PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

The Hidden 1987

Here's an entertaining science fiction horror film with an icky monster that comes from outer space. The Hidden is about a big slug kind of thing that jumps down your throat and takes over your mind and body. It's written by Bob Hunt, who's really Jim Kouf, one of the men behind the current tv series Grimm. The movie is directed by Jack Sholder. Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Nouri are the two main characters. Kyle is a special agent for the FBI and Michael is a LAPD detective Sgt. Chris Mulkey, Ed O'Ross, Claudia Christian, Clu Gulager and Danny Trejo all make an appearance. It's worth a look. I've seen it 6 or 8 times since seeing it on VHS in the early 1990's and I have the dvd that came out in 2000. Not that that's a guarantee that the movie is any good at all. Still, other people seem to like it too, it scores a 7.0 at the IMDb, so, who knows, you might like it too.

The Andromeda Strain 1971

I noticed that there's a fairly nice copy of The Andromeda Strain on YouTube. I remember going to see the movie in the theater and then reading the book. I liked it so much that I wrote to Michael Crichton to tell him. Somewhere in the house, not sure right now where, there's a letter back from him. The movie was pretty good, kind of scary in that real world way that horror flicks can't deliver. The story is about a deadly alien virus that kills off a bunch of people in a small isolated town. They get the couple of survivors into quarantine and try to figure out what's going on and how to kill it. It was directed by Robert Wise and he does a good job. The screenplay is by Crichton and Nelson Gidding. Worth looking at.

Stephen Fry on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight

Here's a 20 minute interview with Stephen on George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight. It's a Canadian program and the interview was interesting. Here's George interviewing Kevin Smith.

Agatha Christie's Partners In Crime

 

I had borrowed the 3 disc dvd set of Agatha Christie's Partners In Crime from the library and watched it over the last week. The tv show is based on the Tommy and Tuppence Beresford stories by Agatha Christie. Francesca Annis and James Warwick star in this short series, there's only the pilot movie and 10 episodes. The embedded YouTube video above has the whole series right in one lump. The series started airing October 9 1983 and it ended on January 14 1984. It's just after World War I and Tommy and Tuppence meet. They're both broke and need work. They get involved with a case of espionage in the pilot movie and that leads to marriage and a career as detectives. The show didn't go over well when it first aired. I can see why, thought it was ok, it's certainly nothing special. It looks pretty good, nice costumes, cars, sets and locations. I just wasn't that keen on our two main characters. Sometimes their antics tried my patience and I fast forwarded through their scenes. I didn't mind watching the series but I wouldn't bother with them again. You can try them out and see what you think.

Science Fiction Sunday 278

  

The Stones Of Blood is the 100th Doctor Who story. It first aired October 28 to November 18 1978 and the 4 part story was the 3rd section of a longer story arc called The Key Of Time that run through the whole 16th series. The last episode of the serial was broadcast during the week that the BBC celebrated the Doctor's 15th anniversary on the tube. That episode would be the 490th in the series. Hardly anything today gets to 15 years and of course the Doc's nowhere near done. As usual the 4th Doctor is played by Tom Baker, Romana is played by Mary Tamm and K-9 is voiced by John Leeson. Both the Tom and Mary mention repeatedly that they really valued John playing the part in rehearsals. John would get down on the floor and act out the part while reading his lines. When they shot the series he'd be in off stage location where he could hear the action and read his lines into a mic. The serial is directed by Darrol Blake who directed a fair bit of British TV before and after his efforts on Doctor Who.

  

The Tardis is spinning through space and the Doctor and Romana are looking for the 3rd part of the Key Of Time. Their detector says it's on Earth in modern day. The Tardis drops them off near a stone circle. The place they used for the standing stones is the Rollright Stones near village of Long Compton on the borders of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. They added some new stones and created moving stones as part of the danger. In one of the making of featurettes they talk about the horror element of the story and how much like a Hammer film it is. The writer of the episode David Fisher and the script editor Anthony Read went on to work on the Hammer tv series. The extra features on several of the serials spend a good bit of time on the violence and various creators have different views on what's too much. Things certainly got more violent and horrific when Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts left the program.

   

When the Doc and Romana arrive they meet a local archaeologist Professor Amelia Rumford who's played by Beatrix Lehmann and her cottage mate Miss Fey who's played by Susan Engel. Later the Doctor and Romana find some Druids that sacrifice animals and feed their blood to the stones. The Doctor is so annoying that the druids decide to feed him to the stones later in the story. Certainly it's not surprising, the Doc can be a handful. There's the usual running about and the getting knocked out. Giant glowing rocks scoot about killing people and crashing through doors. Even K-9 is no match for them. He gets damaged pretty badly at one point. Don't worry, he'll be ok.

