PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

What I Read In October 2010

Only 8 books this month, luckily I got a good start at the beginning of the year, I seem to be slowing down a bit. I'll have the same number in November and in December I am only up to 5 titles so far.

 
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire by JK Rowling is the 4th book in that series about that kid who's a wizard. Maybe you heard of them? In this book Harry gets tossed into a magical tournament that nearly kills him. I don't have either of those books. The one on the left is the British adult cover and the one on the right is the Ukraine cover. That country had some nice covers on their editions.

 
Freddy And The Pied Piper by Walter R Brooks is the 13th book of the Freddy series and it was first published in 1946. Freddy figures out a solution to the town's mouse problem. He collects protection money from the citizens and bribes the mice to leave town. As you can see by the cover he puts on a good show. Freddy's pal Mr Boomschmidt is in financial trouble again and he gets a hand from the farm animals. Leo the Lion has been captured by a lady with a pet shop. Freddy organizes a rescue. There's a nice sequence where Jerry the Rhino gets to plow through the bad guy's house, twice. They stole some money from the animals so it's only fair the animals get some revenge. There's a good bit of fun and laughter along the way. The endpapers show the big race. Lots of different critters competing. It's fun.

 
For Biddle's Sake by Gail Carson Levine is another of her fractured fairy tales. There are two short fun stories in this tiny 112 page collection. Both are entertaining and breeze right along with lots of jokes and funny situations. Well worth a read and like the rest of the series going on the shelf to re-read.

Fred And Anthony Escape From The Netherworld by Esile Arevamirp with Elise Primavera is a short heavily illustrated bit of fluff about two lazy boys that encounter ghosts and monsters. It's part of a series. I didn't read any of the rest and don't think I'll bother with them. This was ok but nothing great. the illustrations are fair to good. It was on clearance for 50 cents and I had a 20% off coupon so it cost me 43 cents and took less minutes than that to read. Not a keeper.

  
Freddy The Magician by Walter R Brooks has Freddy get into a fight with Senor Zingo. Freddy learns how to do magic and his amateur shows don't sit well with the evil prestidigitator from the Boomschmidt circus. You know who's going to get the better of that fight, huh. It does get pretty ugly when Freddy and Zingo start fighting. That Mr. Zingo is a crooked guy and his rabbit is a little weasel. Nothing against real weasels. Jinx's sister Minx returns and she's still a jerk. Freddy helps the local hotel owner and his problems with Senor Zingo. All ends well for the critters once again. Book 14 was first published in 1947.

Syren by Angie Sage is the fifth book in the Septimus Heap series and it was as good as the previous novels. It pretty much picks up where the last one left off. Septimus gets stuck on an island with Jenna and a badly hurt dragon. Other's converge on the same island and death and madness ensue. There are all the usual characters and some new ones. There's an evil plot ot take over the Castle and some bad men need to be destroyed. I have been enjoying the series so far and plan to try to make it through the seven books Sage has planned, at least 7 so far. The writing is good and the characters interesting and sad at the same time. It's a hard world they live in with some bright spots. Septimus has grown quite a bit since he learned of his magical fate. It's worth it to journey along with him.

Dead Beat by Jim Butcher is another of the Dresdin novels. I have mixed feeling about them and grew tired of the character before I finished the books I had bought. Luckily for me the were bought with the large pile of credit from the nudie magazines I had gotten from the partner of a late friend. This book was about the same and some people will like it more than me. I did like the part where he magics up the skeleton of a T-Rex and rides that around the city of Chicago. He's fighting some really bad guys who are once again going to destroy the earth. It's something that seems to happen each book. Get's kind of lame after the fourth or fifth time. I liked the tv version of the guy but that just wasn't that great a series. 

 
Feddy Goes Camping by Walter R Brooks has Freddy helping out Mr. Camphor once again. He's the rich guy who owns a big estate on a lake. The lakeside resort hotel Mr. Camphor's aunts usually stay at is closed because of ghosts. They've come to stay with Mr. Camphor and that's not much fun. Some bad guy, named Mr. Eha, is trying to get the hotel for himself. He's a bum full of dirty tricks. Freddy has to help the poor owner regain her resort and get the aunts out of Mr Camphor's place. They go camping with Freddy in disguise. You can see that he has a nice coonskin cap. Poor racoon, huh. The rats are back and working with the villian, Mr. Eha. There's the usual animal antics and a good story to surround them. You usually don't see cows in canoes that often, do you.

Science Fiction Sunday 110

I was out to do laundry at 6 am and I hit the Target for the after x-mas clearance LEGO. Little to be had, that I was wanting anyway. When I got back I dipped into the dvdr's for something to watch this morning and I hadn't seen the George Pal film The Time Machine in a while, so I pulled that out and decided while watching it to watch the 2002 remake as my second feature. 

