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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

What oft forgotten film gems do you want to offer to us, hey?

22:46 / 26.07.04

I love The Standpitt (Sandpitt Kids?) great pointless coming of age baseball nonsense. Watch it, all of you. NOW!!

23:02 / 26.07.04

Lone Star by John Sayles

Terrific storytelling. A fine tale of murder, hidden aspects of local heroes, surpressed desires, incest, unconditional love, xenophobia, American-Mexican relationships, ...

Start bugging the videostore now!!

01:31 / 27.07.04

Benny, do you mean The Sandlot? It's a fine young-person's film, with a weird turn by Denis Leary as the main kid's father. An old favorite of mine as well, but more along the quality-lines of The Monster Squad rather than, say, The Goonies, all of which are fuckin' killer kid films, but the latter of which is probably a legitimately good film as well.

A criminally neglected movie that is a towering example of taut filmmaking is The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 also known just as Pelham 1-2-3, starring Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau in the most prominent roles. It's just an incredibly natural film where Robert Shaw heads up a crew of four men who hijack a New York City subway train and ransom the passengers for a million dollars. Incredibly tight direction choices, wonderfully natural, well-realized character-performances from everyone with a speaking role. Everybody in the film looks like a real person. And when Walter Matthau goes to kick a guy's ass, you believe it. Quentin Tarantino's color-naming convention in Resorvoir Dogs is an homage to the film. David Shire's brutal 12-tone funk/jazz score for the film is jaw-dropping.

Hickey & Boggs is another great, immensely obscure 70's crime film, starring the I-Spy team of Robert Culp & Bill Cosby. Culp directed, and Cosby kills a LOT of men in deeply violent bouts of very believable rage. Good luck finding it, though. A fun reminder that Bill Cosby was very skilled at acting like a real human being, and often did.

07:34 / 27.07.04

SANDLOT, that's the one - where the fat kid pretends to drown so he can slip the tongue to the fit life-guard girl. Great film.

Also, excellent mention of Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, LDones. One of my favourite films (robert shaw is my second favourite actor after Gene Hackman, and Walter Mathaeu is fantastic in this film) and great, great soundtrack.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:50 / 27.07.04

Easy Wheels

Ivan and Sam Raimi (under the alias Celia Abrams) made this, one of the funniest movies ever. A gang of all-girl bikers (led by a woman who was raised in the wild by wolves) are stealing children to raise a new race of warrior women. Unfortunately, she falls in love with Bruce (not Campbell, but I'm pre-e-etty sure the role was originally written for him), a Vietnam vet (who also, coincidentally, leads a biker gang) who has a shard of metal stuck in his head which gives him visions. And he's out to foil their dastardly plan.

It's got everything. Bikes, beer, biker blokes and chicks, lots of comedy hand-grenade action, possibly THE most laboured metaphorical driving/sex conversation in the history of cinema AND a wonderful a cappella rendition of Rock Of Ages. The dialogue kicks ass, and, in short, it's a movie EVERYONE should own.

09:09 / 27.07.04

Tough Guys Don't Dance.

Norman Mailer goes stark raving bugfuck directing the film of his own existentialist murder mystery novel.
Contains such gems of dialogue as:

"Your knife. Is in. My dog."

"I'm a law enforcement officer, and it TURNS ME ON!"

(explaining why he couldn't commit a murder)
"I couldn't get that heavy shit to flush."

"Oh God oh man oh God oh man oh God oh man oh God."

All this and LAWRENCE TIERNEY! You aren't WORTHY!

09:15 / 27.07.04

Kicking & Screaming. A witty take on dealing with end-of-university issues (including your girlfriend moving to Prague). It's easy to dismiss this as yet another angst-ridden product of the Reality Bites bandwaggon, but there's some good moments in it.

10:24 / 27.07.04

"...monkeys, monkeys, Ted and Alice."

I second Kicking and Screaming.

10:33 / 27.07.04

death line, a hungover, tea-addicted donald pleasance takes on the dying remnants of a community of victorian cannibals under warren street tube. top tragedy-monster, chris lee as a 'you don't want to go down there'-type spook and swinging students being scarfed to feed the wife.

and the doctor phibes films.

