Musings from Brian J. Noggle

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.