PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

LIttle Britain Live

The library also sent along Little Britain Live and I watched it over the weekend. I would have blogged about it sooner but Typepad was having server issues the last week or so. It seems to have settled down now but who can tell with software, it's such crap sometimes. Happily I found Little Britain Live more entertaining than the Little Britain USA series. As you might guess LBL is a live show. The dvd has a complete recording of one of the 242 live shows in the tour. They played the UK from October 2005 to December 2006 and Australia from January–March 2007. The dvd show was recorded in the Blackpool Opera House in December 2005. The stage show has a nicely designed stage with tracks. Stage hands pull set pieces and props back and forth. The back of the stage is flat panels which have images projected from digital projectors. They even have opening doors with video images projected on them.

Matt and David play a bunch of their characters and they have Paul Putner and Samantha Power in supporting roles. Anthony Head and Ruth Jones appeared in some shows and Tom Baker recorded all the narration. It was an entertaining show to watch and the video production looks pretty good. I liked some of the jokes and others I didn't care for as much. You can check it out in the link above.

Little Britain USA

   

HBO hired Matt Lucas and David Walliams to bring Little Britain to the USA thus was born Little Britain USA. There were 6 episodes on HBO in 2008 and though Matt Lucas announced on some talk show that they were planning to do another series, HBO wasn't having it. Really, I'm not surprised, hardly anyone watched it and there aren't hardly any boobs in it. The first episode on HBO got 540,000 viewers. It did much better in the UK.

The breasts you do see on the show are made of silicon and they're not real. No, not that kind, the kind that are made in a special effects house. There are a couple of weiners but they're appliances too. The guys play a couple of bulked out weight lifters with tiny steroid shrunken dicks. That's about how funny their scenes are.

Some of the regulars from the British show are back, Andy and Lou, Vicki Pollard, Dafyd Thomas and more, but the they just seem to be repeating the same jokes. I kind of scanned through the series and sent it back to the library without listening to the commentaries. If you haven't seen any of the series I recommend the original British version and leave this to later.

Come Fly with Me

 

I watched the Matt Lucas and David Walliams sitcom Come Fly With Me this evening. There's only the 6 episodes and they're less than 30 minutes each so you can bung it out in an evening. It's a 2010 sitcom that never had a second series. Lucas and Walliams had some sort of conflict and they haven't been working together since 2011. Shit like that happens, both in show biz and the real world.

The guys play many of the airport staff, air crews and of the customers. It's a reality type show about the day to day life at the airport. Most of the characters they play are kind of annoying but I kind of expect that with these guys. If the jokes are good then the annoying is used to advantage but if the jokes aren't funny enough for me to get gigglin' then that annoyin' character is going to be buggin' me. The gags were kind of predicable and familiar which made the running gags less interesting. Occasionally there was something that made me laugh out loud but that was typically less than once per episode. I did get a laugh out of the Dalek commercial. I laughed a lot more at Little Britain but even that show had characters that I used to fast forward through at times.

Come Fly With Me isn't going to be getting into my top ten favorite sitcoms list and I don't even know which ten at at the top of the list this week. It was ok but nothing special. After it was done I wasn't feeling like I got screwed out of that time but I wasn't thinking "too bad there isn't another season".

Science Fiction Sunday 281

Season 16 wraps up the season long story arc The Keys Of Time with The Armageddon Factor. It's the 103rd serial and it first aired January 20 1979 and the 6 episodes ran through February 24. The first part of the serial is the 500th episode. Wow, huh, Still plenty to go, hundreds in fact. Tom Baker is still the Doctor, Mary Tamm is Romana and John Leeson voices K-9. This would be Mary's last serial and after this season John will be taking a break. The story is by Bob Baker and Dave Martin. It would be the last Doctor Who serial the men would write together. Bob would write one last serial all by himself. The Armageddon Factor was directed by Michael Hayes. In the commentary he said he wasn't too keen on working on the series but financially he couldn't turn it down. Then he wound up doing two serials in the 16th season. It's a hard show to direct, requiring a lot of energy and work with little resources and he had to do 2 back to back. Hayes would return to direct his 3rd and last serial the next season. There have been remarks by producers and writers about how hard it was to find a good director who was up to the task. Some didn't do so well and it shows. Many did it well but didn't want to do it again.

