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I enjoy Abominable Dr. Phibes a lot, but I rate Theatre of Blood just a tiny bit higher, which many consider a homage/spoof of Phibes.

Price did some good comedies in the 50's - Champagne for Caesar comes to mind.

I saw Theatre of Blood as a kid but not as an adult. Need to seek it out as well.
 
Watched some more Marvel stuff this weekend -- quick thoughts:

Shang-Chi: saw this in a theater and really enjoyed it. I agree with the earlier comment about the last part feeling like a different film. Plus it's always great to see Michelle Yeoh and Tony Leung.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: I enjoyed this one a lot too. It's my favorite of the Disney Marvel live-action series so far. A bit slow to start, but it took off after that.

Loki: it was okay. Best thing about it was Mobius, IMO. It mostly felt like a reason to give the Loki character more screen time. Also, the whole big cosmic plot and villain that somehow almost nobody knows about until now thing is getting played out.

Regarding non-Marvel stuff, I will probably start Justified season 6 this week.
 
Watched Dynasty Warriors on Netflix. It’s not good, but it is fun and ridiculous in only the way that an over the top retelling of lu bu fighting lu bei and his sworn brothers can be. The women were props exclusively to set of characters as awful (Dong Zhuo) or secretly having a heart (Lu Bu). Magic weapons, special effects, tens of thousands of troops, weapons tossing dozens around. At one point Lu Bu tosses like an entire battalion in the air.

definitely a great documentary. ;)
 
Watching Mythic Quest the new series from It's Always Sunny's Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day on Appletv+.




Fun and much lighter than Sunny with some familiar faces for Sunny fans and particularly good comedic performances by Charlotte Nicdao, Jessie Ennis and F. Murray Abraham.
 
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Everything about that show suggests I should love it, but everything about that trailer just annoys me.
 
Everything about that show suggests I should love it, but everything about that trailer just annoys me.

It is better than the trailer with a good mix of darker and sweeter humour and like a lot of shows gets better as it goes along but isn't one of those 'you need to watch 5 episodes before it gets good' things.
 
It is better than the trailer with a good mix of darker and sweeter humour and like a lot of shows gets better as it goes along but isn't one of those 'you need to watch 5 episodes before it gets good' things.

I'll probably give it a try as my favourite "new" show (my watching schedule tends to be months or year behind the rest of the world), AP Bio, just jumped the shark hard in the second season, and it's going to be a while now before any more Rick & Morty or Superman & Lois episodes.
 
It is better than the trailer with a good mix of darker and sweeter humour and like a lot of shows gets better as it goes along but isn't one of those 'you need to watch 5 episodes before it gets good' things.

It’s really good. I’m about halfway through season 2. I like that it can have a lot of different takes….sometimes it’s absurd, sometimes it’s touching, sometimes it’s both. The characters can be caricatures in one episode and then deeply examined in another.

And F. Murray Abraham is great.
 
I got a copy of She Wolves of the Wasteland. I'm more familiar with it under it's alternate title, Phoenix: The Warrior.

It's a grade B movie that used to show up USA Up All Night. Back then, I thought it was absolutely terrible, one of the worst movies there was. It's funny how time changes things. A while back it was available streaming on Prime, and it became a sort of comfort flick for me. I'd start it up and let it play in the background.

It's not a good film by any means, but for grade B post-apoc schlock featuring models with big hair, it's probably possible to do a lot worse.

I noticed that Heavy Metal 2000 was available for streaming on Prime. I gave it a watch, for the first time I can recall in a long while. I don't know if I've ever ranted about it here. I used to think it was pretty terrible.

And... yeah, it's not good. But like She Wolves, it's decent enough to have playing in the background. As a sequel to the original Heavy Metal, it's pretty disappointing. It's not even because of the quality of the original as a story. It's more what the original Heavy Metal represented. Animation for adults had come a long way since the original Heavy Metal, and Heavy Metal 2000 just pretended it was still 1980. I'd say that 2000 didn't even clear the bar set by the original even if judged by 1980's standards.

And oh lord the character designs of Heavy Metal 2000 are so dated. Really, really, super dated. As in, the disco themed episodes of the 1980 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV show aren't anywhere near as dated.
 
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Heavy Metal 2000 and The Golden Child are two movies blasted by everyone I know as being terrible yet I want to see for myself.
 
Heavy Metal 2000 and The Golden Child are two movies blasted by everyone I know as being terrible yet I want to see for myself.

The 80's Eddie Murphy fantasy? I barely remember it, but it wasn't like Pluto Nash bad, just...boring and unremarkable.

As for Heavy Metal 2000, have you seen the first Heavy Metal? Remember the sequence with Tarna, the white-haired barbarian chick who rode the pterodactyl and fought those mutated guys?

OK, well, just take that sequence padded out to over an hour, replace Tarna with Julie Strain, replace the animation with...worse animation, and replace all the good music from the original with...not good music.
 
The 80's Eddie Murphy fantasy? I barely remember it, but it wasn't like Pluto Nash bad, just...boring and unremarkable.

As for Heavy Metal 2000, have you seen the first Heavy Metal? Remember the sequence with Tarna, the white-haired barbarian chick who rode the pterodactyl and fought those mutated guys?

OK, well, just take that sequence padded out to over an hour, replace Tarna with Julie Strain, replace the animation with...worse animation, and replace all the good music from the original with...not good music.
You weren't kidding about Heavy Metal 2000. Poor animation, forgettable soundtrack, terrible dialogue. All of that could be forgiven but I have no tolerance for boring.
 
