Blueface said:The trashiness is just campy (as far as I can tell), but... That specific brand of kitsch actually lends the movie a certain mystical quality; if it weren't quite so tacky, I don't think it would be nearly as good a film.
I find it quite amusing that every single alien looks exactly like Bill Clinton. Even better is the fact that even after they deactivate the appearance-altering devices, they *still* look just like Bill Clinton. 😁
It was truly wonderful how Tim Allen managed to strip away Kirk's composure on the Enterprise: specifically that way he’s constantly leaning forward in his chair during the series—complete with that "I smell poo!" facial expression.
But my absolute favorite is the actor playing the ship's technician. The guy is completely spaced out throughout the entire movie; they're sitting in the car and he's studying a can of Coca-Cola as if he's encountering it for the first time in his life. While the aliens are discussing the imminent peril of their home planet, this man is preoccupied with trying to operate a candy machine. Later, when they are transferred to the gel pod on the ship's deck, he simply remarks, "Wow, dude, that was *awesome*!" My favorite scene, however, occurs when they fly through a minefield and the ship sustains heavy damage. There are explosions everywhere, alarms are screaming, and Tim Allen is frantically tapping at the keyboard trying to contact engineering, only for the perpetually stoned "technician" to appear on the screen and say, in a totally phlegmatic tone, something along the lines of, "Well... like.... the berilium ball is... like broken and stuff... and we should.... like replace it. And shit." all while an Alien falls screaming from the ceiling behind him.
casualotter21 said:Word on the street is they’re filming the hobbit right after Jackson finishes his King Kong remake. And even if they do make the hobbit, true Tolkien fans will still be begging for another holy grail: The Silmarillion. Honestly, I doubt anyone will ever actually take on the task of adapting that.
Oh, they absolutely will! If necessary, I’ll personally drag Jackson kicking and screaming until he adapts every single thing Tolkien ever wrote, just so I can watch die-hard Tolkien fanatics scream and collapse in the streets because the movies aren't 100% perfectly, cosmically faithful to the books—or because you don't know fluent Sindarin or some secret dwarven handshake to be allowed in the theater. Maybe they'll start their own little terrorist cell called S. N. O. while wearing spandex and nose rings, hunting people down and making them die of pure laughter at how ridiculous they look.
unknown said:I also feel like the movie serves as a metaphor for a woman—or just a person, really—finding her footing and standing up to those who try to suppress her, blah blah blah...
A person wouldn't exactly say: "Daryl Hannah has this absolute jerk of a husband who cheats on her, then she gets struck by some magical cosmic ray, grows to Wonder Woman proportions, and gets her revenge. YEAH!" The metaphor is about as subtle as a sledgehammer.
Still, I suppose I might actually want to sit through that spectacle.
Anyone else feel like this is easily one of the absolute worst movies of the nineties? At this rate, we might be looking at the next Ed Wood! LMAO!
BOOOOOOOO! Honestly, I thought this was just a teaser for when it hits cable. Besides, it can't possibly be that bad if they've got a ten-foot-tall Daryll Hannah running around in some skimpy outfit!
dustyscout53 said:They say it’s the second work that truly defines an author’s greatness. Tarantino hasn't even delivered his second masterpiece yet. Charlie's Angels was a fun enough movie. Kill Bill is fun too. It seems to me that the first seven pages of this thread have been nothing but a hymn to Kill Bill. Why hasn't Full Throttle received seven pages of praise? Because it lacks that distinct designer signature, or so Douglas Phillips4 would argue.
In the original thread where I copied this text from, someone commented that they loved having Lucy Liu in the cast because, combined with that general 1970s vibe and the fact that the leads are all women, it turns Kill Bill into an episode of Charlie's Angels that went straight to hell. To put it plainly: we don't have seven pages of discussion on Charlie's Angels because there isn't a woman in that film stabbing a guy in the junk with a wakizashi, spraying twenty-five quadrillion hectoliters of blood everywhere, and then having Uma Thruman OFF die off-screen while coldly asking, "See what I mean?". If Charlie's Angels had been *that* kind of movie, I'd probably write seven pages myself and harass people into watching it. Look, Charlie's Angels was entertaining enough, but Kill Bill is like their older sister who joined the S.E.A.L.s, became addicted to performance-enhancing drugs, and is now just absolutely tripping.
dustyscout53 said:When Tarantino was filming Pulp Fiction, he had real vision. That’s why I maintain he spent at least ten years dreaming up all those details in Pulp Fiction.
And what do we have here now? An entertaining movie. Tarantino made an entertaining movie. End of story.
