Giants, Magic Sticks and being surprised
I don’t think I am going to have to time to blog on Monday so most of this was written Sunday -
Finally got to see the Giant from the Unknown – not the worst film ever made –it however is pretty bad and has its share of goofiness and dumb stuff.
When the film begins (set in the western mountains somewhere – where is never mentioned California I think) the locals are all a twit about the bad goings on - Cattle – killed – henhouses destroyed and now one of the locals has been killed. The sheriff – in the long tradition of monster movies everywhere is inclined to blame the visiting geologist who just at that moment comes in from 3 days in the woods looking well - not really looking like he’s been in the woods three days (he’s the male lead so come on). The Sheriff, who will hereafter go by the name Sheriff Jerk grills the Male lead then lightly coats him with olive oil and situates – note must not blog before eating – anyway the sheriff tells the male lead he is under suspicion and shouldn’t leave the county.
After a conversation with a brother and sister pair who have made friends with the male lead – a jeep pulls into town featuring the female lead and the female lead’s father (One Morris Ankrum who looks naked without a military uniform – Morris made a living in the 50’s mostly by playing a senior military officer in Sci-Fi B movies – Earth vs the Flying Saucers, The Giant Claw, the Beginning of the End let al, so to see him in civvies is just odd) After the male lead damn near sprints to the door of the general store open it for the female lead (that god no little old ladies where in the way) and starts making time with the daughter (who judging by Morris apparent age well it just looks like he was about 40 when his daughter was born). Still in a somewhat surprising twist for the standard sci-fi films the daughter isn’t also a scientist but exists merely to make coffee and sandwiches – I’m not saying it was a good twist it was just a surprising one.
Turns out Morris is a scientist too. He's looking for evidence of a party of Spanish Conquistadors who were led by someone he calls the Diablo giant – who lead something he calls the Diablo Brigade – pretty sinister – and then they go up to something called Devil’s Gulch (while it does get tiresome to keep heaving devil and variants all over the place – and while a place called happy puppy gulch wouldn’t be much in the way of atmosphere at least you could try to come up with a better name – it’s not like you have great special effects or anything – so at least try okay?) and there they find the remains of the devils brigade but not the Giant (I am passing over some tedious stuff – note to film makers there is no way you can make scenes where people are using a metal detector interesting. Even if one was a hot blonde and the other was a Asian girl and they were both in bikinis – even then – maybe if they stopped using the metal detectors and started rubbing baby oil on each other and the Asian girls top came off…well then the scene wouldn’t be about using a metal detector now would it?) . There is some toing and frowing with a man in a wig called Indian Joe – perhaps one of the worst performances by a Caucasian as an Indian I have ever seen – “you not like others you not lie” “Joe you went to Harvard why are you talking like that”. Indian Joe has a few functions one to menace the cast while spouting red herring bits about the Indian burial ground and to get killed by the giant later.
Speaking of later – just before a thunderstorm the male lead finds of all things the axe of the giant imbedded in the ground – but as the storm is coming up he has to hightail it out of that spot before he gets soaked.
And as he leaves – of course – we see the giant – who seems to have been buried under mulch - rises up – and takes his axe with him.
Now here’s a problem if the giant has just woken up from some kind of suspended animation (which as set up earlier in some stupid stuff with a lizard in a rock that ended up alive) who was doing all the other killing?
Well never mind – it’s time for the giant to go on rampage – no wait – what he ends up doing for a long time is lurk – behind tress – well I guess cause he’s just gotten up – or has he? There are those other killings.
So he lurks behind some tress – gets a bit hot and bothered cause he sees the female lead getting into her pajamas (it was the fifties) actually he sees her shadow on the tent wall (girls be careful where the light shine in tent when you are undressing – no telling who is out there) he then goes and gets back his helmet breast plate and medallion – no giant conquistador is complete without them anyway – and then – well lurks some more. I was yelling come the hell on make with the death!
And he finally does – killing the young girl we saw earlier in the picture. When ever you hear the words “I’ll be alright” in a horror/sci fi film it’s time to get the meat wagon ready. Your odds of surviving are worse than wearing a red shirt and beaming down with Kirk.
So the girl is killed and Sheriff Jerk (who has been blessedly absent) comes and arrests the male lead because he has to, he’s a jerk. I don’t really get this bit. The male lead has been in the camp with Morris and the female lead – in order for him to have killed the girl he’d have had to either slipped away or the two are lying. And since the two tell the sheriff that he hasn’t left the camp, if I was the sheriff and assumed that the male lead had indeed killed the girl – I’d have to assume the other two were lying and arrest them as well. But he doesn’t. Because he’s a jerk and because if he did.
