PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Science Fiction Sunday 471

Two SF movies from Amazon Prime today. The Last Scout is a 2017 movie about a small spaceship that's been sent on a mission to other planets to find one that compatible to human life. They've been at it for 7 years and things aren't too good on the ship. Mostly the people are getting along but the ship is falling apart. They encounter another human ship near their destination and the killing starts. Trouble is it takes an hour to get to the action, I had kind of lost interest by then. Simon Phillips is the director and Paul Tanter is the writer. I thought Simon did a better job putting the script on the screen but the screenplay wasn't something I was enjoying that much. I can say the same thing about the other film I watched this morning. Ares 11 is a 2016 SF movie about some people stuck on a damaged ship. Not enough oxygen for all four of them to get back safely but enough for two. Things go bad after they find that out. The person telling them that they haven't got enough oxygen tells them to kill themselves in a clumsily written scene. Even at their best I sure didn't want to spend any time with these people. Then the ending left me hanging. Robert Goodrich is the writer director. It's his first film, maybe he'll do better in the future.

Science Fiction Sunday 470

I got the 2011 film New World Order from the library. They didn't describe it when it was first listed and I ordered it thinking it was an SF movie. Hardly, though it is set in the future a bit. If only I had read up on it and passed it by. It's a post rapture movie about a totalitarian anti-Christian take over of the US. It's a join or be slaughtered situation. There's not much going on on screen, at times it just pokes along, and the actors are average to poor. It's a pretty clumsy script and I found it rather heavy handed and uninteresting. I have a tendency to think that if the rapture happened I'd enjoy living here a lot more. I gave it a 1 on the IMDb and I wasn't alone, in fact we were the majority. Give this a pass.

Chosen Survivors is a 1974 surviving the apocalypse movie. At the start of the movie, soldiers to gather people from there homes and take them to a specially built bomb shelter 2000 foot under the ground in the New Mexico desert. In some poorly done effects over a crappy monitor in the bunker we see the end of the USA. The people were selected by computer and are totally surprised to be there. Mostly they seem to get along, at least, until the killing starts. It's only some little mice and they find the culprit right away. It's vampire bats, sneaky and hungry vampire bats, looking for the last of the blood. Now things get a bit more exciting, as the group has to figure out how to fight back. They are some nasty bats. Even with that it's barely average script makes this movie uninteresting, even after the surprise two thirds of the way through. Actually the surprise makes a joke of the whole  hungry hungry bats plot point. Not going to be a movie I would want to watch again, that's for sure. When I first read the blurb for the movie on Netflix I thought it said that there were vampires attacking. Then I read it again and it said bats, ha ha, happens once in a while. Now that I've seen the movie I think it would have been a better movie if post holocaust vampires had been attacking the bunker. That would be a more fun movie for me.

Science Fiction Sunday 469

I had picked up the Aliens Vs Humans three pack of Full Moon movies for 3 bucks. Each movie has it's own disc. I had already watched Seed People a couple of months ago, I had seen a copy on YouTube, and didn't really need it, but now I have it. It's not a good movie, barely average. I was really more interested in the copies of Oblivion and Oblivion 2: Backlash. I was sure I had seen Oblivion but Watched Movie List says no. Well, I might have seen it and forgot, or not seen it, and the memory is going. No matter, they both are on the list now.

Oblivion came out in 1994 and it's based on an original story by Charles Band. Three other guys wrote the story again and Peter David wrote the screenplay. Yes, the same Peter David who would go onto write a couple of episodes of Babylon 5 and an episode of Crusade. Most of his other work seems to be tied into Marvel TV programs which I haven't watched. Sam Irwin is the director. I haven't seen much of his work, besides the two Oblivion movies, but I did see Elvira's Haunted Hills. Oblivion 2: Backlash had the same people work on that film, the movies were shot back to back in Romania, and it came out in 1996. It explains how the town looked exactly the same in the sequel.

The story is set in a Western style town on a distant planet. It's like some crazy aliens copied the wild west but didn't quite get it right. Humans and aliens populate the place. In typical Western fashion, a baddie comes to town and tries to take it over. The sheriff is killed and his coward son comes back to town with a philosophical Indian in tow. Andrew Divoff plays Red Eye, the eye patched alien on the poster. He killed the Sheriff and it's only fair that monster scorpions eat him as punishment.

That's them ripping his torso in two before they stuff the bloody bits into their giant maws. I did like the giant scorpions stop motion animated by David Allen Productions' Joel Fletcher. The movie needed more giant monsters. Luckily there's another in the sequel.

Since it follows the Western kind of plot, the baddies will get what's coming too them, except for the lady on the left. That's Lash, she features in the sequel.

