AE35Unit
]==[]===O °
Saw Doctor Sleep at the cinema before Covid hit. Quite good
What was the last movie you saw?
- Thread starter Tabitha
- Start date
CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF 1961 - The kid who plays the young Leon is such a good choice--he looks so much like a young Oliver Reed--it makes the transition to adult so smooth. The makeup design is really good. Philosophically, it suggests God is kind of a jerk since the child is cursed because he was born on the wrong day (according to Spanish time zones. Technically it wouldn't be December 25th in Australia).
Victoria Silverwolf
Vegetarian Werewolf
The Third Visitor (1951)
Modest but enjoyable little British whodunit with lots of twists and turns in the plot. Starts with a bang as we see a woman chained to a wall screaming in fear, under the huge words WHO WAS THE THIRD VISITOR? We then meet a fashion model and her husband, a writer of detective stories, and a photograph of some folks at a party in a magazine she's reading. The same magazine grabs the attention of a tough guy in New York City, who rushes to the UK to confront the fellow in the photo.
Meanwhile, a man shows up at the home of the fellow in the photo, to try to arrange some kind of shady business deal with some other folks. That sends him off, only so he can come back and find a dead body.
It seems the the New York guy showed up, because he recognized the fellow in the photo, who framed him for some crime that sent him to prison for years. We see him start to attack the fellow with a blunt object . . .
Seems open and shut, doesn't it? Don't assume anything, though, because nothing is quite what it seems. Add to the mixture the wife of the guy who found the body, who has a good reason to lie to her husband about where she was while he was gone. (Due to the murder, he came home early, to find their place empty.) Then there's the very confused older man, just out of a mental institution, who went mad just after building a secret room for the fellow in the photo . . .
Believe it or not, this all comes together by the end, when we find out about the woman chained to the wall and learn the identity of the third visitor. It's a nifty bit of trickery, maybe not the most plausible plot in the world, but full of witty dialogue. Almost all the characters are constant liars, with the exceptions of the writer (because he's pretty much just comic relief) and the confused fellow (because his mind is too mixed up to lie) and, of course, the detectives on the case.
Modest but enjoyable little British whodunit with lots of twists and turns in the plot. Starts with a bang as we see a woman chained to a wall screaming in fear, under the huge words WHO WAS THE THIRD VISITOR? We then meet a fashion model and her husband, a writer of detective stories, and a photograph of some folks at a party in a magazine she's reading. The same magazine grabs the attention of a tough guy in New York City, who rushes to the UK to confront the fellow in the photo.
Meanwhile, a man shows up at the home of the fellow in the photo, to try to arrange some kind of shady business deal with some other folks. That sends him off, only so he can come back and find a dead body.
It seems the the New York guy showed up, because he recognized the fellow in the photo, who framed him for some crime that sent him to prison for years. We see him start to attack the fellow with a blunt object . . .
Seems open and shut, doesn't it? Don't assume anything, though, because nothing is quite what it seems. Add to the mixture the wife of the guy who found the body, who has a good reason to lie to her husband about where she was while he was gone. (Due to the murder, he came home early, to find their place empty.) Then there's the very confused older man, just out of a mental institution, who went mad just after building a secret room for the fellow in the photo . . .
Believe it or not, this all comes together by the end, when we find out about the woman chained to the wall and learn the identity of the third visitor. It's a nifty bit of trickery, maybe not the most plausible plot in the world, but full of witty dialogue. Almost all the characters are constant liars, with the exceptions of the writer (because he's pretty much just comic relief) and the confused fellow (because his mind is too mixed up to lie) and, of course, the detectives on the case.
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Three Wishes for Cinderella - one of the innumerable number of Czech / Eastern Block European fairy tale films made after WW2. These were, according to an extra on the DVD, incredibly popular and did huge box office at the time - and to this day. Three Wishes for Cinderella is apparently an annual Christmas must-see film across great chunks of Europe, so much so that a great deal of the money for the restoration (available on the Second Run label in the UK) came from Norway. Different, and less saccharine than the Disneyfied versions we are used to in the west, though not as gruesome at the end as the Grimm's Brothers' version. The Cinderella character is a lot more proactive. She disguises herself as a boy at one point, joins a hunt and out shoots, and outrides the prince. At the end the film is more about curbing the price's arrogance and his acknowledging her strengths and respecting her opinions than the sudden blooming of any anodyne fairy-tale 'True Love'. I liked it.
