Sergio

Critters (1986) is the movie for this Sunday's "monsterdon" watch party over on Mastodon, our fediverse sibling!

• Just start watching that movie this Sunday, March 9, 2025 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT / 6pm PT, which is ~~2am Monday UTC~~ CORRECTION 1am Monday UTC bc of US daylight savings
• and follow #monsterdon over on mastodon for live commentary. For example, you can follow that hashtag here: https://mastodon.social/tags/monsterdon
• I usually open two web browser windows on a computer side-by-side. But you could follow the mastodon commentary on a phone app while watching the movie on TV or something.

How to watch the movie:

• someone plans to stream it on https://miru.miyaku.media/ at that time
• tubi (US, England, Canada, Australia, NZ?; uBlock Origin adblock on firefox works): https://tubitv.com/movies/100001406/critters
• if you want to pay and/or watch ads, look here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/critters

The plot follows a group of small, furry aliens with carnivorous behavior escaping from two shape-shifting bounty hunters, landing in a small countryside town to feast on its inhabitants.

...

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 52% approval rating based on 50 reviews, with an average of 5.5/10. The site's consensus reads: "While Critters ekes out some fun from a game cast and screwball tone, the titular monsters fail to deliver the credible menace that makes a creature feature satisfying".[7] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film three out of four stars: "What makes Critters more than a ripoff are its humor and its sense of style. This is a movie made by people who must have had fun making it".[8]

Marylynn Uricchio, film critic for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described the film as an enjoyable, if unoriginal, low budget monster movie. Uricchio wrote: "Critters isn't a memorable or even very slick movie, but it is good fun. What it lacks in substance it makes up for with a perverse kind of charm".[9] Caryn James of The New York Times complained that the movie lacked humor and suspense: "Critters just doesn't make the audience laugh or jump often enough".[10]

Alex Stewart reviewed Critters for White Dwarf #83, and stated that "Critters scuttled by quite pleasantly. Nothing really stands out, despite M. Emmet Walsh as the sweaty sheriff, and a scene wherein a couple of Heavy Metal bounty hunters blow away a Baptist church, but the film actually thinks through how the Browns react, as a family, to the anti-social little aliens".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critters_(film)

This is titled "The Hardy Boy Poems" but they're really paragraph-long short stories, i.e. flash fiction stories which "hint at or imply a larger story".

The basis for these is the Hardy Boys series of books aimed at young boys. These were old even when I was a kid, but I keep seeing these "Hardly Boys" book cover edits on [email protected] so people must still be aware of them.

This collection is more risque and suggestive of hidden violence and despair than the mainstream books. In the preface, the author (?) says this is in tribute to the "unwholesome but healthy amounts of anti-authoritarianism and lurid detail" that the original Hardy Boys books had before they were stripped of all such things in the late 50s. The result of these new stories is a world that is far more interesting, far more dangerous, and far more realistic than the world presented in the mainstream books.

Link to the collection: https://www.beardofbees.com/pubs/The_Hardy_Boy_Poems.pdf

An ancient cult embroiled in a sinister blood trade makes the deadly mistake of abducting a young woman with a violent, shocking past.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18284880/

• youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-fRXxUDzI
• tubi: https://tubitv.com/movies/100009884/i-am-rage
• uBlock Origin adblocker on Firefox works on the above links
• if you want to pay and/or watch ads: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/i-am-rage

context: https://slrpnk.net/post/18939157

It's the 70s, and these three vets just got out of Vietnam after doing some crooked business there, and are on a boat headed home. But then two of them screw over the third guy, and throw him in the ocean! Luckily he survives, and gets washed up on an island where these Japanese World War 2 soldiers are holed up unaware that the war is over! And one of them teaches him "the art of the samurai"... The rest of the movie is the neo-samurai guy getting revenge on his former buddies.

It's a pretty entertaining movie if your expectations are low and you're in the mood for a campy but heartfelt action movie with a 70s feel. The ending is kinda sad tho.

• original trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mU3-sgKLS8
• I watched it on Tubi, which is free in I think the US Canada England and Australia/NZ: https://tubitv.com/movies/515830/death-force
• free on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZh6phbL_zM
• free on youtube? you have to log in which I didn't do; the movie length is 9 minutes longer, and comments suggest uploader might have replaced some of the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM3FcIyg3qQ
• ADBLOCK NOTE: uBlock Origin on Firefox should work on the links above
• if you want to pay and/or watch ads, look here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/fighting-mad

Apparently it was originally released as "Death Force" but the opening title says "Vengeance is Mine" for some reason; looks like it was released on home video as "Fighting Mad". From IMDB images I see it was "El Samurai Negro" in Spanish and "Deathforce" in Swedish!

