What was the last movie you watched?

[Cyrusso]

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare -
I had a few problems with this movie... for one, it felt like Guy Ritchie's half-assed attempt at "Inglorious Basterds". It was also very slowly, and very poorly paced. In addition, the movie features appearances of war criminal Winston Churchill(Portrayed by Rory Kinnear). In addition to my idea of "fuck that war criminal asshole"(and not in the nice way), I think it's rather silly to call this movie "The ministry of Ungentlemanly warfare", because when the fuck did Warfare ever become a gentlemanly pursuit in any way, shape, or goddamn form??? It's absurd.

On the plus side though, despite the extremely poor pacing of the film and the drama within, the performances are pretty good. Like I said, it feels like little more than Guy Ritchie's take on Inglorious Basterds. Ironically, my biggest problem with THAT movie was the pacing. But, at least in Inglorious Basterds, the events of it, carried for me a lot more dramatic weight, and the ending was a LOT more satisfying.

I feel like Guy Ritchie decided to just tell this story(with the typical dramatic embellishments all dramatic adaptations possess), and thought that the fact that these badass people were killing Nazis and trying to fuck their shit up would be enough. It was NOT.

The movie was adequate... nothing more.

[stethacantus]

The Golden Sword ( 1969 )
With this film I conclude the Shaw Brothers Classics Vol 1. It indeed was nothing but wuxia films, which I would say was a risk, as the Kung Fu genre of Hong Kong martial arts films is far better known, and more popular. At least Vol. 2 had a couple of Kung Fu films and one horror film tossed in. I am not complaining. The Shaw Brothers wuxia are worth seeing, and are just as much classics as their Kung Fu films.  But even I didn't feel obligated to purchase these collections the moment they were released  because I was not as big a fan of this genre, and felt as if the wuxia was only something I would get as a completest. Hopefully there were no slow sales on these sets which would cause Shout! Factory to discontinue releasing Shaw Brothers films. With still no word of Arrow Video releasing the two year delayed  Shawscope Volume 3, Shout! Factory is the only company currently releasing the Shaw Brothers films on physical media in the United States, and there are still a lot of my favorites from that studio that have only been available in this country as VHS bootlegs.

The set ends wit the film The Golden Sword, which sounds a lot like another wuxia film where everyone is fighting over a magical blade. But the Goden Sword in this movie is just barely part of the plot. The movie itself seems to have several different plots jammed in. Plot #1: The chief of all martial arts disappears after two leather clad women horsewomen show up during a rain storm and demand he accompany them.  Everyone searches everywhere in China but cant find him anywhere. So after ten years, a new chief is chosen. However, the missing chief's son asks if he can continue searching for him for another three years. Plot #2: The only place they didn't look for him is the frontier areas of China. There he discovers a gang of homeless beggars who steal from the corrupt rich and distribute the loot to the poor. The son falls for the daughter of the leader of the beggar clan. Suddenly, back to Plot #1, and the son and beggar girl travel all over the outskirts of China looking for the lost chief. Plot 4: The son gives up his search and brings the beggar girl back to his home to marry her. On their wedding night, the son gets a mysterious gift  which is the golden blade his father had with him when he disappeared.  Plot #5, the leather clad horsewomen show up again and demand the son accompany them. Her refuses, and with the martial arts masters who came to his wedding, attempt to fight off the horsewomen. But their martial arts are too good, and he is abducted anyway. A servant reveals that the horsewomen must be from the legendary Golden Castle, a fantastic palace of wonder which is never actually shown in the film. It is a stronghold of women warriors  which is only rumored to exist. The servant reveals that he was once prisoner there and escaped. And agrees to take Cheng Pei-Pei there so she can rescue her husband. Plot #6 would be the flashback tale of how the servant was captured by the Dragon Warrior women and forced to go to a slave work camp for men, but then managed to escape. Thegn finally another plot involving the queen of Dragon Castle which would be a spoiler to summarize.  I guess what keeps this film interesting is how it jumps into a completely different plot before you have a chance to get bored with the plot you are currently watching. It is a shame we never actually get to see the much talked about Golden Castle, but otherwise this is another entertaining  Shaw Brothers film.


