PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 550

Greg saw Bigfoot: The Movie when he was at the Cinema Wasteland film convention a couple of weeks ago. He really enjoyed the movie and luckily for us he was able to pick up a Bluray and bring it back with him. We watched it for our first feature. It's a low-budget film that got some Kickstarter help to raise it's $100K budget. The movie looks ok for the amount of money they had, I suspect hardly anyone got paid. The movie is the first feature from director by Jared Show who also co-wrote the script with Curt Wootton. Jared had directed a short called Bigfoot in 2009 and recently he'd edited a couple of Sons of Anarchy video documentaries. 

Bigfoot: The Movie is set in Ellwood City Pennsylvania, it's filmed there and in Pittsburgh. Jared plays Burl, the ginger haired Exterminator and Curt plays Chuck, the doofus in a mullet. Nathan Magill plays baseball cap supporting Dale and Joanie Dodds plays Kate. As the movie opens Chuck and Dale are out with their pal Daryl. While having a drink outdoors something big and hairy grabs Daryl and that's the last we see of him. Burl's Uncle Earl is next and he's followed by a couple more. The sheriff can't seem to do anything and it turns out that the Mayor is a huge jerk who has been keeping a lady bigfoot in his barn. Burl, Dale and Chuck go after bigfoot but they don't do so well at first. They get more firepower, after having some more beers, and they spend the rest of the movie chasing the elusive back woods critter. The bigfoot makeup is fairly good, I'd run away from her. There's plenty of gun shootin', pick truck drivin' and mayhem. There's a bit of romance between Dale and Kate. The script is amusing, there is some entertaining dialog and though some of the actors aren't the best, they're only in the movie for short scenes mostly, and that I pretty much can ignore. I enjoyed the movie and would watch it again. It scores an unusually high 8.1 on the IMDb but that's because it hasn't had much exposure. Even though it might not be that good it delivers a good solid bit of entertainment and I'd put it somewhere between 6 and 7.

Our second feature wouldn't rate that high. It gets a 5.7 on the IMDb and that's about right. The Magic Crystal is a 1986 Hong Kong movie that's written and directed by Wong Jing. It stars Andy Lau, Cynthia Rothrock, Sharla Cheung, Richard Norton, Max Mok and Wong Jing. Andy and Wong are a pair of treasure hunter who are hired by the cops to retrieve a packet of damaging papers a crooked business man has. He's using them as insurance but Andy gets them back and he's going to jail. All that takes place in the opening sequence to introduce us to Andy and Wong.

In the main story thread Andy and Wong go to Greece to help a friend in trouble. KGB and Interpol are after Shen because he's found a huge piece of Jade that might have magic powers. Cynthia and Max are Interpol Agents. Richard is an evil creep who wants the piece of Jade and he won't stop at anything to get it. There's of fights as the parties vie for the gem. It turns out that the piece of Jade is the home of an alien consciousness that's been trapped there for 2000 years. It wants to get back to Greece to take it's spaceship home. It bonds with Wong's son Pin-Pin and there some goofy bits then the alien uses his magic powers. Andy and pals help the alien return to Greece. Of course Richard and his thugs want to stop that so there's plenty more action scenes. Eventually there's a happy ending. There's a heavy dose of silliness, Hong Kong style, which some people don't always like. You have to expect that from Wong Jing, he's really the king of the Makes No Sense Comedy style, and I'm totally down with the action and comedy. You can see an English Dubbed version on YouTube int he link in the title. You might like it, who knows.

Friday Night Movies 549

 

Sperhauk got a copy of the German BluRay of Re-Animator and Bride Of Re-Animator and we watched the latter. It's a 1989 horror film directed by Brian Yuzna. He directed Society and several other genre pictures. It's written by Yuzna, Rick Fry and Woody Keith and based on characters from the first film which was directed by Stuart Gordon. Both movies are adapted from HP Lovecraft's Herbert West - Reanimator. Jeffrey Combs plays Herbert West. He's a driven man who wants to re-animate the dead in the first film and create life in the second. Bruce Abbott plays West's partner in medicine Dr Dan Cain. He's the more reluctant one of the pair but he sticks to West through thick and thin.

The movie opens with the 2 men in South America where they're medics in the Peruvian civil war. West continues his experiments on the dead, re-animating corpses and chucks of bodies to see what will happen. The field hospital is over run and the pair escape. They return to Arkham Massachusetts where they get jobs at the Miskatonic University Hospital. They live in an old funeral home where they have a lab in the basement. Herbert's experimenting leads him to try to build a whole human being using the heart of Dan's old girlfriend Meg Halsey. She was played by Barbara Crampton in the first film. According to the Wikipedia her agent said she shouldn't take a cameo in the sequel. Meg died in the first movie and Dan re-animated her. The movie ends before we know what happened but in this movie Meg's heart was stored in the University morgue as part of the remaining evidence from the Miskatonic Massacre in the first movie.

