Film Journal Podcast
George (Film Journal) and Ryan (Cinecrisis) dig through film history one oddball pick at a time—hopping from cult horror to forgotten blockbusters, art house to trash fire (sometimes in the same episode). Whether it’s dissecting Hammer Horror, roasting the latest Studio Flop, or revisiting 70's exploration fare- they bring sharp takes, deep trivia, and the kind of banter only good pals can pull off!
No film school snobbery. No hot take clickbait. Just smart, funny conversations for people who like movies and think they actually matter.
Film Journal Podcast
Beam Me Outta Here! - William Shatner’s 70s Detour
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Between the end of the original Star Trek in 1969 and his cinematic return as Captain Kirk in 1979, William Shatner roamed some strange territory. In this episode, George and Ryan dive headfirst into Shatner’s “wilderness years,” exploring four offbeat, often outrageous films: the carnal chaos of Big Bad Mama, the sleazy psycho-thriller Impulse, the satanic sludgefest The Devil’s Rain, and the eco-horror cult favorite Kingdom of the Spiders. Along the way, they chart the peaks and valleys of Shatner’s post-Trek hustle, revel in his fearless acting choices, and appreciate the weird, wonderful resilience of a man who would one day boldly go back to the bridge of the Enterprise.
Shatner's Post-Star Trek Career Struggles
Speaker 1Here we go.
Speaker 3Okay, back it up, randy, A little more.
Speaker 5Okay, we're going to zoom in. Now, let's roll please, we'll never get wider than this. Okay, we're knocked in now, here we go, ready and action oh hi, I'm William Shatner.
Speaker 1Star Trek coming back. I've heard so many rumors and so much has been made of it coming back that it has never reached me in concrete terms that I tend to discard everything now. But as of this moment, star Trek doesn't look like it is coming back.
Speaker 5Well, if you want to be Captain Kirk again, then that's it. Otherwise, good luck to you, right.
Speaker 6He'll always be Captain.
Speaker 5Kirk.
Speaker 6Thank you for being on the show. So in the 1960s, the Starship Enterprise and its captain, james Tiberius, played by William Shatner, were going on a five-year mission that was unfortunately reduced to three due to the high demands of viewership in 1960s television, and this left William Shatner, its star, grasping for another place in the universe of Hollywood movie making. If you read his book Star Trek Movie Memories, the entire first chapter is about his struggles with a divorce which left him without much cash, and you know the stream of work that was coming in before had started to dry out. He needed something to do, and today we're talking about the films he made in the 1970s Some very good, most okay, some bad. But until Star Wars paved the way for Star Trek, the Motion Picture in 79, shatner was somewhat in the wilderness. Is this a faulty premise or would you agree, ryan, good to see you.
Speaker 3Oh, I completely agree. Good to see you again, george. Yeah, no, this is a wonderful wild world of movies we're going to be talking about today, featuring, as I've been saying on X, one of the greatest actors of our time. I mean, this is a guy that I'm glad he's lived so long enough to see his reputation kind of rehabbed over the years. I mean, he was, for all intents and purposes, like the butt of many, many jokes and stereotypes of his, of his career, you know.
Speaker 6Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3Exactly as kind of like a very bad actor, More you know, to the point or or, and I think that's unfair. I think that's completely unfair I, I agree.
Speaker 6Well, I would tell you this I think william shatner has a lot of interesting range. He's very fun to watch. Whether or not he's like one of the greatest actors, I think is a little bit of a stretch, but he's one of the great media personalities. He's one of the great television personalities of the latter half of the 20th century.
Speaker 3Yes, no, I did not mean that in all sincerity. I meant that as a true celebrity presence like this is one of the great actors like that we come to love and cherish and it's.
Speaker 3it was very frustrating for a number of years to see him kind of maligned and derailed, as like just like a joke, and I think there's been a true Renaissance and appreciation for, for who he is and what he brought to the table, as someone who, who actually kind of cares that you show, you see him in these movies and he's, for the most part, giving it, giving it all he's got, because at the end of the day, like what he's got to put food on the table and this is this is what's getting it done for him if you look at what Al Shatner was doing, it was like various TV appearances somewhat throughout the decade, and then he did a lot of commercials, and there's tons of commercials.
Speaker 4And promise tastes like butter Promise.
Speaker 6Where you find him. I mean, he did a margarine ad which was a nationwide commercial, but then I watched a commercial where he was doing an ad for a seafood sale at a grocery store.
Speaker 4Hey, right now, loblaws is having a huge frozen food sale. You can get tremendous value on over 50 frozen food items frozen vegetables, frozen meat, entrees, frozen concentrated juices, ice cream. If it's frozen, you can save plenty. Don't get left out on the cold.
Speaker 6Come on in and stock up that freezer so you know, this wasn't like a national ad campaign. It was like probably a tri-state deal for a weekly seafood ad, which you're like, man, you know you, just you need to look at.
Speaker 3It's sad because you brought up star trek movie memories which I I just recently acquired. I read the first chapter. I was hoping that there would be some more anecdotes or information about these movies. There is only one line of reference to Tubodum at the end. It's basically like I made a bunch of shit movies like he names Big Bad Mama and, I think, the Devil's Reign. It's just sad because I would have liked to hear a little bit more from his perspective on what it was like making these movies.
Speaker 3But the entire first chapter is quite a fascinating look at what his life was like after the end of Star Trek. The demise of Star Trek, where he was kind of on top of the world, talks about going and meeting with NASA while Star Trek was still on the air, being celebrated as this hero, and then not only does the show end, but he gets divorced at the same time. His alimony is based upon the income that he was making while being a highly paid lead of a major television series and now he's basically broke. He can't get work and he's going around driving around the country in this RV camper set up and he's doing dinner theater along the way, which is like the ultimate insult, that's. It's very similar to what bob crane did, the star of hogan's heroes. After, uh, that show was over, he also went around the country doing, you know, roadside dinner theater productions, which is it's kind of kind of embarrassing, to be honest. I mean it's sad he was.
Speaker 6He. He did a lot to like. I mean he just worked his ass off to keep himself relevant and like, appear in in things and be on talk shows. I mean he's on, uh, here, roald rivera, I think he's on dick cavett, but every time it's always star in star trek coming back. What are you gonna do about star trek? How do you feel about the star trek conventions? And you can tell he's agitated by that because there's like three interviews I found where he goes. Well, I'm also trying to. I don't know if I would want to do that again unless the script was good and I'm on this new tv movie of the week that's really good where I got to act, you know, and I think that, like leonard nimoy, he came to the conclusion that, like I'm captain kirk, I have to do this and have fun with my persona and I can't be so serious because you know, I read a great article in starlog, one of the first issues where starlog was basically made to like capitalize on the existing star trek fan base. And they talk about shatner.
Speaker 6He was very well thought of as a fine classical actor early in his career. He got lots of plaudits on broadway and um, he was. You have to remember. This is a guy that was coming up in the wake of someone, like you know, marlon Brando, and everyone aspired to be that way and be respected for being an actor, and he was very much that way and he became instead this sort of this person. That means a lot to people like us, you know, and not so much to critics and not so much the critics. So I guess we could start out with Big Bad Mama, the Roger Corman production starring Angie Dickinson and Tom Skerritt, which is basically a copy and paste model that Corman was using a lot of the early 1920s Depression-era gangster.
Speaker 7Living fast, killing faster. They blasted their way through seven states.
Speaker 6Angie Dickinson, william Shatner, tom scarry, big bad mama, and I suppose uh and william shatner comes along for the ride on a cross-country road trip of mayhem and fun and hijinks as we rob banks and hold up parties and all sorts of other things, and um, uh, what was? What was andrew dickinson's name in this? Wilma good, wilma, yeah, wilma cartwright or something, and she is out here.
Speaker 6Sorry, wilma mcclatchy is her name mcclatchy and she's got a lot of spunk and a lot of style and she's gonna stand up for what she and her two daughters deserve in this world right all while flashing her breasts many times in the movie.
Speaker 3I what you would have gotten your money's worth in this and right All while flashing her breasts many times in the movie.
Speaker 6You would have gotten your money's worth in this, and while William Shatner doesn't come in till probably the 45-minute mark of the movie, he does make an impression. He's a unique character and we get to really see Shatner in action.
Speaker 3Oh yes.
Speaker 6We do. We get to see a little Shatner, him and Angie Dickinson getting together. Ryan, what's this movie about?
Speaker 3So Big Bad Mama, like you mentioned, is a kind of retread of a very popular Corman formula movie right, average, you know working class people fed up with society taking on the system by, you know, robbing banks and making money as they the best way they could, by stealing it. And so this was popularized by the Shelley Winters vehicle, bloody Mama, which I believe was the first one that Corman did as a you know a film I think that was about Ma Barker and then later done again with more or less the same formula in a film that we both admired and talked about previously Boxcar Bertha by Martin Scorsese. So this seemed to be a formula that was a winning, repeatable, you know, marketable success story. So what this movie is, it's just as I described.
Speaker 3So wilma mcclatchy and her, uh, two daughters, two like teenage sort of adult, but not really it's hard to tell like late teens, I guess 18, because one of them is about to get married at the beginning of the movie they unceremoniously perhaps I mean, you never know this is a different, different, almost a different world at this point.
Speaker 3True, she calls off the wedding because she realizes, like this guy's a no good loser, and so she goes on the run and starts bootlegging, because bootlegging was also one of the most popular things to do in these types of movies, because it shows us the outlaw culture of the time. Um, of course, that gets, that goes awry, and so then they start uh, they start robbing banks and they start doing more and more heists until, of course, the law catches up with them as all, as it always does in these movies well, I enjoyed it.
Speaker 6It certainly has an interesting morality to it. Uh, very much like boxcar bertha. There's a sort of like left wing sort of uh, fdr strain that goes through it twice in the film. We get characters who are denouncing the new deal, right. So I guess these people are a force for you know, a robin hood force of taking, you know what the poor deserve, etc. But um, it was so it hops all over the place in terms of romantic liaisons.
