VHS and Betamax You Have Recently Rented

[Devon Malcolm]

1 hour ago, Jesse said:

Watched Lisa Frankenstein last night and wish I didn't. I liked Jennifer's Body well enough, was hoping for something that would hit similar but this is a mess. Confused in its characterisation, plot, and presentation. It never commits to one thing hard enough to win you over, and I found it impossible to connect to basically anything happening.

Conversely, I hated Jennifer's Body but loved this! It's the only Diablo Cody thing I've ever enjoyed.

[Jesse]

Glad I started posting on this forum more so that I could discover I'm your movie Wario

[FLips]

Terminator 2: Judgment Day
I always say with this one that while I can appreciate it's a better film than Terminator, I still prefer the original. T2 is a masterpiece of the genre though. The action is thrilling, the liquid terminator is still amazing and I still burst out laughing at "your foster parents are dead".

Space Truckers
Dennis Hopper gets tricked into towing a load of killer robots to Earth with the intention of them helping the corrupt President take over the world. He's not aware of that of course, but him and his partners clue on pretty fast when issues start arising with the cargo.
It's a who's who of "oh shit it's them!" You've got Norm from Cheers, Bennett from Commando, and fucking Pat Mustard from Father Ted alongside a load of other familiar but not famous faces, and then Charles Dance as the main bad guy absolutely loving life and chewing up every scene he's in. At one point he spends a good few minutes of the film trying to rev up his motorised cock like a lawn mower and I'll leave that there for you with no context.

It's stupid, and I'd be lying if I said it was a great film, but it's worth the 90 minutes of your time because it has some great practical effects, a cast that are all in on the joke and some actually decent bits including the impressive killer robot enemies.

Killing Gunther
A gang of hitmen decide to make a documentary about hunting down Gunther, the world's most elusive and greatest hitman. It's filmed like The Office or What We Do In The Shadows, etc.
Really disappointed with this one. The trailer pushes Arnie hard, he's in the thumbnail, he's the only star named and he's all over the thing. In reality it's a 90 minute or so film and Arnie doesn't show up until over an hour into it.
It's a fun premise, and I'm admittedly a sucker for the documentary style because it's a cheap and easy way to gets laughs. There are laughs here, but they're not as frequent as you'd hope and with all due respect to Taran Killam but just because you wrote and directed it doesn't also mean you have to star in it. Him and Bobby Moynahan from SNL are all over the thing and while they have their moments you can never shake the feeling it's an extended SNL sketch and they're both two of the weakest parts of the film. Moynahan has a romance substory going with one of the other assassins and again with all due respect to Bobby Moynahan, but it ain't happening mate.
The best one is the lad that vomits when he sees blood and only uses poison to kill, he got some big laughs from us. The rest of it, not so much. Could have been a million times better if someone else made it and/or starred in it.

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
A Wayans Brothers parody of Blaxploitation films and even without knowing much about the source materials or genre you can see the riffs they're making without knowing much about them.
I've never heard of it before and we chose it on a whim to watch with our tea but glad we did. Was this ever famous? I remember other Wayans stuff like Scary Movie really kicking off and this was just as funny and quotable as that.
Keenan Wayans returns from the army after his brother dies of an overgold; wearing too much gold chains (how's he use the bathroom with all that shit on him?) and recruits help around the neighbourhood to hunt down Mr Big played by the fantastic John Vernon who was brilliant in Killer Klowns from Outer Space when I watched that late last year too. He has a real presence.
Really funny film, very watchable with a solid cast and it's always a pleasure to watch prime Wayans stuff as opposed to White Chick era Wayans stuff.

 

 

Edited March 9, 2025 by FLips

[gmoney]

18 minutes ago, FLips said:

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
I've never heard of it before and we chose it on a whim to watch with our tea but glad we did. Was this ever famous?

Huge in my house. My brother taped it off the telly at some point in the early 90s and we wore the tape out. I'm also a huge fan of Don't Be a Menace to South-Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, which I also had taped, but with the first 15 minutes missing. It's a strange example of a film I know mostly off by heart, except the beginning which I barely know. 

[Carbomb]

18 minutes ago, gmoney said:

Huge in my house. My brother taped it off the telly at some point in the early 90s and we wore the tape out. I'm also a huge fan of Don't Be a Menace to South-Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, which I also had taped, but with the first 15 minutes missing. It's a strange example of a film I know mostly off by heart, except the beginning which I barely know. 

I remember the nuclear missile scene. Fell off my chair at "it'll be like Hiroshima and N*ggasaki".

[Jesse]

Just got home from The Monkey. It was fine, you're not getting anything other than what the trailer promises so if that seems appealing to you then go for it. It got a few laughs out of me, I wasn't miserable but I was never super engaged. I just don't think VFX gore does that much for me at this point, and the balance is weird. Like there's enough gore that if you're put off by it you'd be uncomfortable, but it's also all realy quick/off-screen in a way that my hosuemate who's really into those movies left unsatisfied.