![9fbb835df21f3fa614c96af209e545e[1].jpg](https://www.sffchronicles.com/attachments/83087/ "9fbb835df21f3fa614c96af209e545e[1].jpg")
Last edited:
Victoria Silverwolf
Vegetarian Werewolf
Frankenstein's Bloody Terror (La Marca del Hombre Lobo, 1968)
This Spanish monster rally, given a completely irrelevant title for American audiences, made Paul Naschy (Jacinto Molina Álvarez) the undisputed king of Iberian horror movies, and created his most famous character, the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky. (Note the lack of Spanish names. To get away with horror films during the time of Franco, they had to be set somewhere else.)
The very brief American prologue, featuring very minimal animation of the Frankenstein monster becoming a werewolf, tries to excuse the title by claiming that the Frankenstein family suffered the curse of lycanthropy and became the Wolfstein family, but forget all that. It was only done because they needed a Frankenstein double feature. (The other one was the truly awful Dracula vs Frankenstein.)
Anyway, after this nonsense, we get the real movie. To my surprise, it's set in contemporary times. We first meet the characters I'll call Girl and Boy, young adults who seem to be sort of engaged. Next comes Waldemar, something of a spendthrift playboy. Girl falls in love with him anyway. Along the way we learn about the deserted castle wherein lies the body of a werewolf, kept in his coffin by a silver dagger in his heart. A couple of gypsies spend the night in the place, pull out the dagger, and the expected slaughter follows.
While everybody is hunting down the supposed wolves responsible for the killings, Waldemar saves Boy from the monster, but is wounded himself. Ordinary chains fail to keep him from rampaging in wolfman form at night, so Boy and Girl lock him up real well in the old castle while trying to find a cure. It seems to arrive in the form of a young doctor and his wife, but, in the movie's biggest plot twist, they turn out to be vampires, and wind up enslaving Boy and Girl, and reviving the first werewolf again. Monster movie mayhem ensues.
It's not a bad example of old-fashioned thrills, a little Universal, a little Hammer, and a little EuroGothic
stirred into a reasonably tasty paella.
This Spanish monster rally, given a completely irrelevant title for American audiences, made Paul Naschy (Jacinto Molina Álvarez) the undisputed king of Iberian horror movies, and created his most famous character, the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky. (Note the lack of Spanish names. To get away with horror films during the time of Franco, they had to be set somewhere else.)
The very brief American prologue, featuring very minimal animation of the Frankenstein monster becoming a werewolf, tries to excuse the title by claiming that the Frankenstein family suffered the curse of lycanthropy and became the Wolfstein family, but forget all that. It was only done because they needed a Frankenstein double feature. (The other one was the truly awful Dracula vs Frankenstein.)
Anyway, after this nonsense, we get the real movie. To my surprise, it's set in contemporary times. We first meet the characters I'll call Girl and Boy, young adults who seem to be sort of engaged. Next comes Waldemar, something of a spendthrift playboy. Girl falls in love with him anyway. Along the way we learn about the deserted castle wherein lies the body of a werewolf, kept in his coffin by a silver dagger in his heart. A couple of gypsies spend the night in the place, pull out the dagger, and the expected slaughter follows.
While everybody is hunting down the supposed wolves responsible for the killings, Waldemar saves Boy from the monster, but is wounded himself. Ordinary chains fail to keep him from rampaging in wolfman form at night, so Boy and Girl lock him up real well in the old castle while trying to find a cure. It seems to arrive in the form of a young doctor and his wife, but, in the movie's biggest plot twist, they turn out to be vampires, and wind up enslaving Boy and Girl, and reviving the first werewolf again. Monster movie mayhem ensues.
It's not a bad example of old-fashioned thrills, a little Universal, a little Hammer, and a little EuroGothic
stirred into a reasonably tasty paella.
Victoria Silverwolf
Vegetarian Werewolf
Demon Witch Child (La endemoniada, 1975)
Spanish shocker "inspired" by The Exorcist, one assumes. An old hag knocks over stuff in a church and steals a chalice. The cops go arrest her right away, apparently just because she's a gypsy. By the way, they nail her for the kidnapping of a baby as well. She refuses to talk, although she doesn't mind proudly announcing her loyalty to Satan. When the cops threaten to use truth serum, she throws herself out a window to her death.
