This is sort of a pseudo-celebration of my first attempt to become a film buff circa 2005 by renting shit-tons of DVDs of movies that I’d always been meaning to watch since high school, having talked about them without really seeing them. I got a combination TV/DVD player as a graduation present in May 2005 (and moved into my first apartment) but did not really start renting lots of films until the fall of that year when I found a rental place I didn’t know about before. Obviously lots of what I rented was eventually purchased, but those memories have already been plundered.

Some of these are films I’ve rewatched before, but third time’s the charm.

Birdman; or, the Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance: Before I do stuff I watched in 2005, here’s one I watched in 2015, the previous year’s Best Picture winner. I don’t think it much stuck in the public’s mind; I liked the Michael Keaton performance a lot, and still very much do, but was confused as to why he jumps out the window at the end. Now I’m not confused at all: he kills himself to get out of a movie full of obnoxiously neurotic, cartoonishly narcissistic showbiz types, which is pretty much everyone else in the film, even the film critic at the bar. As for the tracking shots…I prefer De Palma’s.

The Last House On The Left: I completely reviled this the first time I watched it, thinking it was an ineptly made piece of drive-in-movie shit, but was somewhat warmer to it on second viewing as sort of a response to Charlie Manson and the like. Three things I didn’t notice this time around: 1)when the first of the two girls is knifed to death, you hear weird electronic distortion noises when she’s stabbed, and there’s a very brief shot of one of the gang members (the female one, I think) pulling her intestines out. Was this the first movie to show something like that? 2)The ridiculous folk songs in the movie were written and performed by the guy who plays “Krug,” who was well into his 30s at the time and had been a teen songwriter in the 1950s; 3)the most rewatchable scene in the movie is the end credits, due to the sheer hilarity of using one of the songs while showing cast members smiling over their names.

The Evil Dead: Now this trilogy I have not watched in 20 years for sure. The first movie is definitely my pick for the best; it’s almost exhilarating watching Sam Raimi, all of 21 years old when he directed this, fashion a small rollercoaster ride out of a budget that for all I know was less than $200 in 1981 dollars. Cheap special effects and trickery, sure, but Raimi knew how to milk it for all it’s worth. If this counts as a student film then it’s the best student film I’ve ever seen.

Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn: Raimi had more money than this time, and it’s a good sequel but there is a slight case of diminishing returns marring the proceedings. Catchphrases, though. Before that sort of shit got old. There’s a very annoying female character in this that I’d completely forgotten, but then again I’d forgotten most of it.

Army Of Darkness: Now this, I’d forgotten damn near every frame of this, except for I think one shot of somebody jumping down from a castle wall. (I knew it took place in medieval times, and that the DVD I rented said “Bruce Campbell Vs. Army of Darkness” on a piece of notebook paper, but nothing in the actual film.) What’s remarkable about it is that even though it had been 12 years since the first film and Raimi had money and fame by this point, large parts of this movie still feel like an experimental student film, particularly all the stop-motion animation, which Raimi clearly relished doing. Not that I’m complaining–I kind of like it that way. And that none of these films are very long. Not sure how often I’ll be revisiting them though.

Shaun Of The Dead: I remembered getting into fights with people here because I had a huge problem with the big “serious” scene towards the end of this, when Simon Pegg’s character has to kill his mother, who has been bitten by zombies. Now I would say that I object less to that scene than I would advise everybody to watch this film just to get a load of it–not only does it seem to come from a completely different movie, if anything it’s even darker than the similar scenes in other zombie films of the time like 28 Days Later and Dawn Of The Dead. Am I the only one seeing this? The rest of this wasn’t as funny as I remembered it, but the best jokes were worth remembering, like the Stone Roses shoutout, or Pegg sipping his coffee. I’m imagining I’ll like rewatching Hot Fuzz better.

28 Days Later: The first half of this movie is probably the best stuff in any of the big zombie movies that I know of–Cillian Murphy wandering around an empty London, totally evoking emptiness and the end of the world. There’s a majestically dreary shot of a light signal coming from a bleak apartment tower that I can’t believe I’d forgotten. The second half is…a bit weaker. Christopher Eccleston does a good job as the villain, but there’s a sense of a concept gone awry here–like they could have done something great with that military group holed up in there, but dumped it to have Murphy become a big amazing hero. Eghn. Still, the first half of this film is immortal.

I Spit On Your Grave: Ebert was wrong to claim that this movie would make men want to rape women, and in doing so he probably made the movie immortally famous when it otherwise might not have been, but I will agree that it’s a very cheap, poorly made film with bad amateur acting in it–the actor playing the mentally retarded member of the rape gang gives the worst performance of the 1970s that I know of, and I’m not forgetting Scorpio in Dirty Harry or Richard Burton in Exorcist II: The Heretic. While any rape scene is embarrassing to watch, it’s less that the scenes themselves are effectively sickening than that probably only porno movies had tried to have three rape scenes in a row, totaling about a half hour. There’s a scene where the poor girl crawls home through some woods into her home only to have a foot jump out of frame in front of her, causing an effective jump scare; otherwise, the whole thing just grows tiresome (in the second rape scene, one of the actors begins jerking around on top of the girl like he’s having a seizure, producing an unintentionally comedic effect.) Here’s some fun trivia for this film that I probably will never watch again (the first time, I watched it with Joe Bob Briggs’ commentary track): that’s an 18 year old Demi Moore’s butt on the poster, and the actress in the movie married the guy who directed it a year after it came out.

