PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 804

Creepshow 1982 Screenplay by Stephen King, directed by George Romero.

Five short segments connected by a framing story. Tom Atkins plays a father that tosses away his kid's Creepshow comic. The segments are the stories in the comic. A ghoul pops out of the grave looking for a cake he never got. Stephen King plays a country boy with bad luck. Leslie Nielsen plays a nasty hubby who drowns his wife and her lover only to have them come back from the dead for vengeance. A forgotten crate at a university is opened, releasing a man eating monster. EG Marshall gets eaten by cockroaches.

I hadn't seen the movie in a good number of years. I remember liking it well enough when I saw it in the theater but I never bought the DVD. I went looking for a DVD recently and found a 3 disc set from some unknown foreign country. The box has no company identifiers or address, no copyright and production info. The discs have no logos on their labels. They all play fine and at 30 bucks they were cheaper than buying the DVDs separately. A DVD of the third film is particularly high on Amazon, $20 for used and $50 to $115 for a new disc. More and more I'm receiving bootlegs from Amazon. Quality wise they are a mixed bag with older classic films being at the poorer end of the spectrum. These DVDs look like they are just copies of the US releases. The third one still has the HBO Video logo on the DVD menu. There are Blu-rays of the films but the first movie is well expensive. It would be over 90 bucks for the three and they aren't worth it to me. I could buy a lot more DVDs with 60 bucks.

I mostly enjoyed the segments though I skipped the cockroach fest. Those guys creep me out more than the goofy monsters and ghouls. It had a fair sense of humor and a laughed a couple of times. I'd look at it again.

Creepshow 2 1987 Stephen King wrote an outline that George Romero adapted, the director is Michael Gornick.

There's only three stories this time, as well as a live action and animated framing story about a boy and his plants. Tom Savini plays the Creep who gives the boy a Creepshow comic before it all turns to animation. It's loose and sloppy animation that isn't that good. At least some giant man eating plants got a big meal by eating some bullies.

In the first segment a scumbag and his pals rob and kill a nice old couple running a store near a native reservation. George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour play the old couple. It was Dorothy's last film. After the poor couple are killed and the robbers run away, a wooden statue of a native brave comes alive and dishes out vengeance to the scumbags. The segment looked pretty good and I'd watch it again.

In the second segment some college kids go swimming in a cold lake and get killed by something floating in the water. Took a long time to get to the end and it wasn't that interesting. I might fast forward through it next time.

The last segment is about a woman who kills a hitchhiker and runs away. I just didn't find it that interesting either. A definite need for speed on the re-watch.

All and all about average for me. Nothing overly special about it.

Creepshow 3 2006 No Stephen King involvement here, the segments are written by Ana Clavell, James Glenn Dudelson, Scott Frazelle, Pablo C Pappano and Alex Ugelow, Ana and James are also the directors. Ana and James were the directors of the direct to video Day Of The Dead 2: Contagium. I've not seen that film. It's an official prequel to the 1985 Day Of The Dead and hardly anyone liked it. I just downloaded it from YouTube and will file it away to watch when I get around to re-watching the original series and the remakes. I should look to see what I am missing and fill in the gaps before all the DVDs disappear or get really expensive.

The framing story is a crappy CGI animated segment that can be ignored for the most part. The five stories are connected with characters from each segment moving through the same sets and encountering other segment's characters.

In the first segment a weird professor gives a dad a new remote to test. Each click changes the family reality, only the daughter is aware of the changes and the changes are fucking her up.

In the second a security guard buys a radio from a homeless guy. The radio talks to him, leading him to $300,000 dollars hidden by an evil pimp guy. They both live in the same apartment and the pimp houses his whores in the place like it's his personal brothel. It doesn't go so well for the guard, the pimp has his own radio.

In the third segment a call girl serial killer meets up with a demon guy and becomes lunch.

The professor from the first segment invites some old students to his wedding in the fourth segment. The two think his pretty young wife is a robot and dismember her body to find out how she ticks. It turns out the professor also made the radios from the second segment.

In the fifth segment a doctor is assigned to a clinic in a poor part of town, he doesn't want to be there and he has no respect for his patients. He buys a hotdog only to drop it to the ground. He passes the dirty dog to a homeless guy who dies after taking a bite. Rather than help the doctor turns his back on the guy and leaves. The dead guy follows him around and scares the life out of the prick.

