Son of Ingagi - 1940

After watching Black Friday, Mom and I decided we should keep checking out those old horror movies we'd never heard of. It might be a decision we end up regretting...next up on the list was Son of Ingagi.

A woman is attending a wedding and then goes home and lets a monster out of her basement. Actually, it looks like a tall dude in a ski mask, but we'll gloss over that for now. She's perfected the most wonderful invention known to mankind (we never find out what that is), but then she leaves it downstairs with N'Gina. He immediately drinks the whole thing and goes berserk, killing the doctor.

The newlywed couple are suspected of the murder of the doctor, but I guess that gets sorted out, because they're just living there now. N'Gina is still hanging out in the basement and makes food disappear. The lawyer comes by and ends up dead when he plays with the gong that summons the beast. The husband is suspected again, and a detective is posted at the house to keep an eye on things. In the end, the house burns down, the beast dies, and the detective pops out of a bush with bags of gold.

It sounds like this would be a fun hour, but it isn't. The newly married couple are ambushed at their house on their wedding night by all their friends and have to listen to The Toppers for hours. The monster was just strange, and the detective was supposed to be funny, but that made the tone of the film confusing. Was it supposed to be funny or scary? And who the heck is Ingagi? I mean, if the doctor just found him in the jungles of Africa, how did she know his dad's name?

John Wayne "triple feature" - Rio Bravo (1959), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) & Donovan's Reef (1963)

The past couple of days can bring back some bad memories. To counteract the passing of my dad, I watch John Wayne movies. Growing up, even after I was out of the house, it was a good bet if there was a John Wayne movie on TV, it was on his TV. This year, I put on two new ones and an old favorite.

First up was Rio Bravo. John Wayne plays a Sheriff who is holding a criminal in the jail. He is part of a wealthy family and normally gets away with everything. This time, though, he's under strict guard of a trigger-happy old coot and a smart man. I liked this one for the most part, but it had the one thing I hate in certain John Wayne movies. A shoehorned woman. There was a woman in this, and there was zero reason for her to be there. The only thing she did was break a window, and Carlos (the hotel owner) could've done that. It's okay, but definitely not a favorite.

Next up was The Sons of Katie Elder. I'd heard Dad talk about this one a few times. And this one was much better than the other one. Wayne is a gunfighter trying to stay out of trouble. He's just trying to come back home for his mother's funeral. Unfortunately, trouble has followed him. A man named Hastings is wanting to take over the town and has already taken over the Elder's old home. He's determined to hang on to what he's got. No matter what. Big shoutout to the music during the funeral. It really struck me. Good Movie!

Finally, an old classic. Donovan's Reef is one of my favorites. It makes me laugh and has one of our inside family jokes in it. My dad used to greet me on the phone with "Daughter! D-O-T-T-E-R!" In this movie, John Wayne plays an old Navy man who is running a saloon on a South Pacific island. When his friend's stuffy daughter from Boston shows up, he's part of the plot to make sure she's not out to cause trouble for him. One of the best John Wayne movies for sure. Great Movie!

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.