What was the last movie you watched?

[Edward J Grug III]

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.

I enjoyed watching it more than I thought I would, but I wish it had either been significantly better or significantly worse.

Everyone in it was doing a great job, and it looked really good (better than anything I've seen from Burton in a long time)

But also, there was too many characters and too many threads so that none were really done justice. The ex-wife should have been it's own movie.

Also... like I get what they were doing with her dad and everything, but if you know WHY he's not in the film, it's a bit of a bummer every time they put him on screen and you are reminded of the real world. It seemed like a not great choice to me.

[stethacantus]

From Russia With Lev ( 2024 )
Friday night MSNBC debuted a documentary about Lev Parnes, the Ukrainian businessman who along with Giuliani, went to the Ukraine to convince the government to announce a criminal investigation against Joe and Hunter Biden  i order to influence the 2020 election. Mostly an interview with Lev who was eager to rat Trump out after Trump allowed him to be arrested, then claimed he didn't know him.



Shailin Avengers ( 1976 )
This was towards the end of Chang Cheh's Shaolin cycle, generally retelling he same story from the first film in the cycle, Men From The Monastery


Ski Lift To Death ( 1978 )
When it comes to collecting the made for television films for a 70s Disaster Movie collection, things get impossible. Most television films were the equivalent of mockbusters, made for the broadcast networks to fill their movie of the week time slots in between the weeks they aired real theatrical films. All pretty much filler shot on the cheap starring television actors who only did these films on their summer hiatus from their television series because their contracts with the networks required them to do one  network special and one television film. Never promoted beyond the network itself, they were forgotten soon after they aired. Occasionally one of the stars in a television movie became popular, and their television film would be dusted off and rereleased on home video with that star prominently displayed on the box and listed as the star, even if they only had a bit part in the actual film. But that was back when there were small independent home video companies who could not afford the rights to major theatrical films, most of which were driven out of business by the 90s as the major studios began releasing more of their films at sales prices. The result is that not very many of the made for television disaster movies got released on DVD, let alone got a Blu-ray release. The bulk of the ones that did get a Blu-ray release were the ones Irwin Allen produced in their Irwin Allen Master of Disaster collection. But most have not been. I wanted Ski Lift To Death in my collection for the simple reason that it was the cheapest disaster movie ever made. A freak wind causes a ski lift to stop and trap the skiers in mid transit, necessitating their rescue. This wasn't a case of scraping the bottom of the barrel on disasters as every other idea for a disaster had been done by 1978, but because it was a cheap enough disaster to film on a made for television budget. It got a home video release by a VHS company called Goodtimes in the late 80s. Goodtimes began as another one of those companies that released public domain films on VHS before moving into releasing B movies and television films. They sold through stores like Woolworth and at a price point of $10 a tape, this at a time when the price of a home video was usually $90, even from companies that exclusively released public domain films. Their were eventually other companies that followed Goodtimes business model, releasing movies they got the rights to cheaply on VHS for $10, all which dominates the shelves of stores like Coconuts and Suncoast. Being able to afford a home video was still a novelty in the 80s, so many Americans bought these movies to fill their VHS movie libraries.  The major studios began releasing random films at affordable prices, and by the time the industry switched to DVD, began releasing all of their films and television series at affordable prices,  driving companies like Goodtimes out of business. Goodtimes had a habit of releasing copyrighted movies they had no license to under the premise that the studios never bothered to renew the copyright to their pan and scan television edits, putting them into the public domain. Of course, the studios could easily prove in court that the copyright to the original theatrical release superseded the rights to the television edit, and usually obtained a cease and desist order, by which time Goodtimes had already released the first printing. A legal loophole that allowed them to release quite a few major films on their label. I can't be sure if Ski Lift to Death fell under one of these loopholes, but Goodtimes did give a brief release of the film to capitalize on the popularity of actor Don Johnson who had a supporting role in the film, and was promoted as the film's star on the box. The movie re-emerged in the 90s on DVD as Snow Blind, in one of those questionable releases by a shady home video company called Legacy where the title of the film was changed  to temporarily throw off the copyright holders. More recently the Snow Blind variant of the film has been released on DVD as an obvious bootleg. That is where I found it in the DVD section of a Dollar Tree, priced at $5. The box screamed "Bootleg" with the artwork now reduced to what looks like pictures taken by pointing the camera at a television screen of the movie playing. But $5? I thought, what the hell. This may be the only way to get this movie into my collection. How bad could it be?

Well, very terrible. Either Goodtimes or a later VHS company sped the film up so it's 1 hour 40 minutes run time was reduced to 59 minutes, no doubt to fit on a cheaper T-60 video tape, or more likely a T-30 and recorded at the LP speed. Goodtimes themselves seems to have sourced the film from a recording of a television broadcast as the music suddenly drops during the closing credits and is replaced with the music from the opening credits. this at the part of the film when a network announcer usually announced the upcoming programs, or asked you to stay tuned to the local news. The Goodtimes release was mastered as the Legacy release, making it at least the third generation VHS copy from it's television broadcast. From there it most likely ended up online, possibly uploaded to Youtube, or floating around as a pirated torrent before Saturn Video released it as this Bootleg. And despite the box having the Saturn Video logo, I sincerely doubt this was the original Saturn Video from the 80s and 90s that was known for releasing cheap martial arts films with no name actors for budget prices. Most likely someone added the Saturn Video logo to give the bootleg some credibility. The picture is heavy on the ghost shadows and washed of color tones. Thankfully, television movies which were shot for low definition television sets, had mostly every detail in frame close enough that you can still tell what is going on, even with a multi generation picture. The sound is slightly muffled, but the few lines I could not make out were not important. The sped up run-time is probably an improvement, as this is basically a dull film that you would not want to spend more than an hour watching anyway.

