The Banker - 1989

 I guessed in the 90s.

IMDb trivia says this is the movie that turned Tarantino into Robert Forster? Interesting. I wonder if that is true. He stars in this muder at mystery thriller movie. 

The Banker is an odd name for a fairly by the numbers movie.  Someone is killing prostitutes and leaving marks on their bodies.  Forster is the cop who is investigating the killings.  The symbol is about the domination of women, and that spirals into the seedy underworld of strippers and sex.

I mean, there's not a lot to say about this crap.  Its barely worth mentioning except that the killer uses a crossbow and is painted in all red and black when we eventually see him  It made me think, how is it that we got to HERE from the horrors of the true life serial killers...  You know its funny because it almost feels like mockery.  Like, we have Dahmer or whoever out there committing real crimes and the banality of their menace is so different from the outrageousness of this stupid movie where some dude has a crossbow.

The Banker is a movie that few people have seen or think about, and it deserves that, but somehow...it also deserves Tarantino to love it?  Movies are weird.

Hardcore - 1978

 There's some notorious movies I've long seen and been on my radar for whatever reason and this is one of them. 

If only for the poster,  which screams "oh god that's my daughter" or something,  this stands out. George C Scott never says the line but it's implied,  and the rest is, well...

A snowy, down to earth Grand Rapids family sends a daughter off to LA and she never returns. Scott flies out to investigate and hires Peter Boyle as a private investigator. He digs into the seedy underworld of hardcore pornography and uncovers more than he ever wanted to know while he searches for his daughter. 

This movie is a lot more controversial and is less of a talky than I would've assumed. It's late 70s but feels that 90s aesthetic, a lot more like its brother from another mother 8mm. 

There's some interesting developments and we do kinda know how it's going to go but not in a awful way. In fact, this is pretty dang interesting and very well made film. This is one to seek out. 4 stars

Sisters - 1972

 I'm still curious to see a lot of De Palma but I won't say all mostly cuz of his more recent work. 

Sisters is a nice classic Hitchcock homage and made me wonder what people now draw from Hitch. I'm watching a lot of Hitch recently and I'll have to say...I mean it's all true. He's a true master. 

Sisters stars Margot Kidder before Black Christmas and Superman, and she's a classic untrustworthy narrator type. She meets a man on a dating show,  takes him home for sex,  and the man is killed by her the next morning. But she may have a twin and it may have been her twin...

This is not a far way away from De Palma's later murder films like Dressed to Kill and Body Double. The edgy raciness, the bizarre off kilter sense. It's definitely in the realm. 

A neighbor who's also a reporter saw the murder see and is onto it,  and she's going to uncover a truly bizarre and confusing scene. 

Just like his other stuff,  this movie takes some wonky turns and goes a lot of places,  just in general. But I enjoyed it and i give it 4 stars.

Devil Story - 1986

 I have so many movies left to watch.  The fact that this exists and I have never heard of it...is confounding.

The immediate comparison I made in my head was to Jess Franco's Oasis of the Zombies.  It has been years since I saw that but in my head it's this slow hazy nonsense movie with vague zombies and basically no plot, and if that doesn't describe that movie well it certainly does describe this movie.

Some French production originally called "Once Upon a Time...the Devil", this the last movie by director Bernard Launois.  It consists of what I will guarantee you are more sounds than words and more specifically noises made by a horse instead of dialogue.

A ship crashes into a hill, a horse bucks around whinnying like mad, a mummy walks around, a undead zombie creature goes around killing people, and all these things are maybe linked, but definitely not clearly linked as our main heroine runs or hollers or fails to react at all.  Like I said, there's not even much dialogue in the movie and a lot of scenes play out with nothing said, explained, understood or communicated whatsoever.

Devil Story I guess has a cult following, in that hallowed hall of movies claimed to be the worst.  In the end, another inexplicable scene happens and it doesn't even make you blink.  This movie like no other trains you to just sorta take it in stride, blink, say uh huh, and just sorta detune yourself one more step and step outside of reality a little more.

There is value in this, its hard to define, but I do like it, and I give it about 4 stars.

