PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Bigfoot 1970

Bigfoot 1970 Written and directed by Robert F Slatzer.

A pilot parachutes from her conked out plane only to kidnapped by a Bigfoot in need of a woman to keep his species going. That's Joi Lansing on the left, she's the pilot. The other lady is Judy Jordan, she plays the girlfriend of a biker. The gals are in trouble, the local Bigfoot tribe have kidnapped them for breeding purposes. Or lunch, it's not clear yet.

John Carradine and his business partner John Mitchum are traveling through the same area in search of customers. John M is the younger brother of Robert Mitchum. The biker who's gal was taken by Bigfoot is played by Christopher Mitchum, he's Robert Mitchum's son. Bing Crosby's son Lindsay plays one of the bikers and Doodles Weaver is a forest ranger.

None of them can do much with the dialog, the story or the budget. It's lacking in all respects. The director is lacking a Wikipedia page, his IMDb page lists two feature films and a documentary on John Wayne. I've seen Slatzer's 1968 film The Hellcats. It was a MST3K selection that I saw when it originally aired, I watched it more recently, 2015, when I worked my way through one of those 50 Movie Packs. I gave that The Hellcats a 2.

Bigfoot is about 50% better so I gave it a 3. Still poor. You can watch it at the link above, though why you would...

 

Legends Of Dinosaurs And Monster Birds 1977

Legend Of Dinosaurs And Monster Birds 1977 Screenplay by Masaru Igami, Isao Matsumoto and Ichirô Ôtsu, directed by Junji Kurata.

 

Made by Toei Company, the studio was inspired by Jaws, the film did poorly in the Japanese theaters but was a block buster in the Soviet Union. It was known in the US as The Legend Of Dinosaurs and it was used in the last episode of the first season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 which was produced by KTMA. That version was chopped up a good bit, the original movie got a US DVD release in 2007 from Media Blasters and that's what I watched.

A woman falls into a cavern, in the Aokigahara region near Mount Fuji, she awakes to find fossilized eggs, one of which hatches. She runs off and scares a construction crew with her hysterics. A geologist called Takashi goes to take a look, while hiking around Mount Fuji he's knocked out and wakes up in the cabin of a family friend. Takashi continues his hunt for the eggs, on the way he meets an old girlfriend Akiko. She's there with her friend Junko, a scuba diver, who wants to dive in the lake where a couple in a small boat went missing.

A diver is injured in the lake, livestock have gone missing, wild theories of living dinosaurs are tossed out to the dubious public. Well, turns out it wasn't a dinosaur, it was two, one of them a plesiosaurus and the other a rhamporhynchus. The pair battle it out and the volcano erupts killing both dinos. It's a bad day on Mount Fuji and the movie ends on a cliffhanger.

I was much more entertained by the movie than on MST3K. It was like seeing a whole different movie, the MST3K version had so much trimmed out of it. It's a more adult film than I thought, there's a bit of gore, mild by today's standards and a brief bit of nudity. I'd watch it again.

I'm not sure why it did so poorly in the Japanese box office. It was Toei's biggest budget, $2.8 million and it didn't even get a third of that back in receipts. It never got released theatrically in the US but it was released to TV in 1987.

Homebodies 1974

Homebodies 1974 Screenplay by Howard Kaminsky, Bennett Sims and Larry Yust, directed by Larry Yust.

An odd little film about some seniors that turn to murder to keep their condemned apartment building.

I liked the film's sense of humor and the groups decent into madness. I enjoyed the movie and would watch it again.

Friday Night Movies 929

Sleep 2020 Written by Thomas Friedrich and Michael Venus, directed by Micheal Venus. A German film with the title of Schlaf.

Marlene is haunted by her dreams, she's filled dozens of journals with the same drawing of a hotel. She takes a trip to the small town of Stainbach and checks into the very hotel featured in her dreams. Marlene has a psychotic break and goes into a coma. Marlene's daughter Mona travels to Stainbach and stays at the same hotel.

Unbeknownst to Mona her mother has a connection to the hotel owner. He's a bad man and a Nazi clinging to their past glory. The hotel has been the home of three suicides and Mona can see glimpses of these past events. She mostly has a bad time on her visit and nearly dies. Luckily, Mona gets some help from her dead grandmother.

It's a arty ghost story that was a bit pokey at times. There's a fair bit of people staring off into the distance and static shots of the hotel and it's surroundings. There's also a bit of action, some romance, murder and the humorous drugging of the Nazis. We were all hoping they'd burn the hotel down with the Nazis in it but I guess the budget didn't allow. I liked it for the most part but didn't think I'd bother picking up a copy for myself.

