Here’s what went up last night at 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting:
Army of the Dead (2021), in which what happens in Vegas damned well better stay in Vegas…
Crocodile (1979), in which Sompote Sands evidently couldn’t quite complete the shift of gears between ripping off “Ultraman” and ripping off Jaws…
Devil’s Express (1975), in which Brooklyn karate gangs battle each other for dope-pushing territory and an ancient Chinese demon for the fate of humankind…
Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), in which screenwriter Daniel Farrands attempts to revitalize a floundering, superannuated slasher franchise by reconfiguring it as an “X-Files” clone…
and…
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), in which the studio walks that back with a quickness after the original cut gets curbstomped by preview audiences.
Also, I’ve finally grown sufficiently embarrassed of some of the reviews from my first few years of operation to rewrite them practically from the ground up. So far I’ve identified a dozen reviews in need of such treatment, and I expect I’ll discover a few more before I’m through. Here’s the first installment on that project:
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), in which Hammer Film Productions were just trying not to get sued, but accidentally touched off a revolution in world horror cinema…
Die, Monster, Die! (1965), in which American International Pictures entrust Daniel Haller to do for H.P. Lovecraft what Roger Corman had already done for Edgar Allan Poe, but the venture doesn’t go nearly as well…
and…
First Man into Space (1958), in which an also-also-ran British studio perfects the art of impersonating cheap American crap.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
#1 by Blake Dennis Matthews on July 27, 2021 - 4:02 pm
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Re: Crocodile – I believe that film was picked up by Filmark, one of the two major cut n’ splice studios running out of Hong Kong. It was ran by Tomas Tang after he fell out with Joseph Lai of IFD Films. In any case, scenes of Caucasian actors doing stuff were filmed and inserted into Crocodile, making for “Crocodile Fury” (1988).
Re: After my neighbors and I saw SCREAM, we went on a slasher movie binge, watching the entire series of both Friday the 13th and Halloween, plus a few stragglers here and there. All I remember about this one when I saw it (circa 1997) was that I found Jamie’s early death to be insulting and the massacre of Mitch Ryan’s team to be pretty crazy. Everything else is a blur.
#2 by RJG on July 30, 2021 - 11:19 am
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Your reviews are always fantastic, El Santo, but the re-writes are especially good here. Your last graf on Curse of Frankenstein is downright brilliant. Thanks for all that you do.
#3 by Richard on August 4, 2021 - 3:33 pm
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There’s one thing that bugs me from the plot synopsis of Army of the Dead that I must comment on.
Why does the party *need* a local guide?
Aren’t maps still available? Even if the whole place was officially “erased” after the Zombie War, shouldn’t there still be pre-war maps to get? Has Google Maps shut down? Wouldn’t GPS still work? And if things supposedly have changed inside the wall, how would the local guide be up-to-date on the latest conditions? Couldn’t you send a few planes, helicopters, or drones over the area for recon?
#4 by El Santo on August 4, 2021 - 10:43 pm
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Lilly’s up on the latest conditions because sneaking people into the city is what she does for a living. For each person she leads into the city, penetrating the Las Vegas quarantine is a huge and terrifying adventure, but for her it’s just another day on the job.
#5 by ronald on August 9, 2021 - 12:04 pm
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Fighting monsters underground while wearing brightly colored overalls, how was Warhawk Tanzania a Super Mario Brother before there were Super Mario Brothers?
😉
#6 by Blake Dennis Matthews on August 16, 2021 - 8:08 am
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On the subject of restoring/redoing older reviews, do you have any plans of revisiting STORMSWEPT and expanding upon *that* review? I think there are few others 90s clunkers that got pretty short reviews. (I bet El Santo shutters as he reads this)