Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) – Scientists land on an island to discover what happened to the previous group of scientists that went there to study the effects of radiation from nearby bomb test. The answer: GIANT CRABS happened to them!
This script exhibits what I call the “One Step Too Far” error. Giant mutated crabs? Sure. Who can absorb the intelligence and memories from brains they eat? No problem — kinda cool, actually. And they’re psychic, so they can mentally lure the humans by “calling out” in the voices of the humans they’ve eaten? Fine. And they’re composed of free-flowing atoms so no solid weapon can harm them, and they’ve got an all-over negative charge? …Stop. You’re hurting my thinky parts.
(Watched in commemoration of Roger Corman’s recent passing, of course.)
The Maiden Heist (2009) – Three museum security guards, each in absolute love with a piece of art, react to the museum’s plan to ship the whole catalog to Denmark by planning to steal those three pieces specifically. And the guards are Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, and William H. Macy. Wackiness ensues.
This is what I call “light comedy.” I chuckled many times and enjoyed the whole thing, but at no point did I laugh until the tears came. On the other hand, nobody went searching for desperate laffs with fart jokes or hits to the nuts.
Walken’s comedic chops, especially, go overlooked much of the time. A worthwhile way to spend a couple of inoffensive hours.
The Beast With a Million Eyes (1955) – I’m used to B-movies of the ’50s having posters much better than the features, but rarely is the disparity so completely pronounced. And the poster isn’t abnormally good, either.
It’s mostly a soap opera about a dysfunctional rural family:
- stolid Dad, who’s also the narrator;
- bipolar Mom, who hates her life and resents the rosy future open to…
- teen daughter, on the verge of leaving for school.
Also,
- “Him,” the brain-damaged mute without a name who’s the sole farmhand.
Oh, and there’s also a mysterious “airplane” which no one saw fly overhead but which left broken windows and glasses in its wake. But that’s not a mystery to us, because the prologue is a monologue by the craft’s occupant, which declares that once it takes over all creatures on the plan, including man, it will be have “a million eyes.” Which, I suppose, is a way out of constructing an absolutely impossible monster costume.
The movie is part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, part The Birds, and wholly inept in its plotting. Every time we seem like we’re heading for narrative tension or momentum, it’s like someone hit the screenwriter with a hammer to the temple so that he’d forget what he was working on and start over again.
You know you’re dealing with a dud when the “high” point of the movie is the sequence where they try to make footage of a very good doggie seems menacing with dubbed-in growls and lots of frantic editing.
Abandoned movies:
Future World (2018) – How did James Franco (and not “young unknown James Franco”, but “already a star James Franco”) get roped into co-directing and starring in this lifeless post-apoc retread?
“How did James Franco (and not “young unknown James Franco”, but “already a star James Franco”) get roped into co-directing and starring in this lifeless post-apoc retread?”
Desperate for work after @MeToo allegations cost him the Oscar nomination for The Disaster Artist (although he’d won the Golden Globe a few months before) and any other meaningful project?
I dunno. Future World is one of five feature acting credits, three producer/exec. producer credits, and two directing credits he had for 2018. It doesn’t sound like he had been ghosted.