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.
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Captain Comics > Commander BensonFebruary 17, 2025 at 9:46pm
Kincaid basically fought off the Japanese Navy with a couple of P.T. boats, some cans tied together with string and a stern warning. It's "truth is stranger than fiction" territory.
Richard Willis > Captain ComicsFebruary 16, 2025 at 10:40am
Although I'm not a big Godzilla fan, I've added Godzilla Minus One to my watch list. I've also added the 2019 Midway.
The Baron > Richard WillisFebruary 16, 2025 at 3:26pm
Yeah, I'd say that it would be the best G-Film for a non-fan. Godzilla vs. Gigan would probably be the worst.
I can count on one hand the number of movies I saw at the theater with my dad, but Midway (1976) was one of them. The thing I remember most about it (and the draw for me at the time) was that it was one of a handful of movies filmed in Sensurround. The first I recall was Earthquake (another "disaster film" like the aforementioned Towering Inferno), but the first time my friends and I went to see it (at Cinema 4), it was sold out. I forget which movie we saw instead, but it was in the theater right next to the one showing Earthquake, and I could feel the "Sunsurround" next door through my feet.
Sensurround
Sensurround is the brand name for a process developed by Cerwin-Vega in conjunction with Universal Studios to enhance the audio experience during fil…
Tales of Terror (1962) was the only movie I saw with my Dad. I don’t remember what got me excited to see it. It starred Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre and was directed by Roger Corman. I now see that it was three Poe stories adapted by the great Richard Matheson and that it was released in July 1962. This was before any multiscreen theaters came along. Here’s a picture of the Star Theater that existed until just a few years ago in my home town of La Puente* CA. I always assumed that it was a WWII Quonset Hut, but it was apparently built after the war in that style.
Two of the three tales scared the $#!! out of me. “Morella” had a corpse that wasn’t a skeleton, which I hadn’t seen before. “The Case of M. Valdemar” had a dying/dead guy melting. I couldn’t sleep that night. My Dad had seen worse as a firefighter during The Blitz. I now own it on DVD and have seen it a few times.
*Those of you who understand some Spanish think it should be El Puente. It was simply Puente until cityhood. The name came from the old Rancho de la Puente (the Bridge). In high school my Spanish teacher told us that, sometime after the old California ranchos, whoever makes such decisions gave the Spanish word for “bridge” a sex change.
Star Theatre in La Puente, CA - Cinema Treasures
This theatre was designed by S. Charles Lee in the Quonset Hut style and opened as the Puente Theatre in late-1947.
It was renamed the Star ...
When I was a kid I remember going to The Strand. I went there with my brother, I went there with my sister, I went there with my grandmother. The one movie I distinctly remember seeing with my sister was Mad Monster Party (1967) by Rankin & Bass. (I would have been just three years old.) When I went with my brother, we sat in the balcony. (I remember being surprised to discover there was a balcony!) My dad used go to The Strand to see Saterday afternoon serials in the '30s. It was renamed "St. Charles Art Cinema" in 1971 and began screening R- and X-rated movies. It didn't stay in business too long after that. Years later, when I tried to visit where I thought it was, I couldn't find it. Later still, I learned it was torn down and replaced with a parking garage for the new city hall. (It was a block down from where I remembered it.) I also learned that it used to serve as a swimming pool in the summer and a theater in the winter.
There was some disagreement recently concerning the relative merits of this film over on the "Dark Shadows" thread, so I decided to check it out for myself.
Rob Staeger: "If you get a chance to see the Modesty Blaise movie with Monica Vitti and Terrence Stamp, don't miss it. It's truly one of the great bad movies of the world. See it with a crowd. The plot is incomprehensible, but the set and costume and prop design? First-rate crazy."
Peter Wrexham: "I thought the 1966 Vitti/Stamp movie was dreadful... I prefer the 2004 film because it is a good deal more faithful to the original character."
At first I was surprised to see the 1966 version described as "Kids, family, comedy"; that's not what I would have expected. I am not wholly unfamiliar with Modesty Blaise, although my "familiarity" extends to reputatiojn only. I have two boxes of Comics Revue, and the comic strip version is featured in many of them. Comics Revue, however, is an anthology, one I was buying for other features, and I have never actually read any Modesty Blaise.