Doctor Death: Seeker Of Souls 1973 Written by Sal Ponti and directed by Eddie Saeta. This is the only film Sal Ponti wrote, he was also producer. From 1959 to 1978 he appeared in 28 TV episodes and 4 feature films. His script for DD:SOS isn't very original.

The movie screams TV movie but I can't see any mention of it being one. I'm thinking with Eddie Saeta's film making background and the low budget it's what Eddie knows. Eddie only directed one film, this one, and it was the last credit on his IMDb page. In the 60s he directed an episode of The Man From Uncle and an episode of Hondo. His career started in 1937 as an assistant director at Columbia Pictures, in the 30s and 40s it was mostly Westerns.

In the 50s Eddie was AD on a couple of films I knew, Creature With The Atomic Brain and 20 Million Miles To Earth. In the 50s he was AD on a lot of TV. In the 60s he worked on 18 episodes of The Man From UNCLE and one of The Girl From UNCLE. He also was AD on Three Stooges In Orbit and The Three Stooges Go Around The World In A Daze. He gave Moe Howard his last role, he played a member of the audience at Doctor Death's magical soul transfer event. He had a speaking part and a bit of a joke.

John Considine plays Doctor Death and Barry Coe plays Fred. After the death of his wife Fred becomes obsessed with his wife returning from the dead. Doctor Death claims to have the power to transfer souls and that's why Fred goes to see him. Doctor Death puts on a soul transfer event to lure more customers for his services. A badly damaged woman is dying and that's what she needs to do to get her soul transferred into the freshly dead body of Sivi Aberg. DD is a showman and he jazzes up the transfer with a stage magician's sawing a woman in half trick.

This time there's no trick, he really saws a woman in half, blood dripping off the table top, then we see her soul transfer into Sivi. The badly damaged lady now has a nice new body to play around in. Somehow the transfer magically makes the dead woman whole and healthy again. It's all enough to lure Fred in, he pays DD's $50,00 charge, no prob. DD has a problem, he can't transfer the wife's soul into another woman, he can kill a woman and transfer her soul into the wife's dead body. It won't be the most important part of his wife but Fred will have her body back. It's a pretty stupid idea, especially when DD pick's Fred secretary as the new victim. Now Fred's got to man up and fight the monster.

Glad I saw it, I did enjoy the laughs, but I'll not be buying this one either. You can decide if you like it by clicking the title above and taking a gander at it on YouTube.

Friday Night Movies 912

Blade Runner 2049 2017 Based on characters from Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, story by Hampton Fancher, screenplay by Hampton Fancher, directed by Denis Villeneuve.

Ryan Gosling is KD6-3.7, he's a blade runner for the LAPD, he's also a Nexus-9 replicant, nobody likes him. KD6-3.7 lives in the large LA sprawl and hunts rogue replicants, he retires them. It's a pretty crappy future, most everything is smog bound and it rains a lot. After KD6-3.7 retires a protein farmer a box is discovered on the property. It contains the remains of a replicant that died in childbirth. KD6-3.7's boss thinks this could be a bad thing to let the public know about, he wants the child found and destroyed.

Kd6-3.7 runs about getting into one scrap after another. People are dropping left and right. There are a number of factions interested in the child and the reproduction rights of replicants. The Wallace Corp is the main villain, the CEO has his pet psycho, a cold hearted murderin' lady. KD6-3.7 finds Rick Deckard in Las Vegas. No one goes there, it's all sand and radioactivity. There's a bunch of fighting when the psycho lady turns up, more people get killed, Deckard gets kidnapped and KD6-3.7 is left for dead. He's not. He sets off on a rescue mission.

It's quite a long movie, 164 mins, and there's a lot of slow moving stuff goin' on but it didn't drag too much. There's usually something to see but that future sure looks miserable. I mostly liked the movie but not as much as the first movie. I'd be curious to see a sequel. I see there's a TV show set 50 years in the future coming out from Amazon.

Massacre Gun 1967 Screenplay by Yasuharu Hasebe and Ryūzō Nakanishi, directed by Yasuharu Hasebe. Hasebe made a good number of films for Nikkatsu  including the Stray Cat Rock series.

