PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Murdoch Mysteries Season 13

Murdoch Mysteries Season 13 aired at the end of 2019 and into 2020, the show is currently near the end of broadcasting the 15th Season. I got the Season 13 Blu-ray some time ago and finally got around to watching it. Like the previous Blu-ray sets the picture is fine. There's little by way of extras, a short Q&A with Yannick Bisson and Daniel Maslany, that was recorded from a live stream by Acorn TV. Nice enough but nothing special there really.

There are 18 episodes and they still maintain a high quality of writing, there's some good amount of mystery in the murders, some humor, some serious personal drama, scads of social commentary and a good bit of delightful wackiness.

Detective Murdoch and Doctor Ogden get stalked by a monster in the Halloween episode, George Crabtree has his new book published and goes on a book tour, Doctor Ogden gets arrested for murder, the Inspector goes on a fox hunt that starts with a dead body and Murdoch gets arrested for murder. Some of those stories deal with morality but it's not heavy handed enough to be bothersome. I enjoyed the episodes, especially the more humorous ones. I look forward to Season 14, that's up next. It's a show that I can binge several episodes in a day.

The Silent Partner 1978

The Silent Partner 1978 Based on the novel Think Of A Number by Anders Bodelsen, screenplay by Curtis Hanson, directed by Daryl Duke. A Canadian movie shot and set in Toronto.

Elliott Gould is a bank teller who discovers a hold up note on a deposit slip. He suspects someone is going to rob the bank and got scared away. Turns out he was right, Christopher Plummer, working as a mall Santa, has the plan. It works too, he gets a bag of money from Elliot and gets away. Christopher is really pissed when he finds that Elliott has glommed onto a large chuck of cash and blamed it on him. A big part of the movie that follows is devoted to Christopher trying to convince Elliott to part with the cash. Elliott refuses and things get ugly, Chris turns out to be a violent psychopath. After hearing the cash info on the news Christopher beats up a young woman for no reason.

Another chunk of the movie is devoted to Elliot's love life and the goings on among the bank staff. Many of the characters are morally ambivalent, there's a lot of cheating going on in their lives. Soon the two streams mix and people start to die. It becomes a fight to the finish. The cast was fairly good, Susannah York does alright as Elliott's main romantic interest, John Candy has a tiny part, as does another SCTV alum, Tony Rosato. The script was fairly decent in moving all the characters around but I found some of their personal melodrama to be a bit tedious. The film plods along using 106 mins to tell the story. It does pick up in the last act. My lack of interest in the characters only makes it slightly above average for me. It might have been a more effective thriller in 1978 though I don't think it's better than Marathon Man which came out a couple of years before. That's a much more tense thriller. I bought the Blu-ray and I might want to watch it again someday. 

Saskdutch Kid

I've been enjoying the farm videos of Saskdutch Kid. He's Jan Kielstra and his family have been farming near Saskatoon Saskatchewan since 1996. You can read more about Jan here and see his YouTube videos here. The woman in the picture is Jan's sister Neline, she works on the farm and has her own YouTube Channel. Between them you can learn a lot about dairy farming.

Friday Night Movies 841

Possessor 2020 Written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

Andrea Risenborough works as an assassin, Jennifer Jason Leigh is her handler. They have a process, they kidnap people, put a chip in their brains, Andrea takes over the host body and uses it to kill her target. After the hit is done all she has to do is kill the loaner body and jump back into her body. It seems an inefficient process, the kidnapping business and killing two for the price of one, but it does eliminate the assassin making a mistake and leaving a trace of evidence on the scene.

As the movie open Andrea is on the job and rather than shoot the target she knifes the man and stabs him repeatedly. Then she can't kill the host, instead letting the police shoot her down. Jennifer is a bit worried on that but there's a big job in the offing and she wants Andrea to do it. Andrea's having some mental issues from from being inside those other heads so much and Jennifer would really like to see her disassociate herself from her husband and son.

