PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Murder Most English

I hadn't heard of the BBC tv series Murder Most English even though I had heard of Colin Watson who's first four novels were the source of the show. I've read a good number of British mysteries but Watson never attracted my interest, even when I worked part time in a mystery bookstore. I picked up a lot of books there. I still have books I haven't gotten around to reading and it's been more than a decade since I worked there. When I'd take too much food and couldn't finish it my mother used to say my eyes were bigger than my stomach. My plate is always overflowing with books and still I can barely scratch the surface of the books that exist. TV is so much easier to consume. The series was made in 1977 and the 7 episodes adapted four novels. You can watch all four stories in an evening or two.

Anton Rodgers plays Detective Inspector Purbright, Christopher Timothy plays Detective Sergeant Love and John Comer plays Sergeant Malley. Rodgers started in show biz in 1948 and worked until he died in 2007. He was in some of my favorite British shows, The Saint, The Prisoner, Man In A Suitcase and Midsomer Murders. He was in some good movies too. Comer played the owner of the Cafe, where the trio of gents passed the time, in the Last Of The Summer Wine series. Timothy was the main character in All Creature Great And Small. I have to admit I haven't watched that series. I tried back in the 1980's and didn't care much for the one or two I saw then. Maybe I'd like it more now. Maybe in the future.

Purbright has an odd mystery to look into each week. He ambles about and pokes around until the mystery is solved. He's not flashy or bold, he just digs in and keeps on searching for some clue to the puzzle. He gets some help from the other two cops. There's a bit of comedy but it's rather dry. The production values are kind of low but it is the BBC and it is the 1970's. The stories have a nice sordid aspect and a bit of sex but mostly it's money that drives the people to do what they did. The characters are entertaining and I got a laugh or two out of watching them. It scores a 7.1 on the IMDb but I didn't think it was that great. I'd give it a 6. The DVD set is 30 bucks on Amazon so you know I'm not going to be buying them. I'd watch them again but it will have to be a rental.

Monsters Vs Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins From Outer Space

I got the direct to DVD Monsters Vs Aliens short Mutant Pumpkins From Outer Space from the library. It's a 2009 production that uses the original cast for the voices of the characters. Some aliens dump the glowing blue contents of their toilet on a farmer's field and his pumpkins come alive. They mutate and attack. Turns out they like candy too and like the humans they are attacking that candy isn't too good for them in large quantities. I thought it was fun and pretty silly. You can see it at the link above. It's fun and worth a look for those that liked the original movie, especially for free.

Science Fiction Sunday 282A

My copy of Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150AD came from Amazon UK the other day and I watched it today after I got back from the TwinLUG meeting. The success of the 1965 Dr Who & The Daleks lead Amicus Productions to make a second film. It was loosely based on the Terry Nation serial The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It didn't do as well at the box office as the first film. They spent more money on it and the lower return killed the possibility of an adaptation of the serial The Chase.

Peter Cushing is Doctor Who, Roberta Tovey is Susan, Jill Curzon is Louise and Bernard Cribbins is Tom Campbell. It's written by Producer Milton Subotsky with additional material by David Whitaker. Gordon Flemyng returns as the director.

  

The Tardis is temporarily parked on a modern day London street when a robbery occurs nearby. Bernard Cribbins is the constable who tries to stop the thieves. He's clubbed for his trouble and seeking help he heads for the police box. He passes out just after he enters the Tardis and wakes up in the future. Don't you hate that? Once I passed out and when I woke up I was on the couch and it was the next day.

  

Outside the Tardis they find London is a mess. Even the Thames is polluted with Daleks. The Doc and the gang run about and get separated. They get caught and escape. That's where the films are similar to the TV show. The Daleks have a plan to dig a tunnel toward the Earth's core and toss a bomb down the hole. They'll fill the giant hole with a space engine and push the Earth to their own world Skaro where they can live on it. You know who is going to put a stop to that. There's a high body count as the rebels and the Daleks and their Robomen fight it out.

