MasterChugs Theater: ‘Machete’

While political movies projecting a serious tone around themes like war tend to drive audiences away from US theaters faster than rumors of a bedbug invasion, when heavy subject matter is laced with light laughs it’s an entirely different story. So even though Machete is just about incendiary enough to incite an all out border war around the current hot topic of immigration, spicing up the proceedings with devilish humor keeps the feverish temperature moderated more at playful than provocative levels.

Troublemaker Studio’s bay boy director Robert Rodriguez, who last shook up movie screens with Grindhouse and Sin City, returns with a vengeance with the bullet riddled, stylishly defiant slice ’em up action satire, Machete. Get even bilingual guerrilla warfare meets guerrilla filmmaking, as wickedly dark screen insanity fuels US north of the border revolutionary beatdown. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Machete’

MasterChugs Theater: ‘Black Dynamite’

The spoof (aka broad parody) sub-genre is a schizophrenic beast. At its best, the spoof can treat you to something as sublime as Airplane!, as mindlessly amusing as the Scary Movie series, or as stunningly worthless as Epic Movie. It takes skill to make a movie bad on purpose, but movies that are bad by accident can be a lot more fun. But the spoof remains the comedy sub-genre for filmmakers who are also movie geeks. Basically, you need to have seen a lot of Airport movies to write Airplane!, and you need to have some solid experience with blaxploitation movies to produce something like Hollywood Shuffle, I’m Gonna Get You Sucka, or the newest arrival: the worthy Black Dynamite, which aims to do to Shaft and Superfly what The Naked Gun did to police procedurals.

Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Black Dynamite’