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The gimmick with the multiverse tech in the film is that one can meld their memories and skills (such as martial arts training) with an alternate version of themselves if they share a singular sensory experience at the same time and push a button. Here’s what it looks like in practice:





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 LunarSol wrote:
Its one of the best films I've seen full stop.

Yes, I agree.

The Mark of Zorro

This is a film from 1940. However, seeing it had Tyrone Powers as Diego Vega/Zorro and Basil Rathbone as Capitan Esteban I knew I was in for at least one killer sword fight. It delivered when the two met.

There are some other fun set-pieces as well. If you want to put some swash in your buckle, you can do much worse than this film.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Anyone seen any good sci-fi lately?

I'm looking for something with some oomph. Not just pretty images that are supposed to make up for a paper thin plot. (ie. The Creator and Avatar 2)

Uhm.... AllI can recall seeing is Life. Which was okay, and I thought pretty cool to look at. Just doesn't have lots of Oomph I'm afraid. As far as general conceptional Oomph goes, I liked Passengers alright. Oh, watch Moon, if you haven't already.

Rewatching Farscape again. That show is so lovely. My favourite sci-fi show.

 Sigur wrote:
Rewatching Farscape again. That show is so lovely. My favourite sci-fi show.

I was trying to decide what to watch next since I finished Andromeda. It was a toss up between Farscape, Babylon 5 or the RoboCop: Prime Directives miniseries. I'll take this as a sign and Farscape it is

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Anyone seen any good sci-fi lately?

I'm looking for something with some oomph. Not just pretty images that are supposed to make up for a paper thin plot. (ie. The Creator and Avatar 2)

Dune? I mean it’s as about classic sci fi as you can get and the industrial design is awesome.

 Ghaz wrote:

 Sigur wrote:
Rewatching Farscape again. That show is so lovely. My favourite sci-fi show.

I was trying to decide what to watch next since I finished Andromeda. It was a toss up between Farscape, Babylon 5 or the RoboCop: Prime Directives miniseries. I'll take this as a sign and Farscape it is

A most wise choice. I watched it occasionally when it first aired and found it very endearing (puppets and it was different), but also quite silly. Now I watched it for the first time in full and earnest (and English!) last year, and it entertained me to no end. AND it's got the best puppets. And it's so different. And the best dialogue, the best sense of when to follow tropes and when to subvert them. And it does comedy well.. And it can go from very silly to huge and dramatic very fast. And by season 3 at the latest it gets very leather-y. And characters are constantly on the verge of going insane, in between they want to have sex and/or something to eat. In general, everything is so organic in that show. The technology itself is proper alien, the aliens are mostly proper alien, it just rocks.

Sure, Babylon 5 is great and important and all, but I just enjoy Farscape so much. Can't say anything about RoboCop: Prime Directive (only watched what Spoony had to say about it back in the day), won't say anything about Andromeda.

Watched some "best of" Rogue Admirals in Star Trek.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Rogue Admiral takes control of the Enterprise from its Commander.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Rogue Admiral steals Enterprise and blows it up... then commanders a Klingon Bird of Prey.

Star Trek IV: The Voage Home. Rogue Admiral in stolen Klingon Bird of Prey travels through time to kidnap two humpback whales from America's past.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. A room full of Rogue Admirals conspire to assassinate everyone.

Star Trek IX: Insurrection. A Rogue Admiral displaces people for a fountain of youth planet.

Star Trek Into Darkness. Rogue Admiral wants to use his super cool Warship to fight Klingons, so he attempts to orchestrate a Federation-Klingon War.

Bridge to Terabithia

You know, my wife and I had a rough day, let's watch some light-hearted fantasy flick. That will cheer us up.

Movie: "No."

 Easy E wrote:
Bridge to Terabithia

You know, my wife and I had a rough day, let's watch some light-hearted fantasy flick. That will cheer us up.

Movie: "No."

I remember the backlash when they had that book on an elementary school summer reading list.

I picked it up from the library and asked the librarian what all the fuss was about, and he told me. Oh. Crap.

