I watched Scanners (1981) for the first time recently and that movie freaked me out. I don’t know how I missed that gem back in the day.
Naked Lunch (1991) was one movie that still lingers in my mind. So trippy. Of course, how can you go wrong with Robocop as your lead actor. Weller is my man crush.
I’ve been K.O’d by a cold or something (COVID test is -ve). My achievement for today was watching a low-demand film from my library I’ve only seen once before: Zombie 4.
Note that Dawn of the Dead was called Zombie in Italy. Then Lucio Fulci made Zombie Flesh Eaters, which they called Zombie 2 in Italy, to make you think it was officially the sequel to Dawn of the Dead. This confusing pattern continued, eventually leading to the creation of Zombie 4 around 1989 (– or, depending on where you live, Zombie 3. Or just After Death)
After a confusing prologue scene involving a witch doctor, two of groups of fools, one a bunch of adventurers(?), the other some scientists, independently run into each other on an island in the Phillipines.
Then, in an infuriating scene, the woman scientists is made out to be the really dumb one, as she says ‘Don’t read from that book of the dead!’ And the other scientists, one of them played by a former actor in gay porn films, says ‘You superstitious idiot!’ But of course she’s right and they are the blockheads. They read the book, releasing a plague of ninja-like zombies. The zombies wear hoods, cooperate, can fire weapons and also go in for a lot of hand-to-hand combat. Some even talk.
Everyone holes up in a house in the jungle. Lots of action and carnage ensues. It turns out the heroine was the little girl lost in the jungle in a second prologue, and she thinks she can fix everything with some kind of sacrifice. In an ending that is non-comprehensible, she becomes a zombie and tears out one of her eyeballs while another zombie repeatedly rams its arm in and out of the surviving scientist’s chest. I guess it’s meant to be some kind of shock that her idea didn’t work?
Enjoy this NSFW trailer. Which has no dialogue in it… I’m not sure why. That’s usually the sign they’re hiding a film’s foreign-ness. Maybe it was still the best way to pre-sell the film in non-English-speaking countries.
The film score’s pretty good. Not that the cool bits of it are in evidence in the trailer.
-Wade
The internet’s having a pile-on on Madame Web at the moment. I just saw the film, and the internet is, as usual, having some kind of mass delusion / groupthink / social-media-loserfest.
I enjoyed Madame Web. And it is a legit story-driven film, unlike The Marvels which I described earlier in this thread as ultrapiffle. The Marvels was bereft of reasons to exist.
Madame Web has a future-telling schtick which is cool overall, though not clearly handled at times. It has some other weak elements in general: The villain is dreadful, as written and in performance, and some of the dialogue’s a bit naff.
Something I don’t understand is why they cast young adults as teenagers here, because they got heavy hitters; Sydney Sweeney is the lead in popular romcom Anyone But You (I’ve seen it – it’s good) right now. Isabela Merced can carry a whole film. e.g. Dora the Explorer. And here they’re both playing teenaged girls. I don’t know, maybe they just wanted solid actors no matter what ages they were playing.
I understand the trailer may have cheated with expectations. It shows the teenaged girls as a team of female Spider-Men knockoffs, but this occurs only once in a fleeting bit of future-telling. Mercifully (far as I’m concerned) we never have to endure their transformation into superheroes in this film.
So the film’s not typical Marvel, and while it’s not great, it’s fine and with some differences.
-Wade
I saw in a review that the movie’s set in 2003 (my first thought: hey cool, that’s when I was living in NYC! Second thought: wait; that means it’s a period piece). So I assume that one of the plans for a future installment in the Spider Man Cinematic Universe That Doesn’t Have Spider Man is to have them play adult versions of the characters in a movie set in the present day.
(Hollywood’s typical casting approaches make this easier, actually: got a 16 year old character? Here, have a 24 year old actress. Got a 40 year old character? Here, have a 24 year old actress).
There’s also the fact that movies and TV shows prefer to cast young 20-somethings instead of teens whenever possible so that they don’t have to deal with the heavy restrictions that child labor laws place on shooting.
Yeah, that’s quite possible. Maybe I was distracted from this possibility because there is another reason in the film for it to be 2003. It’s a bit paltry, but still a spoiler, so I won’t say it.
In production, the 2003ness consists of:
Yeah, you made me think of, say, the latest Spider-Man films, with Peter Parker and his friends.
When I think of why I don’t notice young adults playing teens (outside sex comedies) it’s usually because the actors are unknown. This time it jangled because two are very known and one I saw playing a twenty-something fiancee five seconds ago. I just looked up Sweeney and she’s twenty-six!
-Wade
It was Tom’s turn to pick the movie, and we saw American Fiction in the theater (I always pick horror/thriller, he always picks drama/comedy.).
It was fantastic, a hall of mirrors for nice white liberals like me, never letting up with the ways in which white liberal society (with a special laser focus on literary academia) traps people of color, even when there’s an attempt to turn the tables. The performances were perfect, it was funny as hell, and it hit me close to where I’m soft right now with a mother descending into dementia.
Watched Shine, which was a sad one. A bleak start, a happy middle and a sad end, and with some very good acting. I also need to improve my review skills, it looks like.
We (girlfriend, son, me) went to the theatre to see Wonka today. I liked it a lot.
I would not have connected it to Roald Dahl, though, had I not known the main character beforehand from the books (and I believe that chap Depp did quite a grotesquely impressive impression of the character too…)
This movie totally lacks Dahl’s dark humour, and his confidence that children (both the characters in and the readers of his books) can deal with life’s ugliness, and it’s fun to give it the nastiness a little grimly comical twist.
