Seriously, tons of great old films here from all sorts of genres but Halloween gets me in the mood for bad horror and scifi movies and there are plenty of those here.

The movies mostly seem to be on Youtube and Google video so streaming is pretty nippy but quality isn’t great. Not exactly blu-ray quality films though.

It’s a ridiculously formulaic action movie with some frankly hilarious French gangsters but it does contain some utterly amazing action sequences based around parkour rather than the usual CGI effects. Really impressive stuff and I can see why it has drawn comparisons with Ong Bak given some of the stunts.

Basically it’s undercover cop must infiltrate walled-in future ghetto to disarm a nuclear bomb set to kill everyone inside. He also gets a partner he doesn’t get on with (but of course is destined to be his best buddy) who wants revenge on the people holding the bomb for kidnapping his sister and treating her like a dog.

If you can ignore what plot there is (PS. Snake Plissken wants his plot back) and try not to laugh at the ridiculous characters it’s actually worth watching.

The film has more brains than the usual scifi film fodder and even though the residents of South Africa in the film seem completely oblivious to the irony in segregating and hating an alien race it’s still an interesting idea and makes a change from all alien invasions happening in large US cities.

Like modern-day explorers, the two academics featured in The Linguists travel to forgotten places around the globe to unearth rare treasures—in this case, endangered languages. On a shoestring budget, professors David Harrison and Gregory Anderson navigate difficult terrain, searching for speakers of these forgotten and mostly hidden languages. While more than 7,000 different languages are currently spoken around the world, many are rapidly disappearing. Language diversity is shrinking as colonialism and economic unrest destroy traditional tribal tongues. When young people abandon their ancestral language, the passive suppression of their culture begins, and soon those languages will cease to exist. Joining a traditional ceremony in a remote village in India, observing a Kallawaya healing ritual in Bolivia, and completing an arduous journey into Siberia are all part and parcel of heeding the urgent call. The word connoisseurs are well suited for the monumental task of researching and documenting native tongues; they speak 25 languages between them. These humble ethnographers are in a race against time to preserve the increasingly rare words, which are intricately linked to the vanishing traditions and heritage of Indigenous populations. Well-paced and laced with humor, The Linguists serves as an insightful, contemporary adventure film with a strong emphasis on cultural history.

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Anyway, here’s the best short zombie film you’ve probably never seen:

I Love Sarah Jane

A different kind of Zombie Film. A short film selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Jimbo is 13. All he can think about is one girl, Sarah Jane. And no matter what stands in his way – bullies, violence, chaos, zombies – nothing is going to stop him from finding a way into her world. NSFW Warning: Strong Language and Zombies.

Over at the internet archive you can find a free copy of “The Last Man On Earth” to stream or download and watch. This 1964 adaptation of Richard Matheson’s book is in some ways closer to the original story although it still makes quite a few changes. However the low budget makes for a more thoughtful film, not being able to rely on weirdly moving CGI zombies is sometimes a good thing!

Oh and it’s Vincent Price who is always worth a watch.

 Based on the chilling Richard Matheson science fiction Classic “I am Legend” and later remade as “The Omega Man” starring Charlton Heston. This classic features Vincent Price as scientist Robert Morgan in a post apocalyptic nightmare world. The world has been consumed by a ravenous plague that has transformed humanity into a race of bloodthirsty vampires. Only Morgan proves immune, and becomes the solitary vampire slayer.

I’d half expected this documentary to be one long pro-piracy rant trying to justify piracy, going on some of the comments I’d read about it.

It was then a pleasant surprise to find it is actually an intelligent, well produced documentary examining some of the reasons why piracy, file sharing and just plain information sharing exist and why it won’t go away. It’s by no means comprehensive but it raises some very valid points and I thought the comparison with the rise of the printing press was an interesting one.

All in all, worth a watch.

