What was the last movie you saw?

[MemoryTale]

Add me to the Spectre list. I feel conflicted about it. On the whole, I liked the film, but the attempts to tie all the Craig films together and make the main villain so personal just fell flat to me.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Clash of the Titans - the pointless CGIfest remake. What a waste of - everything! Mind you watching Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes trying to outdo each other in their 'how bored with being in this movie can I look?' competition was almost fun.

 

[Droflet]

Agreed, JM. I much preferred Jason and the Argonauts.

 

[subtletylost]

The cartoon How the Grinch Stole Christmas. First time I watched it that I noticed it was drawn by the same guy who drew a lot of the older Tom and Jerry things. It was really fun noticing the little things that made it his, such as some of Max's facial expressions mirroring some of Jerry's.

 

[J Riff]

The Mist. Geez whillikers... this movie is neg-a-tive. It is deliberate of course, as the typical father/son/family group, which usually survives in this kind of movie - is deeee-stroyed, at the end. (<<spoiler) ... I mean it is a ghastly tragedy, vastly overdone... but, if you enjoy action/sf/horror movies, as in a bunch of people trapped in a supermarket as giant insects swarm in the weird mist that has appeared outside... well fine. It's the military's fault of course, an experiment that has opened a portal to another dimension. (<<SF)
Nothing about the other dimension of course, or the giant bugs.... its all about a religious zealot woman, and other locals, going nuts in a supermarket during a giant bug invasion. Watch it, but tune out the ending or you may get deeeeeeepressed as our main character does the worst thing possible - The End.

 

[J Riff]

Home Sweet Hell - suckered into watching this by the neighbor. Mucho gory as furniture-store guy's wife turns out to be a psycho the minute her societal standing is at risk. Super-sleazy bikers show up as part of an extortion plot.... then psycho-wife chainsaws up hubby's GF... then... he blows up his wife... and then we see him playing with the kids until biker-guy drives up and shoots him. The End. Avoid.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Beautifully filmed, without shying away from the brutality of slavery, and pretty close to the book. Interesting use of non-linear narrative, with multiple flashforwards and flashbacks. A historical film which made me think I was seeing the past.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

I mean it is a ghastly tragedy, vastly overdone...

Whereas I'd say the ending of The Mist is absurd, completely out of character with the rest of the movie, tacked onto King's story by the director, and probably the reason it flopped.

It's a great little horror movie... provided you stop where King's story did, about two minutes before Darabont's does. If I could delete the last two minutes from my Blu-Ray, I would. I wondered why the DVD store was selling it so cheap.

Last movie we watched was Ridley Scott's Moses one. It was OK, but I much prefer the deMille version.

 

[ratsy]

Earth Star Voyager - Disney pilot for an unpicked up series that started off interestingly enough - for a Disney movie - very Robert Heinleinlike with a crew of teenagers setting out on a 26 year mission to another planet to see if it was inhabitable and a suitable place for the teeming gazzillions of earth to screw up next. Somewhere along the line though it got very very dull and repetitive and somehow very familiar. Towards the end I had a revelation and realised it was a near a remake of Ikarie XB1 - Disneyfied.

I loved this movie when I was a kid. Beanie and the gang! I guess it was supposed to be a two part pilot episode for a series that never happened. I had recorded on VHS when it came out and watched it many times. I'm sure it's been 25 years since I've watched it. How did you find it? Youtube?

 

[JunkMonkey]

Youtube? I think so. I can't remember it was in a folder of unwatched movies on my tablet.

 

[J Riff]

The Anomaly. Didn't grab. Didn't care. Tried, but the slomo fights are all I remember. There was a virus, the world was gonna be taken over and controlled... I'm sure I missed something, but never really did figure out what the Anomaly was.

Yeah, The Mist is a ban 'un. Like they thought hmmmmm, just how tragic can we make this.... hey! maybe if the guy shoots his kid and pals, then the army shows up two seconds later and he can agonize to beat the band, The End. Those giant insect lifeforms from another dimension? - sorry no time for that- we have people here who need to be ridiculously stupid, The End. Really. I mean... he had four bullets... they were in a car... they had fought and fought to get away... maybe he could shoot 3 or 4 bugs, maybe they would be rescued, maybe, maybe.... * Hard to believe they would actually go through with that ending, and deny any and all SF ideas. That one bug was as big as a battleship andit gets like five seconds screen time. Hollywood needs to stop 'experimenting' and just do some decent stories properly.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

At Long Last Love (1975)

I'll just link directly to my full review at another place, since it's long and full of multiple quotes.

http://bmmb.prophpbb.com/topic7821.html

 

[REBerg]

SPECTRE
Explosions, chases by air, land and sea, supervillain. Standard, escapist 007 fare -- fully meeting my expectations as a lifelong James Bond fan.