 

The story has the Doc and Romana stopping off at a planet that holds the last segment of The Key Of Time. The planet is in the middle of a big war with another nearby planet. The people live in tunnels far below the surface. The Queen is played by Lalla Ward and John Woodbine plays her General. Lalla would become the new companion next season. I also read that Tom and Lalla would marry in 1981 and their marriage would last less than two years.

 

That's the Queen in the war room. Nice outfit, huh. The other shot is Woodbine, his aid, Romana and the Doc. The Queen is part of a group that are trying to stop the war but the General is dead against it. He's been taken over by an alien called The Shadow who has another agenda. There's plenty of running about and getting captured in this 6 part serial which suffers the usual padding.

It would be the last of the 6 part serials to be broadcast. The filming of the 6 part serial Shada, that would have ended the 17th season, would be interupted by a technicians strike. The serial wasn't finished at the time but years later a fan would animate the missing material. We'll get to that in the future.

  

The Doc meets up with a Time Lord named Drax who helps him out with a shrinking ray. They hide in K-9 at one point. He's a trojan dog. It took me a few minutes to figure out who the actor playing Drax was. Barry Jackson would later play George the coroner in Midsomer Murders. He was in a lot of other British tv including parts in 2 Doctor Who serials in 1965. He passed away last December.

 

Eventually the Doctor and Romana get the last part of The Key Of Time. The secret baddy turns up to take it but the Doc isn't going to stand for that and he puts things right. The Tardis blasts off for a new adventure.

I enjoyed the story for the most part and I'm glad to see the end, nearly, of the 6 part serials. There were two commentaries that could have been cut into one. Mary Tamm appears on the 1st with Michael Hayes and John Woodbine. It's rather dull when they forget to talk which happens a lot. Mary's on the 2nd track with Tom Baker and John Leeson. That's a much more interesting track but it too has it's lulls. There's a seperate disc of extras and they were about average. Nothing too exciting.

Blandings Series 1

Reading PG Wodehouse is a joyous experience. If you haven't read anything by him, you should try some. I've been thinking of digging out some of his books and having a bash at them. He wrote over 100 books and I have most of them. The Blandings stories are only a small part of the whole. 

I've seen a lof of the tv and film adaptations that have appeared over the years and I was curious to see the 2012 BBC production adapted by Guy Andrews. He's mostly worked in TV and I haven't seen much of his work. The series was directed by Peter Seed who's had a more interesting career both as an actor and as a writer.

Watching productions of Wodehouse is never as good as reading the stories. As you might imagine some productions are better at adapting the stories than others. The 1990 Jeeves and Wooster series with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie is absolutely Top Notch when it comes to adaptations. This new Blandings series isn't quite rise to that level but it does ok.

Timothy Spall plays Clarence Threepwood the 9th Earl of Emsworth and Jennifer Saunders plays his sister Lady Constance Keeble. Jack Farthing plays the Lord's young son The Hon. Frederick Threepwood and Mark Williams plays the Butler Sebastian Beach. Except for Jack the main actors are all favorites of mine. I enjoy watching them and they do a good job with the characters.

They all live at Castle Blandings which is in Shropshire, England. It's really Crom Castle in Ireland. It's one of those idyllic locations with a castle and large grounds spread out in every direction. Lord Emsworth and Beach are ok characters but Lady Constance is a bit of a stick up the old butt type and Freddy is a bit of a twit. He's always falling in love but like most things he tries he's not very good at it.

Lord Emsworth only has eyes for his prize winning pig, the Empress of Blandings. She's quite the gal and in the first episode Lord Emsworth is getting her ready for the local fair. His rival, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, puts Lord Emsworth's pig man in the pokey and the pig goes off her feed. Don't worry the Empress will get her appetite back before the end of the story.

In episode 2 David Walliams plays the annoying man that Lady Constance hires to be Lord Emsworth's secretary. No one likes him and later he falls in some manure. In the 3rd installment Freddy tries to help Gertrude with her romantic troubles. David Walliams returns in the 4th episode. He's to tutor Lord Emsworth's grandson. Plenty of bottoms get shot in this one. The 5th episode has trouble with the gardner and visiting children from London. The last of the series has Jessica Hynes playing a broke noble woman trying to catch Lord Emsworth and marry him for his money. He's almost hooked but she wants to get rid of everyone he loves, including the Empress.

