Reviews

I saw this movie on a Saturday afternoon horror movie show in Chicago in the mid-1970s, and for me, it's one of those mysterious movies you remember but know nothing about! I knew it wasn't 'Eyes Without A Face' but until yesterday had no idea what it was! Fernando Rey? How strange. The really odd thing is the movie I saw on TV was re-edited. Yesterday, I watched it all the way through, and remembered every scene except for the final laboratory climax; scrolling through it I realized the movie I saw as a kid had been heavily re-edited, and after the laboratory confrontation the film ended weirdly abruptly with a bizarrely edited Police chase that made no sense at all, and the main character is killed in an automobile crash, pieced in with a totally different car, from a totally different sequence in the movie! One of the reasons the movie stuck with me was that utterly baffling ending which, honestly, despite not being strictly narrative, was so effective in communicating the death of the character, it's stuck with me all my life. I think it's because it made little sense, and in fact because the woman doesn't die while committing a criminal assault it made the movie tragic. In the movie I saw and remember she makes it, she's free, driving a car, and then just... inexplicably crashes and dies. The death of the scarred woman in the lab is not part of my memory; in the TV version I saw as a kid, in her attempt to escape she seems to crash a car and die, and the film 'ends' with the Doctor and the blonde in the lab, and then just... stops. I vividly remember the unusually bad dialogue/dubbing, the B&W cinematography, especially the facial scarring, but the ending I saw was a supremely crude editing job that cut out the original ending; but was actually extremely effective despite the crude edited-for-TV/or re-release, re-cut, 'montage' work. Yeah, she confronts the doctor, then is driving one car, than another, there is a crash, and the doctor and the blonde woman are making some comment, the police are there... Utterly weird. Anyway, I finally got to see a movie from the dimmest recesses of my memory, and I'm grateful for that.

I think of this movie all the time because of the quote above: "You ain't gotta like it, but you gotta show up." This movie is, I think, the best 'war movie' I've ever seen. Yeah, it's pointless, crude, offensive, and some people think it glorifies conflict, but really what it does is in its own way is explain to people who 'showed up' WHY. You know, if you get it, you get it. If you don't, well, then you don't. My other favorite 'war movie' is LOOK, STRANGER; I can't recommend both these films enough.

In October, 1993, I got busted by two Kontrols in the Budapest subway; I was told later the fine I paid was double what it should have been: they ripped me off. A Hungarian I met told me everyone hates them, and I should have 'told them to f** off'. I really didn't mind it too much: by my American standards it wasn't a lot of money.

Later, I was trying to rest in Budapest after an experience in the former Yugoslavia, and spent a fair amount of time simply wandering the subway system. I loved this movie, it captured a lot of the atmosphere and weirdness of that specific time, for me. I remember walking (staggering) through a station drunk and late, and having a junkie covered in facial sores try to mug me. In my state of mind, I swore at him in Serbian and nailed him in the face, decking him out; I viciously kicked his prostrate body. I stepped over him, and walked past his stunned colleagues to the upper world.

One thing I wish this movie would have managed to have in it was the dogs: at least back then, the subway had dogs that knew how to ride the subway and had all the stops memorized. Just little strays that had figured the whole thing out, and would trot onto cars, curl up in the seats, wait for their stop to be announced, and then trot out, obviously knowing exactly where they were! I liked it; it was... 'homey'.

Great movie.

Shortly before this show came out, I was chained to a bench in a Chicago Police station, trying to explain to some rather unhappy cops why I'd done what I did, and found myself unable to give any other explanation than the truth: 'The guy took my time! It's not about the guy, or the stuff, or even about right or wrong: this sack of s--- took my time! He took my time! It's gone, and I can't ever get it back. And that's why'.

I'm not ever going to forget the response from the cops, which was an embarrassed silence: every single one of them had thought or said the Exact. Same. Thing. about some dirtbag, or situation caused by some unknown impulse or thing, that spent their entire created existence just wasting other peoples' TIME.

