Recent Viewings, Part 2

[Dalmatian Bobby Samaritan]

BY DESIGN (2025): Juliette Lewis becomes a chair. Ionesco and Buñuel would be proud. 4/5.

Luis Buñuel is dead! What do you mean? Oh wait I get it. The Cow's eyes getting slit open. And we are the cattle as per movies like Snow Piercer. Ah. Ok. I am a little groggy a late night last night I was looking for my special edition version of Little Mermaid that the case alone is supposed to be worth over eight hundred dollars. I guess my friend stole it (well I stole it from him, so I guess in the end. It is..Well it is what it is!)

Peace all Buñuelians. Doesn't that sound like it would make a good Star Trek villain! Captain: It's the Buñuelians. And they are slitting cows eyes open again!
Captain (whoever, something stuck up his..AKA Scott Bakula forgot to do his count all of the toothpicks routine) "On screen!"

[FatFreddysCat]

"Ghostbusters" (aka "Ghostbusters: Answer The Call," 2016)
Three lady scientists and an NYC subway clerk team up to battle against a supernatural outbreak in New York City.
Paul Feig's attempt to re-boot the dormant "GB" franchise with a new crew of funny females was met with unprecedented hostility online and tanked at the box office. Honestly, it's not a terrible movie -- there are some legit laughs and the special FX were decent, but the fan base obviously didn't want to see anyone but the O.G. 'busters in the jump suits. File it under "interesting misfire."

[lester1/2jr]

Bikini Nurses (2026) -  This was kind of interesting but extremely hard to recommend. The letterboxd reviews https://letterboxd.com/film/bikini-nurses/reviews/ show people alternately furious about how stupid it was, but also sheepsihly admitting, as one reviewer put it, "It's so absurd that I couldn't help but get sucked into it ". Okay, I'll stop reviewing the reviews here and get to the story.

3 bikini clad nurses have a problem: an unhappy but wealthy patient is going to purchase their clinic to fire them because he hates them for some reason. It's the director himself and he also confusingly plays some other guy. They try and work out a solution, which includes doing some kind of voodoo dance for like 20 minutes.

I would break it down like this

1/3 some kind of tax shelter
1/3 demented improv experiment
1/3 purposely opaque art school project
1% wanted to tell this story

or another way to look at it: it's a guy making a Something Weird style exploitation flick, but he couldn't afford to have the girls get naked and also hadn't yet thought of ways to fill out the running time, which is 70 minutes but feels like 3 hours. 

4/5 as the band Scream once sang "Who knows? Who cares?"

[FatFreddysCat]

"Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror" (2025)

The long, strange trip of "Rocky Horror" is examined in this cool documentary that traces its history from a fringe theatrical stage play to low-budget movie that slowly became the ultimate cult film. Written and directed by Linus O'Brien, son of "Rocky" writer/creator Richard "Riff Raff" O'Brien and loaded with cast interviews and vintage photos and film clips. Tons o' fun for "Rocky" nerds.

[indianasmith]

RETURN TO SILENT HILL (2026)
   I am a huge fan of the original film (which, when I watched it, I didn't even know was based on a video game!). The sequel, made a few years later, was kinda meh.
   This thing completely ignores the first two films, creates a totally different back story, doesn't really explain any of the lore at all, and lurches from one nightmare scene to the next with little explanation.  The plot was almost non-existent, but that being said, it was oddly entertaining.  3/5

[indianasmith]

(And my favorite critter, the mosasaur, was in the first and last scene!!!)

I am not sure what to say. A couple of big jokes with the Mosasaur topic. Well for one. When Jurassic Park first came out and then with the sequels, I thought that that would be a great time to rectify the Iguanodon controversy. The poor Iguanodon is not even mentioned in any of the Jurassic Park films. And that was the first dinosaur ever discovered and given a name. The first renderings of the Iguanodon they had it on all four legs and the long bone that was its thumb they put on its nose. As like a nose spike. I thought that the early 1800s looks for Iguanodon are the coolest for any dinosaur. And Arthur Conan Doyle had that look for a dinosaur in one of his movies — as a sarcastic youtuber said, "for a dinosaur that doesn't exist." Ok. How do we really know that any of the dinosaurs ever existed. Now I know why Poppy Harlow passed out.

