Reviews

I am continually let down by Star Wars. The original trilogy should have been left to stand alone instead of being glutted up by the back story in film form. This film is a joke and a waste of time. Basically, this is a children's movie, and a poor one at that. Very poor.

The animation and art are uninteresting, the combat scenes are boring and unrealistic and even implausible in their outcomes. Yoda is a joke, the writers have taken the funny syntax thing to the level of ridiculousness. The Jedi look terrible. The new preteen, tubetop padawan for Anakin is annoying and wholly unnecessary. I wish I hadn't ever seen this.

This film is chock full of veteran actors. Take a look at their bios. Basil Rathbone's performance, of course, cannot be argued with. He is the epitome of evil villains and plays the wicked Lodac perfectly. Sullivan, his secret conspirator, is obviously a villain from the start but plays his smug disguise to the utmost and the result is terrific.

Where the subtleties of an experienced cast may not be readily apparent to more passive viewers, goofy in-camera effects courtesy of Bert I. Gordon fill the gap. There are a number of pretty creepy moments to watch out for, if of course you know what to expect. This isn't a late 20th century modern horror film, it is an early 1960s fantasy adventure. Understand that point and you will have an enjoyable viewing experience! The film feels similar to the Hercules movies, or perhaps the Adventures of Sinbad films with work by Ray Harryhausen (although there is no animation in the Magic Sword).

This film is simply outstanding. Surprises everywhere.

One criticism: There was scant (if any) product placement, certainly not the norm in films nowadays and a fact for which I was grateful. But then right at the end I got smacked in the head with Steven Tyler, of all people. It was a very odd sensation, as if he walked into my bedroom during an intimate moment. If not for such a wonderfully buoyant story, it may have popped the warm and fuzzy bubble.

I've always wondered how Santa did it, although I never expected the elves to be quite so small. I liked the caribou, they seemed very friendly.

'Loved the hobo.

Merry Christmas.

I don't like going to the dentist. Every time I sit in that chair with my head cocked back at a weird angle and those people with their paper masks come in and start scraping and spraying and rinsing and talking about their kids, I just get wigged out. This one dentist I used to go to, he thought it would be a good idea to put video games in his lobby, like that's gonna make everything better or change the fact that some guy is gonna be sticking a drill into my jaw in ten minutes. And the magazines are always crap, like Golf Digest and Prevention.

That being said, Dentist 2 is pretty good. In fact, I'd say it's just as good as the original. A third wouldn't be bad. It takes that squeaky clean/award-winning smile/elevator music voice kind of a facade your dentist has and twists it up, preying on everyone's deepest secret fear, the dentist. I like the last scene where he walks in on the party and everyone there is freaked when he strolls by with a load of nails in his head. I liked that ending, death by nail gun (well maybe she thought it would kill him). The torture scenes aren't too graphic. It's overall worth your time if you like the horror genre.

Watching The Dentist on the screen surely beats the real thing.

In my opinion, The Phantom Planet seems to seems to be one of the better-produced B sci-fi efforts of the early sixties. The acting was decent, the music was good, and the set designers made a genuine attempt at producing quality sets, props, and costumes.

The plot is coherent and wraps itself up neatly: astronaut crashes on an unknown planet, shrinks, has trouble integrating with alien society and after doing nothing in particular to help defend the planet from an attack by other, more brutish aliens, is then politely returned to his moonbase. Very nice, congratulations. Usually in movies like this, there will be loose ends and inexplicable holes left seemingly at random. This starts and finishes without really forgetting to resolve anything.

On the planet of Rheton where Dean Fredricks crashes, he is put before a jury of his peers for the crime of killing a citizen of Rheton. The "jury" is really a cast of hair styles and fake eyelashes straight out of a 1960's fashion catalog, essentially girls in skirts that do nothing the whole film long but stand there and look pretty. The only two lines I can remember any of them saying were "Kill him!" and "Guilty as charged!" So my guess is that they weren't paid too much and probably hired to keep you in your seat either admiring their short skirts and waggling rear ends or to see if they might go nuts and start pulling each others hair. The script is a thumbs up because it adds to the film's entertainment value. When an actor reads lines about shrinking spacemen and density rays, you can't help but be entertained.

