Author Archives: Really Awful Movies

About Really Awful Movies

Horror movie authors and journalists who also review exploitation, action, grindhouse, kung fu, sci fi and other genre films. We are hosts of the Really Awful Movies Podcast, a celebration of low budget cinema - smart genre film chat, predominantly horror movies.

New action movie book celebrates the wildest, funniest films in the genre

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It’s here, action movie fans (well, not so much here or anywhere just yet). Mine’s Bigger Than Yours! the 100 Wackiest Action Movies is available for pre-order through Amazon. Spanning the globe and genres, we break down the likes of Miami Connection, GetEven (sic), Wired to Kill, Deadly Prey and many many more (96 more, to be precise). We’ve highlighted highlighted action genre gems with all of the necessary components for greatness: Heroes! Villains! Henchmen!

We have shootouts in abandoned warehouses, choice zingers spanning “I’m going to kill you LAST” to “here’s a quarter, buy yourself a personality,” rambling spiels (“I’m telling these motherfuckers that if they continue killing our children to make their precious millions that they deposit in their secret Swiss bank accounts, counselor, before your last suit even gets off the court clerk’s desk, I’ll have their stinking bodies in garbage bags and ship them back to Japan for fertilizer.”) Wilhelm screams, heroes hanging off choppers (what’s with chopper pilot lateness? they never time it just right), shooting villains off fire escapes, and getting teary-eyed over wallet photos of loved ones…

Our pal Brian Trenchard-Smith (Strike of the Panther/Stuntrock) penned the foreword. If you enjoyed your last book, Death by Umbrella, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll dig this one too.

Ex Machina

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A weird, extended cyber version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Ex Machina features a “romance” between a sentient and a non-sentient that’s more compelling than 1,000 rom-coms.

In this, the vision of Alex Garland, writer of the exemplary neo-zombie effort, 28 Days Later, programmer Caleb — a kind of James Damore type — also toils away for a global search engine juggernaut. (And speaking of Damore, the #GoogleMemo author recently Tweeted, “Just as foods are labelled “non-GMO”, I wonder if future products will be labelled “non-AI”?)

Caleb wins a one-week stint at the home of his boss, tech jag-off, Nathan, in a secluded modernist Xanadu that’s more of a Xana-don’t when it comes to poking around its various rooms.

It’s there Caleb learns of his assignment: he has to put a pretty robot (Ava) to the Turing Test to see if her thinking behaviour can be differentiated from that of a human. She’s confined to one room of the sprawling home, let out periodically from her confines.

The duo exchange stilted banter at first, the stuff of any real world first date. Soon, sparks fly, metaphorically speaking (they would’ve literally too, if Ava’s engineering wasn’t so darn advanced). Soon, Caleb and Ava are having tête-à-têtes away from Nathan’s prying eyes and Panopticon surveillance.

Are they star-crossed lovers, bridging the human / cyborg divide? Who’s the real automaton?

That’s when the fireworks really begin, as Ex Machina leaps between love story and a cat and mouse between hard-drinking big boss and subservient employee, the latter as riveting as the surreal back and forth between the autocratic director and The Stuntman in that dynamite Peter O’Toole/Steve Railsback-starrer.

Alicia Vikander as Ava is dazzling in the lead, the one time a performance can be described as mechanical and that be a good thing. Her cast-mates more than equal her.

Ex Machina dangles the odd telegraphs here and there, then pulls the rug right out from under the viewer. Stark, unrelenting, thought-provoking, this is top-notch stuff.

****1/2 (out of 5)