What was the last movie you saw?

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Seventh Sin (1957)

Eleanor Parker stars in this adaptation of The Painted Veil (1925) by W. Somerset Maugham. Apparently it was adapted under the original title in 1934 and 2006. Anyway, we got this one because we like Parker, an unusually versatile actress. The movie is OK. Set in pre-Mao China, it's about a woman married for a couple of years to a doctor in Hong Kong. She has an affair with a married man. When her husband finds out, he offers her an unpleasant choice: A messy, scandalous divorce, or accompanying him to an inland village ravaged by a cholera epidemic. She chooses the latter. It's pretty much a soap opera. George Sanders steals the picture as a rakish, boozy fellow at the village who is married to a Chinese woman.

 

[JunkMonkey]

George Sanders steals the picture...

Doesn't he always? And seemingly effortlessly too.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Within Our Gates (1920)

(SOME SPOILERS AHEAD)

Mostly of historic interest, as the oldest surviving film directed by an African-American. The restored copy of this silent film is missing a sequence, and the condition of what we have is often in pretty bad shape. The complex plot is melodramatic and difficult to follow. Lots of characters appear, disappear, and sometimes come back. The action jumps back and forth between the North and the South. The climax of the film is a long flashback sequence, and we even have a "lying" flashback (events shown as a witness mistakenly interpreted them) within the main flashback. Undeniably, however, the film is tremendously powerful during this flashback, as it depicts lynching and an attempted rape. (Just to show you how the melodramatic elements of the plot sometimes undercut the serious aspects, however, I'll point out that, during the attempted rape, a scar on the body of the intended victim is revealed, and her assailant discovers from this fact that she is his own daughter.) In some ways this is the African-American answer to Birth of a Nation. It makes use of the same technique of quick cutting back and forth during the climax in a similar way.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Had a quadruple feature at our house last night. In order of viewing:

The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)

Roman Polanski's spoof of gothic horror films is very nicely filmed. The scenes in the vampire's castle, and outdoor winter scenes, are quite lovely. The comedy is mostly on the silly side, with lots of slapstick and pratfalls. Polanski himself, uncredited, plays the second lead, a cowardly, foolish servant to a nutty vampire-hunting scholar. Poor doomed Sharon Tate, in red wig, appears as the love interest (and source of the twist ending.)

Fitzwilly (1967)

Dick van Dyke and Barbara Feldon star in this bland but inoffensive heist comedy. He's a butler who, with the help of a bunch of other servants, keeps his mistress from finding out that she's penniless by pulling all sorts of complex scams and thefts. She's a newly hired secretary to the mistress who doesn't know about the crimes. It all builds up to one big last job; robbing Gimbels on Christmas Eve. Tons of familiar faces from 1960's television show up in the supporting roles.

Abar (1977)

Wow, this was a weird one. It's a low-budget blaxploitation flick, but not at all typical of its genre. It starts off with an African-American doctor and his family moving into a white neighborhood. This instantly sets off truly extreme bigoted reactions, with liberal use of the N-word, people marching in front of their house with racist protest signs, and even a guy with a Nazi armband. The title character, a street activist, shows up as a sort of bodyguard. The movie takes itself very seriously, and even features long excerpts from the speeches of Martin Luther King. However, things go insane near the end, as the doctor does some Mad Scientist stuff and gives Abar his secret formula. What results is truly unexpected.

To Sir, with Love II(1996)

Made-for-TV sequel to the 1967 original. Sidney Poitier returns as the Guyanese teacher who is retiring from his position in a London school, only to continue at an inner-city school in Chicago. Judy Geeson returns from the first film in a brief pre-credits prologue in London, during which Lulu also returns to sing the title song. Once the Chicago portion gets going, it's a pretty decent, if unsurprising, story of a courageous and inspiring teacher changing the lives of students in trouble.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Get Christie Love! (1974)

Made-for-TV crime story, and pilot for the short-lived series of the same name. It's what you might get if you took a blaxploitation flick of the period -- particularly of the Tough Foxy Lady subgenre -- and took out the nudity, sex, profanity, and explicit violence. Teresa Graves of Laugh-In stars in the title role as a policewoman investigating a drug lord. The crime plot is actually pretty interesting, probably because it's based on a novel by Dorothy Uhnak. Graves has a lot of charisma in the role, and the film as a whole is decent light entertainment. A couple of things that surprised me for an American television movie of 1974 were the fact that's there's a lot of heavy flirtation between Graves and her white boss (Harry Guardino; the fact that he's about a quarter of a century older is a little creepy) and the use of the N-word in an early scene, unrelated to the main plot, where Graves is undercover as a prostitute in order to catch a serial killer. Also notable is the theme of abortion, which is an important story element.

