PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 602

Female Convict Scorpion is a 2008 Chinese Japanese film called Sasori in Japan. It's based on a manga and a 1972 movie. A woman is forced to kill her boyfriend's sister or the villains will kill the boyfriend. She goes to jail and becomes a monster. She escapes and starts getting her revenge on the people who forced her into her current situation. It's an arty film with a bit of a weak script, I often felt myself wandering out of the movie. The last third, mostly revenge, is the most interesting part of the movie. That's we learn much of what the story is all about. It gets a 4.9 on the IMDb, I gave it a 5, but I wouldn't give it a 6.

Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary is a 1975 movie that was directed by Juan López Moctezuma. He directed The House Of Madness, or The Mansion Of Madness, which about inmates taking over the mental institution. I had seen that and it was weird enough to stand out. This is pretty weird too.

Cristina Ferrare play Mary, a bisexual blood drinker, maybe a vampire, who drugs people, often during sex, slashes their necks, then drinks the blood that gushes out. Mary's an artist who drives a VW Minibus and on her travels she picks up a guy for a lover.

John Carradine plays her long lost father. He kills the same way as Mary and the bodies are starting to pile up. There's some cops trying to figure out who the serial killer is and Mary and her lover are suspects. Things go sour for Mary but she has a happy ending riding off in her VW van. More entertaining than our first movie by a fair bit. It scores a 5.3 on the IMDb and that's about right with me.

Friday Night Movies 601

Neon Maniacs is a 1986 horror movie about some demons who come out of the Dante's Bakery truck parked in a garage under the Golden Gate Bridge. It's mostly filmed in Glendale and Hollywood. It's directed by Joseph Mangine and it's only one of two movies he directed. The other was Smoke And Flesh in 1968. Most of his credits are for cinematographer or director of photography and he died in 2006 at the age of 73. Of that work I really can't say that I've seen much of it. It's written by Mark Patrick Carducci who was 43 when he died in 1997. He had a short list of credits on the IMDb, Neon Maniacs was his first movie, followed by an episode of Tales From The Darkside, the entertaining movie Pumpkinhead, a TV movie, Buried Alive, that I never saw and the documentary Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The 'Plan 9' Companion which I did. That documentary is included on a DVD of Plan 9 From Outer Space and I watched it back in 2002. I gave it an A-OK rating on my Watched Movie List.

That's Leilani Sarelle on the left with Donna Locke in the middle. Leilani kept on acting but this is the only movie for Donna. I'm not sure who the other woman is. Leilani survives the attack of the demons while she's hanging out in a park with her friends. The police are skeptical but 6 high school students are missing so they put a tail on her. Donna discovers the demon's Achilles heel and she tells Leilani and Clyde Hayes. He's a grocery delivery guy who hooks up with Leilani. The cops aren't much help against supernatural beings and things go bad at the school's battle of the bands. Leilani, Clyde and Donna try to organize the students at the dance but when the monsters attack their classmates panic and many fall to the chomping jaws of the demons. The parents are in an uproar.

It was fun to watch much of the time. The demons were menacing and they were different enough to tell them apart. The main monsters had a bit of personality. The story after the dance massacre is pretty weak. It gets a 4.7 on the IMDb and I gave it a 5. Worth a look, for the horror fan, but I'm not going to bother picking one up, other than the copy I downloaded from YouTube.

I'd be even less likely to pick up a copy of Demonic. The copy we watched was on a 2 film Blu-ray that was found for under 3 bucks. Sperhauk picked it up because he noticed Tom Savini on the cover. This 2005 British movie came out over there under the name Forest Of The Damned. Johannes Roberts is the writer director of the movie. He's directed 7 other movies, a TV movie and a couple of TV episodes and I can't say I've seen any of them. Johannes isn't that great a film maker. He had trouble making this movie 83 minutes without a lot of tedious padding. There are several long shots of the sky and some out of focus POV shots that make a guy want to give a big slap to someone.

The usual gang of idiots goes off on a holiday trip in a shitty old van that barely starts when they go to leave. They take a forest road on top of that. When the weak ass driver hits woman in the road because he wasn't paying attention the impact kills the machine. Now they are stranded and there are naked bisexual demon women in the area.

