MOVIES

The Rift a.k.a. Endless Descent (1990) is a fairly entertaining submarine/cavemonster tale.  A submarine is sent to find out what happened to the previous submarine and they discover an underwater cave system with a secret DNA acceleration laboratory cranking out crazy cave monsters.  The submarine crew is a zany agglomeration of cliches - Tightass Commander who forces people to do things which will endanger everyone, because what he says goes; Disgraced Hero with something to prove; a Spaniard, a Frenchman and a German; Happy Swede and Angry Swede, a Woman and an Angry Woman (actually the other woman is also angry but she is only angry at Disgraced Hero), and a streetwise gentleman of African descent whose primary purpose is to occasionally remind everyone that they are all white, and he is black, and to exclaim "Sheeit!" and "Aw, May-un!" with monotonous regularity.  Look, here he is ogling the shapely posterior of Angry Woman:

Isn't he TOO outrageous?  Anyway, the monsters are pretty good, mostly because there are a bunch of different kinds that you only see enough of to be able to say what the hell was that, except for the crazy supermonster in the big cave that sends a giant tentacle mouth out to glom down on you while you stand there shooting at it.  Like any good submarine this one has a self destruct panel with a red LED countdown display but it only gives you two minutes to get into the escape pod which makes it really exciting since of course you have to stand there arguing for about a minute and a half. It mostly looks pretty cheap and it is mostly kind of stupid, the kind of stupid where someone says "Take this and don't lose it because if you do you will be trapped in the monster cave forever," and then they don't clip it to their belt or anything, they just carry it in their hand until they come to the first fuming crevasse and then guess what happens.  And yet it is really not too bad though I can't give it more than a 5/10.  It won't kill you to watch it.

On the other hand, Creature a.k.a Titan Find  (1985) is a shameless, no a shameful ripoff of both Alien and The Thing.  A bunch of people are stuck on a planet with a monster that not only has a drooly-toothed monster part it also has these blood slugs that take over your brain so your friends don't know you are also a monster.  Unless you inexplicably get all zombie looking and start going Graaar! The good thing is the blood slug makes Nude Scene Woman entirely disrobe for no discernable purpose, which is reason enough to root for the monster.  There is lots of '80s hair, over-illuminated plywood sets, and everyone basically seems like next week they will be doing a bit part on The Love Boat.  Except for Klaus Kinski in his "I won't say no to anything" period, the only interesting person in the movie. The print I have is about five minutes shorter than the standard runtime which explains why sometimes a monster scene would end with me not knowing what happened or people would go OH MY GOD and you would never see what was so awful.  They must have cut out some gnawing scenes or something.  You don't really see the monster suit well but that is a good thing because they must have said, "We need a suit just like the one in that Alien movie except our guy is five feet tall and weighs 180 pounds.  Make it so all he can do is shuffle slowly."  So shameful is the ripping-off of The Thing that when they are trying to figure out how to kill the monster suit one of them actually says, "I saw this movie once ... etc."  Shame on you, William Malone and Alan Reed.  Shame on you.  The scene where they finally blow up the monster suit, rather than being the best scene in the movie as it should be, was by far the stupidest and most embarrassing scene, and it has a bomb with a red LED countdown in it too.  For what it is worth the space ship model work, what you get of it, is not bad.  There is only one reason to see this movie, my reason, which is to see every science fiction movie ever made before I die.  I am getting to the dregs.  Deep, deep into the dregs.  Happy Halloween.

MOVIES

When I was looking for 1980s post-apocalyptic movies to watch I discovered there were a bunch of 1980s SF movies I hadn't seen.  I think I saw fewer movies in the 1980s because I didn't have a car and it wasn't as easy to go all the way across town to see something at a dollar movie, and impossible to go to any of the dozen drive-ins scattered around Denver at the time. I know that I saw fewer SF movies then because, although I always loved cheap Star Wars ripoffs, I disliked cheap Alien ripoffs because it's just a monster movie; whether it is supposed to be on another planet like in Galaxy of Terror  or on the bottom of the ocean like Leviathan  or Deepstar Six; it's just Ten Little Indians with tentacles and drooling fangs.

