New stuff at 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting:

The Mad Genius (1931), in which the deja vu may actually give you seizures if you’ve already seen Svengali…

The Serpent’s Tale (1993), in which there are vampires and ancient scrolls and a loony cult and an evil multinational corporation and an insurance fraud scam, and it all kind of makes your corpus callosum ache…

Seven (1995), in which the killer isn’t the most flamboyant character in the film for once…

and…

The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in which he most assuredly is.

… one too many times./I tripped over the Ottoman/until I lost my mind.”

And that curiously-appropriate Dead Milkmen lyric brings me to Badi, the “Turkish E.T.”, one of the most appalling attempts at family entertainment I’ve ever had to suffer through.

The Turkish love for masked superhero movies spills over into Saturday Matinee serials as The Mysterious Doctor Satan is plundered and transformed into The Deathless Devil. The 1940’s Copperhead runs headlong into 1970s Eurospy territory with wanton villainesses and, sadly, the near-Lovecraftian horror of an Odious Comic Relief in a Sherlock Holmes outfit. Who will kill the Copperhead first – DOK-TOR SEY-TAN’s indestructible keeler robut, or Bitik, the rubber-mugged horror Holmes? That…. would be telling!

Posted even later than Ken’s, but still on the 29th… I, too, am legal and yet remain an outlaw!!!!

Tarkan, the Turkish soldier of Attila the Hun raised by wolves, fights Vikings, a giant, a treacherous ‘Chinese’ woman, a big rubber octopus, and logic in general in Tarkan vs. the Vikings. The end of the month hasn’t technically occurred yet, and my roundtable piece is up. I’m legal!

SANTO AND BLUE DEMON VS. THE MONSTERS
After this initial orgy of monster mayhem, the rest of Contra los Monstruos unfolds as a rapid series of vignettes in which the monsters, the evil Blue Demon, and the green-faced zombies, in various combinations–though most frequently as one large and unruly group–attack Santo and try to kidnap Gloria, leading in most cases to a chaotic monster-on-wrestler free-for-all. (Seriously, if anyone was entrusted with the job of fight choreographer for Contra los Monstruos, that person took a very Free Jazz approach to his or her craft.) First evil Blue ambushes Santo in a lovers’ lane where he and Gloria are making out in Santo’s car (Santo really gets quite a lot of action in this movie). Next Santo takes on the Cyclops in an awesome scene in which Santo, after finding his usual hand-to-hand techniques ineffective, picks up a piece of wood and starts repeatedly clubbing the Cyclops on his big rubbery head. This is followed by an all monster attack on Otto and Gloria’s home–a scene that is most impressive for how the negligee-clad Gloria, fending off The Vampire’s attack, somehow manages in the course of her life-and-death struggle to put on underwear.

And in other news…

Jet Set Cinema takes a look at Space Patrol Orion, Some Girls Do, Fantomas, Naked Runner, Assault on a Queen, and Teptress of a Thousand Faces.

Shrimp Chips investigates Mad Mission, Fantabulous, Payback, Breakheart Pass,   Love and Bullets, Invisible Dr. Mabuse, Return of Dr. Mabuse, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Song Bird, I The Jury, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, and well — more than I can recount here.

And while Todd and David have been busy keeping the Film sections fresh, I’ve been farting around with the Leisure section with visits to the Prehistoric Forest near Sandusky,  the haunted Hotel Monte Vista in Flagstaff, the mine fire ravaged town of Centralia, and some notes on buying one’s first pair of rock climbing shoes.

(Yes, yes, I know: it’s İstanbul, not Constantinople. But I too have been a long time gone, so there you have it.)

Büyü (2004)

What would you expect from a movie currently rated by IMDb users as the 22nd worst film of all time? Would you expect a thoroughly average, occasionally inspired horror flick? Hmmm?

You would?

Well then, dear reader, one of us is nuts. My entry in the Turkish Roundtable has me wondering if I’ve completely lost my critical standards.

Well, it’s a bumper edition of Et Al. this time….but for all that, there was never any doubt in my mind who was going to be this issue’s Pin-Up Of The Month. He even beat out an undead Humphrey Bogart!

Asia-Pol
Asia-Pol in many ways fits in with the spate of James Bond knock-offs that Shaw turned out between 1966 and 1968, but also exhibits some significant differences that can most likely be chalked up to its Nikkatsu pedigree. For one, while the action of those aforementioned films was largely limited to what could be shot on the sound stages and back lots of Shaw’s Movie Town facility, Asia-Pol is distinguished by a great deal of location shooting set on the streets of Japan, Hong Kong and Macao. This is a style of shooting that the Japanese crew, accustomed to the gritty, street-bound look of Nikkatsu’s violent yakuza thrillers, would have been considerably more at ease with than would the Shaw’s technicians. Likewise, Asia-Pol‘s script gives us an espionage yarn that’s considerably more down-to-Earth than the campy nonsense that Shaw would typically serve up, entirely free of hooded super villains and sci-fi inspired underwater lairs.

Even the most beautiful love song must end.

Presenting, for your weekend delectation, a redesign far too long in the making: The complete restructuring of Cold Fusion Video Reviews! Now with WordPress under the hood, the new site is more responsive, easier to maintain, easier to edit, and just plain cooler with the hip kids!

But don’t just take my word for it:
http://www.coldfusionvideo.com

Plus! As part of the redesign kickoff, you can participate in the Great Typo Hunt, and win cool custom prizes! Full details here:
http://www.coldfusionvideo.com/the-great-typo-hunt/