What was the last movie you saw?

The Pope's Exorcist.
Pretty awful The Exorcist rip-off which nevertheless is quite enjoyable due to seeing how many possession cliches can be packed into a single movie and watching Russell Crowe hamming it up and enjoying himself in the title role. Nice also to see Franco Nero as the Pope, who out-hams Crowe. Must have been very good money...
 
Two Way Stretch (1960)- a British comedy film which, if you believed my memory (which is something I wouldn't advise anyone doing) played on the BBC at least twice a week throughout my childhood. I certainly saw it more than once back then. Not as funny as I remember but it has the odd moment or two.

Castle Keep (1969) - I will watch anything with Burt Lancaster in. A strangely slow surreal sometimes funny, sometimes frustratingly oblique war film. I think I liked it. Firmly in M*A*S*H / Catch 22 territory but a lot more dreamlike at times.
 
New Year's Evil (1980)

Tepid slasher. Rock 'n' roll chick called Blaze hosts a call-in TV show to welcome in the New Year with New Wave music. (Cue the title song.) One of her assistants has already been killed by our film's psycho. Blaze has an adult son who has just landed a lead role on a TV show, but she's too busy to talk to him. Son has serious mommy issues, as we'll later see him cut up one of mom's stockings (or something), pull it over his head like a bank robber's disguise, and tear up the roses he tried to give her. Could he be the killer?

No, and he's not even a red herring, because we actually see the killer's face as he calls up Blaze (must be an unpopular call-in show; he gets right through every time) to tell her he's going to kill somebody each time the clock strikes midnight in one of the time zones of the continental USA. (He's on the West Coast, as is Blaze, to make it clear.)

East coast: Disguised as a doctor, he gets a ditzy blonde nurse to share some booze and start making out with him before he strikes.

Central: Disguised as a smarmy disco guy, he picks up two ditzy blondes (claiming he's going to Erik Estrada's place for a party)
and eliminates them both.

Mountain Time: Disguised as a priest, he stupidly runs his car into a motorcyclist, one of a huge number of bikers who head after him. The chase leads to a drive-in theater, where he kidnaps a ditzy blonde from her boyfriend's car. Amazingly, she gets away, but along the way our psycho stabs one of the bikers after saying "I'm a man of God, not of violence!"

West coast: He heads after Blaze, quite obviously his target from the start, reveals his relationship with her, there's a twist ending.

Nifty bit of trivia: At the drive-in, we hear the audio and see a few scenes from a trailer for a double feature of Blood Feast and Blood Bath. A little research reveals that the former is not the infamous Herschell Gordon Lewis gorefest of 1963 (or other films with the same name) but an alternate title for the pretty good giallo The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) and the latter is a really lousy horror anthology of 1975 (and not another film of the same title.)

This double feature, with La dama rossa uccide sette volte under yet another title:


images.jpg (11.99KiB)
 
Castle Keep had to have been one expensive movie considering what they do at the end. Fire sale.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse - 1960 - First of the 60s Mabuse films (btw--it is pronounced "mabusa") was directed by Fritz Lang and has Gert Frobe as the police official on his trail. In one scene Frobe is drinking a beer and blows the foam off the glass and hits an actor and you can see the guy react as if it wasn't planned. I enjoyed the third film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, more than this.
 
Voices (1973)

Slow-burning ghost story. The young son of a married couple dies by drowning. Cut to quite some time later. The couple is off to see an old house the woman has inherited from an aunt. They barely get there, driving through thick fog. No running water, no electricity, and the fog is too dangerous to allow them to drive away. Flashbacks show us the woman's suicide attempts, session with a medium at a séance, and time in a mental hospital, even getting electroconvulsive therapy. She hears voices and eventually sees two young children and their mother in the house. There's a twist ending.

Based on a play, so it's no surprise that much of it consists of the couple in one room of the house often arguing to the point of threatening each other. (Some critics compare it to Don't Look Now mixed with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; the twist ending resembles a more recent film.)

The brief outdoor scenes at beginning and end are on film, while the interior scenes are on video, which gives the whole thing an odd look. There's only enough plot for a Twilight Zone episode, but it's not bad.
 
Grumpier Old Men (1995) - Stars: Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Ann-Margret and a cluster of other great actors. This film continues the lives of two buddies as they carry on feuding and binding relationships. Wonderful sequel to the first marvelous movie.
 
He Knows You're Alone (1980) A slasher movie, where the killer targets brides. A very young Tom Hanks appears as one of a group of young people. The cop who failed to catch the killer a decade ago, believes the same guy has returned, and he really wants to be the one who gets him.

Very disappointing shower scene, at least, by my standards. Anyway, this was on TCM late night a few weeks ago, just got around to watching it recently. For what it was, I rate it 7/10.


Oh, almost forgot, I just noticed the end credits showed the brand names appearing in the film. M&Ms, Curtis Candy Co., & others. I suppose this is the usual for most films, but the 1st time I noticed it.

Anyway, during the film, I noticed M&Ms, Goobers, and others.

A few years after this film was made, I quite smoking (for the 3rd time), and did notice a sign saying "Cigarettes 65¢" I suppose currently, they cost 10 times that much, if not more! Glad I quit for good!:LOL:
 
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Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Exactly what you would expect it to be.

What really surprised me was the training exercises and mission - a while back we had a Star Wars thread where George Lucas had said that his inspiration for the Death Star run in Star Wars (a wish I didn't need to add A New Hope to that) was watching 633 Squadron and The Dam Busters as a kid - yet here we have precisely the same scenes again, just with faster aircraft, improved weapons and improved camera work. And the climbing under the tank scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark was taken piece by piece from John Ford's Stagecoach. Is there anything new?
 
