#AtoZChallenge GI Jokes

It's ironic I suppose that I'm writing this on Memorial Day since this entry is about soldiers who aren't exactly Real American Heroes.  But I guess at least they try.

McBain:  From the title you might think this 1990 action movie is an adaptation of the Schwarzenegger-like character from The Simpsons.  But really it's about a bunch of middle-aged guys who overthrow the government of Colombia.

Back at the end of the Vietnam War Bobby McBain (Christopher Walken) is being tortured in a POW camp.  A US helicopter sees the camp and the soldiers come down to save him and the other POWs.  The head of the soldiers was for some reason a Colombian guy named Santos.  He gives McBain half a $100 bill and says if McBain is ever given the other half it'll mean Santos needs repaid for the favor.

That happens almost 20 years later when Santos tries to overthrow the Colombian government.  But the brutal dictator threatens some civilians so Santos stops the rebellion and then is killed.  His sister goes to New York, where McBain is working as a steelworker.

McBain gathers up his old squad:  a doctor, a bodyguard, a cop, and a rich guy played by Michael Ironside.  They need money to fund their coup so first they attack a drug dealer played by Luis Guzman.  When he doesn't have the millions they need, they shake down a mobster.  And for some reason blow up an airport in Jamaica before stealing a plane to go to Colombia.  Why?  Who knows?

The most unintentionally hilarious part is the dogfight as the guys are heading to Colombia.  They're pursued by a few Colombian F-5 fighters.  First McBain shoots one down by killing the pilot with a handgun.  He shoots the pilot of a jet fighter through the window of a small airplane.  Think how utterly ridiculous that is.  But it gets better!  Michael Ironside calls in some support in the form of a British Hawk trainer jet that's armed with machine guns and rocket pods.  Meanwhile the F-5s are armed with only fuel tanks and machine guns.  Why the hell would they launch fighters carrying almost no weapons to intercept a plane?  I guess the production couldn't get hold of any Sidewinder missiles.  Though somehow one of the F-5s launches missiles at one point.  From where?  It's worse than some movies where they'll just show the same missile launching under a plane's wing like 4 times.

Of course in the end these like 5 American guys and Santos's sister with the support of an armed rabble take down the dictator.  I mean sure that's plausible, right?

Unlike most of the Rifftrax VODs they show on Pluto TV this one isn't available on Amazon.  You can only watch it on Pluto TV or with the Rifftrax site.

The Starfighters:  When I first saw the title I thought it was a Star Wars-type movie but actually it's this incredibly boring movie about a group of F-104 Starfighter pilots in the 60s.  Most of the movie is stock footage of F-104s refueling and flying around.  The plot?  Yeah, there really isn't one.  There's some blather about a young pilot whose Congressman father wants him to fly bombers, but that's pretty much it.

If you like watching F-104 fighters flying to Lawrence Welk music then this is the movie for you!  For the other 7 billion people, not so much.  This was on MST3K back in about 1994 and one of the fun things during the intermission sketches is Crow T Robot's struggles to get on the "information superhighway."  Remember when you had to use a dial-up modem?  You couldn't just turn on your phone and get to the Internet, you had to set up the IP address and everything yourself.  And even then all it was then was like message boards.  Ugh.  That's probably funnier than anything in the movie.

Red Zone Cuba:  Another MST3K episode from about the same time.  It was made around the same time too but it's in black-and-white not color.  And features far less stock footage of planes flying around.  This is about an escaped con and two ex-cons who wind up being part of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.

Made with almost no budget the locations for this really make no sense.  Most of the movie looks like it was shot in west Texas or New Mexico, not an island in the Caribbean.  The three guys get captured but escape from the Cubans in a stolen plane to somehow end up in a location that again looks like New Mexico, not Florida or Louisiana or anywhere you'd expect them to escape to.  So it doesn't really make much sense.

John Carradine "guest stars" as a train conductor in the beginning who supposedly saw the guys but really this contributes nothing.  Though he does sing the theme song, which is pretty cool.  So there's that.

Deadly Prey:  Back to a Rifftrax episode for this late 80s movie about a militia in southern California that abducts random people to hunt them for sport as part of their training.  But when they kidnap a mulleted shirtless guy in tiny shorts they soon realize they've kidnapped the wrong person.  He starts to kill them one-by-one.

Now you might think you know how this ends:  the guy kills all the bad guys and lives Happily Ever After, right?  Nope.  The bad guys kill his girlfriend and he screams with rage.  The end.  Hooray?