So it makes sense I believe to see the word Mosasaur in connection with her. Umm..Oh yeah there is a building angst too on the internet and almost like a Jets vs the Sharks turf match between people who like Dinosaurs. And people who like Jurassic park. I am sure that there is a huge chunk of people that are legitimately both. But the Mosasaur people aren't bending. And with some Jurassic Park fans it is turning into a Jar Jar Binks type of issue. The Mosasaur in real life was only forty feet long. Big in my opinion, or definitely big enough. But Jurassic Park makes it over a hundred and twenty feet long. I could actually care less. But then again I was never that much obsessed with Star Wars to where I could give a rats hoot about Jar Jar Binks. There were others though..


I am not big on treading lightly these days. Too much at stake. Do we really need to suffer through another Jar Jar Binks?

I always figured that they sprinkled a little bit of Miracle-Gro into the mosasaur's DNA in the movie to get the extra size.

BTW, new evidence has pushed the upper size range of some mosasaurs north of 50 feet!  One of the specimens I dug many years back was recently cited to help define a new species of mosasaur, the Tylosaurus Rex.  That particular individual would have been between 44 and 48 feet in length.  Dr. Polcyn, the paleontologist who curated the bones, said he has another partial spinal column from a specimen that would have been "about fifteen percent larger" than the one I dug.
That is one monstrous sea lizard!

[Rev. Powell]

"Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror" (2025)

The long, strange trip of "Rocky Horror" is examined in this cool documentary that traces its history from a fringe theatrical stage play to low-budget movie that slowly became the ultimate cult film. Written and directed by Linus O'Brien, son of "Rocky" writer/creator Richard "Riff Raff" O'Brien and loaded with cast interviews and vintage photos and film clips. Tons o' fun for "Rocky" nerds.

Self promotion: I conducted a 20-minute interview with Linus about the movie: https://youtu.be/X_Drn1hYJT0?si=WpvPZ5aPim4XKCn1

[indianasmith]

What in the name of Sam Houston's great-grandma was all THAT gobbledegook about?

[Rev. Powell]

What in the name of Sam Houston's great-grandma was all THAT gobbledegook about?

He deleted it, but is this your first encounter with DalmationBobby? All his posts are like that.

[Trevor]

What in the name of Sam Houston's great-grandma was all THAT gobbledegook about?

😳😃😄😅😀🐢

[lester1/2jr]

Homecoming (2009) - Mischa Barton was a star on the TV show The OC in the late nineties that I never watched. Apparently, things didn't go super her way because a decade later she was in this piece of junk. I almost turned it off because it so thoroughly and completely rips off several scenes from Misery, which is stupid to rip off because everyone in the word has seen it. She looks great though, so I stuck it out till the end. I'm indifferent to the fact that I did: not particularly glad or sorry.

A hometown hero quarterback (never a linebacker or kicker) comes home on his winter break (there's CGI snow at one point) with his new girlfriend and his old girlfriend (Mischa Barton) doesn't like it. She is about a million times hotter than the new girlfriend so I'd say she has a pretty good point. They give her a purposely cheap looking dye job and it makes her that much hotter. A lot of the movie is her being like "Come back to me, Billy." and him being like "Oh garsh... I don't know".

I liked the hometown vibes with the bowling alley and stuff, but they should have written a more creative story. It's actually incredible how thoroughly they steal from Misery, right down to specific details. It's the most memorable thing about the movie, though. The rest is appealingly violent, but very perfunctory.

3.25 /5 probably actually a point higher because of how good she looks, but... I couldn't do it.

