What was the last movie you saw?

Daughters of Satan (1972)

A pre-Magnum Tom Selleck stars as an art dealer in the Philippines in this fairly typical witchcraft flick. Starts with some cultists watching their high priestess torturing a woman. This might be a scary scene, if it were not for the really goofy red-and-purple leotard the priestess is wearing. The plot gets going when Selleck buys a lousy painting of three witches being burnt at the stake. One looks exactly like his wife. There's also a dog in the painting. When it vanishes from the painting, it shows up for real. One of the witches disappears from the painting, and her double shows up to be their housekeeper/cook. By now you've figured out that Selleck is the descendent of a witch-burner, and that the whole thing is revenge-by-reincarnation story. There's a double twist ending. Take out the gratuitous nudity and some of the torture, and you've have a made-for-TV fright film. Moves pretty slowly, and only comes to life when we get something nutty like the leotard-clad priestess or the shirtless mortician who takes glamour photos of bodies (and who has nothing to do with the plot.)
 
Beyond Evil (1980)

Unexciting supernatural shocker. A couple move into a haunted house in the Philippines. The witch who lived there tries to possess the body of the wife. Deaths and poor special effects follow. There's more to the plot, but not much worth saying about it. Some scenes look they might have come out of a video game of the time (i.e. green laser-like lights coming out of the possessed woman's eyes.)
 
Guns Akimbo - a part time internet Troll hunter played by Daniel Radcliffe goes all Harry Shotter when he gets drawn into a deadly real life first person shooter. Handguns are nailed to his hands which results in several amusing practical problems. A fun, stylish high octane actioner that is as daft as it sounds.
 
Horizons West - a routine, by the numbers Western with Robert Ryan, Rock Hudson, and other well kent faces I can't put a name to, reciting dialogue they had probably delivered a hundred times before in a hundred near identical movies. Even at 85 minutes it felt very long. There was one moment though when the film lifted itself out of the purely routine. The town's folk have finally gotten fed up with nasty Robert Ryan character's megalomanic law-breaking empire-building which has culminated in the gunning down of the well loved mayor. The corrupt judge refuses to issue a warrant. Someone shouts, "What are we waiting for?" and everyone is marching up the street. A couple of citizens come out of a stables rope in hand. As the lynch mob marches towards the villain's office they pass three guys loading sacks onto a wagon outside a store. Three black guys. The movie stops for a moment to frame these guys pause and watch the mob go past, and mutter something to each other - then it's back to the plot. For a moment the movie looked like it was making some social comment and being interesting. Just for a few seconds.
 
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PLANET EARTH 1974 - Pilot for a Gene Roddenberry series which recycles ideas from Star Trek and they would turn up in later Roddenberry projects as well (like the lapel badge that is a communication device).
John Saxon is a Buck Rogers/Kirk--20th century man resurrected in the year 2133. He's head of a science team that explores the strange new worlds of Earth in the future, ten years from now. There's a character portrayed by Ted Cassidy which I think would become Worf in Star Trek the Next Generation. The doctor has the telepathic powers of Spock.

A mutant gang appears which reminds one of Mad Max.
But the plot focuses on a village where women control men with a drug and Saxon has to infiltrate it to find a missing crewman.
It's amusing, often unintentionally. It plays like a really really hokey episode of Star Trek.
The male slaves are called "dinks" which inspires many a laugh as they use it often: "you are a dink," "I am a dink," etc.
I admire the actors for their ability to keep straight faces.



It lacks interesting visual design--the big set is the tunnel ship they use to travel around the planet but it only looks cool from the outside.
 

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Parson said:
and the very laudable moral that when family of any sort comes together everyone benefits.
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JunkMonkey said:
Personally I find that a very dubious moral message to send out as the solution to all ills given the vast number of child abuse cases, incest, and violence against women and older members of society that were kept hidden by the families concerned 'sticking together'.
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I note that you say "the solution to all ills," which I didn't mean to imply and is a very false conclusion.

But I still think the family unit is the place where one is most likely to find indefatigable advocates, people willing to put their life on the line, and people who will give every penny they have to save one of their own. Are there exceptions? Absolutely yes. But I surely wouldn't want a kid's movie with the moral, "Don't trust anyone" or "Love is for suckers." etc. like all too many adult movies seem to imply.
 
