Jarv’s Schlock Vault: Starcrash

Starcrash! YES! A 4th Dimensional attack!

This may possibly be the greatest film ever made. Seriously- Citizen Kane? Pah, boring nonsense about an old fart’s love for his sledge. Does Casablanca feature David Hasselhoff using a lightsaber to fight a sword-wielding stop motion robot? Well, you get the idea, because none of the alleged cinematic classics feature C3P0 with breasts! Honestly, your tiny little mind is not prepared for the sheer unmitigated awesomeness of Starcrash. The only question I have, is how had I never seen a film where a significant portion of it takes place on the planet of the space lesbians?

Just a warning, but I’ve gone completely picture happy in this review. Because I couldn’t work out which ones to discard, and they are all that funny.

Contains inexplicable Country and Western robots and spoilers below.

Jarv’s Schlock Vault: Re-Animator

What would a note say, Dan? “Cat dead, details later”?

Jarv’s Rating: 3 and a half Changs out of 4. A fucking absolute classic of its kind: gross, irreverent and frequently hilarious, this is an absolutely essential zombie film.

Re-Animator, or “How to get a head in medicine”, is notable for a few reasons. Firstly, it is arguably the only successful Lovecraft adaptation out there (don’t give me that shit about Dagon being anything more than worthless), although I will take Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness as  a Lovecraft-inspired film. Secondly, it also spawned several sequels, the first of which: Bride of Re-Animator is a gross and hilarious reworking of Bride of Frankenstein tied in to the Re-Animator mythology. Thirdly, Re-Animator represents a career high for almost everyone involved in it, certainly Jeffrey Combs will never put in another performance even remotely in the same league as his turn here, and finally, it’s just fucking gold from start to finish, combining some midnight-black comedy with excellent practical effects, and a skyscraper high level of entertainment. This is a storming film.

Post Millennial Trauma: Let the Right One In (2008)

I’ve been putting off this series for a while, as I desperately wanted to do something that isn’t called Let the Right One In for 2008, because I wanted to save it for the Vampire series. Unfortunately for me, looking through the thoroughly underwhelming list of 2008 horror films (there are some good ones in there, Splinter for example, but nothing that I really wanted to do) there was one film that stood out- Sweden’s imperious Let the Right One In. Let me preface this with that I don’t want to talk about the remake at all- this is really more me reminiscing back to seeing this one in the cinema, and the reaction that it left me with. I do hate to go all Knowlesian in a review, but there’s nothing really more to be said about this film critically, and so I’m going to attempt to enunciate what I believe made it so damned successful.

The Underrated: I, Lucifer

I was going to hold off reviewing this book for a while. However, Mrs. Jarv in a wonderfully useless move that got me out of watching SATC2 managed to lose my copy (4th one I’ve bought now), so in sheer celebration I’m going to write this from memory. I know this book extremely well, so have no qualms about taking a gamble and writing it without it sitting in front of me.