Post Weekend Open Thread (6/11/12)…

Updated on June 11, 2012 By Ken Begg 15 Comments

Let’s see. Rewatched Seeds of Doom, one of my favorite Doctor Who stories. A comparatively rare six-parter that holds up for me; I think the discrete first two chapters at the Arctic base help the story from running in place too much. The whole deal is rather like a Quatermass story, and of course, it features a giant monster. Good stuff.

Watched three movies for my Peter Lorre pieces, those will be posted in the Tuesdays ahead.

Finished A Dark Anatomy by Robin Blake, which is presumably meant to be the first of a new series of historical mysteries, a genre I like quite a lot. It was good, but not great. Part of the problem is that I figured out two of the main ‘mystery’ elements quite early, and frankly, I didn’t think it had the best characterization ever. I did appreciate the fact that the author tried to give the characters viewpoints consistent with their time period, though. Characters in the 1700s who spout 21st century political and social views give me gas.

Watched the lastest chapters of both Mythbusters (pretty good) and Next Food Network Star. I find Alton Brown and his team so engaging that I tend to become impatient when the other teams are given the spotlight. Still, good stuff there.

Watched Haywire, a really quite good action film made by Steven Soderbergh, and given a ’70s action film feel like his Ocean’s 11 films have a ’70s heist movie feel. And thank goodness, an action film where we can actually see the action (no shaky-cam!!!) and the running time isn’t dragged out (93 minutes, just about perfect). And while I’m starting to find the willowy action chick beating up an endless stream of dudes twice her size a little wearying, Gina Carano–a professional MMA fighter–really sells the goods. Plus, she can act and is attractive without being ‘movie star’ silly. This film didn’t do well, so I am apparently even more out of touch with the filmgoing public at large than I had thought. If they made more movies like this, I’d be going to the cinema quite a bit more often.

By the way, saw a commercial for the upcoming release of John Carter on DVD / Blu-Ray, and it was about ten times better than the commercials for the theatrical release were. They even mentioned the dreaded work “Mars”!

Got a copy of that David E. Kelly Wonder Woman pilot, and it is indeed awful. I’m sure I will add nothing new to what’s already been said about it on the web, but maybe I’ll write up some notes about it anyway.

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  • Tim

    I didn’t like haywire that much because of the gimmicky way its story was told. I really don’t like the pointless jumps in chronology style of film-making. It worked for Memento, but that’s because the movie was the gimmick.
    Funnily enough, there’s a vocal push on the internet for Gina Carano to be the next Wonder Woman.

  •    I attended a community picnic/music festival/fish fry given by my church. I’ve lived in the same one-horse town all my life, and I never knew we had a park until Saturday! Saw more bodies there than I thought lived in the entire county. Got a great deal of comfort from the fact that everything felt like something from 1972. Just a fine small-town atmosphere. Saw a beautiful blonde near the stage. Now I’m trying to find out who she is. Hope she isn’t married.

       Got a huge stack of original pencil sheets back from AC. I’m selling my comic pages, hoping to raise as much money as I can to send with my brother to next month’s G-Fest. Not much action so far, though.

       Watched a few movies this weekend, but nothing from the latest Big Box of Video Tapes Ken sent me (I need time to write the reviews of the ones I HAVE seen already). Let’s see, I watched HOODWINKED!, KING KONG ESCAPES, and KING KONG VS GODZILLA. Man, what fun! Also borrowed TOY STORY 3, as well as GRAVEYARD SHIFT, which I saw for the first time. I’m pretty sure there was something else…. Oh well!

  • Ken_Begg

    Well, again, that’s a 70s stylistic thing, and I kind of dug it. It wouldn’t have worn as well if the running time hadn’t been as tight as it was.

    I actually mentioned Carano for Wonder Woman myself to somebody after watching Haywire. Certainly be a better choice than whatsherface from the pilot was.

