I’ll say one thing about A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell: it delivers on its promise. There is a titular nymphoid. Dinosaurs abound. There are barbarians. And there is no shortage of Hell. It is worth notin’ that the title says Nymphoid, not Nymphomaniac, which is what I thought it said. Big difference between the two, and as a result, my Tuesday morning.

Accordin’ to Prof. Wikipedias, nymphoid refers to a nymph, meanin’: A young girl, especially one who inspires lustful feelings.

Makes sense. Lea, said nymphoid, is young and just about every guy in the flick wants to give her saddle a rattle.

Now, compare to nymphomaniac: A woman with excessive sexual desire.

If the flick were A Nymphomaniac Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, the plot probably wouldn’t move too far. Lea would be lovin’ everythin’ in sight, just like Ma Sixon after her Thanksgivin’ gallon of Wild Turkey.

But sadly, there is very little lovin’ in this flick. In fact, more uglies were bumped in Forrest Gump.

This here post-apocalyptic flick opens with Lea explainin’ how the world came to an end over a montage (a “capitalist conspiracy” is mentioned–some thing never change, eh?). Most of the footage in the montage looks like it came from a bunch of other flicks, and that ain’t surprisin’, as Nymphoid was a Troma release. They reuse more old footage than a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

To sum up: bad stuff happened in the past (see: Nukes), and now the ravaged world is filled with mutants and dinosaur-like beasties. Items of note: Lea claims to be from Tromaville, and she starts her narration with “Dear Diary,” even though, as we learn later, she can barely read.

Tryin’ to survive in this Dinosaur Hell are our nymphoid and her boyfriend, Marn. Yes, when you get right down to it, this flick is a love story. A love story with some road bumps, mind you. Seems like everyone is after Lea. In the first few minutes of the flick, a gang, who looks like a Manowar cosplay, tries to capture and have their way with Lea.

Marn saves Lea, but later on, she gets captured by a pack of reptoids and their master, a poor man’s Kurgan. The group of baddies beat the tar out of Marn, but he is nursed back to health by an old man, who is learned in the ways of public domain literature (he recites the Jabberwocky poem from Through the Looking Glass). After he’s healed up, Marn goes searchin’ for Lea. What we have here is a ‘boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl meets mutants, boy fights mutants’ kinda love story.

And dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. The effects are classic stop-motion animation, and pretty dang good for a low-budget flick. While there is a fair amount of action, the combat is about as fierce as a third grade stage version of Braveheart: punches and kicks barely connect, and weapons are swung with hesitation. Given that most of the cast played multiple parts, I guess the director didn’t want anyone gettin’ hurt.

Now, this don’t mean the flick is lacking in blood. Nope. Limbs are severed. Baddies are chomped to bits by dinos. Heck, there’s even a bit of cannibalism—just in time for Thanksgivin’!

The acting in A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell is its weakest link, but it only adds to the charm and if you are worried ‘bout the actin’ in a film called A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell, then you are probably watchin’ the wrong movie, friend.

Tiger says, give this one a watch for the stop-motion animation alone, but bring a few beers–or a gallon of Wild Turkey.

Nukes Ear biting Tromaville Sign Axe swinging Sword whirling Hesitant combat Cameraman Shadows Reptoid abuse Swamp Men Laundry stealing Leather bikinis Severed limbs Sandworms Stop motion dinosaurs Dinosaur fights Reptoids Public Domain Literature Groping	6 BLOOD severed limbs and hungry dinos supply plenty of blood. Plus: cannibalism! 2 BREASTS we see Lea’s mosquito bites for about 39 frames in the final five minutes. 10 BEASTS A variety of dinos, reptoids, mutants and more. 6.00 OVERALL

Check out the trailer for “A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell”

A greasy guy in a loin cloth fights dinosaurs, purple cavemen and rock em’ sock em’ robots in Yor: The Hunter from the future. Action crap extrodinaire Steve Banton stars as Yor in one of the few films where the ending is actually given away in the title. Yor is a meat headed weight trainer who may actually be the first post apocalyptic redneck that doesn’t drive a firebird. He’s out frolicking in the desert when he finds some cave people getting attacked by a paper machete setgasuaurus and we all know how vicious plant eaters can be. After a few tucks and rolls and a stone axe to the noggin’ he calls a touchdown, drinks the dino’s blood and tells everyone to gather “the choice cuts of meat.” Yor only eats free range dinosaur meat.

