PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 272

Joe NetFlix'd a copy of the 2009 Japanese action film Hai kikky garu. It's called High Kick Girl here in the USA. A young karate girl is going around picking fights with the leaders of local Dojo's and kicking their collective asses with her head high kicks. The gal playing the young school girl is a real black belt karate expert. She's no actress but she can kick you right in the head while you're standing upright. Her instructor says she's doing it all wrong and launches her on a boring training montage. She still doesn't figure he respects her power so she tries to join a gang of thugs that work for some gangsters. The gangsters have something else in mind. Head gangster has a deep seated hatred going for the master guy and he can only unseat that with some vengeful actions. High kick girl is bait. Now the reluctant to fight master has to beat down the bad guy's minions so he can fight the main boss and rescue his pupil. That last big stand off turned out to be rather poor, especially considering all the people in the room. Dull as dishwater. The other big problem with the movie was a director who could not keep his hands off the slowmo and repeat buttons. He's turned an average 70 minute film into an tedious 81 minute film with his pathetic artistic choices. Nearly every fight has the main kick or punch repeated. He doesn't just do it once or twice to highlight a really cool move or an especially nice bit of action. Nope. He does it nearly every fight through the entire movie and most of the shots are the same shots repeated, not even giving us a different angle. It got really tiring, really fast. What a dick that guy is, cause you know he thought it was cool. Someone kick him in the head. Twice. Slowly. See if he likes it. The main action lady is kind a jerk of a character. Not much sympathy for her. She doesn't even get to do much in the last third of the movie as the story puts her on the floor with a boot on her neck. The intertwined pasts of the  master and the bad guy clash in a series of stoic poses and punch downs. Sadly the climactic battle nearly bored us to death. So, a disappointing bit of averageness. Give it a miss.

 
I've been trying to get the guys to watch Superbad for some time. I had watched it a while back and was jonesing for a bit of McLOVIN. Michael Cera, whom I really enjoyed watching on Arrested Development, plays a nerdy student in the last two weeks of high school. He's going off to a different college than his best friend played by Jonah Hill. They are kind of co-dependent on each other and Jonah still doesn't know that Michael is going to be rooming with their other nerdy friend played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who's also in Role Model. I found that to be highly entertaining also. I thought these guys were a hoot. In order to look cool and get some chicks the guys tell the girls that they can get fake ID's, and with those ID's, they can get booze for the party that one cute girl is throwing. Naughty visions fill the boys head until they see Christopher's fake ID in the name of McLOVIN. He's pissed when they dis his new handle and with a full head of steam Michael plows into the liqour store, makes a mess, and just as he's about to get the booze a hooded figure darts in from stage left, decks him and runs off with the cash in the till. The police come and MCLOVIN gets the ride of his life. He even gets down and dirty with the girl of his most recent dreams. Then it becomes a sad tale of cock blocking cops and burning police cars. Still and all a wonderful night that anyone would remember fondly. And that one girl, she kind of looked bad ass with that black eye. The movie is written by Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg. They wrote the first version of the script when they were 13. I'd be curious to see what they wrote back then. The two of them would write Pineapple Express the year after Superbad, and next year, the script they wrote for The Green Hornet gets made into a movie. I was certainly entertained to watch this a second time and will keep it near the top of the re-watch pile.

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot is a 1956 ITV show that ran for 30 episodes. The dvd has all thirty of the 25 minute long episodes, some of which are in color. I found a copy of the dvd for a ten spot, and I had a 15% off coupon. That's .01132 cents per minute, pretax. Nice, huh. The show ran in the UK and 9 days later in the USA on ABC. I'm guessing it ran in Canada but I could be wrong. I can't be sure I had never seen it before, but nothing triggered any ding dongs of memory. I didn't recognize William Russell, either his face, or either of his names. He also appears in work under his real name Russel Enoch. I looked at his body of work, which starts in 1940 and ends in 2006, and I don't think I had seen more than 3 or 4 items. I hope to see The Kill-Off some day, mostly because it's based on a Jim Thompson novel. I'd recommend Thompson to people interested in good crime novels. Somewhat dark sense of humor and the bad people often come to an end that raises a smile. Not to everyone's tastes that's for sure but I have enjoyed them off an on for a couple decades. I just looked at ABEBooks and you can find a shit load of them from a buck on up and many from the same dealer.

