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February 21, 2006

THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD

The Monster That Challenged The WorldYour February RMC II Results are in!

Tagline: "Crawling up from the depths... to terrify and torture!"

The Preshow Entertainment was Gilbert Gottfried doing stand up on a Comedy Central show from a few years back. This wasn't his best stuff, but it was still funny ("What does Jesus Christ put on his dashboard?").

THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD was, as RMCer Jackson pointed out, a misnomer. First off, there was more than one monster. Second (off), he (she, actually, unless the male laid eggs, which I suppose is possible) didn't as much challenge the world as inconvenience it. That said, I really enjoyed this movie.

Made the year I was born, which makes it a talkie, TMTCTW is set apart from the spate of radioactive/giant animals/sci-fi thrillers of that time because it actually had some decent ideas behind it. A small earthquake rattles the Salton Sea, and unbeknown to the navy base there, it has unleashed a sea monster (a giant mollusk, really). But they find out soon enough when one of their parachutists, on an exercise, lands in the water. The retrieval boat goes after him, and when he doesn't come up, a diver goes in the water. Then, the other navyman in the boat, waiting for the diver, looks up, as the shadow of the monster creeps up his body.

Newbie base commander John Twillinger, or "Twill" (westerns actor Tim Holt in one of his final and fattest roles) is in charge of the missing men. When they discover the parachutist, all his blood is drained (there's also "You Can't Do That On Television" slime that the monster left behind). They close the beaches, yet the diner waitress' rebellious daughter Jody and her navyman boyfriend Morty go for a swim. And never return.

Meanwhile, Twill finds time to ask out his hot secretary (a widow with a young girl), and somehow, amid all this, they go on a date to Mexicali.

Thanks to director Arnold Laven (MANNIX AND HILL STREET BLUES!!!), this movie had a wonderful honesty to it (hey, maybe the writers had something to do with that too?). It wasn't flashy. It knew what it was. It didn't try and be more than that. And although people talked in movie dialogue, the essence was real. And plot-wise, they took something that could have been silly and made a real story. Even the way they beat the monster was smart, although unfortunately, not very thrilling. And I liked the monster. It wasn't a Predator or an Alien. It didn't even look scary (when he moved his pincers, he appeared to be laughing). But it was a threat to mankind (if they get out of the sea through the underground river, they'll first kill all the sea life, then come on land...), and they had to take care of it.

Hans Conried - RMC Hero
I taped this movie because, well, I'm taping everything Hans Conried is in. Ever since I saw him play Mr. Livermore on an episode of I LOVE LUCY a few years ago. Since then, I've taped him on LAVERNE AND SHIRLEY, THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES and two episodes of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. And a lot of movies.

Now, here's what an idiot I am. I forgot I taped this movie, and it was on a few months ago, so I watched it. So I saw it twice in 3 months. But watching it a second time made me realize- Oh! This is JAWS!

And it was. The parachutist's death by unseen monster is Chrissie's death, the beaches closed with wooded signs being nailed into the sand, Twill is Chief Brody, the mother of the teen who died is Alex Kintner's mother, Twill going out with a diver to explore the sea is JAWS' Ben Gardiner's boat scene, and there's even a scene where someone says they can't close the beach with all those people on it.

As mentioned, we had a lot of fun watching this movie. Especially the drinking game. They mention "Salton Sea" a whole lot. It's even in the telephone exchanges (Salton Sea 243). Let's just say that we went through a lot of soda.


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February 02, 2006

THINK BIG

Think Big coverYour February 2006 Random Movie Club Results Are In!

TAGLINE: All they had was strength, determination, and a lucky chicken bone. Brains aren't everything.

The Preshow Entertainment was SYLVESTER AND TWEETY cartoons. We weren't really interested, so we talked for 40 minutes as they played. I was never a big S & T fan, and I guess I'm still not.

The movie selected was yet again a film unavailable on DVD. Then again, it's not like Criterion is chomping at the bit to do a makeover on it. Barely released in 1990, we're talking THINK BIG. Where do I begin?

