nice!

020. Friday the 13th Part 9: Jason goes to Hell 6/10 Completely bonkers Jason tale, that deviates wildly from the usual formula of kids in woods + Jason into a tale of body-jumping Jason hunting down a new body. Mixing elements of The Omen, Dog The Bounty Hunter, The Hidden and Child's Play, this is bananas. But entertaining.

Talk Without Rhythm. It'll be a week+ before it's out, I'll post when it's available.

What sort of podcast is it?

well, movies.

021. The Quatermass Experiment (2005) 6/10 A very interesting experience, a live broadcast reworking of the original Quatermass story. I like Jason Flemyng's interpretation, but stagey (by design) and a little too old fashioned for its own good.

Well, that makes my question seem dumb. Have you seen the youtube show What the Flick?

No, is it any good?

I do watch some vodcasts - Nostalgia Critic, Nostalgia Chick, Kermode Uncut, Trailers from Hell, Jeremy Jahns and Zero Punctuation (that's for games). I'll give What the Flick a go, thanks!

I am not an expert on movie criticism - so I would not put too much weight on my opinion of it. They often have a guy from Rotten Tomatoes on it, they also cover TV by episode on some popular shows e.g. Breaking Bad etc. I got onto it - because I do not have cable and have been desperate to get a view of Game of Thrones 3 before the delayed DVD Australian release.

yeah, there's not much movies and a LOT of TV on that one, but hell, I bookmarked it.

022. Mighty Joe young (1949) 7/10 I really expected this to be a rerun of King Kong, and for the first 2/3rd it mostly was, but it then wildly diverged into unexpected territory of a chase, followed by rescue that was genuinely exciting. The male lead was one of the worst actors I've ever seen, but the rest of the cast was solid. Pretty decent.

023. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) 7/10 Fine Hammer take on Sherlock Holmes from Peter Cushing. Christopher Lee is also present and rather good as Sir Henry Baskerville, and I liked that the Watson in this was rather capable and less of a bumbling audience-substitute who only serves to listen and admire Holmes than we usually get in Holmes' movies. This is Hammer of course, so we get the bombastic school and more blood and violence than more conventional versions, but it's good fun. Cushing was a great Holmes, it's a shame he didn't play Holmes again.

been watching a lot of movies lately mainly horror/sci fi/thriller

two of the best have been the fourth kind and sinister. both pretty creepy in their own way

024. Freddy Vs Jason 6/10 Yeah, reasonably fun, but with long sections with too little Jason or Freddy, especially in the first half. When they actually were either fighting or terrorising the kids, it was decent enough, but a little more Freddy humour would have been nice. Decent turn in a minor role by genre great Katherine Isabelle (her from the Ginger Snaps trilogy, and American Mary).

025. Jason X 7/10

Okay, we're now on the 10th Friday the 13th movie, and this alone should alert you you're heading for a barrel of crap. If so, your film radar is suitably developed, but switch that beeping screen off. It's misleading you. And don't expect a full-horror fare - this is comedy/action with the horror being a simple springboard. This is to the Friday 13th Series what 'Army of darkness' is to the Evil Dead series.


What Jason X is is a fun, dumb film that has just enough wit, action and snippets of cool dialogue and self-reference to make it a tip-top popcorn movie. And believe it or not, no less than David Cronenberg apparently liked the script and premise enough to do a cameo. Good times!

So I think this is actually non-canon and doesn't really follow on from number 9, and is set in the future, where a deep-frozen Jason is recovered from the now-uninhabitable Earth, but then circumstances and lack of attention allow the big guy to thaw out.

Okay, Jason comes back to life on a space ship, that happens to be carrying space-Special-Forces guys, a group of college kids, and a very cute lady robot.

After some fun dispatching the grunts in various amusing and 'ouch!' ways, it's time for Jason to do that hoodoo he does so well. Along the way, he does his usual machete thing (of course), has a face-off with the ladybot who gets suitable software updates to turn her into a terminatrix (played by a lady that reminds me a lot of Karen Black), and he appears to be dead. But... he is rendered lifeless in the medic lab, where the nanobots used to repair damaged tissues have escaped, and the little fellows find their way into Jason, giving us... BIONIC JASON!

There's lots of funnies that are even funnier if you know anything about the Friday 13th series, but you don't really need this background to enjoy - it's still pretty good without this. The most amusing is, when the few survivors need to distract Jason for a short time during escape, they create a holodeck around him of Camp Crystal with 2 hotties in sleeping blankets who say stuff like 'we just love premarital sex!' - suitably enraging the big lug while escape is attempted.

