SF31 part 2
Mar. 7th, 2006 02:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progThe madness continues! You didn't think I had it in me, did you? This covers everything shown up through midnight. Only 12 more hours to go!
12 Monkeys - This was the first time I've seen it since the first time I've seen it, over a decade ago. I didn't like it much then, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed it much more today. Some of this was the venue, but I also managed to find the film a lot less bleak on second viewing.
For one thing, now that I'm a more seasoned reader of SF, I take comfort in the fact that the universe put the kibosh on the blatant time paradox that Bruce Willis' character was trying to pull off. Secondly, it was clear that the future people were continuing to haphazardly spray people into the past despite the main character's original failures, and quite possibly even after he failed to return altogether. Surely they'd hit upon some solution eventually, right?
Minor math gripe: "Only about one percent survived." OK, so those skanky underground colonies had 60 million people in them? I'd probbbaly swallow it with any attempt at explanation, but it was just a throwaway line, so feh.
The Last Man on Earth, a.k.a The Damned Walk at Midnight - The former was the title in the program, and the latter what actually appeared on the screen. Anyway: precursor to The Omega Man, except with a smaller budget and with Vincent Price in the Chuck Heston role. Actually a dark and clever little film, for what it is. The plot is simpler and rather more depressing than that of its followup.
In the later movie, Chuck's house is besieged every night by radioactive albinos, and he fights them off by burping out the window every now and then with his vast array of automatic weapons. That is a ramped-up version of this original film, where every night really stupid vampire/zombie things crowd around Vincent's house, and he fights them off by keeping his door locked while he sits in his basement moping and drinking coffee. This was actually pretty awesome.
The film managed to provide two catchphrases that endured for the rest of the thon:
* (In a monotone zombie-drawl) "Mor-gan! Mor-gan! Come out! Mor-gan!" The only thing that the head vampire/zombie thing knew how to say, while confusedly beating on the main character's door with a piece of wood. The audience would shout this for the remainder of the thon whenever someone looked pensive about opening a door.
* "You're all FREAKS! FREAKS!" Vincent Price's harsh criticism of his surprise shocking-conclusion adversaries at the story's denouement. Shouted thereafter whenever it seemed appropriate.
Bambi Meets Godzilla - Twice, even. You know, I'd feel neutrally about this if I wasn't sitting in front of some guy telling his friend "Wait keep watching! Keep watching! No no keep watching!" right up through the claw-wiggle at the end.
Excuse me, sir? I know you'd like your friend to experience this piece of media which has been important to you since you were a child, but any adult experiencing this for the first time won't actually find this particularly clever or funny. Please forgive her the next time her attention wanders when you're giddily introducing her to The Transformers Movie or whatever. Thank you.
The Naked Monster - The title is a play on The Naked Gun, and that should tell you everything. If it was only half an hour long, I think the thon would have embraced it -- the opening montage that paid tribute to old-timey monster flicks while snarking at the business of Hollywood earned applause -- but making it feature-length was a mistake. A lot of the gags were pretty good, and I liked the way it featured a lot of 1950s-1960s monster-movie stars reprising their roles, either in cameos or (in one guy's case) reprising his role fully when he's plucked from a sanatorium for retired monster hunters.
Much of the movie was apparently shot in 1985, with the rest shot in 2000. This is kind of interesting, but the effect as applied here is either bizarre or eye-rolling. There is at least one scene where the retired monster-fighter guy visibly ages and then regresses 15 years (which is a lot when you're 65 or so to start with) between two cuts, for no in-story reason. There's also a meaningless Titantic parody thrown in, and a lot of scenes with actors in 2000 sloppily green-screened onto the 1985 footage, and then talking about what a sloppy green-screen job it is. Ha ha ha sigh.
Among the accidentally best parts was a scene where an Asian grad-student-looking guy ran around on a boat screaming ALL HAND ON DECK ALL HAND ON DECK; this was a very obscure reference to King Kong which the audience collectively got only because it happened to have seen that movie only a few hours earlier. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel noted to me later, one wonders how they reacted to both scenes in Cinema 2, where these two films were shown in opposite order!
