Category: Movies

I bought this videocassette in August; I think we might have already have it somewhere in the media library, but I picked it up because it was cheap, and because I can never really be sure aside from putting some actual effort into creating and maintaining a catalog, whether we actually have have a film on home media or only think have which will then catch me by surprise when I want to watch a movie. Well, we have have it now. Maybe twice.

So: In the early 1800s, a Spanish don acts as Zorro, the hero of the people of Mexico. The evil governor of California prepares to execute three random peasants as a trap for Zorro, but he dashes in, rescues them all, marks the governor with the Z, and rides off. However, the governor suspects the don and moves to arrest him, which results in the doña’s death. The don is imprisoned, and the governor takes his infant daughter back to España.

Twenty (some) years later, the governor returns; an American soldier pursues two Mexican thieves and kills one, and his brother vows revenge. The don escapes prison using the Count of Monte Cristo trick, and stops the (drunken) brother from seeking ill-timed revenge on the American soldier and trains him up to be the new Zorro. Oh, and the daughter and the new Zorro kind of fall for each other even though she thinks he’s a bandit. Which he is, but he’s doing it for the good of the people.

The film stars Antonio Bandeiras, Anthony Hopkins, and Catherine Zeta Jones, who might be almost as pretty as my beautiful wife. We talk a lot about how modern films strip-mine old intellectual properties, but this late 20th century film also mines old IP. Zorro started out as a pulp story and got film treatment several times, including portrayals by Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power in the early part of the century. I remember watching the Tyrone Power version on television with my sainted mother sometime in the 1970s. But why weren’t we complaining about it in 1998 when this film came out? Because it featured a compelling story, interesting characters, a competent-but-not-girlboss woman character, and basic filmmaking competence (well, maybe more than competence). Modern strip-mining of the old IPs tends to lack all of these things.

This is the kind of film I can imagine actually watching again, and not just hoarding for the next generation. Or the estate sale flippers.

So after a couple of meh movies (The Day After Tomorrow and The Son of the Mask), I decided to go old school here with this black-and-white film on videocassette which I bought sometime, but I am not sure when–it must have been fairly recently as it was atop the cabinet, but I don’t see it in any gleanings from the recent past.

At any rate, the story: A couple of down-on-their-luck musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) in Chicago, 1929, see a mob hit, so they go on the run by posing as women so they can join an all-woman band heading by train to Florida on a several-month-long engagement. One of them (well, the both of them) are hot for the lead singer, played by Marilyn Monroe. Monroe’s character hopes to find a millionaire instead of a no-good saxophone player. Curtis’s character, the saxophone player, also portrays a millionaire to woo her. Lemmon’s character (whilst portraying a woman), however, draws the attention of an actual millionaire whose trappings Curtis’s character uses in his deception. Then, the mobsters show up at the same hotel for a country-wide mobster meeting, and hijinks and more gunplay ensue.

Definitely a more grown-up film than The Son of the Mask. And it’s a bit more sophisticated than what you get out of modern comedies even though some of its themes match what we might have seen on the big screen up until recently, where everything got so serious. Or television–I couldn’t help but remember Bosom Buddies (the trailer played before the film, and it said starring Marilyn Monroe and her Bosom…. Buddies). What’s weird is that Wikipedia says it was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Actor–but only won for Best Costume Design. I guess it won that because many of Monroe’s gowns made it look as though she were effectively topless. Or just dressed like a celebrity in 2025.

I liked it. And I’m starting to think I should pick up any black-and-white film I find on home media whenever I can just so that they don’t end up in the landfill somewhere. I’ll probably like most of them better than the 21st century fare I come across.

Clearly, I have decided that it’s the right time to clear out some of the lesser films in the cabinet. And, brother, the cabinet is full of lesser films. I bought this sequel to 1994’s The Mask at some point in the past (before I was fastidious and fatuous in enumerating most of my media purchases here on the blog). I saw The Mask in the theaters one night when I was staying with Dr. Comic Book on one of my excursions to Milwaukee right after I graduated. I remember that he and some of his city friends, who were some miscreants, got a hold of a video cassette of a non-Milwaukee town councilman shooting himself at a news conference, and we watched it several times because they thought it was a hoot. Me, not so much, but I can still see it in my mind’s eye. Eh, but we were talking about The Son of the Mask, a sequel that came out eleven years later when Hollywood was new to mining old movies and properties. Although two of the last three films I have seen were dated 1993 (Grumpier Old Men) and 1997 (Alien: Resurrection), so maybe this has been a constant Hollywood thing which Millenials Discover and post on the Internet about. After all, my pool company is named after a swimming champion who played Tarzan (Buster Crabbe), and that’s not the swimming champion who played Tarzan that my boys and I watched (Johnny Weissmuller), not to mention the Tarzan I watched on television (Ron Ely) or the film that we saw on HBO (Christopher Lambert). But I really am going at length to talk about anything but this film.