 

That's Sir Lancelot and his squire Brian in the color picture. In the black and white we've got Merlin, Lancelot and King Arthur. Merlin wasn't really magical. He just used science and tricks. Like Lancelot he was a man of the people and just and fair. Luckily there were people to help out of spots each week. There were also plenty of evil knights who needed their asses kicked. Patrick MacGoohan played one of them. Like the Robin Hood series, or The Buccaneers, there was certain amount of humor in the episodes, even though the main story arc might be pretty serious. Not a bad series,  no Robin Hood, to be sure, but entertaining for the most part. Glad to have seen it and I would watch them again. Nice to pass the time with while building.

7572 Quest Against Time

  

I almost passed up getting one of these. It's a whim thing. Sometimes I feel compelled to pick up all the sets in a series and other times I just ignore them. I picked up the rest of the sets the first day they showed up at the LEGO Imagination Center in the Mall of America. For some reason this one just did not strike me as one I needed. I was back again a few days later and picked one up. It's a half a century for 506 pieces, plus 11 extra parts according to BrickLink. That's just under 10 cents a part. Not too bad, better than some recent set averages. There are a lot of good dark blay parts, including 32 cheese slopes and 40 of the 1x2 45 slopes. Both are ideal for castle building or rock making. There's a yellow light up brick and 11 1x2 clear yellow bricks. I didn't have any of that color and they might come in handy someday. Lots of dark tan including 10 8x8 plates. Big plates are always good to have. Micropolis uses a lot of plates, just for their bases.

     

There's a cool dagger in silver and gold. It looks much cooler in the movie trailers, all glowy, oooohhhh, but this is pretty good. I built the set and the light up brick is operated by sticking the dagger into a hole in the wall. You actually get two of the knifes, one is 1 of the 11 extra pieces. Much better than your usual extra piece, say like a 1x1 round plate. There are a couple of those new flames in tran red and 9 of those dark tan 2x2 tiles with the stud in the middle. The little half arch comes in the medium dark flesh. There are several more bricks in that color including two of the lion head busts. I'm using that color for a building right now. Wish I had more pieces. Don't we always.
        

That's Princess Tamina, Dastan, Nizam and Hassansin Leader Zolm. I didn't realize it was Jake Gyllenhaal playing Dastan. That last guy has got a pretty weird looking face. All creepy, huh. Nizam has a nice costume. The rest of them might come in handy for something. I didn't keep the set built long. I needed the room to get building on the undersea layout for the comic con. Kids might like it as a playset.

Science Fiction Sunday 78

 
I watched the whole Quark series this morning. It wasn't much to see. There were only 8 episodes and they weren't that great. I had picked it up on Amazon for under a ten spot. I had vaguely fond memories of watching the show when it was new back in 1977. Just goes to show you that memories ain't much. The show was created by Buck Henry who created Get Smart some years before. It's the same kind of comedy. Richard Benjimin plays a captain of a space garbage ship. He goes about collecting garbage wishing he was captain of a more important ship on more important missions. Well, for 8 weeks at least, he got his wish.

  
The crew is made of up a hot chic and her identical clone, a guy who has both male and female chromosomes, a vegetable guy with no human emotions, and a scaredy pants robot. The bald guy is Quark's boss. Their boss is a giant disembodied head. The episodes are parody's of some science fiction movie or tv show. The Wikipedia has a list of episodes and what they were ripping on. It still doesn't make them better. At least I have it and I might watch it again. Soon as I forget what it's about.

