PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 43

I'm glad that The Dead Next Door don't live next door to me. Those zombie collectin', murder lovin' cult members are worse than the skanky whorebag that used to live on the north side of me. I don't think she'd eat your flesh. Not that I would ever take the chance to get so close. The Dead Next Door is a really low budget indy shot on 8mm, that has the distinction of having Sam Raimi as co-producer and moneybags, thus getting it a nice release from Anchor Bay. Bruce Campbell does a couple of voices in ADR. The zombies aren't the best, but neither is the movie. Mostly poorly done, it was still fairly fun to watch. There were a couple of times that I laughed out loud. Once, when a door opened, a rush of zombies carried a character off screen, like a sudden bus shooting into frame. Whoosh. Scream. Laugh. The acting wasn't so good, nor the directing from first timer J. R. Bookwalter. His career has no great horror highs. If I hadn't already seen it, I might actually pick it up because of the Sam and Bruce connection, and I wouldn't be too disappointed with it.

I certainly wasn't disappointed with The Ambushers, although there was a brief period of fear after hearing the title song sung by Boyce and Hart. It was pretty stinky. I hadn't seen this movie for years. Matt Helm is in an ICE compound having some R&R when he runs into Janice Rule, an agent he'd worked with before, and who had been the pilot of a flying saucer developed by the US. It was stolen and Janice was found wondering in the jungle. She's in recovery, she recovers and hooks up with Matt to investigate Albert Salmi. He's the guy who stole the flying saucer and is selling it to the highest bidder. Senta Berger is one of the bidders. She doesn't win the bidding but she gets some great dresses to wear.  As does Janice Rule, especially the orange and pink top and skirt with matching orange thigh high boots. The clothes were by Olig Cassini who was about at the end of his film costume designer career. There were lots of big ass boots, like on the video box. I am sure glad I picked up this set. It will be fun to watch them over again.

Movie Titles

Pokin' around the few blogs I like I found this link to a site that has movie title screen captures. They could come in handy to the right people. Maybe you, maybe me. The same blog had a link to an nice animation of a cat jumping at a fishtank.

Friday Night Movies 42

Furyô anego den: Inoshika Ochô was released here as Sex and Fury. It came out in Japan in 1973. It's a pink film. It's like a regular movie but with more nudity and exploitation qualities. There are lots of pictures and a review on this site. Most of the reviews I read seemed to really like this movie. It's ok. It's no Lone Wolf and Cub. It sure drags in the middle when it turns more melodramatic. Watchers were restless, hardly anyone was gettin' killed. I wouldn't buy it after seeing it. And you know I'll buy anything, often twice. It's a pretty simple murder revenge movie, set in turn of the century Japan. The daughter of a cop grows up and gets sweet sweet revenge on the guys who killed her dad. There are two major fight scenes. The one at the beginning of the movie has the gal on the dvd cover fighting in the buff. Since it's Japan in the 70's there is no glimpse of any pubic hair. It was illegal to show pubic hair in Japan in the 70's. Now you can see pubic hair in Japan. I am sure they have some other fucked up things going on there. Where doesn't. The other good fight is the big one at the end. Lots of running around and poking people with swords. Most everyone dies. That picked things up. There's a great bad dummy falling off a train. That made me laugh. It's got some good photography, but only occasionally. It's got some good and bad scenes populated by some mostly unpleasant characters and their sordid lives.

Dracula's Great Love is pretty bad. There's just no gettin' 'round that. Several people are traveling by coach in a wooded hilly part of the world. A wheel falls off the coach and rolls a mighty way down a hill. One of the more interesting things in the movie, sad to say. The party makes their way to the shelter of an old sanitarium. Who's waiting? Count Dracula. There's some nudity and biting but it's just not very good. Greg bought that one because he had seen Paul Naschy in some werewolf films, and it was on clearance. The movie also looked like crap, both the original print and the video transfer were bad. At least he got it cheap. Naschy's Dracula does not look as cool as the vampire on the dvd box. There are women chained up. I forget why. My mind had shut down out of sheer boredom. Other people were falling asleep, or closing their eyes to stop the pain. While looking at the dvd box, before seeing the movie, I could feel the stank of badness. In the bit of conversation as the movie was starting, Greg said he was going to a movie convention in Paris next week, and I asked him to pass on a good swift kick to Paul Naschy's nuts. That goes double after seeing the movie. The entire crew needs a good ass whippin'. Praise for good, punishment for bad.

