War of the Robots - 1978

First of all, this is the first time I've ever had two entries on the blog about the same movie.  Rewatching doesn't count of course.  Here is the link to my previous review, done in the infancy of this blog, and before I was giving ratings to the movie.  Side note, what the fuck was the point of reviewing it if I didn't give it a rating???!

In case you're too lazy to click that or something, and because I think it's pretty genius, I'm going to copy my idea of Star Wars to here.  Basically, right here I'm saying how Star Wars would look to someone who didn't know what was going on and only described by some memorable characters and effects:

"So you got this dude and he has these weird metal robots that speak all weird, and he's in this desert but then these white suited guys come after him and he finds this old guy who decides to take him to some planet, and there's this pilot guy with a giant furry ape-type-thing as a friend that only he can understand and they fly away and barely escape. Then there's this huge spaceship and there's this girl on it, and she's good and the bad guys are trying to get information out of her. One of the bad guys is dressed all in black and has some bizarre breathing apparatus on, and he can hurt people without touching them, and eventually the good guys get to the ship and there's fights with these glowing swords and the hero old guy dies...except he actually only sort of disappeared. And they rescue the girl, and fight these huge monsters, and eventually escape and then they come back, in spaceships, and they blow up the huge spaceship."

Genius.  On my first review I saw this as a Star Wars clone/ripoff, and it makes me wonder if I paid attention at ALL, and also if I saw perhaps a different movie.  Sure, this has a lot of blatant rip off things present in it and it 100% stole them from Star Wars.  However, this one is different in many ways as well.

The beginning is completely original-ish.  Captain John Boyd is kidnapped by a bald golden-colored alien.  Alien (who's name I forget) wants John to help him, and at first there's some conflict.  There's a ton of posh looking robot men that the gold bald alien are fighting, and John Boyd is gonna help the aliens fight the robots.  Of course it takes about 45-55 minutes for all this to happen, and in the meantime it's all really boring dialogue and nothing much happening.  

This is one of those movies where you watch it and it has the effect of feeling like the wheels are just spinning.  You're simply watching things happen, with no idea what's really going on, who is who, and why things are happening.  It all looks great, it is fun to see the visuals and stuff, but honestly, no fucking clue.  Clueless.  Towards the end, robots and John Boyd are fighting with ripoff lightsabers, and laser guns are firing left and right, and things are happening, and then all is fine and the movie ends and you turn it off, remarking, "Okay, well that happened."

I had a choice with this one.  Should I skip it and decide that I'd already reviewed it in the blog, and thus keep going with the set, or should I rewatch and review it?  I'm not going to rewatch the other films that are repeat on this set, I believe there is 2 or so.  But, this one was fun to rewatch, and does have a bizarre entertainment quality to it.  Nothing that is worth more than 2.5 stars though.

Concrete Cowboys - 1975

I'm just fucking plunging through these movies right now aren't I?  This month may have the most reviews of any month since the first couple years of this blog!  I should really be capitalizing on this feeling of inspiration by writing something that actually means something...

Concrete Cowboys starts off as a bad western, but I see Tom Selleck there and he's attractive and charming, and I gave it a chance, and soon I got to like this movie.  Tom Selleck plays Will, and he and his friend JD get caught in a bad card game.  They run away, hop a train and head out, unsure of where they're going, seeing where life takes them.

This was the pilot to a TV show that didn't get picked up.  Conceivably, Will and JD would go from place to place, becoming entangled in some story line, fixing it, then getting on their merry little way to whatever was next.  This installment goes exactly in this way, but that's not to say it's unenjoyable or predictable.  Okay, I take that back.  It is a bit predictable.

Will and JD end up staying at a friends apartment when they stop off in Nashville TN. Their friend is a private investigator, and he has them pick up a package for him while he's out of town.  The package gets some baddies on their tail, and also since they're at a private investigators home, some lady comes by looking to hire the investigator.  They're about to turn her away when she gives them a $1000 deposit to locate a missing singer.

