What was the last movie you saw at the theaters?

I also saw Watchmen for the third time.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Watchmen.

A slasher-based double bill tonight - however, I missed out on the first film, Scream, and got to the theatre just in time for the second film...



My Bloody Valentine
George Mihalka, 1981

Hooray, yet another mindless slasher film! This time the monster in question is former miner Harry Warden, sole survivor of a mine shaft collapse that happened due to negligent supervisors dodging work in order to celebrate Valentine's Day. As a result, Harry becomes a gasmask-wearing psycho who kills anyone who tries to celebrate Valentine's Day in his small hometown. However, a bunch of skeptical young workers and their girlfriends opt to host a party at the very same mine where they work.

It seems like something of a shame that this horror exhibit tries to cover the relatively broad range of American horror movies yet once again I end up watching a relatively predictable slasher film. Consider the variety of more original horrors such as The Exorcist, The Shining or even Invasion of the Body Snatchers already on offer and it seems even worse. Oh, well. The thing about slasher films for me is that, let's be honest, they are always entertaining. Even if they fail at generating decent tension and fright, at least you can always count on horrible acting and the illogical plot to at least make you laugh at how stupid the movie you're really watching is (hopefully you can get both).

My Bloody Valentine is no exception to this rule. It's more or less like any other slasher film, but what sets it apart? Maybe the love triangle that ensues between two miners over one wide-eyed blonde who doesn't really want either one of them. The lack of "satisfactory" deaths towards the end of the film was noticeable (as if the filmmakers used up what little creativity they had in the first half or first two thirds). Maybe one exceptionally moronic twist ending (even by the preposterous standards laid down by Halloween and Friday the 13th, this twist took the concept to an all new low). Who knows? They did make it slightly weaker than Friday the 13th (which was also about the same in terms of quality, but was a somewhat superior film), but what can you do? Laugh at the bad acting, I suppose.

GRADE: C

Slumdog Millionaire (2008) is the last movie I watched in the theaters...8/10, pretty average in my opinion although it's a very moving tale. All in all, didn't live up to the hype and my expectations

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"Like the fella says...in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!"
- Harry Lime, Vienna, 1948

Twofer:

Watchmen
Rear Window

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Johann von Goethe

Hancock i have three kids so dont get out much, also kept falling asleep during it as i was 5 months pregnant when we went to see it.

TWILIGHT omg its sooo good,I want the dvd.I didnt even kno it was playin in the theatre we were goin2 at first kuz itza lil cheapy dollar theatre an I didnt even think theyd havvit there yet kuz it had just come out but it was there! an it was great just like I thought it would be

The Fly
David Cronenberg, 1986

The Fly is about introverted scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) who’s trying to build a teleporter. At one point, he opts to test it on himself – however, a normal housefly is caught in the teleporter at the same time and causes Brundle to be “fused” with the fly. The fly DNA overrides his own DNA, causing him to gradually mutate into a half-human, half-fly freak of nature.

Let’s cut to the chase – The Fly was a major disappointment. Why is that? Surely it delivered everything it promised – another of Cronenberg’s typical explorations of the human condition in modern society via one very confronting special effects showcase and performances of questionable quality. So what made it fail (in my eyes, anyway)? Let me see – it just didn’t feel like it did enough. Considering how hyped I was over the gruesome transformations that Brundle undergoes after his experiment, they didn’t feel interesting at all. They weren’t shocking or even amusing – they were quite simply boring, with the exception of a feeling of vague appreciation for the craftsmanship that must’ve gone into putting the special effects together, even though they failed to be exciting at all.

Now if that’s how I felt about the film's special effects, how does the rest of the film stand up? Not particularly well, I don't think. I found it virtually impossible to sympathise with any of the characters (and I didn't reckon the acting was anything special), felt that the plot took ages to get going, never actually felt shocked, disgusted, or anything close to excitement at all over the course of the film. I'm not sure if this puts me in the minority when it comes to this film - although if the earlier comments are anything to go by, I'm all alone in thinking The Fly was a horribly mediocre film, aided slightly by some effects that are technically impressive but ultimately just as horrifying to me as an episode of SpongeBob Squarepants.