In this show, which honestly plays, for me, much more like a Chicago show than a New York show, I was stunned to see and hear Denis Leary give an impassioned speech, a desperate outburst of dialogue, in a nearly perfect paraphrase of my own raw explosion of hopeless loss... of my TIME.

This is a terrific show. The cancellation was a crime.

Edit: In the movie THE DROP, in the scene where Tom Hardy's character kills Richie, his monologue: 'You make me TIRED'.

TIRED of you. TIRED. Guy made me TIRED. I told the guy that: 'You are making me tired. Stop making me tired.'

You haven't been there, you just don't know. This show nails that. The time, and the tiredness. I'll let it go at that.

I've been on a bit of a kick watching movies from the PRK, and honestly, this one isn't bad as entertainment. The version I watched was overdubbed in Russian (you know, the kind with the single, rather disinterested male voice, which I know drives a lot of people crazy, but I don't mind it much) so I could catch most of the dialogue; although who truly needs erudite dialogue in a kung fu movie!?

Much of the movie is physically absurd, but no more so than any other early 1970s chop socky, and there are some amusing nods to Bruce Lee. You know, I am not a 'martial arts' guy in reality, so any idea of 'realism' or a plot that makes sense, or any basis in actual physics in these kinds of entertainments is, to me, irrelevant. I find almost all kung fu movies unrealistic and silly, so this one isn't bad.

Some of the stunts are actually scary: some of these kicks and punches can be seen to physically connect, some in positions that made me cringe for the (possibly serious) injuries the actor HAD to have sustained. There is one on the ship where one of Our Dear Leaders' Heroes smashes a guy in a stomp-type kick in the forehead in a hatch opening, while the guy's neck is bent backward over the edge of the hatch: if that stomp connected even a little... I mean, that's paralyzed time. Frightening.

I found the ending interesting, as in this movie there ARE survivors (in other PRK epics everybody dies), and as they present themselves, bloody and dirty and looking, well, kind of bitter, instead of a cynical, USA Aldrich-style ending, everybody literally gets a big hug and All Is Well! Different, you know?

Something to remember, I think, is that these movies are probably well liked by PRK moviegoers, no less than other kinds of audiences; mocking or condemning them for their 'anti-capitalist messaging' is kind of dumb: it's a different place with different rules, and the movies reflect that alternate reality. And again, it's a kung fu movie! Who cares about the 'message' of a kung fu movie, any more than the dialogue!? Seriously.

This turned up on Netflix and I watched it mostly because Charlotte Rampling was in it; I'd not just watch Rampling read a phone book, I'd be okay with her just kind of standing around holding one. However, I expected an exploitation flick, and to a certain extent, that's what this is, but not altogether. There is a lot going on in this here Un De Film.

Yeah, it's kind of about some drop-dead gorgeous French teenager from a well-off Euro-prog family inexplicably deciding to become a hooker, and the movie makes no effort to explain, in words, why; and that seems to bother a lot of reviewers. I kind of half-watched it until the scene where Isabelle has sex for the first time, and then was really and truly appalled. In my real life, I've had a young woman (not a girlfriend, more of a sister... hard to explain) describe a supposedly consensual experience in exactly these terms: looking at herself, it wasn't happening to her, etc. and in real life she was unable to explain to me WHY she found the experience so devastating. She insisted the encounter was consensual and absolutely not the guy's fault. But she clearly suffered a deeply traumatic experience, and it did affect her in a very, very serious way.

I asked her about after a time and how she felt, and she answered with the following declaration, with a grim facial expression: "It doesn't matter, what's one f*** more or less." And then continued in sexual behavior that clearly she was unhappy with. To say I was horrified is a gross understatement. So I've dealt with a very similar situation.

