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Recent Viewings, Part 2

Started by Rev. Powell, February 15, 2020, 10:36:26 PM

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RCMerchant

Quote from: Trevor on October 11, 2024, 10:12:09 AM
Quote from: RCMerchant on October 09, 2024, 02:32:37 PMthe BLACK CAT (1966)

A drunk gets a gift of a black cat from his wife, and he ends up gouging the eye out of (which he is shown cupping in his bloody hand), then murdering . Another identical black cat with a bad eye appears, and while trying to kill that fuzzy little bastard (or "black demon!") his wife stops him, so he plants an axe in her noggin, and bricks her up in the basement. Cops show up, search the joint, and upon hearing a meowing from inside the wall, tear it down and find the cat perched on the rotting head of his lovey dovey. The end.
 A low budget marvel of overacting by the lead and some nice black and white gore plus a bar band that wear eyepatches and lots of BAD dialouge made this an enjoyable chunk of mid '60's sleaze worth a look-see.
It's on Tubi if your curious.






I remember seeing that exact pic in Denis Gifford's book and going 😳😳

I have that book too. I got it for my 11th birthday.
Supernatural?...perhaps. Baloney?...Perhaps not!" Bela Lugosi-the BLACK CAT (1934)
Interviewer-"Does Dracula ever end for you?
Lugosi-"No. Dracula-never ends."
Slobber, Drool, Drip!
https://www.tumblr.com/ronmerchant

lester1/2jr

Zuma Beach (1978) - Suzanne Somers looks like a million bucks, which in 2024 dollars is probably a billion bucks in this goofy, endlessly teasing made for tv movie about how she goes to the beach one day. Tanya Roberts, Rosanna Arquette, Riff Randall from Rock n Roll High School, and a bevy of other broads help her build this cinematic sand castle that's destined to fall apart by day's end, but you knew that when you started watching.

It's PG, but the cameraman knows what's up and any time any of the girls leans or bends over the slightest bit he's there to catch it. I almost lost consciousness when Somers arrives at the beach and spreads out her towel. (There's gotta be a director's cut somewhere.) and I'm sure all the guys in the movie felt the same way, except half of them are probably gay.

Youtube print was very good.

 :hot: slight spoiler  :hot:

There's an older looking guy who pretends to be a former executive but is actually a loser, which I think was used in another similar movie "Lifeguard"? I could be wrong.

5/5

It's crap though. Somers herself sings the weird broadway ish theme song. Her character is a pop star going through some sort of problem in her career.

FatFreddysCat

"Caddyshack: The Inside Story" (2009)
Made-for-TV documentary chronicling the wild n' crazy making of the 1980 comedy classic featuring interviews with the surviving cast & crew and lots of behind-the-scenes clips. If you're a fan of the movie you'll get a kick out of this look behind the curtain.

"New York Ninja" (2021)
A TV news technician turns Ninja Vigilante after his wife is killed by thugs on the streets of NYC. His quest for justice eventually leads him into battle with a vicious prostitution ring run by a villain known as "The Plutonium Killer."
The story behind this cheap n' cheesy B movie is actually more interesting than the film itself. The movie was shot in 1984, but got shelved when its production company went bankrupt. The cult-movie archivists at Vinegar Syndrom re-discovered the "raw" film reels in 2021, but they had no audio, so they re-edited it with new voice overs and a fresh soundtrack. The result is kind of like watching a dubbed foreign film. The location shots of 1984 NYC are a trip back in time, and the klutzy stunt work and action sequences are unintentionally funny. If you dig classic chop socky schlock like "Miami Connection" or the works of Sho Kosugi, this will be right up your alley.
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M.10rda

#4128
VIDEODROME (1983):
First viewing in about thirty-five years. I wanted to confirm that this was eligible for a spot on the "25 Best Horror Movies" list. Well, it certainly is.

A lot could be said about this film. You could write an entire book and someone probably has. I'm not the kind of wanker who goes around calling things "Borgesian" but qualities of Borges did occur to me while rewatching VIDEODROME, especially in the moment where Bianca O'Blivion reveals her father's current state to Max Renn. Another thing you could say is that VIDEODROME feels like it made possible entire subgenres of horror cinema. I've never seen any evidence that it inspired TETSUO THE IRON MAN or RINGU, but if you see a giant egg and then later there's a giant chicken strutting around, what are you supposed to make of that?

Also, the film looks great and is helmed with exceptional confidence, yet the gritty Toronto locations and the proudly analogue, hugely gooey early 80s budget makeup FX give VIDEODROME the same sheen that you'll sometimes see in the early classic Kaufman/Troma joints, or in Jim Muro's STREET TRASH... and I am here for that verite.

