The Ohio Sci-Fi and Horror Marathons

Whooooa Nellie! A massive time-delayed bump on this thread! Yep, after many years of harboring only half-formed, sleep-deprived memories of the mammaries, tonight I finally revisited the much mooted (at least in the ongoing L.A. Connection/JacksUserID love-hate relationship) Vampyres for the first time since that wee hours screening at the final Night of the Living Drexel.

My verdict? Uhhh....it's not as bad as I remembered. But it's also still not very good. In the grand scheme of lesbian/erotic vampire flicks, it certainly delivers more of the nudity and explicit boffing than something like The Vampire Lovers (which promised much for its R-rating, but is pretty tame by today's standards.) But those bits of erotica feel like padding for a film that seems to be trying for creepy and deliberate, but which only achieves plodding and meandering. In contrast, a contemporaneous film like Daughters of Darkness treads similar territory, but enhances its eroticism with a cool, elegant sense of stylized decadence, its dreamlike atmosphere aided by some excellent cinematography (while Vampyres plays as people walking around, waiting for another sex scene to happen.) Or take The Hunger, a personal favorite. Its emphasis on the tragic undertones of the vampiric existence lend the proceedings a melancholy, elegaic tone, so that when the famous Sarandon/Deneuve seduction occurs, it plays as both payoff and pleasant tonal shift.

So yeah, if you have 88 minutes to kill, check out Vampyres, which is featured on an excellent, feature-stacked DVD from Blue Underground. But don't expect miracles.

To each his own, of course. Certainly compared to the lush art film theatrics of DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, VAMPYRES pales. Plus, DAUGHTERS has one of the most beautiful Euro stars of the era in Andrea Rau.

Still, VAMPYRES has a kicky Euro trash vibe that should have played better at a marathon. The 4am slot is always tricky as any number of posts here and on the Boston board will attest. Of course, if you visit this link, I have a course of action to curb that issue: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=823

But, you lose points praising Tony Scott's THE HUNGER! Tony Scott? Really? Maybe if you think POP GUN was a highlite of 80's cinema. Sure, it has some decent music and photography - Not to mention the fanboy's dream nude lesbo scene with Catherine Deneueve and Susan Sarandon - but, it comes off as a liteweight film trying to be taken seriously as art. I remember seeing it at a critic's screening and it was greeted with hoots and laughter.

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Long Live the Orson Welles Cinemas

I'm with Joe on The Hunger. It's certainly not a perfect film and the last 15 minutes or so turn it into a run of the mill studio schlock from the era, but up until then it's a solid, atmospheric under appreciated gem. To compare it to Top Gun is just stupid. It's the least Tony Scott of any Tony Scott movie. Critics be damned! I've never let critic or audience reaction to a film effect my opinion of a film in a negative way. To be sure, there are a lot of movies (mostly from marathon experience) where the audience reaction has INFLATED my opinion/experience of the film but I'd rather have that than keep looking for the negative like so many people do (especially in the internet age). I love cinema and make my living off it, why would I want to spend time tearing apart mediocre and decent-but-not-great movies when I can save that energy for the truly vile cinematic atrocities like Transformers?

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"I came here to chew bubble gum and kick a**. I'm all out of bubble gum."

Trying not to get sidetracked too much with Tony Scott - not to mention another opportunity to oogle some Andrea Rau cheesecake:



....Still, POP GUN aside, what do you have? The smug TRUE ROMANCE, the disasterous big name Actor double bill of DAYS OF BLUNDER & THE LAST BOY SCOUT, dreary action films like MAN ON FIRE and the mediocre remake of a pretty good flick TAKING OF PELHMAM 1,2,3.

And, let's not forget the risible ending to THE FAN. A night baseball game played in a virtual hurricane with half the stadium's lights apparently out! I know people who worked on the movie and they kept trying to explain to the ignorant Brit Scott that BASEBALL ISN'T PLAYED IN THE DARK IN A MONSOON - but, nooooooooooooooo! Tony "All About The Visuals" Scott insisted. And, much of his career is about on a par with that thinking.........

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Long Live the Orson Welles Cinemas

No doubt that Tony Scott is a hack and I can't say I like anything else of his, though a few rise to the level of mediocre. But so what? Tobe Hooper made one of the scariest movies ever (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and never made anything good after (Poltergeist doesn't exactly count; though I enjoy TCM2 and Lifeforce I wouldn't call them "good" movies). If we can forgive good directors for making the occasional flop then we should admit when I bad director makes something decent. You don't have to like The Hunger, but you should at least admit that it's the biggest anomaly of Tony Scott's career and can stand on its own compared to the rest of his output.

