Mel Brooks Watch: Spaceballs (1987)

 

Watched:  09/26/2020
Format:  Streaming?  Jamie was playing it.

Viewing:  oh, lord, I have no idea

Decade:  1980's

Director:  Mel Brooks

I really enjoyed this movie in 1987 when I saw it in the theater, and despite the fact I've seen it a couple of dozen times, I continue to enjoy this movie.  

Also - every time I'm waiting to see if something at work is going to work, I mutter "come on, Schwartz".  No one ever knows what I'm talking about.

FRIDAY WATCH PARTY: Vampire Circus (1972)

 

Day:  10/02/2020
Time:  8:30 Central

Amazon Watch Party Link 

This movie was recommended to me by the great JAL and is absolutely bananas.  

Several years after villagers have killed a local vampire, a plague has descended upon the town.  Ain't nobody happy.  But then a circus arrives - a circus that may not be all that it seems....

Vampires.  It's chock full of vampires.  

SEXY vampires.

Anyway - things get downright weird.  And nothing can prepare you for the sexy snake dance.

Watch Party Watch: Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974)

 

Watched:  09/27/2020
Format:  Amazon Watch Party
Viewing:  Second
Decade:  1970's
Director:  Brian Clemens

I kinda like this goofy movie. 

Hammer had the not-all-that-bad idea in a post-James Bond era to frame a new character as one of the disaffected antiheroes that had made their way into film.  I am certain this was intended to be the first of several films starring Captain Kronos, but Hammer studios was on the verge of collapse and wsn't able to continue the adventures of the good Captain.  

The movie is also - I learned - part of the Karnstein vampire saga which began with an adaptation of the 1872 novel Carmilla starring Ingrid Pitt and retitled The Vampire Lovers.  As an alternative to the Dracula films, Hammer had found new angles on the Karnsteins across 3 films in 1970 - 71 before the incredibly iffy return of Drac in 1972.

This film sees a vampire that haunts the woods outside a remote village.  The local doctor calls in a friend from "the war", an expert swordsman who pairs with a Van Helsing-like expert in vampire affairs to root out and eliminate the fiends (and in Hammer, especially, the vampires are not just misunderstood weirdos or X-Men with a blood addiction).  Kronos is Hammer's version of a bad-motherf@#$er - chain smoking his way through the film, rescuing a grateful Caroline Munro from her small-minded fellow villagers and bringing her along for the inevitable sex scene and to fawn over him throughout the movie.  

For their part, the vampire is draining young girls of their youth and essence.  Meanwhile, clues start mounting up pointing at the wealthy rich family in town.  

All in all, it's pretty straight-forward stuff.  Hammer was looking to get a bit more action-adventure with their movies and maybe push their aging cast of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as the leads for young film fans to enjoy.  It's actually a good enough formula that a smattering of non-Dracula vampire movies of the past thirty years have borrowed the idea of cool vampire hunters, from Vampire Hunter D to Vampire$ and a bunch I'm not thinking of.   But - Blade the Vampire Hunter appeared in Marvel comics a year before this movie arrived in theaters.  Pretty wild.  Something was in the air.

The movie does include some swordplay, but it never quite reaches Errol Flynn-ness.  And maybe suggested a cantina scene to a certain Mr. Lucas.  

There's no, like, deeper themes to the movie.  It's pretty straightforward, sets up Kronos and his pal and what their adventures look like, and then mic drops.  If you're looking for something that does some good genre bending and is clearly having a good time doing it, sure!  