 
Rod Taylor is the professor with the time machine in the 1960 adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel The Time Machine. You probably know the story by now. A guy from 1899 goes 800,000 years into the future and finds the humans have evolved into underground dwelling cannibalistic mutants, then he wrecks their world. He frees their cattle, normal looking but childlike humans who care about little, and blows up some of the strange steamy underground machinery that the Morlocks keep running. Many Morlocks died that day. It's what they would have written, if they had a written language, but they don't. Sadly, neither do the Eloi. There's a dim future in store for the human's, lots of death and destruction. The escalating power of the bombs pushes some humans below ground where over time they change into the Morlocks. The survivors above ground turn into docile snacks for the underground dwellers who manage to supply the most basic of care. We don't seem to be doing well here on the evolution front. I guess they need some tramatic event to kick start the race again. Oh, here comes Rod in his cool time machine.

 
That's one great prop, that time machine, created by Bill Ferrari, an art director at MGM. It was sold by the studio a few years after the movie was made and it toured in a show. When that tour was over the time machine was abandoned until Bob Burns found it and restored it to it's former glory. You might have see it on an episode of The Big Bang Theory a couple of years ago. Back in the movie Rod returns to his own time and tells his friends of his amazing journey. They don't believe him much but that's ok, he grabs three books and returns to the future to finish the Morlocks off with some knowledge. He's also got Yvette Mimieux waiting. That can't be bad, huh. It looks great in Technicolor and there are some pretty good effects shots for the time. The movie won an Oscar for the time lapse work showing the passage of time. It's a pretty cool sequence. I enjoy the movie and recommend it highly.

Guy Pearce plays the time traveller in the 2002 film by Simon Wells, who's the great-grandson of H G Wells. According to the Wikipedia Gore Virblinski stepped in to direct the last 18 days of shooting when Wells suffered exhaustion. I don't care much for the adaptation in this movie, they have added this whole plot idea about the time traveller and his fiancee. She's murdered and he goes back to change it. He fails a couple of times and he goes looking to the future for answers. Orlando Jones plays a hologram in the New York Public library of 2030. He doesn't believe in time travel so Guy heads for the future. In 2037 men blow up the moon accidentally and there's a hell of a problem on the earth. It's what drives people underground. Guy winds up 900,000 years in the future and there are the Eloi and the Morlocks all over again. This time there's a telepathic uber-morlock that doesn't add much to the story, other than to tell Guy he can't change the past. He gives Guy his time machine and tells him to leave but Guy just doesn't leave well enough alone and he drags the  uber-morlock to his death, destroying that society. Harsh reality for the morlocks, huh. Guy abondons his hope of saving his financee and hooks up with the pretty Eloi lady who teaches English. There's lots of great effects and the movie is very flashy but it's disappointing. I like that the science guy in the first movie is driven to find something for the sake of science. The 2002 movie did well and there was talk of a sequel. Not a favorite but watchable for the most part.

There's a 1978 adaptation that looks questionable. I'm downloading it or you can watch it on YouTube. Maybe I'll watch it next week and let you know how it was.

Friday Night Movies 303

Family Guy It's A Trap is the third of the Star Wars adaptations and they tell you in the crawl at the beginning of the movie that they just did it for the money and it's not that good. They were right, it's the poorest of the lot. We laughed at less jokes than either of the previous two shows. It's only 57 minutes and it was over soon. The ships and scenery looked ok and some of the characters were good choices for their Star Wars counterparts. Some of the jokes went on way too long and I just don't buy the theory that it gets funny again if it goes on long enough. There weren't enough of the good jokes for my liking. It wasn't so awful that it wasn't worth watching but it was rather uninspired. Perhaps grouped with all three it would work better. Someday in the future I'll try that and let you know how it turned out.

Sperhauk ordered up The Horde from NetFlix. Joe said he'd seen the listing and was interested. I didn't know anything about the 2009 French Zombie action film. It's all shot in one location, a crappy abandoned apartment building, on the edge of Paris. Some cops, on a mission of vengeance, invade the building hunting for some Nigerians. The leader of the criminal gang killed the cop's pal so the cops are going to kill the leader, his brother, and anyone hanging around. The plan doesn't go so well and the cops get blasted in the hallway. One guy is badly wounded. The Nigerians capture them, shoot their hostage and the wounded cop, and then the zombies show up. There's alot of yelling and swearing in the movie. Everyone is excited and most of them do a pretty good job with their characters. That excitement isn't enough to keep them safe. Even banding together and loading up with weapons won't save them from the fast moving super fighty living dead. It pretty much goes poorly for the living after that. It's so hopeless, you'd think it was a Russian film. There's a lot of zombie killing as the seemingly endless horde keeps aggressively surging forward, eating their victims inch by inch. Not many of the characters are likable, especially the cops. While the building inhabitants fight for their lives the city of Paris burns and bright explosions light the columns of black smoke. Entertaining to watch for the most part. While it might not get on my shelves I wasn't sorry to see it. Recommended for the zombie fan.

What I Read In September 2010

A better month than August, this one had nine books, and over half of my content was pig-centric. When I find a good thing I tend to stick to it.

 
Freddy And The Ignormus by Walter R Brooks had Freddy trying to figure out who the Ignormus is in the 8th book in the series. It's 1941 and something spooky from the Big Wooods is scaring the local critters. What could it be? I'm not telling. Jinx's sister Minx arrives for the first time and what a pill she is! Always got a story to top whatever someone else says they did and she name drops like a Hollywood Gossip columnist. The other animals tollerate her for a while but finally enough is enough and they give her a bit of a rough treatment. She really is annoying, she does deserve it. Freddy figures out who's behind the scarey critter and sends them packing. There's the usual animals antics and some other fun stuff. I'm still getting a kick out of these books as I write this. Not quite done the series yet but that's ok. I want to spread them out a bit, make it last.

