2021 Movie Watch List...

[silverbullet63]

Chupacabra Territory (2016)


Taking a break from Nordic Drama, with some Found Footage Horror.


Four Idiots go in the woods, lookin for Chupacabra.

[ArcLight]

Stage Fright (2014)

A slasher-movie-musical? All right. Sign me up.

Found it at the Dollar Tree but it's also available free on a couple of the usual-suspect streaming channels like Amazon Prime, Tubi, and Vudu.

Ten years after her stage-songstress mother is brutally murdered backstage, Camilla Swanson (Allie MacDonald) works as a cook at a musical theater summer camp. When she finds out the camp's play will be the same one her mother was appearing in, she decides to audition.

Naturally, someone doesn't want to see the show go on.

Not as many songs as I expected, and most directly related to the stage performance instead of just characters randomly breaking out in song. Meat Loaf is also credited and I was actually surprised to see he has a substantial role as Camilla's surrogate father and camp director.

And there's a bit of gore, so that's cool.

Probably worth the dollar I paid for it.

[silverbullet63]

Grave Encounters (2011)

Grave Encounters 2 (2012)

Clash of the Dead (2018)

[silverbullet63]

More Found Footage Horror



Blair Witch (2016)

She Walks in the Woods (2019)

These and the others, currently on Tubi.

[someoldguy]

Live by Night (2016)

Not horror or SF, bur lots of mob violence to make up for that. I wanted to see if this was as bad as its rep said. With that cast, I found that idea rather improbable. Bottom line: no it is not that bad, but I think it could have been much batter. Acting was pretty good to very good all around, with Elle Fanning being on the very good end. But in terms of story, it did not seen that there was very much there there. I got the feeling that this would have been better off as a half hour weekly TV series that did not need strict connectivity between segments. In particular the good guy to bad guy to whatever Ben Affleck was supposed to be at the end just did not work for me. And there was too much showoff Diversity with a Capital D that could have been done with much more subtlety rather being an overt plot point. It came across as too self-congratulatory IMO. Still Elle Fanning pulled off her unusual and complex role quite well for a 17 year old kid. A movie about her character alone might fare better than this one.

Although the story appears to wrap up sometime in the late 1930s, the movie they watch in the end is a Tim Holt one from around 1950. Holt did a couple dozen or so of cheap (but color) westerns in the late 40s and early 50s after some even cheaper B+W ones before the war. They were all around 1 hour long and although the character and circumstances varied, if you saw one you saw them all.

[silverbullet63]

Jan 16, 2021 21:34:20 GMT -5 someoldguy said:

Live by Night (2016)

Not horror or SF, bur lots of mob violence to make up for that. I wanted to see if this was as bad as its rep said. With that cast, I found that idea rather improbable. Bottom line: no it is not that bad, but I think it could have been much batter. Acting was pretty good to very good all around, with Elle Fanning being on the very good end. But in terms of story, it did not seen that there was very much there there. I got the feeling that this would have been better off as a half hour weekly TV series that did not need strict connectivity between segments. In particular the good guy to bad guy to whatever Ben Affleck was supposed to be at the end just did not work for me. And there was too much showoff Diversity with a Capital D that could have been done with much more subtlety rather being an overt plot point. It came across as too self-congratulatory IMO. Still Elle Fanning pulled off her unusual and complex role quite well for a 17 year old kid. A movie about her character alone might fare better than this one.

Although the story appears to wrap up sometime in the late 1930s, the movie they watch in the end is a Tim Holt one from around 1950. Holt did a couple dozen or so of cheap (but color) westerns in the late 40s and early 50s after some even cheaper B+W ones before the war. They were all around 1 hour long and although the character and circumstances varied, if you saw one you saw them all.

   I think this was a rushed production and Affleck wasn't sober.

   Gone Baby Gone is a great film, I love The Town and think it's his best work as a Director/Actor.

   

[silverbullet63]

What the Waters Left Behind (2017)


The result of tossing TCM, Hostel, Wrong Turn and Devil Rejects into a blender.

With a sprinkle of Chernobyl Diaries and set it in Villa Epecuen, Argentina.

Currently on Tubi

[someoldguy]

Jan 17, 2021 1:08:05 GMT -5 silverbullet63 said:

What the Waters Left Behind (2017)


The result of tossing TCM, Hostel, Wrong Turn and Devil Rejects into a blender.

With a sprinkle of Chernobyl Diaries and set it in Villa Epecuen, Argentina.

Currently on Tubi

Sounds like what they serve at the local diner as the Special of the Day.

[silverbullet63]

Underground (2011]

Nasty little Subterranean horror flick.

Ravers get locked and trapped in an underground military bunker.

With a horde of flesh eating mutants.


On Tubi

[silverbullet63]

Altar (2017)

Another FFH movie set in the woods.


Also on Tubi

[silverbullet63]

Rec (2007)

Rec 2 (2009)

Rec 3: Genesis (2012)

[ArcLight]

Class Action Park (2020)

Documentary about the famous/infamous Action Park in New Jersey back in the day. A water-park designed by people with no experience designing rides (or, it seems, any knowledge of engineering in general) largely staffed by unsupervised kids. What could go wrong?

