PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Science Fiction Sunday 509

The Last Starship is a 2017 British SF film that's mostly all green screen shot. A lot of the sets are small claustrophobic spaces or something for the people to stand behind, then the backgrounds are added later. It's the future, privileged people live in the last remaining city, less fortunate live in the wastelands that surround it, some others man a giant battle tank. There's mutant monsters out there in the wastelands. There's some sort of robot fighting machines that are attacking the tank. It goes on for nearly two hours before the end of the movie. It's mostly yakkin' with a little bit of action. Most of the CGI is fair but not spectacular. It's all grey,  dark and dreary, which makes it monotonous for me. I wouldn't need to see it again, I wouldn't need to pick up a copy.

Max Steel is a 2016 film that's based on the action figure Max Steel. The Wikipedia tells me the figures started in 1999. I would have guessed earlier. I hadn't thought about the toys since they were first out and I didn't think much of them then. I didn't even know they had generated several series of toys and number of TV programs and DTV movies. It's an origin story, a young guy called Max and an alien suit called Steel combine to form a superhero called Max Steel. They wind up fighting some baddies. The effects are better than the usual competent  stuff I normally see on SFS. The budget on this is guesstimated at $5-10 mil and most of the stuff I watch hardly ever gets near a million smackaroonies. It keep me interested to the end but I did speed it up for the later fights. I wouldn't need to buy it, I wouldn't bother watching again.

Science Fiction Sunday 508

Hard To Be A God is a 2015 Russian film directed by Aleksei German, he co-wrote the script with Svetlana Karmalita. It's adapted from a novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The movie was filmed over about 6 years starting back in 2000. The story in the movie is about some Earth scientists who have traveled to a planet with human like aliens who are in a society that's the same as our middle ages. The scientists are there to advance the society. One of the scientists goes undercover, though he's forbidden from acting in local politics or introducing new technology directly into the society. It's a backward violent society where knowing how to read will get you killed. It's all grubby, often the locals are covered in shit. A good reminder that the middle ages really were the place to be from. It's not my cup of tea but some might like it more than me.

Armstrong is a 2017 movie that all takes place in a few hours in the middle of the night. A couple of EMT people run into a wounded soldier with some sort of augmented weapon system. A group of people are after him and there's plenty of running and energy blasts. The CGI effects were fairly descent. I liked the lady that played one of the EMT people, Vicky Jeudy, some might have seen her in Orange Is The New Black. I haven't seen that show, it doesn't have much appeal to me, but I understand it's pretty good. I thought Armstrong was OK but it wasn't much more than a 5. I gave it a 5, it has too many unanswered questions and there's a big opening to a sequel. It feels like the pilot for a series. I wouldn't bother adding it to my collection but I'd check out the sequel if Vicky's kicking ass in it.

Science Fiction Sunday 507

Future World: City Of Mass Destruction is another post apocalyptic movie. It came out in 2010. There's only one city left and it's populated with the usual assortment of odd ball characters and mutants. It's a green screen movie with CGI sets of the lowest level. There's nothing much to recommend about the story or the acting and that sort of thing. It gets an astounding 4.2 on the IMDb where the votes for 10 (16 of 92) and 1 (42 of 92) are fighting for a real average. I gave it a 1, what with it being so poor and all.

Antihuman is a 2017 movie about a dying woman, she returns to the abandoned psychological research center where her mother had been an inmate. When they get there, the place releases some ghosts and people die. It's barely SF and there's not much horror. It's way below average and I got bored pretty quickly.

Science Fiction Sunday 506

Battle For The Last Planet is a 1986 Brett Piper film that is known as Galaxy on the IMDb and Galaxy Destroyer overseas. I have seen several of Brett's low-budget horror and SF films in the past but lost track of him. He's still making films, I'm just not seeing them. BFTLP is Brett's second film, right after Mysterious Planet and a couple before A Nymphoid Barbarian In Dinosaur Hell.

A guy steals a spaceship, gets shot at and hit, he's trapped in space until he can repair his ship. When he finally returns to Earth it's 5 years later and he finds that Aliens have taken over. Only about 20% of the humans are still alive and they have a bit of a resistance group going. Turns out that our guy has a tape that will turns things around.

It's not a great movie, really about deserving of it's 4.1 score on the IMDb, but it's watchable and there are some fun moments. The acting is mixed, some poor, and some less so, the effects are cheap and the warehouse's dingy. I wouldn't bother buying a copy, unless it turns up on one of those 50 Movie Movie Packs. That would be cheap enough.

Phobe: The Xenophobic Experiments is a 1995 SF film that I got from Netflix. It's written and directed by Canadian director Erica Benedikty. It's her second movie, she directed a third film the same year and only a couple of shorts more recently. It's no wonder, the movie is pretty poor. Some have tried to jack the score at the IMDb, 11 people gave the movie a 10, and the average is up at 6.1 which sure is off. I gave it a 2.

