What was the last movie you saw?

[Randy M.]

The Changeling (1980) dir. Peter Medak; starring George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas

Watched on Shudder, this is my second viewing, the first time I’ve seen it in about 20 years, and it confirmed this as one of the most effective filmed ghost stories I’ve seen.

The movie opens with John Russell (Scott) seeing his family killed in a traffic accident. Fade to four months later and the shattered man has packed up his NY City apartment; he’s going to Seattle to teach music composition. The mansion he leases in Seattle is old and after being disturbed at night by loud banging with no apparent physical cause, he finds he’s the first to live there in decades because no one would stay in the house.

Eventually John and Claire (Van Devere), who had helped fast track his lease through the historical society, learn that the house is connected to Senator Carmichael (Douglas), but how? They know the haunter is a child, which preys on Russell’s memories of his own lost daughter, but who, and why?

Fairly simple, practical effects work wonders to build suspense and dread, and one of the most eerie, disturbing scenes in film is accomplished with nothing more than low lighting and a rubber ball.

Also features a couple of actors who were staples of American TV from the ‘60s into the ‘80s, John Colicos (the original Battlestar Galactica) and Barry Morse (The Fugitive).

If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Coonskin (1974)

Combination of live action and animation from Ralph Bakshi. The frame story (live action) has a mad-as-a-hatter preacher (actor/playwright Charles Gordone, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama) and a huge guy (singer Barry White) drive to a prison farm to bust out two convicts. (One of them is Scatman Crothers, and the other is future Miami Vice star Phillip Michael Thomas.) While they're waiting, Scatman tells the other convict about Brother Rabbit (Thomas), Brother Bear (White) and Preacher Fox (Gordone) in scenes that integrate animation and live action. Yes, it's partly a parody of Uncle Remus, with variations on "don't throw me in the briar patch" and the Tar Baby. But it's even more a parody of blaxploitation, with Rabbit taking over organized crime in Harlem.

Full of outrageous, completely over-the-top stereotypes of Blacks, Whites, Italian-Americans, women, and gays, this is guaranteed to offend everybody. It's also got wild flights of fantasy outside the main stories. Violent and vulgar, it may be Bakshi's most daring and most accomplished film


I'm Gonna Get You Sucka (1988)

Airplane!-style spoof of blaxploitation films. Nice to see lots of stars of the genre engage in self-parody. No reason to discuss the generic action heroes against the crime boss plot. Just appreciate the constant barrage of silly jokes and breaking of the fourth wall. I thought it was pretty darn funny.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Devil's Mistress (1965)

Ultra-cheap supernatural Western. Four cowpokes are wandering through Apache country when they come upon a house in the middle of nowhere. Inside are an older guy and and a young mute woman, who fled Salem (!) to escape religious persecution. They feed the four guys, but don't eat anything themselves.

I should describe the four at this point. We have a giggling sociopath, a non-giggling sociopath, a guy who thinks the place is weird because there are no animals or crops to be seen, and the meat they serve tastes strange, and a young, almost nice guy.

The two sociopaths shoot the man and rape the woman, then take her along as servant/sex slave. The other two may not be as evil, but they don't interfere with this, either.

It's not a spoiler to state that the four start to die. Giggling sociopath forces his attentions on the woman, who, surprisingly, passionately kisses him back. This immediately causes him to weaken and soon die. Non-giggling sociopath is bitten in the face by a rattlesnake. Guy who thought the place was weird shows some sense, and decides to escape; he winds up with his neck broken in the branches of a tree. Almost nice guy? Well, let's just say that he supplies the movie's only gore scene, which is fairly strong for 1965. Then there's the twist ending.

Amateurish and slow, but sometimes effectively eerie. It's never quite clear what's going on. Witch? Devil? Vampire? That may be a good thing.

 

[KGeo777]

The Changeling (1980) dir. Peter Medak; starring George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas

This was made at the high mark of Canadian film development fund era.
The producer was a big theater mogul in Canada and this is more classy than most of the others at the time.
The ghost under the water is creepy sequence.



I watched
THE MARAUDERS OF THE DESERT 1965 - Brother and sister in the desert searching for their treasure-seeking father. They meet a rugged loner in a bar where they take cover in a shoot out and he refuses to help until a stray bullet hits his drink. The leader of the bandits is a European who is pretending to be an Arab. He is after the treasure and has a sneaky plan to get it. He poses as a victim of himself--so the caravan takes him in--and he secretly slashes their water supply so they are stranded and then easy to capture. He then forces the hero to take him to the treasure. It is in a tomb--and the bad guy sees a crate filled with jewels and is grabbing it greedily until the hero says "that's just a small part of it--the rest is over here." And so the bad guy and henchman eagerly enters a room through a door with a lock and the hero just lets them in, closes the door, then locks them in and takes the treasure.
It's not fair play but really--since he used the bad guy's greed and stupidity against him--I think it counts.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Plan 9 from Outer Space - for the umpteenth time prompted by a thread hereabouts. What a deliriously bad film. Not my favourite Ed Wood. I think that has to be Bride of the Monster because I love Lugosi's performance in it so much... "khome.... I haf no khome... " or maybe Night of the Ghouls because it probably the most incoherent of his films, even more so than Plan 9.

