PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Blackbeard's Ghost 1968

I might have seen Blackbeard's Ghost back when it came out but I can't remember ever seeing it. Since the bottom has fallen out of the used DVD market I've been seeing a lot of stuff cheap at used DVD stores. The clearance section at Half Price Books is often a pretty place to find things that I wouldn't want to buy normally.

Blackbeard's Ghost is a 1968 Disney film that was directed by Robert Stevenson. It's based on a 1965 book by Ben Stahl, with a screenplay by Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi. Robert directed a lot of Disney features, including Old Yeller, Mary Poppins and The Love Bug. Bill and Don wrote a lot of the Disney pictures that Robert directed.

Dean Jones comes to a small town to take over the track team at a college. Richard Deacon is the Dean and Suzanne Pleshette is a professor there. Elsa Lancaster is the descendant of Blackbeard and she runs an inn that's in dire need of cash lump to pay off the mortgage. If she doesn't a gangster plans to buy the place and turn it into a casino. When Dean arrives he finds himself in the middle of an auction to raise money to save the place. They need $38,000 but sadly only raise $900.

Peter Ustinov plays Blackbeard as an annoying, loud drunk. He's vaguely funny at times, annoying at others. Only Dean can see him, he's the one who read from the spell book, accidentally, of course. Blackbeard, though annoying at it, helps  Dean to get the money to pay off the mortgage. First they gamble, then they cheat at the college games day, then they gamble some more. The gangsters get beat up in the process. There's a lot of slapstick, some punching and plenty of yelling. There's a bit of romance too. It's not bad, I had a few laughs, and I'm glad to have seen it. I'll keep the DVD, it cost me under 2 bucks, as I might watch it again. Most likely, I'll just watch some of my more favorite Disney movies from the 50s.

The Hardy Boys on The Mickey Mouse Club

I've mentioned the Disney version of The Hardy Boys before but I just found the second serial on YouTube and since I hadn't seen the second one, even though it's been up there for 7 months, I got kind of excited. It funny where one thing on YouTube leads you to other interesting things.

Here are the episodes of The Hardy Boys first serial which appeared on The Mickey Mouse Club in 1956. The Hardy Boys - The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure is an adaptation of the first book in the series, The Tower Treasure. You can buy it in that tin box from Amazon for about a hundred bucks. It's came out years ago and sold out pretty quickly. The Hardy brothers are played by Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk. The guys were popular young stars, especially at Disney, of their day.

Tim played the older Hardy brother Frank. He started his career in 1953 worked steadily through the early 70s, then you only see him sporadically until about 2006. He's probably most known for his appearances on My Three Sons. I watched that show pretty regularly for a while but eventually tired of it in my late teens. I haven't really been interested in going back and looking at it again.  Besides doing the 2 serials as Frank Hardy for Disney, he appeared in the Spin And Marty TV series, The Shaggy Dog movie, the Annette TV series and he appeared in The Swamp Fox TV series.

Tommy played the younger Hardy brother Joe. In 1955 Tommy was one of the kids on The Mickey Mouse Club. He appeared in the two Hardy Brother serials for TMMC. In 1957 he was in Old Yeller, the first of several quite popular Disney feature films.  He had some trouble in 1963, when he was 21 Disney found out he was gay when he bummed a 15 year old and the kid blabbed. Disney didn't renew his contract but he didn't get charged with anything. In 1964 he was busted at a party where people were smoking pot. The charges were dropped but he lost a part in John Wayne's The Sons Of Katie Elder for that bust. You occasionally hear about pot busts back in those days and while there was a lot of stigmata attached it often blew over fairly quickly. Tommy worked for other companies, in 1965 he was in Pajama Party, The Ghost In The Invisible Bikini, Village Of The Giants and Mars Needs Women. His career stalled and he had some drugs issues in the 70s. He recovered, got out of the film biz, and had a carpet and upholstery cleaning company for 20 years. He occasionally worked on low -budget films like Attack Of The 60 Foot Centerfold and Club Dead. Now he lives in Las Vegas.

