Solar Crisis - 1990

 Little sci fi double feature here with Star Quest. A Japanese and American co production that flopped. 

Solar Crisis begins and my jaw practically hits the floor with the cast. Charlton Heston, Michael Berryman, Peter Boyle, Jack Palance, Tim Matheson, Corin Nemec. Damn yo!

This was a big budget movie that got out of control and eventually got credited to Alan Smithee, the infamous pseudonym for bad movies. 

A ship on a mission has to go blow up the sun in this Sunshine adjacent action adventure flick. It features a talking bomb and it made me wonder, has the notion of a talking device like this ever worked in a movie? So many times a ship or a plot maguffin will talk, often for comedy, and you know, I really think it doesn’t work, just in general. 

This movie plays out pretty predictably in general and feels extremely B grade in just about every way, so I’m not surprised it under performed. It’s perfect to just kinda put on and half watch. 3 stars. 

Star Quest - 1994

 Also known as Terminal Voyage. 

Here is a Roger Corman produced movie that was made for tv. A new low? I mean at least most his stuff went to the theater!

My friend Reiss once said he was trying to watch just about every space movie. I said something like that was an awesome idea. It would be something right? And given the genre there’s not a ton like dramas or musicals. It’s space. It’s going to at least be a thriller. 

Or is it? I would defy anyone to tell me first, what genre is Star Quest and even more, who the fuck is this for? I wouldn’t have guessed made for tv because there’s nudity but I guess they edited that out for tv. Some guys wake up from a space sleep and discover the world was destroyed. They all spend ample time in the virtual reality machine and that’s a solid 25-30 minutes and then eventually conflict arises. 

This movie is stone cold boring. There’s a ton of talking and nonsense and it does eventually get moving but wow! So slow. People deal with the apocalypse in different ways, some take drugs and some become destructive. The end throws a couple twists that work I’ll say and then boom. Over. 

It’s not that bad because it picks up speed but it’s incredibly uneven and poorly acted. It looks pretty cheap but in a good way. I dunno, I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it. Maybe a 2.5 range. 

Scanner Cop II: The Showdown - 1995

 At movie 1001 this may legitimately be the first time that this has happened. A movie where the subtitle is different on the film than what is online. Scanner cop two has the subtitle The Showdown online and then when you watch it, its subtitle is Volkin’s Revenge. 

Sam the scanner cop is back, in the track of another evil scanner who is out there. There’s an absolutely top notch body melting sequence with the villain, and a girl in a hospital who has clues in her brain. 

In a way that’s about all there is, because there’s not really a different villain or a turn of any sort later. There’s a few good kills and it’s good guys versus bad in this retread of the last movie. 

The novelty has worn off a little bit and even though this isn’t like bad it just feels decidedly middling. 2.5

Chillers - 1987

 An anthology! For blog entry 1000!

Chillers has a group at a bus station waiting and a woman falls asleep to reveal segment one, a bizarre pool based story of a woman meeting a sexy swim instructor who then she is told died 5 years ago. 

She awakens screaming to discover everyone there had nightmares. A boy tells his story, segment 2 where a group of Boy Scouts gets led into the woods to discover not all is what it seems. 

“Who’s next?” The boy asks. Segment three is told by a woman, Sharon. Sharon is in love with her television newsman and hears a telepathic message from him. She calls, he comes. Is he what she’s expecting, though?

The stories keep getting told. Now it’s the turn for a lonely and emotionally empathic story of a guy who wishes a 9 year old boy who died was returned to life. The boy appears in front of him and he returns the boy to his parents. He brings back a few more people, but he’s not very choosy about who he’s bringing back. 

Lastly a bookish teacher is leading a Olmec class. His students take the words they’ve learned and go recite them at night, causing ancient gods or something to inhabit their bodies. 

A little segment at the end that tired it together and we’re out.

This is a very fun fast paced cheap Troma release that has good music and fun effects when they’re briefly in it. This is a great one, and I rewatched Evil Clutch as well, which is a great movie also. I give this 4 stars.

Scanner Cop - 1994

 Scanners finally gave way to this Canadian production of a made for TV movie (and it’s sequel) called Scanner Cop. 

Sam is a young boy with a scanner father who gets killed in a shootout. Sam gets adopted by the cop who is at the scene and cut to him as a young police officer following in his adoptive father’s footsteps, hence the scanner cop. 

Said it before and I’ll say it again I love a movie that’s casually shot in LA. I love a movie that is quickly paced and that has fun easy plot that you can follow. And I don’t know if I love this movie but this is a very fun entertaining flick in the best sense of the word. 

It’s helps that it has one bad guy and a simple plot about police officers being killed. They’re being brainwashed and they now think they’re killing other people when they’re in fact killing police officers. San gets involved to help figure out who’s the mastermind, we go from there. 

