PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Science Fiction Sunday 15

Turner Classic Movies ran The Giant Claw the other day and since I didn't have a copy I recorded one. I watched it this morning. I hadn't seen it in a while. Jeff Morrow is a radar science guy who's flying a plane on a test. He spots something flying but no one believes him. Planes start to go missing so there must be some sort of threat be out there. We, the audience, don't actually see anything for a while. And that's a good thing. Once we do get to see the made in Mexico puppet, we are sad. But no matter how bad the puppet is the military can't defeat the flying monster. Everyone dies. Just kidding, Jeff figures out a way to kill the beast. It's short 75 minute length is the best thing about it, right after pretty Mara Corday. The science gobbledy gook is pretty funny too. Not a movie worth buying but one worth seeing. Just for the badness.

 

Abberation is a low budget small monster movie that's much better. Some lizard like critters are attacking people in a snowbound cabin. It's a good average monster movie with some vicious but only fairly made monsters. They aren't totally convincing but the rest of the movie is pretty well made and has a good score. It was shot in New Zealand but the location looks like northern Minnesota. Director Tim Boxell is from this area and years ago I used to correspond with him. This was back in the late 70's when he was an underground cartoonist. He did art in many comics under the name Grisly, then he moved to Hollywood to be an animation director. This is one of his few films. There are only a few people in the movie, there are way more monsters. They keep reproducing and evolving to meet what ever threat is thrown at them. The main female lead is well played by Pamela Gidley, who also played Teresa Banks in Twin Peaks and was the biker chick in Highway to Hell. I'd recommend the latter, unfortunately it's hard to find. It's the only Chad Lowe movie I'd knowingly watch again. And I'd watch Abberation again. It's fun enough for occasional viewing.

Friday Night Movies 188

There is a new edition of Sora no daikaijû Radon out here in the US, where we know it as Rodan or Rodan, The Flying Monster. It's a 2 disc set. The second Toho monster movie is The War of the Gargantuas. Each movie comes in the original Japanese version and the US version. They are susbstantially different. We watched both Japanese editions in the set tonight. I'd seen Rodan many times over the years. It was Toho's third monster movie after Godzilla and it's sequel The Return of Godzilla. Rodan is in color but not Tohoscope. It was a nice looking print. It takes a while to get to Rodan. A small mining town has some strange deaths going on. People are scared. Turns out they have man eating giant subterranian insects. They are pretty goofy looking but they do kill ya. More talking and some other characters arrive only to have a cave-in open a cavern containing the unhatched egg of Rodan. Guess who gets out of it's egg hungry. I say it's because I don't know if Rodan is a boy or a girl, and I don't want to get close enough to find out. The military shows up and shoots Rodan with bullets. That's no good. Bombs block it in a cave but not only does Rodan excaspe through an underground tunnel, he has a pal. That Toho, not satisfied to just put wings on a monster, they made two. The flying monsters do some damage and head for Tokyo. That's not so good. The city has it's ass kicked. The monsters leave and hold up in their cave. The military bomb the entrance and that accidently unleases a volcano which destroys the creatures.  

Furankenshutain no kaijû: Sanda tai Gaira or The War of the Gargantuas is not your best movie. It's got ugly monsters. These guys got nothing much going for them. The differ over diet and that destroys them. The one monster wants to eat people and the other does not. They clash. For a movie with ugly giant fighting monsters it sure moves slowly and is kind of dull. Most everyone watching was falling asleep. It's got all the usual elements but they just aren't as interesting for some reason. It's still nice to have both editions in one package and I'll be sure to pick one up, but mostly for Rodan.  

I'm Batman

 

TwinLUG is getting a display table at Fallcon, the local comic convention at the State Fair ground on Oct 4 and 5. Members were talking about who would go and who would man the table etc. There was encouragement to build something to do with comics. Luckily I had some Batman minifigs and after a bit of thinking decided to build this. You can see more at MOCpages.

   

 

TwinLUG's Micropolis

     

Here's the finished 4 square block cityscape. We are calling it Micropolis. The big white building in the front is Roy's, who also filled in at the last minute with the billboard. I did the the colorful tall buildings in the back row, except for the black building, that's Max's. He's also responsible for the gas station, park and the church. Nathan did the building under construction, the gray memorial building and the apartment in front of the dark red and sand blue building on the right side, which I made. Roy's building is based on the headquarters of the Superfriends Animated TV show. The rock monster waving the bus around is from the Rock Raiders series of several years ago. Dylan lent us that for the duration, he didn't have time to build a module.

      

I like the look of the place. There is talk now of making it bigger and better for the Comic Convention in St. Paul. It's a biggish con but it's in two weeks. Better get buildin'.