  
Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss is probably the oldest novel I have read, certainly in recent years and maybe ever. It was published in 1812 and translated to english in 1814. This edition is from later than that and according to the book there were some additions to the original novel by a translator. The whole giant snake fight scene was added to the novel to make it more exciting. Additions by translater, something appearently common in the early days of publishing, once again pointing out that when you stop watching people they will do the wrong thing. Reapeatedly. Mind you there was little respect for writers by their publishers in those days. I hear it's a bit better nowadays. I knew a guy who was one of a group of people that sued Hugo Gernsbach for non-payment. He'd taken their stories and published them in Wonder Stories. They won but didn't get any money. Hugo got an award named after him. Go figure.

That's the edition I have on the left above. The other two books are earlier editions. I just put them up to show the difference in covers over time. There are a lot of SFR editions out there, many having to do with the Disney movie from the 1960's. The Robinson's get ship wrecked. The ship they were on has supplies for a colony and they manage to rescue a lot of that material to make their island stay a much better one than they could have expected. There are a lot of wild critters on the island and the family starts in immediately killing everything they run across, at one point poisoning a whole tribe of monkeys that just can't leave the winter house alone. The whole book is one long slaughterfest while details on food storage, critter deboning, and hut construction to fill in the space between the animal killing. They stay there for ten years before they make contact with the outside world. They raise crops and domesticate animals. Eventually they are rescued and some leave and some stay. It sounds like a great place to live, sunny, warm with plenty of stuff to kill. I didn't feel I needed to revisit the island and tossed the book on the reject pile.

Lone Ranger Outwits Crazy Cougar by George S Elrick has one of our favorite western hero's up against a crazy indian who's on the warpath. The rest of the tribe doesn't want any trouble, it's just that bunch who went rogue. There's a lot of riding and fighting and eventually the masked man and his best pal Tonto bring Crazy Cougar to justice. It's one of those younger kids books with lots of illustrations. Kind of like a big little book but larger in size. I thought I was going to get rid of it but it seems to have disappeared somewhere in the house.

 
Freddy And The Perilous Adventure by Walter R Brooks visits ballooning as a theme in this 1941 book. As a publicity stunt for some much needed cash Freddy agrees to go along on a balloon ride. He's joined by Alice and Emma, the ducks from the Bean Farm's pond, and the balloon owner and operator. The balloon gets away with the critters, leaving the owner behind, and Freddy is accused of stealing the balloon. The Sheriff and the State Patrol are out for his arrest. Freddy gets help from the animals of the circus and hides in one of his famous disguises. On the balloon trip he finds Alice and Emma's Uncle Wesley. He'd disappeared in a storm a few years before. None of the animals missed him, except for the sisters, as Uncle Wesley is a bit of a pill. He's returned to the farm but not before the sisters learn his real nature and don't quite fall into step behind him as they did before. He's still a pill but he's been ground down a bit and is easier to swallow now. Another good read and one that will go back on the shelf to re-read again. Once again we have a great cover and some nice illustrations by Kurt Wiese. If you lived around the Bean Farm in upstate New York, you'd often see some sights, yes sir.

 
Freddy And The Bean Home News by Walter R Brooks has Freddy start an animal newspaper when Mrs Underdunk takes over the town's only paper The Guardian. Mrs Underdunk is a nasty stuck up old lady, who hates the talking animals, and she's got an evil brother named Herb Garble. The two of them are not at all above cheating people, or animals, and they really come to hate Freddy. He's the thorn in their side they wish to send to Herb's Uncle's farm in Montana. Send in a crate for an unnamed but surely deadly fate. My liking of Freddy hasn't kept me from eating porkchops but I wouldn't mention it to him if I knew him. The book was published in 1943 and one of the features of the book was a war time scrap metal drive. All the animals pitch in and collect all the little bits and pieces that there are too be found in and around the countryside. The Bean family farm animals are a patriotic bunch and their good nature eventually beats down the evil Mrs Underdunk. Yay!

 
Freddy And Mr Camphor by Walter R Brooks has Freddy get a summer job. Freddy needs some extra cash to help someone else. Mr. Camphor, a rich business man, hires Freddy to take care of his big estate. Freddy sets up a temporary home in a houseboat that sits in the lake. You can see from the cover that it's quite a nice little place. Nice place inside to sleep and a nice place on top to relax and take a gander at what's going on around you. All the animals from the Bean Farm stop in for a visit at one point. That's Banister, the Butler, looking out the front door as Freddy races away in one of his disguises. Banister, like Mr Camphor, becomes a strong friend of Freddy and the Bean farm animals. Freddy takes up painting and teaches Jinx. We see the return of Simon and his rat family. They have set up camp in Mr. Camphor's attic, destroying some paintings for the fun of it. You know they must go. We also see the return of the black mustached man and the dirty boy from To And Again or Freddy Goes To Florida. They try some schnannigans and they get what's coming to them too. There's a lot going on but Freddy manages to get all the puzzles solved and all the rats and bad people are sent packing. 

