We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)
A Roger Corman classic, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes was produced and directed by Corman, who was working from a script crafted by Robert Dillon and Ray Russell. The great Ray Milland stars as Dr. James Xavier, who has been experimenting with his own formula of eye drops because he’s disturbed that human eyes can see “less than one-tenth of the actual wave spectrum” and wants to see the other 90%. He tries the eye drops on a monkey and the poor thing drops dead from the shock of its expanded range of sight – so, of course, Xavier then tests the eye drops on himself.
His newfound eyesight is all fun and games at first. He can check out the bodies of clothed people. He can read a paper that’s inside a closed folder. He saves the life of a young girl when he looks inside her body and discovers that she was misdiagnosed and is about to receive the wrong surgery. But then, of course, things get more troubling. His enhanced sight becomes overwhelming – especially since he can not only see through his eyelids when his eyes are closed, he can also see through the walls and ceiling of the rooms he’s in.
Even though it’s clear that this is going to go terribly wrong, Xavier gets in a fight with a helpful friend over it and accidentally knocks the guy through a window, causing him to fall to his death. So, Xavier has to go on the run – and to support himself, he gets a job at a carnival, working for an unscrupulous fellow named Crane. Crane is an insulting loudmouth, so it’s perfect that legendary comedian Don Rickles agreed to take on the role.
Xavier’s love interest, Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van der Vlis) attempts to help him and Xavier even goes to Las Vegas so he can win some easy money seeing through the cards at Blackjack tables... but any horror fan watching the movie will probably predict from the start that the guy is doomed. It’s one of those Icarus situations; someone gets too ambitious, goes too far, and has to pay for it.
Shot in three weeks on a budget of around $300,000, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes was, like all Corman films at the time, made for the drive-in and grindhouse circuit and played in double features with another Corman production, Dementia 13. It was a hit in 1963, and more than sixty years later it still holds up as an entertaining sci-fi horror film with an interesting core concept. (And if you have the chance to watch the movie with Svengoolie hosting it, that makes it even more entertaining.)
ALL HER FAULT (2025)
I’ve never read the novel All Her Fault by Andrea Mara, but when writer Megan Gallagher filtered Mara’s story into an eight-episode limited series for the Peacock streaming service, it resulted in a fascinating mystery thriller. Blog contributor Priscilla and I watched this show together, and once the story got rolling, we could barely pull ourselves away from it. In fact, when we got down to the final episodes, we ended up just binge-watching through the end, even though it meant staying up until midnight. We’re in our forties; midnight is an hour we rarely see anymore.
At the heart of the story is the wealthy, Chicago-based Irvine family. Sarah Snook plays Marissa, who arranged a playdate for her young son Milo and Jacob, the son of another well-off local mother, Jenny Kaminski (Dakota Fanning). Jenny was supposed to pick up both Milo and Jacob from school, then Marissa would come get Milo at their home later in the day. Problem is, the playdate was arranged entirely through text messages – and Marissa was never actually talking to Jenny. So when she goes to the provided address, Milo’s not there, and neither are Jenny and Jacob. Somebody else took Milo away from the school and gave Marissa the wrong address. Milo has been kidnapped.
From there, it’s eight episodes of intensity and mystery, as Marissa, her husband Peter (Jake Lacy), Peter’s siblings Brian (Daniel Monks) and Lia (Abby Elliott), Detective Alcaras (Michael Peña), and the actual Jenny Kaminski get caught up in the investigation and try to figure out where Milo is before it’s too late.
There are dealings with a lot of shady people, including a nanny played by Sophia Lillis, and an interesting subplot involving Alcaras and his special needs son Sam (Orlando Ivanovic)... and every single episode of this show was absolutely riveting. I couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen next – and did not see where the story was going.
All Her Fault was so good, it’s been difficult to get into another thriller show in the immediate aftermath of this one because it’s too tough of an act to follow.
