PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

The Key Man 1957

The Key Man is another film from Network's The British Film series. It came out in 1957 and was known as Life At Stake in the US. It's based on a play by J McLaren Ross, he wrote the screenplay and the director was Montgomery Tully. I didn't recognize anything by J McLaren and I have only seen a couple of Montgomery's numerous films, Battle Beneath The Earth and The Terrornauts were his last two films, I've seen them and they were watchable, average but entertaining. I have one of his other films, The Counterfeit Plan, in my to watch pile.

In The Key Man Lee Patterson is a crime radio show host, he's on the trail of the loot from an old robbery. I didn't remember Lee being on Surfside 6 but I do know I watched that series back when it was new. Lee's Canadian, I didn't know that either, and he worked in the US and Britain. He appeared in episodes of shows like The Avengers, Combat!, Perry Mason, The Virginian, and The Alaskans.

Back in the movie, the crook who absconded with the loot has just gotten out of prison. Lee goes hunting for him and runs into another interested party. They're after the loot and they'll toss some violence at our poor Lee. Nothing really special here, average with a decent script that moves along at a nice brisk pace, it's only 63 minutes so there's not much time for shenanigans. Glad to have seen it. I'd look at it again sometime.

Murdoch Mysteries Season 11

Season 11 of Murdoch Mysteries has another 18 episodes and they started airing in September 2017. There was a third Christmas Special called Home For The Holidays. They sure don't apply the same quality to the Blu-Ray covers that they do the series. Those are the same pictures and they aren't the only covers that the pictures appear on.

The 10th season ended with Murdoch in jail, his wife, Dr Ogden, was kidnapped, Inspector Brackenreid is missing, Constable Crabtree and two other officers were shot down in a church. All that only takes an hour to clean up then it's back to the usual stuff. Murdock and the coppers have cases involving the Ontario wine industry, Helen Keller, organ transplants, a high speed underground train and a cooking contest. One episode takes place in real time during a car accident. A poor man is pinned against the train by the car, if they move the car he'll die.

Besides Helen Keller the show gets a visit from Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Roosevelt and the Jolson Brothers. There are some good laughs and some sad stuff, usually with a bit of moral message. I could do with less of the sad stuff but there you go. That's what the fast forward button is for.

The Christmas Special finds Murdoch and Dr Ogden visiting Murdoch's brother on Victoria Island. They get involved with an archeologist's murder and wind up in the middle of a dispute between the Songhees and Haida. When Dr Ogden and her niece's autopsy the family dog the girl's mom wigs out. It's a nice mix of drama and comedy. I'll have a long wait until I get season 12.

Murdoch Mysteries Season 10

Murdoch Mysteries Season 10 aired in 2016 and 2017 and I just got around to buying the set. I waited for the Blu-ray set to fall in price and it finally got to a price I felt was good. I usually have a bunch of seasons of TV programs on my Amazon wish list and check them regularly for price drops. There are 18 episodes on 4 discs and a few making of featurettes. I hadn't even mentioned the series before but I have been a fan for a while. I just don't have the time to post about everything. I liked them enough to buy the Blu-rays and I hardly have any TV shows on Blu-ray. 

As usual the series delivered 18 episodes that were entertaining and filled with action and comedy. There's plenty of murder and detecting. There's a massive cliff hanger at the end. Who's dead? We'll see when I watch Season 11. Lucky for me it arrived today.

Trailer Park Boys Series 7

I've been looking at the brick of Trailer Park Boys DVDs on my currently watching pile and thinking I should get that set finished and put it away. Season 7 was the last that the guys did before the long 7 year hiatus. The 10 episodes aired from April to June of 2007. It's trouble as usual at the Sunnyvale Trailer Park. Ricky and Julian are trying to make some money by selling stolen meat. Lucy is pregnant. Julian takes a pizza delivering job until he joins J-Roc and his gang in stealing bags at the airport. Ricky figures out Lucy's baby isn't his. A couple of the local cops try to kill Mr Lahey and he fucks them up good. There's plenty of drinking and swearing and laughs as everyone fucks up everything they touch. I'll get onto Season 8 soon.

4 On The Floor - The Frantics

Back in the 80s there was a Canadian sketch comedy show called 4 Of The Floor. It was written and acted by the comedy group The Frantics. Paul Chato, Peter Wildman, Rick Green and Dan Redican  formed the group in 1979. They did some radio, had their own show after a while, they did an album and a TV pilot. In 1986 they did one series of 4 On The Floor, 13 episodes and no more. I thought they were pretty funny when they were new. I had poor copies on VHS but it wasn't the full series. You can see the show on YouTube in the link above, all 13 eps. They aren't HD quality but you can see what's going on just fine.

The humor is pretty goofy at times, they definitely have an off the wall sense of humor that I like. The Wikipedia says some bits remind them of Monty Python's Flying Circus or The Goon Show. I think if you liked those shows, you might well get a giggle from these funny Canadian boys. Rick and Peter would also go on to appear on The Red Green Show.

