Our first feature, Josie and the Pussycats, turned out to be better than I had heard. Once again I shouldn't listen to critics. Mike brought it in response to our watching Blade: Trinity a couple of weeks ago, the main villian in both is Parker Posey. She's slightly less skanky in this, also way-less vampirey. She's the head of a large recording company dispensing popular rock music to the kids, music with subliminal messages in it. It's a pretty simple story, kind of befitting the origin of the characters. Josie was in the Archie Comics Family, not a comic I read, I read other Archie comics but had stopped reading them in the late 60's. There was a 1970 cartoon but I don't remember carrying anything about it. The girls are cute in the live action version, Alan Cummings is good as Parker Posey's evil henchman/lackey, and there are some funny bits scattered through the film. Keep an eye out for Missi Pyle, she's pretty funny. Mix in a bit of romance and some nice friendship & sentimentality and you've got a fun move. The music isn't too bad, the vocals dubbed by the lead singer from Letters To Cleo, who's only song I knew was the 1994 Here & Now. That's about when I stopped listening to bands and started listening to movie scores. This certainly won't get to be my favorite teen movie but it's nice light hearted fun and Tara Reid is probably her funniest. Now she has big fake boobs, it's sad really. The writer/director team of Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan also wrote and directed Can't Hardly Wait which I liked. They also wrote A Very Brady Sequel and The Flinstones in Viva Rock Vegas, neither of which is quite as entertaining as this.
Everything is more entertaining than our second selection, 1950's Prehistoric Women. This raw piece of cinematic crap was flung into our faces by the 600 pound gorilla that is the Sci Fi Classics 50 movie box set, and that's not box set in any kind of special or wonderful way. There is nothing in the movie that looks as exciting as this DVD box, not the rock throwing scene by the river, and the bear on the box was just a cub in the movie. There is a funny slapstick sequence with an elephant with huge tusks running after our hero. We were hoping for fur bikinis but no such luck. Some guy on the IMDb mentions seeing fur bikinis. What the hell was he watching? It wouldn't have mattered if they did have fur bikinis, the quality of the image was so poor it was hard to see much of what was going on. Add a dash of poor digital mastering and spoonful of low bitrate and you can keep the film lookin' pretty murky. People actually speak highly of this on the IMDb but it only scores a 2.5 rating. It could be lower.
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