I enjoyed them, there's a few laughs though out and occasionally I'd laugh out loud. The locations are nice to look at. I haven't had the urge to add them to my Amazon Wish List but I might pick them up if they are cheap. I did buy the Jeeves and Wooster series when they got cheaper and I've seen them 3 or 4 times now. Might be time to look at them again. I see YouTube has the second series of Blandings posted. I'm going to hit those next.

Friday Night Movies 472

 

Rock 'n' Roll Frankenstein is a 1999 film by Brian O'Hara. He's mostly a sound guy in the film industry. This is his second film, the first was also made in 1999, and he's not directed any features since. I haven't seen his other film and doubt I'll see it. Rock 'n' Roll Frankenstein is a low budget horror comedy that merges Frankenstein and the music biz. Bernie is a music agent with a penchant for swearing. That's him up above on the right. He's a real asswipe so it's no wonder his big client leaves him. Bernie forces his nephew Frank Stein to make him a new star, out of the body parts of famous, and dead, rock stars. He thinks he can own the King and not have to worry about getting left behind when the King becomes a big star.

 

Bernie has a drug addled but mellow roadie named Iggy who's sent to collect the body parts of the dead rockers. That's Iggy with Frank in the picture above left. They're working on the King. The other picture is what was left in Elvis's grave. Those shades held up well. Iggy's sent to steal the hands of Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon's legs and Jim Morrison's wiener. Iggy's henchmen screw up and drop Jim's wang in a jar of acid. The guys grab Liberace's cock instead. After a quick switch of jar labels Bernie is none the wiser. Frank sews the bits and pieces together and the King is born.

Bernie expects to recoup his expenses pretty quickly and he get the King a band and they start working on making music. It goes badly at first but the King finally gets an act together that starts to attract a following. Frank wants to publish his genetic work but Bernie knows that wouldn't be a good idea. There's plenty of bad ideas going on in the character's heads in this movie. Frank has issues with women and he's sexually aroused by autopsy photos. The King has issues with his wiener, it's not responding to the ladies like the Elvis part of the brain thinks it should. His penis talks to him and the dialog is not fit for my mom's ears.

Bernie's just driven by his greed but his stupidity gets in the way of realistic thinking. All this confusion in the heads of the main characters leads to death and destruction. The King kills a groupie and later kills a Priest who assaulted him in the confession booth. The King wants a new johnson but Frank can't help him, a dick transplant would kill his creation. Things go from bad to worse and hardly anyone gets out alive. I'm sure the police who come across the crime scene are going to wonder what the hell that giant green penis is doing there. I know I would wonder. I sure laughed, it's pretty silly film, though not a very politically correct movie. If you've seen Troma films than you kind of know what to expect. It's more for the fan of these genre carbuncles found dotting cinema's huge ass. You can find out about that huge green penis by clicking the link above.

Our second film was the 1961 British Horror film Doctor Blood's Coffin with Kieran Moore and Hazel Court. It's directed by Sidney J. Furie and it was his third film. He does an ok job and he would go on to make pictures that did well enough to keep him working to this day. I haven't seen much of his work, most of it isn't of interest, but many of the titles are familiar. Nothing I did see was really outstanding and neither is this movie. There's nice location scenery in the towns of St Just and Zennor in Cornwall. That's down near the very wester tip of England. It's all rocky and hilly, the houses in the villages are made of stone. The script was by Nathan Juran but Furie had it rewritten by James Kelley and Peter Miller. It's their first writing job and it's got some uninspired dialog and plot devices. The two guys would go on to write a fair bit of British tv after this movie.

 

Kieran is the son of the doctor in the small fictional Cornish town of Port Carron. He's been away going to medical school which was followed by work on a research project in Vienna. He's forced out of the project for his unusual experiments with dead people. He returns home just as some people disappear. Kieran's secretly set up shop in the abandoned tin mine and he's determined to re-animate the dead. Hazel is the nurse at Keiran's fathers clinic and she falls for Keiran. That doesn't go well when he re-animates the corpse of her dead husband. Keiran's big dream falls apart and a few people die. 

