A Visit To The Battleground of "Conquest Of The Planet of The Apes"

 While on a trip to California a few years back, my friend Jas was walking around LA when he came upon the famous Century City. Walking around the plaza, he was suddenly smitten to realize he recognized the place!! He immediately took out his phone, and, snapping photos of the area, texted the pics to us and excitedly said "Hey, Guess where I am!!!"

Turns out he was RIGHT at the spot where they had shot key scenes from the 1972 film Planet of The Apes sequel "Conquest of the Planet of The Apes", and, as a HUGE fan, identified it immediately!!

Seems amazing that it still looks just about how it did back then, making it easy for fans to pick it out!

This is right along the lines of fans who recognized the Dallas Market Center as the futuristic  town centre of "Logan's Run"! LOL

Jodie Foster Still Sleuthin' After All These Years

Caught the compelling first episode of the new Jodie Foster-led True Detective series TRUE DETECTIVE: NIGHT COUNTRY, dealing with a mysterious disappearance of an entire crew at a remote research station in Alaska tinged with supernatural elements.

Afterwards, I went online to read up on it, and while there, came across a photo of Jodie, Julia Roberts and Winona Ryder from 1989 with the general reaction of "Oh my, look how YOUNG they all were"! True enough, but it was then I remembered that I had seen Jodie Foster a LOT earlier than that: in fact, some 46+ YEARS ago!

As a 70's kid I was constantly in the theaters checking out the latest family flicks, and among the slew of movies I saw in 1977 was a film about a group of treasure-hunting kids looking for a fortune in a huge manor called CANDLESHOE, led by none other than Jodie Foster herself!

This was the first movie I'd seen with Foster- true, she had made her mark the year before with "Freaky Friday", however I had missed that one (and didn't get to see it til it made its way to "The Wonderful World Of Disney" on TV years later), so to me, this is THE Jodie Foster I always thought of when hearing her name!

As time went on, I remember the scandal about her when Hinkley shot Reagan, the buzz when she was nominated for The Accused, but it wasn't until Silence of The Lambs, I guess, when she finally became the STAR we think of nowadays. 

From there she became such a respected Actress and Director that over time that childhood image of her disappeared! It was only today that that image of her as the intrepid Casey came back to my mind, taking me away to that magical time of childhood wonder once again!

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HBO's  TRUE DETECTIVE : NIGHT COUNTRY airs Sundays and promises to be one SURREAL trip!

Willy Wonka Collectible Cards

One of the great things about wearing your fandoms on your sleeve is that your friends tend to remember your loves when they happen to come across them in their regular lives. I remember an old girlfriend’s mother browsing a cookie store (in Vegas of all places) and, seeing a tin with the Wizard of Oz on it, remembered my obsession with the Judy Garland classic and brought it home for me!

In that same way, a friend of mine was taking his young daughter to the Shopping Mall’s Fun Factory to play games and ride rides. There was a ticket crane-type game where you could snatch up these hard plastic cards of characters from the 1971 Gene Wilder movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:

After grabbing a few and seeing how nice they were, remembered, “Hey, Z was a really big fan of that Willy Wonka movie…bet he would LOVE these!”He then managed to get ahold of all 10 of the collectible cards and handed the whole deck over to me this past weekend, all bundled up with a rubber band.

MAN, these are some really beautiful cards! Not mere paper, they’re hard like credit cards and glossy. From what he said, you’re supposed to redeem these cards for ticket prizes but many opted to keep ’n’ collect ‘em instead!

Whooohoo, I sure lucked out! I’m the man who suddenly got everything he ever wanted…and I lived happily ever after! LOLOL!

Another 70's Classic: "Eyes Of Laura Mars"

Faye Dunaway as Laura Mars

 As I’ve mentioned many times here on this blog, I am a huge fan of 1970’s-era Horror/Suspense movies, and I just picked up another classic from 1978, the awesome Eyes Of Laura Mars, starring a VERY stunning Faye Dunaway- my gosh she was the epitome of 70’s chic, and in each and every scene she was knocking me out with her sexy silk-clad outfits!

