Old Movie Review Thread

Wild Zero-

The production values are low, the editing could be vastly improved, and some scenes are downright slow and silly, but overall, this is a crazy, entertaining little Japanese horror musical action comedy.

The film stars real-life rock band Guitar Wolf, and their adventures fighting against zombies, Yakuza, and most importantly, their manager, a drug-dealer and pimp who goes around blasting people with his shotgun, all while wearing booty shorts. (Seriously)

Going into any more detail would spoil parts of the movie, but there are some genuinely hysterical, insane moments in the film, punctuated with awesome one-liners. It's no Crank 2, but watch it when you're a little drunk or stoned, and it's a lot of fun.

 

Rented The Hurt Locker this weekend. What an abortion of a movie, from horrid acting to unrealistic scenarios. One of the worst movies I have ever seen. Leave it alone.

Jennifers Body: Aside from a few shots of Megan Fox (holy cankles batman), another shitty ass movie. This is what I get for letting an 8 yr old pick movies.

 

Raising Arizona
Of the many, many,many movies I have seen over the years, Raising Arizona is the funniest movie I have ever seen in my entire life. It's shocking to think that the Coen brothers followed up the cold Blood Simple with this wacked-out treasure.

You have to watch it ten times to see all the hidden gems it has crammed into every oriface. The attention to detail in this movie is galvanizing, it has mud-thick irony, slapstick that has to be seen to be believed, and chase/fight scenes that will leave you gasping for air from laughter.

A special mention must be made to the film's original score collaberated by Charlie Monroe, Pete Seeger and Carter Burwell. It's insane combination of yodelling over a hyperactive banjo creates the ultimate southern chase music score and it's knee-slapping hilarious to listen to.

It stars Nic Cage (in his most atypical role, and that's saying something) as a hamfisted corner store robber married to decorated spaz policewoman HOlly Hunter. They can't have a kid, so decide to steal a Quintuplet from redneck celebrity Nathan Arizona-Huffheins. Unleash Hell. I'm not giving ANYTHING AWAY. John Goodman and William Forsythe turn up as one of the funniest bumbling criminal duos of all time, Randall "Tex" Cobb as the intimidating Leonard Smalls shocks us as the most patient, articulate and reserved character in the whole film, and Barry Sonnenfield's camera work will drive you up the wall.

Cage is the hub of the film. His mellow hayseed dipshit is hilarious no matter what he's doing on camera (even his HAIR is funny), and the central car & foot chase is one of the all-time funniest movie scenes. The entire film is an all-out assault on the senses, crammed with laughs from beginning to end. Granted, it's not for all tastes and the idiots that go to see the "Movie" spoof films in the theatre will probably be left scratching their heads. This is my favourite Coen film. That's right: More than Fargo (which was one of the best ever), No Country For Old Men OR Blood Simple. A screwball black comedy for the ages with endlessly quotable dialogue and in my opinion an absolute scream. See it, than see it again. It's just a shame so many people have missed out on it, but not everyone is atuned to this movie. If I had to pick a favourite of all of them, the part with the lizard nearly gave me cardiac arrest the first time I saw it: (10/10)

 

Lethal Weapon
The first of four in the series, and while not my personal favorite... It spawned the others, so we pay homage and give thanks.

In this installment of Lethal Weapon Riggs and Murtaugh are first paired up with each other, and Murtaugh only has a couple weeks left on the force before retiring while Riggs has nothing to live for because his wife died and mullets are in style.
During the course of getting to know each other, they uncover a huge drug smuggling operation because Murtaugh was in the Nam with a dude who's daughter made a porno tape. (Shower scene!) Then the dude gets shot through the chest (and an egg nog container) by Mr. Joshua (fuggin Busey!) while in a helicopter! (Thus proving that you can hit a moving target from a helicopter. Take that Tom Berenger in "Sniper"!)

