PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Midsomer Murders Series 1-3 Death In Disguise

In Death In Disguise Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby is called into look at a dead guy at a new-age commune. The guy might have just fallen down the stairs but Barnaby is always Mr Plod and he gets right to work. The commune and the members are all pretty odd characters. Sgt Troy isn't too keen on the commune members but Barnaby has a more measured response to them. He says it's a generational thing. They two detectives work fairly well together but Barnaby is often sarcastic when Troy mentions something pretty obvious. There's a second death and this time it's murder. Find out who did it at the link above.

I've decided to use the numbering of the episodes that are listed on the Wikipedia which has the shows in production order. They were often aired out of that order. This episode first was shown on ITV May 6 1998. It was the 3rd made but the 5th aired.

MIdsomer Murders Series 1-2 Written In Blood

 

The second episode of series 1 was Written In Blood. The local writers group in Midsomer Worthy have writer Max Jennings come to talk with them. One of the members, Gerald, is unhappy with the choice but the group has Max in anyway. Gerald and Max have some sort of history but no one knows what it is. Next day Gerald has had his head bashed in and Max has left the country for a signing. DI Barnaby and Sgt Troy are called in to have a bit of a "look 'round" and some "what's all this, then?"

Nothing much happens for a couple of days, then Max turns up dead in a hotel. He's been poisoned. It happened right around the time that he was at the meeting. All the members of the writers group have back stories and some of them are pretty messed up. The guest cast is pretty good, David Troughton plays the local school's drama teacher. He's one for puttin' things where they don't belong, I'll be bound. Sgt Troy used to go to the school and he doesn't care to come back, even if he's on a case. John Sharpnel plays the Max. I like the actor, he does a convincing job playing the kind of guy who looks down on people because he just knows that they're inferior. You know, a twat. I had just seen him in an episode of Jonathan Creek and he's been in plenty of other productions in a career that started in 1963. Anna Massey plays an aged spinster who is just an awful person. You can't help but root she's going to be on the chopping block soon. There's plenty of the usual yakkin' and snoopin' that keep the police busy while they try to collect enough clues to bring the story to a conclusion. I enjoyed this one too.

Friday Night Movies 439

  

Croczilla is the US title of 2012 Chinese movie Million Dollar Crocodile. The croc is a big one, 24 feet long, and really fast. She lives in a little Croc zoo but the owner isn't making any money and he sells the crocs, 8 small ones and the 24 foot mom. The owner didn't realize he was being cheated and the crocs are going to a restaurant that specializes in serving them up as food. The owner's grandson really misses the crocs, especially the mom croc, Amao. A pretty lady, returning from Italy, has the money the Chinese movie title talks about. It's in Euros, 100,000 of them, which everyone says is worth a million of whatever the local currency is. She had worked 8 years and saved it. She has it in cash so she can feel it.

  

That's the pretty lady and the croc. The money winds up in the croc after it escapes the restaurant. She'd been driven to anger when two of her children were killed. The only casualty is the butcher. He gets flipped into the pool with the rest of the children while Amao takes off through the fence. Mike says those are tea bushes. There are a lot of them around the area. That's where the croc turns up. Amao hases the pretty lady up a pole and eats her handbag. The grandson's dad is a police man in Hangzhou. They get together and start to chase the croc. Other's join in and there's plenty of running around and yelling.

  

Hangzhou is a nice looking area and the West Lake is a big tourist attraction in China. Of course the croc turns up in the lake but it still doesn't eat anyone. The evil restaurant guy kidnaps the grandson and the pretty lady and uses them as bait for the croc but it backfires and he gets chomped. There's plenty more action and a pretty entertaining story. It's not a gorefest by any means, there are plenty of bits where there's some danger, but only a couple of people really get chomped. There's a bit of romance and lots of action. It looks great and the CGI is pretty good. I liked the characters. Nothing that original in the movie, the story is a bit predicable but the overall effect is pleasent. Well, worth seeing.

I'd say the same about Eddie, The Sleepwalking Cannibal. It's a 2012 Canadian and Danish film that was filmed around Ottawa. An artist from Danmark named Lars comes to a small Canadian town to teach at an art school. He had some fame but hasn't painted in 10 years. He can't find his passion. Funding for the place comes from a rich lady who insists they let her handicapped grandson hang out there. He's over 30 but because he'd had a tramatic experience when he was a child he's all silent and still most of the time. He likes the art classes and draws like a child. Most people are pleasent to him but there are some dicks that call him names. The rich lady dies and the head of the school asks Lars if Eddie can stay with Lars for a bit. Lars says yes, a bit reluctantly, but wanting to make the best of it. What they didn't tell him is that Eddie is a bit of a sleepwalker when he's upset and he likes to kill small animals. He likes to eat their flesh and drink their blood. That would be good to know. Especially when Lars finds a dead rabbit in the yard the next morning.

