PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 103

We had a mini international film fest tonight. Night Watch is a Russian film about the ongoing and tedious battle between good and evil. It's based on the first novel in a trilogy. There's also a game. Some time in the past the two leaders of the forces of light and dark called a halt to the endless killing. A stable but tenuous truce has existed for centuries. A truce enforced by the Nightwatch and the Daywatch. These pseudo-police forces are made up of supernatural beings; seers, witches, vampires and shape-shifters. Two stories weave through the movie. One involves our main guy Anton, a vampire with some sort of visions, who's past decisions catch up to him. He gets stabbed a lot. I mean a fuck of a lot, sometimes by his own hand. The other story is about a woman who has a curse that is manifesting itself as a huge powerful vortex filled with black birds. It will bring devastation unless the curse is lifted. So you got a race against time and some people in jeopardy stuff. Luckily the goodish guys have a really fast van that shoots fire from it's exhaust pipe. They race around and things go from bad to worse, people die, things are broken. It moves a bit slow. There's a nice site called In The Gloom for this popular film. So popular in Russian it made more money than Lord of the Rings, at least according to the Wikipedia, almost 17 million bucks. I wonder what tickets cost in Russia. Oh, it's fairly cheap.

St. Petersburg, Russia (Source: Russian National Group; www.russia-travel.com)

• Movie ticket: $5.74
• Bus/subway fare: 45¢-53¢
• Cup of regular coffee: 93¢
• Bottle of local beer in a bar: Stephan Rasin, 68¢
• Moderate, three-star hotel room for two: $119.43
• Moderate, three-course meal for one, without alcohol or tip: $9.56
• $1=26.12 Russia Rubles

Our second feature was Hellevator: The Bottled Fools, which at Japanese theaters would cost 1800 Yen for a peek. Imagine how much a box of shrimp flavored popcorn would cost. Joe brought shrimp flavored french fry shaped chips but no one would eat one. Joe only ate one and reported it had nearly no flavor. The horrible smell when the bag was opened must have been the flavor escaping, and now it's on the couch, which is where I was not eating those chips. Hellevator is set in some sort of futuristic Japanese society. It's moved underground for some reason and people move about in large elevators. There are an odd bunch of characters in the car. Some come and go before the convicts get on. Rapist murderers. Chained to a wall in their orange jumpsuits, with a cocky cop, a school girl, the elevator operator, a woman, her baby carriage and a couple of guys. That's a group bound for disaster which arrives in the form of a stalled elevator. Now it's the Hellevator all right. I got this from a guy at work who hated it, as did a few people on the IMDB, a few really liked it. I don't think I hate it, I just don't care much and wouldn't buy one now that I've seen it. There's a lot of violence but it's people on people and not very interesting. It's mostly filmed in the green elevator with framing scenes in a blue room as a cop grills one of the surviving men. There's one of those crappy ambigious endings that I don't care for. What the hell was that? Some one needs to be locked in the elevator with a kick in the nuts.

Stick something in R2D2

Boing Boing had a link to this place with an article on the new R2D2 USPS mailboxes. They also have a PDF of a paper version of the mailbox that you can build. There are also some fun photos of people and the mailboxes. Hints on envelope decorating are found here, although I'm not much impressed with their samples, and see the new Star Wars stamps here.

Eyes

I don't know who that is but I thought she had great eyes.

This lady had something else going on.

She's a real doll. Check out Teddy Babes.

Zooma Zooma

The new Bugati Veyron is a commercial production car that can go 253 miles or 407 kilometers an hour. The first 150 miles an hour take about 250 horses and that last 100 MPH takes another 750 HP. You can see a test drive video over at Outhouse Rag. I've never gone over 100 MPH in a car. That was fast enough for me, especially with mom sleeping in the back seat.

Two words?

That's some fucked up shit right there.

Nachoooo

I watched Nacho Libre tonight and really enjoyed the movie, the commentary and all the extras. It's directed by Jared Hess. He's the guy who directed Napoleon Dynamite, which he co-wrote with his wife Jerusha. She worked on the Nacho Libre script with Jared and Mike White. I have liked many of the projects Mike's worked on, like Freaks and Geeks, Orange County, The Good Girl and School of Rock. His new movie, Year of the Dog, which he also directed, comes out April 13. I thought Jack Black was fun as Nacho, a Friar living in an orphange, who has the secret desire to be a Luchador. That's a wrestler and the Mexican wrestlers are a great and colorful bunch. There are a great number of wrestling movies in the catalog of the Mexican film archives. This one was shot in a small mountain town and Mexico City with mostly Mexican cast and crew. They all do a great job. Nacho Libre, like Napoleon Dynamite, is filled with wonderful characters with great faces and wonderful scenery with great facades. The town is small and old and run down. Kind of like the town in ND. Nacho starts wrestling in his town and works his way up the ladder in the wrestling circuit. He has the help of Esqueleto, played by Héctor Jiménez, who like Jack Black's Nacho spends much of the movie "nearly naked". Esqueleto doesn't get a mask. Not all Luchadors have masks but the ones that do are mighty attached to their head gear. You can loose power and status if you are unmasked in a match. Even the wrestling was fun enough to watch. The story is pretty straight forward and there's a good payoff.

Not the best eatin'

I just liked that guy lookin' out there.

He might like to hunt or fish.

Even if it's an illusion.

We are all so easily fooled.

