Monty Python and the Holy Grail
(★★★★★)
Clearly, there is nothing for me to say about Holy Grail. It’s the original Holy Grail of cinema (except much easier to find than the cup). But my analysis of it is that it’s just one of the best things ever made. Period. About at the top of my list of all-time favorite movies for 40+ years running
But this time, I actually got to see it in a cinema (which I may have done once back in the 80’s, but I’m not certain). But just one of the best films ever. Wonderful in every possible way.
on the other hand…
Saw II
(★★)
I saw the original once, maybe 15-20 years ago, and thought it was pretty annoying. Extremely unlikely torture setups, a trivial story, obnoxious music, and even more obnoxious, unbearable even, fast close-up editing… Making it feel like shallow and far overly too long Nu-metal video. I don’t remember much else about it, but I ended up with the same feeling about Saw II. That said, I liked the Shawnee Smith character alright.
Sinners
(★★★★★)
I went into this knowing three things about this: it was a period piece, it might involve vampires, and someone compared it to From Dusk Til Dawn.
But wow. What a movie. It’s nothing like Dune, but watching it I had the same “this is something unexpectedly wonderful” feeling that I had the first time I saw Dune.
In essence, taking place in 1932 Mississippi, twin brothers Smoke and Stack unexpectedly come back to town. Smoke and Stack had big reps before they left, then they went off to WWI and then spent years working with the Chicago mob. Now ready to come home they come back to this little sharecropper town (with a clear Klan backdrop) to start a juke joint.
Of course, two clearly well-to-do black men with big ideas showing up in a town like this, you just know that someone is going to cause trouble for them. And they seem well ready to face any kind of trouble that comes between them and their dream.
But, alas, the trouble that finds them may not be anything that they would have had in mind.
Featuring great everything. It’s a lengthy movie, but it kept me engaged with its well researched backdrop, the music is fantastic, Michel B Jordan does a great job playing Smoke and Stack, two much different characters, but with a very strong bond between them, Wunmi Mosaku steals a lot of the show as Annie, Smoke’s estranged wife and avowed spiritual wise woman.
And the antagonists (not the racists, the other antagonists) led by pleasantly singing and playing Remmick, are a much more affable and entertaining group of monsters than I’ve seen before.
Web of the Spider (1971)
(★★★)
The high point of Web of the Spider is, of course, Klaus Kinski as Edgar Allen Poe! Klaus’ unique sense of drama is pleasing overdone here in the beginning as Poe traipses through a graveyard and then entertains a group with his dramatic retellings! It then becomes a much different movie as one of the members of his audience, Lord Blackwood, challenges a skeptical American journalist to spend All Soul’s Eve in his abandoned castle, a task which, he claims, no one has ever survived. The movies loses some of its fun as we move from the entertainingness of Kinski to the journalist attempting to manage the castle, as he wavers between skepticism and confusion. But that segment is pretty entertaining anyway.
The Invisible Man (2020)
(★★★★)
I admit I hadn’t heard of this and so I somewhat assumed it would be a remake of The Invisible Man but, nope.
Instead we have the story of Ceceila, whose boyfriend is violent and controlling however, also much respected as a wealthy technology genius. One night she drugs him to make her big escape. But, even when removed from him, she still always feels like she is being watched. Then she hears that he has committed suicide. However, rather than feeling more free, she feels even more trapped.
It’s actually more similar to Gaslight than to The Invisible Man and I thought it was very engaging. Elizabeth Moss was, of course, great and I was on edge the entire time with the tension and the mystery of what the heck was actually going on.
Sorceress
(★★)
Well, this got off to a good start, then got kinda boring and never really picked up.
Another in the standard Swords and Sorcery “evil lord is pursuing a child he needs, but child is concealed from them and grows up to seek revenge” story. A bit of a switch here from the norm as the child isn’t a boy, rather is twin girls. But the movie ends up being not that interesting. And not sure at all why is it called Sorceress.
Highlights are the Catacomb scenes and the character Baldar, who I quite liked.
Unnoted: also, as part of the Catamount Horror series, I watched The Fly. For the fourth time, but the first time since its initial run in ’86. And rewatched Electric Dragon 80,000v… I really liked it the last time I watched it on 2007, but this time is just seemed kinda boring.
Blood Diner! A new (to me) favorite trashy movie!
(★★★)
Right off the bat this seems like a sequel to Blood Feast… Though, as it proceeds, that starts to seem too obvious.
Young Georgie and Mikey are home alone playing and practicing their black magic hypnotism when nutty Uncle Anwar shows up, butcher knife in hand, pursued by the police. He has just a few wise words for them before his well earned demise: don’t forget him, and remember everything he taught you.