Speaker 6At first the daughters and their mother. They make their bucks by basically swindling, swindlers. So there's a band of drunken sort of VFW guys who pay the girls, take advantage of them, make them strip for them. And so Angie Dickinson robs them and takes all the money you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Advantage of them, make them strip for them. And so andrew dickinson robs them and takes all the money you want to be ashamed of yourself. And then they rob a scam preacher, scam, sort of born again, uh preacher guy. But then they end up robbing a bank and piggybacking off the efforts of other robbers, tom skerritt included. His whole gang is murdered by the police or killed by the police, and she, he, hops in with them and becomes angie dickinson's lover, and I've always liked Tom Skerritt. I thought he looked handsome in this movie. He's kind of interesting and quickly, though once William Shatner enters the picture, angie Dickinson swaps him for Shatner very quickly and Tom Skerritt's in a foul mood, so he has a threesome with the two daughters. Which was?
Speaker 3that was the, that was the moment that I was texting you while I was watching it at the first time and I'm like there are so many just wtf moments in this movie. I'm like what? Is going on and all of a sudden it just engages in this menage a trois with the two daughters and I was like, okay, well, certainly not going to see this in a movie in 2025. Maybe in a couple years we'll, we'll, we'll get back to something like that, but uh, I don't think we're quite ready for that.
Speaker 6The audience is not exactly asking you to like have a problem with this, necessarily, right?
Speaker 3um and again. What are their ages?
Speaker 6we're not quite, we're not quite sure here no, no, and you know you'd think that that would cause a lot of problems. But then there's a moment where angie dickinson, after it's been revealed that during this, this liaison, one of the girls the more impressionable and naive girl is like is pregnant yeah angie dickinson's upset but then later she goes oh, you know, it's okay, we'll work together and uh, it was um.
Big Bad Mama: Roger Corman's Gangster Romp
Speaker 6It was interesting because the shatner character I think importantly william Shatner in this. He's very lovable, kind of I wouldn't say dumb, but he's like not as he doesn't have the cruel streak of the rest of the gang. You know he's not willing to go down with all the other more vile stuff. He's more of a card room cheat.
Speaker 4It's seldom I have the pleasure of seeing such a lovely lady as you, and then I commit a social blunder.
Speaker 7I have the pleasure of seeing such a lovely lady as you, and then I commit a social blunder. Oh, it wasn't your fault.
Speaker 4I guess I was hurrying to get my bed down. Allow me to introduce myself William J Baxter, Louisville, Kentucky.
Speaker 8Wilma McClatchy.
Speaker 4Fort Worth. It would be an honor, Mrs McClatchy, if you'd allow me to escort you to the bedding window.
Speaker 3Why thank?
Speaker 6you, he's not very sophisticated, I would say either he's not very sophisticated and there's a moment where he, he, uh, he has an issue. They, they kidnap an heiress at the end of the film and william shatner sort of he doesn't, he's not all in on that, he thinks it's kind of a bad deal. So he confronts tom scarrett and he goes let's put up your dukes, I'm going to fight you over this. They're you.
Speaker 6The sort of tension between the two of them has been mounting and Tom Skerritt just pulls a gun on him and I guess it sort of makes Shatner look foolish. So in that moment I think we're supposed to think like, oh, william Shatner, he's just kind of a bumbler and this guy's the real cool customer, right. But then Skerritt goes upstairs and is fooled by the heiress into thinking they're about to have sex and then she, you know, handicaps him with a hard kick to the crotch and he looks like a dumbass too. So it's like what is this just bumbling gang of people? Then at the end it kind of tries to be poignant in a way which I felt like didn't necessarily work, but it was also such a fun little romp with just constant shenanigans and goofs that I thought it was worth watching, you know.
Speaker 3Oh yeah, no, this is. This is definitely one that's worth watching, worth recommending for for this type of genre, a movie of this era, for sure. It's interesting the parallels that you see with Boxcar Bertha, though I think it's. It's worth pointing out, especially the the love triangle dynamic between the lead woman and then the two male suitors, if you, if you can recall back to that, where she initially hooks up with one guy who's perceived as kind of like oh, this is a kind of like alpha male guy, and then all of a sudden another guy enters the picture and that guy immediately, you know um recedes into the background, but he doesn't leave.
Speaker 3He decides that it's still worth staying around, even though you've been entirely emasculated by your woman. Uh, picking up another guy and bringing him into the picture, you're still gonna hang around.
Speaker 6So it's interesting that both movies did that same exact, you know plot idea which is yeah, yeah, they also pretend to be rich and rob a gala, a party of a rich person. That was exactly from boxcar birth, that birth. So I'm wondering, when I'm watching this I go was free love really still a thing? And like by 1974, was that still going on? Or is this just Roger Corman's like leftover sixties impulses, that it's just like keeping it going, the whole polycule, I guess you would call it now, I think.
Speaker 3I think the latter yeah, I think the latter that just they just have a core set of like ideas and plot tropes that they're going to continuously recycle into all these movies and basically make the same movie over and over again but change the window dressing here and there. I mean how, how different? I haven't seen bloody mama. I would like to see that. But it'd be curious to to compare all three of them together and see how much actual difference there are between the three films well, this one has a.
Speaker 6This one has a large tonal um change and that it's like very much more freewheeling and fun loving than scorsese's, which ends with a, with our hero basically a who, while not being the primary protagonist, still sort of like the soul of the movie, and that he has a lot of he's tender towards Bertha and he has political ideals and moral aspirations and he's brutally, you know, crucified and beaten and murdered by the police Right, and so you're left feeling with that film that there's a sort of poignancy there With this. I feel like the leg it does have over Box Carbertha is that it's led by a very charismatic star being Angie Dickinson, who's terrific in this Very spunky. But it's less, you know, there's less. It's much lighter, it's much lighter.
Speaker 3It's much lighter on his feet. Yeah, it's a much more fun fun enterprise in total. And I agree with Angie about your comments about Angie Dickinson. She's phenomenal in this movie. She carries it, she makes it work entirely through her charm and charisma. There's something very appealing about her in this role, very appealing about her in this in this role, and you know, I didn't realize just like in. I thought about her very differently after I saw dress to kill for the first time and then now I see her in this movie and I'm like what was what was going on with her career that she needed to keep doing these times, the movies that she had a much more kind of respectable career?
Speaker 6But I have to say, even though she does have to get she's nude a lot, I mean, and by the way, she is beautiful. She's still this is a great role.
Speaker 6Oh yeah, for sure I can't speak for how great of a role police woman was. I'm sure it was quite the get at the time, but I don't, you know. But this does ask a sort of agent of chaos, a strong mother, tough, smart and, uh, it's probably a good role. So if you had to, if you had to show a little something for for roger, you know, maybe it was worth the trade. But you know, william shatner, I mean he's, he's um, he's naked too. You know he's doing. What did you? What's your verdict on the sex scene in the film?
Speaker 3we did not good, not good okay, kind of shocked and horrified that I'm seeing shatner in not the best shape to be. To be perfectly um fair, not no, no offense to him, but this is not the point of his career where he should be taken off his shirt and being in bed. Okay, if this was 1966 he could make it work with his Captain Kirk physique, but not here. This is no go.
Speaker 6Yeah, I agree, he was looking a little on the pudgy side, I suppose, and doing a lot of rubbing too. A lot of rubbing, yes, a lot of rubbing going on.
Speaker 3Anyway, I don't know if it's better or worse than impulse, where we see shatner in the tank top, that's.
Speaker 6that's quite, almost on the same level of, uh, cringiness, but I'll leave that up to you and the viewers that was something, and I picked all these movies sort of sight unseen, and I kind of picked them by what I thought would be entertainment value. Um, now, unfortunately, this film and when we get to devil's reign you'll find aren't necessarily the best showcases for shatner's talent, because he's in them somewhat briefly, um I don't think that's fair.
Speaker 3Though you you commented on that about the devil's reign that shatner was barely in it, I wouldn't really say that he's much more of a presence in the devil's reign than in big bad mama, for instance, where he is only in like the third act, um rain he's. I think he's like a major player in the devil's reign.
Speaker 6Okay, well, he makes an impact. His screen time is somewhat minimal, but he makes an impact it's like for the first and third act.
Speaker 3I think he's there.
Speaker 6He's gone for the middle of the movie yeah, um, but you know I uh, do you want to move on to impulse? Do you have anything else?
Speaker 3just a couple more things about a big bad mama. First of all, did you, um, did you buy the dvd, or do you watch it on streaming, or how'd?
Speaker 6you know, I streamed it okay.
Speaker 3I bought the dvd so they had big bad mama 2 included as well, which was made about 11 years later, I believe. It also features features Angie Dickinson. Even though Wilma is gunned down at the end of the movie, the Big Bad Mama 2 sequel is like a soft reboot, so she's kind of still alive. The events of the first film didn't quite take hold in the continuity and it's just much more of a miserable film. It's not really fun or entertaining at all, so I would not recommend the sequel oh, you did what, oh, 87 yes, it has a totally different feel to it.
Speaker 3it does it feels and everybody kind of has those even though it's still set in the 1930s, they still they have those kind of 80s hairdos for the women where everybody looks like they've been, you know, hairsprayed into like oblivion and it's just kind of off-putting in general.
Speaker 6Well, that's too bad. Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that.
Speaker 3That's okay, though is very cool because you can put it onto like grindhouse mode where it will play trailers for other roger corman style movies before it and in between the double feature, and so you'll get like the women in prison or the night nurses trailers and stuff like that.
Speaker 6so it's pretty cool in that regard and I see it was directed by jim winorski. So was there a? Was there enough nudity for you?
Speaker 3in the sequel. Uh, I didn't. I honestly didn't think there was that much. From what I recall, I kind of wasn't paying attention midway to the end because I was like, eh, whatever. Yeah, sure, I understand, got it, but I would recommend big bad mama one to people who like this kind of movie Like this is something worth checking out and seeing.
Speaker 6there's also got dick miller in the movie, so oh, he's back. Yeah, that's something number one, not number two, as far as I know.
