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Started by SmallBlueThing, 04 February, 2011, 12:40:44 PM

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Cursed Earth Dweller

AAhh, the Big Lebowski! Still is and forever will be my favourite Cohen film.

Dude: What about the toe?

Walter: Forget the fucking toe!

Tiplodocus

I'm with SBT block on The Wolfman. There is some shonky cig here and there but mostly grand stuff.

Is there something in the water?
Be excellent to each other. And party on!

Professor Bear

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJyYNMzpqO4

Universal Soldier: Day Of Reckoning, which is that rarest of beasts, a pretentious low-budget action movie.  There are lots of action flicks which skirt around the deepest of philosophical musings in their own reliable way of head-kicking something until it makes sense or explodes or possibly both at the same time and then someone with a gun in each hand jumps towards the screen in slow motion with said asplosion in the background or - latterly - walks slowly away from said asplosion in slow motion so we can see that the asplosion is clearly angled upwards and said person doing the walking isn't very tough at all because they're not in even the smallest amount of danger, with stuff like Nemesis reducing "what makes us human?" musings to how many robot parts Olivier Gruner can get put in before he stops moping like a cunt and goes back to shooting people in the face on a waterslide or running like fuck from exploding stuff or doing that one sweep kick that looks convincing, even though we all already know that it doesn't matter how many cyborg parts you have as long as your cock is still your own and you can feel it working.  Action films can do philosophy is what I am saying, but they do it on the understanding that it's background noise to an action film in much the same way they can do relationship drama or exploring grief: asplosions and head-kicking first, then moping a bit, then more asploding kicks.  That's how America does it and it's worked out pretty well so far.
But then we get the likes of USDOR, in which John (son of Peter) Hyams has clearly seen Apocalypse Now and decided that what that film needed was less Marlon Brando and more Jean Claude Van Damme, and I won't lie, I absolutely applaud this kind of out of the box thinking, though there's no getting away from the fact that the most entertaining thing about the film - apart from that bit where someone goes to kick Scott Adkins and Adkins grabs the guy's leg, breaks it, then uses it to kick the guy in his own face - is the thought of John Hyams going around for months telling people he was going to make Apocalypse Now with JCVD as Colonel Kurtz and doing it with a straight face, possibly even having his feelings hurt when someone twigged he was serious and then went HAHAHAHAHA WHAT.
It is by no means a poorly-made film for this budget range, but the story meanders and lots of lengthy one-shot scenes attempt to put you in the action with the protagonist rather than make the action exciting and then we get to fights with Dolph Lundgren and JCVD and the one-shot take goes out the window so JC can get his contractually-mandated face close-ups and Dolph can have a sit down and a breather in between strenuous actions the filming requires of him, like taking more than two steps at a time or remaining upright.  They're decent scraps, all the same, and much better than the lengthy third-person tracking shot sequences that look like a videogame onscreen and which basically amount to a bunch of grown men playing army, jumping out on each other and going DUHDUHDUHDUHDUH and PSHEW and then falling down when Scott Adkins points at them and goes BKOW.
BUT IT IS FULL OF PHILOSOPHICAL WAFFLE between the pretty fun bits where musclemen throw each other around a small room and wreck the shit out of it and chop bits off each other and there's no real sense of why we're behind the protagonist with only JCVD's character attempting to make sense of things by opining "if you think it's real, it is", which is not helpful right at the end of the film, it's the kind of thing you need to hear back at the beginning of the film when the main character's arc is first set up and you guess right there and then what the "twist" will be.

A decent head-kicker film for beer and pizza, all the same, just about 20 minutes too long for the intended audience.

SmallBlueThing

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2: UNCUT "GRUESOME EDITION".

Ive had this for a while, but hadnt watched until tonight. In fact, the last time i saw chainsaw 2 i was probably in my twenties (unless im forgetting a viewing. It sometimes happens with age, especially with films i watched to death back in the eighties and nineties).

I was especially looking forward to this, as the previous 'uncut' version i'd seen was my vhs pirate back in the day, that was so unwatchable that i was genuinely surprised the titles were red and not blue (and rolling) as i'd previously thought.

I wont dwell on why this is the best film ever made with the word 'chainsaw' in the title- it's a straightforward descent into hell, at times hilarious, beautifully performed by the entire cast (bill johnson instills more life and character into leatherface than gunnar hansen ever did- which is probably why hansen's been bitching about it ever since) and full of great dialogue.

Hooper throws all expectation out of the window (cont)
.