Also, apropos to none of the above, there's a thin yet sturdy thread running through VIDEODROME that feels like Cronenberg is riffing on TAXI DRIVER.   Including a few vivid shot recreations.

When I reviewed THE PARK IS MINE I commented on the ostentatious weirdo antagonist Peter Dvorsky and mentioned that I had no recollection of him being in VIDEODROME. Mea culpa. He makes a significant impression as Harlan the video pirate. (Cronenberg does wonders w/ casting unknowns in supporting roles.) Deborah Harry never made much of an impression on me in movies, either - but she is absolutely iconic here, unforgettable. The great 80s actor James Woods, scrawny and pockmarked though he may be, is compelling and even handsome here, even to the end. Woods more or less stopped acting years ago and today seems to spend most of his life in a blind rage on the internet, sniping at perceived enemies while serving uncertain masters in a conflict far beyond Woods' own understanding. It's almost like the Videodrome signal got Woods, too.

5/5 = Dr. David O'Cronenberg, Media Prophet

FatFreddysCat

"Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die"
(aka "Operation Paradise" and "Our Man in Rio," 1966)
American secret agent Kelly (Mike Connors, later of TV's "Mannix") is stationed in Rio to keep an eye on a shady industrialist. Teaming up with a lovely British agent, the pair soon learn that the madman is plotting to sterilize the entire planet from a satellite (!) and re-populate the earth single-handedly from his own hand-picked harem of freeze-dried women. Yikes!
...a cheap, cheesy James Bond knock off which can't seem to decide if it's a "real" spy thriller or a spoof. It started off strong with an impressive stunt piece set at Rio's massive Christ the Redeemer statue, but in spite of the lush Brazilian scenery and lots of pretty girls, the movie runs out of steam well before the end. There are certainly worse "Eurospy" flicks out there, but I'll never sit thru this one again.
Hey, HEY, kids! Check out my way-cool Music and Movie Review blog on HubPages!
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M.10rda

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948):
First time viewing! There's a lot I could criticize about this movie: Bud Abbott is really an unfunny, unpleasant drag and contributes zero laughs to the proceedings; the pace at times is laborious, milking some gags for minutes when seconds could've sufficed (the prelude to Dracula's first appearance is a great example); the film often looks like it was shot in a hurry and recklessly, and the editor either didn't have sufficient coverage to assemble shots in a way that makes sense or the editor had never seen a Hollywood feature film and didn't understand traditional continuity editing (this is particularly true in the first third of the film, where a wide shot will often cut to a medium wide shot where the camera was two feet to the left, etc); Dracula is constantly covering the lower half of his face w/ his cape and walking around like that, which makes one wonder if one is looking at Bela or at a Bela stand-in ala PLAN 9, but on close inspection it usually seems to be Bela, but I want to see his face, dammit, and also the wacky editing is compounded by occasionally cutting from a wide shot of Dracula w/ his face covered to a wide shot of Dracula w/o his face covered....... dammit; the film is titled ABOOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (or actually BUD ABBOTT AND LOU COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN in the opening credits) but most of the monster-centric portions involve Lon Chaney as the Wolfman and Bela as the Count, and the Frankenstein monster does nearly nothing until the final 5 or so minutes; ad infinitum.

.......BUT....... in spite of all that, the flick remains fun and, unlike some "horror comedies" (YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, TRANSYLVANIA 6-5000) this is legitimately a horror movie w/ lots of comedy instead of a comedy w/ goofy monsters in it. I can dig that. Bela returns to his most famous role and, unlike some takes on the 1931 DRACULA and unlike just about any other lead role he played in the 40s, Bela plays Drac here as a completely evil rat bastard... just a bad, bad guy who wants to hurt people and use the Fmonster to conquer the world. Bela is as good of a bad guy as he is a tortured anti-hero.  (Bela is and always was The Man.) He's still looking plenty spry in 1948, too. It's a treat to watch him mix it up w/ the Wolfman at the end.

Y'know, I've never seen another Abbott & Costello film iirc - only old loops of "Who's On First?" But Abbott was the luckiest man in the business of show - luckier still for having a last name that started w/ "A" instead of "D". Lou Costello delivers almost all of the laughs in this film, and it's not merely that Abbott is at the disadvantage of often playing the "straight man" or that Costello has more screentime (though both are true). Lou Costello, at least in this film, is a bona fide laugh machine. Lines that are in no way funny on the page get laughs, the way he spins them. He's not just funny, either - he's more simply interesting to watch... even just the way he sits down or crosses a hallway or stands near motionless. He's always making some kind of choice that keeps your attention. He was a seriously gifted performer.

The film ends w/ a quasi-"cameo". It's pretty clever.