Of course things go poorly for our guys, the re-animated don't play well and there's plenty of death and destruction. There's plenty of gags and silly things. There's plenty of gooey bits and the movie is packed with make up effects by KNB and others. There are some nice bits of stop motion animation by David Allen. I'm still enjoying the movie even though I've seen it 3 or 4 times in the past. Jeffrey Combs is usually fun to watch, he's pretty entertaining here, it's a role he's really good at playing. David Gale's role as a bodiless head is pretty fun too. Especially when he gets wings and flies around. It's not quite as good as the previous film but Yuzna's just not quite as good a film maker as Stuart Gordon is. He still manages to put together an entertaining film, at least for those that likes that sort of thing, but I can see why it scores a bit lower on the IMDb than Re-Animator. There's a second sequel, Beyond Re-Animator, that came out in 2003 but I haven't see it yet.

Our second feature was the 5th last film that Vincent Price made. From A Whisper To A Scream is a 1987 film directed by Jeff Burr and written by William Burr and Darin Scott. It's an anthology film with 4 stories, there are framing segments that feature Vincent as the town historian.

His daughter has just been executed for multiple murders. A reporter, Susan Tyrrell, comes to interview him so he tells her about the town of Oldfield's horrible past and how he believes it's an epicenter of evil.

In the first story Clu Gulager is a weird middle aged guy who takes a shine to an attractive co-worker. They go on a date and he winds up killing her when she spurns his advances. He later has off screen sex with her corpse and a demon baby pops out of her grave. Clu was great as the creepy villain. It took me a long while to recognize him. Reminds me it's a good idea not to date where you work. I thought the story went on a bit long.

The second story is a bit shorter and it's set in the 1950s. Terry Kiser is a low life petty criminal. Some mob guys are after him, his girlfriend just sold him out, and there at his trailer. He manages to sneak off but they spot him and he's gets hot. The leave him for the swamp to take care of but Terry gets rescued by a man living in the swamp. Clippings in a photo album lead Terry to believe the swamp guy is well over a hundred years old. Terry wants the secret of immortality and he tries to get it out of the swamp guy. Things go wrong for Terry and he winds up trapped alive in a body that can't do anything. He's got 70 years to think about what he did. Ouch, huh. Kind of familiar in premise, not badly executed. Harry Caesar, playing the Swamp Guy, turns in a good performance.

The third story is set in the 1930s and it's about a carnival freak show performer, who eats glass and metal. He crosses the head of the carnival, Snakewoman, when he disobeys her by having a relationship with a local girl. Snakewoman is played by Rosalind Cash, she's got some magical powers and a desire for vengeance when she feels wronged. It's shorter than the previous two segments and it moves along quicker, tightening things up nicely. There's  big gory scene when Rosalind meets out her punishment. Even the innocent townie pays a big price for dilly dallying with the glass eater.

The last segment loves the time to the Civil War era where some kids are holed up in a ruined house in a town destroyed by the war. Cameron Mitchell is a Sgt in the Union army and his few remaining troops happen on the house. Thinking they can get food they move in but things go bad when one of the kids stabs a soldier in the crotch. He didn't see that coming. Those kids were creepy but the Union soldier, especially Cameron, were really pricks. Earlier in the segment they shot some Confederate soldiers who were surrendering.

Not a great film but watchable. My attention was wondering at times and I thought it could have been trimmed a bit to speed things up. Price later said he didn't like the film much but he liked the enthusiasm of the director and writers. Nice to see Vincent in a film I hadn't seen before. There aren't too many left that I haven't seen yet. 

Friday Night Movies 548

Joe brought the BluRay of Avengers: Age Of Ultron and we watched that. It's written and directed by Josh Whedon. He'd done the same jobs on the first Avengers movie. The Avengers fight and there's plenty of death and destruction. The team goes on a mission to some made up country to get the scepter that Loki had in the first movie. It's now in the hands of Hydra who've been using it's magical powers to experiment on people. They've created the Twins, the super fast Pietro and Wanda, who can manipulate minds and project energy. There's a huge fight and the Avengers eventually get the scepter. Pietro and Wanda escape. At Stark's laboratory Tony and Bruce Banner find that there's an alien intelligence in the jewel. Later Thor tells them that the jewel is one of the Infinity Stones. Tony and Bruce use the stone to create a new artificial intelligence with the intention of using it to defend the world. It doesn't work out so well and Ultron becomes intent on destroying humanity to save the Earth. On the top of the AI robot's hit list are the Avengers. He attacks them at their victory party and rest of the movie is one big fight after another. Pietro and Wanda join up with Ultron, at least until his plans for humanity are revealed. Ultron wants to evolve and he gets a biologist to create him a flesh body with the jewel at it's core. That body is stolen by the Avengers and once opened it becomes The Vision. He joins up with the Avengers. The climax comes when the Avengers confront Ultron and his army of robots. They defeat him but not before he triggers a massive chunk of a city to float up in the air. He intends to use it as a mass driver and cause the death of humanity. What a douche bag robot he is. They stop that and the world is saved. At least until Thanos comes to collect those Infinity Stones. There's plenty of action and a lot of melodrama. I could have used less of the latter but there you go. It's a bit bloated at 2 hours and 20 minutes. I hadn't made any effort to seek out the film. I don't want to say I lack the interest in seeing the super hero film but I sure aren't putting them at the top of my list of films to see. It was nice to have it fall into my lap without wasting one of my Netflix choices. It was ok to watch but I'm not going to rush out and pick up a copy any time soon. I probably don't need to see it again.