The plot: Deborah Raffin is a world champion skier who has just returned to her home town because it's local ski resort is hosting a competition. That competition is Freestyle Skiing, which appears to have just ben jumping a single hump and doing a flip back in 1978. Competing in the tournament is Don Johnson as the current male freestyle champ. Deborah's former boyfriend is the former freestyle champ, who dropped out of the sport three years earlier to head the local ski patrol. Clu Gulager plays Deborah's agent who wants her to be his girlfriend, and begins to clash with her old boyfriend when she reconnects with him. Which inspires him to enter the freestyle competition for some reason. basically, the competition, which appears to be a real event, is an excuse for padding this film, and making their stars look like ski champs by intercutting closeups of them wearing the same outfits as the real skiers in the competition. Deborah is not in the competition, as it turs out her sport is... ski dancing? Yes, she is the champion of doing ballet on skis, and performs for the crowd just before the freestyle competition begins. Also padding the film is a tee-shirt competition. Not a wet Tee-shirt competition, but rather just a tee-shirt competition where the female contestants dance to disco music while wearing tee-shirts. Don is a judge, and ends up shacking up with the girl who wins the competition, only for her to tell him the next morning that she is underage ( 17 years old, and not 19 as he thought she was. ) The other two sub plots: Veronica Hamel is a television reporter covering the competition who sleeps with another reporter, who then tells her he is married the next morning. And the sub plot that is slightly interesting, Howard Duff is a businessman on vacation at the resort who for the past few decades has laundered money for the mob, and is now thinking of testifying against them to avoid going to jail. Little does he know that his trophy wife works for the mob, and failing to convince him not to testify, is asked to meet with a hitman who is hired to kill him on the ski slopes and hide his body. Of course, all of these sub-plots are just there to kill time until the actual disaster happens. Most of the mentioned characters end up on a ski lift at the same time when it is hit by a strong gust of wind, causing it to stop, and at least one gondola to break all but one of it's pins. Don and the people in his gondola are close enough to a tower   to climb down, however Don manages to break an arm on the way down. The former ski champ needs to slide across the cable to the gondola hanging by one pin to attach a harness in order to lower the occupants to the ground. One of them being the businessman stool pigeon who had just suffered a heart attack. Just before he is lowered down, his wife confesses that she colluded with a hitman, and warns him that his life is in danger. Once on the ground, the hitman attempts to kidnap the businessman and is fought off by the former ski champ. The hitman and trophy wife are arrested, the businessman and Don make it to a  hospital, and no one dies. Which begs to question why the film is called Ski Lift to Death. Attention is paid to only two of the stranded gondolas, which contain the cast members. There should be at least five more gondolas stuck, and at one point two extras call out from one of the stranded gondolas. We never see them or any other character rescued, so I have to guess they were left there to die. Maybe that was the death mentioned in the title. The movie ends with an unintentional laugh. After she and her former boyfriend agree to get back together for good, Deborah gets onto a train where she is headed to Iran to meet the Shah as part of some sort of promotion. This movie aired in March of 1978, less than a month before the revolution in Iran started which sent the Shah into exile. Which basically meant she survived one disaster to only end up in the middle of another disaster.


Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ( 1998 )
From Russia With Lev occasionally showed clips from popular  movies to prove points, and one of them was a two second clip from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Johnny Depp says "Don't stop here! This is bat country.", which put me in the mood to watch this film again.

[stethacantus]

The Web Of Death ( 1976 )
One of the Shaw Bothers films I bought about 15 years ago when it was released in North America on DVD by Well Go, and the only thing I remembered about it was the silly ending where the heads of all the clans of the martial arts world are trapped in a pavilion by a magic killer spider who blocks every exit with a magic web and gradually kills everyone inside with it's black magic. This was one of the double dip films in this Shaw Brothers Classics set, and I immediately was remembering the plot. Not from watching it a decade ago, but from more recently, as if I had just watched this plot in another film. I soon began to realize that this was a remake of The Thundering Sword from 1967, only instead of the clans trying to find the most powerful sword in the world, they were trying to find a magic killer spider. There are a few variations on the original plot, some which were improvements and some which created continuity errors. In addition, it reuses scenes and plot points from other 1960s wuxia films. Such as the heroin of the film is first introduced as a beggar, which is directly lifted from The Golden Sword   The Thundering Swords was more of a drama than action film. Web of Death has more fighting, and a lot of effect scenes with the villain using the spider to attack his victims, and the martial arts masters able to shoot energy from their hands.


Mayday At 40,000 Feet! ( 1976 )
What television disaster films lacked in budget they made up for with the seemingly mandatory exclamation point in the title. The disaster here, a convict being transferred to a new prison on a passenger jet grabs the gun of the marshal transporting him when that marshal has a fatal heart attack, then begins shooting. Aside from hitting the captain and one of the passengers, he also hits a hydraulic tube in the wall, making the jet nearly impossible to fly. With both the captain and the other passenger needing to reach a hospital as soon as possible, the co-pilot needs to land the jet immediately. However, a massive snowstorm has closed most of the airports forcing him to fly the extra miles with the crippled jet to Chicago. And if that isn't pressure enough, the injured passenger is his fiancée. A lot of the made for television disaster films took place on airliners, because they were the cheapest to film provided the jet never actually crashes. But they ate up a lot  of airliner disaster plots, which is why the Airport film series ran dry of  ideas by 1979. My only problem with this film is that the actual disaster ( the shootout that cripples the jet ) does not take place until there is only a half hour left, which means the first hour of this film is mostly the sub plots with the other characters, which are all basically padding. So this film is mostly boring  for it's first two thirds run time.

[Pastor of Muppets]

I tried to watch The Fast and The Furious.  I hoped it could be good, goofy, fun, and stupid.  I just found the movie aggressive.  I got annoyed and turned it off after 20 minutes.

[stethacantus]

Vengeful Beauty ( 1978 )
Shaw Brothers had a huge hit in 1975 with The Flying Guillotine, the tale of a squad of assassins in Quing Dynasty China who's weapon is a flying disk on the end of a chain, which beheads it's victims. Shaw Brothers immediately wanted a sequel, but director Ho Meg Hua wasn't interested. The two leads from the first film, Chen Kuan Tai and Liu Wu Chi, had agreed to return. Shaws assigned the sequel to another director, and he dropped out after a few months. Filming was delayed until new director could take over, during which time actress Liu Wu Chi mysteriously disappeared. Her part was recast, and after a couple of weeks of the new actress reshooting her scenes, she quit Shaw Brothers and retired from show business. So now her scenes needed to be reshot with aq third actress. Then Chen Kuan Tai himself quit Shaw Brothers, and the entire film needed to be reshot. Flying Guillotine 2 would finally be completed in 1978. During the long delay, Jimmy Wang Yu made his own Flying Guillotine film, Master of the Flying Guillotine in 1976. Jimmy had quit the studio in 1970, going to Tiwan to shoot his films  as his contract with Shaw Brothers only prevented him for working for other studios in Hong Kong. Master of the Flying Guillotine was a double f#$k  you to his former studio, not only beating them to the theaters with an unofficial Flying Guillotine sequel, but making it a sequel to The One Armed Boxer, which had been a combination of two hit films Jimmy had done for Shaw Brothers, The One Armed Swordsman and The Chinese Boxer. As the much delayed Flying Guillotine 2 was nearing completion, director Ho Meng Hua suddenly pitched the studio his own sequel. Once again he was interested in making a second Flying Guillotine film. So Shaw Brothers made that as well, but gave it the title of Vengeful Beauty instead of Flying Guillotine 2 or Flying Guillotine 3. This film opens with a group of Guillotine assassins attempting to kill the proof reader of a book that criticized the Emperor. But instead of finding the proof reader in his home, they find a female vigilante who calls herself The Bloody Hibiscus and kills them all. The movie then goes into a flashback of her origin story. Her husband was  a police inspector who unwittingly arrested a member of the Guillotine squad after they assassinated a government official. The Emperor orders the inspector and his entire family to be killed by the Guillotine squad. Fortunately, he had sent his pregnant wife away just before the squad attacked. She is a martial arts expert, and desires to take vengeance, but realizing she needs to protect her husband's unborn child, goes on the run. The film then details the many attempts made to kill her, and after one attempt causes her to miscarriage, her deciding to go after the leader of the guillotine squad. here is barely any flying guillotine action in this film, and what little is shown is made from reused footage from the first film. It works as a vengeance film, and it set up for what could have been a series of  Bloody Hibiscus movies. But this was where Shaw Brothers abandoned the Flying Guillotine franchise.


