What Films Have You Seen Recently?

[Mojo]

Originally Posted by MrBarlow

The Return Of The Exorcist. 1975.

Teen Peter takes a picture of a naked woman by a waterfall, when the picture is developed the woman is no longer present. He goes back to the area and finds a amulet and slowly becomes possessed.

Another cheesey Exorcist rip off by the Italians, this time round the film starts with the possessed teen Peter and then we are giving the back story in flashback sequences of the possession. Franco Garofalo from Hell Of The Living dead is the cult leader who pops up during the film who also likes to engage his followers in one big orgy while calling upon Satan. The biggest star of the film is Richard Conte as the priest sent in to do battle but he only pops up towards the end, one decent paycheck for him before passing away. There is no head turning, some hot pea soup and bed levitating/shaking but nothing spectacular, yet I still find this entertaining.

Attachment 252104

I?m pretty sure this one was in video stores back in the day as NAKED EXORCISM ( for obvious reasons! )
Apparently Cauldron in the US are going to release this on Blu Ray.

[MrBarlow]

Originally Posted by Mojo

I?m pretty sure this one was in video stores back in the day as NAKED EXORCISM ( for obvious reasons! )
Apparently Cauldron in the US are going to release this on Blu Ray.

This was the front cover of the VHS I had back in the 90s.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

A Virgin Among The Living Dead (1973)

Feck me! This doesn't get any better with repeated viewings.

One of the least interesting Jess Franco films i've seen. The plot sounds okay - A woman arrives from England to visit her estranged relatives in a small castle for the reading of her dead father's will. She eventually discovers that they are all undead - but it all feels really tired and listless, lacking the trademark sex and shocks usually associated with the great Franco. Franco excels himself with an acting performance that is downright bizarre. He never says a word just utters childlike gibberish that's unintelligible to my ears, meanwhile Howard Vernon spends the film singing songs at the castle piano.

Apparently it had a troubled production and was cut and re-cut , scenes added and then cut again. It really is a s bad as it sounds. Even the presence of the lovely Britt Nichols and Anne Libert from Franco's Daughter of Dracula and The Demons can't save this one.

[nicholasrope]

No Escape

Set in the then future 2022, Ray Liotta is a problem prisoner who is dumped on an island and is taken in by Lance Henriksen and others who live a peaceful existence and have to fend of a bunch of violent outsiders (Sort of medieval really) Ernie Hudson and Kevin Dillon co-star. Liked this back in the day and it's still good, just felt that there were lulls though.

Youngblood

1986 Ice Hockey Film which sees Rob Lowe (Still see him in Parks And Recreation) as a Ice Hockey Player who signs for a Minor League team in order to make it to the big leagues. He has a bitter rivalry with another player, falls out with his hard-nosed Coach and starts dating the Coach's Daughter. Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves star also (Before Point Break) seen as part of the Holy Trinity of Ice Hockey Films, this is excellent.

Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling is a Stunt Man who after getting injured is lured back but gets caught up in a Murder Conspiracy. Emily Blunt is the on/off Girlfriend who is also the Director on a Film Set. There's good chemistry between the leads, but it's at least 15 minutes too long and too much Kiss's I Was Made For Loving You. Can see what they were trying to achieve here but they didn't execute properly.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by nicholasrope

Fall Guy

Ryan Gosling is a Stunt Man who after getting injured is lured back but gets caught up in a Murder Conspiracy. Emily Blunt is the on/off Girlfriend who is also the Director on a Film Set. There's good chemistry between the leads, but it's at least 15 minutes too long and too much Kiss's I Was Made For Loving You. Can see what they were trying to achieve here but they didn't execute properly.

Sorry, you can never have too much of Kiss' I Was Made For Loving You.

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

Eugenie (1973)

Jess Franco thrusts the Marquis de Sade's short story Eugenie de Franval kicking and screaming into the pervy, murderous seventies, starring the gorgeous Soledad Miranda as Eugenie, now living with her step father following her mothers passing. It's not long before she discover he's a sexual deviant and the pair forge a relationship that involves the seduction of strangers for murderous intent.

A second viewing of this for me and i once more really enjoyed it. It's pretty seedy, even for a Franco film, the seduction of the hitch hiker is compellingly erotic despite it's menacing sour after taste and Miranda, who is a natural fit for dreamy eroticism such as this, performs well with Paul Muller who plays her step father.

Jess Franco the director (As opposed to Jess Franco the actor who is far more competent in this than A Virgin Among the Living Dead) treats us to some experimental, moody and coldly bleak visuals complemented by another great Bruno Nicolai score in what is definitely one of Jess Franco's greatest films.

