Rate the last movie you've seen

[MinionZombie]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/1...iolent-scenes/ "The spokesperson also confirmed that there had been a total of 10 complaints about the episode." FFS TEN?! TEN?! Fuppin' TEN?! Oh sod off, you precious snowflakes. So much for the "thousands" of complaints ... then again, the article I read it in smacked of click bait ... just like an article I read about the ratings for episode five (one showing on one night and still several million higher than anything else that night!) A load of bollocks, so it all is. Guys, if you don't stop derailing the thread I'm going to bring up the Why the zombies in 28 Days Later are proof that Day of the Dead takes place before Land angle again. Fair enough.

[shootemindehead]

Guys, if you don't stop derailing the thread I'm going to bring up the Why the zombies in 28 Days Later are proof that Day of the Dead takes place before Land angle again. LOL. Bring it on.

[bassman]

"Hell or High Water" - Ben Foster and Cris Pine Star as Brothers that take to a life of crime in order to save their family farm that is on the verge of being repossessed. Jeff Bridges plays the country law-man that's hot on their heels. In a lot of ways, this film plays with your usual crime drama clichés, yet it finds ways to inject new life into them and keep the audience fully involved. I really enjoyed it. "Sausage Party" - it's every bit as immature and vulgar as you'd expect, but it's worth quite a few great laughs if you're into that sort of thing. Much like Toy Story looking at the "secret life" of toys when adults aren't around, Sausage Party is the same idea, but with food. However, if food were to be sentient beings, if you think about it, their existence and ultimate demise would be horrifying! Thats the premise.

[Neil]

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them - 7/10 Perfectly watchable Harry Potter'esque prequel...

[MinionZombie]

Dad's Army (2016) - 3/10 Oh dear...

[Neil]

Dad's Army (2016) - 3/10 Oh dear... Oh dear! Really?

[shootemindehead]

More like "We're doomed".

[MinionZombie]

Oh dear! Really? Yep. Barely a chuckle was raised by it - stunning for a movie based on a situation comedy. More like "We're doomed". And that's another thing - there's several 'catch phrases' strewn about, but barely a single one mentioned makes any sense given the context, or is put somewhere with no power or punch or anything. It was painful. About the best thing in it was the cast singing the themetune in an out-take that runs during the end credits. There's a couple of original cast cameos, but you'd barely recognise them necessarily, and there's some decent impersonations littered about (e.g. Gambon) but equally some ropey ones, too. All-in-all a waste of time, and bizarre to set it in 1944 when the Nazi threat on British shores was relatively minimal (compared to the original show's earlier setting - 1940-ish IIRC - when we Brits were kind of backed into a corner).

[EvilNed]

Two Fulci films. Four of the Apocalypse, 3 of 5 A strange spaghetti western. For one, the main character isn't any mysterious gunslinger but a professional card shark who ends up wandering the unforgiving plains of the wild west. He and three other strangers, all outcasts of society, are beset upon by a sadistic gunslinger who drugs, rapes and tortures his victims. There's not a lot of action in this one but damn, I really fell for it. The plot moves slowly forward and is fairly uneventful on the whole but there's plenty of great character moments and scenes. There's also a creepy vibe to it as the gang progresses on their journey toward safety and stumbling upon an abandoned town halfway through where they split apart for various reasons, including cannibalism. It's atmospheric and manages to get you interested in their sorry tale. Points off for two things; One is the score. It's some kind of cheesy folk music with lyrics. The film is at it's best when there's no score at all - which is really odd for an italian film. The second is Fulci's penchant for closeups. That's a serious gripe I have with him, one which I'll get to later. Fulci's storytelling is very much focused on closeups. I often get a feeling of disorientation in his films because I just don't know where the characters are - or maybe I do know but I really want to see that awesome set they're standing in. Anyway, I recommend this one if for no other reason than seeing a spaghetti western without a gunslinger protagonist... City of the Living Dead / Gates of Hell, 2 of 5 Bought this one Bluray recently. Arrow video. The transfer was great. There's so much to like about this film yet it commits a serious offense for an italian horror film: It's DULL. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy watching it. But I like certain aspects of it. Like the ending in the crypt, and the beginning with the priest and... maybe some of the stuff inbetween. But there's just so many tedious scenes with no payoff. Coming off of Zombie Flesh Eaters this film seems filled with so much filler content in comparison. Almost all of the scenes in the film are set in a house and the inhabitants are plagued by teleporting zombies. Half of the time they just seem to want to scare the players, and the other half they perform this really lame "death grip" where they, through immense strength, pull people's brains out through the back of their heads. After half a dozen of those scenes it just doesn't get anywhere. The characters literally move nowhere inbetween the first 20 and the final 20 minutes. The plot doesn't move forward in steps. It just takes a giant leap at the end when they go into the crypt. Props for having one genuinly creepy scene, the one where the character Sandra finds a dead body in her kitchen. Again, Fulci's penchant for closeups ruin the sense of space for me. Despite almost the entire film being set in that small town, most scenes are just closeups of people in houses...

