What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[bizarre_eye@Cult Labs]

There's a load of these horror cheapies on Love Film Instant too, so for £9.99 a month you can really get your monies worth if you have time to spare to watch films. I personally don't tend to blind buy anymore, mainly because I have so much stuff that I want to get rid of but can't shift (second hand DVDs are worth pretty much nothing nowadays), so I don't want to risk adding more to the growing garbage heap.

[SCM]

Watched Funny Games on Saturday, one of the best horror's I've seen this year

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by bizarre_eye@Cult Labs

There's a load of these horror cheapies on Love Film Instant too, so for £9.99 a month you can really get your monies worth if you have time to spare to watch films. I personally don't tend to blind buy anymore, mainly because I have so much stuff that I want to get rid of but can't shift (second hand DVDs are worth pretty much nothing nowadays), so I don't want to risk adding more to the growing garbage heap.

I suppose this forum is helpful to you when people review new films, it will give you an idea if its up your street or not.

I have noticed a lot more reviews popping up recently which is starting to make this one of my go-to threads on the forum.

I hate it when people just list films they've watched without elaborating in some way as to their feelings towards them.

[Make Them Die Slowly]

THE SENDER. Highly effective "psychic killer" type film from the 80s. It has a great opening scene and a few good set pieces throughout. Interestingly it was filmed in both the UK and USA which explains why a very young Gary Olsen from the Brit Com "2 Point 4 Children" is seen lurking in the background. Worth a look.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Piranha DD. (2012)

I didn't find the first Piranha film much fun at all so held off watching this sequel which underperformed at the box office. I should have taken a bit more notice as when the titles went up i noticed it was directed by John Gulager, the creative genius behind the fantastic Feast trilogy.

Piranha DD was everything i wanted from the disappointing Alex Aja helmed Piranha 3D. The film was tremendous fun and felt like the cast were enjoying themselves making it. Although less of a star name cast, the film boasts a brilliant performance of high comedy from David Hasselhoff, playing himself of course, as well as the returning Ving Rhames and Christopher Lloyd. Not to mention the always excellent Gary Busey in an early cameo.

The film really hit the mark with its high exploitation levels, barely a scene goes by without a blood thirsty death or a naked breast. Its difficult to say why this went down so well with me, yet the original film failed to hold my attention. It must be down to director Gulager who delivered the same levels of exploitative mayhem with his aforementioned Feast films. Whereas the first fell flat because Aja, whilst rooted in the horror genre, tends to go for serious thrills on the whole. For the record all the other Aja directed films i've seen - Haute Tension, The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors and his scripted P2, i've really enjoyed. So i suppose we must not meet in the daft area of killer fish films.

Compared to other recent fish films such as the Godawful Shark Night, Piranha DD is tremendous fun and i had a smile on my face throughout.

[monkeyscreams]

Hausu (1977)
I've heard some comments about this film, but there is no way you can be prepared for this. It really is as weird as people say it is and it also is incredibly funny. Ôbayashi uses every trick in the book, put them in a blender and throws it at the screen. There is so much going on and it is very well done.

I bought the Criterion release, but as I live in Holland standard players play region B. So I bought a second hand philips bdp3000 for 30 euros, flashed new firmware and voilÃ*: region A.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

I went to the cinema yesterday to see Rush which, due to the trailer, I saw with high expectations. I was cognisant of being burned by trailers before Sarah tried to temper my high hopes. Thankfully, it met and exceeded my expectations thanks to the excellent script by Peter Morgan, the really good performances by Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl, superb photography by Anthony Dod Mantle and riveting race scenes.

Although I knew roughly how the real-life events unfolded, I was gripped and found it really exciting because of how well the characters were depicted, the editing and on-screen chemistry between Hemsworth and Brühl. Due to the scale of some of the sequences and the cinematography, it's one to watch in the cinema if you can, but I'll probably buy it on BD when it's released.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by monkeyscreams

I bought the Criterion release, but as I live in Holland standard players play region A. So I bought a second hand philips bdp3000 for 30 euros, flashed new firmware and voil?*: region A.

Surely standard players are set to region B?

[monkeyscreams]

Originally Posted by Nosferatu@Cult Labs

Surely standard players are set to region B?

Yes, you are right. I always mix up things like this.
B=Europe, A=US

[Wes]

I’m scrambling to watch all my John ford films before I take up Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford biography. This weekend I squeezed in…

Stagecoach, Ford’s 1939 Western, and probably the archetypal western – if you’ve even seen footage of Indians chasing after a stagecoach at breakneck speed, you’ve probably seen some of this. Excellent engaging performances, including a star-making turn by John Wayne along for the ride to settle a score with some killers. Once could imagine a young Akira Kurosawa seeing this in Tokyo in 1939/40 and being hugely impressed…

My Darling Clementine (1946) for me one of John Ford’s great masterpieces, eclipsing The Searchers and Grapes of Wrath. Henry Fonda is fantastic as Wyatt Earp bringing law and order to the town of Tombstone, and there’s two excellent turns from Victor Mature as a Hamlet-quoting Doc Holliday, and Walter Brennan who you might know as the lovable old buzzard from Rio Bravo, but here playing a mean, cold-blooded killer...

Prisoner of Shark Island, Ford’s 1936 film about the incarceration of Dr. Sam Mudd, the physician who treated John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg and unwittingly becomes a much loathed conspirator to the Lincoln assassination. The film's treatment of blacks is problematic, all contented slaves and Uncle Tom's but the film is essentially, a tough early prison drama, with a great performance from Ford regular John Carradine as a sadistic warden. Mudd’s story is where the phrase His name was mud comes from…

The Lost Patrol, (1934) Ford’s WWI film about a small British patrol lost in the Arabian desert and picked off by a hidden almost supernatural enemy. A decent enough war film, enlivened by a creepy performance by a young Boris Karloff as a devout soldier who succumbs to religious mania…

The Informer (1935) This was a real discovery, about an ex-IRA man who suffers a dark night of soul on the streets of Dublin after informing on a comrade for thirty pieces of silver (or twenty pounds). This is John Ford as German expressionist, the threadbare sets were given a surreal otherworldly complexion by Joseph August’s camerawork, all shadows and fog, and clearly a forerunner for what would become film noir. Orson Welles famously said that before he embarked on Citizen Kane, he ran Stagecoach over and over again to learn the basics of film making but I suspect Welles and Kane cameraman Greg Toland must have had The Informer in mind as well…