El Santo Writes Again

[El Santo]

I don't really do Halloween updates, because, well, how would you tell the difference anyway?  Nevertheless, this particular crop of reviews accidentally wound up being pretty close to a normal person's idea of what might be appropriate to the season:


Count Dracula (1970), in which Harry Alan Towers and Jesus Franco try to con us all into believing they've made the Most Faithful Dracula Ever, but the only person they fool is Christopher Lee...


House of the Long Shadows (1983), in which all the surviving Horror Geezers gather in a spooky old house to be stalked-and-slashed like a pack of horny teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake...


The Living Skeleton (1968), which begins with the watery ghosts so beloved of Japanese horror writers, but ends in sheer fucking madness...

and...


The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1968), in which Jack Palance sucks even worse than usual, but strangely doesn't much hurt the movie by doing so.

[El Santo]

I'm not sure I've ever posted an update before in which the oldest film I reviewed and the newest were separated by more than a hundred years.  It certainly can't have happened more than once or twice before, in any case!


Bad Meat (2011), in which it's an open question whether the inmates of a reprogramming camp for juvenile delinquents were worse of before or after the staff of the camp got turned into mindless rage-zombes...

Bones and All (2022), in which awards-bait romance and explicit cannibalism are the two acquired tastes that taste really fucking weird together...

The Frozen Dead (1966), in which the Nazi mad scientist and his paymasters would have a much easier time getting their Fourth Reich up and running if his lab assistant would stop helping...

Halloween (2018), in which it's another open question whether Michael Myers or Laurie Strode is the crazier one this time around...

Planet of the Vampire Women (2011), which incredibly comes within a hair's breadth of living up to all the implications of that title...

Queen of Atlantis (1921), in which H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha isn't the only terminally horny sorceress-queen lounging around in North Africa seducing European explorers...

and...

School of the Holy Beast (1974), in which I had no idea they made naughty nun movies in Japan!

[El Santo]

Now that I'm almost done with the Halloween franchise, my thoughts naturally turn toward what I might do for my next long-running undertaking.  What I've settled on is something of a departure for 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting:  under the expert guidance of a longtime reader, I'm going to try to achieve basic competence in the field of Hong Kong martial arts movies.  Don't worry-- there'll still be plenty of slashers, Satanists, rubber-suit monsters, and all the other things you've come to expect from me over the years, but at least for the near future, you'll also be seeing a lot more skinny little Asian guys walloping each other.  Here's a taste of how that's likely to work in practice:


Deadly Embrace (1988), in which David DeCoteau might call himself "Ellen Cabot," but he isn't fooling anybody who knows his work at all well...


The Legend of Spider Forest (1971), in which an artist on holiday in Bavaria has his vacation ruined by killer spiders, fugitive Nazis, and a weirdo scientist with his own private nerve-agent lab...


The Vampire Doll (1970), in which Toho tries its hand at Hammer horror, the AIP Poe cycle, and 60's Eurogothic, all at the same time...

and...


Vengeance! (1970), in which the exceedingly dangerous brother of a slain Chinese opera star vows to get even with the criminal cartel responsible for his murder, even if that means taking on the local warlord and his army.

[Dr. Kobb]

Jan 4, 2023 10:49:21 GMT -5 El Santo said:

Now that I'm almost done with the Halloween franchise, my thoughts naturally turn toward what I might do for my next long-running undertaking.  What I've settled on is something of a departure for 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting:  under the expert guidance of a longtime reader, I'm going to try to achieve basic competence in the field of Hong Kong martial arts movies.  Don't worry-- there'll still be plenty of slashers, Satanists, rubber-suit monsters, and all the other things you've come to expect from me over the years, but at least for the near future, you'll also be seeing a lot more skinny little Asian guys walloping each other.

I don't think I could do it.  Too many martial arts movies seem cookie-cutter to me.  Good thing you've got someone to sort of guide you to the best ones (I'm guessing?).  Otherwise, it just seems like it'd be a slog (for me).  But I know virtually nothing of the genre besides the typical Jackie Chan, Bolo Yeung, Bruce Lee, and a few hopping vampire and ghost flicks that incorporate martial arts and acrobatics tricks. 

[El Santo]

Jan 5, 2023 0:02:11 GMT -5 Dr. Kobb said:

Jan 4, 2023 10:49:21 GMT -5 El Santo said:

Now that I'm almost done with the Halloween franchise, my thoughts naturally turn toward what I might do for my next long-running undertaking.  What I've settled on is something of a departure for 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting:  under the expert guidance of a longtime reader, I'm going to try to achieve basic competence in the field of Hong Kong martial arts movies.  Don't worry-- there'll still be plenty of slashers, Satanists, rubber-suit monsters, and all the other things you've come to expect from me over the years, but at least for the near future, you'll also be seeing a lot more skinny little Asian guys walloping each other.