Handy words because, see, Uncle Anwar wants to perform a feast ritual to bring back the goddess Sheetar! So, twenty years later, his loyal nephews dig him up, put his brain in a jar, and begin working on the Feast preparations via their vegetarian restaurant. For Sheetar, they also need to construct a body from the parts of immoral women (ala Frankenhooker), so between the body parts for Sheetar and the body parts for the feast, they need lots of body parts!
So, while it definitely has a Blood Feast spirit, it is far far more fun.
Featuring: beheadings, faux-nazis, tons of inappropriate dialogue, wrestling, nude aerobics and martial arts, driving over people, limbs being pulled off, eyeballs popping out, a fanged tummy, terrible dialogue (all of which looks like it was dubbed), terrible acting, projectile vomiting, great dialogue (“At least eight tongues must be set aside for proper aging”). It is terrible, but also endlessly entertaining.
I also rewatched:
The Void
(★★½)
I thought it was fine the first time through, but not quite as into it the second time around… The “creatures who walk on four legs” are interesting and the landscape in the Void is intriguing, but comes to no relevance.
Finally, Microwave Massacre
(★★½)
After months of talking, some of the moviegang got together at Thunderbase to watch Microwave Massacre, even though I tried dissuading them beforehand. See, even sight unseen, I became skeptical of the merits of this film.
However, upon watching it, its clear intention of being ridiculous won me over, to some extent. Though, I wouldn’t say that the action qualifies as a “microwave massacre” as no one gets massacred with a microwave…
See, Jackie Vernon (!?) is Donald, a construction worker who eats lunch every day with Roosevelt and Philip, two much younger and hipper workers, and complains about his wife’s attempts to get him to eat gourmet food.
Between his misplaced anger towards his wife, his frustration with his food, and watching a newscast on TV, he develops a new strategy…
Kill ladies and store them in the fridge to eat for lunch! For himself, and for his co-workers, who love it!
He becomes obsessed with it, finding more ladies to add to the fridge and even dreaming of a giant “lady and mayo sandwich!”
Anyway, it is basically terrible. The ideas behind it, the script, the acting… Roosevelt and Philip read their lines so badly it feels like it must be “bad acting on purpose” or maybe just really bad acting. A zillion juvenile jokes and ogles of ladies, ridiculous nudity scenes, terrible special effects, outstandingly bad 70’s decor… But it was fun to watch with a group and was very intentionally tongue-in-cheek
Thunder even seemed quite taken with it, at least at first…
In a much much different mode, we watched Escape at Dannemora.
(★★★★½)
This was really good! The story of two felons who convince a desperate-for-attention prison employee to help them escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in New York. Great directing, great acting! Del Toro and Paul Dano are very convincing in their roles, but I would have to say that Patricia Arquette and an unrecognizable Eric Lange steal the show with their “so good it doesn’t even feel like acting” performances as the woman brought into the scheme and her doting husband. A great script, a totally engrossing storyline, and the “too real for comfort” backdrop of the town. It just feels real and is extremely engrossing.
Demons
★★½
Demons starts off pretty boring like a lot of these 70’s/80’s Italian movies. Then, tack on the terrible score, cheap set design (the mannequin on the motorcycle is almost enough to get me to turn it off), and the terrible dubbing/dialogue where everything sounds like a stilted exclamation, and see what you get. The premise behind this is that some guy in a weird mask has handed out invitations to a free showing of an unnamed movies at the Metropol theater. However, once the movie that they are screening begins, it seems a bit better than the one that we were already watching.
It perks up a bit at the half hour mark when we get some decent metal and some pretty out there and ridiculous effects. But even here where over-the-top gore stuff is the happening left and right, much of the scenes here look hard to take seriously, like it’s intended to be a comedy, but isn’t funny.
It dies down again after that, consisting of a lot of the “waiting and running” scheme of stranded zombie fare, at this point the highlight of the movie is probably the character Tony.
Towards the end it perks up, with “Kathy’s back”, hearing Accept, and most of the sword scenes during Accept are pretty watchable.
The Thing (2011)
★★★½
Third time through this and I still find it interesting either as a prequel or a remake. I like it quite a bit, but mainly because it is just so similar to The Thing (1982), which will always be one of my favorite films. Is it lazy to basically remake it? It is a clever idea? Or, considering the nature of The Thing (itself) and the situation, was there really no other option as this is just how a The Thing scenario is going to play out? One thing that comes to mind is that it is definitely a prequel in the sense of “If you are only going to watch one of them, watch The Thing (1982). If you are going to watch both of them, make sure you watch 1982 before watching 2011!”.
So, besides all that, it’s very familiar feeling and I like the main character, and it’s fun enough that maybe on its own it would rate a 4-star, but the characters just aren’t the great classic characters that populate The Thing (1982), it isn’t very suspenseful (unlike The Thing 1982 which was quite suspenseful), and while some of the effects are good, they are CGI so clearly it’s going to pale in comparison than those brilliant and disturbing practical effects of The Thing (1982).