 

The story turns from horror on earth to a space story when it's revealed that Miss Fey has a space ship in hyperspace. There's a bit of drama when the Doctor goes on trial for releasing a couple of bright lights from a cell on the ship. He figures it out and gets away. The baddie is locked up and the Tardis trio head off for the next part of the Key Of Time. All in all a fun episode.

   

The disc has two commentaries and a large bunch of short featurettes and extras. The commentaries were ok, the first has Mary Tamm and Darrol Blake and the 2nd has Tom Baker, Mary Tamm and Anthony Read.  Getting Blood From Stones is a nice making of and Hammer Horror Fest is a short look at how scarey the program might be. Stones Free is a 2007 short with Mary Tamm doing a bit on the Rollright Stones. Model World is a short segment from the time the serial was made that features the spaceship model creation. Blue Peter has a nice segment on the 15th Anniversary of Doctor Who. Nationwide has a 1978 interview with Tom Baker, Mary Tamm and Carol Ann Ford. There are some deleted scenes, continuities, a photo gallery, info text and Radio Times PDF.

Mr Moto 4 - Mr Moto Takes A Chance

 

The 4th Mr Moto movie with Peter Lorre came out June 24 1938. Mr Moto Takes A Chance was directed by Norman Foster. The screenplay was by Lou Breslow and John Patrick from an original story by Wyllis Cooper and Norman Foster. The Moto character was created by John P Marquand in a series of books. I think I have read one  of the books but I can't remember for sure.

 

In Mr Moto Takes A Chance he's in the kingdom of Tong Moi in French Indochina posing as an archeologist and newsreel cameramen. That Mr M up there with Rochelle Hudson who plays Victoria Mason. She's a pilot who fakes a plane crash to get a chance to hang out at the Rajah's palace. Mr Moto is there investigating gun smugglers. There's murder and political intrigue. The movie moves along nicely and we have a nice wrap up at the end. Unlike the 3rd film, a re-written Charlie Chan story, this movie is more like the first two Mr Moto films. There's more action and suspense, less overt comedy. If you liked the first two films in the series, you'll most likely like this one. It's a good series to watch.

The IT Crowd Series 3

 

The third season of The IT Crowd first aired November 21 to December 26 2008. Graham Linehan wrote and directed the 6 episodes. It's got the same main characters; Katherine Parkinson is Jen, Richard Ayoade is Moss and Chris O'Dowd is Roy. They all work in the IT area for a corporation that's run by Matt Berry. There isn't much IT stuff going on, it's mostly interactions between the characters as they try to live their lives, ones where work isn't that important. Chris and Richard are nerdy, they do know tech stuff, but Katherine knows absolutely nothing about computers. The guys fooled her early on by telling her you'd blow up the internet if you Googled Google.

From Hell has Roy tell Jen that he's 95% sure that her builder was on an episode of the reality show Builders From Hell, their boss shots himself in the thigh and Moss is getting bullied by some young teens.

Are We Not Men? has Roy and Moss try to pass themselves off as real men only to wind up involved with a robbery.

Tramps Like Us has Moss loose his memory, Jen unable to answer what IT stands for and Roy looses his shirt.

 

The Speech has Jen win employee of the month. She has to write a speech and makes the guys write it. They give her a box that they say contains the whole internet for Britain. It's wireless and normally sits on top of Big Ben.

Friendface has Jen get Moss to be her fake husband for a high school reunion. It doesn't go too well and neither does Roy's visit with his old girlfriend.

Calendar Geeks has the girls of the 7th floor planning to do a nude calender for charity. Somehow that turns into a calender of Moss's nerdy male friends in sexy poses.

I really enjoyed that stack of shows. I was laughing out loud every episode. Definitely a series I'd want to watch over again.

Friday Night Movies 469

Our first feature was the 2013 horror film Hansel & Gretel Get Baked. It's about a weed growing granny who lures unsuspecting smokers to her house. The fortunate ones get some weed and go on their way. The unfortunate ones meet their doom. Gretel's boyfriend Ashton is one of unlucky ones. He just wanted some of Granny's awesome Black Forest High and all he got was the life sucked out of him. After some torturous cannibalism by Lara Flynn Boyle. She's playing the granny who gets younger as the movie progresses. Molly Quinn plays Gretel. Molly's been in a few films and done some tv, she's been a regular on Castle for since 2009. I didn't know, I don't watch that show. The one episode I caught I didn't care that much for and I never went back. Perhaps if I saw it from the start of the first season instead of an episode from a couple of years ago. I just didn't like the Castle character much.

