JunkMonkey
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- Jun 8, 2007
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Last years list:https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/the-junkmonkey-movie-diary-2025.60274/
January
February:
April:
July
August
2026 Reading Diary[/list][/b]
January
- Eleven days into the year and I finally get my arse into a position where I have enough time to flop and watch a movie. As per recent tradition I have to start the year with a really BAD movie to make everything I watch after it good by comparison. Previous years' kick off films have included Vampyros Lesbos, Shaolin Drunkard, Bloodsuckers and Sergeant Kabukiman (though in 2022 I started the year by watching Independence Day for some reason - maybe I forgot). This year:
Caged Fury!
An incredibly boring Philippine WIP movie set in Vietnam and boasting some of the slowest motion wooden acting you will ever see. Seriously dull. It can only get better. - They Live (1988) - with #1 Son who has had it on his 'want to see' list for a while. After he enjoyed it I went and found, in an old F&SF Magazine, the original (extremely) short story it was based on. He's doing media studies at school and I thought it might help him understanding the way the transfer from page to screen works - but more importantly to help convince myself that the HUGE piles of mouldering SF magazines that clutter up JunkMonkey Mansions serve some sort of purpose and may even have some sort of educational value.
February:
- Between Time and Timbuktu (1973) an American TV movie based on the writings of Kurt Vonnegut which I remember seeing way back in the whenever on British TV and never quite forgot.
- Bajirao Mastani (2015)
A while ago this came up on my Youtube:
and I went, 'Holy Cremola Foam Crystals!' and immediately bought the DVD. I was a little lost at times with obvious symbolic moments whizzing past my untutored understanding but dang it looked wonderful!
It was a Romeo and Juliet / love triangle tragedy with two of the leads ending up dead.
- Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Years to Earth - 1967) - Watched with #1 Son to finally get round to explaining why I burst out laughing during an episode of Doctor Who a while back.
I recalled this as being pretty darn good but it was much better than I remembered - possibly because this was the first time I have seen it in any kind of widescreen format (previous views being on pillar-boxed VHS. - Bajirao Mastani (2015)
A while ago this came up on my Youtube:
and I went, 'Holy Cremola Foam Crystals!' and immediately bought the DVD. I was a little lost at times with obvious symbolic moments whizzing past my untutored understanding but dang it looked wonderful!
It was a Romeo and Juliet / love triangle tragedy with two of the leads ending up dead.
- The Lost World (1998) - which I watched by accident. Well, not quite by accident but, as it turns out, I did.
Okay, to begin at the beginning...
...during in my wanderings through piles of crap DVDs I have come across a couple of 'movies' called Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World: Some Subtitle Here - which have turned out to be two episodes of a Lost World TV series edited none too subtly together. The last one I watched just had the end titles of one episode and the opening titles of the next cut off and were then taped together. They are awful but do have that wonderfully crap, compulsive 'why am I watching this utterly shoddy sh*te?' fascination that I find irresistible.
Recently, when I found a copy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World With no Subtitle, and the smiley face of Michael Sinelnikoff (who plays Professor Arthur Summerlee in the show) on the front, I thought I had found the pilot (or at least the first of the cobbled together movies.) I watched it tonight and got more and more confused as it went along. For one thing the action of the film takes place in Mongolia, not South America and apart from the names of the characters and the words 'Dinosaur' and 'Plateau' seemed to have very little with the book as I remember it. (Or the TV series for that matter.) My confusion reached a peak when the amiable Professor Arthur Summerlee who appeared in most episodes of the show got very messily eaten by a T Rex - after having been drugged by a Neanderthal blow dart while asleep in a very Mayan looking deserted temple. A couple more recurring character deaths later and our hero and heroine are blown off the side of a cliff by an exploding dinosaur while clutching the parachute they had made out of the remains of their helium balloon (which still had the professor's leg attached when they'd found it).
(And it has Rachel Blakely being sweaty a lot
- I am easily pleased.)
It was really really not good.
- Troy (the Brad Pitt one). I stopped watching Troy (the Brad Pitt one) after 25 minutes as the only reason I had left for watching the cliché riddled, badly written pile of poo was finding out if Sean Bean's character lived to the end of the film. Then I realised he was playing Odysseus and not even this steaming pile of peplum pants would kill off the hero of the Odyssey.
