May's Movies...

1. Ice Planet (2003) - German TV movie pilot for a never to be made TV series that managed to get released in the cinemas (well, at least one cinema - in Norway). A prime example of an undercooked script cobbled up from bits selected from a wide selection of other, better, scripts and glued together with a lot of adequate CGI Lightshow.
   
   A giant horrible something attacks an earth colony. The commander orders everything that can fly to take off then loses his ENTIRE fleet when he sends them ALL into the menacing, mysterious black cloud. At once. Doesn't send in a 'probe', ask for a volunteer to see what's in there, or offer to go in himself... just loses his entire command, and the war, in 10 seconds flat.
   
   Ladies and gentlemen, meet our hero!
   
   
   
   "Oh... Pants!... Can  I do that again?
   Do we have a reset button or something...?"
   
   
   Left only with a rag-bag of cadets, the usual passing Han Solo clone (with whom he has HISTORY), a passing senator, and a mysterious silent girl they leap aboard a gigantic passing spaceship piloted by an elderly oriental super-scientist (bitter at humanity for twisting his super-dingus research to destructive use). The gigantic passing spaceship was, apparently, built from specs encoded in a crystal of ice that landed on Earth. The crystal also contained some very specific galactic sat-nav directions and a very vague mention of some terrible danger.
   
   
   
    Entrants for the 15th Annual Worst TV SF Uniform Contest throwing  in the towel when they see our hero's trousers for the first time
   
   
   One trip through a hitherto unmentioned rent in the fabric of the space/time continuum later and our heroes find themselves stuck on an ice planet in some distant and uncharted part of the universe - oh, and they have a thousand bewildered civilians on board too. (Actually we have to take the thousand bewildered civilians on trust as the budget would only run to someone calling up on the intercom and saying, "Captain, I have a thousand bewildered civilians down here? What do I tell them?")
   
   Well, this is all 'so what'? Sounds pretty much like just about every other failed Star Trek / Battlestar Galactica / Farscape mashup. But then it gets bonkers. On the ice planet, where it is '10 degrees below zero' but no-one's breath ever mists*, they discover a giant glowing tree thing with all of Human history encoded in it and Human hunter-gatherer types living in ice caves. The mysterious silent girl gets all glowy and starts speaking alieny mysticy cobblers. The Bad Guys arrive. The most symmetrical of the male rookies goes through some portally thing at the behest of alien mystical babblespeaking silent girl and turns into a metallic blue-skinned godlike being with long blond hair. He can open his mouth really wide as he screams and shoots blue lights out of his fingers. (Like one of those incomprehensibly super-powered Anime heroes.)
   
   
   
   Behold!  The Giant Invisible Watermelon of Destiny!
   
   
   He stops mid bigmouth-screaming finger-blasting to have a conversation with his dad on a park bench under some trees back on Earth - Whit! now we're referencing Solaris...?
   
   Meanwhile our commander - whose leadership style consists of doing exactly what the last person suggested he do several minutes beforehand - flies to the rescue of metallic blue-skinned godlike boy - though how he knew where to go is a mystery - and gets several more of his people killed before the Bad Guys (whoever they are) are defeated. There is sadness at the death of the several people he got killed which is displayed in loving detail - the sadness is not shared by the audience because they have no idea who has died (or why) and what their relationship to the people who are grieving for them is. (Whoever they are. No one's even bothered to tell us that.)
   
   THEN!
   
   
   The whole planet pops through the rent of fabric of the space/time continuum (or a different one, who knows?) and everyone is now somewhere even more uncharted than the last bit of uncharted universe they were in. We're now deep into Space:1999 territory, folks. A voice over tells us this is 'only the beginning'.... The End. I'm really sorry this series never made it. It would have been hilarious.
   
   * -10 degrees C presumably, -10 F is very cold
2. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension (1984) - for the umpteenth time. For the first time in company and all the funnier for sharing.
   
   
3. Frauen für Zellenblock 9 (aka The Women in Cell Block 9 & Tropical Inferno 1978 ) - tatty, underachieving, nasty piece of shit Women in Prison film. Even by director Jess Franco's standards this was a piece of crap.
   
   
4. Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel aka Castle of the Walking Dead, Blood of the Virgins, and a load of others - though my favourite is: The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism 1967) Short (85 min.) Euro-horror tosh with Christopher Lee paying the rent in a story 'inspired' by Poe's Pit and the Pendulum.
   
   
   
   "I think I left my career over there..."
   
   
5. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) - for better or worse I think this is the start of a Friday Family Movie Night Potterthon. Gawd help me.
   
   
6. Ghoulies IV (1994) - truly godawful. Only the villainess' cleavage and PVC-clad buttocks kept me watching. Another 25p wasted at a car boot sale.

   
   
   
   
7. Journey to the Center of the Earth (The Brendan Fraser one) - stupid trailer for the roller coaster ride / game movie - which I rather enjoyed in a totally childish sense of wonder manner. (New big white sheet home-made projection screen improving the pseudo cinematic experience several hundred percent.)
   
   
8. Humanoid Woman - rewatch of a slashed to ribbons version of Russian SF movie Cherez Ternii K Zvyozdam. Even in its butchered state it's still extraordinary stuff.

   
   

   
   
   
   
   Abandoned this month:
   
   
   Exorcism (2003) - an amateurish filmic version of those dreadful evangelical Chick Publications cartoon gospel tracts - tarted up to look like a horror movie. Dreadfully acted, abysmally directed. Just too painful to watch beyond the ten minute mark. I gave up shortly after this exchange between a father and his boy:
   Quote:

   Father: There's no closer relationship in the world than that between a father and son. Son: I thought it was between husband and wife... Father: No, son. God didn't give his only begotten wife; he gave his only begotten son...

   Wha....? Unless I am totally misunderstanding the word 'begotten', (to have fathered or sired), this means the writer thinks God married his own daughter. In the Middle Ages people were burned at the stake for saying things like that.
   
   Sarah's Child (1994) which is, to quote the back of the box, a 'gripping, spine-tingling psychological thriller filmed entirely in scenic Utah and Idaho'. I guess all the gripping and spine-tingling happens after the 15 minute mark because that's where I abandoned what looked like an endlessly wordy, woodenly-acted TV movie of the week. The sort of crap that turns up on the truemovies channel at 4am - only not as interesting. It was the director's only gig.