Been a bad bad boy: Revenge / Taco Shop / Tremors 6.

I've been a bad bad boy. No updates in awhile and I've seen at least three new releases in the theater. One is just not fair to me review, but I'll cover two today.

But I am also going through stuff, so I'm not at my best and my faceless readers deserve me at my best. Or at my worst. I'm sort of somewhere between right now.... anyway, you don't need to know about my personal demons, failures, or triumphs. Let's get to the movies!

REVENGE!

Obviously inspired by the "I Spit on Your Grave" sub-genre, "Revenge" starts of pretty grimy as a middle-aged married man brings his latest fling to a secluded retreat deep in the desert. He's quickly joined by two of his business friends and the group dynamic quickly gets out of hand. Three Euro-trash scumbags do the lady wrong, try to kill her, and things spiral out of control. Because she ain't dead and they ain't hunting some helpless broad.

Now, here's the kicker- Director Coralie Fargeat embraces the 70's grind-house sleaze and inserts a strong feminist narrative to the movies lead character. This is a journey of a film as we find the woman transform from helpless victim to strong protagonist hamstringing the "alpha" male complex of all three men. What starts as a desperate bid for survival becomes a cat and mouse game here the cat is now the hunted.

8 out of 10.

 TACO SHOP

I love me some low budget indie film work and it's rare that we get to see any of it on the big screen, but the local Maya Theaters owners were one of the investors in the film so we got a special run of the film. With a strong Mexican population, it was tailor-made for the local audience and embraced the culture and comedy found within.

Local "Dollar Taco" is owned by a retired porn star, staffed by a rag time group of locals, and stars Tyler Posey as a local teen hoping to own a taco shop himself But things spiral into a dirty deeds war of pranks when a taco "Roach Coach" moves in across the street and tries to grind Dollar Taco to the ground A series of events, very similar in tone to Keven Smith's "Clerks" with a strong nod to Cholo culture. Ultimately some very funny scenes, but the resolution of the story elements seem a bit rushed and disconnected.

6 out of 10.

TREMORS: COLD DAY IN HELL

Set in the great White Frozen North of Canada, the films Graboids and Ass-blasters abandon the desert for much colder climates. And yet the film oddly felt the need to NOT embrace that premise. The sixth film in the series had only two scenes with any ice in actual view. Probably a problem due t budgetary constraints, it still felt like a cheap shot marketing plug that I would've been happy to watch if they just said it was in Canada. Burt Gummer is still the primary protagonist, and the dad from Family Ties still holds enough attention with his extremist paranoid ultra-right wing anti-government character on the hunt for Graboids. Joined by a son introduced in the previous entry (An utterly uncharismatic Jamie Kennedy), the two do battle with the monsters once again and are trapped in buildings and blow stuff up and do all the stuff you expect in a Tremors ilm.

Not a good movie, but fairly entertaining.

5.5 and a mild rental. Streaming on Netflix.