Balladeer’s Blog’s latest installment of “Give them a shoutout before they’re dead” features Brian Tyler and the Red Elvises’ work on the soundtrack to the monumentally overlooked film Six String Samurai (1998).
FOR MY REVIEW OF THE MOVIE CLICK HERE
In the meantime, here’s On My Way To Vegas, the song that plays over the closing credits to this post-apocalypse rock and roll samurai movie. The video is a fan tribute featuring scenes from the film as the song plays.
Filed under opinion
Frontierado is coming up on Friday, August 4th! Here’s a brief look at two films presented on The Texas 27 Film Vault that match the old west theme of this holiday season: Frontier Marshal and Billy the Kid vs Dracula.
A movie guaranteed to contain absolutely NO accurate information.
FRONTIER MARSHAL (1939)
Original Broadcast Date: Saturday October 25th, 1986 from 10:30pm to 1:00am.
Serial: An episode of Mysterious Doctor Satan was shown before the movie. This 1940 serial presented the title villain trying to take over the world with a big, goofy robot while being opposed by a masked superhero called Copperhead.
THE MOVIE: Frontier Marshal, directed by Allan Dwan, has a well-deserved reputation as the worst and weirdest cinematic depiction of the events leading up to the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Randolph Scott turns inhis usual bland performance as Wyatt Earp with Cesar Romero a very unlikely Doc.
As usual Doc steals the show from the hopelessly dull and straight-arrow Wyatt. Ward Bond shows up as a cowardly lawman, Lon Chaney, Jr, plays one of Curly Bill Brocius’ thugs and Balladeer’s Blog’s old friend John Carradine is the movie’s main villain … Carter. No, not Clanton or even McLaurey but “Carter”.
Randy (right) and Richard way down on Level 31 hosting The Texas 27 Film Vault
Here’s just some of the hilariously distorted bits from this Parallel Universe version of the events in Tombstsone, Arizona:
Doc Holliday’s name is Halliday for some reason and is pronounced “Hale-i-day”. Characters say “Hale-i-day” so many times that if you made it a drinking game you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning about half-way through.
Doc Holliday, excuse me – Hale-i-day – drank only milk in the west until the woman he loved back in Georgia (his cousin in real life) showed up in Tombstone. Then he started drinking whiskey to escape the pain of seeing her again. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies, Movie Hosts
The Frogs was another low point in the career of Ray Milland, along with The Thing With Two Heads. Pollution was to cheap monster movies of the 70s what atomic radiation was to cheap monster movies of the 50s. In other words it was the catch-all explanation for anything and everything.
In this movie’s case pollution, which Ray Milland’s corporations are heavily guilty of, is to blame for wild animals (NOT just frogs, despite the movie’s title) going berserk and viciously attacking human beings.
Milland plays Jason Crockett, whose palatial southern mansion is the film’s location, where various butt-kissing family members of the old codger have come to jointly celebrate the 4th of July AND the patriarch’s birthday.
Sam Elliott plays freelance photographer Pickett Smith, who is doing a photo feature of the wilderness areas threatened by Crockett’s polluting industries. He’s caught trespassing on Crockett’s own estate but the old man invites him to stay for the festivities anyway, since he finds Elliott’s open insolence a refreshing change from the sycophantic behavior of his brow-beaten family members. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies
Regular readers of Balladeer’s Blog are familiar with my fondness for old Silent Movies. America was D.W. Griffith’s 1924 production about the Revolutionary War. The movie is pleasant enough for the July 4th holiday season, but don’t expect a classic like The Phantom of the Opera, The Mark of Zorro or many other masterpieces of the silent era.
Batman fans may enjoy the fact that a very young Neil Hamilton – Commissioner Gordon on the much later Adam West Batman show – starred in America as Nathan Holden, a rebel Minute Man in Massachusetts. Nathan is part of a Romeo and Juliet-styled romance and is in love with Nancy Montague (Carol Dempster), who belongs to a Tory family still loyal to England.
The Holdens can’t stand the snobbish Montagues and the Montagues pompously look down on the Holdens and the rest of the rebels. Nancy’s father would rather see Nancy married off to the prominent British military officer Captain Walter Butler, played with aristocratic and sadistic flair by THE Lionel Barrymore.
The star-crossed lovers Nathan and Nancy struggle to keep their romance alive against the backdrop of historical events like the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s Ride, the Battle of Bunker Hill and many others.Various actors portray figures like John Hancock, Samuel Adams, William Pitt, King George III, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee and, of course, George Washington. Continue reading
Filed under Revolutionary War
It may be my fondness for mythology that makes me love to watch particular movies around particular holidays. I say that because many of the well- known myths were recited on ancient holidays when their subject matter was relevant to those holidays. The stories helped accentuate the meaning of the special events and that’s the way I use various movies.
At Christmas I watch countless variations of A Christmas Carol, around Labor Day I watch Eight Men Out, at Halloween The Evil Dead and the original Nightmare On Elm Street, Thanksgiving Eve I do Oliver! and for Frontierado (which is just a month away now) I do Silverado.
