PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Black Mirror Series 2

Charlie Brooker is back with 3 more stories on Black Mirror Series 2. They aired in February 2013 and there wouldn't be anymore for nearly 2 years. I hadn't even heard of Charlie Brooker when this aired. I first saw him live on an election coverage special in 2014. He shared the stage with Jimmy Carr, David Mitchell and Lauren Laverne.

Be Right Back A guy dies and his girlfriend's friend signs her up for a service that uses and AI to talk to the deceased in the style of their loved one. The AI goes out and gathers info from the public media of the deceased and uses that to re-create the personality. The next step is an android body. I wasn't as fond of this one as I was of the second one but I sure wouldn't care much for that service.

White Bear A woman wakes up and experiences a horrible day. Then she finds out what's really been going on. Man, that's some nasty shit! It's another dark future, but not as bad as the next story.

The Waldo Moment A guy's got a job as a puppeteer, Waldo the blue bear is rude and crude. When Waldo is drawn into a political campaign things go down hill fast for the puppeteer. In the epilogue the puppeteer wakes up in his future. It's some bad shit.

Another batch of odd stories, with White Bear being the strongest, and The Waldo Moment being the least interesting. I didn't believe Waldo could change things like he did. He's hardly different than Triumph the Insult Dog and look where that POS went. Be Right Back was just sad. We don't need electric ghosts.

The Spider Woman 1943

The Spider Women is the 7th of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies. It's the 5th Universal film and the first one to drop Sherlock Holmes from the title. All the rest of the films do the same thing. It's written by Bertram Millhauser and directed by Roy William Neill.

Sherlock fakes his own death to go undercover. Poor Watson is surprised when he shows up after the funeral. There have been some strange suicides and all the clues lead to The Spider Woman.

She's a horrible person and a good match mentally for Sherlock. Gale Sondergaard plays Adrea Spedding, and she's had quite a career. It starts in 1936 with a role in Anthony Adverse. That first part won the first Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She made several films, but that stopped in 1948 when Gale and her husband Herbert J Biberman were blacklisted. She started working again in 1969 and continued until 1982. Gale died in 1985 at the age of 86.

Adrea finds men who are short of money and arranges a loan. The men sign away their life insurance policies. Strangely, these same men are killing themselves soon after. Sherlock and Watson will save the day but it's touch and go there for a while. Another good story and a great villain.

Science Fiction Sunday 481

Hawk The Slayer isn't really SF, it's a fantasy with a terrible poster. It's a 1980 British movie with Jack Palance as the main baddie, a guy called Voltan. It's written by Harry Robertson and director Terry Marcel. John Terry plays Hawk, he's Jack's brother, and Ferdy Mayne plays their father. Voltan kills daddy because he's just a mean spirited prick. He's also pissed that the beautiful Elaine, played by Catriona MacColl, decided to marry Hawk instead of him. He kills Elaine and nearly kills Hawk. W Morgan Sheppard plays Ranulf and Patricia Quinn plays the Sorceress. Roy Kinnear plays in innkeeper, Harry Andrews plays the High Abbott and Patrick Magee plays a priest.

Voltan kidnaps the Abbess from a convent, demanding a ransom. Ranulf, befriended by the nuns, goes to see the High Abbot. The High Abbott gives him a coin and sends him to find Hawk. Hawk is interested in getting his revenge and he goes to see the Sorceress, she magics up his old pals. Bernard Bresslaw plays the giant Gort, Ray Charleson plays the elf Crow, and Peter O'Farrell plays the dwarf Baldin.

The rest of the movie is a battle to the death by all the parties involved. It's pretty standard fantasy adventure stuff, with the usual crappy sword fights, yelling, and lots of riding in the woods. It was fairly entertaining but not a movie I would need to see again. There are better fantasy adventure movies, not that many of them are much good at all.

Vice is a 2015 movie that shoves Grand Theft Auto right up Westworld's ass and gives it a bit of a wiggle. Vice is a resort that lets you live out your fantasies. It's an unpleasant place filled with noisy techno bars, women with giant fake breasts and endless creeps for customers. You can go in, pay some cash, and do what ever you want. Many fantasies seem to end in death of some poor Vice worker.

