I thought the Devils Backbone was a awesome atmospheric supernatural drama. Up there with some of the best ghost storys IMO.

Loved Pans Labyrinth and Hell Boy series is fun like people have said.

Im excited to see what Del Toro comes up with next but sadly he is busy with Hobbit movies to do anything else atm.

just watched The Shinjuku Incident, a marvellous film with a brilliant serious dramatic role for Jackie Chan without a flying ladder or insane stunt insight, and the police officer is from one of my fave jap flicks...Swing Girls..

Really want to see Shinjuku Incident, Jackie is a good actor and doesn't need to do stunt-based films all the time to be entertaining and make good films. New Police Story, although action-oriented, placed a lot of emphasis on the story too, so would recommend that to people who havn't seen it and who like more serious Jackie films.

I watched Fortress 2: Re-entry last night and really liked it, thought it was much better than Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars! OK its a bit silly but very entertaining, with good action choreography. I think Christopher Lambert puts Steven Seagal and JCVD to shame in terms of actual acting ability. And his fight scenes seem decent enough too. Watching Fortress 1 tonight (if the postman permits! :p), shame I had to watch them out of order but still, I'm looking forward to it as its directed by Stuart Gordon :D

Watched:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Over-long and boring!
Men Who Stare at Goats - Much fun.

Just watched VACATION MASSACRE with Joe Dallesandro.
Anyone who likes Lorraine De Selle naked for 60% of the film they're watching,won't be disappointed.:tongue1:

Splendid! I will forgive Raro the non-anamorphic transfer then!

:happy:

Believe me Goj,you won't be paying any attention to anamorphic transfers.:lol:

"House of Wax" (1953)

I was surprised at how wrong I got the first half of this film.
I've not seen it for many years and I forgot that Vincent Price is shown disfigured and going around killing people so early on.
I could have sworn the disfigured face was a big finale reveal (under the rather stupidly realistic wax mask that *shock* looks and moves exactly like Price's face) but I was wrong....and sure enough this first half of the film is by far the best.

The film goes from fast paced disfigured psycho flick to slow, achingly obvious, horror drama and the shift in tone is dramatic.
Thankfully Price is in good form here so it makes the obvious plotting more entertaining to sit through and at least the finale ups the macabre, even if Price's demise is rather blink and you miss it.

What really stands out here though is how great the film looks and how genuinely macabre as far as the attitude to corpses goes. Dead bodies are joked over, they're carted, carried, dumped and abused with grotesque abandon and the film does benefit from this macabre playfulness.
So it gets a bit bogged down and obvious later on but it still holds up, still entertains, Price is good and overall it's certainly recommended.

Inseminoid

On a far off planet (ie Chislehurst Caves in Kent) fair maiden Judy Geeson is raped by what appears to be one of the Silurians from Dr Who (whose genitals seem to comprise a test tube filled with creme de menthe), and goes totally insane. Eating the remains of some of her dead comrades, cackling and bleating hysterically (as was I), and displaying the worst PMT in the history of pregnancies. A far cry from the stunning 60's chick who disrobed charmingly in Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush and demurely asked Sidney Poitier "Do you shake?" in To Sir With Love (my all time favourite film incidentally).

A ghastly pile of cheap, boring, thundering rubbish from beginning to end. Performances ranges from the tolerable - a bored Stephanie Beacham, Rosalind Lloyd from Who Dares Wins & The Wild Geese (who wisely saws her foot off after 25 mins), and Victoria Tennant (who ends up bashed against a bathroom sink and tracheotomised with a pair of scissors) - to the outright awful (Robin Clarke and the appallingly bad Jennifer Ashley), and the film is devoid of anything resembling watchability. Judy tries her hardest (bless her heart - I wonder if she still shakes) but comes over as terrifying as a dead slug on the M1. Cheap sets, genuinely bad dialogue, one of the most annoying synth scores in horror history, bland tiresome characters, and not even in the 'so bad it's good' category (it's too bad even for that). It makes Xtro look like 2001.

Hard to believe this is from the same man who gave us Terror and the masterful Satan's Slave only a few years earlier.

Have to agree there Vince!
This film gets a lot of love and it delivers some sleazy grue...but it's just so damn boring and empty.
Spot on observations. :cool:

BUT I have to say that for me the same problem of 'sleaze and gore all there but still it manages to be damn boring and dull' also applies to "Satan's Slave" as well...even in its fully uncut, scissor vs pubes, International version.

Which is why I put Norman J Warren far below his fellow 70's horror/sleaze director Pete Walker.