My God, It's Full of Nerds!

Random Thoughts On Pop Culture by Scott Hamilton

056/100 Collision Course (1992)

Feb 5

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | No Comments

Hey, a movie starring Jay Leno, America’s sweetheart? How could I not watch this?

Leno made this right before he got The Tonight Show as a regular gig, though it was shelved for years because of financial problems. Some scenes were even left unfilmed, perhaps most obviously one where the main characters enter a garage looking for something and the movie just fades out, and the next scene is the next day and we have no idea what they found.

Jay Leno plays a Detroit cop in robbery. A retired cop friend of his is murdered at the scrap yard he owns, for no obvious reason. In fact, the friend stumbled on thugs disposing of the body of a Japanese industrial spy who was trying to sell some sort of revolutionary device to a start up car company in Detroit. Leno’s character ends up teamed up with a Japanese cop who is also looking for oscillation overthruster (or whatever), and this cop is played by the only actor qualified to play a Japanese person in Hollywood, Pat Morita. The model here is obviously Lethal Weapon, with the two cops starting as adversaries and slowly learning to like each other, as the action scenes ramp up towards the gratuitously explosive.

Did Jay Leno give up a promising career as a action star just to be the biggest jerk in late night? Leno was hired to provide a constant stream of wise-cracks, though by about half way through movie he’s like an annoying buzz you learn to ignore. The couple of scenes where he’s supposed to act, like when he finds out his retired buddy is dead, Leno is so awful he may set a new low in unconvincing acting in what is supposed to be a professional movie.

The other element that makes the movie memorable is the racism. A major theme of the movie is that the Japanese are responsible for the decline of the American car industry and Detroit in general. Yes, all Japanese people, even a cop who is just visiting. The unstopping torrent of abuse directed at Morita is tiring, and sounds a lot more like whining than I think the filmmakers intended. And the really sad part? By the time the movie was made, let alone released, the Japanese real estate and banking bubbles had burst. Their economy was in the toilet, and we were still blaming them for our problems.

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055/100 The Secret of the Loch (1934)

Feb 4

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 2 Comments

The Secret of the Loch is a historic film. It’s the first film to deal with a the Loch Ness Monster, and that also makes it the first movie to deal with a cryptozoological entity in general. It came out quick, too. According to the IMDB it was in theaters in May of 1934, and the Loch Ness story had really only broken nationwide in October of the previous year. The producers of the film may have also made a pretty penny, because the so-called “Surgeon’s Photo,” the iconic one of a creature’s head and neck protruding from the loch, became news right around the time the movie came out. (Probably too late to influence the movie, but more on that in a bit.)

This is the British equivalent of a Poverty Row film, clearly made on very cheap sets and with a cast that’s a lot less stellar than you’d normally see in the movies. The biggest name in the credits is David Lean, who cut his teeth in the movie industry editing movies like this.

What little plot there is has to do with the publicity caused by the Loch Ness Monster. In the first scene we see a scared man run into a pub and tell everyone he saw the monster. A Prof. Heggie (Seymour Hicks) explains to the crowd that the monster is a fact, so he goes to London to address a meeting at the British Museum. The meeting does not go well. Heggie insists the monster is a Diplodocus, hatched from an egg left over from primeval times and unearthed by the road construction so closely associated with the monster’s first appearance. Oddly, this explanation is completely counter to Heggie’s speech in the first scene, where he states that generations of his family have known about the monster. Even more oddness comes when the other scientists take Heggie to see the Diplodocus skeleton in the museum, I guess to prove to him that it’s extinct, but we never see the skeleton. I have three theories as to why the skeleton may be omitted. First, the footage may just be missing. The movie is old and not well preserved. Second, the movie may have been so cheap that they just couldn’t get footage of the skeleton for some reason. And third, and the most likely, the filmmakers decided not to show the skeleton because it would have looked nothing like the monster they eventually do show.

An arrogant reporter named Jimmy (Frederick Peisley) decides to glom on to the story for some quick fame, and he follows Heggie back to Scotland. Once there the movie devolves into a series of jokes about Scotland, and Jimmy’s annoying attempts to woo the professor’s daughter, Angela (Nancy O’Neal). There’s also a lot of talk about how deep Loch Ness is, and how it reaches all the way to Hell itself. This seems to be a major rationale for how there could be a monster in a lake, but it’s not exactly accurate. Loch Ness is deep for a lake in Britain, but it’s not really that deep in terms of lakes overall. It’s also long, but in terms of square miles, it isn’t one of the larger lakes in the world, not by a long shot.

In the last few minutes of the movie a diver is sent down by Heggie to find the cave he assumes the creature must live in. The diver succeeds, but is attacked and eaten by the unseen monster. Heggie is put on trial for disregarding safety rules in his mad search for the monster. Jimmy determines that the only thing that will salvage the professor’s reputation (and his own chances at getting some from the daughter) is to find the monster, so he goes down into the Loch in a diving suit. At the bottom Jimmy finds the cave, but the monster appears too, stalking towards him. So now we finally see it: an iguana, playing a dinosaur. This isn’t the first example of the “slurpasaur” in cinema history, but it’s close. I’ve heard that the 1914 film Brute Force used lizards for dinosaurs, and the 1929 version of The Mysterious Island had a baby alligator with a horn as big as its head glued to its snout playing a sea monster, but those are the only examples I know of before The Secret of the Loch. Jimmy is pulled out of the water before he can become monster chow, and the monster obligingly swims a few laps in front photographers gathered for the trial, proving once and for all the monster exists and allowing Jimmy to get laid, the end.

