What I've Been Watching: The Catch-All Film Thread

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I just finished watching Barbarian.

That was definitely not what I was expecting, and it's the best horror flick I've seen in a while. Very original in the way it unfolded. I also liked how some scenes were shot in Detroit which gave the setting a familiar feel for me.

A must-see for any horror fan.
 
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I read the novel Battle Royale 20 years ago, and watched the movie last night. The actors are gifted physical actors and there were a few bits here and there that I liked but overall I didn't like it. I've always struggled with the Japanese acting style with the exaggerated reactions. The attempts to rationalize everyone's behavior was also pretty laughable. A 30 second flashback showing that girl A's mom was a prostitute doesn't really explain why she likes killing schoolmates with a farming implement.

Tonight I watched Malignant. I enjoyed around 20-25 minutes toward the end but the rest was painful. A friend of mine says it's intentionally bad, and it is certainly bad, but I couldn't say if it was on purpose or not. Either way, that's not appealing to me.
 
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JFarrell71 said:
Tonight I watched Malignant. I enjoyed around 20-25 minutes toward the end but the rest was painful. A friend of mine says it's intentionally bad, and it is certainly bad, but I couldn't say if it was on purpose or not. Either way, that's not appealing to me.
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No, it's not meant to be "intentionally bad", it's meant to be intentionally over the top in style and plot, like Italian giallo and Dario Argento's movies.
A few excellent bits (e.g. the jail sequence), but yeah, overall I thought it was a failure.
 
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I watched Terrifier 2 today. I kept reading about how extreme it was (Reports of people becoming physically ill in the theater, etc), so I decided to see for myself.

Well, it certainly is extreme, but that's about all. Other than pure shock value, it doesn't have much going for it. The writing, acting, and production values are all quite poor. To make matters worse, it's pretty lengthy for a horror flick at 2h, 28min long. I actually started fast-forwarding through parts of it after a certain point.

If you're in the mood for excessive gore, and don't care about much else, it might fit the bill. Don't expect a good movie though.
 
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So last night I checked out a film that I didn't know existed, a sequel to the Descent, which rather confused me, as I thought the ending of the first made it quite plain that the solo survivor of the journey wouldn't live for long. This lead me to a whole research-thing, and I found out the American version has a completely different ending for the first film. It's only about five minutes difference, yet ends the first movie very differently from the version that I'm familiar with. After seeing that resolution, I plowed straight into the second film, which to me was disappointing to say the least. It didn't come close to the quality of the first film, sadly.
 
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I didn't think The Descent 2 was bad, although I agree the first one was better. I liked the twist they threw in with a certain character from the first film.
 
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It just seemed to me like it was purely focused on shock/gross-out scenes rather than continuing the tale, which I think could have been easily done, even with a mostly new cast. And like you mentioned about that certain character, that could have been covered much earlier and extended, as it was surely the best part of an otherwise below average flick.
 
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I haven't seen Descent 2, but I thought the first one was superb. Looks like I'm going to have to search for the alternative ending.
In the one I remember seeing
it appears that she got out, but she was just hallucinating it and she's really sitting there in the dark, unlikely to survive...
 
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Shagnak said:
That looks like the UK ending I saw. The US version cuts that off.
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Yeah, I saw it when it came out, and I thought the ending suggested she'd lost her mind, and you weren't quite sure how much of the film was about that.
 
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Nod, one of the reasons I enjoyed Barbarian. And, of course, ultimately who earned the title of the film for themselves.

Last night I got around to watching Shazam, it was better than I thought it would be. It lost much steam at the end yet I thought the beginning was a decent adaptation of the earlier comics from back in the day.
 
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I got around to watching Weird: the Al Yankovic Story, which I'd been looking forward to for quite some time. It starts off nicely enough, then morphs into something more like UHF-fare rather than an accurate tale of Yankovic's tale. It was still amusing and fun to watch, they did a pretty good job on casting as well, and the pool scene at Dr. D's is well-worth checking out just to see if you can pick up on all the people there. I'll have to hope someday there's an actual biography, I wasn't expecting a parody, yet then again, perhaps I should have been.
 
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New trailer for The Whale which is another one I'm looking forward to seeing at some point. I find it interesting that it's being distributed by A24. It doesn't seem like their usual type of film.
 
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Watched Clerks III and I enjoyed it. On its own, it's not a particularly good flick, but its nostalgic look back at Kevin Smith's films really made me smile.
 
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Drithius said:
Watched Clerks III and I enjoyed it. On its own, it's not a particularly good flick, but its nostalgic look back at Kevin Smith's films really made me smile.
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Kevin Smith is someone I think really lost his mojo. Some of those old movies were great fun, but most of his recent stuff I've found terrible.
 
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