PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Memorial Day Movie Marathon

Since I had nothing to do all day today I decided to sit about and watch only movies I hadn't seen yet. I am getting behind. I have a stack here, and as I watch them I'll post an update as the day goes on.

First up is Bridge of Dragons a 1999 action film with Dolph Lundgren and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. I'm a fan of both these guys, and I'll watch movies with either of them even though I know they might not be great movies. This is not a great movie, it's watchable, there is a fair bit of action. Cary, who's great in most anything, is the evil warlord in some fantasy country, portraited here by Bulgaria. Dolph is one of his best soldiers, which are constantly fighting the rebels. Cary is supposed to marry Princess Halo, played by Valerie Chow who's a cutie. She finds out Cary killed her father and runs off and joins the rebels. Cary sends Dolph off after her and the Princess turns Dolph against his boss with the truth about her father. The Princess is returned to her throne and the country united. Cool. You probably don't need to see this movie but read Dolph's bio on IMDb, it's cool, according to them he has an IQ of 160, a master in chemistry and he used to date Grace Jones. What a guy.

Next up is the 1959 French horror film Eyes Without a Face. Greg was excited about this, it's a classic! I borrowed it, saving me from buying the expensive Criterion dvd. The daughter of a brilliant surgeon has a car accident and her face is disfigured. The doctor's assistant lures girls into the doctor's clutches so he can remove their faces in an attempt to repair the face of his daughter. It's wrong on every level, and it troubles him. It's a moody, slow movin' and atmospheric picture shot in black and white. It's pretty gory for the time, there is a scene of a girl having her face peeled off. After a while the police start noticing the missing girls, needed for the repeated failures, and they set a trap to catch the perp. The decoy is planted, kidnapped and nearly dies before she wakes up and is released by the guilt ridden daughter. The daughter releases the experimental dogs who chew off the evil doctor's face in an ironic gnawfest, leaving the faceless daughter wandering in the woods. The end. I'm pretty sure I won't need to watch this again. Included on the dvd is a 1949 short film by Eyes director Georges Franju. Blood of the Beasts is about the Paris abattoirs, or slaughterhouses. Now that's pretty gruesome. I had the experience of spending a Christmas eve in an abattoir in St. Boniface 40 years ago. I remember a lake of blood but luckily I didn't see anything in production, just skinned meat blobs hanging, dripping. We got to use the Hilti gun that was used to kill the cows. That was cool, blowing small holes in the concrete.

Next up, Sugarland Express, Steven Spielberg's first studio theatrical feature. Based on a true story about a stupid Texan couple who kidnap a state trooper and drive across the state to get their baby back from the couple that have adopted him. Goldie Hawn plays the forceful mother and William Atherton plays the weak minded father. Ben Johnson plays the head of the state troopers who tries to keep everything from getting more and more violent. It's a great part for him, he carries his weight and the weight of the situation wonderfully. The movie is worth keeping for his performance. Goldie surprises William on visiting day with the news she's breakin' him outa prision, where he's got 4 months to go on a 12 month stretch. She needs help getting their baby back, and her reluctant husband follows on her highly impulsive race to destruction. I have to admit I enjoy these sad tales of human choice, especially when they are funny, and this isn't too bad. Spielberg keeps the jokes coming right up until the end when they don't get their baby in the worst possible way. Goldie sure looks cute on the dvd box.  You wouldn't want to date her character, she'd be trouble, a lot of trouble. You don't need that, not even when your young.

I took a break and went out to eat at Perkins over in St. Paul. I picked that Perkins because I wanted to see if Midway Books was open. They weren't, so I came back home and put on The Postman Fights Back. This is a 1981 Ka-Yan Leung picture directed by Ronnie Yu. Yat plays the titled postman and Chow Yun Fat has a secondary role playing a gambler, with trouble in his past. They, and two other out-of-work guys, are paided by Eddie Ko, a local warlord, to deliver 4 cases to another warlord by the 20th, a present for his birthday. Eddie Ko is pretty evil here, he plays a good guy in Heroes Shed No Tears, a 1986 John Woo war movie. He's also in many other good films. Here he's killin' men, women and children, I told ya, he's really bad, and it turns out the "present cases" are a disassembled machine gun which he wants the local warlord to use to attack Sun Yat-Sen's men. Feeling ashamed and betrayed by Eddie, Yat and the guys attack the warlord with explosives tied to white mice and destroy the machine gun, thus restoring their karma. Mostly everyone dies. Eddie Ko in a great explosion, from a bomb lodged in his gut.

