What was the last movie you saw?

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Killer’s Kiss is a story of lust and murder in mid century New York City. Already his second film, Kubrick is demonstrating the filmmaking finesse for which he will be remembered and studied: the well angled camera, the gifted eye for detail, music moulded to form fit the scene. The city he captures is foul, gloomy and needlessly violent. Two people fall in love at first glance and all hell breaks loose around them. One bright spot though, my favorite, is when the main character, sitting in a coffee shop, reads a letter from home. As his family tells him about the ranch they recently purchased, The Plow That Broke The Plains plays gently in the background. The serenity won’t last long.
 
Tarantula (1955) TCM ran a night of BIG BUGS a week or 2 ago, & this is one of my favorites.


Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll; perhaps best known as Mr. Waverly on The Man From Uncle), works with 2, count 'em, two other scientists on research on feeding Earth's growing population. Funny how his projections on future population may have been just a bit off. :giggle: Anyway, he & his associates are 'feeding' various species a nutrient that makes them grow to enormous sizes. Guinea Pigs, rats, etc., though one might assume they were only testing species known to be consumed by humans; among those species, was a -- [suspense builds] tarantula. This already giant spider with a leg span of no less than three feet, was kept in a glass walled cage, while other species were in wire cages.

According to Deemer, his two associates injected themselves with THE NUTRIENT and became deformed in both body and mind. Seems like I have heard of this before, THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JECKYL & MR. HYDE, THE INVISIBLE MAN, come to mind, as examples of bad outcomes when scientists become their own experimental subjects. :unsure:

The small town's physician, Dr. Matt Hastings (John Agar) is called by sheriff Jack Andrews (Nestor Paiva), to give a medical opinion on a dead man found in the desert, whose face & hands are severely deformed. His opinion is Acromegalia, which usually takes many years to result in death; yet, this guy apparently was just a week ago, normal.

Add one young woman, Stephanie Clayton (Mara Corday) who knows how to scream and shriek, and who comes to work under the great Dr. Deemer and live in his house (how convenient) & you have the makings of a 1950's scifi/horror film.

The spider grows so huge- "how huge was it?" - that its fangs are larger that the humans it supposedly consumes. :LOL: It is just too large to actually consume such tiny prey as humans. Like a normal tarantula consuming tiny aphids. Not too likely. The giant spider in EARTH VS. THE SPIDER was much smaller, leg span about 10 to 15 feet, and far more likely to prey on humans.

I laughed every time I though about it. Love this film!


It is not even October, & TCM has shown these & V. Price films!
 
The Black Scorpion (1957) Another wonderful giant critter film, shown during TCM's BIG BUGS day. This one is more reasonable because its size is not such that humans would be too small to consume.

Unlike Tarantula, the critters are not the result of science gone wrong. After a volcano erupts in Mexico, cattle on a certain ranch are found dead. Why are they found at all? Scorpions, unlike spiders, consume their prey in the conventional way. They put them in their mouths, etc.

So, two, count 'em, 2 geologists are dispatched to the volcano for the routine reasons. Dr. Hank Scott (Richard Denning; heard of him, but not familiar with his roles) & Dr. Arturo Ramos (Carlos Rivas). But, wouldn't you know it, they find carnage strewn along the road to the site. They find a Police (Polizi?) car literally torn apart, and its occupants gone. Cold this be the work of THEM!? Nope, THEM! was shown at 8PM, this film was around 2AM.

So, in keeping with the format, there must be a beautiful young woman, if for no better reason, than to scream. Teresa Alvarez (Mara Corday) runs the ranch, and is out on her horse, when [dramatic music] the horse throws her. The two geologists go to her aid.

Once it is determined that giant scorpions are responsible for the carnage, and that they live underground in the heat of the day, emerging only at night, to find food; the authorities decide to use dynamite to close the fissure. Almost forgot: there was an expedition into the fissure, where the 2 geologists and one very young stowaway, find several other giant species.

O.k., so I have a weird sense of humor, but when one of the scorpions grabbed a guy, and he was thrashing around, hoping to escape, here come the stinger, to seal his fate!

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oh, the scorpions have anthropomorphic (human-like) faces; two eyes, etc.

Oh, and this one was made using Willis O'Brien's stop-motion models; which yielded a much more realistic result than the real tarantula manipulated by gusts of air, in the film Tarantula.

