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16th February 2018, 08:16 PM
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Just bought Creature on blu-ray. Looking forward to finally seeing it in 3D.
__________________ "Give me grain or give me death!"  |
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16th February 2018, 08:19 PM
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| Slower than I was expecting but enjoyable enough and compared to ninja force it's a masterpiece. But i was expecting lots of gruesome experiments and naked ladies being tortured and we have what has to be the most unmenacing Josef Mengele, the actors no Gregory Peck. 6/10 Now watching scared to death (1980). |
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16th February 2018, 11:11 PM
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| Interstellar (2014) Earth's future has been riddled by disasters, famines, droughts and some impressive sand storms. There is only one way to ensure mankind's survival - Interstellar travel. A newly discovered wormhole in the far reaches of our solar system allows a team of astronauts to go where no man has gone before, a planet that may have the right environment to sustain human life. Christopher Nolan's film throws idea after idea at us, (some which have already been used in Doctor Who in 2006 and also films like Contact (1997)) and throws plenty of eye catching imagery our way but following an excellent opening forty minutes the film seemed to lose it's way a little as i soon found out that in space no one can hear you yawn. Happily it does pick up again in the last hour, but my ultimate feeling upon the credits rolling and the names of the (Inter)stellar cast scrolled up the screen was that Interstellar is a well made and beautifully acted film but at almost three hours it was just too damn long. I would like to mention Hans Zimmer's excellent score which unfolds around the one hour fifty mark into a disturbing assault on the ears akin to Suspiria and made some seen it all before scenes feel like i was watching something new and ground breaking. |
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17th February 2018, 09:07 AM
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| In the folds of the flesh Starting off with a decapitation and a woman burying the corpse on the grounds of her villa, with a crook witnessing the burial before getting apprehended by the cops, the film then enters the realm of the surreal. From the swirling paint colours of the opening credits with a quote from Sigmund Freud that gives the film its title, to the bizarre murders and plot points including pet vultures, Concentration camp flashbacks, incest and a climax where peoples identities seem to change more rapidly than a catwalk model changes clothes. In the Folds of the flesh is one of the weirdest, sleaziest and most outright delirious Giallo's made. It's a Spanish-Italian co-production that incorporates a lot of the surrealism and savagery of Spanish cinema mixing it with the style of the Italian thriller. Worth picking up. Perfurme of the Lady in black. Another 'slow burn' Giallo that's likely to test the patience of people expecting wall to wall sleaze. Mimsy Farmer plays an industrial scientist who starts having vivid hallucinations that seems linked to childhood trauma. Its about 40 to 50 minutes before the bodies begin to pile up and even then its fairly tame, Perfume instead focuses on a strange, supernatural plot where the line between psychosis and the paranormal disintegrates entirely. I like it, I have a lot of time for the film. I can totally buy why some don't. It seems however that the 'marmite' giallo's can be the most interesting. Autopsy More Mimsy Farmer. This one is a different beast to Perfume however. The film opens with a series of shocking suicides, followed by Farmer's character working at the morgue where shes doing autopsy's. She begins to have hallucinations where the corpses come to life and begin screwing and wandering about. The first ten minutes are amongst the darkest , weirdest and nastiest in any Giallo. It's suggested that sun spots are contributing to the wave of suicides that Farmer is researching for her dissertation and Also her own fragile mental state. However it also appears to be also down to her sexual hang ups. She's dating Riccardo, played by the late, great Ray Lovelock. She won't invite him up 'for coffee' saying she's too focused on her work , however it becomes apparent she has issues with sex. Her dad on the other hand has no issues and she meets his latest squeeze who promptly heads out and is found dead on a Rome beach seemingly of suicide. The woman's brother, a priest with a hair trigger temper doesn't believe she killed herself and works with Farmer's character to investigate. As one would expect, the corpses begin to pile up. I really like Autopsy. Its not outright sleazy but it manages to generate a genuinely disturbing atmosphere throughout. Its only out on DVD right now but really needs a good HD release. A blade in the dark Lamberto Bava's film follows a composer hired to score a film. He moves into a villa in order to get his work done in peace. Unfortunately friends and neighbours end up getting brutally dispatched one after the other and the composer like any good Giallo Protagonist decides he needs to investigate. The script comes from one of the best writing teams for genre cinema Elisa Briganti & Dardano Sacchetti. The plot is solid as a result and for the most part makes sense. Though it lacks the bizarre flights of fancy of some of the stranger Giallo pictures out there. Apparently it was intended to be a TV mini-series which would explain the lengthy run time but overall its worth checking out. |
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17th February 2018, 09:25 AM
