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.

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

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 Week In Review - I have fallen behind in meticulously chronicling every damn thing I see, which I know is a real disappointment to my two or three occasional readers. I will here catch up.

Four Sided Triangle (1953) is a nice British example of genuine Science Fiction packaged as a mainstream melodrama. The science aspect is the creation of a matter duplicator, the human problem addressed is two scientists but only one girl. What could go wrong? Slightly ridiculous concept but very nicely done. 6/10

Zombie and the Ghost Train (1991) is a Finnish film by Mika Kaurismaaki, less stylized than the work of younger brother Aki. Not a story that solves a problem, it follows the decline of an aimless fringe character (Zombie) following his encounter with a mysterious rock band with lots of gigs, but which nobody has heard (The Ghost Train). Interesting to see, if you need to see a kind of Euro-art film. 6/10

The Ghost Train (1941) is quite the opposite, a British wartime light mystery thriller at a haunted railway station, with halfpint comic Arthur Askey there to keep everyone in a constant state of irritation. (If anyone who ever reads this has the slightest idea who Big Hearted Arthur Askey and Richard "Stinker" Murdoch are, leave a comment so I will not feel so terribly alone.) I will just tell you right now because you will never see this movie, that if it is wartime and there are ghosts, it is Nazis. 4/10

The Secret of the Telegian (1960) Japanese thriller in which a teleportation device is used to effect vengeance. Seems kind of pointless since the guy ends up in prolonged foot-chases after every bayonet murder anyway. So why not just drive. Kind of boring. 3/10

Lotosbluten fur Miss Quon (1967) Is a slow, cheap, German-made unthrilling thriller set somewhere in Asia, involving diamonds. Also kind of boring. My IMDB review is the first and only one. See that for more details. 3/10

From Hell it Came (1957) Dying man's curse + radiation = TABONGA, the walking tree monster. One of those monsters it is nearly impossible to escape from because they walk so slowly. Nice "monster carrying a woman" scenes, and there is quicksand as well. I liked how someone would come running into the village saying they saw Tabonga, and someone would say "Are you SURE it was Tabonga?" like there are all these other walking tree monsters out there. Also, the blonde female scientist who gets carried by Tabonga is one of the worst screamers I have ever heard, a harsh grating AAAAKH AAAAKH scream, not the clear piercing EEEEEE so necessary to a good monster scream. Almost stupid enough not to be boring but still pretty boring. 5/10

Made it halfway through the 1961 Edgar G. Ulmer version of L'Atlantide, Journey Beneath the Desert, and it amazes me that one can make something like the discovery of a lost civilization so damn tedious. Big colorful cheesy Italian sets and soundtrack do not enliven it much. 1/10

Movies

Sextette (1978) Mae West crawled out of her grave for this unmusical musical unfunny comedy. I swear I thought my face was going to freeze forever in a grimace of painful horror from seeing that scary old grandma hobbling around, croaking vile lewd one-liners. The songs were uniformly as deranged and ghastly as the very worst songs in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, which is as bad as a cover of a song in a movie can possibly be. It was absolutely nightmarish and agonizing. It's not as bad as the Village People movie Can't Stop the Music, but that is the ONLY MOVIE EVER MADE that it is not as bad as. Rating: NEGATIVE INFINITY MINUS ONE. That's just one short of negative infinity, and the second worst rating any movie could ever have.

On the other hand:

I had read the first volume of the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) comics a couple of years ago and the only difference I could see between it and all the other dozens and dozens of independent comics I have read about the relationship problems of an unemployed hipgeek in a rock band was that it was cartoony fiction instead of painful and embarrassing autobiography like all the rest. So when this movie came out I just ignored it. However, this is the month I am trying to get caught up on some of last year's more interesting seeming movies and I was completely unprepared for how extremely witty, inventive, well-written and well-made this was. Jam-packed with imaginative gimmickry, sharp dialogue, sweet cute romance and hugely farcical action, it is only the somewhat excessive and tiring final spectacle which keeps me from giving it a 10. But it is the kind of movie that makes you feel cool just to be watching it, so it's 9/10.

