Hot Fuzz (2007)

From the same people (and starring some of the same actors) that brought you "Shaun of the Dead" (which I haven't written about yet), this is "Hot Fuzz".

Simon Pegg does a great job as a police officer reassigned from London to a small village because he's making everyone else in his department look bad. I don't know if you'd call it "deadpan" acting, but he played the part fairly straight and it just made it all that much funnier. Never mind that it's a murder mystery as well as a comedy. The last 15 minutes or so had me laughing so hard my sides ached.

Hot Fuzz stars Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and a whole slew of others. Here's the trailer:

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Looker (1981)

Released to theaters in 1981, it took until 2006 to see "Looker" released on DVD. I saw the movie when it was originally released, but I must have slept through most of it because the only thing I remembered was the "looker gun".

Looker, starring Albert Finney (of too many movies to name), Susan Dey (Partridge Family, L.A. Law, others), James Coburn (way too many movies) and more, this is the story of an evil pre-modern computer research company. A plastic surgeon becomes suspicious when his clients start dying weeks after he fixes their features to exacting specifications. The research company, using an advanced optical gun, hypnotizes the victims and causes them to have accidents that look like suicides. Once they discover the plastic surgeon (Finney) is on to them, they try to take him out of the picture. It all backfires and the hero gets the girl in another classic story from Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Sphere, Coma, Westworld, The Andromeda Strain, others). I couldn't find a trailer, but I did find other clips. Here's a clipped scene followed by a deleted scene:

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