The Badge, the Bible, and Bigfoot (2019) Ashley Hays Wright

I fell asleep with the TV on. Woke up some time later to find this playing, The Badge, the Bible, and Bigfoot. I backed it up to I could see the whole thing. It was 66 minutes. It had five actors playing six characters.

The mayor and police chief of a small coastal town go into the woods looking for three missing girls. There've been a lot of bigfoot sightings, so they naturally assume they were abducted by bigfoot.

Made by the Wright family, Ashley Hays Wright, David Owen Wright and their daughters, Jaina, Scout and Cadence. They've made over 60 movies in less than seven years, most of them filmed around their home in Texas. They took a trip to Maine, apparently. 

We see shots of the town of Eastport. They have a town council meeting which is just a close-up up the police chief as he hears it announced that the police department is being disbanded to give more money to the fire department. The sheriff will take over policing the town. 

The sheriff was played by David Owen Wright who also played the police chief, but all the shots of him as sheriff are either from the neck down or with the brim of a large hat hiding his face and he speaks in an odd cartoon-like voice. They could have avoided all that and it might have been better if the sheriff had been the police chief's estranged, perhaps evil twin brother. 

The bigfoot was one of them in a gorilla costume, which is perhaps ironic since they made an anti-Halloween movie.

It started out looking pretty good with shots of the town, old wooden and brick buildings. The locations later in the film were less interesting. The editing became choppy toward the end.

And, I'll give away the ending here. Don't read if you want to be surprised.

It ends with the couple in their living room. The husband had fallen asleep watching TV and dreamed the whole thing, He watches violent movies to help cope with his war trauma. He resolves to stop watching violent movies which seems reasonable. I don't know if it means anything that he dreamed he wasn't married and that his children were strangers to him.

I've seen only a small part of their body of work, but I would encourage the Wrights to take more trips. Airfare is going up with the war of aggression against Iran, but they could be European filmmakers. They could film in western Ukraine if they wanted. The other movie I saw of theirs, Exorcism in Amarillo, was just the five of them filmed around their house. It couldn't have cost anything. They could make a movie anywhere in the world for the cost of airfare and an Airbnb. 

Teenagers Battle the Thing (1959)

This was reportedly a regional horror film that was only shown locally. Filmed in Ontario, California. I don't know what it cost. It's possibly it still made a profit. Years later, they shot more material, added narration and released it as Curse of the Bigfoot (1975). which is sort of interesting because Curse of the Bigfoot was in color and the version of Teenagers Battle the Thing on Tubi is black & white.

Teenagers looked really old in the 1950's and the boys in this movie were taller than the adults. High school kids go with their teacher to help out on some archeological excavation which leads to the discovery of a mummified ape-like creature that comes to life. 

They should have had the creature kill a few teenagers. The poor thing didn't seem like much of a threat. It was an astonishing scientific discovery far beyond anything they could have ever imagined, and I won't give it away, but look at what they did to it.

The landscape was impressive.

Free on Tubi.

The Killing of Sister George (Robert Aldrich, 1968) Beryl Reid, Suzanna York

Beryl Reid stars as British actress June Buckridge who plays kindly Sister George, a 50-ish district nurse in a British soap opera. She's played the role for four years and is so identified with the character that her nickname is "George".

Meanwhile, George's relationship with her younger live-in girlfriend (Suzanna York) is on the rocks. 

Producers of the soap opera plan to kill off Sister George in a sudden, violent accident, a little like Charlie Sheen's demise in Two and a Half Men, something they'd be sure she couldn't come back from. This is in part because the drunken actress forced her way into the back of a taxi and assaulted two nuns. George is offered a voice-acting role in a BBC children's series, something a lot of older actors do now. George Segal was the voice of Dr Benton Quest in a Johnny Quest reboot before his come-back as a sit-com actor.

Based on a play that was presented as a black comedy. The movie was advertised as a "shocking drama". 

Director Robert Aldrich made this and a few other movies in his own studio he bought with his The Dirty Dozen (1967) money.

In 1968, it was about the only mainstream movie about lesbians. It made sense that critics in the gay press were unhappy with it, not that stodgy mainstream critics went for it. I'm not sure how it should be regarded today, but I liked it. George was an awful person and her soap opera didn't look very good. I would think becoming a voice actor would be a nice change. Take it easy for a while.

The Mouse That Roared (1959) Peter Sellers, Jean Seberg, directed by Jack Arnold

Directed by Jack Arnold who directed The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man and numerous episodes of Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch. He was well-regarded in Hollywood. I found it surprising that he worked on those TV shows, but I always like their look, beautifully directed one-camera sit-coms. 

