Arrange my movie-collection - in which order?

This is such a big probem. The last years I've been living with my collection in cartons in the basement - and now in cartons in my livingroom. I have no clue where the movies I want to see are. Where I lived before I had some kind of order, but nowdays... I have no idea how to do it. Tonite I will get to shelfs, classic Billy-shelfs from Ikea. So now it's time to clean up the streets and show my collection who's the man!

Jocke prefers alphabetical order. It's a nice thought and it's easy to find the title you want. But do I really want Burial Ground together with Bad Boys 2? Or Transmorphers together with Transformers? It's something with mixing movies that disturbs me. But maybe... maybe. Jocke also pointed out that some movies, if you have several releases, has different titles. So that fucks everything up anyway.

Some people prefer to sort them by lable, but I'm a movie collector, not a lable collector. So that won't work anyway, though it would be nice to have all Mondo Macabro together. Maybe by genre? Could be an idea - until I realise that some movies belongs in different genres. Horror-comedies for example. Should they be in horror or comedy? They can both be scary and funny.

My dream would to have something similar to what I had in Östersund, three different areas: European, American and Asian. And in each part I also sort in genres. The main problem is to keep them in order because often I buy so much movies that it grows everyday. That means I always have to move around the movies so other movies can fit in the shelfs... WHICH means that I will get lazy sooner or later and stop putting them in some special order, and just stack them on top of other movies.

Another thing: shall I put my über-special-limited-boxes together with the "normal" movies and their correct cateogory, or just have them on a special shelf above the TV and players? What about TV-series? Shall I mix them with ordinary movies?

You see, nothing is simple. It's very complicated... very, very complicated. At least for me.

Aenigma (1987)

There's one stunning shot in Aenigma. The spirit/astralbody of the braindead girl is leaving her body, moves up through all the floors, out on the roofs, floats over a very cool miniature landscape and lands at the St Marys Boaring School. This is a vintage Fulci in the works, very atmospheric, orginal and with stunning visuals. It's a pity that the rest of the movie don't have that magic we love much. 

Where the movie lacks in story and characters, it has a distinct style and professional look. The story is a mix between Patrick and Carrie, with a few sprinkles of Suspiria. That's okey for me, the biggest part of my movie collection is movies that's trying to imitate other movies - sometimes it's better, sometimes not. This could have worked if the characters wasn't so god damn flat. It's just talking faces, a few tits and uninspired dialogue. I like Jared Martin a lot, but he hasn't much to do here except delivering silly lines and kissing overaged teenaged girls.

Here and there we have some great shots and some that could have been a lot better (for example where the girl is getting attacked by the art) and some that dosen't work at all, among them the infamous snail-scene. The problem with that one is that snails is unimpressive to watch at in movie. They just slime around, doing nothing - and no disgusting sound effects in the world can save that. The gore is quite minimal to, which is sad - because this could have been a so much funnier movie with some nasty gore-effects.

I'm negative now, but I would recommend it for the cinematography and that Fulci injects some inspiration where he feels for it. He's doing a cameo to, as usual, and looks very sick and weak. Far away from the streetwise editor in Zombi 2 or the machine gun-maniac in Contraband. After a while I was sitting counting the famous people showing up on posters in the schoolgirls rooms. Stallone (with a snail on!) and Cruise is to, and I can swear I saw Christopher Lambert to. But I could be wrong. Even if I like him, and would never never never have a poster of him on the wall. 

Maybe not the best Fulci has done, but still better than a lot of the other shit out there. So give it a try when you're in the mood for some slow-moving italian horror from the tacky eighties.

Krause and other thai ghost in a tv-commercial!

Quite funny actually, and with a sense of humour that you don't see everywhere. Good idea for a commercial to. 

Voices from Beyond (1991)

It took me few years to watch Voices from Beyond, not because I didn't want to see it, just because it didn't work on my shitty dvd-player. But nowdays a bluray-player shines in my livingroom, and I'm happy to say it played this dvd without any problem. Voices could almost have been the swan song of Lucio Fulci, but destiny made him do another movie, the okey Door to Silence. But if this movie had been his last, it would have sealed a great career in a very nice way.

A greedy man dies in pain in his hospital bed. He's coughing blood and won't survive the night. His family is waiting for him to die, so they can get rich. But the man dosen't day, not inside. His mind is still alive, and struggling to force someone to discover how he died. That one is his daughter, which slowly realises how everyone want's her father money. At the same time the spirit of the dead man is haunting the dreams of the family...

Voices from Beyond is a poetic revenge movie. It's beautifully shot, one of the most good looking Fulci-movies since Murder Rock. It's also seems like Fulci maybe had a little bit money, a little bit more time, to make this movie. The direction is very good and the camera compositions is up there among his best. Just look at the details, the shadow at the train or the camera movements during the funeral. It's a master at work. There's master touches all over the movie, even if it's far from perfect - but it's far from bad either. The actors do what they can do with cheesy dialogue, but turns out okey performances. The music is one of the best things. Very simple, almost meditative electronic stuff that fits very good to the dream-like quality of the movie.

