PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Science Fiction Sunday 543

Six more episodes of Space Above And Beyond. The usual cliche driven shows didn't make me too excited. I'm hoping it will be done next week.

Science Fiction Sunday 542

Still banging away on Space: Above And Beyond. I watched four more episodes and they were about the same as the ones earlier in the only season. I would have watched more episodes but there was a LEGO meeting. I've only got 8 more to go, hopefully finish up next week. After that I'm not sure what to watch, maybe some films off of Amazon Prime. They keep piling up on my watch list but I hardly ever go look at AP. Which reminds me to try to get to the new season of The Tick.

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 489

Taking Earth is a 2017 movie with yet another alien invasion story. It's sure a popular theme. Seems you can't swing a womp rat without hitting another invading alien. It's a South African film, with a $250K budget, that was directed by Grant Humphreys, he wrote the screenplay with Michael Harrison and Grant Knight. The invading aliens aren't at all interested in Earth or the human race. They want one young man, he's been hiding on Earth for the last 7 years. Now the human race is going to get wiped out because of that young man. What dicks these aliens are! The young man does his best to help the humans from being exterminated and he succeeds. Yay! Still, not a very good movie, better than a college film production, but not too much. The actors are of mixed quality but pretty straight up white. I was surprised to only see one black guy in a fairly large role and one black lady in a smaller part. Odd for a movie made in and around Joburg. There's a lot of running about and talking. That's one of the plus double good things about your alien invasion movie, lots of outdoor shooting, often with no actors. Sadly, the nice outdoor scenes and such aren't shot that well, the images are rather dull and lackluster. Perhaps they only shot on overcast days. In the end it falls down, impaled by the script, and it can't get up. I wouldn't need to watch it again. As a positive I did like the robot guys and some of the space ships.

Rogue Warrior: Robot Fighter is another 2017 SF movie. Neil Johnson is the writer and director. It's the future and the humans are under attack from the AI's they built. It isn't very interesting. Yak, chase, shoot, repeat. Not much else going on. The movie scores a 5 and I gave it, what I thought was, a generous 3. The movie's user ratings are skewed with 47.3%, or 569 of the 1204 votes, a 10. It has 307 1s which I assume is people trying to correct the imbalance. If you take everything that's left, half the votes are a 2, a 3, or a 4. No wonder I hate people. They sure suck.

Primer is a 2004 time travel film by Shane Carruth. It's mostly a couple of guys talking and talking and talking and talking and talking. It makes 77 minutes seem like all of time. I was bored out of my mind.

Science Fiction Sunday 424

I'm back watching some of the SF films that I've been seeing on YouTube. First up Flesh Eaters From Outer Space. It's a 1989 alien invasion movie written and directed by Warren F Disbrow. It's the second of 7 movies he's written and directed since 1982. It's super low budget and filmed in Keyport New Jersey. It's put out by Troma and most of their movies are available for free on YouTube. I'm always interested in seeing these amateur pictures in the hope that I might find of of those little gems that occasionally turn up. Occasionally didn't happen today.

A spaceship is seen in Earth orbit. The monstrous alien comes to New Jersey and starts killing people. We follow some teens, a shuttle pilot, a psychic woman who sees the alien attacks, and a few other random victims as the alien chomps his way through their throats.

It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, why someone would give it a 10 on the IMDb I can imagine, but I can barely give it a 3. I would have given it a 2 but it has a fairly decent monster going for it. The guy making the monster failed and they had to start from scratch 2 weeks before they started shooting. Disbrow did most of the monster making too. Still, that monster isn't enough to make up for the rest of the movie. It was shot on Super VHS and dubbed to 3/4inch Umatic so it looks pretty soft and square. A minor quibble. The script is a mixed bag, some scenes are watchable and others make me cringe. Same with the photography and the amateur actors. I'm not one to watch this sort of movie to make fun of it, I can easily forgive low budget film making when there's an interesting story or it's fun to watch. This wasn't either. It's not something I'll need to watch again and I won't be getting the DVD. 

Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster is a 1965 alien invasion movie.It's the only film from director Robert Gaffney. He had a brief career and his one interesting credit is as uncredited director of photography for the Monument Valley scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Writer George Garrett only wrote a couple of other movies before he stopped.

Princess Marcuzan and her bat eared Martian henchmen have come to Earth to steal women to repopulate their species. That's her, played by Marilyn Hanold, in the middle. The guy on the left is her second in command Dr Nadir, played by Lou Cutell, and the other guy is Bruce Glover, father to Crispin.

