Eternal Evil

Paul Sharpe, a tv commercial director, has been studying astral projection under the tutelage of a mysterious woman named Janus. At first, projecting his spirit out of his body brings him a sense peace and contentment. Unfortunately, while he sleeps his spirit has been taking unauthorized trips and killing people in a muderous rage, including his own family.
This is a 1985 Canadian film, also known as The Blue Man. Why, I don't know. It stars Winston Rekert as Sharpe, a familiar face on Canadian tv probably best known as the star of Neon Rider,and Karen Black as Janus. Eagle-eyed viewers should also be able to spot Lois Maxwell, the orignal Moneypenny from the Connery/Moore James Bond films.
The film plods along at its own pace and manages to overcome its inexpensive look and feel to deliver a couple of good scares.

Death Warmed Up

This 1986 New Zealand thriller is a hokey horror-revenge movie. I've had two tries at watching this movie before I could watch the whole thing. That's dedication, let me tell you. A teen is hypnotized and ordered to kill his parents. After blowing them away with a shotgun (and taking out a lamp as well, just to be safe), he's locked in the looney bin with no memory of having done the awful deed.
He's released seven years later, and decides to take his revenge on the man who hypnotized him, but the man is now the head of a large pyschiatric institute and he seems to be creating his own army of mutant zombies. I guess. I don't know, it's hard to follow.
There's a car chase that looks straight out of The Road Warrior. There's lots of blood and heads blowing up. If you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like.

Doomsday Machine

Our film opens with an American spy breaking into the Chinese Embassy. With the help of another agent on the inside, she discovers that the Chinese have built a doomsday bomb. She reports to her superiors that the bomb will go off in just over two days.
We jump to the seven-man crew of the first US Venus probe preparing to launch for it's two year trip. For some reason, the launch has to be hurried, and three of the men are ordered to be replaced by three female officers.
Then comes the launch. The crew are strapped in into La-Z-Boy recliners wearing motorcycle helmets. No, really. Recliners and motorcycle helmets. Someone sacrificed their living room furniture for this movie. They use stock footage of an Apollo take-off, but the rocket in the movie is more along the lines of a classic Destination: Moon big-finned space-ship. Then suddenly it looks like a round space station. Then it becomes a different round space station. Then it's a different finned rocket!
Anyway, it turns out that the Pentagon decided to put the women on board to preserve the American species just in case the Chinese ending up destroying the world. And before you can say, "Whoops, apocalypse!" the earth is laid waste in a montage of clips from Japanese monster movies.
The astronauts realize that the future of the human race now depends on them, so naturally they pair off and start,er, arguing. They have to dodge meteors from the remains of the Earth. Interestingly, the meteors made from the bits of earth come from in front the ship, not behind it where the Earth actually is.
It turns out that they need to drop a bunch of weight from the ship in order for it to land on Venus safely. Some people will have to sacrificed. In a remarkable coincidence, the bitch female astronaut and the bastard male astronaut luckily get sucked out of an airlock.
As they come in to land, two of the astronauts go outside to repair the ship and are believed lost. But they find an old Soviet Venus probe and manage to make their way to it.
Now things get strange, because the ending of the film was never shot in 1967, and when filming resumed in 1972, none of the actors were available. Probably they didn't want to available. Anyway, the last scene of the movie is the two astronauts who board the derelict Soviet craft. They are filmed in spacesuits with opaque visors so that you can't see that they aren't the original actors, and their dubbed voices really don't resemble the original actors' either.
Anyway, they board the Soviet ship and are trying to get it going. They spend an inordinate amount of time bumbling around silently in the dark until a disembodied voice announces to them that the American ship has been destroyed. It turns that Venus is home a race of super-powerful intergalactic busybodies who speak in stilted English: "Last of Man, listen. Of this, we will tell you." They decide that instead of allowing the last two humans alive to land, they will propel the spacecraft on a journey beyond the rim of the universe. Whatever the hell that means.
This film originally began life when filming began in 1967 as Armageddon: 1975. For reasons lost to obscurity, the film was never finished and it was shelved. In 1972, someone got hold of the film and added additional scenes, namely the teaser scene at the beginning with the secret agent, and the ridiculous ending.
Look for Casey Kasam (America's Top Ten and the voice of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo) as a Mission Control Officer, and Mike Farrell (B.J. from tv's M*A*S*H) with one line of dialogue as a reporter.

