What was the last movie you watched?

[Susquehanna-2222]

Godzilla Minus One

A Japanese movie with Portuguese subtitles.  I brought in a cell phone with the subtitles in English.  It all worked out.

Did you know in Portugal they don't serve popcorn with butter?  Just salt or candy.  I had popcorn with extra salt.  99% dark chocolate because I'm health-conscious.  Yecchhh...I don't recommend it.

SPOILER KIND OF.  dude that ending.  I'm like GET OUT.  Needs some editing but otherwise it was pretty good.  Worth seeing.

[stethacantus]

The Bride From Hell ( 1972 )
When it comes to Shaw Brothers, I often wonder why the companies releasing the films on home video chose the films they do. Particularly when odd choices are made by ignoring the best films and instead releasing a lot of obscure films.Is it a matter of them thinking certain films are hidden gems. Or did Celestial Films sell them in groups where you needed to purchase the rights to a few obscure films for every popular film in their catalog.  Or are the rights to most of the other films currently held by other companies, leaving mostly obscure releases. Or is it a matter of the video company being ignorant of the Shaw Brothers films and just got the rights to a bunch of random titles. I have no idea why Shout! Factory chose The Bride From Hell for Volume Two of their Shaws Brothers Classics. At first I thought I was in for another horror themed wuxia film like The Crimson Charm and Devil's Mirror. Nope. No martial arts in this film. Although it does take place in the same era as the wuxia films.  A wealthy man traveling with his servant gets lost and after sundown begs a woman to let them spend the evening in her house. When the rich guy inadvertently walks into the woman's room and sees her naked, she demands he marry her to save her honor. He agrees, and they both move into his house. And it turns out she is the ghost of a woman raped and murdered by bandits twenty years earlier. And the bandits she was murdered by and wants vengeance against  turn out to be the rich guy's uncles. This kind of story was done much better in A Chinese Ghost Story.  Here it was just one of Shaw Brothers low tier releases with not much effort put into production. Perhaps the least important Shaw Brothers film I have ever seen.

When Time Ran Out... ( 1980 )
Looking for a followup to The Towering Inferno, Irwin Allan bought the rights to the book The Day the World Ended, a non-fiction account of the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902, which killed 30,000 people. By the time he finally got around to making the movie, the story was changed to a fictitious resort island, taking  place in 1980. By 1979 most of the studios realized the disaster movie craze was over, and refused to green light the film. Only Warner Bros. was interested, and initially gave Allen a $20 million budget. Pretty much the entire cast were forced to be in the film, having signed two picture deals with Allan for possible sequels to his past disaster films. With another outstanding cast, and a script from Stirling Silliphant who wrote Allan's previous disaster movies, and Carl Foreman who wrote High Noon and The Bridge Over The River Kwai, everyone expected this film to be a fitting send off to the disaster movie genre from the master of disaster himself. This movie would have everything.  Fire, flood, earthquake, explosions and lava. The original script was much more elaborate. But then Warner Bros. cut the budget. You can tell by how nearly half the movie is spent with the characters prior to the volcano eruption. Nearly an hour. With suddenly nearly no money for effects or elaborate disaster sets, Allan went through every trick he learned making low budget disaster films for television. A lot of stuff happens off screen. The destruction of a ranch by advancing lava is mentioned, but not seen. Instead of building a set designed to flood with a dump tank, we get a green screen tidlewave and some water sprayed through windows. The final destruction of the island's resort hotel happens with cheap optical effects instead of a model,  as a ball of fire shot out of the volcano lands on it causing a green screen explosion. It is not just the cheap effects which ruined this film. The script has every cliche from the past seven years of disaster movies. It is practically a parody of the disaster movie genre. This was a sad send off to a genre that began so strong with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.

[Cyrusso]

Godzilla Minus One
A Japanese movie with Portuguese subtitles.  I brought in a cell phone with the subtitles in English.  It all worked out.
Did you know in Portugal they don't serve popcorn with butter?  Just salt or candy.  I had popcorn with extra salt.  99% dark chocolate because I'm health-conscious.  Yecchhh...I don't recommend it.
SPOILER KIND OF.  dude that ending.  I'm like GET OUT.  Needs some editing but otherwise it was pretty good.  Worth seeing.