  

As you'd guess Doctor Who beats the Daleks and saves the Earth. It was fairly entertaining but not great. I was glad to have seen it and don't feel bad for buying one. There's a good bit of action and better effects than the tv show. The films aren't part of the TV shows continuity and that's ok with me. Someone gave me a copy of the RiffTrax version of the film and I watched that too. The guys made a lot of jokes but many of them weren't very funny.

Science Fiction Sunday 282

 

Doctor Who serial 104 has the return of the Daleks in Destiny Of The Daleks. It's the start of the 17th season and the 4 part story aired September 1 to September 22 1979. Tom Baker returns as the Doctor and Lalla Ward becomes the new Ramona. She tries a few other bodies but the Doc didn't like them as much. Terry Nation wrote the serial and Ken Grieve was the director.

 

Here's a bit from the Wikipedia on Terry's script: This was Dalek creator Terry Nation's final script for Doctor Who; he declined several further offers due to the extensive (uncredited) story rewrite from script editor Douglas Adams (Ken Grieve, director of the serial, has claimed on the DVD commentary that Adams wrote "98% of" that script). He moved to the United States in 1980 and would go on to work for various television projects in America, most famously as a writer and producer for MacGyver.

 

The Doc and Romana 2.0 arrive on a planet. The Doc thinks he might have been here before. They go out exploring and hide when they spot some ragged people burying a body. The Doc gets caught under a column when there's an underground explosion. Romana gets chased by a strange man and she falls into an opening in the ruins. She finds herself in an underground complex where she runs into the Daleks. The Doctor's old enemy has a mining operation going on and they're using human slaves as miners. Romana is forced to mine until she dies. Don't worry, it's a trick so she can escape.

  

The Doctor runs into some other aliens. They're all dressed in white and have silvery hair. They turn out to be the Movellans and they tell the Doc that the planet is Skaros, the original home world of the Daleks. The Movellans have been in a centuries long war with the Daleks. The evil pepperpots are on Skaros to dig up Davros. The Daleks want him to reprogram their battle computers to help them beat the Movellans.

  

Davros and the Daleks are re-united and he's ready to take over the universe. The Doc finds out that the Movellans are robots. They want to keep the Doctor and use his mad computer skills to re-program their computers so they can beat the Daleks. The Doctor schemes his way to the top of the pile and turns Davros into a popsicle. Off to the next adventure. It was an ok serial. I enjoyed it, there's some funny dialog. Nice to see the return of Davros. He's a pretty good villain.

   

There's a commentary with Lalla Ward, Ken Grieve and David Gooderson. It was ok. There's a featurette on Terry Nation and another with Ken Grieve. The serial has some special effects that have been redone with CGI but I left that off and watched the original ones. There's some BBC1 promo material, info track, nice batch of photos, Radio Times listings and 4 Prime Computer commercials with the Doctor and Romana.

Macabre Pair of Shorts

Macabre Pair of Shorts is a 1996 horror film that lists David Boreanaz as the main actor. I saw the listing for the dvd on NetFlix and found a copy uploaded to YouTube. I watched that to save a NetFlix pick and I'm sure glad I did. My sacrifice means I can warn you not to watch this lame piece of crap. It's poorly made, has a dumb concept and script, and David is only in the movie for about 20 seconds. So boo on them for listing his name first. I guess they want to trick people into watching their movie which really delivers nothing new or interesting. For some reason, and I can guess, this movie scores a 6.3 on the IMDb. Here's the voting.

32	39.0%	10
2	2.4%	9
2	2.4%	8
6	7.3%	7
2	2.4%	6
7	8.5%	5
9	11.0%	4
3	3.7%	3
8	9.8%	2
11	13.4%	1

It sure looks to me like the director and/or some of his pals have stacked the deck, otherwise you have to put it down to delusional fans who have unrealistic opinions of the movie. There's no reason to give that movie a ten, especially if you think that a ten should only go to movies that are totally at the top of their game. This has no game and I gave it a 2. I wasn't just trying to bring down the average, I really I thought I was being a bit generous. You can check it out at the YouTube link above. If you get through it, there's no helpin' ya.

