What was the last movie you've seen?

[REPO Man]

Been wanting to revisit this franchise for a while. I popped the first one in while eating dinner.

It's such a surreal piece of dark fantasy and in many ways reminds me a bit of the more surreal horror films to come out of Europe at the time, especially Suspiria and Lucio Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy (despite predating the first entry by about a year).

[Ack]

I agree with you, Phantasm has a dreamlike quality that definitely reminds me of Italian horror of the late-1970s. It's a crazy series, and I enjoy how ridiculous and bizarre it is.

Since you enjoy it, I recommend checking out Guilio Paradisi's The Visitor. It's also a surreal experience, an Italian horror film filmed and set in Atlanta and starring Lance Henriksen, John Huston, Franco Nero, Shelley Winters, and a slew of other stars.

[REPO Man]

It definitely looks like my kind of weirdness.

[REPO Man]

Back on Friday night I continued my Phantasm revisit with:


Nowhere nearly as abstract and surreal as the first film, Phantasm II is the more "Hollywood" entry in the series and it shows. With a recast Mike Pearson, the introduction of Reggie's iconic quadruple barrel shotgun and much more lore to the evolving mythos that makes the overall story more akin to a Stephen King story, it's somehow both an evolution of the first film and an entirely different beast altogether.

And then yesterday between my morning and evening job, I fired up the next film:


Definitely less Hollywood than the first film, which both hinders director Don Coscarelli's budget (by about half a million, per Wikipedia) and gives him free reign to stay true to his own vision, bereft of studio mandates. Also, A. Michael Baldwin returns to the role of Mike, literally stepping in the shoes of James LeGros after his aged-up Mike fought The Tall Man. I say literally since the film starts right where the previous film left off and Baldwin is naturally wearing the exact outfit LeGros wore at the end of Phantasm II. This actually worked better than how they handled the new scenes from Phantasm II that took place directly after the first film, where they just obscured Mike's face.

[REPO Man]

Sadly, the weakest entry in the series. With a much lower budget than the last two films, the film mostly features cut scenes and reused flashback footage and fills the rest with scenes shot primarily in the middle of the desert. While I do applaud them for making another great Phantasm film with so little, not even the revelation of The Tall Man's origins can save this from being a low point in the franchise. To add insult to injury, this was mostly meant to serve as a precursor to the unproduced Phantasm 1999, which would have been a much more elaborate project.

[stickem]

a few movies I've watched the last week with a simple rundown.

Terrifier- loved it, even with the weak character development. brutal kill scenes and loved the character Art the Clown, he was awesome. Some cheese with a limited budget with some throwback vibes. I didn't expect much going in, but that clown surprised me. Shit, that might be my Halloween costume lol.

Terrifier 2- better character development, more of a budget, more great torture porn kill scenes. I think it went on 30-45 min minutes too long, clocking in at 2hr 18 min. also didn't care for the supernatural path this is headed, like Jason and Michael Myers. Good acting from the protagonist. I think I like number 1 better. I don't give a shit about character development much in horror, when Art, or whatever icon killer, is the show stopper.

Suicide Kings- nice little who dun it, black comedy/mystery with an all star cast. kind of reminded me of a Tarantino lite flick. Christopher Walken shines as does Dennis Leary. the way Walken ended up in his situation to begin with is a little far fetched, but a good flick to watch on a boring friday night. loved it.

[REPO Man]

I've been wanting to watch Terrifier and its sequel for a while now but it seems like I only want to watch it when I can't commit to watching a movie and forget that I want to watch it when I can.

But the last time I was able to commit to watching a movie, I decided to round out my revisitation of the Phantasm franchise with the last film in the series:



Shot in secret between 2012 and 2013 before getting released in 2016, this final film in the franchise finds Reggie wandering the desert after the events of Phantasm IV and soon the film cuts between a timeline in which Reggie is in a hospital with dementia, implying that the prior films are all in his head, and another where The Tall Man has laid siege across the world, turning it into a desolate hellscape of death and destruction.

It seems to be a somewhat definitive end to the story, but at the same time leaves room for a follow-up.

As for me, I actually came up with an idea for one, as one can read here. The TL;DR is it's an alternate timeline where Jebediah Morningside died before building his dimensional fork but someone years later builds it and becomes that dimension's version of The Tall Man, thus leading a pair of siblings against this variant before he kills the living and enslaves the dead in their small town. And since the series has touched on the idea of the multiverse, it's possible to have various Tall Man variants from different locales, time periods and even cultures.

[REPO Man]

After my trip back to the world of Phantasm, I decided to go with a more light-hearted affair last night before bed.



Like The Simpsons Movie before it, The Bob's Burgers Movie is a bombastic, high-stakes comedy that takes what made the TV series it's based on and cranks it up as high as it'll go.

I've also heard that there's interests from the cast and crew of doing a sequel, but despite critical success, The Bob's Burgers Movie didn't meet expectations, mostly due its constant delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic pushing its release and in some territories getting tossed straight to streaming.

Probably my biggest gripe is that there's no currently-in-print 4K release. There WAS a Best Buy exclusive release and a similar release in Australia but sadly I had to settle for just a basic Blu-ray. And what REALLY sucks is that with most studios ditching physical media in favor of streaming and VOD releases, we probably won't get a 4K Blu-ray release of this. Though the non-4K Blu-ray DID look nice on my 50" 4K television and I wonder how it'd look projected from my projector, which can apparently do up to 200".

[REPO Man]

I recently bought the 4K release that Shout! Factory put out some time ago and last night, I watched this for the first time in... well, I honestly can't remember. I think the last time was in the late '90s/early '00s when it aired all the time on Comedy Central (which is also how I used to watch Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood), with the first time being a year or two prior (at the earliest) when yours truly rented it from Village Video (local rental place that had a few locations on Hatteras Island, closed in the 2010s).

[Raging Justice]

I like how this ended, nice morals and lessons here that we don't typically see in Christmas movies like this.

SPOILERS:

He doesn't get the gift that he wanted, and Santa doesn't magically fix things. Instead, he learns to appreciate what he has and to appreciate the love of his father (who also taught him some useful skills). His sister shows him gratitude even though the gift he got her is not exactly the one she asked for. Lastly, he eventually gets the Nintendo he wanted for Christmas by getting a job and EARNING it himself

Nice. No spoiled kids just getting whatever they demand from Santa here