An Hour to Kill features a hitman (Aaron Guerrero) and his protege (Frankie Pozos), who have some time to kill before a job--the job is their boss, Mel Novak, wants Guerrero to kill Pozos, who has no idea. As they're killing time, Pozos tells stories, which become the horror anthology, starting with "Valkyrie's Bunker," which involves five girls going to get some pot on some farm near an old Nazi bunker; "Assacre," which has a dangerously hot chili pepper and some competitive eaters looking for revenge; and finally "Hog Hunters," which has a group of bowlers looking to have sex with some pigs who get more than they bargained for.
This felt like even more of the fun, 90s, low-budget horror I always loved than Tales of Frankenstein did. This is the kind of thing my buddies and I would have rented and worn out the tape watching and rewinding to rewatch the scenes we got the biggest kick out of. It had a bit of a Troma feel to it as well, and that's a kind of horror I've always enjoyed. The last one, "Hog Hunters," was a bit draggy before it got to the best parts, but I think that may have been due to the fact that footage from the first one, "Valkyrie's Bunker," was lost, so maybe they needed to make Hog Hunters longer to pad out the film. Padding is good when your delivering fragile products, but not when making movies. Regardless, that was a minor issue in an otherwise fun horror romp.
Joe has been doing a great job getting Mel Novak's tag count up. This is now three Novak films he's given us to screen, and when you combine that with two I've done on my own, Samurai Cop 2 and Nemesis 5, that's five Novak films in the year since I've returned from hiatus. That's actually the same number as Gary Daniels, and he's one behind other big names like Seagal, Adkins, and Rothrock, who all have 6--Dolph of course has the most with 9. This was a real fun turn for Novak here as a mob boss, and it seemed like he had fun with it, as small as it was. I'm not sure where we go next with Novak, but perhaps Joe will have another screener, and if so, that will mean another tag.
For me, my favorite story out of all of them was "Assacre"--though the point could be made that I would have preferred "Valkyrie's Bunker" more if all the footage was there, or "Hog Hunters" if it didn't have the padding, which is fair enough. "Assacre" was one of those Tromerific deals that, while I don't want to give away too much, had me both totally grossed out and in stitches. I guess "Hog Hunters" has a similar quality when it finally gets going, and "Assacre" had its slow moments too, but I think it paced out a bit better and had more fun to it overall, which made the payoff that much sweeter. I could see that as one of those classics from high school that my buddies and I would reminisce about today if we got together. Knowing us, we probably would have tried to show it in one of our classes under the pretext of a class project, and then pretended we didn't know how to use the VCR when the teacher was yelling for us to turn it off.
What was interesting about our two hitmen, was you had Guerrero as the guy with his shit together who doesn't want to kill Pozos but knows he has to do his job; while you had Pozos as this real obnoxious pain in the ass who had to play it in such a way that he was endearing enough that we wouldn't want him to get whacked. Like if Pozos plays it too obnoxious, we're looking to the hit as an applause scene; and if Guerrero plays his hitman as too much of a stone-cold killer, it makes no sense that this would be a struggle for him. For parts that were essentially bumpers around the anthology, for them to both play it so well, it enhanced the film in a way that those bumpers seldom do.
Finally, I saw a lot of comparisons to Pulp Fiction because we had two hitmen, which makes sense, but to some extent I think that's like saying any movie with a blindfold is trying for a 9 and 1/2 Weeks thing. The thing is, there were so many movies with hitmen in them that did try to bite on Pulp Fiction in the late 90s/early 2000s that a lot of us DTV fans still have PTSD from the 100-minute dialog fests where hitmen would have ironic conversations about such inane topics as cereal brands after committing a hit. It was insufferable. These characters had none of that, the writers weren't trying to remake their own foot massage or Royale with Cheese conversations; but I think Pulp Fiction was so influential for so many of us--including us who write the reviews--that we don't know how to talk about movies without using it as a pretext. It's a testament to how great that film was.
Since I'm no longer talking about the current film though, it's probably time to wrap this one up. This is a fun horror-comedy anthology that doesn't try to do too much beyond have a good time. It looks like you can find this on oldies.com, and possibly on Troma.com too. If you can track it down I say check it out. Thanks again to Joe for another screener. Can't wait to check out the next one from you!
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4730224
No comments:
Post a Comment