The Spirits Might Have Done It All in One Night…

Posted onDecember 25, 2024

…but I needed the following morning as well. This new update turned out more Christmasy than I intended when a seemingly simple idea spiraled out of my control:

 

Challenge of the Masters (1976), which is basically Drunken Master without the jokes…

Executioners from Shaolin (1977), in which Lau Kar Leung caps off Chang Cheh Shaolin Temple cycle before getting to work on his own…

Exposed to Danger (1982), about the closest thing you’ll ever find to a Chinese giallo

Lake of Dracula (1971), another of the surprisingly numerous Dracula movies with no Dracula…

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972), in which you’ll have no more idea what an Ice Cream Bunny is after watching than you had to begin with…

Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), in which it makes sense for Jacob Marley to do all the work, since there are only six minutes of screen time in which to finish it…

Old Scrooge (1913), in which Marley has to do it all again, for reasons that aren’t nearly as obvious…

Scrooge (1935), in which Ebenezer Scrooge talks for the first time at feature length, and has to contend with the correct number of ghosts, too…

and…

Wolfen (1981), a werewolf movie with no werewolves.

 

 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

2024 Monster-Rama Field Report (and Then Some)

Posted onOctober 30, 2024

I’d already reviewed everything from Roger Corman Tribute Night, but most of the Italian Horror Night program was new to me:

 

A Blade in the Dark (1983), which started out as a four-part TV miniseries, and might have been at least slightly better if it had remained one…

Cemetery Man (1993), which might be the Gen-Xiest movie ever made by a bunch of people born in the 50’s…

and…

Opera (1987), which I was all set to praise as Dario Argento’s best pure giallo until he went and got Dario Argento all over it.

 

Meanwhile, I also saw all these over the past month or so:

 

House of the Living Dead (1973), a strange and in some ways extremely old-fashioned gothic from South Africa, of all places…

The Substance (2024), in which regaining one’s youth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…

Sword of the Valiant (1983), in which Stephen Weeks’s second go-round with the legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight goes awry completely differently from his first…

and…

The Turn of the Screw (1989), in which I finally complete the set for Showtime’s old “Nightmare Classics” package of made-for-TV mini-movies.

 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

These Went Up About a Week Ago

Posted onOctober 9, 2024

I cast a somewhat wider net with this update than I’ve managed to do in a while:

 

Crippled Avengers (1978), which isn’t 12.5% as squirmy as that other kung fu movie with “crippled” in the title…

Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (1971), in which King Arthur’s evil half-sister decides that collecting hot chicks is way more fun than thwarting Grail quests and tricking knights into betting each other their heads…

The Invincible Kung Fu Brothers (1976), in which Chang Cheh’s fourth Shaolin Temple movie looks remarkably like his second…

Shaolin Temple (1976), in which the fifth one, on the other hand, breaks quite a bit of new ground…

Mutant (1984), which isn’t about mutants so much as it is about acidic zombies and ornery rednecks…

The Red House (1947), which always gets awkwardly shoehorned into discussions about film noir and the most aridly fallow period of American horror cinema, even though it’s really a very well-disguised gothic mystery…

and…

Teenage Zombies (1959), in which I regret to inform you that Jerry Warren is at it again.

 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

Worth the Wait, I Hope

Posted onAugust 15, 2024

Bigger update than usual this time, because I got blocked on two of the reviews I originally set out to write, and just kept throwing more movies on the pile in the hope that writing about one thing with the front of my brain would eventually enable the back of it to find weak points in the pieces that were fighting me:

 

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which might sound like a typical copaganda flick when you boil it down to one sentence, but has a whole lot more going on beneath the surface…


The Bikeriders (2023), which, in contrast, is exactly, gloriously the movie it looks like from a distance…

Cruise into Terror (1978), in which the Love Boat runs off course en route to Fantasy Island, and has to detour through an entire season of “In Search Of”…

Deathdream (1972), in which a soldier finds it difficult to restart his old life back home after he’s killed in action in Vietnam…

Escape from New York (1981), in which a Green Beret turned terrorist without a cause gets dragooned into rescuing the President of the United States from the very same dystopian urban prison camp where he was supposed to be spending the rest of his life…

Heroes of the East (1978), which sounds from the title like an absolutely generic kung fu movie, but turns out to be a chopsocky take on The Taming of the Shrew instead…

Hotline (1982), in which a bartender takes a new job answering phones at a psychiatric crisis hotline, and finds herself playing a dangerous game with a repeat caller who claims to be a serial killer…

Messiah of Evil (1974), in which a woman’s search for her artist weirdo dad unexpectedly takes her to the epicenter of an emergent apocalypse that would probably still have defied description even if the movie had actually been finished…

The Space Children (1958), in which even aliens understand that everything that goes wrong on Earth always ends up being a problem for the next generation to fix…

and…

Starcrash (1978), the Italian Star Wars cash-in so ludicrous, it HALTS THE FLOW OF TIME!