My take is that some people, regardless of biological status or physical age, simply do not have the emotional maturity to have truly consensual sex with another person at certain stages. Not everyone really matures at identical rates; and after a number of years of thinking, it seems to me that some people engage in sex because they feel it to be a societal norm, and if they don't, they feel they're not 'normal'. The woman, too, in real life, was a knock-out; an extremely beautiful woman, so much so it was a pain to do social things with her due to the constant advances she'd get. Men (and some women) would just lose their minds. She was also European, from that Euro-prog environment depicted in this movie.

When Isabelle accepts the offer of money-for-sex, did it occur to anyone it might be a (traumatic) response to the knowledge she's expected to engage in sex due to her society, but doesn't enjoy the 'act' at all, or at least with another person? And that the money (which is shown as not really about the money) serves as symbolic compensation for a socially- expected act she finds demeaning, shaming, and humiliating? The money then acts as a kind of 'control': SHE is in charge, SHE decides who she has sex with, SHE controls the set-up of the situation. The one episode of 'bad sex' she has, isn't an assault or rape but the john not paying her properly, and she is shown having an angry tantrum. Like the little kid she really is, inside.

Seeing it this way, the mother leaving condoms out for her, encouraging her to have 'normal' sex with 'nice boys', is gross and appalling: how is the mother not just pimping Isabelle out, herself? Inviting these boys to the dinner table, into their house? Into the family? Why doesn't she just invite one of Isabelle's johns while she's at it?

The question of, "Why would you have sex for money?" is then morphed in Isabelle's mind into, "Why would any woman have sex for free?" The party scene would have been much clearer if, like the apartment in FIGHT CLUB with the furniture, there had been little pop-ups from Isabelle's mind pricing out all the fumbling sexual behavior she sees... before she leaves the party in obvious disgust. To meet a 'nice boy' she refuses to have sex with, or at least not right away.

All I can say is, I half-agree with the reviewer from Turkey, about the indictment of 'vapid Western culture', insofar as it's my firm belief that no single culture is one-size-fits-all. Some women are perfectly fine with a culture of open, early, sexuality; some women are just not. And that social expectations are an extremely powerful thing that can really damage people very badly. I hated the depicted, so-called 'parents' in this movie: what a pack of insipid, clueless fools, stuffing their 'free' value system down the throat of their own daughter, who can't cope with it.

About the only character that really came across well was the younger brother. Oh: Charlotte Rampling was smashing.

I'm giving this B-Movie that people compare to Blade Runner a 10 because of the ending. I am a sucker for B-movies with something on their mind, that is, a routine sales-pitch that manages to say something. This movie does it. And this is why.

The ending. One of the criteria of AI and 'life' is the ability to reproduce with an attached, then detached, separate, consciousness: and that ending blows that out of the water. The Machine, the thing, has reproduced! By, technically, adoption, by how does that matter? It has reproduced. Not just itself, but an entirely different brain scan/matter/consciousness.

I have not seen another review of this movie that caught that!

"I want to play with Mum."

I watched the movie in a sort of comic-book interest, but at that line, WHAOH. This is a very smart movie.

The Machine, at the ending, has given birth, and NOT vaginally, or organically, but like Minerva, emerged from a brain stem/head. Whether it was intended or not, I don't care: this is so far, THE smartest, most intelligent, AI movie/film in the world. For that ending.

Wow.

Wow!

I wasn't going to review this movie, but it seemed there weren't many 'Americans' reviewing it, so I'll go ahead.

Firstly, the English subtitles are absolutely terrible and the movie, in English, suffers for that. It's a shame, because the Serbian dialogue is really clever and often hilarious, which doesn't come through in those awful subtitles. This is nothing unique: why can't Serbian movies rate decent subtitles?

When I go back and talk with friends, some of whom were BPC/VRS, I never bring up this movie, although we often talk about movies, especially old Yugo productions. But this one I leave alone. The first movie about the conflict I saw, VUKOVAR, I saw in a small cinema in 1996, in Chicago, and after that one it took me literally 20 years to watch this film; I knew about it but couldn't make myself see it. And even after all that time, I could only watch it 10-15 minutes at a time; I would get too agitated and... upset, I guess, to watch longer sections.