Of course the dynamic duo put two and two together and take on the bad guys, but not before Riggs gets shot in the chest by Mr. Joshua (that pesky Busey guy again) and then the bad guys kidnap the delicious Murtaugh's daughter.

Riggs and Murtaugh decide that since the family members are now involved they're above the law and are going to shoot to kill. Which is kind of confusing because Riggs has already killed like 6 people, but still, it gives you a little twinge and you look coquettishly across the room to your buddy,, and say..... "Aaaaahhhhh yeah. Shit just got real"

Of course Richard Donner does in fact make it real, as in the ensuing scenes we get to see Riggs kill two dudes with his feet while being suspended in the air by his wrists after getting electro-shock therapy from a chinese dude he calls "Chin" (possible life spoiler alert here for Gibson). After killing the chinaman (not the acceptable nomenclature dude) Riggs kills a bunch more dudes with judo and karate moves then takes off after Mr. Joshua on foot (literally) through the streets of Los Angeles. All while this is happening, Murtaugh shoots a dude after doing that strange neck and head thingy, and lets the head General dude burn to death trapped in his car surrounded by some heroin and grenades on what I can only imagine is Hollywood Boulevard. It was a pretty epic scene because we got to see the dad from Dharma and Gregg get his upcommance for being in such a shitty show with that Elfman chick.

But that's not the end bitches! Mr. Joshua is still out there. But where did he go? Last we heard from him he was getting chased by Riggs on foot while he was navigating the highways and bi-ways of southern california. (that L.A. traffic really is a motherfucker).
When Riggs finally gets back to report to Murtaugh that Mr. Joshua got away, (while the Dharma and Gregg guy is still barbequing in the middle of the road) Murtaugh goes apeshit because he knows where he went... The Murtaugh Casa! So they double time it back there and drive the car through the front of the house. Which lowers the resale value. (see episode 3 with Leo Getz "whatever you want, Leo Gets. Ya get it? Leo Gets")
Seeing that Mr. Joshua never expected a retarded move like driving a car through the side of the fucking house, he's surprised. So surprised that he surrenders his gun and agrees to fight Riggs in the front lawn while the sprinklers are going off. Its on bitches. I think. Except I can't see shit because of the water on the camera, and because Donner shot it like a Matt Damon fight scene when he is hitting dudes with rolled up magazines and stabbing them with bic pens in 3 other movies I just watched.
So we're pretty sure that Riggs beats him up because they've got him in handcuffs, but it was pretty blurry, so we'll just go with it. Then as a cap to it all, as the two heroes are clutching each other, covered in water, one of them out of breath and near passing out (no homo) Mr. Joshua breaks free from his captors and pulls one of the arresting cops guns looking to even the score for the recent ass kicking by shooting Riggs and or Murtaugh. But not so fast, because our boys grab each others guns while still clutching each other tightly (no homo) and shoot Mr Joshua dead on the front fucking lawn.

Brav.the.fuck.O
I give this movie three boners out of five on the bonertime scale.



*It should be noted that in the Directors cut there are two scenes that were cut from the movie, one is Riggs shooting a sniper about 16 times in a schoolyard.
The second one is both perplexing and fucking weird.
After Riggs eats dinner at the Murtaugh house for the first time, he leaves and picks up a prostitute. When he asks how old the prostitute is, she tells him "22". Then Riggs tells her that she is lying, and the hooker asks him if he likes em young... In which she answers her own question and tells Riggs that she is in fact "16"...!!!! So apparently Riggs is a pederast in this installment of Lethal Weapon.
Blew my fucking mind when I watched it.

 

I'll try a connect the dots method here.

Flash Gordon (1980)

It's downright cheesy, but I've always enjoyed the visuals and kick ass soundtrack by Queen. Keep an eye out for Richard O'Brien, who plays a member of Prince Baron's tribe, and also starred in...

Shock Treatment (1981)

Considered by some to be a sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (I don't believe it is), this musical satire of reality television was pretty ahead of its time, and worth looking at just for its early 80's "over the topness". Would have been nice to have seen a little more of Nell Campbell, who was in...

