Sperhauk had upgraded some of his Ray Harryhausen movies to BluRay. We watched It Came From Beneath The Sea as our first selection. I have seen it several times before. The BluRay disc has the film in 2 versions, black and white or color, we watched the latter. The color isn't too bad at all, much better than the color versions of movies from the early Ted Turner days. We got used to it pretty quickly. Here are a couple of shots from the movie.
Kenneth Tobey is the commander of an nuclear sub that encounters something in the deep that grabs the sub and holds it in place. After managing to free itself the partially disabled sub returns to base to find that there is a huge hunk of sea monster stuck in it's back end. It's radioactive too. Some scientists are called in. One, a tall guy played by Donald Curtis, and the other, a pretty gal played by Faith Domergue. Something about her captured Kenneth's attention right away. He falls for her in one of those romances spawned in disaster movie subplots. I always found her to be odd looking but that's just the look that conks some other guy right on the noggin. In the colorised stills above you can see Kenneth putting the moves on Faith and the giant octopus putting the moves on the Golden Gate Bridge. Kenneth is on the right.
The internet came up with some nice posters and the like for the movie. I enjoy these older posters, especially the fake colored ones like these lobby cards. Glad I don't feel the need to collect that type of paper. They aren't expensive, single cards are often just a few dollars, but there are a lot of them.
Back in the movie we find the government is hesitant to believe that a giant octopus is attacking the ships. Isn't that always the way. I've already seen the tenacles attack a ship, it's happening. They didn't believe me either, no matter how loud I yelled at the screen. Stupid government. The science guys figure out that the octopus is from the Mindanao Deep and has gotten radioactive from the h-bomb tests. Eventually the big hunt is started. They use chopped up sharks for bait. We finally get to see more of the octopus as he attacks the Golden Gate Bridge and various places on the shore of San Francisco. Ray Harryhausen did a pretty good job with little cash. He only put 6 legs on the octo to save animation time. His stop motion is pretty good most of the time and the optical effects are good to average for the time. You can see some flaws a little easier in the BluRay version but they aren't much of anything to worry about for me. The story is still a pretty good one. The dialog is mostly entertaining. Robert Gordon directed and occasionally he has a nice shot or two in the movie. With the narration, which I like, the movie has that documentary feel to it. Perhaps adding a bit of reality to the fantasy. An entertaining fun movie, worth a look, or more.
We followed with Defendor a 2009 film with Woody Harrelson playing a mentally handicapped guy. He works as a signman on a construction site and is living in the storage shack on site. He got into a fight with someone at the place he had been living. The forman sort of takes care of him but doesn't know he's living on site. Woody saved the foreman's kid's life in the past. Perhaps that was the reason that Woody started dressing up as a crime fighter. At night he's Defendor, all wrapped up in black and duct tape grey, fighting crime with his marbles, wasps, and heavy wooden club. Sadly he has no wits or agility. Woody turns in a great performance. Defendor crosses paths with a bad cop and a hooker. He hurts the cop and that starts the wheels in motion. Wheels that will grind our superhero wannabe to dust. Woody's being interviewed by Sandra Oh as the movie starts. She's a psychaitrist and Woody is in trouble. Besides the beaten cop, who's as criminal as they come, Woody has beaten up a dry cleaner and stuffed him in a garbage can. Both men are transgressors of the law, justice of a sort had been done, but the cops don't think it should have been Woody putting the boot in. We move around in time and place as Woody unveils more of his story to Sandra. The bad cop has Woody beaten pretty badly when they meet again and the hooker helps him home. She's had a falling out with the bad cop and needs a place to hide out. She moves into Woody's shack. Woody continues to fight back. The guys that he's up against are pretty nasty and because of his interference some cops are killed. The movie takes a decided turn there, more serious, and Woody is the cause of it. He just can't figure out cause and effect. It's a fairly entertaining movie up until it gets sad and deadly. I was glad to see it but won't bother getting a copy.
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