PODCAST! "Dracula" (1931) and "Horror of Dracula" (1958) - Halloween 2020 w/ SimonUK and Ryan

Watched:  09/11/2020 and 09/12/2020

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Unknown and Unknown

Decade:  1930's and 1950's

Director:  Tod Browning and Terence Fisher

More ways to listen

It's Halloween! This year SimonUK and Ryan are taking on the classics of horror from not just one - but two studios! We're starting with a monster that really sucks - our dear old pal, The Count! Join us as we talk two great takes on Dracula - from Universal and Hammer Studios, respectively - that cemented the character in the collective imagination and which still continue to thrill! Let's talk creepy castles, alluring monsters and rubber bats! 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 120: "Dracula" (1931) & "Horror of Dracula" (1958) - Halloween 2020 w/ SimonUK and Ryan

Music: 

Horror of Dracula Main Theme - James Bernard

Swan Lake - Act II (excerpt) - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 

Halloween 2020 Playlist

The Signal Watch PodCast · Halloween 2020 - Universal and Hammer Horror

All the Halloween and Horror

The Signal Watch PodCast · Halloween and Horror

Watch Party Watch: Someone I Touched (1975)

 

Watched:  09/22/2020
Format:  Amazon Watch Party
Viewing:  First
Decade:  1970's
Director:  Lou Antonio

Well, this falls squarely into "something I probably wouldn't have watched on my own".  A 1975 TV movie about syphilis and the people in Southern California who get it.  However, it does star Cloris Leachman making 1970's outfits actually work.  

It's easy to forget - we live in an era of media that's deeply scrubbed and sanitized.  Sure, sure, we've got gritty heroes and complex moral subplots, but a movie torn from the headlines about how sleeping around on your spouse isn't just naughty, it can give you a debilitating (but treatable) disease would be considered un-airable on network TV.  In an era where we had basically three networks and PBS, this was what a network decided would make for good all-purpose viewing.  

And, it's surprisingly good, helped along by Leachman turning in a rock solid performance and bringing some realism to a melodrama that includes infidelity and the impact beyond our immediate group of characters.  In fact, it starts far out from Leachman and works it's way back.  

I don't want to oversell the movie, but there's some willingness to deal with real-life unpleasantness and leave things a bit ambiguous that could exist in today's landscape, but it's hard not to imagine it getting glossed up and the audience missing the point and turning it into a game of "who do we blame here, because everything is about winning and losing?"

Comedy Watch: Hot Rod (2007)

Watched:  09/17/2020
Format:  Amazon Prime
Viewing:  First
Decade:  2000's
Director:  Akiva Schaffer

I'm a little surprised this movie isn't more of a cult favorite.  Or maybe it is, and I just don't know that cult.  4 out of five times, this is exactly the kind of movie I am thinking of when I go looking for a comedy. 

YMMV.

Friday Watch Party: Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter

 

Day:  09/25/2020

Time:  8:30 PM Central Time

Watch Party link here

I watched this in 2000 with a bunch of dudes in Seattle, and while I'd been drinking and my memories are hazy, I recall we all liked it.  And that's good enough for me!

We're going to ease y'all into the horror-movie season with a bit of British action-adventure paired with horror paired with Caroline Munro.  

Noir Watch: Danger Signal (1945)

 

Watched:  09/19/2020
Format:  Noir Alley on TCM

Viewing:  First

Decade:  1940's

Director:  Robert Florey

Noir Alley is back, and I was delighted to see another movie by Austin hometown-boy-made-good, Zachary Scott.  Danger Signal (1945) is a WWII-era potboiler that's of the noir flavor that has kind of become a thing in Lifetime Channel thrillers.  Scott plays a ne'er-do-well who escapes the murder of a woman for whom he's managed to somehow plant a suicide note.  

He winds up in an idyllic California town where he boards with a middle-aged woman and her stenographer daughter, played by Faye Emerson.  He woos and wins Emerson, who doesn't notice the strapping, handsome, baritone-voiced scientist who keeps bringing her work may have the hots for her.  Instead, she slips for Scott's charm.  That is until her 17 year old sister comes home and Scott pivots his interest to her.  

Emerson has a friend who is a psychologist/ scientist who gets involved (Rosemary DeCamp), and more or less tears Scott apart as the charming sociopath he actually knows he is.  It's kinda cool.  I was kinda there for Dr. Silla.  

ANYWAY, Faye Emerson steals a vial of @#$%ing botulism from her hunky scientist friend and plans to kill Scott because, basically, he's a big shit bag and shouldn't get to keep being a shit bag who will hurt her sister.