Also featured my first cinema dickhead of 2025, a guy who was using his front-facing camera on full brightness to comb his fringe and then taking flash-on photos of his face so he could see how his hair looks. Luckily my local Vue staff are generally pretty delighted at getting to bollock someone so they shut it down and he ended up leaving for a while (presumably to brush his fringe some more) and then came back and was mostly phone-free. The high point of the film was imagining every on-screen kill happening to him.

[davertfnewman]

Love Sucka. So many different bits, from Kalinga to "The window or the stairs?" to Chris Rock/"One rib!" to Kung Fu Joe, but a part that I just like based on the cultural aspect is this:

"So what makes you think you can be a black hero?"

"... I'm an ex football player."

[FLips]

Just now, davertfnewman said:

Love Sucka. So many different bits, from Kalinga to "The window or the stairs?" to Chris Rock/"One rib!" to Kung Fu Joe, but a part that I just like based on the cultural aspect is this:

"So what makes you think you can be a black hero?"

"... I'm an ex football player."

I was cracking up at Kung Fu Joe punching the numbers in on the phone and making all the WOO AHHHH noises as he did it. Isaac Hayes filling up on guns and then immediately falling over and setting them all off was great too, as was Pimp of The Year, "I'll have a Pepsi, double" and "pour it in my hands for a dime".

[davertfnewman]

"All twenty-seven of you suckas against Kung Fu Joe? Master of karate! Kung fu! Ninjitsu! And a whole lot of other shit you ain't ever heard of! Ha ha-ha ha!"

[cobra_gordo]

Runaway Jury. I wanted to watch something with Gene Hackman in it because the extra details coming out about his death had really upset me and I wanted to watch the man as I remembered him. I'd never seen this and it's bloody brilliant. Hackman has a presence about him that makes him genuinely intimidating and even though he's not the one getting his hands dirty in this he looks like he'd give you a slap. It also reminded me of how great Dustin Hoffman is, he's so much softer than Hackman and it gives a brilliant dynamic of bully and victim. The rest of the film is worthy of the surreal casts thread because every two seconds I felt like I was pointing at the screen pointing folk out. Oh look, it's Uncle Frank from Home Alone! Fully recommend.

The Fugitive. I've seen it a dozen times and how quickly it gets out of the blocks to the point of Kimble escaping the bus still surprises me, you're off to the races within the first ten minutes and it doesn't really let up. I'd struggle to choose between this and The Last Crusade as my favourite Harrison Ford film.

Lastly, I watched The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises back to back on Saturday morning because I'd spotted they were on Amazon Prime. I know they get flack now and yes they're superhero movies but the former is fantastic and makes me wonder what a career Heath Ledger could have had, the latter is probably my favourite of the two, even with Tom Hardy's ridiculous accent and the whole thing being a bit more over the top. I did start Batman Begins and quickly realised why out of the three, I've only seen it once or twice before.

[SaitoRyo]

1 hour ago, cobra_gordo said:

Runaway Jury. I wanted to watch something with Gene Hackman in it because the extra details coming out about his death had really upset me and I wanted to watch the man as I remembered him. I'd never seen this and it's bloody brilliant. Hackman has a presence about him that makes him genuinely intimidating and even though he's not the one getting his hands dirty in this he looks like he'd give you a slap. It also reminded me of how great Dustin Hoffman is, he's so much softer than Hackman and it gives a brilliant dynamic of bully and victim. The rest of the film is worthy of the surreal casts thread because every two seconds I felt like I was pointing at the screen pointing folk out. Oh look, it's Uncle Frank from Home Alone! Fully recommend.

Good to know as I've got this on my Netflix watchlist and wasn't sure if I'd get around to it. It's interesting that it was the only film Hackman and Hoffman acted in together, having been roommates as struggling actors in 60s New York and then worked in Hollywood for decades before they were cast opposite each other.  

I watched something that was nowhere near as good as Runaway Jury last night. Rolling Vengeance, a very eighties Canadian exploitation film about a truck driver who goes mental after some local hillbillies kill his entire family and rape his girlfriend (which would send you mental, wouldn't it?), building a massive monster truck type thing to take them out one by one. 

You know what you're getting with this sort of thing and it's no surprise to see Ned Beatty show up as the slimy owner of a bar/club and used car lot who does whatever he can to protect his dickhead sons from suffering the consequences of their horrific actions. Not a great film by any means, but I was knackered after playing a full 90 in a pre-season friendly and I couldn't be arsed to think about what I was watching and Rolling Vengeance duly obliged. 

[Devon Malcolm]

1 hour ago, SaitoRyo said:

I watched something that was nowhere near as good as Runaway Jury last night. Rolling Vengeance, a very eighties Canadian exploitation film about a truck driver who goes mental after some local hillbillies kill his entire family and rape his girlfriend (which would send you mental, wouldn't it?), building a massive monster truck type thing to take them out one by one. 