Speaker 3Oh yeah, dick miller was terrific in the in the in the first one yeah, he was a lot of fun it's always great to see him that and getting to see, like you know, anytime you get the um protagonist with the tommy gun going out firing and stuff like that, you know this is all. This is all in good fun absolutely.
Speaker 6What was was impulse.
Impulse: Shatner's Darkest Film Role
Speaker 5All in, good fun for you every few years, a motion picture is made which, by its very nature, demands that everyone see it, a motion picture that dares expose the innermost depths of the human soul.
Speaker 7I thought I locked the door. Well, what are you doing here?
Speaker 5A film which penetrates all preconceived ideas of fear.
Speaker 2Please, oh, god God. God, oh God no.
Speaker 5A film that explores the illusion of death. Atlantis Pictures proudly presents William Shatner and Kim Nicholas as two souls caught in a sphere of suffering. Somebody's gotta believe me, somebody's gotta believe me. Two souls united by the dead.
Speaker 3Impulse. Impulse was not all in good fun. This is a very, very tough watch.
Speaker 6I'll say that it is an unpleasant film, I would say is fair, and William Shatner was quoted as saying that. I don't remember why I did that and I'm sure it was for money.
Speaker 3Oh yeah, Do you know how they got William Shatner for this movie?
Speaker 6The guy ran into him in an airport, correct? Yes, in the.
Speaker 3Miami International Airport. They ran into him in an airport, correct? Yes, in the Miami international airport they ran into William Shatner and they're like hey, do you want to be in our movie? And he was like, oh, okay, sure, sure, I'll do your movie, fine, yeah.
Speaker 5Fine.
Speaker 3Fine, yes.
Speaker 4Sounds good.
Speaker 6Sounds good to me. I also forgot to mention, too, that Marsha Lafferty, william Shatner's wife, played the heiress in Big Bad Mama. Really, that was Shatner's wife at the time. She's also in this movie as the hotel clerk that William Shatner flirts with, okay, and then she's in Kingdom of the Spiders, too, and she was a beautiful actress. It seems like she really was in a few movies, some shows, but mostly she was in things that William Shatner was in, and she's on Twitter. I actually followed her. She has 350 followers 350 followers, that's it.
Speaker 6Yeah, she does a one-woman show on stage where she plays Ava Gardner. I guess that's kind of what I got into. But yeah, she's in three of these films. Very pretty seems like a good actress. I thought she was fun as the heiress. That's where she gets the most time to act in kingdom of the spiders. We'll get to her role, which is a very unfortunate one. But, um, impulse is a film directed by a guy named william greffay. Yes, a little accent on his, on his, on the e of his, uh, of his name, and he. He made a few films. He made the hook generation, which was kind of a a trip out movie. The naked zoo I don't know much about, uh, miami housewife, who begins an affair with a young author, and then, uh, he also made mako, the jaws of which I have heard about as a Jaws ripoff.
Speaker 3Yes.
Speaker 6But Impulse stars William Shatner and Jennifer Bishop, who is another actress I couldn't find very much about, but she was in very few films, some television stuff, but seems to apparently, after two movies after this, just dropped off the face of the map entirely. No one knows what happened to her and I couldn't find any information about her after Mako Jaws of Death in 76. She was just gone but William Shatner in this film plays the hook, I thought, was that William Shatner is a guy who kills rich widows and I thought to myself, oh okay, well, that's sort of like whimsically morbid. Maybe this is sort of a black comedy kind of thing, kind of like a blue beard you ever see seen blue beard, um, with, uh, the the guy richard burton, and uh, I was thinking it was gonna be along those lines, but it's not. It's not necessarily really about william shatner murdering widows, though he does happen to murder two rich widows. Mostly he's just unpleasant, creepy guy who just is kind of a bad guy.
Speaker 2Look, Tina, you deserve to die he was bad.
Speaker 4He'd snap your neck just like that. I did us all a favor. He was a waste of nothing. Come on, get in. Maybe my mother won't believe me, but I'll tell somebody. You told your mother that you didn't believe me. Somebody will. Somebody will. You don't tell nobody. I will. We'll say you're crazy.
Speaker 3I'm not crazy, you are.
Speaker 4Oh yeah, You've got to be crazy talking to a gravestone.
Speaker 6And he stumbles into bed, into it's because of his childhood trauma.
Speaker 3So it's actually a trauma. You know, psychological trauma movie that you know, hunting your inner demons. No, I'm just kidding, it's not. It's not actually about any of that no, it's.
Speaker 6I mean, that's kind of in there, but because the opening of the film is in black and white, which is showing us that we're in sort of a flashback, so there's some artistry there. And William Shatner's mother is very much like a Rorschach kind of a thing, is a prostitute who's sleeping with this guy and he comes out and little baby Shatner comes out and goes Mama, please, what are you doing? And then the guy goes, ok, well, he should watch. And then this is obviously perverse. So William Shat guy goes okay, well, he should watch. And then this is obviously perverse. So william shatner stabs him with a samurai sword.
Speaker 3The young shatner and he dies, and then isn't that exactly what not? Not with the samurai sword, but isn't that in marnie also?
Speaker 6yes, very similar to marnie. It's very much marnie. That's better.
Speaker 3That's a better way to put it yeah, yeah, rorschach, you probably called him nerd.
Speaker 6You Come on I know it's more like the Bruce Dern murder in Marnie. You're right, but yeah, so then, anyway, we cut to present day in a very cool opening sequence, I thought, with William Shatner, with the belly dancer.
Speaker 6Yeah, he's chilling in a club looking cool as fuck smoking a cigarette, cool, big, wide collar, going, and we see this belly dancer dancing. And then it will cut to like still photography shots of, like the atmosphere of the room and the belly dancer and show credits, which I thought was kind of neat. I was sort of on board. And then we see that, uh, william shatner is making time with this belly dancer gal and his rich widow, patron sugared mama, is upset and mad at him and uh, he, the impulse strikes, uh, the, the. I suppose the trauma of him killing a guy makes him strangle this woman to death yeah, that part I I don't buy at all.
Speaker 3But he, he is super creepy in this movie. He's very off-putting, he's very just disturbing, but he's he's not in a likable fashion at all, which is, I think, no to the to. The movie's detriment is that you can do this, you can have this type of storyline, you can have this type of character, but there needs to be some kind of inherent shatner charm that eases uh, you know that ekes through and it's none of that here. He's just unpleasant from start to finish. He's creepy, he's un, just unpleasant to be around his performance is somewhat good well.
Speaker 3His performance here, I want to say, though, is the most like stereotypical shatner-esque performance, like in terms of what people think of the caricatured shatner performance of like very just, weird mannerisms and kind of like jerky motions and stiltedness and like kind of, you know, has always has his hand in his mouth or there's some weird. There's always some weirdness to it, and that, to me, speaks of more of like the family guy or a Simpsons parody of Shatner like that's what this movie speaks to me more of.
Speaker 6I mean, he is acting his ass off to a certain extent, but the plot of the film is basically he kills this rich widow, drives the car, just sends her. You know, she killed her in the car, conveniently by a river, so he just puts the car in drive and rolls her down, which is a cool camera angle, by the way. It's kept the camera in the car the entire time while it rolled down this hill into this river and, like it, fills up with water. So they must have destroyed an entire camera for that shot, which is kind of cool. And, um, anyway, there's no repercussions for this. I thought the whole film would be about him trying to beat the rap of like someone that was on him for murder, but I guess they're just nobody cared. So he he gets into this scheme with a rich widow and then he meets her niece or friend, younger friend or yeah, they're friends.
Speaker 3Ruth roman and jennifer bishop. They're just friends. I yeah. At first you're like, is this a mother and daughter or is this a like?
Speaker 6they're just friends as far as I can tell and jennifer bishop is a young, beautiful gal, younger single mom, and she has this really annoying daughter who you know, looks like a commercial from the 70s long blonde hair, little pigtails and little frilly dress and she likes to go visit her father's grave. And there's a moment in the film where, after her and Shatner because she has witnessed him do creepy, murderous things.
Speaker 3Like deliberately, you know intentionally murder people.
Speaker 6Like first degree murder.
Speaker 3Like she's witnessed that.
Speaker 6I didn't want to jump the gun because that's the best scene in the movie.
Speaker 3With the return of Oddjob.
Speaker 6Yeah with Harold Sakata is great in the film. But there's a moment where Shatner there's two great ones actually where he acts and it's just like so bizarre. The little girl is like walking by him and he goes will you hang out in a graveyard? That's weird, you know. He just like berates this little girl. The other great moment is he's pretending to be Mr Nice Guy on a date with the mom and he bumps into a lady with balloons at the zoo or something I don't know where they're, at that water park or something, and he bumps into this lady and she keeps walking but he goes you're a fat, disgusting pig. People like you should be murdered. I don't remember exactly what he said, but he's like you should be chopped up and fed it.
Speaker 4You should be turned into dog food. People like you ought to be ground up, made into dog food.
Speaker 6Yes, and then he just keeps walking forward and the gal was like, oh, what was that about? He goes, oh, nothing, nothing, it's all good, but you're like what we needed more of that.
Speaker 3We needed more of that in the movie though, because that is, that is the single best scene in the movie the balloon, the balloon lady, and the balloon lady does not react at all.
Speaker 6She just walks away. Yeah, okay, just took her lumps from this guy who's a clear maniac. I guess that was them trying to show he was crazy. But like we get it, like we saw, he's murdering people like we get it.
Speaker 6He's, he's crazy and the worst, most annoying part too, is that they they spend all this time with shatner where he can like be upset and like disgusted about committing the murder, like it'd be one thing if this is sort of like a um, a place in the sun montgomery cliff deal, where he murders somebody but he like feels really bad about it, you know you know, in order to get over.
Speaker 6But he does. But then he keeps being weird. So you know what I'm saying. He goes into the hotel room after he kills her and is like, like throwing up all over himself. He's like, yeah, what have I done? Yeah, what, what have I done, you know? And then like, um, he just kind of keeps going. He's cool, he's flirting with the gal at the deal. Then Harold Sakata comes back into his life and goes you know, you owe me money. And then William Shatner comes up with the most elaborate way to kill him. It's a fantastic moment. Harold Sakata walks out of the hotel and Shatner has a noose hanging from the roof waiting for him and then starts to try to hang him with a noose and like a cantilever, like pulley thing, yeah, and it doesn't work. So then he runs Harold Sakata over with his car like three times after chasing him through the car wash, though which was cool.
