Gore Ratings

You can now rate the gore factor of a movie on Trash Epics. This was a feature on zed's site and he told me I could use it here a long time ago, so I finally decided to implement it. I've been working on a lot of edits, so I figured I'd throw this onto the stack as well.

It's a 1-5 system of basically no gore, blood, gashes, guts, and splatter. Of course, I can't remember every instance of violence in film, so go with your best guess and it'll even itself out.

I'm sure I've overlooked a few aspects of this in the grand scheme of things here on TE, but I'll tweak it as needed. I'm also debating added zed's nudity ratings concept, but I want to make sure this added feature doesn't hurt performance before I work on that. Also, I'm still considering what icon to use for the nudity rating, so we'll see.

So if you've already rated enough shit on here, well... you can now rate everything all over again.

Great Bruces in History

I have probably posted this before, I think this thought recurrently, every few months.... I just can't get rid of it. Anyway: people named Bruce have done disproportionately well in pop culture, for several decades now. Will this exciting trend continue?.... We shall see.

Can you think of any major Bruces who have been a huge part of pop culture, including, but not restricted to, horror movie culture? There are several obvious choices, but just to start out with something people might not instantly think of, there was Bruce, the shark in Jaws. And, arguably, any movie starring any guy from Australia.

Anyone have any others?

Stranger Things 3

The new season came out a few days ago and I didn't give two shits. Season 2 left a really bad taste in my mouth. It had no charm, I really hated Billie, the arc was underwhelming, and it seemed like a season of filler.

Season 3 is a comeback. Somehow, it glued me to the screen again, and I think that's because it had a very fun story this time around. David Harbour is going full Magnum PI with his look, and he's easily the best character on the show.

This season is set in the days leading up to July 4th of 1985, and it cashes in hard on the pop culture. We've got bits about Romero's Day of the Dead and Back to the Future and all sorts of other things. There's a whole Red Dawn plot about communists and evil scientists, and that plot in itself has a Terminator knockoff that I very much enjoyed. He's a Russian soldier who's in very many ways stylized to be Arnold from T1, with the hair and gloves and attitude.

It's also like the recent "Us" in that it deals with dopplegangers and underworlds, which leads to a lot of melting bodies and all sorts of bizarre monster/portal type shit.

Of course, there's also a lot of Fast Times references, since a major setting is that totally 80s mall, in which our character Steve works as a sailor looking ice cream vendor, and he wears that suit the entire season. 😄

Very big improvement over the last season. Quite entertaining. If you watch it, look for as many pop culture references as you can. I'm sure there are a lot.

Least favorite movies

Just interested in peoples least favorite movies of all time. My would have to be Eragon. I loved the books so much and that movie was the worst thing ever. Close is Dragonball: Evolution and Avatar the Last Airbender

Shout Box problems?

Hey Box, is something wrong with the Shout Box? I guess it is also possible that I am doing something wrong. I have tried a few times in the last few hours to post something there, but it isn't working for me. What's up with that?? By the way, what I'm trying to post is a link to an article about Danielle Harris expressing interest in getting involved with any future Halloween movies.

Tornado: The Last Blood (1983)

For some quick and sleazy war points, I saw the poster art for some shitty Italian looking war movie with a Rambo-esque title and I was immediately sold. This is the original "Last Blood", unlike Stallone's upcoming 5th Rambo entry, which will undoubtedly be loads better than this spaghetti war flick.

Granted, this movie isn't very much like First Blood, but it does have a heroic cliche who is stepped on by his commanding officers to the point where he fights back. However, this quickly leads to a court marshall, and he's sent to prison, but the transfer vehicle is attacked, and he's got to survive the enemy territory of the Nam!


Funny enough, this movie is thematically more similar to Rambo: First Blood Part II, which wouldn't come out until a couple years later. This is mainly due to the story actually being set in Nam, but you can tell that this movie had nothing original to say about any of it. This is just Italy's way of jumping on another bandwagon, and the result is exactly what you'd expect: dumb, dubbed, shoddy, and somehow watchable.

I don't really have much to say about this movie, but it's definitely trash. Currently available on Prime.

Roman's song

TrashEpics is the place to be

I've never ranted on here, and now is as good a time as any.

A few days ago, I said that a lack of activity wouldn't bother me.
I guess I was hoping "filmboards" would fill in some activity-gaps. Mistakenly so.

