He's great in We're The Millers D. ;):nod:

Severance (2006)

A team-building weekend in the mountains of Eastern Europe goes horribly wrong for the sales division of the multi-national weapons company Palisade Defence when they become the victims of a group of crazed killers who will stop at nothing to see them dead.

Following on from Wilderness and Botched, Severance is another fave from the mid 00's. Director Christopher Smith's second film has long been my favourite of his. Part black comedy and part out and out horror. The film boasts an excellent cast including Tim McInnerny, Toby Stephens, Laura Harris, and in arguably the form of his life, Danny Dyer.

The comedy aspect adds something to the well worn 'Backwoods' horror genre whilst the graphic gore and mounting tension guarantees it keeps you on the edge of your seat. The script is witty and surprising and the quirky Britishness certainly sets it aside from it's American counterparts such as Wrong Turn.. I mean, an office outing. All that's missing is Ricky Gervais.

Severance is a film i've watched countless times and i always find thoroughly enjoyable with each subsequent viewing.

Severance is one of the best films of the 2000s. :nod:

Good film and the high-point of Mr. Dyers career methinks. :nod:

Not exactly stiff competition, but Severance is a film I enjoy very much. Tim McInnerny is, as you'd expect, hilarious in it.

One of the things I appreciate the most is the subtext about the arms industry being completely irresponsible and how it is there if you want to see it and read it as a critique of the system, you can ignore it and have fun.

Another thought: is the title a pun on the different meanings of the word?

Severance
noun
1.
the act of severing or the state of being severed.
2.
a breaking off, as of a friendship.
3.
Law. a division into parts, as of liabilities or provisions; removal of a part from the whole.

It's also the name of the camp Harris and Dyer enter at the end of the film -Szeveranz - so it can be taken many ways.

I'd forgotten about that one, but thought it was a multi-meaning title with references to the ruthless corporate world where contracts, whether between companies or individuals are severed, limbs being severed from bodies during the film and, as you pointed out, the company-owned prison camp.

An Eye For An Eye (1980?, Steve Carver)
After witnessing his partner's fate at the hands of a mysterious enemy
Chucky strikes his own path on his quest for the truth. If this soundeth formulaic ... it is. :lol:
Shaft tuts from the corner. Then I must have blinked as it turns into a budding romance. :scared:
Bizarre film. For all the left field social realist musical zombie flicks that I have seen
Norris' canon contains some of the strangest juxtapositions witnessed yet. And I like Jodorowsky!! :rolleyes::laugh:

Watched on vhs. 4:3 at that. :pop2:

Well I was going to see Life this week (having seen Beauty and the Beast on Monday) but yesterday the cinema was closed due to the cyclone (which didn't come here in the end :clap: and today at least one session has been cancelled because the screen's bust! :whip::pound:

Lawdy!
Still haven't been this year
At least I don't have a bloody cyclone putting the mockers on my fun.
Kudos!
:hail:

Life. Gravity meets Alien in this sci-fi horror flick starring Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson and Jake Gyllenhaal. A team on the International Space Station are studying samples from Mars when they find a living organism among them - a microscopic single-cell life form that confirms the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. Of course, being that sort of movie, it doesn't stay microscopic for long... This is a terrific, intense, exciting and scary SF chiller that I really enjoyed. Criticisms that this is "just like Alien" are most unfair IMO - it's a monster movie on a spaceship so yeah there's gonna be similarities, but blimey it's been nearly 40 years since Alien, are you telling me we can't ever do that genre again?! (I'm willing to put money on this being better than Alien:Covenant too ;) )
Goodness me, I can't remember the last time I went to the cinema twice in one week - and really enjoyed them both!
This is going to ruin my reputation as a grumpy old fart. :scared::tongue1:

Relieved its not just me that enjoyed it.

Got to agree with the old and fart bit :lol:
But i cant actually remember last time i went cinema i think it was Raid 2.

Vue in my area is £4.99 a ticket.