The hag's pretty young minion easily gets a cop's young daughter to accept an ugly carved wooden doll and a big clunky necklace from her, despite all that "don't talk to strangers" stuff. Next thing you know, double exposure shows us the spirit of the dead hag leaving its body and entering the kid. A levitation sequence immediately follows. Soon the kid is cursing, fighting, and so forth.
Proving that the film isn't going to pull any punches, the possessed kid, wearing makeup and a wig that makes her look like the hag, joins a black sabbath already in progress -- there seem to be a huge number of Satanists in this community, all of them hags except the one pretty one -- and stabs the kidnapped baby to death. The Satan worshippers drink its blood.
The story gets kind of muddled. There are memorable moments, such as when folks dig up the body of the hag, stick a huge cross into it, and set it on fire, at which point it wakes up and screams. This doesn't stop the hag-possessed kid from crawling face down the walls of her house to go kill people with apparent super-strength.
As a subplot, we get flashbacks in which in our film's exorcist hero, a handsome young priest, tells the woman who loves him that he's leaving her for the Church. Back in the present, he finds out that the trauma of losing him turned her into a prostitute. This gives the possessed kid something to torment him with during the climactic exorcism, when she takes on the appearance of the woman.
Not a great film, and something of a mess, but with moments of interest.
Spanish shocker "inspired" by The Exorcist, one assumes. An old hag knocks over stuff in a church and steals a chalice. The cops go arrest her right away, apparently just because she's a gypsy. By the way, they nail her for the kidnapping of a baby as well. She refuses to talk, although she doesn't mind proudly announcing her loyalty to Satan. When the cops threaten to use truth serum, she throws herself out a window to her death.
The hag's pretty young minion easily gets a cop's young daughter to accept an ugly carved wooden doll and a big clunky necklace from her, despite all that "don't talk to strangers" stuff. Next thing you know, double exposure shows us the spirit of the dead hag leaving its body and entering the kid. A levitation sequence immediately follows. Soon the kid is cursing, fighting, and so forth.
Proving that the film isn't going to pull any punches, the possessed kid, wearing makeup and a wig that makes her look like the hag, joins a black sabbath already in progress -- there seem to be a huge number of Satanists in this community, all of them hags except the one pretty one -- and stabs the kidnapped baby to death. The Satan worshippers drink its blood.
The story gets kind of muddled. There are memorable moments, such as when folks dig up the body of the hag, stick a huge cross into it, and set it on fire, at which point it wakes up and screams. This doesn't stop the hag-possessed kid from crawling face down the walls of her house to go kill people with apparent super-strength.
As a subplot, we get flashbacks in which in our film's exorcist hero, a handsome young priest, tells the woman who loves him that he's leaving her for the Church. Back in the present, he finds out that the trauma of losing him turned her into a prostitute. This gives the possessed kid something to torment him with during the climactic exorcism, when she takes on the appearance of the woman.
Not a great film, and something of a mess, but with moments of interest.
AE35Unit
]==[]===O °
Sounds like how we wish disney would do films. A bit like Snow White and the Huntsman which is nothing like the Disney version
Dave Vicks
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2020
- Messages
- 1,357
TRAFFIC French comedy 1971
AE35Unit
]==[]===O °
Voices (2020)
A woman and her daughter are in a car crash, and the girl is left blind. As she grows up she hears voices of people around her warning and imploring her, but no-one is there...
A woman and her daughter are in a car crash, and the girl is left blind. As she grows up she hears voices of people around her warning and imploring her, but no-one is there...
JunkMonkey
Lord High Vizier of Nowt
Dredd - my esteem for Alex Garland just went down a (big) notch.
DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW 1981 --what can I say? Bubba didn't do it!
I saw it when it premiered 40 years ago and it has aged very well. Some creepy moments that linger--and great lead performance from Charles Durning as a mail worker who goes postal--he does want to kill. Very satisfying conclusion with some spooky irony.
