PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 799

 

Knocking On Death's Door 1999 Screenplay by Craig J Nevis and direction by Mitch Marcus. Produced by Roger Corman and shot at his studio near Galway Ireland. The movie is set in New England.

Newlywed students buy a haunted house to look for the ghosts rumored to be in the house. They're there to look for the ghosts. They soon find him. It's a much your typical haunted house story, a bit sexier than some, but really it all boils down to some poor sap getting murdered and he can't move on. David Carradine plays the local doctor, other than that there's nothing much special about the movie. It's part of a two movie DVD that came out in 2003.

The Doorway 2000 Michael B Druxman is the writer director. Also made at Roger's Irish studio and also set in the USA.

It's another haunted house story, this time there are 4 students looking for cheap housing. The jerky guy has made a deal to fix the place up for free rent and some cash. The other's aren't too happy with him once he's sprung this surprise. They aren't as unhappy as the demon that lives in the house. She's been murdered and walled up in the cellar. She's been stewing down thee for years and she's pretty nasty on top of being a mean angry demon. She gets busy and people start to die.

Roy Scheider is their professor, he goes to the house to help with the problem. It's pretty typical stuff and below average in interest to me. I might never get around to re-watching these two films but I'll have that DVD anyway.

Valley Of The Zombies 1946

Valley Of The Zombies is a 1946 horror film directed by Philip Ford. Dorrell McGowan and Stuart E McGowan wrote the screenplay from Royal K Cole and Sherman L Lowe's original story. It was on a double bill with The Catman Of Paris. I found a vaguely watchable copy on YouTube and watched it.

Blood stolen from a hospital lab leads to murder. Turns out a guy who has a strange condition needs it to stay alive and he'll kill to get his blood. A doctor and a nurse help the police capture the murderer. It's pleasant enough, about average, but no zombies. The closest thing is the ability of the murderer to hypnotize people into doing his dirty work. I was glad to have seen it and I might want to see it again someday.

Friday Night Movies 797

Frankenstein Vs The Mummy is a 2015 horror movie, it's written and directed in Damien Leone.

Victor Frankenstein is paying the janitor for a fresh brain. The janitor kills a hobo and tries to bargain up the $5K he's supposed to get from Victor. They have a fight and the janitor's brain winds up in the creature Victor's is making in a dirty old basement.

By day Victor is a professor at the university where Professor Walton has just returned from a dig in Egypt with the mummy of a pharaoh. Best not ask yourself any of those embarrassing questions you might be having. There are no answers here. Victor's creature comes alive and so does the mummy. In the end they will battle it out.

It's endlessly talky, there's a bit of action, and a good bit of gore. Nothing exceptional, nothing to bring it to average and it's way too long at 114 mins. Just another Frankenstein movie, same as the next movie, neither as good as the original.

The Frankenstein Theory came out in 2013 and director Andrew Weiner wrote the screenplay with Vlady Pildysh.

What if Mary Shelley's book was really a fictional account of a real event, what if the creature really existed? That's the theory that Professor Jonathan Venkenheim believes. He takes a film crew to the Yukon in northern Canada. They meet a guy who has supposedly survived an encounter with the creature. They hire a guide and with very little stuff they head into the wilderness.

They camp in a yurt left by some trappers. At night 1 of the 3 snowmobiles is wrecked and another stolen. One of the guys goes for help and doesn't come back. They find him dead, others follow quickly, pretty standard picked off by the monster stuff. After the guide is killed, it's only the professor and the lady director. We don't know what happened to the professor, there's just some noise off camera, then the monster runs off into the woods carrying the lady director.

Good reminder not to go after the Frankenstein monster without a gang with guns, only the guide had a rifle. In the end he was useless and he'd killed 12 polar bears. Well below average story wise, nice Alaska scenery for a while. Not much to make me want to return to either of these again.

