What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[J Harker]

I found there's not really much between Malone and Road House that came a few years later.

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[Frankie Teardrop]

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (the new one, not the old one) – Cronenberg seems to have distilled his own essence and siphoned it off into an avant-garde vat – in fact, I’m surprised that image didn’t turn up onscreen in ‘Crimes Of The Future’, the director’s much heralded return to the theme of dystopian bodily transformation. It’s set in a Kafka-Burroughs-Ballard world of rooms full of dust and unknowable agents, where David Cronenberg, ehm sorry Saul Tensor (played by Viggo Mortenson), an aging artist, muses on the meaning of his work, mortality, and destiny as shadowy organisations concerned with an incipient order of new human bio-social organisation gather around him. If that sounds like a potential recipe for something like ‘Scanners’ or even ‘Videodrome’, re-read that bit about aging artists and mortality; COTF is not without drama, and the squish factor is heightened, but the mode is contemplative, reflective, and there’s a still, painterly feel to its images and tableaus that approaches a kind of serenity. I loved the dialogue more than anything, its constant uber-stylised abstraction; this, together with the sense that the film is basically a tick list of the director’s obsessions, made it seem almost parody-Cronenberg, which I quite liked.

TIMECRIMES – Great Spanish thriller follows a guy who gets tangled in a crime scene in the middle of a forest and finds that his only escape route is the time machine at the top of the hill. If that sounds difficult to pull off, it’s a credit to director Nacho Vigalondo that disbelief is well and truly suspended; here, that’s in favour of quite an eerie atmosphere and a tragic-ironic sense of the protagonist’s (read: humanity’s) need to reconstruct the loathed past. It has the philosophical abstraction common to a lot of time twisters, but a more melancholic tone. It’s also very suspenseful. Heady stuff; I remember admiring it a while back, surprised there’s no UK BD, but then I guess it came out just before the first HD wave broke.

WILDERNESS – This is a bit like ‘Scum’ vs ‘The Most Dangerous Game’. Kids from a young offenders institute are sent to a remote island to learn some manners in the wake of another inmate’s death, and find that they’re not alone etc. Look beyond this unlikely plot device and you’ll see gruff Sean Pertwee being ripped apart by hounds; prior to that he was on good form, playing his usual ‘type’. Otherwise, check out all the early noughties Brit TV faces, most of whom also get hacked by some means or other. This UK backwoods slasher variant is a good laugh, and quite endearing.

[MrBarlow]

99 Homes. 2014.

Andrew Garfiled plays the single parent living with his mum Laura Dern, when he looses his job and home repossessed by estate agent Michael Shannon. Garfield begins working with him and tries to get even with him.

Parts of the film is moving and also infuriating as both Dennis and Carver ruthlessly evict people with the help of the compliant police. They stand no chance in court as the judges are against those in arrears and Carver is always one step ahead making sure any embarrassing paperwork disappears. Ramin Bahrani co-wrote and directed this rather powerful and thought-provoking film that deals with the market crash and almost close to a true story that happened to a man and a corrupt estate agent, for a blind watch this was decent.

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[trebor8273]

15 years after a vampire is killed who was small terrorising a small village , a circus comes to the town and soon strange things start happening , could the evil vampire be back and what does the circus have to do with it. A very enjoyable hammer that doesn't have any of the stalwart names but we have many familiar faces including Lila ward , David Prowse and Thorley Walters.




When a high school student has premonition that the plane he is on is going to explode he gets throwing of with some other students and not long after the plane does explode .

They think they have been lucky and have cheated death, but they aren't so lucky when the survivors are killed off in what looks like accidents . It's a very interesting idea replacing the usual serial killer with death itself and the deaths are all very imaginative and interesting . A classic in my opinion


Now watching

[MrBarlow]

The Ambassador. 1984.

I know one of my fellow cultist reviewed this one not long back which drawn me to give this a re-watch. This has a good star cast with Robert Mitchum as the American ambassador in Israel trying to organise a peace treaty. Ellen Burstyn as the wife having affair with jeweller Fabio Testi who is hiding something. Rock Hudson as the tough bodyguard to Mitchum and Donald Pleasance as the Israelian Defence Minister.