The movie also wisely drops the “scanner fight scene” that’s been in these. Showing two guys making weird facial expressions and we don’t know who’s winning or losing isn’t that cinematically engaging let’s be honest. 

I feel like I liked this more than I should’ve. It’s low rent but it’s fuckin fun. 4 stars. 

Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later - 1998

 They sure painted a weird image of Michael Myers in this one didn't they?

At one point Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode recalls that Myers came after her when she was 17.  She looks over at her son John's birthday card, recalling he is turning 17.  She pieces it together: this means that now is when Michael is going to come for John.  ...Why?  And is Myers presumably buying calendars, clocking months and years, waiting for 17 years to pass?

An hour or so of build and 30 minutes of chase in this quick 90 minute soft reboot sort of (?)  So as mentioned in my review long ago of Halloween 5, this is the first of what I can think of in this modern vein of "pick and choose which movies are canon and which are not".  H20 chooses to call Halloween 1 and 2 canon, and forget Halloween 4, 5 and 6.  Really as I discussed in my Halloween Resurrection post, all they're really throwing away is the verbiage from Halloween 4 that says Laurie is dead and the existence and death of Laurie's daughter Jamie Lloyd.

Either way, we pick up with Laurie saying she faked her death (do I have to rewatch Halloween 2 to see if she was killed off?) so really they're almost acknowledging Halloween 4...  the only thing they don't mention then is the daughter and the thorn cult/man in black thing.  Laurie has a teenage son played by Josh Hartnett and she is an overly controlling mother figure especially as Halloween day rolls around.  

Michael Myers sorta just appears and starts coming after her leaving the typical trail of bodies in his wake.  Laurie has to balance her own traumatic tendency to see him in everything with the newfound evidence that the presence of him is actually there this time.

It works as a medium slow build late 90s slasher.  It even comments a tiny bit on Scream in a reference on screen and by having Kevin Williamson take a draft at the script.  This does not reinvent the wheel but it pairs the two together on screen again after 17 years and it ups the ante with modern effects and renewed energy. 

Altogether, this one didn't make as much of an impact as it could have, and it was easy to make another sequel to and then forget and reboot in 2018.   Trying to verbalize exactly why that is I find slightly hard, but it may be just the relative predictability and tropiness this falls into, rather than changing in the way that horror eventually did evolve to.  It may have just been too soon, too close to Scream, too eager and underwritten.  Also the grittiness of the Halloween 2018 stuff wasn't being embraced yet, it could not go full on dark, unfortunately.

I give this 3 stars.

Scanners II - 1991

 Why do we sometimes use Roman numerals still? Do we just somehow think they’re classier?

Scanners 2 stars David Hewlett of the movie Cube and picks up with him as a socially removed guy who gets thrown into the deep end of stuff as he moves to a large town. He discovers that he has Scanner powers when he’s in a store that gets robbed, and soon enough he gets recruited by a bad politician to help get the guy elected. 

The movie has a good couple believable characters and a tight, minimalistic scope while still having good head explosions and other effects. The politicians have another scanner working for them who’s the main baddie, and he’s an overacting weirdo who looks like a greasy drifter, and that works well. 

I watched Scanners 3 before this and its more fast paced and campy, which is fun, this one is slower and more like the first Scanners.  Not that that's bad, I just did actually like 3 more.  I will give this a 3.5

Halloween: Resurrection - 2002

 Here's my pitch:  Halloween is going to be rebooted or legacy sequeled or given a TV series or something again; its just inevitable.  So, unite the plots and make Halloween the longest running series with a single killer. 

Oddly enough, the longest series (by my count) is probably Hellraiser (I did count others but now I'm forgetting).  Here are my criteria:  must be the same killer (excludes Jigsaw, excludes Friday the 13th part 1 and 5 where it's not Jason, etc), must be a continual storyline (thus, the longest running Halloween storyline is 6 movies from 1 to 6 with the thorn cult, before they reworked it in H20). Excludes reboots (Rob Zombie stuff et all).  Pinhead is supposed to the same even in the soft reboot (different actors are fine) so that brings Hellraiser to 11 movies, though arguably he does not kill many people in some (this is not a body count list).

I'm rewatching H20 and Resurrection to see exactly where this series left off in the "Dimension" storyline which is canonically including Halloween 1 and 2, H20, and Resurrection.  So my pitch is:  Laurie Strode had her first kid shortly after Halloween 2, played by Danielle Harris in Halloween 4.  She abandoned that child and ran away and had another played by Josh Hartnett and a third who presumably was raised partially by her father, played by Judy Greer in Kills and Ends.  

