Recent viewings

[indianasmith]

I watched a neat little Indie Horror film called DELIRIUM last night.
A little girl goes missing, and her mother and stepfather are desperately trying to find her despite interference from her meddling biological dad and a private detective he hired. 

At least, that's how the story starts.

But then we discover that a large part of this drama is taking place in the mind of the man who kidnapped the girl - and now believes himself to be her stepdad.

A bit of a mindbender, but intriguing.  3.5/5

[Jack]

"Metal Tornado" (2011)

That's been sitting in my Netflix queue forever;  one of these days I'll be bored enough to watch it 

[FatFreddysCat]

"Metal Tornado" (2011)

That's been sitting in my Netflix queue forever;  one of these days I'll be bored enough to watch it 

Same here! My wife said she finally put it on because it had been on our Netflix list for so long that she felt sorry for it. :D

[indianasmith]

Last night I watched HAYRIDE 2, the sequel to a slasher film I watched sometime back.   

This one followed the formula used in the original HALLOWEEN 2: it begins moments after the last movie ended, as the police are coming in to pick up the pieces and investigate the carnage from the hayride massacre carried out on the night before Halloween by a legendary killer known as "Pitchfork."  Said Pitchfork had been stabbed in the belly with a wooden pole and was being hauled to the hospital, but of course, he regains consciousness on the way there, kills the nurse and the ambulance driver, and goes on the hospital to finish off his surviving victims, somehow mysteriously cured of his near-fatal injury.

This was formula stuff, but it was actually pretty well done and I greatly enjoyed it.  The characters were pretty well-developed, the juggernaut that is Pitchfork (a MASSIVE dude, btw!) is a single minded killing machine, and the killings were brutal, gory, and left you feeling a real sense of shock and loss for the victims.  This was actually better than the first movie in the series, and far better than 90% of the slasher films I've seen in the last decade or so.  Lack of nudity might be the only complaint, but honestly, the plot left no room for it.

Note to self:  If you ever take down a homicidal psychopath who has just skewered a dozen folks with a pitchfork, put about five rounds through his head at point-blank range to make sure he STAYS down.

Anyway, if you like well-done horror films, this one was pretty awesome!  4.5/5

[lester1/2jr]

Gone Girl (2014) - If you were hoping Fincher would make something like The Game again your prayers have been answered. or they were last year. This has that same kind of super complex plot that if you actually sat there and took it apart would probably have dozens of glaring holes but when you're watching it it doesn't matter.

A guys wife disappears and while he looks like he most certainly had a hand in it everything is not as it appears. Ben Affleck is nothing like Michael Douglas. He has a "how did I get caught up in this, I'd rather be scamming on chicks at Friday's" more casual sort of approach. The Gone Girl is I guess superficially like, say, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? but not really. There's a faux Jeaneane Garafolo sidekick for everyone who wanted a little 90's nostalgia.

It's kind of like a movie with 2 sequels in one big movie. I had a very interesting horror dream last night and I have no problem crediting the stellar writing and plot movements of Gone Girl for that

5/5

[FatFreddysCat]

"The November Man" (2014)

http://youtu.be/jREIRTyj9Mk
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Pierce Brosnan may not be James Bond anymore, but he can still whoop some spy-game ass! He's a retired CIA agent who gets "reactivated" to protect a girl who's been targeted by some very bad Eastern European people. Cool cloak and dagger stuff.

[indianasmith]

That one was pretty good.

[JaseSF]

DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990): Scrooge McDuck along with his usual crew of Laundpad and kids Huey, Dewie, Louie, & Webby searches for the lost treasure of Collie Baba. Unknown to Scrooge, a magic lamp is hidden within the treasure and an evil magician named Merlock, capable of shape-shifting into many animal forms, is also hot on its trail. Sure enough in due time, the genie in the lamp throws the lives of Scrooge and all those around him into turmoil.

Well this film based on the popular animated series, which I also really liked, isn't quite as good as the series upon which it's based. Sure it has some clever moments and some dizzying scares/visuals for a kids movie at times but these stories seem to just work better in a shorter form and this feels padded out to make a movie. It just feels like it goes on a bit too long and I could see the ending coming a mile away. Still enjoyable for fans of the series as a further adventure for its characters. ***1/2 out of ***** stars.

