Recent viewings

[Jack]

The Woods (2006) -  a girl is sent to boarding school, and she eventually figures out that the place is run by witches (the audience has figured this out about an hour earlier).  The woods around the school are, I dunno, haunted or something.  The trees can send out roots and tendrils to grab people.  Two girls are abducted in this way, then finally the main girl is taken away and the witches try to conduct some sort of ceremony with them.  I have no idea what they're trying to achieve.  The main girl is the only developed character in the thing, the rest are your most basic stereotypes - the shy unpopular girl, the b***hy snob girl, the headmistress with a dark secret, blah blah blah.  The plot is slow moving and doesn't seem to have any point to it - it's just all very mysterious.  Production values were top notch, camera work, sound, lighting, sets, theme music, all very good.  The lack of story or characters sort of dragged it down though    2/5. 

[lester1/2jr]

Shalimar (1978) -  imagine if  "enter the dragon" didn't have bruce lee  and had a collection of jewel thieves instead of martial artists.  that's kind of what this entertaining flop is like and it has John Saxon from "Enter.." to boot.  A rich criminal guy, well played by Rex Harrison who thankfully doesn't do any of his famous talk singing,  invites a bunch of colorful famous burglers to  steal his prize emerald the Shalimar, from behind his elaborate security apparatus of an army of soldiers and hi tech cameras and so forth.  The odds are stacked against them and you'd be a fool to try but they all do.  The songs are by the famous hindi film guy RD burman and they are pretty good for the most part.  I especially liked the tribal scenes (it takes place on an island).  The lead actress is very attractive and there are some zany bits here and there but it doesn't quite get there. 

[lester1/2jr]

the outrageous keith deltano live -   christian stand up comedy performed in a high school auditorium with a pro abstenence and anti evolution message.   the guy is spastic and sweaty and not even funny enough to be on comedy central very late at night.  He brings 3 very cute christian girls on stage and asks them if they ever have to urinate when they go clothes shopping.  they answer in the affirmative then he lets them off the stage and explains that waiting to go to the bathroom is the way you shold wait to have sex.  like, don't go in the middle of the store, wati till you are home or on a toilet = wait till you are married to have sex.  If this guy came to my high school with his dane cook on crack antics and condescending attitude he would have been punched in the face then everyone really would have laughed!

[lester1/2jr]

who gave you all the day off?  let's get to it

Mr Warmth: Don Rickles -  I knew rickles reputation as a sort of harsh old school comic but had never really seen his act.  Most of this documentayr shows him performing today and not back in the old vegas days, which is too bad because that is when all the stories he tells are from so it's kind of incongrous.  and his act today is a little corny and nostalgic relative to what it must have been like back then(before "the jews came" as bob newhart uneloquently describes the post mafia corporatization )  clips from movies like "X The mand with X Ray Eyes" and "the Rat Race" definately made me want to see those.  "Beach Blanket Bingo" not as much.


taking out the trash/ faces in the trash  -  if the "Uh Oh!"  episode of Sealab 2021 ("Quinn's Vacation )  had been 10 hours long it probably would have started to look like this after a while.  weird probably drug influenced dag glo colors and shapes interlaced with toy ads from the 80's.  The attempts at an actual cartoon were tossed off and less succesful but there is definately something going on here and wouldn't be surprised to see it on cartoon network soon in some form.

[Doggett]

Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country.
4/5

Thoroughly enjoyable

[Jack]

Offerings (1989) - Pretty much a straight Halloween ripoff.  We start with some little kids, one of them doesn't speak, and he's friends with a girl.  The rest of the kids pick on him, he falls down a well.  Ten years later - apparently the fall didn't kill him, but he's brain damaged, killed his mother, and has been in a mental institution for the last decade.  Well, tonight he breaks out and makes his way back to the town he grew up in.  He starts killing the kids (now teenagers) that picked on him, and leaving their fingers, ears and noses as "Offerings" for the girl he used to be friends with.  He even makes a pizza topping out of human flesh for them.  "It's not sausage, but it's good".  Anyhow, we get a whole lot of cop investigation, the girl and her friend sitting around the house being worried, etc.  No suspense I'm afraid.  No gratuitous nudity.  Not much of anything.  It's watchable, and not half as bad as a lot of the crap '80s slashers out there, but still only gets a 2/5.

Doomed (2007) - In the near future, prison inmates are given the chance to gain their freedom by competing in a Survivor type game.  They're dropped off on an island, and if they can get to the other side, they're free!  But the island is inhabited by zombies.  In the last 9 games, no one has survived.  Yeah.  Well...some pretty decent looking babes in tank tops sweating a lot.  You know, the sweat that changes completely from one scene to another.  Lots of teamwork, betrayal, swarms of really cheap looking zombies picking somebody off every ten minutes or so.  The characters are okay.  Not really any plot.  2/5.

