What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[nicholasrope]

Originally Posted by iank

Went to the cinema today to see Thanksgiving. A year after a fatal stampede at a Black Friday event, someone begins enacting vengeance against those he deems responsible. This throwback slasher flick does exactly what it says on the tin and is pretty enjoyable as a result. Cute girls, gorily OTT murders, dark humour and a madman in a mask. There's a reason for the formula, folks. It works. I had a fun time with this.

Very interested in this one, just wondering, have they given away all the good bits in the trailer or is there more?

[iank]

To be honest, I only watched the teaser.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Coogan's Bluff (1968)

Clint Eastwood plays Coogan. An Arizona sheriff sent to New York to extradite a convicted killer but falls foul of the killer's gang.

The film that marks the midway point in Eastwood's early acting career as Clint crosses over from the western landscapes to the contemporary urban setting of downtown Manhattan.

Directed by Don Siegel this 'fish out of water' tale is certainly a forerunner for Dirty Harry three years later as we see Clint's sheriff both bemused and royally pissed at big city crime and sleaze.

Whilst not as good as Dirty Harry this is still a hugely entertaining film. Gritty and violent with thrilling pool hall fist fights and motorbike chases as well as some nicely written humour - Everyone in the Big Apple calls Clint 'Tex' due to his cowboy hat and boot - Coogan's Bluff created an Eastwood for the seventies.

[MrBarlow]

Stakeout. 1987.

Buddy cop comedy thriller, Richard Dreyfuss and Emilo Estevez are the duo keeping a close eye on Madeline Stowe when her ex Aiden Quinn manages to escape from jail. Although the film offers no originality and is riddled with cliches, it is very entertaining. Although it runs for nearly two hours, it thankfully doesn't feel that long and the story keeps you interested all the way. Richard and Emilio are quality and a slight in joke to Dreyfuss's character not knowing a phrase from a film is a bit of a good laughing moment.

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[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Born of Fire (1987)

A flutist (Peter Firth) searches for a being known as the Master Flautist who seems to have a musical connection to his recently deceased father. However the flautist is actually a Djinn, a supernatural creature who is planning to blow up the world. Aided by astronomer (Suzan Crowley) and the Silent One (A superb Nabil Shaban) the film builds to a surreal good vs evil finale

A film that exudes hallucinatory mysticism, for the first few acts this seems quite normal taking place in London but when Firth flies out to the rural Turkey it all takes a turn for the achingly surreal.

The natural thermal pools around where much of this film was shot are stunningly alluring creating an other worldly landscape which until last night i never knew existed. Delving deep into Islamic lore Born of Fire is a hauntingly beautiful film whilst horrifying and mildly erotic at the same time.

I strongly recommend the Indicator Blu-ray. It looks and sounds very good in HD and the disc is stuffed with worthwhile extras including Qâf – The Sacred Mountain - a film about the power of volcanoes, a worthwhile interview with director Jamil Dehlavi, an interview with Peter Firth and an excellent forty minute interview with Nabil Shaban. I'd go as far as to say this is one of the best Indicator releases for supplemental material i own.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

Early on in this semi-classic action film, following an explosion in downtown New York, someone at the police precinct asks "Who the hell would wanna' blow up a department store?"

Clearly they hadn't met the girls from Sex and the City when those designer shoes weren't the right size.

Interestingly the actor that plays mercenary Simon Gruber's (Jeremy Irons) psychopathic girlfriend is Grammy award winning singer songwriter Sam Phillips. Whilst watching i knew i recognised her but couldn't place her.

