Friday Night Movies 386

Joe picked Lockout to put on his NetFlix queue and we watched that. It's a 2012 French SF film co-written by the Irish directors James Mather and Stephen St Leger from a story by Luc Besson. Guy Pearce is Snow, a CIA spy guy, who is mistakenly thought to have killed another agent who really was his friend. The friend gives him a lighter before he dies. Snow has a briefcase that has infomation about a double agent in the agency. When agents come to get him he passed the briefcase along to his friend Mace, who hid it in a locker. While in custody Snow finds out Mace is sentenced and sent to the orbital space prison. Snow is going to get put into statis for 30 years in the same place. Before Snow gets popped into suspended animation the daughter of the US President, Maggie Grace, travels to the prison to check out the way the prisoners are being treated. Her security guard breaks the rules and brings a gun into the prison. That's such a tired plot device, huh. The foolish warden picks one of the worst guys in the prison for an interview with the President's daughter so of course he gets the gun and it's all down hill from there. A lot of people in the movie seem to make the wrong decisions. The single prisoner with a gun manages to open all the cells with the convenient Open All Cells button. Now there are 500 dangerous men running about. Vincent Regan and Joseph Gilgun play the two brothers who lead the prison takeover. Vincent is the saner of the two psychopaths, he only kills some of the people he meets, Joseph is the guy who kills nearly everyone he meets. Of course he's left in charge of the hostages. Guy is offered a chance to get out of his prison sentence if he can get in and rescue Maggie. He gets on board and the chase is on. More mistakes are made and lots of people die, incuding the guy that keeps the prison from falling out of orbit. The crazy brother dumps him out the airlock for a bit of a laugh. Things get pretty bleak but it works out ok for Guy in the end. It's mostly an ok space action spy crime thriller. Parts of the movie make little sense but it doesn't seem to care much so why should I. People online, and at FNM, have commented that it's very much like a Snake Plisken film. It's not quite as entertaining as Escape From New York but the sets and props are for the most part better. It looks pretty good for a $20 million movie. The film was shot in Belgrade, Serbia and you can get a lot of production value in a place like that. The CGI is good to poor. The space shots were about average, the work filling in backgrounds, and the like, was somewhat better, but the big fancy motorcycle chase looked like a shitty video game. Not a great movie but slightly above average. It gets a 6.1 on the IMDb and that's about where is should be. I find both of the main stars less interesting than some of the other actors in the movie. As always Peter Stormare is good and the two crazy brothers were great charactrers. Lennie James plays another agent and I liked his work. Worth a look at. I probably won't bother picking one up but it was fun enough to watch.

 

We watched The Blood On Satan's Claw. It's a 1971 British film that Sperhauk had recorded off of On Demand in HD. It's not out on DVD in the US for some reason. I'd gotten a copy off of Turner Classic Movies a few years ago. The HD copy looked really nice for something that was streamed. Better than the whole movie that's currently on YouTube. Me pointing to the above embedded video. The story is set in 17th century England. Some peasent is out tilling the fields and turns up some bones with his plow. There's a weird skull that has an eyeball with a worm on it and some tufts of hair. He fears it's evil and goes to the manor house where a visiting magistrate is staying. They get back to the field and the skull is gone. The magistrate thinks the farmer saw some animal bones and thinks little of it until that night when the future wife of the son of the mistress of the house goes crazy and develops a clawed hand. Men from Bedlam come and take her to the mental hospital. That would be a horror. Other weird things happen and quickly a group of devil worshipers forms around the naughty Angel. The group all have some mark of the devil on them, patches of hair, clawed hands, parts which a demonic beast is harvesting for it's resurrection. Angel grows the devil's eyebrows. There's some murders and craziness and the movie moves along at a fair pace, a little slow at times, but it kept our interest til the end. Eventually the evil is put to rest, at least until the next movie. It's fairly nicely filmed and there's even a bit of nudity for those who like that. Worth a look for the horror fan, especially those that like the Hammer Horror type film.