End of the World

This 1977 film stars Christopher Lee as Father Pergado. The good Father witnesses a bizarre fatal accident, then discovers that an alien has taken his form and is going to destroy the world. Meanwhile, a scientist is detecting strange messages from space that seemed to predict a devastating earthquake that occurred in China. More messages from space arrive predicting more disasters, but the scientist also detects messages from earth in response. Turns out the message is coming from a convent run by Father Pergado. Or at least the alien that has taken him over.
Yes, the nuns are all aliens. Clearly the writer has issues with Catholicism.
This is just bad. This is a pay cheque movie -- let's cash our cheque and go home.
The professor's computer makes the sound of the Enterprise bridge from Star Trek. No, I swear! Someone got hold of a Star Trek sound effects record (this was 1977 after all) and made a loop out of it to run anytime someone fires up a computer. Also, a lot of other sound effects sound suspiciously like they came out of Star Wars. I kept hearing lightsabres for some reason.
No argument, this is awful. It's not even bad enough to be cheesy.

Embryo

In this 1976 film, Rock Hudson plays a veterinarian who strikes a dog while driving during a rainstorm. He takes the dog to his lab to try and save it, but the situation quickly becomes more complicated as he realizes that the dog is pregnant and is too badly injured to survive. He tries to save the puppy fetuses, but they all die save one. It will die too, unless he uses an experimental growth hormone he's been working on. He save the pup, but it grows at an accelerated rate.
He discovers that if he treats puppy with the drug, its growth rare is accelerated, but off the drug the dog ages at a normal rate. The dog also seems to be of above average intelligence, but unbeknowst to the doctor the dog also has an evil viscous streak. He decides to try the same experiment on a human embryo.
He gets hold of a living 14 week-old human fetus and using his growth hormone is able to bring it to term in a matter of days. Unlike the puppy, the baby continues to age even without the treatment and in a matter of weeks she grown into Barbara Carrera. Like the puppy however, she also also has a vicious streak.
This is a long, dragged out movie that takes a long time getting anywhere. Roddy McDowall has a brief cameo that livens things up, but otherwise it really drags. It also never really addresses the ethical questions it raises. It was made two years before the first "test tube baby" was born, the perfect time for a thoughtful examination of these issues, but it dodges those questions to concentrate instead on being a slowly-building thriller. It fails on that count, too.

All the Kind Strangers

Stacy Keach plays photo-journalist Jimmy Wheeler in this 1974 tv-movie. He's driving along some back roads in rural America when he stops to give a ride to a small boy carrying a big bag of groceries. He offers to give the boy a ride home, but home turns out to be an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere where the kid lives with six other children. But they don't have parents -- what they do have is a woman (played by Samantha Eggar) that they've kidnapped and forced into acting like their mother. And now with the arrival of Wheeler, they have captured a father, too. And they don't take too kindly when their "parents" want to leave. Wheeler discovers that previous "parents" who have tried to escape have never been seen again. And there have been many previous ones.
The two adults try to leave, but the kids have a pack of trained attack dogs to keep their "parents" under control. Wheeler tries to escape a number of times, but those darn dogs are too much for him. Eventually Wheeler decides to pretend to go along with this crazy game, hoping to find a chance to escape with "mom."
Clearly, this flick was inspired by the success of Deliverance two years earlier. Two of the older children are played by John Savage (The Deer Hunter) and teen-idol Robby Benson, who even sang the title song.
There's could be worse ways to spend 74 minutes, but I'm hard pressed to figure out how. Actually, that's a little unfair. Some of the kids are atrocious actors to be sure, but Keach and Savage hold their own while wallowing in this sub-par material.

The Day the Sky Exploded

Atomic rocket XZ is set for the first flight to the moon. Although it is an international effort, an American is chosen for the first flight. The launch goes well, but when he blasts out of orbit something goes wrong. He's forced to abort the mission. He returns safely when his capsule plunges back to earth; however, his atomic rocket carries on out of control on into space.
Sometime later, animals all over the planet begin to act strangely and they seek shelter. Soon scientists detect something coming towards earth. It turns out that the atomic rocket has exploded and sent an asteroid on a collision course with the earth. Vast evacuations have to take place as the asteroid will impact the earth in a matter of days.
It seems hopeless, but then a scientists figures that if the US and the Soviets fire all their nuclear missiles at the asteroid, it will be destroyed, thus saving the earth. Does the plan work? That would be telling.
This 1958 Italian film was originally known as La Morte viene dallo spazio. It was released on the US in 1961 where it was also known as Death Comes from Space and Death From Outer Space.

