Robo Crampton Watch: Robot Wars (1993)

Watched:  10/26/2024

Format:  Amazon 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Albert Band

Some time back in the early 90's, I remember renting Robot Jox, and kind of liking it well enough, while absolutely understanding I was watching a very silly movie.  It was only in recent years that I figured out that Robot Jox and Robot Wars (1993) were not the same movie.  But I didn't at all care.

But that was before I decided Barbara Crampton is a good idea, and I was looking to see what else she's in that's on Prime.  And, lo and behold.

A trim 72 minutes of movie later, I have now seen Robot Wars.  

This movie is not super good.  It's the kind of stuff made for the rental market and then dumped onto USA Up All Night by 1996.  I'm becoming more familiar with Full Moon Features and its output, and I'm not mad at it.  It's utterly lacking in pretention, and I imagine these shoots were kind of fun.  

Robot Wars takes place in 2041, I believe, after wars and disasters have changed the world.  I'm not sure if it's a sequel to Robot Jox, shares a universe, or whatever.  But there's only one giant, scorpion-shaped robot left in the world, and it's used to both defend the civilized world and transport folks across wastelands full of hostile forces - touristy!

There's a *lot* of plot.  Because they can't really afford a lot of action.  After all, when the robots are in motion, it's Stop-Motion (Jurassic Park is this same year).  And the laser-gun action is mostly... perfunctory.  But there's a lousy guy running the free world, trying to be friends with China.  So, we get two "that guy!" Asian actors having what seems to be a good time.  Two dopey dudes stand in for the hunky hero and his pal, and there's two lovely women running around as our actual heroes.

Anyway, a pre-surgery Lisa Rinna plays a reporter whose pal, Leda (Barbara Crampton) is checking out the wastelands and find out if the toxic-spill areas are safe or not.  

All you need to know is this is a movie with some robot fighting, 1993 LA doubling for a city abandoned in 1993, many steam tunnels, basements, AV equipment doubling for robot command consoles, and the most attention of anything paid to Rinna and Crampton's hair.  They both look 1993-fabulous.

The movie is the equivalent of cotton candy.  You'll know you consumed it, but just be left with a blue tongue and a slightly upset stomach, and then want to have some more.

Anyway, if the goal was to see robots (in general), robots fighting (specifically), actors you recognize and are surprised to see in this...  sign yourself up. 

Regretful HalloWatch: Casper (1995)

ugh

Watched:  10/25/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Brad Siberling

selection:  Jamie.  She made me watch this.

@#$%ing Casper (1995).  

I hated this movie in 1995 when I saw it, and, here, nearly 30 years later, I remember exactly why.  This movie is the culmination of so many bad ideas from the 90's, it's almost a wee bit magical.  It's a kid's movie where they made it 35% for adults and 50% for kids and 15% for a peculiar audience of people who want things to suck real bad.

I have no doubt Millennials Space Jam Fallacy the crap out of this movie (ie: believe this movie is good because they liked it when they were young and their brains were spongey and "good" meant mommy would let you play it over and over on the VHS while she drank wine with the pool boy), but this movie is a parade of 90's excess.  It's also proof that you can drop $55 million (> $110 million adjusted) on a movie, pack it with faces, meta references and other 90's tricks - and it's no better than, say, Bailey Saves Christmas.  

I'm old enough that Casper cartoons were still running on TV when I was a very little kid.*  As a young reader, I was given Harvey Comics starring Casper, Hot Stuff, Wendy the Witch, Ritchie Rich, et al... .  Flash forward to the mid-90's, we were exploiting IP in interesting ways at the movies - making live action Flintstones.  Addams Family.  I'd also seen Dennis the Menace.  And I am sure other things.  So why not a live action Casper?  

Whoops Hallo-Watch: Legend of the Wolf Woman (1976)

this poster way oversells the movie

Watched:  10/25/2024

Format:  Full Moon on Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Rino Di Silvestro

Well, I accidentally watched an Italian sexploitation movie thinking I was watching a werewolf movie.

This is what Amazon pitched to me/ possibly rolled over into after Castle Freak, and I was like "sure, why not?  I haven't watched much straight-trash yet this year for Halloween.  Let's watch a 1976 Italian werewolf film."

To my credit - it IS called "Legend of the Wolf Woman" (1976) and the first scene had a werewolf in it.

After that, it's about a lady (the lovely Annik Borel) with some serious issues who goes on a killing spree, *thinking* she's a werewolf, getting naked occasionally, and sometimes having sex.  

Major content warning:  It also has a really grim sexual assault scene I wasn't expecting and was super unpleasant and unnecessary.

Is the movie good?  No.  Did I keep thinking maybe she'd turn into a werewolf and redeem my use of time?  Yes.  Was I wrong and zero werewolves appeared after the first scene?  Also: yes. 