Well, enough of that. In this film, the mask from the first film has washed to Fringe City, where a dog finds it. The dog belongs to a cartoonist who’s working as a costumed character at an animation studio (played by Jaime Kennedy, whom I think was supposed to become a thing at that time). Cartoonist’s wife wants to have a baby, but cartoonist is unsure. But when he needs a costume for a Hallowe’en party, he puts on the mask and revives a party from its doldrums, and he comes home and sires a baby. But! Because he was wearing the mask, the baby has the powers of Loki. Which somes in handy, because Odin has charged Loki with finding the mask because it’s causing havoc amongst the mortals. Then the wife has to go off for a week and leave the cartoonist, now tasked with coming up with a pitch for the networks based on the antics of his character–him while wearing the mask at the party. The dog, jealous of the baby’s attention, puts on the mask, and we get the dog and the baby competing for the father’s attention, sort of–the baby, fed on a visual diet of cartoons (so the cartoonist can work), tries to make the father crazy so he can go to the psychopathic hospital. Also, Loki is closing in to find the mask.

So it’s a silly little live-action cartoon of a film that lacks the Jim Carrey of the original, and, to be honest, a lot of the stakes of the original. I mean, they did go in a different direction (they actually invoke the difference between Alien and Aliens, which is the second time I’ve come across this explanation for a change in direction in a franchise recently–although, perhaps, the first was when looking into Alien: Resurrection). It would probably have done a little better as an independent story of some sort, but I guess they had enough in the Mask mythos (the comic books and the film) that they rolled with it. Not as good as the original, and more of a cartoon/kids movie.

It did feature Traylor Howard as the wife/mother, though. Continue reading “Movie Report: Son of the Mask (2005)” →

What an absolutely ludicrous movie.

A couple years ago, I took my brother to a medical appointment in St. Louis and spent the next night with him in eastern Illinois before heading home. They watch a lot of television and movies out there, and my new sister-in-law put this film on, claiming it was one of her favorites. I made it maybe 60% of the way through before turning in for the night. So I spotted it in Nixa last August, and I picked it up. And decided Friday night was exactly the night I needed to watch it.

Oh, boy. Okay, so the story: Dramatic scene in Antarctica where a team of scientists is retrieving ice cores for paleoclimatic research but an ice shelf happens to break off just then. So Dennis Quaid, who does not call anyone “char” in this film to my disappointment, has to leap a growing chasm to get the cores. Twice he leaps it, dramatically. Whew! Cut to a climate conference where he presents a theory that a dramatic climate reversal can happen if the oceans get too much fresh water, killing the North Atlantic current. But! The Vice President, who happens to have traveled to this climate conference because that’s what Dick Cheney stand-ins do, go to these sorts of things to poo-poo the sentiments. BUT! The ice shelf that broke off at the dramatic beginning of the movie just so happens to trigger that scenario, and instead of a new ice age starting in a couple of hundred years, it happens in the next week.

So the first part of the movie is a special effects bonanza of strange disastrous weather events, from giant hailstorms in Tokyo to super tornadoes that destroy downtown Los Angeles to the creation of super storms which are not only dropping many feet of snow on the northern hemisphere, but also have giant “eyes” like hurricanes where the temperature drops to 150 degrees below zero (centigrade, presumably, but who knows–it was made for American audiences) and anything caught in that eye is flash-frozen instantly. These special effects scenes are broken by groups of people watching news reports about these events, and then some scienting going on, where models need to be run on mainframes, and wake Dennis Quaid when you get the results, which will indicate sudden bad cold which is only possible with Hollywood special effects.

Then, the next bit is a trek bit, where Quaid’s scientist has to go from Washington, D.C., to New York rescue his son, played by Jake Gyllenhal, who is holed up in a room with a fireplace in the New York Public Library where they build a fire by burning the effin books instead of, I dunno, all the wood furnishings, furniture, desks, and chairs in the building first which would, you know, burn longer and better than effin paper, but, c’mon, it’s Hollywood, baby. Does he get there on time? Dunh dunh dunh! Yeah, then end, but not before the scientist convinces the president to evacuate the northern states, which leads to scenes of the Mexicans closing the border to American refugees and Americans storming across the border anyway (how things are reversed!), although anyone with a gorram brain knows that nobody, much less hundreds of thousands of Americans, are driving from Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, Washington, and North Dakota to Texas overnight, and if they are, there’s an awful lot of room in the southern states for them. But, eh, it’s freaking Hollywood, baby.