[JDP]

City of the Living Dead / Gates of Hell, 2 of 5 Bought this one Bluray recently. Arrow video. The transfer was great. There's so much to like about this film yet it commits a serious offense for an italian horror film: It's DULL. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy watching it. But I like certain aspects of it. Like the ending in the crypt, and the beginning with the priest and... maybe some of the stuff inbetween. But there's just so many tedious scenes with no payoff. Coming off of Zombie Flesh Eaters this film seems filled with so much filler content in comparison. Almost all of the scenes in the film are set in a house and the inhabitants are plagued by teleporting zombies. Half of the time they just seem to want to scare the players, and the other half they perform this really lame "death grip" where they, through immense strength, pull people's brains out through the back of their heads. After half a dozen of those scenes it just doesn't get anywhere. The characters literally move nowhere inbetween the first 20 and the final 20 minutes. The plot doesn't move forward in steps. It just takes a giant leap at the end when they go into the crypt. Props for having one genuinly creepy scene, the one where the character Sandra finds a dead body in her kitchen. Again, Fulci's penchant for closeups ruin the sense of space for me. Despite almost the entire film being set in that small town, most scenes are just closeups of people in houses... Not Fulci's best, but not his worst either. Unlike Fulci's Zombie, which features an easy to follow straightforward plot, this movie was just plain weird. Lots of it don't make any sense. Examples: Why do the zombies materialize and dematerialize? Why do they target some of the citizens of Dunwich but leave others alone? Why do the zombies die by simply driving a sharp object through their torsos? Even the evil priest himself, with all his supernatural powers, is disappointingly easily dispatched with the exact same method as his zombie minions. The police offer to help our heroes, who are in a rush to beat a deadline (no pun intended) before the evil priest succeeds in opening the gates of hell, yet they turn down the offer??? A contingent of cops armed with improvised stakes/spears would have quickly dispatched the evil priest's zombie minions down in the crypt, so why turn down the offer? How did zombified Sandra get behind Peter Bell to rip his brains out, without no one noticing, when she was in fact coming from a direction in front of our heroes and was in plain sight all the time? Did she "clone" herself and then materialize this clone behind them??? Or did Peter just casually "forget" that zombified Sandra was coming straight at them and did not turn around to face her? Or did he just suicidally decided to keep his back turned on her because he got tired of living??? The nonsense and lack of explanations just goes on and on. The ending of that movie was also nonsensical, with the kid running towards the two survivors coming out of the crypt and the scream of terror. WTF was that supposed to mean??? That the "evil" around Dunwich has not really been vanished? That the kid is really the illegitimate son of the evil priest and will now take his place?? That Fulci just screwed up the final scene and put a half-assed ending in its place??? What?!?! Inquiring minds would like to know.

[MinionZombie]

I think City of the Living Dead is one of those that improves with each viewing. It's more of a mood/atmosphere piece, with as much logic as your average dream/nightmare - but that seems to be intentional. Fulci had talked about wanting to go 'post narrative' and you can see that coming forth in the Gates of Hell trilogy, as opposed to the much more straight forward (and over all more satisfying) Zombie Flesh Eaters. COTLD does feel a bit like a series of vaguely connected set pieces, but there's some interesting explanations (of sorts) as to the intentions, style, and pacing of the film in the extra features. It's not really supposed to make an awful lot of sense - but with that approach does come many downsides (the audience thinking "WTF is going on?!" half the time, for one). The ending was flubbed a bit, so that 'cracked screen' effect was tacked on for a more doom-laden approach - but it's not meant to mean anything specific, really, from what I'd read/heard. Just a general sense of the evil not being fully vanquished or some shite. The whole film is more 'spiritual' compared to the likes of ZFE (even with it's talk of Voodoo) - the fact that a Priest's suicide brings forth the bowels of hell upon the earth speaks to that, and goes some way to explaining the 'teleporting' aspect. There are forces and spirits beyond our earthly realm at work here, rather than some kind of biological virus. The Beyond has similar aspects to it, as does The House by the Cemtery - these supernatural elements - so the Gates of Hell trilogy leans more that way, whereas Zombie Flesh Eaters is in a different mold entirely. It's certainly not his best work, and is probably the weakest chapter of the GoH trilogy (The Beyond is the strongest IMHO), but it does have its own charms and high points along the way (the cemetery scene is excellent, for example).