 

[Rodders]

Quantum of Solace was on last night. This is the first time i've seen it. Enjoyable enough.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Silver Bears (1977)

Likable, if not funny or exciting, financial comedy/thriller based on the novel The Silver Bears by Paul Erdman. (I don't know why they dropped "the.") Good cast, nice locations in the complex, if sedate, plot, which ranges from Las Vegas to London to Iran to San Francisco. Michael Caine stars as a financier who works for an organized crime boss (Martin Balsam) who wants to buy a Swiss bank to launder his profits. An Italian prince (Louis Jordan) acts as the manager in name only. They get mixed up with a couple of Iranian siblings (David Warner and Stephane Audran) who need money to finance a secret silver mine. Things get complicated from there, and the story as a whole is as full of scams and double-crosses as The Sting, but here we're talking about tens of millions of dollars. The comedy is mostly provided by Tom Smothers as a strait-laced bank employee and Cybill Shepherd as his hippie wife, who has an affair with Caine. (How the banker and the hippie got together is worthy of a romantic comedy on its own.) It doesn't provide much in the way of laughs or suspense, but overall it's rather pleasant. A very young Jay Leno appears with a full head of bushy hair.

 

[galanx]

Yeah, it's inoffensive. The book was better, but not his best. Erdman's books - high finance shenanigans- were quite popular, and well researched- he had been tossed into a Swiss jail for multi-million dollar bank fraud. The Billion Dollar Sure Thing was a good one.

 

[Starbeast]

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

Actor Kurt Russell stars in this unusual western horror/drama story, about a mysterious, and exceedingly dangerous hidden tribe. Creepy good tale in the old west.


Deadpool (2016)

Many people told me it's not for kids. They were RIGHT!!! (But, I figured that knowing the character, and noticing the "R" rating) Awesome, wacky, violent, and seasoned well with an off-the-wall love story. I thought it was fantastically cool.


Ant Man (2015)

I'm so glad I don't watch trailers to upcoming movies that I really want to see. This was freaking MARVELOUS!!! It is so great to see Marvel comic characters portrayed in live-action, that are just as grand as they are in the comic books.

 

[aThenian]

Suffragette.

It was bleak. They chose a working class lead, which is good in a way as working class women don't get a big look-in when it comes to books and TV, and they didn't duck the issue of how hard her life would have been - she definitely wasn't the chirpy stereotype of so many films. But I think they did duck the issue of whether she would have got on so well with the mostly upperclass suffragettes once she joined their struggle (the main one played by Helena Bonham Carter) or whether she would have been prepared to give up so much, without (apparently) any regrets. Also they didn't explore the issue of whether the violence was justified or not.

 

[ratsy]

I did a blog about some recent movies I've watched Horror Movies with a twist…

 

[Aetius]

5th Wave.

Not that bad actually. Some stunning effects, especially the ocean strikes.

My main gripe is the terrible casting, the lead is supposed to be an ugly duckling type, out of her teens and into college and she'd be very attractive, yet the actress is stunning. Zombie just looks a bit pale rather than a plague ravaged survivor. Walker (I think it was) looked far too old for the love interest of a , what, fifteen year old girl.

 

[J Riff]

Tomorrowland. This one has some debatable science issues but decent characters, and the scene in the collectible comic/sciFi store is fun.
Zootopia. A bunch of animals act almost as stupid as actual humans, in the animal city of Zootopia, where our heroine - the first bunnyRabbit cop - takes on da bad guys in a fun romp for the kids.

 

[2DaveWixon]

Ant Man (2015)

I'm so glad I don't watch trailers to upcoming movies that I really want to see. This was freaking MARVELOUS!!! It is so great to see Marvel comic characters portrayed in live-action, that are just as grand as they are in the comic books.

I'll second that! Loved that movie (but Ant Man's recent appearance in Captain America: Civil War, in which he used the "Giant Man" powers he apparently developed between movies, did not manage to preserve that carefree atmosphere, alas...)

 

[Allen Teasdale]

Through the skillful use of Netflix and Amazon, I avoided anything resembling productivity today and had an Ib Melchior experience.

1st -- The Time Travelers (1964) -- Dumb, Dumb, and Dumber, and then Dumber's cousin Dumblina jump into a desolate future and get trapped. Earth was been almost destroyed by war and mankind is going to a new planet to start over. That ends up not working too well due to mutant human zombies and they return to the present. Then either they go into a different future with grass and trees *OR* they end up looping through the same events over and over and over again. Or maybe both? The ending was a bit confusing I kind of really like the idea of idiots screwing around with time travel and getting stuck in a perpetual loop of badness.

2nd -- The Angry Red Planet (1959) -- Standard Earthings-go-to-Mars-and-get-yelled-at-for-being-more-advanced-in-destructive-power-than-in-intellectual-power. The beauty of the this film is the incredibly bizarre red treatment done to the outdoor Mars scenes that makes utterly no sense. Plus, there is a big rat/bat/spider creature with lobster claws. The adorably cute blinding of said creature makes this film Oscar-worthy in my opinion.

