What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[bleakshaun]

Originally Posted by trebor8273

might give this a watch after back to the future 2, Shatner is always a laugh and doesn't seem to care about setting himself up!

It's a decent enough b movie for the festive season

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[Demdike@Cult Labs]

December 20th - All Through the House (2015)

A deranged killer masked as Santa comes to town for some yuletide-terror.

For the first hour this was so promising. Christmas exploitation at it's finest. Full of T&A and with some of the most gruesome slashings i can recall - Shears through breasts, cocks sliced off - that sort of sick and twisted thing.

However it bogs itself down in it's final third as twists become laughable family legacy revelations when it should have been a Santa slaying massacre. Having said that this was excellent for two thirds and had it been released in the 80's it would be legendary and have had Arrow and 88 Films chomping at the bit to release it.

Incidentally my favourite of the modern Santa Slasher films is still the 2012 Malcolm McDowell slicer Silent Night.

[Frankie Teardrop]

ANOTHER SON OF SAM – Who knows what drove the makers of ‘Another Son of Sam’? I guess the bare fact of getting something onto celluloid was enough to justify it being released back in the seventies. ASOS is much creakier than most low-end grindhouse shit, and is a wonderment of non-event. Some killer escapes from a psych ward, breaks into a university dorm and the cops are called… that’s about it. A certain spell is woven here, although it might not necessarily work on you… it depends on how much you can, not only stand, but get into, a bunch of people, badly shot, just kind of talking things over, whilst the camera stutters and homes in on random objects and close ups now and then. We only get to see ‘this other Son of Sam’ through a repeated shot of his eyes. Pretty cool, if your vision of cinema is a sideburns-heavy update of H G Lewis with no gore and even less coherence.

WILD BEASTS – Someone’s only gone and laced Germany’s water supply with PCP, leaving a zooload of animals freaked and on the rampage… cue heroics from macho vet guy and Lorraine De Selle. I always felt a bit ‘arms length’ about Prosperi and the whole Mondo schtick… this, though, hits the crazy button, but isn’t without problems of its own. There are some great set-pieces, such as a cheetah racing towards its victim in the centre of the city in the night, majestic elephants trashing everything in sight and a polar bear done up with a fish-eye lens menacing kids in a school. The animal attacks are gory and trashy, and really hit home when the damage is being done to humes… they lose points in my eyes when it comes to the animal-on-animal stuff, though. It may never get as bad as the kind of thing you might see in a cannibal movie of the same vintage, but still. Also, ‘Wild Beasts’ has a bit of a leering attitude when it comes to nine year olds – this isn’t the kind of tepid ‘nature attacks’ TV movie you’d get in the seventies / eighties. A bit fried, a bit curdled, and doubtless exactly the kind of messed up, synth addled fantasia people wish eighties horror was more often like, but remember, Franco, rodents have feelings too.

THE SEEDING OF A GHOST – Really good, HK horror that delivers – maybe not to the extent of sanity-battering blitzkriegs like ‘The Boxer’s Omen’, but enough to guarantee its viewer a walk on the weird side, for sure. A humble cabbie crosses paths with a black magician, and finds that his wife ends up raped and murdered… he enlists dark forces in the name of revenge, thus unleashing a load of eighties horror-style special fx, including yucky HK mainstays from around the time such as the vomming of worms. Could’ve been a bit more of that kind of thing for my liking (it’s a specific kink of mine), but there’s pretty much plenty of everything else, from spectral corpse shagging to the ‘The Thing’ tribute at the climax, which is just crazy and is something to behold and treasure. Actually, it’s more like a ‘Deadly Spawn’ tribute, come to think of it. A film of two halves, really – a patchy but intermittently juicy first half hour, then a load of incessant wackiness. That floats my boat.

