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

…you can always get a Vermonster! And get one we did! We celebrated Brian’s birthday by going to Ben & Jerry’s and gobbling up 20 scoops and more toppings that could fit! Man. Well, not much else to say, it’s a bargain for the price, and it feeds, I would say, 3-5 folks nicely. One of my picks of the month, just be prepared to pick 20 flavors!

For the other pick of the month, a new British import, sadly hard to locate over here in the colonies, The Descent! Great! I liked it alot. Though I am quite claustrophobic, I have always loved the notion of spelunking, since those long days in ’81 of playing Adventure on the ol’ Digital Teletype at school. Anyway, I actually would have to say that I found this movie to be scary! I thought that the cave scenes were really well done, very convincing and the visuals of the first descent were very effective and impressive. Most of the movie seems lit only with flashlight, headlamp and flares, making it convincingly dark. Story-wise, be prepared for a non-stop movie: scary, startling, bloody, seemingly hopeless… Basically like a Deliverance for women but underground, complete with “bone sticking out of leg” and lots of screaming. No squealing though…

I wasn’t a big fan of Dog Soldiers, but this one redeems Neil Marshall. It’s a first rate horror film that’s good for plenty of re-watching.

just…

a little…

peek…

I also finally saw Memory of a Killer. It seemed a bit more “American” than I would have expected, but I did like it quite a bit: backstabbing and double crossing, killing and killing. The information I had originally heard about it seemed a bit misleading, as the whole Alzheimer’s angle that seemed to be the main angle (like a dutch hit-man take on Memento, I thought) didn’t actually seem to have much relevance to the story. A few funny memory problem scenes and some confusion on the protagonists part but, the plot? It was quite safe, from that. So that was surprising, but it was still very good. Jan Decleir did a very good job, he was very sympathetic as he went around shooting people, the film was exciting with lots of good killing scenes and blood and it looked really good.

housecall…

Talk about kismet, but it seems that I the last few months, I have been finding reasons to bring up with folks one of my old favorites. A nice apocalyptic science film from New Zealand called The Quiet Earth. It seemed to me that it briefly appeared in art-house theaters about 20 years ago and then there was nothing but a small vhs release and that was that. I’ve had a PAL disc of it from pegasus for a couple of years but now, there is a new american disc of The Quiet Earth!

and then…

We watched Logan’s Run again. Always one of my favorites. It had a crazy misanthropic affect on me when I was a kid and I think it’s just wonderful! One of my favoite of the 70’s “post-apocalypse” sci-fi films. Even though the music is soo crazy I can’t tell if I like it or if it’s freaking me out, some of the “social commentary” is a bit too blatant and the effects are terrible (though just at that point that they are soo terrible they become fun to look at), but damn, it’s fun! Why soo few people seem to remember it (didn’t it even have a TV show and a comic book?) I just don’t know. Heck. It’s even got Farrah Fawcett-Majors in it!

utopia in a shopping mall?

Oh and we watched The Grudge on Cable. Well, I’ve seen the japanese one 3 times and, I gotta say, they are similar enough that I would just skip the american one. It doesn’t have flashy hollywood effects or and the cast is about the most unappealing group of movie actors I have seen and, while the creepy scenes are still there and basically the same as in the japanese film, they totally lack that subtle edge that actually made them creepy. So:
Bad cast, same production values, same story line, scary scenes not scary…

I say skip it and just watch Ju-on.