What was the last movie you watched?

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Angry Guest ( 1972 )
Duel of Fists was a huge hit. And one of the rare Chang Cheh films where he didn't kill off the heroes at the end of the film. So Shaw Brothers insisted on a sequel.  At 90 minutes, it is one of the most padded films I have ever seen, rivaling the rock climbing in Lost Continent ad all of the  Brett Kelly films. This is the infamous Shaw Brothers film that has an entire minute of footage of a car driving down a helix offramp. There is also nearly a minute of footage of David Chaing walking across a construction site. Tons of B roll footage shot from the POV of a car driving past Japanese landmarks. And tons of establishing shots that last way too long. My guess is that Chang Cheh expected this film to go to the 1 hour 45 minute mark once the fight scenes were added. But then ended up having to rush this film to theaters before the extra fight scenes could be shot. A lesser Shaw Brothers potboiler that is only known for Chang Cheh himself guest starring as the main villain.

Gray Lady Down ( 1978 )
A decent disaster movie made towards the end of the 70s disaster movie era. The nuclear sub Neptune gets into a collision with a freighter and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, too damages to return to the surface. The Navy must somehow locate the submarine and rescue the survivors from the bottom of the ocean.  This was a year after Airport 77 used the passengers trapped at the bottom of the ocean plot, so the producer of this film needed to come up with something original that had not been used in the previous film. Worth seeking out for anyone looking to watch a 70s disaster film.

[stethacantus]

All Men Are Brothers ( 1975 )
The epic Chinese novel The Water Margin has an alternate title of All Men Are Brothers.  Think of the anti-heroes of the novel, the Liangshan Outlaws also known as the 108 Mountain Outlaws, can be thought of as a martial arts version of The Avengers. The greatest martial artists of that age, some criminals and others dissidents, band together to fight against corrupt government officials. Not only did the novel chronical the history of the Liangshan Outlaws, but had chapters devoted to the back story of each of the bandits. Shaw Brothers chose to adapt the epic in several movies, and got as far as the origin story of three of the bandits ( two of them in the movie The Water Margin, ) and then sort of gave up with this film which jumps to the final chapters of the novel. The emperor has promised to pardon the Liangshan Outlaws if they conquer the rebel Fang La who is fortified in an unpaintable city.  The film opens with a montage of Liangshan Outlaws dying while trying to attack the city, So the leader of the outlaws decides to sneak seven outlaws into the city as spies to find a vulnerability in the city's defenses. Once again they allow the moron Black Whirlwind to go on the spy mission, and his temper gives them away, nearly sabotaging the mission,  and causing several of the bandits to be killed. This film shows all but the Liangshan generals getting themselves killed capturing Fang La. There was a lot more Shaw Brothers could have adapted from the novel, but with Wuxia losing popularity to Kung Fu, the decision was to wrap things up.


The Cassandra Crossing ( 1976 )
This was to be the first Saturday in weeks where I could watch three or more movies for the weekend. But shortly after I finished All Men Are Brothers, the news of the assassination attempt broke, and the television with the blu-ray player was confiscated. There was one surreal moment when all we knew was that the unnamed gunman had been killed by the secret service, then the news paused to announce the other stories of the day, mentioned that Dr. Ruth had died, and then mentioned that before she became a sex therapist, had been a sniper for the Israel government. Which had everyone in the room putting two and two together and saying: "Oh shit! Dr. Ruth tried to kill Trump!" By midnight everyone was satisfied that there was no new updates from the initial report, and all they were doing was repeating the same footage over and over again, so gave me back the television. So I went to the next 70s disaster movie. The Cassandra Crossingis more of a political thriller than a disaster film. Terrorists try to blow up a  secret lab in Germany that makes biological weapons, and ends up getting infected with a deadly strain of plague. Attempting to escape, the surviving terrorist  sneaks onto a passenger train bound for France. Soon everyone on board is infected, and the U.S. government ( who ran the lab ) tries to cover the incident up by rerouting the train to Poland where it is sent over a dangerous bridge that is so decapitated that it will collapse into the gorge when the train tries to cross. It is up to the passengers to try to wrestle control of the train from the soldiers who are now running it to avoid the pending catastrophe. Despite the universal bad reviews, I liked this film. I'm sure the critics were correct, and  the film was dumb. But so was every other disaster film I have seen no far.

[stethacantus]

The Blood Brothers ( 1973 )
Chang Cheh's epic drama based on a historic event in 1870 when a high ranking Chinese general named Ma Xinyi was assassinated by one of his old friends. There were many different rumors as to why Ma was assassinated, one of which was that he had killed the brother of his old friend because he was having an affair with his wife. In Chang Cheh's film, all three men were once blood brother, and together ran a bandit gang. Ambitious Ma decided to join the Chinese military and soon rose up the ranks becoming a general. After which he sent for his two blood brothers to join him as his lieutenants. But when he falls in love with the wife of one of his blood brothers, he sends him off on a military expedition along with his henchmen  who ambush and kill him. Which leads to the other brother vowing vengeance. Ti Lung, who played Ma, won a Golden Horse Award for his performance. The film was remade in 2007 by Peter Chan as The Warlords. Like most of Chang Cheh's overblown historic epics, the plot is instantly forgettable. I am usually mixing this film up with The Heroic Ones.


Avalanche Express ( 1979 )
The next couple of weeks were to be 70s disaster films  involving trains. This was originally planned to be a double feature with The Cassandra Crossing as NYT reviewer Vincent Canby claimed Avalanche Express ripped it off. While both films are about trains traveling through Europe, they have very little in common. Robert Shaw is a high ranking Russian general who is attempting to defect to the United States. Lee Marving leads a team of CIA agents sent to extract him, deliberately choosing to take him on the Moscow to Rotterdam Atlantic Express in order to lure out all of the KGB agents in Europe. So how is this a disaster film? About halfway through the film some KGB agents attempt to stop the train by triggering an avalanche. It manages to destroy an entire village, but just misses the train which reaches a tunnel just before it hits. No doubt this production began as a disaster film. Mark Robson was hired to direct fresh from directing Earthquake. It became a troubled production. Robson grew sick and died with ten more days of footage to shoot. While awaiting a new director to complete the film, actor Roberrt Shaw died of a heart attack in Irland. He had completed all of his scenes, but replacement director Monte Hellman decided he didn't like that the Russians in the opening scene spoke English, so had the entire scene redubbed in Russian. With Shaw dead, actor Robert Rietti was brought in to dub Shaw's lines. Rietti had dubbed some of the James Bond films, including the voice of Emilio Largo in Thunderball. It was then decided to have Rietti  redub all of Robert Shaws lines for continuity. Which made the final cut seem like a badly dubbed foreign film for no reason. Further cheapening the film ( and I am not sure which director was responsible, ) is the cheapness of the effects. The village that the avalanche destroys looks like one of those mini villages you put under a Christmas tree as a decoration. There was at least one full scale set built that is rigged to be destroyed by the avalanche. Which on close examination is made of soapsuds. Worse than that, ne shot of a car pulling up to a building on a snow covered street uses soapsuds for the snow. And for most of the film, the train is a model which looks like a toy. As does the surrounding snow covered forest. Not really a good film. But still entertaining enough. And with plenty of machine gun battles  to keep it from getting boring.