The movie version of the monster doesn’t resemble the reported monster, or the Diplodocus skeleton talked about earlier, at all. It is interesting that the public perception of the monster crystalized so early on the idea that it was a dinosaur. All of the early sightings were remarkably ambiguous as to what the monster might actually be. Then, as today, there were two competing ideas as to what the whole monster looked like. One is the “sea serpent” version, with a long, undulating body and head something like a horse’s. Sometimes this version has fins, but usually not legs. A humorous caricature of this version of the monster is seen in one scene of The Secret of the Loch. The other version of the monster is the sauropod/plesiosaur, which is obviously more sensational, and based on scientifically known creatures rather than myths and legends. It has been suggested, and I think this is quite likely, that the dinosaur version of the Loch Ness Monster was greatly influenced by the Brontosaurus attack scene in King Kong (1933). The Surgeon’s Photo also appears to have been influenced by that same scene in Kong, and it in turn went on to define what the monster looked like in most people’s minds, despite being a crude hoax.

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054/100 Empire of the Wolves (2005)

Feb 3

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | No Comments

I admit to having a weakness for the new wave of French thrillers, the ones so influenced by Luc Besson and his big budget sensibilities. Empire of the Wolves is another one, featuring many stylish sequences, and even a full out assault by special forces on what appears to be Hobbiton at the end. Oh, and let’s not forget the presence of Jean Reno, though in this movie he’s featuring his worst facial ever, and that’s saying something.

So what is Empire of the Wolves about? At first it’s not really clear. This movie is a textbook example of how not to structure a mystery. There are two plots going for the first half of the movie, and they appear to have nothing to do with each other.

In one Anna (Arly Jover), a Parisian housewife married to a cop who moves in the upper reaches of society, is having memory problems. She also has hallucinations that make her see everyone around her as horrible monsters. Her memory problems are so bad that’s she not entirely sure her husband wasn’t replaced with a double, perhaps someone who’s had plastic surgery to look like her husband.

At the same time there’s a serial killer stalking the streets of Paris. He’s killed three women who were all Turkish immigrants and of very similar physical descriptions, mutilating all of them in the same vicious way. Paul (Jocelyn Quivrin), a police officer, has been investigating, but he’s getting nowhere. Desperate for some help he goes to Schiffer (Reno), a disgraced cop with connections to the Turkish immigrant community. The two of them tour the Turkish underground, and Paul is disgusted by Schiffer’s violent means of getting information.

Obviously all this wouldn’t be going on in one movie if the two situations didn’t have something to do with each other, but it’s more than hour before things start to connect, and by the end the movie is crushed by the incredibly unlikely coincidences that the plot requires. If I may get spoilery, it turns out that Anna is actually a Turkish immigrant who stole a bunch of heroin from the most powerful criminal gang in Turkey. She changed her appearance with plastic surgery, but then, apparently randomly, was kidnapped by a secret government anti-terrorism program. This program has working tech that allows them to wipe out a person’s personality and replace it with a new one. (Hello, Dollhouse.) They want to try it out as a way to create super sleeper agents in terrorist organizations, so they kidnapped Anna because she was an undocumented Turkish immigrant and unlikely to be missed. (She doesn’t look Turkish, though, which you’d think would give the kidnappers pause.) Her memory problems were the new personality degrading.

At the same time the criminal gang sent Azer, their best assassin, to Paris to find the woman who stole the drugs. He couldn’t find her, so the serial killings were just him practicing on women who looked like Anna used to look. I’m not sure how a guy gets to be a successful assassin if he goes around killing extraneous innocent people, especially when those killings serve to warn his target he’s coming. Oh, and let’s not forget that Azer just happened to be a regular customer at the sweets shop where the mind-wiped Anna worked.

There’s more, but I guess it doesn’t matter much. The whole movie has a little La Femme Nikita feeling to the scenes where Anna slowly remembers that she used to be a super-assassin too, and Jean Reno is never less than fun to watch. Too bad that the whole serial killer plot is a useless distraction.

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053/100 The Day After (1983)

Feb 2

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 3 Comments

This was my beloved’s choice for my “Childhood Trauma” movie theme. In case you missed this movie when it first aired, it’s basically the same story as Charlotte’s Web, but everyone gets radiation poisoning and dies slowly over the course of the last hour of the movie.

What did we learn about Americans in this movie? Consider this. Anne Frank spent more than two years living in half an attic with her family, another family, and one extra person, and by “living,” I mean she never stepped outside her hiding space in that time. In The Day After, the young woman who takes refuge with her family in the basement lasts five days before she starts screaming about how she can’t remember what her boyfriend’s face looked like and breaks out of the shelter to go roll around in fallout.

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052/100 The Student Nurses (1970)

Feb 1

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As near as I can tell this is the first of the nurseploitation films, and as you might expect, it’s the one that comes closest to aspiring to be a real movie. So, the particulars. There are four nurses in The Student Nurses, though one of them gets a lot less screen time than the other three. They’re students, closing in on graduation. And as with the other nurseploitation movies, these nurses manage to find excuses to take their clothes off as much as possible.

One of the nurses begins a relationship with a gynecologist because she likes “clean” medicine, by which she means people not dying. Another of the nurses is a free spirit who meets hippie biker right out of Easy Rider, takes LSD with him, and gets pregnant. The third nurse becomes involved with some sort of Mexican militant. And the fourth nurse, the one we don’t see much of, befriends a teenager dying of cystic fibrosis.

There are the standard scenes of what was popular and controversial when the movie was made. The hippie nurse goes to a “love in,” which is a lot like a drum circle, but with a higher proportion of guitars. One character undergoes an illegal abortion. Oh, and there’s a strange scene where one nurse is cautioned not to give first aid for fear of being sued by malpractice. Later she sees a performance art/protest that turns into a riot, and she just stands over an injured person staring, then walks away. I know malpractice laws were relatively new in 1970, but this scene seems horribly silly.

