p e n g u i n d e v i l

I always think that, come the weekend, I will make up for the lack of sleep that I get during the week. While my weekday alarm is set for 5:30 AM, I also have an alarm the other way. Our internet shuts off at Midnight, so I usually use that as a sign that it is time for sleep. Sometimes though, on the weekend, it doesn’t shut off at midnight. The last two night, in fact, I was up until after one a.m without losing Internet… Meaning that I actually had to make an unassisted decision to shut down for the evening. Regardless, I was somewhat productive with that time. Friday I continued with my Harryhausen rock block by watching my third consecutive RH movie. One that, in fact, I hadn’t seen before, Mysterious Island. This was was really great! While there weren’t any compelling beings like we would expect after watching Jason and the Argonauts and (somewhat) Million Miles From Earth, the Harryhausen effect was very well used. There were some creatures, but they didn’t really move my: the giant crab, the giant bird, eh so. But all of the scenes of the hot air balloon were very pleasing. Giant Crabs, you say? Hot Air Balloons? What? Well, see we start off in the Civil War outside a confederate military prison camp. When a group of union soldiers (and a scurrilous captive confederate) make their dramatic escape during a huge rainstorm, they do some by commandeering a small hot air balloon. Unfortunately, they are not aware of the particular law of physics that says that if you take a small hot air balloon and fly off into a rainstorm, you can easily float for thousands of miles in a short time and end up on the other side of the world, where you are bound so crash, not in the middle of nowhere, but right off the shore of a strange (nay, mysterious) island. Well, they’ve learned that lesson, as do a couple of ladies whose boat was lost in a storm in the Atlantic and also ended up crashing by the same island half a world away…

From that point on, it’s trying to get by with the giant beasts and pirates buzzing around… Some close calls and a visit from one of Jules Verne’s great characters help to give the film another exciting spark. The movie is actually much better than I had expected. The intimidating volcanic isle scenery was good, the characters were fun, some good action and scenes of the always nice to see the Nautilus, the nicest submarine that’s ever been floated…. My only dissatisfaction was a lack of interest in the animals… Except for, of course, the giant “squid”, which was pretty great.

Last night I switched it up somewhat on my drive to 1 am. I did without the Harryhausen but went with another fantasy standard of my youth: The Sword and the Sorcerer.

Basically a campy piece of mediocrity, but one that is entertaining and that does revel in its campiness. The story of an evil king’s plotting to defeat all of his opponents, and a group of young rebels seeking revenge against his foul deeds. It doesn’t age well, looking like a cheap, early 80’s fantasy movie that no one took too seriously while making. It does have some things going for it: the casket made of animate faces, Xusia (the lichy-thing which rises from that casket), and the female lead, Kathleen Beller… But that’s about it. Though our hero is fairly entertaining even if (or maybe because) he has a hard time wiping that smarmy smirk off his face.

The movie certainly could have been better if made with, say, the attitude that went into the previous years Dragonslayer. Or if it had at least been saddled with high production values (like the previous years Excalibur)… The lame props (especially the three bladed ejector sword) and the bad acting of most of the actors, make it pretty forgettable. Though Richard Lynch (veteran of just about every b-movie/show from the 70’s and 80’s) as the evil king does make for a fine antagonist.

Any movie calling itself 20 Million Miles To Earth is bound to attract attention to its use of numbers. While Venus can be about 20 million miles away, I am pretty sure that any flight from Venus to the Earth is going to take quite a bit more than 20 million miles of flight. Okay, maybe I’m being nick-picky, but ever since my confusion over Solo’s Kessel Run comment 33 years back (since explained), numbers in movies have always concerned me.

But I didn’t get much time to dwell on it, as the Earth-side action starts off quick! When a giant rocketship crashes into the sea near a group of “Sicilian” fishermen, we know that something exciting is about to happen. The fishermen decide to row on home after this turns of events, except for one boat who with the fateful words, “What are we? Children or men of the sea?” row out to the ship. The enormous space ship is close enough to be pretty tempting, after all, even with how terribly fake its crash-landing was. Plus, conveniently, there is a big hole in the ship right at water level.





