Watching Take Shelter....

..and it's like watching paint dry. I feel like I'm under the influence of sedatives.
I like some stuff abut it but it is very, very slow with not much happening. That seems to be the direction movies, especially indie movies, are going these days.

Finished A FAN'S NOTES, an autobiographical novel which I've been "working on" for years. It's by Frederick Exley and is nominally about a troubled man who lives in a small town and lives for alcohol and the New York Giants, especially Frank Gifford.
It's more than that, it's crazy houses and bad jobs, and lots of craziness. I like this picture of the author. He passed away about 20 years ago, wrote three books and a lot of articles. A FAN'S NOTES was the first of the three, I have not seen the others, although a couple of years ago I read a book called EXLEY that was about a kid whose dad was an obsessive fan of Exley and A FAN'S NOTES.

Deathstalker 2 (trailer)

Saw this sequel last night....even lighter in tone than the first, which wasn't exactly GAME OF THRONES. I think it might have been one of those Roger Corman specials where they'd shoot one movie and then shoot a cheaper one with the leftover sets and props. This is a lot smaller in scale than the first one, but a lot of fun. Wish the others would be availble on DVD or on streaming.

Good movie for beer drinking. I love how the closing credits end with the various warnings and disclaimers about the film's copyright being superimposed over a shot of the female lead's bare chest.

Also....

THE DEAD, not the 1987 John Huston film but a newish zombie movie set in Africa.

One of my favorite horror films is HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD, a zombie flick set in New Guinea. It's a terrible movie, but still has stuff that works, an overall downbeat feeling of dread. Part of what works is that the zombies are out in the jungle and just seem to materialize out of the bush. THE DEAD uses this to a great advantage.

The setting works for and against the film---one of the things that really makes zombie films resonate with people is the feeling of "What if..." and seeing a world that is not unlike the viewer's own world turned upside down. The African setting causes the film to lose that...the desert and savannah seem otherworldly, as do the zombies and survivors.

Still an effective film, and I enjoy the old style effects [no CGI that I could notice.] But I would not say it's "the best movie since the original DEAD films" as some have said. But I have thought about the movie since seeing it, and that is always a good sign.

Blood, breasts, blades, beasts....

This movie has everything, it was a staple of conversation back in 6th grade [mainly due to the large amount of nudity.] I revisited it in my college years and still enjoyed it, and just picked it up on DVD with a few other similar films. DEATHSTALKER is a lot of fun, a good antidote to more serious fantasy stuff. It holds up pretty well and doesn't look any cheaper than it did in 1983.

They don't make these kind of movies anymore, I guess they just assume people will watch Cinemax type stuff or just outright porn. My favorite part is the tournament with the little guy who wears horns on his head.

Warrior, come out and play.....

I love films about fighting, I guess I'm a closet macho steroid freak even though at the gym I stick to the weight machines and the recumbent bike. Today I watched WARRIOR which had a lot of good reviews. It was interesting in that it was about MMA instead of boxing, and I don't know if there have been a lot of good MMA movies. Wrestler Kurt Angle plays a vicious Russian fighter but he ends up kind of being a McGuffin.

The ending was kind of anti-climactic, but I still got into the movie overall. Nick Nolte basically plays Nick Nolte. I like that the movie went into a different direction than I expected, but the most exciting part for me was 15-20 minutes before the end.

MMA matches are so short that they are probably not as good dramatic fodder as boxing is, since there are only three rounds and generally MMA matches in the movies are way longer than most MMA matches are in real life.

Son of Frankenstein

Saw this on Me-TV with Svengoolie! I love the horror host shows, but most have to play the same nine or ten old public domain movies, but Me-TV or whomever pays for the Universal package of films. We had a "Scary movie" show on Friday nights when I was a kid but I could never stay up and watch it most of the time since it came on at 11:30. I remember once time as a kid I was able to stay up and I felt so proud of myself.

Anyway, this was one of the films that they often played. I have the Frankenstein films on DVD but this was the first time I'd seen this. It's surprisingly long for a film back then at 100 minutes. It's also strange in that the true villain of the movie is Ygor, who uses the Monster to strike back at his enemies. The Monster himself sort of takes a back seat.

It's also funny to watch and see just how many things were taken by Mel Brooks when he made YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN---right down to the giant knockers! Huh huh huh...

Finished two other books, House of Prayer No. 2 [a memoir] and Killer Stuff and Tons of Money which is about the antique trade. Enjoyed both, but I really inhaled Killer Stuff. I submitted a poem this week but don't know how it will turn out, it's for a literary journal and I sort of doubt it's good enough but I thought it was worth a shot.

Bird.

I always enjoy books about people obsessed with hobbies that are new to me. This is about birdwatching. A Big Year is an informal competition where birders try to spot as many different species as possible within their continent, state, or other region. This is the story of three birders who are going for the title [which is only for bragging rights.]

I've always enjoyed and noticed birds, so it appealed to me, although in the end they could not add much suspense to it.

I cannot find a book that really takes me away these days, but I keep looking.

CONTAGION

Just not as interested in putting up trailers/images for these bigger budget films, but this did get under my skin. I believe it was one of the first "bio-disaster" flicks to be produced with the cooperation of the CDC and various scientists.

I enjoyed it, it really brought home the whole idea from the Romero flicks that it doesn't take very long at all for everything to just collapse.

Battle: Los Angeles

More like Retreat: Los Angeles. My friend who played this for me said it reminded him of Independence Day, but this is on a much smaller scale, with most of the big stuff being shown through television broadcasts. A Marine regiment is charged with rescuing civilians from L.A. after an alien attack. It's a race against time as the Air Force is about to bomb the place. Of course they pick up a few civilians and some stranded members of other military units, and they end up finding a way to attack the alien command post.

It was strange in many ways...you don't really see much of the aliens who look more robotic, other than one scene where they find one of the creatures and try to determine its vulnerabilities. But it was really just 30 minutes of set up, 45 minutes of them trying to get away, and then 45 minutes of fighting back. The cast was small and not a whole lot really happens as far as the big scale of things.

I've noticed this about many of the bigger films of recent years. They build the entire film around something that would probably have just been a single sequence or two if it had been from a film during the 80s and 90s. The last Indiana Jones film was the same way, basically an extended jungle chase scene that took up most of the movie and might have amounted to maybe 15-20 minutes of one of the older films, but here it's pumped full of air and becomes the entire thing.

Come see how the vampires do it!

Saw it on TCM last night....didn't have anything else going on, and heard it was playing via a horror geek message board where I sometimes lurk.

I'm way too young to have caught the show other than through home video, and am probably going to go through the whole thing on Netflix. I remember being amused in the old days that Barnabas seemed to spend most of his time punishing Willie Loomis, and also that it was live and sometimes they'd flub lines and one time Barnabas was attacked by a fly.

The movie wasn't that great, very choppy and as the writer Tim Lucas puts it, "seems like it was edited by a chainsaw." I didn't mind it that much, it was good to put on while I was fooling around on the laptop. Love that dayglo red blood in HD!