I love me a good zombie movie. We Bury the Dead is a very good, if not particularly original, zombie movie. Daisy Ridley stars as a woman who goes to Australia, where some kind of massive bioweapon was released, killing almost everyone but leaving a few in a zombie-like state. She’s there to help with the cleanup but also to find her husband, who she hopes is still alive (even if he is a zombie). It is a pretty slow-moving film, but I dug it. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
I feel like every time I talk about silent films, I note that I still struggle with watching them. I guess it is an evergreen statement because I keep watching them, and I keep having a difficult time with them. The Thief of Bagdad is a classic filled with stunning visuals and a spectacle-filled story. But I’d be lying if I didn’t have to keep focusing my attention on it because my mind kept wandering off. Still, it is a great movie, and you can read my review here.
Death Ship is one of those movies that kept showing up in my feeds. Every time I went looking for a horror movie to watch, there it was. It looked fun, but I kept putting it off. Then the Blu-ray landed in my lap, and here we are. It isn’t a particularly good movie, and for a movie about Nazi ghosts on a death ship, it is rather dull for its first half, but things do pick up, and it becomes pretty fun in its back half. And it has George Kennedy in it, and that’s never a bad thing. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
Kill Me Again is an overlooked neo-noir gem. Val Kilmer stars as a down-on-his-luck private eye (is there any other kind?) who is hired by a sexy femme fatale (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) to kill her. Well, not really kill her, but make it look like somebody did and thus keep her abusive boyfriend from looking for her.
Naturally, she is lying, and things get complicated in lots of interesting ways. It is by no means a perfect film, but it is a very good one, and it is nice to see it on Blu-ray. You can read my full review here.
I talk a lot about Shaw Brothers Studio in these pages, but there was another Hong Kong studio that was knocking out kung fu movies around the same time – Golden Harvest. I tend to think of them as second-rate to Shaw Brothers, and that isn’t really fair. They made some good movies, and Shaw Brothers made some atrocious ones. I’ve just seen more Shaw Brothers films so I think that makes me lean more towards them.
The Angry River was Golden Harvest’ very first film, and it’s a good one. It is also the debut film of Angela Mao, who would become a big deal in Hong Kong cinema. 88 Films just released it on Blu-ray, and you can read my review at Cinema Sentries.
I love discovering new movies, new actors, and new directors. There is something wonderful about watching a film and finding a new artist to follow. Back in April I got a set of films from French director Yves Boisset. I’d never heard of him, but I dove into the films and really liked him. Now I’ll be seeking him out. That’s kind of awesome. You can read my review of the set at Cinema Sentries.
I’m fascinated with franchises that never really took off. Like a movie gets made, and the studio expects there will be sequels and spin-offs, but the first film bombs, and so nothing comes of it. Remo Williams is titled The Adventure Begins…but it also ended there because the film bombed and there wasn’t a sequel.
That’s too bad, too, because this film is a lot of fun. Fred Ward stars as Remo Williams, who actually isn’t Remo Williams but a NYC police officer who gets into a scrape and has his face and name changed to Remo Williams to help out a super secret government agency. He’s like James Bond but dumber and less cool. Which pretty much sums up the film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
Radiance Films continues to put out fantastic sets of really good, and rather obscure films from all over the universe. I seem to be watching a lot of their releases of 1970s-era Italian films, and I’m loving it.
Confessions of a Police Captain is a gritty tale of murder, corruption, and a man who wants to change things. Martin Balsam is a corrupt cop who does something bad, and Franco Nero is the prosecutor trying to make things right. It is a great film and this is a great release from Radiance. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.
This is a fun little sci-fi flick from director Gore Verbinski, who hadn’t made a film in nearly a decade. You can read my full review here.
And yes I’m not saying much about it here. I have a terrible sinus headache but I want to keep posting all the stuff I’ve written at Cinema Sentries on this pages.
Exploitation films seem so strange through a modern lens. By design, those films are filled with excessive violence, sex, and nudity, things that are often frowned upon today. I loved those films as a younger person, mostly because of those excesses. I love them as a much older person, but I’m much more understanding of the arguments against such things. Still, there is something wonderfully entertaining about films that take things to the extreme.
The title and cover art of So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious…make it sound like nothing but dumb exploitation cinema. In truth, it mostly is exactly that. This is a film loaded with gratuitous nudity, and yet it is surprisingly tender and interesting. I’m not necessarily even against films that are just exploitative and offer nothing else, but I find it fascinating when they do attempt something more.
This is by no means a great film, but it is an interesting one. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.
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