Movie Review: Empire of the Apes (2013)

Sick of all those well acted ape movies? Tired of seeing top of the line CGI? Fed up with fresh stories and writing? Then do I have the movie for you!

Empire of the Apes is basically THE biggest rip off of Planet of the Apes I’ve ever seen. Oh, excuse me. Homage. That’s code for “I couldn’t think of anything original so I just rewrote something I thought was bitchin”. What the fuck ever, dude.

The story, which is told in a flashback by a man about to be executed, is this. Space ship is transporting a cargo of female prisoners (read: three) to a distant plant where they have been sold to a species that only uses females for pleasure (is there any other use for them, besides making sandwiches?). But the women say, ‘oh, hell no’ and make their escape. Unfortunately, the short range pod they’ve stolen crashes on a nearby planet that is home to a species of talking apes. And by species I mean there are six of them.

The apes decide that the women will make great breeding stock to repopulate their species. Wait, what? But in order to determine which ape gets to breed with which girl, the ape leader, Korg, must bring back The Great Ape Games, i.e. really really bad fake WWE smack-downs. They will fight to determine who gets first pick.

And once they'd figured out the women were from off-planet, the apes must find a way to escape this world with them. Apparently, they’re stuck on this rock for reasons unknown (and who really cares) so when Zantor, the prisoner transport captain, tracks down the escapees, he and Korg strike a mutually beneficial deal. Unfortunately, they both plan to double cross each other.

Movie Review: The Amazing Bulk (2011)

THE AMAZING BULK is one of the more recent films from the David Sterling production machine. This one was directed by Lewis Schoenbrun, who made a name for himself editing tons of B movies. Obviously, it is rip-off (or "mock-buster" if you will) of the THE INCREDIBLE HULK, though it comes far too late to cash in on either the Eric Bana fiasco blockbuster, or the slightly more appealing one with Edward Norton. It's timing, like most everything about this movie, is odd.

In order to tell a "blockbuster" type action story like this one on a miniscule budget, the film makers opted to do the entire movie green screen with digitally created backgrounds. The results are very uneven. Some of the backgrounds are nearly photo realistic, and others are very cartoonish. I suppose the attempt here is to give it the look of a comic book. But it comes off more as a video game designed by several different teams. The quality, again, is at best uneven.

Movie Review: Deadly Little Christmas (2009)

Day 10 of the David Hayes 12 Days of Christmas Crap Review-a-Palooza and, boy, the holiday shenanigans just don’t seem to end. Today, holiday shoppers, we will be visiting one in the long line of David Sterling crapics. A film so daring, that it manages to not only rip-off a genre classic but also rip off it’s head and crap down it’s neck even better than Rob Zombie did.

On the tenth day of Christmas, the Head Cheese gave to me… nine lame-ass characters and a tranny plot twist.

Oh the horror. Oh the snowy, festive horror. Remember when Gus Van Zant was on everyone’s naughty list for making a shot for shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho? Apparently, David Sterling (he of Curse of Pirate Death, Camp Blood, Blood Legend, etc. fame, so we know where this is going) took a page out of Gus’ book and threw a little dash of b-movie auteur onto a classic storyline. Let me shake up my magic b-movie snow globe and peer with me into a A Deadly Little Christmas!

Buy A Deadly Little Christmas on DVD!