Oh, listen to that—now suddenly everything depends on expectations. Honestly, I don't know what you people expect from Tarantino, and when I ask myself that, I'm being serious rather than sarcastic. I wasn't sitting there expecting "Tarantino"—mostly because I have no clue what one is even supposed to expect from him—but I was looking for a fun, bizarre action flick that would stand out from the usual mediocre action trash served up in theaters. And that is exactly what I got. It was the kind of action movie my friends and I would come up with during a total laugh when the power goes out at our cabin and we're stuck without a TV. This might sound like I'm trying to downplay the film, but the truth is quite the opposite: I genuinely love movies that allow me to sink into the illusion that the screenwriter and I actually think alike and arrive at similar creative solutions. As for what Tarantino really intended to achieve with this film, that's just a matter of passing interest for me.
dustyscout53 said:That’s exactly my point. It’s an entertaining movie, sure, but if Tarantino had actually signed off on it, people wouldn't just call it entertaining—they'd claim it was some genre-defying masterpiece, blah blah blah... 😁 😁 😛
By the way, did anyone else notice how the poster for Kill Bill had one of those "In theaters today, on local TV tomorrow" slogans? Then you have the title, followed by "A MASTERPIECE BY QUENTIN TARANTINO." I don't know about you all, but my first thought was all those "masterpieces," "most popular series," and "top-rated shows according to American charts" that our local networks bombard us with every single day in their promos. 😁
The movie was alright, I guess. My only gripe is how incredibly lame it is that Pacino’s character is named John Milton. Did they really think they were being subtle by choosing a name that hints at his true identity? "Paradise Lost," anyone? Get it? Get it? Get it? I bet the screenwriter spent the next half hour patting himself on the back after coming up with that little stroke of genius.
It’s just as ridiculous as when a dead priest in "End of Days" is named none other than Thomas Aquinas. Please, spare me these mainstream Hollywood writers who desperately try to be clever. I realize most people won't even notice those references, but that's exactly why these tropes feel even more obnoxious to me.
"Innocent Blood" was actually quite a pleasant surprise. To be honest, I had to fight the urge to burst out laughing at two in the morning while my parents were sleeping. And the best part is, I wasn't laughing at the movie, but *with* it. Quick debrief: this is a 1992 horror-comedy directed by John Landis. It follows a vampire named Mary who is dealing with some serious guilt over her lifestyle, so she decides to only hunt and feed on criminals. On top of that, Mary lives by two specific rules: 1) Never play with your food. In practice, this means no sex or socializing with the victims. 2) Always finish your meal. There’s a scene where she explains this off-screen—a woman drinks the blood of a mobster, then pulls a small derringer out of her fashionable handbag and puts two bullets straight into his head. Talk about following the rules! Alas, circumstances don't allow Mary to apply that second rule to a mob boss, who wakes up confused and angry in the morgue, having no idea what happened to him. Meanwhile, Mary teams up with a young cop who spent three years working undercover in the mafia. Hillarity ensues.
The film is a cocktail of crime, horror, and comedy. If I didn't know the plot and hadn't seen the prologue (which, by the way, features a naked woman—ah, those classic American B-movie tropes where actresses have zero inhibitions about stripping on screen!), I would have thought this was just your run-of-the-mill mob flick. That is, until the woman—who clearly wants to hook up with one of the mobsters (the one who just lost his head to a derringer)—screams in his car, her eyes turn into red traffic lights, and she proceeds to bite FUKKEN HALF OF HIS FACE OFF. By the way, Sinatra is playing in the background with lyrics along the lines of "you put me under Your spell." Heh, nice touch that one.
To me, "Innocent Blood" was far better than Underworld. Sure, Underworld has a decent concept, but it doesn't really lean into it, leaving it with nothing but a pretentious style. This movie might not be spectacular, but it is funny and quite successful at achieving what we sci-fi freaks call "suspension of disbelief." The film starts off totally normal, the characters react naturally to the chaos, and Mary's vampire powers are presented in a relatively understated way. I mean, hell, there's a scene where she jumps from a FUKKEN church tower onto a cop's car and dents the roof, but we don't watch her jump in slow-motion like Kate Backinsale accompanied by an ultra-intense techno soundtrack; instead, we see the cop in the car screaming about what on earth is happening.
I'm not sure how to best convey how much I enjoyed this. I'll just mention two things, and please don't get mad if I spoil the film by quoting exact scenes!
