'THE SAGA OF THE VIKING WOMEN AND THEIR VOYAGE TO THE WATERS OF THE GREAT SEA SERPENT'.....SO WHAT'S THIS MOVIE ABOUT, ANYWAY?

The Saga Of The Viking Women And Their Voyage To The Waters Of The Great Sea Serpent' (1958) 

            We're well aware the shorthand for this movie's title was "Viking Women And The Sea Serpent'.......but we just love silently snickering every time we type out the original title. 

              Who else could have directed this  10.95-and-change quickie besides the legendary God Of All Shlock, Roger Corman?

               Normally, Viking epics (like "The Vikings" and the new "The Northmen")require massive crowds, huge battles, vast effects, and multi-million dollar budgets to pay for it all.

               Not Roger Corman.  Corman-ized to the max, "Viking Women" looks like it was dashed off in a few days........with a sturdy little bunch of actors running around in either the well trod Bronson Canyon or in front of a rear-view projection screen lit with a one-volt bulb. 

               Familiar faces abound, but unlike in other Corman cheapies, you won't spot any future super-dooper stars like Jack Nicholson.  Even Vincent Price is nowhere in sight......

               Our tiny band of Viking gals, all sun-kissed California blondes, is headed up by the plucky Desir (Abby Dalton , later a popular sitcom/game show star). Desir coiffed like a high school Prom queen wants the group to sail off in search of their missing Main Squeezes, who haven't returned since their last ocean jaunt. 

              But whoa.....who's that smoldering raven haired Liz Taylor look-alike  amid the the sea of platinum pulchritude? It's the group's official ominous sorceress Enger,  played by the very star-crossed Susan Cabot (later to become Corman's "Wasp Woman")

              Enger's no pal of Desir's, since she's got the secret hots for Desir's missing boytoy, yet she surprises the bunch by voting to set sail and go rescue their missing hunks. 

              So off the cuties go, in a boat bobbing in front of  a rear projection screen unspooling an 8mm loop of pounding surf and a rubber sea serpent that glides, slides and sometimes pops up fir a roar or two......

              Making landfall, they're promptly captured by a nasty tribe of primitive, dark-haired warriors led by evil fur clad Stark (Richard Devon) and his whimpering cowardly son Senya (Jay Sawyer)

               The warrior guys do a whole of inappropriate manhandling of the Viking babes, not to mention imprisoning their long lost boyfriends in a cave. But battles, escapes and other assorted scrapes unfold.......

                And if you can't figure out who ends up as Sea Serpent chow, you haven't been watching enough cheesy Roger Corman movies. 

                Though blatantly idiotic, ridiculous and embarrassing for the poor actors, the film's so  forthright and winning in its amateurish cornball innocence and enthusiasm, we ended up charmed by it......as we realized, to our own amusement, we'd begun nursing a crush on Abby Dalton. 

               For those who love and cherish the glorious cheapo filmography of Roger Corman, "The Saga...blah-blah-blah..." is a 3 star (***) essential, whether you take it in to mock it or marvel at the sheer chutzpah of its making. 

               And everybody else?  Read the film's title and......what the hell, park all common sense in a shelf and watch it anyway.....and it'll save you a $12.00 ticket to the "The Northmen", which doesn't, to our knowledge, feature any toy store rubber sea serpents......

                  

             

'THE MILLION EYES OF SUMURU'.....SHIRLEY EATON TAKES AIM AT THE PATRIARCHY......

 The Million Eyes Of Sumuru (1967)    Oh how we wish we could tell you we'd found the Holy Grail of 1960's EuroTrash.....a movie that promised to be the most bonkers, most unintentionally funny, most shameful guilty pleasure of all the guilty pleasure we've covered on this blog.......

           Deep sigh........not even close......

           Yet everything's in place for this mad, mad goulash thrown together by American International Pictures and the neverending producer-writer of pulp Euro-sludge, the inevitable Harry Alan Towers.

            From AIP's 'Beach Party' stable, comes the unctuous, way-too-hyper Frankie Avalon and a couple of bikini girls left over from his surf musicals.....

             From Harry Alan Towers comes everything else, a global, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mish-mash of Bond ripoffs and Towers' own campy Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movies.

             Crazy? Yes. Cheesy? To the max.  Post-synched soundtrack that makes everyone sound like they're stuffed inside somebody's bathroom together? You know it.

             So why isn't this stupid thing more fun?  It just kind of lays there, flopping around like a half-dead fish newly hauled on to a boat. 

