PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 716

Cold Skin is a 2017 horror movie about a stupid guy who goes to be a weatherman on the island near Antarctica. It's not near any regularly operating shipping lines so there's little chance of getting off the island. It's also 1914 and they have no radio. The current weatherman is missing and the only other occupant of the island is the lighthouse keeper. Ray Stevens plays the lighthouse keeper. He's not very communicative and doesn't bother to fill the stupid guy in on the situation.

Stupid guy is played by David Oakes. Little does he know on his first day that the night will bring some humanoids from the deep. They attack his little house and David hides in the cellar. The day has him fortifying his house and the night brings an inferno as his flaming moat sets his place on fire. He goes to live with Ray and finds Ray is a pretty horrible person. He has one of the amphibious creatures. He treats it like a dog, a dog he's fucking. Ray's pretty fucked up. The creatures attack and attack and attack. It all gets sort of tedious and the ending isn't much of a treat.

It's based on a Spanish novel by Albert Sánchez Piñol, the screenplay is by Jesús Olmo and Eron Sheean, the director is Xavier Gens. Xavier also directed Hitman in 2007 and The Divide in 2011. Hitman was more entertaining than this movie and The Divide about the same. I won't be getting a copy of Cold Skin, I just wouldn't want to watch it again that much.

Return Of The Killer Shrews is a 2012 sequel to 1959 The Killer Shrews. The 54 year gap between films makes it the 4th longest time between sequels. Bambi, Fantasia and Gone With The Wind are the first three. The script is by James Best, Steve Latshaw, Pat Moran and Patrick Moran. Steve Latshaw is the director. James was in The Killer Shrews and he's in this sequel. Sadly the sequel isn't quite as good as the original.

James Best plays the same guy as in the first movie. He takes a TV Reality show crew and star to the same island so they can shoot some crap. John Schneider plays the reality star and he was in The Dukes Of Hazard with James Best and Rich Hurst. Rick's also in the sequel. They even have a little jokey scene alluding to that. Bruce Davison plays the scientist from the first movie, now older, who's been living on the island since the first movie. He's batshit crazy and he controls the killer shrews. The killer shrews in the sequel are CGI and they look awful. They do kill a lot of people but it looks so embarrassing. It's the same for some of the CGI blood sprays and the like.

Generally, it's just not that good. I gave it a generous 3, it's current score is a 2.8 and there are plenty of 1s and 2s in the votes cast. Out of it's 271 votes, 22 of them are a 10. I bought it on a whim, I had recently seen three movies by Steve Latshaw and while I wasn't that excited over his films I did have some enjoyment from listening to his commentaries. ROTKS has a commentary. I'll get around to that at some point, perhaps when I watch the two movies on the same day. It could happen.

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The Hitman's Bodyguard is a 2017 crime comedy with Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L Jackson. It's written by Tom O'Connor and Patrick Hughes. They have done little other work and I've not seen it.

Ryan's a security guy, he keeps his customers safe, until that one guy got shot in the head. Three years pass and he's down at the bottom of the security heap. He gets a call from his ex-girlfriend, she's an Interpol agent and she's in deep shit. A team of mercenaries have attacked her convoy, everyone's dead and she's on the run with Samuel L. She can't trust Interpol, there must be a leak, so needs Ryan to come rescue her. Then he's got to take Sam to the Criminal Court in The Hague. They have until 5pm tomorrow and there are a pack of murderous scumbags hounding them.

There's plenty of nice scenery as the movie travels about Europe. There's plenty of action, car chases, boat chases, foot chases, guns blasting and bombs exploding. The only thing missing would be a parkour dog. There's a huge body count. even Sam and Ryan get shot up a bit. Gary Oldman plays a Serbian War Criminal and Salma Hayek plays Sam's wife. Both are entertaining. I thought the movie was even more entertaining and I put it on my wish list. I'd watch it again. The Blu-ray is only 8 bucks on Amazon. It might turn up cheap in a place like Walmart.

The Ghost Of Sierra De Cobre is a 1964 TV movie that started out as a TV show pilot and now it's on a Blu-ray. The producers were going for a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits kind of anthology show but with a more supernatural and horror theme. The story was the pilot for a series called The Haunted. The show was not picked up. They shot more material and it played on TV as a movie.

