Testy Area 51 - Page 790

[strolls into frame whistling] Hey wait a second we missed Testy's birthday (as usual), 7 years old last week, aaww it's still a baby! A fat baby! [snort]

I might be wrong but I think Testy has two start dates, 12.15am 28th August 2002 here in the UK and 27th August in the US.

In 2003 we celebrated 100 pages and 3000 posts, shocked that this thread had hit that milestone. In 2004 a bunch of us droogs invaded the long-running Star Wars thread and caused chaos for about an hour, the morning after our posts were gone and we got a good telling off from Parker and a disbelieving Cees, we promised to behave and not piss up other peoples threads when we were bored. By the summer of 2004 there was dissent in the ranks... the Testy creator found he was losing popularity fast and a mutiny ensued, droogs abandoned ship and the good ship Testy was left with just a skeleton crew. But Testy managed to survive and a new crew boarded in 2005, and 4 years later, barely afloat, we're still here, yay! And we certainly wouldn't have lasted this long without Parker and Cees looking over us. Cheers!

The Fog, Elizabeth? Isn't that the remake of the John Carpenter film? I can't remember it much. I do remember being underwhelmed by Blood & Chocolate, which I didn't like much. there was another werewolf film called Skinwalkers, which was better, but still no match for the old classics like The Wolfman and Hammers Curse of the Werewolf, or even An American Werewolf in London, the best werewolf film of the last 30 years.

I saw Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell recently, rubbish! In place of gore he has the old hags face pop up every few minutes with loud screeching noises, that got tedious pretty quickly. And whats this obsession Raimi has of stuff flying into peoples mouths, vomit, drool, a fly, an eyeball. I didn't like the climax and the lead girl was unsympathetic so you didn't really care what happened to her. Raimi should stick to Spider-Man, he still has an 80's horror mentality and it's all a bit silly, amateurish and dated. 2 out of 5.

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes!"

Macbeth eh? I like the Polanski version, though Orson's monochromatic mood piece is pretty good too, "Out damn spot!"

My favourite Shakespeare film is... Forbidden Planet.
"Guilty! Guilty! My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it"

Russ, you might enjoy Drag Me to Hell,  just because I didn't like it doesn't mean you won't. But be warned there's no nudity, gore or torture. Just a lot of bad acting, loud noises and constant close ups of ugly old women. Where's Bruce Campbell when you need him!

Elizabeth, it's good to hear that Mark Whalberg stopped frowning long enough to smile a couple of times in Max Pain [ducks].

Hey I rather enjoyed Jumper, it had some good moments of jumpiness, it'll go well on a double bill with Push, which was a bit better methinks.

The most recent version of Macbeth I saw was made 38 years ago, directed by Roman Polanski and starring 30 year old Jon Finch. When someone complained about the level of violence in the film, Polanski was reported to have said "Violence? You should have seen my house last summer." referring to the killings of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and 4 others by the 'Manson Family'. Hmm would Polanski have been so flippant about such a tragic event? I dunno.

I haven't seen Ethan Hawke's Hamlet either... wait.. Ethan Hawke... Hamlet? [sniggers] I know it's set in present day New York but still... I should give it a go I suppose, might be a laugh.

A female friend read the book The Lovely Bones and was gushing about it, how brilliant it was etc described the whole thing to me which I admit did pique my interest. Btw the trailer of The Lovely Bones practically gives the whole thing away, in fact the trailer is the movie in 2 minutes.

I'm trying to imagine a 10 minute academy award show... [smiles whistfully] next years Oscar show might last even longer than usual now they've lengthened the nominations from 5 to 10, yep GI Joe and Transformers might now get a mention in the best picture category [Russ faints].

Switchblade Sisters Russ? I missed that one, if it's as good as the poster I'll have to track it down.

State of Grace, Macbethian overtones? Hmm trying to remember the film, Gary Oldman the crazy brother of gang boss Ed Harris... best friend and undercover cop Sean Penn... lots of brutality but a distinct lack of witchery do.

