PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

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The Resident Evil series ended last year with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. The movie is written and directed by Paul W S Anderson. He's been the writer of all 6 films, he directed the first and numbers 4 to 6. I enjoy his work, especially a couple of his earlier films, Event Horizon and Soldier. I hear there's going to be a reboot of the Resident Evil series.

The story picks up after the last movie and it's one long battle back to Raccoon City for Milla Jovovich. She wakes up in Washing DC, not dead like it might have looked in the last film. The Red Queen pops up and fills her in. Most human's are dead, but there are a few that need saving. She tells Milla that there's a cure to the T-virus and it's in Umbrella Corporation's Raccoon City facility, The Hive. That's where it all started and that's where everything ends.

Practically everyone dies in the running battle with Umbrella CEO Dr Alexander Isaacs. He's a religious fanatic that decided he should end the world and store away some of the rich to revive when the planet has settled down from the release of the T-virus. He's operating out of The Hive and he wants to stop Milla from releasing the cure.

The zombies infected by the T-virus will all be killed by the cure and that means death for Milla. In the mean time Isaacs has brought a horde of zombies to the city to stop Milla and the gang. There's plenty of shooting and fire but the numbers are vast. It's pretty exciting, especially when Milla blows The Hive up. So long frozen rich people. Ha ha.

It was a fun enough end to the series though I think you've got to be into the series to sit though all the carnage. I've been picking up used Blu-rays of the series and recently got the last of the 6 live action films. I need 2 of the 3 animated films yet but those aren't as important to me. I'm planning to watch the whole series again, but not for a while, there's so much clambering for attention as it is.

Monster High is an 1989 horror comedy that's somewhat short on comedy. Sperhauk picked up The 4-movie Thrills & Chills Collection from Hamilton Books for $3.95, it's nearly 3 times that price on Amazon. Not bad for 4 movies, each on their own disc. Hamilton has a good number of cheap DVDs and I've already placed a couple of orders. They do better on their movies than the TV shows. Of course, they have a lot of books too.

It's the only feature film for director Rudiger Poe, he went on to mostly produce Playboy videos. As practice he puts a good number of bare breasts into Monster High. It was the first feature for the writers, Roy Langsdon and John Platt, they co-wrote two other films I've never seen. Since then they've both gone on to producing reality shows. It's good, those guys seem to have little talent for the writing and directing.

Monster High is an alien invasion movie. That's not the alien there, the gray guy with the horn, that's a statue that was in front of the school. The school's basketball team is called the Demons. Anyway, it comes alive and later plays in the big basketball game. If I made a joke about those teenage basketball players being horny, it would be a better joke than anything in the movie and I would be ashamed that I told it for much longer than this movie will be around.

Two dim witted idiots from space steal the doomsday device and it winds up on Earth. The doomsday device takes on a human shape and starts playing with the citizens.

Some students fight back and the world is saved. That's them above, the stoner, the pretty girl, the hansom jock and the geek. They battle the doomsday machine. Basically, a workable story line, but the script did not deliver. You can laugh at it's low production values, the flubs and goofs, the poor acting, but not at the jokes. It gets a 3.3 on the IMDb and that's better than I gave it. Some people, in the IMDb comments and other sites reviews, say they have fond memories of this movie from their youth, and you could see where an 8-10 year old might get more laughs out of this. Especially if they got to see it on cable, or tape, and all the titties were still there. Titties aren't any reason to see it and they certainly don't make up for the lack of gags. Still, for me, another movie added to the Watched Movie List.

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We watched the Blu-ray of Ghost In The Shell and hardly anyone was thrilled when it was all over. I know I had seen the animated movie that came out, I have it listed as 9-4-00 on my Watched Movie List. It's based on a manga series by Shirow Masamune, the screenplay was written by Jamie Moss, William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, with Rupert Sanders as the director. Jamie and William haven't written anything I have seen yet, Ehren has written a few popular movies like The Ring series, a couple of the later Transformers movies, and a few others that were better. Rupert's only other feature is Snow White And The Huntsman. Not a film I liked that much.

