Eaten Alive
(★★★)
Well, this was a hoot! A bit of a sleezy hoot… Not sure how I haven’t seen this before, but my suspicion is that whenever I came across it, I confused it with a different movie (Eaten Alive!) that was of a genre I dislike (being jungle cannibal movies). This was much more my style! Dark and foggy rural Texas beats jungles every time!
In one of those Texas towns that doesn’t seem to include anything aside from a house of ill-repute and a motel/zoo run by a creepy weirdo, a woman looking for shelter brings us to that awful hotel. A hotel that looks like it probably hasn’t had an overnight guest in years but, suddenly, this night, it is beset upon by many guests, much to the delight of the crocodile that lurks right beyond the chain-link fence next to the porch.
The hotel proprietor doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with these guests, but all the action gets his creepy going full swing. How creepy is he? Well, I did find many of the mutterings of Judd (the hotelier/zookeeper) to be reminiscent of watching Jim Siedow’s character mutter his way through chainsaw (but don’t get excited, this is certainly no Texas Chain Saw Massacre), but much more muttery, like he hasn’t spoken to a person in years.
It’s kind of mediocre, I suppose, but I still found the creepiness of the hotels, that fact that it was always dark and foggy, the cheap creepiness, and rather harshness of it (neither monkeys, children, or pets are safe from the brutality here) kind of charming (not sure what word to use for unsavory and ugly charm) and am glad to have discovered it.
The Devils
(★★★★)
Oliver Reed eats up the screen, and everything else, in this tawdry and blasphemous tale about a powerful priest who inspires passion in ladies all around and, despite his holy calling, is more than willing to engage with that inspiration (then toss them to the side). Of course, he is also powerful and fiercely independent, which turns other powerful men against him.
While his behavior does give him a bad reputation, it becomes more troublesome when the nuns spawn deceit and deviousness after the priest denies the mother superior.
While Reed is the clear lightning rod of this tale, the most magnetic performance is Vanessa Redgrave as the mother superior driven to the brink by the emotions she has writhing around in her for the priest, as her hallucinations and machinations unleash an unholy path.
And that’s just the first half! Once the witch-hunter, Father Barre (the great Michael Gothard), shows up, it turns into an extended manic 1970’s rock opera orgy of nudity, crucifixes, blasphemy, torture, and lunacy! Especially since my cruddy looking old DVD does include the outrageous, and famously banned (until the BFI/Warner restoration just this month), “Rape of Christ” scene.
Of course, while Catholicism dominates every scene of the movie, it isn’t religious at all. It’s a political movie about the awful lengths that people will go to for their own power and revenge. The priest, the nun, and the Cardinal are all megalomaniac people, twisting around religion to poison, control, and abuse those around them.
Black Mountain Side
(★★★½)
Total coincidence that I happened to watch another supernatural wintery “people should stop messing with things” movie after finishing The Last Winter, as this felt thematically like a combination of The Last Winter and The Thing.
Like those two, the story of a group of people stuck isolated at a workcamp (this one is an archeological dig, which was a pretty interesting angle), who dig something up and then lose contact with their support people as weird stuff starts to happen and suddenly no one trusts anyone and tempers heat up as the temperature goes down.
That said, for the basic similarities between these movies, they all feel totally different and I like all of them. Of course The Thing is one of the great films ever, so it can’t really be a good comparison, but between The Last Winter and Black Mountain Side, I think Black Mountain was more entertaining and it gains points because while I thought that the supernatural aspect in both of them was a bit corny, in Black Mountain I think it made up for it at the end, while in The Last Winter it just got cornier and ruined a calmingly bleak sequence.
The Last Winter
(★★★½)
Third time through and I still like it. It’s still annoying to watch Perlman be the “dumbass dude who endangers everyone by his inability to listen to people” and the supernatural angle going from interesting to corny is frustrating. But it’s a convincing drama, the play between the “God wants us to drill for oil!” side and the “but dude, the environment! Don’t melt the permafrost!” side. And it’s nice to see James Legros in stuff, and I do like the movie, and the end itself is good.
Blood Car
(★★★)
Poor Archie. Mild mannered vegan kindergarten teacher in a post-gas world. But he dreams of improving the world by finding an alternate fuel source for cars! From wheatgrass!
Stuck between the charming lady at the vegan stand (“Veg Table”) and the um, spicy(?), meat gal across the way at the meat stand (“Meat”), he strives to perfect his wheatgrass engine, but somehow he can’t seem to get wheatgrass to work!
But, through blood, sweat, and tears, he stumbles on a concoction that works to power his car! Much to the delight of the Meat lady, whose passions get very inspired by driving in a car!
But, alas, wheatgrass maybe wasn’t the solution, which leads to some difficult philosophical moments for Archie.
Kind of a slow, quiet, and unpopulated movie which I found pleasant to watch.
Ah, the Butthole Surfers. Technically my 11th most listened to band of the last 18 years… But oh so much more than that.
In my teens, I was a metal guy… I primarily listed to metal (mainly Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate, Saxon) and Hard Rock (mainly AC/DC, Van Halen, Def Leppard). But by 1983-85 all of those band’s started to suck, releasing lame album in attempts to become more commercial (well, not Mercyful Fate) and I needed a new musical direction. Cut to a fateful trip to our beachhouse with my sister and her “punk rock” boyfriend. The hearing of one song specifically led me down a whole new musical direction. Not only in terms of the style of music that I listened to, but also in terms of having “expectations of intent” in terms of what I think that musician’s should be expected to uphold. The Surfers provided a “purity” of non-commercial “we’re doing just what the hell we want, just because we want to” ethic that I have generally looked for ever since.
