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Takes No Damage posted:Idle Hands (1999) It's explicitly stated that only Devon Sawa's right hand was possessed because the left one wasn't idle. It's his wanking hand.
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Apr 30, 2023 10:17
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:53 |
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Takes No Damage posted:drat that's true More than you'd think. It's a high school sexual myth that wanking with your non-dominant hand feels better because it's more like someone else is doing it. It's not true, but both the character and the target audience would get the joke.
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May 1, 2023 08:49
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I still would have flipped it to explain why his right hand was still ok, but props to the writers covering bases like that.
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gey muckle mowser - can I ask that the Fresh Hell challenge be amended slightly to "movie released since the October Challenge"? It doesn't change it much, while maintaining the spirit in full by allowing all movies that came out since the last time we did this.
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May 2, 2023 16:17
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Don't know how many I'll do - I'm not even willing to commit to 13 the way my eyes have been going - but I'll do a few. 1) Project Wolf Hunting (2022) Challenge: Fresh Hell As per my last post: although this movie doesn't strictly match the stated rule of "released in 2023", its international release date was in November 2022 and so this is the first Challenge Month that it could be watched in. I feel that this is the true spirit of the challenge. A number of Korean convicts who escaped to the Philippines are being extradited back home, traveling aboard a cargo ship to avoid coming into contact with civilians. A violent breakout ensues, swiftly followed by the convicts discovering that they're not the most dangerous person on the ship... I picked this up blind because it sounded suitably mental, and it is. Did I mention the violence? I should have said ultraviolence. There's a shitload of gore, the fight scenes are visceral and brutal - I always wanted to see a movie where someone has their arm ripped off then is beaten to death with the soggy end - and it has a few stylistic choices that will make you look away. It's relentless and quite long at nearly two hours, but it has enough plot to keep you interested. Overall verdict: strong recommend.
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May 4, 2023 01:24
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gey muckle mowser posted:
Murnau invented that shot for the movie. Fun fact: Emil Jannings, who played Mephisto, won the Oscar for Best Actor at the 1st Academy Awards in 1929. Less fun fact: he later became a fervent Nazi.
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May 5, 2023 17:19
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2) The Menu Challenge: Holy Terror A movie about an evening of fine dining and entertainment at the exclusive island restaurant of the legendary chef Slowik. It's difficult for me to rate this. I'm pretty much the antithesis of a foodie; I eat things that I like the taste of, but honestly if eating weren't a biological necessity I'd happily get along without it. As such I was disconnected from the plot when to be disturbed by it would require me feeling involved. As was the most disturbing and amusing thing about it was that I watched it on Disney+. It was all well put together, though, albeit somewhat contrived at times. Justifying the challenge: this is a religious movie, and the religion is haute cuisine. Slowik has turned his profession into an obsession and his restaurant into a cult, and Tyler is his willing acolyte. This is even made explicit during the final course where Slowik describes them all as martyrs.
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May 8, 2023 00:22
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Naked Man Punch posted:
That was intentional - it's meant to look unreal. Everything is deliberately distorted to generate a sense of madness, hyperreality and lost perspective.
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May 12, 2023 23:33
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3) Switchblade Romance aka Haute Tension (2003) Challenge: They Shoot Zombies Not the highest I haven't seen - I somehow managed to miss The Innocents (1961) - but the highest unseen that I have access to. So this is an early entry in the New French Extremity genre, by which I mean it's a late entry in the Young Women Being Tortured genre. And that's all I really care to say about the movie, to be honest. There's no tension to it, the plot twist is nonsense, and Maiwenn le Besco had already been exploited enough by Luc Besson before Aja decided to give it a go. I'll give the female leads credit for doing their best, but if anything they sell it too well to make it work. Verdict: the whole genre belongs in the dustbin, and this should be at the bottom.