The Alpha Incident

Sometimes you can't put it any other way: this is a really bad movie.
A Mars space probe has returned to Earth with a microorganism from the red planet. It is accidentally released and exposure to it has forced four strangers into quarantine while scientists try to find a cure for the alien virus.
It's basically four people stuck in a room, with occasional cut-aways to the scientists working on the problem, and the army enforcing the quarantine. Now when I say "scientists," I mean two guys in a small room with a microscope, and when I say "army," I mean one guy in a General's uniform who talks on the phone while he smokes a cigar.
This leads to one hysterical moment where the General orders over the phone that a quarantine needs to be set up to contain the spread of the virus. We cut to a shot of a couple of tanks driving across a field. We cut back to the general yelling into the phone: "Tanks? We don't need any tanks! It's only four people, goddammit!" And we never see the tanks again. That's brilliant filmmaking!
But really, this is just trash. And it's not even good trash, it's just trash. One of our four quarantinees is a woman who decides for no apparent reason to change into a negligee, and that stupid pseudo-sexy music plays as she changes. This is as low-brow as you can get.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

Despite the fact that this film is universally regarded as one of the worst ever made, I do have a soft spot for it. Apart from it being the height of Pia Zadora's film career, I remember that when I was a child one of the local tv stations would run this every Christmas. Even as a nine year-old kid, I could tell it was pure silly hooey, but it was certainly harmless hooey.
The plot, if that matters, is that Martian children who have been exposed to too much Earth tv have grown sullen and listless (not unlike Earth children exposed to too much Earth tv), and can't stop thinking about one person they have heard so much about: Santa Claus. So the Martian leader, Kimar, decides that Earth has had Santa long enough and decides to kidnap him! Consternation and general uproar! But Voldar disapproves of his leader's plan and opposes him at every opportunity. The Martians succeed in kidnapping Santa, but also kidnap two Earth children as well. But the spirit of Christmas grows in Kimar's heart and eventually he releases Santa, and eveyone is happy blah blah blah.
The real hero of the piece might just be the villain Voldar. He opposes the exposure of Martian culture to this mythical figure of Western consumerism, and let's face it, that's probably a wise point of view. One could view him as a cultural freedom fighter, but this film is not sophisticated enough for an in-depth examination of economic imperialism, and Voldar remains simply what society decrees him to be, a scenery-chewing bad guy.
Yes, this is an insanely cheaply made movie that is sloppily directed. Kids should love this, but for an adult, it's a long 86 minute to endure.

The Giants of Rome

My first question would be, How this film get into a box set of sf films? You could stretch the definition of sf to include a Hercules film because of the fantasy elements, but this is a straight-up Roman gladiator film.
Filmed in Italy in 1964, this flick (originally called I Giganti di Roma) is one of the less well-known of the genre -- it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.
The forces of Rome set out to defeat the Druids but discover that the Druids have a powerful secret weapon. Cladius Marcellus (played by Richard Harrison) leads a squad of Roman soldiers behind enemy lines to find and destroy this weapon.
Where's Russell Crowe when you need him?
There's just not much to say about this film. If you like this sort of thing, it's the sort of thing you'll like.
What's really interesting is that someone feels that star Richard Harrison is worthy of his own Wikipedia page, quite a substantial one in fact. Although almost unknown in his native USA, he began starring in Italian action films in the 1960s and had a long career in B-movies and developed a large European cult following. He made spaghetti westerns, as well as more sword and sandal epics, although oddly enough this film isn't listed on his Wiki page.
He also turned down the part of the Man With No Name in A Fistful of Dollars, and once said, "In my opinion, it is a death wish for an actor to be in too many B or should I say C movies. Maybe my greatest contribution to cinema was not doing A Fistful of Dollars, and recommending Clint for the part."
In the 1970s, the era of the spaghetti western ended, and Harrison began starring in exploitation films like Dig Your Grave, Friend...Sabata's Coming; The Godfather's Friend; You Can Do a Lot With Seven Women and Voodoo Baby (aka Black Orgasm). He even played American President Andrew Johnson in a 1982 Iranian production Hajji Washington.
His career took him to the Philippines in the 1980s were he made where a few really low budget action flicks, then to Hong Kong where he made one film for filmmaker Gordon Ho. However, Ho used Harrison's scenes over and over again in dozens of Ninja films like Cobra Vs. Ninja, Golden Ninja Warrior, and Diamond Nínja Force. Harrison now runs an electronics company called Gladiator Electronics.
I also discovered that sword and sandal films are properly referred to as peplums, which is Latin for the kind of tunic favoured by the costume departments because they were easy to make. So now we've both learned something. You learned what a peplum is, and I learned that I would rather have my skin flayed off with dull glass shards dipped in acid and rolled in lemon juice than watch another one.

