A Fart That Your Brain Makes

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Mike Flanagan and a bunch of creature features (some of them hosted by Joe Bob Briggs).

WATCHERS III (1994)

There are four low budget horror films based on the Dean Koontz novel Watchers, and while none of them are a direct, faithful adaptation of the source material, they do all have the same set-up: a lab has conducted classified experiments for the government that has resulted in an ultra-smart Golden Retriever and a monstrous beast that is telepathically connected to the dog and driven to kill it. Something goes wrong, the dog and the monster both escape into the night, and the dog finds people who are willing to put their lives at risk to protect it from its monster nemesis. The scenario gets reset with each film. The first movie showed us the Golden Retriever and the OXCOM, or the Outside Experimental Combat Mammal, escaping from Banodyne Laboratories, with the dog being taken in by a character played by Corey Haim and given the name Furface. In the second movie, the dog and the creature called the Outsider are the result of Project Aesop at the Anodyne lab. When they get loose, the dog is taken in by a troubled Marine named Paul Ferguson (played by Marc Singer) and given the name Einstein.

I have watched these movies multiple times over the years and I was always under the impression that each one is entirely separate from the others. It took me thirty years to realize that Watchers III is actually a follow-up to Watchers II – and that realization took so long not just because the second movie had already conditioned me to think that each entry was going to be a reboot, but also because the continuity between the two movies is so bad. For one thing, Marc Singer has been replaced in the role of Paul Ferguson by Wings Hauser. While the character was a Captain in the Marines when we previously met him, here he’s a Major in the Army, with Delta Force background. Apparently, sometime after the triumphant ending of Watchers II, Ferguson was arrested and sent to a military prison, while Einstein was captured and sent back to Project Aesop. That’s where we find the characters, with no explanation, when this film begins – and also at Project Aesop HQ is the Outsider, looking completely different. (And much worse: this version of the monster has been described as a human-shaped cross between a frog and a turd.) The Outsider was definitely dead at the end of Watchers II, but this new, different Outsider is referred to as if it’s somehow the same one Ferguson has crossed paths with before.

Director Jeremy Stanford, writer Michael Palmer, and producers Luis Llosa and Roger Corman were not the slightest bit concerned with continuity, but they were on a mission to cash in on the success of the 1987 sci-fi action classic Predator – even though they were seven years late to the party. The second movie began with a pair of NSA agents entering the Project Aesop building, and the third movie begins with that exact same footage, even though those two characters were killed in Watchers II. The use of that stock footage was a classic move on the part of legendary, penny-pinching producer Corman. Here, the NSA agents have arrived to set up an air drop mission. Crates containing Einstein and the Outsider are loaded onto a plane so they can be dropped into the Matagalpan Jungle in Central America.

Then, Paul Ferguson is visited in prison by a NSA bigwig (Frank Novak) who tells him that the NSA has lost contact with a Central American outpost. Conducting a rescue mission would be out of bounds for the government... but not for a group of military prisoners. Ferguson is told to put together a team made of his fellow prisoners, and if their mission is successful they will be each be given an unconditional pardon, reassigned on active duty, and will receive the back pay they’d be owed during the time they lost behind bars. It’s a deal Ferguson can’t pass up. So, he and some convict cohorts (played by Gregory Scott Cummins, Daryl Roach, and John K. Linton) head off into the jungle, accompanied by a local woman named Gomez (Lolita Ronalds). 

After they roam around in the jungle for a while, they cross paths with Einstein, who is hanging out with a kid credited as Boy (Ider Cifuentes Martin), and figure out that the Outsider is stalking them. The monster then starts taking them out, one by one.

Roach’s character is a good guy, Cummins’ character is okay, but Linton’s character, named MacReady in homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing, is a scumbag who should have stayed behind bars. None of these characters, Ferguson included, are nearly as cool as anybody in Predator, and the movie has a whole lot less action than the ‘87 movie – which is to be expected, since the budget is substantially lower. So if you’ve ever wanted to watch a version of Predator that isn’t as fun or exciting, you can turn to Watchers III.

