What was the last movie you saw?

[Jeffbert]

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) a newspaper publisher and his friend, expected to soon be son-in-law, are against capitol punishment. They devise a plot to produce circumstantial evidence to convict the younger of the two, have him sentenced to death, then show how it was all a farce, intended to demonstrate how an innocent man could be wrongly convicted of murder, etc., on circumstantial evidence alone. Tom Garrett (Dana Andrews) as the younger, Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer) as the elder man.

Joan Fontaine as Susan Spencer, becomes disgusted with Garrett's neglect as the two men are searching for an unsolved murder, and calls off the engagement. This will have repercussions later. So, they buy and plant evidence, photographing it as they do, planning to submit the photos after conviction and sentencing. But, thing go wrong. And there is a rather !!! of a twist near the end.

Great film, especially since I really like the newspaper films.

Noir Alley, & as I recall, its 2nd showing there. Fritz Lang's last American film.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Thirsty Dead (1974)

Despite the title, this Filipino flick is more of a Lost World adventure fantasy than a horror film. Starts off with a go-go dancer doing her thing in a nightclub. In her dressing room, the usual radio that plays relevant news stories announces that young women have disappeared off the streets of Manila. Sure enough, the go-go dancer gets abducted right then. Cut to another young woman and her boyfriend, to whom she is not yet ready to be married. Her abduction follows, and we see that the kidnappers are three unseen folks in bright red monks' robes. After a canoe ride through a rat-infested sewer, along with a third victim we haven't met before, we emerge into a really beautiful river canyon. They arrive somewhere in the jungle, meet the go-go dancer and another victim (the only Filipino one) and are led through the foliage by a bunch of mute bald guys in loincloths. After some slogging through the jungle, the goofiness level ramps up, as we meet our Lost Civilization of folks in pastel minidresses (even the men.) Every review I've seen of this thing says this looks like a bad episode of Star Trek, and I can't disagree, particularly given the five-hundred-year-old disembodied head in a translucent red cube. Long story short, these folks stay young for centuries by drinking the blood of their victims, who don't die, but slowly turn into blotchy hags with long, sharp fingernails. One of our victims looks like a painting done by the main guy, so she's asked to become one of them. The four women escape, one of them dies by sheer accident, the main guy decides to help them, and turns old instantly when he's too far from his homeland, just like in Lost Horizon. It's all silly, harmless kiddie matinee stuff.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Great Gabbo (1929)

Early talkie with Erich von Stroheim in the title role as an overbearing, egotistical ventriloquist. After suffering two years of verbal abuse, his pretty young assistant Mary leaves him. Cut to two years later. Gabbo is now the headliner of a big Broadway show, and Mary is part of a act in the same production. We already know that Gabbo is more than a little unbalanced, because he has intense conversations, even arguments, with his dummy, Otto. When he finally allows his softer side to show, trying to win Mary back, she tells him she's married to her dance partner. This drives Gabbo completely around the bend, ruining the show and his career. That's all the plot you get in an hour and a half, because the rest of the time we witness a bunch of Busby Berkeley style production numbers. The combination of old-fashioned movie musical and intense psychological melodrama makes for odd viewing. Worth it just for von Stroheim's performance.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Ruby (1977)

After Piper Laurie was nominated for an Oscar for her role as the strange mother of a strange teenager in the horror film Carrie, it was only natural that she play the strange mother of a strange teenager in another horror film with a one-word title taken from a female character's first name. The big twist here is that Ruby is the mother, not the daughter.