The second Hardy brothers serial is The Mystery Of Ghost Farm. There were 14 ten minute episodes and an introduction. The copy on YouTube isn't great, it's fuzzy and the sound is off a bit, but it's watchable. I can re-sync the sound in VLC player but it won't do much about the fuzziness. Perhaps someday Disney might restore it like the first serial but I'm not holding my breath. Here are the YouTube videos.

Intro, Chapters 1-2, Chapters 3-5, Chapters 6-8, Chapters 9-11, Chapters 12-14.

Here's the first episode of the Annette Serial on TMMC.

Science Fiction Sunday 448

Earth Star Voyager is a 1988 Disney Sunday Movie that was broadcast in two parts. With all the commercials edited it out, it's 3 hours long. It's pilot for a TV series that's set in the future, the Earth is polluted and nearly unlivable, and there's a plan to colonize another planet. Some teens are selected to man a spaceship. It's going on a 13 year voyage to a planet that might be a new home for the human race. They have some problems and adventures along the way. It wasn't good enough, even for 1988, to get picked up as a series and the program has never been put on DVD. It has some fans who have kept it available, you can see a watchable copy on YouTube, but it really isn't that interesting.

Science Fiction Sunday 443

First up, a bit of fun in Spaceman, a 1997 Indy SF film about a 4 year old kid who is kidnapped by aliens. They raised him to be a soldier and trained him to kill. Twenty-five years later he's accidentally left on Earth in Chicago. He survives the best he can. He tries to get jobs in the army and the FBI, because of his fighting and killing skills, but they won't hire him. When we meet him he's working in a supermarket where he doesn't quite fit in though he's a good worker. Angered one day he beats up a shoplifter. After he gets fired he winds up in the psych ward where he learns about hit men from another patient. His attempt to get a job as an assassin with the local mafia boss pits that man against him. Toss in some dissection crazy FBI agents, a pretty girl next door, some fighting, a few jokes, and you've got a fairly decent movie. It even has a happy ending.

The movie is written and directed by Scott Dikkers. I hadn't heard of him before, this is his first film. He directed a second film called Bad Meat in 2004 and in 2007 to 2008 he was an senior exec producer on The Onion TV show. I never watch that series but I know about it and the newspaper.

I liked the whole premise and the script is pretty good. There were some good jokes, a got a few laughs, and the dialog was better than the production values. Production values are non-existent on a movie that's said to cost about $50K but they do OK moving the camera around and setting up their shots. You can see the fuzziness of the DVD image in the screen caps here. The acting isn't always so hot either, some of them are much better than others, but it isn't so awful I had to turn it off. I've seen plenty of these Indy films that have worse acting. It gets a 5.8 on the IMDb and that's not a bad score for a movie like this. Of the 235 votes., fifty people gave it a 10 and 49 people gave it a 6. I gave it a 6 because it isn't a 7 and it's better than a five. It's not the little gem I'm always piping on about but I'd still recommend it to the SF fan that likes a bit of comedy.

I hadn't seen the two Ewok Adventures before. It's not unusual, I don't follow much of anything in the Star Wars universe really. I don't actively seek out the new movies. Someone lent me a DVD set with both films in it. I'm watching that today.

Caravan Of Courage - An Ewok Adventure 1984 The first TV movie was originally call The Ewok Adventure but later it had the title changed. The story came from George Lucas and the screenplay was written by Bob Carrau. It was directed by John Korty. I wasn't familiar with John but I see in 1972 he directed The People, a TV movie based on the Zenna Henderson People novels. I read those books and I remember seeing the TV movie. I haven't seen it in years so I just downloaded it off of YouTube. It stars Kim Darby and William Shattner. A couple of years later John would win an Emmy for directing The Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman. I did see that but I'm not that interested in seeing it again. Joe Johnston was the Production Designer on both TV movies.

In Caravan Of Courage a couple of kids get separated from their parents after their ship crashes on Endor. They get befriended by the Ewoks and stay with them. They find out their parents are prisoners in the castle of a giant so they get a gang of Ewoks together to go rescue them.