Back in March, a friend of mine said that one of our friends (much like myself) is the Soapbox-type. Which Soapbox would that be? They're all equally dead.

In the words of Rocky in Rocky 3, "How did everything good get so bad?"
I'm not sure I buy the social-media theory. I'm not convinced.

There's definitely more here than meets the eye.
I've been to offbeat sites (such as annoyatorium.com). They're annoying.
I've been to obscure sites (such as broadwayworld.com). They're boring.

Clearly, what's happening here is that they all went to "TheFappening.com" (and lived fappily ever after).

The best damn Nam movie ever: Platoon (1986)

When you're a young enthusiastic film buff, you try to see the basics, no matter what the genre. Coppola, Kubric, Scorsese, Scorsaza... When IMDb meant something, their Top 250 was a good reference for the classics. In retrospect, it wasn't good at all, because the system was so damn weighted because people abused the system, but even before it went to shit, you come across some legitimate old school cinematic wonders, and some of them are mindblowers.

In the early days of my blind-buying dvd adventures, I went with a star-studded war film by Oliver Stone and Orion Pictures. What I ended up with was some top-10 material, because Platoon is one hell of a movie.

1986 was a time when a lot of great movies were being made. A lot of great actors were getting their starts, and they had to go through Oliver Stone's boot camp to get it. In a way, you have to respect them for that, because it makes the acting a hell of a lot more real. You believe these people, and you have a haunting horrors-of-war story wrapped around their stint in hell.

There are all sorts of sides to the war, but in the end, it's still filled with people, and people have all sorts of conflicting agendas. The characters struggle to cope with fighting not only the VC, but their own side as well.

A lot of war mishaps revolve around orders and higher-ups and this movie shows the divide. These characters can be awful, but they're still the "heroes", and they have nothing to look forward to. Goddamn, it would be an awful thing to fight in a war. I consider myself truly blessed to not have to deal with any of that shit, but it's also important in the sense of learning from those harsh lessons and knowing your place in this world, and how awful things can be if you don't play by the rules.


Charlie Sheen was such a newb in this movie, but he's there to represent the cherry in all of us. I also love how his narration clashes with Martin Sheen's narration in Hot Shots Part Deux, which is also a great (not-quite) war movie.

So many people in this movie... Johnny Depp plays the translator in a small but decent role. Forest Whitaker, Tony Todd, Keith David, John C. McGinley, Kevin Dillon, and a bunch of others are there, but Tom Berenger is so damn intense. Love that makeup, too.

I love the visuals, and how the shots kind of look like lasers sometimes, in that old Orion sort of way. The whole thing is wonderfully crafted, but the performances and characters are all you have to hold onto in a war movie. Everyone in it has moments of good and bad, heroism and horror-show, and there's no black and white for any of these characters, even though the movie has a lot of black people AND white people, and a lot of mexicans and yellows. Even though these characters had to work with each other in the oft involuntary fight on the other side of the world... they don't really have to like each other.

Some of these scenes haunted me. I used to watch this movie all the time because it stuck with me so much, and it can still pack a punch. Namely the village scene and Elias's scene. War crimes galore, and this wasn't even the worst of 'em. Just wait till you see Casualties of War!

Platoon is fucking awesome. My favorite war movie.

Journey to the end of the night (2006)

Note: I tried to add a movie image or cover, but didn't figure out how. Ah, well...

Journey to the end of the night is about the tense relationship between a father and son who run a club in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

On one night, Russo and Paul's so-so fortunes are supposed to change, as they have a man named Baaba contracted (as a drug-mule) for a huge payoff.
However, things begin to awry when Baaba has a fatal heart attack while fucking a tranny.
This potentially screws things up, since it happens the night before the drug run. Ironically (slightly later on), the same problematic tranny has an altercation with Russo's son Paul, in which a bottle is thrown into a window, cutting Paul's head. Small world, ain't it?

This film stars Scott Glenn and Brendan Fraser, but also stars Catalina Moreno as a prostitute-turned-wife (Russo's), who is having an affair with Paul.

There are many double-crosses (especially from Paul), including a scene in which he has a guide-dog killed in an attempt to extract information.

In Journey to the end of the night, it's dog eat dog, as this film pulls no punches in it's portrayal of a deeply-troubled love triangle.