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I am a little worn out from doing my podcast earlier today and then uploading some tunes to use for this post to acknowledge the birthday of Jimmy Page, a true uranium embued musician if there ever was one. Since I am really worn out I am not going to say much about a man whom I could say way too much easily. Had the fortune to see him twice in concert, once with Led Zeppelin. Front row even. Am I blessed or what. Posting a video here. No shortage of Zep stuff on Youtube so I selected the live performance of Trampled Under Foot from Earl’s Court, in 1975. Also a few songs I uploaded to edublogs.tv. Some stuff you may not have heard. From The Firm, his one solo album called Outrider and the title song from the pretty decent Page/Plant solo effort called Walking Into Clarksdale. The few Page related articles I have done here are fairly popular in terms of traffic. My post on the Lucifer Rising Soundtrack has now become my most commented on post. Anyway, I am wiped out suddenly. Had bigger plans for this post. I made the entire podcast, edited it and uploaded it earlier and now want to relax. And in any case, there will always be more mention on Mr. Page here in the future.
I heard Brian Solomon’s podcast (Vaultcast) over at The Vault of Horror last night and it seemed to be the impetus I have needed to get my podcast back into gear. I am sort of winging it here. I keep babbling about only doing ten minute podcasts and I wind up doing a twenty one while explaining why a ten minute one is better. Am hosting locally at my service and so should not be any major issues with it streaming. As always I also put up a player linked to edublogs.tv s that is one site is slow the other may play better. Did it all pretty quick this time as I have been playing with the software for other things (beatcasts and making samples) so I was not as lost as before. Knew what the buttons did this time. Truly hope they are more regular than before. Will probably have it in a Viddler widget in the side bar soon so it is always available.If you have twenty minutes to kill give it a listen and let me know what you think.
THE URANIUM CAFE PODCAST -EPISODE 04
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1970/Director: Roy Ward Baker/Writers: Anthony Hinds as John Elder
Cast: Christopher Lee, Dennis Waterman, Jenny Hanley, Christopher Matthews, Patrick Troughton, Michael Gwynn, Michael Ripper, Wendy Hamilton, Anouska Hempel
For people who say that this is the worst Hammer Dracula film ever made they must have stopped at this 1970 feature and never checked out Dracula A.D. 1972 and then The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the last of the Hammer Dracula features. This is the last of the Hammer series to feature the Count in a Gothic setting however. In this one the Count is back in Transylvania and the continuity the series had followed fairly well over the last three films (Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and Taste the Blood of Dracula) is jarred by the fact that at the end of Taste the Count is left a pile of powdery, desiccated blood in London. Scars does have the Count start off as powdery blood but there are some gaps here that leave the last story dangling. How did the powdered blood get to Translyvania and into Dracual’s secure chamber, accessable only from the castle wall overlooking a steep cliff? Earlier features spent a good portion of the early story explaing how Dracula returns from the dead but this one sort of bypasses all that and simply has a bat vomit blood on the red powder. Why? Where did the blood gorged bat come from and how did Dracula control it? We will never know. The film was shot on a skimpy budget and shot quickly. It was released, sometimes on a double bill with Horror of Frankenstein, only a few months after Taste the Blood of Dracula. It was director Roy Ward Baker’s first stab at a Gothic film and the absence of such maestros of the style like Terence Fisher or Freddie Francis is sorely felt. But to be honest Ward does the best he can with a script that offers very little in the way of something new to add to the series and a small budget and tight schedule. He just does not have the flair that Terence Fisher had but those are pretty big shoes to try and fill in the first place.
1967/Director: Terence Fisher/Writer: Anthony Hinds
Cast: Peter Cushing, Susan Denberg, Thorley Walters, Robert Morris, Duncan Lamont
Frankenstein Created Woman is the fourth of the Hammer Frankenstein films and sees the return of Terence fisher as director after a brief absence from the helm while Freddie Francis directed The Evil of Frankenstein. Anthony Hinds is back as script writer under the familiar pseudonym John Elder. We will get to The Evil of Frankenstein another day as I will eventually get all the Hammer Frankenstein efforts reviewed then move on to the Dracula films. But I did want to clear something up that puzzled me for a while regarding the film Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. In that film I made the error of stating in my review of that film that Baron Frankenstein shows the damage he received at the end of Frankenstein Must Be destroyed. I was recalling that from memory and I am far from an expert on the films but it would seem that in Frankenstein Created Woman Frankenstein already shows some damage to his hands. We may infer from this that the injuries were received at the end of 1964’s The Evil of Frankenstein when the castle burns down and then explodes (like in the James Whale version) though it not shown or explained. Anyway, I always wondered about his hands in that film and need to go back and rewatch Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, a fine Terence fisher film as well, and see if his hands are gloved in that one.