- Genesis : The Fall of Eden (2018) - which I should have stopped watching after 25 minutes but I was just too disheartened to get my arse out of my chair again to turn it off. Genesis : The Fall of Eden - is set in a post apocalyptic world where the surface cannot sustain life and a small group live in an underground facility trying to develop a self-aware robot that will survive on the surface, find other survivors, bring back supplies blah blah blah. As you would expect with a film called Genesis : The Fall of Eden every other character had some biblical name, the attractive female lead scientist was called Dr. Eve Gabriel, the (nasty) security guy was called Cain, the 'is it self aware?' robot itself was called Abel blah blah blah. For a while I suspected was watching one of those godawful Christian movies that was going to end up thudding home its message with the subtlety of a sledgehammer but it didn't go that way. There was lots of talk about 'purpose', and 'programming' which was I think supposed to be deeply philosophical - but wasn't. I had just given the movie a bonus point for not making the 'is it really self-aware?' robot an attractive, female, 'is it really self-aware?' robot and calling it Eve when bugger me sideways - in a plot twist it turns out that attractive, female lead scientist Dr. Eve Gabriel was also a self-aware robot though she wasn't aware of the fact - that she was a robot. She was an earlier model and no one told her. (Insert lots of dialogue pastiched from Blade Runner and The Humanoids here.)
And on and on it went; nearly two bloody hours of watching far too many barely-introduced characters running around doing stuff for reasons that were never really clear (even, I suspect, to the scriptwriters). The 'is it really self-aware?' robot goes rogue and starts killing people because of philosophical reasons. Someone does something even more obscure than usual (probably off screen) and suddenly the underground facility has Awwooga! Awooga! Danger, Will Robinson! flashing doom warnings all over the place. No one can override the controls because someone we are supposed to know the name of has blocked an airlock door by dying halfway through it; jamming it open. (This is all happening while the bad guys are trying to stage a coup d’etat which is shitty timing). In the end nearly everyone is dead apart from the few who wander off in the final couple of shots wearing military grade hazmat suits hastily dragged into the script from somewhere. They're off to some to some equally hastily, pulled out at the last minute, safe-haven which just happens to be within walking distance.
Somewhere in all this was a halfway decent idea or two. It would have worked a lot better as a TV series with the characters introduced and allowed to develop before being thrown into danger so we gave even the slightest sh*t about what happened to them. As it is, it looks like someone pitched a zero budget prequel to Battlestar Galactica set in an utterly unthought-through post-Apoc wastland and then got bored with making it halfway through. - Changement de cap 1998 - utterly forgettable French TV movie.
- Tron - one of my favourite films.
- Tron Legacy - having watched Tron last night, son and I have a mini Tronathon and watched the Skin Two fest that is the sequel tonight. Neither of us liked it. It don't half go on. (Music is brilliant though).
- Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall - well that was an unfunny boring mess. I love I love Spike Milligan's writing and can probably still recite the Goon Show LPs I listened to obsessively as a kid. A H and my Part in his Downfall' was the funniest thing I think I had ever read at the time, and Puckoon still makes me laugh. The film version of 'AH: my part...' though is a cheap. and shoddy mess that throws away 90% of the stuff that made the book so great and doesn't substitute anything to replace it. If I tell you that the director's later films ('Confessions of a Pop Star' etc.) are funnier, more coherent, and better paced you might get some idea of how disappointed I was.
April:
- Wrath of the Titans (2012) - Dear mother of all the gods! (Gaia) That was crap. A thudding ponderous CGI bore - with the sole exception of Bill Nighy as Hephaestus who, I suspect, just decided to have fun with his part - and then hid behind a huge beard, a cod northern accent, and spent as much time with his back to the camera as he could get away with so no one noticed it was him.
- War of the Worlds (1951) - which stands up pretty well, even if the God message is a bit heavily handedly treacled in at the end.
