movies

[WorMzy]

The fate of Odin is revealed in Thor: Ragnarok. Up to this point all you need to know is that Loki has always wanted to rule, and being "dead" gives him the freedom usurp the throne without anyone realising anything.

[Ghost]

I enjoyed one cut of the dead. It really is a film that rewards you by sticking with it.

[Darkweasel]

WARRIOR OF THE LOST WORLD
(1983)



Hold on to your jumpsuits, it's post-apocalypse 1983 again. Filmed in Italy, and starting with possibly the most unnecessarily lengthy and confusing opening crawl ever - not to mention a synthesizer music score that sounds like the inspiration for Garth Marenghi's Darkplace - Warrior of the Lost World stars Robert (The Exterminator) Ginty riding a talking motorbike and fighting post-apocalyptic Nazis.

Ginty plays "The Rider" (also known as "that guy" by cast members who quite possibly forgot, or may not have actually known, his character's name), a nomadic mercenary type who rides around on a 250cc motorbike - sorry - SUPERSONIC SPEEDCYCLE - powered by something like an Atari onboard computer with an annoying computer voice. It's the '80s of course, so the bike is equipped with machine guns and rocket launchers, and says things like MAXIMUM PURSUIT. It also likes insulting bad guys by calling them "Very bad mothers", "Dorks", "Geeks", "Dickheads", and "Veg Outs".

Oh, and it also flies. Sort of. When stopped by a patrol of heavily armed Nazi future cops, The Rider simply rides forwards and then is somehow airborne, landing badly about twenty feet away in a field. After speaking to himself at length in a stream of highly macho one-liners, The Rider is confronted by some punks who use words from A Clockwork Orange to make themselves a bit more futuristic. Knocked off his SUPERSONIC SPEEDCYCLE, he whistles it like a sheepdog and it comes back over to rescue him. Nice trick tbf.

For no reason at all, The Rider crashes into a cliff and wakes up in a big white cave with Fred (From Dusk Till Dawn) Williamson, and some mystical eternal type psychic fella standing over him, cleverly healing his wounds by shining a torch on them. Trying to enlist The Rider to help defeat the evil, tyrannical dictator PROSSOR (An embarrassed Donald Pleasence still dressed like Bond villain Ernst Blofeld), Fred and the psychic chap give up when The Rider says no thanks. The Rider reverses his decision when Nastasia, a sassy, and incredibly good looking female character (Persis Khambatta - the bald one from Star Trek: The Motionless Picture) pops up and tells him to rescue her father, pointing a gun at his danglies just to make sure he complies.

The pair head into a spooky cave full of tarantulas, snakes, and some unfriendly mutants, where The Rider pulls out a handy, portable flamethrower and sets everything on fire. Although the pair clearly dislike each other, it's also just as clear that they already fancy each other, and after entering the nearby city where Nastasia's father is being held prisoner, they both walk into an S&M dance club where the cameraman seems to be on a mission to film as many crotch shots as possible.

Deciding not to rescue Nastasia's father because it looks a bit tricky, The Rider eventually changes his mind, watching a lengthy and obviously painful execution before finally deciding to pull his gun out and start shooting bad guys. Completely cocking up the rescue, The Rider escapes on a nearby helicopter with the father but leaves Nastasia behind, refusing to go back because it's probably a bit difficult. Actually, this Rider bloke is a pretty shit hero tbf.

Kidnapped by Not Blofeld, Nastasia is tortured while The Rider finally gets his shit together, sorts his motorbike out, and goes into the desert to get some help. Upon arriving in the desert, we find all the Kung-Fu in the 1980s is happening there, plus some crap wrestle-fighting, and the punks from earlier (are they meant to be the same ones who attacked The Rider earlier or new ones? Ah, who fucking cares at this point?) looking like they're getting ready to shoot a heavy metal video.

