films we just saw

Chat here about anything horror related. Be it movies, news, remakes or events.
mamawaldi
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Post by mamawaldi »

Recently seen...
Hitchcock's Frenzy - Love most of the Hitchcock's I've seen (Rope & 39 Steps probably my faves) but had never caught this one before. It's grimey in a Deathline kind of way but a few delicate touches lift it above the mundane. The police inspectors wife's terrible cooking.....Barry Foster cheeky chappie "necktie strangler" and one wonderful sequence as the camera retreats nervously away from a soon to be murder scene.

Ninth Gate - Had this on tape for ages...but wish I'd left it alone. Johnny Depp's worst film?? He's after a set of books that can be used to summon the devil and it tries to boil up in a kind of Rosemary's Baby kind of way(this is also directed by Polanski) but it's just laughable. At one point there's even an obvious piece of string pulling over a prop in a fight scene. I'd have walked out....but err...I was at home and it was raining.
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Post by AdeBrown »

Team Banzai wrote:CLOVERFIELD not too spoilery!
...

what impresses most about the film is the sound design, on the empire's admittedly huge screen the beast, helicopters, planes and building toppling literally punch you in the stomach. i'm guessing that a lot was spent on the sound as the visuals, owing to the concept are lacking. lots of good set-pieces, but there are a few which are a shade under-developed. it was however nice to see the creature quite clearly as they could have kept it hidden a la blair witch. like that film i think this will be a love it or loathe it experience.
so, fully recommended then (if only to have an opinion on it - it's a must see) but not as effective as REC.
We saw you folks across the cinema (and Alan further down the aisle we were in) but didn't have time to hang around and compare notes.

We all managed to avoid the hype on this and I can't imagine the virals being as plausible as Blair Witch had been. Considering the film is fairly simple and often remeniscent (or derivative) of some classics, it does a good job. Shame that I had no affinity for any of the characters. Closest to an empathic character would have been the dude with the camera, but he just needed to put it down occasionally and do film fewer product placements.

One issue, I have with the sound was that the party was WAY too loud, and when the impressive booming, collapsing and exploding (oh and "head banging") noises came along it was hard not to think they were not as loud as the yuppie kids and their dull party.

It was okay. And definitely worth seeing on the big screen.
(Bring ear plugs.)
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Post by Grindhouse »

worked my through a few films the past week or so
kicking of with
Enemy Mine good 80s sci fi,and a remake of hell in the pacific,its still a good story,just a shame the effects have aged so much.
Carandiru i missed this over the festive season and well worth catching on dvd,a tale of an over crowded prison and the lives of those living in appalling conditions inside,and a shocking murderous rampage by riot police.
Grindhouse trailer classics a great selection of those shockingly bad and sometimes good trailers of exploitation porn and sleaze,it started well and ended so abruptly that they must have just run out of room.
why they didnt bookend it with the grindhouse intro at the start and complement it at the end i thought the disc had stuck :(
and why not break the trailers down into genres,still its entertaining and a real trip into cinema we rarely see anymore.

Theres always time for Lucio Fulci madness in my house,so a trip to see Dr freudenstein and get my prescription of terror and gore was needed,and this was the perfect remedy and didn't fail to deliver on a wet dreary day, i hadnt seen House By The Cemetary in a long time in fact it was on a vipco vhs print,and even the R1 diamond dvd print was fantastic and not as i remembered it.
a great film with the most annoying child in film history & i cant wait to get the ultrabit version of this with some decent extras,great music and 2 great actresses.
but wait i havent felt so queasy in years as when freudenstein quite literally spills his rotten maggot worm infested guts out on the floor.
And just how does he eat? who cares suspend disbelief and logic when your in Fulci territory,book your appointment with Freudenstein soon :D
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Post by ghouldrool »

Love enemy mine and have meant to see HBTC for years.

Superman: Doomsday

Sometimes channel surfing reaps strange rewards. Currently this animation is doing the rounds on Sky Premiere.

its very violent and dark so it well deserves its 12 rating. James Marsters does Luthor yet cant escape sounding like Spike. The story line from the comic is drastically cutdown for the better.