- Area Q. (2011) a Brazilian/American SF UFO abduction movie of monumental tediousness. Hampered from the start by a really shonky story structure. After an opening sequence set in Brazil in 1979 that just seemed to go on forever: a farmer disappears... we jump to Los Angeles in 2010 where our hero is being interviewed, and the story is told in his flashback 'a year earlier'... in which, as soon as the audience has got its feet back under the table and got it in its head that we are now in 2009, we get our hero's flashbacks to the mysterious abduction of his son a year before that! - He's a reporter and he gets an assignment to go cover some UFO flap in Brazil and it just plods on and on as he wanders around doing all the boring bits from the X-Files in laboriously translated from English to Portuguese and back again interviews while our hero gets out of more cars in one movie that I thought humanly possible. It seems like every other shot is of him arriving somewhere that looks like it was shot 200 meters away from the last location, getting out of the car, and then looking around to see where he is. (To be fair, some of the locations are pretty spectacular). To help get around various editing bumps and longueurs all this tedious interviewing and wandering around stuff is patched together with a needless voice over (which we we assume is him talking to the reporter in 2010). Sometimes this VO is telling us stuff that is so bloody obvious you wonder why it had been put there.
Ferristance: Scene: Night time, a restaurant: Over a romanticly set up dinner for two, the mysterious sexy female report is very obviously and actively attempting to jump into the sack with our hero. He waffles on about his dead wife. She sympathises. He waffles on about his son. She wets her lips. She toys with her drink, toys with her hair, smiles her big doe eyes gazing into his. She pushes her tits in his direction, and then gently lays her hand on his - basically she does everything apart from rip her clothes off and yell, "TAKE ME, BIG BOY! TAKE ME NOW!" Eventually we hear his voice over say: "I gave in to her seduction..." Cut to a full Moon rising over the tree tops. "...it had been years since I had been that close to anyone." Cut to them both asleep together in the same bed her arm resting on his manly shoulder.
It need a voice over to tell us they schtupped? Really?! I felt my intelligence had been genuinely insulted. And "I gave in to her seduction" is really weird phrasing; it's the sort of thing you would get in a Neil Breen script.
Eventually, after having spent most of the movie doing 'what's going on? what am I supposed to be doing now?' acting up at the corner of the screens (or getting out of cars) our hero is contacted by the aliens who (in Portuguese) give him the whole Benevolent Space Brothers 'we are here to save you from yourselves because you are on the point of destroying your planet and your vital resources are important to the whole universe' shtick. They are going to save humanity by kidnapping children, reprogramming them and making them younger before bringing them back as a new generation of benevolent leaders and scientists (Os cucos de Midwich?) spreading hope and charity and good all over (though their inclusion of Theresa of Calcutta as an example of the kind of thing they mean hasn't dated well). Our hero is given a longitude and latitude and a date and told to be there on Jan 1st 2011. ...and walks back into town a year later having only been away for the night from his point of view... All his notes and laptop are missing from the hotels storage. The hot sexy woman turns out to be a WIB and tries to kill him but the aliens whisk her away to a windfarm as she pulls the trigger. (The movie doesn't bother to tell us which year they dumped her in.)
Cut back to 2010 and our hero tells the reporter interviewing him that she will never get the story printed.
Cut to Jan 1st 2011 and there he is at the map coordinates doing 'what's going on? what am I supposed to be doing now?' acting when he hears a woman's cries. In a ruined building a woman is giving birth. The child bears the same birthmark as his son. The woman dies. Our hero does 'what am I supposed to be doing now?' acting as the camera pulls up and away.
Really avoid this one.
This has been a PSA by the JunkMonkey Tedious Movie Awareness Campaign. - British Intelligence (1940) - a bit of (none too subtle) Warner Bros. anti-Nazi propaganda which I only picked up because it has Boris Karloff in it and I adore Boris Karloff and I had never heard of it. The movie introduced me (I think it introduced me - I don't remember having come across her before) to the lead actress Margaret Lindsay who was simply the best thing in the whole picture. Partially I suspect because she was American (born in Iowa) and everyone else in the cast was British. Her accent was very good - I only found out she was American after looking up the film after watching - but her acting was much more relaxed and natural than all the mostly older (almost certainly stage-trained) British actors surrounding her. She came over really well. Reminded me a bit of Barbara Stanwyck.
- Vampiros Lesbos(1971) - Jess Franco at his randomly weird best helped by some pretty terrific music. The whole jazzy rock sexadelic soundtrack is here.My favourite track I think is 'The Message' - Sounds like Angelo Badalamenti mashed up with Serge Gainsburg at his testosterone-soaked best and then they forgot to turn on his microphone. It's brilliant.