[Trevor]

"Ghostbusters" (aka "Ghostbusters: Answer The Call," 2016)
Three lady scientists and an NYC subway clerk team up to battle against a supernatural outbreak in New York City.
Paul Feig's attempt to re-boot the dormant "GB" franchise with a new crew of funny females was met with unprecedented hostility online and tanked at the box office. Honestly, it's not a terrible movie -- there are some legit laughs and the special FX were decent, but the fan base obviously didn't want to see anyone but the O.G. 'busters in the jump suits. File it under "interesting misfire."

I have to admit that I walked out of it.

[M.10rda]

What in the name of Sam Houston's great-grandma was all THAT gobbledegook about?

He deleted it, but is this your first encounter with DalmationBobby? All his posts are like that.

I used to think he was a rogue AI chatbot from 5 or so years ago but his posts have been a bit more cogent lately...

[M.10rda]

I needed sorbet for my palate following THE GENERAL, so I watched...

THE SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED: A STORY OF THE KU KLUX KLAN aka THE WILDERNESS TRAIL (1920):
This is a near-feature from Oscar Micheaux, the black American film pioneer who laid the groundwork for Melvin Van Peebles, Spike Lee, and Ryan Coogler (among others). His previous feature, WITHIN OUR GATES, is an exceptional achievement. SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED seems like it could be pretty great, too - but only about 2/3rds of the completed film survives. I watched a print that replaces all of Micheaux's (lost) original title cards w/ rough English translations of French title-cards  , which often sounds pretty tinny... and w/ additional cards describing scenes which no longer exist, including  the climax of the film!!! 

About half of SOTU focuses on the provenance of the land that belonged to a deceased black prospector. That land is mighty valuable, because it's got a poopton of oil beneath it. The guy that somehow currently owns it is clueless about this fact, but the prospector's granddaughter knows and so does an evil local businessman and his retinue of henchmen.

The most interesting thing about SOTU is that all of the main characters are (ostensibly) black or mixed race. The bad guy is a self-loathing light skinned black man, his sinister right-hand man is supposedly East Indian but is played by a black man (fortunately not a white guy), the very fair-complexioned granddaughter (who we're told is an "Octoroon") is played by an actress from Barbados, and the clueless current landowner is supposed to be mulatto. (That actor looks to me like a white guy in blackface, but I can't find any confirmation or denial of this online - the actor did only one other (black) movie and died 2 years after this one - so I guess we have to trust that Micheaux cast a very white-looking mixed race dude.) So, all the major players/plotmovers in this drama are black, and a great deal of the film (including the expansive and rather underwhelming romantic plot) is committed to depicting the main characters' uneasy attitudes towards each other, i.e. who is too black, who is less black, who is white enough, and (in the case of the landowner) am I too black to date this beautiful (seemingly white) woman? As in WITHIN OUR GATES, Micheaux was very cognizant that his own community had a ton of issues to work out before even addressing relations w/ white folks.

But!!! As the subtitle indicates, the Klan does play a significant role in Micheaux's original cut - as the black bad guy cynically employs them to terrorize the mulatto landowner into giving up the oil-rich property. There are two sequences in the surviving cut where the Klan appear - and although a lot of SOTU appears just competent/okay, the Klan footage is terrifying. It amuses me to think that Micheaux had the nuts to title this film SYMBOL OF THE UNCONQUERED: A STORY OF THE KU KLUX KLAN, presumably luring in unwary audiences who were big fans of BIRTH OF A NATION....... and then at the climax, having a lone black man defeat an entire Klan lynching party w/ a bunch of well-flung bricks!     

Alas....... that climax (described in a title card) no longer seems to exist. I hope a black projectionist spliced it out for their own collection at some point and played it for appreciative private audiences for the rest of their career.    3.5/5

[FatFreddysCat]

"Kill. Bury. Print." (2026)

A small, family owned newspaper in rural Oklahoma gets on the bad side of a newly elected and quite incompetent, possibly corrupt,county sheriff. When the paper releases recordings of the sheriff making racist remarks and threatening to murder the journalist covering their department, the small town story quickly turns into national news.
I may not be part of the newspaper biz anymore, but I still love a good documentary about them, and this Peacock original is a good one.