What was the last movie you saw?

[Foxbat]

Two Minute Warning This 1976 thriller stars the likes of Charlton Heston, Walter Pidgeon, David Janssen and Beau Bridges. It's a bit of a slow burner but it builds up to a pretty good climax.

[No One]

Trailer Park Boys: The Countdown to Liquor Day.

I've been re-watching some Trailer Park Boys of late, which I think is brilliant, and just recently found out there was a second film.

I didn't think it was as good as the first film/slash christmas special, and it took a while to get going, but it delivered lots of laughs by the end.

[Diggler]

Quarantine 2:

Really woeful second film, which has absolutely nothing to do with Rec 2. 2/5

The Holy Mountain:

Alejandro Jodorowski's masterpiece is a semi-rendition of Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue. While having some rather gruesome scene's involving animals (which I generally detest), this is still one of the greatest films ever created. Hypnotic, surreal and enthralling from beginning to end. 5/5

[Metryq]

Michael Crichton's Looker has "'80s" written all over it, thus making much of the action rather campy. However, the then-fictional technology was insightful. Full-body 3D scanning of people is no longer the massive undertaking shown in the film. In fact, with LIDAR it is possible for one to scan an entire city. Computer animating people is commonplace today. Computer technology has also made it possible for artists to tweak every detail of an image for optimum effect. Even the eye-tracking technology shown in the film has been realized.

The robot janitor looks very clunky by today's standards. Crichton could have pushed the streamlining of that a bit, but either didn't spend much time on it, or didn't want audiences to find a more futuristic design unbelievable. Crichton gave greater attention to domestic robots in Runaway, starring Tom Selleck.

The one piece of technology that remains fictional—to the best of my knowledge—is the Looker gun. The execution of this device was awkward. A flash from the Looker could immobilize a victim, and make the user appear invisible once the victim snapped out of his trance. The same name was given to a subliminal messaging system that could be broadcast by TV.

Spider Robinson described an invisibility system used at a fictional theme park in The Free Lunch. Carefully targeted flickering lights interfered with the saccades of the human eye to render others invisible.

Flickering lights can induce seizures in people, a reality Crichton used in The Andromeda Strain. The Professional Lighting Handbook warns of this in the section on strobe lights. There is also an LED flashlight that can incapacitate a target, even inducing vomiting.

"There's one wavelength that gets everybody," says IOS President Bob Lieberman. "Vlad calls it 'the evil color.'"

There is a deleted scene from Looker that explains the murders. (I can't find a link, but the video clip is on the Web somewhere.)

[AE35Unit]

Red Riding Hood. Fairytale yarn with a difference from Twilight director. It was...ok! So is this what the twilight films are like, only more 'romantic'?

[Glen]

Comedy sci-fi road trip from Simon Pegg & Nick Frost (playing similar characters to their "Spaced" roles) who help an alien find his way home. Five stars (that's out of five in case anyone reading this has a non-Aussie system of rating films with stars).

[Quokka]

Conan 3D, on par with an episode of Xena

...and I'm so not a fan of 3D. It's worth it sometimes like with Avatar and in a very few cases it can actually add something to the film but usually I'd rather just skip the glasses.

Just noticed on SBS tonight is American Splendor, think I'll be watching that again to try and renew my faith in movies being worth the film they're no longer printed on If anyone in Oz hasn't seen it and doesn't mind an indie flick it's well worth catching.

[Starbeast]

Horror Express (1972)

I like these late night B-movies. Besides a good story, we are treated with actors Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas.

[Foxbat]

Saturn 3 Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, Harvey Keitel and a very unstable robot.

The opening shot is a straight steal from Star Wars, the score for the space scenes was obviously designed to create the same audio-visual effect as Thus Spake Zarathustra did for 2001. The shots of the spacecraft skimming the canyons and craters was another Star Wars (skimming the Death Star) moment. Keitel's helmet held more than a passing resemblance to Darth Vader's.

In Space no one can see you plagiarise

Apart from those little acts of naughtiness, this movie was ok for its time (1980)

[Metryq]

I'm not sure which robot was scarier—Hector from Saturn 3, or the ABC robot from Judge Dredd. Both were amazing practical effects. I'd love to have a Bob Burns-style Halloween with one of those actuated props answering the door. (And then I'd be sued to my last penny for all the kids needing counseling.)

[alchemist]

Source Code - some questionable science, but enjoyable hokum nevertheless.

[Mouse]

Shrek 4. Was all right, not that funny though. I thought Shrek 3 was better. And it was too loud. That, or I'm getting old.

[Metryq]

Originally Posted by Mouse

And it was too loud.

That reminds me of Huey Lewis in Back to the Future—"I'm sorry
fellas. I'm afraid you're just too darn loud"—where loud had nothing to do with volume.

[LadyLara]

The Thing. Mainly because it happened to just be on TV. But it's a great film

[Diggler]

Cowboys vs Aliens

We went in with very low expectations and walked very happy. It's a fluff film, and if watched in the same way is quite entertaining.

American Grindhouse

A documentary detailing the growth of Exploitation cinema, from the birth of film, to modern times. Very entertaining and quite interesting little film, which had some great contributors including William Lustig, H.G Lewis, John Landis and Fred Olen Ray among others. I would have hoped for some Euro Trash in there as well, but it was "American" Grindhouse. Not World Grindhouse.