PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Mr Wong,Detective

 
 
Mr. Wong got his start in several popular stories by Hugh Wiley. They were published in Collier's Magazine. Then, as now, Hollywood was happy to pick up an option and make a movie based on a popular character from another medium. They did 6, five with Boris Karloff, and the last with Keye Luke. That's a shot of Boris from the This is Your Life program. Keye's is a publicity still from his days as Number 1 son in the Charlie Chan series. It wasn't often that they would put Chinese guys in starring roles back in those days and certainly not in bigger budget films. The most well known white guy playing Asian in the 1930's and 40's would be Warner Oland who played Charlie Chan in a bunch of films. Mr. Moto, another popular Chinese detective was played by Peter Lorre. You can get all of these films one place or another. The Mr. Wong films have all been uploaded to the Internet Archive where you can watch them for free.

 
The titles in order are Mr. Wong, Detective (1938), The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1939), Mr. Wong In Chinatown (1939), The Fatal Hour (1940), Doomed To Die (1940), and Phantom of Chinatown (1940). 

Just a mention to avoid possible confusion. There is a film called The Mysterious Mr Wong. It's a 1934 film starring Bela Lugosi as a Chinese Criminal Mastermind who's collecting the 12 coins of Confucius for his megalomaniacal plan. He's got a secret door in his shop. It's behind there that he carries out his nefarious business.

 

I enjoyed these old posters for the movies as much as I enjoyed the movies. That's one of the nice things about bloging about these old films, downloading the cool posters that go with them. I like the Keye Luke one, with the dagger flying through the air and the shadowy figure, the best. The mysteries in the movies aren't much more complicated than the posters. The scripts are pretty much typical, bit a drama, bit a humor, bit a running about, bit a gun waving, but not too much killing. Gotta have a corpse or two to keep it interesting. Mostly it's a game of wits as Mr. Wong sifts through the evidence and nabs the killer with his deductions.

 

Even for short 60-70 minute movies they move slower than you might hope. It's the time period, there's no reason to rush, there isn't much story. I found them entertaining for the most part. I was glad to see them, especially all in a lump, and for free. I'll probably re-watch them down the road. Who knows when I'll have time to get back to them. I just picked up a hundred western movies this weekend. Must go, lots to see, lots to see.

7635 4WD with Horse Trailer

 
 
I bought one of these on a whim. Max had brought a built set to a TwinLUG meeting. There's a bunch of good parts in the set which never got built. I didn't have any of the white parts that make up the trailer walls and roof. They might come in handy. There's a horse, a couple of good minifigs and an assortment of random parts that add to the building stock.

    

Science Fiction Sunday 70

      
I've been a fan of the Tremors series since the first movie back in 1990. It's a fun series with lots of yellin' an runnin' an shootin' and explosion after explosion. Many people get eaten by the monster. He's big and hungry.

 
In the first movie Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward are highly entertaining as two southwestern good ol' boys caught up in a mess o' monsters. And what a monster. A swiftly movin', underground travellin', car destroyin', people eatin' giant worm. It will swallow you whole! Add some bitey tentacles that can snatch you off your perch and you're up against it big time. The body count keeps on climbing.

 
Lucky for Perfection Valley Nevada Bert Gummer is on the job. He's packin' serious firepower and he's got the survial know how. After all he made it through all 4 movies and the tv series without being eaten. What a guy! Bert is played by Michael Gross and he's the only one to have been in all the movies and tv series playing the same character. He actually played his grandfather in the 4th movie but it was the same character. When it was monster time, there were big guns. Boom! Boom! It's rumoured that Bert will return in Tremors V: The Thunder From Down Under. That's something to live for, I tell ya. You can pick up the first four movies for cheap in a 4 movie pack. Not like the one below. I'm sure that's extra.

