Species - 1995

 When was the last time you rewatched Species?  Does that fucking movie hold up?

Species is that 90's sci fi movie that wasn't Alien but had similar designs.  HR Giger designed this creature as well, this creature being called Sil in the Wikipedia, though I don't think that name is ever mentioned in the movie.  Species is directed by Roger Donaldson and stars Natasha Henstridge, Forest Whitaker, Michael Madsen, Alfred Molina, and Ben Kingsley.  What a cast!

In the beginning, an alien creature lands on Earth and after it kills some people, a crack-shot team of people are put together to track down the alien that's loose in LA.  Man, remember when movies were casually shot in LA?  Every fuckin movie is shot in Canada, Australia, New Mexico, anywhere else besides LA these days.  Anyways, this team has persons of different specialties hunting down the alien species, and they'll need it cause she's a seductive, intelligent, dangerous foe.

This movie is great!  I liked it a lot as a kid, and I liked it a lot now.  I remembered this as being the "trashy" alien movie, with tons of nudity and some ridiculous effects and a who cares kinda plot.  It is still that.  I remember seeing this when I was say 13, and being so into this fucking movie.  

Rewatching it now, first and foremost, the cast is excellent.  Natasha Henstridge kills it in a demanding, big role, and honestly isn't really naked that many times.  Okay, maybe it's like 7-8 times, but I thought it was much more.  She's beautiful and dead perfect as a somewhat alien acting, deadly woman.  Then, everyone else is great too, even Michael Madsen mostly works.  

The plot of it all is ridiculous, and so many things are blazed by at 100 miles an hour, sorta, hush hush just go with it sorta thing.  Forest Whitaker is a psychic "empath" how, why? Hush!  Go with it.  You know what's gonna happen.  She'd gonna mate, it's gonna become a hunt, and there'll be plenty of action.  It delivers in other words.

It's not a great high-art movie, but it's fun, and it's a perfect high movie, probably.  I was sober.  Such is life.  I give it a classic 4 star B movie rating.

The Invisible Woman - 1940

 The Invisible Man was a sensation when it came out in the 1930's, and spawned several sequels quickly.  Previously in the blog I reviewed The Invisible Agent, and I enjoyed it enough.  This is all from a five film set that I'm periodically renting from the library.

I had a hard time guessing the year of this, and first and foremost, for 1940, this looks damn good.  It's a "simple" effect, but that still means they're quite literally cutting the actress out of certain film stock, and replacing her with something else.  Additionally of course there are the wires holding things up, but overall, shit this looks pretty good.

The Invisible Woman took the series in the direction of comedy, and ya know, I laughed like maybe 3 times.  It's not as bad as one might assume.  Virginia Bruce, John Barrymore, John Howard, and others star in this, the third in the series.  It's pretty simple.  

There's a scientist who's being privately funded by a broke bachelor, and science guy puts a post in the newspaper looking for a willing subject for the invisible injection.  A young plucky model responds to the post, and soon enough she's there being injected and turning invisible.  The mob is after the bachelor guy and soon get involved while in the meantime, she's invisible and that's the main spectacle.  

Barely over an hour, this installment is fine.  It's quick paced, lighthearted, and funny.  The effects aren't as good as some others, and especially the disrobing scenes aren't up to the original Invisible Man film, but for 1940 it's fucking great.  I don't think I'll ever need to watch all five of these, but it's fun every once in a while.  I give it 3.

Space Truckers - 1996

 There's a few movies out there that are known of in the "bad movies" camp.  Birdemic, The Room, Troll 2, Ed Wood films, etc, are well known to be terrible.  Space Truckers is on the fringe, the type of movie I've heard the name of, known it had a following, and is well versed in the cult world.

I downloaded Space Truckers off Amazon, and finally joined the ranks of those that'll know of it.  This is returning to early blog favorite Stuart Gordon, who did Reanimator and such.  Stuart Gordon is a competent director, and this is a certainly competent movie, I say.  Also, rest in peace Stuart Gordon, I did not know he passed away in 2020.  Dang man.