The first thing I loved was the take on vampires. In Resident Evil, about ten main characters spend their entire lives acting like they're living under a glass dome because none of them realize their opponents are hellish zombies that can't be stopped by just a couple of shots to the body. In this film, it takes the young cop about ten minutes to figure out what the deal is. While talking to the coroner examining the body of the mobster who is about to become undead, the officer comments on why there's no blood around the guy. Coroner: "Look, considering the first corpse we found was the same way, and seeing as this guy has no blood at all and has a FUKKEN bite on his FUKKEN neck, one could probably guess what happened here." Officer: "And? What happened?" Coroner: "Look, I wouldn't dare say something like that out loud." Officer: "Aha! I get it."
And so it goes. Later, the guy unhesitatingly turns his car toward a motel when the woman says, "Look, it's almost morning and we need to find somewhere dark to hide." The guy—which is something I felt was totally missing in Underworld—reacts to the vampire in a way that feels completely believable. He calls her a monster without hesitation and sarcastically tells her she looks dehydrated and probably needs a drink. When the woman charms his colleague, the officer mutters under his breath, "Look how she's tearing into him!" The guy remains genuinely nervous around her. There's a scene where they sit on a loveseat—she's at one end, practically naked, and he's at the other, fully clothed. He smokes cigarette after cigarette, and when she shyly says, "But you don't have to be afraid of me! I won't hurt you!" he simply replies, "Yes, that's nice, but just stay the fuck away from me."
On the flip side, the mafia boss clearly hasn't heard a word about vampires, which actually made his character much easier to swallow. Because he doesn't know what he is, the scenes where he discovers his supernatural abilities end up being totally bizarre and hilarious. You have this guy rummaging through a dresser with a bottle in hand, shouting, "I need a drink! Someone give me something to drink!" Later, he's sucking on a raw slab of meat and sleeping during the day in a walk-in freezer using a deli platter as a pillow. Also, related to that, > doesn't suffer from the same issues seen in > or >: he doesn't try to rationalize vampires with light allergies, mutating viruses, or whatever else. A vampire is just a vampire, period: drinking blood, super strength, regeneration, the whole nine yards. What those powers actually are or where they come from remains a mystery.
Another thing I loved was the concept of the female vampire. She isn't some "cool" girl. She isn't some "hot babe." She’s this tiny, slender woman with a heavy foreign accent who acts incredibly timid and shy. Yet, she possesses this massive charisma that makes it impossible for anyone to resist her despite her bashfulness. At the start of the movie, she starts flirting with a cop, unaware that he's working undercover. They chat for a bit, and she thinks to herself, "He looked perfect. He looked like he tasted perfect... but he had such sad eyes," and lets him go. But then, out of nowhere, another mobster nearly runs her over at a crosswalk. Initially annoyed, she slams her purse against his car: Mobster : "Hey, watch it! What are you doing to my car? Huh? Wanna piece of me? Ha? Ha? Ha?" Female Vampire: "You could really pay more attention when people are crossing the street." Mobster: "And I could beat you up a little, you know!" "Now, this one was truly perfect." Suddenly, she completely shifts her persona and begins speaking shyly: "Oh, you know, I'm just totally new to this city. I'm actually a foreigner, and I was so terrified when the car almost hit me at the crossing. Especially because the driver was so... *large*." The mobster's ego immediately inflates by three sizes, and he tries to charm her. This leads to a scene of him losing his mind in the car, followed later by someone using a magnifying glass on him. Heh, there goes your libido, macho man! And she maintains this "Please sir! I'm just a poor foreign girl with a funny accent, sir!" vibe for practically the entire film! When she and the cop try to get into a nightclub, the bouncer starts messing with the lock, threatening to deny them entry. She walks up, rips the > lock and the entire door frame right off, and just gives a shy little smile before walking into the bar. The cop is the only one allowed to follow her inside. Right before getting into the main crime boss's car, the guy tells her things like, "I'm the king of this city! I could kill you just by snapping my fingers! HAHA, I clean my teeth for breakfast with girls like you!" To which the woman says off-screen, in that sweet, timid voice with a French accent: "I should have turned away then... But he was so annoying," as she climbs into the boss's limo while all the thugs around her laugh arrogantly.
HAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!1111That movie was *SO GOOD*!!1
I’m a bit tied up at the moment, but I really need to sit down and write a proper, detailed review. To be clear, I loved it—really, truly loved it. While *Underworld* is spectacular in its own ridiculous way, this film isn't quite as flashy, yet it makes up for it with a far more intelligent script. Also, whereas I laugh at *Underworld* because it's just silly, here I was laughing because the writer actually intended for me to find it funny, which is a mark of true quality.