I'd actually seen Doctor Blood's Coffin in 2010 but I had completely forgotten it. I couldn't have been paying much attention when I did see it because I didn't recognize anything about it. Not a glimmer. Still, it's that kind of movie, familiar with little or nothing to make it stand out from the pack. Just another retelling of the Frankenstein story. It scores a 4.3 on the IMDb and that's probably just a bit low. It certainly isn't above average so I gave it a 5. It could have been a better movie but it isn't so there's not much need to see it again. You can judge for yourself, there's a link to it in the title int he top paragraph. It's your chance to add yet another movie to your own Watched Movie List.

The Day Of The Triffids

I watched most of The Day Of The Triffids on YouTube. I'd seen it a few years ago on cable but don't have a copy. I wasn't that fond of it as a kid, it's kind of slow, but it's grown on me over the years. I don't think it's quite as exciting as that poster and occasionally I'd jump ahead a minute to speed things up. It's a 1962 British science fiction movie about an alien invasion, of plants, that's based on a book by John Wyndam. I read the book decades ago. I wasn't much of a Wyndam fan and haven't read any of his books since the 1970's.

The idea is cool, meteors that make people blind and plants that run around and kill. Only a few people can see after the meteor shower. A sailor with sight helps a sighted school girl after her train crashes into the station. They meet up with a sighted couple who live in a place filled with blind people. There's a lighthouse with a scientist and his wife. They both see and he works to find a way to kill the plants. If you cut them up they regenerate. By the end of the movie he's got their number. The ending is a bit weak and sappy but you can't say it doesn't have a lot of fire hose.

I find parts of the movie to be pretty good, it does well with capturing the horror of the world going blind and the hopelessness of the situation. I imagine that billions would die. At one point we join a plane that's stuck up in the air with with everyone blind. No fuel and no one to help. The physical effects for the plants were fair to good but some of the matted effects are pretty poor. When that plane crashes, it's not so good, and the back drop of the city on fire is laughable. Still, there's a fairly solid story with good acting for the most part. You might like it if you give it a chance.

I doubt you'd like the 2009 tv movie of The Dunwich Horror if you gave it all the chances you could. The only interesting thing about the movie is Dean Stockwell is in both this and the 1970 film adaptation of the same HP Lovecraft story. Jeffrey Combs is also in the tv movie. Sadly he's wasted. At least the 1970 film had some style, there's not much of that going on in this new modern telling of the tale. The 2009 Yog-Soggoth is really sad. Really fuckin' sad. So sad it's not even laughable. I had to say it three times to get that out of my system. If you do watch it, don't say I didn't warn ya. Speaking of Dean in awful movies here's Werewolf Of Washington. The best thing about it is the title. I got a copy in one of those 50 Movie Packs and watched it a couple of years ago. It pretty awful, you might get a laugh or two out of it. You might not.

Psych Season 8

  

The final season of Pysch wrapped up late last month and I caught the last three episodes over the weekend. There were only 10 episodes in the season and most of them were pretty funny. They wrap up the series pretty well, at least to my taste, and left it open ended enough to perhaps have an tv movie down the road. If it never happens it wouldn't matter, there's over 100 episodes to re-watch. 

There were plenty of great guest stars in the 8th season. Cary Elwes, Vinnie Jones, Dana Ashbrook, Katharine Isabelle, Carlos Jacott, Ed Lover, Ralph Macchio, Lindsay Sloane, Janet Varney, Alan Ruck, Ray Wise, Mira Sorvino, Phylicia Rashad, Loretta Devine, Tom Arnold, Peggy Lipton, Yvette Nicole Brown, Peter Stormare, Kali Hawk, Corbin Bleu, Curt Smith, William Zabka, Dean Cameron, The Bella Twins, Billy Zane, Bruce Campbell and Val Kilmer. Wow, what a list, huh.

I can see why the network cancelled the series, it's had falling ratings since it started, with the exception of the 2nd season. The season 1 premiere had 6.06 million viewers  and the season finale had 4.48 million watching. The first episode of season 8 had 2.28 million people tuning in and the series finale had 1.93 million viewers. The show scores high on the IMDb so I'm not sure what caused people to tune out over the years. It's fans seem to really like it though there seems to be a good number who felt the last couple of seasons weren't as interesting as the earlier ones. I understand, there were changes in the series cast that I didn't like. I didn't care much for Michael Anthony Hall as the new Chief of Police. The last two seasons also dropped the regular young Shawn and Gus flashbacks and I missed them.