I'd seen The Beach Girls And The Monster before but I had pretty much forgotten what the plot was all about. Here's the post I wrote in 2011. It's a 1965 low budget horror film written by Joan Gardner and directed by Jon Hall. He plays the dad in the film which is about a monster killing people in Malibu. Jon is a scientist who lives up on the top of the cliffs by the beach where the young woman was killed. Jon's son is one of the young people hanging out at the beach. The first victim is a friend of the son. Jon and the second wife don't get along, the love gone out of their marriage. The wife hates Jon's son and the son and father don't get along to well either. There's a lot of melodrama in this one, more than the monster action. Even that turns out to be a bit of a cheat. The dialog is pretty dumb at times and the acting isn't up to much. It gets a 2.7 on the IMDb for good reason. Still, it's short and over pretty quickly.

Friday Night Movies 547

Harlock: Space Pirate is our first selection. It's a 2013 computer generated anime reboot of the Captain Harlock series from the 1970s. I hadn't seen that series, except for snippets of video and some stills, but I don't feel I missed anything. The movie plot has Captain Harlock and the crew of his ship, the Arcadia, planting some special bombs. He wants to fix the state of the human race by destroying them all and sending the universe back in time. The Earth had been destroyed, by Harlock, one hundred years ago. He'd unleashed some dark matter and made the place unlivable. The ruling body in the universe, the Gaia Sanction, covers the planet with a hologram and does not allow anyone to live there. The dark mater also made Harlock immortal and his ship invincible. He's been running about the universe for the last 100 years planting the bombs he hopes to use to reverse time by destroying the time nodes. Now as the movie starts there's a secret Gaia Sanction spy among his crew and it might be the end of Harlock. It just goes on and on for what seems like forever. The space action and the fighting isn't too bad but the script is filled with yakkin' and backstory. That drags the whole thing down. The story has been changed from the older TV series and not everyone who commented on the various websites was appreciative. It's not something I would bother with again. I doubt that I'll bother with the original cartoon either. So many other things to watch as it is, so tossing one aside for better material just makes sense.

There's not too much sense going on in our second feature but at least The Neanderthal Man was more fun to watch. It's a 1953 low budget horror film written by Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen. I didn't recognize either man but I see from the IMDb that Audrey wrote a bunch of films and a bit of TV. In the 40s he wrote some series films, a Boston Blackie, A Falcon and a Whistler. He wrote The Man From Planet X and others I haven't seen. His last feature was the 1969 Hercules In New York with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arnold Stang. That's quite a film. Worth seeing but not because it's great or anything. Jack wrote a lot of the same films as Aubrey and together they produced a bunch more. The Neanderthal Man was directed by Ewald André Dupont. I didn't know anything about him but his bio on the IMDb is interesting to say the least.

German film director E.A. Dupont an influential critic and newspaper columnist before breaking into the film industry. He wrote several screenplays and worked as a story editor for Richard Oswald before turning to directing in 1917. Over the next eight years Dupont became a respected exponent of the German expressionist movement. He was particularly acclaimed for his film Jealousy (1925), which stood out for brilliant lighting effects and fluid camera work. Encouraged by his success, Dupont left Decla-Bioskop and joined Universal in Hollywood, but only completed one film. Crossing the Atlantic again, he signed with British National Pictures in 1928. He briefly became their leading director, again demonstrating his visual flair with two prestige productions: Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929). The latter was BIP's most expensively made picture up to this time.

After the advent of sound Dupont's career began to falter. His first "talkie", the "Titanic" story Atlantic (1929)--shot in both English and French--was an expensive flop, due mainly to poor dialogue and stilted performances. His next two ventures, respectively in France and Germany, had an even worse critical reception. Dupont next tried his luck in Hollywood. After 1933 he worked at different times for Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers. Critical success proved elusive, as almost all of his assignments were low-budget second features. After being fired from the set of Hell's Kitchen (1939) for slapping a junior member of the cast who had mocked his accent, Dupont spent most of the 1940s in Hollywood as a talent agent and publicist. He eventually resumed his directing career with an offbeat minor film noir, The Scarf (1951), and a watchable precursor to The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Steel Lady (1953). Among his last films was the notorious sci-fi stinker The Neanderthal Man (1953). He died of cancer in December 1956.

The Neanderthal Man is a bit of a stinker but we got a laugh. The story is set in a small town in northern California. A tourist sees what he thinks is a saber toothed tiger out on the mountain. No one believes him but a farmer has had some cattle killed and mauled by something pretty darn big. The local game warden finds a big foot print and a scientist identifies it as from the cat family. Another scientist has a home lab where he's been working on a serum that causes animals to revert to primitive versions of themselves. Now we know where the saber tooth tiger came from. He tries it on himself and that's the result above. Of course the primitive versions of the injected are prone to kill things and they become the hunted themselves. These type of science meddling stories often end in disaster for the experimenter and that's the case here. The cast was about average, keep an eye out for Beverley Garland in her first SF/Horror film. The only other people I recognized were Richard Crane and William Fawcett. The plot is simple, scientist invents a problem and people die, sadly there's some awful dialog to tell the story. There are scenes to marvel at. The outdoor locations aren't to bad but the sets are kind of sad. The make up effects were beyond sad, in fact, they made us happy, judging by the amount of laughter in the room. The saber tooth tiger is a normal tiger in most shots. In a close up they use an obvious fake head with tusks. We could only laugh. It's a short film, only 78 minutes, but there's plenty going on, even if it is kind of goofy. The YouTube version in the link in the title above is only 64 minutes. The Scream Factory release restores the movie to it's original 78 minute version and packs it with The Beast Of Hollow Mountain.

