MOVIE COMMENT CATCH-ALL THREAD

[Randy]

I know what you mean, but there is plenty of violence when the power struggle takes place.

[Curt McGirt]

The next good Wes Craven movie I see will be the first one.

 

Really? Damn. Further explanation?

 

I'm sitting here watching Tales from the Darkside: The Movie and goddamn is 

 

the cat killing David Johansen by crawling in his mouth and into his body INCREDIBLY disgusting. That really came out of nowhere -- I look up at the television and that's just happening.

 

Also, this is one of the better horror anthologies that nobody talks about. Pretty good turns from a young Steve Buscemi, Debby Harry, Rae Dawn Chong etc.

[themaskedaccountant]

 

A couple more Netflix movies for me:

 

Inside Deep Throat - Very good documentary about the groundbreaking porno.  Lots of good interviews and stories.  They don't delve very far into whether Linda Lovelace was lying when she came out years later and trashed the film, claiming she was raped and so on, and that's a big minus, IMHO.  Other than that, worth checking out.  Be forewarned, there's a few seconds of x-rated footage in it.

 

 

 

So I took your advice and watched about an hour of this so far. I was pretty surprised to see part of the actual scene used like you had said. I would recommend this just on everyone saying nice things about one another and then cutting to Lenny Camp answering every question with "He/she/they were an a**hole!".

 

 

That was good. but I like the one done on Debbie does Dallas i think is better.

[Gonzalez]

Don't care for the first two stories, but Lover's Vow is a really good tragic horror story.

[Jingus]

The next good Wes Craven movie I see will be the first one.

Really? Damn. Further explanation?

Yeah, even I wouldn't be that curmudgeonly. Out of his 30 directing credits on IMDB, even I have a thumbs-up for at least four of 'em.

[jaedmc]

The People Under the Stairs is one of those four right?

[Curt McGirt]

I'm guessing People, The Serpent and the Rainbow, The Hills Have Eyes, New Nightmare. Or first Nightmare or Scream. 

 

Let us not forget the man did bring us Swamp Thing, Deadly Blessing, and Shocker during this time period as well.

 

EDIT: Oh god I forgot about Deadly Friend and Vampire in Brooklyn. I suppose the man has made more trash than treasure after all.

[nate]

Cursed.

 

I just recently rewatched that film - $1.99 for the DVD through Amazon, why the hell not? - and motherfucker what a horrible ass film.  Due to all the behind-the-scenes shenanigans, I can totally understand why the film tanked, but a werewolf film without a single solid transformation scene (there's that one scene where the chick turns into ... something ... but ... c'mon, really?  If you wanna count that, be my guest ...).  Such a doo-doo film ... and YET ... likeable in its doo-doo-ness.  My favorite bit of shit dialogue:

 

Ellie (Christina Ricci): “Can you cover for me at the opening?”

Kyle (Michael Rosenbaum): “What? And miss Jake’s big opening?”

Ellie: “I can’t make it”

 

Such a redundant bit of words, it's maddening to hear them echo in my head.

 

Definitely, for me, a so-bad-it's-good movie.

[nate]

Who's made more trash than treasure: John Carpenter or Wes Craven?

[jaedmc]

Carpenter had higher highs, but probably lower lows. Wes Craven's quality deviation isn't nearly as big.

[J.T.]

The expression on Craig Kilborn's (as himself!) face when Ricci's werewolf instinct kicks in and she sucks the blood off of his finger easily redeems most of the horrible in Cursed.  Oh, and Mya gets to look hot for a scene or two before she dies.

 

It's nowhere near Dog Soldiers or American Werewolf in London level good but it's not Darkwolf or Project: Metalwolf level bad in the hierarchy of werewolf movies

[Curt McGirt]

You mean Project: Metalbeast? Hahaha I remember that piece of shit. Some Fred Olen Ray level work right there. Funny enough Kane Hodder played the Metalbeast. Plus it had Kim Delaney and Barry Bostwick!

