Tag Archives: Sunday NIght Movie

Sunday Night Movie: Dog Soldiers

So a while back I was working on a werewolf short story, A Taste Of Tears and Blood, (If fact my writing page horribly out of date indicates that is my current project) and as part of my research I was watching all sorts of werewolf films.

One film I put on the Netflix queue but never got around to seeing as part of the research was Dog Soldiers from 2002. This weekend I had is shipped from Netflix and my sweetie-wife and I watched it early Sunday evening. (I was unable to watch a film later by myself as it my habit because I was so terribly exhausted.) I was a little surprised when my sweetie-wife expressed an interest in the film, gory violent horror film are not her usual cup of tea. She is much more attracted to projects based upon the actors and the nationality of the production. This film had an actor she very much like to follow, Sean Pertwee, son of Dr Who actor Jon Pertwee.

This film was written, produced, directed and edited by Neil Marshall, who has gone to direct such movies as The Decent and Doomsday. If you like or hate Dog Soldiers it’s really just one man’s fault.

Personally I really liked Dog Soldiers, much more than I had expected. The direct was quite aware of his limited budget and knew the limitations of his production. He stayed very much inside those limitation rather than attempting cheap and cheesy digital effects like we see when we’re inflicted with SyFy.

The story is about a fix man army squad that had been dropped into the highlands of Scotland on a routine training mission. The squad is led able veteran Sgt harry Wells (Sean Pertwee) with the capable assistance of Private Cooper (Kevin McKidd of ROME) a young man recently bounced from Special Forces training for ethical reasons. The squad quickly find themselves in serious trouble when they are confronted with a werewolf pack and all the squad is armed with is blanks.

There is one wonderfully British moment when the squad has found temporary safety, and Cooper temporarily in command is ordering men to do this and do that to secure the building and orders the last man to ‘put a kettle on, we can all do with a cup.’

My biggest quibbles with the film is occasionally the characters posses superhuman capabilities and survive the sort of events no human being has any business surviving. That said the film transcends these fault by having neat and interesting characters, a nicely thought out premise, and a relentlessness about the doomed  situation the characters find themselves in. I was disappointed that the Blu-ray disc did not have any bonus feature on it.  I searched on line fro a collectors edition or some such, but none was to be found.

Surprisingly the gore in this film was restrained. There was lots of blood thrown about, but only a few shots of graphic violence. Again I think this was a function of the director understanding his limitations and using them to his advantage rather then foolishly ignoring them

I look forward to seeing more movie from Mr Neil Marshall.

Share

Sunday Night Movie: The Wicker Man (1973)

Last night I was in the mood for something darker and yet fantastic, so I settled on the original film, The Wicker Man, made in 1973. (Let’s make this clear NOT the remake staring Nicholas Cage.)

This is a film I first heard about when I watched the Academy of Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror’s televised award broadcast in 1979. To give you an idea of their commitment to horror they are the ones who unleashed William Shatner’s — interpretation — of Rocket Man upon this world.  Anywho, that year they award the Best Horror film award for 1978 to The Wicker Man. (I guess horror is such a thin field you gotta let a film five years old compete.) So a few months later I got a chance to see this movie in HBO and it blew my little mind. Continue reading →

Share

Sunday Night Movie(s):Dracula’s Daughter & Son Of Dracula

So on Saturday the Fedex man brought me my newest addition to my growing DVD and Blu-Rau collection; Dracula The Legacy Collection.

For those not in the know, from the 30’s through the 50’s Universal was know for its horror films. In 1931 they produced and released Frankenstein and set the tropes that would be used in retelling that story for the rest of the century. Several years ago they began releasing their classic  horror films in Legacy boxed sets. Each set containing the Classic film from Universal in that franchise. The Dracula: Legacy collection has five films in all, I had only seen two of those so when I got the chance to buy the Legacy Collection for just $12 I jumped at it.

Dracula’s Daughter (1936) picks up exactly where Dracula left off. Two police constables come down to the cellar of Carfax abbey and find Renfeld dead at the foot of the stairs, Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan reprising his role) kindly points them towards the body of Dracula and confesses to staking the man. Naturally the police are skeptical about the whole hie was a vampire defense and arrest Van Helsing.