That's some philosophical shit right there.

Let me tell you.

Agent 00 Sexy

I haven't seen this movie, I just liked the picture. Those foreigners, don't ya just love'm. I wish Greg would pick up a copy of this from one of those video bootleggers he's always running into. I heard that Hector LeChuga is the Mexican Bill Saluga. I want my Agent Double-O Sexy. I mean who wouldn't. Look at those ears. I don't even know what they do to me. I do have mixed feeling about the tail. I did read The Age of the Tail by H. Allen Smith and that pretty much sums up the tail.

Friday Night Movies 102

Two films with blood stained boats and monsters. The Crater Lake Monster was in from Netflix and got tossed up first. The word on the street? Terrible movie! But that won't stop us from delving into this cinematic monster mess. It gets a 1.5 on the IMDb. It should be higher. Not much, but higher, although the bad music pulls it down a bit. Some people seem to like the movie, it doesn't get a total pan, and I've seen worse, much worse. Hell this Rhino dvd is fairly good looking with not too shabby color. I just got a new 50 movie pack and to fill it Mill Creek Entertainment has resorted to picking through the trash outside the bottom of the barrel. Near the start of TCLM a meteor falls into the lake. It heats up an ancient dino egg and after a bit a giant beastie shows up and starts eating cattle and people. More the people. And we don't miss any of these people. Especially for their acting. Most of the people never acted before or after. Same with the director, nada, for the last 30 years. But they tried, and while this could never be a good movie, it's got the occasional attempt to create an interesting shot. Unfortunately the technicals skills of the film makers are not the best and the script lets us down, especially in the humor area. The comic relief machines are two local yocals who rent boats on the very same lake that the monster appears in, which according to some guy on the IMDb, is not the real Crater Lake in Oregon. But no matter what lake this is, a dinosaur is bad for the fishing, and bad when your boat renters get chomped by that very same critter. You can see a picture of one of the yocals and the monster at this page, and two guys talk over clips of the movie that they shot off their tv here. You can see a few shots of the stop motion monster, which is the best thing in the movie. It cost about 95 cents to rent from Netflix and delivered almost a buck in entertainment value, especially to us genre fans.

I can't imagine there are fans of Uwe Boll. He seems universally hated, yet he continues to work, planning a sequel to his 2005 movie Alone in the Dark. We watched it as our second feature and it is pretty poor, but again it's not as bad as some of the stuff on the recent 50 movie pack that I bought, or many of the features that they run on SCIFI. I'm watching Pirana right now and that is a much worse piece of crap. Not surprisingly it gets higher score on the IMDb than Uwe's movie, 3.3 to 2.4. At least AITD has some fights and gun battles with monsters, Pirana is just boring, there have been over a half dozen musical montagues in the first hour. No one needs that. That's not a recommendation for either just a perspective thing. At the start of AITD some kids disapppear out of an orphanage. This happened 20 years ago. Christian Slater was one of them and now he's all growed up. Tara Reid is a lab rat for some smarter guy. Christian is her guy but he's been gone for a while collecting artifacts in South America. He returns with a small piece that someone is after. He gets attacked by a super strong guy who's a bitch to kill. Bullets through the chest don't stop him, finally getting impaled on an iron bar puts him down. Turns out he's got a weird bug like thing attached to his spine and he died when it was cut in half. Turns out Christian has one too but it's already dead on the spine. Tara's boss has also been collecting artifacts from a fictional ancient people. People who could open the gate to another place. He's the one who created the spine people and he's been creating more. If your spine bug is alive it can turn you into a super strong nearly unkillable zombie human killing machine. Then, for some reason I missed or wasn't explained, the spine people can morph into CGI creatures that are really fast and nearly invisible. Even the super glowy ammo of the monster fighter bureau has a hard time taking these buggers down. Stephen Dorf shows up to lead that group with his gruff attitude and day old stubble. Most everyone dies and eventually the movie is over. We complained alot and luckily Tara Reid didn't take off her top. No one wants to see those bad fake boobs. That's a horror story that scare's me more than Alone in the Dark ever could, and it's not only not safe for work, it's not safe for anyone.

Hey, monsters!

If monsters came around it would just piss me off. Monsters selling tires?I'm not so sure. Depends if they were spokes-monsters or sales-monsters I guess. Nobody likes a pushy salesman. Especially me. I got one calling on me at my work and that guy is pissing me off and all he does is talk. What about a salesguy who shoots fire out his ass mouth. Or stepped on your car and crushed it. "Oooops! Sorry." Screw that, ya clumsy giant! Sorry ain't going to cut it. Even if he had the money to get you a new one it wouldn't happen right then and you'd still have to go home in a cab.

I would not have expected Godzilla to be able to use chopsticks. And where would he get big ones like that? Telephone poles. On the left you see Gorgo, a British giant monster movie. It's an ok movie. Not great but fun enough. There's another good review here, and you can read about Gorgo of Sparta here. She's in the 300 movie I have no interest in seeing. Then there's the 1969 John Carpenter film Gorgo versus Godzilla. I haven't seen that. I have seen Bambi VS. Godzilla and you can see that...guess where. There are clay stop motion versions there too. Check out Close Encounters of the Nerd Kind part 1 & 2, Hardware Wars Part 1 & 2, and an interview with Producer Michael Wiese who tells a cute story about George Lucas and the creation of Ernie Fosselius' HARDWARE WARS.