If anything, I would have pegged it as a distant cousin of Mary Poppins (has been in my top 3 since I first saw it), Chocolat (which in my opinion is actually a remake of Mary Poppins), and The Wizard of Oz.
I know those films have deeper darker themes too, and so does Wonka, but they lack the obvious enjoyment in exploring the funny opportunities of the darker side of life (and living with other humans) that permeates Dahl’s writings.
We had a lot of fun. Great actors, great scenery, lots of dynamic action and singing and dancing and magic (the magician kind… or is it…?). It’s funny in a lot of styles (clever, slapstick, caricature,…), uplifting, moving. A tad anvilicious on the moral perhaps, but from the presentation it was clear that the makers themselves knew they were laying it on thick, and they asked the adults to just play along, *wink*.
We were sitting right at the front, second row, and my son and I stayed seated until the very end to sing and wave along to the ending credits song, which drew amused looks from departing theatre-goers.
Fun!.
I have been so suspicious of this movie, so I’m glad to hear you liked it. Dahl has been having a renaissance recently with several of his killer short stories filmed and with the Wonka mania. I did adore Gene Wilder, of course, and feel a little hostile about that skinny pretty boy taking over. Although honestly the Wilder movie didn’t capture the Dahl brand of darkness very well, either. And I always wondered why no one ever made The Great Glass Elevator into a movie. I loved the vermicious knids.
Huh. That’s a fresh take of the movie. I guess it makes sense in a way.
I saw The Holdovers with my parents the other day and really enjoyed it - it’s funny, poignant, and well acted. In television, my partner and I watched the first episode of The Sopranos on a whim today (neither of us had ever seen it). We’re now 6 episodes deep and it’s 1:15am on the east coast.
I’ve never seen it either-- I’m saving that for when I break my hip.
Slightly unusual non-fiction recommendation today, but in pros, this film is only 17 minutes long and you can watch it online.
Never Go With Strangers is 1971 British informational film for kids, though it was not shown on British TV for many years as it was considered too frightening. It still raises my pulse today for many reasons.
In the mid-80s, this was shown to us in my Sydney primary school hall on a sports day when it rained. In case I have to say it for the younger folk, it was a film and was projected. The film completely galvanised us and so was given a repeat screening soon after. I especially remembered the frightening cartoon ‘evil face’ that appeared on the strangers a couple of times (or is it just once?).
I went through life remembering the film and its effect, but not what it had been called, until a few years ago when I found it in the BFI archives. And now it’s on the internet archive.
One thing I love about all films is their artifact quality, especially with lower budgets. When I watch this I feel like I’m in all those cramped homes and grey thoroughfares and with people dressed and looking like that, and that basically I’m in Britain in the 1970s. I guess that’s weird nostalgia for me, too, as half our childhood TV in Australia was trickle down shows from the BBC, shown on its local sister the ABC.
Anyway, get ready to have your hackles raised.
(In case the link doesn’t become a link… the text of the link is
https://archive.org/details/never-go-with-strangers
)
-Wade
I went through a binge of these a while back. The British had this strange period where they really leaned into the idea of scaring their children straight using feature length public service announcements. There was a whole part of the government created just to film and produce these pieces. The train track ones live rent free in my head.
I saw Imaginary, the latest horror flick from Blumhouse, which came out today. Doesn’t even have a review on IMDB yet.
A mixed family moves back to the mother’s childhood home where she remembers being happy. The younger of her two stepdaughters starts playing with an imaginary teddy friend called Chauncey there, who becomes increasingly malevolent.
This reminded me of so many recent Blumhouse films (a testimony to their prolific-ness) that it was unfortunately too familiar to me for a lot of the running time. Kids relating to imaginary monsters or dangerous friends, a shared family monster, psychiatry sessions with the family, the parents and the kids solving the problem together.
M3GAN was in this territory, though M3GAN is killer. The Boogeyman was in this territory, and it’s pretty good. It Lives Inside was definitely in this territory – it was okay. Another recent film whose title I can’t remember (but was distracted trying to think of while watching Imaginary) was in this territory. And there’s Five Nights At Freddy’s (killer teddy).
Execution of Imaginary was uniformly very good. I perked up a lot near the end, where the supernatural-set finale seemed to tap a ton of classic films, especially the eighties Nightmares on Elm Streets. There’s nothing throwback about this film but somehow the production design and physical approach reminded me of lots of dream-based horror films you could see in the wake of the success of the Elm Streets, but which dried up by the late 90s.
If you watch fewer of Blumhouse’s films, you’ll probably like this more.
Also, there are a lot of beautiful people in films, but I can’t remember the last time I found someone’s facial beauty so pulling-me-out-of-the-film distracting for the entire runtime. DeWanda Wise had that effect on me in this film.
-Wade
I watched Dune Part 2 just now. I liked it a lot. Of course, there are some flaws - such as the waste of water at the end, after stating earlier that you don’t waste any water (which i totally understand). But otherwise, there were some really awesome scenes and grand visuals and music. I definitely enjoyed it a lot. Anticipating part 3.
Awesome. Some takeaways from this film;
Watching The Gentlemen (2024). It’s very weird, not totally believable and really strange. At first I got into it in the same mind as I did for the first season of Succession. I didn’t find it very great, pretty overly silly and unbelievable that a Duke would be doing all this crazy dangerous stuff.
BUT then I started thinking, “what if this is more of a sitcom…?” And now I’m enjoying it much more. It feels better as a sitcom with wacky, really dark (comedy) events. And I quite like it now.
That’s a really cool trick, changing your own set of expectations in order to get more enjoyment out of a movie/book/album/…
I had this with Romanitas by Sophia McDougall. Halfway through,
I liked it a lot more with my mindset changed to fit the work.
