Gregory Peck is Abraham Lincoln as Capt. Ahab in...

Moby Dick (1956) is another classic movie I never got to see. So we did. 

It starts with Richard Basehart doing "Call me Ishmael" in voice over. He heads for New Bedford, gets a bunk with Queequeg (Friedrich von Ledebur) at Peter Coffin's inn, and goes to see Orson Welles preach at the whaler's chapel. Then he and Queequeg sign on with Captain Ahab on the Pequod.

When Ahab finally emerges from his cabin (after building some suspense), he is Gregory Peck with an Abe Lincoln chinstrap beard and stovepipe hat. He offers up a Spanish gold piece to the man who first spots Moby Dick, the whale that took his leg.

The Pequod looks like a real ship, not a model or soundstage. There are a few whale hunts that appear to be real (filmed in the Madieras). Then the great white whale - a series of life-sized rubber models that are quite realistic. I liked the script (by Ray Bradbury), too. It had to rely on voice-over to wedge in some Melville, but I don't mind and I like Melville.

Unfortunately, the whole thing is scuttled by the acting, especially Peck's. We are led to believe that he held a hypnotic sway over his men, but you couldn't see it. Some of his best lines ("From Hell's heart, I stab at thee!") are sort of thrown away. Maybe Peck was trying to be restrained, but it came across to me as wooden. Richard Basehart, not a notably skilled actor, didn't really rise to the occasion either. In Ice Station Zebra, I think he was supposed to be a more or less unimaginative, solid sort. Here, he just kind of is. 

I guess director John Huston gets points for all the non-actor related stuff - this is pretty cool as an adventure movie, with some poetic touches. I also assign him the blame for the acting. 

Early Monarch

We were never big kaiju fans. We never watched modern King Kong or Godzilla remakes, like Godzilla (2014). It was Kong: Skull Island that got us interested. But that isn't why we queued up the 2014 Godzilla. We saw a preview and thought it looked fun. It wasn't until we saw "Project Monarch" on a memo that we realized.

It starts in Tokyo, with Bryan Cranston as the scientist in charge of a Japanese nuclear power station. He is concerned about odd seismographic readings, to the point of obsessions. He sends his wife (Juliette Binoche), a safety inspector, into the reactor to check it out. Then things start blowing up, and he has to lock her in the reactor, for reasons. So she dies.

In present day, Cranston's son is all grown up, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Quicksilver). He is a soldier whose deployment has just ended, letting him go home to see his wife and son. But just as he gets home, he is called to Japan because his father, now nuts, is trespassing on the closed-down reactor.

So he goes to Japan and his father convinces him to check out the reactor. They find out that it isn't radioactive - that's a cover story to conceal the fact that a giant parasite has been growing off the nuke plant's radioactivity. So Ken Watanabe and his assistant Sally Hawkins take them into the secret Monarch program, and tell him all about the nuke test at Bikini. Godzilla and the MUTOs.

There is a lot of family drama in this monster movie. Eventually, we get Godzilla fighting the MUTO parasites, and stomping on cities, etc. And the style is very modern, sort of documentary almost. (Although there was a lot of rainy night scenes to cover up the CGI.) So we liked the action, didn't take to the whole multigenerational Daddy Issues stuff. 

I don't know what the rest of the world thought, but this movie didn't really spark the whole Monsterverse thing. Everyone took a step back, and deep breath, and knocked it out of the park with the next few movies. Glad they stuck to it.

Central Tenet

The ongoing COVID health crisis prevented us from going to see Tenet (2020) in the theater. That, and the fact that we never go to movie theaters, even when there isn't a damn crisis. We don't even pay for them on streaming. We wait until Netflix gets the DVDs. This definitely lowers the stakes.

It starts with the protagonist, John David Washington, who is apparently just called "Protagonist", going into a hostage situation: Terrorists have taken over an Eastern European Opera House. Prot is part of a group going in in the uniform of the state police, but actually not. Inside, they fentantyl gas the audience (like in Moscow 2002 - it didn't work that great that time...) and start fighting. Washington meets up with someone who is moving strangely, and seems to suck a bullet out of a seat and into his gun - killing the guy in between.

After some contretemps, Michael Caine inducts Washington into Tenet, an organization based on the secret of time-reversal. He is shown several bullets that move backwards in time: They roll around on the table and then jump up into your hand. He gets sort of swishy Robert Pattinson as a handler, and a mission: To get the guy who has the McGuffin. To do that, they need to get at his wife, Elizabeth Debicky. To do that, they need to get a Goya drawing out off a Freeport storage facility...