The Giant wouldn’t be able to snatch the girl – after some hoo ha with the female lead not being a) able to start their jeep b) and then fainting because well that’s what women did in the 50’s. Faint. There is a learned thesis to be written on the reinforcement of traditional female roles as set forth in 50’s sci fi films but I’m not going to write it. Too much fun snarking.
So the giant grabs the girl the male lead and Morris and the sheriff end up all together after a keystone cops sequence where the male lead and Morris steal the sheriff’s car and the sheriff gives chase in the Morris’s Jeep – (it’s dumber than that but this at least is short – which I can’t say the whole business is – this film is only 77 minutes long but it’s a slog nonetheless). Really.
At any rate after the sheriff sees the giant he understands that the male lead is not the bad guy and to show his contrition he allows the male lead to direct operations against the giant. After all he’s a scientist and this was the 50’s so they knew better than say a sheriff on how to bring a dangerous psycho killer (an incredibly big one at that) to justice.
So they form a posse and hunt him down – and trap him what looks like a ledge on sheer rock cliff – they shoot at him – he hurls Styrofoam rocks – they do some damage but he managed to kill one of the posse members with a rock and injure some others. Mean time they put about 6 shots from various rifles into the giant (I’m assuming .30-30 caliber shells – which would be enough – if this wasn’t a science fiction film - to drop a moose) along with a few shots from the pistol the sheriff is packing – the giant, who looks more like he’s suffering from gas pains rather than bullet wounds, continues to throw rocks.
Faced with a wounded psychopathic killer giant – the posse decides, upon the advice of the male lead – to leave a guard and go back to camp. This explains why these people were living in a town that’s nothing more than a wide spot in the road – they are stupid.
To prove that point just before they decide to take a break for the night – one of the posse manages to get close the giant and then instead of shooting him in the head tries to hit the giant with the butt of his rife in the chest – where the giant’s breast plate can take most of the impact. The giant kills him – oddly enough there doesn’t seem to be much reaction from the posse, not even his name is mention. Now either they are all emotionally numb or, they didn’t like the guy much. I’d guess the latter – anyone stupid enough to forget what you do with a rifle has got to have been doing other really stupid things before that, like for years. “Sorry Al I put eggs in the gas tank again”
So they go back to the camp – the giant of course manages to kill the guard – and injure some kid (younger brother of the murdered girl) and high tail it for the mill and the dam near it – Male lead takes off after him. They have a fight in the old abandoned mill – and male lead (who isn’t much brighter than the townsfolk) loses his rifle (of course he didn’t think to cop a pistol as well, while he was going off to tackle a 7 foot tall psychopath on his own, nooo he isn’t going to lose the rifle nooo) and then, as they bust out off the old mill and start to fight outside, he grabs a stick and whacks the giant in the chest with it.
The stick, as one would expect of an old piece of wood found lying in a mill, shatters. And again if you are fighting a 7 ft tall giant wearing a steel breast plate, you really aren’t going to do a lot of damage if you hit in the breast plate. Head, arm, knee,
But lo, this must be a magic stick – because a) the next time we see it , it is back to normal length – amazing enough – but it seems the magic stick actually is managing to hurt the giant – who runs to the bridge over the damn – where the Male lead hits him again with the magic stick and over the giant goes – one assumes to drown – this was the fifties and all horror sic fi films didn’t end with showing the jason/freddy/giant still alive.
As a last action the magic stick heals the railing the giant broke when he plunged into the water (either that or it’s a gaff on the film makers) – and then the film ends – with the male lead and the female lead snogging away.
Random Neural Firings:
War drum beating in the Middle East – US Military or someone is claiming that Iranian troops are behind some attacks on US troops. This one must remind ones self, from the same people who gave you those mobile bio weapon laboratories.
By all accounts a strange article in the Washington Post today where some tame geeks talked to W for a while. He wondered, without out actually mentioning anything like oh – Iraq or New Orleans, why he was so unpopular. This didn’t mean he was going to change his mind about anything just he was wondering. One ‘scholar’ said he was surprised by W’s intelligence – whether that he was surprised that W was smarter or that he was actually stupider than he thought was not clearly stated. Of course this scholar also wrote a column on how great Enron was, after Enron had gone belly up so his judgment on other things could be not as good as you would like.
I begin to see why Fred Thompson preferred acting to actual politics – he’s a dumb as a post with political instincts that would make John Kerry point and laugh
Lieberman is a twit – well twit is too nice a word since people are getting killed and he likes it that way.
And the Brits put us to shame.