 

 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

My First Visits to Normal Theaters for 2024

Posted onMay 1, 2024

Another theater-heavy update for what’s shaping up to be a theater-heavy year, this time including reviews of a couple first-run films along with one last B-Fest straggler and something I caught in revival:

 

Delicatessen (1991), in which some French eccentrics see the funny side to the end of the world…

Demonic Toys (1992), in which one of Hell’s less competent devils tried to incarnate himself, but got stuck haunting a toy warehouse instead…

Dirty Ho (1979), in which a tricky prince blackmails a thief into becoming his bodyguard…

Dune, Part Two (2024), in which a messiah is the last thing you want running loose on your planet, even if you don’t belong to a clan of colonizing tyrants…

The Five Deadly Venoms (1978), in which murder mysteries play very differently when they’re resolved by frenetic kung fu fights…

and…

Immaculate (2024), in which forcing a woman to carry a clone of Jesus is just as much a dick move as forcing her to mother the Antichrist.

 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

B-Fest Roundup, 2024

Posted onMarch 31, 2024

I didn’t quite get everything written that I wanted to, so there’ll be one last film from this year’s B-Fest reviewed in the next update, but I came pretty close:

 

Arcade (1993), in which you should always make sure the human brain tissue you’re harvesting to power the processor of your cutting-edge virtual reality game didn’t come from a child who was abused to death, lest the kid’s spirit reassert itself as Nintendo Power Freddy Krueger…

The Chilling (1989), in which a cryonics lab really ought to produce a higher class of zombies than these…

Hard Rock Zombies (1984), in which these zombies, on the other hand, are exactly the ones you’d expect to arise when a necromantic spell is cast over the graves of a slain cock-rock band…

Hot Potato (1975), in which we all deserved so much more from a sequel to Black Belt Jones

Runaway (1984), in which the cops in charge of dealing with malfunctioning robots find themselves confronting droids that have been deliberately programmed for crime instead…

and…

She-Devils on Wheels (1968), in which Herschell Gordon Lewis can make a biker movie every bit as awful as his worst gore or soft-porn flicks.

 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

Starting Off 2024 with a New Name for an Old Idea

Posted onFebruary 26, 2024

With my first update of the year, I’m formalizing something that I’ve been doing semi-regularly for a while now by introducing Movies Whose Times Have Come. Henceforth, this banner will gather together all my reviews celebrating the completion of our latest circuit around the sun by examining some old sci-fi flick set during the one that’s beginning. 2024’s Movie Whose Time Has Come is…

A Boy and His Dog (1975), in which Don Johnson’s Johnson is pressed into service by the leaders of a post-apocalyptic Good Ol’ American Small Town where the resident young men are having trouble getting the womenfolk with child.

And as for the rest of the update, we’ve got:

Chinatown Kid (1977), in which a fresh-off-the-boat bumpkin gets drawn steadily toward the center of a sprawling gangland conflict, first in Hong Kong, and then in San Francisco’s Chinatown…

Godzilla: Minus One (2023), in which the King of the Monsters’ first visit to Tokyo is reimagined as occurring in the late 1940’s, when Japan was still almost totally supine from its defeat in World War II…

and…

Warlords of Atlantis (1978), in which a pair of explorers and the sailors who mutinied against them fall captive to the extraterrestrial rulers of the Lost Continent.
 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

Posted onDecember 25, 2023

Not only am I giving you all an update, but I’m also bringing along two old ones that I forgot to announce here during their proper time! First, the new stuff:

Deadly Games (1989), a precognitive variation on the Home Alone premise in which it’s hard to say who’s scarier, the Santa-suited maniac breaking into the house, or the ruthless and hypercompetent child defending it against him…

The Fall of the House of Usher (1979), in which the folks at Sunn Classic Pictures take a break from “educating” us about Bigfoot and the Shroud of Turin in order to serve up a Poe movie with only the minutest trace amounts of Poe…

The Hammer of God (1970), in which Jimmy Wang Yu makes his directorial debut, and brings both his arms for a change…

Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), which has all the characteristics of a holiday slasher movie, but arranges them into something more like a Southern Gothic transplanted to the Northeast…

and…

Winterbeast (1992), in which it isn’t winter, and there are a hell of a lot more than one beast.