Probably the most unintentionally hilarious part of this is our hero has multiple opportunities to take some clothes off the bad guys he kills.  At least take a pair of shoes, right?  Nah, he'd rather go around in only a pair of tiny denim shorts.  I guess that was for the ladies.  Yeah.

#AtoZChallenge Future Cops

Not all dystopian cop movies are about cyborgs; some of them are about flesh-and-blood people! All of these ones are on Rifftrax, not MST3K.

Future Force & Future Zone:  In the "future" of the late 80s and early 90s policing is turned over to scummy-looking guys in sleeveless jean jackets who have the power to instantly kill people based on orders they receive from one of those digital scrolling boards like they used to have at the DMV or some restaurants.  It seems like a much worse system, but I guess it works--somehow.

The late David Carradine stars as John Tucker, a member of COPS--Civilian Operated Police Systems.  In Future Force he get embroiled in a scandal involving the head of COPS and his loyal henchman.  They put a hit out on a reporter but instead Tucker saves her and in the process kills a lot of his coworkers.

The most unintentionally hilarious part of this is after a chase in LA, Tucker pushes a car over a cliff.  A cliff in downtown LA?  What the hell?  Since when did they start strip-mining downtown LA?  Tucker also has this power glove thing that shoots lasers or something and the funny thing is first that he keeps in the trunk of his car most of the time so he never has it when he really needs it and then he has a remote for it that all he has to do is keep pushing the same button and it does whatever he wants.  So as far as story logic, there's not much.

The sequel Future Zone kicks the stupidity up a notch as Tucker's son travels back in time to help him solve a case--and keep him alive.  I guess saving your crusty, beer-swilling dad is a pretty good use of time travel, though there are probably better uses for it.  And really, why does some mesh-shirt wearing schmuck have access to a "time portal?"

And again the power glove remains in the trunk when Tucker really needs it, though this time he doesn't even use the remote until the very end.

Omega Cop:  In this dystopian future the ozone layer depleting has caused society to fall apart.  A bland middle-aged guy who looks like a discount Ben Mendelssohn is the head of a police force of 4 guys who work for Adam West in a bunker.  They go out on a raid to stop some slavers but the three other guys die while bland guy survives.  Adam West won't let him back into the bunker so he stays out in the ruins of civilization to search for the bad guys.  In the process he picks up three women who occasionally help him.

About 11 months ago I talked about how weak the ending of this movie was.  There's no big fight between bland cop and the bad guy.  Nope, bland cop sets off some explosives and then he and the girls go off to Montana where it's not so bad.  Hooray!

As far as bad movies go it's not the worst, but it's pretty lame nonetheless.

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe:  If you need a guardian of the universe, who better than former professional-wrestler-turned-Minnesota-governor Jesse Ventura?  Um, almost anyone?

Jesse Ventura is a space cop from some planet who's lived for tens of thousands of years.  His old partner went bad and then escaped to Earth to impregnate a woman who gives birth to a son who's something called a "comater."  Which is...what?  Damned if I know.

Though Jesse Ventura captured his former partner the first time, he escapes back to Earth like six years later so he can kidnap the kid to...do something.  It's like, Step 1:  impregnate woman to make a comater, Step 2:  kidnap comater, Step 3: ??? and take over the universe or something like that.  The talk of an "antilife equation" seems lifted from Darkseid in DC Comics, but it's never really explained what it is or how it could be used.

Of course Jesse Ventura follows him and hooks up with the kid's mother as he protects them from his former partner.

Besides that the plot makes almost no sense, the action scenes are pretty lame and as you'd expect the acting is pretty bad.  For some reason Jim Belushi has a cameo as a school principal, though in 1990-ish he was still able to be in real Hollywood movies, so maybe he owed the director money or something.  Or maybe he's friends with Jesse Ventura.  Anyway, it's a pretty hilariously bad sci-fi action movie.

A fun fact is that Jesse Ventura and his opponent Sven-Ole Thorsen were both in Schwarzenegger movies like Predator and Running Man.  Even if you never saw those you probably saw Thorsen in Gladiator as the formerly-retired gladiator with the tigers and a golden mask.  So that was a step up.

At the end of the movie Bill Corbett cautions viewers, "For the love of God please take the right to vote seriously."  Unfortunately we didn't listen.

#AtoZChallenge Edgewood Studios

Vermont is known for a lot of things:  Ben & Jerry's ice cream, maple syrup, autumn colors, and Bernie Sanders among other things.  What you probably don't think of it for is making movies.  But starting in the 90s there was a studio there called Edgewood Studios making cheap action and horror movies.