Typical in Hollywood, pilots get made, no one ever hears about them again. Most don't get made into TV movies. That probably helped it's visibility but it's got less than a 100 votes on the IMDb. Since the movie is B&W it stopped being shown as people demanded color productions. I think what really helped make this available now is the film makers.

The Ghost Of Sierra De Cobre was produced by by Joseph Stefano of Outer Limits fame. The OL wasn't being picked up after the 1963 season and Joseph created The Haunted. The pilot got made and the Blu-ray we watched has it as an extra. We only watched the 80 minute feature film this night. Robert Stevens was the director of the pilot. He got ill and Joseph had to direct. It's his only directing credit.

There's a good cast, Martin Landau, Judith Anderson, Diane Baker, Tom Simcox, Leonard Stone and Priscilla Morrill. Martin plays an architect who dabbles in the occult. He also an expert building restorer and he's work has put him into contact with the supernatural before.

He gets asked to look into a phone call from a dead woman. A blind guy's mother has died and she was afraid of premature burial. She had a phone installed in her crypt, so she could call for help if she woke up in her coffin. She's been dead for nearly a year before the phone calls start. The investigation takes us to a dark past with murder at the heart of haunting. The end seems a bit downbeat for TV at the time.

It was entertaining but kind of pokey. You don't have to frisk the movie to find the padding, you could see it. It might play better in the short version. I might want to have a copy but it's a $20 Blu-ray, so I might wait to see if I find it cheaper along the way.

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Freaks Of Nature is a 2015 horror comedy that was fairly entertaining. I got a few laughs from the screenplay by Oren Uziel, his previous screenplay was 22 Jump Street and he's writing the script to the new Supergirl movie and a new Mortal Kombat movie. The script was listed in the 2010 Blacklist. Robbie Pickering is the director. 

That's the three main cast members, Nicholas Braun, Mackenzie Davis and Josh Fadem. Nick's a human, Mackenzie was a human who got turned into a vampire and Josh started as a human but gave himself to a zombie and now his flesh is rotting off his body. The town has a mix of humans, vampires and zombies living in a small town who's main claim to fame is the production of the riblet. They mostly get along, at least until the night the aliens arrive. Then it's a three way shitstorm of death and destruction. 

There's a pretty good cast, I liked seeing Bob Odenkirk, Patton Oswald, Joan Cusack, Keegan-Michael Key, Vanessa Hudgens, Denis Leary and Rachel Harris. I didn't realize that Brian Peck and Beverly Randolph, they play a zombie couple, were in The Return Of The Living Dead, playing Scuz and Tina. The IMDb often has some nice bits of Trivia. That's another entertaining zombie comedy. 

As I said, I got a few laughs out of the movie and I would recommend it to those who like a bit of dark laugh with assorted goo. The picture looks good and the special effects and make up are well done. It had a budget of $33 mill and it was well spent. It didn't get much of a release but it seems to have some fans, there are 9300 plus votes on the IMDb and it scores a 5.9. I gave it a 6. Twenty-seven percent of the votes are a 6. 

Battle In Outer Space is a 1959 Japanese film that's directed by Ishirô Honda. I just read a nice bio on Honda, it covers his career quite well. Battle In Outer Space is also an alien invasion movie. I've seen it before, several times, but not since 2012. Back then I watched the Toho Collection - Icons Of SCI-FI set, we watched the Blu-ray today. It looked pretty darn nice.

The human's have to battle an alien invader who have set up a base on the moon. There's plenty of space traveling, rock climbing and alien shooting. The science is entertaining, all madey-uppy and goofy. Sometimes it would be better to not explain it. It's got nice special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya and a score by Akira Ifukube. I doubt I'm going to upgrade my copy. I should spend my DVD and Blu-ray money on stuff I don't already have. 

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First up is the 2018 Dwayne Johnson movie Rampage. Dwayne is a primatologist who works at the San Diego Zoo. He's in charge of the gorilla's and the giant albino gorilla is the leader of the gorilla tribe. He's not so big yet, that comes when a company's experiment on the space station goes tits up. For some reason they're genetically manipulating genes to make monsters. A lot of that sort of thing gets funded in the movies and based on the outcomes it's a good thing we aren't there yet in the real word.

