Movie opinions thread (what have you seen, what did you think?)

SouthtownKid

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Just throwing in another recommendation for Daughters of Darkness. The Hammer comparison is apt: it's a good combination of classy (arty cinematography, interesting use of color and some solid performances) and trashy (it's a lesbian vampire movie that isn't afraid to be a lesbian vampire movie).
Gun dang it, you're torturing me here.
 

fake

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Near Dark
Kathryn Bigelow's first movie, AFAIK. A young ranch worker gets lured in by a roaming pack of vampires. Now that he's one of them, he has to learn to live a new life in which murder is required to survive, and going out in the sun means exploding. But most of the five or so vampires are assholes and he doesn't want to be an asshole.

Pretty bad. Only recommended for if you want to watch a vampire movie that isn't typically "goth."
 

terry.330

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Near Dark
Kathryn Bigelow's first movie, AFAIK. A young ranch worker gets lured in by a roaming pack of vampires. Now that he's one of them, he has to learn to live a new life in which murder is required to survive, and going out in the sun means exploding. But most of the five or so vampires are assholes and he doesn't want to be an asshole.

Pretty bad. Only recommended for if you want to watch a vampire movie that isn't typically "goth."
Oh man, you're nuts. Near Dark is awesome, the cast alone is amazing. It's also not just not "goth" it's an incredibly original vampire movie all around. That's fine if you didn't like it I'm just surprised you dismissed it so easily. I think there's a lot to like about it.
 

Late

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Yeah, Near Dark is great, Severn is one of the best movie vampires of all time. There's a great Vampire: The Masquerade feeling to the whole film.
 

SouthtownKid

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Near Dark
Kathryn Bigelow's first movie, AFAIK. A young ranch worker gets lured in by a roaming pack of vampires. Now that he's one of them, he has to learn to live a new life in which murder is required to survive, and going out in the sun means exploding. But most of the five or so vampires are assholes and he doesn't want to be an asshole.

Pretty bad. Only recommended for if you want to watch a vampire movie that isn't typically "goth."
This is another one I want to watch, but haven't been able to find here. Was looking for this maybe 6 months ago or so.
 

fake

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Oh man, you're nuts. Near Dark is awesome, the cast alone is amazing. It's also not just not "goth" it's an incredibly original vampire movie all around. That's fine if you didn't like it I'm just surprised you dismissed it so easily. I think there's a lot to like about it.
It just felt very TV-movie to me. I'll rarely complain about a movie being too short, but this was basically guy gets bit, bar fight, running away, climax, outro. I'll try it again when I can pay more attention.
 

terry.330

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Yeah, Near Dark is great, Severn is one of the best movie vampires of all time. There's a great Vampire: The Masquerade feeling to the whole film.
I always thought of it as the counter point to The Lost Boys. The total opposite of the trendy, overly stylized hip teen slant that was going for.

Near Dark is bleak as fuck, the brutality, the desert setting, the psychotic codependent family dynamic. It's very clever and legitimately unsettling.
 

LoneSage

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Synecdoche, New York - haven't watched this since it came out. What a delight.
 
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terry.330

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Virus- All but forgotten late 90s sci-fi horror shlock starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Sutherland, William Baldwin and Cliff Curtis. A Tugboat crew finds a derelict Russian freighter that was used to communicate with the MIR space station. Their plan to salvage it is interrupted when they discover that the ship has been taken over by an alien AI that has used to the onboard technology and crew to create cyborg killing machines. The goal of the AI is of course to exterminate the human race and takeover the planet. While it doesn't have the sense of fun idiocy like Deep Rising or Deep Blue Sea it does have some of the last great practical effects to come out of Hollywood. Lots of skin, flesh, robotics and explosions. This would make a good double feature with Event Horizon.
 

jro

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Synecdoche, New York - haven't watched this since it came out. What a delight.
I feel like there should have been a movie that starred Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Tilda Swinton, and of course, Jonze writing/directing. Ah, well (if there was one, don't @ me, I'm too tired to IMDB anything right now, j/k do @ me so I know to watch it).