Earthquake ( 1974 )
Continuing with the 70s disaster movie genre. This was one of the films I saw in theaters during it's original run. It is amazing how much stupidity is in this film. From the guy with a lit cigarette  running into a house to turn off the gas, with expected results. Tp the people who for some reason lived in houses in stilts above the sides of cliffs in a known earthquake zone. To the governor not warning the public about a major earthquake the scientists predicted, because if they are wrong then he will look bad. To the decision to send all the homeless survivors and injured into a subterranean mall knowing a powerful aftershock was soon to follow.  This film is full of stuff that makes you wonder how stupid the citizens of Los Angeles are. This film won awards for it's special effects, although it is full of flawed effects. Such as when a truck full of cattle drives off the edge of a highway overpass, yet somehow not one f the cattle falls out of the truck as it turns over. Or the most notorious  70s effect of all, when a bunch of panicking people in a skyscraper get onto an elevator, only for it's cable to break and send them plummeting to the ground floor, where cartoon blood splatters the screen. And yet, this was considered so gory that Universal ended up recalling the film and cutting the very fake looking blood splatter out and re-releasing it. And yep. this was just one year before the same studio put out Jaws. This was the first in the only for films released in Sensurround.  The other three were Midway, Rollercoaster and Battlestar Galactica, which was the pilot movie for the series, released to theaters six months after it aired on television because..... I guess everyone at Universal was high on drugs or something when that decision was made? I sort of regret not seeing this film in Sensurround, but so few theaters actually bothered to install the speakers needed for it. Perhaps the standout scene from this film takes place prior to the big quake. Realizing they needed to kill time before the disaster actually happens, the script writes added a subplot where Rischard Roundtree plays a motorcycle daredevil who builds himself a weird ass track which includes a loop-the-loop, a bunch of corkscrew turns, and a jump through a flaming hoop. On his first attempt he goes up the loop and immediately falls off and onto the ground, which I assume was the actual stuntman doing that by accident. When we actually do see the character attempting this track, we never actually see him going through the loop or corkscrews or fie hoop., as each time he approaches each stunt, there is either a cut to a POV shot or the faces of those watching. I guess after injuring one stuntman on such a stupid track, the director decided to fake it. As dumb as that scene is, without it there isn't much to keep you interested in the first hour as you wait for the big quake to finally hit. The second half of the movie , with the quake and aftershocks, and all the mini-disasters the quake causes, the dam breaking, the psycho national guardsman shooting people, and Charlton Heston running around town rescuing  people trapped in various structures, is where the non-stop fun you want from a disaster film finally begins.

[stethacantus]

Have Sword, Will Travel ( 1969 )
So... About a year ago while trying to find any updates on when Arrow Video would release Shawscope Volume 3 I discovered that Shout! Factory had been releasing box sets of Shaw Brothers films. At first glance the two volumes that had been released were just wuxia which I didn't like nearly as much as the Kung Fu/basher genre. That and I wanted my next big purchase on home video to be the Shawscope Vol 3, and I also was worried that the Shawscope sets may have some of the same films the Shout! Factory sets had and wanted to think twice before double dipping. ( Bad enough a lot of the films on both the Shout! Factory sets and Shawscope sets I already owned when they were previously released on DVD, and it was only because of the upgrade to Blu-ray that I purchased these same movies again. )  Finally gave in around Cyber Monday when it wasn't just apparent that Shawscope Vol 3 was delayed, but probably not coming out at all. By then there was a Volume 3 of the Shout! Factory Shaw Brothers Classics, and Volume 1 was completely sold out on Amazon. So I ordered Volume 2, and as soon as it shipped, Volume 1 was once again available on Amazon, so ordered that as well. Which is why I watched Volume 2 before starting Volume 1. And was expecting to order volumes 3 and four next. But....