Cosnos:War of the Planets

This 1977 Italian film (originally called Anno zero - guerra nello spazio) reminds me a lot of Space: 1999 -- the sets, the themes, the special effects and especially the costumes all seem drawn from it. In fact, I'd swear the makers of this film went to the Space: 1999 yard sale when the series ended and picked up everything they could. It makes sense that Space: 1999 would be influential at this time -- it was the biggest thing in SF in 1977...at least until Star Wars came out in May and showed everyone how it was done.
An earth spaceship is ordered to investigate a strange planet. Although his ship has a near-sentient computer nicknamed Wiz, Captain Hamilton (played by John Richardson) has an intense distrust of computers. His ship is attacked as it approaches this rogue planet, but they manage to land safely. They investigate and meet the inhabitants: green men with pointed ears in loincloths. They are being subjugated by computers, so this is right up Hamilton's alley. He vows to help the aliens destroy the computers. He destroys the head computer, as in 2001 (another clear influence), which also results in the destruction of the planet. And there's a neat little twist at the end.
There's some interesting ideas in this film and if you can stand watching a cheap, derivative, wooden and obviously 1970s-style film, this might be worth searching out in a video store.

Alien Contamination

This 1980 film is known by a number of names, including Contamination: Alien on Earth and Toxic Spawn. The original version is called Contamination and runs about 10 minutes longer than this version and is significantly more bloody. And after having watched the "cut" version, that's saying something.
A cargo ship sails into New York Harbor. It seems abandoned, but upon investigation, the crew are discovered to have ripped apart by something. In the holds, the investigators find large large containers of coffee, but hidden inside the coffee are large green eggs that look like giant limes. When these eggs are touched, they explode, spraying a green liquid everywhere. The liquid is toxic to living creatures, and makes anyone who comes in contact with it explode.
Any relation to Alien is purely coincidental.
The eggs, it turns out, came from Mars. A recent Mars mission went wrong -- on return, one astronaut disappeared, and the other had a breakdown and became an alcoholic. The astronauts has entered a cave on Mars where they discovered hundreds of these eggs.
Any further relation to Alien is purely coincidental.
It's discovered that the eggs explode when they get warmer, so when a human touches one, its temperature goes up and it explodes. But when a warehouse full of them are discovered, they are destroyed by flamethrowers. Strangely, none of them explode. Go figure.
They follow their only clue, and go to the coffee plantation that the coffee came from. Turns out of friend the missing astronaut runs the plantation. Bet you didn't see that one coming, eh? Somehow the aliens have taken over his mind and he's shipping the eggs all over the world in coffee shipments.
This is a pretty dumb and derivative movie. The writer and director, Luigi Cozzi, wanted to do his version of Alien, and he surely did, and interestingly, he foreshadowed Aliens by having a sequence with what amounts to the queen alien. But really this is just slow-motion blood-letting. Yawn. Next.

