Yes, and thinking about it the final catharsis even looks more strange with open ending. My guess was that the director used the thriller part as an excuse for the rest, but didn’t find the right propotion .
A mix between between both things would demand a more complex, and with the pace of a thriller king the story is more easier, so it seems like the director was almost starting another film at the end.
THE FOOD OF THE GODS - Based on a H.G. Wells novel Bert Gordon directs this very weak horror/sci-fi film where few things are explained, the characters are not developed at all and the special effects are occasionally ridiculous. Don’t waste your time on this one.
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Right. Watched that once as well. I’m still not over it.
Read the book instead, Wells is an excellent writer
Only found an english subtitle version, is there an english audio version ?
I watched it with french audio/english subs. I’m not aware of an english audio version.
Watched a trio of pics yesterday:
Blue Ruin (Saulnier, 2014)
Fantastic revenge-driven debut from Jeremy Saulnier, in which a vagrant learns that the man who killed his parents is about to be released from prison. To say much more about this stripped-back tale would be to (blue) ruin it, so I won’t, other than that star Macon Blair is an absolute find, a star in the making. Highly recommended.
Kill Command (Gomez, 2016)
Set in the near-future, a small military unit are sent into the woods for what appears to be a training exercise but what quickly escalates into something else as the robotic drones opposing them turn sentient and decide to fight back. People are dubbing Kill Command a mash-up of Predator (McTiernan, 1987) and The Terminator (Cameron, 1984) and it’s easy to see why although there are also elements of Hardware (Stanley, 1990) and Dog Soldiers (Marshall, 2002) in there too. Not the most riveting of plots, and characterization is thin on the ground too but it’s definitely up at the more thoughtful end of “bone-headed action”-type movies and the 'droids are absolutely spectacular on what was apparently a pretty slim budget (one of the few sources I could find has the budget as low as £1,000,000 although I find that nigh-on impossible). Worth a look.
Green Room (Saulnier, 2016)
From the same guy who brought us the aforementioned Blue Ruin comes Green Room and, despite the colour-coded titles, the films are entirely unrelated. This one tells of a hard-up punk band - The Ain’t Rights - who find an opportunity for a gig at a dingy Neo-Nazi roadhouse. They do their bit (daring themselves to play the Dead Kennedys classic Nazi Punks Fuck Off on their set, much to the audience’s chagrin) and are about to leave when one of the band members stumbles across a murder taking place backstage. Being forced against their will to wait in the titular “green room” while club owner Darcy (a magnificently cast Patrick Stewart) decides how best to dispose of these eyewitnesses, The Ain’t Rights barricade themselves in before opting to fight their way out. It’s a grisly, gory movie but it’s a smart one too; the protagonists make the decisions you or I would probably make rather than act like movie characters, walking dunderheadedly into one fatal scene after another. Patrick Stewart owns the film but Blue Ruin star Macon Blair almost steals it from him as Darcy’s conflicted right-hand man, and the recently deceased Anton Yelchin gives up the strongest performance I’ve seen from him, from my limited experience of the tragic young actor. Highly recommended.
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The Scorch Trials
A disappointing sequel to the entertaining The Maze Runner. If the first movie benefitted from its horror influences, this sequel offers thrills and kills at the expense of story-telling. We learn that the children who escaped from the maze are immune to a flare virus spread by a sun that has scorched the face of the earth (or was it man-made after all?). They’re now held in quarantine with survivors of other mazes, but plan a great escape after the discovery, by two of them, that the organization W.C.K.D. only wants their blood in order to develop a vaccine.
There are still some good ideas and the production design is impressive, but this overly busy Sf-horror-adventure movie is too noisy and too derivative, and those cranks (survivors who have not yet died from the flare) look too much like zombies to be really scary. However there’s one scene, set in a cave, that will send shivers down your spine. Otherwise it’s a bit of Aliens and a bit of Escape from New York, seasoned with a pinch of Mad Max and a crucial scene literally taken from Jurassic Park: The Lost World. The young actors are still doing well, but there’s very little character development. The always reliable Barry Pepper adds some flavor to the movie with the late cameo.
6/10
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Cheers 
Last couple of days:
Bachelor Games (2016, McGown)
Watched this for another site, my review HERE
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
I’m not a Trekkie by any means. I mean, I’m aware of who the main characters are (from the original series) and I’m even dimly aware of one or two of the fellows from Star Trek: The Next Generation but, by and large, Star Trek isn’t for me. Still, I’ve heard naught but good things about this rebooted incarnation so I thought, sod it, let’s have a look. And, well, it’s not bad. It’s not great, but focussing on Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock was a smart move I think, and the young gentlemen in those roles - Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, respectively - do really well. Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) stood out like a sore thumb as Scotty though, I thought. But as “origin story” movies go, this one wasn’t too shabby.
I noticed today that they’ve just put the entire original series of Star Trek on Netflix (UK). I might even give it a look.
Southbound (Various, 2015)
A portmanteau horror from the makers of the V/H/S franchise, made up of five shorts which actually interlock quite well, which makes a change from most modern portmanteau horrors. I might write a more in-depth review of it at some point soon so I’ll be brief here but, some suspect CGI choices aside, I really enjoyed this. Not quite as much as V/H/S/2 but considerably more than V/H/S: Viral. The whole picture has a real “Twilight Zone” vibe going on, which is the sort of thing that pushes my buttons. Shame it wasn’t scarier.