Movies

Tarkan vs. the Vikings (1971) Turkish movies seem to be popular among badfilm nuts these days so I thought I should see a few. Based on a popular Turkish comic book character, this presents a very imaginative (i.e. absurd) view of Viking life and culture. Primitive in concept and technique, meant to provide cheap thrills only. Good giant octopus though. I saw a short documentary on the Turkish pop film industry of the '60s and '70s and it seems to me that its failure was in catering to the lowest common denominator consistently and exclusively, without attempting to improve the product or the audience. It was doomed to eventual failure because it was content to crank out nothing but cheap crap like this, and lacked a visionary producer or director who strove for something higher. 2/10

10 Rillington Place (1971) could not be more different. A calm, methodical, meticulously accurate depiction of the criminal life of British serial murderer John Christie. Richard Attenborough, Judy Geeson and John Hurt star, and locations were filmed on the actual site shortly before it was obliterated from the face of the earth. Extremely well-produced, perhaps its only weakness being the emotional distance it maintains, which left me entirely unmoved even by the terrible situation of Hurt's pathetic character Timothy Evans, hanged for Christie's murder of Evans' wife and child. Maybe director Richard Fleischer was too versatile to make this as strong a film as it might have been. It left me thinking, "Now I know about that," and nothing more. 6/10 for historical accuracy and general viewability.

Movies

Sometimes educating yourself can be hard work with little reward. Alien Vs. Predator is where the predators from Predator fight the aliens from Alien. Which is to say dickfaces versus pussyfaces. First thing on the screen - BEEPING GREEN LETTERS! Not old school bippety boop beeping, but a kind of half windchime, half dot-matrix printer kind of noise as they pop onscreen one by one, but it still counts. It also appears that, however advanced the alien race, their whirling wireframe computer models and red numerical time-bomb countdowns closely resemble our own. I have said that I enjoy a really atrocious insult to my intelligence, but this was nothing but a rude gesture. Every scene and every bit of dialog is a cliche set-piece: here is where we do this bit of business, here is where we establish this person's character. It's a mouse skeleton of concept wrapped in a whale's blubber of cliche drivel, driven by a soundtrack that drives a hammer of trite derivation into your skull every few seconds. Then for some stupid reason I thought I would go from the "THE END????" finale of this piece of lame-assed crap to its sequel which I knew would probably suck even more, but I couldn't have imagined how much it actually did suck. The half-alien half-predator created so idiotically at the end of the other movie becomes a sewer monster in the middle of a suburban soap opera in Gunnison Colorado. Not the redneck mountain town I remember, but some kind of upscale multi-ethnic suburban soap opera fantasy that was so lame and stupid it wasn't worth wading through a full twenty minutes of the pukey filler to see if anything interesting ever happened to equal the constant garbage-can pounding that was supposed to make it seem like something scary or exciting might one day occur. Alien versus predator, YOU SUCK. 1/10

Movies

Mysterious Planet (1982) Ambitious amateur SF made in New Hampshire USA - it's Verne's Mysterious Island, only it's a planet instead. What it lacks in budget and finish it makes up in enthusiasm, with space models, stop motion monsters and full-size monster heads, matte paintings and every variety of old-school special effect. Director Brett Piper apparently went into the direct-to-video kitschy monster movie field after this, the kind of movie that has to pretend it's a joke because it knows it kind of sucks. This one is still naive enough to take itself seriously, even though they can't always keep things in frame or set the aperture right, and the final dubbing was never done properly in some sequences. Not entirely watchable, but interesting as an artifact and admirable for its audacity. 4/10

The Great and Terrible

UPSIDE DOWN CHIN WITH EYES DRAWN ON,

talking to a little model person.

Movies

Le beau Serge (1958) Claude Chabrol's accomplished first film. A young man returns to his hometown to find his old friend a cruel bitter drunk, and makes everything worse by trying to help. A movie of character, with the protagonist's errors encapsulated in the parish priest who blames the villagers for not letting him help them, instead of trying to find out what they really need. Has a fine nostalgic feel throughout, like a movie you have seen before but entirely forgotten. Just the thing for when you need to see a French semi-classic. 9/10