Friday Night Movies 271

 
Greg picked up a copy of the 1933 Alice In Wonderland. It was new to dvd in March. I don't remember ever seeing it but it could have been on the tv when I was a kid. First thing I notice, the huge cast list. I didn't remember ever hearing about Charlotte Henry, or seeing any of her films, but many of the other actors are favorites of mine. Edna May Oliver, Charles Ruggles, and  Edward Everett Horton to name three. After the title card the film shows us a clip of each actor in and out of character. It takes a while to get through that large gang and this is a short film. Originally 90 minutes the movie was cut in the 50's to 77 minutes. This short version is what we get on the dvd. It doesn't look all that great either but I'm used to watching old movies and they don't always come in the best shapes.

 
I love the old hand colored stills and lobby cards. They have a false reality that I like. You can see that the costumes and makeup are pretty entertaining. In many cases you can't tell who's back there but for the voice. Cary Grant as the mock turtle is one. Here's him with his costume (below). That the Queen and Alice below on the right. Some of the makeup's are pretty wild. Kind of reminded me of the Tenniel drawings in some editions of the books.

 
The sets are pretty good. The special effects are average for the time. It's weird and goofy but for some reason I couldn't get into the movie right away. Mostly I was thinking it was Charlotte Henry. She was kind of annoying, especially when she talked. She looked too old. She was 19 when she shot the movie and looked older. I didn't find Alice or her dialog very interesting. Once we got through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole it was more interesting. The movie grabs bits from both books and mushes them up a bit and even tosses in a cartoon version The Walrus and The Carpenter. In the movie it's shown to us on a tv like screen. Odd as it is I don't think I'll got out and get one.

Life Blood is the US title of Murder World. It's a vampire movie with Sophie Monk. It's terrible. Most of the movie takes place in a desert gas station called Murder World. It's near a famous murder site. It's a pretty weak element in a movie filled with weak elements. Sophie's at a party smoochin' up her girlfriend. Going to bathroom she stops a sleazy actor from beating a girl. Then when he's calmed down she stabs him in the neck. Sophie takes off with her pal, they both die, and they both rise from the ground 40 years later. It gets more unbelieveable after that. The movie's being sold as a lesbian vampire film and let me tell you it doesn't deliver much on either front. Any other lesbian vampire film you hear about is probably better than this. Not much acting, even for the kind of movie it is. We started calling for scanning. There's way to much yakkin' by the two women on their metaphysical voyage. Nothing I want to hitch a ride on that's for sure. It's all the fault of Ron Carlson, who wrote and directed the movie. Boo, Ron!

A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell

Sperhauk found a copy of the 1999 Troma release of A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell and lent it to me to see. You can see the whole movie at the link above. I was pretty sure I had seen it before but not in many years. I looked it up in my Seen Film List and it was 1992 when I saw this 1990 movie. I didn't remember anything much about it. That's not surprizing, it's pretty forgetable. Even the director Brett Piper doesn't recommend the movie. He's got a commentary on the dvd (which is only 5 bucks over at Troma) and that commentary is worth at least 3 bucks of that fiver. Troma's having a sale right now and some of their old stuff is pretty cheap already. They don't have great movies but there are a few there worth having. Cannibal The Musical, Terror Firmer and Tromeo and Juliet are the only one's I'd really recommend, and that would be with some reservations. Troma isn't for everyone. My mom wouldn't like them. The Toxic Avenger series is pretty entertaining. In a sort of WTF kinda way. I got a dvd set of the first 3 or 4 Toxie movies fairly cheap and have watched them a couple of times. I also like Sgt. Kabukiman but not enough to seek it out and purchase one.

A lot of Troma's titles sound cool but way to often there's nothing behind the films. Still if you like bad cinema, it's the place to go. Lloyd Kaufman is the man behind Troma and in 1998 he had a fun and informative book out about being a low budget film maker. I read it when it came out and got to meet the man at DreamHaven. He was in town at a small film festival to promote his book and Greg talked him into coming out to the store for a signing. Hardly anyone came and we got to talk to Lloyd for a long time. He was highly entertaining. The behind the scenes material in Terror Firmer and Tromeo and Juliet have a lot of Lloyd. Those bits and pieces, and the commentaries, are nearly worth the price of the dvds. At least I found them that entertaining. Sometimes I see the featurettes and listen to the commentaries and my opinion of a movie changes. I certainly can become more sympathic to the film makers, especially when they produce interesting commentaries. Often their idea of what's up on the screen is totally different than mine. Who knows where I'm comin' from?

