Just fresh from a screening of The Getaway and this must surely rank as Peckinpah's most infernal film - no one gets out of this film in any great shape, and the long getaway to Mexico is littered with ten-gallon hat mobsters, psychotic hoods, whoreish women, and a sprawling rubbish dump. Even Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw's love affair quickly turns sour. I wonder does Nicolas Winding Refn count this as a favourite movie ? This one reminded me of Drive...

http://movieguy247.com/iMovies/image...oviePoster.png

Have you read the book?

Never did. Should I track it down ? I always meant to check out Jim Thompson..

I love Clu Gulager's turn as Burt!

Anyone else pick up on what Ernie wants from Burt for helping him out:

"Yea you're gonna owe me a big one..."

"Burt about that favour, watch your ass out there!" :pound:

Thompson is amazing, sleazy, raw, cynical and very experimental in the way he writes at times. "A Hell of A Woman" opens with two narratives of the same scene running on alternate lines, one in normal print, one in italics, so that you have to read the page twice to understand it! "Pop 1289" has each chapter written from a different first person point of view. He's one of the most interesting of the old pulp crime writers and ranks for me with David Goodis' bleak existential crime novels which remind me of Albert Camus on the skids.

Thanks, I had no idea...must head over to Amazon for a look. I haven't picked up any crime since Ellroy's LA Noir collection which I hated. I couldn't the believe the same man wrote American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand...

Is the LA Noir collection the Lloyd Hopkins novels? Andrew Vachss is worth a punt too. His series of Burke novels are as bleak as you can get when at their best but also slightly ludicrous at the same time. Vachss himself is a very interesting man.Andrew Vachss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yes.

I liked them. I also enjoyed the film "Cop" which is based on one of them, the name of which escapes me at the moment.

Yep, Lloyd Hopkins... very disappointing I must say. Thanks for these recommendations because I do like a good crime novel. My wife is going thru a big Jo Nesbø but I'd prefer something with a bit more bite... For what it's worth, I think Richard Price's Clockers is an incredible read. I pick it up every few years...

Blood On The Moon. Cop is a criminally underrated film.

Cheers Stephen. Is there a decent release of it on DVD or Blu-ray?

There is indeed.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cop-DVD/dp/B...1971108&sr=8-1

THE CRAZIES - The remake. Slicker and less edgy than its predecessor, I thought this was still an enjoyable attempt, with plenty of tense scenes. Watching it kind of brought home what Romero was good at - large scale social commentary through a genre filter. That's actually quite original. Think of it, you never really get that Brueghelian vision anywhere else, not these days anyway.

MONSTRO - A very strange film, and I have to say, for me, it really worked. I notice a lot of reviews have tried to nail it as a Russ Meyer / Roger Corman mash up. It isn't at all, despite obvious references to both directors. It occupies its own weird space, and actually works more on the level of a dreamy 'coming of age' story with violent tentacular eruptions. Basically, a trio of neo-rockabilly chicks hide out on the Australian coast after pulling some kind of double cross involving fellow crims and big bucks. They meet a schoolgirl who lives with her disabled grandfather and corrupt her by introducing her to booze and partying. Then a sea monster kills a load of people. It's tonally quite jarring, and that might put some people off, but I really liked it. Recommended for sure if you like movies with a switchblade attitude, face ripping sea monsters and quietly desolate seaside locales.

Now this sounds like my type of film :clap:
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I'm on my way !

Yes. It is, as you say, a lot slicker with the rough edges removed but I also thought it's a great film and definitely has some great moments of tension. I was really surprised how much I liked it

Yeah, I too enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. I often clock watch even through movies I'm really into... never once with 'The Crazies' remake - I have to admit, it was that sustaining.

Excision

I was drawn in by Kim Newman's recent 5 star review in Empire. A pretty startling mix of comedy / drama / horror. The dark comedy in the first half I thought worked really well. The high school stuff managed to avoid the usual cliches, and I liked how the typically 'annoying parent' characters were properly fleshed out, relatable human beings. A few things annoyed me - the frequent dream/nightmare sequences I felt were far too 'designed', like a stylised MTV video. They came across more like directorial flourishes than the nightmares of a disturbed teenage girl, and took me out of the film every time they appeared. Talking of the main girl, the clear 'uglifying' of the lead actress seemed a little clunky to me - spots, greasy hair AND a hunched walk! A little more subtlety in the execution and I would've loved this film. Well worth a watch if you like stuff like Lucky McKee's May and the like . . .

There's more mockabilly madness with added Hells Angels, zombies/ghosts and aliens in THE VIOLENT KIND. Here's the trailer which really doesn't do the film any justice at all. It's a great film and worth a look.

THE VIOLENT KIND Trailer HD - YouTube

It's an excellent film! Unfairly slated, I thought... I remember casting around for reviews, and no-one had a good word to say about it. Again, maybe it comes down to shifts in tone. After a pretty mundane build up, suddenly there are weird characters, gore and even a Lovecraftian climax... I really liked it.