The movie doesn’t hold up very well, I find it to be rather dull these days, but I used to enjoy it a lot more. I clearly remember when this movie hit the shelves of a local video store, available to rent on VHS, when I was just ten years old. I had seen the previous movies, I had read the Koontz book, and I was hyped to check out this adaptation. When I was ten, I had fun watching it and thought it was pretty cool. Because of that viewing, I held on to a fondness for Watchers III for years.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (2023)

Genre filmmaker Mike Flanagan had a multi-year deal with the Netflix streaming service that resulted in the creation of several horror TV shows. The first, The Haunting of Hill House, was only loosely based on the Shirley Jackson novel.  The second, The Haunting of Bly Manor, drew inspiration from the works of Henry James, mixing the basics of one of the author's most famous stories, The Turn of the Screw, with ideas from several of his other stories. This approach was described as doing a "literary remix," and that’s the same approach Flanagan and his collaborators took to their Edgar Allan Poe-inspired series The Fall of the House of Usher, which was the last project Flanagan made for Netflix before moving over to a deal with Prime Video.

Moving Poe’s 1839 story into modern day, the series begins with attorney C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly) meeting with Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood), the corrupt CEO of Fortunato Pharmaceuticals and a man Dupin has trying to bring to justice for his unscrupulous dealings for decades, at Usher’s crumbling childhood home. Usher wants to give Dupin what he’s wanted for a long time: his confession. And he gradually confesses to some terrible things while also laying out his life story, which means we have flashbacks to various points in Usher’s life throughout the show’s eight episodes. Many of these flashbacks focus on how Usher and his sister Madeline took control of Fortunato in ‘79 into ‘80, but we also see a horrific event that occurred in their childhood.

Usher and Dupin’s first conversation reveals that Usher’s six children have all recently died – and the really fun thing about this series is that each episode shows us how a different person in the Usher family died. The first episode gives us the creepy end of Usher’s parents, and as the series plays out we also see the Poe-inspired fates of his offspring Prospero (Sauriyan Sapkota), Camille (Kate Siegel), Napoleon (Rahul Kohli), Victorine (T’Nia Miller), Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), and Frederick (Henry Thomas), along with a whole lot of other unlucky people along the way.

Whatever supernatural force is causing the Ushers to die off within a short span of time seems to be tied to a mysterious woman named Verna (Carla Gugino), who appears around each victim right before things go terribly wrong for them.

While Flanagan’s work tends to go with the “slow burn” style, he took this show as his opportunity to do something wild and blood-soaked. He described it as “aggressive and rock 'n roll and over the top and just violent and insane and horrific,” and for the most part, I think that’s a fitting description, even if his version of wild and rock 'n roll is tame compared to how others might use those terms. Some of Flanagan’s stuff has been too much of a slow burn for me, but there was never a moment when I wasn’t interested in the story Usher was telling me and fully invested in seeing how it was all going to play out. And all of the bloody deaths definitely helped the show hold my attention. For me, this was Flanagan’s best Netflix series since The Haunting of Hill House.

THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969) – hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on MonsterVision

I have always been fascinated by the idea of the Western genre being mixed with other genres, especially horror movies and creature features – so, of course, as soon as I heard that there was a 1969 movie that had cowboys sharing the screen with dinosaurs (better yet, stop-motion dinosaurs!), I was eager to see it. Directed by Jim O’Connolly from a screenplay crafted by William Bast, Julian More, and Willis H. O’Brien, The Valley of Gwangi did not disappoint. This movie delivered exactly what I hoped it would.

O’Brien was the genius responsible for the special effects that brought King Kong to the screen back in 1933, and he was inspired to make a “cowboys and dinosaurs” movie soon after, drawing inspiration from King Kong and the book The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The project (which was originally going by the title Valley of the Mists) was first announced in 1941 and O’Brien started planning the special effects. Unfortunately, it was set up at RKO Pictures, and they shut it down because they believed the public wasn’t interested in seeing dinosaur movies. How wrong they were. O’Brien kept trying to push the project into production as the 1940s went on, but it wasn’t to be. The movie didn’t get made until years after O’Brien died in 1962 – and when it was made, it was his protégé Ray Harryhausen who made it happen and created the awesome stop-motion effects.

The story is set in Mexico in the early 1900s. After breaking the heart of rodeo star T.J. Breckenridge (Gila Golan), cowboy Tuck Kirby (James Franciscus) has the audacity to come back into her life with an offer to buy her horse for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Tuck and T.J.’s reunion doesn’t go well, but he wins her way back into her heart when he saves a local kid named Lope (Curtis Arden) from getting killed by a bull. T.J. reveals that she plans to save her ailing rodeo show by showing off an extremely small miniature horse she recently found and named El Diablo. This little horse happens to be of the prehistoric species Eohippus, which a paleontologist Tuck crossed paths with, Professor Horace Bromley (Laurence Naismith), dug up evidence of nearby. When Bromley finds out about the living Eohippus, the situation spirals out of control.

