What was the last movie you saw?

SCARLET STREET (1945) As a fan of Edward G. Robinson, I am surprised that nothing in this film seemed familiar. A middle-aged man Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) falls in love with a hoodlum's girlfriend, not knowing her love for him is a scam.

Katherine 'Kitty' March (Joan Bennett) mistakenly believes him to be a famous / wealthy artist, because he knows a lot about paintings they view when the two go to a museum. He was walking home from work, and saw her boyfriend slapping her around. His instinct for chivalry kicked-in & he leaped on the attacker Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), and somehow knocked him out. She was grateful, etc, & he invited her for coffee, then, took her to the art museum.

She is simply using him, milking him for money he must obtain from others. As he is a bank teller, he has access to money. He also has a wife (Rosalind Ivan), who has insurance money from her 1st husband's death, but she refuses to spend any of it, claiming it is for her old age. The wife is clearly from Hell, as she dominates him, demands he buy her this and that, wash the dishes, while she relaxes, etc. So, he really finds this younger, far more attractive woman, very desirable, and allows himself to believe that she really loves him. He sincerely asks the young woman, if she would marry him, if somehow, he were free from his present marriage. She answers in the affirmative, being sure such a situation was far from reality.

His wife tells him that she is going to throw away the paintings he made, & this, combined with his delusional love for Kitty has him rent a studio apartment, both to keep his paintings safe from his wife, and give, the poor downtrodden woman a place to live. Johnny Prince, always looking for easy money, wants to sell the paintings, which conveniently Cross had not bothered to sign his name upon. So, he has Kitty sign her name, & feign that she is the artist. So, seeing Price far too often in the company of Kitty, he is sure he had seen him somewhere, but cannot recall where. She excuses his presence, by saying Prince is her roommate's boyfriend. Cross, being blinded by love, accepts this excuse.

Hmm, I usually do not write so much about a film, but a quick & dirty synopsis has eluded me! Fritz Lang directed, & this is a crime drama; though, so far, my description lacks the crime element. It is coming, & I much prefer to skip any further details, as they would give away the good stuff.
 
5 AGAINST THE HOUSE (1955) Four young Korean war veteran college friends go to Reno for one hour of gambling, hoping to avoid going into debt because of the time limit. While in HAROLD'S CLUB, they witness a failed robbery attempt. On the drive back to the campus, one of them says he has thought of a foolproof way to rob the place. For the next few days, they discuss the scheme, becoming increasingly interesting in the actual possibility of success.

Along the way, that is, during the 1st half hour, one of them shows himself as a psycho, as his conflict with another man over a woman, has him nearly killing the guy.
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Brick (Brian Keith) has serious anger management problems! But, he insists he will never go back to that mental hospital. He will be o.k., so long as nobody annoys him.

They gather the things needed for the heist, and drive to Reno, some three plus hours away, but two of them are unaware of the others' intent to really rob the place. Brick is convinced that the world owes him for his suffering, etc., and he has the gun. He says he will kill anyone who tries to back-out. A very different type of heist movie!

For me, Reno was only known for divorces. I had no idea it was a gambling Mecca competing with Las Vegas.

The thing I found most interesting is the parking garage. Very space efficient, using elevators, etc., to place cars in the most compact arrangement. First, a forklift-like machine rolls underneath the car, lifts it off the ground a few inches, then slides or rolls it into the elevator.
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When it reaches an empty spot, it reverses the loading action. No ramps, no stairways, no doors bumping into other cars, leaving annoying scratches or dents.
 
The Sleep of Death (1980)

Swedish/Irish co-production based on Sheridan Le Fanu's novella The Room in the Dragon Volant. (Credited here as The Room at the Flying Dragon, apparently assuming viewers would not be familiar with the heraldic term volant; a reasonable assumption.) In 1815, a young British fellow travels to France, where he encounters a friendly marquis, a beautiful young countess, her much older husband, and a soldier who seems intent on pursuing one or more of them. Along the way folks are found dead, their throats torn open. Those who have read Le Fanu's story (including yours truly) will notice that the plot has been expanded by the addition of a theme similar to that seen in another of his works, but that the basic premise remains. It looks like an expensive television movie rather than a cheap theatrical film. The music is provided by an electronic synthesizer, which is inappropriate. Overall , it's a slow-moving but decent bit of Gothic chills.
 
Re: The Day of the Animals -- Leslie Nielsen's advertising executive on the rampage was a highlight.
Seems like everyone in the 1970s was an ad agency executive.