Scarlett Johansson plays Major Mira Killian, she's a brain in a Scarlett shaped body. She works for Takeshi Kitano, the head of Section 9. Scarlett is supposed to be the first of a series of brain driven robot fighting machines. Juliette Binoche is the developer of the program and she works for Hanka Robotics. He CEO of the company is a devious creep played by Peter Ferdinando. Like much of humanity, CEO Peter is augmented with all sorts of technology. He gets jacked at a meeting by a guy, called Kuze, who has a big ass grudge against Hanka. Kuze's killing scientists, all of whom, it's discovered, have a connection to Project 2571.

Major lives in the well light Hong Kong. It's all very Bladerunner like, the film makers even said so, you know, it's an homage. Major is pretty reckless, jumping off buildings and jumping into the A1 minds of other robots, while people are telling her don't do that. She keeps getting her body trashed but there's plenty of medical tech to make her better. As Major digs into her past and chases after Kuze the plot intertwine until she digs up all the dirt.

It's a lot of flash and there are plenty of CGI battle and explosions and machine guns firing. It has no sense of humor, it's all rather dire, even the bits of humanity don't make you feel good. It's much like what we've all seen before. I wouldn't bother picking this up, maybe for a buck or two, and that's because I've little desire to see it again.

I'd probably watch Horror High again, it's a lot more fun than our first movie. It's the kind of movie that you can laugh with and at. It was shot in 1973 but not released until 1974, you see both dates on the film in site listings and searches. The movie was written by J D Feigelson, under the name Jake Fowler, and directed by Larry N Stouffer. Pat Cardi is a weak science nerd that invents a formula that turns him into a shambling monster. It sounds better than it looks, the monster is created by Pat shuffling along, hunching a bit, with his hair messily combed over his eyes. Most of the monsters scenes are shot in the dark so you can't see much. Works for me. Pat gets picked on my his English teacher, the janitor, the gym coach and his jocks. Pat's term experiment in science is making a formula that turns his guinea pig into a monster. It kills the janitors cat and the janitor beats Pat before making him drink his formula. Well, that's the end of the janitor and soon enough the police are visiting in the form of Austin Stoker and his mustachioed sidekick. There are more murders and a bit of failed romance before the monster is felled by police bullets. It's all pretty preposterous but no one cares and they have a fun sense of humor to back it up. You can see it on YouTube. Oh, yeah, keep an eye out for Mean Joe Green.

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Tonight we watched films from two centuries that were 88 years apart in their making. First up was the Blu-ray of the newly restored The Lost World from 1925. It's got elements from 11 different sources to bring this new version to 110 minutes. The Image disc from 2001 was only 93 minutes and some previous versions have been as short as 64 minutes. You can read more about the various DVDs of the film here. The movie is in the public domain so there have been many DVDs, from a number of companies, over not that many years. The length of the various versions is from 64 minutes to 110. Quite a spread, huh. The movie is based on the Arthur Conan Doyle novel, Marion Fairfax wrote the screenplay and Harry O Hoyt is the director.

Wallace Beery is Professor Challenger, he'd been to the plateau with the living dinosaurs but no one believes him as he has no proof. He gets another expedition together, with the help of a newspaper, and returns to rescue Paula's father. Her father had been left behind during the earlier expedition. The second expedition gets to South America and camps a lot.

Months later they get to the plateau in Venezuela. They have to climb up the skinny bit, chop down a tree to make a bridge, then cross over to the plateau with all the prehistoric critters. Sounds like a video game. Of course they get trapped when a brontosaurus knocks the tree down. Now they have to keep out of the way of the meat eaters and try to get down off the plateau. Lucky for them they have a monkey with them.

They do manage to get to the end of the show with out most of them dying. In the mean time the brontosaurus has fallen off the plateau. It landed in the mud of the river and survived so they bring it to London with them.

It gets out of his cage during the unloading and takes in the sights of London. It falls through Tower Bridge and swims off down the Thames River. Challenger is sad to see him go but he's happy his proof broke a bunch of stuff.

