Movie Night 27 March

As an experiment I'm going to blog about our movie night.

The Final Viewing Program:

Cleopatra 2525: Hel and High Water Parts 1 and 2
The Secret Service: Mayday, Mayday
The Giant Claw
High Society

Okay, so lets jump straight in:

Cleopatra 2525

Hel and High Water was the two part season finale, which means we've finally watched all of season one Cleopatra 2525. If you aren't familiar with the show, the introduction will give you some insight into this cleavage-lead, underground-set, action sci-fi series.




Standard episodes are American TV half-hours (23 minutes including intro and credits) so once you've included something scary to make Cleopatra scream, Cleopatra talking about the 21st Century, one or other of the characters running into someone either from their past or who they quickly bond with, and the regulation 2 fights doesn't leave a hell of a lot of time for telling a story. This two-parter allowed a more extended storyline, but from my notes it seems that wasn't what was mostly on our minds:

Why have they changed costumes suddenly?
Sarge has shiny breasts; Cleo's are more matt.
Check the credits for the breast-wrangler.
I missed Creegan - oh but I got a nice picture of an arse. (Creegan and Victoria Pratt's arse appear at 38 seconds in the video above. For "context" see this clip; noone seems to have any Creegan fan videos which I for one find shocking. Also, the theme song is based on this 1969 hit by Zager and Evans)

The Secret Service

Also from 1969, Mayday, Mayday appears to be the penultimate episode of The Secret Service (which unlike Cleopatra 2525 didn't get picked up for a second season). Father Stanley Unwin is a middle-aged Model-T driving priest who moonlights as a spy, or more specifically a counter-spy stopping various foreigners and criminal from doing bad stuff to British commercial interests. This Gerry Anderson series mixed puppets and live action. Trailer:




So anyway, the usual things happen; Father Stanley Unwin's first response is to shrink Matthew, he uses Stanley Unwinese (a made up language demonstrated in this scene from a Carry On film) to get out of difficult situations, his Model T Ford, Gabriel drives across Westminster bridge and B.I.S.H.O.P (British Intelligence Service Headquarters Operation Priest) gives them an unlikely task. In this case to safeguard an Arab Sheikh who has sold an oil concession to the British government. So to be unobtrusive about it, they assign a priest to join his entourage. Notes:

Obviously the previously unknown Christian Arab Kingdom of Muldavia
Exploding Teddy Bear!

The Giant Claw

It's like an old-fashioned cinema program; a serial, a cartoon, we must have missed the newsreel and now the B feature, often a Western, or, in this case, a 1957 monster movie. I can't possibly explain it better than the trailer:



I'll note here that this film's use of anti-matter and their way of penetrating the anti-matter shield using mesons bonded to hydrogen atoms ("mesic-atoms") injured me to the depths of my Nuclear and Particle Physics courses.

Ouch. Anyway I'll note that the flirting between the hero and the female lead (who is a mathematician; when the bird turns up and their crew for the airplane which will fire (shudder) "mesic-atoms" is short a calculator, she fills in; as I noted, in the fifties, calculator was a job, not a machine) uses baseball metaphors, which may explain our reaction in the first note:

Mitch MacAffee reaches first base
Flocks of Weather Balloons

Also, here are some scribbled down and inaccurate transcripts of some of the dialogue:

You keep your shirt on, I'll put my pants on
Declare it Top Secret! Inform all commands!
I admire your spunk - you keep climbing on our backs

High Society

Finally from the year before The Giant Claw[1], our main feature, a musical romantic comedy with Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong (playing himself). Frankly I've spent too long on this already, so here's the first trailer I came across.



And from our notes:

Bing Crosby sings a love song to his ex-wife's kid sister??
They're making promises with their fingers crossed !!?!
Who does want flashy flunkies everywhere? [2]
Captain Trump - flatulent cardsharp superhero
"Why don't we go for a swim in the moonlight?" - Jim's response "Why don't we swim in the pool instead?"
Bing and Frank are singing together!
Bing and Frank have danced into a ballroom arm in arm!
Bing just punched Frank on the chin!

So, that was movie night. This is the blog post. Here's a link to a playlist of all the Youtube videos, in case my attempt to put a player below doesn't work. If you were there and want to add to, or argue with the details, feel free; if you weren't and want to get involved anyway, please do so. Thank you, and good night.





[1] So conceivably they may have shared a bill before.
[2] Jim missed that this was a love song and so didn't realise these two were together. Still, from the notes I suspect I wasn't doing too much better.

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