More Rambling....

JACK HUNTER AND THE LOST TREASURE OF UGARIT-2008-Ivan Sergei  portrays the title character a terrible Indiana Jones clone. It's full of bad acting and direction wrapped around an idiotic derivative plot. It was filmed in Turkey (I'll avoid the pun...). I've read it was actually some kind of mini-series (?). It was directed by Terry Cunningham (if he was related to Richie it might explain why he's allowed to direct movies but of course that can't be true...)....That leaves us with RED FACTION: ORIGINS-2011-more S.F. nonsense that takes place on the planet Mars in 2145. It's an un-fantastic allegory where the Martians have to fight to be free from the evil Earth force. Robert "I used to have a career" Patrick stars as a guy who led the revolution. Kate Vernon is "The Matriarch" (mostly appearing as a hologram) and there's a lot of black and white flashbacks. Hmmm..X-MEN: ORIGINS...RED FACTION: ORIGINS...I hope this isn't the start of something! The story is by Charles Band vet Danny Bilson. TV director Michael Nankin made it...
 I watched a good film recently too! DUEL ON GANRYU ISLAND, the third part of Hiroshi Inagaki's excellent "Samurai Trilogy" (1954-56) starring the great Toshiro Mifune as Musashi Miyamoto, a wandering misfit who becomes Japan's greatest "fencer". At the time Kurosawa was making some of the greatest movies of all time with Mifune (they collaborated on "The Seven Samurai" the same year as Part 1) but as Kurosawa worked exclusively in black and white at the time, all three of Inagaki's films are in color which really adds to the beauty of the story...THE KID WITH THE GOLDEN ARM is a 1979 Shaw Bros. production directed by Cheh Chang. It's chock full of violence, great fights and characters named Iron Feet, Golden Arms and Short Axe. It features the usual "Venoms" cast....I also saw two other martial arts movies recently THE REVENGER-(aka SHAOLIN REVENGER)-1980 and  KUNG-FU OF THE EIGHT DRUNKARDS but I'm sure everyone's tired of me writing about such things!

Thanks for reading!

RIP Robert W. Kaelin-1918-2014