Rate The Last Movie You Saw

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The Lawnmower Man - (1992)

The 1980s and 90s saw a tidal wave of Stephen King adaptations, and while some were huge prestige pictures like The Shining and The Shawshank Redemption, some were utter schlock - stuff like The Running Man and this number, The Lawnmower Man. I'd read the short story, and it's one of King's most bizarre, hallucinatory tales that reads like a fever-dream on acid. The movie doesn't bear too much resemblance as far as I can remember, other than the fact that it features a lawnmower man with God-like powers - the film adheres to a schlocky plot, but the book has you asking "Am I reading this right?" Pierce Brosnan, in a performance I'm sure he's trying to forget, features as the mad scientist type while Jeff Fahey plays Jobe Smith - a simple-minded man with learning difficulties that at first becomes smart (through the use of virtual reality - don't ask me) and continues on to develop ESP, psychokinesis and other powers. The CGI (pre-Jurassic Park) has aged really badly, as has the movie as a whole. King sued to get his name taken from the title. Those who like schlock - this fits in well for it's period, and almost predicts the rise of the internet - something God-Jobe wants to upload his consciousness to - so he can get every phone in the world to ring at the same time. Except those that are busy. It's also a little bit of a throwback to the classic age of sci-fi, with man messing around in the creator's domain. Both fun, and terrible.

5/10


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Oyster Farmer - (2004)

The main star of Oyster Farmer, Alex O'Loughlin, screen-tested for the role of James Bond in Casino Royale and was close by all accounts - but I'm glad we got Daniel Craig instead. Around the time his name was being bandied around, he featured in this film - a very average Australian drama that purveys many themes and manages to squeeze Jack Thompson in via a very superfluous character. O'Loughlin features as Jack Flange, who commits a very clever crime while working as a (you guessed it) oyster farmer on the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. The loot he mails to himself, to avoid detection, but the parcel goes astray and he spends the rest of the film trying to figure who stole it. There are plenty of red herrings, female characters for Flange to possibly hook up with and various other plot strands. This is a painfully average film - it does enough to rise to an acceptable level, but it's director, Anna Reeves, has never done any work since transitioning to the business side of things. It feels like a film made by someone very competent and extremely intelligent, but uninspired.

6/10

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The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Mars Attacks the World (1938)

I wouldn't call this cinema but I would call this trash cereal pulp something or another. In contrast to all of the other pre-1940 films I've seen so far, this one is close to the worst. Its entertaining in that its dumb and poorly constructed and is made in an alien era so much different than our own. Somewhere in the middle theres some hairlike strings on the lens ruining the shot. The attitude is chipper and matter-of-fact through the whole film, no variance in tone of emotion in any circumstance. Still a fun watch though if you want to laugh at something badly done. And that poster got my hopes up.

3/10

Heaven's Gate (1980) -

Given its sprawling, padded out runtime, it's not hard to figure out why this is one of the most divisive cult films out there. Did it have to be 3.5 hours long? No. Was there a ton of padding to draw out the film? Of course. Are these inherently problematic elements though? Not necessarily, no.

While one could certainly call the film slow (as much as I hate using that word), I prefer to describe it as patient. There are multiple ways to tell a story. Not every film should be required to follow the same narrative progression to get to the end. Having the pacing meander is another valid approach to storytelling. Is there a line where this could go too far? Probably. Am I one to determine what that line is? Absolutely not. Trying to come up with a set in stone rule for how long a film can be allowed to meander before it becomes a flaw (especially if you're trying to nail down an exact number of minutes the film has to commit to) would be ridiculously hard to determine, vary depending on the attention span and taste of the person deciding it, and quite frankly wouldn't be worth the effort of doing so.

