The Sugarland Express - 1974

 So I was listening to some podcast and someone described this movie as Speilberg's first film, and I was like, fuck it.  In film class I had seen Duel, and Jaws was right after, so here we go.

The Sugarland Express was part of a selection of 4 movies I sold to my girlfriend as "bizarre romance" in a themed week we're having.  They're all offbeat, perhaps not even romance at the core, but that has to be involved and central in the theme.  

The plot of this is based on a true story, a Badlands/Bonnie and Clyde mold of a bad guy bad girl team who go out in a car and cause major havoc running from the law.  This reminded me a lot of Bonnie and Clyde, which I have just watched recently and I loved.  Thematically similar of course, they are both about rebel couples that took to the road and took to violence as their solution to life, and the difficult and heartbreaking end that brought them to.

In The Sugarland Express, Goldie Hawn stars as Lou, and in the beginning she goes to her husband in jail and sets up the film to him:  she is going to possibly lose her son, and so she wants to break her husband Clovis out and get their boy.  They get Clovis out in a simple maneuver and then they're on the road.  When they're pulled over for a simple traffic reason, they freak out and hit the gas and now the entire state is after them as the crimes stack up and the tensions rise, especially after they kidnap young police officer Max.

The great thing about this film, and the enduring reason for Jaws and the enduring reason for Speilberg's majesty with films is the characters.  They're so well written, subtle, and likeable.  The villains, the cops, the oddball status of everyone, the effort here to find something we as an audience can latch onto is tremendous.  When it wants to be scary and tense it is, when it wants to be funny it is, when it wants us to care, we do.  The feeling was the same in Jaws, when we have to spend so long with the characters cause the shark is not around, we have to like these guys.  

The Sugarland Express does not look or feel it's age either.  I'd definitely have guessed 70's because of the cars, but I'd have definitely guessed late 70s or early 80s because of how this feels.

5 stars.

Idaho Transfer - 1973

 Okay, I wouldn't normally do this but I am 11 minutes in and I want to point out several ridiculous things in this movie:

1. A dentist has a poster for the movie Frankenstein on his wall, right where the patients would look at it. 

2. A woman eating unpeels a banana, rips off part of it in her hand and eats it (gross) followed by a glug of Coke from a glass, followed by a bite of red Jello.  Is this their dinner?!

3.  The next day in the car ride her friend casually admits to getting raped recently, to ABSOLUTELY ZERO reaction from her friend.

4. Our plucky heroines pick up some self-identified "gypsies" and the soundtrack plays some hokey ass "Traveling Man" song for them. How do I know it's for them?  It stops as soon as they're gone.

5.  This line:  Girl 1:  "Lock the door, and take off your clothes."  Girl 2: "Sounds familiar."

This movie has a very crazy beginning, and then it sorta changes up.  Two girls are driving along having the above encounters, then they go to some facility, go into a special room, and one of them shows the other how the machine works.  What does the machine do?  Well, it takes them into the future.  The future is a desolate wasteland which was filmed in southeast Idaho.  Ladies and gentlemen, I propose I watch all the movies with Idaho in the title, starting here.  

Peter Fonda directed this movie, strangely.  This was his follow up four years after the hugely monumental Easy Rider.  He made it because it scared him, made him nervous and suspicious.  The movie mostly takes place in the future the girls travel to, the year 2027, and man, some shit has gotta change in order for us to look like this.  At the rate things are going though it could happen amiright?

The film has no expository dump, and everything takes its sweet time to be told and expressed.  I wondered for a long time just what was happening, and at the end there are still plenty of unanswered questions.  That is certainly the intent, and it completely fulfills that aspect of intrigue.  Filmed extremely simply, using nonactors and no real sets for the majority, with plot progression happening through dialogue.

Welcome back to the thing I love in film, minimalism, and in this movie it mostly works.  There's like 3 major plot holes, and the end is another wtf situation entirely, but I believe I would get more watching this a second time.  Man, the 70's was just the best decade for experimentation in film.  I am sticking to that.  

This film does a whole lot of things right.  The majority.  Weird atmosphere and curiosity does this movie huge favors, and I was downright enraptured as it got towards the end.  I am going to spoil one thing here and say, I do not understand at all how these people have access to a fucking time machine to go back into the past and they don't just all go back there and stay...  the future looks like it fucking sucks and especially with the end, they have every reason to leave.  

Idaho Transfer is a weird one, a movie that should have a cult following, and one I'd like to watch again.  I'll give it 4 stars!

End of the World - 1977

 Oof.  This was a tough one.

