TODAY I WATCHED... (Movies, TV) 2017

Bewitched
Barney Miller

The Punisher episodes 8&9

tohostudios wrote:

Holy crap!  I've never seen anything like that.  

Good motivation!  I've been under doctor's orders to lose weight because of high blood pressure.  I've already lost 20 pounds and I want to lose 30 more.  Seeing that guy is plenty of reason to keep going.

If you want to be amused, check out the comments section of the video I posted. They especially pertain to his wife's comment "My husband wears the pants in this relationship" early on in the video.

Anyways, my dad and I saw Justice League tonight. We both thought it was OK at best. Some good sequences, but a lot of mediocrity. It suffered from a lot of the same problems Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice did, though I'd rank this as a slight improvement.

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

Godzilla And Mothra: The Battle For Earth.

This is the "flipside" of the Godzilla vs King Ghidorah DVD. I sure wish both of these were available in the original Japanese language with subtitles because the lame English dubbing is really distracting to me.

Hostel:Part 2(2007)-Sequel to Eli Roth's "torture porn" flick about an underground club whose members pay big money to torture and murder kidnapped vacationing college students. If you've seen the first one, then you've pretty much seen this as this film is nearly indentical to the original other than a few new actors. If you liked the first film or like the "torture porn" subgenre, check it out, I suppose. I give it 2 out of 5 chainsaws.

I liked Hostel 2 better than the first one.

Finished up the Punisher on Netflix. Excellent series.

tohostudios wrote:

Godzilla And Mothra: The Battle For Earth.

This is the "flipside" of the Godzilla vs King Ghidorah DVD.  I sure wish both of these were available in the original Japanese language with subtitles because the lame English dubbing is really distracting to me.

I think that the bad dubbing in those films is one of the major reasons for the ridicule by non fans. That said, I love all the 90s series Godzilla films.

Since the Redskins Giants game was a snoozefest, I turned on a movie that is a tradition for us, the 1989 classic Christmas Vacation. That one will never get old.

"Black Sabbath" (1963)

A cool, colorful horror anthology by Italian director Mario Bava, featuring the great Boris Karloff as your host for three spooky tales (he also stars in one): a nurse learns why you shouldn't steal from the dead, a woman is stalked via telephone, and an outsider learns of a family's vampire curse. Fun stuff, and of course it also inspired the name of a certain band you might have heard of.

Godzilla Raids Again

The 1959 sequel to "Gojira" features a "second" Godzilla (since the first one was destroyed at the end of Gojira) battling Anguirus (who is actually identified as an ankylosaurus in the subtitled version).  The weird thing about this flick is that some of the fight scenes are "sped up"; I'm not sure what the point of doing that was.

tohostudios wrote:

Godzilla Raids Again

The 1959 sequel to "Gojira" features a "second" Godzilla (since the first one was destroyed at the end of Gojira) battling Anguirus (who is actually identified as an ankylosaurus in the subtitled version).  The weird thing about this flick is that some of the fight scenes are "sped up"; I'm not sure what the point of doing that was.

That is the worst of the original Godzilla films. I have the subtitled version of it as well, which is better than the dubbed one (Gigantis the Fire Monster), but it just doesn't hold up to what came before or will come next. It was a rushed sequel and it shows.

X Files season5, episodes 15-20

The Thing (2010)

I hated this "prequel" the first time I saw it mostly because unlike the 1982 John Carpenter classic which relied on prosthetics and practical FX this one contains quite a bit of CGI.  But watching it again tonight for the first time since that initial viewing several years ago I have to admit that it's better than I originally gave it credit for.

Essentially this movie tells the story of what happened to the Norwegian outpost that originally found The Thing and it contains some nice "dovetails" into the Carpenter flick like the infamous two-faced monster Kurt Russell and company found burned in the Norwegian camp and especially the helicopter chasing the dog scene which closes this film and opens the 1982 version.

Satisfyingly gory and filled with lots of ooey-gooey FX this flick was a lot better than I remembered it.

Just watched a pretty cool documentary called Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond on Netflix. It's all about what Jim Carrey did during the shooting of his movie Man on the Moon, which in case you didn't see that, was a movie about the comedian Andy Kaufman. Pretty trippy how deep Jim went during the shooting of that movie. I didn't much care for the movie, Man on the Moon, but I think I will have to revisit it after seeing this documentary.

Anyway, here's the trailer in case you guys wanna check it out.

X Files: Fight The Future (1998)

Feature film of the titular series that actually acts as a gap between seasons 5 and 6. Pretty interesting for fans of the series, otherwise non fans would do well to stay away from this one. They would have no idea what exactly was going on or even who the characters were.