So we're a little ways into this time-travel movie, and we find ourselves in a heist film. Here's where I am scratching my head, but, you know, it's pretty good for a heist film, so I'm rolling with it. Then a time reversed guy comes through the door and there's a big fight scene, with one guy going backwards in time, and the other going forward.

First of all, this is quite a cinematic trick. And --SPOILER-- you get the same scene later, but from the point of view of the guy going backward. I'm pretty sure this effect is the reason Christopher Nolan made this movie. Unfortunately, at least for me, watching for the first time, it just barely works. Like the Michael Bay Transformer movies (I've heard), the cutting/editing makes it too hard to follow the awesome action, so you never really quite get what's going on - except ACTION!

It isn't as bad as all that - I actually like the action. Nolan is a good director, I guess. He also got some good actors in small parts (Kenneth Branagh is the big bad). He gets a solid performance out of Washington, although he's kind of a cypher - he doesn't even get a real name. 

So this was far from our idea of Nolan's best movie. It wasn't as clever or as personal as Memento, or iconic as the Batman movies. I kind of felt the same way about Inception - looks good, nice gimmick, hollow in the center. But it turns out I kind of like that kind of movie. So no complaints - at least I didn't see it at a theater

The Giant Rat of Sumatra

We wound up watching this in a funny way: I'm a bit of a Deadhead, and I was listening to the Good Ol' Grateful Dead podcast about the song "Dire Wolf".  It seems the Jerry, Hunter and Mountain Girl were up late one night watching The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939). They speculated on what the mysterious beast could be, and MG suggested it was a Dire Wolf. That night, Hunter wrote Dire Wolf, and the rest is recording history. When I heard this, I recalled that we had seen the movie, but maybe slept through it. So I queued it up.

This is a classic Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes movie. Lionel Atwill calls on the pair with a story of the legend of the Baskervilles - how an ancient ancestor had kidnapped and abused a woman, and when she escaped, he hunted her down. But she was found killed by a great beast, who has haunted the family ever since. Atwill tells this story with such dramatic gusto, I immediately suspect him - or is he just a bit over the top?

Any way, the last Baskerville died on the moors, and the heir, Richard Greene, is coming to take over. Holmes sends Watson up to Baskerville to watch over him, then sneaks up in disguise. There is a love interest for Baskerville (Wendy Barrie, a delightful stage name), a séance, several shifty neighbors and John Carradine as a butler. 

It's a fun, campy movie, full of spooky soundstage moors and mires. It even has some action at the end. We enjoyed it a lot and we're glad we stayed awake for it. 

All the Rajah

I know I've mentioned our love for the terrible Peter Lorre Mr. Moto series. Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (1938) may be our favorite yet.

It starts with a woman, Rochelle Hudson, flying over Angkor Wat, then setting her plane on fire and bailing out. She lands near where Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre in lamentable yellowface) is excavating an ancient temple. There are also a couple of newsreel photographers in French Indochina on spec: Robert Kent and Chick Chandler.

They all get taken to see the Rajah, chubby J. Edward Bromberg. He is pretty well disposed towards the foreigners, but the priest, George Regas, claims they are trouble. When the Rajah's first wife dies suddenly, the priest gets the two photographers condemned to death.

As the sentence is about to be carried out, an old guru comes out of the temple to ask them to spare these men. He does a few tricks and convinces even the priest. He even pretends to be on the side of the traditional priest as opposed to the modernizing Rajah and the French. He is also clearly Mr. Moto in disguise.

It turns out Moto is on a mission to find the weapons that the priest has been stockpiling to overthrow the Rajah. He has figures out that pilot Hudson is on the same mission. As Moto, he is a slightly greasy archeologist who never gets involved with other cultures. As the guru, he is a mysterious ancient seer. He often eggs on a character in one guise while taking the opposite view in the other.

There's a good deal of action in this, plus the comic Rajah who turns out to be ahead of Moto in some ways. But I mostly liked the exotic locale, north of Angkor. There are nice touches like kris daggers, gong orchestras with Thai/Balinese dancing, etc. Even one or two Asian cast members. I'm not sure this is the first one to check out, but watch it before deciding that the series is too silly to watch.

Bingo

 The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976) is another movie that I've known about for ever, but kind of put in a category with sports movies, or maybe barnstorming movies (The Great Waldo Pepper?). But Ms. Spenser had never heard of it and wanted to know why I was holding out on her.