  • Sandy Petersen

    Spent much of the weekend at the North Texas Role Playing Game Convention, which is organized by collectors of old RPG crap. They invite as guests people instrumental in the dawn of RPG games, mostly old D&D folks. I got in I suspect because I’m local, so it’s convenient. I did note that in the two games I ran, most of the players had never played Call of Cthulhu before. Unfortunately, a lot of the guys instrumental in old D&D were basically just stoners who hung out with Gary Gygax, and it showed. Slackers who got lucky. Ah well, I don’t begrudge it them. 

  • Beckoning Chasm

    “The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard” is finally out for the Kindle, and I spent a lot of the weekend reading some of those.  Suffered through the Jack Nicholson/Antonioni movie “The Passenger.”  It was torture.  Felt better after watching “A Letter to Three Wives” and “Sabrina” (the original).

  • zombiewhacker

    Soderbergh did the same time-jump thing with The Limey.  Haven’t see Haywire, but in The Limey it was as pointless and annoying as heck.

  • Toby Clark

    I was mostly occupied with TAFE work, though I did find time to rewatch The Little Mermaid – still one of my favourite Disney Animated Canon movies. I’m also reading The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa, which has some great dialogue and hillarious narration: “If you want to achieve faster-than-light travel, let Haruhi on your
    spaceship. She’ll just simply ignore the theory of relativity for you.”

  • Luke Blanchard

    I watched The Beast Must Die (1974) and Fiend without a Face (1958) for the first time recently. My take on the former was that it showed a low budget genre film doesn’t have to be boring. I’m squeamish so I didn’t mind its being more a mystery thriller than a horror film, and I thought the twists towards the end were good. The siege sequence in Fiend struck me as very much like something out of a 70s Doctor Who story, and tense at the start. I particularly liked the image of the monsters moving about in the trees, and I wondered if the throb effect inspired the one in the Who story “Stones of Blood”.

    Changing the subject, I’d like to identify a film for a family member, but I don’t have much to go on. She’s described it to me as involving a pawnbroker who is an alien. It is likely an older film, made before the mid-70s and possibly much earlier, but I can’t exclude its being a 70s TV film. She spoke of it as a movie but it seems to me possible it’s an episode from a SF anthology show. It might start with a shot of a big clock, but that could be another movie. (I asked if the clock was Big Ben, because I thought she might be thinking of the London Film logo, and she said no.) It could be British or American. Does this suggest anything to anyone?

  • GalaxyJane

    My younger son was baptised on Sunday, so had a houseful of family and friends all weekend.  On Saturday my mom, sisiter and I hit the Beer, Bourbon and BBQ festival, while our menfolk went up north to shoot trap at the annual St. Jude’s fundraiser. Why yes, I am Southern, why do you ask?
     
    Sunday we were pretty beat after church and a nice pub lunch, so mom and I put on our PJs and binged on British costume dramas all afternoon and evening, complete run of “Land Girls” followed by the first season of “London Hospital”.  “London Hospital” is quite interesting, if you don’t mind the realistically gory surgery scenes.  All taken from the actual records of the hospital and the memoirs of the employees during the first decade of the 20th century.  Mostly the medicine is very good, if badly out of date, and the drama, while not really the focus of the show, is well done.  Plus it has one of the Second Doctor’s sons (David Troughton) in the role of a great old surgeon.

  • The Rev.

    Damn, I’d have shown up for that if I’d known about it.  Especially if I’d known you were running CoC!

    I finally finished up the 2nd season of “The Walking Dead” Friday.  I thought this season was actually an improvement on the first.  Some huge surprises along the way, and just good character stuff going on.  I’m keenly awaiting the new season.

    I also watched some shark movies!

    Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus: So the Asylum can be taught.  They fixed a couple of problems that severely marred my enjoyment of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus:  namely, more monster stuff (although, like GO in the first one, MS gets short shift this go-round) that’s still completely outrageous (Crocosaurus eating Shamu had me howling), people who can actually act, and better pacing.  Much less of a slog than the first one.  If they made a third one (which seems unlikely considering the ending), and it improved as much as this did over the first, I think we’d really have something.