Towards the end you are introduced to the Solarites, a race of aliens attempting to steal a (ready for this?) gravity-based density ray from Rheton. Despite the name, they are a race of largely dull and uncivilized brutes. Of course they are destroyed quickly by the very weapon they are trying to steal. Like I said, the Solarites are not the brightest crayons in the box. They are classic, awful Hollywood monsters, in fact, they may have given me ideas for next year's Halloween costume. I was thinking maybe I'd get some khaki pants and a polo shirt and be Danny Glover but this is an even better idea.

I have watched this movie several times and it holds its value.

Violence violence violence! I do love a good B movie filled with great humor (thanks, Fred Williamson), bad English dubbing, and some seriously senseless destruction of life, limb and personal property with no clearly explicated purpose.. it makes me wish that my local theater would pick up dubiously awful and forgettable garbage like this so I could at least feel like I got my seven bucks' worth and be sure I'm not contributing to some Hollywood millionaire's personal Scientology donation fund.

I have never seen so many people explode in my life. There is at least one exploding person in each scene. There are no less than three decapitations in the whole movie. One guy's body even twitched after he had his melon lobbed off by a chassis-mounted, multibladed personal decapitation device. Wow.. there were some kind of great special effects in this movie, too. Well, that is to say that plenty of money was spent on explosions, fake blood, improvised costumes and cars converted into wild, freewheeling killing machines.

Fred Williamson plays a very proud mercenary in post-nuclear holocaust Earth, and boy does he ever do it with STYLE! He even gets a girl by the end. This movie has one of the best (ahem, most laughable) science-fiction artsy sex scenes ever done - inside a green cellophane tube, the girl in a bodysuit and the man shamelessly naked, all the while cutting in and out to scenes of the actors sitting by a polluted lake, discussing how they understand their respective life circumstances. It's about as awkward and hilarious as one could get short of sex on the Starship Enterprise with Data. This would be a good movie to show if you are trying to illustrate a psychological or sociological point about the human relationship with aggression and violence, because there isn't really much of a plot without the violence. In fact, the ends of the plot lie in the destruction of one group of people, who believe that their life purpose is the destruction of all humanity, so there you go. Take a good look at the costumes - lots of cool hats, codpieces, stockings.. it only gets better as the flick rolls on. Enjoy.

This movie starts off with a promising storyline and some passable acting only to flush itself down the toilet about a half hour later.

The plot: disembodied alien lifeforms descend on Britain via the moon, and quickly go about building a secure land base from which they may commandeer the bodies of local inhabitants through mind control. Meanwhile, an obsessed Robert Hutton motors around the English countryside in his "vintage jalopy" trying to uncover the alien plan, while also searching for his principal love interest, a psychotic looking secretary played by Jennifer Jayne. The alien mind control techniques are lost on Hutton because he has a (get this) metal plate in his head, so he makes the perfect candidate to save the day. As if things couldn't get any worse, a mysterious plague breaks out that provides the aliens with a legitimate reason for collecting dead bodies to send to the moon for "burial". The bodies aren't buried, of course, they are used by the aliens for zombie-like vessels but the plague seemed plausible enough to serve as a clever ruse.

A few good props, but not too many to mention: the aliens have some kind of incapacitating ray gun that looks like a cross between a flashlight and a lawn sprinkler, the mechanics of which are never really explained. In the final scenes, Hutton and a friend build fancy silver helmets to block any mind control, thus allowing them to infiltrate the alien headquarters and dissolve the situation diplomatically. The mind-ray blocking hats resemble colanders, and look like they'd be fun to wear.

I can't remember if Hutton gets his girlfriend back. The story goes weak and the climax is disappointing, but the movie stays entertaining throughout and has good performances from everyone. I definitely recommend it if you're into this type of thing.