That’s right, folks. I’ve hit the 1000-review mark. Here’s the stuff that pushed me into the next order of magnitude up:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), in which we see why it took El Santo almost two years to give the TV series a try…
The Faculty (1998), in which parasitic aliens attempt to take over an old John Hughes movie…
The Frighteners (1996), in which Michael J. Fox has the best scam ever…
The Giant Claw (1957), in which words just flat-out frigging fail me…
The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), in which our pals at Hammer Film Productions say, “Metaphors? We don’t need no stinking metaphors!”…
and…
Lady Frankenstein (1971), in which the battle of the sexes yields a victory that nobody was expecting.
#1 by Blake Matthews on December 1, 2008 - 9:10 am
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My cousin also loved the movie on the grounds of its pro-illegal drug message. I found the movie to be enjoyable fluff. Cool monster, too.
#2 by Luke Blanchard on December 1, 2008 - 3:12 pm
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It occurs to me that Mitch’s spiral deduction in The Giant Claw might be defensible. Firstly, he has information on the order in which the encounters occurred. Secondly, he might have some idea of the bearing of the object during a couple of the encounters.
#3 by El Santo on December 1, 2008 - 9:17 pm
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Sure, it’s defensible. The trouble is that he could have drawn at least four other spirals that would have been equally so, to say nothing of the erratic, wavy line that would have been the most parsimonious interpretation of the data.
#4 by talthar on December 2, 2008 - 4:40 pm
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While I enjoyed the “BtVS” movie when I first saw it, it lost a lot of shine over the years…especially after I started watching the series. What I find funny is that they reference the movie in the first episode; when Giles encounters Buffy and starts in with the whole “once in a generation a Slayer will arise ” speech, she stops him and says she heard it all before, back in LA. She turned her back on being a Slayer after she burnt her old high school down, which is why she and Joyce (her mom) moved to Sunnydale. Still, you’re dean-on about the movie being subpar.
I also agree with your thoughts on “The Faculty” and “The Frighteners”. I didn’t relaize that “Faculty” did so poorly at the box office…it deserved a much better fate. As for Peter Jackson’s flick, I’ve always loved it. It was my introduction to him and made my brother and I seek out “Dead Alive”.
Good work, sir!
#5 by lyzard on December 2, 2008 - 5:16 pm
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If I get a little lazy time this summer I want to go back and do some re-formatting of old reviews, including adding screenshots. I am SO looking forward to doing The Giant Claw…
#6 by Blake Matthews on December 2, 2008 - 5:39 pm
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Has anyone ever come across an iconoclast that insists that the Giant Claw is actually…well…cool?
#7 by lyzard on December 2, 2008 - 5:53 pm
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Whaddya talking about? Of COURSE I’m cool!
#8 by Blake Matthews on December 2, 2008 - 6:42 pm
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Can anyone suggest some sillier monsters than the ones from “Goliath and the Dragon”to show my wife (who’s convinced that that movie has the worst)?
#9 by El Santo on December 2, 2008 - 7:28 pm
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I’ve never seen Goliath and the Dragon, but any list of my favorite silly monsters would include:
The Giant Claw‘s battleship-sized turkey, obviously
Robot Monster‘s Extension Ro-Man XJ-8, perhaps even more obviously
Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare‘s completely immobile rubber Satan
Jack the Giant Killer‘s incredibly weird sea monster
The She-Creature‘s torpedo-breasted lobster-girl
the lizard-thing in Creature of Destruction, Larry Buchanan’s remake of the above
In the Year 2889‘s mutant James Madison
the huge cuboid robot in Kronos (it might not seem so silly at first, but wait ’til it starts walking…)
Nude for Satan‘s Big Damn Spider for No Reason
The Creeping Terror‘s… well, whatever that thing is
Just about all of the monsters in Inframan
Also, it wasn’t a movie and I can’t remember the title, but there was an episode of some “Ultraman” rip-off series in which the Monster of the Week was a humongous squirrel with a catfish head for an ass. It doesn’t get too much sillier than that.
#10 by lyzard on December 2, 2008 - 7:47 pm
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I reviewed Goliath And The Dragon. Conveniently, all my screenshots focus on its monsters. I assume Mrs Blake is referring to the bat-cat (my personal favourite)?
[Edited to add]: I’ve always been very fond of the titular beasties in Gappa The Triphibian Monster, particularly the hatchling (from memory there’s a pic at Stomp Tokyo).
#11 by The Rev. D.D. on December 2, 2008 - 10:46 pm
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I won’t get into monsters from Japanese Ultraman-type shows because I’d be here all night. However, I will add to this list…
Guilala, aka The X From Outer Space
The Gargon from Teenagers From Outer Space (the execution, and its goofy cry, make it even more delightful)
The “fungus” from The Unknown Terror
The Stegosaurus from Attack of the Supermonsters, which may be the rubberiest giant monster I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a LOT)
“Beulah” from It Conquered the World
Those crap-ass faux Gremlins in Hobgoblins, and their cousins the Trogs from The Pit
The titular menaces in Slugs…well, actually, just the puppet one they briefly use in one scene to bite the lead’s finger (I have a feeling Ms. Kingsley would adore it, little fangs and all)
#12 by lyzard on December 2, 2008 - 11:19 pm
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Ooh, ooh, ooh! – the rubber hand-puppets in Bats!