One of the survivors is a woman named Kala who dresses in fur bikinis and likes dumb doughy guys in golden mullets. She wants to get busy with Yor, so she takes him back to their village where she shakes her money maker at a dino-death party. This seems to only confuse Yor’s pea sized brain and attracts some purpled faced caveman that attack that kidnap everyone including Yor’s new squeeze. They throw him off a cliff by which he miraculously survives with only a few minor scraps and bruises so he and the old sweaty guy hand glide into the purple guys home cave with a gigantic dead bat. Yor kung-fu kicks some cavemen in the crotch and then floods the cave with river water killing as many woman and children possible just before rescuing Kala. He hates anyone that he can easily bench press. They head up river on a boat strapped together with some hemp rope hoping maybe there’s a grateful dead concert upstream and are captured by some sand people wrapped in oily rags roasting marshmallows.

The sand people take them to their leader, Rowa a pretty young blonde who also wears a giant rapper medallion identical to Yors. She’s been baby-sitting some astronauts who’ve been trapped in ice in the caves making astro-slushies. After avoiding a decapitation and fighting some more sand people off, Yor invites Rowa on the trip with them to try to discover the secret of his origins. Sadly Rowa gets killed by more purple cavemen who show up after a brief cat fight she has with Kala. It ends all too quickly and with no mud or lime jello.

Yor gets the smack down on another dinosaur attacker whose survivors take him to yet another village. It felt like the movie might actually be starting over again, but then some spaceships show up and start blasting everyone in the village. Yor seems to have that luck. After the carnage, Yor

promises to avenge their death by sailing on a boat made of wicker and bat guano to the island where the attackers came from. They get stun zapped by slow moving robots and guys that look like sting dressed in teflon jumpsuits. The island is run by a dark overlord whose plan is to have Yor and Kala breed with his new cyborgs to create a new master race and a whole lotta akward after sex small talk.  Yor is helped to escape by a temp worker there where he joins a resistance against the cyborgs in their basement furnace room. Guard rails are a plenty to toss robots over. There’s a nuclear reactor and a robot caveman battle with lasers, trapeze acts and somewhere a guy in a cloak is impaled with a barber shop pole. That pretty much sums er’ up. Barry Goodall says it’s worth checking out if ya got a hankerin’ for communal living and sweaty old guys on hemp rafts..but then again you’re probably already a dang dirty hippie.

impromptu trapeze acts bat hand gliding high beam hand glow crystal balls with premium cable death by barber pole weenie roast attacks dinosaur rodeos astronauts on ice rock em sock em robots dino blood energy drinks extreme theme music	3 BLOOD Mostly from paper machet dinosaurs. 6 BREASTS Cleavage is plentiful but is mostly covered by fur and giant medallions. I blame PETA. 9 BEASTS Dinosaurs, purple cavemen, giant bats and robots. It’s like a kid’s toy box got dumped out all over this movie. 6.00 OVERALL

Check out the trailer for “Yor: The Hunter from the Future”

Hey y’all, Tiger here.

I was able to do another one o’ those Audio Reviews for the Ginger and the Geek Podcast. If yer ears be hungry for more o’ my golden voice, then give my audio review of Dollman a listen. It is under five minutes long, which is about how long my third marriage lasted.

If you wanna listen to the whole dang podcast episode, feel free. It is an hour and three minutes long, making it a touch longer than my fourth marriage.

I also have a wrote up version of the review too. Enjoy.

