Cult Classic Trailer: Q: The Winged Serpent

There can never be enough love in this world for an underrated filmmaker like Larry Cohen, so excuse me while I briefly plug this release of his 1982 monster flick Q the Winged Serpent. Modern viewers may recognise his name on the screenwriting credits of films like Phone Booth and Cellular, but a few decades earlier, when Cohen was in his prime, he was cranking out one terrific B-movie after another: everything from gritty blaxploitationers (Black Caesar, Hell Up in Harlem) to horror gems (It's Alive, God Told Me To) to offbeat thrillers (Perfect Strangers, Special Effects).

The low budgets of his films didn't always meet his ambitions, but this rarely mattered when he could pull off genre pics with the sort of scrappy charm, economy and personality that's sorely missing from contemporary filmmaking. A fan favourite, Q, with its herky-jerky Harryhausen-style creature effects, is a perfect example of Cohen's work. Hats off again to Vendetta Films for putting it out on DVD and Blu-ray! Check out the trailer below  (taken from an old Roadshow VHS tape):

Everything Wrong with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

I say this every time -- but I'm oddly excited about the new Transformers movie coming out in a week's time. Of course, I will most likely live to regret it, as it always happens, once Michael Bay has obliterated my senses two-and-a-half hours later (according to IMDB, Age of Extinction clocks in at 166 minutes). It stands to reason that after being burned by three consecutive movies of the same moronic, depressingly soul-draining ilk, I don't imagine the game changing all that much -- and the dudes at Cinema Sins have just done an amusingly snarky job of reminding me everything that's wrong with the franchise by ripping apart the 2009 sequel Revenge of the Fallen. The plot's even more mind-bending than I remembered:

Beary Creepy Paddington

If you were around your usual social media haunts yesterday, chances are you would've come across a bunch of memes skewering the forthcoming live-action version of children's book favourite Paddington by inserting the character into famous horror movie scenes (click here for a collection of them). Now the first trailer's out, and though Paddington comes off slightly less creepy than the memes have made him out to be, the film does have a weirdly disgusting WTF moment where the CGI bear (voiced by Colin Firth) sticks toothbrushes into his ears and pulls out globs of earwax and proceeds to sniff and lick said earwax.

Anyway the trailer seems to have Garfield/Yogi Bear vibe, which isn't really a good thing in my books. But I didn't grow up reading Paddington so hey what do I know... Gather your kids close around the monitor and watch Paddington destroy a bathroom:

Trailer: The November Man

Perhaps inspired by the recent career paths of greying 60+ actors like Liam Neeson (Taken) and Kevin Costner (3 Days To Kill) back into action-movie bad-assery, Pierce Brosnan is getting his chance to walk away unharmed from explosions once again in Roger Donaldson's thriller The November Man. The veteran-CIA-operative-trains-young-protege dynamic here bears more than a little semblance to Donaldson's 2003 spy flick The Recruit (and countless other films), so I'm not expecting anything terribly original, but the actor's fans who miss his days as James Bond are likely to be pleased what they see in this trailer:

Grand Theft Auto V: Judgement Day

The geekier contingent of our customer base might dig this Grand Theft Auto V remake of the killer truck chase scene from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It's a really impressive recreation that makes you appreciate just how awesome that original chase scene is (and that there are people out there who have enough time on their hands to do things like these).