The next half an hour is basically an extended fight sequence featuring Nazi cops, a big truck with spikes, and extras overacting their death scenes as badly as possible. The Rider's bike is smashed to pieces and you're meant to feel sorry for it as it lies crying in the road. Oh fuck off, you just know it's going to be fixed again by the end. Anyway, The Rider and his gang of Kung-Fu Heavy Metal Wrestlers win the day as Pleasence is shot to death and after a full minute of some extras applauding, everyone gets to live happily ever after. Including - as entirely predicted - the talking Atari motorbike.

But wait.
What's this?
Fred Williamson from earlier is A BAD GUY?!

And in a further development, we have a ROBOT TWIST as we discover Pleasence wasn't human after all! Yes, the evil Prossor was just a clone, and the real one makes his escape - presumably into a hoped-for-by-the-producers-but-literally-nobody-else spin-off TV series which thankfully never materialised.

Supersonic Speedcycle/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Un8h9JeM8




MEGAFORCE
(1982)



Another film starring the now deceased former Miss India, Persis Khambatta (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Warrior of the Lost World), Megaforce is another silly futuristic story about two fictional warring countries in the 1980s. The baddie country (Gamibia) is led by General Guerara (Henry Silva from Alligator, Buck Rogers) while the goodie Country (Sardun) is represented by an elite force of haircuts and fancy motorbikes called Megaforce, led by Guerara's one-time friend, wait for it... ACE HUNTER (Barry Bostwick from Spin City, The Rocky Horror Picture Show).

The film begins with Guerara invading Sardun by blowing up a model village. Two high ranking government officials (Khambatta and Edward Mulhare - better known as Devon Miles from Knight Rider) are sent to enlist the help of Megaforce. Megaforce HQ is basically a budget Bond villain headquarters with lots of ridiculous looking vehicles, machines with blinking lights, and people in the background randomly pushing buttons and twiddling knobs.

After Mulhare devises a pointlessly overly complicated plan, the sassy Khambatta is given a time-honoured "I may only be a woman but I can do everything a man can do... and better" storyline but is told she can't go on the mission anyway. So, that last ten minute training with guns and parachutes montage was a waste of time then.

Wearing a snazzy looking silver jumpsuit, a headband and cheesy grin, Bostwick leads his team into battle where everything goes a bit tits up and all the wrong things explode, but then everything goes right, and with a flying motorbike and some embarrassingly cheap blue screen work, Megaforce eventually explode all the right things and (SPOILER) win the day.

Bad acting, sluggish direction, accidentally hilarious special effects, and a truly heroic music score which combines the best bits of Battlestar Galactica and The A-Team, Megaforce was actually touted to be the next big thing after Star Wars. It bombed tragically, and even a member of the catering staff has apologised for it on the Imdb.



/10



SHE-WOLVES OF THE WASTELAND
aka Phoenix the Warrior
(1988)



Another sci-fi adventure starring Persis Khambatta, She-Wolves of the Wasteland promises plenty but delivers very little. Basically Mad Max with a virtually all female cast, the story about an old witch controlling the sex of babies so no more males can ever be born, on paper, could actually have legs. Unfortunately, on film, it really doesn't.

Essentially ninety minutes of bikinis, big hair, dune buggies and machine guns, the film just sort of plods along throwing in some gratuitous - but welcome - female nudity along the way. Annoyingly however, lead actress Kathleen Kinmont (Halloween 4, Bride of Re-Animator) keeps her loincloths on at all times. Pah!

Highlights include two women showering in a waterfall like they're posing for Playboy, some gloriously overacted death scenes, character names such as Riptide, Whiplash, Chainsaw, and Snapper, a baby suddenly being delivered without any warning whatsoever followed by the whole film flashing forwards five or six years but failing to even acknowledge it in the script, some of the worst (but bounciest) gladiatorial combat ever filmed, and an admittedly funny bunch of wasteland mutants who worship the almighty TV.

