PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

John From Cincinnati 2007

I watched John From Cincinnati and didn't much care for it. I hadn't watched it when it came out in 2007 but I noticed it on Amazon Prime, and still thinking I should watch some of the material in their included library, I put it on. I had hopes, it's been created by David Milch who created Deadwood and Hill Street Blues. I really liked Deadwood but haven't seen it since it was new. I had watched some of Hill Street Blues but never got to be a fan.

John From Cincinnati has 10 episodes about the life of a family of screwed up surfers. They're not a happy group to hang with and I got tired of the panic and anger. It's not weird enough to make the drama more interesting. I started speeding the show up as it got near the end. There's no continuation of the story, since the show got cancelled after one season, so there's no way to know where it was going or what we'd find when we got there.

There's a lot of good actors in the show, Ed O'Neill, Bruce Greenwood, Rebecca De Mornay, Luis Guzmán and Dayton Calle. I like Ed and Dayton's characters the best. They have some of the best scenes. Ed you should know from Married With Children and Dayton did a brilliant job playing Charlie Utter on Deadwood.

Rumpole Series 7

I finally hit the end of Rumpole and I'm kind of sad. The last series aired October to December 1992 and there were 6 episodes. Leo McKern is Rumpole, an old Bailey hack who works in an office with a batch of other barristers. He takes on the cases hardly anyone else in the office would want. John Mortimer is the writer of the TV series and the series of novels. I haven't read any of the novels. I doubt at this point I'll have time to get to them. So many other things to read first. The first of the stories is about a kid and some devil worshipers, then there's a story about a police killing and a crappy misguided judge. Rumpole defends a guy who killed his wife's lover in the third episode and in the next episode Rumpole defends a juvie for assaulting an older woman. A relative calls for Rumpole to help him when a woman drowns on his estate. In the last episode Rumpole faces disbarment after a contempt of court charge. He comes through everything pretty much OK. As I said earlier I was kind of sad to get to the end. I liked the series so much when I started borrowing them from the library that I wound up buying the DVDs. I also picked up the DVD of what they call the Pilot and watched that. It appeared as an episode of Play For Today back in 1975. Rumpole defends a young Jamaican boy accused of stabbing someone. It's a bit different as you might expect being the pilot and three years passing until the series started in 1978.

Top Gear Series 16

I've traveled back to 2011 for the 16th series of Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May at the helm. I'm still enjoying the guys and their antics. There are 8 episodes in this series, 6 of the usual and 2 specials in December 2010. There's plenty of gags, knuckle headed activity, road trips and cars. This series introduces the KIA Cee'D as the car in the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car segment.

In the East Coast Road Trip the trio start a trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway but it turns out to be too slow for the show. They travel into NASCAR territory and have some adventures there. Then they drive up to New York City and have a race up the length of Manhattan. There's also a longer version of the US trip with out all the studio stuff.

In the Middle East Special the guys travel from northern Iraq to Bethlehem and find a new Stig. The old Stig, Ben Collins, had been outed and he wanted to write a book. It was a mess and they had to get a new Stig.

Besides the destinations in the specials the guys travel to Albania and Norway. There's some travel about the UK too. In the last episode Clarkson drives across the whole country in a race with the sun. Stars in the Reasonably Priced Car are Danny Boyle, John Bishop, Boris Becker, Jonathan Ross, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Amber Heard and John Prescott.