Apparently, this film made half a billion at the box office. Which leads me to a spurious assertion that there was a time, a couple of decades, perhaps, when a special effects bonanza experience could carry a film–where people would go to see things in the theatre to be thrilled, so the tornadoes ripping apart Los Angeles or the White House (and Los Angeles) getting blown up by aliens (as in Independence Day, another film by the same director) was worth a couple million in box office receipts. But that time might have peaked with Avatar–and when special effects bonanzas, especially the CGI kind, became so commonplace that they stopped being worth seeing a film for alone. But don’t expect me to put together a Substack-length piece defending this thesis.

So: Yeah, this movie was dumb in so many ways. It’s like someone put Independence Day, Zardoz, a bunch of disaster movies, The Forge of God, and a source book by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber into a blender and this script came out. Which is not to say that is not what, in fact, happened.

So: Yeah. Oh, what rubbish, but high budget spectacle rubbish.

But, Brian J.! Of the two The Day After Tomorrows you’ve suffered through, which is worse? The film or the book with Adolf Hitler’s frozen head which got a two million dollar advance and hit the New York Times best seller list in 1994?

Yes.

Back in 2023, I watched the first one (also on videocassette). So when I saw the sequel in a thrift store in Berryville, Arkansas, last year, I picked it up. Like Alien: Resurrection, this title was in my video cabinet. So maybe it’s almost time to reshuffle and condense the holdings into the cabinet as much as possible to make it so I want to watch the recent acquisitions before a decade elapses.

At any rate, the film picks up not long after Grumpy Old Men. Lemon’s character is still involved with the Ann-Margaret character. The Mattheau character is leading a lonely existence. Their kids are planning their wedding. And an Italian woman, played by Sophia Loren, plans to open an Italian restaurant in the old bait shop. So the bulk of the movie is really the two men trying hijinks to keep the restaurant from opening; Mattheau’s character and Loren’s character starting off as rivals but becoming lovers; and tensions arising as the old men “help” with the wedding planning. When tensions boil over and the bride declares the wedding to be off, Mattheau and Lemon revert to their rivalry of one-upmanship in pranks.

So an amusing film if you’re of a certain age, which is probably “old man.” And the film does feature Sophia Loren, who was, what, 63 when this film came out? Still very stunning. Of course, I’m closer to that age than I was back then.

I grabbed this film from within the cabinet because I didn’t want to watch the dozens of titles which I’ve recently purchased. And, I thought, “It’s the one with Winona Ryder, the third one.” Ah, if you’re a real fan, you are already telling me that this is the fourth installment in the franchise, and Alien³ is the third one of the series, the one in the orbital prison. Ah, yes, well, gentle reader, I eventually got that sense, too, when they were talking about this film taking place 200 years after previous events, and, oh, yeah, Ripley is a clone. So I’ve got the other one shuffled into the cabinet somewhere, and I guess I know how it ends.

So: Uh, spoiler alert for the previous movie, but Ripley dies, sacrificing herself after being impregnated with an alien queen. On a military research ship operating on the fringes of the solar system, the military is working to clone the alien by cloning Ripley from a blood sample. A group of pirates/mercenaries brings aboard some people in cryostasis to use as the hosts for breeding xenomorphs. Among them is a new crew member, Call, played by Ryder, who breaks in to where the scientists are holding Ripley in hopes of killing her before the scientists can extract the embryo queen, but she’s too late. And when the scientists actually grow some xenomorphs, donchaknow those gosh-darned killing machines escape at the same time as the pirates are trying to escape the space marines who think they’re up to something. So basically, it turns into a chase across the military ship while the xenomorphs. Fortunately, the new Ripley has xenomorph DNA mixed in with hers from the cloning, so she’s strong and resilient, but unfortunately is a little sympathetic to the aliens.

So it’s been a couple of years since I watched the first film (2021), and it’s certainly been a while since I bought the first, third, and fourth films (2013), so clearly I am not the biggest fan of the series. But I’ve seen a lot of things that slag on the movies after the second. Although the first was almost cosmic horror in tone as well as a slasher movie in space, Aliens was an action film, and this, too, is an action film and not so much a horror film, although it does have some budget for gore. So it’s an okay action film, with plot-dependent bad decisions and reveals/side quests/sacrifices that are necessary because the screenwriters are under pressure to deliver something cinematic.

