What was the last movie you saw?

Cool It, Carol! (1970)

Odd little sex comedy/drama about a couple of young folks who leave their village somewhere in the UK for London. Starts with a weird pre-credit sequence, with a couple of young men working in a butcher shop. One delivers the stuff, and is our main male character. The other is chopping meat, and very calmly announces that he's just cut off a finger.

After this, the guy who still has all his fingers visits his girlfriend Carol, who works at a petrol station. (This is the second British film from this time period I've seen with a pretty young woman as an attendant at a petrol station. This would have been utterly unknown in the USA.) The boy makes up a bunch of baloney about how he's got a good job waiting in London. The girl calls his bluff. Since she won a local beauty contest, she plans to be a model in the big city. In an eyebrow-raising scene, her Dad asks her if her maidenhead is still intact. She admits that it isn't, so he says it's OK for her to go.

In London, they quickly run out of money, since he has no job and she has to pay quite a bit of cash to get professional photographs taken before modeling agencies will even consider her. Eventually they're literally starving. The boy has a ridiculous plan to rob a bank, but that goes nowhere. Carol agrees to try prostitution. Her first attempts are both comic and pathetic, as she simply walks up to men in the street and asks them if they want to sleep with her. Even this fails, but then some guy picks them up and becomes her first customer, while the boy has to wait in another room of his apartment. The client quickly develops into a middleman, taking a cut of the pay as Carol has to service three other men in a row. At this point, she decides she doesn't like this line of work.

That doesn't prevent the two from performing in a pornographic film together. Later, Carol actually becomes a very successful model, while working as a expensive call girl on the side. After the pair finally get a bunch of money, they decide they don't really like the way they're living, despite all the luxuries they enjoy, so they go back to their simple village existence.

The mood of the film varies widely between innocence and sleaziness. The petite Carol, with her little-girl voice, looks very young indeed, and is willing to take off her clothes at the drop of a hat, adding an extra level of depravity. If nothing else, it's an interesting look at the less respectable side of London at the time.
 
Predestination
I loved this movie. As with Inception, as soon as I thought I understood it all my brain began to fry. I know I'll never get my head around either but hey, it doesn't seem to affect my enjoyment.
 
CITY OF THE DEAD 1960 - atmospheric witches in haunted town. A good one for perennial viewing along with Night of the Demon 1957 and Burn Witch Burn.
 
Rag Doll (1961)

I didn't realize I'd be watching another movie about a young woman named Carol who moves to London, or I would have made this a themed double feature. Anyway, this Carol works at a small diner run by her drunken stepfather, who, we quickly find out, just tried to make a pass at her. The next thing you know, some guy tries to rape her, and is stopped by a decent fellow who has to beat up the assailant. Understandably fed up with all this, Carol gets a ride to London with the good guy. With no place to go and a suspicious policewoman following her, Carol winds up taking refuge at a fortunetelling booth. The woman running it, seeing the policewoman, takes Carol under her wing and introduces her to the owner of a coffee bar. This guy gives her a job, and is obviously romantically interested. Unfortunately, Carol falls for a would-be pop singer who is really a professional thief. When Carol gets pregnant, he actually does the right thing and marries her. Unable to succeed in the music business, he decides to pull the proverbial One Last Job so they can move to Canada. His intended victim is the owner of the coffee bar. Let's just say that things don't work out well. Barely over an hour long, this is a decent little low budget drama/crime story, with some very good acting.
 
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)

Slow-moving supernatural thriller that manages to hold the viewer's attention throughout. The title character is a young college professor who has unexplained hip pain and recurring dreams in which he is murdered by a woman. There's no real mystery; in the very first scene, set in the past, we saw a woman murder her husband. Given the title, you can figure out what's going on. After some investigation, the professor tracks down the place where the murdered man lived. In a weirdly Freudian plot development -- even those characters who know about the reincarnation comment on it -- the professor falls in love with the dead man's daughter. Meanwhile, the murderess picks up signals that her victim has been reincarnated. (She's played by Margot Kidder, doing a really excellent job. She has to play a twenty-something woman in flashbacks, and a fifty-something woman in the present. Given realistic gray hair, subtle makeup, and fine acting, the transformation is completely convincing.) The ending has an almost mythic inevitability to it. The plot is thin enough to be a Twilight Zone episode, but quite effective in its own way.
 
