Has anyone else seen “Happiness”? When I think of disturbing movies, I think of that one.
“Tears of the Sun”- nope nope nope.
“Dark Skies” - y’all can laugh but alien movies scare the crap out of me. I watch them once to get really scared and then I’m good for a while.
Yeah, while his icky ideas about women probably helped keep promising women directors from us.
If Rick Sloane deserves a time-tossed kick, COR-Man deserves at least two. : P
One problem with this kind of analysis is that you can’t prove a negative, though if you’re Tillie Olsen writing about the literary world in Silences, you can certainly try. What she wrote there is probably applicable in other creative fields, too.
Sorry not sorry – I adore Meet the Feebles. It is absolutely a film the vast majority of people do not need to see and probably don’t want to see. I enjoy watching it.
Meanwhile,… I can never ever watch Mike Judge movies ever again. Specifically Office Space and Idiocracy. Because both hit way too close to home. They hurt.
I love Office Space but can’t abide Idiocracy. Its messaging smacks of eugenics and I find it infuriating. (Also, it would’ve worked fine as a half-hour short, but is way too thin humor-wise when stretched out to movie length.)
My original two were movies I wouldn’t watch again because of how uncomfortable they made me feel.
This one, however, made me feel suicidal by the time I got about 2/3 through. I would have walked out, but I didn’t want to spoil it for the people I was with. Turns out they all felt the same way.
I agree that it was one joke stretched out to movie-length and got a little tiresome. Also, I don’t know why Judge bothered setting it far in the future when at the time it was released, it was plain to see that this was the day after tomorrow.
wut…Mitchell was peak Lee Majors years and Larry Miller was probably doing standup in Long Island in 1974.
Melancholia is the only von Trier I’ve seen. A celebration of narcissism and depression. Yay.
That’s funny because I know the name but couldn’t think of anything I’d seen by him. I just remembered him being a critic’s darling in the '90s. Then I remembered, Remember, which is actually quite good (Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau in one of his last roles) if somewhat preposterous. No incest that I can recall.
Troma. I have a hard time watching Troma movies the first time, tbh. I’ve turned off more Troma movies than I can count. (The sound mixing is brutal to me.)
Gaspar Noe seems to just make hardcore porn and critics love it. I guess it’s arty porn.
Not to repeat myself, but I think there was a lot of self-serving PR surrounding this movie. I can believe Corman lied to almost anyone—I’m quite positive he did at one point or another lie to entire film crews—but I have a little trouble believing that he lied to the director about what he expected to see in the film because that would mean extra costs to shoot the footage he needed.
Now, here’s the twist: Peeters’ previous film, Starhops was a T&A film that turned out PG and was re-edited for language to get an R. It’s a T&A movie with “Charlie’s Angels” level T&A. So did two distinct producers have the same problem with Peeters: Namely they wanted R-rated material and she didn’t want to provide it?
Double twist: Her film prior to that was Summer School Teachers for Corman, which was basically sexploitation/proto-teen-sex-comedy (with nudity). So both had experience with each other and should have known what to expect.
Double-bluff-reverso twist: Her first film as a writer was an X-rated women-behind-bars film she also starred in, called Caged Desires! I haven’t seen this one, and I suspect the “X” was taken to make it seem more provocative than it really was. (Notably, the film was directed by Donald A. Davis, who was a P.A. with a small role in Plan 9 From Outer Space!)
I’m inclined to think that Peeters could only get hired for sex-heavy exploitation stuff, felt increasingly disliked being cast to that type, and increasingly (Glen or Glenda-style) filmed more what she wanted than what the producer hired her for.
Could there be a 3D-chess-triple-reverso where Corman knew she was lying, had Murakami on stand-by, and used Peeters anyway because he felt it might shield him from critics to have a female director?
Lol. I saw more than one review back in the day which tried to soft-pedal Humanoid’s content by saying, “But a WOMAN directed it!” Which, yeah… turned out to not be the whole story. At any rate, that’s not a film I ever plan on watching, so whatever.
It sounds preposterous, but I wouldn’t bet on my ability to out-maneuver the Cor-man.
The subject matter is what it is. I wouldn’t try to talk anyone into watching it.
Both Peeters and (star) Ann Turkel have said that it was an intelligent horror story but to me, it was bog-standard '70s-style eco-horror ala The Prophecy or “Day of the Animals” with '50s-style gill-man and '80s-style gore, with a dash of Billy Jack-esque racism. It was one of my pre-MST riffing favorites. So, so dumb and nonsensical at every level.
In retrospect, it’s well-shot, well-lit, well-edited—some of the second unit stuff Corman added in is just seamless, which lends some credence to the theory that he had planned for it all along—reasonably well-acted, even Doug "You Probably Know Me From Such Films as At The Earths Core and Hey, My Head’s Made Out Of Wood McClure, early Rob Bottin FX and the very first James Horner score.
Leonard Maltin gave it 3 out of 4 stars. That’s right: It’s better than Laserblast.
It really is a beautiful and heartbreaking ending. I hear it was originally supposed to be backed by “Also Sprach Zarathustra” but oh my goodness they made the right choice.
What she wrote there is probably applicable in other creative fields, too.
