Dinner Rush

Dinner Rush (2001): Here is another low budget New York based flick. Danny Aiello plays the owner of a popular TriBeCa (lower Manhattan, near the village) Italian restaurant who has a bookmaking past. The entire movie takes place in the eatery (shot in the directors own restaurant) and the film is populated by a wide assortment of interesting characters. I first thought this was going to be an arty out of focus, plot by the numbers type of movie but was pleasantly surprised to find the characters took precedence over the plot which is a bit thin. One of his cooks is a compulsive gambler in debt to dem guys from Queens. The son is the talented and egocentric chef who wants to take over the place. Dem guys come to the restaurant to collect da debt and do a little leanin on da management if you get my drift and you betta or youse could get hoit. Throw in an interesting concoction of customers, wait staff and cooks and you get a very interesting 99 minutes. This is a bit like ‘Big Night’ another very good food/restaurant movie but with a little bit of ‘The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover’ thrown in for garnish. By the end of the night, everything works out but the constant interplay between the cast is outstanding. Acting is excellent across the board and the score fits into the movie very well. Diner Rush is highly recommended for a rental option. You can even admit to friends you saw this movie and not have to leave town. The movie is rated R for: excessive garnish, spilled tomato sauce, blood splatter, lack of fire exits, exit wounds, stiff pasta, lobster deaths, art critics, excessive intellectuals, clueless police, and for too much creamy sauce.

Timber Falls

Timber Falls (2007): Here is another story about seriously deranged redneck hillbilly white trash in West Virginia terrorizing some nice folks from the city, but this one is done better than average and has a few unusual angles going for it. This is about the umpteenth movie made about egregious hillbillies in West Virginia creating havoc so I think Hollywood needs to give that state a little break. Let’s go back to defaming people from Mississippi or Louisiana again just like in the good ole days.

It seems a nice city couple head for the hills of West Virginny for a week-end of hiking and other less mobile but still strenuous physical activities. After getting some directions from the local ranger station they run into a group of armed locals while they are taking a break from hiking and are earnestly involved with that other activity. They get out of that predicament without too much trouble and camp out overnight. Someone is watching them and the next morning while the girl goes for a swim she gets disappeared by a deformed mountain dweller. I think we’ve all seen this movie before but just as I was about to dismiss this effort, it lurched in an unexpected direction.

Sure, the guy and girl get captured and tied up, tortured and stuff, but then the ranger they had met the night before shows up at the house with a loony tune lady and the disfigured kidnapper all dressed up for a wedding! Goll durn if the local loonies aren’t going to marry the couple! I had to rewind and play that part it again; this was new territory for the Tapehead. The best line of the movie went to the ranger/reverend during the wedding ceremony by saying; “You can now kiss the bride……or I’ll cut her lips off.” It seems the local couple is VERY religious and is having trouble having kids. The one they did manage to pop out is our seriously demented, ugly as a porky pine’s bottom kidnapper. All her other efforts are kept is jars in the back room. So the religious couple comes up with plan B, to kidnap some people with better genes and have them deliver a baby. But since the victim couple was not married, they couldn’t have a child out of wedlock and so married them. Apparently they haven’t heard of adoption in rural West Virginia.

Now the guy has to impregnate his girlfriend or else. After both lose some lesser body parts for refusing to cooperate, the girl reveals she is several months pregnant by her boyfriend which means the kid was conceived out of wedlock. Well, this throws the religious couple into a real tizzy and during all the confusion; the semi-married couple manage to escape but not before just about everyone else in the cast expires with lots of anguish and serious arterial bleeding. Our escaping couple also loses more bodily fluids and amasses an unhealthy number of puncture wounds by the time they get back to civilization. The movie kidnapped an R for: multipurpose flammable moonshine, serious whipping, beating, and finger removal, bizzaro wedding, head removal, multiple gunshot wounds, bumulation and breastulation, and especially for the table the ingénue is frequently strapped to during the blessed event initiation activities.

