BRUCE LEE: THE MAN, THE MYTH

BRUCE LEE: THE MAN, THE MYTH

With all the talk lately about Bruce Lee and his appearance in ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD it's probably not a coincidence that this has popped up on the (really, really cool) free streaming app Tubi. (To be fair, it's also on Amazon Prime but it was noticing the Tubi listing that prompted this post.)

 

Our small, southern town didn't have a true 'grindhouse' theater, but it did have the 'old' theaters downtown versus the 'new' theater by the mall.

The new theater got the bigger mainstream releases while the downtown theaters got, well, stuff like this. Those are also the theaters where I saw THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and CALIGULA and BASKET CASE and the like.

Those movies, my dad took me to see. But this one - dad was off stationed in Turkey for a year and somehow I got mom to take me to this one. She stayed up in the back and let me go down closer to the front where I liked to sit - one very young, very white kid in a crowd 100% older and probably 90% non-white.

One of the best, most memorable movie-going experiences of my life.

Won't be quite the same, but here's a direct link to the film on Tubi:
https://tubitv.com/movies/282408/bruce_lee_the_man_the_myth

Halloween Movies

Another grab-bag as work hours, family commitments, and just a bone-deep tiredness have taken up my time this week.

For all that I love Halloween, I haven't had time to do anything for it this year. That sucks.

Ordinarily, there are at least three films I try and watch during this most joyous time of year. What are they, no one asks? Let me tell ya....

Movie Time!

So here's the thing; I'm still doing a lot of overtime, including weekends. So I've not had the time to watch/read much worth talking about here and even if I had...I'm tired.

But darn it! I'm going to keep trying to put something in this space every week, so if you want you can watch a movie I made while playing around with The Movies PC game several years ago....

RIP George A. Romero

I was a horror fan pretty much from birth.

Some of my earliest memories (we're talking kindergarten, here) involve getting up extra early on Saturday mornings to watch the tail-end of the late-late-late horror movie that went off just before cartoons started, along with trying to catch Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Night Gallery every chance I could. So NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD had been on my radar all my life as something I needed to see.

In middle school/junior high we had a teacher that collected movies. I know, now days, 'collected movies' doesn't sound like a big deal. Heck, I have a couple thousand myself. But he collected actual, real, honest-to-god film prints. And he regularly brought them in to school and ran them before first bell and during his home room. Just enough time to usually watch a whole movie a week. I had him for two years, so I got to see a bunch of stuff in his class.

Since it was a school setting, most of what we watched were pretty tame fare. A lot of serials from the 30s and 40s - Nyoka, The Tiger Woman, Captain Marvel - that sort of thing. But sometimes, mainly around Halloween, he expanded the selection some. We watched the Roger Corman FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, and the killer-worm flick SQUIRM (he had to hold his hand in front of the project lens during the shower scene - we were, after all, kids).

He had a poster frame by his desk and would swap out movie posters every week or so and one week he put up the poster for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. It took some cajoling, but finally he relented and so my first viewing of this groundbreaking, classic horror film was sitting in a darkened classroom in one of those uncomfortable school desks along with my classmates with the teacher trying to keep us quiet as kids screamed during the scariest bits.

I never had the chance to tell Romero this story, but I like to think he'd be amused at traumatizing a classroom full of kids. I mean, who wouldn't?

The Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention

Okay.

First, I'm not even going to try and act like I'll be getting back to regular posting any time soon. Every time I do that it seems to pretty much guarantee I'll disappear and now we're coming up on our busiest time of the year at work, so let's just forget that noise and I'll do what I can when I can.

Right now, I want to give a quick recap of my weekend at the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention.

NAKED ZOMBIE GIRL

NAKED ZOMBIE GIRL

Written and Directed by Rickey Bird
Starring Meghan Chadeayne
Not Rated

With a title and poster like that, it's pretty easy to get an idea what Naked Zombie Girl (NZG going forward 'cause I'm lazy) from Hectic Films is about. Just to clarify - the 'Girl' of the film is not a 'Zombie' (this isn't another Dawna the Dead), but never fear, she does end up quite 'Naked' before too long.

This short film clocks in at just over twenty-five minutes long. It's been making the rounds at horror conventions and film festivals and as I was settling down to write this, the NZG facebook page announced they'd won Best Horror Short at the Austin Indie Flix Festival. Go, team!

