Movies You’ve Only Just Watched

Off-Topic
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My fiancé and I just got home from watching Alien: Romulus, while the grand mother was babysitting our daughter.

I had a great time with Romulus, I loved that it pulled threads all the way back to Prometheus and Covenant. Even if it isn’t the conclusion to the trilogy we never got.

The ending, was a big fucking nope. I audibly said “Jesus fucking Christ” all while my fiancé coiled up in horror. If you are pregnant, don’t watch this film.

I feel the same way, I would have preferred if they used Michael Fassbender instead. In some ways I think it would make more sense for the franchise overall.

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Romulus was not my cup of tea. It looked good and the big action sequence towards the end was fun. I don’t know why filmmakers would put in so much effort into something so determined to be unoriginal.

Anyway, I’m here because I saw TRAP this weekend and wanted to recommend it to y’all because although the second half was pretty dumb, the first half has big Hitman energy.

Also I have a Letterboxd if anyone wants to check it out. Trap is not reviewed there yet but Romulus is: ‎Chris’s profile • Letterboxd

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Lake Mungo

I can barely describe how much dread this film inflicted on me. Lake Mungo completely fucked my nerves and tested my sanity all throughout. What makes this film so scary is that it leaves enough room for imagination. The situation is so bleak that you want everything you see to be real. The shitty camera footage and the zoom ins on the disfigured faces in the dark actually triggered my primal fear of the dark.

Without spoiling: the scare towards the end fucked me up so bad I started to feel nauseous, got goosebumps and started sweating over my entire body. It felt like an actual nightmare come true. I feel sick thinking about it. Don’t look it up, watch the movie. It’s better with the buildup.

Lake Mungo is good at playing psychological games. The themes of loss and hope intertwined with horror is a bitter pill to swallow. The imagery is very unsettling to watch, but the feeling it reflects on me is pure sadness. Being haunted by a ghost of the past and not finding the closure and acceptance you need is hard. Showing the viewer distant images of unexplained figures in the background only reinforced both the dread and hope in me. Even when the movie makes you think there is an explanation, it pulls no punches and completely turns that theory upside down again.

Things that usually fuck me up in horror movies are unexplained things happening in the background (in the dark) and uncanny valley figures. I can confidently say Lake Mungo checked all the boxes and scared me. From the start to the very last second of the credits. Which is rare for a horror movie.

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1398

Terminator Zero, it’s not a movie. It’s anime terminator tv series. I been looking forward to this series with great anticipation.

Currently I’m on ep.6. It’s kinda awful, I’ll finish it to see how it ties up. For a R-rated animated show it feels like it’s targeted towards pre-teens. I have no real idea who it’s for, it’s certainly not for me. I have a hard time seeing how it’s for fans of the original films.

The premise evolves around a family in Japan. The father seeks to create his own AI to combat Skynet before it goes online. But things doesn’t go according to plan. The show is split between the father talking vaguely about humanity with an A.I and the kids, their babysitter and the babysitter’s babysitter running from a terminator.

There is currently no real explanation for how the father knows about Skynet and judgment day. Other than “dreams” he’s awfully vague about. The children are stereotypical archetypes, dumb, smart and sensitive. The father not much different, he’s stoic and removed.

The show is also full of technology that doesn’t exist in any of the sequels taking place in the 90’s early 2000’s. Full fledged service robots, robot pets that basically look like their toy counterparts from the early 2000’s. It’s an odd choice to suddenly fill the universe with technology that mirrors films like I. Robot. And expecting the viewer to just accept that robots are everywhere in 1997, before skynet is operational. It’s Japan so it’s alright, they got wacky advanced technology.

The new A.I and service bots, of course turns evil. Here a lot of new inconsistencies turns up. In their uprising we see them indiscriminately slaughter a whole hospital, until the plot dictates that they only kill threats. Liked armed military personnel and police.

Terminator genesys is smarter then this show.

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1399

Well, maybe this explains how SkyNet gets rebranded as Legion and they call it a new timeline based on that somehow.

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Might be what they are trying to achieve, only time will tell.

The show does have its strengths, like anything else. Just awfully executed.

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I finally got around to watching the Venture Bros movie.

It is a film about family. I very much enjoyed it and had a smile on my face the whole time. It’s not perfect, and I wish it’d been 10-15 minutes longer, but that’s because I love the characters and the world, and I wanted more.

:v: Go Team Venture! :v:

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I’ve either forgotten about it or never knew about it… But I came across a clip of a Nicholas Cage movie and now I want to watch the whole thing. :pig: I’ll be on the lookout for it… Maybe it’ll be on Tubi or Amazon Prime.

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Rebel Ridge (2024)

The new Jeremy Saulnier film and therefore, obviously, required viewing. Aaron Pierre stars as an innocent Marine Corps veteran who the local corrupt cops go out of their way to fuck with as he passes through their backwater territory. Both the plot and tone fall somewhere between the underlying sadness of First Blood and the gung-ho wandering badass-ery of [pick any Jack Reacher novel here].

