Blackmoor Vituperative

Tonight’s film fun was Lifeforce, starring Steve Railsback, Mathilda May, Peter Firth, and a host of others. This is one of my all-time favourite movies, and unlike some movies from the 1980s, this is every bit as great now as it was the first time I saw it. Maybe even more so, since this is the Shout! Factory director’s cut on Blu-ray.

I just can’t express how awesome I think this movie is. Everyone is so perfectly cast. Steve Railback as the shell-shocked astronaut fighting his involuntary obsession with the Space Girl is perfect. Mathilda May as the Space Girl communicates through body language and expressions a range I am not sure any living actor could match. Peter Firth as the SAS colonel is as cool as James Bond and just a little bit pervy. Frank Finlay as the death-obsessed biologist is amusingly quirky and detached as only an English actor can be.

How could this movie have failed at the box office? Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakob on the script, John Dykstra on special effects, Henry Mancini on the soundtrack, Tobe Hooper at the helm… this is undoubtedly one of the best science fiction movies of the 1980s, and absolutely the best movie Golan-Globus ever produced. I have not yet watched the extensive special features, but I am looking forward to it.

THANK YOU, Shout Factory, for bringing this long-awaited director’s cut to Blu-ray!

A friend who has daughters shared with me this article about a guy who bought a Justice League board game to play with his daughter, only to find out there that there wasn’t a single female superhero in the game. Seriously?

I find it baffling that there are so few female characters in superhero movies, and that those few seem to get left out of the merchandising so often. I assume that women who like superheroes like female superheroes, and I know that guys like female superheroes (Black Widow was the best thing about the second Iron Man movie). So who is it at these marketing companies that keeps making the bone-head decision to drop Wasp from the Avengers but keep Hawkeye (a character so lame that he’s become the poster-child for ostensibly sexist comicbook art, overlooking the fact that any art with Hawkeye in it looks ridiculous), or to leave Gamorra out of the Guardians Of The Galaxy merchandise? We, the people who buy this stuff, totally dig the female characters (for different reasons maybe, but that’s okay). So who are the idiots in board rooms saying, “No, no, no! We can’t have Supergirl or Batgirl or Power Girl or Wonder Woman or Black Canary or Batwoman or Jade in this movie/game/poster/action figure set, that’s just crazy talk!”, and why are people still listening to them?

The board game story has a more or less upbeat (if not entirely happy) ending. Even so, the whole thing mystifies me, it truly does.

We just finished watching The Host (2013). I liked this movie much more than I expected. What if the Puppet Masters’ invasion had been successful, and years later, one of them had second thoughts about it?

I was expecting some kind of action-adventure chase movie, with lots of action scenes. In all fairness, there are a number of action scenes, but most of the movie is a character study, as the alien “Wanderer” and a number of humans get to know each other. What if the Puppet Masters were … people? What if they started to see us as people?

Give this movie a shot. You might be surprised.

The third Friday of August is Cult Movie Night at Castle Blackmoor. This month, we celebrate the career of Rutger Hauer with two of his most difficult-to-find films. First, we will view Fatherland (1994). Twenty years after Nazi Germany won World War 2, a German investigator and an American journalist uncover a conspiracy of terrible crimes committed during the war.

People who want to stay late will see the action-horror film Split Second (1992). This is a film about eating chocolate, drinking coffee, and getting “BIGGER GUNS!” Set in a near-future world where global warming has put the city of London under eight inches of water, Hauer plays a police detective hunting down a serial killer with a very familiar modus operandi.

Tonight has been Bad Vampire Movie night. We started with Dario Argento’s Dracula (2012), starring Rutger Hauer, who apparently got lost on the way to the movie and only showed up about a half-hour before the end. This was a more or less straight adaptation of Dracula, but I could not shake the feeling that it was a spoof of badly-dubbed Italian horror movies. The worst thing I can say about it is that it’s just kind of dull. It’s not too bad, though: I have certainly seen far worse vampire movies.

The second movie was Dracula’s Widow (1988), starring no one. This was a late-1980s feature, filmed in widescreen, which is unusual for this kind of movie from that era. This, too, almost felt like a spoof, but it wasn’t. I bet Larry Blamire and cohorts could make a fantastic movie in this vein (so to speak). Again, it’s not a great movie, but I have seen much worse.

