If you are a youngster there’s a curious aspect to cable TV you may have never been exposed to; Movies Until Dawn. Back in the pre-history ages, 1980’s, local television stations ran movies all night long, generally starting about midnight and running until the morning shows the next day. These early morning hours were hard to sell to advertisers and so cheap programing was needed. after de-regulation got rid of the requirement that only so many minutes our of each hour could be advertisements, these movies until dawn were replaced by the dreaded infomercials. (No programming ALL advertisement, what an advance.)

In 1987, just before they were to vanish from the screen, Movie Until Dawn were immortalized in the movie, Amazon Women On The Moon. The premise of the film is simple. It is a sketch comedy movie, and the frame that ties the sketches together as if channel surfing. There is a blast of distorted video and audio between the sketches as you are surfed from one channel to another.

The sketches in this film ranges from the freaking hilarious, the titled sketch ‘Amazon Women On The Moon,” is a lovable lampoon of those late 50’s early 60’s low-budget Sc-Fi pictures, to the truly bizarre, “Did you know every seven minutes that is a black person born without soul?” (I swear that’s Herman Cain in that sketch. And if you think I’m serious you need to get your sarcasm detector fixed.) I had not watched the film for a few years and I was concerned that the humor might have become dated, or simply lost its punch from too many viewing, but such fears were misplaced. Video Pirates, though dated in the technology it references, was still funny, and the cast of stars doing small insane bits were just as pleasing.

This is a movie worth seeing, but like all comedies I think it plays better with groups than with a single viewer. Though it did lift my spirits and gave me the exact mood I was looking for Sunday night.

I was not a teenager when this film came out in 1985, I was 24 but still this movie had a strong and visceral impact on me. However for whatever reasons this is a film I have no memory of ever watching on Videotape, Laserdisc or DVD. I recently ordered the blu-ray via Netflix and Sunday night I st down to see if the film still had that old impact or had I changed too much.

Nope, this film is still a well written, directed, and acted movie that goes far deeper than many movies do in exploring human nature and human character. It’s kind of My Dinner With Andre but with a much greater relevance for teenagers.

At the start of the film you have five stereotypes for teenagers, the princess, the jock, the brain, the criminal, and the oddball. By the end of the movie John Hughes has deconstructed these characters into characters pulling off the impressive writing feating of not only making them into human beings, but sympathetic human beings.

The blu-ray had tons of good bonus material and I shall have to consider adding it to my library.

See this movie if you have not.

So Sunday turned out to be a really Marvel Day for your humble host. (Don;t snicker, I am too humble.  I’m WAY more humble than you are.) Anyway I started my day getting up and 8:00 am and no I am not a church-goin kind of fellow, unless you count movies as church, which they might in my case. Anyway I, and my sweetie-wife, rose early so we could catch a 9:15 showing of Captain America: The First Avenger, the last piece needed before next year’s The Avengers. (my quick opinion on Captain America? It rocked. This is a very hard character to write and I imagine a harder one to play but the writers nailed it, and Chris Evans did a fine job. Frankly I consider this film an apology from director Joe Johnston for The Wolfman.) Continue reading →

Well this is sort of a Sunday Night Movie post. You see I did not finish this film and I have returned it to Netflix unfinished.

I heard about Primer at a couple of SF cons where people said good things about this odd little time travel film. It’s about a couple of engineers who accidentally build a time machine in their garage. (apparently they were going for anti-gravity so it’s not like they aim small anyway.)

This film is short, just 77 minutes long and I think the filmmakers have disdain for the three act structure of narrative: Establishment, Conflict, Resolution. I watched more than half of the film, about 40 minutes, and so far no hint of conflict and what establishment there was mainly concerned their engineer speak. It was literally like 40 min of Star Trek techonobabble and zero character. I mean that. When I stopped the disc and went to bed last night I could not name the characters, I could not tell you anything about their personality or natures beyond they were engineers and one was apparently married. (Or living together with his GF and their daughter.) I could not say if he loved his wife, if it was a loveless marriage, if he adored her or had grown bored, nothing. As far as I could tell you take one of the pair and have them switch lines with the other and it would make not one iota of difference.