Two big names lead the film with Hudson and Mitchum this should be a treat but things were not happy behind the scenes yet on screen both act professional. The film follows a near religious war that both sides try to create a peace treaty while others rather have a war and create a blackmail scandal. For a Cannon thriller this was enjoyable.

The_Ambassador_1984_poster.jpg

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Villain (1971)

Richard Burton stars as Vic Dakin, a London crime lord who agrees to orchestrate the robbery of a wages van. However, when he's forced to work with another gangster’s firm, Dakin is less than enthused.

Burton is once again excellent in this gritty crime drama. He's a Hollywood drinking legend and personification of male masculinity but is also at ease playing Dakin who is essentially an overweight homosexual mummy's boy, albeit one who's sadistically violent and likely to slash your face with a razor. The scenes with him caring for his elderly mother quite a juxtaposition to the violence inflicted on others. Dakin is a brave role for such an actor of Burton's standing.

The robbery is brilliantly staged, naturally it doesn't go quite to plan which makes it all the more gripping viewing. After what has gone previous seeing the gang make their escape in a beat up car with a flat tire is the blackest of comedy.

It has to be black comedy because there's barely a glimmer of light or hope during the films 98 minutes. Aside from Nigel Davenport and Colin Welland as the police inspectors tracking Dakin everyone else is damaged or disturbed in some way. Be it the gang members, including Dakin's bi-sexual lover as played by Ian McShane, or the corrupt MP (Donald Sinden) out for cheap sex with girls barely out of their teens who ends up being bribed by Dakin.

It's this gritty realism, embellished by the decay of a post swinging sixties London, that makes the film stand out. Over time Villain has gotten a bit lost in British film history because it hit screens the same year as Get Carter which rightly or wrongly takes all the plaudits, however for me i prefer this due to Burton's uncompromising performance.

The Blu-ray from StudioCanal looks fantastic with excellent depth and detail to it's image.

[gag]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (the new one, not the old one) – Cronenberg seems to have distilled his own essence and siphoned it off into an avant-garde vat – in fact, I’m surprised that image didn’t turn up onscreen in ‘Crimes Of The Future’, the director’s much heralded return to the theme of dystopian bodily transformation. It’s set in a Kafka-Burroughs-Ballard world of rooms full of dust and unknowable agents, where David Cronenberg, ehm sorry Saul Tensor (played by Viggo Mortenson), an aging artist, muses on the meaning of his work, mortality, and destiny as shadowy organisations concerned with an incipient order of new human bio-social organisation gather around him. If that sounds like a potential recipe for something like ‘Scanners’ or even ‘Videodrome’, re-read that bit about aging artists and mortality; COTF is not without drama, and the squish factor is heightened, but the mode is contemplative, reflective, and there’s a still, painterly feel to its images and tableaus that approaches a kind of serenity. I loved the dialogue more than anything, its constant uber-stylised abstraction; this, together with the sense that the film is basically a tick list of the director’s obsessions, made it seem almost parody-Cronenberg, which I quite liked.

TIMECRIMES – Great Spanish thriller follows a guy who gets tangled in a crime scene in the middle of a forest and finds that his only escape route is the time machine at the top of the hill. If that sounds difficult to pull off, it’s a credit to director Nacho Vigalondo that disbelief is well and truly suspended; here, that’s in favour of quite an eerie atmosphere and a tragic-ironic sense of the protagonist’s (read: humanity’s) need to reconstruct the loathed past. It has the philosophical abstraction common to a lot of time twisters, but a more melancholic tone. It’s also very suspenseful. Heady stuff; I remember admiring it a while back, surprised there’s no UK BD, but then I guess it came out just before the first HD wave broke.

WILDERNESS – This is a bit like ‘Scum’ vs ‘The Most Dangerous Game’. Kids from a young offenders institute are sent to a remote island to learn some manners in the wake of another inmate’s death, and find that they’re not alone etc. Look beyond this unlikely plot device and you’ll see gruff Sean Pertwee being ripped apart by hounds; prior to that he was on good form, playing his usual ‘type’. Otherwise, check out all the early noughties Brit TV faces, most of whom also get hacked by some means or other. This UK backwoods slasher variant is a good laugh, and quite endearing.

