Lima

I like Alexander Payne's work very much and so far he has never disappointed me, but this one was a misstep. The basic premise is fine, I get what he wanted to convey to the audience, at the beginning it's full of interesting scenes and ideas, but in the last act it completely falls apart under the director's hands, when you get the feeling that Payne is either taking a solid piss at you or showing a loss of judgement. The only thing missing was Monty Python in a hug with Ashtar Sheran, I guess that's how unintentionally self-parodic it made me feel. It’s just a mess, what can I tell you?

Did I really see it, or just dreamed it? The Cloverfield Paradox is the space version of The Room that flies with its silliness to somewhere beyond the boundaries of tastelessness, where it shakes hands with Robot Monster, Turkish Star Wars before heading to infinity. Julius Onah, along with the writers, is the new Tommy Wiseau. I believe that in a few years this will be a stellar addition to The Shockproof Film Festival, and with the help of alcohol it could be an interesting group experience, like when the audience of The Room bombards the screen with plastic spoons during midnight screenings. Hell, yeah!

It’s been few days after the screening and I'm still thinking about this film. It's an incredibly "colorful" film, not only because of the camera, which captures the garishly colored architecture on the suburbs of Florida with gusto, but also in terms of feeling. An emotional roller-coaster ride with an almost infectious energy that mixes endless sadness with the happiness and naivety of young children and their parents from the margins of society, who – even though their lives are awful – can rejoice in the little things. On the one hand, it's a pretty depressing experience (you wouldn't want to be in the shoes of that mom), but it always makes up for it with the guileless child's view of the world, who doesn't worry about anything and enjoys what little life brings. The film doesn't make you feel depressed about your messed-up life, but rather caresses you, thanks to Willem Dafoe, who is a tough hotel manager, but a fair, straight man with protective instincts (brilliant scene with the paedophile!), to whom you would entrust your children with a calm heart, or go out for a beer with. His performance is so brilliant that his character doesn't devolve into a caricature of his goodness, but you actually believe that such people exist among us. American indie films are often cursed with a sense of authenticity, but you can always sort of see that they're just playing at it. Not this one, though, this one is authentic to the bone. This is the true portrait of people on the fringes of American society, who are called "white trash", this is the "real America", where Disneyland is shown off with its own opulence, so that only two streets away, the losers live in a cheap hotel, but they don't complain about their fate. The character of junkie mom Halley, in a remarkable creation by non-actress Bria Vinaite (the director found her on Facebook), is so above it all and so cool, in fact, that it's almost infectious. And the daughter played by Brooklyn Prince? I've seen all the films of Tomáš Holý, Haley Joel Osment and other great child actors, but Brooklyn leaves them in the dust with her brilliantly immediate acting! I just.... missed the movie so much that I had to watch it again after two weeks. All 165 (!!) festival award nominations, collected from all over the world, are well deserved.

Poster tagline: INHUMAN! INVINCIBLE! INESCAPABLE! THE SCREAM THAT SHOCKED THE SCREENS WITH 300,000 VOLTS OF HORROR!!! I wouldn't say Lone Chaney Jr. outdoes the others here acting-wise, as everyone here writes, rather, it’s a sad sight of a once horror star. In the whole film, except for the beginning, he doesn't utter a single sentence (as the script told him "the volts destroyed his vocal cords"), every now and then he knocks down a cop or a gangster, or picks up a car with his own hands, otherwise he's always slightly hunched over, hands in his pockets, and close-ups of his face that looks like he's constipated and pushing out something unpleasant. As I’ve said, a sad sight. I appreciate that most of the film takes place in interesting L.A. locations instead of boring sets, and the finale is appropriately explosive (literally), but otherwise this straightforward revenge flick doesn't offer much entertainment. Perhaps the only amusing fact is that Chaney, like a proper indestructible man, survives being hit by a Panzerfaust and grilled by flamethrowers, which may fry his face, but his shirt remains intact. (maybe so the star wouldn’t show his love handles, who knows)