The first half of this movie is pretty quick with all the setup.  There's some light comedy, there's some decent acting, they try real hard to keep that primetime audience that might watch the show.  But, it does fall victim to a bit of the "too much" of everything.  Too much twisted plots, too many characters to keep track of, and too much of a complicated idea.

I did like this though, and in the end it's innocent enough.  I could see a show like this being popular in the 70's.  It's pretty much fine as it is now, except that it didn't work out, and instead got adapted to this TV movie.  It's fine.  Meh.

I give this a 2.5

Congratulations, It's a Boy! - 1971

"The Los Angeles Times called it 'forgettable'."  - Wikipedia

Okay, yes, this movie is forgettable. I just thought that was a hilarious one line review of the movie, on Wikipedia.  But this isn't all that bad.  In fact I had a horrid thought after finishing this and starting the next one, Concrete Cowboys.  My thought was:  "Is the 70s boxset growing on me?"  Cause I liked both of these movies!

Did movies used to have more punctuation in the title?  I can't think of any movies that have been coming out recently with as much punctuation as some of these movies.  Christie Love had an exclamation mark.  Help Me had the ellipses. Belles sort of counts as well.  This one doubled up with the comma and the exclamation point.  Wow.  I'm really reaching for things to say here.

Congratulations is the classic story of the rich playboy single man who finds out he has a son he's never known about.  Bill Bixby stars as the charismatic Johnny Gaines, the late 30's single child of a successful business owner.  He's in line to inherit the company, and as for right now he's doing just what he wants- dating aplenty, breaking the hearts of women everywhere, and staying a free bachelor.  His parents are trying to hook him up with his receptionist, but he's having none of that.  That's when kid BJ shows up, claiming he's Johnny's son.

What follows is an interesting enough movie.  In my opinion there was not quite enough proof about the father-ship of BJ, and it's a bit unclear what BJ wants and why he's there.  BJ is 16, owns a gas station, and appears to leave all that to live with his father?  His father doesn't know about BJ's station, and I think rightfully assumes the kid is looking for a handout.  Well, maybe if you told the father the whole story?

The best part of the movie is when Johnny's parents are beginning to wonder what could be wrong with their son.  The father of one of Johnny's dates remarks "maybe he doesn't like girls."  They brush this off, but then later when Johnny is coming towards his parents to introduce BJ, they mistakenly think BJ is Johnny's gay lover.  The comments the father says are fucking hilarious, and I mean that I actually laughed!  

There were a few laughs, and what's more I actually cared about the characters.  They're thin, yes.  But we're seeing perhaps 2-3 days in the initial meet and greet, and even in that time we see a dynamic, natural, and realistic change in both the characters.  Again, minor complaint, the son figure is a bit too straight line, the father a bit too outrageous, but then later they seemingly drop their old selves to adapt without any complication whatsoever.  Eh.  Minor.  What can I say?  It felt pretty genuine and friendly, and at only 75 minutes, concise.  I'll give it...3.5

Las Vegas Lady - 1975

Sigh....  Yup.  This one's gonna be short.

Las Vegas Lady is a 70s boxset entry, one that I'm struggling to remember what the fuck happened, and was surely not a good movie.  This was a crime/comedy/heist film that succeeded only in being none of those three genres really.

The main girl is named Lucky.  Wow guys.  You're really original there!  Lucky and her two friends team up to steal half a million dollars from the Circus Circus casino in Las Vegas, and there ends up being more complication than they expected, and it goes about how you expect from there.

It's a standard entry in the genre, and it did have a few nifty scenes, such as when Lucky is hanging on a rope outside the Circus Circus.  But the acting wasn't great, the movie wasn't great, and I am pretty sure I'm still gonna give it 1.5 stars.

Definitely could've been my mood then or my mood now, but not feeling this one.  I just counted, and this entry brings me halfway through the Swinging 70's boxset!  Nice!  However, what a shitty midway point.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master - 1988

I was gonna skip this review two days in a row, but I did promise it in last my review of Nightmare 3.  So I will compromise and do a short review.