It starts with newsreel footage of the actual 1930s Negro League, including Satchel Paige. We then move to Billy Dee Williams, Bingo Long, pitching for his Negro League team against slugger James Earl Jones' team. It's a wild game, with Williams sending his team off the field for his "Invite Pitch". But off the field, the team owner, Ted Ross, mistreats them, firing a batter who gets concussed by a beanball and docking everyone's pay $5 to send him back home. So Williams decides to form his own team of all stars from the Negro League: the Bingo Long Traveling etc. Since they won't be in the league, they'll have to barnstorm - travel around the country playing local high-school teams and the like. 

He doesn't have much trouble recruiting other players, including Jones. He picks up one guy because he wants to get away from the overweight man-eating team owner Mabel King. He picks Richard Pryor because he has a car. Pryor is studying Spanish and plans to sneak into the Major Leagues as Cuban. And he takes Rainbow (DeWayne Jessie), the concussed player who has been stricken mute by his injury, as batboy. 

For their first game, they ask an older black man for directions to the ball field and he tells them to do it right - go through town on mainstreet, high-steppin' and cake-walkin' - he calls it "kickin' the mule". When they try this, the white folk look suspicious and the black folk shake their heads. So they try harder, kick a little higher, swing a bat like a baton, and soon everybody is into it. There's even a song "Kick That Mule".

I'll skip over the highs and lows, the hi-jinks and the troubles. The owners association tries to get them back, and even sends thugs out after them. In the end, they play a game versus Williams' old team. Win, they join the Negro League. Lose, they go back to their old teams at half salary. You guess how it comes out.

This is very much a feel-good movie. The team gets called the N-word, but doesn't seem face real segregation - they eat, drink, and go to ball games with the white folk. Pryor gets in trouble sleeping with a white prostitute, but it was a setup by the owners thugs. And in the end, one of the team even gets scouted for the Majors. Pessimistic Jones figures the end of the color line means the death of the Negro League. Ever-optimistic Williams has great plans for the team. The movie fades to a sketch of the two and the credits role. They don't even know that WWII is right around the corner.

This is a great movie, with fine turns from Williams, Jones and the rest of the cast. There is some goofy clowning on and off the field, and it doesn't seem like there's any problem Bingo can't work around. Racism was a fact of life, but not something that could crush a man's soul. Maybe a bit of a fantasy, but who doesn't like fantasy? 

Ice Stripes

I've mentioned that Ms. Spenser likes horror movies. Did I mention she likes Arctic movies too? She also likes Patrick McGoohan - we've been watching The Prisoner. That's how she found out about Ice Station Zebra (1968), and she asked me to queue it up.

It starts with a group of Soviets and a group of Americans watching a satellite re-enter the atmosphere and land in the Arctic, where one man goes to pick it up, while another lurks. It cuts to star submarine captain Rock Hudson meeting Admiral Lloyd Nolan incognito in a pub in Scotland. He gets secret orders to rescue the crew of a weather station near the North Pole. The satellite is not discussed.

Before they take off, they take on a mysterious team member, Patrick McGoohan. He gives his name as "Jones" and refuses politely to give any other information. He is tense and sweaty and almost kills his roommate when he is woken up suddenly. After they are underway, a helicopter delivers two others: Russian spy (working for the West) Ernest Borgnine. He is as cheerful and talkative as McGoohan is tightlipped. The other is the supremely bad-ass Jim Brown, who will be commanding the squad of Marines on board. 

Soon, they are in Arctic waters. There is some great scenes of a (model) sub under the ice, all blue light and icy canyons. Hudson tries to break through the ice but can't find a thin enough spot. This is about the only characterization he gets - he is a steady commander, but sometimes finds himself helpless against the elements. 

He tries to torpedo the ice, but there is sabotage. When they finally get to the surface, they have to hike to the station, and there is one of those crevasse scenes. One of the roped-together crew falls in, pulling another one in, while another tries to hold them up, then falls in until there are like seven people down there. Then the ice starts shifting and closing in on them... Very tense. I think one of my friends saw this when I was a kid and told me all about this scene.

Actually, this movie has a lot of tension. McGoohan being all twitchy is fun, and contrasts nicely with his always cool No. 6. Borgnine is pretty hard to buy as a Russian, but his chatty, inoffensive style of spycraft is fun. Jim Brown doesn't get enough to do, but does it all very well. The sub sets are pretty cool, especially when it's full of sailors, marines, and spies. The real and model exterior shots are all cool as well.

This was directed by John Sturges (The Great Escape), based on the book by Alistair MacLean (Where Eagles Dare). If those credentials sound good, you'll like this. But, hey, you probably have already seen this.

Mother Night

I've been trying to watch Remember the Night (1940) for a couple of years, but this is the first Christmas it has been available. Last year, we watched I'll Be Seeing You under the impression that it was this movie. After all, they are both about women released from prison to go home to their small home towns.