3rd -- Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) -- Studly astronaut gets stranded on Mars alone with a monkey. Luckily he remembered his monkey because the critter saves the day by finding water. Mental note: take a monkey on all trips where finding water might be necessary. He finds an almost naked slave man and witnesses little spaceships appear out of nowhere, shoot some lasers at the group, fail to kill them, and then leave. Lather, rinse, repeat about 17 times. This film was a bit homoerotic. Unplanned I'm sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if studly astronaut and almost naked slave man got to know each other a bit in their ice igloo when they were using their body heat to keep from freezing.

4th -- Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) -- sigh, I fell asleep during this one twice. I've just restarted it again, and I vow to make it through. Evil space brains be damned. Edit. Ok, how did I sleep through Quicksand-Snow? Thankfully, the guy survived. As a kid, I was terrified of quick sand. Although outside of Gilligan's Island, I can't remember seeing it anywhere. But it really did scare the crap out of me. Shudder. The sand, the quickness.

 

[Droflet]

Yeah, I agree for the most part. Saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars as a kid and loved it. Didn't notice the homoerotic element though. The others hmm, agreed, 1st and 2nd pretty dumb, 4th boring as bat .

 

[JunkMonkey]

I have a lot of time for Ib Melchior's films. They may not be the best films in the world but in context - compared with the other films of the time masquerading as SF - they were pretty darn good. There were ideas in them. The ideas may look hackneyed and cliché now but at the time this was cutting edge stuff. The man comes over as having read some SF.
Journey to the Seventh Planet owes a great debt to a Ray Bradbury story the name of which escapes me and in
The Time Travelers he beat Arthur C Clarke to the draw. Clarke's of quoted "advanced technology seeming like magic" line came ten years after Melchor used on screen stage magic tricks to display just that advanced technology.

Avoid Reptilicus though. That is bad.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Lifeforce - which was, Mathilda May's utterly gorgeous breasts aside, even worse than I remembered.

 

[J-Sun]

Lifeforce - which was, Mathilda May's utterly gorgeous breasts aside, even worse than I remembered.

She really was spectacular. I mean, that's an easy thing to say about a lot of people in a lot of movies but, really... there needs to be a reserved extra level when one references her in that.

But that said, "worse"? Not possible. My recollection is that it was precisely the opposite of Ms. May. It requires a whole 'nother level for its badness. I'm surprised Patrick Stewart hasn't tried to have all the copies rounded up and burned.

Hm. I haven't seen a movie in a long time but, to excuse my presence on the thread, I guess the last movie I (re)watched was a James Bond flick... um... Goldfinger, I think. It's a highly regarded film that just really doesn't do it for me. I mean, it's a Bond flick, so it's at least okay, but it's nowhere near as good as, say, From Russia with Love.

 

[JunkMonkey]

She really was spectacular. I mean, that's an easy thing to say about a lot of people in a lot of movies but, really... there needs to be a reserved extra level when one references her in that.

But that said, "worse"? Not possible. My recollection is that it was precisely the opposite of Ms. May. It requires a whole 'nother level for its badness. I'm surprised Patrick Stewart hasn't tried to have all the copies rounded up and burned.

I last watched it in Feb 2011. The anally retentive film diary finally comes in handy - rereading my entry back then I was surprised to see that I thought the opening sequences were okay:

Lifeforce (1985) - The first manned mission to Haley's comet finds an derelict space ship. Now anyone who has ever seen ANY movies knows that entering derelict spaceships is just asking for trouble. Unfortunately our valiant crew have spent so long training to be astronauts they never watched anything other than training videos and happily go exploring. Inside they encounter a bunch of dead aliens and three perfectly preserved nude humans in suspended animation. The female of the three probably has the most beautiful tits seen on any screen during the eighties. Hypnotised by naked knockers (as most men are) the crew drag the bodies on board and head back for Earth and the plot goes into out of control free-fall with the movie ending up with rampaging alien vampire zombies destroying London, (I think they were covering all the bases when they pitched this one:

Writer: "It's a vampire flick, with zombies! - and aliens... ...and tits!"
Producer:"I like it!"

All Hail the Hypno-boobs!
​

This film has a real reputation for being awful and I was surprised to find the opening sequences weren't that bad, but it didn't take long to descend into totally confused garbage. Towards the end I gave up trying to follow what was going on - though actors kept telling me at great length - and just felt sorry for Peter Firth (who probably thought this was going to be his big Hollywood break) as he wandered about in a polo-neck jumper trying to be the hero but being confounded at every turn by the incoherent script.

The first feature film to use Brent Cross Shopping Centre as a location and the second film I've watched in a row to feature Patrick Stewart being subsumed by an alien lifeform. He explodes in this one.

(The previous film was a Star Trek movie, and, by total happenstance, the film I watched after Lifeforce back in 2011 also starred Mathilda May. Lots of serendipity do-da going on in JunkMonkey Mansions that week.)

Why I thought the opening sequences weren't that bad - when they obviously are - is confusing. The film is just dreadful from frame one... and then gets worse. I wonder if there are any "My living hell that was shooting Lifeforce" books or articles about? I suspect they'd be much more interesting (and fun) than the film.