I don't think I could do it.  Too many martial arts movies seem cookie-cutter to me.  Good thing you've got someone to sort of guide you to the best ones (I'm guessing?).  

Not the best ones so much as the important ones.  I'm quite sure some of those will end up sucking.

[El Santo]

One long-running project winds down while another ramps up:  My next-to-last word on the Halloween franchise and the next step in my kung fu education (plus a few other things, as is my wont).



Half a Loaf of Kung Fu (1978), in which Jackie Chan's first experiment in kung fu comedy goes over like a lead flying guillotine, until the prospect of easy money changes its producer's mind...


Halloween Kills (2021), in which a temporarily incapacitated Laurie Strode gets a little help from her neighbors in the fight against Michael Myers...


The Hunt (2010), which is not only a riff on  The Most Dangerous Game that I never knew existed, but also one with a twist that I'd never seen before...


Murder Weapon (1989), which calls itself an erotic thriller, but is really more of an erotic slasher movie...

and...


The Ship of Monsters (1960), in which smoking-hot space girls on an interplanetary mission to recruit breeding stock to replace their extinct menfolk receive a much warmer welcome in Mexico than others of their sort got in Britain some years earlier.

[El Santo]

I started and abandoned a whole lot of sword-and-sorcery reviews over the course of 2020.  This update gets me just about caught up on those.  Also, although I'm taking a break from my kung fu studies here, I'm making up for it with a Hong Kong horror film.



Barbarian Queen (1985), in which Roger Corman, say what you want about him, was never under the misapprehension that women couldn't headline an action movie...

Centipede Horror (1982), which isn't quite a killer bug movie, but is instead about using bugs as delivery systems for black magic curses...

The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1983), which is exactly the movie it sounds like, and yet not quite the one you'd expect once you learned that it was written by Claudio Fragasso and directed by Bruno Mattei...

Sorceress (1982), the developmental prototype for the Corman Conan Cash-In...

and...

The Throne of Fire (1983), in which the son of a wizard is all that stands between the Antichrist and a really nice chair.

[El Santo]

It's been a long time since I made it out to B-Fest, and an even longer time since I did a proper B-Fest Roundup:


Big Man Japan (2007), in which a Japanese TV comic asks, "What if it really sucked to be Ultraman?"...

Bloodrayne (2005), in which Uwe Boll does all the stupid shit he usually did back in his heyday, but it brings me no pleasure this time...

The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973), in which Nathan Juran just isn't cut out for the 70's...

The Children (1980), in which Three Mile Island could have been worse...

and...

Thrilling Bloody Sword (1981), in which a bunch of Taiwanese guys raid the entire corpus of Western (or West of them, at any rate) fantasy adventure literature for source material, and make the weirdest sword-and-sorcery flick I've seen in ages.


I've also got another newly rebuilt review for you this time around:

The Phantom of the Opera (1943), in which I'm able at last to explain why it sucks, instead of just how.

[El Santo]

Sometimes an unexpected theme will emerge from one of these updates.  This time, it's "fanciful stories about ostensibly real people," including a variety of Kung Fu Founding Fathers and a Catholic priest who isn't nearly as crazy in the present telling as he was in real life:



The Boxer from Shantung (1972), in which the 1930's Warner Brothers gangster formula gets the Shaw Brothers chopsocky treatment...

Crash and Burn (1990), in which a post-apocalyptic slasher runs afoul of a Final Couple with a weapon that Laurie Strode sure would have found handy against Michael Myers...

The Day Time Ended (1979), in which that phrase doesn't mean at all what you'd naturally expect it to mean...

Flesh and Fantasy (1943), in which there may or may not be such a thing as Destiny, and you may find it challenging to give a shit one way or the other...

Heroes Two (1974), which inaugurates a long-running cycle of Shaw Brothers kung fu movies concerning the Shaolin Temple and its disciples...

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), in which William Shatner plays a cowboy veterinarian facing an enemy even more terrifying than his toupe...

and...

The Pope's Exorcist (2023), in which I learn to my astonished delight that they occasionally do make them like they used to after all!

[El Santo]

I've got a new update to plug, but before we get to that, I realize with some chagrin that I never got around to announcing the previous update around here.  So let's get that out of the way first:



Doom Asylum (1987), a lame slasher spoof that not even Patty "Frankenhooker" Mullen can help...

Frankenstein (1984), a lame forerunner of prestige cable that even David "Embodiment of Evil" Warner can help only a little...

Men from the Monastery (1974), in which Chang Cheh and Ni Kuang take possibly the weirdest approach to a sequel that I've ever seen, not so much continuing Heroes Two as wrapping a larger story around it, while simultaneously contradicting it...

Five Shaolin Masters (1974), in which they do it again by telling us what a totally different bunch of characters were up to while the events of Heroes Two were unfolding...

