the problem with the earlier movie was that it was taken over by shitbirds (i think donald sutherland pulled a kirk douglas-- if you know the story of spartacus). whatever the case, whedon's original script was turned to shit. plus that girl couldn't act much, unlike sarah michelle gellar who was great. plus plus plus. trust me. the tv show kicks the movie in the ass up and down the street for a whole weekend

so anyway yes, season 1 of buffy picks up right after the movie story where she's been expelled for "burning down the gym" lololol.

anyway you can also save "hush" for its rightful place in the story and start season 1, episode 1, and build up to it, 3 seasons later, when you'll know who is who and what is what and will get the full greatness of it.

dude, get ready for a great ride.

It makes me very happy when someone watches this movie for the first time and ends up loving it. This movie didn't get nearly the release or hype it deserved when first released. It was certainly not an easy movie to promote given its a film best seen knowing as little about its plot turns as possible.

Hahaha! I didn't even know Buffy was a Whedon creation! I thought it was just a cash grab to follow up a cult-ish movie with a series that would get through several seasons on curiosity alone (a la Teen Wolf and Fargo).

Now I want to rewatch the movie. And I actually thought whatshername from the movie was OK. I mean, she was definitely super cute and very watchable. SMG on the other hand... gotta say that name is probably the biggest reason why I never bothered with the TV show. She's kinda... late '90s-md-'00s teen movie blehhhrrghh. Never cared for her in anything.

BUT ... I will take your word for it. Now I'm actually pretty interested, knowing it's a Whedon original. Also, I recently learned through watching WAY too much of the WB/CW forever-running Supernatural that some of those WB/UPN shows were actually pretty smart if you gave them a chance. For instance, there's 12 and counting seasons of Supernatural (ugh) and my wifey has watched all of it. I say it to yuck it up for a few episodes, and kinda came and went, but now I can honestly say that at least once or twice a season there is a genuinely GOOD episode of the show that justifies the rest.

Also, RE: Teen Wolf ... Did you guys know that Jason Bateman took over for Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf Too?
I didn't. Not until the other day when I saw both films in the bargain bin an checked the credits. I'd seen "...Too" plenty of times (child of the '80s, y'know) but it never clicked until then that it was Michael Fucking Bluth doing all that terrible hairy boxing!

Well said. Like I said, I thought it was going to be a shitfest until I heard from several reliable sources that it was one of the most "original" horror movies of the decade. They were right of course. But you couldn't tell from the previews that it was going to be a meta-horror masterpiece full of Lovecraftian lore and great genre references.

Somehow feels odd that Cabin is STILL underrated, while DEADPOOL is the highest grossing R film of all time. Cabin did it first, and did it better.

with more time today: yes, i'm a whedon fan and totally totally totally missed this when it was released. i saw serenity, i saw much ado about nothing, i saw dr. horrible, i saw avengers, i saw agents of shield (at first, don't like it anymore) but missed this one COMPLETELY. i was only vaguely aware of the name and nothing more. literally nothing.

but hell yes. yes yes yes yes. great. just. fucking. great.

wait. teen wolf, the mtv show, comes from a movie? lol. never seen that. saw a bit of the mtv shit for lols mostly (talkback tv). anyway...

YES buffy and angel are whedon creations. he wrote a good many episodes and led his team of writers through the development of each seasonal story arc. if you watch them in the right order, you'll understand much better wtf is "the ancient ones" or whatevs in cabin in the woods. plus plus plus plus. not that you *need* it but it just fits the puzzle much better. it's that universe. the universe was created in buffy, expanded in angel, and here we are now (entertain us).

the recommended order is thus:

first: buffy 1 through 3

second: buffy 4 + angel 1 in parallel, and continue in parallel until you run out of buffys and have only angels left

PREPARE TO BE HOOKED. 12 seasons total.

You bet your ass it's from a movie. A movie about a high school werewolf (Michael J. Fox) who uses his Wolf powers to be awesome at basketball. :cool: And the movie is actually kind of brilliant (in, coincidentally, kind of a Buffy-esque way).

The sequel is pretty goddamn horrendous. High school werewolf becomes college werewolf, uses werewolf powers to be awesome at boxing and stand-up comedy or some shit.



Not actually sure if it's the same character but it's a stinker. First one is, dare I say, essential viewing for anyone raised in the '80s with an appreciation for the absurd.


I thought the Ancient One was a Cthulhu-type thing. Am I forgetting something?

^^ you'll find out in buffy/angel

GO VOTE!!!

appropriately, im watching roman polanski's macbeth

hard to concentrate, but... i cant stand the news right now

How was THe Arrival? I want to see every Amy Adams movie. :)

Buffy is awesome. Been rewatching slowly. I'm in the mid of season 3 and it's still great.

8 of 10. Amy was brilliant. she done her part very well.

