What was the last movie you saw?

[M.P. VandenBerg]

Just watched "The House" on Netflix. It's three short stories in stop motion animation. It's cerebral and bizarre, yet mesmerizing. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. There's no real arc or pitch to the story, at least not that I noticed on one viewing, but packed with hidden metaphors and hints of ironic comedy. It's the most 'British' thing I've seen since old Wallace & Gromit.

I recommend it if you can't decide what to watch. It isn't terribly long and is very entertaining.

 

[Jeffbert]

Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century (Yeti – Il gigante del 20º secolo, 1977)

Deliriously silly film "inspired" by King Kong. Seems to have been badly cut from the Italian original, so the plot is a bit jumpy. Example: Movie starts with Rich Guy asking Science Guy to go on some kind of expedition. Science Guy says no. This immediately cuts to Science Guy leading a team of folks thawing the Yeti out of a block of ice with flamethrowers.

Anyway, de-iced but still frozen Yeti gets put into a thing like a telephone booth (remember those?) and carried up to ten thousand feet, hanging from a helicopter. Why? Because that's closer to its natural environment in the Himalayas. (Despite the fact that the entire movie is set in Canada.) Then they spray it with oxygen and warm water, which would seem to be the exact opposite of its natural environment, but what do I know.

Well, things play out as you'd expect. Rich Guy uses the revived Yeti (which, by the way, was about the size of a basketball player beneath the helicopter, but is the size of King Kong in the rest of the movie) for advertising purposes. This includes gasoline ads saying "Put a Yeti in your tank!" and, oddly, a bunch of fashion model types wearing identical T-shirts with blue hands over their breasts and reading "Kiss me Yeti" on the back.

Rich Guy's nubile granddaughter is our movie's Fay Wray. She's accompanied by her younger brother and a Lassie-type dog. Yes, the Yeti freaks out when flash bulbs go off, goes on a rampage, carries off the granddaughter, etc. There's a subplot involving Rich Guy's business rivals, who try to destroy Yeti.

Notable are the scenes where Yeti combs the granddaughter's hair with the skeleton of a giant fish, and where Yeti strangles one of the bad guys between two of its toes.

Goofy fun. Keep your ears open for the disco song about the Yeti.

I saw a really awful film about big foot about a year ago; cannot recall if I mentioned it here, though. Anyway, it was a kids' film, with the grouchy and mean adults out to shoot BF, but the kids wanted to protect him.

-just remembered MIGHTY JOE YOUNG! Similar plot elements with the ape condemned, etc., then saves kids in burning building.




SHAFT (1971) Perhaps one of the 1st blaxploitation films with content that was very controversial for the time, if for no other reason than Shaft in the shower with a White woman. Ben M or some other TCM host did the before & after, but did not mention that.

So, Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is a PI in NY City, & one of his friends is killed in an explosion at his business. Obviously a murder. But the victim's daughter is still there, as his heir, etc., & must be eliminated so the villain can get the money (which he owes to a mobster because he is a fool at gambling, etc.).

Immediately, I noticed the COCA-COLA logo all over the place. Car is on the street, passes a store window with it, turns a corner, & there it is again, goes down the street, and again, there is COKE. Made me recall something about product placement ads, the film maker gives a script to the advertiser, who decides in which scenes to put ads, etc., but this is way over the top!

 

[KGeo777]

SHAFT (1971)

It felt rushed in the last act. We never get to see the daughter with her father and for a movie about a private eye-he has to go to black panthers (?) for help. Would Sam Spade have done that?

I can't remember the sequels but I recently got the tv-series.

Women of Devil's Island also has a white woman romance with a character going by the name "the mulatto." Some scenes of it are in another language which suggests they were edited out of the English version.

Re: Coca-Cola ads---sometimes, in those days, you could see a Coke and Pepsi ad in the same scene.
There was a shot like that in BULLITT 1968.

 

[AE35Unit]

Immediately, I noticed the COCA-COLA logo all over the place. Car is on the street, passes a store window with it, turns a corner, & there it is again, goes down the street, and again, there is COKE. Made me recall something about product placement ads, the film maker gives a script to the advertiser, who decides in which scenes to put ads, etc., but this is way over the top!

Still, much better than the common practise of blurring out any product in a TV show, really silly!

 

[KGeo777]

Secret Mark of D'Artagnan 1962 -- There's a stunt man in this who falls from what looks like a 12 feet height and hits the ground without any kind of soft support. I guess his body was padded but it sure doesn't look like a trick. This one only has two Musketeers on a secret mission while Richelieu is watching from the wings. There's a rather gruesome bit of torture where the heroine of the story gets her hand crushed in a vice.