Anyway, I watched:

Smile - apparently the standards for mainstream horror are just low as shit, I guess? This got a bunch of positive reviews, many of which called it very original, and it actually sucks balls. Plot holes galore and sort of a nasty/decent ending that makes perfect and also no sense. Give me Peele's woke horror or the scattershot indie stuff any day over this.

The Oak Room - Adapted from what I assume works a little better as a play, but still pretty solid. Taut directing, writing, and acting. RJ Mitte in particular, very good. Good pacing, nearly perfect ending, highly recommended come to think of it.

Ambulance - "...and Michael Bay gets to keep making movies" is right. Pain and Gain is still awesome, I will die on the hill for that one, but this was awful. If you have 2.5 hours to kill and also want to hate yourself go for it. Gyllenhaal does his best to make it watchable but, like, Brando couldn't save this.

Hideout - fun premise and the first two acts work well, then there's the big reveal and it all just gets boring and dumb. So much really great indie horror out there, but so much bad also, and this is the latter.

Retaliation - Orlando Bloom plays a, um, altar-boy who lets his bad side get the better of him 25 years later. Very measured, surprisingly restrained, two annoying yet really good monologues from Bloom, and one of the better endings to any movie I've seen in a while. Not a fun watch per se, but really good overall if your expectations are set accordingly.
 

HornheaDD

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Confess, Fletch:
Is it kinda goofy with disguises and whatnot like the Chevy Chase films? No.
Is it still pretty funny? Yes.
Does it have Jon Hamm in it? Yes.
Does it have Robert Picardo in it? Yes.
Does it have a milfy Marcia Gaye Harden in it? Yes.
Does it have Kyle McLachlan in it? Yes.

Definitely worth a watch if for nothing else Jon Hamm's goofiness.
 

SouthtownKid

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Confess, Fletch:
Is it kinda goofy with disguises and whatnot like the Chevy Chase films? No.
Is it still pretty funny? Yes.
Does it have Jon Hamm in it? Yes.
Does it have Robert Picardo in it? Yes.
Does it have a milfy Marcia Gaye Harden in it? Yes.
Does it have Kyle McLachlan in it? Yes.

Definitely worth a watch if for nothing else Jon Hamm's goofiness.
I want to see this, but I'm such a huge fan of the novels that I think I can't help but be disappointed. I would have been disappointed by the Chevy Chase movies if I hadn't seen them before reading the books. But even then, Chevy is Chevy, especially in the '80s, so that was its own thing and it's fine. But this movie looks like it was trying to take more of a legitimate swing at adapting the second novel, so if they miss, the sense of disappointment is going to be larger.

Right from the trailer, it's obvious they've removed a major character (who later got his own spinoff series of novels) which changes everything. So already, that's a strike against it. And maybe I'll change my mind when I see it, but I think Hamm is miscast. A great actor, but he seems too classically handsome to play Fletch. A little too old for Fletch at that point, also.

Still, I'd love for it to be good, and if it is good, for them to make more.

Pain and Gain is still awesome,
 

terry.330

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Wild Things- A delightfully trashy neo-noir from 98. Starring Matt Dillon, Kenvin Bacon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards and Bill Murray. All of whom are perfectly cast, even Richards. The Florida setting is fantastic and offers a great mix of the uber wealthy and Floridas particular brand of trashiness. Excellent score of sleazy jazz that compliments the movie perfectly. Twist on top of twist, this is a legit noir. Unfortunately this is best known for it's gratuitous sex scenes but much like Body Heat there's far more to the film than tawdry sex, they're merely the frosting on the cake. It's no masterpiece but it is a very enjoyable and well made thriller.
 

heihachi

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Parasite - Thought it was going to be a zombie movie for some reason...probably because Hulu has it in the horror section which I don't understand after watching it. Good movie.

Crimes of the Future - Not as weird or as gross as I was expecting. Kind of boring, thought the scenes where Viggo was trying to eat oatmeal in his force feedback gamer chair were unintentionally funny
 

SouthtownKid

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Wild Things- A delightfully trashy neo-noir from 98. Starring Matt Dillon, Kenvin Bacon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards and Bill Murray. All of whom are perfectly cast, even Richards. The Florida setting is fantastic and offers a great mix of the uber wealthy and Floridas particular brand of trashiness. Excellent score of sleazy jazz that compliments the movie perfectly. Twist on top of twist, this is a legit noir. Unfortunately this is best known for it's gratuitous sex scenes but much like Body Heat there's far more to the film than tawdry sex, they're merely the frosting on the cake. It's no masterpiece but it is a very enjoyable and well made thriller.
It's exactly what it's supposed to be. Loved it.

