If you love a lot of blood and guts and crazy action fight scenes and people walking around spraying bullets with not much strategy or cover, then Havoc on Netflix is your jam.
Honestly I watched it in about 3-4 chunks. It starts off pretty slow and then gets more intense. So maybe it’s my fault that I didn’t remember the plot. Or maybe the plot is weak and just an excuse to show tons of people getting killed and blood spurting everywhere. I dunno.
It had some good actors in it (Tom Hardy, Forest Whitaker, Timothy Olyphant, etc.). But mainly it felt like a weak rickety plot, duct taped together in order to show off some decent fight choreography. Sometimes you’re in the mood for that, and sometimes you’re not.
I think if you had a six pack and a nice bag of crisps/chips and some time alone, it would be worth a watch. But don’t say I didn’t warn you about the copious amounts of blood.
Absolutely. There’s just something more immersive about seeing a real, physical thing on screen if you ask me, even if it’s something as goofy as the eyeballs bulging out of the head of animatronic Arnold Schwarzenegger. Also, I guess, it’s possible that I have poor taste!
I suspect there must be a lot of recycled assets in CGI because I’m sure I’ve seen the same alien/dinosaur creature a hundred times by now. I can recite how it moves from memory – skiting about the place, crashing into things, cocking its head and then howling at the camera.
I can’t think of any other films quite like Barbarella. In terms of aesthetics, I might say Logan’s Run or Forbidden Planet, but the combination of things you mentioned is quite unusual.
There are a couple of episodes of star trek the original series that could have been cut scenes from barbarella. Both in costume design and color palette.
I might be able to think of a couple more if I try hard enough, but it definitely caught a biopsy of flash gordon and One million years BC and made them into a weird slice of salami.
I kept having people tell me the new Superman movie was awesome so I checked it out last night. It was super-meh. Like every other comic book hero movie lately to me, though I admit that I generally don’t like that genre either.
Except for the dog, the dog was awesome in the new Superman movie.
Can’t believe it took me so long to watch Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). It’s one of the earliest Ghibli movies, and the blueprint for many that followed, such as Princess Mononoke which came out 13 years later and deals with similar themes. Its influence on anime as a whole is also clear, you see bits of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Attack on Titan here.
Despite being one of Ghibli’s earliest efforts, I think it holds up really well. The world-building is top-level, the story feels very involving and well-paced, and the animation and music is superb. As a Zelda fan I gasped multiple times at things from the games that have obviously been quite blatantly lifted out of this movie. Bong Joon Hoo’s latest (Mickey 17) also borrows so heavily from the last act, that I’m inclined to call it plagiarism.
@echoicMalady
Thanks heaps for the recommendation. I’ll hunt it down online and hopefully watch it at the weekend. I’ve found something interesting as well. After reading the Wikipedia article of the film you recommended, I got curious and also read the Wikipedia article on Barbarella.
I’d never read it before, and apparently Barbarella was made in exactly the same Italian studio as another movie they had just completed directly before they started work on Barbarella.
A film called “Danger: Diabolik”
I’ve attached some screenshots.
As far as I can tell, it’s little known compared to Barbarella, but like I said, was made in the same studio by the same people, and even shared actors. The lead character in this one is the bloke who played the angel in Barbarella.
It has that same look to it, colour-wise at least, and it does look stylish so it’s definitely on my films to see real soon list.
@shigginpit
I was thinking exactly the same when I saw echoicMalady’s comment. The colour rendition is always largely influenced by the film stock they used back then, and I do much prefer the look of those older film formulations!
BTW, regards Logan’s Run and Forbidden Planet. Again l totally agree, and while Logan’s Run is still very clear in my mind since I last saw it, I can’t remember whether I’ve even seen Forbidden Planet or not, crazy as that sounds.
Thing with that one is it’s such a cult hit, and I see so much stuff about it, I can never remember whether I watched it decades ago, or it’s just the stuff I see about it that makes me think that I did.
Every time I see images from that one, it reminds me of a TV series they used to show in the UK back in the 80s, a series called “Metal Mickey”:
I’d recommend watching Forbidden Planet even if you’ve seen it before. It’s one of the ones I’ll reach for when I can’t sleep. It’s just a nice film to hang out with for some reason. I haven’t made it through to the end in years, unfortunately, which is a shame because there’s a really cool animated sequence near the end that looks unlike anything else I know of.
It also has the first entirely electronic film score. A husband a wife duo, influenced by a book on cybernetics, constructed their own electronic circuits to generate the ‘electronic tonalities’ about a decade before the first commercial synthesiser. I have to imagine that it sounded totally wild to audiences back in the '50s.
That’s hilarious! Kind of figures we’d get a cut-price robot, while American audiences had the much more majestic Robby the Robot!
I’ll be sure to watch Forbidden Planet, and I’ll be listening out for those early synth sounds when I do. It does look and sound like something I’ll enjoy!
As for Robby the Robot and Metal Mickey, lol, true. That said, where Robby is bigger in size, I reckon Mickey was bigger in heart. I tortured myself last night and watched the first ever episode of Metal Mickey. I couldn’t help but notice he’s a bit of a womaniser, which at least injected a bit of humour now and then, but my god, that acting!
I say “tortured myself” purely because the acting was so cringe that it was like a 30-minute non-stop torture test. To be fair it’s a kids show, so it’s to be expected I suppose, but man, that took some watching, that did
DISCLAIMER: The following video is posted as an endurance test, purely for those who think they can handle it (trust me you can’t). But if you do reach the end of this without skipping a minute, then your tolerance to mental torture, is admirable to say the least.
Kind of figures we’d get a cut-price robot, while American audiences had the much more majestic Robby the Robot!