KillZone 2/SPL II is an extremely good movie starring Tony Jaa and Wu Jing. If you haven't seem KillZone/SPL, I recommend it since there's some thematic through-lines between both films. The first movie stars Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung and Wu Jing.

I will probably get quite a bit of watching done this weekend. My son is off to the deep south for the next month (Iowa), and this weekend, my girlfriend is busy with dog shows while I'm busy monitoring my fluids to catch my kidney stone. When it finally sees fit to vacate my body grumble grumble.

So, after the glory of Death Spa, I watched Body Bags. After that, being tonight, I watched Murderlust.

Murderlust does not have a promising start. It looks like the digital version was ripped straight from the best possible copy of the VHS they could find. It doesn't have "used VHS tape" lines in it, it's just a league removed from HD, full-screen aspect ratio (or what used to be full-screen), and rather grainy. The acting was initially rather wooden, but as the movie went along, it seemed more and more fitting. Some solid dialog and an actual decent story form in this narrative, which ultimately drives the plot.

The film's graininess even starts to work in it's favor, recalling watching films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer back in the day on VHS, and occasionally having a bit of a "evening news" feel to it adding a layer of realism.

Steve Belmont is the pivotal figure in the film--a serial killer with some churchy views on women who likes to strangle prostitutes and then dump them in the Mojave Desert. He is a spiteful loser, but also works at a church and wants to be a youth counselor. I won't mention anything else, because this film is actually pretty watchable, and I was surprised that the story evolved as well as it did. What initially seemed like wooden acting morphed into a kind of nuanced horror as we get to see how Steve deals with his day to day life, and indeed, he comes off as quite believable.

Another one on Amazon Prime.

And now I finished Blood Hook. A little slasher (hooker?) film as directed by Jim Mallon. If that name looks familiar, it's the same Jim Mallon who produced Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in the day. He was notorious for creative differences with Joel and Mike, originally voicing Gypsy, and for clinging to the rights to the show for ages.

This slasher film follows most of the usual rules of slasher movies. You got your group of youngsters (college kids), the guy with the connection to the past, your litany of people intended to pass for murdery types, your weird locals (Minnesotans or Wisconsonites, I'm not sure which of us was profiled here), and someone doing a bunch of killing. In this case, all the killing was done with marksman-like launches of fishing hooks on a massive lure. Gore was minimal, mostly just some blood, but at least one neat scene of a dead guy having a hook and rope rammed through his jaw the way they hang fish (I guess). Not a terrible film, but certainly not doing anything really different with the slasher genre. At least it wasn't based around some fucking holiday like so many others. Although, there was a fishing contest running as the backdrop to the plot.

Amazon Prime again. Published by Troma, but not made by Troma.

Zhang men ren (English: Lady is the Boss)?



No, close but not right. The lady I meant was European not Chinese.

Gotta say thanks for Death Spa, finally finished watching it this weekend. Pretty fucken bonkers. When that shitty looking frozen fish puppet came alive, growled, then went for the jugular, I lost it.

Oh yeah, that was unexpected. I had a moment of "is this really happening?" then remembered how much other stuff had occurred. And at that point, you just shrug and go with it. "I stuck with your insanity this far, movie, I'm here to the end."

I'm pretty sure they showed the guys preparing sushi in the background in order to justify having those fish in the freezer. Also, the female detective's line "Fuck this computer shit!" needs to be sampled on a grind album.

I got some flack with folks because I found this to be fairly underwhelming, probably same tier as Jacob's Ladder for me. I think they're both not bad but I just didn't grab on as hard as other people. Also Pi is pretty pretentious I must say. I do feel like there was a lot that could've been done to improve but in the end wasn't too gripping.

Life - For a movie I've seen described as an Alien or The Thing ripoff, this was probably a bit better than I expected. Mostly entertaining the whole way, and I liked the ending.

The Blackcoat's Daughter - This was made by the guy who wrote and directed the I Am the Pretty Thing... Netflix original. Both movies were effective at creating an eerie atmosphere, but neither had an ending that I felt made the slow buildup truly pay off. Maybe watch it anyway, if you're into horror.

