We watched a couple of tv episodes before our only feature film. Sperhauk got a copy of the 4 episode DVD of The Adventures of Fu Manchu. It comes in two different dvd packages. He got the one on the left, on clearance for 50 cents, which I think has the worst of the two covers. When I looked on Amazon the cover on the left is selling as used and there is a copy for 1 cent. The cover on the right is new and the asking price is $7.98. Highway robbery. The series ran 13 episodes in 1956 and it's pretty awful. Gordon Glen plays the bad Doctor Fu Manchu, badly. Gordon is a white guy playing a Chinese, very common in US films for some reason. I'm voting on ignorance. In the episode we watched, The Death Ships of Dr. Fu Manchu, our villanous Chinaman is making a virus that he was going to release for his foreign masters. The US would get the blame for some reason. Fu's plan is thwarted each week by Commissioner Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie. There's some fighting and one bad guy gets tossed into the pile of virus. He's screwed. At least Sperhauk didn't get screwed paying full price for this dvd. That slim Amray case is worth at least a quarter and we certainly got 12.5 cents worth of laughs alone. There are three more to see.
Stuart Gordon's The Black Cat has Jeffrey Combs playing Edgar Allan Poe. His wife is dying of consumption and Poe is having some bad days. He's broke and drunk and not any sort of company. I wouldn't want to know him. I wasn't liking the story much at the beginning, it's relentlessly depressing watching the wife die and Poe fuck up his life. Combs is great as always. The rest of the cast is good as are the sets and filmmaking. Sperhauk said that the Masters of Horror series did not get renewed for a third season. It's a mixed bag of a series. I have liked some and not others. I haven't even gotten through the first season box set. Don't know if I will pick up the second series once they collect it. You can read Poe's The Black Cat here. It was published in 1843 in The Saturday Evening Post.
Our only feature was The Dark and what a craptastic piece of poo that is. It's a 1979 film directed by John "Bud" Cardos who also directed Kingdom of the Spiders. Mostly he was an actor and stuntman. This movie makes so little sense they had to tell you what was going on in a voice over at the start of the movie. According to one review the producers changed the monster from a supernatural creature to an alien part way into the production. Richard Jaeckel and Biff Elliot are cops who are investigating the savage murders happening late at night. Some victims are getting their heads ripped off and some are being blasted by the creatures laser eyes. William Devane plays a writer who's daughter is killed. Cathy Lee Crosby is a news reporter. It's like watching a made for tv movie but widescreen. Parts of it are so poorly written and directed that it works well with the poor acting and production. I thought the cover of the dvd looked pretty good. It made me think of a cover to the Doctor Solar comic book from the 1960's. See more pics from the movie here and here. I wouldn't need to see this again. It comes in a three dvd boxset with The Being and Plankton. The latter is the best of the trio.
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