Nightmare 4 took the crown of "most successful" of the Nightmare franchise, but also for me wins the prize of "worst one so far" which would explain why Nightmare 5 was hugely reduced in profits at the box office.

Nightmare 4 has Lisa Wilcox emerging as a girl with ambiguous dream powers.  She meets up with Kristen Parker, who is the character from Nightmare 3, except it's not Patricia Arquette playing her anymore.  Also returning from Nightmare 3 is Kincaid and Joey, who are pretty quickly killed off in this one.  Anyways, Lisa Wilcox and Kristen are going to try to use Lisa's powers to perhaps beat Freddy in the dream realm, and that's pretty much the plot.

I'm not going to have the easiest time trying to describe why this one wasn't as good in my book.  Perhaps it's number one because of the beginning:  different actress playing a part, and quickly killing off the other characters in, quite literally, a shared death!  Then the ambiguity of the powers, and the fact that it takes up until the very final showdown for her powers to truly emerge.  Then the death of Freddy is....well, lame really.

I don't particularly remember much about this installment, even though I watched it right after Nightmare 3.  I'm gonna watch Freddy's Dead:  The Final Nightmare soon, and call it a day.  I have of course seen 1 and 2, I've seen Freddy Versus Jason, and I have no intention of seeing the recent remake.  That just about rounds up this series!  Pretty good, I'd say.  I'll recap it more in Nightmare 6.  This one, hm.  2.5 stars I guess.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors - 1987

In addition to my 70s boxset marathon, I also had a Nightmare marathon.  Look for my upcoming review of Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master.  Also, here is my review for Nightmare 5.

I have to say first off, this was going against Nightmare 5 in my head.  Perhaps because they are sequels and naturally as a movie series they're all going to be judged against one another.  But, I have also always heard that Nightmare 1 and 3 are the "good ones" and that the others aren't as good.  Then, I enjoyed Nightmare 5.  Hence the fucking whatever bullshit, you get what I mean.

Nightmare 3 brings back Heather Langenkamp from the first film, returning as Nancy.  However first we follow Kristen, played by Patricia Arquette.  Kristen is being haunted by Freddy in her dreams, and gets sent off to a psyche ward for a small group of people who are all insomniacs complaining of horrible nightmares when they do sleep.  Nancy is interning at the psyche ward, and eventually they discover the source of all their nightmares is Freddy, who is coming back to claim more souls.  Kristen has the power to pull people into her dreams, and they think they can use this power to team up and beat Freddy at his own game.

The movie is a bit of a slower ride in the beginning, I'll say.  There's a lot of plot and not as much immediate horror thrills, although they are certainly there.  There's a great sequence where they use a claymation Freddy, I liked that a lot.  The little group of insomniacs are a rat pack of fun characters, each one likable and with their own "gimmick" thingy.  They have individual dream strengths they can use against Freddy, which although arguably stupid, are still fun to see.

The deaths are really good too.  There's a genuinely cringe-worthy scene where Freddy pulls out a dude's veins and controls him like a puppet with them.  That one was fucking awesome.  I have to say, at this point (and I noticed this in 5 as well) they sort of stopped following that rule of "what Freddy does to you in the dream happens to you in real life".  It happens sometimes.  But clearly at some points people are being injured or whatever, then they wake up and they're fine.

I didn't like this as much as 5 though.  It was simply a pacing thing.  5 is wall to wall horror violence and insanity.  This is perhaps more of a "movie"  in the development feel, and I'd only say it's a very small point, but I just have that preference I guess.  There is however another cool sequence in a car graveyard that has a claymation Harryhauser-esque skeleton...  Hm.  Maybe I did like this as much as 5.  I can't bring myself to rate this lower that 5.  Fine.  Here, another 4 star Nightmare entry.

