Avenging Eagle ( 1978)
One of my favorite Shaw Brothers films. But unfortunately not the complete film. When Celestial began restoring the Shaw Brothers film library, they reportedly found a number of masters negatives had been damaged. Wikipedia reports that a minute and a half of the final fight was removed for being damaged. This is evident because you can clearly see where Ti Lung is fighting a room filled with guards while Fu Sheng attacks the villain Ku Feng by literally kicking the staircase out from under him. Suddenly Ku Feng is standing upright in a corner of the room and Ti Lung and Fu Sheng are standing over the bodies of the guards who are all suddenly dead. Not reported by Wikipedia is missing footage midway through the film where Ti Lung is being tortured. I still have all of the missing footage on my old VHS bootleg of the same movie. With copies of this film in the hands of collectors, one can only ask why Celestial never bothered to seek out the missing footage for a full restoration. Perhaps because they need to restore and release hundreds of Shaw Brothers films in a short period of time, so did not have the time to track down the missing footage on the odd film. But Dragon Dynasty could have. Except of course that Dragon Dynasty seems satisfied with releasing incomplete prints. Hopefully some other company will agree to release the Shaw Brothers films on physical media, and will take the time to restoring the missing footage.
Mega Snake ( 2007)
Should I even be relieved that the studio that made this week's film is not Asylum as I first thought? After all, it still is a made for SyFy film. On the positive side, the studio, Nu Image, has recently produced a lot of legitimate theatrical action movies that made money, if not pleased critics. So perhaps this could be a better than normal SyFy movie? I have seen it before, but I wouldn't remember. You see, at the time I fast forwarded most of the film looking for the cameo appearance of the film's star.
Perhaps an explanation. Back in 2006 SyFy, then still called Sci-Fi Channel, decided to get in on the reality show trend with a series called Who Wants To Be A Superhero. The premise, a group of cosplayers competed to be picked by Stan Lee himself as an official superhero. Millions of nerds sent in audition tapes with them wearing the costume of an original superhero they invented, out of which about ten were chosen to live together in a loft where they were to continue pretending to be their superhero alter ego.
Every now and then they would be contacted via television screen by Stan Lee who would send the group on a mission. How well each member performed determined which three would be picked for the elimination round, and out of that three Stan Lee ( via screen again ) would decided which one was going home for not having enough superhero qualities. A lot of the time the true goal of a mission was kept secret. For example, during a mission where each individual contestant was asked to race from one end of a park to another as fast as they could, a child actor on the path pretended to be lost and cried for his mother. The contestants who didn't stop to help the child lost the mission, and was eligible for the elimination round.
The series was not very good, making The Joe Schmo Show look like Citizen Kane in comparison. And for what was supposed to be a reality competition, it had the appearance of either being fixed or scripted. Many mission seemed to be designed for a specific hero to fail. One contestant, Lemuria, was chosen via an internet poll. And of course the comic book nerds all picked the hottest looking girl with the sexiest costume instead of the hero in the poll with the best powers. Lemuria managed to ace every mission and secret mission, never giving the producers any reason for putting her in the elimination round. That is until she was in the final four. The mission was for each contestant to approach a prisoner on a chain gang and touch them, either by a hug or patting them on the back. The prisoner Lemuria was to touch refused to allow her to come near her, and since she didn't complete her task she was eliminated. However, the chain gang wasn't real, but was once again actors, and it was either by script or that actors decision not to allow Lemuria to come near her. It should also be pointed out that the second place prize was for the top three contestants was to get their own Dark Horse comic book. Which was incentive enough to fix the game so that Dark Horse got the three heroes they wanted instead of being stuck with one of the lame heroes.
The grand prize for the winner was for his own Sci-Fi superhero movie. The winner of the season was Matthew Atherton who's superhero was called Feedback. Months went by without any word when the feedback movie would air. Once he had his own IMDb page, Matthew began talking to his fans on the message board, telling them Sci-Fi never got back to him about the movie, and as far as he could tell the movie was not happening. However, if they wanted a Feedback movie they should write to the channel and demand one be made.
The second season of Who Wants To Be A Superhero debuted and still no Feedback film. Then suddenly Sci-Fi announced that Feedback would star in the movie Mega Snake. Promos made it seem as if Feedback was the main character and would battle the giant snake. Good thing I decided to put the movie on DVR rather than watch it live. The first thing I noticed was Atherton was not even listed as an actor in the opening credits. Just the guy from Stargate SG-1 and a bunch of unknowns. He wasn't even listed as "special appearance", "guest starring" or "and Mathew Atherton as Feedback". I knew instantly that if he was in the film at all, it would be a cameo. So I fast forwarded the movie, waiting for Feedback to show up. It doesn't happen until almost the end of the film. Feedback is making an appearance at an amusement park that the Mega Snake attacks. But just as he is about to get into an epic battle, he notices children and instead helps them evacuated the park. And that's it for the rest of the film. He doesn't even return to fight the snake.
A little later we all found out the obvious. Due to mounting hate mail from comic book geeks, Sci-Fi took a television movie already in the can and had some extra footage with Feedback shot and edited into the film. This is obvious as the scene with Feedback seems to have been shot in the dead of winter while the rest of the movie was shot during the fall. Still, Feedback faired better than the Season 2 winner, Defusor. Instead of editing his character into an existing Sci-fi film, they gave the actor who played him a bit part as a deputy in some other film. To this day there is no Sci-Fi or SyFy film with Defusor in it.