Winterbeast - 1992

 There's many levels of cult film, some of which I am still discovering.

Winterbeast is some amateur as fuck, completely non-narrative Z grade bamboozle fest fucking weirdo movie that is basically not a movie at all, but rather a collection of things which are honestly not related, but pretend as if they are.

Directed by Christopher Theis, this slab of nonsense is some sorta who knows what of nondescript nothingness paired with insane wtf which will have you instantly wondering "is this a movie"?  The short and real answer is no.  I would challenge anyone who says it is.

Play the first few minutes for someone and introduce them to weirdness.  The problem is that you would not want that first 2 minutes to continue for about 75 minutes.  It would get boring, nonsensical and repetitive.  Of course, they don't exactly repeat it.  There's claymation in this movie, original music, bizarre actor moments, and even some local small town almost sightseeing nonsense?  

Basically this looks like someone was shooting their vacation footage and decided to add a horror plot.  I have rarely seen a movie where it was more obvious that within the same sequence or scene they cut away from the actor to a different actor, completely somewhere else, responding as if they were in the same scene.

 They had some ingenuity, an uncle into claymation for example.  I have no idea what this is, but I will say I kinda liked it.  I give it 3 stars.

The Stranger - 1987

 One puts on the blandly named movie The Stranger with hopes - after all it is basically described as a slasher adjacent mystery movie - and then one gets bogged down in irrelevant dialogue.

Also side note the ENTIRE move I was saying to myself "that's Bonnie Bedelia" and then I would convince myself it isn't.  It IS Bonnie!  Bedelia stars in this shit.

This is possibly also one of the critical few movies where the plot revolves around a song someone remembers?  I mean really, there's a few of these and they are mostly bad - this one doesn't buck the trend.  Bonnie has these phantom memories revolving around an ad jingle from the sound of it and she has vague memories about a murder and I dunno what the fuck else happens in this movie.

The detective character is good and I liked him.  The rest of this....I mean...  One star is generous.

Tokyo Joe - 1949

 I have been on a mostly unreviewed Bogart fest.  I watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre and rewatched The African Queen as well.  Good movies!

Tokyo Joe I put on without a second thought, feeling kinda sick and high on edibles while I recovered from tonsil surgery.  Humphrey Bogart stars in this film noir sorta drama, and I had no idea what to expect.

What I could never have predicted was how unintentionally hlarious moments of this were, as well as how bizarrely influential to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!  Seriously, what a strange duo of things for this movie to pull out of it's ass, but I mean seriously!  

First we meet Bogart's daughter he didn't know existed.  The uber-wooden, awfully scripted, overacted part is pure comic gold.  The little girl never blinks and delivers hyper adult, unrealistic dialogue as she doesn't move and inch and bores a hole directly into Bogey's face.  Tried to find a quote of hers from the IMDb page but nothing doing, take my goddamn word for it brah.

Then we have the place sequence where first off all I notice Bogey is dressed like Indiana Jones and then the sequence in the plane, while not being from an action movie, really reminded me of the sequence in Loa Che's airplane at the beginning of Temple.

I scoured IMDb and Wikipedia, no work on those about the connection to Indiana Jones.  What a bizarre thing though!  I mean it's not a 1:1 but watch those movies and tell me they're not loosely connected.

This is a weird one and one that sticks out.  Sometimes that's all it takes!  I give it 4 stars.

Sleepstalker - 1989

 The first movie about the fairy tale character of the Sandman came out in 1933, the most recent in 2017.  Obviously a character of some status, this little known horror movie also is sorta about the character.  Sorta.

Sleepstalker reminds me of those 3-4 middle Hellraiser movies that were barely about Pinhead and instead some stupid other story with Pinhead shoved in there in the end with 4 lines of dialogue.  It's also about the level of quality of those movies.

We begin with Griffin's family being murdered and the killer bing put on death row.  We get a priest who comes to the man on death row and gives him the ability to come back as living sand, which he obviously uses and comes back to murder some more.  Along the way some cops get  involved or whatever and some mild weird "scares" happen.

