What I've Been Watching: The Catch-All Film Thread

Silver Bullet's the next one from the OCLoH*...my husband insists on a few W.C. Fields movies first, though.(The Bank Dick and It's A Gift) :)

*Official Connoisseur's List of Horror
 
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Just got done with 28 Weeks Later. Not sure it deserves the venom it's gotten here, but it certainly is a forgetable 90 minutes. The ineffectiveness of the military is laughable in its absurdity, though.
 
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Silver Bullet's the next one..

I love Silver Bullet!!!!!!!!! *pounces around crazy tiger*


Let's see, I watched all kinds of movies last night w/ my new girl (The last one had far too much baggage and angst for me). She's going with me to Danzig monday night, so that and the classic and bad movie assault that went down last night very well may be a good barometer of how compatible we truly are. Geez, Ive been quite the playboy lately! Unfortunately the side effect of being a ladies tiger is the almost unstoppable financial hemmorage that begins from that very first wink.....

anyways, the film de jour was:

From Beyond One of my old school favorites. Jeff combs is kinda a one trick pony, but he does his one trick very well. Sexy film too, if a bit disturbing. Good one to gauge both a potential mate's kink index and tolerance for low-fi gore. She loved it and had a good time, so I chalked one up for good taste.

Devil's Sword This was my little turtledove's true film test. If she could not only survive this film, but enjoy it, she's got not only the fortitude but the sense of humor it takes to roll w/ me. I'm pleased to announce that we have a winner on both accounts. I could explain this film again for like the zillionth time, but I'd rather let DVD maniacs, DVD Verdict, Eccentric Cinema, and Monsters at Play do my legwork for me. This is one totally &$%^$ awesome indonesian sword and sworcery martial arts film, it's totally worth a purchase if that sounds like youre thing because it delivers in spades. Never a dull moment, it's impossible for me to praise this film enough! We had great fun watching this one.

Return to House on Haunted Hill Pretty loathsome direct to DVD sequel to some House on Haunted Hill remake I never saw, I threw this in as a bad movie wild card for us both. It's kinda how you see how one will weather the storm with you, ya know, youre both getting blindsided at once. It was bad, real bad. Strangely enough, jeffrey combs was in it, as you guessed it the mad doctor/scientist, but he spoke not a word the entire film. It had some ok cgi gore, but overall it's one of those films that are just pretty much without any redeeming qualities. Newer films just dont get the pass that older ones do, this one's not even so bad it's good!

She could still appreciate some of the cgi effects in such a lamentable film, so I give her props for seeking out the silver lining in many of the dark clouds that us bad flick fanatics run across. Very attractive quality, who knows, this may be The One. She sat thru 3 films with me, that shows incredible endurance. We'll see how she fares monday night! ='.'=
 
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Sammy, I took a look at The Devil Sword reviews at Netflix, and if you got a woman to sit through this one with you, let alone show any traces of enjoyment, I suggest you hang with all ten claws. :)

That said, it went in the queue --but I'm not ready for Ginger Snaps yet. ;)
 
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That said, it went in the queue --but I'm not ready for Ginger Snaps yet. ;)

You really should watch Ginger Snaps... it's truly a classic. If there were a horror film that a female non-horror lover could watch and enjoy I would think that it would be Ginger Snaps (or course... like so many times in life... I could be wrong).

In a way it "kind of" shows two girls dealing with adolescence... in a "horror-film" kinda way... ;)
 
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Invincible - predictable Disney feel good movie, but very nicely done and very effective. Nice family movie night :)
 
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Ya gotta give a bonus point for the singing slugs, Mike! Sure, the movie was well and truly awful, but...singing slugs, man!
 
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just finished watching day watch. liked it even better than night watch though i got to see that in the theatre but sadly not this one. i really love this series! anyone else whose seen the series know if there are english versions of the books available? the style of the movies is fairly unique and i love subtitled movies that are better than most movies in english:) a badass story is a bad ass story even if its in esperanto.
 
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Penny Dreadful vs Beowulf Vs Lions for Lambs

1) Penny Dreadful

For a horror films, with none existent publicity (one review available on rotten tomatoes since 2006), and with a title called "Penny Dreadful" - it isn't really helpful to promote itself. I almost regretted immediately upon entering the theater as i'm the only person 2 minutes before the film starts. However it surprises me and thanked god it's not another horny college kids trying to get laid and then scream like noisy pig when get slaughtered. It didn't have scenes with peoples get dismembered or body parts flying left and right. And while it's has typical tactics with sudden loud sounds and disturbing image flashing by, the film put the female lead (Penny) in a quite original condition and struggling situation. she has serious case of phobia to drive or even sit in a car; so a therapist taking her on a road trip in a effort to recondition her...., BUT (yeah you know the drill)...they almost hit someone on the road and from there on things quickly turn from bad to surreal and to hellish nightmare, with all the while Penny get stuck in the car unable to escape from ***** that want to toy with her. The best thing though is the female lead, she really acts well, very well indeed. She's totally believable nervous wreck, crying, pleading, all jumpy and high-strung basket case as fit for someone who has phobia with something and only get worse when something else is really onto her!