Joe Shishido is Ryūichi Kuroda, a yakuza hitman and the eldest of three brothers. That's his brother Eiji on the right and Saburo on the left. Eiji is a yakuza and Saburo is an up and coming boxer. Boss Azakawa orders Ryūichi to kill his girlfriend. He goes home all miserable, Saburo tries to comfort him but fails. He's young and ignorant, he goes to Azakawa and confronts him. Saburo's going to quit boxing for him so Azakawa has both his hands broken. When the other two brothers find out things get out of hand and nearly everyone dies.

It's a familiar story, yakuza vs yakuza, high body count, little learned. The Arrow Blu-ray looks really nice. I'd certainly watch it again sometime but it's no Tokyo Drifter.

Blood For Blood 1971 Screenplay by Hideichi Nagahara, directed by Yasuharu Hasebe. Another Nikkatu gangster film by the same director as the film above.

Joe Shishido is a yakuza who gets out of prison after 5 years. He returns home to his old gang is being squeezed out by a couple of the local gangs and a gang from Tokyo. It's a blood bath as the rival gangs kill each other in vivid color.Hardly anyone gets out of this alive.

The film looks nice but the story is only about average. No matter, it's still one I'd watch again.

Friday Night Movies 908

Summer Of 84 2018 Written by Matt Leslie and Stephen J Smith, directed by François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell. The 3 directors are the same three that wrote and directed the 2015 film Turbo Kid. I enjoyed that film more than this one, mostly because I'm not much interested in a serial killer story.

A 15 year old named Davey decides that the policeman who lives across the street from his family's house is the Cape May Slayer. The killer had written to the local newspaper confessing to the 15 previous killings. Davey sees some clues that lead him to believe the cop is the killer and he's convincing enough to get his three friends to help him investigate. Turns out Davey was right. That knowledge puts him and his gang in great jeopardy, especially once Davey's father, an incredible asshole, spills the beans to the cop. There's no happy ending for Davey once the cop is outed, he escapes the police dragnet, stopping briefly to threaten Davey with the promise of a return visit for a bit of revenge.

It's well made but the story isn't the sort of horror film I like. It's not something I'd bother with again.

Daughters Of Satan 1972 Story by John A Bushelman, screenplay by John C Higgins, directed by Hollingsworth Morse. I didn't recognize the title but I had seen it back in 2010. It didn't look familiar while we were watching it.

Tom Selleck is a museum curator in Manila. He sees a painting in a shop, it depicts three witches being burned at the stake, Tom notices the witch in the middle looks a lot like his wife Chris. He buys the painting and brings it home, Chris doesn't like it but somehow knows the name of the coven and the day they were burned at the stake. 

The painting is a cursed magical thing that allows the long dead witches a chance to take over the bodies of living women. When the witch possesses Chris her image in the painting disappears. Two other women are possessed and the reformed coven team up to get some revenge on the magistrate who ordered them burnt at the stake. That guy's long dead. No matter, the witches don't mind killing the relatives of their oppressors. Tom's that relative and it doesn't go well for him during the movie.

It's not much of a movie, it's struggling to get to average, I gave it a generous five. I doubt I'd need to see it a third time.

The Great Alligator 1979

The Great Alligator 1979 Story by George Eastman, screenplay by Casare Frugoni and Ernesto Gastaldi, directed by Sergio Martino. Original Italian title Il fiume del grande caimano. That translates to The Giant Alligator River and the movie appeared under that name in a few places, in the US it was The Great Alligator. In Canada it was The Big Alligator River, that title was also used on the US DVD box. West Germany has my favorite title Der Fluß der Mörderkrokodile.

There's about 25 mins of nothing much going on until the alligator starts attacking a new tourist resort in Africa. It's really Sri Lanka but I couldn't tell. Mel Ferrer is the resort owner and Barbara Bach is assistant. A photographer is visiting the area when the attacks begin. Many locals are slaughtered and the living local believe it's the tourists fault. There's some tribe and tourist friction.

It's a below average giant monster movie but not by too much. I got a few laughs out of it but that first long stretch before the critter shows  up is a hump. When it does show up it lacks greatness. You can see if you like the movie on YouTube in the link above.

The Abductors 1972

The Abductors 1972 Written and directed by Don Schain. The second in the Ginger film series with Cheri Caffaro playing the lead role. Cheri married Don Schain before doing this film.

Ginger's some sort of spy or investigator, she gets asked to help investigate a series of teen abductions. We already know who the kidnapping scum are, a thuggish and rapey group who need killing. We spend a lot of time with the scum as they terrorize the young women into submission. They rape them while the boss sets up a trio of business scum for a purchase.

