Even though the cast and crew are making a lark of a movie, Hasebe never lets it collapse under the weight of its own self-awareness. He understands that the best spoof of the campy spy film of the 1960s also has to be a very enjoyable spy film, and Black Tight Killers doesn’t forget to entertain. Kobayashi, as usual, throws himself into the role’s physical aspects with gusto, and he and the girls who make up the black tight squad get to have frequent fights with fists, feet, guns, bamboo bazookas, and of course more mundane weapons like killer albums and ninja chewing gum. The whole thing is light, frothy, and totally ridiculous. Black Tight Killers looks like some scamp replaced the crew’s cameras with kaleidoscopes
Bubblegum Ninjas
Jun 14
Tidying up 1929
Jun 13
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Hey, remember that house-keeping I kept going on about??
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I have now re-formatted and added screenshots to:
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There will be some viewers who will feel that Defense Play is seriously out of date. It takes place back in a time not only when floppy disks were being used, but when floppy disks were actually floppy. But I admit that all this low-tech stuff in the movie was pleasantly nostalgic for me. I grew up with that now-dated technology, and it was nice seeing this obsolete stuff once again. It’s too bad that the movie’s script didn’t please me as much as the technology it presented.
Where can you find Sean Connery dressed in a loincloth, a giant flying stone head that spouts NRA rhetoric from one side of its mouth, and denounces unprotected sex from the other, and a commune filled with people who are so bored with life that they have given up on enjoying anything at all? The Seventies baby, the Seventies.
Something to watch for:
50 mins – Between the perms and the half-tops, I cannot tell the difference between men and women. I haven’t been this confused since Thailand.
This film features a monstrous thing that is resurrected from the past to bring terror to the modern day. I don’t mean the movie’s mummified ‘Bigfoot,’ I mean the movie itself, an obscure sixty minute teen monster flick from the ’50s that had a half hour of excruciating filler added to it in the late seventies, whereupon it became a late night TV staple. Beware, I tells you, lest you too provoke the Curse of Bigfoot.
It’s an AYCYAS! – Braineater joint!
For this Roundtable, I’ve had the pleasure and the honour of tag-teaming with Will Laughlin, as we tackle two versions of the same hominid film: Ishirō Honda’s long-MIA Jūjin Yuki Otoko (Beast-Human Snowman).
Three years after its Japanese release, the film appeared on American screens in the hardly recognisable form of Kenneth G. Crane’s Half Human; which, sadly, has been almost the only way to see this film at all over the past five decades.
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Braineater reviews Jūjin Yuki Otoko (1955).
And You Call Yourself A Scientist! reviews Half Human (1958).
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I’ve always felt that movies with certain titles have an obligation to live up to those titles. For instance, any movie with a title like The Werewolf and the Yeti needs to be a movie full of scenes where a werewolf fights a yeti. If the movie doesn’t live up to that title, then you’ve just ruined humanity’s chances of getting an awesome movie in which a werewolf fights a yeti. It’s just unfair to use up an awesome title/concept on a crappy movie. So when I first heard that a movie called The Werewolf and the Yeti existed, I was both excited and reticent. excited because — well, come on. Werewolf versus yeti. Reticent because I couldn’t help but think, “if this movie isn’t any good, then it ruins my chances of seeing the movie a title like The Werewolf and the Yeti deserves.” When, upon further investigation, I discovered that the movie was one of Spanish actor Jacinto Molina’s — aka Paul Naschy — many werewolf movies, I didn’t know whether to let my hopes rise or plummet. Somehow, I ended up letting them do both, and somehow, the movie fulfilled both those suspicions.
Four years after Disney’s version of Treasure Island, a canny production company rehired director Byron Haskin and star Robert “Long John” Newton for a sequel, Long John Silver (1954). The movie’s not great, but you have to admire the chutzpah.
P.S. The long-awaited sixth issue of Arkham Tales is available! Go here to check it out.
Of all the movies made that deal with man-apes, Missing Link is unusual in a couple of ways. It’s one of the rare ones that was made by a major Hollywood studio. Also, it makes great strides to be sober and serious in tone. But it does share one thing with most other man-ape movies in that it’s overall not very good. Even good production values can’t save a man-ape movie alone.
Peter Cushing vs. the Yeti
May 25
One of the oft cited complaints about this film is that The Abominable Snowman doesn’t get much of a look in during the film, and that is very true. Director, Val Guest has said that makeup and costumes at that time were not really up to the task of creating an effective and frightening looking monster. He therefore believed that ‘what was not seen’ was actually going to be more frightening than anything the special effects, wardrobe and makeup departments could create. Subsequently he chose to only show the snowman in small glimpses, allowing the monster to live in the ‘theatre of your mind’, rather than being unconvincingly paraded in front of your face.