- Ghost in the Shell (1995). Another film with a brilliant score:
Ghost In The Shell (1995) OST
Ghost In The Shell 1995 OST☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰☰♫ Track List♫TrackMaking of Cyborg (謡I) - [0:00]Ghosthack - [4:28]Puppetmaster - [9:43]Virtual Cr...
www.youtube.com
- Ghost in the Shell (The pointless live action remake.) - well that was a pile of pants. I knew it was a pile of pants because I had seen it before but having watched the original the other day I thought I would give it another go... The original was leisurely, gave the audience time to fill in the gaps and work out what was going on, and the who and the why and the what of it all. The remake fills in all the gaps, over-explains everything, recreates shots and scenes from the original but changes their context and meaning, rips out the central idea and replaces it with an origin story and then adds a corporate CEO bad guy because the American audience has to have a villain. And then! to add insult to injury, uses some of the music from the original over the end credits.
I must admit though I did admire the way Scarlett Johansson managed to convey the robotiness of her body by walking around with her arms held stiffly down her side but away from her body as if she had a tennis ball clenched under each armpit and was trying not to drop them. - Dark Breed (1996) - the first 20 minutes. I gave up after 20 or so minutes of incoherent stunt man show reel stuff. I think it was the realisation that not only did our hero (Nick Saxon an agent for the top secret 'Omega agency') have an ex wife on board the crashed space shuttle at the centre of the plot, but that someone managed not only to write the line "we believe the Omega Eight came in contact with an unknown space virus" but thought it good enough to pay an actor to say it with a straight face.
- The Seventh Veil (1945) - The biggest UK box office for the year on release and, according to Wikipedia: "In 2004, the British Film Institute compiled a list of the 100 biggest UK cinematic hits of all time based on audience figures, as opposed to gross takings. The Seventh Veil placed 10th in this list with an estimated attendance of 17.9 million people." Golly! I wondered, how have I managed to miss such an important piece of British film history for so long? Well because it's a pile of utter hooey might be one reason. A schmalzty tale of histrionic psycho-dramatic nonsense with one utterly brilliant shot in it. Towards the start of the film vaguely Viennese psychologist Herbert Lom hypnotises suicidal uncommunicative patient Anne Todd and regresses her memories to her childhood... her childhood... childhood... childhood...
As she starts to remember, Lom, who is sat in a chair next to Todd, and the room they are in, recede into the background to be replaced by a optical wipe and fade in to a scene showing the memory played out. Disappearing Lom into the background was done by a lighting change and quite brilliantly by having Todd and the chair she was sitting in bolted onto the dolly with the camera. As the memory kicked in Lom froze in position and the camera (actress and chair) were dollied away from him, dropping him out of focus as the lights were dimmed - thinking about it now this means that some of the lighting rig must have been dollied back too because the lighting on Todd doesn't change. - Underworld: Evolution - dear gods. What a pile of crap!
- I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998) One of those odd casts you don't see very often: Billy Zane, Ron Perlman, Christina Ricci, Tippi Hedren, John Ritter, Sandra Bernhard, Karen Black, Bud Cort, Eartha Kitt, Ricky Schroder, a couple of lesser Phoenixes (Rain and Summer) and Vampira herself...
- Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) - damn I love this film so much. I'm not sure I really understand the end but it's such a great ride getting there.
I'm going to have this song in my head for days: (Not often you hear a rock song based on Aristophanes' speech from Plato's Symposium but this has to be one of the best.) - Message from Space - which I HAD seen before so I have no excuse. The only thing I came away with this time was the realisation that the opening theme sounded exactly like what you would get if you asked someone to pastiche John Barry scoring Wendy Carlos's music for the end of Tron where the IO powers light up:
- Safety Last (1923) - I knew very next to nothing about Harold Lloyd. I knew he was very big back in the day and was up there with Keaton and Chaplin in his day so I was looking forward to getting to know his stuff I must say I was a bit disappointed.
July
- Dracula Untold - my second foray into the Universal's 'Dark Universe' reboot of their classic monsters. It was better than 'The Mummy' (I know, that's a low bar to hurdle) but starting off with homage shots that reminded the audience that Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula exists was a serious serious mistake. I got to the end of it but it was touch and go in several places.
- Girl Shy (1924) - another Harold Lloyd feature which I enjoyed much more than Safety Last. The gags flowed, some of them were genuinely hair-raising and I was particularly impressed by the audacity of having our central character suffering from a stutter - in a silent film.
