Mr. BIG's Pirates

THE BOY AND THE PIRATES-1960-Jimmy (Charles Herbert), a little kid who likes pirates finds a bottle with a mini-genie (Joe Turkel) in it. Because of a wish he makes Jimmy winds up on “The Queen's Revenge”, a pirate ship ruled by the infamous Blackbeard (Murvyn Vye)) who makes Jimmy his cabin boy. He has to swab the deck, clean fish and get rum for the captain. After the pirates loot and kill on a Dutch ship Jimmy (who Blackbeard calls a “miserable cabin rat”) rescues Katrina (Susan Gordon), a girl about his age. Blackbeard wants to throw her overboard by Jimmy stands up for her. When the crew learn their captain is after some gold Morgan (Timothy Carey) tries to burn out Jimmy's tongue. When a British ship attacks The Queens Revenge, Jimmy and Katrina escape to an island but Blackbeard follows them. Jimmy throws the genie bottle at the pirate and he winds up back home. Despite being aimed at kids there's long stretches of talk and blood and violence. 

This bizarre kiddie swashbuckling fantasy was the first color film for “Mr. BIG” himself Bert I. Gordon (still alive at the time of this writing). There are no giant monsters but it's definitely a low budget production with some mediocre SFX. This was the second of four appearances for Susan Gordon in her dad's movies. Star Charles Herbert was also a popular child star at the time having been in THE FLY and THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK and many TV shows. He was in William Castle's 13 GHOSTS the same year.

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Revenge

GIRLS AGAINST BOYS-2012-A college student Lulu (Nicole LaLiberte) is dropped by her older married lover. After partying at a club she's brutally raped by some jerk she met. The police are no help so she and her friend (Danielle Panabaker) find the guy, torture him and then kill him. They kidnap Lulu's ex-lover and kill him too. Later they talk and ride around while “Hurdy Gurdy Man” by Donovan plays. She meets a dorky DJ guy but her friend kills him so she kills her friend with a samurai sword. Later she goes to a club and meets a girl who's been dumped by her boyfriend..... It was directed by a guy named Austin Chick....

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Dragonball

DRAGONBALL-EVOLUTION-2009-Nerdy white kid Goku (Justin Chatwin) lives with his Asian grandpa and tries to fit in and avoid bullies. On his birthday gramps gives Goku a “dragonball”, one of only 7 in the world. The evil demon Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) wants all the dragon balls so he kills gramps and Goku begins a quest to find all the magical balls and get revenge. Yun-Chow Fat livens things up as the comical Roshi. There's weird metallic monsters, lots of CGI fights, too much talk, crazy dream sequences and Goku turning into a giant monster. Though this is based on a hugely popular anime (of which I know very little about) it seems more influenced by LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER. 

Director James Wong made FINAL DESTINATION and THE ONE (with Jet Li) before this.

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Martial Art Monk

BULLETPROOF MONK-2003-In 1943 Tibet a monk with no name (Yun-Fat Chow) is given the task of protecting a sacred scroll that could grant anyone who reads it great power. The Nazis invade  their temple and kill everyone except the monk who falls off a cliff after being shot at. 60 years later, the monk hasn't aged much and lives above a movie theater (run by Mako) in Toronto. He saves a young girl named Jade (Jamie King) stuck on the subway tracks with the help of a stupid thief Kar (Seann William Scott) who steals the scroll. After saving Kar from a street gang the monk decides to take the thief (who learned martial arts from watching old Shaw Brothers movies) under his wing. Strucker, the German who shot at him in the temple (Karel Roden) is now old but head of a huge corporation searching for the scroll with the help of his grand-daughter in the hope of it making him young again. After being pursued and hiding out with some other monks, the monk trains the thief to kind of be his replacement. When the monk is captured, Kar and Jade team up to save him.

 Chow is great in the title role and the fights, especially in the climax are well done. It's just too bad the thief character wasn't more likable. Video music director Paul Hunter does an excellent job in his feature film debut, a feat many others have tried and failed miserably at.

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Atomic Drama

SPLIT SECOND-1953-Escaped killer Sam Hurly (Stephen McNally) holds a bunch of people hostage in a ghost town where the next day there is going to be an A-bomb test. Hostages include a reporter (Keith Andes), a dancer (Jan Sterling), a married woman (Alexis Smith) in Reno for a divorce and her boyfriend (Robert Paige). Hurly keeps them in line with the help of his mean, silent henchman Dummy (Frank DeKova). Somehow he blackmails the divorce woman's doctor/husband (Richard Egan) to come and tend his wounded partner (Paul Kelly). An old prospector (Arthur Hunnicutt) shows up midway through too. There's a lot of talk, soul searching and a fist fight during an operation. It ends with a mushroom cloud (but the good guys survive). 