Project Moonbase (1953)

This modest little space movie started life as an episode of an unsold TV series, which explains why much of it looks so cheap. Robert A. Heinlein is credited as co-writer, and some of that shows through in the finished product. The "enemies of freedom" substitute a double for some kind of science type who is going to accompany a couple of astronauts on a trip to an orbiting space station, and then around the Moon to photograph the side hidden from Earth. The double's mission is to destroy the space station, either by using the nuclear bombs aboard it (!) or by ramming the spaceship into it. In command of the vessel is our heroine, Colonel Briteis, the first person to go into orbit. (Everybody calls her "Bright Eyes," which sounds like a Heinleinism to me.) This is the first hint of the movie's odd combination of feminism and misogyny. The second hint is a comedy relief reporter named Polly Prattles (!) who is the butt of a lot of weightlessness jokes. (She's on the large size, you see.) There's a lot of bickering between the cute-as-a-button Bright Eyes and her manly co-pilot, but don't worry; they'll fall for each other by the end. The spy's mission is foiled, and our happy couple has to make an emergency landing on the Moon. Because they'll be together on the Moon for some time without a chaperone, they have to get married (!) and have the groom get a promotion, so he'll outrank his wife. Our big twist ending is that the President of the United States is a woman. I presume that Heinlein was responsible for some of the film's more interesting and plausible touches, such as the magnetic boots folks wear on the space station to get around, walking upside down to each other if they have to. (PLEASE DO NOT WALK ON THE WALLS read the signs aboard the space station.) Instead of typical spacesuits, the astronauts were shorts, t-shirts, and goofy-looking skullcaps. Some of the special effects are really cheap, but some of the Moon stuff looks pretty decent for the time. The love story is childish, and most of the rest of the plot is dreary.
 
Welcome to Blood City (1977)



Science fiction/Western hybrid that manages to be interesting despite a low budget and a muddled plot. Four men and a woman, all dressed in drab gray outfits, find themselves in the desert, with no memory of who they are or how they got there. Each has a card stating that that he or she has killed a certain number of people. (This is the first of many confusing details, as this never comes up again and has nothing to do with the plot.) They wander until they get to an Western town, where the local lawman (Jack Palance) tells them the rules. They can agree to work as slaves, and thus be safe from being killed, or they can take a big chance and wander off unarmed and try to kill a "citizen" in a fair fight, thus becoming a citizen as well. The one woman gets locked up in the jail until the time of "the choosing," when the slaves will be auctioned off, to protect her from the lustful menfolk. Our hero (Keir Dullea) manages to become a citizen when a shotgun appears out of nowhere as he's about to be gunned down, so he grabs it and kills his attacker. How did that happen? Well, we already know this whole thing is just a virtual reality simulation, and one of the folks monitoring it (Samantha Eggar) has taken an interest in him, so she's inserted herself into the simulation to help him. The citizens wear black gunfighter outfits with red crosses on back and front. There are also bodyguards who work for the citizens, as well as outlaws, dance hall girls, etc. A citizen who wins twenty fights becomes "immortal" and is not allowed to be killed. Much of the plot involves Dullea trying to prevent the woman from being sold to a guy, and Eggar interfering with what's going on. It's some kind of project to find out who would be an effective military leader in some kind of future war. The more I think about it, the less likely this seems, particularly given the way Eggar is allowed to mess around with the simulation as she likes. Still, it held my interest. Palance gives an interesting performance.
 
Cowboy Bebop The Movie

Japanese animated film adapted from the classic anime series of the same name, takes place somewhere between the 23rd and 24th episode of the 26 episode animated show. The Cowboy Bebop is a spaceship and the story centres around its rag tag group of inhabitants namely, Spike, Jet, Faye, Ed and Eine (the dog) they are a crew of bounty hunters thrown together mostly through events throughout the series. The movie felt like an episode that had been stretched into a full length film. I didn't enjoy it half as much as the series which I absolutely loved. I would reccomend to anyone thinking about watching this not to, just watch the series instead. It's on youtube.

If you enjoy Cowboy Bebop, try Samurai Champloo next. They are by the same producer and both fantastic examples of the genre.
 
Lovers and Lollipops (1956)

Early example of New Wave/naturalism/cinema veritie/minimalism/whatever. In other words, stuff like handheld cameras, location shooting, improvised dialogue, non-professional actors, etc. The story is simple enough, dealing with the relationships among a widow, her new boyfriend, and her young daughter. The kid's behavior, neither too good nor too bratty, seems very real. Unfortunately, the music on the soundtrack is often intrusive, and the film works best when there isn't any. I imagine many people would consider this the most boring thing ever seen, but I thought it was a pleasant enough slice of life. If nothing else, it's a love letter to New York City of the time.
 
The Warriors [1979]
The plot is simple...
Nine gang members are caught a long way behind enemy lines when all the gangs in the city are after them.
Will any of them get home alive and before dawn?
I can see why this film made people nervous but after forty years, things have moved on.
Now it feels more like a fable or modern-day [ish] saga.
It isn't very violent by today's standards, but the repeatedly used epithets and attitudes towards women are of their time and might offend some. But this goes along with the characters in the story. These are not nice polite children, These are the fabled Warriors of CI!
It explicitly states that the tale is based in ancient Greek history [Anabasis by Xenophon], where legend and reality are sometimes the same things. This is made more so by the use of comic style intertitles to link the plot together. While it looks like cinéma vérité, it isn't. It is highly stylised. A hint of what high concept films of the eighties might be.
This version was Walter Hill's definitive cut of the film.
In the mid-80s I remember seeing another version of this film in a cinema late one night and then having to walk home down what seemed very dark dangerous streets of SW London. It might not have been 30 miles to Coney Island but the twenty-minute walk seemed to last forever.
 