The bonus features for the final disc in Volume 2 was described as the trailers for the films in Volume 1, and the trailers for the Brave Archer Collection. What? I immediately searched on Amazon, and despite it showing up in the search bar as something a lot of other Amazon customers had also searched for, there was no evidence a Brave Archer Collection was either released, or listed as a pre-order. I figured Shout! Factory must have either cancelled or postponed the set.  A couple of weeks ago when writing a review for Chang Cheh's Flying Dagger,  as usual I put the movie in search so that I could look up any relevant production history and confirm the release date, when one of those sales windows showed up in the search results for The Ti Lung / David Chiang Collection from Shout! Factory. The what? I clicked the link and was taken to the Shout Factory website, where I soon discovered this set, along with the Brave Archer set, were both exclusive to just the Shout! Factory website. So basically, if like me you just order everything through Amazon because you assume they have everything, then you would not know that thee sets were ever released. And as they are supposedly limited releases, a good chance they would all be bought by resellers long before I ever knew they existed. I  checked to see what was on the Ti Lung/David Chaing set. and sure enough a lot of films I had been trying to get for years. So this was ordered almost immediately ( I had to wait a week for my bank to send the funds to my Paypal account first, ) with the Brave Archer collection to follow next, because despite wanting to add The Brave Archer films to my collection, they are not really among my favorite Chang Cheh films. Pretty light on action and mostly about characters solving puzzles. So what do you get in  The Ti Lung / David Chiang Collection? Well, it should have probably been called the Iron Triangle collection, as according to Shout! Factory, that's what the Chang Cheh films which teamed up Ti Lung and David Chaing were called.  Although, if this was supposed to be an Iron Triangle collection, then it should have had Dead End, the first film that Chang Cheh put both Ti Lung and David Chaing in together. It is not in this set, and unless the rights to those films are being held up by Arrow or some other home video company, then Shout! screwed up a bit. Instead, we get their second film together, the one I will be reviewing today, as the first film in the set. And with many of the other Iron Triangle films, such as the Shaolin films, on Arrow's Shawscope sets, this is not actually the definitive collection of Ti Lung/David Chaing films. But as I said, it has a lot of movies I have been wanting for years. The set includes:
Have Sword, Will Travel ( previously released by Image Entertainment on DVD )
The Heroic Ones ( previously released by Well Go USA on DVD )
Vengeance! ( rights held up by Dagon Dynasty which never released it )
The Anonymous Heroes
The Deadly Duo ( previously released by Tokyo Shock on DVD )
Duel of Fists ( Previously released by Well Go USA on DVD, and as part of their Swordsmasters collection despite it being a Tai Boxing movie )
The Duel ( previously released by BCi/Funimation on DVD )
The Angry Guest ( rights held up by Dragon Dynasty who never released it. Direct sequel to Duel of Fists )
All Men Are Brothers ( previously released by Well Go USA on DVD )
The Blood Brothers ( previously released by Dragon Dynasty on DVD and Blu-ray. I had the DVD release. )
The Savage 5 ( rights held up by Dragon Dynasty who never released it )
7 Man Army ( rights held up by, you guessed it, Dragon Dynasty, who, you guessed it, never released it. )

So, the first film in this set is a wuxia. Ti Lung and Lee Ching are an engaged couple who are also martial arts experts who are helping an elderly swordsman who has recently lost his skill escort a shipment of silver. They run into David Chaing along the way, a homeless drifter who is also a martial arts expert, and ends up helping them transport the silver, and fight of the fierce gang of bandits who want to rob the shipment. This quickly develops into a love triangle with Chaing and Lung at odds with each other, before they both inevitably bond during the final battle in a pagoda.  A decent enough wuxia which is sort of ruined by Chang Cheh's decision to use trampolines just below the camera so that Chaing does a lot of silly looking jumping.


The ?mega Man ( 1971 )
Sometimes there is a film you can only describe as cool! It may not be a good film, but is never the less fun from start to finish. That is what I thought of The ?mega Man when I first saw it on television back in the late 70s. The second adaption of the novel I Am Legend,  which was described in the TV Guide as a remake of the Vincent Price movie The Last Man on Earth, only with a kick ass modern score that was half rock and half hymnal. and a hoard of albino mutants who are part of a cult named The Family, who seek to kill the last surviving man on Earth after a biological weapon released in the third World War has unleashed a plague that has wiped out most of mankind, and turned what is left into mutants. It is Heston riding around the abandoned city of Los Angeles in sports cars machine gunning everything that moves, while the mutants, who can not take the light yet for some reason have no problem with bonfires and torches, try to kill Heston whenever they come out at night. Supposedly, the scene with Heston watching a movie in an abandoned theater gave Joel Hodgson the idea for Mystery Science Theater 3000, which lead to Rifftrax, so this site and this review would have never existed if not for The ?mega Man. Among my favorite movies which for some reason I neither bought on home video yet, and have not watched since the early 80s when my local station stopped airing it. But then when I was compiling a list of 70s Disaster Movies, The ?mega Man was included on several lists. I guess mostly because Heston was in it, and he was in a lot of the 70s disaster films? Because other apocalyptic 70s films like The Ultimate Warrior or Dawn of the Dead are not included on any of the disaster movie lists. But despite this not really being a disaster movie, the second I saw that many websites had it on their disaster movie lists, I decided it was a good enough excuse to finally add it to my film collection. And, it is still cool, even if much of the action has dated. About the only problem I have with this film is that the scenes of Heston driving around an empty city, are sort of ruined by what is obviously car traffic on distant roads and highways. I guess the director could not get the entire city shut down for the shoot. But several city blocks is impressive. Just pay no attention to those cars driving around on the freeway off in the distance.