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076024/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Force

C.H.U.D. is the movie for this Sunday's "monsterdon" watch party over on Mastodon, our fediverse sibling!

• Just start watching that movie this Sunday, March 2, 2025 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT / 6pm PT, which is 2am Monday UTC
• and follow #monsterdon over on mastodon for live commentary. For example, you can follow that hashtag here: https://mastodon.social/tags/monsterdon
• I usually open two web browser windows on a computer side-by-side. But you could follow the mastodon commentary on a phone app while watching the movie on TV or something...

How to watch the movie:

• someone plans to streams it on https://miru.miyaku.media/ at that time
• archive: https://archive.org/details/c.-h.-u.-d..-1984 (edit: fixed link)
• tubi (US, England, Canada, Australia/NZ?; uBlock Origin adblock on firefox works): https://tubitv.com/movies/480176/c-h-u-d
• if you want to pay and/or watch ads, look here: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/c-h-u-d

The plot concerns a New York City police officer and a homeless shelter manager who team up to investigate a series of disappearances, and discover that the missing people have been killed by humanoid monsters that live in the sewers.

...

Lawrence Van Gelder from The New York Times stated in his review for the film, "C.H.U.D. makes no pretension toward serious thesis about government or the environment. It is meant to be light commercial entertainment, and in the category of horror films it stands as a praiseworthy effort".[10] Keith Phipps of The A.V. Club wrote, "Perfect for bleary-eyed late-night viewing and pretty much unwatchable at any other hour."[11] Patrick Naugle of DVD Verdict called it a fun film that focuses more on entertainment than deeper issues.[12] Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out New York included it in Time Out's list of best New York-set films, calling it "more funny than scary".[13] Bloody Disgusting rated it 4.5/5 stars and called it "definitely one of b-movies best kept secrets".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.H.U.D.

[email protected] previously discussed this movie over a year ago: https://lemmy.world/post/6703046

https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. ... The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian comet dubbed "Burns-Caulfield" that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

One of the main characters in this novel is a vampire. It's the future, and this ancient vampire species that used to prey on humans has been resurrected. They sent one of them in a spaceship (as the leader of a team of other transhumans) out to investigate a possible alien artifact.

...just short of the forward bulkhead, Jukka Sarasti climbed into view like a long white spider.

If he'd been Human I'd have known instantly what I saw there, I'd have smelled murderer all over his topology. And I wouldn't have been able to even guess at the number of his victims, because his affect was so utterly without remorse. The killing of a hundred would leave no more stain on Sarasti's surfaces than the swatting of an insect; guilt beaded and rolled off this creature like water on wax.

But Sarasti wasn't human. Sarasti was a whole different animal, and coming from him all those homicidal refractions meant nothing more than predator. He had the inclination, was born to it; whether he had ever acted on it was between him and Mission Control.

• the full novel is on the author's website: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

based on the 1995 novel Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, the first installment in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which was published as The Golden Compass in the United States. It stars Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra Belacqua, Nicole Kidman as Marisa Coulter, and Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel, alongside Sam Elliott, Ian McKellen, and Eva Green. In the film, Lyra joins a race of water-workers and seafarers on a trip to the far North in search of children kidnapped by the Gobblers, a group supported by the world's rulers, the Magisterium

...The film received mixed reviews from critics, with praise for the casting and visual effects, but criticism for its pacing, characterization, and screenplay...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Compass_(film)

• free on dailymotion: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7ww5zk
• a reboot / miniseries was made of this book series several years later, supposedly it's pretty good but it's not free anywhere I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dark_Materials_(TV_series)

Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8iBFmsUrew

Context: https://feddit.nl/post/29167255

Anyone who thinks Van Helsing was bad clearly hasn't seen GOTHIC VAMPIRES FROM HELL... just from the title you can tell that they were going for a B movie feel, and managed to hit several levels below that

• fake-looking fangs, fake-looking blood effects
• randomly inserted computer-generated animations
• bad acting, bad writing
• club scenes of people dancing with cheap video distortion effects overlayed
• occasional BDSM scenes interweaved ... to create a mood I guess?
• It all looks like it was filmed in a goth club somewhere with their friends as actors.

Surprisingly, it has a solid soundtrack made up of second-generation gothic industrial / deathrock music. I think Cleopatra Records had something to do with this movie. Anyway, this is a great movie to play in the background if you like dark vampiric stuff happening in the periphery and you're into "dark" music.

I caught it on Tubi (uBlock Origin adblocker on Firefox seems to work here):

• https://tubitv.com/movies/662920/gothic-vampires-from-hell