Sky Sharks - 2020

While the boyfriend was scrolling through the shark movies for his pick (see Shark Huntress), this movie caught my eye. The preview that played on the screen was hilarious. Flying sharks ridden by Nazi zombies?! What the heck?!

So, I guess some researchers found this ship, which awakened these beasts. They take down a passenger plane for no real reason (and they take an unnecessary long time to do that), so the skies are no longer safe.

I have so many regrets for picking this movie. The nudity and sex was unnecessary, and the gore was way too much for our group. Yes, I know it was a horror movie. If it was just the gore, maybe I could've dealt with it.

One thing I'll say is that at least there were sharks. I loved the sharks and their little landing pads in the ship. And those parts of the movie looked surprisingly good. I will give the movie a lot of credit for that. Unfortunately, the story was a mess. Why were the zombies attacking passenger planes? Who was telling them the planes were in the air? Who's the one behind the scenes pulling the strings? And why couldn't they just give the one lady the antidote if they knew she was already infected!?

The ending of this was super weird. When we saw the credits were so long, my daughter fast-forwarded and found the end credit scene. And that just raised more questions. Was I supposed to know who that lady was? Was she trying to give a rousing speech to an army of zombies? Is she trying to create a new Reich for herself and her assistant? I'm sorry to my group of watchers. It was a bad pick.

Shark Huntress - 2021

We let my daughter's boyfriend pick the movie, so the pressure was on. I'm not sure why he gravitated toward the shark movies, but he spent a lot of time in the category.

A woman's mother goes missing, and she heads off to search for her. Her mother was an environmental activist who was researching an alternative to plastic. The mother's crew comes together to join the search. We have Guru the conspiracy guy, the British dude, another guy and the social media chick.

There's a considerable lack of shark in this movie. Honestly, the amount of people killed by the shark is equal to the number of people killed by the guy who wanted to sell the super seaweed recipe. I'm still kinda hazy on the plastic people. I thought they were part of Guru's conspiracies, but then the group blamed Guru's death on them, so I guess they were real after all?

This movie was pretty boring. Some of the dialogue was hilarious, but nothing happened. We didn't see the shark, and they never defeated it. The "huntress" tried to kill the shark once (and that's a generous evaluation of what she was doing), and she missed anyway.

My daughter's boyfriend apologized. But we've all been there. Picking movies blind is a crap shoot, and it seems like half the time we lose. No apology necessary! :D  (But the movie was really bad...)

 

Kamen Rider - 1971 TV series

Mom and I started watching this a while back. We haven't missed an episode, and it's been an addiction for us. I've also gotten my kids to watch multiple episodes. They've enjoyed seeing Hongo and Ichimonji take on Shocker and keep the world safe.

The show revolves around Kamen Rider, a cyborg, taking on the evil organization called Shocker. He has good friends helping him along the way. My favorite was Tachibana, and my daughter really liked Taki, the FBI agent. Shocker is made up of former Nazis, which becomes obvious really early on. They create monsters to try and take over Japan, and then...THE WORLD!

I loved this show. There was maybe one episode I didn't like and that was only because they drove around for most of it. I loved the way Kamen Rider transformed. By the way, there are two Kamen Riders. One comes in from South America for a while. He has a pretty epic transformation, but Hongo was definitely the favorite around here.

Shoutout to the Ees. These little minions were inexhaustible. I preferred the OG black outfits versus the purple Gel-Shocker ones, but they seemed more acrobatic in the purple ones, so it's a bit of a wash. We call them Ees because that's the noise they make most of the time. Every once in a while, they'd actually talk, and then we were disappointed.

The generals were interesting, but my favorite had to be Dr. Death. Sometimes he was getting wheeled around and other times he was spry and walking about. His hair seemed to have a mind of its own. He just cracked me up.

I could go on and on about this show. It was amazing, and I loved it. There were 98 episodes. The actor for Kamen Rider #1, Hiroshi Fukioka, actually sang the theme song for the first 13 episodes. I thought that was great, and it's still my favorite version of the theme. If you love campy, sometimes ridiculous superhero action, maybe look this up. Great Show!

Black Friday - 1940

We finished up with the list I had with the classic monsters, but the site I was getting the movies from still had oodles of old horror flicks from the 40s I'd never heard of, so my daughter decided we should watch some of those. The first one on the list that we hadn't seen was Black Friday.

An absent-minded professor is crossing the street when he gets hit by a car and dies. In the car was a gangster by the name of Red Cannon. He's paralyzed and begs the doctor, the professor's friend, for help. The doctor's genius plan is to transplant part of the gangster's brain into his friend's head. And since the gangster hid $500, 000, the doctor figures the money can fund his experiments.

The plot immediately goes off the rails. George (professor) starts to act weird. At first, they just tell us he had a brain transplant, so I thought he had a full transplant. They only mentioned later it was partial, so for a while I didn't understand how George had memories of two people. Then George had some skull fractures. What did we do about those? We'll skim over that for now.

The movie made no sense. Ernest (doctor) convinces George to go to New York to try and jog loose the memories of Red Cannon to locate the stashed loot. When they get to the hideout (a swanky hotel), they get adjoining rooms (which George magically remembers as his hideout) and tells the bellhop the secret knock. Then he sneaks out and starts murdering the other members of the gang. Ernest was the worst babysitter ever.

The end/beginning was a bit confusing for me. They're taking the Grinch to the electric chair, but they're not saying why. He did murder a person, but it was to save his daughter, so does that really warrant the electric chair? I don't think he owned up to the experiments, because he handed off his notes to a reporter on the way to the chair. That was a bit confusing.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Grinch (Boris Karloff) in this one. Bela was also in it, but we didn't see him as much. I'm going to give a shout-out to Stanley Ridges. He would switch between George and Red in such a way I wasn't 100% sure if it was the same person. Other than that, I'm not sure how hearing a siren magically made him switch. Putting that aside, this was pretty hilarious. If you have some friends and like this kind of thing, it's not a bad way to spend an hour.