So in our brave men of the sea go. Inside they find two survivors of the crash who are surprisingly not that alien after all. Well, maybe not surprising as, for such a futuristic ship on the exterior, the interior has the definite feel of a ship from the early 20th century.

The key to this story, though, is what they don’t rescue. A canister from the ship winds up on the shore where the little boy Pepe finds it and hides it away. Pepe is making a rather strange decision here, seemingly brought on by his desire for a cowboy hat from the great country of Texas, but maybe he is just odd as he makes another strange number reference by saying “a small kilometer”, but I digress. Of course little Pepe opens this canister, also implying that he hasn’t seen Return of the Living Dead (making him an odd one many times over) and sells off the gelled glob he find inside to a local traveling zoologist.





What we end up with is a real life creature from Venus! One that is is growing at a phenomenal rate due to Earth’s atmosphere, and, of course, he gets away and then begins the chase!





While this is a Harryhausen classic, the accent here is on Harryhausen, rather than classic. The monster is all right, and the scene where he gives humanity a turn with his art is funny, there just isn’t as much exciting eye candy as in his later features. The high point is that the star of the movie was William Hopper, who I associate so strongly with his Paul Drake role that anytime I see him in anything else it seems noteworthy.

While in a movie like this the lack of scene continuity is a given, I still think that they should have paid a little more attention to the details. For instance, when in discovering that the ship has crash landed, a General points to the Mediterranean and says “20,000 leagues under the sea”. What are we supposed to be thinking he is trying to say? Does he think that the ship landed in the sea, careened through the earth and popped out the other side? Does he have no grasp of what a league is (unlikely for a general, I would hope)? Is he trying to make of show of levity in the face of gravity by implying that they are going to be sailing around the earth under the sea? Does he just like the phrase? Should I just relax?

One of the two great fantasy classics of my youthful TV viewing days (along with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad) Jason and the Argonauts is one of Harryhausen’s great masterpieces. Featuring some of Harryhausen’s classic stop-motion monsters, along with a mob of gods and some great adventuring on the high seas. Jason and the Argonauts is the story of a group of heroes (including Jason and the troublesome and bear skin clad Heracles) who set off in search of the Golden Fleece. This all happens against the background of Zeus’ game playing. As, when many years before, Zeus gives favor to a king by allowing him to conquer a rival, he also tells him that one of those rivals’ three children will one day unseat him. Jason happens to be the son of that defeated king, and one of his crew members happens to be that the deposer’s son, hoping to prevent Jason from completing his quest. Personally, I would assume that if Zeus told me that was the deal, then I would assume that he would be right. But this fellow (stupid mortal) decides that he can defeat Zeus’ set-up.





While it may seem like another grand human adventure, it is, like all other endeavors, just a game for the gods, to help them pass the time. In this case, a chess game between that good cop/bad cop team of Hera (the always delightful Honor Blackman, only a year away from becoming infamous as Pussy Galore) and Zeus.





Their voyage to find the golden fleece is fraught with dangers, but also with some convenient assistance from Hera who accompanies them in the forms of the masthead of the ship. She sends them to an island for supplies with the warning not to take anything but food and when Heracles and his pal Hylas stumble upon the treasure chamber below the great bronze form of the islands protector, Talos, Heracles just can’t help but steal a giant golden brooch pin to use as a javelin. Of course Talos, following the creed of neither a borrower nor a lender be, cranes his creaky neck their way and sets off in a vengeful pursuit.





I watched this part of the movie with my daughter who insisted on watching the scenes of Talos moving around over and over again… With frequent pausing when she got scared. I think we watched them about 5 times. But I don’t blame her as this is the first great Harryhausen monster sequence in the film, and one of the best and longest. Plus, Talos is just a bad dude and, hey, those snivelly little people did steal his brooch pin!





