Recent Viewings, Part 2

[Rev. Powell]

I was assuming the whole "Black Mold Exposure" review was a kind of conceptual performance art.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Bloodsport" (1988)
Jean-Claude Van Damme goes AWOL from the Army so he can travel to Hong Kong and compete in the "Kumite," a secret underground no-holds-barred international martial arts competition. The movie's plot is paper thin but the fight scenes are bone-crunchingly brutal, and the flick's interesting supporting cast includes a young Forest Whitaker, Donald "Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds" Gibb, and the legendary Bolo Yeung as the tournament's Big Bad. '80s action enthusiasts will dig.
Fun fact: the movie was allegedly based on the true life experience of martial artist Frank Dux, but in the years since its release, virtually everything in the film has been debunked as total B.S. 

[lester1/2jr]

^ bloodsport features some shots of the Kowloon Walled city, a lawless area in the (then) already pretty lawless city of Hong Kong. I saw an incredible documentary about it.

Rev - The review is real, the documentary may well be conceptual performance art

[indianasmith]

IN FEAR (2013) - Lucy and Tom, a young couple on their way to a music festival, have agreed to stay in a charming rural hotel Tom found on the internet.  But after they turn off the road to find it, they get lost in the Irish countryside - narrow, muddy roads, confusing signs that take them right back to where they started, trees falling to block their way, and finally, blind driving in the dark as menacing figures pop up on the sides of the road.  And they are running out of gas when Tom hits a mysterious stranger named Max, who says he is being pursued by the same people who are terrorizing them.  But is he tormented, or tormentor?
  This movie does a really good job of building a slow, creeping sense of dread, with one nasty surprise at the end, but leaves you wishing for a little more explanation when it was all done.  Still, not a bad way to spend a half hour! 4/5

[lester1/2jr]

The Long Night (1947) - Henry Fonda is a working class shlub who gets involved in a battle of wits with evil stage magician Vincent Price over a girl. I really liked Vincent Price here. It's earlier than most of his more well known stuff and the character is more noir-ishly sinister. On the whole, it's more of a noir-tinged drama though. Fonda is a great actor but he isn't really "of the night". decent budget, memorable cinematography it's just a little slower than, say, Ace in the Hole (1951). I don't think I'd watch it again

4.25 /5

Ann Dvorack as his magician's assistant is not really my jawn. The love triangle girl is much cuter

[indianasmith]

NIGHT OF THE MISSING (2023)

    A woman covered in blood stumbles into a police station late at night, demanding to speak to the sheriff.  When the sheriff arrives, she is regaled with a series of stories from the mysterious woman about various missing persons listed on the bulletin board in the sheriff's office.  This sets up a series of short horror vignettes which are somewhat hit and miss - as is the connecting narrative wedged in at the end.  Not awful - well, actually, kind of awful.  I'd give this one a 2.5/5, maybe a 3 if I was drunk when I watched it - but I don't drink, so 2.5 it is.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Near Dark" (1987)
An Oklahoma farm boy becomes an unwilling member of a traveling "family" of vampires when he gets bitten by a lovely bloodsucker. Chaos ensues as he tries to find a way back to his home and regain his humanity. A cool country-fried horror flick with a great cast headed by the always welcome Lance Henriksen and the late great Bill Paxton. Somehow I'd never seen this flick before; I'm glad to finally cross it off the list because it was a good one.

"Above The Law" (1988)
Steven Seagal (in his movie debut) is a Chicago cop who gets tangled up in a plot involving the Mob, South American drug cartels, and some rogue C.I.A. agents who are planning to assassinate a U.S. senator to cover up their dirty deeds. The plot is needlessly complicated but the Chicago locations are cool and Steve busts many heads and kicks many butts, therefore I was entertained.