"I should have walked away... but he was annoying." HA HA HAAAAAAAAA!!! Pure gold!!!!1👍 👍 👍
This is definitely going into my video collection once (and if) it eventually hits HaHaHAHATevej.
A horror-comedy (WE shall see about that) directed by John Landis involving a sultry French vampire named Mary who enjoys flirting her way through life while exclusively feeding on criminals. After a stroke of bad luck prevents her from taking out a certain mobster, he wakes up in the morgue with a brilliant plan: turn his entire crew into vampires. Hillarity ensues.
....
I haven't actually seen this movie yet, but based on the IMDb synopsis and the TV guide description (sex, vampires, Frenchwoman, sex), it sounds pretty intriguing. Well, we shall see.
Nephrite said:Also, I saw Barrett pulling some kind of stunt jumping over a car in the trailer.
Anyway, when on earth is this movie actually hitting theaters here? In the rest of the world, the DVD has been out since January 6th. I feel like we've been tossed back into the dark ages—like it's 2000 again—where everyone else has seen the movie while we're just sitting here waiting.
Look, it's been playing in our downtown theaters for ages, but it takes a little while to reach the California coast. 🙂
I mindlessly flicked on NBC during dinner tonight. I was sitting there watching some mindless American music videos when suddenly, out of nowhere, a clip popped up using scenes from Underworld! "Are you kidding me?" I thought. It’s a common trope... okay, it *used* to be a common trope, where if a music video uses clips from a movie, the song or the video actually has at least SOME connection to the plot. But now? I’m listening to this song featuring Underworld footage, and the lyrics are completely soul-less—just generic stuff like "working nine to five, what a way to make a living" or whatever. BUT! The connection becomes painfully obvious very soon because this is a song by Bart! HA! There you have it, folks! It’s OBVIOUS! Bart is actually the main werewolf from Underworld, and he’s just gone into hiding in a small town in Montana because nobody’s going to come looking for him there! No wonder he wanted to use scenes from the movie in his video! QED! Q.! E.! D.!
Hooker's Revenge (1974) (USA) (reissue title) They Call Her One Eye (1974) (USA) Thriller (1974) (Sweden) (short title) Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1974) (USA)
"Thriller" stars Swedish porn star Christina Lindberg as a mute who is kidnapped by a pimp, hooked on drugs and forced to serve in a brothel as a prostitute. When she rebels against a sadistic client's wishes, her eye is put out in graphic detail by her cruel pimp. Later, she is able to leave the brothel and return home, only to find her parents dead.
Pushed over the edge, she uses the money made at her trade to train herself in the martial arts, use of firearms and driving skills. Packing a sawed-off shotgun and wearing a black eyepatch, she leaves the brothel one more time to settle the score with her pimp and some of her more abusive clients.
"Thriller" is remarkable in that it manages to combine elements of gratuitous voyeurism and hard core sex with a well-crafted revenge story, and does so with expert finesse. The slo-mo shotgun blow-aways remind one of Peckinpah at his best, and the revenge plot has all the intensity of Abel Ferrara's classic "Ms. 45".
---- HAHAHA! A porn star plays a woman who gets her eye gouged out and is forced into prostitution. Her parents die from the stress, then she rebels, learns how to fight, grabs a shotgun, and starts taking out the bad guys! I WANNA WATCH THAT! 😁 😁
dustyscout53 said:I don't get it. Where's the action, where are the casualties?
Honestly, not every documentary needs to be about aliens or government conspiracies. And they certainly can't all be sex education programs like the ones airing on cable late Saturday nights.
Apologies for the length of this post, but I’m dropping it here because it might actually interest someone. A few months back, there was a heated debate over on the rec.arts.sf.fandom newsgroup regarding Kill Bill. I spent some time digging through the archives today and found it pretty fascinating. I'm copying the whole thing, though unfortunately, it's in English, so I'll leave it to those who can make sense of it. In any case, regardless of how I personally feel about the movie, that entire thread felt far more constructive than three-quarters of the posts on this topic—mine included.
One thing people seem to miss is that the different styles of violence in Kill Bill actually stick to the specific cinematic "rules" of the worlds featured in each chapter (as Tarantino calls it in his screenplay). Thurman's struggle—the core tragedy fueling the whole story—is the part of the movie that leans most heavily on those gritty, sadistic revenge flicks that used to dominate the grindhouse circuit, much like They Call Her One Eye (which clearly inspired Darryl Hannah's character, right down to the colored eyepatch) or, in its most blatant American derivation, the infamous I Spit on Your Grave (a movie that's been slammed as misogynistic garbage and praised as a feminist manifesto all at once). From the very beginning, Tarantino made it clear that his signature style would be a cocktail of everything he obsesses over—ranging from French art films and Olsen and Johnson comedies to horror, chambara, and kung fu. He promised to blend all of that with the grit of samurai tales, Shaw Brothers flicks, Spaghetti westerns, and Yakuza thrillers.
