PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

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The 2011 horror film Creature is another DVD I picked up from Hamilton Book. Luckily it turned out better than the Bigfoot Wars movie I watched the other day. Not much better, it's still below average. It's written by Fred Andrews and Tracy Morse with Fred directing. The only person I knew in the cast was Sid Haig but Joe tells me that Mehcad Brooks is James Olsen in the Supergirl series. I don't watch that series, not because I wouldn't, I have no TV service and the only streaming I get is Amazon Prime. I might see it someday.

Creature has a group of young twenty somethings lured into the bayou's of Louisiana so they can be offered up to the alligator man-god by some inbred redneck scum. Sid's part of the redneck crowd and like usual he's fun to watch. Sad he died just recently.

There's nothing much new but it managed to keep my attention through the film. It won't be near the top of my pile of movies to re-watch sometime but I might get back to it someday.

I can't say the same for Silent Hill, I got hella bored in the middle and I wasn't too keen once I got to the end, it's not going on my DVD Wishlist. It's a 2006 horror movie based on the Silent Hill game. It's directed by Christophe Gans who directed the much more interesting Brotherhood Of The Wolf. Watch that movie instead. Be sure to get the director's cut. There's a nice Korean all region Blu-ray available with that version of the film. Looks nice.

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First up is the 1982 film Parasite, it's directed by Charles Band from a script by Alan J Adler, Michael Shoob and Frank Levering. It's a bit in the future, the cities have some sort of corrupt government, but there's not much going on out in the country. A scientist, contaminated by a parasite in the work place, runs off into the desert. He stops at a small town and infests several of the townies before most everyone is killed. An agent of the gov is on his trail but like most everyone in the film, he's incompetant and winds up blown to pieces in the desert. Cherie Currie, of The Runaways fame, plays one of the locals, she dies too.

Robert Glaudini plays the scientist, he survives, and so does Demi Moore in one of her early roles. Sadly, it's not that good. I was getting dulled to sleep about the half way mark, it did pick up a bit after that. The actors are all over the place, quality wise, and they don't have much interesting dialog. Things the characters do, often make little sense. Stan Winston was one of three credited for the special effects, I don't know what he did, but hardly any of it was inspired. I'm not going to be picking up a copy, I had already downloaded a copy off of YouTube. That'll do if I ever want to see what happened again. I doubt that will come up anytime soon.

36.15 code Père Noël is a French film from 1989. It was released in the US as Game Over. It's very much like a creepy death-filled Home Alone, except it's much better. It's not really a comedy but I was getting some laughs. The writer and director is René Manzor, this is his second film and he's still at it. He directed an episode of Highlander and a couple of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles that were set in France. The rest of his work is mostly unfamiliar to me.

It's about a ten year old boy who believes in Santa. A crazy guy is fired at the kid's mom's store for being a slapping Santa. The Santa learns of a late delivery to the mom's house and he sneaks aboard the truck. He kills the driver and the caretakers before breaking into the mom's mansion. She owns a big store in Paris and it's the last shopping before Christmas so she's at work until late. It's the poor kid and his feeble grandpa that have to survive until someone comes to help.

It's nicely dark and there's a nice sense of humor. The acting was fairly good, especially the kid and the grandfather. I'd consider getting a copy but the DVD is only from Germany and $25 on Amazon. I wound up with a copy, not that great looking, from YouTube. You can see it in the link above. You might enjoy it.

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The VelociPastor is a 2018 movie about a priest who becomes a velociraptor and kills baddies. It was written and directed by Brendan Steere. I don't know who did the poster but the dino that the pastor turns into does not look like that. It looks like this.

Wow, just fuckin' wow! I guess you can't expect much with a $35,000 budget. In many ways it's a lot like a Troma release. Not always a bad thing. A good bit of the movie is shot in the woods, the same spot is used for modern day China, modern day USA and 1960s Vietnam. It's in China that the Pastor gets hold of the magical dinosaur tooth that turns him into a dino. It doesn't always turn him into the complete creature, often it's just his hands that turn into claws. Still fine for killing scum.