The Young Graduates - 1971

Here's a movie that in some ways reminds me of Katherine.  Basically this is Katherine-lite, it's not as interesting, well shot, and it's definitely a lot more of a mess.  Although, this did come before Katherine, so ehh?  I had a bit of a 70's boxset marathon!  Fucking finally.  The Young Graduates rounds it out.

Mindy is a pretty normal 70's high school girl.  She lives with her parents, she's casually dating her guy Bill, and she's got a thing for her teacher Mr. Thompson.  She's 17, and waiting until her 18th birthday to have sex, much to the dismay of Bill.  However on her birthday night, she invites Mr. Thompson out, and the two of them end up having sex at a party.  Thompson becomes infatuated with her, Bill feels cut out, and this prompts Mindy to want to escape from it all, which she does with her friend Gretchen.

The rest of the film, we follow the two girls as they have various travels, problematic or not, on the road.  They don't have much money, but they meet up with people who are sometimes helpful, sometimes out for themselves.  Mindy and Gretchen are trying to get to Big Sur, CA.  Eventually Thompson and Bill and another dude unite and begin to track the girls, following the clues they leave.

Spoilers for the rest of this review.  Beware.  The girls are heading to Big Sur with their hippie friend Pan.  They get a ride with some bikers eventually, and bikers decide to try and rape the girls.  They beat up Pan, and the girls are drugged, but manage to escape.  They ride the bikes to Big Sur, where they find some hippie hangout, but then the cops bust it and arrest the leader, and the girls adventure is then just sort of over?  Huh?!

This movie felt like a big cop out, because like I said, in the end, nothing fucking happens?  This whole thing leads to NOWHERE.  Also, they almost get raped, they get drugged, they get abused, they get their friend beat up, they experiment, and I guess the whole point is to watch the journey and not where the journey goes, but NONE of this effects them at all.  They have a "whatever" disposition that never fades, and even after almost getting raped, they just shrug it off and keep going.

This movie is not trying to say anything bad, or good, it seems about the 70's culture.  For a movie that has a tagline "A report card on the Love Generation," what is the message?  What does the fucking report card say??  Everything is fine, nothing matters, go ahead, but also it's kinda pointless and fruitless?  So what is that like a straight C?  Maybe a C-?

There is some nudity, there is some okay music.  There are plenty of things that are bland and boring, shots of inane things taking place that will make you yell at the stupidity of them, if you're anything like me.  I didn't hate this when I watched it, but my hatred for this has since grown.  It's completely POINTLESS to watch this movie.  Literally nothing happens.

I do want to mention, Mindy bangs her teacher Thompson.  Then later they're watching a sex ed video in class and I said aloud "if this movie is about her getting pregnant, I'm going to be really mad".  Later she says to Thompson "I might be pregnant" and that plotline is dangled... But then, it's completely dropped and never mentioned again.  So...  Was she pregnant?  Does it matter?  Does ANYTHING in this fucking movie matter?!  The answer: NO.

Side note, I did the standard amount of research on the director, and I found another one of his movies.  I love the IMDb keywords list here, it's just hilarious:

The Borrowers - 1973

The Borrowers is a franchise much like Heidi, another film on the treasured 70's boxset.  Heidi, it turns out, has more adaptations of it and shit, but this is a somewhat well known of idea here, the little people living underneath the floorboards in a house.

This boxset has taken me all over the fucking place, and here's yet another random thing I'd never volunteer to see but I'm watching anyways, as the completionist I'm trying to be.  This film does have the "originality" thing going for it, as it was the first adaptation of the novel, and even won an Emmy for outstanding achievement of a kid's movie.

Ma and Pa and daughter Arrietty are about 5 inches tall, and live under the floorboards of a house out in the middle of nowhere.  Their existence is a simple one, they "borrow" whatever they need from the residence they live under, and pretty much chill, raising their daughter.  In the house they live in is an old woman, Sophie.  One day her nephew comes to visit, a young boy.  The boy eventually spots Arrietty, and that could mean trouble for their peaceful existence.