 

[KGeo777]

The Mad Butcher 1971- Black comedy with Victor Buono as a butcher who starts to use a new ingredient in his sausages that become popular around town. The best joke is the end title one that is on the US version.

 

[Rodders]

Alien: Covenant

I hadn’t seen it before and I went in with low expectations as i read a lot of bad things. I can see why people don’t like it, but I enjoyed it.

 

[hitmouse]

Rewatched When Harry Met Sally (1989) for the first time since it came out. Romcom is not my usual thing, but this is just delightful, clever, gentle comedy. Superb script.

Also rewatched A Fish Called Wanda (1988) again for the first time since its original release. I loved this the first time out but found the film surprisingly dated now. It is funny in places, and Kevin Kline is very good, but otherwise it is quite awkward and occasionally embarrassing. I guess British comedy has moved on a bit.

 

[paranoid marvin]

I like them all

Agreed. The Motion Picture does drag at times though...

Also rewatched A Fish Called Wanda (1988) again for the first time since its original release. I loved this the first time out but found the film surprisingly dated now. It is funny in places, and Kevin Kline is very good, but otherwise it is quite awkward and occasionally embarrassing. I guess British comedy has moved on a bit.

Have you seen the 'sequel' Dangerous Creatures?

Cleese is very hit and miss in films sans-Monty Python. I think my favourite is probably Clockwise with a character very reminiscent of the one he portrays in Fawlty Towers. Another very British comedy movie with some very funny moments (esp. when he really starts to lose like with the telephone box).

 

[JunkMonkey]

Star Trek III - The Search for Spock - which turned out to be even more boringer than I remembered.

Assassinaut - a group of four teenagers go to meet the president of earth on a space station orbiting an alien planet. There is an assassination attempt on the president. The space station is destroyed and the kids find themselves alone on the alien planet.
I'm sure this movie made sense to someone at some point in its development but they somehow forgot to let the audience in on the act. Technically it was good, the acting, for the most part decent, but the backstory was all over the place and guess what the implied lesbian (hard not to read the way she was playing the part as anything but) who fancied our lead turned out to be evil; then dead. I thought we were past that kind of sh*t. Some people on the IMDb, where is for the most part slated, were annoyed by the slow pace and long art house like staring into nowhere stuff. I didn't mind that. There was a strange vibe to the film that almost worked. And it would have worked if there had been a coherent plot - or a plot SO disjointed it would tease you into figuring it out - but as it was this is a film that does some arty disjointed stuff to get a bunch of kids into a (YAWN!) wandering around in the woods with a killer on the loose plot. It's so annoying when people go to all that effort and put all that energy into making something so fundamentally flawed in the script stage.

 

[KGeo777]

The Lost Empire 1984-- Jim Wynorski films are hard to summarize. They do surprise and entertain despite deficiencies. Silicone is not one of the things in short supply. Clothing on the other hand....

 

[AE35Unit]

Boringer? Is that a Vulcan word?

 

[paranoid marvin]

Star Trek III - The Search for Spock - which turned out to be even more boringer than I remembered.

Assassinaut - a group of four teenagers go to meet the president of earth on a space station orbiting an alien planet. There is an assassination attempt on the president. The space station is destroyed and the kids find themselves alone on the alien planet.
I'm sure this movie made sense to someone at some point in its development but they somehow forgot to let the audience in on the act. Technically it was good, the acting, for the most part decent, but the backstory was all over the place and guess what the implied lesbian (hard not to read the way she was playing the part as anything but) who fancied our lead turned out to be evil; then dead. I thought we were past that kind of sh*t. Some people on the IMDb, where is for the most part slated, were annoyed by the slow pace and long art house like staring into nowhere stuff. I didn't mind that. There was a strange vibe to the film that almost worked. And it would have worked if there had been a coherent plot - or a plot SO disjointed it would tease you into figuring it out - but as it was this is a film that does some arty disjointed stuff to get a bunch of kids into a (YAWN!) wandering around in the woods with a killer on the loose plot. It's so annoying when people go to all that effort and put all that energy into making something so fundamentally flawed in the script stage.

Star Trek II-IV is Paramount's attempt to do a trilogy like Star Wars. They would really have been better to have kept them all as independent movies of each other. Search for Spock felt much more like an episode of TOS, and whilst Wrath of Khan is a great movie, that really didn't. The trilogy of movies don't really sit well together imho, and after the intense action of WOK, SFS seems far too sedate.

