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Last movie watched...

Started by SmallBlueThing, 04 February, 2011, 12:40:44 PM

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Link Prime

As a card carrying nerd and owner of at least a few titular comic books and action figures I felt duty bound to give Venom a go on Netflix at the weekend.

It is an absolute f**king car crash.

Performances, special effects, plot, dialogue - you name it - all bottom rung.
I actually feel embarrassed for Hardy and Ahmed - equally terrible acting and both woefully miscast.
Biggest disappointment since 2018's The Predator, but not quite at that (omega) level of cringe.
Avoid like an extraterrestrial plague.

Professor Bear

I enjoyed Enola Holmes, which at its heart shows how misguided the suffragettes were in not pursuing peaceful democratic reform and waiting to be saved by handsome young lord.
I personally could have done without the Sherlock Holmes element, tbh, as I don't think it needed it, but I grant you that any detective story in this era is always going to be an enterprise in his shadow, so folding him into the narrative and turning that problem into a selling-point seems eminently sensible.
It's not rocket science - the characterisation of the lead and their fourth wall-breaking in particular makes it seem like a Victorian-era riff on Kuffs - but it's a fun enough waste of two of your hours, I mean what else are you going to do, go outside?  Ahahah aw.

JayzusB.Christ

Quote from: Funt Solo on 26 September, 2020, 04:57:38 PM
Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 26 September, 2020, 10:35:55 AM
Me, I finally got round to watching On the Waterfront...

I went through a phase in my 20s of catching up with all these classics I'd heard about: The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane and (yes) On the Waterfront.


Me and all; it helped that we had an art college library stuffed full of classic videos for the film students to watch but available to the rest of us too.  So I managed to catch Night of the Hunter, the aforementioned Godfather and Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now, White Heat (finally realising where Torquemada's brother's 'end of the world' quote came from), and even the old Soviet progaganda films that broke new bounds in technology.

But I never got round to On the Waterfront.  And I still haven't seen Gone With the Wind, or Casablanca for that matter.

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

pictsy

The People Under the Stairs

I love this film.  It is definitely a gem.  It is hard to know where to start with praise for the film.  I had a blast watching it and was entertained from start to finish.  It is so unlike any other film and so jammed packed with interesting elements, without it being overwhelmed and remaining pretty simple.  It is elegant in it's visuals and storytelling.  Many thumbs up.

Professor Bear

Why not let Scaredy Matt explain why The People Under The Stairs is also a pretty spot-one political allegory about why and how landlords are evil bastards?

pictsy

Quote from: Professor Bear on 28 September, 2020, 08:38:04 PM
Why not let Scaredy Matt explain why The People Under The Stairs is also a pretty spot-one political allegory about why and how landlords are evil bastards?

By coincidence, YouTube has started recommending Scaredy Matt to me recently.  You are indeed right that his analysis of the film is spot-on and pretty much hits every point in a concise manner.  I do have a big appreciation for the aesthetics of the film as well as themes and commentary.

Mardroid

Quote from: pictsy on 28 September, 2020, 08:04:08 PM
The People Under the Stairs

I love this film.  It is definitely a gem.  It is hard to know where to start with praise for the film.  I had a blast watching it and was entertained from start to finish.  It is so unlike any other film and so jammed packed with interesting elements, without it being overwhelmed and remaining pretty simple.  It is elegant in it's visuals and storytelling.  Many thumbs up.

Me too. I haven't seen it in a while (it seemed to be one of those films I just happened across, flicking channels. Each time I've seen it -anout 3 times I believe.) but strangely I was thinking about it recently....

Rately

Quote from: pictsy on 28 September, 2020, 08:04:08 PM
The People Under the Stairs

I love this film.  It is definitely a gem.  It is hard to know where to start with praise for the film.  I had a blast watching it and was entertained from start to finish.  It is so unlike any other film and so jammed packed with interesting elements, without it being overwhelmed and remaining pretty simple.  It is elegant in it's visuals and storytelling.  Many thumbs up.

Seen this in my teen years one late Friday night on BBC1 and loved it, despite struggling to be able to explain to my friends what is brilliant about it.