Well I totally agree with you that Pi kinda sucks, but I totally disagree with you about Jacob's Ladder because that's my favorite horror movie of all time. My problem with Pi is just that it didn't have a lot of substance, and while certain individual scenes were cool, a lot of the writing was corny (like the part with the politician threatening the main character) and overall it didn't seem to really go anywhere or have a really cohesive message, while at the same time being super pretentious. You could tell it was made by a young guy with big ambitions and a lot of talent but not a lot of experience or skill.

Demolition - Jake Gyllenhaal is a widower who just lost his wife to an accident. He starts acting erratically out of grief and sort of looking at life in a new way, forging a relationship with a vending machine customer service worker and her odd son and getting a love of just wrecking the shit out of everything. I found this to be an interesting and engaging film, though I thought there was something overly cutesy about its depiction of grief, kind of tip-toeing around the real core of the lead guy's issues. Not to say it should've been a misery-fest through and through... but the film just never really got to the core of what this character was about or what the real issue was, preferring instead to show us quaint and absurd scenes that were entertaining but not really illuminating. But Gyllenhaal is a master and I guess he can just be put in anything now, no matter how weird, and make it work.

Paterson - A Jim Jarmusch film - first one I've seen aside from Coffee & Cigarettes. This was well made and artful and well acted, and drew you into its world. But I had to admit it felt slightly stilted and dull, sort of content to lay in a pleasantly dreary background-noise sort of way and never really jump out at you. There was nothing terribly wrong with it, but it never really excited me more than a little bit during some scenes here and there. Probably a bit overly long at two hours, too.

Baby Driver - Fantastic. Super stylized, fun action summer flick from Edgar Wright. I don't think this is as powerful as Scott Pilgrim or The World's End, my favorites from Wright - but it was just a delight to behold. The story was fast-paced, careening heist/crime action and it was done up with a lot of music played out in an interesting way I don't want to spoil here through the lead character. Wright plays around with sound and music in very interesting ways and it makes the movie engaging to the senses in multiple ways. The characters were a lot of fun and performances by Ansel Elgort, Jon Hamm, Kevin Spacey and others made this colorful and energetic. It was a bit long and there wasn't a lot of depth to the writing or plot, but the marvelous action and directing just made this so great to watch. Definitely a pick for best action movie this year.

Man, Pi. That movie really takes me back to my late teens/very early 20s. I agree with fsm that it's quite brittle when it comes to actual storytelling and pretentious as hell, but it was certainly a movie that left some kind of impression. Quite aimless as a whole, but a lot of cool building blocks.

Pi is worth watching for the dialogue between what's his name and Mark Margolis. The thing is, I've known someone very much like the protagonist: extremely smart and world-class in his field (organic chemistry) yet is oftentimes delusional, as he convinced himself that all the patterns in the world are the result of intelligent design. He's muslim, but he has really weird and cognitively dissonant perspectives that simultaneously advocate for intelligent design and shoot down the extraordinary mumbo jumbo of his religious fellows, and he argues with so much passion that he basically stands on top of whatever he can stand on and shouts down everyone else and floods them with an endless torrent of incoherent babble. He gets tired eventually.

The Max Cohen character comes close to his degree of delusion, but is definitely far more obsessed, because finding the number is very much his only focus and goal in life. I showed his some scenes from the film:




He thought that Max is an idiot for trying so hard, and also wished he had someone like Margolis's character as his mentor to guide him in his younger days.

A friend of mine with similar opinions of Jacob's Ladder said he appreciated it more after a second viewing and I feel like I would too. I think it succeeds as suspenseful and mysterious non linear story that serves to scramble your brain the first time and reassemble it the next time. Like Mulholland Drive, which I think is just one of the greatest movies of all time. Jacob's Ladder is good when you combat it strictly as a film, it's put together well and has real cool elements. It's an original presentation of s totally unoriginal idea. The whole "Am I dead?" thing is super cliche, but in all fairness I'm just a young hooligan and I wasn't there to experience it when it hit the scene. Someone else said that it is dated now, but mind blowing at the time, and I could get on board with that.

