Monthly Archives: September 2024

Film Geeks San Diego’s Secret Morgue V

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This past Saturday was the 5th annual Secret Morgue hosted by the local cinephile group Film Geeks San Diego. The six-movie marathon doesn’t release the titles on the film being presented only the theme. For 2024 the theme was creatures & monster movies.

American International Pictures

Movie One: Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). A celebration and recognition of low-budget master Roger Corman this movie follows a group of scientists, technicians, and sailors left on an atoll following atomic testing. They are there to study the effects of fallout and radiation but instead encounter monstrous telepathic giant crabs.

This is typical low-budget 50s fare with poor science and less then adequate special effects but entertaining in its own right.

Pathe

Movie Two: Dog Soldiers (2002). A squad of soldiers dropped in the wilds of Scotland for a routine training exercise discover another squad of special forces slaughtered, save for one member, by some unknown force. Trapped and out of communication they struggle to survive a pack of werewolves.

This is a fun, fast, and exciting werewolves vs soldiers of a movie and well worth the time.

 

American International Pictures

Movie Three: Scream Blacula Scream (1973). The sequel to Blacula, William Marshal returns as the title character, an African Prince cursed by Dracula with Vampirism. Raise by Voodoo magics as part of a power struggle among the faithful Balcula is unleashed again on the modern world and hopes to find release from unending torment by way of a voodoo priestess, Pam Grier.

Part of the brief but entertaining subgenre of ‘Blaxploitation’ that run during the 70s, this movie is fast, entertaining, and led by amazing actors. Allowanced must be given to the filmmakers lack of money and special effect resources. If you can look past that this is a treasure.

 

Daiei Film

Movie Four: Gamera, Guardian of the Universe (1995). The relaunching of the Kaijufranchise that challenged Godzilla, and still principally using men in suits, Gamera, Guardian of the Universe, is a fun romp and modern take on the classic Kaiju genre. Not scripted or produced with an ironic eye to the camera of tongue in cheek this movie is a straightforward film about giant monsters that threaten and defend humanity.

 

 

 

 

Hollwood Pictures

Movie Five: Deep Rising (1998). When pirates attack a large cruise ship in the South China Sea, they discover the passengers and crew slaughtered and the ship infested with tentacled monsters. Written and directed by Stephen Summers a year before his take on The Mummy, this movie has his typical style of mixing adventure, horror, and comedic effect.

 

 

 

 

The sixth and final film of the marathon was the home-made movie Suburban Sasquatch. I have a minimum level of quality that I require before I devote 80 minutes or more of my time to a film and this did not meet that prerequisite.

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Streaming Review: Murder by Death

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A year before Star Wars tossed the film industry into a whole new galaxy of chasing action/adventure box office bonanzas Columbia release Murder by Death a parody of the sedate country-manor murder mysteries that by then had already fallen out of style.

Columbia Pictures

Written by celebrated playwright Neild Simon the film is a broad comedy lampooning many of the genre’s most recognized sleuths: James Coco’s Milo Perrier satirizing Poirot, Peter Falk as Sam Diamond a play on Sam Spade, Peter Sellers in atrocious ‘yellow face’ as Wang, a take on Charlie Chan. (I honestly can’t tell if Sellers’ ‘yellow face’ is a comment on the practice used in the Chan films or simple racist.) Elsa Lanchester as Jessica Marbles standing in for Miss Marple and David Niven and Maggie Smith for Nick & Nora Charles from The Thin Man series.

Rounding out the cast was Alec Guinness as the blind butler, Nancy Walker as the deaf mute and illiterate cook, and Truman Capote as Lionel Twain hosting the detective while taunting them with meta commentary on the source novels.

Neil Simon was one of America’s premier playwrights, penning classic that are still watched and loved today.

This was not one of them.

The ‘comedy’ is weak, forced, and scarcely induces even a forced smile. There are moments that have some worth, but they are few. I had watched this movie some 40 years earlier and the only comedic moment that stuck with me was Twain berating Wang for his racist broken English.

