I had been wanting to get La Haine for a while now, and saw it at a second-hand store. Rebels of the Neon God has also been on my radar for a long time, but it's not one I was particularly looking for. I noticed it and figured it was worth grabbing. Wild Strawberries is a movie that I actually bought a year or two ago when a video store went out of business, but the copy was scratched and wouldn't work. I was really glad to see it, and for $20 I thought it was a steal. I'm a huge fan of Bergman, so I'm really excited about getting that one. Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable is one of those exploitation cult classics that I really enjoyed. I remember watching 2 or 3 of the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies online before, though not in great quality. I know I saw the first one all the way through, and it was a very interesting movie. One of the other movies in the series wasn't that great, and then I can't remember much about the other one. Now, they had two of the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies, the second and this the third, but I noticed on the second one that it wasn't by the original director, and this one was. So I didn't want to blow my whole pay check on every interesting movie they had... So I decided to go with this one because I think it's really one of the good ones. I think part 2 was the one I was a little dissapointed with. It's interesting that it has a “very rare” sticker on it. I didn't realize it was all that rare or anything... but anyway, I guess that's cool. Meiko Kaji is an awesome Japanese actress, so I'm really looking forward to watching it again.
Bill's Dirty Shorts: A Collection of Bill Plympton's Naughty Cartoons has a surprising large amount of material on it. I took a chance on this one, because I've never heard of Bill Plympton or this movie. I watched some and they're quite interesting. Many of them are violent and sexual, but the animation itself is pretty incredible and there's a wide range of different types of work. I haven't finished watching them all yet though, but one theme that's stuck out to me is the Persons with Confused Priorities. For example a guy is sky diving, and he's getting close to the ground, but he notices his shoe lace is untied. So he tries to tie his shoe lace first before pulling his parachute, and doesn't finish in time, and splatters on the ground. So I've been thinking a lot about confused priorities in my own life... Like when a client at work asked me a question and then the door bell rang and the phone rang all at the same time, and none of my co-workers were around to help. I was about to get the client what he wanted first even though the guy at the door was pressing the bell again, and the phone was ringing. I thought of Bill's Dirty Shorts and then considered my three tasks, and put them in priority, answered the phone first, then the door, and then the client. Thank goodness for bill or I might have gotten the client's thing first since he was insistant and right in front of me, and I'd have missed the phone call and the guy at the door might have given up waiting. Not really though, I'd most likely have still prioritized them correctly, but that is what was going through my mind at the time.
Fair Game (1986) starring Cassandra Delaney was another one that I took a chance on. It looked like it had the potential to be interesting. It's an Australian exploitation film about a woman living fairly isolated and getting terrorized by a few strangers. It's the kind of thing that makes you worried about trying to live a quiet peaceful life knowing that at any time someone could come along and destroy everything you care about. I was a little surprised by intensity of the scenes with nudity. They looked like the kind of thing that would really strain an actress. Overall it was a pretty decent movie, not great, but entertaining. There was only one time where the acting was so bad that I cringed a little, but I can easily forgive that since the rest of the movie was pretty good. It was a scene where Delaney was talking on the phone and not leaving any time between her responses for the person on the other end to have actually been talking. The movie had a nice build up towards a pretty terrific climax at the end, and finished on a strong note.