LawrenceA

He must really be in need of some deodorant.

Yesterday I re-watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) for the first time in years. The film looks good, if a little too gray-&-beige, and the Jerry Goldsmith score is terrific. However, the film is a still a bit of a bore in places, and the tone and pacing is way off (issues brought on by the slapdash script, according to some featurettes on the disc). Then I watched a pair of Doctor Who serials, Full Circle and State of Decay, both from 1980. The Doctor (Tom Baker) faces off against fish-men in the former and space vampires in the latter. The second was pretty entertaining. Now I'm making my way through Hammer House of Horror (1980), the British anthology show from the famous horror film company. I just finished the 6th of 13 episodes in the sole season. It hasn't been very good so far. Stories have included a 17th century witch (Patricia Quinn from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) showing up at a modern English farmhouse; a weight-loss club that fronts for a society of cannibals; a man (Denholm Elliott) keeps dreaming about murdering his wife; an experimental root causes weird side effects in a kid; a house that was the site of a prior murder causes mayhem for the new tenants; and a couple run into trouble with an African fetish statue. Edit: I finished up Hammer House of Horror. The second half was a bit more interesting, if not exactly good. The stories included - a pet shop owner (Peter Cushing) with a secret zoo in his basement decides to add a recently-paroled ex-con (Brian Cox) to his collection; a couple on holiday encounter a group of strange children living in a manor with a kindly caretaker (Diana Dors), only to be menaced by a werewolf; a woman murders men (including a very early appearance by Pierce Brosnan) in the manner of a 17th century Eastern European countess; an antiques dealer runs afoul of devil worshipers; a woman (Kathryn Leigh Scott) thinks she's losing her mind after killing an acquaintance of her boyfriend (Simon MacCorkindale); after a terrible car crash, a woman is uncertain whether her husband survived or has been replaced by an evil doppelganger; and a morgue worker (Peter McEnery) thinks he's cursed by the number 9.

Thanks for going a little in depth on this side act. I was going to ask you about it, as I was intrigued by the ad line "Vaudeville's Latest Electrical Novelty."

Yes, I have. It was on disc from Something Weird, along with the Jayne Mansfield mondo movie Primitive Love (1964). There's also Ecco aka This Shocking World (1963), with narration by George Sanders, which was on a disc with The Forbidden (1966). Mondo Cane (1962), Mondo Cane 2 (1963), and Women of the World (1963), all by the same filmmakers, are perhaps the most accessible, although their later Africa Addio aka Africa: Blood and Guts (1966) is more outrageous. I've also seen Mondo Mod (1967), Mondo Freudo (1966), and Mondo Bizarro (1966), as well as the later Shocking Asia parts one and two (1981/1985) and the silly Faces of Death films. In case people are misled by Sepiatone's confused and inaccurate description of the Mondo movies, they're pseudo-documentaries that showcase strange customs around the world, from the benign (unusual foods, odd festivals) to the shocking (violent rituals, nudist clubs). Mondo Cane is the most varied and perhaps least sensational of the sub-genre, but as they continued, the movies became more and more salacious, with an emphasis on nudity, sex, and/or graphic violence. While much of the violence is re-enacted (regardless of what some sources say), a lot of it is also real, including newsreel footage of executions, the aftermath of vehicle accidents, and graphic surgery and autopsy footage. Most of the 60's films aren't very gory, and are more quaint than scandalous these days. P.S.: I almost forgot about Russ Meyer's Mondo Topless (1966)!

The Mighty Gorga (1969) The Mighty Peking Man (1977) A*P*E (1976)

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No, I didn't review any of them on here. I watched most of those before I was regularly posting on here. Some of them definitely have things that you can't un-see! 😮😵

Doctor Who: Destiny of the Daleks (1979) - 4-part story, with the Doctor (Tom Baker) and his newly regenerated companion Romana (Lalla Ward) arriving on a desolate planet that turns out to be the resting place of the Daleks' creator Davros, who has been left inert and buried deep underground. As the Daleks attempt to unearth their twisted creator, the Doctor and Romana team up with the local slave labor and a group of strange alien visitors to try and stop the Dalek menace.

I watched a couple of newer horror movies on Netflix last week. Sweetheart (2019) - Kiersey Clemons stars as a young shipwreck survivor who washes up on a small, uninhabited island in the middle of the ocean. She sets about trying to survive as best she can until she is hopefully rescued, only to quickly realize that some sort of humanoid sea monster lurks about. The movie tries for a minimalist approach, with characters vaguely sketched out and very little dialogue. Some of the set pieces are suspenseful, and the creature design is an interesting if not altogether successful variation of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. One could do worse if looking for something to kill the time. (6/10) Doom: Annihilation (2019) - Rushed through production in order to keep the rights secured, this is based on the notoriously violent videogame (which I played quite a bit while at "work" some 25 years ago). Experiments on one of the moons of Mars lead to a portal to Hell being opened, allowing demons to escape who quickly create a small army of possessed zombies. A motley assortment of newly arrived Marine Corps soldiers fight to survive. This is very, very derivative, with nary an original moment on display. However, for all of its low-budget terribleness, it's still a more faithful reproduction of the videogame than the previous, big budget 2005 film was. Still, this is nothing more than a barely adequate , SyFy Channel type of affair, so enter at your own risk. (4/10)

You dirty devil! You're going to inspire some poor soul to seek these out, and it will leave them scarred for life!

