Alien Contamination (1980)

That's right, we're starting a new 50 pack of cheapo movies.  I bet you can't wait.

On reading the DVD sleeve synopsis of this one - "ship is found filled with alien eggs, the crew dead, their organs having exploded out of their bodies", I thought to myself "someone saw Alien, didn't they?".  And if Wikipedia is to be believed, that is literally what happened, for this is one of those Italian knock-offs, like Zombi 2 was to Dawn of the Dead.

In this case, the man responsible for the film is Luigi Cozzi, who was also the brains behind Starcrash.  Which, in case the name isn't enough of a hint of what it is ripping off, has a frickin' light saber in it.

Sadly however, this film will show little of the gonzo absurdity of that sensationally silly film.  It seems Cozzi's producer wanted to do less Science Fiction, more James Bond.  Apparently it didn't occur to him that this was an odd decision when Alien is your starting point.  Though honestly, I would watch Bond vs Xenomorphs.

In any case, the ship I mentioned turns up, with everyone dead.  A team sent into investigate has only one survivor: a Brooklyn cop.  He's then spirited away by 'Section 5', a secret government body set to deal with such strange cases.

The cop's story of killer green eggs reminds the agent leading the investigation of some interviews she conducted with the first astronauts to return from Mars.  Because of yeah, humanity has been to Mars, did we forget to mention that?  One of the astronauts reported seeing something similar, but he appeared emotionally distraught and his colleague - who is now deceased - denied anything of the sort had been encountered.

It's off to see the still-living astronaut, for the necessary info dump.  I also assumed it would set up a love triangle between the three leads, but honestly the two male characters seem more flirtatious with each other than with the woman.  I don't think that was actually the script's intent, but it's true nonetheless.

The conflicting visions of the director and producer render this a fairly anemic film.  It fails to satisfy either as a Bond-style investigation/action film, or as a science fiction one.  There are a few moments of unintentional comedy, and some extremely bloody effects (it was actually banned for a while in the UK as a "video nasty", though frankly that seems an overreaction: this is no Mountain of the Cannibal God), but they aren't enough to save it from being fairly dull stuff, overall.

The Gymnast (2006)

A world-class gymnast in her youth, Jane Hawkins suffered a career ending injury at the age of 22.  Her life never really recovered.  Two decades later she works in a job she doesn't seem to enjoy, and is married to a man she doesn't seem to much like all that much.  She sinks most of her energy into attempts to have a child, but without any success.

Ennui eventually drives her to attend a gymnastics class for adults, and the instructor there asks her to join another woman to put together an aerial gymnastics show: something flashy and impressive that could play in a casino in Vegas.  Jane's not entirely sure about that idea, but she does enjoy the physical experience of it and soon commits to the project with a passion.

When the instructor has to leave town due to a family emergency, Jane and her partner Serena continue to meet and train together.  As they develop their act and overcome hurdles together, Jane slowly begins to realise that their bond goes beyond just friendship.

Because yes, this is a film with a lesbian romance in it.  But if you're looking for titillation, you'll be disappointed.  The core of the film is on the emotional journey of the characters - mostly Jane, but to a lesser extent Serena - as they confront their self-doubts and the things that have held them back in their lives.  This is a film about letting go of the things you can't have in your life and embracing the things you can.  It's no accident that the film closes with Jane performing a gymnastics routine for the pure joy of it.

This is a solid film with some stunning dance and gymnastics moves sprinkled throughout.  It certainly won't be to all tastes, given the subject matter, but it is easy to see why it won a bunch of LGBT film awards - it's a cut above the average romantic drama.

The Corpse Vanishes (1942)

Rubbish, but fun.

That was my immediate response on finishing this film, and as I write this a couple of hours later, I see no reason to change that assessment.

There's been a strange phenomenon sweeping the land: young women dropping dead at their weddings.  Even stranger, the bodies of the young women have then all vanished!  This has happened four times now, and unsurprisingly, people are getting a bit nervous about tying the knot.

Another wedding does go ahead though, after the police emphatically say "we can't speak to the young woman's health, but nothing will happen to her body if she does die!".

... which is not exactly the most encouraging of promises.

In any case, surprise surprise she does drop dead at the altar, and - you might want to be sitting down for this bombshell - the police fail to prevent her body from vanishing!  Yeah, I was shocked too.

