Change Your Image
stuhuzz1981
Reviews
Rampage (2009)
Only watch if you like depraved morons shooting people.
No redeeming value whatsoever. This movie has no purpose aside from depressing those who watch it like the Human Centipede or Triumph of the Will. I'm not someone who is queasy when it comes to shock, shlock & gore but when this one is just too much. It seems to glorify spree killing more than anything else, at least when we saw Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho it was stylized evil that ultimately served as a unabashed critique of the cut-throat Wall Street culture, this however has is just nosediving into nihilism.
The story is about some loser who hangs out around chicken shacks and Circle K and in his spare time constructs bombs, does his own RC hacks on cars, knows enough metallurgy to create a steel plated full body armor suit and purchase two M-4s he turned into full auto. I doubt your average neighborhood loser like our protagonist that lives with his parents will figure out much more than mixing liquor into his Big Gulp will keep the cops off of his back.
Being able to do all of this, our protagonist goes on a killing where he shoots up a town that mildly resembles Mayberry. He kills cops who have never heard of this thing called cover and shoots innocent person after innocent person then faking a ham-fisted "message" at a bank pretending to burn the money all the while pocketing it (like the cops wouldn't notice that it was just burnt printer paper) The spree ends with him framing his best friend. Throughout all of this the cops are MIA and people haven't figured that they could just run away. In the end, he escapes the town without being pursued at all (not even by helicopter and trust me if someone takes out a police station there would be at least one police helo and a dozen from the media) and kills his friend, frames him for the murders and runs off with cash he stole from a bank.
The whole time this was going on I could only despise the main character more and more. He's not an anti-hero, a Han Solo-esque scoundrel, a serial killer who kills those who wrong him or do some big social no-no a la Jason or Freddy, he's just some loser who played too much Modern Warfare. Not worth it at all, not even as some campy or cult movie that has something unique or fun to its name, it's just another piece of garbage churned out by Uwe Boll.
Strike a Pose (1993)
The reason they made Cinemax
Movies like the forgotten "Strike A Pose" were made for a different generation. Cinemax and Showtime would air these after midnight for naughty insomniacs and people who were too shy to buy a Playboy.
Have you ever noticed that there are less and less big name actresses doing nude scenes? Back in the 70s, 80s and 90s it was ubiquitous: Jamie Lee Curtis, Brooke Shields, Phoebe Cates, etc. Nowadays since you can watch any type of sex/nude/fetish scene on your iPad there really isn't a demand for nudity in narrative films (not even in horror movies) rather more focus on mass appeal and some minor titillation, that's what makes money in the digital age. Back in 1993 there wasn't any Google but there was a huge demand for cheap, bad movies so long as they had plenty of pointless nude scenes.
Sure this is a soft core porno thinly disguised as a narrative film meant for cable but what a lot of people miss is the wretched acting by wannabe Calvin Klein model Robert Eastwick and his merry band of models who are out-acted by inanimate objects around them, absolutely terrible synth music that makes Video Poker music sound like Abbey Road, inexplicable stains in the ex-con's motel room and a "surprise" ending that you can see coming a mile away. Don't watch this thinking this was just another bad movie, this was soft core meant for insomniacs with bad taste in movies.
They did try a little bit at the end to hint at a sequel but even the director probably knew in his head that that wasn't going to happen.