This one nails it. Not the combat scenes, which are largely very 'war movie'-style, or even some of the conceits (like the journalist), but in tone and atmosphere this movie absolutely nails it. The characters are pretty much dead on, and that sense of dread and almost, like, some malevolent presence, like an unseen evil being that can't be escaped, is what makes this movie.

Yeah, many 'Serbian' Serbs do look down on Bosnian Serbs as kind of backward hicks and foreigners. One of my 'cultured' friends in the Vojvodina refers to Bosnian Serbs as, 'Those a***oles that ruined it for everyone!'.

The sense of bewilderment and escalating, cascading violence that has some life all its own, and doesn't burn out but just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

"I didn't kill your mother!"

"Then who did!?"

That sense of vile hatred and rage, man, nobody should ever feel that. Nobody. It just eats you from the inside out. It steals your identity and soul. This movie manages to capture that, and that's what makes it what it is, I think. It doesn't have any solutions or explanations, far from it, but it manages to capture the feel of the time and place. For that it's a great film. That's about it.

Raised, kind of, really, 'half-raised', without easy access to TV in the desolate hinterlands of the USA (it's a big place) I very much identified with the Disney movie, 'Escape To Witch Mountain', and this 13-episode series touches on that base.

I've been catching up with it on various internet venues and really, it is utterly charming. I love this show. It captures the idea of kids, when parents used to put their kids out 'To Play' and not come back until it's time to eat or dinner or whatever. The imagination. Every kid who went out to play, and went out 'exploring', the Russian lady in her review here uses the term 'Tripping', I know what she really means.

I've talked to now-grown women in Eastern Europe who, as girls, insisted and fought to have their hair cut like Majka, wouldn't take a 'NO' for an answer! Fought their fathers over it! This show is so cool, so... rich. It's great.

This is one of the best kids' shows EVER. I rate it right up there with, from the USA, THE IRON GIANT for impact. It's just fantastic, in every sense of the term. What a great show. Unbeatable.

...if you haven't spent some time in the outskirts of Beograd this movie might not make a lot of sense. I can't say I liked it; I didn't, really, I don't agree with movies that try to 'show reality', I don't think that's what movies are designed to do, but that aside, I think this movie gets a lot correct in its depiction of what passes for youth life in modern Serbia.

Since this movie makes claims on 'reality', I'll weigh in on that.

This is a place where middle-aged people with advanced degrees work at outsourced call centers for USD$400 a month; one girl I talked to, who spoke perfect English and had a BA, revealed her income, working at a cafe where I had coffee each morning, was USD$210 a month; and these are considered decent-enough jobs that one is lucky to have. There are tons of working-class type kids with, literally, nothing to do and nowhere to go. So this movie shouldn't be too surprising. I told the cafe girl what I did (blue-collar material handler) and, since she asked, how much my income was, and it put her into a frantic, depressed, desperate funk for the entire time I was there. I felt really bad. Shouldn't have done that. But she asked.

A couple of things, about the movie itself: Serbia is a strongly patriarchal culture, and I've seen women, daughters, go really, truly crazy at the loss of their fathers. Just lose their s*** completely. In KLIP we see the illness of the protagonists father, and if you know the cultural background, this girl going bats isn't a shock. She flails around looking for some strong, authoritarian figure as a (very bad) replacement. The ending made total sense to me. In the USA this would be called 'Daddy Issues' and be regarded as a kind of disorder, but in Serbia it's just something that can, and does, happen in the usual scheme of things: 'Lost her dad, went crazy' (shrug).

In a somewhat vulgar comment, and in kind of answer to reviews who describe the lead as 'beautiful', well, by Beograd standards she's actually kind of only maybe slightly above average for what is conventionally regarded as beauty. The place is like some bizarre science fiction experiment in genetically engineered women. It's nuts. Armies of 6-foot-tall supermodels strutting around. I usually go out to Zemun so I can see fat people and un-made-up women in sweatpants just to feel normal.