The Exorcist III turned out to be pretty good. George C. Scott plays a cop investigating some murders, which bear a resemblence to the Gemini murders of 15 years ago, but that murderer is dead. Brad Dourif is the dead killer and he is possessing some guy and killing again, his works not done yet. There's some running and yelling and flashbacks and lots of murder. You might like it. Blatty turns out to be a fair director, this is his second feature.

Cheaters is made for HBO movie, from 2000, a true-story adaptation about a bunch of high school kids and their teacher who do cheat on the 1995 Illinois Academic Decathalon, and the ramifications as everything unravels and they face the scrutiny of the media, their friends and family and the rest of the world. John Stockwell directed, and I liked his Crazy/Beautiful with Kirsten Dunst from 2001. He's writing Artimis Fowl due out some time this year. Stockwell acted in Christine for John Carpenter, both of whom are on the Christine commentary track, which is enjoyable. Jeff Daniels plays the teacher and Jena Malone is one of the students and they both are great, as are the rest of the cast. Lessons to be learned, learn them on your own.

I picked up a copy of Pieces of April because the director Peter Hedges wrote the novel What's Eating Gilbert Grape. He also wrote the screenplay for Grape and About A Boy, both of which I like. I occasionally like a good sentimental melodrama, and this thanksgiving family get-together nearly lives up to the level of his previous work. Katie Holmes is April the "troubled" older daughter, who has to host the annual family dinner, and her oven breaks. Oliver Platt, who always seems to turn in a good preformance, plays her dad, and Patricia Clarkson is pretty amazing as the cancer ridden mom. In two parallel tracks April races around trying to get dinner ready and the family travels from where they live to NYC and April's apartment. Each have their trials and tribulations along the way and it mostly ends on a happy note and everybody gets fed.

I had wanted to see The Whole Wide World since it came out in 1996. It's based on Novalyn Price's memoir about her relationship with pulp writer Robert E. Howard. Vincent D'Onofrio plays Howard and Renee Zellweger plays Novalyn and they do a great job. Howard's life was brief, he was a candle engulfed in flame, but he burned bright and created an amazing body of work. People know him for Conan, and lots of people only know the movie, but his best stories are always coming back in print. I have a whole paper box full of books and I don't have hardly any compared to what is out there and what is planned. I plan to get around to rereading some Howard, haven't read any since I was in my 20's. I liked the movie, it's not a happy kind of story, it's the kind of human melodrama that Howard rails against in the movie but the kind of story the movie Novalyn would like.

I liked I Heart Huckabees, David O. Russell's existential exploration comedy. I like his previous two film's, Three Kings and Flirting with Disaster, quite a bit. I am not as interested in seeing Spanking the Monkey again. Jason Schwartzman hires a husband and wife team of existential detectives, played by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman, to look into a trio of coincidences involving a tall black man.  In order to help Jason the detectives break down his life and make Jude Law cry. Isabelle Huppert plays the detective's nemisis and she helps. Mark Wahlberg plays a fireman who is having doubts of nothingness. Eventually they get to a happy ending with balloons. I like balloons.

Hercules and the Tryants of Babylon is a 1964 Italian film starring Peter Lupus under the name Rock Stevens. Peter throws boulders and doors at people, womps them with his big club, and after destroying the city of Babylon with a big knob, rubs his oiled pecs up against some raven haired beauty. Eventually the movie was over and I went to bed.

This just in: Jon Stewart not half bad

I picked up a copy of Wishful Thinking while going through the used dvd's at Suncoast. This 1997 film was written and directed by Adam Park who never did anything else again, at least according to the IMDb. I got it because it has Drew Barrymore on the cover and I'll watch anything with her in it. She's pretty cute here, although her character is a creep, working to split the couple in the film. An ambitious film which races back in time to tell the story from the various POV's of James LeGros, whom I have never felt anything for, LeGros girlfriend Jennifer Beals, ditto, and Drew's opportunistic third wheel. Jon Stewart get's mixed up in this relationship tossed salad in what I think is one of his best roles. He doesn't get very big parts and this is one of the best and longest parts. He's not a great actor but here he's playing a New Jersey guy living in New York and he's pretty good at that, even in 1997. There aren't many jokes, just people you wouldn't want to date yourself. Still, that Drew is pretty cute here, just don't trust the bitch.

Lego Thriller

Here's a link to a Lego version of Micheal Jackson's thriller. It's a bit blurry, hell it's mostly blurry, but it's still a pretty mean feat doing the whole 15 minutes video, in Lego with plastacine and paper backdrops.  There are some pretty good Lego video's out there. It's been a while since I looked for any, maybe sometime in the future I'll find some again.

Darth Vader reads your mind.

You can go to this Burger King site and have Darth Vader read your mind. He guessed iron in 19 questions. It's fun.