The Magic World by E Nesbit is a collection of 12 short stories from 1912. You can read it here for free. Many of her books are also available at Project Gutenberg. The stories are varied, one has a cruel boy and a wronged cat change places with some goofy results and a bit of a moral lesson. Another has a boy find a magic talisman that helps him though a tough time, and in the last story an evil magician places curses on some other folk. There's some morality in the entertaining stories and often some humourous bits of business to make us laugh at ourselves. Not as good as some of her novels but still not too bad a read. In the back of my mind I figure to keep her books for a while. When I need the space and want to reduce the volume I can toss them and read the e-books.

 
Freddy And Mr Popinjay by Walter R Brooks had Freddy help Mr Pomeroy, a robin with bad eye sight, and Jimmy Witherspoon, a poor boy with a mean streak, get over their problems. Mr Pomeroy goes a bit off the deepend but he manages to get back on track buy the end of the book. Jimmy becomes a fast friend of the Bean Farm animals and his cheap father learns a lesson to boot. It's the 12 book in the series and it came out in 1945. There's a family of wildcats that move into the neighborhood and some of the smaller rabbits and such are going missing. Freddy has to work pretty hard to fix all the problems and he comes through just fine. Another fun story and some silly stuff to boot.

Seven-Day Magic by Edward Eager features a magic book that records the kids magical adventures. They can only have it for 7 days and it needs to go back to the library. It's the only book the kids appear in. It's also Eager's last book, published in 1962, he would die 2 years later. I enjoyed reading it and will put it on the shelf with the others. Sometime in the future I can re-read the whole bunch, then maybe I'll let them go.

4842 Hogwarts Castle - 4th Edition

 
Finally getting around to looking at the 6th of the Harry Potter sets that came out in October and it's almost time for the Diagon Alley set to come out. Hogwarts Castle 4842 is the biggest HP set so far at 1290 pieces with 11 minifigs included. The first set 4709 had 692 parts, the second was 4757 and it had 928 parts, the third is 5378 and it was 943 parts. All the three first sets had a price tag of 90 bucks and each set included 9 minifigs. The new Hogwarts comes in at $130 or just over 10 cents a piece. That's not too bad when compared to the other new HP sets or some of the licenced theme sets like Star Wars. I didn't pick up any of the first batch of Harry Potter sets when they came out. I bought a few of the early Star Wars sets, but I wasn't building anything of my own then, and the attraction of displaying finished sets faded pretty quickly. When the Harry Potter sets started coming out I wasn't interested in them or the books yet. Of course once the addiction set in I had to buy them. A few were still available from LEGO, their sales were slipping then, and the rest I picked up on eBay and Bricklink. The early sets had the yellow minifigs and old grays and brown. The change to the new colors was a curse and a blessing both. I look at the new colors as part of an ever increasing pallet. Since the post is pretty long I'm leaving the minifigs off and doing a second post about them.

4709 Hogwarts Castle 1st Edition

   
4709 came out in 2001. It's made up of 4 connected units. There's a gate where Hagrid brings the first year students up to the castle in a boat. For Harry's first year class you'd need at least 8 if we followed Hagrid's request of "No more'n four in a boat." At $90 for just under 700 pieces it didn't have a very good price per piece count. It had a nice bunch of minifigs, but only one of the 9 is unique to the set, the Gryffindor Knight. There were lots of great tan and gray parts. Some of the parts were larger than average, things like a couple of lurps, some large wall pieces and a couple of large columns, but there are only about a dozen of the largish pieces. There were 18 printed pieces, not counting the minifigs, and some of them were pretty nice.

   
There are 4 books in this set and I'm just a sucker for those books. I picked up some extras when they were usually around a quarter on Bricklink. That was ages ago, now that black book with the hinges and the ghost face ranges between $3.50 and $9 on Bricklink. The printing on three of the books is nice and the illustrations are generic enough that it could be used for many different themes. I think that the black book is supposed to be Tom Riddle's Diary but it could be the screaming book in the library. You know when Harry sneaks into there in the middle of the night looking for some info on Nicolas Flamel. The other two are more your school books, say Herbology and Potions. The last is book is a medium blue one that has nothing printed on it. There's a really nice banner with the Gryffindor Lion on one side and the Slytherin Snake on the other side. That was so that the house cup could be taken from Slytherin and awarded to Gryffindor. There are 4 owls in different colors, white and gray rats, and two black bats. I don't remember any bats in the Harry Potter series but I do like that bat. It's one of my favorite LEGO animals. Ironically the set has no spiders, which Ron would like. It was a good set, especially for the Castle builder. Besides the tan and gray there are some nice sand green cones and roof pieces, including one of the large Belville roof pieces. Now in a useful color. That sand green is one of my favorite colors. I like most of the sand colors. There's a good assortment of parts in small quantities, all good for building up your stock. There's a nice trans treasure chest, though I haven't ever used the ones I have.