From Rusia With Love ( 1963 )
Since we were watching a movie about a train crossing Europ with a defecting Russian and starring Robert Shaw, I decided to watch this movie as well. One of only two James Bond films from the 60s that Robert Rietti didn't work on.

[stethacantus]

The Savage 5 ( 1974 )
There are a handful of my favorite Shaw Brothers films that had never been released on DVD in North America due to Dragon Dynasty acquiring the home video rights, then never releasing them. More recently the home video rights Celestial doled out to various video companies a decade ago expired, and both Shout! Factory and Arrow have acquired those rights for box sets of the Shaw Brothers films. Which is how The Savage 5 finally gets it's North American release.  It begins in a small town on the outskirts of China that is too far away from even the authorities. Which is bad news when a group of bandits on horseback show up with a safe they just robbed from a bank a few towns away. They want the local silversmith to crack the safe for them, and plan to spend the next few days in the town waiting for the rest of their gang to show up. In the meantime, they have pretty much taken over he town and are planning to rape the local women for fun. It is up to five heroic individuals to take on the bandits, and convince the rest of the town to help them do it. What a great movie. I recommend anyone into watching Asian martial arts films to seek this out.

Silver Streak ( 1976 )
This was not actually meant to be a disaster movie.  But then there was a decision that the movie would end with the train crashing into Chicago's Central Station ( Although the movie posters have signs stating this takes place in  Chicago's Union Station.) Silver Streak was then promoted as a disaster comedy with the movie poster featuring the Silver Streak crashing through the walls of the station as people run to get out of it's way. The producers claimed they wrecked an actual train into Central Station, which had recently been closed after the railroads rerouted their trains to Union Station.  There were those who questioned this claim as Central Station was reportedly already demolished by the time filming would have begun. And there was very little chance they would crash an actual locomotive into a station filled with extras and stuntmen not knowing exactly which direction the wreckage would go once it breached the walls. Or if it would even breach the walls at all. It was later revealed that the wreck took place on a set in Hollywood with specially designed breakaway walls and pillars and a fake locomotive.

Silver Streak was among the films in a sub genre of Alfred Hitchcock parodies, which included the first Chevy Chase/Goldie Hawn teaming Foul Play, Mel Brooks' High Anxiety, and Hitchcock's own Family Plot.  Although claiming Silver Streak was not an homage but an original idea, it was never the less filled with tropes of Hitchcock's classic films. It was also the first teaming of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.  Which was nearly their second. Pryor had co-written the script for Blazing Saddles with the intent to play Sherrif Black Bart. But had to be recast when Warner Bros. refused to do a film with Pryor in it.

I had watched this film years ago on it's first network television broadcast and remembered loving it. Sadly, it doesn't hold up that well. I just didn't laugh at it this time around. I especially found it annoying that they kept repeating the same gag over and over again. That Gene Wilder keeps falling off the train and has to continuously catch up to it to reboard it. There are plenty of plot holes. And it has one of those gags you could never do in a movie today. Midway through the film Wilder is hunted by the police after becoming a suspect in a murder. ( another plot hole. A murder takes place on the train, yet it continues to Chicago instead of being stopped so the police can investigate the crime scene. ) He has also fallen from the train a second time and is trying to get back on board at the next station. However, his face is on every newspaper as the murder suspect, and the station is crawling with cops. To get past them, his traveling companion ( Richard Pryor ) convinces him to wipe shoe polish on his face and pretend to be black.  This came out in the 70s, just a decade after the original political correctness backlash that saw the Step-n-Fetchit films and a handful of Little Rascal shorts permanently pulled from Television, along with Porgy and Bess. And was the same years the Walt Disney company altered Fantasia to remove one of the black characters in the Pastoral Symphony segment. And speaking of stuff that didn't age well.. the extras on this DVD are all trailers for other 20th Century Fox DVD releases, one of which is the concert film Bill Cosby, Himself. Sure, this DVD was released way back in 2004. But this particular pressing was within the past five years, which means they never bothered to change the DVD programming even though they company has long ago pulled that concert film from circulation.

Okay, so the film is not really funny. Or should I say, just as funny as a mad for Halmark Channel film. But it does work as a light hearted mystery thriller. The real question here is, how good is the money shot? In other words, the train crash the film was building up to. Well, it is fairly impressive. After crashing through the end of the platform, the train then crashes through two mall shops before reaching the waiting room of the station, taking out at least one pillar prior to it finally coming to a stop. A lot of money was thrown into the train crash, and it looks convincing. Almost worth sitting through 100 minutes of an Alfred Hitchcock parody to get to.


The Bullet Train ( 1975 )
Concluding all the 70s theatrical disaster movies involving trains, I rewatched this one. A Sony Chiba film without any martial arts. Chiba is the motorman on a train with a bomb set to go off if he drops the train's speed lower than 100MPH. I reviewed this one here a while back. Just cant find the post in the search. But it is a decent drama, and a good segway to the next set of disaster films I begin next week which are all about terrorist plots.

[stethacantus]

7 Man Army ( 1976 )
With this movie I complete the Ti Lung / David Chaing Collection set from Shout! Factory. This set went from the 60s Wuxia films, to the Kung Fu films, and ended with something you would not expect to find any Shaw Brothers stars in, an epic World War II film. Tis is not a martial arts film, although there are a few martial arts fights. But the majority of this film has the heroes using guns and grenades.  And there are a lot of tanks, which is something you just don't see in a martial arts movie.  The plot: A battalion is nearly wiped out capturing a Japanese occupied fort on thee Great Wall of China. With only seven soldiers surviving the battle, they decide to defend he fort for as long as they can against the entire Japanese army.


Skyjacked ( 1972 )
The first of four terrorist films that show up on lists of 70's disaster movies. But since no disaster actually takes place on this film, is it a disaster movie? Well, it predates  The Poseidon Adventure by seven months. The Poseidon Adventure was the blockbuster that had other studios racing to put out their own disaster movies. However, 1970's Airport is credited as the first of the 70s disaster movies. It was nowhere the blockbuster that The Poseidon Adventure was, but was successful enough that Universal wanted to make sequels, and other studios, including M-G-M, decided to greenlight their own airliner suspense films. So this was definitely part of the evolution of the 70s disaster film. And it starred Charlton Heston who was in nearly half of the 70s disaster films. The plot: during a flight to Minneapolis, someone has written on a bathroom mirror that there is a bomb on the plane, and unless the pilot diverts to Anchorage, the bomb will be set off. Having little choice but to land during a storm, the plane just barely makes it to Anchorage, where the skyjacker reveals himself and demands the airliner be refueled and taken to Moscow. Aside from having to land in a storm, a near miss with a small propeller plane also making an emergency landing at Anchorage, and the airliner nearly being shot down by Russian jets, no disaster actually happens. Still, a reasonably entertaining suspense film that has a lot of the disaster movie tropes. My only complaint is that the tag is "On board flight 502 is a bomb. It could be anywhere. And a skyjacker. It could be anyone."  but the identity of the skyjacker is given away less than a third of the way through the film. So much for that mystery.