Shadow of a Doubt (1943), in which it turns out there are even worse things for your uncle to get into than Fox News...

and...

Shaolin Martial Arts (1974), in which it's possible to be so good at kung fu that your dick and balls can retract behind your body wall.


And now for the reviews that are actually new:



Blood Feast (1963), which may not strictly have started it all, but certainly took it all to extremes that no one ever saw before...

The Bride and the Beast (1958), the first half of my Bridey Murphy Goes to the Drive-In double feature, in which hypnosis reveals why a big-game hunter's new bride is horny for gorillas...

Cosmic Monsters (1958), which might be Britain's only 1950's big-bug movie, but sure does make you wait a while for the payoff...

Five Fingers of Death (1972), in which American audiences get their first look at Hong Kong martial arts cinema...

The Undead (1957), the second half of Bridey Murphy Goes to the Drive-In, in which the past life itself becomes the focus of the action, as a woman deep in hypnosis inadvertently sets in motion a chain of long-ago events that could prevent her current self from ever existing...

and...

Vampire (1979), an unaccountably slept-on TV movie in which the titular bloodsucker launches an all-out vendetta against the people who busted the art-theft campaign that he'd been running for 800 years.

[El Santo]

I'm giving you all a 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting update for Christmas this year:


Deadly Games (1989), a precognitive variation on the Home Alone premise in which it's hard to tell who's scarier, the Santa-suited maniac breaking into the house or the ruthless and hypercompetent child defending it against him...


The Fall of the House of Usher (1979), in which the folks at Sunn Classic Pictures take a break from "educating" us about Bigfoot and the Shroud of Turin in order to serve up a Poe movie with only the minutest trace amounts of Poe...


The Hammer of God (1970), in which Jimmy Wang Yu makes his directorial debut, and brings both his arms for a change...


Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), which has all the characteristics of a holiday slasher movie, but arranges them into something more like a Southern Gothic transplanted to the Northeast...

and...


Winterbeast (1992), in which it isn't winter, and there are a hell of a lot more than one beast!

[Dr. Kobb]

Dec 25, 2023 1:07:37 GMT -5 El Santo said:

I'm giving you all a 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting update for Christmas this year:


Deadly Games (1989), a precognitive variation on the Home Alone premise in which it's hard to tell who's scarier, the Santa-suited maniac breaking into the house or the ruthless and hypercompetent child defending it against him...


The Fall of the House of Usher (1979), in which the folks at Sunn Classic Pictures take a break from "educating" us about Bigfoot and the Shroud of Turin in order to serve up a Poe movie with only the minutest trace amounts of Poe...


The Hammer of God (1970), in which Jimmy Wang Yu makes his directorial debut, and brings both his arms for a change...


Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), which has all the characteristics of a holiday slasher movie, but arranges them into something more like a Southern Gothic transplanted to the Northeast...

and...


Winterbeast (1992), in which it isn't winter, and there are a hell of a lot more than one beast!

This and the transplanted Southern Gothic part are so true about that one!

"Come to think of it, one of Silent Night, Bloody Night’s best qualities is that it uses Dario Argento’s recurring trick of sending the investigating heroes into the endgame with a completely erroneous “solution” to the mystery, but does it more credibly and effectively than Argento himself ever managed. And as that ought to imply, the mystery itself is both more complex and sophisticated than one typically encounters in mature slasher movies that play the whodunit card, and more logically and fairly developed than in pretty much any giallo that I can ever remember seeing."

[El Santo]

I went back and fixed the misdirected links to the Fall of the House of Usher and Winterbeast reviews, by the way.

[El Santo]

With my first update of the new year, I'm formalizing something that I've been doing semi-regularly for a while now by introducing Movies Whose Times Have Come.  Henceforth, this banner will gather together all my reviews celebrating the completion of our latest circuit around the sun by examining some old sci-fi movie set during the one that's beginning.  2024's Movie Whose Time has come is...


A Boy and His Dog (1975), in which Don Johnson's Johnson is pressed into service by the leaders of a post-apocalyptic Good Ol' American Small Town where the resident young men are having trouble getting the womenfolk with child.


And as for the rest of the update, we've got:


Chinatown Kid (1977), in which a fresh-off-the-boat bumpkin gets drawn steadily toward the center of a sprawling gangland conflict, first in Hong Kong, and then in San Francisco's Chinatown...


Godzilla: Minus One (2023), in which the King of the Monsters' first visit to Tokyo is reimagined as occurring in the late 1940's, when Japan was still almost totally supine from its defeat in World War II...

and...

Warlords of Atlantis (1978), in which a pair of explorers and the sailors who mutinied against them fall captive to the extraterrestrial rulers of the Lost Continent.

[Dr. Kobb]

That was a really authoritative write up for "Godzilla Minus One". 