Since the actual 4th of July is loaded with activity I always show 1776 on the night before. It’s a great way to get in the mood for Independence Day. It’s a musical but with brilliant dialogue portions and the story involves the political maneuvering surrounding the Original Thirteen Colonies at last announcing their independence from Great Britain, more than a year after Continue reading
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Blood Beach
In the middle 1980s/ Way down on Level 31 …
Balladeer’s Blog continues its examination of this neglected cult show from the 1980s by way of my research through VERY old newspapers, my interviews with series co-star and co-creator Randy Clower and emails from my fellow fans of this program.
EPISODE ORIGINALLY BROADCAST: Saturday February 22nd, 1986 from 10:30pm to 1:00am.
*** NOTE: I’ve now received a different account saying that this episode really aired earlier in February and was accompanied by the final chapter of the serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Any clarification would help us.
SERIAL: Before showing and mocking the movie machine-gun toting Randy Clower and Richard Malmos, as members of the fictional Film Vault Corps (“the few, the proud, the sarcastic”) showed and mocked Chapter Two of the Republic Serial Radar Men from the Moon (1952).
FILM VAULT LORE: Our Film Vault Technicians First Class would pull the usual Movie Host duties like providing background info on the films and serials, and would also do comedy sketches centered around their fictional Film Vault Corps before and after commercials. They protected their duty station from menaces like giant rats, cellumites and other threats.
That duty station – Level 31 Core 27 of the Film Vault System was accessed via an industrial park behind KDFI Channel 27’s headquarters off Highway 183 near Dallas. The show was directed by Karl Newman, who often good-naturedly bemoaned Randy and Richard’s tendency to ad-lib. Sometimes in print interviews Newman would joke that if they used a script they would need far too many takes for Clower and Malmos to read their lines right, hence the ad-libbing.
THE MOVIE: Blood Beach (1980) was one of the least effective horror films of the 1980s. It had a half-decent premise – a monster beneath the sand at a California beach sucking victims down into its hellish maw – but squandered that premise with incredibly slow pacing. The inane dialogue spouted by the annoying characters didn’t help matters. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies, Forgotten Television, Movie Hosts
I got a reader request to review the horror film Death Bed, but I already did in 2011. Here it is again and remember, to see if I already reviewed a movie click here: https://glitternight.com/bad-movies/
DEATH BED – (1977) – Category: A neglected bad movie classic that deserves a Plan 9-sized cult following.
A bed that eats everyone who lies on it is the hilarious premise of this actual straight-faced attempt at a horror film. You know how water-beds have water in them? This living bed has digestive juices in it. Its victims are somehow sucked through the membraneous material of the mattress and are broken down and digested by those juices.
The viewer is treated to countless shots of human bodies (plus for variety an apple, a fly and a bucket o’ chicken) dissolving in the acid, looking like they’re being torn apart by millions of tiny piranha fish.
If you’re wondering how a four-poster bed in an abandoned mansion became a living being with a taste for human flesh, we’re told a tree-demon (no relation to the tree-monster in From Hell It Came) temporarily incarnated as a human being to seduce a woman on the bed. At one point in the tale the blood-colored tears of the demon fell on the bed, thus creating our hungry, hungry hero. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies, Halloween Season
FATHER’S DAY (2011) – Brace yourself for a gory time in this enjoyably outrageous cult classic.
Ahab, the eye-patch sporting hero of the Astron 6 horror film Father’s Day is in my opinion the one true successor to Bruce Campbell’s Ash Williams. And considering how unfair the ending of this movie is for Ahab and his two sidekicks a case could even be made for them replacing Ash as the most royally screwed character in the history of gore-soaked horror comedies.
It’s difficult to review this dark, grotesque gem without resorting to a series of catch phrases like “Goes where Dead Alive and similar movies failed to go” or “What Grindhouse hath wrought” or even “Twink and Walnut: They’re NOT Muppets!” Let me start with a more practical line: Do not watch this movie if you can not handle the most offensive violence, concepts, gore and deranged sexuality imaginable. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies, Halloween Season
The Hypnotic Eye is one of the most beloved bad movies of the 1960s. Its hilariously campy trailer, its sinister Eurotrash villain and its Ed Wood-level police work all make it a true anti-classic.
Jacques Bergerac, one-time husband of Ginger Rogers, played Desmond, the magician who uses the title object to augment his hypnotic abilities to an enormous degree.
After various beautiful women appear on stage with Desmond as volunteers from his audience he plants a post-hypnotic suggestion that causes them to mutilate themselves in various extreme ways after the show.
Some set their hair on fire, some wash their faces with acid ,some shove their faces into fans, etc. This being an old black & white movie the effects are very tame by today’s standards. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies
THE FOOD OF THE GODS was very loosely based on part of H.G. Wells’ novel of the same name. It was directed by Bert I Gordon, “Mr B.I.G.” himself. Gordon’s Village of the Giants, about a gang of giant-sized teenagers, was likewise loosely based on an often-forgotten section of that novel.
This movie starred Marjoe Gortner, the child evangelist turned B-movie legend, as football star Morgan (no fuller name given), who travels to a remote Canadian island for a vacation. Unfortunately, thanks to a very embarrassed- looking Ida Lupino, her farm animals plus other wild life have begun eating “the Food of the Gods”, a white substance from deep in the Earth. That food has caused various forms of animal and insect life to grow to enormous size, setting up the usual rampage scenes from Bert I Gordon films. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies
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