 

[Jeffbert]

Violence (1947) NOIR ALLEY. A union-only organization recruits young and naïve blue-collar guys into a hate-filled organization run by the unknown Mr. X.

I already forgot, & the wiki page is scarce of details. But, I do remember enjoying it.

 

[Jeffbert]

Guns of Darkness (1962) on the morning after a coop, the deposed ruler President Rivera (David Opatoshu; the guy in A Taste of Armageddon; 1st time seeing him as other than a bad guy) hides in the car of a British guy who works for a British business that employs hundreds of local people. His boss, being a friend, just happens to be there, and advises him to get rid of the ex-president, and save his job. But, Tom Jordan (David Niven) decides he must help the man. His wife Claire (Leslie Caron) is not happy with his decision, but goes along with it. Now, they must escape the country with the Ex-President in the back of their station wagon, under a blanket.

At least half of the film depicts their escape, including a very different type of encounter with quicksand or whatever, quagmire, etc. So, they need to cross a shallow river, and Tom Jordan takes a long stick and walks across probing with the stick to be sure of a solid bed in the river. But, what appears to be solid ground on the other side is not, as the entire car begins to sink. Tom Jordan swims across pulling his wife with him. but the ex-president is stuck on the tailgate, where his foot is caught. Tom Jordan swims across the muck, rescues the man, and drags him across the mire to dry ground.

But their odyssey has just begun, and anyone even suspected of having any contact with the ex-president, is shot on sight.

8/10

 

[Jeffbert]

My Forbidden Past (1951) a young woman, member of a snobbish family, wants to elope with a young physician, but her elders want nothing to do with a man without wealth or status. Her cousin insists she write a letter to her lover, stating she cannot go with him but will be waiting when he returns.

Dr. Mark Lucas (Robert Mitchum), not receiving the letter takes a wife while away. Barbara Beaurevel (Ava Gardner) is there to greet him when he returns, not expecting him to have a wife. Cousin Paul Beaurevel (Melvyn Douglas) felt he was doing his younger cousin a favor. She was too young to decide for herself, etc.

Then, the is her forbidden past. Her mother was a prostitute, whose name must never be mentioned in the presence of her aunt.

Interesting film, not typical of Mitchum's roles. 8/10.

 

[KGeo777]

THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA - 1973 - Superior to AD 72 in most ways, with a plot that manages to merge science fiction with supernatural horror without negating the latter (since most often, if something supernatural is working alongside science fiction, then the SF is used to explain the supernatural as something based in science--which is not the case here). I don't watch this one often but it is a decent ending for the Hammer ones (if we ignore Seven Golden Vampires).

 

[Jeffbert]

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) A U.S. Marine Corporal Allison (Robert Mitchum) washes up on the shore of a small South Pacific Island. He had been floating in an inflatable raft for days, starving and dehydrated. The lone inhabitant of the island, a Nun Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr) who has yet to take her vows, finds the guy, and takes care of him, while he recovers. All the while, the war rages on, and eventually enemy forces occupy the island, forcing the Marine and the Nun to hide in a cave.

8/10 - 9/10

 

[KGeo777]

Pretty Maids All In A Row - 1971 - I had heard that Gene Roddenberry made Captain Kirk look like a eunuch - and if this film--written and produced by him--was anything to go by--I would say he had one thing on his mind. I thought it was going to be a suspense film but not really--it is a sex comedy with murder on the side. You get the tone early when school principal Roddy McDowall sees Rock Hudson arrive to talk to police after the first murder--the latter had been preoccupied with a student-(a girl student in case you are wondering)-and the former says with relief "Thank God you've come!"
The whole movie is a series of double entendres like that. I suppose it seems tame by today's standards but if not for Trelane and Scotty appearing as cops, one might not believe it was made by the Star Trek creator.

 

[Parson]

Pretty Maids All In A Row - 1971 - I had heard that Gene Roddenberry made Captain Kirk look like a eunuch - and if this film--written and produced by him--was anything to go by--I would say he had one thing on his mind. I thought it was going to be a suspense film but not really--it is a sex comedy with murder on the side. You get the tone early when school principal Roddy McDowall sees Rock Hudson arrive to talk to police after the first murder--the latter had been preoccupied with a student-(a girl student in case you are wondering)-and the former says with relief "Thank God you've come!"
The whole movie is a series of double entendres like that. I suppose it seems tame by today's standards but if not for Trelane and Scotty appearing as cops, one might not believe it was made by the Star Trek creator.

This movie made a huge impression on me. I saw it in the theater when it came out. My 21 year-0ld self found it pretty erotic, but there was a line in there that has haunted me since. After finding another of the girls strangled the policeman(?) says: "Did you notice how they all die with a smile on their face." It struck me odd in the moment and horribly stupid as I thought about it later. I have to contemplate whether lines like that make the movie more pornographic than erotic.