Irreversible: Bleeeurgh, more rape. Again, there’s no rape scene that wouldn’t embarrass me to some degree, but in the case of this movie’s infamous ten-minute sequence, I always felt that I could hear the director loudly taunting me just off-screen while it happens, due to the obvious gimmick of having the camera remain stationary during the whole disaster. I’m not trying to be snotty or funny, but it really does take some of the edge off a scene that countless filmgoers probably consider the worst of its type (for the record, the rape sequence I find hardest to watch is the one on The Sopranos.) The fire extinguisher beating is still pretty nasty too, because everyone knows the guy he kills was innocent. Is there anything else in this film of note? I guess the whole descent into hell at the beginning is fairly effective due to all the queasy camera moves and distorted synthesizer noises. Aside from that, you can have it–I know you’re supposed to watch all the way to the end, but the conversation scenes in the film are dull and forgettable.

Brazil: I think I’ve gone back to considering 12 Monkeys Gilliam’s best movie, not counting Holy Grail. This is his masterpiece _on a visual level_for sure–a beautifully realized “bureaucratic apocalypse.” The fantasy scenes, sets, horror bits, etc., are all still wonderful. What I think I’ve soured on a bit is the plot–the film now seems to be meandering quite a lot to get to the end, though maybe I’m just getting old and impatient and bored with movies in my 40s. I thought the Ebert review was ridiculous when I was younger, wondering why he didn’t talk about any of the good things in the film and instead claimed that it was hard to follow, but now I sort of get why he said that, at least.

Lawrence Of Arabia: First time I saw this I didn’t realize what an anti-war movie it really was, or that it even really made T. E. Lawrence look all that bad; the second time, I didn’t realize what an anti-Lawrence movie it was. Well, I sure do now!!! This movie is downright SICKENED by his behavior by the end; now I can’t get that image of his sick grin charging into battle out of my head! I never bought a copy of this, but it doesn’t waste much of its four hour running time. A classic, sure, yeah.

Bananas: The first Woody Allen movie I watched, still probably his third best. Annie Hall and Radio Days are better, but it sure is fun how tossed-off this film was. It also had the best name for any of his characters to date (“Fielding Mellish”.)

Dawn Of The Dead (1978): I think the most effective part of this film for me now may be the first twenty or thirty minutes, before the main characters group together and get into the shopping mall. The whole tangle of how to handle the news coverage of the outbreak and what all’s going on, and the invasion of the apartment complex, makes for a fine mess. Once they’re in the mall it gets a little weaker–I don’t mind the humorous commentary per se, but the cheap blood and special effects aren’t too great, and the acting limitations of the four main characters becomes certainly more apparent (Ken Foree had some talent; the other three main actors, God no.) The Dario Argento/Goblins synth score is pretty weak, too–the one for Suspiria is better, here we just get lame Moog splorps all over the place. I’d forgotten about the biker gang invading the mall near the end, and am not sure how to feel about that. In general, this was worth rewatching, though God help me, I am actually still a fan of Zack Snyder’s remake, the only good film he ever did, and yes, I do still prefer it.

Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster: This is pretty tedious to watch nowadays–sure, there’s OMG-moments like Dave Mustaine’s lame self-pitying scene (Gee, Dave, maybe if you shut up about being kicked out of Metallica now and then, you wouldn’t have people yelling out their windows as you walk past about Metallica!!) and Lars sneering “fuuuuuuck!” at those guys at the table, but the whole thing is far too long, padded out with piles of tedious scenes where the guys argue about trivial shit. In all honesty, I don’t think it makes them look bad per se–most people think this film makes Metallica look like a bunch of terminal adolescents–I just find it so boring.

River’s Edge: Was really looking forward to this one back in the day, thinking it would be the movie equivalent of some cool underground 80s Husker Du album or something, maybe because the plot mirrors “Pink Turns To Blue,” if that song were about homicide instead of overdose. Actually, it’s just kind of a drizzle, though it does conjure up a Reagan-era sense of failure in flyover-country/Rust-Belt America. But that’s about all. Crispin Glover gives one of the spazzier performances in film history as a mullet-headed junkie teen, predating some of Nicolas Cage’s goofier work (as well as Glover’s own infamous Letterman appearance), and Keanu Reeves is surprisingly not bad, but Dennis Hopper blows it–the weakest of the four big performances he gave in his comeback year of 1986. Fates Warning is on the soundtrack to this–do you think they ever talk about it?