I really liked Godzilla Minus One.  The interesting thing about it is that it's less of a monster movie and more of a tale of survival in post-war 2 Japan. I suppose that could be off-putting, but I found it fascinating, intelligent, insightful, and heart-warming.

The only thing I did not like about the movie is that Godzilla is 100% the bad guy in the movie. I mean... yeah, he's arguably always the bad guy kinda, since he's always causing tremendous damage to people and property... but in this movie, he's straight up an evil bastard. That really kind of put me off. I feel like the ideal Godzilla is the kind of monster I would be able to walk up to, saturate myself in Pym particles, and tell him that I love him, and give him a big hug, and beg him to please be careful with the tsunamis and foot placement from now on, and the tears in his eyes tells me he's at least willing to respect the boundaries of all human beings.

[stethacantus]

Heroes Two ( 1973 )
I watched this movie at least three times in the past four years. I thought I would save time by posting a link to one of my previous reviews for this site, but they have not shown up on search. Did I review this movie? If not, then why didn't I? It is a perfect entry film for the Shaolin genre. It begins as a typical 'what if?' scenario. What if Shaolin folk heroes Huang Tsi Quan met Fong Sai Yuk. Well, predictably, they fight each other, after Fong is tricked into believing Huang is a bandit. Unwittingly allowing a Manchu general to capture Huang. Once her realizes he has caused the capture of a rebel hero, Fong spends most of the film attempting to rescue Huang. And then finally a showdown between all the rebels and the Manchu army. It's simple enough to follow, even if you are not familiar with the Shaolin Temple and how the martial arts experts who the temple produced fought against the Manchu backed Quing Dynasty ( although never succeeded in overthrowing the government, ) you will still get what the simple story is about. This was released around the time the film censorship board of Hong Kong cracked down on the escalating violence in martial arts films. Having already filmed a number of violent and bloody deaths in the final fight, the studio reached a compromise by putting all footage of stabbings and impalings onto black and white film. If you didn't know the studio was required to do this to their films, you would think this was some sort of artistic license from director Chang Cheh.

The Night the Bridge Fell Down ( 1979 )
If you have never heard f this two-part made for television disaster movie from Irwin Allen, then you are not alone. It's first installment aired up against the final episode of M*A*S*H. 1979 was a pretty busy year for producer Irwin Allen. Aside from the release of Beyond The Poseidon Adventure, he was also directing for Warner Bros. When Time Ran Out and producing two television films, each which would span two nights. But then the disaster movie genre collapsed, and Allen's last three theatrical disaster movies bombed at the box office. So NBC, who bought the television films, shelved them. The Night The Bridge Fell Down did not air until 1983, and then only because NBC did not want to waste airing one of their other shows up against the series finale of M*A*S*H. So apparently an edited one night version aired. The plot to this film is simple. A group of motorists are trapped on a span of a bridge when the rest of it collapses. Making matters more complicated, one of the motorists is a wanted bank robber who holds the other motorists hostage and shoots at anyone attempting to rescue them. It starts out as an amazingly solid television movie, but then the padding sets in. You are familiar with rock/cliff climbing padding? well this had a hell of a lot of bridge climbing padding. Especially the final half hour which is just the surviving characters climbing down the girders of the bridge. There is also a lot of plot convenient theater here where characters who know each other just happen to have driven over the bridge at the same time in different cars. And I guess NBC has different standards and practices they apply to their television films  than to the theatrical films they also aired on their network, because every person who dies during this disaster is an unrepenting criminal up to no good. And that is no spoiler because the plot becomes so predictable that you can tell they are going to die long before they do. So if you are going to watch this, the first half of the film is a decent enough watch. The second half was why fast forward buttons were invented.

