PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 826

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.

Science Fiction Sunday 463

In The Year 2889 is a 1967 post-apocalyptic made for TV SF movie. I hadn't seen it for 6 or 7 years, so I thought I'd give it a look. It was written by Harold Hoffman and Lou Rusoff, the director was Larry Buchanan. Larry's known for his low-budget genre cheapies. It was part of a series of films he did for AIP Television, it was based on Roger Corman's 1955 Day The World Ended. An older man makes a house in a canyon that has high walls that keep the prevailing winds out. When the bombs fall the place winds up with much less radiation than the rest of the area. There's nothing much lest out there but several people wonder in so there's now 7 instead of the 3 the rich guy planned food for. One of them is played by Paul Peterson, some old farts might remember him from The Donna Reed Show. His character's brother is all radiation burned and a problem. There's plenty of bad luck that befalls the group and hardly anyone is left alive to re-pop the planet. It uses the script from the original and doesn't change much but the acting and production values turn it into a below average production. It doesn't get a 2.8 on the IMDb for no good reason. You can check it out on YouTube. There's no real reason to need to buy a copy.

Invaders From Space is part of the Starman series of movies from the 1950s. The original series of films were chopped up and turned into 4 different films here in the USA. I've seen the others before but for some reason I missed this one. In the movie a bunch of Kappa like aliens try to invade Japan. The invaders leap about a lot and there's a good amount of dancing. Starman puts a stop to that with plenty of punching and kicking. All the films in the series have a nice level of goofiness that I found entertaining. You can take a look at the movie on YouTube. The others are about there too.

 

 

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Dinosaurus is a 1960 Universal International film. I'd seen it, back in 2008, and hadn't watched it since. I missed buying a DVD, the Image DVD is out of print and now it's pretty pricey, there's one on Amazon for $54. A quick Google search netted a European copy, on eBay for 7 bucks, and another site had a copy for double but they were out of stock. It written by Dan E Weisburd and Jean Yeaworth, directed by Irvin Yeaworth and producer Jack H Harris provided the story idea. It's in the low-budget range for Universal, $450K, but that's still much better than your average AIP budget.

The story is about some dinos that are brought back to life after being found frozen in the sea by a Caribbean island. When the dinosaurs, a T-Rex and a Brontosaurus, were dragged up onto the island they brought up a frozen caveman too. He thaws out to play the comic relief. The T-Rex thaws out to play the monster but the Bronto is a nice guy. The stop motion is fairly good but no Harryhausen. The guy making the dinos, Marcel Delgado was promised 5-6 weeks to create them but 2 weeks in he was told they would need them now. They look remarkably good, considering.

There's some issues with the rear projection shots, sometimes they look so obvious, but it's not something to worry too much about. It's pretty lighthearted, even the T-Rex attacks cut away before things get too dicey. The caveman, a kid and the Bronto provide some laughs. 

There's a bit of danger as the T-Rex tromps around and the human's figure out how to fight the critter. It was fun enough, I got a few giggles out if it, and there's a bit of excitement during the battle between the shovel and the T-Rex. Not the best dino movie around but certainly watchable.

Footage from the movie was used in other productions: During special-effects work on this picture, the crew used their Brontosaurus model and miniature jungle set to film a shot for an episode of TV's The Twilight Zone (1959), called "The Odyssey of Flight 33". A shot of the Tyrannosaurus was borrowed as well for "The Secret of Gilligan's Island," a 3rd season episode of Gilligan's Island where Gilligan dreams the castaways are all cavepeople living on the island back in the stone age. -from the Wikipedia.

Giant Phantom Monster Agon is a four part Japanese TV series that aired January 2-8 1968 on Nippon Television. I found a copy on YouTube that's certainly watchable. The mini-series was filmed in 1964 but Toho Studios thought that the monster was too close to Godzilla and they held up the broadcast. After finding out that Shinichi Sekizawa and Fuminori Ohashi were involved, they lifted the ban. Shinichi wrote some of Toho's kaiju films and Fuminori was the apprentice of Eiji Tsuburaya, Toho's head of special effects. Toho somehow was convinced that the two men didn't intend to copy Godzilla.

It was filmed in B&W with a sepiatone tint. The website in the title above shows some samples of the tint but the version on YouTube is B&W. It's a bit shorter, 90:56 minutes, than the 96 minutes that the Wikipedia lists the film being. There's a 94 minute DVD on Amazon for 15 bucks. Not sure I need that for that price.

The story is typical big monster comes out of the sea and people run away stuff, but it does poke along. There's some good monster action and plenty of talking among the humans. Like some of the Godzilla movies, there's a kid that gets in trouble.

Never one to throw anything out the studio that made the TV series took the Agon monster suit, changed it a bit and used it for a dinosaur in an episode of The Space Giants. It was changed again and appeared a second time, this time the monster had a name, Giant Fire Monster Aron. After that that the suit was probably tossed out.

It's certainly not great but I watched it to the end. The monster is OK and the destruction is fairly descent for a TV production.

I'd recommend it to the Kaiju fan who might be interested in this sort of thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kibakichi 2004

Kibakichi is the US title of Kibakichi: Bakko-yokaiden and from that Japanese title we can see it's about Yokai monsters. It's world wide English title is Werewolf Warrior. It's a 2004 film about a werewolf guy who stops at a town to find the local gambling den is run by Yokai posing as human. They eat some of their customers. The Yokai have a deal with the local Boss and they are left alone. At least until the Boss's henchmen get a Gatling gun. They kill the Yokai and the young blind girl that hangs out with them. Werewolf guy goes off on a revenge fueled bitey marathon and wipes out the Boss's creeps. It wasn't bad but it wasn't great. It kept me going to the end but I was a bit frigidity. The same material in a more deft hand would have been more interesting. The DVD plays with the default to English. The English dub track is nearly as poor as any I've heard. Luckily you can switch to all Japanese with English subtitle. That helps a lot.

The director is Tomo'o Haraguchi and he's mostly a special effects guy who directed 8 films. I've seen his 2010 film Death Kappa and thought it was a bit poor. I'd seen his Sakuya: Slayer Of Demons and my one word comment on my Watched Movie List was "fair". I guess I wasn't too enthused about it. I'm not too enthused about Kibakichi but I did get to the end and I will watch the sequel. It's not something I'm going to rush out and buy as I wouldn't need to watch it again too soon.