Slightly far-fetched, SPLIT SECOND was the first directorial effort from actor Dick Powell who three years later would make the notoriously bad THE CONQUEROR which had some atomic bomb issues itself they say...

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You're In The Frankenarmy Now!

FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY-2013-Though a pretty terrible horror movie FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY may have done something no other movie could do. It makes the viewer feel sorry for Nazi Germany!

Sometime during World War 2 a group of stupid Russian soldiers are dispatch on mission to rescue captive Russian comrades. This event is also being filmed by another soldier on the orders of Joe Stalin himself. So of course this means more shaky found footage nonsense.

After acting like assholes the group arrives at the village to find it deserted except for many dead, mutilated and burnt bodies. Later they find a farmer who tells them about a doctor and after being tortured he agrees to lead them to their Russian POWs. But instead he takes them to some catacombs where they are attacked by incredibly strange creatures looking like a cross between HELLRAZOR'S Cenobites and Tim Burton's EDWARD SCISSORHANDS! Most of them have humanoid heads but razors and drills for hands. Nearly everyone is killed when the guy filming the whole thing reveals he is in fact a Russian captain and the mission about rescuing captive soldiers is false. Their real mission is to find the doctor and bring him back to Russia dead or alive. The 3 remaining soldiers eventually abandon the captain who after taking a taking a tour of the bloody goings on meets the mysterious doctor Viktor (Karel Roden; Rasputin in HELLBOY). He explains his mad methods and reveals that he is in fact descended from Dr. Frankenstein himself! He does brain operations on living subjects for the camera but seems ambivalent about joining up with Russia. When his experiment on one of the Russians doesn't seem to work he turns his sights on the captain but the Russian army begins bombing and the doctor decides to take off. However he is shot dead by Sasha (Luke Newbury) the only surviving trooper (who the rest of the company treated like shit) who takes the doctor's severed head and film camera back to Germany, leaving the captain's fate in the hands of his resurrected revengeful second in command (I guess the experiment did work)

The final scene shows a picture of Stalin and Sasha together.

Although this is suppose to take place during the 1940's the supposed found footage is very clear and in color (gee, like a real movie...). It's very bloody and some of the doctor's creations are weirdly imaginative but it's all very cartoonish and the finale almost seems like something out of MONTY PYTHON!

Director Richard Raaphorst made only short films before this. Let's hope he doesn't decide to do a sequel...like Dracula's Navy???

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ET Go Home

ATARI: GAME OVER-Nerds will love this documentary about the Atari video game adaptation of the hit movie E.T., sometimes dubbed “the worst video game ever”. It really tells the story/myth/urban legend that Atari dumped thousands of unwanted ET games into a landfill in Almagordo, New Mexico and the efforts of the dumps's “caretaker” as he tries to find them. It also covers games many pundits say were far worse and also spotlights the guy who created the game and how he was blamed for the downturn of Atari and its eventual demise. 

Director Zack Penn had made the great pseudo-documentary INCIDENT AT LOCH NESS and later gained fame writing big budgeted movies featuring Marvel superheroes.

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This Is A Thriller....

THRILLER-1961-Episode 23-”The Well of Doom”-The wealthy soon to be married Robert Penrose (Ronald Howard, in one of three roles for the TV series) is on his way to a bachelor party accompanied by his family butler Teal (Thorin Thatcher) when they are waylaid by a spooky looking old man named Squire Moloch (Henry Daniell, made up to resemble Lon Chaney in LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT) who claims to be the devil. He's assisted by a giant named Styx (Richard Kiel). Moloch does seem to have supernatural powers. When the butler tries to run away Moloch kills him just by pointing a finger at him. Later Penrose is held prisoner in a dungeon where his fiance' (Fintan Meyler) is also being kept (a flashback shows Styx kidnapping her). Moloch claims to be the former owner of the Penrose estate who Robert's father killed and dumped in a well. The same well Moloch plans to throw Penrose in if he doesn't give up his inheritance. Thinking ahead he rigs the well so if he is thrown in he can climb back up. Since Thriller has hit the airwaves again I won't give away the surprise (though rather pat) twist ending.