It seems to be universally hated by reviewers and fans, at least from the IMDb and Wikipedia entries. A lot of the complaints were the film was humorous. Of course, I enjoyed it, I even laughed out loud at times. I liked the connections between the segments and enjoyed them better than some of the segments in the first two films. I watch a lot of genre movies and I often seem to find what genre fans think are bad films to be enjoyable and vice versa. What am I like?

Friday Night Movies 799

 

Knocking On Death's Door 1999 Screenplay by Craig J Nevis and direction by Mitch Marcus. Produced by Roger Corman and shot at his studio near Galway Ireland. The movie is set in New England.

Newlywed students buy a haunted house to look for the ghosts rumored to be in the house. They're there to look for the ghosts. They soon find him. It's a much your typical haunted house story, a bit sexier than some, but really it all boils down to some poor sap getting murdered and he can't move on. David Carradine plays the local doctor, other than that there's nothing much special about the movie. It's part of a two movie DVD that came out in 2003.

The Doorway 2000 Michael B Druxman is the writer director. Also made at Roger's Irish studio and also set in the USA.

It's another haunted house story, this time there are 4 students looking for cheap housing. The jerky guy has made a deal to fix the place up for free rent and some cash. The other's aren't too happy with him once he's sprung this surprise. They aren't as unhappy as the demon that lives in the house. She's been murdered and walled up in the cellar. She's been stewing down thee for years and she's pretty nasty on top of being a mean angry demon. She gets busy and people start to die.

Roy Scheider is their professor, he goes to the house to help with the problem. It's pretty typical stuff and below average in interest to me. I might never get around to re-watching these two films but I'll have that DVD anyway.

Science Fiction Sunday 597

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. 

Friday Night Movies 796

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.

Friday Night Movies 793

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.

Friday Night Movies 790

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.

Science Fiction Sunday 588

Reigo: King Of The Sea Monsters is a 2005 Japanese giant monster movie. It's called Reigo: Deep-Sea Monster Vs The Battleship Yamato. I had seen the 2009 sequel not that long ago and wasn't planning on picking this up but it turned up cheap enough and I bought it. It's set during WW2 and there's a lot of going off to war melodrama at the start of the movie. Then everyone is on the Yamato for the monster attacks. They fight back, it's depicted in low budget CGI that doesn't have much going for it. Before the appearance of the big monster the navy kills off it's offspring. First some man size man eaters leap out of the water and smear the decks with some of the crew. The big monster, looking a little like Godzilla but with a shark body, puts up a big ass fight. Sadly the poor CGI makes it less interesting. A make or break effort looks like it might have ended the life of the creature. The Yamato limps back to Japan, most of the other fleet is on the bottom. It wasn't too bad, a little too much blather and the CGI help drag it down for me, but I have a copy and I'll probably have a big monster movie marathon sometime, maybe I'll watch it.

I doubt that I would watch 2036 Origin Unknown again. It's about inventing an AI that kills off the human population because they are heading to their destruction anyway. Or maybe it was all an AI's dream? Who knows? Not me, the film makers didn't tell me what was real or Memorex. Ultimately disappointing. Wasted that $1.95 plus tax and shipping.

Hostile Hauntings 6 Movie Collection

Hostile Hauntings is a 6 movie collection from Pendulum Pictures. It's got 2 DVDs with 3 movies on each, no extras. They are all horror films with one thing in common. They suck.

Films are made up of many parts, the story, the actors, the film makers, the sets, props and production values, all fighting for the few dollars these film makers have. Compound that with a general lack of talent and you've got a product that stinks up the house. I blame the availability of low cost HD video. It looks great, unless you don't know how to light it, understand how to use the camera or understand the basics of film making. Add to that poor attempts to cheaply add physical and CGI effects. Their posters suck too. I've really come to hate the photo shopped crap that the designers crank out. Luckily, some of the films were too embarrassed to put a poster online.

As a collection of mistakes in film making these 6 films are good examples of bad examples. It's almost like they're fighting to be called the worst film in the box. I couldn't pick the worst one. None of them needs to be held up as a shining example of what not to do in film making. We already have enough bad films, best these be forgotten. Here's the list so you can beware if they turn up on some streaming source or TV channel.

The Shunned House 2003 An Italian production about a couple that investigate an old building. Tedious and dull.

The Woodland Haunting 2 2005 An Elvis impersonator in a mental institution tells us about a haunting in Ypsilanti Michigan. Absolute shit.

The Somnambulists 2005 Not even a whole movie, a 24 min short with a 50 minute making of tacked on. Absolutely dull and boring.