Someone, I forget who at this point.. maybe a Roling Stone dude, said this was the "smartest blockbuster since The Dark Knight." That drew me in.

Thought this was in theatres months ago though.

wow good to hear. I def want to see it.

was halfway into HELLRAISER and got distracted. currently celebrating Veteran's Day but so far the movie was pretty terrible. i get the story behind it so far, the thril-seeker

anyway tldr we gonna watch PSYCHO NOW.

PSYCHO HELL YEA

HITCHCOCK IS BOSS

I love Hellraiser. It's so weird. The 2nd one is pretty good. The rest get awful. But I love the first one.

Y'all seen Doctor Strange yet? It was a good time. Not quite top tier MCU, but damn good MCU.

hellraiser is the nightmare of someone who got trapped into a sex cult, but the problem is that weirdness alone doesn't cut it (for me anyway). the story makes so many time leaps that it doesn't give you a compelling narrative. the lighting was also terrible to the point of distraction.

the problem was also that the central character, who is frank, the brother who got involve in shady shit, is given so few lines he's practically a prop for the suffering wife.

as for narratives,

--

oh hi i jjst came back we got psycho ready but had pending yardwork, so... maybe later.

anyway i don't want to condemn hellraiser before i finish it but so far it has been poorly executed. the idea for the core fairytale i get, it's the telling that's bugging me. but i pay too much attention to structure i guess. i think a straight telling would have made this much better.

Has anyone seen the new Adam Curtis documentary that's on bbc iplayer?

I love Adam Curtis' work and this was no less for me. People say he's too scatterbrain in his approach, but being able to connect over 50 years of history of the middle East, the ideas of William Gibson, Putin and with Patti Smith thrown in into a pretty damn coherent narrative takes some doing. It'll leave you depressed and drained, but worth watching.

All in all, we're fucked.

gaaaaah! i've been meaning to watch it, but got SERIOUSLY sidetracked about it

i need a VPN to get the bbc player to work here in 'merica but forgot to install it-- now i'm refurbishing an old macbook pro, and it's *almost ready* for prime time. so i'll probably load it monday if i get to install the HD posts tomorrow (some pins that need a torx key)-- thanks for the reminder

I couldn't agree more. I've tried countless times with it because I really really want to like it. Barker clearly has a great imagination and the scenes with the cenobites are awesome but the rest of it is just so flat. The main girl is particularly awful. Although I'm not sure if that's her fault or just poor direction from Barker (I suspect the latter). Fans will definitely disagree but, for me, if there was ever a film that warranted a remake it's that one. So long as whoever did it, didn't fuck around with the cenobites: the film's sole saving grace imo.

Cenobites get CRAAAZY in the second one, which a lot of people prefer to the first actually.

Also, a remake has been in talks for YEARS. One of them turned into a really poorly rated direct to video "sequel" a couple years ago that I never bothered with. Barked was going to be involved in the remake, but ... y'know..

I too would love to see a good retelling, since the first had the camera sheen of an early '90s Lifetime movie. For me, though, it worked all things considered.

The second one really kicks it up a notch. Some genuinely terrifying shit for an '80s movie. All the others are terrible. Maybe not as bad as the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels... but definitely nothing good going on in any of them. The fourth (which attempts to be anfar future space opera AND alternate history tale using a cast of essentially one very bad actor playing generation after generation of males in his family) is particularly awful in every way.

Alien. With the others to follow. At least up to Resurrection. Beyond that, fuck it.

 

visually nice, funny at times, plenty of action but I was missing something. maybe I am just getting old for them. 6 of 10.

YES. and sure the cenobites are awesome but the problem is that here they're just an IDEA, not characters. they're almost... props.

the problem here is this was 3 stories:
-the story of the hedonist that goes too far (frank & the cenobites). could have been great. like eyes wide shut but with a guilty participant.
-the story of the horny housewife who goes postman rings twice. could have been great too.
-the story of the innocent girl who.. some shit happens in her family or somehting, she makes faces... not so good.

so you don't even know who the fuck you're following here or why. it's pretty shit.

maybe they wanted to do this like the evil dead, when we progressively find out who are these deadites (lol) but no.

also evil dead was made supercheap but had the sense to use light to create a mood even if it was obviously fake & cheaply done--those beams coming out of the cabin and those hanging silks work great even if you know they're artificial.

hellraiser looked like a hallmark movie as severian says because the light was flat as fuck. like a soap opera. since the days of german expressionism it became evident that chiaroscuro works for horror FOR A REASON. namely, that things are hidden just around the corner. all the good ones know this.

i appreciate the attempt and a lot of good ideas in the story but the movie is a bit shit. best suited for talkback tv where you can joke about the penis head monster or the lady's helmet haircut or the girl's terrible terrible acting.

watched Daredevil last night. Hadn't seen it since it first came out. It was better than I remembered, but still pretty meh especially now that we have the excellent Netflix series.

