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Post by Non Banjoble Tokens on Jun 13, 2011 22:47:53 GMT -5
I just bought a nice little four-pack of DVDs from Wal-Mart for five dollars. It was Funhouse, Phantasm II, The Serpent and The Rainbow, and Sssssss. The last one I'm not particularly thrilled about, but I'm a big fan of Phantasm II, and Funhouse was watchable, and I've also been curious about Serpent & the Rainbow. So I took the bait. I also bought the Macho Man DVD, but that's a DVD for a different thread.
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Post by Non Banjoble Tokens on Jun 13, 2011 22:50:43 GMT -5
So, this weekend, I visited my relatives, who rented a horror movie. That movie was Boogeyman, the one from 2005. Now, I saw that movie before, and I was mostly ehh, on it. I wasn't gonna watch it, but I figured "why not?" and stuck around. You know what was weird about it? Since I saw it before, but they didn't, there was this situation where they would react to the movie, but I wouldn't movie, and there was a few times where I was getting freaked out by their reaction than any from the movie. Also, the movie didn't age well compared to the last time I saw it. Just reminded me of when my sister and her friends brought me to see Jurrassic Park 2 in the theaters, and everyone but me was freaking out and holding their eyes closed. Also, noticed that Grudge 3 is up for free, legally, on Youtube via Crackle. Just figured I'd mentioned it, like I did with REPO last time. Personally, I'm more interested that they have up the last Christopher Lee Dracula movie. Hooray Hammer! Ah, Boogeyman. A movie that's only watchability comes from the fact that Emily Deschanel is in it( ). It had a really interesting premise, but just didn't really do anything worthwhile with it.
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Post by DSR on Jun 13, 2011 23:54:19 GMT -5
I just bought a nice little four-pack of DVDs from Wal-Mart for five dollars. It was Funhouse, Phantasm II, The Serpent and The Rainbow, and Sssssss. The last one I'm not particularly thrilled about, but I'm a big fan of Phantasm II, and Funhouse was watchable, and I've also been curious about Serpent & the Rainbow. So I took the bait. I also bought the Macho Man DVD, but that's a DVD for a different thread. I greatly enjoy (and already own a copy of) THE FUNHOUSE. I need a copy of SSSSSSS, though. Haven't seen it in forever, but I love "mad scientist" movies. And a scientist trying to turn a man into a snake? They don't come much madder than that! ;D
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Jun 15, 2011 11:30:44 GMT -5
Also...just watched the two films which you did a WONDERFUL write-up on JU-ON: Black Ghost and JU-ON: White Ghost. I won't attempt to review them, since you already did such a great, in depth job of it, Thomas, but I will say that personally, I enjoyed BLACK GHOST a whole lot more than WHITE GHOST. Also, thanks to this very forum, there is a HILARIOUS "in joke" in WHITE GHOST that only someone who frequents these boards will get: {Spoiler}While basketballs might not hold grudges, apparently, some GRUDGES are pretty fond of holding basketballs. ;D ;D If you're a fan of the GRUDGE series, check these out! {Spoiler}I too thought of the Batista-Grudge basketball gag. Good times. ;D It's admittedly been a while since I've watched the Ghost films, but Black Ghost is definitely the better of the two. It's got a VERY different vibe from every other movie in the series, Japanese or American. The idea of the spirit of an unborn baby holding a grudge is some very badass stuff, and I LOVE those bits with the sister holed inside her home chanting incantations against the grudge. As for White Ghost, my favorite aspect of it is that it's the only movie in the entire series with an upbeat ending. Truly a shocker coming from Ju-On. f***, it's just refreshing that somebody else besides me has SEEN these movies! ;D
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 15, 2011 12:22:47 GMT -5
Hell, the Part XI thread doesn't work anymore, can somebody find me the link from the archives, since search is such a pain?