Haven't seen it in a good decade or so, so off to the Digital Bin i go to fish it out.

judgefloyd

The Usual Suspects is the last movie I've seen.  Stands the test of time very well, I thought.  I'd forgotten the exact denoument, so the bit where [spoiler]something very clever revealed all to someone[/spoiler] came as an interesting surprise.  Gabriel Byrne was brilliant. 

RocketMother

El Camino.

I was expecting Breaking Bad Lite which is exactly what it was. I'm not sure why people seemed to dislike it so much when it came out (maybe they were expecting Breaking Bad 2 or something?) but for me it lived up to my expectations for it.

And now I can start catching up on Better Call Saul.

repoman

I loved El Camino.

I'm currently doing a 31 days of horror thing but instead of watching all the usual horror stuff that I like, I'm using the opportunity to watch things I've never seen before.  I'm getting mixed results!

1.  Escape Room (2017).  Low budget thing where four friends end up in an Escape Room with a demon.  Actually a better premise than that sounds.  Not brilliant though but notable for Skeet Ulrich and Sean Young being in it.

2.  Book of Monsters (2019).  An Irish take on Cabin in the Woods with a bit of a Ghostbusters (2016) thing to it (but not rubbish or dull).  Surprisingly entertaining and plenty of silly gore.  A lot of fun.

3.  A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio (2019).  Australian portmanteau that is clearly just a bunch of short films thrown together with a linking story wrapped around it.  That said, most of the stories were good and a couple were pretty scary.  To be fair the original (A Night of Horror Volume 1) had one of the scariest, and best, stories in it so there was a standard to meet and this film did okay.

4.  Offerings (1989).  Cheap and cheerful film that just aches to be Halloween.  I HATE all the Halloween movies and didn't hate this as much, even though technically its a worse film.  Worth watching once, I won't bother again.

pictsy

Blood Quantum

Canadian Zombie film.  Very solid film.  Effects can be ropey at times, but it is very forgivable.  I like its concepts.  Like a lot of people I got sick of Zombie everything, but this film was fresh.  It does have Zombie cliches, but I think what it does and what it brings to the table that is new makes up for it.  Thoroughly enjoyable watch.

SmallBlueThing(Reborn)

I've not posted here much in the last while- despite it being me (I was shocked to find) who started the thread way back when.

With that in mind, I'll hope you'll forgive me from binging over a bunch of Facebook statuses about films from the last few months.

This will be in several parts, as the forum only allows 20000 characters per post.

Underwater

I was a bit cross with my wife when she watched Underwater without me the other night. I'd been looking forward to it, as it's sort of *exactly the kind of movie I love*. Now, having seen it, I'm no longer cross, just a bit jealous that she saw it before me.

Wow! I know people are going to be snarky about it, but fuck me, that was sensational.

Okay, so the "thing at the end" wasn't *quite* right and a bit over-designed for the sake of it, but I got the point. Loved every single second and if they wish to make a totally unnecessary sequel, then that's *absolutely fine with me thank you very much*.

Color Out of Space: Well, bloody hell. That was a lot better than I feared and a hundred times better than I hoped. Two fer two today. And now: soup.

Well, I've just watched DEATH LINE (1972) albeit under its alt title of 'Raw Meat' and on YouTube, rather than the glorious VHS copy shown in this picture.

How, I ask myself, have I never seen this before?

Donald Pleasence delivers what must be the single greatest performance of his career, and Christopher Lee turns up for five minutes of distilled menace the like of which I've not seen him provide since the first Hammer Dracula.

It's no exaggeration to say not only do I want to see this again, immediately, but that I also want to delve into the whole world in which it inhabits. I want more stories of Inspector Calhoun and his continuing snarky battles against Stratton-Villiers of MI5. I want to know if "Mind The Doors Man" did indeed survive, and if not I want to be with the team sent in to investigate that little enclave under Russell Square, and to read their notes afterwards.

Just... wow. I feel ashamed that I've ignored it this long, and feel like turning in my furry  Fangoria badge with moving eyes.

I may be getting my fan club merchandise mixed up there.

Hereditary

Late again to the horror party. I really am going to have to hang up my horror hat and horror underpants, quite aside from my horror badge. No more secret horror handshakes for me.

