PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 792

First up the remaining movie in the Karel Zeman box set from Criterion. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen came out in 1962 in Czechoslovakia under the title of Baron Prášil. It was released in the US in 1964 under TFBM title. It's quite the thing to look at, a mix of animation and live action with colors that change from vivid to subdued as the scenes play out. The backgrounds are meant to look like Doré engravings. Furniture and props are painted to match the style of the engravings. The attention to detail is remarkable. Karel directed and wrote the screenplay. Jirí Brdecka, Gottfried August Bürger, Josef Kainar and Rudolph Erich Raspe also get writing credits.

An astronaut from Earth named Tonik, Tony in the US dubbed version, lands on the moon only to find the main characters from Jules Verne's From The Earth To The Moon wondering about. Baron Munchausen shows up and he joins the men in mistakenly thinking Tonik is from the Moon. The astronaut has a spacesuit on so he isn't saying much. The Baron decides to take Tonik for a visit to the Earth. They leave in the Baron's flying ship. Once out of the suit Tonik and the Baron have conversations.

The Baron's got 6 horses but they're the flying sort, I can't imagine what their brake horsepower would be. The Baron and Tonik have a series of adventures in the 18th century Ottoman Empire. They rescue a princess from a sultan, they fight his soldiers and escape. Later they get eaten by a whale and beat an armada.

 

It's very colorful and there's plenty of running about, derring do, fantasy and fun. I liked it well enough to want to watch it again someday.

My second film is Streets Of Fire, it's subtitled A Rock & Roll Fable. I picked up the 35th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray to replace a copy from an old laserdisc. Looks much nicer. I went to the theater to see it in 1984, a couple of times, in fact. The movie was written by Walter Hill and Larry Gross, Walter directed. It came out a couple of years after 48 Hrs and 5 years after The Warriors. The latter is still my favorite Walter Hill movie.

Diane Lane is a singer doing a show when Willem Defoe comes along and kidnaps her off the stage. He's called Raven and he's the leader of a scumbag biker gang called the Bombers. Raven wears ludicrous shiny black leather overalls and no shirt. Michael Paré is Diane's ex-boyfriend, Deborah Van Valkenburgh is Michael's sister, Rick Moranis is Diane's manager and current boyfriend, Amy Madigan is a soldier looking for a job and a place to stay.

That's Raven. What a cock! Rick hires Michael to go rescue Diane from that face. The local police aren't up to the task, that's for sure. Michael and Amy rescue Diane but Raven vows revenge. He wants a battle with Michael and he gets it. They slug it out with some sort of goofy long handled picks or hammers.

Larry Gross said he was influenced by the success of Flashdance and they decided to make a musical. I found I didn't care that much to listen to Diane sing anymore so I fast forwarded through those bits. I've always liked the look of the film, it's very 50s like but there's plenty of stuff in the movie that's out of that period. Like some musicals it's set in a bit of fantasy world. The musical numbers are colorful and bright, scenes in other places are often dull and dingy. The neighborhood is in the poor part of town and a bit rundown at best. The streets are a giant set that was built outside and covered with a tarp. It's a great set.

It's entertaining, I liked the characters, I liked the script, I liked the look. I was glad to have picked this Blu-ray up. There's a commentary to listen to and a whole second disc with two documentaries and more. I'll need several hours for that, so who knows when I'll get back to it.

Science Fiction Sunday 576

Aniara is a 1960 Swedish TV movie that's based on the 1956 Aniara poem by Harry Martinson. It's been turned into a science fiction opera Karl-Birger Blomdahl and Erik Lindegren. It was preformed several times in 1959. The TV version was directed by Arne Arnbom. There's a 2018 adaptation that I haven't seen.

The story is about a spaceship that is transporting people from Earth to Mars. It has a collision with an asteroid and winds up lost in space. It's a very minimalist production, there are only a few sets, you can get an idea of them from the pictures. Sadly there seem to be very few images available online and the download I found crashes VLC Player when I try to do a screen capture. The download has English subtitles. I found it a hard slog, it helped to speed it up a bit. There's not a lot of story exposition, between the singing bits there is a good bit of dead space with nothing much happening. There's also a good bit of interpretive dance. I thought the concept was interesting, I liked the costumes and sets, the opera style is of little interest to me, though I have liked bits of opera music from time to time. Glad to have seen it, I'll keep the download but it's likely I won't bother to watch it again. You can read about the poem and see the TV movie in the links in the titles above.

