Tag Archives: Sunday NIght Movie

Sunday Night Movie:Rustlers’ Rhapsody

Many people know that I am not a big fan of the Western. If you look through my 240 plus DVD and Blu-ray collection the list of Westerns is as Elrond might put it, ‘thin.’ I have just a few in my library. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (subject of a previous Sunday Night Movie), High Noon, and Unforgiven. Given such a limited interest in Westerns it would be surprising to most to find Rustlers’ Rhapsody in my collection.

This film from 1985 is a wonderful send-up of the Western genre. While I am not a big fan of the genre I am enough of a movie buff to know it’s conventions, tropes, and cliches. Rustlers’ Rhapsody plays on these perfectly.

The film starts Tom Berenger as Rex O’Herlihan, The Singing Cowboy. Rex rides from town to town, fighting to bad guys, saving the good guys, and always, always winning. He’s an upright, straight-shooting, hand-shooting no killing kind of hero. Befriended by Peter, the town drunk of Oakridge, Rex sets about his karma of saving the poor — and foul-smelling — sheep herders from the evil cattle baron, played with more than just a swish by Andy Griffith. Rex proves more than a match for the villains as he knows all their tricks. You see, it’s the same cliched attack that happened in every western town to every hero that stands up for the good guys. This time is different though. The Bad guys have found an evilly ingenious way to foil the good guy, one that Rex  — or any western good guy — has faced before.

This film did not find an audience in 1985 and was released just this one time on DVD, but if you are a fan of the silly zany comedies that came out of the 80s and love a good poke at cliches and overused tropes, give this a Netflix spin.

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Sunday Night Movie:The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

Like another movie I own, Planet Of The Vampires, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is a film that has been released under a bewildering array of titles. Released in 1974 this is a zombie movie that is  post-Night of The Living Dead (1968) but preceded both films that ushered in the Zombie Apocalypse®, Zombie and Dawn of the Dead (1979.)

Placed in such a unique position in zombie movie chronology The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is a film particular to its time and place in history. For quite a while it was wholly  unavailable on home video and therefore rarely seen. I myself had not heard of this Italian/Spanish co-prpduction until it was mentioned during Zombie week at tor.com.

Today the Zombie Apocalypse® is a well established meme in the greater trans-world culture. Nearly everyone knows what is meant by the Zombie Apocalypse® and it is a common parlor game to thought-experiment your survivalist victory against the hordes of undead. In these thought-scenerios the undead are nearly always the ghouls envision by George A Romero in his film Night of The Living Dead. If one is a heretic, you propose an apocalypse of Zack Snyder’s fast zombie from the re-make of Dawn of The Dead, but most purist reject these zombies. (I do not, I own both versions the 1979 and the 2004 on home video.) If one is utterly desiring of death and failure, you might go with the Dan O’Bannon zombies of Return Of The Living Dead, but really who is interested in an apocalypse of indestructible zombies? Continue reading →

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Sunday Night Movie: The Ghoul

So, yesterday I was cruising through instant view movies on Netflix and I came across a 1933 film, The Ghoul, with Boris Karloff. In the mood for something different, I added it to my queue to be my Sunday Night Movie.

The Ghoul is  story about an Egyptologist who has become so enamored with his subject that he now believes that the religion of the ancient Egyptians is factual. He spend the majority of considerable fortune on acquiring a mystic gem that reputedly can grant immortality to a person if it is sealed with the person in their tomb.

(Apparently it is immortality on the other-side, not here. on Earth.)

Because the gem is very valuable there are a lot of people willing to do violence and deceit to steal it. Because he was rich and spent it all there are heirs who are cross and unsure what is happening. Of course no one believes the ancient story and dismisses the notion that to steal the gem from the tomb will cause said Egyptologist to rise from the dead and seek out the gem, murdering all who stand in his way.

Okay, that is a pretty decent set-up for a horror film. Sadly, this is not the film they delivered. This is a scooby-doo movie. Everything at the end of the movie has a ‘rational’ explanation. Rational is in quotes because if I think it through the explanation cannot stand up to fact as presented.

Spoiler alert……proceed no further if you care about spoilers concerning a film released in 1933.

The Egyptologist is shown weak and dying in his bed (see above). He can bare sit up he is so weak. Later, after he escapes his tomb because he had been ‘buried alive’ he’s running about, overpowering much young men and killing them, and bending iron bars with his bare hands. For a guy on his deathbed just hours earlier he’s one kick ass dude!

While there are plenty of interesting ideas and set-ups, this film just doesn’t work. I would have preferred something with the supernatural in it rather than meddling kids.