Nearest cinema to me is Blackburn and don't know what type of offers!they have .once get into my new job I look into it.

I was struggling to justify it at near a tenner but the current price is not far off what I was paying in the 90's when I spent a LOT of time in the cinema. My record is still 3 times in one day for starship troopers.

I pay £17.99 a month to Odeon for unlimited trips, a single ticket costs £11.25 - problems with living in a big city, almost London prices... Liverpool is getting more expensive every year.

Outside of film festivals i normally went to the cinema a couple of times a year until last month when i got an Odeon limitless card and have been 9 times in the last five weeks. We have a 5 screen Curzon opening in Oxford this October and tempted to become a member there as well as only £200 per year.

Rolling Vengeance (1987, Steve H Stern)
Yet again ... they don't make em like they used to...
Ned Beatty heads a clan of ne'r do wells. A local family falls foul of their 'high jinks' ...so when the father is hospitalised ... the son steps up to the challenge. hokey, creaky and horrible in equal measures. Highly recommended!!

Watched on vhs. A faded, 4:3 print at that :nod:

IMO they just don't make films as good as they use to , even the acting was different and better . a lot of today's film might be film or Blockbuster of the year , but still prefer the older movies , take films like oliver twist , wizard of oz, hunchback of Notre dame, Spartacus , peeping tom just a few but there loads of old films that still stand test of time for how old they are when they didn't have the technology they have today . give me films like these etc from 40s to the 70s \ 80s over most films of today , look how affective and atmospheric quatermass films and 10 Rillington place are and they just can't quite make films as effective nowadays IMO , shame really if they took a leaf out of the old film industry instead of CGI , big is better crashbang wallop attitude then films would be better its all about big budgets who who in the films special effects and all that malarky ..I guess that's part of why a lot of j horrors work because they don't have the budget etc and concentrate more on story , atmosphere, tension, build up all that type of palaver.

I saw it today and echo everything you said. It must be very tough for filmmakers to do anything original with a film set in space, so this is Gravity meets Alien meets Solaris and Sunshine, with a nice reference to Re-Animator thrown in. An additional difficulty is the shortage of A-listers who haven't either been sent into space or been involved in an extra-planetary escapade in some capacity, whether it is leaving Earth or, such as a member of mission control, instrumental in its organisation and monitoring.

Although I've thoroughly enjoyed Life, I hope this, and the upcoming Alien: Covenant is the end of the current extra-planetary sci-fi sci-fi films (though highly enjoyable and excellent films such as the aforementioned and others including The Martian and Interstellar are very real watchable). As I said, there is a limit to the number of stories available without making a film which can easily be dismissed as a rip-off so, just as the slasher genre went through a lull before being reborn with Scream, perhaps it is time to give space a rest and even, if Arrival is any indication, stick to occasional films featuring alien visitors.

The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

An absolute masterpiece which gets better and better.

Last seen, April last year. See review - https://www.cult-labs.com/forums/gen...tml#post486843

A film I've never seen ....



McVicar (1980, Tom Clegg)
Tommy's all grown up now. He can even go to the bank on his own now ... him and his jolly chums ... kneecapping anyone who gives them 'lip'. Geezers. I am sick to DEATH of them. I think I may have found a prime source right here for tropes and all that.
Various Eastenders ping in and out of vision ....and the songs !! If only it had been JG Ballard :laugh:
Ahem.
Look, I bleedin' mean it squire.

For some reason i was positive I'd reviewed this week's ago.

The Salvation. Kristian Levring. 2014.