Speaker 6I mean, it's the best it was that's that.
Speaker 3That's, yeah, absolutely interesting behind the scenes stuff. Harold Sakata was almost actually hanged and choked during the filming of that. They did not rig the noose properly, so he was actually choking and they had to cut the rope in order for him to not die.
Speaker 6I had read that too, but then we never get a wide shot of him actually hanging, so it's like he could have literally been standing on a stool. Why did you need to hang the guy?
Speaker 3No idea, apparently, someone hanging so it's like he could have literally been standing on a stool.
Speaker 6Why did you need to hang the guy?
Speaker 3no idea apparently someone, apparently someone was shooting it. Uh, maybe it was not during the actual like filming it or something, it might have been like while they were prepping it, or I'm not sure, because they, in the commentary track which I dutifully listened to with by william griffey, who's still with us even though he was born in, uh, 1930, he's still with us the um, someone shot it on like eight millimeter film, like it can't like a hand cam or something like that. So there apparently footage existed of, like harold cicada nearly being choked to death while being hanged, or something like that in the movie impulse.
Speaker 6In the movie impulse the classic movie impulse what did, what did?
Speaker 3you filmed in tampa, by the way. So yeah, graffay was a very much florida-based director. I was looking at a lot of the other films. A lot of them were filmed in, like miami, south florida, tampa. It's just, it's kind of cool because it's kind of unusual, especially for that uh time period.
Speaker 6But hmm and uh. You know what did you? I mean what? How did william girdler seem to you as he, when he talked? I mean, did he have any? Not william girdler that I'm sorry, william griffey, william griffey, yeah no, he was.
Speaker 3He was actually pretty knowledgeable and with it and he it was actually more interesting, I think, to listen to the commentary track than to watch the movie, because he talked about like he talked about the scene where they dumped the car into the river and they basically got bought like a junk car for like little to no money and painted it whatever color it needed to be and put the camera in the back seat and then dumped it in the river. So there's a lot more interesting kind of like guerrilla filmmaking stories that come from that commentary track than the actual finished product of impulse, which is not very good.
Speaker 6Did he strike you as normal that he was he realistic about the film? That okay, cause it's a weird movie.
Speaker 3Seems seems like a cool guy. Yeah, I mean it's just. It's just kind of like a misfire, I feel like. I feel like if you watch this enough times, it will probably grow on you. This was the second time that I've seen it. I actually did watch this a couple years ago and I didn't quite like it then, but I don't think I liked it any more the second time. I watched it just recently.
Speaker 6There was little things about it that I enjoyed, but overall with Shatner had he been more like yeah more on. I mean, he was good in it, Crazy more crazy. That's what we needed.
Speaker 3We needed more crazy, extravagant behavior, not this kind of like pensive, weird psychotic, like biting the fingernails and stuff like that. That doesn't do anything.
Speaker 6He never really had much of a plan either.
Speaker 3I guess he wants to rob this old lady safe, but he just kind of meanders around through well, the plan was to get the ten thousand dollar check from the, the girlfriend.
Speaker 6That was the plan right, right, yeah, didn't end up to invest to invest for her, which you know.
Speaker 3You know ten thousand dollars is a lot of money nowadays. Imagine in 1974, giving $10,000 to your gigolo boyfriend to invest for you. That's a that's a lot.
Speaker 6Yeah, he was. I could tell maybe they pitch it to him and like this is going to be a psychological drama where you get to show people what you can really do, but it really is this kind of like nasty movie that just doesn't really have any kind of redeeming moral center to it. No really right and you.
Speaker 3You mentioned the beginning opening scene of the movie, which it doesn't. It doesn't justify anything, or it doesn't. It doesn't really explain why he is the way he is. It's just it did it need to be a creepy guy that he killed, and that was that was going to make him watch him, you know have sex with his mom, or what was, what was it going on here? Like I don't understand that trauma, exactly why they're justifying it that way.
Speaker 6I guess maybe you could justify it more if perhaps he murdered his mom, you know.
Speaker 3So then he had like by accident or something like he went to kill the guy and he stabbed his mom know so. Then he had like my accident or something like he went to kill the guy and he stabbed his mom. That would have been a worthy psychological you know trauma.
Speaker 6Maybe he killed his mom on purpose, because she was like I'll do whatever I want. I want to fuck all these guys and then william shot like a norman-based situation.
Speaker 6Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly like to explain sort of his, I guess, misogyny, you know, because he, yeah, for he sleeps with the hotel gal, which is an interesting scene because uh, it's his wife and she knocks on the door and he, she's like, uh, I hope you weren't waiting long and he goes, I hope it was worth the wait and it's like that's not. I don't think that would work for anybody. I don't think that'd be a line that would work at all.
Speaker 3Right, I don't think that would be I don't think any of the lines in this movie would work at all for any. Well, the daughter.
Speaker 6The daughter too is like someone I guess you're supposed to identify with, but she's such an annoying brat where and she's always like when she just stands in front of the car, the oncoming car, and she's like.
Speaker 3I knew you would stop. It's like, um no. I wouldn't risk that you have some homicidal maniac speeding down at you. And then she he runs over the dog, which is also the most disturbing part in the movie and then she's like, oh my God, you killed him.
Speaker 6It's out of nowhere the way I'm chatting it's like oh, he's probably fine Dogs, oh, but like he's all shaken up about it and like weird, and I'm like dogs lick their wounds and he'll be fine.
Speaker 6Yeah, because the thing is is, if this guy has this trauma that makes him want to kill which is what we're told then he should like want to kill, but instead he's always put in situations where he like has to do it. You know what I mean, Like we're kind of. You know, in order to achieve his schemes, he has to do it. It's never like he's american psycho, like teeing up his next murder, you know yeah, well, the speaking of the dog murder scene.
Speaker 3That is actually quite disturbing when you listen to the commentary track and you find out they kill a real dog no, they did not kill a real dog, but they did go to the humane society and get a dead dog and put it and and film it to show and insert I'm not making this up because I was looking, because I'm like is that a still photo of a dog just lying down?
Speaker 6but then like I saw like the branches and the sun moving over him, so I go.
Speaker 3They said basically it was no, it was too expensive to get a dog and like inject it with something to make it still, you know, like to medicate it. So they, they went to the humane society and got a dog that they euthanized and just filmed it for however long they needed and put it back in, put it in the movie.
Speaker 6Okay.
Speaker 3Disturbing in its own regard, but whatever.
Speaker 6Yeah, at the end, impulse Shatner, in a fit of rage or something, goes to murder the rich widow and he does. He stabs her in a very prolonged stabbing sequence where he's just agonizing over this and then the mom comes in and then he just starts drowning her in a fish tank and I was like, oh my God, and this is already after. We think the daughter is dead too. I was like, is this what we're just going to end with him just murdering these three people and that's it. But no, the day is saved. The little girl is not actually dead and she comes back and shoots William Shatner, stabs him.
Speaker 3Stabs him in the back. Yeah, I honestly don't even remember.
Speaker 6Stabs him in the back, and then mom is alive and that's the end.
Speaker 3Gotta love how cheap the movie gets at the end, where they're doing the chase sequence, where he's chasing the little girl, though, and it's literally just the most plain rooms Like that could be a stock room, a closet, whatever. It's just one room after another. It's just. It's quite fascinating how they, what they did there.
Speaker 6I mean I thought it was somewhat interesting cause they were in a funeral home. When they were running through the with the cemetery I was like, oh, you know. I was like, come on, it's like so dark they don't have any lights to make it look cool. It's just like this blue blur.
Speaker 3You know what I mean. Yeah, I think this movie also does. It would benefit from having a better quality transfer, but I believe the negative was destroyed at some point, so it does not exist like a really high quality original print for this, unfortunately.
Speaker 6Maybe Shatner did that because he said he would. He said he would burn it if he could get a hold of it. Okay, that's what he said. Yeah, I say he wasn't. He wasn't proud of his work it wasn't.
Speaker 3It wasn't avia rod, though for this one right no, no, it was no exactly.
Speaker 6Yeah, shatner did it. He burned the well. It won't die because the shat fans are just. And I was very amused by the DVD cover, which is obviously trying to crib off of just Shatner's in general fame and it's like a picture of him smiling like this. It doesn't tell you anything about the movie at all.
Speaker 3That is one of the worst stock cover things I've ever seen, though that thing you sent me. Did you buy that, or is that like?
Speaker 6no, no, I watched it on tubi, bro.
Speaker 3It was on tubi for free see, I I'm just I'm a sucker, so I buy all these things, and so I you know why? I think I watched this last year or the year before, I don't. I think it was like a limited edition blu-ray or something like that, that you had to order off a special, like special website, and that's, that's where I got this. I can't remember why I found it, but I I shilled out the money, so was it?
Speaker 6what was a special website?
Speaker 3it was a grindhouse releasing something like that yeah I think they had like a special limited edition blu-ray or something like that. Let me?
Speaker 6yeah, it was interesting and actually I did buy the devil's rain blu-ray or something like that. Let me see. Yeah, it was interesting. Actually I did buy the Devil's Reign Blu-ray and the Kingdom of the Spiders Blu-ray, which I was happy with my purchase. They both looked nice and had good special features on them.
Speaker 3The Kingdom of the Spiders Blu-ray unfortunately came out after I popped for the French Blu-ray edition, so I have that one.
Speaker 6Yeah, the new kingdom of the spiders has three commentary tracks, really okay, yeah, and they're all interesting, um, so I listen to them all.
Speaker 3So impulse, impulse to finish up. Uh yeah, thumbs down. I would not recommend this one to only the most diehard shatner fans out there or diehard, just freaks that just want to see something weird, weird I mean like in florida.