Friday Night Movies 473

 

Our first feature was the 1978 US-Italian film Starcrash. It was released in the US by Roger Corman's New World Pictures as The Adventures of Stella Star. I was pretty sure I hadn't seen it and after I was done I was even more sure. It's directed and written by Luigi Cozzi under the American sounding name Lewis Coates. That was very common for Italian films released in the US market. Cozzi got his start working with Dario Argento as a writer and assistant director. Luigi also wrote and directed the fairly poor Contamination and created the unique 1977 Italian version of the 1954 Godzilla. Here's what the Wikipedia says about that version:

In 1977, Italian filmmaker Luigi Cozzi released a modified and colorized version to magnetic band and sensurround theaters in Italy. Originally, Cozzi planned to re-release the original 1954 Godzilla without the Raymond Burr scenes but was unable to secure the rights from Toho and instead was sold the Americanized version of the film. Since the film was in black and white, regional distributors in Italy refused to release the film. In order to release the film, Cozzi hired Armando Valcauda to colorize the whole film frame by frame, using gels attached to the negative. The film's content was re-edited, removing several scenes and adding lots of stock footage of graphic death and destruction, which made it 105 minutes long. When the film was released in the cinemas, a special effect was added that shook the seats allowed each time that Godzilla took a step. Cozzi's film was a great success and received mixed to positive reviews, and some fans consider it superior to the American film of the 1957, even appearing on the cover of Fangoria no. 1. Most prints of the film were lost but some still exist. As of 2012^[update], the Cozzi colorized version (also known as Cozzilla by fans) has only been released in Italy, and possibly Turkey.

Marjoe Gortner and Caroline Munroe are the main characters in Starcrash. They're smugglers and when we meet them they're on the run from the authorities. They find a small scout ship in trouble and get caught while they're stopped. They get thrown into jail only to be taken out when the missing scout ship is found to be part of a ship that the Emperor's son was commanding.

 

Christopher Plummer plays the Emperor and David Hasselhoff plays the son. The Emperor sends the two smugglers on a search and rescue mission with the two Imperial Space Police officers who captured them. One's a robot and the other a green skinned humanoid. The voice of the robot is provided by Hamilton Camp. The cast have some adventures as they search for the missing David. Eventually they find him and he's reunited with his grateful father. There's an evil count, played by Joe Spinell, who's gumming up the works with his plan to take over the galaxy. Now they've got to deal with that meglomaniacal asshole.

It's a poorly made low budget, everything and the kitchen sink, rehash of the highly popular and brand new Star Wars. There's a lot of other sci-fi and fantasy genre ripoffs influences on the film. The story elements are goofy, there's plenty of bad dialog to go along with the poor acting, the effects are average to poor. There's a bit of stop motion animation that wasn't too bad. The way the stop motion action is shot is highly reminiscent of Harryhausen films. The movie has become a bit of a cult favorite. You can catch it in the link above. Who knows, you might get a laugh or two out of it.

When you set yourself up to watch all the zombie films you can, sometimes you find you've gotten hold of something as rotten as the brain munchers in the movie. Stalled is supposed to be a zombie comedy but the comedy stalls out pretty much from the get go. Just saying get go out loud is funnier than the movie. It's a 2013 British movie about a maintenance man who goes into a woman's washroom to fix something. He's really an employee who's been fired. He's snuck back into the office to steal a bunch of charity auction money but his plan got interrupted by the arrival of zombies. We spend most of the 85 minute long movie in 2 of the three stalls in the woman's bathroom. Zombies come and go, escapes are tried, then the movie drags to a halt and flops about the floor waiting to die. It made that 85 minutes seem like nearly twice the running time. It's directed by Christian James and it's his second feature. He directed Freaked Out in 2004. Let's hope it's another 9 years before he works again. His other work were all shorts and Stalled has the problem of being a short that is 85 minutes long. The movie was written by Dan Palmer who also plays the main character. Dan co-wrote and acted in Freaked Out. I'm not planning to see that and I don't plan to see Stalled again either. It has some fans and the critics mentioned on the movie's Wikipedia page liked it quite a bit. It scores a 4.9 on the IMDb and that's way too high. I gave it a 2 just for making me sit through such a boring piece of shit.