Friday Night Movies 546

Ghost Town is a 1988 horror movie that none of us had seen except for Sperhauk. It was written by Duke Sandefur and David Schmoeller. Duke hasn't written much of anything I've seen but David has worked with producer Charles Band since 1979. Mostly David's written the Puppet Master series. In 1984 he wrote the English version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The director is Richard Governor who got some uncredited some help from Mac Ahlberg. Richard didn't direct anything before or after the movie but Mac has a huge list of credits on the IMDb. Mostly he's a cinematographer with 82 credits behind the camera. A lot of them are genre pictures and sequels to bigger movies. In the 1970s and 80s he worked for Charles Band a lot and I guess he still does. His last two credits were for the 2006 Charles Band movie Evil Bong and the 2013 Charles Band short Trancers: City Of Lost Angels. He's also got 14 credits for being a director and most of them are soft core sex films. This is the last thing Mac directed and sadly neither he nor Richard can make the movie more than just about average. Still, that's good for a Charles Band movie.

 

That's Deputy Sheriff Langley, played by Franc Luz, and the evil Devlin, played by Jimmie F Skaggs. In the opening scene of the movie a young woman is driving in the desert. She stops and a big noisy wind picks her up and scratches the shit out of her car. Langley is off shooting his 6 gun in a auto scrap yard. He kills cars well. His boss calls with the news that the daughter of local big shot has run off from her wedding. Langley meets his boss at the missing woman's car. His boss tells him to wait by the car while he goes for more help to search the desert. Langley finds some horse tracks and goes off after them. His truck magically catches on fire leaving him alone in the desert. He stumbles into a ghost town that's been cursed by a bible thumping lawman about a 100 years ago. The town is trapped in limbo until someone comes to kill the evil in the town. Devlin is the evil and he's got the woman from the car in his hotel room where he's been touching her inappropriately.

Langley spends the rest of the movie trying to stay alive. He gets befriended by some of the locals who later suffer for their actions. Langley's gun shoots the ghosts but they don't die. He finds out a bit later that the guns in the town will kill the ghosts, permanently. There's plenty of shootin' and villainous activity. Devlin is a good noisy villain. There a bit of humor and the story moves along fairly well. The hero wins out, the girl is rescued, and the town is released from it's eternal limbo. The effects are average but effective enough. It's more entertaining than many of the movies that Charles Band produced but it's still about average. It scores a 5.4 on the IMDb, I gave it a 5 but wouldn't give it a 6. I don't need to see it again more the most part but it had a bit of entertainment value.

There's not much of anything good to say about Tentacles. It comes on a two movie BluRay set with Reptilicus. I hadn't seen it and now I'm not so sure I needed to. It's a 1977 Italian movie that was trying to capture some of the success of the 1975 hit Jaws. Instead of a giant shark, there's a giant octopus. It's shot in California with a few older name actors. Look for John Huston, Shelly Winters, Bo Hopkins, Henry Fonda, Cesare Danova and Claude Akins. Several of the cast are Italian actors.

That's Shirley from the several minute long registration scene. She's putting her son and his friend into a boat race on the ocean. You know, where the monster is. That non-riveting scene is followed immediately by a hotel registration scene that's only better because it's shorter. The movie is written by a trio of guys who can't collectively tell a story: Jerome Max, Tito Capri and Steven W Carabatsos. It's directed by Ovidio G Assonitis under the name Oliver Hellman. He's as talentless as the trio behind the script. They're all part of a larger group of talentless workers behind the camera. They shot the film poorly, with little interesting action, poor special effects and a dead octopus from the fish market to stand in the sunken million dollar puppet that was supposed to be the monster. The score is a wonder, filled with noise and inappropriate music.

The film's score was done by Italian composer Stelvio Cipriani, who scored the similarly Jaws-inspired films The Great Alligator and Piranha II: The Spawning around the same time. He later recycled many of the cues from Tentacles in his later score for Concorde Affaire '79.

There's another guy who needs a kick in the nuts. If the whole crew were lined up, ready to take one in the goolies, I don't think I'd have enough energy to get to the end of the line. It's not much of a movie, pretty poor in fact, and I would suggest not wasting your time on it. It gets a 3.5 on the IMDb and that seems a bit high. It made Reptilicus more entertaining by far.

Friday Night Movies 545

Our first film was the 2006 monster movie Abominable. It's a giant bigfoot movie with a monster chomping animals and people. It's written by director Ryan Schifrin and James Morrison. Schifrin is the son of Lalo Schifrin who did the music for the movie. Mike looked up Lalo to see if Ryan was his son, unusual name, seemed likely to be the case, and found mention of Lalo's score for The Exorcist. Here's a bit from the Wikipedia.