So, okay. Given how long it’s been–almost thirty years(!), I am comfortable seeing them out of order. And I’m pretty sure I have not seen Aliens, the second film, available secondhand at book sales or garage sales. Apparently, people still hold onto it of all the films in the franchise.

I bought this movie last weekend and watched it right away. Actually, of that haul, I first picked out Revenge of the Nerds, but I then discovered that the disc was cracked and would play. Ah, gentle reader, I have not been in the habit of checking the condition of the dollar discs I buy–I have honestly only relatively recently gotten to the point where I consistently check to make sure that the folder contains the matching disc, but I might have to start checking the condition of the discs as well. Or not, if I don’t remember.

So this is a 1980s comedy whose plot we’ve seen before. When the daughter of a wealthy man is kidnapped, he contacts the Crumb and Crumb detective agency to investigate. That fellow, played by Jeffrey Jones (the principal in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, if you need a reminder), is not a Crumb, and he puts the bumbling current generation of that well-reputed family of detectives on the case. Crumb bumbles his way through various plots at cross-purposes, including the wealthy man’s oversexed second wife, played by Annie Potts, who hopes to kill him before he can change his will, and the head of the agency itself being behind the kidnapping, hoping to get the ransom money to be able to afford the lifestyle that the oversexed second wife wants.

So it’s a series of often slapstick set pieces populated by Canadian comedians, and, you know what? It’s not a bad bit of film. It has its moments of amusement and isn’t a bad way to pass some time. You remember when these kinds of mid-tier movies, not blockbusters but not complete slop. They probably made more economic sense when you had a whole tail of other revenue possibilities for them besides the theater–video store rental sales, home video sales, licensing to cable or television…. Now you’ve got, what, cinema and streaming? So we lose out on films like this. The pity.

So I’m not the biggest John Candy fan, but I’ll think about picking up Uncle Buck if I can find it for a buck.

The film stars Ethan Hawke and Jude Law, so you know it’s a serious film, not an actioner or thriller like, say, Paycheck or Johnny Mnemonic (which I have seen since I read the book, but that was before I bored you a twee “movie report” on every last film I’ve seen recently).

At any rate, in the near future, prenatal genetic sampling/testing allows parents to select for ideal traits in their offspring, which leads to a bifurcated society where God babies/naturally conceived people are called “in-valids” and are left to the lesser jobs of society. One such person, played by Hawke, finds a black market fellow who will help him impersonate a “valid.” Jude Law plays the man whose identity Hawke takes, a champion swimmer and genius who is a parapalegic and hence is shunned for his infirmity. Law’s character provides blood and urine samples so that Hawke can work at Gattaca, a space exploration company, as a navigator whose work and plans earn him the right/privilege of launching on a mission to Titan. But in the week before Hawke can relax his ruse while he’s off world, the mission director at Gattaca is murdered. Despite the care he has taken for some years in removing loose skin and hair, he leaves a stray eyelash near the scene of the crime, and it is swept up, and the authorities know an in-valid was near the scene. So he has to continue playing the role under increased pressure and in getting through new challenges, including checkpoints and random sweeps of the Gattaca headquarters. Along the way, he finds that some people hope that he succeeds and help, and that his greatest opponent is his augmented brother who is heading up the investigation.

So: Eh, all right, I’ve seen it. A little more serious than it needed to be to be really entertaining–the pace was not enough to really be tense, and it lacked enough action to make it compelling. I should probably start a rating system for how many times I paused the film and went upstairs to fold some laundry in the middle of it or something–much less times where I paused a film and came to finish it another day. I must have paused this film three or four or five times.

Still, it must have punched above its weight and resonated with enough people at the fin de siècle that they refer to it today. Kind of like today’s…. erm…. well…. What will members of this generation allude to in twenty years? Probably nothing. Maybe hollaback meme templates.

I picked this film up over the weekend, and I popped it in on Sunday. I thought, man, Val Kilmer, Christian Slater (and, it turns out, Daryl Hannah and Verne Troyer). How did this escape my notice in the 1990s? Ah, but gentle reader, it was because this was an Eastern European direct-to-video movie. Sort of a Borscht action movie, if you will. Given that the actors in the films were on the back-end of their best mainstream success, maybe Hard Cash Grab might have been a better name for it.