The story involves a clone of Superman let loose after Superman is killed by Doomsday. A standoout sequence involves this clone dropping a child killer (a 4 year old victim) from above the city. Pretty full on really.

It contains all the action pace that Superman Returns lacks. Its short length doesnt mean theyve ignored the character stuff either. Well worth a look.
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Post by lupogirl »

ghouldrool wrote:AVP-R

A slasher movie at heart. Shaky cam and close up once more ruin action scenes.

The characters are surprisingly well delivered considering most only get a couple of scenes before they are wiped out. There is one death that did actually shock me

Theres a particularly nasty evolution of the Alien life cycle too. For some it might just push the envelope a little too far.

We dont see the PredAlien much and when he or she is there you can hardly see it anyway.

Its a good solid little B flick marred by the fight scenes being too hard to follow and a last 5 mins ripped from a resident evil title.
Agree with the comments the fight scenes and shaky cam. I was a bit surprised how cliched ridden the script was. There were very few close up deaths and the deaths you do see were actually rather good! I was sitting there smirking through out the film thinking this is rather amusing. Went it in with low expectations and and came out grinning.

Also saw No Country For Old Men. Stunning!!! Solid performances, atmospheric setting, minimal use of music and always love the sound of the whistling wind in films.
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Post by ghouldrool »

i must remark that i loved No Country for Old Men right up until what i shall refer to as the missing reel.

From here it seemed to go on and on. Still geatly performed still wonderful looking. It just felt like i was cheated from what would have been an intense uncertain showdown.

The clues are there though that i should have expected it. The message that "nothing is certain" is rather hammered home and it was strange how the Mexicans were constantly being dismissed. As if they mattered far less.

Woody Harrelsons role could have been excised but it was still a neat role.

Theres a lot of humour to offset the violence. Its just that assassin character is rather cliched regardless of how well it was performed and scripted (kind of a marriage between Eddie Nascoo in Watchers and Max from American Perfekt).

the opening scenes of Brolin finding the revenants of a drug deal gone wrong and then the money are very good visually and aurally. And his cat and mouse thing with Bardem is even better
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Post by Bearded Avenger »

Luci's The Psychic

The Departed

Harsh Times

A Guide To Recognising Your Saints

The DVD that came with the latest album by Stars.
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Post by giles edwards »

ghoul

go to Apple.com/trailers and listen to the podcast about the film from Glenn Kenny, Harry Knowles, Jim Emerson and Elvis Mitchell -- it's utterly enlightening and really highlighted what I love about the film (and what you seem to have eventually found in it as well -- but I can understand your frustration completely. I'd just ask you to give it another chance.)

Spoilers ahoy!

When/If you watch it again, try and think of it as not about Josh Brolin's character -- he's just one of the many modern "messes" which old man Tommy Lee Jones encounters on his way to retirement. It's a fascinating rumination on the modern action film/western/police procedural. There could never be a missing reel, of course in Tommy Lee Jones' story, a story about a man in a country in which things come at you, uncompromisingly, unstoppably, inexorably. It's not a place for those who live by rules, by codes of ethics, by human decency (Brolin's not one of those or he wouldn't have stolen the money in the first place, an irony compounded by the fact when he does go back to do the decent thing with the water, is when the whole shotstorm kicks off!)

It's actually a compelling double bill with the brothers' own Fargo which is laced with just the violent retribution depicted on-screen that the weary world of No Country... wishes it could shy away from and from which many of the old men in that film shut themselves away in dusty, tumbleweed-strewn tombs.
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ghouldrool
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Post by ghouldrool »

another positive aspect of No Country was how utterly absorded you get in it. i recommend sitting as close to the screen as possible.

Ill most certainly give it another chance when it trundles its way to dvd or sky movies. also loved the random car crash and exchange with the boys. the film certainly will stay with you.

that the offscreen event (which in retrospect might have felt even cheap if shown) was so affecting should be seen as a testament to how brilliant things were. Kelly MacDonald also needs a mention. Scotlands s.exiest schoolgirl now Texas' cutest housewife.