In the 1985 sequel, The Battle For Endor - An Ewok Adventure, the family are still living with the Ewoks when the village is attacked in a bloody battle that leaves the little blond girl alone with Wicket. Her whole family gets slaughtered along with plenty of Ewoks. Blondie and Wicket run away and are befriended by a critter with hairy ears called Wilfred Brimley. First he's a gruff old poop but he's a softie inside. They all bond together and work out a plan to fix is spaceship and take off from Endor. It's a good plan, that place really sucks. There's plenty of killing in this one.

Both movies have some of the last stop motion animation produced by ILM before they switched to Go-Motion animation. It's not anything outstanding but most of the critters were OK. They also use a good bit of latent image matte painting which is where they block off sections of the film as the shot and then rewind the film to shoot the matte painting. Those bits are fairly well done. Too bad the stories were kind of weak. I did read that Lucas wasn't too happy with the productions. Not unhappy enough to ban them from DVD. There was a 2004 edition and that's what I watched. That DVD is now out of print, I see they are going for good money, 40 bucks on up, on eBay and Amazon. It's not good enough to get me to spend that sort of money, if I need one, I'll buy a bootleg, there are plenty out there for $10-15. Still both TV movies are much better than that Star Wars Christmas Special. Maybe the cash strapped Disney will put them out on Blu-ray in the future.

Carl Barks And The Perversity Of Beasts, Machines, And Nature.

Carl Barks And The Perversity Of Beasts, Machines, And Nature.

Garth Danielson

I have been a fan of Carl Barks for over 40 years. I was a fan even before I knew who he was. Back in the golden, olden days Disney comic artists weren’t allowed to sign their work. In 1942, when Carl Barks and Jack Hannah drew the first original Donald Duck comic book story for Dell Four Color 9, the readers just thought he was Walt Disney. If they were savvy they knew Walt didn’t draw everything, let alone anything.

National Treasure 1 & 2

 

I kept telling myself not to replace my DVDs with Bluray discs now that I have a player. I didn't want to buy the same movie again. I have done enough of that in the past and the on-going advances in digital technology just seems to be more about the companies getting more money out of you for the same product in a new format. I do know they make the movie look better and the jump from 720p to 1080p is a big one. Of course opportunity knocks and I got a cheap copy of National Treasure: Book Of Secrets for cheap so I had to go buy a copy of National Treasure. I really like the movies and have seen them several times already. The National Treasure Bluray has a new commentary with director John Turteltaub so there's at least something new. I haven't listened to it yet.  

I watched National Treasure back in 2005 and I posted about it in Friday Night Movies 7. I still feel the same today.

National Treasure was our first item. I had watched it a week or so ago (see May 4th entry mo better movies) but I always enjoy a re-watch on the big Sony. I enjoyed NT and will watch it several times in the future. It has the things I think are watchable and re-watchable in an action film, good story and action, a smart hero and cleaver villain, a funny pal and a cute love interest, nice sets and locations. I like Nic Cage ever since he became an action star. This movie isn't hurt at all by being PG-13, you can tell a good story without resorting to lots of gore and sex and swearing, although I really like those things in the right place. It's good to give a good complex story to kids and make it good enough for adults to enjoy. This is why I have been enjoying so much of the Young Adult fiction I have been reading of late.

I saw National Treasure: Book Of Secrets for the first time in 2008 and posted about that in Friday Night Movies 180. Here's that post.

I had seen National Treasure 2 - Book of Secrets before. I still liked it a third time. It's a nice fun piece that has lots of greats sets and scenery. Nick Cage returns as Ben Gates. John Voight, Diane Kruger and Justin Bartha return and they are joined by Helen Mirren as Ben's mother. She hates Ben's dad. The movie starts with Ben telling the story of his grandfather's murder at the hands of Knights of the Golden Circle. Ed Harris claims that his great grandfather has a page from John wilkes Booth's diary that proves Ben's grandfather was a Lincoln conspirator. That bad news starts the race to find Cibola, the City of Gold. There are lots of clues to follow, puzzles to solve and some little bit of danger. I don't mind that the movie isn't all murdering and bloodshed. It's nice you can make a fun action movie for the whole family. I had heard of Cibola before. Scrooge McDuck found it in a 1954 Uncle Scrooge story by Carl Barks. It stayed hidden when Scrooge was done.