So: The before-the-credits bit shows a two groups of criminals; one is offering to buy some counterfeit currency, but the deal seemingly goes south when the seller starts to insult the Eastern European money launderer. But it turns out that the buyers, led by Christian Slater, were there to steal the money through an elaborate gimmick which involves Daryl Hannah (I later learned) plays the part of a seemingly pregnant woman who infiltrates Verne Troyer into the household. After the householders are all incapactitated–but not killed–the team comes back in, but the police show up, and Slater’s character (Taylor) gives himself up to let his team escape. That’s all before the simple opening credits.

The bulk of the movie takes place a year later when Slater is released from prison. He gathers his gang together again, and they stage an elaborate rip-off of an off-track-betting establishment. But they discover after their success that the money is all marked by the FBI, so they have to turn to the money launderer from the year before. Things take a turn when Taylor discovers that a corrupt FBI agent (Kilmer) was using the OTB parlor to launder his ill-gotten gains. So he blackmails Taylor (and his by extension his crew) to rob a money drop from off-shore casinos.

Also, Taylor is trying to reconnect with his young daughter whom he hasn’t seen in a year and the doxie who took care of the kid while he was in the can, but she seems to be working for Kilmer.

So there are a lot of double-crosses and a rather bloody, but without a great deal of budget for blood, ending, and….

Well, I guess there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

But ultimately, the film was a little slowly paced and was just…. I dunno, off a little bit. Maybe the Eastern European look of it–and I only suspected its provenance when I watched it, but research did prove it out. Maybe the dialog–maybe English was not the screenwriter’s first language (although Willie Dreyfus sounds American, but this is his only writing credit, and he has two acting credits: in this film and in an episode of Tour of Duty).

One thing that was on the nose: Sara Downing played Paige, the doxie, and she definitely hit the look of trailer park hot.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Hard Cash (2002)” →

Since I just watched Innerspace with Dennis Quaid, since this film was also atop the video cabinets (since I just bought it at the Friends of the Springfield-Christian County Library Book Sale in May), I thought I would watch it to properly be on a Dennis Quaid kick.

The film is a thriller set in New Orleans. Quaid plays a police officer lightly on the take–they all are–who starts looking into the death of a mafia heavy that was probably to be a message to his mob. Ellen Barkin plays an assistant district attorney who is assigned to look into it as well–but she’s really looking into police corruption. They become lovers (hot and spicy for the 1980s scenes follow), but when Quaid’s Remy McSwain is caught in a bribery stakeout, they fall out (and she prosecutes him). He engineers getting the charges dropped, and she challenges him to reflect on whether he’s even a good guy any more–so he leaves the “Widows and Orphans” group of police sharing in bribes.

As McSwain continues to investigate the “gang war,” he finds that police officers might be involved in several, or all, of the deaths, which leads him to confront his captain–the man who plans to marry McSwain’s widowed mother.

It’s a slow burn film, not as kinetic as you get in the 21st century, and the final climax is rather tame by comparison as well. But it’s a good film, although everyone plays it with a pronounced Cajun accent which, in at least my personal post-The Waterboy, seems funny. Although I might end sentences for some time with cher for a while. Given I am still coming out of my personal post-Shōgun period, my sentences are likely to end with Karma, neh, cher? which will lead to people with whom I speak to beg me to return to my native ainna?

So, I thought I would next watch Bull Durham to continue on my Quaid-kick, but, c’mon, man, a moment’s reflection made me realize that was Kevin Costner, not Dennis Quaid. Then I thought, boy, they are of different eras, neh, cher? Dennis Quaid, whose most noteworthy films come from the 1980s, kinda hams it up. I associate Kevin Costner, who had a string of successes in the late 1980s, more with the 1990s. And he’s so damned earnest in his roles. I suppose if I could turn this into a term paper were I still in college, but you’ll have to just live with my thesis and contemplate it on your own if you’re so inclined.

Also, it led to a little tension at Nogglestead. She said Dennis Quaid was in her favorite Saturday Night Live skit, Mustang Calhoun, from 1990. I said, no, that was Randy Quaid.

In my defense, and in the post-Independence Day world where Randy Quaid played a pilot, you tell me:

That is Dennis, who is Randy’s younger brother.

So maybe my Dennis Quaid kick is over. Which is a shame. He’s fun to watch. In a way Kevin Costner is not. In a 1980s way.

I just bought this videocassette in June, so it was atop the cabinet and awaiting quick viewing since I’m too lazy to actually open the (glass-fronted stereo) cabinet holding years’ (decades’) worth of accumulated unwatched videos. And as I popped it in, I thought it was odd that I had never seen the film.