Drive-In (1976 )
I knew I could not have a complete 70s disaster movie collection without, well, this.  A small  film with a group of unknowns in the cast that is more or less a rip-off of American Graffiti, only set in the 70s  and taking place in Texas. The humor just doesn't work, the acting is usually substandard, many actors are way too old to be playing teenagers, and the dialog at times is unintelligible. The producer did splurge on a lot of country hits for the soundtrack, but not by that much as none of the best 70s country music is in this film, and a lot of the songs are used in more than one scene. However, it does have a charm to it, so not a complete waste. It had a major release from Columbia Pictures, and then went on to be picked up by ABC for a network television broadcast. ( That is where I originally saw it, and don't remember laughing at it back then either. ) It went on to being a staple of 80s cable television before becoming unavailable for a couple of decades before Columbia released it on DVD in 2012. So, what does this have to do with the disaster movie genre? The feature film being shown ate the drive-in is called Disaster 76, a parody of disaster movies, and the first disaster movie parody to reach theaters, beating The Big Bus by a month. And the disaster movie parody is the best thing about this film. Only shown in snippets throughout the overall movie, the plot to Disaster 76 has a bomber setting off a bomb on an airliner that kills the flight crew. The stewardess is able to find another captain among the passengers. A ship's captain. Meanwhile, a safety inspector complains to the architect that his newly built skyscraper has no stairs, and the architect replies that staircases are so old fashioned. Moments later the airliner crashes into the building, setting it on fire. Sa the film progresses, the fire spreads across the city and causes a dam to explode. The flood takes out trees and towns and eventually rushes into the sea where it causes a wave that sinks a ship. A woman passenger who survives the sinking is immediately attacked by a shark. The captain who crashed the airliner ( who is somehow still alive ) jumps off a pier and into the water to rescue her, but gets there too late, and ends up fighting the shark with a harpoon. We never actually get to see if he kills the shark as the movie cuts away to a fistfight between two characters at the drive-in, but Disaster 76 ends with the captain walking out of the water and onto a shoreline with burning debris, looks around, and delivers his final line "Someone is going to have to rebuild Reno." It is actually a decent parody of the disaster movie genre, and worth sitting through the rest of Drive-In just to see. And if I am going to be a completists on the 70s disaster movies, a film hat needs to be part of the collection. Of course, there is a question as to if I will even be able to complete this collection as a lot of movies are out of print or ( in the cse of television movies ) have never been released on DVD nor Blu-ray.

[stethacantus]

The Brave Archer ( 1977 )
This week I begin Shout! Factory's Brave Archer collection. The three films and the two semi sequels based on the epic novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes. Since the first three films are a single story split into three parts, there is really no way to review this until I have seen the entire thing. The first film doesn't even end, but sort of stops. The hero of the film wishes to marry the daughter of a Kung Fu master, and has to complete three tests. And when he does, the movie ends. But wait a second, what about the plot where he is supposed to have a duel with his blood brother? What about the blind master seeking revenge? What about the lost manual that teaches  an unbeatable form of martial arts? We didn't even see any archery in this film yet. This is a busy movie that introduces hundreds of characters each with their own story that you need to keep track of. Just the first ten minutes has enough of a plot jammed in for an entire film. I guess Chang Cheh didn't want to repeat the mistakes of the past when Shaw Brothers tried and failed to adapt The Water Margin and Journey to the East before that, and decided to jam the epic novel into three films shot back to back instead of spread out in a dozen planned films of which the studio only makes three or four.  But boy is this hard to follow.


Juggernaut ( 1974 )
This shows up on a lot of 70's disaster movie lists, so goes into my collection. Someone who calls himself Juggernaut calls up the head of an ocean liner company and tells him he has planted six bombs abord the SS Britannic  which will detonate at dawn unless he is sent a quarter million. The bombs are rigged to blow if moved, and have so many booby traps that they are imposable to defuse. And the Britannic is in the middle of a storm, so evacuating the passengers is impossible. Perhaps just barely counting as a disaster film, Juggernaut is a great thriller, which is unusual considering it was directed by Richard Lester who's expertise is goofy comedies.

Zenobia ( 1939 )
For those of you who saw the film Stan & Ollie and remember in that movie  the team of Laurel and Hardy nearly break up over Hardy doing a film with an elephant for Hal Roach instead of leaving with Stan to work for 20th Century Fox. That elephant movie was Zenobia, and the actual history was a bit different. Stan left Hal Roach because his contract with the studio expired, and he simply could no longer get along with his old friend. Once Laurel and Hardy had stopped  making shorts and were exclusively making feature films, Roach insisted the duo do musicals while Stan just wanted to do  comedies. Both began having fights over the creative control of the films. Stan insisted on forming his own production company, Stan Laurel Productions, which Hal Roach begrudgingly allowed to produce a few of the Laurel and Hardy feature films. But as Roach pointed out, Stan Laurel Productions had no money, and the films were still entirely financed by Hal Roach. When stan walked once his contract ran out, Roach reminded him that Oliver Hardy was still under contract for a couple of years. Furthermore, he threatened to put Hardy in a new team with comedian Harry Langdon. Harry was at one time so popular that he rivaled Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harrold Lloyd at the box office. His popularity began to fade after he broke with director Frank Capra and began writing and directing his own films. He was reduced to making shorts during the sound era, none of which were successful, and ended up working as a writer for Hal Roach Studios. It was there that Roach made good on his threat, and cast both Langdon and Hardy in a film together. However, the plot for Zenobia  does not have Hardy and Langdon working as a team. Rather, Hardy is more or less teamed up with Billie Burke, who shortly after completing Zenobia would go on  to the set of The Wizard of Oz  where she played Glinda. Burke plays Hardy's ditzy wife in this film, and they have a sort of Burns & Allen relationship. An agreement was reached where Laurel would return to Hal Roach Studios for the remainder of Hardy's contract. Stan had no ill feelings towards Hardy for doing a film his contract with Hal Roach Studios compelled him to do, nor had any ill feelings towards Langdon, who he continued to have on his writing staff, even outside of Hal Roach where Laurel hired hi to rewrite the script for The Flying Deuces. Laurel and Hardy were not offered a contract at 20th Century Fox until 1941.

I have long wanted to add Zenobia to my Laurel & Hardy collection. But it was never released on DVD. I had not checked in a while, then a couple of weeks ago checked to find out that a company called Classic Flix had restored and released Zenobia on DVD and Blu Ray, along with a few other old comedies I had been waiting for. But more on that next week. Zenobia is by no means a lost classic. Oliver Hardy plays a Southern doctor in the 1870s who's daughter is about to marry the wealthiest bachelor in town. However, his mother disapproves of the wedding an schemes to break the couple up. Meanwhile Hardy is summonsed to a carnival where he is lead to believe a woman is deathly sick. The woman turns out to be a sick elephant named Zenobia who is owned by showman Harry Langdon. Hardy figures out what is ailing Zenobia, which is someone tied her tail in a knot, and cures her. Zenobia instantly falls in love with Hardy, and begins chasing him all over town. Langdon decides to sue Hardy for the alienation of affections of his elephant, and the mother of the fiancée decides to finance the lawsuit in order to ruin the doctor. He entire cast does their best to make a weak script work.  In fact, the only reason to recommend this film is the cast. Of course, one of the reasons why this took so long to get a DVD or Blu-ray release is it's political incorrectness. Aside from the controversial Step'n Fetchit in the cast, along with Hattie McDaniel playing a typical mammy character, and a scene where Hardy's daughter sings In the Evening, By the Moonlight under the original lyrics where she sings "You can hear those darkies singing". But it also appears to be pro-segregation. A small black child who has just shined Hardy's shoes complains to him how he wasn't invited to the party thrown by the white folks that Hardy is going to. Hardy shows the kid a copy of the declaration of independence and reminds him about the part that says "All men are created equal." , but then goes on to explain that while blacks and whites are equal, that they are better off separated. And you see segregation practiced all through the film. Some black singers perform at the party. But they doo it outside the house while the guests watch their performance through  the door. Similarly, during the trial, while all of the white folks in town are allowed to be seated in the courthouse, the black folks in town are shown standing outside and watching through the courthouse windows. It should be pointed out that Hal Roach Studios took a lot of backlash from censorship boards in the south for the Our Gang comedies for showing white kids playing with black kids. So there was probably some pressure for Roach to have a pro segregation message in this film. Separate but equal may sound like something conservatives thought up, but it originated with liberals who although calming to believe black men were equal to white men, still believed they should not mix. It would not be until the 1960s that liberals realized how flawed that philosophy was, and began calling for the end of segregation. Still, even if Roach had good intentions with this film, it is problematic to see a film with that message today. Of course, an elephant performing at a carnival has also recently become politically incorrect, so this film does not age very well.