As the film starts, three people are in a car, apparently fleeing from...something. News reports on the radio, as well as one of the car's occupants suffering from a bite wound, make it clear the zombie apocalypse is upon us. In short order, the car craps out and the bitten dude decides to end things by way of a gun in his mouth. The two remaining girls barely have time to react to this before the car is surrounded by zombies.

Our heroine, played by Meghan Chadeayne, escapes, losing her dress in the process (and that's where the 'Naked' part comes in at). She quickly finds her courage and a chainsaw and proceeds to go to town on the zombies.

Overall, the thing is very well done and looks better than a lot of full-length b-movies I've seen. Decent zombies and a fair amount of practical gore effects. There's also some computer generated gore but I'm far more forgiving of CGI in a low budget short that was filmed over the course of just a couple of nights than I am in a big budget feature. And, it's hard to deny the appeal of Meghan Chadeayne kicking zombie butt while baring her own for much of the running time.

NZG is part of the new wave of 'grindhouse' inspired films that have come out lately, so there are film scratches and other grunge effects applied to make it look like a '70s drive-in movie. Personally, I could've done without most of that but better that than the jumpy 'found footage' style that hasn't gone away yet.

I don't know if they're even considering filming a feature-length version of the story, perhaps showing how the characters ended up where the short starts and of course continuing on past the end, but I'd be all for it if they are.

If you get a chance to see a screening, I'd say go. The website for the film indicates that it will be for sale at some point, but if you live in a cultural wasteland and are impatient like myself, there's a GoFundMe campaign for a Naked Zombie Girl comic book that can get you a download of the film for a fifteen-dollar donation. That's how I got to see it. As of this writing, there are still four downloads available.


Naked Zombie Girl website
Hectic Films website
NZG comic GoFundMe page
NZG facebook page

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA #3

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA #3

Story: John Carpenter and Eric Powell
Writer: Eric Powell
Art: Brian Churilla
Colors: Michael Garland
Letters: Ed Dukeshire
Publication Date: August 2014
Published by BOOM! Studios

"Hey! Relax! I'm an expert at not listening to anybody."

                                                                              - Jack Burton 

 

Just a quickie 'cause I'm late on this one....

Eric Powell's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA series continues, as Jack and Egg arrive at the House of the Seven-Faced Widow to try and retrieve the souls of the three Storms in their effort to save Wang Chi from Qiang Lu.

This series continues the fun of our hero Jack being entirely too dense to realize just how out of his element he really is. Along the way, we get a look at both another ex-wife, and another example of just how oblivious Jack can be about things going on around him. While the events of the film might've been the first time Jack knew he was up against supernatural evil, it looks more and more like it was around him all the time and he was too self-centered to see it.

The series continues to get the feel of the film pretty much dead-on, with a lot of the humor coming from Jack's non-stop commentary and way of twisting everything into some story about him. Watching the villians trying to deal with this guy who isn't giving them anything like the respect/fear they're accustomed to is one of favorite aspects of the book.

If you enjoyed the movie, or even just like your Chinese mysticism served up with a healthy portion of comic irreverence, you should give this book a shot.

"Can you imagine what it must have been like then... then... then... then... then... then... then..."

The 10th of August, 1984.

That's when it happened.

That's when THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI: ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION was originally released (limited - it would go wide - at least, as wide as it got, on the 15th).

I'd say that's the day that changed my life; that's the day I became a fan, but that's not right.

In a lot of ways, I'd become a fan some years earlier when I discovered Doc Savage (first via the Ron Ely film, then the Golden Press hard back reprints and finally the Bantam books reprints) in grade school.

Doc Savage was a physical and mental marvel, the perfect pulp hero of the 1930s, and a character who quickly influenced a few other heroes you may have heard of. Fortress of Solitude? Doc had it before Superman. (His first name was also 'Clark' and he was The Man of Bronze before anyone ever heard of a Man of Steel.) An independently wealthy man who was both a perfect physical specimen and an expert in many mental disciplines who used his fantastic gadgets and vehicles to fight crime? All Bruce Wayne did was add a bat suit to the mix.

Doc also had a crew of adventurers helping him in his quest. Five men, each experts in their own fields of study, who traveled the globe with him, righting wrongs and punishing evildoers.

So yes, by the time THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI (or TABB as it's affectionately known to fans) came out, I was ready for it.

Some seriously random musings on my history with Dr. Banzai follows. It's long and a bit rambly but there are some cool websites at the very end if  you want to skip down to those.