Pass the popcorn!
 
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paranoid marvin said:
I was never a particular fan of WW in Star Trek TNG. I went to a Star Trek convention in Birmingham a few years ago and got a free ticket to a talk hosted by him, and went to it because there was nothing better on.

It ended up being a highlight of the show, and apart from the Sulu/Chekhov talk was the best of them all. WW came across as an intelligent articulate person with a real live and passion for his role.

Having revisited TNG since, I realise that his character was poorly dealt with by the script writers, and on the odd occasion he did get a good storyline, he did well.
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Birmingham UK or Birmingham AL/USA? Sorry I missed that if it was local. Agreed on Wheaton and TNG -- I dislike his character despite being a big fan of the actor himself. He's practically the only Audible narrator I'll buy for. Currently listening to Start Up Villain.
 
Alien - Daughter Number 2 - who is leaving to go to college at the end of the week! Boo hoo! - and I are frantically watching stuff that we've been meaning to watch together for ages before she has to go. She'd never seen Alien before (and it's been many years since I have) her opinion: it holds up incredibly well. She is familiar with the outlines of the story and the character of Ripley etc. (anyone growing up with the amount of comic con / geek culture she has been exposed to could hardly avoid knowing even if only by osmosis) but loved the look and the atmosphere and the time spent on character - 'a great scary movie'.
 
paranoid marvin said:
I was never a particular fan of WW in Star Trek TNG. I went to a Star Trek convention in Birmingham a few years ago and got a free ticket to a talk hosted by him, and went to it because there was nothing better on.

It ended up being a highlight of the show, and apart from the Sulu/Chekhov talk was the best of them all. WW came across as an intelligent articulate person with a real live and passion for his role.

Having revisited TNG since, I realise that his character was poorly dealt with by the script writers, and on the odd occasion he did get a good storyline, he did well.
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I can recommend giving this a watch if he didn't tell this story when you saw him:
 
MURDERER'S ROW - 1966 -- Decided to revisit Matt Helm and while it has some groans, it had a few chuckles, and was enlivened by Ann-Margret's frenetic dancing.
 
Attack the Block - 2011

A young John Boyega and Jodie Marsh star in this sci-fi horror from Adam and Joe's, Joe Cornish. It's basically Alien with hoodies set in a peckham block of flats. I saw this back in 2011 and didn't give it the attention it deserves. Like DREDD, it benefits from a very simple premise and straight forward execution. Shaun of the Dead's Nick Frost also makes an appearance in what could be a successor to his role as Ed in the aforementioned movie. The movie has the same kinetic directing and great use of foreshadowing.

Good to hear there's talk of a sequel to come with John Boyega already signed on, according to IMDB.
 
"Cloud Atlas" it was really an amazing movie, it's makes me worder about the future and how the time flies so fast and what we are doing with our life right now. My tears came out in the last scene. It's highly recommended.
 
The New Barbarians aka Warriors of the Wasteland (I nuovi barbari, 1983)

Cheap Italian post-apocalyptic thriller. After the nuclear holocaust of 2019, a bunch of lunatics called the Templars, intent on wiping out what little remains of humanity, attack peaceful camps of survivors. Our lone wolf hero, named Scorpion, saves a beautiful woman from the Templars. Assisted by American action star Fred Williamson, who uses explosive arrows, and a little kid who is a mechanical genius and who wields a mean slingshot, he starts a war against the Templars. Lots of car chases, bloody killings, goofy costumes and ordinary cars and motorcycles made to look like "futuristic" vehicles. Typical stuff, except when the leader of the Templars captures Scorpion and then rapes him. I wasn't expecting that.
 
Hyper Sapien: People From Another Star (1986)

Family-friendly science fiction film. Very, very human aliens have been on the Moon for a while. Teenage girl alien and preteen girl alien sneak aboard a flying saucer making a visit to Earth. They get involved with a teenage boy, his father, and his grandfather (Keenan Wynn in his last role) in rural Wyoming (played by Alberta.) Along for the fun is a genuinely weird alien animal with three limbs and three eyes. Not much happens for quite a while, until the alien girls' uncle shows up and is shot by an overly cautious security guard at a political rally. It's all very sweet and cute and utterly harmless.
 
