Movies - recent viewing

Narok (2005) is a Thai hell movie.  A group of people are erroneously sent to hell even though they are all still alive in the emergency room.  Buddhist hell, where they saw people in half, hang them from hooks and smash their hands and feet with mallets forever.  Not much of a story is necessary in a Hell movie - you are there and you want to get out, some do and some don't. It was great to see a Buddhist slant on it.  I don't think there are nearly enough hell movies.  This one is okay as a horror ordeal story, 6/10.  I recommend more highly the Nobuo Nakagawa film Jigoku (1960) which makes maximum use of its limited resources.

The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly (1957) goes by other names but it is a Japanese movie about a good guy with an invisibility ray against a bad guy with shrinking gas which makes him so small he just drifts around and floats into locked rooms to murder people.  It is a movie about people you can't see.  The next day I couldn't remember what I had watched the night before.  3/10

The Nitwits (1935) is the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy said to have been remade as Genius At Work, previously reviewed.  Two goofy guys get involved with a mysterious serial murderer and there the resemblance ends.  The difference between the two movies is W&W have distinct personalities and chemistry as a team, they do and say amusing things in amusing ways, and there are jokes and humor included in the script, as well as a couple of good musical numbers.  As good a Wheeler and Woolsey movie as was ever made - harmless fun and gentle entertainment.  7/10

The Ghost Writer (2010) directed by Roman Polanski, is in many ways similar to his earlier The Ninth Gate, entering an obscure byway of literature by way of a protagonist just intelligent enough to work his way into a baffling maze but not to get back out again in one piece.  Similar too is the depiction of the soullessness of wealth and hollow opulence where genuine evil hides behind banal smiles.  Not a single ray of sunshine is seen in the cold bleak settings or in the hearts of the grim characters laboring under the weight of the contents of their own minds. Eli Wallach's brief appearance is memorable, and the stark locales and settings are simultaneously wide open and claustrophobic.  9/10

I watch all kinds of stuff.  I also recently enjoyed the second of the King Naresuan historical epics from Thailand which goes beyond any other historical epic I have seen for vast rampaging spectacle.  I sort of enjoyed Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), a trippy Italian giallo starring Brazilian actor/director Florinda Bolkan as a woman who appears to have dreamt the stabbing death of her neighbor exactly as it happened.  Didn't really enjoy L'anticristo (1974), an Italian Exorcist rip-off which I had seen before and for some stupid reason watched again, and didn't even make it half way through some damn thing called Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition and Torture (1973) also, perhaps more literally, known as Story of a Wild Elder Sister: Widespread Lynch Law.  It is the stupidest and lousiest cheap Japanese exploitation flick I have ever tried to watch.