Movies: Last Movie You Watched and Rate It | Mid-Spring Edition. Happy Beltane!

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Highway to Hell (Ate de Jong, 1991) - Oh I remember how Fangoria (or was it Gorezone?) had our hopes up about this one. Sgt. Bedlam, played by C.J. Graham (Jason of Friday the 13th 6), a Steve Johnson creation, was the up and coming great horror villain. Fail. It's a horror comedy that's not really horror (more fantasy than anything), and really not a comedy (or a very bad one). The whole Stiller family appears in this no budget production, with Lita Ford, Gilbert Gottfried, and Kevin Peter Hall (the Predator). It's a little crazy and it has somewhat of a "unique" feel, but it's pretty bad. 3.5/10

IMDB Summary (these are fun): An eloping bride is taken into Hell, and her fiancé must pursue.

Read this yesterday and thought, "Never heard of this, but oh this sounds like something I'd be into."

Pulled it up today to put on a watch list and realized I've definitely seen this before. Multiple times. God bless Cinemax.

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

Read this yesterday and thought, "Never heard of this, but oh this sounds like something I'd be into."

Pulled it up today to put on a watch list and realized I've definitely seen this before. Multiple times. God bless Cinemax.

Kind of stuff your mind happily forgets. Cyborg even more so.

 

[kihei]

just watched this tonight . What a great movie ! Any other recommendations ?

Recent-ish horror movies? Lots.

In order:

November (Estonia)
Annihilation
Valley of Shadows (Norway)
Under the Shadow (Iran)
Before We Vanish (Japan)
Under My Skin
Host
The Forest of Love (Japan)
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Swallow
The Witch
The Babadook
His House
Bavenous (Canada/2018)
Relic
In the Earth

 

[Thucydides]

Recent-ish horror movies? Lots.

In order:

November (Estonia)
Annihilation
Valley of Shadows (Norway)
Under the Shadow (Iran)
Before We Vanish (Japan)
Under My Skin
Host
The Forest of Love (Japan)
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Swallow
The Witch
The Babadook
His House
Bavenous (Canada/2018)
Relic
In the Earth

Thanks man . What’s the best movie you’ve seen recently ? I don’t watch nearly as many as I used to , but am slowly getting back into it.

 

[kihei]

Thanks man . What’s the best movie you’ve seen recently ? I don’t watch nearly as many as I used to , but am slowly getting back into it.

In the last four, five months:

Red Moon Tide (2021)--Loved this movie, best of year so far. But it may be only available on MUBI or hard to find.

Red Moon Tide (2021) Directed by Lois Patino 8B

Red Moon Tide represents exactly the kind of cinema by which I am most enthralled. Red Moon Tide is a monster movie/ghost story/witch's tale told almost exclusively in absolutely amazing images. The story has the haunting feel of an old folk tale with the sea and the moon representing the monsters and a mother who is also a witch mourning for her son. Foolishly he has gone to sea in search of the monsters and he has not returned. There is virtually no dialogue which is replaced by a scattering of voice-overs presented by the various characters who appear almost frozen in time. These brief voice-overs help to heighten the atmosphere provided by the (literally) entrancing images. As should more often be the case in cinema, the emphasis is on image, mood, the kind of things that you can feel or sense but not necessarily put into words. The images are often surprising, disorienting, occasionally abstract; they are sometimes dark, even hard to make out until, snap, you do.

There are so far only seven reviews of Red Moon Tide on Rotten Tomatoes, all highly positive, and the following expressions come up among them: "transfixtion is contagious"; "ineffable dread"; "almost supernatural purity"; "the symbol becomes its own essence and purpose"; "operating at the fine art end of the cinema scale"; and "the more the film moves toward the esoteric, the more interesting its images become." In other words, not exactly standard critical reactions to a new film. Some people might call this movie experimental cinema, but what's the experiment? Whatever one calls it, Red Moon Tide is just flat out one beautifully realized film.

Later Sidenote: I wonder if this was the sort of thing Terrence Malick was trying for but wasn't able to pull off. I'd love to know his reaction to Red Moon Tide.

Manor House (2021) I suspect this might be right down your alley.