Space Truckers stars Dennis Hopper, Stephen Dorff, Charles Dance, and the girl from Waterboy, Debi Mazar. So what is this?  This is a comical kids movie/space movie mashup a la Super Mario Bros, similar as well not only with casting Hopper, but also with theme and look.  It begs the question, what was the push in the mid 90's for a kids movie, but I think there's several things really about 90s filmmaking that are questionable.

We begin with Hopper as a sleazy scumbag hitting on Mazar at a bar.  He's a space trucker and his load of whatever is late.  George Wendt as a bossy shipping boss ain't having any of that and strips the cargo from him, giving the cargo to Stephen Dorff.  Dorff and Hopper end up together though, running from Wendt along with Mazar and some mystery cargo.  Turns out what they're carrying is killer robots, which get unleashed after they're attacked by space pirates.

Yes, this movie is stupid, but c'mon, it's obviously a dumb kids movie.  They're not going for a real action epic here or even a mid-brow comedy.  Everything looks stupid, like Dorff's mesh shirt in one scene or Mazar's green bra with high wasted underwear.  This is a movie with multiple, MULTIPLE dick jokes, I mean what do you expect?  

The thing I hate to admit, though...  I felt like shit yesterday.  I was tired, hungry, cranky, headachy, etc.  There was no reason, and it lasted all day.  I fought off the urge to drown my sorrows in booze and I put on this movie instead.  This movie didn't save the day or anything, but seriously, it was the highlight of my day yesterday.  This movie is dumb, it eats it's own shit, and it knows it.  But is it entertaining?  Fuck ya.  Go in expecting crap.  It's not good.  But it's fun.  3.5 stars.

Ugetsu / Sansho the Bailiff - 1953/1954

 Well, it's been a long time since I watched these, but I want to do a review of something and I have nothing else recently I can think of that I watched...so....

Kenji Mizoguchi is one of the Japanese directors I am not as well versed in.  He has some pretty huge major ones too, including these two, Street of Shame, and The 47 Ronin.  Mizoguchi is one of the lesser known guys of this era, but that does not mean less impactful.  As we learn here.

Ugetsu is the story of a war-divided family plight.  Husband and wife are separated after they make a daring escape in a boat after some troops have invaded.  They separate, and husband goes off to certain success while wife is led into a life of prostitution and misery.  

Overall, it's about the horrors of war, the difference between man and woman, and the strife of the everyday person, often overlooked in the big picture of war.

Sansho the Bailiff is thematically similar, hence the grouped together review here.  Brother and sister are kidnapped and taken to a slave camp led by Sansho the Bailiff.  There, brother is helped on the way to escape by sister.  Brother goes and somehow it turns out he is actually going to inherit the role of governor.  He returns to try to free sister, but what he doesn't know is what's happened to her in the meantime.

Writing these down, they sound practically like the same movie, and honestly, they are quite similar.  They're about the disintegration of family, the horror of war (again) and the resiliency of the citizen.  

Spoiler warning, but these movies also end almost exactly the same.  One character finding out the other one is dead and gone, and left alone to suffer and reflect on what happened.  Fuck dude, I mean that sucks you know.

for 'em both

The Serpent and the Rainbow - 1988

Scream 5 or whatever was just released and Wes Craven, being the originator, is certainly a person who's place in horror history is cemented thoroughly.  He passed away somewhat recently, and given he didn't direct all that many movies, what are the ones like that none of us remember?

The Serpent and the Rainbow would certainly be one of these ones that's unknown.  Also, on the surface this concept sounds surefire.  You have the horror master fresh off Nightmare on Elm Street pairing up with Bill Pullman in the movie about the genesis of the idea of the zombie.  An intriguing story, and certainly one ripe for the horror genre, and yet...  it is whatever.

