What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[MrBarlow]

The Bourne Supremecy. 2004.

Jason and Marie are living a quiet existence, until Marie is shot, now Jason finds out he is being framed and sets out and find who has shattered his life.

I'm not sure if this is better or weaker than than the first film, it does seem to go slightly off course from the story then back on again, this is where you see Matt Damon take out a guy with a rolled up magazine, gotta learn how to do that. The camera work looks a bit amatuerish and shaky in some bits that motion sickness almost becomes second nature. The action sequences were well choreographed and have a high packed adrenaline rush that you are almost screaming at the t.v. Joan Allen steps in this time and seems to know how to control a situation except keep a leash on Bourne and proves to be a enemy for him, forgot Karl Urban made a decent part as a assassin.

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[MrBarlow]

The Bourne Ultimatium. 2007.

Journalist Simon Ross uncovers a project that Bourne recognises and sets up a meeting, when Ross is gunned down, Jason tries to piece together his past and goes in search of how he become who he is now, while the C.I.A are trying to stop him.

This is defiantly making up for the previous film, it's like that was good this one will be better and certainly was, this one has more cat and mouse games and basically Bourne able to play mind games with those persuing him. From start to finish the pacing of the film sets everything right with some good intense moments especially in London with Paddy Considine as reporter Simon Ross. The fight scenes just seem to get better and better even in some enclosed spaces behind a shop, at least we get to see parts of Bourne's past that shows us who he was.

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[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Wings of Danger (1952)

Utterly forgettable Noir style thriller from Hammer directed by Terence Fisher and starring Zachary Scott.

In fact it was so forgettable i had to look it up in Fisher's biog to type this as i'd forgotten what the hell it was even called. I would love to go into detail about it but i can't. All i can recall was that it was extremely talky and... Well, that's about it really.

[Demoncrat]

Living Among Us (2018, Brian A Metcalf)

Vampires are real? Get a film crew over there STAT!
Found footage works best without the curse of knowledge, so having James Russo, John Heard and Bill Sadler in yer flick sorta works against it imho.

Meet the faaaaamily. Welcome to our lovely home, no cobwebs or coffins for US.
There being no tension whatsoever ... they are bloodsuckers cough.
So get on with it. Badly paced and poorly written I can handle. Lazy ... I can't.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

On the Beach (1959)

An utterly devastating end of the world drama as US Naval commander Gregory Peck and his nuclear submarine land in Australia, the only place on earth seemingly not affected by the nuclear fallout of WWIII.
He meets the lovely Ava Gardner and a romance develops before Peck and his crew set out on an exploratory mission to see what the west coast of the USA is like following what seems like a message in Morse code from San Diego.

When the term 'post apocalyptic movie' is bandied about we generally think of months if not years after the end of the world scenario but On the Beach plays out in the more or less instant aftermath. The scenes of lifeless San Francisco streets are eerie as hell itself and reminded me of the opening to The last Man on Earth, albeit a film made some four years after this.

The opening hour offers hope as we get to know Peck, Gardner, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire and Dona Anderson as they go about life as normally as possible and at first i thought spending this long with these people before the movie really begins was fairly uneventful but come the end it's clear why we saw this because it makes the final twenty minutes all the more traumatic and distressing. I'm pretty sure had it gone on any longer i would have been in floods of tears.

On the Beach is a movie i really didn't see coming and it hits hard. Had i watched it last year in the midst of this pandemic i think i'd have bawled my eyes out.

[Frankie Teardrop]

More bits of Shudder -

THE RANGER – Punks versus The Man (in the form of Forest Ranger) in this slasher throwback. I liked it, it’s angling for something slightly quirkier than the norm and you do get a pretty good sense of the eighties / nineties underground, at least to the extent that it could ever play out within the confines of a very cheap wilderness-based horror flick. It doesn’t quite flow the way it might, but something about the characters and the setting made for an absorbing watch. There’s a bit of gore and a lead actress with a really haunting look.

