Last night before I went to bed I finished Code Name: Diamond Head, an old failed TV pilot by Quinn Martin about a spy in Hawaii. Complete with cheesy screen wipes and only a little action, there's no question why this never got off the ground.
The bad guy, a master of disguise, codenamed "Tree" (I know, boring) is trying to hijack some new nerve toxin. Helping Diamond Head is the Dragon Lady, a hideously thin Vietnamese lady, and Zulu, who later appeared in Hawaii Five-O. I give this movie forty empty seats, one for every pound that Vietnamese lady needed on her body to look better.
By the way, why do they always cast non-Chinese people as Chinese people? It bugs me to see someone that is obviously Vietnamese or Korean, or even Japanese, playing a character with a Chinese name. That whole "they all look alike" thing? It's utter crap.
I just finished watching Bloodlust, another season 6 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This movie had a lot less science fiction and a lot more crazy than normal. There was a great short film at the beginning about Uncle Jim's Dairy Farm though, which nearly redeemed the movie!
The movie is about two young couples on a boat that get off on an island that turns out to be a crazy hunter's personal playground. He captures them, and they find out he hunts people for trophies.
That was basically all there was to it, and I can only give it four empty seats, one for each of the young "stars" of this film.
Next on the list: The Creeping Terror. I'm pretty sure I've seen this movie before, but I didn't review it, so I had to subject myself to it a second time.
This movie starts with a newlywed couple returning home to California when a rocket lands nearby. The sheriff and his deputies check it out, and the government is called in quickly. They find a monster on board that is imprisoned, and later learn there is another one on the loose. The other monster rampages across the countryside, albeit somewhat slowly, and eats people whole. For some reason, they're never able to run from it.
As entertaining as that may sound, it really wasn't. This movie was somewhat slow, and every once in a while a narrator would come along and narrate a conversation that is going on on-screen. I give this movie one hundred empty seats, which is at least how many people were eaten by this stupid monster.
After a long hiatus, I've gone back to watching more MST3K (I'm on season 6). This time it's Colossus and the Headhunters, a terrible Italian movie about a guy named Maciste (we can only assume he's Colossus, but they never really tell us). Since they pronounce it like "my cheese steak" there are quite a few jokes about that throughout the show. Maciste is on an island as a volcano is erupting and people are running for their lives. Although he's a stranger, they follow him to a boat (his boat?) where they leave just as the island sinks into the sea. They sail to another island where a war is raging between two tribes, one of them headhunters. The headhunters are ruled by a guy that left the other tribe, and he captured the old king so he could force the king's daughter to marry him so he could be king.
Full of lots of Italians in short shorts, this movie wasn't really my thing. But because of all the near cheek-shots, I rate this movie two empty seats one for each of the eyes that was put out of the old king. If only I had been so lucky, I wouldn't have seen this horrible movie…
I received my copy of Cinematic Titanic's The Alien Factor in the mail the other day. I watched it this morning since I was up early with little to do. The Alien Factor like East Meets Watts, is a "live show DVD," a recording of a live performance. I didn't think I'd like either as much as I did because of the laughing in the background, but it wasn't too bad. (In case you don't know, I have a strong aversion to laugh tracks.)
In any case, The Alien Factor was a horribly low-budget film. In fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't some amateur film school dropout project. A significant portion of the movie involved people walking around in the woods not saying anything!
The plot (what there was of it) involves a crashed alien spacecraft that held dangerous biological entities the aliens intended to study. They are freed by the crash and begin terrorizing a small town. There was a ton of plaid and most of the pants flared out at the bottom (always funny!) and the acting was horrendous. The "hospital" scene was obviously a white sheet backdrop, and the sheriff's car had only two doors. A "state policeman" showed up in uniform driving a VW Beetle.
The worst part, however, has to be the end, when we find out the guy helping to kill the monsters is actually himself an alien. The woman he's speaking to screams because he's hideous, and the sheriff shows up and blasts him with the shotgun and the film ends abruptly. While I enjoy this type of entertainment (well not the movie, but the riffing), I think I enjoyed East Meets Watts more than The Alien Factor.
Oh, and take this:
The Dead Talk Back is a movie that had never seen the light of day after it was filmed. It was found many years later and licensed for release, probably made most popular by MST3K.
This movie had a decent storyline, if you ignore the pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo. It's about a detective solving the murder of a young woman in a boarding house in San Francisco. He enlists the help of a scientist working on a radio to talk to the dead. They eventually ferret out the murder by pretending the whole thing is working when we fingd out it was all a hoax, and even the girl was still alive. It was interesting, because the whole time you are led to believe it's all real, but the scientist was just helping the police smoke out the guilty party.
I give this movie 36 empty seats, for the number of years it sat in a can waiting to be discovered. Hollywood budgets way worse films nowadays, this should have gotten a little more limelight.
