Movies I Have Seen Lately

[The Baron]

Saw a Takashi Miike picture called The Great Yokai War. "Yokai" is a Japanese term for monsters from folklore, as opposed to the more familiar kaiju. It's a kids' picture, about a young boy from Tokyo sent out to live in the countryside with his older sister and his intermittently senile grandfather. When a vengeful spirit appears, the boy gets caught up in a war between warring groups of yokai and must find his courage to become the "Kirin Rider", the hero who will set everything to rights. It's not a bad picture - nothing deep, but an amusing story. Some of the yokai are really trippy, Japanese folklore can get pretty "out there", apparently.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN (1960): "An escaped safecracker is made invisible by a scientist being forced to work for a crazed ex-military officer with dreams of world domination,"

This movie is only 57 minutes long, but our copy started glitching 20 minutes from the end, then froze completely at 13. Fortunately, Bob mentioned above that this is MST#K 623 (which I wouldn't've known because I lost my MST3K access by season six) so I was able to look it up in the "Amazing Colossal Episode Guide" (where the summary provided there is actually more entertaining than the movie itself. I will say the bit with the "invisible" guinea pig and harness was lifted whole from Universal Studios. Millcreek DVD are cheap (inexpensive) but they are also cheap (poorly made). I have had trouble with them in the past. Anyone else? 

[The Baron]

I haven't had trouble with their DVDs so far, but I'm not sure if I've tried watching all of this collection yet.

It's not that bad of a movie (it's not that great of one, either), but it's hard to take it seriously once you've seen it MSTed.

I was astonished to see that this picture came out in 1960, it looks about ten years older than that.

The science in it is BS, of course, but that's par for the course in these pictures.

They "blew up half the county" at the end, but the telephone poles a hundred yards from the house are still standing.

Jeff of Earth-J said:

THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN (1960): "An escaped safecracker is made invisible by a scientist being forced to work for a crazed ex-military officer with dreams of world domination,"

This movie is only 57 minutes long, but our copy started glitching 20 minutes from the end, then froze completely at 13. Fortunately, Bob mentioned above that this is MST#K 623 (which I wouldn't've known because I lost my MST3K access by season six) so I was able to look it up in the "Amazing Colossal Episode Guide" (where the summary provided there is actually more entertaining than the movie itself. I will say the bit with the "invisible" guinea pig and harness was lifted whole from Universal Studios. Millcreek DVD are cheap (inexpensive) but they are also cheap (poorly made). I have had trouble with them in the past. Anyone else? 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

In the past, with a set like this (in which the movies cost, like, 20 cents apiece) I don't really care. But I had a problem with one of their Ultraman sets (no sub-titles) which remains unresolved. I returned the defective disc and they sent a replacement, but it was defective, too. 

[PowerBook Pete, the Mad Mod]

I hope that means you enjoyed it.

Richard Willis said:

I had to watch the whole show!

PowerBook Pete, the Mad Mod said:

Tipton-Rosemark Academy Presents: Little Shop of Horrors.

PowerBook Pete, the Mad Mod said:

I may be able to post a link to a video after the performances.

[Fraser Sherman]

Mill Creek are indeed cheap, but I haven't had any problems with the DVDs so far. Now, of course, I've jinxed it!

[Richard Willis]

Yes, I did. Stage productions are always great, even their imperfections.

PowerBook Pete, the Mad Mod said:

I hope that means you enjoyed it.

Richard Willis said:

I had to watch the whole show!

PowerBook Pete, the Mad Mod said:

Tipton-Rosemark Academy Presents: Little Shop of Horrors.

PowerBook Pete, the Mad Mod said:

I may be able to post a link to a video after the performances.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

The movies on the Millcreek "Strange Tales" 20 Movie Pack are not in the same order on the discs as they are on the label (which is the order Bob posted on the previous page), and we're watching them in disc order. That means next up was...

THE RETURN OF DOCTOR MABUSE: This one started glitching immediately, so I took it out to try to clean the disc. It had a hard time reloading, and the movie started to play 45 minutes in. We decided to skip ahead to...

