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

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 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

Im Staub der Sterne (1976) East German SF film, extremely colorful and cheesy with garishly painted plywood sets and lots of scantily clad dancing girls. Elicited crows of joyous laughter from me at its delightful presentation, somewhat on the level of TV's Space 1999 - wonderful futuristic costumes, brightly-lit sets (a very early use of cheap vacuum-formed items stuck to the walls and painted silver, possibly influenced by the design of Silent Running) and surprising locations, including what appears to be a vast salt mine and a bizarre sculpture park. Fun to see. 7/10

Millie (1931) Conventional melodrama of the Modern Woman, starting with a divorce and ending with a trial scene. I watched it primarily to see what the deal is with Helen Twelvetrees who is presented here as possessing alluring qualities not readily apparent to me, and to enjoy the too-brief appearances of Joan Blondell. Not the worst thing I've seen this week, nice night club scenes. 5/10

Movies

Cry Tough (1959) John Saxon is a first-generation Puerto Rican American faced with the choice between drudgery and crime. A very nice New York independent production with many familiar faces from movies and TV, and a fine performance by Joseph Calleia as the father. 7/10

Flying High (1931) Formulaic aviation comedy of interest to me primarily for the Busby Berkeley dance numbers, but this is the first time I have seen Bert Lahr in something other than a lion costume. Charlotte Greenwood is his comedy mate, and Pat O'Brien takes the leading man role. Fills the time adequately. 5/10

La Nave de los Monstruos (1960) This Mexican singing-cowboy vs. space-monster movie was my choice for a completely ridiculous Family Movie Night. Women from Venus are wandering the galaxy in search of men, but until they arrive at last on Earth they find nothing but crazy looking monsters which they keep frozen in blocks of ice. The most appealing feature of this film for me is the spectacular Lorena Velasquez, also seen in Planet of the Amazon Women. Silly robot, crazy rocket set, nice space model shots probably lifted from another film, goofy monster suits, and of course a singing cowboy still can't overcome its basically soporific nature but it was fun anyway. 7/10

Lorena Velasquez: Beautiful but deadly

Freejack (1992) A chase movie in which Emilio Estevez is snatched from a fatal car crash into the dystopian future of 2009 for a rich man's mind transplant. Lots of running, shooting, driving, crashing, getting chased by non-actor Mick Jagger, and things blowing up; but the numerous huge bloblike cars of the future were great. Also great is any opportunity to enjoy charming Amanda Plummer, here endearing as a shotgun-wielding crotch-kicking nun. It's all kind of stupid but mostly fun. 6/10

What we will drive in 2009

Movies

Destination Inner Space (1966) I saw this at a Saturday matinee when it was new, and still enjoy it though its flaws are more evident. Undersea lab is attacked by amphibious alien from a flying swimming saucer, using the same background music as Angry Red Planet. Nice work on the functional swimming monster suit, not really thrilling but fun enough. James Hong plays the Chinese cook. 5/10

She Had to Say Yes (1933) Busby Berkeley had it in his contract that he could direct whole movies, not just dance sequences, and this is one he co-directed. Loretta Young and Lyle Talbot star in a lite melodrama about a garment manufacturer's use of its stenographic pool to entertain buyers, and the consequences thereof. Opens with a signature Berkeley montage of pretty secretaries and busy typewriters. Nothing to telegraph home about, but there is considerably more innuendo and implication than I expected, and nifty layered two-tone gowns by Orry-Kelly. Hugh Herbert plays it as straight as I have ever seen him, as one of the lecherous businessmen. 5/10

Movies

Chelovek Amfibiya (Amphibian Man) - 1962: Soviet science-fantasy romantic melodrama, which I assume was filmed in Cuba. Boy meets girl in mid-shark-attack, but the boy is the silver-clad amphibian man, having been implanted with gills by his scientist father to rectify a lung ailment. Much of the appeal of the love story is in the charismatic and charming leads, Anastasiya Vertinskaya and Vladimir Koronev, with Mikhail Kozakov as villain. I'm sure the exotic and colorful locales helped to make it a huge sensation in the USSR when it was released. Very well-produced with great modern sets in the scientist's lab. More for education than entertainment at this point in history, but fairly enjoyable. Putting Vertinskaya in a bathing suit that becomes transparent when wet was a wise choice. 6/10

He's the Bad Guy.

