posted
Hmm... I've seen 86 of the top 100, but only 6 of the additional 20. 28 out of 120 unseen...
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Hal Ashby may be well-represented, but i do wonder why Harold And Maude (1971) didn't make the list. Posts: 2176 | From: The Netherlands | Registered: Jun 2011 | Site Updates: 0
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That is a good point. Harold and Maude may be my favorite of his films.
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aTomiK
.... has green eyes as well....
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Watched Mario Bava film Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970).
"A small group of people come to an island to relax but soon find themselves trapped on the island with a murderer in their midst." (IMDb)
What a disappointing movie with a one dollar plot. Stupid charaters killed one by one with no hint of excitement or any sense at all. The worst Bava flick i´ve seen so far and only beautiful ladies like Edwige Fenech and Helena Ronee got me trough this relatively short film.
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posted
I agree. Five Dolls is easily Bava's worst film--and I've seen 'em all. It has all the signs of a hired-gun/paycheck job with the master just phoning the direction in.
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Helen_S
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Who doesn't! A pretty fun mystery comedy with some great atmosphere at times.
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Crash, that list is great. I have seen a lot of the movies, I would estimate around 50/100. So many on that list that I would like to see. I might have to check the library again soon. Problem is, I haven't been doing a lot of movie viewing, as we have had exceptionally warm weather. That means we haven't been hibernating and watching movies, ha ha.
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Helen_S
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posted
Necromancy - A 70s film with a creepy cultlike town, voodoo dolls, witchcraft, tarot, dreaminess, raising the dead. All things that should add up to a big yay for me, yet it just all feels so flat up until that fantastic ending.
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Bert I. Gordon's Necronmancy has eluded me over the years, but it does have one of my favorite 70s actresses in it, Pamela Franklin. She was in three classics: The Innocents, And Soon the Darkness, and The Legend of Hell House. She's always terrific, especially in the small masterpiece And Soon the Darkness.
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aTomiK
.... has green eyes as well....
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posted
How a good actress like Pamela Franklin hooked up with schlockmeister Bert I. Gordon (Mr."B.I.G." who had big animals and humans and crap in his films) is just beyond me!
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Helen_S
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quote:Originally posted by Crash: Bert I. Gordon's Necronmancy has eluded me over the years, but it does have one of my favorite 70s actresses in it, Pamela Franklin. She was in three classics: The Innocents, And Soon the Darkness, and The Legend of Hell House. She's always terrific, especially in the small masterpiece And Soon the Darkness.
Ha, a 70s flick I've seen that you haven't! Like all 3 of those and my fave film she was in is The Nanny I also liked Satan's School For Girls. I know you say the remake of darkness is horrid but it's on the horror channel at the weekend so I may be tempted Posts: 4057 | From: uk | Registered: May 2007 | Site Updates: 0
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The remake of And Soon the Darkness is horrid. Instead of quiet, unnerving terror on a short stretch of French road, you have Amber Heard with an automatic weapon in a plot about human trafficking in Argentina. Right. It's closer to I Spit on Your Grave than the original masterpiece.
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Helen_S
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Watched a different type and much better witchy film tonight, The Witchmaker (1969). Really atmospheric and got more interesting as it went along.
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The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) starring Tor Johnson, Douglas Melling, Barbara Stafford, Bing Stafford and Conrad Brooks.
Possibly worse even that Johnson's more famous Plan 9 from Outer Space, this one really needs to be seen to be disbelieved.
The main plot surrounds Soviet scientist Joseph Javorsky, in the process of defecting from the Russians with a briefcase full of secrets. when the KGB try to stop him, he flees into the Nevada desert, and (as you do) gets caught in the blast from a nuclear test. Rather than kill him, this turns Javorsky into an inhuman beast, intent on killing at all costs. After he strangles a young married couple, he retreats into the desert pursued by two local cops.
Nearby, a family have pulled over to change a blown tyre. The two boys wander off into the desert, and are soon confronted by Javorsky. Whilst they escape, their father is searching for them and comes under fire from the cops, who mistakenly believe he's the killer.
Basically that's it, but to be fair, the acting is so terribly wooden and the narration so matter-of-fact that revealing the entire plot to you really wouldn't count as a 'spoiler'.
There is one thing, though, that even now - and even after I've googled it - still doesn't make sense. At the very beginning of the movie, there's a scene where a young woman steps out of the shower, and whilst dressing, she is strangled by the 'beast' - even before any of the rest of the story happens. There's nowhere in the movie's narrative that this scene would fit, and so it really stands out as strange. According to Wikipedia, this scene was put in (in two versions, one far less revealing than the other) simply because the director Coleman Francis 'liked nude scenes'.
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Sixties Sci Fi. Don't you just love the bits that go Bzzzzzzz! Or the bits that go Wheeeeeeeee! And don't forget the thing with the sparks that goes Ftzzzz!
What I love about early sixties sci fi is the cheapness of it all. As long as there's a bank of switches and knobs somewhere, everything else (plot, acting) really doesn't matter.
