Sperhauk picked up a copy of The Inglorious Bastards for real cheap. It's the 3 disc edition. The movie on one disc, a disc of extras and the soundtrack. Nice package, especially for about 5 bucks. This is the movie that Quentin Tarantino just remade. I haven't seen that movie. Might be fun. The 1978 movie sure was. It's called Quel maledetto treno blindato in Italy which literally translates as That damned armored train. It's France in 1944. Some scummy criminal soldiers are being transported for trial when the convoy is attacked. Most everyone is slaughtered and 6 convicts escape, headed by Bo Swenson. He's on the lower end of villany when compared to the other guys. The guys get into some scraps with the local German soldiers. Lots of people get blasted with machine gun fire. They hook up with a German soldier who is tired of the fighting. He will help them get to Switzerland, if he can go with them. He's not any better at planning 
than they are. Every plan they try gets them captured by more Germans. More machine gun fire. After escaping from one group they run into a truckload of Nazi's who start shooting. They blast them with machine guns. It turns out they were American spys. They learn this when they get caught by the French resistance. In order to save their asses the guys undertake the secret mission the real spys were on. That's where the damned armored train comes in. They have to get the gyroscopey bit from a missle on the train. A train filled with German soldiers just waiting to get blasted with machine gun fire. Most everyone gets dead by the end of the movie, especially them Nazis. There are some pretty good explosions, lots of carnage and a great scene with some naked German women. The guys find them bathing in the river and jump in. When the women find out the guys are American's they pull out their machine guns and start blasting. In their birthday suits! Who doesn't like that. It's a short scene but I appreciate the extra work that the 5 writers took to get the scene just right. There are plenty of explosions and occasional pistol fire to go along with all the machine gun fire. There's a train crash and some fair to good model work. Occasionally it looks a bit fakey but that isn't much of a problem. It fights the rest of the movie. Well worth the watch.
Joe NetFlix'd The Sword of Doom. They sent the 2005 Criterion dvd. It looked pretty good. It's a 1958 Japanese movie about a cold hearted, dead eye'd samurai that likes to kill, and how it affects the people around him. He starts the movie by killing a peasant who is praying for death at a roadside shrine. Stupid peasants, take care what you wish for, sometimes your prayers are answered. You can read a longer description of the story at the Wikipedia. It's a dark slow moving piece that's punctuated with violent murder. It's end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and there's a 
general lawlessness going on. I didn't remember much about the film. I hadn't seen it in a while, which is okay because I enjoyed it all over again. I did remember the haunting dead eyes of main bad guy and the fight in the snow that Toshiro Mifune has with a gang of assassins. You can see the fight on YouTube. It's a cool bit of action. Mifune isn't in the movie long enough but it's not really his movie. It's Tatsuya Nakadai's movie. He's great as the stone faced killer. You might have seen him in some other movies, like The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, High and Low, Kaidan and Ran to name a few of the more famous ones. It's not a happy movie by any stretch of the imagination. Everyone gets screwed over pretty much. Still a good reminder not to want to live in fuedal Japan.
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