Manor House (2021) Directed by Cristi Puiu 7D

Manner House takes place at an elegant Romanian estate in the wintry Transylvanian countryside where a small collection Russian intellectuals discuss religion, philosophy, European culture, world politics, and the nature of goodness in all its intricate differentiation among conflicting scriptural beliefs. The time is near the end of the 19th century, and while these aristocrats don't yet realize it, their era and the belief system that accompanies it is about to come to an end in no uncertain terms. For 200 minutes, they talk and we listen, trying to keep track of the complex theological and philosophical arguments batted back and forth like tennis balls. Starting with a stunner of an establishing shot in a snowy field, the movie is gorgeous to look at and the interior of the manor house in which these discussions take place is practically another character in the movie. Director Cristi Puiu often uses long takes, cutting only when absolutely necessary as the scenes progress. However within these takes, his camera is gracefully mobile, so we really get a genuine sense of time and place. Think of Manor House as a more rigorous My Dinner with Andre, Louis Malle's film that simply records a dinner conversation between two New York theatre people. There is a lot to digest in this film, though obviously its lack of incident and reliance on complex discussions will not be everybody's idea of a good time. I watched it in two parts so as to better understand what the discussions were about. In some respects, their very esoteric nature is part of what makes them so revealing of the characters and of their class.

Host (2020) Not the best horror movie of the year, but sneaky smart.

Host (2020) Directed by Rob Savage 7A

Oh, clever little horror movie, this one. Director Rob Savage combines Zoom technology, pandemic isolation, and generalized anxiety to make a scary movie about a teleconference seance gone horribly wrong. Five university-age girls and a male pal meet via a Zoom call and are joined by a woman who will lead the seance. So basically we are looking at a screen that resembles a Zoom or Skype call. There are as many as seven people in separate little rectangles at one time, each seemingly safe at home. The male friend drops out for awhile and the seance leader exits fairly quickly, so usually we are looking at five rectangles each containing a terrified woman sitting in her own apartment trying to figure out with her friends what is happening. I thought this format for a horror movie was brilliant, a variation on the too familiar found footage routine, yet a method capable of providing similar jolts of adrenaline. Sometimes it is a hard call to know just where to look as reactions can be as intense as whatever else is going on. Some entity is either confused or really pissed off and there is no safety in numbers as they are nowhere near one another. There are several false alarms, and then the false alarms stop....and things get serious. There are some good jumpscares, and some more subtle chills provided by what is going on in the background behind the girls or just out of camera range, not to mention what happens when they start exploring their environment. At 57 minutes, Host never lingers long enough to wear out its welcome. I guess one could say this is a horror movie made for the times we live in. It uses the technology of the day, the isolation that beleaguers us, and the fears of the moment to create a horror movie that could exist in no other time and place than this one.

In terms of old movies that I have re-seen recently, Jules and Jim held up like the masterpiece it is.

 

[kihei]

Spoor (2017) Directed by Agnieszka Holland 7A

Set in a remote, mountainous region in Poland near the Czech border, Spoor focuses on Janina, an old, cantankerous woman with two dogs that she loves. Though she teaches English part-time to school kids, she is pretty much seen as the town's local kook with her strange ways and her taste for astrology. When one of her dogs goes missing, she confronts a local hunter, an adversay named "Bigfoot," who shortly thereafter turns up dead. Janina remains more upset about her missing dog but the local sheriff and parish priest merely admonish her, not help her. There are a lot of hunters in this town, and suddenly some of them start showing up dead, too. One such body is surrounded by nothing but deer tracks. Something strange is going on in the Klodzko Valley.

Spoor is a delightful eco-friendly thriller, but don't let that the ecological ramifications put you off. This is a wonderful, highly entertaining mystery, fillled with colourful characters,and graced by a brilliant lead performance by Agnieszka Mandat. Spoor has a little bit of everything: a sort of Eastern European Miss Marple, gorgeous visuals, humour, a clever story, a twist you won't see coming, and tucked in there neatly, a droll political statement about animal rights that is not the least bit grating. Holland is an accomplished film maker (Europa, Europa; Burning Bush; In Darkness) and Spoor is among her finest works.

subtitles

The Criterion Channel

 

[Osprey]

The Dark and the Wicked (2020) - 6/10 (Liked it)