Friday Night Movies 187

Speed Racer was our first selection. It's long, 135 minutes, and it shouldn't be. I would have thought that the Wachowski Brothers, and that's a non-gender specific brothers, would have learned from the complaints directed at their last two movies and toned down the self-indulgence, but maybe this is just their style. SR is a bombastic version of the tv show with some awfully longwinded speeches and hard to tell what's goin' on races. The story is typical of your racing movies and that's fine. We all like rooting for the underdog racing team who battle the rich powerful blowhard and his team of cretinous creeps. I have mixed feelings about the family of characters in the movie. They are colorful in their appearance, that's for sure. Some of them are more annoying than others. I think we all disliked the kid who keeps getting into all that trouble, but didn't mind the monkey so much. Maybe it's me, and I'm getting old, but that kid sucks and he needs some major punishing. I would have thought the monkey would have known better. John Goodman plays the dad and Susan Sarandon plays the mom, and they're just great. Christina Ricci plays Trixie, and she's hardly ever looked that thin. She might have been tweaked by the CGI fairy but I haven't bothered to look that up. The movie has been processed so much nothing is real. Parts of the processing I liked but parts were annoying after a while. Same with the story and dialog. Some good and some annoying. The melodrama keeps ramping up and some of scenes run way too long. I actually forgot what the villian was going on about at one point. He'd gone on too long and the visuals were racing at speeds the cars couldn't have kept up with. Maybe I just didn't care at that point. Now I have seen it I won't feel the need to go buy one.

The Being is a family affair. Producer Bill Osco, who produced both Flesh Gordon and the nudie musical Alice In Wonderland with Kristine DeBell, hired his wife Jackie Kong to direct him as the main character, whom Bill is playing as Rexx Coltrane. They also hired their baby daughter and sadly she was one of the most natural actors in the movie. There's something going on in a small Idaho town. Jose Ferrer is the mayor and the head of Big Potato. Ruth Buzzy is his wife. Martin Landau is a crappy crooked science guy who says that dumping radioactive waste into the lake is doing it no harm. Of course there is a radioactive mutant who kills people. They have to stop it before it kills everyone in the town. The monster and the movie are laughable. Sadly we enjoyed ourselves more with this movie than the first. I wouldn't run out and buy a copy of the movie but I might watch it again in 10 or 15 years.

The Troll who would be King

 

This guy named Dan Church, the Mr. Frenke guy, tagged me for TROLLtag. It's a round robin story told in words and bricks. It's running on MOCpages. There have been 14 episodes before mine but the numbering got changed twice and mine is #14. It stars Jake. That's him there. He's the creation of a guy named Joris Blok. He's a maniac who's got a lot of stuff on the 'pages. I think he builds a couple of hundred things a month. Maybe he doesn't have a job. Anyway, I got tagged a week or so ago and taking Dan's story as a starting point I killed off the Jack character by runaway bus. As a favor to a guy. Nothing personal. Even though it happens off screen, I intended it to be a bit of an homage to all the movies where someone gets hit by an unexpected bus. Then I had Jake being surprised by the unexpected arrival of The High Chancellor of the planet Jorisania and his assistant and body guard Simon Thud. In this universe trolls come in two types with a large variance in size.

   

As I have remarked before, I sure do like the LEGO trolls. Especially the bigg'uns. My only complaint, the club doesn't come in brown. Lord Threll takes Jake back to his home world where he finds out he's the son of the dying king and the world is about to explode in a struggle for the throne.

 

Then Jake has to decide what to do. You can see more pictures and read the whole story here. 

The Ace of Spades

That's my new cyborg racer. I got asked to compete in the MocOlympics over on MOCpages. A guy name Chris Phipson put the contest together. There are 16 pairs of contestants in the first round. I got put into the Cyborg Racer competition, paired up with Professor Eggplant. His entry is also up on Mocpages. The title for my race is The Ace Of Spades. It's from a Motorhead song. Racers were invented by Shannon Ocean. Quite a few people have made them but this was my first one. I made a back story that's kind of goofy. You can read it here.

Science Fiction Sunday 14

I blew off going to do laundry in favor of watching a couple of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. Mighty Jack is a Japanese tv series from 1968. The first and sixth episodes were put into a movie format and sold by Sandy Frank, who also distributed the US versions of the 1960's Gamera movies.  He's quite the character. I knew a guy who used to work for him. He had some funny stories I wouldn't repeat here. Mighty Jack is a group, and a fancy ship, that fight Q, the super terrorist organization. Q are bent on taking over the world, or some such. The plots are forgetable and heavily influenced by spy movies like Dr. No. One plot had to do with a method that could freeze water at room tempurature. There's a lot of yakkin' by the good guys and the villians. The action is typical of Japanese tv of the time. Lots of shots of the ship swooshing about, both in the water and out. There are no monsters in this series and it's less exciting for it. The follow up series added monsters. That would have been better. The MST3K host segments weren't too bad.

