What was the last movie you saw?

[Randy M.]

I've also seen that film. I recognised it from your description, but I wasn't aware of the P K Dick connection before.

There wasn't. I was just 'supposin' that if you matched him with John Huston you might get something like that movie.

 

[Dave]

Sorry, I missed the crucial "if" in your first sentence.

 

[Jeffbert]

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.

I remember that film, & one other, Genesis II, whose plot was so similar that I thought the two were one film.

 

[Jeffbert]

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.

I loved that Simpsons parody of the guy clinking the bottles together!
"Warriors, oh, Warriors, won't you come out to play?"


CAUSE FOR ALARM! (1951) NOIR ALLEY. The wife Ellen (Loretta Young) of a sickly & bedridden ex-Army Air Force flyer George Z. Jones (Barry Sullivan) too late realizes that her husband believes that she & his physician friend are attempting to murder him. Just that morning, he had written a damning letter of accusation to the district attorney, which she, ignorant of its contents, had given to the mailman. When she knows this, she goes all-out in an attempt to recover the letter. Talk about stress!

Do not want to spoil this one, as it is tense!

 

[AllanR]

Apparently The Warriors had a problem, it was popular among real gangs. They would come to a show, see each other and start fights.

Great movie to, I think it holds fairly well over time.

 

[KGeo777]

And wasn't the guy who shoots Cyrus "Sully" from COMMANDO? He was a funny guy so Matrix was going to kill him last.

Remember when he said he was going to kill him last?

He lied.

 

[Guttersnipe]

Just got home from the cinema. I saw Pig, starring Nicolas Cage. It was a wistful film about an ex-chef whose truffle-hunting pig gets stolen and who contends with a cut-throat society of high-class chefs. I would've enjoyed it more hadn't I been so tired.

 

[AllanR]

Rewatched: The Mystery of Rampo (1994) The setting is late 1920s Japan. A writer has his latest work censored before publication. As he burns his manuscript his publisher shows him the newspaper with a story mirroring the one he's burning.

 

[KGeo777]

I watched an obscurity on YouTube called SORORITY KILL, a 1974 shot on video tv-movie. Stars Nicholas Hammond, Joanna Cameron, Tony Geary as a psycho, and Larry Wilcox. As I watched, I began to feel as if the tv Spiderman, Isis, and Jon (from CHiPs) were trapped in an episode of Marry Hartman, Mary Hartman.

It felt more like a rehearsal of the stage play with bromides about class and rebellious youth.

ESCAPE TO VICTORY 1981 A favorite of mine. It is silly in a way but I think it is well-made. It's a funny thing--in Canada, professional soccer is unknown. No one watches it, talks about it. Hockey is still the most popular spectator sport--however, as kids, we played soccer more than anything else. One time these kids form Libya came to the school and one of them was so good he could kick a ball from one end of the field to the goal net at the other end! But professional soccer never caught on here--however, this movie was much talked about in the school yard.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Soylent Green

Haven't watched this movie, for many, many years. The only thing I remembered about it was the ending (which is amongst the most memorable), but what I had forgotten was that it starts off as a murder mystery set in a dystopian world (2022in actual fact). It's a great movie, and a fitting epitaph for Edward G Robinson, who once again proves what a fine actor he is in his final movie.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I watched an obscurity on YouTube called SORORITY KILL, a 1974 shot on video tv-movie. Stars Nicholas Hammond, Joanna Cameron, Tony Geary as a psycho, and Larry Wilcox. As I watched, I began to feel as if the tv Spiderman, Isis, and Jon (from CHiPs) were trapped in an episode of Marry Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Someone else has heard of Mary Hartman Mary Hartman! I am not alone!

 

[hitmouse]

Soylent Green

Haven't watched this movie, for many, many years. The only thing I remembered about it was the ending (which is amongst the most memorable), but what I had forgotten was that it starts off as a murder mystery set in a dystopian world (2022in actual fact). It's a great movie, and a fitting epitaph for Edward G Robinson, who once again proves what a fine actor he is in his final movie.

I reckon the look of the 2000AD character Robohunter is modelled on Charlton Heston’s character in Soylent Green.

 

[Jeffbert]

DRAGONWYCK (1946) A landowner Nicholas van Ryn (Vincent Price) has no son to inherit his wealth, etc. So, he tricks a young cousin Miranda Wells (Gene Tierney) into moving in, supposedly, to care for his daughter, but he has another purpose, as he intends to eliminate his now barren wife, & marry Her, hoping she can deliver the son he wants. This is the plot, though unknown to the viewer until nearly the 1/2 way point.



FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964) TCM ran both this & For a Few Dollars More a few nights ago. Ben M. noted the similarity to Kurosawa's Yojimbo, etc. which brought up memories of an Eastwood documentary that showed clips from both. If I could be any character from movies, this guy is my #1 choice. The man with no name. Yojimbo is #2. I was sorely disappointed to learn that fanning a pistol just does not work well, because it is soooo cool!

What can I say about this film, that has not already been said?

 

[Extollager]

Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, the theatrical version with the World War II references -- the gas rationing card on Marlowe's dashborad, the FDR portraits in the background, the references to "red points."

 

[Droflet]

The cat in the foreground? Hmm, just a little extra to the review.

 

[Jim Frost]

Not a movie, but I have been watching a Netflix series called Cursed, and also The Mandalorian.

 

[Droflet]

Hey Jim, welcome aboard. Why not tell us a bit about yourself on the introductions thread. Don't worry, we don't bite. Well, almost never.

 

[Guttersnipe]

For the first time:
Shazam! (2019)--finally

Again:
Us (2019)
It Follows (2014) (commentary on)

 

[Jeffbert]

VERTIGO (1958) Ben M., in his intro noted that this film had advanced in the ranks to the #1 spot, displacing Citizen Kane. What matters to me, is that it is very good, in fact, great. !st time I saw it, a crucial detail eluded me; not this time!



HELPING HANDS (1941) Spanky & Our Gang helping with the war effort. Cute.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Evil Brain From Outer Space 1964 - an utterly bewildering short (78 minute) film edited down from three other films with a total running time of 159 minutes (according, that is, to my friend Mr Wikipedia). Fever dream stuff. It's full of characters who appear from nowhere, disappear from the story without having done anything, and are then replaced by near-identical characters who don't do anything either while delivering lines like: "The suitcase contained nothing of importance... just a diseased guinea pig." They might have been able to retain some semblance of a story if they had cut out more of the establishing stuff - one sequence near the end a shows yet another a voice-over introduced ("Who the hell is THIS?!) character arriving to deliver something. It takes several shots of him walking through trees, walking up a garden path, ringing a doorbell, entering a laboratory before he hands over some documents to yet another ("Who the hell is THIS?!) character we've never met before who says he doesn't need them. Well that was a pointless minute of screen time. Somewhere else in the film our hero infiltrates the villains' lair in a jump cut.