What was the last movie you've seen?

[REPO Man]

My Neighbor Totoro

Gorgeous Ghibli affair. So glad I got this when I joined the Disney Movie Club (remember if you click the link in my signature and sign up, I get two free titles and iirc you get 5 titles for $1 instead of just 4).

[Pulsar_t]

I'm glad Hayao Miyazaki's "unretired" himself recently




They will keep at it won't they? It's amazing how one franchise has managed to influence generations of people. Definitely better than Lucas' prequels at any rate.


Cop Land

Two decades later, Cop Land remains Stallone's best drama work imho (Rocky 1 was also great, but I still prefer Cop Land).

[Michi]

Beauty and the Beast

If you enjoyed the animated version you'll like this one. There are a few differences, though. There are some added scenes, some extended scenes and some lines of dialogue that explain away some questions that the animated version brought up (Like why everyone in town seemed to forget about the local prince and the big-ass castle in the woods.) They also included some additional musical numbers and tweaked a couple of the original songs. Some characters were added, some characters were altered a bit and a couple had occupational changes. But other than those subtle changes, the movie is a carbon copy of the original, but in a live-action format with a ton of CGI.

Basically it's like a rebooted, extended cut of the original.

[Exhuminator]

The Red Turtle (2016)

Here's a dialogue-free film about a man turned castaway on an island, who falls in love with a raft hating sea turtle, after which they have a son, and... not much else happens beyond that. But wait a minute, it's all metaphorical right? There's a deeper meaning here! This is symbolic of life's existential core struggle and extrapolated joy... if only one focuses on the simpler, more meaningful aspects of life. The island represents the man's life, the rafts his personal dreams, the red turtle equates to love itself! Everything has a secondary symbolic purpose, oh my jiggly synapses! Alrighty then. Gotta admit this turned out to be exactly what I expected when Hayao Miyazaki decided to let a French auteur direct a Studio Ghibli piece. The whole thing felt like ÉCU bait (and was successful as such). I don't know, maybe you would get more out of it then I did. As for me, today I experienced more weltanschauung gyrations planting turkey figs in my yard then watching this movie.

[MrPopo]

So just to be clear, the kid is half man and half turtle?

[Michi]

A Manurtle?

[Exhuminator]

So just to be clear, the kid is half man and half turtle?

No. The sea turtle magically transforms into a human woman, after the man kills it, while it was still a sea turtle. Yes, a living human woman magically transforms from a dead sea turtle. Then they have a human kid, who is not half-sea turtle.

Then a whole lot more nonsensical stuff happens, which can be written off as metaphorical. But still doesn't save this movie from wasting your time.

[Ack]

The House by the Cemetery

This is the last of Lucio Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy for me. They're gory flicks, with bad dubs, plots both incomprehensible and lost in translation, and story elements combed directly from classic American horror literature and film ranging from Shelley to Lovecraft, with a bit of Kubrick thrown in for good measure, all wrapped up in a package of giallo and sleaze.

Of the three films in the trilogy (The Beyond, The City of the Living Dead, and The House by the Cemetery), The House by the Cemetery comes across easily as the weakest of the lot. For the most part it is far more restrained than its predecessors, involving a mad undead scientist living in the basement much more than the potential opening of a gate to Hell like the others, though it certainly has its supernatural elements and poor explanation. Truth be told, the big questions about what is happening are all actually answered in an info dump with only 15 minutes left to go in the film; the rest is mostly people screaming to odd noises, creepy footage that feels a bit out of place, bad dubbing with annoying children, and the occasional violent murder or excessive gore shot.

Yet this movie doesn't go anywhere near where its predecessors went. The Beyond has a scene were random tarantulas eat a man's eyeballs, while The City of the Living Dead had a literal maggot wind scene and a guy's brain get squished while people weep blood. The House by the Cemetery has...well, it's got some nasty pokings and slashings, but it just feels like Fulci-light. And when tension is trying to heighten, I find myself thinking instead of previous films. There's a scene towards the end of the movie where our protagonist little boy has his head forced against a door while a hatchet bursts through less than an inch from his face. As terrible as that might sound, Fulci had done it before with a pickaxe driving into a coffin to hover over the eye of a woman who had been buried alive in The City of the Living Dead. Instead of freaky, the result to me is that The House by the Cemetery just feels rehashed.

We also need to talk about a pet peeve in movies, and that's kids. When handled well, a child actor can be phenomenal. When not handled well, it can ruin the film. When dubbed with what sounds like a woman doing a bad impersonation of a little boy's voice, it comes off almost humiliating. That's what we get in The House by the Cemetery: a pair of child actors who don't feel authentic and come across as stiff but sound like adults faking at being children due to a bad dub. It's not the worst sin a movie can commit in my eyes (that's a dance club scene. You want to date your movie horrible? Put a scene in a dance club), but it's pretty high on my list.

Well, it's Fulci, so are there any disturbing highlights? Sure. Evil Dr. Freudstein is quite creepy to look at, and the scene where he's stabbed and oozes maggots instead of blood is intensely gross. There's also a few scenes involving turning a key with a knife that starts to ramp up that dread which I found Dario Argento so good at in his heyday. But then you get things like the bat in the basement scene, where a very obviously fake bat bites a character's hand and must be repeatedly stabbed with a pair of scissors to the point that it goes from being possibly horrific to absolutely hysterical.

If you're interested in getting into Italian horror, which I most definitely recommend if you are a horror buff, then you'll probably end up covering Fulci at some point. My biggest suggestion for you would be to see the other two Gates of Hell movies first, because this one is a let down in comparison.

Oh, and it did make the Video Nasty list in Great Britain, so if that's a personal goal of yours, yeah, ok, definitely check it out.

Also Cop Land is the bomb yo.

[Michi]

I've seen House by the Cemetery. I don't remember much of it though. I just remember being kinda bored through most of it, honestly.

But I do remember the boy... hoping that he'd get knocked off at some point so I wouldn't have to listen to him (or her, or whoever the hell dubbed him.)

[prfsnl_gmr]

A few days ago, my wife and I watched:



What We Do in the Shadows (2014), a mockumentary horror comedy from New Zealand - the land of great horror comedies. It was very, very funny and deserving of all of its praise. It is also streaming on Amazon Prime; so, those of you with the service should be sure to check it out.