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"I came here to chew bubble gum and kick a**. I'm all out of bubble gum."

How ironic to dismiss something as smug and follow that up with the very smug writing technique of replacing words in a title with an insulting rhyme. But oh well, whatever. I don't like what Tony Scott quickly devolved into, but The Hunger and True Romance are both very, very good.

And I'm sorry MEATFETISH, but Poltergeist does "count," and don't forget about The Funhouse which is worth a revisit if you haven't done so in a while.

I laughed when I read Joe's comment about Vampyres playing as "people walking around," because my admittedly cloudy memories of that movie involved just that. I vaguely remember a dude waking up after a night of debauchery and sleepily and silently stumbling through EVERY ROOM in the castle, only to return and collapse on the bed... and scene.

A quick IMDB search also confirms what I suspected at the time, that it was the same castle used for The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

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Aliens? Us?
Is this one of your Earth "jokes?"

I feel the same way when I watch Blood for Dracula. Vampyers is slighty better flim than Blood. I do have a copy of Funhouse it was the non anamorphic letterbox Goodtimes DVD and it is a good film. Dissmissing Tony Scott True Romance is pathetic. It is a good film. I judge each director's film and not the director him, her, or transitioning.

It would be simple to call Spielberg a bad director just because he directed 1941. Judge on the merits of the film and not the director.

I am judging the merits of each respective film. THE HUNGER stinks, and TRUE ROMANCE is even worse. 1941 is mediocre at best, but, it's better than either of them, to boot.

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Long Live the Orson Welles Cinemas

True Romance is a great film. You must fall in the 9 per cent of the Rotten Tomatoes score for True Romance.

Rotten Tomatoes' scores are more than a bit scued by all the fanboy critics they include in their ratings. Their 'Top Critic' score is 80. And, the more level-headed Metacritic has TRUE ROMANCE at 57. But, yes, it is liked by too many folks who should know better.

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Long Live the Orson Welles Cinemas

There's that word again that you are constantly throwing out like it's a pejorative.

What is so wrong about being a FAN of something?????

And why is it bad when an opinion about art is subjective and based on previous experiences with similar art and artists?

And pardon my French, but who gives a s#!% about arbitrary numbers and metrics? Saying that someone should "know better" for liking a thing is just crazy.

I'm not trying to devalue your opinion, LA, but constantly calling out "fanboys" on a forum dedicated to geeks like us with very specific and sometimes narrow tastes is not going to score you many points.

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Aliens? Us?
Is this one of your Earth "jokes?"

I wasn't the one who first mentioned Rotten Tomatoes' "arbitrary numbers and metrics".

More importantly, I also admit to being a fanboy myself. I'm just a discriminating one.

Let's face it, there are lots of us who if you give them enough explosions, hot chix and just plain old "cool $hit" will like just about any movie with even the most modest amount of quality. These are many of the self-same numbnuts who flock to see TRANSPONDER ALIENS Part 7 on opening weekend (after having bought the first 6 TRANSPONDER ALIENS Film Blu Ray Boxed Set) and give the film a 10 on imdB. Then 12 months later when Part 8 is foisted up them they'll bitch and moan: "Why are we getting another sequel!??" Worse, ask many of them about TRANSPONDER ALIENS PART 7 a few years after it was released, and they'll say, "Oh, that movie sucked". Those are the Fanboys that give the term a bad name. And, there are way too many of 'em.

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Long Live the Orson Welles Cinemas

Geez, a guy makes a brief mention of Tony Scott and all hell breaks loose!

I could say a few things about staying somewhere in the vicinity of the topic, or about shifting the Scott-centric discussion (if everyone's really hot to trot for it) to the unmoderated section of the forum, or about how it seems like too many of us on this forum have a prediliction for turning what could be good-natured, occasionally chop-busting debates into "No, I have the last word" fests...

But that would be too obvious, right?

I will poke my good buddy L.A. in the ribs a bit (as I have before in this same vein) by saying that not every discussion of a film's merits has to be turned into a referendum on the critical consensus, or the fanboy consensus, or the zombie consensus. Yeah, a film's standing in the larger world is always going to be a part of its legacy (past, present or future) and character. But sometimes, it's fun and beneficial to just have a discussion about why we liked or disliked films, mass opinion of any kind be damned.

Can I say LA be trolling?

I too find it funny that LA complains about fanboys on a site that have fanboys talking about movies. Movies that majority of people never seen or heard.

Whoa. Whoa. That be uncalled for. I am giving honest opinions. No trolling involved.

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Long Live the Orson Welles Cinemas