The hit on the rich guy and his daughter starts with the kidnapping of the daughter's fiance. He works for the father who really doesn't care for him. The remote controlled fiance starts a short program of odd activity with the family which might explain why he cracked and killed father and daughter. Andrea gets through some of the day to day pretty well and does the hit. The daughter dies but daddy is in a comma. To top that fail, Andrea can't force her host to kill himself.

The fiance's personality becomes aware of her presence and disables the chip, now she's trapped in his head. The fiance battles with Andrea for control and things get worse and worse. Jennifer sends a guy to help but the fiance kills him. Andrea's family suffers the same fate when the fiance visits them. The fiance kills the husband and Jennifer uses the process to take over Andrea's son and uses him to stab the fiance, the son is killed before the fiance dies. Now Jennifer's got her main assassin free of that pesky family stone around her neck.

It's a fairly good movie about some really horrible people. My only complaint is the evil corp, not a fan of that overused plot element. I'm not going to rush out to buy the Blu-ray, I'm unlikely to ever want to watch it again. I'd be more likely to order our second movie.

Uncle Peckerhead 2020 I watched this last December on Amazon Prime and posted about it here. Other's hadn't seen it and they enjoyed it as much as I did seeing it again. I've got the Blu-ray on my Amazon Wish List and hope to see the price fall a bit.

Friday Night Movies 839

VFW 2019 Screenplay by Max Braillier and Matthew McArdle, directed by Joe Begos.

Stephen Lang is the bartender at the VFW post, William Sadler, Fred Williamson, Martin Kove, David Patrick Kelly and George Wendt are his old Army pals. They come to the bar to drink and hang out. It's nothing special but it's a place for them. That all gets interrupted by the arrival of a young girl, she's stolen a big bag of drugs from a psychopath drug dealer. He sees her run off with the stash and sends his younger brother and a few henchmen to get her back.

The thugs rush the bar and David Patrick Kelly goes down with an axe in the shoulder, nearly all the thugs are killed including the psychopath's little brother. The psychopath sends an small horde of fucked up drug addicts to kill them. There's plenty of action, oodles of body parts hacked and sent flying. It's a battle to the end and hardly anyone comes out alive at the end.

I enjoyed it, a good solid action film with a great cast. It had a nice, dark sense of humor, good gore, and a great score. My only complaint is the action was in the fast jump cutting style and I'm not as big a fan of that. I'd still watch it again. Worth a look for the fans of that sort of thing.

Psycho Goreman 2020 I watched it a month or so ago and posted about it on FNM. It's still funny and Mimi is still an asshole.

Science Fiction Sunday 637

Out Of Time 2019 Written and directed by Matt Handy. Found on Amazon Prime, as were all of today's films. AP lists the movie as a 2021 release but that's a big lie or it's just some incompetant bullshit. I could believe either.

Three aliens in human form escape from a secret government secure site in Nevada  in the 1960s, they time travel to Los Angeles in the modern day. Nadège August is a police detective, as we meet her she helps an old confused man get home. He warns her of trouble ahead. She returns home to find her fiance is banging someone from the office.

Back in the past Blake Boyd is a government man who works with the alien incarceration project. He goes after the aliens even though he knows that the trip is going to kill him. He lands in LA and pretends to be a police Lieutenant to get some assistance from LAPD. He gets assigned the woman cop who helped the old man. Blake does a good job playing the fish out of water, mystified by some of the new things he sees. 

The pair hunt the trio of aliens. They aren't that hard to find, they leave a trail of bodies. The trip through time has affected their bodies too, they need new ones and they don't care who they kill. They really hate the humans and want to kill as many as they can. Since there are no spaceships on the planet they decide to build a transmitter to contact their armada. Then the human's will fall under their powerful onslaught.

It's a race to figure out what the aliens are doing and how to stop them. There's some fighting, plenty of driving about in cars, and a good story to back it all up. This is one of those little gems that I'm always hoping to run across in the low budget or Indy film. Nice to see waiting paid off.

The Starving Games 2013 Written and directed by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. A parody of The Hunger Games that's really hit or miss on the gags. It's got a 3.2 on the IMDb and that's not too far off for me.