The Omega Man. This is great campy fluff. A bit heavy on the religious metaphors and very (technicolour) bloody. Not strictly a better adaptation of I am Legend, but it works.
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Post by Melvin Junko »

I watched 'Bangkok Dangerous' yesterday, a thai movie about a deaf mute hitman. I thought it was ok, it took it's time to get going but all in all worth the 4 quid i paid for it.

also saw critters 3 on saturday, definitly not as good as the first two but all right for a saturday afternoon being ill.

just watched phantasm 4, finished off the box set and felt a bit unsatisfied. I thought the ending was too open to finish of a series of 4 movies. I hope the disc of exta's brings some clarity
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Post by rawshark »

Loving the love No Country... is getting here...! :D

Now, is it as good as, or better then There Will Be Blood?
It's a tough call...

Recently saw Rescue Dawn, well worth checking out. By far and away Herzog's most Hollywood movie, whilst still retaining his own unique slant (midgets in the jungle, eating bugs). Christian Bale puts in yet another phenomenal physical performance and Steve Zahn underplays things nicely as a fellow PoW. Shame about the last 5 minutes though...

The Diving Bell and The Butterfly - very, very good. Watch out for surprise Awards at Oscar. I'd read the book, and it still made a huge impact on me, so would love to know how it affects people who are unaware of this life-affirming true story going in.

Also caught up on the Region 1 2-disc edition of Street Trash - one of my guilty pleasures - with a hugely rewarding two hour 'making of'...
It's horrible... I love it... What is it?
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Post by giles edwards »

MILD SPOILER

My wife is convinced the last 15 minutes of Rescue Dawn are some kind of insane dream and that's the only way it makes a lick of sense tonally. Unless he's just a bit crazy of course, which is totally probable.

There's really nothing to support that in the text so I'm just thinking it might simply be shoddy wannabe-Hollywood filmmaking on Herzog's part, a needless concession to the mainstream market. Good picture though, however I loathe Jeremy Davis as an actor. He just grates with the same aloof, disjointed mumbling in everything he does.

Voor, I caught Freddie Francis' Paranoiac over the weekend. Sublime stuff, Sure, it's totally nuts and pretty hokey as a picture, with an unbelievabley OTT performance from Oliver Reed, but it's a fun little b-movie, full of atmosphere and some brilliantly macabre touches.
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Davo
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Post by Davo »

Totally agree with you Giles about Davies’s shtick in Rescue Dawn –he’s so mannered it’s painful.

However Bale’s performance in the film is seriously variable too. At the beginning I couldn’t work out whether Dengler was some kind of idiot savant as Bale starts off essaying him as a demented buffoon..? He changes tone pretty swiftly enough when he’s captured….

I thought Rescue Dawn was hugely underwhelming actually, particularly given Herzog's rep.

I mean it’s a perfectly serviceable, watchable war flick (with a deeply suspect ending where it turns into IRON EAGLE or something) but I found it totally anonymous.\It could've been directed by some workmanlike director like Ed Zwick.

I think it’s important to mention this, if only to distance DAWN from the genius work Herzog has done in the 70s and 80s.

There are more than enough gutless ‘prestige’ pictures clogging up cinemas out there without Herzog joining the club. Hell this man isn’t just a director of extreme cinema - he’s an extreme director. I mean how many other filmmakers were once best friends with the lunatic Kinski or have been shot at during a live interview??

I always wondered what Herzog in his pomp would’ve made of say.. Alex Garland's The Beach. It certainly wouldn’t have ended up as the extended Bounty ad that Danny Boyle made.

Herzog’s best films (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo) are marvellous, maddening, oddly beautiful, frequently unhinged. Rescue Dawn is none of these. Its just another Ok war movie...

Hell gimme Milius magnificent unapologetically right-ist RED dawn anyday!

Anyway ....what have I been watching? Well, apart from the 3 best films of the year so far - No Country, There will be Blood and Four months Three weeks , Two Days - I’ve been mainly watching giallos and westerns.

Went a bit Western crazy this weekend and watched three of my all time Italian faves - Sergio Sollima's marvellous Face to Face, a splendidly meditative spaghetti classic on the duality of good and evil, Sergio Corbucci’s equally bleak and morally complex masterpiece The Great Silence (Gotta love the snow filled landcape on that one, replicated - but in no way bettered - in the amusingly viscious hate fuelled gore western Cuthroats Nine ), and The Big Gundown another Sollima flick with Lee Van Cleef palying one of his best characyres outside iof a Leone flick - aTexan sheriff on the trail of fugitive Thomas Milan. Great Ennio scores on the latter two ...