 

The TV series starts with pretty much all new characters. Bert is the same and another lady plays Nancy. There's a new asian lady store owner, some new guy who run's the graboid tour, and a latina lady ranch owner. The bald guy is the government man who's in charge of the valley. El Blanco, the graboid, has become an endangered species and is protected. The people can live there but they have to leave El Blanco alone. That's cool for El Blanco, he's got carte blanche to eat all the people that wander into his path, which is a good thing, there are a lot of them, and he's a big worm, with a big appetite.

There's a steady stream of guest stars who bring new activity to the town. Christopher Lloyd as a crazy science guy who's been living out in the desert since the government closed his secret germ lab. Oh, wait some of it got loose and it can fuse any sort of different DNA together. That's as bad as it sounds. Cause you know it's never going to fuse a turnip and a strawberry together and make some great tasting food that will feed the world. Stuff shows up to kill the locals each week. Nicholas Turturro shows up in Prefection. He's a gangster who's partner gets eaten by the worm. Too bad that guy the key to millions around his neck. Nick returns in the last episode with Vivica A Fox. They want to kill El Blanco and get that key back. Richard Biggs shows up as a science guy for a couple of episodes. I was sad to hear he passed away. I really enjoyed him in Babylon 5 as Dr Franklin.

There were only 13 episodes before it got the axe from the SciFi channel back in 2003. For some reason it took until now to get to DVD. They were shown out of order on SciFi and the dvd puts them back in production order. The production is ok and the effects are fair to good. They do the physical stuff best, the CGI looks fakey at times. It's good enough to get by. All the versions of the movie graboids are in the series and there's the added bonus of "Mix Master" creating many new monsterous hazards to toss the townies way. I was glad to pick up the series but was sad there are no extras on the dics. It's crammed into 3 discs so there isn't much room. Guess the series just wasn't popular enough to warrent spending any more money on them. I enjoyed the series when it was broadcast and enjoyed them all over again this week. I'm glad to upgrade my dvdr's which came from vhs tape.

Friday Night Movies 265

 
 
We'd seen Fred Dekker's first movie Night of the Creeps(1986) at the beginning of this month. Sperhauk had NetFlix send him the BluRay of Dekker's second movie The Monster Squad(1987). I'd seen it for the first time back in early January. I have a nice 20th Anniversary dvd with lots of commentaries and interviews with the director and cast. It was on sale at Target for 5 bucks. Can't beat that. The movie didn't do well when it was released grossing a $3.5 million box office on a $12 million dollar budget. It would prove popular on video. Dekker would go onto direct Robocop 3 and write and produce a few episodes of Enterprise. Co-writer Shane Black had just written the first Lethal Weapon movie when he co-wrote the and would go onto write The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero and The Long Kiss Goodnight. All top notch action films and three of my favorites. More recently he's written and directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and he's working on Doc Savage and a remake of The Monster Squad.

  

Our original movie opens in Transylvania in the late 1800's. Van Helsing attacks Dracula in his castle. He has the aid of a powerful amulet and a spell. He doesn't do so well and gets caught in his own trap. The titles take us into the modern age of 1987. Some kids have a monster club in a cool treehouse. The kids aren't too bad, a little annoying, and their treehouse blows up real good. Dracula arrives in the area in a souped up magical hearse with a silver skull for a hood ornament. He's collecting his old pals together to take over the world and he wants that amulet. It's come to America in the 100 years since Van Helsing disappeared. There are 4 other classic monsters in the gang. The Wolfman, The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Frankenstein Monster are on the prowl.

  
The monster makeup is by Stan Winston and I don't care for some of it. I didn't care for the guy playing Dracula but I liked the little girl who played the kid sister. Parts of the movie are entertaining and Scary German Guy has pie. There are some horror movie references and in-jokes for those who care about such things. The whole mom and dad fighting scenes were kind of annoying. I didn't care for the guy who played the dad very much. The movie looks nice and the effects are mostly ok. They have a nice swamp, all foggy and stuff. The vortex the amulet creates looks a bit lame but it works well enough. The kids manage to make friends with the misunderstood Frankenstein's monster and with his help fight off Drac and the groovy ghoulies. The cops aren't much help, most of them get chomped on. There's some comedy. I thought it was worth the 5 bucks I paid. I don't think I need to upgrade to a BueRay version. I still haven't gotten a player yet.