Time Chasers:  This is one of the few movies that has the "honor" of being featured on both MST3K and Rifftrax.  The Rifftrax version was a live show that used a restored version of the film from the director that actually looks a lot better than the MST3K version.

Both versions feature the same ludicrous plot of a mulleted college professor who creates a time machine using his small airplane and a Commodore 64 computer.  He stupidly sells the technology to a big corporation that immediately starts using it for no good and so the professor and a local reporter have to go back in time to put right what once went wrong.

The movie was shot on the cheap and looks it as "the future" doesn't have any flying cars or jetpacks or anything like that; it pretty much looks like the early 90s.  The apocalyptic future they use only a crummy computer drawing to "show" it; they couldn't even afford a matte painting, I guess.  The head of the evil corporation's office is clearly the top of a stairwell in a public library or community center or something.  I mean if you're the CEO of a huge, evil company why would your office have no walls?  And be in the middle of the building?  Geez, you couldn't rent a corner office for a couple of hours?  Or even a motel room?

There is definitely a corny charm about the whole thing though.  Since it was on both MST3K and Rifftrax, which is better?  The movie itself is better on Rifftrax.  The quality is better and they didn't have to edit anything for time.  The MST3K version edits out the best part where the time traveler and the reporter go to the local airport to rescue their time machine and are stopped by this goofy guard who keeps telling them it's a "gubbment installation."  One of the riffers says, "Don't mess with da gubbment" and it's just hilarious.  But the MST3K version does have a funny series of intermission sketches where Crow T Robot goes back in time to convince young Mike not to take the job that ends up with him being stuck in space.  That leads to him becoming a rock star who's killed on stage and so he's replaced on the Satellite of Love by his grumpy, chain-smoking, hard-drinking brother Eddie.  One whole section of the movie then is riffed by Eddie and the bots, which is fun as a change of pace.  So either one is good.

Pressure Point:  This came a few years after Time Chasers.  It features a gubbment agent who is framed for murder and imprisoned.  His old handler helps him escape from the world's most escapable prison that apparently only has one phone.

Then he goes to a small town to track down some arms dealer; one of the guy's henchmen is played by the hero from Time Chasers even!  And then the gubbment agent has to foil a plot to blow up Montpelier Washington DC.  It's not quite as goofy as Time Chasers, but still a pretty cheap action movie.

Icebreaker:  For this 2000 movie Edgewood Studios brought in some B-list talent with Sean Astin playing the hero and a shaved-head Bruce Campbell playing the villain.  Stacy Keach co-stars as Sean Astin's future father-in-law.

The movie starts with a plane carrying stolen radioactive material going down near a ski resort in Vermont.  Bruce Campbell and his crew go to retrieve the stolen material so he can blow shit up because he's dying and thus will have "no more birthdays."

Sean Astin is a ski patrol guy at the resort who stumbles across the plot and has to foil it to save the day.  There's better acting talent, but it's still not much better made than Time Chasers or Pressure Point.  It is funny to think that Sean Astin did this right before all the Lord of the Rings movies; this is clearly what got him the part!  Um, probably not.

There are a couple more Edgewood movies in this challenge to be included on other entries, so stay tuned!

#AtoZChallenge Dark Times

For this one I decided to highlight a few Rifftrax movies that all have "Dark" in the title.

The Dark Power:  This was made by Phil Smoot, the writer/director of Alien Outlaw from the "A" entry.  This actually was made before that and it also "stars" the geriatric hero Lash Larue and takes place in North Carolina.  Only instead of aliens, it involves evil Native American spirits who terrorize a bunch of college kids who have moved into a house that was made on a burial ground or some damned thing.

The four evil spirits are all clearly guys in rubber masks and crappy makeup and the rest of the movie is about that good.  Lash LaRue proves that a whip is a really, really useless weapon.  One of the college girls dispatches three of the bad guys with a holy knife in a couple of minutes while Lash needs like 10 minutes to kill just one bad guy with the stupid whip.

Dark Future:  Made in 1994 in Eastern Europe on the cheap, I described this once as a reverse Westworld as in this humans are being used as workers in a theme park of various time periods to amuse cyborgs.  Why?  I don't know, it's a Greydon Clark film so don't ask.

Anyway, it's also sort of like Children of Men as there haven't been any babies born--until finally a woman gives birth to one.  Then one of the humans working in the park has to protect her and overthrow the cyborgs and their masters:  a bunch of old guys who I guess aren't cyborgs.

Like I said, this was made in the 90s but it looks like an 80s movie.  It's definitely not the worst Greydon Clark movie ever (that's Star Games) but it's not really good either.