The Horror At 37,000 Feet ( 1973 )
So... I was working through the few 70s made for television disaster movies released on home video. When I was ordering Mayday At 40,000 Feet, Amazon suggested this film. I took a quick glance at the synopsis and it seemed like a disaster movie. And it sort of is a disaster film, if you count a cursed artifact causing the disaster a disaster movie. A rich couple has removed an alter from an ancient British church and is taking it back to their Las Angeles home in the luggage compartment of a jet. It turns out that alter had been used for centuries by the druids who used it every summer solstice to make sacrifices, and with the solstice taking place during the flight, the alter demands a sacrifice. The jet itself gets stuck in mid air, unable to move forward no matter which direction it turns due to freak winds. Meanwhile the passengers are beginning to get scared and demand someone offer themselves as a sacrifice. There is enough disaster movie stuff going on in this film for it to just barely qualify, But this is basically an extended Outer Limits episode with an all star cast of television stars.

I am also attempting the 31 days 31 horror movie challenge, and have so far watched Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein ( 1948 ), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ( 1994 ), Bride of Chucky ( 1998 ), Wicked City ( 1992 ), Untold Story ( 1993 ) and The Witch From Nepal ( 1986 )

[stethacantus]

Death Duel ( 1977 )
The Third Master gets the moniker of God of Swordsmen for having never been beaten in a fight, resulting in hundreds of swordsmen going to his manor every year to challenge him. Meanwhile another swordsman named Yen Shihsan has made a reputation of being the Soul of Swords for also being unbeatable. He journeys t the island where the Third Master's manor is, only to find out that he died a few weeks earlier. Actually, Third Master has faked his own death and has gone out into the world as a homeless wanderer because he is fed up with killing. He soon finds a home with a kindly family, falling in love with the daughter Hsiao Li. However, some swordsmen doubt that the God of Swords is dead, and soon figure out where he is. despite all efforts to keep his identity concealed, the family he lives with end up being killed one by one, as he is forced to fight the challengers, eventually having a duel with Yen Shihsan who he believes killed Hsiao Li. it is an all around tragic film for all the characters. Also, there are a lot of cameos from big named Shaw actors, sometimes playing characters from other Shaw Wuxia films.

Cyclone ( 1978 )
The 70sdisaster movie with the worst reputation is Cyclone, a Mexican film shot for distribution in the United States featuring mostly Mexican actors dubbed into English, and a few familiar American actors, including Lionel Stander a year before the series Heart to Heart. Cyclone attempted to capitalize both the disaster movie gene and Jaws, but as cheaply as possible. A sudden storm hits a costal town of Mexico. Somewhere off shore a glass bottom tourist boat gets caught i the storm, along with a fishing vessel. Also caught in the storm is an airliner which crashes into the ocean. The fishing vessel sinks, and only for men make it onto a lifeboat. After a day floating around at sea, they run into the survivors of the downed airliner who are floating around in life preservers, and take the women onto the boat while allowing the men to hang onto the side. about a day later they float next to the crippled tourist boat, which has been rationing their water. all of them spend the next week or so adrift, waiting for help that never comes, and eventually resorting to cannibalism. After rain provides more water, he captain of the fishing vessel decides to make a sail out of shirts and attach it to the life boat to find help, taking a few of the passengers with him. He finds a yacht, who's captain radios in that there are survivors on the crippled tourist ship. But just before the rescue plane arrives, the remaining tourists get into a fight over the water ration, and manage to break the glass at the bottom of the boat, sinking it. Thats when the sharks show up, eating nearly all of them before the rescue sea plane lands to get them. Tis is one of those cheap movies where a storm is simulated by shaking a boat and squirting the cast with a fire hose. Stock footage of storms from other movies is used, as is actual news reel footage from real floods for the devastation of the coastal town. Just about the only effort put into this film is giving the sharks their own theme music for every time they show up. The only copy of this film available on DVD is mastered from a VHS release in the 80s retitled Terror Storm, which tells you that it was released without paying royalties to the copyright holders, and changed the name so it would take them a while to realize someone was releasing their film on home video without their consent. Not only that, it appears as if this was a third generation copy made from that VHS release, so very poor quality of an already poor quality film.


I have also continued watching films for the 31 day horror movie challenge which included Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires ( 1974 ), Black Magic ( 1975 ), Seeding of a Ghost ( 1983 ), The Killer Snakes ( 1974 ),  Human Lanterns ( 1982 ), Corpse Mania ( 1981 ), and Häxen ( 1922 )

[stethacantus]

Life Gamble ( 1979 )
Another one of those films where when any character shows up on screen, they have a complicated back story and agenda to learn, and more and more characters show up as the movie progresses, and it gets more and more complicated as the film progresses, so you constantly need to be thinking and listening ( or reading the subtitles when using the original language soundtrack )and remembering  everything about the characters when they reappear.  The basic story is about four bandits who steal a jade amulet from a transport, and decide to gamble among themselves to see which one of them gets the loot in a game moderated by a famous gambler.. Meanwhile, there are a whole host of characters who know the four bandits who want to either steal the jade for themselves, or return it to it's owner, although some of the characters seemingly to be on the side of law and order secretly want to steal the amulet themselves, and some of those wanting to steal the amulet are planning to double-cross their partner. It helped that I had seen this film before, so it wasn't as hard to follow this time around.

Gold ( 1972 )
Starting to get down to the last of the disaster movies. This was one I debated getting. It is on a few disaster movie lists, but didn't seem to be a disaster movie in any  synopsis of it, and was unclear from the trailer. Someone uploaded it for free on YouTube, and before it was removed, I scanned the film to see if there was a disaster, and it seemed to have one. The plot: a group of evil investors want to drive up the value of gold by destroying the gold mines of South Africa. To do this, they see to it that an inexperienced middle manager ( Roger Moore ) is hied as the new manager of a South African gold mine, and then trick him into digging a tunnel into an underground lake, telling him that despite reports that there is an aquifer in that area, there is actually a major gold vein. If breached, the aquifer will not only flood that mine, but all the other neighboring gold mines. The aquifer is breached, and Moore descends the mine to set off explosives which should close  off the flood. So yea, sort of a disaster film. More than enough disaster to qualify as part of the genre.

