movies

[Darkweasel]

^ Is that the film with the fight scene in a bar where Clint twats two blokes with a pool cue after they knock him down?

That's the one. Clint pretty much takes out everyone in the bar single-handedly.
Because he's Clint.

[Darkweasel]

THE LOST EMPIRE
(1984)



One of the most prolific sci-fi/fantasy/horror directors of the '80s and '90s, Jim Wynorski is also one of the least well known. Titles like Chopping Mall, Deathstalker II, The Return of Swamp Thing, Ghoulies IV, and 976-Evil II adorned many a video shop wall back in the day, and the scary thing is that he's still going. Chucking out an average of three or four films a year, his most recent efforts include Dinocroc vs Supergator, Scared Topless, Sharkansas Women's Prison Massacre, and the surprisingly entertaining Piranhaconda.

Going back to the beginning, The Lost Empire was Wynorski's first attempt at low budget (sub-Roger Corman) film making, and it certainly shows. The story barely makes a lick of sense as three barely clothed women with massive chests try to stop a bad guy from taking over the world with magic crystals. There's a violent but sensitive cop, a native American who may or may not have magical powers, an ex-con with a never-ending supply of bubble gum, lots of fighting, undressing, dressing,cheap explosions, tits, more undressing, more tits, and a bit more fighting. And tits.

It's all played for laughs (there's no other option, really) as Angus Scrimm (Phantasm) plays a really shit bad guy, and Blackie Dammett (Lethal Weapon, National Lampoon's Class Reunion, and as I found out recently, the father of Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis) plays his underling with all the natural acting ability of a pork sausage.

There's a bloke in a gorilla suit for some reason, Robert Tessier (the bald baddie from almost every TV action show from the '70s and '80s) keeps forgetting to put his fake eyebrows on, and most of the time is spent staring at heaving chests and big hair. It's stupid, pointless, embarrassingly badly acted and generally shit. But in a good and very breasty way.

6/10

[VizardAmata]

Went to see IT tonight... I won't say any specifics but I loved it!

[thehairyone]

Right. 5 film Star Wars marathon, and now I have definitive list for "Which is best". Based on which I'd watch again and again:

• Empire Strikes Back
• Rogue One (oooooh! Slight controversy)
• A New Hope
• The Force Awakens
• Return of the Jedi

Not even happy with that. It will probably change again in 6 months.

[Darkweasel]

IT

A vast improvement on the enjoyable but highly flawed 1990 TV mini-series. Bill Skarsgard is superb as Pennywise and every individual character is crafted superbly and believably. Of the main characters, only town bully, Henry Bowers, suffers a little due to the time spent with the protagonists but even then is still much more than a thinly drawn bad guy. Skarsgard doesn't chew the scenery like Tim Curry's Pennywise, but is easily as memorable.

There are jump scares galore, all of which had the desired effect as everyone in the cinema was jumping out of their seats every five minutes to the point when, after the clown room scene, I overheard two girls pleading with their boyfriends to let them leave. The house on Neibolt Street must surely already be one of the creepiest houses in horror (during one scene it even looks like it's swallowing the kids), and if there's any justice, this adaptation will quickly join the ranks of The Shining, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand By Me as one of the more revered Stephen King films, even if it does deviate from the source material (thankfully, in some cases).

Only one niggle. Why do bad guys always have to wear Metallica and Anthrax t-shirts?

Still, having Anthrax on the soundtrack was a bonus.

9/10


‘IT’s’ $117 Million is the Best Horror Box Office Opening EVER!

early estimates are reporting that IT has exploded to a whopping $117 million opening weekend, making it the best horror opening ever.

While Hollywood has suffered one of the worst summers in years, the horror genre is laughing all the way to the bank. Universal kicked the year off with massive successes, including Jordan Peele’s Get Out and M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, both topping $250 million worldwide. In fact, David F. Sandberg’s Annabelle: Creation could topple $300m. While we’re all celebrating these successes none are as important as Warner Bros./New Line Cinema’s IT, which has shattered September records by topping $100 million during its opening weekend.

That $117 million is just here in the States, with early international reports just coming in adding $62m to the total. Early Sunday morning estimates have the worldwide gross at $179 million. An interesting comparison would be to Sony’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, which shared a similar debut. That ended its domestic run at $325m and worldwide at $750m, which would be absolutely insane for a horror film. $500+ million worldwide is all but guaranteed.

http://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3458 ... ebut-ever/

[some_thing_wild]

Thought IT was extremely meh

Whole thing felt like an episode of Stranger Things. Jumpscares galore with no actual intensity. Plus I find it very difficult to get scared over anything CGI, which it was full of.
Worth a watch I guess but doubt I'll bother rewatching

[bloodfiend]

I loved IT, definitely one of the best Stephen King adaptions, up there with the likes of The Mist and Misery. I thought the 1990 TV version was a reasonable attempt to tell the story, but limited by budget and with more of a drama series feel to it. This however felt like a real horror, dark and creepy, but loads of fun and a total blast all the way through. They really nailed the character of Pennywise too, I thought Tim Curry's version was good, but had too much of a comedy feel to it; Bill Skarsgard's version however genuinely looks like the stuff of nightmares.

