Ring: Complete Edition ★★☆☆☆
I guess listen to @theTheRingPod if you want to hear my full thoughts on this. Really the only reason to watch this is if you liked Ring 1998 but wish it had more tits and incest in it.
Conan the Barbarian ★★☆☆☆
It’s fine.
The Shadow over Innsmouth (1992) ★★★☆☆
This was a cute little adaptation. Amusingly it is set in Japan but they do not change any of the town names. They are written out in the Roman alphabet unchanged but with made up kanji transliterations as well (or in the cakse of Kingsport, translation). Innsmouth is 蔭洲升, Arkham is 赤牟, Dunwich is 壇宇市 and Kingsport is 王港.
Did not need the incest, though.
Millenium Actress ★★★☆☆
Gorgeous and cute film, though I am finding it difficult to say much about it.
Paprika ★★☆☆☆
Of the three films of Kon’s I’ve seen this is easily my least favourite. It is pretty but mean spirited and misanthropic.
Children of the Corn ★☆☆☆☆
🌽
Dragon Ball: Episode of Bardock ★☆☆☆☆
Wow this sucked. Clumsily inserting something into the cracks of continuity to make up a shitty explanation of where the legend of the super saiyan came from that just ties it to Goku’s family. I have not listened to any Big Finish audios but I get the impression that this is what the worse ones are like. The Plant guys also suck and now we have three different species on Planet Vegeta lmao (I am still counting Tuffles).
Dragon Ball Super: Super Heroes ★★★★☆
We watched Episode of Bardock as an apéritif for this and wow this ruled actually. I did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did. I watched Dragon Ball Z as a kid and thought it was cool, watched Battle of the Gods at some point and thought it sucked, and then never watched Super and assumed I would just not enjoy it as an adult, but this film was good.
The 3D animation was surprising and slightly offputting at first but it grew on me. And yeah this was a good reminder that this series is not just big dumb fight scenes. There are characters! They rock! They have relationships and motivations and all that shit too! Piccolo being roped in as a hapless babysitter and being annoyed at Gohan’s wasted potential works. Pan is great too.
I am glad they made a movie that sidelined Goku and Vegeta (my favourite plotline as a kid was Garlic Jr., by the way) and got to focus on these guys instead, though the obligatory fight scene between them was amusing in just how much it was pandering to people who were going to complain about there not being enough Goku.
The bad guys thinking that the protagonists are secretly fronting an alien invasion is great too. I mean yeah. The richest family in the world are, in fact, funding the lives of a bunch of aliens. It does seem a bit weird.
Piccolo not realising he turned orange, then not giving a shit about the name for it and calling it Orange Piccolo was funny too.
It turns out Dragon Ball is actually still fun? Fuck?
Dragon Ball Super: Broly ★★★☆☆
Watching this a week after Episode of Bardock was funny because I did not expect this to also dedicate a large part of its runtime to retconning Bardock. I didn’t care too much for that part, honestly. They seem to be trying to soften Bardock and make him into Jor-El and also make the saiyans as a whole much more normal and not just a species of psychos who Goku turned out different to because he hit his head as a child and forgot about being evil. Was that an amazing backstory? No, but it was funny.
But the main part of the movie was cool! They clearly had a lot of fun changing up artstyles and animation styles for different fights which was really cool, though a bit jarring when it would suddenly switch to 3D in particular. Goku is fun in this one. I like him showing up at the end and just wanting to help out Broly but also doing it because he wants to fight him again. Saying that Broly can call him Kakarot was cute, too.
Also Broly is autistic 💙
Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return ★☆☆☆☆
I was considering making this my first zero star movie but I did say to myself that that was only going to be for things that are actively repulsive, which this movie isn’t, because this movie is absolutely nothing. I could not pay attention to it. It is so fucking boring.
Drive-Away Dolls Dykes ★★★★☆
Ethan Coen spends an hour and a half making the argument that he should be allowed to call a film this, even if they couldn’t put it on the poster. Shocking that this film was directed by a straight man and it makes me think of how funny and cool it would be if the Coens pulled a Wachowskis on us.
Not my favourite Coen Brothers movie, it’s no Fargo, but it is fun to see a movie of that style about lesbians.
I also brought a bunch of friends to it and they all thought it was going to be a serious crime movie lmao.
The Shaggy D.A. ★☆☆☆☆
I watched this movie because it is where this gif is from:
Rest assured that this is the only good part of this film. You do not have to watch any more of it. You have seen all that is worth seeing in it.