[stethacantus]

The Heroic Ones ( 1970 )
Already reviewed this one:
https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,5210.msg1009294/topicseen.html#msg1009294
I could not find the DVD release in my library. I know in my original review I complained about some additional music and sound effects added to the soundtrack, mostly to cover up the original soundtrack which used music from Hollywood movies without getting those studios permission. Apparently Shout! Factory has been clearing the music rather than trying to mask it.  I just wish I could find the Well Go release to confirm this.

The Swarm ( 1978 )
Is this a disaster movie? Certainly the bees cause a bunch of small disasters. Helicopter crashes, a passenger train derailment, a nuclear power plant exploding and the burning down of Huston Texas in an attempt to kill them. But does killer bees attacking people count as a disaster? This film makes a lot of 70s disaster movies lists because it was made by Irwin Allen.  But none of the other animal attack/natural horror movies are considered disaster movies, even though they basically follow the same formula. Supposedly Allen had three movies lined up to directly follow The Towering Inferno which would have followed within a couple of years, and would have been released during the peak of the 70s disaster movie craze. The Swarm was to be first, followed by the volcano movie The Day The World Ended and a sequel to The Poseidon Adventure which would reunite the cast in a different disaster. All three films went into development hell. When The Swarm was finally made, it was reportedly with a big budget, but one can tell Allen employed his cost cutting techniques he picked up making cheap disaster films for television. For example, the destruction of the nuclear plant is just a brief shot of a model exploding. The entire town of 7,000 it takes out with it is not seen.

Okay, so it is Saturday Night, and I pop this into the Blu-ray player, and to my shock it says the movie is 2 hours and 36 minutes long. WHAT? It actually does not deserve to be this long. For example, did we really need to see a sub plot with an annoying love triangle between Fred MacMurray, Olivia de Havilland and Ben Johnson? A plot that is never resolved because the bees kill them?  My guess is all the sub plots exist just to give the multitude of guest stars who show up for a few scenes some lines. Get rid of the all star cast that is mostly guest stars with brief scenes, cut just to the main plot of scientists and the army battling bees, and all you need is the five core actors, and the film only runs 90 minutes. It is probably the unnecessary length that makes this film bad. That and the terrible acting from actors and actresses, many who had done academy award nominated performances in other movies.

[stethacantus]

Vengeance! ( 1970 )
By 1970 Chang Cheh had grown tired of the Wuxia genre. It would be another six months before Jimmy Wang Yu kicked off the Kung Fu genre with The Chinese Boxer, and another year before Bruce Lee would make it the most popular genre in martial arts film. Chang Cheh would eagerly move into the Kung Fu genre. Beginning with this film, we see Cheh transitioning into the Kung Fu genre by moving the Wuxia films into China's Republic era, replacing the warring clans with warring organized crime gangs, and changing the swords to knives. One of Cheh's best films, and perhaps David Chang's best performance in any film, it was a crime Dragon Dynasty kept this from being released in America. Simple plot. Ti Lung is a Cantonese Opera performer fighting the local gang bosses who keep coming on to his hot wife. They eventually ambush and kill him at a tea house. His brother ( David Chiang ) arrives in town for revenge, taking out the gang leaders one by one.

The Big Bus ( 1976 )
Saw this one in the theaters. After it bombed on it's initial run, Paramount decided to distribute it as the B feature for their remake of King Kong. ( This was back when theaters still had double features and Paramount was still rereleasing their duds as B features. ) I didn't remember laughing at that comedy then, and I didn't think it was funny other than the lounge singer this time. It is supposed to be a parody of disaster movies, but other than a few cliche bus passengers that resemble characters from the Airport films, the script writers went for original humor rather than poke fun of the disaster movie tropes. Actually, the material in this film is pretty good. But the directing by James Frawley  is off as he makes all the comedy obvious. He would do much better in his next film directing Muppets. But as Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker showed a few years later on Airplane!, treating this style of comedy like it isn't comedy works a hell of a lot better. Also, there is barely a disaster in this film. At one point in the final half hour the bus can't slow down due to a bomb going off, then gets stuck on the edge of a cliff, but most of the film has nothing to do with any disaster. Beside all of that, I would still recommend this film because of the cleverness of the bus itself. Two levels with a oriental themed bar with a piano playing lounge singer, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a private bathroom with bath, and even a private dining room for VIP passengers. ( The actual passenger seating area is pretty small though. )