4757 Hogwarts Castle 2nd Edition

 
You can see that they changed the look of the boxes for the 2004 Harry Potter sets. It's Harry's blue period. 4757 was another 90 dollar set but this time there were 929 parts including the 9 minifigs. That's a much better price per piece than the previous edition. Since LEGO was doing poorly at the time these sets came out you could occasionally find good sales on them. They were great part packs even if you weren't interested in Harry Potter. Most of this set is the front entrance hall and clock tower module. It's made up of three separate towers that click together with technic pins. The clock face turns and a pendulum moves with some technic gearing and a wind up motor. It looks pretty good. There's a gate to Hogwarts that would have been made better if they would have had those pigs to place on the columns on each side of the gate. Big warty hogs would be better but I can't have everything. There's another tower that attaches to the main entrance hall module. The towers are 4 stories tall and the rooms are tiny and pretty sparely decorated. They mostly hint at their reason for being. There are 9 printed parts and a sticker. Here's a few of them below. They look pretty good and some of them have other uses. I like that blackboard and the white 2x2 dish with the red printing is really pretty. There was another bat in this set, one black owl, a frog, a rat, and finally, a couple of spiders. Trans red and neon green spiders. What the... There aren't any trans spiders in the Harry Potter books or movie that I remember. Many of the 2001-2005 sets have them as an accessory, and about a third of the sets with spiders have the black ones. Weird, huh. 

 


    
This set had a good bit of the light and dark blay, a bit of reddish brown, a nice amount of tan, a bit of sand green, some black parts, and some odd bits and pieces. A good mix for the Castle builder or someone interested in building buildings. There's a lot of light blay arches and 67 of the 1x2 light blay logs. There's a dozen of the 1x2x5 dark blay wall panels and a nice 1x8x12 dark blay door flame with reddish brown doors. I like wall panels, they can come in handy, for quick building. Those doors and frames have been around in the Belville sets but not in a color for the castle guy, unless a hot pink castle is your goal. Having one of those large doors in reddish brown in your building stock just makes sense. What castle doesn't look better with a nice big door, besides how are you going to get the large trolls through some of those small doors, make them crawl? I don't think so. This set only had two books, one a blank green one, and a tan one that's printed to turn it into the Monster Book. A book that bites you! Who wouldn't want that? That Hagrid! He's the best! So a good set by most measures. Of course, I found all the HP sets to be good sets for the most part, but you know what a sap I am for Harry and his pals.

5378 Hogwarts Castle 3rd Edition

 
Three years would pass before LEGO revisited the castle in set 5378. It was the only HP set in 2007 and it was a scarce one. I'm lucky to live near a LEGO store and they had some. The price to buy one now is high on Bricklink. If you have a box it's 2-4 times the original price of 90 bucks. With 943 parts in the set that's a better price per part. There's a scaled down entrance hall with a small award display area and a bit of the astronomy tower on top of that. There are towers on each side of that central piece with a bedroom and a bit of Umbridge's office on top of another small room. The separate castle segment opens revealing some more vague rooms. All the walls are even more open than usual and only the small greenhouse is nearly a finished piece. The thestral is pretty nice, using a 1x1 plate with a clip to hold a black set of the dragon wings in place. Luckily for us we don't need to have seen someone die to see them.

   
That openness of the walls bugs me, the awards are kind of goofy, Umbridge's office has two huge stickers, a sad little desk and a purple lamp shade. Ron seems to be asleep in astronomy class. It was the only new Harry Potter set in 2 years and the only HP set that year. No new HP sets would follow until 2010. 5378 seems thrown together to me. It's one of the worst sets to display but it still was a nice parts pack. There's lot's of tan and blay parts, with some nice sand green and a nice mix of other bits and pieces. There are only 5 printed parts, a sticker, and one red unprinted book. I do like the face of the mandrake. Make sure you have your earmuffs on tight or you'll be passing out on us. There's 6 animals including the thestrals, a rat, a bat and two owls. No spiders, even of the trans variety, but still the bat. At least they are consistant, huh. I'm not as happy with this set as the other editions but I still bought a couple.

4842 Hogwarts Castle - 4th Edition

 

Three years later and the theme is red and we see Harry, Ron and Hermione on the box of 4842. It's the biggest HP set with 1290 pieces for $130. That includes 11 minifigs and 9 animals. There's a cooked turkey but I didn't count that. They added a black bat, again. All three of the gorgeous new owls, a rat, and a new color, medium dark flesh, for the 6251 crouching cat, painted up to be Mrs. Norris. I wish they had made a cat for Hermione but this one is nice. Her cat's a ginger cat and this is close enough. The castle is made up of four modules that are mostly tan pieces. As a tan fancier I can tell you that is one nice parts pack for some happy brickster. Trouble is right about now they are hard to find. Maybe after the holidays they'll start turning up again. Seems there was some more thought in putting this set together than the last one. It looks better from the outside, especially all that sand green for the roof.