The Northlander 2016 Written and directed by Benjamin Ross Hayden. This was on AP under the title The Last Warriors, with a 2020 release date. It was annoying to find a listing for the film under that title, too bad there are so many other films with a similar title. AP, you are an idiot.

A Canadian film made in and around Calgary Alberta. Benjamin is a Métis film director, writer, producer, and actor based in Alberta. It was his first film, he had another SF film last year and a third in post-production. This production has many Native Americans in the cast and crew.

It's after a big collapse and there are few people left anymore. Corey Sevier is the hunter for a tribe called Last Arc. He must go further and further for game. There's a problem protecting the tribe as some scumbags have been seen in the area. They are part of a rival tribe that pillages and kills for spoil. Corey has to make a voyage to discover something. He has some help and some hindrance along the way. He manages to find a hidden store of knowledge but the baddies turn up and nearly ruin everything.

Despite the overused story line I did enjoy the movie for the most part. It's about average, down a little here and there for the dialog, up a bit here and there for the nice scenic shots, down a bit for the melodrama but up a bit for the costumes and sets. Worth a look for the fan of PA films and SF.

Corner Gas Animated Season 3

Someone told me that Season 3 of Corner Gas Animated was on Amazon Prime. It's a AP deal with IMDb TV and all three seasons are free to watch with commercials. There's a couple short ad breaks in each episode. The original series of Corner Gas is also available. I'd highly recommend both series and the movie. There's plenty of laughs, fun characters and silly antics galore. 

Science Fiction Sunday 633

The Fare 2018 Written by Brinna Kelly and directed by DC Hamilton. I'd seen DC's first film The Midnight Man and enjoyed that well enough to check this out when I saw it listed on Amazon Prime. Brinna c0-wrote TMM with DC. On this movie she's the star, the producer, caterer and driver. The movie is mostly set in a Yellow Cab and entire film was shot in 6 days.

Harris Caron is a cab driver, he's on a dark lonely road, he's got to pick up a fare. He's listening to the radio talk about time travelling aliens when he finds her by the roadside. Brinna plays Penny. Harris drives off, heading to her destination,  Elm and River Drive. They chat to pass the time. There's an electrical storm in the air, lightening in the distance. Penny disappears out of the backseat when his eyes are distracted by the storm. Harris calls dispatch and tells him his fare disappeared, the dispatched tells him to head back to town and not to forget to reset the meter. Harris does and he's back on the road listening to the same radio broadcast from earlier in the film. He picks up Penny all over again.

Some might be tempted to say it's a dark Groundhog Day but it's not. It's much more complex and interesting than that. The script is good and there's some nice camera work and direction. I'm normally one to get bored with a couple of characters bottled up together, especially once there's not much going on. The Fare kept my interest, I'd want to see it again sometime. There doesn't seem to be a DVD or I'd order one.

Exit Humanity 2011 Written and directed by John Geddes. A zombie film set at the end of the Civil War. It was also on AP. It's Canadian with a minuscule budget of $300,000 Canadian. Geddes does a good job capturing the past for no money.

A young man narrates his survival during the resurrection of the dead. Mark Gibson plays Edward, the young man, on screen, Brian Cox narrates his story as an older man. Edward's family is turned and he has to kill them. He's disturbed and sets off wondering, killing any zombie he runs across. I found the first act of the film fairly engrossing, once Edward encounters other living it becomes more like a lot of films with a loner and a local war lord.

Bill Moseley plays General Williams, he's organized some men, dug in and taken control of an area. They fight the zombies, capturing some for experimentation on by a doctor played by Stephen McHattie. Edward meets up with a man called Isaac who talks Edward into helping him rescue his sister from Williams. When Edward gets caught by Williams, Isaac is hiding in the woods, later he manages to rescue Edward and his sister from the underground compound. They come across Dee Wallace and learn a whole lot of backstory.