Jon and his brother Peter are Dutch immigrants seeking a peaceful life in 1870's America. Jon has been focusing on building up a successful farming business in preparation for his wife and son to join him from the Netherlands.
After several years he finally manages to make that happen only to see his son killed and his wife brutally raped and murdered by a small time outlaw less than 24 hours after their reunion. This is where we see that despite his peaceful ambitions Jon is no stranger to violence as he unflinchingly empties the contents of a shotgun into said rapey bandits.
Unfortunately it turns out that the brother of one of the bad guys is anything but small time and turns out ro be ultra ruthless psychotic land baron Henry Delarue played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Betrayed by the cowardly townsfolk Jon is captured and handed over to Delarue in exchange for not massacring more innocent locals than he feels necessary. Jon's brother Peter manages to rescue him but gets himself killed in the process and from here on Jon goes Rambo as he wages all out war on Delarue and his men. A Dutch production lensed in South Africa The Salvation is clearly a low budget film. There are even some ropey cgi bullet holes scattered throughout. That said I stuck this film on late one night not expecting much and I found myself really engrossed. There is an almost post apocalyptic feel to proceedings with large chunks of the film taking place in some of the dryest dirtiest dustiest looking settings I've ever seen. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is basically doing a dry run for Negan here, just missing the constant grinning and smirking. The lovely Eva Green is also along for the ride too as Delarue's mistress the mute Madelaine, a villainess with secrets of her own. Don't expect miracles from The Salvation and hopefully you will be rewarded.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES – It's cannibals versus the suburbs in Craven's dust bowl chiller from '77. A whitebread American family head out into the desert and, ending up stranded in a military testing zone, find themselves at the mercy of a clan of flesh eating thieves. THHE benefits from windswept locations and an eerie synthesiser score, both ramping up the atmosphere of pulsating menace as M Berryman et al set about picking off them thar city folk. THHE was clearly made in the shadow of TCM, a film which surpasses it on the level of raw horror and emotional savagery. In some ways though, THHE is a slightly more thoughtful meditation on the violence that lies at the heart of conventional society, a line which Craven takes up from his controversial debut more than TCM. I do prefer the go-for-the-jugular sleaze of 'Last House on the Left', and you can see that with THHE Craven was trying to court a wider audience. But the film's no less effective for that, and, whilst it maybe can't be considered top ranking seventies horror, it's within spitting distance.

SCALPS – A Fred Olen Ray film from before the time when everything he churned out was sub-Troma camp. Seriousness in horror does have its virtues, but doesn't automatically guarantee a good movie. 'Scalps' isn't very good, objectively speaking, but I like it. I won't spend much time on it here as I've reviewed it before in the last two or three years, but I did happen to watch the newish blu ray the other day and was pleasantly surprised to find that my memories of its stark, weird atmosphere were confirmed. On the downside, 'Scalps' offers shoddy construction, bad editing / acting and is arguably boring for a big part of its run time. However, it ties in with 'The Hills Have Eyes' in that it manages to generate quite a sinister tone just by dint of its eerie desert locations and discordant electronic soundtrack. On top of this, it has this freaky Indian demon guy with a horribly gnarled face running around doing the slashing, aided and abetted by odd supernatural visuals. Cheesy maybe, but with an underlying grimness. I was really spooked out by the first few minutes, too, with that lion-headed spirit waiting on the hillside. Funny how some flicks just get under your skin.

AMERICAN PSYCHO – Mary Harron's adaption of the Brett Easton Ellis novel has a lot going for it, but veracity to the source material probably isn't one. Not that the book was very filmable – it's power in one sense lay in something pretty abstract, in the clash between numbingly repetitive descriptions of consumer status goods and splashes of porno-violence. Thankfully, Harron manages to stay faithful to the satirical tone of the novel by taking it on as a chilly, alienated black comedy, and it's good that she did that because a genre approach wouldn't have worked and a full-on avant garde one probably wouldn't have even been made. C Bale is pretty good as Bateman, the plastic narcissist who likes to chop up hookers to the strains of Hewey Lewis and the News, and the film delivers an effective portrayal of the strange, dehumanised world of Yuppie America at the tail end of the eighties. We have yet to emerge from the shadows of that time – prophetically, there are at least two references to Donald Trump years before his political 'ascendency'. Anyway, soapboxing aside, you can't speak ill of a film which features three way shagging soundtracked by P Collins' 'Sussudio'.