All the baddies have Stormtrooper Syndrome, unable to hit even those stood directly in front of them, the main villain is just an old lady in a wheelchair, and the whole thing just sort of... happens.

4/10

[Darkweasel]

Sssssss
(1973)



You might think that The Fly is the daddy of man-turns-into-something-else creature features, but that's only because you haven't seen Sssssss. Starring a pre-Battlestar Galactica/The A-Team Dirk Benedict, this 1973 classic is easily the best mad-scientist-turns-man-into-King-Cobra film you will ever see.

Benedict plays a lab assistant hired to help a bonkers herpetologist in his work with venomous snakes. Of course, nobody knows the scientist is a loony, not even his lovely daughter (Heather Menzies from Joe Dante's Piranha), who immediately falls in love, blissfully unaware that her new boyfriend is actually being unwittingly injected with a serum which will eventually turn him into a giant rubber reptile.

Although the film moves extremely slowly, the scenes which feature actual snakes are quite tense and well directed, going some way to make up for a lack of overall pace and story. Real snakes are used whenever possible (the actual King Cobra is a mightily impressive beast), with pretty good replicas used for most scenes involving the actors. And unlike some other '70s animal horrors, the film actually gets its sciencey facts correct (apart from how to transmogrify a human into a ten foot slithery thing, obviously).

In truth, nothing much happens in the first hour or so. Benedict complains about feeling cold, looks a bit peaky, and sheds a bit of skin, but everything happens at once in the last half hour - a local bully gets on the wrong side of a Black Mamba, a fellow scientist threatens the mad doc and ends up tangling with an angry python, and when Menzies goes to a carnival sideshow (run by Tim O'Connor from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), she discovers the fate of her dad's former lab assistant.

Slow and silly, with some decidedly dodgy early '70s transformation effects, but still highly watchable.
6.5/10



MIDNIGHT RIDE
(1990)



Seemingly have given up the way of the jedi as well as the way of decent acting, Mark Hamill leaves the ghost of Skywalker behind (for a while anyway) to play one of the worst, most accidentally hilarious homicidal maniacs ever in this epic disaster of an action thriller.

Michael Dudikoff (American Ninja) plays a cop called Lawson. We literally know nothing else about him other than that he has one leg in a cast, that he's married to the lovely Lara (Savina Gersak from some stuff you probably won't have seen), and that she wants to leave him.

After dumping Dudikoff at a grocery store and driving off, Lara picks up a hitchhiker (Hamill) who, almost immediately, begins acting strangely. This progresses quickly to acting wildly and erratically, and finally to just acting like a complete fucking nutter. Equipped with the world's fastest polaroid camera and an admittedly impressive array of facial contortions, Hamill grins, laughs, sneers, roars, chuckles, snarls and screams through his lines, amplifying each and every expression to the maximum. We are definitely not at home to Mr. Subtlety tonight.

Dudikoff, unhappy at being dumped, gives chase, and while clearly wanting to come off as concerned and lovelorn, actually succeeds in coming across just as mental as Hamill in his single-minded pursuit of a woman who clearly doesn't want to be with him any more. Cars are dumped and blown up, coaches and lorries are hijacked. Cops, motel owners, abused girlfriends, and just about everybody Hamill comes into contact with end up not breathing any more.

As it turns out, Hamill wants to visit his old doctor (Robert Mitchum - yes, that Robert Mitchum) for some reason, and with Lara as his captive, goes to see him at his hospital with (the possibly mentally unstable himself) hubby arriving shortly behind them. After tying the extremely bored looking Mitchum up in a chair, Hamill faces off against Dudikoff, and the pair begin their final showdown.

And this is where the film takes a turn for the utterly fucking amazing.

Dudikoff (his leg now free of his cast) is stabbed in the shoulder by Hamill, but even in his seriously incapacitated state, still manages to fight him off. The scrap goes from the ground floor of the hospital, up some stairs briefly before the pair fall straight back down to the ground floor again. Running through a perfectly normal looking double door (now, remember this is the ground floor of a hospital), all of a sudden there's a very distinct lack of floor and the pair plummet fifteen feet into the basement. Health and Safety should be having serious words about this.