Obviously, this is going for the effects. The whole film has a lot of the older style effect to make people look small.  Using rear and front projection, as well as occasional cutting out of one piece of film and putting over another, they manage to make it look passable.  The whole thing features quite a bit of effect, and it would be fair to say it looks decent.  It had to, I mean it's the one thing they had to make look good in the movie.

I won't say I loved this.  It's not really my speed.  Despite the fact it's technically "done well" and nothing is "wrong" with it, it's just sort of there for the most part, and it's not particularly engaging.  A cool idea.  I'd still see the Japanese anime Arrietty, if I ever get around to it.  I guess I'll give it a 2.

Evel Knievel - 1971

 Here is a movie where, if it wasn't for the fact that it's in the 70s box set, I might have guessed it was from the 60s.  Cause it's lookin' pretty old. As a casual fan of stunts and stuff in general, I have heard of Evel Knievel before in my life. I think we all know of him as "someone who existed who did stunts".  This is also my first review written using voice to text on my phone.

Evel Knievel is a part biography, part fiction, part re-creation of the famous stuntman's life.  It's got a little bit of a time play thing going on, jumping forward and backward in the timeline of Knievel's life. It has a voiceover, it has re-creations of stories, and overall it tells a story of a man who pushed himself to extremities in terms of his job. Most things are not dwelled on, just touched on.  We see Evel as he meets his future wife, as he attempts his first paid stunt, and then we pretty much jump to when he's famous and he ends up injuring himself on a stunt. And then the movie pretty much ends. With lots of other random shit thrown in, and some very very untrue fiction parts.

 This phone refuses to except the word stunts. STUNTS. It puts stance, it puts just about anything else.

 Did I like this? Well I'll tell you one thing, I would've actually enjoyed a autobiography of Evel Knievel. That sounds pretty interesting to me? I don't know much about the guy, I would've enjoyed a re-creation of his life. However that was not this. This doesn't really explain much about him, his history, or for that matter where most of this movie takes place.  Too many things are touched on and never gotten back to. We see him meet his wife and take her on a bike ride where he endangers her life and he gets sent to jail, then later they're magically married with no story of what happened between. A lot of the stuff in his life is treated similarly.

Even so, parts of it were intriguing. The acting is good, the archive footage of the real Knievel is fun to watch, and the re-creations of the stunts are done well. It's gotten not a lot else to offer though. If you're not interested in just watching the stunts, this movie probably is not for you.  I'm glad that they included things about him getting injured, and there's even footage of one accident where he was almost killed. To not include this would've made sense, but to make the choice to include it was a good idea.

 It was fine. I don't know. There's not much to say about this one. I doubt I would ever tell anyone that I saw this.  Although I will say it made me interested in the real person. I wonder if there's a real movie that was done about this guy? Or if there ever will be? It seems a little late to do a movie about him now. "In 1974, he failed an attempted canyon jump across Snake River Canyon in the Skycycle X-2, a steam-powered rocket". Uhhhh, I wanna see that!! Speaking of, it's interesting to read that he lived until 2007! You would think that the guy who lives this dangerously would've died earlier.

I guess it's another basic, middle of the road 2-ish star movie.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child - 1989

I put on the Iron Maiden song that was made for this movie, and I started writing my second review for something in the Nightmare on Elm Street series.  See my review of Wes Craven's New Nightmare here.  I jumped from 7 to 5, and I am considering now jumping to 3 and reviewing The Dream Warriors next.  We'll see.

The Nightmare series was not a series I grew up with.  I think I mentioned this in my New Nightmare review.  For some reason, I think it was the quirkiness of the films, Halloween was the series I enjoyed the most.  Those half baked sequels are ones I am incredibly aware of.  Everything from possessed masks in Season of the Witch, to the latter embarrassing cult of the thorn.  I saw all the Friday the 13th movies later, and those intrigued me.  For laughs sake, I saw all the Chucky series.  But it was shortly around that time I began to be drawn towards the more obscure sequel shit, and I never really got around to Nightmare as a franchise.