[stethacantus]

The Anonymous Heroes  ( 1971 )
Sure, these Shout! Factory Shaw Brothers sets have films I have never seen before. But so far in the wuxia genre. This is a mostly kicks and fists martial arts film with David Chaing and Ti Lung and directed by Chang Cheh. Taking place in the 1920s, there is a lot more shooting than actual martial arts. A rebel recruits a couple of bandits to steal a shipment of guns from a warlord.  Yet another hidden gem from the Shaw Brothers library.


Married ( 1978 )
Oh yeah. I forgot. The first episode of Season Two of The Incredible Hulk was a two hour television movie. Shows you how much CBS loved this series at the time. Not just ordering a second season, but agreeing to giving an episode a two hour slot, and even paying for it to be filmed in Hawaii. There was a trope on television that developed in the 80s and continued up to the 90s. Whenever a character either got engaged or married, his fiancé/spouse would tragically die after a couple of episodes. This was mostly due to Networks not agreeing to sign the actor/actress on as a regular cast member, and to head off the inevitable, that the actor/actress would probably not be available in the near future due to joining the cast of another series, or finding success in the movies, that the character needed to be written out. Sometimes it was an awkward breakup. Most of the time the character tragically died. And it happened a lot of the time.  This episode of The Incredible Hulk lets you know from the start that the woman David Banner falls madly in love with has one of those rare terminal diseases that only television characters get. And since it was the 70s, and Mariette Hartley was not listed as a cast member in the opening credits. you knew the second she mentioned she had a terminal disease that she was not going to survive the episode. So basically, Dr. Carolyn Fields has a rare terminal disease with no cure. If only Dr. David Banner who had been working on a cure for the disease before he died was still alive. Thats when David Bemmer shows up at her door. It seems that Dr. Fields had been working on curing violent rage with hypnosis, and he needs her to cure him of his outbreaks of rage. She soon realizes he is actually Banner, and the two realize they could possibly cure each other. They spend a lot of time together, fall in love, and get married. Her hypnosis therapy nearly works. He discovers the cure, but while driving to the hospital to administer the cure she passes away. THE END. A really depressing episode with no real villain, and could have easily have been shown in an hour rather than padded out to two hours. Mariette Hartley received an EMMY award for this episode.  And she and Bixby would team up again as the lead cast members of Goodnight, Beantown.

Rollercoaster ( 1977  )
A couple of the Shaw Brothers box sets from Shout! Factory are exclusive to their website. And since I needed to order from their website to get The Brave Archer Collection,  I decided to also order all the 70s disaster films they released and get that over with. I had previously bought their releases of Earthquake and the Irwin Allen Master of Disaster Collection through Amazon. A lot of the other disaster films they released are questionably disaster films. Such as this. Wikipedia has it listed as a disaster film. But it isn't really. The only disaster happens in the opening of the film where the villain sabotages a roller coaster, making it jump the tracks and crash into a busy amusement park midway, causing death and destruction. He apparently causes a fire at a funhouse in another amusement park, but aside from stock footage of fire engines rushing to a fire, that disaster is never shown. He is doing this to extort money from the major amusement park companies. Pay him $1 million or he will continue to sabotage rides. So the rest of the film is the FBI trying too capture the saboteur before he strikes again. The suspense and police procedural parts of this film are entertaining. But anyone looking for disasters will be disappointed as it is almost non existent. Even more misleading, the movie was released in Sensurround, the sound format Universal invented for disaster movies. Reportedly the Sensurround effects were only used for the scenes with roller coasters which are few and short.

[fuzzywzhe]

The concept is simple.  Post the last movie you watched and your thoughts about it.

Saved!
I liked it.  The type of comedy in the movie was right up my alley.

Mother from NetFlix.

It's about a ruthlessly immoral, moral machine that forces mankind to step up morally.

I'm an engineer, morality is scientific, it's based on non-zero sum games which is a part of game theory, which is a part of evolutionary psychology.  There's no possibility that something like that will happen in that film but it was an interesting film.  We have tried to make a general purpose artificial intelligence, we can't do it.  We can now easily simulate as many neurons as you have in your brain, but we cannot make a consciousness.  We thought we could, but if we could, you'd have seen it by now, and I certainly would have.  It's quite possible in my mind to think that our awareness, our consciousness isn't entirely computational.