THE BEASTMASTER (1982) – hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on MonsterVision
Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, the sword and sorcery film The Beastmaster was shown so often on basic and premium cable that it became a joke, with viewers saying HBO stood for "Hey, Beastmaster's On!" and TBS for "The Beastmaster Station." It would also show a lot on TBS’s sister station, TNT – and, of course, soon after drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs was hired to host the TNT show MonsterVision in 1996, they had him host a double feature of The Beastmaster and its 1991 sequel Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time.
Joe Bob would always start the show with an off-topic bit, and at the head of the Beastmaster episode he talks for a while about how “tattoos are getting out of hand” – and if he felt that way in ‘96, his eyes must really be popping out at the amount of tattoos people have these days.
He goes on to introduce The Beastmaster as “a poor man’s Conan the Barbarian,” but also admits that he likes the better than Conan, as he found that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie to be a disappointing adaptation of the source material written by Robert E. Howard. The Beastmaster is an adaptation itself, as the screenplay by director Don Coscarelli and producer Paul Pepperman was loosely based on a 1959 novel by Alice “Andre” Norton, who was so disappointed by the changes that she asked for her name to be removed from the film. Joe Bob doesn’t mention any of that in his hosting segments.
The Beastmaster is set in a Bronze Age-esque world of magic, gods, and monsters, and begins with an evil cult leader named Maax (Rip Torn) planning to sacrifice the unborn child of the land's King Zed to his god Ar. Maax is arrested before he can carry out this plan, but one of his witches does manage to steal the infant – who is then rescued and raised in a village by his rescuer, who has no idea he has the king’s son in his house. As the child, named Dar, grows up, he realizes that he has the special ability to communicate with animals telepathically.
Once he reaches adulthood, his life is torn apart when a horde of marauders called the Jun invade the village and slaughter every man, woman, child, and animal they come across. The Jun are led by Maax, and Dar sets out on a mission of revenge to take them down. As he travels through dangerous terrain, he gathers an animal support team, each animal bringing a specific advantage. There is Sharak the eagle, who will be his eyes, giving Dar a literal bird's eye view of situations. Mischievous ferrets Kodo and Podo bring cunning. Black tiger Ruh is the embodiment of strength. He also meets some human allies: Kiri (Tanya Roberts), a slave girl who is also the niece of King Zed; the King's bodyguard Seth (John Amos), and young son Tal (Josh Milrad). Seth and Tal have spent the last three years trying unsuccessfully to raise an army to help them fight back against Maax and the Juns... but you don’t need much of an army when you have a beastmaster.
Joe Bob gives the movie a perfect rating of 4 stars and describes it as “my kind of movie,” especially since it has 105 deaths in it and despite the fact that star Marc Singer doesn’t look very barbaric and he had trouble understanding what Singer was saying the first time he watched the movie. As the movie goes on, he says it’s “pretty good” and is impressed by the weirdness of the story and the fact that it delivers “one sensation after another.” His favorite sequence involves a bunch of “leather freaks” who have undergone a mind control process involving glowing leeches.
It’s mentioned that this is “the only movie to combine child sacrifice scenes and ‘aren’t the animals cute?’ scenes,” like a cross between The Jungle Book and The Terminator. Joe Bob says people were bonkers over Tanya Roberts at the time when this movie was released, comments on the great Rip Torn playing the “evil guy with a weird accent,” and refers to John Amos as Gordy from The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Running 118 minutes, The Beastmaster has storytelling and pacing issues, and Joe Bob acknowledges this a little bit, saying, “This is a long mother, isn’t it?” and getting annoyed that Dar and his companions keep getting distracted into taking side quests on their journey. “There’s too much plot getting in the way of the story!”
That dry stretch in the movie was also acknowledged by horror Svengoolie when he showed The Beastmaster on his show. He complained that nothing was happening, but at least he was able to liven things up a little with a performance of the song “Please Master Beastman,” in the tune of “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvelettes.
Because of the repeated cable airings, I saw The Beastmaster a whole lot of times as I was growing up in the late '80s and early '90s, and I greatly enjoyed The Beastmaster as a child. The style was right up my alley at the time, and as an animal lover I found the aspect of Dar's ability to communicate with animals an endearing added quality. I've never owned a ferret, but this movie made me wish I did. While The Beastmaster has its problems, as far as these types of movies are concerned, I still count it as one of the best (and I’m with Joe Bob in preferring it over Conan the Barbarian). It'd be even better if it had been cut down a bit and/or reassembled in the scripting stage, but it's a fine bit of entertainment just the way it is.