Florida, 1935. Ruby witnesses the father of her yet-to-be-born child shot dead by his fellow gangsters. Sixteen years later, Ruby runs a drive-in theater staffed by the same gangsters, a premise harder to believe than all the supernatural stuff that follows. Also disorienting is the fact that we're in 1951, and the drive-in is showing Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, which came out seven years later. Anyway, the gangsters/drive-in workers start getting killed in bizarre ways; a projectionist strangled in his film, another guy impaled by a speaker, etc. There's also Ruby's mute daughter, who gets possessed by her dead father in ways stolen directly from The Exorcist. (The movie's most unnerving scene is when the daughter, speaking in the father's voice, gets all seductive with her mother/his wife.) Laurie is the whole show, with her best scenes having nothing to do with the plot, as she waxes nostalgic about her days as a nightclub singer. (She sings the torch song that plays under the opening credits, and quite well.) Otherwise, the film is something of a mess, with spooky stuff thrown in pretty much at random.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Angel-Titled Biker Films Not Featuring Hell's Angels And Which Seem Like Westerns Double Feature

Devil's Angels (1967)

John Cassavetes, in an unexpected role, is the leader of the Skulls motorcycle gang. They've fallen on hard times, since they had two hundred members five years ago, and now only have twenty-six. One of the gang kills a "citizen" (somebody who isn't a member of a motorcycle gang) in a hit-and-run accident, so they head for the fabled Hole-in-the-Wall hideout. (There's no indication that they have any idea where this is, or if it even exists as all.) Along the way they trash a desert general store, trash an RV after it accidentally knocks over one of their bikes, and so on. The plot gets started when they arrive at a small town. A local young woman hangs out with them, gets stoned on marijuana, and runs away when they start to get too physical. The town authorities accuse them of rape (which didn't happen), eventually leading to the Skulls fighting back with the help of a more feral gang, the Stompers. Let's just say that things get out of control, and Cassavetes goes off on his own at the end. The whole thing is pretty mild for a biker flick, with a fair amount of comedy during the early, episodic portion of the movie. Neither the town authorities nor the gang come across as good guys, although the local sheriff and Cassavetes seem to be a little more decent than others, like two opposing gunfighters with a certain grudging respect for each other. Some nifty surf music on the soundtrack, but a really sappy title song (!) at the end.

Angels Hard As They Come (1971)

A trio of bikers, who seem to be the entire population of the Angels (not Hell's Angels) gang, get away from the cops after a botched drug deal. This has nothing to do with the plot, which gets started when some members of the somewhat larger Dragons gang invite them to party at a ghost town in the desert, already inhabited by hippies. The leader starts what might have been a romance with one of the hippies, after a discussion of their different lifestyles, but she gets stabbed to death by somebody. The completely evil leader of the Dragons blames it on the Angels, drags them behind their bikes, and plays human polo with them in desert. One Angel actually gets away on the bike of one of the Dragons. This turns into the film's oddest subplot, as he runs into a racist jackass in a dune buggy, who makes various insulting remarks to him, because he's African-American, points a pistol at him, and tries to force him to have sex with his female companion. (An excuse for the first of several gratuitous topless scenes.) Meanwhile, with help of the hippies putting LSD in the food they prepare for the Dragons, and the fellow bikers that the escaped Angel recruits, we get our big battle at the end, like the final shoot-out in a horse opera. Compared to the above film, this one is poorly filmed, with some scenes so dark you can't tell what's going on, a lot sleazier, with constant profanity, but with a certain gritty appeal and a truly nasty villain.

 

[HanaBi]

The Departed (2006) - Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson

Damon plays Colin Sullivan, a wayward young boy who ends up working for Irish Mafia boss, Frank Costello (Nicholson). Over the intervening years Sullivan he joins the Boston police force in order to be a spy for Costello and to make him aware of any investigations heading his way.

DiCaprio plays William Costigan, is a top-notch police detective for the same police department, and goes undercover to work for and spy on Costello, while reporting back to his Captain.

Both men are very good at their jobs, but as the intensity grows to finally nail Costello, both men know that their respective covert operations might just be blown wide open if they let slip their true intentions and identities.

Based on the 2002 Hong Kong hit "Infernal Affairs", Martin Scorsese does an American update with mixed results. I much preferred the original, not least because the actors were not big names in the West, and therefore didn't detract too much. Moreover, there was far more suspense/tension along with tighter direction and editing. But here, Scorese tries to be clever with the plot twists but makes a bad job of raising any surprises, albeit the very ending possibly.