[Pastor of Muppets]

I watched a 2015 movie called Hope Lost.  It can best be described in two words: relentlessly bleak.  I guess with a name like that, and the plot -- girl gets kidnapped and sold into sex slavery -- some bleakness is expected.  But it starts out with the kidnapping and the enslavement and just goes downhill from there.  By the end she has been resold to some guy who is going to torture her and use her in a snuff film.  At the end it has a sort of happy ending.

[Cyrusso]

Deadpool and Wolverine: One of the greatest films of all time.

Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman have absolutely wonderful onscreen chemistry, which makes this damn thing so incredibly enjoyable. It also has one of the best quotes of all time: "They call me the Merc with the mouth, they don't call me Truthful Timmy, the Blowjob Queen of Saskatoon."

S RANK MOVIE

Did I mention it was great? Easily better than the first Deadpool films, imho.

[stethacantus]

The Brave Archer 2 ( 1978 )
Continuing the story.... and then abruptly stopping the story. Well, at least they killed off two of the characters I had to keep track of before introducing a bunch of other characters with their own story. This should all be tied up next week with The Brave Archer 3 and then I will know if it was all worth watching.

Twilights Last Gleaming ( 1977 )
When I began collecting 70's Disaster Movies, the first thing I needed to do was make a list. I could remember the big films like Earthquake and The Poseidon Adventure but was sure there were some other films I forgot about, or probably didn't know existed. So I checked several sources for lists of 70s disaster movies including Wikipedia, Letterboxd, IMDb, and a few other online sources. This movie was included on a few lists, although I had seen it before and knew nothing approaching a disaster happens. But it was one of those films from the past I remembered enjoying, so ordered a copy. You tell me if you think this is a disaster movie. Four convicts escape from prison and manage to break into and take control of a nuclear silo. They threaten to launch the seven missels  at the silo at Russia and start a global nuclear war  unless they are given ten million dollars, safe passage to a country of their choice, and the president as a hostage. Also, the leader of the group wants the release of a document  that proves the U.S. government knew Vietnam was an unwinnable war with no goal before they entered it. A nice suspense film, but does threatening to start a worldwide catastrophe count as a disaster film?


Jack and the Beanstalk ( 1952 )

Here is how Amazon can sometimes be terrible.  So, a couple of weeks ago I checked to see if Zenobia was finally released on DVD or Blu-ray, and it was. Then Amazon suggested I should also buy the 70th Anniversary limited edition of Jack and the Beanstalk. Far from my favorite film, but necessary to complete my Abbott and Costello collection, and it was a limited edition, and Amazon said they  only had three Blu-rays left in stock.


About a decade ago I had completed my Laurel and Hardy home video collection.  Well, sort of. Back then I included the unrestored films I bought on VHS. But I had a copy of every one of their films as a duo, excluding their lost films. Around that time Universal had been releasing box sets of Abbott and Costello films with four films in each box. Typically with one of their best films, like .....Meets Frankenstein, mixed with some of their least popular films, like Ride Em Cowboys. Abbott and Costello seemed like the next logical comedy team to move onto, so I kept that in mind, but also mused if The Marx Brothers or some other classic film comedians should be next. Then Universal announced they were putting out a complete set. Every one of the Abbott and Costello movies in one box. A controversy from the start as it would include the only Universal movie not included in the earlier box sets, It Ain't Hay, which was kept from release due to rights issues over the novel the movie was bases on. For everyone who bought every one of the $40 sets, now they would need to spend another $150 on a set with every film they already had, just to get the one Universal film they didn't have. All the Universal films in the same set? It was an easy decision for me. I bought it and now owned 85% of the Abbott and Costello movies.

A quick explanation on Abbott and Costello.  For the most part they did all their movies for Universal, and broke up soon after their contract with Universal expired. And yet, eight of their films were made outside of Universal.  Three for M.G.M. as a lend-out deal, who in turn lent Universal two of their stars for three films. And on their second contract with Universal, the right to make four films independent of the studio.  Jack and the Beanstalk was one of two color films released through Warner Bros., the other being .....Meets Captain Kidd. The copyrights to Jack and the Beanstalk, along with a movie made for United Artists called Africa Screams, weren't renewed, so both films became public domain. After their contract with Universal expired, they did one last film together, Dance With Me Henry for United Artists, after which they broke up for good. And it is with Dance With Me Henry where things went wrong for me. Once I finished watching all the Universal films, I decided to begin collecting the eight films made outside of Universal.  Except that M.G.M. Home Video had acquired the rights to it, along with another A&C film called The Noose Hangs High. Both were given individual DVD releases. M.G.M. also released two of the films A&C made for their studio on a double feature set, but for whatever reason, didn't release Rio Rita, which was considered the best of the three M.G.M. films. Shortly after, the rights to the M.G.M. library were acquired by Warner Bros, and all of their A&C DVDs went out of print. Warner Archive would eventually release all three M.G.M. films, along with .....Meets Captain Kidd. But at that time I was unable to get Dance With Me Henry as it had become a collector's item, and the DVD was going for over $100 used on eBay. "Well, that's that." I thought to myself, and decided to upload the missing A&C films off of bit torrents, burn them to DVDs, find images of the boxes online, print them, then put the printed image into a case with the burned DVD. And for the past decade, those bootleg DVDs completed my A&C movie collection. I was convinced Warner Bros., which by that time owned the home video rights to all eight A&C films, were about to release them all as a set, and the bootlegs were just placeholders. But Warner Bros. never released an A&C box set. And I forgot about the hole in my A&C collection, until now.

So yeah, I ordered one of the last three Blu-rays in stock at Amazon.  Waited for it to arrive.  And when it did, I realized they had sent me the DVD instead of the Blu-ray. ClassicFlix released it both on DVD and Blu-ray. And I paid five dollars more for the Blu-ray.  When shit like this happened, I would got to the page on the Amazon website where you submitted your phone number  for customer service to call you back so you can explain to them how they f#$ked up, then arrange for the item to be sent back and exchanged for the correct item. But in the past few years that page has been harder and harder to find, hidden in an increasingly complex maze of menus. As of this year, humans no longer work for customer service.  Instead you are sent to the Amazon chatbox AI which is dumber than a box of rocks.