The Eyes of Laura Mars tells the still-original-even-today supernatural tale of a woman photographer who is cursed with seeing through the eyes of a Serial Killer whenever he is slaying his victims. Each of the murdered people have connections to Laura- coworkers, acquaintances and models, and it all builds up to the day when she “sees”  the serial killer stalking HER!

When I saw a copy of this DVD on the shelf at a secondhand store, I excitedly grabbed it up-I have to say that it has been years and years since I’d seen this movie (and even then, only on TV) so I didn’t remember much. In fact, at the time, I mostly remembered it being the movie that the iconic disco song “Let’s All Chant” by the Michael Zager Band came from! Couldn't WAIT to check it out again!

  

  Watching it now, I was surprised to see some famous faces connected with it-for example, I had no idea that Irvin Kirshner directed this! Irwin, of course, is probably most famous among us nerds as the genius who directed “Star Wars-The Empire Strikes Back”, in fact, Laura Mars was the movie right before he began Empire! Also appearing was actor Brad Dourif, Raul Julia, and, unbelievably, a VERY young Tommy Lee Jones as the (gasp!) LOVE interest to Ms. Dunaway!! How did I not remember any of this!!!

with Raul "Gomez Addams" Julia

Brad Dourif

Above and Below: with Tommy Lee Jones

 Gotta say, The Eyes of Laura Mars still entertains today, and if the psychic twist on the murder mystery cliché isn’t enough to keep you interested, this movie is a PERFECT slice of the late 1970’s Disco era- the models, outfits, clothes, even the makeup, each shot is like taking a time trip back to those glitter garbed days of the past! Such a blast to watch again!

The Disco Era in Full Bloom!

Tommy Lee Jones and Faye Dunaway

The Legacy

Back in the horror boom of the 70’s, the decade that gave us The Omen and The Exorcist, it seemed like everywhere you turned there was yet another new soon-to-be-classic spooky screen gem, and in 1978, there were two flicks that came out that became huge faves of mine- the excellent Anthony Hopkins ventriloquist dummy film MAGIC, and the Katharine Ross /Sam Elliot starring movie THE LEGACY. While I’d acquired Magic years and years ago, it wasn’t until only very recently that I got ahold of a copy of The Legacy, and just this past weekend I checked it out once again, and OH! How the memories came back!

Katharine Ross as Maggie Walsh in The Legacy

Amidst all these great horror flicks, there was something about The Legacy that I really took to. I hadn’t seen it in the theaters, the first time I saw it was on television- and in fact my main draw to watch it was because my favorite musical act was The Who and I’d read that lead singer Roger Daltrey was going to be a character in it! But it only took a bout 20 minutes before I fell in love with the lovely Katharine Ross, and from that point on, I made sure to watch it every time it came on!

Katharine Ross with Charles "A Criminologist" Gray

The Legacy tells the tale of a young woman named Maggie and her boyfriend Pete, who take a trip to England in prospects of a lucrative freelance architect job. But they are met with blockades on their journey, and it seems no matter what steps they take, something or someone is guiding them to the mysterious Ravenhurst Estate, where we find that others beside her have gathered. She is shocked to find that they seem like part of a cult, and even more alarmed when they inform her that perhaps she is part of their sect as well.

with Sam Elliot as Pete

Meeting the Members

Roger Daltrey as Clive

I don’t know what drew me into this film so much, perhaps the enchanting English countryside backdrop, the spooky old manor with its halls filled with renaissance paintings and rooms with secrets doors, but the visuals really knocked out the young moviewatcher in me. The intricate way that the hapless victims all get murdered was fascinating to me (especially the woman diving in the pool who gets stuck under the water)… Even the illusion of the servants who turn into cats when you look away was a novel idea for me at the time.

Awaiting their Patriarch

Spooky Nurse Adams (Margaret Tyzack)

Of all the scenes, the one that always stuck with me throughout my life was the one where Maggie and Pete have had enough and try to leave Ravenhurst. They steal some horses, go into town and get a car, but no matter WHICH road they drive down, they KEEP ENDING UP BACK AT THE ESTATE. As a youth, this was such a thrilling scene! Eventually they give up and go back into the house, where Maggie begins to piece together exactly what is going on and what the LEGACY has in store for her.

