Recent Viewings, Part 2

[Alex]

Expendables 4.

The crew are trotted out for another adventure. If these films are supposed to be a throwback to the 80s muscle heroes then they forgot one important ingredient. They just don't have the sense of fun those films had. Given the last two installments have lost money I'd be surprised if there was another one. Even if they do return this was supposed to be Stallones last appearance in the series with Statham taking over. Never say never.

[RCMerchant]

FEAR AND DESIRE (1952) This is Stanley Kubrick's first full length film...and is it BAD. Four soldiers from an unknown army in an unknown war continuesly babble- mostly by the way of spoken thoughts- on ...who the f**k knows. It's BAD. Almost Ed Wood bad! The one saving grace for me was a young Virginia Leith ( Jan inna Pan) as a mute native girl who is ultimitly murdered by a gibbering moron gone mad.
Whatta pile. That KUBRICK did this is mind staggering.




Jan inna Pan as the Girl (as she's billed)

[Rev. Powell]

FEAR AND DESIRE (1952) This is Stanley Kubrick's first full length film...and is it BAD. Four soldiers from an unknown army in an unknown war continuesly babble- mostly by the way of spoken thoughts- on ...who the f**k knows. It's BAD. Almost Ed Wood bad! The one saving grace for me was a young Virginia Leith ( Jan inna Pan) as a mute native girl who is ultimitly murdered by a gibbering moron gone mad.
Whatta pile. That KUBRICK did this is mind staggering.




Jan inna Pan as the Girl (as she's billed)

Did you see the new director's cut version? It's only been out for a week or two.

[Trevor]

Expendables 4.

The crew are trotted out for another adventure. If these films are supposed to be a throwback to the 80s muscle heroes then they forgot one important ingredient. They just don't have the sense of fun those films had. Given the last two installments have lost money I'd be surprised if there was another one. Even if they do return this was supposed to be Stallones last appearance in the series with Statham taking over. Never say never.

Whenever I see the name NU IMAGE or MILLENNIUM FILMS on a credit or poster, I always go a little 😳 as the people behind those companies did a lot of harm to our film industry in the 1980s and 1990s as Nuworld Services: they were chased out of SA by a long line of angry creditors 😳😳

[RCMerchant]

FEAR AND DESIRE (1952) This is Stanley Kubrick's first full length film...and is it BAD. Four soldiers from an unknown army in an unknown war continuesly babble- mostly by the way of spoken thoughts- on ...who the f**k knows. It's BAD. Almost Ed Wood bad! The one saving grace for me was a young Virginia Leith ( Jan inna Pan) as a mute native girl who is ultimitly murdered by a gibbering moron gone mad.
Whatta pile. That KUBRICK did this is mind staggering.




Jan inna Pan as the Girl (as she's billed)

Did you see the new director's cut version? It's only been out for a week or two.

I don't think ANY version of that slop is worth viewing!

[RCMerchant]

the BREACH (2022)

A team of cops enter an old house in the middle of nowhere after finding a mutated and mutilated corpse in a canoe. Inside the house is a home-made contraption that is opening into another dimension that somehow turns humans into skinless deformed monsters.
I really was surprised at this Lovecraftian type tale of twisted bodies and a mad doctor bent on warping time and space.
Catch it if you can!

[Alex]

the BREACH (2022)

A team of cops enter an old house in the middle of nowhere after finding a mutated and mutilated corpse in a canoe. Inside the house is a home-made contraption that is opening into another dimension that somehow turns humans into skinless deformed monsters.
I really was surprised at this Lovecraftian type tale of twisted bodies and a mad doctor bent on warping time and space.
Catch it if you can!

Sounds like something I need to add to my to watch list.

[Rev. Powell]

FEAR AND DESIRE (1952) This is Stanley Kubrick's first full length film...and is it BAD. Four soldiers from an unknown army in an unknown war continuesly babble- mostly by the way of spoken thoughts- on ...who the f**k knows. It's BAD. Almost Ed Wood bad! The one saving grace for me was a young Virginia Leith ( Jan inna Pan) as a mute native girl who is ultimitly murdered by a gibbering moron gone mad.
Whatta pile. That KUBRICK did this is mind staggering.




Jan inna Pan as the Girl (as she's billed)

Did you see the new director's cut version? It's only been out for a week or two.

I don't think ANY version of that slop is worth viewing!

Since I just got this press release, thought I'd share it.

Fear and Desire is the ambitious first feature film by legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket). In this existential drama—which has the feeling of a waking dream rather than a conventional war film—four soldiers return to their senses after crash-landing in a forest behind enemy lines. Blindly navigating their way back to their unit, they attack an isolated cabin occupied by enemy soldiers, then apprehend a peasant woman who is tormented by the deranged young soldier assigned to guard her. On the verge of freedom, they discover an outpost of enemy officers, and must decide whether to slip silently past or stage a violent confrontation with their doppelgängers. Upon its initial release, Kubrick was stung by negative audience reactions and immediately decided to tone down the philosophical aspects of the film. These edits made the film less of a metaphysical experience and more of a conventional war film. For decades, this 62-minute version was all that existed of Fear and Desire, until the Library of Congress came into possession of a 35mm element of the original 70-minute premiere cut, which has not been seen since its interrupted theatrical run in 1953. Now, we can finally see Fear and Desire as it was first released, and witness the blossoming of a 23-year-old cinematic genius.

