Triangle (2009) – One of the better “rubber reality” mind-bender movies I’ve seen. When a bunch of friends and acquaintances on a sailboat encounter a freak electrical storm, they’re left adrift until they run across a cruise ship — one that seems antique and empty. But is it? When time starts looping on itself and effect and cause don’t follow their normal order, young single mother Jess desperately tries to figure out the rules of the ship so she can get back to her autistic son — and that means she’s willing to sacrifice her friends.
The rules never became clear to me, and there are a couple of instances of “if you didn’t behave like an idiot, this wouldn’t have happened,” but there are also a few stunning images that make it well worth watching.
One Dark Night (1982) – It’s become habit for me: that reflexive flinch when I put on a movie that I haven’t seen for thirty years, hoping that it holds up to my memories. This one does, although my three-decades-old assessment of wasn’t too high to begin with: It’s a slow movie where very little happens except ominous foreshadowings for most of the running time, and there isn’t really a protagonist. But this story of a high school girl forced to stay in a mausoleum overnight as part of an initial on the same night that a recently deceased psychic and occultist decides to come back and reanimate all his new roommates has no serious missteps, and further, the dead bodies that emerge from their individual niches are pretty realistic.
The Seventh Curse (1986) – Sorceriffic Hong Kong craziness in which a kung fu-fighting doctor has to return to the area in Thailand where the designated sacrificial damsel of the Worm Tribe saved his life a year ago, and defeat the Worm Tribe sorcerer and his flying polyps before the seven wounds that should have killed him a year ago re-erupt. Along the way he picks up a petulant reporter girl (who proves that there is no sound more annoying than a pouty Mandarin speaker) and her relative, Chow Yun-Fat, who knows everything about everything.
Nope, it makes no more sense when I try to write it down.
Abandoned movies: Warlock (1989).