 

I'm with Jae. Halloween, The Thing, The Fog, Escape from New York, Assault on Precinct 13, They Live and even Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness trump the great ones from Craven (minus The Hills Have Eyes) but then you've got stuff like Ghosts of Mars sitting in the recent filmography. I've never seen Elvis, Someone's Watching Me!, Starman, or Dark Star. Or all of Big Trouble in Little China either (yeah, I know). Looking at all those means Carpenter smokes 90% of most of the horror/genre auteurs.

[J.T.]

See? It was so bad I forgot the original title.

[Brian Fowler]

Yeah, I'm not sure how anyone could say at the very least that The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and New Nightmare aren't all good. 

[piranesi]

As we've been discovering the last couple weeks, PIRANHA may be the most important movie made in the last 50 years, just in terms of the number of amazing significant actors that Joe Dante somehow managed to shovel into it.  Entire eras of Hollywood greatness cascade through this movie one cameo at a time.
 
But today, with our fourth installment of AWESOME ACTORS BURIED IN THE CAST OF PIRANHA, we turn from cameos to someone with a much more prominent role in the movie, who sort of ends as the projected future antagonist.  The evil, soulless scientist/corporate/army lady who espouses that the deaths of a few hundred campers is an insignificnt and expected price to pay to protect democracy from (the Vietnamese???? The Iranians????? The Cubans??? It's hard to tell what the fuck she thinks she's doing).  
 
 The point is she's super hot and super evil and if you are supposed feel ashamed at how much you wanna get with her, and a little turned on at how much she's probably going to experiment on your junk, then mission accomplished,  Joe Dante.  I hate myself.

Hot Evil
"I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for campers and you curse the Piranha. You have that luxury of not knowing what I know, that a few campers eaten by Piranha, while tragic, probably saves lives."
 "Did you order that Piranha strike?"
"I did the job that..."
"DID YOU ORDER THAT PIRANHA STRIKE."
"YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID!!"  
[Note: I may be mixing up PIRANHA with something else here.]
 
This installment was easy because that hyptnotic demonic lady is Barbara Steele, and alarms are already going off in the twisted minds of you Mario Bava Italian Giallo fans.  On top of everything else, Barbara Motherfucking Steele is also in PIRANHA.  You weirdos can stop reading now, you already know all of this.  And I'm not going to go into super detail here because unlike Richard Deacon or Keenan Wynn or Amy Holden Jones, there is seven worlds full of cult-movie websites devoted to Barbara Steele.  But for those of you who do not spend your late nights shamefully stroking old VHS cases of video nasties, Barbara Steele is the queen of the damned...literally, she was the queen of the damned in what is regarded by many as the greatest Italian horror movie of them all, BLACK SUNDAY (aka THE MASK OF THE DEVIL):
 
Ladies and Gentlemen, holy shit: 

For the next thirty years, despite claiming not to like horror movies (telling one interviewer "I never want to climb out of another fucking coffin again!"):

Ha Ha ------>

She became one of the most prominent international visions of macabre death and tempting evil to have ever lived playing a type that she herself described as the "Predatory Bitch Goddess."  It helped that she is startlingly beautiful, in like a near supernatural way,

but also has a kind of devouring confidence and dour coldness.  There's fight and flight...but a look from her activates a third, less well known instinctive urge: total capitulation.

She starred with Vincent Price in THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM:

With Christopher Lee in THE CRIMSON CULT:
And in David Cronenberg's first body-horror feature SHIVERS (aka THEY CAME FROM WITHIN)
[note: too gross for pictures]

And if horror movies aren't good enough for your particular brand of film snootiness, she was hand-selected by Federico Fellini to play one of the most memorable of Mastroianni's lovers in 8 1/2:

She also had a prominent role in Volker Schlöndorff's Der junge Törless (this is grad. school level/Criterion Collection film nerdery so tred carefully, people)

But now back down to the level of this series.  One of my fondest memories of Barbara Steele is as the twisted perverted, wheelchair bound warden in Roger Corman/Jonathan Demme's women-in-prison epic CAGED HEAT:

Evil, yes.  But also emotionally stunted and physically broken.  Unable to feel anything herself, she took her revenge on the young healthy bodies around her by attempting to fill up their capacity to feel with only pain.  Also, too, boobs...soapy boobs.