DISCONNECTED – Sorry to gush, but Vinegar Syndrome have been brilliant recently – first ‘Blood Beat’, then ‘Liquid Sky’… never in a thousand years could I have imagined ‘Disconnected’ making it to BD, but, here we are. I’ve reviewed it before, but ‘Disconnected’ is a very weird slasher movie that, well, isn’t really much like a slasher movie – but it is very weird, and is pretty ‘disconnected’ in more ways that one. It’s about a small-town video store clerk who tangles with a mysterious stranger whilst some local murders are going down. At the same time, she starts receiving some odd phone calls that sound like someone jamming with Merzbow. Really cheap looking with a threadbare ambience, but it’s more student art-film than grindhouse, or some cross between the two – it’s noirish and expressionistic, with more than a casual nod to Hitchcock. It’s always lazy to compare strange cinema to David Lynch just because of its oddness, but, like ‘The Deathwish Club’, ‘Disconnected’ feels a bit Lynch before that modern-day master had developed his house style – many of the preoccupations, and some of the stylistics, are there. From the director of ‘Psychos in Love’. Thanks once again to VS for rescuing another obscurity from the vault.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Irreverent and informative reviews of four films of which I was previously unaware, so thank you for giving me a chuckle with your witty prose and bringing them to my attention, Frankie.

[Frankie Teardrop]

Thanks, Nos. Very kind.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

Thanks, Nos. Very kind.

Actually, I'd forgotten about The Seeding of a Ghost, which I have seen (I have the 88 Films Blu-ray release) and thought was insanely brilliant in a similar way to Bewitched. Because it's been a while since I saw it, it's certainly not something I could review in such a visual way as you did, something which has bumped it up to near the top of the pile of things I bought recently and need to rewatch.

[trebor8273]

original and still the best. 9/10





when i was younger this used to be my favourite but not now, but still a great movie thats part of great trilogy. 8/10




8.5/10




decent enough but as bleakshaun said with jumping back and fourth between the storys made them less immersive and annoying to watch. 6/10

was going to wait till Christmas eve, but have decided to watch die hard tonight.

[Justin101]

I just finished watching Die Hard actually. Fun from start to finish. Choked up for a second when John and Sgt. Al finally met at the end

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

I'm currently watching Die Hard and will watch the sequel later on tonight.

[Nosferatu@Cult Labs]

Quickly, in between Die Hard films, my thoughts on what I saw at the cinema yesterday:

JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE isn't exactly a sequel to the 1995 film which I love and hoped this would in some way live up to. It's very different, with the events taking place in a Jumanji computer game with four high school students transported into the bodies of the avatars they chose. So, in this scenario, the Jewish nerd becomes Dr Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson, a large African-American football player is a backpack carrying zoologist with an allergy to cake and running (Kevin Hart), a pretty, self-absorbed cheerleader is in the body of a fat, middle-aged man (Jack Black) and an intelligent, but socially retiring, bookworm becomes a Lara Croft-type athletic dance fighter (Karen Gillan)! The thing this does beautifully is being self-aware and playing with the rules of computer games and films, using a cut scene in the game early on as exposition. I won't go into it any further, but I found it to be enormous fun and, though not as immediately charming as the first eulogy film, is something I will happily watch many times in the future. This is highly recommended for adults who loved Jumanji in the mid-to-late 1990s, for children who have grown up with the film and even those who haven't seen the 1995 film – it just about exists in its own right with only one brief reference to the previous movie.

PITCH PERFECT 3 doesn't seem to have the level of tension or sexual chemistry between the 'Bellas' and another group of singers as the previous two films in this series. It does have some excellent writing and performances by the ensemble cast, all of whom have grown up and are now dealing with job and relationship issues, and struggling to come to terms with adulthood and everything that comes with it. There are several things about this film which left me disappointed, but so much which left me smiling broadly, wishing I could remember all the jokes, excellent one-liners, and thankful I could listen to the soundtrack on Spotify immediately! It's a film which will be the fans of the other Pitch Perfect films, and you may be slightly disappointed but will probably have a great time anyway. If nothing else, the a cappella version of Britney Spears' Toxic is at least as good as the original!