Ah, but as I watched, I realized this was, in fact, a film that appeared on Showtime back in the day, and I had seen it probably more than once albeit not in over 35 years.

So it’s a bit of an action/comedy take on The Fantastic Voyage. Dennis Quaid plays a former Navy pilot working with a lab team working on minaturization; the lab team is going to shrink him and inject him into a rabbit. Just as the experiment begins, though, the lab is attacked by a black ops crew working to steal the technology. The lead guy takes the syringe containing the shrunken pilot and capsule and flees, injecting them into a hypochondriac played by Martin Short (not to be confused with the hypochondriac played by Tom Hanks–have we really lost the stock comedic hypochondriac character? Probably.). They, helped by Pendleton’s (that is, Quaid’s) reporter girlfriend (played by Meg Ryan) have to retrieve a computer chip and re-enlarge Quaid before his air supply runs out.

So it’s a series of chases, impersonations, and comedy that turns out all right at the end.

The film has Robert Picardo in it, and although I saw the name in the credits, I didn’t recognize him. It also has Henry Gibson and Kevin McCarthy playing the kinds of roles they did. I see a lot of overlap in their film careers around this time and have learned that they must have been part of the Joe Danteverse, the director of this film and others like The ‘Burbs. I shall probably forget this trivia presently, but I bet you know what you’re getting when Joe Dante directed a film.

At any rate, not a bad way to spend a bit of an evening, but since I’m not trapped in a tin can in a trailer park in 1988 with nothing but Showtime to occupy me, I probably won’t watch it over and over again. Especially since I have a full cabinet and the tops of two littered with accumulated things to watch and another book sale bearing down on me in two weeks where I will likely add to the pile faster than I watch them.

After watching Godzilla vs. Mothra, I did, in fact, pop this DVD in for my next movie watching a night or so later.

This film is eight years older than the Godzilla movie I just watched and features the origin of Rodan, or at least of the species known as Rodan. Miners digging coal near a volcano in Japan reach an unheard of depth, and water floods the cave, leading to two missing miners who previously scuffled on the surface. The film plays out for the first portion like a horror movie: Something in that deep tunnel is deadly, but what is it? They eventually discover that giant insects are killing the miners and investigators. When the army goes in with force, a cave-in separates an engineer from the rest, and when he is found on the surface, he has amnesia. Meanwhile, a supersonic UFO is devastating different cities in Asia and defeats, somehow, some military jets. The engineer recovers his memory when his fiancée shows a nest with one of her songbirds’ eggs in it, ready to hatch: In the mine, he saw an egg hatching, and the giant winged creature ate the giant insects. From then on, it’s a straight-up monster movie with the military trying to deal with the giant dinosaurs (there are two) who seem impervious to bombs, missiles, and artillery. Spoiler alert: The barrage triggers a volcanic eruption which kills the pair, although a voiceover at the end indicates that the remaining mate might not wanted to live without its partner.

A fairly short film, of course, and again it hearkens back to my youth when we saw these movies “all the time” (again, where “all the time” might have meant on ten or fifteen Saturday afternoons in our eternal youth).

So I got to thinking: It’s clear that this film was made with models and toys in the cases of most of the military equipment and destroyed cityscapes. But we were kind of forgiving of this back in the day because that’s how our toys looked and so they were fake, but akin to what our imaginations produced on their own. Modern films look a lot like video games with all the computer imagery, and I’ve probably mentioned that I’ve found old films upscaled to 4K or whatever to look like video games, too, with different layers of things pretty clearly grouped together for rendering. But how do modern films look to my children, whose toys for the last five years or so and even before them, were video games and screen-based. Did it impact their imaginations so that modern films more clearly align with how they imagine things (if they imagine things outside what the screens provide)? How much of our youthful amusements shape our imaginations not only in content, but in shapes, appearances, textures, and the other underlying framework?

An interesting thought exercise, and were it my job, I could go into great and kind of tedious detail about it. But, gentle reader, as you know, I have no job, so I will not.

When I shelved the two new Toho monster movies that I bought in April–well, topped them as “shelving” them means putting them atop my unwatched video cabinet–I put them by the old Godzilla movie I already had up there. And I did not look closely, and it was only when I picked one to watch the other night that I realized I had Godzilla vs. Mothra and Mothra vs. Godzilla. Which, it turns out, are two releases of the same film (also known as Godzilla vs. The Thing, which is how I think I originally saw it forty-some years ago).

