@MightyDemon82 Only last year's "28 Years Later" is required viewing before "The Bone Temple", as this is a direct continuation of that film. The other two are highly optional as there are no references between them (with one tiny exception, which I will not reveal here, but rest assured, you will not have missed anything should you see these two without having refreshed your memory of "..days.." and "...weeks..:" - fun aside, when you wrote "28 Months Later", I did a double take: How did I completely forget about that one? Turns out, I didn't, "... months..." was never made )
Having said all that, I would absolutely recommend watching them all beforehand, should you feel like it.
I used to not enjoy massages either; my main issue was that I got too self conscious about it, but I got over that a few years ago. So, when I decided to try a spa type massage a little over a year ago to loosen up some intensely knotted shoulders, I got hooked. The place I go to has an incredible relaxed atmosphere and ambience, so not only do I loosen up, but for the hour I'm in there everything Trump, tense geopolitics, work stress and health worries simply evaporate and I come out truly refreshed. It is insanely addictive, though, and I'd probably stay in there forever if I could
Hope you'll enjoy "The Housemaid"; high literature it ain't, but not everything has to be 🙂
I'll permit myself to remain off topic a little bit more: Do you remember what your favourite game for the console was? Or one that stands out in your memory for some reason?
@MightyDemon82 There are references to the first film in 28 Years Later. The ending of 28 Weeks Later is ignored in 28 Years Later. I'm not sure if 28 Weeks Later is considered canon as it was not a Danny Boyle/Alex Garland film.
I watched the first two before the third film and enjoyed them both. 28 Days Later is one of my all time faves, so will take something really exceptional to beat that. 28 Weeks Later I did not think was awful, but nowhere near as good as the first film.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
@MightyDemon82 You haven't seen the first one yet? You are in for a treat, it's one of Cillian Murphy's best movies. And probably one of Danny Boyle's best pieces of work, I think Shallow Grave was his first movie I saw then Trainspotting then 28 Days Later. I saw Dog Soldiers for the first time that day too, I was making my way through a lot of British movies in bulk. 28 Days Later is absolutely brilliant.
I watched a really bad movie from 1995 called 'The Demolitionist'. It's another one of those Robocop knock-offs this time with a female officer who's brought back to life to fight bad guys. It's special in that it was directed by Robert Kurtzman of KNB Effects. His effects house has done everything from Men in Black, Spawn, From Dusk till Dawn and John Carpenter's Vampyres. One of his first movies was Evil Dead 2 so people definitely know his work. It's full of cameos too, even one by Tom Savini (Effects Artist for The Thing, Robocop, Dawn of The Dead and a bunch of others) Bruce Campbell manages to sneak in there too. I'm going to watch the Cyborg movies next (Van Damme) then maybe a really good independent British sci-fi movie called Hardware.
The Demolitionist
And that's Hardware, one of the best British independent movies ever made.
@Metonymy You'd really like Hardware. It was mentioned in filmschool too, that's how I found it. It's also featured in the The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook, both the London and New York Editions.
@GirlVersusGame I have but only the once when it came out 24 years ago. I've also seen "28 Weeks Later", but can't remember it quite so much. Might have only been half watching it at the time.
I might have to watch those "Hardware" especially looks great.
@MightyDemon82 It's really good but so few people know about it. You might call it Cyberpunk almost, definitely apocalyptic too. It was originally going to be a simple Terminator knock-off but the team turned it into something really special. Both Lemmy and Iggy Pop have cameos. If you know the UK Band Public Image? 'this is what you want, this is what you get', Johnny Rotten's band. That movie was the first time I heard them.
You might like Nemesis too. Slick Cyberpunk style movie from 1992. The same director (Albert Pyun) mainly made sci-fi movies like Cyborg and Dollman. I imagine he grew up with Manga, he has a certain style. I grew up on a lot of cheesy movies like that, one of the security guys would watch bad 80's movies with me all the the time. Then we got onto sci-fi and there were so many bad ones that turned out to be great. The names were different because of localization like at the moment Badlands is 'death planet', but I've been rounding them up nonetheless. Screamers is another I need to re-watch with Peter Weller.