Wild Zero ★★★★☆
🤘🏻Love has no borders, nationalities, or genders🤘🏻
Pinocchio (del Toro) ★★☆☆☆
I think I have grown out of de Toro a bit. It’s fun enough and pretty as hell but I thought that it just felt shallow.
The Boy and the Heron ★★☆☆☆
Certainly not Miyasaki’s best, though I am not a particularly rabid Miyasaki fan either. Kiriko is Mahito in the future after transitioning, though.
Baltimore ★★★☆☆
A movie about Rose Dugdale, a posh Englishwoman who joined the PIRA. It is... sort of sympathetic to her but then portrays her and her crew as hopeless in over their heads and a big unhinged and they start to unravel as it goes on. It is not going for historical accuracy so much as personal drama and it does do it well.
Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound ★★☆☆☆
luv u Uncle Moton
Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13 ★★☆☆☆
💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💇
Monster (怪物) ★★★☆☆
There was a point in this movie where I was thinking if these kids don’t turn out to be gay I am going to be very pissed off at how this movie is portraying stuff, because it was either going to turn out that they were gay or it’s going to be some kind of awful twist where one of the kids was secretly an evil bully mastermind. Thankfully they were gay.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch ★☆☆☆☆
@Jenheadjen has decided that Australia should celebrate Halloween in April rather than October and has been streaming some horror movies. It turns out that she appreciates bad horror movies a lot more than I do. I joked while watching this that John Carpenter learnt that Halloween and “Sam Hain” were Irish and was just leaning into it more and more as the series went on, though Jen informed me that his only creative involvement in this one was the soundtrack. I do appreciate the accurate representation of the Irish as demon worshoppers who put bugs in people though, even though I do not like the film as a whole. Also there’s not fucking witch.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 ★☆☆☆☆
Well that was fucking stupid.
All You Need Is Death ★☆☆☆☆
The premise of this film involves someone archiving old trad songs and coming across a song that is cursed. This is a decent idea for a horror film. For some insane reason they tried to sex this idea up a bit by not making the protagonists just ordinary researchers or archivists or anything but clandestine sean-nós dealers operating in a black market. This is played with complete stone-faced seriousness and portrayed as someone being a dangerous, underground operation. I was somewhat in awe of this and it could have been very funny if the rest of the film was not so shite. I don’t have much to say about the rest of the film. It’s not good. Character motivations and relationships to dramatically shift suddenly without much setup. The film seems to think it’s implying a lot more than it actually is. I don’t even want to talk about the gender stuff with the singer’s son.
Evil Dead II ★★★☆☆
I never saw the first one so it starting with a weird fast recap of the first movie is good I guess but I would have been very confused if @JenHeadJen had not explained that to me as we were watching as it is weirdly jarring how it rushes through things. But this movie was really fun. The slapstick is good and the effects look great.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) ★★★★☆
Good-ass movie. I could nitpick the mechanics of people being replaced being a bit confusing but mostly this is just a cool movie. I
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) ★★★★☆
Also really good. I think I might prefer the original slightly, but it is only a slight preference. Ignoring the tacked-on framing device to justify a sudden happy ending, I do prefer how the ’50s movie introduces itself, with Bennell coming back to town where people have already been replaced, hearing people talking about their loved ones disappearing and not believing them. Things already in place and unsettling and he can’t see it, versus the ’70s movie showing someone close to Driscoll getting replaced immediately. The people in the ’70s one are also much more obviously behaving weirdly. I really do like the tension in the ’50s one of the swapped people still behaving outwardly pretty normal and their loved ones just insisting that they aren’t.
They movies do converge plotwise more as they go on and the ’70s one does have Jeff Goldblum and Spock in it so that’s cool. It also looks really good. The effects are great. Well, other than the dog man face thing. I didn’t even parse initially that it was meant to be anything other than a dog in a mask, becuase it is clearly just a dog in a mask. I also don’t like the reworking of the dog scare bit to be a moment of disgust rather than a moment of empathy.
Love Lies Bleeding ★★★★☆
Gay gay homosexual gay.
The Foley artist was uncomfortably good at their job at points.
Hundreds of Beavers ★★★☆☆
Hundreds of them.
Morbius ★☆☆☆☆
I have seen this film like three or four times now for stupid joke reasons it’s so bad and so boring.