[El Santo]

I posted these last Sunday, but got too busy to compose a proper announcement post until now:


Arcade (1993), in which you should always make sure the human brain tissue you're harvesting to power the processor of your cutting-edge virtual reality game didn't come from a child who was abused to death, lest the kid's spirit reassert itself as Nintendo Power Freddy Krueger...

The Chilling (1989), in which a cryonics lab really ought to produce a higher class of zombies than these...

Hard Rock Zombies (1984), in which these zombies, on the other hand, are exactly the ones you'd expect to arise when a necromantic spell is cast over the graves of a slain cock-rock band...

Hot Potato (1975), in which we all deserved so much more from a sequel to Black Belt Jones...

Runaway (1984), in which the cops in charge of dealing with malfunctioning robots find themselves confronting droids that have been deliberately programmed for crime instead...

and...

She-Devils on Wheels (1968), in which Herschell Gordon Lewis can make a biker movie every bit as awful as his worst gore or soft-porn flicks.

[El Santo]

Another theater-heavy update for what’s shaping up to be a theater-heavy year, this time including reviews of a couple first-run films along with one last B-Fest straggler and something I caught in revival:


Delicatessen (1991), in which some French eccentrics see the funny side to the end of the world…

Demonic Toys (1992), in which one of Hell’s less competent devils tried to incarnate himself, but got stuck haunting a toy warehouse instead…

Dirty Ho (1979), in which a tricky prince blackmails a thief into becoming his bodyguard…

Dune, Part Two (2024), in which a messiah is the last thing you want running loose on your planet, even if you don’t belong to a clan of colonizing tyrants…

The Five Deadly Venoms (1978), in which murder mysteries play very differently when they’re resolved by frenetic kung fu fights…

and…

Immaculate (2024), in which forcing a woman to carry a clone of Jesus is just as much a dick move as forcing her to mother the Antichrist.

[Marxo Grouch]

May 1, 2024 16:51:00 GMT -5 El Santo said:

The Five Deadly Venoms (1978), in which murder mysteries play very differently when they’re resolved by frenetic kung fu fights…

Not a big kung fu guy, but out of the comparatively small number of examples I've seen, this is one of my favorites. The other probably being Master of the Flying Guillotine.

[El Santo]

Bigger update than usual this time, because I got blocked on two of the reviews I originally set out to write, and just kept throwing more other movies on the pile in the hope that writing about one thing with the front of my brain would eventually enable the back of it to find weak points of the ones that were fighting me:


Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which might sound like a typical copaganda flick when you boil it down to one sentence, but has a whole lot more going on beneath the surface...

The Bikeriders (2023), which, on the other hand, is gloriously, exactly the movie it looks like from a distance...

Cruise into Terror (1978), in which the Love Boat runs off course en route to Fantasy Island, and has to detour through an entire season of "In Search Of"...

Deathdream (1972), in which a soldier finds it difficult to restart his old life back home after he's killed in action in Vietnam...

Escape from New York (1981), in which a Green Beret turned terrorist without a cause gets dragooned into rescuing the President of the United States from the very same dystopian urban prison camp where he was supposed to be spending the rest of his life...

Heroes of the East (1978), which sounds from the title like an absolutely generic kung fu movie, but turns out to be a chopsocky take on The Taming of the Shrew instead...

Hotline (1982), in which a bartender takes a new job answering phones at a psychiatric crisis hotline, and finds herself playing a dangerous game with a repeat caller who claims to be a serial killer...

Messiah of Evil (1974), in which a woman's search for her artist weirdo dad unexpectedly takes her to the epicenter of an emergent apocalypse that would probably still have defied description even if the movie had actually been finished...

The Space Children (1958), in which even aliens understand that everything that goes wrong on Earth always ends up being a problem for the next generation to fix...

and...

Starcrash (1978), the Italian Star Wars cash-in so ludicrous, it HALTS THE FLOW OF TIME!

[El Santo]

I've cast a somewhat wider net with this one than I've managed to do in a while:


Crippled Avengers (1978), which isn't 12.5% as squirmy as that other kung fu movie with "crippled" in the title...

Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (1971), in which King Arthur's evil half-sister decides that collecting hot chicks is way more fun than thwarting Grail quests and tricking knights into betting each other their heads...

The Invincible Kung Fu Brothers (1976), in which Chang Cheh's fourth Shaolin Temple movie looks remarkably like his second...

Shaolin Temple (1976), in which the fifth one, on the other hand, breaks quite a bit of new ground...

Mutant (1984), which isn't about mutants so much as it is about acidic zombies and ornery rednecks...

The Red House (1947), which always gets awkwardly shoehorned into discussions about film noir and the most aridly fallow period of American horror cinema, even though it's really a very well-disguised gothic mystery...

and...

Teenage Zombies (1959), in which I regret to inform you that Jerry Warren is at it again.