Highlights include the owner getting the park insured by the simple expedient of creating his own insurance company (based in the Cayman Islands, of course) and the discovery that one reason kids were coming out of one ride sliced up was because they were getting cut by the teeth of past riders still embedded in the 'protective' padding.

I forgot to cancel my free trial of HBOMax in time but at least I found this to watch after hearing about the park for years.

[silverbullet63]

Jan 18, 2021 9:50:44 GMT -5 ArcLight said:

Class Action Park (2020)

Documentary about the famous/infamous Action Park in New Jersey back in the day. A water-park designed by people with no experience designing rides (or, it seems, any knowledge of engineering in general) largely staffed by unsupervised kids. What could go wrong?

Highlights include the owner getting the park insured by the simple expedient of creating his own insurance company (based in the Cayman Islands, of course) and the discovery that one reason kids were coming out of one ride sliced up was because they were getting cut by the teeth of past riders still embedded in the 'protective' padding.

I forgot to cancel my free trial of HBOMax in time but at least I found this to watch after hearing about the park for years.

   Do you remember New Jersey's own Jungle Habitat?

   Short lived animal safari park in the early/mid 70's.

[silverbullet63]

Zoo (2018)

British zombie horror film, with elements of romance and personal drama.

Much better than I expected, the two leads were good as a married couple.

See No Evil 2 (2014)

Currently on Tubi

[someoldguy]

A package of SF DVDs had arrived at the PO on Saturday but I did not get around to opening it until yesterday. They are all old ones I have seen before and mostly classics. YAY! I had seen all of them back in the 1950s except one that I had seen a few years back on TCM although it comes from that era.

Here we go:

The Thing From Another World (1951)
Seen it a million times and never get tired of it. What always impresses me anew is the dialog – credible, realistically delivered even with multiple people talking at once. The story? If anyone out there looking in does not know this movie, immediately go find where online it is playing and watch it. Intelligent plot, interesting characters, fine old school scares.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
Story by Ray Bradbury, FX by Ray Harryhausen. The first of the Big Monsters of the 1950s. Good action, intelligent script, credible acting all carried forward under smart direction.

Them (1954)
Nicely constructed giant ant feature that is as smartly done as it is scary. The first of the giant insect movies. Graduates slowly from small-scale off-screen action as the it is slowly discovered what is going on. Moves on to first seeing the monsters and the initial battle and finding out how big the threat is. Culminates in a battle royal with the things in the LA sewers. That makes it very claustrophobic and more effective for that. All of this was done on a surprisingly small budget. Although it sometimes seems like many more, they only had three of the big ants to use, that being all they could afford.

Forbidden Planet (1956)
Absolute classic of science fiction, with the science aspect being well above the level of most movies. Beautiful alien scenery, terrific FX, first class acting by the leads, genuine SF plot presented in human terms, intelligent just about everything. (Well OK, the part about the girl losing the telepathic link with the tiger because she got kissed is a little too 1950s. As I recall the book implied considerably more and made it clearer why the link got broken.)

The Time Machine (1960)
I had read the book years before the movie came out and had some trepidation about seeing it back then and what they might have done to it. Happily, it was treated well and preserved all the key elements without any embarrassing infantilism as too often happens with good books. It was with considerable pleasure that again viewed this oldie.

World Without End (1956)
Cinemascope and Technicolor make this movie look good. Too bad they did not spend more on FX. That spaceship control panel could have been in a Star Trek episode a decade later, and I do not even mean the bridge. The spaceship exterior shots and the crash landing in the snowy mountains are footage from When Worlds Collide. Another place they could have freed up a few more bucks was in the screenwriting. Acting is actually fairly good. It is the plot that sucks, a mashup of Buck Rogers time travel and The Time Machine two societies setting, mixed with SF B movie tropes like the future men being weaklings and the women hot to trot but the men from the past (or earthlings etc.) being as virile as anything.

In checking this out, I discovered that this was from Allied Artists, aka Monogram Pictures. I am astonished that they even scraped up enough coins to manage Cinemascope and Technicolor rather than their usual Academy Aspect and B+W. The other financial limitations now make sense.

Satellite in the Sky (1956)
From the UK, this was done in Cinemascope Warner color. A good-looking film but sadly not much to it. This could have been a lot better if they had paid attention to presenting the thrill of the first manned spaceflight instead of getting sidetracked into military conspiracies and stowaways. It should instead have been about the accomplishment like that UK movie that convinced all its viewers that the Brits were the first to break the Sound Barrier (in a dive) when the Yanks had actually done it some five years earlier (in a climb. ) The FX are nice as spaceships would be imagined in the 1950s. And the real military aircraft look terrific, including beautiful shots of the prototype Avro Vulcan bomber. The huge straight edge delta wings on the bare aluminum body are really impressive. The production version had curvy ogival wings, this giving better low speed lift.

UPDATE I managed to hit Replay instead of Eject and discovered that Wally Veevils was in charge of FX. He would later be a big player on the 2001 FX crew doing models and such.


More movies on the way but the Postal Service really sucks these days to the point that the State has started an investigation.