Remember stars Barbara Stanwyck as a classy woman a little down on her luck. She steals a bracelet from a 5th Ave jewelry store and tries to hock it on 3rd. She is promptly arrested. Her trial is prosecuted by hot-shot Fred MacMurray. Since it is just before Christmas, he knows the jury will be sympathetic, so he gets the trial held over to bring in expert testimony. He realizes that this means Stanwyck will be in jail over the holidays, so he gets her bailed out, then goes home to get ready to drive home to Ma's farm in Indiana.

The bondsman thinks he is bailing her out for non-humanitarian reasons, and delivers her to MacMurray's apartment, where his man, Fred 'Snowflake' Toones, seems to have the same idea. MacMurray feels sorry for her (but not exactly responsible), and offers her a nice dinner. So they go out, have some dinner, dance a little and talk. When he discovers that she is a Hoosier, too, he offers to drop her off to see her mom.

They have an eventful trip, and wind up running off the road in Pennsylvania and sleeping in a farmer's field. In the morning, the farmer gets nasty and runs them into the sheriff for trespassing and breaking his fence. MacMurray trues to joke his way out, but Stanwyck is more practical. She lights the wastebasket on fire and they run out. Now they are fugitives.

In a chilling scene, Stanwyck's mom, Georgia Caine, calls her evil and won't have her in her house. MacMurray defends her and invites her to his Ma's. Ma, Beulah Bondi, her spinster sister, Elizabeth Patterson, and MacMurray's somewhat dim cousin, Sterling Holloway (!) all greet her warmly and include her in the festivities. But MacMurray has to be honest with his mother and tells her about Stanwyck's past.

By the end of the holiday, they are clearly getting closer. But before they can come clean about their feelings, Ma has to have a talk with Stanwyck. She says she can see how they look at each other, but she also knows neither she nor Stanwyck would ever want to hurt MacMurray, with her past and his job... It's a stunning scene, with Bondi holding Stanwyck tenderly, speaking sweetly and telling her to gets lost almost as brutally as her own mother did. Maybe more, because Stanwyck feels it is true.

They drive home to New York through Canada (to avoid Pennsylvania, where they are fugitives. In Niagra Falls, MacMurray tries to convince her to jump bail and stay in Canada. When she refuses, he asks her to marry him right there. She turns this down as well, but since they are already in Niagra Falls, maybe they can have a honeymoon. Racy stuff. 

In the end, MacMurray tries to throw the trial by being too hard on her, to make the jury more sympathetic. But she cracks and changes her plea to guilty. So she will serve her time, and if MacMurray is still waiting, he can marry her when she gets out.

Directed by Michael Leisen, this was written by Preston Sturges, and it has a bit of that flavor. MacMurray is a standup guy, not mean or selfish, but he's kind of oblivious - at first, Stanwyck is just another statistic. Then, at dinner, he treats her like a social acquaintance, forgetting that he is going to try to imprison her after the holidays. Stanwyck is a bit of free spirit, a bit of a realist. She doesn't feel guilt the same way as other people, says she is just wired different. I don't know if this is true. 

I loved this, but Ms. Spenser couldn't get over the 1 or 2 scenes where Snowflake's character (who is black) is portrayed as a clown. It wasn't great, but on the other hand, he is pretty good at clowning. Sterling Holloway, of course, is best - and he gets to deliver a beautiful rendition of the song, "At the End of a Perfect Day."

Slow Zombies

I have told you that Ms. Spenser likes scary movies, and I don't. One of the ways I've been compromising is with horror-comedy, but I just realized something: they don't count. That is, she doesn't mind horror-comedies, but considers them comedies, not horror movies. Still, if they are good, she still likes them as comedies. Thus, Cockneys vs Zombies (2012).

It starts on a construction site, where workers find a vault sealed by Charles II in 1661. It's full of skeletons, and one of them bites a workers, starting a zombie infestation. But we are really interested in Rasmus Hardiker and Harry Treadway, two cockney youths who plan to rob a bank. They need the money so that their granddad's old age home won't be demolished. We meet his granddad, played by Alan Ford, looking and sounding very Michael Caine, his sort-of girlfriend Honor Blackman, and the whole crew, gathered round the piano singing "Knees Up Mother Brown". They are a rowdy, feisty lot.

Meanwhile, Hardiker and Treadaway pick up the other gang members: Their cousin Michelle Ryan, a not-very bright security expert and convicted thief played by Jack Doolan, and Mental Mickey (Ashley Thomas), a heavily armed Iraq war vet with anger management issues and a plate in his head. 

