What did you watch this week? (04/06-10/06)

Hell or high water (2016 Bluray): In the beginning of the movie there is a lot of uninspired conversation scenes, mostly in cars, and I found them a bit boring so I couldn't get warm to the characters. But at the 30 minutes mark, I don't know what exactly happened, but I started enjoying the movie more and more. What seemed to be, at first, cliché and soulless characters (the cop who's a few days from retirement, the clean brother that has a family and the crazy brother that did 10yrs in the joint) became something very sensible and a genuine. A lot of people seem to complain about how stupid their plan was. Well, they surely are not the smartest duo so I didn't mind about the plot. Overall, I was not too impressed but it was a fun watch. 7/10

Into the Badlands (2015 Netflix): I went into the badlands clueless and found a show that seems to be made for me. I binged it over two weeks, although there are only six episodes. The story is great and the action is even better. Every episode either starts or finish with a fight worthy of a final scene of a kung fu movie. Absolutely loved it. The characters/actors are good too but the only flaw was the younger ones. They didn't really match with the adults, unfortunately. Apart from that, everything was perfect. 9/10

I resumed watching the Disney Channel series "Shake It Up" and hopefully will finish the first season by this week. Not much into figuring what movies I want to watch next. Still have to finish movies with Zac Efron and then maybe start on Bradley Cooper ones.

glad you liked Creep - I thought it was a wonderful little gem

I've heard many good things about Creep. It has a cult following for good reason. I still haven't seen it yet though. Maybe I will finally go ahead and take the plunge like everyone else.

Well I'm still trying to find a good movie made in 2017. I wanted to find something not mainstream, so I watched a really dumb crime drama murder mystery about a small town detective investigating a bank heist gone wrong. It had an even dumber surprise ending. After the surprise was revealed in the last act, I had so many more questions about why the characters behaved the way they do. Unfortunately a re-watch isn't necessary because the problem was the plot. The gimmick is that the events are shown backwards. It's called Shimmer Lake and it's worth a 2/5 rating.

Death Machine (1994) - take Terminator and Alien, then put in some 80s cheese and let Stephen Norrington cook all that on a low budget - you get the best sci-fi B-movie of the 90s (sorry, but Hardware comes second). What could be cooler than a movie with characters named Wayland, Yutani, Carpenter, Raimi...? Perhaps a funnily running death robot? Nope, not that... The coolest part is Brad Dourif going mental. You may have been thinking that in The Dark Knight Ledger plays The Joker, but I would rather say that he plays Brad Dourif in Death Machine (admittedly, Ledger plays Dourif better than Dourif).

Some parts had to be sped up and others were too excessive for the chickenshit 90s (remember, they were listening to Backstreet Boys back then), and this led to so many cuts that the movie was massacred. Finding it in its full length (running few minutes above the 2 hours mark) was almost impossible, but years ago I found a copy ripped from LaserDisc to VHS and then to DivX. The quality was... authentic. At last, there is a nice Blue-Ray release and I finally can enjoy its full awesomeness in HD. 8/10 (yes, I'm biased)

Green Room (2015) - I have been wondering what is behind the green door since the first time I heard Jim Lowe's eponymous song. It is the green room, of course, what else could be? Seeing this movie being mentioned here a lot, I decided to check whether I will find the green room cozy, or it will be more like a bad Airbnb experience.

If you are a crappy story teller like me, you well remember many of those moments where you failed miserably in catching ears with otherwise interesting story and even gory details could not prevented the mighty slumber from descending upon the lands. That is what this movie is for me - badly told story. I can see why it would divide opinions - fine bleak cinematography, gore and Mon Capitaine in unusual role - but there is not enough to keep me much interested. Passable horror experience, even though I really hate when they duct tape wounds in movies (I prefer Yutani's way in Death Machine). 6/10


She-Wolves of the Wasteland (1988) - being big fan of America 3000, I hoped this to be a worthy addition to the canon of post apocalyptic girl power cheese. My hope sank 20 minutes into it. Some barely dressed overwomen, led by what could have been the cenobite wife of Emperor Palpatine, chase other nude women across the desert and that is all about it. Except for the zombified TV worshipers scene, there is no weirdness, no characters, no plot and almost no fun, aside from the unintentional fun coming out of all these things women do awkwardly, like running, jumping, fighting hand to hand, shooting guns and driving vehicles.

Recommended only for serious B-movie scholars. The occasional cheese eaters should satisfy their appetite with America 3000 or Hell Comes to Frogtown - these movies look like blockbusters, when compared to the She-Wolves. 3/10

I watched The Keepers and the new season of Orange Is the New Black which is why I haven't seen many films recently.

The Keepers is an excellent documentary that does a good job I think of objectively handling very sensational material.

Orange Is the New Black is difficult for me to rate because although I love the characters, I feel like the storylines go way beyond believable, and not in the intentionally surreal David Lynch, Fargo kind of way... but in the lazy... ah that's close enough type. Some moments were very powerful and moving, some were funny... but a lot was wtf... I can't believe they would do that. Still worth watching for its core message though.

I watched a decent chunk of episodes of The Clone Wars https://moviechat.org/tt0458290/Star-Wars-The-Clone-Wars because our own Princess Leia(of Lothlorien) reminded us that Netflix was retiring the series. It was really enjoyable and now I'm bummed that it's gone.

The animation was great and of much higher quality than the original Clone Wars series https://moviechat.org/tt0361243/Star-Wars-Clone-Wars The stories were interesting and gave a lot of cool Star Wars prequel backstory. I would call it a must watch for any serious SW fan.

It may have been last week, but I watched Logan as well. https://moviechat.org/tt3315342/Logan It was good, but I didn't like it nearly as much as most people apparently did. It was a little too depressing/dramatic for the genre, in my view.