Bullitt: Because it was a-renegade-cop-who-plays-by-his-own-rules movie before it was cool to be a renegade cop who plays by his own rules. This one was pretty neat. Has that low-key, procedural feeling you get with the good seventies dramas (1968, close enough), which I like a lot. No melodrama, nothing amped up with flashy camerawork or music just for the sake of generating tension. Car chase has a lot of the fine detail and charm that CGI lacks sometimes, smoke pouring off of wheels in random patterns, hubcaps flying off at odd moments, random stuff you often don't get when someone has to plan out every pixel of an action sequence. Good times.
Forbidden Zone: Wow, what, I don't even--*headsplosion*. If ever there was a movie to test one's tolerance for cult weirdness, this is it. This is basically what you'd get if you locked David Lynch, Mel Blanc, and Meeple in a room, gave them the budget of a high school play, and told them they couldn't come out until they'd made a movie. I really don't think I can say I
liked it just because my tolerance for "weird for the sake of weird" is fairly low these days, and I have zero interest in seeing it again, but I really can't hate any movie whose credits include stuff like "and Danny Elfman as Satan." Mostly I just sat there in slackjawed amazement that something this insane could actually exist. (In other words it is something Grefter should watch like right now.) Also, the theme song will not leave my head. (It can be found here, in the intro sequence--which I should note involves mild nudity, blackface, and copious amounts of raw insanity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOhncfDJum8)
Dagon: Despite the name, this is basically The Shadow Over Innsmouth (except set in Spain for some reason, probably because that's obviously where the director's funding came from. The actual name of the town in the movie is Imboca, which seems like some mangled Spanish translation of Innsmouth). Random guy on vacation gets stuck in creepy, sheltered port town, flees unpleasantly fishlike locals. It starts out looking like a run-of-the-mill horror movie, but some sequences are pretty much lifted wholesale from the story (fleeing a hotel by shifting a door lock around, then barricading an escape route room by room). It's very low budget, but they make good use of what they have; a minimum of digital effects, most of the effort going into makeup and prosthetics. The Innsmouth Look is captured with admirable detail. It's a B movie, but put together with some reverence for the source material (it's directed by the guy who did Reanimator and From Beyond back in the eighties). Fun enough for what it is, outside of the obligatory gruesome sequence (poor Ezekiel. That really was extremely painful to watch). Main character's kind of a wiener, but eh, not really out of place for a normal guy getting stuck in a horrible situation. Earned massive points for the final stand even if it didn't work out as intended, at least. ("No options." *torch*)
9: Eh. It was okay. I can't quite put my finger on what was missing, but something definitely was. There were some nice bits--escape from the cathedral was probably the highlight as far as the action sequences go, follow-through on the "Sometimes, one must be sacrificed" line was pretty much what it should've been (although, I'd really, really like to see Christopher Plummer play someone who's not a complete asshole sometime before he dies). Basically a decent effort for a first-time director who might be more interesting with some experience behind him.