Speaker 6You know historic florida filmography yeah, I mean film history in florida. Yeah, and also, this is also why I do generally like these movies that are really low budget because they don't have a permit to shoot anywhere. They're just out filming like in the real world, so you get a good idea of, like, what things look like in the 70s. They just walked outside and started filming stuff, so there's a sort of documentary element to it. That's. That's always appealing to me. But, yeah, just, uh, just weird misfire movie. Um, devil's rain. I'm kind of curious to hear what you thought about this. This is a film from Robert Fused.
Speaker 2There have been films about earthquakes, airplane disasters and blazing infernos, but there has never been anything like the Devil's Reign. The Devil's Reign, the 300-year search for the power to damn mankind, is over Fools and the towering terror of the devil on earth is now unleashed.
Speaker 4Burn, burn, burn, burn, burn Burn.
Speaker 2Burn, burn. The devil's reign, hundreds of souls held captive in an eternity of hell. Seize him. Possessed by the devil, you, my son, have defiled all that is holy.
Speaker 5Mother of my God, my.
Speaker 2God. They become his worshipers and his demons.
Speaker 3Oh yes, not Robert Faust, robert Fused. Might as well be Faust, because he's obsessed with Satan.
Speaker 6It's sort of in the company of like what's that movie with Peter Fonda, the Race with the Devil with Warren Oates? That's kind of a similar thing, because I think like devil cult stuff was very new, in the company of like what's that movie with Peter Fonda, the race with the devil with Warren Oates? That's kind of a similar thing, cause I think like devil cult stuff was very new in the sixties and it was kind of like this takeoff of sixties counterculture shit. Like oh yeah, we're doing devil stuff Very edgy, right, and this guy directed the abominable Dr Fibes and Dr Fibes rises again, which is phenomenal, phenomenal movie.
Speaker 3I love the abominable dr fives and I just I re-watched it after I realized that he had directed this. I was like, oh, I definitely I need to re-watch that. And I watched. It is just such a beautiful, uh, horror movie. I love that movie so much this movie was widely.
Speaker 6No, I have not, actually I'm going to, I hope to see it. You know, this one, I feel like, was very maligned at the time when it was released.
Speaker 3Oh, I bet yeah, it's messed up. It's messed up, but it's messed up in all the right ways, like this is such a beautiful, disgusting movie.
Speaker 6It's a great looking movie and it is disgusting in certain ways. For sure it's a great looking movie and it is disgusting in certain ways, for sure it was a film that was produced by the company that put it out was called a Bryanston distributing company, which was, you know, not officially but widely regarded as a mafia cutout outfit. They'd also released the Texas chainsaw massacre, which I thought this film had a lot of similarities to. There's lots of wide open country spaces, very desolate. But they also released Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat. They were the guys behind those as well. So actually, bryanston dried up shortly after this film because its ownership was sued and successfully sued for a lot of money by the federal government for an obscenity charge for the release of deep throat.
Speaker 6Shortly after, in the eighties, the law was changed so that sort of pornography was more widely viewable via the Supreme court. But at the time no one really knew what to do with that movie and they sued him for a shitload and they had to fold the company. But this was one of their efforts, yeah, and I found it to be somewhat interesting and the thing that was hailed at the time was that it was just boring. I think Ebert even watched it and said it was boring. I didn't find it to be necessarily boring at all. There were sort of long stretches of people walking around, but go ahead.
Speaker 3What were your thoughts? What do you think? So I boring is not a word I would use to describe this at all there is something interesting going on at all times, I think. Visually, no matter where you are in the movie, it's a very visually appealing, uh, aesthetically appealing movie. It is a movie that revels in its special effects and makeup effects, which are just to a T excellent for this type of low budget independent movie. I mean this movie. They got the melting effect for the melting faces and melting bodies and they milk it for everything that it's worth and it looks fantastic and talk about, about and not to jump to the end of the movie right now.
Speaker 3But you can tell they they clearly were very pleased with themselves by having the exploding church at the end of the movie, that it lingers on for like two minutes just like sitting there after it's blown up just burning in the embers, like they clearly were very happy with this. So I I kind of respect that and appreciate that. It does not give two cents about plot at all. The plot is all over the place. It jumps you into the plot and you're like, did I miss like the first half an hour this movie, or the first hour, or was there another movie that came before this, but it's irrelevant. Basically, there's like a. It's kind of like there's an Epstein list of Satan worshipers that the Shatner family is hiding under their house and Ernest Borgnine is Satan incarnate, who wants the special book so that he can take the orb filled with souls to hell, or something like that.
Speaker 6Which, by the way, the orb of souls is this sort of urn buried beneath the satanic church, a wonderful set with stained glass window of baphomet and, um, the orb is like, from what I could ascertain, or it's like a television inside of a I don't know how they did it, but it's a really cool effect of all these souls stuck in this sort of like window within this large urn, and it's a very neat effect of all these souls stuck in this sort of like window within this large urn, and it's a very neat effect. And they're all stored in there. And, yeah, the Shatner family is plagued by. They're trying to get out of the church but they're not able to, and then dad comes home and he's melting.
Speaker 3They are they are, yeah, they are Satanists. They are Satanists either it's hard to discern, either by their own choice or because of their family heritage lineage that are descended from these pilgrims that made a pact with Satan, or something like that, back in like the 17 or 1600s, and so their descendants, like are, are like, bound to this curse, or or their souls are also tethered to this or something like that, and so so they do want out. They're on the run, but they have the special book that has all the people's you know, ledgers of who's in the who's been so, who sold their souls to satan, and ernest borgnine needs this in order to, like, complete the ritual or something yeah, who cares?
Speaker 6it's like you had to do something uh, who cares?
Speaker 3exactly because who cares when ernest borgnine is turning into like a goat monster midway through the movie and it's like I'll buy it.
Speaker 6Yeah, it was awesome. His goat makeup effects were spectacular and it reminded me very much of this is very much like a devil rides out kind of companion. I think you could watch this as a double feature and be very satisfied.
Speaker 3Yes, although devil rides out is like 10 billion times better than this.
Speaker 6Yeah, far superior. But you know, there's a moment where Shatner, where he has to go confront the church at the beginning, and it's a very cool scene where he enters the church and tries to fight against the power of Satan and the people and it's this like very desolate, like Western town. It looks like a leftover Old West set, oh yeah, and the church is really neat and all, all of the adherents, they get their souls sucked out and then their, their eyes become black. So they all have these prosthetics that make it look like they have this voidless black eyes, which is eerie and interesting, right, oh yeah, ultimately shatner fails to confront, uh, ornish borg nine, who just he looks great man. I mean, he looks so cool, his eyes are just wild. Parker Longbow in the chat says Borgnine is wonderfully unhinged and he is.
Speaker 3And the bushy eyebrows? Come on, bushy eyebrows, equally satanic. And it just works here.
Speaker 6But all the robes and the visual of the church. It's great lighting, great set design with these stained glass windows. It's really cool. It reminded me it's it's really cool. It reminded me. It's the closest I've seen it in a movie to reading like an old tomb of dracula comic book or any of those like 1970s marvel horror films. And shatner is subdued and word gets out to his brother, tom scarrett, and his wife, played by joan prather, who I thought was very beautiful and compelling somewhat, um, who they're doing some kind of weird mind experiment. So I thought there was going to be something involving ESP, but then it never really materializes. And their sort of pal is Greenacre's own Eddie Albert, who is great in the movie A wonderfully ineffectual character for the movie.
Speaker 6He's nice to have around, though it's nice to see him in the film. I like Eddie.
Speaker 3Albert, I had no idea he was in so many like 70s movies and stuff like that. I was watching the longest yard and he's the prison warden and he's just always around.
Speaker 6It, never, never went away, which is which is kind of crazy but basically tom scarrett has to go track down everybody and figure out what's going on. And you have to admit there were extended sequences of him just like walking around, which is, I guess somewhat eerie, but like you could tell, they're kind of scrambling for time.
Speaker 3Yeah, that didn't bother me for this movie because, because the landscapes and the Western town have their own kind of like inherent beauty and charm to it while you're watching it. That to me didn't didn't bother me, unlike walking around in like impulse, for instance, where you're just walking around like a you know, badly constructed 1974 funeral home in tampa bay, like not not interesting to look at this. At least if you're walking around this kind of abandoned Western ghost town, there's something to you know, kind of at least take your interest while you're just watching the meander.
Speaker 6I mean, your favorite parts of Scooby-Doo are when they say let's split up and then just walk around with with beautiful paintings in the background.
Speaker 3Right, I mean that's always been my favorite, so it's very much like that Even in the ghost town this is like the minor 49er, you know.
Speaker 6Yeah, totally. And joan prather is able to read the mind or get sort of a collective consciousness viewing of a flashback to where now am I supposed to understand william shatner when we cut back to, like you know?
Speaker 317th century.
Speaker 6Yeah, puritan days. He is like a. That's his ancestor. That just looks like him or he.
Speaker 3He hasn't lived forever, right yeah, no, no, they're not as far as I. I mean, my interpretation is that they're just playing their ancestors for for benefit of not having to recast, like you know, a million parts which is cool and creepy, you know.
Speaker 6When we see that, uh, that's a very common.
Speaker 3That's a very common trope for these types of things. I mean, I'm going to use like a tv analogy, but like on dark shadows, for instance, when they would travel back in time or do flashbacks to you know olden days, like that, they would often play analogs of their ancestors and stuff like that.
Speaker 6So it's it's not an unheard of thing I, that's what I figured, but at the same time, when I first saw it, like ernest borgdine is there and I'm like, okay, well, I believe though he is different, corbus.
Speaker 3Corbus is unique because he is satan's emissary on earth, and so he may be immortal, or some something like that that's what I had figured.
Speaker 6So anyway, that was interesting and sort of well shot. And then I guess some things happen. There's some mcguffin explaining about the book and then we enter the final showdown between well, first of all, william Shatner is sacrificed to the devil and loses his humanity and becomes a drone right.
Speaker 3He does with the pentagram carved in his chest which is which is scary.