While Laurie is off raising Josh Hartnett and Judy Greer, Jamie is stalked by Myers in H4 and killed in part 6.  Meanwhile, Strode has H20 and Resurrection happen, fakes her death in Resurrection and runs off to find her last remaking child, Judy Greer, where she lives in the woods and then Kills and Ends happens.  Its not that hard, plus then the sequel I have in mind is Halloween 7, meaning after 6 The Curse of Michael Myers, and we see the end of the Thorn Cult.

Halloween Resurrection is bad.  Curtis signed on if they agreed to kill her off and not leave it open for a sequel.  They kill her off in the cold open and then its a "haunted house" story where for some reason a reality TV group has a bunch of airhead teens staying in Myers childhood home, having sex and doing drugs.  Myers comes home and begins to kill them, while Tyra Banks and Busta Rhymes are our new main characters I guess in the house.

Kills are okay, mask is bad.  Its again one of those movies where I ask, non ironically, is this even supposed to be scary?  Its not scary.  I give it a 1.5.

Children of the Corn: Revelation - 2001

 I put this on and I swear it just kinda leapt by.  I have to say I didn't feel its 82 minutes.

Revelation besides being biblical in sound means disclosure, or revealing something.  Hellraiser and CotC both have this as a name to one of their installments deep into the series as if now, seven movies into the series, we're finally going to learn something about the Children or perhaps He Who Walks Behind the Rows.  We don't learn anything new in this if you're wondering.

A woman is in search of her grandmother after being unable to reach her for a while.  She goes to the town in Nebraska where her grandmother lived and soon encounters creepy children who want to play violent video games and seem to disappear and reappear randomly.  Its fun to see the House of the Dead console game in this movie, damn do I miss arcade games.

Anyways, the woman gets mixed up with some strippers and other classic horror movie sequel characters like a yelling, abusive wheelchair bound neighbor, and soon enough people around her begin to die.  

On the Wiki for this thing, people bitch about its lack of scare or its plot holes.  Its the 7th film in the Children of the Corn movies guys.  This isn't Schindler's List.  I don't think its going for scares, which could be an issue, but its going for fun, and I'd say it succeeds.  Plot holes?  I mean, yeah, again, going for fun.  Which is why it gets 3 fun, average stars.

Scanners III: The Takeover - 1992

 Duuuude.  The IMDB and the WIkipedia do disagree, but one of them says 1992 which was my exact guess.

Okay dude, did you know there are 5 Scanners movies?  Something about establishing a world with rules and with a interesting dynamic to the system must be the trick about building series.  Scanners was a fairly normal idea for a sci fi thriller: guys have certain cool mental powers to manipulate and control others, all up to making their heads explode.  Nice.  

So in this one, there's a experiment going on with the Scanners where they're administering an experimental drug to Helena, which is slowly turning her evil.  Her brother Alex eventually begins to notice a change at the same time that bodies are piling up.  Helena, it seems, has very powerful mental powers including being able to control people over TV screens and controlling them deeply enough for those people to kill others or even themselves.

Theres some really good bloody sequences, decent kills and some wacky bullshit going on.  Online this gets shouted out for being the worst of the first three, and if it's because this movie is silly and a B movie and it knows it, then I say I don't mind that.  Maybe Scanners coming from a place of social commentary and excellent direction by David Cronenberg wasn't the top movie to make a straight genre sequel to, but worse has definitely happened.

This is a fast moving, B grade sequel that is still plenty of fun and would make one want to watch the others in the genre, which I hopefully will.  I give it 3 stars.

Encounter with the Unknown - 1972

 Rod Serling was really a TV guy and a writer, and even then mostly known for TV.  He did, however, provide narration for two movies, with that trademark voice of his.  This is one of those movies.

Encounter with the Unknown is an anthology film consisting of three stories.  Then, oddly enough, a giant recap at the end when they couldn't fill enough time.  They suggest witchcraft and mention the Egyptian book of the Dead.  They seem to add a whole second viewpoint to the thing, as if the original intros by Serling were either ignored or just not enough.

Segment 1: A guy on a plane talking to a preacher about a kid that him and his friends played a joke on, which ended with the kid accidentally getting killed.  The mom of the kid put a hex on them that they'd die, one by land and two by air.  Just so happens they're on an airplane when the story is being told...

Segment 2: A missing dog.  A mysterious hole in the ground emitting smoke and strange noises.  How far would you go for your scared son when these two circumstances happen?

Segment 3: A mystery woman on a bridge with no explanation.  She gets driven home as her story unravels, the story of two young people in love.  A love not approved of by her father.  A couple that ran away together despite their parents to get married, with an entire musical sequence involved.