The Vulture (1967) Absurd British multigenerational-curse monster mystery, one of the few such set in Cornwall. After a vehemently unsuperstitious schoolmarm sees a human-headed vulture bursting out of an 18th century grave, brilliantined B-actor Robert Hutton, a visiting American Nuclear Scientist, comes to startling conclusions based on the scantiest physical evidence, bafflingly tying together teleportation by nuclear transmutation, and the bird-man worship of Easter Island. Broderick Crawford and Akim Tamiroff are the aging name actors dragged into this jaw-dropping, head-smacking absurdity. The script and dialog creep into the fringes of Ed Wood territory with their nonsensical non-sequiturs and bizarre leaps, as well as the dreadful acting from some tertiary characters. Tamiroff is one of my favorite unappreciated actors, and he certainly doesn't get much to work with here. They made the very wise choice of never providing a beauty shot of the idiotically conceived monster, but the attack sequences, when people get shoulder-grabbed by two big bird legs from above, are quite sufficient. Really quite astonishing at times, for all the wrong reasons, right up to the very last moment. Not a huge bulldada classic but definitely marbled with strong veins of it. Most normal people would not find it very watchable. 7/10 for screwiness.

Movies

El hombre perseguido por un Ovni (1976) Also enigmatically known as The Man of Ganimedes, this thrifty Spanish-made story of a man persecuted by a UFO is full of fun. Trippy light and film effects, NASA stock footage, gratuitous nudity and automotive excitement. Biomechanical humanoids from a flying saucer want to abduct this guy, so they steal his little grey Simca sedan and shove it off a cliff, then hoist it up with their saucer and ditch it IN SPACE, then chase him around and he fights with the yellow-blooded monstrosities a few times and eventually the silver-handed Master Controller in the motorcycle helmet with lights on it gets him on board the saucer to explain it all to him. Full of incident and bright color, wildly varying film quality and also some gratuitous nudity, which I may have mentioned, but pretty irrational plotwise. It's very important for this sort of film to have lots of extremely colorful bits, even if they are irrelevant or nonsensical - I mean ESPECIALLY if they are irrelevant or nonsensical. Just the type of movie that has me chortling with glee and exclaiming, "This is SO GREAT!" I salute semi-professional director Juan Carlos Olaria for a real good effort. Not really watchable by normal folks though, so 6/10.

He won't escape us with his car IN SPACE like this!

Movies

El planeta de las mujeres invasoras (1966) A flying saucer from the Planet of the Female Invaders lands at an amusement park in Mexico which has a Flight to the Moon ride that looks exactly like the flying saucer of the Female Invaders, so they replace it with their flying saucer to capture people to take back to their planet so they can use their lungs to make some kind of breathing machine which will allow the women to live on Earth because they can only breathe Earth air for a limited time, and eventually they find that adult lungs are too old so they have to capture a lot of Earth children to use their lungs for their nefarious purposes, but the wicked Queen of the planet has a twin sister who is as good as her sister is wicked (both played by the statuesque and leggy Lorena Vasquez) who helps the Earth people in their efforts to escape. Gloriously inexpensive, it shows how much use you can get out of a hallway set with a rear-projection screen at the far end - just change the background to a different piece of fantastic architecture and it's a whole different scene. The film is enhanced by subtitles which translate the dialogue, but not always entirely into English. I don't know why I ever bother trying to better myself watching highbrow intellectual stuff or even things that are supposed to be moderately good, when this sort of absurd primitive fantasy makes me SO HAPPY. This is perfectly wonderful throughout. 10/10

Off to Planet Sibila!

Throne Room of Queen Adastraea

Welcome Earth Man!

Movies

Human Highway (1982) Eccentric improvisational amateur comedy following the antics of the denizens of a roadside diner on Earth's last day. Musician Neil Young said, "I know what, let's make a movie!" and got his chums Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, and DEVO and they all made a movie. Some parts are very funny, some parts require patience. I found the bits featuring Young and Tamblyn as a dopey duo the most entertaining. Had only an extremely limited theatrical release and was only released to VHS years later, but it is available and anyone who really needs to see this (mostly DEVO fans) probably already has. Wells from the same font as Timothy Carey's The World's Greatest Sinner, but it's the sort of thing that if you aren't really sure you want to see it you probably ought to get some reading done instead. 5/10