The only problem with Barbara Steele is deciding which incredibly striking images and which awesome quotes of hers to use.  She has embraced her image and given many interviews, appeared at conventions and festivals, so there is a lot out there to look at.  A few of my favorite quotes:

Comparing the quiet personalities of both Bava and Corman:

"So many of these people who are enthralled with the chaotic dark side all look like Jesuit priests."

On why Heidi sucks:

"What is life without a dark side?  What do you have?  You've got Switzerland.  You've got Heidi.  Hopefully Heidi's got a dark side.  Or else what have you got, the cuckoo clock?"

FUCK YOU, SWITZERLAND and your STUPID PRECISION CRAFTSMANSHIP!

But I'll let her tell you all about the darkness in her own words, with some poetic ramblings by Clive Barker, Tim Burton, Roger Corman, and our MC Joe Dante (PIRANHA!) thrown in along the way:

Here she is in 2009 talking about Bava, Fellini, and PIRANHA!!!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNecZZYZfr4

Once again, PIRANHA has led us to a haunting chapter in the history of...you know what, fuck it, you AJ-gif collecting creeps.  Here's what you're after:

 

 

[Curt McGirt]

You really need to do a Caroline Munro overview now.

[J.T.]

You really need to do a Caroline Munro overview now.

 

He can't.  Caroline Munro wasn't in Piranah!

[piranesi]

I'm conceptually forbidden.

[odessasteps]

Liked World's End.

(Is this the right thread? Who can keep them all straight?)

Thought it was good, but prob not as good as the other two.

In order of personal preference, i'd prob go:

1. hot Fuzz 2. shaun 3. World's end

And Rosamund Pike has become quite the fetching mature lady.

One small niggle

nothing against Bill Nighy, but i would have liked to have heard a different voice for the Network. While sitting there, i thought how great it would have been if it was Tom Baker.

[Tabe]

Another random watch for me last night:

 

The Rainmaker - Matt Damon stars as a lawyer fresh out of law school working for a charlatan and suing a big, evil insurance company for killing his client by failing to pay for his leukemia treatments.  Danny Devito co-stars and Mickey Rourke plays Damon's boss.  And you get Danny Glover as the kindly veteran judge trying to steer Damon through his first case and Jon Voight as the evil corporate attorney opposing Damon.  There's a good story here - the book is your typical excellent John Grisham novel - but the execution is not good.  The questioning that Damon does is terrible, not asking important questions, not knowing proper court procedure and just generally is a mess.  Stuff that they try to pass off as "rookie mistakes" but really aren't.  The music is 1970s cheesy and the whole thing just feels real cheap and cheesy.  Definitely not the best Grisham adaptation I've seen, that's for sure.  4/10.

[J.T.]

All The Boys Love Mandy Lane is finally getting a US release.  It should be out the weekend of Septermber 6th.

[Control]

Most of the way through MUD. Jeff Nichols has to be one of my favourite new directors.

Oh my God, his next movie is a "sci-fi chase film" inspired by 80s John Carpenter!

[Swift]

The Skin I Live In is stunning. Both visually, and thematically. It's the kind of movie that you need to see knowing as little as possible. All I can say is that it involves a surgeon who has a mysterious, beautiful woman locked up in a room in his mansion. It's been a long time since I've watched something this... original and bizarre.

[Niners Fan in CT]

We saw We're the Millers. It's not too bad. There's not a lot of tears from laughter but still some funny bits and I'm loving Jennifer Aniston in these foul mouthed roles.

[jaedmc]

The Skin I Live In is stunning. Both visually, and thematically. It's the kind of movie that you need to see knowing as little as possible. All I can say is that it involves a surgeon who has a mysterious, beautiful woman locked up in a room in his mansion. It's been a long time since I've watched something this... original and bizarre.

Great film. If you get a chance watch Eyes Without a Face, which is a classic and surely inspired Almodovar's film