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

I had more teenagers than kids this year. In the past 18 years I've lived in my house I've had a grand total of zero teenager.

What was up this year?

Also, I tried watching the first Halloween movie decades ago and I thought it was stupid, so I changed the channel. I guess Jamie Lee Curtis survived the first two encounters. She didn't drown in the Halloween water 10 years ago then?

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But more interesting - I read a magazine article decades ago that these characters in slasher films are actually pretty moral. The people that die are all people that deserve it: either they are having premarital sex, or smoking weed or somesuch ("the brother always gets it" is possibly an exception. I haven't watched horror films.) The kids that live are the ones stay pure - i.e. they are the good guys - ultimately the films protagonists. The villain, such as Jason, becomes the Angel of Death sent by God to punish the wicked.

I started to see a lot of this pattern in B movies but I've recently read where Michael Myers isn't like that. He's basically a cold calculating machine. I read this on stackexchange said there's been some controversy on why Myers didn't kill (or imply to) whatever was in the baby carriage in the living room and the director admitted this was out of character later on and a mistake.

Since the 90's I've noticed this pattern disappeared and I realized it had something to do with the value systems that Baby Boomers were raised vs GenX. It wouldn't have occurred to GenX and Millenials to write horror films as some sort of allegory - or GenX was just sick of messages being forced on us where Baby Boomer writers always seem to think its central.

I saw the original Halloween in theaters when it came out. All the kids in my class were raving about it prior. Was quite disappointed when I finally saw it later in the week but didn't actively hate it. I actually found it watchable enough (but not re-watchable) to also check out the sequel Halloween II a couple of years later in theaters, I actually liked it more than the original but I still didn't go gaga for the series. There's a scene in H2 where Michael is in the maternity ward of a hospital gazing at babies. I too wondered why he didn't go all splatterplunk on them and start carving away but a part of me was thankful he didn't.

This Halloween I watched Gremlins on blu-ray. An okay movie but it had some cutesy segments that turned me off (Chris Columbus' original screenplay was much nastier but Producer Spielberg of course had final say). It does contain one of the great funny & thrilling sequences in horror movies though - the old woman (modeled on the witch in Wizard of Oz) meeting her demise on the chair lift on the staircase after a gremlin has tampered with it. A fun fun-sized Snickers & Milky Way candy bar movie for Halloween.

joxer said:

Anyone remembers ex-avatar of mine?

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I don't think I've ever seen you without an avatar of a man holding a big gun in his hand and thrusting it towards the camera. I guess something about men with big guns and sticking em in people's faces gets some boys 'n' girls really excited.



Some trivia: in Dirty Harry (1971) during the nighttime scene in the park where Scorpio has detective Harry Callahan take out his .44 magnum and toss it away, actor Andy Robinson improvises the line: "My, that's a big one." The cast and crew all burst into roaring laughter. Director Don Siegel liked the line so much and how Robinson delivered it that he kept it in.

joxer said:

Mandy is an utter bullshit of a movie.
A mish mash of "coo" and "mysticysm" with overused and tasteless artificial red light. Even Donnie Darko was better than this abomination and you know I slapped 1/10 on Donnie Darko rubbish.

So bad it's worse. Suggest it to your worst enemy, it can't fail.

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I liked the original theatrical release of Donnie Darko because it seemed so bizarre, twisted, and cryptic, like a grotesque and slightly malevolent horror-SF variation of Harvey (1950). It's only when the "director's cut" was released with its newly inserted hand-holding scenes explaining it all and sounding a bit wacky that I realized it's quite overrated. Great use of surround sound though. I have not seen Mandy. I just assumed that all new Nicolas Cage movies should be avoided.

I saw both the new Halloween and the remake/re-imagining of Suspiria.

Both movies original versions I really like and consider them one of the few movies to actually scare me. I was a young teen when me and some other kids saw Halloween when it was on tv at the time (years after the theatrical release) and I remember how scared we all were, having never seen a movie like that before.

The new Halloween is not as good as the original, sorry to say. That said, its a decent horror movie, not great, not bad.

Suspiria I saw when I was fully grown in my 20s. Oh man, this movie freaked me out! There is one sequence in the movie that was truly nightmarish and memorable, and it still counts as one of the scariest parts in a movie that I ever saw.

Unfortunately, the Suspiria remake (its a limited release) is not scary at all. It fails to generate the same type of creepy atmosphere as the original. The acting is pretty bad too, with a couple exceptions. Eventually it goes to a ridiculous climax that is nothing but a cheap gore fest.

JackOfOwls said:

I don't think I've ever seen you without an avatar of a man holding a big gun in his hand and thrusting it towards the camera.

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Yea, well, I ought to put a certain pic from this as avatar, but that kinda wouldn't go well with site rules…

JackOfOwls said:

I have not seen Mandy. I just assumed that all new Nicolas Cage movies should be avoided.

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In this case it's not his fault. He tried to save the movie, but you can't bake a turd then call it a cake.

Arkadia7 said:

Suspiria I saw when I was fully grown in my 20s…
Unfortunately, the Suspiria remake…

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It's just another silly and unnecessary remake - there's no way I'll watch it. The original is a masterpiece that needed no retouche.
My 5 years old post:

joxer said:

Ahahahahaa, I knew it!
Check my posts from a year ago or so where I said go watch Headhunters before Hollywood remakes it.