Astro is a 2018 SF movie directed by Asif Akbar, he wrote it with Bernard Selling. It's about a rich guy's space program, Alexander Biggs is working with some ancient aliens from another dimension. They've built a space craft and taken it into space, they returned with a captured alien that has the DNA of a guy named Jack, a guy that Biggs knew from his Army days. Biggs wants to know how that DNA got there and he goes after Jack. There's plenty of running about and stuff you'd expect in a low budget SF movie, lots of yakking and walking through corridors. It goes on and on and I was not liking it much at all. Especially when it ended on a cliff hanger. I speed this one up too. I'm getting to old to waste time on this sort of thing. Don't watch it. I found it at Dollar Tree for a buck, I'll keep it to remind me that I wasted that buck. I won't watch it again, out of spite.

Science Fiction Sunday 570

Prometheus Trap is a 2012 low budget SF movie. It has an estimated budget of $560K on the IMDb. I believe it. It's written by Steven J Niles and directed by Andrew Bellware. Both have made more than a dozen pictures each, this is the first for me. A space ship is sent to investigate a missing cargo ship. I wasn't too fond of the ships, the CGI is fair, kind of monotone. The crew, two humans and an android, get to the ship and find a couple of people still alive. The actors are fair to good, none are familiar to me. The ship has a secret weapon, one that can destroy the Earth by knocking it out of time. The device has turned on and it's making the ship and everyone in it repeat a segment of time over and over again. Lucky for them, the androids have an offline memory, it lives in hyperspace and isn't affected by the time resets. Eventually something else happens and the movie is over. I kind of liked the concept of it but wasn't impressed for the most part. I saw it on Amazon Prime and wouldn't bother with it again. I see there's a DVD, I wouldn't need a copy, though it might turn up in one of those multi movie packs of genre films. I'd probably buy it, if the price is low enough and I didn't have most of the movies.

Operation Atlantis was another film from AP. I've been picking through their free SF movies and it's getting harder and harder to pick a good one. The AP description for Operation Atlantis said it's SF, so does the IMDb, but that's stretching it a bit. There is an underground atomic city but we don't see much of it. There's not much by way of cool spy gadgets but the main spy has a radio transmitter in his elbow. It's an 1965 Italian and Spanish co-production with American John Erickson as George Steele Agent S 03. It was filmed in both countries. There's a bit of nice scenery but most of it's dully shot. The movie pokes along and it's 100 minutes long. There's some fights, car chases and gun battles, much of which are handled at a level below average to me. The whole movie isn't up the level of the worse of the OSS-117 movies I watched a while back. Not going to bother seeing it again. It'll be removed from my Watchlist next time I get in there.

Science Fiction Sunday 565

My Alien Girlfriend is a 2019 SF movie directed by Sean King, he co-wrote the script with son Taylor King. Taylor has a part in the movie. A guy named Joe is getting married, his wife is off for her bachelorette party but he's supposed to stay home and out of trouble. Joe's a super nerd who does a podcast show about SF culture. His friends want to take him to a strip club but he decides to stay home. Good thing he did, an alien landed in his backyard and turned into a beautiful naked woman. The alien copied it's human disguise from a movie poster on Joe's wall and everyone who sees her thinks she's the actress. That creates more problems for Joe and during all the running. He also finds out some stuff about his girlfriend he didn't know. Joe spends a big part of the movie helping the alien with language and clothes, it really slowed the movie but the last half picks up a bit as more characters start to interact. It's got a fairly good idea but the execution is a bit weak. There are few special effects and most of them are in the first 10 minutes. The actors are amateurish, some are a bit better than others but they get the job done. I wish the jokes were punchier but I got to the end. I wouldn't need to see it again. It was on Amazon Prime as is this second film.