I tried watching Cronenberg COTF few days ago, not sure why I just struggled to take to it and get into it. I’ll try again soon.
For some reason quite a few films I struggle to get into these days, I couldn’t take new evil dead rise film either .

[Frankie Teardrop]

Seem to have been doing a lot of re-watches recently;

ALMOST HUMAN – Joe Begos has made some fairly arresting films of late – ‘VFW’, ‘Christmas, Bloody Christmas’, ‘Bliss’ etc. I think this is from when he was cutting his teeth. It’s certainly from before his gelled lighting fixation, though his love of eighties horror is evident; it’s basically a riff on hostile alien stuff from that decade and contains references to everything from ‘The Thing’ to ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’. There’s even a nod to ‘Inseminoid’ for the sake of additional yucks, although the gore and gloop don’t quite reach the level of his later work. Pretty solid, there’s a stiltedness that doesn’t quite connect, but at only just over an hour it's brisk and painless enough.

A CANDLE FOR THE DEVIL – Seventies Spanish horror from the director of classic ‘Horror Express’. It’s about two spinsters who run a guest house in an out-of-the-way tourist spot and take a murderous dislike to anyone who seems a bit too decadent for their particular brand of warped Catholicism. Judy Geeson hits town and messes things up for them. It’s a film I always quite like to revisit; there’s a good pace, a nice sun-baked atmosphere to contrast with all the sturm und drang, and a couple of lovely ‘Pan book cover moments’ such as a severed head bubbling up in a tureen full of soup (yes, forced cannibalism is their other gig, judging by what’s on the menu at their inn).

NO ONE LIVES – Luke Evans is, I guess you could say ‘a man with a past’, who ends up on the receiving end of the ire of a semi-competent biker gang… guess which way the tables turn? It’s an enjoyable action horror romp full of ridiculous characters and lovely absurdities such as a holiday trailer decked out with sophisticated murder devices, thrown together at pace marred only by the inevitable mid-section sag. Nice after-hours cinematography with that ‘roadside diner neon glow’ feeling about it, though it was made before the eighties fixation became stylistic formula (2012 I think in this case). Stick it on whenever you find yourself haunted by the question “is there any room left in today’s cinematic landscape for mindless, brutal exploitation?” According to ‘No One Lives’, it’s a probable “yes”.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986)

Well, Frankie, because of your wonderful review i watched it again. My personal favourite and once more i had a great time returning to Forest green.

The most entertaining film in the long running series in which not a single scene is wasted. The story begins straight from the off with Jason's resurrection and it never slows until the closing credits as the corpses build up throughout as masked killer Jason Vorhees makes his way back to Camp Crystal Lake (renamed Forest green you know, so everyone would forget a maniacal killer returning every few years) with inventive blood thirsty flair.

The plot is further up the evolutionary scale from simply killing teens at a summer camp, there's an actual story with real characters and yet there's also a kill scene every five minutes or so i'd guess. Thom Matthews and Jennifer Cooke make for an appealing double act you can get behind, Cooke in particular is a great heroine, the kind of girl you know you'd have a great time with and get into a spot of trouble along the way.

There's some clever editing taking place throughout as scenes seamlessly blend into one another. Take the drunk old timer who digs graves. His scene ends with him quizzically asking "Do you think i'm a jackass? To which a group of kids in the next scene all cheer "Yes". Simple quirks that set this apart from the usual slasher dreck. Then said drunk lovingly gazes at his empty bottle of whisky proclaiming "You'll be the death of me" before Jason crushes it and sticks it in his neck.

Throw in a couple of classic eighties Alice Cooper songs and a Bond inspired start to the opening titles and you have the perfect Friday the 13th film.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Sweet Sixteen (1983)

A slasher film unoriginal in plot yet somehow seemingly quite fresh and very enjoyable.

It may be the usual teens getting murdered by a mysterious killer, who may or may not be the pretty fifteen year old new girl in town (Aleisa Shirley, 20 at the time of filming and looks it) who is fast approaching her 16th birthday storyline, but an unusually strong cast including Bo Hopkins who seems to elevate anything he's in to proper movie status, Patrick Macnee and Susan Strasberg, and underlying themes of small town bigotry make Sweet Sixteen stand out from the crowd.

The sub Barry Manilow theme song is so excruciating it needs to be heard to be appreciated and the final shot is a slasher classic.