Recent viewings

[fulci420]

White Sands 1992

A dead body and a bag of money. This is what starts off many thrillers and you can add this one to the list. Willem Dafoe is the cop who finds the money and decides to take the dead mans identity and see where it leads. Add to that Mickey Rourke in a large role and an early appearance by Samuel L Jackson and you have a great cast. Too many twists in the last half hurt this film a great deal but this is still a pretty good movie. Dafoe and Rourke are doing great work here and their exchanges are all highlights. Nice Tangerine Dreamish score from Patrick O Hearn.  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDANCwhxAYw

[indianasmith]

I HAVE to track down some of the movies talked about in this flick now!!

That's the exact same reaction I had after watching that 

As soon as it was over, I started feverishly searching Netflix to see if they had any of the titles shown in the movie ("Savage!", "Cleopatra Wong," "The Big Bird Cage," "The Hot Box," etc., etc.) ... miraculously, "The Big Bird Cage" was actually up there for streaming!! If the clips from that movie shown in "Machete Maidens" are anything to go by, though, that one's gonna have to wait till a night when my wife is working. :

A bunch of them are on YouTube, unedited!

[claws]

Paranormal Activity 4: Extended Version (2012) (Blu-ray)

Family must take care of new neighbor's little son because the mother is hospitalized. Turns out the kid is partly possessed or surrounded by evil forces, causing mild disturbance and confusion in the family's home. The family's young daughter who is constantly on cam-chat with her boyfriend suspects that something is wrong with the neighbor kid, and records a bit of paranormal activity. When the boy's mother returns from the hospital the family is in even more danger.

The extended version doesn't really add anything of importance, and since nothing much happens in the first hour the "nothing happens" is even longer in the extended cut. Part 4 takes the franchise in a new but underwhelming direction while keeping the chills rather bland, tired and uninspired. Not the worst but pretty weak. 3/5

[FatFreddysCat]

"The Prophecy" (1995) - Christopher Walken's darkly funny turn as Gabriel, the Angel of Death, is the highlight of this otherwise lukewarm religious thriller about a war between rival factions of Angels that comes to an end in a small Arizona town, with a former priest turned cop caught in the middle. Not terrible, not great, just "Meh."
Apparently there are four sequels to this movie; I think I'll pass on those.

[claws]

^^ I thought Viggo Mortensen as Luficer was quite chilling.

[FatFreddysCat]

^^ I thought Viggo Mortensen as Luficer was quite chilling.

Yeah, the movie could've used more of him and Walken, and less of Elias Koteas and the little possessed girl.

Anywhoo, last two films seen:

Marooned (1969) - Three astronauts are trapped in Earth orbit when their re-entry engine fails, so NASA must mount a risky rescue mission to bring them down before they run out of oxygen. Slightly overlong but still pretty suspenseful scientific thriller, with a great old school cast (Gregory Peck, David Janssen, Gene Hackman, Richard Crenna). Eerily enough, the events in this movie mirror the real-life Apollo 13 accident, which occurred a year after this movie was released!

The Valley of Gwangi (1969) - Turn-of-the-century rodeo cowboys discover a "lost" Mexican valley full of dinosaurs. When they capture one alive and put it on display ala "King Kong,"  predictable monster mayhem ensues. This Western/Sci-Fi mashup is mostly kid stuff but the cool stop-motion dinosaur animation by the great Ray Harryhausen makes it worth a look.

[SynapticBoomstick]

Desolation of Smaug - Additional characters, additional scenes, non-canon elements, wah wah wah. I couldn't give less of a damn to all of that because they got Smaug perfect and that's who I went to this movie to see and I got my investment back a million-fold. This comes from a guy who's read the book several times and seen the Rankin/Bass film probably more times than anyone alive or dead so I maybe should care but don't. If you can't have fun at an action/fantasy movie, by god, what are you doing there?

[Chainsawmidget]

The Lone Ranger
I don't care what anybody says.  This was a fun movie, and some of those action scenes where just laugh out loud hilarious. 

[Josso]

Synecdoche, New York

Gets more beautiful on every watch

[FatFreddysCat]

"The Big Doll House" (1971) - classic "chicks in chains" flick set in a typically hellish third-world women's prison. Five hottie inmates spend half the movie being victimized by butch cellmate Pam Grier or tortured by the twisted lesbo warden, before finally mounting an all guns blazing escape.
Delightfully sleazy flick with plenty of violence and T&A, and no socially redeeming value whatsoever. In other words, total awesomeness!!  :-)

[Jack]

Android Insurrection (2012) - a group of commandos are sent into a big industrial facility to retrieve an android and of course they have to fight a bunch of bargain-basement CGI robots to get back out. Totally schlocky nonsense with vaguely interesting characters and plenty of goofy shootouts. Favorite part was when anybody would get killed, the rest would literally not even notice, much less care. Always good for a few chuckles  3/5.

[Trevor]

The German evil child film Gonger: quite creepy but that awful dubbing! Give me subtitles any day.

www.redarrowinternational.tv/fiction/movies/mystery/gonger_vengeance_from_the_other_side.php

[Rev. Powell]

IRON DOORS (2010): A man wakes up to find himself locked in a concrete vault sealed with iron doors; he hopes the key to his escape lies inside the padlocked locker that (besides a dead rat) is the room's only furnishing. Mysterious and engaging, this CUBE variation could have been a minor classic if the writer had been able to come up with an ending. 3/5.

A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD [AKA CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM] (1973): A beautiful young girl (a virgin? why not?) who has been raised in boarding school in England returns to her fathers' chateau in France after his death and is introduced to her bizarre (and horny) relatives. Sleazy and ridiculous, but it's never boring and a few individual scenes, especially those with a hanged man, are actually creepy and effective. By Jess Franco Eurosleaze standards it's a superior effort. 2/5 on a normal horror scale, 3.5/5 (or maybe even 4/5) on a sleaze scale.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Dead Heat" (1988) This buddy cop comedy/horror mashup might as well been called "Beverly Hills Zombie." Bullets (and tasteless one liners) fly as a pair of L.A. cops (Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo) investigating a string of mysterious robberies discover that the bad guys are actually zombies,  created by a crooked corporation that has figured out how to re-animate the dead. This goofy, gory, mindlessly violent flick deserves to be a cult film.

[indianasmith]

Last night I watched a wonderfully creepy film called STATIC.

Jonathan is a successful writer who lives in a large country house with his wife Addie.
Their marriage was shattered by the loss of their two year old son, who had drowned in the swimming pool out back about a year before.
Late one night, the two are awakened by a pounding at the door.
A young blonde woman named Rachel tells them that she had a flat, and that while changing it, she found herself being stalked at chased by strange men wearing gas masks.  Jonathan and his wife take her in, but there is something odd about Rachel.  She seems to know them very well . . . too well, in fact.
But before they can question her, the power goes off, the door is kicked in, and the masked men carry her away.

The rest of the movie features Jon and Addie being relentlessly pursued by these bizarre, masked figures as they try to understand who Rachel really was . . . and why these men are now after them.

Creepy and atmospheric with a great twist ending!