The House of Blue Leaves sequence, which acts as the arterial-spray soaked climax of Kill Bill, Vol. 1, pulls from a distinct cinematic lineage, utilizing a much more theatrical and expressionistic style of violence—one that feels significantly less sexualized. That surreal geyser of blood used to punctuate the finale of Kurosawa's Sanjuro had, by the early 70s, morphed into the Monty Pythonish excesses of the bizarrely Beautiful LONE Wolf and CUB series (which, in my opinion, remains the best and purest set of comic book adaptations ever put to film, not to mention an action franchise with remarkably consistent quality across every single installment). Once Kill Bill, Vol. 2 shifts gears into a Spaghetti western setting—presumably when The Bride finally settles scores with Darryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, and/or Bill himself—the violence will likely take on yet another flavor. Spaghetti westerns tend to fetishize and dramatize the tension leading up to the violence, stretching it out indefinitely, but once the actual brutality hits, it’s usually dealt with quite matter-of-factly and swiftly. It’s actually the polar opposite of Peckinpah's style, regardless of what those conservative 60s critics claimed about them being identical.
A few more observations. It’s somewhat ironic that the most genuine and human beats in Kill Bill belong to Sonny Chiba—an actor who, for audiences here in the States, is mostly famous for ripping an opponent's testicles off with his bare hands and flaunting them. Granted, he was a major leading man in Japan for over ten years before he did The Streetfighter, but very few of those movies actually made it into American grindhouses. It also provides a fascinating contrast to the highly acclaimed Lost in Translation. In that film, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson aren't afforded even a single moment of true empathy or connection with the Japanese locals. I'll concede that Johansson is shown having a few Japanese friends, but they feel like nothing more than plot devices to nudge her out of the hotel and into various quirky scenarios; Sofia Coppola practically ensures they slip out of the frame whenever she can. Kill Bill, however, suggests that an American woman can stroll into an Okinawan sushi bar and, even with limited Japanese, can actually make a connection. There’s this genuine emotional connection with the chef—and yeah, she definitely establishes that before dropping the bombshell that she’s actually hunting down Hanzo the swordmaker. Honestly, a connection like that just doesn't feel plausible in Lost in Translation. Don't get me wrong, I loved both movies, but in a strange way, I think the latter presents a much bleaker universe.
To wrap things up, I’ll borrow a line from Spinal Tap: there is a razor-thin margin separating brilliance from pure stupidity. Normally, seeing Uma Thurman lugging a katana around an airplane would fall squarely into the latter category, but once you realize most of the other passengers are also packing katanas in their carry-ons, that surreal level of audacity feels less like a mistake and more like a stroke of low-rent genius.
---- To be fair, Tarantino plays it a little safe regarding the sexual violence that clearly fuels the inspiration for these sequences. The Bride isn't violated by Bill or any of those other women. That whole incident at the hospital wasn't even Bill's doing; it’s something the script treats as a heavy topic discussed through dialogue rather than explicit imagery. In fact, the moment that horrific concept is introduced, we see her handling the two attackers on screen with some pretty direct resolve. Even though those guys are monsters, the hospital assault stays off-camera—Buck specifically warns his clients not to lay a finger on her or leave a single mark. While Tarantino is clearly paying visual homage to movies like They Call Her One Eye, Last House on the Left, and I Spit on Your Grave... Regarding GRAVE and the assault in *Comin' at Ya*, he seems significantly less sadistic than his predecessors. That’s a stark contrast to the sequence in *The House of Blue Leaves*, where he cranks the violence up quite a bit.
rapidstag74 said:I finally sat down yesterday to watch the movie properly—just me, a beer in one hand, and the remote in the other. All I can say is that when I grow up, I want to be just like Roland. Roland is the Law. Any guy who can sneak up on the White Wolf while wearing nothing but a furnace and a cloak made of chainmail, all while dragging a massive seven-foot two-handed sword behind him, deserves an Academy Award for Stealth performance, which I am hereby awarding on behalf of the Academy.
Also, did anyone else notice the gauntlet the White Wolf is wearing on his sword hand? Now I finally know who stole my left arm and the brake from my Pony bike.