 

[paranoid marvin]

The Happening

Quite some years since I've seen this movie, and I couldn't recall that there had been so much humour. It's watches like a low budget B movie (whether that is the intention or not), with invisible enemies, nonsensical plot and hammed-up acting. Whether this is intentional or not is open to question, although I would say that due to the quality of the man who wrote, produced and directed it that it is likely intentional.

This movie is to horror/thriller what San Andreas was to disaster movies; humorous, cheesy and never taking itself too seriously. Switch your brain off and it's a fun 90 minute homage to the B movies of the 50s and 60s.

 

[Jeffbert]

SHAFT'S BIG SCORE (1972) Not such a great follow-up to Shaft, but not bad, either.



THE MOB (1951) NOIR ALLEY coverage as usual very in-depth. Plain clothes cop Johnny Damico (Broderick Crawford) makes a major goof, and allows the killer, who had shown him a police badge, but whose face, Damico neglected to see, go without the usual scrutiny. So, officially, he is being disciplined, but unofficially, he goes under cover, seeking the killer.


So, Damico assumes the identity of Flynn, a dock worker from New Orleans, who has just arrived in NY City. Has trouble with fellow dock workers, but eventually is accepted. Meets Smoothie (Matt Crowley), the bartender, who seems to know what is really going on, as drunken men might talk a bit too freely with their bartender.

I am omitting the parts of Ernest Borgnine & Neville Brand, for the sake of brevity, but theirs were important.


What a twist! The ending had the killer revealed in a rather unusual way. The killer, known only as Mr. Blackie [I disagree with Wiki page, but whatever] wants to hire a hit man to kill Damico whose photo in the newspaper had been swapped with that of another man. Damico in the assumed role of Flynn, is to be the assassin of himself. But, in order to accept the job, he insists on meeting face to face with Mr. Blackie, who strangely agrees. To me, that seems very foolish of Blackie, but, what do I know.

Another film that I cannot recall seeing prior to this!

 

[JunkMonkey]

Star Trek II-IV is Paramount's attempt to do a trilogy like Star Wars. They would really have been better to have kept them all as independent movies of each other. Search for Spock felt much more like an episode of TOS, and whilst Wrath of Khan is a great movie, that really didn't. The trilogy of movies don't really sit well together imho, and after the intense action of WOK, SFS seems far too sedate.

I would hardly describe The Wrath of Khan as a 'great' movie. 'Acceptable' maybe. I mean given a choice between rescuing the last known print of The Wrath of Khan or the last known print of The Brady Bunch Movie I know that I'd pull The Brady Bunch Movie out of the inferno every time. It's a lot funnier and makes a lot more sense than any Star Trek movie ever did - I'm still puzzled as to why the ship searching for a lifeless planet at the start of WOK hadn't noticed there was an entire planet missing from the solar system. (Do planets really just 'blow up' like they do in ST movies? That's two exploding planets in two films - mind you, one had been contaminated with, "Protomatter. An unstable substance which every ethical scientist in the galaxy has denounced as dangerously unpredictable!" (All credit to Robin Curtis for getting that line out without giggling - I wonder how many takes it took?)

But tastes are different.

I remember Number 4 being acceptable too - though it does not quite conform to JunkMonkey's seventh rule of bad SF
"All bad SF films involving time travel will involve the time traveller only being able to travel to Los Angeles the year the film was made." in that they travel back in time to San Francisco the year the film was made.

 

[AE35Unit]

Never seen the brady bunch but I'm damn sure I would rescue that Star Trek movie

 

[Rodders]

I’d have to agree to disagree with you there, JunkMonkey. ST: TWoK is a great Movie in my opinion.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I think the difference between the two is that each time I watch The Brady Bunch movie I see more. More jokes, more clever moments of foreshadowing that I hadn't seen last time, more background detail, more moments of nice, in-character reaction acting. Each time I watch WOK I see less. Just actors going through the motions. Last time I watched WOK I spent a great chunk of the latter part of the film trying to work out why the brain-controlling parasite in Chekov's brain decide to quit his head when it did. Why? What was its motivation? It didn't have one. The scriptwriters couldn't think of any way of getting it out and they needed the character to still be alive for the next film... so it just came out. Lazy, sloppy, hand-wavey writing.

 

[Rodders]

Star Trek: Into Darkness was on the gogglebox just now.