They dress in construction worker outfits and enter the bank, where the manager assumes they are part of a pickup for the money the construction company. She's about to hand over a million pounds, but gets suspicious, so Mental Mickey hauls out a gun and takes her and another banker hostage. 

But when they leave the bank, they find desolation - OK, it's East London, so maybe it always looks like that. But there are zombies wandering around, so our friends need to get out fast. They bring the hostages to a warehouse, but there are zombies everywhere. They are slow and stupid, but there are a lot of them. Mickey gets bit, but he still wants to hold onto the hostages.

And now the zombies are menacing the old folks. Alan Ford is pretty tough - he fought in WWII. But they aren't armed, and most of them are only partially ambulatory. Will they hold out until the kids get it together?

And so on. This is a fun movie, not hilarious, but cute - sort of like Juan of the Dead. Plus one of the old geezers keeps using cockney rhyming slang that none of the other cockneys have ever heard. So, even though I can't count it as a horror movie, Ms. Spenser was happy with the choice.

Not Brand-X

I'm old, so to me, the X-Men are the original five: Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Angel, and Jean Grey. I had never even heard of Wolverine until the movies. But a few years ago, I got a big iPad and a subscription to the Marvel U and read most of the New Mutants run. So I was ready for the movie The New Mutants (2020).

It starts with Blu Hunt running from her house as it is destoyed from within. Her father encourages her to run, then gets killed. She passes out as the monster approached and wakes up strapped to a hospital bed in a sort of old-fashioned hospital. It turns out to be run by Alice Braga, who is sympathetic but strict. She doesn't really explain anything, but invites Blu to a group therapy session where she meets the other inmates.

• Maisie Williams, a shy but sweet Scots girl 
• Charlie Heaton (Stranger Things), a West Virginia bad boy with a broken arm and trucker hat. I kept thinking it was a strangely de-aged Kevin Bacon until Ms. Spenser told me who it was.
• Henry Zaga, an egotistical Brazilian
• Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma.), a very sarcastic Russian. She has a plush puppet dragon, named Lockheed (after Kitty Pryde's dragon)

The session doesn't go well, and Blu isn't very happy, so she tries to run away. At Taylor-Joy's urging, she runs full-tilt into a force field. When she tries to fight Taylor-Joy, she discovers her power - she can vanish and teleport. As is the current convention, super-hero names are rarely mentioned, but she is Illyana Rasputin, Magik.

Also, a wolf running nearby hints at Maisie Williams power - she's a werewolf.

We also see Heaton tethered to a concrete block, zooming around like a tetherball - he's Cannonball.

The idea is that this hospital (Medfield State Hospital, also seen in Shutter Island) is for the training of mutants whose powers are dangerous or out of control. It slowly becomes clear that the monster that destroyed her village, the Demon Bear, was summoned by her, leaving her wracked with guilt. She tries to kill herself, but Maisie talks her out of it, and they become friends and soon, lovers. But more and more the kids are menaced by creatures out of their nightmares. 

The story is that if they learn to control their powers, they can join the X-Men. But Dr. Braga doesn't seem to be that trustworthy or sympatico. She keeps referring to them as "patients" in a condescending way. Finally, she gets instructions from her superiors (NOT Prof. X) that Blu is too dangerous, and must be put down. That triggers worse monsters, because her power is to manifest people's worst fears -including her own fear of demon bear. 

There are strong elements of horror in this version of the story. The decrepit hospital, the monsters from the id, the evil doctor who wants to control or kill. There's even a scene in the closed school pool, like in It Follows. But it's fairly light, as horror goes. The lesbian love theme is also not really pounded on. It's mostly just a regular superhero origin story. 

This movie had a rough production history, with years of anticipation, false starts, new directions, and so on - finally being released into the mouth of the COVID lockdown. It was, as far as I can tell, completely ignored. But I liked it. Blu and Maisie had a tough sweetness, and Anya T-J is a great bad-ass Illyana. Heaton gets an interesting back story - I know his as a goofy farmboy, but here he killed his father and a bunch of miners going off underground. Zaga doesn't get much more than a moment, but maybe that's for the best. 

I'm guessing that this will be a one-off, which is too bad. I wouldn't mind seeing them, and maybe a couple more members in later movies. 

Tales of Brave Ulysses, That Jerk

A film about Ulysses (1954) with Kirk Douglas in the leading role? That pretty much launched the peplum (sword and sandal) craze? Sign me up!

