The Penguin (2024)

Colin Farrell is back under heavy prosthetics to play Oswald Cobblepot, Gotham gangster from 2022's The Batman. The first episode picks up 1 week after that film, where Gotham is recovering from the Riddler's flooding and crime families are re-organizing.

Oswald isn't a top-dog here. He's a hot-head and he makes mistakes. He wants respect and he's ready to take it. He plays it really well, keeping you rooting for him even when he's clearly an asshole. We'll see if he retains that Tony Soprano-like quality as the series plays out.

Fortunately, this wont be some dumb superhero garbage. This is a grounded crime story, and producers assure us that Batman wont even be in it. Weird move, but I think it'll work, given the show's R-rated tone. Who needs Batman around to ruin the fun? Penguin isn't afraid to get his hands dirty, and that's what we all want here, right? The bad guys are always more interesting than the heroes.

Promising start. I'll keep watching...

Best double album

Triggered cause Im listening to Physical Graffiti atm "the rover" which rocks, others on the album not so much (kasmir, in the light excepted)
I'm gonna give it some thought
I've been listening to the album years podcast and they say they nearly all are better as a single album, yes I agree mostly (obviously quadrophenia or the wall not)

What say yous?

October Challenge 2024 - RESULTS

Congrats to everyone who completed the challenge , yours not included (yeah I blame half term school holidays falling in the last week). Extra well done to Troma for getting the most viewings in. Also big 🙄 to zed for yet again not being arsed to tally up his viewings/points.

RESULTS:

Troma - 80 (55)
Ballz - 68 (39)
Deferenz - 57 (50)
Nicko - 56 (20)
Box - 49 (25)
ebossert - 44 (16)
jimb - 43 (39)
Conditioned - 43 (18)
Shroud - 39 (24)
Trigger - 38 (32)
Brett - 31 (18)
------------
Onyx - 29 (8)
Ninja - 28 (23)
Markus - 26 (15)
zed ? (?)

What was your favourite FTV and what was your least favourite? Comment below!

my wacko nutsack


I laughed about it with the great monkey fondler, of course by laughing god has cursed me with the same affliction.
I tell you my penis has a strip on it now.

It didn't used to this is untoward

Steven Seagal's COMEBACK

Here's some dumb AI generated garbage. God, I wish this was a real movie. It could be the next Amazing Bulk if it gets made. I am now a fan of AI. Make it happen Skynet.

Hey people. I'm back.

I know it's been a long time. I've just been really busy. So what's new?

Cannibal Girls (1973): coincidence or real HGL tribute?

It was only after I have seen the above movie that it was directed by Ivan Reitman. That name sounded familiar but I had to look him up where I had seen him before. Many fans of the 80s blockbuster Ghostbusters would have felt insulted not putting the link but hell I don't care. Ghostbusters is some cheesy horror comedy which I personally cannot really appreciate and I'm really being nice here. I won't go on a tirade how overrated and trash (in the bad or boring sense of the word as I like trash movies) but it's hard to believe that Reitman would have made a decade earlier a movie that is so vastly different. Despite that Cannibal Girls is labeled as a comedy horror there hardly is anything to laugh about and has a serious dark tone. Plus it felt to me like a tribute to the horror movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Story in short a young hippie couple spends their honeymoon in a sleepy town. There isn't really anything to do and their car was in for repairs but the nice lady of the motel they are staying at tells them about a story of 3 young girls that lived in a remote house luring men in the house and their beds to end up eventually as food. So yes the girls were cannibals. But that happened long ago and the place had become a neat restaurant worth checking out. And that's what the couple does without spoiling things go from bad to worse as the place is a restaurant but the cannibal girls are still there...

Coming to the HGL tribute part. There is a certain Two Thousand Maniacs vibe as the inhabitants seem to be welcoming to visitors but don't like snooping around. They also do their best for the couple not to leave town even the phone company and public services are minimal in their "services". There is a bus once a day that can take you to another town but that might be a lie. The sheriff who is not that nice to them reminded me nevertheless of the Maniacs mayor as he would make sure they didn't do anything funny and has 2 nasty boys to keep visitors in line (like Lester and Rufus but a bit more violent in their ways to persuade).

Further the restaurant owner who calls himself 'reverend' is almost a copy paste of Montag the Magnificent aka the Wizard of Gore in the way he dresses, acts, speaks and even the hypnosis is there. It's way too obvious Reitman got his inspiration from this character. The biggest difference is that his victims are not women but men. Yes that's right women do not have to fear anything as only visiting males end up as a dish on dinner tables. Meat at the butcher's is not likely to come from animals. The Blood Feast reference is more than obvious. I wouldn't go as far as calling the movie feminist as men still rule the place but they do worship women in a rather extreme way not only sparing them from the fate foreign men will but also persuade them to join their little cannibal cult. It's hard to understand that the same director would pretty much make a u turn and make Ghostbusters rather misogynist mostly thanks to Bill Murray's annoying character.

Finally in the cannibal house we have also a grunting imbecile character a guy more beast than human called Bunker. And there we have our Gruesome Twosome reference as well Bunker reminding us as Rodney doing the dirty job. The nice motel lady could be seen as Mrs Pringles.