They find a beat up old house where Tom Savini is the resident crazy person. Things go poorly for most everyone. If Tom don't get you then the naked bisexual demon women will. Just don't look in their eyes! Everyone does, then the victims start making out with the naked bisexual demon girls, and that leads to some chomping action. Look at those teeth. Ow! Ow! Ow! as they rip off your lips.

It's sadly not that good of a film. The padding made everyone complain. The characters are kind of annoying but with British accents. Does that make it worse? Might do. I thought they could have made it better with more diverse accents. It certainly could have used some better scenes and action. I wouldn't recommend and the voters of the IMDb are right there with me. It scores a 2.9 and I gave it a 3. There's a 2008 sequel called Forest Of The Damned II: Death By Desire that I haven't seen. I might never see it but who knows. Shit happens.

Friday Night Movies 600

Blood Diner is a 1987 horror comedy about eatin' people. It's written by Michael Sonye and directed by Jackie Kong. That diner on the poster isn't in the movie.

Two young brothers are convinced by their Uncle that they should worship the 5 million year old Lumerian goddess Sheetar. The Uncle is a murdering maniac because the rituals of the church demand human sacrifices and he's terrible at covering up his crimes. Twenty years after he's been killed by the police the boys, now young men, dig up their Uncle and put his brain in a jar. The brain has eyes and it can communicate by speaking out of it's ... who knows what. It's in a fucking jar.

Magical bullshit aside, Uncle sets the boys on a mission, luring women and chopping them up to build the perfect vessel for Sheetar. That's Sheetar there on the left above. She's topless most of the time she's on screen. There's plenty of slaughter and body parts flying but it's so comical all you can do is laugh. That's okay with me. I prefer a fun picture to a dark and dire trip to some serious black place. The police are on the case. The detective is a sleazy pig of a guy. He's the mind of guy with Brylcreem on his head and you can just imagine he's used it on his pubes too. His partner is a feisty gal who can't act very well. It was her only movie and I can see why.

Some of the actors did better in their roles than the police lady. The variety of accents, real and made up, is amusing. Jackie's film making isn't anything special but it does the job. Especially for a movie that was shot in three weeks on what I can only guess is a small budget. It's a pretty silly fuckin' movie and I got a laugh. When it came out it was banned in some Canadian provinces.

I got some laughs out of our second movie, The Monster of Piedras Blancas, but not because it's meant to be a comedy. It does have a sense of humor but that's not it's job. It's a decent low-budget, $29,000, film about a town terrorized by a monster. I'm pretty sure that I had seen it before but it's not listed in my Watched Movie List. If you haven't seen it you can check it out by clicking the link in the title above. 

It's from 1959 and it's got a script by director Irwin Berwick. In 1945 Irwin started working for Columbia Pictures as a dialog coach for directors like William Castle. He later moved to Universal-International. He only directed 7 movies, this first one in 1959, and the last, Malibu High in 1979. The first and last movies he directed are the only ones I've seen. At least so far anyway. Malibu High is one of 32 movies packed into the Drive-In Cult Classics Multi Movie Pack. Well worth picking up, it has slightly better films that most of the Multi Movie Packs. It's a nice mix of low budget B pictures, most of which are from Crown International. Berwick's son Wayne plays Little Jimmy in the film. Wayne acted in a couple more films, directed a little bit of TV, and had a few other jobs in the industry.

The monster is similar to many Universal monsters even though this is an independent film from Irwin Berwick and Jack Kevan's Vanwick Productions. The monsters hands are the same as the hands of the mole people in The Mole People. Here's a bit from the IMDb Trivia page on the creature:

The monster suit looks like the one from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), mainly because the creator of The Creature, Jack Kevan, produced and supervised the make-up effects on the film. Much is credited to Universal-International's standard make-up credit of Bud Westmore, but he had little to do (other than posing for publicity photos) with the great monsters from that studio in the '50's.

That's Forrest Lewis, Jeanne Carmen, Don Sullivan and Les Tremayne in the picture. The most famous name in the cast is Les Tremayne, at least to me. He's in one of my favorite 1950s SF films, The Monolith Monsters, where he plays a newspaper man. It's a similar character to the doctor he plays in TMOPB. Pete Dunn plays the monster. John Harmon plays the troubled lighthouse keeper.

