It’s only my second week of doing these throwback recommendations and I already kind of stumped myself. It’s not that I am at a loss for any titles to bring up, it really just comes down to relevancy. First in my mind, I wanted to talk about Rob Zombie’s House Of 1000 Corpses, which celebrates it fifteen year anniversary this week. Seeing as I brought Fede Alvarez’s remake of Evil Dead last week, doubling up on horror may be a little much but this film is an absolute iconic gory experience that showed Zombie’s love for everything monstrous and paved the way for his greatest onscreen masterpiece, The Devil’s Rejects. If you have never seen this one and have a penchant for something decidedly messed up and slightly derivative of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre the “run, rabbit, run” to go find this one.
I digress. My point this week is to bring attention to two fantastic films from the last year or so that are now available anytime on Netflix. First up is the latest Yorgos Lanthimos film The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which was uploaded last week. If you have already checked out his last film The Lobster starring Colin Farrell then you are already aware of how much his films differ from everyone else’s. He has stilted dialogue, wooden feeling blocking and a penchant for making things unbelievably twisted in the blink of an eye and where The Lobster was a comedy, Killing is certainly not. The story is about an idyllic family man and open heart surgeon, again played by Farrell, who has a questionable and awkward friendship with the son of a former patient that get very sinister very quickly. This film will stick with you for a long time after the credits hit.
The second film is a bit more popular but always demanding another re-watch, Shane Black’s buddy comedy The Nice Guys. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe have such magic chemistry together, playing private investigators of varying degrees that have to team up to solve the murder of an adult film actress. Actors are only as good as their script and however great our two leads are in this film, Black screenplay elevates them even higher and when you add in young Australian actress Angourie Rice as Gosling’s whip smart daughter to the mix you have a movie filled with so much great dialogue that you will be laughing so hard that you may miss follow-up lines here and there. This is why it is so brilliant for Netflix to offer this title. They know just as well as I do that this one will get people over and over again.
Steve Stebbing 