Which brings up the following question; Is SyFy run by morons? They commission hundreds of crap television movies a year, and they couldn't make a Feedback or Defusor movie instead of billions of movies with hybrid predators? The Feedback and Defusor films already had promotion from two seasons of a hit reality show, as well as promotion from Dark Horse. It was not as if both wouldn't get huge ratings. And let's not forget, THEY ALREADY PROMISED THE MOVIES AS THE GRAND PRIZES OF A REALITY SHOW. That means the network is sort of legally bound to make those movies. They are just lucky both actors settled for the films
they were given. And because SyFy reneged on the prize, Stan Lee refused to do a third season of the reality show. I mean, come on! For the price of Sharktapus vs Mooseagator they could have made a superhero film that their viewers would actually watch.
I probably would have never added this film to my superhero collection if not for a friend who remembered it and reminded me there is a Feedback film. So, how much screen time should a superhero have before the film is considered a superhero film? As Mega Snake has recently gone OOP, I didn't have the luxury of thinking about it for a few months. There was only a couple of reasonably priced copies left on Amazon.
And BTW, Feedback is only in 1 minute 15 seconds of combined screen time.
The good news is that this is not a bad film. The bad news is that it is pure formula. Jaws meets Gremlins meets Them. In a stereotypical Southern town, somewhere in East Tennessee ( but actually Bulgaria where the film was shot ), a snake wrangler goes to a shop run by a Native American to buy some rare poisonous snakes. There he sees a snake in a jar, and asks the shop owner what it is. He is told that it is Unteka, basically one of the last living babies of a creature that once terrorized North America before the Native Americans successfully wiped them out. Apparently keeping a baby in a jar will bring good luck, but only as long as three rules are followed:
1. Never let Unteka out of the jar.
2. Never feed it anything living
3. Never fear the heart of the snake
The wrangler wants to buy Unteka, but is told it is not for sale. So, of course, he steals it. And of course with a few minutes of getting the jar home he drops and breaks it. And before you know it, Unteka has eaten a kitten, all the chickens in the coop, the dog, and finally the wrangler and everyone else in his house, growing bigger each time it eats, and leaving nothing behind but the blood of it's victims.
The next day the wranger's brother ( Michael Shanks from Stargate SG-1 ) returns home after a night of drunkenness to find the house wrecked and nothing but blood. He calls the sheriff and is immediately suspected of being the killer. There is a love rectangle between Stargate guy, his girlfriend who is a deputy, the sheriff named Big Bo who is also trying to woo the deputy, and Stargate guy's female co-worker who is always trying to seduce him, and also flirts with Big Bo. The love rectangle exists purely for padding out the film, and ultimately has nothing to do with the main plot, with the possible exception that Big Bo makes Stargate guy a suspected only because he is a rival for the deputy. Of course there is another motive. The deputy, who happened to have studied zoology in school, suspects that what has killed the family, as well as a nearby field of goats, is actually a giant snake. Except the mayor doesn't want to hear this because, you guessed it, the town is about to have an annual festival, and the mayor does not want rumors of a giant snake driving away the tourist. And Big Bo is all too eager to appease the mayor by saying that Stargate guy not only slaughtered his family and pets, but must have also killed the goats as well.
Meanwhile Unteka has begun eating everyone in the cast one by one until only Stargate guy, the deputy and the Native American are left. And only Native American guy knows how to kill Unteka. They realize that Unteka's next target is the festival. The film then shifts to an amusement park which is supposed to be the festival and Unteka has begun killing and eating tourists left and right. Cue the edited in footage of Feedback where the crowd is suddenly bundled up in winter coats, their frozen breath can be seen whenever someone talks, and it even appears to be filmed at a different amusement park. Once the Feedback cameo is over, it is back to the main cast who track Unteka into a haunted house ride, and go in after it for the final confrontation.
Something that surprised me was that the box claims the film is R rated, for creature violence and gore. But there is nothing in this film that should have earned it an R rating. Jaws had gore, and nudity ( which this film does not have ) and mild swearing ( which this film does not have ) and still got a PG. This is a made for broadcast movie. It would never have gotten an MPAA rating. But assuming this was given a brief theatrical release, I doubt a made for tv movie would get an R rating. So did the company releasing this film on DVD lie about the rating to get more people to buy/rent it? If so, they are lucky the MPAA didn't sue them. All but the X ratings are copyrighted. A precaution the MPAA took to prevent any distributor from putting their own ratings on their films.
Monkey Business ( 1931 )
This was the first of the Marx Brothers films to be given the screen credit "The Four Marx Brothers". This time Zeppo's role is bigger than the last couple of films. Primarily because Paramount finally realized he should be cast as the love interest instead of someone else. This was one of the three Marx Brothers films that would occasionally air around 1am on a local station, and I had already seen the second half, so this is the first time I got to see the entire film. It was the first original script Paramount wrote for the March Brothers, the first two films being adaptions of musicals they started in on Broadway. Unlike the later MGM films, the first two musical adaptions, Monkey Business has the brothers running around aimlessly. If not for Zeppo falling in love with the girl who is kidnapped in the last act, there would have been no excuse for the brothers to try to save her. The wonderful Margaret Dumont is not in this film, and has been replaced with Thelma Todd. While I am a big Thelma Todd fan ( she is the only actresses from old Hollywood films that occasionally gives me a boner, and I have found her funny in a lot of her Hal Roach films ), I think she was completely miscast in this film.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1538114 times)