 

Meanwhile, here’s all the stuff I forgot to tell you about:

Blood Feast (1963), which may not strictly have started it all, but certainly took it all to extremes that no one ever saw before…

The Bride and the Beast (1958), the first half of my Bridey Murphy Goes to the Drive-In double feature, in which hypnosis reveals why a big-game hunter’s new bride is horny for gorillas…

Cosmic Monsters (1958), which might be Britain’s only 1950’s big-bug movie, but sure does make you wait a while for the payoff…

Doom Asylum (1987), a lame slasher spoof that not even Patty “Frankenhooker” Mullen can help…

Five Fingers of Death (1970), in which American audiences get their first look at Hong Kong martial arts cinema…

Frankenstein (1984), a lame forerunner of prestige cable that even David “Embodiment of Evil” Warner can help only a little…

Men from the Monastery (1974), in which Chang Cheh and Ni Kuang take possibly the weirdest approach to a sequel that I’ve ever seen, not so much continuing Heroes Two as wrapping a larger story around it, while simultaneously contradicting it…

Five Shaolin Masters (1974), in which they do it again by telling us what a totally different bunch of characters were up to while the events of Heroes Two were unfolding…

Shadow of a Doubt (1943), in which it turns out that there are even worse things for your uncle to get into than Fox News…

Shaolin Martial Arts (1974), in which it’s possible to be so good at kung fu that your junk can retract behind your body wall…

The Undead (1957), the second half of Bridey Murphy Goes to the Drive-In, in which the past life itself becomes the focus of the action, as a woman deep in hypnosis inadvertently sets in motion a chain of long-ago events that could prevent her current self from ever existing…

and…

Vampire (1979), an unaccountably slept-on TV movie in which the titular bloodsucker launches an all-out vendetta against the people who busted the art-theft campaign that he’d been running for 800 years.

 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

An Unexpected Theme Emerges

Posted onMay 31, 2023

I didn’t plan this, but this update turns out to be heavily freighted with movies depicting real (or at least “real”) people in fairly fanciful ways, including a variety of kung fu founding fathers and a Catholic priest who isn’t nearly as crazy in the filmmakers’ telling as he was in actuality:

The Boxer from Shantung (1972), in which the 1930’s Warner Brothers gangster formula gets the Shaw Brothers chopsocky treatment…

Crash and Burn (1990), in which a post-apocalyptic slasher runs afoul of a Final Couple with a weapon that Laurie Strode sure would have found handy against Michael Myers…

The Day Time Ended (1979), in which that phrase doesn’t mean at all what you’d naturally expect it to…

Flesh and Fantasy (1943), in which there may or may not be such a thing as Destiny, and you may find it challenging to give a damn one way or the other…

Heroes Two (1974), which inaugurates a long-running cycle of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies concerning the Shaolin Temple and its disciples…

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), in which William Shatner plays a cowboy veterinarian facing an enemy even more terrifying than his toupe…

and…

The Pope’s Exorcist (2023), in which I learn to my astonished delight that they occasionally do make them like they used to after all!

 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.

B-Fest Roundup, 2023

Posted onApril 3, 2023

It’s been a long time since I did one of these, hasn’t it?

 

Big Man Japan (2007), in which a Japanese TV comic asks, “What if it really sucked to be Ultraman?”…

Bloodrayne (2005), in which Uwe Boll does all the same crap he usually did in his heyday, but it brings me no pleasure this time…

The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973), in which Nathan Juran just isn’t cut out for the 70’s…

The Children (1980), in which Three Mile Island could have been worse…

and…

Thrilling Bloody Sword (1981), in which a bunch of Taiwanese guys raid the entire corpus of Western (or West of them, at any rate) fantasy adventure literature for source material, and make the strangest sword-and-sorcery flick I’ve seen in ages.

 

I’ve also got another newly rebuilt review:

 

The Phantom of the Opera (1943), in which I’m able at last to explain why it sucks, instead of just how.

 

 

 

El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.