PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

The Fog 1980

I hadn't watched The Fog in a number of years. I had forgotten enough of the details that it was nearly new. John Carpenter directed and co-wrote the script with Producer Debra Hill. John does the music too. The fog rolls in on a small coastal town an the killing starts. Jamie Lee Curtis is hitchhiking and Tom Atkins picks her up. They arrive in town the night the killing starts. We meet some people in the town the night the killing starts. Some of them get murdered the night the killing starts. Some dead guys come to do the killing. On that same night. Hal Holbrook is the local Father, he figures out what's going on but it won't save his life. This is a movie that kills priests and old ladies. Still, it's mostly entertaining as the locals fall foul of the returning dead. Sad for them. There's a fairly good commentary on the movie with John Carpenter and Debra Hill.

The Sweeney 2012

I was curious to see The Sweeney, a 2012 film adaptation of the Original Series, because I had spent so much time on that OS recently. If I hadn't I might have liked the movie a lot more. Director Nick Love co-wrote the script with John Lodge. I thought their script was weak and not very interesting. I was really kind of pissed when they had Regan take some gold from the heist site in the first big robbery scene. It's not the sort of thing that the original Jack Regan would do. He's the kind of guy who hated bent cops. It like Nick and John took a big dump in the script for me to step in and I'm not caring that much for that.

Ray Winstone plays Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Rapper Plan B, under his real name Ben Drew, plays George Carter. Ray's a good actor for some parts, he's got the tough part down fine, but I think he's too old for Regan, he's 55 and John Thaw was 33. The Flying Squad is a young man's game. Ben's he's OK but he's no Dennis Waterman. The rest of the cast were fine enough.

The production values were fine, all that sort of thing. I'm just not buying it as The Sweeney of old. Perhaps it's the story is based on the real Flying Squad, the one that was corrupt and got cleaned out. Sadly they attached the old series to this new story. I'll file this DVD away but it's doubtful that I'll get back to it again.

Saturday Live - Fry And Laurie, Harry Enfield And Ben Elton

The third set of clips from Saturday Live has three discs, one each for Fry And Laurie, Ben Elton and Harry Enfield. A bit of the material is also on the first two Saturday Live sets but it's not that much. Each disc has about 2.5 hours of sketches and stand up. I watched the whole of the Fry and Laurie disc and enjoyed that. I got bogged down on the Ben Elton stand up bits and bailed about 80% of the way through the disc. I'll watch it tomorrow. I did like his satirical political commentary but he does go on. I liked the sketches that he was in. I skipped a good bit of the Harry Enfield disc. I'm not much of a Harry fan.

Jack The Giant Killer 1962

I watched the Blu-ray of the 1962 fantasy adventure film Jack The Giant Killer. Producer Edward Small had wanted to cash in on some of the money that the 1958 Charles H Schneer and Ray Harryhausen film The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad was making. He hired that film's director, hero and villian but didn't hire Ray Harryhausen. Ray said he tried to see Small at one time but the guy wasn't interested. Happens all the time.

Nathan Juran directed and he co-wrote the screenplay with Orville H Hampton. Orville wrote the original story. Nathan only directed 2 dozen movies but some of them are popular genre favorites. You might have seen 20 Million Miles To Earth, Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman, The Deadly Mantis, The Brian From Planet Arous and First Men In The Moon. Not all great films but often entertaining. Nathan worked on several TV shows, directing episodes on Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, The Time Tunnel, Lost In Space, Land Of The Giants and Daniel Boone. He retired in the early 70s and lived nearly 30 years, he passed away in 2002 at age 95. Orville has an impressive list of credits in TV and film.

Kerwin Matthews is the Jack in the title, he's a farmer who rescues the King's daughter from being kidnapped by a giant beast and a twisted toady. Judy Meredith plays the daughter Elaine and Dayton Lummis plays the King. Torin Thatcher plays the main villain, the wizard Pendragon and Walter Burke plays the twisted toady Garna. The King hires Jack to take his daughter to a convent across the sea. Pendragon sends glowy witches to attack the ship and steal the Princess. The crew mutiny after the Captain is killed, they toss Jack and the Captain;s son Peter into the sea.

Lucky for Jack and Peter, they are rescued by a Viking. The Viking has a bottle with an Imp inside. If Jack will promise to release him from the bottle he will give Jack three wishes. They will come in handy when fighting Pendragon. The trio continue on to Pendragon's island castle to try to rescue the Princess. There's some fighting and plenty of colorful characters and lots of effects. The Princess gets rescued a couple of times before we get some happy endings.

I enjoyed the movie, I'd last seen it on TCM several years ago and the copy I have was pretty fuzzy. The Kino Lorber Blu-ray looks pretty good. I'm not too fond of some of the stop-motion figures, they just aren't as well sculpted as you'd get from Ray. The commentary by Tim Lucas mentions some of the problems the production had, mostly caused by Small's cheapness and jobbing the work out to less than stellar film makers. So it goes, huh. The disc also has a musical version of the movie. It sounds so horrible that I didn't watch it. The only other extras are some trailers, one of which was for this movie.