Counterblast

In this 1948 film, an escaped Nazi POW named Dr. Bruckner, the Beast of Ravensbruck (played by Mervyn Johns), sets up a lab in England under the name of a scientist that he brutally murders, Dr. Forrester. The Nazi underground wants him to work on a plan to vaccinate the German people against the deadly germs that they plan to unleash on the Allies in the next war.
Bruckner plan is complicated by an inquisitive lab assistant, and further complicated by the later arrival of a beautiful young woman who was hired by the real doctor to assist in the lab. The complications become extreme when the two lab assistant fall in love.
Bruckner develops a deadly infection and an antidote, and he plans to inoculate the female assistant with the antidote, then infect her a few days later. But after his test proves successful, his orders are to kill her and destroy the evidence, but he has fallen in love with her, too. What's a love-struck killer Nazi to do?
The most interesting thing in the film is watching Mervyn Johns. We've all seen him in another movie, the classic 1951 Alastair Sim of version Scrooge. Johns played Scrooge's meek long-suffering assistant Bob Crachit. That film is so ingrained in my mind that watching Johns expertly play a cagey and sadistic killer is a real revalation and a treat. In one scene, Bruckner as Forrester is asked to report to the nearby POW camp because a Nazi prisoner has been injured in a fight. As he treats the prisoner, the injured man denounces Hitler and Nazism. Left alone with his patient, Bruckner without hesitation or remorse dispatches the man with an injection of drugs. The smile on his face as checks the dead man for a pulse is horrifying.

The Lost Jungle

The Lost Jungle is a 1934 Republic serial. This version is is edited together to form a feature-length film.
Clyde Beatty, an animal trainer, leads a rescue party to search for his girlfriend Ruth and her father who have been lost on an expedition searching for a mysterious island. Clyde takes a drigible to search for her but it crashes. Fortunately, it crashes on the same island that Ruth is stranded on.
Clearly designed to cash in on the previous year's King Kong, The Lost Jungle contains many similarities: the mysterious island, wild animals...there's even a dangerous trip over a chasm across a fallen tree trunk.
Clyde Beatty is played by none other than Clyde Beatty, a world-famous lion tamer and animal trainer. Beatty was famous for his "fighting act", in which he entered the cage with wild animals with a whip and a pistol strapped to his side. He act included lions, tigers, cougars, and hyenas, sometimes brought together all at once in a single cage, a potentially nasty situation. Some reports suggest that Beatty was the first lion tamer to use a chair in his act.
A large part of this film is really just Beatty's animal act. Not that that's a bad thing -- he's in a cage with live lions, tigers and bears (although the filmakers cheat a couple of times as Beatty stares down a lion that's actually a rear-projection lion... in reality the lion isn't really there), but for the most part it's the real deal, and the animal act scenes are well-integrated into the movie. The animal footage is crudely shot by today's standards, but it's excitng and pretty amazing to watch.

Fatal Tide

In June of 2002, an adventure race in New Brunswick went terribly awry during its kayaking segment and one of the racers died.
David Leach's account of the ill-fated race, Fatal Tide, is a straight forward but engrossing account of the tragedy. He examines the events of the day, of how many of the racers, tired and exhausted from the running and cycling portion of the race, were at best novice kayakers. Many, including the victim, had only kayaked once or twice before they took to the stormy waves of the Bay of Fundy for the kayaking segment without immersion gear or any idea of the windy weather forecast. Dozens of single kayakers hit the water that day; only three completed the course. The rest either turned around, beached themselves before the end, or had to be rescued.
One amateur athlete named René, who had kayaked only once or twice before, was in fourth place when he launched in his borrowed racing kayak. He flipped over 100 feet from shore, righted himself with help from the rescue Zodiac and insisted on continuing, and paddled out into 20 knot winds and two-metre waves. 90 minutes later he was in the water, his head held above water with both hands by another kayaker as they both drifted backwards past the starting point towards towering cliffs. They were sighted by a passing fishing boat, but too late to save René.
Leach also describes a litany of failures by the organizers. Race volunteers had no list of competitors, or any way to communicate with each other. The organizers had failed to notify local law enforcement and emergency services about the race, nor had they informed any the racers of the weather forecast. They had only one rescue boat that soon proved no match for the waves they were facing. The organizers did supply some kayak training, but it was only a five-minute on-land demonstration of how to use the pump, the paddle float and a description of a paddle-float re-entry.
Local kayakers were aghast at the lack of preperation and the number of novice kayakers who were venturing out under such stormy conditions.
But Leach doesn't lay all the blame on the organizers. He spends a far portion of the book exploring the reasons why adventure racers want to risk their lives and the notion of "shared risk," how participants must share the blame when they proceed into dangerous conditions. Many racers continued paddling into bad conditions because of their percieved "need" to finish, even though it was obvious that the best course of action was to head for land and shelter.
Leach also delves into kayaking history and safety, even devoting a chunk of a chapter to Tim Ingram, the infamous Sponson Guy.
Leach also explores hypothermia. Most kayakers do not drown; they die from hypothermia or its effects, and Leach offers up some surprising clues about some little-known effects of hypothermia which may killed this paddler and others.
This thoughtful and sobering book reminds us of the risk we take going on the water, and the need to be properly prepared. And that it's okay to say, "No."