I drew a Pi comparison because they both hit me nearly the same way, mildly, but Jacob's Ladder does have wayyy more substance. Plus both have protagonists that I'm not too ecstatic about. In Pi's case, it isn't bad character development at all. He just comes off as confrontationally pretentious and reclusive in his goals and sometimes he makes it hard to like him. But then at the same time, he's obviously a damaged individual that calls for sympathy, the headache/anxiety sequences are super intense, like he's experiencing a pain much worse than we even comprehend as simple film viewers. I'd say that he's a person you might not like much, or just totally hate, but you're rooting for him all the same. Jacob's Ladder's protagonist is just kinda bland.

Watched John Wick. Keanu Reeves again excels as a well-dressed stoic that is great at shooting and not aging amid the chaos of essentially no plot.

The thing is, I think people over-focus on the twist ending and miss out on a lot of the complexity. For example a lot of people (including myself, upon first viewing) buy the hippie chemist's explanation about why shit went down in 'Nam the way it did, when really Jacob had absolutely no way of knowing any of that and it's much more likely his whole squad just completely panicked, either under a real attack or an accidental explosion or something. It's just another attempt to invent a satisfying reason for what happened. Also the whole "go into the light" thing is just stuff in his brain, there's never any evidence that he really went to heaven or anything. Like his chiropractor says, the same exact process can either seem like devils dragging you to hell or angels taking you to heaven - but it's not one or the other, it's not both, it's neither. It's just the subconscious brain falling back on its familiar dream-symbols in an attempt to interpret and process its own imminent death.

I think the director had a religious interpretation of the events of the film, but he wisely never made anything explicit and left it all open to interpretation. Do Jacob and Gabe really reunite in the afterlife? Jacob believed that was what was going to happen, but who knows? Personally I don't think so, but it's really up to the viewer.

I don't care if it was unnecessary, I thought Independence Day: Resurgence was a fun movie. I saw it in theaters and I rented it from Redbox today to watch tonight. Good, mindless fun. Or maybe I just like Jeff Goldblum too much.

I wasn't too crazy about the ending of Jacob's Ladder but every other minute preceding the final 2 minutes was so chock full of glorious, nerve-wracking, utter WTFery that not being crazy about the last one-and-a-half scenes didn't bother me too much. What a trip. I've never seen any other film like it.



It was just dumb fun. I could have done without the "hey maybe there will be a sequel" feel to the ending but otherwise I had fun. When the trailer came out it gave me crazy feels and then having that speech right at the start of the film gave me goosebumps.

I thought it was good, too. A much better return than the Jurassic World reboot.

Watched "Baby Driver" this weekend. It was a good flick, but not a great one. Lot of fun and interesting editing to match the music, but I felt like there was less car mayhem than advertised, the attempts to do quirky dialogue often failed, and the love story overwhelmed the rest of the plot.

Independence Day Resurgence had one really cool idea, the African bush army fighting the aliens. Make a movie about that and drop all the rest of the ham!

You liked The World's End over Hot Fuzz?

They're all very similar in quality for me, but TWE has fascinated me the most in recent years. Maybe because it's newer, but also because I find it a bit more intricate and layered in its writing.

The World’s End was pretty great though doesn’t have quite the replay value as Hot Fuzz for me. For its time, Shawn Of The Dead was pretty groundbreaking, but I think Wright perfected that formula in Hot Fuzz. I tried watching Scott Pilgrim though ended up just leaving midway through because it was so obnoxious. I did not care for it at all. I showed my wife the trailer for Baby Driver and she exclaimed, “it looks like a made-for-TV-movie on the CW or something, not one for theatrical release” and I’d have to agree with her. Is the movie much better than the trailer implies? Looks like it could be just mindless fun and there’s not anything wrong with that, though I was a bit underwhelmed from the trailer.

Scott Pilgrim is one of my favorite movies. Just fantastic writing, hilarious comedy with jokes packed in everywhere that you notice something new each time. And it's got a lot to say about modern people and relationships and what not. It's a feast on the eyes and ears.