[indianasmith]

EXHUME (2017) - Caught this one on Tubi this evening; supposedly inspired by real events.
An archeologist and his wife, a forensic anthropologist, are called on to excavate the grounds of a former Reform School for Troubled Boys.  For some inexplicable reason, they bring along their teenage daughter, who suffers from clinical depression.  The place is haunted, lots of boys were tortured and killed there, and bad stuff happens.
This was a surprisingly good, dark film that I thoroughly enjoyed.  Took a little bit to get going, but lots of creeping suspense - my only complaint is that much of the time, it was so dark on the set you couldn't tell exactly what was happening.  Still, a fun horror flick!  4/5

[Trevor]

"Bloodsport" (1988)
Jean-Claude Van Damme goes AWOL from the Army so he can travel to Hong Kong and compete in the "Kumite," a secret underground no-holds-barred international martial arts competition. The movie's plot is paper thin but the fight scenes are bone-crunchingly brutal, and the flick's interesting supporting cast includes a young Forest Whitaker, Donald "Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds" Gibb, and the legendary Bolo Yeung as the tournament's Big Bad. '80s action enthusiasts will dig.
Fun fact: the movie was allegedly based on the true life experience of martial artist Frank Dux, but in the years since its release, virtually everything in the film has been debunked as total B.S. 

I think all of us on here combined know more about martial arts than Frank 🦆

[Rev. Powell]

THIS NIGHT I'LL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE (1967): Through the magic of hand-waving screenwriting, sadistic mortician Coffin Joe is back from his apparent death in AT MIDNIGHT I'LL TAKE YOUR SOUL, once again terrorizing a Brazilian village, preaching atheism, kidnapping potential mothers to find the one who will bear his son, torturing women in see-through nighties with snakes and tarantulas, crushing heads with a giant suspended stone, and even taking a dream trip into a colorful Hell full of nudity, torture, and body parts sticking out of the walls. Mixing crummy exploitation with genuine avant-garde impulses, the "Coffin Joe" movies (especially the first two) are truly like nothing else out there. 4/5.

[M.10rda]

Recently mentioned in the "post-apocalyptic" thread though I'd started watching it three and a half weeks ago... 

THE TIME MACHINE (1960):
Repeat viewing but last seen in early childhood. Wow, what a pleasant surprise - I enjoyed nearly every moment of it. Director George Pal pulled out all the stops here and the results have aged very well. The "Special Visual Effects" won an Oscar and range from truly effective to good enough if you squint. However, the art direction and Pal's generally steady and sometimes ostentatious hand deliver the best technical effects, particularly once we get to the far future and hang out in the Eloi temples and the Morlock caverns. The "hypnotic air raid" sequence is legitimately stunning and those friggin' Morlocks... well, they work great when barely glimpsed, and then when you finally see 'em - I still think they're great! Of course I love/hate a**hole man-ape creatures as movie villains so maybe that's just me.   

Speaking of those a**hole man-apes... H.G. Wells' vision of the future (as updated slightly yet mostly preserved by Pal) also remains... "apt", shall we say. Whether any particular viewer prefers to interpret a subterranean technocracy of sterile mutant monkeys preying upon the flesh and blood of a perfectly docile, empty-minded species of perfect Aryan sheeple as the sort of racist "White Replacement" hysteria one might enjoy on AON or Newsmax, or as a prescient forecast of MAGA-mad nihilistic politicians living off the fervent donations of low-info rural voters... uhhh, the conflict still tracks nicely!

The Elois themselves are one thing among a small handful that I don't love about THE TIME MACHINE. It's by design that they're maddeningly complacent and inert for most of their screen time, but while they don't deserve to become yeti-chow, it's still hard to feel much sympathy for those blonde haired, blue eyed plastic bastards. In spite of Yvette Mimieux's charms, even Weena doesn't come off as any thinking man's dream girl in a world where any other candidate has more than half a brain. There's also an earlier (well-intentioned) sequence added by Pal that takes place in the late 1960s, which I don't think was in the original material. It's an admirable attempt at relevance but the sequence suggests that Pal doesn't quite understand how nuclear weapons actually work... and finally, the final 2-3 minutes, though not catastrophic, suffer from the same kind of unfortunate hyper-obviousness that we've recently discussed as a criticism of LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL, SALTBURN, and others. Yeah, let's literally have a supporting character explain events which would likely be entirely clear (if implicit) if the viewer is paying any attention, rather than figuring out a more cinematic way to communicate clarification or just trusting the damn audience.

