I’m one part behind in the anniversary roundtable, but…

WAHAN KE LOG

It’s a cause for celebration when a B movie delivers on its concepts as spectacularly as Wahan Ke Log does. Especially given Wahan Ke Log is an Indian B movie and must shoehorn in its disparate genre element alongside all of the requisite singing, dancing and romancing. For this, all it asks in return is that you suspend — or completely abandon — your disbelief and fill in the inevitable gaps left by budgetary shortfall with your imagination. Like the best Indian popular films, it exhibits an expansive generosity in its sincere desire to entertain. At the time of Wahan Ke Log’s release, science fiction was an unexplored genre in mainstream Indian cinema and was, to the extent that it was seen at all, solely the purview of the country’s B movie industry.

I wrote a little something for the Diabolique website.

While living in France, and after having directed a British TV episode that resulted in him being surrounded by a yard full of chickens that went insane and dropped dead, director Samuel Fuller decided to write Brainquake, a bonkers pulp novel about a Mob bag man who finds himself on the run with a deadly dame.

“When he needed a little extra scratch, or maybe it was just because he was feeling inspired, he wrote Brainquake, a fever dream pulp novel that begins with a baby apparently murdering someone and includes, among other things, a former French Resistance fighter tormented in his dreams by the disembodied jaundiced head of Charles De Gaulle, screaming at him for being a coward.”

It’s been a hot, steamy summer of updates, repairs, and occasional new stuff. I can’t even remember which ones are which at this point, so let’s jump right in…

Back in action…

FIRE AND ICE

Somehow, the animated Ralph Bakshi feature Fire and Ice managed to slip through the cracks, though I can’t imagine it didn’t make the early 1980s cable TV rounds. It’s perfect late-night HBO fare. If I’d seen it back then, I would have embraced it whole-heartedly and probably proclaimed it the best thing I’d ever seen. Or something to that effect.

THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

Judging Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much from its first scene, it would be reasonable to assume one was watching a Fellini movie, or at least a reasonable imitation of Fellini. The opening shot of a TWA plane in flight toward Rome, the bustling capital of high style, suggests the dawn of the age of the jet set

HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON

Hatchet for the Honeymoon is not the kind of film to watch for a kill count or ingenious murders. It is the kind of film to watch for paranormal and sartorial phenomena, ghosts, discotheques, mysterious deaths, horrifying old toys, and the narration of a “paranoiac.”

FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION

Even the most mediocre giallo film can serve as a kind of lifestyle guide—especially for those who pine for the life of a 1970’s era Eurotrash jetsetter. There is a downside to that lifestyle, of course, in that, like most of the characters in The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, you would be inherently unlikeable.

A real obscurity here… and for good reasons. The Baltimore Bullet is a complete waste of time despite its notable cast.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.

I’d rather play Galaxian for 24 hours straight than watch any five minutes of Joysticks ever again.

You’ll have plenty of hard words to say if you are unlucky enough to watch the Australian heist movie The Hard Word.Keith Bailey is the proprietor of The Unknown Movies Page.

Ah, were we ever so young?

I know what you’re thinking. What a timely review!! But sometimes you want to examine something obscure that no one’s ever heard of.

In this film, there’s a event that horrifies everyone who witnesses it, or even just hears about it. People then tell themselves it’s over and try to get on with their lives. But then, 15 years later, it happens again. I don’t know why, that just seems to speak to me right now.

It’s the scariest and most horrifying Michael Myers this side of the one in The Love Guru, as we learn what awaits the unwary on Halloween.

Ken Begg is the proprietor of Jabootu: The Bad Movie Dimension.

With 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting passing the ten-year milestone back in July, I decided to do something extra-stupid to celebrate.  I went and took on three of the most thoroughly discussed and dissected properties in all of science fiction:

Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965), in which the Doctor is an idiot, the Daleks are pushovers, and only the juvenilized Susan seems truly qualified to go adventuring through the most dangerous regions of time and space…

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), in which motion is famously the thing that’s most sorely lacking…

and…

Star Wars (1977), in which the Force– the energy field created by Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, James Earl Jones, and a whole lot of immensely talented guys named “John”– truly was with George Lucas.

Also, I’ve got some less overreaching reviews, too:

Carnival Magic (1981), in which a tiger-tamer ain’t nothing next to a psychic with a talking chimp…

Pacific Rim (2013), in which HUGE FREAKING ROBOTS punch HUGE FREAKING MONSTERS in the face for two hours…

Phantasm (1979), in which funeral parlors are even creepier than you realized…

and…

Wake in Fright (1971), in which Outback mining towns make for a truly unforgettable Christmas vacation.

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