3.5/5
Also, the throwaway line "Yours had teeth". Slays when Lou says it, would be funny even if delivered by Rob Schneider.

Rev. Powell

THE INVISIBLE FIGHT (2023): A young man in the Soviet Union circa 1973 becomes obsessed with kung fu and Black Sabbath, and joins a Russian Orthodox monastery, enduring discipline and religious instruction so he can get to the kung fu training. A wacky slapstick comedy that's also a legitimate metaphor for spiritual growth, this movie is confident in what it is, although many audiences will have trouble accepting the tonal contradictions. From the Estonian director who did the moody b&w Estonian peasant fantasy NOVEMEMBER, this could hardly be any different.  3.5/5.
I'll take you places the hand of man has not yet set foot...

M.10rda

FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958):
This atomic horrors/sci-fi cautionary tale is sometimes referred to as an early pre-gore film, and though it takes about 65 minutes, eventually you do get some gooey scenes of unearthly stop-motion animated fiends getting shot up real good and bleeding like the chicken from ERASERHEAD. For the first hour or so, said fiends remain invisible, stalking the residents of a rural small town near a nuclear plant. THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD or I.O.T.BODY SNATCHERS paranoia runs high until the neighborhood's pleasant-seeming mad scientist reveals his Lovecraftian experiments into extra-dimensional psychic powers.......

FWAF takes place outside Toronto and at least some of the actors are clearly Canadian, and maybe this Northern perspective accounts for the anti-nuclear subtext->supertext. Also, perhaps not for nothing, the acting and writing are uniformly at least one step above what you'd expect from similar 50s US domestic fare. There's a large cast and yet most of the characters are easily distinguishable and even the de facto army protagonists come off not as whitebread macho tools but as decent and capable dudes who I didn't want to punch. The female lead doesn't get to do significantly more than female leads ever did in these movies but at least she comes off as the intellectual equal of the male characters. Although it's a little slow to get going, the rural Ontario setting and its residents feel so entirely convincing that I had the same homey/uncanny friction I used to get from Stephen King's old novels about working class small towners in Maine dealing w/ pitched macabre crises. It's fun - I dug it.

3.5/5

Jim H

One for Trevor  :tongueout:

Hunting Emma (2017) - I think this is the first entirely in Afrikaans film I've seen - I've seen other South African films that are multilingual.  It's a pretty good "bad guys pursue someone, meet their match" sort of film.  A young woman ends up stumbling upon some scumbags and sees them do something bad, they chase her.  Unfortunately for them, she knows the territory and how to handle it.  It's nothing remarkable, but it's decently acted and made.  There's also a couple cliches it looks like it will step into (like what her father will do) to its detriment, but it sidesteps them, and the final moments in the end hit as they're supposed to.  I enjoyed it.

Rev. Powell

THE PLATFORM 2 (2024): The prison/social experiment from 2019 still has a descending platform of food which inmates are on the honor system to share, with the sequel exploring a brutally enforced quasi-religious system that evolves to force people to take only their own share. THE PLATFORM 2 raises some interesting political questions about enforced equality and tyranny, and while I didn't find it quite as bad as early reports suggested, it does drift off into a dissatisfying "mysterious" ending without really resolving anything. 2.5/5.
I'll take you places the hand of man has not yet set foot...

M.10rda

THE WICKER MAN (1973):
Believe it or not, first time (complete) viewing. This was one of those flicks w/ an ending that had been ruined for me by books long before I had a chance to ever watch it for myself. I did start it maybe 7 years ago, got fifteen minutes into it, and tapped out. The music (which I know many adore) just wasn't what I was looking for that night. For a couple reasons, I gave it another shot this weekend.

Okay, it's a musical. Like, the performance of the music is very much an integral part of the narrative, and to the extent that said folk music (some of it good, some of it great) is presented as more or less diegetic (as far as any musical is diegetic), it works very well. What doesn't work is any time some chirpy non-diegetic s**t w/ goofy folk vocals suddenly starts playing as overscore - during the opening credits, during scenes of the lead walking around town, etc - when some tense mood instrumentals would've much more wisely done the job. This remains my biggest issue w/ the film and it's why I tapped out the first time, but it pretty much resolves itself about halfway through.