No need to worry about them says the incredibly smug Vice owner Julian Michaels, all the dead are artificial humans. Bruce Willis plays Julian and Thomas Jane plays the cop who's tired of the problems Julian's resort creates. The creeps leave the place and cause problems in the city. The place plays a lot of taxes, blah, blah, blah, and it's got some amount of protection from the local government.

During the usual glitch these movies have, one of the artificals, Kelly, starts having flashbacks. Normally the artificals' memories are wiped after each days work and their bodies are repaired for the next day.  Kelly is confused by the flashbacks and the lab brings her in. When the scientist tells her he's going to wipe her memory, Kelly freaks out, escapes and goes on the run. The company goes after her, guns blazing, and the violence spills into the city. Soon Thomas is busting down the doors at Vice HQ and the bodies are piling up.

There's plenty of violence and noise but even as it gets exciting it's still barely average. I like Thomas Jane but this is the least interesting guy I've seen him play. Glad I got it from Netflix, wouldn't have wanted to pay for it, I don't need to see him again.

Rupture is a weird little film that I'm not keen on watching again. It came out last year. It's written and directed by Stephen Shainburg. The only other movie of his I've seen was Secretary, and that wasn't much by way of fun. There's little fun here either.

Noomi Rapace plays a woman who's kidnapped by some people. They do experiments on her to release the next stage of human evolution. It's waiting in her body. Somehow drugs and fear will set it off. Most of the movie is a caged woman fighting to get free. It's all pretty miserable but eventually poor Noomi turns. She didn't know she had it in her. Now she's supposed to be a more advanced human, but really, all they seem to have become is a race of emotionless sociopaths. They have weird eyes that find yellow light comforting. That's hardly the evolution I want. At the end Noomi finds out the group's plan for her is worse than she thought. Pretty much sucks to be Noomi in that one. As a story it could be scary, kidnapped and experimented on. That sucks. As a movie it's about average, what brings the score down for me is that after the build up, it fails to deliver much of an ending.

Friday Night Movies 673

Class Of 1999 was the first selection. I thought I hadn't seen it, I had, back in 1992. It's got a screenplay by C Courtney Joyner and Mark L Lester is the director. C mostly worked for Full Moon productions but this is a fairly well funded studio movie. Not a big name studio but they had 5 million smackaroonies to buy stuff to smash up, blow up and burn up. Mark directed some fun stuff, Commando, Armed And Dangerous and Showdown In Little Tokyo but I can't say I've seen anything much else by him.

The movie came out in 1990 but it's set in 1999. Schools haves gotten so bad that the district lets Stacy Keach bring human shaped robots into the school. That's Stacy on the left and three robot teachers are played by Patrick Kilpatrick, Pam Grier and John P Ryan. The three might act like teachers on the surface, but  they're really ex-military killbots, they react pretty badly when threatened. When they start killing the students for punishment, the students fight back, by the end of the movie the whole school is in flaming ruins. What's not to like? It was entertaining, there's always some fighting or yelling going on, and the students learn to stand up to authority. With explosives. I would watch it again and pick one up if I could find one cheap.

Our second feature is The Big Bang. It's a 2010 noirish crime film with Antonio Banderas. It's got a screenplay by Erik Jendresen and it's directed by Tony Krantz. Erik's screenplay drives it's plot with the main plot driver from the movie Murder My Sweet. A man looking for his ex-girlfriend asks help from a private eye. MMS is in turn an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Marlowe novel Farewell My Lovely. One of many adaptations. Most of them I have found re-watchable.

Erik uses the Moose Malloy character and his frenzied search for his old girlfriend Velma and strips that down before re-dressing it with blood diamonds, physics and transgender romance. It's a good reminder that rocks, relativity and sexual choices can kill you. The movie uses a bit more structure from the 1944 Dick Powell film Murder My Sweet, Phillip Marlowe is being grilled by a police detective at the beginning of the movie about some killings, most of the story is told in flashbacks.

That's what's going on with Antonio when The Big Bang opens up. He tells the trio of detectives about his version of Moose, Anton "The Pro" Protopov, played by the giant sized Robert Maillet. In Murder My Sweet Moose Malloy is played by one of my favorite character actors, Mike Mazurki, he's big but not quite as big as Robert. Other than that, there isn't much else in the two films that's very similar.

For some reason the critics hated The Big Bang, perhaps there's too much science talk, who knows. I liked it. It's modern and brash, the noir isn't quite so noir, it's more like a modern crime thriller than it's noir ancestors. Still, it tells a good story, there's some action, some shooting, and some crazy shit too. It's only scoring a 5.5 on the IMDb, It's not a perfect film by any means but it should be a 6.5 at least.