Speaker 6And I think that if we have Shatner, the, the thing that he does that makes this movie work is that I was at first annoyed because I thought, you know, why not just switch Skerritt and Shatner so that Shatner could be the hero and we can follow him? But at the same time, if you're a viewer who's used to the heroic Captain Kirk, he does play this role. Where he comes into the town, he's very forthright, though you can tell he's nervous. And if the cult is able to take down heroic manly square John William Shatnerner and you know, uh, prostrate him on the altar of satan and and brutalize him and basically kill him, right, it's uh, it makes the stakes a little higher. So I think that's the sort of role he serves and he's a very earnest character. You like him. You know you don't want to see him um turned into a melting drone, but eventually that's what happens. They destroy the urn, right? Is that how they kill everybody?
Speaker 3yes, yeah, they destroy the urn right Is that how they kill everybody? Yes, yeah, they destroy the urn, but did they.
Speaker 6That's the other thing. The ending is 20 minutes long of people melting.
Speaker 3Which is fantastic, though Just exquisite. That's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 6They milk in these special effects until there ain't no more to milk, okay they were very happy with that and I thought, hey look, sometimes less is more okay. But also the melting gag made me like want to vomit in the first in the opening, because it's not that the melting is so gross that I was like, but it's that there's a close-up of the guy in the melting costume melting and he hasn't reached the final stage of melting where he's just a fake mask and a blob, so you can tell there's a guy there and in the close-up you can see the makeup draining up his nose and into his mouth and I was like that would suck.
Speaker 3That's what makes it so good though.
Speaker 6Oh my gosh. But yeah, actually the ending, though, I will say the ending of where Tom Skerritt confronts Ernest Borgdine and is like, oh, you've been defeated, or whatever, and then he goes oh really, and we find out that his wife is stuck in the voided world of the Urn, and the final scene, as credits roll, is like desperately grasping and pawing at this like void to escape, as like rain comes down the screen, I was like that's awesome and very scary and cool, you know very disturbing.
Speaker 3I mean there is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth in this movie. Very, I mean the. The opening credits, which are also very long and protracted, are all hieronymus bosch paintings with the most eerie sound effects. It's not even the music that's eerie, it is a lot of just anguished cries of despair from like souls in hell that are like suffering. It is a very just. You have to wonder the mindset of someone who made this movie. Like what were they thinking? It must have really relished this topic or this idea.
Speaker 8Oh deathless one who calls me from out of the pit we.
Speaker 5I still hear you. What is thy purpose?
Speaker 8The deliverance of the soul has it been prepared.
Speaker 7It has thy purpose. Has it been prepared?
Speaker 2it has, and I command this soul to be purified by fire and water. All mighty light and burning flame of comfort enter this body and cleanse it of its unworthy soul I'm surprised.
Speaker 6Well, they brought in antonVey to be the consultant on the film.
Speaker 3Yeah, how many other movies do you know about that have a Church of Satan consultant.
Speaker 6Right, and I know that on the DVD there's an interview with the modern-day Church of Satan, who I have to imagine is just some kind of science and facts and logic libtard, right, am I wrong?
Speaker 3I didn't want it.
Speaker 6Okay, I didn't either, but like you have to imagine, he's just like one of these guys. It's like oh yeah, bro, satan is just about sort of like this, like libertine thing yeah, like the earth man, it's like getting back to mother nature and wicked yeah, it's like, yeah, it's very much like these, uh, these, these larping uh pagans or something you know what I mean.
Speaker 6Yeah, but. But I did watch the interview with the makeup artist, which basically he talks for about two minutes about how they did the effect, which is interesting, and then he just shit talks everybody in the cast. So he's like Eddie Albert did not want to be there.
Speaker 3He looks like he doesn't want to be there, yeah.
Speaker 6And he goes. William Shatner loves himself more than anybody I've ever met in my life, and Ernest Borgnine complained that he never got paid, so that was quite the cowboy you could be right though, quite the cowboy production, but it was one that I'm surprised I don't hear talked about more, because I thought the things that it does effectively, were very effective, and it's got quite the cast.
Speaker 3We mentioned most of them, but there's even more. So we mentioned ernest borgnine, eddie albert, william shatner, keenan wynn is in the movie, tom scarrett, yeah, ida lupino. Okay, there's a lot. And oh, we didn't even mention who I did not even see in the movie, and I didn't either. John travolta is. This is his film debut. I didn didn't see him.
Speaker 6He must have been real quick and then he must have been a guy with black eyes for the rest of the time, because I didn't. I didn't see him or notice that he was in the film at all.
Speaker 3Now I don't know how accurate this is from the Wikipedia article, but it says during filming, travolta converted to Scientology after co-star Joan Prather gave him a copy of the book Dianetics by L Ron Hubbard.
Speaker 6Really.
Speaker 3Again, I don't know if that's how true.
Speaker 6Was Joan Prather, a Scientologist? I looked into her a little bit too. I was interested in her and what happened to her.
Speaker 3Well, she must have been.
Speaker 6Yeah, she must have been, or she was probably dating L Ron Hubbard. Yeah, maybe she was a fan of his novels. He is, after all, the most prolific novelist of the 20th century. Perhaps, yeah, after this she was on a fantasy Island. A lot she was on.
Speaker 3Eight is enough, um, you know, but she did very few bad mama.
Speaker 6That's right. Yeah, she is in big bad mama. Yeah, there's a lot of synergy here between a lot of these films.
Speaker 3Tom scarrett connection is probably the biggest one in that. In big bad mama they're they're rivals for the love of angie dickinson, and in here they're brothers.
Speaker 6So yeah, and it was interesting, you know, tom scarrett obviously went on to have a relatively solid career. I mean, he's a sort of you know well-known actor. Right, he's an alien, he's top.
Speaker 6Yeah, what uh mash right yeah, he was in mash, that's right, I forgot about that. He was in mash, which I'm surprised it didn't elevate him more as a sort of member of that uh robert altman company with actors like elliot gould or or uh or or uh donald sutherland, like he. Why didn't he kind of keep going on that track and be sort of an indie but not indie darling but you know what I mean, like a new hollywood, you know guy. But I guess he just sort of piled around in genre for a while before he really kind of made it semi-big. But um no, this was a movie. I thought it had a lot of great atmosphere. I would definitely put it on at a halloween party. Just have it on, because there's lots. It's a sort of very visually visual feast, yeah, yeah, visual feast.
Speaker 3There's just so much interesting, just visual, uh, um ambiance that's present in this movie like you just can't help but you can't turn away. Like there's just so many I mean again, wandering scenes. Put those in a separate category, but the rest of the movie, like there's a lot here to enjoy and appreciate.
Speaker 6Absolutely, but I feel like if you're an OG Shatner fan and you love Star Trek, the movie that we watched that you will probably be most satisfied with and enjoy is definitely Kingdom of the Spiders.
Kingdom of the Spiders: Shatner's B-Movie Triumph
Speaker 8What do they want? In the tradition of the great science fiction thrillers, dimension Pictures presents Kingdom of the Spiders Starring William Shatner, tiffany Pauling, woody Strode and introducing AltaVis Davis.
Speaker 2The spiders in this area have organized themselves into an aggressive army.
Speaker 8I've never seen anything like it. One minute they weren't there and the next minute they were everywhere. Jump at a girl. Jump at her girl Listen there's thousands of them out there. We'll never make it. Why haven't we heard from the sheriff? He must know we're trapped in here. I'm telling you I don't think we should chance it.
Speaker 6Your nightmares will never be the same kingdom of the spiders the next victim could be. You agree, shatner is an old school hero. He gets to be as kind of um stubborn cocky. You know he sort of um. You know himself he's a.
Speaker 6He's an animal veterinarian, if I recall yes, he is who is has a thing with, uh, his wife, marsha lafferty, who plays the widow of his brother, and, uh, there's sort of an odd beat where he called, she calls him. You know his brother's name by accident. He gets like all really pissed off and I was like, is this guy gonna be like weird, you know? But it turns out he's basically a normal hero and he feels a sort of kinship to his brother's wife and and daughter, um, but he also has a little bit of a fling with, um, uh, tiffany bowling, I believe, is the actress who plays the out town scientist who's coming to investigate a rash of unexplained livestock deaths at the hands of extremely agitated spiders who are adapting to be super evil and venomous, because, in the tradition of basically all of the animal attack films, many of which we spoke about early on in this show, uh, the animals that have been derived of their natural habitat by, you know uh, industry or what I can't remember. What the hell happened here.
Speaker 3Pesticides are the big one for this one so they're lashing done but it's done in a very um, even-handed, nuanced way like this is not a movie that a more ham-fisted, heavy-handed, nuanced way Like this is not a movie. That a more ham-fisted, heavy-handed way where it will be made nowadays, for instance, would literally show you know the DDT being sprayed onto the livestock or the spiders or whatever, and then you know having a direct response or something like that. It's more or less implied and inferred that this is what is happening, which I think makes it more interesting that you can you can infer your own motive for what's going on here.
Speaker 6Yeah, absolutely, and you know I I really liked the movie. I thought it was really well done. It was exciting. There's a lot of great pacing, good characters, great work with wrangling thousands of spiders to walk all over the set, some of which get stepped on or run over by cars. But I guess they went down to Mexico and they bought like 5,000 spiders or something crazy from some spider wrangler and just let them loose. It must have been a nightmare to make this thing.
Speaker 7They wanted me to do the picture and I agreed to do the picture and then they cast the picture with me being there. So I was in on the casting and they had lovely young ladies come in and they'd say oh you look, read the part. They were going brilliant actor, great-looking girl. Look at those legs. Now put your hand on this box and touch the tarantula. Aha, you're afraid of tarantula, aren't you? Goodbye, my dear. And then this ugly beast would come in. Fine, couldn't act. Ugly, no legs, short little dumpy legs. Touch the tarantula, you're in.
