What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Midnight Lace (1960)

Doris Day, Rex Harrison, Myrna Loy and Roddy McDowall star in this giallo style thriller about a newly wed American heiress just moved to London who suddenly begins receiving life threatening phone calls. As the narrative progresses the threats become real.

Not a bad little thriller at all and quite a departure for the likes of Day and Harrison, although had Loy's former on screen partner William Powell been around i'm sure he'd have worked out the who's and why's in about half an hour.

It's fairly pacy with red herrings galore and even one or two decent moments of genuine suspense as well, especially towards the finale, with Doris Day's performance a highlight as she really does seem to be living the role as she's terrorized in a delightfully macabre way.

[Paul Zombie]

The Children(1980)

A school bus drives through a cloud of yellow smoke after an accident at a nuclear power plant. and turns all the children into zombies who melt people after they touch them. and it is up to the local sheriff and his dopey deputy to stop them.

A rather silly but still entertaining film about creepy kids, that i first saw on VHS in the 1980's under the title The Children of Ravensback.
and with poor special effects and bad acting in the typical Troma style.
But the dispatch of the children is still quite controversial and effective as theyre pumped full of bullets and get chopped up with samurai swords. and is always more powerful when children are the victims and not adults.

Definitely worth a look, despite all the strange characters, including a couple of sex mad rednecks.

oh, and an interesting soundtrack as well that is a complete rip off out of Friday 13th. 69 out of 100.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Deathwatch (2002)

Of all the films that show the horrors of the Great War this is the one that sums it up best for me. It's story of a British platoon that hole up in a German bunker, deserted apart from the bodies of German soldiers strewn about the rat infested trench, deep holes beginning to fill up very quickly with incessant rain.

It really is a grim film, the narrative is almost secondary to the thick atmosphere of dread the young soldiers find themselves unable to escape from. There's a pervading sense of paranoia throughout as well as sporadic violence and horror that really goes for the jugular. One or two scenes even remind me of Soavi's The Church - I think it's the huge pile of German bodies in the middle of the trench which resembles an altar and is very Argento like when it begins eerily writhing.

Deathwatch isn't the best modern horror film about, far from it, but i'm tempted to say it's the best example of a horror film set during either the first or second World Wars.

[Inspector Abberline]

The Night Stalker (1972 film)
The first film in what would become a pretty successful TV show of the 1970s, and the first of a pair of groundbreaking TV horror films...While there filmed pretty much like most American television programmes of the 1970s, they look good and are competently made,they're not flashy or have none of the fast-paced editing or cinema special effects style that would come later in 1980s and the 1990s with the likes of Miami Vice and the explosion of sci-fi shows that filled the TV schedules on a Saturday team time and beyond. What really sets the TV films and Kolchak: The Night Stalker series is apart primarily down to the writing skills of Richard Matheson who did the films, and this was carried on into the series by various other writers who kept to the same style...But most of all the success of the shows has a lot to do with the late great Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak, the wisecracking but down at heal news reporter, who seems to be the only reporter who manages to come across anything weird..The other long-running character from the films who made into the tv series is Simon Oakland as Kolchak's long-suffering editor Tony Vincenzo, who unfortunately for him has to take the brunt of any trouble that Kolchak causes with the police or anybody in authority, which is pretty much every episode..The Night Stalker (1972 film) is a modern,(well for the time) updating of the vampire legend, which they would return to in the series episode The Vampire...While by today's standards the horror is very lightweight, the story is still interesting enough, and again the performances of McGavin and Oakland and their on-screen chemistry really add to the quality of it all..We also have a great supporting cast in Carol Lynley, Ralph Meeker and Claude Akins...The films and tv series are some of the best telly of the 1970s and highly rewatchable.

[gag]

Bohemian Rhapsody

Sam me and a friend who queen is his all time fav band watched it , we all enjoyed it and thought it was good, but also felt there was something lacking a tadge dull and bland and didn't think it lived up to the hype .

