The Outwaters dir by Robbie Banfitch
I saw a review of this film that started out by saying "If you like found footage films you'll love this, if you don't then you'll hate it". I found that interesting as I think that's a weird qualification for a film, most found footage movies I've enjoyed utilize the format in a clever way that was engaging or at least had extremely entertaining concept that the framing of found footage didn't really matter. Well I won't lay out that generic of a statement for a quantifier of this movie but what I will do is warn you that this one is 1hr50min long and boy oh boy does it feel like an eternity. I think the concept here is really good and once the shit hits the fan it's extremely engaging (although a little frustrating which I'll touch on shortly). The films main issue is that it was written, directed, produced, filmed and edited by one person, a commendable achievement to be honest but as many of us know an editor can really make or break a film and this one really could have benefitted from some one that was not engrained in every single aspect of the film. There's a killer 90 minute movie in here and one that I think a better editor could have shaped out of the footage shot. It takes 54 minutes before something happens at all, that first 54 minutes are used to "build" the characters but in reality we just get really long drawn out shots of them doing random things, it's a weird and bad choice, since we actually don't get any real info on these people and there is no emotional connection to them for when shit gets crazy. What they actually had was 15 minutes of useful footage that should have been used instead of 54 minutes of long boring hand cam shots. But the insanity that ensues after the hour mark is well worth sitting through, it's weird, kind of trippy and at times unnerving. Unfortunately it suffers from being too bloated and a problem with flash light lighting, they use LED flashlights with hyper concentrated beams to make it so you only see this tiny illuminated circle during the night scenes and it's just too much over the course of the film. It ends up losing it's effectiveness pretty quickly and will probably just annoy you by the end. All that said this is an interesting film and worth checking out.
The Dead & The Deadly dir by Wu Ma
Written by Sammo as well as starring him, The Dead & The Deadly continues off the success of Encounter of the Spooky Kind from two years prior. Sammo taking the Horror Comedy Martial Arts film and pushing further into the comedy side of things. I actually hadn't heard of this one until it was announced for bluray, my Sammo early years knowledge is pretty limited so I blindly grabbed this based on my enjoyment of Encounter and it was well worth my money. It's an absolute blast, Sammo is ridiculous here, it starts with him trying to scare his dead friends wife as a way to keep her from being an adulterer, he is found out and then the ghost of his friend actually shows up and murders his wife and her lover. From there it turns into Sammo investigating the murder of some one he thinks was poisoned but everyone is stating it was natural causes, when it reality it's some one trying to fake their death to get money. Hijinks ensue, murder actually happens and ghost of weird alien design appear. A few fun fight scenes, some goofy animated effects for good measure and an excellent ending only HK films of the era could pull off. Highly recommend this one if you're into early 80's HK and/or Sammo Hung.