Read more »
I was a bit skeptical about this one…
The Dracula Saga
(★★★½)
Berta (pregnant with her first child) and her husband Hans are heading back to Berta’s homeland to visit her grandfather. When they get to the area, they find that the locals are full of superstitions and maybe even some concerns about her grandfather’s castle. Then, while on a walk, they find a wounded and bloodied young gal in the forest! Once the villagers bring the girl in to examine her, more crazy superstitious talk happens, especially from the priest who’s all up in arms about evil women and temptation!
Finally, they get the ride up to the castle! But, alas, it turns out that her grandfather isn’t just any grandfather… He happens to be Count Dracula! And he is very quite interested in the baby-to-come.
This was actually a pretty interesting take on the Dracula story, taking many of the standard elements (nervous superstitious villagers, Dracula and his three ladies, the crypt at the castle, gypsies, a young and naive couple), but put a bit of a different twist on the story. I quite liked it, though the narration at the beginning and the end was a bit awkward, and the final scene could have been skipped.
Cure
(★★★)
Another in the “how have I never seen this?” category. I got really into Japanese movies in the late 90’s and I think that this was the only “classic” from that period that I didn’t see. It was always on my radar, but I guess I was too focused on Miike, Takeshi Kitano, and Kinji Fukasaku to see a wider selection.
The story of a detective who is hunting a series of seemingly unrelated deaths that, may somehow be a serial killer, Cure has a pretty interesting idea behind it, and it definitely was suspenseful, but it didn’t really grab me otherwise.
Old People
(★★★)
This was pretty fun! A woman and her kids return to her home town for her sisters wedding. Which is a fabulous affair, of course. But most of the old folks in town seem bitter at their treatment at the old folks home and feel ignored. Especially with the exciting wedding party going on and, well, they decide to do something about it. Violent something. A lot of violent something…
I guess we will see if it’s true that old age and treachery will beat youth and exuberance…
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(★★★★★)
I still can’t believe that they made any sequels or remakes of this! A perfect classic.
If there is a movie that I can say, more than any others, that any attempts to remake or follow it up only serve to undermine and disrespect the historical majesty of the original, this would be the top of the list. While, yes, I did find part 2 to be humorous, as with The Evil Dead, making a funny and overdone sequel just kind of damages and dilutes the greatness of the original.
Alita: Battle Angel
(★★★½)
This was pretty fun. I hadn’t heard of it so I had no idea what to expect, aside from that it starred Rosa Salazar who was my favorite character in the Maze Runner movies.
This story of the wealthy in their floating city versus the poor down below, is always a fun dynamic, And Alita is a pretty badass character and fun to watch! Except, of course, for the weirdness of combining CGI people with real people… That is very distracting and rather unpleasant to look at.
Oh and, this week we also watched The Apartment twice. Once at home and once in the theater. But re-watches of that classic are nothing new…
Hush
(★★★)
I’m a bit torn between this. It’s certainly suspenseful and the deafness of the protagonist is put to interesting effect, but the whole masked killer outside the window shtick is something that I’m a bit tired off (one of the best ways to disinterest me in a movie is to have the promotional material show the killer in a mask or a costume). And, after watching so many movies, It’s hard to keep a suspension of disbelief when people act like it’s perfectly safe and normal to put themselves into situations that are so clearly (in the movie world anyway) terrible ideas.
That said, it certainly kept me on my toes and was fun to watch.
Vertigo…
(★★★★½)
For the millionth time…
While I do love this movie just in general, and especially the character of Midge… My favorite bit is Henry Jones as the coroner. His snipes at Scotty are just great, especially since Scotty becomes such a creepy weirdo after the inquest.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(★★★★½)
I don’t know when I first saw this… I would guess on TV in the 70’s… But, back then, some of it really stuck with me and I’ve had bits of it that I have thought about recurringly over the years. I assume I’ve seen it since then? But, even so, it’s been too long to have much of a firm memory beyond the general idea and those memorable scenes, so it was great to rewatch it!
In Close Encounters, we follow two stories: firstly, vehicles that disappeared years ago in the Bermuda Triangle are turning up, crew-less, and un-aged, in weird areas of the world. Most odd would be the ship Cotopaxi, which vanished 50 years early in the Atlantic, but turns up now in the sands of the Gobi desert. A team of scientists led by Francois Truffaut (??) and Bob Balaban are chasing these weird occurrences down.
At the same time, weird power issues start occurring in Indiana and some people start becoming fixated on subliminal images or feelings that they are having. Most notably would be Roy Neary. This is a great performance by Richard Dreyfus; watching his weird fixation in piling things into pillars is really pretty interesting, and, once he gets into his “move the garden indoors”, and you see how much he is freaking out his family, you really have to wonder just how far gone he is.
Of course, these threads come together at a very exciting moment!
Honestly, the big UFO reveal is possibly just about the best reveal of anything I’ve seen in a movie. It seems so much different then other alien contact things I’ve seen, and the combination of audio and visual and the sense of amazement really makes it something. Even 48 years later it still resonates well and looks great.
Poltergeist
(★★★★)
Haven’t seen this in 20 years but I think it’s held up pretty good. Especially since I got to see it in a theater this time!
I still like the cast, the TV screen, the whole haunted house bit (which usually is not a genre I like) I think is interestingly done, the build-up to it (from fun with spirits to waaay not fun) is great, and Tangina (the medium) is still one of my all-time favorite movie characters.