The Hunting Party (1971)

••Moderate spoilers ahead••

I'm sure you're all aware of the recent tragic news, but for those who aren't... Gene Hackman's dog died. I don't know anything about Gene Hackman's dog. How old it was. What breed it was. But that doesn't make it any less of a tragedy. So, as a tribute to Gene Hackman's dog, I thought I'd review a movie starring Gene Hackman's dog's owner, Gene Hackman. It's the least I can do.

Gene Hackman didn't buy into the chameleonic tendencies of his contemporaries, like De Niro or Pacino or Hoffman. Aside from a comedic caricature in Young Frankenstein, Gene avoided broad characterisation and focussed on making each role intensely natural and human. With just a facial expression or a look in his eye, whether it be of steely determination or crippling self-doubt, he infused every role with an inherent depth and turned simple words in a script into believable, 3-dimensional people. Regardless of whether the character was good or bad - from Popeye Doyle to Bill Daggett to fuckin' Lex Luthor — Gene made them real.

Which makes The Hunting Party all the more unnerving, because Gene plays a bonafide piece of fucking shit. He's a rich motherfucker who owns a lot of property, with one of those pieces of property being his wife. We're introduced to his character while he's raping her. In fairness, marital rape didn't exist in 1971 when the movie was made, and certainly didn't exist in the late 1800s when the movie is set. So, from a legal standpoint, he was having marital relations with her. He's still a piece of shit.

Gene and his pals go off on a hunting expedition to test out their new rifles, which can hit a target from 800 yards away. Being a piece of shit, he gets in the killing mood by pooning and torturing some Asian whores first. While this is going on, his wife is kidnapped by a gang of thugs, led by Oliver Reed. Olly is the '˜good guy' in this scenario, although that's relative here. He saves her from being raped by one of his flunkies, before beating her into obedience and raping her himself; a rape that becomes kinda sorta maybe consensual halfway through. The '˜70s were a very different time.

Gene is not at all happy about his wife's kidnapping. As he sensitively states, she'll probably get passed around to 15 or 20 different guys and end up pregnant. He's supposed to take back a turned-out whore and look after a bastard kid? Hell no. Instead, he takes his new state-of-the-art rifles and aims them at a new prey: Humans.

In case you haven't gathered, this is a supremely nasty piece of work. Despite being directed by a dude who mostly worked in TV, it embraces (ie. rips off) the savagery of Sam Peckinpah, and not just in the aforementioned lax attitude toward the boundaries of sexual consent. Gunfights are brutal, bloody and merciless. Death does not come briskly in this film's cruel universe. Pain and degradation are celebrated by the grand tunes of Riz Ortolani, of Cannibal Holocaust fame. There's an almost exploitation-like harshness to the bloodshed. It's easy to forget that mainstream '˜70s audiences had no care for trigger warnings and appreciated a certain level of confrontation from cinema.

It is, however, far from perfect. A random scene of comedic peach-eating is bizarrely out of place. Oliver Reed is fine playing a grizzled badass, but far less convincing when his badass is revealed to be a softy with a heart of teddy bears and flowers. In fairness, the problem lies with an under-developed script, rather than with Reed's performance. Gene, on the other hand, is just excellent all round. We've all seen him play a detestable baddie in his entirely deserved Oscar-winning performance in Unforgiven. Here, he's an even more vicious piece of shit and he commits himself fully, as he always did.

If Gene's dog liked watching horses as much as mine does, I think it would have had a ball watching this. RIP, little guy. As for you humans, if you like westerns or like exploitation or, hell, just like '˜70s cinema, this is a damn good flick, well worth checking out.

Rhonda Shear on USA UP All Night

Ohhhhhhhhh, Rhonda. What a woman. Here's 40 minutes of her being herself.

The Leftovers (2014-2017)

Update: Completed the show. My advice? Don't waste your time.

Season 1: 6-7/10
Season 2: 4/10
Season 3: 2/10

Hey cuntses. I've been watching this for the rather lovely TV challenge. It's one of those shows that's not massively well-known or revered, but has a handful of devotees who consider it the greatest thing since sliced things. Figured I'd share some thoughts...

The premise is that 2% of the world's population inexplicably disappears in an instant. Nobody knows how or why. And the show cleverly doesn't explore or care how or why it happened. It's purely about the fucked-up, destroyed people who are left behind.