They Came From Beyond Space

I've never understood why many 1960s dramas use those kind of Austin Powers-ish faux-jazz scores. To me, it's hard to take any sort of dramatic or action scene seriously when you've got this light, bouncy, almost comedic underscore playing against and undercutting the tension. Did 1960s film composers think this was an alternative to "old cinema"? Or were they just stoned all the time?
Fortunately, the music in this 1967 British film does not usually cut the film off at the knees. On the other hand, it doesn't help matters, either.
This is basically a rehash of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Scientists are investigating a meteorite that landed in a British field. They are summarily taken over by an alien life force, except for an American scientist who is recovering from a bad traffic accident for which a steel plate was installed in his head. He convinces one of his pals to wear a colander on his head as protection against the aliens' influence. It's not quite as goofy as it sounds, but not far from. The aliens have a plan to fly humans to the moon to use as slave labour.
The film holds together reseanably well until our heroes sneak aboard a rocket ship and confront the Master of the Moon.
No, really. That's his name.
The Master of the Moon is played by Michael Gough (Alfred from Tim Burton's Batman films) in whiteface and a bright orange robe and leotards. It's here that the film starts getting a little silly.
There's nothing terribly bad about this movie, expect for Michael Gough's leotards, of course. It's all done quite competently, yet like so many of these movies I've been reviewing it never rises above medicore.
The American scientist is played by Robert Hutton, and I spent the whole movie trying to figure where I've seen him before. He retired in 1975 (and passed away in 1994) and the only credit I recognize from his imdb.com profile is the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (coincidentally also from 1967). Guess I'm going to have to dig out my Bond discs or I won't get any sleep tonight.
The special effects, which are cheap but effective, were supervised by Canadian Les Bowie who would be most know for working on Roger Corman films and Hammer horror films, but he also worked on such films as 2001, Star Wars and Superman.

The Snow Creature

Another film directed M. Lee Wilder, this 1954 feature concerns an American botanical expedition in Nepal. At first it seems like an old documentary film due to the use of stock footage and the ever present narration of the expedition head, Dr. Frank Parrish. "I hired Peter Wells, an expert photographer, and 10 sherpas, who are much like human mules...."
No, I'm not making that up.
As the expedition proceeds, the wife of one of the Sherpa guides is kidnapped by a Yeti. The Americans, of course, do not believe in the Yeti, but the Sherpas hijack the botanical expedition and turn it in to a search for the mythical animal. (Interestingly, even though the action is taking place in the Himalayas, the Sherpas are speaking Japanese.)
The Sherpas are pissed that the Yetis are always stealing their women, and the Americans, who discover that the Yeti does exist, see a way to exploit nature for money. What if they took a Yeti back to Los Angeles?
A Yeti is captured, but as they transport the Yeti to America, Parrish and Wells have a falling out, and Wells publishes an article about the adventure, referring to the Yeti as a "man."
This raises the question of whether the Yeti is human or not, and the border service holds the Yeti to decide on its immigration status. (Remember, this was before there was such a thing as terrorism -- I guess they didn't have a lot to do back then.) But before this interesting issue can be resolved, the Yeti escapes and runs amuck through Los Angeles. (Los Angeles and especially New York always seem to have some monster running helpless mucks through the city....) The police eventually kill the Yeti by beating it up AND shooting it.
This film was made just a year after Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first people to climb Mount Everest, and is clearly intended to cash in on that historic event. We never really get a good look at the Yeti as it spends most of its time in the shadows which is just as well. What we can see of it looks pretty cheap.
And you can't beat stealing plot elements from King Kong either. Of course, when you steal from the best, you invite the inevitable comparison, and let's face it, this never measures up. As one character says, "This whole thing is cock-eyed."
Yep, he's right about that.