             True, there's plenty of unintentional laughs from the movie's sweaty, strenuous efforts to cast itself as a tongue-in-cheek spoof.......with the dialogue loaded up with the most groan-worthy gag lines imaginable.

              Most of the so-called snappy patter falls to the movie's official 007 wanna-be unsecret agent. He's played by George Nader, one of the many young Hollywood hunks who wandered over to Europe to become junk movie leading men....(Nader flourished as FBI guy Jerry Cotton in a slew of West German movies)..

             With the obnoxious Avalon as a tag-along, Nader must thwart the world domination schemes of the nefarious Sumuru ("Goldfinger" golden girl Shirley Eaton). 

             The gorgeous, imperious Eaton deploys, naturally, an entire army of hot babe assassin warriors to take out world leaders and replace them with women.  She's even got an especially muscular minion who, like "Goldeneye"s Xena Onatopp, crushes guys with her formidable thighs'

             Sumuru's latest target is mythical kingdom playboy President Boong, played by the prolific international madman Klaus Kinski.. (The sight of the already weird Kinski campiing it up as an bubbly bon-vivant almost helps the film reach its potential for utter looniness.) 

              So it's up to Avalon and Nader, spewing out dead-on-arrival wisecracks like machine gun fire, to raid Eaton's lair with what looks like the entire Hong Kong police force.  Listless carnage ensues, with cops and babes collapsing and dying as if suddenly sedated. 

              We found it ironic that this film came out the same year as 20th Century Fox's much higher profile '"In Like Flint". That one featured James Coburn, reprising his 'Our Man Flint' superspy, taking on an all-female organization who replaced the U.S. President with an idiot actor.   (See our post of  3/24/17.....)

               Needless to say, in both these 1967 films, the women were thwarted and the Patriarch survived......and as anyone can see from the everyday headlines, the battle still rages on.   (Sumuru may have gone down to defeat, but at least we now have Gal Gadot, Elizabeth Olsen, Zoe Kravitz,  Scarlett Johannson leading a whole host of women warriors)

              But sorry to say, "The Million Eyes Of Sumuru" never really delivers the goofy fun it implies you'd get by watching it.......1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2)....suitable only for completists and curators of the lowest grade '60's cinema.

'THE CHILDREN ON THE HILL'....MONSTER HUNTERS FIND INHUMAN THINGS....BOTH IMAGINED AND REAL.

The Children On The Hill by Jennifer McMahon (2022)     

      We were lucky enough to snag an advance copy of this one.....now that it's hit the stands,(and your e-readers) couldn't wait to tell you about this riveting little chiller.

       While we might well agree with those who'd label this one the perfect read for Halloween during the crisp Fall air, nobody, but nobody should wait that long to dive into this book. 

       Disturbing, grisly and surprisingly heartfelt (sometimes all the same time), this is one wild ride through a horrific childhood that reaches into the characters' adult lives.

 
        The side-by-side timelines here, 1978 and 2019 bring the dark storyline closer and closer to each other - to the point where you can't warp-speed through the pages fast enough. 

         We're not keen on going through an elaborate plot description, since the joys of a thriller like this come from the way it slowly but surely reveals all its terrible secrets.

         Let's just say in 1978 there's two kids, Violet and Eric, living with their beloved "Gran", who happens to be a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. Hildreth. Gran practices at a Vermont inn converted to a treatment center for the mentally ill.  And  she's brought home, as a sort of foster adoptee and new 'sister' for her grandkids,  Iris, a strange, silent child.  Gran encourages Violet and Eric to befriend and embrace Iris, who appears physically and mentally damaged from events unknown.  

          Violet and Eric, obsessed with hunting down mythological monsters, soon bring Iris enough out of her shell to join them in their adventurous search for ghouls, vampires, werewolves and other assorted creatures of the night. 

           Speaking of monsters, in 2019  Lizzy Shelley has made a multi-media career (podcasts, TV shows) out of hunting down legendary monsters across the U.S. Lizzy's monster-hunts contain another agenda, though - since she suspects the disappearance of teenage girls may be the work of a very real monster hiding behind all the fanciful 'local legend' creatures.

          And that's more than enough said. As the timelines converge, "Children On The Hill" reveals an ever growing series of horrors, suspense, some stunning surprises and a jaw dropping final twist.  Needless to say, in both timelines, the three children of '78 and Lizzy Shelley deal with the difference between imaginary monsters and the all too real ones. 

           A superb read, one of the most entertaining and profoundly chilling novels we've  come across - and a definite 5 star (*****) experience, a BQ FIND OF FINDS.