Baby Driver is just what I thought it'd be from the trailer, a super fun, over the top ride. Nothing substantial, but also it doesn't insult your intelligence - it's just a good action flick and works for what it is. Not sure I'd say it looks like a made for TV movie. Everything about it is glossy, big budget and looks excellent. In terms of lighting, colors, camera angles, etc it looks fantastic.

I'm on a splatter binge now

Watched Manhunter. I very much like the humanistic approach towards the antagonist here. Noonan went a little over-the-top with it sometimes, what with all his dramatic monologues, but never do you get a moment of cheese. Really powerful film overall, and thoroughly decent and moral for a horror/thriller; makes for a nice change.

Young, beardless Brian Cox is cool, btw.

The thing is, I think Noonan's dramatic monologues were entirely in-character - the Red Dragon had built up this entire dramatic spiritual journey for himself and believed he was literally becoming this demonic being from the William Blake painting. Grandiose melodramatic delusions like that are a big symptom of mental illness, especially from people who are completely socially isolated.

How good is Manhunter's score? When I saw another Mann joint, Thief, I was struck by how goddamn good that music was.

Well Tangerine Dream did the score to Thief, and Manhunter's isn't that good, but it's still really good. The climax is perfectly synced with In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and it's amazing.

Ralph Fiennes did it better. :V

I never liked Manhunter all that much (mostly because I found the 2002 adaptation of Red Dragon to be much better), but Manhunter's soundtrack is definitely one of its highlights (alongside William Petersen's portrayal of Will Graham). Excellent dark 80s synth that adds a lot of unease to each scene.

What've you been watching, and what's up next?

Nerve - A high school girl begins playing an online game in which she must complete increasingly dangerous challenges to win money. While watching this, my brain kept telling me I should hate it. The commentary about online behavior was pretty obvious, with insights like "sometimes we go too far in our quest for Likes and Follows" or "people can be obnoxious if they think anonymity will let them get away with it." The climax involved blatant speech-making from the main character, and the resolution was too neat. Even the lighting was overdone in several scenes.

And despite these flaws, I almost liked it anyway. For some reason it added up to more than the sum of its parts, possibly aided by a short running time and a fairly quick escalation of the stakes.

I'll never own all of Tangerine Dream's music, but I'll keep trying! Optical Race and Lily On The Beach are ace.

Watched What We Do In The Shadows last night and I enjoyed it very much. However, I was expecting it to be better. The movie's quite short, 1h25, but I felt it was beginning to drag on a bit. Also, Petyr was gone way too soon, he was my favorite of the bunch and I wanted more scenes with him. Nick was a bad trade-off IMO.

Still, a solid 8/10.

So, I saw Spider-Man: Homecoming.

I enjoyed it and thought it was a solid movie, but everything felt a bit inconsequential. I don't know if it's just too much of Spider-Man over the course of the last half-decade, or a burning out in the "traditional" style of the MCU movies, but this didn't really do much for me on a larger scale.

I feel like GOTG and GOTG2 represented a shift in style for the MCU, and we see that being carried into Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther, both of which look absolutely incredible. Homecoming felt like a very traditional MCU movie, and I'm not sure I'm interested in revisiting that style more than once every couple of years.

But yeah, solid movie. Solid Spider-Man movie. It feels a bit inconsequential. Still can't wait to see what the hell Infinity War even fucking looks like at this point.

It was ignited by Braindead which is basically the greatest movie, desert island pick for sure.

Haven't gone too deep just yet but have also watched:

Bad Taste
Street Trash
All the Evil Deads (seen em but they're always good)
All the Re-Animators
Body Melt
The Blob
Basket Case (not too much splattering but another favorite regardless. A comedy horror hybrid that's actually managed to make me crack up hysterically and freak out with fear. I mean that creature and it's screaming is genuinely terrifying)
Hardware (awesome)
From Beyond

Don't exactly have a set list that I'm checking off but I'm looking to watch Xtro and Mindwarp tonight and tomorrow.

I love artsy movies and even artsy gory movies as much as the next guy but I'm saying if you're gonna call something a splatter movie, then it ought to be as ridiculously over the top and outrageous as possible. You know, bodies melting and exploding and splattered entrails and rib cages and all the good stuff. Braindead is like the archetype, if anyone has good recs.

