The best movie(s) I'd never heard about

[jenkins]

wilderesque,
magnetism: today blankenship & co. made first announcements for a theater's october "the united states of horror" series (nightly midnight movies set and made in a dispersal of states) and the third movie is jeff lieberman's just before dawn -- oregon and 1981

you can youtube the trailer but that's not going to help. not a trailer-made movie. there's a dance scene to watch (twist ending) and you can see some characters under a waterfall. from this movie and on youtube there are clips of characters dancing and characters standing under waterfalls, so i understand why it was selected by blankenship. cinephile style, note the composer was brad fiedel, at a point three years before the terminator, then fright night, then blue steel, then t2:jday. sometimes in the right place and in the right moment you can maybe have an entire audience think about how they're watching an oregonian horror movie from 1981, and the score is by the t2 person

i'll attempt to go see it, with a room full of people, and share what that's like

[jenkins]

wilder,

a description of the end of just before dawn

she punches the slasher inside his mouth, such that she lodges her first in the slasher, and she holds her fist there until that kills the slasher -- she holds her fisted hand inside the slasher's mouth for such a long time and to such a degree that you can see his body shake and see her personal trembling and it's rather unexpected and horrible and the slasher dies from it all. she takes her arm out of his deadmouth and her arm is salivated and she stares at it. there's another character, a male, and the male has been crying. he wasn't strong. there's a series of shots as the characters recover from the mentioned. many emotional shots of the two characters in the woods by the slasher's dead body. her emotion: holyfuck i just did that, i'll be damned. the last shot is her, then pan to the skyline to see those trees in sunrise light

if you can (i bet you can), please see the end. it' something

[wilder]

Thanks for the recommendation...that sounds extremely fucked up. Lieberman connection aside, the description on this page is also piquing my interest...

But the element of "Dawn" that really sets it apart from the rest is the character arc of the "last female" [...]. At the onset, she is like a lesbian Girl Scout denleader, complete with a sensible French Twist and trousers. But as the story progresses -- or, one might argue, to progress the story -- she becomes more feminine, tying her shirt up, letting her hair down, wearing makeup and Daisy Dukes. Oddly, it seems that every time we see her do something feminine, some tragedy befalls the group. For example, when she first lets her hair down and starts dancing, the backwoods family blows up their boombox. We see her painting her nails, and immediately Chris Lemmon is killed. The makeup itself is a major plot point; no one sees the killer stowaway on their camper because Red is hogging the mirror. By the end of the film Connie is tarted up like a French whore, and even goes so far as to apply a fresh coat after being knocked out of a tree and then nearly smothered by the evil fattie. It is in this easy, breezy, beautiful Glamourshots getup that she confronts the final baddie, literally stuffing her fist down this throat as her patently useless boyfriend watches, blabbering like a baby.

What the fuck is going on here? We see a butchy girl (usually a sign of strength in these films, as opposed to the hair-flipping hoardes of bimbo victims) who finds her inner tart, and in this discovery finds strength [...]. Quite a far cry from the usual character arc of the "last girl", who is almost always masculinized as she finds her strength, a point which my friend Bryan notes is a backhanded misogynist statement: in order for a woman to be strong, she much become a man. Here we've got just the opposite, and it is absolutely mind-boggling to watch.

I'l try to watch it later tonight.

[jenkins]

that's a great read. her daisy dukes are impressive, andbut please don't pause for them

i might not've gone to see just before dawn if you hadn't brought up jeff lieberman. he's a discovery. it seems like my bad that i haven't already heard of him or seen his movies -- the only works of his i've already seen are related to 'til death do us part. he helped on 'til death do us part! this fucking guy

remote control was worth seeing, i don't even have to ask. the just before dawn theater is also showing his movie squirm, and now i'm way more likely to go see squirm. and from imdb, this seems like a must:

Lieberman made his debut as a writer-director with the excellent and inspired revolt-of-nature killer-worm outing Squirm (1976). He followed this substantial drive-in hit with his best and most beloved film to date, Blue Sunshine (1978), which tells the extremely absorbing and original tale of a bunch of hippies who take a lethal form of LSD that causes them to lose their hair and become insane psychotics 10 years afterward.

!!!. happy about lieberman

[wilder]

I rented Blue Sunshine a while back but remember feeling like it failed to live up to its premise, might revisit it if Dawn delivers.

[jenkins]

watched satan's little helper and i'm so frazzled now. there's nothing to say about it

keeping my hopes for lieberman's earlier movies, and promising never to watch satan's little helper again

[tpfkabi]

I got a lot of delayed Notifications today, including this thread.
I'm kinda interested in Remote Control. The director discounted both versions $8 on eBay, so I might get it. The eBay listing doesn't say anything about them being signed and numbered though.
Is this corny in the way Troma stuff is? I hope not.

I see that Alex Winter's Freaked was re-released.
I have it somewhere, recorded off of TCM, but haven't watched it.

