It was movie night over at my place this week. Joe was wanting to see some special effects movie on the big screen. We watched The Abyss. I hadn't seen it in a long while, so I was game, and Greg had never seen the Special Edition. The dvd has both the Theatrical and the Special Edition versions on the same disc. The Special Edition is 171 minutes long. The Theatrical version was released in 1989 at 146 minutes. Here's a list of the changes. The SE was released in 1993, which is the same year as the release of the big laser disc box. Most of the content of this dvd came from that box. The SE has a whole subplot added back in and some special effects were finished. We all agreed the new material added a good bit to the movie, besides time. I like the whole tidal wave thing, too bad they didn't get it finished in time for the theatrical release and the movie was so long it was scarin' people. This is before Dances With Wolves proved that people will sit through long movies without leaving. Theater owners don't like long movies, less turns for the day. As the movie opens, a submarine crashes on the ocean floor. None of us wanted to work on a submarine. I don't want to work anywhere I can't walk, or take a bus, home from. The Navy recruits a group of undersea oil workers to carry some Navy seals to the sub to check for survivors. The oil guys have an undersea platform called Deepcore. They work and live there. It's attached to a surface ship by a big cable a couple of miles long. There's a mother of a storm coming. Many of the characters in the film make bad calls and people die. Luckily the aliens are here and maybe they will help the stupid violent humans. I like the new ending with the alien ship lifting all the other ships out of the water and the sailor branishing the machine gun. Like he's going to save anybody with that. And hokey as it is, I really like it when our hero comes walkin' out of the hatch, wavin' his arms. I sure wish we could have some nice aliens come by, and help us with their superior technology, instead of the jerks we have now.
Much of the movie was filmed in the containment vessel of the unfinished Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant. The Deepcore platform set is still there. You can see it in Google Earth, and here's a web site with a recent visit to the location. During the movie we were discussing the probability of surviving death by drowning in such cold waters. It's an emotional high point in the film. Someone on the movies FAQ on the IMDb said that an 18 year old guy survived 38 minutes. I am still staying away from water like that. Can't walk home from the bottom of the ocean in your street clothes. I wouldn't go for even 4 times my pay. We also wondered about the liquid breathing suit. It's still not ready for prime time, at least according to the Wikipedia, which also has a nice synopsis of the movie. I noticed something about an undersea hotel the other day. It was being built by some guys in the middle east. When I searched the first thing I found was this place. Then I found an article about the place in Dubai. It's surprisingly penis looking as well as making me think of the alien spaceship's own uprights.
Joe brought that 9 movie pack back. We watched King of The Zombies from it last week. This week we watched Fangs of the Living Dead. It's a 1969 Italian film called Malenka, that came out here in 1973. You can read a long synopsis by clicking on the link above. It's a pretty awful movie, so, beware. It's good for complaining about though. Lucky for us the dvd box lied and the 80 minute movie was only 73 minutes. It was 98 minutes when it was released in Italy. Again, with the luck. A young woman inherits a castle somewhere in Italy. It's filled with vampires, so you know that can't turn out well. The video transfer didn't turn out well either, but it goes hand in hand with the crappy dubbing and Anita Ekberg's bad acting. Parts of it made me laugh out loud, and that's laughing at, not with, the movie which gets 3.9 over at IMDb. Click on that link and you can see some photos. You can watch a clip on YouTube that looks better than the dvd we watched. It really brings Anita's bad acting to life. Check out her dress and hair style. Again, fits the bad acting. Someone else posted "the good scenes" on YouTube. Another lie from the internet. You can see more than enough of this movie in that 9 minutes. Check out the goatee on the creepy count. Then go watch a good movie.
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