Crystal

I really like getting new books, and I particularily like getting the kind of books that make me want to read them. The ones that hook you in and pull you along. The kind that you can't put down. A book that makes me want to read it and not watch the tv. You don't always get that kind. I just had two in a row. Not totally uncommon but a nice surprise, especially considering the first book. The latest Buffy novel was at DreamHaven when I showed up on Monday. I went to the store directly from work, which is where I left the book I was reading. Lucky for me Buffy's in the house.

Afterimage by Pierce Askegren is set a little way into the second high school year. Buffy and Angel aren't very along in their relationship but Xander and Cordelia are getting pretty hot and heavy. Some guy comes to Sunnydale to re-open the drive in movie. Xander gets a part time job with the construction crew being a gopher. He's really looking forward to the Opening Night All-Night Exploitation Movie Marathon. Of the made up movies running that opening night my favorite is Double Drunken Dragon Kung Fu Fight. Xander is the only one of the scoobies that is interested in the drive-in and he winds up going with Jonathan. After the drive-in several people fall aleep and do not awake, including Jonathan. All sorts of bad shit seems to happen to him. Giles gets magically knocked out, a welcome change from the usual blow to the head, and wakes up in a locked room. Lucky for him his kidnapper only subjects him to the torture of an un-air-conditioned room with no comfy chair. The bad Count Cagliostro makes Giles eat some un-identified fast food before Buffy comes to save her watcher and light the bad guy's ass on fire. The book is shortish and I read it all the way through before I went to bed. It was fun to read and there were lots of movie references for the genre movie fan to get all gooey about. Many of the Buffy novels have been good reads. Some not so good.

You can always count on a good read from Dianna Wynne Jones. I finished Fire and Hemlock Tuesday night. It was the book I left at work Monday. I finished it, then I looked up some stuff on the internet about it. Turns out the story is based on a couple of old ballads. Here's the Wikipedia bit on Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer. Here's a page with a long essay on the end of the book. These things contain spoilers. I would go get the book and read it before hand. So far all of her books have been entertaining. I didn't know anything about the ballads before hand and I am not really interested in them now. I read enough stuff on the internet to slacken my thirst. Sometimes a bit of general knowledge is good 'nuf. Several other authors have done retellings of the ballads. I have not read any. People are interested in the interaction between humans and the fairy world. I don't find the  cover to be a very nice painting. I am particularily troubled with the highlighted area over the right hand side of her mouth slit. I really liked the book inside. Her writing is great, so readable, what I think of as being transparent. As you read you forget you're actually reading a story, all you see is the story, you don't think about the words anymore.  It's a rare creature that stays in the zone so long. Jones is consistantly good. The Crestomanci series, the Dalemark Series and The Dark Lord of Derkhom are all good places to start if you aren't already on board.

Woo, woo, off to bed.

Friday Night Movies 41

It was a night of bad accents again. I guess there were no good dialect coaches back in ancient days. From Russia With Love has some pretty good bad accents. Daniela Bianchi is an Italian beauty queen who plays a Russian clerk, with a bad accent, who is dupped by Lotta Lenya, a Russian Secret Service boss with a bad accent who is secretly SPECTRE's number 3 agent. SPECTRE, a super secret world domination organization with a bad accent additude, play the Russians and the English off against each other in order to obtain a Lecter decoding machine. There's an abundance of running about and killin', much of the latter by Robert Shaw. He's a great villian, certainly one of my favorites in the Bond series. On the hero side Pedro Armendariz, a veteran Mexican actor with 125 listings on IMDB, plays the Turkish bureau chief Kerim Bey. He's a delight in his final film. His accent, which I wouldn't think of as Turkish, is a joy to listen to. It suits him well. It's a darn good spy film, with some fairly good fights and things happening.

