What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[iank]

I saw Moonraker barely two years ago... loved every minute of it.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

La belva col mitra (1977)

Known as Beast With a Gun, La belva col mitra is a fast paced, violent Italian crime thriller starring Helmut Berger, who escapes prison along with three other convicts and goes on a violent rampage against those who wronged him.

Berger is very good here though sadly completely unlikable. The film is full of shoot outs, brutal murders, rape and other horrors the likes of which the BBFC would not approve back in the day. Marisa Mell and Richard Harrison as the put upon dame and police inspector trying to end Berger's reign of terror, cope well but the film really belongs to Berger.

La belva col mitra, come the end is a fairly standard Italian crime film, similar to Bava's Cani Arrabiati but not just as good, however the relentless violence on offer gives it a whole new level. A good film - yes. Fun - No.

[MrBarlow]

Superman 1978

On the planet Krypton, a scientist sends his only son to earth to escape the fate of the planet. . On earth the orphan is told of his heritage and becomes Superman. Lex Luthor plans to wipe out half of America to own land for money purposes.

Richard Donner brings this comic book superhero to the screen with Christopher Reeve playing Clark Kent/Superman while Margot Kidder as Lois Lane and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor. This movie is still amazing after all these years.

Superman 2 1980

Three Criminals General Zod. Ursa and Non have escaped from The Phantom Zone a Kryptonian prison and head to earth to rule along side Lex Luthor. Superman's secret identity is know to Lois Lane and wishes to live as a human as the Kryptonian criminals wreck havoc.

There are two versions of this, the original Richard Lester and there is the Richard Donner cut. Richard Donner started filming after the success of Superman but was fired after filming 75% of the movie. As much as I admire Donner as a director, I still stick with the Lester version. Not many sequels live upto the original movie but this one stands out.

Superman 3 1983

Computer genius Gus Gorman is hired by wealthy businesses man Ross Webster for a economical control. Only thing that stands in their way is Superman.

Stand up Comedian Richard Pryor and the man from u.n.c.l.e star Robert Vaughn play the bad guys in ths installment. This is where the franchise started to go downhill. There is like very little effort into it the acting and more funny moments which aren't to be taking seriously.

Superman 4: The Quest For Peace.

Lex Luthor escapes prison via help of his nephew Lenny, with one thing on his mind "Destroy Superman". With the help of a nuclear missile Luthor creates a foe Nuclear Man, can Superman stop him and Luthor.

This is definitely the lame movie in this franchise, produced by the cannon group as the earlier films were produced by Warner Brothers and Alexander and Ilya Salkeld. Christopher Reeve helped write the script to this but was disativised with the outcome. Original was to be 130 mins but was reduced to 89 mins and part of the budget was taken out so Cannon Group can do a Spider-man movie that was shelved and the special effects in this are laughable.

[keirarts]

Originally Posted by MrBarlow

Superman 1978

On the planet Krypton, a scientist sends his only son to earth to escape the fate of the planet. . On earth the orphan is told of his heritage and becomes Superman. Lex Luthor plans to wipe out half of America to own land for money purposes.

Richard Donner brings this comic book superhero to the screen with Christopher Reeve playing Clark Kent/Superman while Margot Kidder as Lois Lane and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor. This movie is still amazing after all these years.

Superman 2 1980

Three Criminals General Zod. Ursa and Non have escaped from The Phantom Zone a Kryptonian prison and head to earth to rule along side Lex Luthor. Superman's secret identity is know to Lois Lane and wishes to live as a human as the Kryptonian criminals wreck havoc.

There are two versions of this, the original Richard Lester and there is the Richard Donner cut. Richard Donner started filming after the success of Superman but was fired after filming 75% of the movie. As much as I admire Donner as a director, I still stick with the Lester version. Not many sequels live upto the original movie but this one stands out.

Superman 3 1983

Computer genius Gus Gorman is hired by wealthy businesses man Ross Webster for a economical control. Only thing that stands in their way is Superman.

Stand up Comedian Richard Pryor and the man from u.n.c.l.e star Robert Vaughn play the bad guys in ths installment. This is where the franchise started to go downhill. There is like very little effort into it the acting and more funny moments which aren't to be taking seriously.