Amazon AI: "How can I help you? Please describe you problem with the order."

Me: "I ordered a Blu-ray and was sent a DVD."

Amazon AI: "Please describe your problem with the order."

Me: "I paid for a Blu-ray and was sent a DVD."

Amazon AI: "You are having difficulty explaining your problem. Here are some suggestions.  A) Item hasn't arrived.  B) Item is broken but the package is undamaged.  C) Item is fine but packaging is damaged. D) Already bought item elsewhere.  E) sent wrong item or item is different than description...."

Me: "Sent wrong item"

Amazon AI: "Thank you. Explain what is wrong with item."

Me: "I ordered Blu-ray and got a DVD."

Amazon AI: "Do you wish to make an exchange for the correct item, or do you want a refund?"

Me: "Exchange for correct item."

Amazon AI: "Let me get this straight.  You ordered a Blu-ray and want to exchange it for a DVD?"

Me: "NO! I ordered a Blu-ray and was sent a DVD."

Amazon AI: "Our records show you ordered a Blu-ray, not a DVD. Do you wish to exchange the Blu-ray for a DVD?"

Me: "No! Nononononononononono!"

How ironic I am trying to exchange an Abbott and Costello DVD and somehow end up in a f$%king Abbott and Costello routine with a chatbot. Anyway, this went on for a good half hour where no matter how I explained it, the Amazon AI could not comprehend that I was sent a DVD instead of a Blu-ray.  I tried begging it to give me a number for customer service, or to put a human in the chat, but it either could not, or had no way of conceiving that either. Finally, about an hour into this ordeal, I thought I finally got through to the AI when it finally said that it would exchange the DVD for a Blu-ray and gave me a QR code  for a drop-off of the DVD at any UPS store. Five days later Amazon emailed me and said they got the DVD and were going to make the exchange. Their site was showing they only had one Blu-ray left in stock, so this seemed to be just in time. The next day they rushed a package over. I opened it. And it was another DVD. I checked my e-mail and got one saying "We have exchanged your Blu-ray for a DVD. You have been credited the $5 in the price difference". What!? NO!/

I went back to the AI and got nowhere. Screw this! I went to a nearby Amazon GO! and decided to talk to a real human. The worker was apologetic, and tried to fix things from her end. But Amazon was listing the Blu-ray as 'Out Of Stock', and none of the associated sellers had it in stock, so an exchange was no longer possible. Meanwhile the DVD had also gone out of stock and was going for over $70 from the associated sellers. She finally said that she could get me a $20 credit and I did not need to return the DVD. Basically, I would have it for free.  I did a quick check on eBay. The DVD was going for $23 and up, and the only Blu-ray currently listed was $500 used and described as 'rare'. At this point in time I prefer getting movies on Blu-ray so I have the optimal quality. I had no choice here. So I took the credit. FU Amazon for making it harder and harder to fix your mistakes. And FU ClassicFlix for releasing this as a limited edition. Why the hell would you do that? I can understand why a boutique company like you did that with any other film. You got to license it from a copyright holder who may have limited you to a set number of copies. BUT THIS IS A F&%KING PUBLIC DOMAIN FILM THAT YOU COULD HAVE PRINTED ANY AMOUNT OF COPIES OF! You spent all this money restoring a film, and most of the copies went to resellers.

All of that trouble, and this is not only Abbott & Costello's worst movie, but one of the worst comedies ever made period! Something only an A&C completest would want in his collection. This was an attempt to make a fantasy musical on a shoestring budget. The story goes that Lou Costello promised his daughter he would make a film adaption of her favorite story book Jack and the Beanstalk, but when he brought the project to Universal, they told him no. Costello decided to finance the film on his own, and got Warner Bros. to agree to a color distribution. Perhaps he should not have wasted money on filming in color, because there was basically nothing left for the budget. Sure as hell not enough money to pay for the green screen effects needed to make the giant look over 20  feet tall, or to build sets with oversized furniture for the giant's castle. Instead, this film has a seven foot tall giant, and a normal sized castle set left over from the film Joan of Ark. Dance choreography seems to be make it up as you go along. Aside from dance choreography between Costello and Dorothy Ford copied from an earlier A&C film, the dancing here is everyone spinning around in circles to an overhead camera. The songs are just as bad. Costello did hire top notch composers for this film, but they gave him their weakest work. I am sure Costello thought the song I Fear Nothing was going to be his Somewhere Over The Rainbow. It is very apparent that Costello tried to model this film after The Wizard of Oz as it begins and ends in black and white while the fantasy part is in full color. Or rather, SuperCinecolor which is like a cheaper looking version of Technicolor, and definitely out of date as Eastmancolor had been invented two years earlier and by 1952 was the new standard.  The plot.. is non existent. After an unnecessary framing segment where Costello gets a job as a baby sitter and reads Jack and the Beanstalk to a bratty child, he dreams he is Jack, who's mother sends him to town to sell their cow. Bud Abbott plays Dinklepuss, the man who tricks Jack into trading the cow for beans he claims are magic. When the beans do turn out to be magic and grow a beanstalk that reaches the Giant's castle in the sky, Dinklepuss insists on joining Jack on his climb to the castle so he can steal the Giant's treasure. Pretty much nothing much happens after that. The Giant immediately catches Jack and Dinklepuss and brings them back to his castle to be slaves. Jack finds out the princess and a prince are being held captive in a dungeon. and then they all escape. Once on the ground, Jack chops down the beanstalk, and the Giant, who was climbing down after them, falls to his death. Costello wakes up and the movie ends as it began, in black and white. Five years earlier Walt Disney had covered Jack and the Beanstalk in his anthology film Fun and Fancy Free, and despite that segment being a third as long as this film, did a lot more with the story. There is some minor action here during the escape from the Giant, but the bulk of the film has characters singing annoying songs in the Giant's castle before the escape takes place. What could have saved this film was some comedy injected by A&C, but Costello mostly sticks to the script instead of injecting his signature ad libs, and none of the duos's popular comedy routines are in the movie. Costello relied entirely on the script, and the script wasn't funny.

BTW, I always thought the story of Jack and the Beanstalk was deeply flawed. How the hell was the Giant's castle up in the sky? How did he get up and down to steal the various treasures and terrorize the people below? If he had another way of getting up and down, then why did he climb down the beanstalk. And how the hell did a kid a tenth of his size not only beat him to the bottom of the beanstalk, but have enough time to chop it down when the Giant was still high enough that the fall would kill him?

[stethacantus]

The Brave Archer 3 ( 1981 )
Okay, now I am pissed off. I was hoping the Brave Archer trilogy, Chang Cheh's adaption of the classic epic novel The Legend of the Condori Heroes, would tie up the story in the third installment. After all, the first ten minutes of the first Brave Archer film set up the story of two babies separated at birth, one raised by a Jing prince, the other raised by a clan of martial artists, and both destined to have a grudge dual. But we never got back to that story. The third film launches into a brand new story about a grudge between an emperor and a woman who vows vengeance against him for a past wrong. This tale takes up the entire film, and when the villain of that story is killed, the movie ends. Was Chang Cheh expecting to do a Brave Archer 4? Well, no. When Shaw Brothers asked him to make a fourth Brave Archer film, he made The Brave Archer and His Mate which is supposed to take place a generation after the events of the trilogy. Chang Cheh meant for The Brave Archer to be a trilogy. So why did he introduce a bunch of stories in the first film that were not to be resolved? I mean, I kept track of all these characters and their relationships with each other, and all the plots the various villains had, and none of that lead to anything. There was a lot of good martial arts, but most of these films are about the characters trying to solve riddles and puzzles. If you are going to watch this series. I suggest watching the third film and skip the first two. It is a contained story that has a beginning, middle and end, and you don't really need to have seen the other two films to know what is going on.

