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Hausu is such an amazing film. Kind of like a drunk Dario Argento in thrall to pop culture. I could watch it 10000 times over and I probably will.

Recently I've watched Tuff Turf (hilariously uneven James Spader vehicle with a bizzarely amazing soundtrack), Revenge of the Nerds (unsettlingly offensive non-comedy with a pretty good soundtrack), Pirhana 2 (early James Cameron vehicle, not bitey enough, passed out halfway through), Point Break (couldn't hear a word of dialogue as we were all too busy doing Keanu Reeves impressions).

I think Hausu is special. An amazing film? No, doesn't qualify in that category for me. But I was stunned by the incredible technical achievement and undeniable invention. Definitely one of the better Japanese films I've seen, but there's not enough genuine directorial quality to get me to see it more than a few times.

A beautiful looking novelty though, for sure.

I have such a crush for Kung-Fu in Hausu. I recommend a double feature of Hausu and the Steve Miner film House.

Idiocracy was worth a rental, not a purchase. Next is an ultraviolent kung-fu flick, like 13 Assasins or Raid - The Redemption. Rentals are my on-demand blood sport.

Speaking of movies I've watched multiple times recently, I've been fairly obsessed with The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of Yik-Yak as of late. Downloaded and watched it, then shelled out the 30 bucks for the DVD because I loved it so much. Fun, erotic adventure by Just Jaeckin, probably most famous for the original Emmanuelle that spawned about a billion sequels. I'd best describe it as The African Queen, Indiana Jones, Ben-Hur and bondage. The soundtrack won't leave my head!

Checked out the horror flick known as "American Mary" that was written and directed by identical twins, the Soska Sisters, currently streaming on Netflix. The lead actress, Catherine Isabelle, provides plenty of eye candy with her sexy black colored surgeon garb (certainly different from the traditional blue or green colored surgery smocks prevalent in the U.S. hospitals indeed). The ending wasn't quite to be expected but is taken at face value (unless an alternative ending was filmed -- perhaps not). The Soska Sisters do make a cameo appearance as the demented twins in this film.

You might recall the Soska Sisters' earlier horror flick of "A Dead Hooker in The Trunk" -- has plenty of WTF moments to behold as well.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

I think The Raid - Redemption is a more worth-while movie than 13 Assassins.

I might be in the minority, but I did not find myself enjoying 13 Assassins much at all. I couldn't tell any of the characters apart, thought the villain was cartoonishly evil in a movie trying to be serious, and the final fight-scene, while coo, was way too long (30+ minutes).

My friends all disagreed and said they liked it, but half of them were probably high or drunk, and I was neither, so I don't know.

The Raid has the benefit of being some sort of grindhouse Die Hard with nothing but violence and fighting. Obviously it's light and fluffy on characterization but you certainly don't watch if for the plot.

It certainly moved faster than 13 Assassins. Very different styles though.

Great! I was hoping it was like the '74 Gone In 60 Seconds except with kung-fu killin'. Downloading now..

Caught about half of Zodiac. Pretty good.

I prefer to think of it as Donkey Kong The Movie. Here is a tower block full of AK47-wielding crackheads. How high can you get? Kind of like Taken is Super Mario Bros The Movie. Thank you Liam Neeson, but your daughter is in another whorehouse!

Saw The Master - the film about Scientology cult creator L.Ron Hubbard.
It didn't scratch the surface. I mean Hubbard's own son went on air saying it was a satanist cult and yet the movie only makes one veiled hint at the beginning when they play "Get thee behind me Satan" as a background to the department store scene .

Why bother even making these biopics if they don't want to reveal anything substantial about these people?!

Thatcher is another example of this. It concentrates on her as a person and leaves out the huge fact that she sold all the UK's manufacturing companies to foreign countries. Stuffing up our economy for decades to come.

Going back to The Master - good performances but in a movie that says nothing. A movie that almost plays like a propaganda piece for Scientology.