Things go wrong on the space station, a giant rat gets out, and the lone survivor escapes in an escape pod. She's got three specimens of the pathogen. Malin Ackerman plays the CEO of Energyne and she wants the pathogen bad enough to deny the lone survivor on the space station use of the escape pod. That poor scientist gets the pathogen but leads the rat to the escape pod. She gets away but the rat scratches the window. That weakens it and on reentry the whole pod blows the fuck up. The three samples are supposed to be in containers that will survive reentry. They don't. George, that wolf above, and an alligator are turned into giant aggressive killing machines.

The science is dubious but that's easily pushed off to the side, it's just an excuse to get some monsters running about, munching on the locals, and creating a lot of mayhem and property damage. The military is outmatched by the critters. Malin has added a homing system to the pathogen. She plays a signal in Chicago and the critters home in on it. There's a big battle on Lake Shore Drive. That soon heads over to trash some buildings. Dwayne works hard to save George from the military, he's aided by Naomie Harris, a good scientist fired by Malin for objecting to the research and trying to shut it down.

There's plenty of monster action, the beasts fight anything that happens by and they're hard to kill. The pathogen gives then recuperating powers. There's a good bit of comedy and I had a great time. I usually like Dwayne's pictures and will watch this one again sometime soon. I was lucky to pick up the Blu-ray at Walmart, packed in a bin with other films, DVD and Blu-ray, for cheap. Amazon lists the Blu-ray for $14.99 today. Oddly, I picked up 4 Dwayne movies that day, Jumanji and Baywatch on Blu-ray and Pain & Gain on DVD.

Our second film is a 1980 Italian horror movie called Nightmare City. It's set in an unnamed European city but filmed in Madrid and studio in Rome. A plane full of living dead arrives at the airport, they jump out of the plane, firing machine guns at the airport staff and security. Soon enough the city is overrun by the flesh eaters. The military is useless. The power is out in much of the city. The infected are quick and smart, not like your typical shambling zombie or the furious runners of 28 Day Later.

Typically, the movie has more than one name, but that doesn't make it any better. There's a some action, a story of sorts, and some tedious bits scattered about. There's a twist at the end that put the movie down a couple of notches for me. I can't figure why they would do it? That gag was old in 1980.

From the Wikipedia: John Kenneth Muir in his review of 1980s horror cinema, referred to Nightmare City referred to the film as a "cobbled together disaster" Muir went on to say it's not the worst zombie film of the 1980s which he felt belonged to Hell of the Living Dead.

There's a DVD available that puts both Nightmare City and Hell Of The Living Dead on the same disc. I didn't buy a copy but there is something about having a couple of the worst zombie films of the 1980s. I did see Hell Of The Living Dead and in My Watched Movie List I said it was Crap fun. I can't remember anything about the movie. I didn't quite think NC was the worst of the 80s lot but it is barely average. I gave it a generous 5 on the IMDb. I wouldn't need to get a copy.

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Alien Predators is the title on the Blu-ray, the movie says the title is The Falling, the IMDb says that the title is Alien Predator. It's also known as Mutant in the UK and in Spain & Mexico it was known as Cosmos Mortal. The movie came out in 1986 and Deran Sarafian is the director, he also co-wrote the thing with Noah Bloch. Deran turned out to be so piss poor at his job, the rest of the film makers weren't much better, and the film went over schedule and over budget. The cost was passed onto Producer Carlos Aured and he quit the movie business. In the early 70s he worked on several films with Paul Naschy. Alien Predators was so well received that it's Opening Weekend Gross was $2,554. That's total, not per screen. Amazingly Deran made 7 more movies over the next 8 years, none I think I've seen, before he switched to TV work. I'd seen a bit of that.

From the IMDb Trivia Page: Early on Michael does a Rod Serling impression of the Twilight Zone style monologues. Later a talking doll declares itself to be Talky Tina, which is a nod to a famous episode of Twilight Zone, Living Doll, which director Deran Sarafian's father, Richard C. Sarafian directed. 

