TCM Genre movies schedule...

[Vandervecken]

Reminder: TCM is a having a Dracula marathon tonight, showing the first six (!) Hammer DRACULA movies in a row tonight. Starring Christopher Lee as the Count, of course. The films are being shown in order, starting with HORROR OF DRACULA and ending with DRACULA A.D. 1972.

They're skipping over my favorite, BRIDES OF DRACULA, but I can forgive that since Lee skipped that one, too. Also missing is his final DRACULA movie, THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, but that may be just as well . . . ..

Horror of Dracula, Dracula AD, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Scars of Dracula, and Taste the Blood of Dracula are all on TCM on demand until Nov 1. Not everything but a lot. Also noticed the Gorgon, which I just saw on another channel.

 

[JD]

I watched Ice Pirates this morning, and it was a lot of fun.

 

[Noname Given]

I watched Ice Pirates this morning, and it was a lot of fun.

It still has one of my favorite film lines:
"Whatever happened to we rape, we pillage?"

 

[Christopher]

I watched Ice Pirates this morning, and it was a lot of fun.

Oh yeah. I forgot that was on today, but fortunately I expected to forget, so I have it on my DVR.

 

[Christopher]

Okay, having seen The Ice Pirates, I think I know why I didn't see it back in the day. The bad reviews must've kept me away. This was terrible. Slapdash, barely coherent writing, unfunny comedy, lazy and phoned-in acting, cheap production values and effects (I saw stock footage of the city from Logan's Run, and I think a couple of the space vistas were stock animation from Cosmos), and even the odd bit of racism here and there. Plus it totally wasted Ron Perlman and almost totally wasted Anjelica Huston. Not to mention John Carradine and his grand total of one scene.

I'm trying not even to think about the logic holes in the basic premise, but it's hard to resist. How can the whole galaxy run out of water? Where did it go? What happened to all the trillions of comets and ice moons and such? Why can't they synthesize more water by reacting hydrogen and oxygen? And if there's so little water, what was all that mist on the Amazons' planet made of?

 

[Christopher]

Okay, I've finished watching all six of the Hammer Dracula movies they marathonned t'other night, and I was not very impressed. Their Frankenstein movies are more interesting, because each one was a new variation on the premise, a different type of experiment that Victor Frankenstein was exploring. Dracula pretty much just has the one shtick over and over and over. Also, the Frankenstein movies rode on Peter Cushing's charisma. Only two of the Lee Dracula movies have Cushing in them, and they were the most entertaining of the lot. I wasn't that impressed by Lee in the role, since only 2-3 of the movies made any real use of Lee's greatest asset, that stentorian and sepulchral voice. Most of the time, Dracula was given no personality beyond being a ruthless predator, and that got kind of boring, especially with no recurring hero to root for, just a succession of random priests and random horny young men. Oh, yeah, and the religious piety of many of the films got a bit tiresome, particularly in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, where the lead character was an atheist who had to embrace God at the end, and in Taste the Blood of Dracula, where the very confusing climax seemed to have Dracula defeated by the church he was in, even though it hadn't been a problem for him to occupy it before.

I did really like Peter Cushing in Dracula A.D. 1972, though. When he starred in Amicus's Doctor Who movies, he played a doddering, elderly scientist loosely based on the Doctor at the time, William Hartnell, but after seeing him in this, I think it would've been cool to see him play a more Pertwee-like version of the Doctor. I also think I might like to track down Hammer's The Brides of Dracula, which has Cushing's Van Helsing but not Lee's Drac.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Ice Pirates is one of those movies that I think could've only come from the 80s. Something about the earnestness that can be found in the cheesiest corniest movies. It's better than Galaxina anyway.

 

[Christopher]

Ice Pirates is one of those movies that I think could've only come from the 80s. Something about the earnestness that can be found in the cheesiest corniest movies.

"Earnestness" is the last word I would use for The Ice Pirates. The whole thing felt phoned in, like nobody really wanted to be there and was just going through the motions. The movie's tagline might as well have been "Meh."

 

[Mr. Adventure]

^ I mean the actors play it straight and there seems to have been an effort put into the production and in many ways it plays as a straight (if crappy) adventure. It seems to me that more was done than say your typical modern cheap schlock attempts. A lot of 80s movies seem that way to me but I admit I'm probably not articulating it well.

A couple of odd asides:
- Has Ron Perlman ever looked less imposing than he did in this movie? He even looked a bit on the small side.
- The princess and her handler on the ship reminded me a little of Spaceballs.
- Running around industrial areas with a guy named Killjoy made me think of the Syfy series, the sets share a certain similarity.

 

[Christopher]

^ I mean the actors play it straight and there seems to have been an effort put into the production and in many ways it plays as a straight (if crappy) adventure.

I don't see that. The actors were playing it comedically; they just didn't put much energy into it. The production is very low-budget, TV-level stuff. And it plays as a very clumsy comedy.

I dunno, I guess if you like John Carpenter's Dark Star, The Ice Pirates has kind of a similar tone. But I mostly hated Dark Star. And Dark Star at least tried to have a degree of intelligence, with its phenomenological discourse in the climax. This was just cheesy.

- Has Ron Perlman ever looked less imposing than he did in this movie? He even looked a bit on the small side.

Yeah, that was weird. He's 6'1", but he was surrounded by a lot of tall actors -- Robert Urich and Michael D. Roberts were 6'2", John Matuszak was 6'8", and Anjelica Huston is 5'10". It was pretty odd to see him looking just average-sized compared to the people around him.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

@Christopher, this should be up your alley, in the external shots the spaceships in Ice Pirates sounded a lot like those of Jason of Star Command. Am I off base there or did you notice?

