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]

Oh! I looked on eBay (and Amazon) and didn't see it. I'll have Tracy look.

Richard Willis said:

It's  available on eBay, FWIW.

Jeff of Earth-J said:

I felt the same way. Unfortunately, it was a single production run product and is no longer in inventory.

[Richard Willis]

Try this

Drive-In Cult Cinema Collection: 200 Classic Features DVD 50-Disc O...

[Jeff of Earth-J]

I don't know what was up yesterday , but both Tracy and I looked on eBay last night and didn't see it. Tonight we could. It's ordered and one the way, scheduled to arrive Feb. 15. Tracy bought a different listing, though, one that was still factory sealed. 

NOTE: $95 may seem like a lot of money, but that's only 47 cents per movie. And worth every penny, I'm sure.

[JD DeLuzio]

I noted that several of the films from this collection have been uploaded to YouTube, and selected Cindy and Donna (1970). Sexploitation film about two twenty-something teenage half-sisters who live with their alcoholic mother and womanizing father/stepfather in suburbia and want to break out. Basically a porn film without visible genitalia (the nude scenes go to often hilarious lengths to avoid that), crossed with a "ripped-from-the headlines" wild youth plotline, insincere Afterschool Special/Movie-of-the-Week reflections, and a shock ending. The soundtrack seems to have its own separate cult following. Robert O. Ragland, in addition to writing Cindy's theme song, was tasked with recreating the range of musical styles one might hear in 1970, from ersatz Bacherach to psychedelic pop, all served with a side order of cheese.

The internet also informs me that the film:

-was the basis of a legal case after the sheriff and DA of Pulaski County, Kentucky seized a copy of the film.

-is apparently also available in Twisted Sex, Vol. 15. Who knew?

[Rob Staeger (Grodd Mod)]

Congrats on tracking it down!

I've only seen a couple of them -- Hustler Squad, on a grindhouse double feature disc we've got, and My Tutor, back when I was the target audience for sex comedies about high school seniors (i.e. a high school freshman). And I saw a tongue-in-cheek stage play based on Wild Women of Planet Wongo a number of years ago -- it was a blast!  

[Jeff of Earth-J]

Wild Women of Wongo is a favorite of ours. It was part of the 100-movie pack we just finished, plus we have the Riff Trax version. Usually, knowing it might take us months (or in this case, years) to finish, I insist on watching multi-movie sets in order. Tracy was in favor of jumping around, but I told if we do, she would be in charge of keeping track of them. I held firm and that's why we finished (even though it took us a decade). I intend to watch the 200 cult movies in order as well, but we might just move Cindy and Donna to the top of the list since it's fresh in JD's mind. I'll let y'all know when we'll be watching it just in case anyone wants to watch on YouTube as well. 

[JD DeLuzio]

Yeah, Wild Women of Wongo is a bad-movie classic. We saw it years ago as part of a collection of old SF drive-in films.

I recently saw Star Wars Kid: The Rise of the Digital Shadows, a documentary that uses the "Star Wars Kid" incident as a way to discuss the rise of meme culture, people circulating inappropriate videos online, and the right to be forgotten.  The adult (and successful) Ghyslain Raza was heavily involved in the production, and much of it follows him as he revisits the story. The kids in the class he once occupied point out that the video now would likely be lost amidst the hundreds of thousands of others, and a contrite Andy Baio (whose repost most contributed to the video's viral status) and Raza find they really get along now. The doc also dispels many myths that grew up around the video and Raza, including the interesting fact that he was never even, particularly, a Star Wars fan. He was trying to work out the effects sequence for a Star Wars segment of a class video project.

His lawyer (there was a lawsuit, settled out of court) recalls that the saddest point, for him, was that after significant cyberbullying and real-world bullying of Raza, he saw no trace of regret or remorse among the classmates who posted it online or their parents.

[Jeff of Earth-J]

I've never seen "Star Wars Kid" before (but now I have).

[Jeff of Earth-J]

QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958):

Cheesy but well-made (DeLuxe Color, CinemaScope), sexist even in 1958. The year is 1985, and four astronauts land on Venus, which is populated entirely by women. Stars Zsa Zsa Gabor. I picked this one up in TCM while I'm waiting for my cult movies to arrive. Would make a good MST3K, but entertaining in its own right. 

[Jeff of Earth-J]

QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966): This is another movie I recorded off TCM but, instead of being a 1958 movie set in 1985, it is a 1966 movie set in 1990, and instead of going to Venus they go to Mars. the capsule description is: "Astronauts go to Mars and return with a green vampire woman." Who wouldn't want to see a movie like that? No one I'd care to know. It has certain similarities to Alien, especially when the green vampire woman starts laying eggs. Objectively it's not as good as Queen of Outer Space, but nevertheless well worth watching. 

[Richard Willis]

Jeff of Earth-J said:

QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966): This is another movie I recorded off TCM but, instead of being a 1958 movie set in 1985, it is a 1966 movie set in 1990, and instead of going to Venus they go to Mars

I recorded it of TCM also, and just watched it.  In 1966 we were closing in on the Moon. It was somewhat reasonable that we would be beyond the Moon in 1990. Thanks to politicians and funding cuts, we weren’t. Interestingly the aliens aren’t from Mars, but crash landed there from a “distant galaxy.”

the capsule description is: "Astronauts go to Mars and return with a green vampire woman." Who wouldn't want to see a movie like that? No one I'd care to know.

I probably know people like that, but not on this board. The only things I didn’t like were the annoying music and beeps (etc) that they inflicted on us whenever no one was talking.

It has certain similarities to Alien, especially when the green vampire woman starts laying eggs. Objectively it's not as good as Queen of Outer Space, but nevertheless well worth watching. 

They did a few interesting things with the alien woman’s biology. The eggs were really a similarity with Alien. At the end Basil Rathbone was the villain, unintentional or not.

I watched Queen of Outer Space a while back. Meh.

[Luke Blanchard]

The Soviet Bloc made a fair number of SF films. Some were cannibalized by AIP films. My understanding is Queen of Blood is one of these: it has special effects sequences from Soviet films, but mixes them with an original story.

Queen of Outer Space is one of a number of movies of the era with similar plots: others are Cat-Women of the Moon, Fire Maidens from Outer Space and Missile to the Moon. The genre was spoofed in Amazon Women of the Moon.