'WORLD WITHOUT END'.....LET'S DO THE TIME WARP......ONE MORE TIME...

 World Without End (1956)   As promised, here we go off to the wild blue interdimensional yonder of time travel.......and again loaded with tropes cribbed from  H.G. Wells'  "The Time Machine"

              Arriving 4 years earlier than the time looper we covered yesterday ("Beyond The Time Barrier" -1960), this one did catch the irritated attention of the H.G. Wells estate....enough for them threaten a lawsuit. 

               "World Without End" arrived with advantages over "Time Barrier".....the backing of an actual studio, Allied Artists, who forked over enough cash to shoot the film in Cinemascope and color.

               This time around, we're in deep space with a crew of men headed back to Earth from an orbit around Mars......(including Hugh Marlowe, that 'Earth Vs.The Flying Saucer" warrior, and smarmy nemesis of Klaatu in "The Day The Earth Stood Still")

              After one of those bumpy-ride glitches rocks  'n socks them around a little, they land on earth allright.....in the year 2508.......where they discover to their horror that Trump and Biden are still running for President....(just kidding, but not outside the realm of possibility....)

               Mother Earth's been through nuclear war sure enough, since our plucky band discovers the populace divided up into those two traditional H.G. Wells classes.  By that we mean the pasty-faced white people who live underground and the feral, hairy 'mutates' ....who are not only screaming cavemen but afflicted with multiple eyes....or just one really big one. 

                  Our 1956 crew (including future 'Time Machine' star Rod Taylor at the start of his Hollywood career) have to dodge the mutates and a huge rubber spider until they're taken in by the pasty-faces. Not very fertile, these guys, which must drive their womenfolk crazy, since all the girls once again parade around in the true sci-fi fashions of miniskirts, stockings and heels. 

                   One of the jealous, villainous pasty-faces tries framing our boys for a murder he committed but before long, the truth comes out and he tries escaping into the great outdoors, where the mutate guys make a meal of him. 

                    Unlike "Beyond The Time Barrier", which ends on a somber, downbeat note, "World Without End", still steeped in the optimistic 1950's offers a sunnier, more hopeful climax......with our fish-out-of-time-warp boys rebuilding a new world side by side with the pasty-faces. 

                    Way, way more fun than "Beyond The Time Barrier", we'll warp out 3 stars (***).  And speaking of 'way ahead of its time', take notice of that striking modern art used for the poster.

'BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER'.....LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN......

 Beyond The Time Barrier (1960)   When it came to time travel movies, low budget sci-fi filmmakers followed their own Golden Rule...

             All's Wells that ends Wells......

             Rather than labor over their own attempts at inventive plots, our quickie movie guys stuck with the Master and one of his finest creations....H.G. Wells and "The Time Machine"......

              Which would explain why we watched these two particular films back-to-back, since they essentially plundered Wells' central idea......a time traveler hurled into a  post apocalyptic future where humanity's been divided up into effete elites (the Eloi) and the ravaging beasts (Morlocks) who prey upon them.

              We didn't watch these in chronological order, so we'll first cover "Beyond The Time Barrier", a 1960 dirt-cheap, black-and-white grinder that arrived 4 years after 1956;s "World Without End", a much more ambitious 'Time Machine' wanna-be.....(we dive into that one tomorrow....)

              Spit out in a matter of days by the tireless, prolific Grade C workhorse Edgar G. Ulmer, "Time Barrier"s hero is U.S. Air Force test pilot Bill Allison (Robert Clarke). Major Bill, taking an experimental supersonic jet so high he cruises outer space itself, unwittingly propels himself into 2024.

               And this movie's version of 2024 is only a little less worse than the upcoming prospect of a Trump Vs. Biden presidential race.....

                It seems that nuclear testing way back in Bill's day let cosmic rays filter down to Earth, causing a worldwide plague.  The cosmic virus or whatever rendered the remainder of humanity sterile and left still human people living in a vast underground bunker called 'The Citadel'  

              The not-so-lucky ones in the disease's  final stages are reduced to gibbering, violent mutants very similar to current GOP representatives,  imprisoned by the imperious Citadel folk

                Major Bill (and we as well) notice the Citadel women parade around in standard dystopian, futuristic  fashion - micro mini skirts, nylons and heels.  And that includes the cutie-pie telepath Tririne (Darlene Tompkins), who like most of the populace, can't speak.  She makes up for her lack of conversational skills by constantly smiling as if angling for the "Miss Future Congeniality" prize.

