Yeah you should watch it again, give it a chance and take it for what it is. I think its a grower and a film that is appreciated more second time i felt like that with a few of Bava's films namely (Hatchet For The Hooneymoon and A Bay Of Blood.)

And more Bava

I Vampiri - a film which Riccardo Freda originally directed but left on the last day of shooting so in stepped Mario Bava who was working on the film as a cinematographer. The film itself is an enjoyable film and a glimpse of what was to come with Bava's own Black Sunday. The special effects for the ageing scenes are amazing for it's time.

Black Sunday - wow what a film, a film that is very gruesome for it's time which led to it being banned in the UK for 8 years. Babara Steele is brillant in the main role(s), and the scenery is fantastic very creepy. It is amazing that the film is 55 years old it is ahead of it's time and can still be shocking today.

:cool::cool::cool::cool:

Untold story

Apparently based on a real-life murder case in Macau, Anthony Wong plays a crooked mah-jong cheat who kills a family of seven after being caught out. He carves them up and puts them in Pork buns which he serves to the public. While trying to claim legal ownership of the business, which is proving tricky given the owners 'disappearance' (Macau has a legal system based on Portuguese law given its status up until 1999 as a colony of Portugal) he proceeds to murder any employee who gets suspicious, throwing in a bit of rape for good measure when said employee is female. Once again, any meat is used in Wongs famous Pork buns! Meanwhile the police are closing in after some remains not suited for the buns washes up on the shore. Eventually the police capture Wong and the final third is devoted to him getting pretty much abused and beaten repeatedly until he confesses before topping himself.

Untold story is pretty much a definitive Cat 3 film. Some of the scenes are still pretty shocking today. It was apparently a big hit on release and spawned a sequel and numerous imitators. Future Tony Wong classic Ebola syndrome borrowed a bunch of stuff from it, especially the enforced cannibalism and rape, though Ebola is actually a more outrageous and over the top picture. Behind some of the sensationalism and over-the top violence, Untold story is a pretty decent true crime picture. If you can get it its worth a watch. The american DVD is pretty dear right now but the Thai release was £7.99 on ebay and is decent quality and english friendly.


Helter skelter

Continuing the evenings true-crime theme comes the TV movie account of the Manson murders, still one of the definitive accounts of what happened. The film starts with the Tate murders and continues on through to the capture and ultimate trial of manson and his family for multiple murders. The film is based on the true crime classic book which it gets its title from the Beatles song which one of the family wrote in blood at a crime scene. The closest film I can compare it to is Finchers ZODIAC which I consider to be one of the all-time great true crime pictures, along with Charles B pierces TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN.
I'm not really a big remake fan but another adaptation of this, with a Zodiac like approach to the material might be petty good. The only real difficulty would be finding someone as terrific as Steve Railsback as Manson, still THE greatest depiction of the cult leader and killer on screen to this day and never bettered.

With the earlier discussion of M Night Shyamalan, it could be that he has made his worst film yet with The Visit. This is what Mark Kermode wrote in The Observer:

There’s a terrible sense of dread lurking in M Night Shyamalan’s latest. Sadly, it has nothing to do with the boring shaky-cam story about two incandescently irritating teenagers spending some Grimm-lite time with their unhinged grandparents. Instead, it’s the horrible realisation that the film-maker who was lauded for The Sixth Sense, defended for The Village, and just about tolerated for The Happening, may actually have made a movie worse than Lady in the Water. Is it meant to be a horror film? Or a comedy? The publicity calls it “an original thriller” but it is neither of those things. Only “endurance test” adequately describes the ill-judged shenanigans that ensue, as our two young heroes film their estranged Nana and Pop-Pops scratching at the walls, puking on the floor, and mysteriously stockpiling soiled nappies in the woodshed. Can you spot the inevitable plot twist that lurks noisily in the corner? Can you listen to any more of little Ed Oxenbould’s cute comedy rapping without stabbing yourself in the ear? Can you get a refund? Bring back The Last Airbender!