Superman 4: The Quest For Peace.

Lex Luthor escapes prison via help of his nephew Lenny, with one thing on his mind "Destroy Superman". With the help of a nuclear missile Luthor creates a foe Nuclear Man, can Superman stop him and Luthor.

This is definitely the lame movie in this franchise, produced by the cannon group as the earlier films were produced by Warner Brothers and Alexander and Ilya Salkeld. Christopher Reeve helped write the script to this but was disativised with the outcome. Original was to be 130 mins but was reduced to 89 mins and part of the budget was taken out so Cannon Group can do a Spider-man movie that was shelved and the special effects in this are laughable.

superman 3 is interesting if you watch it considering it was originally supposed to be Brainiac as the villain but they had to scale things back.

[keirarts]

In the mouth of madness

Sam Neill teams up with Carpenter again. This time he's playing the 'good guy'. John Trent is a Freelance insurance investigator who makes a living exposing insurance fraud for big insurance companies. He's hired to investigate the disappearance of Sutter Kane (Jürgen Prochnow), one of the twentieth century's most popular authors. Trent is something of a cynic and smells a publicity stunt. His suspicions seem to be confirmed when he discovers the covers of Kane's books can be cut and pasted to form a map to a location in New England. Heading there with Kane's Editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) on the request of the publisher, Trent discovers the small town of Hobbs end previously thought a fictional place along the lines of Stephen King's Castle Rock. Things get steadily weirder as events described in the books seem to be unfolding for real in the town and Trent begins to realise the lines between fiction and reality are blurring.
A real return to form for Carpenter. In the mouth of madness is a well paced and written horror with serious nods to Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft as well as more nods to Nigel Kneale with the name Hobbs end coming from the Tube Station in Quatermass & the Pit. The film came straight to video in the UK as it tanked in the states. A real shame as this is a solid, entertaining horror that makes a nice companion to Prince of Darkness.

Village of the damned.

A remake of the 1960 British science fiction horror. Itself an adaptation of the novel Midwich cuckoo's by John Wyndham. The film concerns the small town of Midwich where the entire town mysteriously falls asleep one day. When they awake all the women of the town are pregnant. once the children are born the authorities and many of the parents realise the children are not quite human and this may be a prelude to an invasion.
Carpenters adaptation suffers somewhat from a poor choice of score. Possibly a first for a carpenter film, especially since he worked on it himself. Village is possibly Carpenter's worst film, but this is a credit to him that its still watchable. Its sadly inferior to the 1960 version but there's some entertaining stuff and Carpenters Panavision camera work is mostly solid. There's probably a lot of directors who wish this was them on a bad day.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by keirarts

In the mouth of madness

The film came straight to video in the UK as it tanked in the states.

It didn't actually. I saw it at Bury Warners cinema.

[keirarts]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

It didn't actually. I saw it at Bury Warners cinema.

Really? It came nowhere near any cinema's near me. Must have been a very limited release.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by keirarts

Really? It came nowhere near any cinema's near me. Must have been a very limited release.

It made over half a million at the UK box office which wasn't terrible back in 95.

[Frankie Teardrop]

SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN – Shot-on-video Brit-flick from the early eighties that disappeared after some minor (in both senses) DPP notoriety. In it, a mysterious orphan is taken in on the doorstep of an unrealistic-seeming children's home, then runs riot with satanic intent. If the results look like a school project filmed with a camcorder from 1983, then that's actually pretty close to the truth, but it's a truth redeemed by scenes such as the one in which someone's violently stabbed in the leg and bleeds spurtingly over 'Smash Hits' type eighties pop posters. Make no mistake, SLC is no-one's idea of Friday night horror fodder except for those whose idea of a classy evening in front of the box equates to a few tins and a double bill of 'Invitation to Hell' and 'Tales from the Quadead Zone'. That said, I can do nothing but recommend a movie that features a finale as blisteringly psychotic as the one in question here, even if that amounts to little more than an attic, a strobe and some dude dressed as jesus – poundland Jodorowsky, to be sure. Great soundtrack too, fuzzed up punk and its own theme tune!