I came to the series after it had been around for nearly 4 years. I lucked out and got the first 3 seasons for 8 bucks each at a Target Black Friday sale. As the rest came out I've been buying them once the price falls to something reasonable. It doesn't take long before you can buy the dvd set for close to ten bucks. That seems a reasonable price to pay for a season of a tv show. Even though there's no new episodes being produced I'll have the DVDs to keep me entertained in the future.  

Bob Hope & Bing Crosby - The Road Pictures

     

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby starred in 7 Road pictures together, the first was in 1940, the last in 1962. They were all made at Paramount except for the last one which was made in England. The guys play different characters each film and each film is king of a different genre. The basic premise is the same no matter the trappings. Dorothy Lamour co-starred as the love interest in the first 6 pictures. Bing thought she was too old, at 48, to be the love interest for the last picture. She has a small part and a musical number while Joan Collins is the main female lead. The guys usually start the picture with trouble of the female sort. Not ready to settle down they run away, swearing off women. They wind up in some remote place where they meet Dorothy. She rekindles their interest in women, or at least, one woman. They vie for her affections and Bob usually loses to Bing in that department.

   

There's usually a villian but hardly anyone ever dies. The jokes are fun at times and lame at others. There's plenty of 'em, so if you don't like one, there's another coming along right soon. Some of the gags are of the slapstick variety. Sometimes the guys are way too dumb for my tastes but that's mostly me. There's several musical numbers in each movie. Most of the songs are solos or duets, the latter with some combination of Bob, Bing and Dorothy. Occasionally other people do numbers. I have to admit I skip through some of the songs. They just aren't my cup of musical tea I guess. There's plenty of dancing and I mostly fast forward through those too. Still I enjoy the films  and kind of ignore their flaws. If you haven't seen them they're worth a look. They aren't perfect and they're pretty much of their time. I think the first four are the better films of the group. Rio and Bali re ok and Hong Kong is pretty goofy, even for a Road picture. The last film in the series also has some interesting cameos as well as a small part for Roger Delgado who played that great Doctor Who villain The Master.

Here's the batch of films with links to YouTube. See if you like them.

• Road to Singapore (1940)
• Road to Zanzibar (1941)
• Road to Morocco (1942)
• Road to Utopia (1946)
• Road to Rio (1947)
• Road to Bali (1952)
• The Road to Hong Kong (1962)

Aliens Vs Monsters: Cloning Around

Sperhauk lent me his copy of Monsters Vs Aliens: Cloning Around and I watched it last night. I laughed a fair bit. The short lived tv series stared airing March of 2013 and ran on Nickelodon for 52 episodes, 15 of which are on this single disc, then it was cancelled for low ratings. Not sure why it didn't find an audience, I don't watch Nick at all so I have no idea what's popular there.

Chris O'Dowd (of The IT Crowd) supplies the voice for Dr Cockroach, Riki Lindhome for Susan, Diedrich Bader for Link and Eric Edelstein for B.O.B. They're the monsters in the title. If you haven't seen the movie that started it all, shame on you. It's really fun. The government has a group of monsters that it keeps in a secret base. They help the army fight aliens and the like. The TV show introduces two new aliens who come to live at the secret base. One's a flying chair bound fellow who has secret plans for world domination and the other is student who is working on his thesis about life on Earth. The stories are varied, in some the group has adventures, in others it's just stuff going on at the base. In one episode Dr Cockroach makes the President a youth ray and the Prez gets turned into a baby. Like no one saw that coming. In another episode Link eats part of B.O.B.'s girlfriend. It's not quite as bad as it sounds, B.O.B.'s girlfriend is a jello mold with pineapple chunks in it. The plan is to make a new jello mold before B.O.B. finds out. Kind of a standard sitcom plot in many ways. Like their live action sitcom counterparts our aliens and monsters all have their personalities and they often get in the way of common sense, especially where B.O.B. is concerned. He has no brain so it's amazing that he can function at all. Still, he has some of the best jokes and bit of slapstick. My favorite  B.O.B. line in the show is e=MC Boom. It really explains it all. I'm looking forward to the second dvd. Hopefully they'll eventually release the whole series.