More rockabilly/garage punk madness is to be found in THE SORE LOSERS. Sadly this time the trailer is better than the film.

sore losers early trailer - YouTube

sore losers early trailer - YouTube

I like the German trailer best.

Which I will now post rather than the same trailer twice!

The Sore Losers - Schlechte Verlierer Trailer - YouTube

I don't think any film could live up to those trailers!
I'm quite intrigued, though - is it worth getting, or is it way, way less than what's on show here?

It has been really wet in Bremen today - a good excuse to sit in my warm, dry sitting room and watch a few of the Blu Rays and DVD's I have accumulated over the past few weeks.

First in the old blu-Ray player was Troll Hunter. Its been a while since I first saw this (September 2010 and then again at last years Fright Fest) but it remains thoroughly enjoyable. You can count the good found footage films on the fingers of a single hand, and this IMHO is one of the best.

Next up was a film I hadn't seen before, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within. Its a sequel (I guess) to the earlier Elite Squad and is another intriguing peek behind the scenes of the battle between criminals and a corrupt and violent police force in Brazil. The politics and intrigue are punctuated by some extremely violent gun battles as the BOPE take on the drug cartels amongst Rio De Janeiro's favellas. Well worth a look.

Finished off with the portmanteau film V/H/S which you can read more about over in my Diary review from the Edinburgh International FIlm Festival.

I've been putting this off for such a long time now, feeling utterly fatigued with the found footage genre. Everyone says it's good so I really think I must give it a go.

I've not seen it in years to be honest but still own the video but don't have a player to check it out. I was a total trash head at the time and seem to remember vast periods of boredom between the action scenes which today I rather like. Worth a look if you see it cheap I guess. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Actually, I remember flagging it as a potential buy, then being put off by the big price. Will have to check out whether it's circulating more cheaply these days.

I've seen Monstro on Amazon's coming soon schedules for ages and thought it looked good from the cover art alone. Now suddenly its out and i missed it.

The Violent Kind is great, any film which involves rituals and a naked Tiffany Shepis is always a winner with me.

Just finished watching Cheerleader Camp - gratuitous, gory and so 80's it hurts and I loved every minute of it! One of the best slashers I've seen in a long time and one that strikes the perfect balance between comedy and horror.

and if you live near a FOPP store you can pick the Blu-Ray up for around £6!

I definitely need to pick up The Sore Losers on dvd asap,an old vhs favorite.
Kerine Elkins,Mike Maker and Guitar Wolf are in it so it can't be bad,right? ;)

Its great innit!

Lovely Molly [Blu-ray]: Amazon.co.uk: Eduardo Sanchez: Film & TV

I forgot to mention in my review that Tortoise do the soundtrack, which will mean something to some and bugger all to others.

Going to give ILL MANORS a try.

The Gold Rush (1925)

Chaplin at his finest as the lone prospector who finds love and danger during the 1896 Yukon Gold Rush. One of the greatest films of all time actually lives up to its billing. The Gold Rush boasts some great comedy and thrilling set pieces, often at the same time.

I actually watched the 1942 edit of the film which dispensed with the dialogue plates in place of a Chaplin voiceover. Purists may disagree but it certainly helped the pace of the film and allowed it to zip along at a great speed.

NIGHT OF THE ANATOMICAL DOLL - Hisayasu Sato is well known for his often very weird Pinku films which include odd, disturbing fetishes and voyeuristic themes. Most probably know him for 'Naked Blood' or 'The Bedroom'. This feels like a kind of precursor to 'Naked Blood' in some ways. A scientist moves into a new apartment and quickly finds herself surrounded by weirdos, including a creep who seems to be using surveillance techniques in order to merge with her identity and a medical student who has a disturbing fixation on his fathers prosthetic hand (!) Not as graphic as '... Blood' or as warped as some of his other stuff, but really quite strange, with trippy dream sequences involving meat raining down on writhing torsos etc etc. Well worth catching, although, like much of Sato's ouvre, not very available outside of the grey market.

Very uneaven and sprawling and far too easy to lose track of what's going on, I also hate hip hop (if that's the term the young people are using these days) which is hop the film is narrated. That aside, despite having a lot of the flaws of a first time director the film is still worth sitting through, with some genuinely harrowing moments of life in the seedy underbelly of london among the junkies, dealers and gangs.

Watched the '81 My Bloody Valentine.

Awesome movie, if you watch it on blu pick extended cut. Seems all the gorey bits were spliced out for the theatrical cut, wouldn't be a very good movie without them though?

They mostly talk about MBV-3D in the extras so boohoo there.

The film was cut before it's theatrical release either because the MPAA insisted on it for an R-rating or because distributor Paramount wanted it to be less violent... ;)