What have you watched recently? 3D!

Homelander

Watched Soverign.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26843513/

Incredible movie. An insight into the right-wing conspiracy, anti-Government element and the warped thinking behind their logic. Couldn't recommend it highly enough, and terrific performances.

One of the best movies I've seen in a long time. Bleak, compelling, educational and based on real life events.

Tony EH

'Underwater'

‘Underwater’ is a 2020 movie that basically takes its cues from ‘Alien’ and ‘The Abyss’, which are both vastly superior, and starring the usually lifeless Kristen Stewart as Norah Price, a mechanical engineer on a deep sea drilling facility called Kepler 822 in the Mariana Trench. When the facility is struck by an underwater earthquake Price and a small group of other survivors are thrust into a life and death situation in which they must try and reach the surface somehow and also avoid life forms that have been released by the earthquake.

As mildly an intriguing a premise like that might sound, William Eubank’s derivative movie results in just being rather dull for far too much of its screen time. The cast are ok in their roles, with the exception of T.J. Miller who’s simply insufferable. But they’re never anything more than adequate for a film of this type. None of the cast members are bad, as it were, it’s just that their characters are deeply uninteresting. For instance, Vincent Cassel, as Captain Lucien, is the type of trope filled leader figure who constantly says to all the other characters that everything’s going to be alright and that they’re all going to live.

Yeah, sure pal.

‘Underwater’ is also quite confusing too. You never really know where the characters are because the geography of the movie is impossible to spell out and it’s incredibly murky, as one would expect from a movie set deep under the ocean. But while that may help with atmosphere in some better made films, it just adds to a sense of frustration in this one.

The audio cues, too, quickly become very annoying. Every attack or movement in the gloomy water is accompanied with a musical sting or a “roar” from some sea beasty and it all becomes incredibly laborious.
‘Underwater’ is one of those pictures that sounds like it might be a good idea at the time, but for most of its 95 minutes it just treads water and ends up being unsatisfactory when it’s all done and wrapped up.

3/10

silliussoddius

….

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123745446#Comment_123745446

Spoiler Warning

Isn't the creature at the end meant to be Cthulhu?

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123745525#Comment_123745525

It certainly takes it…um…"inspiration" from him. But I don't think the film makers intended it to be him.

Tony EH

‘Burial Ground Nights of Terror’

No plot, no story, no rhyme or reason, the awkwardly titled ‘Burial Ground Nights of Terror’ (it takes place over the course of a single night) is an Italian zombie gore fest from 1981 that sets its carnage in a large mansion located near a, yep you guessed it, burial ground in which a “professor” somehow unleashes a horde of flesh eating Etruscan zombies that cause havoc among a group of people that were invited to his home for a holiday of some sort.

Gut munching ensues.

Shot over a period of four weeks at the Villa Parisi in Frascati, Andrea Bianchi’s incredibly inept movie is often a riot because of its bad acting and complete lack of sense. The English dubbing, too, is frequently a source of amusement as characters keep uttering their inane lines as they stand obligingly still while the slow zombies shamble toward them.

The zombie makeup, which was done by Giannetto De Rossi, looks laughably bad in places despite the fact that De Rossi was a special effects artist of note. However, that may have been down to budgetary constraints more than anything else. But most of the zombies are just guys in masks complete with oversize teeth that are orthodontic nightmares. The actors playing the part of the living dead are troopers, though, as a number of them were required to have maggots and worms lodged into the eye sockets of the masks they were wearing to give the zombies a little more umph. The gut munching looks the part even though it’s the pig guts pulled from under the jumper type of effect.

‘Burial Ground Nights of Terror’ abandons all sense after a pretty dull opening section and just contents itself showing repeated zombie attacks as the dead assault the Italian chateau. The living dead in Bianchi’s movie are smart enough to raid a barn and make use of some farm tools like a scythe and a hoe. One of them is also quite handy with what looks like a tent peg as he uses it to impale an unfortunate victim’s had to a window shutter, where upon his zombie pals decapitate her with the scythe.

The attacks are relentless, but are terribly staged, and all the while the entrapped guests could just simply run away because the living dead are so slow. But the dead keep coming eliminating the living one by one until the movie’s preposterous finale.

But ‘Burial Ground Nights of Terror’ also contains one of the weirdest ideas I’ve ever seen in any movie, exploitation trash, or otherwise. Two of the guests who have been invited to stay at the Italian mansion are a mother, Evelyn (Maria Angela Giordano) and her teenage son Michael (Peter Bark). Peter Bark (whose real name is Pietro Barzocchini) is clearly a midget and was, in fact in his mid 20’s when the movie was made. At one point his character Michael becomes sexually attracted to his mum and makes advances on her claiming that he’s missed her breasts! And, as if that wasn’t crazy enough, it’s probably giving nothing away in saying that later in the movie his mum actually tries to breast feed him after he’s become a zombie!

It’s a truly astonishing scene in whole series of bizarre sequence that have strung together to try and form a movie of some description and has to be seen to be believed.

But apart from that hideous vista there’s little in ‘Burial Ground Nights of Terror’ that can be considered remarkable. Even more so if one has been previously exposed to the dubious wonders of the Italian cannibal/zombie cycle of trashy movies, in fact there’s one scene that’s a blatant rip off of Lucio Fulci’s ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ which was itself a rip off. It’s awfully plodding, despite wasting no time with any kind of plot, and the endless dubbed screaming, especially from the female characters, becomes absolutely fatiguing resulting in something that’s only worth watching if you want to see an example of the aforementioned genre or the type of bizarro 42nd Street grindhouse nonsense that just doesn’t get made any more.

1/10