Movie Review: Guns, Girls and Gambling (2012)

A Native American artifact is stolen from an Apache casino and now a quirky bunch of Elvis impersonators, crooked cops, blonde haired women, guns for hire and more are on the hunt for it.

I love a good heist movie and I even like a bad one if the story is goofy enough.  This falls into the latter.  There are actually quite a few decent actors in this film and it was cool to see them working together.  Christian Slater totally fits the role as the main character, John Smith, who gets wrapped up in all the silliness that is a movie about Elvis impersonators hunting down a Native American mask.

As in all heist movies, there are twists and turns that I won't get into here, but they do keep you entertained.  At times it looks like things start looking up for John Smith, and then something happens(usually a hit to the face).  Slater's portrayal as the main character was extremely fun and kept the movie going.  His part made me think of his roles from the late 80s/early 90s where his career was at it's peak.

The person who shares a lot of time with Slater is "The Girl Next Door," played by Megan Park.  There was excellent chemistry between the two of them on screen making her a surprise of the film.


If you can get past the first five minutes, you should be fine the rest of the way with this film.  Although I felt most people played their parts the way they were intended, I did not like Helena Mattsson's line delivery.  She's an absolutely gorgeous assassin who quotes Edgar Allen Poe poetry before she shoots people.  Problem is, she doesn't sound confident doing it.  I'm assuming she was going for sensual but there's a crack or something else off in her delivery and it just comes off poorly.

The Elvis impersonators are great with Chris Kattan as "Gay Elvis," Anthony Brandon Wong as "Asian Elvis," Tony Cox as "Midget Elvis"- I mean "Little Person Elvis," and Gary Oldman as "Elvis Elvis."

Powers Booth is "The Rancher" and has a very Boss Hog look going for him.  Dane Cook and Sam Trammell are the Sheriffs.  The film even has Jeff Fahey and Matthew Willig as hit-men with cool nicknames.

Overall, I think that Michael Winnick as writer/director put together an okay film.  It was a lot of fun with cheesy over the top action and goofy lines.  It was definitely better than I expected.

On a scale of up to 5, I'm giving "Guns, Girls and Gambling" 3 Pile Drivers.

You can read more of my reviews here on Cinema Head Cheese and also please check out my blogs, reviews and podcasts on http://maskerpiecetheatre.blogspot.com/

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Movie Review: "The Green Inferno" (2014; Blumhouse Tilt/Universal/High Top Releasing)

...as they said in that old cigarette commercial, 'you've come a long way, baby!!"...

...yes, indeed-ee, folks!! We've definitely come a long way, as far as an semblance of depiction of that oh-so taboo subject of unspeakable horror...that oh-so forbidden atrocity of human behavior...namely, the subversive and gut-wrenching concept of (...yeech!!) human cannibalism. Oh granted, in the past, we're toyed and danced around the ghastly activity, from a pop culture perspective...tempering the material with a certain overt and irreverent level of chuckle-able, knee-slapping humor. Surely, you remember those corny and stereotyped 'Looney Tunes"...the ones which had a helpless and clueless, jungle-entrenched Elmer Fudd, soaking in a big ol' black pot of steaming hot water, while a black-faced, grass-skirted primitive with bone through his nose, and sporting dreadlocks (...'onga-bonga-bonga, onga-bonga-bonga'), is cutting up carrots and potatoes into the bulbous cooking vessel. And a wayward-traveling Bugs Bunny, having taken that wrong turn at Albuquerque once again, burrows in at the last moment, and saves the day...as well as Elmer's skin, quite literally...

...and to that...oh, how we laughed...and laughed...and laughed some more...

...and later, there arose a certain social fascination with media-saturated criminal history, and the equally heinous and unspeakable crimes of true-life cannibals, like Ed Gein and Albert Fish...the horrific exploits of which were incorporated into a provocative and controversial sub-genre of horror films, stemming back as far as 1960's "Psycho". and in years to come, we'd revisit these concepts, time and time again, translated into terror films like "Deranged", the later "Hannibal" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Heck, even during this period, filmmakers would again attempt to temper that oh-so horrific idea of cannibalism, by injecting comical fervor into the ghastly and gruesome proceedings, as evident by dark-humored fright films, such as "Motel Hell", "Delicatessen" and "Parents", just to name a tender and juicy few...

Cinema Head Cheese: Podshort! - Dracula Untold (2014)

Peggy Christie reviews the latest Dracula story to hit the big screen.

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