I am loosely familiar with where the series goes, and as I understand, it got pretty lame at certain points.  I went into this film with no knowledge of it, and I basically rented it because the SF Public Library has little to no Nightmare films available on DVD.  Seriously, what the shit is this:

So...There are 3 copies, and one is on hold.  Yet, I can't request it?  WHY NOT?!

I didn't expect this to be good.  Let's say I expected a less than stellar follow up sequel.  I expected that, 5 films into the franchise, this would be shitty, probably have lame comedy, and would be a disaster of a flick.  And honestly, I was very surprised by just how good and innovative it was!  I was pleasantly surprised by Nightmare 5, and I don't know what the general perception is, but I found this to be a great horror flick.

This is an effects filled, extremely fast paced, awesome looking movie.  Main character Alice Johnson is back from Nightmare 4.  She was the titular Dream Master, and we gather that she bested Freddy and laid him to rest in the previous film.  However now, he's back and what's worse, he seems to be able to invade the world when she's awake as well as asleep.  Turns out she is pregnant and thus Freddy is able to get at her through her infants dreams.  Furthermore, Freddy is trying to turn the infant into the "next Freddy" by feeding it souls of people he kills.

Along for the ride is Alice's friends, coworkers, and random others who Freddy kills while he tries to get souls.  There's some cool deaths here, some original effects, and plenty to keep even the entry level fan entertained by.  I gather that at this point many fans had left the franchise, and this was also seen as a bad sequel to 3 and 4 where the series was "good".  But shit, if this is bad, I do wonder what is GOOD?  Cause this movie was not bad at all!  Fucking assholes man.  Every movie fan is an asshole.  True story.

I give this movie high marks.  Coming in randomly into the franchise, it stands out.  It didn't have too many attempts at humor, and the 80's-ness was on full display as seen in some of the costumes and in the MTV feeling wackiness that happens at times.  However, that shit was fun to watch, and way better than some bland ass slasher flick.  This is a slasher flick made to appeal to the audience, the audience being young adults.  There's a saying which fits:  "If it's too loud, you're too old".

Disconnected - 1984

Disconnected.  Is this a documentary about how I feel these days?  Is it an hour and a half interview about how emotions, inner turmoil, and constant mixed messages make me feel incredibly disconnected with life?  Cause holy shit that would be prescient.  Brian Eno makes it all better.

Disconnected is in fact a 1984 movie that's a sort of slasher, sort of thriller, sort of talky who knows, definitely amateur flick which I watched on Amazon.  It's got a cool cover on Amazon, one that made me believe it was a When a Stranger Calls / Don't Answer the Phone rip off.

Posters like this lead me to believe I have a genuine 80's fun time slasher on my hand.  And this...  Well, it is 80's, it is part fun time, and I guess it does have one kill in it?  This is the work of a school student as director, an actress with a career of only a few years, and a barely existent budget.  So, you get what you expect from this one.

Alicia is a nice enough girl, working in a video store.  Her store brings in some questionable characters, one of them being Franklin, who is interested in getting to know her.  She's also been getting weird phone calls, sometimes with no one there, sometimes with intense robotic sounds that grind into her and make her feel pain.  Also as if this is not enough, there's been a string of murders going on locally.  Could all these be connected?  Yeah, probably.

This movie does have the things that make one generally like an 80's flick.  It's got deaths, nudity, weird music, eccentric actors, minimalism, and a surreal vision to it.  I am sure it is divisive in it's watchers, and in fact I even found one review where the guy loved it and put it in the same grouping as The Room when it came to cult films.

For me, this is not exactly how I felt.  The film for sure is an interesting experiment.  Randomness is it's primary attribute, and it is essentially good, but for sure it's got a tendency to wander around unfocused, and it gives the feel that it for sure is amateur.  All that aside, for amateur, it is certainly better than one might expect.  I give it 3 stars.