HOME SWEET HOME (1981) is a slasher film set at Thanksgiving. Verdict? No thanks. It is about a homicidal fellow who escapes from an institution and goes on a killing spree. The problems with it stem right from the first appearance of the killer--Jake Steinfeld--who I vaguely remember from the 80s. Before I saw his name I was thinking --what if Bowser from Sha Na Na was a bodybuilder but didn't sing--just laughed goofy when he killed? That is what you have with this guy. No mask, not modus operandi. He plays it for laughs--I hope he was because if he was trying to be serious and scary--that would be the most frightening thought of all. The script is awful (the heroine--who might have been created while someone was on heroin, keeps forgetting about the child who is left in the house with the killer--but then it's not her kid so I guess that is a touch of harsh realism). All the characters are a lost cause so you don't care when they are killed--except for the singer with the mime makeup--it is somewhat satisfying when he departs. The soundtrack is surprisingly good though. A symphonic score I would have assumed was stock library music. The constantly abandoned child is Vinessa Shaw in her first film.
I saw it when it premiered 40 years ago and it has aged very well. Some creepy moments that linger--and great lead performance from Charles Durning as a mail worker who goes postal--he does want to kill. Very satisfying conclusion with some spooky irony.
HOME SWEET HOME (1981) is a slasher film set at Thanksgiving. Verdict? No thanks. It is about a homicidal fellow who escapes from an institution and goes on a killing spree. The problems with it stem right from the first appearance of the killer--Jake Steinfeld--who I vaguely remember from the 80s. Before I saw his name I was thinking --what if Bowser from Sha Na Na was a bodybuilder but didn't sing--just laughed goofy when he killed? That is what you have with this guy. No mask, not modus operandi. He plays it for laughs--I hope he was because if he was trying to be serious and scary--that would be the most frightening thought of all. The script is awful (the heroine--who might have been created while someone was on heroin, keeps forgetting about the child who is left in the house with the killer--but then it's not her kid so I guess that is a touch of harsh realism). All the characters are a lost cause so you don't care when they are killed--except for the singer with the mime makeup--it is somewhat satisfying when he departs. The soundtrack is surprisingly good though. A symphonic score I would have assumed was stock library music. The constantly abandoned child is Vinessa Shaw in her first film.
alexvss
Me doesn't knows no grammar.
Villeneuve's Dune. Watched it last night on the movie theater. The contemplative style of Villeneuve really fits here, much more than it does in Blade Runner or Sicario and, nevertheless, I was never bored. The fight scenes are well choreographed, and the personal shield is believable.
It's divided in two parts, as it should--you don't want to do it like Lynch--, and I'm eagerly waiting for part 2.
It's divided in two parts, as it should--you don't want to do it like Lynch--, and I'm eagerly waiting for part 2.
Dave Vicks
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2020
- Messages
- 1,357
Watched THE NIGHT STALKER 1972.
Dune (2021)
As visually stunning as advertised. I'm not sure if I like this one more than the 1984 version.
As visually stunning as advertised. I'm not sure if I like this one more than the 1984 version.
I am saving that for January. 50th anniversary.
But I watched another Dan Curtis and Richard Matheson collaboration, DRACULA starring Jack Palance, or as I prefer to call it, Taste the Blah of Dracula.
A dud despite the credentials. I don't understand it--I like other Curtis and Matheson projects a lot, and never is disappointed in a Palance performance but in this case--I think it is rather lifeless and disjointed. They said the romance subplot was added to give Dracula a reason to go to England BUT he was already planning to go to England!
Even the death of Dracula is a bland affair--Nigel Davenport is blank-faced as he delivers the death blow. Strange given that a good number of the cast are familiar and are good in other films but here--it just doesn't work. Even the cinematography lacks any spookiness.
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Slashers - a cross between The Purge and The Running Man. I assumed that his was a new made-for Netflix, but apparently it's a 20 year old movie. I assume it's been released to coincide with The Squid Game which it appears to be similar in premise to.
A very odd movie, which starts with absolutely no kind of intro - it's almost like switching channels and finding a tv programme that's just started. I've only watched the first half so far, and the acting is not great, neither are the special effects and the filming is quite odd - think Blair Witch, but with a steadier, high-quality tv camera.
A very odd movie, which starts with absolutely no kind of intro - it's almost like switching channels and finding a tv programme that's just started. I've only watched the first half so far, and the acting is not great, neither are the special effects and the filming is quite odd - think Blair Witch, but with a steadier, high-quality tv camera.
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