HEREDITARY. Truly one of the most chilling and frightening films I've ever seen. At least four scare sequences that I'd put up there with "that bit" in The Exorcist III and "those bits" in Ghost Watch. Not to mention, well duh, "the obvious bits" in Day of the Dead, American Werewolf and The Thing.

Possibly the purest horror film I've seen since The Blair Witch Project- which was the last time a new film scared the crap out of me.

Astonishingly good.

Midsommar

There seems to be a growing trend towards sending American teenagers back to the past. Largely, sending then back into the plots of seventies horror films. MIDSOMMAR is the latest iteration of this, and as with THE GREEN INFERNO and numerous TEXAS CHAINSAW remakes and sequels beforehand, it proves to have fuck-all new to say in the process.

To say Midsommar is a derivative piece of shit that pisses away the promise shown by the director's last film (Hereditary, see yesterday's status) in favour of lazy riffing on far better films would be an understatement that eclipses any of the characters' constant musings that things seem a bit off in the Swedish Summerisle equivalent in which they've ended up.

Every cliche is layered on, notably the lack of children which very early on indicates the whole point being some kind of sex/magic ritual designed to "renew" the community. (I wont dignify that bollocks by adding a 'k'. If you're the sort of person who thinks 'magic' should ever have that extra letter on the end, please go read a book about biology or physics and come out of the nursery).

The "young people" (awkwardly highlighted by the spectacularly cloth-eared dialogue, "these are the other young people of the village") are all in their twenties, and theres no one over 72. At 72 you have to jump off a cliff, you see.

When two septuagenarians jump off a cliff, the American teenagers moan a bit but don't even try to get the fuck out of there. If they had, maybe it would have evolved into a different type of film- maybe a straight rip off of Wrong Turn or The Hills Have Eyes, with them being hunted through the forests- instead of a rip off of The Wicker Man and Texas Chainsaw (bad characters even indulge in sympathetic screaming at the good characters' anguish, there are innumerable pseudo-cannibalistic dinner table scenes, skinned faces are worn, huge mallets are wielded "by surprise" and then characters are dragged out of shot... etc etc ad nauseum).

There's not a single original idea in the whole, boring, confused mess. OF COURSE, the "Queen of the May" storyline is a distraction from the *bad thing that will befall the male character*- because Rowan Morrison was never the point of The Wicker Man, it was the entrapment of Sergeant Howie. OF COURSE he will get sewn into a bear suit, because Howie put one on in the last remake of The Wicker Man. OF COURSE he will burn to death trapped inside an offering, having fulfilled his plot responsibility of ensuring the "salvation" of the village, because so did Howie. And OF COURSE all the strangely blank and unworldly villagers can sing strange folk songs, because there was a very famous and successful soundtrack album to The Wicker Man.

It doesn't stop there. The filmmakers also use exactly the same sudden audio/visual cut from discordant violins to silence as is used in The Wicker Man at almost exactly the same moment in the plot. And, as a final insult, the films end on almost exactly the same visual shot- except Midsommar assumes its audience is a bit dim and has to push in a close up of the main character smiling evilly so you get the point that she chose her bloke to die. I actually shouted "oh fuck OFF!" at the screen at that point.

I don't know what the current fascination with redoing older and better movies in this way is,  rather than just remaking them. Unless it's that remakes tend to be sneered at, while this kind of "thematic mirroring" (I'm being nice, it's blatant childlike theft of a better idea) gets lauded and has awards bestowed upon it. But by taking the route of pretending to be something deeply serious and important, Midsommar (unlike the very similar but thoroughly trashy and purposefully ludicrous Green Inferno) instead becomes a hash of pisspoor choices made by a director continually trying to distract from the basic fact that his material is so thin, you can see the curves of the model underneath. "Look at the big hat!" he seems to be shouting, as if you'd never notice that his knickers are showing.


Next door continues their 24 hourshouty hippy party, complete with banjo and mandolins. Almost drowned out THE SKULL (1965, Amicus, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee) but not quite.

Another one I should have seen years ago, but somehow never have. Cushing comes into possession of the skull of The Marquis de Sade, which has a life all its own and begins a rampage of poltergeist activity and demonic Dennis Wheatley-style Evil. Freddie Francis pulls out all the stops in the direction, playing with points of view (notably from "inside the skull, looking out"- achieved by seemingly placing a cheap shop-bought skull mask over the camera lens, because it never matches the actual prop) and somehow stretches the budget to a number of excellent sets- which surely must have been built for something else? The interior set-bound graveyard and the apartment rented by occult antiquities seller Marco (a wonderful performance by Patrick Wymark, topped only by Peter Woodthorpe as his landlord Bert Travers and Cushing himself) are beautiful pieces of design and dressing.