I hadn't seen Mutiny In Outer Space before, at least it's not on my watched movie list. It's getting to be harder to find an old SF film I haven't seen before. It came out in 1965 and it was directed by Hugo Grimaldi and an uncredited Arthur C Pierce, they co-wrote the movie with Bernard Woolner, David Woolner and Lawrence Woolner. Astronauts return to Space Station X-7 to have their cargo of rocks inspected before they head for Earth. One of the astronauts collapses and eventually dies from a fungus. It's possibly dangerous to everyone on Earth but the Captain goes a bit nuts and tries to cover up the situation. The fungus takes hold and the crew fights back as best they can. The Italian poster shows an alien, there are no aliens like that, just that fuzzy feather boa like fungus. The film is barely average, it's got a 5.0 on the IMDb with 300 votes but there are a good number of 10 votes. I'd give it a 5 for the story idea but 4 for the execution. I gave it a 5 anyway. It won't ever be a 60s favorite for me but it's watchable. I got to the end. I might even watch it again someday but I wouldn't need to buy the DVD, I downloaded a copy from YouTube. You an check it out there by using the link in the title above.

Friday Night Movies 753

I had seen The Terrornauts back in 1993 and I had watched it again in 2010 for a Science Fiction Sunday post. I couldn't remember anything about it. This last week I received a DVD from the UK that's part of The British Film series from Network. It has two versions of the film on it, the original theatrical release at 74 mins and the re-release at 58 mins. The copy I had seen came from the Sci-Fi channel back in 1993. I recorded it off the TV and transferred that VHS tape to a DVDr, it runs 69 mins. We watched the 74 min version, it's image isn't as cleaned up as the shorter version but it was still watchable. I like the poster above, it's sure more exciting than the film.

The Terrornauts came out in 1967 and was produced by Amicus Productions. It came out on a double bill with They Came From Beyond Space. The Wikipedia says that the double bill has been called "the two worst films the company ever produced". John Brunner adapted the Murray Leinster novel The Wailing Asteroid for his screenplay. The Wikipedia synopsis for the novel helps show all the changes that Brunner put in and that might be the reason that he hadn't done any more film screenplays. A couple of his stories were adapted for episodes of Out Of The Unknown but he didn't write the screenplays.

The film is directed by Montgomery Tully. I've seen a handful of Montgomery's 40 films, Battle Beneath The Earth, Master Spy, The Electronic Monster, Scotland Yard Dragnet and The Key Man. Some of them are in The British Film collection.

That's our crew of space travelers. Left to right we've got Stanley Meadows, Patricia Hayes, Charles Hawtrey, Zena Marshall and Simon Oates. Simon heads the project collecting radio data from space. He believes there's something out there and it turns out he's right. Stanley is his co-worker on the project, Zena is the office manager, Charles is an accountant come to check the project books for the funders, and Patricia is the tea lady.

The aliens come to Earth and steal the projects building, taking the five people in it to a space station out among the asteroids. The only sentient being is the robot and he doesn't say much. The robot tests them and they learn that the aliens that built the station have been in a long war with the Enemy. Now the Enemy is headed for Earth, Simon has been chosen to battle the incoming fleet. He's got the robot and a whole lot of missiles.

They win the day and return to Earth via a transporter device. It's a clumsy movie with barely adequate special effects. It's almost more interesting for what it is than for the story. It's not often you seen an accountant and a tea lady in space. There's probably a good reason for that. I'm glad to have a nicer copy of the movie and I hope to make time to see it again in a few years.

I wouldn't bother with The Mermaid: Lake Of The Dead again. It's a 2018 Russian horror movie that's pretty much devoid of mermaids. It's just a ghost story and it's about average. Some guy's father leaves him a cottage by a lake, he tells the son to sell it but he goes there weird things happen. Eventually they subdue the ghost and movie is over. Not going to see it again. I liked the recent Polish movie about mermaids better, at least, the Lure has some mermaids. Vicious creatures to be sure but a much more interesting film in the end.

Science Fiction Sunday 548

I watched Stranded, a 2013 SF movie with Christian Slater on the moon. Roger Christian and Christian Piers Betley wrote the script and Roger directed. A meteor shower hits the lunar base that Christian heads, the meteor has spores that contaminate the crew. Christian and some lady fail to stop the spores, now in the form of one of the human crew, from getting to Earth. It ends with Christian yelling a warning to the Earth authorities that they need to kill the alien. It was watchable but I noticed my mind would wander when the cast got yelling at each other. The alien bits were usually gooey and the actors have pusy make up all over their body. Yuck, huh. It's like Alien with it's enclosed spaces and lurky monster but with a shape changing monster reminiscent of The Thing. Sadly, not quite as imaginative as those two projects were, I re-watch Alien and The Thing but this I probably wouldn't bother with again.