There weren't very many good fights in the fourth and last Matt Helm, The Wrecking Crew. It has even more bad accents, doled out liberally to Sharon Tate, Tina Louise, Elke Sommer and various lower level actors. The main villian of the piece, Count Massimo Contini, is played by Nigel Green who plays it with an english accent. His own. I don't get it either, bold choices by director Phil Karlson, who also directed The Silencers, Ben and Walking Tall. The Count watches as his minions steal a train car load of gold. He has a remarkable camera system that lets his see just about anywhere. Someone joked he should market that amazing video system, he wouldn't have to steal tons of gold. But, he's not that smart, so he steals the gold, hides it in his chateau and Matt Helm comes a lookin'. That's him lookin' out of the VHS tape box, along with Sharon Tate. She's kind of like the Stella Stevens character from the first Matt Helm film, clumsy and inept, but with big glasses. She even falls in some water, but without Stella's comic timing. Bad timing, that's what Sharon Tate had, being home when the Manson's came calling. The IMDB bio page is fair but sad reading. The Wrecking Crew is proably the worst of the Helm films but it made most of us laugh out load once in a while, even if it didn't mean to. I look forward to The Ambushers with Janice Rule.

Sean Astin's There and Back Again

I finished There and Back Again by Sean Astin. It was ok. It's no If Chins Could Kill. Bruce Campbell's autobiography is a much snappier read. Astin's writing isn't as playful or entertaining. He had a co-author, Joe Layden, and Joe's books aren't too impressive in my mind. Astin spends the first third of the book going through the highs and lows of his career, finally reaching the Lord of the Rings. I personally don't care for most of the movies he has made. Most of them aren't my kind of story. I have three on dvd, The Goonies, The War of the Roses, and Toy Soldiers, and that's out of over 40 movies he's made. I'm not interested in seeing Rudy. He tells some ok stories and talks about his feelings concerning other actors and the expectations he has, both from them and himself. He complains alot apparently. He then spends way too much time complaining about his complaining. Woven into the book between the complaining are mentions of other's complaints about his complaining. He's a constant talker and the book rambles around like one of those conversations people have that touch on a myriad of topics and wind up miles away from where they started. "How the hell did I get here?" I know that feeling. Since he can't shut up he often says things he regrets. Boy, who hasn't been there. I often feel I am burning my bridges around me. Got to quit playing with matches. Then Sean complains to everyone about his conversational foot-mouth problem. He's a bag full of neurosises. But, he's putting it down on paper and you can read all about it. The comments on the book over at Amazon were pretty much either really nice or really nasty. And it is that kind of book. Either you are going to buy into him and go with it, getting some interesting stories mixed in with a personal story, or you don't like him and wind up disliking the book.

I was interested in the book because of the LotR connection obviously, and I was interested in the chapter on his dad, John Astin, and John's work in Peter Jackson's The Frighteners. I really like that film, it's my favorite Peter Jackson film, just slightly ahead of Braindead. The Frighteners is a nice blend of comedy, horror, murder, ghosts, mayhem, romance, and a wonderful performance from Jeffrey Combs. John Astin played a ghost, he was pretty funny. One of the IMDb trivia pieces on Jackson says he has directed three generations of Astins, John, Sean, and Sean's daughter Alexandra. The Frighteners Director's Cut dvd came out a bit ago. It has the wonderful four and a half hour documentary that Jackson did for the laserdisc box set. How dvd's have changed what you can offer for bonus features and how they can be displayed.

The John Astin chapter was enjoyable. Did you know John Astin also auditioned for the part of Gandolf? I didn't. Mind you, knowing everything takes so much more work than I am willing to put in. Much easier to watch a movie and read a book or two. Last year I did pretty good with both. I topped a hundred books and double that in new movies watched. There were a lot of tv shows watched last year. Not so much on tv but on dvd. Just this week I have been chain-watching several shows a day from the third season of Have Gun-Will Travel. Many have been good. Dead Alive is the title of the US release of Braindead. Now, where am I?

Hallmark - whoda thought

Two nice things from Hallmark today. There's a repeat of the second Mystery Woman movie and I found this fun bit on a sampler of things. The link takes me to a Hallmark page for the characters hoops & yoyo. There is a little flash animation about Santa that I liked. Be sure to have the sound on and press the bear button once the music and dancing starts. There is some other stuff to look at or download and several short animations that could be interesting to the right people. I have just enough time to watch them all before the Mystery Woman episode comes on. It's a mystery set in a bookstore but ther isn't much bookstorin' going on in the early episodes. There is some more later on, especially the episode that has three mystery writers coming for a mystery weekend. One of them is a murderer. They aren't great movies but watchable and I like the characters played by Kellie Martin and Clarence Williams III.