The Dark:  In the dark, there's something killing people for...some reason.  Then...whatever it is...kills the daughter of an ex-con played by William Devane who started writing horror novels under an assumed name while in prison.  He teams with a reporter to track down whatever it is, which turns out to be an alien...or something.

How did the alien get there?  Why is it killing people?  Yeah, who knows.  Like one of the riffers says the end is like the screenwriter's little brother wrote it as all the sudden the alien starts shooting lasers in a big shootout with soldiers and cops.

Most of the movie is so murky-looking that you can barely tell what's going on.  This was made in the 70s and you can really tell from the clothes, hairstyles, and cars.  It's pretty corny all around.

#AtoZChallenge Cyborgs

Last entry I talked about how the popularity of some biker movies spawned imitators.  Similarly the popularity of The Terminator and Robocop spawned a lot of imitating cyborg movies.  Most of these are on Rifftrax, not MST3K.

Cyborg Cop 2:  The hilarious thing about this is that it's called "Cyborg Cop" and yet there are no cyborg cops in it.  In actuality the cop named Jack Ryan (like the Tom Clancy character but not) is a flesh-and-blood human who fights against evil cyborgs.  So I guess he polices cyborgs so that's close enough.

The evil cyborgs are led by a former gang leader who was supposed to be executed but instead the government turns him into a cyborg.  He immediately turns on his creators.  And only Jack Ryan and a female agent can stop him.  The effects are not great and like Star Games while it was made in 1994 it looks like something a lot earlier.  And our hero wears a fanny pack through the whole thing.  What more is there to say about how bad it is?

R.O.T.O.R:  One of my favorites.  I actually saw it on local TV years before the Rifftrax version.  Either way it's a hilariously bad movie.  The "plot" doesn't make much sense whatsoever.  A policeman/scientist/rancher designs a killer cyborg to be the cop of the future but in a lengthy conversation with his boss, the product is rushed into production.

The result of this is Robotic Officer Tactical Operations Research or ROTOR.  It makes itself active and immediately murders a speeder.  A speeder in the middle of nowhere when he starts out in the middle of Dallas.  I mean if you're a killer cyborg out to fight crime isn't there plenty of it in Dallas proper?  I mean earlier our hero thwarted a robbery at a convenience store going to get some charcoal so clearly there's crime a plenty.

The speeder's fiance is able to escape because she triggers ROTOR's one weakness:  car horns.  A weakness she forgets repeatedly through the movie.  Meanwhile ROTOR's creator, Captain Coldyron (Cold-iron), chases after them--until he goes to pick up another scientist, a woman named Dr. Steel.  Inexplicably she has to check into a hotel at like 7am so she can change from a dress into a tank top and cargo pants.  This while the speeder's fiance is on the run, leading ROTOR to a lake.  One of the many, many plot holes is that the woman on the run has a CB radio in her car that she never uses until Coldyron calls her on it.  For some reason she pulls over to call the cops when couldn't she have just summoned help with the CB?  And thereby made it harder for ROTOR to catch her?

And to cap it off, after Coldyron stops ROTOR (and Dr. Steel and the speeder's fiance somehow die), his boss shoots him in the back with a shotgun.  Because...why not?  It's not like they'd make a sequel.  I have to admit though the theme song "Hideaway" is OK in an 80s adult contemporary way.  So there's that.

Cyber Tracker:  This was made about the same time as Cyborg Cop 2 above but it does actually feature cyborg cops who are known as cyber trackers.  These things all look the same; they're all some big Mr. Clean looking dude.

The movie stars Don "The Dragon" Wilson (that's how it's listed in the credits) as a senator's bodyguard who foils an assassination attempt and then has to unravel some big conspiracy with the help of a rebel group led by some woman.  This leads to fighting a lot of Cyber Trackers and ultimately revealing the senator the guy was protecting was himself a cyborg!  What a twist!

Much of the movie is shot in overly blue light for some reason.  Sometimes because it's at night and sometimes just because.  While it's supposed to be like 2014 they use technology like big hulking computer monitors.  Though the voice-activated assistants they have are probably better than Alexa or Google Home or whatever.

Future War:  This is the sole MST3K entry on today's list.  It was one of the later episodes.  This is another of those movies that was pretty new yet at the time since it was made in the 90s.  The plot is fairly nonsensical like ROTOR.  An alien escapes from his jailers to crash on Earth and enlists the help of a woman training to be a nun and her friends.