Looks like they dropped the 2 on the DVD cover. Not sure why. No matter it won't keep me from watching the movies occasionally in the future.

Darby O'Gill And The Little People 1959

I hadn't seen Darby O'Gill And The Little People since I was a kid. It's a 1959 Disney film that was directed by Robert Stevenson. It's screenplay was written by Lawrence Edward Watkin who adapted the books of Herminie Templeton Kavanagh.

Albert Sharpe plays Darby and Janet Munro plays his daughter Katie. Darby's the grounds keeper at the big manor house of his lordship. Sean Connery is Michael McBride, he's the new grounds keeper. He'll be taking over and Darby gets half pension and a place to live out his life. It's a sudden development and Darby's reluctant to tell Katie since the place has been her home for her whole life. Darby tells a story in the pub about his encounter with Brian Connors, King of the Leprechauns, and how the King tricked him out of his three wishes. King Brian arranges for Darby to fall down a well so he winds up in the Leprechaun's underground kingdom. There doesn't seem to be any Leprechaun women but they are kind of small so it's kind of hard to tell.

The King tells Darby he brought him there so he doesn't have to tell his daughter she has to move out of her house. Darby escapes and captures the King again. A romance develops between Michael and Katie and they sing some songs. There's more running about and a bit of drama then there's some happy ending singing. It was a lot of fun and I thought it was pretty darn entertaining. Leonard Maltin sure seems to like it according to this snip from the Wikipedia.

Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin in his book The Disney Films, states, "Darby O'Gill and the Little People is not only one of Disney's best films, but is certainly one of the best fantasies ever put on film." Maltin rates the movie so highly that in a later article he included it among a list of lesser known outstanding Disney films.

 

There's a couple of short featurettes and the May 29 1959 episode of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color called I Captured the King of the Leprechauns. In the show Walt travels to Ireland to meet Darby O'Gill who introduces Walt to King Brian. Walt convinces the King and Darby to play themselves in the film. There's a bunch of clips along with the new material but the show is only in Black and White. It was still entertaining.

The Great Mouse Detective 1986

I hadn't seen The Great Mouse Detective since I first saw it April 2 1993. I didn't have a copy and Sperhauk was nice enough to pass along the DVD from his BluRay combo set. I watched the movie after I got back from the TCLUG meeting. For those that don't know, it's the mouse version of Sherlock Holmes. Basil of Baker Street lives below the Sherlock Holmes flat and at one point we hear, but only see the shadows of, Sherlock and Dr Watson having a bit of conversation. The voice of Sherlock is provided by Basil Rathbone in the form of clips from his 1930s Sherlock Holmes films.

A young mouse girl's father is kidnapped from his toy shop by the henchmen of Professor Ratigan. The Professor is voiced by Vincent Price and he's a real jerk. He wants to take over the country by having the toy maker, Mr Flaversham, create a robotic queen and then have the robot give him the throne. Flaversham's daughter Olivia goes to see Basil and along the way she runs into Dr Dawson. He helps her find Baker Street and they both meet Basil for the first time. The trio teams up and they go after Mr Flaversham. They have a great adventure and meet plenty of other characters. As you could guess Basil keeps the right person on the throne, the family is reunited, and Sherlock gains a new companion and detecting partner. It was fun and I enjoyed it. I'll add it to the Sherlock Holmes section of the DVD collection and watch it again some day.

Friday Night Movies 521

 

Our first feature is the 2014 Disney animated feature Big Hero 6. I didn't know anything about it but Greg had seen it and he was pretty enthusiastic that it was lots of fun. It's based on a 1998 Marvel 3 part mini-series. but the movie isn't really much like the comic book, other than some of the names of the characters. Hiro Hamada is a super smart 14 year old who builds robots which he uses to make cash at robot fighting events. The fights are legal but he betting part is illegal. His brother Tadashi goes to university and he wants Hiro to go too. There's a contest to get in and Hiro shows off his tiny microbots. They win the prize and Hiro is headed for the school. While Hiro and his brother are outside the event building the place catches on fire. Tadashi runs back into the building to save Callaghan. The building blows up and Hiro is devastated.