Terror In The Crypt 1964

Someone mentioned Terror In The Crypt on Facebook and I didn't think I had seen it before. I looked at my Watched Movie List and it said no. I ordered the Retromedia Double The Horror DVD, the other movie is Slaughter Of The Vampires. I'd seen that last April and blogged about it then.

The movie has so many names that a guy would get fatigued kicking all the name changers in the nut sacks. My favorite is the German title Ein Toter hing am Glockenseil which translates to A Dead Man Hung On The Bell Rope. Literally true. There's a dead man on a bell rope in the movie.

The movie is Italian and it came out in 1964. I don't know anything about the Italian film makers, director Camillo Mastrocinque and writers Tonino Valerii and Ernesto Gastaldi, but it doesn't really matter.The movie is based on Camilla by Sheridan Le Fanu.

Christopher Lee plays Count Karnstein and everybody else is unknown to me. The Count hires a man to restore some books. The Count hopes to find some info about his ancestor who he thinks might have possessed his daughter. That's her on the left above. There are some murders and the women get in some good amount of yelling and crying. It moves along slowly as the mystery of the murders is revealed and I was pretty much interested until the last third, then I was getting kind of interested in the end of the movie. I gave it a 5 anyway. I wasn't sorry to have seen it or bought it, at least I can say I've seen it. It might be a while before I get back to it. I've certainly seen better vampire films.

The Franchise Affair 1951

I didn't know anything about The Franchise Affair when I found a copy on Amazon while looking for something else. It's a 1951 British crime movie that's based on a Josephine Tey novel of the same name. I haven't read that book, nor can I remember ever reading any Josephine Tey. I see that she died the year after this movie came out. The Wikipedia says there were TV adaptations of the novel, one in 1962 and the other in 1988. Rosalie Crutchley played the daughter in the 1962 version and the mother in the 1988 version. There was a 2005 radio adaptation. The Wikipedia didn't mention this 1970 radio version.

The movie was written by Robert Hall and director Lawrence Huntington. Robert has only 6 other credits for writing on the IMDb and I can't say I know any of them. That's the trouble with foreign cinema, often it's been hard to see, what with being so far away. Lawrence directed 31 other films and a fair bit of TV. He directed 6 episodes of The Adventures Of Sir Lancelot, which I've seen and enjoyed, but I can't say I find the titles of his films familiar. I would like to see Night Boat To Dublin because it has Robert Newton in it and not as a pirate. I just added it to my Want List on Amazon UK. Someday it will be here to see. I'll tell you about it.

That's Michael Denison as Robert Blair, Dulcie Gray and Marjorie Fielding as Marion Sharpe and her mother Mrs Sharpe. The women are the accused and Robert is the solicitor they go to for help. In real life Michael and Dulcie are married. Back in the movie the Sharpe women live in an old house called The Franchise. They inherited it from a relative and they live there with little money. The Franchise has high stone walls and a gate with metal panels, you can't see the house from the road. Ann Stephens plays Betty Kane, she claims that the two women gave her a lift in the rain and then kidnapped her to be their servant. She's seen running down the road at the start of the movie. She gets a lift home and tells her mother the story of her kidnapping. The police are called in and it looks poorly for the Sharpe women. The two keep to themselves and ignorant people gossip. Mrs Sharpe has been called a witch. Soon as the kidnap story breaks the Sharpes start receiving hate mail and rocks through their windows.

Nasty words are painted on the wall at The Franchise and the local handymen say they are too busy to help. Michael enlists the help of his friends Kenneth More and Patrick Troughton for a bit of painting. They suffer an attack from the ignorant locals, punches are thrown and windows broken. The good guys drive the scum off before anyone is too badly hurt. Kenneth took a bottle to the head but he'll be OK. That's them up above. Michael starts digging and bit by bit he starts to put together what really happened to Betty. Turns out she's a lying little bitch and nowhere near as clever as she thought.

It's definitely a slow paced film but there's a great script that keeps me interested. The actors are more than up to the parts. I think anyone who liked a bit of a mystery and some smooth law talking would like this movie. Sure glad I bought it and I'll watch it again. I bought it from Amazon Global through Amazon US and it cost me $8.62 including shipping. It's a British DVD and you need a PC running VLC player or a multi region DVD to play it. No prob here. The sad thing was it took 5 weeks to get to me, still, well worth the wait.

Treasure Island 1950

I was going through my old home made DVDs and decided to order a copy of Treasure Island to replace the so-so copy from TCM. It came today and I watched it this afternoon. It's fun watching poor Jim Hawkins get tricked by Long John Silver. Makes me laugh. I like Robert Newton but I'm not as fond of Bobby Driscoll as Jim. He isn't in the sequel Return To Treasure Island. I watched that recently and enjoyed it. TI is directed by Byron Haskins and he does a great job. I know I'll be watching this again sometime, though probably not so soon.

