Terror from the Year 5000 (1958)

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Terror From the Year 5000 PosterWhen I first heard that there was a movie called Terror from the Year 5000, my mind went into hyperdrive at the possibilities!

What would this terror from three millennia in the future be like? Would it be some hideous monster bent on sucking our souls out through our nostrils in order to feed its black hole heart? Or maybe some type of overgrown insect cyborg unleashed by a secret cabal of scientists to cleanse the Earth after the Last Great War of 3255?

Heck, it might even be a human so advanced that he’s pure energy, whose only desire is to enslave us to do his dark bidding! In short, this Terror could have been anything and in any event was probably simply beyond my puny 21st century brain to comprehend! Continue reading “Terror from the Year 5000 (1958)” →

The Deep (1977)

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The Deep is a movie long on scenes of Nick Nolte and Robert Shaw vacuuming up the ocean floor in search of Spanish treasure and short on anything resembling excitement. The movie has also been “credited” with starting the wet T-shirt craze with scenes of Jacqueline Bisset diving around in a clingy top, but once she gets relegated to bored girlfriend status and just hangs out on the boat while Nick and Robert battle Lou Gossett and a big eel, the movie loses whatever momentum it had.

Nolte and Bisset play a dumb couple down in Bermuda on some sort of adventure vacation where they go diving around wrecks in the hopes of finding some valuable doodads or other. After finding one such knick knack, they’re approached by Lou who claims to be a bottle collector and is interested in buying this piece of glass they found. Continue reading “The Deep (1977)” →

Donovan’s Brain (1953)

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I don’t know where all the flying brains were in this movie. If you’ve got yourself an early 1950s movie about a killer brain, it either ought to fly around or have grown to gargantuan size, preferably both. The only thing the brain in this one does is sit in a bunch of dirty water in a fish aquarium!

Now you can’t just up and order yourself a human brain from Amazon.com or someplace (at least the last time I checked you couldn’t), so just how does Dr. Patrick Cory get his mad scientist hands on one? Continue reading “Donovan’s Brain (1953)” →

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

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There’s been some iffy Best Picture winners in the history of the Academy Awards. Mrs. Miniver‘s win back in 1942 over Kings Row and The Magnificent Ambersons comes immediately to mind as does Forrest Gump‘s win over any other movie released in 1994, but 1952’s selection, The Greatest Show On Earth, is easily the worst movie to win the biggest award in the movie biz.

I don’t know if this was some sort of lifetime achievement thing for producer/director Cecil B. DeMille (he would direct only one more feature, 1956’s The Ten Commandments) or if the Academy voters were made up of lion tamers, trapeze artists, and clowns, but this movie was more like an infomercial for Ringling Brothers (the opening credits state it was made with Ringling’s cooperation) than an actual movie. At least Jimmy Stewart was smart enough never to appear out of his clown make up, lest he be recognized as having been involved at all. Continue reading “The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)” →

The Colossus of New York (1958)

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The Spensser family is one where the father (William) is a brilliant brain surgeon, one son (Henry) is really good with electronics and the other son (Jeremy) is just an all around genius who works on stuff like frost-resistant crops. Since Jeremy is the one who is getting all the headlines for winning the International Peace Prize, his daddy likes him best and that means he will be the one run over by a truck and need his brain transplanted into a giant mechanical creation of his brother’s. Continue reading “The Colossus of New York (1958)” →

The Best of Everything (1959)

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Despite starring Joan Crawford, Stephen Boyd, and Hope Lange, The Best of Everything manages to spend most of its two hours on exciting stuff like Joan throwing files on people’s desk, making them work late, and watching Lange go from dumb girl who just took the secretary job until her boyfriend gets back from London, to power-hungry wench that doesn’t care about men anymore once she’s jilted, to gal who is sweet on Mike Rice (Boyd), to dumb girl who is going to break up her old boyfriend’s marriage and then realizes that he’s only using her.

She isn’t the only woman that this movie focuses on though. This is a soap opera which means that you have the lives of a bunch of lonely, pathetic women intertwining. And by intertwining, I mean that occasionally they show up for work together and every so often they’ll all be back at their apartment at the same time to mope around about the latest stunt whatever piece of trash they’re dating just pulled. Continue reading “The Best of Everything (1959)” →

Strike Commando (1987)

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Strike Commando VHS CoverFrequently when I’m at one of those Strike Commando conventions they hold a couple of times a year, I hear other fans debating which was their favorite Rebbo moment. For some it was when he fought the big Russian to the death. For others, it was when he fought the big Russian to the death a second time.

Still, you have your holdouts that maintain it was when Rebbo (Yor, the Hunter from The Future‘s Reb Brown) burst forth from the water in super slo-mo, screaming and big gun blazing. There’s also a school of thought that when Rebbo was running along the rice fields in super slo-mo, screaming while rockets and bombs exploded around him was perhaps the finest display of Rebbo mayhem in his 100 minute long tour of duty. Continue reading “Strike Commando (1987)” →