p e n g u i n d e v i l

Do I actually select movies because of ad’s in Rue Morgue? Well, maybe occasionally. This week I watched, as much of it as I could stand, Bloodlines. One of those that is so derivative it is hard to single out which movie it’s ripping off. Yes, another in the long line of Chainsaw wanna-be’s. Featuring an old man at a gas station in the countryside and a creepy family in the woods who kidnap women to use as breeding stock, supposedly. Though we get the idea that they harvest the little babies with rather unclean c-sections, following the movie it actually seems like they take these women so that they can fight each other to the death in pit fights. Yes, it sounds good, but how can a movie with a plot like that have no action, no nudity and no gore (a scene of fake blood splashed on the wall doesn’t do it)?

you’re going to what?

It does start off quickly, with an captive pregnant woman being dragged off to the bloody “operating table”, but after that badly acted and cheap sequence, it screeches to a dull stop and spends most of the next hour showing the women panicking in their cell, those terrible fights and always exciting scenes of searchers searching. You get the picture, nothing redeeming, even the Leatherfacian mutant-boy looks to just be wearing a mask.

latexface doesn’t have quite the same ring

I very much appreciate the makers of low budget and independent horror movies, but if you don’t have the resources to get good actors, sets or effects, please at least have an entertaining or interesting script. A lamely put together scene that folks may find distasteful is not enough to build a film around.

not anther fight? ugh.

well, maybe they are supposed to be wearing masks

So we stepped up a bit and watched The Man Who Knew Too Much. Now, while I am a fan of Hitchcock, he was still 4 years away from making a film that really spoke to me. This one is fine though. It isn’t too Hitchcockian, being pretty much a straight ahead espionage thriller. From just a few minutes in, you know who is good, who is bad and who will be naively victimized in the whole ordeal. Peter Lorre and Frank Vosper are up to no good from the first scenes, and the Lawrence family is nothing but the good, blindingly polite folk of British society. This happy-go-lucky British family is in Switzerland where they befriend a skier who then winds up dying, only after whispering a last request in the wife’s ear. The bad folks kidnap the couples annoying daughter and the chase is on!

It is a pleasing example of 1930’s thriller filmwork, or it would be if Laserlght (yes…) would have put a bit more effort into the audio/visual aspect here. But it contains some of those always fun 1930’s movie sets, cinematography that shows great potential, a rooftop chase, trenchcoats, a religious cult and an evil dentist.

folks behaving badly

p.s. if IMDB continues sending me to an advertisement every time I click on something, I may revert to movie books for reference. Yes, you heard me. Maybe that will be the end of the Internet? People getting so sick of advertisements being everywhere and “you will be redirected to content once you look at the ad” that they will start just talking to each other and finding things out from books again? It does remind that I read somewhere that MS got a patent on a device to measure how long computer users spend looking ads, that being a way to ensure that if they use software or hardware that is free due to ad content that they actually spend sufficient time staring at the ad. Nice. It brings back memories of Brainstorm… But then, yet again, I digress.