Moontrap (1989) is a pretty creative cheap independently produced SF movie in which it is discovered that there is a 14 thousand year old killer robot base on the moon.  They start out as buglike pods that open up and grab any scrap or machinery nearby and build themselves into big death ray killer robots.  They don't mind using organic components either, so they are kind of zombie killer robots.  The star of  it is Walter Koenig who had name recognition from having been in Star Trek on TV, but that didn't give him any real acting talent.  They show him thinking a lot.  The other big name is cult film star Bruce Campbell - cult film star means he was in a lot of movies but none of them very good ones.  They go to the14 thousand year old killer robot moon base and find a 14 thousand year old space babe in suspended animation, and the good part is she gets her shirt off at one point but not nearly enough time was spent on that.  I would have cut a few minutes of Koenig thinking and replaced it with shirtless space babe.  But that's just me. They did a pretty good job with sets, props, models and effects, especially with sets considering what is involved in a moonscape set, and the story is not just a string of cliches.   The least convincing effect in the whole movie was Koenig's hairpiece.  Hairpiece technology has advanced greatly in the intervening years. I learned one important fact - that a NASA moon lander, like all good movie spacecraft, contains a self-destruct panel with a beeping five minute red-LED countdown. Moontrap is not a total piece of crap and I will even give it a rating - 6/10

Unlike Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) which I remember making a conscious choice not to go see at the time and I am glad now I did that because I would have felt cheated even if I saw it as part of a double feature at a dollar movie.  It was directed by Charles Band, and I had ridden a bus half way across town to see a couple of his earlier movies, The End of the World and Laserblast and it looked like  Metalstorm was going to be even crappier.  I remember one guy shot me some pretty nasty looks for laughing so hard at Laserblast.  I remember also on the bus ride home I was sitting up at the front where the seats face the aisle and across from me was some kind of oddball with a bag of groceries who had a package of frozen fish sticks that he opened up and he'd stick his face down in it and take a big whiff of it, then grin around crazily at the other passengers, and repeat.  This drew chuckles from a few of the onlookers, but beside me was a sensitive young man who seemed to take their chuckles as a personal affront.  He glared angrily at the other passengers and took it upon himself to humanize the Fish Stick Whiffer by means of sympathetic communication.  He started asking the guy questions like, "Are you ANGRY?"  "Do you ever feel like you want to SCREAM?" Fish Stick Whiffer didn't seem to recognize that he was being spoken to and kept grinning away and enjoying the wonderful fish stick sensation.  Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is an idiotic, incoherent half assed piece of crap. What is worse is that it was one of the few entries in the failed 3D craze of the day so it is full of shots of people needlessly pointing things right at the camera.  It was filmed almost entirely in an old sand quarry and at Vasquez Rocks, the default location for any cheap-ass cowboy movie which is all this is - a 1930s cheap ass cowboy movie and Road Warrior ripoff which should have been included in my post-apocalyptic series except for the sole fact that there is no introductory narrative telling how many years it has been since the fall of civilisation or the oil wars or the radiation wars or the cabbage patch kids wars or some other fake assed wars that made it possible to make such a stupid lousy movie.  The unshaven leather-clad loner is some kind of lawman looking for a bad hombre who is stirring up the natives who in this case are bald headed cyclops guys who have their right eye covered with wrinkly flesh.  There is a blonde girl in it who gets captured but she never gets her shirt off so what is the point.  There is lots of footage of driving around in the old sand pits, lots and lots of it, showing the crapped up dune buggies or the hero's goony cubemobile driving around, or thrilling point of view shots from the front bumper of driving between shrubs on an old sand quarry road, or of the driver jolting back and forth in a faked up cockpit.  Then there is lots of footage of people walking around in the old sand quarry, with something sending up a plume of smoke every twenty feet or so just so there is something happening on screen while they walk and walk and walk in the old sand pits. There is also a surprising amount of footage of the lawman just looking at something.  Like twenty seconds at a time of  a shot of his face, looking at something.  You can't even call it a reaction shot - he is just looking at something like the director said, "Okay now act like you are looking at it!  Perfect!  Cut!  It's a take!" When it comes to the big midnight showdown between the unshaven leatherclad lawman and the bad hombre with the huge black leather boobs on his costume, the lawman abruptly dashes over to a skycycle and suddenly it is a broad daylight skycycle chase with the bad guy Jared-Syn who always looks as stupid as his name, in a completely different costume and man are the blue-screen effects crappy.  I am going to ruin the entire movie for you right here and I don't care, but this shows just how incredibly lousy and stupid this movie is - not only is there nothing that could possibly be called a metalstorm in this movie, Jared-Syn is NEVER DESTROYED.  He GETS AWAY.  Total bullshit.  The only thing worth seeing in this entire half-assed piece of crappy bullshit garbage is this shot of the cubemobile jumping over a couple of dune buggies:

You have been warned.

MOVIES

 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983) was a fitting conclusion to my postapoc binge, as it stunk enough that it doesn't merit a full review.  A surly leatherclad loner is recruited to go into the ruins of  NYC and rescue the last fertile woman on Earth to take her away on a rocket ship to Alpha Centauri and humanity's New Start.  It is an Escape from New York ripoff and not a Road Warrior ripoff  so it only has a couple of cars, but I would hate for my handful of occasional readers to miss seeing these great things driving around in the same old quarry put to such good use in Warrior of the Lost World.  1983 was a good year for that quarry.

 

The only other notable features about the movie are a big model of NYC in ruins, which I always like to see, and the fact that about eight minutes of film time were shot in Monument Valley, meaning they actually flew the star and a crew over from Italy just for that.  Amazing.  Oh yeah, they also use some props and costumes from Starcrash, but that doesn't help much.

SUNDAY WEBCOMICS

One of the continuing matters of interest here at SUNDAY WEBCOMICS is the problem of creating an Online Webcomic while lacking the basic skills to do so, the ability to do any kind of artwork at all for example.  The creator of Artless Bart sidesteps that issue entirely, by simply posting storyboards with dialog and a description of what you would see if there was a picture there.

Returning to the pure SUNDAY WEBCOMICS art style, The Corpus Squid is pretty impressive.  Make that very impressive.  You should have heard the sound I made when I saw it.

Also pretty remarkable is the passive-agressive opening panel of Guards of Anarchy, and the way the pages become so gigantic as to be impossible to even see all of.

Because these are mostly pretty brief and I know you like to sit for hours trying to decipher inscrutable scribbly online webcomics here also is the most literally inscrutable Online Webcomic I have seen in some length of time, the brief and abortive Life in the Wild.

Go and do likewise.

MOVIES

I don't even know why I started this postapoc film festival but if I didn't still have another one slowly downloading, this one would bring it to an end.  Warrior of the Lost World (1983), Unlike BATTLETRUCK, is a cheap exploitation spectacle and nothing more.  According to IMDB the director was hired and brought to Italy where he was shown a poster and told to make a film to go with it.  The misspelled and mispunctuated opening narrative crawl (this is the first time I have ever seen misuse of the apostrophe in film credits) says it takes place "generations after the radioactive wars" in a "new age of tyranny."  Luckily there is an anonymous hero on a Supersonic Speedcycle (their term, not mine, but it is a good one) which is named Einstein because like the famous physicist it communicates by repeating brief, slightly sarcastic phrases three times in a grating squeak-doll voice, simultaneously flashing the same words on a little TV screen with a continuous star-zoom screen saver behind them.  This is the most irritating talking motorcycle ever created, and it gives the driver the opportunity to make weak sardonic retorts. The hero is recruited to rescue the female lead's professor father from the fascist overlord but while they rescue the professor the girl gets left behind so they have to rescue her too by gathering a ragtag group of rebels to overthrow the government.  If I were making a movie with Lost World in the title I would try to get some dinosaurs in there.  This movie has much in common with the previously reviewed Endgame, the hero being leatherclad, unshaven and pudgyfaced with no perceptible acting ability, the female lead being a non-actress of swarthy semi-asian extraction - in Endgame it was Laura Gemser of the Emmanuelle movies so at least she got her shirt off once but it was no big deal, and in this it's Persis Khambatta whose big talent was having a shaved head in a Star Trek movie.  Here she lacks even that.  The best thing the two have in common though is this helmet:

I couldn't get a good shot showing the spike on top but it is there.  Note that the W.O.T.L.W. photo is taken in the old quarry. They had a pretty good budget for cars and there are half a dozen of them, some goofy crapped up Volkswagens and a couple of these police cars with big spikes stuck on the front:

When they crash into something the spikes just fall off and scatter all over the road.  There are also a couple of big trucks, one of which gets exploded during the running gun battle down a tree-lined road, mysteriously transported in a flash to the old quarry to crash into an inexplicable pyramid of highly explosive oil drums.  The police cars suffer from a uniquely exploitation-cinematic technical flaw, in that when they start to go over a cliff, even a tiny bit, they explode right away in a huge ball of fire and plunge down into the old quarry in flaming fragments instead of waiting until they hit the bottom like other movie cars do.  In reality cars almost never explode which is why sometimes people just disappear and their car is found a couple of years later at the bottom of a ravine unexploded.  This movie also has a couple of helicopters but there isn't much you can do to crap up a helicopter, except paint it black like they did with everything else that moves.  They actually explode one of the helicopters, and the exploding helicopter is a classic mark of film quality but this one is done so abruptly and briefly it has little impact.  What does have a little impact though, and the high point in the movie for me, is when they encounter a BATTLETRUCK!

It's a costumed dump truck with a flamethrower, but they didn't have enough money to blow it up so it just grinds to a feeble halt, though it does run over that stupid motorcycle, to my extreme delight.  There are lots of good locations in this, the fascist government being ensconced in what looks like an unfinished resort hotel and their science center looks like a brewery.  The cast includes Fred Williamson who doesn't have much to do compared to his role in Warriors of the Wasteland, and Donald Pleasence as the Fascist Overlord, obviously the only actor in the entire production.  This is by far the stupidest entry into this brief festival and unless 2019: After the Fall of New York really pulls something great out of its leopard print helmet I will have to recommend this one as the postapoc film to see.

MOVIES

My post-apocalyptic binge continues with Warlords of the 21st Century, a.k.a. BATTLETRUCK (1982) which was made in New Zealand so it is scenic as hell and it is the story of BATTLETRUCK and its battle against the Renewable Energy Hippies and their champion, Methane Powered Motorcycle Man.  It is set "after the oil wars" when gasoline is nearly unobtainable so the thing to do is drive around in a gigantic armored truck looking for more fuel and enslaving people.  Here's how cool BATTLETRUCK is:

Note that it is being viewed through a Monocular Vision Enhancement Device which inexplicably always indicates N S E and W no matter which direction it is pointing. For technical purposes. Except for the purely irrational conceptual basis this is a creditable effort to create a believable post-industrial scenario, and not a cheap exploitation spectacle, which takes some of the fun out of it.  The geodesically domed hippie commune is convincingly created, like it burst full grown out of a 1968 issue of Mother Earth News or a Dealer McDope comic except unfortunately it  is winter so no naked hippie chicks.  Another strike against it.  Things really pep up though when the hippies pitch in and help their champion and his pal the bespectacled mechanogeek (people who owned television sets in the 1990s will recognize John Ratzenburger from that show about Cheers The Bar) to cobble together out of scrap metal a Super Deadly Machine Gun Volkswagen, seen here amid its Holocaust of Doom:

It's obvious that BATTLETRUCK must necessarily lose because it embodies the Old Paradigm, but at least it dies magnificently.  Even though there are only three vehicles, BATTLETRUCK, Battletruck Junior (for chasing things - it would have been cooler if Battletruck Junior had been carried inside BATTLETRUCK), and Machine Gun Volkswagen, there are also some entertaining Romanian style horse-drawn carriages, and the show opens with a two-horsepower VW Kombi pickup that is quite appealing.  Though this is not as stupid as most of the genre it has its moments, when stuff explodes and cars drive through things, and of course BATTLETRUCK's glorious demise.

MOVIES

Sometimes a guy just needs to see some Post-Road-Warrior crap. Good thing there are so many of them, because they were so easy to make.  You need some old cars with a bunch of funky crap tacked onto them, an abandoned industrial site, an old quarry, and for costumes some leftover Roman stuff mixed up with football shoulder, knee and elbow pads painted black.

 Wheels of Fire (1985) was created by Filipino genre hack Cirio Santiago.  It had a good enough budget to have some decent cars and a couple hundred uniformed extras in the big battle scene at the old gravel pit.  Some of it was filmed in an old fortress of some kind that still has big cannons in it.  It's a cowboy movie where there are these bandits and the good guy has to rescue his sister from them.  The good thing is that the sister is played by Lynda Wiesmeier whose big skill was having her big old tits out flopping around, and she spends most of her screen time doing just that, but unfortunately most of the time she is also tied up or getting slapped around or raped which I am not that big on.  I don't mind a little bondage but beating and raping is where I draw the line.  There is also another female car driver provided for romantic attachment but she only gets her shirt off for the brief love scene. You have to realize that it's the goofy cars and the boobs that make these stupid things watchable.There's lots of chasing around, and they actually crash the cars together real good and blow them up.  There are also some subterranean albino mutants thrown in, and some kind of incoherent aborigine dwarf and a telepathic girl who can communicate with him, and a rocket cult that is supposedly going to blast off into space in their stupid looking hand built rocket if the bandits don't come kill them all and blow it up first, which guess what - they do come kill them all and blow it up.  *Spoiler alert* Sorry.  Lots of bad guys get shot and so do some good guys and the lone stranger drives on. Here are a couple of the pretty decent looking cars driving around the old quarry with a topless babe strapped to the hood of one.  I just thought, "Man that would get really hot being strapped onto the hood half naked like that, not sexy hot but ouch hot."

This Trailer has everything in the entire movie that's worth seeing.

Endgame (1983) is by Italian genre hack Joe D'Amato, and in it the winner of the Running Man game gets recruited to take a telepathic kid across the mutant wasteland, so you get a Running Man ripoff for about half an hour and then the rest of it is Road Warrior with the requisite goofy cars driving around in the old quarry. [Hold on there!  The Running Man wasn't made until 1987!  So this is a Road Warrior style Tenth Victim ripoff, or somebody actually read Robert Sheckley!]  The in-jokey thing about this is that the Italian title was Endgame: Bronx lotto finale (Bronx final fight) which I assume is an attempt to latch onto the brand identification of another, marginally better Post-Road-Warrior movie, 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) which was actually filmed in the pre-apocalyptic Bronx.  Which is kind of interesting that you could do that, film a post-apocalyptic fantasy in the actual location because it is already so broke down and crummy it looks like an atom bomb went off there. This one though is in the future where normal people look like extras from a Flock of Seagulls video or rejects from Purple Rain, and tough guys paint stupid crap around their eyes to look cool.  The cars in this one are incredibly great and had me laughing louder than I have at anything in weeks.  Look at this idiotic thing:

That red dome on the hood is a flamethrower but I think you already guessed that.  There are only three funked up cars in this and they just stripped off most of the body, then tacked some wire mesh and pointy crap and a couple of oil drums on.  Since they didn't have a lot of cars, the wagon train runs into the Mutant Motocross Army, with about a hundred dirt bikes which the mutants customize by putting a ratty animal pelt on the gas tank and seat. The good thing is that even though the mutants only have two cars they put topless slave babes on them.  Nothing says future like topless chicks on a crapped up old junker driven by a fish man.  