It's a fun enough movie, though a bit slow. There are some nice dino moments by Willis O'Brien. He'd go onto doing King Kong in a few years. The quality of the film is pretty good for a film from that age, though you do see a lot of film damage on some of the bits from some sources. I doubt I'd bother with buying one but you never know it might fall into my hands sometime.

Our second movie also had a drooling creature in it, in The Lost World it's a Dryopithecus, in 13 Eerie it's a more modern zombie type. 13 Eerie is a 2013 Canadian horror film that was written by Christian Piers Betley and directed by Lowell Dean. I got it from Netflix because we had just seen his Wolf Cop movie and I was interested in his other films. It's Lowell's first film and the only one available at Netflix. Their DVD selection just hasn't been up to snuff lately. The death of the the DVD is going to be slow and painful. On the flipside, it's good for getting stuff cheaply.

The story is about a group of forensic students getting their final exam. The Professor has ditched 3 dead bodies, each in their separate area, and the pairs of students have to investigate what's done them in. Trouble is, there's a fourth dead body, and on top of that, it's alive. That's one of the dead bodies with Producer Roger Christian on the left and Director Dean Lowell on the right.

That's Katharine Isabelle smiling, she's one of the students sitting the exam. You might have seen her in the Ginger Snaps films as well as many other films and TV programs. Back in the movie, the dead have risen and people are getting attacked. There's plenty of running about and screaming. The gore is pretty good, some goopy and some grisly bits included. The characters are less hideous than a lot of horror films. It's the Professor and his bus driver that are the dumb asses here. The bitey zombies are OK, pretty aggressive and pretty chompy. I thought it was about average, a bit of enjoyable carnage, but not as good as his later film Wolf Cop. I wouldn't need a copy 13 Eerie but I'd pick it up if I saw it for a couple of bucks.

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First up, Insectula, a local effort from writer director Michael Peterson. It came out a couple of years ago but just showed up in the free section on Amazon Prime. It's supposed to be a parody or homage to the older 50s and 60s SF movies and it has some of those elements in it.

Greg knows local actor Joel Thingval who's been in plenty of big and small movies. That's Joel as Lobo, he's actually the hero in the film. It's about an alien that comes to earth in a meteor. It falls into a lake and starts killing people. A local mad scientist finds an egg and hatches it in his basement lab. He hires Lobo to be his Igor and eventually Lobo turns against him. That MS was a dick, that's for sure. His idea of helping the world be a better place was to kill off three quarters of the population.

The movie starts with a pretty entertaining stop motion animation of the planet with the insectula. It's fired off into space and lands on earth. It's starts killin' right quick. The effects are OK for the most part, the script slows down at times, but we all enjoyed the movie for the most part. Joel gives it a 9 but he's in it. I give it a 6, it's not a 7 but better than average for a low budget Indy movie. You might like it.

Kong: Skull Island is the King Kong reboot that came out earlier this year. The screenplay was written by Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly, with Jordan Vogt-Roberts as the director.

Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L Jackson, John Goodman and John C Reilly are the actors that I knew. They're part of a group that goes to Skull Island for a look see. They find man chomping critters, some folks get eaten, some folks escape.

It's got a nice looking Kong, he's big, and he moves well for a cartoon guy. He'll be fighting Godzilla in a future film, so he needs to be big and strong. Kong seemed like the 1933 Kong to me, just bigger, and that is what the director wanted. There's more backstory in this movie than the 1933 film, with the addition of a passage to the underground world of the monsters. Kong is trying to keep the monster levels down and, sadly, he's the last of his race.

I really liked the make up on the natives. It adds a nice bit of color to a very green hued movie. There are plenty of nice jungle scenes, much of it was filmed in Vietnam, and the CGI additions work pretty well.

The group arrives in a bunch of helicopters and Kong knocks them all out of the sky. Who hired these pilots!? The survivors are on foot and they've got to make it across the island in a race with a ticking clock. The meet up with the locals and John C Reilly, he'd crashed there during WW2 and been there until the time the groups arrives in 1973.

There's plenty of action and I enjoyed it. I'd watch it again but I'm going to wait until the Blu-ray turns up cheap.