Movies

Signale - Ein Weltraumabaenteuer (1970) East German formulaic Space Expedition film. Great models and sets, beautifully filmed, but incredibly slow-paced and lacking in dynamic qualities. Sadly boring. 3/10

Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949) Howard Duff, Shelley Winters and Dan Duryea in a William Castle drug-smuggling drama. A competent script and good actors transcend Castle's slightly crude directorial technique. Shelley Winters is still pretty cute here, Duryea deserves a little more recognition as a reliable supporting actor, but Duff is stonefaced and not very appealing as a protagonist. A pretty good crime action drama. 6/10

Movies

Lifeforce (1985) Expedition to Halley's Comet finds huge spacecraft full of dead monsters and takes home the three perfectly preserved humans also aboard, not thinking they might be soul-sucking alien parasites. High concept psycho-erotic horror from the Colin Wilson novel on which it is based is genuinely disturbing, but the effect is diluted by over-reliance on shouting, flashing lights, explosions and snarling zombies - all of which merely tire me. Much of it is done extremely well, but all the noise and schlock were unfortunate and irritating. 5/10

Movies

Endhiran the Robot (2010) Indian scifi action musical romantic comedy in which I Robot becomes a Matrix of Terminators. He can cook, dance, beat up a whole gang of thugs, help you cheat on your exams, talk to mosquitos, and fall in love with his creator's girlfriend, and is transformed by the Bad Guy into the insane dictator of an army of his replicas. Fantastically colorful and elaborate musical numbers, including one filmed at Machu Picchu. Not some digital greenscreen Machu Picchu - they actually filmed it there. One minute they're laughing on the beach and the next they are dancing and singing in the Andes with dozens of dancers in pseudo-inca garb. Indian movies are intended to be fun and make you feel good. There were some really imaginative sequences throughout, and it was entertaining as it could possibly be. I like fun. I like seeing a giant robot made of robots give a "thumbs up" where the thumb is a robot giving a "thumbs up." For over 2 1/2 hours of pure crazy stupid fun, 10/10

Look! A giant snake made of robots, biting a helicopter!

Movies

Panique (1947) An unpleasant, but perfectly innocent and relatively harmless, man becomes the target of intentionally malicious gossip and mob violence. A resounding condemnation of then-recent historical events, and overall a well-presented story. Michel Simon is always both repellent and attractive in all his roles and is perfect for this one. 8/10

Paycheck (2003) A nice little twenty-minute short story by P. K. Dick is padded out to a numbing action movie with car chases, explosions, people constantly crashing through windows while running and shooting, as well as lots of running and shooting, shooting while running, running while being shot at, and shooting at people who are running. You get beeping letters and whirling wireframe computer models before the credits are over!! That is a warning right there. Luckily someone would pop in every twenty minutes or so to explain the concept to us dumb schmucks who find anything other than running and shooting real tough to figure out - at one point using an apple in the explanation - I am beginning to take note of the "apple explanation" as a hallmark of quality filmmaking. Ben Affleck is the guy trying to understand the message he left for himself from the future, and he looks really good running. Rarely has anyone had such talent for the role of shallow hunk. The disparity between concept and presentation in this movie is amazing -I am sure Dick never could have imagined so many people crashing through windows in one of his stories. Kind of a chore to sit through all that crap. 2/10

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

Celebrated Thanksgiving by staying home alone, eating a small lentil and brown rice burrito with spinach in it, and some cake, and watched these movies:

The Creeping Flesh (1973) Peter Cushing and Cristopher Lee are fraternal competitors for the big science prize - both want to cure insanity, but Cushing's technique involves making a serum from the blood of an ancient New Guinean devil skeleton which regenerates its flesh when dampened. Doesn't work out as well as he had hoped. DEVIL SKELETON, I said. Fairly good Victorian Pseudo-Science movie, not a real rip-snorter though and you have to wait quite a while for the devil skeleton to get rained on enough for it to amble about, but it does have the craziest POV shot I have ever seen. 6/10

How the world looks to a partially regenerated devil skeleton.

Puzzlehead (2005) Small, quiet, intelligent SF story exploring what it means to be human. Man builds his android replica and programs it by scanning his own brain - the creation must learn to overcome the weaknesses and failings of its creator. No huge surprises, just a thoughtful, well-made character study. 9/10

Love on the Run (1936) Joan Crawford is the rich girl who hates reporters, Clark Gable is a reporter. Pretty much like a jillion other movies where the girl finds out the guy wasn't being honest and never wants to see him again. Lots of "follow that cab" kind of stuff, competition with fellow-reporter Franchot Tone (who overacts horrifically), and there is a spy subplot tossed in. Some sequences are irrelevant to the story and are dragged on way too long, and at one point Gable suddenly has a black eye for no apparent reason. Kind of a mess, though Crawford seems very human, fresh and almost innocent at certain points. Best part of the movie is Donald Meek's role as an eccentric night watchman at the palace of Fontainebleu. Won't kill or thrill. 4/10