Dennis Christopher, Martin Hewitt and Lynn-Holly Johnson are a trio of annoying 20 somethings traveling through Spain in a mobile home. They stop beside a small town only to find that alien organisms are killing the locals. There's a bit of bullshit on why that's going on. The trio get caught up in this, a scientist from NASA has an antidote and he needs their help. The poor acting and script make the movie a bit tedious. The makeup effects are a bit better but not much more than average. The movie scores a 3.3 on the IMDb and I gave it a 3.

Krampus Origins is a 2018 horror movie set during the First World War. The Germans are summoning a demon when the American soldiers arrive. One of the soldiers steals the spell book. They don't seem to post guards around their outpost and the German's come in and shoot them. The book remains with the man's affects and winds up in the hands of his wife. She's just taken a teaching job at an orphanage in the Arizona Territories. Someone looked it up, Arizona was a state by then. It's the little details that often fuck a movie up it's own ass. It did give us something to talk about while the movie was boring along. The book falls into the wrong hands and the demon is called. It's sadly nothing as good as the Krampus on the DVD case. The movie is kind of dull and the music and sound are annoying. I gave it a 1, it might be more a 2 but I'm sticking to my vote. Like the first movie tonight, I'm not going to buy this one. So far most of the Krampus movies have been crap. Only the 2015 Krampus has been entertaining so far.

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Frogs is a 1972 critters against humans movie. In fact, most of the animal attacks are not carried out by frogs. It's an MGM movie and the DVD is packaged similarly to the Midnite Movie series but there's no MM logo. The VHS that came out before the DVD has the Midnite Movies logo. I'm not quite crazy enough to want to collect the VHS versions of movies though I know that there are still many that are. It's directed by George McGowan and written by Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees. Robert H doesn't really have any other credits but Robert B has some interesting credits. I've seen a few of his works and like The Black Scorpion, High School Confidential, Screaming Mimi, From The Earth To The Moon, Who Slew Auntie Roo? and Dr Phibes Arises Again. George is mostly a TV director. He's Canadian and one of the 1960s programs he worked on was Seaway. I was fond of that show when it was new. I remember seeing one of his TV movies, after he started working in the US, Run, Simon, Run with Burt Reynolds. He even directed a couple of episodes of The Starlost. Later he would direct some much better programs.

Frogs is a bit pokey as it intros the characters. A really young Sam Elliot is a wildlife photographer and he comes in contact with Ray Milland's family on an island in the swap somewhere. Milland is rich and he has a mansion on the island. Not a place I would go on a bet but there you go, people will pick the worse places to live. Once all the people get sorted out they start talking about how noisy the frogs are. Ray has poisoned the area trying to kill wildlife. He's a selfish asshole who likes being the boss. The clan is visiting because it's his birthday the next day. Before the bunch of them can get some cake the killing starts. One by one the family is killed off by one sort of critter or another. There are escape attempts but only Sam, Joan Van Ark and a couple of her nephews manage to get across the swamp. Pretty soon it's only Ray in the house with his dog and the frogs.

It's almost fun to watch but it's not more than so-so to me. I gave it a 3 on the IMDb when I saw it years ago and I don't see any reason to change my vote now.

Horror House On Highway 5 is a minuscule budget horror film with little going for it. The DVD was 3 bucks at the local used place and I picked it up. Money wasted. It's all the work of Richard Casey.

The DVD has quotes taken from an IMDb user and another from Geocities. Remember the latter? The guy on the IMDb, Daniel Shea says Take Some college students, put them in a van, throw in a killer in a Richard Nixon mask and BANG, you've got an instant classic. What bullshit!  I found the review, which appears under the name malenko, on the IMDb. Where did that David Shea name come from? Richard's ass? Here's the rest of the review.

The plot includes Nazis,rape,mysterious rooms, and that's about it. But this is what makes the film great, it's total ineptness at everything, from creating suspense to scaring the viewer. And the glue that holds the whole film together is the most whacked out, ludicrously insane soundtrack in movie history. If you don't want to watch the movie(which I could understand, but you'll miss out on some wonderful chase scenes involving President Nixon)just put the movie in your VCR, close your eyes and listen to the jarring sounds of Horror House On Highway Five. Also make sure not to miss one of the least satisfying and sensible endings in movie history.