Just watched Netflix’ The Highwaymen with Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner. It’s about the two former Texas Rangers who took down Bonnie and Clyde. I quite enjoyed it. Kind of gritty. Built up tension but ends in a way one wouldn’t expect with movie versions of real life events. They didn’t really embellish things, I guess.
 
Tonight we watched 'Malignant'... which was pretty hilarious. Though I think I would have liked it better if it had had about one third the budget... OR, the money had been spent on better writing and actors instead of pointless FX. Still... lots of fun... might be the origin story for a new grim superhero, ala Darkman.
 
I'm on season 5 of Burn Notice. It's a wonderful show for anyone who wants to bone up to play in any kind of espionage RPG. Plus it has Bruce Campbell, always a good thing.

I liked that show, though I don't think I ever saw the last few seasons. I enjoyed the open didactism--Michael explaining tricks of tradecraft through voice-over--and it was fun seeing Sharon Gless as his mother. Gabrielle Anwar was pretty miscast as his ex Fiona, though.
 
On a Rainer Werner Fassbinder binge right now.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is touching and tender, a minimalist tribute to Sirk's 50s melodramas.





Satan's Brew couldn't be more different, a literally hysterical, frenetically-paced, obscene and black farce about a homicidal failed poet who starts to believe he is cult-like, proto-fascist poet Stefan George.





World on a Wire is Fassbinder's 2-part TV film adaptation of Daniel Galouye's paranoid sf novel Counterfeit World that recalls Phillip K. Dick, virtual worlds and the net.


 
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Just watched the first episode of Y, The Last Man on Hulu.

I love the comic and have been looking forward to this for a while. The first episode was solid, if a bit of a departure from the source material. But understandable why they’d go that route.

Interested to watch more.
 
Just watched the first episode of Y, The Last Man on Hulu.

I love the comic and have been looking forward to this for a while. The first episode was solid, if a bit of a departure from the source material. But understandable why they’d go that route.

Interested to watch more.

I just watched the first two. The second episode really departs from the comic in a major way. It is going to be interesting to see where they go from there.
 
Watching the Douglas Fairbanks classic silent, epic version of Thief of Bagdad with the great, sexy Anna May Wong.

The skimpy outfits in this must have stirred controversy back then.



I'd love to see his Robinhood film as well now.
 
I just watched the first two. The second episode really departs from the comic in a major way. It is going to be interesting to see where they go from there.

Yup. Watched the second myself once I realized they actually released the first three eps in week one. Wife barely made it so we didn’t start the third.

Definitely at a different place by the end than I thought it’d be. But that’s cool. It’s solid so far.
 
The skimpy outfits in this must have stirred controversy back then.
1924 is pre-Code, right? People probably became more uptight about such things later on. There's some pretty risquée pre-code horror films that I really enjoy but most are from the early 1930s.
 
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Another bit of sifting through the anime on Netflix: Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It's a sort of Evangelion treatment of magical girls, quite dark and surreal and I was pleasantly surprised - It's pretty good.

I also watched another one the other day: Erased. This is a sort of time travel thriller that leans into Groundhog Day a bit. Also not bad.

It looks like there's also a live-action adaptation of Erased, but I haven't seen that.
 
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Another bit of sifting through the anime on Netflix: Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It's a sort of Evangelion treatment of magical girls, quite dark and surreal and I was pleasantly surprised - It's pretty good.

I also watched another one the other day: Erased. This is a sort of time travel thriller that leans into Groundhog Day a bit. Also not bad.

I really dug Madoka, I actually liked it more than Evangelion (the TV series at least) by a wide margin.
 
Saw the new Candyman. It was....well, uneven. Badly paced, a lot of scenes that didn't have anything to do with moving the plot forward, next to no suspense or horror really, and (as expected) some heavy-handed social commentary that frankly came across as more cartoony than anything.

But despite all that, there are some things I really loved about it. The way it played with and expanded the original mythology was great. I really appreciated the fact that it was a direct sequel to the original, not a reboot. Getting Virginia Madsen back (even though it was just her voice) was fantastic. And the ending reveal made me very happy.

This could have been a great, great film with some better editing, a tighter script, and a better score (music was such an important part of the original film).
 
When season five of Lucifer came out, I mistakenly believed it was the final season. After seeing the last episode of season five, I thought to myself, "That was kind of a weird, unsatisfying ending." So I was excited when I heard they were making season six.

Now that I've seen season six, which is the actual final season, I'm ... less excited about it. I did like the storyline about
Lucifer's Daughter
, but overall, I found the final season a bit boring and also felt it didn't fit with the previously established tone of the show. I think the end of season four would have probably been the best endpoint.
 
Now that I've seen season six, which is the actual final season, I'm ... less excited about it.

I just finished it, and was disappointed with it. It is very sappy. I suspect that the writers and showrunner realized that there is a large female audience for the show, and decided that making it a teary-jerky romance would be the way to appeal to them, even if that meant changing the whole tone of the show, even though the audience was built up under a fully different style. It reminded me of the final episode of "Supernatural," which was also disappointing.
 
Saw the new Candyman. It was....well, uneven. Badly paced, a lot of scenes that didn't have anything to do with moving the plot forward, next to no suspense or horror really, and (as expected) some heavy-handed social commentary that frankly came across as more cartoony than anything.
I didn't really care for the original, probably because I liked the Clive Barker story... about an urban legend come alive through belief... and thought it was more interesting. The movies seemed to ditch that in favor of a story about a vengeful ghost.
Does this new one get at the urban legend/tulpa idea any at all?
 
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