The jokes are kind of weak but so is the script. The location and sets are fairly descent, you can get a lot for your US dollar in Romania. The actors are mostly OK but I suspect they aren't given much rehearsal time or second takes. George Takei plays the drunken town doctor, Julie Newmar plays Miss Kitty, the saloon owner, Carel Struycken plays the undertaker, Meg Foster plays the cyborg deputy - called Stell Barr, Musetta Vander plays Lash, and Isaac Hayes plays the bartender. Some of them could have used more direction, or something, I'm not sure what. It's pretty much the same for the sequel.

I got a few laughs and in general was happy to have the movies. I doubt I'll get around to them again too soon but at less than a buck each, who cares.

Science Fiction Sunday 468

Independence Day: Resurgence came out last year, twenty years after the first movie, and I don't remember hearing about it. Mind you I miss a lot of that sort of thing by not keeping up with the new releases as well as I could. It's directed by Roland Emmerich and written by him and a gang of others. Many of the cast members return to fight the returning aliens. This time they have a bit of a hand from a second alien, the last of her kind, who brings knowledge and a hope for the second sequel. The movie didn't make any money so I doubt that will happen. It's an OK movie with lots of action and things blowing up but it doesn't have as much going for it as the first movie.

The Divide is a 2011 movie about a group of people who get trapped in the cellar after some bombs destroy New York. It gets all Lord Of The Flies down there as they all turn on each other. Soon they get radiation sickness and their hair falls out. It gets more and more unpleasant until the utterly hopeless ending. I started to get tired of it half way through the 122 minute running time. Even at 1.5 speed it seems to crawl along. Glad I borrowed it from Netflix. I won't need to see it again.

Science Fiction Sunday 467

Independents' Day is a 2016 SF film from The Asylum and it scores a stunning 1.9 on the IMDb. Sixty-five percent of the votes were a one. I gave it a 1 too.  I should have given them a one two punch but who's got the time to run out to LA for some old fashion vengeance. I'D is running on Amazon Prime and I thought I'd watch it to use some of my memberships perks. It was made and marketed to cash in on the release of Independence Day: Resurgence. For some reason I haven't seen that yet. I just put it on my Netflix queue, we'll see what it's like in a few days.

The alien invasion in I'D has the rather poorly rendered CGI aliens arrive and tell the Human's that they're going to be moved off the Earth because they're violent thugs. Any human's that don't make it onto the transport ships by a certain date will be exterminated. The aliens will then terraform the planet for themselves. Supposedly the human's will have a new start on a new planet. The aliens load the human's on their transport, suck the blood out of them and then toss the lifeless bodies into space. Some human's fight back and as you might suspect they beat the aliens. 

The production is the typical low budget stuff with lots of scenes shot on green screen. The 500K budget seems larger than a lot of their budgets. The script is weak and the actors fair to poor. It's often from these low budget films that actors get their first credits. That might be the best thing about the movie, what I was seeing on the screen made me bored. Not something to recommend to anyone, the only thing I got out of it was another name on my Watched Movie List.

It's the same for my second feature from Amazon Prime. Moontrap Target Earth scores higher on the IMDb, a 2.4, than the previous movie but I thought it was a worse movie, at least story wise. It has about half the votes and 45% of those were 1s. It's does have a nice robot but most of the CGI is pretty piss poor. The story is about finding an artifact that might turn out to be valuable. A young couple, both scientists, go to work for a mysterious guy called Richard. He's got a henchwoman kills people. After he's done with the couple Richard sends henchwoman to  murder them. The annoying girlfriend survives and seeks vengeance. She fails. Richard is ready to kill her but it turns out she has some mysterious connection to the artifact. After visiting the artifact it activates and she winds up on the moon in a dissatisfying ending. The script is weak, and rather amateurish. The red robot on the moon is fairly descent but it loses some marks for it's lack of movement, especially after the lack luster battle with the blue robot on the moon. Another movie that isn't worthy to be part of my collection.

Science Fiction Sunday 466

First up today was Beacon Point a 2016 science fiction camping movie, with aliens. It's directed by Eric Blue who co-wrote the script with Traci Carroll. A convicted murderer takes 5 people into the woods on a 10 day hike. The murder would have been fired but he got into a fight with his boss and accidentally killed him. He takes the hikers anyway. Ones a young woman who wants to dump her father's ashes at a certain spot, two are brothers who are trying to reconnect, and the last guy is a well off, and well fed, computer guy who's wife just ran off with the Yoga teacher.

They all hike and yak for ages, then a bit of weird stuff happens, then more hiking and yakking. The older brothers gets sick, he dies, then the computer guy gets his head bashed in. The guide rips his own eyes out and the younger brother disappears into the bush. Eventually there's just the young woman left and she dumps off the ashes. She finds a mystery and the movie ends without me ever learning what the hell was happening. The guide partially explains it, but that lack of an ending is just the kind of bullshit I don't care about. Big spaceship on the poster, not in the movie. Another dick move. It's below average for me and the voters at the IMDb have given it a 4.3. There is some nice scenery but it's not enough to elevate my score of 4, and I think I was kind of generous.

