While The Kingdom was aired on Danish TV, I watched it at one sitting on VCR. Its weird, scary and brilliant. Its Lars von Trier at his best imo.
It was adapted for USA TV by Stephen King.
I could have sworn he was in it. IMDB tells me I’m wrong (as do you). I really did too many drugs in college. :smack:
Two movies I’ll add are Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead (1991, stars Christina Applegate) and Eurotrip (1994). Both are kind of silly but amusing enough.
**
A Shane Black screenplay and a great starring role by the perennially underrated Geena Davis. Pair it up with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with Val Kilmer and a return-to-form Robert Downey, Jr.
Stranger
Thirding or whatever Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. I absolutely love that movie, and watch it once a year or so. I can’t explain why I love it so much, I just do. I think it’s because I was 16 when it was released and I kind of associate it with my teenage years. I even bought the soundtrack on cassette (!) when it was released.
I also liked Dante’s Peak. It has stupid, unbelievable disasters,Pretty scenery, Linda Hamilton, and that sweet Chevy Suburban. What’s not to love?
Under the Tuscan Sun is another great movie that I think is underrated. There isn’t a thing about it that I don’t like, and it’s another that I watch once every year or two.
Mountains of the Moon (1990)-- biopic about Richard Burton – no, not the actor, the OTHER Richard Burton – explorer, co-“discoverer” of the Source of the Nile, translator of the Arabian Nights, the Perfumed Garden, and the Kama Sutra (all unexpurgated, and at the height of the Victorian Age), Pilgrim to Mecca (who wrote a book about the experience) and to Salt Lake City (ditto). Posthumous hero of Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riverworld” series. A truly fascinating individual.
Brain Damage (actually 1988, but I’ll let it slide) – really off-the-wall science fiction/horror film by Frank Henelotter (Basket Case, Frankenhooker) about a couple keeping a monster in their apartment because he generates a psychoaxtive drug. The monster is sentient, and escapes, and is found by their next door neighbor. My favorite line – Neighbor (upon learning the name the couple bestowed on the monster) : “Elmer!!! You fucking named him Elmer !!!”
Prospero’s Books (1991)-- easily the weirdest telling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, starring John Gielgud as Prospero.
Princess Caraboo (1994)-- true story of the exotic and mysterious Princess Caraboo who turned up in 19th century Britain speaking an unknown language. Phoebe Cates’ last movie. Also with Jim Broadbent, Kevin Kline, and John Lithgow. I’m surprised this film isn’t more well-known.
Tremors - Saw it opening weekend and loved it. Will usually watch to the end if I stumble across it. Never saw the SyFy channel series or most of the sequels.
Arachnophobia - Fun killer spiders movie, but not a big box-office hit.
Darkman - Early Sam Raimi superhero flick (his first time working with a Hollywood studio), with relatively unknown Liam Neeson.
Tremors is a great intentionally-B movie that nods and winks at the tropes of survival horror without descending into parody. None of the sequels are really worth watching although the TV series (which I have not seen) seems to be relatively well regarded for what it is, and there is apparently a 2018 pilot for a series that wasn’t picked up featuring Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward.
Stranger
I have to disagree with this. I think that the first and second sequels actually played pretty well with the (admittedly outrageous) life cycle of the “graboids”, throwing weird developments at the heroes (Fred Ward and Michael Gross) that they had to work around, and doing it all with a sense of humor and a not terrifically high budget.*
I could do without the fourth movie, or the TV series (at least what I’ve seen of it).
*And at least in Tremors 2 they got “infrared vision” right, using frost-coated clothing to fool the IR-viewing young graboids, unlike the movie Hardware, where the heroine hides from the IR-vision robot in a freakin’ refrigerator!. That’s like hiding a lit candle in a dark room.