Midnight (1982)

I was expecting a little bit more horror from this glorified travelogue than is actually onscreen. The films director John Russo might have been the writer of Night of the Living Dead but Midnight suggests his real love affair is with the likes of Easy Rider and the great American road trip.

It starts off promisingly with a decent pre-credits sequence which offers hope but then any horror aspects are dropped until the final fifteen minutes. I was hoping for a bit of grubbiness and seedy film making...I hoped wrong.

The Visit (2015) - 6.5/10

Funny, creepy, and just overall a fun time at the cinema. One of the better found-footage films.

N. a pris les dés... (1971)

An interesting experimental film from Alain Robbe-Grillet. N. a pris les dés... is basically the previous years Eden and After re-cut and re-edited to come up with a new film using the same footage.

There's not much in the way of story narrative and in a way if you've seen Eden and After you have seen it all before, but Robbe-Grillet has created a film with a different atmosphere here due to the fact that the footage although the same, is from different angles making it a bold experiment in editorial techniques rather than a coherent film in it's own right.

You clearly liked it much more than Mark Kermode did (see above).

So did my friends, they were jumping and laughing throughout and rated it 9/10 and 10/10! My scores are more realistic but it's fair to say I enjoyed it.

The average score at Rotten Tomatoes is 62, so not everyone is of the same opinion as Kermode.

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Really enjoyed this, so much so that I went and ordered more of the Cohen brothers films, if they are even half as good I will be happy. Not much really happens but with so many great characters, quotable lines and laugh out loud moments this is a film that will be getting many more viewings in the future. 10/10

The Big Lebowski is brilliant. What have you ordered treb? Fargo is one of their best.

In the what did you buy thread

When you are next shopping and have seen those, you should put No Country for Old Men and Blood Simple at the top of your list.

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Yes,it's that time of the year again...time to rewatch Night Caller.

Still entertaining,still suspenseful (even though I remembered part of the storyline),still feels slightly cut (possibly pre-release). ;)

What a silly question.

It's Trebor. He's ordered everything. :lol:

I went to a test screening for this in Manchester. Had a shit load of forms to fill in once it'd finished.

Shameless:

#17 - Oasis of Fear (1971): Really like this Ornella Muti is just stunning and can give Edwige a run for her money! Also love the soundtrack. Can anyone identify the song played at the disco and at the end! Shazam cant ID it!

#18 - Watch Me When I Kill (1977): This did absolutely nothing for me, didn't bore me, I just wasn't interested in it.

looking for recommendations of something unique to watch.

Rubber

Watched a couple of different films tonight.

Cube - one of my all time favourites, shows that not all low budget horror sucks!

Curse Of Chucky - a fresh and welcome return to the original film's tone without the comedy of Bride/Seed.

Eaten Alive (Death Trap)

Neville Brand is a Hotel Keeper living out near the swamps with an enormous Crocodile. One night a hooker, thrown out of her cat house for refusing Robert Englund's demands for Anal sex, heads out to his hotel to spend the night. Brand wants 'none of that sort of thing' and promptly kills her with a rake and feeds her to the Croc. Pretty soon a young family turn up as does the hookers family and poor old Neville will likely need to kill again.

Death trap arrives on Blu-ray finally looking like it does, previous releases looked far to washed out and battered to really get across how the film should look. Hooper always intended a surreal, southern-gothic fairytale atmosphere to the film with a lurid, unreal colour scheme that makes the film look like pages from an E.C horror comic. The film is full of odd moments and characters, chiefly Brands character who seems to be perpetually wired from the coke that Englunds cowboy is supplying in exchange for use of his rooms. Maralyn Burns & William Finley play a couple who seem almost as outright weird. Burns character is a pill popping neurotic who wears a wig for no explicable reason and Finley seems to be tripping on something, constantly lapsing into weird moments where he believes he's lost his own eye and begins looking around the floor for it. The fact that he has a shotgun and shells lying around in the trunk next to the family luggage is somewhat worrying. Robert Englund is also terrific as the local ladies man buck, who seems to veer from playful man-child to ruthless, angry psychotic at the flip of a switch.