While one could argue that this film goes too far pacing-wise, the more pressing question I ask myself when watching meandering films is whether they offer enough in the way of mood, style, feel, etc. to keep me engaged. All things considered, this film did an alright job at that. First things first, I think the main argument one could make towards its length is that it serves to paint a vivid portrait of the town's rhythms and give us a sense of what's going to be disrupted (the same argument could be made for the divisive first hour of The Deer Hunter). While I admired what Cimino did, I think The Deer Hunter handled this pacing style better. Since the threat of Canton's posse was made clear before the big chunk of padding, taking focus away from that and shifting to a more relaxed tone took me out of the film for most of the middle act since a significant amount of narrative tension was lost in the process. This wasn't an issue with The Deer Hunter as, while the first act had the inevitability of the Vietnam War, it mainly loomed in the background while the relaxed and rhythmic vibes of the town were at the forefront.

Still though, the prolonged middle act was able to keep me on board for a few reasons. For instance, with the exception of The Searchers, it's probably the most gorgeous Western I've ever seen (it's a shame the film wasn't on the Criteron Channel when I watched it). The landscape/panoramic shots are beautiful to look at and, with the abundance of flowers in some shots, bordered on fantasy at times. Given that Westerns are more reliant on the scenic qualities of their environments than most other genres, this is a big strength. A few of the side characters were also decently compelling. Nate Champion's arc is well-done, John Hurt gives his character enough humanity to balance out his pathetic aspects, and Ella Watson's able-bodied portrayal fit the action-centric second half really well. Jim Averill is perhaps the least colorful of those characters, but this didn't bother me much. The action scenes in the second half probably don't warrant much defending (aside from the unfortunate on-set animal cruelty). They're tehnically impressive, differentiate from each other significantly in terms of set pieces, and in the case of the wood wagon fight at the end (how did the immigrants even build all that in one night?), rather jaw-dropping given the amount of craft on display.

I originally gave this film a slightly lower rating, but in retrospect, I decided to bump it up a notch. I think the "too slow" criticisms levied at it aren't entirely fair or sound, so even though it's not without its flaws, I'm okay with giving it this extra bit of support. Really, if you loved The Deer Hunter, you should find plenty to enjoy with this film.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

SF = Z


[Snooze Factor Ratings]:
Z = didn't nod off at all
Zz = nearly nodded off but managed to stay alert
Zzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed
Zzzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed but nodded off again at the same point and therefore needed to go back a number of times before I got through it...
Zzzzz = nodded off and missed some or the rest of the film but was not interested enough to go back over it

Mars Attacks! (1996)

I've seen this a couple times before. A good comedy sci-fi with a big cast. Cartoonish aliens. Makes you laugh here and there. If you haven't seen it you should.

7/10

Cocaine Bear
7/10.
A horror/comedy about a black bear that goes on a killing rampage after eating packages of cocaine that had been dropped out of an airplane. I found the first half hilarious, but the CGI-obvious bear did not scare me. The movie starts with the caption "Based on a true story", but it should read "Very loosely based on an actual event".

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Boldly going.

Price sporting a hoodie before rappers

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Vertigo follows retiring detective Johnny "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) as he copes with bouts of vertigo and acrophobia following a tragic accident at work. But when an old college friend asks him to tail his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), Scottie is forced to come face to face with everything that haunts him if he wants to move forward.

Following Madeleine gives Scottie that chance, or at least that's what he thinks. The plot puts him in an intricate web of deception and lies in which he finds himself in both sides. The truth is that his "vertigo" is nothing more than a manifestation of the guilt and trauma he's suffering for not being able to save a fellow officer; something that he's clearly not been able to get past.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

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I feel the same way, the roller skating scene alone is sublime, all of the film is gloriously shot. I wrote about my appreciation of the visuals of Heaven's Gate in my review, take a look.
https://www.movieforums.com/communit...38#post1367638

Nice review. It looks like we share plenty of thoughts for the film.

The Menu (2022)

I can haz cheeseburger has reached its final form.

Under the Silver Lake (2018)

A guided tour to living your worst male life.