The big puffy guy is Baymax, he's a medical robot that Tadashi was working on before the movie started. I want one. He's the best. That's Hiro on his shoulders. The others are all students at the university and Tadashi's friends. They are all quirky science nerds who Hiro turns into superheroes.

He's got a reason. One of Hiro's little microbots managed to find it's way into his jacket pocket before the fire and it's still there. The microbots are programmed to head for other microbots and connect up. This one acts like it knows there are other microbots around. Hiro doesn't believe it, thinking all the other microbots were destroyed in the fire. Baymax offers to track the microbot and that leads to a secret microbot factory and our villain.

Kabuki man controls the microbots and he chases Hiro and Baymax out of the factory. It's then that Hiro decides to turn the other students into superheroes so they can capture him. They have some set backs but eventually get the job done. There's lots of action and plenty of humor mixed in with a bit of sadness. I'd pick The LEGO Movie over it for the Oscar but I'm partial to the little bricks. It was still mostly fun to watch and I'd probably watch it again.

Greg brought a 3 movie set of Jerry Warren movies. He's a low budget film maker that has pretty low scores on the IMDb for all of his movies. This one scores a 2.8 but might be a three. I was kind of interested in the film because it had Lon Chaney Jr and John Carradine in the cast. I thought that the picture of Lon in a robe on the DVD box looked familiar. but I wasn't sure I had seen the movie and I do see a lot of stills from films I haven't seen. I didn't remember that I had watched the House Of Black Death back in 2011 when I found a copy on the Internet Archive under the title of Blood Of The Man Devil so we watched it. As the movie played the odd scene was familiar. I looked up the movie on the Internet, we all do that now that everyone has a mobile of one sort or another, and found that I had see the move and posted about it. Here's the post on the movie, slightly edited.

Blood Of The Man Devil is a 1965 horror movie with John Carradine and Lon Chaney Jr playing warlock brothers. They are Satan worshippers and part of a cursed family. Tom Drake and Delores Faith are the other two family members doomed to hell. There's a bit of murdering, some angry townies, some spooky noises, a big old house, lots of fog and evil. Doesn't that sound like there might have been some potential in that story? They didn't do much with it. One director shot a lot of the movie, a second shot more and a third finished up the mess. It's nearly watchable. I kept wondering what the heck was going on while watching the movie and I'm pretty forgiving when there's something left out of the story. I figure it might have been intentional to keep you on your toes. I'm only fooling myself but that's me. I can't handle the truth.

The movie was made under the title House Of The Black Death and retitled a few times. Lucky for me I didn't see it over and over again thinking I was seeing some new movie. That's Sabrina to the right with Lon enjoying the show. She dances when the Satanic Rites are going on. Guess you have to have something to make that ritual worth coming out for. I wouldn't recommend wasting your time on it, you know, unless you need to watch a lot of crappy movies for some reason, or say, you need to see all the horror movies ever made. This would be a good one for that sort of thing. It's just not quite goofy enough to become your classic bad movie.

Friday Night Movies 511

We watched Machete Kills as our first film. It's the 2013 sequel to the 2010 Machete and it's written and directed by Austin Texas film maker Robert Rodriguez. There's quite the cast as you can see from this chunk copied from the Wikipedia: Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez, Tom Savini, Billy Blair, Electra and Elise Avellan, Felix Sabates and Jessica Alba reprise their roles from the first film, as well as being joined by series newcomers Mel Gibson, Demián Bichir, Amber Heard, Sofía Vergara, Lady Gaga, Antonio Banderas, Cuba Gooding Jr., Vanessa Hudgens, Alexa Vega, William Sadler, Marko Zaror and Charlie Sheen (credited by his real name of Carlos Estévez).