Probably my least favourite of Saulnier’s mainline films to date - Green Room is still the high-water mark, with Blue Ruin hot on its tail - but I still had a really good time with it. As an overall package it’s of a similar quality to Hold The Dark - it’s actually probably a more consistently solid film, but although it finished with a great action set-piece it didn’t have any individual moments that were quite as stellar as the stand-off at the farmhouse in the middle of Hold The Dark. Plus this is the first Saulnier film where [absolute legend] Macon Blair doesn’t feature in an acting role, so by default it has to go below his other movies on the list.

Think people will safely be able to ignore all my qualifiers above and just have a lot of fun with this movie (which has just appeared on Netflix) so it’s a definite recommend from me… just go watch Green Room as well if you haven’t already seen it.

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Terrifier 3,

Admittedly I’m a self professed horror fan. I feel I gotta admit that I’m not an absolute gore fiend when it comes to the genre. That being said I knew what I was getting into since I’m familiar enough with the series and its lore that its creator has made between The 9th Circle into Terrifier 3 of today.

Story is as expected if you seen Terrifier 2. It’s an extension of everything established from the previous film and continues the divine battle between Art and Sienna. The Lore is deep, and albeit requires some prior explanation. A Main Lead gets killed off screen, but this might be a misdirect given an unwritten rule within the Genre is if you never actually see them die, they can always come back. That being said the film ends on a cliffhanger setting up the inevitable fourth and presumably final part to Leones planned story.

Kills,

I can safely say this is the most violent and probably the most uncomfortable I felt watching a Slasher movie. Lack of a better way to put it. If a character encounters Art and his partner chances of them surviving is unrealistic. No discrimination either so that means kids are on the chopping block which for a lot of people is very controversial and taboo.

What I will say is while a lot of the kills are visceral and mean spirited, the one major one involving children is oddly comical lack of a better way to put it given the context behind it.

As for the adults, it’s definitely mean spirited and very violent. Everything between Liquid Nitrogen to Chainsaw rectal exams, the kills are creative, but I was left uncomfortable. There’s a lot of the red stuff and it’s not for the faint of heart. So expect kills to be consistently like the infamous bedroom kill of the 2nd film.

As a slasher film, it achieves its goal. The film within reason is enjoyable, but with an over 2 Hour Length and the film being muddled with lore that requires prior knowledge of the films within this series. Terrifier 3 is an 8/10.

Definitely the better of the two clown movies released this October.

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While the universal stance is overwhelmingly disliked. I’m in the camp where Joker 2 largely takes away what makes Joker 1 strong and that’s its ambiguity.

And what questions it raises they aren’t worth theorizing about or answering.

The reality of the matter is this films is an unnecessary epilogue for a film that is a great character study but a terrible super villain type movie.

Arthur Fleck never had the intelligence of the clown prince of crime. That should have been known since the original movie and it’s baffling people think he had the capability of being the character people know and love.

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Right, so, Alien Romulus!

Overall I had a great time watching the film, it had some really spooky and tense moments and some very fun and interesting setpieces/obstacles the main cast had to deal with.
The style of the environments is really fun to look at. I love all the clicky buttons and lights and bulk of this ancient-future tech. Fancy holographic touch-screen stuff would never be cooler than this.

There are some grisly kills (though I wish the main trailer didn’t showcase a few of them) loooots of Aliens to contend with by the end, and some fun twists and reveals.
I quite liked one involving an android’s personality getting overwritten, letting its actor completely change the way he behaves and comports himself on-the-fly.

I’ve only ever seen Alien and Aliens, Prometheus, and played the game, so I don’t know how this movie compares to the rest of the franchise, but I think this Alien film does a pretty good job of getting back into Horror, adds in some dashes of action, and also calls back to the original Alien in some fun ways.

There are a lot of really well-shot horror moments, and it’s awesome how the production wanted to focus on practical effects and puppetry over CGI, as it evident in almost every scene. Almost.
I’m reminded of “the pod on the wall” scene and how that was the most beautiful terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. The slow reveal of the Xeno popping out of that thing, seeing its iconic tube-head, then its claws, oooohh man it was a perfect re-reveal of Scary Alien is Back babyyy!!

That said, the movie isn’t without faults that made me eye-roll or shattered my suspension of disbelief.

Overall I definitely enjoyed the whole package, but it’s due to some repeating issues that I’m giving this a 6.5/10. Great fun horror movie, but with issues they should have ironed out.