SEASON OF THE WITCH

with hellboy, nic cage, and claire foy

*terrible movie*. bad accents, contemporary slang in the middle ages, tons of CGI and absurd shit-- but laughable and action packed, therefore entertaining.

this morning

ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN

i heard my wife laugh a lot while i played computer games next to her. that is a good way to relax. she loves buffoons.

last night:

PSYCHO

fucking masterpiece.

now here's the thing that just dawned on me last night.

in that sequence when the sister comes up to the house to look for the mother--

i'm looking at it and i go HOLY FUCK IT'S SPIELBERG! IT'S SPIELBERG!

and i realized where spielberg learned to be so good

when i pulled the epic rap battles of history hitchcock vs spielberg though it wasn't that great-- too many characters not enough comebacks

anyway, yes. fucking spielberg! hitchcock! yes!!! i saw it.

Getting to the end of Aliens at this point.

Had you never seen PSYCHO? Really?

Fuckin' congrats man! I'm envious. A masterpiece indeed.

This is getting pretty insanely good reviews. Something like a 92% on Rotten Tomatos. Honestly it looks like a mashup of Batman Begins, Inception and latter-day Harry Potter to me, but ... y'know... those movies all kicked ass.

Bloody hate Doctor Strange though. Not at all interested in seeing him. But... I am interested in seeing the movie. Will do so. Though I'm way more amped about Arrival and Rogue One.

Did you like Ironman? It's like that... with magic.

There are plenty Marvel movies I put above it. But still very good.

i've seen it a bunch of times, including repeated visits to "24 hour psycho" when it showed in dc, but it's one of those rare movies that gets better on rewatch. i actually own it, and i don't own movies (long story).

what was new to me yesterday was the spielberg connection. it's because of jaws a couple of months ago stuck with me. and i spotted those shots.

i need to rewatch it on blu-ray soon. dvd has limits. i meant psycho-- or jaws-- or both lol.

The only thing with Psycho that bothers me is the absolute last scene. Where he's shown in hospital and there's the two psychiatrist talking about him. Hitchcock deciding to RAM home what it means was stupid. The audience has figured out that he's hearing his mum's voice and that he dresses like her already. There's no need to have a scene explaining what everyone knew.

Other than that it's a great film.

oh ha ha yes-- that last bit is clunky.

i see it as a concession to a 1950s audience more than anything (it's a 1960 film but it's a "50's" movie to me). i wonder if it was a hitchcock decision or the studio did that. i'll investigate.

the other thing is that we grew up in the aftermath of all that... psychologization (is that a word?) of life, so i don't know if the audiences from 70 years ago would have picked up on it the way we do it today. we're hitchcock's children.

the last-last shot that follows is also a bit of overexplaining... that's the car being dragged out of the swamp with a chain. i would have liked more i think not to know what happened, but again 50s audiences most likely wanted a clear ending. too early in history for something like "inception".

but shot by shot, the way douglas gordon made it explode, it's just so brilliant.

Meh. First Iron Man was pretty good and refreshing, despite he terrible music.
The second and third were fucking terrible, only RDJ's smart mouth made them watchable. I think it was super easy to compare the first one to Batman Begins though, since it came out one year later, and that wasn't a battle it or any Marvel film could ever hope to win.

I've heard that Hitchcock wasn't keen on the psychiatrist scene but felt it necessary for audience comprehension. It was self financed so he didn't have any studio pressure, and the whole film plays havoc with the Hays code. It was just a rare case of poor judgement by Hitchcock which he thankfully learned from in time for The Birds, which benefits from explaining nothing.

Yeah the last scene in PSYCHO is infamously ridiculous. A pimple on an otherwise pretty much perfect face.

the code was still in effect in 1960? oh hell. ha ha ha ha. not so much the great tits, but that talk of alimony... shocking. well there's all kinds of stuff censors would frown upon in it.

thanks for all that info, i had no idea this was self-financed

looking up spielberg + hitchcock this stuff came up-- sad or funny? ha ha i vote funny

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...g-1796069.html

See this is the weird thing about that sort of writing. Some directors would get slated for not explaining a massive thing like that, others get praised *cough*Lynch*cough*. I remember watching M Night Shyamalan's The Happening and he does a similar thing as Hitchcock. At the end everyone's left wondering when it's gonna happen again and not explaining anything, yet for some reason he got slated HARD for doing that. Even though he was doing a similar thing as Hitchcock.

Haha no that's brilliant.

The code lasted until the late 60s but studios had been openly flaunting its rules for quite a few years before that. Saying that there are a couple of minor censor-imposed cuts to the shower scene.

I suppose the only way you can judge it is to ask whether it works in an individual film. I'd say it works in The Birds and, say, Mulholland Dr. but I haven't seen The Happening so can't comment on that, although I dare say there could be a bit of snobbery involved when it comes to critics dismissing filmmakers like M Night Shyamalan.