Jubilee (1978)

I could have gone with Pink Floyd: The Wall here, but I didn't think it fair to count a 10 second part as a full on role. This one is pretty bizarre, telling the story of Queen Elizabeth I time traveling to a depressing 20th century Britain. Borgia Ginz is uncomfortably creepy, and Adam Ant in a starring role is just downright odd. If nothing else, it's an interesting look into the early punk scene.

 

It isn't exactly a movie, but I downloaded UFC #1 and it is fantastic. The entire time, I kept waiting for the camera to pan from the action and cut to Jean Claude van Damme or Rowdy Roddy Piper. This is wholly entertaining, between Jim Brown's commentary, the fighters who look like "Trailer Park: Unleashed", and the mullets/mustache combos, I highly recommend this. Even if you don't like the current UFC, if you think Rocky 4 is fun to watch for the 80s awesome, then you will love this.

 

I was in a strange mood, so I rewatched

Slap Shot

Wow. I thought it was great when I first saw it, but after a second viewing...it's easily the greatest sports movie ever, and moves into my top five comedies ever. Not only is it hysterically funny and fast-paced, but it's such a perfect depiction of small town life, its denizens, and the road trips and personalities of a sports team.

Wonderful acting, memorable characters, and perfect dialogue, all about the drudgery of the small-time. There isn't just one outstanding quote or scene in this movie; there are a few dozen.

Looking it up, it was made by George Roy Hill, the same director behind "The Sting". Doesn't surprise me one bit. I wish they made films like this today; but it's probably too vulgar, violent, and sexual.

 

One of the scariest movies I've ever seen:

 

Black Book (2006)

A WWII movie about a Jewish girl who gets involved in the Dutch Resistance, and is assigned to engage in an affair with a German officer to help free one of their members.

If you like WWII movies, you'll certainly like this one, as the setting and costumes are wonderfully done. The plot is a little bit convoluted sometimes, there are a few plot holes here and there, but you get over them for the sake of the bigger story. It's a Dutch film and apparently won quite a few European awards (I don't know anything about their awards system), and it was well-deserved.

For anyone who has seen The Lives of Others, the actor who plays Georg (Sebastian Koch) also plays in this movie as the Nazi. The actress, Carice von Houten, is absolutely gorgeous with the most perfect breasts I've ever seen. Even if you don't like the plot, you'll probably just like the movie based on that alone.

 

The Panic in Needle Park- 1971 Al Pacino

Al Pacino plays this annoying junky asshole who gets his clean cut girlfriend hooked on smack. The whole movie I just wanted to punch him. He is like a charicature of every douche bag that you meet in a jail holding cell: never shuts up, thinks he's god's gift to the world of comedy, women, and the world of crime, talks in moronic street slang, has a stupid accent and the vocabulary of a 5th grade dropout, etc.
There is no real plot; it's just a slice of life about junkies in early '70s New York. There were a lot of things that didn't have anything to do with the "story," like when he and his girlfriend take a ferry to Staten Island to buy a dog, and on the way back to Manhattan, it jumps off the boat. What the hell?
After his girlfriend starts shooting junk, she fucks practically everyone in the movie and becomes a whore (one of her tricks is a guy who looks JUST LIKE McLovin from Superbad! The glasses, the haircut, everything!); we get to see her A-cups at one point.
I was expecting one of them to end up dead by the end of the movie, but that didn't happen.
This movie was very dark; I realize that it was done on a low budget, and they wanted to portray the setting as dirty and unpleasant, but there were times that I couldn't tell what the hell was even going on!
Clocking in at 110 minutes, it felt more like 3 hours.
This was nowhere nearly as good as Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream.
If you are into drug movies, watch it, otherwise pick something else with Pacino.


An interesting thing was that just like No Country For Old Men, there was no music in this movie. And speaking of sounds, you will want to watch this with the captions on, because a lot of the dialog sounds muffled, drowned out or garbled. You would think that with the money they saved by leaving out music that they could have gotten some decent recording equipment.

