Return of the Ghost of the Son of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 25 - Pluto Nash

I’m not entirely comfortable with being in a universe where a film like Pluto Nash exists.

As one watches the film so many many questions spring up – is this a comedy – an action picture – was Eddy Murphy asleep when he accepted the part? He looks a lot like he just woke up before the film started rolling.

Okay – it’s 2087 – which isn’t that far away time wise folks alive now will see it (which makes some of the jokes weird and some of them just  baffling)  Eddie Murphy  is Pluto Nash who runs the hottest nightclub on the moon – yes that’s right by then we’re to the point where we are not simply surviving on the moon we are getting down to boogie or some such thing.

Pluto is also or was a famous smuggler – which is rather boring to point out makes no damn sense at all. Like none. That’s like being a famous pickpocket or famous well anything criminal – other than a gangster – somebody sees that Pluto Nash is arriving by rocket or however they move about here and on earth that ship is going to be torn apart al la the Lincoln in the French Connection (always wondered why they didn’t noticed that it was a different car, ah well  plot stuff).  Some 7 years ago  - and we see this Pluto rescues a friend who owes money to the mob buys friend’s bar because he always wanted to be a club owner – well okay –

As said it’s 2087 – someone representing Rex Crater a mysterious whoever – wants to buy Pluto’s club. He says no. He has his robot bodyguard – played in bizarre fashion by Randy Quaid – it’s seriously strange piece of acting even for a man pretending to be a somewhat obsolete robot (a point which is not so much of a running gag as a running failed joke and oh yes he recharges by pulling the fly of his pants down and well yes. Ha ha ha.  I’m dying of laughter).

I think I rather hate this film.

Pluto has said no – the female lead arrives looking for a singing job but settling for a waitress job at the place – the female lead is the very attractive and talented  Rosario Dawson. However I think the costume designer hated her . Actually thinking about it, the costume designer hated everybody in this film.  Everybody looks ridiculous. 

The sets are of a drab uninteresting not quite as bad as blade runner dystopia – and yet the moon has a casino – explained that gambling is illegal on Earth. Just how the hell did that happen? Especially as nowadays almost every city wants to have if nothing else some slot machines and is more than willing to tear down that preschool to make room for it . It’s one of the many points in this film that just make you go eh?  As for example, the money with Hilary Clinton’s face on it. That’s a real huh moment. What was or is the point of that joke?

Anyway Rex Crater – mysterious gangster who nobody has ever scene – has Pluto’s club blown up – and so Pluto, female lead and Quaid robot are off to escape hit men and to find out who Mr. Crater is. We meet some wacky folks – our heroes are pursued by thugs – some folks get killed – things get blown up there is an embarrassing cameo by John Cleese as a cars’ computer intelligence – there is some other guy with a van that makes my head hurt – and there is a casino were the mystery is solved after we are treated to Pluto’s friend doing a Frank Sinatra impression.

Two things here – we are expected to believe that nobody remembers Frank Sinatra. Really?  I have a portable systems right now that could hold every single note Frank sang if I wanted to.

Also I’m not a big fan of Frank or Vegas style music acts or the great American song book – so this just added to my irritation with the film.

In the end we find – surprise that Rex Crater is a clone of Eddie Murphy – made while he was in prison but well never mind that the clone would be at best 15 years old and b wouldn’t know everything Eddie did – and , oh just let it go. It’s a miserable stupid film and it sat on the shelf for a year for a reason.

Eventually it ends. The Bad Eddie Murphy is killed (twice I think) Pluto rebuilds his club the girl sings and the robot remains annoying.  I don’t care and neither will you.

Enjoy with comfort food. 

Return of the Ghost of the Son of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 24 - The House on Haunted Hill

Ooohhh boy is this a cheese fest  - really spooky mansion where lots of folks have been killed, Vincent Price hamming it all up – Ghost , Skeletons and a group of people who are challenged to stay the night for $10,000 (worth about $80,000 today – where do I sign up?).

It’s profoundly silly film but it’s fun – there are some scares – the creepy old lady that appears out of nowhere in the wine cellar scaring the female lead half to death  is the best one – but there is an almost Victorian melodrama creakiness to the story that to be honest adds to its charm.

Vincent Price plays an eccentric millionaire who has asked some people to a party being held by his wife. He and his wife obviously loathe each other, we are told that Vincent has had several other wives and they all died suddenly so it’s not looking good for the current  Wife who is  #4 .