This movie has a generally favorable review pool, and Ebert liked it.  That all considered, I found it to be very tedious and not very engaging.  Bill Pullman plays Dennis Alan, the man with two first names, and he's investigating claims in Haiti about a man who claims he was raised from the dead and forced to be a slave.  Alan investigates this claim and is introduced to a seedy underground world full of deception, violence, and a dangerous powder which may kill you and bring you back from the dead.

Featuring a veritable gamut of actors I know from maybe one other 90's era film, this movie is stacked with good effects, a decent job of writing, and a very good idea.  It's about 100 minutes long, and all these things considered, it should have been a blast, or at least fun, or at the very least engaging.

Like I said though, I wasn't particularly interested.  It seemed as if the plot elements were vague and I wasn't sure what was happening or why sometimes.  It seemed like other things were done for no reason and didn't relate back to the plot.  Or, more likely, I probably wasn't paying attention, as I sat very distractedly.  

I think the most likely culprit to my disappointment might have been high hopes, specifically for horror, and then I was not paying attention for shit.  I'll give it a cautious 2.5.

The Hound of the Baskervilles - 1959

 I'm currently reading a huge collection of every Sherlock Holmes book ever written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  There are 54 short 10-20 page individual adventures, as well as four longer but still relatively short 100ish page stories.  The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third Sherlock Holmes longer book style adventure, and I just finished it before watching this movie.

In the Sherlock adventures, it's all about deduction, right?  Sherlock arrives on the scene, and with a uncanny alertness, he notices small details which for him paint a specific picture from which he can deduce certain facts, i.e. the man was short because of the distance between his footsteps.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is probably my least favorite of the books so far, let's start off with that.  It's about 100 pages, and maybe 30 pages in Holmes separates from Watson, sending him on to investigate the details of the case.  We always follow Watson in these adventures, so we are privy to his own private investigations, and the letters and conference he has with others while Holmes is away.  Then, in the last 20ish pages or so, Holmes finally returns.

This is duplicated in the movie, and it is really apparent that it is only done because of Holmes' hitherto flawless ability to solve things, and of course to solve things rather quickly.  It would never be a 100 page story if it followed the other writings format, Holmes would just deduce this and that and know the killer before there was any real mystery or horror.

This is of course a mixed blessing, as the atmosphere is built on for a while and we're allowed the liberty of seeing the mystery grow without knowing what happened.  However, it also gets a little plodding and repetitive, with literally a few multiple page-long letters about this or that, which are incredibly tedious to read.  

Luckily those are taken out in the movie, and instead replaced with a long mining shaft scene where Holmes is trapped and presumed dead after killing the Hound.  Peter Cushing is Holmes, Christopher Lee is Henry Baskervilles, and Watson is there too, and this Hammer production looks pretty awesome.

Overall, not much of a movie review, but it's decent, I'd say probably better than the book, and the atmosphere is good.  It's hard to say precisely what happened, and the book is more clear, but it's a fine Holmes-ian adventure of the finest sort.

The Hit - 1984

 There's somehow a precedent for movies to sneak by us, even though they are known, successful, and moderately were around when we were.  The Hit snuck by me.

Stephen Frears directs this moody slow-burn character piece with an all star cast.  I mean really, we have Terence Stamp, John Hurt and Tim Roth.  Can it get any better than that?  

In the beginning of this film, Terence Stamp is in a courtroom, turning in some fellow criminals for a crime he helped commit.  The men he turned on all stand at the end of the trial, quite literally singing out to him, "We'll meet again!" as a threat.  We cut to 10 years later, and John Hurt and Tim Roth are the hit men that as sent to collect on the old score.  John Hurt is a moody, seasoned vet while Roth is the young whippersnapper sent with him.  Soon enough, an innocent girl is dragged into the scene as the simple hit takes escalation after escalation.