Friday Night Movies 796

Army Of The Dead is a 2008 zombie film of little originality. Joseph Conti directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Ciccolini and Tom Woosley. A professor and some students take an archeology trip to the Baja Peninsula.

According to the movie, four centuries ago Coronado sent 1000 men to find El Dorado, they disappeared. Well, the professor thinks he knows where the city is and he's secretly made a deal with some scumbags to steal the gold. His students are clueless about his plan. The prof finds the city and of course releases the curse. It animates the 1000 lost skeletal conquistadors. They are totally bent on slaughtering the professor and his minions. 

Sadly the CGI is only fair, it's about the same for the rest of the movie. The actors are adequate but the script isn't that interesting. You've certainly heard it all before in any number of the other 'trapped by some evil force that's killing everyone' movie. There's nothing much exciting about the location, I've seen the desert before, and better photographed too. I wouldn't need to see it again, that's for sure.

Subferatu is a 2020 everything but the kitchen sink comedy that blends time travel, Nazis, vampires, submarines and Gilligan's Island. It's written and directed by Patrick Penta. I found it over at Amazon Prime, same as the previous movie.

A small pleasure craft is out for a 3 hour tour when a big storm comes up. Their ship is floundering when they are rescued by a submarine commander in the Nazi navy. There's only a small crew on board the sub and they don't realize the survivors came from the future. The ship was in the Bermuda Triangle and the skipper's name is Captain Gavin McCloud. That's him in the red shirt.

The Commander tells the Captain that it's the day after Hitler killed himself. The Commander wants to surrender his sub but only if he can sail it into New York harbor. The Captain doesn't know if he traveled back in time, or the sub came forward, but he knows it's going to be somewhat of an issue to show up in the harbor. On top of that possible trouble, there's a vampire on the sub.

It's definitely goofy, it made me laugh out loud 3 or 4 times and I snickered once in a while. It's pretty self aware, the Captain talks to the audience from the start, and while the jokes are not all top raters there are a lot of them. It's a cornucopia of genre movie references, so keep an eye, and and ear, open. The actors, the film was made in Seattle, are mostly OK, the characters are pretty broad so they have a lot of wiggle room in their roles. I wasn't sold from the start but the general goofiness won me over and I had a good laugh. Sadly it's not out on DVD, I might buy a copy if it was cheap enough.

Universal Cult Horror Collection

Universal Cult Horror Collection is a 5 movie pack of 1930s and 1940s horror films. They're from TCM and Universal Home Entertainment. Each movie gets a separate single layer DVDr. The files on the first two movies are just under 3 GB each. They could easily have had the set reduced to 3 double layer discs but that might have meant they couldn't charge the nearly 50 smackaroonies the set cost. They're short movies, ranging between 61 and 66 minutes, and they look alright. There isn't anything special by way of extras, some behind-the-scenes stills, posters and lobbycards, TCM Database info, that sort of thing. I didn't really care enough to look at the extras. You can't find these movies anywhere else but Turner Classic Movies on cable. I don't have cable so there you go. My only real complaint is the cover to the DVD case is really poor and uninteresting. The back cover has mostly yellow text on black, the letter's are really small and hard to read. Reminds me that many product designers are below average.

House Of Horrors 1946 Dwight V Babcock wrote the original story, George Bricker wrote the screenplay, Jean Yarbrough did the directing. Dwight wrote the original stories and screenplays to several horror films: The Mummy's Curse, House Of Dracula, She-Wolf Of London, The Devil's Mask and The Brute Man. I've seen a few of the films that George penned: Sh! The Octopus, Mr Moto In Danger Island, The Devil Bat, House OF Dracula, She-Wolf Of London and The Brute Man. Jean started directing shorts in 1936, his first feature was Sauce For The Gander in 1940. He followed that with over 60 films. I've seen a few of them: The Devil Bat, King Of The Zombies, The Gang's All Here, She-Wolf Of London, The Brute Man, The Creeper, Jack And The Beanstalk and Lost In Alaska. You can see they worked together on a few films. That was common under the old studio system. I have a fondness for these old horror films, they're often more entertaining than their modern counterparts.

