It doesn’t take long into watching Goddess Of Love to figure out why Vanna White didn’t have much of an acting career.

So, yeah; 2019. The Year of the Meat Grinder, apparently. I spent the last half of the year watching in despair as important deadlines went flying by, not least of which were my commitments to the Cabal. Bad enough that I disappeared for the last half of our Anniversary… I even missed commemorating my own site’s 20th Anniversary in November.

Thinking of which: twenty years ago, while the Braineater site was still getting started, there were a handful of movies I felt a compulsive need to comment on. Since my site was still embryonic, I created a user account on the IMDb — user name “barugon” — and opined. One of these movies was:

Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1971)

…and it’s bewildered me that in the last 20 years I never returned to that capsule review to expand it. It’s one of those movies for which I feel a special affinity, not just because it figured so significantly in my childhood, but also because I felt I understood it — which was important, considering the general incomprehension this truly bizarre movie inspires.

It’s always seemed to me that most of the arguments for or against the movie were missing the point. I wanted to step in and provide a little wider context: not necessarily to change anybody’s mind about the quality of the movie itself, but to show how Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster was really an inevitable, pivotal artifact of its troubled time. So, having missed my original deadline for the B-Masters’ “At Long Last!” Roundtable, I’ve taken a deep breath, done more research, watched the entire Criterion Collection Godzilla set (the release of which has to be one of 2019’s only redeeming features), and come up with what I hope is a new way of looking at the eleventh installment of the Godzilla saga.

Making The Norseman on a limited budget probably wasn’t the wisest move for a Viking-themed story.

The British movie Digby: The Biggest Dog In The World proves it was not just Disney that made dim-witted slapstick motion pictures for kiddies in the 1970s.

They had the ingredients to make a good thriller, but A Stranger Is Watching ends up being not worth watching.

The Golan-Globus movie The Barbarians is an entertaining mix of comedy with sword and sorcery.

If you’ve seen just one of the many tired and uninspired spy spoof movies from the 1960s, then nothing in Modesty Blaise will be much of a surprise.

If you can momentarily forget the recent news reports concerning actor Cuba Gooding Jr., chances are you’ll find Wrong Turn At Tahoe to be a surprisingly strong crime drama.

In the future, I will keep trying to sample at least one example of every film genre and category. It’s with some embarrassment that I realized recently I haven’t reviewed a movie from Hammer Studios, so with The Snorkel, I fix that.