PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Legends Of Dinosaurs And Monster Birds 1977

Legend Of Dinosaurs And Monster Birds 1977 Screenplay by Masaru Igami, Isao Matsumoto and Ichirô Ôtsu, directed by Junji Kurata.

 

Made by Toei Company, the studio was inspired by Jaws, the film did poorly in the Japanese theaters but was a block buster in the Soviet Union. It was known in the US as The Legend Of Dinosaurs and it was used in the last episode of the first season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 which was produced by KTMA. That version was chopped up a good bit, the original movie got a US DVD release in 2007 from Media Blasters and that's what I watched.

A woman falls into a cavern, in the Aokigahara region near Mount Fuji, she awakes to find fossilized eggs, one of which hatches. She runs off and scares a construction crew with her hysterics. A geologist called Takashi goes to take a look, while hiking around Mount Fuji he's knocked out and wakes up in the cabin of a family friend. Takashi continues his hunt for the eggs, on the way he meets an old girlfriend Akiko. She's there with her friend Junko, a scuba diver, who wants to dive in the lake where a couple in a small boat went missing.

A diver is injured in the lake, livestock have gone missing, wild theories of living dinosaurs are tossed out to the dubious public. Well, turns out it wasn't a dinosaur, it was two, one of them a plesiosaurus and the other a rhamporhynchus. The pair battle it out and the volcano erupts killing both dinos. It's a bad day on Mount Fuji and the movie ends on a cliffhanger.

I was much more entertained by the movie than on MST3K. It was like seeing a whole different movie, the MST3K version had so much trimmed out of it. It's a more adult film than I thought, there's a bit of gore, mild by today's standards and a brief bit of nudity. I'd watch it again.

I'm not sure why it did so poorly in the Japanese box office. It was Toei's biggest budget, $2.8 million and it didn't even get a third of that back in receipts. It never got released theatrically in the US but it was released to TV in 1987.

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The Awakening 2011 Director Nick Murphy co-wrote the script with Stephen Volk.

Rebecca Hall plays a woman ghost debunker in post WWI London, she doesn't believe in them and she finds out the hard way that she's wrong. Dominic West is a teacher in a boy's boarding school, he asks Rebecca to come to his school and find out if they really have a ghost. They do.

There's a few scares but some of the nasty activity is man made, the young boy who died off screen was really killed when a disturbing teacher, who shouldn't be teaching anyone, locked him outside to toughen him up, the kid had a fatal asthma attack. Much of the staff seems messed up, the grounds keeper is a mentally deficient cowardly rapist who tries to kill Rebecca. The school's head housekeeper is played by Imelda Staunton, she's one of the most disturbed of the lot.

Sadly they ruin a good ghost story with all sorts of personal melodrama, not much happens while they spend a lot of time on figuring out what's behind Rebecca's miserable life. Not something that appealed to me that much. I wouldn't need to see it again.

The Day Of Destruction 2020 Written and directed by Toshiaki Toyoda. The movie is a scant 57 mins so we watched the even shorter prequel Wolf's Calling from 2019. There's a third short in the Resurrection Trilogy, Go Seppuku Yourselves from 2021. We didn't see that.

A monster lives in a old coal mine and it's created some mental issues in the people who live there. The story is told in a disjointed way with little by way of clues as to what's going on. Think art film with a noisy annoying soundtrack.

Some guy, commenting on the IMDb, says the three films are an angry response to the pandemic and the government's handling of the situation. I couldn't tell that from what's on screen. The films we saw look good but it's not enough, I'm looking for a story I can get my head around. Enigmatic personal stories just don't cut it for me. I wouldn't need to see it again.

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Big Bad Wolf 2006 Written and directed by Lance W Dreesen. I hadn't remembered seeing this back in 2006. That post is in the title above. I didn't think it was going to be such a short while before I saw it again. It's still about average. I probably don't need to see it again at this point. That's an ugly poster.

The Snake Girl And The Silver Haired Witch 1968 Based on the comic Hebi Onna by Kazuo Umezu, screenplay by Kimiyuki Hasegawa, directed by Noriaki Yuasa. The comic was published in the US under the name Reptilia in 2006. The director is also the director of the first series of Gamera films.

A young orphan girl called Sayuri finds out that her parents are alive and they want her to come live with them. They live in a nice house, the mother is an amnesiac from an accident and the father is a scientist specializing in snake venom study.