                The Citadel's supreme leader (called "The Supreme", so everyone knows he is, we guess) wants Major Bill to impregnate the still fertile Trirene in order to jump-start the human race from scratch. 

                 Bill has no problem with that plan (nor would we.) but gets entangled in the nefarious plotting of some other accidental time travelers who hope to trick him into firing up his plane and dropping them off into their own time periods. 

                Gunplay and violence breaks out and some liberated mutants go on a take-no-prisoners riot against the Citadel crowd. To n nobody's surprise,  the mutants main goal involves performing flying tackles on every mini-skirted  Citadel babe in their vicinity.

                 Our stalwart Major Bill escapes to his plane, heads back for the stars to zap himself back to 1960.......but at great, terrible cost, which actually provides the film with a powerful, provocative ending. 

                 We certainly had a great time watching this, but anyone who's not a die-hard fan of 50's and 60's sci-fi movies, really needs to forgive the ultra  low budget in play here. (Yes, the Citadel's vast elevator shaft is a cartoon)......and director Ulmer, if nothing else, knew how to move things along......therefore, 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)  

                 See you all tomorrow for another back to the future romp.....in CinemaScope and color!

WEEKEND MADNESS UPDATE.....BQ SURVIVES TO POST THIS SPECIAL 'DESANTIS CLAWS' EDITION...

           So sorry to have gone MIA the last 10 days....BQ's still beating heart required some tender loving hospital care, but we're back, if a little worn out from the ordeal.  Naturally, even as we recuperated the world kept going crazy....so here we go.....

Gov. Ron DeSantis wages war on Walt Disney World over his 'Don't Say Gay' bill.... and immediately receives congratulatory texts from Cruellea DeVille Ursula,, Malificent, Jafar, Scar, Gaston, and Huggy Bear from 'Toy Story 3'.......

Kevin McCarthy, professional Trump ass-kisser, revealed he wanted Trump to resign, later denying he said that....which actual recordings disprove.... leading the International Zoological Society to nominate McCarthy as 'Invertebrate Of The Year'.

Drunken plane passenger torments Mike Tyson, who delivers a thorough beatdown......in better news for the  inebriated passenger, , he was immediately offered  starring roles in the upcoming, "Jackass-Forever And A Day" and "Dumb and Dumber-And It's Only One Guy"......

'DR. WHO AND THE DALEKS' & 'DALEKS' INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D.'......EX...TERM....IN.....ATE!!!! EX....TERM....IN.....ATE!!!!

 Dr. Who And The Daleks (1965), Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.' (1966)    What a fine, fun easy breezy night we had revisiting these two back to back......

               Though British produced and filmed in widescreen and color, these very kid-oriented movies are considered as outliers in the Who-Verse......as if, in the greater scheme of Who-iana, they don't exist.

                 Don't care. We still loved 'em both.

                And even though he's not designated  (like the many versions of the TV series' Who) as some sort of immortal time-and-space entity, we still thought Peter Cushing's down-to-earth 'little old genius' portrayal fit perfectly.

                 Cushing's presence in the role was designed to attract U.S. audiences since we all knew him well from our matinees watching him as Doc Frankenstein and vampire nemesis Van Helsing in the Hammer double features.

                  And the two films themselves arrived as simply plotted, easily digestible action-adventures, moving along with immediate comic-book speed. 

                  Best of all, the films featured Daleks!  Yes, those oversized, intergalactic salt 'n pepper shakers barking out extermination orders in electronic, guttural voices as they bounce around the cosmos seeking world dominations everywhere they park. Basically, they functioned as chromium plated Nazis from outer space.

                'Dr, Who And The Daleks wastes no time plunging the good Doctor, and his Scoobys, his two granddaughters and the older one's nerdy date, into another dystopian planet. (Of course this trip comes courtesy of the Doc's 'Tardis' the phone-booth sized police box with way more square footage on the inside.....)

                 A sort of 'Time Machine' remake ensues, with Who and the gang thrown into a battle between the Eloi-like 'Thals' (sporting 'Village Of The Damned' wigs and eye shadow) and the Daleks, shooting lethal fire-extinguisher fog our of their various appendages. (You don't want to get sprayed.)

                Do we even have to tell you who triumphs?  Oops, read that sentence again for the reveal....

                 Even more fast and fun and way more ambitious in execution and scope, "Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.' arrived one year later....

                 In this follow up, the afflicted planet that Who and company go time tripping into is none other than futuristic Earth, now blasted and besieged by the Daleks who cruise around conquered London in a big ass flying saucer. 

