VHS and Betamax You Have Recently Rented

[SaitoRyo]

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot 

Overdue re-watch. Last time (first time) I saw it was something like thirteen or fourteen years ago. I remembered the general vibe, but hardly nothing about the plot. 

I enjoyed it as it's a fun caper and Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges have good chemistry. I mean, they clearly want to fuck each other, but there are enough fights, explosions and other stunts (and naked ladies) to distract you from that. 

I also watched a thing called Blood Games last week, which was weird. It's a 1990 slasher about a female baseball team who beat a team of rednecks and live to regret it. Has a feminist sensibility but is also very exploitative and features a whole bunch of nudity. Just a strange film where the one-time-only director fucking LOVES a slow-motion shot. Oh, and Mac's dad plays one of the main rednencks, so there's that. 

[cobra_gordo]

Jurassic World Rebirth. Second viewing and whilst this is objectively not great, I fucking loves me a dinosaur film and this was perfect viewing for Sunday morning, hungover on the settee under the duvet. I mentioned it in this thread when I saw it at the cinema that some of the effects are janky and it feels like a collection of set pieces tagged together like video game levels but, it's dinosaurs, and dinosaurs will always be awesome. I can genuinely see me watching this another half a dozen times at least just for the stupid t-rex chase and the mosasaur. 

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. I'm a massive fan of the MI franchise but I'd put off watching this because I'd heard it was overly long, flashback city and not as good as the last two films (Fallout may be my favourite of the series). For the first hour it was more MEHssion Impossible, just really took it's time getting going, really wants to show you loads of clips from the previous films and make sense of the daft AI villain plot. Then Ethan gets on a submarine and the whole film improves ten fold. There were points in the action where I simply could not breathe and a bit in the final fight where I held the duvet up to my gob and gave a slightly muffled shout of "Oh Jesus fucking Christ". It's got some brilliantly disorientating cinematography, some nice cameos and whilst some characters backstories felt a bit shoehorned in, by that point in the film I was willing to let it slide. If that first hour was condensed in to 30 minute this would be an absolute bobby dazzler of a film. Looking forward to seeing how it holds up on a rewatch.

Edited October 6, 2025 by cobra_gordo

[LaGoosh]

One Battle After Another

I think I let the hype get to me with this one because I was a bit let down by it. It's definitely a pretty good film but far from the masterpiece it's being heralded as. The first half is great, filled with engrossing and brilliant scenes, but the second half drags and I was getting pretty desperate for it to end in the last 20-30 minutes. The Sean Penn character was fairly ridiculous and I have no idea what kind of point they were trying to make with him or the ludicrous Christmas Adventures stuff. I came out of it wishing that the film was actually all about Benecio Del Toro's character and story instead as that was easily the best stuff in the movie and way more interesting than everything else.

Edited October 6, 2025 by LaGoosh

[DavidB6937]

One Post About One Battle After Another After Another

The hype thing is a tough one. I'd actually seen far more hype around Smashing Machine so I think I felt a bit more underwhelmed coming out of that, especially after seeing this.

I'd not read a massive amount but saw the trailers a bazillion times over the last few months so I knew it was definitely something I wanted to see.

I'd completely agree about the Sean Penn character being quite jarring, especially at first, but to be honest I got used to it and oddly enjoyed the weird Christmas stuff. It was definitely a movie that had about three different personalities and you could cut it in a different way and get a completely different movie. Direction and performances were all spot on.

I can't really fault it as the time flew by and once I got into the flow of it and the weird juxtaposition of all the different parts, I had a really fucking good time with it. But I can also see people coming out of it wondering what the fuck that was and I'd completely understand that angle too.

Spoiler

I did not expect to be sitting there watching a scene where they joke about being reverse raped or whatever the fuck it was. And then him surviving the shooting and his fucked up face and.. yeah, I dunno. I laughed but also felt a bit dirty about it. I was potentially delirious at that point.

 

 

[FLips]

Child’s Play 2

Not as good as the first but surprisingly good for a sequel. This time Chucky stalks Andy at a foster home after his Mam gets put in a madhouse. It’s not even 90 minutes long but that’s enough time for it to get through to the inevitable over the top Chucky death. Has the kill of the series (so far) where some poor bloke gets his eyes replaced by doll eyes on the assembly line. 

Child’s Play 3

Ah there we go. We’re now at the point where the only original “actor” is Chucky. Something like 8 years have passed and 16 year old Andy is in Military School. Chucky, risen from the dead to please the stockholders mails himself there to fuck shit up again. 

The military setting doesn’t work but it’s went the same way as Elm Street does by the 3rd installment and it’s less about the story and more about the Chucky character. It’s not awful but it’s not a patch on the first two. At this stage my wife said she kinda feels bad for Chucky because he’s putting a shitload of effort in and every single time he gets brutally mutilated, this time being thrown into a massive fan at a worryingly dangerous Ghost Train.

From what I can gather the films get worse before they get better again so this feels like a safe place to call time on the Child’s Play series. First one is fantastic, second one is a worthy follow up, third one is bang average.