 

After seeing the dead rabbit Lars gets a big artistic boner and paints a painting we never see. It gets sold for a lot and he donates the money to the school. He's all set to go back to teaching and not paint anything but he gets weak and he purposely doesn't lock Eddie's window one night. Their neighbor has a yappy dog and he won't keep it quiet. It barks all night and Lars is very tired. Lars comments on the bog and how tired he is in hope that Eddie will go after the neighbors yappy dog and sure enough he does. Trouble is, the neighbor got caught up in the slaughter. Lars had already agreed that they would cover up Eddie's trouble with the rabbit. this is to keep the grandmother's money flowing in to the school. Lars decides to cover this up too. He makes another masterpieces, sells it, and hopes to stop. It doesn't go that well and I do have to admit we all laughed pretty hard when Eddie finished off the 3 ignorant American fishermen that Lars lead him to. They were assholes. Not that they deserved to die but if that's the price of good art then they were the ones to be robbed from the gene pool. 

It's all so troubling to Lars and he keeps trying to stop but he can't paint anything without the stimulation. Eddie helps him out one last time and events go pretty badly for Lars. It's not a happy movie but it's a funny one. There's plenty of humor but it's all rather dark and deadly. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It's like a modern version of the Roger Corman film A Bucket Of Blood. It has a similar sense of humor. 

Midsomer Murders Series 1-1 The Killings At Badger's Drift

   

John Nettles plays Detective Inspector Tom Barnaby and Daniel Casey plays Sgt Gavin Troy in the long running British police series Midsomer Murders. The series is based on the Detective Inspector Barnaby novels by Caroline Graham. I haven't read those myself but remember seeing them in Uncle Edgar's when I worked there. There are only seven of them and The Killings At Badger's Drift is adapted for the first tv movie. Each program is about 100 minutes long and self contained.

In the first program an old lady is out in the woods. She sees a rare orchid and takes a picture. She hears a noise, and looking around a bush, sees something that we don't. She runs off and drops a couple of her plant marking stakes. We see a naked pair of feet follow her and find the stakes. Later in her home the old lady is murdered and Barnaby and Troy come to investigate. It opens the door to more murder and perverse sexual stuff. Nice, huh.

The show is set in a fictional area called Midsomer. There are lots of little villages, each appearently filled with murderers, where the individual stories take place. Here's a fun bit from the Wikipedia:

Midsomer is an English fictional county. The county town is Causton, a middle-sized town where Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby lives with his wife and where the Criminal Investigation Department is located. Much of the popularity of the series arises from the incongruity of sudden violence in a picturesque and peaceful rural setting. Individual episodes focus on institutions and practices popularly seen as being characteristic of the English counties.

Many of the villages and small towns of the county have the word Midsomer in their name; this is inspired in part by the real county of Somerset, and specifically the town of Midsomer Norton. The county of Midsomer is notable for its particularly high crime rate, causing the Midsomer Constabulary to be inundated with the number of murder cases that come their way - estimated at 32 per million, around double that of London. This has even become a running joke among the British public. When Mrs Barnaby proposed they move out of Causton and suggested various villages, her husband countered with recollections of particularly grisly murders that occurred in each community. Humour is a main feature of the series, with many of the actors playing up their high-camp characters. This causes some black comedy, such as a woman being murdered by a wheel of cheese, and many scenes being examples of "dramedy" (comic drama or dramatic comedy).

I'm an occasional fan of humourous dramatic stuff and occasionally the episode made me laugh. The show has plenty of interesting characters, not many of them nice, some of them just cannon fodder. The nice thing about a program like this is that they have an all new cast each week. Barnaby's wife and daughter appear on the show, quite often from the looks of it online. They live in one of the bigger towns. There's lots of driving around the pastoral countryside. Little do we know that horror lurks around the bend. What terror has left it's mark on the next little cottage just down the road.

I used to be more of a cosy reader. I am a fan of Carter Dixon, John Dixon Carr, Naigo March and a bunch more. I wasn't a big Agatha Christie fan but I like the tv made from her characters. I haven't been reading those writers much in the last several years but I still have a bunch of their books in the actic. I think the Midsomer Murders are a bit of a modern version of the cosy, a little more graphic, you know for the modern age. The other nice thing about tv programs is that they're quicker to consume than a novel. The library has some Midsomer Murders and I watched a random movie that I can't remember the name of. They aren't all out on dvd in the US but there seems to be more of them on YouTube. I plan to go through a few more, starting at the beginning, and see how long it takes before I get tired.

I do like the little English village. I wouldn't mind living in one except they seem to be filled with murderers. Oh, well, no place is perfect, huh.

