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5th October 2015, 09:30 PM
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 Offski now to watch DAY OF THE DEAD. 
__________________  Teddy, I'm a Scotch drinker - you know that. I just have the occasional brandy when I'm not drinking.  |
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5th October 2015, 10:12 PM
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| lesdiaboliques.jpg In a small country town Christina Delassalle owns and runs a school for boys with her husband Michel. Christina does her best to run the school but she faces both physical and emotional struggles. Christina is a frail lady with a very weak heart and to add to this burden her husband is a very dominant cruel man who has a mistress Nicole Horner who also teaches in the school. Nicole is the total opposite of Christina Nicole is a very strong women who knows what she wants and is not afraid to go and get it while Christina is quite and obedient. Despite her strong demeanor Nicole is experiencing the same abuse both mental and physical from her lover Michel. Everyone at the school both students and staff alike both hate and fear Michel. Nicole finally realises she has enough when Michel gives her a black in an argument and has to suffer the embarrassment of having to hide behind dark sunglasses in class. Christina and Nicole get together to devise a plan red themselves of the man they both love and hate in equal measure. They find a window of opportunity when the school will be close for a weekend holiday. Both woman leave town and head to a house owned by Nicole where they plan to lure Michel and dispose of him once and for all. Christina lures Michel to the house by demanding a divorce which Michel is not willing to allow happen knowing that we will loose everything because Christina is the one that has all the money that keeps him in the luxury he has become accustomed too. Once Michel arrives the plan is put into action when his wife tricks him into drinking some poisoned whiskey. Once he is out cold the women carry him to a bath and drown him. They then transport him back to the school where they dump him in the dirty school pool hoping to make his death look like an accident. When a few days pass the woman decide to drain the pool but when the pool is empty Michels body is nowhere to be found. Who could of taken the body ad where could it be now? Was Michel even dead to start with. Les Diaboliques is a fantastic tense film. The acting is great from everyone involved. Each character makes you feel different about their situation. Firstly there is Christina who you cannot but feel sorry for her and her struggles. She is finding life very hard and constantly has to rest and recover from the smallest amount of stress mainly caused by her husband and his constant torture he inflicts on her. Then there is Nicole who demands your respect and admiration for her strength. Finally we have Michel a horrible man who thrives and the fears and weaknesses of those around him you really come to hate this man right from the get go. The mystery of the missing body had me glued to the screen right until the end and the pay off is fantastic the final scenes really get under your skin. 9/10
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5th October 2015, 10:15 PM
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keirarts likes this.
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5th October 2015, 10:59 PM
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BAIT – This horror-thriller from the director of 'Before Dawn' has a lot going for it (if you're me, that is). For one thing, it's shot around my neck of the woods (in Halifax / Leeds / Huddersfield / Hebden) – not a genre first, but hardly the norm. Another plus is the presence of raddled stand up comedy renegade Charlie Chuck, here occupying a small role as a sleazy indoor market dweller – there's just no way I could ever give a bad review to a horror flick starring that guy. Anyway, 'Bait' is about two women who run a stall on said market. They want to upgrade and start 'living the dream', and the offer of a loan from nice guy money lender Jeremy seems like a solid proposition – until he turns out to be a massive arsehole who basically viciously beats or kills anyone who can't cough up. 'Bait' hooks into the day-to-day horrors of austerity riven England, where the worst off face a kicking from Cameron and the very real prospect of slipping through the economic safety net (what's left of it) and into the clutches of tw*ts like this loan shark guy. That's a pretty interesting angle for a genre movie, and 'Bait' plays its hand well, delivering strong performances from all involved, together with some well sustained tension in the latter half. It doesn't slouch on the horror aspects, this being, after all, essentially a kind of exploitation film rather than an episode of 'World In Action', and there are some brutal punch ups and bits of gore towards the end. Where it falls down, for me, is in its sense of style – it doesn't really have one. It's all a bit flatly done. That's OK, a film like this maybe has to be more about substance than anything else, but it sort of comes across like a particularly gritty ITV drama at points. Again, whether that's good or bad is all a matter of taste, but for my money it could've done with something like the loose-but-urgent realism of, say, Shane Meadows. There's also some silliness that needed to be explored more for it to work (local cops in cahoots with loan shark... OK, I can buy it, but not when it's tossed in as a throwaway answer to the obvious question “if you're being threatened to the point of murder by a homicidal man, why don't you at least report it to the police?”) In the end though, there's enough going on here to justify it as a pretty good flick in my eyes, and it's always a pleasure to see the great Rula Lenska, looking supernaturally young after all these years. JULIA – The recent Ashley C Williams film. It's basically another rape-revenge scenario, with Williams as a meek medical technician who survives a brutal assault by a gang of vicious yuppies. She gets involved in a radical therapy aimed at relieving trauma by way of victim empowerment – here, taken to an extreme degree – and, before you can say 'Ms 45', turns into a leather clad avenger. Things get messy when she decides to revisit her assailants and dish out some sweet justice. 