(And yes, Rev, I would!)
#13 by MatthewF on December 3, 2008 - 4:55 am
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C’mon, King King from KK vs Godzilla, that’s one lame monkey suit.
#14 by Blake Matthews on December 3, 2008 - 5:17 am
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Yeah, the cat-bat and the Cerberus were the ones Paula saw. There’s a TV program here that condenses movies (in the public domain) down to 30 minutes and redubs the dialogue to fill it with profanity and sex jokes. She just happened to catch the episode showing Goliath and the Dragon.
#15 by The Rev. D.D. on December 3, 2008 - 8:33 pm
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Ms. Kingsley–I’d tell you to find the trailer for that movie online because it shows the slug puppet, but it also blows two important special effects from the movie–one suprisingly gruesome (if a bit over-the-top and not entirely realistic) and the other, one of the most laughable things I’ve seen. (Which, considering it’s a movie about killer slugs, is saying quite a bit.) I was very glad I watched the movie first before checking the extras.
#16 by Nathan Shumate on December 3, 2008 - 11:38 pm
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And while everyone’s talking about goony monster marionettes and whatnot, congrats to El Santo for the odometer rollover.
#17 by The Rev. D.D. on December 4, 2008 - 10:10 am
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Oh yeah! The whole point of the post! Congrats, man, that’s a hell of a lot of reviewing. Here’s to another 1000.
Or however many you manage to do before breaking, at any rate.
#18 by PCachu on December 4, 2008 - 12:55 pm
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Nice to know that a hefty post-count is yet another thing that El Santo can piledrive into the mat.
…Wow, that metaphor was an epic fail. Well done anyway, O’ Silver-Masked One.
#19 by KeithA on December 5, 2008 - 2:55 pm
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Congrats, Santo!
I’ve been neck-deep in migrating content off of blogger and onto a content management system on my own server, but I have to chime in with a silly monster:
I watched, just last week, an Indian movie called Shaitani Dracula, and in addition to Dracula being a fat guy with a mustache and one of those Outback style bush hats on, there was also a werewolf wearing a gorilla suit and a rubber wolf mask that kept falling off when he attacked people, and a skeleton that was just a fat guy in a black bodystocking with bones painted on it.
#20 by Nathan Shumate on December 5, 2008 - 3:17 pm
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Is it WordPress, Keith? Are you migrating to WordPress? Are you? And if not, why not?
(Don’t worry, WordPress devotees are still less creepy than Obamaniacs.)
#21 by Chadly on December 6, 2008 - 2:55 am
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Though not an iconclast, I did revel in the inept beauty of “The Giant Claw’ — I think it was the Larry Fine haircut that finally won me over. Love the other rubber-suited monsters already mentioned, and the only one I can think to add is the rubber dinosaur that Richard Boone and his trusty catapult bonked that boulder off of in “The Last Dinosaur.”
#22 by The Rev. D.D. on December 6, 2008 - 9:45 pm
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Oh yeah, that thing’s a good choice. Along with that ridiculous “horse suit” triceratops.
#23 by supersonic on December 7, 2008 - 5:43 pm
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More precisely, he ought to be whacking scaly reptilian horrors with his space-axe.
The name is a Doc Smith homage.
#24 by KeithA on December 8, 2008 - 10:10 am
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Laugh at my UFo report, will he! Hrmph. Buskirk…more like Buzzkill! Score!
#25 by Read MacGuirtose on March 9, 2009 - 10:09 pm
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OK, I’m writing this pedantic message three months after the fact and no one’s likely to read it, but for whatever it’s worth…
El Santo, I think you missed Luke Blanchard’s point. If McAfee took into account only the locations of the encounters… then yes, the spiral is completely arbitrary and ridiculous; there are innumerable other shapes that would fit such a small data set as well or better. But if he’s also taking into account the times of the encounters–and possibly even the direction the Claw was traveling when sighted in each instance–then it’s another matter. The “wavy line”, for example, could have the encounters happening in the wrong order, or at least with the wrong relative time differences between them, and it’s entirely possible that the bird’s moving at a more or less constant velocity along the spiral he draws is the only simple path consistent with the data.
Mind you, that’s not to say the movie makers thought of that; the ridiculousness of the “science” in the movie makes it seem entirely possible that they were only thinking of the locations, in which case the spiral makes no sense at all. Still, though, technically an argument can be made that McAfee’s deduction actually makes sense.
(Regardless, though, among my many unrealistic aspirations for B-movie parodies I aspire to make someday, I’ve still got an idea for a scene parodying the spiral-drawing incident…)