Martin Kosleck is a sculpture who's belittled by art critic Alan Napier. He looses a much needed sale. Martin finds Rondo Hatton struggling out of the river and brings him to his home.

Rondo is really The Creeper, a big man with a deformed face, who murdered some people, then ran away. He was thought to have died in the river. Martin doesn't realize who Rondo is at first, he just wants to have a grotesque model for his next big, important sculpture. Rondo played The Creeper in two other films, The Pearl Of Death in 1944 and The Brute Man in 1946. The character has nothing to do with the film The Creeper, that's a totally different monster.

Rondo sneaks out one night and kills Alan. Martin doesn't realize it was Rondo at first but once he does, he suggests another critic who needs killing in his eyes. Soon the power goes to Martin's head and that's his downfall.

There's the usual bit of romance between Robert Lowery and Virginia Grey. Bill Goodman plays the cop on the look out for The Creeper. It's a good solid film with a nice quick pace and a good sense of humor. Well worth the look for me.

Murders In The Zoo 1933 Philip Wylie and Seton I Miller wrote the screenplay and A Edward Sutherland was the director. Philip might be best known for his novels When Worlds Collide and After World Collide. I've read them and seen the movie several times. Seton wrote quite a number of films, some stand out a bit, The Sea Hawk, The Black Swan and Here Comes Mr Jordan. Eddie started in the silent era and directed about 50 movies. You might been familiar with Fireman, Save My Child or Tillie's Punctured Romance. I know I've seen The Flying Deuces with Laurel and Hardy, Beyond Tomorrow with C Aubrey Smith, The Invisible Woman with Virginia Bruce, and Having Wonderful Crime with Pat O'Brien, George Murphy and Carole Landis. The later film is based on a Craig Rice novel with her lawyer detective John J Malone. He's renamed Mike J Malone here. Who knows why.

Lionel Atwill is an animal hunter and scientist. He's very jealous of his wife, Kathleen Burke, as the movie opens he's sewn a man's lips together for kissing her. The man is abandoned in the jungle with no weapons or food. Lionel is collecting animals for a zoo, he brings a bunch back for private zoo.

Charles Ruggles is the zoo's new press agent, he's a nervous Nellie of a guy. That's him on the right, the others are Kathleen Scott and John Lodge. Lionel discovers his wife is having an affair with John and kills him with snake venom. Kathleen has the proof but Lionel catches her at the zoo and tosses her in to the alligators. That closes down the zoo and attracts the police.

Randolph Scott plays the zoo's animal doctor and Gail Patrick plays his assistant' They team up and solve the mystery and save the zoo from closing down permanently. The baddie gets his and things end as well as they could.

 

Pretty entertaining, they pack a lot of story in a 66 minute movie. Lionel is as creepy as he can be and Randolph is young and handsome. There are some laughs and some thrills. I thought it was worth seeing. Some nice posters too.

The Mad Doctor Of Market Street 1942 Al Martin wrote the screenplay and Joseph H Lewis directed. Joseph directed a good bit of TV at the end of his career, before that he directed 40 other films. I'd seen a few, The Big Combo, Gun Crazy, The Falcon In San Francisco, Pride Of The Bowery, That Gang Of Mine, Boys Of The City, and The Invisible Ghost. 

Lionel Atwill is a mad scientist, he kills a test subject with his new suspended animation formula, now he's on the run. He sets sail on a ship that sinks and leaves him and a handful of survivors on an island inhabited by some natives.

Lionel saves a tribal matriarch and takes over the tribe. He fails to live up to their expectations by being much too clever. It wasn't as good as the previous two films, more about average. It was nice to see Lionel get his in the end. He was a real dick. I'd watch that again.

The Mad Ghoul 1943 James P Hogan directed this film, Hanns Kräly wrote the original story, Brenda Weisberg and Paul Gangelin wrote the screenplay.