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I will give 1000 Flanian pobble beads to whoever can make me this

Feb 1

Posted by Scott Hamilton in Computers | 1 Comment

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051/100 The Mephisto Waltz (1971)

Jan 31

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 1 Comment

My beloved recorded this movie off cable, I guess because it has Alan Alda in it. Eh, it’s a movie, it will do for today.

So the first thing I noticed is that The Mephisto Waltz was produced by Quinn Martin, who produced such shows as The Fugitive and Streets of San Francisco. This was his one foray into feature producing, even though the way the movie is made it looks like it was shot for TV. The only indication that this was intended for theaters is nudity in a few brief scenes.

Myles (Alan Alda) is a music journalist, happily married to Paula (Jacqueline Bisset). One day he gets an offer to interview a reclusive master pianist named Duncan Ely (Curt Jurgens). Duncan and his daughter Roxanne (Barbara Perkins) are clearly taken with Myles, outwardly because he used to be a pianist himself. They befriend the Myles and Paula, and invite them to parties at the Ely mansion, which are bizarre bacchanalias. So maybe Duncan isn’t that reclusive? Anyway, Paula begins having strange dreams and finds strange things in Duncan’s house, like a magic books and life masks, and then she find out that Duncan is dying of leukemia. Duncan does die, and Paula notices changes in Myles. He’s suddenly a much better pianist, and he doesn’t remember details of his marriage. Oh, and Duncan left him a bunch of money. Gee, I wonder what happened?

This movie was early in the whole “Devil’s disciple” cycle of movies that ran from Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, and while I’ve often seen the movie referred to as nondescript, but I would like to talk about the ending, which as far as I know is unique to the genre. Spoilers abound from this point on.

So Duncan is a Devil worshipper, and he’s taken over Myle’s body. This is obvious immediately, though I’m not sure when Paula figures it out. The movie is fuzzy on that. The more I think about it, the movie is fuzzy on lots of things. Perhaps the biggest fuzzy area is that Myles and Paula have a daughter, Abby. She’s about twelve-years old, and she only appears in a couple scenes. So much of the way Myles and Paula talk suggests that they don’t have children at all. I wonder if she was added at the last minute for some reason, but I’m not sure why.

In the second half of the movie Duncan (in Myles’ body) and Roxanne start a campaign of terror against Paula, killing Abby (though Paula barely responds to the news) and another man Paula goes to for comfort, and apparently even try to kill Paula. So after complaining that she just wants Myles back, Paula sneaks into Duncan’s mansion and steals his magic book and some magic artifacts. She then uses these to make her own deal with the Devil, and transports herself into Roxanne’s body, who, despite being his daughter, is also Duncan’s lover. So Paula gets to stay with Myles… even though it’s actually Duncan’s mind in Myles body. So that’s the moral of the story folks, Alan Alda’s penis is so great that it’s worth making a deal with the Devil and sleeping with what is, in every way but the physical, a completely different person.

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050/100 Damien: Omen II (1977)

Jan 30

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 3 Comments

I’ve always thought that the Omen films were the laziest of all the occult themed movies of the 1970s. They’re based on arguably the most movie-ready book of the Bible, Revelation, yet they manage to dumb down all of Christian eschatology to the following: There’s a creepy kid, and lots of people die in accidents around him. Not even interesting accidents, necessarily. There’s one scene in Damien: Omen II where an old man playing hockey on a frozen river overshoots the marked rink and falls into a hole in the ice. I think the Devil can only claim an assist on that one, at best.

Seven years after the events of the first movie the twelve-year old Damien is being raised by his uncle Richard Thorn, and his second wife Ann (Lee Grant). Damien is enrolled in a prestigious military academy, along with his cousin Mark. The plot, such as it, has various people discovering that Damien is the Antichrist or the Beast of Revelation (in keeping with modern understandings of eschatology those two figures are assumed to be the same, despite a lack of Biblical evidence for the view), and then they die. There are a couple of the Devil’s disciples hanging around, including Lance Henriksen as a teacher at the academy and Robert Foxworth as an executive at Thorn’s company who’s pushing for a morally bankrupt land grab scheme.

Some of the deaths are more funny than scary. A nosey reporter stops by the side of the road and has her eyes pecked out by a crow. Then she wanders towards the sound of a truck and gets run over. A doctor who is looking at Damien’s blood sample under a microscope realizes Damien has jackal’s blood (Son of a bitch! – but what kind of medical book in a hospital identifies jackal blood?), and rushes to tell someone. The elevator he takes gets stuck and falls. It stops and he’s unharmed, but then the counterweights at the top of the shaft fall, and, with a cable strung between them, cut the poor doctor in half at the waist!

It’s a shame the movie barely tackles the most interesting aspects of the story. First, what’s it like to find out you’re the Beast of Revelation? The movie seems to go back and forth as to whether or not Damien knows his true nature, and the movie certainly never deals with his state of mind on the subject. There’s is one scene where a disciple tells him to read Revelation, Chapter 13, and Damien finds the 666 scar on his head and freaks out, but in the next scene he’s fine.

But here’s the second thing. The disciple told Damien to read the Bible. If you read a bit farther along from the chapter the disciple indicated you find out that the Jesus wins and the Devil loses. If you believe that the Bible is an authority on such things, why would you be the Devil’s disciple? You’re fated to lose! Have these disciples never read the Bible all the way to the end? Or does the Devil have its own Bible? But then why give Damien the version where he dies horribly? Not going to do much for morale.