It's a weird movie that seems like they just kept forgetting parts of the movie.  Scott has a limp he fakes as a war wound that they just don't mention.  A gun shows up, but is never really used.  And the end is - weird.  Like, totally unsatisfying.  Which Muller discussed in the backmatter of the episode.

Anyway - Zach Scott is terrific, Emerson is pretty good, and I felt like the overall direction by Robert Florey was solid and built tension despite the narrative bumps.  Special note for Mona Freeman who does a remarkable heel-turn in the back third of the film, and a young Dick Erdman playing "Bunkie", who is everyone's personal disappointment.

Watch of the Damned: Creation of the Humanoids (1962)

Watched:  09/18/2020

Format:  Watch Party

Viewing:  First (and last!)

Decade:  1960's

Director:  Wesley Barry

...R.O.T.O.R.

...Santa with Muscles

...Monster a Go-Go...  

Sure, we watch a lot of not-great movies, but some feel as if they exist to test your very sanity.  Some movies are so insanely bad, so weirdly made and uncomfortable to watch - made and released with what appears to be utter sincerity on the part of the filmmakers - sincerity that serves no one and seems like a hallucination more than a delusion...  

These films join our personal canon of Movies of the Damned.  

We've had a wild ride this summer as we've enjoyed our Friday night Amazon Watch Parties, but Jenifer found an amazing entry this week with Creation of the Humanoids (1962).  

It's the movie that dares to ask:  but what if a movie was 96% exposition?  

and

What if everyone just stood on their marks with a minimum of motion for the runtime of a film?

In some ways, I give it credit.  It does nothing but propose a few sci-fi premises and then builds on those premises, asking questions no one asked and providing a sea of answers that no one cares about, only to ask more questions.  And it does it over and over and over for what I am pretty sure was a full calendar year, but you will find to be a neat 75 minute or so runtime.  

It's a post-nuclear-holocaust future and man is barely hanging in there despite shiny outfits, women with rocket bras, nifty architecture and the help of our robot friends.  

People seem to be on their way out, as robots seem to be figuring out self-replication.  There's a herd of guys running around yelling MAGA dressing in shiny Confederate uniforms and harassing robots.  They have a cute clubhouse and everything.  Meanwhile, Robots are, in fact, secretly rising up to replace humans.  

All of this is told, not shown, in lengthy, lengthy speeches which would make a high school forensics teacher proud.  

The make-up on the humanoids/ robots is weirdly excellent - the work of Jack "Universal Monsters" Pierce himself, apparently slumming by 1962.  

I can't do this movie justice.  I hate it so much I like it.  It's mind-bogglingly inept, except that... the cinematography, sets, and make-up all work fine.  It's just that there's only 4 sets, and long, long scenes that will not end containing nothing but nonsense sci-fi talk that can and should have been SHOWN.  Just when you think this might be an allegory for something - NO.  We move right on past that and it's right back to a very concrete story about the concrete problems of robots.  It's like the mad ramblings of the worst nerd in your class who gets why robots are interesting, but not at all how a story works.  And was given money to make a movie.  

I... I'm worn out just thinking about it.

"Sexy" Halloween Costumes - 2020 Edition

Well, we haven't done this in a few years, but let's do it again.  Let's look at "weird sexy costumes for Halloween 2020". 

For 2011, go here.  For 2017, go here.

Honestly, I've gotten so used to, like, "sexy cop" going by, I don't really think about it anymore.  But there's still always a few costumes that pop out at me as "but why?".  

The first thing that popped out at me on this go-round was:  

Would the target audience even know what this is?  

I'm assuming to have Halloween plans and the body confidence to wear a hastily-stitched Halloween costume that's not work appropriate, these costumes are aimed at women aged, oh, 18-28.  And even that may be pushing it. 

But that would mean the target audience was born between 1992 and 2002.  So...  do they even know who these characters are?

Pretty sure this is supposed to be Julia Roberts in the first reel of 1990's Pretty Woman.    It was called something like "Beautiful Lady"/