Much has been said regarding the gratuitous violence, but to be honest I have seen far worse in his previous/superior films, such as Taxi Driver and Goodfellas.

There's also a pointless/ham-fisted love interest, that doesn't add anything tangible, and just bloats the film time by a further 30 minutes.

Too long, too convoluted, too clever for its own good.

3/5

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Sleazy British Crime Thrillers Of The Miniskirt Era Double Feature:

Night, After Night, After Night (1969)

Police detective investigates a series of stabbing murders of women. He quickly picks up a suspect, but has to let him go for lack of evidence. The detective's wife becomes one of the victims, sending him on a vendetta against the suspect. (The guy doesn't help himself very much, since he acts like a total jackass toward the detective from the beginning, which gets him in big trouble later.) Meanwhile, we've got a judge who hands out maximum sentences to all the sex criminals in his docket, and his equally puritanical clerk. It's pretty darn obvious who the real killer is early in the film, but I'll offer no spoilers here. Suffice to say that the murderer goes completely berserk at the end, going into his secret room full of pinup pictures, dressing up in a Beatles-type wig and black leather, and finally dressing up in drag, with blonde wig and lipstick. The whole thing has a gritty, slimy feel to it. Notable for the fact that the killer only gets caught because an undercover policewoman happened to see him picking up his intended victim by sheer chance. Our nominal hero's investigation is of no help at all.

Clegg aka The Bullet Machine aka Harry and the Hookers (1970)

Our antihero is private eye Harry Clegg, self-described in the voice-over narration as a lecher, a liar, a cold-blooded killer, and a loser. In an opening sequence that has nothing to do with the plot, an unhappy client and a couple of thugs with machine guns try to kill him, but he uses the old "let me have one last cigarette" trick to gun them all down. The story really begins with some rich older guys getting notes telling them they will be killed. Clegg gets hired to protect one, gets beat up by thugs, the guy gets killed anyway, while he and Clegg go to Paris for some reason or other. Another of the guys gets killed without Clegg's help. By this time, and throughout the rest of the film, the audience is way ahead of the antihero, as we already know the killer is a blonde woman in a miniskirt and those gigantic round glasses they had back then. Clegg gets hired by another of the guys, who gets killed. Then he gets hired by the last guy. (In what must be a running joke, his fee for being the world's least effective bodyguard keeps going up, from fifty pounds a day, to seventy-five, and finally to an outrageous three hundred fifty.) The blonde is just the hired help, and the real bad guy is the owner of a fashion house. (Not really a spoiler, because, again, we're way ahead of the antihero.) It all has to do with a guy that went to prison for a crime the four guys committed. Something of a spoiler, although it's not really unexpected at this point: Clegg fails to protect the last guy, manages to gun down a bunch of thugs with machine guns, and grabs a bunch of cash from the dead guy's pocket. With it's low-rent Raymond Chandler first person narration throughout, and the constant beating of and by thugs, I had to wonder if this was intended as a parody of hard-boiled detective yarns, although there's not a trace of humor. Notable for the fact that women find our dirt-poor, not very attractive antihero irresistible -- he does some heavy smooching with one the instant he meets her for the first time -- and because the antihero only figures out as much as he does about the case from the information he gets from a woman on the police force. Also for the bad guy's weird harem of identically dressed -- yes, in miniskirts -- young women licking big lollipops. At one point, the film completely stops, for a long, long scene of one of the women licking a lollipop and the antihero ogling her, while acid rock music -- unlike anything else on the soundtrack -- blasts away.

 

[HanaBi]

Face Off (1997) - John Travolta (Sean Archer), Nicholas Cage (Castor Troy)

Directed by Hong Kong master, John Woo, this action thriller has Travolta (short-tempered FBI agent) on the trail of long-time foe Cage (sociopathic bad guy), who is not only threatening to blow up Los Angeles with a massive bomb, but also for killing his young son by accident.