Our second feature was a science fiction movie none of us had ever seen. Stranger From Venus is a 1954 British film staring Helmut Danti as an alien who comes to earth in human form. His body has been adapted to Earth but only for a short time. He needs to get picked up in a couple of days or he'll die. He wants to see the leader's of earth to warn them about the dangers of atomic power. This movie was made three years after The Day The Earth Stood Still and Patricia Neal is still falling for those cold stone faced guys. She gets to meet the alien when his ship runs her car off the road. He heals her with his alien technopowers. It's a pretty low budget film with most of the action taking place in a small English inn in the middle of nowhere. There's some stuff shot outside but there aren't many special effects. The Venusian spaceship is a simple disc poorly filmed. The story is much like TDTESS but nowhere near as good. The British authorities act like a bunch of dicks. They try to capture the alien ship on its return. The science guy has second thoughts but he's ignored. Helmut warns them not to do it. It will be bad, everyone for miles around will die in a sun driven fire storm. Ohhh! Not that they are going to show that. Some metal towers did fall over when they tested the trap. Faced with destruction the weak politician returns the stolen alien communicator and Helmut calls off his rescue craft. It's unclear to me if that meant he died when the camera panned off him only to return seconds later and he's not there. Self-disintegrating corpses. That would be less messy. It's a mystery as to what happened there. The movie drags a bit and parts of the dialog are none too good. I wouldn't buy this but I'd snag a copy if it turns up on Turner Classic Movies. We were comparing it to Devil Girl From Mars most of which is shot in a small English country inn. That's a more entertaining film. Keep an eye out for that one. Here's Devil Girl and her robot. She might be a ray gun shootin' bitch but she's got style, and that robot is great.

   

The Missing Corpse

I thought I would mention some of the films that I have been finding at the Internet Archive. Ones that people might miss while perusing the vast and somewhat poorly organized list of stuff that is there. The problem with the IA is the key words used to tag films. They aren't used with any sort of consistency. I have been sifting through the collection page by page and writing down names of films that were possibly interesting. Some more so than others obviously.

One I found last month was The Missing Corpse, a 1945 comedy that beat Weekend at Bernie'sto the dead guy lyin' about the place problem by decades. Not as good as my favorite dead guy in the house comedy, which would be Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry, but still pretty entertaining. A newspaper publisher lives in his big mansion being ignored by his wife and kids. His only pal is his chauffeur played by Frank Jenks. If your an old movie fan you might have seen Frank in many films from the early forties to the mid 50's. He appeared on a lot of tv from 1951 until his death in 1962. That's Jenks on the left in the photo. The guy in the middle is J. Edward Bromberg who's the publisher. The other guy is the villain of the piece. He kills his boss and stuff the corpse into Bromberg's trunk. Bromberg finds the body soon after and there's a race to figure out how it got there and keep the cops off his trail. It's pretty funny and there are some entertaining characters. It's briskly paced and wraps up the whole story in 61 minutes. A nice piece of work and one worth seeing.

Batteries Not Included

 

I was poking about the Internet Archive site in the Classic TV section and I found a few toy commercials. Burried in those few was this compilation called Batteries Not Included. It's 58 minutes of pretty entertaining commercials put together by Jon Behrens. As someone old enough to remember some of those toys, I thought it was a nice flash back to the past. I had some G I Joe's back in the day when they were huge 11 inch dolls. Dolls with flame throwers and hand grenades. We didn't swear so much back then but we liked our army men. Good for adventures. I did not have that Mattel Sonic Blaster but I knew a guy who did. I don't think he killed anyone with it. They took it off the market because it was loud and kids perforated their ear drums.