 

A Nymphoid Barbarian is Dinosaur Hell is the work of Brett Piper, who wrote and directed the movie, raised the $40,000 from Lloyd to finance the shoot, made the costumes, built and painted the styrofoam and cardboard sets, created the puppets for the stop motion animation he would shoot in his living room, built the minatures he used for the matte shots he shot in his kitchen and he painted the matte paintings for the movie he photographed. He's directed over a dozen low-budget horror and science fiction films. We've seen 3 or 4 of them on movie night. Mostly they are entertaining, even if they aren't none too great. That's almost the case with ANBIDH. It's no where near as entertaining as his later films, at times it's down right poor, yet it's better than many post-apoc movies I've seen on SyFy.

The movie is set in the Tromaville, after the world had been destroyed in just a day, and some gal is telling her story. Not much to tell. World blew up when she was a kid, her parents are dead, and she's been trying to stay alive, fighting off mutants, monsters and marauders. The opening narration fills in the backstory then we move forward. There's aren't any dinos in the movie. That tile was something that Lloyd thought would sell better than The Dark Fortress. lloyd had a go at the script and his re-writes that make me wonder about the guy. Certainly he's got a different scense of humor than I do. Yet he's managed to stay in business for all these years. Just goes to show ya.

The Beast Of Hollow Mountain

  
I noticed this over at the Internet Archive earlier today and while the title was familiar for some reason I wasn't sure if I had ever seenThe Beast of Hollow Mountain. I might have seen it as a kid. I tended to gravitate toward the monsters then as now, I tend to think it's my love of the fantastic that drives me to certain forms of entertainment. I downloaded it from the Internet Archive and just watched it. It was entertaining. There's a dinosaur attacking some people in Mexico. Guy Madison has a cattle ranch with Carlos Rivas somewhere in Mexico.  Carlos was a Texan who appeared in many movies and tv shows, both in the USA and Mexico. TBOHM was made in 1956 and a year later Carlos would appear in another monster movie with a Mexican setting, The Black Scorpion. That's a slightly better movie. One of the local ranchers, Enrique, is a real dick. He hates the Gringo and wants to drive him from the land. Enrique is supposed to get married to Patricia Medina, an actress from the UK, who often played latin ladies. She was married to Joseph Cotton until he died. In the movie she has a bit of interest in Guy and some doubts about her fiance. I mean he is a dick. Luckily he'll get his.

    

I love the posters to the movie. Scavenged them off some site or another. Sadly the dino doesn't turn up until the 59 minute mark.  He's in most of the movie after that and he does pick up a whole cow in his mouth and carry it off. There's a nice model kit out. The dinosaur is animated and mostly looks pretty good. It's not like you're going to think he's real, especially now that you've seen Jurassic Park. 

 
Everyone has a bit of a run in with the dino, which might be a t-rex, or might be an allosaurus. No matter, they'll both chomp you up good. Remember that cow? Yummm! Must be why that dino has such red lips in the picture on the right. The one on the left is Pancho, Panchito, Carlos and Guy. Since the monster is in the movie so little he doesn't eat that many people and it's mostly off stage anyway. As the movie plays out there's building tension between Guy and Enrique which culminates in a street brawl. In order to get Guy back for beating him soundly, Enrique stampeds Guy's cows and they accidentally run into the town. In the confusion Panchito, the son of Pancho, runs off to the swamp to look for his dad, who'd disappeared the day before. All they found was his hat! They thought the quicksand in the swamp had gotten him. Might have been the dino. Eventually Enrique gets a trouncing by the dino, maybe he'll live, maybe he won't, but he's probably lost his girl. The end. Not a bad movie, worth checking out, especially for the monster fan. It's long wait to the monster but there's enough to see on the road to get you to the end. It's said that The Valley Of Gwangi was a remake of this. That's a good one too. Dinosaurs and cowboys. Good combination.