 
Inside there are some small rooms with a feature or two. Here's a nice pic from From Bricks To Bothans showing that off. There's a vanishing cabinet in the bottom room of the astronomy tower. It's the square tower with crenellated top and a hidden bookcase in the middle. There are three reddish brown books in there and a 4th black one somewhere else. None of them are printed on. Kind of sad. The tallest tower next to it has the owlery on top with white 1x1 round plates for poop. There are some small rooms, starting with a tiny bit of the Gryffindor common room. There's a moving part that pops a plate with a sticker of Sirius Black's head out of fireplace so he can talk to Harry. You can see the big sticker up above. It's nearly 6 inches across. Lots of texture for the tan corner wall pieces of the tower and a couple of odd portraits. Even though I don't use them often I have to point out the ever increasing quality of the sticker in the current sets. There's a bit of corridor in the middle of the tower, and below, a bit of the Slytherin common room. I guessed that because of the green snakes. Those are nice to have. The largest module is the school's great hall. It's a nice bit of work but skimpy to say the least. There's only two student tables and only three teacher's chairs so you know it's been scaled back a tad. There is one huge cake and some other good accessories, like red and green cherries, and pearl gold goblets. The last module has one of those new doors in a nice facade, a knight in armour, and a circular stairway up to a bit of Dumbledore's office. Above that there's the silver sword of Gryffindor and fire on a stick. I don't know what that fire is all about. There are some good printed pieces. I liked the sorting hat in reddish brown, and the Quibbler and Daily Prophet 2x2 tiles are really fun. I was happy to see the return of Harry Potter. I find the sets mostly pretty entertaining. I wouldn't play with them but I'm going to leave mine built for a while. Maybe dust them.

Science Fiction Sunday 109

   
Battle Beyond The Sun was something I noticed on The Internet Archive. It's a 1959 Russian film called Nebo zovyot that was purchased by American International in 1962 for distribuation in the US. Since their target audience was the American teen subtitles alone wouldn't do. Roger Corman hired Frances Ford Coppola to create the American version. They re-edited the film and added dubbed dialog and voice over narration. Coppola also created the monster fighting footage that mars the film so. Even for the time and place it's some bad monster makin'. Just look at the shots of the critters below.

 
The story is about two competing super powers that are racing to get to Mars. There's boredom and death on the journey. Some of the russian effects shots are pretty good and there are a lot of space ships. Might be nice to see the original but the US version just isn't worth much of a look. The really interesting thing is Coppola's involvement which isn't much of anything great. Not for everyone that's for sure.

This Island Earth is an good science fiction film from 1955. I'd seen the truncated version that they used in the MST3K movie in September and while flipping through the dvdr's I found this dvdr. It's a copy that I taped off of AMC ages ago. When the tapes went it got transfered to dvdr. I probably thought I'd just buy one eventually and this is a good placeholder. It's the whole movie and while watchable it's a bit grainy and pan and scan. Looks like the only dvd on Amazon is also pan and scan, and it's 12 bucks. Not much of an incentive to purchase one. I will have to keep an eye out for the chance to record one off of Turner Classic Movies. I love the low cost option.

Rex Reason is a science guy and jet pilot. He has an encounter with a green ray while flying back to his lab. Someone sends them a odd condenser and it does a remarkable job. A catalog of strange electric parts arrives and they build the interociter. It puts them in communication with Jeff Morror who plays Exeter. He tells them that the machine was a test and Rex passed. His prize? He could come work on a special project for Exeter. A project full of amazing technology. Rex goes along to a special lab in Georgia. Exeter and his large forheaded group have assembled some science people from around the world. Faith Domergue is one of them. There's some plot advancement and science stuff. Rex suspects something and he eventually gets the proof that Exeter is an alien. Aliens with designs on his world. While escaping Rex and Faith are picked up and taken to Metaluna with Exeter. The timing can't be worse when they arrive the planet is under heavy attack and the Zagons are winning. The Metalunians live underground because the Zagons bomb them with meteors. Well it's been going on so long that their cities have been destroyed, most of the citizen are dead and the planet is starting to break up. Sucks to be there. Rex and Faith are befriended by Exeter and he helps them escape on the ship. Metaluna falls and they get home. It's an entertaining film and more fun to watch than many from the time.

Friday Night Movies 302

 
First up a copy of The Navy Vs The Night Monsters, a 1966 Michael A. Hoey film starring Mamie Van Dorn and Anthony Eisley. This is Hoey's only feature. He went on to have a long career in directing and producing tv, working on Fame, Dallas, and Falcon Crest. Not shows that I watched myself but I understand they were popular. Michael A. is the son of character actor Dennis Hoey, who was in a lot of pretty good movies. He played Inspector Lestrade in 5 of the Universal Sherlock Holmes series and he was in Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, again as an Inspector. I'm pretty sure I hadn't seen The Navy Vs The Night Monsters before, but it's kind of forgetable, so you never know. I'm still counting it as a new film watched and it's #707 for 2010. I still have 12-13 days left and a stack of stuff to pound through so I should be able to do better than an average of 2 a day for the year. In TNVTNM a plane full of scientists has a problem while heading for the refueling stop at Gow Island. Something in the cargo of plants and animals from Antarctica forced everyone off the plane except the pilot who lands the plane in a state of shock. He left the wheels up and the plane skidded to a stop, possibly a permant one. The Commander is off island and Anthony Eisley is in charge. Some of you might recognize Anthony from all the tv shows he did from the late 1950's to 1991. The Commander is played by Biff Elliot who starred as Mike Hammer in the 1953 3D film I, The Jury, a pretty entertaining adaptation of Mickey Spillane's hard boiled character. Billy Gray, the son on the tv show Father Knows Best, plays a radio operator who gets his arm ripped off. It isn't all that exciting, in fact some of the plant attacks and deaths are down right shamefull. The script is average at best and some of the actors are not up that level. The monsters are not anything as cool as the poster above. The dvd has a pretty poor print. Someone sure didn't care about saving a good copy of this film. You can find it cheap but there isn't much reason to watch it unless, like us, you want to see all the monster movies that exist out there. It scores a 2.4 on the IMDb and they aren't far off. A better title might have helped.