The alien is pursued by a tubby cyborg played by the late Robert Z'Dar who also uses crappy claymation dinosaurs that are like mini T-Rexes or something as his henchmen.  It really doesn't make much sense.  Besides the crappy effects, the fight scenes are pretty badly choreographed and of course there's not much acting "talent" to be had.  Which is what makes it fun!

#AtoZChallenge Bikers

In the 50s and 60s you had a lot of popular movies with motorcycles in them like Rebel Without a Cause and Easy Rider.  So of course they had a lot of imitators too.  Biker gang movies were popular B-movie fodder around that time, so naturally some of them were on MST3K.

There were at least three of them that I've seen on Pluto TV.  They're pretty much interchangeable in my mind.  I mean I couldn't hardly tell them apart.

Side Hackers:  This one stands out only because it involves this weird "sport" of "side hacking" where people ride motorcycles that have a weird kind of sidecar someone rides on.  They go around a track in a normal dirt bike race style.

Anyway, the movie involves Ross Hagen as some side hacker who gets into a rivalry with some biker gang.  They kill his woman and then he assembles a team to take them down.  In the end he and the bad guy kill each other.  The End.

Hellcats & Wild Rebels:  These are pretty much the same movie.  Some guy goes undercover with some bikers.  One features Ross Hagen (again) only this time he's avenging his brother after he comes home from Vietnam.  The other the cop is the wheelman as the gang robs some crappy little banks.  That ends with a shootout in a lighthouse, which is kind of cool.  But again, which one is which?  I couldn't tell you.

Stone Cold:  Unlike the others, this was from the early 90s.  It's on Rifftrax, not MST3K.  But the plot is similar to Hellcats & Wild Rebels:  an undercover cop infiltrates a biker gang.  In this case the cop is played by former college star and NFL bust Brian "the Boz" Bosworth.  The biker gang leader is played by Lance Henriksen, who tries to kill a judge for some reason.

The movie is pretty funny because of the ridiculous clothes and hairstyles and stuff.  For some reason the Boz has a pet iguana that I guess is supposed to show how bad ass he is.  Or something.  Unfortunately this one isn't on Amazon Prime much and not on Pluto TV so I haven't watched it many times.

1990 Bronx Warriors:  This 1982 movie is basically an Italian ripoff of The Warriors.  In the "future" of 1990 the Bronx has become No Man's Land for...reasons.  If there was some disaster, the rest of the city looks fine.  No one really ever seems to mention what happened or why.  The plot is that a girl in Manhattan flees to the Bronx and is saved by a guy named Trash and his biker gang.  She's so happy to belong to someone (her words) that she sticks with him.  But when her father starts sending people to find her, Trash and company have to make allies with a gang led by former NFL player Fred Williamson, who you'll see again (twice) in an entry near the end of the challenge.  And they fight some other gangs and cops.  Hooray.

The ending is about like Side Hackers, where it doesn't really end Happily Ever After, though at least the "hero" survives.  Anyway, this is a cheesy copy of an already cheesy movie.  So, a lot of cheese.

#AtoZChallenge: Alien Invasions

It's time for the start of the A to Z Challenge!  This year I'm doing it on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax episodes.  If you don't know what that is, look it up or read my topic reveal post from March.

As the title of Mystery Science Theater 3000 would imply, there were plenty of sci-fi movies.  A lot of them were from the 50s because those were cheap but especially on Rifftrax there were newer ones from the 80s and 90s.

Alien From LA:  This was one of my favorites from MST3K in the early 90s.  It was also one of the first ones after Michael J Nelson took over the hosting duties.  The movie was actually pretty new, from the late 80s but because it was made by the defunct Cannon Films it was probably pretty cheap to obtain.

Anyway, the movie starred supermodel Kathy Ireland as a waitress who follows her archaeologist father to Egypt after he disappears.  She winds up falling underground into a strange world that's populated by human-ish things like a guy with lashes across his whole eyes or a lady with a hairy eyepatch.  The cleverness of the title is that she's the alien in this world and she's from LA.  Get it?

With the help of a vaguely Australian-sounding guy and some other guy she finds her father and escapes back to the surface world while the evil empire underground tells everyone, "Nothing to see here."  Like most Cannon pictures it's made on the cheap; in a DVD extra the director talked about how they went to Africa to film it because it was cheap.

One of the intermission sketches was pretty hilarious as the robots quizzed Mike on all the expressions of Kathy Ireland.  They were all the same:  dull surprise.  They could probably revise that game for Kristen Stewart in those Twilight movies.