So: An egg washes ashore after a great taifun (after reading Shōgun, watch I drop transliterated Japanese words in blog posts for a couple of weeks). The fishermen sell it to a Businessman who, with his business partner, are going to make an attraction of it. Two little fairy-sized singers come to ask them to return the egg to its home from whence it was washed during the taifun (doesn’t count; it’s the same word re-used). When the Businessmen rebuff them, they turn to a Reporter, a Photographer, and a Scientist to help them. A Politician moves forward with building an industrial area after the storm, but this awakens Godzilla (this picture is the last of the Toho era where he is the antagonist) who starts destroying things. The Reporter, the Photographer, and the Scientist go to the home island of the fairy girls and the home of Mothra to seek his/her/its help in defeating Godzilla. And, after the egg hatches, Godzilla is dispatched into the sea. Until next time.

I capitalized the characters by their job titles instead of names because, c’mon, they’re archetypes, ainna?

Oh, man, did this film make me think of the olden days. On Saturday afternoons, one of the television stations in Milwaukee had a Creature Feature where they played these old Toho Godzilla movies along with classic Universal monster movies and the like, hosted by a Svengoolie knock-off. I remember seeing at least the end of this film because I didn’t understand what it meant when the recently-hatched caterpillars head out to sea, and my sainted mother explained they were returning to their home island. So I knew that much, anyway. Perhaps the original Mothra movie ended in a similar fashion. I can’t be arsed to look.

When I was at my brother’s house recently, a commercial for an upcoming bloc of twenty-year-old movies had my nephew exclaim, “Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is twenty years old?” (It is not, actually.) I asked him if that’s the first time he’s experienced the double-decade ago. It’s funny, but when I saw this film on Milwaukee television, it would have been less than fifteen years old. But it definitely looks different, more archaic, even then compared to how 21st century movies have changed (more looking like video games in big budget pictures, but Hot Tub Time Machine 2 wasn’t that).

So I suppose I will view the other monster movie (Rodan) sometime soon, and I have to think of how to dispose of my duplicate copy of this film. Which is not a true duplicate, but good enough. Free book cart at church? Maybe!

I picked this up in spring of 2023 along with a stack of other films at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. Looking back at the list, I’ve done okay on watching the films I bought then–out of 37 or 38, I guess I’ve watched a dozen or so. Which counts as okay for the video-buying excursions’ buy-to-watch-within-two-years ratio at Nogglestead.

As the Return (as with Legend) indicates, this is a sequel to an earlier film which I haven’t seen. In this film, the one-armed swordsmen is approached by a pair of swordsmen, one in black and one in white, to participate in a competition at the castle. He demurs, saying he’s just a farmer now, and they leave, but he is approached by other local “families” who have also been approached. They go, and he ends up taking up his broken sword (which looks like a big cleaver) when the bad guys persist and take the “fathers” of the families hostage–and their “sons” approach him for help. One of the sons takes the one-armed swordsman’s wife hostage to get his help. So the one-armed swordsman leads the “brothers” to the stronghold to fight the Eight Sword Kings–the big boss bad guys (well, seven guys and a girl) with gimmick powers or blades. Well, they fight some of the Sword Kings on the way, but ultimately free the “fathers.” However, during their night of celebration, the Eighth Sword King, the “Unseen” attacks with a bunch of ninjas, but the One-Armed Swordsman eventually triumphs and returns home. Until, perhaps The Legend of the One-Armed Swordsman.

It’s a particularly bloody and brutal bit of kung-fu theatre (wuxia, I believe the Chinese term is)–most or all of the “brothers” die, sometimes in bloody fashion. And I have put the family relationships in quotation marks because the dubbed version I have refers to “fathers” and “brothers,” but apparently other dubbed versions and probably the original say that these are martial arts schools, not clans, and the “fathers” are instructors while the “brothers” are students. Which kind of makes sense given how many “brothers” each family has. Still, we’re not watching for the plot. We’re watching for the stylized fighting and gimmicky villains. And we got them.

Less than a decade later, and I might have seen this on kung fu theater on Friday or Saturday night after MASH and Hawaii Five-O. No telling what films I actually saw. Come to think of it, there’s no telling how many times we actually watched this when the Odya boys were sleeping over. Five? Ten? Not as many as twenty, surely. But all the time as it seemed at the time. Then all the time ended unnoticed as it often does.

You know, I would not have expected to watch this film, as it is on a streaming service and I’m an old school media kind of guy. But a week ago, we visited my brother and his family, and they have all the streaming services, and so we watched this film.