It starts with Silvana Mangano as Penelope, suffering the suitors as she wove and unraveled her tapestry, along with old Mentor and young Telemachus. Then we find Douglas as Ulysses, washing up on shore, all by himself. He has lost his memory, but is comforted by Rossana Podesta as Nausicaa. At this point, I'm a little miffed - the Odyssey is almost over. But after they fall in love and are about to be married, he gazes out to sea and remembers.

We get a quick rundown on the Trojan Horse, then the men set sail for home. But since they defiled the temple of Poseidon, their ship is thrown off course. Desperate for supplies, they find an island with a cave filled with sheep and set to work on them. This is, of course, the cave of the Cyclops, who eats one of them and traps the rest. Ulysses does the wine and blinding trick, but not the "My name is No Man" gag. Too bad, it's a favorite.

We also get the adventure of the Sirens and Circe's Isle (with Silvana Mangana also as Circe). Meanwhile, Anthony Quinn shows up as Antinous to woo Penelope, and he isn't some rude jerk - he's a powerful warlord who gets what he wants. 

When Ulysses finally gets back to Ithaca, though, watch out.

Once I realized that this story would be told largely in flashback, I settled down - of course the Odyssey traditionally has a full recap of the story every now and then, so that fits. I liked the the whole sword and sandals spectacle, especially the Cyclops, which was directed by Mario Bava, uncredited. Unfortunately, I didn't like wily Ulysses. His outright theft of the sheep, his years of dalliance with various babes on islands when he should have been attending to business - I suppose some of this was to show that things were different then, and some was in the original material. But it all left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. And it was worse for Ms. Spenser, who found the whole thing annoying.  

Annus Horribilis

2067 (2020) is a low-budget time-travel film, that, like at least one character, makes every mistake. 

It is set in the year Eponymous. The world has gone to hell, with all plant life wiped out. That drastically reduces the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, so people have to use artificial oxygen. That's my first gripe. Artificial oxygen isn't and shouldn't be a thing. It's just a simple atom or two. But the artificial stuff is bad for you, and can give you the Sickness. This trope isn't stupid, but it isn't what I want right now.

It stars Kodi Smit-McPhee (the latest Nightcrawler) as a tunnel worker, maintaining the dangerous and clunky yet high-tech nuclear power system. I guess that's a trope I have no real problem with. He has a wife he dearly loves (Sana'a Shaik) who is coming down with the Sickness. 

Then he gets a call from ChronoCorp, the corporation that runs everything. From its name you might guess it has something to do with time travel, and you would be right. But so far, they have only sent something into the future, and that was when Kodi was a kid. Not much to base a corporate empire on.

Kodi has a grudge against time travel and his dad. You see, he used to love his scientist father - he wanted to grow up to be a "science man". Then one day, his father came home, and locked a bracelet on his wrist, one that drew blood and had a red LED. Then his father disappeared for a while, then called his mother to meet him somewhere dodgy, leading her to get killed (we don't learn this all at once). Well done, science man.

It turned out his father went forward in time with the upstream time machine, which then failed. He might have been a rotten father, but wasn't very good at science either? But now, with Kodi all grown up, the time machine in 2067 receives a message, saying "Send Ethan Whyte", Kodi's character. 

Kodi is completely against this, wanting to stay with his sick wife, not abandon her like his dad. But she convinces him to go into the future and send back a cure. Of course everyone assumes there is a cure in the future, not like, some new plants or something.

And when he gets to the future, he finds a lush jungle, but everyone is dead. There's so much oxygen that all his equipment burns up. (Nice touch, I'll grant that.) In short order, he poisons himself on mushrooms, and his buddy Ryan Kwanten pops out of the time machine to save him. The time machine that could only send ONE person. So they just changed their story - it could only send two people.

Anyway, is he here to help Kodi? Kodi has found a skeleton of himself with a bullet through the skull, and Kwanten has the only gun. But wait, how did they get into the past for Kodi to get shot? Never mind.

As you can tell, I was kind of annoyed by this movie. The design was good - director Seth Larney did visual effects for a Matrix sequel and an X-Men movie. The acting was fine, although it gets a little fraught in the climactic crazy scenes. But the plot is just all over the place. The whole father thing, the artificial oxygen, the clunky time travel, just a mess. At least it looked good.

King of Hearts of Darkness

Although I'd heard a lot about how terrible Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration (1980) is, one or two good mentions and I put it on the queue. Maybe I'm just not ready to watch The Exorcist.

It is set in a castle in Oregon (shot in Hungary, because PepsiCo was funding, and had some money there they couldn't get out). This castle was being used as an asylum for soldiers driven mad by the Vietnam War. The opening scenes show Sergeant Tom Atkins trying to get the motley crew of crazily dressed soldiers to line up at attention. Arriving is Stacey Keach, the new commanding officer and chief psychiatrist of this madhouse. He seems withdrawn and melancholy, but is willing to humor the men.