The game room inside the cafe within the Maximum Overdrive flick was cool for it's time...it has an upright Konami Time Pilot '84 conversion cab, a rare cocktail table cab of Tempest, and a classic Cinematronics Star Castle upright cab as well. In post-production, some simple zooming effects were added on top of the existing vector-based CRTs for that cool EFX factor (of course in real life, it'd be just vector graphics solely and none of that applied raster-scan special EFXs on top of the existing vector graphics).

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

Hrm, methinks you missed the point. It isn't even a biopic - Hoffman's character is only loosely based on Hubbard. It's a psychological character study more than anything else.

There is a short but adequate flashback about Riddick's transition from Necromonger overlord to well-armored Robinson Crusoe; it's more of a sequel to Pitch Black.

Pity, chronicles is the better film.

I watched World War Z last night and enjoyed it a lot more than I anticipated. I got over the whole "fast zombie" thing and had a lot of fun with it.

I also watched Cloverfield, which was not all that good.

Safety Not Guarenteed - 4/5.

On a small Hitchcock + Jimmy Stewart binge this weekend, having meant to watch these for ages.

Rope like Glengarry Glen Ross, a tautly paced play on film I could watch every day for a year without complaint. Virtually every line, gesture and tic from the main players is worth scrutiny. Actually rewatched it a couple of times already, with alarming ease - the runtime is tight and there's a total lack of dead air. The film's technological innovations are a bit wasted on me, though it's undeniably impressive just how much craft was going on off-camera to create such a clean, unfettered viewing experience. Jimmy Stewart on fine swaggering yet perceptive form, opposite a dangerously fruity John Dall and Farley Granger.

Rear Window actually found this one a little too predictable... kept anticipating a twist that wasn't there, although the rising tension certainly was. The underlying themes of morbid curiosity and the line between neighbourly concern and outright snooping were great, however. Silent Hill 4 fan represent. Jimmy Stewart on fine prickish yet earnest form, opposite a stunning Grace Kelly and memorably squawky Thelma Ritter (who gives great back rubs).

Vertigo seriously dark, unhappy stuff. The psycho freakout SFX sequence hasn't aged well, but the growing sense of watching a daydream teeter on the edge of nightmares is riveting. Jimmy Stewart on fine sensitive yet morbidly obsessed form, opposite an impressively dualistic Kim Novak.

Finally watched Boondock Saints - enjoyed it a lot, don't know why it gets so much stick - ok it ain't Godfather II, but it's a very enjoyable action film, and Willem Dafoe is incredibly charismatic in it. His crime scene analysis bits are brilliant.

Accents are as usual a bit iffy, especially Reedus', it held up OK (ish) untill the last scene when he's shouting in the courtroom, there it went all over the place, Flanery just stuck with the subtle kindof 'add some sustained air to the end of every word' type of intonation, and as it was subtler, it never went wrong quite as much. Bill Connollys was OK, though not quite as good as I thought it would be for someone who was originally part of the trad music circuit so would have had plenty of interaction with people from here.

Man, I love all of those. Don't forget The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) - Jimmy Stewart version. Still haven't seen the original, also by Hitchcock.

I'm a bit nonplussed to admit how few Hitchcock movies I've seen. At the same time, when I was younger I wasn't really in to thrillers and horror movies like I am now.
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The other night I watched The Invisible Man (1933) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) - a Universal double Creature Feature, if you will.

It's interesting to note how the tone of the movies changed in the intervening twenty years, despite being horror movies in black and white (sometimes I'm surprised at how late they were making black and white movies). The Invisible Man is filled with this sense of paranoia and is really driven by the increasing madness of its eponymous character, Griffin. Bizarre bits of macabre humor punctuate the movie, notably when the Invisible Man kills his would-be partner-in-crime, explaining to him all the various ways he will be injured as his car is pushed off a cliff. Some of the special effects still impress, especially when today it would all be CGI - computer-generated-invisibility. The general feel of the movie is nervousness and fear at an unknown threat, which I suppose would be right at home in 1930s America. Special mention must be made of Claude Rains' voice as the Invisible Man. It's hammy and theatrical, which is precisely what the character calls for. It's perfect and memorable.