I just checked my copy and it came with art cards and a booklet that features notes from the production and some comic panels. I should really listen to that commentary and watch his Super 8 shorts, the documentary too.
I've only a passing interest in anything awards related but I'm glad that Sinners and Frankenstein have got a bunch of nominations at the Oscars, which has pleasantly surprised me.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
@JohnnyShoulder Agreed, but I fully expect them to lose out most of the awards to "high brow fare" (read: The Academy scoffs at anything that whiffs of "horror"). I would love for them to prove me wrong, but I really don't think they will.
Still, like you, awards like that matter little to me, though it somehow still irks me when things like this happen
@FuriousMachine I'm not too concerned about if they win or not, it would nice for people involved but I've long given up being invested in awards shows.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
@JohnnyShoulder I saw that too, I went right off of the Oscars a couple of years ago when I saw how it really worked. It's interesting to see something horror related get recognition but I still won't watch the show. I'd like to see both get something, if just for crew recognition. When you can say 'this picture I worked on won an Oscar', well it definitely helps with job security and right now crews are skeleton-like. So many people are leaving Hollywood, they can't afford to live there anymore. The adult industry relocated too, laws etc are more relaxed in Florida. Film production itself has shifted to London and Canada, the studio I sit in on is already fully booked for the year and they are all blockbusters. Editing and post-production has gone remote too, sound stages are cheaper to run in Europe and Canada. Lots of celebrities have relocated to London, people just don't realize it, they will eventually when idiot paparazzi start to hound them. I see actors out all the time now and they aren't in the city for a shoot, they moved here. The same for last night I saw two at dinner, others have returned to their native countries. They do the usual travel for the production but then afterwards they fly home, not to Hollywood. Guillermo del Toro is moving to Edinburgh, I heard from someone on Frankenstein that he wants to focus on shooting in England. Which fits because he did for Frankenstein and Netflix have a lot of ties with the UK Film Industry, especially location-wise.
Hollywood is drying up and the Oscars is one of the last bastions of that old fossilized system. If strikes don't finish them off taxes will, the entertainment industry in Los Angeles is really struggling. The wildfires didn't help either, nor streaming. I once really liked the Oscars, attending one year was a big thing, until I did see through it. Now I think it does more to hurt the industry than help it, the system penalizes real artistic vision. Cannes does more for the industry as a whole and awards genuine artists, those are real people. I've used my accreditation to attend there too, people are a lot more down to Earth and the their voting system uses a proper jury, there's no outside influence. The Oscars is all influence, it's absolutely rigged.
@ZeroE I was going to ask if you saw it in the end. I might watch it just for the soundtrack, it sounds like we're due a Tron game? Do you think it would lend itself to a game? I've been thinking of Wipeout a lot lately, and listening to that soundtrack too. I've mainly been watching bad sci-fi from the early nineties, also Bollywood knock-offs of popular franchise. I heard there's a Bollywood version of Fear and Loathing, I'm on the lookout for that today.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
Just got back from seeing Primate and it was good enough to deserve better than languishing on the "January movie dumping ground", but I think it may have been stuck there because the movie, like the title chimp, is brutal, vicious and almost malevolent. After the first attack I thought maybe this was a PG-13 movie that would mask, hide or tone down the violence, but oh boy was I wrong about that. The mean-spiritedness of the movie gave even me a slight guilty conscience for at times chuckling at the grisly violence... but only slight
Bonus: While the movie has a couple of characters that truly shout "cannon fodder", it does a decent job of not making it too obvious who, if any, will walk away from the carnage.
A good, but mean, horror movie, then. And that chimp? Properly nasty!
@FuriousMachine After the first attack I thought maybe this was a PG-13 movie that would mask, hide or tone down the violence, but oh boy was I wrong about that.
That's exactly what I heard and why I don't want to see it, I don't trust chimps at all. Sort of like in Zootopia 2 where snakes are the good guys and lynx are the bad guys. I adore lynxes and don't trust or like snakes so I was rooting for the bad guys, and naturally they didn't win but chimps are even more shady. Remember a couple of days ago I said monkeys remove faces, so did your movie's monkey, they scalped someone too brutal stuff.
