Recent viewings

[Rev. Powell]

HOMESDALE (1971): Six guests arrive at Homesdale, a mysterious Australian resort where the subtly authoritarian hosts have planned strange activities like treasure hunts, talent shows, and surprise re-enactments of murders. The uncomfortable tone of this well-acted, partially successful early Peter Weir experiment lies somewhere between David Lynch and Monty Python. At 50 minutes long, its either a very long short or a very short feature. Included as an extra on Criterion Collection's PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK DVD. 2.5/5.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Piranhaconda" (2010) A film crew shooting a low budget horror movie in Hawaii deals with a team of kidnappers who want to hold them for ransom, AND a pair of gigantic, carnivorous monster snakes, in yet another campy-n-cheap SyFy creature feature. Your mileage may vary depending on your patience for this sort of nonsense.

[Josso]

Another Earth (2011) -




take a standard depressing indie movie about people dealing with a terrible tragedy, add a little bit of Lifetime harlequin romance trash, then add a totally inconceivable sci fi element and you get = a really good movie somehow. 5/5

The sci-fi:drama ratio was a bit weird for me, haven't watched it for a couple of years though. I did notice however that the director and/or writer put out a new film last year or something. Might check that out.

[lester1/2jr]

the sci fi aspect basically just took away some of the heaviness of the drama. It's a drama, but then a lot of sci fi movies are actually action movies.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Best of the Best 3: No Turning Back" (1995) A martial artist (Philip Rhee, who also directed) tangles with a white-supremacist group bent on turning a small Southern town into their own private Aryan homeland. The bad guys in this flick are so despicable that it's extremely satisfying to watch 'em get their asses whooped.

[Rev. Powell]

WEAPONS OF DEATH (1981): The Chinese mafia kidnaps the daughter of a family who runs a martial arts school because they won't pay protection money; they organize a team to go after her. This is the kind of movie where motorcycles explode for no reason, the bad guys forget to tie up their victim, and a team of four guys beats an entire army without taking one casualty. It's cheap and dumb and made by people who are better at fighting than filmmaking, but it's one battle after another and it's never dull. 3/5.

[JaseSF]

The Giants of Rome (1964): Claudius Marcellus (Richard Harrison) leads a group of courageous soldiers assigned a dangerous, potentially suicidal mission by Julius Caesar to infiltrate the stronghold of the Gauls and destroy the secret weapon being used by the Druids to protect their stranglehold over the region. Not everyone will make it back alive.

This was an enjoyable peplum variation of The Guns of Navarone. It has some good moments going for it that really keep us guessing as to whether our heroes will be successful or not. There's some exciting battlefield sword fights and battlefield recreations using horses, bows and arrows, throwing knives and other assorted weapons. Our heroes though it can be argued don't always exactly act heroic and Claudius in particular is forced to make some harsh and hard choices here that all viewers may not be sympathetic with yet it gives this film a bit of an harder edge than I was expecting. Things do move a little towards fantasy though at moments with regards to strongman Germanicus (Ralph Hudson) who comes across as a much more mortal version of Hercules at times. Aside from Harrison's Claudius, good support is offered here by the heroic Castor memorably played by Ettore Manni and the brawny, no-nonsense Varo (Goffredo Unger) as a throwing knife expert. Ultimately though this film's big surprise turns out to be something of a disappointment and sometimes the dialogue seems a bit on the ridiculous side especially when one of our heroes tries to romance a captured Gaul woman. Some good moments in this one and deserves points for keeping its heroes human and flawed but ultimately it doesn't live up to its promise or potential. Still, I'd give it *** out of ***** stars. (Not quite sure why this action/adventure/war film is included on a Sci-Fi collection?)

First Spaceship on Venus (1960): Upon discovering a secret message encoded on a spool found within a rock on Earth and  believed to be of Venusian origin, a team of expert scientists, astronauts, and researchers embark on a mission to Venus to make contact with those behind the alien artifact discovered.

Ultimately this is a huge mystery movie with humanity working to decipher, decode an alien message, working to trying and understand just who these Venusians are and why no one has heard anything from them since when the spool was thought to have been left on Earth in 1908 during the Tunguska explosion in Siberia.

I rather enjoyed this. A huge mystery of this magnitude probably would lead to scientists working to decode and decipher a message from space which might not be an easy feat. To further explore its planet of origin assuming that is possible is not such a huge stretch either. I liked how the mystery gradually unraveled before us as viewers and how it forces us to use our noggins a bit to keep up with everything we learn. That said, the Americanized version of this I viewed is missing several minutes of footage, around 15-16 minutes if I'm not mistaken, and no doubt some things are lost in translation here. It is interesting to note how this film features an heroic international cast among its astronaut crew. There are elements here that might have potentially been influential on Roddenberry (international team working on a ship together), Kubrick (deciphering a message from space, computer control over ship systems), and Kneale (or maybe vice versa in that last case - elements of Quatermass and the Pit). X the Unknown may have also proved an influence. This does take things very seriously and doesn't focus on fun or romance even though it hints at touches of it here and there, the primary focus of our characters remains on their mission and their respective jobs and duties. A good sci-fi mystery that takes many exciting twists and turns but definitely requires one to pay close attention. It was a bit hard to decipher just what the little robot was saying at times though. Still it's inclusion also proves somewhat memorable. **** out of ***** stars.