The Pastor joins up with a prostitute to wipe out criminals and the police are on their trail. There's plenty of running about and yelling, some bad fights and worse dialog. It's got a bit of good sense of humor but not enough to make me like the movie more than a 5 on the IMDb. That's being a bit generous, as I did get a few laughs from the movie's more ludicrous moments. Unintentional laughs but you take what you can get. You can see it's IMDb score of 5.9 is heavily skewed by the 20% of the users that voted it a 10. Are they deluded or are they the director and his pals? Not one I would pick up.

Dangerous Men is another that I'm going to skip on picking up for myself. It's a movie that was made back in 1984 and it had a showing in 1985. The film maker John S Rad edited it for 20 years before finally releasing it in 2005. Rad rented 5 theaters in LA for a week and the ticket sales were $2238. John is really Jahangir Salehi Yeganehrad, he produced, wrote, directed, co-edited the movie, and wrote the music. It got a video release in 2015 but John had passed away 8 years before.

It's a crime movie, with a rape revenge sort of story. Melody Wiggins and Coti Cook play a young couple, they're on the beach when they encounter a couple of bikers. The bikers plan to rape Melody but Coti puts up a fight and kills one of the bikers. The other biker kills Coti and distraught over his friend starts to walk away. Melody runs after him, convincing him to take her with him. She convinces him she wants a real man and he takes her along to a motel. She fucks him up good with a steak knife. On the run Melody gets a ride from an older guy who tries to rape her in the desert. She gets the advantage, strips him of his clothes and leaves him naked in the desert. The movie cuts back and forth between Melody and the naked guy int he desert for a quite a while. He's lucky to only get a sunburn on his nob. He could have been leaving other fluids on the desert.

Melody picks up a prostitute and pumps her for info on the dangerous streets and people. She kills some johns and a pimp. The cop is still on her trail. She's eventually arrested in a park and doesn't appear in the rest of the film. The action follows the cop as he busts a white biker named Black Pepper. It ends in a clumsy way.

The whole movie is just generally clumsy, poor dialog, story elements that make little sense, goofy music, bad acting, crappy fight scenes, all the sort of things that make people laugh at this non-comedy. The IMDb Trivia page has some interesting tidbits.

Jahangir Salehi died in 2007 and never lived to see the movie receive a full national distribution from Drafthouse Films in 2015. However, his daughter, when later interviewed, said she was not sure he would have understood the film's place as a "so bad it's good" movie. At a midnight screening he was able to attend before his death, he referred to everyone laughing in the theater as "just a bunch of drunk people."

The car which is pushed down into a gorge belonged to Jahangir Salehi's daughter. Even though she had paid for the car herself, Jahangir took the car without her permission and only told her she would never see it again. It wasn't until 20 years later when she saw the film that she learned what had happened to it.

Melody Wiggins, who plays Mina, the would-be main character, broke her leg during filming in the 1980s and refused to return to production after Jahangir Salehi would not cover any of her medical expenses.

Sadly it's just not good enough to enjoy much. How sadly deluded the director must have been. It gets a 4.4 on the IMDb and that seems high to me. I gave it a 3. You can see a copy on YouTube in the link in the title above.

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Turbo Kid was fun the second time around. I liked the movie so much I ordered the 3 disc Blu-ray and DVD set. We watched the Blu-ray, it looks very nice.

Fantômas Vs Scotland Yard is the third of the Fantômas trilogy and it came out in 1967. It's directed by André Hunebelle and the screenplay is by Jean Halain and Pierre Foucaud. The trilogy is based on a series of novels by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. I've read the first two Fantômas novels and they were entertaining enough. The books have more complicated stories and Inspector Juve is a much more intelligent and capable character. The third movie has Inspector Juve acting even more like an idiot than the first two films. I got tired of him about half way in.

Fantômas has decided the tax the rich. He'll kill them if they don't pay up. I didn't think there was anything much wrong about that plan. We wouldn't miss any of the rich and when Fantômas decided to add criminals to the mix, I didn't see that as a problem. The criminals and the rich sure did. Since Fantômas is a master of disguise he can be right under your nose without you suspecting anything. Sure enough, both groups spill the beans right to the heavily disguised super villain.