It’s that time a year again. Time when little monsters beg for snacks and drunk soccer moms dress as slutty pirates. No it’s not kids eat free night at Long John Silvers, it’s time for our annual “Movies you might have seen but maybe not but if you didn’t then check them out halloween night movie list” or “MYMHSBMNBIYDTCTOHNML” for short. Our highway mutant editors came up with a list that in no way reflects good taste, human decency or a proper hygiene and to that we say “heck yeah!” So here’s our movie list which is in no particular order mostly because we ain’t no communists.

1. The Frighteners
Three years before that kid saw dead folk in The Sixth Sense, Michael J. Fox had a similar affliction in this here flick. But, unlike the mopey kid in Sixth Sense, MJF used his powers to make some extra cash.

2. Trick r’ Treat
A collection of interlaced short stories which nobody but four people saw, Trick r’ Treat is a hoot. Shame it didn’t get the attention it deserved, much like Jaleel White’s one man musical, Urkel Rex.

3. Ernest Scared Stupid
Yes, this may fall under the ‘kiddie’ category, but aside from being an important Public Service Announcement about the dangers of trolls, it is some of Jim Varney’s finest work as Ernest.

4. Planet Terror
A throwback to over-the-top zombie movies (are there any other kind?), Planet Terror is as fun as it is gory.

5. Call of Cthulhu
For those what like their horror a bit more on the ‘cerebral’ side (and I don’t mean floating killer brains), check out this take on H. P. Lovecraft’s classic story. It is black and white, and not a talkie, but captures the mood (and time) of the story pretty well.

6. John Carpenter’s Vampires
No Halloween movie list is complete with out at least one JC flick. Vampires is funny, gory, and gritty. No fancy hairdos or sparkling here. Trivia: stars Sheryl Lee, Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer. Yes, please.

7. Dead Alive
Most blood and gore I’ve seen, and I’ve been looking for years to find more; all of it is absolutely gratuitous. The story of a momma’s boy whose mother is bitten by a spider monkey and becomes a zombie. Unable to properly “deal” with his mother, a comedy of errors insures and the plague spreads quickly. But the real gem is the Kung Fu priest and his line, “I kick ass for the Lord!” Can I get an Ahmen!?!

8. Evil Dead 2
This one is a no brainer. Yes, it is a popular favorite, but it stands the test of time and needs to be on any Halloween list.

9. Ghost Dad
83 minutes of terror. Bill Cosby (yes) rises from the dead to wreck havoc on those who done him wrong. Or he just comes back as a ghost and tries to make his kids love him. I can’t remember. I always pass out after the first ten minutes due to brain failure.

10. Thirst
A vampire movie that is actually cool. Not because some aesthetically pleasing teens are wearing tight black leather, but because the story is excellent. Tired of feeling useless watching patients die at the hospital he works for, a Catholic priest volunteers for an experiment to find a cure for a deadly, and incurable, disease. During one of his blood transfusions he is tainted with vampire blood. Without knowing what’s happened, he has to come to terms with his new urges and his religious calling.

11. The Signal
Someone has started broadcasting a signal on all devices, radio, television, interwebs, etc., that has driven people insane. A young girl tries to make it to a rendezvous with her lover at a train station, all the while being pursued by her husband, and what seems like the whole of the city, that’s gone psychotic. Another great mix of bloody horror and humor.

12. Murder Party
Christopher Hawley is a loser who mistakenly gets an invite to a Halloween party. The group throwing the party intends to kill him for their “art”. What they get is mayhem, mishap and hilarity.

13. Shawn of the Dead
Best. Romantic. Comedy. Ever. It took me a while to realize it was a romantic comedy because the genre is so masterfully hidden under the layers of “buddy flick” and “zombie outbreak”. Pure GENIUS.

14. The Mist
Whereas this movie has monsters, and blood and guts, the real horror of the film is what happens because of the people who are trapped, trying to survive. In true Stephen King fashion, no one gets away clean in this film, and the worst of the worst is saved for the very end. The last minute is heartbreaking.