Ultimately what we've got is a meditation on grief. Not just sadness or depression, but pure fucking soul-ripped-to-shreds grief. When people are grieving in our world, everyone rallies around them, to drag them back to some semblance of normalcy. Here, there is no normalcy, because everyone is grieving. There's no one left emotionally capable of bringing others back from the edge of the abyss. There's no one left who knows what normal even fucking is. Bizarre, irrational, unexplainable behaviour is the new norm. Weirdness here is not for the sake of weirdness, but because that's the only thing that makes sense in the overall context.

The conventional religions no longer hold any comfort, so people splinter off into weird cults. One involves a messianic charlatan who takes away pain, whilst covertly impregnating hot Asian bitches. Another cult takes a vow of silence and chain-smokes their days away, believing that a forsaken race can no longer place value on trivialities like breath. There's some genuinely profound stuff here, about the desperation for meaning where there is none, particularly poignant given that, at some point, we'll all no longer exist, with no hint available for why we're even fucking here to begin with and no clue what happens after we're gone.

It's all heavy going and exhausting, in a good way. BUT, and there is a big but... the showrunner is Damon Lindelof, the dude who made Lost and the moderately cool sequel to Watchmen. In true Lindelof style, there's threads of faux-depth running through the series. A single issue of National Geographic pops up here and there. Some viewers went to the trouble of tracking down that issue and it contains a bunch of unimportant easter eggs for the show. Like, the main article in that issue is about Cairo, Egypt. One of the episodes takes place in Cairo, New York. OMG YOU GUYS, ISN'T THAT CLEVER??? There's also a random reoccurance of people watching the shitty '80s sitcom Perfect Strangers; a thread that means nothing and goes nowhere.

I've watched the first season, 10 episodes worth, and I'm still not sure if I even especially like it. But I do know that I'm hooked and intrigued to see where it goes. There's a rare combo of weird surrealism and big, earth-shaking emotions at work here - broadly similar to say Twin Peaks or Dark or Six Feet Under. Worth checking out out if you dug any of them. It's strange and human and unique and unpredictable. Oh yeah, and there's also some good tits, a young Margaret Qualley in her undies, and one of the most genuinely brutal kills I've seen in quite a while.

I'll keep y'all posted on how I go in the next 2 seasons, if anyone cares. All I know is, I'm gonna be annoyed as fuck if the whole thing ends up being some lame alien abduction shit.

I can't stand Facebook lately

I know, you'll say, "then get the fuck off of it!" but work gets really boring when I'm on break.

Basically, every other post is Democrat horse shit. I've been blocking them all, but it's endless! So many dumb ignorant cunts out there getting angry at any and everything Trump says or does. Dude hasn't even been in there a month! You can't blame him for inflation. And if I block one, the stupid algorithm assumes I'll want to see more.

Also, every post about superman is bashing Gunn and the actor. Cavill was cool and all, but move the fuck on!

I also block every post I see with AI images of fake movie posters/ trailers. Except the ones making fun of Steven Seagal for being a fat arrogant dickhead. Those are funny.

Zuckerberg is a piece of shit.

Dexter: Original Sin

The prequel series premiered on Friday the 13th with a single episode and will go on for a total of 10 episodes. This was announced alongside the news of a sequel series to Dexter: New Blood with Michael C. Hall returning. Obviously, he has fun playing the part, and he definitely owns it, so why give that up? I'm all for more, and this prequel includes him as a narrator. So far, we're looking good.


This story begins in Miami, 1991. That's 15 years before the original season 1 is set. The casting is phenomenal here. Christian Slater doesn't look like James Remar, but he's welcome anyway. It's easy to move past that, because these characters already feel completely authentic. Foul-mouthed Deb, chuckling Masuka, serious Batista... No sign of Doakes yet, so they must be saving him for later. We may learn the reason as to why Doakes never trusted Dexter.

This pilot episode expands on a subplot from a season 1 episode featuring Denise Crosby. Fleshed it out a bit more.

I wasn't satisfied with the New Blood finale, so I'm glad this series had its fingers crossed and is undoing it. And you know what? It was a very good episode. I forgot that Dexter used to be a great show.

Fun Fact: The pilot was directed by Michael Lehmann, who directed Christian Slater in Heathers.