The plot continues with Van Helsing and his friend Dr Garth struggling to find some way to save Van Helsing from the gallows while remaining true to the truth. Their job is made easier when Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) appears on the scene and starts munching on necks. in this story however we have an unwilling vampire, the Countess wants to be free of her curse and believes that Dr garth has the secret to freeing her. However the Countess’s human servant — the best vampires have one — Sandor (Irving Pichel) is convinced that there is no release.

This turned out to be a better movie than I had expected. the story had a few twists and I really enjoyed the fact that you could splice it together with Dracula’s and there would not be a moments’s continuity gaff.

In the evening — I had watched Dracula’s Daughter in the afternoon — I watched the next in the series Son Of Dracula (1943).

This film I had more interest, but lower expectations for. Unlike Hammer Studios, Universal was not seeking a way to raise the Count for each film and in this one another lost relative of the famous vampire turns up. This time the charming and suave eurotrash vampire is played by Lon Chaney jr.  This is some of the worst casting ever. Please just go ahead and put Arnold Schwarzenegger in a musical if you want to equal this terrible casting. Lon Chaney jr had no ability at voices or accents and it not credible an in fashion as a Hungarian prince.

Surprisingly, I kind of like this movie and wish it had not been hampered by inadequate  direction and moronic casting.

A european count, Alucard (Lon Chaney jr), has come to live in a Bayou town at the invitation of a plantation owner’s daughter, Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton.) People are suspicious as Katherine is not acting like herself. Upon the mysterious death of the plantation owner, Katherine inherits the land and bring in Alucard as her husband. Cheesing off her fiancée, Frank Stanley (Robert Page) to the point iof murder. Slowly the counts true name is learned — cause spelling your name backwards just won’t fool Americans a young and vital race — and it falls upon men of learning to battle the demon spawn again.

What made this film particularly interesting is I think it might have been the first time in film we saw a character who wanted to become a vampire. That here might be the genesis of the rock and roll vampire. It’s good to live forever and party all night even if you have to die to achieve it.

Share

Sunday Night Movie: The Sword and The Sorcerer

So last night I was in the mood for something fantastic. By that I do not mean something of such tremendous quality that decades later people ares till amazed with the filmmaking, but rather in the mood for a film that dealt with a fantastic premise.

Thanks to my new nifty database program, I was able to sort the movies by time, I was looking for something under one hours fifty minutes, and then I just scanned the titles until I saw something that struck my fancy.

So The Sword And The Sorcerer is a fantasy film that came out in 1982 about the same time that Conan: The Barbarian was released into theaters. While Conan was a big budget film, 20 million dollars, which grossed nearly 40 million dollars domestically, The Sword And The Sorcerer was a much more modest production. Reportedly The Sword and The Sorcerer was made for the price of a single set on Conan: The Barbarian, and yet it still gross 39 million dollars domestically as well. Clearly the better return on investment went with the little film that could. Continue reading →

Share

Sunday Night Movie: 2012

So being a fan os disaster movies, and to a somewhat lesser degree a fan of disastrous movies, withe the release of 2012 on Blu-ray I had to make that movie my Sunday Night Movie this week. (before anyone thinks I slipped a cam and actually bought the Blu-ray, I ordered it via Netflix.  That’s one of the reasons I have Netflix, so I can see movies I would not ordinarily pay for.)

As I have said in other posts I thin Roland Emmerich is in a race with Michael Bay as to who can make more stupid movie. After Michael Bay raised the stakes with Transformers : Revenge Of The Fallen, Emmerich had no option but to go all in with 2012.

Like all really classy disaster movies this one has a diverse cast from all sorts of walks of life caught up in the disaster. They struggle to survive, many failing and ending up in either noble moving deaths if they were likable characters, or ironic fitting deaths if they were jerks. There isn’t a single surprise in this entire films save for the level of stupid.

For example, the scene picture above. Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) failed writer whose HARDBACK book sold less than 500 copies (a face many people know in the film, no matter how divorced those characters may be from the publishing business.) is running to catch the plane with his ex-wife, two kids, and their new step-dad in order to escape the eruption of the super volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park. Behind the character is the slowest pyroclastic flow in the recorded history of vulcanology. In real life this effect can have speeds up to 750 km/hour. Jackson has managed to outrun the bit of disaster in an old RV. Crashed the RV into a fissure from the eruption, climb out of the fissure, chase down the plane with family et al aboard, and still manage to escape the deadly winds, pressure, and temperatures of up to 1000 degrees C. Now to paraphrase Morbius from Forbidden Planet: Prepare your minds for a new scale of stupidity values. What I just describe was the most CREDIBLE disaster/action/escape sequence in the whole film.