I've been trying to think about what to say about Silent Hill without spoilers. I really liked the first movie, and I was seriously excited to see the new one. The plot didn't stick, the acting was rough at best. I think if I could point the finger at one major gripe it would be the CGI, there is good CGI and there is bad CGI. I'd invent a third category, terrible CGI which is exactly what I saw and it never improved. I don't think it adds anything to the franchise, if anything it takes away from it. They could have at least tried to implement some practical effects, instead it looks like they outsourced them for as cheap as possible. I saw some leaked footage from their Serbian shoot and I thought 'this isn't bad at all', it was dailies so no music of effects. It worked better raw than it did polished. The whole thing was one big disappointment, I can't think of one good thing to say about it. Have you ever seen a movie and it made you angry almost? because they ruined such an amazing opportunity and never honored the source material? That's Return to Silent Hill.
@GirlVersusGame Oh dear, I've not seen anyone that has anything good to say about Return to Silent Hill.
The film that comes to my mind for me is Wonder Woman 1984. Everything about it I just found preposterous. I like to think I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, but for whatever reason this film took things too far for me. I was also noticing every single plot hole, which usually I'm not aware of until someone points them out after I watch the film. It also had bad cgi, which they tried to hide by setting the scene at night. It didn't work.
Life is more fun when you help people succeed, instead of wishing them to fail.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
@GirlVersusGame I'm not trusting of apes in general myself (not monkeys either, come to think of it), which is why it is effective as a horror movie And especially not as pets. Most animals are, as you mentioned earlier, quite unsuitable as pets as they are wild animals with centuries of bred instincts that simply cannot be shed by cuddling one specimen from birth. Sure, a few will accept or even enjoy living with humans, but they will always be wild animals who can not be fully domesticated.
The movie, though, is not about the dangers of domesticated wild animals, but the joys of living with rabies
I was originally going to see Return to Silent Hill yesterday as well, but postponed it to Thursday. After reading your impressions I may very well skip it altogether. I may decide to watch a good Christophe Gans movie instead - been ages since I've seen Crying Freeman and even longer since I saw Brotherhood of the Wolf
@FuriousMachine Crying Freeman wasn't that bad but I'm biased because of Mark Dacascos wearing very little while in the prime of his life, and I can't remember a thing about Brotherhood of the Wolf. I think Return to Silent Hill should have gone straight to streaming. At the moment for thirty seven territories it's done nineteen million USD, it will need to do triple that to recover it's original production budget and to make a real profit (once you factor in distribution/fees etc) That might sound like a lot of territories but The Housemaid did seventy four. Silent Hill has official distribution back home too, making it one one of the highest grossing movies in Russia this year but if you ask me Hollywood jumped through hoops to push that release. They knew if they didn't a digital cinema package would have made it onto the screen instead and of course they'd get no cut. Soon after that same DCP would have made it's way online which would further damage profits.
DCP is kind of like how I watched Return to Silent Hill, it's sort of like bringing the distributor into your home and usually it's a fun experience but the whole thing was dreadful. My girlfriend walked out after about twenty minutes, I don't blame her because I almost did too. It's basically a system that locks onto a static IP (in your home) then streams cinema quality directly from a dedicated server, it's all encrypted and runs on DRM. In the past they'd send someone (who would sit off to the side making sure you weren't copying it, I made friends with a couple of them) to your home with a kind of sealed box, it started back in Hollywood for Execs but now they are worldwide and offer it for pre-screened members. I've never been to a regular theater other than red carpet events, it's a security thing. My Partner thinks a public place in the pitch black is not a good idea. Maybe, maybe not.
Metal was different because in the media pit there are security all around. I'd like to experience a regular theater at least once, but with actual people in there not just me. I don't think red carpet events count, it's a different kind of energy and I don't go as much anymore because I've lost a little faith in the industry. A regular theater is definitely on my bucket list, so maybe one day. I always wondered if people really do shout at the screen? or if you have two hundred people all with popcorn doesn't the entire room smell like popcorn? And when it's that dark, how do you not drop things. Sometimes at events they don't even dim the house lights properly so you are watching a movie in a brightly lit theater. I think it's an insurance thing, they could switch to side lighting but they don't. I watched one of the Conjuring movies in the kind of brightness that would make the sun squint, the movie wasn't great but neither was the setting. Someone once told me it's dark inside once you've spent almost an hour in-front of the press, that sort of makes sense.