Science Fiction Sunday 520

I watched a couple of disc of UFO and the episodes were somewhat better than the previous batch. There's an origin show but it's tainted with too much melodrama with Striker and his failed marriage. His wife, thinking his long hours are due to an affair, decides to leave him. While arguing on the stairs Ed slaps his wife when she won't listen to him. She falls down the stairs and it's all touch and go at the hospital. I can't seem to catch a break with Striker, the more I see of him, the less I like him. There's a commentary with Ed Bishop, who plays Striker, but it's not that good, after a while he forgets to talk. They should have had someone there to moderate. I was happy to see a really young Susan Jameson in one episode. That's her in SHADO HQ in a shiny dress. Some might have seen her in New Tricks where she played Alun Armstrong's wife. She's actually married to another New Tricks cast member, James Bolam. Only 2 more discs to go.

Edgar Wallace Double Feature

I watched Circus of Fear about 3 years ago. I liked it but didn't have a copy. It's also called Psycho-Circus here in the US. I found the Blue Underground Edgar Wallace Double Feature Blu-ray for cheap enough and picked it up.There doesn't seem to be much connection to any Edgar Wallace novel but movies of his books were popular in Germany.

Today I watched the film with subtitles and the director's commentary. John Llewellyn Moxley joins a guy from Blue Underground to talk about the movie. John's got a few interesting things to say and I enjoyed the commentary for the second time.

The second movie is Five Golden Dragons which I had also seen but didn't have. Like the first movie it was produced by Harry Allan Towers. He had put together a deal with a German company to make films. They sent Klaus Kinski and a couple of other German actors.

Five Golden Dragons came out in 1967 and Harry wrote the screenplay under the name of Peter Welbeck. The director was Jeremy Summers who directed plenty of British TV that I've seen, shows like The Saint, The Baron, Jason King, UFO, The Protectors and All Creatures Great And Small.

Bob Cummings is some sort of playboy who gets involved with a secret criminal organization called the Five Golden Dragons. There's plenty of walking and talking as the story meanders around Hong Kong. There's a couple of pretty girls, Margaret Lee and Maria Rohm, involved somehow. Roy Chiao is an Inspector, he comes to investigate the suicide, and stays for the criminal gang. Brian Donlevy, Dan Duryea, Christopher Lee and George Raft are 4 of the Five Golden Dragons but who's the fifth. I enjoyed it, it has a bit of humor, some interesting characters and some crime. It's kind of pokey but still fun. I'd watch both of these again someday.

Friday Night Movies 711

Alien Predators is the title on the Blu-ray, the movie says the title is The Falling, the IMDb says that the title is Alien Predator. It's also known as Mutant in the UK and in Spain & Mexico it was known as Cosmos Mortal. The movie came out in 1986 and Deran Sarafian is the director, he also co-wrote the thing with Noah Bloch. Deran turned out to be so piss poor at his job, the rest of the film makers weren't much better, and the film went over schedule and over budget. The cost was passed onto Producer Carlos Aured and he quit the movie business. In the early 70s he worked on several films with Paul Naschy. Alien Predators was so well received that it's Opening Weekend Gross was $2,554. That's total, not per screen. Amazingly Deran made 7 more movies over the next 8 years, none I think I've seen, before he switched to TV work. I'd seen a bit of that.

From the IMDb Trivia Page: Early on Michael does a Rod Serling impression of the Twilight Zone style monologues. Later a talking doll declares itself to be Talky Tina, which is a nod to a famous episode of Twilight Zone, Living Doll, which director Deran Sarafian's father, Richard C. Sarafian directed. 

Dennis Christopher, Martin Hewitt and Lynn-Holly Johnson are a trio of annoying 20 somethings traveling through Spain in a mobile home. They stop beside a small town only to find that alien organisms are killing the locals. There's a bit of bullshit on why that's going on. The trio get caught up in this, a scientist from NASA has an antidote and he needs their help. The poor acting and script make the movie a bit tedious. The makeup effects are a bit better but not much more than average. The movie scores a 3.3 on the IMDb and I gave it a 3.

Krampus Origins is a 2018 horror movie set during the First World War. The Germans are summoning a demon when the American soldiers arrive. One of the soldiers steals the spell book. They don't seem to post guards around their outpost and the German's come in and shoot them. The book remains with the man's affects and winds up in the hands of his wife. She's just taken a teaching job at an orphanage in the Arizona Territories. Someone looked it up, Arizona was a state by then. It's the little details that often fuck a movie up it's own ass. It did give us something to talk about while the movie was boring along. The book falls into the wrong hands and the demon is called. It's sadly nothing as good as the Krampus on the DVD case. The movie is kind of dull and the music and sound are annoying. I gave it a 1, it might be more a 2 but I'm sticking to my vote. Like the first movie tonight, I'm not going to buy this one. So far most of the Krampus movies have been crap. Only the 2015 Krampus has been entertaining so far.