Pretty much more bullshit. The movie is poorly made, poorly acted and poorly directed. It looks like shit and the sound isn't much better. Don Dohler makes better movies than this. The DVD looks terrible. Like they beat a poorly exposed print with rocks before transferring it, again poorly, at the local Photomat."Color correction, what the fuck is that?"

I gave it a 1, someone needed punishment after me sitting through this mess. I couldn't find anything good about it, but it makes me wish they had a Punch In The Face button on the IMDb. I see that Richard made Horror House On Highway 6 a few years ago. I doubt that I will ever see that.

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Unearthly Stranger is a 1964 British film that was directed by John Krish and written by Rex Carlton. The Wikipedia says the movie was based on an idea by Jeffrey Stone and that he was an actor who was the model and inspiration for Prince Charming in the 1950 Disney Cinderella. The IMDb listing for John Krish says he mostly directed documentaries and shorts. He directed ten feature films but I don't believe I've seen any of them. I did see the three episodes of The Avengers he did, same with the episode of The Saint. When it comes to Rex's work I can say I've seen his The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Blood Of Dracula's Castle and Nightmare In Wax. Not the greatest films but watchable. This is a better movie than those three.

That's John Neville on the left, he's just come back from vacation with a new bride. Jean Marsh is his secretary and Phillip Stone is another professor at the super secret spaceflight project. The group is trying to invent teleportation. John you might remember from the Terry Gilliam movie The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen or one of the many movies he was in.

I suspect everyone knows Jean but not everyone might know Phillip Stone. His second acting job was the play a character in Hot Snow, the pilot episode of The Avengers, which aired April 21 1969. Only 15 minutes of that episode exist and only 3 episodes of the1st series survived. I believe that the 1st role I had seen him in was playing Alex's dad in A Clockwork Orange and three years later he had three parts in O Lucky Man!

Once back at work John starts to notice his new bride is a bit odd, he'd meet her on vacation, in a whirlwind romance he'd married her. His wife doesn't seem to blink. Once he found her totally unconscious with her eyes open and she had no pulse. Minutes later she wakes up as if nothing had happened. John's co-workers take notice of his problems, especially the security guy. Other strange things happen that make people more suspicious.

It's a nice little SF thriller with a vague but still entertaining ending. Some say that's a bit of an important film. I wouldn't say that but I liked it enough to order the Blu-ray off of Amazon this morning. It's only about 12 bucks with postage. Unfortunately, for some, it's a foreign disc. I'm also looking at region Free Blu-rays as I am starting to get some of them. Want to keep all options open.

Our second film was The Return Of The Living Dead 2. It came out in 1988 and Ken Wiederhorn is the writer - director. It's not a direct sequel to the first movie, in fact, it was written as a different film. The producer liked the script but wanted a sequel so it was rewritten. The movie gets started in a similar way. One of the Army's zombie storage containers falls off a truck and a kid breaks it open. The gas that escapes turns people into zombies that want some brains.

There's plenty of yelling and running about as the zombies ramble about looking for a snack. James Karen, left, and Thom Matthews, second from right, were in the first movie but they played different characters. Their parts are similar, Thom is a guy who just started working for James. In the first they are working at a medical supply house and in the sequel they are guys who steal skulls out of cemeteries for the black market. They get turned into zombies in both films.

It's a good sequel and more of a comedy than the first movie. Not that there wasn't some good gags in the first movie. That half a dog is still a hoot. I gave it a 6 and I'd watch it again someday.

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Daikaiju Mono is a 2016 Japanese giant monster wrestling comedy. A giant monster has appeared on the scene and a mad scientist has a way to fight it. He's invented a serum that turns the victim test subject into a giant human. With endlessly expandable shorts. He fights the monster but can't seem to beat it. The science solution is to make a new serum with evil cells. That works.

The movie is directed by Minoru Kawasaki and he co-wrote the script with Takao Nakano. I've seen three of Minoru's other movies, The Calamari Wrestler, The World Sinks Except Japan and The Monster X Strikes Back: Attack The G8 Summit. The last two were better than this movie, which in turn is better than TCW. Still even at his best the comedy is hit and miss for me. Part of that is cultural differences and part of that is the jokes just weren't that good. DM is fairly good fun but it's lacking in the gag department. It's fights are a bit weak but there are some pretty girls. I wouldn't recommend it to most, fans of Daikaiju movies might get a kick out of it, but the average schmoe isn't going to find as much there. I'm likely not going to buy it, so many others higher up the list.