I approached this, not as a true representation of the character, but as a "bad movie"... and it was that. What it reminds me most of is the 1967 film version of Casino Royale. I suspect that the Modesty Blaise movie bears about as much resemblance to the character Peter remembers as Casino Royale does to James Bond. I agree with everything Rob said about the sets, costumes, prop design and especially the plot. I couldn't follow it. Tracy took a phone call 40 minutes in and didn't return until it was over. It's "first-rate crazy" all right, but it's not good enough to be "one of the great bad movies of the world."
PLANET OF THE APES (2001): We watched this one just because we watched the four other 21st century "apes" last week. I felt then that we should have started with the Tim Burton movies, even though it had nothing to do with the rebooted series, so we watched it last night just to provide some closure. I liked it more than I expected to (I've seen it before), not because it was different than I remembered, but because my expectations weren't so high. I remember being disappointed the first time I saw it that it was more of a done-in-one novelty rather than the start of a new POTA series. It did provide some of the aspects missing from the reboot series, however. I distinctly remember that Maggie Thompson reviewed it in Comics Buyer's Guide at the time of its initial release and spoiled the ending (because she underestimated her reading audience). Don would never have done that. That has stuck in my craw all these years. Having said that, though, the more I think about it, the less the ending actually makes sense. I thought about it all night long and couldn't even make sense of it in my dreams.
doc photo > Jeff of Earth-JFebruary 24, 2025 at 9:07am
I came away from the theatre disappointed with Burton's take on POTA. Re-watching it at home a couple years later it put me to sleep - the only POTA film to do so.
It just occurred to me: I have the novelization of the 2001 Burton film. Although I haven't read it, sometimes the novelization crystalizes plot points left unclear by the movie itself (case in point: the novelization of Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk film). Not so with 2001 POTA, however. The nonsensical ending was left out of the paperback entirely. Oh, what the heck. It's short, here it is:
The perfect black of space, strewn with stars like uncounted grains of dust, spread to infinity beyond Davidson's window. He was working hard, trying to recapture the correct coordinates and reprogram them into his flight system.
Without warning, the screen in front of him lit up: Coordinate unknown.
From out of nowhere, suddenly the wormhole was there, twisting space and time in a vast, pulsing blaze of light.
Davidson gritted his teeth and held on as incalculable energies tossed the pod about like a speck of sand.
Then it vanished, leaving nothing behind but empty, traceless space, nothing at all to show that davidson had ever been there.
Replies
Kincaid basically fought off the Japanese Navy with a couple of P.T. boats, some cans tied together with string and a stern warning. It's "truth is stranger than fiction" territory.
Although I'm not a big Godzilla fan, I've added Godzilla Minus One to my watch list. I've also added the 2019 Midway.
Yeah, I'd say that it would be the best G-Film for a non-fan. Godzilla vs. Gigan would probably be the worst.
I can count on one hand the number of movies I saw at the theater with my dad, but Midway (1976) was one of them. The thing I remember most about it (and the draw for me at the time) was that it was one of a handful of movies filmed in Sensurround. The first I recall was Earthquake (another "disaster film" like the aforementioned Towering Inferno), but the first time my friends and I went to see it (at Cinema 4), it was sold out. I forget which movie we saw instead, but it was in the theater right next to the one showing Earthquake, and I could feel the "Sunsurround" next door through my feet.
Tales of Terror (1962) was the only movie I saw with my Dad. I don’t remember what got me excited to see it. It starred Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre and was directed by Roger Corman. I now see that it was three Poe stories adapted by the great Richard Matheson and that it was released in July 1962. This was before any multiscreen theaters came along. Here’s a picture of the Star Theater that existed until just a few years ago in my home town of La Puente* CA. I always assumed that it was a WWII Quonset Hut, but it was apparently built after the war in that style.
Star Theatre in La Puente, CA - Cinema Treasures
Two of the three tales scared the $#!! out of me. “Morella” had a corpse that wasn’t a skeleton, which I hadn’t seen before. “The Case of M. Valdemar” had a dying/dead guy melting. I couldn’t sleep that night. My Dad had seen worse as a firefighter during The Blitz. I now own it on DVD and have seen it a few times.
