Amoeba hollywood Staff
Wild Beasts (BLU)
Absolutely insane Italian movie (from one of the guys behind Mondo Cane) about a bunch of zoo animals going on citywide rampage after drinking water laced with PCP. Just as nutty as it sounds, an exploitation flick with a beautifully bonkers premise that delivers everything it promises. Polar bears attacking children in a gymnasium, a chase between a cheetah and a Volkswagen, tigers on the subway, elephants on an airplane runway - it's a total trip, and the film teaches valuable life lessons. For example, you do not want to be trapped in a car surrounded by drugged-out elephants. Avoid that as best you can.
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Greener Grass (BLU)
Absurdist black comedy, one of the oddest and most otherworldly films I've watched in a while, is a twisted dissection of suburban ennui that feels kinda like Lisa Frank's Eraserhead. Upper class American life viewed as a candy-coated, dread-soaked bizarro world. Weird doesn't even begin to describe it. There's a lot of funny stuff in here. The flick has a strong look, mixes the mundane and the menacing to great effect. Greener Grass is a bright, colorful movie with an undercurrent of doom, like death is lurking on the edge of every frame. An erratic ride but one worth taking, as unsettling as it is amusing.
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City of Fear (LP)
FM
Hard to find, but worth tracking down for one song - "Lost and Found". That song... is a beast. Copies float through the store fairly often, and it's usually very cheap.
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Blue Steel (BLU)
Slick, engrossing thriller often straddles the line of plausibility but it's so well done in every respect - especially on a technical level - that it doesn't matter much. Kathryn Bigelow (working off a script she wrote with Eric Red) directed the shit out of this urban nightmare tale about a rookie cop crossing paths with a crazed, trigger happy commodities trader working on Wall Street. Jamie Lee Curtis is fantastic in the lead role and Ron Silver goes 100% bananas as the villain. It's very fun watching him lose his mind. He's a great antagonist. The bloody climax finds Silver stalking Curtis through the streets in broad daylight like pistol-packing Michael Myers. If this weren't so silly in places, it would be damn near brilliant. As it stands, Blue Steel is a highly enjoyable piece of stylish pulp, mainly worth seeing for the aesthetics and Silver's frantic, bug-eyed performance. Brad Fiedel's electronic score is great (GREAT).
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jon