Madame Web ★☆☆☆☆
This was probably worse than Morbius but it was often bad in much funnier ways than Morbius so that is a positive. Contender for worst film I’ve ever seen but perhaps only because Children of the Corn 666 was so boring I couldn’t actually pay attention to it and I am not sure if I should actually count as having seen that.
It immediately feels like Morbius 2 with the opening of a woman studying spiders in the Peruvian jungle and the vibes do not stop as we meet and get to know our awfully written and unlikeable main character. She sucks so much. She is a selfish, thoughtless woman who is petty and snarky to even the people she supposedly likes. And it’s honestly kind of amazing that none of that comes across as misogynstic? She is a prick but she is a prick in similar ways to a lot of male characters are. It does not feel like she is falling into shrewish or bitch female stereotypes. Feminism win!
The main plot of the movie involves her getting visions of bad things that are about to happen and we see this as entire sceens playing twice, with her asking people why they keep repeating things and she is so slow on the fucking update about this. It is infuriating.
Eventually she starts seeing visions of three girls getting murdered by an evil Spiderman she sort of kidnaps them to save them from him. She ends up driving them out of New York City and then suddenly they are in the woods. She tells them to wait there while she gets food and then DRIVES BACK TO HER FLAT IN THE MIDDLE OF NEW YORK TO CHECK HER MAM’S SPIDER RESEARC NOTES AND JUST LEAVES THEM THERE FOR HOURS UNTIL IT GETS DARK. When she comes back and find that they have wandered into a diner that was like twenty seconds away from where they were in the woods she gives out to them for not staying put IN THE WOODS IN THE DARK WHERE SHE LEFT THEM WHILE SHE DROVE BACK INTO THE MIDDLE OF NEW YORK.
Evil Spiderman can’t be called that because they don’t have the rights to anything directly involving Spiderman by the way, so we get the most incredibly awkward lines around it. The closest thing he gets to a title is fucking Ceiling Guy and one moment where a character goes “he was like some sort of spider.......... person.” Uncle Ben’s famous line is rendered as “when you take on the responsibility, great power will come” which is not said by him but another random character who has apparently been waiting in the forest in Peru for thirty years waiting for Cassandra (Cassandra is the main character’s name by the way) to show up. Ben is in the movie, or at least a character named Ben who we cannot legally say is related to Peter Parker. Peter Parker, or at least a baby who is implied to be Peter Parker but they cannot legally use that name, is born during this movie. It is set in 2003 purely so that they can pretend that it is a prequel to the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies even though they cannot legally mention anything from them.
Oh yeah, by the way, the bit about the guy waiting in Peru? The pacing of this movie is ridiculous. Most of the plot is trying to avoid being hunted down by Ceiling Guy and hiding the three girls from him. This is really dangerous because he has a generic evil hacker woman working for him who can monitor every CCTV camera in New York and run facial recognition software against all of them live to hunt them down even though this is set in 2003. He can also monitor and hijack all the police radio calls and track people’s phones. He knows who all of the main characters are and is monitoring for their faces constantly. Cass also has a warrant out for her arrest because she has been blamed for kidnapping the three girls. Anyway, in the middle of this Cassandra flies to Peru without him noticing.
In Peru Cass learns the origin of her and Ceiling Guy’s magic spider powers and the tragic backstory of her mother who died giving birth to her but who she thinks hated her for some reason. This is resolved when she has a vision of her mother in hospital pregnant with her where the doctor says that Cass is going to be born with a neuromuscular disorder to which Cass immediately says my favourite line of the movie: “but I don’t have a neuromuscular disorder” and then realises that her mother went to Peru to get bitten by a magic spider to heal her of her neuromuscular disorder she never knew she had and realises her mother loves her. Ceiling Guy also got his spider powers from the same spiders.
Speaking of actually, Ceiling Guy can also see the future, but only one specific thing: He dreams every night of him being killed by three future spider-women, who are the three girls who he is trying to hunt down and kill. So you might think that this is going to be an ironic self fullfilling prophecy where him trying to hunt them down and kill him before they kill him is what leads to his death in the first place? No. I mean it is what leads to him dying at the end of the movie but his death at the end of the movie is completely and utterly different to the vision. So they were going to kill him anyway but he did successfully change the future by trying to kill him but he only changed it so they killed him sooner. Great.
Also at the start of the movie he only knows them from the dream so when they find the girls initially through the facial recognition stuff it is only through like versions of their faces they created from his memory of the dreams. But the woman doing all the evil hacking stuff is then surprised at how young they are in the model. But didn’t you programme them from his descriptions??? So how did he describe them that made such a perfect match for them without describing them as teenagers????
