Recent Viewings, Part 2

[indianasmith]

Weekday double feature:
PIRHANA 2: THE SPAWNING - Someone reviewed it on here and I remembered it being a cheesy fun mess, so I revisited it and was not disappointed!  Classic bad movie gold.

THE EXECUTIONERS (2018)  Four girlfriends decide to spend a weekend at the country house owned by one of the group; it's her first time back since her father died of a heart attack several years before. They wind up being terrorized and assaulted by three men wearing face paint, but then turn the tables on their tormentors and exact some pretty twisted revenge - only to have a couple more surprise plot twists kick in before the end of the movie.  Overall, a well done B movie thriller, but nothing more.  3.5/5

[indianasmith]

Weekend Double Feature:
RIPPER UNTOLD (2021) - This was a fairly dull account of a police inspector's investigation of the infamous Whitechapel murders; the coroner is a chronic alcoholic who frequents houses of ill repute; he often has blackouts and wonders if he might be the Ripper himself.  Overall, a very slow, draggy account of what should be a fascinating scenario. 3/5

PLANK FACE (2016) - I've seen this one pop up on Tubi several times and finally decided to give it a watch.  Not gonna lie; this is a pretty disturbing film.  A guy named Rex and his girl Stacy are camping in the woods when they are ambushed by a weird family of backwoods degenerates.  The old man who heads the clan is dying; Granny and her two daughters need another man, so they force Rex to don a bark mask like their patriarch wore, nail his foot to the floor to keep him from escaping, and feed him human flesh.  The two younger girls take turns jumping his bones, and eventually he becomes a full-fledged backwoods cannibal himself.  Bizarre, gruesome, and explicit with both sex and violence, this movie is well done but not for the faint of heart. 4/5

[Rev. Powell]

NOWHERE SPECIAL (2024): An Irish single father dying of cancer searches for an adoptive family for his 3-year-old son before he expires. Nothing surprising: it's just earnest, well-acted, and respectful. 3/5.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Alien: Romulus" (2024)
Deserters from an oppressive corporate-owned mining planet sneak onto a derelict space craft orbiting above, hoping it will provide them with a ticket home. However, they soon learn that the ship is literally crawling with those pesky facehuggers... and you can probably figure out the rest.
Fede Alvarez's straight up sci-fi horror flick is essentially made up of the best bits of the first two "Alien" movies, without all the pseudo-religious, origin-of-the-species bullsh*t that bogged down "Prometheus" and "Covenant." It may not be the most original entry in the Alien franchise, but it's certainly the most entertaining one in a while.

[lester1/2jr]

The Guilty (2018) - This is the original version of a movie on Netflix that I haven't seen. A cop who is in trouble and faces a hearing in the morning is doing punitive dispatch duty when he gets a crazy call. A woman is being kidnapped and somehow manages to trick the kidnapper into believing that she's just checking on her daughter. He's got to be smart and tricky to save the dang day.

It was good but I got kind of tired of seeing the guy in the dispatch room all the time. Here's a review of the other one. The guy didn't like it because he felt it got police procedures incorrect https://www.imdb.com/review/rw7405647/?ref_=tturv_perm_13 I love off on their own tangent reviews. Also love ones that are like "I turned it off after 5 minutes".  HELPFUL

4/5

[M.10rda]

ODDITY (2024):
I was tickled - in a rather nasty way - by this Irish chiller that plays like a greatest hits collection of gothic horror tropes. There's a spooky old country estate, a mental asylum, a shop for haunted curios, twin sisters, a blind psychic, at least one murderer, at least one ghost, a cannibal, and something that might be a golem. If only an escaped gorilla rampaged through briefly you could yell "Bingo!" during ODDITY and win a small cash prize. Mentioning those elements really shouldn't constitute a Spoiler, either. A lot of the enjoyment comes from seeing how writer-director Damian McCarthy packs all that content into a tiiiiiiight 97 minutes that mostly plays out in a single setting w/ a small ensemble.

Mileage may vary. Mme.10rda didn't much like it, which is fine. (She subjected me to TWISTERS the night before, so that's karma, ennit?) She objected to behavior by the lead characters which might accurately be described as "implausible". I get her objections, but this didn't bother me as almost all the characters are clearly clinically insane to one degree or another. That said, ODDITY's tone is so pervasively bleak - and its insane characters conduct their implausible behavior in such a straight-faced manner - that it's impossible to process the proceedings as satire or high camp or something. And yet, ODDITY does have a sense of humor, buried deep in its angry black heart. In fact, the film's punchline is downright jolly... perhaps betraying that all the previous grisly ennui was just a shaggy dog put-on.

