The B-Masters Cabal

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As it turns out, a balloon on wires with stuck-on googly eyes. Bet they didn’t tell you that in anatomy class..

THE BRAIN FROM PLANET AROUS (1957)

In which a “recognised nuclear scientist” is taken over by a giant transparent floating space brain, and immediately starts making plans for world domination. He also turns into a ravening sex-maniac.

Hmm…is it just me, or is a pattern starting to emerge in the reviews I’m resurrecting?

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A resurrected review from the earliest days of the site:

REEFER MADNESS (1936)

In which evil marijuana pushers turn clean-cut young Americans into sex-crazed drug fiends (see left).

Oh! – and this one’s a bit NSFW, although not for the usual reason…

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I’ve also reformatted and added screenshots to FRANKENSTEIN (1910).

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Ah, dearie me…and I had such good intentions. Unfortunately, they’ve landed me just where good intentions traditionally do.

I don’t know whether the rest of the world suffers from this particularly idiocy, but here, although they’ve long since stopped bothering about region-coding our actual DVD players, they still do region-code the DVD players in our computers; which means that over time I’ve ended up with three computers devoted to the serious business of screenshots: my old desktop for R1 discs, my new laptop for R4/R0, and – in the relatively short time since it was superseded – my old laptop for R2, which are a tiny but significant minority of the collection.

And now my desktop has gone and died, which threw quite a spanner into my house-keeping plans, since I can’t play R1 DVDs until I’ve come to terms with the prospect of buying a new computer just to take screenshots.

And yes, I do realise that this pretty much defines the expression “First World problems”.

In the meantime, thwarted in many of the plans I’d made, I’ve done what I always do in the face of too much choice, and gone back to the beginning:

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LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (1902)

I’ve gone back over this review and replaced the blurry black-and-white screenshots with images from the recent colour restoration, which allow much more of the film’s fine detail to be observed; as well as offering a salutary reminder that while the Italians may have taken it to new heights (or depths), it was the French who invented cinematic eye violence.

Thanks, fellas!

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