We started the evening with the 1983 Sonny Chiba classic Legend of the Eight Samurai, which is part of the Sonny Chiba Collection recently released on dvd. Read this rare good review on the IMDb page, it covers several of the complaints we all had, plus a good endorsement for the director's earlier film The Yagyu Clan Conspiracy, which I just bought but we have not watched. An hour into LOTES and there were two people falling asleep, not a good sign, maybe there should have been six samurai with glowing blue crystal balls instead of eight, to move the plot along. Since I wasn't falling asleep I had to sit through the whole 136 minutes. There were some good parts, occasionally, but the poor music, some slow scenes and a couple of annoying characters doesn't help anybody get their groove on. I don't feel I need to see it again. Luckily the copy was not mine. The most interesting thing about this movie, for me, was that it's a story taken from a 1840 era Japanese novel called Hakkenden. It is a huge novel, nearly 100 volumes then and 10 in modern Japanese. Sadly no English translation is available. This same director also used the same novel and adapted it to his 1978 movie Message From Space, a Samurai in Space actioneer with Vic Morrow and Sonny Chiba. I haven't seen it in a while. I've only seen the English Dub version.
Our second item on the menu was Shock Waves, a 1977 horror film by Ken Wiederhorn, who's other big films were Meatballs II and Return of the Living Dead II. It was so-so. Lucky me again, this one's not mine either. Some annoying boatniks, lead by Captain John Carradine, run their boat aground on a sandbar near an island, who's only living occupant is Ex-Nazi Peter Cushing. I've been a fan of John Carradine since I was young. He was one of the first character actors that I had seen repeatedly enough that I was able to learn his name. This was back in the 60's. He's been in over 250 movies, and not all of them were too good. Here he's the gnarled old ship captain, delivering a mixed bag of passengers somewhere. He's the first to get it from the aquatic Nazi Zombies. This happens off screen, and it just might be an accident. John reappears a bit later in a rather fun corpse scene, staring up at us through the window of a glass bottom boat. Even Peter Cushing couldn't keep 2 people from falling asleep from the slow pace of this 85 minute movie. His walking around scenes were riveting. The Nazi Zombies pop out of the water every now and again, scaring the passengers and crew, and occasionally kill someone, but they are a bunch of damp, slow moving, sun hating, google wearing World War II Nazi super-soldier experiments who are fairly easy to kill. The crew and passengers are mixed bunch, there's the cute girl played by Brooke Adams, the loner seaman, the yelly bully man, the crabby cook, the beat down wife, the muscle shirt guy, and they buy it one by one, dragged under the water mostly, by the clammy hands of the wet-needin' Nazi Zombies. Only Brooke Adams escapes to tell the flashback to us. Don't feel you don't need to listen, I certainly don't need to hear it again, I have my own stack of bad movies to re-watch.
Comments