Siblings (Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr.) return to their parents' Texas farm upon hearing that their father has taken ill and find that their mother is not herself and convinced that an evil presence is on the property. This is one intense and bleak horror film. The sense of dread is palpable. The use of sound is excellent in achieving it, whether it's the bleating of goats, the racket of wind chimes or the bestial breathing of something on the other side of the door. A lot is left to the imagination, though there are some jump scares, a background scare or two and a few horrific scenes. There's not really anything that you haven't seen or experienced before in many other horror films--I was reminded quite a bit of The Wind, in fact--but it's still executed well enough to be effective. The film has themes of grief and guilt and there's possibly a metaphor for how a troubled family can feel like a dark cloud is hanging over it, but it doesn't seem to follow through on them as well as The Babadook and Hereditary did. The ending, particularly, is abrupt and unsatisfying. Certainly don't watch this expecting answers or resolution. If you can appreciate 90 minutes of mounting dread and suffocating atmosphere for its own sake, though, it's worth checking out because few recent horror films are this good at it. It's on Prime Video.

 

[Thucydides]

In the last four, five months:

Red Moon Tide (2021)--Loved this movie, best of year so far. But it may be only available on MUBI or hard to find.



Manor House (2021) I suspect this might be right down your alley.




Host (2020) Not the best horror movie of the year, but sneaky smart.



In terms of old movies that I have re-seen recently, Jules and Jim held up like the masterpiece it is.

Thank you for the evening plans this week. I’ll check them out and leave a review.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Cyborg. As I noted above after @Pranzo Oltranzista's review of Highway to Hell I thought I hadn't seen it, but turns out I have. (Rewatching soon). Funny enough I definitely would have sworn I saw this, but after rewatching it I don't think I did. There's a scene in a sewer I remember but other than that not a single moment of this seemed familiar. Definitely fits the so-bad-its-good mold. For a movie called Cyborg there's a shocking lack of cyborgs in it. One by my count and only really barely. Van Damme spends most of the movie looking like a cast off from the Lost Boys (Peter Pan, not the vampire movie). The villain is big and dumb and kinda rad but actually looks like he is in a vampire movie. The movie itself, despite being in "the future" actually feels a lot closer to a Conan the Barbarian type flick. Not remotely good, but I derived enough enjoyment from it.

 

[ItsFineImFine]

The Rock (1996) - 7/10

A good Michael Bay movie? It is filled with a lot of dumbness but man are some of the action sequences and explosions jaw-dropping. The second half actually gets good, the first is destructive setup. Nic Cage puts in a mixed role with a weird character who's supposed to be scared and out of his depth but also acts with machismo in a bunch of scenes....really odd directing by Bay. The drama is tense enough and as for the James Bond theory, oh Sean Connery is definitely Bond in this.

 

[TheGreenTBer]

The Rock (1996) - 7/10

A good Michael Bay movie? It is filled with a lot of dumbness but man are some of the action sequences and explosions jaw-dropping. The second half actually gets good, the first is destructive setup. Nic Cage puts in a mixed role with a weird character who's supposed to be scared and out of his depth but also acts with machismo in a bunch of scenes....really odd directing by Bay. The drama is tense enough and as for the James Bond theory, oh Sean Connery is definitely Bond in this.

I also like this movie. In fairness it's early Michael Bay, before he went full Transformers. But then again, he made Armageddon next and that was crap, so that doesn't help my argument...

 

[Osprey]

The Rock (1996) - 7/10

A good Michael Bay movie? It is filled with a lot of dumbness but man are some of the action sequences and explosions jaw-dropping. The second half actually gets good, the first is destructive setup. Nic Cage puts in a mixed role with a weird character who's supposed to be scared and out of his depth but also acts with machismo in a bunch of scenes....really odd directing by Bay. The drama is tense enough and as for the James Bond theory, oh Sean Connery is definitely Bond in this.

Can we really blame Bay for not being able to direct the "weird" out of Nic Cage, though? Has any director managed to do that?

 

[kihei]

Can we really blame Bay for not being able to direct the "weird" out of Nic Cage, though? Has any director managed to do that?

Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas)?

 

[Osprey]

Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas)?

That was Nicolas Cage, the Oscar winner. We're talking about Nic Cage...

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas)?

David Gordon Green's Joe gets a (comparatively) lower key performance out of Cage. (And it was even made in the last decade so very much amid the crazy rabid Cage days).

 

[NyQuil]

The Rock (1996) - 7/10

A good Michael Bay movie? It is filled with a lot of dumbness but man are some of the action sequences and explosions jaw-dropping. The second half actually gets good, the first is destructive setup. Nic Cage puts in a mixed role with a weird character who's supposed to be scared and out of his depth but also acts with machismo in a bunch of scenes....really odd directing by Bay. The drama is tense enough and as for the James Bond theory, oh Sean Connery is definitely Bond in this.

