Consortium of Seven: Year 4

The first time I saw this movie, I walked out halfway through. Not, by any means, for the quality.  But because I was sincerely, I think, having a panic attack.  (If you've watched Ted Lasso , think of the scene when Rebecca is singing "Let It Go" and how Ted has an attack.). This movie is so....distressing and scary in all the right ways.   Elisabeth Moss, continuing her insanely good run of performances, stars as Cecilia, a woman trapped in a controlling and abusive relationship with her boyfriend Adrian, a tech billionaire working on human augmentation.  She finally works up the courage to escape and goes to stay with her friend James, a police detective and his teenage daughter.  Adrian then apparently commits suicide and leaves her millions and then... Well, here's where the movie gets really scary to me.  Adrian might be dead.  He might not.  He might have an invisibility suit and be gaslighting Cecilia by making people think she's craz...

 Strap in folks.  We've jumped forward to the '80s and we need to talk about a movie that feels like it was made for TV (and I seriously thought it was) but apparently somehow  got a theatrical release. Hooooooo boy.  Do any of you remember the terrible movie Zapped!  from 1982, starring terrible person Scott Baio?  He gets telekinetic powers and just uses them to make women's clothing fly off?  It's creepy and weird and no one comes off well in it.  This is a very slight improvement with a kid named Grover (Jay Underwood, and forget this and see The Boy Who Could Fly  instead) trying to replicate his dead father's toilet bowl cleaner and, of course, accidentally creates an invisibility formula.  He has a best friend, Milton who is played by very veteran character actor Wallace Langham and out of respect for his long career I'll use his current picture. But BOY is he terrible in this.  There's actually good actors trying there best ...

  Woof, this is a brutal one.  Joey Faust (great character name), a renowned safecracker is sprung out of prison by a criminal named Major Krenner.  For his own weird purposes (and frankly, it's never explained) he wants Faust to steal some uranium ore for him.  Naturally, since we're in this series, he has a way of making Faust invisible. Enter Dr. Ulof, a German refugee scientist who has developed an invisibility ray (of course).  Ivan Triesault, an Estonian actor, is the real highlight of this movie, talking about how he escaped Germany with his daughter at the end of WWII and how he was forced to perform experiments in concentration camps.  Including on his wife.  It's a weird shift in the movie that kind of works.  Krenner is keeping the daughter captive to force Ulof to work with him.  We do get to meet the daughter at one point; do you think she gets any lines?  Of course not. Of course, the ray doesn't quite work as it shoul...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Sorry about the lateness on this one but work caught up with me.  As we continue on our adapttaions of The Invisible Man , this week is the second Japanese adaptation in a row, The Invisible Avenger .   The movie literally opens up with an invisible man being struck by a car and appearing as he dies and surprise , he's part of a group of Japanese commandos who were turned invisible by a ray so they could be better soldiers.  How do we know this?  Oh, because the government immediately tells everyone about it and says hey, there's one more invisible guy out there so...keep a look out for him?  Which is such a weird thing to happen in any government that I actually rewound to make sure I had heard correctly.  Nanjo, the remaining invisible man, has been disguising himself as a clown because no one questions them wearing greasepaint all the time (a touch I really appreciated) and working the streets while he also befr...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  This week's entry is  The Invisible Man Appears , a Japanese addition to the film series from director Nobuo Adachi (with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, well known for his decades of effects work). A loose adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, this actually shares a good bit of the basic idea of   Abbot and Costello movie, where criminals are trying to use the invisibility formula for their own crimes.  In this case, they want to force the invisible man, a student of the professor who created the formula, to steal a diamond necklace called the Tears of Amour from an actress friend of his. Of course, it's all complicated by how the invisible man and his fellow student are both in love with the daughter of the professor (and in fact have both proposed), but this movie keeps the essential plot point that the invisibility formula slow drives you insanely violent.  So throughout the various theft and romance shenanigans, he's g...