You know its bad when you finish a movie, go on the IMDb or Wikipedia and read the plot and think to yourself "was that what this movie is about?"  Sometimes with the longer plot outlines, you're sorta like, "yeah I vaguely remember that idea or this moment," but then the how and why of it you're like fucking shrug city.

I do remember Christopher Lee as a dependable villain, the evil father Pergado who is leading a convent of nuns and is maybe hiding something.  Perhaps one of the reasons I don't remember much of this movie is because in the first hour, fucking nothing happens.  This is Setup: The Movie.  That's this one's alternate title.  

They had a lot to lead up to also, cause spoiler alert in the end Christopher Lee turns into a weird fish looking alien and the entire world explodes!  Badass!

This movie was remarkably boring, however, and I cannot give it more than 1.5 stars.

Down - 2001

 Most of the way through Down, I checked to see if this was Naomi Watts first movie. It's not. So she had no excuse. 

Down was a remake of Dick Maas's Dutch horror thriller The Shaft, redone by him for American release I guess. They got American stars and made it in English and set the film in NY and bam, Down is ready for us Americans. 

Down is the sort of movie that probably didn't translate much to the cultural differences. I mean, I have no idea what the original movie was like, nor do I know if this remake was popular over there in the Netherlands where it was filmed. All I'm really guessing is something didn't work, cuz this movie didn't. 

It's first of all the dubbing. I don't know why it's dubbed but it is, and the voices are very comical. Then it's the trite characters and silk thin ideas. This movie is on the ever present graph chart that is "so bad it's good' but at the time it came out I can see it just being bad. 

The Millennium Tower is a 100-something story building in NY, with 70 elevators. It's stuck by a lot of lightning one night and from that point on the elevators come alive. Not all of them, confusingly, and not all the time. But they do. And they start to kill people. The elevator tech gets called in and now it's up to him and plucky reporter Naomi Watts to figure out what's going wrong.

There was a line in this movie, Naomi Watts says at one point "Manhattan used to be Native American land, maybe the building is on a Indian burial ground?!" I was thinking, the moment I actually get paid money to say something that stupid and cliche in a film, I'd fucking celebrate. Isn't this every actors dream?

The movie is pretty ridiculous and I'm not sure if it was trying to be or not. I feel like it wasn't, but that still makes it fun. I'll give it 2.5

The Day the Sky Exploded - 1958

 This Nightmare Worlds boxset had a classic black and white sci fi movie on it I had thought about seeing several times?  What luck!

I had heard of and looked for The Day the Sky Exploded, I'm particularly remembering one time somewhere between 2-4 years ago I remember typing it into Google and being astonished it was nowhere for free except YouTube.  Guy, I am not going to usually choose to watch something on YouTube, unless the exact right conditions exist.  

This is a pretty much straight down the barrel standard example of a 50s sci fi leaning thriller.  It does have a bit less on the effects side than some, but it also has the character parts and the it has enough going on to qualify.

Early in the film, an astronaut who just launched off to the moon is having difficulty, and coming back to Earth.  The astonaut John launches his warheads as a way to get rid of some of the weight on his ship, and those warheads blow up a moving comet or something, which then sends thousands of asteroids hurtling towards Earth.  Now, its looking like humanity is going to have to think hard and fast about how to avoid a fiery death.

Sky Exploded is not a bad film, it's just a bit "whatever".  The standards of the dramatic characters, as well as most of the movie happening through dialogue is expected, so I can't mark it down too much there.  I think what it comes down to is the payoff doesn't happen so much, and maybe I had very high expectations.  It's not like this is a collossal failure, it just kinda ends in a meh.

I'll give 3 stars.

All The Kind Strangers - 1974

 I watched this before the boxset, and it is unknown why I didn't write a review. This was when I was marathoning movies on Tubi, basically two months ago?

Stacy Keach stars as a man who, early on, has his truck die in the middle of nowhere and finds a house of all children. The kids take a liking to him and it seems they have no adults, that is until Stacy meets the "mother", Samantha Eggar.  It is slowly revealed these kids have kidnapped her, and intend to do the same with Keach, asking the two of them to play as their parents. 

Slow and methodical, this is a thriller of a minimal aspect, but super cool. Strangers has solid acting all around, and a genuine creepy feeling to it. I did not know what would happen next, and definitely did not know where it would end. 

This was the movie of the week on ABC on November 12, 1974. I wonder if anyone who saw it then has rewatched it recently?

This flick isn't radical, it's just extremely solid, well made, and it does intrigue. If this was remade, it would work. It's dark and deceitful, and it has a nihilism about it I appreciated. 

It ain't like the best movie ever, but I did thoroughly enjoy it. 4 stars. 