When Sayuri arrives at the house she's greeted by an ambulance, the maid had just died from a heart attack. The father has just learned he's got to leave right away for an opportunity to study a rare snake in Africa. He's gone until the very end of the film.

The next night Sayuri finds a snake in her bed but after her mother and the housekeeper arrive it's gone. There's also someone in the attic, looking at Sayuri's bed through a hole in the ceiling. Things start to get more and more serious and deadly for Sayuri. She's a plucky girl who stands up to danger in the end.

It moves a bit slowly for me but I was still entertained enough to order the Arrow Blu-ray. I'll want to watch it again.

Godzilla Vs Kong 2021

Godzilla Vs Kong 2021 Story by Terry Rossio, Michael Dougherty and Zach Shields, screenplay by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein, directed by Adan Wingard.

Godzilla surfaces and attacks an Apex Cybernetics facility in Florida. A conspiracy theorist called Bernie thinks that's something is going on at that location. He's gotten a job there so he can spy on the company. He finds a dodgy shipping order in his search but isn't sure what it means. During the attack he stumbles onto a powerful device but has to leave because of Godzilla stomping about. Bernie joins up with one of his listeners and her pal to sneak into the Florida Alex location. They get shipped to Hong Kong in a secret underground transport system.

The Apex CEO hires Alexander Skarsgård to lead an expedition to the Hollow Earth. They take Kong along, he's sedated and lying on a barge. Godzilla attacks to convoy of ships, there's a massive punch up and big G puts Kong down. Alexander saves the ships from further attack by shutting down all the ships and pretending to be dead. The CEO believes Kong came from the HE. Turns out he was right. A good thing for the human's in their fancy high tech helicopters. Kong beats down some giant flying beasties that chomped on one of the fancy choppers. Lucky for us, the stars of the movie where in another chopper. It's dangerous working in corporate America.

CEO guy sent his daughter with the expedition to HE. She's a ruthless cold hearted type that comes to a bad end, at least from her POV, I was kind of digging the fire ball created by her chopper as it was crushed by Kong. Back in Hong Kong, the conspiracy trio have chanced upon a test of Mechagodzilla. Turns out that CEO guy is there and he's large and in charge. Godzilla pops up and opens a tunnel to the Hollow Earth. Kong and Godzilla yell at each other until Kong jumps into the hole and lands in Hong Kong. There's some big battle scenes and more people and places succumb to the monster mash. Eventually it's all sorted and Kong and his pals on on vacation until the next sequel.

Mostly entertaining but seems long winded even at 113 mins. There's a Blu-ray due in a couple of weeks, that should look better than the version I found online. I'll order one after the price falls a bit. I'd want to see it again.

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Godzilla 1985 Written by Shuichi Nagahara, Lisa Tomei, and an uncredited Tony Randel and Straw Weisman, directed by RJ Kizer and Koji Hashimoto.

I'm watching the Red Menace HD Reconstruction from the Internet Archive. It's a fan made wide screen release of the film. It's a massive 12.4GB file, it took over 8 hours to download. You can also watch it right on the Internet Archive with their player.

There's no Blu-ray or DVD release of the movie, some one tells me that the music rights are an issue that might never be resolved. Movie and music people are so greedy and stupid. There was a laser disc and VHS release but they were pan and scan

The movie is called Godzilla 1984 in Japan and, like the original 1954 Godzilla, it's been Americanized for release here. Godzilla surfaces again and the world is watching. Especially after he attacks and destroys a Russian submarine. The Russians are all mad and shouty, first they blame the Americans but they soon learn that it was Godzilla. 

Raymond Burr plays the same American reporter who appeared in the 1955 movie. He's called in as a consultant on Godzilla by the military. Both the Americans and the Russians want to nuke Godzilla but the Japanese Prime Minister says not while he's on Japanese soil. Secretly the Russians arm a nuke.

When Godzilla returns to Tokyo the military have their new Super-X Attack Plane and the scientists have an idea on how to lure Godzilla into a trap. There's plenty of collateral damage and stuff blowing up. I've see it a few times already but I enjoyed it again.

Gravy 2015 Written by James Roday and Todd Harthan, directed by James Roday. You might remember James from Psych. This is his first film. James and Dulé Hill make cameos in the film.