[Cyrusso]

Dune part 1 - I mean... very impressive film, very well written, great sci-fi, with excellent performances, ESPECIALLY by Oscar Isaac. My only problem is that it didn't really do a ton to appeal to my humanity. It's almost like there was this cold, detached, almost emotionless atmosphere throughout the movie. I kind of get that, but the lack of warmth in the film kind of put me off.

That said, like I said though, it is a well-written and very intelligent film, that still has humanity, even though it doesn't really give me the kind of humanity I want to feel whenever I watch a sci-fi film. I think that's just the tone of the film. To me, it feels less like a typical Star Wars or Star Trek film, and more like 2001 a Space Odyssey. That's. not neecessarily a bad thing, but because of that tone, it was especially difficult for me to get drawn into the world.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I've read Dune 3 times, I think that is sort of the tone of the novel, after so many thousands of years humanity is not what it is now. 

[Cyrusso]

I've read Dune 3 times, I think that is sort of the tone of the novel, after so many thousands of years humanity is not what it is now.

That is very fair.

[stethacantus]

The Flying Guillotine ( 1975 )
Once again, I am surprised I have not reviewed this here yet. Based on a weapon from 18th century China called a Blood Dripper, but became known as a Flying Guillotine in English translations of the weapon due to it's function, which was to behead a person. Reportedly a disk at the end of a chain, it would be tossed onto the heads of opponents where it decapitated them before the wielder of the weapon pulled it back, head and all. While historic text claims such a weapon existed, no such weapon has ever been found to confirm it. This Shaw Brothers film gives a fictitious account of how the  weapon was invented, and how it ended up being used by an elite group of assassins working for the emperor. Not the best martial arts and with a weapon that is mostly special effects, it is pretty fast paced and a nice adventure film.

Cave In! ( 1973 )
Although the box set from Shout! Factory is called  Irwin Allen Master of Disaster , it does not actually contain any of his disaster movie masterpieces. Which is a shame, because he had done way better than what was in this set. Cave In! was the final of his disaster movies. And here he finally found a disaster  cheap enough for television. A group of explorers in a cave have to go out the long way because a cave in blocks their exit. Supposedly there are over forty   different tunnels that lead to the South exit of the cave system, and the ranger guide chooses the most dangerous one for some inexplicable reason. There are also a lot of unnecessary flash backs to help pan out the running time, which Allan had done in his three previous made for TV disaster films.  Fortunately, this one was not a two parter as I had originally thought, so moved along at a reasonable pace.                                                                                                                                                                 

[stethacantus]

The Dragon Missile ( 1976 )
A year after his film, The Flying Guillotine, became a hit, director Meng-Hua Ho followed it up with this film many say is nothing more than a rip-off of his previous film. At the time other studios were releasing their own Flying Guillotine films, including Master of the Flying Guillotine which was Jimmy Wang Yu's sequel to The One Armed Boxer ( which in turn was a combined rip off-of his earlier Shaw Brother's films The One Armed Swordsman and The Chinese Boxer ) and  The Fatal Flying Guillotines  starring Carter Wong and Chen Sing. Shaw Brothers themselves had a proper sequel to The Flying Guillotine in production, but for whatever reason Meng-Hua Ho chose to make  The Dragon Missile for the studio instead.  Production delays would plague Flying Guillotine 2, most notably star Chen Kuan-tai quitting the studio with half the film shot, forcing them to reshoot the entire film with Ti Lung, and two of the leading ladies also quitting mid production, forcing more reshoots. Flying Guillotine 2 would not be finished until 1978. The Dragon Missile stars Lo Leih who carries two blades which are boomerang shaped, and similar to Boomerangs can turn in the air and return to the man who threw them. And yes, their main function is to decapitate their intended victims. But that is as close as this film comes to ripping off The Flying Guillotine. Lo Leih is one of a group of killers sent by the prince to retrieve a herb that will cure his deadly skin infection. Like most royalty in the Ching dynasty, the prince is a mean son of a bitch who is constantly ordering the beheadings of his servants, and you are rooting for neither Lo Leih nor the other killers to make it back with the cure in the seven days the prince has before the boil on his back kills him. However, everyone is too busy double crossing and stealing the herb from each other, each wanting to be the one who hands the prince the herb and gets rewarded. Meanwhile, there is the children of the people Lo Leih beheaded and took the herb from who want revenge. A fun film from Shaw Brothers which has been overlooked for years as it was dismissed as just a Flying Guillotine rip-off.  It is also the final film in the Shaw Brothers Classics 2 set from Shout! Factory.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods ( 2023 )
I am not sure why this got such bad reviews. Sure, it is not as good as the first movie. And yes, if you are going t do a franchise with children, it is advisable to get to the sequels as fast as possible before they all grow into adults. Although this film was delayed four years due to COVID-19, so sort of not the studio's fault. So having some of the kids aged out was not exactly Warner Bros. fault. The only other complain I would have with this film is the villain Master Mind, who was teased in the post credit scene of the first film, is not the villain. Instead we get another post credit scene with Master Mind once again visiting Sivana in prison who is pissed off that it has been four years and Master Mind has yet to begin his plan. I am not a fan of teasing sequels when sequels are not certain. But  to produce a different plot than the plot that was teased?  Otherwise, this is a perfectly good superhero adventure film.