10:34 / 27.07.04

death line, a hungover, tea-addicted donald pleasance takes on the dying remnants of a community of victorian cannibals under warren street tube. top tragedy-monster, chris lee as a 'you don't want to go down there'-type spook and swinging students being scarfed to feed the wife.

and the doctor phibes films.

11:01 / 27.07.04

Horror Express.
Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing TEAM UP to take on a body-hopping, brain-sucking, prehistoric alien BASTARD on the trans-siberian express.
Also features Telly Savalas as a mad Cossack captain- "I know that a horse has four legs and a man has two legs but even the Devil fears one honest Cossack!" I mean, what the fuck? Was that actually in the script?
Best line- when someone points out that Lee or Cushing could be the monster, Cushing looks confused, then patiently explains- "Monster? But WE'RE BRITISH!"

21:36 / 27.07.04

I second Horror Express. The closing theme alone is worth it (a disco'd out rendition of the tune the monster whistles in the film), but the absolute kicker is when they examine cells from the monster's eye on a microscope slide and see a brontosaurus . Glorious deadpan work from Cushing & Lee.

Also, the original The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a cinema classic - it's one of my favorite films, and it just reeks of Anton LaVey from start to finish, with all that wonderful vaudevillian posturing/self-entertainment, that elegant-but-cheesy deco feel his lair has. Just a wonderfully weird film. The second film, though, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, was a travesty in the face of how fine the original was. It was so lacking in the spirit and charm that made the first so rewarding.

Haus of Mystery

00:15 / 28.07.04

Vengeance The Demon (or Pumpkinhead) - Stan Winston (FX maestro) directs superb gothic rural horror. Everything is horror movie perfect, the monster is amazing, young people die and

LANCE HENRIKSON

who deserves his own thread.

08:12 / 28.07.04

For Your Height Only

Phillipino Bond spoof featuring midget Weng Weng as agent 003 1/2. Best part is a hooker with a total Red Hot Riding Hood accent who asks Weng "Are you a sexual creature?" Weng seduces her with a sultry "I dunno."
I tell you, though, the little guy can land like a cat! He's always jumping off tall things and you think he's going to break every bone in his tiny body, but he just goes THWAP like Spider-Man and walks off, no pads, wires or trick shots.
I've been told I'm a dead ringer for a Phillipino movie star called Christopher De Leon...

11:04 / 28.07.04

Harold and Maud.

Morbid rich teenager hooks up with 80 year old, free thinking holocaust victim.

14:05 / 28.07.04

Is Harold & Maude really forgotten, though? It's rather popular round these parts.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:21 / 28.07.04

OH MY GOD!!! "For Your Height Only"!!! I'd forgotten that particular gem!!!

Man, that midget sure has the creepiest grin I've ever seen...

Our Lady Has Left the Building

16:24 / 28.07.04

Krull.

Oh yes.

Keith, like a scientist

18:36 / 28.07.04

would you consider Running on Empty with River Phoenix and Judd Hirsch a forgotten film?

cause i love it, and no one I know cares much about it... the performances are just amazing to me...sidney lumet directs to great effect. anti-war protesters on the lam, kids caught in the middle, adolescence, etc. lovely, lovely, lovely.

Brigade du jour

21:56 / 31.07.04

Thanks the Easy Wheels tip Stoatie, I shall now dedicate my immediate future to tracking it down.

Um, unless you want to lend it me?

Anyway, The Stunt Man, starring Peter O'Toole and Barbara Hershey. Saw a tv trailer for it and wanted to see it mainly because it had a plane falling off a cliff quite spectacularly and stupidly at the same time. Jolly good film as I recall, but I really need to see it again because this was about twelve years ago.