Death trap has some problems, mainly due to the chaotic nature of the production where Hooper ultimately walked off due to interference, certain moments don't work as well as they should. Dath Trap is an underrated film hower and deserves a reappraisal. The fact that a number of its harsher critics may have only seen the film in battered washed out prints probably factors in to this. Hopefully Arrows Blu-ray will change some minds.


Hard to be a god

On a distant planet, scientists from earth live among the medieval locals as gods thanks to their advanced knowledge, quietly they guide the locals to civilisation. However, its hard to be a god, especially when the locals are seen to be barbaric and difficult. One lord has begun a 'cultural revolution' after society threatened to enter a renaissance and the scientists are carefully shelterting and saving the intellectuals and artists the lord is having murderd. One scientist is seemingly 'going native' and has begun a relationship with a local woman, he struggles with trying to limit his interference with the locals culture and slowly things begin to unravel.

Hard to be a god will be a difficult film for some. Combined with the almost 3 hour running time Aleksey German delivers a film that has a style that may bewilder some of the audience. Every scene is densely layered, dialogue overlaps, in some scenes we enter mid way through. the camera seems to act as another camera, cast members seem aware of its presence and even look directly at it. Partly this is explained by the fact the scientists have cameras in built and we may be seeing through them, but combined with the theatricality of the performances and the strange movements of the camera it left me not quite knowing where I was in some scenes. The muddy, piss and shit caked sets that seem to perpetually rain look magnificently disgusting as do the unusual and grotesque characters the director fills the frame with. Overall though it worked for me as an immersive piece of cinema that given its subject matter on the difficulties of interfering with other cultures seems very relavant today. Certainly worth giving a chance to.

I'm very much looking forward to checking out Hard to be a God at some point. As soon as it's in an Arrow sale I shall be picking it up.

Watched CLOWN and TARANTULA over the weekend. Clown was mediocre; while Tarantula was entertaining. No extras on the Clown disc, I've yet to watch the Tarantula extras.

Rubber is unique and brilliant. Holy Motors also fits that description.

Alien

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I watched Alien with my flatmate who had never seen it before, he's a sucker for a strong female lead so I knew he'd love this one. Immediately he was drawn into the film and every time I looked over he was biting his fists with tension! He gasped out loud when Lambert slapped Ripley (we were watching the Director's Cut) and he seemed to be very concerned over the fate of the cat :lol: It never ceases to amaze me how well made this film is, to be able to make a haunted house film set in space, to make it scary and tense as well as very human is a good skill. My flatmate commented on how modern it looked and he expected it to look quite old fashioned for a film made in the 70's - I have to agree, apart from 'Mother' and the computer screens on display, there isn't much in the film to give away the period of filming.

The Maze Runner

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I was going to go see this on the big screen, but at the last minute got cold feet, worried that it was going to be crap and £20 down the drain. Now it's on Sky Movies so I gave it a go. It's firmly in the "not as bad as I was expecting it to be" camp. I actually found myself quite enjoying this teen adventure movie which is both well made and well acted, in the most part. I suppose that the premise of the film is it's worst attribute, I found myself jokingly saying to my mate during the film "I've seen Lord of the Flies already", "I've seen Labyrinth already" and funny enough "I've seen Alien already..." in reference to the creatures inside the maze.
That being said, the action was well orchestrated and the tension was well executed, and I found myself holding my breath while scenes unfolded! Not a perfect film but very enjoyable and I'm intrigued about the checking the books out afterwards.

Wrong Cops
Amer
Eden Log
The Voices
3 Iron
Life & Death Of A Porno Gang
The Apple
Taxdermia

Watched
Electric Boogaloo (2014, Mark Hartley)
:pound: What a hoot, from Lemon Popsicle to buying up Cannes, the whole hair raising story (well....). Recommended!!

Tender & Perverse Emanuelle (1973, JF)
Grubby, venal, sordid. But enough about my weekend. Who killed her? With Jack Taylor's face getting in the way of the investigation, we may never know.....the somewhat washed out print may add to this. Recommended?

