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 was single 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 cost of airfare and the price of 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.