Recently Watched Films

Another Jack Hill film. Tarantino credits this one as a big influence on him and you can definitely see it in his more grindhousy stuff. 

What starts as a fairly standard British gangster movie soon takes a turn towards the strange and surreal. A weird but good one. 

Something more watchable found on Shudder. 

Another long one, though not as long as Happy Hour (still over 3 hours long). Like that last one, I watched this in a few chunks, though I'd have liked to have done it in one. Very compelling drama from Turkey. 

Set in 1750, this is kind of a western although far removed from the typical ones set later and is much more the folk horror movie. I can't help but imagine that this may have been an influence on Eggers' The Witch. The film is brought down by dated low budget effects, but the atmosphere is good. 

English title: Zazie in the Metro. Spoiler alert: Zazie never enters the Metro in the entire film. This is the third disc in my Louis Malle boxset and it's a massive change of pace from the first two films. It's absurd and slapstick as hell. Just totally whack from start to finish. 

Watched while going through the parent sitcom again. The film has continuity errors with the series and isn't its finest hour, but it's good fun and keeps the same spirit alive. 

Stephen King adaptations can be a bit hit and miss. This one is mostly hit. Max Von Sydow is excellent as Leland Gaunt. Ed Harris and J.T. Walsh put in pretty good shows too.

I don't like spiders so I was of two minds to even try this one, but it has decent ratings so I took a gamble. It's not a bad movie (indeed, too many actual spiders for me), but I don't think I'd watch it again.

Meh, yet again. I think this Shudder sub has about run its course. 

This one is over five hours long, so I watched it in chunks. I kinda wish I could have taken the whole thing in during a single sitting though. Wonderful movie. 

Lacks the charm and style of my favourite vampire films, but it's not a bad venture. 

This one wasn't too bad either, as far as these Shudder exclusives go. The title works on two levels, one of them being that the movie takes place during a blackout. 

Major WTF movie. But I think I may be done giving director Sion Sono's films a shot. While obviously technically accomplished and capable of mashing a multitude of genres together into a package that's surprisingly cohesive, his films tend to end up either annoying me in some manner or disgusting me with how he can't seem to make a film without putting something perverted in it. He did at least make a balancing point with this one that did make me say 'oh' at the end, but the film still feels unnecessarily gratuitous. I get that the actresses in the film were probably actually of legal age (at least I hope they were, but I don't know what Japan's standard is compared to the western world), but when they're portraying school children, this just ends up one big NO. Still, at least it's not on Love Exposure's level. 

Second watch of this Argentinian/Spanish anthology gem.  You need to have a bit of warped sense of humour like me, but I think this is hilarious. 

Final King Hu movie I picked up recently. This one's another epic, over three hours long but is in a different genre (RYM naturally puts it in the exact same genre as the other three I watched recently, which honestly kinda stinks of unintended racism - 'It's Chinese, must be a Wuxia' kind of thing). It's actually a ghost story blurring the lines between fantasy and horror. I'd put it in a similar style as the Japanese Kaidan films (something those geniuses over at RYM recently got disassociated with horror, ruining tagging on a number of important films). The film itself was very good with some great visuals but could sometimes be hard to follow and is probably my least favourite King Hu film so far. Still a solid 4/5 though. 

I don't know what sort of weird shit I just watched here, but this is brilliant!

Stunning, if disturbing. It's as if the filmmaker was trying to one up Soviet classic Come and See. This kid goes through some serious shit (and the buried up to the neck to be pecked at by crows on the cover is far from the worst). It can not be called a nice film. It can be called a brilliant one though. It's as beautifully shot as it is harrowing and horrifying. It runs for almost three hours, but really doesn't feel like it. It's also the first film ever made in its language, Interslavic, and features an international cast including Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgård & Harvey Keitel as people the boy meets along the way. 

I feel like this one has gone somewhat ignored so far, which is a same. I'm tempted to give this one 5/5 right off the bat, and I try to reserve that rating now for at least second viewings.