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)

Slow-moving supernatural thriller that manages to hold the viewer's attention throughout. The title character is a young college professor who has unexplained hip pain and recurring dreams in which he is murdered by a woman. There's no real mystery; in the very first scene, set in the past, we saw a woman murder her husband. Given the title, you can figure out what's going on. After some investigation, the professor tracks down the place where the murdered man lived. In a weirdly Freudian plot development -- even those characters who know about the reincarnation comment on it -- the professor falls in love with the dead man's daughter. Meanwhile, the murderess picks up signals that her victim has been reincarnated. (She's played by Margot Kidder, doing a really excellent job. She has to play a twenty-something woman in flashbacks, and a fifty-something woman in the present. Given realistic gray hair, subtle makeup, and fine acting, the transformation is completely convincing.) The ending has an almost mythic inevitability to it. The plot is thin enough to be a Twilight Zone episode, but quite effective in its own way.
Doesn’t she attack the professor with an oar screaming at him about sleeping with “their” daughter?
 
CITY OF THE DEAD 1960 - atmospheric witches in haunted town. A good one for perennial viewing along with Night of the Demon 1957 and Burn Witch Burn.

Saw that a year or two ago and it was good. You're right, it would be good paired with either of those movies, or as part of a triple-bill.

Randy M.
 
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)

Slow-moving supernatural thriller that manages to hold the viewer's attention throughout. The title character is a young college professor who has unexplained hip pain and recurring dreams in which he is murdered by a woman. There's no real mystery; in the very first scene, set in the past, we saw a woman murder her husband. Given the title, you can figure out what's going on. After some investigation, the professor tracks down the place where the murdered man lived. In a weirdly Freudian plot development -- even those characters who know about the reincarnation comment on it -- the professor falls in love with the dead man's daughter. Meanwhile, the murderess picks up signals that her victim has been reincarnated. (She's played by Margot Kidder, doing a really excellent job. She has to play a twenty-something woman in flashbacks, and a fifty-something woman in the present. Given realistic gray hair, subtle makeup, and fine acting, the transformation is completely convincing.) The ending has an almost mythic inevitability to it. The plot is thin enough to be a Twilight Zone episode, but quite effective in its own way.

With all the controversy around her later life, it's easy to forget that Kidder was a good actress. I remember liking her in a short-lived TV show, Nichols, and she was quite good in Sisters as well as the first two Superman movies. I think she was one of those actresses who got pushed aside as being too sexy or pretty or ??? for some of the more serious roles in the '80s, and that's too bad. She may have been better than most of the material she had to work with.

Randy M.
 
Attack of the Robots (Cartes sur table, "Cards on the table," 1965)

The English language title of this tongue-in-cheek Europsy flick is misleading, but not as enigmatic as the original. We start with a montage of assassinations, all performed by bronze-skinned men in black turtlenecks and horn-rimmed glasses. When one of the assassins is killed, his skin goes back to normal. (You can't really tell; apparently this movie was filmed in color, like a Europsy film should be, but printed in black-and-white.) We soon find out that the killers were all missing persons, each with the very rare blood type Rhesus Zero. (Some nonsensical science here; we're told that these folks are neither RH positive nor Rh negative, which is absurd.) Our hero, a retired Interpol agent, happens to have Rhesus Zero blood, so the good guys set him up as bait for the bad guys. Complicating matters is a Chinese spymaster who wants to find out about the assassins himself. (We're told that this guy works for both North and South Vietnam.) Our hero goes to Spain (nice location shooting at the scenic city of Alicante), gets mixed up with the movie's Good Girl (he doesn't know she's working for Interpol until near the end), meets the movie's Bad Girl and some other folks. The usual fist fights, chases, gun fights, etc. The gimmick is that the bad guys use Mad Science to transform Rhesus Zero people into brainwashed slaves (the "robots.") There's quite a bit of humor, although it's not an out-and-out parody. All in all, an enjoyable romp.
 