                 A full fledged mini-version of World War 2 is in full swing, complete with hardy resistance fighters lobbing grenades at the Daleks, who've 'robotized' some of the hapless humans into zombie stormtroopers. 

                  Huge amounts of comic-book carnage play out here - pitched battles rage while the Daleks work on their wild plan to use the Earth's core energy to turn the whole planet into their own personal spaceship. (The plot machinations even include  a few nasty humans who turn on our  good guys, handing them over to the Daleks....)

                 And once again, you know who ultimately wipes out those D-bags.....oh damn we did it again, didn't we?   But as all Who-Maniacs can affirm, the rasping, gasping Daleks went on to make plenty of comebacks in the TV series episodes, continuing to slowly annunciate their commands as if they learned English from watching spelling bees. 

                The only thing we dearly missed in both movies was that signature synthesizer whining of the TV show title theme music, here replaced with insistent loud and brassy jazz scores that have little do to with the films themselves.  (A trope all too prevalent in 60's cinema....)

                We'll wrap this up with a 'jolly good show' salute to the Amicus guys -  producer Max Rosenberg and producer-writer Milton Subotsky, who put out these little Who epics the same time they were pumping out their many imitation Hammer horrors ("The Skull", "The Psychopath", "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors")

                 One more special shout-out to the director of both these 'Who' films, Gordon Flemying, a briskly efficient craftsman who even surfed that 60's cultural wave that landed talented young Brit directors some Hollywood gigs.....(Flemyng got to helm the MGM Jim Brown heist caper "The Split" and the frantic, screwball Zero Mostel-Peter O' Toole costume farce 'Great Catherine' -see out 11/14//19 on that one).  

                Anyone aching for a great near 3 hour double-whammy binge in 1960's sci-fi, we know Who you should watch......sorry, we couldn't resist one last time. 3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2) for each film.

               

                 

                   

'LIKE A SISTER'.....YET AGAIN, REALITY BITES A SOCIAL MEDIA CELEBUTANTE.....

 Like A Sister by Kellye Garrett (2022)   After finishing this twist-packed but somewhat tedious thriller, we're swearing off any more books centered around social media reality tweeting instagramming influencers......

            And that's coming from a reader who normally grabs every new thriller-mystery that hits the market.

            Why?   Because anyone with more than 3 working brain cells knows these social media, self aggrandizing twits are soulless morons whose desperate need for attention and adulation knows no bounds.....

            Since we assume the authors of social media thrillers usually possess more than 3 working brain cells, that would explains why their books rain down all sorts of mystery, misery and death upon their 'famous-for-being-famous'  non-entity characters. 

             As the 'Cellblock Tango' number in 'Chicago' goes......'they had it comin'.

             "Like A Sister" dives right into the reality maelstrom with the untimely drug-related death of young, beautiful black celebutante Desiree Pierce, a recently disgraced reality-TV star. Why was the 25 year old Desiree found fatally overdosed in a Bronx playground in the middle of the night?

               Was she trying to contact her estranged half-sister Lena Scott, a graduate student leading a quiet low profile life as a student at Columbia University?  The only thing the disparate sisters had in common was their mutual estrangement from their all powerful, intimidating father Mel 'Murder Mel' Pierce a fabulously successful Hip Hop record tycoon. 

                 Lena knows something's fishy about her sister's death,  Not believing the overdose story, she launches her own amateur investigation, discovering ominous and suspicious links to a DUI car accident her sister managed to skate past before her......murder?

                 We'll be blunt - the pacing in the book's first half drags terribly, but author Garrett manages to enliven the story with her very sardonic on-target wit. ("his pause lasted longer than my last Netflix binge" )   Lena's probe into her sister's many secrets takes her through a host of unusual suspects who orbited around Desiree.   And they're a rogue's gallery of NYC celebs, hangers-on, young hard-partying playgirls, superstars and bottom feeders, all hungering for their 15 minutes. 

                 Thankfully, the book casts a withering eye on this preening bunch, which kept us turning pages through those plodding chapters.  We continued to hang in there awaiting what all thriller authors know they must deliver in plentiful quantities as they move into the climax.......the twists.

                   The twists and red herrings do finally start arriving, one on top of the other......but by the time Lena inevitably finds herself at the mercy of the book's principal villain, this particular individual's motives and methods seem abrupt murky and poorly explained. 

                  Overall effect of "Like A Sister" - mildly entertaining, and suspense-thriller completists will want to give it a read.  But far, far from top-drawer.  2 & 1/2 stars  (**1/2)   And if it's another 10 years before we come across another book about mock celebs and their social media lives......fine with us.

