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.

[Doctor Hmmm?]

Rifftrax did this one (available on Tubitv.com.)

[Jeff of Earth-J]

WARRIORS OF THE WASTELAND: 

"It's... set in 2019, nine years after a nuclear war."

I thought it was set three years after a national election.

If this movie sound like a Mad Max rip-off to you, you're right.

It's funny... just as there was a certain point in "The Doomsday Machine" when I realized I had seen this before, there was a similar point in this one Tracy came to the same conclusion. For the record, it was the first time the car appeared. Tracy remembers taking a screenshot of it and posting it here with the comment, "Jeff has found his new car." It looks like a black '71 Gran Torino with silver tubes coming out of the hood, a large spoiler on the trach, and a useless clear, plastic dome on the roof. I checked our 100 Movie Pack and sure enough: this is one of the ones we have already seen. I didn't remember it, th0ugh (until she pointed out the car), and neither of us could remember anything else about it, so we continued to watch. (We had also seen The Tranparent Man before but neither of us remembered any part of it.) The funny part is, we have not only seen this movie twice, but we own two different copies of it!

The Baron said:

Just watched Warriors of the Wasteland (1983).  Holy Mary, Mother of God, that was awful.  It's an Italian postapocalyptic picture set in 2019, nine years after a nuclear war. (Remember the nuclear war in 2010? I don't.)  A  death cult called the Templars is out to wipe out the remnants of humanity, and our protagonist is out to stop them. It's cheesy and badly-made, with some truly distasteful moments. MST3K  did three or four similar Italian movies, but I think this may be worse than any of them.

[doc photo]

Hitchcock's 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. I would have sworn to having seen it before, but other than the climactic scene in Royal Albert Hall, I remembered nothing of the movie up to that point. I am now wondering if it was the earlier B&W version I had seen.

[Fraser Sherman]

China is likewise the mastermind having Spectre set the US and USSR at war in You Only Live Twice.

Richard Willis said:

This was the period of time when Russia/USSR was being portrayed in movies as kinda nice/not so bad while China was being assigned the evil guys role. I think this mindset was why all of the James Bond movies involving the Russian SMERSH organization were converted to the stateless SPECTRE. In the movie version of Goldfinger, they had China overtly helping the title bad guy.

[Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod)]

I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once yesterday, and do yourself a favor -- don't look at any promotional materials or reviews of this movie, just go see it. It's incredible. 

[The Baron]

Funny, I just saw someone post the same thing on Facebook.  Oh, wait, that was you.

Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod) said:

I saw Everything Everywhere All at Once yesterday, and do yourself a favor -- don't look at any promotional materials or reviews of this movie, just go see it. It's incredible. 

[Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod)]

Well... it was me from another dimension!

[The Baron]

Watched Frozen Alive (1964) A British-German co-production in which a scientist has himself frozen on the same night his unhappy wife accidentally shoots herself.  Kind of a letdown, really.  I had acquired the impression that the plot would be that he would be unfrozen and find himself having to prove his innocence, but that whole business is dismissed in one sentence.  I can't help noticing that at the end of the picture, he appears to have gotten over his wife's death quite easily and is cozy with the woman she was jealous of.  As the Church Lady used to say, "Isn't that  convenient?"

[Richard Willis]

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

I don’t think I ever heard of this before yesterday. An hour-and-a-half that felt like three times that long. The dragging of the story is mainly because so much time is spent with Chewbacca’s family and their untranslated language. A very clear copy is on YouTube. It may not be there for long as Disney is supposed to be gunning for it. Here’s the link:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hH8rxarVG8

All of the actors from the original movie appear in this, plus Art Carney, Bea Arthur, Diahann Carroll and Harvey Korman (in three roles).

This is a link to IMDB’s trivia section for this movie. There is a lot of truly interesting information.

The Star Wars Holiday Special (TV Movie 1978) - Trivia - IMDb

[The Baron]

I've never seen it all the way through, but the bits I have seen lend credence to the legends thast it was so epically bad that Lucas forbade it to ever be shown again or ever released on home video.

Richard Willis said:

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

I don’t think I ever heard of this before yesterday. An hour-and-a-half that felt like three times that long. The dragging of the story is mainly because so much time is spent with Chewbacca’s family and their untranslated language. A very clear copy is on YouTube. It may not be there for long as Disney is supposed to be gunning for it. Here’s the link:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hH8rxarVG8

All of the actors from the original movie appear in this, plus Art Carney, Bea Arthur, Diahann Carroll and Harvey Korman (in three roles).

This is a link to IMDB’s trivia section for this movie. There is a lot of truly interesting information.

The Star Wars Holiday Special (TV Movie 1978) - Trivia - IMDb

[Jeff of Earth-J]

FROZEN ALIVE: I was pleasantly surprised to discover this movie actually had a plot... a dull, boring and uninteresting one, but a plot nonetheless. 

The Baron said:

Watched Frozen Alive (1964) A British-German co-production in which a scientist has himself frozen on the same night his unhappy wife accidentally shoots herself.  Kind of a letdown, really.  I had acquired the impression that the plot would be that he would be unfrozen and find himself having to prove his innocence, but that whole business is dismissed in one sentence.  I can't help noticing that at the end of the picture, he appears to have gotten over his wife's death quite easily and is cozy with the woman she was jealous of.  As the Church Lady used to say, "Isn't that  convenient?"

The Star Wars Holiday Special

Thank you so much for providing the link to that video! I watched it when it first aired and have wanted to see it again, well... not ever since, but for a good many years now. Yes, I realized it was crap then, but we were so hungry for anything "Star Wars" we watched it and liked it.

It reminds me, too, of another TV movie from the same era: Kiss: Phantom of the Park. That is of equal quality and, as George Lucas and the holiday special, Kiss has forbidden that it ever be shown again or released on home video. Unlike the Star Wars Holiday Special, I did manage manage to score a bootleg copy on dubbed VHS back in the '90s, and yes, I have watched it several times since, usually on Hallowe'en, because that's when it aired. I was not a Kiss fan at all, but many of my friends were, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. Besides, I was too old for trick or treating, anyway. 

[The Baron]

Never was into KISS.  I remember my classmates talking about the band when I was in elementary school, but I never saw what made them more than a mediocre gimmick band.