George And The Dragon 2004 Written by Tom Reeve and Michael Burks, directed by Tom Reeve.
Kind of an average retelling of the George and the Dragon story. It did a bit better on the story than it did on some of the special effects. The fights scenes were quick and often so close to the characters that you couldn't really see what was happening.
Not something I'm going to need to watch again but I'll keep the DVD I picked up for a dollar, at least for now. Someday there will be a purge.
Oblivion Island: Haruka And The Magic Mirror 2009 Written by Hirotaka Adachi and Shinsuke Sato, directed by Shinsuke Sato.
A young girl goes to a temple and wishes to find a mirror that he dead mother had given her. She gets transported to Oblivion Island via a pool or water. She finds an old stuffed animal that she had neglected. He helps her on her quest to find the mirror.
It was entertaining, there's a lot of weird creatures and odd things happening. I'd watch it again so I'm lucky to have been given a DVD. You can see it on YouTube, link above.
The Dragon Pearl 2009 Story by Ron Saunders, John Armstrong and Mario Andreacchio, screenplay by Philip Dalkin, directed by Mario Andreacchio.
A PG film about a trip to China. A couple of young kids meet on their parents archeology dig in China. They meet a dragon and have an adventure.
It's about average for what it is. I enjoyed it but wouldn't necessarily watch it again.
Wooshi: The Demon Slayer 2009 Written and directed by Choi Dong-hoon. A Korean fantasy comedy with plenty of action and effects.
The movie mixes events from the modern day and 500 in the past. Some of the characters are immortal beings, others have magical powers. Back in the past the goblins have taken the Flute Of the Prophecy. The Immortal Taoist Wizards band together with The Master and Hwadam and banish the goblins from our world. They retrieve the Flute, break it in two, and in trust half to The Master and Hwadam. When The Master is murdered his student Wooshi is blamed for the crime and imprisoned in a painting. We know it's really Hwadam what done the dirty deed. He's a real monster.
In modern day the Immortal Taoist Wizards find the goblins are escaping their imprisonment and hiding among the humans. They can transform, only their green blood gives them away. The Immortal Taoist Wizards get Wooshi and his dog pal Chorangyi out of the painting and they have a smashing time fighting the goblins. On top of that it turns out Hwadam has gotten even more evil.
It's action packed and the magical effects are top notch. The story has a nice sense of humor and the baddie gets put down. I was glad to have picked up the Shout Factory Blu-ray from Hamilton Books for a fiver. I'll watch it again.
Crumbs 2015 Written and directed by Miguel Llansó. A rather surreal Spanish-Ethiopian science fiction story set some centuries after a big collapse. Candy is a deformed man who lives with a woman in an abandoned bowling alley. He scavenges for ancient artifacts, there's some sort of economy left over that allows a trade in collectibles. Above the landscape, floating in the sky, is a dormant spaceship. It's been there since before the big collapse.
There's a rumor going around that it's coming back to life and Candy thinks they should be on the ship if it leaves. He sets off an a quest for tickets, wondering through the landscape, following the train tracks. Eventually he finds a guy running a cinema showing the Turkish Superman film.Candy throws his Superman top into the river and the movie is over.
It's such a personal story that I can't tell you what it's all about. It was sort of interesting to watch, wondering what was going to come next, but the message is so lost in the medium that Marshall McLuhan would just tell me to go to bed and not think about it.
Cowboys Vs Dinosaurs 2015 Anthony Fankhauser and Rafeal Jordan wrote the poor screenplay and Ari Noval did a so-so job directing. Together they manage to make a pot boiler with little nourishment. Looks like the movie appeared on SyFy at some point. It's kind of typical of what they feature.
