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This is my first time watching this. I was very impressed. One of the best black comedies I've seen in ages. 8.5/10
__________________ My Video Nasty Podcast (Born Nasty) and "Let's Play..." YouTube Channel: http://tinyurl.com/hyphk7u |
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Punch drunk love is one of the few Adam Sandler films I like. P.T.Anderson really tapped into something about Sandler as a performer that was always lurking in the background of his own middling efforts. A sense of self loathing and Rage that's genuinely uncomfortable to see. I think that's one of the reasons I like it.
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Don't look in the basement. A nurse starts work at an Asylum where the head doctor practices unorthodox therapy on his patients. Something seems off about the place as the nurse begins to uncover a dark secret about the hospital. An ultra low budget example of the regional horror scene back when directors could sell there work to the drive in circuit. It's lingered about primarily after getting caught up in the video nasties debacle back in the early eighties. The film is relatively tame and somewhat uneventful but has something about it that keeps me watching. I'd suggest it's a similar low rent charm that can be found in the films of Andy Milligan and directors like him. Not for everyone perhaps but I like it enough that I return to it every once in a while. Don't look in the basement 2 Directed by the son of the original director S.F Brownrigg and starring some of the original actors. The film is something of a retread of the original with supernatural overtones as a new doctor discovers history may be repeating itself. If your not a fan of the first then avoid this. It's pretty much similar in tone and pacing but with better production values and some gore. If you did like the first then it's a decent sequel and an affectionate tribute at the same time. |
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__________________ My Video Nasty Podcast (Born Nasty) and "Let's Play..." YouTube Channel: http://tinyurl.com/hyphk7u |
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The Return of Doctor X (1939) Seven years after the first film, the dastardly Doctor X returns, this time played by Humphrey Bogart. Bogart was never really a horror actor and this role doesn't give him much to do aside from sneer and attempt a silly Karloff style hair-do with a laughable white streak. According to the history books the legendary actor wasn't a fan of this film and there was so much more to come from him with his career about to truly take off in a mere two years time. Lacking much in the way of horror or indeed the first films technicolor hues, this has more in common with newspaper comedies of the time and is for the most part instantly forgettable. |
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PREY – NJW’s weird three hander always comes across to me like an old seventies ‘Play For Today’ with added sex and gore (and fox faced aliens). It’s about, yep, a fox-faced alien who lands on Earth for undisclosed but probably pretty sinister reasons (well, he kills some dude and a copper so it’s clear he’s not some envoy for intergalactic peace). After taking on the appearance of a mere earthling he ends up in a menage with two lesbians who confuse him with increasingly edgy mind games, one of which sees him dressed up in drag and looking a bit baffled. Lots of questions arise, such as -is one of the unhappy couple a murderous psychopath? Slow moving but tense and tantalising if you’re in the right frame of mind, with a pretty brutal climactic bit. Has a proper bloopy seventies sci-fi synth soundtrack too. THE OILY MANIAC – Mash-up of creepy sexploitation, folk horror and superhero-type monster flick done with typical seventies Shaw Bros genre movie lunacy. Saw it years ago on R3 DVD… 88 Films are certainly to be congratulated for plucking these obscure ones out of oblivion and serving them up with such great AV. As for the film, it’s an acquired taste. I’d forgotten about the rapeyness and the weird attitude to gender. But the creature is pretty mighty, a huge man-turd of tar that shrieks and bellows as it leaps from buildings and transforms into pools of oil (the latter in the form of an oft-repeated and charmingly lame special effect). Many of the other aspects – character and plot etc etc - are as wooden as you might imagine, but films like TOM still seem vivid and strange. GHOSTKEEPER – Snowbound horror about some people who end up in a big house with a secret… will it all turn into an incoherent ‘The Shining’ rip-off by the end? I really like ‘Ghostkeeper’, actually. It’s slow but it’s atmospheric. If there’s part of you that doesn’t mind long, dimly lit conversations in shadowy rooms and endless shots of snowdrifts, then you’ll probably dig this one. I don’t really say that in jest, because ‘Ghostkeeper’ does boil up quite a lot of tension and foreboding, and seems to be leading somewhere until it goes a bit crazy in the last half hour or so, during which I had trouble deciphering what was meant to be happening. But I don’t hold that against the movie, if anything it adds to its grainy, early eighties charm and sense of slowly creeping madness. SAVAGE STREETS – Linda Blair is out for vengeance after her sister is raped and her best friend murdered. The gang responsible gets it with a crossbow. I like that eighties movie paranoia about urban youth. Maybe it was always more of a fifties / sixties thing, but there seemed to be fresh wave of it back in the first half of the eighties, with stuff like this and “The Class Of 1984” out there alongside their ‘Ridgemont High’ counterparts. The characteristics of this little phase in exploitation movie making are evident here, such as laughably evil ‘punks’ ripped from a Daily Mail reader’s nightmare, and the whole ‘school as a warzone’ thing. It’s all wrapped up in eighties crassness, with big hair and neon-lit nightclubs and a preference for cardboard characters doing each other in rather than speculating on the sociology behind their downfalls, which has its place if you're not permanently zoned out on Ken Loach. You’ve probably all seen it, so watch it again. |
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