15. Audition
This movie can be incredibly slow. I almost didn’t make it through the film. It’s about a man who’s raised his son alone after his wife died in childbirth. Now, some 17 years later, he’s looking to remarry but doesn’t know how to meet women. A friend, who’s a movie producer invites him to take part in some auditions he’s holding to fill the female lead to help him break the ice. Know this, it is WELL worth what the film’s building up to in the last 25 minutes. When it hits the fan it’ll freak you out, but good.

16. The Ugly
From New Zeland, a good looking psycho thinks he’s ugly and everyone laughs at him, so he starts butchering every chick he comes across with a straight razor because he is possessed by The Ugly. Tries to have a good relationship, but whatever pseudo-demonic force inhabits him just won’t let go, despite the best efforts of a psychologist who comes to love and understand poor Simon. Awesome mental hospital scenes, and a decent twist on the end.

17. The Abominable Dr. Phibes
Willy Wonka’s Candyman up against the diabolical Vincent Price and his wind-up jazz band. Psychedelic dance scenes, prolonged organ playing (of the musical type, you perverts!), and some of the fanciest death scenes ever! My particular favorite is the frog mask. It doesn’t get much more technicolor than this.

18. The Stuff
The best parasitic alien dessert food movie yet. White gunk bubbling from the ground is discovered by two hobos whose first instinct is to taste it. It takes off like effing wildfire, and the only things standing between The Stuff and world domination are a little boy and an industrial spy. You get an excellent grocery store freakout, melting faces, and sentient cool whip. It’ll make you think twice about eating a twinkie ever again!

19. Stanley
Vietnam veteran gets along better with snakes than he does people; your typical traditional country native fighting off the sleezy, drug-addled land developer. He takes matters into his own hands and sics his pet rattlesnake Stanley on the city scum, and then in a moment of pure ‘What just happened?’ kidnaps the developer’s daughter after he’s filled the pool with various and sundry snakes, and she falls in love with the cold-blooded swamp stud. He plans to make her his Eve, but she wants to go to the rock-n-roll show, and in a climactic man vs. nature scene, he reaps the venom he spewed.

20. Don’t Answer the Phone
Psychopathic pudge-bucket throttles ladies with extreme prejudice. Amateur S&M photography sessions, and extreme stalking behavior. The one that got away is chased and psychologically tortured, but thankfully a hunky police officer feels sorry for her and annihilates the bad guy.

21. The Blob
I can’t say much about this one other than if frigging rocks. The quintessential Earth vs. Extraterrestrial Gunk movie. Just awesome fun all the way around.

22. House
William Katt, a horror writer with PTSD inherits his aunt’s haunted house, where his son disappeared years before. Estranged from his soap star wife, he goes to the house to write his Vietnam memoirs, but ends up doing battle with the supernatura, led by Bull from Night Court. The Greatest American Hero dukes it out with sentient garden tools, slime glopola monsters, demonic troll kids, and a taxidermied swordfish. Badass.

23. Dr. Giggles
Crazy surgeon takes revenge on his home town for the deaths of his parents. His mom died of a bad heart, and his surgeon father tried to find her a replacement…by cutting the hearts out of townsfolk. They gave him the Frankenstein pitchfork treatment, but not before he had sewn the young doctor into his mother’s corpse. He runs into a teenager with the same condition as dear momma had, and makes it his mission to kill her friends and transplant her heart.

24. Popcorn
A twist on the wax museum revenge story; this time set in a movie theater where a college film studies class puts on a horror movie extravaganza, but someone’s got their sights set on murder! A little girl with vague memories of almost getting murdered by a cult, the movie the cult was filming showing up, and the hideously deformed creepazoid hiding his marred visage behind elaborate makeup untl the final showdown. Great sendups of William Castle classics and old theater gimmicks.

25. American Gothic
Traumatized woman takes an island vacation with her friends, only they land on an island inhabited by a family of nutballs who murder folks from the modern day and make them into mummified dolls for the kids. This one goes full circle, everyone getting hacked up except for the crazy lady, who goes so absolutely and perfectly insane that she joins up with the family, only to go EVEN MORE CRAZY and kill them all. Amazing

Do you like movies about sweaty, shirtless guys punching space aliens? Then Arena (1989, dir. Peter Manoogian) is the flick for you. If not, well, then yer on the wrong website, friend. I’m sure Martha Stewart has somethin’ about puttin’ glitter on pinecones over on her site.