I laughed my way, and I mean that quite literally laughing out loud, through this entire movie. From the ridiculous  psuedo-science (Sub-atomic particles do NOT mutate Mr. emmerich, they decay.) to the ignoring of the vast distances involved this film gets everything wrong and does it in the most over the top manner imaginable.

It is filled with stock character, not one of which has any spark of originality and life. It ignores the consequences of its own stupid actions and stands.  SPOILER ALERT.

Continue reading →

Share

Sunday Night Movie: Sibiriada (1979)

So this is a quite different kind of selection for my Sunday Night Movie series. Sibiriada is a sprawling Russian epic about four generations of families in a small isolated village in Siberia. The image presented in the post is of the character known as The Eternal Old Man and he is the one constant in the story of change and revolution. ( I joked as I watched this film with my sweetie-wife that in a western remake he’d be played by Anthony Hopkins. It would be a better role that that of Sir John Talbot, I can tell you that.)

When I describe this movie as a sprawling epic I am not giving in to hyperbole. The Running time for this film is 275 minutes. That’s 4 hours and 35 minutes of Russian characters, names, and history. It far too much for my sweetie-wife and I to watch in one sitting and so this sia  film we have digested in bits and pieces.

The film starts in the 1800 when the Czars still ruled Russian and it introduces to the feuding families, the wealthy and prosperous Solomins and the poor and unfortunate Ustyuzhanins. Across the decades we watch the families feud and fight, why possessed  by their passion for the land of the small forgotten village of Elan.

We watch as each generation deals with the hardships of their age. The brutal police of the Czars, the chaos of revolution, the struggle for survival in WWII, the desperate search for resources in the fifties and sixties to satisfy the central committee and finally the treat of the land itself being eradicated in the name of progress.

This is not a film for light viewing. It’s dense with a strange narrative structure. There is an element of the mystical  — as seen in part by The Eternal Old Man — which seems at odds with the normal Soviet insistence on realism and scientific processes. (Though the Soviets were horrid about perverted that process for political ends.) However if you like dense films with dozens of foreign characters to keep track of and no sense what so ever of the three act structure, then Sibiriada may be for you.

Share

Sunday Night Movie: Casino Royale(2006)

So, one the gifts I got for Christmas was a gift card to Borders. Now, as regular readers of the blatherings know I have purchased an ebook reader in 2009 and so I have transitioned to e-books for my pleasure reading.

Sunday I was at Borders with my sweetie-wife and I used the gift card to upgrade my DVD of Casino Royale to a blu-ray collectors edition of Casino Royale.  I got a much better picture and sound quality and additional bonus feature. Which is like crack to me.

I really liked this reboot of the James Bond Franchise. Frankly the Bond films had slipped into fantasy and as such were not very satisfying.  Now, don’t get me wrong, Bond in the books is not about realism. Bond is a larger than life character. He’s a tough man who can win any fight and knows what to do to survive and to win. As a character he is interesting because of what he went through in the story Casino Royale. These are the events that armored Bond, that until the story of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service rendered him cold to women. If you want gritty complex spy novels with a heavy dose of realism you should read the works of John Le Carre. There’s nothing wrong about either approach. James Bond is what we would like to have out there on our side and John Le Carre’s characters are what we fear are out there on our side. Continue reading →

Share

Sunday Night Movie: Back To The Future III

After last weekend’s Sunday Night Movie it seemed only right to select the final film in the trilogy as the weekend’s movie.

Back To The Future III completed the story arc started with Back To The Future II. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), when the time machine is struck by lightening it stranding Marty in 1955 and Doc Brown in 1885 the old west, seeks out Doc Brown — of 1955 — (Christopher Lloyd) to get home. Upon learning that Doc Brown was murdered in the  Old West, Marty travels back into time in the new repaired time machine to save his old friend . Their plans for a quick return home are complicated by Biff Tannen’s murderous ancestor Mad Dog Tannen. (Thomas F. Wilson) and Doc’s growing feeling for the new school Marm of Hill valley, Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen.) There are plenty of stunts and action and even middle-aged romance in this film and in fact I think it plays better than the second film of the trilogy does.

