I used to love this film when i had it on video. It took me ages to buy the dvd and i for whatever reason thought it was boring and sold it almost immediately. The pics you posted elsewhere make me want to watch it again.

It's all rather annoying! :lol:

You have been possessed by the spirit of a certain forum member

Maybe you should re-buy it, just so that you can watch 10 minutes of it and then sell it straight away!

I saw it years ago when I was young on BBC 2, could not remember much about it till I watched it last night and I thought it was a great movie

Watched ABC's of Death 2
another 26 directors make 26 short films around a word they've chosen by the letter they've been given. All of which linked by one recurring idea: Death.
The first is better, however as with the previous you're probably going to find a few bad eggs, not to say that it's all bad. If you're a fan of the modern horror anthology then i'd recommend it, if you're not; then enter at your own risk ;).
7/10

Ideally via the BFIs stunning blu which looks gorgeous.

Certainly does, nice looking steelbook too :nod:

I love the scene with the family eating dinner in a rat infested town square.

http://www.keef.net/images/201510/no...-rat-feast.gif

Herzog's Nosferatu is really good! Atmospheric and creepy.

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

Well, what a derivitive, plotless, characterless, thrill-less, CGI shitfest that was!

Shit certainly blows up...you just wish your tv would as well.

The Dark Tower. Nikolaj Arcel. 2017.

A young boy in NYC dreams of another world where a sinister man in black is attempting to harness the psychic powers of abducted children to destroy the pivotal Dark Tower, a strange monolith that stands at the centre of time and space and protects the multiple dimensions from demons seeking to devour mankind. Roland Deschain is the last in a long line of mythical figures known as Gunslingers. Think knights of the round table with six shooters. The destinies of Jake and Roland collide in a battle to defeat the man in black and save the world, all worlds.
Nikolaj Arcels Dark Tower sees the long awaited adaptation of Stephen Kings eight novel epic series finally get to the screen, and its a bit of a conundrum. As an adaptation of the novels it plays fast and lose. Adding in a bit here, dropping a bit there. But then it is condensing eight novels some seriously thick buggers (this is King we're talking about) into a 95 minute scifi yarn. And do you know what?? It does a bloody good job of it. The fact that the film feels tight and cohesive and drops enough hints at the backstory and deep mythology is very impressive. The casting is excellent too. Some important characters from the books don't get a look in but the three primary ones, Roland, Jake and Walter aka The Man in Black are portrayed superbly by the always impressive Idris Elba as Roland and the superb Matthew McConaughey as the man in black. With relative newcomer Tom Taylor playing Jake Chambers perfectly.
The film feels more like a traditional sci fi than the novels with technology being largely a relic in the books and here still very relevant. The more fantastical elements of the books also seem to be played down slightly with everything being presented as more rational and explainable. The best parts of the film for me are seeing Elbas fish out of water Roland Deschain tackling modern Manhattan and its a pity this wasn't played on for longer. There are endless easter egss scattered throughout for King fans and ultimately i don't think the film will dissapoint hardcore fans too much. As an adaptation i thought it was rather well done all things considered and as a film in its own right i thought it was a blast.

Just pointless. Totally pointless.

I've got it in the BFI Herzog set. Still only seen Nosferstu and Aguire though.

I've only read the first book, will watching this spoil the rest of the series?

Tricky. It borrows bits from all over, so to some degree yes. But i do have to admit its been 7 years since i finished reading the main series so i can't remember precisely which bits of which books it keeps. I'm inclined to say no overall it doesn't follow the books close enough to really spoil them. You might want to crack on though, apparently there is a tv series and other films to follow so i presume at some point they will begin to touch on things in more detail.

I was told i was wrong on here when i suggested the film was basically all the books.

By whom? And have you seen the film Dem? I didn't think you did the cinema?

What Films Have You Seen Recently?
 

Cheers, my girlfriend is a big Idris Elba fan and wants to go see it so I thought I'd check first

No i haven't. I read in Empire in an interview with King where he said it was all the books condensed, mentioned it on here and someone dismissed it.

I've tried to find it bit can't. Looked on the King thread, the remakes thread, the TTT thread and the upcoming films thread.

I'm drinking Red Stag so can't be arsed to look into any more threads. Don't want it to get warm. ;)

Nah its all the books condensed. Though it barely touches on some of them. I was well impressed with the way it managed to pack 7 intermittently good, sporadically brilliant novels into one very good and not particularly long film. Just goes to show what I've said for years. Stephen King needs a stricter editor.

Early test screenings of IT are looking pretty good, I'm tempted to go to the midnight opening after band practice (and many beers) in a couple of weeks :nod:

Cherry Tree

Attachment 193850

This came up on the Horror channel and thought i'd give it a watch because the adverts for it made it seem intriguing.