[stethacantus]

The Assassin ( 1967 )
And now I double back to Shaw Brothers Classics Volume One, thanks to Amazon delivering Volume Two first.  Here is the breakdown of the films found on Volume One:

The Assassin ( 1967 )
The Thundering Sword ( 1967 )
The Golden Swallow ( 1968 ) Previously released by Dragon Dynasty
The Jade Raksha ( 1968 )
The Bells of Death ( 1968 ) Previously released by Image Entertainment
The Sword of Swords ( 1968 ) Previously released by Funimation
Killer Dart ( 1968 )
Invincible Fists ( 1969 )
Dragon Swamp ( 1969 )
The Flying Dagger (1969 )
The Golden Sword ( 1969 )

Mostly films not previously released in North America, but mostly if not entirely, Wuxia ( swordplay ) films. Not that Shaw Brothers Wuxia era films were bad. But their most popular films were of the Kung-fu/Unarmed Combat/Basher genre. And a lot of the stars from the 60s left Shaw Brothers Studios around 1970 when the studio began making their Basher films, bringing in the 70s stars David Chaing, Ti Lung, Chen Kuan Tai, Alexander Fu Sheng, Gordon Liu and the Venom Mob.

The Assassin is a lethargically paced movie which is more of a drama than an action film. Which is a surprise considering it was directed by Chang Cheh. The story is very simple. Jimmy Wang Yu is a commoner who trained to be a swordsman and dreamed of someday using his swordplay skills to rise to greatness. Instead, he ended up taking care of his elderly mother and sister and living the simple life of a butcher. A former advisor of the emperor of Han who had survived an assassination attempt by another advisor looking to usurp his position, asks Yu to assassinate the other advisor for him. But Jimmy refuses, saying he can not accept such a suicide mission until his mother has died, and his sister has found a husband. About eight years later both happen, and Jimmy accepts the job, leading to a finale where he mows down an army of guards in a fort to get to his target. Not a bad film, but much like the Chambara films that inspired the 60's Wuxia, it is a drama which leads up to a final battle.


The Flash ( 2023 )
Actually, this is a pretty good superhero film that did not deserve the poor reviews and should have done better at the box office. My only complaints are that the CW Flash television series got to this story first, and except for the better action and effects in this movie, was better at the drama part. The idea that changing an event in the past would somehow effect events before it, resulting in different Batmans is not logical. Which is one of the DCEU's biggest flaws, that their movies would just shit on the established cannon so that a cinematic universe made no sense. This was pretty much an attempt by Warner Bros. to reboot the DCEU with a character who is about to be rebooted. Other than that, a fully entertaining film.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Dune part 2

I loved part 1, can not say the same for part 2.

If you have never read the books or watched previous adaptions then you'd probably enjoy it way more.

