What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[keirarts]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

The first Avengers film was very good, the second less so, Civil War was also decent but the less said about Spiderman Homecoming the better, oh yeah and Doctor Strange was so far up it's own mystical arse it was practically unwatchable.

Watch the DC series Gotham instead. It pisses all over the Marvel Universe from a great height. And i mean a great height, similar to the one Demoncrat photographs his dog from.

I thought Gotham was a bit shit...

Really badly written.

[Mojo]

DR JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE

Jekyll's experiments to discover the elixir of life bring out his feminine side in this hugely enjoyable slice of latter day Hammer horror.
The casting of Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick is inspired and the script is genuinely witty ( unlike, say HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN ). It all rattles along at a nice pace and includes everything from Burke and Hare and the Whitechapel murders!
Highly recommended on a lovely looking blu ray from Optimum.

IMAGES

Robert Altman's eerie psychological thriller stars Susannha Yorke as a troubled woman who starts hearing strange voices on the phone and visions of her dead husband. So what's actually happening and what is real or not?
One of the many things I enjoyed about IMAGES is that it leaves the viewer to their own interpretation of events, with a number of scenes during the film leaving a truly unnerving feeling after the film has finished.
Terrific choice for Arrow Academy and a wonderful looking bd to boot.

[ArgentoFan1987]

I've never been the biggest fan of superhero movies. I like Richard Donner's Superman and the like, but nowadays, it just seems like the same thing repeated over and over. I'd much rather read the comics.

[keirarts]

Originally Posted by ArgentoFan1987

I've never been the biggest fan of superhero movies. I like Richard Donner's Superman and the like, but nowadays, it just seems like the same thing repeated over and over. I'd much rather read the comics.

Let's be brutally honest. They're all popcorn fodder at the end of the day. I think Marvel have simply nailed the formula better than most through trial and error.
The bigger mistakes made have been made by DC who seem stuck fixated on the Nolan bat flicks. Thing is non of those films were especially deep either and Dark night rises was a pretty awful film.
So we get zac Snyder., a genius in his own mind and the handful of people who think sucker punch was some work of misunderstood genius rather than the pretentious twaddle it was coming out the woodwork and making dark and angst ridden ponderous trash. The kind of films 15 year olds think is mature because it has rain and violence and people swear and occasionally cry with angst. Then the films crash and burn while Marvel puts out carefully measured material that kids can enjoy and the parents can have a good time with as well. Ironically captain America civil war turned out to be far more 'mature without pandering to the kind of people who read Dark knight returns and failed to realise it was satire.
Even watchmen managed to miss the whole bloody point of the book and made it a redemption story rather than 'look at how awful it would be if costumed heroes actually existed'. Mainly because the people involved appear to be quite shallow.

[Cinematic Shocks]

One of the most effective things the superhero film provides, when the genre is done right, is catharsis.

[Rik]

Other than Deadpool, I’m bored to death of all these superhero films now, they’ve saturated the market too much IMO

[Frankie Teardrop]

NIGHT OF THE HUNTED – Jean Rollin flick from near the conclusion of his canonical phase. Don’t expect vamps, but it does contain some of his usual staples i.e forlorn expressions of love between two twin-like female protagonists. It’s seen as a bit of an anomaly set against the rest of his work from around this time, however. NOTH unfolds in a semi-futuristic psyche ward / apartment complex that houses the victims of a vaguely defined dementia. Bridget Lahaie is on the run trying to figure out what it all means whilst a bit of random stabby stuff goes on in the background. It’s a film that never seems to get great press, possibly because of this perception that it deviates from the ‘usual’ JR template. I’ve always really liked it. The morbid atmosphere of Rollin comes through strongly, only this time the sense of ‘dreamlike suspension’ has an early Cornenbergian tilt (think ‘Stereo’ / ‘Crimes of the Future’), or maybe the arid complexion of a J G Ballard novel.