And I’ve just finished watching Girls! Girls! Girls! (Taurog, 1962)
In which Elvis tries to buy the fishing boat on which he works once his boss decides to retire to Arizona, whilst simultaneously trying to juggle two girls (not literally, that would be illogical, captain). Absolute fluff built around the King, as almost all Elvis movies are. Really more of a Sunday movie, I reckon. Harmless and enjoyable though, and I maintain that Elvis was actually a pretty good actor. Highlight of this one was a rendition of Return to Sender, one of my favourites.
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NIGHTMARE AT BITTERCREEK - Four women and Tom Skerritt are surrounded by aryan terrorists in the mountains and try to survive. Unsuspenseful late 80s TV movie directed by Tim Burstall. They couldn’t even capture the beauty of the locations. Burstall has made some good movies, but this is not one of them.
MISSILE X: THE NEUTRON BOMB INCIDENT - Russian bomb is stolen by terrorists, Peter Graves must cooperate with the Russian agents to save the day. It feels like an average TV movie. Some of the action scenes are so poorly directed it hurts the eye. Not to mention that the bomb itself looks like a toy. A plus: Most of the Iranian locations that appear in the film are the original ones.
TORMENT (1986) - From imdb:A detective sets out to capture a psycho who kills women, but the psycho turns the tables and goes after the detective’s girlfriend. Hopelessly average clichéd affair. It’s all been done much better a thousand times before. Two thumbs for the killer’s face though - the guy looked truly psychotic and sick.
THE THIN RED LINE (1964)
Not the Terrence Malick version from 1998 but an earlier adaptation of the James Jones WWII novel set on Guadalcanal, a small tropical island in the Western Pacific. Apart from the setting and source the two movies don’t have that much in common. Malick’s version was a philosophical meditation on the paradox of nature, presenting it as both beautiful and destructive; this version is a more straightforward action drama, focusing on its main characters rather than occupying itself with ideas. Those who despised Malick’s version, might like it, those who like Malick, may want to see it out of curiosity.
Keir Dullea is an inexperienced, but resourceful private, Jack Warden a sarcastic veteran sergeant, hardened in battle; of course the two men hate each other and of course one dies in the arms of the other, after having saved his life. This may sound predictable (or better: it is), but nevertheless the movie feels different from what Hollywood used to produce in those days. According to IMDB it was filmed in Spain; it looks good, but we never get the idea we are in a tropical rain forest. The combat sequences are quite exciting (even if the excessive use of dummies somehow diminishes their effect), but the drama is often overwrought. Both Dullea and Warden are excellent.
7/10
COLD RIVER - Two kids go on a trip to the mountains with their father, but at some point the father suffers a heart attack, leaving the young ones all alone in the unforgiving snow-covered landscape. This is a pretty dull one and the kids can’t really act. The mandatory bear attack sequence in this kind of films is here as well. The film gets a little more grim towards the end, but generally it has a family movie feel. The locations could have been captured a lot better. My VHS tape says copyright 1979, imdb says year of release 1982, don’t know what’s the story behind that though.
VENGEANCE IS MINE aka SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY - How the fuck has this one escaped me for such a long time I don’t know. One of the best 70s revenge flicks, very well shot, the killings are quite brutal and the performances by Ernest Borgnine and Michael J. Pollard are excellent. This time around our ‘‘hero’’, whose mental stability is questionable, has control of the situation and likes to give the scumbags some rough time and that’s what makes this film a bit different from the rest. 8++/10
Glad you enjoyed !. Favourite of mine aswell. Love the Borgnine character.
Gave WOLF LAKE (1978) a rewatch - One of my all-time favorites and the best Burt Kennedy film by far. Rod Steiger gets so deep in his role it’s fucking scary. Locations, violence, intensity, all are up to the highest level. By the end of the film the resort feels like a battlefield. If there are 10 films that were worth the search among so many obscurities, this is surely one them.
CAT MURKIL AND THE SILKS aka CRUISIN’ HIGH - Very average crime flick about some rival teenage street gangs. Flat direction that can’t deliver any sense of drama in the depiction of events. The out-of-place score is to blame for that as well. To make things worse, most of the kids can barely act. 5/10, tops
APP (2013, Bobby Boermans)
A low-budget techno thriller from Holland that created a hype and became a small hit in theatres (and on VOD) in the US and Germany. It was presented as the first second-screen entertainment: the film tells a story about an App that becomes destructive once loaded on a cellphone; the gimmick was that audiences could actually download an App with the same title on their own cellphones, which displayed a some extra material meant to enhance the story.
I didn’t download the app so I can’t tell you anything about the second-screening, but the movie tells a story that is surprisingly compelling, even without downloading the app yourself. After a night of binge drinking, Anna, a young psychology student, discovers a mysterious App on her cellphone; the App presents itself as 'Iris’ and seems helpful at first but starts playing tricks with her and her friends, notably fellow student Sophie, whose sexlife is exposed to all her cell-phoning friends. The naughty tricks soon become nasty, even lethal …
App will no doubt remind viewers of Takeshi Miike’s “One Missed Call”, but there are also similarities to Dutch classic horror movie “The Lift”. As a horror movie App is not very scary and it becomes more predictable as the story progresses, but it benefits from a couple of strong performances (both leads are real actresses, not just pretty faces) and with a running-time of a mere 75 minutes it’s over before you know it.
- Fulll movie (in Dutch and in two parts) here: App de film Movie Watches - YouTube
- If you prefer to watch it in German, you can watch it here: - YouTube
yeah, disappoinitng, and i thought i’m going to enjoy this big time, but nooooo
hey, scherpy, have you seen last part of Hunger Games - that’s the best!