Astron-6 (2011)

Studio: Troma
DVD Release Date: December 13th, 2011
Rating: Unrated!
Review by Craig Sorensen


Another day, another Troma film that needs reviewing.  There’s always a bit of trepidation when I put a Troma film in the DVD player, not because the films are shocking or disgusting but because they are so lazy.  Other than that first batch of films everything I’ve seen from them has just been awful.  I don’t think that that first batch of pictures (Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ‘em High) are particularly good but they were novel at least.  Troma has been riding that wave of films ever since.  And things keep getting cheaper and cheaper.  So I wasn’t exactly excited to watch a two disc collection from them.  TWO DISCS!  Fuck, this is going to be painful.

Maybe it was my lowered expectations but I didn’t hate Astron-6.  There is some creativity at work here, which is more than I can usually say for the shit that Troma releases.  So Astron-6 is a group of five guys from Canada that get together to work on each other’s videos.  This set is a collection of those videos.  They vary greatly in quality and most are a little too derivative for my tastes but there is some talent on display.  I think that there might be a good film in these kids if they manage to find their own voice.

Anyway, on to the films...

Cool Guys
Cool Guys is a parody of 80’s sex comedies (think Hardbodies I guess).  Two losers (Adam Brooks and Conor Sweeney) think that if they can travel to a new city they can reinvent themselves as “cool guys”.  Their “cool” uncle tags along.  That’s basically the whole plot.  Well, there is a prostitute murder along the way.  They do a good job of capturing the over the top style of the genre but I think that this is way too long.  It just feels padded.  If this was about five minutes shorter it would be much stronger.  Once you get past a couple of 80’s jokes that’s about all there is.  I do like the title song though.

H.I.Z. (Erection Der Zombi)
Five kids go to work at a camp grounds for the summer and are infected by a zombi virus.  I guess the gimmick here is that one of the kids is infected by cutting his dick on the test tube containing the pathogen.  So there are dick jokes.  H.I.Z. is a parody of bad Italian zombie films (Zombi 3) so the whole thing is dubbed.  Which could be a funny joke.  It’s kind of killed in that the actors are still speaking the same dialog that is being dubbed.  So the dialog still matches the actor’s lips.  Also, the plot kind of rips off Cabin Fever a bit.

Punch Out
So this one is also set in the 80’s and is about a punk kid who I guess gets turned on by getting punched in the face.  I don’t think that the film is really that explicit in the sexualization of getting punched in the face but I don’t know how else to read it.  There’s also some bit about one of his friends trying to get laid but being afraid of vaginas.  Watching Punch Out is like watching your friends short film after he comes home from his first year of film school.  It’s not awful or anything but you know, you have to struggle to come up with things to say about it.

You're Dead
I’m not really sure what the point of this is.  So there’s a guy wandering around Winnipeg for some reason while two other guys are about to rape some girl.  Eventually the first guy runs into the other three and then gets beat up and shot.  The end.  So is the film saying not to get involved?  The whole thing plays like a trailer for Grindhouse.  It makes me wonder if this wasn’t created for that Grindhouse trailer competition.

Insanophenia

This is the worst film in the set.  It’s like everything that I hate about student films.  It’s trying to be funny but failing.  Trying to be weird and arty but ends up as the dumbest kind of pretension.  It is ambitious though.  It combines live action and stop motion animation which does look kind of interesting.  The video quality is fucking awful though.

Father's Day
Another fake trailer.  This one plays better than the last one.  It also has the only nudity on display.  So this is the fake trailer for a 70‘s horror film about a guy named Chris Fuckman who rapes fathers.  The jokes work much better here than in most of the shorts, probably because of the shorter running time.

Sebastian And Alan
And continuing with the grindhouse feel is the next short, Sebastian & Alan.  Two guys driving at night pick up a young girl.  Then they kill her.  The end.  The majority of the thing is shot in a car so it’s a little stagy but I don’t know how you would get around that.  Still, even if they did I don’t know if I would enjoy it.  I get the same reaction as I did with “You’re Dead”.  I just don’t see the point.

