So Chad had a copy of a fun romantic / comic / murder mystery called Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe. I think I might have read the novel when I was a teen. The lead couple is lovably obnoxious fast food magnate George Segal (who pulls off that tightrope really well) and the beauteous Jacqueline Bisset. The movie is owned by Robert Morley as an acid-tongued gormand, though. It might be Morley’s best part ever and he is just perfect. Anyway, it’s not The Thin Man or anything but its a really entertaining example of this sort of thing. Check it out.
Sandy took a nap so Chad R and I (the sole men standing at this point) watched overly serious hippies on campus movie R.P.M. (Get it?) Stanley Kramer’s direction is typically turgid, but a very solid Anthony Quinn as the conflicted central character and especially the lovely Ann-Margaret as his student lover are very good. She’s really great, in fact, and in their scenes the movie is much better than it should be. It’s no Zabriskie Point, which is either a good or bad thing depending on your perspective.
Sandy was back and we watched Chad’s copy of The Extraordinary Seaman, a ‘comedy’ remembered for being so bad that the studio never released it. And that was after cutting it down to only 80 minutes. It’s pretty dire, despite being directed by a name director (John Frankenheimer) and cast (David Niven, Alan Alda and Faye Dunaway). The film painfully keeps (supposedly for comic effect) cutting in WWII news reel footage, and it’s just not funny. It’s kind of a riff on The Canterbury Ghost. Bad comedies are horrible to watch, so we finally skipped like 30 minutes of it and just cut to the ending. Dreadful.
Then we watched the fabulous Shaw Bros. movie Heroes of the East, just one of their real classics. One Chinese hero vs. like seven Japanese masters. Great movie.
Then Sandy showed us 2023’s German movie Blood and Gold, a WWII crazy good action movie about evil Nazis and other creeps trying to steal some hidden gold. It’s John Wick meets Kelly’s Heroes.
Sandy, like me, owns all the Zatoichi movies (all like 23 of them or whatever). However, he didn’t know there was a long-running TV series on top of that, and it’s on YouTube. So we watched the first episode of that. As you’d think, it’s like another movie but shorter.
And that was it for this year’s Tween-Fest, and I just realized we didn’t watch anything else with a monster. Oops. So enjoy the miscellaneous pulp cover.