The Magnetic Monster - This 1953 scifi offering might seem nondescript at first glance but it wins bonus points for its's earnest attempts at realism. Richard Carlson stars as Dr. Jeffrey Stewart, an agent for the Office of Scientific Investigation. He and his partner Dr. Dan Forbes (King Donovan) are called out, Ghostbusters style, to a local appliance store. Their clocks have stopped and their metal products inexplicably magnetized. Using a geiger counter they pinpoint the source to a suite of second floor offices where they find lab equipment and a dead body. The precise cause is nowhere to be found leaving only a heavy dose of radiation residue to mark it's presence.

After asking the public to call in with any anomalous occurrences they eventually track down fellow scientist Dr. Howard Denker (Leonard Mudie) on a flight that is immediately rerouted back to Los Angeles. They find the source off all the unexplained phenomena in a briefcase the scientist was carrying. It turns out to be a new unstable element Denker has created by bombarding a substance called "serranium" with alpha particles. It needs to "feed" by absorbing energy from it's surroundings every 11 hours which causes it to kill anything that happens to be in the way. It also doubles in size and mass giving off radiation and magnetic waves. The magnitude of the situation becomes clear when calculations show the isotope will eventually become heavy enough to alter the earth's orbit

It's a quick and concise 76 minutes long with the climax taking place in Nova Scotia at an experimental generator dubbed the Deltatron. The film is a little dated of course and their are several instances of stock footage being used but the technical jargon comes off as plausible and they seemed to have gone to some lengths to make it appear as valid as possible.

70/100

Wild River (1960)

Vincent Price Performs The Thriller Rap Live 1987

the OG

Nice review! Like you, I've watched this many times since I first watched it on its release. It's one of the great films for sure, and in my top 3 Hitchcock; but there are a few peculiar things in the film which I've noticed over the years.

First, as you've alluded to, Scottie didn't have vertigo, but acrophobia-- a fear of heights. But of course they couldn't very well have named the film "Acrophobia"..

Right from the first sequence in the picture we see Scottie slip and hang off a ledge, which introduces Scottie's acrophobia. But there he was hanging several stories over an alley, and the cop who tried to help him falls to his death. How did Scottie escape his deathly predicament? We never find out. It's not mentioned in the next scene in his old college chum's office.

Also when Scottie tails Madeline to the old McKittrick Hotel, she enters the hotel, and then he sees her in the second floor window. Then when he goes in to question the manager (Elen Corby) about it, she says no such person is there, and shows him the room Madeline was in, which is empty. What happened to Madeline? We don't know.

There are several weird unresolved scenes in the movie. When questioned about them, Hitchcock said he didn't mind about that, and that the audience wouldn't either. Also he told Truffaut in their interviews that basically Scottie was in effect a necrophiliac. Hell, that's even more modern than some of the sick stuff in contemporary movies!!!..

Like the game, Mortal Kombat follows a group of characters that find themselves somehow in the midst of a battle between multiple otherwordly realms, all striving for control of each other through the titular tournament ("the word 'combat' isn't even spelled right.") In the middle of it all is Cole Young (Lewis Tan), a washed up MMA fighter and non-game character that has just realized he is the descendant of a legendary fighter and the subject of a prophecy.

The truth is that I'm struggling to write these brief synopsis to make it sound coherent, because the film is just shock-full of clumsy character introductions, a weak script, and some mediocre performances. There also seems to be a divide between the two main subplots: that of Cole stumbling upon the Mortal Kombat tournament, and the story of his lineage which introduces to us the popular characters of Scorpion and Sub-Zero (Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim) while bookending the film.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

Hooper (1978)

Sweet Thing, 2020

Billie (Lana Rockwell) and her little brother Nico (Nico Rockwell) live a precarious existence with their alcoholic father Adam (Will Patton). But when Adam heads off to rehab, they end up spending several weeks at a beach house with their absentee mother, Eve (Karyn Parsons) and her unpredictable new boyfriend, Beaux (ML Josepher). They befriend a boy who lives nearby, Malik (Jabari Watkins), but their “vacation” quickly becomes just as volatile as their previous situation.

Firmly rooted in the relationship between the siblings, played by actual siblings, this is a compelling portrait of children with no one to rely on but each other.



Full review