There's a lovely "hanging judge" dream sequence involving Russian Roulette that shows Cushing's acting chops, as well as, again, superior set design. And the final- almost dialogue-free fifteen minutes are very effectively set up and orchestrated.

A shame the musical score is abysmal- taking what could have been a contemporary occult horror movie a la Rosemary's Baby if given a mid sixties electronic score- and setting it firmly in the style of period Hammer Horror.

Based on a story by Robert Bloch, the creator of Psycho, amongst others. Good stuff.

Lacking Maltesers or lemonade, I decided to pop back to 1958 and sink into a shortish and mostly overlooked film that I've passionately loved since I first saw it a few years ago. WOMANEATER is the story of a mad scientist and his Amazonian plant that, er, eats women. "She will merge with the plant!" he says, "then I will distill the elixir to bring the dead to life!". Because that's what happens when you stick an aubergine in the blender with a bit of human woman blood.



Anyway, it's very of its time and British. Mad scientist has an indian ("native") manservant (presumably from the Indian Amazon jungle in Africa, where the opening scenes seem to be set and where Kenny Lynch would have turned up had this been shot five years later), and nice English girls have to warned not to be scared of him (they still are though).

Even though the actor would these days be at home in any uk drama, here he says "You want Master?" to house callers, and is mostly naked other than big cloth underpants, like Aladdin's evil brother. He grins maniacally as he feeds successive girls into the maw of a man dressed in a carpet waggling extra puppet arms.

I love it.

SmallBlueThing(Reborn)

Sunday morning double-bill Chez me: THE UNCANNY (1977) and THE GORGON (1964), both starring Peter Cushing, ably supported by Donald Pleasence (in The Uncanny), Christopher Lee and Patrick Troughton (in The Gorgon).

Neither of these is a personal favourite. In the first, an anthology, Cushing plays a writer who fears cats are plotting to take over the world. In the film's wraparound story, he attempts to get Ray Milland to publish his work, all the while telling stories about how cats have been responsible for many deaths. The best-remembered tale is the first, in which Susan Penhaligan and Simon Williams conspire to screw Williams' aunt out of her money, after she changes her will and leaves everything to her cats. While the makeups are excellent, the film suffers because filming cats is, well, like herding cats. Anyone with a cat will recognise that, no matter how much the shot would like to convince that the cat is angry or scary, the cat is actually just mildly pissed off- the default attitude of a cat.

The best story is the third, with Pleasence playing a murderous and unfaithful Hollywood horror actor of the 1930s called "VD", who gets his comeuppance at the ickle paws of a ginger cat whose kittens he drowned and whose owner (his wife) he killed. Of the second story, in which terrible child actors and even more terrible grownups play around with black magic, the less said soonest mended.

THE GORGON is a problematic one for me, as I fell asleep the last time I tried to watch it- and again the glacial pace of the plot found me fighting the urge to go away and do something else. German Doctor Cushing is curiously restrained, German Professor Christopher Lee towers over everyone, especially Chief of Police Troughton- with whom he shares a remarkable face-off that's worth the entrance fee- but the most hypnotic thing is Troughton's hair. Here, two years before he modelled the mop-top Beatle wig (and later grew his hair to match) in Doctor Who, he has a very 21st Century "hard man crewcut" that somehow looks completely out of place, but suits the character perfectly.

The Gorgon of the title is Medusa's sister Megara, who absconded to a castle in a German forest apparently (2000 years ago, when her sister was killed by Perseus), to continue her full moon (?) reign of terror. It's an unconvincing makeup, the effects are few and no one mentions that when she's turned people to stone, they are basically awkward statues. Everyone somehow accepts they used to be human beings, and doesnt say for example "no, we haven't found the missing girl, but we did find a statue that sort of resembles her, albeit a poor likeness".

Ho hum.