The aliens kidnap women in bikinis and bring them back to the ship. The military work to put a stop to that. There's also a plot line with a android space pilot that the US has created. His space ship gets shot down by the aliens and he crashes in Puerto Rico. He's all screwed up after that and he starts to attack the citizens.

The pilot, nicknamed Frankenstein eventually fights the space monster that the Princess has brought along. It's all pretty goofy and it makes you think, "What were they thinking?" We'll probably never know, the writer and director are dead, life goes on. I've certainly seen worse, today even, and I'd only recommend either movie to those die hard fans who like a SF move of pretty much any kind.

Science Fiction Sunday 421

Back to scrounging movies off of YouTube today. Taking a break from Supermarionation before tackling the last puppet series. First up was Lost: Black Earth, a dull SF story about some people on a future earth taken over by aliens. It's a 2004 Australian movie, though barely 48 minute long, that spends most of it's time wandering about in the countryside. That might be nice but it's rather uninterestingly filmed and the people in the frame add an additional level of boredom that makes it less fun to watch. It scores a remarkable 4.5 on the IMDb, at least until you look at the mix of votes. It received ten votes each for 1 and a 10. That's 20 out of 68 votes for one or the other. Forty two of the votes fall in the 1-4 range so I think you know where the votes really should fall. No matter, just don't bother.

Next was Spaceflight IC 1, a 1965 British film about a spaceflight to another planet. The Earth has become crowded and they want to see if they can set up another place for humans. There are 4 couples, 4 kids and 4 more adults frozen for later use. After a year one of the women gets a fatal pancreatic infection and the Captain won't turn the ship back. When the Captain won't let her have another child she kills herself. Some of the crew rebel and lock the Captain up. One of the other men lets the Captain out. The rest of the crew can't believe it when the Captain plans to execute the Doctor who locked him up. The Captain orders the Doctor to unfreeze the Doctor in storage so he can be replaced when he's executed. Nice guy, that Captain, and I didn't mind much when the unfrozen Doctor killed him. He'd unthawed poorly and his brain was damaged. He died minutes after killing the Captain. The ship continues. The movie is over.

It's a Robert Lippert film, one of the batch he did in the UK, and like many of his movies it's not quite good enough. It was filmed at Shepperton Studios. The script is by Harry Spalding, writing under the name Henry Cross, and it wasn't that great a script. The director was Bernard Knowles who had worked on a fair bit of TV after making about a dozen movies. He worked on the 1950s British Robin Hood series, Ivanhoe, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers. Most of those episodes are much more entertaining than this film. He's also the uncredited director of The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour.

Professor Julius Sumner Miller

Back a while back I found that YouTube had a big collection of the Canadian kid show The Hilarious House Of Frightenstein. That series had segments by Professor Julius Sumner Miller in which he demonstrated science in various forms. I'd seen the Professor on various other shows in the 1970s, like The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I enjoyed the science bits when I was a kid and still find some interesting.

Looking around on YouTube I found that the Professor has a channel of his own. He has short demos that are grouped by Electricity and Magnetism, Waves and Sound, Physics of Toys, Heat and Temperature, and Mechanics. The videos run about 15 minutes and they appeared on Australian TV.

Science Fiction Sunday 417

I spent some more time with Joe 90 today and didn't find the second disc much more entertaining than the first. Joe has 7 adventures this disc and he gets into some big scraps working for World Intelligence Network. They aren't the best employer that's for sure. The guy who's Joe's contact with WIN, a guy called Sam, is supposed to be a pal of Joe's dad but he's sure willing to lie and cheat to get Joe into some scraps. He sends Joe on vacation with the wrong imprint, a military weapons expert instead of a surf boarder's experience. Then he follows Joe and his dad to the vacation spot he recommended and gets Joe to go on the mission by screwing up their vacation. Why Joe or his dad would trust Sam after that I can't figure.

That's the office of Sam's boss, it looks like the corner of a crappily designed ballroom in a shitty hotel. What were the designers thinking. Hadn't they been in an office before.

Some of their other buildings look better on the outside. It doesn't help the stories much but at least I have something to look at. The new puppets were smaller, lighter and more humanly proportioned. The problem was that they were difficult for the puppeteers to handle and they don't move the characters around much. Often walking is from the waist up with the puppet looking like it was being moved on a dolly or something. Just adds to the disappointment. Only two more discs to go.

