PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Irish Luck 1939

Frankie Darro and Mantan Moreland appeared in Irish Luck, a 1939 crime comedy. Frankie is a bellboy and Mantan as the hotel's porter. Some crooks check into the hotel and Frankie spots them. His attempt to capture them goes south but the police arrive in the nick of time. Frankie's pal on the cops yells at him and Frankie promises to stop detecting and keep out of trouble.

It doesn't last long, almost immediately Frankie and Mantan help a young woman in trouble with some gangsters. Lucky for our plucky hero things work out for the best this time. I got a few laughs. I like the way Frankie and Mantan work together, they appeared in several movies together.

Frankie had a long career though he only lived to fifty-nine. He started at age 7 in 1924 and worked until he died in 1976. He was the voice of Lampwick in Disney's Pinocchio and he was the uncredited guy inside Robbie the Robot when he appeared in Forbidden Planet. He appeared on The Red Skelton Show, Bat Masterson, Have Gun-Will Travel and a couple of episodes of Batman.

 

Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle 2017

I really enjoyed Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, it's the 2017 remake of the Robin Williams film. They've updated the game to a video game. It's directed by Jake Kasdan, son of Lawrence Kasdan, and the screenplay is by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinker.

Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan are the on screen avatars of the players.That's Alex Wolff, Ser'Darius Blain, Madison Iseman and Morgan Turner as the real life players that get sucked into the jungle world.

A baddie stole a jewel, the Jaguar's Eye, and it needs to be returned to the giant statue to lift the curse. In the game, jungle is massive. It's pretty gorgeous country, it's filmed in Hilo and Honolulu, and the CGI adds even more value. There's plenty of critters and danger, which only reminds me to stay the fuck away from there. There's a good number of jokes, some video game related and less funny to me, still, I had plenty of other sniggers and such. The Blu-Ray looks great and there's a good chance I'll want to watch this again, a couple more times.

Ed Byrne - Crowd Pleaser Tour 2011

Ed Byrne's DVD Crowd Pleaser Tour 2011 arrived today and I popped it right in to have a laugh or two. This DVD follows the Different Class DVD and it's about as funny. There's a commentary track with Ed and his pal Dara O'Briain, it's pretty funny too. They keep talking about going to see Troll Hunter next. Hope they liked it, I know I did.

Ed Byrne - Different Class 2010

Ed Byrne is an Irish comedian and Different Class is the DVD of his 2010 tour. It's a nice long show, broken up into two 50 minute parts. Live there would be an opening act, then Ed for his two bits, with a 20 minute break between them. Ed whinges on about all the things that annoy him. It's a long show because there are many things on his list of annoying things to complain about. I feel his pain, there are many things that annoy me too. I got a bunch of laughs and was happy to see the show. I know I'd watch it again. There's an added bonus of a video commentary track with Ed and Jimmy Carr. I enjoyed that and I'll be getting some more Ed DVDs down the road. The nice thing about these DVDs is they're older ones and the price is often under ‎£5. I usually add a cheap disc onto a UK order.

Alan Carr - Spexy Beast 2011

Spexy Beast is Alan Carr's stand up tour from 2011. Alan performs in front of 13,000 people at the Manchester Evening News Arena. The Wikipedia tells me it was his first tour in large venues and there were 33 shows in total.

Alan buzzes about the stage, going on about what's happening in his life, and sweating. I laughed. Alan's show runs about 95 minutes and there's a 25 minute extra with Alan on Live At The Apollo. I liked it well enough to put some more of Alan's live show DVDs on my Amazon UK Wishlist.

Science Fiction Sunday 536

Disc 3 of Space 1999 has 4 more episodes. In one episode guest star Ian McShane is taken over by a space being. He needs more and more power to survive. He eventually sucks off one of the Nuclear Generating Plants and blasts into space. In the second episode a new born baby gets to host an alien life force. I hope they have some more plot ideas down the road. Another contact with aliens in the third episode, no one gets taken over, but the moon gets breathable atmosphere for a brief time. Voyager One was an automated space probe launched 15 years earlier. It's powered by the Queller warp drive and it's on a collision course for the station. The problem isn't the impact, it's the Queller drive. Unless they can shut it down the closer it gets to the moon the more radiation they'll get bathed with. What a predicament! On the plus side they've got the shamed designer of the Queller drive, under another name that even the Captain didn't know about, and Queller thinks he might be able to help shut off the drive. On the minus side the Voyager was followed by some aliens looking for the planet it came from, they want some revenge, the Queller drive killed off the people on two planets. Luckily Queller blows himself up with the aliens. Back to normal. The first three weren't too bad but the fourth seemed to drag on.

Friday Night Movies 727

Wacko is a 1982 horror comedy that was produced and directed by Greydon Clark. We'd watched his movie Uninvited just a couple of months ago and like that movie I don't think I need to see Wacko again after putting my eyeballs to the test. The movies got 4 writers, Dana Olsen, Michael Spound, Jim Kouf and David Greenwalt. You might need a lot of writers to pen all the gags in the film, it wasn't enough for funny gags. Jim and David worked on Grimm together and David worked on both Buffy and Angel.

It's got a huge cast, Joe Don Baker, Stella Stevens, George Kennedy, Julia Duffy, Elizabeth (EG) Daly, Andrew Dice Clay, Jeff Altman, Charles Napier and Michele Tobin. Some are alright and some are annoying. Same as the gags. Occasionally there was a guffaw or two but they were few and far between. I think I laughed out loud once and smiled a time or two. Not a good average for a movie with a gag or two every minute.

I'd wondered about Wacko after seeing it listed in the Hamilton Books video section but it's 22 dollar price tag put me off. I hardly ever pay that much for a movie, it would have to be pretty special for that kind of outlay. This wasn't special enough for me to shell out that cold hard cash and that's coming from a guy who spends his money foolishly all the time.