Freefall ( 1989 )
The series finale of Miami Vice which NBC decided should be a movie event. I will be giving a full review of the series in the television section, so this is just the review of Freefall. There are actually two ways I can review this. One, as a movie. And grading it on a curve as a television film, it is just okay. Much like the second Miami Vice television film, The Prodigal Son, an overblown saga that probably could have been told in a single episode.  Crockett and Tubbs are recruited by the CIA to go to a fictional South American country in the tail end of a revolution to rescue it's dictator and bring him to America. The dictator knows things that can bring down the drug cartels, if he can get to America without the cartels killing him. The second half of the movie takes place in Miami where Crockett and Tubbs try to keep the dictator alive as cartel hit squads are sent to kill him. And you have the usual predictable plot twists of various government characters double crossing Crockett and Tubbs so that the hit squad keeps finding their safe houses. Both halves are a hodgepodge of material already covered in past Miami Vice episodes, but it is a solid enough for television movie. Maybe not as good as the first two Miami Vice television films, and done on the cheap ( the South American revolution is mostly stock video footage from real South American revolutions and riots unconvincingly edited onto the rest of the film, ) but despite what could have been done in an hour episode dragged out to tow hours, still manages to move along without any obvious padding. The other way f reviewing this movie, is as a series finale. And it is there that Freefall fails. A series finale should be a satisfactory tying up of the entire series. That does not happen. Sure, Stan is given a redemption arc with the hoodlums he owes money to for gambling. A plot point only introduced in the previous episode. But as for Crockett and Tubbs, their deciding to hand in their badges and quit the police has the feel of being tagged onto the episode. And aside from a coupe of minutes where they both say goodbye to each other, there is no real closure. Crockett offers to drive Tubbs to the airport so he can return to New York, and then in a voice over, Crockett suggest that they could join the police down in the Keys, and Tubbs seems to be into the idea. We don't get to see Trudy or Gina say goodbye to anyone. They are just barely in this episode, and have very few lines. Castillo sort of gets a goodbye moment when he unexpectantly shows up and asks Crockett and Tubbs to reconsider quitting. And Stan gets no goodbye moment. We barely even see the inside of the precinct set, and Elvis is nowhere to be seen. This was more like a cliffhanger episode than a series finale. I bet the producers were counting on another network to pick the series up, and would open Season 6 with Castillo offering Tubbs and Crockett their old jobs back. Which was probably why no characters were killed. The plot of this episode was an excellent opportunity to kill off a cast member or two in a heroic gun fight. Instead, the episode ends with a montage over the closing credits showing scenes from the previous seasons, which includes some footage of Zito who left the series a season and a half earlier. But no footage of Lieutenant Rodriguez, despite him being part of the original cast. Miami Vice deserved a better sendoff rather than a movie that kept most of the cast off screen, and had Crockett and Tubbs doing a mission for the CIA rather than their usual undercover work busting drug dealers.

Black Sunday ( 1977 )
This is on a lot of 70's disaster movie lists. Specifically because Paramount chose to promote it as if it were a disaster film about a blimp crashing into a stadium during the Super Bowl. That actually only accounts for the final ten minutes of a two and a half hour thriller about agents trying to track down a terrorist. Furthermore, the blimp crash is disappointing, with a lot of cheat shots quickly cutting to close ups of the crowd panicking and close ups of the blimp, and one quick unconvincing bluescreen shot of the blimp nearly crashing into the announcer's booth. Unfortunately John Frankenheimer just didn't have the money in his budget for a spectacular blimp crash. Not even the money for some work with models. What most of the trailers and other promotion for this film didn't mention is that the blimp has a bomb on board designed to send shrapnel all over the stadium and kill everyone attending. Can the hero of this film figure out a way to keep that from happening? No spoilers here. But despite the underwhelming ending, the rest of this movie is an excellent thriller full of shootouts and chase scenes and a few explosions, along with a sizable body count before we even get to the Super Bowl terrorist attack.  That does it for the terrorist films that fell into the 70s disaster movie genre. Next week, a legitimate disaster movie about an entire city burning to the ground.

[Cyrusso]

Alien: Romulus - Definitely better than I expected. I was pleasantly surprised, and had a great time watching this. Some people complain about the fan service, but honestly? I don't care. It doesn't take away from the film at all, and the audience in my theatre actually cheered.

I'd give it a solid B+.

[stethacantus]

Brave Archer And His Mate ( 1982 )
This is either a sequel to The Brave Archer, or as most historians of Hong Kong cinema call it, an unofficial sequel. Despite this being Chang Cheh's fourth movie based on The Legend of the Condor Heroes, he separates it from the previous trilogy by not calling it The Brave Archer 4. No attempt was made to bring back the original cast, even though many of the actors were still under contract for Shaw Brothers, so the returning characters were all recast. This includes Guo Jing, played by Alexander Fu Sheng in the original trilogy, and now played by Philip Kwok. Philip previously played Ciu Pek Thong in the original trilogy. What makes no sense is that Alexander Fu Sheng is in this movie, playing Guo Jing's adopted son Yang Guo. I guess since Yang Guo was the lead character in this movie, and since much of it takes place 20 years after the events of the first movie making the Guo Jing character older and mature, that it made sense to recast Fu Sheng to the son. The studio could have cast Fu Sheng in both roles, but doing split screen effects to have Fu Sheng playing two characters in the same scene would have made the film more expensive. Switching cast members around to different characters makes an already hard to follow plot even more confusing to follow.

Although based on the beginning chapters of The Return of the Condor Heroes, the movie begins with a condensed version of the final chapters of Legend of the Condor Heroes which was omitted from the Brave Archer trilogy. It does tie up one plot point not tied up in The Brave Archer 3, but completely abandons the blood brother duel plot point which began The Brave Archer. This is yet another film which abruptly ends mid story, and I am sure it was to be the first in a trilogy of films based on The Return of the Condor Heroes, but Alexander Fu Sheng died in a car crash just before the next film in the franchise was to be filmed. 

Ciudad en Llamas ( 1979 )
I was fully expecting to be watching City on Fire this weekend. It was the movie I ordered from Amazon who said they had one last copy in stock. Imagin my surprise when I opened the package and found the Spain release of the movie instead, in a Spanish case. City on Fire is now out of print in North America, so if I want the film, then the Spanish release is all that is left. It's not region locked, and by switching the audio from Espanola to Ingles, can watch the movie as if it was a U.S. release. As I approach the end of  collecting all of the 70s disaster movies released on DVD or Blu-ray, I am getting down to the OOP movies, which means I will have to get creative in order to complete the collection. Which includes accepting Amazon's substitution of a Spanish disk for the North American disk they said they had in stock.