Wife vs. Secretary (1936): Van Stanhope (Clark Gable), a wealthy magazine/advertising executive, is very happily married to beautiful wife Linda (Myrna Loy). However he also has an extremely attractive secretary he nicknames Whitey (Jean Harlow). Sure enough in time, while Van generally hasn't even noticed his secretary's beauty, others begin to suspect there might be something between Van and Whitey including Van's very own mother Mimi (May Robson). Despite her better judgment, Linda eventually starts to become more and more jealous.

This was quite good. Really enjoyed the interactions between characters here and there does seem to be an attraction between Van and Whitey too although Van seems to love his wife much too greatly to ever act upon it. Jimmy Stewart plays Whitey's love interest Dave who wants her to sacrifice her career for a family life which throws Whitey's plans for the future into doubt as well. Great performances all around with Gable and Harlow really standing out her, Loy too to a lesser extent. Stewart gets some great lines too in his bit role, some really thoughtful stuff there. ***3/4 out of ***** stars.

[indianasmith]

In honor of this weekend's D-Day anniversary, tonight I sat and watched SAVING PRIVATE RYAN again.
I consider this to be perhaps the greatest war movie of all time.  No other film captures the squalor, horror,
and heroism of World War II more effectively.  An old friend of mine who fought and was captured by the Germans
in the Battle of the Bulge saw it when it came out, and he said, for him, it captured every aspect of being on the
battlefield "except for the smells."

And yes, I cried at the end.


Again.

[Trevor]

War Horse: I found it good with great cinematography and production design but it was a bit too schmaltzy for my taste.

[Jack]

009-1: The End of the Beginning (2013) - so this hot Japanese babe has a bunch of cybnernetic implants making her a super warrior, and she works for the government as a secret agent. But she can't remember her past or her family, and decides to try and track them down. Which leads her on quite a twisted adventure. This had plenty of tongue-in-cheek martial arts fights (and our babe's usually in a miniskirt), a rather interesting plot, and hot babes galore. Gotta love these guy's camera work - always make sure you're got the hot babe's butt in the foreground of the shot    Not great but a fun time. 4/5.

[Newt]

War Horse: I found it good with great cinematography and production design but it was a bit too schmaltzy for my taste.

That was my understanding: highly sentimental.  Not my cup of tea, contrary to expectations.

[FatFreddysCat]

"M*A*S*H*" (1970)

http://youtu.be/O48Cr5vm6Yg
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In this classic satire of military life during the Korean War, the day-to-day adventures of two Army field-hospital surgeons (Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould) include playing pranks on their superior officers, drinking lots of martinis, hitting on nurses, and occasionally saving some lives.

Like many people, I am more familiar with the long-running TV series based on this movie, than with the film itself. Released during the height of the Vietnam conflict, the crude humor in "M*A*S*H*" was apparently considered quite shocking/subversive in its day (legend has it that this was the first major studio film in which someone said the "F" word), but its edges have been dulled by the passage of time. There's no real "story" to this movie, it feels like it was stitched together from a bunch of random sketches.. Still, it's a fairly entertaining period piece.

[indianasmith]

I just finished watching a truly bizarre little film called ASYLUM.

Basically, some filmmakers went to a country called Bulvania to film a haunted asylum movie, and sent their footage back to the studio for editing.  So what you get is the raw movie playing with two film editors riffing the whole thing as it plays, MST3K style.  Periodically it will cut back to the studio to follow the romantic and personal lives of the employees, then it will cut back to the horror movie as if nothing happened, and the guys go on riffing it.  The horror movie itself might have been somewhere between tolerable and halfway decent, but the two editors keep cutting into the dialogue, and parts of it are obviously unfinished with captions like "add more sparks" or "change eye color" at the bottom of the screen.  I won't say I didn't enjoy this, but I won't say I did either.  Since I got it for free, I won't complain too much. At that price it was a bargain!  3/5

[lester1/2jr]

The Hellstrom Chronicle - In the same way that Chariots of The Gods is the precursor to the History Channel et al's ancient aliens stuff this is the same for Nature and Nat Geo wild and whatnot.

This was I believe the first movie to show really close up footage of insects which must have freaked people out because some of it is pretty violent. There's a harrowing scene where a lizard gets chased up a tree by ants (spoiler: he loses). A fake scientist guides us through the film but it's not ordinary science lesson. No genuses or species are noted and theres no quiz at the end. The theme is survival, something insects have been doing for millions and millions of years. Why? As the guy points out they never ask themselves that question.

Classic doc The ending is like something out of a cannibal movie.

4/5