 

[J Riff]

San Andreas. If you enjoy watching cities fall down and go boom, and buildings breaking into millions of bits- this is a good one. Otherwise, it is the typical Dad saving family thing... and Dad has cars, airplanes, helicopters and what-not. There are some great disastrous cgi moments in this one.

Man From U.N.C.L.E. - Napoleon and Ilya meet and are assigned to stop a crazed woman who wants to build a raft of nukes and do something unpleasant to the world. They do this, and when it's over you think: Not bad, easily as good as an episode of TMFU from the sixties.

 

[JunkMonkey]

A Knight's Tale - funnier than I remember.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Project: Kill (1976)

Mostly action-less (although there are a few violent and bloody sequences) action flick filmed in the Philippines on a shoestring budget by infamous director William Girdler, creator of the insane horror film The Manitou and other cult favorites. Leslie Nielsen stars as the leader of an elite group of counter-assassins who are given mind-controlling drugs to make them super-killers. He doesn't like the way this thing is going, so he takes off for the Philippines, where he has a couple of old war buddies, one of them in a wheelchair. (By the way, during the opening credits we see a file which tells us that the name of his group is literally "Project: Kill.") He leaves his second-in-command (an oddly miscast Gary Lockwood, trying to convince us he's a super-killer too) behind. Naturally, the government sends Lockwood to hunt him down and terminate him if necessary. Meanwhile, some Filipino bad guys want Nielsen also, so they can learn the secret of the mind-control drugs. (The leader wears a white suit and carries a swagger stick, so he seems to think he's in a 1940's movie.)

This sounds like plenty of plot, but there's a lot of padding with Nancy Kwan (quite stunningly beautiful here) as Nielsen's love interest. We even get the typical nightclub sequence where they listen to a singer perform what I can only call "The Love Theme From Project:Kill." There's also some woman vaguely associated with the government who hangs around Lockwood and who is played by a truly terrible actress who never, as far as I can tell, appeared in anything else.

Since this film pretty much goes by the big book of action movie cliches (the bad guys torture and kill Nielsen's buddies, so when he kills the leader he says "This is for an old friend!") and thus it all builds up to the big fight between Nielsen and Lockwood, where they trade meaningful dialogue as often punches and kicks. (I know less about fight scenes than anybody on the planet, but even I can tell that the ones in this movie look like pretty ordinary brawls for folks who are supposed to be super-killers.)

 

[J Riff]

Starship 1984. Well a nice Starwarsy robot helps out the humans and the kids and the evil empire is thwarted.
Contamination 1980 Alien-ish silicon-based green eggs from Mars appear on Earth and start their gory antics.

 

[Starbeast]

Zontar: The Thing From Venus (1966)

One of my favorite cult films. It's remake of the 1956 Roger Corman movie, It Conquered the World (which is also great, plus a better production than Zontar). John Agar stars in this version, which is also a "sci-fi monster" flick he adds to his list of many films he starred in this genre. Even though this movie is a low-grade copy of the original, I like it very much. The Venusian evil being looks like a demon, rather than a big-face space monster, compared to the 1956 film.

Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1973)

It's an awesome little independent horror film that grew into cult status. I watched the 35th Anniversary Exhumed Edition, which is jam-packed with extras about this low-budget creepy zombie flick. The soundtrack is still chilling to hear. I'm so glad I discovered this movie many, many years ago, in the early hours of the morning.

 

[Foxbat]

Zontar: The Thing From Venus (1966)

One of my favorite cult films. It's remake of the 1956 Roger Corman movie, It Conquered the World (which is also great, plus a better production than Zontar). John Agar stars in this version, which is also a "sci-fi monster" flick he adds to his list of many films he starred in this genre. Even though this movie is a low-grade copy of the original, I like it very much. The Venusian evil being looks like a demon, rather than a big-face space monster, compared to the 1956 film.

Where would Sci-Fi monster flicks be without John Agar?

 

[Starbeast]

@Foxbat I would have loved to have had the film career John did in so many weird sci-fi flicks.

If you haven't seen the 1962 movie Hand of Death with him in it, SEE IT. Don't watch the trailer for it, because it's a very short film, and a great deal of good scenes are shown.