The day before Thanksgiving I watched Fangs of the Cobra (1977), a Chinese lite contemporary romance adventure from Shaw Brothers studio, not the usual costume martial arts for which they are best known. Young man returns from studying abroad to take over management of the large family farm, and falls for the daughter of a tenant farmer. The unique twist is that her pet, best friend, confidante and protector is a cobra - but he hates snakes because his mother was bitten by one when he was a child, and died. The scheming cousin who wants to marry his money ends up naked quite a lot more than I expected, though without sufficient attributes for me to find it anything but surprising. Eventually the hero cobra protects the infant son from being bitten by the evil mongoose and pretty much saves the day all around. Unique and surprising while still being quite mediocre. 5/10

Movies

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) Space aliens want to save the earth by exterminating humanity, but change their minds when they see people hugging. Wasn't as bad as I expected. Personal note to soundtrack composer Tyler Bates: You have used your quota of thundering drums for the REST OF YOUR LIFE. Try to come up with something else. 5/10

Movies

The Earth Dies Screaming (1965) A very small end of the world movie, with half a dozen baffled survivors in a British village facing enigmatic alien robots and blank-eyed remote-controlled corpses. It's full of slow-moving threats from which people are unable to escape, since they hide by running into a room and leaving the door open. This is one of a number of similar British films at that time, such as Night of the Big Heat, based on the novel by John Lymington, who made a career of writing novels about a small group of people trapped in a village by a mysterious force. Doesn't live up to its title. 4/10

Wonder Bar (1934) One evening's events in a high-class nightclub in Paris. I had read that this film contains some of Busby Berkeley's most spectacular work but I didn't know why it wasn't readily available. Now I know. It must have been incredibly expensive to produce, with huge numbers of dancers, costumes, forty-foot moving pillars and other props, and some scenes are shot in a closed room walled with gigantic mirrors, creating a vast space filled with moving forms. Al Jolson stars, and he gives an amazing performance of songs, offhand gags and vaudeville routines. Dolores Del Rio is resplendent in a backless lame' gown and metallic satin jacket with mink sleeves. Every dress is completely nuts - even the dowagers were wearing eye-popping attire. Dick Powell sings, Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert drink and try to evade their wives. The plot is mere filler between insanely elaborate spectacles. What killed the film for television is not the gay joke or the sadistic gaucho dance, but the astounding production number in which Jolson rides to blackface heaven on a mule. I don't think any other movie contains so many blacked up white folks as this, not to mention the relentless depiction of the most painfully obvious stereotypes. Blackface heaven contains Lincoln worship, porkchop trees, an automatic chicken roasting machine, and of course free watermelons in the blackface heaven version of Harlem. Even his dog and mule end up with tinfoil wings in blackface heaven. I think everyone ought to see this, just so they can see what kind of bizarre and deranged stuff was once considered perfectly normal and acceptable entertainment. This is the sort of screwed up thing I pick for Family Movie Night. 10/10 for being one of the damnedest things I ever did see.

THIS IS BAD. DON'T DO THIS:

Marse Linkum is patron saint of Blackface Heaven

Blackfaces love watermelon.

Movies

Mechte Navstrechu [A Dream Come True] (1965) A Soviet SF film from Odessa Studios. An alien spacecraft on the way to Earth crashes on Mars, prompting a complicated series of rescue attempts. Numerous colorful, elaborate and often surrealistic sets and models depict the alien planet and spacecraft as well as landings and walks upon the surface of the Moon, Mars and Phobos. Not much of a plot, and a cop-out ending, but really wonderful to see, as demonstrated below. 8/10

Event Horizon (1997) Another rescue mission, this time to an experimental FTL drive ship orbiting Neptune. I had given up on SF films around this time so I missed this one, and I don't know if I am sorry or not. The parallels between this and Disney's The Black Hole are numerous and obvious, not just in concept but in visual design and in the vast absurdity of execution. This is so excessive, even the sound design stands out as simply going too far. The only thing it didn't have was a comedy relief robot, or a comedy relief anything for that matter. Nevertheless it is delightfully ridiculous from the very first beeping letters that pop onto the screen. Beeping letters are always the sign of things to come, not necessarily good things, from a skewed conception of how a movie ought to be done. Sadly, they were not beeping green letters, the acme of the form. Anyhow, the long-lost spaceship eventually transforms into an Old Dark House from which None Shall Escape, and the SF movie becomes a grisly supernatural horror story. Why would anyone design a faster than light drive to look like a mechanical device for summoning demons? Because THAT'S WHAT IT IS! Why would anyone design a spaceship to look like a Haunted Mansion, with gothic wall panels, arched colonnades and coffin-shaped doorways? Because THAT'S WHAT IT IS. Though it becomes outright ghoulish at the end, with actual cascading rivers of blood, it is primarily an excessively, absurdly over-the-top gadgetporn space opera that had me laughing with glee. Except for the horrifically mutilated corpses, which I hate. Stupidly great in certain ways. 8/10