Movies of the past week

Nothing like variety eh? And so a brief summary of the rubbish, deplorable, and quite good flicks that have graced our TV recently.

House 1977 Japanese
This movie was odd, and beautiful. The lead character, Gorgeous, sets off with her friends to her Aunt's house in the country, with her cat. And that's the simple easy to follow plot summary.
the cat becomes important, there are special effects with bright lights, people die. Actually most of the girls die. There is screaming. And most importantly, a piano eats someone.
I loved it. It's funny, it's surreal, and is definitely worth seeing.
Definite parallels with some of the studio ghibli work, for some reason certain scenes and development reminded me of howl's moving castle.






Dr Tarr's Torture Chamber (aka The Mansion of Madness) 1973

Oh dear god this was bad. For badly explained family reasons a journalist wants to find out about some therapy being done in a mental hospital. Things turn bad immediately, and a number of surreal hokey bolloxy episodes drag you through the 90 minutes. Painful. The mental hospital had been taken over by the inmates, which doesn't become clear until about halfway in. At which point the strangeness goes up several notches.
I kinda enjoyed it, but for those of you who like bgrade rubbish, it's a 6-7/10. the oddness is very odd.
For the rest of you, 2/10.



Inception I rewatched it, to see if I'd change my opinion that's its overblown rubbish. Nope. Still think that. Concept is great, but everything is so hamfisted and over-explained. I still think that an indie movie, with a smaller budget, may have achieved a more cohesive story than this.
I've seen a review recently which summed Inception up as 'a movie to make stupid people feel smart'.

Hour of the Wolf 1968.
Touted as Bergman's only horror movie, I'd originally bought this for Halloween, but we ended up not watching it.
I really enjoyed this. It seemed very typical Bergman, moody lighting, slow pans, low action quotient. The main character, an artist, suffers from insomnia and thinks a lot of the weirdo's he's seeing are imaginary. These appear to be representations of his insecurities, which makes the death of the young boy either homosexuality or paedophilia?
The other inhabitants of the island are upper-class party-goers, who invite the artist and his wife for dinner. The group explore ownership of people by purchasing their art, mainly to rile the artists wife.
Told from the wife's perspective, in a pseudo-documentry fashion, the movie seems to be a long rant against consumer driven art.
It's slow, and at times violent, but worth watching.

Rewatched Monty Python's Life of Brian, Captain Blood and Godfather II, and I may spin Gainsbourg this afternoon.

Albums ofthe year is coming along nicely.