I loved this movie! "Look who got beat with the ugly stick!" is one of the all-time great lines in cinematic history.
I don't know if it came through, but I enjoyed this a lot as well. I think it suffers from being intentionally edgy in a way 90s movies were, and that doesn't work quite so well in 2023.
I looked up a few reviews and a few didn't like Brooke Shield's performance, but I think she's a proto-Karen type in this movie, and I think she gets the part right.
Art the Clown somehow survived the last movie, possibly with the help of a new entity, the Little Pale Girl, and then he vanishes until next Halloween. We then switch focus to a family, Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) getting ready for Halloween. They recently lost their father, and their father seems to have some sort of mystical connection to Art. They independently have weird encounters with Art and the Little Pale Girl. There seems to be something Art wants from them.
We fill a lot of time, have a few brutal murders and then eventually these characters have a showdown. There's a bit of mysticism and something resembling folklore here.
This is a scary, gory movie, leaning heavily on practical effects, which makes it more visually interesting. It's way too long though, and Art's schtick gets tired the more he's on screen - the first one was 84 minutes, and that was plenty.
A roadie gets in a bit of trouble in the family way, and goes back to visit her sister's family. Unfortunately, the same night, an earthquake opens a sealed vault and the eldest son finds a copy of the Necronomicon and some LP records. Of course, he plays the records and unleashes a demon. Now the aunt must find a way to protect the children from their possessed mother.
Am I weird that the mom is hotter as a deadite? Probably.
Well, this was scary, splattery and over the top, but I miss the comedy and slapstick from the original series.
I generally hate Zack Snyder's ideas but enjoy how he presents them. I don't even think his stuff is particularly beautiful, but he has an interesting style.
It's been 8 years since the first movie, and it's time to send Dalton (Ty Simpkins), the oldest and the subject of the first film, off to art school. Josh (Patrick Wilson, who also directed) has a bad argument with Dalton and resolves to find out why he's not able to connect to his family. Dalton's hypnosis from the first movie is reversed by his art professor, and he and Josh are in danger again.
This was a solid entry, the only real problem is that it's missing Lin Shaye, the heart and hero of the previous movies. Cheap jump scares still scare me, so it was still effective for me.
Most of the movies in this series are fine, I think the first one is still the best, but they're all pretty good at what they intend to do, which is deliver a lot of jump scares.
Sexy French vampire Marie (Anne Parillaud) decides to make mobsters her next meal plan, only she miscalculates and Sallie (Robert Loggia) lives after her feeding. He's a dangerous psychopath at the best of times, and now he's a vampire, quickly learning how to take advantage of his new powers. Marie and the undercover cop who discovers her secret (Anthony LaPaglia) resolve to hunt the mobster down.
It's an entertaining horror comedy that's light on the horror and comedy and has multiple car chases. It does have a lot of Parillaud naked and Loggia chewing scenery with fangs.
I forgot this was directed by helicopter manslaughterer John Landis, or else I wouldn't have given it the view. However, it's actually a pretty good film. When he's not killing children with poorly thought out special effects, he's quite a competent director. I can't say I regret seeing it, but I wish I hadn't contributed to Max Landis' inheritence.
A Japanese mashup of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Cinderella" called "Once Upon a Crime." Unless you have time that you don't care if you ever get back, just take my word for it.
Horror has a time-honored tradition of cashing in on "of the moment" urban legends, myths, or memes. It's also a time-honored tradition that these are generally not very good. The online trend is several years old, so I question even the cleverness of using this as a basis for a cash-in.
The "Elevator Game" is a online trend that says you can open a portal to Hell by riding an elevator in a specific floor sequence. This movie adds some additional and rather silly ideas to it, like if you play it wrong, a vengeful spirit will tear you apart.
Has its moments, a step above PG-13, and basically watchable, but not something I'd watch again.
One of my cousin's kids recently married a young fellow who is a big James Bond fan. Actually more a big "Daniel Craig playing James Bond" fan, really.
He had never seen any of the early Bond flicks.
So, after a rather interesting discussion, we found that MAX is running the old Bond Flicks. I was talking up the old flicks and how great Connery did.
They were technological Marvels of their time, says I.
We settled down and started with Dr No.
Holy feckin Grief! I had not seen any of the early flicks since I was a kid. Needless to say, my expectations were dashed. My GOD they were feckin Horrible.
I was required to buy the kid's Motorcycle Club a keg, and declare publicly that Daniel Craig's Bond was superior to Connery's.
Though I hold that it really was the studios' fault. If Terence Young had the budget that Sam Mendes had, the early ones would have been better.
__________________
“Logic is a defined process for going wrong with Confidence and certainty.” —CF Kettering
Not Judge Dredd, with Sly Stallone, but just Dredd.
I think there's a good chance I'd seen it before and wiped it from my memory banks, for good reason.
I liked Dredd a bit, but I have to admit to being a Karl Urban fan. It is rather stupid and intentionally grim. Plus they just had to find an excuse for the pretty young Judge to take her helmet off, even if Urban doesn't.