These are strange times indeed. While they continue to command so much attention in the mainstream media, the ‘battles’ between old and new modes of distribution, between the pirate and the institution of copyright, seem to many of us already lost and won. We know who the victors are. Why then say any more?

Because waves of repression continue to come: lawsuits are still levied against innocent people; arrests are still made on flimsy pretexts, in order to terrify and confuse; harsh laws are still enacted against filesharing, taking their place in the gradual erosion of our privacy and the bolstering of the surveillance state. All of this is intended to destroy or delay inexorable changes in what it means to create and exchange our creations. If STEAL THIS FILM II proves at all useful in bringing new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think ‘after intellectual property’, think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity, we have achieved our main goal.

Will Smith plays the lead Robert Neville, possibly the last man left alive after a virus cure for cancer has slightly more side effects than they were hoping for. Obviously this one slipped past the rigorous testing and FDA approval…

In the book the infected are quite clearly vampires but the film plays more to a 28 Days Later style ‘infected’ zombie type thing but with the light aversion intact. The virus also appears to convert all the infected into strangely moving CGI versions of humans, which was one of the disappointments with the film. The CGI work is just overused and it reaches that weird, looks real but something is not quite right style last seen in all the Spider-man movies.

If you’ve read the book and are hoping for some scrap of the plot to be still ticking along in the background then you can pretty much forget it. I’ve read the book a few times and it felt like and for the most part was a completely different story, right down to the actual use of the ‘Legend’ phrase which in the book is quite tragic (in a good way). It’s not a bad plot, it’s just not the plot but then the book would be rather hard to film as it stands.

All that aside, it is an entertaining action film with a few jumps here and there and some great shots of the empty city, although I preferred the grimy urban look in the 28 Days films to I Am Legend’s sunny tropical jungle city. Much like the last Will Smith genre adaptation I can remember ‘I, Robot’ it’s a great action film that bears only a passing resemblance to it’s source material.

A thumbs up for weirdly moving zombie entertainment but go and read the book…

OK I have something of a b-movie/trashy SciFi addiction but who wouldn’t want to watch films titled Attack of the Giant Leeches or Atom Age Vampire?

Here you’ll find hundreds of movies that have been lost in the wasteland of forgotten cinema. No sign-up or log-in needed, just hours and hours of B

All you’ll need is a broadband connection and hours to waste. Enjoy!

This has been created using the footage of the famous silent movie The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, whilst providing entirely new soundtracks.

Eleven composers collaborated in Exquisite Corpse fashion to produce two brand new soundtracks for the German Expressionist Classic The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari.

As part of the project, public domain footage of the film was located and restored. The film was re-divided into six acts after the original scenario, tinting was added and new inter-titles were created approximating the style of the original film.

The result, while not a definitive restoration by any means, is a brighter, more colorful version of the film somewhat truer to the original than other freely available prints.

Each of the eleven composers worked in isolation from the others scoring one of the film’s six acts, with the film visuals being the only common reference point.

Each of the eleven scored from a unique viewpoint and style, yet the striking visual coherence of the film was sufficient to ensure an emotional continuity in soundtrack approach. Even more surprising, sonic elements and motifs are echoed and reiterated throughout the film, despite the fact than none of the composers heard the work of any of the others prior to submitting their own work.

Its just bloody Jumanji!

Its been a cheesy movie month…can you tell?

Honestly I’ve read some reviews of this that bemoan the lack of plot and decent human characters but they all seem to be missing the point….look they are bloody great big robots that turn into things, fighting!

The plot (what little there is of it) serves simply to link the huge robot fighting sequences together….and what is wrong with that. Its basically giant robot porn, zero plot, no deep characters, corny one liners and lots of robot on robot action .

Oh there is a bit of blatent King Kong…”please don’t hurt my big robot he’s really here to help” nonesense but it doesn’t really get in the way of the misiles and explosions.

Probably works better on the big screen and it was even loud enough to drown out the annoying twats sitting behind me that talked through the whole film.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.