I had an incredibly busy weekend, but I managed to watch three movies.
Deadpool and Wolverine – I loved the first one. Th second was meh, but this one was much better. I don’t agree that it’s 90% fanservice. There’s a lot in here that you’ll miss if you’re not a website-following nerd (I had to look it up afterwards), but there’s lot that can stand on its own, at least for people familiar with the MCU and the like. A lot of things were hilarious, even when the film was at its most meta.
The Astrozombies - saw this in the RiffTrax version. I’ve seen it before – I’m a big fan of Bad Films – so I knew what I was getting into. The riffing was pretty good.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a low-budget Ted V. Mikels film (that’s redundancy – ALL Mikels films are ultra-low budget). He’s along the lines of Roger Corman or Bert I. Gordon, but with even lower budgets and quality, but more sex. In this case Ted blew a large part of his budget by hiring John Carradine to play the Mad Scientist. The film also stars Tura Satana, one of Mikels’ stable of regulars , most famous for Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill! The leaps in logic, pointless coincidences, and bad acting make this film a riffer’s delight. My favorite part is when one of the titular Astro-zombies gets his power pack pulled off, and would have shut down. Fortunately, however, Carradine gave him a solar cell in his head, so the AZ shambles out with a flashlight pressed against the solar cell. Think about that – you don’t need an expensive power pack to power your astrozombie. You can pretty clearly run it on a couple of “D” cells.
Carradine gets hi own Evil Hunchbacked Assistant, who has greasy hair and eyes of two unequal sizes. And he’s named Franchot, which is at least better than “Ygor”. I thought of him and the tall Carradine as Don Quixote and Franchot Panza.
I also watched the RiffTRax version of another film I’ve seen many times over – Bert I. Gordon’s The Magic Sword. This one has a cheesy plot and cheesy special effects, but they got hold of Basil Rathbone (!) to play the Evil Sorceror Lodac, and Estelle Winwood to play the Good Witch Sybil. They also got Maila Nurmi (the original Vampira!) to play The Hag and Gary Lockwood (long before 2001) to play the hero, George. Naturally, George fights a dragon. It’s got two heads and breathes real fire, so it must have used up most of the rest of the budget. It looks a lot better than three three-headed fire-breathing dragon in Ilya Mouromets (AKA The SWord and the Dragon).
Interesting thing. I notice that around 1960 it was a feature for fantasy films to have an evil sorcerer/sorceress who lived i n a castle surrounded by grotesque-looking hangers-on. This film has it, with Lodac’s minions including a lot of dome-headed pinheads and bird-faced people. The 1962 film Jack the Giant Killer has “witches” that are mainly people with grotesque masks. And Disney’s Sleeping Beauty , where Maleficent has a court with animalesque creatures, notably her pig-like soldiers.
We haven’t seen much of that since, unless you count Jabba the Hutt’s stronghold in Return of the Jedi. It’s a “castle”, and Jabba isn’t a sorcerer, but has a lot of super-scientific tech. His Gamorean guards look as if inspired by Sleeping Beauty’s pig-guards, and Jabba’s hangers on are a medley of odd-looking aliens. I wonder if George Lucas was drawing on this 1960s trend, or if it’s just a riff on the Spaceport Bar meme.