The story is pretty simple, it's a 71 minute movie, and there isn't any time to waste on anything but story and lean character development. The acting is quite good, a lot of these are veteran character actors and they do a great job. Especially John Harmon, the lighthouse keeper who has a secret about the monster. In a lot of ways I enjoy these older story drive monster movies over a lot of the gore fested monster movies of today with little by way of interesting characters. Well worth a look for those that like this sort of thing.

Friday Night Movies 599

Dune Warrior was the first pick. It's a 1991 David Carradine post apocalypse film set in a quarry. David's a wanderer who has a grudge against the baddie played by Luke Askew. Jillian McWhirter is a woman in the village with a nice endless water supply. Lew wants to set up camp there and he sends a group to hold the place until he gets there. The village has little by ways of weapons and they're easy prey for the heavily armed thugs. Jillian leaves to find warriors to fight back and she runs into David. He takes her to a town where three con men fall into their hands. They meet up with a warrior woman on the way back to the village. The fight for the town is long and deadly. The townies win and the group breaks up.

It's all very much a Seven Samurai inspired story but marked down to 5. There's plenty of fighting and explosions. Too little nudity and hardly an scenery but the desert and rock quarry. It's written by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver  and directed by Cirio H Santiago. Both worked heavily in the low budget genre. Thomas wrote a dozen movies and this is the only one I've seen. Cirio directed a 100 movies, many of which were made in this home town of Manila. He made a bunch in the US in the 70s and 80 with movies like TNT Jackson, Vampire Hookers and Equalizer 2000. He continued to make films into the 90s but has slowed down, directing only one film since 2005.

It's not great nor is it quite fun enough to make me give it more than a 4 on the IMDb. It scores a 3.9 there now but only with 199 votes. I did like seeing David Carradine but he's not quite enough to make me think about buying the movie. I might never get around to wanting to watch it again.

Our second feature was the 2005 Charles Band film Doll Graveyard. For some reason Charles has an doll fixation. His dolls are magical murderous creatures that enact vengeance on those that cross them or their masters. Band wrote the story that Domonic Muir, under the August White moniker, turned into a screenplay. Dominic worked with Charles Band on many occasions. Sadly some of his films include the Evil Bong series and the Gingerdead Man series.

Doll Graveyard opens in 1905 with a girl playing with her dolls. That's one of them in Jared Kusnitz's hand. He's just found it buried in his garden. The girl in 1905 had broken a glass ornament while playing and as punishment her cold stern father made her dig a grave for her dolls. After she places her dolls into the grave she falls back while climbing out of the shallow grave. She is knocked out or dead, it's not established, and her father buries her. Years later the samurai doll is found and placed on a shelf in Jared's room. His father later finds the watch belonging to the buried girl's father.

Jared's sister invites 2 of her girl friends over for girly stuff. One girl is a cheerleader, blonde, stuck up and annoying, the other is more normal. The cheerleader invites a couple of jocks over and things go down hill from there. The jocks rough up Jared and crush the package of one of his action figure collectables. That signs their death warrant and the other three dolls crawl out of the ground looking for some killing. One of the jocks gets speared right in his crotch and that's the end of him. The rest of the movie is trying to survive the doll onslaught.

It was OK but nothing special or original. I liked it a bit better than our first feature tonight but like Dune Warrior it's all something I've seen many times before. It gets a 4.1 on the IMDb and I'd give it a 5 because a 4 seems low, especially when I'm giving a 4 to Dune Warrior. Since I bought Doll Graveyard, in a three pack of Full Moon productions, I'll have it for a while but who knows if I'll ever get back to it.

