What was the last movie you saw?

Adulterers (2015)

A man leaves work early on his wedding anniversary. He arrives at home - to find his wife in bed with another man.

He holds the two adulterers (the man is also married) at gunpoint and puts them through psychological hell. The ending was a bit predictable. but well done. Good acting, a great psychological story. I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

(Includes nudity.)
 
"The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" (1966)

The best of the Dollar westerns by a considerable margin, and clearly production values are perhaps the most apparent, as well as the elaborate almost operatic storyline that carries the film to a full 178 minutes - which would become a familiar trait for director Sergio Leone in his latter films.

Eastwood needs no introduction, although he still acts by the numbers. Lee Van Cleef returns, but as the "Bad" guy this time, which is unfortunate. But he still brings a lot of much needed gravitas to the film although perhaps not as appealing compared to his more "fatherly" appearance in "For a Few Dollars More"

However, the real revelation is Eli Wallach (the "Ugly"): a role of many personalities: evil, cunning, stupid, comedic and sometimes forlorn. He brings an appealing quality that sometimes outshines that of the rather bland Eastwood. We know more about his history, how he ended up being a bandit; whereas we know little background for Eastwood and Van Cleef's characters.

The film itself is lavish, especially the camerawork and the sumptuous and easily recognisable score by ever-dependable Ennio Morricone. And this is the film that put Eastwood firmly on the road to Hollywood stardom.

5/5
 
Monstroid "It Came From the Lake" (1980)

That's how the title appears on the copy I watched, anyway, quotation marks and all. It's not until the end credits that we're told we've actually been watching Monster.

In any case, this is a bad movie indeed. Starting off with the outrageous lie that this is based on a true story, we first see a woman in a white dress dancing to Latin music in front of her husband next to a lake. Lake monster kills husband. This is supposed to be in Colombia. (The end credits give the name of somebody filming in that South American nation, but as far as I could tell everything looks like the New Mexican town where the majority of the movie was shot.) Back in the USA, an executive yells, swears, and grabs his secretary's butt while going on about the killing, which happened by the lake which his concrete factory is polluting. (Does concrete manufacturing create a lot of toxic waste?) There's a local Yankee-go-home radical and an American TV reporter causng trouble. Our hero (Jim Mitchum, looking so much like his father Robert at a young age that it's almost as if the great actor went forward in time to star in a cheap monster movie) gets sent to check things out. Folks get killed, people fly helicopters, dance, and talk on phones. John Carradine is the local priest (with no attempt at all to make him seem Colombian.) The credited director's kids play a major part. (The creation of this thing was such a mess, over several years, that these may be the only scenes he actually directed.) It's got one of those "the end -- or is it?" type endings.
 
Inspired by your post, I have put on Toxic Shark. Meanwhile, for fans of monster movies, there are reels of stop-motion monster movies... one started with The Lost World and went thru till the ninties... then I spotted the Japanese reel... five hours of Zilla and many others, five solid hours of hilites. Can't understand a word of it, but fun.
Toxic Shark - live review: A couple riding dune buggies crash at the shore, the undertow gets them? No idea, now it's character development, some louts, and - boom! The shark appears, in shallow water, spraying green acid from a nozzle on it's head? Victim 1 eaten, then another shark leaps high in the air and lands on victim 2.
Okay back to the girls...one studies environmental science. The guys are vapid..'Is that a shirt or a sausage casing?" We're in Puetro Rico, and Reese is the bigmoth bigshot boss, of a fitness retreat. Our MC girl has a magnetic bracelet on, it creates an electromagnetic pulse, confusing sharks.. *
Girl on horse on beach, horse acting up, shark leaps out, grabs her, 3 down. 4 is a fitness instructor and now everyone knows about the shark(s),, the cellphones are out, the boats are broken, one blows up, if the shark scrapes someone, they go nuts, a chance for bad crazy acting which is not passed up.
Now, acts of stupidity, then MC learns the seawater is infected with... arsenic. A while later, everyone is crazed, like zombies, except 4 MCs...
the shark sprays green goop, which gets arsenic on the boat motor, but heroic acts involving a flare gun allow this one to end, with sequel setup. More sharks and zomboids... Won't be reviewing that one. )
 
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London Has Fallen (2016)

Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman star in this well-acted thrill ride.

Several years in the planning, terrorist attack as the English Prime Minister is eulogized, with almost every free-world Head of State present. Five HOS are killed in the initial attack, but POTUS escapes due to the diligence and skill of our MC (Played by Butler).