I'll start with the cast and just maybe you'll get the idea. The leads are David Paul and Peter Paul, a/k/a The Barbarian Brothers (twin wrestlers in the 1980s), TV's Ari Meyers (KATE AND ALLIE), TV's Peter Lupus (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE), TV's Claudia Christian (BABYLON 5), TV's Richard Moll (NIGHT COURT), Richard Kiel ("Jaws" in two James Bond movies, and head honcho Kanamit in the famous TWILIGHT ZONE episode "To Serve Man"), Martin Mull (an ARISTOCRAT!), Michael Winslow (of POLICE ACADEMY funny noise guy fame), and David Carradine (who when making THINK BIG must have muttered under his breath "Kill me, vol. 1").

It's a D-List bad, bad, bad, bad world as Martin Mull tries to sell an invention created by teen genius Holly Sherwood (Ari Meyers)- a remote control that can make anything electric go off or on by pressing a series of numbers (that somehow the user always knows, even when they've never used it) to bad guys, (proving it works by stopping the pacemaker of the Secretary of State)...but the device doesn't work, so the bad guys Mull it over and give him 2 days to make it work...meanwhile, truckers/lovable morons Victor and Rafe (The Barbarian Brothers) only have one payment left before they own their truck, but repo man ("...and David Carradine as 'Sweeney' ") wants it now because their last payment is late, however he gives them 2 days to make the payment anyway. So...

The pumped-up-'80s-torn-shirt-wearing-Macy's- Thanksgiving Day-balloon-looking -trucker brothers decide to take the job of transporting toxic waste from Billings, Montana to San Pedro, California, and they have, yep, 2 days to do it (in case we forgot, their boss Thornton, a hair-wearing Richard Moll, put an actual countdown clock on the truck's dash).

In the '80s/early '90s, I used to meet with friends every Friday evening and see a movie in Times Square that started at midnight. One night, after seeing TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, four of us went to the Cine 1 and 2, which was a 24 hour theater (no, not one of those, though I bet it was in the '70s). At 2:30am, we watched HARD TO KILL. Afterwards, at 4am-ish, we went into the other auditorium and saw THINK BIG. We were captivated. Just watching the names in the titles was getting us excited. We giggled like schoolgirls as we watched the movie among the sleeping homeless men who used the theater as a place to spend the night (for $6).

Off story: At 6am, we went back to one of our apartments to watch THUNDERBALL, PENN & TELLER'S INVISIBLE THREAD, and some SUPERMAN cartoons. Then back to Times Square at noon for the double feature of TRANSYLVANIA TWIST (Robert Vaughn) and NIGHT GAME (Roy Scheider), food at B-B-Q, a nap, then back to Times Square for a 10pm show of THE FORBIDDEN DANCE and then across the street to the midnight show of LAMBADA. Life was so perfect back then. And I used shorter sentences, too.

Anyway, back to THINK BIG. It's not a good movie, but I can't say it's a bad movie either. I mean, if you're looking for a harmless, sometimes even charming movie as big and dumb as its leads, this is for you. The jokes are pretty lame, although we did enjoy when one of the brothers (doesn't matter which) and henchman Irving (giant Richard Kiel) are holding crowbars, ready to fight. They swing, hitting each other's crowbars. The brother says, "Let's not do that again!" and Richard Kiel says, "Yeah. That really hurt." So they drop their crowbars and fight. Act now and you also get a fight in an airport which no one in the airport seems to notice, words on the computer screens too small for us to read, a theme song written and performed by The Barbarian Brothers, and the chant the brothers do to start their truck:

Rabbit rabbit treat 'em good
Lucky lucky knock on wood
Yogi Berra, Tug McGraw
Start 'er up, kumbaya!!!

The feature debut of director Jon Turtletaub (he did the wonderful DISNEY'S THE KID and now doing the I'm-gonna-guess not so wonderful NATIONAL TREASURE 2), and written by (get this) five writers, THINK BIG is a stupid little movie that's fun to watch with a bunch of people in the room. Sadly, we were shy about 10 people.

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