What was the last movie you saw?

Satan's Slave (1976)

British witchcraft/Satanism flick starts off with three seemingly unrelated scenes. 1. Typical movie Satanic ritual, as guy in goat mask tries to reincarnate somebody into the nude body of a woman on an altar. 2. Romantic banter between two young people, ending in the attempted rape and successful murder of the woman by the man. 3. Young woman talks to her boyfriend about how she and her parents are going to meet an uncle and cousin she's never met.

Scene three leads to Dad suffering some kind of severe attack that causes him to crash their car, right outside Uncle's house. He's not hurt too badly, but Mom seems to be in pretty bad shape. Daughter rushes out of the car to get help, just in time to witness the car explode into flames.

The newly created orphan meets Uncle, his secretary, and Cousin. Besides being understandably upset, she also has visions of naked witches being tortured in the past, Satanic rituals, etc. (One of the latter sets a new record for exploitation sleaziness, as it manages to be both a human sacrifice and a lesbian sex scene.) There's also an Eternal Triangle going on among Daughter, Cousin, and Secretary. The latter eventually tells Daughter what's going on, in order to get her to leave the place.

The viewer has already figured things out by this time. It's obvious that Uncle is going to use her to reincarnate a witch from the old days. Meanwhile, psycho Cousin kills more people, in present time (including Daughter's barely-seen boyfriend, via long-distance witchcraft) and flashback (another random woman.)

Mostly a PG-rated, slow-moving supernatural melodrama, with moments of gore and female nudity that seem otherwise out of place. Decently filmed and acted, so not a waste of time, but otherwise undistinguished. There's also a weird twist ending.

Dad suddenly shows up alive, and tells Daughter she injured her head in the crash, and just imagined everything else, including the death of her parents. Of course, a few minutes later it turns out that she didn't imagine it after all, and Dad is in on the plot. No, it doesn't make any sense, really.
 
Satan's Slave (1976)
This was not bad. Norman J Warren made some interesting UK films because they are increasingly sleazy and yet he uses good actors for it.
PREY is bizarre--it's your standard horror film with explicit sexual elements but the actors act like they its the Royal Shakespeare Company.
But Inseminoid isn't that good despite the cast.

IT CONQUERED THE WORLD 1957 - Despite the notorious reputation of the alien carrot it's a well thought out film with a thoughtful premise---it is seemingly intended as a counterview to The Day the Earth Stood Still. The alien stops all machinery (and they mention the effect this has on medical equipment) and the scientist is eager to help the alien but eventually realizes he has been deceived. Some preachy dialogue at the end by Peter Graves but Beverly Garland has very good role as the cynical wife. She gets the best lines.
 
The Colony (2013) - after an okay (but not great) start with a bit of scene-setting world building showing us a tiny group of survivors huddled against a new (man made) ice age, the film rapidly sinks into the usual 'running around corridors as zombies/monsters/cannibals kill the cast members one by one'.

An expedition leaves their sanctuary to find out what happened to another group of survivors sending a distress signal.

I should have given up on the movie at the moment when, crossing a huge, crumbling road bridge, our heroes took a running jump and leapt across a barely leapable hole in the road surface - trusting that the chunk of road they were about to land on wasn't going to crumble and fall into the abyss like the bits next to it obviously had. They only jumped across because they were action movie characters. Real people would have edged across on the HUGE, clearly visible on screen, steel beam holding the road surface up - the one next to the heavy metal crash barrier that would have been easy to hold onto or belay off.

I should have given up when beating a hasty retreat from the (as yet unseen) cannibal hoard our heroes quickly ransack the storage cupboard they are holed up in and happen to find a whole drawer full of dynamite tied in neat bundles with their fuses all tied up together.

I really should have given up on the movie when, out of ammunition, our rearguard hero (Laurence Fishbourne doing his usual substantial and workmanlike job) wrests loose the metal ladder that leads up to the only exit he is defending and throws it down to ground just before the cannibal hoard arrive. Ha! That will thwart them! He was right. None of the cannibal hoard thought, "How we gonna get up there? Hey look! There's a ladder! Give us a hand lads!" No, once the ladder had disappeared out of the frame line it disappeared from the movie, and presumably the consciousness of anyone dumb enough to take the film seriously. I watched most of the rest of the film on Fast Forward stopping only for the dialogue (of which there was not a lot, and was, for the most part, totally predictable).

Towards the end, as you would expect, there was a crawling along stupidly huge air-ducts sequence.
 
Kill List

Bought this Blu Ray from CEX because it had rave reviews on the cover (don't they all?) and cost £2. I've never heard of it; apparently it came out in 2011.