It wasn't until High School that depressing books were foisted upon us. Back to back to back we had Animal Farm, 1984, Alas Babylon, and On the Beach. (I was pretty sure a lot of the emo kids in Florida were created by our public school reading lists).

I picked up that book on my own in elementary school and would read it during breaks. Got completely blindsided in the middle of the day and had to try and explain to a teacher why I was so upset.

Nailgun Massacre

Super low budget slasher, in which a nutter clad in combat fatigues and a motorcycle helmet goes around offing folk with a Nailgun.

Written, Directed and Produced by Terry Lofton, who was apparently a stunt man on The Dukes of Hazzard.

I’m not gonna lie, the complete lack of budget ($50,000) shows. And whilst not disastrously so, you can tell it was made by people who were largely amateurs.

But I do want to commend it on at least one thing. The Nailgun killer has a compressed air tank on their back. So there’s at least some attention to detail. Also, it’s identified that victims are bleeding out, none of the individual injuries being fatal. Oh, and the wounds are well done from a VFX point of view, looking suitably convincing. Granted that’s not difficult when it’s a Nailgun, but again it is something to commend.

Just got a better look at the air tank, and it’s adapted from a fire extinguisher. And to be honest? That adds to it for me, making it seem like something cobbled together by our nutter, rather than something carefully crafted.

It’s otherwise all by the numbers, as we might expect. Which is almost a shame, as whilst there’s nowt wrong with that, this could’ve been a nice bit of Outsider Art.

Is that the movie where the smoking trailer park woman comments “It’s getting so you can hardly go out anymore for all the mosquitoes and serial killers.”?

Almost! That’s the general store owner. Terry Lofton’s Granny, in Terry Lofton’s Granny’s very own general store!

OK, that wasn’t as bad as reviews made it out to be. Cheap and amateurish, sure. But effort was put in. The acting is…fine, I guess?

Main thing I didn’t like was the nutter’s “spooooooooky” voice. Though it’s a fairly early example of a Scream style vocoder/voice changer. But it’s relied upon too much, and the “waaa, waaaaaaaaa, waaaaaaaaaaaaaa” as the killer walks away, it feels silly rather than scary.

As with a fair few of this genre, the meat of a much better film is there. But for a $50,000 micro-budget, I’m prepared to forgive a lot. It’s a decent, aha, stab, at a slasher flick, and not entirely devoid of merit. But, once again, it’s another example of a film originally intended to be straight up horror being adapted into a black comedy part way through, and it shows.

Massive props for keeping us guessing who the killer actually is though.

Finally watched the re-uhhh... re-ruining of Robocop.

What a terrible film. Just honestly, it missed the point of everything the original attempted to satarize.

I'm so glad they were able to save his hand. The rest of him they couldn't save, but he can touch things.... ooooo.

Then we get the redesign "tactical black" for the last bit.

Ugh. Samuel Jackson was the best part of this nightmare.

Star Trek Generations

A perfectly cromulent movie.


If you like mediocre TNG episodes but want to se what they look like filmed in theater aspect ratio, have I got the film for you. Look, we just need to clear the slate for the big refit ship next movie and we have a page of funny Data moments we weren’t able to slip in earlier. It’s fine.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Finally watched the re-uhhh... re-ruining of Robocop.

What a terrible film. Just honestly, it missed the point of everything the original attempted to satarize.

I'm so glad they were able to save his hand. The rest of him they couldn't save, but he can touch things.... ooooo.

Then we get the redesign "tactical black" for the last bit.

Ugh. Samuel Jackson was the best part of this nightmare.

The best part of the movie was the first ten minutes or so, when it had a satirical edge (for then-current events) like the original. Then it became IP product and the director was kept from making any more decisions. Except for the body horror scene. That was neat.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Star Trek Generations

A perfectly cromulent movie.


If you like mediocre TNG episodes but want to se what they look like filmed in theater aspect ratio, have I got the film for you. Look, we just need to clear the slate for the big refit ship next movie and we have a page of funny Data moments we weren’t able to slip in earlier. It’s fine.