Luckily Mark Millar and Peter Gross did a comic that took this material a bit more seriously called Chosen, reprinted as American Jesus, Vol. 1. As far as I know Vol. 2 isn’t yet on the horizon.

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049/100 Posers (2002)

Jan 29

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 1 Comment

Or considering the Canadian origin of this movie, Posers, Eh?

No more Canadian jokes. Posers is the story of four female roommates who go clubbing at every opportunity, but being a movie friends they are incredibly diverse and have nothing in common that might otherwise make them friends. Love (Stefanie von Pfetten) is a self-obsessed former beauty queen who even has a huge picture of herself as wallpaper in room. Vonny (Sarain Boylan) is a drug user and kleptomaniac. Ruth (Emily Hampshire) sells flowers in a clown suit by the side of the road, and tries to insert herself into TV news stories about car accidents as much as possible. And Adria (Jessica Paré) is the new girl and our narrator.

One night Love beats a woman to death in the bathroom of a nightclub, while the other three watch. They cover the crime up, though that requires little more than telling the police that Love’s ex-botfriend probably did it. Not only does the lead investigator (Adam Beach) accept this, he starts sleeping with Adria! Things don’t go as well as planned for the girls as time goes on. One night Adria arrives home to find Love missing and the floors of the apartment covered in blood. Ruth obsesses over Love, and sets up a shrine to her memory. Vonny becomes unstable and paranoid, and Adria’s mother entreats her leave the destructive influence of the other girls.

The resolution to the whodunit is laughable, based on a ginormous coincidence and someone seeing The Sixth Sense way too many times. If you need to see a movie to figure out that being shallow, self-obsessed and homicidal is a bad thing you might get something from this movie, but everyone else is likely to be insulted by the ending.

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048/100 Airport ‘77 (1977)

Jan 28

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 1 Comment

I’m not sure that current or future generations are going to understand the Airport movies. Hell, I remember them as a fairly current phenomenon, and I’m not sure I get why there were four of them. Airport ‘77 is the third in the series, and probably the one with the most preposterously overloaded cast. Let’s list some of the people in this movie, shall we? Jimmy Stewart, Joseph Cotton, Jack Lemmon, Olivia de Havilland, Christopher Lee, Darren McGavin, George Kennedy, M. Emmet Walsh, Brenda Vaccaro, Lee Grant, and Gil Gerard. Hell, the token black guy is played by Robert Hooks, the star of Trouble Man. There are so many stars in this movie you might wonder why they don’t show it in a planetarium. Sadly lots of stars don’t make the movie more enjoyable. Some actors get very little to do, especially Joseph Cotton. Jimmy Stewart is supposed to have some sort of emotional journey related to the fact that his grandson is on the doomed plane, but mostly he just squints into the distance while stuff happens far away. I would have rather this movie given more time to fun actors in important roles, like Jack Lemmon (the pilot) and Darren McGavin (the engineer, or something), rather than cutting back to Olivia de Havilland looking worried every few minutes.

As you can tell from the picture above, the big event in this movie is that the 747 ends up underwater. The reason is that the plane is underwater is because it’s hijacked by art thieves who want the plane’s cargo. Even though the copilot is in league with the thieves he still manages to clip and oil derrick on the way to the abandoned airfield where the thieves were going to offload the art collection. Once the plane is under the only real drama is trying to figure out how to get a raft with a radio transponder outside without flooding the rest of the airplane. Once found, the movie kills time with diving scenes and the Navy bringing the plane up, but it’s not the sort of “one damn thing after another!” scenario featured in the best disaster flicks of the 1970s.

Oh, and I know human life is priceless blah blah blah, but it might have been nice if they had at least mentioned that what was supposed to be a infinitely important collection of art was left on the ocean floor.

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047/100 Dead Alive (1992)

Jan 27

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 2 Comments

Dead Alive was Bryan’s choice for my “childhood trauma” movie group theme. If you’re familiar with this movie, you know that the trauma associated with it is not limited to any age. Bryan’s defense against other angry movie groupers is that Peter Jackson has 35 Academy Award nominations. There’s even one member of our group who before tonight had only seen one zombie movie, and that was Shaun of the Dead, so imagine how this went over.

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046/100 Deja Vu (2006)

Jan 26

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This Denzel Washington/Tony Scott thriller features Washington as Carlin, an ATF agent investigating an explosion that kills hundreds of people on a ferry out of New Orleans. He’s contacted by a secret government project that claims to have ultra-detailed surveillance data on the area of the ferry four days before, but it soon becomes apparent that it isn’t surveillance in the usual sense. Rather an experiment opened a wormhole back in time, and now the government can use it too look back in time, but only at one place and only exactly four days and six hours into the past. By itself, this is a pretty neat concept. Carlin, in his investigations, figured out that a certain woman (Paula Patton) was killed by the bomber and her truck used to sneak the bomb aboard the ferry, and now Carlin is able to see before she was killed. This could have made for a bittersweet movie about a crime being solved in the past but being too late to save an innocent woman from a tragic fate. However, this is a Tony Scott film, so we don’t get that. Instead, car chases! Insane car chases! Like Carlin, wearing a portable rig that lets him see the past, driving the wrong way down a crowded highway. Deja Vu also, after initial indications that the past can’t be effected, heads straight into irreconcilable paradox territory, with Carlin conspiring to send himself back in time. It’s a shame, I would have liked to see a version of this film that was more of a straight mystery.