               

FRIDAY MADNESS WRAP-UP......SPECIAL 'BABY ORANGE'S BFF' EDITION

 Putin's forces slaughter more innocent Ukranians, firing missiles at a train station.....Trump tweets, "What a genius move....I'm gonna buy this guy a beer and a Big Mac as soon as I'm back in 2024..."

Marjorie Taylor Greene reports a Jimmy Kimmel joke to the Capitol police as a 'violent threat'....believe it or not, this one we're not making up.   In related news, QANON nominates Greene for this year's "America's Greatest Lunatic" award, a small gold plated replica of a straight-jacket.

Sen. Rand Paul deliberately holds up Ketanji Brown Jackson's senate vote to confirm her as a Supreme Court Justice......and later brags, "You all think Ted Cruz is such as asshole?  You see...I can out-asshole him any day of week.

Mitch McConnel, asked if draws any moral red lines in his conduct, states "I'm perfectly comfortable with the way I've conducted my political career"......later, McConnel received an e-mail from Vladimir Putin - "You and me both, pal! Preach"

'SKYFIRE'...A VOLCANO THEME PARK? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Skyfire (2019)    We've still got 9 months to go in 2022, but as of right now, here's the dumbest, craziest and most cheeseball entertaining guilty pleasure of the year.......

             Don't mind telling you, we laughed our ass off all the way through it......and couldn't have enjoyed it more. 

             Now that we think about it (not that we did any real thinking while watching it), "Skyfire" was inevitable.

             Hollywood studios scooped out big box office bucks by pumping out an endless stream of big budget, junky action-disaster movies.  Even to the point where they'd still make them even if a competing studio was making more or less the same damn movie.....

             So we all thrilled to the spectacles of twin 'meteor headed for earth' movies ("Deep Impact" and "Armageddon", and twin volcano movies, "Dante's Peak" and "Volcano".  The tireless junk movie shlockmeister Roland Emmerich became an "end of days" factory with "The Day After Tomorrow", "Independence Day" and its sequel, "2012", "Moonfall" and other apocalyptic fantasies.

              Vast boodles of those box office bucks, came from audiences in China, who couldn't get enough of these bloated CGI-fueled three ring circuses.

               Which brings us to the inevitable "Skyfire", in which China itself produced it very own homegrown version of the All American Hollywood Disaster-Action-Apocalypse movie.  And just like knockoffs of designer clothes, you can hardly tell it apart from the real thing.

              It's one of China's most authentic carbon copies of Hollywood product,...... as gloriously idiotic, eye-popping and action-packed as the most brain-dead, overproduced Jerry Bruckheimer epic.

               And the producers took no chances here, hiring as its director Simon West, the seasoned workhorse who brought us "Con Air" , "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" and "Expendables 2"

                Everything's in place here for the kind of movie that requires a tub 'o buttered popcorn and a lobotomy. What's not to love?

                A lunatic premise -  a multimillion dollar theme-park-hotel resort built around a volcano, complete with monorail rides to the peak and a huge observation bubble elevator that drops the tourists straight down for an up-close-and-personal look at the lava.....

                 Anybody wondering yet is this sounds like a bad idea?  You bet Jurassic.......

                 Geologists have assured the self-important Australian tycoon (Jason Issacs) who built the place that ole Smoky Top won't blow for 150 years.......

                 But you and I and anyone else whoever sat through a movie like this know the lava will soon start flowing like rivers of overcooked oatmeal......and we'll thrill to sight of half the cast obliterated either by fiery debris or from taking forced swan dives off the monorails.and other high places.

                Yahoooooooooooo!  Let the red hot carnage commence!

                We especially appreciated that "Skyfire" presents a fast 'n furious 97 minute stripped down version of a Hollyuwood disaster-rama, wasting no time at all with any comic relief or excessive  exposition.

                We want the wham-bams right away and this movie delivers....... with real showstoppers like hapless tourists trying to leap from one monorail to another and the surviving actors dangling from a jeep while suspended over the boiling magma.

                  Naturally the lush orchestral score swells with anthem-like gravitas as we watch some folks survive and others meeting fates that guarantee they won't be around if there's ever a "Skyfire 2"

                Stupid to the max?  Sure. Populated with a badly dubbed Chinese cast?  Well...yeah, but they're all not bad and take a whole lotta wear and tear.  A generic imitation to the extreme?   Uh....okay, but we knew that going in.......and the unintentionally funny moments here came at us non stop.  Who know, we might've gone through two popcorn tubs......