Witchcraft XII: In the Lair of the Serpent (2002) - Some evil girls hang out at bars and pick up guys, bringing them back to their warehouse and having sex with them, then some even more evil dude comes out and shoots cheesy looking electricity out of his eyes and kills them.  The sister and the best friend of one of the victims team up to get to the bottom of it all.  Hmmm...three sex scenes consume the first half of the movie.  The second one, let's just say that if you wake up with a girl like that, you're not a social drinker - you have a drinking problem.  Janet Tracy Keijser stars, I think she's adorably cute.  She shows up in a variety of sexy outfits, and no outfit at all.  Real Z-grade movie, but I think I've watched it 3 times now 

[Mr. DS]

I found it to be graphically violent and entertaining.   

[asimpson2006]

Resident Evil: Degeneration ** out of ****.  While I enjoyed the violence and how beautiful everything looked, the thing that got me mostly was the faces.  Everyone seemed so well emotionless.  Certain things that should have given people different reactions didn't and I didn't enjoy that.

Citizen Kane *** 1/2 out of ****.  One of the better films that I have seen in  while.  I really liked it, though at times it seemed like the pacing would slow down to the point of stop altogether.

[Rev. Powell]

JACOB'S LADDER (1990): A Vietnam War veteran (Tim Robbins) starts seeing demonic faces and hallucinating, while at the same time some of his old army buddies are turning up dead.  He becomes paranoid that the Washington brass are hiding a secret revolving around the day he was wounded as his squad was slaughtered in the field.  Psychological drama is worthwhile due to some intense hallucination sequences, but the film would have benefitted from more misdirection in the early reels to make the big revelation fell like a climax instead of an anticlimax.   3.5/5.

KUNG FU HUSTLE (2005):  With the help of an incompetent wannabe criminal and his fat bumbling sidekick, a gang of dapper axe-wielding criminals tries to take over a Shanghai tenement where every other resident seems to be a legendary kung fu master with mystical powers.  Insanely fun popcorn action/comedy with genuinely hilarious sequences and bizarrely inventive battles.  This is a keeper.  4.5/5.

[RCMerchant]

NIGHT of the DEMON-No...not the 1958 classic with Dana Andrews...the Bigfoot/bloody mess classick! Big foot runs around killing people in gory and imaganitive ways. A GREAT film. After all the kudos I've heard from this board on the movie...I was NOT disappointed! Thanks,guys!  I yam a happy camper....unlike the shmucks in this movie...who were NOT very happy at all!!! 

[Jack]

Convict 762 - six girls are on a spaceship and they run into an asteroid and lose a lot of fuel.  So the only place they can refuel is at a penal colony.  When they get there, they find everybody is dead except for two guys.  Which one is the murderous convict and which is the last remaining guard?  This movie is just one act of wanton idiocy after another.  We start with the navigator, who is supposed to check to make sure the course they set is safe.  She doesn't actually have to do anything, just wait for the computer to finish computing.  But she's bored with waiting, so she tells the captain that everything is okay.  So they immediately run into an asteroid field.  Then they get to the prison - this place is big, it must have held thousands of prisoners.  And they're all dead!  Might be a good idea to not go wandering around in there, eh?  But then they pick up a distress call from deep within the facility, and go running right out there to investigate.  As if that's not bad enough, one of the girls decides to wander off from the group and ignore the radio calls from her captain.  For no reason whatsoever.  At the same time, another girl is left behind, safe inside the ship.  But then a guy comes along, a guy they've previously discovered is probably a convict.  But she thinks he's handsome, so she lets him in.  Etc.

I could tolerate all this idiocy if the girls were at least sexy, but oh no - they're all dressed in these baggy shirts that are about as attractive as potato sacks.

I would suggest not wasting your time with this one.

[asimpson2006]

Old School *** out of ****  It was fun to watch and I got a lot of enjoyment and I didn't waste my time with watching it.  The only thing I felt that could have been done better was making the film longer, as to get more of the story rounded out.

[lester1/2jr]

MST3K The Crawling Hand -   This wasn't quite as good as the later episodes as you can see they were still kind of working the whole concept out.   it doesn't go as quickly as usual and is slightly sub par but still worth seeing.  goofy movie is from the 50's and features a cute swedish girl and james dead type method acting by the star.    the skipper from gilligans island lends ....his expertise  in locating the villain indicated in the title after abuot a half hour of two scientist talking to each other, some teen romance and a gothic,  or is it "emo", black eye makeup afflicted space malady guy who arm crawls and strangles aruond.

[Doggett]

Ghostbusters.
4/5
Classic 80's comedy.

However, I think I'd like the sequel more if it wasn't for the fact that they change the theme is the second one.

[InformationGeek]

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Verison of Hobgoblins.  Man, that film is bad, but at least the guy and robots made the film bareable.  Would it be normal to actually want to watch the film in its regular format?  I sort of want to.

Signs: This was a good film and I liked the fact you didn't see the alien most of the time or didn't get a real good look at it until the very end.  I think this is the director's best film (I'm not a fan of The Sixth Sense).  The movie is, however, slow at some points and can seem to drag on for too long between good and exciting points in the film.

The Thing From Another World: This was an awesome sci-fi classic for me to watch.  The characters were very likeable (Besides that doctor guy), the special effects were very nice for the time, the script was good, and the alien was very cool (I actually got spooked by a scene when the alien appeared).  The only thing I found very off about the film was the fast pace talking.  I had to rewind to hear what they had to say.  Anyhow, keep watching the skies!