Trash Menagerie

Dir. Barry J. Gillis The world is a pretty terrible place and many people do many terrible things. Violence constantly plagues us and oppression is omnipresent. This is not a thesis statement, but merely an observation, and a reductively pessimistic one at that, the appropriate response to which is probably, ‘Yeah, ok. So what?’ Barry J. Gillis doesn’t seem to be interested in the ‘how’ or the ‘why’ of it all. Or maybe he is, but with all the time in the world, he could not develop the filmmaking skills to properly communicate his ideas. To try to explain the plot of Wicked World would be a futile endeavor. Even if I could, the plot is irrelevant to the experience. And Wicked World is very much an experience. The film starts out as a slasher movie, albeit one that has been filtered through the mind of some extra-dimensional alien being. Groups of young people are killed by a middle aged man in a gas mask. He is able to walk right up to these people undetected until he actually t...

Dir. James Bryan James Bryan and Renee Harmon are dynamite. They’re magic. They're no slouches individually when it comes to low-budget exploitation, but paired together they are unstoppable. How else would you explain Lady Street Fighter? By all accounts it should be an unwatchable piece of crap. The plot makes no sense, the acting and dialogue are uniformly terrible, the action is clunky, and the eroticism is painfully awkward. But somehow Bryan and Harmon are instead able to turn these ingredients into a golden nugget of cinematic insanity that must be seen to be believed. The film opens with a woman being tortured to death by men trying to extract from her the location of a stuffed dog containing sensitive materials. The woman’s twin sister, Linda Allen, arrives in L.A. with said dog, apparently unaware of its significance and is promptly attacked by two thugs in a parking garage. One of the thugs drives a car into the other’s face, but luckily this leaves him only wit...