                 You can call us as misguided and nutty as "Skyfire" is as a movie,  but we're still going to erupt out 3 stars (***).  And we don't care. We had a good time.......and in this day and age, that's not bad thing to experience.......

'GIRL IN ICE'.....I THAW WHAT YOU DID THIS WINTER......

 Girl In Ice by Erica Ferencik (2022)   Here's one of the main reasons we started this blog in the first place......letting folks know about hidden gems in cinema and books, givin' out the scoop on movies and novels that might've slipped under the pop culture radar......

             Thrilled to report we found a real keeper here, one hell of a compelling read that combines so many different genres, we lost track of them all......

                There's mystery here.....close to believable science fiction......heartbreaking drama.......suspense.....unbearably dangerous action-adventure..... harrowing, almost otherworldly landscapes.......dramatic tension waiting to explode.....and all of wrapped up in the immediate burning issue of what's happening to our planet and what can be done about it. 

               Quite a package and it kept us glued to the pages all night long.

               First, the strangest of events fall upon Val Chesterfield, a lonely linguistics academic who's still mourning the suicide death of her twin brother Andy, a fiercely committed climate scientist. He was found frozen to death by his fellow scientist Wyatt in their forbiddingly remote Greenland experimental lab.

                 And now Wyatt stuns Val with an incredible mission - asking her to trek up to the lab to uncover the mysteries behind an 8 year old girl whom Wyatt has actually thawed out alive after finding her body deep inside a glacier......entombed in ice for.....who knows? And how? And why? 

                   There's no telling how long the little girl was preserved in the ice - she speaks in an undecipherable language that Wyatt hopes Val can decode and translate.......because  she's slowly dying from some unknowable ailment and unable to communicate why or what would cure her.

                   The timid reclusive Val throws all caution to the wind and travels to the lethally snow and ice covered lab, hoping, as she delves into the astounding enigmas of the unfrozen child, to also uncover the mystery of her brother's death.  This all leads to a climax as thrilling and hair-raising as anything you might see in a multiplex action movie. 

                    Intrigued yet?  We were, without a doubt. And this book dazzled us on multiple levels......with its vividly drawn characters and its realistic, spectacular  renderings of the artic environment.  

                    BQ says seek this one out wherever you can lay hands on it, cause it's a most definite 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS. Chill out with one of this year's best thrillers.

                  

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'ANTLERS'.....THE HORNED IDENTITY........

 Antlers (2021)   After barely tolerating that cynical, crapfest geekshow "Halloween Kills" yesterday, we'd no plans to post on yet another horror movie the very next day.....

\             But then this darkest-of-dark, grisly little beauty crossed our path and......ah, what the hell.

               We're not sorry, though. For a radical change of pace, this one's the real deal. And then some.

                Honestly scary. Scenes and images that still stayed with us in their nightmarish conception. 

                (When we saw Guillermo del Toro's name listed as one of the producers, we knew at once this wouldn't be some big studio cheeseball time waster.....this guy takes his horror seriously....)

                And like the best of horror, the film takes a deep dive into the everyday modern horrors that surround us......which connects in all sorts of ways to the film's supernatural Big Bad.

                For a relatively modest creature feature, "Antlers" takes on a host of corrosive issues to deepen its overwhelming sense of doom and dread.......the country's economic agonies of disappearing jobs and unemployment, the drug addiction epidemic, the destruction of the enviroment and the permanent psychic scars left by physical and sexual abuse.

                  That's a lot of stuff piled up on the film's plate, but it always stays true to its main purpose......to scare the living crap out of you and leave you with a few lingering bad dreams

                   Julia (Keri Russell),  is a middle school teacher who returns to her little rural Oregon town and moves back into her family home with her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons) now the town sheriff.  The town's dying from the closure of its mines, which some residents use for meth labs.  And Julia herself still battles the temptation of alcoholism, the aftermath of the terrible abuse she and Paul suffered at the hands of their late father. 

                   In the midst of this toxic atmosphere, one of Julia's students, Lucas, (Jeremy T. Thomas) a sad, haunted wraith of a child, lives a horrific home life - feeding freshly killed animals to his now zombie-like father and little brother who've been possessed by a Wendigo, a monstrous spirit from Native American mythology. 

                    When Lucas's father fully transforms into the creature's full rampaging, antlered  true self, the film doesn't shy away from delivering the carnage and gore that today horror fans expect. But to its great credit (and what the horror hounds may not have expected), the film deals seriously with the terrible cost of lives lost and lives forever damaged. 