We watched The Cyclops as our second movie. It was written and directed by Bert I Gordon. It's the second film he wrote and the third he directed. I've seen a few of his 2 dozen films, he's been known to turn up on old episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I like them. They aren't great films by any stretch of the imagination but some do have a bit of imagination. Just no money.

I found the Blu-ray of The Cyclops Thursday and thought I'd splurge a bit. It's going for $22 on Amazon, it's part of the Warner Archives Collection. The used Blu-ray was just over 9 bucks, after a 20% off coupon and some tax. The disc played perfectly fine. There's nothing by way of extras but a trailer. That's OK, I don't mind a bare bones disc, the extras eat up a lot of time, and I don't have to feel guilty if I didn't take to time to watch them. I certainly don't listen to as many commentaries as I used to when the format was new.

I know I had seen the movie before but I didn't remember seeing it on a FNM night back in June of 2011. Here's the text of that post, the accompanying art has changed, but I feel pretty much the same way about the film. Tonight I commented on the four seater plane issue while we were watching the movie. I hadn't seen the movie before and the opening sentence is in reference to the previous movie we watched back in 2011.

I can't say as much about Bert I Gordon's The Cyclops. I hadn't seen it before and I'm always interested in seeing 1950's SF movies. This is from 1957 and it's fun enough and short.  That's the best thing about it, at 65 minutes there isn't much time to waste on padding out the story. Gloria Talbott is trying to find her missing husband. He crashed his plane in the mountains in an uninhabited part of Mexico. She's joined by her friend and hopeful suitor James Craig, hired pilot Tom Drake, and a uranium hunter, Lon Chaney Jr, who supplied some extra travel expense money. The plane has some trouble and lands in a flatish spot surrounded by mountains. Lon's scintillator tells him there's 8.5 on the meter and that gets him all excited. He's thinking to get rich selling the stock option on the claim. If he gets back to put the claim in that is, turns out Gloria owns the plane, and she's sticking to that valley until she finds her husband. They find part of his broken plane. Could he be alive? How would they get him back with 4 people already packing the four seater plane? Bert is like a lot of film makers when it comes to story. You know, film makers who don't care much about the details in their stories. The important thing is to get the giant monsters into the movie. Turns out the highly radioactive area has more than uranium.

That's James, Gloria, Tom and Lon in the plane. Soon after the group lands they encounter some of the local fauna and it's crazy big. A field mouse the size of a dog and a 12 foot hawk. We also have a giant , nearly transparent spider, a couple of huge, slightly opaque lizards and a giant one eyed husband. Yep, the husband is still alive and he's huge. They should have brought a cargo plane but who knew. The guy playing the giant guy is Duncan Parkin who would play a similar character in another Bert I Gordon classic War Of The Colossal Beast a year later. The script is pretty poor but at 65 minutes it goes by quickly. It was fun enough, even though the effects are pretty cheezy. It's barely worth watching for those that are less of a fan of the low budget science fiction film but I enjoyed it enough to be glad that I picked up a copy off of Turner Classic Movies the other night. Now I can watch it again later.

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Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is the 13th movie in the series. It reboots the story and makes the puppets evil little Nazis. The screenplay is by S Craig Zahler and Sonny Laguna & Tommy Wiklund are the directors. Exec Prod Charles Band was the co-writer of the original movie but he didn't have much of anything to do with this picture. It's not even a Full Moon Production, Cinestate is the production company and it's being distributed by RJLE Films. That last company used to be called Image Entertainment and they started back in 1981 distributing laser discs.

Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich is set modern day and most of the action takes place in a hotel. Owners of Andre Toulon's puppets are gathering there for an auction. It's an old hotel in a small town. Thomas Lennon is a comic store clerk who's brother had a doll. The brother died some time before the movie starts. Thomas decides to take the doll to the auction, he also takes his new girlfriend and the owner of the comic shop. They aren't all so lucky when the puppets are given life by an electrically charged Andre Toulon, played by Udo Kier. They start stabbing and slashing and the hotel guests start toppling left and right. The sheriff, Michael Pare, arrives and tries to gain control of the situation. He doesn't believe the dolls are alive until he gets attacked by one. There's a few other people in the cast that I recognize, Barbara Crampton, Jenny Pellicer, Matthias Hues and Charlyne Yi.

