Last movie watched...

[I, Cosh]

The Village Directed by M Night Shaymalan.

I guessed the twist to that within 15 seconds, shurely shome kind of record

I've never seen it but somebody told me what the twist was and I was slightly confused as I had assumed from the trailer that was what was meant to be happening all along.

Anyway, saw most of Beowulf last night. Beowank, more like.

[Teivion]

WOLFMAN was my choice for a Sunday night. I'd met a few of the VFX cast a way back and they were all buzzing over it, but I'd read some mixed reviews at the time and it fell off the to-do Radar until recently.
I enjoyed it - notably Hugo Weaving's Police Inspector ( his lines to the village landlady were great). Anthony Hopkins plods through well enough, Benicio Del Toro kept it together, although I wonder if he wasn't a little miss cast- if the hero was a little more weedy, the transformations would have had far more impact, but as he looks quite feral anyway, well............;-)
I watched the 'Extended Cut' and was really confused over [spoiler]the man who handed him the silver walking stick on the train[/spoiler] Every time that was shown later on it was a real distraction, as if it was going to be a massive plot twist that never came to be. Am I missing something ? reference to an original story or something?
As for my main interest- the VFX, I couldn't tell what parts or the transformation were CG or not- I cant work out if that's a good thing or not,  and seeing as they were done by Rick Baker, I though the overall design of the wolf was really lame. The teeth appliances, for instance, looked like the ones you buy in joke shops ...shame.
Good fun though, and worth a look now its in the bargain bin....

[brendan1]

The Village Directed by M Night Shaymalan.

I guessed the twist to that within 15 seconds, shurely shome kind of record

Yes, I think I was close behind. It was horribly obvious, and I'm not usually great at that type of guesswork. Partly because I can't be arsed.

[Zarjazzer]

Green lantern, i found it perfectly good fun. Not perhaps a match for thor but i enjoyed it anyway. The alien bits were too short imho.

[Goaty]

No Country for Old Men on FilmFour, that Coin toss scene so brilliant!

Anton Chigurh, what a villian!

[radiator]

A recent trip to Naples (bit of a dive if I'm honest) inspired me to finally watch the 2008 movie Gomorrah this afternoon, which had been sitting on my shelf for ages.

I found it almost impossible to follow due to the sprawling nature of the multiple narratives and lack of any explanation or exposition - to the extent that I almost gave up on it an hour in, and embarrassingly had to resort to Wikipedia to get up to speed on the plot. Overall it was ok, but nowhere near as good as I was expecting it to be.

[Professor Bear]

Scream 4 (Scre4m).  Utterly fucking insufferable within the first 6 minutes and never recovers.  There's a bit where characters sit around going "aw, man, what can we do that hasn't been done - even if we do the opposite it's been done and people expect it!"  They literally say it out loud on camera, then they complain about horror movies being too meta, then they complain that they don't know what meta means and are only copying what someone else said.  That's not clever writing, that's a mid life crisis.
Also, I guessed the murderers within ten minutes, though in fairness, I did cheat by watching something other than shitty horror movies since 1996 so I had an advantage over the typical viewer who actually finds this kind of incestuous lampshade-hanging toss entertaining.

[Tiplodocus]

So for SCRE4M you really mean SHI4T?

I thought Beowulf was pretty good myself; a good way to bring to life and update a (genuine) classic.  It took me a while to get into it at the cinema but subsequent viewings have increased it's appeall to me.

But some bits of it are definietly Beowank but maybe our terminology is being used for different purposes?

[brendan1]

Scream 4 (Scre4m).  Utterly fucking insufferable within the first 6 minutes and never recovers.  There's a bit where characters sit around going "aw, man, what can we do that hasn't been done - even if we do the opposite it's been done and people expect it!"  They literally say it out loud on camera, then they complain about horror movies being too meta, then they complain that they don't know what meta means and are only copying what someone else said.  That's not clever writing, that's a mid life crisis.
Also, I guessed the murderers within ten minutes, though in fairness, I did cheat by watching something other than shitty horror movies since 1996 so I had an advantage over the typical viewer who actually finds this kind of incestuous lampshade-hanging toss entertaining.