Take Rocky and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (or Babylon 5 if you prefer), toss ‘em in a blender and you pretty much have Arena. On a space station populated with humans and aliens, a human short order cook, Steve Armstrong, dreams of fighting in the station’s popular slugfest.

Now, let’s back up a bit. Our hero, a fighter, is named Steve Armstrong. Get it? That would be like naming Tom Cruise’s character in Days of Thunder, Cole Driveswell, or Roy Scheider in Jaws, Chief Martin Kantswim.

But, given that Steve Armstrong, played by Christopher Reeve clone Paul Satterfield, looks and acts more or less like a poor man’s Flash Gordon, the name works. This is not a serious epic about the tests and trails of a fighter, like in say The Fighter (starring the Batman and Marky Mark). Nah, this is an excuse for a guy to punch a bunch of alien puppets. Need another example? Steve’s best buddy is a short alien guy with four arms, named, of course, Shorty. This film does not take itself seriously, and I mean that in a good way.

It is worth noting that this here flick features plenty of folks from both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5—science fiction TV shows about life on a space station. Both o’ these shows came a few years after Arena, so maybe we have this flick to thank for a pair of classic science-fiction shows. Or it just helped them all get another job. Typecasting, y’know? Kind of like how Don S. Davis played a fair share of military guys, or how Clint Eastwood never plays anyone who smiles.

Arena starts out with Steve picking a fight with some kinda fish man. Reminds me of the time I tried fishing for catfish barehanded. Steve’s throws and ‘bo’s grabs the eye of a fighter trainer, played by B5’s Claudia Christian, and he gets his wish: to be the first human in 50 years to fight in the titular arena.

But, all ain’t cheery in the arena. A shady fight promoter fixes fights and rules the roost. His henchman, DS9’s Armin Shimerman (once again in full makeup), ain’t too nice neither. Steve fights his way through alien after alien as he works his way to the top of the rankings—and yes, we are treated to a mandatory montage.

Hijinks and shady business plague Steve as he works his way up to the championship fight, but you pretty much know how this one is gonna end. Arena does have a neat plot device in the form of the Handicapper—a machine that averages out the strength between the two fighters. This comes in handy when one fighter is a scrappy human, and the other is some sort of horned cyborg-lizard with a welded on codpiece. Yeah.

The real charm of Arena lies in its alien makeup effects. And, thankfully, some of the aliens ain’t yer basic humanoid shape neither. One of Steve’s first fights is against some kind of large-space grasshopper thing. It is a sight to behold, and makes the flick worth a watch on its own. They don’t make ‘em like this no more. A bit of trivia, Hollywood voice over legend, Frank Welker, provides voices for some, if not all, of the aliens Steve fights.

Tiger says, while Arena is predictable with its underdog fighter plot, it is fun and the makeup effects are great reminder of what movies were like before the overuse of CGI and motion-capture. Give it a peep, and play the Count the Star Trek/B5 Actors Drinking Game.

Puppet Punching Alien Punching Poor Customer Service Food Throwing Fourhanded Cooking Fourhanded Massages Gold Shorts Cyborg Codpieces Exploding Skulls Hologram Dancing Girls Future Star Trek Actors Future Babylon 5 Actors

2 BLOOD While there is plenty of fighting, mostly punching and the like, there is little blood on screen. Sure, Steve bleeds a bit here and there, but it is nothing major. 1 BREASTS We don’t see any full on naked boobies, but we get close a couple times, and Steve’s dream girl has some low cut dresses. 10 BEASTS Yes, Arena is lacking a bit in the first two categories, but it piles on the aliens with puppets, body suits and some great makeup effects—especially for a straight to video movie. 4.3 OVERALL

Check out the trailer for “Arena”