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THE UNTAMED – Interesting post-genre weirdness that segues indie relationship drama into tentacular sex-beast territory. Confused? Just watch the movie. If you’re into ‘Possession’, a fairly explicit reference point here, you might lap it up. ‘The Untamed’, which follows Ruth in her attempts to deal with her oppressive partnership with brutal Angel and her attraction for free spirit Simone, doesn’t have the unreal vibe of Zulawski’s eighties classic, but it does have a phallic squid being eager to worm its way into human orifices. Come on, that’s pretty good going. If only more contemporary arthouse cinema was like this. Recommended. THE PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK – First viewing for me – I really liked it. An Italian psychological thriller from the seventies, it’s obviously derived from Polanski – ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘Repulsion’, although interestingly it predates ‘The Tenant’. It stars Mimsy Farmer as an industrial chemist who gets increasingly lost in her own aura of unreality, here made up of hazy childhood memories of her mother (the titular ‘lady in black’) shagging a bad man. Also, there’s a local satanic conspiracy afoot that doesn’t quite seem to be only in her head, but we can’t really tell as TPOTLIB is such a shimmering mirage of a film that it might as well be a rendering of a dream. The narrative might not be all that original, but Francesco Barelli’s visual stylistics and atmospheric sense are so persuasive that you forget all the other references. A great, and superior, companion piece to the likes of ‘All The Colours Of The Dark’, TPOTLIB is a wonderful depiction of suspended reality and is kind of the Giallo stepping beyond itself. DEVIL’S DOMAIN – About a bulimic teen with shit parents; to make matters worse, she suffers abuse at the hands of a bunch of homophobic WASP high school fascists who humiliate her after she makes a pass at a friend. The devil is available for a Faustian revenge pact in this instance. This could’ve played out as some kind of magical-realist indie drama, but, for better or worse, it’s actually just a trashed out wallow in human misery parenthesized by dumb-ass DTV horror aesthetics. It’s as close to true ‘exploitation’ as movies get these days – the ‘issue angle’ is a convenient springboard for leering shots of someone puking in a toilet bowl, whereas the gay characters are even more weakly portrayed than in mainstream cinema. This in itself makes room for a truly hate-packed first thirty minutes, with seething prom-queen types covertly filming the protagonist wanking and tossing off lines like “I really hope she kills herself when we post this online”. Eventually DD gives itself over to standard genre stylistics, but even so it’s full of craziness, like the bit where our heroine daydreams about an ex-friend menstruating in public. There’s also a reasonable load of gore, delivered by a trio of drooling mongs who randomly crop up whenever the director decides it’s time for another implement-based death scene. Recommended to those who lust after weird, ambiguous shit. SCHIZO – I think this is probably my fave Pete Walker movie. ‘Frightmare’ might be objectively better, but ‘Schizo’ really captures the curdled, grimy Englishness that runs through all the director’s films. It starts with a haggard guy in Northern UK who takes the train down to London to look for someone from his past; flashbacks show a little girl witnessing the brutal sex-slaying of her mother at the hands of her lover back in the sixties. What follows is a game of cat and mouse sprinkled with a couple of murders and set-pieces ripped off from Gialli movies from around the time – the scene in which a psychic foretells doom is a threadbare version of the one from ‘Deep Red’, except it’s set in an estate community centre where cups of tea are 4p. A bit overlong and sags after an hour or so, but this doesn’t dispel its seedy magnetism. Anyone watching ‘Schizo’ for reasons of clinical accuracy should probably consult a medical dictionary, though. With Stephanie Beacham. |
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17th February 2018, 11:06 AM
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It's not my favourite Pete Walker film by any stretch of the imagination. That honour goes to Frightmare, The Flesh and Blood Show and Man of Violence, but like so much, no, all of Walkers work is a must have for any serious collector. This Devil's Domain thing? Is it on dvd or bollocks like Prime? keirarts and Frankie Teardrop like this. |
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17th February 2018, 02:58 PM
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| The Avengers (2012) There was another four films to get through before Marvel would produce something of the same quality as the first Iron Man. They came mighty close with Captain America: The First Avenger, but not quite. Although, the CA trilogy has the most solid story arc for any of their characters, and is the strongest overall of their standalone franchises; The Winter Soldier is still arguably the best MCU film next to the first Guardians of the Galaxy (I haven’t seen Black Panther yet). But this still fits comfortably somewhere into my top 10, and was their best effort as this point. Sure, it’s not perfect, and I could nit-pick if I was a joyless prick, but none of that matters. Joss Whedon gets more than enough right here, and it’s one of the most enduring blockbuster event movies of recent years. It’s something that shouldn’t have worked with so many big name superhero characters vying for screentime, but Whedon manages to find the right balance, and executes some of the MCU’s most memorable moments, with not just its exhilarating set-pieces, but with superb character interplay as well. The Avengers are as a dysfunctional family injected with some of the writer and director’s trademark humour, and the cast’s chemistry is sublime. He also realizes the definitive version of Hulk/Bruce Banner that Marvel would stick with in the following films, and one of the few great villains of the MCU - Loki. Of course, this is also thanks in large part to the excellent performances of Mark Ruffalo and Tom Hiddleston in their respective roles. **** out of *****
__________________ My articles @ Dread Central and Diabolique Magazine In-depth analysis on horror, exploitation, and other shocking cinema @ Cinematic Shocks Last edited by Cinematic Shocks; 18th February 2018 at 12:38 AM. |
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17th February 2018, 03:15 PM
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 (I've tried to word that somewhat carefully so that I don't post a big spoiler).
keirarts likes this.
__________________ PSN user name: suspiria-inferno Xbox user name: suspiria742952 |
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17th February 2018, 03:44 PM
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17th February 2018, 10:05 PM
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'Devil's Domain' is available on stateside DVD and multi-region BD and is worth a punt if you're into morally dubious schlock with a high quota of ickyness to it, which almost certainly you are. |
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