Lalo Schifrin's working score was rejected by Friedkin. Schifrin had written six minutes of music for the initial film trailer but audiences were reportedly too scared by its combination of sights and sounds. Warner Bros. executives told Friedkin to instruct Schifrin to tone it down with softer music, but Friedkin did not relay the message. It has been claimed Schifrin later used the music written for The Exorcist for The Amityville Horror, but he has denied this in interviews. According to "The Fear of God: The Making of the Exorcist" on the 25th Anniversary DVD release of the film, Friedkin (known for his temper) literally took the tapes that Schifrin had recorded and threw them away in the studio parking lot.

 

Matt McCoy plays a guy who got hurt in a mountain climbing accident that killed his wife 6 months before the movie takes place. He returns home for the first time with the help of a male nurse. The house is in a wooded area on a sloped piece of ground and there are plenty of steps to the door so he needs help getting his wheelchair bound body up there. Once inside it's going to be hard for Matt to get away. Some young women drive up to the house next to Matt's to celebrate one of the girls up coming marriage. Things go along quietly while everyone settles in but soon the bigfoot starts to prowl.

 

He picks off one of the girls and then turns his attention to Jeffrey Combs and Lance Henriksen who are out hunting with another man. They don't last too long and Bigfoot is back at Matt's place, attracted by the noise the girls are making. There's more bigfoot action and the people keep dying. Matt and the last remaining woman, played by Haley Joel, try to escape but the monster is right on their trail. Even driving an axe through his chest barely slows him down.

It's an entertaining monster film that's about average. The cast is ok, keep an eye out for Dee Wallace-Stone and Paul Gleason in small parts. There's some humor and some gore. It's not often you see a man's face bit off. I'd seen the movie in 2008 on the Syfy channel and enjoyed it the second time. I'd watch it again. You can see the whole movie, including the nudity that wasn't on Syfy, on YouTube. There's a link in the title above.

I've seen Reptilicus several times already. It's on a newish BluRay with Tentacles. It's a 1961 Danish movie that was shot in two versions, one for Denmark and one for the US market. Here's a bit from the Wikipedia about the production.

Danish-American co-production, produced by American International Pictures and Saga Studio, and is—upon close examination—two distinctly different films helmed by two different directors.

The original version, which was shot in Danish, was directed by Danish director Poul Bang and released in Denmark on February 25, 1961.

The American version, which was in English with a nearly identical cast, was directed by the film's American producer-director Sidney W. Pink; this version was initially deemed virtually un-releasable by American International Pictures and had to be extensively reworked by the film's Danish-American screenwriter, Ib Melchior, before being finally released in America in 1962. Pink was angry at the changes and wound up in a legal dispute with AIP. After Pink and others viewed the English-language version, the lawsuit was dropped.

The BluRay has the AIP version of the film on it. It looks better than the version I have off of TV but the version they transferred has some issues. There is a Danish DVD of the Danish version but we haven't seen it.

Some men are drilling a hole in the ground when they strike meat. They dig up a bunch of bones and a giant piece of a frozen reptile tail. Back at the University the tail eventually gets thawed out and starts to regenerate. An electrical storm helps turn the tail into a full blown dragon that spits green acid goo. The green acid goo is only in the AIP version and it looks pretty poor. The dragon terrorizes the country and the army fights back. Trouble is the body parts can regenerate into a full blown copy of the dragon. They have to poison it and destroy the body some other way, like flame or acid.

Sadly the monster doesn't look as good as it does on the posters. I've seen a lot worse monsters and it does trash some buildings, sink some ships, and eat some people. Still, it's kind of sad looking. The scientists get the upper hand by the end of the movie but the  monster leaves them a surprise.

It's pretty silly and I don't mind the low budget monster. I keep watching it so it much be something like a favorite, partly from it's novelty and partly from the monster. It would have been nice to see the original version, subtitled, and intact. 

Friday Night Movies 544

Scarecrows is a 1988 horror film written, produced and directed by William Wesley. It's his first feature film and it's got a budget about $425,000. Wesley would go on to do one more film, Route 666, and a couple of episodes of TV. I had seen Route 666 a few years back and rated it fair/poor. None of us had seen Scarecrows and I hadn't even heard of it. Mind you, I haven't heard of a lot of horror films, I rarely read about the genre. That's ok, I get more than enough stuff to watch as it is. There is some nice cinematography by Peter Deming who would go on to shoot a lot of films for Sam Raimi, David Lynch and Wes Craven. The movie was released on VHS back in 1998 in two versions. The VHS box below says it's the unrated version and the running time is 88 minutes. The Bluray from Shout Factory is listed as 83 minutes. The Wikipedia says there was a 2007 DVD that was unrated. Update: after some checking Sperhauk found that the uncut version was 79:17 and the Shout Factory BluRay is the uncut version at 83:14. The VHS box lies.

The story is about some robbers who steal an Army payroll. They force a pilot and his daughter to fly them to Mexico. On the way one robber jumps out of the plane with the money. One by one the rest of the crooks jump out to look for him. Eventually the plane lands and the only female robber drags the daughter with her as a hostage to keep the father in the pilot's seat. They converge on a desolate farmhouse in bad need of repair. Not that the demons that inhabit the place care for repairs, they're only interested in harvesting lives. One by one the robbers get picked off, chopped apart, and stuffed with cash. The demons find the money and use it as bait to gather in the rest of the robbers. That works quite well and hardly anyone gets out of the movie alive. It does better than a lot of low-budget films. It's not awful, some bits are entertaining, but there's nothing special to make it much more than average. The characters are kind of dumb so their dialog is often dull and uninteresting. The only sympathetic characters are the pilot and the daughter, he gets little to do and she's not a very good actress. It gets a 5.7 on the IMDb, that's not too far off, I'd give it a 5 but not a 6. I doubt I would need to see it again.

Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead is a 2014 Australian film. It's the first film by director Kiah Roache-Turner who wrote it with Tristan Roache-Turner. They did a great job with their script. There's all the elements that you expect, action, humor, horror, sadness, and then they toss in some interesting new and original ideas. The film looks great for their small budget of $160,000. There's a planned sequel after the pair complete their "mental ghost' film. I hadn't heard of any of the actors but they all do a great job. We all liked aboriginal actor Leon Burchill as Benny, that's him on the left, he practically steals every scene he's in.

As the movie opens we see Barry and his family heading for bed, during the night meteors fall, and the next morning Barry and his family wake up to find a zombie in the kitchen chomping on some raw meat. He attacks, Barry and his wife barely put him down. The family leave town, heading for Bulla, and the possibility of finding Barry's sister Brooke still alive. On the way Mom and daughter change and Barry has to kill them with his nail gun. He's out of ammo and can't kill himself. He tries to get a man who stops to kill him with his rifle but Chalker won't do it. They decide to travel together until Benny shows up and accidentally kills Chalker. The two pair up and head for Bulla. The night before Brooke is taking pictures in her studio when the meteors come and her two models go mental and attack.

That's Brooke and Barry above. She'd escaped the zombies in the studio only to get captured by some military men. She wakes up to find herself chained to a wall in a mobile lab run by a crazy doctor. The Doc is experimenting on the zombies and he tells her that the meteors released a gas that affects most people. Those with A- blood are immune. He repeatedly injects her with blood from a zombie. When he's finished the series of injections he'll take a brain sample and see what's up. The sample taking doesn't leave anyone alive. Before he gets his blood stained hands on her grey matter Brooke finds out that she can mentally control the other zombies. Benny and Barry have come across Frank, holed up in his garage,  surrounded by zombies. Frank shows them that petrochemicals have lost their flammability. That explains why the cars Barry had been driving have all stopped. Barry discovers that zombie blood, and the gas they breath out, is flammable. They hook up a zombie to their truck and take off for Bulla.

On the road they encounter the military men and Brooke. She's used the zombies to escape and kill the doctor. He was a sick fuck. There's more stuff going on, the movie is pretty much packed end to end with activity, only rarely does the story slow down to give you a break. There's a good bit of gore and most of it's physical. I think that the 6.3 it scores on the IMDb is a bit lower than it should be. It's definitely on the list of zombie movies that show a bit of originality. I enjoyed it and would want to watch it again.

Friday Night Movies 543

We watched Robot Overlords which I had already seen on YouTube. I thought it was a bit better than last time but I still can't give it more than an average for a score. It gets a 4.6 on the IMDb and that's still not much lower than I would rate it.

Chopping Mall was our second feature. It's a 1986 film directed by Jim Wynorski who co-wrote it with Steve Mitchell. This was Wynorski's second job at directing after The Lost Empire. He continues to make low-budget films of dubious quality. I have not see many of them, especially when it comes to his soft-core work. The movie was produced by Roger Corman's wife Julie. It's rather short, 77 minutes, and there was a longer version that was released originally. There's a TV version that has some more material than this DVD version. The shopping mall in the film is the Sherman Oaks Galleria which was one of the hangouts for what became Valley Girl culture and it's been used in a dozen films including Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Night Of The Comet and Valley Girl. In the 21st century it has been rebuilt and turned into office space. The movie was originally released as Killbots. It did poorly at the box office under that title but did much better when re-released as Chopping Mall.

The stories pretty simple, some robots are guarding the mall at night and some young couples decide to have a party at the furniture store Tony O'Dell's uncle's owns. Tony has no girlfriend so the other three couples hook him up with a young woman from the pizza place, played by Kelli Maroney. Lightning hits the building and it affects the computer system. The robots kill the security guards, one of which is played by Gerrit Graham Later the 3 couples are all getting rumpy pumpy and Tony and Kelli are watching a movie on TV.  Since it's an 80's horror movie and they aren't getting any you can guess who has a better chance of surviving. The robots are tracked units that have lasers, tasers and tranquilizer guns. Their claws can crush a man's throat. After the security guards are killed the robots go off into the mall to keep an eye on things. Poor Dick Miller is a janitor and he's next to go. Then the young couples get picked off one at a time while they run about the mall. The security doors on the mall are locked until early in the morning so they have to wait it out.

It's about average, there's nothing too special about it, bit of nudity or two. Barbara Crampton plays one of the young ladies who doffs her top. Sadly she doesn't make it out of the mall at dawn. Paul Bartelt and Mary Woronov have a brief cameo as Paul and Mary Bland, their characters from Eating Raoul. It was worth a look and I borrowed the DVD to listen to the commentary by Jim Wynorski and Steve Mitchell.