City on Fire  was one of the first films riffed by MST3K for their KTMA episodes. So yea, it is going to be that sort of film. It was a good idea for a disaster movie. An oil refinery explodes and sets an entire city on fire. But it was a made for Canadian television production that after partnering with Embassy Pictures, became a theatrical release. So basically, a mostly non existent budget, most of which was spent on the all-star cast. So we do get a film about an entire city in flames. But all the action takes place on a single block of tenement buildings. The plot: a mentally disturbed worker at an oil refinery is fired, and before he leaves, opens up all the valves, allowing fuel to spill out into the sewers where construction workers are using an  Acetylene Torch to fix a pipe thingy. The fuel burst into flames and races back to the refinery, which explodes, sending a fireball all over the city and setting most of the buildings on fire. At this point there should have been expensive effects showing the fireball setting the various buildings ablaze. Instead, we get Henry Fonda in his just slightly longer than a cameo role as the fire chief, looking at a map of the city and saying the fire ball has set the city on fire. Most of the characters in this film were already at the city's hospital for an opening ceremony. and immediately take refuge inside. Which is where the rest of the film takes place until the fire department shows up to rescue them. For some reason, the only road leading to this hospital is a narrow city street lined with tenement buildings which are soon ablaze. The only burning sets built for the film, and the place where  most of the characters who die get killed. As underwhelming as this cheap disaster film is, it is oddly watchable.

[stethacantus]

Little Dragon Maiden ( 1983 )
Back in the early 90s, I collected a lot of bootleg Shaw Brothers movies on VHS. That was pretty much the only way to collect any of the old school martial arts films. Only a few of the best made it onto home video in North America, and many of those with video companies that went out of business once the Hollywood studios began their own home video labels. So most of the best Hong Kong martial arts films were either out of print, or had never been released on home video in the U.S.A. Meanwhile companies like Saturn Video and Master Arts released hundreds of martial arts films on home video with actors even Hong Kong citizens would not recognize, who could not convincingly screen fight for shit, and were mostly made on the cheap in Malaysia or Thailand. It was cheaper to get the rights to these movies rather than movies made by Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest or Seasonal Films. So if you wanted to collect martial arts classics that were not Bruce Lee, then the only option were bootlegs of OOP videos, or released oversees, or subtitled and sourced from the video stores in Chinatown. There was a sizable newsstand on 42nd and 8th run by a Pakistani that no longer sold newspapers or candy. It was entirely bootleg martial arts films. And it had just about everything.  The proprietor bootlegged the films he sold himself, running off copies of what he was low on the night before. He took pride in being able to track down videos across the globe to bootleg from. If you mentioned to him a film he didn't have, he would have that film on the shelf within days.

This week's martial arts film, Little Dragon Maiden, reminded me of that newsstand. Back then The Brave Archer series was considered a classic, and unavailable on video until a bootleg showed up that was camcorder from a screening of an English dub version of the film. I eagerly bought the bootleg and didn't like it so much. Not just the poor quality of a camcorder video, but it was one of those films with too little action, too much talking, far too much exposition, too many characters to keep track of, and too many sub plots which kept popping up every ten minutes.  And the video tape cut off two minutes before the movie ended. Which I assumed was at least a half hour before the movie ended considering all the sub plots needed to be tied up. Little did I know the movie ended abruptly anyway.  The newsstand man had tracked down copies of the second and third Brave Archer film, and was boasting that within a weeks time he would have The Brave Archer And His Mate. I wasn't interested in getting any more of the Brave Archer series, and was only there looking to see if he had any new Jackie Chan films. The group gathered around the newsstand, who were all themselves collectors, began an argument over if The Brave Archer And His Mate existed at all, or if it was a completely different Fu Sheng movie that got that title in a different country. The group was split in opinion over if there was a fourth film in the series, with half of them having heard of it and insisting it existed. "There is a fifth Brave Archer movie" said the newsstand man. Everyone insisted there wasn't.  If there had been another Brave Archer film, they would have heard about it. "Ahh, but yes there is. It doesn't have Brave Archer in the title.  I will have it soon. Just you wait and see." And just like how the Brave Archer films end abruptly, so does this story. I never went back to that newsstand, and I can't remember why. Never found out what movie he thought was the fifth Brave Archer film. But I am sure it was Little Dragon Maiden.

For those not familiar with  Legend of the Condor Heroes and the Brave Archer film series which was the screen adaption of it, think of the George RR Martin book series A Song of Ice and Fire which was turned into the television series Game of Thrones by HBO. Both Martin's books and the television series are long complicated stories with hundreds of characters. ( Not so many characters by the final episode.  )  Now imagine if HBO didn't devote an entire season to each book in the series, and instead tried to condense each book into a single episode.  That is what the Brave Archer series was like. Each film simply stops after a fight or when a task is completed, ignoring that most of the other plot points were unresolved. Which would only make sense if they were to be resolved in future films. But Chang seemed to decide to abandon them after the second film.

1983 through 1986 is a weird period at Shaw Brothers that American fans are just getting acquainted with. World Northal didn't yet get around to syndicating any Shaw Brothers films made after 1982 when they went bankrupt in the late 80s, so they never aired on American television. Very few English dubs from after 1982 showed up on the bootleg market, and most of the 82 and up films that did were in Mandarin and subtitled. Films from this era recently released on home video in America seem more like New Wave films made by independent studios rather than somethiing that came from Shaw Brothers. A lot of the talent at Shaw Brothers left around this time as their contracts expired. This included Chang Cheh who's final film for the studio was directed in 1982 and released in 1983. That meant in the final years that the studio was open, there  were a lot of directors and actors unfamiliar to most American Shaw Brothers fans. Or even actors you never thought worked for Shaw Brothers, including Leslie Cheung, who takes over playing the character Yang Guo after Alexander Fu Sheng's death.  With Chang Cheh gone, Little Dragon Maiden  was directed by Hua Shan, a director who previously worked for the Shaws where he directed Super Infra Man, before spending a few years directing films outside of Shaw Brothers for Bruce Lee clone Bruce Li, and Jackie Chan clone Billy Chong. ( A couple of those are my favorite of the independent martial arts films, Dynamo for Bruce Li, and The Jade Claw for Billy Chong. )  Little Dragon Maiden seems a lot like an independent New Wave film, if not for familiar Shaw Brothers stars Chen Kuan Tai and Lo Lieh in the cast. Really not part of the Brave Archer series at all, the first third of this film retells the same story from the second half of Brave Archer and his Mate,  only this time Yang Guo is adopted as a teenager instead as a baby in the previous film. So basically a remake of Brave Archer and His Mate, only without the first third of the film based on the final chapters of The Legend of the Condor Heroes, and this film basically being the entirety of Return of the Condor Heroes with a lot of the characters and subplots being cut out so it could  fit into a 90 minute film. Basically just the romance between Yang Guo and the title character. So really, not the fifth Brave Archer film, although many do consider this to be Brave Archer 5.




