What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[MrBarlow]

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. 1987.

We all knew this one would come up, Gene Hackman returns this time without Otto or Miss Teschmacher but has a nephew joining him in the form of Jon Cryer and Samantha Weyson who is seen only in a small bit and a background appearance. Mark Pillow is the radiation product of Lex that he wants to use his "Nuclear Man" to destroy Superman. Margot Kidder and Mariel Hemingway is the love interest to both Superman/Clark Kent.

Sidney J. Furie got hired by Cannon for this instalment and given a decent budget then to have it sliced and diced and then badly edited that parts don't make sense but still managed to be more entertaining the more you watch it. Picture quality for the 4K version is a bit sharper that Perry White and Jimmy Olson look like they been in the sun too long and Lois looking like she is whiter than Michael Jackson. The sound is a bit sharper that the sound had to be turned down slightly.

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[MrBarlow]

Zombie Holocaust. 1980.

A journalist teams up with some doctors after body parts from dead bodies go missing and witness a worker eating a heart. They travel to a island and meet up with a doctor who is performing strange experiments.

We got cannibals in a zombie flick or is it zombies in a cannibal flick either way Ian McCulloch turns up and tries to be the hero again like what he did in Zombie Flesh Eaters and i'm sure they used the same sets from that film for this one. Donald O'Brien turns up as the mad doctor who is performing the experiments and gives out a great line while someone is screaming.

It does have it's mash up and blood and gore, for it's time and budget director Marino Girolami wanted to give the audience great make up effects and doesn't really disappoint and some little nudity. Holding my hands up, I was never really that keen on this one but slowly warming up to it.

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[Susan Foreman]

Originally Posted by MrBarlow

Zombie Holocaust. 1980.

AKA 'The Bouncing Arm Movie' !

[Demoncrat]

Dvd night!

Deadly Reactor (1996, David Heavener)

Lead actor directs? Poapoc caper? Stuart Whitman??
Sold.
Many highlights. The townsfolk seem to be Amishish. Honest. Our hero is rugged and manly, though I kept thinking of David Essex at points what with his lustrous locks. Lawdy.



Strike Of The Panther (1991, Brian Trenchard-Smith)

A sequel! Must find the parent, as this was high grade second tier action ... until the disc crapped out on me. Unconsolable Demon!!



Omega Cop (Paul Kyraizi)

Ron Marchini caper.
Now this has been featured on BOTW, so I only had myself to blame. Ron plays the man of action. Adam West is clearly drunk in all his scenes. Our hero traverses the poapoc landscape scooping up bints a go go. Lawdy cubed.

[MrBarlow]

See No Evil. 1971.

A somewhat British Giallo with Mia Farrow playing the lead of a blind woman Sarah who goes to visit relatives in the country manor only for the family to be stalked and killed and leaving Sarah to defend for herself.

Did director Richard Fleischer deliberately pace and carefully considered direction to make a decent thriller by using everything at his disposal and cinematography to make the viewer be drawn into the film. The film can have you almost on the floor instead of edge of your seat right from the time where Sarah arrives at the manor straight up to the end with the nice suttle twist ending that still has me saying "Oh Ya F@?ker". Considering this was a flop when it was released to the public, this is actually a enjoyable mystery thriller , thanks to Dem for pointing out the Indicator/Powerhouse release, best version of this film I have watched.

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[MrBarlow]

Holy Spider. 2022.

A journalist travels to the city of Mashhad to investigate the murders of sex workers by a killer who calls himself "The Holy Spider".

This was a blind buy and had no idea what I was getting myself in for, the actors I have no clue about or ever heard of them so that was a good start.

The film opens up with a prostitute doing her work (there is a scene of her performing oral and it is hardcore) and then meeting her death. Zar Amir Ebrahim is the female journalist and we are introduced how tough the laws are on women on their own in the city. Early in the film we are seen who the killer is and then the suspense builds up on how to catch a killer who leads a normal family life that's almost like the BTK killer Dennis Radar. The kills can be mild but also in one part can be brutal and we see the aftermath. The film was made in Iran and does contain subtitles.

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The film is based on a real crime that happened in Iran between 2000 and 2001.