GRADE: C-



Blue Velvet
David Lynch, 1986

Yeah, I’m well aware that Blue Velvet does not really count as a “horror” movie in the same way that The Evil Dead or Halloween do, but that doesn’t make it any less of a disturbing adventure. I don't really think I'll bother trying to write up any sort of halfway-decent review for Blue Velvet, given that I'm working on the assumption that anyone who has seen it has already formulated enough of an opinion on their own and anyone who wants my opinion can probably get it from any other members who are bigger fans of the film than I am. Regardless, let it be known that I still reckon Blue Velvet is a good film, made better by a theatre experience (complete with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments that would induce quiet cringing when watched on DVD at home, but spawn an audience-wide gut-laugh in the comfort of a theatre - I wonder if that was the case back in 1986, though...)

GRADE: B+

I wish I had a movie theater around me that showed older movies.

Technically, it's an art gallery that's running all the shows I've been going to.

But you're serious, there's nowhere nearby that would hold a program like this? The films I'm attending are one-off showings and I found out about it by accident. You should try keeping an eye out - you never know what's going on.

Although I'm assuming you live in a somewhat smaller town than I do...

I don't think I live in a small town, but then again I'm really not sure. I don't know why my town doesn't have a thing like that, I mean my town was called the best place to make a movie on the east coast of the US (I read that somewhere online). I'll have to really start keeping an eye out for something like that though.

Yeah, you never know what can come up. I live in a state capital, which is a reasonably big city, and there's quite a few places around here to catch older films, although you have to be in the know about it.

Ok this post will just prove that I'm an extremely honest person. As I have a job that requires me to work in the evenings, I've started a new trend with a few friends of mine. On say a Wednesday (preferably a rainy one) we go to an afternoon session at one of the less popular cinemas. You know the ones, the ticket guy is also the snack guy, and you are the first customer he's seen all day. There are no cup holders in the seats and there isn't even mood music playing while you wait for the movies to start. And the best part, you get the whole cinema to yourself! This is a key factor, because the idea is to watch stupid movies and chat all the way through.

So with all this in mind. the last movie I saw at the cinema was He's Just Not That into You.

I JUST SAw race to witchmoutian today . it was really good. i recommed checking it out.

"Alexander"!!!Rocks
seen it 4 times so far in theatre but if they dont get it off the list i have to go see it again..its almost perfect movie!

Alexander.... You mean the Oliver Stone picture?

Wow, I really disliked that film. Terrible stuff.

I was somehow supposed to believe that Angelina Jolie (29 years old at the time of filming) was supposed to be Colin Farrell's (28 at the time of filming) mother.

Yeah, right.

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Hollywood has a habit of trying to pull that one off... Cary Grant's mom in North by Northwest was less than ten years older than him... if I remember correctly...

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West Side Story, again, just the other night. Had a wonderful time, as usual, and, although the theatre didn't sell out, there was a good crowd. I also had the good fortune of encountering an old roommate of my sister-in-law's, and her sister, and had a wonderful conversation with them following the West Side Story screening.

Another thing about seeing West Side Story so often is that each time I attend a screening of this film, I notice something that I didn't notice before.

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MARTIN
George A. Romero, 1977

Finally, I got around to watching a George Romero film that didn’t have the word “dead” in the title. Martin is probably his most famous non-zombie film, and while it’s not exactly as great as the first few films in his …Dead series, it’s still reasonably entertaining.

The film is about the titular character, a young man who engages in bizarre vampiric rituals (from what I’ve read, it’s up for debate whether he is a genuine vampire or not) – he drugs unsuspecting women and drinks their blood. The only person who believes he’s a vampire is an old man who believes Martin to be his cousin (in spite of the age difference), and who plans on saving and destroying him.