Erica fills us in on her film making experience here. She spent $250 to make her film, everything else was donated. The movie played on the local cable TV channel and got a bit of a following. It finally made it to DVD in 2015. It's got a bit of a cult following but I couldn't see watching it again.

Science Fiction Sunday 505

Cartel 2045 is a 2017 movie that's also out under the title Juarez 2045. The movie is set in the area around Juarez but it was filmed a good way from Mexico, with Salt Lake City filling in. It might come as no surprise to find the movie is set in 2045. The drug war between Mexico and the US gets ramped up a notch when Danny Trejo's drug cartel acquires fighting robot tech. The robots have been outlawed but he's got some and in typical cartel style they've been blinged out with gold panels. 

Danny's a cruel and vicious sort of man, he kills people around him all the time, enemies and his workers alike. With his new killbots he's top rabid dog. Instead of hunting down the robots and blowing them up with heavy artillery, the military sends in one fucked up Marine with a chip in his head and a few guys who are there to get blasted by the robots. Pretty much everyone dies by the end of the movie. They're all pretty useless in the future, those humans, and the movie isn't much better. The bots are about average TV CGI. The script is filled with poor dialog and the acting average or below. I'd give it a miss, though you might enjoy Danny boppin' around killing people and snarling.

I quite liked Ready Player One. It's based on a novel by Ernest Cline which I haven't read. Ernest wrote the screenplay with Zak Penn. Zak wrote the story to Last Action Hero, that was his first movie, and since he's worked on a lot of the Marvel Superhero movies. I enjoyed LAH a lot when it came out and it still delivers an entertaining story on repeat viewings. Ready Player One is directed by Steven Spielberg. It's a 2018 movie that's also set in 2045. Different world view, people spend a lot of their time jacked into a VR game called The Oasis. It kind of sucks in the real world, at least for anyone not at the top of the food chain.

It cost $175 mil and there's a lot of detail up on the screen. Gamers would shit to have that sort of game. In the game or in the real world, it's all covered with layers ofl CGI, all the time. Most of it's really good, you can see where a lot of the money went. It's pretty long, 140 minutes, but it moves along at lightning speed. There are so many references to film, TV, books and music, you can see a small percentage in the poster. If I looked, I bet I would find that someone has started a list. i enjoyed it enough to put it on my mental Wish List. Someday it'll get cheap enough for me and I'll see it again.

Science Fiction Sunday 504

2047 Virtual Revolution is a 2016 SF film by first time director Guy-Roger Duvert. He wrote the indy film and shot it in France. It looks pretty good for a $3.2 mil picture. They made nice sets and props and costumes and had some money left for a good bit of average to better than average CGI.

In this future world most people are connected to virtual reality. The government and the corporations that really control things like this set up. Not much trouble from the locals and they don't live that long, only about 40 years. There's a resistance force that wants to pull the plug on the plugged in, at one time. That seems like a bad idea and one of the corporations hires Nash to investigate.

Nash spends some good amount of his own time plugged in to a fantasy world with swords, elves and dragons flying around. His investigation takes place in the RW with some bits in the VR. The real world is all Blade Runnery as is much of the movie. The script is his weakest element, it's kind of like so much of what came before. Guy-Roger's direction is pretty good.

The Man From Earth: Holocene is the 2017 sequel to 2007 The Man From Earth. Our 14,000 year old man is teaching in a town when some awful students kidnap him and fuck up his life. This one's even more worse than the first one. That religious guy is a truly horrible person. Then again most of the people in the movie are pretty awful. Selfish, self centered, willing to commit murder, and cover it up, to get what they want. Sadly, they don't seem to get punished. There's not much of an ending. It's more like a big garage door open for the sequel to drive through. If director Richard Shenkman takes as long to get to a sequel as he did with this sequel I might be dead by then and will have to miss it. One can only hope.

Science Fiction Sunday 503

First up is Future World, it's a 2018 post apocalypse film, and sadly it's all pretty below average. James Franco plays the deadly baddie who finds a robot gal, played by Suki Waterhouse, whom some might have seen in The Bad Bunch. James directs, with Bruce Thierry Cheung, and those two co-wrote the screenplay with Jay Davis. Numbers don't mean much but you'd think three people would have a better chance at having a good script than one but it's often a too many cooks problem. Who knows what the problem here was but the result isn't getting many fans over at the IMDb where the movie scores a 3.1 after 2342 votes. I gave it a 3 because it's all so much the same as it's predecessors.