Although an exciting movie, it portrays - probably not meaning to - extremely incompetent British and American counter-terrorism organizations. For this terrorist plan to work, dozens of people had to be put into key positions,
including the cook and those watching over the cook, at 10 Downing Street.
To think that something this extravagant can remain totally unnoticed, or even hinted at, is a difficult stretch of the imagination.

The only other serious problem in the movie came about half-way through, when the Vice President (played by Freeman) was informed that 19 terrorists had been killed. That means that our MC killed them all - no one else. No, I didn't go back and count, but I have no doubt that he had killed more than a dozen by that point!

Still, though intellectually I knew this scenario to be totally ridiculous, I still enjoyed the action. I'm glad I watched it - and that's more than I can say for more than half the movies I've watched on Netflix these past two months!
 
Victoria and Abdul.

Quite a charming character piece, all told. It's only loosely historically based, and comes with a warm glow cast upon Victoria while all the household around her are racist AF. It's not really a story, as such. More of a two hour vignette. But it was gentle and I didn't fidget much :D

4/5.
 
The Disappearance of Flight 412 (1974)

Made-for-TV movie done in documentary style. Air Force jet goes on a routine mission, spots three UFO's on radar. Two Marine jets are sent up to investigate. The Marines vanish, the UFO's vanish, the Air Force plane is directed to a secret base in the middle of nowhere and the three guys inside are subjected to questioning by shadowy security types. An Air Force colonel (Glenn Ford) sets out to get his men back. More of a military drama than an SF movie. Made on a limited budget with lots of stock footage of aircraft mixed with people talking to each other, yet manages to create a sense of realism.
 
"Coogan's Bluff" (1968)

Continuing my Eastwood film-fest, and here we have what I would call a transitional period in Clint's career.

Already an established Hollywood star after his "Dollar" westerns Eastwood now wanted to move away from that genre for fear of being typecast. And fortunately, director and long-term collaborator, Don Siegel, we see Eastwood achieve his goal by combining two genres: his "Man with No Name" western and the early makings of his "Dirty Harry" contemporary cop films.

In fact on watching the opening few minutes of "Bluff" one would be mistaken in thinking the film was going to be just another western. But as the story unfolds it quickly unravels into a modern-day (1960s) world, and of New York and its traffic, skyscrapers and its eclectic people.

Eastwood plays an Arizona sheriff, who is asked to visit the Big Apple to extradite a known criminal who is on the run from the law. Eastwood's character is definitely a fish-out-of-water as he tries to deal not only with a criminal on the loose, but also NY police bureaucracy; the hurly-burly 24/7 New York life, the noise, the pace and everyone shouting at each other for no good reason! But eventually he gets used to all the drug-dealers, hustle artists, prostitutes and other city lowlife, and he manages to track down his prey to make for a very tense and exciting finale.

Strip away the modern veneer and you'll find this is scarcely any different to his Dollar films; but at least Eastwood is trying to lay the foundations into something that would eventually evolve into the dirty and uncompromising world of Harry Callaghan three years later.

Nice action sequences, a quite a low body-count, and some wonderful views of NY in all its 1960s glory (the Pan-Am building, especially!)

3/5
 
"Where Eagles Dare" (1968)

Having grounded his roles in westerns and contemporary police thrillers, Eastwood opted to give the WWII genre a try when he was offered the role in this 1968 classic starring Richard Burton, from a script and subsequent novel by Alistair MacLean.

The story is rather meandering and comes a distant second to the full-blown action sequences, which includes a fairly remarkable cable-car fight sequence. But essentially the story involves a group of British elite soldiers, and Eastwood representing America's interest in rescuing an American general from the evil clutches of the Gestapo. The main obstacle is that the general is imprisoned in an almost impregnable fortress high up in the Bavarian Alps. Unfortunately, during the mission some of the British troops are murdered by double-agents, which puts the whole mission, including the lives of the remaining men and the general in great jeopardy.

This film is way too long at almost 3 hours, and the story is not only highly implausible but doesn't really have much to say about anything other than to move from the film from one action sequence to the next - especially during the final act.

That said, the action sequences are generally well done, and both Eastwood & Burton seem to be enjoying themselves in this no-brainer of a film. It was also a big box office success, which was good news for Burton following 3 major flops previously. And as for Eastwood, it would propel his fortunes in this genre further in the rather comic "Kelly's Heroes" two years later.

