Feel kinda bad I always look at your blog and never say anything. So Iron Giant came on at like 3 in the morning one night. I watched it because of your rating. I loved it and then at the end when it said Vin Diesel was the robot. I was like damn dude has range.

He is good at adding something to what would otherwise be a monotonous voice. His Groot, for example, works really well.

#56 Lockout 2012

★★★

Fun, goofy actioner with some terrible CGI on a motorbike as an opener, but decent CGI for the rest (for a low budget film) with Guy Pierce doing a decent Snake Plissken in space. I like the two Scottish villains too.

However, it's kind of forgettable once watched.

43/56 first watches (77%)

#57 The Love Punch 2013

★★★

Goofy caper movie that relies very heavily on how charming Brosnan and Emma Thompson can be, but these two pros are very charming indeed, so it's a likeable, extremely lightweight comedy that entertains.

44/57 first watches (77%)

Good work DB, always worth a read.

Have you ever seen / reviewed - Hard Target? / It's worth a look just for Lance Henriksen's performance alone. Let alone its ultra John Woo'ness and JCVD's Mullet.

I've seen Hard Target a few times, but not for 3-4 years. Lance Henriksen is the best thing about it, thought I do like JCVD a lot.

This one is often overlooked, and I think Woo's next English movie, Broken Arrow is even more overlooked than this one. Both are solid action movies.

I do try to revisit this one now and again though (though it's been a while), as I'm interested in the subgenre of movies that concern humans hunting humans, a genre starting with The Most Dangerous Game (1931) and more recently realised in Battle Royale and The Hunger Games.

In the last few years, the movies I've watched that fall under this subgenre are: The Condemned, Contenders Series 7, Running Man, Battle Royale, Battle Royale 2, Hard Target, The Most Dangerous Game, Gymkata, Man With the Golden Gun...there are others, but they've slipped my mind.

#58 El Topo 1970

★★★½

Goofy absurdist existential Western, with some startling imagery and a meagre through-line. It's cool, but feels too pretentious to be as trandenscendant as it's trying to be. Enjoyable and certainly memorable, but not rich enough to be wholly satisfying. For that, I'd recommend Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre.

#59 Godzilla 2000 1999

★★★½

Fun kaiju, but you really need to be prepared to overlook the abysmally bad CGI and embrace the good parts. Decent voice acting on the dubbing (which mostly doesn't get too nonsensical), and the redesigned Godzilla is cool. There's some clear riffing from other sources (Jurassic Park, certainly), but ultimately what's key to these movies is the monster fight, and this delivers. Godzilla is effectively fighting a giant grey Rancor, with is fine in my book.

46/59 first watches (78%)

Broken Arrow is a good one..... Prob. the best line..... "Please do not shoot at the thermo nuclear weapons...."

Re: The Battle Royale genre: The Tournament (2009) is worth a look. Its a bit of a mess. But, a diverting one.

I've been meaning to watch The Most Dangerous Game since it was referanced in Zodiac..... Ive got it on the list.

Yes, I've seen the Tournament. It was okay.

I remembered a few more I watched. Surviving the Game, Turkey Shoot, The Beast Must Die.

Of these knock offs, the Condemned is probably the most fun, with Steve Austin and Vinnie Jones out-machoing each other all day.

#60 Enigma 2001 (first watch)

★★½

Passable drama/thriller, but I was actually expecting a fictionalised account of true events, not a whodunnit. It worked reasonably well, but not what I expected.

47/60 first watches (78%)

I'm a fan of this "genre" myself, really enjoyed Surviving the Game, Gary Busey at his craziest/best.

DB, I think I recommended it when you 1st started this thread, but you gotta check out Judgment Night sometime. Quick synopsis - Dennis Leary and his thugs chasing down 4 regular Joe's (Emilio estevez, Jeremy piven, Cuba gooding, and Stephen Dorff). Made in 1993 and my all-time favorite movie.

The Beast Must Die - Classic..... Judgement Night - Good film, great soundtrack!

It's definitely now high on my rental list.

#61 Freaks 1932

★★★★★

Still very impactful, despite its glaring flaws.

47/61 first watches (77%)

#62 An American in Paris 1951 (first watch)

★★★½

Quite a startling movie, I really appreciate it, but can't say I love it. I could see how many movies it went on to influence... I detected its look, feel, costume and scenes in Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 101 Dalmations and so on, and Gene Kelly was spectacular, but the story was incredibly lightweight, and Leslie Caron, whilst charming and a lovely dancer, was a complete blank as a character.

The several fantasy sequences were also quite puzzling (especially the middle one with the pianist), though the final, spectacular one, was startling and enthralling... and led into a dramatically-flat though happy ending.

Having said that, it's not a musical I'll ever revisit, and I like musicals. I'd take Singin In The Rain over this any day of the week.

48/62 first watches (77%)

#63 Punisher: War Zone 2008

★★★★

Really terrific fun piece of cartoonish ultraviolence. Ridiculously violent, it sets up its stall early by having the Punisher hanging upside down from a chandolier whilst spinning and machine-gunning bad guys, and gets more and more extreme. The two main villains are deliciously silly but well-played, and overall Stevensen was a solid Frank Castle - so much better than the unfortunately sanitised 2004 movie (and almost as much fun as the even-better Dolph Lundgren pulp movie).

