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.
Transpacific rubberization!
May 14
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!
Fool Hu-Mans!
May 12
The monster suits will be along next time… and I think you’ll be very pleased with them when they arrive. But for now:
Dead Man’s Eyes (1944), in which Edward Fielding has it brought forcefully to his attention that making someone a bequest of your body-parts is a terrible idea…
The Ghost Train (1941), in which not even screenwriter Val Guest thinks the star comedian is funny…
Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), in which Arthur Lucan further underscores the dreadfulness of Arthur Askey by being less unfunny than him despite appearing in the teeth-clenchingly awful swan-song of the world’s worst drag act…
On the Beach (1959), which is actually good if you can get beyond all the goddamned “Waltzing Matilda”…
and…
The Return of Dracula (1958), in which Paul Landers and Pat Fielder do Salem’s Lot twenty years before Stephen King.
Continuing to fill up the Rubber Soul Roundtable…
THE MAZE
There are a lot of times when I don’t remember a movie (sometimes mere hours after watching it), but I remember a particular scene or vague theme from the movie. All I could remember about Treasure of the Four Crowns was the scene where fireballs on ridiculously visible wires were flying around. With Sword and the Sorcerer, it was “guy falls into room of naked women” and “guy makes witch’s chest explode, then catches her heart.” Although there are many times when I remembered both the scene and the title of the movie, there are many other times when I have no recollection at all of the film’s title. It is in these instances that the Internet has proven to finally be worth all the trouble. Thousands and thousands of years of social and technological evolution finally lead to the moment when I can look up “screaming banshee on moors” and find out in which movie it appears. And the internet was there for me again, very recently, when I was trying to remember the title of a movie about which all I could recall was, “frog man in center of hedge maze.”
The Month of 2!
May 7
It’s time for the latest Video Binge over at Cold Fusion, which is an entire month of first sequels to movies I’ve previously reviewed. Can’t you just feel the electricity in the air?
First up is 666: The Beast (2007), which is a sequel to a knockoff of a remake of a knockoff. Which pretty much tells you how good it is.
And then there’s Femalien 2 (1998), which has exactly the same things going for it as the original Femalien. Wink wink, nudge nudge, yawn yawn.