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Sunday Night Movie: Star Trek III: The Search For Spock

It is a well know dictum in the SF community that the ‘good’ Star Trek films are all the even numbered ones and that the odd numbered movies are ‘bad.’ I have advised people to remember that what the even numbered, II, IV, and VI, have in common is Nicholas Meyer. He had a hand in writing all three and directed two of them.

I myself have espoused this Even/Odd dictum to people about how to judge Star Trek movies. (Counting all the Next Generation films as ‘odd.’ The first, a weak and bull film was the best of the lot. They proceeded to become more and more idiotic as the series progressed becoming what can oxymoronically called Luddite Science-Fiction.)

Recently Star Treks, II, III, and IV were released a a single blu-ray set with new bonus features. I resisted as best I could, but when I found a set for about $25 I broke down and purchased it even thought it had a ‘bad’ movie in the collection. I spent part of the weekend watching the bonus material and oohing and awing how gorgeous the films look in the Blu-ray format. Last night I decided that I would make Star Trek III: The Search For Spock my Sunday Night Movie.

Continue reading →

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Sunday Night Movie: Incubus (1965)

So yesterday my sweetie-wife and I watched a film called Incubus, from 1965.

Now this was a film I had heard about, but one I had never seen. It stars — as you can see from the screen cap — William Shatner just a few years before he began his five– no three — year voyage as Captain James Kirk.

As the title suggests, it is a horror film and a demonically based horror story. (Though much better than Shatner’s other foray into devil worship The Devil’s Rain.)

What made this film so utterly mysterious and difficult to see is two factors.

One, it was thought that all know prints had been lost and or destroyed. The film failed miserably at the box office and this was before there was a home-video market to rescue turkeys like Manic Cop 2.

Second this movie was and is the only film to be entirely in Esperanto a wholly artificial language invented in the late 19th century. Continue reading →

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Sunday Night Movie: The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938)

By way of my Netflix account I got ahold of the Blu-ray for the 1938 production of The Adventures Of Robin hood, starring Errol Flynn as Robin Hood.

There have been a number of Robin hood productions. The character has been in the popular imagination for literally centuries. Which means two things to movie makers.

One, that there is a built-in audience for the stories, and producers love a built-in audience. Producers really hate risk, when it comes to putting money into films they can be very conservative.

And two Robin Hood is in the Public Domain and they don’t have to pay no rights to nobody.

This production of Robin Hood was hardly the first. Douglas Fairbanks had been in a very successful silent version and was considered the definitive screen Robin Hood until this film was realeased. Continue reading →

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Sunday Night Movie: The Day The Earth Stood Still

Yesterday I got the news that award winning actress Patricia Neal has passed away and I resolved to make my Sunday Night Movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.

I have not seen very many films with Patricia Neal, but from what I have seen she was a talented actress of diverse skill and range. The films I know her best from are, of course, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and  A Face In The Crowd.

The first film clearly SF and the second very nearly SF. If you have never seen A Face In The Crowd this is a must see movie. A great, absolutely stellar cast, a pitch-perfect scrip and just as relevant today as when it was made.

Back to last night’s movie.

The Day The Earth Stood Still is a classic of SF films, and is a classic of films in general. Made in 1951 it was ahead of the curve for SF films, leading, along with Destination Moon, the charge into SF films of the 50s. Sadly, most of the films that followed were heavy on ray guns, monsters, and adventure and light in the thought and ideas that science-fiction can explore so well.

Very loosely inspired by the Harry Bates short story, Farewell the Master,  the movie is about the arrival of an alien, Klaatu, and his robot, Gort, to the planet Earth. Klaatu is greeted with gunfire and suspicion. The alien has a mission and message, but refuses to share it with any one nation or people, insisting that it must be heard by representatives of all the peoples and nations of the Earth.

This of course is impossible in a world divided between the United States and the USSR. Frustrated by terran stupidity, Klaatu eascape his captivity to learn more about humans and their fears firsthand.

What follows is in part a message film, in part a lovely look at the Earth through alien eyes, and in part a manhunt. (Or an alien-hunt if you prefer.)

I have problems with the specific message delivered in the film, but that’s okay. It’s a wonderful story, wonderfully told. I am not as allergic to ‘smug aliens’ as some of my friends are.

Of course if you have never seen this movie, I urge you to rent it. I own it on Blu-ray and the effects hold up very well for a film nearly 60 years old.

DO NOT see the remake. There is no remake. I refuse to acknowledge it.

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Sunday Night Movie:Ikarie XB1

This past Sunday was a bit different for my Sunday Night Movie feature in that is was a movie I watched together with my Sweetie-wife.