Speaker 6I mean, I was very impressed and so I thought to myself you know this John Bud Cardos guy, he's an interesting cat, I'm going to like watch more of his films because this is good. And then I watched the dark with William Devane and Richard Jekyll and I was like, okay, that wasn't very good, that was kind of weird and bad. And I go, I'll give him one more shot. And I watched his film the day time ended, which stalked. Okay, let me tell you. Let me tell you, and it's got, uh, it's got marshall lafferty in it too. Shatner's wife was in this film, which is a miserable movie about like a family that's in a weird looking house in the middle of the desert and aliens come and a horrible stop motion little cute alien walks around terrible. But he did have a shining moment with um, with kingdom of the spiders, which is a really a fun movie and the best time I had watching something on this show absolutely, and rip john bud cardos in 2020.
Speaker 3So we lost him only five years ago, at the age of 91. It's funny, though, if you go to his imdb page, the first movie that pops up is no, for what he's known for is not kingdom of the spiders as the director, but it's actually, as for memento, christopher nolan's memento as the transportation department.
Speaker 3He was a driver on the memento he worked he worked in the transportation on a lot of movies later on in his career, and so it's just ironic that that is what's listed as. The first thing that he's known for is being a driver on Memento rather than directing this cult classic William Shatner movie.
Speaker 6That's really unfortunate, and I wonder if Nolan ever met him or knew who he was. Probably not. Probably not, but that's a shame.
Speaker 3Yeah, I love this movie a lot. This was the most fun to rewatch. So prior to this show, I had seen Impulse and I had seen Kingdom of the Spiders, and so I did not have a pleasant time rewatching Impulse, but I had a blast rewatching Kingdom of the Spiders and I've recommended this movie to other people and they have also enjoyed it. It's just something very pure and innocent, but also effective and provocative. You know what I mean. Like it's it's got, it's got an edge to it. It's thrilling enough, but it's also kind of good, wholesome fun from this time period. And, um, the spider scenes are very effective. They're very creepy, especially when he's going down in the basement to flip the circuit breaker and there's spiders covering everywhere and they're falling out of the window on top of him and, yes, he goes in a full Shatner apoplexy of writhing around and screaming and it's great.
Speaker 7The detritus of these spiders is spider hair. When they were kept in a bag to be used like a large shopping bag and we were going to get spiders and place them someplace, there'd be a lot of hair there and in one sequence they were all supposed to jump on me. So they had these shopping bags of tarantulas and they dumped them on me and there was this shimmer of tarantula hair that came down. And then everybody was going like this, because spider hair probably just tarantulas are the basis of itching powder. So although very few were harmed, they left a lot of their debris behind. They got their arachnid revenge.
Speaker 6Yeah, it's great. I was like don't die, I didn't want Shatner to die revenge. Yeah, it's great. I was like don't die, I didn't want shatner to die. We kept getting bit. I was like no, don't stop, get out of there.
Speaker 3And it's it's very scary, like when you see there's children, imperiled people do die and you mentioned characters and this is the movie that has the strongest characters out of any of the four that we've talked about. I think, even more than big bad mama, where I think you I mean at least I did I really felt for like the farmer and his wife, that um, yeah the people that we made at the beginning of the movie, whose calf is first stricken by the, the tarantulas.
Speaker 3Like these people we we actually get to know them. You feel very, very um strong connection to them and when they die it's like, it's like kind of heartbreaking, like these are real, they feel like real characters, real people, and it's like Go ahead, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with you.
Speaker 6And like, like you have, it's sort of this. You know you're in sort of a comfortable Jaws style area, you know where. You have the sheriff, you've got the mayor of town who doesn't want to cancel everything because of the Fourth of July parade or whatever, and you have the bar owner of the hotel who has a little bit of a thing for the sheriff and he dies too because a giant water tower falls on his car, because everyone's getting bitten by spiders and sewn up in webs and just lying in chaos all over town and people are crashing their cars left and right and it's just mass chaos. And I was impressed with the scale of it. I was impressed with the set pieces.
Speaker 6I really enjoyed Shatner's relationship with our lead gal, tiffany bowling, because she's got this kind of like early eighties built playboy model kind of a. Look to her you know what I mean when she's blonde and tough and strong and she's got some clever fun lines and she's from the big city and shatner has to woo her with his sort of, his know-how and country uh, you know country, you know good looks and and he's a lot of fun she's also like, portrayed initially as this, like kind of um, feminist, um, you know, kind of like overly educated, stick up her butt kind of like I'm stick up her butt, kind of like I'm not interested, you're a jerk.
Speaker 3And Shatner does act like a total jerk to her when they first meet and she rebuffs him but you know, comes to realize, hey, he's not so bad once you get to know him and you know they actually have a mutual understanding and relationship that develops as a result.
Speaker 6And you know I did. Did feel bad, though, for Shatner's wife cast in the, like you know, the unsung role thankless role of this pining woman who loves Shatner. But then this hotter blonde comes to town and then what happens to her? She gets bitten and killed by spiders and dies. But it's like.
Speaker 3I never understand those types of relationships that exist in in movies, where the widow of a sibling and then the, the, the surviving sibling, are expected to have some kind of relationship, romantic relationship, like that's just weird, like that's. I know that's like a hunter b situation, but right, but that's just. It's very strange, if you don't mind me saying so.
Speaker 6He did feel a certain amount of kinship towards her, like wanting to take care of her daughter. You know that's different responsibility. Yeah.
Speaker 3Taking care of the child in a platonic father, like father figure fashion is one, is not unreasonable at all.
Speaker 6That's no big deal, but to have a romantic relationship with the widow is like just bizarre, In my opinion it's sad because she's like pining after Shatner and like hoping that they'll get together so she can have a full family again. And then what happens? Well, she just dies, she gets eaten by spiders, and then the daughter is saved.
Speaker 3Well, so that's because we can have then Shatner, with the scientist lady and the surrogate daughter, all be one big, happy family.
Speaker 6There you go, but like that's too bad for Shatner's wife, but like there's also just I just think about that scene where she dies and she's just covered in spiders and then they get into the cab of the truck and there's just a spider on the steering wheel and the dashboard. There's just spiders all over the place in this movie.
Speaker 3That all over the place in this movie. That's what's great, though, that's what's very effective, is that instead of the 1950s mentality of Tarantula, for instance, which is a giant mutant spider that attacks a town, it's much more effective in haunting, in a more modern setting, for death by a thousand cuts, where there are millions of normal-sized spiders that you cannot escape from, that are just infesting everywhere and they effectively incapacitate this entire town that is cut off from civilization. By the end of the movie, encased in spider webs, there's nowhere to run.
Speaker 6I love this scene too. I mean, there's a lot of great moments, Obviously, when they're holed up in the house, at the end the spiders are coming out of the air conditioner vents and all over the place and up through cracks in the wood and through the fireplace. But there's also a great moment too, where the town decides to get together and crop dust the whole town with poison to kill the spiders. But the spider gets into the pilot's plane, so he's fighting them off and he flies his plane right into the hangarar and there's a massive explosion. And it's an incredibly well shot scene. They're flying this plane 10 feet off the ground. It's flying towards like eight people. They've got it's a great shot. And then it flies. Now they're stunt doubles, but it's done very well and they get out of there at the nick of time before this thing blows up. It's I watched it like step through it thing by thing and you could, and they like flew a plane into a barn and exploded. I mean it was.
Speaker 3I was impressed you know it's great. It's great. I like this movie a lot. I again, like I said, I've recommended it to people who have also enjoyed it. So that's, that's always the. The ultimate test at the end is like at the end of the day is like, if you actually recommend this to someone else and they watch it and like it, you're like okay, we've done good, yeah it's beyond, it's a great crowd pleaser.
Speaker 6It moves in a good clip. Shatner's charming and fun and brave and he's got the bravado. And you know I this is the kind of thing that if you were to say watch a movie with shatner, that's not star trek or whatever. It would be this, because everything else he just has to be kind of it's kind of a, you know he's a goof in most of these other ones like let's be fair exactly especially he's a total goof and impulse in big bad mama.
Speaker 3He's like a bumbling bozo in the devil's reign. He is like the victim of the satanic cult. Here he is at his most captain kirk level of like heroic heroism. Okay, so he he fulfills a lot of the criteria for which we expect him to be in a movie and that is very satisfying by the conclusion yeah, because also you know he's womanizing, he's charming, he. He's got a charm to him, he's got everything.
Speaker 6He's racing his car fast, getting by car, things like that. You feel good for him to have this thing, which wasn't a picture he probably would have wanted to be in. It was a movie that probably a lot of his fans really appreciated and liked.
Speaker 3It was a hit that probably a lot of his fans really appreciated and liked was a hit, and but what's sad, though, is that for people like you and me, we appreciate this other output that he created in the vacuum of when he was not doing star trek. A lot of star trek devotees will not have, will have zero interest in these films. They're only about the star trek and that's it. And that's what I don't like is that you have to appreciate these actors, and I think they appreciate it a lot more. From my personal experience of meeting them at conventions and stuff, if you go up to them and you talk to them about some other random movie that they were in and say, hey, I saw you in this movie and it was great, it was good to see.
Speaker 3They're much more appreciative and want to talk to you a lot more, especially if it's heartfelt and you actually mean it like I, like I do, like they care about that more. It's like thank you for noticing me. I'm an actor who did other things like, and that shows them that hey, loved you in Star Trek. Now I'm going to be a patron for you wherever you go. That's how I see a lot of these people is like I want to see you in everything. I don't want to just see you pigeonholed as just on star Trek only.
Speaker 6Well, I actually had the opportunity to meet William Shatner. I was at, I was at a bachelor party in Kansas city and I woke up the next day and was like oh fuck. And then like I saw a sign and it was like, maybe go meet shatner, but it cost three hundred dollars and I was a little, that was a little too much. I didn't want to. I didn't at the time. I'd already spent a significant amount the night before. So I thought to myself probably can't justify this one. But he did have a big line and if I were to meet him I would probably say, bill, I've loved kingdom of the spiders, but he would probably think I was screwing around with him. But I wouldn't be. It's, it's, he's, he's great in it. Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3Yeah, see, I've. I can say I've been in the presence of the chat twice in my life. I did not personally meet him or talk to him because, again, the price is way too high. I'm not having a fake conversation with these people. It's much more fun when you go to a convention and you meet like kind of the lower C level people that you can. There's no entry price to talk to them and you can have a nice normal conversation. And if you pay 30 to $40 for a picture and an autograph, like that to me is justifiable.