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Deadly Embrace (1989)

Dire attempt at an erotic thriller. Jan Michael Vincent is on auto pilot throughout in what is essentially an elongated cameo appearance and the rest of the cast - Chris Bauer, Linnea Quigley - are wooden in the extreme. Only Ty Randolph comes out with any credit as Vincent's sex starved wife.

The plot is minimal and the running time is padded out with Quigley and Michelle Bauer strip sequences in some sort of blue fantasy world.

Terrible.

Whoever wrote the synopsis on the back of the 88 Films release clearly never bothered to watch the film first.

[MrBarlow]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Deadly Embrace (1989)

Dire attempt at an erotic thriller. Jan Michael Vincent is on auto pilot throughout in what is essentially an elongated cameo appearance and the rest of the cast - Chris Bauer, Linnea Quigley - are wooden in the extreme. Only Ty Randolph comes out with any credit as Vincent's sex starved wife.

The plot is minimal and the running time is padded out with Quigley and Michelle Bauer strip sequences in some sort of blue fantasy world.

Terrible.

Whoever wrote the synopsis on the back of the 88 Films release clearly never bothered to watch the film first.

Is this one of those films that Channel 5 use to show on a Friday night?

[John Matrix]

The Peacock King - 5/10

Rather pish fantasy martial arts film with Yuen Biao. Cuople of decent set pieces in it though. The fight between Yuen Biao and Gordon Lui is half decent.


Magnificent Bodyguards - 5/10

Late 70s Lo Wei Jackie Chan film. It's ok, nothing special, lots of walking, some fight seens, then some more walking, then another fight scene. I think it's also the first HK 3D film and it steals the music from Star Wars. What more could you ask for.


Maniac - 6/10

Good plot twisty Hammer film from the early 60s. Has a kind of slasher vibe to it as well.


Fanatic (Die, Die My Darling) - 7/10

Good mad auld nutter woman genre Hammer film. House of Whipcord takes a good bit from this and no doubt there's many like it before and after.
Donald Sutherland plays a no richter that seems to have Night of the Living Dead make up on.

[Inspector Abberline]

London is in the grip of a series of bank robberies, and their modus Operandi being that they blast the banks with gold plated Purdey shotguns, escape, and always leave a certain amount of money behind on the back seat of there getaway car...So its down to Regan and Carter to catch the blaggers before there next robbery..After the first Sweeney film dealt with political corruption and politicians getting caught doing scandalous things..(in other words shagging prostitutes ) the second film sticks more closely to the TV series in that it deals with the more common bread and butter criminals we were used to seeing in the TV show,.And while the hi-jinx of the Sweeney is always fun to watch,most of the entertainment comes from the antics of its two main leads John Thaw as Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Dennis Waterman as Detective Sergeant George Carter, as they singlehandedly drink copiously and chat up any women they come across that takes there fancy in-between defusing bombs and chasing the crooks.
leading the supporting cast is Denholm Elliott playing a corrupt Chief superintendent and Nigel Hawthorne is Chief Inspector Dilke, and the rest of the flying squad are made up of familiar tv actors of the 1970s and 80s..Sweeney films are fairly successful in recreating the atmosphere and feel of the tv show and transporting it to the big screen, and it is nice now to see them in HD and see London in all its 1970s glory, with all its polyester suits and flares...This was then followed by Argentos Euro cut of Dawn Of the Dead..which is basically zombies in polyester ....Rip Flyboy...what no Gonk...

[MrBarlow]

2019: After the fall of New York. 1983.

After a nuclear war, the wasteland is divided by gangs. A mercenary is tasked to go in and find the only woman that is still fertile in a area controlled by the Euraks gang.

This is like a Italian rip off from Escape From New York, and Mad Max, but was enjoyable to watch with action and cheesy special effects and daft acting. With most Italian films George Eastman appears towering over everyone as the leader of a gang who seems to want out of New York. 5-6 out of 10