The Monolith Monsters (1957)

They used to show this now and then on a local TV station and I loved it. I remember finding it strangely frightening. A meteor lands in the desert. It explodes into little pieces. When you add water, each little chunk grows into a giant monolith which then falls over, shatters, and become even more monoliths. It's easier to do a special effect monolith than a convincing space monster, so it had that going for it.

Watching it again for the first time in 45 years, it was slower than I remembered, and I didn't remember the horrible health effects of coming into contact with them. A little girl has to be placed in an iron lung. 

Starring Grant Williams, Les Tremayne and Lola Albright, with Troy Donahue and Paul Peterson as Bobby the paperboy.

Tha Dam Busters (U.K., 1955)

British engineer invents bombs that will bounce along the surface of water to destroy Nazi dams during World War Two. I'd seen film of these long ago on the old British documentary series World at War.  Turns out it's not that easy to blow up a dam, although that would probably depend on the dam.

The British seem so polite and civilized until the dog, the squadron mascot, shows up. The dog was black so the Brits called it by a deeply offensive racial slur. They couldn't have used that word in a Hollywood movie back then. According to IMDb, the RAF guys would give the dog beer in real life, then it would urinate on their legs. The dog was hit by a car and killed, which happened in the movie. But in reality, the driver swerved to miss him, wrecked the car and injured its occupants. That dog was the REAL hero.

With Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave and Robert Shaw in there somewhere. Available on Movieland.Tv. 

The California Kid (Made-for-TV 1974) Vic Morrow, Martin Sheen

Made-for-TV movies weren't all true crime stories and diseases-of-the week back then.

I watched the world television premiere of this movie in 1974. I must have been 11. I thought it was weird that they had a two-door police car. 

Martin Sheen arrives driving a hotrod in a speedtrap town where the local police chief (Vic Morrow) murders speeders by running them off the road. One victim was played by Martin Sheen's brother, Joe Esteves. Sheen comes looking for revenge. 

The plot was a little thin, but it was all right. They destroy several cars that seem extremely old now but weren't over 20-years-old at the time. I didn't entirely understand the duel at the end.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

With Nick Nolte and Stuart Margolin.

Swamp Girl (1971)

Not that offensive. Rated GP in its day. Seven people were killed if I counted right, they kept referring to the Black character using a terrible racial slur, and it had this swamp doctor who pregnant women kept going to. The doctor would promise to put their baby girls up for adoption, then sell them into white slavery, but this was explained in a dialog scene. Most of the movie was dialog. I assume the Georgia accents were authentic. The doctor and the child traffickers were killed with a hatchet before the story began. Shot in the Okefenokee swamp. The place didn't look quite the way I would have pictured it.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

The Big Bus (1976)

I must have been 13 when I saw this in a theater. I went to it alone. I think I got all the jokes. I just didn't think they were funny, and seeing it again after all these years, I still don't.

Disaster movie spoof about a very large nuclear powered bus. Oil companies target it on its maiden voyage across the United States.

Joe Bologna, Stockard Channing, Ruth Gordon, Larry Hagman, John Beck, Rene Auberjonois, Ned Beatty, Bob Dishy, Jose Ferrer, Richard Mulligan, Sally Kellerman, Stuart Margolin, and Howard Hessman among others.

Free on Movieland.Tv. I was surprised to find it was available on a couple of other streaming channels. I haven't seen this thing available anywhere in years.

The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972)

I had seen the box for this movie in video stores over the years but never checked it out. I assumed it was a comedy based on the alliterative title. I may have related it to The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County. Stars teen actor Gary Grimes.

Grimes first starred in Summer of '42 as a kid who does nothing but talk about sex and goes to bed with a war widow. The Culpepper Cattle Co. was his second starring role as a teen who desperately wants to be a cowboy. He gets hired to go on a cattle drive, serving as their "Little Mary" which is what they call the cook's assistant.

The movie went for gritty realism, but I like to think it was grittier than it was realistic. Cowboys keep getting into gunfights with cattle rustlers, horse thieves, and, in the end, a greedy land baron extorting money from them because their cattle was on his land. It turns out that a religious commune has also stopped on land he considers to be his and he plans to murder them---that's what they do to squatters there. The commune members refuse to leave but also refuse to fight. This leads to the final confrontation.

Free on Movieland.Tv.

New Adventures of Old Christine, psychoanalysis

Pluto started showing The New Adventures of Old Christine, so I started watching that a lot. Binge watching doesn't work that well. Sit com characters tend to be one note and they get old really fast. I can't remember if I watched this show when it was still on or if I only started watching it in syndication. I remember the kid being the center of the show, the reason Christine is in constant contact with her ex-husband and his girlfriend, with her brother and with the mean moms at his high-priced private school, but the kid does almost nothing on the show. He's there for about a minute in each episode then he runs off to his room.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the daughter of a French billionaire in real life. I don't know how I should feel about her playing a less well-off mother constantly being put down by the wealthy mothers at her son's school. 

More of a sex comedy than I remembered.

Also, I've been reading Hollywood on the Couch by Stephen Farber and Marc Green. "A candid look at the overheated love affair between psychiatrists and moviemakers." Psychoanalysis was really really big among celebrities. Woody Allen was pretty average in that regard although he may have stuck with it longer than most.

It made me wonder if that was my problem. If rich successful celebrities go for psychoanalysis, it must be good. It's shocking how many actors, writers, directors and producers are named in the book, and a little disturbing that this private medical information was public knowledge. I started thinking maybe I should go for psychoanalysis. It's expensive, outdated, and I don't like the idea of "transference". To quote Wikipedia:

In a therapy context, transference refers to redirection of a patient's feelings for a significant person to the therapist. Transference is often manifested as an erotic attraction towards a therapist, but can be seen in many other forms such as rage, hatred, mistrust, parentification, extreme dependence, or even placing the therapist in a god-like or guru status.

And I realized that I was no better than people who think Scientology must be helpful because Tom Cruise is in it.