Fortunately for everyone, a young female reporter from the society pages is a bit more on the ball than the authorities, and she notices the strange flower in the bride's bouquet.  Eager to investigate a 'real story', she sets out to discover if there is a link between the unusual bloom and the strange events that have been unfolding.

There is, of course.  And frankly, despite being the product of nutty cinematic science fiction, the perpetrators' motives for their crimes are one of the less silly plot points of this film.  I mean, compared to the straight-faced delivery of the line "I have no recollection of that conversation, but it is possible I was speaking to her while in a somnambulistic state", harvesting an elixir of youth from the bodies of young women seems pretty reasonable.  Of course, it would perhaps have been smarter to choose a less bizarre and attention-getting method of acquiring those bodies, but it's not that kind of movie.

So I enjoyed this.  It's dumb as a box of rocks, but it has a female lead who actually comes up with plans and does stuff, and that's pretty impressive for a 1940s film.  Plus it's just dumb enough to be entertainingly stupid.

So yeah: rubbish, but fun.

Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (2005)

This is one of the most aggressively 3D movies I've seen.  By that I mean that it has a lot of scenes and sequences that are clearly designed with the 3D format in mind.  Naturally, a lot of those scenes and sequences involve things flying out at you (including in one memorable case a CGI brain which actually "hits" the camera lens and then slides down the screen).

Now I'm no fan of 3D, and watched this movie in its 2D version, but I understand the decision to make the feature a focus of the film.  For one thing, it's aimed at a pretty young audience, and they're more likely to find the "in your face" element appealing.  For another, the story's rather slight and the visual gimmickry might help distract from that.

Max is a geeky loner at school, teased by the other kids for keeping a dream journal and talking about his imaginary friends Sharkboy and Lavagirl as if they are real.  He's also having a tough time at home since it seems his parents - in a barely there subplot that gets resolved in about five seconds later in the film - are having problems with their marriage.

As Max endures another terrible day at school, a hurricane blows up.  But riding out of it come Sharkboy and Lavagirl!  They take him with them to their home planet, where things have gone terribly awry: the planet runs on Max's dreams, but lately all those dreams are turning into nightmares.  The trio will have to traverse the world's puntacular geography (including taking a ride on the Train of Thought and swimming the Stream of Consciousness) in order to find and thwart the evil-doer who is ruining everything.

There are some fun elements to this film, and it's cool that writer/director Robert Rodriguez has developed his script from a story originally dreamed up by his then 7-year-old son, but he probably should have spent a bit more time on that development.  The film has a tendency to tell, not show, and most elements feel pro forma in their execution.  Scenes that are probably supposed to be big stirring moments just don't have the 'oomph' I would expect of a properly refined script.

Now Rodriguez plays pretty fast and loose with the script in say Spy Kids as well, but that still feels a bit more polished (and the puns are much cleverer - I'll forgive a lot for a clever pun).

Seek this out only if you have little ones you need to keep entertained, and even then I think you've got a lot of better options.

Invisible Ghost (1941)

At some point in his career, Bela Lugosi probably played someone who is not a murderer, but I am yet to see that film.

In this nonsensical bit of fluff, Lugosi is a respected pillar of the community.  The only whiff of scandal around him is that some years before his wife ran off with another man.

Oh, and the unsolved murders that keep happening in his home.  So you know, nothing major.

As we the audience soon discover, Lugosi's character is the murderer.  But he doesn't know that.  How can this be?  I'm glad you asked.  Buckle in for stupid.

So, for poorly justified reasons, the gardener is keeping Lugosi's wife in his shed.  She was injured in a car crash when she and her lover tried to flee, you see.  And so the gardener has kept her secretly, ever since.  Why?  Well, there's a bit of waffle about how 'it would destroy' Lugosi to see his wife in her current state (she looks fine, but has neurological damage).

However, the gardener's really bad at keeping Lugosi's wife locked up, and she occasionally sneaks out of the shed at night to steal some food from the house. Whenever Lugosi sees her do this, he mistakes her for a ghost, goes into a fugue state, and murders someone.  Why does this happen?  Because that's what the script says it does, that's why.

After the latest murder, the police - who are colossally incompetent throughout this film - arrest the boyfriend of Lugosi's daughter.  The latest victim was an ex-lover of his, you see, who was trying to break up his relationship.  So he had motive, and - lacking an alibi for the night in question - gets executed.  But don't worry, his identical brother will turn up in the very next scene to investigate.

