PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

3065 Olivia's Tree House

 

I really liked the mix of parts in 3065 Olivia's Tree House, liked them better than the actual set once you build it, which I did. The box says 191 pieces but there are a few extras and they count the flowers and bugs as a single piece. There are 20, 4 each of 5, pieces in a poly bag that has a single number in the parts list that you'd find in the back of the instructions. The ladybug and butterfly are nice and the flowers will add a good bit of variety to flower displays. You can either attach them with the pin or use the hole through the middle to poke a flower stem through. You get them in light bright orange in the Veterinarian set. I'd like to see them in even more colors.

       

The rest of the parts are mostly the handy sort that I like. Others might not like the mix. It's always about the re-use for me. There's a 16 x 16 green plate that could be of use. I have a bunch of the dark tan that I traded some goats for but I haven't figured out a use yet. You get a nice handful of light bright pink parts and another of reddish brown pieces. A nice assortment of plant pieces will come in handy. There aren't enough of them unfortunately to make that tree look very good. The tree house is really just a platform, the only roof is on the bird house. I liked the bird and thought the cat was nearly too cute.

 That bird looks huge and it is. Two bricks high and those gals are only 5 bricks high. That's a huge sparrow, huh, and what's with those eyes. The rest of the parts are going to be useful once I figure out what to do with them. I'm glad I got one and I'll be keeping an eye out for these on clearance to pick up another one.

Comedy Kings 50 Movie Pack Disc 4

     

The Admiral Was A Lady is a 1950 movie with Edmond O'Brien as the leader of a bunch of vetrans who were all involved in a plane crash. They don't have regualar jobs but they manage to get by with their little schemes. They all live rent free in an unused warehouse where Edmond is the night watchman. They drive a truck that advertises a music store which pays for their gas. They get unemployment since they are part of the 52-20 club, returning soldiers got 20 bucks a week for a year, and to make an extra quarter they open saving accounts at a bank which gives out free piggy banks. They sell the piggy banks to a shop and close their accounts. Every week. It's all fun for the guys until a young WAVE crosses their paths. Turns out they all have some emotional baggage and that leads to some fun comedic bits as things work themselves out. Wanda Hendrix plays the WAVE - the Admiral of the title - and she's pretty cute. The rest of the cast does a good job with an entertaining script. Worth a look. Available on dvd in various forms or I've hidden a link somewhere in the post. Keep an eye out for it.

   

 

His Double Life is a 1933 Roland Young & Lillian Gish film. He's a reclusive artist who takes advantage of the death of his valet to pretend to be dead and she's the valet's mail order bride. They hook up and then Roland gets charged with bigamy. It's a dopey idea but I always enjoy Roland Young and I don't have too many Lillian Gish movies. It's a fairly entertaining movie but there's too much melodrama,  too little comedy, and the previous movie was more fun. You can watch it too for free by clicking a link. I'm not going to tell you which one. 

Boys Of The City is a 1940 East Side Kids movie. It's the second of a series of 22 films that were made by Sam Katzman at Monogram. They started in 1940 and ended the series in 1945. Before that series most of the same actors were in The Dead End Kids over at Warner Brothers. They did 6 films over there before getting tossed out of the studio for trashing stuff. At the same time some of them were making a dozen Little Tough Guys pictures and all that was followed by 4 dozen Bowery Boys films. I find them to be similar enough, mostly entertaining in a dumb way, and this is not to different. The guys have to take a trip to camp for playing in the street too hard. They's a big old house, crooks, ghosts and yelling, lots of yelling. You can see it on the IA.

Escape To Paradise is a 1939 film about a guy travelling to South America. He meets a young motorcycle taxi driver and then a young woman. Romance and some comedy ensue. There's some singing by the young motorcycle taxi driver. I didn't know who the kid singer was, he headlines the film, but I read that Bobby Breen was a Canadian singer, yay, he made several movies, and the Beetles liked him enough to put him on the album cover of Sgt Peppers. That's kind of cool. The movie was ok, about average, nothing too special. Again you can stop off here to see it.