The poster says it's based on a true story, and the movie suggests so at the end, but... who knows?

Anyway, I'm calling this one a mulligan.

If anyone knows of anything with Annik Borel that isn't... bad.  Let me know.

Crampton Hallo-Watch: Castle Freak (1995)

One poster shows the villain, which is a spoiler, and one is a teenager in a bra, so you get Crampton

Watched:  10/24/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stuart Gordon

I am not always in-line with all of the thinking that goes into being a hard-core horror film fan, but I love how much they celebrate the work of their favorite actors - and keep them employed for decades.  One such fave I've been aware of for some time has been Barbara Crampton, and I'm on board.  Sign me up for the Crampton fan club.  

So, we'll be digging a bit more into the Crampton-filmography over time.

When I saw that Castle Freak (1995) re-teamed director Stuart Gordon with actor Jeffrey Combs and Crampton, and I saw some notes about "this is a horror movie with a kind of grown-up storyline" I was curious.  I like a good "whoops, the robots have flipped out at the shopping mall" movie as much as the next guy, but I wanted to know what this team looked like doing a bit more drama and little less in the way of re-animated corpses running about.  

Combs and Crampton play a couple on the rocks following the blinding of their daughter (Jessica Dollarhide) and death of their young son after Combs drove them off the road, drunk.  Clearly Crampton can't forgive and forget, and Combs is maybe too much of an egoist to really accept what he did.  But a mysterious relative has just passed, and when that occurs, Combs learns that he's inherited a castle in Italy.  Apparently he was Italian nobility.

Well, wouldn't you know it - there's a freak living chained up in the basement of the castle.  And by freak, we mean a hideously deformed, savage human, that for some reason, someone decided it was best they keep in a cage in the basement.  

The arrival of the fractured family leads to the "freak" flipping out and escaping, where he hides in the many hidey-holes of the castle and occasionally popping out to harass and then murder.  There is a housekeeper, who is aware of the freak (who is named Giorgio, so I can stop calling a fictional disabled person a "freak") but has been complicit in Giorgio's horrible life.

The family fractures all the more, and Combs goes out where he picks up a bottle again and accidentally picks up a hooker.  Things go sideways as the hooker leaves - and it brings things to a head, as police want to look into the castle.

As a stand-alone story about a family trying to move past trauma, you do get the idea that Combs and Crampton would have been interesting in a straight drama about loss.  The Crossing Guard, which is @#$%ing great but depressing, comes to mind.  We're nowhere near that - after all, we have a dude running around murdering people with his bare hands to contend with - but we do get to use that as a sort of investigation of the secrets families keep, our own weaknesses and what we can do to make amends.  

There's a 2020 version of this film for reasons I cannot fathom, which sounds like it's much more Lovecraftian in nature and changes all the major details that make this one different and/ or interesting.  What it does do is say "maybe we shouldn't make a wretched human an actual monster" which plays very oddly now, as I know it probably did in 1995 - but which arrived in a period full of serial killer movies, so who knows?

I find it interesting that this was poster-girl Jessica Dollarhide's last movie.  Maybe she went to college and was done.  I can't say.  She's certainly not bad in the movie.

Anyway, I don't want to oversell it, but it *is* different.  The same sort of lived-in, real-world problems, like, say, in The Shining, are an interesting refraction against the part that makes the film "horror".  

1930's HalloWatch: Vampyr (1932)

Watched:  10/23/2024

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Carl Theodor Dreyer

Apparently when this movie came out, people were just *mad* at it.  Like when you read that people freaked out about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and rioted*, when Vampyr (1932) was shown, it seems the good people of Vienna wanted their money back and subsequently rioted. Berlin just boo'd the picture.  And it kind of went from city to city, earning a terrible reputation.

But imagine just dumping David Lynch or Tarkovsky on people who think they came to see Universal's very palatable Dracula.  

That said, this movie is *great*.  And that's with the viewing I did which was of a stitched together restoration of a film no one really wanted to see again after 1932 and was more or less lost.  

In theory, based on the work of Sheridan le Fanu, it's really it's own thing, nodding to bits of his collection of works entitled In a Glass Darkly, which contains the novella Carmilla - upon which my fave rave, The Vampire Lovers, takes inspiration.

The film is creepy enough, just based on the concepts.  A young man comes to a small French town and is visited by an older gentleman in the middle of the night (in the film's first real tell about how weird it will be), who leaves him with a package marked "open in the case of my death".  Soon, he's seeing disembodied shadows running around, a mysterious doctor, a mysterious older woman... and then witnesses the murder of the older gentleman through his window.  And then it gets weird.