This time George Zucco is the mad scientist. He's cooked up an ancient Mayan formula that will turn men into easily to control zombies. George works at the local university where David Bruce is a medical student. David's pretty girlfriend is Evelyn Ankers, George has his eye on her for his own. He uses his formula on David and controls him while Evelyn is on a musical concert tour.

George has David kill people, the formula needs human hearts to make it, and that sure attracts the attention of the police. Things look pretty bleak for Evelyn but she gets a hand and it all works out as best it can. A little better than the previous film. I'd watch it again.

The Strange Case Of Doctor Rx 1942 William Nigh is the director and Clarence Upton Young wrote the screenplay. I've seen a handful of William's 120 films, The Ghost And The Guest, The Ape, Mr Wong In Chinatown, The Mystery Of Mr Wong and  The Fatal Hour. He started directing in 1914 and hung up his monocle in 1948.

Dr Rx is a murderer, he's been killing criminals that escaped justice. He's got a gorilla. Edmund MacDonald and Shemp Howard are the cops who ask their PI pal Patric Knowles to lend a hand. Mantan Moreland is Patric's butler and assistant. I always think a movie is made better by Mantan's presence. They get on the case and track down the murderous Dr Rx. It was fun and I had a laugh or two. Worth the watch to me, as I thought the whole set was, it's just too pricey at nearly 10 smackaroonies a movie. Too bad more people aren't into classic movies, the DVDs might be cheaper and more common.

Friday Night Movies 794

The Girl In The Photos turned out to be a crappy 2015 slasher film with little of interest other than it was the last film Wes Craven produced and it's got Kal Penn in it. He plays a jerky photographer who leads his entourage to their doom in a small town. Claudia Lee plays a woman working in a store in the town. One day she comes into find a picture of a tortured woman on the store bulletin board. The police put it down to a prank but it's some scumbag who likes killing and making  statements with bodies. It's not much fun and I wouldn't need to see it again.

Pyewacket is a 2017 horror film about a stupid young high school student who pals around with people who preform rituals for their own selfish gain. She gets pissed at her mother for moving them to a house in the country. Mom is depressed from the loss of her husband and she can't stand being in the old house anymore. I can understand that but the daughter, a selfish cunt, can't. She preforms a ritual to wish death on her mom. Of course it releases Pyewacket, a demon spirit who comes creeping around. Regretting her choice the daughter tries to reverse the curse but that goes south and Pyewacket tricks her into burning her mom alive. The police just don't seem to believe her demon story. What a useless person. Glad she's off the streets. Not a good thing to watch, kind of below average and hardly anyone is likeable. Never going to see that one again.

Friday Night Movies 788

Trilogy Of Terror is a 1975 TV movie produced and directed by Dan Curtis. The three stories are written by Richard Matheson, 2 of the screenplays are written by William F Nolan, the third is by Matheson. Karen Black plays the main character in each segment. In one she's drugged and blackmailed by a student at University. Turns outs out really bad for that guy. In the second segment Karen plays twin sisters, one straight laced and uptight, the other a blonde playgirl. Turns out bad for them.

The last segment really earned the movie some fame, Karen comes home with a tiny statue of a man who turns on her with murder on his mind. The little guy gets into all the horror film magazines and Karen gets mentioned for her hysterical performance. That segment doesn't end well for her.

Not a bad lot of stories. I know I saw them when the film first aired but I hadn't seen it since the 80s. I got a cheap DVD and watched it. There's some extras but they aren't for today.

Jeepers Creepers 3 is the third of the films in the series, it came out in 2017, 14 years after the second film and it's story takes place between the the first and second films. Victor Salva wrote and directed the film. It sure got panned when it came out but I didn't think it was that awful or anything, about average, maybe a little lower. There's plenty of running about while being chased by an unkillable monster and plenty of gory bits. It ends with an opening for a sequel, I'm not holding my breath. I'd rather watch the first one over again, it's way better.

