Red Inkworks:  The Flicker File

An appreciation for underrated movies.  Films that honour the entertainment experience...by discarding the uninspiring predictability of formula production.  

A Boy And His Dog: (1975)  Don Johnson plays a young man in a post nuclear war world who has an interesting friend, a telepathic dog. The dog gives him an advantage in dealing with the barbaric world he lives in. When Johnson finds one place that has escaped the devastation of the war, he also finds some rather odd attitudes.

Bagdad Cafe: (1987  ) Also known as Out of Rosenheim:  Jasmin has a row with her husband in the middle of the desert, and storms off to a truck-stop cafe. She stays there, and starts to make friends with the regulars, including Rudi, an ex-set decorator from Hollywood who wants to paint her picture.

Big Fish: (2003)  The story revolves around a dying father and his son, who is trying to learn more about his dad by piecing together the stories he has gathered over the years. The son winds up re-creating his father's elusive life in a series of legends and myths inspired by the few facts he knows. Through these tales, the son begins to understand his father's great feats and his great failings.
 

Black Day Blue Night: (1995) A disgruntled wife of a cheating husband takes off on a road trip with her husband's "other woman". The two women pick up a hitchhiker who may, or may not, be a robber and murderer on the run from the cops. In the mean time, a policeman who is tracking the robber/ murderer is hot on the trail -- but why?

Blood and Donuts: (1995) A vampire who went to sleep in 1969, is awakened in modern day Toronto by a stray golf ball. He becomes involved in the lives of a hapless cabby, an all-night donut shop clerk, a few local criminals, and his ex-lover from the 60's.
 

Boiler Room:  (2000)  A morally decent college dropout finds himself at conflict with his harsh federal judge father. He gets a job as a stock broker and gets on the fast track to success. Only things take a turn for the worst when he learns that his job isn't what's it cracked up to be.

Cemetery Man: (1994) Rupert Everett brilliantly cast as a cemetery man who must kill the dead a second time when they become zombies.

Cherry 2000: (1987)  When Sam Treadwell breaks his Cherry 2000, a robot wife/sex toy, he hires E Johnson, to guide him across a dangerous apocalyptic wasteland to an abandoned manufacturing plant where he hopes to find a duplicate model Cherry 2000 to replace it with.

Cold Dog Soup: (1990)  Teenage Michael meets the gorgeous Sarah in a fitness studio. He accosts her and manages to get a date for dinner. There's just one problem: not only is her mother and obnoxious dog Jasper with them, but the dog suddenly falls dead! Sarah's mother wants him buried immediately and sends out Michael to the next park - with a promise for a more intimate party from Sarah later.

Devil In A Blue Dress:  (1995)  It is 1948 in LA and Ezikeal "Easy" Rawlins, an African-American World War II veteran, is looking for work. At his friend's bar, he is introduced to a white man, DeWitt Albright, who is looking for someone to help him find a missing white woman assumed to be hiding somewhere in LA's Black community. This woman, Daphane Monet, happens to be the fiancée of a wealthy "blue blood," Todd Carter, who is currently the favorite in the city's mayoralty race.

Die Blechtrommel:  (1979) Also known as The Tin Drum:  Danzig in the 1920s/1930s. Oskar Matzerath, son of a local dealer, is a most unusual boy. Equipped with full intellect right from his birth he decides at his third birthday not to grow up as he sees the crazy world around him at the eve of World War II. So he refuses the society and his tin drum symbolizes his protest against the middle-class mentality of his family and neighbourhood, which stand for all passive people in Nazi Germany at that time.

Donnie Darko:  (2001) It's October 1988, in the Virginia suburb of Middlesex. When Frank, a grotesque giant bunny (possibly imaginary), leads Donnie out of his house minutes before a plane smashes through his roof, he not only saves Donnie's life but also warns Donnie that the world is about to end. Over the next few weeks, Donnie falls in love with Gretchen (Jena Malone) and tries to figure out what his life means.

Grosse Point Blank:  (1997)  Martin Blank is a professional assassin. He is sent on a mission to a small Detroit suburb, Grosse Pointe, and, by coincidence, his ten-year high school reunion party is taking place there at the same time.
 

Jacob's Ladder: (1991) A traumatized Vietnam war veteran finds out that his post-war life isn't what he believes it to be when he's attacked by horned creatures in the subway and his dead son comes to visit him.

Miller's Crossing: (1990)  A highly styled 'genre' film which can perhaps be seen as a pastiche of all gangster movies. Tom Reagan is the laconic anti-hero of this amoral tale which is also, paradoxically, a look at morals within the criminal underworld of the 1930s. Two rival gangs vie for control of a city where the police are pawns, and the periodic busts of illicit drinking establishments are no more than a way for one gang to get back at the other. Black humour and shocking violence compete for screen time as we question whether or not Tom, right-hand man of the Irish mob leader, really has a heart.

Primer:  (2004) At night and on weekends, four men in a suburban garage have built a cottage industry of error-checking devices. But, they know that there is something more. There is some idea, some mechanism, some accidental side effect that is standing between them and a pure leap of innovation. And so, through trial and error they are building the device that is missing most. However, two of these men find the device and immediately realize that it is too valuable to market. Primer cost $7,000.00 to make!

Repo Man:  (1984)  Frustrated punk rocker Otto quits his supermarket job after slugging a co-worker, and is later dumped by his girlfriend at a party. Wandering the streets in frustration, he is recruited in the repossession of a car by a repo agent. After discovering his parents have donated his college fund to a televangelist, he joins the repossession agency (Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation) as an apprentice "repo man".

Road to Perdition:  (2002)  Michael Sullivan, Sr. is an enforcer to John Rooney, an Irish American organized crime boss in Illinois during the Great Depression. Sullivan, an orphan raised by Rooney, has worked for the crime boss most of his life. Sullivan and Rooney's son, Connor, are sent by Rooney to talk to Finn McGovern, a disgruntled employee. Sullivan's son, twelve-year-old Michael Sullivan, Jr., follows the enforcers, witnesses Connor's impulsive killing of McGovern, and stumbles into discovery by Connor and his father. Although Sullivan swears his son to secrecy, Connor tries to seal the secret with a failed attempt to kill Sullivan, while murdering Sullivan's wife, Annie, and the younger son, Peter. Sullivan and his son Michael escape the attack and flee to Chicago.

Run Lola Run:  (1998) A young woman (Franka Potente) in Germany has twenty minutes to find and bring 100,000 Euro Dollars (about $12.00 USD) to her boyfriend before he robs a supermarket.

Starship Troopers: (1997)  The time is the future. Johnny Rico joins the military after graduation to become a citizen and for the love of his high school sweetheart. In the war against the bug aliens of Klendathu, the military is a very dangerous place to be. Johnny works his way through several battles and with the help of his friends and comrades, helps turn the tide of the war, and save the human race.

Strange Days:  (1995)  The movie tells the story of Lenny Nero, an ex-cop who now deals with data-discs containing recorded memories and emotions. One day he receives a disc which contains the memories of a murderer killing a prostitute. Lenny investigates and is pulled deeper and deeper in a whirl of blackmail, murder and rape. Will he survive and solve the case?

True Romance: (1993)  Clarence and Alabama are newlyweds who acquire an unexpected wedding present. Unknown to the blissfully happy couple, ruthless gangsters are on their tail, determined to reclaim their lost property.

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