After a fightout Archer manages to subdue and arrest Troy, who is seriously injured and is nothing more than a vegetable. But with him out of action Archer has no idea where the bomb is located other than he has about 5 or 6 days to find it before it detonates. And the only other person who might know of its location is Troy's brother. However, to get info from him (currently holed up in prison), Archer has to agree to quite literally swap faces with the comatose Troy, and "become" Troy!

However, just to complicate things, Troy suddenly wakes up missing his face. So he gets the same surgeon to fit Archer's face onto his, and now we have a complete reversal of characters, and much confusion and double-crossing ensues

In essence this just another Die Hard with a twist of James Bond for good measure. Lots of explosions, deaths, and pyrotechnics, but it soon becomes boring, overlong and predictable with more plot holes than a block of Swiss cheese And shackled further with one of the most god-awful endings ever!

If you like your action without any hint of a plausible storyline or sympathetic characters, then this is very much up your street.


1/5

 

[biodroid]

Green Lantern - Even with all the hate for this film I enjoyed it. Ryan Reynolds is fantastic and even in this film you could see Deadpool was surfacing through his comments.

Can you keep a secret? - Silly RomCom that wasn't good at all.

 

[Randy M.]

Bumblebee (2018), dir. Travis Knight; starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena

Another movie harking back to the 1980s. Funny how innocent a past time period can seem when it didn't seem innocent at the time. (See also, the 1980's nostalgia for the 1950s.) Anyway, set in 1987 this recalls some of the heart-string tugging s.f. from back then, like Short-Circuit and E. T. with even a quick visual shout out to Jurassic Park. Lonely teenager, Charlie, who lost her father to a heart-attack a couple of years before is trying to pull it together, wants a car but her mom can't afford another one, and can't get her dad's old Corvette working though she's a crackerjack mechanic. And then she meets Bumblebee.

Bee is a yellow Transformer in the shape of busted, powered down VW Beetle. He had been sent here from a losing battle to protect the Earth while the other rebel forces regroup. Unfortunately, he was followed and while victorious, had his voice box pulled out and his memory core severely damaged so he doesn't entirely remember why he's here. The movie follows their growing friendship as Charlie fixes Bee as best she can and helps him regain bits of his memory. Meanwhile he helps her heal from the loss of her father.

Cena, who showed in Breakers he's good at comedy, is okay in this but not given much to do except look tough. Requisite love interest, Jorge Lendeborg Jr. is a good nerd. But really it all depends on Steinfeld and how sympathetic they could make the Transformer. On that count, this is a very enjoyable throw back. The camera loves Steinfeld and she is so completely in control that hugging a yellow robot only looks cutely hokey instead of roll-your-eyes hokey.

Randy M.

 

[BAYLOR]

The Color of Space with Nicolas Cage . It starts a bit slow but picks up steam as a goes . Over all, a very good horror film and , to date the best adaptation of Lovecraft's story.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The First Two 87th Precinct Novels Of Ed McBain Become The First Two 87th Precinct Movies Double Feature

Cop Hater (1958)

Features the recurring characters from the novels of Detective Steve Carella (although the movie makes an odd vowel shift and calls him Carelli) and his deaf-mute girlfriend (wife by the end of the first book) Teddy. Starts with a plainclothes cop getting gunned down in the street. It isn't much later that the cop's partner is killed the same way. In an odd subplot, a reporter asks nosy questions of a member of a kid gang, because he thinks they might be the cop killers. They gang up on somebody they think is the reporter and shoot him with a zip gun, but he turns out to be another cop. Midway through the film ***SPOILER*** Carelli's own partner gets shot dead, but provides some clues. When he has too much to drink, Carelli talks to the same nosy reporter, resulting in an article that puts Teddy and himself in danger. The killer turns out to be a lot closer to home than anybody thought. It's a pretty good police procedural/whodunit. The fact that this all takes place during a heat wave adds a sweaty tension to the proceedings.