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Watched the amazing Russian film, Край (2010) released in the UK with the daft title of The Edge of War and the usual cover-art trying to sell a film as an action packed war movie.

Instead it is a beautiful arthouse production, darkly ethereal, set in a remote forest internment camp deep in Siberia for those considered traitors by Stalin for having been captured by the Germans during the war. Trains race through long endless forests, a strange abandoned locomotive sits on an island across a river, the main character struggles to find it and discovers a feral German woman hiding aboard. Very little happens, yet so much does.

If you like smart movies, this is one for you - The Edge review. The Horizon DVD is meh, but the best available with English options.


Also, that was my 500th review!

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Saw Class of 1999 last night. This dumb schlocky 1990 flick with Stacy Keach, Pam Grier, Malcolm McDowell and Fright Night II sex goddess Traci Lin sees three humanoid androids sent into reinstill discipline into a school overrun by gang violence, but they soon go out of control and start killing the students left, right and centre. Have fond memories of this, and there's some fun to be had, especially in the first half, but it gets a bit tedious toward the end and hasn't aged all that well. Keach is having fun hamming it up as the mad scientist behind the project, and Traci Lin is gorgeous, but compared to FNII there's not much to her character and she has little to do. A bit meh.

Avengers Age of Ultron (2015) Passable mainstream. But Olsen as Scarlet Witch...Noooooooooooooo!

I was home unwell yesterday so I took advantage of the situation and had a movie marathon! My watch pile is huge and growing every day, unfortunately some of my choices were not really good for someone feeling down in the dumps and sick in bed :lol:

Blastfighter

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I've never seen this Lamberto Bava action epic before, in fact until 88 announced it I had never even heard of it! Going from the gaudy gun-toting cover artwork the film wasn't even remotely like what I was expecting, in fact the first 45 minutes is pretty gentle fare with some human drama, ex-con cop back in his home town and trying to get on with his life but the locals don't want him to have an easy ride... It quickly escalates into Deliverance with guns! It's a fun film and helped probably by the fact that Michael Sopkiw is a DILF :lol:

Antichrist

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OK, this is the first of my film mistakes - although I guess that makes it sound like I didn't enjoy the film right from the off which isn't true. I actually really liked this film up to a point... and that point was Chapter Four: The Three Beggars. I enjoyed the psychological intensity of everything up until that point, well enjoyed isn't the right word really, appreciated maybe! I think my main problem is that Charlotte Gainsburg is not all that interesting to watch unlike for example, Adjani is in Possession. I actually remember thinking that it's been a while since a film has actually made me feel uncomfortable while watching and that is quite an achievment, no-one can deny that von Trier is a master of his craft and in fact one of the last times I felt as utterly disconnected from reality and quite un-nerved was when I first watched Dancer in the Dark. All in all, a good film, very bleak and not the correct film for my frame of mind at the time but I'm not in any rush to revisit it!

Norwegian Wood

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Film mistake number 2 came in the afternoon when I momentarily forgot the plot of the Haruki Murakami book that this film was based on. I just thought, 'oh that's a film about love i'm sure that'll cheer me up after Antichrist' but no, it's much more than that. It's a film about loss, about never recovering from the death of a close one, about suicide. It's set in Tokyo 1968 against the back drop of student rioting which is mirroring the main character Watanabe's inner turmoil. His best friend killed himself at 17, we don't find out why we just see indications that his life was great he was doing well in school, he was popular and he had a long time girlfriend Naoko. Watanabe goes off to university and one day he sees Naoko in park, suffice to say she's still very troubled from the loss and thus begins and emotional rollercoaster for everyone. It's a good film with a great soundtrack from Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, the cast are really good actors but the story was so sad that I didn't quite know what to do with myself by the end of the film.