Alien Outlaw:  This was a goofy 80s sci-fi movie featured on Rifftrax.  It involves aliens who crash in North Carolina and hassle a woman who performs gun shows like a modern Annie Oakley and a few locals including the elderly Lash LaRue.  Though most of the movie involves the woman firing her lazy manager at a small motel that for some reason has a bellboy, yokels fishing, and a horse called "Mr. Stud" that runs away to a local gas station.

The aliens look like white trash cousins of the Borg and for some reason they don't have any ray guns or anything like that.  Instead they steal the human woman's guns to use.  One of them is stopped when a fish hook detaches an air hose or something.  It really makes you wonder how the hell they managed to travel across the galaxy.

The grand finale involves the woman shooting a damp piece of dynamite that explodes like a 500-lb bomb, which is pretty improbable.  But then so is the whole movie.  It is pretty fun to watch though.

Galaxy Invader:  It's basically a country cousin of Alien Outlaw.  An alien ship crashes in a Southern town.  Only this is less wacky and more unpleasant.  The alien is found by the patriarch of a family who slaps his daughter, chases her around with a shotgun, and generally acts like an asshole.  Along with his dopey son and a local big shot they plan to sell the alien and/or his ray gun to the highest bidder.  But things don't go as they planned and mayhem ensues.

It's not as much fun as Alien Outlaw but just as cheaply made with no real acting talent or anything and pretty crappy effects.

Star Games:  I talked about this in an entry last year.  It's basically one of the worst movies I've seen.  It's cheaply made and annoying and the plot makes no goddamned sense.  While it was made in the late 90s it features effects like claymation that looks like it's from the 50s and computer effects left over from Tron.  Director Greydon Clarke cast his own kids in the lead roles and it shows as they're both about as talented as their father.  Tony Curtis cashed a paycheck as the grandpa to the one kid who's an alien prince trying to avoid an evil alien who wants to take over the universe or some goddamned thing.

But watching the Rifftrax is pretty fun as this movie is just so, so bad that it lends itself to making fun of just about everything about it.

Starship Invasions:  The same year as Star Wars, Christopher Lee starred in this crappy sci-fi movie where he wore a black body stocking with a snake painted on it and communicated telepathically with his minions.  His planet was dying so he thought he'd take over Earth.  But there's some kind of Federation that is headquartered underwater.  So there are terrible battles in the air and space and then some random robot saves the day.  Hooray?  Instead of an epic story of good vs evil you had sort of a minor skirmish.  Instead of George Lucas ILM effects you had ships on string.  Instead of a John Williams score you had crappy Scooby-Doo music.  Instead of R2D2 and C3PO you had crummy looking junk robots.  Otherwise, exactly the same.

Contamination:  An Italian-German ripoff of Alien, though it never actually leaves Earth and takes place in present day, which was 1980.  A boat comes into New York loaded with green "eggs" that when heated explode goo all over.  The goo then causes people it touches to explode.  I guess that way it wasn't exactly like the famous John Hurt scene in Alien.  A female Defense Department person, a police lieutenant, and an astronaut who went to Mars and reported seeing green eggs, which caused him to become a drunken laughingstock, go to Colombia or somewhere like that to find the source of the eggs.  There's a ridiculous scene in the hotel where the woman is locked in her bathroom with an egg.  Um...since when do bathroom doors lock from the outside?  Or need a key?  It would have made more sense for someone to just put a chair against the door to keep it from opening, but then we couldn't have the drama of the astronaut busting through a cheap motel door.  Anyway, this does beat the Alien franchise in depicting an alien queen laying the eggs, only their alien queen looks more like Mother Brain from Metroid.  In the end the astronaut shoots it in the eye and problem solved--except there's still an egg in New York that explodes, seemingly harmlessly in a pile of garbage.  Anyway, it's pretty cheesy and kind of gross with those pickle egg things.  Which a "scientist" says are not eggs...and then in the next sentence talks about their "yolks" and goes back to calling them eggs.  And why does the queen lay exploding eggs?  What's the point of it?

Attack From Space:  A really low-budget, black-and-white Japanese movie from like 1965.  A bunch of cheap looking aliens send their chunky champion "Starman" to Earth to stop a bunch of space Nazis and their "Death Star."  That looks nothing like the Star Wars one but clearly Lucas ripped it off.  Even by the low standards of sci-fi movies of this era it's pretty bad.

Killers From Space:  This was actually one of the 4 episodes of The Film Crew that features the cast of Rifftrax.  It's from the 50s and stars a young Peter Graves as a scientist who dies when the plane he's in crashes during an atomic bomb test.  Except some aliens revive him and send him back for...reasons.

