Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Rad

I am super excited as I now have access to a couple new cinemas, so I have been watching more movies in theatre lately. There are two things I LOVE so far, first is they have a weekly "Nostalgia" series that shows re-releases and older flicks. The second is a Monday Mystery Movie. Both of these are at discounted prices. That is why I got to see Rad on the big screen.

To sum up, this movie is about a local BMX biker who tries to win a local BMX race against the Nationwide professionals.

In a word, this movie is Rad.

This is a clealy a B-movie effort and is basically MST3K material. I mean, there is a big scene where the movie wants us to believe in "BMX Boogie" is a thing and is magical. It ends on a freeze-frame! The transitions and cuts between scenes are terrible. The actors are community theatre level, with the stand-out performance being the guy from My Favorite Martian!

Damned, I am so glad I got to see this on a big screen with an audience. There was a lot more respect for the film and very little crowd interaction, which surprised me. However, there WAS about two dozen folks there; including families.

They’ve arrived! So here I go with Stripped to Kill

In which some rotter is going around bumping off Exotic Dancers. And so our female detective goes under cover as a stripper to find the loony.

It’s 80’s! It’s cheap! It’s salacious! It’s tacky! Roger Corman Was Involved Somewhere Along The Line! It’s quite good fun if you like this sort of thing, and I for one do. Even the acting is fairly cromulent.

By the end, you realise you’ve gone from watching Cheap Titilation to an actually fairly reasonable thriller. In particular it gives some depth and nuance to the strippers and their performances, showing the artistic side of getting your baps out for money.

Just a shame the opening is so cheap and tawdry.

Rad was featured on either Best of the Worst or GoodBadFlicks if you’re looking for a riff on the film.

I don’t think we’ll ever be able to explain to younger generations just how radical a BMX bike was at the time.

Fade to Black

In which our loony is a young, film obsessed, socially awkward young man that loses the plot and goes a-slaying, but in ways that echo his beloved films.

This is better than it should be to be honest. Whilst the loony is our lead character, he starts off somewhat sympathetic. He’s not inherently unlikeable or irredeemable to begin with, and he’s kind of a product of his environment and a world that sees him as someone to just push around and make fun of.

It by no means even attempts to justify his acts though, and he becomes increasingly unpleasant as his delusions deepen.

A nice touch is clips from the films inspiring his methods showing within the film, as if we’re seeing into his head. And that helps what could’ve been a cheap Video Nasty type flick elevate to something with genuine artistic merit. There are also lots of easter egg references to classic movies. Such as a photography studio called Blow Up and so on.

And so we end up with a solid thriller. Definitely going to put this in my general movie rotation.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Sorority House Massacre

Oh dear. It’s basically a low-rent Halloween knock off this one. And it’s all the more disappointing as around the middle there’s almost a hint of a twist in the tale. But no. This is a by-the-numbers-absolutely-nothing-new-to-see-here slasher.

It is at least competently made and has reasonable acting. It’s just so boringly derivative. Even has officers named Kruger and Voorhees, in what feels like a middle finger to far more interesting and thrilling films.

In summary? An Own Brand Cornflakes of 80’s slashers. Good enough for a night’s entertainment, but you’re still wishing you had the real McCoy as you choke it down.

Watchmen (2009)

It's 1985 and the cold war is about to get hot. Masked heroes are outlawed. There's a murder mystery to be solved.

Zack Snyder does superheroes. Which means it's always dark and rainy. I feel like there should have been more slow motion because Watchmen wasn't long enough yet.

Not sure I have much to say about this one. It's fine, if slow. The most notable thing about the movie is remembering an acquaintance coming back from the theater disappointed because he wanted to see a fun superhero movie and got what he called a long ass boring drama instead. No idea if that was just a matter of wrong expectations, but I can see how it happened. When you're in your early twenties you probably don't want to spend hours of your life watching aging has-beens pining for the good old days.

Was he not familiar with the graphic novel at all? It always had a reputation for not being a fun superhero story. It won the kinds of awards they never give to fun stories.

The movie feels like an adaptation made by someone who only understood Watchmen on a surface level. It feels like he misinterpreted things that weren’t supposed to be cool as cool and badass. To a lesser degree, this feels like the adaptation of Starship Troopers’ relationship to its source material, only inverted.

Snyder's problem has always been that he's a fan of comics that deconstructed the genre without being a fan of the genre itself. It results in him taking things that were parody and presenting them as how the genre should be. The problem with that is its the same pitfall the whole industry fell into in the 90s and ran into largely the same issues.

2000ad is mainly responsible for that. DC talented scouted from The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic’s writers and artists. Vertigo was created as their American playground.

If you can find it streaming (it’s on Prime at least in the UK), Future Shocks, the story of 2000ad is worth your time.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Was he not familiar with the graphic novel at all? It always had a reputation for not being a fun superhero story. It won the kinds of awards they never give to fun stories.

I couldn't say, but I'm guessing he wasn't.

Might have been about the best time to go into it with the wrong expectations. Just based on trends of the time you wouldn't have suspected what kind of movie it is. The MCU was only starting out and DC had yet to go off the derp end.

Lure

Low budget feature length horror thriller kinda Saw movie from the UK, found and paid for on Prime.

It’s not too bad to be honest. IMDB shows it’s the Writer/Director’s feature length debut, so is a bit rough about the edges.

I don’t want to reveal plot stuff, because I think that again despite some glaring flaws I really enjoyed it. It’s not completely original, but it feels somewhat fresh.

Downside is some dodgy sound mixing, where the dramatic music is louder and more prominent than the vocals. And some things Which Happen Because Otherwise We Can’t Move The Plot Along. The cinematography is solid. The acting is perfectly acceptable. Atmosphere is a wee bit hit and miss, but mostly hit.

For low/no budget horror/thriller though, this is comfortably above average. And as I do love in this sort of film? There’s the makings of something really quite special underneath it all. Even better? It’s underneath due to lack of budget and experience and absolutely not a lack of raw talent.

Now, I paid £7 for this, which you may wish to factor into your own decision making process. But honestly? I do not feel short changed at all.

 LunarSol wrote:
Watched the original Scream again last night and it was just as good as always.

After this my daughter has demanded to see the rest. So far Scream 2 was fine but not as good as the original. I was kind of surprised how much I liked the third one. I'm not sure I've actually seen it, but its fun though probably more as a product of its time than it would have been in its time.

Also somehow I forgot Project Hail Mary of which I have like one or two nitpicks and a million little bits of joy to take from the film. I'm very glad I read the book first, but the movie definitely cemented it as something special.

Project Hail Mary reminded me of 80s family adventure films, like Explorers. I was a little confused by the PG13 as there isn't a lot of violence and almost no swearing*. Pet rocks might make a come back. Certainly have some nitpicks as well but overall I found it very engaging and delightful.

Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

The privatized Tokyo police force fights violent criminal mutants who upon mutilation regrow damaged body parts in the shape of deadly weapons.

Mostly the story is there as pretext to spray preposterous amounts of blood all over the place every few minutes. It's a very silly movie. Good fun.

On the technical end it's not bad, but you can definitely see budgetary constraints.