Psych The Musical

I missed the two part musical episode that came out last December 2013. It was meant to be part of the 6th season but the writing took too long. It became part of the 7th season production but it got delayed and wound up being broadcast months after the season wrapped up. It was released as a separate release, packaged with a CD of 6 songs from the show. The story is set in the world of theater and a playwright is murdered. It's written and directed by series creator Steve Franks who also co-wrote the 14 musical numbers with Adam Cohen. There's the usual gags and silly bits you expect from the series and those were fun but I wasn't too interested in the songs. They just weren't that entertaining to me. I've seen several musical episodes on tv shows and this certainly isn't up the Buffy The Musical level. The dvd turned out to be kind of a useless purchase, the musical episodes will be in the package of dvd's for the 8th season and the CD only has 6 songs from the show. Luckily for me I'm not needing to go buy the shows soundtrack. It's only available as a download. The DVD has 3 earlier episodes of the series and they all have a musical theme. Not full blown musicals but music is part of the plot. Those were all better episodes than the Musical was. A guy can't win with the insidious packagers of tv content. Every now and then you take a punch in the head. Life goes on.

Invasion of the Bee Girls

Here's a good goofy movie, Invasion Of The Bee Girls, that you can see on YouTube. It's 1973 and this is the first movie job for Nicholas Meyer who wrote the script with Sylvia Schneble. It was the last job for director Denis Sanders. There's some mysterious deaths in a town, the men all died during sex, and William Smith comes to check it out. He's a special agent for the State Department. He digs around and comes up with a lady scientist who's experimenting on bee's. What he doesn't guess, at least for a while, is that the lady scientist has an agenda and a whacky imagination. She's made some bad bee ladies and they're darn good at slaughterin' while having a bit of hanky panky.  William tries to figure out what the heck is going on. There's a bit of romance, a bunch of naked ladies, and plenty of murder. It's low budget drive-in fare and the movie doesn't give a shit. It's certainly worth watching once, maybe a couple of times. I watched it a couple of times a few years ago when I got one of those 5o Movie Packs of public domain movies.

Monsters Vs Aliens Vol 2

I watched the 2nd volume of Monsters Vs Aliens, subtitled Supersonic Joyride, and found it as entertaining as the first volume. This collects about another quarter of the series. They only had the one season and so far no news of the rest coming to dvd. It's all pretty silly and there's plenty of noisey stuff going on. I have a copy of the Halloween direct to dvd coming from the library. I'm hoping that as much fun as this was.

Okinawa Soba

There's a guy, Okinawa Soba, on Flicker that I have in my Contacts. He posts a lot of his own pictures, taken around Okinawa, and those are quite interesting. I'm probably never going to go there and this is a great way to see something interesting from a guy who lives there. He's got plenty of variety in his pictures and I always find something of interest. I wish my picture taking was as interesting.

He posts a good number of these hand colored pictures taken by photographers a century ago. He has a good bit of info about the people taking pictures and selling them. This one was published somewhere between 1913 and 1924. I thought it was very lovely. I don't have anything against hand coloring. I think color can make a good black and white picture more interesting. I think this is much better colored than most of the hand colored pictures you see. There's a lot of good things about the picture. You can catch more of these delightful ancient relics at his Flickr Photostream in the link above. Worth a look.