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May 13, 2023 11:23
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4) Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things Challenge: as per title A theatre troupe travel to a secluded island and attempt to rip off Night of the Living Dead without great success. Watching this, it was hard to believe that just a couple of years later Bob Clark would make a stone cold classic like Black Christmas. This earlier work is vastly inferior, not even measuring up as a calling card showcasing the director's talent. The one-sentence description of the movie above is tongue in cheek but also profoundly literal. The cast really were a theatre troupe, most of whom play characters based on themselves, and the movie really is just a ripoff of NOTLD without the budget (which is saying something). At least, it is once anything actually happens. More than an hour of the movie's scant running time is spent watching Alan Ormsby be an obnoxious rear end in a top hat, which is not fun. Verdict: Goons Shouldn't Watch poo poo Movies. Jedit fucked around with this message at 22:38 on May 25, 2023 |
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May 14, 2023 00:48
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5) City of the Dead (1960) Challenge: ... of the Dead A young woman travels to a small Massachusetts town haunted by the curse of a 17th century witch. It's a bit of an odd fish, this one. The plot is quite straightforward and might remind you somewhat of Psycho in many respects. The cast is mainly people you might have heard of rather than people you have heard of - singer Dennis Lotis turns up towards the end of his short dalliance with movie stardom - but is lent weight by a small role for Christopher Lee and a somewhat larger one for the much underrated Valentine Dyall. Dyall cut his horror chops as the Man in Black, narrator of BBC Radio's 1940s horror anthology series Appointment With Fear and was mainly known as a voice actor, but he was perfectly serviceable in the flesh here. Overall, though, it's fine. Not a classic, I don't think I'll ever watch it again, but fine.
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May 15, 2023 01:22
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6) Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) Challenge: Second Chance Kung fu vampire action in a Hammer/Shaw co-production. It's been a very long time since I first watched this one, so forgive me for being brief: I wasn't keen. And I'm still not. It's one of the lesser lights of Hammer, coming as it did towards the end of the studio's run when the barrel was being firmly scraped. The absence of Christopher Lee was a big hint that it wasn't going to be good; he was offered the part of Dracula but turned it down after reading the script. I'd wager that Peter Cushing wished he'd done the same. It's a limp movie, not even saved from mediocrity by absurdity. The plot is contrived and the staging is very poor. That said, I will give it credit for including a rare movie appearance for the jiangshi, the hopping vampire of Chinese myth.
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May 19, 2023 00:57
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7) The Brood (1980) Challenge: Woke In Fright Classic Cronenberg about a woman externalising her mental health issues as killer children. I was 100% certain that I'd watched this before, but it was completely unfamiliar to me. I may have read enough about it that the Mandela Effect kicked in. I wouldn't call it part of his top tier. He always went a bit ropey when dealing directly with psychology, and this is no exception. But there's enough memorable scenes to keep it going, and Ollie Reed is excellent as the radical psychiatrist Raglan. Should I need to justify the challenge: the whole movie centres on Nola's suffering, which she kept pent up for a lifetime because nobody wanted to hear about it. It's a solid criticism of how we deal with mental health, pushing the problems aside as if they weren't real until they become all too real.
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May 20, 2023 00:20
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8) The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot (2019) Challenge: Tales From The Cryptids Challenge: History Lesson (1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 2010s, 2020s) So there's this man, right, and he killed Hitler. And then he killed Bigfoot. That pretty much sums up the plot, so it's bulked out with flashbacks to his relationship with a woman before he went to war. From the general scarcity of plot and the huge contrivances made to have it happen, it seems quite likely that this is a movie in the classic AIP mould where they'd come up with a cool title (and sometimes even the poster art) before actually writing the script. As a horror movie it doesn't really work at all and barely even qualifies; one telegraphed jump scare is all there is to try and shock. But it's a nice little character piece for Sam Elliott and I'm always happy to see him work.
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May 21, 2023 00:34
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STAC Goat posted:More catchup insomnia spamming. Sorry. Sounds like they should have called it The Ascent.