[Hannibal Scorch]

@FLips I think Bride of Chucky is next which I thought was a lot of fun

[RIDDUM_N_STYLE]

Yeah Bride is a fun film, Seed is weird trash, Curse brings a bit of a darker tone, Cult is good but a bit ott and the TV series is fantastic (I still need to finish season 3, only got as far as episode two)

Skip the reboot completely though, it’s different but utter shite

[Devon Malcolm]

The Chucky series is arguably the most consistently good long-running horror franchise. Seed of Chucky was the only one I didn't care for and even that wasn't that bad. The reboot was good, too.

[JoeManco7]

On 10/5/2025 at 10:44 PM, Hannibal Scorch said:

One Battle is about 25 minutes shorter than Avatar. But yes, seeing it in 3D is the only way to enjoy them. It was the last 3D blu ray released in the UK (and yes I still have a 3D TV, I’m one of them). 
 

As to One Battle After Another, I’m on the fence. Very well made, the car chase is phenomenal. But I found it too nonsensical to make me feel it’s one of the films of the year. I didn’t feel the same leaving the Cinema after watching this compared to Sinners.

I stand corrected and my excuse is after going to One Battle After Another on Thursday and then knowing that I would be in for another long cinema viewing when going to Avatar: The Way of Water on Saturday, I delayed going into that screening until fifteen to twenty minutes after the start time so as to miss the usual adverts and trailers so it didn't seem that longer. I really did think that One Battle After Another was a great film compared to most that have been released over the past few years, but it didn't give me the same first impression of being a cinematic masterpiece that seeing There Will Be Blood did (although few films do that anyway, even if they are made by the same director!).

I Swear

Thanks to Escapes, supported by the BFI awarding National Lottery funding, I was able to get down to my local cinema for free tonight and saw the soon to be released comedy-drama film based on a true story of someone with Tourette's syndrome.

At two hours, a bit shorter than the two films I saw last week, it has moments when the swearing and the use of words in the outbursts can be humorous, but also make you cringe for the character and realise Tourette's is not always about profanity. 

I thought it is a good British film set in Scotland, with the soundtrack made up of some great songs by Manchester bands. The lead actor Robert Aramayo does a great job and in the closing credits it shows clips of the real life John Davidson which proved it. 

I haven't seen much of his other work and don't know if it has been said on here before, but towards the end of this film I had the recurring thought of how facially similar Robert Aramayo looks to what could be a younger brother of a current WWE wrestler:

Spoiler

GUNTHER

 

Edited October 6, 2025 by JoeManco7
Make film title bold

[LaGoosh]

17 hours ago, FLips said:

From what I can gather the films get worse before they get better again so this feels like a safe place to call time on the Child’s Play series. First one is fantastic, second one is a worthy follow up, third one is bang average.

Number 4 (Bride of Chucky) is great. Jennifer Tilly is fantastic in it. The third is easily the worst in the entire series.

The Chucky franchise is a rare horror franchise in that the original creator is heavily involved and behind all of them so even though the quality waivers between them the spirit and vibe of the series always remains intact. I've got a lot of time for Chucky.

[FLips]

Looks like I’ll have to check the Chucky sequels out then!

[Merzbow]

18 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

The reboot was good, too.

The TV show? Yeah I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Probably the best non-binary rep in a show, better than most serious attempts.

[poetofthedeed]

22 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

The TV show? Yeah I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Probably the best non-binary rep in a show, better than most serious attempts.

There was a 2019 reboot starring Aubrey Plaza.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child's_Play_(2019_film)

 

Smashing machine.

Alright, Dwayne Johnson is utterly engrossing as Mark Kerr, and his portrayal is the best thing he's done, the scenes where he flips the fuck out while being the most soft spoken man in the world are incredibly well done, and there's a scene with him and Emily Blunt set to Jungleland that's fantastic. Ryan Bader as Mark Coleman was surprisingly good.

But it's just off slightly, they got the balance of the internal fight/actual fighting wrong, and I don't think we got a lot of time to absorb what was happening to him. Warrior and iron claw both balanced the see saw better.

Absolutely worth a watch and I wouldn't be massively surprised if DJ gets a few nods for it, can't see him winning though.

[Devon Malcolm]

1 hour ago, Merzbow said:

The TV show? Yeah I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Probably the best non-binary rep in a show, better than most serious attempts.

I haven't seen the show but I meant the Aubrey Plaza reboot. As a standalone it's a really decent horror film.

[gmoney]

Off sick from work the past few days, so that means spending hours on the sofa under a duvet watching films. 

Tron

Always enjoyable to see filmmakers try to make computing seem as anything other than fucking boring, and there is lots of charm, but ultimately this couldn't keep me interested. I can see why it's a cult favourite, but I wasn't sad not to have seen it before. 

Krull

Sword and sorcery, mad cast, slumming it director. Could be the recipe for outrageous fun, and it is really beautifully shot, but it really sags at some points. Still how can you not enjoy Alun Armstrong as a sexy rogue with Mark Fowler and Liam Neeson in his crew?

Breaking Away

Same director as Krull but a very, very different film. This has been on my watch list for years and I sad not to have watched it before. A real gem, and even though it dips into cliche I was welling up at the end and it felt right.

Rosemary's Baby

This was completely engrossing from the off. I'm not a huge horror movie fan, but a well made film transcends any genre. Also confirms my suspicion that all old people are cunts and up to something. That'll be me soon. 

Edited October 9, 2025 by gmoney