 

Scrubs Season 5

I hadn't seen any Scrubs for a long while. I had started buying the series dvds when they were coming out but stopped with season 4. I decided to wait to pick them up after they had fallen in price. That was precipitated by seeing the pricing pattern that developed over the first 5 or 6 years that dvds were coming out and the desire to spend more money on LEGO. Now thanks to a Half Price Books 40% coupon I picked up season 5 and got to watched it for 6 bucks, plus tax. It's got 24 episodes on three discs and I had seen a few of them before in syndication. Originally the episodes were broadcast from January to May 2006. That was pretty much just after I had given up trying to keep up with shows as they were broadcast. There were too many dvds to watch. I could never remember to watch broadcast episodes at the right times. I just missed a lot of stuff I was often interested in. Of course watching a series on dvd is preferable to broadcast, what with no commercials, which made waiting seem like a good idea. For the most part I enjoyed the 5th season but I really like the cast of actors and the characters they play. It just helps so much to have clever scripts and visuals to enjoy.

Zack Braff and Donald Faison play two best friends who had been interning at the Sacred Heart teaching hospital. In the 5th season they have moved up to attending doctors with Zack a GP and Donald a surgeon. Zach goes through the season commenting on his life and life at the hospital. We hear his internal monologue and see his fantasies. He's got a bunch of interns to take care of plus all the regular stuff that happens in a hospital, some sad and some happy, it's a humourous melodramatic mixture. Then there's Zack's love life. Lots of comedy potential there. He's dating a woman at the beginning of the show and as soon as they buy some property and build a porch they break up over commitment. That pouch later attracts middle aged gay men who like hanging out on it. It's a nice porch. For a while Zack lives in a tent on his porch. It's a show with heavy continutity that moves people through several story arcs of varied lengths that can continue from season to season. That porch is in later seasons and later in the 5th season Zack gets something going with Elizabeth Banks that lasts into the 6th season and beyond. Donald and Judy Reyes are trying to have a baby so there's lots of fun stuff going on there. I just love Donald Faison. He can act, he's really great at physical comedy, and I find him a delight to watch. He has great chemistry with Zack, they are best friends in real life, and their scenes together really make me laugh. Laugh out loud at times.

That's good cause some of the stories are kind of sad. People are always dying from one thing or another. One episode has a woman die, her organs are harvested and transplanted, and the recipients get sicker. They find out that the dead woman had rabies. It's totally unexpected  and sadly everyone dies. It breaks John C McGinley's tough doctor Cox even thought it was not his fault. Rabies is very rare and there was little time to do tests for something you would never expect. John dives into depression and Scotch and stays that way for a couple of episodes before he's back on track. McGinley's created a really complex tomented character that I might not like to hang out with but do enjoy on tv. Sarah Chalk plays another doctor who worked at Sacred Heart but she left last season to work on a fellowship which ends the second show into the season. She winds up going back to Sacred Heart and starts dating a young intern. That will continue into next season before that goes all to hell. There's always pain mixed in with pleasure in the show. You don't get a laugh for nothing with this show. The cost is worth it for the excellent writing and wonderful comedic moments. Hard to do a hundred shows and keep the quality up but they manage to get something good in each week story wise and there are plenty of jokes. I'm looking forward to finishing off the series thanks to a batch of 40% off coupons.

Science Fiction Sunday 171

Red Dwarf Series 7 appeared in 1997 which was 4 years after the last series had aired. Rob Grant left the series and Doug Naylor wrote or co-wrote the 8 episodes with some other writers. Ed Bye, who had directed the first four series, returns to direct this series. Chris Barrie, Craig Charles, Danny John-Jules and Robert Llewellyn all return. They are still in the Starbug. They'd been killed by their future selves and since that destroyed the time machine they were alive again. Back to normal they return to looking for the Red Dwarf. In the first episode they travel back in time and screw up Oswald's assassination of President Kennedy. Since the Pres isn't killed the world goes to hell. The guys go back in time once again and get JFK to shoot himself from the grassy knowl. It had to be the world needed savin'. Ace Rimmer returns to our universe. He's been shot and his life is nearly over. He recruits Rimmer to take over being Ace Rimmer and Chris Barrie leaves the series. He'll return for another episode this series and appear in series 8 and Back To Earth.

