TODAY I WATCHED... (Movies, TV) 2021

I Spit on Your Grave(2010)

Captain Kronos :Vampire Hunter (1974)



A former soldier/master swordsman turned professional vampire hunter is summoned, along with his hunch backed assistant, to a small village by an old friend who begrudgingly believes the village has become a hunting ground for a vampire that drains it's victims of their vitality. Plenty of sword play in this one , along with the mystery of who is the strange breed of vampire. A decent Hammer production, with Caroline Munro at the height of her hotness.

"Mean Man: The Story of Chris Holmes" (2020)

Former W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes looks back on his life and career as he adjusts to living in Europe, where he's attempting to re-establish himself as a solo artist.
Chris can't sing worth a damn, which may not bode well for the success of his new project, but otherwise he seems like a pretty cool, humble guy, who's just grateful to be out there making noise again after so many years. I will definitely be dusting off my vintage W.A.S.P. stuff for the rest of the week.

Creepshow

Paranormal Caught On Camera

Tattoos. A documentary on tattoo history.

"Kevin Smith: Silent But Deadly" (2018)

Filmmaker/podcaster/comedian Kevin Smith performs to a packed house in Glendale, CA. where he tells lots of funny, foul mouthed stories about his family life, his career, and of course, how much he loves weed. Immediately after this show, he suffered a near-fatal heart attack in his backstage dressing room, which makes the previous hour and ten minutes much more poignant. It would've sucked to lose this guy.

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier finale

On the elliptical today I watched the Twilight Zone classic "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street".

As usual when I watch this show I scrutinize the credits at the end of each episode.  This time I noticed a name I recognized right away, Burt Metcalfe.  Anyone who's a fan of MASH knows that name but I looked it up to make sure it's the same guy.  It is.  Metcalfe is the only producer who stayed with MASH for its entire TV run and he also wrote some episodes.  Yet another alumnus of Twilight Zone.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker Primal Scream episode

Fear The Walking Dead

007 wrote:

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier

I found this series to be kinda disappointing after coming off the high that was WandaVision. I have high hope for Loki though.

Twilight Zone - People Are Alike All Over

This is another classic TZ episode starring Roddy McDowell as an astronaut who crash lands on Mars and discovers the natives to be "friendly" people who look like Earthlings. The Martians even build him a "home" that looks like what they read from his mind. If you've seen the episode you know how that turns out.

This episode also stars the uber-hot Susan Oliver as a female Martian obviously used by the others to put Roddy at ease. Oliver is also featured in the Star Trek TOS pilot episode "The Cage" as "Vina" who the Talosians use to lure Capt. Pike.

I watched a cool/weird little short doc on YouTube last night called "The Day that the Beatles Came to Argentina," which told a strange rock n roll story I'd never heard before.

...when Beatlemania blew up in the early 60s, a nightclub owner in Florida saw an opportunity to cash in. He talked a local bar band called the "Ardells" into getting mop-top hair cuts and Beatle suits and learning some Beatles covers, so he could book them in local venues as "The American Beetles."

This worked pretty well for a while, and eventually the "American Beetles" were contacted by a promoter in Argentina who wanted to bring them to South America for a tour. When they touched down at the airport, however, they were met by hordes of screaming teenagers who were expecting the actual Beatles.

Apparently the South American promoter booked a ton of concerts and TV appearances for the band, but neglected to mention that they were not the "real" Beatles. Needless to say, venue owners and TV stations were less than thrilled by the deception. The doc claims that the shows were well attended anyway; Argentinian teens must have figured the "real" Beatles were probably never going to visit their country, so they settled for this Gringo bootleg version.

Somehow the band survived without being hung from the nearest lamp posts, and they wisely changed their name as soon as they hauled ass back to America.

Someone seriously needs to make a movie out of this story! I would totally watch it.

The doc is in Spanish and some of the sub titles/translations are a little wonky/awkward, but it's an enjoyable watch anyway. The best part is a clip  from an Argentinian "American Bandstand" style teen-music TV show, whose Dick Clark type host appears visibly annoyed as he introduces these fakes to his faithful audience who are expecting George, Paul, John, and Ringo.

Creepshow season finale

Paranormal Caught On Camera

I'm Too Old For This Sh*t. The documentary Chris Jericho produced on the 80's metal band Siren.

The Stepfather (1987)



A psychopathic family values type guy (Terry O'Quinn) moves around marrying widows with children and, when the family ends up not living up to his expectations, slaughters them all. His current family, especially his stepdaughter, soon becomes suspicious of him, leading to a deadly confrontation. I somehow missed the one over the years but am glad to finally catch it. Not a bad film that naturally spawned a few sequels and a crappy remake (I'm sure) a few years ago.

O'Quinn is really creepy in that film.  I like when he starts mixing up which persona he's supposed to be and he says something like "Wait, who am I here?"

^^ I watched all three (!) of the "Stepfather" movies during my October horror-thon last year. Terry O'Quinn (who was only in the first two) was a great villain.

"The Happytime Murders" (2018)

Set in a world where Muppet style characters live alongside humans, a puppet P.I. and a loud mouth L.A.P.D. policewoman (Melissa McCarthy) team up to find out who's murdering the cast of a popular puppet TV show. Yes, it's just as weird as it sounds.
Jim Henson's son Brian directed this bizarre, raunchy, foul-mouthed action comedy that's sort of like a mash up of "Meet the Feebles" and "Lethal Weapon." I have a feeling that his Dad would not have approved of this movie, but I thought it was good for a few cheap, dumb laughs.

That looks like something I need to see.

tohostudios wrote:

That looks like something I need to see.  

It's no "Feebles," but it had its moments.

Nothing can be as off-the-wall as Meet The Feebles.

"Forget About It" (2006)

Three old friends (Burt Reynolds, Charles Durning, and Robert Loggia) who live in an Arizona retirement village get mixed up with the Mafia and the FBI when they find a suitcase filled with stolen cash buried in the desert. So basically this is a mobbed-up "Grumpy Old Men."  
Burt and his pals are clearly doing the best they can with this thin material (and Raquel Welch, who plays the foxy neighbor that all three guys have a crush on, still looks fabulous in her 60s) but the movie's cheap, TV sitcom production values and dopey script sank this one pretty quick. Skip it.

Finished Disc 4 of Season 1 of Twilight Zone. The last episode on the disc was "Nightmare As A Child" which is a cleverly ambiguous title but unfortunately I remembered this one so the usual "twist" at the end wasn't really a surprise. Still a solid story from Rod Serling.

"Willoughby...next stop...Willoughby"...

That's how disc 5 opens. I remembered the "punch line" to this Twilight Zone episode too but I still enjoyed it. With these ones where I know the "twist" already it's kind of fun to watch how delicately the story unfolds to that point. I don't think most of current TV understands how much the "setup" makes the ultimate payoff all the sweeter for the viewer.

I really enjoy the subtlety of the TZ series; it's a nice change of pace from the in-your-face stuff I usually watch.

"Inside Motorhead" (2007)

This is another one of those low budget, semi-official music documentaries that are all over Amazon Prime, with the usual gang of British rock journalists (Dave Reynolds, Malcolm Dome, Jerry Ewing, etc.) discussing the classic early Motorhead catalog (i.e. the debut thru 1986's Orgasmatron) album by album. Some vintage live clips and interview footage of Lemmy and the boys provide added flavor.
As usual with these docs, long time fans won't learn anything new but it was a decent enough time waster with my morning coffee.