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Jun 16, 2011 8:47:48 GMT -5
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jun 16, 2011 12:14:17 GMT -5
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Welfare Willis
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Post by Welfare Willis on Jun 18, 2011 0:07:11 GMT -5
Been too long my peeps. I've been out of a job, but no longer! Plus a couple of the guys I work with are horror geeks as well. So tell me what big dvd/blu-ray releases have happened in the past 9 months? I'm at deepdiscount and need to keep my huge 700 disc collection going.
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Post by Baixo Astral on Jun 18, 2011 4:25:29 GMT -5
Watching The Signal - fine example, so far.
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Post by mysterydriver on Jun 18, 2011 8:05:08 GMT -5
Watched Devil. As hilarious as promised.
Although I wish they would've had an after credits scene of bread falling jelly-side up.
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Post by YellowJacketY2J on Jun 18, 2011 13:25:45 GMT -5
Picked up Castle Freak and Urban Legend for a dollar yesterday. Rewatched Urban Legend and still don't like it. Great concept but terrible execution. Brad Dourif and Robert Englund were the best things about the film, obviously. I enjoyed it a bit more than Bryan Nimmo, but not by much.
As for Castle Freak, I plan on watching it shortly.
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Post by DSR on Jun 18, 2011 16:44:35 GMT -5
Not sure if anyone noticed, but I've been MIA for the past couple of days (f***in' Comcast! ). Anyway, I've decided to throw a couple (hopefully) short reviews your way. Some TCM flicks I've caught thus far this month. Without further ado: THE GIANT CLAW (1957) - Produced by legendary penny pincher Sam Katzman. Our story centers around electrician/test pilot Mitch MacAfee (Jeff Morrow, perhaps most famous for playing Exeter in THIS ISLAND EARTH), and his budding romance with mathematician Sally Caldwell (Mara Corday). No wait...sorry. Our story centers around electrician/test pilot Mitch MacAfee seeing a horrifying creature up in the sky during a flight. MacAfee alerts the government, but their pilots can't find the monster, and radar won't pick the thing up, either. Not only does the US gov't. get pissed for being sent on a wild goose chase, but some of their pilots don't make it back, so they're doubly pissed (even though someone ELSE reported seeing a similar creature...this fact gets dropped from the script not long after it's introduced). MacAfee is determined to find out what that monster is, and over time the government is eventually convinced that, yes, it actually DOES exist. Then they have to figure out why their bullets and stuff don't hurt it, and how to combat the monsters defenses... The story itself is pretty standard fair for the time period. Jeff Morrow was a good actor even if he never set the world on fire. When the script is actually up to snuff, Morrow and Mara Corday certainly perform well. However, THE GIANT CLAW is most famous for its laughably bad monster. Sam Katzman, typically working with a shoe-string budget, went to Mexico and bought a cheap (and cheap looking) turkey/vulture puppet. At no point does it ever not look like a puppet, and audiences that went to see the motion picture were said to have broken out in hysterical laughter upon the reveal of this winged "menace" (much to the shame of the cast, which never actually SAW the monster until the premiere of the movie). In addition to looking like pure s***, the bird is described in the film as having some sort of anti-matter shielding around itself, that it lowers at will to attack people. Wait, what? THE GIANT CLAW is considered to be one of the worst movies ever made by those that have seen it. I actually didn't think it was THAT bad. As I said, the cast is capable. And I thought the bird was creepy in the way that old, low-budget children's show puppets are creepy (sort of like the descriptions in the "Candle Cove" creepypasta). It's still not a very good movie, but there's worse ways to spend 74 minutes. 