Watched Horror Express, with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas last night. I am a huge, longtime fan of cheap horror movies with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and this was lame even by my standards. Telly Savalas' brief appearance was an amusing bit of scenery-chewing, but even Peter Cushing rolling up his sleeves* and doing an autopsy failed to make this film worthwhile.
*For some reason I cannot explain I have a thing for Peter Cushing's forearms and love the scenes in old Hammer films where he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
I think I've got Horror Express on a DVD somewhere. IIRC it must be in the public domain as it was sold at the dollar store at Halloween. Is it boring bad, nauseating bad or funny bad?
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Much of MADNESS, and more of SIN, and HORROR the soul of the plot.
*For some reason I cannot explain I have a thing for Peter Cushing's forearms and love the scenes in old Hammer films where he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work.
One of my favorites is the one where he scolds an apprentice for not using a clean knife.
Deep Red, a Dario Argento movie with David Hemmings. I had a huge crush on David Hemmings (in his prime) when I was in high school, so his bum in white pants is the biggest plus for me in this film. The minuses far outweigh it. On a personal note, the fact that David Hemmings tears a picture out a library book makes him a worse criminal that the murderer he is trying to find. That's just a librarian thing, though.
The biggest problem is that I have never yelled at so many characters so often that they are stupid to:
Walk into the creepy, decrepit mansion alone at night
Lock the door when you know the weirdo is already inside! (Still can't believe that one)
Walk toward the strange noise
Let down your guard when you know darn well there's a killer after you
Etc.
Also, the revealed killer is way too small to have very physically murdered the much larger people that were killed. Way too small.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
I think I've got Horror Express on a DVD somewhere. IIRC it must be in the public domain as it was sold at the dollar store at Halloween. Is it boring bad, nauseating bad or funny bad?
Sorry, missed this. Boring bad except for about 5 minutes of Telly Savalas chewing scenery.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
I think I've got Horror Express on a DVD somewhere. IIRC it must be in the public domain as it was sold at the dollar store at Halloween. Is it boring bad, nauseating bad or funny bad?
I love The Haunting from 1963. I have very fond memories of introducing my best friend to it one Devil's Night, accompanied by the best unfiltered apple cider I've ever had.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
I mean, I expected it to be bad. I knew it was going to be bad. And it was.
So why did I pay perfectly good money to see it? Because I like battleships. The mere fact that the U.S.S. Missouri was going to be featured in it meant that I had to see it. The Iowa-class battleships are both the most impressive and perhaps the most beautiful warships ever built.
But to say that the movie was utterly predictable, completely unrealistic, and just plain ludicrous is the understatement of the century.
Oddly, given that the danged movie is named "Battleship," the Missouri basically doesn't even appear until the movie is nearly over.
Nor was the movie very consistent, either. We got several very graphic demonstrations of the explosive potential of the aliens' "shells" early in the movie. But explosions of that magnitude would barely have scratched the paint on an Iowa-class battleship. After all, those beasts were designed to slug it out with other battleships lobbing 16" artillery shells back at them. The puny shells the aliens were lobbing would scarcely have slowed the Missouri down, much less ruined the Number 3 turret.
Unless you have a thing for warships, or for explosions -- and you have a really high tolerance for inept storytelling, I'd suggest you don't waste your money.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
So I finally got around to watch The Last Airbender (the movie), out of morbid curiosity.
It was worse than I ever imagined. It was one of the worst movies I've seen in the past few years. It was probably worse because I saw the show, but I would've been confused by the plot instead of confused by the awful changes they made to the plot, so I guess it's probably equally bad either way. Even just 4 minutes in I was groaning at how awful it was.
And why do all forms of bending seem ridiculously slow and awful? They'd be better off just getting some "arrowbenders" to shoot arrows at the various benders and kill them before they finished their stupid little dances to throw rocks at you slowly.
M. Night Shyamalan needs to be stopped. And they need to reboot the series with a director who hasn't sucked for over ten years.
M. Night Shyamalan needs to be stopped. And they need to reboot the series with a director who hasn't sucked for over ten years.
Why reboot it? It's already a TV series. What creative void is filled by compressing three seasons of extant animation into a couple of hours of live action?
M. Night Shyamalan needs to be stopped. And they need to reboot the series with a director who hasn't sucked for over ten years.
Why reboot it? It's already a TV series. What creative void is filled by compressing three seasons of extant animation into a couple of hours of live action?
It's all about the ka-ching.
I more mean that he shouldn't be allowed to touch it again, and if they do want to make another movie, they should ignore the first one.