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Colossal was our first movie. It's a 2016 monster from the ID sort of movie, too much time with the humans, and so little with the monsters. It's the work of Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo. I've only seen his 2010 movie Timecrimes, I didn't care for it much. Colossal is a better movie, but I'm not caring that much for it, there just aren't any very likeable characters.

Anne Hathaway plays a drunken gal who gets kicked out her boyfriend's apartment for being too much trouble. She moves to a house in her home town and meets an old pal. He gives her a job in his bar. While all this is happening a monster appears in Seoul Korea. Ann soon discovers that the monster is connected to her. It had appeared in Seoul once time previous, 25 years before when Ann was a little kid. It happened at 8:05 AM while Anne and her pal were on the way to school. The whole movie seems to hinge on this traumatic event being the cause of the psychic event. I question that. The area where the traumatic event happened is now a park and the psychic hot spot is the sand around the climbing equipment. When Ann walks in the sand area at 8:05 AM the monster appears in Seoul. When she leaves the sand area it disappears. Turns out Ann's old pal can make a giant robot appear in Seoul too. The old pal becomes more of a monster as the story progresses. Finally Anne has to throw him out of the picture. It took a long time to get to that and it didn't do much to get me to like the picture.

They say it's a black comedy but it's mostly drama with a bit of monster in-activity. Is this a postmodern kind of monster movie? Some praise the mash up style but it's lacking any entertainment value for me. Spending time with that group of losers isn't much fun. I like my monsters big and loud. Now that I've seen it, I won't be picking up the DVD and I like giant monster movies. I can't see ever watching it again.

The Night Of The Sorcerers is a 1974 Spanish movie about a trip into the jungle that goes badly. Amando de Ossorio is the writer and director. I'd seen two or three of his other pictures. I didn't know any of the actors but all the ladies get their kit off pretty regularly. Greg knew who Jack Taylor was and when I looked him up I had seen a few of his pictures. He's still around and was acting up until 2014.

When the movie opens we see some Africa natives performing a voodoo ritual. A woman is tied, spread eagle, to a couple of trees, her clothes are whipped off her body. They put her on the alter and off goes her head. Shortly after some soldiers arrive and slaughter everyone. The government has deemed the voodoo practice to be illegal. Of course, it goes under ground. When the research expedition stops near the area where the slaughter took place, something is sure to happen.

There's a bit of gore, people get their heads chopped off, and the leopard clad zombie chicks do some bloody biting. When they run, it's in slow motion, it made me laugh. As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of nudity, but there's a fair bit of personal drama going on for an expedition of a half a dozen. It's not great but it has at least a bit more entertainment value than the previous film. It's certainly not so pretentious.

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Up first is the new Jackie Chan movie Kung Fu Yoga. It came out in 2017 and it's written and directed by Stanley Tong. This is a sequel of sorts to The Myth, Jackie plays the same archeologist in both films. I'd forgotten that, The Myth isn't near the top of favorite Jackie movies. Stanley directed The Myth and it was the last film he directed before Kung Fu Yoga.

Jackie is one of the better archeologists in China. He tells a story, that's show in CGI animation, about India's lost Magadha treasure and how it was lost. This happened in Tibet over 1500 years ago. Then the movie takes up to the Terracotta Warrior Museum.

Jackie and his team find the treasure under the ice, they dig down, pull out a huge core of ice, and descend to the treasure. A greedy guy from India thinks the treasure should be his because he's a descendant of one of the people who died while carrying the treasure. He attacks the group and they fight back. The baddies plans are thwarted for now.

One of Jackie's team runs off with a big ass diamond. It turns up at auction and one of Jackie's team steals it. Everyone goes to India and gets treasure hunting. They find that big ass treasure and the baddie shows up again. There's a good bit of fighting, that looks OK, the archeology stuff is pretty goofy. In fact the whole movie is goofy and cartoon like. Some of the CGI isn't up to the better work we've been seeing out of China. There's a nice car chase in Dubai with all the cars being really expensive super cars. Some get wrecked a bit. No one gets hurt to bad, and I don't think anyone died. It's entertaining enough, kind of mindless fun, but it's not good enough to to get more than a 6 out of me. I was being kind because it only scores a 5.3 on the IMDb, that's pretty low for Jackie. The Myth gets a 6.2 and I gave it a 7. I'll pick up Kung Fu Yoga but I'll wait until it gets cheap.