I stopped just after they started traveling in time to make money on the stock market. Really, once they started time traveling my interest grew less. For me to care about what happened I need to care about them and they weren’t people to me, they were walking talking exposition.

Well that’s my opinion and I am sticking to it.

Technically this is a Sunday Evening Movie that I watched with my sweetie-wife. I had suffered a migraine attack on Sunday night, and while the wonder medication takes care of the pain, I was left too tired to stay up very late.

It! Is a British film from 1967, so this is not the film with Tim Curry as a terrifying clown.

Roddy McDowall stars as Arthur Pimm a deeply disturbed assistant museum curator. After a devastating fire ruins the artifacts stored at the museum’s warehouse, the curator and Pimm discover a medieval statue undamaged in the rubble. Well, the curator ends up dead and we the audience knows that something is very amiss with that statute.

What made this film so very interesting to me is that the central character, Arthur Pimm, is such a deeply flawed and mentally ill character. Many films will start out with a weak character, and under the pressure and temptation of power, glory, and sex or love, they crack and give in, performing vile deeds until poetic justice at long last catches up with them in the film’s climax. Within very few minutes with It!, we know that this is not the case for Pimm. Pimm’s train derailed long before we met him.  Pimm’s introduction very quickly puts him into Norman Bates territory.

Pimm is frustrated professionally, he’s considered too young for the Curator position and is passed over, frustrated sexually, infatuated with a woman who seems unaware of his crush, and unable to cut the apron string from his mother, when a handsom confident American enters the scene, making eyes at Pimm’s crush it is too much for the young man. Discovering the power of the statue, Pimm goes beyond mad into barking at the moon, bat-shit crazy.

While I enjoyed this film, it can be a bit slow. that said any film that ends with a tactical nuke is not all bad.

If you netflix this one it will come on a dis with a second movie, The Shuttered Room. Do Not Watch. I warned you.

A day late the Sunday Night Movie feature has returned. I was in an experiment mood Sunday night and decided to watch an SF film that I had heard much about but never had seen myself, ZARDOZ. This was certainly something different and in many way is a pretty decent example of the trajectory that SF films were on until the assault on our senses that is Star Wars. (Don’t misunderstand me I like Star Wars, I own a copy of the original trilogy, granted the mucked up version, but far better that than the prequels.)

Sf film by the 70s had begun to be seen as vehicle where important subject, where challenging subject, could be raised and tackled in an adult manner. While there was still monster and adventure flicks, a lot of SF in the 70s was about something and written with thinking adults in mind, Zardoz, for all its flaws, it just such a movie.

Zardoz is set in a far distant future with radically different cultures than the one of the filmmakers and the audience. Instead of presenting Wester Civilization, usually American, as the sole culture of the Future, Zardoz presents us with two very startlingly different culture.

There are the Eternals, a small isolated population of people forever young and undying. Even murder and accident cannot keep an Eternal dead at the nearly magical technology housed in the Tabernacle grows a new body and implants for all effective purposes a backup personality and memory into the new, also Eternal, person. Outside the Vortex where the eternals live life is savage, brutal and short, the people there are called Brutals and, they have no technology at all save what is delivered to them by their god, Zardoz, and what Zardoz delivers is weaponry, instructing his followers to  murder and to always remember that ‘The Penis is evil and the Gun is good.”

Sean Connery is a Brutal named Zed who by cunning and daring penetrates the forcefield surrounding the vortex, invading the world of the Eternals. There his presence is disruptive. A world that has known nothing new in literally centuries is thrown into turmoil by murder and questions about the Brutals and what they might mean for the etrnals own future.

There is a lot to make fun in this Film, mocking comes easy when someone tries to talk seriously in such a manner, but I would advise you to look closer. This film is very much a product of its time, the use of psi powers is very much a 70s trope, the very limited special effect due to budget and capability detract from the attempt, but the attempt was a worthy one. This is a film about what it means to be human, what do we owe each other, and the terrible price of lifeboat ethics.

If you have not seen it and you like SF films that have more bite than fluff, then see Zardoz, but try to avoid spoilers if you can.