Alien Implant is a 2017 movie about a woman getting her own back against the aliens that abducted her. In a cabin, in a remote forest, she connects to a satellite and sends a signal into space. Soon after an alien shows up and she shoots it. She reflects on alien killing in a voice over of her writing in her diary. That all took 23 minutes, then the movie drags on for another 50 minutes. Daniel Falicki is the director and he wrote the script with Warren Croyle. Warren is mostly a producer of documentaries on UFOs and aliens. He's produced 269 of them since 1990 and he's still going. Daniel has directed some features and some UFO documentaries but I've not seen any of them. I probably won't go looking for them after seeing AI. I liked the concept but not the execution so much. It's kind of dull and pokey moving. After the visiting alien Blues Brother arrived it went into snooze overdrive and I had to fight to stay awake. Top that off with a piss poor ending and I wouldn't recommend it.

Science Fiction Sunday 465

Humanity's End starts with nearly 7 minutes of backstory narrative, the movie is only 79 minutes long. It's one of those nearly all CGI movies with nothing much by way of physical sets. It's also painted a drab grey-bluish-green. I've come to dislike that sort of effect and it sure helps bring the movie's score down for me. Choices are often punished. It's a 2008 movie about some of the last human's in the galaxy. Clones have developed into super-clones and those dicks are killing off the humans. Human's that develop tougher, stronger clones deserve to die off. Did they learn nothing from Blade Runner. Where's that kill switch? The story is familiar, a bit of this and a bit of that from other movies you've seen. The characters are all dull and uninteresting, especially the noisy spaceship captain. I was glad to have seen it on Amazon Prime, wasting a Netflix DVD selection would have been sad.

The Day Of The Animals is a 1977 movie about some people walking in the woods. They get helicoptered up the mountain and now they are slowly going back to the bottom. Mostly they're city folk. Christopher George, Leslie Neilsen, Lynda Day George, Richard Jaeckel, Michael Ansara, Ruth Roman and Paul Mantee are the names in the cast that were familiar to me.

As the group goes along they start to notice things aren't normal with the local critters. They soon get attacked by animals that they learn have been driven crazy by the decrease in the ozone level. The critters have gotten really aggressive and organized. Rats, snakes, wolves, a grizzly, eagles and vultures all feed on the flesh of the human. We must taste good, they keep coming back for a nibble. The whole depleted ozone turns Leslie into a murdering rapist, luckily that grizzly comes along with a big bear hug to put a stop to Leslie's nonsense.

I hadn't seen this movie since I had first seen it in 1999. I didn't make a comment on My Watched Movie List back then and I didn't remember anything from that viewing. Now I would say it's OK but not much above average. It's a 5.5 on the IMDb and that's about where it should be. There's a fair bit of action but there are long slogs of bickering and walking in the woods. Animals walking, humans walking, it doesn't matter, we shouldn't need to see all the path to get where we're going. I don't think I would need to see this again. Not having it on DVD means one less thing to store and probably never use. I have enough of that sort of shit.

Science Fiction Sunday 464

I watched a whole pile of stuff today, virtually that is, Amazon Prime streamed everything. First up was the 1995 SF comedy Out There, with Billy Campbell and Wendy Schaal. He's a photographer for a local paper with Bobcat Goldthwait for a boss, she's a veterinarian who's seeking her missing father. Imagine her surprise when some pictures of Daddy show up in the National Moon. Billy found an old Brownie camera at a garage sale and after developing the film he discovered aliens kidnapping a couple of hunters. He tries to interest the government but they don't believe it's real. The editor of the National Moon tricks Billy into selling him the pictures. Those pictures bring Wendy and Billy together, they embark on a mission to find out what happened in the past. Along the way they meet Rod Steiger, Jill St John, Paul Dooley, Julie Brown, Billy Bob Thornton, Carel Strucken, PJ Soles, David Rasche, Bill Cobbs, Tom Kenny, June Lockhart, Cindy Morgan and Abraham Benrubi. Keep an eye out for director Sam Irvin, Jennifer Connelly, Tino Insana and Robert Picardo in uncredited cameos.

It's an active film, plenty of running about and weird things happening. Billy and Wendy hunt for clues to what happened to her father, one of the hunters in the photos, and they find an alien conspiracy that's been infiltrating the human population. It's got a descent script by Thomas Strelich and Alison Nigh. I didn't recognize the writers, so I looked them up on the IMDb, it's the only production that they wrote. Too bad. Sam Irvin has directed 2 other films I've seen, Elvira's Haunted Hills and Oblivion. Both of those are over 15 years ago, I've not seen any of his more recent work. He does an OK job here on the directing, nothing fancy, good solid, slightly above average work. I saw it back in 2001 and said it was OK to fair, that's still about what I think. I gave it a 6, mostly for the fun cast, but it's not a 7. There doesn't seem to be a DVD but I bet there's a bootleg.