BEASTMASTER 2: THROUGH THE PORTAL OF TIME (1991) - hosted by Joe Bob Briggs on MonsterVision
Coming nine years after its predecessor, Beastmaster 2, which has an inaccurate subtitle (it features travel between parallel dimensions, not time travel), is the work of veteran producer Sylvio Tabet, who made the film both his directorial debut and swan song. Beastmaster 2 is also the only movie on which Tabet has a writing credit, as he assembled the screenplay with a committee of four other writers that included a couple first timers ( Ken Hauser and Doug Miles) and prolific B-movie filmmaker Jim Wynorski, along with his frequent collaborator R.J. Robertson. Wynorski and Robertson also provided the basic story that everyone was working from.
The film picks up in the aftermath of the 1982 original. During the climax of that film, the king of Arok was murdered by evil cult leader Maax, and even though Dar the Beastmaster helped the people of Arok defeat the Jun marauders that served under Maax, it is said that the land was plunged into darkness afterward anyway as a warlord named Arklon (Wings Hauser) rose to power, using unholy magic to enslave the people. An unnecessary twist is dropped into the mix when Dar learns that he wasn't the only child who was stolen from King Zed. His firstborn son was stolen as well, raised by Jun priests, and that son has grown up to be Arklon, whose quest for power is an apocalyptic threat. If Dar doesn't destroy his older brother before the autumn equinox, all life in their land will somehow cease to exist.
Sarah Douglas enters the picture as the witch Lyranna, who reveals to Arklon that she knows of a magical portal out in the desert, through which she has been observing a dimension that exists on a parallel plane. The dimension she has been spying on? Our own. The portal gives a view of Los Angeles in then-present day 1991. The source of Arklon's power is the Key of Magog, a weapon he wields that blasts out green energy rays. The Key is not limitless, however. There are weapons in the other dimension so powerful that Arklon could rule over Arok unopposed, with Lyranna at his side. She tells him of a device called a neutron detonator (capable of destroying all life within a thousand mile radius), suggesting they enter the other dimension, raid a military base, steal the neutron bomb, and bring it back to their world to threaten the rebellion with.
Before the villains can pass through the portal, wild, rich party girl/Senator's daughter Jackie Trent (Kari Wuhrer, one of my childhood movie crushes) comes driving through in her convertible. She crosses paths with Dar and they do some bonding, but then interrupted by Arklon's men, who take the girl back to their leader. Intending to make Jackie lead them to a neutron bomb, Arklon and Lyranna open the portal and step through into Los Angeles with the native girl in tow. Pursuing the goal of thwarting his brother, Dar jumps through the portal after them, accompanied by his animals - eagle Sharak, ferrets Kodo and Podo (never mind that one of them died performing a heroic act at the end of the first movie), and tiger Ruh.
A lot of "fish out of water" comedic beats follow, as a baffled Dar must endure this strange world he finds himself in. Cars, music, profanity, zoos, the LAPD, Dar learns about it all while searching for Arklon and Lyranna. In a mind-bending moment, he even spots the title "Beastmaster II: Through the Portal of Time" on a theatre marquee.
Someone who does not seem to have had fun with this sequel at any point is Joe Bob, who gives the film a two-star rating. I've always said that watching any movie with Joe Bob hosting segments is better than watching it without, but his October 4, 1996 presentation of Beastmaster 2 puts that to the test because he doesn't have much to say about the movie. He just points out how goofy the movie is again and again, cringing at the wackiness, saying it's like a Jerry Lewis movie or a sitcom, and listing the ways in which it's falling short of its predecessor. This doesn't enhance the entertainment in the way that Joe Bob's hosting segments usually do.
The most positive thing Joe Bob has to say in this section of the double feature, aside from nods to Sarah Douglas and co-star James Avery, is that the then-new sequel Beastmaster III takes the action back to Arok.
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