Last movie watched...

[Keef Monkey]

LifeForce, man what were my parents thinking letting me watch that on video when i was 8, nightmare city.  Watching it now the young space vampire lass is rather tasty and some decent effects for its time with a suitably apocalyptic story.  Oh and you cant go wrong with PATRICK STEWART in your movie.

Cu Radbacker

That was Tobe Hooper was it not? I seem to remember it being mentioned in his Masters of Horror doc and thinking I'd like to give it a watch.

[SmallBlueThing]

Absolutely love Lifeforce. Saw it when it came out and it immediately appeared to me to be "Doctor Who, on the big screen, crossed with a 2000AD story, and directed by a pervert.". How could I not love it? Mind you, haven't seen it for twenty years, so who knows what it's like now. I may have to pick up a copy.

SBT

[Jim_Campbell]

Absolutely love Lifeforce.

Mathilda May certainly appeared to be in possession of a world-class pair of breasts, and the rest of the movie is splendidly silly. Very hard not to like it, TBH.

The wife and I watched Public Enemies last night -- Bale and Depp were excellent. The movie could have been 20 minutes shorter, but really only through some very judicious pruning rather than the wholesale excision of padding, of which there was very little. Also refreshingly short on the orange and teal, although I thought the digital video showed its inferiority to film in a couple of scenes.

Cheers

Jim

[satchmo]

I watched Monsters last night. I watched it again this morning. What an incredible film. I'm about as predisposed to giant monster films as a human can be like  but this wasn't what I was expecting at all. Intimate and thoughtful and scary, it's the best film I've seen in ages.

[BPP]

Trolljegeren / Troll Hunter

Absolutely excellent and reminded me of Alpha's time travelling escapade.

[Ignatzmonster]

The Road. Not horrible but not quite right. The performances were uniformly good as was the cinematography, but there was something not clicking. Can't quite figure it. Maybe it was the voice overs, maybe too many flashbacks, but it couldn't communicate the drive the book had. Yes the book was dismal but it was a page turner no question.

The Sting. Confessed to my bro I hadn't seen it and he was appalled. A classic for a reason. All charm though I had my doubts while they were setting up Redfords motivation. Robert Shaw did seem to have a sixth sense for getting into good 70's thrillers: The Sting, Jaws, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

First part of Carlos. Its a five and a half hr movie about Carlos the Jackel, a famous terrorist from the seventies. It's been filling in a sense of context for films or books I've enjoyed in the past: The Little Drummer Girl, The political/plotless films of Goddard, Cortazar's Hopscotch, Bolano's Distant Star, One Day in September etc etc. Makes me think Speilberg should have left Munich to a Frenchman. 

[Mardroid]

The Road. Not horrible but not quite right. The performances were uniformly good as was the cinematography, but there was something not clicking. Can't quite figure it. Maybe it was the voice overs, maybe too many flashbacks, but it couldn't communicate the drive the book had. Yes the book was dismal but it was a page turner no question.

I just saw that recently. I think my response is the same. I did like it, but it certainly wasn't a favourite.

I also found myself (perhaps unjustly) annoyed at the wife/mother from the flashbacks. [spoiler]She seemed selfish. She might have gone outside because she felt the others would have more chance of surviving but that didn't seem to be the impression. It looked like she just gave up. Of course that's easy for me to say, not being in her situation, but  I just felt she should have fought more.

I mean, I didn't entirely like the man's hard heartedness at times, but I understood where he was coming from and why he would act like that, and his son was at least a softening influence, but I found her hard to empathize with. [/spoiler]

I don't think that's what I dislike about the film as a whole though, as such people do exist and we don't have to like every character in a film to enjoy it (which to be fair, I largely did).

LifeForce, man what were my parents thinking letting me watch that on video when i was 8, nightmare city.  Watching it now the young space vampire lass is rather tasty and some decent effects for its time with a suitably apocalyptic story. 

LifeForce! I've seen it a couple of times (although I'm not sure I've seen it all the way through) but I can't remember all that much except the space vampire lass wandering around through a large portion of the film in the noddy. Trust my one trek mind...

[Keef Monkey]

Was at Frightfest this weekend, so....(deep breath)

Little Deaths - 3 short stories, all with a bit of a kinky side. They were all pretty decent, little terror tale type affairs, with more cock and spunk than I'm used to seeing outside of specialist cinema.

I Saw The Devil - Was a bit blown away by this. Is about 20 minutes too long, which could easily have been fixed, but it's a really nice spin on the serial killer cat and mouse game in that it's about a cop out for revenge who torments a serial killer. Very violent and very, very funny in places. It's got that chap from Oldboy in it but even without that connection it would sit very nicely alongside the Mr Vengeance/Oldboy/Lady Vengeance movies.

Machete Maidens Unleashed - Doc about Filipino-shot exploitation movies. It's by the guy who made 'Not Quite Hollywood' (a doc about Australian exploitation movies) and is perhaps even more entertaining. It's snappy, funny and has some great talking heads from John Landis, Joe Dante and Sid Haig.

Rubber - Absolutely brilliant, and easily ten times more bonkers and surreal than the trailer makes out. The fact that it's about a psychic, head exploding evil tyre and that's one of the least odd things about it is commendable. Really unique and funny stuff.