Science Fiction Sunday 404

Atlantic Rim is a 2013 giant robots vs giant monsters film produced by The Asylum to capitalize on the release of Pacific Rim. People call films like these mockbusters but I just call them crap. Some say that the films from The Asylum are "so bad they're good" but I say they're "so bad they're mediocre." Produced with a budget of $500,000 which makes me wonder how little did the people working on the film get paid. They must have some cheap CGI people. Graham Greene's in it and I can't see him working for little money but who knows. I suspect they hire him for 2 or 3 days and shoot all his scenes one after the other. As with most films by The Asylum the writing is poor and riddled with cliches. The military read the script and withdrew their permission for the film makers to shoot on a military base. They didn't think the soldiers in the film acted like real soldiers would and I'm certainly agreeing. Scenes tend to be overly long and drawn out. That helps pad the movie to over 80 minutes. The acting poor to average but it's a bit hard to tell since the poor script would give the best actor little to work with. The actors do get to yell a lot. The only positive I can see is that workers get a film credit on their CV. The CGI is fair to poor. The monster is a skinny ocean lizard from aeons ago. There's a smaller one and a larger one. There's plenty of slaughter, both military and civilian, as the monsters range along the eastern seaboard. The monsters eventually attack New York City. They almost nuke the city, that would suck, huh. I watched the movie with the peddle to the metal to make it go by faster. I wouldn't recommend the movie to anyone. There's little point in seeing it.

Space Daze was the second feature that I picked on from Amazon Prime. It's a Troma release and like The Asylum you just can't count on getting a great feature from Lloyd and his pals. Usually the Troma films skew to a more the weird and this is no exception. Space Daze is written and directed by John Wesley Horton and the IMDb says he had a budget of $100K. It's the first of his 6 films. I haven't seen any of them so who knows how he's doing, he's still working so I guess that's something. A guy called Al Manac walks into a bar and tells the bartender his troubles. Al works on an alien investigation TV show which counts the bartender as a big fan. Max tells the man the troubles he has on the show in the form of film clips that we see. It's got a lot of little bits and pieces, some gags are pretty poor and some are a bit funny, though nothing is ever really hilarious. It's still way more fun to watch than the previous movie and while there isn't much need to see it, you can find out if you like it by clicking on the link in the title above. I wouldn't much need to see it again.

IT! 1967

IT! is a 1967 British film with Roddy McDowell as an ambitious assistant museum creator who's pretty mad. He keeps mom's corpse in his apartment and talks to her. The film starts with a fire at the museum's warehouse. It destroys everything in the place except for a giant stone statue. At the site the head curator is killed. We don't see what happened but after a couple more deaths it becomes apparent that the golem is the killer. Roddy gains control of him and starts his reign of terror. He sinks more and more into madness and that's going to be his downfall. It gets pretty whacky by the end of the movie. There's even a ticking time bomb. Big Badda Boom.

It's very Hammer like but this is a Seven Arts Production. It's got a script by the director Herbert J Leder. I enjoyed it, more for the goofiness of the story than anything. Roddy is pretty entertaining as the crazy Mr Pimm. That's Jill Haworth in the picture above. She plays Miss Grove, Roddy's love interest. Sadly for Roddy she's not at all interested in him.

I really like this shot of the golem near the end of the movie. You can find out if you like it by watching it on YouTube.

The Shuttered Room 1967

The Shuttered Room is on a 1967 British horror thriller that's based on a August Derleth and H P Lovecraft story. It's got a script by D B Ledrov and Nathaniel Tanchuck. David Greene is the director. It's set in the town of Dunwich in the US but the movie is filmed in the UK. I don't think they did that great a job of their make believe. The movie stars Gig Young, Carol Lynley and Oliver Reed. Carol and Gig are just married and they are visiting the house and mill where she lived when she was a child. There's something dangerous in the room at the top of the stairs. Carol was sent away to foster care as a child and she has now inherited the place from her recently late mother. Oliver is her creepy cousin. He had been told that the mill would go to him by his aunt and he's not too happy to have Carol come back home. Things get quickly out of hand between the newly weds and Oliver and his gang of intellect lacking layabouts. The thing in the room at the top of the stairs is still lurking there and a drunken local gal gets slaughtered. It all ends sadly. I thought it was OK but not anything great. It was worth a look but I wouldn't be surprised if I ever got back to it.

Friday Night Movies 595

I hadn't seen Five Golden Dragons before. It's a goofy 1967 comedy thriller with Bob Cummings as the lead in what would be his last feature film. It was made in Hong Kong at the Shaw Brothers Studio and the Tiger Balm Pagoda. It was produced by Harry Alan Towers who also wrote the script. The film was directed by Jeremy Summers who had directed many episodes of Danger Man and The Saint.