The final movie in our Bad Vampire Movie night is Zoltan, Hound Of Dracula (1978), starring a spectacularly well-trained Doberman and Michael Pataki (of Sidehackers fame) and José Ferrer (winner of the Academy Award and numerous Tony Awards, and the first actor to receive the National Medal of Arts). I am not sure how to describe this film. It’s the best-made movie of the three, in my opinion, but the plot is… strange. The first half-hour is literally the dog’s journey from Soviet Romania to Los Angeles (spoiler: he takes a boat). The second half-hour is a relatively uneventful camping trip (certainly no more terrifying than any of the camping trips I’ve been on). But if you like vampire movies, and you like dog movies, this is your movie: in addition to the title character, it features two German shepherds in prominent roles, and a fair number of canines in supporting roles. And you know, it’s nice seeing German Shepherds with healthy hips, before they got so inbred to please dog-show ghouls. Warning, though: a puppy dies about 45 minutes into the film. It’s not gratuitous or sadistic, though: it happens off-screen, and it’s not played for laughs or gore. If a softie like me can cope with it, small children and pregnant women should be able to handle it just fine (spoiler: the puppy shows up again later in the film). Oh, and there is a beautiful late-1960s Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible that José Ferrer drives around Los Angeles. Truly a beautiful classic American car.

I just watched Gravity with Susan Blackmoor. I had low expectations. After all, I have seen this movie before, when it was called Marooned and starred Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman. George Clooney is no Gregory Peck, and Sandra Bullock is no Gene Hackman. But when I’m wrong, I admit it: I enjoyed this a great deal. This was a spectacular homage to the “space adventure” movies of the 1950s and 1960s, back when manned rockets were new and people thought we might actually colonize the Moon and other planets. I highly recommend it.

Just watched “Alien Trespass“. I almost didn’t, because the cover art and the title made me think it was probably yet another of those execrable Asylum ripoffs. (If that makes you think the Asylum films are terrible, you are mistaken: they are much, much worse than that. Seriously, do not ever watch one. They aren’t “bad” in an entertaining way. They are just plain bad.)

However, to my surprise, it wasn’t. It’s more in the vein of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, although it’s played completely seriously, without even the deadpan humour of Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. I confess I enjoyed Skeleton more, but I recommend Alien Trespass to anyone who has an affection for 1950s science fiction movies.

We celebrated the third day of our four-day weekend by watching a number of shows on Netflix. The best of these were from across the water: Grabbers (an Irish film in the tradition of Tremors and Shawn Of The Dead), and the first episode of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. These were both great fun. Grabbers, in particular, deserves to have wider recognition. As much as I enjoy the work of Simon Pegg, Grabbers was much more fun than The World’s End.

As for Miss Fisher, it reminds me a great deal of another mystery genre import, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I wish they had made more episodes of that. It was a delightful show, and quite likely the first time I had ever seen Africa being portrayed as a place where people could actually live and be happy.

The theme for Cult Movie Night this month was 1995 Ice-T movies. It’s a very specific genre. The first movie was Keanu Reeves’ first foray into cyberpunk, Johnny Mnemonic, which starred Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, Dina Meyer, Ice-T, and Takeshi Kitano. Fun fact! This was Dolph Lundgren’s last theatrically released film role until The Expendables. Lundgren’s street preacher is actually one of the high points of the film.

The second movie was Tank Girl, starring Lori Petty, Naomi Watts, Ice-T, and Malcolm McDowell. Ice-T got second billing in this, but I do not know why: Naomi Watts and Malcolm McDowell both had more substantial roles. I am glad that we watched Tank Girl last. Lori Petty was perfectly cast as Rebecca, and the whole movie was really fun. And Naomi Watts has really nice teeth!

edit: Unfortunately, I made an error in the scheduling of this Cult Movie Night. The blu-ray special remastered “collector’s edition” of Tank Girl is released this coming Tuesday. So we watched the DVD version. Ah, well.

edit: The Blu-ray has arrived! I’ve watched all of the special features. I love the Lori Petty interview. She seems so fun! The Rachel Talalay interview is really interesting, too. Tank Girl was ahead of its time in so many ways. Shout! Factory has awesome extras on almost all of their DVD and Blue-ray releases. It really is worth buying.

Next month: a Patrick Swayze Christmas!