2019 was for me a year of unwanted adventures, even leaving aside the whole “the world is on frigging fire, both figuratively and literally” thing. A slow downward spiral of depression and declining health during the first half of the year culminated in mid-summer with what didn’t feel at the time like a near-death experience, but absolutely was one, followed by a hospital stay of several days. The second half, consequently, was all about acclimating myself to some rather drastic lifestyle changes, some of which I’m still fine-tuning. And then there was a bunch of stuff that I’m not going to talk about for the sake of other people’s privacy; suffice it to say that it all sucked. So if anybody’s been wondering why I’ve been incommunicado lately, now you know.

All the foregoing also factors into a decision I’ve been wrestling with for a while. Now that my life is getting back into some semblance of order, I’m beginning to regain some of my enthusiasm for writing about weird movies on the internet, but the fact is I’m desperately tired of having my increasingly limited time and energy for doing so overshadowed by the requirements of the next B-Masters roundtable. So in the interest of keeping 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting alive and well, I’m going on sabbatical from the Cabal. I’ll be back once my batteries are recharged (I’m thinking roughly a year from now), and if nobody objects, I’ll keep announcing my updates here on the B-Masters blog. The reviews below will be my last roundtable contributions for a while, though:

20th Anniversary Roundtable, Part 1 (which you already know about, but just for the sake of completeness):

Black Emanuelle (1975), in which the title character is neither strictly speaking Emanuelle nor strictly speaking black…

Evil Dead II (1987), in which surviving the night in a demon-haunted cabin doesn’t actually improve one’s situation much…

From Hell It Came (1957), in which an isolated Polynesian tribe could use the services of a good lumberjack…

Goodbye, Emmanuelle (1977), in which our heroine starts to wonder whether this “free love” thing is all it’s cracked up to be…

and…

Martin (1977), in which George Romero gives us a much more satisfying answer to the riddle, “When is a vampire movie not a vampire movie?” than Val Lewton managed to.

20th Anniversary Roundtable, Part 2 (which you might already have seen on my site, but connectivity troubles prevented me from announcing here):

And Then There Were None (1945), in which Agatha Christie sure does know how to throw a party…

Get Crazy (1983), in which no show I ever booked went this far out of control, but most of them usually felt like they were about to…

Pink Flamingos (1972), in which you never can tell what some people will get ego about…

and…

Viva Knievel! (1979), in which a guy can’t even jump a Harley over 150 feet of lions and tigers in peace anymore!

20th Anniversary Roundtable, Part 3 (which I interpreted very narrowly to mean movies that I’d already tried to review, but never quite managed to make the words flow):

The Bat People (1974), which could almost have been mistaken for something from 1956, if you’d seen it on a black and white TV back when…

and…

The Dungeonmaster (1984), which has nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons, but oddly does tie in semi-subliminally with the early-80’s arcade boom.

20th Anniversary Rountable, Part 4:

A Cold Night’s Death (1973), in which even the best union can’t do anything about these working conditions…

The Eyes of the Panther (1989), in which there’s someone out there for everybody– even werecats…

The Seventh Curse (1986), in which our hero’s pecker arguably has the highest kill count in the film…

and…

Son of Samson (1960), in which Maciste returns to the screen after an absence of more than 30 years.

Meanwhile, I did manage to review a few other things, too, amid the scramble to keep up with the roundtables:

Blood Beach (1980), in which (say it with me) just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, you can’t get there…

It, Chapter Two (2019), in which splitting up the unreasonably huge book for translation to celluloid wasn’t such a good idea after all…

Rebirth of Mothra (1996), in which Toho’s other mon-star gets the Heisei treatment…

and…

Us (2019), in which some things really are better left unexplained– and the explanation had better be good if we’re going to get one anyway.

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.