The Last Templar 2009

I picked up a copy of The Last Templar for a couple of bucks and it was kind of a waste of money. It's a two part mini-series that aired on NBC. It runs 240 minutes with commercials and about 170 minutes without. Sadly the script isn't up to the time it's got to fill and there are dull spots. On the plus side it's got Mira Sorvino and I usually like seeing her. Here's she's an Indiana Jones like archeologist who gets drawn into an adventure involving the Knights Templar and their special secret treasure. I didn't think it was much better than average and I'm not keeping it.

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie 1972

 

Someone on Facebook mentioned they had just watched The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie and I decided to get the library to lend me their copy. Good thing, after seeing it I would have been bummed if I bought it. I'm pretty sure I saw it when it was new. It came out in 1972 and it was nominated for an Oscar the following year. By then I was working and going to movies all the time. I would have been interested in seeing Oscar winners and they would often run the nominees in the theaters after they were announced. I just can't remember anything about it really. After seeing it, I can see why, there's not much going on. Some people in a country have a hard time getting a meal, then they have some bad dreams where they get shot. There's supposed to be a lot of social commentary and allegorical stuff going on in the movie but I never think much about that sort of thing. I don't always know enough to get all the jokes, as it were. I don't read critics telling me that sort of thing, I can't be sure they're right, so why bother. I'd like to trust the director but I've heard too many commentaries. They often say they don't know what was happening and if they told me what they were thinking, I wouldn't necessarily believe them. Directors are liars, they lie for a living, it's a passion with them. Others may get more entertainment than I did, I'll probably never know.

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death 1943

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death is the 6th of the Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. It came out September 17 1943 and it's the fourth of the Universal Pictures films that set Sherlock in the modern day. Unlike the first three, this film veers away from the WWII spy adventure and delivers a nice mystery set in an English location. Roy William Neill is the director and he working off a script by Bertram Millhauser that's based on Doyle's The Adventure Of The Musgrave Ritual.

Dr Watson is doing some doctoring at Musgrave Hall in Northumberland. The Hall is home to several servicemen suffering from shell shock. When one of the other doctors is attacked on the grounds Watson asks Holmes to come have a bit of look-see.

By the time Sherlock arrives there's been a murder, one of the Musgrave brothers has been killed. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard shows up and arrests Captain Vickery as a suspect. Dennis Hoey plays Lestrade and Milburn Stone plays Captain Vickery. Milburn you might remember as Doc on Gunsmoke.

Soon after the other Musgrave brother is murdered, leaving his sister Sally as the only heir to the estate. Lestrade suspects the butler who was fired that day but that guy soon turns up dead in a crypt beneath the house.

Holmes continues to cogitate and eventually figures out what's been going on. It's a nice story with something going on most of the time. These Universal movies are so short, this one is 68 minutes, there isn't time to waste on anything that isn't making the story move along.

There's a commentary with some good info by David Stuart Davies. He's the author of Holmes Of The Movies, which I haven't read and most likely won't bother with. That's not a slight, I just don't read film books anymore. Too many novels to read first. 

Western Wednesday 42

A hat trick of Randolph Scott Westerns today. It's a triple feature from Warner Brothers and all the movies are worth a gander for the Western fan.

The Man Behind The Gun 1953 Screenplay by John Twist and direction by Felix Feist. John wrote The Saint Strikes Back but I can't say I recognize much else in his credits, other than The Outcasts Of Poker Flats. Felix started directing in 1930, after TMBTG, his next movie would be Donovan's Brain, after that he'd make one more movie, then no more.

Randolph is a US Army officer who's traveling under cover. He's on a stagecoach that gets robbed by an outlaw played by Anthony Caruso. Randolph captures the outlaw and turns him over to Captain Giles at the local garrison.

Randolph has a couple of ex-Army guys along, Alan Hale Jr and  Dick Wesson, who  don't know he's undercover. That's them in the picture above. Alan would later play The Skipper on Gilligan's Island. The trio arrive in Los Angeles to find the locals have gun runners in their midst and there's a separatist movement that's getting violent. Randolph and pals will soon put a stop to all those shenanigans.

It was entertaining and there's plenty of shooting and riding about. The movie has a few jokes and a bit of romance too.