    To be continued…

  • The Rev.

    Jersey Shore Shark Attack:  I was kind of torn on watching this, but since it turns out only one actual Jersey Shore asshole’s in this thing (and only briefly), Chelsea and I gave it a go.  It’s clear very early that their tongue is firmly in their cheek; hell, I’m tempted to call this a comedy rather than any sort of horror movie.  Paul Sorvino, Jack Scalia, and Tony Sirico somehow got dragged into this, but they provide some welcome relief from the fake guidos.  The attacks tend to be “blood in the water” types, but occasionally you get one that involves prosthetics spraying fake blood like….well, think Monty Python’s “Salad Days” sketch.  This just adds to the hilarity, it’s so over-the-top.  They tie the shark attacks to the old, real ones in Jersey in the early 1900s, which I expected.  They also reference three of the four Jaws movies, which I’m not sure was the best idea.  The CGI sharks are terrible, although I’m proud to say I actually figured out what species they were supposed to be before they said it, so good on me.  Chelsea, whose morbid curiosity led her to watch a couple of “JS” episodes, said the fake guidos did a pretty good job of parodying the real thing.  I’ll take her word for it.  Also, the actress playing the fake Snooki was 50 times hotter than the real thing, and would’ve been even more so if she hadn’t been painted orange.  Maybe we were just in the right mood, but this really amused us.

    Shark Zone:  What an odd movie.  Part of it is surprisingly competent, and the other part is laughably bad.  The plot is dumb and full of holes, no one can act a lick, and there’s way too much “referencing” of Jaws for their own good.  There’s a lot of stock footage; sometimes out of place (hello, explosion from the end of Octopus!), but all the real shark footage is rather enjoyable, because sharks are amazing creatures.  The prop shark head is surprisingly well-done and tends to blend pretty well with the real thing, and the attacks, though repetitive, are pretty good, as well.  The couple of bits of CGI are actually not bad, which was a further shock.  If you like killer shark movies, you could do much worse; like I said, anything not well-done is laughably bad, rather than boring bad.  One of the (very) few genuinely entertaining movies Nu Image ever put out.

  • Sandy Petersen

    The scenario I ran (twice) was totally based on Bava’s Planet of the Vampires. The first time I ran it, the ending featured them flying the ship into the center of the sun. The second time, the players exploded a 3 megaton fusion bomb aboard their own ship. Total Player Kill both times, and both times initiated by the players themselves, not me. They were proud and felt they had saved Earth.

  • What little there is to go by makes me think it MIGHT be one of the segments from ASYLUM (provided I’ve got the correct anthology picture in mind), but the details are backward. In the segment I’m thinking of, a tailor is commissioned to make a suit from a glowing fabric at the request of a mysterious Peter Cushing. The fabric looks alien, but the story is actually supernatural in nature. If memory serves, it seems there was a big grandfather clock that played into the story. At any rate, that’s what the clues make me think of.

  • Luke Blanchard

    Thanks, Rock: I don’t think it can have been ASYLUM, which I’ve seen, but you might’ve helped me find it. What my relative used to say was how good it was and that it played late at night. Since no-one seems to recognise it I think it must have been a British movie or TV show, as they’re more likely to be obscure despite being good today. I thought you were right to guess that she might have got the shop slightly wrong, so I did a search using “antique shop” and it found for me a reference to a 1981 storyline from the 1979-82 show SAPPHIRE AND STEEL that involved an antique or bric-a-brac shop and a “man without a face”, which could be my mother’s alien. 1981 is later than I would have thought, but just possible in terms of when she first spoke to me about it. I don’t know if the show ever reached Australia, where I’m located, but I would have missed it if it played here late at night. The clock imagery might be that from the first episode, part of which I’ve seen, or might be from something else. This is the first possibility I’ve found that fits at all, so I think it might be it, but since she did say it was a movie I’ll see if I can find a better candidate from an anthology show. Thanks again.

  • Glad I could help, however indirectly!