"Comix: Beyond the Comic Book Pages" (2016)


This documentary examines the history of the comic book industry and its impact on other forms of pop culture like television and film. Interviewees include Stan "The Man" Lee, Frank Miller, Neal Adams, John Romita Jr. and many more. There's really nothing here that comic fans haven't already seen and heard in dozens of similar docs, but I could listen to Stan tell stories about the old Marvel Bullpen days forever so this was an enjoyable time waster.

Jurassic World

Meh.  It's basically a remake of Jurassic Park with slightly better FX.  Totally unnecessary IMO but at least it's not boring.

Fat Freddy wrote:

"Comix: Beyond the Comic Book Pages" (2016)


This documentary examines the history of the comic book industry and its impact on other forms of pop culture like television and film. Interviewees include Stan "The Man" Lee, Frank Miller, Neal Adams, John Romita Jr. and many more. There's really nothing here that comic fans haven't already seen and heard in dozens of similar docs, but I could listen to Stan tell stories about the old Marvel Bullpen days forever so this was an enjoyable time waster.

Have you watched that new show on AMC about comic books, Robert Kirkman's Secret History of Comics? It just started and so far it's pretty good. I was never into comics as a kid much, so it's all pretty new to me. They did one on Superman last week that blew me away. Never knew the guys that wrote it were pretty much kicked to the curb and never got credit for it until the 70's.

Cool shot though, check it out if you haven't seen it yet.

Wrecked Neck wrote:

Have you watched that new show on AMC about comic books, Robert Kirkman's Secret History of Comics? It just started and so far it's pretty good. I was never into comics as a kid much, so it's all pretty new to me. They did one on Superman last week that blew me away. Never knew the guys that wrote it were pretty much kicked to the curb and never got credit for it until the 70's.

Cool shot though, check it out if you haven't seen it yet.

Sounds cool, I don't get AMC anymore since we cut the cord though...I'll have to keep an eye out for it on the various streaming services...

...and yeah, the Superman guys (Siegel & Schuster) got totally screwed, big time. Early comic book history is full of stories like theirs, it was a cut throat business back then. (and probably still is today.) If you were a writer or an artist, whatever characters you created were owned by the publisher, lock stock & barrel. The publishers took advantage of guys like Siegel & Schuster cuz most of them were young kids who were just happy to be working in the business.

There's a documentary on Hulu called "Batman & Bill" which is a heart breaker too -- it's about a guy named Bill Finger, the writer who co-created Batman with artist Bob Kane...but due to some bad business dealings Bob ended up with all the glory and the sole "created by..." credit and Bill got screwed. He eventually died in obscurity in the 1970s.  It wasn't till his surviving family members took up his cause with the current owners of DC Comics (Warner Bros.) in the past few years that Bill started getting credit on anything Batman related. Until the "Batman vs. Superman" movie, it was always "Batman Created by Bob Kane," now it's "Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger." Better late than never, I guess, but geez.

tohostudios wrote:

The Thing (2010)

I hated this "prequel" the first time I saw it mostly because unlike the 1982 John Carpenter classic which relied on prosthetics and practical FX this one contains quite a bit of CGI.  But watching it again tonight for the first time since that initial viewing several years ago I have to admit that it's better than I originally gave it credit for.

Essentially this movie tells the story of what happened to the Norwegian outpost that originally found The Thing and it contains some nice "dovetails" into the Carpenter flick like the infamous two-faced monster Kurt Russell and company found burned in the Norwegian camp and especially the helicopter chasing the dog scene which closes this film and opens the 1982 version.

Satisfyingly gory and filled with lots of ooey-gooey FX this flick was a lot better than I remembered it.

You should check out a little number related to The Thing '10 called Harbinger Down. So the story with the FX in Thing goes that ADI (Tom Woodruff & Alec Gillis) was hired for visual effects, all practical, which they did design and conceptualize. However, things got iffy with the schedule and budget so the studio axed the practical effects and went for CGI instead. So ADI makes this genius move by kickstarting their own movie--Harbinger Down--and shooting all the practical effects they developed for The Thing. It's not a great movie, and nor does it pretend to be--it really is a direct ripoff of The Thing, for that matter--but the effects are just yucky cool and you get a good idea of how things were supposed to go down in The Thing. And it's got Lance Henriksen.

tohostudios wrote:

Jurassic World

Meh.  It's basically a remake of Jurassic Park with slightly better FX.

And just way, way stupider. The characters saw what happened at the original park and said "Meh. We'll do it again. Only this time with BIGGER and SMARTER dinos. What could possibly go wrong?"

I really hated that movie.

I didn't hate it (for a big budget monster movie that I hated, see Pacific Rim) but other than the cool FX the whole movie was pretty stupid.  And I kept hoping the female lead would get eaten because she'd have deserved it.