Ron Moore says why Generations wasn't as good as First Contact. They were so focused on getting Kirk and Picard together, everything else in the script was a footnote, and good storytelling was pushed aside to make the meeting a reality.

A change of pace and quality this evening.

The Substance

Demi Moore stars, and I believe has won awards for her role as an aging star that takes the mysterious, eponymous Substance.

Her performance is terrific here, being both captivating and convincing.

The film itself is heavy on symbolism, and there’s some excellent body horror to boot. However, it’s one you need to watch, rather than have on in the background.

The Mummy

You know, the Tom Cruise one. You know, the studio forced a lot of exposition into this one. For some reason, just showing us the backstory wasn't enough. We would be to dumb to understand it, so they needed to have Russel Crowe and the lead actress both explain it to us at different times.

However, I did enjoy seeing Tom Cruise get his ass absolutely handed to him by the titular beast. Like, painfully handed to him.

Yeah, this was not good. The connection with the Templars and the Egyptians was also..... Why? Honestly, the Brendan Frasier and Boris Karloff version are light years ahead of this thing.



Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey

Imagine if Winnie the Pooh and Piglet were mutant serial killers who went on a rampage after Christopher Robin left the 100 Acre Wood! That would be clever right..... RIGHT!

No, it would not.

Nobody

Bob Odenkirk action flick. A mix of John Wick and A History of Violence.

Is pretty good. Not especially original, but it’s well made, and despite commonalities doesn’t feel like a rip off or retread.

Does he at least blind a cyclops?

I just rewatched the extended editions of the Hobbit trilogy. Definitely much weaker than the Lord of the Rings movies, and part of that was some of the more zany action scenes that would fit better in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Also the extremely stilted elf-dwarf romance. Blech! Some of the CGI has held up okay over the last 12 or so years. Some of it definitely has not.

The biggest problem with the trilogy is how much extra stuff they added in just to pad it out to be a trilogy. It only needed to be two movies, really, and that includes showing how Gandalf investigated Dol Guldur and found out that the Necromancer who had taken up residence there was, in fact, the Dark Lord Sauron (I didn't mind this inclusion despite it not being in the actual book; Tolkien did write about it elsewhere, after all). They could have skipped the whole subplot of Azog chasing Thorin and company, and they drew out Thorin being obsessed with the treasure for far too long in the third movie. And the chase through the mountain with Smaug at the end of the second movie was probably the silliest scene in the whole movie.

Overall though, the movies are still reasonably fun. I enjoyed watching them once again, and I do recommend the extended editions despite the fact that there are some pacing issues (there are reasons why some of the extra stuff was left out of the theatrical release).

The Hobbit movies were pretty terrible.




Those Hobbit movies were pretty brilliant.

Tonight, for starters?

Annabelle

Kinda forgot I own all The Conjuring movies on Prime, so will be sprinkling them here and there in my viewing schedule. And tonight it’s the aforementioned Annabelle, second release in the movie universe.

I’ve definitely seen this before, but probably due to a propensity to binge the series alongside Insidious, I couldn’t tell you much about it right now.

Excellent design work on the doll though, making it look just creepy enough.

Overall, the film is kind of unremarkable. I will give it praise for avoiding lazy jump scares, but the atmosphere just doesn’t quite build. That being said, I am a heavily seasoned fan of the wider horror genre, so it may very well be this would be scarier to someone less experienced. I don’t regret buying it, and I don’t regret watching it. It’s just…..pretty average, almost frustratingly so.

(500) Days of Summer

This movie was from 2009 or so and made Zoey Deschanel (sp) a star! Also, was this the last big movie Joseph Gordon-Levitt made? What happened to that guy, he was everywhere for a while.

Anyway, this movie perfectly explained to me why dudes are shifting rightward. The whole movie is about a guy who feels entitled to a women's love, and completely falls apart when he doesn't get his infantile fantasy.

The most unrealistic part is that Tom actually learns his lesson and realizes that he isn't entitled to anyone's love at the end and actually takes ownership of being a better person. We all know this guy in real life, and he almost never does this.