In episode 3 the guys meet up with a parallel universe version of Lister's old girlfriend Kristine Kochanski. Chloe Annet plays Kochanski and she is the second person to play that part. She's hooked up with the Lister of her universe but he's a hologram. Kochanski was the one in the statis chamber when the crew was killed by the faulty drive. Kochanski gets left in our universe and asks Lister for some sperm. No sex, just the juice. She has the baby and we find out it's Lister. What the hell? Movin' on, the ships power generator goes out in show 4 and everyone has to spend some time in the ducts of the Starbug. Kryten is jealous of Kochanski but they work that out. That Kryten is such a big baby. Lister is missing Rimmer so Kryten puts him in a the virtual reality machine and shows him some flashbacks of Rimmer in action. The highlight of the show is the Rimmer song. That cures him. He never wants to see Rimmer again. Kryten meets his brother only to lose him; then Lister gets a virsus and loses his arm. In the last episode Kryten uses nanobots to build Lister a new arm. Then they get the nanobots to rebuild the Red Dwarf. They do but it's not the right size. They'll get it right next series. That won't appear for a couple more years but thanks to the magic of digital media we can travel forward that two years in just a weeks time.

Mostly still making me laugh. I wasn't ever a big fan of the Kochanski subplot. The dvd set is now three discs and there's the usual commentaries and featurettes. There are a couple of fan films but they aren't that good. There's a 9th episode that was written but never produced. Chris Barrie reads the script over the storyboards. He does all the voices. It's an episode where the cat needs to get laid or die. He finally gets his end away and they don't make that episiode because of the expense. Poor cat.

Comedy Kings 50 Movie Pack Disc 3

 

Here Comes Trouble is a 1948 William Tracy movie. He's playing the same character as the two other William Tracy movies in this set but now he's out of the army. He gets a job as a newspaper reporter and his pal gets an job as a cop. There's lots of running around and some comedic bits as they thwart the blackmailer. There's a bit of romance and lots of yelling. It's ok but nothing special.  

Hollywood and Vine is one of those stories of a young gal who comes to Hollywood to get into pictures. It's 1945 and her plans don't go so well at first but she finds romance in the form of a screen writer. There's an entertaining dog storyline that made me laugh once or twice.  Good average B picture comedy I'd probably watch more than once.

    

The Lost Honeymoon is a 1947 Franchot Tone film. He's an architect that had been in the war. He's returned to start his life again. People think he's a bit of a hero but really what happened is he got knocked on the head, lost his memory for 6 months, and missed all the fighting. A woman shows up with two kids in tow claiming to be his wife. That's a surprise to him but he had no memory so who knows? It's a long needlessly complicated story that sort of works out at the end. Not a bad thing but not great either. I'm just not that big a Franchot Tone fan and this is really not much of a comedy. This could have been a lot better with just a few script changes.

The Animal Kingdom is a 1932 Leslie Howard film and it's hardly a comedy eithr. Jokes wouldn't help it. I'm not a big LH fan that's for sure. Here's he's ok as a whimpy publisher with a small book company. He's just about to marry Myrna Loy when a woman from his past shows up. They've been naughty but parted with no strings attached. She arrives thinking to start the romance again. She's still in love with Leslie. Myrna is a cold calculated type with her position in society foremost on her mind. She's always manipulating Leslie but she isn't in love with him. The story is pretty heavy handed. There's not much comedy here, I mean look at that poster, ick, huh. More interesting to me for the actors and the period it was made than the melodrama.

