I highly recommend it. Robert Culp, who starred, considered it one of the best episodes of SF to appear on TV. I agree with him. Great low-budget SF.
Just finished Save Yourselves! and really enjoyed it. It was an interesting take on alien invasion movies. It stared Sunita Mani who I really liked on GLOW. Another thing I liked is the movie didn’t feel the need to explain everything. The audience was as clueless as the characters which is a plus for me.
I love my Roku! It is 2 am this morning, I am watching Otherworlds TV, and they are showing “Son Of Dracula” (1974), with Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr. I haven’t seen it since 1977(at an arthouse in L.A.), but it has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time.
Badlands (1973) staring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. Fantastic acting and terrific cinematography. I didn’t care for the ending, though. I now want to see more films by Spacek.
Last Night in Soho - I had been really looking forward to this one. It turned out to be very different from what I expected, as I thought it was going to be more of a psychological thriller. Turns out it’s pretty much straight up horror, but I enjoyed it anyway. Great visuals and sound track, and I’m a sucker for swinging 60s London. The opening sequence is especially delightful. It definitely demands a second viewing, which is fine by me; there’s lots to look at and probably a lot of clues to catch the second time around.
The Verdict (1982) (Amazon Prime) We recently saw a rerun of the CNN series “The Movies - 1980’s” and decided to watch one of the referenced movies that we’d never seen before, and so landed on The Verdict.
I love a good courtroom drama, and Paul Newman could easily have won an Oscar (he was nominated, but lost to Ben Kingsley for Gandhi.) Far be it from me to say that David Mamet’s Oscar-nominated script had holes, but it does leave a few things to the imagination:
If the admitting nurse wrote on the form that the patient had eaten 1 hour before, how did it get past that point -- how did the patient even get into the OR? Why wasn't she placed on hold immediately?The jury’s verdict was obviously founded on testimony that was stricken from the record. It’s implied that the archbishop was disposed to seeing justice done … do we think that he tampered with the jury to return a verdict against his own hospital? If so, it might be the last time the Catholic Church played a hero in a movie. 
(Not a doctor, but my take) How long before the patient had eaten wouldn’t prevent/delay the procedure. But it is critical in determining what type of anesthesia to use. And having eaten so soon before the procedure, the anesthesiologist should never have used the anesthetic that they did.
I’m not sure that it is implied that the archbishop was “disposed to seeing justice done”. I think you misinterpreted that scene. “Justice” for them was 1) not losing the suit (hence hiring James Mason who can/will do whatever he can to win, and 2) not smearing the name of the doctors and thereby smearing the hospital/institution. But they couldn’t go “on record” by saying such outright (not unlike politicians). I don’t think the church was pleased with the verdict (and James Mason’s handling of the case) so they would not have tampered with the jury.
Operation Finale , a 2018 film that I’d never heard of. Ben Kingsley as Adolf Eichmann and his capture and “extraordinary rendition” to Israel for a war crimes trial. I’m guessing it stretched the truth a bit for dramatic purposes but it was a good flick.
Martyrs (2008). French horror film. Zero character development. Nothing but blood and screaming. I ejected the Blu-ray after 30 minutes.
That was definitely the archbishop’s stance before the trial and before the surprise witness testimony from the admitting nurse, when he thinks the case is about a tragedy but not a crime. But I think the key scene was when the archbishop’s operative (lawyer? detective?) is recapping the nurse’s testimony. The archbishop asks him pointedly: “Did you believe her?” and the scene cuts before the answer. My reading is that the operative says “yes”, and the archbishop knows now that he’s involved in a cover-up and needs to make it right,
I agree that this is a very telling scene. But I interpreted it in a different way. The lawyer is explaining how he managed to get the nurse’s testimony stricken (and thereby “won” the point). But then the archbishop asks that “did you believe her ?”. And the lawyer gives that look (before the cutaway).
This in essence says that even though stricken from the record, the jury also believed her. And therefore they lost the case. So James Mason is trying to say “see, I won this for you.” But the archbishop is now seeing that they will lose the case. There would be no need for the archbishop to influence the jury - he could tell that the nurse’s testimony would decide the case (and the church/doctors would lose).
I’ve been staying home after severe dental torture recently and have been watching a lot of DVDs
Dark Shadows – I somehow missed the 2012 Tim Burton movie based on the Dan Curtis 1960s soap opera. I could never get into the series, because, despite being weird and supernatural, it was still a soap opera, and things took forever to happen. I figured the movie had to be over in a couple of hours, so it wouldn’t have that problem. The ever-chameleonic Johnny Depp was an interesting Barnabas Collins, but the plot really didn’t work for me. An interesting way to kill time, but I wasn’t the fan audience this really needed. My wife Pepper Mill, who was a fan, pointed out the Easter Eggs I would’ve missed.