3/5
 
I saw Where Eagles Dare for the first time just a couple of years ago; brainless action/adventure, with a nice gloss of Burton's character being something of a mastermind of undercover work. I recall when it came out, there was a buzz among the boys in school about counting how many Nazis Eastwood killed, which now reminds me the scene in Hot Shots, Part Deux where a pinball-like counter appears on screen as Charlie Sheen machine-guns his opponents. You could probably say WED prefigures the Stallone and Schwarzeneggar movies of the 1980s.

Interesting to note the cast also includes Ingrid Pitt, who went on to establish herself as a cult actor in horror movies, especially from Hammer Studios. It's been a while since I saw an old promotional trailer for WED on Turner Cable Movies, but one of the people involved in making the movie had the good grace to acknowledge the distance between the movie's WWII fantasy and Pitt's reality as a survivor of a concentration camp with a note of admiration in his voice.


Randy M.
 
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

Cheaply produced and quite corny, but wow! What a movie!

Henry Fonda as the young Abraham Lincoln, trying his first murder case.

And that is, truly, the only problem with this movie: Henry Fonda so outshines and out-acts everyone one else in this movie, it's like he's all alone! Then again, since he was playing a "Larger-Than-Life" character, I suppose that works. The case - though it was secondary (as all else was) to Lincoln's character - reminded me of all the Perry Mason trials I'd seen! Can't help but wonder if this movie inspired the Mason writers?

I'd seen this movie many years ago, but couldn't remember a thing about it. So glad I chose to watch it again! I encourage everyone to watch it, not to learn anything about Lincoln (the story is a fictional one, about the real-life man), but to see why Henry Fonda was considered such a great actor, he got top billing even over the likes of John Wayne!

(No, sorry... John Wayne's not in this one.)
 
I admire Fonda a great deal. Have a number of his best-known films in my film library, but not "Young Mr Lincoln" but will definitely track it down.

My personal favourite probably goes against the grain (most peeps go for "12 Angry Men" or "Grapes of Wrath"), but his portrayal as the utterly despicable "Frank" in Sergio Leone's classic 1968 western "Once Upon A Time in the West".

It's not often Fonda plays against type, but to see him play the bad guy here was a mesmerising performance, especially with those hypnotic blue eyes of his.
 
The legend goes that Fonda appeared on the set of Once Upon a Time in the West with brown contact lens and Sergio Leone insisted he remove them.

Note, up until the 1950s, Fonda was probably a bigger star than Wayne. Wayne's introduction in 1929 was supposed to make him a star but the movie flopped. In 1939 Stagecoach started his comeback, but it was 1949's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Sands of Iwo Jima (nominated for the Academy Award for the latter) before he was recognized at all for his acting.

Have you seen The Lady Eve? It's one of Preston Sturges' best and a great reminder that Fonda was good at comedy, too.


Randy M.
 
Crimson Peak. It's the Big Mac of horror.

The ghost element is the meat on a dry bun - processed, plastic and predictable. The crime, well that's the garnish. It's always plain and ordinary despite it's name. The scarlet clay from which the movie derives its name is the ketchup. It's smothered on heavily to try and hide the reality that, like a burger, this movie is ultimately unsatisfying and formulaic.

Furthermore , it feels and looks like - and if it is meant to be - an homage to Hammer, it falls short of the mark because the audience has moved on since then and needs more than just a straight-forward carbon-copy of the past.

Do yourself a favour - watch Pan's Labyrinth instead.
 
Survivor (2015)

Milla Jovovich, Piers Brosnan, Dylan McDermott.

Great action movie! A counter-terrorism officer (played by Jovovich) from the USA has second thoughts about an already-approved visa application. When she holds things up, the bosses get upset. And when she survives a bomb blast, in which four of her buddy's die, but not her - the target, she becomes Suspect #1. With both the bad guys and the good guys trying to kill her, she must race after her suspects, while avoiding bullets and more explosions.

Nothing about this movie is unbelievable. One can perfectly understand both the political backlash from her action re the visa, and her subsequently becoming the #1 suspect. It takes an ally within the agency to get her clear back to NYC - not incompetence on the part of either British or American agents.

Of course Milla saves the day - that was a given from the start! But I really, really appreciated the intelligence of this movie - and the fact they didn't make Jovovich's character into an undefeatable fighting machine.

And Brosnon makes for such a great bad guy!
 
Harold Lloyd - Speedy 1928. If you haven't seen these late-20s silents, do yourself a favor. This one features the usual action and great characters and music. Babe Ruth appears as a victim of Lloyd's cabdriving skills. *****
For Heaven's Sake - the music is different than the zany version I once had on VHS, but it's still excellent. This one has laughs to burn, roaring twenties audiences roared at this one and so will you. *) *****
 
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