What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Frankie Teardrop]

HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY – One that I always come back to, although I never know why really – it's not the best, the most gratuitous, the freakiest Fulci on the market, but for some reason it's one of my faves. It's just the indefinable atmosphere and the strange little touches like the whimpering sound Freudstein always seems to make, not to mention that atrocity cellar and wonky moments like the excessive murder of a bat. The gore is really 'Fulci', too – again, not his most full on, but you get that lingering, leering camera which just makes it all feel so much grottier. Totally recommended of course, a genuine bad dream of a film.

MIMIC - Del Toro's studio B movie stands up pretty well these days. In essence, it's the definition of meat and potatoes horror – for all it's moral wranglings, it's about big, flesh eating insects in a sewer. Stylistically and visually it looks great, and quite in advance of its era (mid nineties) imo. I liked the creepy, trenchcoat wearing 'disguise' of the mutant roaches – genuinely felt like something out of a Ramsay Campbell story (I say something like that at least every year). Fans of the director (I'm not one especially, although I can see his greatness) might not rate it all that much, but I'd rather watch this than some of his other stuff.

SHOGUN ASSASSIN – One of the 'classics', 'Shogun Assassin' pretty much sums up the essence of exploitation for me, a cut 'n' shut of a couple of the 'Baby Cart' films with no respect for the original material but plenty of time for what got the punters in – namely, excessive violence. There's something really cool about watching all that stylised arterial gushing as the soundtrack pulsates with chilly early eighties electro and harsh acidic echos. Linearity and honest storytelling are forsaken for a ramshackle lurch from one 'good bit' to the next, making 'Shogun Assassin' little more than a series of mere sequences, most of them involving severed body parts – but you knew that already. Seriously, one of the best films of all time!

PLANET TERROR – Wham-bam grindhouse homage from Rodriguez still looks OK from where I'm sitting. I think I prefer 'Death Proof', but I can't quite remember. Anyway, at least this is fun, with lots of slimy zombies and an acceptable gore quotient. I like a film which is miserable enough to off a defenceless kid just to make a lame joke about firearms. If that doesn't sell it, there's always Bruce Willis as “the man who killed Bin Laden” and Tarantino as an obnoxious, rapey oaf. Dunno about all that faux-seventies knackered film stuff going on, but then I never did, and neither did anyone else.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

PLANET TERROR – Dunno about all that faux-seventies knackered film stuff going on, but then I never did, and neither did anyone else.

Ha,ha, how true. Most of the 70's films i've seen recently (Symptoms, Deep End, Monique, What the Peeper Saw...actually it's a really long list) have all looked quite splendid.

[J Harker]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

and Tarantino as an obnoxious, rapey oaf.

Beautifully composed reviews as ever Frankie but as far as I'm concerned you get serious bonus points for using the term 'rapey oaf'. Bloody priceless.

[trebor8273]

Devonsville terror.



Film opens in the past with the good folks of devonsville burning some suspected witches and one of the witches invoking a curse,jumping forward a couple of hundred years and a group of women moving into the town and upset he male dominated and bigoted townsfolk. Could one of the women be the a descendent of the witch and bring about the curse. Nor much really happens till the end when we have some brilliant exploding heads and a fantastic melting head that had to be ripped of by Lucas in raiders of the lost ark. Also what was up with Donald pleasence and the maggot's and five minutes after getting a patient he would have them stripped to there underwear and hypnotised! Was not that impressed with the picture quality which had a lot of damage in places and was not any better than some DvDs .5.4/10

Next up Seven deaths in a cats eye.

[trebor8273]

Giallo with a fantastic Gothic atmosphere, a giant ape and a large ginger pussy. A film that should be any horror/giallo fans collection. Picture quality is very good and a vast improvement on devonsville. 9.3/10

[Make Them Die Slowly]

SPIRIT CAMP

Fun little slasher featuring cheerleaders being butchered at a summer camp that carries a nasty undertow in the final scenes.

TERROR FIRMER

Throw it at the wall and see what sticks madness from Troma.