Friday Night Movies 598

There's a new Blu-ray of Godzilla 1984 out here in the US, it came out last Tuesday, and it's the first time that the Japanese version of the movie has been commercially available here. It was released in the US as Godzilla 1985 with some changes. The movie was released in Japan as Godzilla on December 15 1984. It's also been called The Return of Godzilla. I'm sticking with the Godzilla 1984 moniker. Over the years since it's release I've acquired a number of copies of the film from various sources. I made a DVDr copy of both the English dubbed New World VHS tape and Laserdisc so I could get rid of those formats. There's a DVDr copy of someone's Japanese Laserdisc, it looks nice, but it has no English dub or subtitles. I have a Video Dakaiju VHS bootleg tape that I copied to DVDr, again to get rid of the tape which had the Japanese version of the movie with fan subtitles. Someone gave me an English dubbed version of the Japanese movie but it looks pretty poor and there are Dutch subtitles through the whole thing. I've got a DVDr bootleg from the Japanese DVD that has fan subs. It looks the best of the bootlegs. It's amazing what the fans will do to get the films they want, huh.

The movie starts with a ship at sea, it gets attacked, and Godzilla pops out of an island. He's also dropping giant 6 foot long fleas that suck the fluids out of humans. All the ships crew get killed but one guy. The government tries to keep a wrap on the story but nosy reporter guy comes along. The movie ignores the decades of sequels to the original 1954 film as if they had not happened. So it's 30 years after the first Godzilla appearance and he's returned. Something destroys a Russian sub and they think it was the US. Sabers rattle and the Japanese release info about Godzilla to stop a war. Once the Russians and US find out it was Godzilla they demand to drop a bomb on the critter. They toss their demands in the Japanese Prime Minister's face. The PM says No nukes!

The Japanese Defense Force has tanks, missiles and the Super-X. It's a big fat VTOL spaceship looking craft that's got some super deadly cadmium missiles that knock Godzilla out. The Russians have a ship in Tokyo Bay that is damaged when Godzilla strolls by and the automatic launch control goes out of wack and  launches a nuke. In the Godzilla 1985 version the nuke gets launched on purpose by the Russians. Luckily the US explodes it in upper atmosphere with a missile.

The radioactive fall out revives Godzilla and he beats the Super-X to the ground and pushes a building over on it. There's always plenty of work for the building trades after Godzilla comes knocking. The scientists figure out a way to lure Godzilla into a volcano and they blow it up with him inside.

Don't worry, he'll enjoy basking in that refreshing molten mass until next time. It's more like the early Godzilla films than the ones from the 1970's, somewhat more dark and much more deadly for the citizens unlucky enough to be out when Godzilla comes calling. It's a fun restart of the series and worth seeing.

I, Madman is a 1989 movie that was directed by Tibor Takacs. We had just watched his more recent movie Spiders. I, Madman is written by David Chaskin and while he didn't pen a masterpiece he did pen something more watchable than most of the low budget horror films that I've been seeing of late. I, Madman is a horror movie about a horror novel. That's the book from the movie on the still below. I'm guessing that they changed the book in the poster so there wouldn't be any near nude breasts on the poster.

Jenny Wright is a worker in a used bookstore. She's found a horror novel that she really got into, so much so that she starts hallucinating the killer from the book. I, Madman is by author Malcolm Brand. Jenny goes looking for any info on him. Brand's old published says he died years ago. Jenny's boyfriend Police Detective on a the trail of a killer who keeps slicing pieces off his victim's faces. Jenny tells the police that the killer is the Doctor from the book. You can imagine that didn't go down well. I always wonder why people don't lie when this sort of thing comes up. The police will always think you're crazy if you tell them it was a monster. There's plenty of murderin' and yellin' and runnin' about. I enjoyed it well enough and was glad to have seen it.

Friday Night Movies 597

I'm running a bit behind of late, I had to go get a new PC, mine was just dying a byte at a time. Now I'm up and running with a new PowerSpec from Microcenter. It's much better. I also bought a new monitor, a 27 inch LG, and boy is that great. It's so huge.

Our first feature was The Beast Must Die, a 1974 British horror film from Amicus Productions and British Lion Films. It's based on a James Blish short story called There Shall Be No Darkness. I don't recall ever reading it but Blish was never one of my favorites. I know I read some of his novels when I was younger but I haven't read any of his work since the 1970s. The screenplay is by Michael Winder and it's directed by Paul Annett. The IMDb tells me that Michael wrote an episode of The Avengers, a Space 1999 and 2 episodes of The Saint. Most of his work was in TV, this is one of 3 films he wrote, and his career only covered 1965 to 1977. Paul's work was also mostly in TV. He wrote 3 theatrical films and 3 TV movies. Most of his TV work I haven't seen, other than the 3 episodes of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series and 3 episodes of the Tommy and Tuppence series Partners In Crime. 