Miss Congeniality (2000)

A tough FBI agent goes undercover at a beauty pageant to catch a terrorist.

I really enjoyed this. Sandra Bullock is very good as the lead character, and Michael Caine plays against type as her stylist. The various aspects of being a cop and being Miss Alabama or whatnot are played for laughs, but not cruelly, and the film makes the contest feel more than just silly and exploitative. William Shatner provides an acting masterclass in his amazingly convincing portrayal of William Shatner.

There are some surprisingly modern touches: Caine's character is quite blatantly gay, not just camp, and there's a friendly nod to lesbianism. Given the need to sell big films in countries with a more bigoted attitude to these things, I don't know if these would have been included if it was made today. Several of the things modern feminists object to crop up in the story: there's a scene where Bullock's suggestions are literally repeated by a male colleague, who then gets the chief's approval. There's a romantic subplot which feels unnecessary and is the most dated element of it all.

Apparently it got quite poor reviews, but I thought this was a shrewd and entertaining film. I laughed out loud several times.
 
Spider-Man : Once Upon a Time the Super Heroes - (originally De Superman à Spider-Man: L'aventure des super-héros) A bland, pretty uninformative, whistle stop through the history of American superheroes. I.E. Superman & Batman, and Spiderman (with vague mentions of the Flash and Captain America, Daredevil and the X-Men) which fails to tell anyone who knows even the slightest bit about American Superhero comics anything. For one thing there is hardly any mention of any women; characters or creators. One mention of Marie Severin (over a static library photo) and one or two passing mentions of Wonder Woman and that's pretty much it. And watching this you wouldn't get the idea that there were any Black or Asian superhero characters either. Mention is made that Marvel's business model in the 60s involved keeping up with current events and trends - artists were admonished not to make their comics look like thay had been drawn ten years ago - so things like student unrest on the campuses was incorporated into story lines, as well as drug use, but where was the Civil Rights movement? Where were the Black characters who were invented in response? The Black Panther, The Falcon, Luke Cage? Nowhere. Not even in the endless rostrum camera panning and scanning of the endless number of comic book covers that seemed to take up 50% of the films running time. (Though artist Jim Lee turns up as a talking head so we know comics weren't only created by old White men.)

On the upside it was interesting to see the likes of Lee, Mike Kaluta, Joe Kubert, Carmine Infantino, and Dave Gibbons talking - names I know from their signatures on their art but couldn't put a face to before now (even if what they had to say most of the time wasn't very informative).
 
Dead & Buried (1981) Dir. Gary Sherman; starring James Farentino, Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson

Small town sheriff, Gillis (Farentino), investigates the near-death of a photographer vacationing in their area. His death in hospital slows Gillis’ investigation since while he appears to have been incinerated in a car accident, he has no ID on him. Further, Gillis has reason to believe his wife, Janet (Anderson), may have known the photographer.

The viewer knows exactly what happened to the photographer, since the movie opens with him being killed. Even so, there’s a surprise ahead a little later.

Farentino and Anderson are fine as the sheriff and his wife, but Jack Albertson steals the movie and seems to be having a good time as an eccentric funeral director. There’s an early appearance by Lisa Blount before her breakout in An Officer and a Gentleman and a supporting role for Robert Englund shows he had a connection to the horror genre even before Freddy Kruger.

I hadn’t seen this since it first came out on VHS, so I’d forgotten how good it was. If you don’t mind a little gore or a (unnecessary) topless scene, it’s one to look for if you’re inclined to watch horror as we roll toward Halloween.




Two-O’Clock Courage (1945) Dir. Anthony Mann; starring Tom Conway, Ann Rutherford, Richard Lane

A fair amount of fast-talk comic banter makes this at best pale-noir and I suspect it wouldn’t have been part of Turner Movie Channel’s Noir Alley if it weren’t for Mann as director. He had a visual sense that merged nicely with the more noir sensibilities of the script.

Ted Allison (Conway) comes down with a bad case of amnesia (a poor paraphrase, but Eddie Muller introducing the movie mentions someone calling amnesia noir’s communicable disease), runs into – almost literally – a cabbie, Patsy Mitchell (Rutherford) and comes to discover he’s involved with a murder. Taking some clues from his pocket – no ID; I wasn’t looking for a connective theme between movies, but there it is – with Patsy’s help he finds out who he is and tracks down the murderer.