They do blow up a couple of the cars but it is the kind of  blowing up where they just cut it together so it is supposed to look like they crashed but you can see the cars are just sitting there when they blow up.  Lots and lots of guys get shot off of motorcycles though so if you like seeing guys fall off motorcycles this is good for that. This movie also has the benefit of a Rhodes Synthesizer soundtrack, one guy at a keyboard going eedle deedle deedle deedle - oodle doodle doodle doodle for an hour and a half, which really adds a lot to a post-apocalyptic fantasy. Of the two I thought this was more hilarious, which is the major value of these.  I know you are wondering so I will tell you that of all the films of this genre which I have seen, and I have seen a lot, many of them when they came out in the theater, my favorite is Warriors of the Wasteland (1983) even though it doesn't have any women with their  shirts off, the cars have plastic domes and duct pipes stuck on them, and there are LOTS of them.  Plus the bad guys are extra ridiculous looking and there is a buttraping Knights Templar angle which you might think goes against what I said about rape and I guess it does.  Buttraping Post-Apocalyptic Knights Templar are, in my opinion, a socially redeeming plot element.

MOVIES

The Silk Express (1933) is as odd a jumble of plot devices as I have ever seen.  Youthful Neil Hamilton represents a textile mill owners' organization in the midst of a silk boom, compelled to import raw silk themselves to avoid exploitive pricing by unscrupulous speculators.  They have 72 hours to get the bales from Seattle to New York by train, and the speculators will do anything to stop the Silk Express.  There is a surprise discovery of Mongolian Silk Rust, and an imperilled archaeologist suffering from a rare Asian Sleeping Sickness which slowly deprives him of movement and senses and will kill him if he falls asleep, along for the ride to the only clinic in North America that can save him.  Naturally it turns into a Locked Room / Vanishing Weapon murder mystery on wheels.  Guy Kibbee shows up as a cantakerous lawman, along with Allan Jenkins in an uncharacteristic role as a scholarly hobo.  Not really thrilling, but odd.  6/10

Wives Under Suspicion (1938) stars Warren William, a fine figure of a man but no great shakes as an actor, in a somewhat unexpected psychodrama nicely directed by James Whale.  William puts a gloss of superficiality onto everything he does but this eventually becomes effective in spite of him.  The opening sequence is outstanding, and it is less formulaic than I expected but difficult to recommend.  It seems this is Whale's second treatment of this story, filmed in 1933 as The Kiss Before The Mirror.  5/10

I'm trying to find a Warren William film in which he does some real acting, and The Case of the Curious Bride (1935) presents him as Perry Mason, a wisecracking scoundrelly master-chef lawyer who has no qualms about concealing or manufacturing evidence, unnerving to anyone accustomed to Raymond Burr. Also startling is the fact that Mason's assistant Paul Drake is renamed Spudsy and played by Allan Jenkins in his conventional lowbrow mode.  It is only late in the movie that Spudsy is referred to as Drake, to my shock and dismay.  Claire Dodd doesn't have much to do as Della Street but answer the phone and look admiringly at Perry. Overall it is a fair murder mystery with lots of San Francisco locations.  Errol Flynn appears in a brief role that requires fighting but no speech. 5/10  I also saw William (and Flynn) recently in Don't Bet on Blondes (1935), an unremarkable Love Insurance farce.