2 stars out of 5. THE CYCLOPS (1957) - No, this film has nothing to do with Scott Summers. THE CYCLOPS is one of writer/producer/director Bert I. Gordon's many forays into the genre of giant monsters (he's also responsible for BEGINNING OF THE END, THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, and VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS, among others). Some 3 year ago, a man named Bruce Barton crashed his plane and went missing in the jungles of Mexico. Now (well, the now of 1957), his fiancee, Susan Winter (Gloria Talbott) is still in love with him. She intends to find him, even if the Mexican government won't grant clearance to her and her crew to fly there. Despite warnings that they're flying into forbidden territory, they make the trip mostly in one piece. Let's stop for a minute to meet the crew. In addition to Susan (who's pretty in a chaste and dignified sort of way), there's Russ, Bruce's best friend who was also in love with Susan (still is); Lee, the pilot; and Marty (the legendary Lon Chaney Jr.), who's hoping to make a fortune when he finds uranium in the jungle where Bruce went down. Marty certainly finds something radioactive in the jungle, as the crew has to avoid gigantic mice, birds, and lizards in their search for Bruce. Then, finally the Cyclops makes his appearance (seriously, the movie's only got about 20 minutes left by the time he shows up)! The Cyclops in this instance is somewhere around 25 feet tall, with a mutilated scrap of flesh covering about a third of his face! Susan's got quite a dilemma here: Marty and Lee just want to leave to make their fortune, Sue herself has to come to grips with the idea that this Cyclops just might be her lost fiancee (affected by the radiation the same way the birds and lizards were), and the Cyclops may or may not just want to kill the whole crew! In typical Bert I. Gordon fashion, the special effects are pretty crappy. It's always painfully obvious that the "giant" animals are just regular sized animals placed into the footage. And at one point the Cyclops grabs Susan to carry her somewhere, but the act of picking her up is displayed by moving the footage itself (sort of like when Poochie went back to his home planet, is the best way I can describe it...but the background moves with the character)! Yeah, the effects suck (well, the editing them together part, at least...the makeup for the Cyclops is actually fairly decent). But the cast does a very good job with what they have to work with. I've made no secret of my devotion to Lon Chaney Jr. He's usually so good at playing a sympathetic dope, caught up in circumstances beyond his control. He's still somewhat of a dope here, but he's also greedy and obnoxious and no where near sympathetic. Gloria Talbott is convincing as the hopelessly devoted fiancee. And James Craig is very good as the "other man" showing no real ill will towards the man with whom he competed for Susan's affections, but obviously hoping she'll realize Bruce is dead once and for all, so they can move on together. As I said, the effects work is far from top notch, but the interplay between the characters is captivating. And the film doesn't even hit 70 minutes, so there's no real chance of getting bored with it. 3.2 stars out of 5.
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Lick Ness Monster
Dennis Stamp
From the eerie, eerie depths of Lake Okabena
Posts: 4,874
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Post by Lick Ness Monster on Jun 18, 2011 17:02:35 GMT -5
but the act of picking her up is displayed by moving the footage itself (sort of like when Poochie went back to his home planet, is the best way I can describe it...but the background moves with the character)! ;D Very refreshing to see those reviews come back, DSR. I always love reading your takes on classical monster movies. In fact, if not for these reviews, I might not have actively started seeking out some of the Hammer Horror movies that I got into recently (well, as recently as six months ago). Excellent stuff, as usual. As for Urban Legend, Y2J, it goes into my pantheon of "very good up until the last 20 minutes (or mystery killer reveal), at which point it becomes a monumentally stupid movie" movies.
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Post by Michael Coello on Jun 18, 2011 17:50:55 GMT -5
Seamless. Yeah, I remember hearing about both movies from Cinemassacre's Monster Madness. I wanted to see The Giant Claw especially, though I can never find anything on it except small fragments and a riffed version.