Bromley orchestrates the theft of El Diablo so he can set the little horse loose and follow it back to the valley it came from, in hopes of finding more prehistoric creatures. He certainly does. When Bromley follows the horse into the area locals call the Forbidden Valley, with Tuck, T.J., and rodeo riders close behind, he finds that this area is home to multiple surviving species of dinosaur: Pteranodon, Ornithomimus, Styracosaurus, and an Allosaurus that happens to be the extremely dangerous Gwangi of the title. The King Kong influence really comes into play when the rodeo riders capture Gwangi and put him on public display. As you would expect, things go terribly wrong.

The Valley of Gwangi is a really fun movie that features some great stop-motion special effects – and there’s just something really cool to me about the visual of cowboys sharing the screen with monstrous creatures.

Drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs hosted a screening of The Valley of Gwangi on his show MonsterVision back on August 16, 1996 – a night when he was feeling slower than usual because it was the time of year when it gets really hot in his home state of Texas. That gives him the opportunity to go on a comedic rant about the “suburban brain damage” that’s caused by swimming pools, as he thinks Texans were not meant to swim. With that rant out of the way, he puts his focus on the goofy and classic The Valley of Gwangi, a movie he loves because it’s both “incredibly stupid and incredibly entertaining.” 

During his hosting segments, Joe Bob nitpicks the Harryhausen effects, points out some questionable dialogue, sides with the more troublesome characters because otherwise the story wouldn’t get to the dinosaur action, hates on that kid Lope, assumes that the movie would have had some bare breasts in it if it had been made in the ‘70s instead of in ‘69, and brushes off a section of the running time that he describes as “plot plot plot, complicate the story, boring part in the middle where they ride around on horses and fight a lot.” Even with all the nitpicking he does, he says he still thinks this movie is better than Jurassic Park. 

Those would be fighting words for a lot of people of my generation, but I don’t have any strong allegiance to Jurassic Park – and actually, yeah, on most days I would probably rather watch The Valley of Gwangi.

THEM! (1954) – hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on MonsterVision

Joe Bob had a great double feature for his viewers that August ‘96 night, as The Valley of Gwangi was followed by the 1954 nuclear monster movie Them! Even Joe Bob had to admit that it was a great night – with the caveat that you’ve got to get into the spirit of these movies, released back when “people were stupider.”

Directed by Gordon Douglas from a screenplay Ted Sherdeman and Russell Hughes, based on an original story by George Worthing Yates, Them! gets started with the sight of a catatonic little girl wandering through the New Mexico desert. While trying to find her parents, the police find the travel trailer she was riding in – and it has been destroyed. Also destroyed is a nearby store, with the owner dead on the scene. Then a police officer gets killed by some kind of monstrous creature, but Douglas doesn’t let us see what has him so terrified before he’s killed. The corpses of the victims have a whole lot of crushed and broken bones, and they’ve been pumped full of formic acid. When the little girl gets a sniff of formic acid, she breaks out of her catatonia and starts yelling “Them!” over and over. That’s how we get our title.

The New Mexico police, primarily represented by Sergeant Ben Peterson (James Whitmore),  are joined in the investigation by FBI Agent Robert Graham (James Arness) and father-and-daughter myrmecologists Harold and Pat Medford of the USDA (Edmund Gwenn and Joan Weldon). Prints found at the crime scenes have the Medfords speculating that there are giant ants roaming the countryside – and soon enough, we have giant ants crawling across the screen. It seems ants have been mutated by radiation from the atomic bomb test set off in the desert back in 1945 and have turned carnivorous because there’s not enough food for them.

So these irradiated ants have to be eradicated, and the way these ants are dealt with is awesome to watch, especially to see these things in a ‘50s movie: cyanide bombs are tossed, bazookas are fired, and, best of all, ants are roasted with flamethrowers. One really cool sequence has gas mask-wearing, flamethrower-toting characters exploring the giant ants’ underground tunnels. Unfortunately for the characters, the Queen ants escape before the nest is destroyed – but that’s a good turn of events for the viewer, because it leads to more action. The ants are tracked to Brownsville, Texas, then to a freighter that departed from Acapulco, Mexico, and finally to the tunnels beneath Los Angeles.