“Pronouns! Say your god damned pronouns!”

The physical comedy has no speed or action to it, the character-based humor is tepid, and the plot makes less sense in 1985’s Clue.

All in all, even on YouTube for free, this is one to miss.

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A Writing Blindspot

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As a writer one of the things I strive to do is get emotionally in the head and heart space of the characters in my stories. Of course I am far from perfect in this. I maintain one of the hardest things for any human to do is truly see something from another point of view. It is difficult to ignore the years of joy and pain and experiences that formed your nature and try to imagine even a sliver of that which was felt by another, but I try.

That said one aspect of people I can never seem to connect with emotionally is antisemitism.

Intellectually I can construct the flawed and hatefully reason why someone might believe such idiotic things, but it is a mindset and a prejudice that is always alien to me.

Perhaps my distance from it stems from my own non-religious nature. While as a child I was exposed to Southern Baptist teachings in Sunday school they never took root in my mental garden. Even if they had I suspect my ever-questioning nature wouldn’t have place me in a position to hate Jews because they had ‘killed Jesus.’ Wasn’t that his purpose anyway? To die, albeit get better after that that, for our sins? That would just mean the people who killed him were all part of God’s plot and plan. It makes no sense.

Of course, there are the conspiracy theories that Jews run the world. Conspiracy theories are sanctuaries for those that need an explanation for the chaotic world we live in. They are poison to a healthy mind, and none stand up to the most casual scrutiny. I cannot emotionally connect with any conspiracy theory; they are more ludicrous than any religion.

Sadly, antisemitism is very real and my lack of ability to even fake feeling it has no bearing on the world, only a weakness in my fiction. Out there in the wider world it is alive and well and sadly thriving.

It may be strange, alien, and incomprehensible to me but that doesn’t mean I will not denounce it or that I will not fight it.

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Not Dead, Dying, or Seriously Ill

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This blog has been fallow since Sep 11 because my mind has been a wandering and not very blog productive. I am half-way through my folk/cosmic horror novel, but production of that project has now stalled.

I started this manuscript with just a bare idea of who the characters were and crude arc for their passage. This is the most I have ever ‘pantsed’ a book and overall the results so far have been surprisingly good. The voices of the point of view characters, three in all, came easily and strike me as distinct. (Whenever I turn to Sabrina the langue gets very salty. She’s got a moth on her.)

However, the motivation I gave the protagonist for traveling to the island commune feels too weak, too little to sustain her momentum until the hard plot kicks in. I need to find more personal motivations with more to lose that will drive her actions rather than having events influence them.

I have come ideas, and it feels like they are about to fall together into something I can use but there is an element or two missing still.

For the blog I could have been writing about the current and terrible political landscape but at this point it feels terribly repetitive. I did not watch the presidential candidate debate because it is almost inconceivable that Harris could have made a gaff that would have cost her my support and vote, and it is utterly inconceivable that Trump could do anything at all that would win any support from me at all.

I have been thoroughly enjoying on YouTube watching a pair of Canadian Gen Z’ers working through way through Star Trek the original series. Being an old fart who has seen these episodes countless time it’s quite a thrill watching someone get surprised that Korby is a freaking robot, that it was Kodos’ daughter that was murdering all those pesky witnesses, and that Finney wasn’t actually dead.

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Voice Actors are not Interchangeable

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I had intended to write this yesterday but when you wake in the morning in the midst of a migraine your day is pretty much trash.

Monday, we learned that the talented performer James Earl Jones passed away at 93. With a career and noted performances well before his ascendency to fan stardom as the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars, Jones was a unique talent.

Jones was also not the person Lucas had in mind when he wanted someone to vocally perform for his space fantasy adventure, his first choice was Orson Welles. Jones proved to be the right choice. His voice was lesser known but nothing in the man’s multidecade history indicates that he was ever difficult to work with. Would Star Wars have reached the same heights with Welles providing the voice? Probably. The nation culturally was ready to turn the page on the cynicism of the 70s and Star Wars provided that new direction and escape, but I do think that Vader would have been lessened with another voice actor.