[FatFreddysCat]

"The Frighteners" (1996) Michael J. Fox stars in Peter Jackson's quirky action/horror/comedy mashup as a con artist "psychic investigator' who gets tangled up in a series of supernaturally charged murders. Takes a while to get going but once it does the gas pedal stays on the floor till the end. Fun stuff!

[Jack]

Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986) - a nuclear power plant has a radiation leak and students at the nearby high school turn a little odd. The usual Troma, um..."humor" follows. This actually wasn't too terrible, the babes were beautiful and the soundtrack was totally '80s. 2.5/5.

Hideous! (1997) - old favorite of mine. Some "biological oddities" chase some people around inside a mansion. Lots of Full Moon charm in this one with entertaining characters, fun plot and the little critters are pretty cool too. 4/5.

[Trevor]

"The Frighteners" (1996) Michael J. Fox stars in Peter Jackson's quirky action/horror/comedy mashup as a con artist "psychic investigator' who gets tangled up in a series of supernaturally charged murders. Takes a while to get going but once it does the gas pedal stays on the floor till the end. Fun stuff!

Jeffrey Combs is great as the agent in this. 

[JaseSF]

The Lucifer Complex (1978): Within a secret cave, a survivor watches Earth history unfold on magnetic crystals. Eventually our story focuses on an American secret agent named Glen Manning (Robert Vaughn) and his efforts, with the help of female prisoners in a Nazi camp, to stop the unlikely rise of the Fourth Reich via the use of cloning technology.

This movie is a mind-numbing bore. It's painfully slow, dull, stupid, and just plain bad in pretty much every way. It's basically just a really bad TV movie style pilot film about a secret agent battling Nazis who are trying to grasp power and world control via cloning with boring wraparounds featuring a guy in a cave commenting and watching old news footage about war before focusing his attention on said short film. This was partially directed by David L. Hewitt who gave us such classics as The Wizard of Mars and The Mighty Gorga. What's perhaps most disappointing about this is the cast includes so many great classic stars of the 1960s such as Robert Vaughn, Keenan Wynn, and Aldo Ray. The attempts to try and add some type of women in prison exploitation to this pretty much fails miserably and seems to have been toned down in some ways (perhaps as this may have been meant to be a TV pilot or TV movie of some sort but Lynn Cartwright does play a dominatrix style Nazi female with lesbian overtones given charge over the female prisoners) since there's never any full blown nudity or sexuality aside from what's suggested. The Nazis here do seem to be pretty blundering and incapable and seem to get much too easily outwitted by secret agent Vaughn and the female prisoners led by Merrie Lynn Ross. Victoria Carroll also plays one of the prisoners. The final battle between Vaughn in a tank teamed with the female prisoners against the Nazis seem to go on and on and on forever. The cloning tanks somewhat resemble similar tanks used in The Atomic Brain. A painfully bad movie, it's not likely anything like this would get made today (unless it was from the Asylum which no doubt would throw in bad CGI FX). Likely featured on many old VHS box covers pointing out its talented cast and touting this piece of trash as something much better than it ever is. Probably the worst thing Vaughn and Wynn were ever in. * out of ***** stars.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Women In Cages" (1971) Pretty typical "chicks in chains" flick with four lovely inmates attempting an escape from a hellish 3rd world work farm run by butchy warden Pam Grier. There's so much nudity, lesbianism, S&M torture and other sleaze in this movie that you won't even notice that there's almost no plot.

[indianasmith]

Tonight I watched THE JERSEY SHORE MASSACRE.  I'll admit I've never seen an episode of the reality show that inspired this
piece of shlock, but if the people there are anything like the denizens of this movie, it would be hard to grieve if life imitated art.
A group of girls rent a beach house for the weekend, but when the stoner owner (played by Ron Jeremy) rents it to someone else
the same weekend, they go stay in the cottage of one girl's uncle, who is a mob boss.  They go to the beach, pick up guys, bring
them back.  People get naked, people die, and the final "two girls discover that everyone is dead and run around screaming" scene
goes on FOREVER.  Killer mask was pretty cool, and the girls were cute if you could ignore the ridiculously overdone Fran Drescher
accents, but overall this one was one stinky slice of B-movie cheese.


Jack would love it!

[Olivia Bauer]

When some snobby film critic pins you against a wall, looks you crooked in the eye and asks you if you've seen Big Trouble in Little China you stare that sucker right back in the eye and remember what 'ol A.J. Bauer always says at a time like that.

"Have you seen Big Trouble in Little China, A.J.?"
"Yessir the movie's in the Netflix instant queue."

Www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xiAbDkXDgg

[RCMerchant]

the STEPDAUGHTER (2000)
Cripes-this could be a made for TV movie from the 70's-you got the word f**k her and there-it's got Gil (Buck Rogers) Gerard,even! Dull,no suspense factor-a real snoozer. The guy who plays the mentally challenged Bobby is...dam-he's no Lon Chaney Lennie-more like Pee Wee Herman. Awful.
 
the NINTH GATE (1999)

It's Roman Polanski! Remember the guy who did REPULSION,ROSEMARY'S BABY,The FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS,CHINATOWN?
Well-he did this too-but-beyond a good performance by Frank Langella and some cool music and camera shots-what a f**king time waster! It wanders everywhere-ends up nowhere. It's horse s**t. I was waiting for steak-got peanut butter and jelly. BAH!