PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 1007

Samurai Wolf 1966 Written by Hideo Gosha and Kei Tasaka, directed by Hideo Gosha. The movie is packed in a recent Blu-ray with Samurai Wolf 2. Gosha has directed a good number of movies. I've only seen the 1971 Yakuza film The Wolves and that was fairly good. It's a modern day story and nothing to do with the Samurai Wolf series.

A ronin who calls himself Wolf gets caught up in a fight between the blind lady who runs the postal station and the local baddie. The blind lady has to move 30,000 pieces of gold from her station to the next station. The local baddie and the horrible woman who runs the brothel want that money. Many die before the story ends.

It's very similar type of story like you'd find in Zatoichi movies. Isao Natsuyagi is OK as the Wolf and the rest of the cast is fine. There's plenty of fights and a stack of bodies when the movie is done. Plenty of vacancies for new baddies the day after the movie. The score is heavily influenced by Italian Western music, it's rather noisy. Over all I liked the movie. Looking forward to the second Wolf movie.

Monster Party 2018 Written and directed by Chris Von Hoffman.

Casper, Iris and Dodge are three house robbers who steal from the rich. Casper is in dire need of $100,000 to pay off his father's gambling debts or the baddie will light his dad on fire. The trio decide to rob a mansion posing as replacement catering staff for a fancy dinner party. They figure out where the safe is and create a plan of action.

Things don't go so well once they start the plan. Turns out the house is filled with psychopaths and murders celebrating their not murdering anyone in a while. Like addicts who haven't had a drink or taken some drugs the urge is still inside. The urge takes over and poor Dodge is the first to go. The fight for survival is on and Casper turns out a dab hand with a katana. It's touch and go for Casper but he has some help from the daughter of their host.

It starts off a bit pokey and I didn't care that much for the trio of robbers. It picks up once the house guests start showing their true colors. I wound up enjoying it more than I thought I would. I did enjoy the movie's sense of humor but I don't think I'll pick up the Blu-ray.

Batman: The Doom That Came To Gotham 2023

Batman: The Doom That Came To Gotham 2023 Based on the 2000 comic series of the same name by Mike Mignola, screenplay by Jase Ricci, directed by Christopher Berkeley and Sam Liu.

I'd read the 3 issue series almost 20 years ago and had forgotten all the details. I should dig it out to read sometime. I like Mike Mignola quite a bit, first as an artist and second as a story teller. I wish he had drawn the whole series not just the covers. I have the same complaint about him and Hellboy. Oh, well, huh.

The animated movie is set in 1928 and Bruce Wayne has been traveling since his parents were killed twenty years before. He's led an expedition to find what happened to Oscar Cobblepot. Bruce is joined by his three wards and his man Alfred. On arrival they find the crew dead except one man who's called Grendon. A strange creature is seen in the distance. Unbeknownst to Bruce it's Oscar, mutated by some evil force.

Bruce heads home to Gotham City and the Wayne Manor. He's got a nice wine cellar there. Grendon babbles on and on and Bruce starts to see something in his mutterings. Other strange things happen, many die. Bruce interacts with characters who are similar to characters in the regular comic series, there's a steady stream of them.

Eventually things come to a head when the unknowable evil arrives. Supernatural magic has to happen for Batman to defeat the baddies. There's plenty of fights and running about. The animation is good and the story is busy and entertaining. I picked up the Blu-ray and would watch it again sometime. There's a commentary by the writer and directors. It was about average. There's a nice making of for the movie and a promo featurette on the Superman Red Son movie.

Friday Night Movies 953

Gorgo 1961 Story by Eugène Lourié and Daniel Hyatt, screenplay by John Loring and Daniel Hyatt, directed by Eugène Lourié. We watched the new Gorgo Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome. I've watched this movie several times over the years, this is the nicest version so far.

A giant monster wanders into an Irish village on Nara island. An enterprising seaman and his partner catch the beastie and take it to London to put on display for 5 shillings a head. The seaman lets some scientists take a gander at the creature, they find out that it's a youngster. The seaman speculates that there could be an adult out there.