A father and son (Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch) autopsy team get delivered the body of a young woman (Olwen Kelly) from a crime scene that's inexplicable to the police. They start the procedure, but there's something wrong with the body. It only gets weirder as they investigate further.
OK, so this one is quite freaky, but it devolves into a more basic horror and I had a few, "wait, how did that work?" moments. I enjoyed it, though.
I vaguely remember there being more social commentary in the Sly Stallone version and that's what I expected from this one, so I was disappointed. As a pure sci-fi/action movie it was definitely entertaining enough.
George Manning (Seymour Cassel), a wealthy family man gets left behind on his birthday due to a family issue. That night, two young ladies (Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp) knock on the door. They're lost and got caught in the rain. He lets them in, offers them the phone, a chance to get dry, and some food and shelter while they wait for their ride.
They both go off to the bathroom, but seem to be taking too long so he goes looking for them and finds them naked in his hot tub. The two ladies quickly seduce him and spend the night.
The next morning, he's feeling a bit regretful, and discovers they haven't left, and don't look like they're at all ready to do so. Eventually George badgers them into leaving, but they don't stay away, and the two ladies capture him, torture him, trash his house and act more and more demented as the day goes on.
This is pretty delightfully unhinged - Camp and Locke are really going for it, and they're quite scary.
Not that long ago, I watched the remake of this: "Knock Knock" with Keanu Reeves and Ana De Armas as one of the ladies. I really enjoyed that one up until the seduction. However, I actually enjoyed "Death Game" all the way through to it's intensely out-of-the-blue stupid ending. The remake almost, sort of, gave the girls a reason or logic behind the mayhem, but the original isn't particularly concerned with that. It's simply enjoying having this master of the universe man get dominated by two random stray ladies.
Henry, a rich man brings in his new wife Elizabeth to his huge high tech estate (all the doors are opened by code or thumbprint). He has a nice evening with her, and shows her around. In a very Bluebeard moment, he passes by one door which is locked and tells her that while she can open the door with her thumbprint, she should never go in there. He leaves for a day, and she can't resist. She goes into the door and discovers these chambers with clones of herself in them. She panics and runs back to the room, hoping he doesn't notice. Of course he knows, so when he's back he murders her.
This maybe the first 20 minutes of the film, so we know something more will happen, and sure enough, six weeks later, a new Elizabeth in a wedding dress is brought to the house, and she's shown around the house with the same warning about the door.
The movie was OK up to this point. You kind of know what's going to happen with the first Elizabeth, but it occurs so early in the movie, it leaves you wondering what will happen next. Things don't go exactly as expected after the next Elizabeth shows up. Without spoiling it, I think it gets a lot more interesting once we get past the first round.
A lot of social media reviews are comparing this to Ex Machina, and that's fair since the plot mechanisms are the same - a remote, high tech mansion where no one can get in or out without access, and a genius interested in playing some mind games. However, like I mentioned, it's a scifi take on Bluebeard at first.
Not too bad overall. It stars Ciarán Hinds, who is always a good villain, and Abbey Lee is stunning and does really well as Elizabeth.
A young lady is being stalked by a skipping Bill Paxton. Who murders in a cloak, corpse paint, and an embalmer's wand as a weapon. A mediocre movie in most regards.
Found footage anthology. The wrap around premise: 4 thugs who make underground videos of their criminal exploits are hired to steal a rare video tape from an abandoned house. Inside the house, they find a dead old man and a *bunch* of VHS tapes. They start going through them there, and these are the other segments of the anthology.
Like most anthologies, these segments are a mixed bag and have some scary moments and some dumb shit. One thing I don't like about all of them is the low quality of camera work. Some of that is purposeful, but it's also a way to make a movie cheaply and easily hide the special effects.
This past weekend, I watched "Bigbug", by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I wanted to see it because he is the same director that made "Amelie," which Mrs. S and I had enjoyed two decades ago. No one in the family, other than me, was willing/able to sit through it. Visually, it really pops, and certain aspects of it ring true (e.g., when the characters talk about something, or something happens inside the house, and then an ever-present advertising drone hovers in front of the window advertising something related to the discussion/occurrence). But the dubbing is horrible, and the farce a little too broad.
So everyone should run to Netflix and watch it, now!
I think this was a slight improvement on the first, answering some of the questions in the first movie a bit more with a slightly improved framing story: A sleazy private detective is asked to check up on a missing son and provide video evidence. He and his partner enter an empty house with a bunch of TVs piled up, much like the 1st movie. The PI's partner starts watching some to figure out what's going on, and we learn this son is part of an underground tape-trading community. I liked this framing story better than the first movie, if only because the story spends less time on how awful the characters are and fleshes out the reasons behind these weird tape collections.
The rest of the stories have a bit more variety than the first, but I think the best overall is the story of a biker turned zombie, as told through his helmet cam. It's slightly funny and definitely gory, and any good zombie story should be.
ETA: Correction: bicyclist turned zombie - I should be more clear here, it's some guy on a bicycle in a park.
__________________
ta-
DAVE!!!
Last edited by specious_reasons; 10-10-2023 at 10:26 PM.