Spoiler-talk of my issues:

  • For one thing, I feel like Fede Alvarez needed to not be afraid to end the movie with a darker ending. Everyone dies, even the main Alien, kind of thing. Because main character Rain ended up surviving like 5-6 reeeeally risky/dangerous situations or getting way too lucky with the Alien’s behaviour in a row near the end, and it ended up becoming a little ridiculous. The Xeno needed to stop chewing the spooky scenery and just go in for the kill sort of thing.

    • This would have also made this film an interesting, darker mid-quel entry after Alien, since it already solidifies in the first 3 minutes that Weyland-Yutani won despite everything Ripley went through. They just… get a craft to pick up the frozen Alien in space after the Nostromo explodes, excavate it out of a space rock, and boom, they have their Perfect Organism to experiment on as they please. Having all that, plus main characters who survive the encounter by the end, feels a little too much like a re-hash of the first film.

  • Speaking of, the movie has quite a few verbatim callbacks to the original Alien and Aliens (plus maybe some more from other films I haven’t seen. It got a little silly with how much the film “paid homage” to the films by just straight-up copying or recreating its iconic lines, just for some 'member-berry points.
    The line “Get away from her … … … You bitch.” stuck out very sorely to me as nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake in an already ridiculous moment.

  • Plus there’s just a bunch of smaller things that don’t make all that much sense in the script, like how After the first Chest-Burst, why do the characters around that area (who got knocked out) know immediately to be quiet and creep around? They should be calling out for each other. Or, “rewriting an Android’s clearance” takes a very clear few minutes in the beginning of the movie, but only takes like 20 seconds near the end, because any longer would get the characters killed.
    Just stuff like that, which was a little weird.

  • Oh yeah, and also, the movie employs some really weird deep-fake techniques to recreate and add in the late Ian Holm’s face to an android in reference to his character Ash in the first film.
    I looked it up, and the team had a lot of cooperation from his family, and especially his widow, who know he wanted to return to the series but never got the chance. And they employed a lot of puppetry and real-actor stand-ins to recreate it, so that’s good. But… I dunno, the CGI use for his mouth was always strange when not behind a fuzzy screen, and they used some generative AI and other tech to recreate his voice over-top someone else’s.
    While I like that it adds onto the idea that of course Androids of a similar model would look identical which allows Holm’s face to reappear, it feels strange that he was given such a pivotal and extended role… because he’s been dead for 4 years, he couldn’t have agreed to any of this.

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The Coffee Table. Made me so uncomfortable that I had a difficult time finishing it, what a memorable and dread-inducing film. Discussing the plot in any way would ruin the experience, I’ll just say that this movie might hit harder if you’re prone to making stupidly avoidable mistakes in your life.

One of the better spanish language films that I’ve ever seen, flowed well and kept me on my toes even if I wanted to stop watching at multiple points. A psychological nightmare bomb of a movie, check it out on a night when you feel like you can handle something heavy.

I also watched The Substance a week or so ago, all of the praise you’ve heard for it is warranted. It reaches for a number of themes like addiction, vanity and parenthood at once and hits them while simultaneously being a (kind of sexy?) disgusting body horror. Both Moore and Qualley are excellent, the latter has done some really great work over the last few years with movies like Sanctuary and Kinds of Kindness, she has a knack for choosing really fun and interesting roles. Would recommend to anyone that can stomach some gore and intentional cringe.

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So I finally watched Joker 2. It wasn’t that good tbh, but I didn’t hate it. It was mostly pretty boring until the last act, everything from Arthur’s courtroom admissions until the end was fairly captivating imo and it had me feeling empathy for the character, who’s story ultimately winds up being quite sad. That said, I don’t feel like Todd Phillips was the right director for the job. He doesn’t have a fine enough touch for this specific kind of bleak darkness that he wanted to put across, it felt like a novice chef attempting something gourmet.

5/10

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Today I saw Conclave on the big screen. It was really entertaining. A bit predictable and at the same time not.

Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow are all as good as they always are.

Worth your time for sure.

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Saw Paddington in Peru. It was wonderful, really great film, I smiled and laughed a lot. Olivia Colman store the movie though, she seemed like she was having a lot of fun.

President Zelensky actually dubbed Paddington Bear in the first two movies in the Ukranian dub.

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Watched Gladiator and Gladiator II back to back.

The 2000 film is one of my favourite Ridley Scott films and if not the best sword and scandal film made. I knew this would be the film where I would call upon my parents to honour their vow, letting the spawn of their spawn sleep in their domicile. A nice dinner and a movie, was much needed.

The fellow up to the original, isn’t as tight told story as as the one starring Russel Crow. There are some wonky CGI through out the film. I never expected it to be as great as the first, but I didn’t need it to be, only for it to be a good film and for that it lived up to my expatiations.

The soundtrack is epic and bombastic. I was relieved that Hans Zimmer didn’t reuse a certain part of the original soundtrack. In todays world it would take a majority of the audience out of the experience and evoke the wrong feelings.