Space Truckers

I picked up a dvd of Space Truckers for $3.99 today. It was used but it plays fine. Not a great film but a fun film. Dennis Hopper is a interplanetary rig jocky in this 1996 Stuart Gordon film. Dennis unknowingly picks up a load of organic robot super warriors and heads to earth. He's joined by Debi Mazar, who looks marvelous and Stephen Dorff, who I could care less about. Charles Dance plays the designer of the robots, and later he looses his weiner. Bummer for him, his mechanical one scares the girls, as it should. There are more good things than bad things in this movie. Everybody seems to like the square pigs, Hopper's first load, before the killer robots. There's a nice happy ending and some fun stuff happens to get us there. Dennis gets a girl too.

Friday Night Movies 9

Our first feature was the digitally shot 2004 Korean giant monster film Garuda.  A bunch of soldiers and a couple of civilian researchers release the ancient murderous god-bird Garuda, who kills most of them and escapes into the city. The people-eatin' monster in Garuda isn't too bad, kind of a bird like thing, with nice wings once he gets out of his underground tree prison and gets around some soldier snacks for revitalizing energy. The CGI is pretty good for a crew of seven. There is an annoying but cute half-caste girl who everybody hates, who comes with her own annoying white guy assistant. The Thai people don't like her because she's half white but I didn't care for her because she's a pain in the ass who gets people killed. The hating of foreigners pops up several times in the film, the monster-fightin' soldiers pick on Tim the white guy assistant for being not-Thai. I am not sure of what to make of this, but Joe said that Thailand is the only Asian country never ruled by western countries, maybe they're going through some changes. Still a fairly good giant monster film, with lots of running and screaming. I do like the graphics on the box of the dvd alot. The Hindi's have a Garuda. Check out this cool statue.

Our second feature The Wild Women of Wongo is a 1958 comedy from the SCIFI Classics dvd box set, 50 movies for under 30 bucks. It's not very science-fictiony but a voice over talks about Mother Nature's  experiment which puts beautiful women with ugly men in the village of Wongo at one end of an island, and ugly women with beautiful men in the village of Goona at the other end of the island. After that comedy insues, and everyone finds a mate. For 60 cents this is a pretty good buy in the 50 movie package, I laughed a lot, sometimes with the film and sometimes not. There is a seperate version at 6.99 on Amazon. That's where this box cover comes from. It's a amazing what you can find out on the internet. Everybody liked Jean Hawkshaw as Omoo, she's the one with the spear and leopard skin suit. The set contains other films we are determined to see, I myself have only seen about half of them. I have a BestBuy coupon and I am determined to go find one at 10% off.

It's later and I have returned with said box set. Here is a list of the movies included. The Incredible Petrified World, Queen of the Amazons, Robot Monster, She Gods of Shark Reef, The Amazing Transparent Man, The Atomic Brain, Horrors of Spider Island, The Wasp Woman, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, King of Kong Island, Bride of the Gorilla, Attack of the Monsters (aka Gamera vs. Guiron), Gammera the Invincible, Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, Teenagers From Outer Space, Crash of the Moons (Rocky Jones), Menace From Outer Space (Rocky Jones), Hercules Against The Moonmen, Hercules and the Captive Women, Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon, Hercules Unchained, Lost Jungle, Mesa of Lost Women, Assignment: Outer Space, Laser Mission, Killers From Space, Phantom From Space, White Pongo, The Snow Creature, Son of Hercules, Devil of the Desert vs. the Son of Hercules, First Spaceship On Venus, Zontar, the Thing From Venus (remake of "It Conquered the World"), The Astral Factor (aka "The Invisible Strangler"), The Galaxy Invader, Battle of the Worlds, Unknown World, Blood Tide, The Brain Machine, The Wild Women of Wongo, Prehistoric Women, They Came From Beyond Space, Warning From Space, The Phantom Planet, Planet Outlaws (Buck Rogers), Colossus and the Amazon Queen, Eegah, Cosmos: War of the Planets, Destroy All Planets (aka Gamera vs. Viras). I'll let you know how some of them are when I get done watching the lot.

Darth on high

Here's a nice little bit for all the Star Wars fans out there. I picked this up from Outhouse Rag, he listed an article too. His site was were I saw the De-animator game. That's been a fun find. So far the highest score I have seen is over 130 something, by Richard who works at DreamHaven.