But as I was saying, Russia was about three million (first weekend) of the nineteen million global gross. I think the budget shows just how little respect the studio had for the name and for the franchise, the new Mortal Kombat's budget (along with the delays) is up to about seventy million USD now. Last I checked they upgraded their effects by moving to Framestore. They have studios all over the world even one here in London that handles a lot of Marvel work. I saw what they did from the inside with one of their Bond contracts.
A studio like that would have done justice to Silent Hill but it's about two hundred and fifty thousand USD per shot, so if you take their Marvel contract it would be two hundred million USD. Good CGI on the big screen by no way comes cheap, they used multiple VFX vendors on Return to Silent Hill and they did it to save money. Remember I mentioned one of the worst movies I've ever seen? Jeepers Creepers Reborn? It's the same effects house but they removed their name from the credits. I did a deep-dive on their company, they sold Christophe Gans on 'we worked on 150 movies', they did but they are all awful and I've found multiple instances of credits being pulled. I found only eight full time artists on their books, they wrangled most of the others through Discord. You'll understand why all of that matters when you do eventually see it. I went from shocked because 'this is rather terrible' to 'they ruined such a perfect opportunity' then right to 'I need to find out why they was so bad', then I went digging. Competitive Digital VFX vendors are a good and bad thing about the industry, too many studios are willing to spend less while expecting more and by the time they see the finished piece (not the original concept) it's too late.
Mortal Kombat 2 was different, they listened to their test audience, I don't think Return to Silent Hill even had one, some don't. There were a lot of redflags, I wish I'd noticed them sooner, that was my top (I don't know the word) most excited for movie for 2026. I should have known when I saw Cineverse, which is ironic because I had to go to Paris a couple of hours later and they are advertising the movie so strongly here, they are pushing for a February fourth release. It will be interesting to see how it does at the box office, surely by next-week word will have gotten out that 'it's not very good'. The director being French is something they are really focusing on, so we'll see how it goes. My main focus is on Paris Fashion Week, but I'm keeping an eye on how Silent Hill does too. It's being billed as a French movie (it's international) a lot of the investors are French, and of course the director and some of the crew, the editor is French too and also worked on Brotherhood of the Wolf and the original Silent Hill.
I'm going to watch this when everyone goes to bed later, no one will watch it with me It's a ninja movie from 1984 and goes by something like ten different names. It stars Alexander Rei Lo, he once won the Tae Kwan Do world championship. I saw it years ago, it was brilliant.
Some of the guys agreed to watch it after all, and admitted that it was really good. It was even better than I remembered, Lo never lets up. Enter the Ninja (1981) will follow at some point this week. It was the primary catalyst for Ninja movies to push into America and beyond. Cannon Films knew what they were doing.
@BlAcK_Sw0rDsMaN You'd probably like the Shogun Assassin (1980) (babycart) movies. A lot of games took inspiration from those movies and they are widely known for their sword choreography. The movie follows Ogami Itto and his son as they travel across feudal Japan. Along the way he has to face off with waves of different ninja assassins. It's a revenge tale and a cult classic, it introduced Western audiences to Japanese samurai cinema.
@GirlVersusGame Apologies, I didn't get your notification, I just saw your post to me as I was browsing the forum. I think unless you tag two people one after the other in the opening line of your post, the second person won't get the tag, I've found that with others on here before, previously. I have already seen and greatly enjoyed Shogun Assassin, and the complete Lone Wolf &Cub (BabyCart) series is on my WishList, plus I've already read some of the Manga that inspired it, but, thanks, for thinking of me! .
@BlAcK_Sw0rDsMaN I can shed some light on this, as I get notifications for this thread in general (whether I'm @ed or not) so the notification for @GirlVersusGame's original post shows that your @ was added by an edit after the initial post. In those cases, notifications won't work, only @ included in the initial post will trigger a notification (regardless of where in the post the @ occurs). This has caught me out a few times, so I thought it worth mentioning
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