While I love horror movies, generally unconditionally (in that i will most likely choose to watch a genre film over anything else at any given moment), I do have my particular favourites. I think because of how I was raised- and the horror I absorbed as a child in stolen snatches of tv showings, film posters outside the cinema, illicit looks at horror mags and library books and other playground thrills- the likes of Universal and Hammer (and Amicus, Tigon and RKO) will always be my true ancestral "home".

Its quite remarkable therefore, to watch a Hammer film at the age of forty-nine and realise that for one, I've never seen it before- despite being extremely familiar with its most famous images- and secondly that it might just be one of the best.

I talk, obviously, of THE REPTILE (1966), which despite lacking Cushing or Lee, manages to be extremely exciting indeed, very clever, has more than it's fair share of wit, has two sequences in which I actually *jumped*, and a clumsy but also quite beautiful makeup on a young Jacqueline Pearce (later to be the hugely camp Commander Servalan in Blake's Seven). It also gives Hammer regular Michael Ripper what may be the best role I've ever seen him play. Why he was never a big star I have no idea- they should have found a place for him in Dad's Army, and if they had it may have been him playing Grandad in the BBC kids sitcom and not Clive Dunne.

Clive Dunne's Dad's Army cohort John ("We're doomed!") Laurie is in The Reptile too (and he and Ripper share scenes), and here he shows how he can dial it down and play a similarly extreme character ("They call me Mad Pete. I'm not mad!") with a subtle charm that rarely showed itself in his more famous tv role. It's a pleasure to see both he and Ripper on screen, both absolute professionals at the top of their game.

There's a glorious mansion, a tumbledown cottage, the moors, a graveyard, day-for-night shoots, cravats and a backstory about Colonial India. Also, there's a particular scene in what may be the heaviest rainstorm ever committed to film. What more could you want?

And it only cost £100,599, which is just a snidge under two million in today's money. Bargain.

SmallBlueThing(Reborn)

As a young teenager I raided my aunt's collection of old Dennis Wheatley paperbacks, only to find far from the sordid thrills promised by the lurid covers they were in fact badly-written twattery of the lowest order. I think 'The Irish Witch' was the only one I finished.

So here I sit, watching Hammer's 1976 effort TO THE DEVIL, A DAUGHTER and wondering if it was worth the space on my tv recorder.

It looks like shit. Like a particularly cheap tv movie or two episodes of The Sweeney stuck together. No one seems to have paid any attention to the set design or lighting, as the actors just wander around in whatever location they've happened to find themselves employed to say words that day, accidentally sitting or standing in front of the camera, with no sense of framing whatsoever. Sometimes they are half out of shot, sometimes the camera moves around them and forces them to stand in unnatural places on the 'set' so as not to trip over wires. It's quite distracting. And don't get me started on the continuity. A woman with no knickers on (and a very un-seventies tidy muff) has just been writhing around on a bed, delivering some kind of antiChrist (I'd imagine, the plot isn't clear at present) and then magically donning pants for the next shot, then bloodily giving birth in the next, back in the nud. I'm not sure why they'd stick an insert in that's less explicit than the rest of the scene, but there you go.

There are some pleasingly familiar actors, but none appear anything other than very bored indeed. Christopher Lee sleepwalks throughout as an evil priest in his last proper film for Hammer, Denholm Elliot says words, Honor Blackman is as terrible as she always is, Frances De La Tour has just turned up for ten seconds and a very young Natassja Kinski plays a nun who is somehow at the centre of this whippetshit. Bet she gets her kit off at some point, because it's that kind of Seventies Satanist Cult film.

It's absolutely terrible, and I have no idea why my otherwise staid and respectable aunt had a collection of Wheatleys, no.

EDIT: OH MY GOD!! There is a frankly incredible sequence where Kinski is assaulted by the demonic, blood-covered rubber puppet baby, which crawls between her open thighs and performs oral sex on her before (it's not clear, but it looks like the intention is) crawling up inside her fanny as she smears blood all over her nether regions. Amazing.

And yes, a minute or so later, Kinski stands up, sheds her robes and walks starkers towards the camera, showing that the muff in the previous sequence definitely wasn't hers. Unless she's wearing a merkin to keep warm. It does look a bit chilly in the grounds of that old folly, and a bush like a beekeeper's beard would be eminently sensible.

