What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Snicnic]

Shaun of the deas and Mirrors

[trebor8273]

Been to see the hobbit battle of the five army's again and don't know why I gave it such a low score, granted some of the CGI is awful and for me it was the worst of the trilogy but still a lot of fun to be had and the time flew by with some fantastic action. Think I'll have a middle Earth weekend and watch the first two movies followed Blythe Lord of the rings trilogy.8.5/10

[Buboven]

The Witches (1966)

8/10.

[gag]

Just watched I spit on you're grave 2

Now IMO I'm beggining to have a bit of a problem with these films now . there like becoming the bob geldof band aid song , no matter how different version there is there all the same in the long run except for different people .
Women gets raped , kept hostage escape gets revenge end of story.
The whole problem is its all exactly the same its like a unwritten rule they have to have or they can't make the film.
Its always someone they barely know or just met.
The women never have friends or relatives to report them missing .
They don't or refuse to report this to the police.
This bit always grinds me because you know in some point in the film its going to happen because 1000s of horror films are guilty of this.
When they escape first person they meet has got to be someone who ends up taking them back to where they just come from.
And at least one bloke has to be tortured by the penis or balls.
Its like suddenly the revenge part the women have become someone who has knowledge on torture , some of the torture a average Joe blogs wouldn't have the knowledge what to do.
And suddenly they become great fighters as if they been taught by chuck Norris or Steven seagal.

So why don't these films just slightly change and shake things around a bit ?
Why can't the rapist be a friend who had a crush and got fed up of being rejected.
Or a group of friends she known for years.
Why does it have to be 1 women why can't it be 2 .
Why do they have to rape them ( yes yes I'm aware that's object of the film ) but what was going to say is why can't they kidnap them and the kidnapers are using them because they are running a illegal porn site and blokes are paying to request the women to do things to each other while they jerk off.
They have friends or family who report them missing police raid them catch them in the act and some escape and their the ones they hunt down for revenge.
Or they get taken to court for some reason get of with it and vow to kill the women but she ready for them. Why does a bloke have to have his bits tortured why can't they arrange for him to be bummed so he can experience what its like to be raped ?
Why dont they do the opposite and have a women who kidnaps a bloke and ttorture him and use him as a sex slave for women who have struggled or to ugly to get a bloke.
There is loads of possibilities I could come up, just wish they would slightly alter the format or film a little instead of being a film you seen to often and to many times you know the plot of by heart before the scenes even happen.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by gag

Just watched I spit on you're grave 2

There is loads of possibilities I could come up, just wish they would slightly alter the format or film a little instead of being a film you seen to often and to many times you know the plot of by heart before the scenes even happen.

You raised a number of interesting points there and it would be easy to say the same film is made over and over again due to be lack of imagination/ambition, but that's possibly because it is.

[SShaw]

I watched Eurocrime on DVD last night for the first time since I saw it at Fright Fest. A cracking documentary, f only more of the movies it covers were available on blu-ray.

Going out this afternoon to see Taken 3, my first cinema visit of 2015.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Cremators (1972)

An additional film on the same Retromedia disc as Octoman, apparently because it was made by the same director. My bet is this was the only way anyone would actually buy this turgid sci-fi mess.

The plot is basic - An alien life form arrives in backwoods town USA in the form of a large fireball and rolls over people to consume their energy leaving them as ash on the ground.

Although it has potential, after all it's not a story line too far removed from The Night of the Big Heat. The Cremators is so poorly executed with pacing all over the place as well as shoddy editing and an extremely dull script that seems to be a few short sequences of the fireball lazily rolling over someone intercut into long, deathly dull scenes of two scientists gawping into test tubes, with seemingly hundreds of shots of microbes on a slide.

The movie poster shown below is easily the best thing about the film meaning The Cremators is a serious case of i've watched this so that you don't have to.

[Frankie Teardrop]

THE INITIATION – An eighties slasher flick which feels like a box ticking exercise in genre cliches – nothing wrong with that, originality is definitely not required when it comes to this kind of heads down, no-nonsense boogie. You'll notice that I mentioned 'no-nonsense' there, whereas as in fact I should point out that 'The Initiation' is indeed total nonsense, albeit of a completely enjoyable kind. Nightmare sequences with stabby kids, vengeance-crazed burns victims escaping psyche wards, exposition heavy dream research subplots and climactic twists ripped off from other slasher movies are just some items on the endless conveyor belt of mindlessness in operation here. It isn't badly made in any overt sense, but badness is there, under the surface. It comes through in the tone, which has that glaringly dead eyed eighties ripeness about it, and is aided and abetted by acts of random bizarreness, like the frequent cut-aways to a statue of Kali (I think) during the more slasher orientated bits at the end. The pacing isn't always dead on, but for some reason I found it really absorbing, even during the lulls.

