Quote from: yosemitemike on April 12, 2025, 10:21:14 PMI finally got around to watching the rest of Torchwood.  There are good things about it.  I like the characters though they killed off my favorite character midway through.  It looks good for a TV show.  It's all very dramatic.  The writing is something else though.  The season 4 finale has this big mystery they built up but, in the end, they didn't really try to explain it.  There was a McGuffin.  It did this thing.  What is it?  How does it work?  Why does it do this?  They just threw up their hands and said, "I dunno". 

Spoiler

There's this thing that goes through the center of the Earth from Shanghai to Buenos Aires.  It sets the life expectancy of the whole world to that of people living near either end.  How does it control the life spans of everyone in the world to fit them to this average?  No explanation.  Does it control everyone's lives and kill them off to maintain the average?  What is it?  No explanation.  What does Jack blood, which they repeatedly say has no special properties, have to do with anything and how does giving it the blood change everyone's life expectancies so that no one can die?  *shrug*  The whole thing just completely falls apart if you think about it at all.

Maybe it's Khan's "super-blood" from ST: Into Darkness?

Maybe it's Khan's "super-blood" from ST: Into Darkness?
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I might buy that if they didn't say the opposite several times every episode.

Quote from: yosemitemike on April 12, 2025, 10:21:14 PMI finally got around to watching the rest of Torchwood.  There are good things about it.  I like the characters though they killed off my favorite character midway through.  It looks good for a TV show.  It's all very dramatic.  The writing is something else though.  The season 4 finale has this big mystery they built up but, in the end, they didn't really try to explain it.  There was a McGuffin.  It did this thing.  What is it?  How does it work?  Why does it do this?  They just threw up their hands and said, "I dunno". 

Spoiler

There's this thing that goes through the center of the Earth from Shanghai to Buenos Aires.  It sets the life expectancy of the whole world to that of people living near either end.  How does it control the life spans of everyone in the world to fit them to this average?  No explanation.  Does it control everyone's lives and kill them off to maintain the average?  What is it?  No explanation.  What does Jack blood, which they repeatedly say has no special properties, have to do with anything and how does giving it the blood change everyone's life expectancies so that no one can die?  *shrug*  The whole thing just completely falls apart if you think about it at all.

New Who increasingly turned into a live action cartoon.

Quote from: yosemitemike on April 12, 2025, 10:21:14 PMI finally got around to watching the rest of Torchwood.  There are good things about it.  I like the characters though they killed off my favorite character midway through.  It looks good for a TV show.  It's all very dramatic.  The writing is something else though.  The season 4 finale has this big mystery they built up but, in the end, they didn't really try to explain it.  There was a McGuffin.  It did this thing.  What is it?  How does it work?  Why does it do this?  They just threw up their hands and said, "I dunno". 

Spoiler

There's this thing that goes through the center of the Earth from Shanghai to Buenos Aires.  It sets the life expectancy of the whole world to that of people living near either end.  How does it control the life spans of everyone in the world to fit them to this average?  No explanation.  Does it control everyone's lives and kill them off to maintain the average?  What is it?  No explanation.  What does Jack blood, which they repeatedly say has no special properties, have to do with anything and how does giving it the blood change everyone's life expectancies so that no one can die?  *shrug*  The whole thing just completely falls apart if you think about it at all.

I really liked Torchwood. The two kills midway through were kind of surprising (both those characters brought something useful to the show I think). It also becomes a very different series after that (it always felt a little like 24 but it feels a lot like 24 to me starting in season 3). That last season was definitely strange. I don't know what the writers were smoking on that one

Ryan Coogler, working as both writer and director, reteams with Michael B. Jordan for SINNERS, an under-siege-by-vampires story set in a 1930s Mississippi juke joint, which is worth the watch for the music and the spectacle but fell emotionally and thematically flat for me.

Pluses: Great music. Great performances, especially from Jordan as twin gangster-turned-juke-joint owners "Smoke" and "Stack" Moore, and a solid supporting cast including Hailee Steinfeld. Well shot and full of enjoyable visuals, including one mid-film sequence where musicians and dancers from the past and future appear in the Smoke-Stack brothers' juke joint. Convincing and sufficiently bloody special effects, and a good return to showing vampirism as a monstrous and horrifying contagion in the vein (no pun intended) of From Dusk Till Dawn and 30 Days of Night.