The second episode I watched was Earth Vs The Spider. It's a 1958 Bert I. Gordon film. Bert made many films, some of which were featured on MST3K. They aren't great films but they eat up the time. Bert is a low budget showman who took advantage of the publicity over The Fly and changed the name of his film to The Spider. But only on the poster. That would have been the cheaper thing to do. And every expense was spared here. Some guy is driving down a road at night and his windshild gets shattered by what looks like a rope. Next morning we meet a couple of teens, a boy and a girl, walking to school. Her dad's missing. The two find the truck, and a cave with a giant spiderweb. Oh, and a giant spider. The town rallies around, eventually, and gets a big bunch of DDT. Taking the dead spider to school, it gets loose and runs away. Isn't that what always happens. More people are killed but not too many. Bert was never too blood thirsty. They close the cave with the spider inside only to find that the teens are in the cave. A hole is dug from above and the kids rescued. The spider is finally killed. The world can rest easy. I know I'm gratefull that the giant spider is dead. It means it's safe to go and do laundry. Or maybe I'll just go buy some more socks and see if I can stretch it out another week.  If I combine the two main elements of the movie, the flying ship and the giant spider, into one good fantasy I can almost believe I had a good time. Oh, well, at least Joel and the 'bots were there to lend a hand. Together we can get through these movies.

Buildin' Buildin's 3

 

I've finished a third building and added some cars. Other's have some great new buildings also.

   

That's Brian's 1/4 of a block. It's got 4 buildings. I particularily like the brown one and the one closest to the right corner. I have trouble thinking small buildings. Max's church is next. Very nice.

     

There's Nathan's Memorial which should sit nicely next to Max's park, which can be across the street from his Octan gas station. Nathan has a construction site in the works and Roy and Alice are working on something too. Hopefully we will have enough stuff to fill the case.

Friday Night Movie 186

Mike brought a copy of Dai tozoku, the 1963 Toshiro Mifune movie that came out in the USA a couple of years later under the title of The Lost World of Sinbad. There is no Sinbad in this movie, it's just made that way. Mike's copy seemed to be from France where it's sold under the name of The Samurai Pirate. A quick glance around the internet shows a bunch of people offering bootlegs. Toshiro plays the sort of character he's so good at. He's a swaggering adventurer who escapes from certain death in the opening scene only to have his ship sunk by the Black Pirate. He washes up on shore and is befriended by a horny old man, who turns out to be a wizard with a libido problem. The wizard part is a good thing, he has to battle an old, snaggletoothed witch. She has no upper teeth except for her two massive canines. Creepy to say the least. The king is being poisoned by the Chancellor, who's also in cahoots with the Black Pirate. While the king lies sick, the evil guy, guided by snaggletooth, rules the land. He takes young women when the family can't pay their taxes. Some he makes dance for him and the rest get locked up in the dungeons. Toshiro hears of this and decides to make things right. There are sadly no big monsters or clever stop motion animation like the better Sinbad movies. There is a castle and a princess played by Mie Hama, who was also in You Only Live Twice with Sean Connery.  You can see a poor video clip with bad dubbing on YouTube. If you watch Japanese movies pretty often you'd recognize several of the other actors in the movie. While not a great movie it was enjoyable. There's some action, some comedy, some sailing, some special effects of various quality. The giant man carrying kite scene does not look nearly so good in the movie as on that poster, which takes liberties depicting what's on the screen.

We watched a second Japanese film. More modern this time. Kiseichuu: kiraa pusshii is a 2oo4 made for video movie about a parasite that embeds itself in a woman's vagina where it grows teeth. It's called Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy over here. There's nothing much to recommend with this movie. It's not well written, it's unimaginately filmed, and it's got annoying characters. Yay, it's only an hour. During the first scene, supposedly set in the Amazon, a snaggle toothed witch doctor warns the group about the dangers of that fish. The wriggly, ugly fish busts through the styrofoam box and sticks itself you know where. After fading to black we see some 20 something's in a van. There are three women and two men. The van breaks down and they break into a hole in the wall. They settle in confiscating the booze and smut magazines of the bunker's owner, who is nowhere to be seen. A couple of them leave the walk in freezer door open and a frozen woman is revivied to start the killin'. Yep, typical boilerplate stuff so far. Then comes the vagina monster. Chomp goes that one guy's weiner. Then the blood starts flowing. Believe me there's nothing that cool about it. You can see some pictures here. Beware, contains a lot of bare breast. Don't all rush off at once.