48/63 first watches (76%)

#64 The Truman Show 1998 (first watch)

★★★½

Decent scifi drama, which has since been transcended by reality (though not to the remakable degree shown in this movie), with a solid central performance by Carrey, and witty and clever writing and plot development.

49/64 first watches

#65 Under the Skin 2013 (first watch)

★★★★

The first half or so left me cold, it felt just like pretentious arthouse fare, but as it continued, particularly with the scenes involving the disfigured man (well played by I believe a non-actor), I really started to get its rhythm. In the end, I really liked it. The score was an interesting and good mix of modern with some sound cues that sounded straight out of British early 70s horror movies (that excellent period that included Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan's Claw etc).

It really drew me in. Johanssen gives a great performance.

It's great to see some thinking scifi - I'd recommend this as a double bill with Under The Black Rainbow for a cerebral, though visually beautiful, double bill.

50/65 first watches (77%)

#66 Phenomena 1985

★★★★

Whilst I didn't really understand what the hell was really going on, the soundtrack, pure cinema, and sustained dreamlike tone was really terrific and enjoyable.

51/66 (78%)

Walking Dead Season 6

Very enjoyable season, with a very tense final episode that asked as many questions as it answered. Some standout episodes in this one.

#67 Tusk 2014 (first watch)

★★½

A perplexing movie, with some great elements (probably any scene involving Michael Parkes, for both his lines and delivery, and for the gross horror within those scenes) and some really poor elements (it's very baggy when dealing with the real life of the podcasting douchebag, his partner and his lover; almost everything with the Quebeqois detective is really tedious and just bad). I enjoyed it at the end, but did lose patience with it while watching for a few times.

52/67 first watches (78%)

Danse Macabre by Stephen King

This is a book I’ve read and reread, maybe 6 or 7 times, possibly more. It’s King first published non-fiction book, an idiosyncratic cherry-pick through the field of horror in all its mediums, with several autobiographical segments to colour in any dry patches (though King doesn’t really have any dry patches in this - you can tell he relishes the subject)

He covers horror literature (and starts with 3 key works: Frankenstein, Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as the way into all of horror), TV, radio, modern horror literature, and movies. He jumps all over the place, but most important to me is the development of a few key ideas - ideas that resonate and have stuck with me like dried Frosties to a bowl (forgive the silly metaphor; King has a way of inspiring you to write - as well as read more - as you motor through this book). Some of his key ideas are this:

- Horror exists of 3 levels. The best and highest to try to be attained is terror, where there is a creeping dread and you don’t see the monster, you only imagine what is to come. The next is horror, where you see the monster, but even while you are scared, you are relieved - it’s never as bad as you can imagine it. The third and most base is the gross-out, where the monster vomits on you. He also talks about the eternal conundrum of horror, that when you deliver the horror to break the terror (and in his view, you must deliver or you are not worthy of reading), that 99% of the time, the reader/viewer is disappointed.

- There is a primal horror Tarot; The Vampire (represented best by Dracula), The Werewolf (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), The Thing (Frankenstein), The Ghost (no one novel, but he uses The Turn of the Screw as a good example). There are mentions of lesser cards maybe, The Bad Place (a subset of which is the Haunted House), The Ghoul (which is a variant of The Vampire).

- That horror movies can be fine works, but the cheap and cheerful ones can also operate to feed the soul in the same way junk food can be satisfying (and I contend that this isn’t just a horror movie thing, this is a movie thing). But he stresses the best horror movies generally regress us back to a more childlike, open state of mind.

- He develops the idea of how horror helps explore man’s internal dichotomy that balances the Apollonian vs the Dionysian throughout the book.

- That horror works by exerting pressure on our ‘phobic’ points, and helps to keep them well exercised. This might be a fear of spiders, of birds, of the dark (which he suggests is probably the master phobic point).



Through this, he leads us through lots of autobiographical fits and starts (the afterword becomes a discussion of the ideas that went into the creation of The Stand, for example), but I never get bored with the digressions. King is a marvellous raconteur in print. He has asides for budding writers (that boil down to: WORK HARD), and tells us of creaky pop psychologists trying to understand why he writes horror. He does have faults indeed: his overview of horror movies are firmly American and mostly mainstream or drive-in fare, and so are severely limited as an overview of the horror movie genre; his review of radio horror seems quaint now (radio drama is a mostly lost form this days) though it does seem a medium well suited to horror; and his TV horror overview is again very American-centric; written in the late 70s, the films he focusses on to make points seem very idiosyncratic (Amityville Horror? Prophecy?) - but at the time they were contemporary, so we need to be more forgiving about that.

Despite the flaws, this is a fascinating and rereadable book (which is also available in audiobook form - and works well in that medium), that gives an insight into horror that resonates hard and may shape the way you think about horror as a genre.

Finally, every time I read this, it makes me realise how many books I still want to read, and never get around to. And promise myself I’ll read more fiction - even though I know I probably won’t.

You’ll want to read The Shrinking Man, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and maybe Dracula, Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde and many more books, after reading this.

10/10

68 Big Trouble in Little China 1986

★★★★

This still rocks, and doesn't even seem that dated, because the quirky elements that go into it are timeless.

A thoroughly enjoyable adventure that makes almost no sense as a coherently plotted story, but works because of the talent and energy of the director and cast. They really rocked the gates of heaven.

52/68 first watches (76%)