Juve travels to Scotland with Fandor and his girlfriend Hélène and Juve's assistant Bertrand. Lord MacRashley is being threatened by our villain and he's called together a lot of his rich friends who are in the same predicament. They plan to capture Fantômas so they don't have to pay his tax.

 

The criminals get together after they are told they too need to cough up some of their ill gotten gains. Their plan is to capture Fantômas, kill him, and pretend he's still alive so they can still collect the tax from the rich. Great plan. Too bad, they just told it to a disguised Fantômas. Now they need to get punished. Our super villain is a harsh man. If I ignored the Juve nattering the movie was watchable but less interesting than the previous two. It's too bad but I'd still watch the trilogy again.

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Mega Time Squad is a 2018 New Zealand film about the effects of magical time travel. It's written and directed by Tim Van Dammen. Some dumb guy named John is in Shelton's gang. John and another gang member decide to steal some money from a Chinaman. The problem is that money was meant for Shelton. To top that shit cake with some whipped creme John's partner in the robbery turns John into Shelton. Now John faces death at the hands of Shelton's crew. Don't be like John.

John had also stolen a bracelet, a magical bracelet that sends the wearer back in time a few seconds. Comes in handy when you want to get the fuck out of there. With it he manages to escape from Shelton and his crew. The bracelet comes with a curse, the action of meeting yourself will call a demon and kill you both. John blunders about, skipping back over and over again, he winds up creating a whole gang of himself. Even as part of a group John isn't clever enough to keep some of the John's alive. He's got the Chinese gang after him as well as Shelton's crew. Lucky for John, none of them are competent. Lucky for us, the script is clever and the actors capable. There's a nice bunch of laughs and some bit of gore. I enjoyed the heck out of it and put a copy of the Blu-ray on my Wish List.

The Banana Splits Movie is a 2019 horror film that brings the Banana Splits out of retirement to murder people. It's directed by Danishka Esterhazy, the script is by Jed Elinoff and Scott Thomas. Danishka is from my old home town of Winnipeg. I haven't seen any of her other films. Jed and Scott write together a lot, mostly stuff for kids, some Scooby-Doo videos, Paris Hilton My New Best Friend, R L Stine's The Haunting Hour and Celebrity Deathmatch. I've only seen a few episodes of the last show. The film is American but it was filmed in Capetown South Africa. It appeared on the SyFy Channel last October. I don't have cable anymore so I didn't see it there. We watched the DVD from our local library.

In the film reality, The Banana Splits TV show has remained on the air for ages. We visit the set with a little fan named Harley and his dysfunctional family. They have tickets for the recording of the show but only Harley is really happy to be there. His mom is nice but his stepfather is a jerk, his brother is nice but introverted. Tagging along is Harley's classmate Zoe, she's filling in for Harley's only friend who is sick. Just before the show starts the producer finds out the show is being cancelled and this is the last recording. We soon find out that the Banana Splits are all robots, their creator gives them a reprogramming and sends them out to the stage. Things start to go wrong and off stage the robots kill staff members, after the recording ends, the robots start to kill the parents too. The kids are all herded into a space and the show continues.

I enjoyed the movie when it started but about an hour in I was losing interest, once you get past the Banana Splits characters being killer robots there's not that much out of the ordinary about it. It did pick up a bit nearer the end but I didn't put it on my Wish List. I might want to see it again sometime, but who knows.

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Rurouni Kenshin was our first movie, it's a 2012 Japanese film and the first of a trilogy. It's set in the early Meiji period, western ways are moving in, the samurai class are reduced to vermin who can't even own swords. Kenshin is a young man who had been an assassin but grew dissatisfied with the life after the Bakumatsu war. Now he wanders about helping people who have been wronged.  He joins forces with a young woman who is being driven out of her martial arts school by the local opium baron. He's such a creep I could hardly spend any time with him and not want to slap the ugly haircut right off his sniveling rat face. It's a typical baddies pushing the locals about. I liked that part of the story OK but was less enamored with the melodrama lifestyle of the main character. There's a lot of scenes that could be trimmed and the movie shortened. It runs 135 minutes and seemed a bit padded. I liked it well enough but I'm not sure if I'll see the rest of the trilogy.

Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone was our second movie. It's a 1983 SF film with Peter Strauss, Ernie Hudson and Molly Ringwald. It was originally 3D but it's only 2D on the Blu-ray it shares with Krull. I don't remember ever going to see it in the theater.

I hadn't seen it in a number of years. It's directed by Lamont Johnson, Stewart Harding and Jean LaFleur wrote the story, David Preston, Edith Rey, Daniel Goldberg and Len Blum wrote the screenplay.

Peter is a spaceship salvager who hears of a big reward for the rescue of some women who've crashed on a planet. He has to fight his way across the wastelands to get the job done. Molly is a local who helps and hinders him. Ernie is a space soldier who's there to find the women too. They run into a bunch of typical post-apoc types, marauders, nomads, mutants, amazons and a dragon.There's some action and big props. It's not great but it's fun. I might pick this up, I haven't see Krull in a while and I don't seem to have copies of either.

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Fantômas Unleashed is the 1965 sequel to Fantômas, it's French, where it's called Fantômas se déchaîne. The story starts in France and then the action moves to Italy. Plenty of nice city and country scenery. André Hunebelle and Haroun Tazieff are co-directors, Jean Halain and Pierre Foucard wrote the script. André also directed three of the OSS 117 series.

All the main cast is back from the first movie, Jean Marais plays the reporter Fandor, the supervillain Fantômas and Professor Lefèvre, Louis de Funès plays Police Commissaire Juve, Mylene Demongeot plays Fandor's girlfriend Hélène Gurn, Jacques Dynam plays Juve's assistant Bertrand. The young boy in the picture is Olivier de Funès, the real life son of Louis de Funès, he plays Hélène's brother.

Fantômas is kidnapping scientists and he has an eye on Professor Lefèvre who  has a machine to control people. Juve and Bertrand are on the case and Fandor has a plan to substitute himself for the real Professor Lefèvre. There's plenty of people disguising themselves. Some of the makeup works better than others. Juve also has some new crime fighting weapons that mostly add a few laughs. The movie seems be be more comical than the first in the series but I didn't find it a problem, I like a bit of slapstick.

There's plenty of activity and I found that entertaining. Nice scenery, costumes and sets. The villain's lair was even grander than the previous film's lair. I'm happy with the set so far, I'll certainly want to watch them again.

The Dead Don't Die is a 2019 Jim Jarmusch film about the zombie apocalypse. He wrote and directed. All the action takes place in the small town of Centerville. I enjoyed Bill Murray in this quite a bit, same with Danny Glover, the rest of the cast were no slouches either. Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny are the police, Tom Waits, Caleb Landry Jones, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Tilda Swinton, Carol Kane, Larry Fassenden are among the locals, the RZA is the WU-PS driver, Rozie Perez is a TV newscaster, Iggy Pop is a zombie with a taste for coffee, Selena Gomez is a victim.

There's much going on in the story, murder, polar fracking, the earth shifting on it's axis, animals disappearing from houses and farms, zombies, popular culture commentary, all this is told to us from the local's conversations and new sources. As the endless day progresses there are murders, Bill and Adam find an open grave, zombies become more plentiful. So plentiful that hardly anyone survives their attacks. Sad, because they are the slow moving kind, just run the fuck away. There's not that much gore and what there is, is rather toned down, often there's a quick cutaway to a reaction shot.

It wasn't a popular movie, it struggles to get a 5.5 on the IMDb, and that's with almost 30K votes. The comments on the IMDb are often harsh but I enjoyed the droll take on the genre. If there's something that's being beaten to death in the horror genre, it's zombies. They're so mainstream, grandma's like them, country singers sing about them. The movie didn't make me a fan of country singer Sturgill Simpson, he sang the opening title song.