Manhunt (2007)

Grueling Norwegian survival horror in which four young people are hunted in remote woods by a band of backwoods locals.

In truth there's nothing here that you won't have seen before and the plot is quite conventional. What is different is the whole thing is laugh free. There's no humour, no camp thrills, Don't go looking for fun here, for Manhunt is an atmospheric horror film, with a slow burn beginning that transforms into something that is hard to watch on the lines of Last House on the Left with relentless terror and brutality.

A film liked the previously reviewed Severance, Botched and Wilderness, that i keep coming back to time and again.

Manhunt would never have survived the 80's uncut. Recommended to those who enjoy Backwoods Horror.

Duly noted, I love Wilderness (as we've discussed previously on here), so I'll look out for this.

Cough
Bone Tomahawk
The Interior
The Duke Of Burgundy

To name but 3 modern films that have impressed me. So there's that. Old films, new films, some are great, some are ferking awful. I've seen plenty of older films that weren't much cop to be frank....On Golden Pond for one :laugh:

As always, I bow to your mighty pen F!!:nod::hail:

it's a 1p special on Amazon, Rik. ;)

Yep, ordered it about 10 minutes ago from Music Magpie, which means I'll probably end up with Mousehunt :lol:

:pound:

Mousehunt is almost a live action Tex Avery cartoon.
Looking forward to getting the BD ;)

Watching Bug (2006, William Friedkin)

Yet another variation on Satre's No Exit ... this time set in a 'rustic' motel in Oklahoma.
The story is as old as the hills ...ex con ghosts ex just at a point where they can 'move on'.
:lol:
Damaged people circling the drain .... to me THIS is horror ... the death by a thousand slights. Masked psychos are all very well. But the monster within is harder to see.

A film.

IMO.
;)

Bug is simply brilliant, the play is well worth catching if you ever get the chance.


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If only ...

This is the reason Il watch anything with Shannon in it.

Shannon is fantastic in it, but the real surprise for me was Ashley Judd.

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Il give you that ... both Judd and the crooner were a revelation tbh.

Cahill U.S. Marshal (1973)

John Wayne is at his grizzled best in this later western. Standing alone against gangs of bad guys is no problem to him but his two sons aged 11 and 17 are a different matter since their mother died, especially when they join up with George Kennedy and rob a bank.

Whilst not one of Wayne's best westerns, Cahill is still a lively 90 minutes or so with Andrew V McLaglen directing some violent shoot outs whilst adding (true) grit to proceedings by putting the 11 year old lad in genuine peril whilst at knife and gun point. In fact i doubt they'd get away with the knife sequences on a child today.

Naturally Wayne stands tall throughout and he has a good rapport with Neville Brand who plays a Comanche chief cum tracker for Cahill. They spar off each other well and their camaraderie is as much to the films fore as Cahill realizing he's been a lousy father and having to make up for it.

When it all comes down to the said and done Cahill U.S. Marshall is a vehicle for John Wayne. John Wayne the cowboy and John Wayne the legend and he doesn't disappoint with some brilliant lines only he could deliver.

I watched House 2 (aka House and the Crystal Skull) last night and I might have missed something :lol: Why such a massive shift in tone, it loses all of the horror trappings of the first movie and turns it into a slapstick comedy about a goofy old man and his prized magic Mexican crystal skull which gives him eternal life.

I thought it was OK, and I feel on a re-watch when I'm not caught off guard I'll enjoy it a lot more than I did last night. However, there were some really good bits, that bit John Ratzenberger was really funny and was definitely a high point in the film and now I'm racking my brain trying to remember another good bit and I can't really, it was more funny lines and brief moments of good comedy. I'll watch parts 3 and 4 over the weekend then I think I'll come back to this one with the commentary track and see what's what.

Initial thought are just under three stars (I thought the first film was around a four).