After writing on Saturday about the late lamented Creature Feature from my youth, I went on line to see if Planet Of The Vampire had been re-released on DVD again. (nope, not yet.) However I found the trailer for the movie at YouTube and of course I had to give it a go. While I was watching the trailer for Planet Of The Vampires, I spotted a clip for something from a ‘soviet-style SF film’ about exploring a derelict spaceship. It fascinated me and I wanted to watch the movie it came out of.

There were 198 comments on that YouTube post and a great deal of them were flame-wars over the fact that the film was Czechoslovakian and not Soviet or Russian. However there were very few posts naming the damned movie. Eventually I did discover the film was called Ikarie XB-1 and was made in 1963.

A quick searched showed that the filme was released on DVD in 2006, was out of print, could not be rented and used copies were going to sum too great for me to buy. (I’ll spend money on movies I know, but its rare that I will buy a movie I have never seen unless I get it dirt cheap.)

By the time Sunday came around I laid my hands on a copy of the film and me and my sweetie-wife watched it.

The film is about the flight of the first inter-stellar craft, Ikarie XB-1, en route to Alpha Centauri. (I am told by my lovely wife that Ikarie is Czech for Icarus.) The navigation must have been off on this trip as the round trip will take the ship fifteen years from earth’s perspective but just 28 months by ship-time. Sounds like the ship is going very nearly the speed of light, but round trip to Alpha C would then be about 9 years, not 15 Earth time.

Anyway the ship is manned by forty people, both men and women, single and married. The film is entirely about the trip and the hazards they face. It was a very serious, though flawed, attempt to do dramatic action and not wild action in an SF environment. There is an attempt at showing a different culture than what was standard in 1963. The crew are dealing with a  number of interpersonal issues and the stresses of the close-quarters living.

The derelict spaceship sequence that tripped me onto this title is from about the middle of the movie and really was quite nicely done. It was something much better than what we are normally used to seeing from SF of the late 50s and early 60s.

That said the film was on the slow side and I think the mountain the writers and film-makers set out to conquer was beyond their skills.

Still, I am glad I got a chance to see it. It is always interesting to see genre films of the period made from a decided non-western viewpoint.

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Sunday Night Movie: You Only Live Twice

So last night I returned to my trek through the Bond Franchise. Since I am watching the film in release order the next movie was You Only Live Twice.

This is a Bond movie I have never seen in it’s entirety. Oh, I’ve seen lots of bits here and there, but I had never had the chance to sit down and watch it straight through from the start.

The problem in doing a franchise like Bond is that the producers, writers, and directors have to keep topping themselves. Each film needs to be bigger and with higher stakes than the last or you risk having you audience go ho-hum over what was supposed to be  thrilling experience.

Of course the problem with getting bigger and bigger in your stunts, action, and your dangers is that you run the terrible risk of sailing right over the top and landing in farce-land. (A fine place to be if you intend to go, but a lousy accidental destination.)

As you can likely tell from the picture i selected to illustrate my post, I think You Only Live Twice splashed-down in farce-land with a side trip to Mockalvania. Continue reading →

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Sunday Night Movie:I Sell The Dead

So this week’s movie was a bit of a gamble for me as it was something I had never seen and further more was something I had heard little about.

I started the Sunday Night Movie habit as a way of utilizing my movie collection. I had realized one day that I rarely watched so many movies in my collection and when I did I tended to watch the same ones over and over. I started Sunday Night Movie as a regular event to enjoy those movies that I love but so rarely watched.

This is not one of those movies.

I Sell The Dead is a story about two men in the resurrection business in what I presume is the 17th or 18th century. Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) is partner and former apprentice to Willie Grimes in the resurrection business. That is they steal corpses and sell them to doctors. Their lives take a dramatic turn down a path of bump in the night events when they discover that digging up some corpses leads to a much more active product than the pair is accustomed to finding.  They have a number of serious threats in their wretched lives, There Dr. Quint (Angus Scrimm, Best know as the Tall Man in Phantasm.) who is extorting their services without compensation by threats of the law. Then there’s the House Of Murphy a rival gang of resurrectionists with a tendency for murder and mayhem, and of course there’s the very active undead who are always ungrateful for being dug up or unboxed.

This movie is supposed to be a comedy and as such one is expected to give it more leeway that a traditional horror film or dramatic feature for suspension of disbelief, however this film had too many flaws for me to do that. There are endless anachronisms, historical errors, and a general failure to understand just what it was that resurrection men did. (They did not sell bodies to doctors for their general practice, they sold them to schools and teaching doctors for study, instruction, and research.) In the end this movie was simply too much of a mess with too little plot and too much gag to work as a film.

I recommend pass if someone offers a viewing to you.

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