Sperhauk got the Blu-Ray of The Castle Of Cagliostro and wanted to watch that. I was game even though I've seen the film oodles of times. It's a darn good one and it's been a couple of years since I've seen it. Time flies while you're crammin' new video into your eyeholes. Joe said he didn't think he had seen the film but I thought we had watched it at a FNM night before. We had, Friday Night Movie 86 - December 2 2006.
We started with the usual what-do-you-want-to-watch palaver and finally settled on The Castle of Cagliostro. It's a Hayao Miyazaki film from 1979. I really like it and so do these guys. I've seen the movie maybe 10 times. At the end of last August Manga Video and Anchor Bay released a new version of the DVD. The dvd packaging looks a lot like the ongoing Disney series of Miyazaki films. I picked up one and watched it, comparing it to the first Manga Video version. The first version isn't anamorphic, the new one is. The new dvd also looks better, especially on my TV. I have to zoom the non-anamorphic version to fill the screen and that makes the picture poorer. The biggest difference is the title sequence change. The original has animation under the Japanese credits. The new version has still pictures with new English language credits. I wind up keeping both dvds, just for that opening scene.
The rest of the movie's no slouch either. It's got everything I like in an action movie. The story is fun, fast paced and extremely explosive. Me like boom boom. There's a princess to rescue, a creepy bad guy to foil, and some stealin' to get on with. Then there's the massive destruction. In a nice range of size and intensity. There's a marvelous car chase, as good as any by Rémy Julienne. And I like the characters. Ignore the animated TV series. They suck the big one. Their infantile sexual antics are embarrassing to watch. The movie is much better in every way. The new dvd has a version of the movie in storyboard format and a nice interview with one of the animation directors. He's pretty entertaining and has some interesting stories and opinions. He did say that they made the movie in 4 months working day and night. That intense focus really paid off.
Back to me in the future of that post. The Blu-Ray does look good and there are different soundtracks and subtitles for the film. We watched the 1992 version.
Sperhauk had borrowed the DVD of The Zombie Diaries and that was a sad fuckin' picture. Not because the people are up against the zombie hoards, nope, it just sucked. It's a 2006 British film written and directed by the team of Michael Bartlett and Kevin Gates. They did a sequel to this in 2011, followed that with The Paranormal Diaries: Chophill in 2013 and Treehouse in 2014. None of them get rated very well on the IMDb. The Zombie Diaries gets a 4.1 and that's just nuts. This isn't as good as an Ewe Boll movie. Of the 4122 votes there were 260 that gave the film a 10. The film makers must have a lot of friends. I couldn't see giving it more than a 2. It cost £8,100 and actually made $2 million. Unbelievable.
Here's a couple of quotes from the film box.
"A bloody powerhouse of a movie." - Film Threat
"the most realistic zombie film ever made." - Twitch film
The movie doesn't live up to either of those quotes. I can't even find the review of the film on the Twitch site but they have a pretty shitty search feature. What I did see when I searched with Google is that there were a lot of "I don't think so." from reviewers that tried watching the film. I just got tired watching the film, It's a found footage film and by now I've little in that genre. They pay homage to The Blair Witch Project by shooting a lot of footage of the ground while the characters are running, whimpering and crying through mucus filled nasal passages.
The film opens with some people trying to survive after a virus has been turning people into shambling flesh eating zombies. They're filming their adventures for pretty much no reason and their recordings are as poor. Like those crappy phone shot videos people post on YouTube. At least the film makers managed to turn the camera horizontal in the film. The movie follows those people for the first month. They make a lot of stupid decisions and get chomped by zombies. Most of the scenes are your typical zombie genre fare but during the the last 10-15 minutes the film turns into a torture story with a couple of psychopaths kidnapping, torturing, and killing some of the survivors. The film's a mishmash of familiar scenes and not worth anyone's time. Sadly Sperhauk had borrowed the film so he can't toss it into the river for that satisfying kerplop. He'll have to return it and then some other sad person will experience the film. Perhaps it will toughen them up for the apocalypse.
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