It's got a nice international cast. Bob Cummings is from the US, Klaus Kinski is from Germany, Rupert Davies is from the UK, Roy Chiao is from Hong Kong. There's some pretty ladies, Margaret Lee is from the UK, singer Yukari Itô is from Japan, Maria Rohm and Maria Perschy are from Austria.

Christopher Lee, Dan Duryea, George Raft and Brian Donlevey have smaller parts than the rest.

Bob is goofy American who gets mixed up with the criminal gang called the Five Golden Dragons. The gang is going to sell their organization to the Mafia for $50 million. The gang think they are going to use Bob for a patsy but he screws up their plans.

Bob and the 2 Maria's have a couple of rather low-throttle chases, one on the junks in the Hong Kong Harbor and one with rickshaws. Fights and the like are none to great. It's all pretty silly and fun. It's been released on a new Blu-ray with Circus Of Fear. Both are worth a look.

Deathstalker is from a recent Blu-ray it shares with it's sequel. It's a 1983 action adventure film produced by Roger Corman. It was one of 9 films he made in Argentina. It's directed by James Sbardellati under the name of John Watson. The script is by Howard R Cohen. Beside this film and two of the Deathstalker sequels Howard wrote Vampire Hookers, Stryker, both the Barbarian Queen pictures and Rainbow Brite and Care Bears cartoons. He also directed 6 low-budget films that I'm pretty much sure I haven't seen.

That's Rick Hill on the right in the picture above, he plays Deathstalker, and he's on a quest to re-unite a trio of magical objects. He's gets given the sword but needs the other two for a power boost. The other guys are part of the group of warriors that come for the contest at the castle of the big evil magician called Munkar. That's Munkar on the left and it's his castle that holds the other two magical objects. There's plenty of fighting, sadly not all so good. The story has good bit of humor. There's plenty of nudity, too. It's Barbi Bention's last film, she'd appear on some TV before retiring in 1986.

Lana Clarkson is the warrior Kaira, she'd play the lead in the two Barbarian Queen films. Sadly she was the woman Phil Spector murdered. Six years after her 2003 death Phil was sentenced to 19 years in prison.

It's not any better or worse than a lot of these sword and sandal films. The movie was fun enough, most of us got a laugh or two and I was glad to have seen it. I was thinking I might have seen it back when it was new but I am not sure, it didn't look familiar. It's not on the List of Watched Movies but I didn't keep the list at the time it was released. I know I have seen the third film of the 4 Deathstalker films, Deathstalker And The Warriors From Hell, when it was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Of course for TV all the nudity was edited out. On that sad note, I'm done.

The Brokenwood Mysteries Series 2

Four more 90 minute murder mysteries set in the small New Zealand town of Brokenwood. It's a madeupy town but the show is filmed in the town of Warkworth which is about 40 miles north of Auckland. It's farm country and fairly close to the sea. The 2nd series of The Brokenwood Mysteries had DI Mike Shepherd and DS Kristin Sims solving murder mysteries. Neill Rea plays Mike and Fern Sutherland plays Kristin. The murders are very much like anywhere else, most of them are the someone kills someone else for fame, gain or pain. A rugby coach is found dead, naked and tied to a goal post, an actor is poisoned during a show, a fishing inspector is harpooned in the ocean and a country singer is found electrocuted in her bath. There's usually a second death related to the first. The wheels of justice grind slow and there's plenty of time for the murderer to add to the body count. I enjoyed the series, I like the characters and enjoy their company while they go about their business. There's a series 3 coming and I'll be seeing that next year most likely.

Fantastic Four 1 & 2

I finally watched the two Fantastic Four films that came out a few years ago. I wound up with both DVDs for less than 4 bucks. There didn't seem to be any urgency to see them when they were new, I wasn't going to see them at the theater, and that was about when I quit buying a lot of DVDs as they came out. The price of a new release was falling faster than it had the first years of the format and I could wait 6-12 months and pay less than half the release price. Plus a popular title was going to be in the used venues pretty quick.