It made some money but it was a pretty cheap movie, $2.5 mil with a $14.4 mil return. There's a fair number of jokes, some big and some small. Generally it's all low key and slow moving. The living have as little urgency as the dead. It's self referential, maybe that was a problem for some people, maybe it was the slow pace, the complaints on the IMDb are all over the place, some make little sense. All I know is I'd like to see it again and hope to pick up a copy at some point. It's pricey now but it'll be under 10 bucks in a year or two, I can wait.

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I enjoyed Fantômas quite a bit. It's a 1964 French spy comedy about super villain Fantômas. It's the first of a trilogy of films that are all packed in a nice 2 disc Blu-ray set from Kino Lorber. Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Alain wrote the original Fantômas novels. I read one or two of them ages back. Jean Halain and Pierre Foucard wrote the screenplay, André Hunebelle is the director.

That's Jean Marais and Louis De Funès as reporter Fandor and Le commissaire Juve. Marais also plays Fantômas but they are definitely two different characters in the story. Fandor writes a fake interview with Fantômas and the super villain get peeved enough to screw with Fandor's life. Fantômas is a master of disguise and he commits his next crime with a Fandor mask on his face. Le commissaire Juve thinks Fandor is the villain but that notion is soon unseated when new evidence points to Juve being Fantômas. It's another trick.

We all know that Fantômas has set this all up but the police don't, so there's all sorts of running about and mayhem as they chase after the face changing villain. There's plenty of fist fights and stunts. The chases take our characters on foot over a roof, into a car, onto a train and in a boat. There's a bit of everything in the movie. Early on the action takes place in Paris but the story soon moves into the countryside. No matter, there's stuff to break there too. 

It's a nice looking movie, good sets and props, great scenery and an entertaining story and characters. I look forward to the 2 sequels.

Our second feature is the 2015 horror film The Hallow. It's made in Ireland with Irish demons. A couple with a young baby come to the area so the husband can look at a tract of land for a company that's going to cut down all the trees. The locals don't like that, they believe the hallow has something evil in it and it should stay there. The wife of the couple takes down the iron bars on the windows of her house against the advice of the locals. It's always good to follow the advice of the locals but the couple stay and the demons attack. It's all yelling and crying from then on. The demon critters were all creepy and very murderous. They infect humans with their poisonous spiky fingers and turn them into demons. It's a nice looking movie but very pokey, it seems to drag itself to a standstill way too often. Other than that it was about average. I didn't think I need a copy.

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Devil Doll is a 1964 British film about a crazy ventriloquist and his dummy Hugo. It's directed by Lindsay Shonteff, he directed a few movies but the only other one I've seen is The Million Eyes Of Sumuru. The story for DD is by Frederick E Smith and the screenplay is by Ronald Kinnoch writing under the name George Barclay, and Charles F Vetter writing under the name Lance Z Hargreaves. The film was selected, and heavily edited, as a later Mystery Science Theater 3000 selection.

We watched the Double Feature Special Edition DVD with two versions of the movie. We watched the newly discovered "hot" continental version. The regular version is just under 81 mins and the "hot" version is just over 83 minutes. There's some nudity in the later. The IMDb has this to say.

The international version is different from the original British version.

• The opening and closing credits are different.
• The international version replaces two scenes with topless women with alternate takes, featuring them clothed or covered.
• The international version contains a scene which explains the motivation for Magda's murder, while the British version replaces this with a stage performance in which a woman is hypnotized and strips, ending up topless.

So what Gordon Films and Image are calling the "hot" international version the IMDb is calling the British version. No matter, there's not too much difference. Check out both versions and their differences in the links above.

That's The Great Vorelli and Hugo on stage, Bryant Haliday plays Vorelli, a midget woman plays the puppet when it walks. Vorelli does an ventriloquist act with a side of hypnotism. I didn't think much of Vorelli's act, he wouldn't be able to get away with hypnotizing the volunteer and making them strip down like that one lady.

