What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Make Them Die Slowly]

HE NEVER DIED

Henry Rollins plays a near autistic loner in this funny and brutal supernatural crime drama. Low budget but very well crafted this is a tour de force from Rollins who hold the film together with a very funny and detailed performance. Worth a look. Playing on Netflix presently.

PEE WEE'S BIG HOLIDAY

Basically a remake of "Big Adventure" but with a full on homoerotic story between Pee Wee and Joe Manganiello playing himself. It also has a sub plot homage to "Faster Pussycat Kill Kill". Excellent stuff and worth watching just for the sheer amount of sex metaphors in the scenes with Pee Wee and Manganiello...of course since Pee Wee is a middle-aged man child in make up, the general sexual tension has a genuine unnerving edge to it. Recommended.

[keirarts]

Alienate

I admit it, I bought this to watch because it has credit for an actor named Tatum Ponce. I'm juvenile. Ahem... Alienate is a film that tries to use genre to tell a story about a failing marriage, think another earth in terms and intentions. Its not great as the human drama is a little asinine and when that's supposed to underpin the whole movie then its a bit of an issue. Its a shame because a film where humanity is basically being exterminated, showing the plot through a backdrop of genocide that adds a really dark element to the proceedings.

Captain America

Not the Joe Johnston version, as I'm still working my way through some of my unwatched Cannon releases I went for the Albert Pyun one. Its weird coming back to the film after seeing Cap done with time and money to see what people with neither can do. It's not a well regarded picture and I can see why. The opening scene falls totally flat, Captain America is supposed to be a living legend. Here he loses his first fight and 'dies' anonymously, therefore its astonishing anyone even recalls who he is at all. Cap spends a lot of time fleeing from villains.. and here the henchman are a bunch of Eurotrash trustafarians led by the red skulls daughter. However, in spite of the low budget its actually sort of fun and Pyun is good at getting the most out of his budget. Plus the red skull is more interesting here as he's given a decent back story and a little depth.

Messenger of Death

Mis-sold on the cover as 'the vigilante is back - with a vengeance!' Messenger of Death is best approached as a whodunnit. The film opens with a brutal massacre of a mormon family and Chuck is a local newspaper man who begins investigating the incident, set against the snowy colorado mountains and seemingly tied to a grudge between two fundamentalist Mormon families.
It seems to be going for a witness-style plot that uses the crime plot to examine Mormon culture. while this seems to not work so well the film is still very well executed courtesy of assured dirction from J Lee Thompson.

Kinjite forbidden subjects

Released the year after Messenger and made by J Lee Thompson again, I would argue this is the better of the two. Bronson plays a cop with Rage issues, he works the vice beat and spends his days trying to bring down a nasty piece of work called Duke. Duke has been snatching kids up off the street, raping them and then pimping them out to various L.A low lifes. when the young daughter of a Japanese businessman is kidnapped Bronson must track the monster down.
Kinjite is a tough little film even by Bronson's standards, the ordeal of the businessman's daughter is genuinely harrowing and there's a bit more depth to his character this time round. Its not perfect, there is a sub plot about the Japanese businessman molesting chucks daughter on a bus that goes nowhere but overall this is well worth watching.

[Justin101]

Branded to Kill (1967)



If I was pitched a Yakuza/Gangster movie about a hitman who got all hot and bothered by the smell of rice steaming in the cooker I'd have thought you mad. I'm still not entirely convinced as it's one of the oddest of Japanese movies I've seen, but it's also bloody brilliant.
While the plot makes very little sense you kind of get the feel of it throughout the running time, but then this film isn't about the plot making sense it's about the set pieces which are some of the best I've seen in a long time. The scene at the docks where No. 3 is shooting from underneath the car is gripping stuff and all in all this is a highly recommended film.

The Martian (2015)



Probably the only film you're going to see about growing potatoes on Mars. This had me hooked from the opening sequence of the storm closing in and the team of astronauts abandoning the test facility. What follows is pretty wordy and not very actiony but it's exciting stuff all the same. Easily the best film I watched last week!