So, KLIP might be a bit exaggerated, but likely not by much. Can't say I liked it, but it's worth watching once.

This might well be the worst 'documentary' of cult kids I've ever seen. It may as well be some episode of Jack Black's 'Documentary Now!', it's that bad. That said, I'm SGA: a cult kid. This 'film' is absolutely wretched. The 'film-makers' should go back to Brooklyn or wherever they are from and never do this again.

The problems: there is, among cult kids, what I have grown to call the Persistence of Belief: that is, the exiting cult kids retain the basic beliefs while experimenting with the outside world; in this case, the extreme Mormon beliefs these kids were raised with are only, and I mean ONLY, magnified expressions of LDS doctrine, and when these kids exit, they exit into only a slightly less virulent version of what they grew up with. Nowhere is it explored if they have changed anything except their desire for broadened sexual opportunities.

There is a very telling 'interview' in which a kid describes some vague bad guy as 'That guy who killed those kids', and the alleged film-makers interject, 'Hitler'? and the kid politely agrees with them: in fact the person he is referring to is Bill Clinton. The Waco Branch Davidian Compound crime sent shock waves throughout splinter groups in the USA and THAT is what that kid was referring to, and these morons knew nothing about it.

This is an excellent example of how some people should not be allowed cameras. Worst rating. Terrible. Awful. For the ignorant.

I am writing this review as I finally managed to find this movie and watch it; and really, because I admit that, even though I knew at the time (late 1970s) that Mills was much older in real life than in the Disney movies I saw her in, I had the biggest boy crush on her. Embarrassing I know, but I doubt I was alone.

This movie is quite good; it manages to make the green, lustrous English countryside seem genuinely menacing and eerie. It's one of those 'road movies' where a stranger is picked up, that may or may not be who or what they say they are. It reminds me a bit of movies like THE HITCHER and such like.

And yes, a VERY adult Hayley Mills turns out to be not at all what one may think, and also gets naked in this movie, and I am deeply glad I didn't see it back when I was a young teen: I think it would have ruined my life!

First of all, I watched it in Polish, which I don't understand well, so my comprehension of the dialogue is about 50%. I don't know if it's ever had subtitles in another language. However, the opening scenes don't require knowledge of any language, and are what hooked me: the robbery scene is very atmospheric and shockingly violent.

This is a clever and entertaining thriller about a plain-Jane bank clerk who, after surviving an incredibly vicious cash-transport robbery (the driver and police escort are machine-gunned to death, and she is left for dead in the back seat, unconscious), is chosen to get all dolled-up in a Hollywood-worthy makeover, and attend a swanky resort where the robber/killer is suspected to be. Oh, and she's accompanied by a handsome heartthrob undercover cop posing as her brother.

That's the kind of funny part, as my language skills are such that I had trouble figuring out what exactly was going on, and I had to rewind a couple of times to realize it was the same actress! She was almost unrecognizable.

It's fun material, although the violence is really tough, which may or not be a plus for some viewers. Very much worth watching. It's one of those 'small' movies that seem to kind of get lost, and it deserves a much better fate than that.

How do things like this get lost? This is a terrific Noir starring the one and only Patrick McGoohan at his stony best. Religious, brooding, dark to the point of blackness, and violent as hell, this is a near- masterpiece of cinema.

I have a visceral love of formula and/or B-movies that use familiar, even clichéd structures to do or say something different, and this one fits that definition perfectly. The worn-out 'plot' of reluctant-hit-man- does-one-last-job is almost totally irrelevant here: it's just a frame to hang the movie on. It's about life, or the absence of it.

Other reviews here demonstrate that certain people have found this movie extremely important, and I admit I'm one of them, too. I first saw it on a late-late show on broadcast TV (back when local TV stations would show almost ANYTHING in the middle of the night!) in, probably, the mid- 1980s, and never forgot it. I finally tracked down a decent VHS copy and watched it again recently, and it's lost not one bit of its power.