Peace Love, magic sticks.
Finally got to see the Giant from the Unknown – not the worst film ever made –it however is pretty bad and has its share of goofiness and dumb stuff.
When the film begins (set in the western mountains somewhere – where is never mentioned California I think) the locals are all a twit about the bad goings on - Cattle – killed – henhouses destroyed and now one of the locals has been killed. The sheriff – in the long tradition of monster movies everywhere is inclined to blame the visiting geologist who just at that moment comes in from 3 days in the woods looking well - not really looking like he’s been in the woods three days (he’s the male lead so come on). The Sheriff, who will hereafter go by the name Sheriff Jerk grills the Male lead then lightly coats him with olive oil and situates – note must not blog before eating – anyway the sheriff tells the male lead he is under suspicion and shouldn’t leave the county.
After a conversation with a brother and sister pair who have made friends with the male lead – a jeep pulls into town featuring the female lead and the female lead’s father (One Morris Ankrum who looks naked without a military uniform – Morris made a living in the 50’s mostly by playing a senior military officer in Sci-Fi B movies – Earth vs the Flying Saucers, The Giant Claw, the Beginning of the End let al, so to see him in civvies is just odd) After the male lead damn near sprints to the door of the general store open it for the female lead (that god no little old ladies where in the way) and starts making time with the daughter (who judging by Morris apparent age well it just looks like he was about 40 when his daughter was born). Still in a somewhat surprising twist for the standard sci-fi films the daughter isn’t also a scientist but exists merely to make coffee and sandwiches – I’m not saying it was a good twist it was just a surprising one.
Turns out Morris is a scientist too. He's looking for evidence of a party of Spanish Conquistadors who were led by someone he calls the Diablo giant – who lead something he calls the Diablo Brigade – pretty sinister – and then they go up to something called Devil’s Gulch (while it does get tiresome to keep heaving devil and variants all over the place – and while a place called happy puppy gulch wouldn’t be much in the way of atmosphere at least you could try to come up with a better name – it’s not like you have great special effects or anything – so at least try okay?) and there they find the remains of the devils brigade but not the Giant (I am passing over some tedious stuff – note to film makers there is no way you can make scenes where people are using a metal detector interesting. Even if one was a hot blonde and the other was a Asian girl and they were both in bikinis – even then – maybe if they stopped using the metal detectors and started rubbing baby oil on each other and the Asian girls top came off…well then the scene wouldn’t be about using a metal detector now would it?) . There is some toing and frowing with a man in a wig called Indian Joe – perhaps one of the worst performances by a Caucasian as an Indian I have ever seen – “you not like others you not lie” “Joe you went to Harvard why are you talking like that”. Indian Joe has a few functions one to menace the cast while spouting red herring bits about the Indian burial ground and to get killed by the giant later.
Speaking of later – just before a thunderstorm the male lead finds of all things the axe of the giant imbedded in the ground – but as the storm is coming up he has to hightail it out of that spot before he gets soaked.
And as he leaves – of course – we see the giant – who seems to have been buried under mulch - rises up – and takes his axe with him.
Now here’s a problem if the giant has just woken up from some kind of suspended animation (which as set up earlier in some stupid stuff with a lizard in a rock that ended up alive) who was doing all the other killing?
Well never mind – it’s time for the giant to go on rampage – no wait – what he ends up doing for a long time is lurk – behind tress – well I guess cause he’s just gotten up – or has he? There are those other killings.
So he lurks behind some tress – gets a bit hot and bothered cause he sees the female lead getting into her pajamas (it was the fifties) actually he sees her shadow on the tent wall (girls be careful where the light shine in tent when you are undressing – no telling who is out there) he then goes and gets back his helmet breast plate and medallion – no giant conquistador is complete without them anyway – and then – well lurks some more. I was yelling come the hell on make with the death!
And he finally does – killing the young girl we saw earlier in the picture. When ever you hear the words “I’ll be alright” in a horror/sci fi film it’s time to get the meat wagon ready. Your odds of surviving are worse than wearing a red shirt and beaming down with Kirk.
So the girl is killed and Sheriff Jerk (who has been blessedly absent) comes and arrests the male lead because he has to, he’s a jerk. I don’t really get this bit. The male lead has been in the camp with Morris and the female lead – in order for him to have killed the girl he’d have had to either slipped away or the two are lying. And since the two tell the sheriff that he hasn’t left the camp, if I was the sheriff and assumed that the male lead had indeed killed the girl – I’d have to assume the other two were lying and arrest them as well. But he doesn’t. Because he’s a jerk and because if he did.
