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borg1005-1
discovered I'm a closet gypsy and born 50 years too late.
Been a movie fan/addict since the 50s and still prefer many of the old black and whites to the stuff put out today.
Best Sci-Fi - Twilight Zone
Best Musical - Oklahoma by a mile, but Singing in the Rain a quarter mile after.
Favorite Movies (watch at least twice a year) Treasure of Sierra Madre, Double Indemnity, Grapes of Wrath, The Killing - just about any film noir from the 50s.
Favorite actresses: Ava Gardner, Debbie Reynolds, and that recently discovered talented little dancer in Oklahoma, Lizanne Truex. Yikes! I'm in love with a 50-year-old image.
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
The Creeping Terror (1964)
YEARS ahead of the Mars Rover
Agree with all the fully-deserved bad reviews here. First time I saw it the obvious question "Why can't those people run?', followed by the Keystone Army guys, in effect, emoting "Oh Fear", "Oh horror!" while standing there with outstretched arms.
There's one element I found interesting and worthy of a remake. At the end it is discovered that the "monster" was merely inhaling people to break them down into chemical components and send the info back to its alien masters.
When the Mars Rover was announced, one of its missions was to sample the environment and send back the chemical components of what it found.
Talk about life imitating art - as bad as it was.
Colonial House (2004)
Unrealistic - and they would not have survived the winter
As others have said, "The Worst", but for me, worst on different levels.
First off, no for-profit outfit sends a group of colonists to a new land, filled with hostile natives, without a means to defend themselves. IMO, the backgrounds of these producers are Politically Correct, and to show guns in a positive light would have been a No-No, so the colonists are portrayed as unarmed.
Matchlock muskets had been in existence for 200 years when these colonists shipped out, so at least one of them should have been so armed. The hunting scenes were a joke - sending the guy out with what looked like a Boy Scout bow and arrow kit. No wonder they had no luck. OK, it was out of season for deer, but it would have been more realistic if they could have one guy designated as The Hunter, and had him go to a rifle range and shoot at a deer-sized target at 25-50 yards. A hit in the vitals and he would bring home a hog or sheep to simulate a deer. If he missed, they ate porridge.
The athiests should have been given an ultimatum - attend the services or be banished. You signed up for the equivalent of a four-month enlistment. None of this a la carte business.
The gay guy played it straight (no pun intended) and stuck it out, despite the threat of death in the time period. The black guy who folded was a disappointment, as he seemed to have his act together. He let his 21st century angst get in the way and it chased him off.
The Passamaquoddy indians played the "white man bad" routine, but it was within the context of the time. They made a good point when they said "first there comes one, then two, etc" and was then backed up by the preacher wanting to expand their community by building a church on the outskirts of the hamlet.
The Wampanoags were a different story. They come with an attitude, tap-dancing in from 300 miles away. Instead of a 20-day hike, they probably drove only one day.
One of the bucks is so filled with hate over what happened to them 400 years ago, he steals a chicken from the colonists in revenge. When he is rightly chastised by the tribal elders, he does a phony mea culpa and later relishes the thought that he put one over on the colonists, whose dog was touted as the community's guardian.
The Governor's wife (I think) missed a chance to straighten out the Wampanoag matriarch when she said something like they wore the original clothes while the whites wore costumes. At that point, the wife should have observed that the experience pointed out the fact that the indians never advanced, just existed day to day, while the whites created wealth by inventing things, such as the cars the indians drove to the site so they could complain. She could have also mentioned that they lived comfortably on the reservation in warm houses with electricity and running water, courtesy of white creativity.
One look at the woodpile would tell the assessors the colonists wouldn't last the winter. "Frontier House" used that as a criteria and should have been used here. Then we have the houses - you could see daylight coming in through the unchinked walls (no attempt to fix that) and the suicidal attempt to live in one house that just had two large openings in the gables instead of a fireplace. It was summer and the colonists told how cold they were - how would they feel in mid-winter, with near zero temps plus snow up to the window sills, when the firewood ran out?
All in all, a pretty lame attempt.
It Came from the Desert (2017)
I have a rule for movies like these
I'll get comfy on the sofa, pour a moderate sized glass of wine and light off the DVD/TV.
If I'm still awake 15 minutes into the film, I feel it will be worthwhile to watch the rest of it and keep my eyes open. If not, I wake up just as the credits roll.
This movie is in the first category despite have gun-oriented flaws that just grit my teeth. (They are not the only ones.) I'm talking about those butane flashes when a gun is fired. Spare me the "safety" excuse - I have seen others where blanks are actually used, which added realism to the scenes. In various settings the characters blaze away, emitting enough flame to light up the screen - and nary a shell casing is to be seen. In at least one scene the guys fires what must have been 100 rounds - from a 20-round magazine. Sorry to nit-pick, but that's my hangup.