Well we have a story about a teenage school girl who lives with her father, when dad develops Leukemia and becomes ill she is obviously worried for him and her future.
As luck would have it there's a coven of witches who meet under a Cherry tree who tell the girl that they can cure her father, only downside is she has to become pregnant and give it up to the witches for their dark purposes.

I found this reasonably well acted and the photography was good, there is an 80's horror vibe to it i thought, with some gore and boobs and some effective scenes of prosthetic style effects and faces being ripped of that all reminded me of Hellraiser type stuff.:cool:

The witches coven seems to have a fixation with centipedes and there are a lot of scenes of these creatures crawling about and burrowing into skin which are quite unsettling.Also for some reason the coven likes wearing old sacks over their heads in a 'Batman begins' Scarecrow style.

So i quite enjoyed this up to a point and would certainly watch it again sometime, but it was let down by a script that seemed a bit scattershot, and not enough characterisation to make you really feel for the characters, also the ending seemed a bit rushed and underwhelming.

But i would definitely say it is better than a lot of the tat that turns up on the horror channel and the head witch is quite sexy too.;)

An interesting 7/10 :pop2:

I seen this at the cinema around my birthday last year, it was one of the best comedies of last year [emoji38]

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Creepshow 2. Pretty average late 80s horror anthology. The second story was the best with the raft and the killer oilslick (!).

The Windmill Massacre.

Avoid this witless garbage. The first kill sets you up for some fun ... but then the makers obviously used up their originality with that.
I'm very tempted to say Shuttle was betterer.
(it isn't :rolleyes:)
Il stick with Bathory's Massacre methinks ... ;):hail:

I was impressed with it and agree with Frankie Teardrop's review from a few pages ago but, as with almost every film, see how it won't be everyone's cup of tea.

I thought it was average at best, nothing special and easily forgettable, different strokes and all that :nod:

I think that was me :lol: I was under the impression that they were only shooting the first book, I couldn't, and still can't in retrospect, believe that they have taken an 8 volume book and made a 95 minute film from it :rolleyes: It seems I was quite wrong though...

Really?
Bugger that then.

PHANTASM – Was a real pleasure to see this after so long. 'Phantasm' has to be one of my faves from its era (late seventies), and it's so atypical for US horror. Everything about it is out of joint – the fact that it's a kind of coming-of-age story, the screwy ideas which just never seem to stop, the constant flow of strange events that flow dreamily past. I love how the main character can pop down the road for an audience with a psychic as if it''s no big deal. And when was the last time a movie protagonist was an ice cream man? More than anything, the atmosphere is hard to pinpoint but just so totally 'there'. Maybe it just boils down to people hanging around in graveyards and long shots of houses at night, I don't know. But anyway, what a great film.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA – The late eighties retelling. A young opera wannabe from NYC is whisked back in time (somehow?) to nineteenth century London, where Robert Englund is in post-Freddie mode. Actually, I was quite taken with his attempt at a sinister, whispering English guy, although I'm not sure whether it was any good or not. Ditto for the rest of the film – I'd probably come down on the side of 'not', but I did like it. It has that late eighties thing going on with it, and basically looks like a long, overblown rock video for at least some of the time. So much so that I wondered whether it was Italian, given its combo of slick visuals and stiff performances. It's also a bit ponderous, albeit peppered with splashes of gore. No-one's idea of a game changer, but if this kind of nostalgia is your thing then you'll probably be into it (a little).

DEVIL HUNTER – Back with the Jess Franco. 'Devil Hunter', well, if you're looking for one of his suffocatingly erotic fever dreams that descend on you like a Succubus in the night, then maybe look somewhere else. The truth is, the guy turned out scores of movies, and not all of them are 'Vampyros Lesbos', or 'Succubus' for that matter. 'Devil Hunter' is probably closer to the reality of Franco's oeuvre – i.e, threadbare shit with some pretty baked stuff going on, but also with some pretty dull stuff going on. This one's about a movie starlett who's abducted for ransom by a posse led by Lionel Blair along with Mosquito der Schander guy. Al Cliver comes to the rescue, so already we're in dodgy territory. 'Devil Hunter' just happens to be set in a jungle where some Western guy's idea of an African tribe worship a tall, cannibalistic 'god' with weird eyes, and of course this matter complicates things. Watching 'Devil Hunter' becomes an exercise in balancing tedium with delirium, as long stretches of people wandering around in the jungle and doing their bit to expand 'the plot' alternate with transporting passages of the cannibal god lurking, wreathed in echoes and organ drones on the soundtrack. We get to see lots of close ups of the cannibal guy's incredibly fake looking but interestingly messed up eyes. It sounds like I'm doing a real diss of 'Devil Hunter', but I think it's great. It's the sort of cinematic equivalent of some mouldy food in a dead man's fridge, you imagine it's been buried under dust or some other filth in a forgotten corner for years (although actually it's never really been out of circulation). It feels really dirty somehow despite not being massively explicit – maybe this is a tribute to its gutter level cheapness. Either way, 'Devil Hunter' is perhaps not the best intro to Franco, but is still fascinating cine-slime.

