What was the last movie you saw?

I find the Caine Mutiny rather corny (supposedly that is where Michael Caine took his stage name from).
For one thing, that young officer is so dumb--it's annoying how dumb he is and the hokey romance sub-plot.
It's interesting politically for the time because it has the demoralizing view of military command--that Bogart's character has PTSD (though does it take place in WW2 or before?) and Fred MacMurrey is a kind of the privileged intelligentsia archetype--the opposite of the 60s counterculture version--he represents American blueblood and yet he's the trouble maker. And the lawyer is the voice of morality and sense for all of them.
 
La Princesse de Montpensier 2010 - Ravishingly beautiful, technically wonderful, beautifully costumed romantic tragedy set in 16th Century France but, somehow, just a little antiseptic. I never once forgot I was watching a movie.
 
Sinner's Blood (1969)

Take every exploitation film trope you can imagine, throw them in a blender, and you might get something like this ultra-cheap mess. Two adult sisters go to live with their aunt and uncle after their mother dies. The household also includes their adult cousins, both of whom seem a little mixed up. Male cousin peeks at the new arrivals through a hole in the wall, female cousin comes very close to seducing one of them, the Good Girl. The other one, the Bad Girl, enjoys having the uncle watch her undress. Motorcycle gang shows up, beats up the local pastor. Bad Girl goes off with one of the gang, giving him LSD that causes a wreck that kills him. The dead man's male lover goes after her. There's a bizarre end scene that has to be a fantasy in the mind of the male lover. Sleazy as anything, amateurish, and incoherent.
 
THE FINAL PROGRAMME 1973 - I wouldnt call it pretentious but too silly eccentric for me to like--a second viewing just made me admire the set design more. Jon Finch deserved a better career and Jenny Runacre too but from an interview I read she liked doing the weirdest ones.
 
Refuge of Fear (El refugio del miedo, 1974)

Spanish science fiction drama takes place almost entirely within a rather luxurious underground fallout shelter. They've even got a billiard table. (I had to look up what game is played with just two white balls and one red ball, with no pockets in the table. It's carom billiards.) When the big war finally breaks out, five people are inside, along with a cat and a bird. There's a by-the-book military guy and his wife, the stepfather and mother of an adult son who's also present. There's another military guy and his sexpot wife. Flashbacks show us what happened to a sixth person. The tension builds quickly. Suffice to say that things don't work out well.

With the limited cast and set (we go outside very briefly to see desiccated corpses, and there's a flashback at the very end to the time before these folks were underground) this could easily be done as a stage play. Many folks will find it inherently talky and slow, but it held my interest.
 
THE FINAL PROGRAMME 1973 - I wouldnt call it pretentious but too silly eccentric for me to like--a second viewing just made me admire the set design more. Jon Finch deserved a better career and Jenny Runacre too but from an interview I read she liked doing the weirdest ones.

Prompted by this I went and watched it too. It's been in my "must get round to" list for the longest time. What a load of self-indulgent twaddle! Nowhere near as stylish, funny, or odd as it thinks it is. A real wannabe movie. It wanted to be The Tenth Victim, and The Prisoner and episodes of The Avengers and it doesn't come off. Pity. I've liked what of director Fuest's previous films that I have seen - this one came directly after his Dr Phibes films which are genuinely really weird stuff which I like. A lot. But this one? ...meh!
 
The Day It Came to Earth (1977)

The first thing we hear on the soundtrack is a radio playing news relevant to the plot (of course) about an informer testifying against mobsters. Then there are references to Vice President Nixon and "young singer" Elvis Presley. Yep, it's the 1950's.

The mobsters kill the stoolie and throw his body in the lake. A meteorite lands in the lake, transforming the corpse into a skull-faced zombie. It kills the crooks who killed the informer. Some college kids find the meteorite, the zombie smashes up the lab of the local Science Guy (comic actor George Gobel, the only person close to a big name in this thing) to get it back. I guess it provides its life energy or something. A chunk of the rock was made into a piece of jewelry for one of the college guy's girlfriend, so it gets attracted to that, too. Chaos ensues at the "haunted house" where the girlfriend's sorority is having an initiation. Will the cops stop it in time?