Just having it focused on the kids worked were, avoiding the disjointed jumping backwards and forwards through the timeline that the novel does, and setting things up perfectly for the sequel. It's not completely faithful to the novel, but I don't think it would be as good if it was tbh, the novel goes on forever and spends ages telling backstories about minor characters, and asides like that just wouldn't translate into a good film. Patrick Hockstetter for example (the bully with the longish hair in the movie), has an incredible death scene in the book, but to get there we have an endless story about him being a disturbed psychopath who collects death animals and killed his younger brother, his death isn't as shocking in the film, but at the same time he was just a minor character who didn't need masses of screen time.

Great that it's being a huge hit, for a mainstream horror film, it was spot on 9/10

[Darkweasel]

I fully expect to catch some shit for this one...




BABY DRIVER

SPOILER IN TINY PRINT

A teenage getaway driver with tinnitus and an iPod falls in love and tries to leave his life of crime.

Directed by Edgar (Shaun of the Dead) Wright, presumably after binge-reading the Big Book of Quentin Tarantino (illustrations and foreword by Michael Bay), this absolute nonsense of a film amounts to nothing more than flashy photography, COOL TUNES, and nearly two hours of my life wasted.

Right from the opening ten minutes, it's clear that Wright does not give one single fuck about credibile characters or a decent story and is just out to deliver car chases and loud noises. Crime boss Kevin Spacey goes through the motions with barely a raised eyebrow, John (The Punisher) Bernthal sits among the top billed stars but only gets about ten minutes of screen time and spends most of that just sneering. Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers plays a baddie for some reason, CGI blood explodes from CGI gunshot wounds whenever the story(?) stalls, and there's even a back story for Baby which, although returning to it repeatedly, still somehow manages to shed absolutely no light on Baby's motivation for becoming a getaway driver in any way. It's like Wright is deliberately sticking a middle finger up to anyone requiring the film to make any kind of sense at all. A point further driven home with the cassette tapes side-story which amounts to the grand total of absolutely fuck all.

On top of all that, Baby's girlfriend is startlingly apathetic about her new fella's outbursts of extreme violence as he shoots people at point blank range in front of her. It's all fine though because apparently maiming and murdering is fine if you have a heart of gold.

Almost managing to salvage a plus point, the film does pull a nice switcheroo at the end, with Baby being arrested. Ha! No romantic eloping for you, Baby.
No, but wait. It turns out all all the people who saw him involved in murders and robbery are now also vouching for his heart of gold, and he leaves the prison a remarkably short time inside after getting sent down for twenty-five years. Even with the whole "five years before parole" thing, it still looks like he hasn't aged a day as he crosses the road into the welcoming arms of his also non-aged girlfriend. And if that section is just a dream? Well, then it can just fuck off forever because that's even worse.

Confused as to which character should be the main baddie, crammed with story threads that go nowhere, and needlessly repeating the content of flashbacks in expositional dialogue, Baby Driver is also another one of those films that hides the fact it has absolutely nothing to say behind fancy camera angles and a relentlessly ADHD soundtrack of COOL TUNES. Yes, I get it. He listens to music. Unfortunately, the only sound I could hear was one of cash registers collecting the money for the accompanying soundtrack album.

With the amount of love shown for this film seemingly across the board, it's clear I've missed the point somewhere. But I'm really not sure what that point is. Paper-thin, unlikable characters, a non-existent story, and a never-ending succession of COOL TUNES, Baby Driver is shallow, superficial, vacuous drivel clearly aimed at a target audience that is not me.

/10

[Ghost]

Watching critters.

[Darkweasel]

Critters is great.
Critters 2 isn't bad.
Critters 3 is shit and has Leonardo DiCaprio in it.
Critters 4 is rubbish but better than 3.

[Ghost]

I never used to like Critters but I enjoyed it last night. I always liked the second one. The bit where the bounty hunter morphs into the model and has a staple in him has stayed with me since I was a kid

[someone else]

Watched Blade Runner on the big screen last night - possibly due to its glacial pace, maybe I've not been in the mood to enjoy it before,but without distractions it finally sunk in!

[Darkweasel]

LEATHERFACE
(2017)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series surely has to be one of the strangest horror franchises of them all. Not just because of its mad characters and the bizarre nature of the movies themselves, but mainly because the films rarely conform to any kind of sensible continuity.

In the 1974 original, the cannibalistic family were merely unnamed characters credited as “The Hitchhiker”, “Leatherface”, “Grandfather”, and “Old Man”. In the underrated sequel, they were given the surname of Sawyer, and consisted of Drayton/The Cook (Jim “Old Man” Siedow from the original), Leatherface (now also known as Bubba), completely bonkers Vietnam vet, Chop-Top, his dead twin brother, Nubbins (The Hitchhiker from the original), and the now 130 year old Grandpa.

The third film in the series, also called Leatherface, changed everything to do with the family apart from the titular chainsaw wielding monster (although he was now referred to as “Junior”), and the fourth, the utterly bizarre, “The Next Generation” changed everyone else apart from Leatherface again, but at least it gave us a memorable character in Matthew McConaughey's “Vilmer”. It also gave the world Renee Zellweger, but don't hold that against it too much.