                   For us, that lifts "Antlers" out of the usual morass of horror movies that flood the Walmart shelves and streaming sites every single week.  So anyone who'd like a little cinematic quality in their scares, you should check this one out ASAP......3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2)

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'HALLOWEEN KILLS'.....INCLUDED IN THE BODY COUNT......THE MOVIE.

 Halloween Kills (2021)   How quickly this rebooting of the legendary horror film franchise came full circle......

            The clever conceit of the 2018 reboot was pretending all those crappy 'Halloween' sequels from the past never happened.....(even the gore-drenched Rob Zombie ones....)

              And now, sorry to report, we'd like nothing better than to do the same thing to this direct sequel to the 2018 film......let's pretend it never happened. 

              Horror fans might well have forgotten what made John Carpenter's original 1978 the scare classic that movie buffs  now revere like the Holy Grail.

               Simple. It was effin' scary. It's one and only agenda was to make an audience cringe, shake, cower, jump and scream........which it did. 

                 "Halloween Kills" also has an agenda. Scaring you is not on its list.  One thing and one thing only weight heavily on this movie's mind.

                  The body count. A huge one. Maybe the highest in slasher movie history......(we don't count the zombie movies, since zombies get routinely cut down like wheat ....)

                   Immortal boogeyman Michael Myers slaughters 31 people before "Halloween Kills" finally grinds to a halt. How do we know that for sure?    The DVD featured a special feature which conveniently recaps them all, with a counter on top of the screen totaling them up. 

                   Maybe they should've done that in the movie itself, since the filmmakers here only want to impress us with the formidable pile of corpses they accumulate.

                    Jamie Lee Curtis, who began this franchise at age 20 playing a teenager. returns as Laurie Strode, now a haggard, hysterical grandma painfully recovering from stab wounds suffered during her last 2018 mano e mano whoop-de-doo with the monstrous Michael.

                      Meanwhile one of the kids she babysat, now grown into a thuggish loon (Anthony Michael Hall), has whipped up the townsfolk into a bloodlusting frenzy, chanting "Evil dies tonight!" with the same commitment as Trumpanzees screech "Lock her up!".....

                     And Michael Myers, as impervious to bullets, bombs and pitchforks as a Marvel superhero, methodically goes about his business.......depopulating the town at a record level with whatever implement sit conveniently in front of him,,,,even the broken end of a lengthy florescent light bulb.

                      Not a single scare to be had in the entire running time, but the film does encourage the audience to both gasp and guffaw at the ingenuity of the kills........(including one poor dude who gets a knife up his nostril and out his eyeball.....woo-hoo...)

                       By the time the credits roll, you come to realize what a dubious achievement the filmmakers accomplished here......

                      ........by making a 'Halloween' sequel that's the same kind of lifeless, soulless, clumsily produced cash grab as all the previous 'Halloween' sequels it deliberately ignored. 

                     A third and final entry in this version of the franchise is threatened.

                    Maybe they should pretend "Halloween Kills" never happened.....1 star (*).  Fit only for basement-dwelling geeks who cackle to each other about the guy who got the knife up his nose coming  out his eye......

FRIDAY MADNESS WRAP-UP.....BQ'S "RANCID ONION" AWARDS OF THE WEEK

             Since the film awards season has finally ground to a shameful halt, we'd like convert this weekend's Madness Wrap-Up to a glittering presentation of the "Rancid Onion", which is....an actual rancid onion on a small pedestal.  We proudly present the winners......may we have the envelope please...

WORST 'LADY MACBETH' IMPRESSION -  Clarence Thomas's wife Ginni, wholeheartedly supporting the MAGA terrorists who tried to overthrow American democracy. New info reveals her toxic trips to Trump's White House, with a hit list of people for him to fire for disloyalty......

MOST PATHETIC TRAITOR IN AMERICAN HISTORY - As always, Donald J. Trump....once again proving there is no bottom to his evil treachery against the United States......asking Vladimir Putin to help him find dirt on Hunter Biden. 

WORST ACADEMY AWARD ACCEPTANCE SPEECH -  Will Smith, blubbering to the Oscar audience that he's a 'vessel of love' after slapping Chris Rock......at long last, a speech even loonier than Donald Trump declaring himself a "very stable genius"....

BEST SELF DESTRUCTION OF A REPUTATION IN 3 SECONDS OR LESS - Will Smith.

THE HONORARY SADDAM HUSSEIN AWARD FOR IDIOTIC MILITARY STRATEGY - to Vladimir Putin....his Rancid Onion with a grenade inside is already on its way to Moscow.....