[RCMerchant]

^ Hmmm...mebbe I'd give it another try if it's the original cut, but from what I'd seen, I can't see it being much better.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Horror Hospital" (1973)
A stressed-out hippie musician answers an ad for a "health spa" getaway in the British countryside, and ends up trapped at an old mansion where the insane doctor in charge (Brit-cinema legend Michael Gough) lobotomizes his guests to create a zombie army... or something. Hilarity does not ensue.
This movie started off promising with a double decapitation right after the opening credits, but from there it quickly turned into a slog. Badly acted, muddled plot, horribly dated, avoid, avoid, AVOID.

[Dr. Whom]

^ Hmmm...mebbe I'd give it another try if it's the original cut, but from what I'd seen, I can't see it being much better.

More philosophy rarely makes a movie more enjoyable.

[RCMerchant]

"Horror Hospital" (1973)
A stressed-out hippie musician answers an ad for a "health spa" getaway in the British countryside, and ends up trapped at an old mansion where the insane doctor in charge (Brit-cinema legend Michael Gough) lobotomizes his guests to create a zombie army... or something. Hilarity does not ensue.
This movie started off promising with a double decapitation right after the opening credits, but from there it quickly turned into a slog. Badly acted, muddled plot, horribly dated, avoid, avoid, AVOID.

I dunno call me weird (won't be the first time someone did) but I kinda liked that one!

[Alex]

Roadhouse.

Watched this remake without high expectations and in that regard it did not disappoint. The lead does not look like a grizzled fighter, I didn't care if he saved the bar, the bad guy wasn't memorable and Conner McGregor was just... Conner McGregor. Even the fight scenes (which I was expecting to be decent) weren't all that. There were occasional chances to make this something more (like the train scene near the start, that could have been developed), but anything like that is just ignored and left to drift off into the distance leaving a strictly by the numbers plot to roll along.

On the plus side, I've seen worse.

[indianasmith]

GODZILLA X KONG (2024) - Somehow this movie slid under my radar; I didn't even know it existed until I saw the poster for it earlier this week.  Well, tonight the wife and I went to see it with a couple of friends, and we had a BLAST!  Lots of city-smashing, historical structure stomping monster mayhem from Rome to Cairo to the Arctic Circle, great footage of the kaiju realm inside the Hollow Earth, and a great exposition of the relationship between the monstrous Titans on the earth's surface and the giant apes inside the earth.  A great watch all the way around!
5/5

[M.10rda]

THE IDEA OF YOU (2024):
The first time I've watched a full-length movie with my wife in maybe a month or more... her selection, therefore. This skipped theaters and went straight to Prime. Anne Hathaway seems to play Olivia Wilde if Olivia Wilde wasn't famous and just ran an art gallery. She meets Harry Styles and uhhh... sexiness ensues, I suppose. I appear to be one of the few people on Earth with limited-to-no interest in Harry Styles and the actor playing quasi-Harry Styles in this movie is actually considerably less interesting than the real Harry Styles. I don't want to be especially crass but really this seems to be soft-core fanfic for (presumably) ladies. I don't even think horny gay dudes would get much of a thrill from this Harry's styles. Madame is a voracious reader and claims that the novel this was adapted from was sort of a real book, not internet forum slash ala "50 Shades of Grey". She was disappointed in the adaptation but still enjoyed it.

Me? It was rough going, but... I confess a soft spot for Oscar winner Hathaway, who delivers an at-least two-and-a-half dimensional performance here and invites sympathy for a character who really has little realistically to complain about yet still of course requires audience sympathy for the plot's contrivances to contrive semi-functionally. I admired her much earlier work in films that included RACHEL GETTING MARRIED and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, where she had the same gift for humanizing potentially unlikeable characters. As Hathaway (technically) ages, she could potentially lose all the warmth and humor of youth - Julia Roberts lost nearly everything that made her charming in the late 80s by 1991. But Hathaway retains her youthful charm... and, frankly, Hathaway looks incredible - better at 41 than she did at 21. (Actually she looks younger than the actress who plays her 16 year old daughter...) That bona fide actually poses an additional challenge to THE IDEA OF YOU...

The lone offbeat thing about TIOY is that it's adapted and directed by former "State" member Michael Showalter, who starred in WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER and then directed HELLO, MY NAME IS DORIS, another film that focused on what is often unnervingly known as "May/December romance". (It's an intriguing niche sub-genre for a former actor best remembered for wanting women to be "inside" him.) The eponymous DORIS was played by Hathaway's fellow (!) actress-of-certain-age Sally Field, who I also recently objectified lasciviously in the Farmland Horror thread. What made DORIS a little more interesting, however, was that Field was 68 when she starred in DORIS, thus the stakes in that film were more elevated, and the cultural context within which Fields' Doris existed was quite a bit distinct from the one Hathaway's character occupies in TIOU. When Hathaway's character feels self-conscious around the 20-year old scantily clad groupies that surround the movie boy band, audience members who have already seen Hathaway cavorting in lingerie and bikinis might feel puzzled by her insecurity. Likewise, when Hathaway (repeatedly) breaks up w/ Harry Styles and then regrets it, this particular audience member just shrugged, confident that Hathaway's smart and gorgeous businesswoman would remain single in SoCal for exactly as long as she felt like it and no longer. There's a million Harrys in Silver Lake, Anne!

I watch 'em so YOU won't have to!
2.5/5

Maybe Adrian Tofei's BE MY MILF: A SEQUEL FOR ANNE will follow...