Dangit, The Tall Guy is from 1989, just short of the OP’s time period. It’s a great little movie. Jeff Goldblum, who at the time was a character actor rather than whatever it is he is now, plays an American actor who plays a sidekick to Rowan Atkinson’s stage act who gets a role in the West End stage version of The Elephant Man – titled Elephant! (wicked parody of Andrew Lloyd Glurgy Bombast. His love interest is Emma Thompson. Great little movie.
Sorry, I’m listing good movies, not stupid ones.
But I have to mention An Awfully Big Adventure (1995) with Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant as conceited and catty members of a minor theatrical company putting on a production of Peter Pan. They’re not the main characters, though. And the ending is not one you would expect from a mainstream film.
Bright Young Things (2003) Stephen Fry! directs an adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh! novel (Vile Bodies), with Michael Sheen, Emily Mortimer, James McAvoy, Stockard Channing, Jim Carter, David Tennant, Jim Broadbent … Dan Aykroyd? Amazing little movie about a group of interwar social butterflies.
Little Voice (1998) with Jane Horrocks, Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent, Ewan MacGregor, Brenda Blethyn.
Ewan McGregor did a bunch of really good movies in the 1990s, before he became a superstar.
Miniseries Lipstick on Your Collar (1993)
Shallow Grave (1994)
Brassed Off (1996)
Young Adam (2003)
Eurotrip is on my list, but it was from 1994? Dang, I thought it was from much later (like 1999, or the early 2000s).
…looks like it was in fact from 2003, so yeah. The guy had a pen pal from Germany that was e-mail based, so it was after people widely had personal email accounts (circa 1996), but before mobile phones and social media combined so that tracking someone down as they moved across Europe would not be a manhunt so much as subscribing to their Twitter or Instagram feed.
My personal guilty pleasure from this era: 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (1997). In fact, I just rewatched it last week. It’s the movie I have rewatched multiple times that has the absolutely lowest ratings on Rotten Tomatoes (11% on the Tomato-meter, and only 35% from the audience)! Eurotrip wasn’t exactly highly rated (RT of 47%), but at least most viewers liked it (75%).
As with Eurotrip, the entire plot of 8HiaDB really couldn’t happen in today’s world; it required graduate school aged people not knowing where their good friend was on vacation, and having no way to just reach him immediately, and no way for him to send a photo of 7 heads to identify which of the 8 had gone missing to someone who would know. Oh, and airport security was very different in 1997 as well. Obviously a comedy so the ease of bypassing it is exaggerated for comic effect, but still.
Sorry about that. I think Wikipedia said Eurotrip was released in 2004 and I think I mistyped 1994 instead.
I also liked that one; Christopher Walken as the kind-of unhinged dad and Sissy Spacek as the mother who’s going a little stir crazy in the bunker.
And did you know that Rick Baker himself designed the grotesque transformation scene where Martin Short slowly morphs into the horrifically huge red dog?
Well, you still don’t…
Blast From The Past was great. I, um, third it.
The best Zombie movies from then:
Night of the Comet and The Return of the Living Dead with the Pathmark Guy James Karen.
Does anyone know of any other movies James Karen was in? Also, does anyone know what I mean by the Pathmark Guy?
Fourthed.
While we’re on the topic of Brendan Fraser, let’s don’t forget Bedazzled.
[quote=“lobotomyboy63, post:57, topic:853100”]
Fourthed.
While we’re on the topic of Brendan Fraser, let’s don’t forget Bedazzled.
[/QUOTE]IF camp is defined as bad art that the developers had a blast doing…then Bedazzled is definitely camp.
Well, its not actually bad, but the cast looks like they had a lot of fun.
Heaven forgive me, but I kinda like “Con Air” (1997). Maybe not little, but definitely stupid…
So I married an Axe Murderer - 1993. Gets surprisingly little love for being a Mike Myers film, and is a bit cheesy, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. Amanda Plummer does a great turn as the sister-in-law.
US Marshals - the poor relation of The Fugitive. Still has plenty of Tommy Lee Jones wisecracks though, so what’s not to like?