   
As a boy, I didn't have any Barbie dolls, not even to play hooker to the G I Joe's. Sad for those Joe's, huh? We didn't have any VD either, so I guess it's a trade off. What's really sad was the Stony Smith - Battling Soldier from Marx. He couldn't even take his uniform off. Molded right on. Shower with your boots on, that's some man's dream. It's a Sick Sad World! That reminds me. Daria - The Complete Series is due on dvd May 11. All five season's and both movies for 47 bucks on Amazon right now.

 
I did have a lot of Milton Bradley games. My mom usually gave my brother and I a game each Christmas. She started us on simple counting games and gradually we came to like the money driven games that were so popular in the 60's and 70's. At least they were popular in our house.

 
 

Monopoly is the one people usually played. We had that, and played it alot, as well as Dealer's Choice, Masterpiece, some I cannot remember the names of, and one of our favorites, Stock Ticker. Too bad I can't remember more of the titles.  Perhaps I'll stumble onto them one day while cruising about the internet. It could happen.

  
My old pal Mike actually had the Stock Ticker game. It was a game that needed a few players. Mike also had a Girder and Panel building set. Make modern looking office type buildings with girders and beams, then attach the decorated panels to finish the facade. That was back in the 60's.Read more about the building system on Wikipedia. Here's a few random pictures of early sets.

 
 
I don't know which set Mike had, neither of these boxes looks familiar. The facade panels in the picture on the right look more familiar than the panels in the picture on the left. Now a days I would think those are some poorly choosen colors for a building but as a kid I didn't feel that way. The panels on the left picture look better, more of a uniform theme to the color scheme. It might be fun to have one of these sets to build but if I got one it would go into storage after a quick looksee and I'd never get back to it. Sometimes a picture is better.

7637 Farm Set

  

I got the farm set for the cows and lucky for me it was on sale. I liked the brown cows in the Medieval Market Place. They are black and white in the farm set. Now I have a small herd of the best kind of cows. Ones that don't stink up the house and leave manhole cover size dollops of poop in the yard. Believe me I have stepped in to many of those.

 

I used to go visit the grand parents on the farm when I was a young lad. Once my cousin pushed his younger brother out of the hay loft in the barn. The kid fell right into a huge 3 foot high pile of cow poop. Splat! He wasn't hurt but he sure yelled and cried. His right side was all covered with poop from head to toe. My cousin got a solid ass whoopin' by my uncle. Pants down too. In the front yard. It was hell on the farm, for some. The rest of us laughed. I wonder if my cousins remember that? I never see them, they live far away in another country.

   
The LEGO farm is only part of a farm. There's a little area for the cows, right next to the silo. Sadly they have no walls to keep the wind off their backs. The barn too is missing the lower walls. It's really a hay loft on stilts. There's some good parts in the set. I didn't have any interest in the set itself. Just a bunch of parts. The silo is made from the large curved panels in dark red. One of my favorite colors dark red. There are some nice large plates and 3 of the 8x16 red tiles. Those might come in handy for something. There are two tan crane supports holding up the silo. Lots of small parts and lots of tan. Couple of the 16x32 baseplates in green. I use baseplates more now than I used to. Still don't for micropolis. It's hard to get a lot of the little ones cheap. Good costumes on the minifigs, though I seem to have a lot of the one with the blue overalls from a rash of grab bags a year or so ago. The tan fedora will come in handy. There's a dog, a cat, and a few good minifig accessories. Plenty of other bits and pieces.

Science Fiction Sunday 71

I didn't actually watch the whole Quatermass TV series this morning. There's a lot of it. You can get a peak at the first three series over at the Internet Archive.