SmallBlueThing

(cont) and gives us an insane dripping blood-wet fantasy rather than a dusty, bone-dry docu-horror like the original. The first chainsaw stuffed your dry mouth full of chicken feathers and scared you with rattles and bones and filthy kitchens- chainsaw 2 kicks you off a precipice into a giant bucket of guts, and laughs as you fall.

The sets are still amazing, it's still the most incredibly designed film to comes out of the golan-globus cannon stable, and possibly the mid-eighties full stop. This dvd  unrated 'gruesome edition' is lovely and restores the Cramps soundtrack ('googoo muck' was missing in the last version i watched), but unbelievably it fucks up the ending. The final shot of the movie has always been Stretch, high in the sky, waving her chainsaw and as mad as any of the sawyers... as a truck goes past in the background, and you realise this 'planet of the apes'-style alien landscape that somehow exists on top of the hellish underground funfair, is mere yards from the highway. She was (cont)
.

SmallBlueThing

#3290
(cont) within shouting distance of help all along. Except- the truck's now gone. No truck passes. What happened there? I cant believe Hooper went back and recut it- he may be an infrequent and entirely accidental genius, more reliant on his collaborators for success than any of the other 80s horror heroes, but even he's not that dumb. He wouldnt completely undermine the most powerful shot in the movie- would he?

Oh well. As i say, it's still a far better movie than what came next- even the perfectly decent remake didnt fly like this one, and im sure the upcoming TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D (jan 9th) will similarly miss the target. Chainsaw 2 is probably my favourite of that glorious mid-eighties period of fx-heavy 'fangoria films', and so is therefore one of my favourite films ever. The saw is indeed family.

SBT
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Professor Bear

Is it possible the truck going by in the background was just bad timing - the equivalent of a boom mike in shot?

Quote from: SmallBlueThing on 25 November, 2012, 10:57:55 PMThe sets are still amazing, it's still the most incredibly designed film to comes out of the golan-globus cannon stable, and possibly the mid-eighties full stop.

Better than G&G's Masters of the Universe, American Ninja 2 and Superman 4?  You're full of shit.

SmallBlueThing

#3292
I dont know about the truck. It's always been there and suddenly it's not. Ive got to dig out all my old copies of chainsaw 2 now and find out when it left and compare to see if it's been digitally removed or what. Which is a bit frustrating.

I also dont know about superman 4- but it's better than invaders from mars, and lifeforce, which were the other two golanglobus tobe hooper movies that relied upon innovative and exceptional design work. Chainsaw 2 is often dismissed a cheap, lousy rip-off sequel and the least of tobe's three efforts for cannon. It's very much not. That's what i was getting at.

I must pick up invaders from mars and lifeforce one day- saw both at the cinema and on rental, but never since.

SBT
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Professor Bear

Quote from: SmallBlueThing on 25 November, 2012, 11:32:11 PMI also dont know about superman 4- but it's better than invaders from mars, and lifeforce

If you have never seen Superman 4, I would just go ahead and roll the dice on saying it does not measure up against something else.  Them's pretty good odds.



Lifeforce is worth a revisit.  Great film.

SmallBlueThing

No, f course ive seen superman 4- saw it at the cinema! Just not since it was released, and so (other than it's awful) i can say nothing with certainty...

SBT
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TordelBack

Never knew there was an '80s remake of Invaders from Mars, and the 50's original was one of my favourite films as a kid.  Must try to find that.

SmallBlueThing

And if you find a copy, let me know, because i wouldnt mind one. It might be freely available for all i know, as ive not checked. The kid from the original is in it too.

SBT
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Keef Monkey

Finally watched Drive and Cabin In The Woods at the weekend.

Drive had perhaps been overhyped a bit for me, and a couple of the more shocking parts had been spoilerbombed, but it was still a really intense watch. I've seen Gosling in a few things now and he really is incredible. The score was perfect too, licensed songs aside it was really disciplined, bubbling away and keeping tension going when more traditional composers would have been trying to ramp things up constantly.

Loved Cabin, as a horror fan I thought it was very, very, very clever. It wasn't scary, but bucket loads of fun, and a real horror movie made for horror fans who understand the cliches and tropes of the genre. It's hard to find genuinely fresh ideas in horror these days, but this was one of them. Jolly good show.

Goaty

Quote from: Judge Jack on 25 November, 2012, 12:20:27 PM
Dawn of the Dead - 1978 last night, in its extended cut, on BBC2
Marvellous.

It's on iPlayer up to next Saturday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b008y3d8/Dawn_of_the_Dead/

M.I.K.

Quote from: TordelBack on 26 November, 2012, 07:55:02 AM
Never knew there was an '80s remake of Invaders from Mars, and the 50's original was one of my favourite films as a kid.  Must try to find that.

You won't like it.