The Mugger (1958)

Same year, same director, same writer, but this one discards the characters from the books and goes its own way. The hero is a police psychiatrist, who also does a lot of undercover work, it seems. Several women have been attacked, their purses stolen and their faces lightly cut. The movie goes off in another direction, or so we think, when the psychiatrist gets involved in the domestic problems of a cab driver. It seems the guy's young sister-in-law is a problem. The kid works at a dime-a-dance joint and is obviously seriously worried about something. These two plots come together when ***SPOILER*** she gets attacked in the same way, but is killed. There's also the psychiatrist's girlfriend, an undercover cop, who not only works at the dime-a-dance joint, trapping a drug dealer, but later is used as bait for the serial mugger, providing some clues when she is attacked but gets away unscathed. It's got the same plot structure as the other movie, in which the crimes are not related in the way they seem to be, and the ultimate revelation strikes close to home. Not as good as the first one, but not bad.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Jungle Street Girls (1960)

A very young David McCallum starts off this British crime film by conking an old man on the head and stealing his wallet. The victim later dies. Another guy figures out who did it, so blackmails him. Meanwhile, a fellow who went to prison for 18 months for a robbery in which McCallum was also involved gets out. McCallum gets him to go along with a plan to rob a safe, but double-crosses him, bashing him on the head and grabbing all the cash. Things don't work out well, with McCallum again semi-accidentally killing an old man and facing the gallows.

So why "girls"? Actually, the original title was just Jungle Street, with the third word added for the American release. That's because a lot of the scenes take place at a strip club, where a very young Jill Ireland, to whom McCallum was married at the time, is the star attraction. She's the girlfriend of the guy who went to prison, and the object of McCallum's desire. A lot of other strip acts pad the running time. Otherwise, it's a fair-to-middling heist flick.

 

[Droflet]

The usual suspects. Yeah, I've seen it ten times but it's still a genuine treat every time I revisit this classic mystery.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Flaming Teenage (1945/1956)

Two years listed above because this ultra-cheap flick consists of new footage added to something called Twice Convicted. This frankensteining is very obvious, as the opening sequence has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but at least it adds about fifteen minutes to the running time, so the whole thing is a little over an hour.

Part One: Young guy gets drunk at a party, winds up in jail, Dad takes him around to a bunch of bars in order to show him what booze does to people. Done in an awkward flashback structure, so that the wild party -- dancing to records and drinking -- takes up a big chunk of the middle. Features some guy at a desk talking directly to the viewer as the narrator.

Part Two: The true story, or so we're told, of a guy who went from alcoholism, crime, and heroin addiction, to becoming a preacher. He owns a candy store in some town, sells it, gets a job as a clerk in a drug store in New York, briefly works on a Broadway show, drinks and gambles, comes home broke, some rich guy pays him to produce a stage show, he quits that and goes back to New York, commits some unseen crime involving larceny and fraud, goes to jail, skips bail, becomes a heroin addict, shoplifts, goes to jail, undergoes a religious conversion, becomes a preacher. I've made that all one sentence because that's what this part feels like. We jump from one scene to another with no transition. Characters come and go so quickly that we have no idea who they are. The oddest scene is when some guy talks to our hero about the crime he wants him to commit. In order to avoid hearing what they're planning, the camera cuts away to the dim-witted guy who's serving them at the diner where they're chatting. This fellow attempts to serve a piece of Boston cream pie, in a slow, awkward, and entirely out-of-place bit of slapstick. This irrelevant sequence lasts longer than some of the really important parts of the plot.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

I Crossed the Color Line AKA The Black Klansman (1966)

Our hero is an extremely light-skinned African-American jazzman in Los Angeles, at the time of the Watts riots. Unfortunately, he is played by an actor who is very obviously Caucasian, with faked hair and beard. He's got a dark-skinned buddy and a white girlfriend. Cut to a small town in Alabama. A young black man decides to test the recent civil rights laws by walking into a diner and ordering a cup of coffee. Since the place has a sign reading "No [N-word]'s Allowed", this is a bad idea. That night the KKK kills him. Since that isn't evil enough, they also throw a Molotov cocktail at an African-American church, killing a little girl. (We actually see her [faked] body on fire, which is pretty darn intense for any movie.) The child happens to be the daughter of our hero. He gets rid of his jazzman goatee, puts on a wig, and assumes a new identity as a white man.