Otherwise, THE WICKER MAN isn't a very tense or scary film but it's thought-provoking. One historically popular critical take is that Inspector Howie (Edward Woodward) is the bad guy and the folks on Summerisle are the good guys. It's true that Howie is a fool, a wet blanket, a small-Z zealot and possibly a small-F fascist, and definitely a pathetic figure. In comparison, Lord Summerisle (THE Christoper Lee) and his followers would be a lot more fun to live among and party with (though not on May Day!), but they're the Big-Z Zealots who can justify any action or mistruth if it reinforces their smug convictions. In spite of Summerisle's early monologue, he and his cronies demonstrate no sympathy or respect for other living animals (including humans) who aren't Them, as seen variously through the film and particularly in the assorted other, unsung victims of the eponymous climactic deathtrap. In retrospect (SPOILER?!), it's apparent that every man, woman, and child on Summerisle spends 93 minutes perpetuating an enormous criminal conspiracy to f**k over one honest Christian. It's kind of like a 70s version of the Infowars-esque fantasy about what antifa are doing when they're not having gay orgies on George Soros' private island.

It's interesting how watching early 70s cinema often challenges my own established politics. WICKER MAN is akin to PINK FLAMINGOS, perhaps, in this extremist regard: the Marbles sure ain't good people, but if you're vigorously cheering on Babs Johnson, dude, you need to chill TFO. In any case, the film's ultimately a debate between Howie and the Summerislers about whose version of God is the right one. Of course they're both wrong, but it's a credit to Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy that the (infamous) climax is not a clear win for either side, and any reasonable sympathy must fall, in the final moments, with the hapless Howie. No deus ex machina appears to deliver obvious divine justice, but I was pulling for Howie's final agricultural predictions as, in the final shot, the sun sets on Summerisle and the credits roll. Fascinating flick.

4.5/5

Great dialogue and some absurdist highlights (sometimes almost evoking Python). Woodward is very good and this is another truly Great Lee performance. (He looks great w/ all his hair back after playing "M" for Billy Wilder.) Diane Cilento and Aubrey Morris also deliver tremendous value, and then there's Britt Eklund - wow. She was 31 here, looks 16 (and you get a lot of her to examine), but gives a very smart, nuanced, mature performance for what she has to work with. "Willow's Song" is THE WICKER MAN's best evidence for musical excellence, and I was puzzled/horrified that the print I watched on CinemaBox (which includes pleeeeeeenty of Eklund as well as Lee & Cilento singing about felching and buttplay) somehow fails to include "Willow's" best and most suggestive lyrics - the part about the "bucketful"???????  :question:  :question:  :question:  :question:  :question:  :question:  :question:  :buggedout:

lester1/2jr

Town Full of Ghosts (2022) - I liked "Visher" by the same director but this flat out sucks. A guy buys an entire old desert town with the idea of turning it into a theme park but it has a hidden dark past yadda yadda. It's stuck between found footage and regular horror but lacks the unpredictability of the former while keeping the slick blandness of the latter. The whole thing feels like a tax shelter. It took forever to watch the actors are all very obviously real actors. The ending was an abomination.

1/5

Jim H

Sting (2024) - Pretty good spider creature feature.  A girl finds an alien spider (you know this IMMEDIATELY, not a spoiler) and raises it.  It soon grows really fast and starts dining on pets, and...  Bigger things.  This is a pretty well made and entertaining little film, good pacing and good acting, pretty solid characterization too for the run time.  It doesn't all totally gel, but still a good time.

One complaint, I thought the opening scene where it's a sequence from later in the film, followed by "4 days earlier" text was lame.  Way too many horror/sci fi films have been using that tactic, and it usually feels more like a late editing choice to punch up the opening rather than a good storytelling choice.

Rev. Powell

STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS (2022): A man accused of a murder he says he didn't commit accepts a plea bargain that sends him to undergo an experimental treatment at a mental hospital; after completing the program he finds he has large memory gaps and persistent hallucinations. An oddly structured psychological thriller (the "is he hallucinating or not?" tension gets sorted out fairly early, and the third act is one long gap-filling reveal) that lacks much in the way of memorable set pieces or major sparks; that said, although it constantly tested the bounds of mediocrity, it kept me watching until the end. 2.5/5.
I'll take you places the hand of man has not yet set foot...

FatFreddysCat

"The Godfather" (1972)
In Francis Ford Coppola's sprawling, epic period piece, a New York mafia crime family struggles to maintain their "business" in America's turbulent post-WWII period, leading to an eventual shift of power from the old-school Don Corleone (Marlon Brando, in one of his career defining roles) to his youngest, more ruthless son Michael (Al Pacino).
"Godfather" is considered one of the best films ever made, and rightfully so. With a stacked cast that includes James Caan, Talia Shire, and Robert DuVall, and a lush, spare-no-expense look, this movie sucks you in from the first scene and keeps you riveted for its entire three hour (!) run time, which is no mean feat. This was my first viewing of "Godfather" in many years and I'm glad I finally got around to revisiting it. Even if Mob sagas aren't your thing, this is essential viewing for anyone who considers themselves a film buff.
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