I didn't pay as much for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald but it still was in the 18-20 buck range. Usually I can wait for the new Blu-rays to fall a bit in price but I preordered this one. I enjoyed it. Lots of new stuff to think about in the Wizarding World. I'll want to watch it again sometime soon and I'll be interested in seeing what the third movie in the series brings.

The Class of '74 1972

The Class of '74 is a soft core nudie flick about some young women in college. It came out in 1972 and has an odd lot of creators. It lists two directors, Anthony Marks and Mack Bing. Arthur produced a 145 episodes of Perry Mason. I know I've seen them as I just watched the whole series a year or so ago. He also directed 76 episodes of the same show. In the 1970s he directed several movies, I've only seen Detroit 9000 and Linda Lovelace For President. Neither of them is outstanding.

A big chunk of The Class Of '74 was lifted from the 1970 film Gabriella, Gabriella. Mack Bing directed GG and the film is a mess of themes and images. It's a bit surreal and not the kind of thing people are going to want to book in their theaters. Mack worked various jobs in TV and movies. He directed 19 episodes of The Garry Moore Show back in 1964, I know we watched that show when it was new. His last directorial job was the first episode of The Smothers Brothers Show in 1975. Mack's greatest number of credits are for producing shows like The Garry Moore Show, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Roots, Quark, The Greatest American Hero, Airwolf, Magnum PI and Moonlighting. He passed away in 2008 at 85. GG was produced and financed by Louis Yale Brown who was Jerry Lewis's musical director. Jack Mattis wrote the story and the screenplay. It's Jack's only writing credit on the IMDb. He also was in GG as the molestin' coach and he was one of the producers. 

The two movies are way different in story even though they share a good bit of footage between them. They're both about 80 minutes but only about half of the footage from GG is in TCO'74. In the latter we meet four independent college women who talk about their lives and attitudes toward men. Most of that's new, the footage from GG is cut into that as flashbacks and such. There's plenty of nudity and sex but nothing too explicit. The way the footage was edited from GG really tells a different story. In GG Gabriella's family story is much longer and kind of sad, the father is womanizer and her mother has an affair. The documentary film makers get much more time to get their clothes off and the sexual lecture is much longer. The end of GG shifts gears as it gets more heavily political with a rather odd and somewhat surreal anti-racism message. There are musical montages too and at the end the cast dance naked by a pool. It's not something you see everyday, though I could now that I own the Code Red DVD. Not that I would, no time for that.

The movie doesn't get the Blood Bath treatment extras wise, it has a trailer for each movie and 8 random trailers for other Code Red releases. I thought it was fun enough but it's the sort of thing that won't appeal to all.

Blood Bath 1966

The most interesting film in the 4 film Blu-ray set of Blood Bath isn't one of the features but the Tim Lucas documentary that goes with them. It's the main extra in this 2 disc set and it really illustrates why I find Roger Corman so frustrating. Occasionally he's an entertaining film maker but sometimes he's so cheap it grates to the bone. Tim has spent a good bit of work researching Blood Bath and it's history, it's an admirable bit of film making. Not Blood Bath, Tim's documentary The Trouble With Titian Revisited. It's well worth seeing.

Operacija Ticijan is the Yugoslavian title for Operation: Titian, that's the film Roger Corman invested in back in 1963. According to Jack Hill in the documentary Roger had a habit of looking for unpaid films at developers and he'd buy them. I hadn't heard that before but I knew he had bought some Russian SF films and worked the special effect shots into new scenes shot in the US.

In Yugoslavia Roger put up $20K and transport for the 3 people he supplied, the Yugoslavians would feed and house them while they were working on the film. William Campbell and Patrick Magee were in front of the camera and Francis Ford Coppola was the script supervisor and English coach. They were there nearly 5 months, William said he had a great time, he meet his wife there.

The Yugoslavian producers had planned to film in English and Roger would get the US rights. What he got was a film that he didn't think he could sell to the US distributors. Money well spent, Roger. He reedited the film and changed the dialog a bit and sold it to TV as Portrait Of Terror.

In 1964 Jack Hill got hired by Roger to make something of the film. He turned a murder mystery involving a stolen painting into a vampire film called Blood Bath. He shot a lot of new footage and worked that into the film. It ran 62 minutes and never got released. Stephanie Rothman was then hired to shoot more footage and she eventually turned in a 69 minute film that played on a double feature with Queen Of Blood. QOB was another film Roger had bought from the Russians and edited in new footage. Additional footage was added to Blood Bath to pad it out to 80 minutes, it was sold to TV as Track Of The Vampire.

All four versions of the film are on the two discs. Operation: Titian was watchable but a bit dull, Portrait In Terror cut the travelogue like opening to the film and sped up the story. Blood Bath was entertaining enough, Track Of The Vampire was longer but weaker. I was starting to lose interest during the last film. As I said earlier I enjoyed the Tim Lucas look at the film history and would recommend that over the features. It's a nice package, there's a booklet of essays and a poster, but there's really nothing special about any of the movies.

Return Of The Living Dead - Rave To The Grave 2005

Return Of The Living Dead - Rave To The Grave is the last of the films in the series. It's from 2005, William Butler and Aaron Strongoni are the writers, Ellory Elkayem is the director. Peter Coyote has some Trioxin and the Russians are after it. They want to destroy the stuff but they fail and some zombies are created. Peter is killed and the story moves to the survivors of the last movie. They're in college. They hear of Peter's death and find a couple of barrels of Trioxin in his house. That creates more zombies. Again, the film doesn't come up to the level of the first three films. Oh, well, that shit happens, huh.