PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 696

The Weekend Murders is a 1970 Italian film pretending to be a British murder mystery. Sergio Danati wrote the screenplay and Michele Lupo is the director. Sergio has a better handle on the story than Michele has on the directing. but neither is that great.

When the family patriarch dies the family congregates at the family estate for the reading of the will. Everything went to the granddaughter and everyone else got the shaft. Shortly after the various relatives start getting murdered. Sadly it takes an age to get to the good stuff and Michele ruins those scenes with some fucking annoying music and sound effects. I know it's 1970 and everyone was experimenting with smoking banana peels. I hope they were all high, otherwise there isn't much of a reason to do thing's that way.

The Inspector from Scotland Yard comes calling but he turns out to have little on the local Mr Plod. Not many of the characters were people I'd want to know. Fifty-one percent of the IMDb votes are a 6 or a 7, that seems high, especially when the middle drags so much. It averages a 6.2 and I gave it a five, it's just not quite there.

The comedy in The Backlot Murders is a bit better but it's still only so funny. The characters aren't much more likeable but there's no entertaining character like our policeman in the first film. It's more fun, I laughed out loud on a couple of occasions but I laughed more at it than with it. It's a 2003 film, directed by David DeFranco and written by him, Paul Arensburg and Steven Jay Bernheim. A shitty rock band goes to shoot a video on a film company lot. Some of the movie is filmed around the Psycho mansion and a set from The Lost World. Someone starts killing everyone and we have to wait a while before we find out who it is. Most of the actors were fair to poor but Priscilla Barnes and Charles Fleischer stand out from the rest. They both made me laugh. I was laughing more with the film than at it. It's still not that great a film, maybe one of the reasons that David isn't directing much anymore. I probably wouldn't pick either of these up if I see them cheap.

Where Evil Lies 6 Movie Collection

Here's another multi film collection from Mill Creek Entertainment. Where Evil Lies has got 6 movies on 2 discs. That's a better average than most of the discs in MCE's library. Currently this set is $6.25 on Amazon, I picked on up for 3 bucks in the HPB clearance section. Here's what's on there.

Devour 2005 This is about a dangerous magical video game that could kill everyone on the planet. It could be the devil. It could have been more interesting but it wasn't.

Population 436 2006 Jeremy Sisto comes along to a town that has certain rules about the population. They want him to stay and he doesn't. It's a pretty creepy place, glad I'm not living there.

Candy Strippers 2006 It's an alien invasion in a hospital with all the nursing staff and doctors being taken over by alien parasites. It's up to some young people to fight back. Not too good, it scores a well deserved 3 on the IMDb. It could be lower. It could have been higher if they had more nudity and gore but it wouldn't help the story or much of anything else.

Incubus 2005 Tara Reid and some pals have accident on a lonely road. They wander through the woods until they find a facility. They break in and discover a couple of dead people in lab coats. They unlock the security cell of a nearly naked man, he's strapped to a chair. Turns out that nearly naked guy is a psycho killer who had been executed 6 years earlier. It's all running and screaming once he gets out. Oh, yeah, he's some sort of demon too. Poor saps, sad for them. Sad for me, it's another one that's below average. I kind of blasted through the last half pretty quickly.

Wind Chill 2007 Emily Blunt is a collage student returning to her home town, she gets a ride from a guy in one of her classes, he takes a short cut and they break down and meet some ghosts. Bad shit happened at their accident site in the 50s and it doesn't seem to want to leave. There's the most walking around in the woods I've seen in a while. Another candidate for the FF button.

The Cottage 2008 This is the best film in the batch. I'd seen it before and enjoyed it a second time. Andy Serkis and Steve Pemberton are involved in a kidnapping that goes wrong for them. Their pain is my gain. The more they get hurt the harder I giggle. It's well worth the cost of the DVD set.

Better than many of the multi movie packs that I pick up. I'll keep it, I keep most of the multi movie packs I buy, as I want to watch The Cottage again some day.

Bad Boys I & II

Bad Boys is one of my favorite action movies. It's a 1995 buddy movie with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. I'm trying not to upgrade DVDs to Blu-ray but once in a while I break down and pick up a copy of something like Bad Boys. I noticed that the 2 Blu-ray set of Bad Boys I & II was only 10 bucks. The movies look much better than the DVDs I have. I like the first movie much more than the second movie but only because Michael Bay changed his style in the 8 years between these movies. His action scenes became filled with close ups and lots of quick cuts. I find that more annoying than not. I don't think the script is up to the first movies script either. It's still delivers a good action movie with lots of gun fire, explosions and car chases. The first movie was just more fun.

Murder On The Orient Express 2001

The 2001 CBS TV adaptation of Murder On The Orient Express was just average. It was written by Stephen Harrigan and directed by Carl Schenkel. Alfred Molina plays Hercule Poirot in a modern day setting. He's joined by Meredith Baxter, Leslie Caron, Peter Strauss and a bunch of other actors I didn't know. The number of suspects is cut in half and all the characters changed a lot. Most of them do a good enough job and the production looks pretty good for the most part. It's just not that good an adaptation of the story.

Run! Bitch Run! 2009

Run! Bitch Run! is a 2009 rape-revenge film that's a throwback to the exploitation films of the 70s. It's co-written, with Robert James Hayes II, by director Joseph Guzman. It's their first feature and the two of them would collaborate on Nude Nuns With Big Guns the following year. Both their IMDb credits stop in 2011 with a short film called The Gift. I'd seen NNWBG and thought it was a pretty good film but definitely not for the weak ass viewer. It's a barrage of nudity, blood, violence, and special effects. Run! Bitch Run! is like Joe and Rob's practice run.

A couple of Catholic school girls are canvasing door to door, they see a murder, the killer's henchman captures them. The blonde is Catherine, played by Cheryl Lyone and the brunette is Rebecca, played by Ivet Corvea.

That's the scum what done the crimes. The long haired guy is the leader, he's called Lobo, and he's a straight up psycho who comes to a good end. Tommy and Marla are the rest of the gang. They aren't as psycho but they aren't far off. No one will miss them when they expire.

Poor Rebecca is killed pretty quickly but Lobo has other plans for Catherine. They take her to a wooded area and let her go. The title comes from Lobo yelling Run, bitch, run! at her. I thought the title should have punctuated with the same commas as the phrase in the movie. The exclamation point after the first run seems weird to me. It just doesn't scan right.

Lobo tells Catherine he's going to track her, rape her, and kill her. He does and he leaves her for dead. She doesn't die in the woods, nope, she staggers out of them and recovers in the hospital. After her release she gets a big knife and goes after the trio of scum. You can guess what's going to happen to those pricks.

The actors were all pretty good for the most part. The film was well enough made but it's a pretty dreadful story, not everyone's going to like it. It does copy that 70s style fairly well. It could have been on a drive-in double bill with I Spit On You Grave back in the day. It's very like that film. At least that's what my faulty memory tells me, I have to admit I only watched it once, back in the 80s. Back when I saw ISOYG, on VHS, I fast forwarded some of the nastier bits. It's the same with R!BR!. It's so much better being in control of your media. Imagine having to sit in a dark theater, with a film running in real time, and it's a piece of crap. I was also disappointed in the ending of Run! Bitch Run!, it made me like the film less. It's not unrealistic but it makes me less interested in returning to it.