EVIL BRAIN FROM OUTER SPACE: ...but when we chose that one, the next one started to play.

NIGHT FRIGHT: Luckily, this one played correctly. Even more luckily, it was only 75 minutes long. It was in color (1968), but the night scenes were so poorly lit it was had to tell what was going on onscreen. "A NASA experiment involving cosmic rays has mutated an ape and turned it into and unstoppable killing machine with a thirst for blood." A more accurate description would be: "Some clean-cut college kids hang out in a wooded area near a lake and are picked off by a mutated ape that is hardly seen." When we do see the "mutated ape" it looks like a guy in a gorilla suit but wearing a Klingon mask from ST:TMP. 

Way back when we started watching Tracy's 50 Movie Pack of "Horror Classics" I mentioned that we have a 100 Movie Pack od "Sci-Fi Classics" we bought years ago and watched only about half of. The good news is, it includes both The Return of Dr. Mabuse and Evil Brain from Outer Space; the bad news is it's also from Mill Creek so odds are those discs won't play, either. Because we generally watch these things in disc order, those won't be coming up in queue for quite some time, but we'd be willing to make an exception if anyone else was in the mood to watch one or both along with us. 

[The Baron]

The Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961) was glitchy on my disk, too, but not too glitchy to watch. A not overbright West German police inspector matches "wits" with the shadowy super-villain Dr. Mabuse.  Apparently Mabuse was quite a popular character in the West Germany of the time.  A very murky picture.

[Fraser Sherman]

Mabuse has a status like Moriarty over there. He made the jump from novels to films in the silent era and then got revived for a series of low-budget 1960s films. I wrote a review of the first film (I'm a big fan) over at Atomic Junkshop: https://atomicjunkshop.com/dr-mabuse-picture-times/

The Baron said:

The Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961) was glitchy on my disk, too, but not too glitchy to watch. A not overbright West German police inspector matches "wits" with the shadowy super-villain Dr. Mabuse.  Apparently Mabuse was quite a popular character in the West Germany of the time.  A very murky picture.

[The Baron]

Interesting.  I have to admit that I don't know much about German popular culture.

Fraser Sherman said:

Mabuse has a status like Moriarty over there. He made the jump from novels to films in the silent era and then got revived for a series of low-budget 1960s films. I wrote a review of the first film (I'm a big fan) over at Atomic Junkshop: https://atomicjunkshop.com/dr-mabuse-picture-times/

The Baron said:

The Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961) was glitchy on my disk, too, but not too glitchy to watch. A not overbright West German police inspector matches "wits" with the shadowy super-villain Dr. Mabuse.  Apparently Mabuse was quite a popular character in the West Germany of the time.  A very murky picture.

[The Baron]

Watched Evil Brain From Outer Space (1964), a no-budget Japanese sci-fi epic in which the Space Council sends the heroic Starman (known in Japan as "Super-Giant")  to Earth to defend it from invasion by the evil space brain Balazar.  Starman is very similar to Prince of Space and Space Chief from "Invasion of the Neptune Men".  As in those films, the heels are simultaneously the greatest threat in the universe and goofy and utterly incompetent.

I'm given to understand that this movie was an amalgam of four movies from a series, which might explain why the plot makes no sense.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

"We have a 100 Movie Pack of 'Sci-Fi Classics' we bought years ago... [which] includes both The Return of Dr. Mabuse and Evil Brain from Outer Space"

THE RETURN OF DOCTOR MABUSE: We watched our other copy of The R. of D.M. last night and it played fine (except the the sound was a bit out of synch). I really wanted to see Gerte Frobe two years before he became forever enshrined in cinematic history as Auric Goldfinger. I realize now that, when we tried to play it the other night and it jumped 45 minutes in, it has actually jumped 45 minutes into Evil Brain from Outer Space, which sounds awesome, BTW. We will definitely be watching that one next so, assuming you watch Night Fright next, after tonight we'll be in synch.