And what a wacky assortment: Moses Gunn thinks he's Superman. Joe Spinell is staging Shakespeare with dogs. Scott Wilson was an astronaut who had a screaming panic attack just before his launch. And the psychiatrist, Ed Flanders, is just about as bad, walking around with no pants because the patients took his only clean pair. 

So the first half is about the kooky goings-on in Castle Nutbar. But Keach is slowly coming out of his shell. He talks a little about his brother, a vicious killer, "Killer" Kane, now dead. Then a new soldier is admitted and recognized Keach as "Killer" Kane. Flanders ("Hi-diddly-ho!") explains that Kane is the killer, who decapitated enemy soldiers in Vietnam. He had a breakdown and believes he is his brother, who is a psychiatrist - wanting to heal people, not kill them, And yes, Flanders is actually Keach's brother, which almost explains why they are letting him get away with all this.

Then it gets dark. But not the way I expected. You see, this being Peter Blatty, I assumed that the occult would make an appearance. Probably involving ancient evil beings living on the moon that the astronaut was so afraid of. But - SPOILER - no. The evil is all in the hearts of men.

When I was in high school, our psych class went to see King of Hearts, about an Allied soldier who comes upon an Italian town that the fascists have retreated from. But first they let out the inmates of the local sanitarium. You see, war is madness, and in war, madmen are the only sane ones, etc. I might have bought this as a high-school kid, but not anymore. Insanity, and in particular, "battle fatigue" doesn't work that way. Of course, they might have been malingering. The castle was a pretty good deal.

Anyway. I mainly wanted to see it for Tom Atkins ("Thrill me!"). And he was barely in it.

No Tribble at All

Save Yourselves! (2020) is a pretty timely movie. The concept it simple: a couple goes to the woods for a digital detox, and doesn't realize that the aliens have conquered the earth while they were away.

It stars Sunita Mari and John Paul Reynolds as a typical high-tech couple. They are always exhausted from their (undefined) high-tech jobs, so they spend all their time staring at their phones. One night they meet up with their much more cool friend, who gave up his job in venture capital to 3D print surf boards in Nicaragua. He offers to let them borrow his upstate cabin to get away from it all. 

They promise they will turn off their phones when they get there. And as they drive up, we notice, but they don't, that odd things are falling from the sky. Then, while Reynolds is trying to figure out man things like chopping wood, Mari sneaks a glance at her phone. She has a lot of messages - mostly panicked texts from her mother about something on the news. But she's always upset about something in the news. When Reynolds comes back in, she hides her phone and they go back to having relationship discussions. 

But in the morning, they discover that all the liquor is gone, and the sourdough starter too. Also, the big round fuzzy pillow they have been calling a pouffe as moved. Mari breaks down and admits that she checked her phone, and when they both do, they find out that alien invaders, who live off ethanol and look like big tribbles, have conquered the earth.

So they fight some of the aliens, and try to escape, but the pouffes have drunk all the cars gas for the ethanol. The cabin has a diesel car, so they do get away - only to spot another car being attacked by pouffes. They can't save anyone in the car, except a baby. They don't want to save it, but they do. And then another survivor steals their car.

Carless and stuck with a baby, they wander into the woods. When they try to change the baby, the smell sends them into sick hallucinations for a while. Yet somehow they survive, but not save themselves. 

This was somewhat funny, but suffered from a common problem - unlikable leads. Reynolds and Mari play completely un-self-aware characters, who really can barely relate to each other. Mari wants to do relationship quizzes she downloaded from online. Reynolds wants to do ... something ... Maybe start a community garden. They aren't evil or spectacularly selfish, but they aren't much fun to be around. And it isn't very funny, just kind of real. The space aliens are more fun, for sure.

Wild Again

Theodora Goes Wild/Together Again (1936) is a nice Irene Dunne double bill. Theodora might have been the first movie I saw at the Stanford Theater, and this was my first time for Together.

In Theodora Goes Wild, Dunne is Theodora, the respectable daughter of a family of small-town Connecticut big shots. Secretly, she is also the author of a scandalous best-seller, which the newspaper is serializing, and the literary society (of which she is a member) deplores. 

She visits New York to see her rakish uncle Robert Grieg, but also to see her publisher. Hanging around the office is Melvyn Douglas, a sort of hanger-on who always shows up uninvited when there's a chance of free food. He accuses Dunne of being a prude who doesn't know anything about the lurid life she writes about. To prove him wrong, she has him take her out carousing.