Science Fiction Sunday Bonus

The Internet Archive had a copy of Larry Buchanan's 1967 film In The Year 2889. It's one of the remakes that Buchanan was making for AIP. I don't think I had seen it but I have seen the movie it's based on. The 1955 Roger Corman film Day The World Ended was where the script came from and an unproduced Jules Verne project provided the title. Buchanan's movie isn't even set in the year 2889. It's set in 1977 and the bombs have been falling. Some people are holed up in a canyon with some lead filled mountains all around them and the guy who built his house there hopes that will keep the radiation from baking them. Because of the shape of the canyon the prevaling winds blow right over them. Hopefully that will keep the fallout off of them. That guy's got a daughter who's fiance didn't show up before the bombs fell. Paul Peterson managed to escape the bombs to fill in for the missing man. He used to be on The Donna Reed Show and he's an uncredited paperboy in one of my favorite 50's sf films Monolith Monsters. In ITY2889 Paul shows up with his radiation burned brother, who sets of the geiger counter a tickin' crazy like with the rontgens pourin' off him. He should be dead but he ain't. There's a creep and his floosey and an older guy in the group. They all come to a bad end except for Paul and the daughter who have re-populate the earth. Sadly we don't get to see that last part. The movie isn't much, like most of Buchanan's work. Kills 80 minutes, or if you do like I did, and watch it with the VCL player at 1.5 speed. It's less painfull.

Science Fiction Sunday 77

 
I was a bit excited to see the complete first season of Starhunter really cheap on Amazon. It was down to $12.49 about a month ago. It's back up to $14.49 today. Buying it was a bit annoying too, as it replaces a set I already have. The Canadian/UK/France co-produced science fiction series from 2000 had been partially released by PLATINUM DISC LLC back in 2004. They don't live up to their name that's for sure. They packaged 15 of the 22 episodes in a set with two dvd's and left the others to hang in limbo. Low bit-rate havin' MF's!

The 2007 release by Echo Bridge Entertainment puts all 22 episodes on 4 discs. Better but not great. Five or six discs would have been better but I understand, it's an expense thing, not too many folks are going to rush out to buy a show they never heard of. It gets a good rating, 7.7 on the IMDB but that's only 169 votes and I bet they're fans. Why else would you go looking there. I watched the series when it was in US syndication back in 2002, enjoyed it well enough to kept a tape copy. You never know if these short lived shows are going to show up on dvd any time soon or at all. To get a whole season on dvd I used those tapes to transfer the missing episodes onto DVDR's back in 2005. I'm kind of surprised that it was that long ago. How time flies. I hadn't watched the series since then. I was searching for cheap dvd's of science fiction tv series on Amazon last month and noticed the complete version at a nice price. It went into my cart with Quark and The Ray Bradbury Theater sets and that put me in the free shipping zone. Love it. That's the cover to the current complete first season to the above left. That's not the hero ship in the foreground. Way in the background is the Tulip, a retired Luxury Liner that serves as home for a crew of bounty hunters.

Michael Pare stars as Dante Montana, the scruffy bounty hunter. Tanya Allen is Percy, Montana's annoying teenage niece and Claude Roche is Luc, ex-soldier gal with a secret. The whole show is about secrets. It's 2275 and the Earth has become a nearly uninhabitable shit hole. Humans have spread out amongst the solar system in colonys to try to survive. That's one of the things that I liked about the series. Just humans in the solar system. There have been some fights in the past and though things have settled down it's still rather lawless and wild west. That means lots of work catching criminals or transporting them from one part of space to another. That's where the Tulip comes in. It's a big old ship that Rudolpho bought and rents to Montana. He's also their boss. He's pretty shady but he's learned to live with it.