Them! is a really good movie, one of the best of the mutant monster movies that came out of the ‘50s. During his hosting segments, Joe Bob made the case that James Arness steals the movie, points out what he thinks is Joan Weldon’s one great line (and feels that her character mostly a piece of furniture otherwise), hypes up a  Fess Parker cameo, and says he enjoys the fact that the movie doesn’t leave out a single plot point. We see every step of the characters figuring out what’s going on with the ants. He points out the obligatory scene where they go to Washington, D.C. and explain their scientific theories to the President. Such a scene may be boring now, but in the ‘50s these “scientists say it could happen” scenes made the movies even scarier to the audience.

Joe Bob also spends some time making fun of the giant ant special effects, letting viewers know it’s going to be “a hoot” when they show up. In the ‘50s people, screamed when these things came up on the screen. They look hokey now, but people really got scared by these giant ants with rubber tentacles in 1954. Joe Bob says the first time he saw the first giant ant in this movie, he was on the floor laughing at it.

BEWARE! THE BLOB (1972)

I had been watching the 1958 sci-fi horror classic The Blob since I was a little kid in the late ‘80s, since around the same time that the awesome 1988 remake was released. I was aware that a sequel – sometimes called Beware! The Blob, sometimes called Son of the Blob – had been released in the decades between those two movies, but it never crossed my path... until the mid-1990s, when a new video store opened in my hometown. This was the same store that finally brought Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and The Last House on the Left into my life, and they also had a copy of Beware! The Blob on VHS. I snatched it up and rented it, just like I did with those George A. Romero and Wes Craven movies the moment I saw them stocked on the store’s shelves. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up liking this Blob sequel nearly as much as I did those Romero and Craven movies.

Directed by Larry Hagman (yes, the actor who’s best known for playing J.R. Ewing on Dallas and Major Anthony Nelson on I Dream of Jeannie) from a screenplay that was assembled by Anthony Harris, Jack Woods, Richard Clair, and Jack H. Harris, this Blob sequel lets you know it’s going to be an odd one as soon as the opening title sequence starts, playing out over images of a kitten frolicking in the grass. This kitten is outside the home of oil pipeline engineer Chester (Godfrey Cambridge) who has been working on “a pipeline nobody wants” in the North Pole and has returned with a frozen sample of the blob, which was dumped at the Pole at the end of the original movie. His wife (Marlene Clark) doesn’t appreciate that he’s keeping this frozen sample in their freezer, although she doesn’t mind that he hangs out in a camping tent that he has put up in their living room. The sample is taken out of the freezer, thaws, and starts crawling around once again, absorbing every living thing it touches – including Chester, who is shown watching The Blob on TV before the blob drops on his head.

The nonsensical ride continues from there, as the blob starts creeping, leaping, gliding, and sliding its way into Los Angeles. Along the way, we see Dick Van Patten as a Scoutmaster, Cindy Williams as a hippie (that’s how her character is credited), Gerrit Graham as a man in an ape suit, Burgess Meredith as an old hobo (yep, that’s his credit), Del Close (who had a memorable role in the '88 film) as a hobo wearing an eyepatch, Carol Lynley as a blob victim, and more. The lead characters are Lisa (Gwynne Gilford) and her boyfriend Bobby (Robert Walker). Lisa witnesses the blob earlier on – while it’s consuming Chester, in fact – but has difficultly convincing anyone, including Bobby, that she actually saw what she saw. They’ll come to believe her eventually, after more people have been consumed.

Beware! The Blob is a really weird, clunky movie. It has an irreverent sense of humor about a lot of things (as evident from the fact that The Blob is even shown on a TV in its own sequel), but also expects you to be unnerved when people are in danger from the blob. It can be difficult to watch at times because it gets carried away giving screen time to random, dopey characters (how about the guy who takes a bath while wearing a fez and holding his dog?), but it also has its moments. One of the best scenes has the blob coming up through a sink drain while a person is getting their hair washed in a barber shop.

Even if you love The Blob (as I do) and its remake (as I do), you might not like Beware! The Blob. Sure, you get to see the blob in action again, but there is an awkward movie wrapped around those moments. You have to get through some cringe-inducing stuff to get to the blob. I brave my way through it from time to time, but never end up enjoying the movie as much as I hope to.

That said, if you’re nostalgic for the 1970s, this is a great movie to check out, because it is intensely ‘70s, very much of its time.