Of course the parent comes calling to Nara Island, it leaves a devastated village and heads out to sea. The Navy can't stop it and neither can the buildings of London. Many die in the city that day. Successfully rescuing it's child the beasts head back to the sea.

Even after many viewings the movie holds up. I'm enjoying the movie and it's a good reminder that taking a giant beast into the city is just a bad idea all around.

Evil Dead Rise 2023 Written and directed by Lee Cronin. The fifth in the Evil Dead series.

The movie opens with an unrelated scene by a lake. One woman scalps another woman and cuts the head off of a man.  Cut to a rundown apartment building in LA. It's due for demolition but there are still a few families living on site. The son of a woman finds a book and 3 phonograph records in a secret room. He plays the records, a man reciting some foreign words opens a portal to evil and mom gets turned into a deadite. Most everyone dies.

There's plenty of yelling,  running about and slaughter but the film lacked the humor that the series had in the hands of Sam Raimi. I might have enjoyed it more with a lighter tone. Deadly dark films aren't my jam. It did make me realize I wouldn't need to pick up a copy. My other complaint is about the constant references to other horror film scenes that Lee shoehorns into the film, like the elevator filled with blood opening onto a lobby from The Shining. One or two references would be fine but 8 or 10 are too many.

Friday Night Movies 946

The Lake 2022 Written by Lee Thongkham, directed by Lee Thongkham and Aquig Xu. A Thai production.

A giant creature lives in the lake, no one seems aware of it until it starts laying eggs. One hatches and it's all panic and death. The military catches the smaller creature and mom comes running. It's a decent monster, fish like, croc like, lizard like, moves well and causes plenty of death and destruction.

A vigorous addition to the giant monster genre. There's plenty of jeopardy, a high death count and lots of running and yelling. Trouble is there's a fair bit of personal drama that slows things down a bit. It could use some trimming, tighten it up a bit.

Despite that, it's fairly good and I enjoyed it. I might not rush out to buy it but if I saw it cheaper than the Blu-ray at Deep Discount for $14.12, I might pick it up. I wouldn't need to see it anytime soon.

Moonfall 2022 Written by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser and Spenser Cohen, directed by Roland Emmerich.

An ancient alien nanobot swarm attacks a space shuttle on a mission near the moon. NASA covers up the encounter and discredits the astronaut that won't play ball. Ten years later the moon goes off it's orbit and is headed for the Earth. Tidal waves wash the people away.

The alien nanobot swarm came from a giant hole in moon's surface. Some plucky human's get to restore a mothballed space shuttle, launch it into space, then EMP the swarm. Near the moon they're contacted by the moon's operating system and learn that the moon was made by the ancestors of the human race.

The alien swarm is an AI that went bad. It wants to wipe out the ancient humans and has been going after them for billions of years. It's held up well, huh, hard to get a toaster that lasts 10 years.

There's some exciting bits, plenty of close shaves and oodles of personal drama. Way too much personal drama for me. It's 130 min movie and it seems longer. I was glad it was over. I enjoyed a good bit of it but it didn't make me want to go buy the Blu-ray.

Bigfoot 1970

Bigfoot 1970 Written and directed by Robert F Slatzer.

A pilot parachutes from her conked out plane only to kidnapped by a Bigfoot in need of a woman to keep his species going. That's Joi Lansing on the left, she's the pilot. The other lady is Judy Jordan, she plays the girlfriend of a biker. The gals are in trouble, the local Bigfoot tribe have kidnapped them for breeding purposes. Or lunch, it's not clear yet.

John Carradine and his business partner John Mitchum are traveling through the same area in search of customers. John M is the younger brother of Robert Mitchum. The biker who's gal was taken by Bigfoot is played by Christopher Mitchum, he's Robert Mitchum's son. Bing Crosby's son Lindsay plays one of the bikers and Doodles Weaver is a forest ranger.

