Star Raiders: The Adventures of Saber Raine – RiffTrax Live Trip Report!

June 9, 2019ByTars Tarkas

RiffTrax is still traxxing the riffs and the world is still better for it. This time we caught another of their live shows, featuring 2017’s Star Raiders: The Adventures of Saber Raine! Not only is this the newest film they’ve ever done, it was also one of the rare live shows where I haven’t seen the film beforehand. And boy I didn’t know what I was missing! Star Raiders is amazing genre pulp made on a shoestring budget and just does a bunch of crazy things that made me love the flick. That also makes it perfect RiffTrax fodder, as a movie with rubber aliens, CGI spaceships, lots of walking through a forest, and a villain who is missing a large portion of his skull means we got ourselves a target rich environment!

Before we got to the feature, we had us a short, this one that taught us an important lesson about telling the truth. At least that’s what the feature claimed, any actual lessons are accidental and you should consult your morality code. A teacher tells a group of students about three boys (why there was this weird framing device I am not certain, unless the movie company just repackaged another story) who wander around and eventually get a bunch of smooth stones from a crazed cement enthusiast and begin chucking them at random things. It’s all fun and games until one of the stones smashes a window and ends up in an old lady’s soup. One of the kids is too scared to run away and she grabs him, then the film ends and the teacher asks the audience of students to discuss telling the truth. Makes perfect sense, right? Crazy moral stories are almost as fun as when there is a creepy animated object teaching children valuable lessons, so this one was a hoot!

Star Raiders: The Adventures of Saber Raine begins in space with a confusing battle between forces we have no idea who are who, which is interrupted by Saber Raine in his custom CGI ship. He decides to defend one of his friends, who is from the species that the humans are fighting, so the humans aren’t too happy with their fellow human Saber and try to kill him, except they forgot the part where their ships were inferior and Raine Star Raiders the hell out of them. We cut to years later with the actual plot, which involves Raine being recruited by the bodyguards of the royal family to help rescue the missing children of the Emperor. This involves a lot of walking in the forest as a convenient energy net disrupts technology so they can’t fly around in their ships. The villains are lead by the guy we mentioned who was missing most of his skull, and most of his goons are dead bodies controlled by crystals and robots. What we get are a bunch of actors hamming it up, crazy costumes and makeup, and green screens up the wazoo! This leads to lots of fighting and visual insanity as the plot chugs along in brief bursts in between the wandering around scenes.

As you can imagine, the film presents a riffer’s paradise, and there were tons of jokes about Van Dien, the cgi ships, the makeup effects, the confusion on who the heroes an villains are, and the general plot. Special shout out to Gary, the name they gave one of the bug alien villains, who sadly died (multiple times thanks to the film reusing the mask as different members of the species! Poor Gary….) Some of the heroes came equipped with eyeware that was obviously sunglasses that had one of the eyecovers removed. Overall the riffing was pretty strong, the film has enough entertaining portions that fans will be pleased, and weird people like me would even enjoy the film without Mike, Kevin, and Bill cracking wise. The credits showed that writer/director Mark Steven Grove as well as actress Sara N. Salazar were in attendance. Mark Steven Grove has been making a series of genre films to showcase a lot of his talent pool at the choreography studio he runs, and he just made a fan that will be tracking down more of his filmography. Star Raiders has a big Galaxy Lords vibe, and everyone knows how much we love that one! Hopefully the rest of the batch live up to Star Raiders, and hopefully when RiffTrax Live does The Giant Spider Invasion, we will have another great show! Until then, keep raiding those stars!

InMovie Reviews

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (Review)

June 2, 2019ByTars Tarkas

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

2019
Story by Max Borenstein, Michael Dougherty, & Zach Shields
Screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
Directed by Michael Dougherty

Roaring into theaters is Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the follow up to 2014’s American Godzilla that stays in the same universe but ditches most of the cast. It’s now a few years later, the world knows about monsters, and the Monarch group is besieged by people who want to kill the monsters and people who want to set them all free.

This film is in theaters as I publish this, but it’s the kind of movie that is easy to classify. If you loved the first one, you will love this. If you love giant monsters fighting each other but were disappointed by the lack of monsters in the first one, you’ll probably love this one, as there is lots of monster action. If you want a movie with a good story and don’t care about giant monsters, go see Booksmart or something. Godzilla and other monsters smash stuff up! The humans do questionable things in between being boring! It’s a couple of allegories, some more intentional than others. No reason to get all worked up at the RottenTomatoes score like some people were, this isn’t a movie for everyone, it’s a movie for people who like giant monsters smashing things!

And everything after this paragraph is…..

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!!!!!!

InCinema Articles

March of Godzilla 2019

June 2, 2019ByTars Tarkas

It’s time for March of Godzilla 2019! As usual, we are bringing out theme month late and it will probably run longer than a month, but if there is one thing TarsTarkas.NET is known for, it’s for randomly starting and updating things at no regular schedule. Thanks to the power of busy work, being sick, and a major construction project eating up my spare time, we will get one Godzilla flick, then a few other updates, and finally the rest of the bunch! And hopefully there will be a bunch this time, not just Godzilla flicks but other media!

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

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InMovie Reviews

Magnificent Warriors (Review)

May 14, 2019ByTars Tarkas

Magnificent Warriors

aka 中華戰士 aka Zhong hua zhan shi aka Dynamite Fighters aka Yes, Madam 3

1987
Written by Tsang Kan-Cheung
Directed by David Chung Chi-Man

Magnificent Warriors is a required Michelle Yeoh film to watch. There is so much energy and joy here as she gleefully beats the tar out of dozens of people while cracking whips, flying planes, and firing guns. She’s a pure pulp action hero who runs guns for rebels, flies her own plane, dogfights fighters despite being outmatched, goes on secret missions, does her job, helps inspire the people to fight, and stands tall against impossible odds.

