Movie Mon. - The French are a Riot

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian: Second installment of the big-screen adapation of C.S. Lewis's fantasy series finds the Pevensie children called back to Narnia over a thousand years after they left to help the human Prince Caspian save the remaining Narnians from the advances of the savage Telmarines. It's been a looooooooooong time since I read the book, so I spent most of the film going "I'm not sure, but I thought Caspian was much younger in the book, and what's with all this Susan/Caspian romance going on? That wasn't in the original, was it?" But adaptation issues aside, I really enjoyed it. They did an awesome job with the character of Reepicheep, the mouse knight, both in terms of animation and voice-work (thank you, Eddie Izzard), and Peter Dinklage was night unto unrecognizable as Trumpkin.

Frontier(s): French horror film about a group of young crooks taking advantage of riots to pull a job, and then hiding out at a hostel, only to find that their hosts are sadistic, blood-thirsty neo-Nazi's with an insane breeding program. Not a bad little film; interesting concept, a couple of fairly gruesome sequences, and not too much in the way of "Oh, come one, nobody in their right mind would do that!" scenes. Was a bit slow to get going, though, and few of the protagonists were all that likable, so I had a bit of trouble getting into it early on; really picks up once you meet the bizarre Nazi clan.

Inside: Another French horror film set during a time of riots -- what are the odds?-- except this one centers on a pregnant widow who is attacked at her home the night before her planned delivery date by a crazed woman who wants to claim the baby as her own. Dang, was this movie intense! Found myself squirming in my seat more during this movie than pretty much anything else I've seen in I don't know how long. Sure, the last third of the movie suffered greatly from stretching my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point (why didn't she keep the gun? Why oh why oh WHY didn't she keep the gun?), but on the whole the tension and suspense of the cat and mouse game played by the uber-creepy stalker lady kept me enthralled. Not for the squeamish at all.

Vision Quest: Mid-80s film about a high school wrestler (Matthew Modine) who decides he wants to drop several weight classes in order to wrestle the best guy in the state, a quest that gets derailed when he and his dad take in a independent (and sexy) border (Linda Fiorentino in her big screen debut). Li'l Random has been referencing this a lot recently, so I picked it up at the Media Library for our Odd Squodd Mostly-Regular Dark and Twisty, Strange and Unusual, Off-Beat, Quirky, Movie Fest, although in this case I think we might want to add the word "cheesy" in there somewhere. Honestly, though, this was a pretty good movie; a bit dated, to be sure, but it had plenty of quotable lines that will be sure to entertain Li'l Brother and myself for weeks to come, as well as some nice fashion ides -- the Random One is adamant that we find matching work-out suits like the main character wore to lose weight, due to their space-man like design. . Would kind of like to watch it with PigPen just to hear him critique the wrestling sequences.