For all fans of HGL flicks it's worth checking out. And it's a turkey so that's a possibility for this challenge.

Trap (2024)

Several of us have already talked about this in the shout box. But I just wanted to mention something that I found confusing.

Josh Hartnett (AKA Cooper) saw an old lady in at least three scenes. I was unclear, watching the movie, about exactly what the hell was supposed to be going on there. After consulting the oracles of Reddit, and of Quora, and the comments sections under some YT videos, I think I get it now. It does make sense, I guess I just had some kind of mental block against seeing it, or perhaps, of course, I'm just an idiot.

Basically, I think she was supposed to be Cooper's hallucination of his (probably deceased) mother. She doesn't talk in her first couple of appearances, but eventually she does talk. She is just sort of a haunting prresence who gives Cooper at least one LOOK that is rather baleful, right after he gives that poor girl who worked at the concession stand horrifying burns from the explosion in the fryolator. Wow, fryolator really is a word, according to Google, I'm surprised that that word was in my head...

Anyway, the old lady I'm talking about was supposed to be Cooper's hallucination of his mom, I'm pretty sure.

I am not, by the way, talking about the old lady who is prominent in the FBI/police sting operation devoted to capturing Cooper. She is a different old lady.

I thought possibly that Cooper's mom had at some point gone back to school and actually become an FBI profiler, just because of her scary experiences with Cooper when he was a child. I was mixing the two old ladies up, and attributing statements made by or about each of them to the other of the two.

Anyway. Yah. I just wanted to share that. It's a really good movie, IMHO, if you haven't seen it I do recommend it. M. Night Shyamalan was clearly trying to help his daughter out with her career, but I don't really care about that. I think you should be able to just enjoy the movie anyway, whatever you think about him possibly being nepotistic. Just try to keep your thoughts on those two topics separate, if possible.

OK, that's my two cents.

The F13 Franchise

I was just thinking today, it sucks so much that that franchise has been stuck in legal limbo, or whatever the hell is going on, for so long. We could have had... I don't know, maybe ten or fifteen more sequels, over the years, if people had just stopped the legal bullshit.

Those movies aren't even supposed to be very good, that's part of why they're fun. Fans could and would probably have churned out even more than fifteen sequels, like, say, three or four movies a year, if there hadn't been so much copyright law or intellectual property law or whatever the bleep the problem is.

I realize, the genre has moved in other directions, with demonic curses on families, haunted houses, demonic possessions, evil dolls, etc. But it would have been fun if the F13 movies hadn't been throttled by law and corporate crap.

I don't know. I'm just venting. Had to share.

Rawhead Rex (1986)

First of all, everyone go read shadow-345's posts about this movie. I wouldn't have watched it if not for his posts. I'm gonna try to watch it again soon, by the way, because it was very late in my time zone when I watched it and I was dozing off by the end.

Having said that, I basically liked it. The monster (supposed to be an ancient pagan deity actually, if I got that right) seems to be intended to represent a sort of combination of berserker barbarian fury and sheer (raw?) animal power. He is disturbed from his rest beneath an ancient menhir in a field by a bunch of farmers, and things basically go way the hell downhill after that, for the people in the town.

Just quickly, a few movies that it made me think of include Lair of the White Worm (1988), The Green Man starring Albert Finney from 1990, The Guardian (not the 2006 Kevin Costner movie, but the 1990 Jenny Seagrove movie), and the books about Corum by Michael Moorcock. Also, it made me think of Conan a little, only because of the Crom stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crom_(fictional_deity)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crom_Cruach

Also, something about the monster kept making me think of Victor Crowley in Hatchet. Just the style of violence, the sense of brute force and power, the general shape of his body maybe... hard to explain.

So anyway, yeah, an enormous ancient pre-Christian, pre-Roman era, pre-literacy savage god/monster gets awakened, and wreaks havoc. You get the idea. There is one hell of a body count in this movie, I'll give it points for that. There are even more kills if you count the people killed by a guy who is sort of Rawhead's henchman or servant... he falls under the spell of Rawhead and is responsible for a few deaths.

I thought the main character guy added a lot to it, the actor, David Dukes, took it seriously and did a good job. His character was basically following clues and piecing together the story of what the hell Rawhead was. They could have had him be a journalist or a detective, but they made him an historian researching a book. That worked for me. He kept reminding me of Kirsty's father in Hellraiser: basically a good guy, loves his family and takes an interest in them, etc. I wonder if Clive Barker drew both characters from someone he knew? For some reason they seem very similar to me.

So, yeah, in some ways it's not super high quality but I liked it anyway. Just the general mid-80's Irish/British ambience of the times is kInd of cool, it made me think of Local Hero and Threads.

ok, THAT'S ALL i CAN THINK OF TO SAY RIGHT NOW. Oops, frigging caps lock. If anyone can recommend similar movies, books, or short stories about roughly similar topics, and ancient Celtic or other pre-literacy gods, demigods, spirits or monsters returning to life in modern Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, Cornwall, etc, I would be interested in that. It doesn't necessarily have to have any carnage, by the way, I just like the idea of the remote past suddenly rearing its ugly head and becoming unwelcomely relevant in modern people's lives.