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Well Frankie i'm definitely in the loathe camp. However after reading your excellent review i want to watch it again. So take some pleasure from the fact that i'll either change my opinion and enjoy the movie, or you've bored and frustrated me for 90 minutes. Either way, you should be proud of the review. |
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Treehouse (2014) I'm finding Treehouse a difficult film to review. The story of two older teen brothers who discover a girl trapped in a large treehouse deep in the woods. In an attempt to save her, one of the brothers goes missing leaving the two alone with something trying to get in. Despite a lowish budget the film looks great, opening with some gorgeous aerial photography of the surrounding area. In fact the whole film is professionally done. It's well acted with Dana Melanie and J. Michael Trautmann playing a couple of characters you care about which had to work, as for the most part they are the only two people in it. The scares are well produced, in particular a sequence where something is attempting to get into the treehouse. The fashioning of light, shadow and sound is done to great effect creating a suspenseful atmosphere as creepy as any i can think of from recent memory. The image of bodies hanging high up in the trees is also particularly memorable... ...there's just one problem. It didn't play out as i thought it should or hoped it would, and come the final act it became a crushing disappointment. The script rockets from the possibility of being supernatural or mythical and crashes down to earth with a clunk. Having said that it's all plausible, just not how i thought or imagined it would work out. The final shot perhaps promises a sequel as the film finishes at a great point leaving things very open ended. Despite some terrible reviews on IMDB i liked the atmospheric horror / thriller that is Treehouse, whether you would is a different matter. |
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__________________ Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much.. |
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I have a soft spot for this one. |
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The Gambler and the Lady (1952) An American gambler and mobster meets his match when he moves to London and falls for an aristocratic woman before being swindled by an upper class conman in a gold mining scam. Meanwhile closer to home, personal scores are about to be settled as local mobsters take over his new nightclub. Reminding me a little of the Edward G Robinson classic The Little Giant from nearly 20 years earlier with it's fish out of water storyline, this Hammer production is a classic British Noir. Starring American Dane Clark and Naomi Chance, two actors i hadn't heard of previously, this is a tightly scripted little film which moves forward at a pace. Even though it had two directors - Patrick Jenkins and Sam Newfield (some rumours even suggest Hammer stalwart Terence Fisher was the films actual director), the film could have been a mess, however what is on screen is far from a mess and what we see is actually a very good B-movie thriller. |
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The Eagle Has Landed. In the dying days of World War II, the Germans come up with a daring scheme that could change the outcome of the war - by sending a crack team deep into enemy territory and abducting the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill! Michael Caine leads a fantastic cast (Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Jenny Agutter, Donald Pleasence, Larry Hagman) in this cracking 70s thriller that, by putting the German characters front and centre, almost has you rooting for the bad guys. Terrific stuff.
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Bit of a mini-marathon this evening. Parallax view Warren Beatty plays an investigative reporter and witness to a political assassination who becomes alarmed after a friend comes to him who believes she's going to be murdered. While Beatty is sceptical at first he soon changes his mind when she turns up dead. All the deaths look like accidents but after some digging into one of the latest deaths he discovers some evidence linking the mysterious Parallax corporation. Parallax view does paranoia well. Released 1974 and directed by alan J Pakula, Parallax taps into the 70's paranoia fuelled by the hangover from the assassinations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and then his brother Bobby, as well as the fresh taint of Watergate. Ironically 74' also saw the release of the Book All the president's men that Pakula would later adapt. The film has an interesting take on the normal conspiracy theories that were doing the rounds, with the ultimate conspiracy not being so much political as corporate. It's still a damnned entertaining little thriller that was well worth re-visiting. Dillinger Following the trend of AIP breaking major talents of 70's American cinema, John Milius gets a crack at the story of John Dillinger. The Ever excellent Warren Oates plays Dillinger himself with Ben Johnson portraying his G-man nemesis. Both Harry Dean Stanton and Geoffrey Lewis play gang members and Richard Dreyfuss is Gleefully Psychotic as Baby Face Nelson. While I'm a big Michael Mann fan, personally I think this is a much better, grittier take on the story than Mann's Public enemies with some genuinely impressive action scenes with the bank robberies including plenty of Peckinpah-esque shoot outs. The passage of time sequences cutting together black & white images from the film with footage from 40's is a nice touch and the whole film seems washed out with brownish almost sepia coloured imagery and some great photography of the American Heartlands. The film really manages to keep to a period feel with costume soundtrack and dialogue. Overall this is well worth watching. Cold sweat A french-Italian co-production directed by Terrance Young. The films about a seemingly peaceful man played by Charles Bronson whose dark past comes to visit one night armed with a pistol. As his past is exposed he must fight his former comrades (including a wonderfully Sinister James Mason ) The film is a pulpy noirish thriller from a short story by Richard Matheson and feels not dissimilar to another French thriller with Bronson and Jill Ireland called RIDER ON THE RAIN. Its got peadophillic villains, heroin smuggling and plenty of violence on show and is one of Bronson's better films. (as is RIDER ON THE RAIN!) |
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One I haven't seen. It sounds interesting so consider it added to the watch list! |
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