♪Un♪, ♪Deux♪, ♪Trois♪
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I loved Muzzy! We had those tapes in 5th grade French class.
I found a big case of tapes of the Spanish language versions for a friend a couple years back who was looking to get his kid started with them.
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Watched a bunch of random, cheesy movies I’ve had in my backlog:
Broken Arrow
Eh. Didn’t love this one.
John Woo movies are usually quite a treat for me, so I save them for a rainy day. I haven’t seen most of them. My main point of comparison here was Hard Target, a movie I had a great time with, so I was really underwhelmed here by Christian Slater, who is just kind of there. I suppose I liked that he was a nice guy and continued to be so, all the way through all the action and the end of the movie, that was a little charming.
This is my first time seeing Travolta as a villain and I do get why he got cast as a bad guy a lot, he’s probably the only performance that had enough weirdness to it to be memorable. I kept thinking about how good the bad guy in Hard Target is and I wanted greatly for that kind of hate-bond between hero and villain here.
Samantha Mathis is good but I do wish they’d brought up her nerdiness a bit more, that could’ve been the chemistry between her and Slater. As it is, they’re just, not even friends but pleasant co-workers.
I did like all the helicopter stuff, like that one dude getting decapitated by the chopper blades, Mathis kicking the tail rotor up to knock the gun out of a guy’s hand, and that one helicopter exploding and having the spinning rotor come down on her, that stuff was fun. Also, it’s just generally impressive to see how coherent all the action is, and how efficient some of these scenes are. There’s one where all the bad guys are delivering exposition in a fun way while a real helicopter takes off immediately next to them, and they had to film all of that together. Pretty cool.
Nightbeast, Galaxy Invader, Fiend
I watched a whole bunch of Don Dohler movies, all of them had the same review:
Incredibly boring with a pretty decent monster, typically one pretty fun fx scene near the beginning. I would say Fiend doesn’t even have that, sadly, but the monster ghost is weird enough to be a lil interesting.
That said, one of these was the standout for me:
The Alien Factor
A spaceship containing specimens for an intergalactic zoo crashes on Earth near a small backwoods town. The specimens escape, and soon town folk start turning up mutilated.
For sure the best of his movies, that one has ton of random stop-motion and practical effects monsters running around and a cast of doofs. I wouldn’t call this movie “good” by any stretch, but it’s worth a watch I’d say if you’re into the creatures.
There’s a good Cinematic Titanic for this movie too, I’d recommend it.
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I tried to give 28 years later a shot and it felt like I was watching a let’s play for a first party sony game from 2015. The writing, the directing, the art direction and violence, it all screamed middling AAA video game
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Though I’ve never seen it, I remember the crew for the movie reached out to my dad’s company at the time (computer security) for research on how to visually show someone hacking into a secured system. He and all his co-workers had this session where they were pitching this idea and that for ways the hacking could be accurate and also look cool, then they all got to attend the premiere when it was finally released.
Predictably, the director thought the ideas they had would be visually boring or confusing, and opted instead to have a 3D cube float down and have smaller cubes plug in and flash and such.
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travoltas hacker exam in that movie is still so fucking hilarious
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I kind of have to give it up to sales guys for figuring out how to work backwards from the epicness of cubes to building a fake discipline around it, lingo heavy wiki pages about cubes, etc. thats where they outmaneuvered the coders
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Huge Ackman, you may think you’re a hot shit hacker, but can you hack… while getting dome??
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Dont forget having a gun to your other head
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The Plague is a recent bad-vibes movie about an all-boys summer water polo summer camp, set in the early 2000s, where the in/out group clique formation separates a “weird” kid with a skin condition from the rest. The newest member of the team is a young boy whose a bit more sensitive and attempts to shield, if not befriend, the kid who has the plague. I thought this movie was remarkably and uncomfortably close to my own experience doing summer camp activities during that time. The not-exactly-criminal toxicity of young boys on display here is like so eerily reminiscent to my experience, I was freaking out. Good child actor performances and a really excellent inept adult coach character helps to take the movie very seriously. It’s good!