For those who doesn’t quite now what I’m talking about, then I would listen to The Battle around the 6 min mark.

4 years later Hans Zimmer scored another iconic film, the theme often evokes a call to adventure and the worst Captain you heard about, but you have heard about him. Zimmer reused part of the Gladiator theme for Pirates of the Caribbean. I do find Gladiator worse for it, that theme now feels out of place and I don’t need to visualiser Captain Jack Sparrow in the middle of a tense gladiator battle.

I know this isn’t unique for movie scores, but in this instance the later version have become so iconic that it overshadows the original. Part of the score also lives in the Rock, however it’s different enough that it doesn’t break the illusion.

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I loved the first Gladiator. It’s on my all time top list. The soundtrack, the setting and the story was superb.

I haven’t gotten around to watching G2 yet but I will but I’ve heard a lot of people say it’s very similar so will judge that when I finally get around to watching it.

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Last night I saw the 1980s cult hit The Evil Dead for the first time!

Boy, I’ve only got cursory knowledge of this based on pop culture references, and this first movie feels like a whole other spooky beast than what I’d heard!
There were a few moments I seemed to recognize, but it all seems like a darker first draft of what it has become in the cultural zeitgeist. :raised_hand::chains::carpentry_saw:
A book with a face, low-panning camera shots, creepy yet campy ghouls and demons and a striking shot of a chainsaw are all the “Evil Dead” you get in this entry!

(Ash doesn’t even use the chainsaw on anything in this! It’s such a tease!)

It starts out pretty campy, and in typical classic horror movie setup as 5 college friends go to a cabin in the woods for summer break. Some very silly “hey look it’s a shotgun! points at best friend’s face for a joke” kind of stuff happens. Also “let’s steal this weird stuff in this spooky basement, and also this freakish looking book” kinda of dumb decisions…

And then… things get freaky. Demons get summoned, a girl feels like she’s being watched from outside, so she goes out into the woods in her nightgown all “I know you’re out there! Show yourself!”
She then I guess gets raped by a tree?? That was freakish on a whole other level.

And finally, I’d say about halfway through the 90 minute film, things start getting pretty freakin bloody.

People get possessed, their faces turning to rotten flesh and blood pouring out of lesions… people get stabbed with all manner of objects, Ash gets thrown into a bookcase (like 3 seperate times I think! which was funny) and man, this first one is definitely more of a horror with surreal/campy moments.

I definitely think Bruce Campbell did a great dramatic performance, as he both felt extremely saddened and on the brink of going crazy at times, with how much he was trapped in this cabin with the possessed bodies of his friends (and also everyone suffering some gruesome injuries and stuff too.)

Gonna be really interesting to get to the sequel someday, since it shifts to full-on horror-comedy. Most of Evil Dead 1 seems to be played totally straight and serious no matter if it’s a little eccentric.

Aaand I watched The Evil Dead because I had to prep myself before seeing Evil Dead: The Musical today!!

My cousin highly recommends it, and yeah, it was a really fun show.

It’s got song, it’s got dance, it’s got gore and blood (lots of it). It’s like half of Evil Dead 1 mixed with half of Evil Dead 2 – story mostly starts out same as the first film, but halfway through Act 1 they introduce new characters I knew nothing about – I checked wikipedia during the intermission and yeah they’re from the sequel.

It’s also a very campy production. Scotty is played up to be a total complete tool, for instance. Annie has multiple moments where she rips up her own costume (for that corny 80s sex appeal parody) claiming "oh nooo… you ripped the cuff of my shirt… [rips off own sleve] etc…

It was a really fun time, and especially for the first 5 rows I’m sure.
I sat in the front of the balcony, but that meant I got a good look at people down below. Because this show has an Audience Splash Zone of Blood!!

Near the middle of Act 2, the performers start squirting their blood packets onto the audience (who paid extra and were provided ponchos – or not for the truly daring) and it’s quite entertaining. You also discover that near the lighting fixture, they’ve also assembled a sprinkler system of fake blood which they activate at the end of about 3 musical numbers near the end of the show. Rains down upon the audience below, hope they enjoyed hahaha :laughing:

It tours around North America very regularly and for a long time now apparently, so if you’re a fan, go look it up.

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Yeah when most people think of ‘Evil Dead’, they really think Evil Dead II. Though it’s essentially the same plot.

I think they were earnestly trying to make a real horror movie with the first one but just on a shoestring budget. The second leans much more heavily into the comedic side. The third is a medieval swashbuckling adventure-comedy…

I love Evil Dead (though I actually have not seen this musical so may have to now), so I recommend you watch the rest of the franchise. The best Evil Dead is the Ash Vs Evil Dead TV show, closely followed by II. The newer films are decent enough horrors, but not really Evil Dead films to me, feeling more like high budget fan films, as they forego the comedy and campiness that became so integral in II.

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