Rob Hills returns home after failing at the rodeo circuit, he's got some past history with the Sheriff, who's now living with Rob's old girlfriend. Eric Robert's plays Rob's father, they are reunited in a jail cell, one they should have stayed in. Vernon Wells plays the head of a mining company that has a mine in the area. The miners have opened a chamber and released some gas fueled dinosaurs. They get to chompin' the locals and rampaging about the town. Just about everyone dies but I didn't care, most of them were jerks. It's a film that brings little joy, other than rooting for the dinos.
Dispiser 20o3 Written and directed by Philip J Cook. Typical of Amazon Prime, they've listed this as being made in 2018 when it's a film from 2003. It's a low budget green screen movie with amateur actors and a so-so script.
The guy with the machine gun is an artist, he gets fired from his job and dumped by his girlfriend the same day he dies in a car wreck. He wakes up in Purgatory where he meets up with some demon fighters. That's them in the background. They battle monsters and try to keep the faith.
It's a bit more interesting than the previous movie but still below average. Cook's a little more imaginative than the writers on the first movie tonight. Not something I needed to see or would bother with again.
The Gallows 2015 Absolutely annoying film about some mostly horrible high school students doing a play about a hanging. It's a found footage film that's an eye sore. It makes my eyes sore. Twenty years ago the school players produced the same play and young man named Charlie was accidentally hung when the trick noose failed. Now, it's twenty years later and his spirit is killing off the cast, or something like that. There's plenty of whining and screaming, doors slamming and things jumping out at you. The brain staggering whip pans that are more annoying than scary, they can fuck off. It was cheap to make, $100,000, and it made $43 million. Yay, on their money making skills, maybe they can make a better film with out all the gimmicks. Be nice if they could put in some more interesting characters. I hope I don't run into the sequel from last year.
Hangman's Curse 2003 Based on a Christian novel by Frank Peretti, screenplay by Kathy Mackel and Stan Foster, directed by Rafal Zielinski.
I saw David Keith was in this DVD that I think came from Dollar Tree. I think all the films today came from there, I'd hate to have paid more than a dollar for these. I keep hoping to come across that gem but so far not even half way there.
David plays the head of crime fighting family that goes undercover to route out crime. We first meet them as drug pushers working with the police. Their next assignment is undercover at a high school that's been having students fall over and go into a coma.
In the school the mom is a councilor, David's a janitor, the two teen kids are a popular girl type and a nerdy type. They find a lot of bullying from the football squad, they attack the nerdy kids and extort money from them. The school seems to do little. There's a group of Goths that have called up the curse some kid who hung himself at the school. Several kids have been cursed, they freak out and collapse, then go into a coma. No one can figure out what the drugs that are causing this are.
It turns out to have a mundane Scooby-Doo mad scientist sort of ending but someone does die. It's vaguely Christian but not in your face about it. I could see this being the pilot for a show. It was better than average for what it was and about average for a teen crime movie. Not much reason to watch it again.
Frost: Portrait Of A Vampire 2003 Written and directed by Kevin VanHook. It's a movie about some mercenaries in Afghanistan being lead by a guy called Jack Frost. They're asked to kill and burn a man the locals bring to them. They believe he's a demon and they don't want to be cursed. A guy called Nat shoots it after it bites him in the leg. Later that night they're attacked and split up. Most of the men are killed, Frost survives, Nat disappears for a long time.
Frost figures out who attacked them and kills that prick. Then Nat turns up as a vampire and he's all bitey and evil. That's him in the picture above. Nat was the most entertaining bit of the movie. Frost is a big beefy block of wood with mirror shades. The script is nothing too original. There's plenty of fighting but not all of it so good. I liked the Nat parts, he made me laugh once or twice, but I doubt that I'd need to watch it again.
I remembered liking Frankenstein: The True Story more when I watched it on TV back in 1973 than I did today. It played over two nights, which turns into 185 mins on DVD. It's a British and American production which I saw in Canada. The script is by Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, the director is Jack Smight. Below is a bit from the Wikipedia that I found interesting.