Behave Yourself was a fun crime romp with Shelley Winters and Farley Granger. Because of a dog Farley and Shelley get involved with criminals and police. A lot of great character actors get dispatched in this 1951 film. Lon Cheney Jr, Elisha Cook, Sheldon Leonard and Hans Conried are part of the criminal gang and they get bumped off one by one. William Demarest plays the cop that suspects Farley is mixed up with the crooks. He's not he's just a hapless hubby living with his wife in his mother-in-laws house. That can't be good, huh? Everything works out for the most part. It's pretty goofy and not to be taken serious. Just the kind of thing I like. too bad it's only one of two that I'd watch more than once. Maybe the next disc will have a better ratio.

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Both Joe and Spehauk had Puss In Boots arrive from Netflix. It seemed like the movie to start with. It's Puss's backstory. He was an orphan who was framed by his friend Humpty Dumpty and that caused him to take on a life of crime. While robbing Jack and Jill for some magic beans Puss surprized by a rival robber in the form of a masked feline and the whole caper goes to hell. The two cats barely escape with their lives. The masked robber leads Puss to the Litter Box bar. He has a fight with the masked feline who turns out to be a woman named Kitty Softpaws. They team up to rob Jack and Jill and eventually are successfull. The action sequences were pretty darn good. Humpty turns up and he manages to convince them that they need to team up to rob the Giant's Castle at the top of the beanstalk. After Humpty set up Puss so well you'd think that Puss would never trust the egg again but he does. I wouldn't. They actually steal the chick of the goose that laid the golden egg and bring that back to their hometown. Turns out you couldn't trust that Humpty and he's set up the whole town for treating him poorly as a kid. He lived in the town's orphanage with Puss. They became friends and fellow petty thieves, when Puss when straight Humpty couldn't cope and set him up. He's pretty much a straight up jerk. Puss will save the day and there's plenty of collateral damage after the mother goose arrives. She's giant, towering over the houses, smashing things up.  There'a a lot of nice scenery and action. Antoniao Banderas and Salma Heyak play the two leads. Billy Bob Thornton plays Jack and Amy Sederias plays Jill. There's a lot of running around and some funny bits. It's mostly a fun movie, I enjoyed it, and will eventually pick one up once I can find it cheap.

Sperhauk had found Santo And The Blue Demon Vs The Monsters for cheap. It's the actual Mexican release but lucky for us there's an English soundtrack. Santo and Blue Demon are a pair of Mexican wrestlers who also appear in movies as themselves. This movie has them fighting a dead evil scientist. He's re-animated by his henchmen so he can return to his evil ways. He collects an army of monsters to destroy everything. Not much of a plan but there you go. He's got a great lab in a castle. There are some fake rock walls that get used for that set and several others.

 

Evil villian has a Frankenstein monster, a Dracula guy, some vampire women in lingerie, a cyclops with a glowing red eye, a mummy and a wolfman. I'm not sure what the henchmen are, they have green face makeup that doesn't quite cover their faces, mostly they look like wrestlers. Santo has a nice blonde girlfriend who is seen in that picture on the left. It's from a scene in a nightclub and the group is watching a stage show. The whole stage show is from another movie, just spliced into the Santo movie. The stock is totally different but you can see she's totally enthralled, or stunned, I'm not sure which. There's a lot of wrestling and fighting, especially once the monsters start showing up. The story is pretty simple, evil scientist, evil plan and lots of monsters. Fun in it's dumb way. Seeing one or two of these is fun, the whole series might be tiring.

Comedy Kings 50 Movie Pack Disc 2

Here's the second disc of movies from the Comedy Kings 50 Movie Pack. These are some short movies, let me tell you, but mostly worth a gander. Sometimes shorter is fine. You probably aren't going to be as lucky as me and find this box set for under 3 bucks so I've hidden some links on the post to lead you to online copies of the movies you can watch for free. These are all old public  domain movies so there's no copyright infringement. Nice, huh.  