Mike wanted to see some comedy after all that murderous plant fueled mayhem, so we watched Balls Of Fury. Joe, Greg and I had already seen it and we were still interested in seeing it again. I can't say that about a lot of movies. Balls Of Fury is a 2007 ping pong action comedy starring Christopher Walken, James Hong and Dan Fogler. Dan's the adult version of a child ping pong sensation who lost big time in the 1988 Olympic Table Tennis Championship match. He lost to a "full of himself" German played by Thomas Lennon. Lennon is the co-writer of the script with director Robert Ben Garant. Lennon and Garant are both on Reno 911! and this is Garant's second feature film. He directed the Reno 911!: Miami feature film in 2007 and some episodes of the series. He did a pretty good job in both the script and the directing. After the opening in the past we cut to modern day and Dan is appearing in a crappy Reno, Nevada casino stage show playing with ping pong balls. George Lopez plays an FBI agent come to recruit Dan, and his mad table tennis skills, to infiltrate the secret underground world of competitive ping pong. Christopher Walken plays Feng, the evil villian, who's got a ping pong tournament. He's wanted by the FBI for trafficing in weapons. James Wong plays the master who has to help Randy refine his mad skills and Maggie Q plays the daugher. She's quite a cutie. The story is sort of based on the Bruce Lee film Enter The Dragon but with more laughs. There's all sorts of jokes and a lot of them, the good outweight the bad. Walken is a great comic villian and the rest of the cast is easily as entertaining. Not the best comedy I have ever seen but it does a good job of delivering the laughs and some action. It's got a nice high level of goofyness and I enjoyed it the second time around. 

What's West Of Shanghai - You'll find out!

 
Here's an odd pair of movies that got stuck on a DVDR together. They were on Turner at an inconvenient time and I figured I'd time shift 'em and see what they were about. Tonight I watched them and both were entertaining and completely different from each other as could be. They only shared the one actor. 

West of Shanghai is from 1937 and it 's set in China. Karloff plays a Chinese warlord named General Fang. He's fighting and causing trouble. Some American's travel through China to an oil field. Guess who's near by? Most of the foreigners are connected to one another in some way. They congregate at the mission in a small town near the oil fields. Soon after their arrival Boris shows up and takes over the town. It looks sort of grim for the foreigners, everyone's waving guns about. Turns out Gordon Oliver gave Fang a hand when we was a cooley and Fang thinks of him as a friend. Gordon is in love with the creepy oil man's enstranged wife, Beverly Roberts, who's there as a missionary. They can't marry because she is still married and though she loves him in return she won't get a divorce. That kind of sucks, huh. The oil man, Ricardo Cortez, is there to cheat Gordon out of his lease on the oil field. He cares more about making money than his ex-wife and even uses her as a bargining chip for his own safety. There's some double crossing and Ricardo has to be shot repeatedly to be put down. That guy was a creep, I was not sorry to see him get his, but now, with the help of Fang's pistol, the happy couple is free to marry. Yay for war! Sadly, it ends poorly for the General. He was quite the character. It's a pretty good story with a good script. Boris is the scene stealer but his second in commmand played by Richard Loo is no slouch. Well worth the half of a disc that it took up. I'll watch it again and the same can be said for the second movie co-starring Boris.

You'll Find Out is one of seven musical pictures that the famous radio personality and band leader Kay Kyser made between 1939 and 1944. He's joined by his band The College of Musical Knowledge. There were a lot of musical pictures in the 1930's and 40's, all the band leaders had shots at movie stardom, as did popular singers like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Kay Kyser played himself and the stories revolved around the band. You'll Find Out is the second of his movies and it's from 1940. There are a nice trio of guest stars, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre, guys I always enjoy watching. Kay and the band are playing at a party for a rich girl. It's in a huge mansion on an island with only one bridge to get on and off. Lightning blows it up just after they arrive, and there they are, trapped by misfortune. Slight bit of sychronicity what with both movies having trapped people that face death. In YFO someone is trying to kill the rich girl and the murder doesn't seem to care if anyone gets in the way. I wonder who the murder could be? Probably not the band, they just want to get paid. I think we have some good suspects. Good luck guessing who did it. The movie is fun and snappy, briskly moving from scene to scene with occasional outbreaks of singing. The musical numbers dry up as the mystery kicks in. It kept me entertained. Unlike West of Shanghai, You'll Find Out is actually on dvd, in single movie editions and a 4 pack which I saw on Amazon for $17. The single movie editions seem out of print and are fairly pricey. Yay for Turner Classic Movies.

What I Read In August 2010

Only half a dozen books for August. Wonder what I was doing?