It was originally broadcast on NBC-TV in late 1973 in two 90-minute parts, but is often seen edited into a single film. Its DVD debut date was September 26, 2006. Included at the beginning is a short introduction featuring James Mason wandering through St John's Wood churchyard, London. He suggests that this is where Mary Shelley is buried, which is incorrect (she is in fact buried in the family plot in Dorset), despite standing beside a gravestone bearing her name.
That short intro is over 5 mins long and it shows the best bits of action in the movie. Disappointing to say the least. Why waste time on stuff like that. They change a lot from the novel and their main gimmick has Michael Sarrazin playing the monster as a handsome man. At least for a little while, things go south in the looks department later in the show. Leonard Whiting is Victor Frankenstein and David McCallum is the professor that introduces him to experimenting with life. Nicola Pagett plays Elizabeth, Victor's to be wife.
James Mason plays Dr Polidori, a character who didn't appear in the novel, he's loosely based on the Dr Pretorius from Bride Of Frankenstein, and he's a right old bastard. Jane Seymour is the bride in this one, at least her head is, the creature brings her damaged body to Victor, and Victor works his creature magic and brings her head to life on another body.
Jane fare better than the creature, she gets to briefly be lovely in high society, unfortunately her coming out ball turns into a slaughterfest after the creature shows up. It's all horror and sadness for the main characters, most of them die. It's a good reminder that you shouldn't fall in love with crazy people. It's a fairly well made production, kind of slow, and very brown looking.
Frankenstein is a 2007 British TV film that takes the opposite tack with the creature's look. It's written and directed by Jed Mercurio. His gimmick is to make Dr Frankenstein a woman and set her in the modern day world of bio-engineering. She uses some of her dead son's stem cells to grow organs in a soup of bio-goo, the bits and pieces coagulate into a creature that's not anywhere near as handsome as Michael Sarrazin. That's him below.
Behind all her work is a company that's got it's fingers into those secret black government programs that turn up so often in films. I'm leaning toward boredom with that plot line but that's just me. Helen McCrory plays Dr Frankenstein and she's mental. James Purefoy plays her ex-husband and he's a bit of a scum bag. Nothing much good to be said for the rest of the players in the secret world of genetics shenanigans. It's well enough made but I sure didn't care for it much. I'd be hard pressed to watch it again.
Army Of The Dead is a 2008 zombie film of little originality. Joseph Conti directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Ciccolini and Tom Woosley. A professor and some students take an archeology trip to the Baja Peninsula.
According to the movie, four centuries ago Coronado sent 1000 men to find El Dorado, they disappeared. Well, the professor thinks he knows where the city is and he's secretly made a deal with some scumbags to steal the gold. His students are clueless about his plan. The prof finds the city and of course releases the curse. It animates the 1000 lost skeletal conquistadors. They are totally bent on slaughtering the professor and his minions.
Sadly the CGI is only fair, it's about the same for the rest of the movie. The actors are adequate but the script isn't that interesting. You've certainly heard it all before in any number of the other 'trapped by some evil force that's killing everyone' movie. There's nothing much exciting about the location, I've seen the desert before, and better photographed too. I wouldn't need to see it again, that's for sure.
Subferatu is a 2020 everything but the kitchen sink comedy that blends time travel, Nazis, vampires, submarines and Gilligan's Island. It's written and directed by Patrick Penta. I found it over at Amazon Prime, same as the previous movie.
A small pleasure craft is out for a 3 hour tour when a big storm comes up. Their ship is floundering when they are rescued by a submarine commander in the Nazi navy. There's only a small crew on board the sub and they don't realize the survivors came from the future. The ship was in the Bermuda Triangle and the skipper's name is Captain Gavin McCloud. That's him in the red shirt.
The Commander tells the Captain that it's the day after Hitler killed himself. The Commander wants to surrender his sub but only if he can sail it into New York harbor. The Captain doesn't know if he traveled back in time, or the sub came forward, but he knows it's going to be somewhat of an issue to show up in the harbor. On top of that possible trouble, there's a vampire on the sub.
