Recent viewings

[Rev. Powell]

RACHEL, RACHEL (1968): Joanne Woodward stars a Rachel, a timid and sexually frustrated 35-year old schoolteacher who's desperate for a change in her life; a summer fling throws her emotions into chaos.  A slow, quiet film about ordinary sadness and triumph; it requires a star turn from Woodward to pull it off, and gets it. 3.5/5,

[Raffine]

THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST (1958) A new bride is strangely attracted to her husband's pet gorilla Spanky. On their wedding night Spanky breaks into the bedroom and rips her nightgown off, forcing her big game hunter husband to shoot him.

Puzzled by her strange attraction to the gorilla and her love of angora sweaters* the couple have a hypnotist friend takes her through past life through regression. It is discovered she was a gorilla in a previous life who was killed by giggling natives with a blowgun. By strange coincidence the couple have planned to honeymoon on safari in darkest Africa, and decide to go despite the recent discovery of her past life as a gorilla.

Meanwhile in Africa: two man-eating tigers escape from a passing ship and are terrorizing gorilla country! When the couple arrive they decide to go after the rampaging tigers. The tigers keep busy by killing Indians and watching stock footage of zebras, hippos, and crocodiles.

Our couple must react to hundreds of feet of stock animal footage before their final confrontation with stock footage tigers. During the confusion a family of gorillas kidnap the bride and take her back to their lair in a familiar Bronson Canyon cave.

Will she return to her new husband or stay with the gorillas? See the movie and find out!




* Screenplay by Edward D. Wood, Jr.

[Jack]

Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter's Cove (2005) - A pirate (aye matey!) shows up in a small town and starts killing people.  Turns out he's after the descendants of the town's founders, who were members of the pirate's crew and betrayed him.  Very cheesy and downright stupid in parts, but I enjoyed it.  The T&A quota was definitely met.  The plot moves along at a good pace and the characters were okay.  I've seen much worse.  Loved the part where the pirate chops somebody's head off with his sword, and it bounces on the ground - obviously made of rubber.     3.5/5.

[lester1/2jr]

^why am I going to queue that? oh yeah "The T&A quota was definitely met."

edit: netflix has it in a category called "Super Swashbucklers" 

[Umaril The Unfeathered]

THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST (1958) A new bride is strangely attracted to her husband's pet gorilla Spanky. On their wedding night Spanky breaks into the bedroom and rips her nightgown off, forcing her big game hunter husband to shoot him.

Puzzled by her strange attraction to the gorilla and her love of angora sweaters* the couple have a hypnotist friend takes her through past life through regression. It is discovered she was a gorilla in a previous life who was killed by giggling natives with a blowgun. By strange coincidence the couple have planned to honeymoon on safari in darkest Africa, and decide to go despite the recent discovery of her past life as a gorilla.

Meanwhile in Africa: two man-eating tigers escape from a passing ship and are terrorizing gorilla country! When the couple arrive they decide to go after the rampaging tigers. The tigers keep busy by killing Indians and watching stock footage of zebras, hippos, and crocodiles.

Our couple must react to hundreds of feet of stock animal footage before their final confrontation with stock footage tigers. During the confusion a family of gorillas kidnap the bride and take her back to their lair in a familiar Bronson Canyon cave.

Will she return to her new husband or stay with the gorillas? See the movie and find out!




* Screenplay by Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Oh jeez.....now I've heard everything...

[Raffine]

Oh jeez.....now I've heard everything...

Now you can SEE everything, or at least a trailer for everything:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9S0RRaV2-8
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Unfortunately with snarky commentary by John landis.

Hey, John! That's Steve Calvert as the gorilla. He bought Crash Corrigan's suit in the 40s and played gorillas in all sorts of classics like BRIDE OF THE GORILLA, BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA, and several Three Stooges shorts.

John Landis - yer a jerk!

[Jack]

The Tomb (1986) - A guy steals some artifacts from an Egyptian tomb, then heads back to LA and sells them to a couple of archaeologists.  But then the ancient Egyptian princess shows up and she's kind of P.O.'d about the whole situation.  This is a Fred Olen Ray movie, so it's all extremely dopey and can't be taken seriously at all.  Fred went too far with the dopiness this time, making a half-hearted attempt at a comedy that bored the crap out of me.  I dunno, maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it.  2/5.

[lester1/2jr]

The King of Comedy (1982) - I'm not a normal cinephile so alot of the big movies I've never seen. That's especially true of the scorcese/ italiano type stuff. That's stupid because this is a great movie. It is a little 70's for the early 80's but it's great and it doesn't take a genius to see the implications of the whole thing. Jerry Lewis an inspired choice as a Carson like host as I'm sure many have noted. 5/5

[claws]

Boogie Nights (1997) Blu-ray

It's my all time favorite non-horror movie, so: 5/5. And a real beauty to watch in HD.