I watched the new Mill Creek Blu-ray of Mothra and really enjoyed that. It came out last month in a nice Steelbook case with a printed transparent plastic sleeve over top. Nice artwork and attractive looking case. I used to be more enthralled by fancy DVD packaging but over the years so much has proved to be inconvenient, bulky or damaging to the discs. Some of these designers need to fuck off!

There are two versions of the movie on the single disc. The Japanese version at 1:40:51 and the US version at 1:30:11. I watched the Japanese first and liked the nice looking picture. I've seen the movie several times over the years, it's one of my favorite Japanese giant monster films, this is probably the nicest image. Mind you I had some VHS bootlegs in the 90s, while they were watchable I've had fleece that was less fuzzy.

Next I put on the US version to check out the commentary by Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski. It turns out to be the same commentary track that's on the Icons Of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection DVD set. I have that set and would highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't need a Blu-ray of Mothra. I think that's most of us. Anyway, the Icons set came out 10 years ago and it's still available. Only a tenner on Amazon for 3 films on 3 discs. The other 2 films are Battle In Outer Space and The H-Man. All are directed by Ishirō Honda and all are entertaining. The Mothra commentary is still a decent commentary, though I would have liked a new one, I wound up watching it to the end. I recently read Steve and Ed's book on Ishirō Honda, he's also the director of the first Godzilla film, interesting book and man. I didn't need the Blu-ray but I'm glad I picked it up.

Friday Night Movies 740

Nightbeast is a 1982 Don Dohler film. Don was an independent film maker who died back in 2006. He directed 7 films of various quality, his production work got a bit better over time but his scripts are the weakest link in the three films I've seen. Don was also creator of the ProJunior underground comic character.

Nightbeast is an alien encounter movie, a bit of an update of Don's first movie The Alien Factor. A space ship lands near a small town and a murderous alien gets out of the ship. He starts killing people. The sheriff and the locals fight back but many die.

It sure looks better than either of the Dohler movies that I've seen, The Alien Factor and Galaxy Invader, even the script is better than those two but there are still has some annoying bits in it. There's a fair bit of gore and some nudity. Don had said, in an interview I had seen some time back, that he put more of both in his films as the request of the distributors. It doesn't make up for the flat script but on the whole it gets us to the credits. I doubt I'll pick up the new Blu-ray but if I find one of the old Troma DVDs I might pick that up, if it's cheap enough. You can watch a version of it on YouTube.

Invasion is a 1965 British alien encounter movie that started as a story by Robert Holmes. Some might know him from his time with Doctor Who. The screenplay is by Roger Marshall who wrote many episodes of popular British TV, William Tell, The Sweeney, The Avengers, Lovejoy and many more I haven't seen. Alan Bridges is the director.

That guy is an alien, he's played by Eric Young. I'd seen him before, in old episodes of The Avengers and The Saint. Eric stumbles out of the fog into the front of a car driven by a rich man and his mistress. The man takes the alien to the hospital where they find he's not quite normal. Two alien women, one played by Yoko Tani, appear. They're cops and the male is a criminal. They aren't very good cops, their attempts to capture the male alien are pretty poor. They get some help from a doctor, a couple of nurses and a some military men. It's a bit slow but I was mostly entertained. It's another of The British Film series from Network. I'd watch it again.

The Sorcerers 1967

I'm pretty sure I hadn't seen The Sorcerers in the past. It's a 1967 Boris Karloff film that was the 2nd last film from director Michael Reeves. He'd follow it up with the more famous Witchfinder General. He died in 1969 of an accidental overdose of barbiturates. The idea for the movie came from John Burke, he wrote the first screenplay, Michael rewrote the screenplay with Tom Baker. Not the Tom who was the fourth Doctor.