Kriss Miss
This is a bad infomercial parody for a christmas wife rental service and it plays like a bad Tim & Eric sketch.  And again, this is too long.  Whatever jokes there are here that work are hampered by the short overstaying it’s welcome.

Heart of Karl
This is another short by Steven Kostanski (Insanophenia).  And again this is sub David Lynch stuff.  It does fair better than his previous film though.  This had descent atmosphere.  The plot is nonsensical though and I’m not going to try to summarize it as I don’t think it means anything anyway.  There is some nice stop motion animation here as well.  But the video quality is awful.  There is a lot of digital processing going on though so I’m assuming that’s the reason this looks like shit.

Haunted
This is some kind of music video.  It’s for the music group Darkhouse.  I'm no expert but I'm going to say that this isn't good hip hop.  But there’s no accounting for taste I guess.  This also plays out like a grindhouse trailer (seeing a trend?).

Lazer Ghosts 2: Return to Laser Cove

So with this short I guess they are going for a late 80’s video release trailer type of vibe.  I do like the bad VHS tape effect that they’ve given the video.  But like Cool Guys, this goes on way too long.  It starts out well enough though.  It’s just that after you’ve got the joke it just seems to go on and on.

SiamIam
Matthew Kennedy and Chris Epp play conjoined twins.  When one of them falls for the pretty girl in the upstairs apartment however, his brother hires a hitman to take him out.  SiamIam is too goddamn quirky for it’s own good.  And I think that the 1990’s soured me on all self consciously quirky comedies.  This just kind of annoyed me.  And the whole thing looks cheap.  I hope these kids earn enough money from this DVD to buy some lights, microphones and a new Camera.

Inferno of the dead
A couple are annoyed by the living dead.  I kind of liked where this one was going.  It does reference Burial Ground so that earns it points anyway.  The living dead are walking the earth but they don’t do anything other than stand around and watch TV.  Of course, long after the joke is over you’ll have about five minutes left of video to get through.

Nobodies
Ugh, a film about making films.  Mike and Alan are a couple of losers who make bad shot-on-video genre films.  This started out kind of annoying me (and ripping off American Movie a bit) but it does grow on you.  It’s almost 30 minutes long but it didn’t feel like it overstayed it’s welcome.  Probably because unlike most videos in this collection it’s about characters and not a gimmick.

Xtreme Ghost Killers
This is supposed to be a parody of reality TV ghost hunter shows.  The shows are fucking ridiculous so I do see how you would want to make fun of the genre.  But if there was one genre that I could wipe off the face of the earth it would be the “fake” reality show.  It’s the only thing I dislike more than reality shows.  The “real” shows are so ridiculous that they act as parody already so the jokes are usually redundant.
Fake reality is usually a bad sign.

Fat Adam
This is a short black & white flash animated fat joke.  It’s drawn well at least.  That’s about all I have to say about it I guess.

Gore Blade
These are a collection of shorts with various fantasy movie characters in ordinary situations (using Facebook, smoking pot, etc.)  They are short and to the point.  I don't think the jokes are that great but they work in the context.  I do like the titles though.

Video quality on the majority of these shorts is awful.  They look like they were shot on cheap consumer video equipment.  Some of these are anamorphic and some are not, so you might need to zoom in and out between shorts.  Of course zooming in will only intensify the awfulness of the video quality so maybe that’s not such a good idea.  Sound is also pretty bad on these.  There is a lot of wind noise in a few of the shorts so it’s difficult to hear sometimes.  I guess I can forgive some of this as they all seem like student films.  I suppose that they will eventually be able to move up to better equipment.  Hopefully they take the time to edit their films down a bit in the future though.  Special features on the disc include audio commentaries on the shorts, photo galleries, behind the scenes videos, a special preview of their feature Father’s Day and even an easter egg.