Danny plays Machete, an ex Mexican Federali, who is asked by the President to go after a crazy guy named Mendez who stole a nuke. He's a drug kingpin and revolutionary wants to drop his new bomb on Washington DC. The Prez wants to put a stop to that and he offers Machete citizenship if he goes in and do what he does best. Kill. Machete is reluctant but he goes along with the plan. He heads to St Antonio and a meet up with another agent, blond and beautiful Amber Heard, who leads him to Vanessa Hudgens. Vanessa's a hooker in a brothel run by her mother, who's played by Sofía Vergara. They have a connection to Mendez.

That's Sofia with her machine gun bra up front and Alexa Vega on the right. They were in such a hurry to chase after Machete that they forgot to change out of their working clothes. Some of you might remember Alexa from the Spy Kids movies. Machete makes it to Mendez who has Vanessa killed for bringing Machete to him. Sofia is pissed when she finds out and she brings whores and guns and bullets for vengeance. Several more people get involved with the chase around Mexico as Machete tries to get Mendez back to the US. Mendez is suffering from a split personality and the craziest one has hooked a trigger for the bomb to his heart. If he dies the rocket launches sending the nuke to the heart of DC. If he's kidnapped his men have orders to offer a 10 million dollar reward for his death.

Michelle pops in and give Machete some support. There are plenty of gun battles, heads getting chopped off, and fist fights. It just gets more and more over the top as the story plays out. At one point Machete is hanging off a wire attached to the spinning blade of a helicopter and while he's rotating in the air his machete is hacking off the heads of the villain's henchmen. There's lot of violence aimed toward helicopters and pretty much anything that gets in the way of a bullet or a sharp edge takes a hit or a stab. Luckily for us, and the US, Machete is pretty much unkillable and he slaughters onward. Eventually the bomb prob leads Machete to Mel Gibson, who plays the nut job head of a large corporation. He had a vision of the world's end and he wants to be off planet, hiding in his space station, when the shit storm comes. Like the recently watched Snowpiercer it reminds me that rich business men should not be making decisions that affect pretty much anyone. All the elements of the story lead us to the end of the movie where it leaves us with a huge cliffhanger that could be solved in the sequel. There's a trailer for Machete Kills Again ...In Space. I hope they make that one. Machete Kills was a fun enough movie, it passed the time and there were some pretty ladies kicking people's asses. It seems less people liked it and a lot of the critics gave it a poor rating. Not sure why, it isn't much worse or better than Machete. I'd watch both of them again.

We watched the BluRay of Maleficent next. It's the Disney re-imagining of the Snow White story that somehow took 15 versions of the script to retell. It's written by Linda Woolverton and directed by Robert Stromberg. She's written all sorts of Disney movies I don't care for and this is the first film from a guy who's been a special effects designer on almost 100 films including Avatar and the recent Disney Alice In Wonderland.

The movie changes the story to make Maleficent a wronged fairy who has her wings stolen by the upwardly mobile Stefan. He meets Maleficent when they were kids. He wants to live in the castle and when he gets there he forgets her. The King wants to conquer the moors where the fairy folk live but the adult Maleficent is too powerful for his army. The dying King offers anyone who kills Maleficent the keys to the kingdom. Stefan turns creep and uses his old relationship to get close to Maleficent. He drugs her and cuts off her wings but he's too weak to kill her. Stefan takes over the kingdom and has a child called Aurora. Maleficent turns up and puts the curse on her. In order to keep Aurora safe the king has all the spinning wheels collected, broken up and stored in a dungeon in the castle. This forces everyone in the kingdom to get all their cloth from another kingdom. Stefan repeatedly makes all the wong choices and things get worse and worse in the kingdom. Another film with a rich guy who can't lead worth shit.

Three annoying fairies take Aurora to a small house in the woods were Maleficent keeps an eye on her. I really disliked the new version of the three fairies. Over time Maleficent grows to love the little girl and befriends her. Aurora thinks she's her fairy godmother and she's not really wrong. What I thought was wrong was the idea of making Maleficent the hero. By the end of the movie she's kissed Aurora awake and Stefan is dead.

All these changes didn't work that well for me. It took me ages to get interested in the film. I did read that they chopped 15 minutes out of the start of the film in order to shorten it. They worked the remaining scenes with re-shoots which didn't make it better. I think they spent too much time on the look of the film. I wouldn't need to see it again.