OFFERINGS – Looks like they were still doing ‘Halloween’ rip-offs in the late eighties. This isn’t a very good one of those, but I still found it pretty entertaining in a scraping-bottom-of-barrel kind of way. Copies are generally more interesting when they’re imperfect, and ‘Offerings’ tempers its fairly literal retread of the Carpenter classic with a host of flaws. Unfortunately one of these is a relative lack of splatter - you’d think they’d soup things up with something a bit gratuitous, but, not really. In its favour, the pace isn’t too bad, and the ‘shot on a shoestring regional horror indie made by probable non-professionals’ feel comes through rather well – I happen to like that sort of thing, but many don’t.

DREAMING PURPLE NEON – Todd Sheets might be a name familiar to those with an interest in shot-on-video horror, a fannish underground that spawned some real trash. Sheets himself was known pretty well for items such as the undynamic but gory ‘Zombie Bloodbath’ etc back in the early nineties. As for what he’s doing these days, DPN is a microbudget indie about some guy who returns to his home town only to find it laid low by a drug epidemic manufactured by devil worshippers. Things heat up at the local dentist’s, where some ritualistic shit goes down along with a load of blood and guts. In true Sheets style, DPN is very graphic and goes through a ton of prosthetics in its bloated run-time, although a slight levity of tone takes the edge off any harsh stuff. Looks much better than his earlier camcorder-in-a butcher’s-window workouts such as ‘The Goblin’, and flies by pretty quickly.

THE RITUAL – Some thirtysomething Brit guys go on a walking holiday in Sweden to commemorate their friend, a dude who died in during a robbery. They find themselves lost in a forest that turns out to hide a small community of monster-worshippers. ‘The Ritual’ is pretty good overall and offers lots of finely honed cinematography, tense atmosphere (early on) and some decent performances. It does actually suffer when the horror elements become more overt – maybe these were always going to end up as more central (haven’t read the book it’s based on so can’t say), but, up to a certain point, it works better as an increasingly paranoid thriller about the dynamics of male friendships, and to me it felt like a real shame when that psychological intensity was abandoned halfway through for something more literal. Anyhow, still worth catching.

[SymbioticFunction]

Originally Posted by Deadite

I used to be right up to date with the Marvel films, but somewhere along the line i lost count of them.

Yet to see - Antman, Civil War, Ragnarok, Dr Strange, Black Panther, and Guardians of the Galaxy 2...

Tesco are doing a 2 for £12 on Marvel films atm, so might pick up Antman and Dr Strange.

Both of those are very enjoyable imo. I'd recommend a purchase.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Dollface (2014)

A group of college students - assigned a research project on local legends - researching Dorchester Stewart, better known as the infamous killer Crinoline Head, after discovering that their teacher was a survivor of the original massacre. Returning to the scene of the horrific murders that happened in 1996, Crinoline Head – missing and presumed dead - is very much alive.

Debbie Rochon stars in this generic slasher horror and in truth without her trailer trash milf act the film is fairly unremarkable despite some innovative kill sequences, It is however riddled with errors. Take the filthy mouthed Rochon for example. When she first meets the students she holds a rifle with it's barrel and sight in the dirt, leaning on the guns butt - an absolute no-no. Then there's her grimy Vietnam tee-shirt - it's brand spanking new. The biggest faux pa is the final reveal of Crinoline Head. In the prologue he was a Myers style white youth, come the reveal he's an over weight black guy.

The never shy Rochon though is a hoot. Lines such as "I need a stiff one when i've just had a stiff one" trip from her tongue with laugh out loud regularity.

I wouldn't exactly recommend Dollface to anyone, but if you like cult scream queen Debbie Rochon (As i do) then her full on role here is a delight to watch.

[Demoncrat]

Benji (2018)

Tis a Blumhouse production and it certainly starts like one. Sadly tis a blubfest (WELL DUH). If your summer holidays were punctuated by the many Benji films that were about ... you will know what to expect. Ahem. Woof!!

Next up... Bloodbath In The House Of Knives