This ultra-cheap, amateurish flick seems to be a deliberate attempt to recreate an ultra-cheap, amateurish sci-fi monster movie of the 1950's. It doesn't seem to be a spoof, with only very minimal attempts at humor. You'll get lines like "Bullets don't stop it" that will sound familiar. The time period isn't very convincingly recreated, despite a lot of old-fashioned rock 'n' roll on the soundtrack. It's a lousy movie, which is what it seems to want to be.
 
Harlequin aka Dark Forces (1980)

Very strange Australian fantasy/political thriller, loosely inspired by the story of Rasputin. Politician and his wife have a young son near death from leukemia. Mysterious fellow shows up out of nowhere, seems to cure the child. Meanwhile, the politician is being pushed by the powers that be to replace a high official who drowned under suspicious circumstances. The healer, who often wears black fingernail polish covered with mystical red symbols, heavy eye makeup, and outrageous costumes, as if he's in a glam band, demonstrates what can only be genuine magical powers. (I'm talking about shooting lightning bolts out of his mouth and so forth.) The powers that be want him out of the way, permanently.

It's a really odd film, intriguing and bewildering.
 
Demonoid (1981)

Muddled Mexican horror movie (filmed in English) which is nutty enough to hold one's interest. Woman (Samantha Eggar) goes way down into a Mexican silver mine with her husband. They find the remains of the temple of some kind of evil cult, as well as a severed hand in a metal case. Hubby brings it back up, gets possessed, blows up the mine, and runs off to Las Vegas, where he wins a ton of money at the craps table. A couple of lowlifes kidnap him, trying to force him to give up the secret of his success. He manages to kill them, getting burned to death in the process.

That's just the start. His reanimated body crawls out of his grave, wanders over to a cop car, and chops off his left hand by slamming it in the door. He's really dead now, and the crawling severed hand goes on to:

1. Possess a cop who forces a surgeon to cut off his left hand, at which point the severed hand grabs his gun and kills the doctor's nurse and tears the cop's face off.

2. Possess the surgeon, who runs off in an automobile, leading to a car chase with lots of crashes, as if this were an action film, until he puts his left hand under a moving train, severing the hand.

3. Possess the priest (Stuart Whitman) who is helping Eggar, who drives a big knife through his hand and then burns it to ashes with a blowtorch.

Surprise ending you'll see coming a mile away? You bet. Everybody takes things very seriously, which adds to the campiness.
 
EXECUTIVE ACTION - 1973 20 years before JFK there was at least one other docu-drama on the assassination, this one was from the POV of the killers. Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Will Geer plan to kill Kennedy because he was a leftwinger and would ruin all their plans for world domination. Ryan even gives us the WEF Great Reset summary--saying that there are too many people and they need wars and deliberate famines to bring the population down to 500 million or so.
Must have been much more shocking in 1973. Genocidal nuclear Armageddon conspiracies only compel me to shrug indifferently these days. The interesting thing about JFK conspiracy stories is that either it was the mafia, Cuban exiles, oil companies, anti-communist generals, never on the left side of the aisle. Is there any film that explores that? I can't think of any.
There's even a tale that a few frames from the Zapruder film were missing and some speculated that there was only one person in America who had the film technology to tamper with such a film and had worked for the government. Walt Disney. Childhood innocence is shattered.

And yet no one questions how perfectly positioned Zapruder was to catch the head shot. The absolute perfect angle and timing. For an amateur he did an excellent job too--some people as soon as they heard shooting would have stopped recording but not him. He was an ace. And his family made a fortune off the film. How nice that the government didn't seize the film as evidence either. Some people have amazing luck--being in the right place at the right time with steady nerves to achieve family financial security from the assassination of the head of state.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
 
Demonoid (1981)

Muddled Mexican horror movie (filmed in English) which is nutty enough to hold one's interest. Woman (Samantha Eggar) goes way down into a Mexican silver mine with her husband. They find the remains of the temple of some kind of evil cult, as well as a severed hand in a metal case. Hubby brings it back up, gets possessed, blows up the mine, and runs off to Las Vegas, where he wins a ton of money at the craps table. A couple of lowlifes kidnap him, trying to force him to give up the secret of his success. He manages to kill them, getting burned to death in the process.