[Frankie Teardrop]

THE APPOINTMENT – Edward Woodward is a businessman who's been called away at short notice to sort out some kind of accident at one of his facilities. The only trouble is, his new appointment clashes with his daughter's end of year cello recital. Sounds like horror dynamite, huh? Think again. 'The Appointment', a little seen British chiller from the early eighties, is a near pitch perfect exercise in atmosphere. You get this right from the opening scene, where a bleak forensic voicover describes the disappearance of a schoolgirl after she takes a shortcut through the woods. We're told a psychopath is at large, but we can see from the footage before us that something decidedly supernatural is at work. Then we meet the Woodward clan, and it's apparent that there's a disturbing undercurrent affecting father and daughter. She's quite fixated on him staying for her concert, but he shrugs off her protestations and heads upstairs for a night of eerie dreams... or premonitions? 'The Appointment' certainly builds slowly, but it never once breaks with its unsettling vibe. The gradual manifestation of an otherwordly force in the house is suggested through a strong use of odd angled shots, lighting and subtle imagery. The camera stays with objects long enough to give them a sense of 'presence', and we see three dogs prowl at night and petals fall from a vase of flowers. In a way these are all quite obvious moves, but they do conjure a certain atmosphere. There's a heaviness at play, and sometimes it's difficult to pinpoint just why – some of the scenes with Woodward and his daughter are really uneasy for example, and it's not just the sense of there being something possibly incestuous about their relationship, but the interaction itself, silent faces lingering a little too long, oozing an ominous sense of things going wrong in the background. Spooky. Not bragging, but I don't often feel that much when I watch horror flicks beyond a sense of 'yay' when someone gets their head cut off or if something weird happens, but 'The Appointment' carried a twinge of low level dread in through my eyes and down to my stomach. It really does have the feel of one of those dreams where nothing much is happening on the surface but you know that something bad's around the corner. Criminally (and surprisingly) neglected these days, I'd read mention of it a few times before checking out an old VHS rip on YouTube the other day. It'd make perfect sense for the BFI to do something with it, and I really wish that someone would, because it's a great example of dour, understated but ultimately very disturbing British horror. Check it out where you can, I'm pretty sure 'The Appointment' will get under your skin.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Hunger (1993)

Tony Scott's film debut is a stylish take on Whitley Strieber's best seller about a vampire, Catherine Deneuve, who loses her partner, David Bowie, and sets out to replace him with scientist Susan Sarandon.

Scott, throughout his career littered his films with a certain 'style' that set him apart from his contemporary's for better or worse, and with this debut feature it is never more apparent. Scott's film is visually stunning, of that there is no doubt, bathing his sets in dark orange colours with billowing curtains a must. However, although set against a backdrop of vampiric decadence taking in differing centuries fashions and cultures in a wayward MTV style, the word vampire is never uttered once. Nor are fangs used in the drawing of blood. Instead it's an Egyptian knife in the form of a pendant that is used to lacerate the victims flesh and veins.

There isn't an awful lot of horror, although this i suspect is down to the source material. Horror being replaced by lesbian trysts between Deneuve and Sarandon in attempting to maintain the audiences attention, but what there is remains in the memory, especially Deneuve's demise at the hands of her many discarded lovers in the form of skeletal husks.

To me The Hunger remains interesting but non-essential viewing.

[Justin101]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

The Hunger (1993)

To me The Hunger remains interesting but non-essential viewing.

I've never seen it before and your review was selling it to me until the last line and now I don't know what to think

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Justin101

I've never seen it before and your review was selling it to me until the last line and now I don't know what to think

It's definitely worth a watch, though it is very much style over substance.

Don't take this the wrong way in relation to the above line, but going off your reviews and purchases i think you might like it.

You should certainly give it a go.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Do you know what i thought to myself as The Hunger's credits rolled?

"What would Jess have done to this material??"

[Demoncrat]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

Do you know what i thought to myself as The Hunger's credits rolled?

"What would Jess have done to this material??"

Thread it is then....

[Justin101]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

It's definitely worth a watch, though it is very much style over substance.

Don't take this the wrong way in relation to the above line, but going off your reviews and purchases i think you might like it.

You should certainly give it a go.

I've promised myself I wasn't going to buy anything else this month Perhaps it's on Sky Movies on demand, I'll check later hah