That's Calvin Lockhart, with the gun, and Tom Chadbon. I didn't think I had seen Calvin in anything before but I see he was in a fair number of blacksplotation films that I've seen and he was the Jamaican Drug Lord in Predator 2. He was also The Electrician in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. That I don't remember at all. Calvin is a rich big game hunter in the film, he's got a big estate with all sorts of cameras and microphones planted, and he's invited 6 people to visit. He believes that one of the 6 strangers he brought to his estate is a werewolf. He offers no proof other than strange deaths when they've been places. He says he will kill that werewolf and he won't let them leave. Marlene Clark plays his wife and the rest of the prisoners are Peter Cushing, Tom Chadbon, Michael Gambon, and Charles Gray. Anton Differing is the security guy who set up, and operates, the Audio and Video equipment. Sadly his nice gear won't help him and he's the werewolf's first victim. 

It's got a weird gimmick, the Werewolf Break, in which they let you guess who the werewolf is a few minutes before the end of the movie. There's an announcement at the beginning of the film. Joe said he was sure he hadn't seen the movie before, he thinks he would have remembered "something so stupid." It's not a very good gimmick but neither was the werewolf. Turns out the werewolf was a dog in a wig. It was a big dog and he did have a fluffy wig. Some of the werewolf mythology is pretty fluffy too. The movie struggles on the border between dull and interesting. Parts of it were almost exciting but then the next scene is a let down. It was entertaining to watch, mostly because of the werewolf and Most Dangerous Game mashup, and I think it almost lives up to it's 5.8 on the IMDb. I would give it a 6 because a 5 is a bit low. It was one of the last films Amicus produced and there wasn't much of a budget. I doubt I would need to see it again.

The Monster Club was our second feature. I hadn't seen it before and was interested because it has an interesting cast. It's an 1981 British film with a script by Edward Abraham and Valeria Abraham. Roy Ward Baker is the director. Milton Subotsky is the producer on this and The Beast Must Die.

Vincent Price is a vampire in this horror comedy musical. He bites the neck of horror writer John Carradine. He finds out John is his favorite writer and he invites him to The Monster Club. It's a nightclub catering to the monsters. Sadly some of the monsters are pretty sad looking. Mostly people in rubber masks. There's some musical numbers of mixed quality and between the songs Vincent tells some tales. There are three stories, each about the offspring of various monsters. There's a long explanation about the types of offspring. It's pretty dumb. The first story is The Shadmock, a monster that can turn you to jelly with a whistle, the second is The Vampires, a comedy story with Britt Ekland and Donald Pleasence, and last, The Ghouls, a story about Stuart Whitman falling into the hands of some ghouls.

It's all pretty silly and I got a few laughs out of it. Worth a look for the fan, it's pretty goofy so be warned. You can see it on YouTube.

Friday Night Movies 596

Our first film was the 1959 musical Li'l Abner. It was a free selection on Amazon Prime. It was a nice colorful noisy film that was pretty much fun. It's based on the comic strip by Al Capp. The director is Melvin Frank and he wrote the script with Norman Panama. It's got an interesting cast including Stubby Kaye, Leslie Parrish, Julie Newmar, Stella Stevens and Robert Strauss. That's Julie as Stupifyin' Jones above. Here's another shot of her.

That picture is very much like the movie. There's more leaping and movement in this picture than you'd see is any 2 or 3 martial arts movies. Sadly the movie is out of print and costly. I wouldn't pay the over 23 bucks on Amazon. Not that I need to really have a copy. There are a lot of clips on YouTube but not the whole movie.

Deathstalker II: Duel Of The Titans is a 1987 film from producer Roger Corman. It was one of the 9 films that he made in Argentina. Jim Wynorski is the director. He wrote the story that scriptwriter Neil Ruttenberg adapted. RJ Robertson is credited for additional dialog. It's sad to see 3 grown men fail at writing a good movie. The movie is even dumber than the first Deathstalker. And that's quite a feat. There's a new guy playing Deathstalker and he doesn't quite match up to Rick Hill's performance in the first movie. Deathstalker meets up with Monique Gabrielle, she's a seer and a princess, and he helps her get back her castle from an evil wizard played by John Lazar. There's some poor fighting, a few gags that work, and a bit of nudity. Not much good but short, only 77 minutes. Short is good. The original release was 85 minutes and it was cut with footage from the first movie. This version is touted as a director's cut.