This movie is great. The effects are great. Even with it being nearly 50 years old, the great stop-motion effects don’t slow down the appreciation or the “buy-in” of the movie. The splashing effects, on the other hand, kind of killed my buy-in because when the Argo is dropped into the sea by Talos and when they are traveling through the treacherous straight, the water drops from the splashes make it all too obvious that the things falling in the water were really quite small. But they gain an enormous amount of credit in my book for traveling through most of the movie in an actual ship in actual water. That is pretty cool. And, of course, the monsters… Talos, The Hydra and the teeth of the hydra (Harryhausen’s famous skeletons).

Sure, zombies are bad. But like everything, some kinds are worse than others. Of course, there are many different philosophies on this subject as to which varieties of zombie are the most troublesome: mummies, fast zombies, slow zombies, non-zombies (the not dead kind of “zombie”), smart zombies, dumb zombies… But I happen to think that fast zombies are the worst. Though coupled with minds, you have the rare and dreaded speedy thinker zombies. Could your zombies get any worse?

How about speedy and thinky Nazi zombies? Well, when this ill-fated group of 8 friends heads to the proverbial isolated cabin in the wilderness for a holiday, that is exactly what they find… That and a box of gold treasure and a condescending local fellow full of warnings. Of course, why bother heeding the warnings of the locals when good times are at hand?





With all of this, you have the makings for this greatly fun Norwegian Zombie movie, Dead Snow. Somewhat of a zomedy, but not really a full-on comedy, just a humorous and gorey movie that is well worth watching. While the zombies aren’t all that good, there is certainly a lot of bloody gore. Plus a machine gun, a hand grenade, zombie fistacuffs, sex in an outhouse, and lots of tough dead nazi’s.





As is common with these, while it starts out feeling like a “scary” horror movie, after a point it just turns into a gore/action film, but one that can be tense enough to keep your attention… The snowy environment is a nice one for the subject matter, though the soundtrack can be a bit horrible and out of place. I thought that this movie was a lot of fun, one of the better examples of what you can find for horror movies in the watch instantly section at Netflix.

Ah, the good life! That’s what Gal and Aitch have found in Spain. Two British gangsters retired to Spanish villas and enjoying nights of drinking, dancing and general merriment with their molls. Could life get any better? Probably not… But could it get worse? Starting right off during the opening credits (the best opening scene ever, by the way) we get a hint the filmmakers may not intend this particular retirement to be as relaxing as it might seem.

Into this situation comes a phone call from back home in jolly old England. It seems that there is a big job on the horizon and someone has decided that good old Gal has to join in. The problem is that good old Gal doesn’t want to come out of retirement. Unfortunately, this call came from good old Don Logan, the scariest psychopath this side of… Well, not this side of anyone. Really just about the scariest psychopath around. And Don has decided, in light of Gal’s hesitation, to come for a visit and make the invitation in person. And so we encounter one of the great film performances of all time. While all of the cast does a great job: Ray Winstone is just great as Gal, Cavan Kendall does a terrific job as his nervous and twitchy old pal Aitch… But Ben Kingsley? Ah, yes… It was this role, coming after his great performance in Death and the Maiden, that convinced me that Ben Kingsley could do no wrong, and here he doesn’t. Don is angry. Don is calm. Don is in charge and Don is a free-of-charge profanity dispenser. You want to be cursed at? Threatened? Smacked? All from someone who really is just trying to set you right? Logan’s your man! If you want to say no to him, he’d just as well chop your head off with an axe while he’s using the loo, burn your house down while he’s on the phone and then go out for lunch. One of those kinds of chaps.

Watching our little group trying to keep themselves together and not completely wilt under the heat of Don Logan is a very stressful and uncomfortable situation… And one of my favorites to watch. The second half of the movie is similarly stressful but in a much different sense. They do not drop the suspense and dread for poor old Gal, as he goes off to London under somewhat unexpected circumstances to participate in this job. Trying to get this job dealt with under the weighty shadow of Don Logan and trying to keep himself together while dealing with a much different, yet equally intimidating thug Teddy (Ian McShane in another great performance), keeps us on the edge of our seats. Sexy Beast is an hour and a half of stress, and it is worth every minute of it.

