list/discuss/rate - your recently watched movies

the Last Shift (2014) Directed by Anthony DiBlasi

Rookie cop's first day on the force has her assigned to looking after an abandoned Police Station prior to it's permanent closure the next morning. Bored but eager to please her superiors, the likeable and beautiful Officer Loren (Juliana Harkavy) avoids encroaching tedium until things take a distinctly sinister turn and her routine chore turns into a harrowing ordeal. Reference points are fairly easy to spot in the last Shift, from Assault on Precinct 13, the criminally neglected Let Us Prey from the same year, to echoes of the Manson family cult but it's never derivative and manages to exploit its single location/solitary actress budget limitations to telling effect. Some of the imagery is genuinely unsettling so it's not a horror for the feint of heart (and if any are, they ain't worthy of the name) There is also a plot twist at the conclusion I genuinely didn't anticipate which is well worth sticking around for. More psychological thriller with horror elements than standard issue horror, it's a tale of an idealistic young woman's mental disintegration when confronted with ghosts of the past (real or imagined) and a very interesting tangent on how so many otherwise rational and intelligent females somehow get sucked into the black hole event horizons of the likes of Charles Manson, Ian Brady, Richard Ramirez, Jimmy Boyle, David Koresh, Warren Jeffs, Keith Raniere et al. Credibly creepy throughout, choc full of jump scares and with a knack for tourniquet tight suspense, the Last Shift might have a few glaring plot holes here and there but is great value for it's modest outlay in cinematic resources.

Not bad, not great, and an unclear future for the Bond franchise.

^ Good movie, and a powerful score from Terrence Blanchard.

Mort Sahl:The Loyal Opposition - 10/10

I'm devastated over his death, and have watched this 4 times. It only premiered in 1989 on PBS.. The last time I saw Mort in person I asked him about this. He said the director, Bob Weide hadn't cleared the sources, so it couldn't be distributed. I met a girl from Germany at the hostel in SF the next day, and.. it's a long story (PM me if you are interested) but after asking me if I wanted to go to The Whiskey (if she would have asked me to go to hell with her, I would have replied, "What time?") I asked if she wanted to go to The Museum of Radio & Television, which was the only way to view this (Paley Center), but it was my last full day, and we didn't go, but instead walked around North Beach. When we went to Vesuvio's, she went and got some tea, and I look out the window, and I see the "hungry i" where Mort got his start..

You don't have to be an American to enjoy this. Just a human. It's funny. It's an amazing time capsule. It's so well done. I think you would all love it.

Await Further Instructions (2018) Directed by Johnny Kervokian

For at least 70 minutes this emanates a cramped, skewed and menacing paranoia you only usually meet in something like English playwright Harold Pinter. I think Grant Masters' resemblance to Michael Jayston circa the Homecoming from 1969 may have forged this connection in my mind. As a sci-fi parable on fake news, social media, Brexit, xenophobia, and blind devotion to strong leaders no matter how monstrous, the jury is still out but as a meditation on that petri-dish of neuroses called 'British family life' it succeeds brilliantly. A Christmas family reunion for the Milgrams* soon opens more wounds than it closes. The racist Grandpa who taunts his son as 'an effeminate clerk' who in turn bullies his spouse and offspring by way of sublimated revenge. The equally racist (and by implication) feckless daughter, pregnant with 'Jock' partner's child, who abuses her brother Nick's Indian girlfriend. All this makes for a very tense Xmas dinner where the only creature in attendance safe from further torment is probably the turkey. The late Johnny Kervokian, a Cypriot born filmmaker raised in the UK, would have encountered first hand the racist insecurity at the heart of the British psyche and he handles his cast and themes with deft assurance and objectivity throughout. Things do tend to fall apart thereafter alas, and the ending has certainly polarised many movie goers. For me, you could hack off the w.a.n.k.y techno/apocalyptic ending entirely and still have a compelling and unflinching family psychodrama.

*They ain't called the Milgrams for nothing. The Milgram experiments measured the willingness of study participants from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a 'learner'. These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real. In the movie, the family receive similar instructional messages from their TV which is being controlled by some unknown predatory entity (not Rupert Murdoch but slightly better looking all told)