny enough to enjoy this turd. Skip it. I would say for hardcore Miike fans only, but I am a hardcore Miike fan and I found this entire movie to be rubbish. Skip it.

Crew visible in reflection.

THE NAKED SPUR (1953)

I have a theory that every movie where Millard Mitchell has a substantial role is going to be an excellent film. So far my theory has held up - SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, THIEVES' HIGHWAY, WINCHESTER '73 - and now THE NAKED SPUR.

Jimmy Stewart is on the trail of a killer (Robert Ryan). He's tracked him to Colorado and with the help of two strangers (Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell) he captures the killer and his girlfriend (Janet Leigh). The killer quickly figures out that Stewart didn't tell the others about the $5,000 reward so he spills the beans in order to create a rift between his captors. The two want their part of the reward, so now these three armed men, one vicious killer and one confused female set off from the Rocky Mountains to Kansas.

The direction by Anthony Mann is great and the cinematography by William C. Mellor (A PLACE IN THE SUN, GIANT) is beautiful. Nothing life changing, but still a highly entertaining Western.  Double-feature with ALONG THE GREAT DIVIDE.

Mann - Stewart westerns:

WINCHESTER '73 (1950)
BEND OF THE RIVER (1952)
THE FAR COUNTRY (1954)
THE MAN FROM LARAMIE (1955)

PANDORUM (2009)

As with the majority of sci-fi survival/horror movies since ALIEN/ ALIENS the first 30 minutes of PANDORUM was exciting, cool and full of possibilities, but then the story sets in and it's just your standard running around the spaceship while being chased by some goofy looking humanoid creatures that you know are evil cause they twitch a lot and they always have their heads tilted sideways.

Hundreds of years from now Earth is all f'ed up so humans pack their shit on a huge spaceship and head out to distant Earth-like planet. While everybody hypersleeps there's just three people left aboard to take care of the entire ship (sounds like a good idea). One of the three goes nuts and kills the other two, then he, well I can't tell you, but everybody is asleep for a long, long time and when our hero wakes up at the beginning of the movie he doesn't know shit. That's pretty exciting and I really enjoyed the first 20 minutes, but soon it settles into your standard human vs. creatures on a spaceship story.

Worth watching, but there was zero gore, very little character development, no tension, zero tits and a lot of the action scenes had that superfast editing technique going on to where you have a some trouble figuring out what's going on. Also, the whole mental illness aspect was done in the same way that most movies do it with the twitching head and the backwards sound effects. Yawn.