It's also a who's who of character actors, every one of whom you've seen in something else.

 

[ProstheticConscience]

That was Nicolas Cage, the Oscar winner. We're talking about Nic Cage...

I actually knew someone who was in that. IIRC he had a speaking role and everything. Even he told me not to watch it.

 

[ProstheticConscience]

The Old Guard

with Charlize Theron and various other people I didn't recognize.

Apparently based on a comic book (because nothing is original anymore), Theron is Andi aka Andromache the Scythian. She's an immortal warrior who's been creeping around for at least four thousand years and leads a band of three other immortals on whatever private war strikes her fancy. There's her, Joe and Niki (Yusuf and Nicolo) who met during the crusades and killed each many times over then became lovers for the last millennium, and finally Booker, a French guy who's the baby of the crew at only two hundred. They've recently had the bad luck of being targeted by a pharmaceutical magnate who wants to experiment on them...but there's another development. A US marine gets her throat cut in Afghanistan, but comes back to life and suddenly she and the crew are dreaming about each other non-stop, which means she's another one like them. Lots of shooty stabby stuff happens.

A decent amount better than I expected, actually. They don't really explain the whole immortal deal here or show what happens if someone gets their head cut off avoiding the obvious Highlander comparison, which disappointed me. It does give a tiny look at how truly checked out of the human experience you'd get if you were thousands of years old and couldn't die. Pro tip: don't fall in the ocean.

On Netflix

"K...dunno about this chick. Can I get Sean Connery over here?"

 

[Ainec]

Found flick films, not my usual cup of tea but checked these out

Creep 6.5/10
Creep 2 9/10
Afflicted 9/10 - added 1.5 points for budget

 

[The don godfather]

Octopussy Roger Moore classic. One of my favorite all time bond films.

 

[kihei]

That was Nicolas Cage, the Oscar winner. We're talking about Nic Cage...

Should have starred Sting.

 

[ProstheticConscience]

Punisher: War Zone

with Ray Stevenson, Dominic West, and other people, mostly with exploding heads.

Ray steps into the blood-spattered combat boots of Frank Castle, the titular unhinged vigilante taking out the loss of his family on absolutely everyone in the criminal underworld. During one casual massacre of a mob family, he also kills an undercover cop, and he become wracked with guilt. Kinda selective morals there...but anyway. Dominic West is Billy "The Beaut" Russo, vain asshole gangster with the worst fake NYC mob accent you've ever heard who's nevertheless lucky enough to slip away from the carnage. Frank catches up with him and tosses him into a giant broken glass bin; once again luck is with Billy as the only thing maimed is his face, which causes a total break from reality. Bye Billy the mobster, hello Jigsaw the supervillain! He retrieves his brother Loony Bin Jim from...the loony bin. Lots and lots and lots of death and property damage ensue.

Totally over the top. The villains layer on vast quantities of ham, heads explode all over the screen in vivid detail as the Punisher dishes out endless headshots, the bad guys can only ever shoot at his armoured torso (lucky him!), and Loony Bin Jim is basically nonstop vandalism and broken furniture. It was frankly a move of questionable wisdom to spring him from the loony bin where he was kept tied up yet somehow retained the upper body strength of half a dozen Icelandic bodybuilders.

Ridiculously overacted, ridiculously bloody...and easily the best Punisher movie ever.

"Cocaine and antibiotics have given me the power of ten Nic Cages!!"

 

[Pranzo Oltranzista]

...and easily the best Punisher movie ever.

Being the worst entry in a pond of crap could indeed make it the "best", but I have a soft spot for the Lundgren one. I think you just inspired me a new thread

 

[ProstheticConscience]

Being the worst entry in a pond of crap could indeed make it the "best", but I have a soft spot for the Lundgren one. I think you just inspired me a new thread

I don't know if they're necessarily a pond of crap...I mean, they're bad, sure, but I enjoyed this one. It was bad but fun and it knew it was cheesy just concentrated on showing us the best exploding gibs they could film.

 

[The Kingslayer]

Saint Maud is now on Netflix. Excellent, must-see horror movie

The final scene kinda stays with you for a bit lol. Cant remember the user who recommended this as a watch but i've liked every movie hes recommended so far this being one of them. The Neon Demon and The Killing of a Sacred dear were also great.