 

[Christopher]

@Christopher, this should be up your alley, in the external shots the spaceships in Ice Pirates sounded a lot like those of Jason of Star Command. Am I off base there or did you notice?

Yeah, all the sound effects were recognizably from the same library that Filmation used. Back before the digital era, when sound effects were stored on physical media, there were only so many sound-effects libraries out there, belonging to a few different companies that did most of the sound-editing work in Hollywood productions, and they had a narrower range of different sounds to choose from than there are today. So there were certain recognizable sets of sound effects that would tend to be associated with certain productions. As I recall, Filmation's sound effects were done by a company called Horta-Mahana. I don't see a credit for them in Ice Pirates' IMDb page, but the sounds were very recognizable -- the rocket roars, the alarm whoops, the console beeps, the sliding-door hums, etc. (That library also included Star Trek: TOS sound effects as a result of Filmation doing ST:TAS, which is why the TOS shuttlecraft interior sound effect was heard at one point in the movie.)

I have a certain nostalgic fondness for those sound effects, but their presence did contribute to the general low-budget, TV-quality feel of the movie.

 

[Christopher]

November:

TUE 11/1
1:15 AM: Scream of Fear (aka Taste of Fear) ('61): With Christopher Lee & Susan Strasberg.
2:45 AM: The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll ('61): Hammer's take on the story, with Lee.
4:30 AM: To the Devil, a Daughter ('76): Hammer Satanism with Lee and Honor Blackman.

FRI 11/4
10:15 AM: Seven Days in May ('64)
2:30 PM: Dr. Strangelove ('64)

MON 11/7
2:00 AM: World on a Wire ('73): Or Welt am Draht, a German-language film about AI and simulated reality, co-written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
10:00 AM: Gabriel over the White House ('33): The disturbing pro-dictatorship propaganda film again.

THU 11/10
6:45 PM: The Invisible Man ('33)
10:00 PM: The Innocents ('61): Ghostly gothic horror with Deborah Kerr, co-written by Truman Capote and adapting a play based on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

FRI 11/11
8:45 AM: The Most Dangerous Game ('32)

SAT 11/12
9:15 AM: Bride of Frankenstein ('35)
8:00 PM: Blithe Spirit ('45): Adaptation of Noel Coward comedy about a couple haunted by the ghost of the man's first wife. With Rex Harrison.

SUN 11/13
8:00 PM: Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor ('36): First of the three Popeye Color Specials, two-reeler cartoons made in Technicolor. Notable for its 3D effects using animation cels on glass in front of tabletop miniature backgrounds.
8:30 PM: Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves ('37): Second of same.
10:30 PM: Soylent Green ('73): Popeye not included.

SAT 11/19
Noon: The Swarm ('78): Irwin Allen killer-bee disaster movie with Michael Caine.
3:30 PM: Jaws ('75)
5:45 PM: Time After Time ('79)

SUN 11/20
4:00 AM: Head ('68): I guess the Monkees' feature film deconstructing their own manufactured fame is surreal and reality-bending enough to count as genre.

WED 11/23
3:00 AM: King Solomon's Mines ('50): Allan Quatermain adventure with Deborah Kerr and Stewart Granger.

SAT 11/26
12:15 AM: Brainstorm ('83): Douglas Trumbull virtual-reality thriller, Natalie Wood's final film. With Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher.
4:15 AM: Meteor ('79): Wood, Sean Connery, and Henry Fonda in a misnamed, all-star asteroid-disaster movie.
6:00 PM: The Incredible Mr. Limpet ('64): Don Knotts becomes cartoon fish.

SUN 11/27
8:00 PM: Fantastic Voyage ('66): Raquel Welch gets tiny!
10:00 PM: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea ('61): The original Irwin Allen movie, with Walter Pidgeon.

WED 11/30
1:45 PM: A Christmas Carol ('38): What, already?

 

[Gary Mitchell]

I watched Ice Pirates this morning, and it was a lot of fun.

Yes, it was.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

10:30 PM: Soylent Green ('73): Popeye not included.

Guess Soylent Green isn't spinach.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^ I mean the actors play it straight and there seems to have been an effort put into the production and in many ways it plays as a straight (if crappy) adventure.

What's interesting to me is that the main cast is mostly TV actors. Robert Urich was on Vega$, Michael Roberts was on Baretta, and Mary Crosby was the one who shot JR. It must have been cheaper to use them.

- Running around industrial areas with a guy named Killjoy made me think of the Syfy series, the sets share a certain similarity.

That's been the go-to look for most "Sci Fi" for thirty-five years, unfortunately.

 

[JD]

Even today a lot of the lower budget movies seem to rely on mostly TV actors.

 

[Christopher]

Even today a lot of the lower budget movies seem to rely on mostly TV actors.

There's less of a distinction between TV and movie actors today anyway. More big-name actors are doing TV series, because TV is where the good writing and characterization are.

 

[Noname Given]

November:
SUN 11/13
10:30 PM: Soylent Green ('73): Popeye not included.

What did I mistake Charlton Heston's last line in this film all these years and it's actually:

"Soylent Green is made out of Popeye!"

 

[RJDiogenes]

Even today a lot of the lower budget movies seem to rely on mostly TV actors.

Could be. I'm not as aware of TV versus movie actors as I was in the 70s and 80s.