Candyman (2021)
★★★
I only just saw the original for the first time last year, so didn’t feel the need to a sequel. But I actually liked this more than I would have expected, except it kinda lost me at the last part, when some other sub-plot took over.
I quite enjoyed Tony Todd’s creepy Candyman character of Candyman (1992), I think that in Candyman (2021), the Candyman seemed more a phantom than a character, so that detracted from the story for me and maybe I would have liked it better if it had been a new story, not a Candyman redux. But I thought it was pretty engaging.
Blood Sabbath
(★★½)
Our guy, a Vietnam vet, wandering alone, cross country with a guitar, very 1970 style. Probably not thinking that anything odd is in his future, especially witches and murder!
What he mainly seems to encounter are extremely forward, free spirited ladies who he seems to find are more an annoyance than anything else. After fleeing like a lunatic from, of all people, Uschi Digard (and friends), he winds up as the obsession of the local witch queen (yes, Dyanne Thorne) who seems to command everyone around and is intent on possessing this fellow.
The lack of blood and the fact that the gaggle of young ladies under the witch queen’s control seem to spend most of their time without any clothes on, this would be much more accurately titled “Nude Sabbath”.
Featuring, as well as you can see through the haze of a worn out VHS (which is how this appears), quite bad acting and cheap production values (mainly shot outdoors), but it’s likeable enough and definitely should have a release better than than this shoddy looking DVD release…
The Shape of Water
(★★★★½)
This fabulous movie is a great romance, but also a great thriller as well.
The story of Elisa, who is mute due to something terrible done to her throat in her youth, but who otherwise seems to have a pleasantly peaceful and solitary, if a bit lonely, life living above a cool old movie theater in a grand old apartment with a nice big bathtub and a quirky and charming, in a way, artist neighbor, Giles.
She is also a janitor at a strange, and seemingly highly secure, government facility, the purpose of which isn’t exactly clear. But they do seem to store specimens there. When the noxious and evil security man, Colonel Strickland, shows up with an extra strange specimen, who he dragged out of a river in South America and seemingly tortured all the way here, Elisa sees something in the creature that no one else does.
But when the political machinations of the US Army and the Soviet Union seem to spell doom for this fascinating being, Elisa turns to the only friends she has, Giles and her co-worker Zelda, for help.
A great movie, beautiful to look at, involving, nerve-wracking (as Strickland is just absolutely terrible and driven to stay that way), but also exciting, charming, a bit fantastical, and fun!
Blacker Than the Night
(★★½)
Pro tip: If you have a bunch of snotty and entitled roommates and you inherit a grand old house from your aunt… Don’t move your roommates into the house with you.
Especially if: the made fun of the house, are rude to the housekeeper, if owning the house requires you to care for your aunt’s cat (and the roommates hate cats), and if they are just all around ungrateful…
Otherwise, as Ofelia finds out, her friends Aurora, Marta, and Pilar are bad roommates for the cat and, once the cat ends up dead, the deceased aunt has some issues with that.
Not particularly interesting or entertaining, but it was alright.
Rawhead Rex
(★★★)
A pub called The Tall Man with a creepy tall man sign. A strangely demonic stained glass window with burning red eyes in the old church. An ancient stone pillar sticking up out of a field.
Signs of the kind of spot in the Irish countryside where you should think “hmm, maybe I shouldn’t mess around here?” Especially that stone pillar…
But no, the farmer wants that pillar out of his way… So, even as weird steam starts coming out of the ground as he tries to pry the damn thing up, he just doesn’t stop…
A pretty entertaining tale of an ancient evil unleashed in a little village, featuring: priests gone bad, dismemberment, mind control, burning red eyes, and the demon (or is it a god) Rawhead Rex, which, while it is one of the better monster names out there, the appearance of it leaves much to be desired, especially since they have no qualms showing him clearly, and often.
Poison for the Fairies
(★★★)
After a murderous start, we hop to a school where the new girl, Flavia, meets up with Veronica, whose parents are dead and who says she has a spider at home, also named Flavia?
Flavia is from a skeptic family, educated folks who pride themselves on their modern rejection of old beliefs and who don’t believe in religion or spirits or anything. Veronica, however, lives with her grandmother and has a stuffed owl that tells her things at night and, in fact, says that she is actually an old witch!
Well, they kind of befriend each other and it’s all fun and games. Until Flavia asks Veronica if she can cast a spell so that she doesn’t have to take piano lessons anymore…
From that point, things starts getting south. Turns out that witches and fairies don’t get along and Veronica sets them off on a path top make poison for the fairies. She is rather intimidating and plotting and and Flavia doesn’t know what to do but gets dragged along for the ride.
It wasn’t super engaging, but I did appreciate how they basically never show the faces of adults, leaving it feel like it is really just about the kids. And I did love the ending.