 

The Quatermass Experiment was the first series which was broadcast in 1953. The production was broadcast live with prefilmed bits to add some production value. Only the first two parts of the original six remain. Professor Quatermass (Reginald Tate) is part of a rocket group that has a ship returning from outerspace. When it lands 2 of the 3 space men are missing. The other guy is all screwed up, contaminated by some alien presence, and he starts turning into a veggie monster. Quatermass has to figure out some stuff but since the rest of the series wasn't filmed when first broadcast we sadly have to make do with hearsay. I guess they save the earth from alien invasion since there was a sequel. There's a movie remake from Hammer which is fairly entertaining. The British title was The Quatermass Xperiment and the USA title was The Creeping Unknown.

 

The second series was called Quatermass II and it aired in 1955. All six of the episodes are available and the story is another alien invasion. This time the alien presence is coming to earth in little meteors which upon breaking open release an alien presence that takes over the human brain and links it to the alien group mind. Quatermass (John Robinson) gets involved and you know he's going to save the day. It's an even more ambitious project, bigger sets and a larger cast. There are more pieces filmed before the broadcast, giving the production a boost. The quality of this series is much better than either of the two previous episodes. It's a bit slow moving but at times it gets pretty exciting for British tv in the 50's. Hammer made a film of this too.

 
The third series, Quatermass and the Pit, aired in 1958-59 and all six episodes are still around. There's an alien invasion in this one too, but the invasion took place 5 million years ago. While digging the foundation for new building the workmen find some weird skulls. Science guys get involved, and more digging leads to a large cylinder, which is thought to be an unexploded bomb. It's not that, let me tell you. Once inside they find some preserved insect critters. There's also an alien presence that turns the city on it's ear. Death and destruction follow before Quatermass (Andre Morell) can save the day. The Hammer film was renamed Five Million Years To Earth for the USA. You can see a few trailers for the movies at the Internet Archive link above. I liked the movies but I'm happy to see science guys save the day.

 

As an added bonus today I wanted to mention a fun little invisible man comedy that Sperhauk noticed on Turner Classic Movies last week. I caught it and enjoyed it. Thanks for the tip! The Body Disappears has multiple people, and a monkey, disappearing and appearing all through the movie. One of my favorite character actor's Edward Everett Horton plays a professer at a college. He's a bit whacky, it's his monkey, and he's in trouble with the head of the school. He's created a formula to make people, and monkeys, invisible. No one believes him at first, except that monkey. Edward has a daughter, played by Jane Wyman, whom I'm not a big fan of, and a servant, played by Willie Best, who I am a big fan of. Willie often played the scared black guy and he played that character, oh so well. His characters often filled in for us the audience and vocalized the only voice of reason. Often he was just the comic relief machine. He's was great at physical comedy too. There's another guy, who's getting married. The bride's ex-boyfriend shows up at the bachelor dinner. He makes some threats and gets tossed out. The groom, a bit drunk, has an accident and accidentally gets turned invisible by Edward's formula. The police think he's dead and arrest the bride's ex. There's a lot of running around, yelling and all sorts of silly stuff, as more and more people turn invisible. The right couple's pair off and the professor proves he's not crazy. Even Willie gets a shot at turning invisible as the movie signs off.

7567 Traveller

 

I picked up one of these on a whim the other day. I like the minifigs space jacket. It's one of my favorite torsos. I bet they could sell a ton of jackets with that design on them. It's a simple set, not much going on, just a guy and his luggage on a cart.

 

All the parts are useful ones. Two tiny wheels, a camera, 2 suitcases, a computer screen, a pouch, a 1x2 cheese slope, one of those new 1x1 bricks with the stud flush on one side, and two of those short wall panels in clear. I think I might need a couple more of this one. I would like a few of the hair piece. Good for Weasley's hair.
 

7595 Army Men On Patrol

 

I've picked up a couple of these guys since they came out. I'm not building an Army but I'm sure that many will. They were limiting them to 5 per person at the LEGO Imagination Center. I'm just adding a few good parts to my building stock. There are a lot of parts you don't normally find in green, like all the accessories and those guys heads. I like the minifigs bases too. Might be good for Micropolis landscaping.