All that aside... TIME MACHINE still works beautifully, and far and away the biggest reason for that is... the endlessly compelling and watchable Rod freaking Taylor as H.G. Wells! Although in his buttoned-up Victorian nerdliness he resembles Ralph Fiennes a bit, he also possesses the quiet charisma and formidable physicality of a Guy Pearce....... who probably not coincidentally reprised the role in the early 2000s remake. And most importantly, Taylor has mastered something that many actors claim is among the greatest dramatic challenges: he is completely convincing at playing a hyperintelligent visionary genius and making that character not only believable but transparent and relatable. There's no shortage of significant leaps of logic or gaps in exposition within TIME MACHINE, yet whenever Taylor communicates that he's figured out new information and understands/accepts a situation, this viewer automatically got on board with him and stuck with the screenplay. That's 100% a credit to Taylor. His performance isn't so much a triumph of performer of material, but it is a herculean demo of how a smart, tireless actor can elevate and propel a highly demanding project.

4/5 Much better than I would've imagined.

[Rev. Powell]

THE STRANGE WORLD OF COFFIN JOE (1968): Three horror stories introduced by Coffin Joe: a dollmaker's revenge (excuse for a rape scene), a street performer obsessed with a beautiful woman (excuse for a necrophilia scene), and a Coffin Joe-adjacent professor demonstrates his oddball philosophy (excuse for S&M scenes). It's all the sleaze with only a little Coffin Joe, but there are a few moments of Jose Mojica Marins' oddball magic. 2.5/5.

[M.10rda]

The Long Night (1947) -
Ann Dvorack as his magician's assistant is not really my jawn. The love triangle girl is much cuter

Oh golly, young Ann Dvorak (which apparently and inexplicably is pronounced "VOR-shack") in the original SCARFACE was TOTALLY my jawn....... whatever a jawn is. Anyway, she gives a dynamite performance in SCARFACE as the sister and I loved her crazy big eyes. Good to know she was still working 15 years later (an eternity for young contract starlets in the 30s + 40s). Now I may need to watch THE LONG NIGHT!

[RCMerchant]

LISSA'S TRIP (2022)

A children's show star goes for a walk into through L.A. after accidently taking a s**t load of LSD.
Ok. I  have dropped acid quite a few times in the past, and I never seen anything like she does. It's very
disorientating, but you don't see cartoon birds or scary faces on walls. People don't morph into weird shapes or look animated. It really can't be explained. I seen a few movies were they try to replicate an acid trip on film, and no one get's it right. Anyway, the visual effects were pretty cool, but what little story is there goes nowhere. All in all, it was just an excuse to show off some interesting visuals.

[M.10rda]

Maybe LSD just works differently for different people? I've never done it, but one of my best friends in high school did A LOT of drugs and I was with him when he once dropped acid in a field near some dark woods at night. After a while he got real nervous and gradually described for me how he was seeing hands coming out of the ground and angels hovering in the sky above the woods. Then he freaked out and claimed that a figure who looked like Bela Lugosi as Dracula had walked out of the woods and was approaching us. (I figure you'd appreciate that part.) I didn't see the Count but my friend was freaked out enough that we left quickly.

My first serious girlfriend also dropped in front of me and had a bad panic attack where she thought she saw scary stuff through windows. Both of them were sort of depressed people w/ a lot of issues anyway. Maybe if you're intrinsically disturbed the LSD just amplifies your inner disturbance?