I decided to order a copy of the Beat Girl Blu-Ray after seeing it again. We are watching the BFI restoration of the movie, it contains both a Blu-Ray and DVD. It's a 1960 British film that was called Wild For Kicks in the US. It's written by Dail Amber and directed by Edmond T Gréville. Dail didn't write more than 4 movies and a couple of TV shows. I haven't seen any of his other material. I did see the movie that Edmond directed right after Beat Girl, it was The Hands Of Orlac. You might have seen it. Most of his work was in the 1930s in France.

Beat Girl about a rich, spoilt teen, called Jennifer, who goes wild when her father brings home his French bride. It's been a couple of years since she died so he's not out of line or anything but his selfish daughter is only interested in wrecking the marriage. She is quite a bitch. You'd want to slap her if you met her.

She hangs out with some other beats, Oliver Reed is one of them, he plays Plaid Shirt, according to the credits. Pop star Adam Faith plays the beat with a heart of pacifism, he's got the guitar up above. They all hang out at a subterranean beat club. David Farr plays Jennifer's dad, Noëlle Adam plays the French bride Nichole, Christopher Lee plays sleazy strip club owner Kenny, Nigel Green is Kenny's right hand man at the strip club, which is called Les Girls. Scenes in the club are pretty sedate and there are so many lights on that the old men can't get a wank in. The girls never strip down too far, they have panties on and pasties. It's all rather innocent, in it's way.

I'd seen this last year, on YouTube, and enjoyed it. I couldn't remember the title but once a bit of the story played out it was starting to get familiar. There's some nice extras, part of what's driving my picking up a copy of the Blu-Ray. It comes with a DVD of the movie and it's only about 11 bucks with exchange and shipping. BFI has a few DVD/Blu-Ray combo titles for the same price. Of course I'll need to get an all region Blu-ray but that's been on the back burner for a while. I'm going to need one eventually, I was thinking it won't be long before I want a movie that I can only get in the UK or Europe.

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Absolutely Anything was our first film, it's a 2015 movie by Terry Jones. He wrote the script with Gavin Scott, directed and makes a cameo. Gavin wrote Small Soldiers back in the day. Sadly Terry has recently developed a problem with aphasia and he can't do much of anything. Not something to look forward to, huh.

The rest of the Python gang voice all the aliens in the picture. They're the ones that give Simon Pegg the power to do anything with a wave of his hand. They're testing him as a rep for everyone on Earth. If he does well, the planet is left and the humans asked to join the aliens. If he does poorly, it's toast for us on terraferma. Simon doesn't do so well with his powers, he's just not a very clever or imaginative guy. Lucky for the rest of us, his dog steps in to save the day. Robin Williams voices the dog in his last role.

Sadly the movie is kind of flat, the jokes aren't overly funny, occasional chuckles but no real good laughs. It gets a six on the IMDb but I only gave it a five. I won't bother picking up a copy, I might never desire to see it again.

I would want to see our next movie again, and that's after two viewings. Belphegor, Phantom of the Louvre is a 2001 French film with Sophie Marceau. She's lives across the street from the Louvre, with her grandmother, who passes away just a bit into the film. There's work being done under the street and that causes a collapse of a wall in Sophie's building. She chases a cat into the opening and find her way to the Louvre. It's after hours and there's evil a foot. The ghost of a mummy is awake and Sophie becomes his new host. Julie Christie is an archeologist working at the museum. A retired cop, some guards and an electrician are the rest of the players. Sophie's possessed body starts collecting bits and pieces of the ghost's pat life. The ghost will kill if you get in the way. The retired cop, Julie and the electrician join forces to defeat the ghost, while still keeping Sophie alive.