Being without Netflix we did some Redboxing this week. Picked up Dream House in a spooky mood and also Daniel Craig. Spoilers below, but seriously read them because NO one should watch this movie.
So very, very bad. I spent the first half hour waiting and waiting for them to reveal the first "twist" which was so obvious it made my teeth itch.
It's YOU. You're the crazy killer Dad, Daniel Craig.
The acting was aight, even if the writing was bad. They did what they could with it. I swear if that woman had said "Daddy's home" one more time I would have reached through the screen and slapped her.
They had actually worked it so that I could have seen a few possible endings which is a nice feeling because I usually see them from a mile away. I also thought they had sprinkled in a few nice red herrings that just couldn't possibly be where they were headed.
You see Elias Koteas in the first few minutes and he looks so much like Di Nero from Cape Fear your head goes, FAMILY KILLER! FAMILY KILLER! I figured that had to be a red herring, right? But no, he's the killer. So you spend hours just waiting for them to get to the freaking point and explain why he did it.
But the truly terrible thing is that when they got to the conclusion, it came so far from left field that it didn't make any damn sense. Worse than that, it made every action and motivation in everything that had come before completely impossible. Like at all. And the answer to the mystery was so very lame, it has only seen the light of celluloid in Lifetime movies of the week.
It's a hitman, who went to the wrong address. SERIOUSLY. It was meant for the neighbors. Fluke of the fucking fickle finger of fate and had no bearing whatsoever on the rest of the story, or the characters, or their development. It is like watching a whodunit set on a tropical island and finding out the Eskimo did it. Seriously. So very bad.
This puts everything in a new light. A stupid light. So Craig's family is killed and he is put away for killing them though he maintains his innocence in a mad house. The logical thing for him to do as an innocent man is to repress his identity out of guilt for something he didn't do, take a new name from his hospital bracelet, and talk to his imaginary dead family right? Not at all. There is no freaking reason for him to reject or disassociate his identity in that case, which we spent an hour and a half trying to watch him figure the fuck out. At least if it had been his wife as the killer he would have something to repress. Or if he had had an affair with the neighbor and she/the wife killed them over him or something. But watched your family get killed isn't any reason to repress your identity while at the same time maintaining them as a fantasy life. That is just twenty shades of stupid.
And what about the invisible family? They spend the whole film building them up as delusions, who lie to him about their names because that would make him remember, that exist only in his head. Last five minutes OOPS THEY ARE GHOSTS. What the fuck, did the screen writer have an aneurism writing those last few pages and no one noticed?
And the film takes place five years after the original botched hit. Why is the hitman still hanging around? Why is the original target still alive? Why would they wait five fucking years for him to get out of the hospital before they tried to kill the neighbor again? It might have been possibly relevant if they were trying to make Craig a patsy for the second killing. WHY THEN DID THEY SPEND THE FIRST HALF OF THE MOVIE TRYING TO SCARE HIM OUT OF THE HOUSE OR GET HIM TO LEAVE? God, episodes of Scooby Doo have more consistency and brighter fucking villains.
My favorite, favorite terrible thing they did to the ending though, is that after FIVE YEARS of mental illness so severe that he: forgot his identity, invented a new family who is his dead family and maybe ghosts, hallucinated a beautiful house from a condemned shack, lived like a crazy persecuted hobo maniac; after our hero discovers the truth of how his family died (which it turns out he fucking witnessed to begin with), and the trauma of almost getting killed a second time, he is perfectly well, normal, and free of all mental illness. Truth and justice is a sure fire cure for bat shit crazy apparently.
Not only that, he is rich and lives in New York now! Because he has written a book that is a "Number 1 Best Seller!" Everyone spoke about him writing a novel through out the film even though the only thing we have seen him write in is a crazy hobo journal with creepy pictures, serial killer doodles, scrawling nonsense, and quite possibly bodily fluids. God being a best selling author is so easy. Extra stupid points for the long crane shot of Craig peering into the bookstore window at a giant display of his best selling book, which incidentally is also titled Dream House and the cover is identical to the freaking movie poster. Dude that is so meta. Did I say "meta?" I meant mental.
There are so many bad things in this movie I can't even list them all. At first I thought it would be just kinda lame, but then the ending was so bad it physically hurt. Sadly, that makes this not even an enjoyable heckle film because it is pretty mediocre up until the shit pile of an ending. So it fails at even having a potential of camp.
The only scary thing about this movie is that it was directed by Jim Sheridan who did My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father. For that to have happened there must be some kind of supernatural evil at work.