Hi everyone,

Here are a couple of films that I watched over the long holiday
weekend, just passed:

I watched THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953) which aired on AMC, with all
the ads, bah. This is an excellent sci-fi film, which again
reflects much of the paranoia felt at the time (beginning of the
cold war). The aliens were cool, kind of like THE OUTER LIMITS, but
I don't mean that in a bad way, because I loved that series. There
is a decent amount of suspense throughout as scientist Gene Barry
meets up with small town gal (but PhD!) Ann Robinson for some love
interest throughout. The ending has a very eerie "end of the world"
type of feeling. This wasn't a great film, but it had some decent
effects for it's time, and was fairly engaging throughtout. It
didn't have nearly as much impact as the infamous radio broadcast,
done by Orson Welles, but that is to be expected. I did dig the
narration by Sir Cedrick Hardwicke, was very cool, but during his
narration, the stock footage used was low-budget z-grade cheese.
Interesting contrast with the rest of the film, which was well
done. Perfect popcorn cruncher for a Saturday night.

Late Saturday night on AMC, I just couldn't pass up a guilty
pleasure of mine, and watched the original GODZILLA (1956). Now to
purists, this isn't the original, because it's the American version
with all these scenes of Raymond Burr spliced in to make sense of
things for a non-Japanese speaking audience. What's good about it
is that we don't have that silly dubbing that is characteristic of
the later films in the series, but instead, we're left not knowing
what is said, or the dialogue is left silent, and we get Burr's
narration, or sloppily edited insertion in order to explain what is
going on. I don't care, though, I kind of liked it and when I was a
kid, this was the only version I was aware of, so it's nostalgic for
me. This film depicts ol' Godzilla as lean and mean, no nice goofy
stuff, no good guy saving the earth from bad aliens. This version
is ferocious, mean, and just plain flat out wants to destroy and
create mayhem. A force of the nuclear age, as it was meant to be,
and it's great. The scenes with Godzilla tearing it up are very
well done--this is one of only two films in the series (the next one
isn't very good), which is done in black and white, and it really
adds to the quality (though I do have a guilty pleasure fondness for
those cheesy ultra-colourful 60's versions too). Look, no one's
going to win any acting awards in this one, but it was yet another
great Saturday night popcorn cruncher.

Mark