Hellbound: Book Of The Dead 2003 Also called Cadaver Bay. Not worth seeing.

The River: Legend Of La Llorna 2006 Terrible looking CGI background and dull story.

Sleep Disorder 2005 Ghost hunting guy has nightmares that cause him mental suffering, We have to listen to his boring conversation with a psychiatrist. Utterly awful in every way.

Science Fiction Sunday 577

TimeSlingers is the Canadian DVD title for Aliens In The Wild, Wild West. It turned up at the Dollar Tree for a buck and I bought it. It's a 1999 Canadian Romanian production that was filmed in Romania. There's Americans, Canadians and Romanians in the cast. The screenplay is by Alon Kaplan and the director is George Erschbamer.

It's really an SF western aimed at the teen crowd. A really fuckin' annoying kid and his slightly annoying older sister go on vacation with mom and dad. The kids don't get along. The family stop at a ghost town and the kids find a space device that sends them back in time to the 1880s. They team up with a local guy to save some aliens who've landed and got captured by cowboys who want to sell them to a circus as freaks.

It's all pretty much by the numbers. I would have enjoyed it more for what it was but for the wise cracking shit bag teen boy. At it's best it's below average and I'm sure glad I didn't pay more it than a dollar. I'm going to keep it for now. I might want to watch it again. It'll probably never happen.

Vampire Wars is another DVD from the Dollar Tree, at least I think so, it's been languishing in the pile for a while. Hopefully it wasn't a $2 or $3 clearance item at Half Price Books. I wouldn't want to pay that much, even for a fun Michael Ironside performance. He's a nasty vampire guy in this 2005 Canadian TV movie that's also known as Bloodsuckers. The DVD is pricey on Amazon, starting at $22.01 and rising to $83.50. I'm still hopin' I didn't pay 2 bucks for it.

There are vampires in space and they aren't any too happy to have the humans among them, other than for food stuffs. The human's have spaceships that go out and wipe out vampires. We follow the crew of one of the spaceships as they battle the bitey guys. There's plenty of fighting, ray guns, gore, spaceships, tunnels, yakking and walking in the woods. The movie was filmed in Squamish BC. The human crew is made up of four humans and a turncoat vampire of some sort.  Michael is on one of the planets they stop at, at least he was entertaining to watch. He's a delightful bastard but he's still a vampire and he needs to get lit up. There's nothing great about it, barely average in every way. I wouldn't need to watch it again but I'll keep the DVD, who knows, maybe it will be worth even more money in the future.

Science Fiction Sunday 573

Isolation is a 2005 SF Irish film film about cattle mutations. A scientist is experimenting on cows at a farm. He wants to make them grow faster. It partially works, a calf is born already pregnant. Sadly, the new born has wicked teeth and can bite the dickens out of fingers and teats. It's fetuses are even worse mutants, fanged flesh lumps with exoskeletons. The scientist kills the calf but one of the fetuses escapes during the autopsy. The escapee starts poking it's flesh pods into any handy living thing, infecting cows and humans alike. It's all very much an Alien/The Thing sort of movie. It's all goopy, bloody and there are a lot of cow entrails. There's a fair bit of struggle as the monster and the scientist kill off the humans and cows. The scientist went mad, well, madder then he already was, and started killing people. Essie Davis plays a vet who gets pulled into the middle of the mess when she visits the farm. It's written and directed by Billy O'Brien. I didn't mind it but I wouldn't need to see it again. I'm glad I don't feel the need for the disc, there are two on Amazon, one for $34.,95 and another for $143.03. Not worth it, I doubt I would even download a free copy.

Octaman is a 1971 SF and horror film about a human octopus mutation. It's written and directed by Harry Essex. Rick Baker is the costume designer. Kerwin Matthews, Jeff Morrow, David Essex and Pier Angeli all deliver lack luster performances. It's set in Mexico, the scientists find a weird octopus that can crawl on land. They can't get money to study it so they make a deal with a circus owner to fund the capture of more of these creatures. Turns out there's a big human size critter and it can kill humans pretty easily. They round up some locals and try to capture that big beast. Hardly anyone comes out of that alive. It's all pretty below average. Meandering script, sad monster attacks, poorly shot locations, shit day for night effect, not much was good about the film. Another one I wouldn't need to see again. I get so forgetful, if only I had a way of warning myself not to watch it again. Anyway, you can see it on YouTube, there's a link in the title.