[Frankie Teardrop]

I, MADMAN – Another VHS era horror flick that passed me by, and in fact I’d forgotten it ever existed until I spotted it online the other day. ‘I, Madman’ takes its cue from the ontological sketchiness of many of its eighties ilk, movies that force us to ask – is this happening for real, or just in the mad part of someone’s head? You can see shades of that in everything from ‘Videodrome’ to ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’. Its central device is that a second-hand bookseller can’t tell the difference between her pulp-fiction infused imagination and the world around her; when a bunch of murders happen, they open the door on whether the culprit might somehow be a disfigured villain from a trashy fifties horror novel. It doesn’t blast you, there’s no wham bam horror histrionics on show, but there’s something hugely enjoyable about the way it fuses a kind of smoky, measured noirishness with post-Freddie prosthetic grot. Tibor Takacs, he of ‘The Gate’ and its sequel, has crafted a nicely stylised little find, one that should be better known.

CURSE OF THE SCREAMING DEAD – It is quite a task to find anyone who will go on record with a semblance of a good word about ‘Curse Of The Screaming Dead’. Its saving grace is that it is meant to be slightly less rubbish than its prototype and companion here on this recent VS release, ‘Night Of Horror’. There’s no getting away from the fact that long stretches of ‘Curse Of The Screaming Dead’ are sit-throughs of the most tedious kind, but a barrel scraper such as myself can glean at least some amusement from this lopsided movie’s eccentricities. The first forty or fifty minutes, which is mostly made up of hippies getting lost in the wilderness and talking about it endlessly, still feels, through an inspired disaster of poor construction and worse editing, as if it’s beaming in from several different time / space zones simultaneously; a backwoods genre regionalist’s attempt at a Cubist collage, if you’re as charitable and unrealistic as I am. Then the zombies rise, and the surprise is that they are satisfyingly gross and bring with them the gift of disgusting entrail-yanking gore. The splatter is delivered with a kind of over-the-top brutal ASMR slurping sound effect that might leave you feeling quite haunted. Too little, too late? A question unanswerable by the vast majority, who more than likely will have switched off long before the ‘payoff’, if they ever switched on at all. There’s no point me trying to sell it – it’s shite. If you’re an early eighties regional horror completist, or are enamoured of the occasionally transporting effects of ultra-incompetent filmmaking, or are a masochist, or are Frankie Teardrop – you probably know what you think of it already.

[nicholasrope]

Hunger Games: Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes

A title as long as the Film which serves as a prequel to how President Snow came to be. From becoming a Mentor to being a Peacekeeper, he forms a friendship with the person he is mentoring until things conspire to make him the way he becomes. This was way too long with the fact that you was meant to be rooting for someone that you know was going to be the main villain. Viola Davis and Peter Dinklidge are really good portraying cold hearted characters whereas Jason Schwartzman is really good as the Presenter who does the Weather Report during. Very disappointing.

Thanksgiving

A year on from a mass riot at a Store during a Black Friday Sale which saw some (Rather brutal) deaths. A person dressed as a pilgrim decides to gain revenge using equipment used in Thanksgiving. I really enjoyed this one, some rather creative kills and some really gory violence. it's been mentioned that this is a throwback to the 80's Slasher and I agree, it's a lot of fun.

If you are into this kind of thing, then give it a go, The Full Trailer doesn't give everything away.

[MrBarlow]

Another Stakeout. 1993.

Richard and Emilio return for the sequel hired to team up with D.A. Rosie O'Donnell to find a missing witness who could be hiding out with friends Marcia Strassman and Dennis Farina while hitman Miguel Ferrer is closing in. It took six years for a sequel to pop up and at the start like the previous film our buddy cop duo get into a mess that is completely rubbed in and some laughs, but as soon as the trio head to the stakeout point, the laughs become non existent. Rosie was partial at the height of her career in the 90s but she didn't seem to fit in and not bring in any comedy like the two lead actors.

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[MrBarlow]

Cop Land. 1997.

A decent mid/late 90s thriller with Stallone playing a partial deaf, over weight sheriff of a small town and dealing with corruption of a few New York detectives. Ray Liotta does have a big part as the coked out copper trying to get his life back on track and leave the circle of corrupt colleagues. Robert DeNiro and Harvey Kietel do bring some of their acting methods to the screen along with Robert Patrick who seems to have one or two facial expressions when things go his way. I haven't watched this in a while and certainly one that gets better with every viewing.

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