I also watched 7 more movies  this week as part of the 31 day 3 horror movie challenge. King Kong ( 1933 ), Bigfoot ( 2012 ), Subterano ( 2003 ), Food of the Gods ( 1976 ), Frogs ( 1972 ), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari ( 1920 ) and Gotham ( 1988 )

[stethacantus]

Soul of the Sword ( 1978 )
A swordsman called Nameless seeks to beat the unbeatable King of Swords in a duel, and he is willing to sacrifice anything to do it.

Concorde Affair '79 ( 1979 )
I wasn't sure I would get this one, because although being on DVD, the print for this release is notoriously low grade. Yet, after already adding poor quality releases of other disaster movies  I decided what the hell. At the moment it looks like I can actually complete collecting all the disaster moves released in the United States in the 70s, so not buying this one would be the one hole in my collection. The company that released this one on DVD is called Substance, and on the box it claims "Digitally Remastered" and "Enhanced Audio", which I doubt. This was obviously mastered from a VHS source ( there are some tracking flaws from the original transfer ) and appears to be multiple generations old. However, Substance did better than usual artwork for the case cover featuring the entire cast, and even added cast and crew bios and filmographies as a bonus. So despite not being able to track down an actual film print for a master, they at the least tried to do a professional job with the rest of the DVD. There is even an animated menu screen, where the other poor quality DVDs had no menu at all.

Concorde Affair '79 was a quickie Italian film with recognizable stars like Joseph Cotten and Van Johnson in short shot in an afternoon roles so Americans would think it was a Hollywood film. And the unbelievable part, this movie was made because the Italians thought they could capitalize on the success of the upcoming release of Concorde: Airport '79, a film which ultimately bombed and ended the Airport franchise. The verdict: Concorde Affair '79 is way better than Concorde: Airport '79. In fact, it is actually a good film when it should have been crap. James Franciscus, who actually does have a sizable role in this film, stars as an investigative reporter who undercovers a plot to sabotage Concordes by the airliner industry who's 747s will be obsolete if everyone starts flying SSTs. It's not a great film, but is reasonably entertaining, so a shame no actual attempt was made to remaster this from a film print, and the only DVD release is from a bootleg of an old VHS release.

Also this week, I have watched 7 more movies for the 31 day 31 horror movie challenge. The Batman vs Dracula, Embrace of the Vampire, Brightburn, The Grudge ( US ), The Craft, Man Thing and From Beyond. 

[Pastor of Muppets]

I watched Basic Instinct yesterday.  I found this movie mostly silly and I laughed a lot.  The eroticism was over the top and Michael Douglas especially really chewed the scenery.

[stethacantus]

The Deadly Breaking Sword ( 1979 )
This is the first of the post Snake in the Eagle's Shadow movies made at Shaw Brothers. With the record breaking success of Snake in the Eagle's Shadow followed by the success of Drunken Master, every studio began adding humor to their martial arts films. Alexader Fu Sheng was a very similar actor to Jackie Chan who portrayed similar young rebellious characters to Jackie Chan's comedic screen character, so Shaw Brothers adjusted his character to be more like Jackie Chan. The Deadly Breaking Sword shows that. A degenerate gambler who always loses, he ends up in debt with the gambling hall and forced to work as a bouncer for them until he pays his debt off. He is the comedy relief of the film who's character could easily be edited out of the film without changing the plot. Otherwise this is a Ti Lung wuxia movie where he is a famous swordsman called "he Deadly Breaking Sword" who is known for defeating his opponents by a death blow that always breaks off an inch of his sword. S you get a serious  late 70s wuxia film interlaced with a kung fu comedy. This was what most of the Shaw Brothers martial arts films were like in the studio's final years, and it was often like whiplash when these films switched back and forth between comedy and serious drama.

The Medusa Touch ( 1978 )
It was the closest weekend to Halloween, so what would be more appropriate than a horror themed disaster film? Actually, the timing of this film in my schedule had nothing to do with planning a horror disaster film for Halloween, instead just creepy coincidence.  I think I started collecting 70s disaster movies a year or two too late. Most of them are currently out of print. For some I ended up buying foreign releases that were mercifully region free. But for some, all which was available was whatever effect I could get off of eBay for whatever marked up price the seller asking for. I kept tabs, and pounced on a couple of factory sealed copies the seller didn't realize was supposed to be "rare and out of print" and sold close to or below retail.  Now I am down to the last few films that have so few copies in the wild that even a used copy is hard to find, so have to pay around $50 or more. The Medusa Touch was one that for whatever reason was impossible to find a listing for a North American release. For many months I was convinced it had only been released on home video in Europe and was region blocked because Amazon had no listing for an American release during searches. And for a few months I thought this was one film that would never be in my collection.  Oh well, it's British, not Hollywood, and it is more of a horror film than a disaster movie, so I guess I will have to ignore it. But then a few months ago I did a backwards search on Amazon and found that indeed there was a North American release, curiosly listed as "unavailable" but with out the additional words "we don't know when this item will be back in stock". Something that usually occurs when something they were selling turned out to be bootlegged.  So basically this item was delisted? On ebay it was offered for $100 and up factory sealed as "rare", and only two listings among the three pages of listing for European releases. I kept monitoring eBay because maybe one of those sellers would come to his senses and drop the price. Then last week someone listed a factory sealed copy for $15, and I pounced on it. It was delivered Monday while the other two movies I ordered on eBay will not arrive until sometime next week. So, coincidence.

