Last movie watched...

[repoman]

THE MORTUARY COLLECTION

I need to see this immediately.  It sounds like exactly my sort of thing from your description.

Portmanteau horror films are basically my favourite thing.

[Keef Monkey]

THE MORTUARY COLLECTION

I need to see this immediately.  It sounds like exactly my sort of thing from your description.

Portmanteau horror films are basically my favourite thing.

Yeah I love them and they don't come along very often these days so was good to see a good 'un! As always some stories are stronger than others but I thought they were all pretty strong and a couple in particular were really great, most importantly the whole thing had a good sense of fun that was very old school, I loved it.

[repoman]

THE MORTUARY COLLECTION

I need to see this immediately.  It sounds like exactly my sort of thing from your description.

Portmanteau horror films are basically my favourite thing.

Yeah I love them and they don't come along very often these days so was good to see a good 'un! As always some stories are stronger than others but I thought they were all pretty strong and a couple in particular were really great, most importantly the whole thing had a good sense of fun that was very old school, I loved it.

There's a lot of recent ones but most of them suffer from the same problem.  Namely, they are usually a bunch of short movies that get packaged together, usually with little or no linking/wraparound story or even a common theme.

Occasionally though you'll get a good one.  I've watched some this year already.  Including this one yesterday...

Skeletons in the Closet - so frustrating.  The set up is good, it's very meta and knows it is an anthology and the first story is really creepy.  Unfortunately the second is rubbish and the third is good but ruined with terrible camera work!

The way everything links up is very cool though.  This is just a few decisions away from being good.

[Keef Monkey]

There's a lot of recent ones but most of them suffer from the same problem.  Namely, they are usually a bunch of short movies that get packaged together, usually with little or no linking/wraparound story or even a common theme.

This was exactly the problem with the other anthology that showed that weekend, A Night Of Horror: Nightmare Radio, it was very very obvious (and I read up and confirmed it later) that it was just a bunch of unrelated short films that were already out there on YouTube and whatnot. They'd literally just thrown a very weak and thin connective scene in there (a radio DJ telling spooky stories on air) and it meant that it was all over the place, although a couple of segments were decent it just didn't feel like a film. The Mortuary Collection is all written and directed by the same guy and it makes a world of difference, especially as the linking story is one of the best parts rather than an afterthought!

I should give Skeletons In The Closet a go, even if just for the first story.

[MacabreMagpie]

The Hunt (not the Mads Mikkelsen film!)

Went into it with low expectations but that was very enjoyable indeed! Maybe I misremembered the trailer but it was more comedic than I had expected, which worked in its favour as there's a particular plot point that didn't work for me but you're having so much fun that the story doesn't really matter so much.

Betty Gilpin is (unsurprisingly, as the lead) the show stealer with a very memorable performance, her character oddly reminded me of Villanelle from Killing Eve throughout, accent aside.

Recommended!

[MacabreMagpie]

PS I have never been so nervous to cough in my life

[Gary James]

Thinking out loud, so take what follows as it is...

The problem with anthology films - going all the way back to the Amicus run of films at least, if not all the way to the thirties when the format began - is that the narrative stops every so often and has to rebuild its momentum, and there really is no way around that without maintaining the central core of characters (which is slightly cheating the format). It is interesting to compare and contrast critical reception to comic anthologies, short story collections, and film anthologies, and see how vastly more difficult it is to pull off on the big screen than in other media.

Given that narrative film originally took most of its cues from the stage (at least in France and the US) it isn't at all surprising that the Aristotelian unities were folded into the melange of influences, traditions, and conceits - although it quickly developed into its own thing, that early ideology persists to this day in much arthouse fare.

Due to anthologies abruptly stopping and starting, with entirely new casts in many cases (V/H/S largely works, strangely, because of its acknowledgement of the media format it focuses on) that unity is not only broken, but completely shattered. While I'm not saying that films work better if there is a core driving narrative, it does seem to indicate that audiences have been trained by repeated film viewing to expect a cohesive through-line.

Comics come from the literary tradition, which has always had anthologies, so readers are prepared for there to be more latitude in how a narrative unfolds. Oddly (at least to me) radio seems to be the best media outside the printed page for the anthology format, which probably harkens back to oral tradition (which informs literary tradition) having prepared audiences for digressions, asides, and complete breaks from the story at hand.