To escape from the various apocalypses we seem to be living through, I once again descend into the depths of the Hammer back catalogue, and THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (1966).

Now, I was born in 1970, which means that for me zombies have *always* meant "the apocalypse" and wanton flesh-eating. But, remarkably, there was a time before that (pre-1969 and Night of the Living Dead) when zombies were *entirely* about voodoo, black magic and slavery, and the walking corpses just shuffled around, gurned at the camera and throttled people. Their horror came from their very unnatural existence, rather than what they did to us. That changed the year before I was born, when the ghouls got suddenly hungry and the world ended. It's been much the same ever since, and these days nothing so parochial as the living dead inhabiting a Cornish tin mine would ever get the green light.

Which is a huge shame, as Plague of the Zombies is very, very good indeed.

Shot on the same sets and locations as THE REPTILE, by the same director, back to back, and sharing both Jacqueline Pearce and Michael Ripper across both productions, Plague is a faster, more compelling film with better use made of its resources. And if you remember how much I liked The Reptile, you'll understand how I consider that high praise.

I wont explain the plot- Cornish village, strange deaths, a local landowner who may be behind it all, protagonists who decide to go grave robbing (at this point, both films seem more or less indistinguishable) then more deaths... and zombies! Genuinely creepy-ass ridiculous zombies! And a beheading, a stabbing, a dream sequence that amps up the strangeness, zombies rising from the graves, a horrible and weird scene where Jacqueline Pearce undergoes the most subtle and pointless transformation ever seen on film (and I presume because she famously refused any more prosthetics after The Reptile, though I dont know if that was definitely shot first) that both manages to be hugely wasteful (she ends up looking the same as she started, so I dont know why they spent money in post production) and absolutely freaky as hell. She crawls from her open coffin in living dead form, and it's glorious. The film even ends with a big fire, like The Reptile, but it's so much better filmed (and looks absolutely terrifying to have experienced on set) that I'm more or less convinced director John Gilling used the climax of one as a run-through for the other.

Everything about Plague impresses. Andre Morell as Sir James "Head of Medical Science at London University" (previously Quatermass) is brilliant- commanding and stuffy, warm and sarcastic in turn, happy to get his hands dirty, whether investigating a voodoo cult in a scary mansion, doing the washing up, or cutting up the corpse of his daughter's best friend while her widower (his former best pupil) assists. He carries the film, ably assisted by Pearce- who is strangely naturalistic here in contrast to everyone else's melodrama, and good old Michael Ripper- squeezed into a policeman's costume too small for even his tiny frame.

The dialogue crackles with snappy retorts ("Dont walk home, you may be attacked"/"I already have been attacked- and it was in your house!"), the story turns and undermines your expectations at certain crucial points (though of course, this being Hammer, it all ends as you'd expect), and, if you do as I will suggest and watch both back to back starting with The Reptile, you'll see pleasing reversals of many scenes. The grave robbing sequence I mentioned is so different to the earlier film despite being shot on the same set, that it really does make you sit up and take notice. It's very cleverly done.

Two things i noticed: one, the villain's scheme is reliant on accidents he can't possibly predict (cutting yourself on a broken glass) and two: as that infamous Public Information Film of the Seventies pointed out, "set a rug on a polished floor and you might as well SET A MAN TRAP!", because there is indeed a rug on a polished floor in the mansion, and the actor does indeed slip.

Modern eyes will see a pleasing anti-fox hunting theme running through bits, and may find the zombies disappointing, their makeups primitive in comparison to what we are now used to. That is true up to a point. There is one scene, in the mine towards the end, when a zombie is set on fire and staggers about still trying to strangle the heroes. Underneath is a stunt man swathed in fireproof padding and wearing a mask to approximate the makeups the zombies have been wearing up to that point. It being a mask, it has gaping sightless black holes for eyes, and is both very silly and utterly chilling.

Also, the first sighting of a ghoul, carrying the lifeless corpse of Jacqueline Pearce- the one on all the posters and in the stills that you will have seen even if you've never watched the movie, because Pearce is showing a lot of cleavage and magazines like that- is suddenly, shockingly frightening. I think it's because the walking corpse *laughs*, which we are not used to, and which is bloody horrifying.

It's a great movie and I liked it an awful lot.