Re: 30 Days of Night-liked the idea, and it was amusing that Mark Boone Junior gets killed by vampires again (after John Carpenter's Vampires) , but I think the missed a better ending. They show grinding machinery mid-way in the story and I just assumed they would rig a trap where the vampires are snagged by chains hiding in the snow and then dragged into the machinery, but alas, they didn't do it! They went for the far out approach.
A shame. The vampire designs were unique.

Speaking of unique, it is the 50th anniversary this month of The Thing With Two Heads. A film where one wishes they had a camera recording the reaction of the stars when they were first told the idea. Ray Milland reaction must have been priceless. I think it is wise that they took the story seriously because it makes the humor more effective. It is so ludicrous but the FX for the heads are very good. Considering this was a low-budget affair, the Milland head is pretty good--it even blinks when they move it around.
 
Attack of the Clones - 2002

My wife and I are revisiting all 9 Star wars films and adding Rogue One in as a bonus, now I have not been a fan of the prequels so I on advice we decided to give the HAL9000 Fan Edits and in all honesty I am glad we did, Pacing is better, stupidity has been toned down, awful dialogue and some dodgy decisions excised and all making for a better film.

Not perfect by any means but very very watchable, the first 2 are done and its Rise of the Sith tonight.

Speaking of unique, it is the 50th anniversary this month of The Thing With Two Heads. A film where one wishes they had a camera recording the reaction of the stars when they were first told the idea. Ray Milland reaction must have been priceless. I think it is wise that they took the story seriously because it makes the humor more effective. It is so ludicrous but the FX for the heads are very good. Considering this was a low-budget affair, the Milland head is pretty good--it even blinks when they move it around.

Ray Milland was the first guy to give me real waking from sleep nightmares, I was about 8 or 9 and watched the interestingly titled "The man with Xray eyes", all was well until the very end when he starts to see further and further and starts to scream about seeing hell and for some reason that struck a chord and gave me months of bad sleep and nightmares, Looking back at it maybe 15 years ago its laughable but damn back then it struck a nerve.
 
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The Intruder (1981)

Bizarre Canadian low-budget allegorical fantasy. Starts with a little kid watching a tree get covered with blue light, then getting knocked down and getting covered with blue light, then getting up, none the worse for the experience. Tall guy dressed in black suit, black hat, and black cape drives into town, pulling a trailer with the words COMING SOON on it. He rents the local town hall for a night. (The only question the woman renting it to him asks is "It's not punk rock, is it?") The town council gets all upset about this mysterious person and his posters that announce an otherwise unexplained show by Howard Turt, also known as H. Turt. I'm sure you can figure out the anagram. They put a police watch on him 24 hours a day. Various folks try to break into the big wooden box he has in the trailer, without success. The little kid we saw at the start talks to the box, causing it to open and glow with purple light. He gets inside it, to vanish from the film until the end.

Meanwhile, we've seen the sordid little secrets of the town's inhabitants. Bribes, loan sharks, extramarital affairs, etc. On the night of the show, the box opens, caused by the audience wishing it to open, and a blinding light emerges, causing everyone present to have a blue aura. These folks go on to reform their wicked ways, telling the truth to everyone and so on. Despite this, eventually the inhabitants (mostly at the instigation of the ones who didn't see the show and thus don't have blue auras) to wish to have the box destroyed, so it gets crushed to pieces in a trash compactor. The blue auras vanish, except for the little kid, who can turn it on and off at will.

Imagine somebody making a very loose, uncredited version of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes on a tiny budget and filming it in a small Canadian town in winter. Imagine also that this person was heavily into pop psychology. (The film is dedicated to the memory of psychologist Abraham Maslow, and there's some talk about the "self-actualization" concept that made up a major part of Maslow's ideas.) Given that, it may be no surprise that what the film really seems to be about is a teenage girl (her first name is Chandler, which seems more like nowadays than 1981) trying to convince her slacker boyfriend to make something of himself. Imagine further that whoever supplied the money for this thing demanded that it include some full nudity and a lot of disco music. You'll have some notion of what this very odd movie is like.
 
Captain Marvel

I haven't seen this since it was first released. I vaguely remembered enjoying it. A rewatch confirms that, yes indeed, I do like it. One of my favourites from the Marvel stable. Plus, it also has the coolest cat in the universe.