The puppets have been revamped too, there's more of them and some of them are similar to ones in the first movie. The effects are pretty good and I enjoyed it for the most part. I'd give it a 6 and would pick up a copy but not until it's real cheap. I got the first 9 Puppet Master movies in a set with the 3 Killjoy movies for under 10 bucks brand new. If I don't get a copy of this new one it won't matter.

Path Of Blood is a 2013 animated feature about a ronin. It's written and directed by Eric Power. It's done in a cut paper style, think Southpark. The story is set in 1614, at the start of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which is a pretty awful time for anyone who wasn't really rich. It tells a story filled with blood spouts and flying body parts. The story is a lot like a lot of Samurai movies and I swear that there are scenes that seem similar to something I had seen before. At one point the characters move on and sitting on the side of the path is a baby cart, similar to the one in the Lone Wolf And Cub movies.

It's pretty well done, though I don't care that much for the style. It's my least favorite thing about Southpark. I did find I liked the scenery better than the facial design of the characters. I can see that it was a labor of love and a hell of a lot of work for Eric. Good on ya, Eric. He got some people to help him put together a nice soundtrack too. I gave it a 6 but I'm still not sold on getting a copy. If you might be, there's a Blu-ray at Hamilton Book that's only a ten spot.

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We were all kind of interested in the 1986 Albert Pyun movie called Vicious Lips until we saw it. Albert wrote and directed this SF film set in the rock n roll world of the future. An annoying manager called Manny steals a space ship to get his all girl band to a big concert. It crashes along the way, leaving the girls and Manny stranded on a desert planet.

Sadly, the script leaves us stranded. It's not very good at best but it is a good soporific. I was struggling to stay awake after the middle went by. The first act gets us into space, the middle gets us crashed with the girls, the third gets us confused until the barely coherent ending. There's a bit of humor but not enough, there's aliens but they're kind of lackluster.

Some of Albert's early pictures are fair to good SF and Horror films, not always the best work, but usually entertaining. I liked Radioactive Dreams, Alien From LA, Cyborg, Dollman, the Nemesis series, Brain Smasher...A Love Story and a couple more. They aren't great films but they are, for the most part, fun and entertaining. By the mid-90s the video market was expanding and there were many more films available on cable. I had sort of lost interest in Albert, his movies weren't popping up on my TV, I didn't return to his early films. I don't own most of them.

Albert is still banging away at directing, though he seems to have slowed down since 2010, he had a couple of projects that year, then a skip to 2014 and another to 2017 when he directed Interstellar Civil War: Shadows Of The Empire. Haven't seen it, probably won't. He still has 4 projects in pre-production. I have a feeling I won't see them but you never know.

I hadn't seen GI Samurai before. It's a 1979 Sonny Chiba film that's based on a novel. It's Japanese title is Sengoku jieital which translates loosely to Time Slip. Sonny is the 2nd Lieutenant of a squad of soldiers. They are on a practice manoeuver when they are sent back in time 400 years to the Warring States era. They spend the movie getting to know the locals. In one's and two they get picked off until the end of the movie when they are betrayed big time stylie.

The movie's long, 139 minutes, and it could have been a lot shorter, it plonks along ponderously at times. The soldier's are the stupidest one's I've seen in a many a day, they continuously devalue the fighting abilities of the locals, they don't seem to be able to use any strategy at all. Sonny and his crew arrive with massive firepower, a helicopter, a tank, a small PT type gun boat, a big diesel truck and two jeep size vehicles. One by one they are destroyed. The vehicles all seem to have a pretty good supply of petrol but eventually that fails and the men are that much more vulnerable to arrows and spears. It's sad to see them be so stupid. The only guy who might have survived gave up the crew and went to live with the locals in the woods. I was glad to see it but I don't think I'll be looking to pick up a copy, unless it comes with one of those cheap movie packs.