Star Raiders: The Adventures Of Saber Raine is a 2017 SF adventure story with Casper Van Dien and Cynthia Rothrock. It's written and directed by Mark Steven Grove. Mark should have had some help with the story and the dialog. Casper is an ex-military space guy who winds up helping some aliens get their prince and princess back. They have been kidnapped by an evil warlord type. The sister joins up with the evil guy and the brother joins up with Casper and Co to fight the baddie. Plenty of wandering around in the desert, and then a forest, before attacking the CGI castle. There's nothing special about the movie, I didn't feel I needed to watch it once I was done.

Oasis was the pilot for a British SF TV series that was based on a book by Michel Faber called The Book Of Strange New Things. I've not read it. The story was adapted by Matt Charman and directed by Kevin Macdonald. It's about a priest that goes to a planet to teach Christianity to some aliens that live there. In the TV pilot they only get the priest to the planet where, briefly at the end of the episode, he meets up with the aliens. It was developed by Amazon Video and aired March 2017. There doesn't seem to be anymore so far. It was OK, kind of interesting, and it might have turned into something. Maybe someday we'll know.

Nobility is another TV show about the crew of a spaceship. It was written and directed by E J De la Pena. The only people in the cast that I knew of were Doug Jones, Christopher Judge and Walter Koenig. The episodes are just under 17 minutes long and Amazon only has 3 of them to view. It's proud to have made the shows for $100,000 and it shows they spent all the money on the cast salaries. The show looks like something fan made. Not an uninteresting story idea but nothing too special. Mysterious aliens seems to be the big thing going on. The cliff hanger on the third episode was kind of annoying. Probably not worth bothering with, if it comes back on. Pretty forgettable.

Not a great day for SF so far. One good enough movie and three things that are going to be forgotten about if my brain has anything to say about it.

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.

 

 

Science Fiction Sunday 462

First up, Another World, from Amazon Prime. It's a 2014 film by some guys I hadn't ever heard of before. In the movie a couple of guys are surviving the virus infected zombie horde future, they meet up with a couple of gals while running about shooting zombies. They all travel together until a couple of them die. It's below average script doesn't help the barely average production values. The acting is average but the actors don't have anything much interesting to say. There's plenty of CGI gun shooting, often at nothing visible, the horde just off screen. All in all I was rather bored with the whole thing. I used the fast forward button a good bit during the shootouts. The movie gets a 5.7 on the IMDb in what must be one of the worst gaming of the system I've seen so far. Of the 6103 votes, 48.2% are a 10, that's 2942 votes for a movie that, based on my sheer boredom with the story, I wouldn't give more than a 3. How do they get that many votes, do they buy them, plea on their website?

Starforce is the second film I watched on Amazon Prime today. It's a 2000 film that's also been played with on the IMDb. It gets a 6.1 with 201 votes, 94 of them are a 10. The plot is actually the sort of thing that was popular in 50's and 60s SF novels, one guy is put into the position to uncover some devious plan by a top government group, then he saves the day by putting a stop to that, and he meets a pretty girl along the way. Sadly the script that went along with the plot isn't much good. The acting is all over the place and there's a lack of money for the CGI and production. They had a 1.25 million budget and it didn't get them too far. The CGI space ship stuff is embarrassing to watch. There's nothing new here. No real reason to watch it. So many better films to watch.

Back in January I had watched Flesh Eaters From Outer Space for SFS 424. It's a low budget film that I saw on YouTube. I mentioned not ever needing to buy the DVD at the time. I noticed that there was a sequel on the DVD and put it in my Netflix queue. It finally arrived the other day and I watched it today.

Invasion For Flesh And Blood is the sequel to Flesh Eaters From Outer Space and it came out in 1991. It's written and directed by Warren Disbrow. He's a guy from New Jersey who made commercials and Indy films. He made several horror films over the years. These two were released on a single DVD by Troma and there's a commentary for each film. I listened to both of them and they were interesting enough. Warren does what he does because he wants to make movies, some folks like the end result more than others, but we all know they aren't great films. I have to admit to turning up the speed on both of these films, and watching the commentaries at double speed. I can understand what he's saying perfectly fine. At times Warren's commentary was more interesting than the film. At least you get an idea on why a guy might make a film, even though he has no cash or anything. Unless you need to see all the horror films made, what a wacky idea, you don't need to see this. I didn't need to see it but I don't know any better.