Frontier

Frontier (2007): Wow, the Tapehead is really going to have to change his tune about French movies if they continue to make flicks like Frontier. Now before you run off to the video store, be forewarned this is a first class effort in terror and organ carving gore. If that isn’t your cup of ‘swill’, pass on this one. The story goes something like this: a group of French Moslem young people are enmeshed in a general riot while robbing a bank. One of them gets badly shot (which starts the bloodletting early) and has to be left behind. They split up and head for the country, planning to meet up at a hostel near the border with Holland but things don’t go quite as planned. They should know by now that you never ever go to a hostel in rural France and not surprisingly, spiff soon starts to happen. It turns out the inn is run by (stay with me on this now) a family of in-bred, cannibalistic, hard core Nazis led by a grandfather who looks remarkably like B-movie maven Roger Corman with a bad attitude and a nasty sneer. This segment of the master race appears to prefer living in a dirty run down abandoned mining installation. They also seem to have become somewhat mentally challenged by eating too much of ‘the other white meat’. We also meet a kidnapped mentally challenged pregnant woman who seems capable of giving birth to really defective kids who are consigned to crawling around in the mine and grabbing scraps off the things hanging in the larder (ugh). No matter, the master race continues to try and get her to come up with a pure Aryan storm trooper but they finally seem to get the idea that the new gal from our doomed group may have better genes. Cast mortality is appallingly high and most types of cutting devices imaginable are used by the movie’s end along with automatic weapons, shotguns and pistols. Throw in some tendon cutting, exploding heads, and a little propane explosion and you have the makings of a first class gore fest. The movie ends somewhat like the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” in that the lead ingénue stumbles out of the Nazi trauma center with a mind suitable for further institutionalizing. This plot has been done before (see Hostel) but this one is done well and by the end of the movie, you will be exhausted but probably unable to sleep. The movie is rated R for: hot Nazi lassies, nasty Nazi lads, geriatric sneering Nazis, exploding Nazis, wounded Nazis, dead Nazis, inappropriate use of a table saw, a salted and boxed Moslem, multiple dead people just hanging around, excessive pig generated mud, and especially for the cringe inducing tendon cutting scene.

Alien Abduction

Alien Abduction (2005): Not to be confused with any of the well done Alien movies or even with the rather bad “Alien Blood” or “Alien Apocalypse” this low budget morass has only a few good points going for it. Apparently two couples are on a camping trip and get picked up by some large lizard like aliens. They get the usual probing and gut removal found in these types of flicks but then the movie starts to diverge from the usual track and head in a totally unexpected direction. The lead ingénue wakes up in an army hospital with a bunch of mental defectives and is told most people returning from abductions have a lot of mental problems and that she is very lucky to be normal. This seems a plot device to get her out of her really brief camping outfit into an even briefer hospital gown. Fortunately she has great gams and is soon using them to wander around the wards without a pass. She soon finds her friends who seem to have found a new talent for drooling and babbling incoherently and all have strange scars on their foreheads just about where you would expect to get a lobotomy. Soon, everyone is chasing her and wanting to give her a lobotomy too. If she is functioning normally, why would they want to do that? Well, that’s not too clear at this point but the lady army officer (with an English accent) running the place seems to want her de-brained like the others.

Our lead ingénue uses her karate skills to lobotomize her nurse and escapes and finds out that some of the doctors are using slug like aliens with eggs and the large lizard like aliens with gooey impregnata juice to grow more….what----aliens?. Our star hides under a gurney in her gownlet, when a doctor comes in to milk the male alien and spills some (you know what….ugh…). and drips it all over our now damp hidden heroine. This is just another plot device to get her out of the gownlet and back into her shrunken camping outfit, but only after she takes the required shower and shows her assets to the camera. But hey, here is one of the unique touches to this film, she has no running water so uses the water in her canteen which she finds next to her camping outfit and does a near waterless spongy clean up. I haven’t seen that before so give the director a few points for originality on that one and it is one of the few bits of workable logic associated with this film.

Now it starts to get really confusing as our heroine finds out the army hospital is actually on the alien spaceship that abducted her. What???? And it appears that most of the staff is inhabited by the slug like creatures that control their bodies which may explain why they want to lobotomize her. But not everyone is like that since some seem to be real humans just working at a job. What the herpes is going on here anyway, did the humans miss the fact they are on a spaceship for heavens sake. Well, she finally gets caught again and finds out that the aliens have never killed any humans; they appear to be kept in sacks in the ship. Well goll durn, it they don’t show her a copy of herself in a sack so it turns out she is really an alien whose control connection didn’t seem to function. So if she is an alien, why do they want to lobotomize her? And why are they so brutal with their own kind if they are so careful with humans? This made no sense to me unless all the mental loonies are malfunctioning aliens. Any way, they fix her connection with a snip of scissors and she and her friends return to earth as secret aliens, part of a plot to take over the Earth. There’s another giant plot hole, if it was so easy to fix her why did they want to lobotomize her for most of the movie? Perhaps there would have been no movie without that extended chase scene? And if they are plotting on taking over the earth, why do they need to be so careful about keeping their abducted humans alive. At this point irrationality is leading logic by a score of 23-0!

This film had several good ideas buried in there somewhere but it seemed just beyond the director’s ability to fully abduct them and keep a logical story line going. Perhaps if I’d listened to the commentary it would have made more sense. This was not a complete wash out but wasn’t too good. The movie has abducted an R for: really short hospital gowns, really short shorts, really short logic, multiple lobotomies, multiple exploding heads, multiple drooling boyfriends, very annoying blond- both pre and post lobotomy, and for the driest nude shower scene ever filmed.