Nuff said:)
 
Cosmic Sin (2021) - well that was.... crap. Which is a pity because, somewhere in the history of the genesis of this movie someone did, at some point, have an idea that there were some kind of moral and philosophical questions to be answered about what to do when Humans and Aliens first meet.

And then at some point during the writing of the film 98% of it got thrown out and they shoved in lots of running around and shooting and standing about not really saying anything (LOTS of that) and more shooting and then then let's do a weird dreamy bit, and then some more shooting and then Oh, I know a bar fight! and then... Oh, how about one of them promises a cute little girl everything will be all right?
"What cute little girl? There's no cute little girl."
"She's one of the people hiding out in the Orbital Cannon place."
"What? Wait.... I thought this planet was totally uninhabited! apart from the two miners who got infected by the aliens in the opening sequence!"
"Hell, that was twenty pages ago, you think anyone is gonna remember that far back in the story!"
"Guess not."
"Hey guys! How's the script going?"
"Ok. We got most the boxes on the Big Book of Crap Movie Cliche Bingo spreadsheet filled in."
"Good... well I got some GREAT News. We got Bruce Willis for next Tuesday."
"Wow! That's great! For how long?"
"Next Tuesday. That's it. Don't give him any long lines and my cousin Ralph's gonna shave his head so we can do all the reverse shots over his shoulder that'll save a few hours...".

After a while I gave up trying to work out what I thought the film makers thought they were trying to do. It made no sense whatsoever. Zero.
 
Two Versions of a Movie That Should Not Be Watched Once:

A Night to Dismember (filmed 1979; re-editing completed 1983; released to VHS 1989)

The story goes that much of the original print of the movie was destroyed by fire, so infamous exploitation director Doris Wishman took what was left and added new footage starring American porn star Samantha Fox (not to be confused with the British pop star of the same name.) The alternate explanation, offered by some, is that Fox paid to be in the film, so Wishman threw out a lot of stuff and put her into it.

Anyway, what results is a film without any synchronized sound, so it's all narrated by some kind of police detective. He informs us that a woman killed her sister with an axe, then fell on the axe herself and died. Meanwhile, the father of the sisters paid somebody to kill his wife, got caught, and hanged himself in his cell. This prologue has nothing at all to do with the rest of the story, except that these folks were part of the same family as our main characters.

Fox comes home from years in an institution after killing a couple of boys. Her brother doesn't want her around, so he tries to scare her back by putting on a Hallowe'en costume. Meanwhile, folks get chopped up. Fox has hallucinations, the real killer is revealed.

A Night to Dismember (filmed 1979 and lost; recovered 2018)

Somehow they found a print of the version with the stuff that was supposedly burnt or thrown out. Somebody put it on YouTube.

This version is narrated by a horror host type. Woman is pregnant by her boyfriend. She finds him with another woman. They get chopped up. Woman tries to call her friend, who hangs up on her. She gets chopped up. Mom and Dad are unsympathetic. They get chopped up. Woman dies in childbirth. For the life of me, I can't tell you if she chopped up the other folks or if it was some kind psychic power that did it.

Twenty years or so later, the woman's daughter lives with folks that adopted her. She has hallucinations. She chops up folks.

This version isn't quite as amateurish, although they're both really bad. This one has electronic music, the other random and frequently wildly inappropriate library music. This one isn't as incoherent, but the plot is still nearly incomprehensible.
 
Mad God (2021) stop motion animation. More eye candy than story. It had the feel of Giger crossed with Gilliam
 
BARB WIRE (1996; dir. David Hogan; starring Pamela Anderson Lee, Xander Berkley, Steve Railsbeck)

I didn't realize this was an s.f. version of Casablanca left in a cement mixer for a month with Mad Max, Escape from New York, some post-punk music, pulp magazines and possibly a soft-core porn movie or two. I had the distinct impression the production team behind Atomic Blonde watched this repeatedly to find things not to do. Railsbeck is his usual intense self, apparently enjoying a chance to play Conrad Veidt; Berkley, who usually plays weasels (see The Walking Dead), gets to be Claude Rains. So much for the highlights of this movie. It would be easy to pile on Anderson (I think she took the brunt of it when it came out) it could have been better -- maybe not good, but better -- if the production staff had shown a bit less interest in the camera caressing her endlessly an inserted a bit of intelligent dialog and even a bit of the comedy she's fairly good at instead of taking it all so seriously.
 