ParaNorman

I probably would have gotten around to getting ParaNorman from NetFlix or the library sometime but Sperhauk gave me the dvd from the BluRay he bought and I watched it soon after. I enjoy free movies, or anything really, and will almost always take anything that anyone hands me. It's nicer when the movies are entertaining and I thought Norman's story was. Norman is a boy who lives in a small town in Massachusetts. Norman can talk to the dead. He's a lonely kid but for the dead. Humans don't care for Norman so much, even his family ignores him. He spends a good bit of time watching tv with his dead grandmother's ghost. He makes a friend in Neil, a large boy who is picked on by the kids at school. Kids at school suck, huh. Norman gets wrapped up with the town's curse. Good thing, it might be the end of the town if he doesn't work out how to fix things. Norman gets some help from his sister Anna and Neil's older brother Mitch. There's plenty of action as they run about saving the town. I liked the way the movie looked. I hadn't seen any of the other movies from the director, Sam Fell, who co-directed with script writer Chris Butler. The only two I had heard of were Flushed Away and The Tale of Despereaux. Neither has been of interest to me. I'd watch ParaNorman again and now that I have a copy I can.  

  

The Sarah Jane Adventures Series 3

The third season was another set of six stories spread out over 12 episodes. The 2 part episodes aired on consecutive nights, which seems like a good idea. They started airing Sept 15 and the run stopped November 20 2009. The ratings for the series were better than series 2 which were about .5 million per episode on average. The 3rd series had shows in the low end, about .73 million, and that was still a jump up over last year. There shows in the upper end reached 1.6 million. That sure doesn't seem like that many people tuning in does it? There's the usual slew of alien invasions as Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and her gang of teens fight them off. I enjoyed them for them pretty much but like a lot of stuff I'm glad to have borrowed them from the library and not bought them. Not that they are awful or anything, I just might not want to watch them all that much, so no use buying the dvds. They are expensive on Amazon anyway. I could see the 5 sets costing well over a hundred bucks.

Here's the episodes: Prisoner Of The Judon; The Mad Woman In The Attic; The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith; The Eternity Trap; Mona Lisa's Revenge and The Gift. Only the one complete episode on YouTube at this time. Maybe they'll turn up in the future, or this one will go away. Who knows. Maybe the Doctor, but I bet he's not talking.

Sanctuary Season 3

The third season of Sanctuary aired October 15 2010 and the twenty episodes ran through June 20 2011.  I never saw it when it was being produced and I'm actually glad.There was a several month gap between end of the first half of the season and the second half which started April 15. Less and less I like waiting around for a program to run through the season. It's nice to pop a disc in and watch a few episodes each night and in a few days, bam, your done. I'm still not streaming stuff but that seems to be where the state of tv delivery is going. From what people tell me, everything still isn't available, at least through one source.

Amanda Tapping is Dr Magnus. She's 157 years old and she still looks great. There are pretty much 4 regular cast members who all work at the Sanctuary. Robin Dunne plays Will. Agam Darshi plays Kate. Ryan Robins plays Henry and Christopher Heyerdahl plays Bigfoot and John Druitt. There are plenty of guest stars but I haven't really heard of most of them before. Still they mostly do a good job. The Sanctuary is a place for research on abnormals. They also act as a police force to keep the peace between humans and abnormals. Most humans don't know that the abnomals even exist.

The third season starts pretty much where the 2nd season ended. Big Bertha is still a problem. The control of the Sanctuary network is still out of Doctor Magnus's hands and Will's talking to the god Kali. Well, that all sorts itself out and the world is saved once again. In episode two things take a bit slower place. Just kidding, it's a 20 episode battle to the death with all sorts of monsters and villains attacking the Sanctuary crew. Someone nearly dies every episode. The plots are dense, fairly well written, and there's always something new going on. Besides the monster of the week, we jump around in time, find hidden places around the world, battle Nazis, and meet historical figures like Nicola Tesla. He's a vampire with plenty of sides. Mostly he's a pal to the Doc but it's touch and go, he's so selfish. He adds a nice touch of dark humor to the series. Not that it's so deadly serious for the most part. I like that.

I enjoyed the first two seasons and was interested in seeing the rest of the 4 season series so I added them to my library queue. I wnns't disappointed with season 3 when it finally came along last week. The production values are fairly good, they aim to make the show as big as possible and do a fairly good job. Some of the heavily CGI'd show looks a bit fakey, it gets the job done, and other parts look down right great. If you watch it you'll see what I mean. You can see the whole third season at the links below. There's only one way to find out if you'll like it but I'm not going to tell you what it is.