I just watched Invasion USA, an early 1950's film about an invasion on US soil by our "enemy." They never specifically say who the enemy is. Several people in a bar bind together as a newscast announcing the invasion is broadcast. They all experience some type of regret, such as not helping the army build tanks, or joining the navy, etc. They were all very "patriotic" things that seemed to be regretted.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the armed forces or the government was responsible for the film in the first place. In any case, the invasion turns out to be mass hypnotism by a man in the bar, but it leaves all the people more patriotic.
I give this movie one empty seat for the unnamed enemy that was supposed to be Russian.
Just finished watching 12 to the Moon, a terrible pre-moonlanding movie about landing on the moon and what we'll find there. It was prefaced by an annoying short film opera about futuristic cars which was almost as bad as Mr. B Natural.
This episode also marks the end of the fifth season.
Some of the most basic things that are wrong with this film are: steaming craters, quicksand, gravity, air-filled caves, and advanced life—all on the moon. After the advanced moon-creatures tell us to go with their weird symbolic language (that only the Asian woman can read, by the way), they launch an attack against North America, freezing it solid. Our intrepid heroes launch a "space taxi" with an atomic bomb on it, which they drop into a live volcano to try to warm the continent up. It doesn't work and the pilots die. But then the moon people realize Earthlings aren't all that bad, and they leave everyone alone and extend a future welcome to return to the moon.
I give this movie seven empty seats for the astronauts that make it back. Hey, at least they kept the black man alive this time…
Last night I watched Village of the Giants, another Bert I. Gordon stinker of a 1960's film. It also starred Tommy Kirk, if you could call that "starring."
The movie is about Kirk's younger, nerdy brother, who invents a substance that makes anything ingesting it grow five or six times normal size. When their giant ducks invade a local disco and shake it like there's no tomorrow, a gang of hooligans become interested and steal the remaining compound from Tommy's house. They then ingest it themselves and grow gigantic. The now thirty-foot-tall gang terrorizes the local police and begin to get their way. Tommy's nerdy brother invents an antidote (accidentally), solving their giant hooligan problem once and for all.
I give this movie two empty seats, one for each giant duck that was roasted.
Somehow they credit H. G. Wells for writing, I'm not familiar with all his stories, but somehow I doubt he wrote more than one or two percent of this storyline.
I just finished watching Teen-Age Crime Wave, a 1950's movie with a moral: don't be a hooligan or else you'll turn out like this.
It's about a girl that gets thrown in jail and her cell-mate's boyfriend breaks them out, but her "friends" are much more hard-core than she is. They murder several people throughout the movie, and hole up in a farmhouse, taking its old couple owners hostage. The cops eventually track them down, and the movie ends in a long chase up to the same observatory so many other movies end up at down by Los Angeles.
I give this movie two empty seats, one for the inquisitive neighbor and one for the "badgirl" that came clean in the end.
I watched Santa Claus earlier today. This movie was all kinds of wrong. To start, Santa doesn't live at the North Pole, he orbits the Earth directly above the North Pole. He also has children from every country living with him, where they sing their ethnic songs for him. Merlin also lives with Santa. Yes, that Merlin.
Santa is opposed by the Devil, who tries to entice children to do bad things and plays tricks on Santa. Like stealing the magic flower that lets Santa disappear.
This movie was wacky and weird, exactly like MST3K likes to make fun of. I give it 666 empty seats for all the evil Santa opposes.
I just finished watching Radar Secret Service, a completely forgettable movie about using the super science of RADAR to fight crime! Woo!
No, it wasn't very exciting. In fact I nearly slept through it. I give this movie one empty seat for the RADAR!
I just finished watching Outlaw (a.k.a. Outlaw of Gor), starring Jack Palance. Well, maybe not starring. I've heard about the Gor books, but have never read them. This is about a teacher transported to the planet of Gor who becomes a hero to the people. There is an evil priest (Palance) who is plotting with the queen to kill the king and take power. Cabot, the hero, is sucked back to their world along with one of his coworkers. The coworker is seduced by the queen, then betrayed by her. Cabot saves the day and marries the king's daughter.
I give this movie two empty seats for the near-continuous near-bare hinder shots of all the people wearing loincloths. *shiver*
This morning I watched The Atomic Brain, an 1960's thriller about a rich old woman who pays for a scientists' research on transplanting brains. After successfully transplanting some animal brains into human bodies, the old woman wants him to put her brain in the body of a young woman. Three young women are tricked in to staying with the old woman so she can pick out the best one for herself. Everybody starts to realize that when the old woman gets what she wants, she'll have no further use for them, so the scientist saves the targeted young woman (to whom the old woman left her entire fortune in preparation for the operation) and puts the old bag's brain in a cat. I have no idea how it fit, unless your brain shrinks with age like an old lady's body. The old woman kills the scientist using her cat-body, but the young woman escapes.
To sum it up, this had a much better storyline than the average MST3K movie, and it had some great riffs, too. I give this movie four empty seats, one for each of the kidnapped women and one for the poor cat that had its brains scooped out.