The Nightmare Never Ends - 1980

 1980??!  I had previously looked this movie up, as I was watching, and had therefore SEEN THE YEAR of it, but just now in writing this review I STILL GUESSED 1971.  This feels that old and looks that shitty.

Also known as "Cataclysm" and "Satan's Supper"

This is, to go back to my first paragraph, the type of movie you need to Google while you watch it.  We have the opportunity to do that now, and it's certainly a mixed blessing.  We therefore can answer questions while we watch the flick, instead of needing to wait for the dumb thing to either explain itself or not.  I'm not sorry I averted my eyes while this thing played to Google it and figure wtf was going on with it.

Passed between three different directors, chopped to all hell, this movie was basically the orphan child no one wanted or cared about.  Cameron Mitchell plays a detective investigating the death of a woman which apparently has something to do with Nazis.  Meanwhile, some woman apparently in a B story is having weird dreams and this turns into something, what exactly I could not tell you.

This movie is incredibly hard to follow.  Maybe I need to rewatch it, that's a certainty actually, but I'm not fucking going to.  This was incredibly boring and tedious, and it felt like most of the time simply NOTHING happened.  

If I had to describe the average scene in this movie, it would go something like this:  "A blurry, out of shape weird guy walks around a building, tries a door, it doesn't work.  He wanders around.  He sees a mystery man we never get back to.  He goes to his car.  He drives around.  Cut to the woman character talking to her husband.  Nothing happens.  Cut back to the guy in the car.  He's still driving.  I dunno where to."

There's probably a version of this that makes sense, but I doubt even that is a good movie.

Werewolf Woman - 1976

 When a movie starts with a curvy naked woman dancing in a fire ring at night, it can go nowhere but up.

Werewolf Woman, after reading the Wikipedia article, says it was supposedly made as a real movie. I don't know if I really believe it. I clocked the fourth nude scene (minimally) at minute 24, and that was only a few minutes before the bizarre lesbian rape scene. 

I mean, this is thick oozing sleaze, this is sleaze you can taste. You can hear the oily boozing weirdo next to you as you watch this. He's chain smoking and masturbating over his pants. He says something weird about her legs and slaps you on the back with the same hand that was just on his dick. 

I don't know why this was called Werewolf Woman either. I'm 90% sure no one was a werewolf. The main woman seems to be vaguely "cursed" and even then, exactly the how of it? Who knows. Instead, our main woman wanders around, she fucks people, other people fuck, random violence happens. How about Wandering Woman as a more accurate title?

This movie is about as high on the nonsense-ometer as it is on the sleaze-ometer, and I actually watched most of it twice, cause I wasn't paying a lot of attention.  This is a good midnight movie type thing, a good one to watch when you're in your early 20s, horny and craving violence.  For me, it's still fun as heck, but perhaps I enjoy it a tad less.  I'll give it 3 stars though, still.

The Alpha Incident - 1978

 If you had told me that MST3K director Bill Rebane, known for The Giant Spider Invasion and Monster a Go-Go, had one movie that I might slightly enjoy, there's a chance I would not have believed you.

It's true, and I didn't love this movie or anything, but The Alpha Incident is at least halfway decent, and I'm frankly impressed, because Monster a Go-Go is simply one of the worst movies, not even a good MST episode, just so boring and pointless.  Let's get into it shall we?

The Alpha Incident is a late 70s minimal conspiracy thriller, a mystery a bit, and something which I do normally like:  dialogue based, extremely minimal, and built around the suspicions and threats of characters.

Early into the film, Ralph Meeker as Charlie is in a small town at the train station which is transporting unknown cargo, and gets informed of some sort of microorganism outbreak there.  He is a military guy I think, and he is given the order to hold the people of the town in place, since they need to be quarantined.  What happens next is the long, tense, character and dialogue driven part as the 5 people interact in a small variety of sets and places, and we learn more or less about the situation depending on what happens.

The thing about this movie, is that pretty clearly to keep a story like this propelled, it needs one heck of a good script.  Not just anyone talking is interesting.  This movie was not quite well written enough to be as gripping as it could have been, and they didn't have enough for the characters to do in order to drive the tension up.  The five of them are hungry and tired, yet the tensions don't rise beyond a basic level, and the characters instead read as overall bored.

Given how unattainable the prospect of movies like this is though, this is at least a valiant attempt, and there were awesome segments.  The end is a bit predictable, but overall I liked this more than I should have.

I have not yet announced that I'm watching these on DVD, a very special DVD, because this is movie 2 after Alien Contamination with my new boxset Nightmare Worlds!  Rejoice everyone, because I've watched a bunch of these already and this should be a painless set, but also, two movies that are at least pretty good so far!  This can have 2 stars.  Maybe 2.5.