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 – Not seen for a while, new BD out, so, why not? It's pretty good. It's not amazing, it's Brian Yuzna, which to my mind usually means big-seeming ideas but slightly pedestrian delivery, but then again with something in the background making it all a bit cock-eyed and scrambled. Excuse my little prejudices, but that's how I've come to view his work (which, incidentally, I have learned to quite like). This was made back when I suppose he had designs on being a horror hot-shot still, although 'Society' had left the oven a while ago and 'Faust' was beckoning. It's a taut, well made B-movie that seems to want to explore edgy (for the time) themes such as body mod, S&M and self mutilation in the context of a doomed romance overrun with zombies. Part of the problem is that it takes quite separate sub-cultural tropes, crams them into one pierced bracket and uses them to window-dress what's essentially well-trodden ground, plus you get yawnsome cliches like the decent post-Nam tramp guy who lives in the sewer and is desperate to help out. But for all that, ROTLD 3 manages to evoke quite a nihilistic mood in places and features some reasonably harsh gore. It works, it entertains and it's enjoyable, although, with all that sex/mutilation/death material, the far more intense film it could've aspired to have been is nowhere to be seen.

THE SUCKLING – Grainy eighties low budgeter set in a brothel-cum-illegal abortion clinic, where a freshly expurgated foetus hits toxic matter and becomes a vengeful monster with a flesh-ripping fixation – bad taste? Forget it! Actually though, sad to report that 'The Suckling' is a bit of a wasted opportunity in some ways. This is the second time I've seen it, and, just before I bought the more recent 88 Films version, an ominous voice at the back of mind whispered “isn't that the one that's full of quite nasty potential but somehow ends up as quite boring despite itself?” Inner voice, you were so right. 'The Suckling' is a disjointed mish-mash of ahm 'tonal variation', but, given it's also a threadbare piece of indiefied dreck from years ago, it really wasn't a problem for me that it couldn't seem to decide whether it wanted to be a sex comedy, a Troma wannabe or an alien rip-off... sometimes inconsistency works for me in the context of 'grindhouse'. No, the difficulty was simply in the pacing and lack of tension – cardinal sin of 'people trapped in house with monster' flicks is committed again and again here, namely lots of wandering around and bickering in the name of 'drama'. Shame, because the bits that were done right come through – the trashy tastelessness of the premise, the gothic look of the foetus's descent into the sewer, the seriously freaky 'return to the womb' ending and subsequent bleak madhouse conclusion... all good stuff. Not a winner, but somehow still worth seeing.

TONIGHT SHE COMES – Latter day indie horror about a bunch of lads and lasses down't woods (dunno why I'm talkin' Yorkshire, they're all from Brooklyn or Orlando, dog). Before they out-sass each other with their modern day witticisms, it transpires that there's a naked dead girl lying in a ditch – a problem, but then a greater one emerges when it turns out that naked dead girl is up and walking, and soon covered in blood. 'Tonight She Comes' takes the satanic backwoods route, and we spend the greater part of its duration in the company of the surviving bright young things and a rural bother-sister duo, who seem to hold the key to the unfolding ritual-horror shenanigans. I found 'Tonight She Comes' pretty confusing, which is not a criticism at all as I don't care whether films, especially genre films, make sense or not, although I can understand why that matters to some. It would be a shame if TSC, which seems to be proving a bit divisive online but is surely destined to be a fan fave, was passed over because of its refusal to be more linear, because it's satisfyingly gory and intense when it needs to be, and just, y'know, interesting. Does it hark back to the eighties in a crowd-pleasing way? Maybe, although not obviously, and is that a bad thing anyway? If you watch a lot of contemporary horror releases, you'll know that a lot of them are mediocre fodder for the Asda bargain bin – that's the sad, brutal truth. So it's always nice when a genuine, full-on horror film comes along, and TSC is definitely that. Recommended.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Damn Frankie!

You make me wanna' watch Tonight She Comes (although the cover art has been tempting me for a while as well). You also made me buy The Vault and that didn't work out very well at all.