Speaker 3But I did see uh go to his lecture at the 2004 Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, uh, which we went as a family. I was able to convince my parents to take me, and my brother and I we both went to that one and he appeared on stage with Leonard Nimoy, which was very cool at the time. That's cool. I don't remember what he talked about, but it was just cool because I remember Leonard Nimoy came out Like I think he like interrupted Shatner's talk or something like that. You know, of course it's rehearsed, it's all planned, but he came out and he like took off his jacket and he had this shirt that said like number one vulcan on the back and he, like paraded around the crowd, went wild. This was the same convention where kate mulgrew, uh, came out. Instead of talking about star trek, talked about endorsing john kerry for president. So that was that was a fun memory.
Speaker 3And then I think about I think it was late 2003. I mean, excuse me, 2023. It was during the SAG strike. He was going around I don't know if this was a tour or he was just uh. He came to my local town. They did a thing where they showed Star Trek to Ratha Khan and then he came out for like a Q and a afterwards.
Speaker 6Oh really.
Speaker 3Yeah, and it was just after he had gone to outer space and we were in the midst of the SAG strike, and so it was. It was an interesting conversation. I mean, he was in his nineties but he was still totally with it, and it was an interesting time.
Speaker 6He's an interesting guy. I like his. I'm interested, I suppose, in his music. I listened to the. I actually own on vinyl the uh, what's it called? The? The illuminated man or something like the digital man or something someone in the chat can tell me. But yeah, shatner has a it's like a spoken word album and, um, he does uh to be or not to be. He also does mr tambourine man, which is, I mean, a little dramatic.
Speaker 6But uh, very dramatic yeah, he starts like you know. You know the original bird song or the bob dylan song or whatever is more like hey, mr tambourine is he like hello, mr tambourine man mr tambourine man. It's like what he's doing, he's like me. Please, mr tambourine man, play a song for me and you're like I don't, why would anyone want to listen to this? But?
Speaker 3like I wouldn't. I want to listen to it now, for sure I don't have that yeah, I have it on vinyl and he still does music today.
Speaker 6He just put out a children's role, uh, children's album, like last year. It's like william shatner talking to animals, or something really um yeah, yeah I um what was the?
Speaker 3uh oh shoot, I lost my train of thought um something about shatner spoken word, but never mind, but I love the price line commercials.
Speaker 6You know he's obviously going on to have a great and and you know what he was. Um, he got to really show his chops and get a lot of respect for star Trek 2, which was great, and he got to direct Star Trek 5, a movie that I like and think is good, it's unfairly maligned, I think. I think, so it doesn't have the payoff he wanted. I know that, but it's definitely like.
Shatner's Legacy and Later Career Renaissance
Speaker 3If you're ranking them, it's probably going to be 4th or 5th, because the other ones are so good, though, because in my opinion, I mean two. Obviously everyone loves two, but I think star trek three does not get enough accolades. Like it's, it's quite good. I think star trek um search for spock is like great movie, almost on par with rathacon okay.
Speaker 6Yeah, I think it's good too. I enjoy it that they, that they recast kirstie alley kind of I.
Speaker 3Just that pisses me off in like a very small way, but like I get what I like about it though what I like about it a lot is that because there's no Spock in the movie, you actually do get to see the other crew members, get to do more and speak more and interact more with Kirk and McCoy, because you know, I know they're not integral, you know, sorry they're, they're not. It's like those original movies focused on the Trinity, kirk, spock, mccoy, and that's fine. But the other characters do matter and it's nice that in three and four particularly, they get their. I think they get their due the most. They get to do the most in the in those movies well, I was just to defend Star Trek 5.
Speaker 6I think that the moment where bones they have these sort of like revelations about themselves or like forced flashbacks because of the God thing, yeah, and bones like remembers how he euthanized his father, and it's like very powerful moment and like a good scene. You know, it's well disturbing.
Speaker 6Yeah, let's read some super chats First. Disturbing, yeah, uh, let's read some super chats. First of all I want to thank 1001 johnny for the super chat. Thank you very much. He says damn, I love this show. Always a pleasure. Well, thank you very much. Um reggie zimmerman says I agree about engaging actors, about other roles they have done. I met john reese davies at an indiana jones invention uh event and I was talking his ear off about his work in shogun and he was very jazzed about it. That's nice. And then Parker Longbos says if I met the Shat, I would tell him I loved Tech Wars. What the hell is that, ryan?
Speaker 3Don't know.
Speaker 3No idea, no idea, it's like also, I met the comic book artist, howard Chaykin I think I've talked to you about this before at a convention. Every single person was going up to his booth bringing copies of star wars number one for him to sign and he, literally the contempt on his face was just, he could not hide it and he would tell people I'm happy to sign whatever, but like I hate this book, like I hate it, and so I went up to him and I was talking to him about stuff that he was currently working on, like he had done the um oh god, I forgot the name of him, sorry to say the one where it was like the uh, the one where he got in trouble for like it was like the Islamic one, um, and then he did the rough and ready show um, comic book adaptation, around that time too, and I was talking to him about that and he's like you're no-transcript. That's cool. I actually just read a howard chicken comic last night. What was that? I'm embarrassed to say what?
Speaker 6the one that I couldn't remember? No, I think I might have it. It's like his sort of like mobius style futurist one. I can't remember what the hell it's called. I have it over my shelf over there, but, um, I just read. Uh, I just got the the epic collection, moon knight volume one, and he did some work on moon knight early on when moon knight had a guest appearance in rampaging hulk black and white magazine. Uh, that are cool. So, uh, any anything else on shatner, anything else on shatner ryan, before we wrap it up here.
Speaker 3Um oh well, some of the movies that he did before Star Trek are also worth watching. I watched the Intruder for the first time recently.
Speaker 6You did.
Speaker 3Yes, it's excellent, it's definitely worth watching. He is at peak level, like when you see the classic Shatner from the early 60s, like on Twilight Zone or movies like that or TV shows like that. He looks great. He is at like peak performance. He is very effective and chilling as this very um, like racially racial instigator, kind of like devil figure who invades this town and stokes up like the most base emotions and people, uh, to stop a school from being integrated, racially integrated. It's very effective, it's very chilling and you know it's not heavy handed or ham fisted or anything like that. It's actually very emotionally moving.
Speaker 6All right, yeah, I haven't seen that. I know Roger Corman thinks very highly of it as a film that one of his only films that didn't make a profit, that he had a lot of we can't escape a lot of the corman cheapness.
Speaker 3You know what I mean. Like you can still sense there's that kind of amateurish uh level to a lot of the other actors performances, but shatner's in like a level of his own, a league of his own for that movie absolutely he's also in judgment at Nuremberg, has a has a pretty substantial ancillary role for that, which is kind of cool.
Speaker 6And I guess I have to get going here. But sure, just curious, our next show, or we're we're thinking about him ahead of time, guys, we always do. We think about him ahead, and I think our next show is going to be the dirty harry sequels.
Speaker 6So the four sequels to dirty harry yeah and, uh, I'm doing a big video on dirty harry, so hopefully we'll have those out concurrently. And then after that we're gonna get it's almost halloween, guys. It's almost halloween season for big movie freaks like us. And uh, we're gonna do a show on frankenstein and cinema, culminating with the release of Guillermo's new adaption, which I think looks good.
Speaker 3I'm very excited for for the del Toro Frankenstein. I think he has a lot to bring the table for that and, of course, going back all the way to the James Whale Frankenstein is always a welcome treat.
Speaker 6Absolutely.
Speaker 3And we have some big plans for October and for Halloween in terms of horror output.
Speaker 6You guys are going to be very satisfied. You're going to have a lot of fun. It's going to be a good time have you seen?
Speaker 3Wait, we have a comment here. Okay, have either of you seen the Western remake of Rashomon, where Shatner plays the priest? The actor who plays Benjamin Franklin from 1776 was also in it. I have not. What do you know?
Speaker 6what is that?
Speaker 3I don't know let's see, I have no idea white comanche perhaps uh, no, I have that on dvd. I have not watched.
Speaker 6That's a spaghetti western where shatner plays a dual role of both a cowboy and an indian well, that's interesting, and and you know what too, we could do an early shatter, because we didn't talk about the movie where he speaks in Esperanto.
Speaker 3Yes, oh, also you should. I mean I'm picking that up this weekend because Barnes Noble has their 50% off Arrow video sale going on now and it's been sitting there. No one wants to buy it.
Speaker 6So I am more than willing to pick up the 4k edition now that it's 50 off you better buff up on your, your esperanto.
Speaker 3Yes, absolutely without subtitles.
Speaker 6They're just gonna figure it out just from for anybody who didn't know esperanto is like this liberal dream or hippie dream, I suppose, similar to like a metric system where it's like we all had to learn esperanto so everyone could like speak the same language, or some shit. It it was like a mix of Spanish and English, a universal language of brotherhood, you know. Yeah, it was a universal language of brotherhood and of course everyone's a hater, so nobody wanted to get on Esperanto, except for Shatner.
Speaker 3Apparently Leslie Stevens, this guy who directed the movie. I mean, whatever it's definitely on my list, but yeah. I'm ready Interesting Whatever. It's definitely on my list, but yeah, this has been a really this was really fun. I'm glad to have been able to see a lot of these movies that we kind of were putting off, but I mean, I can go without watching incubus for another 20 years or so. I think I'll be good.
Speaker 6Impulse, yeah, impulse.
Speaker 3Yeah sorry, Incubus is the Esperanto one which I haven't seen yet.
Speaker 6I will probably never watch Impulse again. So I hey, let's give a little salute to William Shatner 93 years old, still going strong. He's a great, great personality, hey.
Speaker 4Mr Tambourine play a song for me in the jingle, Mr Tambourine man play a song for me.
Speaker 2In the jingle, jangle. Morning I'll come following you. Hey, mr Tambourine.
Speaker 4Man play a song for me, mr Tambourine man. Mr Tambourine man, hey. Mr Tambourine man. Hey, mr Tambourine man, mr Tambourine man.