[MrBarlow]

The Monster Squad. 1987.

A group of monster movie fanatics try to save their small town from Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man and Gil Man.

Fred Dekker's little classic from the 80s with some of Universal's monsters making a good strong appearance with Frankenstein joining the good guys while playing dress up in a tree house. Van Helsing tried to stop Dracula with a amulet, jump 100 years and Dracula wants the amulet and our heroes try and find it aswell to end his new reign. Full of dark comedy with how a person would react if his son claims to see a monster in his room always gets me laughing and Frankenstein capturing the best shot of a girl at her window with a camera.

6a34ec34124787a1b1a4e57dab566eb01b659f6650dcb319f5dbfdc91b137f0f.jpg

[Frankie Teardrop]

LITAN - I'd only ever seen it once, years before, on a bootleg that might not even have carried English subs, but 'Litan', Jean-Pierre Mocky's whirling nightmare of a film, made such a pungent impression. I've waited ever since for some kind of aboveground release that did justice to the film's weird riches, and I thought all that was in vain, so obscure was the movie and its maker outside France. Leave it to Radiance to introduce both Mocky and his flagship horror moment to the high-street movie fan with their super three film box set - more on the rest of that in a moment. So 'Litan', how did it fare after all these years? It didn't blow me away like it did back then, but it's a vision of undeniable strangeness that feels as ungraspable as the mist that lines the crooked streets of its namesake, and whose dreamy evocation of the menace at the heart of a remote and squalid township seems destined to evoke the work of Lovecraft or Ligotti. It's about a woman who searches for her missing husband in Litan, a run-down burg in the throes of some kind of horrendous celebration involving widespread mask wearing. She runs from corner to corner surrounded by cavorting figures, her every step shadowed by sinister revellers in disguise, until her story intertwines with that of a researcher who wants to contact the dead. Back to those masks. They're everywhere in 'Litan' - it's like stepping into a painting by James Ensor, everyone's wearing one, making the whole movie feel a bit like an undulating crowd scene where all faces are covered. Skulls one moment, Venetian the next, then pigs. There's something frenetic about Litan's dark dreamworld, it's not meditative at all, everything's in constant motion, and poised to the point of appearing balletic... you're as prone to following the choreographed path of scampering urchins on the periphery than anyone or anything that might push the plot forward. That 'plot' feels like a mishmash of crazy arcs about hospital eruptions, bizarre experiments and glowing eel-things whose meaning and significance utterly escape me. But that's 'Litan' all over - not interested in appeasing expectations of common sense, more captivated by its own gauzy atmosphere of decrepit carnivalesque. Guaranteed to baffle as much as dazzle, and one for the surrealists out there.

KILL THE REFEREE - Another one from the Mocky box. I think 'Litan' was something of an outlier, not only for cinema in general but for the director too, as it seems that most of the rest of his work doesn't move in the direction of such dreamlike intensity. At first, 'Kill The Referee' seems down to earth - a faction of football fans squabbles inside a stadium, blaming the ref for a decision that spoils the match for them; meanwhile, their minds on other things, the referee and his journalist lover wring their hands and try to sort out their relationship. That all seems pretty grounded, but things take a dark turn with the death of one of the hooligans, and 'Kill The Referee' takes flight from reality in the form of a French-Soccer themed John Carpenteresque urban siege thriller! Nice idea but is it enough? With all that running around and chat I worried it might flag a little. I needn't have, because Mocky keeps things moving and always makes them nice to look at, his cinematographer giving Paris by night the mystery of a looming sepulchre. I guess the idea of thugs surrounded by Brutalist architecture was a nod to 'A Clockwork Orange', but the high rise they all end up in had the sterile grandeur of something out of Cronenberg or Ballard, and the film for me became more about the visual atmosphere of alienation than anything else. More perplexing and interesting stuff from the maverick Mocky.

[Stephen@Cult Labs]

Watched Boy Kills World last night. Totally flopped on release and a lot of people hated it, but I thought it was a lot of fun.

IMG_2999.jpg

[nicholasrope]

Originally Posted by MrBarlow

The Monster Squad. 1987.

A group of monster movie fanatics try to save their small town from Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man and Gil Man.

Fred Dekker's little classic from the 80s with some of Universal's monsters making a good strong appearance with Frankenstein joining the good guys while playing dress up in a tree house. Van Helsing tried to stop Dracula with a amulet, jump 100 years and Dracula wants the amulet and our heroes try and find it aswell to end his new reign. Full of dark comedy with how a person would react if his son claims to see a monster in his room always gets me laughing and Frankenstein capturing the best shot of a girl at her window with a camera.

Attachment 252163

This needs a UK release