He goes to Alabama and talks to the guy known to be the head of the local KKK, acting like he wants to join up. I'll give the movie credit for making the bad guy smart enough to deny that he has any connection with the Klan until he's had one of his thugs get beaten up by our hero. In an interesting subplot, the brother of the murdered man hires some tough guys from Harlem, whose method of dealing with the Klan is to show up at one of their rallies and start shooting. The movie makes it clear that these guys are definitely not on the side of good. Anyway, our hero's buddy and girlfriend show up in town, causing all kinds of complications and leading to the violent climax.

Despite obvious limitations caused by a low budget, some melodramatic parts of the plot, and, in particular, the ludicrous white-man-playing-a-black-man-pretending-to-be-a-white-man aspect of the film, it's an intriguing drama dealing with vital issues. Mind you, this was made before the real-life story of the African-American police officer who infiltrated the KKK in the 1970's, as shown in the movie BlacKkKlansman. (In more realistic fashion, he did it on the phone, having a white officer stand in for him when necessary.)

Would you believe this was made by the same director who later gave us The Astro-Zombies and Blood Orgy of the She-Devils?

 

[CupofJoe]

Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker [2019] Finally!
Pleasantly surprised. I thought it better than its two precursors [The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi]. I liked that there were a few Easter eggs for the fans but it wasn't too over burdened by what came before.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Black Christmas (1974)

Millions of words have been written about this Canadian shocker, a very early entry in the slasher film genre, the vast majority of which are worthless and dependent on gore for their effect. This one is very different. The violence is far from explicit, but genuinely scary. It may amaze some viewers to find out that you can have a movie about a bunch of sorority women threatened by an insane killer without a trace of nudity. The acting is fine all around, with lots of familiar faces -- John Saxon as an intelligent, professional police lieutenant, Margot Kidder as a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed sorority woman, Olivia Hussey as a pregnant sorority woman who wants an abortion, Keir Dullea as her boyfriend who doesn't want her to have the abortion, and who serves as our major suspect, and even Andrea Martin as one of the sorority women, which pleased an SCTV fan like me. Lots of creepy moments, particularly the obscene phone calls from the killer, in which he uses a wide variety of extremely weird voices. Highly recommended.

 

[Randy M.]

I saw that a year or so ago, Victoria, and was a little surprised by how much I liked it, though already aware of it's reputation. (And I had a niggling sense that I might have seen it years ago, but I'm still not sure of that.) The director, Bob Clark, went on to make Murder by Decree, Porky's, Turk 182. Oh, and pleasant little movie I'm sure no one's seen, A Christmas Story.

Or maybe I should say, few people have seen only once.

Randy M.

 

[AlexH]

Chef (2014)
Feel-good film with half the cast from a Marvel superhero film that has nothing to do with superheroes but is about a chef struggling to come to terms with social media and his relationship with his 10 year old son.

La Grande Illusion (1937)
French POW escape film that had positives but overall left me disappointed. Some things just didn't make sense (like why or how one of the guys ended up in solitary confinement...and why he was let out). One of the attempted escape scenes was confusing. And with that title, I was expecting a twist or something bigger.

The Departed (2006) - Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson

Based on the 2002 Hong Kong hit "Infernal Affairs", Martin Scorsese does an American update with mixed results. I much preferred the original, not least because the actors were not big names in the West, and therefore didn't detract too much. Moreover, there was far more suspense/tension along with tighter direction and editing. But here, Scorese tries to be clever with the plot twists but makes a bad job of raising any surprises, albeit the very ending possibly.

I agree. Infernal Affairs is a favourite film (probably top 5 all-time), and I was very disappointed with The Departed.