Watching the first 20 minutes, it's looking like a Ken Loach kitchen-sink drama, but it's anything but. I defy anyone to watch the first third of this movie and predict the way that things will end up! It's well worth a watch, although it is rated 18 for a reason, with some violent scenes and nudity.

This looks like one of those films that bombed at the box office, but will go on to gain a cult following; it's very 70s in style, offering more questions than it ever answers. If you do decide to watch it, then try to know as little of the plot as you can before you do.
 
Howl's Moving Castle.
If I were to recommend a Miyazaki movie this probably would not be my no. 1 suggestion.
Still the brilliant imagination, the hugely creative imagery, the depiction of the major characters - all hugely interesting. Plot? Well it was there but not the major attraction.
Watch Miyazaki. His imagination is not that of western filmmakers.
 
The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (L'assassino ha riservato nove poltrone, 1974)

Eccentric mixture of giallo and supernatural horror. A wealthy guy brings several family members and acquaintances to a centuries-old theater. Among those present are his much younger fiancée and her male lover, his ex-wife and her new husband, his adult daughter and her male lover, and his sister and her female lover. There's also a mysterious young guy whom nobody knows; they all assume one of the others brought him along. An apparent attempt is made on the life of the wealthy guy. Just about everybody else has a motive for killing him. Since this is a giallo, the viewer is likely to think that he faked the attempt himself.

The fiancée dies while acting out a scene from Romeo and Juliet, stabbing herself to death with what she must have thought was a stage dagger. (You'd think you'd notice as soon as it started entering your skin, but what do I know.) In proper And Then There Were None fashion, they're all locked inside the theater and the phones are cut off. People have plenty of excuses to wander off on their own, so we get more killings, by somebody wearing a mask and cape. Along the way, we get legends of a family curse, wherein this kind of mass slaughter happens once every century. The mysterious guy pops in an out, literally vanishing before our eyes at one point.

The plot doesn't make much sense, and it's pretty sleazy. Most of the actresses take off their clothes at the drop of a hat. There's a weird scene in which the daughter takes some kind of psychoactive drug to calm down, does a nude dance, and starts smooching on her father in an amorous way. (This ties in with an aspect of the curse, which the mysterious guy, who is apparently a ghost or something, explains can only be lifted when there is not an incestuous relationship between father and daughter. You'd think this might have happened some time in the last several hundred years, but apparently not.) There's also a bizarre scene in which the two nude bodies of the murdered lesbians are put on display like a particularly gruesome surrealist painting.
 
Vice Raid (1959)

Mamie Van Doren stars in this efficient B movie, which is a little bit franker about its salacious content than you'd expect for the time. A couple of cops threaten to bust a guy for "transporting a female across state lines" if he doesn't spill the beans on his boss. He agrees to go along with the deal, but one of the cops tells him to run and then shoots him dead. The bad cop is on the take, and didn't want the guy to talk. The other cop is our honest hero. The boss can't bribe him, so he has Mamie brought in to frame him for supposedly demanding payoff money from her. The cop gets thrown off the force, and Mamie becomes the boss's personal property. Our hero handles things in his own way, by slapping Mamie around to get the boss's attention. His plan is to pretend to set up his own, more successful, "model agency" to get the boss's bosses to put pressure on their boy. Meanwhile, Mamie's innocent little sister, fresh out of high school, shows up. The boss's second-in-command talks her into showing up to what is supposed to be a modeling job, and rapes her. This sets Mamie against the boss, so she works with our hero. It all leads up to a gun battle. I'll give the film points for actually using the words "prostitution" and "rape" in the screenplay instead of the usual euphemisms of the time.
 
I have seen Vice Raid and The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (which reminds me of The Flesh and Blood Show which I need to revisit soon).

TOWER OF EVIL 1972 - I watched it again and paid more attention to the story. In the past I was surprised by the amount of nudity and concentrating on Candace Glendenning (who should have been starring in more movies) and Anna Palk and the comical dialogue but I give it major credit for generating some pretty good suspense and for its use of multiple red herrings--I had forgotten the ending--and was getting tricked again by the way that an actor takes off his coat. That is some clever bit of work how they got that surprise final revelation (maybe it is a little underwhelming due to the tech of the time but it was well thought out). The set design is above average as well. It deserves to be better known as a pioneering horror film of the era. It is usually considered a proto-slasher and it really is.

I watched ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS again before that---funny how a movie can echo the ones that comes after. They both use crabs for some atmospheric cut away shots.
 
