Some non-Hammer stuff, too, but yeah. Mainly Hammer:
The Cyclops (1956), in which a rescue party finds the guy they were looking for, but he’s in no condition to be brought home…
Five Million Years to Earth (1967), in which there are fossil ape-men, a buried spaceship, paleolithic ghosts, trans-temporal possession, grasshoppers from Mars, and a huge psionic outer-space bug-devil, but those jackasses from the Ministry of Defense don’t believe in any of it…
The Old Dark House (1963), in which a teamup no one ever thought to ask for yields results nobody would want…
Paranoiac (1962), in which any one-line synopsis I might devise would just be rendered obsolete within fifteen minutes anyway…
The Phantom Carriage (1921), in which dying at midnight on New Year’s Eve is almost as bad an idea as fixing the world’s agriest drifter’s overcoat…
[REC] (2007), in which those TV people did say they were hoping for something exciting to happen…
The Reptile (1966), in which were-snakes and their fathers make crappy next-door neighbors…
and…
The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), in which “Thug Life” has an altogether different meaning.
#1 by Jen S on July 17, 2011 - 10:43 pm
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I love, love, love, love that poster/cover for The Phantom Carriage. If the movie is half as good and mood-evoking as the picture, I’m definitely seeking it out.
#2 by Mr. Rational on July 18, 2011 - 9:14 am
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Loved your thoughts on [REC]. Pretty much exactly dovetails with my assessment of the movie. At some point, can we expect to see your thoughts on [REC] 2?
#3 by Anarquistaodr on July 18, 2011 - 9:36 am
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“Great. Now I want really want to see Kali vs. Reptilicus, even though I know perfectly well that it would end up being made by UFO International…”
…and that’s….bad?
#4 by El Santo on July 18, 2011 - 9:49 am
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One of these days, sure– and the remake as well, I imagine.
#5 by Doug Hudson on July 18, 2011 - 12:59 pm
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The remake of [REC] is fascinating: in many ways it is a shot for shot remake, but it completely changes the core of the movie, making it well worth watching.
Originally I greatly preferred Quarantine to [REC], because I felt that the story was much more coherent; however, once I watched [REC] 2, I realized that it wasn’t so much a sequel as the second part of a single movie, and with the additional information, [REC] made more sense.
#6 by The Mud puppy on July 19, 2011 - 8:44 am
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I found Quarantine to be horrid. It was not only a scene by scene remake, but what little they changed or added to they did for the worse. The only scene of note they added was a great horror scene of an infected dog attacking someone with the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As for [REC] 2, I quite enjoyed it, but it’s a definite step-down from the first–mainly because somebody felt the need to insert a trio of annoying teenagers into the story who serve no real purpose. The only thing they add is a zombie death so idiotic even the makers of Quarantine would have refused to put it in their movie.
Of course, Santo’s mileage may vary when it comes to the fact that the sequel takes what was implied about the nature of the infection at the end of the first and makes that blatantly what it is. I actually kind of dug it, cheesy as it sometimes was, but mainly because it allowed them to once again differentiate it somewhat from every other rabid zombie film of late.
#7 by Blake on July 19, 2011 - 7:11 pm
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I remember staying up late on Christmas day to watch “The Cyclops” on a special edition of TNT’s MonsterVision. It was quite entertaining; I found it better than “The Giant Claw”, which came on the same night (although not as good as “Valley of the Dragons,” one of my favorite examples of crap cinema). The video store near my house carried it during my childhood, but it was an Elvira Present’s version and as a kid, I thought that meant that she’d pop up on the screen every few minutes to ruin the film, so I never rented it. Thank goodness for TNT before they sucked.
#8 by Blake on July 23, 2011 - 7:27 am
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Random: I first learned about Thus/Thugee in the original sense of the term while reading a Fu Manchu novel (the first one, to be exact). There’s a room where a character mysteriously died of asphyxiation or something like that and our heroes discover a thug hiding in there.