*Those of you who understand some Spanish think it should be El Puente. It was simply Puente until cityhood. The name came from the old Rancho de la Puente (the Bridge). In high school my Spanish teacher told us that, sometime after the old California ranchos, whoever makes such decisions gave the Spanish word for “bridge” a sex change.
When I was a kid I remember going to The Strand. I went there with my brother, I went there with my sister, I went there with my grandmother. The one movie I distinctly remember seeing with my sister was Mad Monster Party (1967) by Rankin & Bass. (I would have been just three years old.) When I went with my brother, we sat in the balcony. (I remember being surprised to discover there was a balcony!) My dad used go to The Strand to see Saterday afternoon serials in the '30s. It was renamed "St. Charles Art Cinema" in 1971 and began screening R- and X-rated movies. It didn't stay in business too long after that. Years later, when I tried to visit where I thought it was, I couldn't find it. Later still, I learned it was torn down and replaced with a parking garage for the new city hall. (It was a block down from where I remembered it.) I also learned that it used to serve as a swimming pool in the summer and a theater in the winter.
MODESTY BLAISE (1966):
There was some disagreement recently concerning the relative merits of this film over on the "Dark Shadows" thread, so I decided to check it out for myself.
Rob Staeger: "If you get a chance to see the Modesty Blaise movie with Monica Vitti and Terrence Stamp, don't miss it. It's truly one of the great bad movies of the world. See it with a crowd. The plot is incomprehensible, but the set and costume and prop design? First-rate crazy."
Peter Wrexham: "I thought the 1966 Vitti/Stamp movie was dreadful... I prefer the 2004 film because it is a good deal more faithful to the original character."
At first I was surprised to see the 1966 version described as "Kids, family, comedy"; that's not what I would have expected. I am not wholly unfamiliar with Modesty Blaise, although my "familiarity" extends to reputatiojn only. I have two boxes of Comics Revue, and the comic strip version is featured in many of them. Comics Revue, however, is an anthology, one I was buying for other features, and I have never actually read any Modesty Blaise.
I approached this, not as a true representation of the character, but as a "bad movie"... and it was that. What it reminds me most of is the 1967 film version of Casino Royale. I suspect that the Modesty Blaise movie bears about as much resemblance to the character Peter remembers as Casino Royale does to James Bond. I agree with everything Rob said about the sets, costumes, prop design and especially the plot. I couldn't follow it. Tracy took a phone call 40 minutes in and didn't return until it was over. It's "first-rate crazy" all right, but it's not good enough to be "one of the great bad movies of the world."
PLANET OF THE APES (2001): We watched this one just because we watched the four other 21st century "apes" last week. I felt then that we should have started with the Tim Burton movies, even though it had nothing to do with the rebooted series, so we watched it last night just to provide some closure. I liked it more than I expected to (I've seen it before), not because it was different than I remembered, but because my expectations weren't so high. I remember being disappointed the first time I saw it that it was more of a done-in-one novelty rather than the start of a new POTA series. It did provide some of the aspects missing from the reboot series, however. I distinctly remember that Maggie Thompson reviewed it in Comics Buyer's Guide at the time of its initial release and spoiled the ending (because she underestimated her reading audience). Don would never have done that. That has stuck in my craw all these years. Having said that, though, the more I think about it, the less the ending actually makes sense. I thought about it all night long and couldn't even make sense of it in my dreams.
I came away from the theatre disappointed with Burton's take on POTA. Re-watching it at home a couple years later it put me to sleep - the only POTA film to do so.
It just occurred to me: I have the novelization of the 2001 Burton film. Although I haven't read it, sometimes the novelization crystalizes plot points left unclear by the movie itself (case in point: the novelization of Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk film). Not so with 2001 POTA, however. The nonsensical ending was left out of the paperback entirely. Oh, what the heck. It's short, here it is:
The perfect black of space, strewn with stars like uncounted grains of dust, spread to infinity beyond Davidson's window. He was working hard, trying to recapture the correct coordinates and reprogram them into his flight system.
Without warning, the screen in front of him lit up: Coordinate unknown.
From out of nowhere, suddenly the wormhole was there, twisting space and time in a vast, pulsing blaze of light.
Davidson gritted his teeth and held on as incalculable energies tossed the pod about like a speck of sand.
Then it vanished, leaving nothing behind but empty, traceless space, nothing at all to show that davidson had ever been there.
And that's it. That's the end.
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