00:00 / 01.08.04

I watched THE STUNT MAN just a few weeks ago, actually, and it was... okay. Certainly not as mind-blowing as its reputation would suggest, and some aspects of it have dated very badly--Steve Railsback's hair, the godawful overmixed score, and certain of the dialogue's idioms (e.g., "balling my old lady"), in particular

The "special edition" DVD features a hilariously self-important introduction from the director, who appears to be under the impression that, because his film deals a bit with paranoia, he has just written Gravity's Rainbow.

Brigade du jour

00:48 / 01.08.04

Always the way isn't it? Things are never as good as you remember from when you were younger.

Although it can work both ways. I thought Supergirl was an irredeemable dog when I saw it as a child, but it was on the other day and I found it really funny. I don't think that was entirely unintentional on the part of the film-makers.

07:38 / 09.08.04

Two more-

Spacehunter- Adventures in the Forbidden Zone
Fucking MOLLY RINGWALD in a Mad Max/Star Wars pastiche that just don't let up. Peter Strauss hits just the right Han Solo/Treat Williams note as the hero, Micheal Ironside out-hams himself as Overdog, say it with me, Overrrrrdoggg. Like Underdog but, more OVER! And did I mention Molly Ringwald? In action-hero mode? Useless trivia you could care less about: the two motorbikes with rollcages and gatling guns were reused in the live-action Fist of the North Star movie.

The Man From Hong Kong
Jimmy Wang Yu, hero of such genre classics as One-Armed Swordsman and Master of the Flying Guillotine, rampages through Australia with the kind of casual disregard for bodycount, property damage, international relations and unwanted pregnancies usually reserved for 00-Agents. Directed by "Turkey Shoot" and "B.M.X. Bandits"'s Brian Trenchard-Smith, also features Sammo Hung and Hugh Keays-Byrne (Mad Max's Toecutter), and George Lazenby as the badguy.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:45 / 09.08.04

Morgue, you're worryingly good at this. Turkey Shoot. Oh My God.

09:37 / 09.08.04

Eh, I actually used to do film reviews for Sick Puppy magazine. I heard the editor, Stratu, killed the series after he came off heroin and got hooked on God.*

Kids, winners don't do God.

*Shit, should have grabbed his death metal C.D. collection while I had the chance... all that Cannibal Corpse gone to waste, he probably burnt it all, not to mention all those old issues of Hustler! SOB!

18:06 / 09.08.04

Psychomania is my current filmic obsession, as discussed over in that over thread, but aside from that..

A few months ago I was lazing around one afternoon and happened to catch The Three Lives of Thomasina, as briefly referenced in the Invisibles, on Channel 5. For most of its running time it's an absolutely appalling soppy Disney live action thingy full of patronising comedy Scottishness, but... there are a few sections that go absolutely bugfuck strange, and it's easy to see why it made an impression on ol' Grant Morrison..

GET THIS: when I turn it on the first thing I see is a sequence where the spirit of a dead cat (an actual live action cat, no cartoon shit) is flying through the depths of space on a glowing silver shield as part of a fleet of millions of other warrior-cat souls toward the shining light of a planet-sized golden effigy of the Eygptian Cat-Goddess Bast!
As the cat becomes one with the light, Bast delivers some kind of speech about the universal one-ness of cat consciousness..

..and then the action returns to the real world, with a close-up of the dead cat curled up in a coffin. Camera pulls out to reveal it's being paraded through the streets as part of a full highland funeral procession with bagpipes etc.!

By which point I am of course reaching for the TV listings thinking "fuck me! What in the hell is this??"

Then the cat comes back to life and wanders off or something, and gets nursed back to health by this merciful animal-loving, forest dwelling witch-lady (every crappy sub-Incredible Journey Disney film must have one). And this section is interesting, because it seems as if the script writer is secretly some kind of real intense guy, and it builds up this weird thing where the witch-lady becomes the cat's new god (by vestige of her position as "the giver of life!"), culminating in the cat (whose thoughts are voiced by an actress) experiencing a terrible existential crisis when the lady chucks her out of the house to play with the other animals and..

..well you get the idea - it's one of those films which can so easily be taken as a huge gnostic metaphor that it becomes clear that it's not just wishful thinking - there totally IS some really weird religious sub-text going on..