Elvira Mistress of the Dark

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Let's put this out there, I love the idea of Elvira but I had never seen this film before and I wish that I had left it that way. There are some good bits in this film and I can see what they were trying to do but I think that the script was a major mis-step which unfortunately was co-written by Cassandra Peterson herself... The jokes fell flat but there were a few quotable moments which were good such as "Oh well, there's nothing wrong with G-rated movies, as long as there's lots of sex and violence."
I wonder now whether I should give the sequel a miss :lol:

The "sequel" to Elvira would have been much better if played straight imho,I liked the first one though. ;)

Watched these:

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Robot Jox

In the future, after a global nuclear war humanity has found a more measured and reasonable way of solving issues and disputes over territory. Giant robots. So, the current champion is heading to the end of his career and is looking to be replaced by 'tubies' test tube robojoxers who are designed purely to fight in the huge robots designed for this purpose. After a tragic accident kills numerous spectators, the champ decides to quit, however after falling in love with one of the tubers he realises he must get back in the cockpit and finish the job as well as uncovering the spy who is revealing the secrets of his teams robot.

Well directed by Stuart Gordon, who seems to have framed the interesting or somewhat slight plot as an excuse to feature giant robot action, the film delivers this in spades in spite of a restrictive budget. Well detailed set design and carefully shot model work that took several years to complete, the finished work still holds up today in HD. The model work is done with amazing care and attention to detail and the robot combat is well choreographed and shot to make a film that I'm glad to say is still a thrilling experience even once the fog of nostalgia is cleared. It looks bloody stunning on Blu-ray as well.

Pacific rim.

After Jox I decided to double bill it with this to see how it holds up against state of the art CGI. The temptation to do a hatchet job subsides while watching as the effects work here is well considered and well delivered with attention to detail. while there is a certain charm to Jox's practical effects, the action here holds up thanks to the care and attention of the film-makers. It helps that Pacific rim was the film that delivered way more than the bigger Godzilla remake in terms of action and entertainment.

Noose for a Lady (1953)

An excellent, largely unknown British whodunit in the Agatha Christie / Dashiell Hammett mold. The story centres on a man who returns from abroad to find his cousin has been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to death. Worse still her execution is only seven days away. Dennis Price is excellent as he pokes around into the affairs of the village where his cousin lived. Everyone seems a suspect and more corpses turn up as the mystery deepens.

Noose for a Lady is a terrific little film with a final sequence reminiscent of The Thin Man film series. However the rest of the film is tense and compelling piece which grabs you in the opening five minutes and refuses to let go. It's also remarkable that it's written so well that i didn't work out who the real murderer was until the final five minutes.

Another superb release from Network. Highly recommended.

Sold!!

I was really impressed. Quite often these old British films sound better than what you actually get onscreen but this was a proper gem.

The redeemer


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEgxB3_3YBo

Upcoming low budget Chilean action movie. Very well choreographed action scenes and manages a solidly entertaining 90 minutes for your buck. Don't want to say a whole lot though it would be hard to spoil a film that is pretty much what it looks like but I'm suitably impressed enough that I'm going to buy it.

My interest was piqued as soon as you mentioned 'Agatha Christie'. :nod:

Cursed

Thanks to the heads up in the Wes Craven thread,I realised the uk dvd of cursed was cut (so thanks for that) I purchased the unrated region 1 DVD which is 7 minutes longer that is a hell of a big difference. I already liked the film whilst blissfully unaware but now I REALLY love it as 2 of the cuts from the uk disc were obvious immediately. One of my favs by Wes. 9/10


My soul to Take

Oh dear the second in my Wes Double bill wasn't quite so great. In Fact it is a cringey pile of :ack::horse::scared: Unlike Wes to turn out such a poor turn. Awful dialogue,annoying cast & plot lost the plot... 2/10


I Saw The Devil


I didn't see the devil but I did see a crazy old git who takes time out of driving a schoolbus to rape and brutally murder half the population of Japan. He makes the mistake of killing the lover of James Bond on Steroids who soon plays him at his own game. Fantastic film 8/10


Nomads

Olivia Richards from Sunset Beach (Lesley Anne Down) Faints in this film when life gets hard too! Mind you if Pierce Brosnan grabs you and whispers something naughty in your ear then you're haunted by motorbiking Eskimos you'd want to faint too. Enjoyable but bloody bizarre film 7/10