films you've seen recently and would NOT recommend

Pestario

tell your friends
Dragon Wars aka D-War. I should have known with a name like that. It is honestly the worst movie I've seen.
 

Chef Napalm

Lost in the Supermarket
Worst movie I've seen in a while was "The Happening". Apparently, acting means knitting one's brow for Mark Wahlberg and buggin one's eyes out for Zoey Deschanel.

Having said that, I don't know how they delivered some of that dialogue with a straight face. M.Night needs to drop one of his writer/director/producer hats; he's doing a half-assed job of everything.

The worst movie I've ever seen is a toss-up between The Green Mile, AI and Meet Joe Black.
AI was hard to watch because of the clash of styles; Kubrick's scalpel vs. Speilberg's broadsword. [SPOILER WARNING!!] The example I would use is the scene where the boy robot David crash lands in the ocean. That would've been a brilliant Kubrick ending, but no, Speilberg had to go for the tear-jerking reunion.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Fever with Venessa Redgrave is probably the worst thing I have ever seen. I don't know if it ever got a full release as I saw it at a film festival. Angelina Jolie pops up with immaculate make-up and plucked eyebrows as a Marxist revolutionary.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368725/

Who says revolutionaries can't be fashionable? ;)

Speaking of which, I saw a guy the other day wearing a fantastic tee-shirt. It had a print of Che Guevara (you know, *that* photo of him), only Che was wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt - and the Che on Che's tee-shirt was wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt, ad infinitum...make me chuckle, anyway. That's the kind of postmodernism I can really get behind!
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Phantom of Death by Ruggero Deodato of Cannibal Holocaust fame.

It was made in 1988 and is a post-giallo/pseudo-slasher flick starring Michael York and Edwige Fenech.

And frankly, it's hopeless. It's an obvious attempt to cash in on mid-period Argento, and revive, or replay, a great Italian cinematic staple: the extreme erotic thriller. It's a post-Tenebrae vehicle made years after Tenebrae itself had provided the perfect end, or coda to, the giallo. That really is the last great giallo, and there was nowhere for the genre after it: the excessive psychological violence and physical gore, the virtuoso cinematography and postmodern self-reflexivity amounted to a big full stop. The American slasher movies were sordid trash because they simply lifted the worst elements from it, and went further (down) from there. In fact, just after Tenebrae, Lucio Fulci's vile New York Ripper came out, which basically set a template for the nihilistic mysogyny of the slashers, though Fulci was making some kind of point still and had also made two of the greatest gialli that exist: Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Don't Torture a Duckling.

Phantom of Death doesn't even have the visceral nastiness of your average slasher: it's a highly mannered, badly paced, pointless mess of meagre Argento visuals and formless set-piece murders. Venice and Edwige Fenech, in particular, are badly wasted. Michael York (who hams up the appalling script) plays a famous concert pianist who suffers from a rare ageing disease that usually develops in children but catches him in his mid-30s. He therefore (obviously!) goes on a lurid killing spree, while an inept detective (sleep-walked by Donald Pleasence) tries to catch him. It's a lame idea, but given a bit of thought it could throw up some interesting intellectual angles or visual moments. Ruggero is the kind of eurosleaze director just smart enough to touch profundity but not smart enough to convert that potential into subtle and arresting film making, like Bava and Fulci usually did. His masterpiece remains Cannibal Holocaust, which is a startling film, and one of the great Italian horror movies, but, really, that was the absolute limit of his abilities. (Though look out for Waves of Lust, a genuinely original and twisted erotic thriller that Dead Calm owes a big debt to and is, in a number of ways, worse than.)

The film has been put out by the British DVD company Shameless, who are a kind of heir to Redemption and Vipco. Unlike Anchor Bay, Blue Underground, No Shame (RIP), Severin and other Continental and American DVD companies, the Brits have never really been very good at putting out quality eurosleaze, horror and crime films and, while better than Vipco and Redemption, the quality of Shameless releases is not hot: the packaging is horrific, no Italian soundtracks only the dubs, and poor picture quality. Which is a shame because they are releasing some premier eurosleaze, like Massino Dallamono's What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, Sergio Martino's Torso and Piero Schivazappa's The Frightened Woman.