Saw: This didn’t actually have to be a shitty movie, let alone the beginning of one of horror’s most painfully interminable film franchises. It has a really great setup, for one–two guys chained at opposite ends of a dirty bathroom (with a dead body on the floor between them) have to figure out what’s going on and how to get themselves free? That’s a start! And there honestly isn’t even that much “torture porn” in it (sequels would dwell far harder on the ridiculous traps set by the Jigsaw guy), so that’s good too. You know what made me want to see this film in the first place? The ending was spoiled for me, when it’s revealed that the dead body between the two guys was actually the villain, who was still alive. I still like that twist, though obviously the dead body would have had to come into play sooner or later. So what’s the problem? Nobody seems to comment on this: ALL, and I do mean ALL of the major actors in the film (Danny Glover, screenwriter-creator Leigh Whannell, Michael Emerson from LOST, and particularly Cary Elwes) start giving hideously bad performances about 45 minutes into the film. Elwes in particular–I’ve never seen him ham it up so badly, but any scene where he has to yell or heavily emote is just…agh. Too bad. You coulda been a contender, Saw.

Slacker: It must have been pretty cool to see a hip, original, free-form indie film like this back in 1991, but time has been a lot kinder to Richard Linklater’s other movies than this one. The basic idea (randomly following people around, then shifting to someone else every few minutes over the course of a single day in Austin, if you didn’t know) was a good one, but there’s only two scenes of any significant strength in the entire 100 minute running time: the bit with the weirdo who murders his mom near the beginning, and the part where some loser invades a guy’s home only to find out the guy is an anarchist, who wants to have a friendly conversation with him. The rest is tiresome proto-Indie Quirk chittachat, albeit with the caveat that Linklater is probably still better at this than most people. There’s a scene involving a weirdo with a television strapped to his back about 70 minutes in; after that, the last half hour is a total waste, covering no new ground and ending on a bunch of idiots playing with a camera. I’ve given this film three tries now and it’s never really taken, though I guess it has historical value.

Pink Flamingos: Mostly painful to watch, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. The gross out stuff is gross indeed (and one scene, where Divine really does just perform oral sex on the guy playing his son, is honestly just actual porn), but at least it sort of gets my attention, because at least then I can entertain myself by thinking about what it must have been like for people to see this in 1972 when there probably wasn’t much of anything like it. Aside from that, the only scene in the film I like is near the end, when Divine gives her “kill everyone now! eat shit! Filth is my life!” rant. So what’s the excruciating part? That the rest of the film just consists of ad-nauseam scenes of John Waters’ lame friends from Baltimore reciting dialogue and proving that not a single one of them had a fucking shred of acting talent whatsoever. And that’s like 90 percent of the movie. Fuck this shit, I’m outta here!

Mean Streets: This is okay, but I never much cottoned to it because not that much actually happens in it. Yeah, I remember “Be My Baby” over the home movie opening credits and De Niro blowing up a mailbox and the silly “stand on the table and kick” fight scene and Harvey Keitel holding his hand over the flame and the scene on the beach with the girl and Scorsese shooting everyone at the end…but people say this is a film about Catholic guilt, and while that’s certainly there, and not hard to spot, it’s really just a movie about people failing to leave their adolescence behind, if you ask me. Part of it’s that Scorsese made better films after this, obviously, but there’s been a push in recent years to say that this is as good as Taxi Driver and GoodFellas and the like, but I think I’d honestly rather watch I Vitelloni.

Suspiria: There have been few wider oceans in cinema history than the gap between this film’s wonderfully gaudy style and the lameness of its incoherent plot and silly dubbing/amateur acting. I get that there’s a subtext about how the young women in the movie are being reduced to children on screen, and that’s interesting enough for me to forgive the rest of it. Whoever cared about the plot anyway? And hey, it’s still better than the godawful remake…

Manhunter: I think I’ve been a bit hard on this one in the past, due to me being this board’s lone Silence Of The Lambs lover. It runs a bit long, and that godawful ending with William Petersen charging slow-motion through Tom Noonan’s window is still howlingly bad, but a few things stuck out this time around that I hadn’t picked up on. The sequence where Noonan torments Stephen Lang is still pretty good, the Miami Vice feel actually works best in the scenes where Petersen sneaks around the murder victims’ homes and tries to figure out what’s going on, and I’m kicking myself for not realizing how good one of Brian Cox’s three “Lecktor” scenes actually is: the sequence where he tricks someone over the phone into giving up Petersen’s home address, which is good enough to suggest we could have had an entire movie with Cox playing “Lecktor.” (His other two scenes aren’t that great, and I’ve always felt people who thought he was an even better Lecter than Hopkins are just hating on Hopkins more than they love Cox, but whatever.) I don’t really know whether or not Tom Noonan was a better “Dollarhyde” than Ralph Fiennes, but he feels a bit underwritten, though still somewhat effectively creepy. And of course, that 80s “heartbeat!!!” pop song that plays over the end credits is awesome.

See you at the movies!!!