Which makes Monstrosity (a.k.a. The Atomic Brain), from 1963, interesting.
Yes, it's a sci fi film, but the science is used just as an enabler for a far more compelling, more sinister tale.
Mrs March (Marjorie Eaton) is old and dying. Which is something she just cannot accept. So she uses her vast wealth to recruit the brilliant but morally suspect scientist, Dr Frank (Frank Gerstle) whose work promises the ability to transplant her brain into a young body. When the technique seems to work, the old woman hires three foreign girls (Erika Peters, Lisa Lang and Judy Bamber) as servants, who are all beautiful, and who all have no family to notice their disappearance.
The three girls are interesting, but not always convincing. Of the three, Peters gives the best performance as the girl who most quickly realises that escape is the only way. Lang has little to do, and Bamber's fake cockney accent is even worse than that of that Van Dyke chappie in Mary Poppins! Eaton is sinister as the creepy Mrs March, whilst Gerstle gives a not-untypical wooden performance as your standard bad scientist type.
As the girls are inspected and the target is chosen, they suspect that all may well not be as it seems. Escape is impossible, however, so how will they manage to get away from the mad old lady, the obsessed scientist, and the murderous monster prowling the grounds?
And where on earth does Xerxes the cat come into play?
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Helen_S
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posted
Joseph Javorsky, once a respected scientist... Coleman Francis's films have a kind of hallucinogenic fugue logic all their own. Francis was clearly a man who drank a lot and liked light aircraft, as the MST3K boys used to say. He's absolutely much worse than Ed Wood as a filmmaker, but the Medveds in their bad films book anchored Wood to that dubious honor forever.
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aTomiK
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"A thief breaks into the home of a wealthy, happily married Beverly Hills couple. He soon finds out, though, that the couple is neither as wealthy as he thought they were and are not as happily married as they appeared." (IMDb)
Larry Cohen´s first and a good one. They even filmed it in his own house (which looks nice btw)! I loved how the truth about the rich and the restless is revealed and Kotto has some juicy lines concerning black mysticism Add lovely Jeannie Berlin and more 70s un-PC behaviour and we a cool little film, just the way i like ´em.
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Love, love, love Larry Cohen's stuff. I have Bone in the Larry Cohen box set from many years ago.
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aTomiK
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"After several weeks of heavy rainfall, the dam above Brownsville is short from running over. However the mayor refuses to open it's gates, because he fears for the fishes in the lake... and paves the way for disaster." (IMDb)
Disaster lite from Irwin Allen. Flood is a tv-movie so Towering Inferno it´s not. I like the genre though and it´s always fun to watch these and witness the cause and effect. The film stars Robert Culp (cool), Martin Milner (very uncool), Cameron Mitchell plus pretty ladies Barbara Hershey and Francine york.
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aTomiK
.... has green eyes as well....
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"New Orleans businessman Michael Courtland's life is shattered when his wife and daughter are tragically killed in a botched kidnap rescue attempt. Many years later whilst visiting Italy he meets and falls in in love with Sandra Portinari, who bears a striking resemblance to his wife." (IMDb)
De Palma and Schrader doing Vertigo.
So, we have a script from those fellas, Vilmos Zsigmond camera work and Bernard Herrmann score. But damn this movie is dry and slow I liked Genevieve Bujold and John Lithgow was fun but Cliff Robertson is made of wood.
There´s hints of incest, some nice camera ideas and a big twist in the end but overall i think that this was boring. And there´s just too much coincidences and oddball behavior here, i usually don´t mind things like that too much if the film is otherwise entertaining, this wasn´t.
Obsession was originally called Deja vu which is a perfect name but they thought it sounded too french. Come on!
The Arrow blu included short film Woton´s Wake and documentary The Responsive Eye. Woton was wild and crazy, Responsive Eye interesting time capsule.
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DePalma hated working with Robertson, who thought Bujold was upstaging him so he tried to sabotage her performance, and he tells a great story in the documentary DePalma about Zsigmond's telling Robertson that his tanned faced looked like mahogany paneling!
I like Obsession. It's early DePalma, but his skill set is already established, and sure, it's Vertigo in a way, but I think that it goes off on its own variation. And it is so beautifully put together--gorgeous locations, cinematography, and music. You have the first excellent performance by John Lithgow as a bad guy in a DePalma film. And Bujold is terrific, despite having to act against a piece of paneling. I remembering seeing it over 40 years ago. It got some fantastic reviews, the best of DePalma's career to that point. Carrie was released in the U.S. a couple of months later, and the rest is history.
The two shorts are very interesting!
[ 15. March 2017, 09:43: Message edited by: Crash ]
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aTomiK
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"A convict starts a fire in a forest to cover his escape, but the fire goes out of control and threatens to destroy a small mountain community." (IMDb)
Another Irwin Allen tv-movie directed by Earl Bellamy. I have to give the filmmakers some respect for the effort but overall it´s just too lame and predictable. Two main characters do die so at least there´s somekind of excitement.
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