Vader wasn’t the only character transformed by their vocal performer.

C3PO is famously vocally performed by the character’s suit performer Anthony Daniels but that was not the intention.  Daniels had been hired to be the body on set, much as David Prowse had been Darth Vader on set.

Instead of a prissy English butler, C3PO’s conception of a character was closer akin to an untrustworthy used car salesman. Go back and listen to his dialog in the original film and note just how mean and cutting it is. 3PO is not a nice and likeable character as written, but only becoming endearing due to Daniels’ performance. It is my understanding that when they tried to record the lines as originally envisioned, everyone heard the disaster it was, and the role was then given to Daniels.

We often think of voice actors as lesser. That is unfair and probably due to the preponderance of terrible dubbing of foreign language films. In those case the artists are rarely given the time or direction to craft a real performance, a gross disservice.

Voice actors deserve the respect and admiration of the audience, and they are never interchangeable.

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Series Review: The Decameron

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It is 14th century Italy, and the black death is ravaging the cites. The scope and scale of the pestilence is breaking civil society, and many believe that divine judgement is upon humanity and the end days are close at hand.

In this setting a collection of nobles and their servants greedily accept an invitation to fortified country villa to be the guest of Visconte Leonardo to either wait out the pestilence or spend humanity’s final days in comfort and luxury.

Netflix

The Decameron, very loosey based on the 14th Century manuscript, is a black comedy satirizing class structure, religion, and the endless human need to gain the upper hand on one another even as everything falls apart.

All of the characters of the series are duplicitous, scheming, and concealing secrets from one another. The humor is dark with death ever present. The tone of the show is not for everyone, but I enjoyed taking the series to be sort of a dark twisted comedy version of Corman’s adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death.

While very few of the cast were known to me save one secondary character, the actors performed their parts well and brought in my emotional engagement. The only thing that marred the production value of the program was the CGI flames utilized in some scene in the final few episodes, but I will not begrudge any production that errs on the side of safety.

The Decameron is pleasant, funny, and not without a few points to make. It streams on Netflix.

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Booths are for Cruising.

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When the story broke that the MAGA and Trump backed candidate for Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson, a pol that frequently rants about pornography, was in fact a loyal customer of porn shops in the 1990s and early 2000s I had little interest. The story struck me as merely another example of the blatant hypocrisy so often seen in crusading extremist politicians. But then one detail came to my attention, not only did he visit these shops five or more times a week, but he was a regular customer of the booths.

Now, for several years in the 1990s I worked in a adult shop selling toys, magazines, and renting out porn to the customers. Like any business we had our regular customers and for someone to shop there five or more times a week would certainly be memorable. Also like nearly all of the adult shops we had the ‘arcade,’ a dozen or so closet sized private booths. A couple or the booths were fitted so that someone could rent a video, we’d load it into the player, and they would watch it in the booth, but that was not the majority of the booths. Most played an endless loop of porn on a number of channels and the customer just fed money into the machine and cycled the display to what struck their fancy.

But the real purpose of the booths was not to watch porn.

After all this was the 90s, video tapes players were in nearly every home, rentals were easy, and a cramped stuffy booth was hardly comfortable. Anyone interest in the porn would be far more comfortable at home.

No, the booths were for cruising.

Cruising is anonymous sex in public and semi-public places. Public Parks at night, airport bathrooms, and video store booths. Men, and it is always men, make their discreet eye contact and then follow each other into a booth, feeding the machine for the privacy to engage in sexual activates, afterwards going their separate ways.

Mark Robinson, in addition to his rants about pornography, his holocaust denial, and other unpleasant public stands is also blatantly homophobic.

I do not know that Robinson cruised the booths but it would hella shocking for someone that dedicated to the booths to not have.

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