The Well of Doom is an effectively eerie piece directed by German born John Brahm who made other fog bound thrillers like THE UNDYING MONSTER, THE LODGER and HANGOVER SQUARE. This was one of 12 THRILLERS he directed as well as 10 episodes of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. His last film was the crazy HOT RODS TO HELL. Prolific TV writer Donald Sanford adapted the John Clemons story. Sanford would later write the screenplay to the WW2 epic MIDWAY. Earlier he shared an Emmy for writing the TV special “The Golden Junkman” in which Lon Chaney Jr. gave perhaps his finest performance.

Richard Kiel (who died in 2014) would play a much more memorable TV role as the Kanamit alien in the TWILIGHT ZONE episode “To Serve Man”. As the sinister Moloch, Henry Daniell was coming to the end of his long career (he died in '63) but still found time to be in 4 other THRILLERs. His last role was an un-billed bit in MY FAIR LADY.

Of course THRILLER was hosted by the great Boris Karloff (who occasionally starred in a few). His intro here isn't as good as some others but he still ends with the often used tagline “as sure as my name is Boris Karloff”.

THRILLER was a neglected anthology for years but thanks to a DVD release and it showing up on cable it's been given a second look and should be checked out by everyone!!!

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Two Blues by Blank

THE BLUES ACCORDING TO LIGHTIN' HOPKINS-1970-Nice cozy 45 minute documentary about the great delta blues man Lightin' Hopkins. He strums his guitar, tells stories and tries to explain “the blues”. It also features many residents of the rural Texas he lived in when this was filmed there in 1967 by Les Blank.

A WELL SPENT LIFE-1972-Sharecropper Mance Lipscomb plays guitar and gives his philosophy on life, love and marriage in Navasota, Texas. He also appears in THE BLUES ACCORDING TO LIGHTIN' HOPKINS. Les Blank co-directed it with Skip Gershon.

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No Pain, No Money

THE BRASS TEAPOT-2012-A married couple of likable losers Alice (Juno Temple) & John (Michael Angarano) find a ancient teapot that gives them money every time they feel pain. Of course this leads to many comic situations as they try and figure out new ways to feel more pain and get more money. After the guy has it appraised on an “Antiques Roadshow” type TV show many people want it including some Hasidic Jews who beat John up to try and steal it! A Korean doctor (Steve Park) shows up and explains the history of the 2000 year old teapot and how the couple are actually in a lot of trouble. Things get a little more serious later on but the story goes on too long. Apparently director Ramaa Mosley used a short film with the same title as basis for this, her first feature film.

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Troggie Dearest

TROG-1970-In England three spelunkers go looking for trouble in some underground caves and find it in the form of a prehistoric man/monster who beats one guy to death. Another guy goes crazy and is taken to a hospital where he's questioned by Dr. Brockton (Joan Crawford in her last motion picture role) who wants to see exactly what terrified him, so she and the third spelunker go back to the cave and she gets her wish snapping a photograph of the “trog” picking up a boulder. An expedition is mounted and Trog (Joe Cornelius in a monkey suit supposedly leftover from 2001!)) appears on live TV! Some people run but others (mostly the police) just stand around when Trog kills a cameraman. Brockton whips out a tranquilizer gun and Trog is captured and put in a cage for study (“For a senior citizen he certainly has a marvelous appetite”). Brockton's daughter Anne (Kim Braden) assists her when Trog plays with toys and listens to classical music. But when a jazzy rock number is played he goes wild! 

Dr. Selbourne (Jack May), a jealous assistant and Murdoch (Michael Gough), a greedy land developer plot to have Trog destroyed. A famous American surgeon (Robert Hutton) performs an operation that makes the caveman have flashbacks to prehistoric times (scenes from THE ANIMAL WORLD (1956) are used). All seems ok until Murdoch breaks into the institute and taunts Trog who escapes, kills Murdoch and terrorizes the small community (he hangs a local butcher on a meat hook). He kidnaps a little girl and heads for his cave. Brockton convinces Trog to set the girl free but the army kills him anyway. 

 This was the second outing for Joan Crawford working for her friend expatriate American producer Herman Cohen. I wonder if she still considered him a friend after starring in this dumb low budget horror thriller? Their first collaboration was BERSERK in 1967. Both have screenplays by Aben Kandel who in the US had written I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF in 1957 for then AIP producer Cohen. Earlier Kandel had written KID MONK BARONI (1952), Leonard Nimoy's debut film. Co-story credit goes to director John Gilling. 

Director Freddie Francis was also a respected and busy cinematographer though at this time he was directing his own films which were usually competently handled but TROG suffers from lack of budget and a rushed story line. This was the real nadir of Crawford's career (although she was on the board of directors of Pepsi-Cola at the time) and though miscast she plays it straight.

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