Friday Night Movies 542

If you were living in the US when Witchfinder General came out you would have seen it under the name The Conqueror Worm. I first saw it under that title on a VHS tape back in 1993. I've since gotten a DVD of the movie. It's a 1968 British and US production from Trigon British Film Productions and American International Productions. It's written by Tom Baker and director Michael Reeves. Louis Heyward is credited with some additional scenes and the movie is adapted from a novel by Ronald Bassett. The US title is from the poem by Edgar Allen Poe and it was thought that the Poe connection could attract more customers who had been seeing the AIP Poe adaptations by Roger Corman. It must have worked, the movie was a good money spinner and brought in $1.5 million on it's $175,000 cost.

Tom Baker isn't the actor who played the Doctor, he's a screenwriter who's only other credit is for co-writing The Sorcerers the year before. It was his last movie and the same for Michael Reeves. He's previously directed The Sorcerers in 1967 and She Beast in 1966. A bit earlier than those movies he has an uncredited bit of directing on Castle Of The Living Dead in addition to directing three shorts. He wrote, or co-wrote, the screenplays for the films he directed. He died an accidental death from an alcohol and barbiturate overdose in 1969 at the age of 25. That's the same age that the Wikipedia says the real Matthew Hopkins was when he died in 1647. Vincent Price was middle aged when he played the part in his 75th movie but it's just one of many historical inaccuracies in the film. I can't imagine anyone thinking this is unusual.

It's 1645 and Matthew Hopkins is a specially appointed witchfinder. He finds them, tortures them, and hangs them. No trials for this busy guy. That's Matthew in the middle, played by Vincent Price, the guy on his left is Robert Russell playing Matthew's assistant John Stearne. John likes sinking his thin little knife into people's flesh. He's not the more sophisticated psychopath that Matthew is, he's much cruder. He does most of the heavy lifting and Hopkins takes the reward, one silver piece for every witch dispatched. Robert's voice was dubbed in as Reeves though his natural higher pitched voice wasn't suitable for the character. Witchfinder General is the nick name that the citizens bestow on Matthew Hopkins. He's quite proud to be doing God's work and thinks he should be routing out witches across the whole of England.

There's a romantic subplot with Ian Ogilvy as a Roundhead soldier named Richard and Hilary Dwyer as Sara. She's the niece of a priest who's killed by the Witchfinder General. She gets roughed up and raped for being the niece. That subplot takes up a good bit of the film as a vengeance bound Richard chases Matthew and John about the East Anglia area. There's a fair bit of moving about on horses. I guess it helps fill time. In real life Hopkins has no special appointment and the authorities were chasing after him. He still managed to kill 2-3 hundred people in his short career. There's a subplot dealing with the English Civil War and James Cromwell makes a brief appearance. Richard and Sara fall into the hands of the Witchfinder General and gets a taste of John's blade. They escape and Richard eventually gets his revenge. Not a good day for any of them.

The movie seemed longer than I remembered, it's a bit draggy, but it's still fairly entertaining as a look at what shitty ancestors we used to have. Sadly torturous religious zealots are still holding court in the world today. Flawed as the movie is, and that's only a slight bit, it's still worth a look for Vincent Price's work. He plays the role deadly serious, instead of the broader way he often played characters in the AIP films he'd already done. This was his 17th film for AIP. The adaptations of the Edgar Allan Poe stories are quite entertaining. I'd recommend The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Comedy of Terrors (1963), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964),and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965). He also starred in The Last Man on Earth (1964), the first adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. That's another film where he plays the character in a straight up serious way. The WG isn't going to appeal to everyone but it still is worth a look.

For some reason, lack of memory mostly, I thought I hadn't seen The Mini-Skirt Mob but about 20 minutes in I was thinking it was looking more and more familiar. I had seen it, in 2012, according to my watched movie list. It's a 1968 movie about another couple of lovers tortured by some scumbags. It's written by James Gordon White who would be responsible for two pretty awful films everyone laughs at now: The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant and The Thing With Two Heads. TM-SM is directed by Maury Dexter who directed about 20 low-budget films. Besides this one I've only seen one other, The Day Mars Invaded Earth. That was back in 1993 and I didn't make a comment on the movie in my watched movie list so I have no idea what I thought.

The movie opens with a terrible song sung by Patty McCormack. That's Patty above, she's an ok singer, and that song she sings couldn't be made better by anyone. She's in the film as the voice of reason and sadly they light her on fire and she dies. The opening credits show us some guys at a rodeo, then they hop on motorcycles with some chicks with jackets that say The Mini-Skirt Mob on the back.

Ross Hagen and Sherry Jackson are on their honeymoon. If you're a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan you might remember Ross in The Side Hackers which is also called Five The Hard Way. Hagan did a lot of TV, his career started in 1966 and he continued to work until his death in 2011. In The Mini-Skirt Mob Ross is a rodeo guy and Sherry is a gal he met in a bank. They've known each other for three weeks and now their married and travelling in a trailer. Neither one is driving with a working engine and that helps complicate their lives.