  
Magic Or Not by Edgar Eager has Laura and James meet their new neighbors Kid and Lydia and the four of them have some possibly magic adventures during the summer. Like the sequel, The Well-Wishers, the events in this story can be explained by coincidence or chance. Still, like all the Eager books, an entertaining read. I like his characters and the message is good. I'll keep his books and re-read them again in the future.

Even More Short and Shivery by Robert D San Souci is a bounch of short slightly scarey stories that were mostly entertaining. The most interesting thing about the stories is they are all based on folk stories or legends from all over the world. Fun enough but it's not a keeper.

 
The Mirror's Tale by P W Catanese is another of his fairy tale re-imaginings. This time the story is connected to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the magic mirror that the witch has. PW invents a whole world to fill in around the oiginal story, which happened some time in the past of the novel. The main characters are twin brothers who are some trouble. The king, their father, thinkin that apart they would be less trouble, separates them for the summer and sends one of they to the castle of his brother up north. The boys secretly change places. Good and bad things happen and the boys eventually get together, grow up, and save the kingdom. I've found all of Catanese's books to be entertaining reading. There's a pretty good story that's told well. Worth checking out.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling. what can I say, 8th run through and still going strong. I think you know what the books about so I won't talk about that. I did still enjoy reading the book, it might be one of my favorites in the series. It has one of the best time travel sequences in any media.

   
Midnight Magic by Avi is the story of a wizard, one who's had to renounce his magic at the bequest of the king, and has been placed under house arrest. His son thinks he cursed the family with his Tarot cards one night, especially when the king sends men calling for the father. At the castle the King tells them his daughter is being haunted by the King's dead son. He wants the magician's help and the magician doesn't believe in ghosts. The son helps the dad solve the mystery of the ghost and most everything works out in the end. Not a bad book, not a great book, an ok read, but not a keeper.

  
Freddy's Cousin Weedly by Walter R Brooks is the 7th book in the series and it came out in 1940. Jinx takes Freddy's shy cousin Weedly under his wing for the summer. The Bean's are in Europe and their relatives, The Snedekers come to collect a silver tea set that they think belongs to them. The animals try to keep them from finding and leaving with it. There's a bunch of fun bits and pieces. There's a play that the animals put on with Freddy playing Sir Walter Raliegh and Mrs Wiggins playing Queen Elizabeth. That's it in the endpapers above. I sure enjoy the heck out these books. They make great bedtime reading. It a pleasure to nod off to dreamland in such company.

Science Fiction Sunday 108

I picked up a copy of Gog at the Internet Archive. It doesn't seem to be there now. Might have showed up by mistake and it was taken down. That happens occasionally when some uploader makes a mistake and posts a copyright movie. I'd seen Gog for the first and last time in 1999 and didn't have a copy. Kind of an interesting poster but I don't find it attractive. When this movie was made it was 1954 it was in 3D and the Cold War was going on. I don't miss either process. When the movie opens some scientists are experimenting with freezing monkeys. They are trapped in their own experiment, frozen solid, and their bodies shattered. Richard Egan shows up to investigate and he's taken to the secret underground lab out in the desert. There's a super giant computer called NOVAC and he's got two robot helpers, Gog and Magog. The security finds some radio transmitters hidden around the base. Some suspicious activity is happening on the surface as well with a plane flying around. A plane that shouldn't be there and doesn't show up on radar. There's a lot of talking and looking at the scientists work. Some of the scientific equipment is provided by the Minneapolis Honeywell Regulator Company. There's a tour of the atomic pile and the control robots run by NOVAC. One thing happens after another and more people die. It moves quickly and there's pretty good actors and production values from producer Ivan Tors. Richard is helped by Constance Dowling who would retire from acting after the movie. She married Ivan Tors and they had three kids together and adopted a fourth. Tors would produce a lot of tv over the years. A fairly entertaining piece of work. Worth a look.

   
Terror In The Midnight Sun is a 1959 US-Swedish film about an alien spaceship that crashes in the snow covered mountains of Lappland. A group of science types heads into the mountain region aided by colorfully dressed Lapplanders. Too bad it's a black and white film. There's a pretty girl, Barbara Wilson, who gives us a nice bit of figure skating. She'll be the romantic interest for our handsome lead science guy, who's, of course, a bit of a skirt chaser with a trail of broken hearts across Europe. Well, we all know that guy will go down in love flames of a greater magnitude than the arrival of our burning meteor. The group's evening socializing is interupted by the military. Seems there's been some trouble. At an isolated farm they find some damage, torn apart animals, and a giant foot print. They speculate that the animal would be 20 feet tall. There's no animal on earth like that, what could it be? Next day at the meteor site they find the answer to their question. It's a critter from space. Oh oh.

   

On that guy's planet he's something of a looker. Here he's just a monster to be destroyed. Seems like that's a good reason to stay home, doesn't it. Oh well, he's here and he's toast. There's lots of great footage of northern snow covered outdoors and a pretty good alien monster chasing movie. There's some danger, lots of skiing, and near the end of the movie a weird scene with the crew of the alien spaceship. After the monster attacks the Lapp village it's destroyed and the aliens, feeling a lack of welcome, leave. It's a good average B movie. Interesting enough in it's setting and the monster is ok. Well worth a look for the monster movie fan and the price is right.