CURTAINS – Another eighties slasher curio, again plagued by strange shifts in pace and tone which ultimately somehow work in its favour and in the end give it quite an 'out-there' feel. I discovered, after I'd seen it, that the production was quite troubled, and that fundamental changes were made to the directorial approach midway through. It really shows, but happily this does not spell 'curtains' for 'Curtains'. Erm. 'Curtains' starts out in psychological thriller mode (actress commits herself to psyche facility to research a role and finds herself abandoned there by her director buddy / accomplice), shifts over to murder mystery / whodunnit territory (six actresses are invited to a house to audition for said role by said director, and one by one they get offed), whilst at the same time slowly mutating into something inexplicable and dream-like (sinister dolls appear out of nowhere and portend slasher murders: a killer in a wonderful hag-mask looks well freaky: the director and actresses randomly burst out into psycho-drama in some ludicrous but unsettling scenes: subplots and minor characters appear and disappear for no reason) before a randomly Bava-esque climax. Instead of all this appearing grating and random, it feels like the weird life trajectory of a constantly morphing organism. I'm not sure whether 'Curtains' is very good, but it's certainly interesting, entertaining and odd. Slasher / eighties / weirdness fans will quite dig it.

SAVAGED – A deaf woman is raped and murdered by some rednecks, only to rise from the grave when possessed by the spirit of an American Indian warrior chief. A supernatural revenge-spree ensues. Is 'Savaged' as awesome as it sounds? Not quite, but it is very good, and I recommend it to fans of latter day exploitation. It moves along really swiftly, is pretty gory, and delivers the goods when it comes to moments of high ludicrousness whilst maintaining a commendably serious tone. I liked the way it was shot – filtered, to make everything look diseased, washed out and dirty. Maybe just my projection, but I found it created a really strong ambience. Definitely worth some of your time, an enjoyably twisted modern day nasty.

GUN WOMAN – Despite having been shorn of a few seconds by the BBFC, there's still plenty of ickyness on show in 'Gun Woman'. An ex-addict is captured by the husband of a woman who was raped and murdered by an international serial killing perv. Ex-addict, after being subjected to a gruelling regimen of training / torture by grieving husband, becomes a killing machine hot on the tail of international serial killing perv, who likes to hang out in a desert based facility known as 'The Room', which caters for rich necrophiliacs. Cue lots of shooting etc. 'Gun Woman', with its shot on video cheapness and sleazy theatrics, is another number which will attract those into modern day exploitation. No grind-house visual augmentation or any of that bollocks, just an abiding sense of having crawled out of a gutter. I wouldn't normally advocate for the censored version of anything, but as far as I know it's the only one on the market, and there is definitely much to recommend about 'Gun Woman', not least the synth-metal soundtrack, which sounds like some kind of eighties hallucination (or maybe just something from a computer game with lots of fast cars in it).

ALLELUIA – You can't go wrong with Fabrice Du Welz, director of 'Calvaire' and 'Vinyan'. 'Alleluia' is his take on the Lonely Hearts Killers of forties America, although we find ourselves here in what feels like latter day Belgium, despite some anachronisms. The elliptical 'arthouse' (loosely speaking) approach of his previous films is once again evident, and this again gives way occasionally to moments of stylistic hysteria – the high point occuring, for me, when the female lead breaks away from doing a musical number to saw someone's foot off. Despite all this, the tone is mostly serious, grainy and sombre, and oozes the slow burning dread we recall from 'Calvaire' as we follow the deepening obsession at the heart of this film. Easily the strongest of the movies I've reviewed here today, I definitely recommend 'Alleluia', an excellently bleak downer to start the new year on.

[SShaw]

Taken 3 more of the same but also less of the same. Its a passable action flick, but nothing special.

[J Harker]

An improvement on the second one? The original is a great film but the sequel i thought was very weak.