Blake of Scotland Yard an utterly bewildering 72 minutes spent watching people skulking in doorways, opening secret panels. sneaking down secret tunnels, opening more secret doors and then peeking on someone sneaking out of wherever that was, before sneaking back again - and being spotted sneaking back and being sneakily followed by other people. 90% of the time I had no idea who was sneaking where. But I had an idea why. Early on in the film some of these sneaking people had stolen The Death Ray That Was Going to End All Wars by Making Armies and Navies Obsolete. The inventors of The Death Ray That Was Going to End All Wars by Making Armies and Navies Obsolete somehow deduce (no idea how) that the stealers were hanging out in a dingy dive in Paris. So they all trooped off to Paris to sneak around the dingy dive for a couple of reels before coming back to London and sneaking about in a dingy boarding house in the East End of London. Most of the running time of this film was of people walking, sneaking, and lurking up and down the same three corridors with precious little explanation of who why or what was going on. Hell it took me till nearly the end of the movie to work out which of our small bunch of hero sneakers was Blake of Scotland Yard! I managed to deduce it wasn't the girl and the one called 'Doctor' something wasn't him but that still left me three or four characters to chose from. In the end though there's a Scooby Doo moment and one of the innumerable characters who had been less good at sneaking was unmasked as The Scorpion! And everyone was happy that was all over.

Halfway through watching it I had the thinks that this looked awfully like one of those 12 part Saturday afternoon kids' matinee serials chopped into bite sized pieces and shoved in a tin. Turns out I was right. The serial ran for 303 minutes. The film was 72 minutes. You would have thought whoever was given the job of cutting it down would have left some of the exposition in.
 
Studio 666 - 2022

So this was an odd one, I was watching Dave Grohl on Hot Ones and he mentioned that they had made an actual Slasher type film with the band all starring, had a watch and .. fair play its not awful

Essentially they are trying to record the 10th album but Dave is suffering from writers block, the manager sends them to an old house for inspiration and Dave gets possessed, band members dies, great music is played it all ends in tears.

as I said its not awful by a long shot, Glad i have seen it and will never watch it again.
 
Tenet (2020)

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This was really good. It has an intriguing plot, very good cast, excellent directing and truly superb utilisation of music. I wanna emphasise the use of the music, as the rhythmically driven tunes really were configured masterfully here which proportions the tension and designates the pace of the movie. Nolan redeemed himself with this movie for me, given that I had colossally been disappointed with his Batmans and Inception.

8/10
 
A Bullet For Sandoval 1969 - One of the more operatic of European-made westerns that I have seen. George Hilton is a Confederate soldier who, through a series of cruel encounters, including the starvation death of his infant son through his inability to get food for him, becomes the leader of a ruthless gang with the intent of seeking final revenge on Ernest Borgnine. Dramatically, there are good parts for both leads, and a unique violent finale that makes me wonder if the title should have been A Bull For Sandoval.
 
The Lost City A fair romantic adventure comedy... on the order of (and similar to) Romancing The Stone, but less serious. I rate it as fair and worth a watch, if nothing better is available. Although it didn't generate any belly laughs.; I'll give it 2 or 3 chuckles out of five.
I did not use the skip or fast forward button on the remote; so it wasn't bad...

Enjoy!
 
I was scrolling on Vudu last night and found a movie about a giant killer croc, Rogue. As a child, Lake Placid was one of my all time favorite movies. I would watch it anytime it aired on TV. So seeing a decent looking movie about an apex predator, I jumped on it. It was a bit older, 2007 release, so the CGI wasn't out of this world but it also wasn't completely unrealistic. I greatly enjoyed it for the most part. I only had one qualm with it and it was that *spoiler alert* the dog dies. That's the only part I would really change. Other than that, I was pleasantly surprised with it and couldn't believe I hadn't found it sooner.
 
Sidewinder 1 (1977). Looked to be another good ol' boy Marjoe Gortner extravaganza based on the poster and there are a lot of Marjoe moments (though Charlotte Rae has the best surprise intervention in the plot) . But I was mainly watching this for Susan Howard, since she gives strong leading performances. And she did not disappoint as a wonderfully bitchy and increasingly aggravated investor for Michael Parks' motorbike project after her easy-going brother (Alex Cord--pleasant part for him too) exits the movie. The scenes between her and Parks are most amusing. The nice thing about it is that it doesn't feel typically Hollywood for the era (either big studio or Corman level exploitation). It's a light-hearted drama about motorcross biking, just like the poster suggests. sidewinder_one_xxlgsml.jpg
 

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