The fist two are maybe 20 minutes including intro and the wrap around moments.  The third segment is about 35 minutes. Not because it is the most fleshed out or the best story, simply wasting time with the musical sequence.  These are all presented as real stories, and I suppose they're vague enough to be based on folklore or similar happenings. 

Very 70s feeling is production value and budget, this has it all from awesome wallpaper to the outfits.  I wonder if Serling was in his groovy 70s hairy phase when he did the recordings?  No trivia online about how Serling got involved with this movie, I suppose they hired him in some desperate move for legitimacy.  Its kinda nice because as this is vignettes it feels somewhat similar to The Twilight Zone, but these stories are very inferior to the Zone.

This is actually kinda fun, and it moves by like a breeze.  I give it 3.5 stars.

Island of Blood - 1982

 Also known as Scared Alive and as Whodunit?

It appears the song that sounds like a direct rip off of Peter Gabriel featured in this movie is Black Hole by Gary Philips.  If I'm going to mention the soundtrack, I must also mention Face to Face by Factor Four, At least 3-4 "versions" of this song are present in the movie, with the lyrics being changed to reflect how someone just died!  It might sounds kinda dumb, but hey, all these slashers need is one gimmick and suddenly they become memorable and different.

Island of Blood is a grainy early 80s slasher thing with some interesting deaths and no real blood, no nudity, nothing offensive in it whatsoever.  Which works in the vein of "fun factor" which this movie traffics in more than like "horror factor".  Its completely fine when movies do this, as long as they commit to their choice.

The biggest problem with some of these movies in general is that it seems like they don't commit, or even worse, they're not aware of how dumb they come off as.  It should be evident by the acting, by the scarceness of the effects, that these aren't going to be truly scary, so if you know that, lean into the cheese factor since that's essentially free.  That's what they did here.

This is a fun romp, mild and quick moving, nothing challenging here, it goes down easy.  Gives it a straight 3.5 stars.

Death Screams - 1982

 Janusary 2nd mini-slasher marathon.  Sorta.

In the realm of what makes you a movie worth mentioning, a formulaic slasher is a nice little thing to have.  That's partially because even little things make these fun, and its an easy baseline to elevate yourself from.

A making out couple gets killed and there's breasts in the first 2 minutes, so I'm obviously in early.  Starring a future Playboy centerfold girl, this movie could have had more nudity, but I won't be an asshole about it.  It had some great nice perky tits.

Then there's a couple good kills including a good sequence on a carousel.  The kills in this are pretty decent, and though its clearly all low budget and handmade, it has enough heart and soul to keep you interested enough.  

Overall relatively not much else, its kinda a thin story and slight on most things but you know, its fine enough.  I give it 2.5 stars.

Coda - 1987

 A couple girls kiss in a car and moments later one of them is killed.  Thus we start Coda.

An Austrailian made-for-TV movie I'm surely not going to have a lot to say about, this movie is only remarkable for a couple reasons:

1) almost the entire cast is women.  Its basically a bunch of single ladies and ladies with ambiguous sexuality, interacting and talking.  And talking.  And talking.  And talking.

2) Its a whodunnit where its more like oh she did it.  There is no mystery here.  The woman who is acting like an antagonistic bitch?  Yeah, she's the killer.

That's about it really.  Its really by the numbers with zero thrills, blood, nudity, language, nothing fun.  Its about as fun as listening to the accents.  Gets old quick in other words.

The Fugitive Kind - 1960

 Criterion released this Sidney Lumet directed Marlon Brando film, and that's the version I watched.

Brando stars as the wandering, murmuring Xavier, a somewhat mystery man, who becomes entangled in the happenings at a town he happens to be wandering through.  Partially he gets entangled because everywhere he goes he gets hit on by women, whether it be the alcoholic and problematic Carol, or married and desperate Lady Torrance.

Most of the movie, though, is his listening to monologues or being semi involved in them, as characters dialogue about the wears and whiles of their lives to him.  Written by Tennessee Williams, this is rejoining Brando with his material from A Streetcar Named Desire.  This is case in point that not everything the guy touched was gold.

I dunno, I read a few things online about exactly why this didn't work.  A lot of people blame the actress who plays Torrance, Anna Magnani.  Certainly that is part of the problem.  I'd be interested in seeing her in her Oscar Winner role in The Rose Tattoo, because here she is very uninspiring, and the chemistry between her and Brando is non-existent.  

But also, this is not one of those where Brando's character gets involved in crime or in a caper or whatever.  There is a climactic ending, but wow do you have to wait and wait for anything to happen.  In the meantime its just boring, without the crackling dialogue or the amazing shot composition present in Streetcar.  

Brando is great in it, but beyond him its not like the worst thing ever but it is not very interesting or special.  2 stars.