Month: June 2019

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 4 Episode 1 – In His Image

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Alan Talbot is a young man living in New York City who is in love with a girl named Jessica.  When we first meet him, he is waiting on a subway platform.  A religious zealot approaches him and after she harasses him about his religious convictions, he has some kind of mental breakdown and throws her under the train and flees.

Jessica and Alan plan to get married and Alan has invited Jessica to go back to his home town to meet his Aunt Mildred.  But when he gets back there many of the details seem different from his memory.  And when he goes back to his aunt’s house the guy living there denies knowing anything about the Talbots and says he’s been living there for ten years.  Utterly confused, Alan checks the town records and finds out there’s no Talbot family there and the college he thought he went to doesn’t exist.

He heads to the graveyard and instead of the Talbot family he finds the Ryders.  While Jessica is driving him back to his hotel, he has another attack and gets out of the car.  When Jessica follows him, Alan realizes that he is ready to kill her with a rock and he orders her to flee.  Once she runs to her car, he follows her but she drives off in time and he’s left standing in the road.  Suddenly a car narrowly misses running Alan over and when he gets up and examines a wound on his forearm, he sees that under his skin is electronic and mechanical components.

Returning to his hotel he tells Jessica over the phone that he will meet up with her the next morning and straighten things out.  He looks up a Mr. Ryder in the phone book and goes to his house.  There he meets Walter Ryder.  And Ryder is the spitting image of Alan.  Walter explains that he created Alan as part of his childhood dream of creating a perfect version of himself.  He shows him the two earlier protypes.  Then he explains that some fault in his design renders Alan violently insane which explains the earlier homicidal actions.  Alan tells Walter about his engagement to Jessica and tells Walter to build an improved version of himself and send it to Jessica.  But suddenly Alan has another mental breakdown and attacks Walter.  The scene ends with the two of them locked in a life and death struggle.

In the next scene we see Alan show up at Jessica’s apartment and tell her that he’s now okay and that they can be happy together from then on.  She hesitantly listens to him and then accepts his word that his crazy actions are behind him.

A final scene shows the inanimate body of Alan lying dead on the basement floor of Walter’s laboratory.  Walter has replaced his robot in a real relationship that he always wished he could have.

Wow!  Well, you know photog’s rule against robots or mannequins that think they’re humans.  There’s one strike right there.  But let’s move on.

Putting aside the mistaken identity and the modern setting this is the story of Frankenstein.  The monster seeks revenge on his creator for making him an outcast in the world of men.  The ending is a bit talkative and Jessica ending up with Walter is a little trite but I’ll give the story some credit for interaction between Alan and Walter.  That portion is at least well written.  Well, all things considered I’ll go with a B-.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – The Killer Shrews – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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Killer Shrews: Schlock at its finest. Poor special effects, hackneyed plot and ham acting. They used hand puppets of the giant killer shrews for up-close shots. They looked like an oversize stuffed mouse with chopstick fangs glued in and black ping pong balls for eyes. For action sequences, they used coon hounds with carpet and fur attached to them and never shot them close up. The coon hound shrews supposedly ate the token Black man in the movie, which would be protested today.

 

The premise is that a Swedish scientist was working on the then threatened coming food apocalypse. He had a Hispanic servant (Alfredo de Soto; more racist tokenism), a cowardly assistant (played by Gunsmoke’s Festus, Ken Curtis, who was an investor in the film and also a fine western actor and amazingly good singer), a beautiful Swedish daughter (played by the attractive Swedish actress Ingrid Goude) and an American assistant scientist played by Gordon McLendon. They are on an isolated island somewhere in the Atlantic hurricane zone so they can be left alone, especially by federal inspectors. James Best (most famous for playing Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrain on Dukes of Hazzard) plays the captain of the small motor ship bringing them supplies. With him is the faithful Black actor Judge Henry Dupree who is his first mate and apparently engineer, playing the character Rook.

 

A hurricane is approaching, so they have to anchor in the protected harbor and wait it out before unloading. The captain goes ashore to meet with the scientists while Rook runs extra anchors and has to tie the boat to a tree ashore. The captain is met by Ken Curtis’ character who is armed and takes him to the residence. There he is told what all is happening, that the experiment went astray and they accidentally created giant killer shrews who must eat their body weight daily to survive, that other animal food is running out, that the shrews are mostly nocturnal and that they will eat humans with gusto.

 

Poor Rook is chased and run up a tree by the coon hound shrews and the effects are so poor you can see the lines pulling the tree down supposedly under Rook’s impressive weight to his doom of being eaten alive. The shrews then surround the residence like the Little Big Horn and try to get in to eat the humans. They dig through the adobe walls and have to be shot or burned. One grazes the assistant scientist’s leg and they therefore find out that the shrews are also deadly venomous, as he dies shortly thereafter. The Hispanic servant also dies from a shrew bite. The shrews make a very distinctive noise that sounds something like “aaawk-ch-ch-ch!”. The shrews are also enthusiastically cannibalistic and will eat any form of meat, including each other, to quell their ravenous appetites.

 

The surviving humans decide they must escape and create a human-powered tank made of barrels roped together. Ken Curtis refuses as he is deathly afraid of the shrews and stays behind. Creeping in the tank the Captain, the Scientist and his lovely daughter make it, barely, to the water where the shrews, who cannot swim, leave them and go back to eat Ken Curtis who, instead of camping out on the roof and safe for a couple of days until the shrews turn on each other, stupidly tried to run off through the woods and he suffers Rook’s fate. As the shrews take him down he screams like a 12 year old girl with a spider on her face. The survivors swim to the motor launch and the Scientist declares; “In twenty-four hours there will be only one shrew left on the island, and he will die of starvation.”

 

This movie and it’s double feature The Giant Gila Monster made a surprising amount of money on the drive-in circuit. Although they were both low budget and schlocky even for 1959, I enjoyed the two movies at the drive-in. An amazing fact is that James Best reprises his role as the captain in the remake “Return of the Killer Shrews” in 2012, which was mostly a mockumentary of the original with even worse special effects and played for laughs. I am probably one of the very few people who have seen both movies. It is also a break of 53 years between the original and the sequel. Has to be some kind of record.

07JUN2019 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Angelo Codevilla’s “The Way Out of Our Judicial Impasse is Through It

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Codevilla is making a bold statement.  He is basically saying Americans are going to have to defy Leftist judges.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/05/the-way-out-of-our-judicial-impasse-is-through-it/

Listen to what Codevilla says:

Defying the reach of a federal court ruling—even one of the Supreme Court’s, never mind that of a district court—is within everyone’s power. Alexander Hamilton had made that point in Federalist 78: the judiciary’s fundamental power is neither more nor less than the power to persuade. You may be otherwise persuaded. Hamilton is clear that there is no constitutional duty to obey the courts—certainly not on policy.

Andrew Jackson applied that principle even to the Supreme Court’s decision in the specific case of the Bank of the United States in 1832: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” There is no constitutional reason why any president, or governor, should forbear from carrying out a law or an executive decision just because a federal district judge’s opinion is that it violates some standard, The president or governor has his own opinion. In the final analysis, all depends on executive power, which, in turn, depends on popular support.

This is getting very close to revolt.  Looks like we are starting to see the mainstream Right testing the waters of the river that the Dissident Right crossed over through a few years ago.  With what is going on with abortion law in Alabama  and elsewhere how long before a Leftist judge says “Thou shalt not.” and some Governor says “In a pig’s eye!”  Without a doubt we live in interesting times.