The movie turned out to be enjoyable. I laughed out loud near the end. Nice.

Friday Night Movies 40

The Big Alligator River is a 1979 Italian giant alligator eats some folks movie. It's funny but not very good. Mel Ferrer is a rich guy who sets up a resort in the jungle, maybe in Africa, with Barbara Bach as his anthropologist. I never found her that attractive and still don't. Some Italian guy plays the hunky hero, except he's kind of a jerk. He's there to take photos of the resort and he's brought this skinny model to jazz up the place. She gets eaten along with a local when they sneak over to Love Island for some Here to Eternity like beach action. Before things get too hot and heavy our couple gets some gatorinterruptis. Racing back to the mainland they get attacked by an ill-defined aquatic chomper. But this takes a while to get to and you don't see much of anything anyway. Mostly everyone sucks, and some of them are eaten and some are killed by the locals who go gatorcrazy and have a murderin' good time. Flaming arrows are pretty plentiful. There's an amusing, cute little girl who's mother is a tramp. That gets some laughs. There's hardly any nudity, but that's not going to help much. The big alligator isn't very good, there are some pretty bad underwater model scenes that made us laugh, especially when the VW minibus fell off the bridge.  One I won't be adding to my collection.                                          

Our second feature will make it to my shelf. There is a new edition of Death Race 2000 out. It has a commentary with Roger Corman and Mary Woronov. The director, Paul Bartel, also directed Eating Raoul, Lust in the Dust and Private Parts. He died in 2000. He didn't make many films but he did act in over 70 projects, so you can still see him again sometime.   This is a real fun movie. David Carradine is Frankenstein, the favored racer in the annual cross country race. He's one of five contestants, Sylvester Stallone and Mary Woronov are two others. The bread and circus public pleaser has some detractors. There is a rebellion going on, things are going to change, but not quite the way people were expecting. There is lots of slaughtering as the cars race across the country trying to score more hits. There are a lot of jokes and characters to enjoy. 

Friday Night Movies 39

Our first feature was the 2003 Australian indy horror film Undead. Hand made by the Spierig brothers, Micheal and Peter, who wrote, directed, edited, did the sound and the visual effects. Meteors falling on a small coastal town turn the citizens into reanimated corpses who like to kill and eat livin' human beings. I'm not sayin' they're zombies but those guys are all messed up. We follow a group of people about and there is killin', yellin' and lots of gun shootin' as they first get trapped in a house and then on their run to the airport to escape in a plane. That's the plan but like any good horror film things go badly and everybody has to follow the script which has them getting picked off one by one. Damn script. The film is filled with small references to other films. There's an isolated farm house to get trapped in like Night of the Living Dead. There is two fisted John Woo style .45 handling by the main character who is like a cross between the Man with No Name and Blade. He has a holster on his back like Ash in the Army of Darkness, but he doen't have a shotgun in there. Nope. He has three shotguns bolted together. You can cut a person in half with 'em. And, we get to see that. Cool, that half zombie dancin'. Go, baby, go. There is a bit of gore, well, a lot of gore, and some good jokes and some bad jokes. All in all it works fairly well and you do get to see a naked alien. Yes, there are aliens, but I don't want to give any more of the story away. It's good enough that I would buy a copy for further watching, and I didn't like the characters that much. The story was good though, kind of a downer but entertaining none the less.

As was our second feature, Dean Martin in 1966's Murderers' Row. This was the second of 4 films in the Matt Helm series. It was Ann-Margret's 13th film in just 5 years, following right after The Swinger. Those are my two favorite Ann-Margret films. That's two links there. I really haven't followed her career but I see from the IMDb that she's worked in a movie or two just about every year from the start. Sadly, there were few of interest. Still, in Murderers' Row she's cute and funny and sexy, and oh, those dresses. Love 'em or hate 'em, they stand out in a room. Camilla Sparv gets to wear some pretty fun stuff. Yeah. I never heard of her either. She's pretty hot lookin' in that green pantsuit, until she get rubbed out. Sad, but that's what happens when you align yourself with a power mad Karl Malden. He has the worst accent, when he actually remembers to use it. Near the end it's almost all gone. There's more gadgets, but everyone one thought the backward shooting gun from the first movie was still the best. It's a fun sequel. The picture is from the VHS tape box.