shadowkat | Day #4 of the 30 Day Film Challenge

I saw this prompt and thought, "let Shadowkat take a movie with 7 and then take another number." Yep, most of the movie titles with numbers pick seven.

How about a not great movie for a change? Five Weeks in a Balloon? Patterned after that other 19th-century-travel-romp movie with a number in the title that someone else can take, I thought it was terrible, but critics seemed to have thought it was at least okay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R_nLE33XWc

Edited 2020-09-03 23:22 (UTC)

Well, when I initially saw the prompt...I thought, I have to find a movie I like and all I could come with is movies I really hate. So I googled, and voila 7.

Interesting that you thought that I'd take a movie with 7. 7 is my favorite number. There's just something fascinating about it.

Also, you could do this meme on the number 7 alone...it's ridiculous really. (I came very very close to picking movies with "One" in them. But it felt like cheating and I didn't do it for the same reason I didn't pick one for song with a number in it. Also not white for color. But other's should go for it. Just my particular weirdness.)

That's an entertaining trailer. Ah Irwin Allen - he did a lot of B disaster and adventure films in the 1950s and 60s. Also Fabian...Red Buttons, and sigh, Barbara Eden. Women never fared well in these things, always camera pretty, always stupid.

Brad Pitt is really, really good in this movie. He's trying and failing to keep himself centered in the middle of all this horror and you're afraid he's going to fall off the edge.

Who knew Kevin Spacey could be so creepy?

< strangled laughter >

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Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit), dir. by Roy Ward Baker (1967)

Third, and unquestionably best, movie featuring redoubtable British scientist Bernard Quatermass, as he once again protects the world from potentially dangerous extraterrestrial phenomena.

This was a rare foray into science fiction for Hammer studios, but it still managed to elicit chills, as an excavation project at a London subway finds something ancient and inhuman--and waiting to be revived.

Hammer veteran Andrew Kier is a 1000% improvement as Quatermass (over gravel-voiced Yank Brian Donleavy in the first two movies), and a host of great British character actors (led by Barbara Shelley) lend top support. SFX are.... pretty crappy, but the screenplay by series creator Nigel Kneale never talks down to the audience, and the mass freak out finale is still pretty amazing, even after 50 years.

Proto X-Files? Could be! Highly recommended.

https://youtu.be/v5xPvFjPhkQ

Edited 2020-09-04 00:13 (UTC)

Yeah, that was I think David Fincher's first film? Pitt was excellent in it. (I actually preferred Pit in this film to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.). As was Spacey, although now that I think about it - Spacey's best roles were creepy ones. He was very good at playing creepy villains.

Ah, you and cactus watcher are going for the obscure B movies..from the 1950s era. Hammer and cactus with Irwin Allen.

I've never heard of this one. (Actually haven't heard of either.) Looks interesting, if bizzare. The trailer is kind of head-ache inducing but entertaining. LOL!

The Quatermass stories were originally TV series by Nigel Kneale. The first three were on the BBC in the 1950s, and there was a final belated story on ITV at the end of the seventies. The first three were also remade by Hammer as cinema films.

Big influence on Doctor Who, especially on the Pertwee period, they're also notorious for having a different actor as Quatermass in all four stories.

I was expecting you to start of with:"cjl is writing about Quatermass? Nobody in the States knows about Quatermass!"

I'd be curious to see the original two TV series from the fifties (if only to scrub Brian Donleavy's Broderick Crawford impression out of my head); can't imagine where I would find them, though.

Except with the way technology is today? It's hardly surprising - we can get our hands on all sorts of obscure cultural items. I mean honestly? I have an American friend (New Yorker born and raised, three-four years younger than me) on FB who told me that if I ever wanted to get into Classic Who - she can direct to the best episodes in its entire history. And where to find them. [I had to restrain myself from telling her - that I've a lot of people of DW that can do the same thing.]

If it's been recorded? You can find it.

Edited 2020-09-04 15:43 (UTC)

I have all the surviving Quatermass shows on DVD. The first series, The Quatermass Experiment, was made at a point when TV shows were broadcast live and could only be recorded by a crude method involving literally pointing a cine camera at a monitor. Only the first two episodes were saved as the quality was too poor - much of the second episode features an unplanned "alien monster" appearance due to an insect crawling across the cine camera lens. Quatermass II, Quatermass and the Pit, and the final story, titled simply Quatermass, have been released on DVD in Region 2 - I don't know about Region 1 or if they're available legally on any US streaming services.

As I discovered several years back - apparently R2 can be changed to R1. A friend from Austria was able to send me DVD's of "Misfits" that at that time was only on R2. But this way back around 2009 or thereabouts. And I don't know how she did it.

I also no longer have a DVR that can hook up to my television. I do know you can get R1 and R2 DVRS now. Also file sharing off the net.

If there's a will there's a way, apparently.

[ETA: LOL - about the insect crawling across the camera lense becoming an unplanned alien monster appearance.]

Edited 2020-09-04 16:07 (UTC)

I just found all six parts of the Quatermass II TV series on YouTube.

(Forget what I said before, ok?)

Mmm, I much liked Se7en and Brad Pitt sometimes really impresses me.

He's actually at his best when he's not playing the pretty boy or a specific romantic trope.

Let's stay with obscure, and go animated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv00WE6o1pI

One of my fave finds from recent years. Always a kick to just be randomly flipping through DVDs at the local Barnes & Noble and coming across something you 1) Never heard of, 2) that looks interesting, and 3) is on sale cheap because it's obviously obscure... and then it turns out to be simply marvelous.

Did I mention marvelous? Oh, good. :-)

Oh yes, I remember that one - haven't seen it, but remember it coming out. Burton's best films are his animated ones - I think it's because he likes the details. My brother had some friends who worked on the Nightmare Before Christmas with Burton - and said, it was a painful process. Every single movement, detail, had to be exact, and they would work 18-20 hour days getting it right. Burton liked the stop motion animation techniques of the 1950s and 40s, and sought to revitalize them and improve upon them. Starting with Nightmare, Corpse Bride, Coraline, and 9.

Cool choice, by the way. Perhaps I'll catch it some day.

The Michael York Three Musketeers. Love me some Richard Lester

Edited 2020-09-04 09:12 (UTC)

I came very close to picking that one myself. It's my favorite film version of the book. Oliver Reed - was my favorite Musketeer though. But it did have an interesting cast. Charlton Heston and Faye Dunaway playing the villains.

Not to mention Christopher Lee.

8 1/2. It's a terrible movie from the early sixties directed by Federico Fellini.

I have a pick coming up in "worst movie in a genre you love" category that also kicks Fellini around a little. I happen to like "8-1/2" a lot more than you do, but I can understand if you can't tolerate the massive doses of self-indulgence.

Very very self-indulgent. I know it's supposed to be his masterpiece but I would not watch it again. Ever.

Day #4 of the 30 Day Film Challenge

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