 

I had the opposite reaction. While there is definitely some questionable acting at times, particularly from Brian Geraghty (Spc. Eldridge), and Jeremy Renner's character (SSgt. James) does seem a bit unruly at times given that he's in a war zone, I had no complaints otherwise. Anthony Mackie (who plays Sgt. Sanborn) did a good job at his role. Side note: I didn't realize until last week that he played Papa Doc in 8 Mile. Neato.

As for unrealistic scenarios, there were some that I had to suspend disbelief for. When I watched it with my parents over Christmas, I pointed them out to my dad (U.S. Marine for 26 years and counting), who'd have better perspective than I would:

Spoiler

Sanborn taking out the running Iraqi with a .50 cal. I called bullshit, but he assured me that it is doable. Not easy, but not out of the question.

Spoiler

Cambridge accompanying Eldridge when they found bomb materials in that one building. Given the working relationship between doctor and patient, and that nothing dictates that Cambridge couldn't go with them, it's believable.

Spoiler

James making his own agenda, once to find Beckham's house, and again later when he took Eldridge and Sanborn to find whoever detonated the car bomb. These, he said, would have gotten him into a shit ton of trouble.

My favorite part, for a reason I can't pinpoint:

Spoiler

In the end, just after they fail to save the suicide bomber, when Sanborn tears up and tells James how much he wants a son. Taken in context, considering how opposed he was to having children earlier in the movie, it was a bit moving.

Even if you don't enjoy this movie, it is far superior than most shit Hollywood puts out about the military. In this past decade alone, you had abortions such as In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss, Stealth, Behind Enemy Lines, Pearl Harbor, The Guardian, Tears of the Sun, and Annapolis. They fuck these movies up much more often than they get them right, and The Hurt Locker is definitely among the latter.

8/10

 

A Thousand Clowns (1965)

Anyone who enjoys old black and white movies will like this. It's a comedy about a guy who is raising his nephew, but never really grew up himself, so he refuses to get a job or do anything normally. That is put in jeopardy when Child Services starts investigating them, but it never really loses its funny even through what should be a very serious issue.

 

Longitude.

It's a 4 hour historical mini-series with two parallel stories: one of John Harrison (M. Gambon) who invents a clock that can keep time accurately at sea in the 18th century and the other of Rupert Gould (J. Irons), a man obsessed with restoring the clocks in the 20th century.

imdb's summary:

Spoiler

In the 18th century, the only way to navigate accurately at sea was to follow a coastline all the way, which would not get you from Europe to the West Indies or the Americas. Observing the sun or stars would give you the latitude, but not the longitude unless done in conjunction with a clock that would keep time accurately at sea, and no such clock existed. After one too many maritime disasters due to navigational errors, the British Parliament set up a substantial prize for a way to find the longitude at sea. The film's main story is that of craftsman John Harrison: he built a clock that would do the job, what we would now call a marine chronometer. But the Board of Longitude was biased against this approach and wished to award the prize to an astronomer rather than a "mere clockmaker". Told in parallel is the 20th century story of Rupert Gould, for whom the restoration of Harrison's clocks to working order became first a hobby, then an obsession that threatened to wreck his life.

Simply put, it's great.

 

Slither

Slither is an ingenius Canadian horror-sci-fi outing written and directed by James Gunn (who wrote the amazing Dawn Of The Dead remake). IT star Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Henri and Michael Rooker.

It revolves around a typical podunk town that has an ivading meteor land in its woods that discharges a slimy, flesh-eating alien. It quickly takes over the body of the town's richest resident (Rooker) and then using it's slug-like "children" to take over pretty much alsmot the entire town, with few survivors banding together to try and stop the invading menace.