Those are worth buying, as there're no better versions available, even from the great American and Italian outfits. But, seriously, avoid this Deodato shit, but head for this instead.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
"Phantom of Death by Ruggero Deodato of Cannibal Holocaust fame."
Shame. I always thought that looked good from the trailer. I came close to buying it off ebay but something always held me back.

"Which is a shame because they are releasing some premier eurosleaze, like Massino Dallamono's What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, Sergio Martino's Torso and Piero Schivazappa's The Frightened Woman."
I thought that Torso was a bit of a mess to be honest - Frightened Woman is good though - who would have thought that Sting could be so sinister?
 
nice review OC. almost like a proper one off a book innit! there was an anchor bay UK for a few years, i think Mark Morrison was involved. Sony bought them out recently. there's something very English about your underachieving genre movie distributors. I'd be disappointed if they did it well.

I tried to watch Derek Jarman's "The Last of England" last night, largely because it's shot on super-8 and I'm always interested in super-8 features. Anyway it was clearly blown up to 35mm and filmed on Braun Nizos or something (you can see someone holding one at one point) cos it looks very nice. But i only made it about halfway. I mean...Derek Jarman eh. it's all a bit embarrassing isn't it? I wish it was better but realistically this film is pretty silly. If that was the last of England it's probably for the best all in.
 
the Brits have never really been very good at putting out quality eurosleaze, horror and crime films

thinking about this a little more Mondo Macabro is a british operation and between the book and the label have single handedly introduced the whole turk/indo etc exploitation thing to a wider genre audience. i think they've done it well, ok you can't actually call these films quality and the presentation is somewhat rough and ready but they have found prints of some rare/obscure films etc...stuff that had flown under the radars of all but yr most elite b-movie aficiandios
 

craner

Beast of Burden
i think Mark Morrison was involved.

What, Return of the Mac???

You're right about Mondo Macabre, I forgot about them.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"What, Return of the Mac???"
I resisted that. Somehow.

"You're right about Mondo Macabre, I forgot about them."
I recently watched a film called Silip that they put out. Slow and with too many long, boring sex scenes, presumably so it could be marketed as an erotic thriller but got good in the end. Notable for the line "Nobody throws sand on my daughter's cunt".
They put out Coffin Joe right - what else?
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I had a copy of Death Walks at Midnight from them once, but didn't like it much. Um, Jess Franco's Diabolical Dr Z is one I want to get. Oh yeah...Lady Terminator!
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Yeah. It's quite colourful. It has a beautiful soundtrack. Milan looks lovely. But in the end the film boils down to Susan Scott running around a lot in apparent mortal danger but just looking silly.
 

Octopus?

Well-known member
Anybody that hasn't seen "Mystics in Bali" needs to do so now.

..and the Coffin Joe series of films are some of my favourite features ever.
 
The Dark Knight and There Will Be Blood.

Soulless, emotionless, nihilistic.

1.
Personas, rather than characters, who represent ideas/preoccupations (rabid Christianity, corrupt capitalism, chaotic terrorism). It's all so self-conscious and synthetic and all based on this view that it has to be gritty because the modern 'world's a TERRIBLE place' (Joe Cornish, Something of Boris). These films are anti-intellectual, always pontificating and never subtle. It seems fitting that Harvey Dent gets his wish and becomes a real, live metaphor in the shape of Two Face.

2.
Direction that is painfully striving for greatness (TWBB's wordless opening passage where countless situations arise where words would certainly be spoken) or amateurish (TDK's action scenes have no pace, threat, danger at all / the interrogation scene between the Joker and Batman passes off without one angle where we can actually see them confront each other - a la De Niro and Pacino in Heat)

3.
Cinematography direct from the National Geographic - cliched panoramas and colour palettes (sepia, steel blue), dead images that have somehow become shorthand for beauty and technical proficiency

4.
Nihilistic stories: characters that grind to an impasse. They are unchanging and have no real aims or motivation. The ending of There Will Be Blood is disgusting as it comes out of no emotional truth or discernible narrative arc. It is purely for a cheap thrill.
 
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