Saturday night I found out exactly why Amazon delisted it. It was a legitimate release. A combo set with both a DVD and Blu-ray.  But when I loaded up the Blu-ray, the menu screen popped on, but without any options. No matter what button I pressed, the movie didn't start. Just the animated menu screen repeating over and over again.  Was it some sort of region lock? I put the DVD on, the same menu screen popped on, and this time the options appeared. Movie, subtitles, audio, chapters, bonus. I checked and the movie on the DVD was playable in North America. Perhaps if I load the Blu-ray again, this time the menu screen will work? But no. Menu screen, no options.  One thing I knew about Blu-ray and DVD players, you can fool around with the settings to find shit not on the menu.  Sometimes referred to as Easter eggs, but Easter eggs are accessible through the menu via hidden icons. I am talking about extras already on the DVD/Blu-ray program that they were unable to licenses and so simply removed from the menu instead of reprogramming the disk. These are usually music videos, and sometimes shorts. This happens a lot with those Canadian discs where the US release had something as an extra not licensed for Canada.  So I fussed around with the settings and found the full movie. Anyone buying this for the Blu-ray would have not bothered to find the movie and returned it as defective.  No mention of this in the Amazon buyer reviews, but they may have assumed it was a region lock issue, and there were many complaints about that.  If you did manage to play the movie on Blu-ray, it suddenly craps out during the climatic disaster, as if there were some sort of scratch on the disc, which forced me to switch to the DVD to end the film. Fortunately he DVD quality is almost equal to the Blu-ray quality. I examined the disc and found neither scratches nor any foreign substance on the disc. So once again, a manufacturing flaw. For a small boutique company, having a defect in the playback program is a devastating extra expense.  Far worse if the flaw was not caught before all the discs were pressed. Little more to do than recall the defective discs, then sue the company that programed the disc for not beta testing for quality before delivering the program. And if they declare bankruptcy or pull out some fine print in their contract shielding them from lawsuits, then that usually means the entire release gets canceled. I don't know how many times some release I was looking forward to didn't get released, and I later found out the printing was defective.

The film itself centers around a comatose Richard Burton and the investigation as to who bludgeoned him, during which we learn he has telekinetic powers and can cause disasters with his mind. I can't really say any more without spoiling what is mostly a who-done-it mystery movie, or giving away the ending, but needless to say that Burton causes enough disasters to qualify this as a disaster movie, including a spectacular disaster that closes the film.  I would put this in the top five of the best 70s disaster movies, as well as one of he best 70s horror films.

[stethacantus]

Clan of the White Lotus ( 1980 )
One of the best of the Shaw Brothers films. After the defeat of Pai Mei by two Shaolin students, his teacher, Priest White Lotus, seeks revenge. Pretty much the same plot as Executioners  From Shaolin where the hero has multiple encounters wit a white haired master and is continuous beaten in fights, each time going off to learn a new fighting technique that is sure to counter the master's unbeatable Kung Fu. This movie was sometimes referred to as a sequel to Executioners From Shaolin and other times as a remake. It is neither. Choreographed by Lau Kar Leung who directed Executioners From Shaolin, giving him the opportunity to choreograph any additional fights he may have thought of since that film using the same basic formula of an undefeatable master. However, directorial duties went to actor Lo Leih, making this his directorial masterpiece.  This was one of the films Harvey Weinstein kept out of North America for so long when he acquired the distribution rights for Dragon Dynasty, yet never released it.



Avalanche ( 1978 )
I debated getting this one. It's out of print and even a used copy on eBay goes for more than $50, although a seller on Amazon had it listed for New for 54$, which I am sure is just a used copy resealed. And I already have the movie.  As an MST3K episode.  A most likely edited version with riffs over the audio and those shadows of the riffers blocking the bottom of the screen.  But it sort of counts as having it in my collection, right? I finally gave in as I got down to the last few films to complete my collection. This was the late Roger Corman's only attempt at producing a disaster movie, although not his first. In 1974 New World got in on the disaster movie craze by acquiring the rights to a 1973 Japanese disaster film The Sinking of Japan, then re-editing it and cutting in brand new scenes with Lorne Green, released it in North America in 1975 as Tidal Wave. Sadly, that American version has never been released on home video anywhere, so will not be in my collection.  Tidal Wave was enough of a hit that Corman decided to invest the most money he ever had into a movie to produce his own original all-star disaster movie. CBS offered and additional $2 million to the budget for the exclusive broadcast rights, provided Corman could cast two A list actors in the leads. about half of that money went to casting Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow. Despite the movie failing at the box office, Corman claims the money CBS paid offset their entire budget with a few hundred thousand left over, making it New World Pictures most profitable film.  In it's raw unriffed form, Avalanche is a 90 minute disaster film where you need to wait an hour for the disaster to begin, during which time you follow a bunch of often hard to follow subplots that are all abandoned the minute the disaster happens. So basically, without the riffs, this is barely entertaining. Thank God Corman would only pay enough for a 90 minute film.

[Charles Castle]

I don't think more than five minutes had elapsed at the start of Immaculate (2024, directed by Michael Mohan) before I started thinking about the Magdalene laundries and residential schools. What goes on in the convent depicted in this film is not so far outside the actions of the actual Roman Catholic Church that the film can be dismissed as mere exploitation. Don't get me wrong, it IS exploitation, but that's beside the point. It has such theological and ideological axes to grind that it was bound to find Evangelical Christians and devout Catholics and right wing trolls of all sorts squawking when the film reached its end. This film hasn't got time for their bullshit. It has a particular shape of reality it wants to express and it uses bludgeons to present it. It's crude, but it's brutally effective.

The plot follows American novitiate Sister Cecilia traveling to the convent in Italy where she will take her vows. Cecilia has felt a deep religious calling since surviving a drowning in childhood during which she was "dead" for several minutes before being revived. She has been invited to the convent by Father Tadeschi, and in due course takes her vows. The convent is a hospice for nuns at the end of their lives. Cecilia feels a bit adrift at first, given that her Italian is poor. She befriends Sister Gwen, who speaks English. As she explores her new environs, she notices strange occurrences. Some of the nuns have crosses branded or scarred on the soles of their feet. The convent's private chapel is a reliquary in which, she discovers, is one of the nails used in the crucifiction. One night, she dreams of hooded figures gathered around her against which she has no ability to resist. Afterward, she finds that she has become pregnant, though her maidenhead is intact. The other nuns view this as a miracle, save for Sister Isabella, who attacks Cecilia and tries to drown her before throwing herself from the roof of the convent. The pregnancy goes poorly for Cecilia, and when she loses a tooth, she demands to be taken to a hospital. Father Tadeschi refuses. Meanwhile, the old nuns who are the convent's patients begin to view Cecilia with religious awe. Sister Gwen, however, takes a stand against her superiors, and pays a price for it. After faking a miscarriage fails to liberate her from the convent, Cecilia becomes resigned to her fate, especially after her own feet are branded to keep her from escaping. But she's got a plan. She bides her time until right before her labor. When she manages to escape her confinement, she discovers the true horror of what the Church has planned for her.

One right wing reaction to Immaculate holds that star Sydney Sweeney was shoved into this film because she was popular among conservative Christian men and that the film is intended to degrade her in the eyes of that audience and make them sad in their pants. I am sincerely skeptical of her alleged popularity among this demographic because have you actually seen Euphoria? I mean, really. Additionally, nobody shoved Sweeney into doing anything. She originally auditioned for the role a decade ago, never forgot it, and bought the rights herself to get it made. It's right there in the credits: Producer Sydney Sweeney. It is fair to say that the actress herself has an ideological interest in the film. The elephant in the room when listening to these kinds of critics is that this is a film about abortion and reproductive rights that is categorically opposed to the anti-choice right and to the Catholic Church and to Evangelical Christianity more generally, all of whom it views as anti-woman and anti-life. And because it was released by a small distributor--Neon has a history of releasing lefty content (they release films by Laura Poitras, for crying out loud)--it comes to the screen more or less unfiltered.