The aliens are especially goofy-looking as they have these giant eyeballs that are just hilarious.  The alien lair underground also features "giant" creatures that are clearly just normal-sized creatures projected to look larger.

Eventually Peter Graves stops them by overloading the power grid.  One thing noted in the episode is how the camera frequently zooms in really tight on people's faces for no real reason at all.  It's bizarre, though not as bizarre as those alien eyeballs.

Plan 9 From Outer Space:  The granddaddy of bad movies was one of the earliest ones on Rifftrax.  It was also the first live Rifftrax show.

Written, directed, and produced by Ed Wood ("the poor dope wasn't smart enough to spread the blame around!") the plot involves a nonsensical plan by aliens to revive the dead to somehow scare humanity from developing some kind of weapon that could destroy the universe.

The effects are notoriously bad, featuring pie plate UFOs on strings, foam tombstones, and an airplane cockpit even a six-year-old kid could have done better.  It was the last film of Bela Lugosi, who died during the filming, so Ed Wood used a chiropractor to double Lugosi in some scenes--and it shows.  The whole thing is laughably bad, though in context probably not as bad as Star Games.  I'm just saying.

The Show Goes On...For Now

The danger of COVID-19 has shut down pretty much everything around me.  I've been holed up in my apartment and hopefully by the time this entry posts I'm not in the hospital or on a slab in the morgue.  Since I'm diabetic and 42, I'm in the vulnerable category, so I'm not one of those people with the luxury of calling it a hoax and violating the quarantine.

Anyway, you might wonder:  what about this blog?  Well, I wrote most of my A to Z Challenge entries about 11 months ago, so those are still going to post in April.  And like last time I have a couple of bonus entries I wrote in May.

After that...who knows?  There's so much uncertainty in the world that I suppose in the grand scheme of things a simple little blog don't mean a hill of beans.  I hope you're staying safe and that my little blog might amuse you for a few minutes as your blogs amuse me for a few minutes.  That's about all we can ask for.

Until All Are One, May the Force Be With You and Live Long and Prosper.

The Best Star Wars Since 1983 Has All Been on the Small Screen

At the start of the month I finally got around to signing up for Disney+.  I had thought about it before but then I saw a Hulu ad saying I could add it and ESPN+ to my existing subscription for $7 more so it seemed like a decent price.  And I didn't really have anything on Hulu or Amazon I was keen on watching.

The upshot is I finally got to catch up on Star Wars TV shows I hadn't been able to watch.  First I watched The Mandalorian and I loved it.  The thing is, the story itself is pretty much a cliche.  There are tons of movies where an assassin has been around a while but goes rogue when asked to kill a kid or a woman--or both.  That was what set The Bourne Identity in motion as just one example.  But one of those things you can talk about with writing is that you don't need to reinvent the wheel; you just need to make the wheel seem not as used.  So you take the shopworn tale of an assassin finding a conscience and going rogue, make that assassin a Boba Fett-looking dude and then make the child he saves a baby Yoda creature and you have screen magic.  And other than books, we'd never really gotten to see anything in the post-Empire era between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, so it was nice to finally have something in that time frame.

After that I watched Star Wars Rebels, which I'd never really gotten a chance to watch.  I saw the first episode at Michael Offutt's house and I caught one or two others either on Sling or at my mom's house but most of the time I didn't have access to Disney XD or whatever so I could finally catch up.  That was for the most part a good show.  It kind of picked up where The Clone Wars left off in that while it was a cartoon and the computer graphics were not very real looking, it wasn't silly or stupid.  Of course it wasn't extremely dark and gritty either because it was on a Disney channel, but like Clone Wars it managed to be grown up enough for adults while not too grown up for kids.  And the best part was it gave us an in-continuity Grand Admiral Thrawn.  Hooray!

I do have one bone to pick with that show and that's that I think it was the origin of all that "running low of fuel" bullshit in The Last Jedi.  Several times the Rebels have to steal "fuel" for their ships.  Which again, smaller ships like fighters or the Ghost it would make sense for them to use some kind of fuel cells, but the big ships it still seems dumb.  It would be extremely impractical for Star Destroyers to run on "fuel" rather than something like fusion.  Imagine how much "fuel" something like Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer would go through!  And the Death Star had some kind of "reactor" to power it, so why wouldn't ships?

Watching The Mandalorian and Rebels back-to-back there are some common elements (besides typical Star Wars stuff) like the darksaber, blurghs, a Loth-cat that tries to eat Baby Yoda, and the transport Imperial troops show up in near the end of The Mandalorian.  Mandalorian culture also had a fair amount of detail in Rebels and in The Clone Wars before it.