Martin threw me off at first because it wasn’t really attempting to be conventionally scary like the bulk of the horror films I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks. There are a few instances of bloodletting and a couple of surprises, but nothing that should really make anyone jump with fright or anything. Granted, Romero’s not really a master of suspense or thrills, but he makes up for it by constructing a decent re-imagining of the vampire myth. Aside from his vampire attacks, Martin is really just an ordinary (albeit socially awkward) boy who struggles with his own slew of problems – the old man’s superstitious behavior (and his grand-daughter’s level-headed approach to Martin), the bored housewife who tries to seduce him, the talk show that Martin calls with tales of his vampire stories, and of course the instances where Martin searches for new blood (which very rarely go to plan).

The acting is about what you’d expect for a small-budget effort like this, the experimental feel of the film (full of quick cuts, close-ups and impressionistic black-and-white flashbacks) doesn’t hurt the film too badly, and it does have a rather oddball sense of humour to it (the scenes with Martin and the housewife who seduces him are pretty laughable, as is one attempt he makes at feeding on another woman that doesn’t go to plan). It’s very rough and could probably use a remake one of these days, but it’s a rather original take on vampire films (and the ending’s a kicker).

GRADE: B-

Okay, this marks the last of my "horror movie" outings for the time being as the festival I was seeing them at concluded today. Apart from a second theatrical viewing of Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead last night (which I already wrote up and since nothing has changed, I won't bother writing any more), the last film I managed to see was...



SHIVERS
David Cronenberg, 1975

I managed to see three of the four Cronenberg films that showed at this festival (the exception being The Brood, which I missed out on in favour of Halloween). After catching Videodrome and The Fly, which I liked and disliked respectively, I got to see Cronenberg's feature-length debut, Shivers.

Shivers is set in an upper-class apartment complex in Montreal. A series of strange occurrences (a fight that leads to murder-suicide, several men heading to the doctor with odd lumps in their stomachs, etc) all build up to revealing something dangerous - a mad scientist's creation of bizarre slug-like parasites that infect ordinary people and transform them into animalistic sex fiends. Not only do people end up being infected by the parasites themselves, but they also infect each other through sexual contact.

The film works on a very similar basis to a zombie or body-snatcher film, except it's given an interesting twist by Cronenberg's trademark "sex is dangerous" theme. Whereas with a typical horror film, the obvious danger is that the threat presented in the film will wipe out humanity (or at the very least the cast of the film in question) by killing or assimilating them into something inhuman, the strange thing about the parasites/infected people in Shivers is that they don't actually do either of them, but rather just "simplify" humanity down to only ever acting out of a basic desire for sex. Cronenberg goes all-out in his depiction of sexual desire gone wild, and some of it can be confronting - to various degrees, the film touches on homosexuality, pedophilia, incest, sadomasochism and more. It can often be as funny as it is disturbing, often at the same time. The funny thing is that most of the people who end up dying in the film do so at the hands of the ostensible hero (with the exception being an accidental death caused by trying to stop the hero leaving), and while the instinct-driven behaviour of the infected results in the total breakdown of modern society (both in the complex and, as the ending implies, in the outside world as well), I almost got the impression that it's a happy ending, as everyone forgets the hassles of everyday life and descends into a massive orgy.

Being a Cronenberg film, Shivers is a particularly decent satire and I have to admit, I found it particularly scary during the first third of the film or so. I find it interesting that I managed to be more disturbed/anxious as a result of the simplistic special effects used to make the parasite (which resembles a small, reddish-brown chunk of octopus tentacle and leaves bloody trails wherever it goes) than by any of the mutations in The Fly, but that's just me I guess. I also find that Shivers is also, like a lot of these films, full to the brim of various funny moments. Whether it's the hero punching his newly-infected love interest in the face (an act which got riotous laughter and applause for its sheer inanity) or the lunacy of some of the infected people and their behaviour, it's damned funny. I remember seeing most of John Waters' A Dirty Shame, which shares a roughly similar premise (where ordinary people end up developing bizarre sexual urges after getting concussions), but I don't remember it being as laugh-out-loud hilarious as this, an admittedly more serious and less trashy take on the topic.

I know that, as with virtually every film in Cronenberg's filmography, Shivers is definitely not for everyone. It's disturbing, blackly comic yet potent, and it was an interesting film to end this horror festival with.

GRADE: B