HEX HOLLOW

Documentary about 3 men in 1920s America who killed a man they believed was a witch who had hexed them. This is rather good as it examines the belief in folk magic, in this case of the Christian kind known as Pow wow. Recommended.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Hateful Eight (2015)

Samuel L Jackson, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth, Bruce Dern and Michael Madsen star in this western tale of a disparate group of cowboys, war veterans and criminals all forced to take refuge at the remote mountainside stage coach stop over known as Minnie's Haberdashery.

Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight when studied is many things. A snowbound western, a retelling of his own Reservoir Dogs - a group of protagonists all in one location, bearing their own secrets, teetering on the brink of killing one another, and in the final half hour a wonderfully macabre piece of Grand Guignol - Witness Jennifer Jason Leigh, blood soaked being physically hung by Samuel L Jackson and Walton Goggins, themselves shot to bits, with the severed arm of Kurt Russell chained to her wrist.

As is often the case Tarantino shows his cards with a whole host of references to other movies. In this case it's Ennio Morricone's score which utilizes themes from The Exorcist II and John Carpenter's The Thing, both originally scored by Morricone but slipped into this film effortlessly and helping enhance the visuals. It can be argued that the influence of The Thing doesn't end there. Whereas in that film the cast lead by Kurt Russell are trapped on a base with a killer with the snow raging outside, in this Tarantino uses the snow storm as a reason to keep his cast together in the knowledge that should they attempt to escape each other they would die from the severe weather conditions. So in this case it's a killer both out and in.

Tarantino is a fine story teller and an even better film maker. Sure not all his films and ideas are triumphs (Here there are too many n**** references seemingly thrown in from Tarantino's other western Django Unchained (2012) which do grate during the first hour) but more often than not they provide discussion points and not just immediately after a viewing, often for years to come. In The Hateful Eight, Tarantino harks back to the underused idea of snow bound westerns of the era. Andre DeToth's 1959 classic Day of the Outlaw is an obvious comparison and indeed this film could be seen as a loose re-imagination of Outlaw. However what sets it apart from the majority is it's wide 70mm screen resolution, harking back to the Super Panavision experiences of Ben Hur (1959), The Sound of Music (1965) and Laurence of Arabia (1962) with it's stunning widescreen panoramas especially in the first hour coming across as QT's love letter to films of this ilk.

The opening credits tell us The Hateful Eight is the eighth film by Quentin Tarantino and it's definitely one of his best.

[Justin101]

Originally Posted by trebor8273

Giallo with a fantastic Gothic atmosphere, a giant ape and a large ginger pussy. A film that should be any horror/giallo fans collection. Picture quality is very good and a vast improvement on devonsville. 9.3/10

I watched this last night as well, I went away very disappointed which seems to be against the grain here as everyone else seems to really like it. I loved the gothic vibe of the film, I thought the ape was a waste of time and the story was so thin I almost missed it. At least the 3 younger actors in the film were all nice to look at. I scored it a 2.5/5 as it did have some fun elements but overall was a bore.

[Frankie Teardrop]

LUTHER THE GEEK – From Carlton Albright, who also made the cock-eyed horror gem 'The Children' – c'mon Vinegar Syndrome, how about it? Anyway, 'Luther' is a kind of late eighties slasher I guess, and in its favour you can say that they got the bad guy right – the freak in question is a paroled con whose mind was warped by a childhood carnival incident involving a Richard Hell lookalike doing some hardcore geekery to a hen. OK, sounds a bit samey, but he clucks like a chicken and looks like a weird cross between Francis Dolarhyde, Johnny Rotten and a pissed off Hugh Laurie! Very good. Once out of the slammer, he gets right on it and bites out the throat of a granny at the local supermarket after offering her an egg... quite a surreal moment, but the film is peppered with them, not least the insane 'duelling cockerels' climax which needs to be seen to be believed. There's a bit of padding, but it's also quite pacey. Really worth getting, especially if you've only ever seen the rubbish Troma DVD.