TV Show Challenge 2025

I'm veering away from the runtime method this time. Hopefully this will be easier to tally.

From February 1st to 28th
Watch as many TV episodes as you can

Score points by episodes watched:

• Less than 30 minutes = 1 pt (2 if FTV)
• Greater than 30 minutes = 2 pts (4 if FTV)

• Full season watched = +0.5 pt per episode
• Full series watched = +10

Mark your SPOT.

Anti-Turkey Challenge 2025 - RESULTS

Despite a slow start, congrats to Ballz for running away with the first Anti-Turkey challenge. Also, fair play to Troma for coming second by watching a bunch of movies he would never otherwise have watched - The Dark Knight? Deadpool?!. Zed probably got more points than me because I am sure he hasn't included any FTVs in his total but hey, I did keep reminding him... Hope you all (well most of you) enjoyed participating - Any favourite FTVs or a particular movie you enjoyed rewatching? Any movies you watched that you considered to be overrated? (STFU zed about Tokyo Story!).

Here are the final scores:

Ballz - 186
Troma - 153
Markus - 130
zed - 123
Ninja - 91
Box - 77
Nicko - 48
Zombie - 9

Anti-Turkey Challenge 2025

So a brand new challenge and a slight revision of the rules. Using IMDb, the idea is is to watch as many movies as you can rated 7.0+. Well, ideally 8.0+ but see below as to how I will try to encourage this...

1. Scoring:
8.9+ = 6 points
8.6-8.8 = 5 points
8.3-8.5 = 4 points
8.0-8.2 = 3 points
7.5-7.9 = 2 points
7.0-7.4 = 1 point

2. FTV = 1 point

3. Can be any genre.

4. Trifectas: franchises and directors only however they only apply to movies rated 7.5+
A movie can only count towards one trifecta. For example, the "Dark Knight" trilogy can be either director or franchise but not both. If you decide to count "Dark Knight" as a franchise trifecta and then watch another Nolan movie like Inception, you will need to watch another two of his movies 8.0+ to count as a director trifecta.
Trilogies such as The Godfather can be counted in the "franchise" rule but not something like Leone's "Dollars" trilogy because they are too loosely connected.

Single trifecta: 5 points
Double trifecta: +7 points
Triple trifecta: +9 points
Etc.

5. Movies with a rating of 6.9 or under do not count.

6. Running time must be at least 60 minutes.

7. Starts 00:00 1st January and ends 23:59 31st January in your respective time zones

So come on people, grab a spot and get watching some of those classics or to some, overrated movies!

Also, please use the discussion thread or the shoutbox for questions.

Eruption (book) by Michael Crichton and James Patterson

You guys, I am about a third of the way through this book right now. I'm mentioning it here because I am wondering if it might have been partly inspired by Return of the Living Dead.

I won't wreck it, but one of the things going on in the book involves old, semi-forgotten canisters of dangerous chemicals, which were caught up in a complicated bureaucratic screw-up by the army over a period of many years. The canisters ended up being stored in a dangerous location, overseen by people who at first only have a hazy idea of what the canisters hold, or how they (the canisters) got there.

Also, the chemical is called Agent Black, but they specifically say that it came out of the same research that created dioxin, and also they call... not the chemical itself, but a molecule that it can create as it is broken down in certain contexts, 2,4-D. All of this makes me think of 2-4-5 Trioxin, from RotLD. Maybe 2,4-whatever or 2-4-whatever are extremely common starting elements in the names of chemicals. I have no idea. But, I can't help but think of RotLD, given the various parallels.

If the canisters leak, things in the book will get pretty apocalyptic. I don't think that will happen, as far as I can tell from my sense of what is going on in the story. But it certainly could happen. We shall see. The apocalypse that would happen if the canisters broke would have nothing to do with zombies, brains, or paramedics, but it would be pretty damned bad.

Anyway. Yah. Had to share. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and so far I would recommend reading it! I think it will stay interesting and suspenseful. The authors, of course, know/knew what they are/were doing.

Tokyo Story : The greatest film ever made

ranked #1 on Metacritic's Filtered "Best Movies of All Time"
Tokyo Story at the top of his published list of the best 1000 films ever made
#1 2012 Sight & Sound Directors' Top Ten Best Films Ever
#215 on IMDB top 250



With stats like this, Surely worth a watch
You're in luck its on youtube