Category: Home Video

Cloak & Dagger was a 1984 movie that was released as part of a double feature with The Last Starfighter.  It was directed by Richard Franklin, and it was one of my favorite movies as a kid.

The movie is about a Davey Osborne played by Henry Jackson Thomas, Jr. (the E.T. kid) as he tries to deal with the loss of his mother, and he immerses himself in a spy role playing game that has a video game counterpart.  He also uses the main character from those games Jack Flack (Dabney Coleman) as his imaginary friend.  While doing a favor for the local game store owner Morris (William Forsythe) with his best friend Kim (Christina Nigra) he witnesses a murder by some spy thugs, and now he is playing Cloak & Dagger for real.

What I love about this movie is that Kim and Davey run around San Antonio all by themselves and no one seems to care.  They have their bus passes and giant walkie-talkies, so they can get around.  I also noticed that Louie Anderson plays a dirty cab driver in a bad part of San Antonio at midnight, and he refuses to give Davey a ride: shame on you Louie!

Even though this movie was mostly an excuse to sell Atari games like its double feature partner The Last Starfighter, they still made a pretty decent movie, and it holds up surprisingly well.  They all act fairly well and even though hiding secret plans in a video game is the worst plan ever, and Davey could have been thwarted a couple of times if the thugs would just lock their doors every now and then.  It is still a movie that I will watch with my kids someday.

I know nostalgia my be clouding my judgment, but it seems like in the 80’s that all kids movies didn’t have to be garbage like they are now, and I wish more people would take the time make some good ones.

Another day another MST3K movie to review, and this week I have duesy.  The Crawling Eye!  This is an older MST3K episode from when they adlibbed the jokes, so sometimes they aren’t the greatest, but the movie is so delightfully bad that you can make up your own jokes.

This movie takes place in a small town near Geneva where the local mountain the Trollenberg has been covered in fog and people have been going missing, or ending up beheaded when they try and climb the mountain.  It turns out that the fog is a localized atmosphere so these eye like alien creatures can breathe and I guess eat people’s heads, so don’t climb the Trollenberg.  But people keep climbing it and dying, and it turns out this has happened before in the Alps, so I guess we should have known better, but that would be boring movie.

This is one of those movies where everything is the right kind of bad: cheesy acting, horrible special effects, and an awful script, but they keep up the pace so it doesn’t get boring.  It is a shame that some of the jokes from Joel and the Bots don’t land, but this is before they hired TV’s Frank, so they were down a writer.

If you are by yourself this movie may not be as fun to watch since you will have to make up your own jokes, and you will have no one to tell them too so you will be talking to yourself, but if you are like me then that is a common occurrence anyway, so it was a fun movie to watch.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a 2011 film by Lasse Hallström (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape).  It was nominated for the Best Picture Golden Globe.  I don’t watch a lot of romantic comedies, but it was a nice change of pace.  It was not without issues however.

The movie starts off with the British fisheries office getting a question from a Yemeni sheikh (Amr Waked) about planting salmon in the Yemen river, which of course the fisheries office says is impossible due to the heat, but when the UK needs a feel good middle east story they tell them to at least try, so Doctor Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor) teams up with the sheikh’s account manager Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) to try and make it happen.

This movie mostly works because of how likable Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt are.  They make a perfect on screen couple and you just want them to get together, but here comes my nitpick with the story, Ewan’s character is married, but the movie makes you happy that he is leaving his wife behind even though she hasn’t done anything wrong, so it makes the romance leave a bad taste in my mouth.

The cinematography is wonderful in the movie.  With the vast Scotland and desert shots, and then all the wildlife imagery is fantastic.  It just makes this movie all the more visually inviting.  Lasse Hallström knows how to shoot a movie.

Like I said this movie works mostly due to how much you like the two leads, and the entire movie is so warm it is like curling up with a warm blanket, but it is shame the way they handle Dr. Jones wife it makes the whole movie feel a bit off.

“Manos” The Hands of Fate is considered among the worst movies of all time.  Most lists have it as number two below the classic Plan 9 from Outer Space, but you could defiantly make a case for Manos as number one.  Though number two may be a good descriptor for the movie.  It was written, directed, and stared in by Insurance and Manure salesman Harold P. Warren in 1966, but it was almost completely forgotten until MST3K found it, and it is one of their best episodes.

The movie starts with a young family on their way to a vacation at Valley Lodge, but they get lost and end up in the desert, so they ask to stay with the creepiest looking hillbilly of all time named Torgo, but at first he doesn’t want to let them because The Master doesn’t like dogs or kids (even though The Master has a dog), but he relents and lets them stay.  What will happen when The Master finds out?

You know your in for a good movie when the movie starts off with like fifteen minutes of camera out the window driving shots, and the characters have to beg to stay with a creepy guy who works for a person he calls “Master”.

Everything is bad about this movie.  There is no script and the “actors” have to repeat the dialog to fill time, and to call it dialog is an insult to writers everywhere.  The sets are someone’s small living room, and a place in the desert with pillars where The Master and his Wives live.

I hope Warren was a good Manure and Insurance salesmen because he was an awful director.  He never framed his shots, and anytime he showed the “actors'” faces they were bad close ups it is like he had never seen a movie before and he was making up something new as he went along.

It is safe to say the Joel and the Bots had a field day with this movie.  Every seen has so much to make fun of, and the movie is so strangely bad that you can take your eyes off of it much like a train crash.

“Manos” The Hands of Fate is so bad that I think everyone should watch it at least once it will make you appreciate how good most movies are.  This is streaming on Amazon Prime so there is no reason not to see it, other then fact it is really bad.