Poster tagline: IT KILLS, BUT IT CAN’T BE KILLED!! IT COMES OUT OF THE DEPTHS OF THE EARTH TO DISSOLVE EVERYTHING IN ITS PATH!! NEITHER RIFLE BULLETS NOR FLAMETHROWERS CAN STOP IT!! After the success of the Quatermass franchise, the legendary Hammer studio made a few monster-horror movies, and this is one of them. There are several TV versions, because the cinema version was quite violent for its time, as the censors back then judged. So most TV copies don't show those scenes of people's faces melting. Nowadays that wouldn't shock anyone, but in its time people weren't used to it and it had a similarly shocking effect as, for example, The Monster of Piedras Blancas from the same era, where a severed human head appears in a close-up. Unfortunately, a minor problem with this otherwise likeable horror film is that it’s not very visually appealing. It all revolves around a muddy military training ground, with a few shots of a hospital and a science facility thrown in, and the first deadly slime doesn't fully appear until ten minutes before the end. Hollywood would have peppered it with some fancy effects, bombastic front or rear projections, but there's nothing like that here (apart from the very few seconds of shots of slime rolling down the streets) and the centre of the film, the muddy, rocky training ground, is not pretty to look at and not a magnet for nice camera shots. It's a shame, because the actors are otherwise likeable, and it all builds up nicely at the end, but the overall impression is so ....how to say ....sketchy. The low budget is simply more evident here than it should be.

Poster tagline: LURED TO THE HOUSE OF MONSTERS, WHERE’S THERE’S NO ESCAPE!!! GUARANTEED TO FRIGHTEN!!! In the 1930s and 40s the hottest horror subgenre in cinemas was the mad scientist undertaking his even madder experiments (you can ask Bela Lugosi about it). The subgenre ceased to attract audiences in the 1950s and it slowly disappeared from the screens with films like Bride of the Monster, The Fly, and also this one, which didn't make much noise, though the cast was remarkable despite the low budget – names like Carradine, Tor Johnson and Allison Hayes (the fifty-foot woman!) were already well-known B-movie stars. I guess I'll join the reviewers here and be partly in opposition. There's nothing inherently wrong with the film, nothing stupid enough to make you bang your head against the wall. It's not dumb enough to make me laugh, nor is it funny enough to entertain, it's just plain unentertaining. The whole thing takes place in one house, the camera only briefly gets outside twice, and the "healthy core" of horror, i.e. the perverse experiments and hairy monsters, are basically on the sidelines and take up a tiny part of the runtime. Otherwise, there is a lot of talking, interpersonal relationships and about seven minutes (!!!) of operation without the camera showing anything. The only reason I'll remember this film is because it was the first time I heard Thor Johnson speak (!!). He utters a few sentences, but otherwise he's the classic frown and scowl we know from Ed Wood movies.

A classic of midnight screenings overseas, a virtually unknown film here. As for the "infiltration of an alien race into human society" theme, this is one of the better pieces. The opening half hour would have made even Hitchcock happy. The tension builds up like in a pressure cooker, the initial appearance of the monster (that beautiful alien tentacle!) probably raised the pulse of more than one viewer in its time, the acting is superb for what is essentially a B-movie production. But then the film gradually tilts into an unintentionally fun romp, with lots of death (including animals), lots of shooting towards the end, and aliens melting into jelly-like mass. When the cards are laid on the table and the alien in the husband's body reveals his identity to the protagonist and explains his motives, the tension fades and it's not as interesting. It’s clear here Gene Fowler was more of an assembly worker and not a visionary like Jack Arnold or Don Siegel, so the genre and thematically related Invasion of the Body Snatchers is in a different league. But I still give it a thumbs up and will overrate it a bit, the overall impression is decent even compared to most film productions of the time.

The idea was good, but it was handled reprehensibly. The whole plot and the twist were as embarrassing as Glenn Close's botox. The only thing keeping it afloat is Noomi’s performance, but unfortunately she tried her best in a crappy movie. The last quarter of an hour is like a bad parody, does anyone still enjoy these copycat movie endings?

So this is what Sláma spent five years of his life working on? Compared to his previous films, the message of Ice Mother is too banal. I’m between 3 and 4 stars, but compared to other Czech productions, Sláma's work shines like an oasis in the desert, full of refreshing water, which is actually quite unflattering news about the current state of Czech cinema. Sláma is one of the few certainties today, at a time when even Hřebejk is slowly declining, and his work with actors is still admirable. And I still really enjoy his socially sharp scripts about people whose lives are fucked up, to put it mildly, or fucked up by those closest to them, and they haven't got old yet.

More Emmerich than Emmerich himself, and just as dumb. No, actually not, this is far dumber. Emmerich takes his fairytales lightly, but this one is taken very seriously. Devlin didn't learn much from his buddy. That it was a fuckton of special effects? They don't impress anybody anymore. CGI effects are a standard today, not the privilege of a good film. Devlin was 20 years behind the times, and this dumbed-down mess deservedly flopped in theaters.