That's just the start. His reanimated body crawls out of his grave, wanders over to a cop car, and chops off his left hand by slamming it in the door. He's really dead now, and the crawling severed hand goes on to:

1. Possess a cop who forces a surgeon to cut off his left hand, at which point the severed hand grabs his gun and kills the doctor's nurse and tears the cop's face off.

2. Possess the surgeon, who runs off in an automobile, leading to a car chase with lots of crashes, as if this were an action film, until he puts his left hand under a moving train, severing the hand.

3. Possess the priest (Stuart Whitman) who is helping Eggar, who drives a big knife through his hand and then burns it to ashes with a blowtorch.

Surprise ending you'll see coming a mile away? You bet. Everybody takes things very seriously, which adds to the campiness.

A crawling hand, eh? Is it as convincing as the one in EVIL DEAD II? :LOL: When the severed hand picked up the gun, etc, was it just floating in midair?




TO HELL AND BACK (1955) Audie Murphy as the most decorated soldier in the Army, and how that came to be. 'nuff said!
 
I finally had the chance to watch Thor: Love and Thunder. At first it seemed a potential nomination for Raspberry Award as worst picture, however it did develop into a funny movie in a goofy way (appropriate for Disney).
 
THE GLASS CEILING 1971 -- Rather good Spanish giallo with a strong gothic atmosphere. It has unusually picturesque cinematography and despite being a slow burner variation on REAR WINDOW, it has so many interesting qualities that separate it from your standard murder mystery. In fact, I was thinking that it reminded of Corman's Pit and the Pendulum, especially since co-star Patty Shepherd has an eerie resemblance to Barbara Steele. I see it described as a cerebral thriller and that is certainly a fitting description.
 
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2017 Horror
Well photographed but annoying study about the perils of fame for a poet whose writings achieve an almost messianic power, and the presumptuousness of the uninvited fan. Wished it were a little more supernatural and a lot less kooky.
 
ALLIGATOR 1980 - rewatch. Very good horror comedy -- John Sayles script. The gator are pretty good--sometimes they use a real alligator and other times a full size rubber version. The attack on the wedding party is very satisfying. At the very end you can see "Harry Lime Lives" written on the wall of a sewer tunnel.
 
ACTION IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC (1943) A merchant Marine transporting war material for Allies, is torpedoed and sunk. The crew, rowing along in a life boat, which, is rammed by the U-Boat, vows revenge, etc. Captain Steve Jarvis (Raymond Massey) and First Officer Joe Rossi (Humphrey Bogart) are assigned to a new ship, this one equipped with deck guns, would not be such an easy target. Most of the main crew signs on top this ship. Name brand actors such as Alan Hale, Sr., and Dane Clark, among others.

Good film, 2nd, perhaps 3rd time seeing it.
 
THE NAKED STREET (1955) NOIR ALLEY; Interesting, if not strange story. Gangster Phil Regal (Anthony Quinn)'s unmarried daughter Rosalie Regalzyk (Anne Bancroft) is pregnant by Nicholas Bradna (Farley Granger) who is on death row, with 60 days left. When Regal learns of this, he uses underhanded techniques to persuade the two eyewitnesses whose testimony was used to convict Bradna, to recant their identifying him as the murderer. Bradna is freed, but, immediately finds himself at the altar, and married to Rosalie. Regal insists Bradna go straight, and start at the bottom, driving a truck. He must forget about a life of crime, but can he? $80 a week will not satisfy him. An almost Twilight Zone-like ending!

Newspaperman Joe McFarland (Peter Graves) is just too curious about this situation. Muller said that Granger's role was intended for Richard Widmark, but things happened and Granger, who usually plays good guys was thrust into the role. As usual, Muller gave a much more detailed lecture than the other TCM hosts.

Edit: LIFE SAVERS, MR. GOODBAR, & of course, COCA-COLA easily identified!
 

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