I've read the book several times, the changes started to annoy me about 1/3 into part 2.  And about 2/3 the way in it seemed to be in a rush to finish up and move on to part 3.   Some beats from the book are still there, but compressing years of story into a few months was too much to believe.  And altering the relationships between many of the characters was a big turn off, as well as changes to many of the personalities involved. 

[stethacantus]

The Thundering Sword ( 1967 )
The second film on the Shaw Brother's Classics Volume One set. I knew that the wuxia heavy Volume One would be a bit disappointing.  The Wuxia films prior to the 60s were mostly musical dramas with very little fighting at all. But in response to the rise of the increasingly violent Japanese Chambara genre which included such films as the Zato Ichi series, Shaw Brothers decided to update the Wuxia genre with violent fight scenes. And as the Chambara films grew more gory with such series as Lone Wolf and Cub and Lady Snowblood, the Wuxia made at Shaw Brothers too grew more gory and violent. By the time the unarmed combat Kung Fu films took over thanks to the success of Jimmy Wang Yu's Chinese Boxer, Bruce Lee's films for Golden Harvest,  and Chang Cheh's Boxer From Shantung,, the entire martial arts genre became mostly about having a lot of choreographed fights. However, prior to the 70s, martial arts in movies was still in it's transitional period. So with films like The Thundering Sword, it was more like an old fashioned wuxia film which was mostly drama. The Thundering Sword is a black unbreakable sword that martial artists are constantly fighting over possessing. A Buddhist abbot wants to possess the sword so that he may find a way to break it, therefore ending centuries of bloodshed, and sends two brothers who are his students to find it. Also looking for the sword is the daughter of the leader of an evil clan. On her travels she meets and falls in love with one of the brothers. But then ends up throwing poison darts into the chest of the other brother moments after he recovers the Thundering Sword from a crypt out of an Indiana Jones movie filed with booby traps. Realizing she had poisoned the brother of the man she loves, she arranges for an escort company to rush him back to his temple where the abbot has a cure. But even this goes wrong as the escort company abandons the brother upon being attacked by bandits looking for the sword who then torcher and permanently cripple the brother to try to find out if he knows the location of the sword. When she finds out the escort company allowed him to be injured, she takes vengeance by attacking and killing everyone at the escort company. This, aside from a few  brief battles,  is the one fight set piece in the entire film. After massacring everyone at the escort service headquarters, she runs off,  The man she loves hears the sounds of the battle from outside the escort company gates, and decides to investigate, but climbs over just after she leaves, and ends up being blamed for the massacre. The remaining 50 minutes is all drama with no fighting at all, with exception to a single clash of two swords in a quickly aborted fight. I would not call this a bad film. Just a letdown for anyone expecting a lot of action.

Blue Beetle ( 2023 )
The only way to go with this film is up. In the past, I had seen films with identical plots about a teenage kid finding symbiotic armor from space that bonds with him and turns him into a superhero. They range from just barely entertaining ( Star Kid ( 1997 ) Review here:https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,5210.msg982698/topicseen.html#msg982698 ) To just below the entertaining threshold ( Max Steel ( 2016 ) Review Here: https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,5210.msg985820/topicseen.html#msg985820 ) and both hard to watch in between action scenes. Also, I have seen one other movie featuring Blue Beetle as the hero, and it was one of the worst movies I had ever seen, period ( Agent Beetle ( 2012 ) Review Here: https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,5210.msg988849/topicseen.html#msg988849 ). And both Max Steel and Agent Beetle were both on the worst Superhero Movie LoC with Max Steel coming in at #68 https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,36049.msg1039819/topicseen.html#msg1039819 and Agent Beetle coming in at #32 https://forum.rifftrax.com/index.php/topic,36049.msg1039881/topicseen.html#msg1039881 So, this has to be better, right? This was to be the first film in the James Gunn DC Cinematic Universe which was to replace the Snyderverse or whatever we are suppose to call it. And based on how it just barely broke even, probably the last of the James Gunn cinematic universe films as probably right now Discovery is secretly in talks with Yorgos Lanthimos or Greta Gerwig for a third reboot at a combined superhero cinematic universe. I guess we are lucky we got a few DC films that interconnected at all. Anyway, this film, which does not appear to connect with any past DC films, yet may be just as much a dead end as Green Lantern was, Was a pretty good superhero film,  if predictable and goes overboard with the hero being Hispanic as if DC has to prove to the world they are no longer racially bias towards whites. The only thing I did not like about this film was the mid end credit scene that teases for the sequel. I wish they would stop doing that. Sequels are never guaranteed, even if the film was a hit, and most of the time the sequel ends up being a completely different story. This is also the American debut for Brazilian actress  Bruna Marquezine who plays the hero's love interest Jenny, and looked very sexy as she shows up to a memorial service wearing tight leather pants. Okay, I get it. She was a pretty face throughout the film, and the ending of these genre  action  is traditionally where the female lead looks her sexiest, just before the hero kisses her. Just would be a shame if this is the last we see of her in a DC film. 