Boz ain't shit

Saturday I had the misfortune to watch Midnight Heat, the US title of the 1996 Brian Bosworth craptastic actioneer Black Out, on UPN no less. I was out visiting and this was on the tv. Sometimes you have to go back to your roots to remind yourself how good the new world is. Mind, Midnight Heat would not get any better on dvd, even with gallons of nudity. Bosworth is a FBI guy who's girlfriend is killed by a gang and Boz goes into the witness protection program after he falls apart. This all takes place before the movie starts. He's hurt and looses his memory at the start of the film, causing the Boz to stumble and squat his way through the rest of the film. The Boz never could act and here he can't act in abundance, his grieving neanderthal phone call has to be seen to be enjoyed, also enjoyed by all was the Boz's bunnyhop down a hill. There is only one good thing about this film, Brad Dourif and Jeremy Roberts as the villians. Brad, a favorite of mine, is the leader of the gang that killed the Boz's old gal. His right hand man is Jeremy Roberts who been in lots of genre stuff. I see him often as a villian. I'll never see this film again but I have seen it.

It's also doubtful that I will ever watch Peter Benchley's Creature again either. It's not that it's really bad, it's just filler, and i have enought of that that I don't rewatch. Luckily I captured this off of SciFi, or something. A 70's genetic experiment to make killer shark-dolphin super soldiers goes kablooey and people die. Years later the one remaining, still mutating ks-d resurfaces and starts killing. This wrecks the peace and solitude of marine-biologist Craig Nelson, even more than the arrival of his ex-wife Kim Cattrall and his teen-age son. The mutating bio-hazard grows arms and legs and can breath out of water, but luckily it can be blown up, and then the movie's over. At least there was a nice Jackie Chan commercial for gargage bags to partially recover some of the lost evening.

Friday Night Movies 8

Sometimes our pair of features have a theme. We rarely plan ahead. Sometimes the theme is found in the features, last night I was reaching and found destruction and wires.

Our first feature was Team America, Trey Parker's puppet feature from last year. We watched the Unrated DVD, which has a minute more material than the theatrical version, which I guessed came from the sex scene. This morning I looked at the review on IGN  and it confirmed my suspicion about the poop. Not something I am fond of. IGN has an interview with Trey and Matt here, in which they explain the poop and some other stuff. I liked the movie mostly. It won't make my top 200 but I'll certainly watch it again. There are some funny parts, some good songs, some great sets and great puppets. I think the puppet faces are a bit strange, just on the borderline of creepy. The heads are big for the body. They were created by the Chido Brothers, who are cool. They worked on Elf recently and the wonderful Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Lots of stuff blows up, I always like that. The sets are massive and filled with lots of puppets, some of whom blow up. There are wires. Team America is a mixed bag of things, which all boils down to pussies, dicks and assholes. You can read a whole lot into Trey and Matt's simple worldview. I like the simplicity of putting people's personality types into basic, crotch-based categories. It's like the Harmon Principle: Cookies and Toys. All things boil down to that. You eat it or you play with it. Some of those basic crotch-people can be found here on a pretty long message board page that argues which country is better with most of the posts devoted to Canada and the US. It's the best and the worst of the internet personalities.

Our second feature Varan the Unbelievable is a 1958 Ishiro Honda feature. He's the director of nearly 30 of Toho's great monster movies, starting with Godzilla in 1954 and ending with Mechagodzilla vs. Godzilla in 1975. Varan is awaken by two scientists, who are killed by his monsoon-wind-creating, earth-moving personality. More scientists come and Varan chases them back to Tokyo where he's bombed repeatedly. He leaves, movies over. Several people were falling asleep during this one but I wouldn't fault the movie. It's got a good monster and some hokey characters and is short, only 87 minutes. The dvd from Tokyo Shock looks promising, with a commentary, some other stuff and a lecture from a special effects guy. I am looking forward to that. There are wires on the special effect planes to guide the rockets when attacking Varan. While the planes are attacking him he's tramping about creating lots of property damage.

Cry-Baby dvd coming

I copied this from Dvdreview.com.

John Waters shows us a Cry-Baby May 16, 2005 John Waters collectors will want to get ready to expand their collection with the upcoming director’s cut release of Cry-Baby from Universal Home Entertainment. Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker is the coolest, toughest delinquent who heads a gang of hoods known as the Drapes. His ability to shed one tear drives all the girls wild, especially Allison Vernon-Williams, from the rival group, the Squares. Trouble starts when “Cry-Baby” falls for the beautiful, rich Allison. She soon finds herself eagerly absorbing the influences of rockabilly music and fast cars. This sets off a rumble between the warring factions, and “Cry-Baby” ends up doing time in reform school under the supervision of the hateful guard The DVD will be available in widescreen and Dolby Surround 2.0. Extras include “It Came From Baltimore” - An in-depth look at the making of Cry-Baby with new interviews from John Waters and cast and five never-before-seen deleted scenes. The DVD will land on July 12th with a $19.95 suggested retail price.

What a nice bit of news