Last film you saw, vol. 6

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El Topo (The Mole) (1970)

"You are seven years old. You are a man. Bury your first toy and a picture of your mother."

A gunslinger and his son come across a massacred village and attack the bandit gang that committed the atrocity, and the father abandons his son to the priests for raising while he leaves with a woman to hunt down legendary gunfighters. After completing his quest he is betrayed and must rediscover his purpose in life with the help of outcasts.

I asked for this as a birthday gift because I really liked Jodorowsky's Dune (documentary) and I wanted to see more of his work. I was initially a little hesitant to show this to my dad but when I mentioned it, he told me he'd seen it fifty years ago when it came out and that it was indeed a real head trip.

I can only begin to describe the crazy shit that goes on here, but it's indeed quite creative and is well done, nothing half-assed (though much of it is perplexing because of his interpretive and symbolic Jodo likes to make things). It's not as utterly insane as The Holy Mountain but it's still pushing the envelope pretty damn hard. (Also a little long at 124 minutes, but the pacing is very good so it doesn't feel like it's dragging).

Recommend checking this out but be prepared for some unusual content.

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Ahh, you non-movie watchers (or worse you non-poster watchers) are killing me again. In order to not have a post of like 15 movies I had to evenly distribute recent watches in all my old posts on the page. Plus I guess I’ll bump this in case it inspires anyone else to let me free like 5 more.

Se7en (1995)

"I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was virtue."

Watched for its 25th anniversary this week. It had been a while. Love this flick (dark as it is).

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)

"You best go find out who you are. Come on. Now what's wrong with you, you old buzzard? Come on. Don't be afraid. Out there you can kick up the dust. You can dance to fiddle music. Watch the alfalfa bloom. If you like, you can... see gold teeth. Taste sweet whisky and red-eyed gravy. The air breathes easy, nights move faster, and you tell time by the clock. Now you don't wanna be a jailbird all your life, do ya? You're a highballin' sparrow."

Excellent flick even if they apparently made the man much nicer than the real person.

The Unforgiven (1960)

"Ben, what did those Indians want?
-They offered to buy you for those five horses.
Well, did you sell me?
-Nope; held out for more horses."

A family of ranchers (led by elder brother Burt Lancaster) is haunted by the past when an old enemy resurfaces and claims their adopted sister (Audrey Hepburn) is a Kiowa foundling sparking a feud with that tribe that the local former friend ranchers are not willing to risk their lives for. Good stuff (dir. by John Huston). I love Hepburn (literally my favorite actress) but have to admit she was probably not the best choice since they keep trying to say how her skin is darker yet she's clearly the most pale member of her family.

El Topo (The Mole) (1970)...

I liked it, but would definitely have to be in a certain mood to re-watch it.

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There goes that Space Cop boy again, complaining about watching too many movies...

Watched The Black Raven (1943) with my dad on Saturday, starring George Zucco.

Plot is that a storm is raging and an escaped convict tries to get revenge on his old partner (Zucco, now an inn proprietor). A gangster, an eloping couple, a corrupt politician, a pencilneck also show up and then someone kills the politician. Hijinks and deductions ensue especially as the local sheriff is a total asshole who can't put two and two together unless he twists the facts to suit his idiot ideas (though this allows Zucco to repeatedly humiliate him and garner viewer sympathy).

This is probably at least the third film I've seen where Zucco dies (he gets shot in The Mummy's Hand, I believe, and then dies of old age in the film right after that).

Film is a weird combo of crime, drama, suspense/horror, and comedy (the helper Andy is a bungling oaf who jumps and screams at everything and it gets old quick, but I did like him interacting with the pencilneck).

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A bunch more anniversaries (obviously 80, 50, and 25) over the past few weeks such as . . .

The Mummy's Hand (1940)

"Hey Steve, can a dame go crazy from being sawed in half too many times?"

The first of the Mummy sequels, the first to introduce the Tanna leaves as the reagent, and the basis for the rest of the series.

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

"I can't imagine anything that would infuriate the Americans more. II fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

As A Night to Remember does to Cameron's Titanic, this movie just blows Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor out of the water (no pun intended).

Empire Records (1995)

"We mustn't dwell. No, not today. We can't; not on Rex Manning day."

There goes that Space Cop boy again, complaining about watching too many movies...

What? I watch the proper amount of movies. Everyone else watched too much TV or has too much of a life.

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Honestly I just haven't found the time in all of two damn months (or not been distracted enough to remember) to watch Dark Was the Night. I don't want to force my dad to sit through it since it's modern horror and that means finding extra time on my own clock.

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The Joker (2019)

"Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?"

I get why this was divisive and won't be putting it on when I want a fun diversion, but I thought it was good. The riot stuff seemed even more relevant watching it now for the first time.

Boy and the World (2013)

No-dialogue cartoon (there's fake language at points) about a boy's journey after his father leaves for work.

Showgirls (1995)

"She's no butterfly. Tony, she's all pelvic thrust."

Another 'classic' that turned a quarter of a century.

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Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, actually murdered two people. The first was a customer of a prostitute he was pimping, and the second was a prison guard. He also committed several assaults against fellow inmates.

A movie that made him look as good as this one did wouldn't get made today.

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Hotel Transylvania (2012)

"Hey, kids, reel it in! You're only supposed to make mom and dad miserable!"

My full moon werewolf pick because this series is perfect for Halloween season.
By the way, this month will have a very rare blue moon on Halloween (extra rare because it's across the time zones). Won't happen again until 2039.

Also the beginning of my Halloween-season watching. This month, I will probably watch only horror/monster movies unless there's an important anniversary for another kind of movie.

Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015)

"You're the nicest boy I know and I have 300 brothers!"

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018)

"It is our children! Run!"

Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, actually murdered two people. The first was a customer of a prostitute he was pimping, and the second was a prison guard. He also committed several assaults against fellow inmates.

A movie that made him look as good as this one did wouldn't get made today.

Yeah. They mention the first murder and show the second in the movie but kind of present them as him going too far, but essentially being provoked.

The movie also presents his continual time in solitude as being the warden holding a grudge but apparently the official reason was that he was deemed to be extremely violent and "an aggressive homosexual," which in the parlance of the day seems to mean a prison rapist.

Interestingly, though, in the scene where the guard who is nice to him talks about his ingratitude, I thought "that sounds like a psychopath" and according to Wikipedia the real Stroud was diagnosed as a psychopath (with an IQ of either 112 or 116, both of which are on the high-but-not-genius level). People who knew him for more than a few minutes seemed to say he was not a nice person that happened to be very smart about birds, medicine, and history.

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By the way, this month will have a very rare blue moon on Halloween (extra rare because it's across the time zones). Won't happen again until 2039.

I'm going to have to make sure I take a picture of it.

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Doctor Sleep (2019)

"We're all dying. The world's just one big hospice with fresh air."

Watched the director's cut with the family.

The Devil's Advocate (1997)

"Who, in their right mind Kevin, could possibly deny the twentieth century was entirely mine."

Hack the Movie's review put me in the mood to re-watch this one (which was in my DVD collection anyway).

The Gingerdead Man (2005)

"It sure ain't the Pillsbury f***ing doughboy."

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The Snow Creature (1954)

"Sometimes yeti come down to steal woman. Always wanting to steal woman."

A botanist, a photographer and their sherpa are scaling Mt. Everest when word arrives that a yeti has abducted the sherpa's wife. He forces a hunt and the team eventually corners the yeti in a cave, only for it to collapse the ceiling and knock itself out...while at the same time causing the death of its own family, like an idiot. The scientists then force the team to carry the creature back to town and transport it in a large Port-A-Potty-like refrigeration unit to Los Angeles where it escapes and run amok.

According to IMDB, this film is 60% walking, hiking, or running, and I swear it must be a serious contender for most recycled shots in any film ever made (in English, at least): I lost count of the number of times the same arrow-marked street or dark alleyway was shown, and the sewers portion is practically on loop. The makers knew this film needed padding and they brought it in droves.

The Snow Creature itself is a complete laugh. The man who played the yeti was huge, easily around six-six or more, but he wears this god-awful suit that makes the Universal Wolf Man look cutting edge. There are a couple of model monster hand scenes that are decent but are nowhere near capable of saving the monster, let alone the film.

Thankfully only an hour long and I know I've seen worse from better, but this is still poor.

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Werewolf in a Women's Prison (2006)

"You sound like a bad movie to me."

Trashy fun. A gift from a friend.

Crawl (2019)

"Follow the wet wall.
-They're all wet!"

Really liked this one despite having CGI gators. The premise is simple enough, which is good--a woman goes to check on her dad who isn't responding in a hurricane and they both get trapped in their old house's crawlspace when a gator blocks their way.

Troll 2 (1990)

"Your brother is not a little sh*t; he’s just sensitive."

A contender for best worst movie and one that has its own documentary of that title; this ‘classic’ turns 30 today. I remember as a kid being confused not only by the fact that this had no connection to the first movie, but they were really goblins here.

The Snow Creature (1954) ... A botanist, a photographer and their sherpa are scaling Mt. Everest when word arrives that a yeti has abducted the sherpa's wife. He forces a hunt and the team eventually corners the yeti in a cave, only for it to collapse the ceiling and knock itself out...

Sounds like a good concept that didn’t have the means to see it through. If there was a riff, I’d watch it gladly, but otherwise it sounds like a chore.

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While watching it I kept wondering if they made the film to make use of stock footage from something else, like Monster from Green Hell did. I doubt there's a riff of this because it's so shallow and repetitive that you'd need some serious wit to make use of anything herein.

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Night of the Ghouls (1959)

"Oh, it was a nightmare of horror!"

Watched for the anniversary of Ed Wood's birthday and as a Halloween-time flick.

One Cut of the Dead (2017)

"Do you have any hobbies?"

The family and I loved this. Best not to know too much about it, though.

The Vampire Lovers (1970)

"You must die! Everybody must die!"

Not sure if this classic (which turns 50 today) is Hammer's first with nudity, but it is the first of the Karstein Trilogy (based on the novella Carmilla) and the first starring the beautiful Ingrid Pitt and it's definitely the year the British studio decided to go more adult both with the violence and the sensuality.

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Midnight Manhunt (1945)

"There's a corpse playing cards!"

A hitman (George Zucco) kills another man and steals a bundle of diamonds, but his target crawls to the next-door wax museum of gangsters (that's a bit niche admittedly, which is why they have a fortune teller figure there, for diversity and all) where his now-actually-definitely-dead body is discovered by a small-time journalist. She tries to leverage the infamous gangster's death so that she lands the big article in her paper, but the museum's owner and a smartass staffer find it and try to ditch it, thinking the cops will accuse them of murder. Thus ensues a series of hijinks that result in the journalist and her ex reuniting while dealing with the hitman.

This is fairly amusing even now, but my biggest surprise was the Zucco doesn't die at the end. The characters were a who's-who of cliches but Zucco was smooth and the plot was steadily paced, so the hour went by easily enough. (Studio should have made sure to match Zucco's short-barrel first gun in the end fight, though, because suddenly he has a chrome-plated long-barrel revolver).

Thankfully I saw this recommended when my dad was scouring YouTube for K-pop videos or I might have had to come up with something even worse (he thought it wasn't all bad, he did laugh at some of the jokes).