What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Wrong Turn (2003)

Wrong Turn was the movie that brought the backwoods horror genre kicking and screaming from the grave following it's seventies and early eighties heyday. I've always loved the genre from it's early beginnings with the likes of Deliverance and Race With the Devil through the likes of Tourist Trap and The Hills Have Eyes to later movies such as Southern Comfort, so seeing Wrong Turn on a cinema screen in 2003 brought me great joy.

Spawning five sequels of varying quality from the excellent (Bloody Beginnings) to the annoying (Left for Dead) and paving the way for a host of imitators and refreshing new blood, Wrong Turn remains an effortlessly entertaining backwoods horror film some seventeen years later. The characters are all fairly likable with a decent cast especially Buffy's Eliza Dushku to get behind, whilst a pacy script thrusts us into the action from the off with some startling tension thrown in whilst Stan Winston's excellent FX and make up prove the cherry on top of the cake.

[Dave Boy]

unnamed.jpg
THE BEAST OF HOLLOW MOUNTAIN (1956)

When cattle go missing in the shadow of Hollow Mountain, the locals talk of the place being evil.
The culprit is a dinosaur who causes mayhem by starting a cattle stampede at a town festival.

Based on a story by legendary special effects creator Willis O'Brian.
O'Brian for some reason did not do the stop motion for the movie.
A strange combination of two stop motion techniques were used. The dinosaur looks okay but only appears after over an hour in to the run time. The lead up is like some romantic soap opera with people fighting over the girl and the land.
The cowboys v dinosaurs idea by O'Brian would later go on to greater things in THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969)

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2 (2011)

Look, when i bought the original it was cheaper to buy the two film set than it was the single disc. Thought i'd better get it watched as we are nearing October and with the best will in the world this ain't no Halloween classic.

What it is is a bit of mindless fun. It's not as good as the first film but remains watchable with some funny lines and even funnier dog antics and at a mere 80 mins certainly doesn't outstay it's welcome.

I liked it enough so i don't give a **** what anyone else thinks

[J Harker]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Wrong Turn (2003)



Wrong Turn was the movie that brought the backwoods horror genre kicking and screaming from the grave following it's seventies and early eighties heyday. I've always loved the genre from it's early beginnings with the likes of Deliverance and Race With the Devil through the likes of Tourist Trap and The Hills Have Eyes to later movies such as Southern Comfort, so seeing Wrong Turn on a cinema screen in 2003 brought me great joy.



Spawning five sequels of varying quality from the excellent (Bloody Beginnings) to the annoying (Left for Dead) and paving the way for a host of imitators and refreshing new blood, Wrong Turn remains an effortlessly entertaining backwoods horror film some seventeen years later. The characters are all fairly likable with a decent cast especially Buffy's Eliza Dushku to get behind, whilst a pacy script thrusts us into the action from the off with some startling tension thrown in whilst Stan Winston's excellent FX and make up prove the cherry on top of the cake.

Get behind Eliza Dushku you say??

[gag]

Short stories told In random ways about life, mixed with live action and animation. Fascinating way to waste around 25min.


(Taken from Wikipedia page)
Why Man Creates focuses on the creative process and the different approaches taken to that process. It is divided into eight sections: The Edifice, Fooling Around, The Process, Judgment, A Parable, Digression, The Search, and The Mark


The voice over is very calm and soothing to listen to.

[gag]

Also been rewatching stuff by David firth, love his stuff,
Weird, bizarre, random etc etc also love some of the music in his stuff very atmospheric and disturbing as well .




Got to love a bit of salad fingers as well.

[Frankie Teardrop]

BLOODTIDE – From the director of ‘Island of Death’. Those hoping for something as curdled might be disappointed to find a leisurely travelogue with nice photography and a bad monster puppet at the end. ‘Lovecraftian’ in the eyes of some because of a certain level of fishiness, but I really wouldn’t stretch that far. Somehow though, I found myself liking it.