The 'feel' of what you'd call 1950s America seeps through in Creature, where every other word is 'science' and is very much targeted towards white-middle-class (it's hard to describe it; maybe the presence of token minorities only makes it extremely obvious that the entire cast is WASP). The extended scene where the buxom Julia Adams swims in the Lagoon, closely matched and followed by the Creature, is an obvious inspiration for Jaws' famous opening, except here it's obviously a bit more playful, with a lot of sexual overtones in the way it is shot. While I can't help but chuckle at how a supposed scientist would throw herself into an unknown body of water in the Amazon, it's pretty to look at. All told, it's a monster movie, made by the masters of the monster movie; however, I like the little touches here and there: the effects of the boat-captain's (possibly illegal) drug causing all the fish to float to the surface in one lingering scene, or the camera focuses on these little bags of chemicals wispily dropping down into the depths to 'smoke' the creature out; the Creature's shy attempts to touch the object of his affection; the audacity of having a Latino pull a knife on a white man (the gall!)... Fun stuff - it's obviously campy and light at heart, but I usually don't ask much more from movies.

Interesting, that assertion that The Raid was akin to a Donkey Kong movie. I can see it being analogous to many videogame genres due to its compartmentalised setting and exposition through bashing from one room to the next. It's pretty much a dungeon crawler.

I love 'self contained' films like these, within a single location, but focused on exploration. Suspiria would be another good example (along with haunted house flicks from The Haunting to Hausu). Labrynth is pretty awesome like that too.

I know I asked this a year or so ago to no response, but reccomend me dungeon crawling films, Shmups Forum. Films where the characters are periphery and the setting is the antagonist.

Me too - besides the almost too obvious Raid complement of Dredd 2012 ("Get to top of tower block and defeat big crime boss!") I'm drawing a bit of a blank on further examples, though. [REC] (2007) comes to mind, under the haunted house umbrella. "Escape zombie-infested apartment building" about covers it, with characters haplessly escalating things as they ferret about for keys Biohazard-style. It's a pretty decent found footage / 28 Days hybrid as well - some convincing terror in there along with horror lurking behind locked doors.

Death And The Maiden is pretty damn awesome.

Also, Jan Svankmajer's Alice in Wonderland adaptation Neco z Alenky (1988). Allegedly an influence on the old Konami Silent Hill team. Within the house it's confined to, it definitely reflects that sense of picking one's way through a mundane environment gone surreal and vaguely antagonistic.

Cube (more of a room-escape movie) and Die Hard aren't far behind. Also Game of Death (Bruce Lee) has a similar format (fight your way up the pagoda).

@BIL - I'm a big fan of REC. One of the few films I genuinely consider scary. I like the way the story progresses as they gradually climb the tower. Fucking incredible ending. It's like the bottom completely falls out the narrative and everything just disolves.

Svankemjer's Alice is also exceptional. I used to teach a module on it but it used to infuriate my students, bless them.

@Emphatic - Death And The Maiden sounds awesome, thanks. I've been meaning to get in to more Polanski. Rosemary's Baby has has that compartmentalised, narrative and location linked thing going on.

"I'm also a fan of Svankemjer's Alice." - SAID THE WHITE RABBIT.

Watching this weekend, to finish off the quartet.



Cool.

You're likely a ways ahead of me, but on the off chance, have you seen his adaptations of Faust and Otesanek? More fantastic kitchen sink surrealism. The former has some of my favourite things ever, like the sequence of entering a dumpy Czech cafeteria, popping upstairs and summoning Mephistopheles himself from beneath the floorboards.

Yes, the literal process of escalation in [REC] where hell beneath forces the protagonists higher up to even worse things really jived with me as a gamer. As did the sense of going out of the slaughterhouse into the abyss with that last unlocking.



DRAUCH, PLZ

(dat dub )