FINGERS – Another keeper, ‘Fingers’ starts off with the vaguely Lynchian tribulations of a company boss who can’t stand physical deformity and ends as a kind of post ‘Blood Simple’ crime caper about the crashing mechanism of human communication. Obviously, some dude gets his fingers cut off at various points. American Indie through and through, with ‘The Battery’s Jeremy Gardner as a shrill hit-man.

SLAXX – The weighty issues of global capital and postcolonial exploitation squeeze themselves into the skinny comedy horror-flick that is ‘Slaxx’, which delivers a fair amount of silly gore but obviously wants us to know that its heart’s in the right place. Fairly amusing when satirising the internal dynamics of its setting, a local fashion emporium which seems more Primark than Versace, but I didn’t quite know what to make of those disembodied jeans showboating their Bhangra moves. Then again, I never said that big themes and trashy horror weren’t compatible.

THE SUMMER OF 84 – A latter-day riff on eighties flicks – who saw that coming? No, but this is very well done actually, and takes the ‘suburban adolescent gang’ trope in a decidedly un-nostalgic direction as a bunch of kids investigate a local copper’s potential murder spree. Good production values, poignant and well-observed, surprisingly nihilistic by the end, great synth soundtrack. From the directors of ‘Turbo Kid’.

THE FURIES – Abductees in a forest, on the run from nasty men in horror masks, try not to get slashed. I liked ‘The Furies’, it felt somehow like a better made, more cinematic version of a much cheaper kind of film. It also tries to combine reasonably brutal gore with a sort-of gender oppression narrative, although I’m not certain whether this apparent attempt at thoughtfulness comes across with any real sincerity. With sci-fi bits and some questionable performances. Closest thing I’ve seen to a modern exploitation film in a while.

SPIRAL – A gay couple head for nineties smalltown America, hoping for a new start after the big city – Reagan-era attitudes and homophobia might be less of a problem than the local satanists. ‘Spiral’ slowly and surely builds an atmosphere of suburban dread – and then nearly crashes with a couple of obvious plot manoeuvres and rubbish ‘horror moments’. It gets it right in the end, but the great momentum of ‘Spiral’s initial shadowy trajectory doesn’t quite pay off.

[Demoncrat]

I keep seeing posts about this Slaxx .... which is duly noted in this case as always F!!

[gag]

Originally Posted by Demoncrat

I keep seeing posts about this Slaxx .... which is duly noted in this case as always F!!

Slaxxs looks like a Mickey take in fabric style, in Fabric is one of my fav films in recent years.

[Demoncrat]

White Star (1983, Roland Klick)

Dennis Hopper and David Hess in Berlin?
Managing a synth pop hopeful??
Yes, really!!!!
I do find 'em. Dennis still a bit unsober here tbh, some fun to be had etc etc.
The erstwhile "star" is a tad bland and the film just sort of tumbles along, but I've sat through far worse. Reminiscent of the late night oddities that used to turn up on 4 tbh ....

[MrBarlow]

The Bourne Legacy. 2012.

With Treadstone and Blacl Briar been declared obsolete and exposed by Simon Ross, the C.I.A AND N.S.A. decide to shut down everything and kill off their members, one has survived and seeks out a doctor who helped him.

I have held off watching the rest of the Bourne films after the first three as this didn't seem like a decent installment, it goes back to Ultimatum and shows where this one starts off and we are introduced to Aaron Cross who seems to be on survival training only to be allegedly wiped out and seems very upset at that. Rachel Weisz plays the pharmaceutical doctor who provides the tablets that enhance everything in the human body and becomes a target.

What I liked about this one it has a good bike chase through the streets of Thailand and the painful outcome of the bad guy chasing the hero's, that defiantly had to hurt though and the fast paced from start to finish with some tense moments and some good acting from Edward Norton and Stacey Keach. What this film lacked was some decent fight scenes, we got one or two that lasted seconds where as Matt Damon was able to make it last a bit longer, like the previous ones I will go back and watch again, gonna take a chance on Jason Bourne 2016.

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