You know what you're getting with this sort of thing and it's no surprise to see Ned Beatty show up as the slimy owner of a bar/club and used car lot who does whatever he can to protect his dickhead sons from suffering the consequences of their horrific actions. Not a great film by any means, but I was knackered after playing a full 90 in a pre-season friendly and I couldn't be arsed to think about what I was watching and Rolling Vengeance duly obliged. 

I watched this last year and it's really good. Love a bit of Canuxploitation, I prefer it to the American equivalent.

[FLips]

The Running Man
One of my favourite Arnie ones but I haven't seen it in years due to nowhere streaming it and the DVD copies I find in CEX being wrecked. Finally found it on Channel 4 of all places.

Brilliant sci-fi/action flick with a fun concept and memorable baddies for Arnie to cut through. Richard Dawson as Killian is inspired and for a gameshow host ends up maybe being the best actor in the whole thing. Always love seeing Jesse Ventura show up and Kurt Fuller might be the king of "oh it's that guy"; even my wife pointed him out!
Set in a dystopian future, Arnie gets set up when he refuses to gun a load of civilians down. He escaped his mining prison but spitefully gets grassed up when trying to escape the country. To boost the ratings on their show "The Running Man" they convince Arnie to "star" in it by threatening his two mates who they put in the show anyway. It's a fight for survival against a rigged deadly game!
Some of Arnie's best one liners in this one but it doesn't get talked about as much as his other hits.

Also it's maybe more suited for the Retro thread but I'm still up to my neck trying to beat GODS so won't be writing about it for a while; the Amiga intro to The Running Man might be one of the best on the console. The game itself though, maybe not so much.

The Fugitive
You can thank @cobra_gordo for this one. Neither of us had seen it before so remembering his post about it, I shot it on. Brilliant film.

Cobra is right, the film never lets up but also despite that never feels like it drags. Ford moves with purpose through the whole thing. A fantastic combination of action and a who-dunnit.
It was also the first of two instances of my wife making a bold call on the baddy and getting it wrong. This time she was convinced (and to be fair so was I but she declared it) that Tommy Lee Jones was the bad guy until a bunch of back to back scenes of him having both his arms.

We only knew two scenes from this going in, the Dam scene which we're more familiar with the Milhouse version, and the scene with the Janitor from Scrubs on the train because there's a whole episode of Scrubs about it. The actual Dam scene is incredible, the way he swanton bombs off it when he should have done a pencil dive.
The overall arc of the film really ties it together; everyone but Tommy Lee Jones (and the murderers of course) knowing Ford is way too nice to have done it and nobody willing to grass him up or help the police find him, and then eventually Tommy Lee Jones' hard shell being broken and him also realising it. I think half the film is actually spent not trying to find the killer, but hoping Tommy Lee Jones realises he's innocent. Wonderful stuff.

Executive Decision
Advertised as Kurt Russell and Halle Berry being stuck on a hijacked plane, there's actually a pretty star studded cast here. Steven Seagal, BD Wong, David Suchet (who makes an astoundingly great enemy) and John Leguizamo head up the main cast among others. "Look it's him!" of the film goes jointly to the fella that breathes funny when he dies in Terminator 2 and the uncle out of The Bear.

Terrorists led by Hercule Poirot hijack a plane and fill it with a deadly nerve agent. There's a great mini-twist here where all the terrorists think they've hijacked the plane to just free one of their own from American prison but shit falls apart when he gets released and Poirot is like "oh no there's a load of nerve gas bombs on here and we're suicide bombing it over the eastern seaboard" causing a quickly shut-down dissention among the terrorists.
Second bad call of the night on who the baddy is from my wife when she boldly declared "I reckon Steven Seagal is in on it" until he hilariously got sucked out of a plane miles above the earth about 20 minutes into the film and she defeatedly muttered "oh... I guess not". Third bad call from myself when I reckoned the trigger man on the bomb was the co-pilot.

Another fun action flick that doesn't really stop going right to the end. There's some dubious dubbing in the Netflix version to remove any mention of Islam which became noticeable on close ups of Poirot during a big speech about Islam he was doing, but it doesn't effect the film. There's not a whole lot of action due to it being bottled onto a plane, but there's a lot of tension with the sneaking around, bomb defusing and time limit on the USA shooting the plane down (very similar to the Under Seige films) but it does have a nice big plane landing set peice at the end.

A rare 3/3 of decent films there. Happy with that.

Edited March 11, 2025 by FLips

[WyattSheepMask]

I absolutely love The Running Man. One of Arnie’s best and still incredibly relevant today. 

Theres an Edgar Wright remake being released in November that I expect I won’t like at all. Glen Powell (who I’m unfamiliar with) steps into the Ben Richards role while Killian is being played by Josh Brolin.

[Chest Rockwell]

Glen Powell is great, and I quite like Edgar Wright. Still would have very low expectations for that though.