The guests arrive, a test pilot, the female lead (who is the only one in her family that works so they could really use the money) a columnist who has bit of drinking problem and has bad luck when she picks the ponies, a psychiatrist, and the owner of the haunted house – played by Elisha Cooke who is staying for reasons I can’t understand – he has stayed one night earlier and had been found almost dead in the morning – the rest of the party were dead and some were missing heads. (it’s that kind of place)

At any rate, they all come into the drawing room, Vincent goes over the rules of the contest, E and the columnist head for the bar – E starts to tell them how doomed they all are – (he will repeat that a lot as the night goes on) them once the group is spooked and drunk they go on a tour of the house including the wine cellar with the pit full of flesh eating acid. 

Well it’s a fixer upper that’s for sure. Possibly beyond even the ability of the Home depot to fix however.

The test pilot – Lance - played by Richard Long starts to put the moves on the female lead – Lance by the way is amazing ineffectual in this film – he gets knocked out, he vanishes or a while and is later locked in a closet – this is a test pilot? Someone with the right stuff? I wouldn’t let him test string cheese. I’d be afraid he choke.

Meantime the female lead ends up seeing the floating creepy woman more than once and also ends up finding one of the missing heads – much to her displeasure – and as the trope for these films the head is gone when she gets back with the rest. “pure hysteria” states the shrink who must be a Freudian as he is smug as hell and says Hysteria a lot.

Then we find wife number 4 hanging from rope and looking dead like.  At first it looks like suicide but later the shrink points out that it couldn’t be as there was no place for wife 4 to jump off of.

So it was murder.

Well not really but it turns out that a) the Shrink and Wife #4 who is not dead – are plotting to kill Vincent Price by driving the female lead out of her mind with fear so she will ‘accidently’ shoot Vincent.

This happens – so it seems in the basement – female lead dashes off in hysterics while shrink starts to tote Vincent’s body to the acid pit (why? There isn’t any reason to do that really) the lights go out we hear the sounds of a struggle and hear a splash.

Wife #4 comes into basement to check things out – nobody is around then the lights go out and then a skeleton with Vincent Price’s voice emerges from the vat – Wife #4 of course freaks and ends up falling into said acid vat.

We then see that it was a Skelton puppet (well  we really could tell that all the time) and that Vincent is very not dead.

“I loaded blanks in the female lead’s gun “ he explains showing a hell of a lot of trust in her not switching weapons at some point.  “I’m really to face justice” which if I was his defense lawyer I ‘d be thinking about pleading insanity –‘so when you realized your wife was planning to kill you, you started building a skeleton puppet. Right.”

Anyway still a fun movie to watch – even with the plot holes and the campy effects. Vincent is great fun to watch here.

William Castle the producer loved gimmicks – in this one for the first run at least he had it set so a skeleton on a string would run down from the back of the theater to the front. It really didn’t take much to spook people in the 50’s I guess. It was as nervous decade.

Enjoy with something non-alcoholic the folks in the movie are drinking enough for everybody

Return of the Ghost of the Son of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 23 - Birdemic 2- Resurrection

Birdemic – Shock and Terror has a deservedly high reputation as perhaps one of the worst movies ever made – but it was so awful so mind blowingly bad that it was impossible to not watch it – from the wooden acting of the male lead Ron to the absurdly bad special effects – Gif.s of birds  essentially  the dialogue that sounded like it had been translated into martian by babelfish and then back into English, the fact that it took 47 minutes for the birds to start attacking , to the pictures insane insistence that it was making a big statement on global warming the picture is amazing and became a hit on the midnight circuit.

So, in true Hollywood fashion, they went and made another one.

This one is set in Hollywood where we mostly follow the adventures of a guy who is not Ron and a woman who is not Natalie. Not Ron is a producer director whose last film which was done for we are told ‘a big studio’ flopped.   Rod is a long time friend of Not-Rod (no I don’t know his name and I don’t care to look it up – this will have to do) and he and Natalie meet Not-Rod in a restaurant.

The restaurant is by the way – completely empty other than our party there – however since the director had more money and some actual support from a real studio – he added the crowd sounds to the scene which makes it very odd – you keep thinking where are all the people making this noise.

Rod and Not-Rod form a production company – they get backed for “A million dollars” in true Birdemic universe fashion – Not-Rod convinces Not-Natalie to try out for the lead the film, this leads to Not-Rod and Not-Natalie falling for each other – along with scenes of the four of them walking on the beach or visiting the Labrea Tar Pits.