Boris plays a scientist who works out of his home. He's got a electronic hypnosis device that can give him control of a poor sap. It will also let Boris experience what the poor sap is experiencing. Boris's wife is played by Catherine Lacey, she had a good career in TV and movies, starting in 1938 with a British TV movie called The Duchess Of Malfi. The same year she appeared in the Margaret Rutherford film The Lady Vanishes. She was in the Hammer Film The Mummy's Shroud in 1967 and her last last appearance was on the TV series Play For Today.

Ian Ogilvy is a bored young man, Boris picks him for his test subject, offering something special. They hook him up, take control, and are rewarded with success. They send Ian off swimming and enjoy the feeling of the water on their skin. The power seduces Catherine and she uses Ian for her own gain, making him steal a fur coat. Then she makes Ian drive a motorcycle really fast. Boris keeps telling her they must stop this sort of irresponsible behavior and get his work published. Catherine isn't having any of that, she takes control and sets Ian on a little killing spree. Wow, that C escalated quickly, huh.

It all ends badly for Boris, Catherine and Ian. He sure got fucked, huh. I found the bio-feedback ending a bit dicey but I'd already suspended my disbelief on that hypno machine. I was warned it was slow and it did tend to poke along. Quick fix, speed up some of the long montage scenes at the nightclubs. The music in those clubs wasn't anything to care about. Mostly I liked Catherine's fall, so bright, so brief. I'd watch it again.

Island Of The Burning Damned 1967

Island Of The Burning Damned is a 1967 movie with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. That's it's US title, it was also called Night Of The Big Heat. It's British, filmed in Milton Keynes, Dorset and Pinewood Studios. The Swan Inn in the film is a real pub, it gets credited that way on the IMDb Filming Locations page. I used that location address and Google Maps to have a look and it's still there. Looks like it was on a double bill with Godzilla's Revenge. I have to say the poster makes the space critters look much better than they are.

It's based on a novel called Night Of The Big Heat by John Lymington, the screenplay is by Ronald Lies, there's addition dialog and additional scenes by Pip Baker and Jane Baker. It's directed by Terence Fisher, he directed oodles of films for Hammer. I've seen quite a number of his films, not all 50 odd, and enjoyed them. I often prefer the Hammer type horror movie, or those period pieces that Corman did, more entertaining than many. He'd only direct three more films before retiring.

Peter Cushing is the local doctor on Fara Island. They're having a heat waves there while the English mainland freezes in the middle of a vicious cold snap. That's Sarah Lawson behind the bar, she plays the wife of a writer who's played by her real life hubby Patrick Allen. They run the bar. Patrick hires a secretary and it turns out that the applicant is a woman he had an affair with and ran away from. She's played by Jane Merrow. Sarah, Patrick and Jane all turn up on episodes of shows like The Saint, Danger Man, The Baron, The Prisoner, The Avengers, plus numerous films.

Christopher Lee plays a scientist who's figured out it might be aliens but he has no proof. When weird things start happening on the island, he comes to have a look around, he'll get his proof but at great cost. Ominous, huh. It's a deadly threat, though not depicted really well, and people are burned up about it. The super heated alien's defend themselves with bursts of intense heat, BBQing those around them. Luckily for the human's there's a defense against the hot buggers.

I enjoyed the movie, it reminded me of a Quatermas picture in a way. There's not much budget but they do fairly well anyway. You can check it out on YouTube if you want. Link above, while it lasts.

 

Science Fiction Sunday 527

I finally upgraded the last of the Ray Harryhausen movies in my collection and today I watched the 2017 Kino Lorber Blu-ray of One Million Years BC. First I watched the 91 minute US cut, then the 100 minute International Cut, then the latter with commentary. Each version of the film has it's own disc. Each disc has a few extras. The US cut has interviews with Raquel Welch, Ray Harryhausen and Martine Beswick. The International cut has a commentary by Tim Lucas, a poster gallery and a trailer.

The International cut came out in 1966 and the US cut got released in 1967. The film is directed by Don Chaffey with a screenplay by Michael Carreras. It's adapted from the 1940 Victor Mature picture One Million BC and the original writers, Mickell Novack, George Baker and Joseph Frickett, are credited.

I hadn't seen the longer version before and it was a bit of an improvement over the US cut. There's a bit dino action and some other business. Tim Lucas mentions some of the material that was cut on his commentary.