Part of Top Gun Maverick is nostalgia too. To be fair they do a pretty good job compared to such as Star War Episode 9.
 
FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS 1974 -- Certainly lives up to the title. One of those films that is hard to summarize even after a couple of viewings. Count Frankenstein has some neanderthals as neighbors and he takes one to use for his experiments, but his dwarf assistant is a voyeur and wannabe necrophiliac which leads to police scrutiny, as his daughter arrives with her fiancee' and a friend. The dwarf is kicked out of the castle but he meets a neanderthal man who he educates on cooking food and raping village girls...
I think they could have improved the lab set a little more--they have jars of coloured liquids but it is such a bland variety of green and red. It's kind of distracting how limited those chemical colours are. They are shooting in a real castle, you think they could get some sauces or cheap wine to use as lab chemicals instead of red poster paint or tomato sauce.
 
HEY AMIGO, YOU'RE DEAD! 1970 -- Very generic western with simplistic plot and almost no dialogue and yet the direction is so lively and the cast of unfamiliar actors (the only one I recognized for sure was in Once Upon A Time In the West as the informant who wore a belt and suspenders---"man can't even trust his own pants.") do have interesting faces so even though there's no real acting--it worked enough for me. Interesting case where the faces of the actors are just watchable without them doing much with them.
 
I'm going to see Dune Part Two on Sunday, so a rewatch of part one was in order.

What a beautiful looking movie. I had to up my original opinion of it up quite a bit, (and i did think quite highly of it).
 
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Roadhouse (2024 & 1989) watched the first 30 minutes or so of the remake with Jake Gyllenhall on Netflix with no1 son. It was was dull, so we switched over to the 1989 original starring Patrick Swayze, which I had not seen since its original release. My goodness they do not make films like that any more (bad film making has changed style.) The hair! The bad acting ( Swayze emoting strains credibility). The embarrassing sex scenes. The stilted dialogue. The slowness of the fights. The monologuing of the villains.
This was a regular video rental in my student flat back in the day. 35 years later it is still low rent 1980s fun, and a better pick than the remake. Both are on Netflix.
 
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Gods of Egypt (2016) - this is what would happen if you typed in some teenage wannabee writers fantasy novel into an AI and stood back. Gods almighty that was a ****ing endless CGI drippingawful mess. Aquaman in the desert. Even the sultry hotness of Rufus Sewell and the director's determined attempts to get his camera right into Courtney Eaton ample cleavage couldn't distract from the sheer crapness of the script.

(While we are talking eye candy I could have done with a lot more than two lines and ten seconds screen time of Yaya Deng.)

yaya.jpg


Someone please take Alec Proyas's toys away from him and get him to make proper movies again. Please!
 
hitmouse said:
Roadhouse (2024 & 1989) watched the first 30 minutes or so of the remake with Jake Gyllenhall on Netflix with no1 son. It was was dull, so we switched over to the 1989 original starring Patrick Swayze, which I had not seen since its original release. My goodness they do not make films like that any more (bad film making has changed style.) The hair! The bad acting ( Swayze emoting strains credibility). The embarrassing sex scenes. The stilted dialogue. The slowness of the fights. The monologuing of the villains.
This was a regular video rental in my student flat back in the day. 35 years later it is still low rent 1980s fun, and a better pick than the remake. Both are on Netflix.
Click to expand...
I copied Sam Elliot’s hairstyle from Roadhouse for a couple of years.
 
IMG_3558.jpeg

Top notch production of Kipling’s classic tale of rich tycoon’s son thought lost at sea. Everything about this is good. If it were a 45, Old Yeller could easily be the flip side.
 
Victoria Silverwolf said:
New Year's Evil (1980)

Tepid slasher. Rock 'n' roll chick called Blaze hosts a call-in TV show to welcome in the New Year with New Wave music. (Cue the title song.) One of her assistants has already been killed by our film's psycho. Blaze has an adult son who has just landed a lead role on a TV show, but she's too busy to talk to him. Son has serious mommy issues, as we'll later see him cut up one of mom's stockings (or something), pull it over his head like a bank robber's disguise, and tear up the roses he tried to give her. Could he be the killer?

No, and he's not even a red herring, because we actually see the killer's face as he calls up Blaze (must be an unpopular call-in show; he gets right through every time) to tell her he's going to kill somebody each time the clock strikes midnight in one of the time zones of the continental USA. (He's on the West Coast, as is Blaze, to make it clear.)

East coast: Disguised as a doctor, he gets a ditzy blonde nurse to share some booze and start making out with him before he strikes.

Central: Disguised as a smarmy disco guy, he picks up two ditzy blondes (claiming he's going to Erik Estrada's place for a party)
and eliminates them both.

Mountain Time: Disguised as a priest, he stupidly runs his car into a motorcyclist, one of a huge number of bikers who head after him. The chase leads to a drive-in theater, where he kidnaps a ditzy blonde from her boyfriend's car. Amazingly, she gets away, but along the way our psycho stabs one of the bikers after saying "I'm a man of God, not of violence!"

West coast: He heads after Blaze, quite obviously his target from the start, reveals his relationship with her, there's a twist ending.

Nifty bit of trivia: At the drive-in, we hear the audio and see a few scenes from a trailer for a double feature of Blood Feast and Blood Bath. A little research reveals that the former is not the infamous Herschell Gordon Lewis gorefest of 1963 (or other films with the same name) but an alternate title for the pretty good giallo The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972) and the latter is a really lousy horror anthology of 1975 (and not another film of the same title.)

This double feature, with La dama rossa uccide sette volte under yet another title:


images.jpg (11.99KiB)
Click to expand...
Just browsed the last several pages. Please remind me,Victoria, that if I should ever visit Chattanooga, to not come to your door unannounced. Preferably in full armor.
 
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