But for some I really can't understand the "need" for remake, for example Escape from NY, who needs a remake of that cult classic? Or Argento's Suspiria, hell are they normal? The catch of that horror was not horror elements but the movie style, and you can't copy or remake that. Timecrimes? For god's sakes there are so much better timetravel loop/paradox movies (an example: Triangle, I think it's australian movie and is definetly not widely known about for whatever reason), this one is good, but definetly doesn't deserve a remake.

Whatever, I wish good luck to Hollywood and am pretty sure I won't watch most of those remakes.

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overlord -> very enjoyable which means no one here will like it but whatever.

Saw The Predator. Boring as hell - when you show your monster arsing about in his spaceship in the opening scene, you're not even trying. By ten minutes in, I couldn't care less about any of it.

Ripper said:

Saw The Predator. Boring as hell - when you show your monster arsing about in his spaceship in the opening scene, you're not even trying. By ten minutes in, I couldn't care less about any of it.

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Yeah read a lot of negative watcher opinions on that movie. Arnold was right not to accept a small part to play a cameo of the marine from the first 1987 Predator movie.

Same mistake they made with all "monster movies" sequel/reboot like Alien 4, Jason X, (etc…): a new version of the monster!
Peole go to see a good Predator movie with the famous title monster in it, and all they get is a stupid ugly new uber-predator version (who's even uglier than the hybrid creature from Alien 4).

Also, no jungle!
Even Predator 2 tried to picture Los Angeles as an urban jungle, to keep that "reverse safari" vibe that is crucial in this serie.
No jungle, no good Predator, simple as that.

And Keegan-Michael Key is a cool dude, but he isn't Arnold or Bill Paxton level of cool…

Well, thanks for saving me time in the future, I was looking forward to that new Predator flick coming to HBO sometime, now I'll just avoid it. And I would agree, people want to see similar features in what intrigued them the first time with monsters, starting off in some very different circumstances with a whole new cast rarely works.

Quite frankly, I'm shocked that anyone even thought it might be good. I wrote it off immediately after seeing the first trailer.

Some of us don't watch trailers.
We rely on word of mouth from people who went on premiere. People that have some taste of course, I'd never trust a freind who's best movies ever are Transformers.

My wife is recovering from surgery this week, so we have watched some stuff (mostly caught up on TV series). But ...

'Destination Wedding' - Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder. Trailer didn't look great, but what the heck - price is right . And ... it was astoundingly NOT good. Yet not bad enough to switch off. There were too many cliches for a movie that seemed set up to take shots at the cliches. And for a movie with basically only two speaking characters ... things were really shallow.

Also watched 'The Post' - much more my kind of movie than hers (too much 'inside baseball') but because of the performances and players she loved it as well. It was also a bit sad to see what our view of corruption and a petulant president USED to look like ... crap, now we get worse on Twitter pretty much daily.

The Predator is one of cinema's great monsters but I lost most interest in the series after even the first one but enjoyed occasional memorable moments like the predator about to kill Lance Henriksen (?) in one of the films then scans him and sees he's terminally ill so tosses him aside and spares him because he's not worthy prey. But this new one looks like shit. Even the last Predator film I felt was pretty crappy and that was considered one of the better ones.

I actually saw a Predator movie the other night that I'd never heard of before, and it was fairly decent. I didn't think it was as good as the first two, but it wasn't awful. I was stunned when Fishburne showed up halfway through.

The Predator series has a marvelous premise - alien sportsmen & warriors that only hunt the most aggressive, dangerous and capable of human prey - but the execution is just not well done after the classic first film. I'd actually be interested in seeing a predator film that takes place entirely within their society without these boring macho human male action-figures we see being chased around like that annoying hero-asshole I saw in the The Predator trailer. For example, we never saw a female predator. I bet they all look like Bo Derek or Mariah Carey in their prime but with huge musculature, long legs, voluptuous T & A and sexy-as-fuck arthropod mandibles that they use extensively in their mating rituals

I could easily see the female predators being far more dangerous than their male counterparts. Maybe that's why we've never seen them, as the male predators stay far away from the women-folk!

Carnifex said:

I actually saw a Predator movie the other night that I'd never heard of before, and it was fairly decent. I didn't think it was as good as the first two, but it wasn't awful. I was stunned when Fishburne showed up halfway through.

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That would be the 2010 Predators it was one of the better sequels.

Link - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1424381/

A group of elite warriors parachute into an unfamiliar jungle and are hunted by members of a merciless alien race.

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They went back to the jungle setting but on a alien planet.

As for seeing what a female Yautja/Predator looks like you have to read the comics.

Link - https://www.avpcentral.com/female-yautja

The female Yautja are fearsome warriors just like their male brethren. Little is known about them and there are only a few notable specimens. When they have a mate, they prefer to hunt together, sometimes even die together. They are often more calculative than males, who tend to be more reckless. The female Yautja are usually bigger than males and some have feminine qualities, like breasts. The female Yautja have never been featured in the movies or games, they are only in the books and graphics novels. Here is a list of all notable female Yautja.

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I liked the 2nd one