I was a little disappointed. I imagined a more creative or surprising way in which the Grand Duchy of Fenwick would conquer the United States than stumbling upon America's football-like doomsday bomb. It was like a less realistic proto-Dr Strangelove, but they kept talking about what nice people Americans were. I've been to Canada a couple of times and felt like the biggest jerk. I don't know about other countries, but Canadians are so much nicer than us. Leaders of the Duchy thought they'd declare war on the U.S., be quickly defeated then benefit from a sort of Marshall Plan because Americans are so generous. I don't know how British audiences felt about this after the UK went through years of poverty paying their massive war debt to the United States.

With Peter Sellers playing multiple roles and Jean Seberg just one year before Breathless.  

Filmed in Britain. 

When Harry Met Sally... (1989)

It must have been December 15th. I went with my sister and her husband to a local production of Oklahoma! A friend's son was in it. We stopped and ate on the way home and somehow got on the subject of the films of Rob Reiner. I didn't care for them. I couldn't stand Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, I thought The American President was a morbid romantic fantasy about Bill Clinton dating again after Hillary dies; Spinal Tap just didn't interest me. I know he made others. 

They told me I should watch When Harry Met Sally. They were sure I'd like it.

We went home and were in the living room. I opened my laptop and looked at the news. Two people were found dead in Rob Reiner's home. The police wouldn't say who they were, but they did tell their ages which were the same as Rob Reiner and his wife. Variety was the first site I saw that stated that Rob and Michele Reiner had died.

My brother-in-law asked if I wanted to retract what I said about Reiner's movies. I didn't. It was unrelated. I sometimes separate the art from the artist. 

So, after all this time, I finally watched When Harry Met Sally..., about two terribly unlikable people who start dating. It wasn't his fault, but Billy Crystal was not romantic leading man material. 

When it came out, it was compared to the films of Woody Allen, but Woody Allen's characters generally had careers and families, parents, friends---they didn't just walk about talking and talking about how men were from Mars and women were from Venus. 

The big gag in it, where Sally makes a spectacle of herself in a crowded restaurant, didn't really make sense. No one would do that. Earlier in the movie, Harry and Sally were in another restaurant and she was humiliated when she blurted out something about her sex life attracting the attention of other diners. Maybe it showed her character arc, how much she had grown and changed.

I feel a little hurt that my sister thought I would like this thing. 

Written by Nora Ephron. Free on a streaming channel called Cineplex. 

Hothead (1963)

Frank (John Delgar) is a hothead. He's very unpleasant, a terrible jerk. He's angry about his father having abandoned him and his mother, leaving her to work her way into an early grave. Frank had to go to work himself when he was twelve. Now he lived his aunt, his father's sister. 

Frank has the day free after he's fired from his job. He drives around in his big old car. He and his friends, Tom and Iris (Robert Glenn and Barnara Joyce) spend most of the movie dressed in swimwear. They pick up a pleasant, well-dressed middle-aged hobo (Steve Talbot) and take him to the beach. He calls the kids to hang around in a beach house he just broke into. They have liquor. With Tom passed out. the hobo tries to sexually assault Iris who runs drunkenly from the house and finds Frank who's sitting on the beach losing his mind. He thinks the hobo is his father.

Frank is completely unsympathetic. He probably didn't need to be. He could have been a nice guy who came to believe a hitchhiker was his father who deserved to die. 

The movie was the only credit for the director and most of the cast. One actor, Robert Pearson, appeared in 2001 a Space Odyssey as an actor in the inflight movie. Barbara Joyce was a regular on The Ken Berry Show and appeared in a TV series, Legends of the Superheroes (1979). Robert Glenn was in The Last Picture Show and Larry Buchanan's A Bullet for Pretty Boy.

It's free on Tubi and available on DVD.  Still available after all these years. That says something for it.

Claude Chabrol's Blood Relatives (1978)

The novel by Ed McBain was set in New York but Chabrol changed the setting to Montreal. Donald Sutherland as a police detective who investigates the murder of a 17-year-old girl which was witnessed by her cousin. The Canadian police were surprisingly polite even while interrogating Donald Pleasance playing a convicted child molester. It was kind of nice for a change. 

I'll try not to give anything away, but it seemed like a coincidence that I watched this movie soon after the Florida state legislature failed to pass a bill banning marriage between first cousins. 

The victim (Lisa Langois) is an orphan taken in by her aunt and uncle. She shares a bedroom with her cousin (Aude Landry) and there's a male cousin (Laurent Malet) living there, too. 

Ed McBain aka Evan Hunter really cranked out the best sellers. So many of them were made into movies. The best was Kurosawa's High and Low.

Available on a Roku Channel called Movie Vault which may not be around long. An identical channel called Movie Hub was quickly shut down.