Again the time travels story is simplified by the malfunction of the time machine upon arrival. This is the most classic method for maintaing drama in a time travel story. Even the progenitor time travel story, The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, strands the time traveler by having his machine stolen shortly after his arrival.

I have not seen this film since its original theatrical showing and I was unsure how well the film would stand up over time in my mind and emotions. It did so pretty well. I had forgotten a few details but I remembered the arc of the film well enough. The cast was good and it was nice seeing Christopher Lloyd getting a chance to stretch his own acting and dramatic muscles.

Share

Sunday Night Movie Back To The Future II

So this week I got a copy of The Hurt Locker in blu-ray from Netflix. It was a film I wanted to see in the theaters, but sadly I missed. Sunday night I almost selected it as my Sunday Night Movie, but I was in a more whimsical mood and didn’t want a film that was going to cause deep thinking or such on my tired and stressed brain. (I had worked Overtime at the day job and I was in serious need of just brain downtime when Sunday night rolled around.) So I wen through my DVD library looking for something that suited my suddenly fickle mood.

Back To The Future II seemed perfect. I had purchased the entire trilogy as a box set last year, but I had watched only the first film on DVD. It was time to watch the second film. A movie I had not seen since it was in the theaters.

For those not in the know, the Back to The Future franchise is about Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and his adventures with a time traveling Delorean built by local eccentric scientist Dr Emmet Brown (Christopher Lloyd.) The first film is about Marty traveling backwards to when his own parents are teenagers and his adventures as a fish out of water as an 80’s teenager in 50’s America. The writers quite properly had the time machine non-fucntional for the majority of the film saving them from dealing with the inherent paradoxes of most time travel stories.

The Second film picks up where the first film left own, with Marty traveling into his own future at the behest of Dr Brown because something has to be done about Marty’s kids. This film plays more with the idea of time travel and some of the well known dangers involved. The cast is perfect in their role and I was always impressed the most by Thomas F. Wilson who not only played his character at different ages but played different version of his own character as the time line changed and created new realities.

The special effects were outstanding for their time, 1989, but compared to todays dazzling wizardry the smoke and mirrors simple do not work. The composited images are clearly lit different from the background plates and this would be acceptable in a made for ScFi (sorry SyFy) channel presentation today. However they are not bad just dated.

This was what I need for an under two hour no brain stretch of a movie.

Share

The Return Of The Sunday Night Movie: L.A. Confidential

I apologize for the long absence of my regular feature, Sunday Night Movie. The last several weeks have been filled with all sorts personal issue and drama leaving me too tired and and wrung out to watch movies, much less blog about them. I am happy to report that things seem to be getting back on an more even keel and life is slowly returning to normal.

Sunday afternoon I picked a copy of L.A. Confidential on blu-ray. I already owned the film in the DVD format, but the blu-ray was well prices and came with numerous new bonus features. I spent Sunday afternoon and evening digging through the bonus feature, before settling in to watch this film I love once more.

This is a sprawling complex character -driven movie and one that should have won Best Picture in 1997. (The nominees were As Good as It Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, Titanic, and L.A. Confidential. Titanic won, but it did not deserve the prize in that line-up.) Based on the large — and many ways inferior — novel by James Ellroy, LA Confidential is the story crime, corruption, and illusion in L.A. in the 1950s.  The film had a modest budget for 1997 — 15 million dollars — and few stars. Kevin Spacey had just the year before won an Oscar for his role in The Usual Suspects (I another film I adore) Kim Basinger and Danny DeVito were well known, but cast here in supporting roles. (Kim Basinger went on to win an Oscar for her performance in L.A. Confidential.) The remaining lead actors in the films were at that time unknowns to the American Public, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. Two Aussie actors who have go one to be stars and leading men in their own rights.

L.A. Confidential is a rich and powerful period crime story that is clearly set in the 1950s, but without the saccharine sweetness of nostalgia.  It is a film that in many ways is a revival of Film Noir, but without looking like it was a revival. It is dense and complex and expect the viewer to be smart enough to follow along. It doesn’t backdown from racism and classism of the period without resorting to preachiness and lectures. It lets the characters be who they are true to their fault and their culture. Photographic with gorgeous colors and detail this film is a feast for the eye, told expertly and with stunningly powerful action it is a feast for the brain, the music, both period and original is pitch perfect.

I cannot recommend this film enough.

Share