Maybe you have to be a certain kind of person. I suspect anyone who didn't like it just didn't even watch it long enough to form a negative opinion, and remembered it not at all; others watched it once, and it was seared in their brain.

Watching it again I just had to think, feel, "Man, there is just nothing left of this guy." Was there ever anything there? Was he ever a... person, a human being, at all? If so, 'what a waste of a man'.

I'm giving it 8 not because it's not terrific, it is, but certain parts of it irritated me intensely for reasons I can't really articulate; it's possible it's just me, the intense irritation, and possible I just don't like being confronted with some aspect of myself. Why else would I feel so strongly about such a seemingly minor thing?

Why else would it find such a strong place in my memories?

I have never forgotten this show and its devastatingly real treatment of the lead character's gambling addiction that ruined his entire life. The pilot movie was good, John Sayles always is, but the show was honestly not only grimly funny but grim. I will never forget one especially tough episode in which Shannon scrapes enough money together to buy his teenage daughter an expensive bicycle, only to discover his gift can't compete with her new stepfather's gift of a new car; she refuses the bike. That was bad enough, but he rides the bike around for the rest of the show, and and at the end, exits a building... and finds the bike gone: it's been stolen. I can't forget Jamey Sheridan's demeanor of near-desperation and hopelessness, staring at a broken bike lock on a courthouse steps and regarding his equally broken life. This was a GREAT show, if often truly brutal; not really violent, but just brutal in it's depiction of someone laid completely low. The second season 'lightened it up' a bit and the show suffered for that; the first season was brilliant TV. Elizabeth Pena was so beautiful in this; the only time she's been more beautiful is in the equally forgotten JACOB'S LADDER. But Sheridan created a character any actor would murder to have inhabited; and it's been almost totally lost. Re-issue this. It's not a 'please' kind of thing: just re-issue it already.

I really, really liked this movie. I caught it on Netflix (USA) in the category of Turkish comedies, but it's actually anything but Turkish or really a comedy, although parts of it are an absolute riot. It's a road movie about the Balkans in general and Macedonia in particular, and although not 'sweeping' or pretentious, is one of the best movies about the Balkans I've ever seen. It initially seems to feature a kind of nervous, awkward, almost child-like guy trying, with a notable lack of any social skills, trying to transport his long-lost, drunken, profane, and violently recalcitrant brother to their father's deathbed from Istanbul to Macedonia. The road part is diverting and often screamingly funny, involving a Gypsy wedding, outsized tires, and, in a sequence that almost put me out my chair, the 'Turkish' brother's inability to read Cyrillica road signs getting them lost in such an absurd way I just couldn't handle it at all. I had to stop the movie to catch my breath. The sense of absurdity that permeates the Balkans is on full display, here, and if it's not your thing, then it's not your thing: but it is my thing, and I loved it all. Funny, funny stuff. It's the second part of the movie that took me totally by surprise and that I found deeply moving. I was expecting a kind of more-or-less typical Turkish-style comedy overdone 'family reunion' (not that those kind of movies aren't funny), but instead got something much more meaningful. It was going somewhere I couldn't quite figure out, and then came the scene where the two newly-met brothers eat a meal in a local restaurant and learn about each other, and I was just... blown away. I'm not sure I've ever before seen anything quite like it. The 'awkward' brother is revealed as a deeply responsible, moral, decent, and terribly damaged guy trying to truly do the right thing. The sense of the 'Turkish' brother being a kind of missing piece of the family puzzle was extremely moving; his homecoming to a place he's never been before is so perfect and understated it's stuck with me in a way few movies do. Maybe I'm the only one who found the messy, troublesome, but genuinely heartfelt reunion of this family emotionally devastating; I hope not. This movie would make an interesting double bill with BEFORE THE RAIN, it's that good. A lot of it's comedic but when it gets powerful, it's really powerful. Also, the early scenes of what you might call a 'mosque-crawl' are well worth the price of admission; it's some funny material: "I'm prune-y from ablutions!"