2) Beowulf

Nice animation, good visual, huge battle scenes but beside that, nothing got me really excited. The story? so-so stories on heroic, redemption, human weakness, etc etc. I'm not impressed with Robert Zemeckis previous stuff either (The Polar Express).

3) Lions for Lambs

This is first time i saw Tom Cruise in a political film. It's blatant anti-Iraq war film by Robert Redford but in the end, i think we already heard alot of similar points put forward somewhere else either on newspaper, magazine, TV news or online articles. Really, it's better to read a good academic papers on the war of Iraq/terrorism or even articles in the TIME magazine which gives better arguments or put them all in a more enlightening ways...
 
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Caught 12 Monkeys for the first time this weekend--what a bizarre flick--picked it up thinking it was a Bruce Willis action effort, but Terry Gilliam's direction definitely had other ideas. Excellent movie with a surprisingly convincing performance from Brad Pitt as a total nutcase.
 
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We got Spiderman 3 from Netflix ... definitely the worst of the three by FAR. The song sequence in the middle really didn't work, unlike the one in #2. And while I have never thought much of Kirsten Dunst, Tobey Mcguire can actually act ... just didn't see it much here.
 
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Took Mrs dte to Beowulf Friday night. I consciously decided to wait a day before putting down any thoughts. I'll put in a disclaimer that the theatre was showing a 35mm version (as opposed to what?), so perhaps some of my thoughts aren't valid for the "widely released" presentation.

I wasn't aware I was going to a cartoon. But even more annoying was that the level of cartooning seemed to change from scene to scene. The opening scene in the mead hall could have been pulled out of Morrowind. A scene with the Queen confronting Beowulf's doxie looked like it had no "tooning" at all.

The movie has nothing in common with the translation of the original text that I read back in high school beyond the names of the characters. Well, I guess Beowulf kills Graendel in both. Not under the same circumstances, unless my memory has really gone to pot.

The running gag with Beowulf going naked was really funny when they did it in Austin Powers. It was badly out of place stuck in the middle of a scene that was supposed to be tense action.

I suppose the tooning was appropriate in the sense that all the characters were empty wire frames. I don't go looking for deep exposition in an action movie, but this was so bad that it actually got my attention.

It's a good thing that I didn't go into this movie with any expectations. We chose it because it started at the right time for us to do a little shopping and dinner-n-a-movie and still get home early enough for the babysitter. There were a few good scenes in the movie, but overall this was a real dog.
 
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The movie has nothing in common with the translation of the original text that I read back in high school beyond the names of the characters. Well, I guess Beowulf kills Graendel in both. Not under the same circumstances, unless my memory has really gone to pot.


Actually, the movie stuck pretty close to the original story as far as Grendel was concerned. It after the death of Grendel where they changed a few things.

My girlfriend and I both thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I must mention the fact that we saw the digital 3D version though, which is quite a different experience.
 
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Watched The Black Hole

Horrible dialogue, bad acting, anthony perkins as ship commander. Craptastic over/under dual-beam laser gun design. A token ship empath or psychic or something, who can like, read the emotions of a robot. Speaking of robots, oh no, lets not...

One of those early 80's films that I never saw, and didnt really want to. I knew that I didnt miss anything, because when even kids dont rave about a sci fi or fantasy film in that era, you just knew it had to suck badly. There was s strange silence surrounding the Black Hole, it seemed to slip into it's own little tear in the fabric of reality and disappear. With good reason, it was pretty terrible, even the kids that saw it must have hated it. The robot mascot Vincent was bad enough, but when the old hick robot of a later model made his appearance ("Bob"), I started feeling downright queasy. Oh Good Lord of the Tigers, that shooting competition scene between the robots was so utterly retarded, I was literally feeling ill by that point! The Maxmillian robot seemed cool at first, but then when he did his little spinning blender blades trick, his coolness went negative. The religious nature of the black hole itself, and their little Heaven/Hell trip just had me WTF??? Wow.

I will admit that the space ship was cool tho, with all it's weird stained glass looking panels and bizarre angles and such, like a floating industrial cathedral or something. I know now why I never really saw anything about this mess in the toy aisle!
 
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Rented Warriors of Heaven and Earth, a Chinese adventure movie that takes place in the Gobi desert. In all significantly better (and with seemingly more realistic fighting scenes) than your average Kung fu flick. My main objection would be that the CGI for a certain artefact was pretty annoying, and that the subtitles obviously were off (and the English audio track was plain annoying, so we went with Mandarin audio and English subs). In all it was like watching a solid western movie. 3.5 stars.

I might pick up Indigenes this weekend if I can convince my gf to watch a war movie. Maybe if we couple it with a romantic comedy? :p
 
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Checked another one off the Connoisseur's List of Horror today with The Skeleton Key--pretty decent creepy house flick with an above average twist ending which I ought to have seen coming but didn't. (The spouse liked it too, though all he kept saying was "I can't believe that was Gena Rowlands.") Next week we take a break from the List with Conan the Destroyer.

@Sammy--know anything about a 1945 horrorish flick called Hangover Square about a composer who goes into a psychotic frenzy when he hears the wrong combination of notes? Saw it at Netflix and it looked interesting.
 
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Glad you enjoyed it. It takes a while to build up speed, but the ending was pretty pell-mell.
 
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