Movies

The Woman Eater (1958) British-made shocker in which a mad scientist seeks a serum to bring the dead back to life, using the fluids of a carnivorous plant (a big hairy heap with three pairs of waving arms) which feeds on attractive young women. You'd think with a premise like that you could get some sort of thrills out of it, but sadly no. 3/10

En Effuillant la Marguerite a.k.a. Mademoiselle Striptease (1956) Crude "comedy" of errors in which teenage Brigitte Bardot must secretly win a striptease contest. This is one of the lousiest French movies I have ever seen; as bad as an American movie, but with naked women. They did have a brief scene in a newspaper composing room with numerous linotypes, and I liked that, but you need more than linotypes and naked women to make a good movie. You can quote me on that. I have seen a half dozen Bardot movies from throughout her career but have never appreciated her appeal. She was a star, but never an actress, and she was wise to get out of the business. 2/10

Movies

Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro [Goke - Bodysnatcher From Hell] - (1968) Terrifically colorful low-budget Alien Vampire thriller. After a UFO causes an airliner to crash land in what looks just like the old quarry, an alien brain parasite turns its hosts into vampires. At least half of the action is just the jerks and psychos - including a political candidate and his flunky, a sadistic psychiatrist, an American war widow, a teenage Mad Bomber, and an International Assassin, like you get on most flights - in the airplane squabbling among themselves. For god's sake if you are going to have alien brain parasites crawling into people's skulls why do you need neck-biting vampires? In spite of all the strife, activity and strong anti-war message it ended up being a bit tedious. 6/10

Movies

The Crooked Circle (1932) Primitive spooky crime farce. The eponymous band of hooded conspirators have sworn to kill the head of the amateur detective Sphinx Club, in an Old Dark House with a ghost violinist when the clock strikes thirteen. Zasu Pitts and James Gleason provide real laughs as ninny maid and nitwit policeman. Secret panels galore. Who keeps an open can of glue right next to a human skeleton, and what must be the inevitable result? Silly archaic fun. 6/10

Movies

Everything's On Ice (1939) Offbeat low-budget showcase for the talents of seven-year-old ice skater Irene Dare. Irritating comic actor Roscoe Karns is the greedy mooching spendthrift uncle whose grandiose schemes threaten to ruin everything, Edgar Kennedy is the level-headed father who must save the day. Dare is not a particularly appealing child or skilled actress; she is kept out of the story line entirely except as a background/gimmick and her skate-dancing numbers are rather bizarrely staged. I got it here, and if the embedded player works for you, go to 51 minutes and you will see all that is really worth seeing, the deranged polar bear vocal quartet and baby penguin number which is the weird pinnacle of the film. 4/10

Movies

The Slime People (1963) Monster-suit movie has some unique ideas - it skips the usual slow invasion lead-up and gives you the suit in the opening shot; scaly subterranean beast-men driven up from their abode by nuclear testing have used a solidifying fog to make a dome over L.A. to change the climate to suit their needs. Sadly, it becomes incredibly tedious in its relatively short run-time, with much of the walking and running around obscured by smoke machines and foggy overlays. The script is pretty eccentric, and there are only a couple of actors in the film, the rest being untalented amateurs - old-timer Les Tremayne goes over the top as a local eccentric but doesn't last very long. Much credit is due the creators of the three pretty darn good monster suits, but they and the location shots of a meat market are the best part of the movie. 3/10

Movies

Prince of Space (1959) Inexpensive, primitive children's SF adventure from Japan. Bad guys from space, model spaceships wobbling on wires, goofy dubbing, silly and fun. 6/10

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002) Apparently they spent 100 million dollars on this Eddie Murphy SF adventure, and 20 million to promote it, and got back 7 million in the theatres and 24 from rentals. If I can still add right that makes an 89 million dollar loss. I wanted to see how that could happen and I did. What happened was it is actually lousy. It's like they pulled a crummy action movie script out of the trash and puked dollars on it. (The good news is it appears to have ended the screenwriter's career.) Bad guy wants to buy good guy's night club, good guy won't sell, bad guy's goons blow up night club and kill good guy's friend, good guy goes after bad guy. ON THE MOON. Those were some really expensive looking sets they were blowing up. See Moon Zero Two or Leonard Part 6 instead. 1/10