Some things on my IMDB Watchlist:

The Dark Backward (1991)
Dead Heat (1988) - There must be similarities with RIPD, because it is brought along with obvious MIB comparisons.
Class Reunion (1982) - I want to see this since John Hughes had a hand in it. Lampoon horror spoof from what I take.

[wilder]

Is this corny in the way Troma stuff is? I hope not.

I don't think I've seen a full Troma movie, maybe not even more than clips, but my first thought is that they don't seem at all alike. tkmj can probably answer this better than me.

[jenkins]

lol noo most want to see their high school nuke movie and i haven't. damn, sorry troma

do people receive updates when you post? not a bad idea to receive updates when your fav people post

[Sleepless]

I'm got a lot of delayed Notifications today, including this thread.

I had like 20 PM notifications this morning, all for messages sent within the past two weeks. And one thread notification. I'd received them all previously at the time.

do people receive updates when you post? not a bad idea to receive updates when your fav people post

There's some settings somewhere where you can opt in to receive notification emails for certain posts. I only have them on a couple of old threads but they rarely get posted in so I haven't bothered to unsubscribe. I usually just check the unread posts since last visit.

[jenkins]

why would it not be worth mentioning that British Pathé uploaded 85,000 historic films to YouTube

described:

Thousands of hours of historical footage showing major events, celebrities and simple day-to-day life from 1896 until 1976 has been uploaded to YouTube

seems like some of this has been chilling there for a while. there's a lot going on, there are channels. just, wow. this is a lot of stuff

an older release i enjoyed watching:


a new release that's heavy:

[jenkins]

[^^midday rementioning, seeing if there're people who wanna "greatest hits" or "enjoyed this example" the collection. they got 85k chances for captivating footage of recentish human history]
[for fans of: ripley's believe it or not, guiness book of world records, thrift shops, antiques, vintage shit, classic movies, old people e.g. grandparents, kittens, chitchat]

[wilder]

I highly recommend Edward Yang's movie The Terrorizers (1986), which has such gobsmackingly beautiful cinematography I can't even explain. It's available as a region-free, English-subtitled Taiwanese blu-ray via YesAsia (it comes back in stock periodically), and by...other means if you must. It really deserves to be seen in HD, though.

Below is an extended video essay about the film by The Seventh Art, very much worth watching.



The lives of anonymous strangers become intricately intertwined in this 1986 effort by late Taiwanese auteur Edward Yang. Following the sudden death of his superior, a doctor frames his colleague in order to succeed as the clinic's director. The doctor's writer wife, meanwhile, is experiencing a mid-life crisis, struggling to finish her next novel while surrendering to the advances of an ex-boyfriend. Elsewhere, a hippie photographer randomly snaps a delinquent girl escaping from a crime scene and becomes obsessed with her. The girl is locked up at home by her mother, and begins making random prank calls, which in turn affect the lives of the doctor and his wife.

The collage of chance encounters in The Terrorizers vividly portrays the degenerating psychic life of the Taipei city dwellers through disjointed narrative and multiple storylines. Set for brief moments against an eye-catching poster of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? on the wall, the irony constructed by Yang turns out to be all the more poignant, considering how his quiet characters never really speak up amid their simmering rage, before boiling over completely. Similar treatment is given to the film's supposedly dramatic plot elements, such as extramarital affairs, police raids and violence, which are delivered with unusual calmness and tranquility.

As with many other examples of Taiwanese New Wave cinema in the 1980s, The Terrorizers realistically records the people's private sentiment at a specific moment of Taiwan's rapid socio-economical transformation. Nevertheless, the film's depiction of the experience of urban ennui and desperation remains largely universal. No matter how one sees fit to interpret the film's double endings, Yang's vision of urban life looks all but doomed. The director once explained that this is essentially one tragic ending - that somebody would inevitably be hurt - told in two different ways. For a bleak story narrated without any comic relief, it is a fitting conclusion that is at once profound and disturbing.

- Edmund Lee, TimeOut HK

[Lottery]

Woahhhh, that looks really cool. Will add it to the watch list. Don't think I've seen anything by Edward Yang, including the popular Yi Yi.

[wilder]

For anyone interested in purchasing The Terrorizers on blu-ray, there's this helpful info via Criterion Forum:

That reminds me, is there any way to get the Blu-Rays in that series without paying exorbitant prices? Most seem to be out of stock at Yesasia.

I believe JSDVD (http://dvd.jsdvd.com/index.php?language=us) (Taiwanese retailer, I believe) has all of them except Vive L'Amour.

JSDVD may be a good option for anybody looking to get hold of The Terrorizers, because it's gone from YesAsia and possibly everywhere else.

If you haven't ordered from JSDVD before, keep in mind it's a strange ordering process--you order and pay for the product first, then they email you when they've calculated the shipping cost and you pay for that separately. Also, the prices are in Taiwanese currency, I think, so you have to do the conversion. Seems like a good retailer though--the Blu-rays were well packed and shipping was fast.

Here's the ordering page for The Terrorizers blu-ray on JSDVD. NT$790 comes to about US$26. No idea how much shipping will kill you.