Big westerns - big performances - big landscapes - big beards. Big cinema !

I also caught the recent 3 10 to Yuma on DVD, which was perfectly serviceable and enjoyable, but seemed staid in comparison to those crazy Italians ..

Mike - Diving Bell had me choking back the tears too mate..
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Post by Davo »

Totally agree with you Giles about Davies’s shtick in Rescue Dawn –he’s so mannered it’s painful.

However Bale’s performance in the film is seriously variable too. At the beginning I couldn’t work out whether Dengler was some kind of idiot savant as Bale starts off essaying him as a demented buffoon..? He changes tone pretty swiftly enough when he’s captured….

I thought Rescue Dawn was hugely underwhelming actually, particularly given Herzog's rep.

I mean it’s a perfectly serviceable, watchable war flick (with a deeply suspect ending where it turns into IRON EAGLE or something) but I found it totally anonymous.\It could've been directed by some workmanlike director like Ed Zwick.

I think it’s important to mention this, if only to distance DAWN from the genius work Herzog has done in the 70s and 80s.

There are more than enough gutless ‘prestige’ pictures clogging up cinemas out there without Herzog joining the club. Hell this man isn’t just a director of extreme cinema - he’s an extreme director. I mean how many other filmmakers were once best friends with the lunatic Kinski or have been shot at during a live interview??

I always wondered what Herzog in his pomp would’ve made of say.. Alex Garland's The Beach. It certainly wouldn’t have ended up as the extended Bounty ad that Danny Boyle made.

Herzog’s best films (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo) are marvellous, maddening, oddly beautiful, frequently unhinged. Rescue Dawn is none of these. Its just another Ok war movie...

Hell gimme Milius magnificent unapologetically right-ist RED dawn anyday!

Anyway ....what have I been watching? Well, apart from the 3 best films of the year so far - No Country, There will be Blood and Four months Three weeks , Two Days - I’ve been mainly watching giallos and westerns.

Went a bit Western crazy this weekend and watched three of my all time Italian faves - Sergio Sollima's marvellous Face to Face, a splendidly meditative spaghetti classic on the duality of good and evil, Sergio Corbucci’s equally bleak and morally complex masterpiece The Great Silence (Gotta love the snow filled landcape on that one, replicated - but in no way bettered - in the amusingly viscious hate fuelled gore western Cuthroats Nine ), and The Big Gundown another Sollima flick with Lee Van Cleef palying one of his best characyres outside iof a Leone flick - aTexan sheriff on the trail of fugitive Thomas Milan. Great Ennio scores on the latter two ...

Big westerns - big performances - big landscapes - big beards. Big cinema !

I also caught the recent 3 10 to Yuma on DVD, which was perfectly serviceable and enjoyable, but seemed staid in comparison to those crazy Italians ..

Mike - Diving Bell had me choking back the tears too mate..
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Post by giles edwards »

I LOVE The Great Silence. Just a fundamentally brilliant piece of, not even exploitation filmmaking, simply filmmaking. A bold, striking and uncompromising take on what's really a very simple archetype. Somilla's one of those directors who lives in the shadow of the Fulcis and Corbuccis of this world. I love his Violent City with Charles Bronsen as well. I missed a Sir Christopher Frayling introduced screening of it at the NFT a couple years back but heard him effusing like a teenage geek about how much he loved in in the lobby beforehand while I was waiting for something else to start.

I though I'd brought a crappy VHS of The Big Gundown from ebay but it turned out to be The Big Showdown, aka The Grand Duel. Still, looks like great stuff (and I bought Day Of Anger at the same time.

Nothing ever quite beats the Italians at the marginal exploitation genres...Big cinema indeed!

Haha, yeah Rescue Dawn isn't vintage Herzog, though I did like it, especially the brooding Klaus Bedelt score. He's like the missing link between classic exploitation and modern arthouse, bless him. An amazing, fearless figure. The documentary Little Deiter Needs To Fly is much more compelling than RD.
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