My partner’s on vacation so we’ve been watching more movies than usual. Last night we saw The Mist (2007), which had some of the worst writing I can remember sitting through. Every time I considered turning it off, the digital and practical gore drew me back in… seriously though, it became almost unbearable anytime anyone opened their mouth.
A few nights ago I watched Paul Schader’s Hardcore and Coppola’s Dracula, which were both terrific. Dracula is a hamfest but a very passionate and fun one, with gorgeous costume design, and Hardcore’s a much more nuanced and touching version of a genre now bloated with Taken-type films.
I suffered through Arena recently. The big mini-boss fight half way through is quite the spectacle. The only thing that kept me watching though was the fact that both Armin Shimerman and Marc Alaimo were in it. They have such distinct looks that you’ll immediately recognize them under their makeup. I loves me the Star Trek.
The movie wasn’t absolutely terrible, but it was pretty silly. Robot Jox is so much better though.
And then there’s whatever Anthony Hopkins is going. I think someone like briefly described what they imagined a Dutch accent might be like, and then he ran with it. Hard.
When Star Wars came out I had chicken pox so I couldn’t see it right away. When my parents finally took me to see at a drive-in, it was playing as a double feature with…you guessed it…Laserblast. Star Wars played first and by the time Laserblast started eight year old me was pretty tired. I only hazily remembered it afterward, and the aliens stuck in my head as being “just like” Hammerhead from the cantina scene in Star Wars. The two movies have always been sort of connected in a weird, blurry, half-remembered way ever since, making Laserblast seem much better to me than it has any real right to.
One of the great thrills of my childhood was having a sleepover at my aunt’s. They had this magical device called a VCR!
My cousin and me wandered around the video store for an hour gawking at the overload of movies, and we often ended up picking whatever impressed us the most with the flashy cassette cover.
I recently rewatched one of my favourites from that time:
I did love and repeatedly watch the Beastmaster as a kid, but for whatever reasons, it’s not one that excited me that much when I got a Blu-ray of it a few years ago. Though the ring with the spying eye in it has always stayed with me.
Migod. Nothing can really top the poster - barbarian, sword aloft, pecs out, his girlfriend in a fetching swimsuit, and his ferocious kitty beast. They’re coming from inside a giant ring. With an eye. And a giant bird inside it (of course he has falconry skills)
Oh, wait. Pretty much everybody, and for good reason. What the heck happened to the tiger that he changed color? Maybe in the first movie he was just dirty?
I unfortunately remember seeing this sequel. While looking up the poster I discovered there was a third movie I had been unaware of and thankfully never saw.
Seeing Kari Wuhrer on the Beastmaster 2 poster made me think of Kari Wuhrer. So I watched a sci-fi action film called Fatal Conflict (2000) starring Kari Wuhrer, and coincidentally, Miles O’Keefe, who played Ator in Ator The Fighting Eagle (1981), the Conan-alike that I recently rewatched by accident and criticised earlier in this thread. Wuhrer plays a sort of sexy space commando who has to go undercover on a penal ship that a criminal brother and sister have hijacked. Bro’n’sis plan to ram the ship into the USA.
Fatal Conflict seems to have had moderate ambitions at the script level – a bit of sci-fi detail and nods to characterisation. It could have been effective if done by a big studio. With the resources it had (few?) and really unskilled direction, it falls low.
The lighting’s close to TV, so scenes of people trying to sneak around really well-lit cargo holds look silly. Kari’s Schwarzenegger-like one-liners don’t produce laughs. The villain is miscast or misdirected. There’s some weird incest thing going on with the bro’n’sis characters, or at least there was once, and they have a complex relationship that’s not helping the film either way.
There are tons of computer screens showing tech readouts that look good. The 2000-era CGI of spaceships and such looks decent, too, in standard def. So what is ridiculous is that tons of props in the films have their names on them. In one scene, Kari’s holding the transponder. The screen-filling label on it says ‘TRANSPONDER’, etc. I don’t know if this is some side-effect of the film being shot in what is now Czechia, but I’ve never before seen a movie that went so badly overboard with it.
Kari Wuhrer sounded familiar, so I have checked the works she was in and I have found where I saw her. Now I have to watch five Prophecy movies again, thanks.
I watched this film (Triangle) and found it to be deeply upsetting and suspect that for some it might be terribly triggering.
It would not have made a difference in my case because I wanted to go in cold, but if I may give my own content warning (which contains at least one major spoiler):
Content warning
The child abuse victim is disabled. Specifically, he’s autistic. Though we don’t see the physical abuse, we do hear it. We also see some of the emotional abuse. I feel that anything positive in the depiction of the character is undercut by the fact that it is very strongly implied that he dies over and over and over again.
Of course, if you are not easily triggered or offended, you might want to go in cold like I did. You do you.
To mark the death of Donald Sutherland, I watched a movie of his I’d never seen, Don’t Look Now from 1973, costarring Julie Christie.
It bills itself as a thriller, which is a weird description for it, except that it’s incredibly bizarre in the way that movies of that era can be. But it’s got a serious emotional core to it that’s almost horror-worthy, showing the way that grief can become a monster. It’s also got a pretty racy sex scene that was apparently famously shocking when the movie came out. Do I recommend it? I guess. It’s artsy and melodramatic and a weird mixture of obtuse/predictable. But seeing the young Julie Christie naked is certainly worth it.
You sound like you’d not heard of it before, which surprises me a little. But only a little – I mean it’s always kind of dumb when we’re surprised someone hasn’t encountered something before, isn’t it?
The film’s huge in horror-art circles and other shapes, and very influential. You’ve probably seen tons of films that consciously grabbed from it here and there, because directors love grabbing from it. Even (to use a far flung example) Event Horizon, if you’ve seen that. There’s Paul T Anderson on the commentary saying ‘I got the idea for this bit from Don’t Look Now.’