Jimmi Simpson, Micheal Weston and Lilly Cole are murdering cannibal psychopath scum, they seal everyone in a small Mexican restaurant for some late night torture and snacking. They get the drop on the staff and some of them die. The tide turns after a while when the bartender, Sutton Foster, starts fighting back. Still, hardly anyone gets out alive.

It's gruesome and gory with a twisted sick sense of humor. Certainly not going to be popular with some. I got to the end and thought it was sort of funny but barely average. I had bought the DVD a while back, so I have it, and I might 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.

Meatball Machine 2005

Meatball Machine is a Japanese live action tentacle movie. It's all gooey and disgusting so some should like it. The rest is all yakkin' and furtive looks with a side of body modification. Not my cup of tea and I found it less than interesting despite the constant barrage of gore. Some days I feel wanting to watch all the SF movies out there is a chore not a pleasure. Maybe I should stick to watching everything before the turn of the century. I'd certainly enjoy watching a lot of those movies over, not this one.

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Tarzan The Ape Man is a 1959 film with Denny Miller as Tarzan. I was pretty sure I hadn't see it before, but truth be told, it turns out that I had seen parts of it before. MGM has re-make rights to their 1932 film Tarzan Of The Apes so they decided to re-make the film. Sy Weintraub had the rights to the other Tarzan films and he was making Tarzan's Greatest Adventure at the same time.

For an MGM film it seems pretty low budget, making it, rather sadly, a poor  addition to the Tarzan film library. Roger Hill beats some words into a screenplay but he doesn't have much of a story. Joseph M Newman directed the scenes that were new to the film. The film makers borrow heavily from the 1932 Tarzan Of The Apes, the 1934 Tarzan And His Mate, and the 1937 King Soloman's Mines. All of those were B&W films and this new one is color. You'll notice that right off. There's a good bit of miss matched color stock footage of animals wedged in there too.

Besides Denny Miller, there's Joanna Barnes, Cesare Danova and Robert Douglas in the cast. Joanna is Jane, Robert her father and Cesare their guide. They encounter a Tarzan that doesn't speak much English. Tarzan fights some critters, Denny Miller fights a stuffed leopard, and Johnny Weissmuller fights a crocodile. That was the footage from Tarzan And His Mate. There's a good bit of tramping through the jungle and some noticeable rock climbing. It's all to the  score by jazz thingy Shorty Rogers. I can't say I disliked the movie but it sure wasn't something anyone could be proud of. Since I bought it, I'll keep it, making my Tarzan collection that much more complete.

The Evil Of Dracula is the 3rd of 1970s vampire films from Toho. It's came out in 1974 and once again the style copies the Hammer horror film. A teacher arrives at a school to find the Principal's wife has just died. She's down in the basement for a week. It's a local custom. The teacher has an odd dream about the dead wife. Soon enough it's a battle to the death with the vampires. There's plenty of tooth flashing and dripping blood. It's similar to the other two films in quality. I'm going to keep an eye on the price for the three film set. It'll get cheaper someday or I won't bother with it.

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The Lake Of Dracula is the second Toho vampire movie on The Bloodthirsty Trilogy set from Arrow Films. It's a 1971 film, the script is by Ei Ogawa and Masaru Takesue and Michio Yamamoto is the director. Like all the films in the set, it's in the style of a Hammer horror picture. It does a good job capturing that look and feel, yet the film is still very Japanese. I thought I had read somewhere that this was the first time this film had been released in the US. When we sat down to watch it, Greg said he'd seen it and has a VHS tape somewhere. I looked that up and sure enough the two Dracula titled films in the box were released on VHS by Gateway in the early 70s. The films were pan & scanned and trimmed a bit. You can see the box art at this site.

This story is about a woman called Akiko who had an encounter with a vampire when she was a child. As an adult she believes it to be a dream. Sadly the vampire from her past comes visiting, his coffin is delivered to a local handyman. The chompin' starts right up and the handyman is the first under the bloodsuckers spell. It's the usual sort of running about and screaming as the characters try to figure out what's going. There's a bit of gore, the gag with the flesh of the dead guy stuck to the table was praticularily entertaining. Sets and locations were good and moody, a nice score added to that. The scenes by the sea were very nice. The story isn't anything new here, Dracula ancestor comes to a sticky end, but I enjoyed it. I'm pretty much sold on getting a set but I might wait a bit to see if it comes down in price a bit. It's about $32 on Amazon right now.