A new Beatcast with samples from the film Sorority Girl. I have struggled with this tune more than any others so far and am not happy with it. It is a bit muddy and cluttered but I have cleaned it up as much as I am going to. Lost all the samples I made from the film on my hard drive somehow and had to get them all back from the AVI file. The Sony Acid 6 program could not locate them on the disk and it was a hassle to get them back but in the end they sounded better anyway. This tune was an early experiment and so suffered from me lumping all sorts of sounds into the mix that were hard to get off later. Still want to do some tunes with myself doing some vocals and riffs on my guitar collection here. Just a lot of work to do this sort of straight forward prerecorded loop things much less create all the loops and samples from my own playing. Crazy but it is coming eventually. Another mix version of That’s All I Need, with samples from Teenage Werewolf, coming up in a few posts. Hope somebody out there likes this strange creature. Enjoy.
LOOK AT YOUR HAIR – REMIX O3
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2009/Director: Quentin Tarantino/Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl
I have to admit that I really did not enjoy this Quentin Tarantino film at all but I really, really wanted to. I waited for this with high expectations. In fact I still want to be able to write something about it and sound like I am one of the special people (one of the many people) who got the film’s ‘message’ and consider it to be Taratino’s best work to date. I read that the film got an eight minute standing ovation at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. From me it got shut off wit my remote and finished a couple nights later out of a sense of obligation (maybe to just write something abut it here, the worst reason to watch a film maybe) more than a passion to see the rest of the story. And while I am at it I will have to say I was let down, though much less so, with his Grindhouse Death Proof feature as well. The last thing I liked by the guy was Jackie Brown and just feel he has lost his once marvelous mojo since that film. I will be direct. Inglourious Basterds had too much banter and not enough gutsy action in it for me. Sure Tarantino could once create riveting dialog about Quarter Pounders in France but the dialogs in Basterds, a script he reportedly worked on for nearly a decade, simply drug on and on and lacked any of the wit and humor one watches his earlier films over and over for.
I really had my hopes for this film and so I probably am all the more miserable for having them dashed so unexpectedly. I had been reading about Tarantino doing a WW II combat film loosely based on The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare for a couple years now and could hardly wait. I imagined all the cool dialog and character conflicts and humor that such a story could allow but I also pictured actual combat. Guns shooting people. Of course that does happen here and there for tortuously brief moments but the actual combat and battles seems to be done with sly innuendos and witty jabs over the dinner table than in a battle field or shell blasted side-street somewhere. At nearly three hours long I kept losing interest in the characters. Brad Pitt as Tennessee born Lt. Aldo Raine (maybe a play on action character actor Aldo Ray) is the leader of the Basterds which is a group of specially trained commandos that have been raising hell behind enemy lines with the Nazis since the early days of the war. I am not sure how I feel about the idea that the group is made up solely of Jews, except for Raine, bent on revenge and terror. I do not see it as remotely necessary to make the group all Jewish and if there is some message here I missed it. I also do not like the way the Basterds simply come into existence with little explanation of who they are as individuals. In fact the Basterds all but vanish from the middle part of the story while a series of painfully long and drawn scenes occur one after the other in restaurants and coffee shops between various Nazis and French citizens. And to add to the agony that the majority of the dialog occurs in German and French. That is okay for the most part but well over half of the dialog in the film is in French or German and the puns and clever Tarantino phrases that make the scenes in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill quotable and priceless are all lost here. There is, for an example, a scene of a group of spies in a tavern who have as their guest an uninvited SS officer who causes stress levels among the group to jump off of the chart. The problem is not that the dialog here is in another language than English but that it goes on for too damned long and when things finally erupted in gunfire I was in a state where I just did not care.