One of the things about Bridemic 2 is that almost everybody who wasn’t dead at the end of the first film is back in one way or another – by the tar pits we meet dr. Jones who once again talks about Global warming and that in ancient times birds would kill the cave men –

Then we flash to a cave couple - we know this because they are wearing furs - having sex who are then killed by birds – it’s an insane scene and really bizarrely out of tone with the rest of the film.  (At least up to this point).

And then of course we get the bird attack.

Whereas in the last film the actual reason for the bird attack is never really given (as in Hitchcock’s The Birds) this time is some sort of red rain that is linked to global warming that brings the birds that were trapped in the tar pit to life – along with the cave couple.

We are treated to birds attacking – inside the studio this time and another coat hanger scene – we also see the birds attack a movie filming in the next sound stage over I guess – which has two topless actresses who die of bird attack. And if you thought the folks dying in the first film were bad actors you have not seen bad acting like this.

Still whereas the first film was a weird and giddy delight mostly for huge gap between the vaulting ambition of the filmmaker and his limited abilities to bring it off – sort of a new Ed Woodish kind of film – Bird 2 has a real paint by numbers feel along with a bit of forcing – and an overall rushed feel – it’s about 20 minutes shorter than the first one and it shows.

Our party move on – find a big studio van – and run into the cave people along with zombies as well as birds – and one by one for each encounter one of the extras dies –until at the very end the last of the folks who are not Ron and Not-Rod and their main squeezes if killed and falls into a pool al la William Holden from Sunset Boulevard – which I’m terrified the film maker is going to try and do a knock off of that soon.

It’s hard to capture lightning in a bottle twice especially when so much of the lightning depends on the spark of madness in the producer/writer/director of these films James Nguyen.  In the first,  his mad serenity shone like a searchlight – here the phrase Global Warming is taken as a joke. I think in Bridemic 1 he was following his dream – in the second he was delivering product.  One can notice the difference.

Enjoy with chicken nuggets – preferably from a fast food joint.   

Return of the Ghost of the Son of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 22 - Mission Stardust

No it’s not about Tinkerbelle getting more stardust  - this is a 1967 German-Italian co production loosely based – as in I think the man Characters name – on the Perry Rhodan series of sc-fi novels that was a huge hit in Europe in the 60’s and 70’s if memory serves – per someone on Amazon they published something like 125 books in the US but in Germany the series continues and recently reached number 1,800 which is mind boggling.

Anyway – the story –as I’m able to piece it together has Perry and his stalwart crew heading for the moon to find a newly discovered valuable mineral – Uranium ultra it seems – however they are highjacked and end up on the dark side of the moon where the band Pink Floyd plays – well never mind that they actually have been highjacked by a alien spaceship which has landed on the dark side but is unable to take off due to the automatic repair unit being broken.

There are two aliens – one is the hot alien babe from space – named Thora who has a major chip on her shoulder most of the film – which is okay if I was in control of a space ship that could reduce a mountain range to molten lava in minutes I might have a bit of an attitude myself.

Now of course said attitude does not sit well with Perry and he says so – in a movie way that means they will be lovers by the end of the film.

Anyway the other alien, Crest , is ill but the teams doctor is able instantly or almost instantly find out what is wrong with him – he has leukemia – and it seems the one man in the world who can cure leukemia is a Dr. Haggard who works out of a clinic in Mombasa  – so Thora, Crest,  Perry and annoying sidekick and the rest, take off in an auxiliary ship to earth – by the way why couldn’t the aliens use the auxiliary ship to get out of the solar system and into the space lanes but okay.

They land in a desert in Africa hundreds of miles away from the doctor – why? Plot that’s why! If they could just land well one – the local military wouldn’t get to take potshots at them, not would the oily gangster be able to try and get control of the ship.

There is a massive amount of toing and frowing – while Perry and annoying sidekick head to Mombasa to bring the doctor and the leukemia cure back. They have a encounter with a Sidney Greeenstreet type who gives them a land rover and then of course rats out where they are going to the greasy underworld boss – who it seems has one of Rhodan’s crew as a mole – there is really a lot of filler in this film.

At the very end Crest is healed, the bad guys are killed , there is a lot toing and foing and plot twists that don’t really twist and well of course Perry and the hot alien babe are seen making out.

It’s a pretty silly film that reeks of the 60’s groovyness – it does not have the zing of wild wild planet but it is a reminder that the world was very different in the 60’s.

Enjoy with antipasto and sausages.