There is a 1994 low-budget film called The Fantastic Four that Roger Corman produced. Some say it was a trick to keep the film rights and it was never meant for release to the general public. I don't know but it never did get released. You can find bootleg copies out in the world but since it's not very good, there's not much point in seeing it. If you're curious, you can see it on YouTube for free. You'll only have wasted that time you spent watching it.

Fantastic Four came out in 2005 and it's pretty much a typical origin story. It's not quite like the comic, they pack everyone into Victor Doom's Space Station to observe a space cloud that is passing near the Earth. Everyone gets their new powers from the cloud and there's a lot of melodrama as they deal with that. Victor Von Doom turns to metal and after some business upsets he turns to evil when he kills off the other board members. There's conflict there. Eventually it ends with the team a real team and Victor banished to the country of his birth. It's way better than the 1995 film but it still didn't make me go Yahoo! Like all Marvel films the level of melodrama is high and that detracts, at least for me, from the fun of the story.

The Fantastic Four return in the 2007 sequel Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer. The melodrama here mostly hinges on the marriage of Reed and Sue. It nearly doesn't happen when the The Silver Surfer comes to scout out the Earth as a possible lunch for the planet chomping Galactus. I didn't care much for the film's depiction of Galactus as a big swirly cloud. I liked the old comic book version better. There's plenty of interaction with The FF, the SS, and Doctor Doom. Obviously the planet is saved, the studio had hoped for a third Fantastic Four and a separate Silver Surfer movie. The box office was fine on FF:ROTSS but the studio didn't think it was quite good enough for a sequels. 

Of course there was a 2015 re-boot of the Fantastic Four but I sure didn't care that much for it. I wouldn't want to watch it again. I might watch these the two older films again, I have the DVDs, and who knows, it might happen.

The Sniper 1952

Every now and again Netflix sends me a really good film. It's mostly my fault, I do ask them to send me some real crap. A while back I put some noir films on my queue, mixed things up a bit, and after a while, they sent me The Sniper. I watched it and was really impressed. It's a serial killer movie, one of the first ones made. I don't really care for the genre much but this one stands out. It's got a script by Harry Brown and it's based on a story by Edna and Edward Anhalt. Harry was an sub-editor at The New Yorker in it's early days and he went to Hollywood in the mid 1930s. His most famous film would be Ocean's 11 from 1960. The Sniper is directed by Edward Dmytryk. I have a feeling you might have heard of him. If you haven't look him up, he's had quite a life.

Arthur Franz plays Eddie Miller, he's a disturbed man who could have mother trouble from the sound of it. He works as a delivery man and he drops off a dress to the woman in the picture above. The actress is Marie Windsor, she was in a lot of films and her nickname was "Queen Of The Bees." She offers Eddie a beer and then pushes him out the back door when her boyfriend comes home. Eddie is mad, later he gets his rifle and that starts the ball rolling. Now I'm on the edge of my seat, wonder who's going to get shot next. Hope it isn't me.

There are plenty of interesting actors in the film, well seasoned principles and a solid supporting cast. Adolphe Menjou is the police Lieutenant working on the case and Gerald Mohr is Adolphe's Sergeant. Both are good actors and they have a great script to work with. Frank Faylen is a police Inspector, Richard Kiley is the police psychiatrist, Charles Lane is a drunk in a nightclub and Jay Novello is the club's owner.

The film is mostly shot on location in San Francisco. There's a nice score by George Antheil who also created frequency hopping with Hedy Lamarr. His story is kind of interesting. The movie comes to a pretty good conclusion and I was impressed. There's a great commentary by noir guy Eddie Muller and a short intro by Martin Scorsese. Both of them point out the importance of the film at the time. There weren't many films about serial killers that preceded it. They mention the German film M with Peter Lorre. Of course, hardly anyone would have seen the film, even by the early 1950s. It's certainly one of the better movies that I've seen in the last few months. Recommended highly.