  
That's the bridge. Much of the action takes place there. The ship is kind of run down and Percy, as the ship's engineer, has a hard time keeping it going. There's a new client to lock up, or save,  each week. Some of them just get shot. Couldn't be helped. There might not be much spaceship on spaceship action each week but there's usually some person to person combat every 10 or fifteen minutes. Sometimes the clients tie into the secret story brewing in the background, sometimes they don't. The Divinity Cluster is a group of newly discovered human genes that may have been planted by some alien intelligence long ago. They could be the next evolutionary step for mankind. Some of those clients have been affected by the DC and they have some weird things happen to them. Montana had a wife and kid at one time but the Raiders came and his wife was killed and their son kidnapped. It's been ten years and he's still searching for his son. The Orchid is a powerful corporation that is up to no good. They keep mucking with Montana and more people die. It's a tough universe.

It's not a great series, not Babylon5 great, but it's mostly pretty entertaining. The special effects are pretty low-budget poor. They get a bit better as the season progresses and they get the job done. The main physical sets are pretty good but some of the one use sets are kind of sucky. The scripts go from good to average and the actors are about the same. It's dirty and gritty and probably more real than a lot of fancy sf series. Things come to a head in the last episode and everyone is thrown off the show except Tanya Allen and the guy who played Rudolpho. It ends with a cliff hanger that has the ship blasted into hyperspace. I'll have to dig out season two, which was retitled Starhunter 2300, and find out what happened to them.

Friday Night Movies 270

Sperhauk found a copy of Nihon igai zenbu chinbotsu on NetFlix and took a chance. It's a Japanese movie from 2006 that is out here under the title The World Sinks Except Japan. It's a terrible title, I thought. The movie is a parody of Japan Sinks!!! or The Sinking Of Japan which is a remake of a 1973 Japanese movie, part of which was used in the Roger Corman disaster pic Tital Wave. The movie we were watching tonight is a low-budget comedy which has the USA sinking first. Then the rest of Asia and Europe sink, followed by Africa and the other two subcontinents. The only thing left is Japan and the mountainous areas near Tibet. Mostly barbarians live there. The Japanese have been reduced to 20% of the population but they still maintain the position of power and all the jobs. The foreigners get all the crappy jobs and live in cardboard boxes. The Japanese are overwhelmed by the foreigners who are stealing and causing all sorts of trouble. Gaijin Attack Teams round up the trouble makers and deport them to Tibet where it's said they are raped by the barbarians. Hope they enjoyed that. The humor is often crude and stupid but mostly it was entertaining. There's lots of harsh commentary about the way nations and people behave, some delightfully sarcastic and right on. There's a lot of jokes, so occasionally something was funny enough to get a chuckle. The acting is nearly non-existant, especially from the foreigners, but that's ok since most of the characters are characitures anyway. I think they were picked because they vaguely looked like famous people or they actually showed up to the set. The special effects are pretty poor but they get the job done. It's not a movie about that anyway. We don't often see Japanese comedies, especially low-brow ones, so that was kind of refreshing, but I don't think I'll run out and pick one up.

Battle Girl: The Living Dead In Tokyo Bay was something Gregg found somewhere. It's a 1991 Japanese zombie action flick called Batoru gâru: Tokyo crisis wars. It's our second feature from Synapse DVD. Their catalog is a selection of mixed quality mostly old and lowbudget films. A meteor falls into Tokyo Bay. First it creates a barrier over a big chunk of the city. That stops the sunlight and the city is always in darkness. There's lots of smoke too. The meteor also gives out a green gas with turns the dead into zombies. It fast actin', those zombies jump right the fuck up. Chomp! There's a power struggle going on in the darkness and the general sends his ninja-skill-havin' daughter a battle suit and instructions to come a runnin'. She fights the zombies and the Human Hunters, the zombie like slaughtering soldiers of the upstart Lt. Fujuka. He wants to use his easily controlled army to take over the world. Lucky for us it only takes one girl in a battle girl suit to kick his ass and save the world. It sounds more entertaining that it was. It seemed to drag after the fast pace of our first movie. The fights aren't any great shakes and there aren't many of them. The effects, both graphic and physical, are poorish, even for 1991. We've seen a few worse zombie movies and I wouldn't rush out to buy it. It's $22.49 on Amazon right now. That's a great incentive to buy something else.