The 2003 remake changed the name of the family from Sawyer to Hewitt, gave Leatherface a totally unnecessary backstory about a facial deformity, and yet again, introduced an entirely new set of characters. The sixth film in the series was a prequel to the remake, and although admittedly a fairly weak entry, at least offered some form of continuity.

The series was reinvented again in 2013 with the almost offensively stupid Texas Chainsaw 3D, which tried to act as a direct sequel to the original, but once again, pointlessly messed about with Leatherface's family unit (seriously, with more family members than Guns N'Roses have had line up changes, it's no wonder Leatherface is such a confused and angry individual). And now, for some extra unnecessary confusion, using a name already employed earlier in the series, we now have the lazily titled Leatherface, which once again ignores every one of the previous entries by trying to act as a direct prequel to the original.

Back in the 1950s, Leatherface is still just a confused young boy called Jed Sawyer who lives with his brothers Drayton and Nubbins, his Grandpa, and mother, Verna. After distracting a teenage couple driving along a country road by wearing an unrealistic cow head as a hat, young Jed leads the girl to meet a predictably gruesome end, while her boyfriend (who, for apparently no other reason than to randomly link more things to the original), appears to be the father of Sally Hardesty, the survivor of the 1974 massacre. The girl turns out to be the daughter of town Sheriff, Hal Hartman (Stephen Dorff), who, not taking the death of his daughter too well, sends young Jed to a mental asylum.

Ten years later and the plot decides it's time for Jed to escape from the asylum. But here's the twist. With so many years having passed, and with all of the inmates being given new identities, you don't actually know who Jed is any more. Well, not until about two and a half seconds of him being on the screen anyway. So, after the film majestically fails at disguising his identity for even a few short minutes, Jed and three other inmates kidnap a young nurse and head for the hills, killing anyone who gets in their way. Back on the trail after ten years of drinking heavily and growing chin stubble, Hartman (the surname possibly being an oblique reference to Chainsaw remake actor R Lee Ermey's earlier role in Full Metal Jacket) punches, shoots, and threatens everyone in his efforts to stop the escaped loonies, while his deputy (Finn Jones from Marvel's Netflix damp squib, Iron Fist) tries unsuccessfully to bargain with the family of cannibal mentals.

As the film progresses, Hartman gets madder, the killers get killier, the set-pieces get sillier, and the barely held together story falls apart with each successive, poorly directed sequence. The worst of which surely has to be the scene where three people (one of them a gigantic lumbering behemoth) all manage to very quickly and safely hide inside a cow to evade capture. Fake blood and disappointment drips off every character until we finally reach the point where Jed's face is disfigured by a stray bullet and finally becomes Leatherface.

At a stretch, the transformation from confused teen to skin-wearing psychopath does actually make some tiny sort of sense if you think about it long enough, but Sam “wasn't he in Eastenders once?” Strike is so utterly miscast that even with large meaty dollops of imagination and artistic license, he barely resembles the hulking monster from any of the previous films, psychologically or physically.

By spoon-feeding the audience every last poor quality drop of unrequired information, Leatherface has successfully managed to ruin any remote sense of mystery the series may have had left to offer.
4/10

[Darkweasel]

CULT OF CHUCKY
(2017)

The seventh film in the Child's Play series finds killer ginger Good Guy doll, Chucky, stalking his victims inside the stark white confines of a mental asylum as he continues to torment the wheelchair bound paraplegic girl he managed to frame for a bunch of murders in the previous film.

What begins as a decent idea filled with bonkers inmates, a disturbingly pervy psychiatrist, a spot of wheelchair sex, and the return of Andy Barclay, the kid featured in the first three films, soon deteriorates into yet another unfocused mess which fails to explore a single one of its several story threads properly.

Repeating death scenes from earlier films, bringing back Jennifer Tilly as Tiffany but making her say rubbish like “Yes, I know I look like Jennifer Tilly, but I'm not”, the only real (Charles Lee) ray of light comes, as ever, from Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky. But not even he, as much as he tries, can save everything from collapsing in on itself, with only the reference to his appearance in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest as the film's single moment of genuine wit. Paraplegic Nica (played by Dourif's real life daughter, Fiona) puts in a decent performance, but even she becomes grating during the latter stages of the film.

To it's credit, COC does at least try something new, as it turns out Chucky has learned, thanks to a home voodoo internet website, how to transfer his soul into more than one different person/doll at a time. So now we have four or five Chuckys running around the place, plus one or two humans with his soul inside them, wreaking havoc and making a bloody mess of a host of inconsequential minor characters.

As usual, the death scenes are nice and gory, and it does actually feature one genuinely creepy scene featuring a conversation with Chucky's severed head. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of this scene is never repeated, and with the addition of another Marvelesque post-credits scene featuring another previous character returning to the franchise, the whole film merely serves as the gateway to yet another sequel.
4/10

[Darkweasel]

Blade Runner 2049 is a fucking masterpiece.
Too much to say, and not enough time to write at the moment, but it really is incredible.
9.5/10