This is way, way better than it has any right to be.

026 A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

2/10

This was really quite poor. It had the flashy graphics, the beats, but it felt lifeless, characterless and pointless. I felt sorry for the actors, who did a sterling job with what they were given, but this really felt like a Michael-Bay-Directing-Transformers version of a horror movie. I wondered if they felt they were trapped in a nightmare during the making of this movie. The whole child molester angle was also quite tasteless as it recalled the behaviours of real-life child molesters, and made you feel uncomfortable.

It had two moments I liked, which helped break up the monotony. The part where one of the characters dies, and Freddy explains there is brain function 7 minutes after death, so he still has time to play... and the part where the parents are hunting Freddy down and he's fleeing, which was quite good. It too often left me bored or slightly offended.

Still, not as completely terrible as 'New Nightmare' though.

I'm not nearly as much of a horror fan, now that I am older as I once was because I find the images VERY disturbing, but I gotta tell you... that new evil dead movie was off the hook.

yes, it was pretty good. Try the remake of Maniac next, with Frodo Baggins. Amazing commitment to first-person perspective through the whole film, and succeeds much more than I would have expected, because it has internal coherency. It's streaming on Netflix.

027 Friday the 13th (2009) 5/10

Dark reboot of the original series, which is boring when Jason isn't around, and pretty good when he is. There's numerous references to the 'classic' movies, especially the first 3 (but there are definitely other visual references to other ones), but it has very, very baggy sections throughout. I also missed the whispering breath scoring of the original series (we get it a little at the beginning). I actually liked some of the minor characters (the Asian guy and the black guy), and also how at least 1 character was deliberately written to be a tool (thus making his death more satisfying), but I wasn't that keen on the liberal borrowing from other horror franchises. There was borrowings from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, for example.

028. Plague of the Zombies 6/10

Pretty solid Hammer movie exploring Haitian zombie lore, with some tense scenes. The scene were huntsmen cut cards over a trapped woman is tense as was the scene where they hunt her down in the woods beforehand), and the old mine full of white-faced, white-eyed zombies was fine, as was the priest costume. Recommended.

029. Fermat's Room 7/10

Nicely made film that looks great, and solid script and performances. The central conceit intrigues right up until you find out exactly who is responsible, and the revelation doesn't live up to the original promise, and as you think it through, the logical flaws start to be bothersome. In some respects, it's a slicker version of 1997's Cube, but that movie at least had the balls to not explain itself - and the explanation here makes the film weaker by explaining the mystery. Still, great first and second acts.

030. The Killer 7/10

Parts of this film have not aged well. The parts that have aged well are the insanely great action pieces - if there's gunfire, you're gold. To some degree if there's doves, churches, candles, hospitals, or fast cars, you're also gold. It's the rest of it that is distinctly shakey. While some of the more thoughtful scenes look and sound great (reminiscent of Sergio Leone and Ennio Moricone), other's have bad dialogue, endless emo grimacing, and quite terrible synth music.

So it's 80s, and parts haven't aged well. But the action stuff and the cool of Jeff (this film is channeling Le Samourai, right?) allows you to forgive the more creaky parts of it.

Also, did the villain have a major share in a white sweatsuit business? Because all the cannon-fodder henchmen looked like that's were they got their outfits...

031. Never Sleep Again 8/10

Ridiculously long, but rather glorious documentary about all the movies of the Nightmare on Elm Street series (except the very recent remake). You get actors' insights, special effects guys, producers, where the seed ideas for each movie came from, you get everything you could possibly want. And it doesn't flag until maybe the last 10 minutes, where it turns into a love-in about New Line - but even this is redeemed by the closing titles, where various actors from the series deliver the best lines.

This documentary made me realise two things: The Freddy series is clearly the best horror franchise of the 80s; Robert Englund is fantastic.

Got 4 hours free? Watch this.

032. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels 6/10

Reasonably charming comedy, with some laugh out loud moments (watch out for the mention of a 'genital cuff', and Caine testing the paralysis in Martin's legs), and a ton of charm from Caine and Martin. Glenne Headly also does really well not to be swamped by these two.

033. How To Train Your Dragon 7/10

This started slow, but got better and better, and had a great, happy ending. Very enjoyable.