Edit: Aw shiet, top of page. PLEASE DISPERSE. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
Aliens
Spoiler
Even better effects this time round, with clinically executed shot timings and practical work, and all-round impressive finale. The industrial brutality of the power loader was just the ticket for the genre - far too unwieldy to be an easy power-fantasy win, but enough blunt force to do the job.
And who'd have thought that Hicks' jarhead helmet was surpressing his Samsonesque haircut - and corresponding power level - all along
It's at this point that I realize I've already seen Ali3n one and a half times by way of late-night reruns in times long past, so I think it best to quit while I'm ahead and live content in the knowledge that they only ever made two films.
That takes me back to post-LAN movie night, rewatching Event Horizon on an equally-packed couch and feeling adjacent newcomer Jimmy silently go statue-rigid at the first snifter of ambient scare. An odd fellow - mercifully, his brand of weird was less horrifying metamorphasis and more gas masked industro-kink.BIL wrote:Perhaps the best film to rewatch with newcomers ever. A treasured memory is my old seadog uncle's muttered "Jesus! What a situation!" in the aftermath of the Macready Method's calamitous - yet vindicated! - first run. "Cut me loose God damn it!"
(speaking of a certain hated piece of furniture - now you've seen the film, please enjoy The Musical, if you haven't already! masterful!)
And oh lord - the Sinatraesque schmuzak transforming MacReady's shaky flashlight into a broadway spotlight. That's profound
Sounds like you lived in interesting times! My grey-and-green analog was a mercifully brief career in the cheese industry, cramming into a clown car of spliff-toting polish workers at the crack of dawn and beetling off to a remote factory for a sentence scraping away in the mold room - the day's stinking monotony broken by an agonized KURWA MAĆ! signaling the union of knife and hand.BIL wrote:We had a particularly brutal storm once, in our neck of the Caribbean; we lads volunteered to scavenge our BTFOd docks for foodstuffs. You know, to bolster our resumes! I mean the local foodbanks! All going well, with one hulking container after another yielding non-perishable bounties! Aaand then, we opened what had been a mains-powered refrigerated container (what could go wrong lmao) full of rotten meat (aieee!). Instantaneous pratfalling hand-on-stove retreat is all I recall. >w<
By Crom, the smell worse yet it follows you home, needing to be exorcised with sanctified cleaning products like some sort of fetid ghast. Never trust a temp agency.
It was for the greater good and I can relate to that - gore as straight-faced demonstration can dip below a certain line where the means become questionable relative the to effect they intend to evoke.BIL wrote:I must confess to a spot of defintional wangling there; I was worried you'd soon find the film spoiled, with its latter-day ubiquity In the word's true sense of "outrageously distorted figures," The Thing is indeed A1, exemplary. But I genuinely distinguish artful body/xenohorrors ala Cronenberg/Carpenter, where the grisly is more in service of the uncanny, or eerie, or weird. More ineffable than flat F-this.
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Not to get preachy, just not my bag. Also not to say I can't enjoy films in those genres - but again, my favourites again tend to involve a bit more than meatspace. Argento's Tenebrae, for example... some horrendously cruel slaughters in that one, but the film's real forte is a story so floridly insane, I'm kinda cracking up just recalling it (it's nuts, and excellent! killer soundtrack too).
Tenebrae looks darkly intriguing, I see it wears the UK's 80s-prestigious 'video nasty' honour badge! The blurb sounds as wild as you say, especially the parts about metafiction. I've been a right sucker for that since reading King's Dark Tower cycle, though that may be a way more literal form of it.
And done - I'm fresh away from the movie couch and feel that recommendation was as precision a tactical strike as Roddy's castingBIL wrote:Investigate They Live post-haste! A film for all seasons, with David opposite an astonishingly capable (or maybe just expertly-deployed?) ROWDEH Roddy Piper. You may be aware of its legendary Alley Fight - a microcosmic masterpiece of cinema, all on its own - but it's even better in full rueful context!
Spoiler
Love the way the horror stuff is all shot on old monochrome film stock with borderline-goofy props straight out of 20s sci-fi - not only a shrewd production choice, but perhaps also an extra potent bit of seasoning for the broader theme of established control
And I'd seen the No-DQ Loser Eats Bin match as a wrestling gaiden piece in my earliest days of kayfabe-awareness, but a decade more experience in battle, life and wrestling make the proper context all the better. A real rollercoaster of prideful cheap shots, signature moves, weapons from the apron, and the brief sense of it all being a big playfight when Roddy let out that laugh. Perfect aftermath as well - fat lips and natty shades all round.
I found myself actively questioning how things would end given the familar hopeless scale of the problem, but it did not disappoint - the grin persists five meticulously-edited paragraphs later. Filmmakers like George Romero and John Carpenter really need to start showing some restraint