What else needs to be said about The Thing? Easily the best John Carpenter movie and easily the best of Kurt Russel’s (rather tired) series of scraggy independent tough guy roles, The Thing is also one of the greatest horror movies of all time and easily ranking in the top three of Sci-Fi monster movies (along with, obviously, Alien and, not so obviously, Event Horizon)… And yes, it is also one of the few examples of remakes that are completely superior to their originals.

Taking place on a secluded base in the Antarctic, the small crew of 12 men are getting ready to settle in for a long winter when they get some rather unexpected visitors. A couple of Norwegians in a helicopter chasing (well, and shooting at) a dog. When the helicopter lands and the Norwegians run through the base still shooting in pursuit of the dog, well, something just had to be done. The Norwegians end up dead, the dog ends up in the kennel and a couple of the guys take their helicopter off through the bad weather to see what might be up at the Norwegian’s base.

Of course, upon investigation, the Norwegian base is gutted and only corpses are to be found, including a very unusual one… What they also find is that those fellows seem to have uncovered an ancient spaceship and dug something out of the ice next to it. As our guys return to the base and the crew start to realize what is going on, we settle into a very unsettling case of rampant paranoia wherein everyone thinks that everyone else is not to be trusted. Scary, creepy and suspenseful with the great isolating environment of Antarctica, The Thing is a monster movie with great ideas.

Featuring one of the most outlandish and tricky monsters out there and a great cast. While the special effects are certainly starting to get pretty dated after 30 years, they still hold your attention with their great, grotesque and outrageous gore.

The Devil’s Tomb, hmm. Of course, the name alone brings to mind Prince of Darkness especially with the video tape playing through the credits. Some of that is certainly cribbed from the great PoD. But it doesn’t stop there… It didn’t take more than a few minutes for me to start thinking, “What the hell?”. Even before the opening credits are done we’ve been through such a smorgasbord of film rip-off’s that it’s a bit startling… Sensations of Aliens, The Tomb, and most notably, my all time favorite horror movie Prince of Darkness.

Once the credits are done we drop right into a badly rewritten re-shoot of the scene in Aliens where Ripley gives her briefing to the marines. Even using some of the same dialogue. So yes, they make it very clear that this is going to be bad. Plus, it’s directed by Bond son Jason Connery which creates another lack of confidence… Though it’s a whole different brand of bad than the bad films of Andy Sidaris that the other Bond’s son R.J. Moore frequently features in, as this doesn’t even feature any bathing/softcore nude scenes with busty ladies or even any attacks using remote control helicopters or cars!





After the video taped message in very Price of Darkness style made by a scientist who, in proper The Mummy fashion, goes missing in an archaeological site, and his daughter comes in with a batch of proper Aliens style ignorant wise-cracking soldiers, they descend into this place where they find, in proper Prince of Darkness style, a devil encased in something. And, of course in still more Prince of Darkness style, their pals start getting taken over by the bad guys so everyone, in proper Aliens style, does lots of excited and ineffective shooting… And cursing.

Looking at a digital map that brings Raccoon City to mind, the movie then descends into a standard clichéd American action film. But at this point you stop following the story anyway and instead start looking to see what scenes were taken from which movie.





What makes this mess even funnier is the casting.. Cuba Gooding JR? Ron Perelman? and yes, no, yes fuckin’ Henry Rollins doing a terrible, yet eager, job playing a priest. What the hell again? Who put this thing together?





And christ, is one of these marines actually named Hicks? Maybe the whole thing is intended as a homage to Aliens after all…

I imagine that some of the military flashback war scenes must be taken form some other movie but as I don’t tend to see those movies, I don’t know for sure, but maybe all of the helicopter scenes are cribbed from Blackhawk Down?

I know that all of this is probably unfair judgment, but as the movie isn’t original, scary or even suspenseful you’ve got to find something to think about while watching it.