Science Fiction Sunday 415

Einstein's God Model is a 2016 movie about a guy who loses his fiance and tries to contact her with a magical device made by a dead scientist. He's all driven and unwilling to give up on his dead fiance. He connects up with a couple of guys who worked with the dead scientist and they have a lot of conversations on psychics and other dimensions. It's a well enough made movie but kind of slow moving. It's all sad and there's way too much yakkin' among all the characters. Speaking of talking I just don't buy into the talking to the dead so much. Not too interesting to me. I kind of started speeding up the movie to get to the end quicker. I'd give it a miss if I were me.

The Second Best Science Fiction Movie Ever Made isn't. It's not even in the top 1000 best SF movies ever made. It is a 2010 release that the IMDb says was made in 1996. It is about some astronauts that were kidnapped by aliens, taken to a planet where they had a great time but caused problems. None of the characters is very likeable so I had no one to root for. The aliens got tired of the astronauts fighting and have returned the astronauts to the Earth so they can fight it out. It lacks a good script, the scenes seem rather disjointed and unconnected to each other at times. It's kind of dull on top of that. I didn't really need to see it and I wouldn't recommend it.

Alien Strain is a 2014 film about an alien abduction. A couple is camping when the woman disappears. The man searches for her and a year later she returns. She's different and her body has open sores on it. The movie jumps around in time, the man is in a mental institution in some scenes and he tells the doctor most of the movie in flashback scenes. It wasn't clear for a while what was going on. It's the first film from writer director team Robert Benavides Jr and Andy Palmer. They've mostly been production people. With a bit more practice, and a better script, they might wind up with  better films in the future. They produced a decent looking film, mind you they had a $2,000,000 budget, but the story lets me down. I gave it a 4 on the IMDb for having an interesting concept.

Science Fiction Sunday 411

More episodes of Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons today. Disc two has 8 more episodes and here they are.

Seek And Destroy has the Mysterons take over three of the fighter planes that the Angels fly. They use the planes to attack the Angels but they fail in the end.

Spectrum Strikes Back has Spectrum leaders at a secret meeting location with the Earth President. They raise and lower a whole house to enter the underground shelter. It makes little sense to do that but there you go. The scientists from around the world have developed some new weapons for fighting the Mysterons. One is that Mysterons detector in the picture above. Looks like a car grill, huh. When they test it they detect a spy in their midst. He escapes with the key to the elevator. The house is descending on the Earth President and the others in the secret basement. They'll be crushed unless someone gets the key and stops the house descending. Who designs this stuff? When they showed the house descending the part of the house that stayed down below was replaced by an identical section that came out from the side. Wouldn't that automatically slide back when the house is descending? It just makes no sense when you stop to think about it. The house makes a stupid ticking time bomb. It's that poor writing that really bugs me about the show.

Avalanche takes us to the Frost Line, the Outer Space Defense System, which the Army runs. The Army guy is a big asshole who wants to attack Mars with missiles. He didn't listen to Colonel White when he called and now the General is in over his head. Spectrum helps out but everyone in the Red Deer base is dead. There's a lot of killing each episode. The Mysterons have to kill someone to take over their body. Will Captain Scarlett be able to stop them before they destroy Cariboo base? Nope, but they do save the next base in line.

Shadow Of Fear has Spectrum land a probe on Phobos to spy on the Mysterons. The aliens take over one of the scientists on the project right under the noses of Captain Scarlett and Captain Blue and that guy plants a bomb in the rotational gears of the antenna that picks up the signals from Mars. They build that antenna on a mountain and house the control center in a building down the mountainside, right under the very heavy exploding antenna. When the Antenna explodes it all falls on the control center, killing everyone inside. No one thought that through either. Oh, well.

The Heart Of New York has some criminals break into a Spectrum security vault. They don't find any money or treasure but they do learn from the documents they stole about the Mysterons. The crooks pretend to be Mysterons and break into a big bank. Captain Black shows up as they are robbing and locks them in the vault. He blows up the bank with them in it. Ha ha, on those guys. I did learn that there are Spectrum police.

Fire At Rig 15 has the Mysterons attack a Spectrum oil well.

The Launching has the Mysterons plan to attack President of the US. Captain Scarlett gets President Roberts to stay home. Captain Black sets up an attack on an atomic liner called the President Roberts. Which one is the target?

Lunarville 7 is a station on the moon, the Lunar Controller there says they want to be neutral in the fight between the humans and the Mysterons. The Aliens agree with him. Captain Scarlett, Captain Blue and Lieutenant Green head for the moon where they get trapped by the Lunar Controller. They escape and find out that the Mysterons are building a complex for themselves.

Another disc done and 2 more to go.