I watched The Clone Wars years ago when it was still on Netflix.  It was the kind of show where it didn't really start out all that great, but as it went on it really started to gel.  Characters like Anakin, Padme, and even Jar-Jar who weren't all that deep or interesting in the movies were able to get fleshed out a lot more in the series.  And then there was Ahsoka Tano who starts out as Anakin's bratty little Padawan but then grows up over the course of the series.  Even the clones became more than just generic troopers.  Some like Rex and Cody developed their own personalities.  The series really was able to take a lot of the concepts of the prequels that seemed dumb or lame and make them work.  Though it's a cartoon and was mostly on Cartoon Network back in the 2000/2010s before moving to Netflix and then Disney+, it wasn't really a show written for little kids.  Like Robotech in the 80s it was a sci-fi cartoon but there was a lot of violence and death and stuff that would probably scare little kids.

The bone I have to pick with The Clone Wars is by the third season they had story arcs that were unnecessarily stretched out.  Like one where they have to break Tarkin and a Jedi out of a prison went on for three episodes when it could have just been one.  Or one where they have to stop some slavers and they had a rescue going and that should have been it, but instead the rescue fails to wring one more episode out of it.  Or one where R2D2 and some droids have to steal something from the Separtists which should have just been a wacky little episode went on for 4 episodes!  They should have just got the stuff and gone home and made it a happy little diversion instead of a drawn-out storyline.  That's always something to remember in writing:  don't make things too long if you don't have to.

The other difference between Clone Wars and Rebels is that Rebels focused on a small group of...Rebels, while Clone Wars was far more free-wheeling with its storytelling.  The first episode after the movie focused on Yoda and 3 clones, not Anakin, Obi-Wan, or Padme.  That was the tone set for the rest of the series, where sometimes you might not see a main character for four or five episodes in a row as a story focused on one or two main characters--or none at all.  In writing, Clone Wars was like an old-fashioned omniscient 3rd person POV that cuts to lots of characters while Rebels was more of a limited 3rd person POV.

So the thing is that as the title of the entry says, the best Star Wars since the original three movies has all been on the small screen.  And I think there are a couple of reasons for that.  First off, the TV shows don't have to try to be Star Wars movies.  And by that I mean they don't have to be a big flashy 2 1/2-hour spectacle.  They don't have to try to match the original trilogy in awe and wonder.  Which brings me to the second point that the series can go slower and actually develop stories and characters.  They could probably have made The Mandalorian into a 2 1/2-hour movie, but it also wouldn't have been as good.  For one thing because the producers would want to make everything bigger and flashier and tie it to some big event and so on.  Because it's a Star Wars movie so we have to pull out all the stops!  But a series can stretch its legs and grow better.  That's why The Clone Wars is so much better than the prequel movies were.

The most recent trilogy of movies were so concerned with trying to live up to the originals that they couldn't really cobble together much of a coherent story.  As three 8-episode TV seasons they probably could have done a better job with it to build characters and the setting instead of just throwing together shit that was supposed to remind us of the movies we grew up with.

Anyway, maybe it's time they just forget about the movies and focus on TV.  I mean, except for the billions of dollars the movies make.

The Last Encore: It's New to You

Last Friday I talked about Amazon and Draft2Digital pulling most of my age regressions books.  So the first couple days of the quarantine I spent a lot of time updating the Planet 99 Publishing website so most of those books you can download for free.

One of the ones they pulled was The Comeback, but instead of putting that for free, I decided to re-edit it and release it under the P.T. Dilloway name as The Last Encore.

Most of the world has given up on 80s rocker Alex Axx--including Alex himself.  His life has become a series of small venues , binge-drinking, and one-night stands with fading groupies.

During a festival in Michigan, a drunk Alex falls off the stage only to wake up in a rehab facility as a teenage girl.  Acquainting himself with a new body is difficult, but not as difficult as acquainting himself with feelings he hasn't experienced in decades.  He falls in love with another patient, but far too soon he's whisked away by his former manager--now his guardian--to take part in a televised talent show as Alexa Axelrod.  

The new career brings new fame for Alex, but will he make the same mistakes the second time around?

In editing it, I made it more PG-13 instead of R-rated by taking out a lot of f-bombs and the more explicit sex talk.  Maybe that will make it more palatable to mainstream readers and it can find a new audience.  Or maybe someone will accuse me of plagiarizing myself.  It wouldn't be the first time.

You can get it for $2.99 on Amazon--until they ban it again for no real reason.