THE THING – The remake. I seem to remember loads of people dissing this for daring to defile their memory of the classic Carpenter version with nasty CGI. I don't really care about that sort of thing. This 'Thing' falls short of the 1982 one because it can't quite match the balefully paranoid vibes sent out by the latter, but, for what it is, it's pretty good. Of note, those CGI mutations, well, they kind of do it for me. They're pretty loathsome and give you what you want if you're up for some gross biomorphic flesh warping. It's well put together and is visually quite lush, even if it doesn't particularly go anywhere with its source material. Mary Winstead is good in the lead role, and seems generally nicer to be around than craggy Kurt Russell.

EMBODIMENT OF EVIL – Contemporary Coffin Joe film which seems keen to cash in on prevailing horror trends of its day (namely, torture porn and that bit in the mid to late noughties when everything seemed to get really gory). Here, CJ has been released from prison and is on the lookout for a female receptacle for his mighty, god defying sperm (or, he wants a kid). He's spewing his usual cod-Nietzschean bollox about how beyond good and evil he is, which is entertaining, I think the genre needs more examples of this kind of this kind of half baked bar room philosophising. Though it would get a bit boring unless accompanied by a load of gore and exploitation, which happily is the case here. There's lots of nudity, bloodshed and bad taste on show, including show stoppers like a vaginal excavation by rat. More than this, the film is just simply ludicrous for the most part, and I lost count of the 'huh?' moments, like the one where an entire roomful of cops beats up a single female lawyer for doing something fairly minor. Needless to say, there is no attempt at even a semblance of internal logic here, which explains why CJ, despite being a raving misogynist who is physically unattractive, is constantly surrounded by a crowd of dewy eyed minxes, and in fact it all comes off as a particularly deranged Nuts reader's fantasy. It's done with a slight nod and a wink, for better or worse, and feels like it should be more badly made than it is. Jose Marins has made some genuinely creepy, effective and psychedelic movies in his time, and this one doesn't really capture him at full tilt, but is worth catching for its excesses and general idiocy.

[J Harker]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

The Hateful Eight (2015)

Samuel L Jackson, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth, Bruce Dern and Michael Madsen star in this western tale of a disparate group of cowboys, war veterans and criminals all forced to take refuge at the remote mountainside stage coach stop over known as Minnie's Haberdashery.

Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight when studied is many things. A snowbound western, a retelling of his own Reservoir Dogs - a group of protagonists all in one location, bearing their own secrets, teetering on the brink of killing one another, and in the final half hour a wonderfully macabre piece of Grand Guignol - Witness Jennifer Jason Leigh, blood soaked being physically hung by Samuel L Jackson and Walton Goggins, themselves shot to bits, with the severed arm of Kurt Russell chained to her wrist.

As is often the case Tarantino shows his cards with a whole host of references to other movies. In this case it's Ennio Morricone's score which utilizes themes from The Exorcist II and John Carpenter's The Thing, both originally scored by Morricone but slipped into this film effortlessly and helping enhance the visuals. It can be argued that the influence of The Thing doesn't end there. Whereas in that film the cast lead by Kurt Russell are trapped on a base with a killer with the snow raging outside, in this Tarantino uses the snow storm as a reason to keep his cast together in the knowledge that should they attempt to escape each other they would die from the severe weather conditions. So in this case it's a killer both out and in.

Tarantino is a fine story teller and an even better film maker. Sure not all his films and ideas are triumphs (Here there are too many n**** references seemingly thrown in from Tarantino's other western Django Unchained (2012) which do grate during the first hour) but more often than not they provide discussion points and not just immediately after a viewing, often for years to come. In The Hateful Eight, Tarantino harks back to the underused idea of snow bound westerns of the era. Andre DeToth's 1959 classic Day of the Outlaw is an obvious comparison and indeed this film could be seen as a loose re-imagination of Outlaw. However what sets it apart from the majority is it's wide 70mm screen resolution, harking back to the Super Panavision experiences of Ben Hur (1959), The Sound of Music (1965) and Laurence of Arabia (1962) with it's stunning widescreen panoramas especially in the first hour coming across as QT's love letter to films of this ilk.

The opening credits tell us The Hateful Eight is the eighth film by Quentin Tarantino and it's definitely one of his best.

A fine review I've been looking forward to reading from you for a while Dem. I'm glad you enjoyed it, I was starting to feel alone. I love the opening scene with the stagecoach belting across the snow going past that old gothic cross sticking out of the snow.