The problem with plot synopsis is that they don't capture the small moments.  They don't capture the moment Terence Stamp escapes from the two gangsters, only to stand in awe of a waterfall, enamored with life's beauty.  The synopsis doesn't capture the budding friendships between the three men, despite the situation, the way the hitmen respect Stamp and the way he manipulates them.  And they don't capture brutality of other scenes, like when John Hurt casually murders a gas station attendant.  

This movie reminded me a lot of Badlands, which I recently rewatched.  A sympathy letter to "bad men" both of these or a noir-ish feeling look into the humanity of those who might not normally think of.  This movie also reminded me of Meantime, the British character piece I watched like last year or the year before.  I think these super well written character-piece style dramas as vastly vastly fucking underrated.  

I give this one a 4.5.

Red Planet - 2000

 Reading about and watching Mission to Mars made me think of this movie, Red Planet.  What was going on in the year 2000, where we needed two Mars movies about colonization and weird alien encounters on said planet?

Neither of these movies were successful, I remember talk of the town being that they were bad, but what can I say I still always sorta wanted to see the two movies.  A year after this came out, there was also Ghosts of Mars, which was also hugely unsuccessful and is one of the last John Carpenter movies.  We just could not stick the landing on these dumb Mars movies!

Red Planet stars Val Kilmer, Carrie Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore and Benjamin Bratt.  It's a who's who of turn of the century actors.  They're crack-shot astronauts, on a colonization mission to Mars, and once they get there, problems arise and they are running out of oxygen on the planet.  About to die, Kilmer opens his helmet and discovers there's oxygen.  This is just the start of the problems and the mysteries inherent to the planet, so let's see what happens next, eh?

What happens next is a "suspenseful" story of survival.  Trapped on the planet with only a few options, they have to get from point A to B to C, they have to evade a kung fu robot(?) and there's internal conflict between the astronauts.  They later discover life on Mars in the form of insects, as well as combat the various communication problems and the limited time they can be on the planet.

Overall, this is a averagely middling sci fi movie, and although it's not good, it can be entertaining at times.  I guess.  There's nothing special about it, and it relies on heavily cliched heroics and heavily stereotyped characters to do what you expect them to do.  Nothing really happens worth mentioning, and were it not for the stupid robot that turns into a wolf-like killer, this would be a straight up drama.  I don't remember the explanation for the robot thing, but I'm there was a throw away one line of dialogue about it.

Meh, it's a space movie, I guess.  1 star.

Mission to Mars - 2000

 I got home from work just now thinking, ok I'll finish Mission to Mars. What? I finished it? How did it end? I didn't remember. 

This movie is directed by Brian De Palma, in an apparent experiment to make a movie as cool as the recently successful Apollo 13. 

Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, Tim Meadows, Jerry O'Connell and Connie Nielsen are a star team of astronauts sent to Mars to rendezvous with a team there, a team that recently all but got wiped out by a huge, seemingly sentient tornado.

Wait. Sentient tornado? Sure, but you'll have to wait an hour and a half to get back to it. In the meantime, wonder of space for 45 minutes, a problem for 15, and then Mars for a few. This movie is slooooooow. 

Its by far not a bad movie, I'm not shitting on it, I just wanted a horror or a sci fi or even a space movie, but this sort of isn't any of those. What is this instead? I have no answer to this question. 

The actors are fine and nothing huge is bad UNTIL the weird ass jampacked nonsensical end. Spoilers. So they get there, we have a giant face in the ground, there's a weird cgi alien, and nothing is revealed while at the same time, everything is? I mean, this must be the only movie that confirms aliens and then has it mean nothing and in fact barely be acknowledged. I mean I'm not wrong right? There was an alien in this?

You know who's going to die, sacrifice themselves, and you know they'll be ok in the end, and overall it's one of a slew of weird Mars movies that came out around this time. 2 stars for occasional interest and the effects. 

Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo - 1970

 I wrote a big ol review for Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff and I guess the blog...deleted it?  Fuck!  C'mon man!

I was high school-ish age when I got really into Zatoichi, Lone Wolf and Cub, Kurosawa, and everything else samurai related.  I saw a ton of these Zatoichi films, and I don't remember any of them.  I remember some of the Lone Wolf and Cub films, and in fact I recently rewatched one of them under a different title.

I did not remember this movie, although I feel pretty confident that being a huge Kurosawa fan, I had likely seen it before.  17 year old Theo, Tim's Potato Chips in one had, Dr. Pepper or Cherry Coke in the other, maybe some cocktail pepperoni and some random ass Japanese candy, sitting there chowing down and chilling out on a weekend...  Life huh?

Zatoichi is reprised by Katsu Shintaro, who played the character all throughout this era.  He is a blind masseur and swordsman, renowned in some areas, unknown in others.  He strolls into town and has a 100 or 200 ryo price on his head, we discover through dialogue.  Various people in the town help him, and he has an old relationship with a prostitute Umeno that he rekindles.

This is great n all, but also in the town is Mifune Toshiro as Yojimbo, who oddly enough is never really given a name I realized.  Google tells me it's Daisaku Sasa?  Weird name bruh.  Sasa and Ichi meet and are after the same girl, plus Ichi has that money on his head, so their relationship is contentious to say the least.

The main thing about this, is know it's almost 2 hours and know that those two hours can be quite slow.  This movie does drag a lot, because we have little moments of tiny bits of action with a looooottttttt of standing around in between.  It's more about the relationships in the town than about the swords, and when you see the swords, especially the fight between Ichi and Sasa, it's so short it's barely worth mentioning.

Considering that, it is not so much an action movie as a drama, expect the plot's not really interesting either, so it sorta just lays there, and you kinds look down at it with mild interest.  It like seeing a penny on the road.  You might reach down for it, you might say fuck it and go back into the strip club.  

For that reason, it's a 2.  Or even a 1.5.

Lost In Space - 1998

 Welcome back, me.  I always give an excuse for being gone so long, even though no one cares, and here it is:  My girlfriend came for something like a month, and though we probably watched a few things that could've made the ol' blog here, I opted not to write.  Worse, I also didn't read any of the Sherlock Holmes book I am halfway through.  Ugh.

A while back I got a 4 film "Space" themed set that had 100% only real actual movies on it, big budget, recent, known.  Contact, Red Planet, Lost in Space here, and I don't remember the 4th.  This was also likely the first time I'd seen it since I saw it in theaters at the age of 12.  Ah, good times.

Matt LeBlanc, Gary Oldman, William Hurt, and Mimi Rogers head up an all star cast in this adaptation of the 60's television show I've never seen.  The movie and show were both about a family that is thrown into the depths of outer space with a man who has tried to kill them, and they have to deal with this threat as well as the threats that are in the space they're now exploring for the first time.

Lost In Space is a kids movie, in a lot of ways, and I was the demographic in mind.  That said, it really doesn't fail in that way.  Lots of focus on the kids in the movie, the giant friendly robot, and the stupid cgi monkey thing.   Mom and dad are sort of there, mostly dad of course, and the juvenile romance between sister Heather Graham and Matt LeBlanc is superficial and played for laughs.  It's got "dumb" stamped all over it's head in many, many ways.

Speaking of dumb, this movie is pretty dumb.  They encounter weird spider robots, which I remember from seeing it in the theater.  That part is decently done.  What isn't decently done is the speed up, slow down nature of the story movements.  

The biggest flaw though is the over 2 hour length, and some of this really should have been trimmed off. It's not a terrible movie, surprisingly, but it offensively long, and the writing is thin at best.  For a kids movie, though, what do you expect writing wise?  The length though, is shocking.  What the fuck kid in the 90's wanted a 2 hour movie?!