Friday Night Movies 595

I hadn't seen Five Golden Dragons before. It's a goofy 1967 comedy thriller with Bob Cummings as the lead in what would be his last feature film. It was made in Hong Kong at the Shaw Brothers Studio and the Tiger Balm Pagoda. It was produced by Harry Alan Towers who also wrote the script. The film was directed by Jeremy Summers who had directed many episodes of Danger Man and The Saint.

It's got a nice international cast. Bob Cummings is from the US, Klaus Kinski is from Germany, Rupert Davies is from the UK, Roy Chiao is from Hong Kong. There's some pretty ladies, Margaret Lee is from the UK, singer Yukari Itô is from Japan, Maria Rohm and Maria Perschy are from Austria.

Christopher Lee, Dan Duryea, George Raft and Brian Donlevey have smaller parts than the rest.

Bob is goofy American who gets mixed up with the criminal gang called the Five Golden Dragons. The gang is going to sell their organization to the Mafia for $50 million. The gang think they are going to use Bob for a patsy but he screws up their plans.

Bob and the 2 Maria's have a couple of rather low-throttle chases, one on the junks in the Hong Kong Harbor and one with rickshaws. Fights and the like are none to great. It's all pretty silly and fun. It's been released on a new Blu-ray with Circus Of Fear. Both are worth a look.

Deathstalker is from a recent Blu-ray it shares with it's sequel. It's a 1983 action adventure film produced by Roger Corman. It was one of 9 films he made in Argentina. It's directed by James Sbardellati under the name of John Watson. The script is by Howard R Cohen. Beside this film and two of the Deathstalker sequels Howard wrote Vampire Hookers, Stryker, both the Barbarian Queen pictures and Rainbow Brite and Care Bears cartoons. He also directed 6 low-budget films that I'm pretty much sure I haven't seen.

That's Rick Hill on the right in the picture above, he plays Deathstalker, and he's on a quest to re-unite a trio of magical objects. He's gets given the sword but needs the other two for a power boost. The other guys are part of the group of warriors that come for the contest at the castle of the big evil magician called Munkar. That's Munkar on the left and it's his castle that holds the other two magical objects. There's plenty of fighting, sadly not all so good. The story has good bit of humor. There's plenty of nudity, too. It's Barbi Bention's last film, she'd appear on some TV before retiring in 1986.

Lana Clarkson is the warrior Kaira, she'd play the lead in the two Barbarian Queen films. Sadly she was the woman Phil Spector murdered. Six years after her 2003 death Phil was sentenced to 19 years in prison.

It's not any better or worse than a lot of these sword and sandal films. The movie was fun enough, most of us got a laugh or two and I was glad to have seen it. I was thinking I might have seen it back when it was new but I am not sure, it didn't look familiar. It's not on the List of Watched Movies but I didn't keep the list at the time it was released. I know I have seen the third film of the 4 Deathstalker films, Deathstalker And The Warriors From Hell, when it was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Of course for TV all the nudity was edited out. On that sad note, I'm done.

Friday Night Movies 594

Samurai Resurrection is a 2003 Japanese film about some revenge fueled Christians that come back as demon souls after they are all killed. The Christians rebelled and the Shogun slaughtered them all. The leader comes back as a demon and resurrects various fighters to kill for him. They all fail and the movie ends with everything back to the way it was. All the Christians are dead. I was hoping for more but the movie was kind of dull at times. I didn't like much the dreary look of the movie either. Not something I'd need to see again. Others might like it more than me. So far it scores a 5.2 on the IMDb, with 333 votes, and I think that's about right.

