It's every 80s action film condensed into 15 minutes of non-stop violent claymation, executed with great care and tremendous technical skill. Beautifully sculpted clay models, stop-motion animated, are enhanced with CGI explosions, the whole thing directed and edited like a really good action film. Some bits look almost real.English humourist Miles Kington once said that for a parody to work the parodist had to truly love his subject, and Mike Mort must love those old 80s action movies to create this. It made me laugh with every single frame. It's fast, dense, clever and painstakingly well done, and unlike maverick cop-on-the-edge Chuck Steel it plays by ALL the rules.
... View MoreWhen a heavily armed gang of kidnappers take hostage one of the city's most influential bankers and proceed to kick him repeatedly in the groin until his balls come out of his nose (250 hits apparently being the magic number), tough maverick cop Chuck Steel leaps into action, guns a-blazing.A claymation pastiche of the '80s action genre, director Mike Mort's Raging Balls of Steel Justice is 15 minutes of pure animated excess, packed full of gloriously over-the-top violence and shamelessly unsophisticated humour. But even though the script is undeniably crude, the execution is far from it: Mort's animation is wonderful, with great characters, lovingly detailed models, and oodles of plasticine gore, with impressive use of CGI effects to enhance the action (huge explosions being tough to make out of modelling clay).Admittedly, a couple of the gags don't work as well as they might—the over-sexed police robot getting it on with inanimate objects isn't funny enough to be repeated as often as it is—but overall this is a very enjoyable way to waste a quarter of an hour.7.5/10, rounded up to 8 for Steel's accidental 250th wallop in the banker's bits, which does indeed result in the guys nuts dangling from his nostrils.
... View MoreThis is a 14-minute short film from 2 years ago and it's actually animated, even if this genre is not listed here om IMDb for this little film. BAFTA Award-nominee Mike Mort not only wrote and directed this, he also voiced all the characters. I have to say I liked the animation. The characters were kinda fun to watch, but I cannot really say the story was on par. A cop arrives at a warehouse to free a hostage and in the process of doing so, he kills all the bad guys and finally blows up the whole building. The horny robot was fun and the guy constantly kicking the hostage in the balls was as well. Unfortunately, at some point, it gets pretty repetitive. I guess Mort should have kept the film under the 10-minute mark as, apart from the ending outside, there is nothing really new happening during the entire second half of the film. A bit underwhelming after a good start. Also the lone rider cop aspect could have been emphasized a bit more with funny references other than him shooting the robot near the end. Not recommended.
... View More...So it's a shame that the rest of this short is such a letdown. RAGING BALLS OF STEEL JUSTICE was conceived as a claymation tribute to the action films of the 1980s, movies which inevitably featured a square-jawed hero committing ultra-violence against terrorist gang members and the like.Mike Mort's job is to play out an action-packed siege scenario in just 15 minutes of screen time, and to be fair he achieves that aim. The animation is very good, and there's a pleasing adult tone to the grisly violence in which various bad guys are inevitably blown to smithereens.A shame, then, that the script seems to have been written by a scatologically-obsessed 14-year-old boy. The constant humour is weak and wearying, such as the sex-obsessed robot (no, I didn't laugh once) and the over-the-top ridiculousness of other bits. Lee Hardcastle's Youtube shorts (such as the exemplary PINGU'S THE THING) are much, much better.
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