I don't typically like devil movies or possession movies all that much. They tend to act as propaganda for religion, for Christianity, and for the Catholic Church more specifically. This film acts in opposition to that impulse, and I think that it's about time that impulse was questioned. The Exorcist, after all, came after a decade of upheaval created by young people and its central thesis was that foul-mouthed young people were driving the world to hell in a handbasket almost literally and the only way to stop it was to coerce the acceptance of the authority and supernatural power of the Church. It paved the way for the politics of the Reagan era. Its effect still echoes in contemporary politics, so I welcome a countervailing narrative.

It doesn't take a detective to see this film as a reflection of the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2022. A woman who is forced to carry a baby not of her making by a patriarchal Church? Yeah. That's obvious. This film re-writes the end of Rosemary's Baby with the mother nipping things in the bud in the way that Rosemary Woodhouse should have done once she saw that her baby had "his father's eyes." Perhaps less obvious is a broader culture war being fought over religion and secularism. This is a film with overtly religious themes, but it is hostile to religion in a way that its contemporaneous fellow traveler, The First Omen, is not. In spite of its trappings, this is not a devil movie. This is a "God" movie, where the villains of the piece are trying to engineer The Second Coming. Even dressed up in horror movie trappings, this is nakedly opposed to the project by the religious right to bring about exactly the same thing in the real world outside the movie screen. The Evangelical project in Israel, for one example, is inspired by this very impulse. The Jews must remain in Israel/Palestine for Jesus to return in their framing of the end times. Immaculate is a film that both speaks to its moment in time and is of its moment in time.

The genre horror here functions in three other separate keys beyond the reproductive nightmare it presents. At the outset, it functions as a paranoia thriller, in which its central character doesn't know who to trust and who is blocked at every turn from saving herself by people she trusted. It also functions as a Christian version of a folk horror film. The scene where Sister Cecilia is dressed up as the Madonna and worshiped by the nuns who are in on the plot is of a piece with Florence Pugh's flowery get up in Midsommar. The ultimate plot, in which a priest who used to be a geneticist attempts to clone Jesus Christ from the blood remaining on one of the nails used in the crucifixion is the sort of thing Nigel Kneale might have written if he had had a taste for irreligious mockery. All of these strains weave together with the dominant narrative to create a bigger picture that is so much more horrible than any of these ideas alone. Each narrative twine leads to Sister Cecilia biting the umbilical cord that ties her to their plot, to the Church, and maybe to faith generally. She does this both figuratively and literally. The villains here would have done well to heed their own holy book, which says that no man knows the hour of the second coming, that it will come like a thief in the night.

I know plenty of people who question whether Sydney Sweeney is a good actor or not. I get that. She has a tendency to mush her words like a teenager and some viewers won't like that. But for this film, she's fine. She performs every emotion she's asked to perform. The final scene, when she finally gives birth and has a choice to make, asks her to go beyond where most actors will usually go. She's up to the challenge and performs it with a convincing mix of pain and horror and rage. She absolutely nails the landing. The scene where she fakes a miscarriage as a means of escaping the convent also works because Sweeney is even up to acting that she's acting, which is not an easy thing. Moreover, the rest of the cast has few native English speakers, so they throw Sweeney into stark contrast. She's on her own in this movie and she holds the camera.

I will mention yet again that I am a seriously lapsed Catholic. The Church has done so much evil in the world, from preventing Catholics from using condoms in the Global South in the face of HIV to the Magdalene Laundries and residential schools I've already mentioned to sex abuse scandals without number to financial shenanigans through the Vatican Bank to its complicity with fascism during World War II to its role as the handmaiden of Colonialism and so on and so on, that it's impossible for me to recognize it as a moral authority on anything. It's certainly impossible for me to recognize any moral authority on matters of bodily autonomy. This is an institution that used to castrate young boys to preserve their voices for singing in the Church's choirs, after all. Seriously, the last castrati died in the 20th Century, so it's NOT a medieval practice. The gall it takes to tell someone what they can and can't do with their own bodies after that boggles the mind. It's safe to say that I'm a key member of the demographic for any film that questions - or obliterates - the Church's moral authority. This one hits that itch just so.

[Charles Castle]

Blade (1998, directed by Stephen Norrington) didn't seem like a landmark film at the time of its release, but time has been kind to it. It remains a shock that this film and this character were the first foundations laid in what has become the Marvel Entertainment empire. Blade never had a comic book of his own prior to the movie. He was a supporting character from the long-forgotten Tomb of Dracula series in the 1970s, and yet was the first Marvel Comics character to become a big screen success after previous attempts--famously Howard the Duck, less famously The Punisher and Captain America--crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. But more than that Blade ushered in both a cinematic idiom and design aesthetic that would spread like wildfire throughout cinema. The Matrix movies were the immediate inheritors of Blade's fetish-attired action look, but you can see it in the Underworld movies, too, and in the Resident Evil movies, and in countless vampire films and television shows littering the backwash in the film's resulting wake in the myth pool. Pick up any given "urban fantasy" romance novel these days and you'll see an echo of Blade's influence right there on the cover. Guaranteed.

Blade follows the exploits of the eponymous hero as he fights a secret war against the vampires that live among us. Blade has the advantages granted to him by an accident of his birth: his mother was in labor when she was bitten by a vampire, and Blade was born with all of the powers of a vampire, but without the weaknesses. He can walk around in sunlight, he is unaffected by silver and garlic. Although he feels the thirst for blood, he can control it with a serum that's made for him by his mentor, Whistler. The vampires call him "The Daywalker." Opposing Blade is Deacon Frost, an upstart vampire lord who is upsetting the ancient order of the vampire clans. Frost is a "turned" vampire, rather than a pure vampire who was born as one, and the heads of the vampire clans distrust and dislike him. He has power and followers, though, and he has made a mission of translating parts of the Book of Erebus--the vampire "Bible"--whose meaning has been lost for millennia. His long game is to summon the vampire god, La Magra, and lead the vampires in a cleansing war to supplant humans as the dominant species on Earth. Caught in the middle of all of this is Dr. Karen Jensen, who is unfortunate enough to be an attending physician when the vampire, Quinn, is brought into her hospital as a burn victim from a run-in with Blade. Quinn revives, of course, and bites Karen as he makes his escape. Blade rescues Karen as Quinn makes his escape, then takes her to his lair in order to treat her for her vampirism. Whistler thinks he should have killed her, but they're in time and prevent her from becoming a vampire. She has a useful skill, though: she's a hematologist, and Blade is building up a resistance to the serum that keeps the thirst at bay. Meanwhile, Frost completes his project, and discovers that Blade himself is the key to summoning the vampire god.