I'd have to say I'm not going to be jumping to watch Lurking Fear again. It's a 1994 Full Moon film that was written and directed by C Courtney Joyner. He's written several Full Moon pictures and directed one other film. None are great and neither is this. I did like seeing Jeffrey Combs in the cast but there's nothing that entertaining about his character. The story puts some criminals in the midst of some demon fighters. Things go south quickly and many people die. The problem with the film is the script, the music and the direction. They seemed to have a bit of a budget, some of the actors were better than others but even the worst weren't much less than average, and the effects guys were OK. It's too bad that someone, Charles Band perhaps, didn't have a bit more work done on the script. That might have made the movie more entertaining. It scores a 4.6 on the IMDB and that isn't much off the mark.

Friday Night Movies 593

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier was up first. It's the 2014 installment of the ongoing Captain America saga from Marvel Films. It's the second in the series and there's been another one, last April, but who knows when I'll get to see that. I'm not caring if I see something way after it's been released. Can't see everything when it comes out, even if it came out when you're alive. Often I'm seeing movies that were made when Cap was in the Army, you know, back in World War 2.

Chris Evans is back as Steve Rogers, Captain America, and he's working for Nick Fury at S.H.I.E.L.D. Samuel L Jackson plays Nick Fury and Scarlett Johansson plays Natasha Romanoff or the Black Widow. S.H.I.E.L.D. has been infiltrated by HYDRA all the way to the top of the organization. Their dirty plan is to launch three Helicarriers and use some magical algorithm to read people's media profiles and forecast who would be a problem to HYDRA's rule in the future. The Helicarriers will shoot all the people it thinks will be a problem, both now and in the future, to make the world a safer place for HYDRA to operate. They'll get world peace by killing millions of people. Good idea, huh.

Nick is killed and Captain America is suspected by Robert Redford. His smarmy behavior made me think he's going to be a piece of shit. I guessed right, he's a HYDRA guy and he's got the HYDRA tentacle so far up his ass that everyone should see it wiggling out his mouth when he talks. Robert is a Senator and he  takes over S.H.I.E.L.D. when Nick is killed. Robert orders the agency to take Steve Rogers into custody because he won't tell what Nick said to him before he died.

Steve Rogers isn't having any of that, he hands out a beat down to the men who try. Steve joins forces with Natasha and an ex-soldier who becomes The Falcon. There's plenty of fighting, death, and collateral damage. There's a good bit of melodrama as Steve deals with the past. Since I'm seeing this some time after it came out I knew Nick would survive his death somehow and sure enough he turns up later in the movie. He joins up with Steve and his pals to put an end to the tainted S.H.I.E.L.D. I enjoyed the story well enough and the action scenes were pretty good. There's plenty of CGI and most of it looks good. I'm not happy with the design of the Helicarrier. The special area that stores the all important ship-running data cards is right out in the open on the bottom of the ship. It's something that seems designed by someone who hadn't thought about the security. Seems like a failure there. At least it helps bring the Helicarriers to their doom that much quicker.

I was happy to see it and enjoyed it more than a lot of the Marvel super hero movies. I'll probably see it again since I have a copy I got for a couple of bucks. One day I'll have caught up buying all the Marvel movies and watch them in one big gulp. I'm finding the DVDs at fairly cheap prices, $2-3 each, so I'm picking up those that I know I don't have. I got both of the fairly recent Fantastic Four movies for under 2 bucks each. At some point I'll make a list and check them all off.

Our second film was the 1999 Full Moon Pictures film Blood Dolls. It's written and directed by Charles Band. It's a weird one, there's a fight between millionaires and it turns to murder. One of the men, Virgil, is a twisted recluse. He's got a little tiny head and to make up for it he's filled with big evil. He turns 2 men and a woman into tiny living dolls that kill for him. He goes after two rival men who screwed him on a business deal. The wife of one of the men, she's got the brains in that house, fights back. She kills her hubby to frame Virgil but then offers up herself as his wife to build a bigger fortune.

Virgil lives in a big house with a clown faced butler, a dwarf and an all girl rock band in a cage. It's all pretty goofy and a lot more fun than most Full Moon pictures. It's not great, it seems to drag a bit in the last act, but it was worth seeing. I want to see it again sometime so I ordered a copy from Amazon, it was only 6 bucks. I also picked up a set of Gerry Anderson's The Protectors. Not sure how I'll like it but someday in the future I'll find out.