I doubt I would need to buy the Blu-ray of Island Claws. It's a 1980 film that has a script co-written by Ricou Browning.  He played the Gill Man in the underwater scenes in The Creature From The Black Lagoon and sequels. He's a writer who co-wrote, with Jack Cowden, Flipper and Salty. He directed 37 episodes of Flipper and some other TV. The movie was directed by Herman Cardenas, he co-produced the film with his Dario Cardenas and co-wrote the story the script was based on with Colby Cardenas. He was a local businessman who wanted to make a movie. He hired Ricou and Jack to write the screenplay.

Herman did pretty good for a first time director but Island Claws a still a bit below average, not too surprisingly it's the only movie he made. It hasn't many votes on the IMDb and a lot of them are a 4. I gave it a 5 because of the giant crab and it's not really a 6. Sadly, there's a bit too much character development and not enough giant crab. It takes a while to get to that big crab but it's pretty good when it we do get there. Not great, just pretty good. The giant crab they built doesn't move around a lot but it is huge. Before we see that behemoth, we see plenty of regular size critters running around, the little scuttlers are ganging up on the humans and getting their own back. Eventually the big beast is defeated and the town goes back to normal. Like I said, I don't think I'll bother getting on. Too many others to pick up first.

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Rabu & Pisu is a 2015 Japanese film called Love & Peace in the US. It's written and directed by Sion Sono and it took two decades to get to the screen. It's a comedy drama with annoying musical interludes featuring Japan pop music. A pathetic salaryman is bullied by his co-workers and boss. He has no friends so he buys a turtle. When he takes it to work his co-workers pick on him when they find out. He flushes the turtle down the toilet. Why wouldn't he take it home?

Well, there's a magical Santa in the sewer that gives abandoned toys and pets a place to live. He feeds them magical candy so they can talk. At the end of the year he restarts their lives by turning the pets into babies and making the toys new in the box. Santa gives the turtle a talking candy but it turns out to be a wishing candy. The salaryman wishes he was a pop star and that happens because he's still connected to the turtle. Salaryman accidentally hooks up with a band and then proceeds to turn into a big, full of himself, prick as he gets more famous. This all happens in a short time period, a few weeks maybe. The wishes in turn make the turtle larger. Eventually the turtle gets so big he's giant monster size. Sadly, there isn't enough giant monster action.

It's telling that Sono picked Babe: Pig In The City as his choice for the London Film Festival in 2014. While the films aren't similar in story they share a big colorful surreal sentimentally driven reality where animals talk, have adventures, and learn life lessons. I have to admit I liked Babe: Pig In The City much better. I did like the sewer bound Santa stuff in Love & Peace quite a bit, the use of physical puppets and real dogs was nice, but I didn't care at all for Salaryman's story. He's just a weak man who can't stand up for himself, and after he grows a pair, he's a selfish cunt. Who needs that? Typically, I'm on the outside looking in here, other's like the movie much more than me. It scores a 6.9 on the IMDb, I'd give it a 6 but only for the surreal Santa and his sewer of misfit toys. I'm not going to need a copy now that I've seen it.

Jack-O is a 1995 film by Steve Latshaw, it's one of three Steve films on a new Retromedia DVD compilation set with Dark Universe and Biohazard: The Alien Force. All three are produced by Fred Olen Rey. The film originally went straight to VHS, there was a 2005 Image DVD and more recently this 3 film compilation.

Fred was one of the three writers on Jack-O. You'd have thought with three brains they might have a better script. Nope, it's below average for some reason. Still, that goes with the below average production values. Fred's a guy who never had enough money to make a great film. He takes what he's got and does what he can.

The movie is about a wizard who curses the families of the men who killed him. This happened a couple of generations back and in modern day the Jack-O character is that vengeance made solid. It comes with it's scythe, loppin' heads and stabbin' guts, in the dark of night. A kid eventually defeats him on Halloween. Linnea Quigley is the only actor in the lot I knew. The rest of the cast are poor to fair. Jack-O gets a 2.9 on the IMDb and that ain't far wrong.

Fred and Steve do a commentary Jack-O and someone has posted it on YouTube. I have to say I often like Fred's commentaries more than the movies he's made. There are commentaries for the other two films and it's enough to make me interested in the set but I doubt I'll bother with it at 15 bucks on Amazon.