Easily the best scene takes place 46 minutes in when the guy left alone (of course) upstairs with some messed up dying guy they found, wanders off in pursuit of a nude chick that happens to wander through the room. Of course, he ends with with something much different then his dream lady, and that was pretty funny.





Of course, it does have some things going for it: Rollin’s terrible performance, lot’s of fairly good gore, and you don’t have to pay much attention to it. A good to movie to have people over for some beers to, if you know what I mean.

The be-sored oozing baddies are fine and honestly, the second half is certainly more entertaining than the first half. Though towards the end it does bog down with the jibber-jabber. For some reason Ray Winstone is in this too. But honestly, all that I had been intending to do was see if Legion was available as an instant movie from Netflix.

Ah yes, the fine line between what is and what could be and who we make ourselves and who we could be. These themes are pretty blatantly covered in a fun little movie I watched last night, Ink. There, the line between waking reality and sleeping dreams is certainly blurred over and over again as we follow Emma and John through their troubles and an assortment of folks who are invisible to the waking word guiding them through some crazy events.

Though it certainly isn’t in the same league as any of these, it is at times reminiscent of Night Watch, Dark City and The Matrix and it gave me occasional flashbacks to playing Myst. I didn’t think of it a copy of those though, as it seemed pretty original. Ink is the story of conflict between those who bring dreams and those who bring nightmares, played out via a strange big-nosed being named Ink who is desperate to belong, a little girl that he has abducted as a means of doing so, those who are trying to return her to the real world and a father who has lost his way. Sort of Sci-Fi and sort of fantasy, Ink is certainly a very low budget movie, which shows with the acting, the sets and the grainy “very digital” quality, but it has a fairly interesting storyline and plot and the special effects are pretty well done.





Though it begins with a boring segment of this bitter father who is too serious and disconnected to pay any attention to his daughter, after night falls things pick up. A group of folks with an unusual and interesting entrance go around to the sleeping people and give them pleasant dreams, after that appear some interesting looking fellows who give people nightmares…





Then comes Ink. He is a mysterious being who abducts the little girl, against strenuous objections from the dream bringer people. While Ink tends to remain somewhat mysterious and concealed, her protectors do not. Consisting of the cute girl who was watching over her when she was abducted, an irritating “Pathfinder” with electrical tape over his eyes (well, maybe not all of the effects are good) and a couple of others, they relentlessly pursue Ink as he carts the girl into his intriguing hallway and all over the place.





While the movie was entertaining enough, I really thought it was the special effects that held my attention as they were not overdone and they fit the movie quite well. Though, honestly, the reason for this might mainly be that the effects involve light and the parts of the movie that those scenes take place in are shot in very high contrast, which serves to blur the line between the efect and the rest of the film. Regardless, I still thought that they were interesting, original and looked good.





Certainly not for everyone, but Ink is a great example of how, if you have some good ideas, you can make an interesting film with decent effects on a very low budget.

Oh, how could I?

A week ago today, April 8th, was the Penguindevil’s 5th anniversary! With nary a posting to be found. As it is both finals week and tax week, my annual picks and summation post will have to wait a few more days. Sigh…

But I can bring up a funny little movie that I watched this week. While having one of those “fall asleep in front of a movie” evenings, I selected something suitably mindless for that… Hide and Creep! Oddly enough, I didn’t fall asleep once… Which means two things. One is that I only ended up with about 4 hours of sleep that night, and two, I actually watched the movie from beginning to end.