This movie is still surprising relevant today. In a bad way.....

He did Batman, Inception and Looper after that film. Skimming his Wikipedia andnIMDB pages indicates he’s done a bunch of smaller parts and voice work since 2015 which coincides with the birth of his first child. I have no proof but it seems likely that he’s taken a decade or so off to have a family. I noticed him in a lead role again last year in a few things like Greedy People. Maybe he’s coming back?

 Flinty wrote:
He did Batman, Inception and Looper after that film. Skimming his Wikipedia andnIMDB pages indicates he’s done a bunch of smaller parts and voice work since 2015 which coincides with the birth of his first child. I have no proof but it seems likely that he’s taken a decade or so off to have a family. I noticed him in a lead role again last year in a few things like Greedy People. Maybe he’s coming back?

I was sad that he did not return in his masterclass performance of Cobra Commander in the second GI Joe film.

The Conjuring 2

Movietisation of the Enfield Haunting.

And it’s silly. Very silly indeed. How silly, dear reader? Set in 1977, we see a British hovel (and it is a hovel) where the teevee has a remote control. And a choice of more than three channels.

1977. When your teevee choices were BBC1, BBC2, ITV, or Sod All.

And now I just can’t take it seriously. Suspension of disbelief ruined.

Still. At least we get to see The Goodies being silly for a few seconds.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Tonight, for starters?

Annabelle

Kinda forgot I own all The Conjuring movies on Prime, so will be sprinkling them here and there in my viewing schedule. And tonight it’s the aforementioned Annabelle, second release in the movie universe.

I’ve definitely seen this before, but probably due to a propensity to binge the series alongside Insidious, I couldn’t tell you much about it right now.

Excellent design work on the doll though, making it look just creepy enough.

Overall, the film is kind of unremarkable. I will give it praise for avoiding lazy jump scares, but the atmosphere just doesn’t quite build. That being said, I am a heavily seasoned fan of the wider horror genre, so it may very well be this would be scarier to someone less experienced. I don’t regret buying it, and I don’t regret watching it. It’s just…..pretty average, almost frustratingly so.

A while back my employees and I were discussing the Conjuring universe and what movies were in it. None of us have really delved into it. Is "Oculus" part of it? I watched that movie, and it kinda feels like it should be in there somewhere.

It’s, in release order….

The Conjuring
Annabelle
The Conjuring 2
Annabelle : Creation
The Nun
Annabelle Comes Home
The Conjuring; The Devil Made Me Do It
The Nun 2

Related, but not full parts? Mostly they just feature a single, supporting character from the main series.

Wolves At The Door
The Curse of La Llorona


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Dead of Winter

The 8th film in 88 Films Slasher Collection.

And this is a proper thriller movie, starring most notably Roddy McDowall.

I shan’t say too much, as I’m going to flat out recommend this for fans of murder mystery.

It’s got tension, it’s got terrific acting, and it’s overall just really well made.


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x-Ray aka Hospital Massacre aka Ward 13 aka Be My Valentine, Or Else!

In which our loony is offing people in….a Hospital! It’s pretty enjoyable. The murders are decently enough done, though the grisly bits aren’t in shot.

As a rule, any film known by multiple titles is going to be goofy fun. And this is no exception. It does do a genuinely good job of keeping us guessing as to who the loony is. We do see them as a murderous child in the beginning, but exactly which of the many grown ups they are is kept decently hidden.

Finally got around to seeing Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.

Definitely excellent, though I found Jack Horner kind of distracting and a lot of the journey kind of rote. Everything with Death is so incredibly well done. but every time Jack comes in, particularly at the end, I just wasn't feeling it. Goldie works great as the rival antagonist while Jack is just kind of an extra that distracts from the rest.

One of the best depictions of Death I've seen though. Every bit of him on the screen is a treat and the action is up there among the best fights I've seen, both it terms of animation and in emotional weight. Great film, highly recommended, but a little bit of fat in the middle.