Thunder Over The Plains 1953 Screenplay by Russell S Hughes and Andre De Toth is the director. Russell only wrote 10 movies but one of them was THEM! He wrote an episode of Have Gun - Will Travel, one of Perry Mason and four of Maverick, along his numerous other credits. Andre directed 35 movies and the 1953 House Of Wax is among them. I recently saw his 1953 film Crime Wave and that was a real treat. He also directed a fair bit of TV.

Randolph is a Federal Captain in Texas just after the Civil War, he's not liking to uphold the law for the scumbag carpetbaggers that are legally robbing the citizens of their homes. Phyllis Kirk plays his wife. There's plenty of trouble ahead as the homesteaders resist the criminal scum who run the county. There's plenty of shooting and running about. A good solid story and a good cast. You might know Lex Barker, Charles McGraw, Henry Hull, Elisha Cook Jr, Hugh Sanders or Fess Parker.

Riding Shotgun 1954 Another film directed by Andre De Toth. It's got a screenplay by Thomas W Blackburn. Thomas wrote quite a good lot of TV episodes and several movies. He wrote several programs for Disney including the Fess Parker Davy Crockett And The River Pirates.

Randolph rides shotgun on stages. He's got an agenda, he's looking for the man, a guy named Dan, who killed his wife and child. He gets tricked by one of Dan's henchmen and leaves the stage in the hands of another guard. Randolph is captured and left to die. He escapes. When Randolph gets back to town he finds the stage was robbed and the town's people blame him. He's hold up in a cheap saloon waiting for the sheriff to get back. The town's folk want to string him up but they are afraid of him. Even the deputy doesn't want to go up against him. Only a couple of people believe his story about Dan's plan to raid the bank.

It's another good tight story with a good bit of action, tension and humor. I think I liked this one the best of the three but they're all good. Here's a couple of fun foreign posters for Riding Shotgun.

The Nude Bomb 1980

It's the movie that brought Get Smart to the big screen. Sadly it's the movie that kind of sucks. It was nominated for worst picture at the first Razzies. It wasn't quite bad enough to win. Arne Sultan, Bill Dana and Leonard Stern are the writers and Clive Donner is the director. Arne wrote 34 episodes of the Get Smart TV series and plenty of other TV of various quality. Bill you might remember from his appearances as José Jiménez on shows like Make Room For Daddy and The Ed Sullivan Show. Leonard later became the Stern in publishers Price/Stern/Sloan. Stern would do better writing the 1989 Get Smart TV movie. He also created shows like McMillan & Wife, Diana, The Governor & J.J., He & She, Run Buddy Run and I'm Dickens, He's Fenster. I remember enjoying several of those programs, though I haven't seen them in years. I don't know what happened here.

There's a disappointing lack of nudity in The Nude Bomb. You get to see a bunch of guy's asses and a lady in a see thru top. That's about it. On top of that the movie doesn't have very good gags. Max bumbles around, without 99, and gets more things wrong than I like to see. He's got Agent 22 helping him. Andrea Howard plays Agent 22, Sylvia Kristel plays Agent 34, and they are joined by Rhonda Fleming, Dana Elcar, Pamela Hensley, Joey Forman, Robert Karvelas, Norman Lloyd, Bill Dana, Vittorio Gassman, Vito Scotti and many more I didn't recognize. Barbara Feldon wasn't even asked to be in the movie. She says she wouldn't have taken the part anyway. That seems kind of sad to me.I bought a copy but it was fairly cheap so I'm not too sorry. I might watch it again. I'll eventually try to see the series again someday and I'll watch all the movies that came later. There's also a short TV series with Don Adams and Barbara Feldon taking a back seat to Andy Dick and Elaine Hendrix. That was better than this movie and it wasn't that good. It too lacked good jokes.

Sherlock Holmes In Washington 1943

Sherlock Holmes travels to Washington DC in Sherlock Homes In Washington. It's 1943 and Holmes and Watson investigate the disappearance of a British secret agent. He was carrying a secret document vital to the war  effort. Our guys go up against a tough spy ring and have a good adventure. Bertram Millhauser and Lynn Riggs are responsible for the screenplay and Roy William Neill is the director.

I enjoyed the movie. Holmes and Watson have a good villain to battle and the US location is different. Like the other restored pictures this one looks really good.