[Demoncrat]

Death Has Blue Eyes (1975, Nico Mastorakis)

His debut.
Fun flick.
Two layabouts fall in with two blondes, who really rock their world. Lawdy. Not quite as insane as the film he made the following year, it's still no Hallmark flick . Spotting two actors from that film also added to the fun ahem, as was a rather ... individual ... musical number ahem.
Having seen quite a few of the man's films over the years, I can honestly say I'm not surprised and will be revisiting this one sharpish. The Arrow BD looks crisp enough imho, and the sound was clear.

[Frankie Teardrop]

HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK – The undisputed acme of ‘soiree goes wrong in arid late seventies home’ is ‘Abigail’s Party’. HOTEOTP may lack much Steadman, but it makes up the shortfall with the glowering presence of David Hess and his blade-to-breast fixation. I like Hess’s look, his lumpy face and sly eyes. That weird slo-mo bellow he does at the end always puts me on edge. HOTEOTP is about what happens when yuppies invite a couple of proles home for sherry and poker; their cheap laugh upends when Hess whips out the razor, making them wish they’d stuck with getting tramps to dance for meths. Is it class war? Is it just Deodato rubbing our noses in it? Everyone in this film is a bit of a shit-bag. This universal lack of the moral compass actually makes you feel for Hess (a little) as he lies dying like a mauled buffalo. It’s so sleazy and grubby, but there’s an element of zeitgeist about it; The House On The Edge Of The Park looks out over the glacial hinterlands of the eighties / nineties / Now and takes in Brett Easton Ellis’s neo-con era sybarites as well as Haneke’s subzero interiors. As always, a revisit is an opportunity to notice new things, and I saw more shadows this time, a noirish inkiness spreading itself across the cream carpets.

COBWEB – Peter‘s parents have a garden full of decomposing pumpkins. To some that’s just quirky, but I kept looking at it, thinking “there has to be a skull in it.” I got the skull, I just wasn’t expecting Rapunzel. I liked Cobweb. I thought I was being set up for a delve into the psyche of a troubled young man and that the spooky photography was all a projection; that was before I twigged that the whole thing was more an excuse to parade nice visuals of cellars, mouldy interiors, and hoodlums creeping around in animal masks. It loses some atmosphere when it goes off the rails into monster stuff, it gets a bit blunt, though that bluntness itself still satisfies. The mist hangs heavy over this Halloween fairytale, and I don’t need much more than that.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop

COBWEB – Peter‘s parents have a garden full of decomposing pumpkins. To some that’s just quirky, but I kept looking at it, thinking “there has to be a skull in it.” I got the skull, I just wasn’t expecting Rapunzel. I liked Cobweb. I thought I was being set up for a delve into the psyche of a troubled young man and that the spooky photography was all a projection; that was before I twigged that the whole thing was more an excuse to parade nice visuals of cellars, mouldy interiors, and hoodlums creeping around in animal masks. It loses some atmosphere when it goes off the rails into monster stuff, it gets a bit blunt, though that bluntness itself still satisfies. The mist hangs heavy over this Halloween fairytale, and I don’t need much more than that.

Pleased you've seen this one. I noticed there was a blu available here in Blighty. Sounds like one to pick up for this October.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

It's always nice to mention something new each time i review a favourite film so this time i noted the game of oneupmanship, if it can be called that, by the officers aboard Lord Vader's star destroyer - Executor. It's a little merry-go-round of pass the admiralty until Vader chokes you to death for inefficiency.

Note the withering look Michael Sheard's Admiral Ozzel gives Kenneth Colley's Captain Piett when Vader commends him for discovering the rebel base on the Hoth system and then the uneasy way the newly promoted Admiral Piett accepts the post from Vader with the dead Ozzel on the floor, having incurred Vader's wrath for leaving hyperspace to soon thus alerting said rebels to the Imperial fleet.

Captain Needa (Michael Culver) also incurs deadly Vader's wrath for losing the Millennium Falcon when practically within the star destroyers reach. Meanwhile Admiral Piett somehow uncharacteristically survives the film and Vader's retribution living until the finale of Return of the Jedi.

It seems the only officer Vader doesn't terrify is General Veers (Julian Glover) who leads the Empire's successful ground assault on Hoth, commanding the lead AT-AT Walker. Although unlike Piett, he's never seen again.

That took ages to type with one finger thanks to my extremely painful right shoulder tendon injury.