- White Warrior (1959)- staring the Steve Reeves himself - derived from a story by Tolstoy. Plodding historical hokum that suffered in the print I saw from the worst, cheapest pillar boxing I have seen for a long time. Sometimes neither actor in a scene were visible as the sides of the screen were cropped off. I did come to admire the voice actor dubbing the main villain who really managed to make the not quite English as she is spoke phrasing he was given - to fit the mouth movements of the actor talking in (I presume) Italian- seem almost believably natural. (When you could see him.) They obviously spent a lot of time getting the lead actresses' heaving bosom beautifully lit too.
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being: after about 40 minutes or so I decided I just couldn't take any more 'Hollywood does European Arthouse'.
- Ocean's 8 - I remember quite enjoying the first couple in a Park your Brain way (the remakes - the original is awful!) but after 20 or so minutes of not believing a sodding moment of it I baled on this one too. Most of those 20 minutes were spent wondering (once I had recognised her) what the hell Sandra Bullock has done to her face and listening to Cate Blanchett's accent slipping (not that that was a showstopper - I figure they owe us one after Don Cheedle's cockney).
- Cause for Alarm! a 1951 minor thriller which had its moments. A suburban housewife's husband dies while trying to kill her - but before he croaks reveals, in a fit of plot-driving 'mwhahahaha! I'm so clever' exposition, that he has sent a letter implicating her in a fictional plot to kill him. When he dies in the act of truong to kill her she desperately tries to get the letter back before it reaches the DA's office and things just keep getting worse and worse as she keeps digging the hole she is in deeper and deeper. It was one of those films that makes you appreciate what a great director Hitchcock really was. All the elements are there in this film (and some of them very good) but that elusive ingredient X was missing.
- Sirocco (1951) - Bogart plays a variation on his Rick character from Casablanca but meaner and less noble and with a great slathering of his Dobbs from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - and then gets himself killed at the end of the movie. A strangely unbalanced movie: the big name star, (and executive producer) Bogart takes up a lot of screen time really playing a secondary part with the hero of the piece, the noble peacemaker, played by Lee J Cobb, playing second fiddle. There are all sorts of parallels with Casablanca (down to the final longshot of two gaberdine clad men walking towards a possible better future).
- In This our Life (1942) Bette Davis and Olivia DeHavilland chewing up the scenery, the furniture, for all I know each other, and then some more of the scenery with such relish it manages to make the preposterous, melodramatic script almost credible.
She: Oh don't use that word; it frightens me. There's nothing permanent but now. The moment. That's all there is.
He: There'll be other moments and there'll be other days... I'm not going to lose you.
She: You'll only lose me if you try to hold me - don't do that, Craig. We should have learned that lesson by now, both of us. Never count on its lasting and don't ask me to count on it.
He: I can't think l when you're so close to me.
She: Then hold me closer; I don't want you to think.
[They kiss and - fade to black before both actors burst out laughing.]
August
- Robotrix (1991)
Basically it's just that for 90 minutes but with some very long (not badly done) raunchy sex scenes in there to break things up. The only film I know where someone gets beheaded with an empty pick-nick basket.
Robotrix (1991) Trailer
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- Dracula (1979) - a version I only found out about the other day and rushed off (to eBay) to buy a copy on the strength of the fact that I had never heard of it before and some of the stills I saw from the article looked gorgeous. It was directed by John Badham, Frank Langella is an effortlessly seductive Dracula who never once had to do the the fang bearing false teeth thing. I think I'm right in saying the only vampire fangs on display were the small ones worn by Kate Nelligan as Lucy as she was going over to the darkside. (Brilliant performance.) The film was better for it. Laurence Olivier took his Tcherman accent out for a stroll as Van Velsing and Donald Pleasence was obviously enjoying himself as Sewart. The script was by W.D. Richter who wrote the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and wrote and directed The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Music by John Williams. It had something going for it. It wasn't great but it was certainly a lot better than a lot of other versions. I got slightly distracted by spotting a very young Sylvester McCoy (his first big screen appearance) and I am sorry, but Trevor Eve (Harker) will forever be Eddy Shoestring to me no matter what his character is called.
2026 Reading Diary[/list][/b]
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