Leaping onto a nearby quad bike (er, what the absolute f... oh, just go with it), Hamill rides down a flight of stairs which wasn't there before and is set on fire. Dudikoff chases him up the stairs, but instead of being back on the ground floor of the hospital again, we're now in some sort of huge open air computer room. Pushing Hamill off the edge and into a huge box of electricity which wasn't there before either, Dudikoff wins the day and goes back to claim his wife who doesn't want him.

Looking like a woman forced at gunpoint into an arranged marriage, Lara is clearly unhappy at the one-sided romantic reunion, so what exactly is the message the film is trying to relay here? Keep hold of your man, even if he's a bit of a dick, because if you don't you'll probably end up being murdered by a maniac?

Anyway, the whole thing climaxes with a "shock" ending every bit as hilarious as it is telegraphed, and as Mark Hamill overacts majestically for one final time, stumbling to the floor with a stick-on gunshot wound attached to his forehead, the credits roll, accompanied by a sultry jazz saxomophone and trumpet soundtrack that sounds like it belongs in some Channel 5 softcore porn film.

Fuck it, I don't even know/10

[Darkweasel]

SUBCONSCIOUS CRUELTY
(2000)



Fucking hell, Canada. I don't know what problems you were having around the turn of the century but I really think we need to sit down and have a little chat.
Okay, I understand you might have still been suffering from post-Celine Dion guilt, but come on. A low budget indie art house film which shows Jesus being raped in the bottom with a massive tree branch surely can't be the best way to deal with your problems.

And it's not just poor old Jesus on the wrong end of some messed up fuck-uppery in this (thankfully short) portmanteau of short, thematically related stories about how the left and right hemispheres of the brain perceive morality and religion (all pretentious nonsense of course, and all filmed under standard film school weird lighting). Opening with a scene which features an eyeball being cut out of a woman's womb (nope, no idea what that's all about), it then moves onto a virtually plotless story about a man who fantasises about killing his sister's baby while it's actually being born.

After dreaming about sloshing around in his sister's menstrual blood, he masturbates while watching her have sex, and then spends a good two minutes afterwards staring at the jizz on his hands. The "story" ends shortly after he actually kills the baby and explains how he didn't really enjoy fucking his sister's corpse.

I don't know about talking, Canada. I'm now actively thinking you should be on some sort of register.

We then reach a short story so painfully shallow, it could have been dreamt up by a twelve year old ( a seriously fucked in the head twelve year old anyway). A bunch of naked people writhe around on a field, fucking it, fisting it, making it bleed, and poking it with sticks. Yeah, it signifies the rape of the earth or something. What-fucking-ever.

The final part is where the director obviously wants to offend everyone he hasn't actually managed to offend so far. A man bashes one out over some naughty porn and then, after another jizz staring scene, imagines his cock having the skin flayed off it as he's given the bloodiest wank since the barbed wire scene in Human Centipede 2. Then Jesus appears and is raped by some women. I'm probably wrong but it all just seems to be a simple message of redemption as wanky man then goes on to dream about himself having all his sins being washed away in a waterfall until everything is clean and wholesome again. Then the screen turns red, which probably signifies that sin always returns, no matter how much you scrub yourself clean.
Or something.

It's quite obvious that director Karim Hussain's main intention was to stir up as much controversy as possible with this film, presumably so he could feign shock at the guaranteed accusations of blasphemy and claim everything was all done in the name of art. You know, the usual trick. A hint of actual talent creeps surprisingly to the surface occasionally, but mostly It's just a shallow and transparent attempt at lowest common denominator "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!" attention whoring from a director who appears to have more than a couple of issues to deal with.