It's definitely goofy, it made me laugh out loud 3 or 4 times and I snickered once in a while. It's pretty self aware, the Captain talks to the audience from the start, and while the jokes are not all top raters there are a lot of them. It's a cornucopia of genre movie references, so keep an eye, and and ear, open. The actors, the film was made in Seattle, are mostly OK, the characters are pretty broad so they have a lot of wiggle room in their roles. I wasn't sold from the start but the general goofiness won me over and I had a good laugh. Sadly it's not out on DVD, I might buy a copy if it was cheap enough.
First up, Knives Out, an entertaining mystery movie. It came out last year and it seemed to create a bit of a buzz. It turned up on Amazon Prime for free and that seemed like a good test price to see if I would want to pick up a disc. It's written and directed by Rian Johnson who's announced Knives Out 2. Rian's last movie was Star Wars: Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, before that it was Looper in 2012, I'm not familiar with any of his earlier work.
Christopher Plummer plays the rich head of a really scummy family. He's supported them but after he commits suicide it turns out that he's not left them any of his fortune. Daniel Craig plays a southern private eye who's been hired anonymously to investigate the death. Most of the action takes place in a big old house filled with plenty of nooks and crannies and stairwells. It's a nice old place but too many stairs for me nowadays.
The money helps bring out the family's evil side and they are some scum suckers. Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Katherine Langford, Jeeden Martell, Riki Lindhome and Chris Evans are the family members. Ana di Armas plays the health care worker who gets the prize. Can she keep it. We'll have to wait for the second movie to know.
There's a good complicated story going on with good dialog and good actors to make it work. The characters are interesting, though some of them are truly repulsive. My only complaint was some of them didn't get punished so much, that might be mitigated by the second movie. I had plenty of laughs and was real happy to have seen it. I'd watch it again sometime, but I'll probably wait for a 2 pack with the second movie before buying it.
I can't think of anything good to say about Unearthly, a 2013 low budget POS that was on AP. It's a totally directive and unoriginal. A 15 year old girl is on the hunt for a powerful medallion and some scumbag is also after it. Her dad, mom and boyfriend go after her. It's mostly people tramping about in the woods. There's nothing of interest there, sad dialog from stupid characters, crappy CGI, poor jokes and embarrassing action. It's the kind of movie you want to tell to Fuck Off.
A couple more horror films off of Amazon Prime. First up Against The Dark, a 2009 post-apoc movie with a well padded Steven Seagal. Stephen doesn't do much other than walk, talk a bit, and wave a sword around. The mutant humans just seem to leap right on that sword. Everyone else breaks a sweat. I didn't recognize anyone else in the cast but David Keith. He head of the military in the area, he doesn't do much more than boss people around. He's going to bomb the area to kill the mutants, there's a clock ticking down. He going to bomb the place even if Steven and his band of hunters aren't out of the area. I didn't care much for it, nothing much interesting or clever here. Move along.
The Night Sitter was a good bit better, it's from 2018 and it's a bit of a horror comedy. Some guy hires a strange babysitter to look after his son and the son of his girlfriend. She's "new" to the area and it turns out she's there to grab as much cash and merch as she can. She calls a friend with a truck. In the meantime the two boys steal the key to dad's locked office. A strange book gets handled and the three mothers escape. They had been trapped in the book by some guys in the past. They are a trio of children killers, they kidnap the little nippers, hang them up by their feet and slit their throats. Easier to drain the blood from them. The girlfriend's kid is the first to get the treatment. The sitter's ex-boyfriend shows up, a neighbor shows up, they're just more fodder for the witches. They like killing children, but in a pinch, they'll kill anyone. It takes nearly half the movie for anything interesting to happen. It all looks fairly good but I soon got tired of the red/green/blue lights that are supposed to create some mood. I got to the end and didn't think I needed to see it again.