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045/100 Night Call Nurses (1972)

Jan 25

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 2 Comments

Night Call Nurses is one of the “Nurseploitation” movies of the early 1970s, a strange little subgenre that flowered briefly before being almost totally annexed by the growing porn industry. The plot of all these films is exactly the same: Some number of young nurses (usually three, sometimes four) work at the same hospital and are friends. They each get romantically involved with someone, usually patients they meet at the hospital. There are lots of scenes of the nurses taking their clothes off, and all these films are practically obsessive in their attempts to fit as many current trends or fads as possible into their brief running times.

So here’s the how this movie shakes out. The nurses, three of them, work at a mental hospital. Barbara (Patty Byrne) is involved in a strange free love encounter group, and eventually falls for her therapist, though when she thinks he’s betrayed her she tries to run him over with a car. Okay, that was pretty awesome. Janis (Alan Stewart) is blonde, and that’s about all we ever find out about her. She hooks up with trucker who is in the hospital because he’s addicted to amphetamines and has hallucinations. And finally there’s Sandra (Mittie Lawrence), who sees a prisoner famous for starting a riot (a reference to Attica) being wheeled into a secure ward. She falls for one of his cronies, and the climax of the movie has Sandra engineering the prisoner’s escape, therefore sticking it to the Man. There’s also a creepy guy stalking all three women, leaving notes written in lipstick. This is the kind of movie that’s fun as a time capsule, not so much as an actual story.

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044/100 Mars Needs Women (1967)

Jan 24

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | No Comments

I’ve written about many films by writer/director Larry Buchanan over the years, and I’ve even suggested him as a better candidate for “worst director of all time” than Ed Wood, Jr. Yet this whole time ‘ve had a secret shame. I’ve never seen perhaps Buchanan’s most famous movie, at least by title, all the way through. So I finally sat down and saw all of Mars Needs Women.

The plot couldn’t be much simpler. Mars needs women. Mars sends five guys in a flying saucer to Earth to get some women. After an odd first act where the lead martian (Tommy Kirk) tells the U.S. military his entire plan for no reason, the five martians disguise themselves with earth clothes and go looking for one or so women each. The lead martian hooks up with a space scientist who, to the unending shock of every man in the movie, is also an attractive woman. Yvonne Craig to be exact. So after a bunch of padding and some successful forays into a strip club, the aliens have the five women they’ll need to repopulate Mars. But what of love?

The problem I have with a many Buchanan films is that I can’t tell if they’re supposed to be parodies. With it’s complete lack of special effects (the martians teleport simply by being edited into scenes), minimal plot, and duct tape costumes, this movie is at least a decade or two behind the times and can’t be taken seriously. But it isn’t funny either, so what is it? Bad science fiction or bad comedy?

043/100 Death Laid an Egg (1968)

Jan 23

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 5 Comments

And now for something completely different. Obviously, I decided to watch this entirely on the basis of the title. How could I not? I mean, it’s not even a comedy!

So what is Death Laid an Egg? It’s sort of a giallo, though so close to the hatching of that genre that it doesn’t follow many of the rules of that form. Let me lay out the plot. Anna (Gina Lollobrigida) owns a chicken farm. But not any chicken farm, but a chicken farm that is totally automated. So automated that she can run it herself, with minimal help from her husband Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignant). The only regular employee the farm seems to have is an egghead chemist, who is working on breeding better chickens. Nesting with Anna and Marco is Gabrielle (Ewa Aulin), Anna’s niece. Gabrielle is having an affair with Marco, though I’m not sure Anna would care that she’s being cuckolded. Then there’s Mondaini (Jean Sobieski), a man who happened to witness Marco kill a prostitute in the hotel room next to his. Later Mondiaini shows up at a meeting of the “commission” of poultry farmers Anna and Marco belong to, crowing that he can help them with advertising the wonders of chickens.

I’m really underplaying the movie’s obsession with chickens. The whole movie has a weird, disjointed style that can make some scenes a chore to sit through. But imagine my surprise, by the end the movie actually pays off, with the mysteries of who knew who and who knew what actually making some sort of strange sense.

However, the two most memorable scenes have nothing to do with the plot. In one Anna and Marco throw a dinner party, and Mondiaini is invited by Gabrielle. At the party Mondiaini suggests a game where the guests clear all the furnishings out of a room, and one by one the couples at the party enter the empty room and are exposed to the “truth” because there’s nothing in the room to distract them.

The real money shot of the movie, though, is scene where an unlikely confluence of events result in the birth of a brood of super-chickens. These mutants, apparently the result of Marco accidentally interfering with the chemist’s experiments, have no heads or wings, yet grow without consuming any food! Incredibly, this is a good three decades before those silly rumors started circulating that KFC was growing similar mutant chickens. Marco decides the chickens are abominations and takes a hatchet to them before they grow much larger, much to the consternation of Anna and the commission.

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042/100 Tetsujin 28 (2005)

Jan 22

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | No Comments

I was a little surprised to find out that the original manga version of Tetsujin 28 dates all the way back to the 1950s. Between that and Astroboy, the Japanese started early on their fetish for robot surrogate family members.

This live action rendition of Tetsujin 28 tries to keep as much of the original plot (son inherits the giant robot his dead father built for WWII), but seeing as the movie is set in the modern day it’s an awkward fit. It’s similar to how the origins of the Marvel superheroes that rely on the Cold War have gotten all messed up as the decades passed. So in this movie the original Tetsujin(s) were built during WWII, but never used. The original scientist’s son continued working on them for some undetermined period of time, but was killed in an accident, and now it’s his 12-year old son Shotaro who inherits the robot’s controls. Good thing too, because it just happens that another mad scientist has sent his giant robot Black Ox to destroy Tokyo. Shotaro has a crisis of confidence both because Tetsujin is out of date and because he thinks he’s too young to control a giant robot. I don’t know, I’m not sure I’d want to tell a 12-year old smart enough to know he shouldn’t be piloting a giant robot he’s wrong, but in this movie old people yell at him to sack up, and then they rig poor Shotaro with a control rig that makes him feel pain every time Tetsujin gets hit.