Ginger arrives and starts investigating, she enlists another gal who gets kidnapped right away. She follows them to a house, scopes it out and returns with a gang of coppers. They raid the house and rescue the young women.

Ginger and another cop confront the head man at his office, he's a bank manager with a trio of shotguns in his desk. Ginger and her pal nearly get blown away but the head man gets all worked up over the injustice some other rich scumbags have inflicted on him. Poor him, he should suck a shotgun and put himself out of his misery. As it plays out in the movie, head man gets all worked up, Ginger and the cop jump out of the way of the shotguns while his fingers are waving in front of his face. A couple of quick punches and he's ready for the slammer.

Like that scene the whole movie is poorly made and scripted. Well below average. I downloaded this from somewhere last January and it's no longer there. You can download a copy at RareLust. Certainly not something I would need to buy.

Friday Night Movies 888

Doctor Strange 1978 Written and directed by Philip DeGuere. I had forgotten that we had watched this on a previous FNM night. That was back in 2018. Click the link in the title to read that.

I still feel it's just not that exciting. The director was sad it got such low Nielsen numbers but I could see where a lot of people would have bailed on this after sitting through the first half. I don't think Peter Hooten is much of an actor, he certainly doesn't do very well here. The other actors are a mix, John Mills, Jessica Walters and Clyde Kasatsu do well, the rest are weaker by far. Not that they have that great a script to work with.

The Blu-ray does look nice but that isn't enough to make the movie much better. Ironically the second film today, like the film in the 2018 post, made Doctor Strange look a little bit better by comparison.

Bury Me An Angel 1971 Written and directed by Barbara Peeters. It was picked up for distribution by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. According to the Wikipedia, Peeters was the first woman to direct a biker film. Peeters is also credited with directing Humanoids From The Deep. Not a great picture but one that's fascinating to watch none the less.

Corman didn't think Peeters had made the monsters in Humanoids From The Deep nasty enough for his audience, so Jimmy T Murakami and second unit director James Sbardellati were asked to direct a bit more of the rapey monster stuff that Roger wants his audience to have. He did this without telling the other cast and crew, Peeters and Ann Turkel didn't care for the changes and asked to have their names removed from the film, they were refused. Roger, classy or what?

It''s kind of the same for Bury Me An Angel, the exploitative elements are weak for a biker film. Dixie Peabody plays the main character, a biker called Dag. This is her second film, the first was a bit part in the 1970 biker film Angels Die Hard. Peeters worked on that film and it's there she meet Rita Murray, an actor who wanted to producer her own films. In 1971 Dixie had a small part in Night Call Nurses and then worked briefly as a PA on Summer School Teachers. No more acting. It's probably best, she doesn't have the ability.

In Bury Me An Angel Dag's brother is killed by another guy. The brother stole that guy's nice motorcycle and gave it to Dag. She decides to get revenge. After rounding up a couple unarmed goofs for backup and getting some info from a guy, the trio head north. They meet some people along the way, Dan Haggerty was one of them, eventually they find the guy who killed Dag's brother. There's an unsatisfying confrontation with the murderer at the end of the movie.

It's amazing that a movie could fail on so many fronts. Peeters just isn't that good of a director. The film meanders around with nothing happening way too often. The script isn't very good, it's certainly does not make for a good exploitative biker film. It seems more like a melodrama with Dag moping around. Too much time is spent with Dag and her internal struggle over her brother's death. The acting is mostly poor with poor Dixie leading the pack in lack of ability. We were mesmerized by her facial expressions. I think mostly because there wasn't a lot going on up on screen. Oh, well, another one I wouldn't need to buy.

Blue Money 1972

Blue Money 1972 Story by Nick Boretz, screenplay and direction by Alain Patrick. I watched an online copy not the Blu-ray. Not much by way of posters available online. It was cut down by Crown when made and there was a multi pack DVD set that came out ages ago. The negative reports of disc quality on Amazon make me less interested in buying a copy. Nothing else in there I really need to see. I didn't even need to see this movie. The Blu-ray is closer to the original run time of the movie.

It's about a guy, writer director Alain Patrick plays the main character, who is making porn films in California. He's got a pretty wife who seems unable to keep her clothes on, a nice baby, a boat and a sports car. He's being cheated by the film distributors that buy the films him and his partner make and the local police want to bust him for making porn. His wife leaves him and the business falls apart.

It's below average to me. I started fast forwarding a short way into the film. It's just a sad melodrama with plenty of nudity. I wouldn't need to see it again, let this one time.