Movie Review: La Bamba (1987; Columbia/Twilight Time)

...considering the historical events associated with the previous film, which this viewer partook of and reviewed, a while back, it is sort of ironic that the year 1959...closely associated anti-establishment movement, initiated by political warfare guerrilla Che Guavara...would also be the same year, which bore a headline of great tragedy, of equal precedence...media & headline-wise...and the subject of this viewer's next review...

...date line, circa 1959.....Cuban President Fulgencio Batista is forced from power, and in his place, Fidel Castro becomes the reigning Cuban Premier.....Television viewers were taken to strange, surreal and sometimes horrific places, which lay 'somewhere between the pit of man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge', with the premiere of "The Twilight Zone".....the Xerox company introduces their very first copier.....The epic film, "Ben Hur" holds it's star-studded gala premiere, in New York City.....And disaster strikes down a small, single-engined 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza plane, one fateful winter's evening, on the outskirts of Clear Lake, Iowa...the fiery crash, claiming the lives of famed rock-n-roll musicians Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson (...aka 'The Big Bopper'), and 17-year-old Richard Stevens Valenzuela, also known as Ritchie Valens.....

Movie Review: The Final Terror (Blu-ray / DVD, 1983)

There have been several sub-genres that have spawned from the glorious slasher film craze of the 80’s.  We've seen the school slasher, abandoned house slasher, the religious slasher and other varieties of genre films thrill moviegoers looking for some good ol’ fashion bloodshed in there horror. The “backwoods” slasher was another fun form that brought the unforgiving aspect of being alone in the wild with a maniac killer. For a good stretch of time this seemed like a great way to scare the pants off people. Some of the more popular of that ilk would include James Bryan’s Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone, Rituals, The Forest, Just Before Dawn, Geek, Back Woods and Scream Factory’s Blu-ray release of Andrew Davis’ The Final Terror.

When a group young hikers (including Rachael Ward, John Friedrich  Adrien Zmed and a and a pre-Splash Daryll Hannah) take a bus trip into the wilderness for a good time things become extremely difficult for the kids when one of the group member pisses off their bus driver and guide, Eggar (Joe Pantoliano, Risky Business, The Sopranos). Now it’s up to them to find a way out of an area they know nothing about. After one of the hikers is found dead after getting machete while doing the naughty things get pretty serious. Oddly enough, instead of going separate way like similar horror films this band of pals stay together and choose to seek out the psycho.