While I enjoyed the movie, the second time around, I see that some on the IMDb aren't too happy with it. The critics were mostly negative, according to the Wikipedia, but I mostly discount critics, often they aren't genre fans. It's got a score of 4.4 and I think that it should be higher than that. I might have given it a 7, but I didn't want to falsely drive the score up. I would recommend it to those that might like a moody foreign horror film.

Belphegor, Phantom of the Louvre is based on a 1927 novel, of the same name, by Arthur Bernède. There was a 1927 movie made from the novel. You can watch a 4.5 hour long French TV adaptation, from 1965, on YouTube. It's looks interesting but it's only in French.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Shin Godzilla was our first movie. It's the 29th film in the Godzilla series. Several of the recent re-makes have been sequels to the 1954 film, they ignore all the previous sequels, this new re-boot of the series starts fresh with no other previous giant monster action. It came out last year and it's the tallest Godzilla so far. Here's a size comparison.

The big fella arrives in a different state, that's him below. Like the first Godzilla movie this one takes some inspiration from a radioactive activity. In the 1954 Godzilla, hydrogen bombs detonated in the Pacific ocean created the original Godzilla. In 2016 scientists think Godzilla has been eating radioactive waste dumped into the ocean in the 1950s. Then he started mutating, now he's come a shore. Maybe he's looking for a date. Lonely in the ocean.

He's a funny looking guy at first, he seems hardly in control of his body. He crashes into anything in his way. After a while he heads back to sea. He returns a bit later, having mutated once again. Now he's looking like the guy below and he's doubled in size from the previous version. When he's busting a move, he's busting a building.

It's pretty chatty for a lot of the movie but once the big guy shows up it's full on destruction. Some of the best we've seen. The scientist gang works hard on a solution to kill or disable him. They come up with a good plan and save the day. The US pushes to nuke the monster and they set up a bomb and a plane. Just say the word, Prime Minister. The PM struggles with the nukes in Tokyo question. What will the people think?

People talking about the movie mention that the movie takes a poke at the way the government thinks and reacts to problems. It but what I found more interesting is that the scientist group and the government group acted differently to the problem when setting up the hierarchy for the groups. The government group follows the traditional way, pushing the decision every higher, and the scientist group gets rid of all the hierarchy in favor of everyone getting an equal say. When a woman scientist of lesser standing is giving an address to the government group she's set off to the side instead of addressing the group head on. It's a little thing but such a class system can't be good for anyone. The Japanese world is complex and I haven't got the patience to discuss it in detail.

Of course Tokyo takes a hefty punch in the goolies after Godzilla evolves fiery breath and rays from his fins. There are scenes in the movie that remind me of the first movie and some of the ones that followed. Often the feel of the movie is like the 1954 film. Even though the big guy is all CGI, his movement was captured from a motion control rig. The big guy's body even was made to look more like rubber than skin. The CGI is top notch. It's a gorgeous looking film.

Our second feature was Transformations, a 1988 SF film that was made in Italy at the Empire Studios. Mitch Brian wrote the script and Jay Kamen directed. This was Brian's second feature. He wouldn't have many more. It's Jay's only feature as a director. He mostly does sound work.

Rex Smith is a spaceman. He's got a little ship and in his sleep he's visited by a naked lady who's really some sort of monster. That's not the naked lady monster with him in the picture above. That's Lisa Langlois, she's got an all together different monster in her. After Rex has sex with the NLM, his ship has problems. He needs to land but the only place to do so is a prison mining planet.

That's the naked lady monster sitting on Rex there. On the prison planet, Lisa is the acting doctor, she born there, her mother was a prisoner. Lisa had been raised by a real Doctor, she knows some medical stuff. The doctor had died a bit before the movie starts and the new doctor hasn't arrived. She treats Rex and the monster in the script Lisa makes her fall in love with Rex and she wants him to take her with him when he leaves. Trouble is so do some of the criminals.