On the plus side, the kid playing Shotaro is great. Probably the best child actor I’ve seen in any Japanese movie. It turns out he was a couple years older than his character, which is a little bizarre. I thought he was actually younger than 12.

While the scene where Black Ox first attacks Tokyo is pretty terrific, the climactic fight between the newly redone Tetsujin and the evil robot is terrible. Maybe they ran out of money, but the bright blue Tetsujin looks like a cartoon in every shot, and even the animation quality on the Black Ox seems to degrade as the movie goes on. The fight itself is an uncompelling mix of the two robots slowly punching each other and the robots stumbling backwards, and nothing else. It’s like a big budget adaptation of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots.

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041/100 Whiteout (2009)

Jan 21

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 2 Comments

I will give credit to the filmmakers here. They identified the movies biggest asset right off the bat, and that’s Kate Beckinsale and curves. So the movie opens with what has to be one of the most gratuitous shower scenes imaginable, because the movie is set entirely in Antarctica. After Ms. Beckinsale towels off, she’s stuck in pretty ordinary murder mystery, albeit one with a more limited number of suspects than usual for this movie. Even if you include everyone on the continent, it’s the number of suspects probably isn’t in the triple digits. A body is found out on the ice, without cold weather gear. Beckinsale plays the only law enforcement officer in Anarctica, and a monster storm is closing, threatening to trap everyone for months if they don’t leave soon. So it’s a race against time, and a killer who has an agenda that appears to have something to do with a Russian plane that crashed decades before.

A movie like this really has to sell the environment as a threat, but I can’t say I ever felt like this movie did a very good job at that. The climax, where people can stay on their feet in the middle of the storm so long as they’re attached to the magic carabiner line, but pinwheel through the air the second they’re detached, is particularly fakey.

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040/100 The Day of the Triffids (1962)

Jan 20

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 2 Comments

The Day of the Triffids was Teresa’s pick for the “childhood trauma” movie theme. Perhaps the funniest thing about this movie when seen today, besides the unlikely seawater solution at the end, is that our “hero” Bill Manson (Howard Keel) is about the least heroic person imaginable. He’s in the hospital for an operation to save his sight, but the next morning when the rest of the populace is struck blind he shows no interest in helping anybody else, even though he was nearly blind himself. Later in the movie he leaves all the students at a girls’ school to the tender mercies of a gang of escaped convicts, and then the triffids, only saving teacher he’s hot for. Incidentally, one of the more conspicuous victims at the school is played by Carol Ann Ford, who shortly after this movie would play Susan on Doctor Who.

Oh, and perhaps the most famous scene in the movie, the lighthouse attack, is pretty funny too, because for it to happen the 10-foot tall triffid must have some how snuck by our heroes and in through the open front door, without them noticing anything. Maybe being a scientist reduces your peripheral vision.

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039/100 The Time Machine (2002)

Jan 19

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 1 Comment

What the heck? That’s my simple reaction to this retelling of H.G. Wells’ groundbreaking story of time travel. I think the problem is that the original story is so simple. Wells’ wasn’t, as far as I can remember, even thinking about paradoxes, but this movie has one because any self-respecting time travel story now has to have a paradox. It doesn’t add anything to the movie, other than wasting the first half hour of the movie. (And like all paradoxes, it doesn’t make sense if you think about it too much.) The future with the Eloi and the Morlocks is transformed into a comic book, with the Morlocks being lead by their own Doctor Doom, played by Jeremy Irons in what would have been a career slide for nearly any other actor, but Irons’ previous movie was Dungeons & Dragons, so his campy performance here is actually a step back towards respectability. The new Morlocks also look awful, and I’m not sure why the filmmakers allow so many closeups of the stiff, unconvincing masks.

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038/100 The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

Jan 18

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 1 Comment

It would perhaps be best not to dwell on the exact circumstances that resulted in me sitting in a theater showing New Moon, the second movie in what I’m supposed to believe is the “Twilight Saga,” even though all the good sagas I know of include dragons and fights and the occasional pillaging. Nothing that much fun going on here. Certainly no pillaging.

First, let me sum up the entire Twilight experience with two lines of dialogue and an unintended double entendre:

Bella: I’m coming.
Edward: I don’t want you to come.

I saw the first Twilight, and it was a bland supernatural romance, completely pointless in a world where Buffy the Vampire Slayer did and True Blood is now doing the same material so much better. The central premise of Twilight is that Bella (Kristen Stewart) is incredibly attractive to every male in the story, yet whether by design or accident, Bella is portrayed as so aggressively bland that it’s impossible to believe anyone would want to spend more than couple of minutes around her. The fact that Bella (or Stewart) can’t seems to work up the slightest bit of charm makes everything that’s going on in the movie seem like a surreal play staged for Bella’s benefit, like maybe it’s all a huge practical joke and when Bella finally gets back together with Edward he’s going to drop a bucket of pigs’ blood on her. But no, that would be interesting. Nothing interesting is allowed to happen in New Moon.

Sadly, the bad acting doesn’t stop with Bella. Almost the entire cast is bland and uninteresting. When, about 45 minutes in, a minor character delivers the first bit of funny dialogue, and does so with wit and verve, it was like finding an ice cream cone in the desert. It shouldn’t be surprising that the character dies a few scenes later, lest he say something else interesting and show up the main characters more.