Hallo-Re-Re-Re-Re-Watch: Ghostbusters (1984)

Watched:  10/21/2024

Format:  Alamo

Viewing: hahahahahaha

Director:  Ivan Reitman

Si invited me out to a Ghostbusters Party at The Alamo.  It was a good time!  They gave us a marshmallow, a tub of slime, a glow-in-the-dark thing to wave around for proton beams...  

I also realized I've seen Ghostbusters (1984) more than the average bear when I p-shaw-ed the guy who went up to the front as a "super fan" saying he'd seen the movie twenty times.  I also told the host I'd seen the movie opening day at age 9, and that apparently earned me some street cred.

It was a bit of a quote-along, jam-out to the songs thing, and super fun.  

A few years back, Si, Jamie and I did this as a podcast, so rather than me rehashing the movie in text, you can listen to that.

I guess my only real note is that Sigourney Weaver is a stone cold fox in this movie, and I'm not sure we're supposed to talk about that.

Weaver judges me for bringing it up

Hallo-Universal-Watch: The Invisible Man (1933)

Watched:  10/18/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  James Whale

We watched this one with some folks.  

I always enjoy that this movie is essentially about a guy who injects himself with a serum that, yes, makes him invisible - but it also makes him an incredible a-hole.  It's a real take.

But Jamie and I discussed this in what turned out to be the penultimate episode of The Signal Watch PodCast.

Anyway, you can listen to our thoughts on it!

How can you not like a movie where the main character declares the moon is afraid of him (and means it!)

HalloDocWatch: Haxan (1922)

surely someone remade this as an album cover in the 80's

Watched:  10/19/2024

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Benjamin Christensen

What an incredible film.  

I mean, obviously.  This is a silent film that has thrived well into the modern era, so I'm no genius for noticing that it's pretty good.

Essentially a documentary/ presentation about the history of what we consider witches and witchcraft, the film feels a wee bit like an early Powerpoint at first, but it has a lot of territory to cover - like explaining how people a few hundred years ago thought the universe was constructed and the way in which that informed their entire worldview. If you literally believe Earth is the center of all things, flat, and God is sitting beyond line of sight directing celestial bodies for fun and profit, and Satan literally sits in a spot in a hole in a firey hole in the Earth, then you're going to be willing to believe he's also in your neighbor's house making it with the old lady who lives there.

The film doesn't just have fascinatingly well-constructed arguments, it's a prime example of the imagination, visual artistry and astounding craft of film by 1922.  If you ever think silent film was primitive - my dudes...  The movie creates scene after scene with unbelievable art and set design, costuming, lighting, optical and practical FX... many positively surreal.  They show the cosmos at work from a Christian cosmology perspective, what people imagined was happening at Black Sabbaths, complete with the devil in many forms and troupes of demons alongside him, recreate scenarios for how a witch hunt could begin...  And they also show very practical demonstrations of torture devices, etc...  

It's hard to explain how incredible these visuals are, so...

The movie is scary, but not in the "ooOOOooo...  witches!" way.  Instead, it's a reminder that humans are terrible, the world is drowning in abuse of power and misogyny, and religion is used as an excuse to do all sorts of things your deity of choice would really frown at, especially done in His/ Her/ Their name.  Basically, the film is about how we decide to abuse power, mostly for no reason, other than that we have a hard time seeing certain kids of people *as* people, and we fucking love to punch down.  

They also discuss how the very world that people lived in, and the rules they believed they lived by - ie: Satan could just pop up, sex you, and now you're evil (I don't know, man) likely had profound psychological impact on people and led to all sorts of weirdness in the Middle Ages (for an example, we can look at Ken Russel's film The Devils, based on a true story).  And led to nonsense like Salem.

Not so curiously, by the film's end, they leap to the modern era (of 1922) and rather than say "but we're so advanced now", they say "look, this is how we do the same shit now, only we dressed it up for polite society" by showing similar treatment of women in the modern era.  Remember - 1922 is also when we'd, like, lock up our wife in an asylum for getting sick of our shit and talking back.  And while there are plenty of 2024 examples, these are the good old days a whole lot of people think they want back because their context of the past are glimpses of old TV shows.*

Anyway, reality is a hellscape of terrors inflicted on each other for reasons that don't seem to make much more sense than believing our  omnipotent friends would have us do that, and/ or we're really sickos who found ourselves in a position where we could abuse the shit out of people and make money doing it.

Never trust anyone who desires power.

Happy Halloween!

*the past mostly sucked, and the desire to go back to any period before a Star Trek future makes absolutely no sense to me.  Unless you get to have a candlelit dinner with Myrna Loy.  Then it makes sense.

HalloWatch: The Vampire Happening (1971)

Watched:  10/16/2024

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Freddie Francis

Imagine a movie written entirely with the same vibe as one panel comics from mid-Century Playboy.  That's the entire vibe of this "movie".  