Several more murders will happen, while the police scratch their heads over the baffling "mystery" that would be solved by, you know, searching the grounds of the house where all the murders happen, before things finally get resolved.  My favorite moment of script lunacy in all this nonsense is the scene where one of Lugosi's victims wakes up in the morgue, then dies before he can say anything.  Why does this scene exist?  Your guess is as good as mine.  Perhaps it was supposed to create tension in some way: 'will Lugosi be discovered?  Will he go into a trance and murder the witnesses?'.  That's all I can think of.

The cast does their best with this nonsense, and make it watchable enough if you don't mind how stupid it is, but there's no way to save it from being preposterous.

Equilibrium (2002)

When I saw the film of Fahrenheit 451, I found it very slow and a bit dull.  When I later read the novel, I added pretentious as well: I didn't care for the snobbish overtone of "printed fiction is more worthwhile than visual fiction".  Or to be more succinct: "Books rule, TV drools".

Don't get me wrong: I love books.  I own far too many of them.  But there are many good films and TV shows out there, which tell interesting stories of their own.  And there are plenty of trivial, substance-free books.

This film seems to me at the very least to be a response to the first problem: because this is Fahrenheit 451 with a ton of kung fu/gunplay action baked in.  Where it stands on the second is a little more subjective.

After a Third World War in the early 21st Century, the survivors abolish what they perceive as the cause of war: emotions.  Hatred and anger are the catalyst for violence.  Suppress them, and there will be no risk of a Fourth World War.  Of course, suppressing emotions means the good ones as well as the bad, but joy and love are worth sacrificing for an end to warfare and murder, right?

Unfortunately, there are things out there that can cause us to feel, even when we don't want to.  Books and art and music and computer games and TV and movies.  These things are therefore outlawed.  The script specifically references cases of the first three during the movie, as well as other pleasures such as a pleasing fragrance.  Ironically though, its main use of film is as a medium of oppression and control.

In any case, the chief agents tasked with hunting down 'sense offenders' and the contraband they traffic are the Grammaton Clerics.  One of the most senior of this order is John Prescott, who is implacable, unfeeling death on legs to those who oppose the regime.  Or at least, he is until a worm of doubt begins to crawl into his mind.  What will happen when the man tasked to destroy art and beauty finds himself compelled to preserve it, and can he keep his change of heart a secret from his former masters?

The film does a pretty good job of the keeping all its "balls in the air" plot-wise.  There are a couple of fumbles that you might need a bit of handwaving to deal with but most of the big questions get answered and in the mean time you have a solid cast and well-staged action sequences to keep you occupied.

If you're looking for a fun action romp and don't mind it with some Science Fiction trimmings, this is worth a watch.

Dark Eyes of London (1939)

In Bowery at Midnight, Bela Lugosi plays an apparent philanthropist who maintains two identities and is secretly a murderous mastermind.  In this film, he plays an apparent philanthropist who ... well, I'm sure you can guess the rest.

The similarities between the two films were probably what led to them being paired together.  Here, they form part of a 10-pack, but they were originally a "two movies on one DVD" deal, as evidenced by the cover picture on the back of this boxed set:

Honestly, I think that matching the two movies together, at least in this order, does this film (which you can also find under the title The Human Monster) a disservice.  For one thing, it was filmed three years earlier; for another, it's based on a story by Edgar Wallace.  In the early years of the 20th century, Wallace was an extremely successful mystery writer, though these days he is probably best remembered for writing King Kong.  What that means is that this film actually has a solid core to work from, with the result that we get a movie which, if it's not good enough for me to recommend it, at least makes some kind of sense.

Here, for instance, Lugosi's dual identities actually assist him in his nefarious deeds, instead of being a glaring Achilles Heel in his plans.  What a concept!

Now this is not to say that the film lacks flaws: Lugosi's plan requires his victims all die by the same method, and for them all to be insured by his insurance company, which unsurprisingly draws the suspicions of Scotland Yard.

But you know, it's not random zombies out of nowhere and people recovering from being dead, so it's certainly a step up from the last Lugosi film I watched.

Overall, I didn't mind this, but there's not enough to it that I'd give it a recommendation to anyone who wasn't an aficionado of Edgar Wallace's works.