JACK’S BACK – Sometimes I wonder whether my fondness for these things really just stems from the look and feel of late eighties direct to video junk. ‘Jack’s Back’ is solid but not captivating, although it has good stuff going for it – not only the era-specific vibe, but an early turn from James Spader, here playing a gimmicky double role in this tale of potential resurgent Ripperdom. But it plays more like an angsty thriller than the slasher I was half expecting.

THE IMMORTALIZER – Get an empty house, some people who can play sinister doctors and a few bits of rubber and play-doh – you’re minted, you’ve got a horror classic in the can already. Well, you’ve got ‘The Immortalizer’. Perhaps a lot of the budget went on buying ‘Reanimator’ juice, here in abundance. Era-specific charm is once again the key to unlocking this treasure trove, though there may also be good times in store for those who just like desperate cheapness. A couple of crazy crazy things happen, like doesn’t someone get literally stabbed in the back at one point… with a gun? Scratch your head all you like, all it will do in the end is bleed.

PALE BLOOD – I liked this, ‘Pale Blood’ is definitely my thing. It’s from the late eighties / early nineties and I suppose marries a slightly art studenty “MTV rock video neon mist” vamp aesthetic to direct-to-video-meat-and-potatoes-B-movie-type-hackery. Or should I just say that it’s got Wings Hauser shouting at things (including; boiled eggs) and laughing like a maniac whilst meanwhile, across the city, some dude recites Baudelaire in slow motion in a hipster bar… and leave it at that? For those wanting to get specific, it’s about a soul-sick and existentially weary good-guy vampire on the streets of LA who spends a lot of his time looking nauseated and saddened by life and unlife, whereas Wings is a generally awful psycho Van Helsing type who pisses around making video art and being nasty to hookers. Good movie if you still have a couple of Poppy Z Brite paperbacks at the end of your shelf.

THE LIGHTHOUSE – Another good one. By ‘The VVitch’ guy, as a matter of fact. It has Robert Pattinson and Willem Defoe as lighthouse keepers stuck on a remote island with nothing much but their own crappy power dynamic to keep them company. Pattinson resents tyrannical Defoe and falls foul of wanktastic hallucinosis involving visions of a mermaid. We witness the battering of a seagull and some things too arcane and confusing to rightly fathom. The atmosphere is one of simmering madness where nothing is revealed with anything like the luminescence of a lighthouse beam… it may sound a bit too easy, but as a monochrome slump into nightmare, it seems genuinely unsettling.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by gag

Short stories told In random ways about life, mixed with live action and animation. Fascinating way to waste around 25min.


(Taken from Wikipedia page)
Why Man Creates focuses on the creative process and the different approaches taken to that process. It is divided into eight sections: The Edifice, Fooling Around, The Process, Judgment, A Parable, Digression, The Search, and The Mark


The voice over is very calm and soothing to listen to.

Did you watch that on YouTube or the Phase IV Blu-ray disc? I watched it with the other six Saul Bass short films on that 101 Films BD and thought they were mostly very watchable.

[gag]

Originally Posted by Nosferatu@Cult Labs

Did you watch that on YouTube or the Phase IV Blu-ray disc? I watched it with the other six Saul Bass short films on that 101 Films BD and thought they were mostly very watchable.

Youtube I’ll have to google the rest and watch them,

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019)

At times this in name only sequel to the mildly successful 47 Meters Down was quite a bizarre viewing experience. I was caught off guard during the first minutes when the soundtrack was Status Quo's Wild Side of Life from their 1976 album Blue For You. I'm sorry but Quo never feature on movie soundtracks, especially new genre movies, but from then on it got very strange as Aztec Camera's 80's classic Somewhere in my Heart featured heavily too.

Yet when we got underwater in some old sunken ruins things really became weird. Not only did we have gnarled, blind Great White sharks but we had the eerie muffled out hollow sounds of Roxette's The Look playing underwater as these ghostly looking sharks took on the spitting image of the statue's they were quietly hunting among, and with the soundtrack becoming more eerie by the minute with underwater sounds reminiscent of de Ossorio's Blind Dead movies, so much so that the final third was practically blind Templar sharks hunting young female swimmers through underwater ruins. Now that's cool.