William Sylvester and Yvonne Romain get involved, he's a reporter and she's his gal. William gets Yvonne to volunteer to go onstage at the show and get hypnotized. The Great Vorelli makes her dance wildly on stage but keeps her clothes on. William has a fascination with Hugo, who did he walk, that sort of thing. He gets Yvonne to invite TGV to her aunt's big society due. He comes and stays the night at aunties big mansion. That gives William some time to check out the dummy, all word, no boy. Hugo comes to visit William in the night, leaving him a clue to Vorelli's past.

It gets a bit crazier as the rest of the story plays out but it never makes me think it's much above average. It was still entertaining enough to get to the end. I bought the DVD and I'll keep it. I'd watch it again.

Unmasked Part 25 is a 1989 British film about a hideous serial killer that's also called The Hand Of Death. The Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray we watched has that title on the actual film but not the box. The last scene in the movie ties in with the THOD title, the scene makes less sense with the UP25 title. Mark Cutforth wrote the screenplay and Anders Palm is the director. It was Anders first film, he directed two more that I haven't seen, then then he switched to producing stuff that I haven't seen. I'm not thinking, based on UP25 that I'll go looking for them

It's supposed to be a comedy but it fails to deliver on the jokes. The hideous murderer winds up getting involved with a blind woman and the movie spends the middle 40 minutes of the movie getting to know them better. It kind of takes the wind out of the movie's sails. It picks up near the end but it doesn't have that much to bring it above average. I didn't think I needed a copy of my own.

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I had totally forgotten that I had seen the 2017 SF movie The Recall back in March 2018. I know my memories is failing but it is a rather generic alien invasion movie. There have been so many of them that they tend to blur together. Often a scene or image in the film will trigger a reminder, it happened in The Recall but not until nearly the end of the movie. Here's that blog post:

The Recall is another alien invasion story. It's from 2017 and it's mostly told from the POV of some vacationing friends in a remote mountain cabin. The TV news tells of some strange weather formations and visits to a military base fill us in that the government knows we've already had some contact with aliens. Wesley Snipes is an ex-astronaut who's gone starin' off into the distance survivalist after his encounter with the aliens. The vacationers have a run in with Wesley, and then, some aliens. The men in the group are fighting all the time, none of them seem to be able to work together, and by the 38 minute mark two of the 5 are dead by their own hands. I hate the stupid in horror films. I guess their stupidity is a good reminder that we're doomed when it comes to alien invasions. I did like the CGI floating alien brain critters and the visit to the alien ship was kind of creepy. Still, there's nothing much to recommend, another time filler for cable and streaming venues.

Hercules In The Haunted World is a 1961 Italian film that I have seen before. I remembered having seen it but nothing much about what's in it. A lot of those Sand and Sandal action films tend to be similar. We watched the new Kino Lorber Blu-ray, it's got three versions of the film. We watched the original Italian version, there's a US and UK version. I'm more intrigued with the various versions of the film that I ordered the Blu-ray myself this morning. Now I can find out what the others are like and listen to the commentary by Tim Lucas.

The movie is directed by Mario Bava, the script was written by Mario, Sandro Continenza, Francesco Prosperi and Duccio Tessari. I'm no big fan of Mario's but occasionally I like one of his films. When I saw this back in 1996 I watched the US version. 

Reg Park is Hercules and Christopher Lee is the evil King Lico. According to the Wikipedia Lee dubbed his voice in the Italian version but someone else dubbed him in the US version. Italian movies of the time were mostly shot without the sound being recorded live. All the voices are dubbed, even in the Italian version.

Hercules has to go to Hades to retrieve the Stone Of Forgetfulness to revive his love Daianara. He takes Theseus along with him. They hook up with a comic relief machine in the form of some guy called Telemachus. King Lico is planning to take Daianara for his bride when Hercules restores her to her normal state. Hercules has his hands full and he got to put a stop to that prick too. Busy guy.

There's plenty of walking about, some sailing, some feats of strength and a big giant stone guy. There are a few jokes but they aren't that good. It's about as entertaining as these movies get, it's about average for the genre. There's a dded bonus in this one of Chris Lee but he's not in a big chuck of the movie. I guess I'll be watching it again when the Blu-ray comes but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's not interested in the Sword and Sand genre.