Wonky? That's an understatement, it's taken me 15mins to open the forum, log in and make my way to this thread! Wow! Maybe I always pick the time when the Huddler folk are tinkering with the format, which may never end it seems. A couple of days ago I discovered a soundtrack music forum and I nearly burst into tears, it looked exactly like our old v-bulletin forum, I even panned down to the testing area to see if Testy Area 51 was there... [sniff]


Hey I want to see this film too! Daybreakers eh, sounds good. I wonder if there's a trailer out. Blade was a Daywalker, than we had Daywatch, the Russian vampire film. And before that we had Daylight with Sylvester Stallone, no vampires in that, and oh yes The Day After followed by the sequel The Day After the Day After and than the prequel[STOP IT STEVE!]

I know Van Helsing isn't a work of art for christous sake, but I really enjoyed the damned thing. Yes it's all CGI, well... I like CGI. I'm a "more is more" sort of guy.

Anyway while I haven't got into blu-ray just yet, I still regularly pop into the HD areas to see the latest reviews, news and bitching about this and that. Seeing eminent restorationalist Robert Harris admit to enjoying Van Helsing made me grin like the cheshire cat and I had to chip in and say something, and more people have since posted saying they liked the film. I will definitely be getting it on blu-ray when I finally make the move to the format.

16th October will mark exactly 10 years since I got into dvd. I bought a multiregional JVC dvd player for £420 in 1999. Which lasted about 2 years and I've gone thru half a dozen dvd players and one dvd recorder since then.

VHS buying and taping lasted 20 years before I eventually stopped some time in 2000. The Phantom Menace was one of the last videos I bought.

So 10 years of good old SD-DVD is plenty I suppose before moving up to luverly DNR'd blu-ray PQ e.g. erased arrows from Gladiator, waxy faces from Dark City, ooh can't wait!

Parker the forum seems to be back to normal for me today after a couple of days of waiting and waiting for each page to open. Using Explorer was faster but I don't like Explorer and posting here using Explorer instead of Firefox was a pain, I don't know what key I pressed but suddenly mid way thru typing a post in Explorer I was suddenly back to the index page, so I had to type everything out again, that never happened with Firefox.


Edited by Steve Christou - 9/12/09 at 7:11am

That happened to me a few times my old Terminator dvd stopped playing or was freezing mid play and so did my Silence of the Lambs, had to buy them again. Maybe it was dvd rot?

Rick, I'm curious, if Van Helsing was completely CGI a la Beowulf would you have liked it more? I dunno there's something about CG animation that fascinates me, I remember being utterly gobsmacked seeing that huge brachiosaurus in Jurassic Park for the first time, it looked so real. I think I had tears in my eyes seeing that on the big screen.

Wow that looks great! A planet of vampires, humanity on the verge of extinction, a crossbow wielding Willem Dafoe and ugly bat-like vampires! [bites fist] I wish it was out now.

Someone at IMDB mentioned that a similar storyline was being adapted for Blade III but they ditched it in favour of Blade v Dracula, which ended up being the weakest entry in that trilogy. Vampire slayers Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel were good fun in that though, but they didn't get along with Wesley Snipes, according to Daily Variety wisecracking Reynolds couldn't get any laughs from Snipes on the set, "I think he smiled once" says Reynolds "it made a cracking sound."

Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula? Didn't know it existed Rick, sounds cool. But Abraham Van Helsing was basically the Sherlock Holmes of the vampire world wasn't he? Well they've had Holmes on the trail of Jack the Ripper a number of times, and even Nazi spies in the movies, so why not the lord of the undead? With a capable director like Stephen Sommers and dollops of CGI it could be made into an entertaining movie. Sommers will probably be tempted to add Jack the Ripper and Dr. Jekyll to the mix just to be on the safe side though... [wink wink]

Shawshank Redemption dvd free inside the Sunday Times, tsk tsk. "the most popular film of all time" according to the blurb on the cover, it was a really good film but far from being the most popular, especially on it's cinema release when only a handful of people went to see it, the films title didn't help much either.