12 Monkeys - This was the first time I've seen it since the first time I've seen it, over a decade ago. I didn't like it much then, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed it much more today. Some of this was the venue, but I also managed to find the film a lot less bleak on second viewing.
For one thing, now that I'm a more seasoned reader of SF, I take comfort in the fact that the universe put the kibosh on the blatant time paradox that Bruce Willis' character was trying to pull off. Secondly, it was clear that the future people were continuing to haphazardly spray people into the past despite the main character's original failures, and quite possibly even after he failed to return altogether. Surely they'd hit upon some solution eventually, right?
Minor math gripe: "Only about one percent survived." OK, so those skanky underground colonies had 60 million people in them? I'd probbbaly swallow it with any attempt at explanation, but it was just a throwaway line, so feh.
The Last Man on Earth, a.k.a The Damned Walk at Midnight - The former was the title in the program, and the latter what actually appeared on the screen. Anyway: precursor to The Omega Man, except with a smaller budget and with Vincent Price in the Chuck Heston role. Actually a dark and clever little film, for what it is. The plot is simpler and rather more depressing than that of its followup.
In the later movie, Chuck's house is besieged every night by radioactive albinos, and he fights them off by burping out the window every now and then with his vast array of automatic weapons. That is a ramped-up version of this original film, where every night really stupid vampire/zombie things crowd around Vincent's house, and he fights them off by keeping his door locked while he sits in his basement moping and drinking coffee. This was actually pretty awesome.
The film managed to provide two catchphrases that endured for the rest of the thon:
* (In a monotone zombie-drawl) "Mor-gan! Mor-gan! Come out! Mor-gan!" The only thing that the head vampire/zombie thing knew how to say, while confusedly beating on the main character's door with a piece of wood. The audience would shout this for the remainder of the thon whenever someone looked pensive about opening a door.
* "You're all FREAKS! FREAKS!" Vincent Price's harsh criticism of his surprise shocking-conclusion adversaries at the story's denouement. Shouted thereafter whenever it seemed appropriate.
Bambi Meets Godzilla - Twice, even. You know, I'd feel neutrally about this if I wasn't sitting in front of some guy telling his friend "Wait keep watching! Keep watching! No no keep watching!" right up through the claw-wiggle at the end.
Excuse me, sir? I know you'd like your friend to experience this piece of media which has been important to you since you were a child, but any adult experiencing this for the first time won't actually find this particularly clever or funny. Please forgive her the next time her attention wanders when you're giddily introducing her to The Transformers Movie or whatever. Thank you.
The Naked Monster - The title is a play on The Naked Gun, and that should tell you everything. If it was only half an hour long, I think the thon would have embraced it -- the opening montage that paid tribute to old-timey monster flicks while snarking at the business of Hollywood earned applause -- but making it feature-length was a mistake. A lot of the gags were pretty good, and I liked the way it featured a lot of 1950s-1960s monster-movie stars reprising their roles, either in cameos or (in one guy's case) reprising his role fully when he's plucked from a sanatorium for retired monster hunters.
Much of the movie was apparently shot in 1985, with the rest shot in 2000. This is kind of interesting, but the effect as applied here is either bizarre or eye-rolling. There is at least one scene where the retired monster-fighter guy visibly ages and then regresses 15 years (which is a lot when you're 65 or so to start with) between two cuts, for no in-story reason. There's also a meaningless Titantic parody thrown in, and a lot of scenes with actors in 2000 sloppily green-screened onto the 1985 footage, and then talking about what a sloppy green-screen job it is. Ha ha ha sigh.
Among the accidentally best parts was a scene where an Asian grad-student-looking guy ran around on a boat screaming ALL HAND ON DECK ALL HAND ON DECK; this was a very obscure reference to King Kong which the audience collectively got only because it happened to have seen that movie only a few hours earlier. As
derspatchel noted to me later, one wonders how they reacted to both scenes in Cinema 2, where these two films were shown in opposite order!