Well, it's been a busy week and I haven't had much to yak about. I spent a big chunk of my free time getting rid of a big pile of books. Then I spent another large hunk of time getting adding creations to my new MOCpages site. MOCpages is a free site for LEGO fans to show off their stuff. Feel free to look around. Now onto the movies.
Joe bought another one of those 20 Movie Packs. We picked The War of the Robots to watch. You can see pictures and read a synopsis at the link. When I read the short discription on the box I did not remember having seen it. I had though, in March 2006. It was in one of the 50 Movie Packs that I bought. So we suffered through it and even after the movie finished I couldn't say for sure I'd seen it. I sort of remembered the white dome in the space ship, but I figured it was from some other movie. Most of the actors and some of the sets are used in The War of the Planets, another crappy Italian sci-fi movie. It sure didn't register with me, so I guess it's that forgetable. Even now only a few hours later I can thankfully feel the images of it slip out of head. It's an Italian movie from 1978 and there's really nothing much good about it. We yakked a lot during the 100 minutes and when I went over to look it up on the IMDb, the box did not give a year, everyone went to look too. Desperate to get out of the room even briefly. In the movie some aliens steal a professor and his assistant. Human spacemen head out after them. The professor left his reactor going and it will exploded destroying everything around it. Maybe the whole earth. Oh, oh. After a brief detour to another planet, where they rescue a guy who then joins the crew, the rescuers find the kidnapped humans. It turns out the assistant is now the emperess of a group of dying aliens. The prof is going to help them recover. The aliens had mostly died off and they were using robots, with blonde pageboy wigs, to do their dirty work. The main alien baddie sure looked like Emperor Palpatine in the later Star Wars movies. TWOTR ripped off lightsabers from Star Wars. They didn't have the money to do much more than paint some swords with luminous paint and bounce a lot of light off of them. It's really the best thing in the movie, sadly. The fights were pretty poor, the sets cheap, and the acting poor. There is a guy who has a Texas accent. He's blond with curley hair, but he has boots. I think that made us laugh the most. All that poor film making sure made us fidget, but being in a group made the watching that much more tolerable. I guess it is true about misery loving company. It gets a 2.4 on the IMDb and that's probably generous. Near the end I did comment on it's having a Flash Gordon kind of feel. Greg said that it lacked Buster Crabbe, and so did our next selection.
We watched the 4th episode of the 1954 Flash Gordon TV series. The Brain Machine has Flash, with his shirt off a lot of the time, and Dale trying to rescue Dr. Zarkoff and Commander Richards. They have been kidnapped by the Witch of Neptune. She has a machine that can steal the knowledge from your brain. Then, if she wants, erase your memories. She's an evil hag in goofy makeup who wants to rule the galaxy. Or was it the universe? I can't remember. Anyway, Witchie plunders the Zarkoff and Richards noggins, scooping out their thoughts, and leaves them drooling. There were nice big hats with flashing lights and wires to transfer their knowledge to a wooden box with some knobs and lights on it. They were dumb hats but I laughed. Flash shows up just in time for the Witch to escape. Then the To Be Continued... message pops up on the screen. Bummer! It was the last episode on the disc. There is another Alpha Video disc, which doesn't seem to have part two, and some other vendor has a third disc but I haven't seen a listing of it's episodes. The Wikipedia says most of the episodes are lost. It looks like we won't ever find out what happens to those two guys. I'm guessin' they are ok in the end, and from the cover of the second box we might have a good chance of seeing Flash with his shirt off. I know that's always a treat for the ladies, but all I can say is, "Hey, at least, it's not man ass."
Even though I had seen it fairly recently I recommended The Werewolf. It ran on Turner a few weeks ago and I snagged a copy. It's a 1956 Columbia Pictures production. Set in a small town, kind of wintery but not much snow. We are in a bar and some fidgety guy acts kind of nervous and weird. Talkin' crazy. He leaves and is followed by a second man, who asks for money. No! He forces the fidgety man into an alley and tries to rob him. Our fidgety guy turns violent and knocks the robber to the ground. All we see is the bottom half of their legs thrashing about, and all we hear is some screaming and growling. The view of the camera is cut off by a wall. I bet you can guess what's going on here. That's right, building suspense and savin' money on makeup. Out on the sidewalk an older lady is heading somewhere, she pauses when she hears the commotion. A man appears out of the darkness and that sets her off. Screaming bloody murder. The man runs out of town. The deputy and some men run out of the bar to see what's going on. They find the guy with his throat torn out. Was it an animal? The old lady says it was a man. Maybe it was a bear in a suit. They don't know. The sheriff collects men from the town and they head off into the woods. The seal off the town and try to contain the problem. In another thread a woman and her son are looking for the dad of the family. He's supposed to be up in this area, selling or something. Then we switch over to a couple of scientists. They are worried about the end of the world and nuclear fallout. They are trying to develop a serum to cure it. That can't be good. Not the serum, their being in the movie. I'm startin' to suspect somethin' is goin' on. The story threads pull together and the various people interact. Occasionally someone gets bit, or shot at. Some reporters show up and there is a lot of running around in the woods. More people die. It's kind of sad, but I liked this movie. It has good actors and a good story. Not great but more interesting than many I have seen. It's a good B-movie and I enjoyed the second viewing almost as much as the first.
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