Tuesday 10 October 2017

Its movie time!!!

Eeh by gum, been a long while since I put anything on here, so I thought I'd dust the place off a bit and have a natter about some films I've been watching recently, mostly courtesy of the Horror Channel.

So, In no particular order.....




(Theatrical poster 2011)

Five semi-naked young women decide to go for a long nature ramble in the British countryside (you know, that place where wearing nothing but short shorts, bikini tops, fashion wellies and having little to no field craft skills is a really good idea.) . Inevitably, they meet up with some love interests and eventually some psychos then the blood and depravity starts etc etc etc.

A predictable formulaic film filled with bad acting and bad dialogue but manages to have half decent gore effects and a fairly interesting plot twist.

4/10



(Release poster 2014)

Sometime in the future humans are at war with some aliens that definitely don't look like Xenomorphs from the "Alien" franchise and some shit goes down that leaves most women infertile or something, and then a special forces team escorting one of the few fertile women gets chased by the aliens (who are seemingly indestructible) into some kind of forgotten underground complex which consists soully of increasingly narrowing tunnels and pipes, so the team has to "crawl or die".

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what the point of this film is supposed to be, as it contains little to no dialogue, but manages to contain loads of grunting from the main character, as well as many, many close ups of her face and as she slowly strips down until she is wearing nothing more than a sports bra, bikini bottoms and knee length high heeled go go boots (military issue go go boots?, the future is fucked) , close up shots of her arse and camel toe. Its pointless mentioning any of the other characters, as they get killed off one by one by the aliens chasing them, but the films entire plot consists of the go go boot wearing "hero" crawling through a series of increasingly small and invariably dirt filled tunnels and pipes before she finally escapes the complex.
Somebody must have been on something when they came up with this idea.

2/10 - Only because the arse in question is quite nice to look at.



 (Theatrical poster 2007)

A mans wife is murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion, and the only clue is a mysterious ventriloquists dummy that was delivered to their house only a few hours before. He returns to his childhood home to organise her funeral and to try and unravel the mystery of what happened, but finds that a supernatural curse has come calling to collect on an old debt.

Yeah, this is actually a GOOD film, with an interesting story and an unexpected plot twist at the end.

7/10


(Theatrical poster 1958)
A scientist meddles with things he does not understand and ends up in a horrible predicament.

Considering this film is considered a classic, and one of the first examples of the "body horror" genre, I had never actually seen it until the other day, and I can't say I was terribly impressed.
Even for the time, the story pacing is slow and somewhat dull, with the real "action" not happening until near the end of the film.
Despite being classed as one of Vincent Prices definitive horror roles, his part in the film is pretty minimal and not exactly pivotal, which leads me to believe he was cast to merely be a "big name" in the film. David Hedison (who later played Captain Crane in Voyage to the bottom of the sea) does a fairly competent job as the scientist who gets in over his head (literally) but other than that I cant really say much about this decidedly average film.

5/10
(VHS/DVD cover 1999)
This TV Movie tells the story of the microcomputer revolution, focusing mainly on the fortunes of the Apple company and its main players in the form of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, with Bill Gates and Microsoft's humble beginnings being thrown in there for good measure.

The film does take some liberties with actual events, but, unlike some of the more modern films made just after Steve Jobs' death in 2011, the liberties taken do not deviate from the true story that much.
Noah Wyle does a magnificent job of portraying Jobs as being the vain and egotistical asshole that he was, and Anthony Michael Hall pulls off a good performance in the role of Bill Gates as the sneaky, calculating but ultimately more skilled businessman that he is.
Being as it was made in 1999, the film ends before the Apple company saw a resurgence in its fortunes with the introduction of the "iSOMETHING" series of products, but manages to portray all events up to and including the launch, and subsequent failure, of the Macintosh series of computers and the fallout between the Steve's when Woz finally tires of Jobs' egotistical nature.

8/10
(Promotional poster 2009)
A TV movie made by the BBC, in a similar vein to "Pirate of Silicon Valley", Micro Men charts the course of the fortunes of the British Microcomputer industry, starting in the late 70s and ultimately ending in the late 80s.
Clive Sinclair (as he was known until receiving a knighthood in 1983) started off the 70s with the successful invention and marketing of small, affordable pocket calculators, however his subsequent inventions of a digital watch (the "Black Watch") and a pocket television set (the "Microvision") both end up being unsuccessful, mainly due to the technology not being sufficiently advanced enough and the products not being quality assured very well. after the windup of Sinclair Radionics, Sinclair begins a new business venture in the form of Sinclair computers, a business that he had dispatched his long time friend Chris Curry to set up for him under the name of "Science of Cambridge" to test market a small computer kit called the Mk14.
Curry however, seeing that Clive intends to completely take control over this new company and thus ignore all the work done and possibly profitable ideas he envisaged, promptly jumps ship and sets up his own rival business in the form of Acorn Computers.
With the Microcomputer boom of the early 80s, both companies see a massive amount of success, however short sightedness, hubris and both men's unwillingness to live in the here and now see both Sinclair and Acorns fortunes take a dramatic downturn in the late 80s, with both companies being sold off to other, more successful business concerns, leaving both Sinclair and Curry more or less back where they started.

This film is really, really good. Armstrong and Freeman do magnificent jobs of portraying their characters, and the films use of 80s music(so memorable that the BBC actually released the films soundtrack in music store) really tops off this fine piece of historical high-jinks. although some liberties are taken with the time line of events and recreations of such, they don't take it too far off the tracks.

9/10
  







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