[shootemindehead]

and bizarre to set it in 1944 when the Nazi threat on British shores was relatively minimal (compared to the original show's earlier setting - 1940-ish IIRC - when we Brits were kind of backed into a corner). That's just silly. The Home Guard were practically nothing by 1944 and wound down at the end of the year. There were plenty of reserves to go around from the real army. 1940 was the height of it. That's a truly odd decision to say the least. But, in a stupid decision to make a film out of a period piece like 'Dad's Army', which really is well past its sell by date and the definition of niche, it doesn't seem out of place. What's next? 'Last of the Summer Wine'. - - - Updated - - - The ending of that movie was also nonsensical, with the kid running towards the two survivors coming out of the crypt and the scream of terror. WTF was that supposed to mean??? That the "evil" around Dunwich has not really been vanished? That the kid is really the illegitimate son of the evil priest and will now take his place?? That Fulci just screwed up the final scene and put a half-assed ending in its place??? What?!?! Inquiring minds would like to know. I don't even think Fulci knew. - - - Updated - - - I think City of the Living Dead is one of those that improves with each viewing. The only classic films of Fulci's that I can watch these days are 'The Beyond' and 'Zombie Flesh Eaters'. I've given up making excuses for the others on his well known list. Purely a matter of taste, but I just cannot get into 'City of the Living Dead' no matter what. It's as dumb as a bag of rashers, and not in a good way like some of his other stuff. Fabio Frizzi's score is great though. I kinda get the feeling that old Lucio's heart just wasn't truly in it either? Despite directing, writing and producing.

[EvilNed]

Yeah, I don't really buy the "Post Narrative" excuse that's thrown around Fulci's work either. There was an interview with the screenwriter on the BluRay and he seemed to think that "Cities" was a classic film with a classic story. Is it really? The script is really weak. It's just a bunch of thrown together, awkward death scenes with some really great stuff inbetween. But does anyone even remember the maggot storm? That old abandoned house that pervert goes into - and is scared away from - twice? Or the fact that the pervert is later killed by one of the townsfolk rather than a zombie, something which just feels really out place. Here you have these zombies "running" around and tearing people apart in one way or another and in the middle of it we throw a homicide? Why? For the gore, of course. Solely because of the gore. But the consequence of this is that the most memorable death scene of the entire film is not really supernatural in nature at all. It's just a guy, unconnected to the Gates of Hell, who decides to take matters into his own hands. Eh. As I said, there's a lot of great stuff in there. But as awhole it doesn't stack up. It's boring, unfortunately.

[MinionZombie]

Well, I for one remember those scenes. It's a bizarre sort of a film, and there are scripting issues to say the least - to consider it a "great" script by any stretch of the imagination is a load of bollocks, so I'm certainly not defending it as a quality piece of writing. In some ways it feels like highlights from several episodes of a TV series with all the various plot strands happening to these people in this town - evil has been unleashed upon it, so these are examples of people encountering evil throughout the town in whatever 'stories' they had running already ... but even still, it's all over the shop. You can argue over whether Fulci and co knew what they were doing or not - I'd venture that maybe they just didn't really know how to say what they wanted to say (which, to me, fits in with the weird 'shattered screen' ending). The 'post narrative' thing works better in The Beyond - and yet, ironically, it has far more conventional plotting (by comparison, at least) to COTLD. Fulci's gore flicks always had a sort of pornographic element to them. Rather than having a bunk up every ten minutes (like in an Emmanuelle movie, say) you instead stop everything for a drawn out gore fest (the 'thrown up guts' scene is superb in that regard).

[shootemindehead]

There are a lot of excuses thrown around for Fulci's films, let's be honest and I doubt anybody would be talking about him if he hadn't had cottoned onto his gore schtick in the early 80's. I say that as a guy who was obsessed with tracking down a copy 'Zombie Flesh Eaters' for about 10 years, so it's not as if I have no time for the guy at all. But, 'City of the Living Dead' is pretty dreadful. Even more so, when you knew what he could do with his other best known titles. It just seems really unfocused and confusing - with added zombies, cos he thought people liked zombies - and fleshed out with some truly stupid scenes, such as Christopher George pickaxing his way through a coffin to get to Catroina McColl (or whatever name she chose for that particular outing) and the set piece where the, much maligned, John Morghen gets an auger through the head from what has to be one of cinema's most...erm..."excitable" fathers. I know you have to go with this film or not, but 'City of the Living Dead' just makes too much hard work out of it. That said, I've seen it about four times. I think the Fulci gorefest I've seen the least is 'The New York Ripper', which I've seen only once and I cannot remember a single thing about it. Might give that a go soon.