The movie is populated with the usual desert oddballs and creeps that you've been seeing for ages. This movie have that robot gal so that's something you don't see as often. Mind you, I'd seen a movie with a robot gal just a few weeks ago. There's lots of riding around in the desert on motorcycles and scumbags killing anyone who gets in their way. There's an added story element with Lucy Liu as the deadly sick leader of a group of survivors in a nice oasis, her son goes into the wasteland looking for a cure. The robot gal helps him out. After a while I started fast forwarding to get to the end quicker. I wouldn't need to see it again.

I wouldn't need to re-watch Return To The Lost World again either. It's a 1992 sequel to the 1992 film The Lost World. Harry Alan Towers has a hand in both films, they were filmed back to back and released the same year. The Lost World was a slightly better film, it scores a 5.3 on the IMDb, and RTTLW is a 5. It's pretty much a family film and there isn't much violence. The dinosaurs are like something from that Dinosaurs TV show. They do film in Zimbabwe and that's kind of nice to see. Not a place I would ever travel too, but I like seeing it on TV. Nothing much more than light entertainment, the most fun thing about the film is seeing John Rhys-Davies and David Warner.

Pacific Rim Uprising is the 2018 sequel to the 2013 Pacific Rim directed by Guillermo del Toro. Like the first it's loud. It's the directorial debut by Steven DeKnight who had mostly been a writer and producer. He worked on Buffy, Angel and Dollhouse. He also created Spartacus for Starz. I didn't care much for that series after I saw the first season. I didn't ever go back. It's like the HBO series Rome, one depressing thing after another. Who wants to see that? Not this guy.

Mostly Pacific Rim Uprising is OK, though it takes while to get to the robot on monster action. There's plenty of robot on robot action as mysterious robots attack the good robots. It isn't until the last third of the movie that the big critters start to appear. It's been ten years after the big attack in the first movie, people have been stealing robot tech to make their own robots. The pilot of one of those illegal bots is a young woman, Cailee Spaeny in her second movie, who steals robot tech to fund her own project. John Boyega, some might remember him as Moses in Attack The Block, or that guy in those Star Wars films, plays the son of Idris Elba in Pacific Rim. He was a robot pilot but left the program, now he steal robot tech. The two of them get caught with an illegal robot and join up or go to jail. Then there's plenty of action and more noise. I'll probably pick up the Blu-ray of this, I found the first one on Blu-ray for under 3 bucks at HPB and I bet this will turn up like that if I wait a while.

Science Fiction Sunday 502

I had some tedious fare to start the day. Raptor Island is about what you'd expect to find on the SciFi channel back in 2004. It's a made for TV movie so don't expect much by way of good CGI. Some Navy Seals are on a mission, the baddies gets away in a boat, the seals chase him to a tiny island with it's own smokin' volcano. From the title you can probably guess that this is where those raptors are and you'd be right. They're a low res menace that can stand up to the soldiers without much trouble. The humans find a Chinese plane, stuffed with broken caskets of radioactive material, that had crashed some time in the past. The Seals speculate that the radioactive material had seeped into the ground and made the raptors come alive somehow. Glad that sort of shit doesn't really happen. Now the critters are  chomping the humans. There's some gabbin' as the film makers try to shoe horn in some character development but the movie is mostly running through forests, climbing rocks and spelunking caves. There's a lot of gun fire but neither the baddies or the Seals can seem to hit much of anything. Most everyone gets picked off before the rescue helicopter gets there. Of course, it arrives just as the volcano starts blasting. Luckily, some of the raptors swim off into the sunset. Not so good, as you can imagine, and one I won't bother watching again.

The 9th Life Of Louis Drax is a 2016 thriller that's only SF element is the doctor and the boy's mental connection. And I'm stretching it. Louis is a kid who's supposed to be accident prone. His latest accident has put him in the hospital in a coma. His mental connection to the doctor, achieved through the EKG machine and the doctor's meditation, brings to light the real reason that Louis had a fall off a cliff. Once you get past that silly story element the rest of the story is just ferreting out an awful person. It's all rather dire, I didn't care much for it at all.

I did like War For The Planet Of The Apes. It was certainly more entertaining than today's first two choices. It came out in 2017 and it's pretty much one big battle. Caesar vs Woody Harrelson. The CGI apes and such have improved over the previous films and I liked them. In fact I'm rooting for the apes. I also like Steve Zahn as Bad Ape. I bought the Blu-rays of the original 5 films and plan to watch those at some point. I just haven't gotten to them yet. I enjoyed them when I saw them in the theater when they came out. I haven't seen them since the days of VHS.