The Diabolical Dr. Z (Miss Muerte, "Miss Death," 1966)

Mad Scientist chiller with a great deal of Gothic atmosphere. An older fellow, confined to a wheelchair, has a sort of brainwashing gizmo, but up to now it's only been used on experimental animals. By sheer luck, an escaped convict turns up at his spooky mansion and becomes his first human subject. While at some kind of scientific conference, promoting his work (without mentioning the part about already using it on people), he gets rejected by the other scientists and dies of a heart attack. His daughter later picks up a hitchhiker who resembles her, and her plan for revenge begins. She kills the hitchhiker, puts her in the car, sets it on fire, and sends into a lake. She also accidentally burns part of her face, leaving it horribly scarred, so we can have some more Mad Science later when she restores it. The whole point is to fake her own death. In disguise, she visits a nightclub performer and tricks her into being kidnapped. This woman is the "Miss Death" of the original title; the daughter is, I take it, our diabolical Doctor Z. Her act consists of coming out on a stage that's made up like a web, dressed in a revealing outfit, and doing a sort of spider-and-fly dance with a mannequin. Doctor Z brainwashes Miss Death into becoming her weapon of revenge, by having her use her seductive wiles to entice the three men she blames for her father's death, then killing them with her incredibly long, sharp fingernails, which have been poisoned. It's an outrageous plot, of course, but it's very nicely filmed, with an eerie mood that mostly overcomes the campier aspects of the story.
 
Uncut Gems (2019) I could not comprehend Adam Freakin' Sandler could pull off that type of performance until I saw it myself. This movie was his Denzel Washington in Training Day moment. Sandler plays a gem dealer who gets in way over his head, and he is phenomenal. No goofy voices, no stupid gags; just a sleazy, yet, emotionally vulnerable and surprising likeable hustler navigating himself out of a bad situation. When people told me he put on an award winning performance, I demanded they get drug tested.

Turns out they were right. The guy was on a whole new level.
 
It Chapter Two
Far too long (almost 3 hours) with not enough there to justify that running length. It wasn’t a bad movie but nothing startling either. I thought Chapter One was slicker and overall a much better film.
 
They Won't Believe Me (1947)

NOIR ALLEY.

The title seemed familiar, as did certain elements, but, thankfully, the ending was not! Did not see that coming!

So, the man Larry Ballentine (Robert Young) is tired of his wife, & has been seeing another woman, Janice Bell (Jane Greer). As he and the OW are driving to Reno so he can divorce his wife, a tractor trailer going the opposite direction has a blowout, and crashes into their car. Ballentine is thrown clear, but the OW is burned beyond recognition, & dead. When Ballentine comes to, in the hospital, the authorities assume the dead woman is his wife Greta (Rita Johnson), & Ballentine realizes he can use this fact to go home, where his wife, who had all the money, had moved her husband and herself, to a remote ranch that did not even have a telephone, murder his wife, dispose of her body, since it was assumed that she had died in the crash, and all the money would be his! So, he goes home, hoping nobody had seen her since before the crash, and traces her to a waterfall on the ranch, and finds her dead! Apparently, she had fallen over the edge and broken her neck, though the cause of death is never revealed. Now, his hands are clean, and all he has to do, is dispose of her body.

But-- after dumping her in the stream, and assuming her corpse would be washed out to sea, Janice Bell's roommate comes looking for her!


ROAD GANG (1936) wrongly convicted man must somehow get out of prison.
 
THE NIGHT STALKER 1972 - I knew about this years before I got to see it. The sequel and tv series I had seen first. It has really good rewatch value.

I remember that movie . It was very good and still holds up pretty well. :cool:
 

Similar threads


Back
Top