What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[nosferatu42]

The Monolith Monsters

the-monolith-monsters1.jpg

Begins with a Ed Wood/ Criswell style voice over introduction that seems to promise a B movie cheese fest, but this ends up being surprisingly serious in the way it deals with its bizarre subject matter.

A meteor crashes to earth bringing with it sinister black space rocks which reproduce when they come into contact with water.
Eh… come again?!?, how can rocks be scary.
Therein lies the greatness of the film, taking something benign and actually making a decent sic-fi invasion flick out of it.

The rocks grow when in contact with water then crumble when they reach colossal heights, falling to the ground destroying houses and crushing the inhabitants. Shattering as they fall,each small piece repeats the cycle, so effectively moving across the landscape in a creeping fungal style fashion.

So in a way this has more in common with a inferno/fire/disease outbreak style disaster flick than the usual 50’s alien invasions.

Humans that come into contact with large amounts of the rock are found "turned to stone”.
A little girl slowly begins turning to stone and the reproducing Monoliths are about to descend upon a peaceful town and destroy everything in their path.
So it’s a race against time for a scientist and his school teacher girlfriend to find a cure and end the invasion.

This shouldn’t work at all in theory and sounds really dull, but what we get is a decently acted, enjoyably entertaining and unique film.
I saw this as kid at my grans house one afternoon on T.V and it always stuck in my head, but thought it would turn out to be dull on rewatch. Happily i can say i enjoyed it once again, it’s no masterpiece but is a perfectly entertaining slice of hokum.
An enjoyable 7/10 from me.

vlcsnap-317886.jpg

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

Spoiled German woman gets drunk and depressed and embarks on a brief lesbian affair... without leaving her boudoir.

Two hours of boring expressionism from the supposedly wonderful Rainer Werner Fassbinder. You can gush about static camera shots, deep focus photography and emotional anguish all you want but this is still a stagy, oddly camp and utterly sleep inducing experience.

Farewell Rainer, our relationship was brief but not to be and never the twain shall meet again.

[nosferatu42]

Exterminators of the 3000

exterminators-of-the-year-3000.jpg

For my money its the best Italian Mad Max rip off I’ve seen, with some moments that approximate the kinetic vehicular mayhem of it’s inspiration, a lot of scenes are straight lifts from mm2, with some bone crunching crashes and car flips.
Theres an evil guy clearly modelled on the second fiddle bad guy from MM2 and his sidekick who comes across as a psychotic and leather clad young Floella Benjamin.

exterminatorscunningham.jpg

Lead guy Alien roams the barren landscape looking for water, posing and killing bad guys.
He meets a kid with a gerbil(?) (who also appeared in city of living dead and cannibal apocalypse), the kid is some kinda android i think although not much is made of this apart from the fact he is really good at throwing stuff.
Also turning up is some Old guy and Aliens old girlfriend Trash.

So everyone is basically looking for water, the kid to save his home colony, the others to survive and get rich (?!?)

Along the way we get some music that appears to be the Blade Runner theme played by Jean Michel Jarre, also some blood, booby traps, mutants and dodgy fashion statements.
The only thing absent here is nudity,but hey you can’t have it all.
Still i found this really entertaining and cheerily stupid in all the right places.

It was one of the first VHS movies me and a friend rented from the boot of some dodgy guys car during the pre cert era, along with the likes of Evil Dead and Mad Max films.
So i have a nostalgia for the film but couldn’t actually remember much detail, another film i approached expecting to ruin a childhood memory. Happily this was enjoyable once again and the Shout factory Blu i watched probably enhanced my enjoyment as it was much clearer and more impressive than my VHS recollections.

So as the bad guy says.
"Once more into the breach you mother grabbers”

An enjoyable piece of post apocalyptic trash, recommended if you like that sort of thing.
7/10

[Frankie Teardrop]

AENIGMA – A student at a girl school is psychically invaded by a vengeance-crazed coma victim, courtesy of eminent hack-auteur Lucio Fulci. Even third tier Fulci has its good points, and 'Aenigma', whilst not really outdoing the likes of 'Murderrock' or 'A Touch of Death' or any other flick from the more fallow end of his oeuvre, still delivers a fair whack of entertaining oddness. As I've said before, I often enjoy these supposedly lesser Fulcis more than the 'real deal' anyway, and I certainly liked 'Aenigma'. It ticks a number of boxes for me. It has the highly synthetic feel of most eighties Italian schlock cinema, it's reasonably pacey and contains quite a few creative kill scenes. There's a horrible theme song and some lovely Fulci set-pieces. More importantly it is full of little moments which are just unfathomable. There's a bit where the camera homes in on a snail that's crawled across a poster of Sylvester Stallone. So what in a way, it's just signing that there are evil snails about which will eventually en masse suffocate one of the girl school's bitchy residents. Maybe, but it's lingered over for just a little too long and strange meaning begins to form around it. Snails. Sly Stallone. Why? What? Am I awake? Near the end, when the last dregs of blood drain from an uprooted cannula, a single note sounds when each droplet hits the floor. Maybe it's a reference to something else that I'm unaware of, but it just seems freaky. Minor touches that hardly break the deal when it comes to the kind of film that most genre fanciers will think twice about investing in, but they contribute to the slightly unhinged atmosphere here. And atmosphere is pretty key when it comes to Fulci I think, he has a knack of elevating pretty banal material and giving it a really strange, hard to describe flavour. That's what he does with 'Aenigma', a film which at base is just an anaemic mongrel incorporating bits of 'Patrick', 'Carrie', maybe shreds of 'Phenomena' amidst sundry other semi digested horror steals. In other hands, particularly American ones from around the time, this might just amount to being a relatively diverting potboiler, but Fulci turns it away from being totally straightforward and linear. Sure, it's not as loud as something like 'The Beyond', but it's still larded with stylistic excess and a general lack of rationality. A lot of people think it's dull and skip it in favour of his more canonised work, but I say see it if you like Fulci or the dog-end of Italian genre cinema, or just eighties gunk in general. It's great to finally watch it in a good version, via 88's new blu-ray.

[Demoncrat]

Review!! You make me want to see it again.
Love it I don't.....


The Woman (2010, Lucky McKee)
A suburban hunter captures a feral woman. In order to "civilise" her. From the minds that brought us May and The Girl Next Door, so you know what you're in for.
A gruelling watch in places, this is highly if belatedly recommended.

[bizarre_eye@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Farewell Rainer, our relationship was brief but not to be and never the twain shall meet again.

You should check out World on a Wire - fantastic stuff.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by bizarre_eye@Cult Labs

You should check out World on a Wire - fantastic stuff.

It is a great film and one I considered for my top 10 list of 'Paranoid' movies.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by bizarre_eye@Cult Labs

You should check out World on a Wire - fantastic stuff.

205 minutes of Fassbinder questioning existence in a computer generated world similar to The Matrix according to the back of the dvd.

If it's full of Matrix style action then i'm there!

[bizarre_eye@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

205 minutes of Fassbinder questioning existence in a computer generated world similar to The Matrix according to the back of the dvd.

If it's full of Matrix style action then i'm there!

You may want to take the blue pill in that case.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by bizarre_eye@Cult Labs

You may want to take the blue pill in that case.

To be honest it sounded okay, but i think the bridges are well and truly burnt.