Science Fiction Sunday 501

I'm such a sucker for those multi movie packs. Here's one from MGM's Midnight Movies line. This one collects Morons From Outer Space, Alien From LA, The Man From Planet X and The Angry Red Planet. All these movies came out in single DVDs, then they were packed in pairs, then MGM doubled up and packed four to a set. This set was produced in 2011, inside are a couple of double sided DVDs with a movie on each side. I've seen all these movies, a couple only once, the other two a couple more times, but didn't have 'em. I'm stock piling DVDs for the future. I'm betting, based on what I've seen so far, that many of these movies won't always be available on streaming. Currently stuff disappears off of Amazon Prime pretty regularly and abruptly. I see reports on Facebook about content on Netflix streaming, Hulu and the like, and it seems to be the same story. I've read people's blogs where they complain about not being able to go buy a movie that they like, it's OOP and pricey. Yeah, boo hoo. So, I'm picking up stuff that I might want to watch down the road. I'm partial to a clearance but new is preferred. The set was about 8 bucks, not a bad price for 4 movies. They're a mixed bag of SF films covering different sub-genres and the first and last were released 37 years apart. It's an odd selection, you'd think they just randomly drew them out of a bucket of SF titles. On the whole I like the MGM Midnight Movies series and have several DVDs in the line.

Morons From Outer Space is about 4 dumb aliens who wind up on Earth. It's directed by Mike Hodges, who had directed Get Carter, Flash Gordon and The Terminal Man. It's written by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones who were on the British TV show Not The Nine O'Clock News with Rowan Atkinson and Pamela Stephenson. Mel plays one of the aliens and Griff has a part in the movie too. Three of the aliens are turned into celebrities but poor Mel gets left out. It's a fair movie but not a great movie. I wish there were better jokes.

Alien From LA was a selection on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It's was kind of perfect for the guys to chatter through. It's not that great, one of the reasons I hadn't ever picked up a copy. I didn't buy the set for this movie, I wanted the couple below.

The Man From Planet X a 1951 low-budget science fiction film by Edgar G. Ulmer. Made in 6 days for under $60,000 it was shot on some of the sets of Joan of Arc. They use lots of smoke for fog and it's hard to see them. It set in Scotland, on an island. A spaceship lands there and the man from Planet X is a weird looking guy. That's him in a bubble on the cover. He can't communicate with the earth people but he has a hypnoray to put them under his control. He's found by a science guy's beautiful daughter, who is played by Margaret Field, Sally Field's mother. The science guy brings the alien into his house so they can communicate with him. There's a reporter, played by Robert Clarke. William Schallert plays the assistant who wants to use the alien for his own dreams of glory and power. It doesn't go to well for him or the man from Planet X, especially after the authorities show up. The man from Planet X shows his true colors and they learn he's the first of an invasion force. He's got to call home at midnight to start the invasion. Will they blow him up in time? Sure. It's the 1950's and no alien isn't gonna take over our planet Earth. It's pretty entertaining to me and certainly better than the previous movie.

The Angry Red Planet is a 1960 film about some astronauts that land on Mars. Sid Pink wrote the story and co-wrote the screenplay with director Ib Melchior. The astronauts find the place pretty deadly and they have to fight off monsters. A couple of them die but they do manage to get the ship back to Earth where we learn what happened. Ib's not the greatest film maker but he delivers a solid average picture that got enough of a sense of humor that I like it. I'd only seen it once before but I might get around to watching it again someday. Just a matter of time.

Science Fiction Sunday 500

Infinity Chamber 2016 Travis Milloy wrote and directed this film about a guy in an underground prison. The authorities are looking for a key, that guy in the poster hid it, and they mess with his head to get him to reveal it's location. Much of the movie is spent in his head, in simulations created by the authorities. Sometimes it was hard to keep track of what was going on and the end is rather ambiguous. Didn't click with me, wouldn't need to see it again.

Spaceship 2016 Alex Taylor wrote and directed this film that doesn't have a spaceship in it. A goth teen decides to fake being abducted by aliens and boring stuff happens. Another I was glad not to have purchased sight unseen. I often take a chance on a bargain DVD, many times I've been burned, yet I still plunge headfirst into the fire. Oh, well, at least I have some variety.

Orion 2015 I put this on my Netflix queue because it has David Arquette, I really enjoyed him in Road Racers and I keep an eye out for his films. It's a movie set in the future, after society has collapsed, there aren't many people left. David has to rescue Lily Cole from the baddie. It's rather artsy fartsy with title cards for each scene. It's shot so dark, it's hard to see what's going on. I didn't care for the script, often scenes didn't make any sense, dialog made me shake my head. I didn't find it very interesting and wouldn't need to see it again. Not doing so good this week.

Star Leaf 2015 An ex-Marine and his girlfriend are on the road with another of his Marine buddies. The meet up with a biker who will lead them to some alien weed growing in the Olympic Mountains. They can't do anything but smoke it. No taking pictures, no taking cuttings, no taking seeds. Of course they break the rules and the aliens come along to sort them out. They get some help from a couple of locals. I mostly enjoyed it, it's sort of goofy and doesn't take itself too seriously. I doubt I need to see it again but it was silly way to pass the time.