Unable to Escape

History Lessons

Meeting the Head of Ravenshurst

She Got The Power

And Katharine Ross… MAN, I know I’ve gushed about her time and time again here, but it has to be said how freaking gorgeous she is here! Arguably the queen of the late 60’s-70’s groovy girls with her starring roles in The Graduate, Butch Cassidy&The Sundance Kid and The Stepford Wives, she is one with a very distinct look of her time. So pretty and now I’m ready to dig out The Graduate again!

Side Note: in 1982, supergroup ASIA released a song called “One Step Closer” that featured a symphonic synthesizer intro which ALWAYS reminded me of The Legacy’s scene of Maggie and Pete on the horses, though I couldn’t place why. Watching the movie this weekend, I had to laugh because the musical score during the said scene sounded SO MUCH like the Asia song (with a bit of The Big Country thrown in), no WONDER I kept thinking about it!

Middle-School Movie Madness: Slithis!

    In 1978, my next door neighbor took a bunch of us squabbling kids down to the local theater (the grand old long-gone Kapahulu Theater), to see a new sci-fi horror flick called "Slithis" that my brother and his friends were dying to see, and a merry old time was had by all!
  There was quite a bit of a party atmosphere going on in that theater as I recall- for this promotion, they’d gotten some guy to actually dress up in a Slithis costume and walk up and down the aisles. Myuch to his chagrin, my older friends made it a point to follow and harass the monster as he made his rounds, poking and prodding him as well as gleefully squeezing his rubber costume butt!!!
  In the lobby of the theater, they offered forms you could fill out to receive the SLITHIS SURVIVAL KIT, and the gimmick was, if you saw Slithis twice and then sent in the ticket stubs you saved, you’d be sent this so-called survival kit in the mail.  After reading over the “fine print, my friend realized we could just walk around the theater and find all the discarded movie stubs all over the ground between the seats and send it in that very day! So we went crawling around on the floors of that theater between showtimes, and when we'd all found multiple stubs enough for all of us, we scurried home, filled out the form, and sent it off! 
   A few months later, I got a package in the mail- as I recall, an 8x10 manila envelope which was the said “Survival Kit”…The package contained a glossy 8x10 photo of Slithis complete with scrawly autograph (see the picture below, which a fellow Slithis Moviegoer uploaded awhile ago on an SF forum) 

Even MORE strange however, was the accompanying LETTER from Slithis, which not only told me to “Stay off the Drugs and Stay in School” (or some parental advice like that, which was very strange to hear from a deranged mutant killer monster), but it also told us to “Watch out for my SEQUEL, “SLITHIS RETURNS”!!!"
  Well we waited and WAITED, but ya know what, that movie never came out. Maybe they just couldn’t scrape up the cash to get it off the ground, or more likely, Slithis couldn’t bear coming back out to promote the new movie and then getting harassed by my friends again!

Nostalgia From "The Blues Brothers"

When I was a kid, I used to go to movies with my friend Jas and his mother, and one thing we’d always do if we liked a movie was sit through the movie for two sittings (can this even be done anymore?) and I remember once even sticking around for the beginning of a third!

 One such movie was the 1980 John Landis musical comedy THE BLUES BROTHERS, starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the titular musical siblings, and not only did we stick around for two showings of this one, we loved the songs and performances so much, we went back with other friends so they could check it out, too!

As a story, the tale is a pretty simple one, (when the brothers find out their old orphanage is going to be sold unless they can come up with the money to pay the back-taxes, they decide to reform their old Rhythm and Blues band up) but when I was watching it again, after all these years, it strikes me how much the IMAGERY of the movie has stayed with me. So many of the scenes are like looking at captures of my childhood!

Really, from the opening scene with Elwood waiting to pick up Jake as he leaves Prison with the sunlight shining from behind him, to the ominous creaky steps up to the Mother Superior’s Room at the orphanage, these are images that have ingrained themselves in my mind, so whenever I read about a prison scene or a church scene in a book or story, these are the pictures I see in my mind!

And one other thing that I’d completely forgotten about was the appearance of Carrie Fisher as Jake’s jilted ex-fiancé- at the time I first saw this movie, it was the first non-Princess Leia role I’d seen her in, and I remember being completely stunned at how pretty she was in “real” clothes, with her hair down looking like a vixen proper as she tried and again and again to assassinate Jake and Elwood!