This movie is so bad in so many ways and they all interconnect to make an intricate spiderweb of awfulness.
The fact that Cass’ main weapon against Ceiling Guy is knowing where is going to be because of future vision and then just running him over with a car repeatedly is funny though.
The Wizard ★★☆☆☆
Y’know an hour and a half long ad for the NES could have been a lot worse.
Furiosa ★★★☆☆
God I wished I liked this film a lot more but I couldn’t shake the feeling throughout the entire thing that I would just rather be watching Fury Road again instead. A lot of the stuff it does also just makes the world feel smaller. Apparently the four locations shown or mentioned in Fury Road are the only places of import in the entire world. Nothing exists beyond them.
Spiral (1998) ★★☆☆☆
I... enjoyed this film rewatching it? Rubbish sequel to Ring, though. Like the plot is ridiculous and has all the problems from the book its based on and has the extra problem of being a sequel to a much better movie that was not trying to be a faithful adapation.
Trigun: Badlands Rumble ★★☆☆☆
It was fine.
Bodies Bodies Bodies ★★★☆☆
I think it’s good that those people died.
Bound ★★★☆☆
The sex scene was a lot more explicit than I expected.
Sadako 3D ★☆☆☆☆
I have this on my media server along with all the other Ring movies. Girlfriend put it on as a joke and then I just said okay and left it play. She did this to herself. I have taken in so much of this shit I am immune to it.
Ring ★★★★☆
I did show her the good one afterwards.
Arrival ★★☆☆☆
I was expecting this one to be better. I dunno I can’t think of much to say.
Some Like it Hot ★★★☆☆
Daphne is still trans. Giving it a bit of a lower score on rewatch, though. I was enamoured by it but it is a movie that is mostly just very densely packed with very mediocre jokes and callbacks.
Wild Zero ★★★★☆
Showed this and some other movies to friends over (many) drinks. Very fun night.
Rainbow War ★★★☆☆
This is just fucking Splatoon.
Pink Flamingos ★★☆☆☆
At the same party we started watching this put turned it off due to the animal cruelty. Big warning for that if you were thinking of watching this yourself along with a bunch of others you can look up yourself I guess. This is a shock movie and I knew that but did not realise how much of one it was till we put it on. It is still endearing in some ways but there is a lot to look past.
House (1977) ★★★★☆
Last movie of the night ended up being this instead. 🍌
Turning Red ★★☆☆☆
Cute movie.
Silent Hill: Revelation ★☆☆☆☆
Sean Bean’s attempt at an American accent is entertaining at least.
Loafers ★★★☆☆
Local no budget documentary about the local gay bar that closed before I realised I was queer. Nice thing to get to see.
The People’s Joker ★★★★☆
Finally I can rewatch this and also show it to friends. I thought I would be less enthused on it on a rewatch but no this rules.
Don’t Look Up/Joyû-rei ★★☆☆☆
Kind of shocking how much of an improvement Ring was over this movie, but it makes an interesting point of comparison.
Kneecap ★★☆☆☆
Was hoping this would be better but I’m glad it exists.
Alien: Romulus ★★☆☆☆
Seemed like it might have had some kind of point to it or like opinions as a piece of art early on but then seems to just play the hits of the Alien series, but at least it does that well.
Suit Hung. Tied Tongue. ★★☆☆☆
An interesting movie but disappointingly vague in how it sketches the politics of the story. Also the faux-documentary structure tends to linger too long on people saying basically the same thing as each other in different words too much.
Breakfast on Pluto ★★★☆☆
Incredible to think that all of this happened to Oppenheimer.
It Follows ★☆☆☆☆
Whatever
I Saw the TV Glow ★★★★★
I felt like I couldn’t breath for two days after watching this. Fuck. I do have some criticism, in particular it feels like it takes a while for anything to really happen. There is only so much of a kid being moody and miserable I can take before I need an actual plot. But also when I was watching it the first time I had a headache and needed to piss the whole time so that was certainly affecting how absorbed I could get early on. But when it kicks off. Fuck. I do need to rewatch it.
Fatal Deviation ★★★☆☆
You killed my son. Now I'm going to kill you just like I killed your father.
You killed my father. Now I'm going to kill you just like I killed your son.
Ring 0: Birthday ★★★☆☆
Fuck I forgot that this movie is actually really good. I don’t love the end of the movie but it’s not awful and everything leading up to it works so well.