Four's a Crowd (1938) is a frenetic screwball comedy starring Rosalind Russell and Errol Flynn, and it's a pretty good one if that is what you are looking for. 7/10

The Perfect Specimen (1937) pairs Flynn with Joan Blondell in a mild Rich Boy, Poor Girl comedy.  Joan is charming as always with soft shoulder-length hair and summery print dresses befitting her role as daughter of an eccentric professor, and she induces Flynn to break out of his golden cage and live it up.  Allan Jenkins helps out, and there is a lot of shouting "I would NEVER marry you!" before it is over. 6/10

I'm off in my own little world here.  I did see one recent movie, GANTZ - Perfect Answer (2011), the second of two movies based on the GANTZ manga.  It's all pretty ridiculous with lots of things blowing up and people brought back from the dead by a big black sphere to shoot aliens.  Wasn't as bad as Green Lantern.  Which was mostly pretty lame.  That's why I watch more movies from the 1930s.  At least you get Allan Jenkins, Guy Kibbee, Margaret Hamilton, et.al.even if the movie stinks.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

UPDATE!!! - The perpetrator of A Cannonade of Hogwash has generously advised me of its new location.  He continues to accumulate a body of work of a remarkable consistency and I don't feel that my original assessment, "I know this guy is trying to be 'ironic' but I don't think he's quite making it," quite does it justice.  I don't think I was really into full swing with this project at the time.

We start this week's bumper assortment of SUNDAY WEBCOMICS with Blunderclod! by Susan Marie, a superhero parody in which instead of being heroic and good at everything the hero is inept and clumsy.  Instead.  I have selected it primarily because it is an example of the old-timey "ball nose" style of amateur cartooning, which I haven't seen in years.  Nowadays budding cartoonists have so many sources from which to copy that they rarely opt for ball-nose, which to my mind lends an especially untainted quality to this strip.

Bearly There is a diverse collection of gag strips and the one to which I have linked is especially outstanding in its SUNDAY WEBCOMICSy qualities.  Who among us could have come up with this?  Only Rob.

And in conclusion, P.S. is two comic strips in one.  Except for the very last one which is the one I linked to, which strangely does not actually contain the "P.S." which is the conceptual basis of the comic, the idea of which seems to me to have a comic and then another comic as a Post Script, hence the title.  That makes it extra SUNDAY WEBCOMICSy, the final strip betraying its fundamental concept like that.

Whee.

MOVIES

Family Movie Night has not seen any huge successes of late, with all the selections being flawed to some strange degree, but a few have provided some satisfaction.


The Cobweb (1955) is an incoherent Mental Clinic soap opera in which the staff seem more neurotic and hysterical than the patients.  Richard Widmark, Charles Boyer and Gloria Grahame were miscast, and the best performance was Lillian Gish as a stiff and angry little administrator.  The script was a muddle and characters' motivations were not clearly defined.  I would not have sat through it on my own, but Donna found it more tolerable.  I would give it 4/10.

Tomorrow's Children (1934) is a roadshow exploitation/educational film on the topic of eugenics and compulsory sterilization.  Not by nature a very good movie, it still has some good entertainment value in characterization and story line, and it becomes a nailbiter before it is over.  Lanky redhead Sterling Holloway provides some peculiar comedy relief. 6/10


The Blonde Captive (1931) Is an anthropological exploitation film made and narrated by Lowell Thomas using footage from his expedition through the South Pacific and around the northern coast of Australia.  It is fascinating to see this footage of the indigenous Australians apparently untouched by technological societies.  The real anthropological interest here is more in the viewpoint of the filmmakers, as the ostensible purpose of the expedition is the search for evidence of the survival of traits of  Neanderthal Man in the modern age, and Neanderthal Man is rung in at every opportunity until they find a fat happy Australian who shows enough visual similarity to a sculpture in the museum that they can claim their thesis is proven.  This film was also a good opportunity for the average guy to see lots of women with no shirts on and call it education, and the narration's blatant racism and sexism were perfectly acceptable humor at the time.  6/10