Oh, and a note filmmakers: If you’re going to have a parodic fake movie in your crappy movie, make sure it isn’t far more fun than the movie it’s in. When the fake action movie Face Punch is introduced, I spent the rest of New Moon wishing I could see Face Punch. I bet stuff at least happens in Face Punch.

From what I understand New Moon is very close to the novel, but that’s not a good thing. There are moments in New Moon that look ridiculous onscreen in a way that may not have been obvious on the page. Take the scene where Bella goes running off into the woods even though some animal is killing people in the area. Bella, for reasons I can’t remember, faints in the middle of the forest, and is found by Sam, a member of the local native tribe. Bella’s father (who is also the town sheriff) is about to mount a search of the woods, and Sam, inexplicably only wearing a pair of bike shorts in the winter weather, comes walking out of the woods carrying Bella. Bella’s father runs up and says, and I quote, “Thank you, Sam.” Not, “Why the hell are you naked in the woods with my daughter, you freaking psycho!” “Thank you, Sam.” Because that’s what a sheriff and concerned father would say.

I guess the movie was rushed into production, presumably to cash in on the Twilight phenomenon before the 12-year old girls who love it so start to get interested in real boys, and probably partly because Robert Pattison’s “eternal youth” isn’t going to hold as well as a vampire’s is supposed to if the production schedule gets dragged over more than a couple of years. This particular movie was directed by Chris Weitz, who is best known for American Pie, and who showed no particular flair for fantasy in The Golden Compass, and I suspect he got the job because he was available. The movie is surprisingly flat. The only time it shows any life at all is during the brief werewolf fight about halfway through.

I really am not looking forward to the next movie if this is how the producers are going to treat the movies. And it’s not like they have an incentive to put much more care into the next one. After all, New Moon made nearly $300 million in the U.S. alone.

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037/100 Open Graves (2009)

Jan 17

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 3 Comments

One SyFy original movie is enough… Wait, the very next movie stars Eliza Dushku! Record!

I was robbed. I’m glad Dushku got a free trip to Spain out making this turkey, but Open Graves wasn’t that much fun to watch. Basically, the movie is a ripoff of the Final Destination movies. A group of adults acquire an antique board game that, as it turns out, is made out of a witch. Not made by a witch, mind you, but made out of the body of a witch killed during the Spanish Inquisition. Bet you weren’t expecting that! I certainly didn’t know Torquemada was sponsored by Mattel. So these people decide to play the game, and the ones that draw “death cards” die in the manner the cards predict, except the cards are written so obscurely it’s tough to see exactly what the connections are between the cards and the deaths. But I guess the important thing here was to ape Final Destination as closely as possible, so everyone dies in ludicrously unlikely accidents. The upside of playing the game is that if you win you can get a wish to come true, and in what I think is a gallant gesture, the final surviving character wishes the movie never happened. Thank you, but too late.

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036/100 House of Bones (2010)

Jan 16

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 1 Comment

Oh SyFy original movies, how I love you so.

House of Bones starts out well. It’s basically a parody of one of SyFy’s biggest hits, Ghost Hunters (ie, the show where people look for proof of ghosts and never find any, week after week after week). A TV ghost hunting crew investigates a house known for being haunted, though nothing has happened there since the 1950s. But when the crew arrives the doors are open and the house is in remarkably good repair for a house that should have been abandoned for decades. There’s even fresh food in the fridge! Charisma Carpenter plays a local psychic hired by the TV show to add some color commentary. As the TV crew sets up one of their number gets sucked into a wall after following an apparition into a basement. The remaining crew quickly realize that for the first time ever they’re dealing with a real haunting, and the house won’t let them out. The set-up is creepy, and Charisma Carpenter makes one of the least annoying psychics I’ve seen in this kind of movie.

While the movie starts well, towards the end there is copious evidence of rewrites, re-editing, padding, and a completely rejiggered ending. You may notice that the picture above features Corin Nemec, for example. He plays the studio-bound host of the TV program, and he doesn’t share a single shot with any of the actors. He does eventually show up at the house after a bunch of time-wasting shenanigans like arguing with a cab driver, but he stays outside and only talks to the other characters through closed doors and windows for a few minutes before getting killed, having contributed nothing to the plot. At the climax Charisma Carpenter’s character comes up with a plan to kill the house (turns out the house is the monster, not the ghosts in it), and even though everything suggests her plan should work there’s a sudden bizarre edit and, boom!, she’s randomly stabbed by another character. That character proceeds to kill everyone else, sometimes, I suspect, standing in front of a green screen showing the sets the rest of the movie was filmed on. It’s shame, because before the confuse-o-rama ending, this was a passable alternative to movies like Spirit Trap.

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035/100 The Sisterhood (1988)

Jan 15

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After noticing that America 3000 was one of two post-apocalyptic Amazon movies Chuck Wagner made, I of course had to see the other one. The Sisterhood is a Filipino movie, and it focuses on three women with superpowers, looking for the rest of their sisterhood. Chuck Wagner plays a quasi-villain, though he’s not as bad as some of the other bad guys. The movie is not particularly memorable, but the finale is pretty funny. The three women acquire both an APC and a bunch of machine guns and fight their way into the bad guy’s fortress. They find the rest of their sisters chained to a wall, but are trapped in the room. (Amusingly, the bad guys are all wearing Vietnam era American military uniforms, surplus from some other film I assume.) Suddenly a glowing, faceless female figure appears to the sisterhood, berates the women for using guns, then transports all the women magically to freedom. Hey Goddess, you know when would have been a good time to transport your followers to safety? Before the few who were still free needed to take up the guns you hate so much just to survive.