The Giant wouldn’t be able to snatch the girl – after some hoo ha with the female lead not being a) able to start their jeep b) and then fainting because well that’s what women did in the 50’s. Faint. There is a learned thesis to be written on the reinforcement of traditional female roles as set forth in 50’s sci fi films but I’m not going to write it. Too much fun snarking.
So the giant grabs the girl the male lead and Morris and the sheriff end up all together after a keystone cops sequence where the male lead and Morris steal the sheriff’s car and the sheriff gives chase in the Morris’s Jeep – (it’s dumber than that but this at least is short – which I can’t say the whole business is – this film is only 77 minutes long but it’s a slog nonetheless). Really.
At any rate after the sheriff sees the giant he understands that the male lead is not the bad guy and to show his contrition he allows the male lead to direct operations against the giant. After all he’s a scientist and this was the 50’s so they knew better than say a sheriff on how to bring a dangerous psycho killer (an incredibly big one at that) to justice.
So they form a posse and hunt him down – and trap him what looks like a ledge on sheer rock cliff – they shoot at him – he hurls Styrofoam rocks – they do some damage but he managed to kill one of the posse members with a rock and injure some others. Mean time they put about 6 shots from various rifles into the giant (I’m assuming .30-30 caliber shells – which would be enough – if this wasn’t a science fiction film - to drop a moose) along with a few shots from the pistol the sheriff is packing – the giant, who looks more like he’s suffering from gas pains rather than bullet wounds, continues to throw rocks.
Faced with a wounded psychopathic killer giant – the posse decides, upon the advice of the male lead – to leave a guard and go back to camp. This explains why these people were living in a town that’s nothing more than a wide spot in the road – they are stupid.
To prove that point just before they decide to take a break for the night – one of the posse manages to get close the giant and then instead of shooting him in the head tries to hit the giant with the butt of his rife in the chest – where the giant’s breast plate can take most of the impact. The giant kills him – oddly enough there doesn’t seem to be much reaction from the posse, not even his name is mention. Now either they are all emotionally numb or, they didn’t like the guy much. I’d guess the latter – anyone stupid enough to forget what you do with a rifle has got to have been doing other really stupid things before that, like for years. “Sorry Al I put eggs in the gas tank again”
So they go back to the camp – the giant of course manages to kill the guard – and injure some kid (younger brother of the murdered girl) and high tail it for the mill and the dam near it – Male lead takes off after him. They have a fight in the old abandoned mill – and male lead (who isn’t much brighter than the townsfolk) loses his rifle (of course he didn’t think to cop a pistol as well, while he was going off to tackle a 7 foot tall psychopath on his own, nooo he isn’t going to lose the rifle nooo) and then, as they bust out off the old mill and start to fight outside, he grabs a stick and whacks the giant in the chest with it.
The stick, as one would expect of an old piece of wood found lying in a mill, shatters. And again if you are fighting a 7 ft tall giant wearing a steel breast plate, you really aren’t going to do a lot of damage if you hit in the breast plate. Head, arm, knee,
But lo, this must be a magic stick – because a) the next time we see it , it is back to normal length – amazing enough – but it seems the magic stick actually is managing to hurt the giant – who runs to the bridge over the damn – where the Male lead hits him again with the magic stick and over the giant goes – one assumes to drown – this was the fifties and all horror sic fi films didn’t end with showing the jason/freddy/giant still alive.
As a last action the magic stick heals the railing the giant broke when he plunged into the water (either that or it’s a gaff on the film makers) – and then the film ends – with the male lead and the female lead snogging away.
Random Neural Firings:
War drum beating in the Middle East – US Military or someone is claiming that Iranian troops are behind some attacks on US troops. This one must remind ones self, from the same people who gave you those mobile bio weapon laboratories.
By all accounts a strange article in the Washington Post today where some tame geeks talked to W for a while. He wondered, without out actually mentioning anything like oh – Iraq or New Orleans, why he was so unpopular. This didn’t mean he was going to change his mind about anything just he was wondering. One ‘scholar’ said he was surprised by W’s intelligence – whether that he was surprised that W was smarter or that he was actually stupider than he thought was not clearly stated. Of course this scholar also wrote a column on how great Enron was, after Enron had gone belly up so his judgment on other things could be not as good as you would like.
I begin to see why Fred Thompson preferred acting to actual politics – he’s a dumb as a post with political instincts that would make John Kerry point and laugh
Lieberman is a twit – well twit is too nice a word since people are getting killed and he likes it that way.
And the Brits put us to shame.
Peace Love, magic sticks.
Labels: bad movies -
posted by Unknown at 8:48 AM
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