How interesting is it to take a different path to return to the source?  I've traveled a long path just to return to the same location.  I started as a programmed child for religion, to go into a scientific inquiry, to return to the same location of perplexity of wonder of this existence.  I don't think we can make a machine that can think.  Just what does that mean?  I am speculating and now you can as well.  We may not just be meat computers after all.  How amazing is that to know it from the point of view of decades of research and study?

[ihavemyreasons]

Hit Man (2024)
One of Linklater's movies with a plot and based on a true story.
Performances good, but didn't really like the story. Too many unbelievably twists. Not bad, but not one of his best.

[stethacantus]

The Deadly Duo ( 1971 )
During the five kingdom period,  a prince has been captured by a rival emperor, and it is up to a group of warriors to somehow free him from a prison fortress. The only way o the fortress is across a rotting wooden bridge which spans a chasm, but only a person with excellent lifting skills can make it across. What are lifting skills? I have no freaking idea. I can't find it listed on the internet as a martial arts technique. The only lifting skills I can find are weight lifting. Yet every subtitle translation of this film specifically says that only a marital artist with lifting skills can cross the bridge. The English dub version doesn't even mention any skills, but rather claims only a special man can cross the bridge. If I had to guess, lifting skills is probably the ability to walk weightless. But we never find out if that is the case. While Ti Lung goes off on a journey to find a bandit who is known for having lifting skills, the warriors he leaves behind ignore his orders to stay put and wait for his return, and one by one attempt to cross the bridge, each causing the part of the bridge they are on to collapse and send them plummeting into the gorge below. Ti Lung finds David Chaing, who is a martial artist with lifting skills, and by the time they get to the bridge, most of it has collapsed into the gorge, and at least half of the warriors are dead. Chaing tells Lung that the bride is now so damaged, that even someone with lifting skills couldn't make it across. But they could make it across by walking across the heavy wooden beams supporting the bridge. So, we never get to see this lifting technique, and instead get a very silly scene of swordsmen falling hundreds of feet to their deaths. Despite that and a few other silly scenes, this is an outstanding martial arts adventure worth watching.

Two-Minute Warning ( 1976 )
Is a sniper in a tower cutting down spectators at a football game a disaster? Someone at Universal thought it was. Two-Minute Warning is an excellent thriller with an all star cast who get picked off one by one. But this was another Universal film that had a completely different version made for television. NBC didn't like the idea of a lone gunman who goes nuts for no reason and begins shooting civilians, so  had additional footage shot where the gunman is revealed to be a member of a gang robbing a museum next door to the stadium, who fires into the crowd in order to distract the police from the real crime, and rob the museum of it's priceless paintings while the police are occupied at the stadium. Shout! Factory has both versions, so I thought I would just watch the theatrical version, then fast forward through the television version and only slow down to watch the additional scenes. But I was in for a shock. Most of the television version is brand new footage, with a lot of the footage from the theatrical version removed. I had been planning to watch a second movie on Saturday evening, but spent anther 90 minutes watching the television version. Unfortunately, it appears Shout! Factory got the television version via someone who video taped it. You can tell by the poor quality, and the TNT logo on the bottom of the screen. They go through the trouble of finding and remastering camera negatives for the theatrical version, why can they never seem to be able to track down a decent print of the television edit? The could at least of asked TNT to lend them the version they have in their library. BTW, the television version sucks, removing all the tension from the theatrical version, along with a lot of the kills.

[Cyrusso]

The Green Knight(2021) -

I actually had this movie sitting on my shelf for the past two years(maybe longer), and I for some reason never finished watching it.
There's a philosophy when it comes to movie-making that I 100% approve of, and that's "show, don't tell". Whenever I watch a film that has more of an emphasis on cinematography, and less on dialogue... the movie has already scored a TON of points with me. What I found interesting was in the final act of the film... it kind of did the "An occurance at Owl Creek bridge" trope. That is, the main character imagines whats going to happen in their mind for a period of time, and then... the rug is pulled out from beneath them.

But it's an interesting inversion of the trope, because it's totally turned on its head, in a way that I don't want to get into, because it would spoil things. I can however say that The Green Knight is fascinating, because although its set in what is clearly medieval times, it has a pretty clear(yet implicit) modern message, an environmental one.

The Green Knight is one of those films that most certainly ranks up there with all those great movies you watch in film school, that help you understand how to make a movie. It's maximum approach to story with minimal dialogue and extremely trippy, insane visual style is unforgettable, and enthralling. 