Again I bow to your mighty pen F.
DH is certainly one of his 'sweaty' films imho ;)
His lack of interest in the genre makes for a tussle of a watch. I love it and hate it in equal measures.

Phantasm is just out there. Always was and always will be ;)

" You play a good game, boy, but the game is finished. Now you die." :)

It's been years since I've seen any of the Phantasm films (the ones in the Anchor Bay boxset, anyway), something which really needs remedying. However, I have a huge 'to watch' pile, so they are either going to sit at the back of the watchlist forever, I'm going to have to find the motivation to push them to the front of the queue. I think Frankie's review may be the required nudge.

I really liked this (seem to recall b_e also rated it well) as it was different to the norm when it comes to 00's horror.

I too thought it average on first viewing, Rik. However second time around i really enjoyed it. I even started one of those specialist film pages for it. :lol:

https://www.cult-labs.com/forums/cul...-massacre.html

That's why i did like it, i kept umming and ahhing to give it a 7/10 because it was above average for me, but the flaws slightly ruined it. :nod:
Actually i think i might edit the score, trouble is i always seem to give high scores (7 and above), but thinking about it i've probably given worse films 7/10.:lol:

The Devil's Men (1976)

Having only ever seen the film in it's truncated US PG version as Land of the Minotaur i was both intrigued and apprehensive of the original UK version.

Well, it seems an added six minutes of footage doesn't really make this a good film. It just makes it longer to endure. Peter Cushing (here in a villainous role) and Donald Pleasance do their best with a fairly turgid script and in all truth make the film worth watching. Yet The Devil's Men is so problematic. It's dullness personified for much of it's run time with endless shots of the barren wasteland that is the Greek countryside and little scares for a film about satanic practices. It's a film with a decent idea at it's heart - sacrifices to the legendary minotaur - but hasn't much of a clue of what to do with it.

Having said that the film certainly has plus points - the aforementioned Cushing and Pleasance are always worth a watch as is the lovely Luan Peters. There are one or two creepy sequences involving Peters being stalked by hooded cult members and of course i'm a sucker for satanic rituals as well. But what of the additional 6 minutes i hear you ask? There are additional New York based scenes with nudity and more gore and nudity scattered throughout. That was all i really noticed. The sacrifice scenes are clunky but have a charm thanks to 'evil' Peter Cushing and a cool minotaur statue with blow torches stuffed down it's nostrils.

Watch this in a double bill with the equally stodgy Greek set Incense for the Damned (1970) and it'll put you off both British horror and Greek holidays for the forseeable future. The Devil's Men isn't a film i can recommend but i'm sure it's one i'll return to time and again - Why? Well i cannot say, merely that it's just one of those films. I've seen the US PG Crown Int version several times over the years so an uncut UK version is a more than welcome addition to my British film collection.

Pleasance does have some truly awful lines in this movie (and I am pretty sure between takes he must have said "Why am I reading such crap") :lol:

Luan does make up for it.:)

Was the version you just saw include the orgy scene within the movie (as screenedd way back by the BBC) or as an extra?

As an extra unfortunately.

I've got the UK Prism release. To be honest i've no inclination to want to buy an uncut version.

Watched Damiano Damiani's Nobody's The Greatest from 1975 (aka A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe/Idiot). Very enjoyable comedy western with good performances from the four leads - Terence Hill, Robert Charlebois, Patrick McGoohan, and Miou-Miou. Famous for having the opening sequence directed by Sergio Leone and for having a particularly beautiful Morricone score. Is a great movie, film score - 7.5/10.

Whilst certainly not as good as the previous Sergio Leone produced Terence Hill film (My Name Is Nobody), it is still lots of fun. Viewing was via a German Universum Film blu-ray which looks truly great for around 75% of the running time but rather primitive for the remainder. This is not a fault. Some film negative was stolen and offered for unpaid ransom. The film used previously rejected footage to fill in the gaps.

Nobody's The Greatest will very probably never look better, highly recommended blu-ray purchase.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Colombiana.jpg

Zoe Saldana plays Cataleya, a young woman who has grown up to be an assassin after witnessing the murder of her parents as a child. Turning herself into a professional killer and working for her uncle, she remains focused on her ultimate goal: to hunt down and get revenge on the mobster responsible for her parents' deaths.

Loved it and comes highly recommended.

Bad Moms.
I like to laugh and this is making me laugh.
Mila Kunis is fed up with being 'the perfect mother'. As mainstream comedies go, this is okay. Christina Applegate plays the nemesis.