Atragon (1963) – It’s like a kaiju movie without the kaiju (mostly), as befits a movie directed by Ishiro Honda and scored by Akira Ifukube. Agents from the Mu Empire, the Pacific version of Atlantis that sank beneath the waves 10,000 years ago (and whose inhabitants are genetically indistinguishable from modern Japanese), are preparing for the Empire to literally rise again, and the only hope the world has is a Japanese submarine commander who’s been missing and presumed dead since the end of the war, but who has really been on a secret end-of-war mission to preserve and advance his awesome submariney technology. Unfortunately, said commander (and his men, none of whom have shabby uniforms or seem absolutely bonkers from their solitude) is still devoted to the idea of Imperial Japan, and doesn’t want to save the entire world if it doesn’t specifically benefit his little corner of it.
Oh, the pseudo-kaiju? It’s a giant underwater dragon that the Mu-ites worship (by which I mean, they feed inconvenient people to it); it looks like one of King Ghidorah’s heads decided to go solo.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) – I finally realized that, while I know I’d seen at least parts of this before, it was probably on TV and I probably didn’t see all of it, and anyway it’s been at least 35 years.
Really, it’s nifty to watch Sergio Leone’s progression through the unofficial “Man With No Name” trilogy,” from the impoverished production of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), in which Clint Eastwood had to provide his own wardrobe, to this movie two years later, which has buildings and bridges blown up, and huge Civil War battles staged. Sometimes quality does indeed rise to the top.
I gotta admit, though, I prefer A Fistful of Dollars or For a Few Dollars More (1965) to this one, and I don’t think it’s just because I’d rather watch Lee Van Cleef as an anti-hero than as an out-and-out villain. This one just seems overlong and indulgent — the extended Civil War battles could almost be excised whole without disturbing the flow of the narrative.
On the other hand, the final scene’s practically worth the cost of admission all by itself.
KillerSaurus (2015) – Most of the bad dinosaur movies I watch are cheap SyFy Original dreck, but this is an entire order of magnitude lower on the budgetary scale. We’re talking a micro-budget [cough] “extravaganza” [cough], with a cast that doesn’t exceed the fingers of both hands including background extras, a shooting location confined to an old industrial garage, and not a bright light bulb to be had.
And the premise… Jeez. Because when an experimental “bio-printing” company, dedicated to 3-D printing functional replacement organs, runs out of money… it’s just natural that the military steps in to hire them to 3-D print tyranno-frickin’-sauruses. No, don’t start with any sort of smaller complete animal — say, one that isn’t extinct, so you can actually model internal organs and processes; instead, create ceramic bone structure, then map the organs of a crocodile onto the bones, and ta-dah! Instant T-Rex! (Actually, you’d get an instant bipedal crocodile that’s very, very confused.)
If there’s any positive to be found here, it’s that the dinosaur is realized not with CGI, but with an honest-to-Darwin cable-controlled puppet. Of course, it’s not terribly mobile, and every time it supposedly does something carnivorish, we have to cut away not to protect our delicate sensibilities but because the budget can’t afford showing anyone actually getting munched…