While I wouldn’t say that I recommend it, I also wouldn’t suggest avoiding it, either. Hide and Creep is a super-low budget (the production company is aptly named “Crewless”) zombie movie. Being also a bit of a comedy, with a bit of UFOish goings on, it was fairly entertaining. Starting off with two storylines, one the tale of a video store clerk beset upon by what is possibly the cheapest rendition of a zombie that I have ever seen (but so unapologetically lame and cheap of a zombie that it seems forgivable), and, two, a poor fellow who wakes up naked in a tree (where we are forced to start pondering either drunkenness of abduction, or both) who sets off in pursuit of his clothes and his “’64 and a half Mustang” (and potentially the girl he was with)…

These two tales converge in this small hick town in Alabama where zombies (yes, more of the same type as above) start appearing everywhere and the non-zom population begins to decline rapidly. Sadly, the sheriff is on vacation and the deputy is stuck in Florida so two groups of non-zom civilians struggle to make it through this mess. One group is the above mentioned folks who are “joined” by Barbara, the bitchy (but still somewhat charming) girl who works the phones at the police department and a Federal agent (again, the worst rendition of a federal agent that I have ever seen) who parachutes into town, and a second, more motivated group, consisting of Barbara’s brother and his hunting pals who end up driving all around the place shooting all the zombies that they can find in the head.

Hide and Creep is a fun and entertaining (and low-expectation) movie that features the requisite naked ladies (naked lady zombies, that is), references to anal probes, hordes of hungry zombies, corny newscasts, dopey hicks with guns and an arrogant video store clerk.

While it does have all of that going for it, and it most certainly does qualify as a zomedy, Hide and Creep is not (as “Kevin Smith” is quoted as saying on that poster over there) “even better than Shaun of the Dead”. Not in the slightest, really.

Nope.

Well, only two more weeks of this semester and then I will most certainly need to get caught up with this! Of course, the best way to get caught up is to start by not falling further behind, so, with no further adieu, our watching this evening… I started off this afternoon by trying to get into three sci-fi movies Eden Mor (snore), FAQ (I think I only got about a minute into that one) and, yes, Lynch’s Dune. I might have stuck with Dune, but as it seemed about as corny as the last time I tried to watch it back around when it first came out, I was none to upset to shut it off. After that though, I met with greater movie success…

Though I wasn’t sure if I felt up to watching Kurt and Courtney, being more in the mood for the Queen documentary that I came across, I watched it!

Even for those who aren’t particularly interested in the subject (such as myself) Kurt and Courtney is a rather good film. These British filmmakers go to his childhood home, talks to friends and relatives, talk to Kurt’s ex-girlfriend and school teachers and even Courtney Love’s father (who, yes, has conspiracy theory), so it really tries to focus on what kind of guy he was and what his upbringing was. After watching the movie, I don’t want to offer any theories about Kurt’s death either way for fear of Love’s lawyers giving me a call, but let’s just say that the filmmakers don’t shy away from either the conspiracy story or the suicide story, they just let the people explain what they think. Regardless, you do get the sense that knowing Courtney killed him, one way or another… As she does come across as be the lame, shallow and selfish person that everyone (or everyone as far as I can tell) seems to think that she is. It was a bit startling to see so many “northwest” type of people, it really brought me back to the early 90’s…

We then did watch the Queen Doc, Becoming Queen… What it had in common with Kurt and Courtney is that no music from the band appears in the film, no members of the band talk to the filmmakers, and that it focuses on pre-fame days, but that’s about it. In its defense, as befits the title Becoming Queen is a good enough biography of Queen, focusing primarily on the youth of the band member and the originals of the band itself. They do interview a number (a small number) of people who knew them and played with them in the pre-Queen days. But there really isn’t too much to it. More so than the Kurt documentary, this one really did suffer from a lack of Queen’s music being in the film.

We then followed that up with The International. I wasn’t sure about it, but we wanted some kind of suspenseful thing, we were limited to Netflix Wi, it was directed by Tom Tykwer (though I’ve not seen Run, Lola, Run, I am a fan of his Winterschläfer) and it had Clive Owen, so I went for it. And, well, I didn’t have anything against it. A nice big conspiracy with banks and governments, hit men and all of that good stuff It was engrossing enough and entertaining, if nothing particularly special. There was a scene with, yes, a bit too much gunfire (who do they think made it, John Woo?), some small plot failures pop up and it was generally fairly predictable. But it was entertaining enough and had some good characters… And lots of nice scenery as the story popped all around Europe. I could have done without Naomi Watts though as I didn’t really buy her portrayal of her character.