Krakatoa, East of Java ( 1968 )
So what does a 1960s disaster movie have to do with the 1970s? Well around 1974 Cinema Releasing  Corporation desperately wanted to get into the disaster movie craze, but didn't have a current disaster movie to distribute.  But they did have the distribution rights to a disaster film from the 1960s they were about to package along with some other of their films for syndication to the local television stations. So they retitled it Volcano and released it as if it was a brand new film. They even gave it a movie poster that looked a lot like Earthquake's poster, and promoted it as being in 'Feelaround', a sound system that as far as I can tell, never existed. Certainly Cinema Releasing didn't have the money to spend on equipping theaters with a new sound system, and the grind house theaters they four walled their films to didn't have the money to invest in an advanced sound system.  Best I can tell is that Volcano put the same sound cue on their soundtrack that would activate the Sensesurround speakers if screened at a theater equipped with the Sensesurround sound system. A lot of people were convinced Hollywood had made another star studded disaster movie spectacular, and it made money again.  It was even picked up by CBS for a network broadcast the following year. Perhaps only a third of the people who saw Volcano realized it was something that had already been in theaters six years ago. Strangely, there does not appear to have been any other disaster movie from past decades to get reissued in the 70s to capitalize on the popularity of the genre. Perhaps because most of them had been shot in Black and White.

Krakatoa, East of Java was even older than it's 1968 release date suggests. The original script was written in 1955, and it had taken another 1 years for it to find financing. By the time it was finally green lit, it had gone through several producers, directors, studios, and attached casts. There even had been a few rewrites of the script. Non of which corrected the title, as Krakatoa is actually West of Java. The producer originally sought a subject that would look spectacular in Cinerama. And what could be more spectacular than the great Krakatoa eruption of 1883? By 1968, with the end of the studio system and competition from television cutting into the box office, the motion picture industry was less eager to produce spectaculars, so it was a miracle this was even made. The disaster movie craze of the 70s didn't exist yet. And it's mediocre box office on it's original release did nothing to contribute to the craze. It only began to make real money when it was cut down to 100 minutes and re-released in 1969, mostly as a B feature for double bills. It did make enough of a dent in popular culture to be referenced twice on Monty Python's Flying Circus, and again on an episode of Fawlty Towers.

This is nothing like the other 70s disaster films, and feels more like something that would have come out in the 1940s. In 1883 a steam ship is charted to a patch of sea right next to the island with Krakatoa where another ship with a fortune in pearls is to have sunk in a storm. On board are a professional diver, a scientist with a diving bell,  some aviators who own a  passenger balloon, and a group of Japanese girls who are free divers, all to help the captain locate the wreck of the sunken ship so he can claim the treasure. Also on board are a group of convicts the ship is forced to transport in it's hold to a prison colony. There are a few minor hitches, like the balloon being swept by the winds up over Krakatoa as it erupts, setting the gondola on fire and forcing the aviators to jump into the ocean, the diver being addicted to opium and nearly raping one of the Japanese girls while high, and the diving bell getting stuck on some rocks and springing a leak necessitating the diver to get it loose, and of course the predictable jail break by the convicts who temporarily take over the ship.  As the eruptions from Krakatoa get worse, the captain decided to attempt to rescue children at an orphanage on the nearby island of Palembang. This necessitates sailing past the volcano as burning lava rocks fall from the sky and lava pours into the sea. At this point the disaster part finally kicks in. After safely   sailing past the volcano with only one fatality ( one of the Japanese girls who panicked, and ran out onto the deck where a lava boulder landed right on top of her, ) the ship arrives at Palembang only to see the entire town engulfed in flames. Setting out to sea, they find a junk filled with the children and nuns from the orphanage and rescue them. In the distance there is a mighty explosion as Krakatoa blows up. Realizing this will cause a tsunami, the captain decides to head out to deeper waters to ride it out, some of the other passengers decide to take a lifeboat to nearby Anjer and make a dash for higher ground. This turns out to be a mistake as the wave towers over the buildings in Anjer and kills everyone. The ship is thrashed by the wave, but survives with no fatalities, which is where the movie ends. Like I said, and old fashioned film that is nothing like any films from the 70s, and even has a scene where music fills the room while one of the characters sings a sons as if in a musical. I am sure 70s audiences going to see Volcano, a film that both boasted a destructive volcano and more destruction from a tidal wave, all in Feelaround, were confused to see such an old fashioned style film. Had this actually have been made in the 70s, there would have been a different plot with far more cast members getting killed, and a fatality every ten minutes.  It is actually a good film, but very out of place among the other 70s disaster films.

The Suicide Squad ( 2021 )
Had the extra time this week, so decided to rewatch this.

[Pastor of Muppets]

I saw Beetlejuice 2 last night.  It's a fun film.  Beetlegeuse is such an amusing character.  It was a complex film though.  There were three different antagonists, four if you count Rory, though he's more of a sleazeball than an antagonist.

[stethacantus]

Killer Clan ( 1976 )
This week I begin the Shaw Brothers Classics Volume 3 from Shout! Factory. As with any of these sets, I have to wonder how much double dipping will there be. Sure, these movies originally came out on DVD and were sometimes missing their English dub track. But my entertainment money needs to be budgeted, so can't just upgrade my movie collection even though I would like to. And if Shout! Factory had only released these as individual movies, I certainly would have skipped the ones I already own on DVD. This volume has 11 movies, 7 of which I already own, and only 4 I didn't.  But one of those films is Clan of the White Lotus, which was one of the Shaw films high on my wish list, and one of the films Dragon Dynasty had the rights to yet never released. Here is a breakdown of Volume 3:

Killer Clan( originally released by Dragon Dynasty )
Shaolin Avengers
The Web Of Death ( originally released by  Well Go )
The Vengeful Beauty
Death Duel ( originally released by Well Go )
Life Gamble ( originally released by Funimation )
Soul Of The Sword ( originally released by Funimation )
Deadly Breaking Sword (  originally released by Image Entertainment )
Clan of the White Lotus
Shaolin Abbott
Shaolin Rescuers ( originally released by Funimation )

According to Amazon, I purchased Killer Clan back in 2012. Yet as I watched this movie, nothing at all was familiar, as if I had never seen it before. Just to be sure I actually owned this film and it wasn't something I ordered from Amazon and never showed up, or perhaps did buy and somehow never watched, I took a quick look the box where most of my Dragon Dynasty DVDs ended up, and luckily it was there.  And with the plastic wrap removed, so I definitely watched it.  The beginning is a bit hard to follow, It starts with a hired killer swordsman who has never failed at an assignment. His next assignment is to kill the leader of a massive clan. The story then shifts to the clan and how they seek justice against a rival clan who's generals have just raped a girl in their territory. It takes a while for the original pot to return and merge with the second plot, but all becomes clear when the true villains are revealed. One of Shaw Brothers better wuxia films, and I have no idea why I didn't remember it.

The Andromeda Strain ( 1971 )
Is this a disaster film? It appears on a lot of lists of 70s disaster movies. But I am not quite sure. A couple of soldiers are sent to a small desert town to retrieve a space probe that has just returned with samples from an asteroid. They discover everyone in town is dead, and soon the soldiers drop dead themselves. This activates the wildfire protocol, a covert government program set up just in case of some alien virus reaches earth. It includes an underground base where the lab to study the virus is  located, which is rigged with a nuclear bomb that will go off if the virus ever breaches the lab and is at risk to escape. Sure, we get a town of dead people, but we first see this town after the virus has killed them. The majority of this film is the scientists studying the disease and trying to figure out how to kill it. The only other thing that seems disastrous is when the nuclear bomb starts to count down and one of the scientists needs to deactivate it. An engaging thriller despite almost nothing happening for most of it's 2 hour and 10 minute running time.