Bajrang Bali - Chandrakant - India - (1976)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0157845/

Plot by Imdb:" Bhagwan Shri Bajrangbali has had super-natural powers at a very young age which includes swallowing the sun, lifting mountains, just to name a few. Bajrangbali has always regarded the skies and universe as his playground and could leap and fly around at will. Non could be super-natural as Bajrangbali, he could make himself small and large, if needed, burn down a whole colony all at once. Bajrangbali makes it his duty to serve Bhagwan Shri Ram all days in his life. He will make this comes to light when Ram's wife, Devi Maa Sita, has been kidnapped by Shivbakht Ravan, and is being held captive in far off Lanka. He displays this as he locates Sitaji, kills Akshaye, Ravan's son, mocks Ravan, and even sets Lanka afire, before returning back to Ramji, and tells him that he has 30 days to get Sita back before Ravan forcibly marries her. Watch as events unfold what Bajrangbali will do to make Ram locates his wife, Sita, how he will save Ram's brother, Laxman from dieing and a good result at the end"

What an amazing movie ! A 3 hour treat for the lovers of Indian mythology, filled with fantasy and magic, as we watch Hanuman battling against the villains for the honor of his lord RAM. Quite a mesmerizing spectacle, Bajrang Bali really is a masterpiece of a kind: the art direction is impressive, sets are beautiful, the super old-school fx are great and flashy, the music is catchy (some songs are excellent),  the fights are funny, the actors are good overall and one dance act just left me with a stupid smile on my face (I guess I am a sucker for Indian extravagant choreography by sexy dancers). How can we ask more from a 1976 Bollywood movie about mythical events ? Guess Bajrang Bali would need to be rediscovered because it's really great fun.

Hail, hail Bajrang Bali !!!

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From Beyond - Stuart Gordon - USA - (1986)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091083/

Plot by Imdb: "Scientists create a resonator to stimulate the pineal gland (sixth sense), and open up a door to a parallel (and hostile) universe..."

I like Stuart Gordon. His movies are fun and really appealing to an all-time Lovecraft fan, like myself. It reminds me of my childhood when, with  a friend of mine, we put our money together to buy the first french edition of the Lovecraft biography by Sprague de Camp. Good ol' times ! 

Back to  Stuart Gordon. Good director of fantastic movies, he went on to direct some weird movies of his own that I particularly like: King of the ants, Edmond and Stuck, for example, are a rare mix of social / cultural comment, dark humor and plain insanity. Ironic and poignant, they left you wondering if you have to laugh or cry.

In From Beyond, no problem, you can laugh. Adding to Lovecraft's strange and paranoid story, Gordon injects some 80's humor in  the dialogues and delivers a movie that's packed with action, silicon makeup and  old-school CGI. The resut is a blast for the fan of horror comedy genre, like myself. Get a beer, sit back and relax for a nice ride that will get you through psychiatry, parallel universes, monsters, a frantic Jeffrey Combs (Re - animator) with a giant hypophys gland growing out of his head, Ken Foree (Dawn of the dead) in a blaxploitation baddass mockery and Barbara Crampton, sexy as hell  in an SM outfit...A 10 in my checklist.

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Altered States - Ken Russell - USA - (1980)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080360/

Plot by Imdb:"A Harvard scientist conducts experiments on himself with a hallucinatory drug and an isolation chamber that may be causing him to regress genetically."

30 years old and still one of the best psychedelic movies of all-time, way better than the 70's hippies experiments, Ken Russell's Altered State stands as one of the weirdest experience on screen, an amazing mix between drugsploitation and SciFi. The cast is super solid, especially William Hurt who's carrying the whole movie on his shoulders; the hallucinations fx are old school but quite effective and add to the general feeling of strangeness. Ken Russell proves once again that he has no limits. He breaks every barriers of credibility and go all the way to a point where many would think the story is getting ludicrous. More than a drugsploitation movie, it's a very impressive exploration of a wild scientific theory. It could be related to the theory of Stanford Anthropology doctor Jeremy Narby in his book, "The cosmic Serpent", witch postulate that the ingestion of hallucinogenic plant Ayahuasca gives the Peruvian indigeneous  tribe Ashaninka some kind of molecular knowledge of life, especially the knowledge of the ADN structure of life, and helps them analyse the molecular properties of the forest around. In this movie, no ADN but a backward trip to our ancestors that ends up in the most peculiar way.

You definitively should try this movie, this is good medicine for the soul.

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