Hay Foot is a 1942 film with William Tracy as Sgt Dorian 'Dodo' Doubleday. He's a smart nerdy guy with a great memory who's the assistant to Col Barkley on a military base. The Colonel is played by James Gleason, one of my favorite actors. He pretty much plays the same character, a kind of noisy and irascible guy. He made 160 films in his career and a lot of them were pretty good. This is about average. The story is pretty simple, the movie is only 46 minutes long, William is getting picked on my the tougher Sargent's. No matter the script is on his side and the nerdy guy gets the girl. You can see it on YouTube. This is the second movie with Tracy as the same character. The first, Tanks A Million can be seen on the Internet Archive.  

Her Favorite Patientis a 1945 film about a doctor who's traveling to Chicago. She stops in her hometown to visit her uncle. He's the small towns doctor and he's played by the delightful Charles Ruggles. Charles wants her to take over his practice and he enlists the help of a test pilot. There's laughs, romance and some military men on leave. A nice mix of comedy and melodrama. I'd seen it before, just a few months ago, and it was still entertaining to watch again. You can see this on the IA.

   

Affairs Of Cappy Ricks was a fun bit of business with Walter Brennan. He's the Cappy Ricks of the title. He returns home to find his daughter planning a wedding. Turns out she is marrying the son of a rival  businessman Cappy hates. He's not so fond of the rich spoiled son either. The mother in law has taken over his house and, since she bought some stock, 51% of his business. Cappy fights back and takes the family on his boat. He plans to strand them on an island so they can work out their differences. It doesn't go well at first, and they all get stranded for real, but it all works out in the end. There are some silly gags and life lessons learned. This one's worth the look and once again it's on the IA.  

All Over Town stars Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson as a couple of comedians trying to help a theater owner to raise some money so she won't loose her building. Some evil guy wants to the lot and he kills to get it. It's a 1937 movie and it's fair to middlin' in story and quality. There's nothing much to the story and it has a few comedic bits and pieces. I just don't care much for the main two guys, either as actors or as characters. You can see it on the IA.

Niagara Falls is another really short movie. This 1941 movie runs 43 minutes. That's about what you get in an hour long show on commercial tv today. It's a quick paced silly comedy with a guy and a gal and some romance. They are both driving somewhere and they smack up their cars outside Niagara Falls. They get a lift into town and the hotel they stop in at is filled with honeymooners. That can go either way, huh. There's some confusion, it's that kind of a movie, and a meddling guy thinks they are fighting newlyweds and gives them his honeymoon suite. He's just trying to get them back together. They protest but it falls on his deaf ears and he forces them to stay in the room together. He's using a gun to keep them there. Nothing happens but it's not a time for a man and a woman to be left alone in a room overnight. There's even a scene where the other the hotel patrons get all riled up that an unmarried couple had stayed overnight. Scandalous. It was fun enough and it was over quick. You can take a gander at the movie at the IA. It's worth it.

The Kids In The Hall - Season 1

I started watching The Kids In The Hall when they showed up on tv back in the 1989. The show appeared first on the CBC and then on HBO and CBS the following year. It ran for 5 seasons and those shows were followed by The Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy movie. HBO pretty much ran the irreverent show uncut but CBS edited some episodes. Those uncut episodes are on the DVD set that you can buy. I had taped all the shows and kept them until I got the 2006 Complete series dvd set. It finally got cheap and I picked it up for under 50 bucks last summer. It's got each season on four discs and each disc has it's own slim keep case. It's still under 50 bucks on Amazon as I write this. There is a 2011 set that has the 20 discs from the previous set as well as the 2 disc set of Death Comes To Town. That's a 2009 8 episode series the kids did. The newer edition bundles the 4 discs from each season into one case so you only have 6 cases total. The new set is cheaper than the previous version on Amazon as I write this today so that's the one to get. Each of the 5 seasons had 20 episodes of new material and a couple of compilation shows. There was an hour long special that ran before the series that served as a pilot. About half of the sketches are included in one of the first year compilation episodes. There's a separate dvd of the Pilot. I'll need to pick that up as well as the set of Death Comes To Town.

