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Sunday, 24 June 2018

Film Review: Bigfoot's Wild Weekend (2012)

Genre: Creature Feature

A cub reporter for a sleazy tabloid is sent to the boondocks to get a story on Bigfoot. 
 While Bigfoot lurks about the woods looking for beer and nubile women, dozy rednecks hunt for him and random women provide blatant fanservice. 

  Low-budget films like to establish their tone as early as possible. In this case a brace of nubile women get topless in a river and invite a beer-swigging Bigfoot to join them. Tone established. 

 What we have here is very low budget movie making using the good old fashioned rubber suit method, no name actors - most of whom will consider this the high point of their career before they go back to local supermarket adverts -and a definite indication that the whole thing was filmed over a weekend. 
 
 I can't say I was really that impressed. There's some OK bits but the whole thing never really came together for me. It looked and felt like a bunch of scenes strung together on the flimsiest frame imaginable and wasn't particularly funny, either in its own right or as bad-movie cheesefest. 
I also found it telling that they seem to have put more effort into filming the bikini dance contest scene than...pretty much everything else, including the climax.  Tone confirmed. 

You might like it.  I can't honestly say that I did. 

Wednesday, 6 June 2018

Book Review: Bikini Planet by David Garnett (2000)

Genre: Sci-Fi/ Humour. 


Bikini Planet book review
Las Vegas 1978: Police officer Wayne Norton stumbles into a group of  Mafiosi having a bit of a dispute and is cudgelled acros the back of the head.  

300 Years later: Norton wakes up from a cryogenic sleep to find him,self in a very, very different world. Before he has time to work out what the hell is going on, he's dragooned into the GalacticCop police force and sent on a crucial mission. 
Except nobody seems to want to tell him what the mission is. Or anything at all. That can't be good. 

I liked the title of this book. I liked the cover of this book. However I am sadly unable to say I liked the book itself.  

It starts off decently enough, with Wayne being introduced and then sent for his overlong nap. But once he arrives in the Future it all got a bit too much for me. 
  A lot of the humour relies on rapid-fire, maximum confusion dialogue and that didn't really do anything for me but get me um...confused.   The fact that most of the characters change their names the way most people change socks doesn't help.  There's also the slight problem that most of the characters are a little thin so even the ones we're supposed to care about just sort of wander past without registering. 
 There's nothing wrong with the writing and there are some nice ideas but the execution left me cold. And confused.  

 I suppose I could also take exception to the fact that the titular Bikini planet only shows up right at the end and isn't remotely what you'd expect. 

A book called "Bikini Planet" ought to have been more fun than this.