Yeoh easily outshines costars Derek Yee and Richard Ng and the entire film is built around her mission against the invading Japanese. I don’t mean to cut Richard Ng short, he does hold his own as a live-action cartoon drifter con man who bumbles into all the action. Ng’s unnamed Drifter comes complete with his own cartoonish theme music that completely contrasts with the rest of the film’s adventury score, which totally works for hammering in the point that his character is a completely different archetype plopped into this mayhem. Together Ng and Yeoh overshadow Derek Yee so much that despite his character being a James Bond analogue he can barely keep up with them (and it stands out even more with Yeoh moving on to being an actual Bond girl!) Yee was from a prominent entertainment family and would eventually move into producing and directing and based on his output he seems to have found a good fit, several of his films being acclaimed as classics.

Magnificent Warriors is one of the Hong Kong films I rented from the late, lamented Le Video in San Francisco, I was working through Yeoh’s filmography (shockingly, most of her movies weren’t available in video stores in the Midwest!) and this one was amazing enough I watched it twice and ended up with a DVD myself soon after. It also begot my love for Richard Ng, as he popped up in some of the films I rented in rapid succession but was first memorable here.

InMovie Reviews

Perfect Game (Review)

May 7, 2019ByTars Tarkas

Perfect Game

aka 完全な遊戯 aka Kanzenna Yugi

1958
Based on the short story by Shintarô Ishihara
Screenplay by Yoshio Shirasaka
Directed by Toshio Masuda

This time we are beep-beep backing the truck up to 1958, where the Nikkatsu flicks were more disaffected youth culture than the thrillers and borderless action the genre will evolve into soon enough. Perfect Game still has plenty of strong characters, bad choices, and dangerous situations even with the slow leisurely pace the film begins it’s scheme setup with. The protagonists are introduced, their want of fast and easy money and willingness to bend the rules (past the breaking point!) to get said money. Like many youth they also think themselves invincible, the next score just being another quick job that will never have any bad repercussions. But if that were the case, then we wouldn’t have a movie, now would we? The fact that the protagonists all come from affluent families but still succumb to the temptations of their excesses makes this a solid Sun Tribe feature.

I love Nikkatsu’s films but I have to do them in spurts as you can only take so much bleak ruination of tragic endings before you want to watch Godzilla punch some monsters or Captain America punch some monsters (or Nazis, same thing!) Director Toshio Masuda (Rusty Knife, Red Pier) turns what could have easily been an ordinary film into a memorable tragic tale thanks to strong characters and skillfully constructed scenes that highlight the buildups to tragedy as the characters compromise their values more and more.

We got ourselves a quartet of young college students who want a bit of excitement in their lives, and gambling away the meager allowance their parents give them just ain’t cutting it. Mastermind Toda (Yasukiyo Umeno) is a straight-faced liar and owes his girlfriend Meiko (Mari Shiraki – Underworld Beauty) – the Mama of a hostess club – a large sum of money. There is also Soji Oki (Akira Kobayashi – in so many films he has a tag), who is usually called So-chan, he is the pretty one that makes the girls swoon. Jiro Akitani (Shirô Yanase) lies to both of his parents about his money issues but can manipulate his successful father into coughing up dough as needed. And finally Toshio, who I’m struggling to remember anything significant about beyond just being part of the gang. Sorry, buddy, get a personality!

InMovie Reviews

Atomic Shark (Review)

April 16, 2019ByTars Tarkas

Atomic Shark

aka Saltwater

2016
Written by Scott Foy, Griff Furst, and Jack Snyder
Directed by A.B. Stone

Atomic Shark is a pretty darn good SyFy shark flick, but the problem is, it was so close to being among the best that I’m angry it missed the boat! But I guess no one can live up to Ghost Shark, so we got to just accept the fact that you are good and fun, but not the new classic we were hoping for! Once again Tars is digging through his archive of shark films taped off of SyFy that he hasn’t gotten around to watching. This time the shark is glowing red hot because it has been mutated to become nuclear reactor! That gives this shark a unique look, and combine that with Atomic Shark throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the film to add flavor, and you got yourself some fun shark chomping!

We got burnt fish popping up on shores, environmental coverups, government coverups, a sunken soviet sub leaking radiation, and the shark is a bomb (though a glowing red from the heat shark that’s a bomb, not a shark with a literal bomb strapped to it like the posters seemed to suggest!) that without sea water it will overheat and explode all over the place. And it will probably explode if you shoot it! So that makes the plans to take it down a bit complicated. Luckily the plucky lifeguards and their cadre of friends and fellow shark-stopping enthusiasts are up to the challenge, even if the shark won’t be the only red stuff in the water (it’s blood, blood in the water is the other thing I am talking about here)

Old newsreel dialogue, footage of cold war atomic bomb information, and even Dr. Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Hindu Bagavad Gita “Now i am death, the destroyer of worlds”, plays we see a shark swimming through the ocean. It’s a crash course in setting the tone along with some of the great monster movies that use environmental tragedy as the foundation for their creatures’ destructive power. Atomic Shark takes a deep dive into the meta-textual with hashtags, emojis, and instragram filters on screen, yelp reviews of restaurants, the film becoming even more widescreen during an epic confrontation between a lifeguard and the atomic shark, and dramatic music playing that cuts out every time Gina blows out the lighter from the enraged documentary lady but comes right back once the lighter is re-lit. Atomic Shark even has it’s own surf theme song, and it’s own rap song and video! I’ve tried looking up A.B. Stone, the credited director, and that seems a pseudonym, so there may have been some things going on behind the scenes (or it is just someone at a specific production company who is smart enough to avoid all social media!)

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