Recently I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I remember watching this film when I was 15 when it was first released. I watched it with my uncle from Australia and my younger brother, we were rolling around in aisles with laughter. It still retains its magic to this day. 10/10.


Have you seen Spamalot, the musical version created by Eric Idle? Very funny.
 
The Lost City (2022; dir. Aaron & Adam Nee; starring Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Brad Pitt)

Park your mind at the door and it's an enjoyable romp in the tradition of Romancing the Stone -- Bullock's character is a romance writer and in one quick scene in a hotel lobby you see a poster behind her announcing, Romancing the Page, a fairly obvious tip of the hat. It is not in the same league as Romancing the Stone, but it has moments that are light-hearted enough and Bullock, Tatum and Pitt all seem to be having a good time which is mostly shared with the viewer.


Lady Bird (2017; dir. Greta Gerwig; starring Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts)

A coming of age story of a high school student who wants to break free of community conventions without really knowing what that means. Ronan is believable and in spite of her character's often charmless manners and actions, is entirely sympathetic as someone just trying to grow up without knowing how. Pretty much like the rest of us. Metcalf is pitch perfect as the nagging, worried, harried mom who takes her daughter's anger and frustration and remains close, keeping an eye on her, trying to guide her if ham-handedly. Letts is the calmer, more sympathetic father who maybe is too often the good cop to the mom's bad cop. The family dynamics seem spot on.
 
Recently I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I remember watching this film when I was 15 when it was first released. I watched it with my uncle from Australia and my younger brother, we were rolling around in aisles with laughter. It still retains its magic to this day. 10/10.

Once we had friends from the states visit. We knew both of them were big Monty Python fans and being good hosts and proud of where we live we took them sightseeing. On the way to south to Oban we pulled off the road just south of Appin and made them get out of the car.
Him: "?"
Us (Pointing at Stalker Castle behind him): "Behold! the castle AAaaaaargh!"

Castle_Stalker_-_geograph.org.uk_-_204092.jpg


I have never seen anyone as excited and happy.
 
Bad Girls Do Cry (made 1954; released 1965)

Ultra-cheap exploitation flick. Our heroine is played by a stripper, and we get two scenes of her undressing down to her scanty underwear before the plot gets going. Innocent heroine moves to the city, gets talked into showing up for a modeling job, winds up a victim of white slavery. Nice guy starts off as a client, tries to rescue her from a life of sin, folks get beat up and shot. That's more coherent than the film itself. Filmed without sound, so we get scenes where the camera looks at Person A while Person B's voice is dubbed in, then the reverse, back and forth. Weird bits of comedy, such as when a woman gets herself tangled up in a telephone cord, finally delivering the punch line "I'm all tied up" after this scene just runs on and on. Really bad.
 
Island of Doomed Men (1940)

Peter Lorre is the whole show in this otherwise decent but unremarkable B melodrama. He runs a diamond mine on an private island, recruiting paroled convicts as workers, out of a pretense of charity, but really working them to death under brutal conditions as slaves. A government agent is assigned to check things out. As soon as he talks to a fellow agent, however, the other guy is shot dead. In what is a remarkable show of devotion to duty, the dying man tells him not to reveal anything, and our hero agrees. When the cops show up, he just says his name is John Smith and doesn't talk about his assignment. He winds up in jail for murder, just so he can get to Lorre's Island of Doomed Men when he gets paroled. Lorre has a beautiful wife whom he treats as his property, and who loathes him. He knows that "John Smith" is a G-man, but doesn't know how much he knows, so it becomes a cat-and-mouse game between the two. He's also very upset that his wife is obviously attracted to the guy.

Lorre greatly underplays most of the time, speaking softly and politely but managing to exude menace. The only time he freaks out is when he sees the pet monkey owned by his timid cook. He shoots the poor beast early in the film, and you know that's going to lead to payback time.
 
No Time to Die (2021) This is the latest and could possibly be the last James Bond film or at least that what the plot would suggest. (I doubt it very seriously myself. But I do suspect actor will play the next James Bond). As to the movie it was at the same time better than most/all of the earlier series and less satisfying. It was better because it was a more cohesive story, had more rounded characters and more believable social dynamics than some of the previous Bond movies. It was less satisfying because for me there's a rhythm to a Bond movie which seemed lacking. I've always preferred the Bond stories where Bond is absolutely the coolest cat in the kitchen and you just knew he was going to turn the tables in the coolest way and end up alone with the Bond Girl at the end. If you're looking for that story, you're not going to find it. If you are looking for a solid movie with great action scenes and only one completely improbable gun fight you'll like the movie quite a lot.

This movie is now available free with Prime.
 

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