Blade exists at a cinematic nexus between the action movies of the Hong Kong new wave, the CGI special effects movie, the superhero movie, and the horror movie. Unlike many films that occupy so many cinematic idioms at once, Blade seems to arise naturally from all of them. It announces itself as a horror movie right off: comely vampire Traci Lords leads an unwitting dudebro into the depths of a meat packing plant where a secret door hides a rave. The assorted clubgoers seem disinterested in him until the sprinkler system douses the entire room with blood. Like the punks a generation earlier, Goth culture is associated with deviance and villainy, but given that the heroes of this film are Goth-styled badasses, that's okay. It has an even hand with such things. Blade's arrival on the scene is the kind of iconic framing that action stars crave but either never get or which wind up looking ridiculous when they come. Wesley Snipes, done up in black armor, black duster, and bearing a silvered katana, does not look ridiculous. He looks like he means business, and the film proceeds with its first action sequence with Blade chopping up vampires like they're so many extras in a samurai film. The interplay between Blade and Quinn in this scene suggests a much longer story without actually having to stop and provide exposition ("I'm getting a little tired of chopping you up. Thought I might try fire for a change."). The war has been going on for a long time. Other elements of the film play like scenes from the apocalypse, whether the grotesque vampire archivist or Dragonetti's unfortunate encounter with the rising sun.

This is a lean action film, edited with propulsive forward momentum and rarely stopping for very long. The scenes that examine vampire politics are as close to resting points as the film permits. It's edited with a surprising clarity of action. The geography of characters is usually clear, and scenes flow from one to the next with a purpose. Director Stephen Norrington comes to the director's chair from a career in special effects, which wouldn't suggest he's a skilled director of bodies in motion, but he's mostly good at it here (his subsequent career, however...).  Norrington is a little too enamoured with digital effects, though, and when the film presents us with vampire disintegrations a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it begins to resemble a video game. When the film presents the god version of Deacon Frost, the special effects really let the film down (and did in 1998--this isn't just a matter of two decades plus worth of special effects advances). This doesn't hurt the movie as much as it could have, but it's a blemish on the film's otherwise sleek surfaces.

This film wouldn't work without Snipes. Snipes had been trying for years to get a Black Panther film off the ground, but wound up "settling" for Blade. He acted as a producer as well as a star and his investment in the role is visible in every scene he's in. Stephen Dorff, by contrast, seems like a frat boy playing at being a vampire, though this is of a piece, I think. Certainly, Frost earns all of the disdain Udo Kier's vampire chieftain feels toward him. Kris Kristofferson (RIP) is fine doing the crusty old man part as Whistler. He gets some of the film's best lines, and alone of the supporting cast members got invited back for the sequel. He's a good addition to the character's mythology. N'bushe Wright has rather more to do than most damsel/girlfriend characters, which is refreshing, but she's not co-equal with Blade himself. This is a one-man show.

In truth, I had mostly forgotten how much fun this film is in the wake of Guillermo Del Toro's sequel. This film is generally pretty good even if it doesn't have the visionary sensibilities of that second film. And Blade, not its sequel struck the spark. The conflagration is still burning.

[stethacantus]

Abbot of Shaolin ( 1979 )
Every now and then there is a week where both films were released the same year. This week ( and this wasn't planned ), two films released in the same year from the same studio. The Golden Triangle had broken up after Chang Cheh's Longbow Pictures went bankrupt. It had been director Chang's idea to team David and Ti Lung in his films, all three being known as the Golden Triangle.  Shaw Brothers had been distributing their movies in Taiwan.  But a new Taiwanese law prevented them from moving the money those movies earned out of Taiwan. Shaws solution was to allow Chang Cheh to make independent movies in Taiwan, financed by the money they could not move out of that country, which would be exclusively distributed by Shaw Brothers.  This both appeases Chang, who was fed up with the restrictions of working for a studio and ready to become an independent producer/director as King Hu had done, and for the Shaws to convert their Taiwanese money into more movies. The studio allowed Chang to bring with him many of their contract actors, including David Chaing and Ti Lung.  When the Taiwanese money ran out, Longbow folded, and Chang returned to the Shaw Brothers Hong Kong studios along with the actors he had borrowed, which other directors at Shaw Brothers wanted to cast in their films. Ti Lung and David Chaing were broken up as a team as they kept ending up in separate films. Chang Cheh had been prepared for the loss of his favorite actors, replacing them with six actors he had found in Taiwan who would go on to be known as the Venom Mob. While Ti Lung would end up in some of the classic films of Shaw Brothers final years as a studio, Chaing would end up in pot boilers ( With exception to Shaolin Mantis of course. ) Abbot of Shaolin was one of those potboilers, mixing up the various legends of the Southern Shaolin temple. This was actually released a year before Clan of the White Lotus and presents yet another version of how Pai Mei was killed, this time not involving a combination of Tiger and Crane style Kung Fu, but David using his iron finger technique on Pai Mai's only weak point. So, not the best Shaw Brothers film, but even their potboilers were entertaining.




Meteor ( 1979 )
This is the last of the OOP disaster movies I had no choice but to buy off of eBay. In 1975 Marvel collaborated for the first time with D.C. to publish a comic book adaption of M.G.M.s The Wizard of Oz which was released as an oversized treasury addition.  The book was a best seller, leading to Marvel adapting other movies, including Star Wars which they continued as a monthly comic book after the adaption was completed.  By that time studios were asking Marvel to adapt their upcoming movies as free publicity.  ( they were already sending Mad Magazine and Cracked movie stills and synopsis of their upcoming movies so their parodies would be on the news stands the week the film was released. )  Marvel usually released these adaption as one shot issues of their magazine sized Marvel Super Special.  Since these were movies yet to be released, the adaption often included scenes that ended up being cut prior to the film's release. Back then I had bought the Marvel adaption of Meteor, and like most of their movie adaptions, was drawn long before the movie was completed so that it would be on newsstands the week the film was released. And if you are interested in seeing Meteor then I suggest going on line and reading the Marvel adaption, because that was the version that was supposed to have been on screen.  A spectacular disaster movie with Michael Bay level effects. Or at least as close as movies were able to get to that level of effects in 1979. When I finally got around to watching Meteor, I was very disappointed. Most of them were stock footage from other disaster movies ( including footage bought from Roger Corman's Avalanche ), and what little effects were actually done for the film looked extremely cheap. Not that the production company didn't spend millions on the effects. That production company, Shaw Brothers. Even the in-house effects for their Mighty Peking Man released a few years earlier were far better than what is in this film. It should be pointed out that Shaws involvement was just financing the film. Everything else was left up to the Hollywood crew they hired to complete the film. Director  Ronald Neame had previously directed The Poseidon Adventure, which in 1979 was still considered the best disaster movie ever made by most critics, and surely could have done something with this film. He put the blame for the effects on academy award winning effects artist Frank Van Der Veer, who the Shaws had hired to create and film the disaster footage. After waiting months for the footage to be completed and the deadline for the films release a week away, Neame went to Van Der Veer's studio to discover he had only shot test footage for a few scenes on VHS, all of which was crude and unusable.   At the time Van Der Veer was being overwhelmed by other projects he was working on simultaneously, including Flash Gordon and 1941. Neame fired Van Der Veer, and the release date was pushed back four months from a summer release to a fall release while another effects team was hired to complete the effects with what budget was left, after Van Der Veer had spent most of the effects budget on his test footage. Shaw Brothers learned from this experience.  Their next international film Blade Runner would have the best effects in film for nearly a decade until finally surpassed in the 90s by Jurassic Park.

