What are you watching?

[Barry M Super Fiend Find all posts View Profile Close Barry M]

Robot & Frank. Frank Langella plays old Burt Reynolds; the role of Casey Siemaszko is played by a robot with Peter Sarsgaard's voice. Slight charmer's a little underwritten (the women's roles are just pins on the map), but it's an entertaining piece of fodder for an aging demographic. Frank Langella's always enjoyable, he's like a trip to Easter Island, all big awesome stoney head. I liked this way more than I expected: like an Asimov story.

[Ian Jane Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Ian Jane]

Savage Streets - I don't need to go into too much detail here. It's awesome.

Female Teacher: Hot Afternoon - Well it does feature a female teacher, some of it takes place in the afternoon, and some of the sex is hot so I guess the title is appropriate. Interesting psuedo-Lolita-esque drama from Nikkatsu with some good acting and a decent enough storyline.

[paul h. woly boly Find all posts View Profile Close paul h.]

documentary night:

Into The Abyss (2011) d.Werner Herzog. Amazing view of the victims and perpetrators of violent crimes in small town Texas.

Last Days Here (2012) Pentagram lead singer Robert Liebling struggles to get off the couch (and off of crack, heroin, valium, etc.) to make his musical breakthrough/comeback. Surprisingly good doc. I'll probably be watching this one again.

The Beat Hotel (2012) a look at the cheap hotel in Paris where all the crazy kids would hang out and write and paint and smoke hashish. Kinda cool, but not a lot of new information presented here if you're really into the Beats. Some of the folks interviewed grated on my nerves, and some still photos are used repeatedly, which gets annoying.

[Barry M Super Fiend Find all posts View Profile Close Barry M]

Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978). Three Detroit working stiff friends from the Checker Cab assembly line rip off their crooked union. Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Richard Pryor; also with Ed Begley Jr. and tv cameos by Sheman Hemsley and JJ Walker. Great soundtrack (overuses Hard Workin' Man, but who wouldn't?). All kinds of wonderful: good times & cynical politics, J&B, sexy bachelor interior decorating, Keitel vs Pryor dildo fight, Big Mac song t-shirt, and a character named Dogshit Miller.







Dildo fight (NSFW a bit): http://i.minus.com/iTCpsu7nxCEan.png

[Richard--W a straight arrow Find all posts View Profile Close Richard--W]

After viewing 65 Jess Franco films in the last two months or so I've concluded that THE DIABOLICAL DR Z is his best film. Probably. But I need to let his overall body of work percolate a little longer. Enjoying the ride.

[Richard--W a straight arrow Find all posts View Profile Close Richard--W]

BarryM, put that screen grab back in.

[Barry M Super Fiend Find all posts View Profile Close Barry M]

Ha, it's still there, you just have to click on it. Somebody could put an eye out or something.

[Ian Jane Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Ian Jane]

Sororiety House Massacre 1 & 2 Double Feature night!

Part one sort of has a story. Girls move into a sorority house, killer escapes from an asylum and knocks them off as they expose their breasts at random. Part 2 recycles footage from the 1st Slumber Party Massacre movie for some reason and has nothing to do really at all with the 1st movie. The girls run around in bad eighties style lingerie though. Jim Wynorski kind of rules.

[Andrew Monroe Pallid Hands Find all posts View Profile Close Andrew Monroe]

APARTMENT 143 aka EMERGO - Shameless PARANORMAL ACTIVITY ripoff that subscribes to the "in for a penny in for a pound" school and also throws in some EXORCIST and POLTERGEIST influence too. It's got some spooky bits and like the PA films it has a pretty effective final shock but not an original bone in its body. EMERGO makes me think of William Castle.

[Barry M Super Fiend Find all posts View Profile Close Barry M]

Pocket Money (Stuart Rosenberg, 1972). Modern sad-sack cowboy innocents Paul Newman and Lee Marvin try their luck in Mexico on a rodeo cattle deal; Strother Martin and Wayne Rogers (Trapper John) play picaroons to their parsifals. Like buddies Jim and Leonard, the movie's slow and amiable, just my kind of stupid. Screenplay by Terence Malick. Paul Newman's horses have the clap.