This is one that took me a long time to get through.  It moves at a glacial pace and is an hour 45 minutes which is probably about 45 minutes too long for what it is trying to do and how thin the storyline is.  Character have bad dialogue, stand around, plan things, discuss things, have zero chemistry or charisma.  It's a fucking dull, dull movie.

Then we eventually get to the priest who unveils what we already know, and cablam, final confrontation.  I dunno.  This movie is not good.  I'll give it like half a star. The effects are good, the few times they happen. It might deserve higher.  But ya know.

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural - 1973

 Halloween horror fest bayyyy-by!  The theme of the movies this year is "Tubi algorithm".  I am going to watch whatever it recommends in the first screen (or so) and this will be therefore random, and will also give you an interesting insight into what Tubi thinks I like.

Also known as The Legendary Curse of Lemora, and Lemora, Lady Dracula.

Lila is a angelic virginal singer who is a member of a church after her father is accused and found guilty of murder or something like that.  She receives a communique from her dad and sets off to find him after being told to come alone.  Doesn't sound fishy at all.  On the way, she enters an area full of cursed, psychotic people and things don't get much better when she finally arrives and meets cryptic Lemora.

The movie chugs a long and there are some pretty good sequences.  The beginning with the bus ride into town is really good, and though the movie telegraphs what is going on and what is going to happen, its a fun ride to take even with the outcome clear.  The usual lesbian undertones are present, there is a little nudity, and that's about the sum of it.

About 30 minutes were cut to make the version now available.  It's rated mature and nowadays except for the brief breast shot it's practically PG rated.  I wonder if the original cut had more violence and nudity.  This cut though, gets a relatively average 2.5.

Night Feeder - 1988

 I love how the IMDB for this says "the debut of Kate Alexander"  Yeah!  Because it was basically everybody's debut!  And also for a lot of them, their only film ever.

Night Feeder is a super Z grade slasher that no one has ever heard of.  Its amateur to the true definition, which we have seen a few times now on the blog, and the movie really looks, sounds, and feels like it.  As I may have said before, these can be divisive, a lot comes down to tone and atmosphere...

Night Feeder has main character reporter Jean in a city where young women's bodies are turning up with their brains sucked out of the heads.  She wants to write a piece on the news and begins to investigate, meets a charisma-less police guy Alonso, and gets sucked into the story.  

It cannot just be that, and so what it does instead is have a lot of weird nonsense shit whth the town blaming stuff on a weird band that sings exclusively about suicide, and having a weird subplot about prostitutes.  I tried to find the band on YouTube but I can't so you will just have to trust me, it's great.  Also great and jarring is the strange electronic score by one of the films 3 credited directors.

Sometimes you walk the line and find something which is yes Z grade but scratches the itch in just the right way.  I give it 4 stars.

The Chamber - 1996

 So I am at the thrift store and picking around VHSs, and the usual route here is to grab something unknown and random, and I pick up 1996's The Chamber in this context.

Bought for almost $4 million for a one-page idea around the height of the legal thriller, Hollywood banged down John Grisham's door to make another smash hit like The Firm.  The Chamber is originally going to star Brad Pitt and be directed by Ron Howard, that falls apart and eventually what we have here gets made.

Chris O'Donnell and Gene Hackman star in this southern story of a bomb which kills two children, and the fallout involving the killer being put on death row.  Sam (Hackman) has been in prison for 16 years and his grandson O'Donnell is a lawyer who decides to fight for him.  Sam is definitely a racist asshole, and guilty of many things, but is he guilty of the bombing?

The Chamber is a really odd movie in that we are watching our protagonist fight for a racist, and grow close to one, and Sam is not like the lovable curmudgeonly old dude who we kinda love.  He is a murderer, a slur blaring bigot who doesn't hold back and isn't trying to be on any good behavior.  Watching as we emote some sort of sympathy towards him for almost 2 hours is...an odd choice, to say the least.

We're all expecting bland leading man Chris O'Donnell to legalese his way to a happy conclusion and he doesn't, spoiler alert, so at least it does not pull punches.  I'll give it 1.5 stars and say it does move pretty quick.