I've seen Scream 4 and I can't remember one thing about it, other than that I'd still love to rattle Courtney Cox.

[Dark Jimbo]

My Halloween night's viewing consisted of - Halloween and Captain Kronos.

Maybe you had to be there first time around for Halloween - or maybe I've been spoiled by access to the twenty years worth of horror cinema that's come since. Surprisingly slow, slightly cheap-looking (in a bad way), a villian who makes no real sense (they don't even try to explain how he's able to drive a car after spending fifteen years locked in a pysciatric institution since the age of six, for instance, even after specifically flagging this up as an anomaly!), and then it just sort of... ends. Maybe the sequels try to make more sense of things, but I

[Dark Jimbo]

...wasn't impressed overall - and before SBT or someone bites my head off, this is coming from someone who loves the first Friday the Thirteenth and most of Carpenter's other work; Prince of Darkness is a personal fave, for instance. Still, it was nicely suspenseful in places and Donald Pleasance (who I didn't know was in it!) is always good value.

Captain Kronos was much better, and managed to make its cheapness part of the charm. Quite simply oodles of fun, even if the lead's a bit wooden - razor-sharp dialogue, likeable characters, nicely witty, tries a different take on the vampire mythos, plenty of heaving-bosomed Hammer babes, and a genuinely impressive finale with a twist I didn't see coming. Such a shame the proposed TV series never emerged.

To be honest, the difference between the two - made roughly at the same time I believe - just goes to show why I generally prefer British horror to American.

[SmallBlueThing]

The years being unkind to Halloween is something im acutely aware of, jimbo. It's a great film, no question, but is it my favourite carpenter? Not on your nelly. It's also why i honestly prefer rob zombie's remake these days: it's more psychologically truthful, removes all the mystical shit (at least until zombie shovels it all back into the mix with the sequel) and is more threatening. As a film on its own, it's nowhere near as important as the first, obviously, but taken in comparison with the original i think it comes into its own. It's so patently at odds with the intent and execution of carpenter's film that there's no way the two are even reconcilable, in my opinion.
SBT

[M.I.K.]

Michael Myers is the bogeyman. That's the explanation. That's all the explanation there ever should have been.

[Dark Jimbo]

Any of the sequels worth a watch? I'm assuming not, but...

[SmallBlueThing]

(Rolls up sleeves, again)

Halloween 2 is interesting, in that its a direct continuation of the first- picking up as the original ends (but count the gunshots at the start). To those of us of a certain age, its impossible not to consider it just the second part of a three hour film. It's nowhere near as good a film, but rosenthal ramps up the gore (to make it compete with its newfound competition in the f13 movies, etc) so watched back to back, it's like it all kicks off in the second half. H2 also introduces all the backstory that everyone assumes was there in carp's film, but wasn't. It's this backstory that eventually sinks the series several films later.

H3 is a whole other topic. Unrelated to the Michael Myers story, it's either a brilliant, beautifully told horror film in its own right, or a waste of time, depending on your point of view. I love it.

H4 is the belated attempt to jumpstart the franchise, and is a watchable, superior slasher pic, that continues with that backstory i mentioned but takes massive liberties with established continuity for the good of the plot. 5 is a direct sequel to 4, except not as good, and 6 is like a fanwank tribute movie- which we've never seen the director's cut of. 6 also sees the end of the myers-plot as started in 2.

Then we have another gap, and H20: Twenty Years Later, which is a taut, jumpy suspense film much like the original and sees the proper end to the franchise... which was then fudged by the makers of the piss-awful H:Resurrection, in the worst entry in the series to date. Then the rob zombie remake and his troubled sequel.

H3D is in development.

SBT