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May 24, 2023 09:18
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9) The Police Are Blundering In The Dark (1974) Challenge: It's A-Me Who is murdering every woman staying at this small Tuscan hotel as soon as she gets her boobs out? Is it the rear end in a top hat waiter whose casting call said "must have past experience in snuff movies"? Is it the rapey idiot gardener? Or perhaps the wheelchair-bound scientist is not as crippled as he wants you to think? Could it be all of them? And after 90 minutes of this, will you even care? Couldn't find a Mario Bava, so I had to go with a giallo. Big mistake. Literally the best thing I can say about this movie is that it waits a whole three minutes before the first sexual assault. I searched another candidate movie on IMDb to check it wasn't Spanish and the top Trivia line for that one was "the producers didn't want to wait for the first titty murder so they put the opening credits over it". The kills are dire, the blood is loving magenta at one point, the acting is lame even for a bad dub and the plot - such as it is - is ludicrous. The killer is finally unmasked when the scientist reads his mind with a theremin and sees a picture of a naked woman, and the waiter - who turns out to be a PI - then confirms to the police that actually he knew all along the guy was a schizo who had changed his name to hide but didn't say anything. Christ, this genre is a sewer. Verdict: Don't Watch. Run.
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May 26, 2023 00:44
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10) The Wolf House (2018) Challenge: Drawn and Quartered A young woman flees from a colony of expatriated Germans in Chile. Pursued by a wolf, she finds her way to a small house inhabited by two pigs and takes up residence. I don't want to say too much about this retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, as it's a hard recommend but it's best watched blind. Stylistically it's both inventive and nightmarish, with stop motion puppets being mixed with chalk paintings on the walls of a house and real furniture. It doesn't try to hide what it is, it being a story told through art is much of the point. The movie was inspired by true events at Colonia Dignidad, which I'll leave you to read up on for yourself if you wish. Once you have, three scenes in the movie will suddenly make a great deal more sense and the film as a whole will become a great deal more disturbing.
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May 27, 2023 00:23
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Class3KillStorm posted:
It's not about that. The street people outside won't let the group leave, but also won't come into the church itself. But those of the group who have been directly possessed by the entity in the canister are inactive during the day unless they're approached - Lucifer is, after all, the Prince of Darkness. The race to dig through the wall to get Walter out is to get the job done before the sun goes down and it can start controlling them completely again.
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May 28, 2023 17:55
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11) We Have Always Lived In The Castle (2019) An adaptation of Shirley Jackson's classic gothic novel about an extremely eccentric family whose lives are disturbed by the arrival of a cousin. Being something of a drawing room drama with little room for flash, so long as it hewed closely to the plot of the book - which it does - it was always going to stand or fall on the strength of its cast. Luckily, they're quite good. Alexandra Daddario is convincignly fragile as Constance, Sebastian Stan walks the line between manipulative and charming as the cousin whose motives may have been misinterpreted by the paranoid Julian and Merricat, and Crispin Glover is Crispin Glover. Taissa Farmiga as Merricat is perhaps the weakest link, but it's also the hardest part of the four leads to play. Verdict: recommended if you like Jackson's work, and you can gently caress off if you don't.
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May 29, 2023 01:05
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Class3KillStorm posted:Do they ever come out and say that, though? I always thought it was just that all the zombies were posted up to protect the Antichrist while it was merging/consuming Susan Blanchard, which is why they weren't moving around. Sentries don't need to move, after all, and the Devil has bigger things on his mind moment to moment at that point. They don't explicitly say it, but someone does say that the minions stop attacking as soon as the sun comes up.
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May 29, 2023 09:11
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12) Spoonful of Sugar (2022) Challenge: Horror High I already wasted 90 minutes watching it, I'm not going to waste 90 seconds talking about it. Summary: 11/11 specific challenges completed. History Lesson complete: 60s, 70s, 80s, 2010s, 2020s. Didn't have the energy to fill out Geography, unfortunately. My eyes simply weren't up to any more watching than I did, and I lacked the energy to go hunting far for movies from the global south.
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Jun 1, 2023 00:38
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Pretzel Rod Stewart posted:might be even easier to go “watch six films not from the US, UK, or Canada”—even the dedicated Anglophone will hit like fourish and be forced to start to looking at Gambia or wherever I'm pretty sure I can find six Australian horror movies. Six films not in English might be interesting though.
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Jun 2, 2023 15:07
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:53 |
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Pretzel Rod Stewart posted:ah I meant each from a different country! so you check off Ireland and Australia and now ya gotta watch some Czech thing from 1973 You can do that challenge fairly easily without watching a movie not in English. Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, and finish off with Jesus Franco's Count Dracula.
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Jun 2, 2023 15:21
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