[Cyrusso]

Just watched Labyrinth with a friend of mine last night. Fascinating movie. I had no idea it was written by Terry Jones. Interesting movie, and honestly I had only seen bits and pieces of the film before. Great soundtrack, good movie, probably not my favorite fantasy film of all time, though.

[LucasM]

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

I could not believe, as I watched this, just how incredibly bad all aspects of it were.

The tone was uneven throughout: from the deadly serious to the childishly goofy.  In some cases with the two alternating in the same scene (conversation between Black Manta and Dr Shin a bit over 1/2-way through).

The main plot alternated between the intense real world (end of life on the planet through global warming), and goofy fantasy.

I outgrew the 'humor' that was in this when I was possibly 5-6 years old.  In other words, the humor has no depth to it, it is simplistic with minimal context or relevance to the characters.

It had the absolute worst physics I believe I've ever seen in any film.  Fuck, the physics were worse than in 1940s Warner Bros cartoons!

Because Manta and the ancient entity possessing him were so intense, the producers jammed Randall Park in, to try to use some of his humor to break it up (but he fits in the world of Ant-Man, he does not in the world of Aquaman).  Instead, it made it far more clear that the writer, producers, and - most likely: WB execs - had no clue what they were doing.

It was like the producers, writer, director, WB execs thought, "these are superheroes: lets have them beat each other up and destroy a lot of stuff, and that will be 80% of our film!  Who cares if the plot is the same recycled shit?"

What were presented as if they were supposed to be surprises were all predictable, and they fucking repeated them!  There were THREE TIMES in the film where Hera came in at 'the last possible second' to save Aquaman from 'certain death'... and she did it the exact same way each time.

The dialog lines in the film were so laden with clichés and lacking in anything resembling creativity in the way things are expressed (or resembling how people actually talk), that it felt like the dialog was written by a 15-20 year old or an AI.

I've always preferred Marvel because Marvel stories were character driven (comics and MCU), while DC stories were plot-driven.  But I still think it is possible to tell good stories about the DC characters.  Sadly, the last roughly decade of DCU films never came close.

For the sake of these characters, I'm glad that these made-by-committee DC films are coming to an end.  Hopefully Gunn can bring something worthwhile to the screen.  I'd love to see a GOOD Aquaman film, or a GOOD Superman film, or a GOOD Batman film (since Dark Knight).  The first Wonder Woman at least didn't suck, but it wasn't particularly special, either (the second was horrendous, however).

Gunn's Suicide Squad was excellent... but I see that more as the start of his run as DCU guide, rather than near the end of the prior collection (despite it possibly not being in continuity with his new DCU).

[Cyrusso]

I'm still not sure Aquaman works all that great as a hero in the DC universe. He's not that interesting as a character/superhero, and I have yet to see proof that he's got potential. To be fair, I think Namor in Wakanda Forever has the same problem... but at this point, he's still more of an antagonist in the MCU, which at least to me, is interesting.

At this point, I am so disinterested in underwater movies, that the only type of that movie that would drag me back to the cinema would be a live action Sealab 2021 film. Either that, or a fascinating movie about the evolution of sea creatures narrated by David Attenborough.