During the darkest days of COVID lockdown, I would scroll Amazon Prime for movies to Watch Party, and at some point, The Vampire Happening (1971) came up, and I laughed at the title and checked it out, deemed it far too boob-tacular to make it into the queue, and moved on.  But Amazon Prime was not done with me.  And so - for whatever reason only the algorithm knows, this movie always found it's way into my line-up of offerings.

It's a goofy comedy that works by 1970's European erotic movie rules, so you kind of have to just roll with it.  But the basic story is that a Hollywood actress inherits a castle in Transylvania.  She looks just like an ancestor who was some sort of vampire.  Her arrival means her relative rises from the grave again, and while Betty romances a strapping young man, her double is out there making new vampires.

Eventually there's a vampire party, or, as us hep cats said in the late 1960's - a vampire happening - complete with the arrival of Dracula.  

Italian produced, written by Germans and shot in Germany by an English director, and starring a ragtag pile of Euro-talent and staying just on this side of softcore, it's truly an artifact of its time.

Basically, the movie was a weird excuse for the Italian producer to put his wife on film, and have a big party in a castle.  I can only imagine what was going on behind the scenes.  But in watching this movie, there's a distinct feeling you're watching the product of someone's scheme to have a very adult good time on someone else's dollar.  As such, it's not... good.  It's not funny or particularly sexy and feels interminable for the first 2/3rds.  It had one line I found laugh out loud funny right at the end of the movie, and I did like the winky end to the film.  And Dracula is kind of funny.

The star, Pia Dagermark - wife of the producer - had won awards at Cannes in 1967, and I think this movie was what more or less ended the movie business for her.  It happens.  

Just go watch a Hammer vampire movie instead.

HalloWatch: Puppet Master (1989)

Watched:  10/15/2024

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  David Schmoeller

It's important to note the budget for some of these movies.  

Puppet Master (1989) has a reported budget of $400,000.  That's about $1.12 million in 2024 dollars for a whole movie - or, roughly, the cost of bagels on an Avengers movie.  And, people still watch this thing.  So hopefully residuals are still making their way to folks who worked for cheap.

This movie is like someone took a bunch of ideas, threw them in a hat and then pulled them out whilst blind-folded.  And that isn't necessarily a complaint.  It's weird to see so many ideas in one movie, but they do work together.

The rough idea - for some reason a Puppet Master (William Hickey!) is tracked down at a hotel in the 1930's by Nazis?  He kills himself rather than give them the secret of how to imbue puppets with life.  

In the late 1980's, four psychics are summoned to the fancy hotel by a former colleague, Gallagher.  To be honest, I do not know why he summoned them as he then kills himself before they arrive.  One is sort of an everyman psychic, one is a fortune teller who gets glimpses of the future, and two seem to channel sex into their research, which is at least kind of novel.  Meanwhile, Gallagher's widow is hanging about.

There are spirit visions and glimpses of people's deaths yet to come.  A lot of rolling around on a bed.  And nobody seems to have liked Gallagher.  

Soon, the puppets who once were Hickey's pals are running around picking off the psychics.  And each puppet kind of has their thing.

It's probably telling that the stars of this movie mostly don't have many credits.  Hickey is a cameo and our star is really Paul Le Mat, who you'll keep squinting at, trying to remember what you know him from.  I put the movie on because it said it had Barbara Crampton, but she's in it for 30 seconds as a favor to someone, and it managed to sucker me into watching it, so... well done, film producers from 1988 or so.

The puppets are kind of neat.  It's all just... puppetry, but to its credit, it works.  The Pinhead fellow with human hands, Leach Girl, Blade...  just good ideas.  

But there's oddly almost no... feel to the movie.  They have this stunning location of the hotel, but seems like they had a few rooms somewhere, and decided to just light everything like a late 1980's TV show - ie: there are no shadows.  It's sort of weird, visually, in 2024 to see something speaking in TV-language of the era.  

The movie is just weird enough, by virtue of throwing ideas at you left and right, that it's not boring or repetitive.  But it can feel like someone was just writing things down with no clear goal where it was going.  And that's okay.  I just don't think there's anything remotely scary about this movie.  It's more... kind of interesting.  Some really oddball stuff out there winds up drumming up multiple sequels and a fanbase.

I do wonder if this was made because someone say 1987's Dolls, a movie by Stuart Gordon of Re-Animator fame.  Dolls worked for me when I saw it on HBO or something in probably 1989.*  But Dolls was pretty creepy, if memory serves.  

Anyway - it was fine.  One more to check off the list.

*I wound up watching this with a good friend's mom.  I was at his house spending the night, and she'd wandered into the room as the movie started, and my pal fell asleep, and so I wound up watching this goofy movie in a super awkward context, as she was clearly watching it and I didn't know if I could just go to sleep or turn off the TV or what.  She also would go to movies with us and sit by herself so she could see, like, Dirty Harry: The Dead Pool.