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034/100 The Village of the Damned (1995)

Jan 14

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 3 Comments

You know when I realized John Carpenter might not have been the best person to direct this movie? When the mob of townspeople in a modern day California show up with actual pitchforks and torches. Seriously, where would you even find a torch today?

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033/100 Poltergeist (1982)

Jan 13

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 1 Comment

Poltergeist was the second in the “Childhood Trauma” movie night, chosen by Chasity. When she was younger her parents let her stay in the room while the movie was on TV, but covered her eyes whenever some scary happened, which was probably worse than just letting her watch it.

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032/100 The Last Castle (2001)

Jan 12

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The Last Castle is basically an update of Cool Hand Luke set in a military prison. Robert Redford plays a disgraced general who is sent to the prison run by James Gandolfini. Soon the general realizes that Gandolfini is abusing and sometimes killing the inmates, and leads a revolt. The ending gets pretty crazy, with the inmates building a surreptitious trebuchet, molotov slingshots, a rocket launcher, and even a method of hijacking a helicopter in flight. The whole last third of the movie plays like a demo reel for Mythbusters.

My favorite thing about the movie is that Gandolfini is basically wearing the same costume as he was in In the Loop, but is playing the completely opposite character.

031/100 Crimson (1976)

Jan 11

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 1 Comment

There should be a special genre called “What the…?” for those European horror films that spend much more time confusing me than scaring or thrilling me. Take Crimson, for example:

- When the thief Jack (Paul Naschy, who I just don’t get as a horror star) is shot in the head during a robbery his compatriots all agree that he should be saved because he’s such a great guy, but no one wants to risk jail by taking him to a real hospital. What the..?

- Instead of taking him to a mob doctor, they take Jack to mad scientist they happen to know. What the…?

- The mad scientist has been perfecting a process to repair brains, but all he needs another brain from a donor. After a little discussion, Jack’s friends decide to steal the brain of a rival thief they hate called, by himself and others, the Sadist. What the…?

- After shooting the Sadist dead Jack’s friends decide they need to decapitate the body, so they lay it on train tracks and wait until a train goes by. What the…?

- The mad scientist has ruined hands, so his pin-up wife has to do the operation to graft the Sadist’s brain onto Jack’s. What the…?

- Everyone is surprised when Jack wakes up after the operation and starts attacking women, just like the Sadist. What the…?

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030b/100 The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

Jan 10

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Perhaps doomed to be best known for being Heath Ledger’s last movie, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is another disaster behind-the-scene story for Terry Gilliam, but perhaps not as much his fault as some of his other disasters.

I guess the “What if?” here will always be, would Parnassus have been a better movie if Heath Ledger had been around to finish filming it? Though Gilliam’s films are sometimes a bit loose when it comes to plot coherence, this movie is particularly unfocused when it comes to Ledger’s character, who is apparently of central importance. He doesn’t show up until a half-hour in, and by the time the movie was over I wasn’t quite sure what his exact story was. The fantasy sequences inside the mirror are certainly stunning, but I’m still not sure what it was all in aid of.

This movie did whet my appetite for the possibility of Depp/Gilliam project, if not the previously deep-sixed Man Who Shot Don Quixote, then something new.

030a/100 Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Jan 10

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Is this movie completely accurate to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories? No. Does it really matter? No. I mean, it wasn’t until 1939 that any filmed adaptation of Sherlock Holmes even took place in Victorian London (the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce The Hound of the Baskervilles), and even that venerable series only lasted two movies set in the past before the detective was moved, without explanation, to the modern day to fight the Nazis (Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror). Clearly, accuracy to the original stories does not a great Holmes movie make.

The new Sherlock Holmes is more of an action romp through someone’s barely-recalled memories of the Jeremy Brett TV stories. Watson (Jude Law) has only just moved out of the apartment he shared with Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.), apparently putting an end to their partnership. (In more ways than one, the movie implies.) But a new case, involving a Lord Blackmore’s apparent survival of his own execution as well as a black magic/Masonic conspiracy that threatens the entire British government.

Remember a few years ago there was a TV show called Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, but with it’s feral jungle woman, reptilian lost civilizations, and rampant sorcery, it was much more Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Lost World? This Sherlock Holmes reminds me of that, resembling much more Edgar Rice Burroughs’ outlook on pulp fiction than Doyle’s.

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029/100 Dead-End Drive In (1986)

Jan 9

Posted by Scott Hamilton in 100 Movies/100 Days 3: The Long Weekend, DVD | 2 Comments

Continuing my tour through OZploitation I watched Dead-End Drive In, one of the more interesting movies I’ve seen from Down Under. The movie, like Mad Max, takes place after one of those apocalypses where things sorta go to hell, but the government keeps operating. Our main character is mildly ambitious mechanic Crabs (Ned Manning), who borrows his employer’s ‘57 Chevy to take his girlfriend Carmen (Natalie McCurry) on a date. He decides to take her to the Star Drive In. Once there two wheels are stolen off the vintage car. Crabs chases after the thieves and realizes that it was the police that took his wheels. Crabs tries to report the theft to the only attendant on duty, but the kindly old man doesn’t seem too interested and tells him to come back in the morning.

The next morning Crabs realizes the true purpose Star Drive In. It is in fact a concentration camp, designed to attract the troublesome young people and keep them pacified with junk food and free entertainment. Everyone but Crabs seems completely okay with living in the Drive In, so Crabs is on his own as he formulates an escape plan.

I found this satire pretty entertaining. The acting is not exactly subtle, but the concept really carries the film. It’s like the entire 1980s compressed into an single mold the shape of Australia.

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