Territories - Apparently this is getting renamed 'Checkpoint' when it gets a release, which isn't as good a title for it imo. It's a really powerful film, which manages to cover the horror of a Guatanamo Bay type situation without actually going for torture porn levels of gore. The torture is far more mental, and it's a pretty upsetting downer of a movie. Hard to forget.

The Shrine - Didn't think I was going to like this one, about half an hour in the dodgy exposition and cheap tv-film look had turned me off, but it turns out to have some really good ideas up it's sleeve, even if it doesn't quite have the budget or the directorial flair to do them justice. Basically a variation on the 'evil small town cult' movie, I ended up really enjoying this.

Mother's Day - Thought this would stink up the place, as it was the most mainstream-looking movie shown. It's got some recognizable faces and has that Hollywood gloss to it, but is actually pretty nasty in places. It's one of those old school home invasion movies where some innocent folks having a party find some fugitives descending on them and forcing them into all kinds of horribleness. The worst movie of the weekend, but given that it was actually alright shows how strong the fest was this year. It's also got Deborah Ann Woll in it from True Blood, who I could look at until my eyes stopped working. And they might.

Hobo With A Shotgun - Fucking brilliant. It's the grindhouse, Planet Terror deal, but made with a genuinely low budget and a hell of a lot of love and energy. It's really, really funny, and Rutger Hauer plays it brilliantly. It reminded me a lot of Troma films at their manic best, a really exhilaratingly crazy movie. The director seems a nice chap too, he suggested we all took off our shoes and trousers to watch it. No-one did, but like a trooper he took off his anyway. I'll be buying this when it gets a release, instant classic.

[brendan1]

Kick-Ass.

Christ knows why it took me so long to watch it.

No idea how similar it is to Millar's comic - I don't really have much interest in his comic work since some of the shit he served up on 2000AD - but I might check it out after this.

Absolutely delirious ultra-violent genius. Loved it!

Although obviously, it would only be about 65% as good without Hit Girl.

[JUDGE BURNS]

The wife and I watched HOT FUZZ last night .....brilliant funny film.

[Paul faplad Finch]

I've watched more films in the last week than the  year previously I reckon.

Including: The Spider Woman   Probs the best of the Rathbone Holmes that I've watched so far. At least he Universal ones.)

All Quiet On The Western Front which took me a little whie to settle into early style with the overacting and strange cuts - I'm a philistine I know - but yo can't help but be sucked in and moved by it)

Race To Witch Mountain. The new one with The Rock. Thought the kids were good and the denoument was surprisingly violent for a Disney movie. Carla Gugino sadly seems to be starting to show her age.

Last One I watched though as The Strangers, this very afternoon. Nicely creepy in places and quite gruelling to watch in the last 10 minutes or so but I was kinda pulled out of the moment by the fact that the villains seem to have taken it upon themselves to change Liv Tylers outfit between [spoiler]knocking her out [/spoiler] and [spoiler]tieing her to the chair.[/spoiler]  Enjoyed it over all though.

[I, Cosh]

I think I'm in a minority of people who preferred the film to the book of The Road. The book was good, and a page-turner as Ignatz said, but I simply didn't get the emotional charge from it which so many did while the film I did find very affecting. I actually thought the flashback scenes to the wife added poignancy to The Man's (NB my biggest problem with the book is that I have a real dislike of works where the characters are only referred to by deliberately-distancing-but-supposedly-universal and portentous soubriquets) situation and showed another approach to the situation they find themselves in.

I think they've both given up, but she decides she can't live when there is no hope and the only purpose is to delay the inevitable whereas he can even if there is no point. I don't think either way was really preferable.

[Jim_Campbell]

All Quiet On The Western Front which took me a little whie to settle into early style with the overacting and strange cuts - I'm a philistine I know - but yo can't help but be sucked in and moved by it)

I think we all acknowledged this as being an issue with the film -- you absolutely have to accept it as a product of its time, but I think the bare decade between the end of the war and the film being made brings it a certain amount of immediacy that a more recent production would (and, indeed, did) lack.

There are a thousand and one things a modern film maker would choose, possibly rightly, to do differently, but the mud, the machine gun pan, the hands on the wire... there's real power here.

Cheers

Jim

[Paul faplad Finch]

Oh absolutely. I think it was only really the very early sections,in the schoolroom and training barracks, that caused me any problems (the schoolroom especially, with the teachers naive but patriotic rant).

Once Paul and co reached the front you'd need to be dead inside not to be able to overlook those - I almost typed flaws but not even that really, just products of the time.

It's just a shame that I know most people of my acquaintance wouldn't even sit down to try. The fact that it's b/w would be enough to put most of them off.

   
 

[Hoagy]

Last One I watched though as The Strangers, this very afternoon. Nicely creepy in places and quite gruelling to watch in the last 10 minutes or so but I was kinda pulled out of the moment by the fact that the villains seem to have taken it upon themselves to change Liv Tylers outfit between knocking her out and tieing her to the chair.  Enjoyed it over all though.

Based on the French/Romanian film is saw on Film 4 last night. Which itself is based on a true story.