Ross's pals show up to party but things get a bit rough and Ross tells them to go. Diane McBain is the blond on the left, she's Ross's old flame, and she's pissed that he married Sherry. She instigates a fight between Ross and his pal Jeremy Slate after Ross tells them to leave him alone. Ross gets the upper hand briefly but the other three guys gang up on him to help Jeremy. That's the kind of guys they are. Not my sort, that's for sure. One of them is played by Harry Dean Stanton, that's him in the cowboy hat, in case you didn't spot him right away. Ross grabs a rifle and drives them off. Diane riles them up for revenge. She wants Ross and his wife dead for dumping her and she'll do anything to get her way. Their low-intellect driven antics get one after another of the gang dead. First, while harassing the couple in their moving convertible and trailer, one of the gang is accidentally driven over a cliff. Ha ha, served him right. Only Patty will speak out, saying it was an accident, but Diane is furious and wants revenge. A couple of the guy leave and the rest catch up to the couple while they're parked in a remote spot. Ross has left Sherry alone in the trailer and the gang tie her up and steal the rifle. They keep Ross and Sherry in the trailer but don't seem to have any idea on what to do with them now that they've caught them. Diane still wants them dead but Patty's argument is getting some traction. Patty knocks out Harry and returns the gun to Ross. She pretends to be Sherry while Ross and Sherry leave. Jeremy decides to burn them out and poor Patty is lit on fire when the propane tank blows. Freaked out, Harry and the two gals in the mob leave. Diane blames Ross and Sherry and they chase after them. The movie doesn't end well for hardly anyone.

It's barely entertaining, it gets a 4.5 on the IMDb and I can't fault the group mind. Like our first movie it's not going to appeal to everyone. It's got pretty evil twisted villains who get theirs in the end. You can see it on YouTube, there's a link in the title above, so you can find out yourselves if you like it.

Friday Night Movies 541

Barely Lethal is a 2014 teen comedy that mixes the usual teen high school angst, spy action and Samuel L Jackson. It's written by John D'Arco and directed by Kyle Newman. This is John's first feature, he's mostly worked in the camera department or as an assistant director. Kyle is the writer and director of the 2009 Fanboys. That was an enjoyable movie. Hailee Steinfeld plays Agent 83 and she works for Sam Jackson. He's head of the Prescott Academy which trains kids to be spies. Jessica Alba is an arms dealer that Sam sends a team to capture. 83 gets her hands on Jessica, straps her to a cable hanging from a raising balloon that gets snatched up by a plane. Hailee is dangling below Jessica when starts shooting and to save herself she drops into a river below.

Rather than call for a pick up Hailee decides to run off to join a high school. She pretends to be Canadian, from Regina, and applies to be a foreign exchange student. She stays with Rachel Harris and her teen daughter Dove Cameron and young son Jason Ian Drucker. There's the usual high school stuff about fitting in and dating then the spy world catches up to Hailee. Sam finds her and has her brought back. He drugs her to get the truth, she just wants to have a more normal life. He lets her go. Things go back to near normal for her until Agent 84 shows up. Her old rival at Prescott vies for the cute musician Hailee has eyes for and the two of them fight it out. Jessica escapes from Prescott's prison and comes looking for revenge. There's more fighting and the movie ends on a happy note.

It was fun enough but not great, there was a clip in the movie from Bring It On and I couldn't help thinking that was a better movie. BL gets a 5.2 on the IMDb and that's about right. I'm not sorry to have seen it but I wouldn't need to see it again. You can see a fair to good copy of the whole movie on YouTube it a link somewhere above, or just watch the trailer in the link in the title.

I hadn't see Return To Oz in quite some time. I'm pretty sure I saw it in the theater when it was new, I used to go to the theater a lot in those days, but it might have been on VHS later. I didn't keep records of movies watched when it came out in 1985. I don't remember seeing it since then. The screenplay was written by director Walter Murch and Gil Dennis who sort of adapted The Marvelous Land Of Oz and Ozma of Oz. Murch is mostly a sound designer and film editor. This is his only feature film as a director and he had a bit of trouble with it. From the Wikipedia:

Once shooting began, Murch began to fall behind schedule, and there was further pressure from the studio, leading to Murch being fired as director for a short period.George Lucas and other high profile filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola supported Murch in discussions with the studio, and Murch was reinstated and finished the film.

Murch's version doesn't have the light hearted feel of the L Frank Baum Oz books and that might be one of the reasons the movie wasn't too highly regarded when it came out. Critics didn't like the dark take too much back then and that probably hurt the box office. It only made $11 million on the $28 million cost. Fans have liked it for years and it gets a respectable 6.7 on the IMDb.

Return Of Oz introduces Fairuza Balk to the movie audience. She's Dorothy Gale, Piper Laurie is Aunt Em, Matt Clark is Uncle Henry, Nicol Williamson is the Gnome King and Jean Marsh is Mombi. Dorothy has been back from Oz for 6 months and she's unhappy to be in Kansas. Aunt Em takes her to a doctor who wants to give her some electroshock therapy to clear her mind of her sadness. She runs off and falls into a river which takes her to Oz. While she's been away the Gnome King has defeated the Scarecrow and taken all the emeralds back to his mountain. The citizens have been turned to stone and the Mombi and the Wheelers have taken over the city.

Dorothy spends the movie running about gathering pals to defeat the GN in his rock pile. I like some of the characters better than others, Jack Pumpkinhead is pretty good, Tik-Tok is a bit goofy, not a fan of the Scarecrow's face but I did like Toto and the Gump. It's pretty colorful and there's oodles of interesting scenery. The story's ok, I'm not tied down to the books enough to care that they have changed things up a lot. I got a laugh or two and it was fun to see it again.