Found footage horror. Four friends go camping, and the framing device is one of the guys is filming a documentary about his buddy who has never gone camping before. But then strange things start happening. Are they being hunted by someone? Something? Then the WTF-ometer explodes as the entire movie goes off the rails in the best way possible.
This movie is very short; under 80 minutes. But holy crap does the second half make some hard left turns. I did not see that coming. I’m not even entirely sure what I just watched. If you like found footage horror and have never heard of this, go fire up Plex right now. It’s free. Well worth watching.
Fair warning that the main character douche-bro filming the documentary is pretty insufferable.
My favorite disaster is 2 with the log truck, which makes that my favorite of the movies. My favorite cast by far is 3, though. Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Amanda Crew in a 2000s horror movie? Yes please.
Confession time. A couple weeks ago I got so frustrated with having eight different watch lists (one for each different streaming service) that I pulled out a pencil and a piece of paper and physically wrote down the most interesting titles from each. Looking now, my sheet has a total of 81 titles. So far I have watched 14 of them, so technically speaking I would say that the sheet is working. But still.
The year is 2026. What the heck am I doing? There has to be a better way.
Judgment at Nuremberg was about the judges trial. In which they literally judged the (Nazi) judges for their complicity in Nazi atrocities.
Anyway, I just saw Nuremberg (dropped on Netflix this past weekend) and was not impressed. Overly long and uninteresting. Didn’t give a shit about the scenes with Goering, and cared even less about the minor inconveniences of his complicit wife. The only mildly interesting scenes were (1) watching a Nazi cry like a frightened child as he is dragged from his cell and hanged (and then pissing himself while slowly strangling on the gallows) and (2) the argument that, yeah, we can get Nazis in America, too. All of that was in the last 20-30 minutes (after the trial).
Seriously, the whole film should have centered around those two themes, and kept hitting it over, and over, and over again: these men are, fundamentally, garbage and, like garbage, all too common. Wherever they arise, they should be publicly shamed and degraded.
There is something elegant about a sheet of paper with writing on it. It’s the permanence, the physicality, that writing will not change until a human being in your home picks up the paper and puts pencil or eraser to it. Your watchlists are data buried in a server 500 miles away accessed by multiple layers of requests, logins and applications.
Protector with Milla Jovovich. A poor man (or I guess woman’s) Taken/Rambo. Not particularly well written, directed or paced. A solid D, except I think the ending might boost it up to a C.
Solo Mio (2026). A man about to get married plans an elaborate honeymoon in Italy. When his bride is a no-show at the wedding, the heartbroken groom tries to cancel all the arrangements, but the hotel concierge tells him it cannot be done, and suggests that he just go on the honeymoon by himself. And thus the plot begins to unfold.
As I started watching this I was thinking it was a light-hearted if insubstantial romantic comedy, but it has some serious and poignant moments. Recommended unless you’re allergic to romantic comedies, and has quite high ratings on both IMDb and RT. Stars Kevin James and Nicole Grimaudo, and also features the Italian tenor and pianist Andrea Bocelli as himself.
Really? I saw it first-run in the theater as a child. I thought the violence was pretty standard for an action movie. We’re not talking Wizard of Oz or even John Wick levels of violence here. It’s Die Hard levels at worst.
This is pretty much the type of documentary you’d expect - Louis talks to a lot of manosphere “influencers” getting rich out of pushing delusional hypermasculine bullshit to their followers. You get more detail on their background, and learn that they will do or say literally anything in pursuit of “content” or “clout”. And in the end we discover that it doesn’t really matter to them whether they believe their own bullshit or not; they’re so deep in it that they no longer know or care what’s true or not as long as they can wring fame and fortune out of it.
If you’re not already despairing for humanity, this will get you there.
I remember this film from when it first came out, and yes, there was violence, but as @ASL_v2.0 says, I didn’t feel it was that much worse than other action films of the time.
But what struck me most was that, unlike almost all other such films, it explicitly showed some characters reacting with horror and disgust to the violence. I specifically remember a reaction shot of David Paymer’s character and thinking, this is something you don’t see in movies much.
I wonder if it was the reactions that made you feel it was more violent than usual.
A bit off topic and not sure if it made it to the US, but Tate was arrested in Dubai (think for undeclared cash) and earned the name “Lawrence of Dry-Labia” on British social media.
When I saw Payback when it was new, I came to the conclusion Mel has issues. (other issues) He’s got some form of video masochism. He loves seeing his characters tortured. Maybe he watches and enjoys it vicariously, as it were.
As for Nuremberg, it just seems like it would be 2 1/2 hours of rehashing stuff I already know, Nazis=bad. yes yes tell me something I don’t know.
I think they should do a movie about Rudolf Hess. Now that’s a fascinating nazi. Was he nuts? High ranking party member who secretly flew to England in the middle of the night. Ended up spending the rest of his life as the sole prisoner in Spandau. Maybe murdered in prison. There’s so much stuff going on.
Goering? There’s probably some good stuff to mine about how much of a true believer he was, vs just an opportunist. Does the movie go there?
I noticed that as early as Lethal Weapon. As a kid, I pretty much figured out that a Mel Gibson character was good for two things in any of his movies: getting tortured, and entering a state of psychotic rage. In retrospect, I should have found that concerning.
Bit of a mini fact there, Hess was a big fan of psychics and tarot card readers, and after he dropped into Scotland to try and negotiate surrender, Hitler was so mad that a few hundred psychics got taken out and shot.