I still have Marvel Super Special #14 and consulted it  after watching the movie to see what had been changed due to the effects debacle. It appears that  Marvel must have begun the book before the movie had even been cast as none of the characters look like their screen counterparts, and was most likely begun based on an earlier draft of the script. It is likely Marvel began work on the book early and banked it waiting for a release date from the studio. Meteor was initially scheduled for release in June of 79, but having to reshoot the effects moved it's release date to October. The Marvel adaption was released in October as well, which meant they too pushed back their newsstand date rather than have it on the shelves four months early. Instead, they began publishing a three issue story arc for Warriors of the Shadow Realm. Oddly, Marvel Super Special #13 which ended that three story arc, and Marvel Super Special #14 were both released a week apart in early October, suggesting Marvel was informed of the film's release date at the last minute. ( Marvel Super Special #15 would be the adaption of Star Trek: The Motion Picture released two month later. Marvel Super Special  was normally published every other month. So this was a last minute release. ) One of the biggest script changes was changing the destruction of Tokyo to the destruction of Hong Kong. In the comic book, an amateur astronomer in Tokyo discovers the comet which eventually crosses through the asteroid belt , causing one to dislodge and head towards Earth. He is killed when one of the meteors lands in the ocean, causing a 100 foot tidal wave to destroy Tokyo. In the movie we see a Chinese character and his wife and kid killed in the Tokyo flood, but any scene of that character discovering the comet is no longer in the movie. When Shaw Bothers became the main producer of the movie, the city was most likely changes from Tokyo to Hong Kong at their insistence. The destruction of Hong Kong is reduced to optical effects of water over footage of civilians running, and not the spectacular effects of water knocking down buildings as the comic book showed. Another meteor was to hit the Alps, causing an avalanche that buries a town along with a televised ski marathon with hundreds of skiers. This is replaced with footage taken from the movie Avalanche Practical on set footage featuring Cybil Danning as a skier at a resort town who takes shelter in a building that gets demolished by the avalanche was matched to that footage. But as for the ski marathon, it could not be matched. So instead, it is sown in a news report which the anchorman says was footage taken moments before the avalanche. Perhaps the most devastating loss to the film is the destruction of New York City, which was to show a meteor taking off the top of the twin towers, the Empire State Building and 30 Rockerfeller Center along with other tall buildings ( which I assume would include Trump Tower based on the trajectory ) before plowing into Central Park. Instead we get stock footage of those buildings ( one showing the Twin Towers still under construction, which is impossible considering they were completed six years earlier, and had already been featured in the 1976 King Kong remake. ) followed by a quick cut to stock footage of explosions. And some news reel footage of an apartment building being demolished. Also missing was the cast emerging from their bunker and witnessing the destroyed city. Instead we get an aerial photo of the city with smoke and fire overlays. Meteor could have been a great disaster movie if not for the effects. Imagin how much a Michael Bay disaster film would suck if it had the effects of a typical Asylum film. Which is too bad. It's failure hastened the end of the 70s disaster movie era, destroyed co-production company American International Pictures, and contributed to Shaw Brothers decision to close their studios and instead put their money into their television network.

[stethacantus]

Shaolin Rescuers ( 1979 )
Shaw Brothers Classics Vol 3 ends with a Venom Mob film, Shaolin Rescuers. Three ner-do-well's with excellent martial arts skills ban together to help an injured Hung Hsi Kuan escape from the minions of Pai Mei.  A typical Venom Mob film, where Cheh surprisingly kills off a lot of Shaolin heroes shortly after they appear on screen. As if he was making some sort of comment on the half dozen Shaolin films he directed a few years earlier.



Hurricane ( 1979 )
I debated getting this film. Out of print and only available as an import, and by most reviews a romantic drama with a hurricane tagged on in the final reel which is over in a couple of minutes. But I wanted a complete collection  of 70s disaster movies, and this was promoted as a disaster movie when originally released. So yeah, the last country to keep this movie in print was Spain, which not only meant a Spanish language box, and Spanish language extras, but I was disappointed to learn that when you access the English language track, you get Spanish subtitles with no way to remove them. Turns out the disaster part of this film isn't as minimal as the online reviews say. With a two hour running time, the hurricane begins around the 30 minute mark, and reaches it's full destructive mode ten minutes later, leaving  20 minutes of disaster. I can see why many criticized this film. Like most dramas of the 70s, it was slow moving. If you are not use to that era then you would probably not be use to this. I have seen a lot of negative online reviews for The Godfather and Rocky because they complained of the pacing. But even for a 70s drama, this isn't very good. Your basic Romeo & Juliett style drama that is resolved by nearly every participant drowning. The white daughter of the Navy admiral made governor of Pago Pago falls in love with the young chief of one of the islands. When dad finds out, he has the chief arrested on some archaic charges, and gives him a stiff sentence to six years in a federal prison, which is lengthened to 16 years when he tries to escape during the transportation. The daughter helps him escape again from the naval ship taking him to the prison, during which a racist guard is killed. The couple make their way to the neighboring island, with dad and the rest of the men under his command in hot pursuit. And just as the couple is about to be separated again, the wall of the hurricane hits the island, destroying every structure and sinking every ship. Did I mention that 30 minutes of the movie is devoted to the daughter and chief having a romantic tryst  on his island which is why dad tried to lock him up? So yeh, if you watched this movie to see a hurricane, having to sit through a half hour of a Harlequin Romance Novel mid film would be a good reason to pan this film. The effects are slightly above Meteor, but obviously a lot of models were used, and the island hit by the storm was sparsely populated with just a few structures leading to very little in effects to begin with. And this movie had a reported $22 million budget, very little which went into any effects. This is nowhere near the worst of the 70s disaster films, but not among the good ones either.