movies that stuck with you all these years

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The Exorcist
Dune (1984)
Conan The Barbarian (1982)
No Country For Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Star Wars movies
Star Trek movies
The Matrix movies
Superman
Jaws
Phantasm
Silence Of The Lambs
Fargo
Kill Bill 1&2
Blade Runner
The Ninth Configuration

When President Kennedy was assassinated, the assassination coverage was on tv that entire weekend. For an elementary school kid, there was nothing on at all -- just useless news coverage.

Except on Saturday night, one channel actually showed a movie. I watched it and had no idea what the movie was. It had something to do with a tank and the tank's crew out in a big desert and they were out of water.

I may have had no idea what it was, but the small fragments of the movie haunted me.

About forty years later, the video tape rental places abounded. One weekend, I rented a movie and took it home to watch. It didn't take long after I started watching it to realize that there was something familiar about the movie. Pretty soon, I realized that I was watching the same movie that they showed the weekend of the assassination of President Kennedy. It was Sahara starring Humphrey Bogart.

Mostly all of Al Pacino's movies - I have almost all on DVD

World of Suzie Wong

I saw a film, way back in the late 90s called The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase that has haunted me ever since. It was so strange, an arthouse pseudo-documentary that came out around the same time as Blair Witch Project and shared that grainy, camcorder look. I remember a woman microwaving her baby but it wasn't the horror of that idea which affected me, there was a sort of horror in the very way the film was put together. The rough cuts and the poor quality of the footage, the weird unemotional tone of it. I never saw it again and its one of those things where you wonder if it ever really existed, or was it a bad dream?

The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase

In an effort to wash that out of my mind I'll mention a movie I like. I'm not going to say it is a particularly good movie but it remains stuck in my head and I'd always be glad to watch:

The Crawling Eye [1958]
<=>"It's looking for you!"



Really, I like The Crawling Eye.

^Well if you ever find a way to watch it, let me know! I'd be interested in seeing it again.

Oh I have another one. Apaches (1977).

This was public safety film that was shown to kids in school, particularly kids who lived in rural areas. I'd probably have been 8 or 9 when it was shown in my school.

It's about 6 kids who are playing on a farm. One by one they die in horrific accidents. From memory, one gets crushed by a tractor, one drowns in a slurry pit. The one that really haunted me was a girl who died drinking poison from a bottle, pretending it was alcohol. They didn't show her actually die, it was just a static shot of the farmhouse at night with a light on in the window and these terrible screams ringing out as she dies in agony - that image is burned in my psyche.

The really weird thing about that movie was the parents reaction to the children dying. After each death there'd be a shot clip of the adults doing something like putting the child's clothes into a drawer and closing it, or removing their plate from the dinner table - all very sombre. And then they'd just carry on like nothing had happened, and the children would go out next day to play on the farm again, and another one would die.

It was absolutely terrifying. I never played on a farm. So I suppose it did its job but you'd never be able to show it in a school now, I'm sure of that.

^^^
I don't know if I should be appalled... or if I should take it as gallows humor and laugh.