None of them can do much with the dialog, the story or the budget. It's lacking in all respects. The director is lacking a Wikipedia page, his IMDb page lists two feature films and a documentary on John Wayne. I've seen Slatzer's 1968 film The Hellcats. It was a MST3K selection that I saw when it originally aired, I watched it more recently, 2015, when I worked my way through one of those 50 Movie Packs. I gave that The Hellcats a 2.

Bigfoot is about 50% better so I gave it a 3. Still poor. You can watch it at the link above, though why you would...

 

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.

Jonathan Ross' Myths And Legends Series 1

Jonathan Ross' Myths And Legends Series 1 Four episodes that aired March 13 to April 3 2023.

Johnathan travels across Britain to take a look at the men, women and beasts of myth and legend. In Episode 1 he's in Northern England, in Episode 2 he's in Wales, in Episode 3 he's in the Isle Of Skye and the Scottish Highlands, in the last Episode he's in South West England.

There's three or four places and things to see each episode, if one doesn't interest you, another might. He's got a few guests: Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Simon Entwistle, Michael Sheen, Neil Gaiman and Brian Froud. All in all it's generally entertaining, thought I doubt I'd need to see it again.

Konga TNT 2020

Konga TNT 2020 Story by Brett Kelly, screenplay by Trevor Payer, directed by Brett Kelly.

A Canadian production of the worst sort. It's been taking a shellacking from giant monster fans for a while, I'm not bucking the trend. It scores a 1.9 on the IMDb and 60% of it's scores are a 1. The most exciting thing about the movie is that poster, nothing like that happens in the movie. It's supposed to be a comedy but the jokes fall flat. I saw it for free on Amazon Prime and all I could think of is that Amazon doesn't have a variable speed video player. I wouldn't recommend it to much anyone. Plenty of better movies out there.

The Great Alligator 1979

The Great Alligator 1979 Story by George Eastman, screenplay by Casare Frugoni and Ernesto Gastaldi, directed by Sergio Martino. Original Italian title Il fiume del grande caimano. That translates to The Giant Alligator River and the movie appeared under that name in a few places, in the US it was The Great Alligator. In Canada it was The Big Alligator River, that title was also used on the US DVD box. West Germany has my favorite title Der Fluß der Mörderkrokodile.

There's about 25 mins of nothing much going on until the alligator starts attacking a new tourist resort in Africa. It's really Sri Lanka but I couldn't tell. Mel Ferrer is the resort owner and Barbara Bach is assistant. A photographer is visiting the area when the attacks begin. Many locals are slaughtered and the living local believe it's the tourists fault. There's some tribe and tourist friction.

It's a below average giant monster movie but not by too much. I got a few laughs out of it but that first long stretch before the critter shows  up is a hump. When it does show up it lacks greatness. You can see if you like the movie on YouTube in the link above.

Frankenstein 1973

Frankenstein 1973 A two part TV production that was based on the Mary Shelley novel, screenplay by Sam Hall and Dan Curtis, directed by Glenn Jordan. It was part of ABC's Wide World Of Mystery. Dan Curtis is the creator of Dark Shadows and Kolchak The Night Stalker with Darren McGavin. I've seen Kolchak a few times through and I saw a fair bit of Dark Shadows when it was on originally. I've got the box set of DS and hope to get through it someday.

Dan produced a good number of horror titles for TV over the years. I saw Frankenstein when it was first aired. I was well into being a genre movie fan back then. I just naturally gravitated to them. I hadn't seen this production since it was first aired.

Robert Foxworth is Victor Frankenstein, Susan Strasberg is Victor's wife and Bo Swenson is the monster. It's a fairly decent adaptation of the book as far as I can remember. It's been a while since I read it, mid to late 80s. No matter, the Wikipedia provides.

Victor is totally wrapped up in his man made man. His careless handling of the monster leads to much harm from the confused, spurned and poorly trained creature. A good reminder not to got down the resurrection road. Bo does a good job as the monster and most of the rest of the cast is adequate to good. It's shot on video and it looks rather flat and dark. 

I enjoyed watching it and was glad to have added the DVD to my stack. I'd watch it again someday.