The guys, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson are all Canadian. Good on them, eh. They had been doing live stage improv comedy in various groups before they gelled into the group that finally appeared on the show. Some of the other people they worked with became writers on the show. Lorne Micheals is the producer of the show. He is also the producer of Saturday Night Live. I like at least one of his shows. I'm almost kidding, I actually like some of the first 5 seasons of SNL and picked them up when they got to below 20 bucks each at Target. I will watch those again. I like sketch comedy and I really liked The Kids In The Hall's version of it. Their sketches have various lengths and each show had 8 or 9 pieces. Some of the shorter pieces, like the guy who crushes people's heads or the two cops, appear 2 or 3 times in an episode. At some point one in the commentary one of the kids talked about their trying not to return to the same characters in all their sketches but it was too hard to create hundreds of new characters and situations. That's fine with me some of their characters are really entertaining. The humor tends to be off beat, perhaps surreal, abstract for sure, bleak and mean and definately goofy. If you like Monty Pytons Flying Circus or SCTV you might like these guys.

The first season introduced a lot of recurring characters, some are entertaining and some are disturbing. People might remember the head crushing guy who crushed the heads of distant people between his fingers or the 30 Helens standing in a field commenting on life lessons or Cathy and Kathy and all the women in the office they worked in. The guys play women a lot, maybe as much as they play businessmen. They riff on business, often it's not very nice. Relationships of all sorts take a punch. There's a great opportunity for laughter in the misery of others and some of the characters are pretty awful, like the cabbage headed guy who hits on women in the most inappropriate way possible. He's a real bastard who appears at random times. One of my favorite characters is Scott Thompson's Buddy Cole a flamboyant gay guy who has a knack for entertaining commentary. Sketches parody all kinds of topics, school, home, work, sports, movies, lawyers, you name it, it might be there. With 20 episodes there are a couple of hundred bits and pieces. In one bit a kid brings a young business man into his house. He asks his mom if he can keep him, 'cause he followed him home. It works for a while but eventually the kid has the release his business man back into the wild. He drops him off near an office building, so he can be near his own kind, and rejoin society. Not all of them are funny, some are just weird, and there are the occasional head shakers. There's a lot of anger and violence and darkness in their comedy. Still I find myself smiling and occasionally laughing, and that's even after watching the series several times.

     

Dave Foley was born in 1963 in Etobicoke Ontario. Great name, huh? Dave took classes at the Second City Training Center in Toronto and that's where he meet Kevin McDonald. The two of them eventually teamed up and the first version of The Kids In The Hall was born. The other fellows arrived later and after the series they worked on the Brain Candy movie. Dave left the group in the middle of the writing, not happy with the movie, and having News Radio to go to. I enjoyed News Radio pretty much when it was on but it's a show that I haven't really had any interest in seeing them again. Not sure why, once I watch everything else I want to I might have to pick them up. Foley appeared in several movies and a lot of tv shows. I haven't seen most of them but occasionally I come across him. Just a few days ago I saw him in some episodes of Scrubs. He was playing a doctor who deals in grief. I'm sure I'll be seeing him sometime soon. I have more Kids seasons to watch and I have to pick up that Death dvd and see what that's about.