Science Fiction Sunday 495

Pete Winning And The Pirates is a 2015 post apocalypse film. There was a 2013 TV show with the same name. It ran a dozen episodes and there hasn't been anymore. After seeing the movie I can only imagine that the viewers were mostly as disappointed as I was. Everything about the movie sucks and Pete Winning should be called Pete Losing. He's a big fuckin' loser. He doesn't do much of anything right or intelligently. It's supposed to be a comedy but it was lacking on jokes. It's supposed to be a swashbuckler but there's little entertaining in these fights. A lot of the actors are pretty amateurish. Nothing worth seeing here. I can't imagine anyone would buy the DVD is see listed on Amazon. Unless they plan to destroy the copy. That would save someone else seeing it.

Space People is another movie I wouldn't buy. It might have a better concept that the first, fish out of water aliens, but the execution is weak and sloppy. I think it's intentionally made to look cheap and all but it just looks kind of stupid. Once you get to the script and acting the movie takes a big punch. Adam Griswold wrote, directed and starred in the movie. His script writing, acting and directing is all below average. It's got a joke or two but not much was funny. If you haven't ever seen any of the current SF comedies out there you might get more laughs but there's just rehashed humor here, and it isn't that funny. I was hoping to like it more.

Friday Night Movies 681

Blood Harvest is a 1987 film by low-budget Wisconsin director William Rebane. I've seen other of his films but not on Blu-Ray. Not surprisingly, the better video format doesn't help his film out much, it's still a fair bit below average. Especially in the script department, and that's with 2 people, Chris Vaalar and William Arthur, writing the story, and two people, Ben Benson and Emil Joseph, writing the screenplay. Rebane does his own camera work under the Ito moniker and he's more competent there. Pedestrian but competent.

The only actors in the cast I had heard of before were Tiny Tim and Peter Krause. The only thing I remember seeing Peter in was Six Feet Under. I looked at his IMDb listings and I'd also seen him in The Lost Room back in 2006. He's from the area, raised in Roseville, and 1987 was the year he graduated college. According to the Wikipedia it's Peter's first feature film role and Tiny's first starring role. Bill saw him at a 1985 beer carnival and thought he'd be just right for this film.

Blood Harvest is the first film where Rebane switched to more adult content. Previously his films were more PG or G rated. This has some good amount of nudity, mostly from the main lead Itonia Salchek, and some gore scenes. Itonia plays a college student returning home to her small Wisconsin farm town during a time when the farmer's were losing their farms to the bank. Being low-intellect havin' Wisconsinites they've taken to harassing the bank manager and people of authority. She returns to find her parents missing, the house vandalized and someone lurking about in the bushes. The sheriff is no help. There's the usual sort of running about and yelling you'd expect in a slasher film. There's nothing much good to say, a little nudity and some gore don't make a movie. There's the ungodly pall of the script hanging over everyone's head. It's not a film I'm going to need to add to my stack of rewatchables. That's OK, it's getting to be such a large stack already.

Loch Ness Terror is a giant monster TV movie that aired on the SyFy Channel January 5 2008. It's written by director Paul Ziller and Jason Bourque. In the opening scene we see some men attacked by a plesiosaur at Loch Ness. The only survivor is a young boy, his dad was eaten. Now years later the boy is all grown up an he's come to Lake Superior chasing Nessie. The locals don't believe him until people start disappearing and the monster leaves chunks of lunch lying around. The monster has some babies and they prove to be easily killable. Mom, on the other had has to be blown up with explosive magnetite. The script doesn't have the dialog issues like our previous movie but it makes up for that with technical doltery. It does have a lot of monster action and running around. The CGI is low rez TV quality. It gets the job done but never gets stellar. There are dozens of this sort of monster movie on the IMDb, this is no better or worse than many of them.

Trailer Park Boys Season 6

The 6th season of Trailer Park Boys came out back in April and May 2006 and there were 6 episodes. While I was in Winnipeg last month I was sad to see a segment on the local news about the death of John Dunsworth who played Mr Lahey on the program. In season 6 Mr Lahey turns his life around in order to get his own back on Ricky, Julian and Bubbles. He actually get reinstated in the police. I can't imagine that will last. Julian has some luck this season, he's made some money selling home brew in prison, he buys a trailer and works on fixing it up. Ricky doesn't do much to getting his life turned around but he manages to stay out of jail this season. Bubbles does well with his kitten sitting service and Sarah, Cory and Trevor have opened a "Convenients Store". There's a problem with a chicken but that all works itself out and Trinity graduates grade six. You need your grade six. I got a few laughs and was sad there were only 6 episodes. Lucky for me, there are 5 more seasons to go.