In fact, I thought the lead role was so well performed by this kid Everett Blunck that I actually went out to find more movies with him in them and stumbled on Griffin in Summer. This may prove to be my favorite comedy/drama of the year, though it’s from 2024. Basically, a young boy, played by Everett Blunck, has high ambitions to be a serious playwright and attempts to coordinate his friends to put together a production of his latest script, which is about the painful collapse of a marriage due to failures to communicate and alcoholism. It’s a great premise, and you get to see really good tween-age actors begrudgingly handle the material as much as their interest and ability can allow them. But the majority of the movie is really about watching this kid attempt to be taken seriously and complete his work, all the while his mom goes through a real divorce like the one depicted in his play, and his intensity pushes him away from his friends, just as he is discovering he has a crush on an adult handyman that his mom hired for the summer who happens to be a performing artist from Bushwick and a much worse artist than Griffin. It’s a super funny movie.
Big recommendations for these both, if only because the performances are great, but I’d say because they had some truthful things to say about what it is like to be young for some people.
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I remember seeing ads for the other dubs of Muzzy as a kid, in the form of a multi-VHS set to teach kids spanish, Italian, French, or German. I never realized it started out as a movie. Love the character design
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in the Arizona Air BnB with nothing on netflix to watch and wanting to watch a “bad” film and also having seen Johnny Mnemonic the previous night I elected to show my friends Albert Pyun’s “Nemesis” and they called it “insane”, with one of them electing to light up a second joint after the hotel gunfight scene
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these dudes showing up in nemesis is always the exact moment people lose their minds
it’s a beautiful thing to witness…true movie magic
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something about casting billy eilish in the bell jar is making me do a small lol
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Baby Driver — love its soundtrack, and what a car-festival it is.
Bullet Train Explosion — Bullet Train… but let’s throw in some Godzilla-movie Seriousness! And Bombs! And refer to a 1970ies movie nobody has seen or heard of! And let’s explain technical terms (ATC) and how they work! And then have the experts in the Operations Control Centre forget how they work so we have a plot-point to clear in the first 15 minutes or so! Have Politicians turn up and be hardliners, but then come around and help anyway! Make Problems out of ordinary things that would never register to be a problem! And then throw in lots of bantering between cardboard cutout clicheé characters! Oh and don’t forget, We Take Our Job Serious Even Though We Are Afraid!
Wonderful 4/5 train-shlock, highlight of the lot.
Me Before You — Cute Accent Lou, rest: Forgettable.
The Collini Case — surprisingly kept me engaged/watching? A german courtroom drama about a killer and whydunnit (yes that’s a word)… surprise of this post.
Materialists — Madam Webb working at a Dating Agency, and that works as well as you’d expect. Just gotta love how it portrays how Love became a commodity, what people would do to get a tiny bit higher up (
) and has lots of tiny tidbits that would make it good, except the whole thing … doesn’t. Seriously made me hate the dating game even more than it already did before though, so as a dating horror movie it worked pretty well 
Love Thing — a typical german romcom - look, i was sick, and i wanted something light. Hoped it wouldn’t kill braincells while watching, went into a slaughterhouse instead. Tonally and totally tone-deaf, best forgotten before watching.
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Watched this bad ass movie named Screamers with my friend the other day…I sentence this to be shown on the sci fi channel every day for one thousand years!!!
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I remember watching this movie as a kid… Its one of those “based on a pkd story but you would never be able to tell” adaptations right?
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the dick short story it’s based on, “second variety”, is one of his most conventional, a straight shot to the wry irony of the twist ending. it reads as the pulp SF bedrock upon which he developed richer/kinkier ideas for autofac, then the electric ant, then electric sheep. screamers strips out the cold war setting of “second variety” for vague inter-corporate resource war and has generic corridor skulking, but in some ways it’s actually the more provocative and strange work.
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