Science Fiction Sunday 170

The BBC was hungry for more episodes of Red Dwarf and series 6 appeared 7 months after the end of the previous one. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor are back writing the series. Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Danny John-Jules and Robert Llewellyn all return but Hatty Heyridge doesn't. There's no Holly as the guys start the series in the Starbug. That's the little green spaceship they use to go planet side. They wake from suspended animation and have no idea where the Red Dwarf is. They detect a trail that could be from the engines and follow that only to run into sirens in an asteroid belt. The guys nearly get their brains sucked out by the shape shifting aliens. They haven't got much to loose, they need to be more careful. After that they run into a space station with a strange guy in a mask. He's an experimental lifeform that gives Rimmer an upgraded hologram projector, one that makes him solid and able to interact with his surroundings. He helps the other guys out and the space station seems like a nice place. Of course it turns out their host is crazy and they're on their way. There's a funny hitting Rimmer scene that makes me laugh. Episode 3 has a virus get on board the Starbug. Kryten fights in the virus in a cyberspace that looks like an American movie western. Kryten plays the pathetic sheriff who has to rise to the occasion and defeat the bad guys. That show won an International Emmy. It's pretty silly. Lister has to marry a Gelf woman in order to get a part for the Starbug. Gelf's are big hairy apelike humanoids. Lister doesn't stay to consummate the marriage. Rimmer gets sucked into a timehole and has to wait 600 years for the guys to catch up. He screws that up. He's managed to make clones of himself and they tossed his ass in jail for nearly the whole 600 years. No much good happens to that guy but he is a git. I enjoy his pain. They end the series with a cliffhanger. The guys hit a pocket of space fog that creates unrealities. For a while Lister is a cyborg. The show ends with the guys fighting older versions of themselves in the Starbug. The shows are still making me laugh for the most part but then again I've seen them several times and I like the characters. The commentaries have bits and pieces of entertaining banter and the interview featurettes are good. They add a nice background to the series.  

Friday Night Movies 361

There's something beautiful about the African countryside, beautiful and dangerous, besides all the usual dangerous animals the countryside in The Dead is filled with zombies. A plane filled with Americans is leaving some unnamed African country. Things have fallen apart and they're in a rush to leave. The plane isn't totally fueled and they crash off the coast about 40 miles from the border of Sierra Leone. That could be Guinea or Liberia. After the plane hits the drink the only survivors of the crash wash up on shore. A couple of them get eaten right away. Lt. Brian, played by Rob Freeman, gets away and heads across country looking for someone who isn't dead. The zombies are the slow shambling type and they are everywhere. If you don't see one, just wait a minute, he'll be there, with a hungry friend or two. They just wear your ass down by sheer numbers. Prince David Osie is a soldier who gets back to his village only to find his wife dead and his son gone. His dying mom tells him soldiers took his son and he might be alive at a camp 200 miles north. His mom dies and Daniel has to shot her. Bummer, huh. The movie moves these guys along a path that intersects and they team up to have a better chance of survival. That works for a while but eventually it all goes to hell and that's pretty much the end of the world as we know it. Despite the dispair of it all, it's a pretty entertaining zombie movie. The movie is filmed in Burkina Fazo and Ghana by the English writing & directing team of Howard J Ford and Jon Ford. They made a couple of movies and a hundred commercials before this. I don't know about their previous work but here they do a good job creating an adult horror movie. It's well filmed in a style that makes me think the movie is older than it is. It doesn't rely on excessive gore or frequent short scenes with violent startles to scare you. I thought it was almost poetic. It's kind of slow moving at times and while we were yakking a bit we were all still watching. There's a lot of time spent looking at scenery, the desolate and isolated countryside is a big part of the story. Well worth checking out for the horror movie fan.

The BluRay of Pirates Of The Caribbean - On Stranger Tides was pretty darn good looking. There's the usual big set pieces and noisy soundtrack you'd expect in a Jerry Bruckheimer production. Johnny Depp is still pretty entertaining as Captain Jack Sparrow in this story of the race to the Fountain Of Youth but there isn't anything new here and the story is pretty sparse. Geoffrey Rush returns as Barbossa, minus his lower leg. Ian McShane appears as Blackbeard and Penelope Cruz plays his daughter. There's lots of amazing scenery though some I figure is made up. Most of the CGI looks good. The sailing ships are pretty nice, expecially the Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard's magical ship. The Spanish are also racing to the Fountain of Youth. The groups converge on the Fountain, people die, and things get wrecked pretty well. There are murderous man eating mermaids on top of all that. You need a tear from one to make the Fountain work. There are many twists and turns along the way but eventually the movies gets done and we all rushed off home. It's not better than what went before, and it got panned a bit, but it's not unwatchable. It would be nice if it was shorter and moved a bit quicker. I'll want to watch it again, as part of the series, sometime in the future. I was thinking as I watched the movie, oh, that's where the LEGO set came from.