What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[trebor8273]

Originally Posted by Rik

I think me and my other half are the only people who hated the Babadook

No your not, truly awful movie personally can't understand the praise it gets. Also wasn't overly keen on it follows

[keirarts]

50 shades was the worst film I saw last year.

Last days on mars

I've held off watching this for a while now, but it was a quid in a charity shop so took a punt. Its....ok.... essentially it nicks a lot of ideas from other movies and blends them into something approaching a fun film. Essentially a bunch of Astronauts uncover a fungus under the surface of mars that begins turning each of the crew into zombies. It did everything I thought it would and ended the way I expected, it was entertaining enough and passed the time. For me the epitome of the 5/10 movie. Sorta like the Wolfen of sci-fi.

[tele1962]

Videodrome. While I did enjoy this movie I felt it was not one of Cronenberg's best.

[keirarts]

Colors

directed by legendary hellraiser Dennis Hopper & shot by legendary (and recently deceased) DP Haskell Wexler (medium cool), Colors was the first film to explore the growing gang scene in LA. The film stars Robert Duvall & Sean Penn as cops in L.A on gang duty as a rivalry between two gangs begins to spiral rapidly out of control. The film explores the tragedy of Gang violence and the inability of the police to deal with the problem. Both sides of the conflict are portrayed with humanity and there is no clear good vs evil conflict in the film. Colors is a terrific looking, well directed cop thriller that paved the way for films like Rampart, Dark Blue and End of watch. Second sights Blu-ray looks fantastic and the film still holds up today.

[J Harker]

Monsters. 2010, Gareth Evans.
Utter bollocks, turned it off halfway through, which takes some doing for me.
The fact that off the back of this film the director, Gareth Evans got the chance to direct the (relatively) recent Godzilla reboot, a film which barely featured the title character, should have told me something. At least Godzilla had some interesting characters, the painfully underused Bryan Cranston being a standout.
In Monsters a Nasa space probe has returned with evidence of alien dna, unfortunately the thing has crash landed in Mexico and massive alien lifeforms have begun appearing.
The story begins six years later so effectively is told against the backdrop of these events. An American journalist in Mexico is charged with escorting his bosses daughter back through a now quarantined zone to the American border to safety.
And here in lies the problem, in the hour and a bit that i watched nothing really happens. Yes the American journalist chap and the bosses daughter slowly make there way across an infected Mexico, we see various forms of state corruption and capitalisation on the events. But so what? The characters are uninteresting charisma vacuums which is probably the films greatest failing, but then relying on them to carry our attention while the Monsters of the title fail to appear is just fatal. What you get is like a Dracula movie without Dracula, or a zombie movie with no zombies, or heaven forbid a Godzilla movie where Godzilla hardly shows up. Maybe its me but i just don't see the point, if someone had bothered to make its lead characters likeable or interesting then at least there are scenes that would have been quite tense and thrilling. As it is i turned it off.

[iank]

Originally Posted by trebor8273

No your not, truly awful movie personally can't understand the praise it gets. Also wasn't overly keen on it follows

Add me to the group (though It Follows was marginally less boring than Babadook).

[Gigantor]

HARLEY DAVIDSON AND THE MARLBORO MAN
INSIDIOUS 3
MEATBALLS 1-4
HORRIBLE HIGH HEELS

[Rik]

The Shining AKA Stanley Kubricks confession to directing the Apollo 11 moon landings for NASA.

Despite being one of the worst literary adaptations of all time, I still love this film

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Viva (2008)

Every so often i go into a film completely blind, Viva was one of those films. I was half expecting a kinky romp, perhaps on the lines of ...well, i don't really know. Whatever it was it certainly wasn't what i anticipated.

Viva was terrific. A modern pastiche of 60's / 70's sexploitation movies, except i didn't realize this at first. I thought it was a piece of 70's sexploitation. It took about ten minutes for me to realize the acting was meant to be terrible, especially from the men, and the blatant advertising was an absolute hoot.

I ended up really enjoying the film. Everything about it felt right. Star, producer, writer and director Anna Biller clearly knows her sexploiters and this homage is spot on from the script to the costume and set design. The love and understanding of the genre being spoofed is up there with Tucker and Dale versus Evil.

The film isn't perfect by any means. At two hours it's about forty minutes too long. Also the way scenes connect or indeed fail to connect can be a little distracting, but overall Viva is a little gem of a film.

[Make Them Die Slowly]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Viva (2008)

Every so often i go into a film completely blind, Viva was one of those films. I was half expecting a kinky romp, perhaps on the lines of ...well, i don't really know. Whatever it was it certainly wasn't what i anticipated.

Viva was terrific. A modern pastiche of 60's / 70's sexploitation movies, except i didn't realize this at first. I thought it was a piece of 70's sexploitation. It took about ten minutes for me to realize the acting was meant to be terrible, especially from the men, and the blatant advertising was an absolute hoot.

I ended up really enjoying the film. Everything about it felt right. Star, producer, writer and director Anna Biller clearly knows her sexploiters and this homage is spot on from the script to the costume and set design. The love and understanding of the genre being spoofed is up there with Tucker and Dale versus Evil.

The film isn't perfect by any means. At two hours it's about forty minutes too long. Also the way scenes connect or indeed fail to connect can be a little distracting, but overall Viva is a little gem of a film.

I believe Biler is working on a 70s witchcraft/occult project at the moment or has been, it has been awhile since I read her blog.