The B-Masters Cabal

It’s my last stab at nailing down some sequels in The Month of 2, and do I make it count?  Naah, not really.

For your delectation this week is Magic in the Mirror: Fowl Play (1996), a sequel shot directly on the heels of its predecessor, and Return to Frogtown (1993), a movie made a little too long after the original: They couldn’t get Rowdy Roddy back!

http://www.vimeo.com/1081523

Finally

You’ve also got a couple of movies I thought had rubber suits in them, but turned out not to after all:

Bog (1978), in which we see once again that nothing good ever comes of dynamite fishing…

Gamera vs. Gaos (1967), in which the world’s weirdest turtle takes on the world’s biggest vampire bat…

Rawhead Rex (1986), in which Clive Barker’s second commercially produced screenplay doesn’t turn out quite according to plan…

They Came from Beyond Space (1967), but they forgot to bring any rubber monster suits along, goddamnit…

Transmutations (1986), or as I prefer to call it, Clive Barker’s C.H.U.D.…

and…

Warning from Space (1956), in which the silliest aliens you’ve ever seen rip off The Day the Earth Stood Still in order to warn the people of Earth that they’re really ripping off When Worlds Collide instead.

Continuing my month-long binge of first (and often only) sequels, this week’s offerings are Killjoy 2 (2002), a follow-up to a movie that no one wanted followed up, and Excessive Force 2: Force on Force (1995), a follow-up which is in no way a follow-up to the movie it follows up.

If Tarkan vs. the Vikings taught us anything, it’s that everyone loves a GIANT INFLATABLE KILLER OCTOPUS!!!! So when Turner Classic Movies recently featured a night of Killer Octopus movies, it made sense to give them a look. First up is the best known of the lot, Ray Harryhausen’s It Came from Beneath the Sea.

And yes, I’m still alive. Very droll.

Death Trip
Once Death Trip has gotten Walker and Rowland effectively teamed up and its villains clearly established, it proceeds with a series of set pieces in which the gang make alternating attempts to kill both Leyla and Jenny, all of which are foiled in high style by Jo and Tom. Finally the Green Hounds, realizing that Rowland has pulled a switch-a-roo on them with the LSD, kidnap him in order to get him to divulge where the real stash is hidden. Rowland ends up imprisoned along with Leyla, Giselda and Hood in the Hounds’ desert camp, which is located in a network of caves in a region aptly named the Valley of a Thousand Hills. It’s up to Walker to rescue him, and in the attempt he employs a desert sheik disguise that, for all its ridiculousness, is still less silly than the lemonade vendor get-up he sports in an earlier sequence.

Plus, for your added amusement…

I have finally added an Index of Shrimp Chip reviews and will be doing the same for Jet Set Cinema and The Hell of 50 Movie Pack. The index gets updated at the end of every week.

And for your further further amusement…

Episode 1 of the Teleport City Video Podcast is live! This has been a long time coming, and it has nothing to do with movie reviews (it’s a travel and adventure show). It should be available in iTunes within the next day or two (it has been approved), but until then, you can follow the link above to either subscribe or watch it on YouTube.

Redline
Redline, which was originally titled Deathline, has nothing to do with the underground street racing circuit. For a movie about that, you will have to go see Redline — the one that features a car on the front cover, instead of Rutger Hauer. Both movies feature lots of hot ladies in really tiny mini-skirts. But the Redline we want is a movie that sees Hauer and his partners Merrick (Dacascos, who is Russian this week) and Marina (Yvonne Scio) as a trio of smugglers in the Russia of the near future, running some sort of biotech you would assume becomes central to the plot at some point. It never does, but it does give us an early opportunity for Merrick and Marina to betray Hauer’s Wade and shoot him dead, presumably over the lack of judgment he demonstrates in choosing his outfit from the Glenn Fry “Smuggler’s Blues” collection at Sears. Merrick then gets to be doubly evil, thus justifying his growing of a goatee, by betraying Marina as well. The corpses are picked up by Russian police, and for some reason Special Prosecutor Vanya (Randall William Cook) decides to use top secret military technology to bring Wade back from the dead. Thus revived, Wade promptly sets out to do two things: see some boobs, and kill Merrick.

Warning: this review contains nudity, both from Mark Dacascos and Yvonne Scio, neither of whom can keep their shirt on for very long.

I’m a multi-tasker, I am. And that’s why my review for Guyver 2: Dark Hero (1994) not only fits into my Month of 2, but also fits the bill for the Rubber Soul Roundtable. It’s the endearing tale of a boy, a girl, an alien bioweapon, and a horde of insta-mutating bad guys in rubber monster suits. Even a plot-centric guy like me can just lean back and enjoy the monster-on-monster pummeling.

The second feature this week, also part of The Month of 2, is Decadent Evil 2 (2007), which produced on the premise that you can never have too many cheap vampire stripper flicks, especially ones produced in exotic locales like Little Rock, Arkansas.

When it comes to weird, few people did it as weird as Hong Kong horror in the 1980s. Teleport City closes out our Rubber Soul contributions with David’s look at…

The Seventh Curse
If you’ll pardon my very clumsy analogy, The Seventh Curse is a bit like the blood curse in the movie. Once you have seen this film, it slowly infects your whole body, and while your veins don’t explode, there is a certain amount of ‘verbal’ eruption. I have told so many people about this film since I have seen it. I just want to infect everyone with it’s dynamic exuberance. And I hope by reading this review, that some of that ‘infection’ has rubbed off on you. If you haven’t seen The Seventh Curse, track down a copy, switch on your lava lamp, pull up your candy coloured beanbag, pour yourself a decent measure of Scotch (you’re gonna need it) and prepare to be thoroughly entertained!