Really Weird Tales 1987

I lucked out today and found a copy of the DVD of Really Weird Tales at Half Price Books. I almost bought it at the Kino Lorber sale. I didn't save that much over the sale price of the brand new DVD but a couple of bucks buys another movie and the used DVD was clean as a whistle. I had a DVDr of RWT that I copied off an old VHS tape back in 2005 and that doesn't look that good. Now I have a nice looking version of the HBO TV program that parodied shows like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. The three episodes, produced in 1987, run about 88 minutes. That was one of the nice things about HBO, no commercials. Really Weird Tales is a little SCTV like, which isn't surprising, since many of it's cast and crew are working on this new project.

Joe and David Flaherty wrote most of the scripts, with John McAndrew and Catherine O'Hara working on a script each. Joe is the host of the show, he introduces each story, pops up randomly during the episode, then wraps it all up. Joe is joined by these other SCTV people, John Candy, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, John Hemphill and Jayne Eastwood, some in each program. There are plenty of other Canadian actors in the cast. Lot's of talent, yet the production just isn't as entertaining as any good episode of SCTV. The stories are sort of funny but I'm lacking the good laughs. All the actor's do a great job but the script is weak. Can't do much about that. It only lasted the three episodes. It's nice to have a nice copy, I'll probably watch it again some day. In the mean time, there's much other material to watch, including hours of SCTV. I just finished transferring the episodes I had from VHS to DVDr, these include material that hadn't made it to DVD yet. At this stage I doubt we'll ever see a complete series collection.

Friday Night Movies 645

The Pit, it's a 1981 horror movie with a bit of a twisted kid as the main baddie. It's a Canadian film that was filmed in Beaver Dam Wisconsin. It's got a screenplay by Ian A Stuart and it's directed by Lew Lehman. It's the only feature film either wrote or directed. There's an interesting bit on the Wikipedia: Ian A. Stuart's original screenplay was considerably different from the final film. In his screenplay, Jamie was 8 or 9 years old, and the Tra-la-logs were figments of his imagination. When Lew Lehman signed on to direct, he made Jamie older, the monsters real, and added more humor to the original script. Stuart has expressed dissatisfaction with the final result.

That's Jamie and his teddy bear. He talks to the bear and the bear talks back. Jamie is 12 and he's a weirdo who's got a nasty streak in him. He's got the making of being a nastier perv. He's a handful for his parents and they hire in home care for him. There have been along line of women who came and left right quick.

Sammy Snyder plays Jamie and Jeannie Elias plays Sandy O'Reilly. She a psychology student who comes to stay with Jamie while his parents are on a business trip for several days. The interactions between the two grow more and more odd. Jamie really comes to like Sandy and he decides to share his special place with her.

That's Jamie looking into the pit. He's found it in the forest near his house. He really likes it. It's filled with monsters. He feeds them but soon runs out of meat money, so he has to find another source of snacks for the pit critters. Neighbors and fellow students find themselves being tricked to the pit and it's the end of them.

Isn't that poster art great? Not great, as in good art, either. The movie starts off as what you might think of as a typical crazy psycho kid movie. It then adds a level of weirdness that might not be expected and there's a lot of humor that may or may not have been intentional. The script, while not great, is entertaining. Sometimes I just wondered what Ian was thinking of and then another goofy thing would happen and I'd forget about it. It's almost worth watching for the dialog. The end has a nice pay off too. You can see a copy on YouTube that isn't too bad looking. You might get a laugh or two. Who knows.

The Crimson Cult is a 1968 horror film with Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff. It's based on a story by Jerry Sohl, the screenplay was written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln with Vernon Sewell as director.

The movie was the last British film that Boris Karloff worked on. He got pneumonia from shooting in the rain in January 1968. He recovered and by May 1968 started making the 4 Mexican films that would prove to be his last work. He died February 2 1969.

Mark Eden plays a guy who's looking for his brother. Said brother was supposed to have stayed for a couple of days at Christopher Lee's place in the country. Mark has a letter on Chris's stationary. The brother disappears, and after a couple of weeks, Mark shows up looking for him, but no one remembers him. There's a local festival going on in the district, it's celebrates the burning of a witch called  Lavinia Morley on January 21, 1652. Turns out Mark is related to one of the guys that killed that witch. She cursed the families. Sounds bad for Mark, huh.

Barbara Steele plays  a lady with rams horns on her head. The sets and costumes are pretty good. Much of the movie is set in this big house.

The house they use for Christopher Lee's country place is called Grim's Dyke House and it's in London. The house was used in around 20 TV programs and movies, I've seen at least ten, maybe 12 of them. Since 1970 it's been a hotel.

There's a plan a foot to punish Mark and make him sell his soul to the devil but Boris helps him defeat the evil oiks. It was fairly entertaining, but not as much as a good Hammer film might be. It's not much above average, it gets a 5.5 on the IMDb and I gave it a 6. I'd re-watch it and would add the movie to my stack if I find it cheap enough. You can watch a watchable copy of the movie on DailyMotion.