This film is so crammed with different ideas you fear it would explode. It's alternately hysterically funny, gross, violent, and horrifying (especially in the scene where Banks makes an unforgettable discovery in her basement). IT has more funny lines than TWO Hollywood comedies and borrows on classic sci- fi and horror (Night Of The Living Dead, Shivers, Night Of The Creeps, The Puppet Masters just to name a few) but it's a style that Gunn has made his own, with terrificly funny performances (especially from Fillion as a wise-cracking sherrif and Henri as a profane, pass-the-ammo mayor).

If you can handle its intentionally extreme violence and cold-blooded plotting you ae truly in for a treat with this film. I can say its equally as good as Evil Dead 2, and if you're a horror fan like me that's a bold statement.

8.5/10

 

Kingdom of Heaven (Director's Cut)

I was sorely disappointed by this film at the cinema, however I recently read that the director’s cut made it much better film with an extra 49 minutes of footage. Thats right, 49 fucking minutes!

Was it better, shit yes it was, I enjoyed all 3 hours + of it. Fuck the guy who made them cut it down. I would have given the theatrical version 2/5 I give the director’s cut 3.5/5.

 

You are pretty much the only person to give a negative review. I'm also curious how you can say the scenario's were unrealistic? If you have been fighting in Iraq and or on a bomb unit in Iraq I apologize in advance; otherwise you don't know shit.

What made the film great was that it deal with a specific part of the war in Iraq, a very real and very tangible part of the conflict. We have all read about the IED's as well as the numerous bombs and booby traps these soldiers deal with every day. If there was anything wrong with the film it was that it peaked in the middle and kind of dribbled off at the end.

Jeremy Renner gives a powerful performance and is also nominated for an academy award. The film itself is nominated for an academy award so calling it an "abortion of a movie" is just foolish and poorly thought out. I'm not saying every movie that get's nominated for an academy award is great ( The Pianist and English Patient come to mind) but to call them an abortion of a film is stupid, and clearly would have been one person's opinion. I think I covered your horrid acting comment by pointing out Renner's oscar nod, you probably should have given an example or two (or maybe just one) of what was unrealistic about the movie. I didn't even like the movie that much but your movie review felt like it was done by a nineteen year old who thought they would use a clever cliche like "an abortion of a movie." The thread is "movie review" not "spew out your worthless opinion."

 

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Holy shit, why didn't Anne Hathaway win an award for this? It was shot in a bit of an annoying style but it was one that really worked for the material. I really don't want to say anything, even in spoiler tags, because it will give a lot away. However, I think it captured the entire feel of the days leading up to a wedding, the wedding itself, and then the odd aura of the morning after.

I really enjoyed it.

 

Cliver Barker's HELLRAISER (1987)

Forget the sequels. Forget everything but this film. Clive Barker: the depraved, humorous, gay ad above all brilliant auteur of modern horror (an HP Lovecraft for our era) made an outstanding debut directing this adaption of his own novella The Hellbound Heart.

This is an excercise in the most brutally excrutiating, nihlistic fashion possible and it pays off in spades. The acting is somewhat ham-fisted and the low budget show in some of the special effects, but this film is a true Poltergeist roller-coaster ride of a film, with the most graphic violence you could ask for with a sick sexual edge.

Essentially, the film is about a perverted sex tourist that buys a box that takes you to the most extreme centres of pleasure and pain, and the creatures called the Cenobites demonstrate this by tearing him to shreds. When his brother and sister-in-law (also his former lover) move into his house, he comes back from hell in the form of a flesh-eating gellatinous beast and then the shit hits the fan like none other. As a bonus, the film has one of the most gorgeous looking girl-in-jeopardy of all time, Ashley Laurence (who is STILL fucking hot). She rises above with a solid performance of someone being terrified out of their wits at every turn.

This has it all: S&M, bloody torture, giant monsters, maggots, rotting corpses, people getting killed with hammers, sex, demons, and the introduction of Pinhead (Doug Bradley), who is thankfully NOT in this film very much.

If you're a horror fan, this is ugly fun the whole way. Don't miss it.

8/10