[stethacantus]

Duel of Fists ( 1971 )
Let's get the confusion out of the way. Those who remembered the Shaw Brothers films that aired on television during the 80s on Black Belt Theater ( Drive In-Theater in NYC )  remember Duel of the Iron Fist, a 1971 Chang Cheh film starring Ti Lung and David Chaing, which  was remade nine years later as the Venom Mob film Flag of Iron, also directed by Chang Cheh. Nothing like IMDb or Hong Kong Cinemagic or Wikipedia existed until the early 2000s, so even the biggest American Shaw Brothers had little idea of Chang Che's full filmography, or how significant his films actually were back in Hong Kong. In 1990 Southgate Video was the last company to legally release Shaw Brothers movies on home video, and among the films they released was something called Duel of Fists, from 1971, directed by Chang Cheh and starring Ti Lung and David Chaing. Imagine how confused martial arts movie fans were when they popped the VHS into their VCR and instead of Duel of the Iron Fists, got a completely different movie.  So, the Shaw Brothers films that aired on television in the 80s were distributed in the United States by World Northal, who from the late 70s until the company went bankrupt in the late 80s, were the official distributor for Shaw Brothers in the United States, distributing their latest films, and handling the re-releases  of their classic films. World Northal chose not to release Duel of Fists, but for some reason did re-release it's direct sequel Angry Guest both in theaters and on television. They re-released The Duel, but to avoid confusion with another 1971 film called Duel ( Yep. The Steven Spielberg film about a killer truck ) World Northal decided to retitle The Duel and Duel of the Iron Fist. . While The Duel and Duel of Fists sounds different enough not to be too confusing, Duel of the Iron Fists is confusing. Especially when a lot of Home Video companies  had an annoying habit of shortening titles of foreign films on their boxes. In this Shout! Factory set, we have Duel of Fists, The Duel and Angry Guest all back to back.

While The Duel was and still is one of my favorite Shaw Brothers films, Duel of Fists is not.  The story of David Chaing searching for a half brother in  Thailand  with the brutal sport of Tai Boxing as the backdrop, it's formula story is not memorable, and much of the film is padding, mostly with Chaing and his girlfriend sight seeing. And yet, Duel of Fists was a tremendous box office success, coming in at #2 for the year behind Bruce Lee's The Big Boss. So yeah, an important milestone in Martial Arts film history, but a lesser potboiler as far as I am concerned.

Survive! ( 1976 )
Basically, a Mexican disaster movie dubbed into English. Bought and released by Paramount to capitalize on the popularity of the novel it is based on, and the disaster movie genre. The opening credits for this shorter English dub   version does not list any of the cast members. The story is basically the survivors of a plane crash on a mountain top end up eating the flesh of their dead in order to survive. A plot that was shocking in the 70s, but is not very shocking today. At least this film moves along at a brisk pace so that it doesn't get too boring.

[stethacantus]

Two movies this week I have discussed here before, so this review will be brief.

The Duel ( a.k.a. Duel of the Iron Fists ) ( 1971 )
Previously reviewed here: https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,5210.msg997044/topicseen.html#msg997044

For budgetary reasons I am probably not going to buy a new martial arts film for another month or two ( unless something suddenly goes OOP ), which gives me a chance to rewatch some of the films in my library. This week I picked at the last second The Duel, one of Chang Cheh's violent gangster films from the early 70s where everyone either carries a knife or hatchet, and the gangsters have nothing better to do but try to hack each other up. It has a very decent plot, one which Cheh liked enough to recycle in Flags of Iron ( 1980 ). ( I was so tempted to watch Flags of Iron as a double feature, but just didn't have the time. )

Going back to the 80s when The Duel aired on television as part of the Saturday afternoon martial arts movie theater on a local station, and going through my bootleg SB Video copy, an authorized VHS release from Canada that inexplicably edited out all the violence, including the opening rumble at a funeral and last ten minutes where Ti Lung and David Chaing take on an army of thugs, and finally the official DVD release, I have previously watched this film about a dozen times. An this is the first time I noticed Scrooge McDuck was in the film. His picture is on the box of a tattoo artist along with a few drawings of nudes. Except that this film is supposed to take place in the 30s, a decade before Scrooge was created.