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Post by DSR on Jun 18, 2011 18:18:55 GMT -5
Seamless. Yeah, I remember hearing about both movies from Cinemassacre's Monster Madness. I wanted to see The Giant Claw especially, though I can never find anything on it except small fragments and a riffed version. Yes! It's amazing just how much random s*** is on Youtube. Good find. *thumbs up*
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Post by YellowJacketY2J on Jun 18, 2011 18:49:35 GMT -5
but the act of picking her up is displayed by moving the footage itself (sort of like when Poochie went back to his home planet, is the best way I can describe it...but the background moves with the character)! ;D Very refreshing to see those reviews come back, DSR. I always love reading your takes on classical monster movies. In fact, if not for these reviews, I might not have actively started seeking out some of the Hammer Horror movies that I got into recently (well, as recently as six months ago). Excellent stuff, as usual. As for Urban Legend, Y2J, it goes into my pantheon of "very good up until the last 20 minutes (or mystery killer reveal), at which point it becomes a monumentally stupid movie" movies. The reveal had me yelling at the screen, actually. As I mentioned, I seen it before. However, it was way back in 2003 when I started getting into horror, so all the good stuff I was catching up on (such as Universal/Hammer flicks, Hitchcock, 70's thrillers and 80's juggernauts) overshadowed it and basically erased it from my memory. Halfway through the film, I remembered who it was, but was hoping my memory was wrong. Unfortunately, it was not.
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andrew8798
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Post by andrew8798 on Jun 18, 2011 20:44:07 GMT -5
I never could hate on The Giant Claw I watch it anytime its on TV
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Welfare Willis
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Post by Welfare Willis on Jun 19, 2011 21:55:04 GMT -5
Since I don't see it posted yet: Blue Underground's Zombie Blu-Ray Cover
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Post by Rorschach on Jun 19, 2011 22:27:18 GMT -5
Also...just watched the two films which you did a WONDERFUL write-up on JU-ON: Black Ghost and JU-ON: White Ghost. I won't attempt to review them, since you already did such a great, in depth job of it, Thomas, but I will say that personally, I enjoyed BLACK GHOST a whole lot more than WHITE GHOST. Also, thanks to this very forum, there is a HILARIOUS "in joke" in WHITE GHOST that only someone who frequents these boards will get: {Spoiler}While basketballs might not hold grudges, apparently, some GRUDGES are pretty fond of holding basketballs. ;D ;D If you're a fan of the GRUDGE series, check these out! {Spoiler}I too thought of the Batista-Grudge basketball gag. Good times. ;D It's admittedly been a while since I've watched the Ghost films, but Black Ghost is definitely the better of the two. It's got a VERY different vibe from every other movie in the series, Japanese or American. The idea of the spirit of an unborn baby holding a grudge is some very badass stuff, and I LOVE those bits with the sister holed inside her home chanting incantations against the grudge. As for White Ghost, my favorite aspect of it is that it's the only movie in the entire series with an upbeat ending. Truly a shocker coming from Ju-On. f***, it's just refreshing that somebody else besides me has SEEN these movies! ;D Yeah, White Ghost seems like it tries WAY too hard to fit American style "GOTCHA!" moments into a traditionally Asian, "slow paced creepfest" franchise. Black Ghost on the other hand....THAT is an awesome film, and one that, as you said, defies anything that's come before it in the series. It keeps you off balance and off-kilter enough that you NEVER really see that reveal coming, and the titular ghost....well, mileage may vary, but to THIS horror fan, she looked even creepier than Kayako, though no one can hold a candle to the late Mrs. Sayeki in the "pure embodiment of evil" category. Kayako stands as an entity unrivaled in modern horror as far as "kill efficiency" goes, and as far as her gender goes. Not many female monsters/villains are as long-lived or as lethal, not to mention as terrifying as Kayako consistently is. Speaking of femme fatales....what's this I hear about ELVIRA making a comeback? Anyone have any news on that?
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Post by DSR on Jun 19, 2011 22:44:10 GMT -5
Speaking of femme fatales....what's this I hear about ELVIRA making a comeback? Anyone have any news on that? Um...I've actually caught a few episodes of Elvira's Movie Macabre on a local retro movie station. Comes on around 5 in the morning. I actually sat through MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE on her show one time.
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