[Raffine]

BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1980)

Recorded this from TCM Underground(!).

Three babies, two boys and a girl, are born during a solar eclipse so they naturally become heartless killers right before they turn ten. These evil Little Rascals begin a reign of terror on their suburban neighborhood as they start killing off necking teens, the police chief (Chief Brody!), and anyone who gets in their way.

This overbright, cheerfully filmed slasher movie full of 1980 clothes and hairdos looks like an episode of Eight is Enough gone terribly wrong. What makes it a bit unusual is the amount of nudity (Mernard Alert: lots of perky teenage girl breasts/Mernard Warning: Lots of perky teenage boy butts, too) and the gruesome murders performed by the kiddies. Most films featuring child murders tend even now to shy away a bit from showing the kids performing really brutal acts, but this happily shows them beating in the chief's head with baseball bats, shooting one of their teen sisters in the eye with an arrow, locking a playmate in an abandoned fridge, firing guns at baby sitters, etc.

The little girl and the kid with glasses are creepily effective but the little blond boy is the 'Larry' of the group. Joe Penny is in it - and so are Jose Ferer, Michael Duikoff, and Susan Strasberg.  
 
Includes lots of late 70s rock posters and multiple birthday cakes. I never did understand all the business with the burglar alarm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrCZRblvmy8
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Meanie art teacher Susan Strasberg buys the farm:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg3gBEJlUpM&feature=related
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[Newt]

BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1980)

Recorded this from TCM Underground(!).

Three babies, two boys and a girl, are born during a solar eclipse so they naturally become heartless killers right before they turn ten.

Hasn't our Trevor told us he was born during an eclipse? 

[Flick James]

I watched Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom last night. I didn't make it to the very end (I'm guessing I was about 20 minutes from it), but not because I didn't want to finish it, I was just so freaking tired, as any parent with a 3-year-old and an infant will tell you is par for the course. But I saw enough to give a decent evaluation.

Not bad. It's a Japanese delinquent girls pink film, one of which I'm not familiar. So it's plenty trashy, over-the-top, and ridiculous. The dialogue (watched in subtitles) is awesome, with lots of whacky colorful delinquent names like Razor Blade Remi and Boss With the Cross, The Pipe Basher, and so on. Every male role made men look like complete dorks except for the one cool guy playing a sensationalist journalist who enjoys blackmailing people and forever greasing the wheels with stacks of yen in every scene he's in. It's got the typical Japanese themes, with the word "honor," "dishonor," "disgrace," or "revenge" showing up in every other scene. And, of course, nary a gap of more than ten minutes without a boob shot or softcore sex scene. It's 70's Japanese softcore exploitation, mind you, so that means no full frontal.

This was pure trash and of course a bad movie, but certainly bad fun. What was surprisingly good was the artistic elements. The quality of the film stock was very good, not grainy at all, and it was lit well. Whoever shot it knew what they were doing. It was edited well enough, and had plenty of decent artistic shots and closeups, with no shortage of the off-kilter zoom-in closeups that seem to be common in Japanese cinema (not that I'm an expert).

All-in-all, an entertaining flick, and worth a watch for bad movie lovers.

3.8/5.

[Doggett]

The Day the Earth stood Still (2008)

3.5/5


Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975)

4/5


Dinosaur Valley Girls (1996)

2.5/5


Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1985)

3/5


The Haunting (1963)

3/5 (kinda disappointed with this one)

[Jack]

Big Bad Wolf (2006) - Some kids go to a cabin in the woods, but most of them get killed by a werewolf.  One of the survivors thinks the werewolf might be his stepdad, so he and his girlfriend investigate the matter and eventually have a big bad showdown with the big bad wolf.  Pretty good overall;  it had a an A move budget and it shows.  Good characters and some interesting subplots.  It definitely had a dark sense of humor about it, and went overboard in a few spots, but on balance I think it added to the movie.  4/5.

[claws]

Switchblade Sisters (1975)

Girl gang dump own boy gang and fight bad guy gang with the help of a black female gang. Explosive exploitation, the super-cool kind. Awesome Grindhouse with quotable dialogue and great characters. 5/5

Deep Red (1975)

A laid back English pianist in Italy tries to find the murderer of his next door neighbor with the help of a female reporter. Solid Argento with creepy/violent moments but a tad overrated in my opinion. Too much chit-chat slowing things down. Funny enough those unimportant dialogue-bits were edited for its back then U.S. release, but are inserted back into the film with subtitles for the DVD. 4/5