Once a Sinner (1950) is a British melodramatic thriller centering on class conflict.  The plot element of marrying above/below one's station is more a 1930s thing in US films but it's still obviously an important issue in 1950 Britain.  Fairly entertaining and overall a pretty good movie, but not great.   6/10

MOVIES

The Phantom President (1932) In the first of his two sound picture appearances, George M. Cohan plays a dual role as a stuffed-shirt banker with presidential aspirations and the coincidentally identical stranger, a medicine show mountebank with the pep and personality needed to pull off a successful campaign.  Claudette Colbert is another of the dead stick banker's aspirations which is also taken over by his double - despite the obvious decades of age difference.  Jimmy Durante is the double's eccentric gibberish-spouting factotum and they perform a couple of  Rodgers and Hart numbers together with excellent chemistry.  There are few opportunities nowadays for us to ascertain what Cohan's appeal was, but his charisma and personality are obvious and his blackface performance lacks the smarmy emotionalism of Jolson's and doesn't even go into dialect.  There is some effective political satire here, showing that the only way to win the presidency is to put on an entertaining spectacle.  I was also impressed with the sophisticated direction and camerawork, with the double scenes handled very effectively.  It's all pretty weird, but entertaining, and Colbert is well-dressed in sleek satin with huge puffy feather collars or fur sleeves.  Worth seeing for historical value, 7/10

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

I have been getting comments from cartoonists whose work I featured in recent editions of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.  Their confusion as to my intentions is understandable, as I am not always certain of them myself.  All I will say is that the purpose of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC is to present works which are uniquely creative in unexpected ways.  To the artists, I say - you are doing a webcomic and I am not, so that automatically puts you a cut above me.

There are a number of features I look for in a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC which can't be found in any other medium.  I love apology pages, where they write a long explanation for why there is no strip.  I love it when there is an explanation of the strip which takes longer to read than it does to read the actual comic.  When browsing webcomic lists I check out the ones that are discontinued or on hiatus because they often end with an apology, an explanation, or a promise that the strip positively will continue, that they will absolutely be back better than ever before you know it, and then I see it's dated May 2008.

The cartoonist who created Unlimited Evil integrated the abrupt end of the strip in a very pleasing way, and the artistic technique of the entire production is a great combination of scratchy original artwork and flashy digital processing that unites opposite ends of the quality scale.

The perpetrator of Childproof Epsilon also stays "in character" in the final strip, presenting it in exactly the same way as all the preceding work.  This strip is an exceptionally impressive solution to the problem of being unable to draw a comic strip, by having absolutely no artwork at all, ever.  I enjoy the tautological echo effect of having the same text repeated as a list under each strip, and the self-referential beginning strips which are about doing a comic with no artwork.  The only thing it doesn't do is come out and say it is an Online Webcomic in the title.

So there you have it.  Another one done.

MOVIES

I have been watching nothing but dispiriting crap for the past couple of weeks.  Sometimes intentionally, mostly by accident.  Sorry.

BLAME YOURSELF

-Herman Cain, multimillionaire, candidate for U.S. President

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

This week, SUNDAY WEBCOMIC proudly presents SUNDAY WEBCOMIC, an online webcomic about SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.  I even joined an online webcomic site so as to present it in its appropriate context with the appended apology and explanation requisite for such an endeavor.

Perhaps you, unaccustomed as you are to the total immersion experience of online webcomics necessary for me to bring you such quality selections each week, did not know that Stick Man is an actual genre of online webcomics.  An entire semi-ironic genre of comics consisting of crudely scribbled stick figures, more often than not making jokes appropriate to the college dormitory environment in which they are most frequently created.  Who would have thought of such a thing?  And yet, Sticktown seems to take it another unexpected step beyond mere irony to... something else.

Then, to show exactly what really makes my brain go DOING, please enjoy the noteworthy Old Hickory Blog, whatever it is.