Patrick Macnee is a priest, somehow, he knows that evil is coming. Rex's fling with the naked lady monster has infected him with a space plague. Not listening to anyone, Rex visits the prisons night spots and spreads the space plague around the place. Don't worry Rex will be reborn in fire before the end of the movie and he'll be OK. Not everyone in the prison planet fares so well, especially after the riot and all.

It's sadly, a lack luster production with poor script and a few OK actors. They used sets from Arena and Robot Jox. It's been a while since I saw either so I don't know what was reused. I do know both of those films were somewhat more entertaining movies than Transformations. My watched movie list says I watched Transformations back in 1992 but I didn't comment on it at the time. I sort of thought it looked familiar while we were watching it. Amazing, since it's rather forgettable. It gets a 3.9 on the IMDb, I gave it a 4 but it's not going to be something I'll be chomping at the bit to go buy or re-watch.

Friday Night Movies 643

High-Rise is the 2015 adaptation of the JG Ballard novel of the same name. I haven't read the book, I think I've only read one Ballard novel, and I didn't care enough for it to want to read any more of him. Amy Jump wrote the script and Ben Wheatley is the director. It's got some good cast members, Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy, Reece Shearsmith and some I didn't know before.

The story is about Tom and his new apartment in a new exclusive, high-end, high-rise out of the city. It's supposed to have all the things that would make you want to stay in the building but the reality is that not everyone gets to sample the amenities when they want them. It's all cold and soulless and the walls of Tom's apartment are, as Joe said: "Painted with shit." Shit with a bit of rust in it. The Architect of the building is a nut job with little contact to reality. There's a class structure in the building and the snobbery at the top is sick making. I have to admit I would side with the lower classes, they are more interesting and likeable. Once the power, water and sewer fail it turns all Lord Of The Flies and Piggy gets it in the ass. By the time the movie ends, nearly everyone is dead, and Tom's drifted off into his head.

The story didn't always keep me interested, even though it's a well made film. There's a ton of allegorical butter slathered all over everything and I'm not sure what message I was supposed to get. I know it's supposed to be about the failure of society but when the building failed I couldn't understand why no one bothered to leave. It's not like they were trapped like the kids were on the island in The Lord Of The Flies. The society turned to barbarity right quick, less than 3 months, with no apparent off screen reason to believe it would have happened. I guess I like my allegories more literal. Others are going to get more out of it than I did.

I enjoyed our second feature more than the first. One Dark Night is a 1982 horror movie about some bad girls who have it in for Meg Tilly and a dead paranormal knob. Director Tom McLoughlin co-wrote the script with Michael Hawes.

Meg is dating Julie's ex and Julie isn't going to let that go unpunished. Julie pretends to like Meg and she convinces Meg that she could join up with Julie in her exclusive club of stuck up and useless high school teens. They call themselves The Sisters.

Julie sets it up that Meg will have to stay overnight in a mausoleum as an initiation. Julie plans to sneak back into the place a scare Meg. It's a huge mausoleum, with lots of corridors of dead people. I thought it looked like the mausoleum in Phantasm but that was a fake one and this movie uses the outside of one place and the inside of another. Both are located at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Part of the real mausoleum was re-created on a sound stage.

Back in the movie, Meg is set up in the mausoleum. One of The Sisters decides to walk away from the harassment and she spills the beans to Meg's boyfriend. The mausoleum is the home to the recently dead Karl Raymarseivich Raymar. At the beginning of the movie we see his dead body and there are 6 dead women in his closet. After the funeral, his daughter gets a visit from a writer on the occult. He knew Raymar and he claims that her father was a psychic vampire. He would suck the energy out of frightened women and use it to power his telekinesis. Adam West plays the daughter's husband, he doesn't believe any of this occult stuff but the daughter comes to believe.

After Meg gets settled in, Julie shows up and Raymar's corpse breaks out of the crypt. He animates some of the other dead to attack the girls. Meg's boyfriend comes to help, after Meg and he are joined by the daughter, they manage to escape. The Sisters don't fare so well.

I was entertained, it's got a couple of giggles and some yelling and screaming. The baddies get theirs, hooray.  It's still not much above average. At best I would give it a 6 on the IMDb but I'm not going to run out and buy it.