Imogene McCarthery is a 2010 French spy comedy set in England in 1962. It's in the same vein as the recent(ish) OSS-117 spy comedies. Catherine Frot is Imogene, she works in the office of the Intelligence service for the British Admiralty. Her boss sends her on a secret mission, take some plans to an Admiralty man in Falkland in Scotland. She's a terrible spy, she gets drunk and passed out with three Scot fishermen on the train. She wakes up and makes her drop off only to find that the plans have been switched for old newspapers. She takes on a new mission, catching those three spies. She does too well, killing two of them, before she finds out that it was all a ruse to help flush out the mole in the agency. There's a bit of romance and some jokes. Not as much fun as the OSS-117 comedies but still worth a look. I'd watch it again someday.

Friday Night Movies 785

Trailer Park Shark is a 2017 big ass shark comedy. It's directed by Griff Furst, son of Stephen Furst. Griff wrote the movie with his brother Nathan Furst, Marcy Holland, Matt Muschamp and Xander Wolfe.

The movie is set in a squalled trailer park in Louisiana. A rich scumbag wants the park gone so he hires a stupid scumbag to blow up the levee. It floods the park and most of the trailer park residents are washed away with their trailers. A few survive and to make their day worse, somehow, a big ass hungry shark has come calling. Oh, yeah, he's an electric shark. His electric discharge knocks people out and shorts out electrical systems in boats.

The CGI is fair to middlin', you can see that shark top looks a bit low rez. Generally the physical effects work, the only one that was annoying was the rain effect. They had a physical spray system set up but it was so small you could see where the rain ended on the water. The physical gore is a bit of a step up over the CGI gore. The movie moves along briskly and there's always some new danger and slaughter.

I did like the movies sense of humor. I laughed out loud a couple of times and it was fun to see the scumbags get some chompin' action. Glad to have seen it and would watch it again.

This Is Not A Movie came out in 2011 and the Wikipedia says it's a Mexican experimental SF film. It's written and directed by Olallo Rubio. Edward Furlong plays three different versions of the same character. It's the end of the world and he's in a hotel room in Las Vegas discussing some philosophical stuff with his other selves. It's pretty artsy fartsy but I did get a good laugh out of one part. A physical gag that had little to do with the lack of story. Edward was pretty good as the different personalities. Sadly I wasn't that interested in his internal monologue. I had gotten the DVD cheap and will keep it. I might never watch it again. Who knows.

The Lost Patrol is a 1934 Boris Karloff film. It's adapted from a Philip MacDonald story called Patrol by Garrett Fort, the screenplay is by Dudley Nichols, the director is John Ford. Victor McLaglen, Wallace Ford, Reginald Denny, Billy Bevan, Alan Hale and JM Kerrigan are some of the cast I knew. Merian C Cooper is an executive producer and Max Stein created the music.

It's a WWI film, set in the desert of Mesopotamia, with a troop of lost soldiers. They've been beleaguered by some spirituous Arabs who snipe at them with sad efficiency. The troop find an oasis and camp out, resting themselves and their horses. In the night two men are killed and the horses stolen. The troop are randomly picked off by the hidden enemy. Help arrives in the form of an airplane. The pilot lands and is killed.

As their despair grows Boris goes mad and he becomes a danger to himself and the troop. He's eventually killed by his own delusion. Rescue comes but nearly too late. It's all pretty bleak and horrible. Not much by way of humor going on here. It's very much like a horror movie, the kind with a human monster. It's still better than the other two films. I might even watch it again someday.

Hostile Hauntings 6 Movie Collection

Hostile Hauntings is a 6 movie collection from Pendulum Pictures. It's got 2 DVDs with 3 movies on each, no extras. They are all horror films with one thing in common. They suck.