'Julia' is, well, I guess it's a tale of two films, one of which is nigh on pitch perfect, the other basically preposterous. OK, to take the first angle – this film has really good aesthetics. It looks great, the textures, visuals, sounds and William's performance are all really top rankin'. Maybe it's something which appeals specifically to me, but I think the director and associates have done an impressive job of managing to splice a latter day indie palette into 'Maniac' (remake) style neon-slick techno-noir, and then into a kind of seventies Franco / Rollin feel. Lots of really evocative, sometimes striking images and tones, from the electro soundtrack to the feverishly lit scenes of cultists hard at it during their bloodletting and sex rituals (I'm not going to oversell it, this latter stuff doesn't predominate). However... the other side of things is a bit more problematic. Rape revenge films, yeah we all know the politics are often dodgy, but there are different approaches. What rankles about 'Julia' is that it sells a particular scenario on the back of feminist ideas about taking power, but doesn't bother to do justice to any of those ideas. I know it's 'just' a horror film, but there's something smarmy about paying lip service to these things only to have your female leads do a blood smeared shag, or else dress up like a 'Nuts' reader's wet dream. Maybe the director thinks that by doing this HE's 'deconstructing the male gaze' etc etc, but for me there's too much contradiction. Too much contradiction everywhere else too – for instance, this therapy business – basically, go out and kill guys who are a bit sleazy and make a move on you. That's the premise. How's that going dispel trauma, exactly? Again, it's just a movie, I know, I know, but... particularly when therapist guy boldly tells Ashley to “not make it personal. You must transcend the ego”. What, when you're out killing people? How does that work, again? In the end, the therapist is shown to be crazy in a beautifully thrown away and utterly senseless revelation, so yes it's obvious that his techniques were always going to be questionable, but I don't know what it says about the film's inner logic when none of these otherwise smart women go “wait on - these therapy ideas are bollocks! I might as well just go out and take revenge in a standard 'rape-revenge' movie kind of way rather than dress up kinky for the boyz and resort to these bizarre and protracted ritualistics”. OK, the films inconsistencies pile up to point where they teeter over into “can just about get away with playing the 'dream-like' card” territory, so maybe, patronising fan-boy take on feminism aside, it's all good. Absorbing and messy, 'Julia' will hold your interest and attention, and I look forward to what the director does next. |
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5th October 2015, 11:21 PM
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Demoncrat and Nordicdusk like this. |
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5th October 2015, 11:38 PM
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I have watched some turgid crap in my time but straight into numero uno of celluloid shit ever witnessed by my eyes is Hard To Be A God. I so wanted to like it, too. The concept sounds great. Scientists visit the planet Arkanar and discover a society 800 years behind our own earth. The intelligentsia is being wiped out by Arkanar's cruel rulers but can the scientists help the world towards a more enlightened future? Can they feck! Now, I'm quite willing to admit that I'm not the sharpest tool in the box but I'm not the dullest either. Seriously, WTF?? After an hour of this I was so tempted to turn it off but thought that would be a disservice and persevered for another hour when thoughts of self harm flooded my mind. Like a martyr to the cause I stayed to the very end in the full knowledge that brain damage may likely occur. So what was wrong with it? It was made, for a start. Actors stare into the camera trying to give the impression that some cameraman is recording the events as they unfold - if you can see past objects continuously swinging out of focus just inches in front of the lens, chicken feet, swords, fingers, rope, whatever. I have no idea, if anything, this is meant to signify but all it is, is distracting and bloody annoying. Food is there to chew for a few seconds and then be spat out, on the floor, back in the bowl or in someones face. There seems to be an obsession with shit and dirt/mud in particular. Mixed together if at all possible and then rubbed on someone. The biggest kink however is reserved for sniffing. Sniffing stuff is big in Arkanar. Everyone does it. To everything. People, dogs, clothes, food, shit, dead people but especially fingers. They sniff their own and others fingers as if they just spent a night with Sweaty Betty and want to remind themselves just what rotten whale blubber smells like. The dialogue leaves you confused and wondering if there is some miss-translation from the Russian. Example; "Here. Drink." "Why?" "Everyone is rubbing themselves." Another one; "Me dogs sprouted - and it keeps on raining." Most of the dialogue is disjointed rambling, means nothing and no conversation advances the plot (Plot...? Ha! That's a good one!) or even makes sense. In fact I think it would have been better with no subtitles at all. Even with the worst films you've ever seen you can usually find something good to say about it but the best thing I can say about Hard to be a God is that it finally ended. £15.00 bloody quid and 3 hours of sheer mind numbing crap. Please can anyone tell me (Michael Brooke...?) what on earth did I not get or am I just a Philistine? Avoid like Sweaty Betty after she's pulled a train out the back of the pub!
__________________ "Why did they have to go and cut her for?" "She could have been used two, maybe three more times!" |
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5th October 2015, 11:38 PM
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| download (1).jpg A mist falls on a small hick town and everyone gathers in the local supermarket trying to figure out what is happening. Thats it they spend most of the film screaming at each other and preaching about the lord and then screaming some more then a few monsters then back to screaming and shouting about the lord. This has to be one of the worst films i have ever seen utter rubbish with maybe the most annoying group of characters ever assembled. The ending was so terrible it made me angry. No score for this one its just best forgotten about.
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5th October 2015, 11:40 PM
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J Harker likes this.
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5th October 2015, 11:42 PM
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 Nordicdusk likes this.
__________________ "Why did they have to go and cut her for?" "She could have been used two, maybe three more times!" |
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5th October 2015, 11:47 PM
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I taught Hell Ride was the worst film i ever seen but at least that had cool bikes and boobs so get s couple of points for that at least. The Mist takes the crown now.
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