 

[JunkMonkey]

The Wicked Lady - (the 1945 original not the Michael Winner remake) - swashbuckling period melodrama in which a rich M'Lady takes to highwaywomanism for kicks, gets jiggy with James Mason (who wouldn't?) and then betrays him in revenge for his infidelity (while she was preoccupied with murdering her butler who had discovered her secret) before shooting him dead after he escaped the gallows, raped her, and got in the way of her murdering her husband who, in turn, stood in the way of her marrying the one true love of her life - who empties the irony bucket all over the script by mortally wounding her when she holds up the carriage he is on. A total nonsense farrago but jolly fun in Georgette Heyer on steroids sort of way. The final couple of shots (well the final two before the very tacked-on looking shot of our insipid reunited lovers looking forward to their shining future) were amazing. Michael Rennie backing away in horror and a final crane shot up out through the window as our protagonist bad girl dies alone on her bedroom floor are brilliantly done. Weird mixture of ingredients - not all of them worked but a few wickedly funny lines dotted about let the audience know in no uncertain terms that the makers knew they were camping it up dreadfully.

 

[KGeo777]

OPEN SEASON - 1974 -- surprisingly obscure thriller with Peter Fonda and William Holden. It really keeps you gripped thanks to the slow unraveling of the story and very good performances about three sadistic buddies who kidnap strangers for fun and games. Never has had a dvd release apparently.

 

[Foxbat]

The Green Mile

Because I’m currently reading the novel, I decided to rewatch the movie.
A bittersweet and enjoyable if overly long film.

Tom Hanks might get top billing but, for me, the mouse is the real star

 

[CupofJoe]

The Last Duel [2021 Ridley Scott]
As always a Ridley Scott film that looks amazing and the story is compelling enough to warrant a run-time that was an hour shorter.
The run time of 2 1/2 hours was just too long and as it is so grey and colourless, there isn't much spectacle. Yes, the fight and battle scenes are great, maybe even epic, but it just drags.
on the other hand...
Deep Impact [1998 Mimi Leder]
Not quite as rock'n'roll as Armageddon, but an enjoyable melodrama, that I watch time and again. I really don't know why...

 

[Randy M.]

Movies with no discernable connection other than I watched them this weekend …

THE LIQUIDATOR (1966) dir. Jack Cardiff; starring Rod Taylor, Trevor Howard, Jill St. John, David Tomlinson

During WWII Boisie Oakes (Taylor) saves the life of Mostyn, a British agent (Howard), shooting the men who attacked him. Several years later when Mostyn’s branch is being embarrassed by scandals, he enlists Oakes as a liquidator – if admitting people in your organization are corrupt is too publicly embarrassing, do the next best thing …

From the heyday of the Bond craze, it’s a spoof, but it's not the spoofiest spoof you’ll ever see. Howard was always good as a bluff, take charge type; Taylor had leading man charisma and the comedy chops that make his kind of bumbling killer endurable; and Jill St. John was near the peak of her Jill St. Johnness – I think a competent comedienne lurked under the bombshell looks, but I can’t recall anyone coaxing it out consistently. The interesting thing about Oakes is that he farms out his kills, and the manipulation of the plot for him to finally save the day doesn’t quite work for me: Sometimes your light-hearted, frothy comedy needs a bit more froth.


DEATHSTALKER (1983) dir. James Sbardellati; starring Richard Hill, Barbie Benton

There’s an amulet, a chalice and a sword that offer the owner great power. Sorcerer Munkar (Bernard Erhard) has the first two, and an ancient witch gifts Deathstalker (Hill) with the last. Let the battle begin!

Munkar teases Deathstalker (never stated whether it’s his given name or somehow acquired) with the captured Princess Codille (Benton), tries to assassinate him several times, creates a tournament to kill off as many warriors – including one pig-headed guy that actually has the head of a pig – who might challenge him as possible, and generally shows all the worst traits found in a leadership position.

Post-Conan cash grab – er – Sword & Sorcery flick made somewhat tolerable by Hill’s performance, and I doubt it was accidental that he looked a bit like He-Man. Benton and several other women are there just to look good, although Lana Clarkson makes an impression as one of the warriors. Another where the script has deficiencies like, why does the curse one character is under insist he will only be saved by a child? So they can show the sword has the power to turn He-ma – er – Deathstalker into a child. There are some cult movies where I just wonder why.

 

[KGeo777]

The Green Mile

Because I’m currently reading the novel, I decided to rewatch the movie.
A bittersweet and enjoyable if overly long film.

Tom Hanks might get top billing but, for me, the mouse is the real star

Mr. Jingles.
That awful scene where a foot comes out of nowhere. Tear-jerker manipulation.

The Asphyx (1972) must have been inspiration for that movie.

 

[CupofJoe]

Godzilla Minus One [2023]
A sort of origin story for Godzilla, but only sort of.
While Godzilla was the main show [and the FX are amazing] where I think the film really scores is in the human cast.
They felt like real people doing the best they can, and sometimes that is not very much.
One of the best films I've seen in a long time, and probably the best [new] Godzilla film.

 

[RDArmstrong]

Matrix Resurrections (2021)

It felt like a fan movie in many ways. There were some interesting scenes and concepts but I had a tough time immersing myself.