[Richard--W a straight arrow Find all posts View Profile Close Richard--W]

I love POCKET MONEY. It's so true to life, so sublimely futile. I know these cowboys. The film is a clinic in behavorial acting from Marvin and Newman. Their performances are so subtle and layered most people don't notice they're acting. The film was largely shot in my old stomping ground in Tucson, Arizona.


Last night I sampled THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN COLLECTION on blu-ray. The helpless, squeeky clean, wholesome Mexican farmers are so unreal they're uproariously funny. The very premise of the film - that Mexicans need to hire Gringos to protect them -- just doesn't wash, not even in a fantasy. In the real west Texans used Mexicans for target practice. The guy who wrote this must have lived in New York City all his life. If the Mexicans had been swinging machetes and chopping heads off and stealing guns off sleeping Gringos I would believe in them. Yul Brynner must have been cooking in all that black under that heat. RETURN OF THE SEVEN (1966) has some nice Spanish atmosphere and flavor but I still think GUNS OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1969) is the best of the sequels. Except for the first one, all the transfers could stand improvement. You really notice the loss of resolution in the nighttime and wide angle vista shots.

[47lab Guest Find all posts View Profile Close 47lab]

THE SWEET SCENT OF EROS - Dir. Toshiya Fujita (1973)

While waiting on my Lady Snowblood blu ray to arrive, I decided to check out one of the director's roman porno films & was surprised to find something so overtly political in tone. Initially thought it was going to be a fairly straight forward affair following a couple slackers looking for some free love action but this film could've been mistaken for something that came out of ATG.

[Ian Jane Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close Ian Jane]

Screaming In High Heels - fun documentary about Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer and Linnea Quigley's time as the reigning scream queens of low budget horror movies in the 80s. Worth a watch if you're a fan.

Ghosts Of The Abyss - James Cameron and Bill Paxton get inside some tiny submarines with some Russians and go explore the wreck of the Titanic. CGI is used to overlay 'live action' scenes over the footage of the wreck to show us what it would have looked like in its glory days. Sometimes this works well, sometimes this comes across as corny. If you dig shipwrecks and underwater fooage though, this is rad.

[Alex K. Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Alex K.]

The Protector (James Glickenhaus): Very fun sleazy 80's action flick with Jackie Chan who speaks pretty decent English in this film -he may have been dubbed but I don't think so- and best of all it retains the sleaze of Glickenhaus' previous masterpiece The Exterminator. I swear the writers of the Simpsons watched this film. The bar room shoot out was eerily similar to a sequence from Mcbain. Plus it features a slow clap.

Awesome trash.

[sukebanboy Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close sukebanboy]

The Protector (James Glickenhaus): Very fun sleazy 80's action flick with Jackie Chan who speaks pretty decent English in this film -he may have been dubbed but I don't think so- and best of all it retains the sleaze of Glickenhaus' previous masterpiece The Exterminator. I swear the writers of the Simpsons watched this film. The bar room shoot out was eerily similar to a sequence from Mcbain. Plus it features a slow clap.

Awesome trash.

Make suyre you watch the HK version too...after Glickenhaus had finished, Jackie was so pissed off that he took Bill "superfoot" Wallace and filmed longer (better) fights and reedited the movie more to his liking...
Still not improved VERY much...but more "Jackie" style...

The Chinese version has a subplot featuring Sally Yeh, with a few additional action sequences. A large number of scenes were cut to improve the pace of the action and to completely remove instances of nudity. Fully dressed lab women were added for the sake of continuity. A lot of swearing and American slang has been totally replaced by more universal dialogue. Bill Wallace also has an extra scene, in which he gets to show off his talent near the ice warehouse. The final fight scene is re-edited to make it more of a Hong Kong style. Overall, the script has been cleaned up and the subplot involving the coin is resolved.