Watched this in part because I like Conway; he was a B-movie George Sanders, and indeed was Sanders’ older brother. Like his brother, he specialized in light banter, which comes in handy with Rutherford, a detective, a reporter, and assorted others, as Allison and Mitchell travel the city (never named) to find whodunit. Early appearance of Jane (billed Bettyjane) Greer well before her breakout in Out of the Past, and like that movie her hairstyle and makeup make me think RKO Studios was grooming her as their version of Gene Tierney. Also in the cast, Jean Brooks, in a thankless role as an actress, a couple of years after a terrific turn, also with Conway, in The Seventh Victim.

Enjoyable, minor movie that does what it sets out to do, entertain.
 
Lots of rewatches for me
THE MAN WHO WAS NOBODY - 1960 Edgar Wallace mystery with Hazel Court as a private investigator hired to find someone who ran off with a diamond.

MR MAJESTYK - 1974 - Perhaps the most exciting movie ever about watermelon farming.
 
Cosmic Monsters / The Strange World of Planet X (1958) Scientist is experimenting with extremely powerful electromagnetic fields that cause an opening in the earth's protective magnetic field, allowing cosmic rays to reach earth's surface.

Gil Graham (Forrest Tucker) is assisting Dr. Laird (Alec Mango) in his attempts to alter the structure of certain materials by exposing them to these fields, among them metals. In the case of metal, after the exposure, the result is that it crumbles. Military types hope to turn the thing into a weapon that can destroy enemy aircraft.

Whereas both Tarantula & The Black Scorpion each had 1 attractive young woman who screams, this film has two, count 'em, 2 screaming women. the 1st (1th) joins the scientist as a computer expert. Michele Dupont (Gaby André) who is very unwelcome at first, merely because she is a woman. Yet, her innovative ideas bring efficiency to the system, that she is suddenly appreciated. The 2nd (2th) young woman is the schoolmarm.

Anyway, the Big Bugs: because of the critters' short reproductive times, they grow to enormous sizes, though still tiny compared to Tarantula or The Black Scorpion. Using camera tricks, actual multilegged creatures (not the 1 allegedly crawling up the guy's back in A Taste of Armageddon), all within the shadows of the woods, and at night. Not very impressive.

Oh, the British title mentions planet X; which sent flying saucers to earth to check on the Earthlings' progress, etc. These space ships use planets magnetic fields as propulsion, and one such saucer was brought down because of the experiment. One Man from Planet X was among the Earthlings; though not the same one as in the film of that title.

The film was enjoyable, at least by my standards.
 
Out of the Fog (1941) NOIR ALLEY. Stella Goodwin (Ida Lupino) is the daughter of Jonah Goodwin (Thomas Mitchell), a man of meager means, she is girlfriend to George Watkins (Eddie Albert), also a man of meager means. Along comes Harold Goff (John Garfield) a crook running a protection racket, who targets Stella's father and his friend, who go out in a small boat to fish, as their relaxation. Goff threatens to sink their boat, if they don't pay $5 a week. Further, he begins courting Stella. Stella's initial response, is loathing, and standing by her man. Eventually, Goff wins her affection, and gives her the nightlife Watkins could never afford.

Film opens in a small restaurant, in which 2, count 'em two actors associated with The Bowery Boys film series are portraying 1, a restaurant employee, & 2, a customer. 1, Leo Gorcey & his father 2, Bernard Gorcey. Interesting to see both in one film.

Anyway, Goff soon legitimizes the $5/week by forcing the two friends to sign a loan paper, alleging they borrowed $1000 from him. They take him to court, alleging he was running a protection racket, but he shows the signed paper to the judge, an case is thrown out. But now, they have had enough!
 
Skippy (1931) film version of the newspaper comic strip boy whose name was put on peanut butter. Mischievous little boy's comedic and dramatic adventures.
Skippy Skinner (Jackie Cooper; it was his day on TCM) disobeys his father Dr. Herbert Skinner (Willard Robertson; definitely not the Willard of the film Willard), who forbade him to cross the railroad tracks and go to the poor section of town, so, finding a small pipe underneath the tracks, crawled through.

Cute film.
 
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