Some people have said the film was too violent but I feel it was not violent enough. There is not enough action and mayhem to make up for the long attempts at Tarantinoesque banter in German or French. While actor Christoph Waltz is simply great as the Jew Hunting Nazi Col. Landa I just was not excited by any of the other character’s or the actors performances. In particular I was utterly bored by Brad Pitt’s weary performance. He is one of my favorite actors and I was picturing some sort of Lee Marvin type character here and it was maybe the worst performance of this fine actor’s career. And like the joke from Annie Hall about the bad food at some restaurant in the Catskills (paraphrased): A: The food here is so bad. B: Yes. And such small portions. I did not like his performance and he was simply not on the screen enough. I though the film was about him and his elite squad of killer Jews but they the people one sees the least. Eli Roth as the baseball bat welding ‘Jew Bear’ is goofy at best. Definitely not imposing or larger than life. Tarantino has said that this was actually a Spaghetti Western with a WW II backdrop. Well crap man, just make a Spaghetti Western then. Or maybe not. Why muck that classic genre up as well. What the hell happened here? I wanted to see Nazis being blasted with a Tommy Gun and Panzer tanks terrorizing tough talking G.I.s from Brooklyn, instead I get to see Nazi’s put out cigarettes in cheese cake and wax philosophically about rats and squirrels. Hey, lots of people like this one. I would, and have, watched many previous Tarantino effort more than once. Including Death Trap. Hell I love that scene where that gal’s leg soars through the night sky. But, and say this with regret, this is one Tarantino film that I will not watch again. Am I saying that it is totally terrible film and not worth a watching? No way and let me clear on that point before shifting gears for a bit. It is, in the end, a Tarantino film and even a bad Tarantino film is better than most other films coming out of either Hollywood of the foreign market these days. And in the end will I probably give the film another go someday… yea I probably will. I am still in the bitter let down phase right now. Like the trusting girl who has sworn off men after she finds her boyfriend in bed with her best friend. But eventually we all regain some faith in men, humanity and Quentin. My opnion is just that, my opinion and is not the final word on anything.
But there are a couple other war dramas I have seen more than a couple times and will probably see again. These films may have inspired Tarantino’s war drama but his story falls way short of at least two of these great war epics, The Dirty Dozen and Iron Cross. The third film is not a great film but is notable in that it was the inspiration for the title of Tarantino’s dreary adventure. That film is called, with proper spelling, The Inglorious Bastards. Lets take a brief look at those films before leaving this subject behind. At the end of the article I hope I will have something positive to say about Inglourious Basterds. I may just need some time to reflect while saying something about these other films.
The Café reached it 200th post before the end of the year, which was something I was hoping for. I know some other bloggers who started out abut the same time I did have passed me up in sheer terms of post numbers. I had hoped I would be closer to 300 now than 200 but given some situations it seems I am lucky to have reached this amount even. As people may or may not know I live and work in China and therefore blog from here. Not the easiest country in the world to blog from. My other site Necrotic Cinema, which focuses on newer horror films, simply died after Blogger was yet again blocked here. I maintain that site from a VPN proxy now. I had loads of hosting issues that almost made me give it all up more than once. I had to change hosting providers and my URL. My site was hacked. Bandwidth and storage became problems. I now pay more per year than I want to admit too and do it with Chinese RMB. I think the rate right now is around 7 RMB to one American dollar. If you’re traveling to China and spending the dollars you made in USA that is sweet. If you’re in China paying for services in the US it blows big time.
But I am happy with the way things are for now. I love the way the site looks. My traffic is around 1500 to 1800 visitors a day and it’s more than I thought I would have at this time. I get very comments but I can tell by my stats I have good traffic and that they like to look at pictures of sexy girls more than read studies of K. Gordon Murray or Al Adamson. My most visited post is my tribute to Julie Newmar which I wrote off the top of my head. So I am giving my fans what they want with this 2ooth post with a chesty picture of Hammer gal Madeline Smith. I have tons of stuff to report and comment on. New Podcasts and Beatcasts in the works and who knows what else. Barring any unforeseen disasters with my hosting service or my ailing Lenonvo PC the Café will continue to churn out the high quality posts that it has come to be known and revered for in horror circles all over the world (that last part I sort of made up but it sounds great). Thanks to every one who helped me out in hard times and to any one who visited the site more than once. Now I am back to working on my slightly too long Inglourious Basterds post.
Bill D. Courtney aka Uranium Willy
I am a little more than half way through one of my long posts right now and need a break and need to keep some posts coming. So time for some eye candy and a return to my Girls With Guns fetish. It has been a while since I did a Girls With guns post and felt it was about time to get back into it. I have my first two original GWG posts listed in my sidebar under my pages section. GWG 02 is my award winning Asian Girls themed post featuring loads of Asian DVD covers of the CAT III variety. These two posts wound up as pages when I moved all my posts over from a previous URL. Guess I will make GWG 03 and 04 pages eventually. After I get these up I will get back to my post on Inglourious Basterds and comparing it with three other WWII films. That should be done by tomorrow I hope. For now lets check out this new collection of hot babes with big bad guns.
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