Tomorrowland – not the Brad Bird-directed Disney film from 2015, but a “Disney Treasures” collection of special episodes from Disney’s 1950s show “Disneyland”. They were broadcast in black and white, but filmed in full color, and featured Ward Kimball as director and host, backed up by Werner von Braun, Willy Ley, and other Project Paperclip experts. Gorgeous production values and a vision of space travel and projects that never came to fruition, mixed with nifty Disney animation and storytelling. I’d seen excerpts from these in later Disney shows and elsewhere. (Part of “Mars and Beyond” was shown as background in DisneyWorld at the Science Fiction Drive-In Cafe).
Another entry – “Eyes in the Sky” isn’t about spy satellites, but about weather satellites (and weather spotting from the proposed space station) and the 1950s dream of weather control, an idea killed in part by the discovery that Sensitive Dependence Upon Initial Conditions (i.e. “Chaos theory”) ruled in weather evolution. There was also the short “Our Friend the Atom”, which I’d seen in school. Its optimism about the benefits of controlled nuclear energy was uplifting at the time, but seems shortsighted in the wake of things like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and other bad reactions to exposure to radioactive materials.
I also watched another Disney Treasure package – Silly Symphonies. Impressive animation, especially the award-winning shorts Three Little Pigs and The Old Mill. when I first saw the latter, many years ago, I missed the opening and wasn’t aware that it was a Disney cartoon, and was blown away by the animation. It was the first outing for Ub Iwerks’ Multiplane Camera, which revolutionized cel animation. great stuff. It’s amazing that Carl Stalling was partly responsible for the direction of the series and its dependence o n music. I always associate him with the Warner Brothers studio, because his name was on the credits for all of the classic Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes – both of which appear to have been named in imitation of Silly Symphonies.
You have no idea how intensely dark and gory that movie gets after that 30 minute mark. You probably ejected during the mild stuff comparatively.
One of the movies which has stayed with me.
Hereditary has stayed with me and I think it is a great film. Martyrs? I remember it…it stayed with me…but it was pretty much trash. It’s not as bad as some trash and crap out there, but it doesn’t have the power of a Hereditary or The Nightingale, two movies that disturbed me, but are also really excellent films.
I watched it last night after reading these comments. Actually, I found the first half of the movie more disturbing that the last half in that it was “real.” I mean, kids and women get abused every day and it hurts to see it relayed so starkly. The second half is almost sci-fi. Seriously, I know I was supposed to be grossed out by seeing the girl completely flayed except for her face, but I burst out in laughter when I saw it. I did like the ending. That baroque, leaving them wanting more, don’t let them in on the big secret … loved it.
I was reminded of a movie I reviewed waaaay up in the thread that I can’t recall the title of, but it had to do with torturing people to get them to covert to a higher state. In retrospect, that seemed a bit of a rip off.
After Hours (1983).
Heard about this film for decades. Finally watched it last night. Absolutely hilarious! Superb acting and writing.
Watched Belfast, written and directed by Kenneth Branaugh. It’s a new release my wife wanted to see, so we paid the $20 rental fee on some streaming service. The reviews on Rotten Tomatoes varied between ‘too heartwarming and schmaltzy’ and ‘a little too heartwarming but strong and heartfelt’. I’ll give it an A-minus.
It deals with Protestant on Protestant violence in Ireland, as seen thru the eyes of a pre-teen boy (Buddy, a stand-in for Branaugh). The film is nearly entirely in black and white. The accents aren’t thick, but Americans may want to use subtitles.
There are half-a-dozen scenes that I thought were overplayed, including one that seemed to have wandered in from a cheesy action film. But if you want heartwarming you could do worse. The sound track is almost entirely Van Morrison songs.
Nitpick but the violence was between the Catholic and Protestant communities not Protestant on Protestant violence. I liked the movie. Supposedly it might appear on the Oscar nominations list.
Hi, Dewey. To nit-pick further, the big violent episodes were Protestant/Catholic, but the threats to the central characters (Protestants) came from other Protestants. That was the conflict central to the plot.
And the dramatic climax (“that seemed to wander in from a sleazy action film”) was Protestant/Protestant (within the framework of a Protestant/Catholic episode).