Gretel goes looking for her boyfriend and asks her brother Hansel for help. They get the address of the old ladies house and visit there. Gretel is suspicious and she has a right to be. There's some crazy shit going on in that house. The cops, Lochlyn Munro & Yancy Butler, aren't much help. Ashton has had several run in's with the law and they just aren't too keen to spend much time looking for the guy. At least this early in the movie. They eventually get to the house but Lara had a .45 up her sleeve and they're down for the rest of the movie. Gretel is pretty much on her own and that Lara is a kick ass witch. Really, she fights well and she's tough, you can break her neck and she gets right back up. All thanks to the healing powers of the life essence she's sucked from her victims. She turns people into zombies too. She's really awful and Lara does a good job with the part. She shares production credits with Molly Quinn. It turned out better than I had hoped but it wasn't a great film that would make me want to watch it again and again. The movie lacked weed jokes, including the one in the title, Hansel doesn't even get baked. There's a bit of action, some good production values, nice sets and locations, decent actors, and all for 4.5 million bucks. I don't feel the need to own a copy and that's a-ok.

I might get a copy of Resident Evil: Damnation. I thinking if I run across it on cable, I can record a copy onto a DVDr for nearly free, you know, as opposed to buying a real DVD. I've been pretty good as picking up the live action series as they get cheaper but I like those a lot more. I did see the first of the two animated features and wasn't that impressed. I'm not a big fan of the animation character style. I hadn't come across the second animated feature yet and was sort of interested in seeing it when it showed up at Sperhauk's house on BluRay. It had been sitting out for a bit but Joe talked it up as being ok and watchable. It's very much like a video game, there are plenty of corridors to go strolling around in, then monsters jump out from behind doors and around corners. There are plenty of corners and tight spaces to get caught up in too. The landscape of the city was ok, too. The characters are mostly rotoscoped, so they move fairly well, but their faces are kind of creepy looking. At least to me. I got used to them as the movie went along. The story takes place over a short period of time, some US spy is in a fake Eastern Block Country when they pull the plug on his mission. He's there to check up on Bio-weapons being used in the fighting between the rebels and the government. He finds them and then he runs around for the rest of the movie uncovering one more problem after another. Sometimes the problems try to kill him. Like a video game the monsters increase in size and power as the movie moves along. The multiples of the boss character at the end of the movie are really huge and nearly indestructable. Still, our hero gets his ass through the movie without getting it in a sling. Not up to the level of the live action films that movie is, as Joe said, watchable. It gets a 6.5 on the IMDb and that's about as good as it is. If you're a fan of the series you might enjoy it.

Graham Norton Show S10E14 Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart & Alan Davies

I was looking for Alan Davies stuff on YouTube and found this episode of The Graham Norton Show that had Alan as a guest. The other two guests were Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart. There's a singer too, Ed Sheeran, but I don't know who he is and I skipped his song. It was a fun show and I got several laughs.

The show is in three parts: 1, 2, 3.

If you haven't seen The Graham Norton Show before, don't worry, it's just a talk show. Graham's been doing this for years, he tells a bit of a joke or two and then gets three people out on the red couch for a gab fest, some gags and then there's a song. I enjoy them, I've been watching the current series on cable, and I can find quite a few episodes on YouTube. I'll try to post some more links when I get the time.

Simpsons Collectible Minifigs

The Simpsons Collectible Minifigs will be coming out in May. There's 16 figures and the pictures got released yesterday. I pulled them off Bricktimes Photostream but they'll be turning up all over soon enough.

The figures are Chief Wiggum, Scratchy, Ralph Wiggum, Nelson Muntz, Marge Simpson, Milhouse, Maggie Simpson, Lisa Simpson, Krusty the Clown, Itchy, Homer Simpson, Grampa, Ned Flanders, Mr. Burns, Bart Simpson and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Here's a larger version of each character and their accessories.

 

Homer, a donut and his remote. He looks like you normally see him in the show. Marge has a Friends purse and a copy of Donut Fancy. That easily could have been an accessory that was more Marge-centric.

      

Bart and his skateboard. Lisa and her sax. Maggie and her worn out teddy. All good icons for their characters.

  

Grampa Simpson and his newspaper. Ned Flanders and his toolbox and a lefthanded cup. Mr Burns and a fuel rod and three headed fish.

  

Milhouse and a copy of Biclops. Nelson Munz and a bat. Ralph Wiggam and his Choo choo choose me valentine which was one of my favorite sight gags on the show. Poor Ralph.

Itchy and Scratchy with impliments of death. Not my favorite sculpts of the characters.

 

Apu and a Slushee. Krusty and a yellow pie. Chief Wiggum and a bullhorn. 

It's a good assortment of characters and seeing them makes me glad I didn't rush off to get the house. The costumes on these figures are more like the ones they usually wear in the series. They are also more re-useable for making new characters in new MOCS. I know I'll be picking up a set no matter what.