Episode 1 - Part 1, 2, 3, 4. Episode 2 - Part 1, 2, 3, 4. Episode 3 - Part 1, 2, 3, 4. episodes 4-20.

40078 Hot Dog Stand

The LEGO store was giving these away (with purchase) last month. It's a really nice little set with a couple of figures, a cart and that nice medium azure bicycle. The hot dog cart is nice enough, the figures have good costumes but that bike is sweet. Parts wise the other cool pieces are the hot dogs and the bright light orange dish. That dish arrived just in time to be made into a fried egg for my Bento Box. The set has already gotten pricey on Bricklink with a spread of $9 - $25. I wouldn't pay that and was glad to get one as my free incentive. this month the small polybag is the mini VW camper. That is just less interesting to me and I doubt I will get one.

The Andy Griffith Show Season 8

Finally finishing up with all 249 episodes The Andy Griffith Show. The last season aired from September 11 1967 to April 1 1968 and there were 30 episodes. The season finished up in 1st place in the ratings and it was the highest rated season of the lot. I enjoyed the batch of programs but wouldn't rate them the best of the series. All told it's a nice slice of American life in the 1960s. Sanitised for tv of course. The general public could hardly stand too much controversy in those days. Andy, Opie and Aunt Bea have the usual low-key adventures in the small North Carolina town. You can guess the plots, Opie falls in love but gets screwed over, Aunt Bea plans a trip to Mexico with her best friend Clara and they have an awful time together, Andy drives to a larger town. Barney Fife returns for an episode and winds up hosting a summit meeting between the US and the Soviets at Andy's house. Everyone likes Aunt Bea's cooking. I couldn't find any shows uploaded to YouTube, there are plenty of the earlier season's, which is ok, those are the ones to watch.

Hit & Run

Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell star in Hit & Run, a 2012 action comedy with Tom Arnold, Kristin Chenoweth, and Bradley Cooper. Keep an eye out for Beau Bridges and Jason Bateman in small parts. Dax was a wheelman who turned states evidence against his old gang when one of them shot a guard. The gang got off on a technicality and Dax went into the Witness Relocation Program under his US Marshal handler played by Tom Arnold. Tom had a problem with firearm safety in the past and he's been sent into the California hinterland as a punishment. Tom is great here but I'm a big fan. Kristen is Dax's girl friend in the movie. They've been together about a year in the movie and for the last 6 years in real life. She gets offered a great job in her field but the job is in LA. That's Dax's old stomping ground and Bradley still roams the streets with his dreds of vengeance. He has the worst hair but that's dumb ass criminals for you. Dax insists Kristen go for the interview and he offers to drive her. Noise, burning rubber, and action ensue.

The movie is written by Dax and he co-directs with David Palmer. They worked together on Brother's Justice which I had seen recently. They made a fairly well made film. The thing looks good, there are plenty of good actors who can sell the script and the chases aren't unbelievable. Dax does his own stunt driving. There's a bit of romance, some car chases, some gun shooting and plenty of punchng and a few laughs. Dax provided the Lincoln Continental and the super dune buggy from his own car collection. The budget was a measly 2 million bucks and reportedly half went for the music. The box office was 7 times the cost of the movie but who knows what they spent on marketing. I bet it will do well on dvd. It scores a 6 on the IMDb. It's that  or a bit better, when you look at the spread of votes, 28% are 5 and below, 25% a 6 and 23% a 7. The critics were mixed; Roger Ebert gave it a 3.5/4 but Richard Roeper gave it an F. I'd trust Roger on a genre picture over Richard. I think it's worth a gander for the action comedy fan. I was happy to watch it and I'd watch it again.

Here's another fun romantic car chase movie: The Chase. Entertaining script with lots of jokes and goofy stuff going on. I like the cast; Charlie Sheen, Kristy Swanson, Claudia Christian, Ray Wise and Henry Rollins, and it's directed by one of my favorite directors, Adam Rifkin. I think it's a highly entertaining movie to watch. Too bad it isn't posted to YouTube. Keep ya eye open. It might turn up.

You can see the whole 1976 film, The Great Texas Dynamite Chase on YouTube but I don't kow if you should watch it. If you don't like a lot of nudity, you shouldn't watch it. It stars Claudia Jennings and you see plenty of Claudia. What you don't see is enough dynamite. It's not very good, strickly a low-low-budget New World Pictures production but you'll get a laugh or two and it'll give you an idea how much the technical quality of film making has risen since that time. Again there's plenty of naked Claudia, so if you do like seeing a naked Claudia Jennings running around, then this is right up your alley. 

And now, for absolutely no reason, other than it was poster on YouTube, Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence in the 1976 Greek horror movie Land Of The Minotaur. It's got a score by Brian Eno. And really, after you hear it, you won't care. Honest, there isn't any reason to watch it.