And….

Well, it was okay.

It takes place a couple of decades past the first film (obviously). Happy Gilmore became the tour champion several times, but an errant tee shot kills Virginia (after she had borne a pile of kids). Happy hits the skids, becomes an alcoholic, and drops out of golfing and ends up the lowest of the low: A grocery store produce clerk (hey! wait a minute! I was a produce clerk for a long time in a couple different places!). A wealthy guy approaches him to join his new gimmicky golf league–Happy’s youngest daughter needs $300,000 to go to ballet school (an approachable problem for every man), but Happy demurs and looks to rejoin the pro tour to make the dough. Meanwhile, in a scene reminiscient of Batman or more likely Mystery Men, someone springs Shooter McGavin from the insane asylum where he has spent the decades–to rival Gilmore or to help him?

I mean, it was okay. A lot of memberberries, a lot of flashback footage from the original, and a couple of chuckles. But some things were gratuitous, such as the inclusion of Chubbs’ son who is also missing a hand. A lot of cameos–I recognized Travis Kelce, of course, and I did not recognize Eminem–and it has a lot of the Sandlerverse in it, including bringing back Ben Stiller as Hal, this time leading a court-ordered alcohol rehabilitation program, and a pile of Sandler’s actual children. Perhaps it’s part of the nature of Sandler’s contract with Netflix that allows him to be a bit self-indulgent in his cash grabs.

But it’s not likely to be the touchstone that the other one was. I cannot think of a single line from it worth repeating, and I allude to the original with disturbing and disappointing frequency (given that it’s almost thirty years old now).

But: Some things of note outside the film itself.

One, not long after watching it, Facebook presented this to me:

While watching the film, I said to the assemblage, “That’s Travis Kelce,” when Kelce appeared on the screen. Facebook knows what I said.

Second, Ben Stiller’s character in this film compels the recoveries in his substance abuse program to do work around his house much like he had the nursing home residents doing handicrafts for profit in the original.

Meanwhile, in Missouri:

Niangua pastor charged with forced labor in Webster County:

The founder and director of a Niangua-based sober living program has been charged with six felony counts of Abusing an Individual Through Forced Labor, following a sweeping investigation that spanned multiple years and exposed a pattern of alleged exploitation.

* * * *

The charges stem from numerous allegations that Tilden used his position of authority to coerce court-ordered residents into unpaid labor under threat of being removed from the program, potentially sending them back to jail.

According to the probable cause statement, Tilden allegedly forced at least six individuals to perform extensive labor between 2023 and July 2025. The reported work included roofing, farm labor, moving personal and church property, running thrift and feed stores, and construction projects, including the building of a pole barn for which one witness said Tilden was paid $1,500.

Ripped from today’s headlines. Is this actually prevalent? Or did I just happen to see this headline (in an actual, physical paper) and it struck me because I just watched the film?

Spotting these patterns probably explains a lot of my Internet-is-listening paranoia. Which, comes to think of it, is very similar to the patterns I spotted watching Jeopardy!

But my madness doesn’t mean the Internet isn’t listening.

Strangely enough, I watched the films in the Tom Selleck Western boxed set that I bought in June in reverse chronological order of when they were made and, perhaps, when they were set. Monte Walsh was made in 2003 and was set in 1892; Crossfire Trail was made in 2001 and was set in 1880; this film was made in 1997 and was set in 1865.

In this film, Selleck plays a returning Confederate Civil War veteran who comes back to his family in Texas after years away at war. He’s estranged from his wife and family and did not even learn that the youngest died while he was gone. They pack up to return to their homestead in Arizona (territory, of course, as it would not actually become a state for almost fifty years–1912) but find that other local ranchers, including one who served in the Union army, have moved into the valley. Conflict arises, abetted by a Confederate sympathizer running the local store and smuggling guns for the cause. Things come to a head, of course, and there’s gun play, and a resolution that brings the neighbors together and gets the husband and wife to start to reconcile.

Pretty stock stuff. To be honest, after watching three television Westerns in a row (and watching in the genre in watching The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. over the course of the last year or so), I’m ready to switch genres for a while. I actually watched this a couple of weeks ago not long after Crossfire Trail (I guess it’s only been a week and a half maybe–the review is dated July 17) but am only now getting to review it (and eventually to shelve it).

But I still like Tom Selleck as long as we can spread out the television Westerns over a longer period of time.

The film had Tracey Needham as the daughter of the rival ranching family.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Last Stand at Saber River (1997)” →