Minuses: Thematically, the story suffers due to Coogler never quite making up his mind whether he wants the "outside evil" of the vampires to be more horrifying than the "inside evil" of the Ku Klux Klan or not -- a scene near the end where Smoke takes on the entire local KKK chapter by himself feels tacked-on and unrelated to the main plot. (If the title of your film is SINNERS, wouldn't you think your protagonists' personal sins and moral flaws, and their redemptions therefrom, should be bigger parts of your dramatic and character arcs?) And while the characters are all vividly if sketchily developed, Coogler unfortunately chooses a framing prologue which makes it very difficult to stay invested in any of them. The motivation of the head vampire, Remmick, for besieging the juke joint -- he wants to kidnap a young blues singer named Sammie to co-opt his talent, which is apparently so powerful it can reach throughout space and time and conjure up spirits -- also makes very little sense in hindsight, partly because it's never convincingly developed why this is so important to Remmick, partly because this talent is never used in any way that actually affects the plot, but also because when you can't enter a place without an invitation, the logical course is simply to hide and wait in ambush until the one person you need leaves.

(The film also gets a personal downvote from me -- though this is purely a personal philosophical preference -- that of all the traditional vampire weaknesses, the one these vampires don't share is, like all too many recent examples, any vulnerability to faith or holy symbols. I am sick and tired of religion always, nowadays, being treated as useless in most supernatural horror stories.)

Overall, definitely worth seeing if you like Michael B. Jordan, blues music, or party-under-siege stories in the vein of The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13 or (natch) From Dusk Till Dawn. But while I can easily see myself listening to the soundtrack multiple times, I can't see myself bothering to watch it again. You can't exactly call a film "woke" for depicting the KKK as horrible people who did terrible things and 1930s Mississippi as full of racism, but there does come a point where we don't need to have that hammered into our heads again.

Watched the Jap VHS of Angel of Vengeance (War Cat/Battle Angel -Jap title) 1987. Great title. Surivalists murder bikers and rape chicks. Then one journalist chick gets revenge, but she studies real field manuals on individual infantry TTPs and Patrolling and '80s survivalist mags first, and her dad was a Colonel in 'Nam. She never out strengths the dudes (in fact they rape her about 40 times first), but she does out wit them convincingly in the end. I miss almost believable "strong women" in the '80s..  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094294/mediaviewer/rm1832189697/?ref_=tt_ph_1_4
IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094294/mediaviewer/rm1832189697/?ref_=tt_ph_1_4  IMDb

Quote from: Spooky on April 24, 2025, 10:17:08 PMWatched the Jap VHS of Angel of Vengeance (War Cat/Battle Angel -Jap title) 1987.

uhhh... That movie was an American production?

Quote from: Omega on April 26, 2025, 12:46:57 PM

Quote from: Spooky on April 24, 2025, 10:17:08 PMWatched the Jap VHS of Angel of Vengeance (War Cat/Battle Angel -Jap title) 1987.

uhhh... That movie was an American production?

yeah no shit. I have it on a Japanese VHS release, meaning, it's typically more survivable, coz of the heavier grade tape and higher quality components used. You can also guarantee the transfer is going to be as good as possible. The downside is it has Jap subs, but I can tune them out mentally.

I collect a lot of this shit on Jap release coz of the above first two reasons and they're way cheaper than US releases on Feebay.

Got my Shaw Brothers Collection volume 6 today. Includes: Swordsman Three, The Twelve Gold Medallions, The Black Enforcer, Duel for Gold, Finger of Doom, Na Cha and the Seven Devils, Shadow Girl, Swordsman at Large, The Black Tavern, The Young Avenger, and Crazy Nuts of Kung Fu.

I love Finger of Doom and Duel for Gold, but have the former on VCD and the latter on an old DVD. So getting both in Blu-ray will be convenient. Been trying to get a hold of The Black Tavern forever as well.