When it comes to pure horror it's like a normal Fulci-movie: it's more about dread than dead. The atmosphere is thick and slow, and as usual no jump-scares. Just a feeling of something sick. Of course there's some gore: a nasty autopsy, a few gory knife-stabbings and a decomposing body. But it's quiet laid back compared to some of his other work. 

So, slim on story, but fat in depth and atmosphere. Fulci still shows us who could transform an ordinary italian tv-movie to something very special.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969)

I just can't get enough of adventure-movies set in historical times. Temples, battles, intrigues, men dressed in very little clothes.

There's peplums, there's dark dramas from the eastern europe, there's Hollywood extravaganzas. And then we have those middle-movies. Not cheap, not expensive, just inbetween somewhere. They're aren't consider big classics because not so many people know about them. Kings of the Sun is one one. The War Lord is another one. Excellent flicks, but hardly any movies that are brought up together with the big classics in the genre, like Spartacus or Ben-Hur. The Royal Hunt of the Sun is one of the most forgotten ones, maybe just because it's in public domain and no one really bothered to release it properly over the years. I think it's well worth watching, if not only for impressive performances by Robert Shaw and Christopher Plummer.

Robert Shaw plays Pizarro, the spanish explorer who makes one final journey to South America to proove to his king that there are gold for everyone there. This time he's being forced to bring two priests and a couple of the kings men with him, which causes trouble. The only thing they want is to make everyone they meet a christian and claim more land for Spain. Pisarro is a warrior, but also way smarter than the religious idiots he has to bring with him, and when they meet a young and free-spirited Inca King (Christopher Plummer) he's starting to get confused about his mission and about his religion...

As you can hear, it's mostly a drama - and it's based on play by the way - but it's also a good drama with Plummer in one of the most weird roles I've seen him in. He's has the strangest acccent I've heard in a movie, makes sounds and weird movements, like monkey or a bird, and dances around like a madman. He causes a crisis when he says he's a god, and makes the spanish monks belive he's a reincarnation of Satan. The spanish expects him to convert to christianity, to act like a "normal" person, but finds out that he never will do that. Instead he starts to question the logic in the christian religion, which opens up more questions about morality and what people do in gods name.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun is shot in Peru, and they uses something that looks like a real Inca temple. The location is fantastic, and if it's fake I just want to send my regards to the set designers. Like Kings of the Sun, it has a realistic feeling to it, and there's a lot of strange rituals and clothes that seems real, and not some silly invention from Hollywood (or England in this case). But is there any action at all? Yes, there's one battle in the beginning when the spanish first meet the Inca king and his people. But it's not a normal generic epic movie-battle, it's much cooler. Everything is in slow-mo, gorgeous slow-mo so you can see everything. It's like a early version of 300, with less blood. It's so stylish and cool that it made the hair on my arms stand up. Every movie I love has that "thing" that makes it even closer to me, and this is one of the scenes which moved this movie from good to great in my opinion. It was the extra spice I needed before all the drama started.

I've only seen the short version, which runs around 95 minutes. The original version is almost 2 hours. This is a cheap british dvd which is in the original ratio, but non-anamorphic. The picture quality is quite bad, but better than the other versions of the movie I've seen.

The Strangeness (1985)

I've read a couple of negative, or at least patronizing, reviews of The Strangeness, and after watching the movie myself I just can't understand these opinons. Sure, it's cheap and gritty, but also a quite good monster movie with great locations and a very bisarre monster. Shot on weekends and on sparetime during one year, this a movie with a lot of love you actually can see.

Basically it's a couple of cave-explorers going to find gold, or something, that get's caught in an old mine and hunted down by a grotesque tentacle-monster with a vagina-mouth. It has a slow build up with some okey character-work and very little horror - but when the finally go down in the mine there's a great atmosphere, ya know the one you can cut with a knife, and even if the filmmakers holds back on the gore, there's nothing boring going on. It's competent storystelling.

I was surprised that the movie looked so good and professional. The only thing that really reveals the low budget nature is the cheap filmstock and some editing choices. But except that it's a eighties horror movie like a lot of other, except with a lot more atmosphere. It reminded me of everything from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Ciro Ippolito's Alien 2. The mirror scene is up there with the best, and with a stunning use of how you can use a mirror to make a dialogue scene much more tension-filled.

Mark Sawicki's stop-motion effects are primitive, but I've seen worse, and for once they are used in an intelligent way. Mostly hidden in shadows, this is a cheap monster that looks much more impressive that way. It's not only strange, it's really disgusting to! When I come to think of that, it's quite fun that Sawicki came out as gay after this movie and the director made a sex-operation - which considering the vagina-like monster is kinda fun. But on the other side, it maybe should have been more fitting with a penis-monster instead for the director?

The Cod Red dvd is in great shape, and has a couple of very entusiastic interview with the makers of the movie. Smart people with a lot of affection for their old b-movie. I would say this is my favorite cave-movie from now on, together with Alien 2 and The Descent!

Our cat in Halloween-mode!

Here she is. Looking scarier than ever. The head twisted like little Regan's in The Exorcist, tongue like the Aswang and wild, rolling eyes like He Who Walks Behind The Rows! No surprise we can't have her in the bedroom during the night anymore. We fear for our life.