There's a great couple of nightclub scenes, including a hula show, but she manages to survive and make it back to her respectable Connecticut home. But look who's coming up the sidewalk? It's Douglas, pretending to be a tramp looking for work. To keep her secret, she has to offer him a gardening job and a bed in the shed out back.

So Douglas is hanging around, being annoying (he whistles constantly, making sure Dunne can't ignore him). But of course, through all of this she is slowly falling in love with him. He encourages her to stop living according to other people's expectations and live her own life. Which she finally does - telling everyone in the literary society that she wrote that book, and that she is in love with the gardener.

But instead of being the happy ending, Douglas gets quiet and sour and disappears. So in the next act, Dunne hunts him up in New York. It turns out that he is married (unhappily) and he can't get divorced because his father is running for office. So Dunne moves into his apartment and starts tormenting him. It's a nice twist.

Together Again (1944) is set in another small town, with Dunne again one of the first citizens. Here she is the widowed wife of a much beloved mayor, with a teenaged daughter (Mona Freeman) who dotes on a statue of her father in the park, and shows distain for her boyfriend.

When lightning strikes the head off of the statue, Dunne travels to New York to hire a sculptor to make a new one. She finds Charles Boyer. He takes her out for some gay nightlife, including a visit to a strip club. When she spills something on her dress, a washroom attendant has her take it off to touch it up. And then the police raid the joint, a stripper grabs her dress and jumps out the window, and she gets photographed in her slip (fortunately with her hand in front of her face).

She goes back to her town, and finds that they have all seen the picture of the raid in the papers. She tells everyone that the sculptor is too busy, and by the way, he's old and ugly. Then he shows up. He even moves into her shed to work on the sculpture. There's a merry mix up with the daughter setting her hat for Boyer, which makes Dunne pretend to go for her boyfriend. All the while, Charles Coburn, the dead mayor's father, is trying to get Dunne to be a human and marry Boyer.

Pretty similar to Theodora - there's even a newspaper editor subplot in both. But in place of the twist where Dunne tortures Douglas, we have the cross-generational mixup, which frankly belongs in a 50s TV sit-com. Still, there's a lot to like about it, even if it isn't quite the classic Theodora is. It does have Charles Coburn, plus the washroom attendant is Nina Mae McKinney, a beautiful black woman who get very few roles. . 

Skunk-Ape!

The concept behind Monster Beach Party (2005) - a 1950s-style teensploitation monster movie can be made just as cheaply in the 2000s.

It stars Claire Johnson, Cynthia Evans, and Mary Kraft as a Bangles/Go-Gos 80s girl group (that's a lot of decades...), the Violas. The movie starts with them singing "Shout, Stomp, Scream". After the show, when they are loading up their gear, a fan (Travis Young) tries to chat them up, but they politely blow him off. 

Meanwhile, two deputies in a small beach town are investigating a call about a smelly pile of debris on the beach. They find a small girl wandering with a dazed expression and discover her family brutally killed. The girl won't speak, until she screams: "Them!".

Wait, no, that's Them!

One deputy calls in his nephew, Jonathan Michael Green, who is a scientist, to help out.

Anyhow, the next day we find the Violas cruising along in their aqua station wagon on their way to a gig in Florida. Their car breaks down outside the very town the killings took place in, and get a ride into town by the (very handsome) scientist. And it turns out the town's garage is owned by Young, the fan from the last gig. The girls don't really want to stay in a town with mysterious murders going on, but they don't have any money to fix the car. Young offers to fix it in exchange for them playing at his party that night. The Florida gig is cancelled due to hurricane, I think - which isn't a plot point, but it should have been.

It's no spoiler to let on that the killings are caused by a bipedal cryptid, known to folklore as a Skunk-Ape, a smelly sasquatch. It's also not much of a spoiler if I tell you Claire Johnson, the guitarist and lead singer of the Violas, has sworn off men, but is getting interested in Young. It would be a spoiler to tell you why she swore off men, but they reveal it in a song ("He gave her syph-syph-syph-syphilis...").

I was prepared not to be impressed by this movie. The Coming Attractions on the disc looked terrible. But it was actually a lot of fun and kind of sweet. The Violas are a decent band, and I loved the great psychedelic rave-up at the end of "Hands OFf My Man." Maybe not as great as the Del-Aires in Horror of Party Beach (the first horror-musical), but who are? The men who court Johnson are all respectful, not gross. The sheriff and his deputies are almost as much fun as Ed Wood's cops. All in all, I recommend it.