Well, it worked for me, anyway.
3.5/4
Check it out on Shudder and (this review notwithstanding) try to go in... blind....... 

[FatFreddysCat]

""Get Smart, Again!" (1989)
Bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) is called back to active duty when his old foes in KAOS steal the plans for a machine that can control the weather.
...a cheap looking TV movie revival of the 1960s spy spoof series, starts out promising enough but runs out of gas well before the end. Skip it.

[Rev. Powell]

PICTURES OF GHOSTS (2023): Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho observes the decline of downtown Recife through memories of his family's apartment and the gradual disappearance of the grand movie palaces that once thrived by the ocean. Oft-poetic, with a theme of ghosts and disappearances, it's a combo of essay movie and city (well, neighborhood) symphony--but I found impressive but a bit inaccessible, precisely because it is so personal to Filho. 3/5.

[lester1/2jr]

Whistle and I'll Come To You (2010) - decently creepy ghost story but I didn't understand what it all meant. A guy finds a thing with an inscription of some kind on the beach and it leads to weird happenings, some involving his catatonic wife. Maybe I would have gotten it if I had read the short story it's based on, but who has time to do that?

3.75/ 5  only 54 minutes long check it out maybe I'm just stupid

[RCMerchant]

^ I started to watch it but fell asleep.

[Rev. Powell]

NO OTHER LAND (2024): Israeli journalist Yuval joins Palestinian activist Basel to document the destruction of villages in Masafer Yatta by Israeli soldiers and settlers between 2019 and 2023. The Israelis bulldoze family's homes, the people rebuild new houses, the Israelis bulldoze those, people get shot, and by the end our protagonists' friendship endures, but their hopes for peace and harmony are further away than ever. 3.5/5.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Troll 2" (1990)
...yeah, I figured it was high time I knock this legendary stinker off the watch list. :D
An all-American family travels to the seemingly peaceful country village of Nilbog for a vacation - and soon learn that the town is overrun with hungry Goblins who plan to eat the newcomers for dinner. Yes, that's the entire plot.
...this infamous Italian-made Z-Movie earns every bit of its "Worst Film Ever Made" reputation. The plot is a confused muddle, the acting sucks, the dialogue is awkward and nonsensical, and the makeup amounts to little more than Halloween monster masks and green goo. Hilarious if you're in the right mood (or on the right drugs), but otherwise "Troll 2" is not worth your time. 

[Jim H]

Wheels of Fire - Post-apocalyptic trash, but I gotta say, more entertaining than most.  It's buoyed by understanding one thing - if you can't be good, don't be boring.  This film NEVER goes more than maybe 3-4 minutes before a new action set piece, a bunch of nudity (yet is tasteful enough to have no on-screen rape somehow), explosions, a car chase, a weird transition to a sex scene, a random babbling dwarf, psychic powers, flamethrowers, whatever.  It's also like 75 minutes minus credits.  It's poorly written and barely makes sense, but I enjoyed it.  Director Cirio Santiago deserves real props.

[lester1/2jr]

Happy Valley (2014) - I really wanted to see "both sides" on this one. College sports aren't big here in Boston. Our pro teams are billion dollar juggernaughts (sp?) and the colleges are like... Harvard, MIT, etc. They don't have the greatest athletes. That said, I know if Bill Belichick had looked the other way while a defensive coordinator was abusing kids there would be no mercy on him. Penn State and it's fans might actually be worse than the Catholic Church in terms of accountability and leaving obvious problems to fester. I know it's easy to say this, but try as I might, I can't appreciate the views much of the community there seems to have.

The documentary itself has no voiceover and is focuses mostly what you might call the Penn State cult members. There are a couple of relatively measured voices here and there, but the director is specifically interested in showing what it was and is like there (to the chagrin of some reviewers on imdb).

The most damning piece of evidence against Paterno comes somewhat casually midway through: They were going to go to the police with their concerns but Paterno and the college president decided against it. This is in writing from the president himself in an email he sent to all involved as it was happening. Sandusky abused four more children after that.

5/5

props to the guy who stood next to the Paterno statue holding a sign ( I couldn't quite read it) and taking unbelievable amounts of grief from people. He is the closest thing to a hero here.

[indianasmith]

VIRAL (2016)

  Two sisters are trapped in quarantine during an outbreak of a parasitic disease that is blood-borne; the infected spread the parasites by spitting blood in the face of their victims.  As the military descends on their remote mountain town to isolate the infected and enforce the quarantine, Emma has to protect her sister, who has contracted the virus. Real clips of President Obama (talking about the Ebola outbreak a few years back) and memories of COVID from 2020 make this one hit a little harder now than it did when it came out.  Overall, a well-done film that is a notch above the usual zombie flick.  4/5