Films are made up of many parts, the story, the actors, the film makers, the sets, props and production values, all fighting for the few dollars these film makers have. Compound that with a general lack of talent and you've got a product that stinks up the house. I blame the availability of low cost HD video. It looks great, unless you don't know how to light it, understand how to use the camera or understand the basics of film making. Add to that poor attempts to cheaply add physical and CGI effects. Their posters suck too. I've really come to hate the photo shopped crap that the designers crank out. Luckily, some of the films were too embarrassed to put a poster online.

As a collection of mistakes in film making these 6 films are good examples of bad examples. It's almost like they're fighting to be called the worst film in the box. I couldn't pick the worst one. None of them needs to be held up as a shining example of what not to do in film making. We already have enough bad films, best these be forgotten. Here's the list so you can beware if they turn up on some streaming source or TV channel.

The Shunned House 2003 An Italian production about a couple that investigate an old building. Tedious and dull.

The Woodland Haunting 2 2005 An Elvis impersonator in a mental institution tells us about a haunting in Ypsilanti Michigan. Absolute shit.

The Somnambulists 2005 Not even a whole movie, a 24 min short with a 50 minute making of tacked on. Absolutely dull and boring.

Hellbound: Book Of The Dead 2003 Also called Cadaver Bay. Not worth seeing.

The River: Legend Of La Llorna 2006 Terrible looking CGI background and dull story.

Sleep Disorder 2005 Ghost hunting guy has nightmares that cause him mental suffering, We have to listen to his boring conversation with a psychiatrist. Utterly awful in every way.

Friday Night Movies 782

Stay Out Stay Alive is a 2019 horror movie playing on Amazon Prime. Dean Yurke wrote and directed. It's his first writing and directing work, he's mostly been in the digital side of things, working on effects for some of the biggest genre pictures from the Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel Universe, Star Trek, Pirates of the Caribbean franchises and many more.  SOSA is a much smaller picture than any of those, supernatural horror in the Yosemite woods with a fair bit of CGI to help out.

Five annoying 20 somethings go on a camping trip. I didn't recognize any of the cast except for Barbara Crampton, she plays a forest ranger. The 5 are a couple of couples and the older sister of one of the women. A small earthquake opens the entrance to an old mine and the older sister falls down the short shaft. She gets trapped by a boulder and she's there all night. She had gone off for a walk and two couples went to their tents. The next day it's hard for one of the women to get the sister and he boyfriend to search for her. Those two are a real treat to be around. They find her and try to release her. No go.

One of them finds some gold while poking around. Gold fever kicks in and things go downhill from there. As they dig into the mine they unleash the spirits of the Native Americans who were murdered and buried there back in the gold rush days. The spirits appear as animals or shadow figures and the CGI that does it is fair to good. The earthquake footage was fairly good too. What wasn't much fun was the annoying characters. I think it's barely average, mostly because it's such a familiar story with little to elevate it. Good to have seen it and not have bought it. Well, on DVD, I'm paying for AP and not getting many things shipped to me right now, so it's good to get something out of the monthly fee.

Attack Of The Southern Fried Zombies is another from AP. It came out in 2017 and Christian Hokenson, Mark Newton, Stephan Stromer and Daniel Wood wrote the story, Christian wrote the screenplay and Mark directed. It's set in Charleston Mississippi during a blues festival. One of the big draws are the rival meat pie vendors. Timothy Haug plays a crop duster who's working for one of the meat pie makers on the side, during the day his latest job is spraying a new herbicide on kudzu. The kudzu doesn't like it and it starts turning the dead into zombies somehow. At first it's just one poor guy but it soon spreads and the zombies invade the festival.

The characters we meet are a wide range of southerners, mostly done up for a laugh, some are fun and some are less so. The acting is all over the place and so is the dialog. You'd think with that many of them working on the story, there would be better dialog. Be nice to have better jokes too.

Once the murderous horde descends on the festival it's run or be killed. Some folks escape but many are slaughtered. The physical make up is only so-so and so is the CGI used for gun shot hits and explosions. There's no money here. I enjoyed a fair bit of it but I wouldn't need to see it again.