I watched Gangster Squad. I guess it was perfectly adequate in every way except for how cynically unoriginal it was. It was like Untouchables and L.A. Confidential had a baby with ADHD. With Josh Brolin in the Kevin Costner/Russel Crowe parts, Ryan Gosling in the Sean Connery and Kevin Spacey roles, and Sean Penn in the De Niro role. Good luck watching it without the whole time wishing you were watching one of the other two movies.
 

terry.330

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Smile- Ugh... It Follows meets The Ring meets Final Destination. Dumb, unoriginal and predictable.
 

terry.330

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The Beyond- Considered by many to be Lucio Fulci's masterpiece. Crazy as a bag full of rabid squirrels and about as coherent as if those squirrels had access to a typewriter.

Something about a warlock who was killed in the 1920 in a hotel built over one of the 7 gates to hell. Then some chick inherits the hotel 50 years later and the gate opens. I honestly don't rightly know. A guy gets his face eaten off by tarantulas, a blind woman gets mauled by her seeing eye dog, lots of eyeball damage, zombies, lots of goop, unidentifiable muck and melting faces and a bunch of other unexplainable Italian bullshit. Effects and camera work range from impressive to downright embarrassing. Excellent score.

Overall par for the course for Fulci and possibly his best work. Not sure I could recommend it to anybody except genre fanatics, still though there is definitely something to it all. I just don't know if anyone could actually articulate what that something is exactly.
 

Lagduf

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Is that the one where the dudes eye gets stabbed with a long splinter of wood and it’s a super graphic practical effect?

My friend was really in to that shit in high school. Horror flicks with practical effects. He used to subscribe to Fangoria. I’ve seen so many shitty horror VHS from back in the day I can’t even remember.
 

rarehero

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Is that the one where the dudes eye gets stabbed with a long splinter of wood and it’s a super graphic practical effect?

My friend was really in to that shit in high school. Horror flicks with practical effects. He used to subscribe to Fangoria. I’ve seen so many shitty horror VHS from back in the day I can’t even remember.
You're thinking of Zombie, where a zombie pulls a lady's head to the door where there is a long splinter. It had an underwater zombie messing with a shark too. To be fair both that and the beyond is fulci. Striking imagery and music, the rest tends to be the typical schlocky Italian special effects.

I felt like it was probably great at its time for how shocking it was. Zombie and the beyond are probably two of my favorites out of his work.
 
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LoneSage

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Big Fish - I have heard women don't 'get' this movie. As tears roll down my soft, cherub cheeks, my wife asked me what was this about. Theory confirmed.
 

Lagduf

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You're thinking of Zombie, where a zombie pulls a lady's head to the door where there is a long splinter. It had an underwater zombie messing with a shark too. To be fair both that and the beyond is fulci. Striking imagery and music, the rest tends to be the typical schlocky Italian special effects.

I felt like it was probably great at its time for how shocking it was. Zombie and the beyond are probably two of my favorites out of his work.

Ah yes, Zombie - thank you. I’m remembering that one now. Shark vs Zombie was epic.
 

terry.330

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Ah yes, Zombie - thank you. I’m remembering that one now. Shark vs Zombie was epic.
Most of Fulci's stuff all kind of blends together. I thought I had seen The Beyond before but hadn't, was getting it mixed up with City of the Living Dead and House by the Cemetery. They're all pretty entertaining despite their many flaws and general nonsensical insanity.

The only one that really feels different is Cat in the Brain which is a meta piece where a horror director is blamed for killings modeled after scenes from his movies and he goes insane thinking he might actually be the killer.
 

Lagduf

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Does the beyond feature a guy getting whipped by a chain and his skin coming off? I’m finding my memory of all the horror shot I’ve seen also blending all together.
 
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