3/10

[bloodfiend]

[
It's quite obvious that director Karim Hussain's main intention was to stir up as much controversy as possible with this film, presumably so he could feign shock at the guaranteed accusations of blasphemy and claim everything was all done in the name of art.

Sounds shit, but at least it had a vague plot.

The Angel's Melancholy and The Bunny Game are probably the worst examples of shock for shock's sake that I've seen - not even the slightest semblance of a plot in either of them, just endless dreary distasteful rubbish with the sole intention of offending anyone who watches them.

[Darkweasel]

I actually thought The Bunny Game was quite good. Yes, it was pure shock presented as performance art, but amongst the seemingly senseless brutality, it did actually have quite a positive (albeit fucked up) message about taking someone with no hope, and breaking them down to virtually nothing so that they eventually find the strength to become something better. Rebirth, rediscovered potential and all that. No, it's hardly high art, but there is something there.

Also, the actress (I say actress, she's actually a performance artist and activist above anything else) actually underwent all the torture for real. The fucking nutter.

[some_thing_wild]

Saw Midsommar on Sunday

My gripe with Hereditary was that it was unnecessarily long and Midsommar is the same
Could've easily missed out most of the first half hour or so and it would have been the same film. As a new director I guess Ari Astor is trying to make epics and have them be long and drawn out to create tension but it just verges on tedious. With better editing this could've been okay
I also have no idea why it's an 18, there's maybe 45seconds of violence. Please do not go into this film expecting to be scared, this is not a scary film

Overall, 5/10 for the good bits, but that's still maybe only 30 mins worth

[Ghost]

Saw Midsommar on Sunday

My gripe with Hereditary was that it was unnecessarily long and Midsommar is the same
Could've easily missed out most of the first half hour or so and it would have been the same film. As a new director I guess Ari Astor is trying to make epics and have them be long and drawn out to create tension but it just verges on tedious. With better editing this could've been okay
I also have no idea why it's an 18, there's maybe 45seconds of violence. Please do not go into this film expecting to be scared, this is not a scary film

Overall, 5/10 for the good bits, but that's still maybe only 30 mins worth

I thought Hereditary was such a disappointment. Some nice visuals but some of the acting was terrible. A real marmite film by all accounts.

[bloodfiend]

I also have no idea why it's an 18, there's maybe 45seconds of violence. Please do not go into this film expecting to be scared, this is not a scary film

The scenes that are gory though couldn't really be cert 15, i.e the cliff splatter/hammer stuff, plus there's several scenes with full male and female nudity and sex scenes you wouldn't get in a 15.

Enjoyed it, but yes it's very ponderous, especially as it's basically a one location film, and you can guess how things are going to turn out from the start. It's ok, but it's certainly nowhere near The Wicker Man, which reviewers seem to lazily compare it to.

[Bisset]

Spiderman: Far From Home - takes everything great about all spiderman's appearances in the MCU so far as well as everything that makes SM great in general and builds on it. Also a wee nod to the game at the end was class.

[Ghost]

Feel excited for the new Top Gun purely because it's a new action film with no CGI. It's such a rare thing now. I often wonder if they'll ever make a film set at sea again and actually film it on a real boat at sea

[some_thing_wild]

Still on my quest to watch all of IMDb's top 250 films. Finally got to watching 3 Idiots which was the only one left in the top 100. Only 17 more tip all 250 done

3 idiots has eluded me for ages but was finally on prime. For anyone who isn't familiar with modern Bollywood, I highly suggest you give it a try, it is nothing like I assumed it would be. Every film with Aamir Khan has been fantastic (see Dangal and Like Stars On Earth Netflix)

[Smerphy]

The IMDb top 250 has decreased in quality in recent years, several classics fell off while some questionable films have crept up. Still mostly a good list though, and I've similarly tried to watch as many of them as I can.

[gavdann]

Watched Joker at the weekend. Frickin amazing film. Joaquin Phoenix is genius in it. 10/10 all the way.