I'm going to guess that the new Spider Man ends on a note that sets up another inevitable sequel?

Some stuff I saw lately...

The Hero - Sam Elliott shines as this old washed up actor who gets a cancer diagnosis and starts re-evaluating all the things he's fucked up in life and trying to fix them. I thought this was a bit generic - the problems the character faces are fairly typical for these sort of dramas and nothing particularly surprises you; a May-December romance with a beautiful woman played by Laura Prepon (though I'm curious why they didn't just cast an elderly woman in this role myself, wouldn't have changed anything except the amount of sex appeal), and a tumultuous relationship with his daughter Krysten Ritter, though this is never really given much screentime. His best friend played by Nick Offerman is good though. And there are enough well written moments to make this worth seeing - while not doing anything particularly new, it's well directed and well acted and comes off entertaining anyway.

Money Monster - An attempt at making a political/social statement about the amount of control the wealthy stockbrokers and 1%ers have over the American people - a story about an unhinged man crashing a financial TV show and holding its host hostage, trying to get answers about why he lost all his money on stock investments. This wasn't particularly subtle and I am not sure it ever got to a grander point than "some of these rich people are just bad," but it was a thoroughly entertaining thrill ride anyway. I had a shitload of fun with this. I wished it could've found some greater purpose beyond the obvious message, and the third act was weaker than its set up, but I would say this was a lot of fun anyway.

Spider-Man: Homecoming - Really fun. Just a high-speed good time, with a lot of humor and personality to it. It really felt like a Spider-Man story should, with all the tropes and signatures you'd expect - this is probably the closest they've ever gotten to really nailing how a Spider-Man story should feel. Tom Holland is great and I liked how authentically young he seemed - lent a heightened sense of danger to it when he was in an action scene. Michael Keaton was maybe my favorite Marvel villain yet - really good. Very cleverly done and a lot of cool little moments all throughout. Just a plain old fun flick to watch.

A Cure for Wellness was the most enjoyable time I've had with a Hollywood movie in ages. Fuck Chris Nolan, Gore Verbinski is the Kubrick of blockbuster movies. As far as cinematography goes, this may be the best looking horror movie to date and no, I'm not being hyperbolic, every frame could be pored over by art students for years to come. It really is just that pretty. Unfortunately, no other element can quite match up to the cinematography--the music is moody but indistinct and forgettable, the script waffles between inscrutable and insufferable obviousness (you THINK that glass of water the protagonist guzzles before he attempts to leave the institution for the first time maybe has something to do with "the bigger picture?") and the ending is absolutely ridiculous and overwrought and ends in an unearned "question" of whether or not the entire movie was an outgrowth of the main character's psyche (don't worry, it thankfully doesn't make a definitive statement).

But it's still a great movie and one of the best hollywood horror movies I can remember. Many critics complained about the length (roughly 2.5 hours) but damn, I nearly cried when it ended, because I wanted to marinate in this obscenely beautiful and morose and dreary world for as long as I could. If you like atmosphere and don't mind a lot of absurdity in your horror movies, you should definitely check out A Cure for Wellness.

And then I watched Logan. A soporific nothing-movie that was so impressively uninteresting and forgettable I scarcely remember anything about it even two days later. All I can remember is that it felt about five-times longer than A Cure for Wellness but was actually shorter and that nothing in it made much sense, especially regarding the flexibly effective (depending on what was demanded in the script, because consistency requires actual writing talent) mutant powers of the (completely obnoxious btw) children. Also, this wasn't fucking "post-apocalyptic" since they're still exchanging legal tender and nothing is dying of radioactive poisoning, everyone is just kinda a bit more poor and sad than usual; basically it was just what you'd expect the state of the country after the Trump administration. Also, how did the director make me hate Patrick Stewart, forced to play a bumbling, obnoxious senile old fart that no actor deserves having to make interesting, much less my beloved Sir Patty Stew? Yet another awful Wolverine movie, thank christ they're finally over. Honestly, I think X-Men Origins: Wolverine was the best of the bunch because at least it was like 80% action scenes, rather than attempting to make a good movie and failing spectacularly.

Go see A Cure for Wellness instead.