The critters were believable, not the screamingly bad CGIs seen in other "Mega-" movies. The actors did a decent job, but the character played by Alex Mills was SO aggravating that I was hoping the ants would take him out.
I fast-forwarded by the biker scenes as, IMO, it just seemed to be padding. I did get a kick out of the fact that in times of danger (RUN AWAY!!) they always put on their helmets before racing away. Maybe that was a way to use the stunt driver look-alikes, but it always drew a laugh from me.
All in all, if you're going to watch this type of film, it is not a bad way to kill an hour and a half.
Man Overboard (2008)
Reminds me of my trip to the car dealer
Entertaining film with interesting, well-played characters. An enjoyable 90 minutes without F-bombs being dropped every 60 seconds - in fact, none that I can recall. I ended up buying the DVD.
The selling techniques were a hoot and reminded me of some salesmen I have run into, played to perfection by Matt Kaminsky and Mel Fair.
I really enjoyed hating Fair's character and eventually warmed up to Kaminsky's b/s but decent salesman character.
One thing that really appealed to me was that Matt's wife was not the blonde bimbo usually seen in these types of movies. Brooke Baumer's solid performance as the stand-by-your man wife was a refreshing relief.
The kids were good, not that wise beyond their years smart-mouthing brats - another staple.
I sorta figured out the ending, but liked the way everything was wrapped up.
Watch this when you get a chance.
Last of the Summer Wine (1973)
A Long-Running Gripe and Heretical Thoughts
Well, I read through all the reviews, and unless I missed one, I saw nothing about the two unsung actresses in this series: Sarah Thomas and Juliette Kaplan. These two ladies always gave rock solid performances in thankless roles as a naïve wife and an unrelenting harridan (admittedly with some justification).
What I especially liked about these two is that they are attractive in their own right and yet submerged their egos and convincingly did their roles, dressed in frumpy outfits and dowdy hair styles. Yet when given half a chance, they could be knockouts, with curves all over the place: Sarah, in "Life in the Fast Track", dressed in black, red and white leathers, was absolute eye candy. Juliette, in "The Suit That Turned Left", dressed like Marina, revealed she was a pretty woman.
What ticked me off was that these two talented ladies were never given their due in the opening credits, only at the episode's end, while late-comers, with no larger, or even lesser parts, were addressed in the opening. It was so consistent that I wondered if the Powers That Be had it in for them for slighting them in such a manner.
And Jean Ferguson, even though always dressed "tarty", was a gem of a comedienne and drew a good many laughs as Robert Fyfe put her through his various inept schemes that always backfired.
Over the years, thanks to video downloads and the local library, wife and I were able to watch all but the first few years - evidently no loss. Truth be told, we never really got into the series before Sarah Thomas and others were introduced around 1985-86. Up until then, only Brian Wilde was the interesting character, especially when he began his war story routines (ably carried on later by Hobbo (Russ Abbot)).
A Major Heresy here. Compo always came off as a useless sponge (stealing food from a buddy's plate when he's not looking is not "cute" or "loveable") and Cleggy, despite his clever quips, was such a wimp that both the wife and I, more than once, blurted out "Oh fer Chrissakes!" when he started whining.
Doubling down on The Heresy, we enjoyed the show even more in the early 2000s when Truly of the Yard (Frank Thornton 1997) and the rest of Hobbo's gang began to take over and guest stars started showing up.
We were totally pist when BBC abruptly ended the show. They could have given long-time followers some kind of graceful farewell, perhaps with a tribute to all the actors.
To this day (08/2019) we still watch all the episodes as a break from the dreck now appearing, but stick to those episodes that started in 1983. Occasional viewings of earlier episodes have not modified the above views.
Moment of Truth: Stalking Back (1993)
Déjà Vu
I was interested in this movie because back in the '80s, my kid sister ran into the same situation, although the age gap and period of stalking were smaller.
Bracing myself for another "men/police are thick as planks" theme seen so often in these movies, I was surprised at how well they portrayed the situations, being hampered, mostly, by the legal system.
As with this family, we quickly found out how useless it was to argue with the stalker and how little the police could do with a guy who wouldn't take "NO!" for an answer.
Unlike this family, ours, after giving the judicial system a few chances, took a different approach. Along with two of my Navy buddies, we finally cornered the creep and gave him three options:
1) Be introduced to time travel (knocked into next week)
2) Be given a new nickname, "Louie the Gimp" (baseball bat meet kneecap)
3) Stop stalking my sister.
Again, as with this family, we waited for the other shoe to drop after "the counseling", but she wasn't bothered nor did we ever see or hear of him again. She married one of my buddies, relocated and never had another problem.
All the actors did a first rate job, with Tom Kurlander as the psychopath who escalated his attentions and psychologically, and then physically terrorized this family for three years. Acting like a Momma Grizzly, Shanna Reed goes to the legislators and after some frustrating times, FINALLY gets a long-overdo stalking law enacted. Why the politicians shuffled their feet on this law for so long is beyond me.