Freaky (2020) dir. Christopher Landon; starring Vince Vaughn, Katheryne Newton, Celeste O'Connor

I wanted to like this one, a comedy slasher movie playing off Freaky Friday, in which the Butcher (Vaughn) swaps bodies with Millie (Newton). And I do like it with fairly large reservations, the main one being that the trailers and advertising I saw focused on the comedy and didn't really prepare the audience for the grossness of the slasher side of the movie.

Freaky pays homage to various slasher movie scenes/ideas (or lack of them)/tropes, a reasonably subtle nod to Halloween, a less subtle nod to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and opens with a nod to Scream, going a bit over-the-top with establishing the Butcher as real, not just local legend, and a killing machine. This also establishes that the family he comes in contact with later is in danger.

What mitigates the bait'n'switch advertising somewhat is that Vince Vaughn seems to be having fun, and for some reason Vince Vaughn enjoying his role is enjoyable to watch. Also, Katheryne Newton. Newton may be one of the hottest young stars around after appearing in Big Little Lies, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Blockers; I remember her from a recurring role in Supernatural, and she was always enjoyable in that. She's credible as Millie, the youngest daughter of a widowed mother, and plays shy and passive without overdoing it. When she takes on the killer spirit Vaughn showed, she's also credible as a ruthless, homicidal maniac who is also sly and very willing to take advantage of his new situation. She takes over the screen when she's on it, no easy feat going against Vaughn.

So, if you don't mind a few gory scenes, it's worth a watch, especially if you like seeing the "final girl" trope played on. If you don't like gory slasher movies, scenes in this may appall you, and especially if you're a fan of Alan Ruck. Poor Alan, this is a long way away from Farris Buehler's Day Off.
 
The Call of Cthulhu I saw years ago but it leaves an impression. One of the better fan film projects out there.

The Baseball Furies in the Warriors also leave an impression. Someone said that one Halloween he and friends dressed up as them and ran through a park.
 
All the Colors of the Dark (Tutti i colori del buio, 1972)

Ever wonder what Rosemary's Baby might have been like if it had been a giallo? This Spanish/Italian coproduction goes a long way to answering that question. After a lovely title sequence, which just shows a scene of nature as the sun goes down, we get a truly surreal dream sequence. It seems our long-suffering protagonist is suffering from recurring nightmares. That's hardly surprising, given the fact that her mother was murdered when she was a child, and she recently suffered a miscarriage after an automobile accident. The fellow to whom she is all but married gives her vitamins in an attempt to cure her. (These are dissolving tablets that turn the water bright blue. Visually interesting, but not relevant to the plot.) Her sister takes her to the kindly psychiatrist for whom she works. A new neighbor has a more extreme suggestion; take part in a Black Mass. As this involves drinking the blood of a freshly killed dog, then participating in an orgy, you wouldn't think this would be the most psychological healthy form of therapy, but it seems to help. Meanwhile, the killer with unnaturally pale blue eyes with white streaks (obviously contact lenses, but, again, visually impressive) whom she sees in her nightmares stalks her in real life. When she passively takes part in the killing of a cult member, things get way out of control. The film creates a constant sense of paranoia, and if the plot doesn't always make sense, that's par for the genre. Recommended for fans of Euroshockers.
 
Oh yeah I have seen that giallo. One I really like for paranoid cult aspects was Short Night of the Glass Dolls. They sure had inventive names.

I re-watched a Poliziotteschi that I liked a lot. THE BIG RACKET 1976 - A cop faces an epidemic of crime which causes him to lose his job so he forms a vigilante team comprised of those harmed by the same criminals. They include a mob hit man, vengeful skeet shooter, and a nighclub owner with a steel neck brace that renders him bulletproof!
 
Lightning Bolt (Operazione Goldman, 1966)

Eurospy flick that's more blatant a Bond imitation than some, from the title, in either language (Thunderball and Goldfinger allusions) to the plot. Our laid-back pseudo-007 narrates much of the film, so you can tell what's going on. It seems somebody is altering the trajectory of American rockets, so they have to be blown up, at two million bucks each. Somehow the rocket folks detect radiation from "the bottom of the sea" (which isn't very far down at all) so they send Science Guy and a diver in a small boat to check it out, which seems like a pretty cheap way to go about it. A spherical gizmo underwater grabs the diver with its metal claws, blows up the boat, and somehow the bad guys capture Science Guy. The boringly named Federal Security Investigation Commission sends their best agents. Unexpectedly, the leader is a woman. Predictably, they call her "Agent 36-22-36." Her underling is our movie's hero, and does most of the spy stuff. His gimmick is that the government gave him unlimited funds to pretend to be a millionaire playboy while on the case. Cue the usual fights, captures and escapes, etc. It all leads up to the big battle with the minions of the evil madman in his underwater headquarters. I never figured out why one of the Bad Girls uses a pistol that shoots acid instead of bullets. It's pretty typical stuff.
 
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