For some reason when I first watch the DVD, I watched using the English dub instead of the original language soundtrack with subtitles as I usually do with martial arts films. This time I kept the subtitles on and occasional cut back to the English track for comparison. One big difference, while most of the music is the same, the Chinese track uses the theme from 2001 A Space Odyssey whenever one of the heroes attacked the evil gangsters while the English track used some of the archive music from the Shaw Brothers music library. Another big difference, how dumbed down the English dub is. ( As usual. ) The Duel is not one of the classic Shaw Brothers films, but it is pretty close. And thanks to Dragon Dynasty acquiring the rights to a lot of Shaw Brothers films they never released, this is one of the few Chang Cheh gangster films to be available on home video in America.

The only thing to change here is that this time I watched the film on Blu-Ray. Also, that for some reason Shout! Factory disks do not allow for you to run the Chinese subtitles over the English dub track for comparison. Needless to say, this film was originally about gangland activity during the Republican era which was manipulated by corrupt warlords and public officials. It was assumed Americans are ignorant about the politics in China in the 1920s, so the English language track is dumbed down to remove all of that. So there is no explanation why 50 armed me suddenly show up at the end of the film to fight David Chaing and Ti Lung.

I should also mention that Arrow Video has just announced they will be releasing a third volume of Shawscope, which will include the entire One Armed Swordsman franchise, and Killer Constable on November 26. Just in time for Cyber Monday. I still intend to purchase Shout! Factory's Shaw Brothers Classics Volumes 3 and 4 by then.

Damnation Alley (1977 )
This film was at #25 on my list of Road Movies for last year's LoC, and came in last place at #122. When I included this film on my list, I had not actually seen it in decades, and it just wasn't as fun as I remembered it. It is still entertaining though. A group of survivors of a global nuclear war drive cross country from California to Albany through Damnation Alley, a hellscape of bad special effects. This was to be an effects driven film. But during production, another effects driven film went overbudget, and 20th Century Fox had to make the decision as to which one they would cut the budget for. So the effects budget for Damnation Alley was cut in order for George Lucas to complete Star Wars. Had they gone the other way, perhaps today we would be watching Damnation Alley spin-off series on Disney+. Another film from Shout! Factory that is on a lot of 70s Disaster Movie lists, and I have two more coming up which are better examples of the Disaster Movie genre.

[stethacantus]

Now a July 4th tradition, watched Babes in Toyland ( 1934 ) and Jaws ( 1975 ) as both take place on the 4th of July.  Next year, however, I will be watching Jaws on June 20th, if I don't forget. On that date Jaws turns 50. As for Babes in Toyland, it turns 90 on November 30 this year, two days after Thanksgiving where it usually airs twice in a day on the local station.

[Cyrusso]

Furiosa: A mad max saga

George Miller is a damn fine filmmaker, so it was kind of disappointing for me to hear Furiosa bombed at the box office. I love Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor Joy... so that's disappointing.

But it was extremely engaging, because it was so emotionally compelling. The movie builds itself upon the depth of the backstory of Imperator Furiosa, last seen in Mad Max: Fury Road, portrayed by Charlize Theron.

The acting was excellent, the stunts fantastic, it was a crazy, gripping, post apocalyptic action movie. George Miller's directing is refreshing, not so much because the action is realistic, but because it is smart, and serves a purpose in furthering the story in world building and/or character development.

I highly recommend it.

[Pastor of Muppets]

A few nights ago I watched The Neverending Story, which actually ended in less than 2 hours.  Ripoff.

Yesterday I watched Final Destination 3.  I love these movies.  They're so god damn stupid but the contrived accidents are funny to watch.  If they make any more, I'm totally in the theater on opening night.

I also watched 2012, which I had also seen in the theater back in 2009.  This one was just stupid but not in a fun way.  But it's a Roland Emerich disaster movie, and if you're going to watch a Roland Emerich disaster movie, you know what you're getting into and you have no right to complain.  The idea is of course based on that silly "2012 Mayan apocalypse" thing that people were all talking about 15 years ago.  In this movie, something happens to the Earth's core and yadda yadda the crust destabilizes leading to enormous earthquakes and volcano eruptions and floods so high they nearly reach the peak of Mount Everest.  So naturally most of humanity goes extinct except for a few hundred people on these special boats.  Heroic sacrifices are made, disposable characters die.  Amanda Peet's second husband dies and she gets back together with her first husband John Cusack.  Neither her nor her children seem to care about their dead husband / stepfather.  Oliver Platt is the cookie cutter heartless government official.  Other forgettable random crazy shit happens. 

For my money, Moonfall is better, just because of how batshit insane it is.