This is the Sea 4

The latest in Justine Curgenven's series of kayaking DVDs, This is the Sea 4, has arrived. This latest release is a well put together two disc effort.
Disc one is a series of shorter films, and opens with with a group of kayakers out playing in rock gardens and caves of Baja in northern Mexico. This looked like a whole lot of fun with a lot of rock hopping and beautiful sea caves.
The next segment profiles the Seattle-based commando kayaker Dubside, followed by a segment on kayak fishing in San Diego. I'm not much into fishing, but it was interesting to watch a group of sport fisherman on their fully-outfitted sit-on-tops on the water. It was even more interesting watching them land through the surf! :) At one point, one of them even hooks what looks like a giant ray, but it gets away.
Next up is an island-hopping crossing of the Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania. There's some great wildlife shots -- I didn't know wombats are so cute!
The next segment features Canadian kayak champions Ken Whiting and Brendan Mark running the rapids of the Ottawa River in sea kayaks. They get into some gnarly whitewater and there is some great footage here, especially as Justine, far out of her comfort zone, follows the boys down the river.
A quick paddle on the Dead Sea in Israel is followed a longer sequence in Norway. First, there's profile of a Norwegian family that perform amazing balance tricks in their kayaks while enjoying the amazing scenery of the fjords. Then they go to a standing wave that's never been ridden by sea kayaks, and end with a paddle along the Norwegian coast. The disc ends with a paddle along the American side of Lake Superior. There were some amazing sandstone cliffs and sea caves in this segment; it looks like a terrific place to kayak!
Disc two has two longer expedition films, the first being a circumnavigation of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Three paddlers go around both islands in a figure-8. The second expedition is clockwise trip around the south island of New Zealand. Both expeditions feature action and adventure and terrific photography.
As with the previous 3 DVDs, all the segments are contain great and picturesque footage, and there's a nice balance between flat water, whitewater and expedition kayaking. And as always, there are great stories waiting for for the viewer. No doubt this will be on a lot of kayakers' Christmas lists, and well it should be.

Hercules Unchained

If you have to sit through a Hercules movie, you might as well sit through what Dr. Frank-N-Furter referred to as "an old Steeve Reeves movie."
Hecules Unchained (filmed in Italy in 1959 as Ercole e la regina di Lidia) is the sequel to 1958's Hercules, the film that launched a thousand bad "sword and sandal" movies over the next decade.
Here, Hercules is travelling to Thebes for an important diplomatic mission, when he drinks from a magic spring and loses his memory. Then he spends a large hunk of the movie in the pleasure gardens of Queen Omphale of Lydia suffering from amnesia. Young Ulysses tries to help him regain his memory, while political tensions escalate in Thebes.
Compared to the last three Hercules films that I just watched, this film looks gorgeous. The wonderful sets and costumes are bathed in lush colours. There's even a musical number. And you've got to like any film that gives story credit to Aeschylus and Sophocles.
Reeves had an interesting career. He appeared in the early Ed Wood film Jailbait (interestingly, it's one of the few films he made where his voice wasn't dubbed), but became a superstar thanks to the success of Hercules. But he turned down the role of James Bond in Dr.No, and the role of the Man With No Name in A Fistful of Dollars. Chronic injuries forced him to retire from the movies and he passed away 1n 2000.

Planet Outlaws

This began life originally as a 1939 Buck Rogers serial starring Buster Crabbe. It was edited into a 69 minute feature-length film in 1953 which the version I'm reviewing. Apparently there is also a 90 minute version released in 1977 to cash in on Star Wars-mania.
Buck Rogers, and sidekick Buddy, crash their dirigible(!) in the arctic and are left in suspended animation for 500 years. Revived by Dr. Huer, they discover that Earth is in the villainous grip of the outlaw Killer Kane. With the help of the lovely Lt. Deering, Buck is able to defeat Kane and the world is safe again! Until next Saturday afternoon anyway.
You can't help but love these old serials. They're action-packed with thrilling derring-do, and are now charmingly anachronistic, as when Buck marvels that his spaceship must be travelling a thousand miles per hour (gasp)! Yes, they are hopelessly old-fashioned and primitive, but they are also wonderfully fun with their art deco buildings and cities.
And it is Buster Crabbe's sincere charm that carries the film. He anchors it with an honest presence that most actors today must wish they had.
This was how the future should have been.