The rest of the movie is the big tussle with Williams. It's all fairly well done and I was entertained more than I often am with these low budget zombie films. I might not need the DVD but I might watch it again someday.

Friday Night Movies 832

Needful Things 1993 Based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, screenplay by WD Richter, directed by Fraser C Heston.

Ed Harris is the sheriff of Castle Rock, Bonnie Bedelia is his girlfriend, Max Von Sydow is a demon. Max has opened an antique shop in Castle Rock. He's got great stuff and the price is cheap, in cash. It's the favors Max wants, those have a great cost. It's why I don't go to antique shops.

I hadn't seen it before, I bought the DVD some time back but it's just been sitting in a box waiting to get watched for a good long while. I'm endeavoring to clean out that box and get those DVDs put in their final resting place other boxes.

I liked the characters and the script was fairly decent. I thought it poked along at the beginning, I'm not always a fan of the melodrama that fills in between the interesting bits before the real action starts. Once Max gets to manipulating the locals things get more interesting, more often. Nice production values, I watch so many low budget films, it's a welcome change to see some money on the screen.

I was glad I picked up the DVD, I enjoyed it more than many SK adaptations. It certainly has a better sense of humor than a lot of the films made from his books. Books that I haven't ever read. I liked it enough to think I might actually try to get back to it some time in the future. Typically, I seem to have liked it more than the critics did when it came out. Oh, well, nothing new there.

Tomorrow I'm going to watch the extended TV version of the film, then I probably don't need to see it for a while. That's good, that box of DVDs aren't going to watch themselves. They have no hands, how could they work the DVD player. The TV version is just over 3 hours long. You can watch the original in the title link above and the long version here.

Psycho Goreman 2020 Written and directed by Steven Kostanski. It's a Canadian film and Steve is part of the Astron-6 Production Company. His previous films include Manborg, Father's Day, The Void and Leprechaun Returns. This isn't an Astron-6 release, it's on the RLJE Films label. They produce a lot of genre TV and film. You can stream PG on Shudder and it just come out on Blu-ray.

That girl in the picture, that's Mimi, she's a real fuckin' asshole. The kid to the left is her brother Luke, she mistreats him something fierce. Mimi mistreats most everyone, she's loud and selfish, she wants her own way and no one can tell her what to do. After a deadly game of Crazy Ball, Luke has to dig his own grave in the back yard. Luke strikes a coffin like box that's got a glowing red jewel on it. Mimi gloms onto that. They get scared when purple light pours out of the coffin.They fill in the hole just in time to go to bed.

The next day the dirt is out of the hole and soon after we meet the Arch-duke of Nightmares. He's been sealed in the coffin for a long time, placed there by The Templars, the powerful alien beings that defeated him and stopped his galaxy destroying rampage. Mimi doesn't care about his backstory but the flashbacks to his past were quite entertaining. Mimi renames him Psycho Goreman, or PG for short, after it turns out that the glowing jewel gives her complete control over him. Now starts the Arch-duke's nightmare. She bosses him about and he threatens her with a slow torturous death. Mimi soon has PG out on the town and some of the locals aren't always fairing too well after their encounter with an alien.

More crazy things happen and there are plenty of laughs. There's a fair bit of gore and the make up effects are mostly pretty good. The film looks great considering it had a budget of $1,500,000 Canadian dollars. Money well spent. I sure plan to watch it over again.

Canada's Worst Handyman Season 2

Canada's Worst Handyman Season 2 is about the same as the first season. Five hapless amateur handymen, two are women handymen, bash and crash their way to the end of the series and one of them is crowned the worst Handyman in Canada. The jumped to 9 episodes, from season 1's 7 episodes, and it was a bit of a stretch. They went to 8 in the 3rd season and 7 in the remaining three seasons. This time the contestants are building sheds and other projects. The shed's have to be a certain size and only one of the contestants made them shorter than the max allowed roof height. They later had to take their sheds out of the build ares and the door is only 9 foot 2 inches. One had had her shed nearly 12 feet tall. I got a few laughs as a sped my way through the series on YouTube.