Someone else on here also left their review for the new Little Women in another thread, and they weren't nearly as pleased with it as you were. They said that they felt this was the worst version, and that Florence Pugh was abysmal/atrocious/some other very disparaging term. So the movie may be more divisive than one would expect.

Yes, in one of the earliest episodes. There's some winking in-jokes, as well.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1980) - I watched the theatrically-released pilot film and the entire 20-episode first season of this oft-maligned sci-fi show featuring Gil Gerard as the title hero, an astronaut from the year 1987 who ends up frozen in suspended animation only to be awakened in the 25th century. Co-starring Erin Gray as Wilma Deering and Tim O'Connor as a benevolent Earth scientist. I saw bits and pieces of this series back when it was new but didn't pay much attention. I recall it being more of a children's show, but I was surprised watching this first season how racy it was, with a lot of sexual innuendo and double entendres, not to mention a lot of gorgeous people in skin-tight outfits or flashing a lot of skin. It's all very goofy and corny, but I found it entertaining both as kitsch and as a sexy time-capsule of the disco era, the latter of which makes it as much a curiosity piece to today's eyes as the Buster Crabbe serial would have been to the typical viewer of the '79 TV show.

That's the one that, after filming was done, Howard Hughes watched it and declared that Nazis were no longer relevant villains, and to change them to Communists. I saw it last year or so, and thought it was entertaining if more than a bit silly.

Most of them were very good. I don't know how historically accurate they were, but, for instance, Buono was very warm and charming as Taft. Most of them are shown in a favorable light, with the exception of the Hoovers. Larry Gates' Herbert Hoover refuses to speak directly to the staff. Jan Sterling is nearly unrecognizable as Lou Hoover.

And I've seen all four of those, too.... Such a rich and rewarding sub-genre.

A friend of mine moved into an old duplex apartment about 20 years or so ago, which had previously been occupied by an elderly bachelor who had died. The place had been cleaned out by the landlords, but my friend poked his head up into the attic crawlspace and discovered an old 3-ring binder-type photograph album, the kind with thin sheets of plastic that peeled back and one would place a photo on the sticky paper beneath and then replace the plastic over it to seal it in place. Anyway, this photograph album was full of nothing but those types of ads from a local newspaper from the college town (Gainesville, FL) south of us. I don't recall the theaters mentioned in many of the ads, but I recognized the drive-in mentioned in a few. There had to be hundreds of these kind of movie ads in the album, and none from more mainstream, "legitimate" movies, either, only these kind of low-budget exploitation/grindhouse types of flicks, mainly sexploitation and horror stuff. My friend's GF was really into kitsch, so when they split up, she took the album with her, and I haven't seen it in years, but I'd love to be able to look through it again now.

My #2 and #3 picks for each year - 1920- The Penalty and Outside the Law 1930- L'Age d'Or and Westfront 1918 1940- Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent 1950- Rashomon and The Asphalt Jungle 1960- Psycho and The Magnificent Seven 1970- The Conformist and Little Big Man 1980- The Shining and The Empire Strikes Back 1990- Slacker and La Femme Nikita 2000- O Brother Where Art Thou? and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2010- 127 Hours and Monsters And since Gerald mentioned it.... 1910- Frankenstein (the only one that I've seen from that year!)

Untamed Mistress is another masterwork from the Ormonds, Ron and June. With such terrible delights as Mesa of Lost Women (1953), Please Don't Touch Me (1963), Girl from Tobacco Row (1966), and the delirious The Exotic Ones (1968) under their belt, they deserve permanent rotation in the TCM Underground playlist.

This may be one of the strangest ones, with a script courtesy of Ed Wood -

I just read some guesses that make sense. All four are box sets coming out next year, thus the boxes in each. Top left - fallen "E" = Fellini box set Top right - 1 (on back hub cap), why (? on front hub cap), car = Wong Kar-wai box set Bottom left - the box is "on Yes" = Agnes, as in Agnes Varda box set Bottom right - not US Grant, but Robert E. Lee with a black eye = "bruised Lee" = Bruce Lee box set I'm fairly certain the top two guesses are correct as both sets have been rumored for some time. I'm not as sure about the bottom two.

Backstairs at the White House (1979) - 7-hour TV mini-series that follows the working lives of Maggie Rogers (Olivia Cole) and her daughter Lillian (Leslie Uggams), serving as White House staff members from the administration of Taft through that of Eisenhower. Fellow staffers are played by Louis Gossett Jr, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Hooks, Hari Rhodes, Louise Latham, and Cloris Leachman. The presidential couples are played by : the Tafts (Victor Buono and Julie Harris), the Wilsons (Robert Vaughn, Kim Hunter, and Claire Bloom), the Hardings (George Kennedy and Celeste Holm), the Coolidges (Ed Flanders and Lee Grant), the Hoovers (Larry Gates and Jan Sterling), the Roosevelts (John Anderson and Eileen Heckart), the Trumans (Harry Morgan and Estelle Parsons), and the Eisenhowers (Andrew Duggan and Barbara Barrie). 7/10