---

Though I've not been scoring films as I've watched them (which is slightly too anoraky even for me), I have been keeping track of the joys and disappointments of what I've been watching... My strike rate is waaaay down, and it looks as if I'm going to cover more awful films taking into consideration reviews.

I like Borley Rectory, even though it looks like it was shot for sixpence and a bag of humbugs (which is somehow appropriate), and the cast is excellent. There are moments where the clever artiness is slightly too explicit - and there are a few scenes, such as a character looking straight up through a broken pane of glass, which don't work - but overall it is the best take (which isn't a book) on the subject.

There are important things missing, and the footage which was shot of the ruins - where you can see the rooms laid out on the ground - ought to have been included at the end as a coda, but it is a difficult film to criticize due to the obvious love for the subject on display.

I really dislike Last Christmas. I could spend a few thousand words listing each and every hoary old cliche brought out to play, and all the ways it insults its audience, but it is far easier to simply state that I would rather stab myself in the eye with a rusty spoon than sit through it again. Fantastic cast, but the script...  The one thing it leaves me with is a fascination for Emilia Clarke's eyebrows, which is surely not the intention of the film.

There were no high expectations for The Mummy (Tom Cruise version) nor Gemini Man, but even so...

The Mummy is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There isn't a scene which works perfectly in the entire film, and it lurches from set-piece to set-piece with all the grace of a drunken sailor. For someone who was practically raised on classic horror films it isn't merely a disgrace to the genre but an insult to the memory of Boris Karloff.

Gemini Man is slightly better, though that's like saying that losing a finger is marginally more appealing than losing an arm. Some of the effects are extremely bad, and the lauded de-ageing technology is more unconvincing than in some other films of the recent past. It also takes far, far too many plot points from better films and stories of the last twenty years. Why it felt like a project intended for Jean-Claude Van Damme eludes me, but that's my overall impression.

[Greg M.]

Robocop 2 (1990)

Bafflingly structured, weirdly (almost charmingly) reliant on stop-motion effects and tonally all over the place, Robocop 2 is absolute train-wreck – a complete mess of a film on every conceivable level. And yet... it's quite watchable, and not without substantial trashy charm, despite itself. Though they may have bastardised his script, it's also one of the most Frank Miller things you'll ever see – particularly the bit when those darn liberal do-gooders render Robocop impotent through conflicting wishy-washy directives, or when they naively try to rehabilitate a murdering junkie cultist on the basis that he's just 'socially misaligned'. The design for Cain's baroque cyborg body is the most memorable thing in the film – it'd probably look great on paper, but in three dimensions, it's just endearingly rickety. (Those skinny little legs!) Overall: frequently stupid, seldom boring.

[Gary James]

The Avatar Press adaptation of the script, titled Frank Miller's RoboCop rather than RoboCop 2 for some reason, does a slightly better job than the film of telling the story, though isn't without problems of its own.

And RoboCop 2 is still far better than the abysmal reboot.

[Greg M.]

The simple fact that it's got so many of the same cast members - particularly the fact it's still Peter Weller playing Robocop - lends Robocop 2 a certain authenticity that papers over some of the chasm-like cracks in the movie. I've seen few films so badly structured though - it's just a bunch of stuff jammed jarringly together. Still enjoyed watching it though.

[Professor Bear]

Robocop 2's most Frank Miller-y moments are ones you probably don't even notice, like Robocop driving through a picket line, or, faced with answering to the demands of society or dying, he marches out of his robochair and hugs a million volts of electricity without hesitation.

[JamesC]

Godzilla: King of the Monsters.

Absolute shit.

[JamesC]

I quite liked Robocop 2 but I really liked the Marvel Comics adaptation. Some nice artwork and a really entertaining condensed version of the story.

[shaolin_monkey]

The latest Jay and Silent Bob film.  Utter garbage.  I don't know what I was expecting, but still - absolute bollocks. Incoherent narrative, badly acted, not even remotely amusing. What a waste of a £2 rental.  I could have got a bag of chips with that.

[wedgeski]

Bafflingly structured, weirdly (almost charmingly) reliant on stop-motion effects

As opposed to...?