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I was totally without restraint last night and watched I Married a Monster and immediately put the Demon Under Glass DVD in as soon as it had finished. I blame the bite-sized Mars bars I some irresponsible person bought for Halloween, way too early to stand a chance of still being there by October 31.
So... thoughts on the RB one, as this got long when I did both together, cut for spoilers. Be aware of my inability to remember names of either characters or actors. I suppose I could get the cast list up... hang on.
OMG, I am so dim! RB's wife in this is his wife in Point Pleasant! Susan Walters has dark hair here; blonde in PP, which threw me off the scent, I guess. Wow.
Okay, that has nothing to do with anything. I don't know the original 1958 movie but I love that it kept playing on the TV throughout the movie. Very neat.
RB looks good in this. I should just cut and paste that because, let's be honest, I pretty much always think he looks good.
It starts with his as a smoking, drinking, pool playing bachelor boy about to get married (kind of late in life; RB's 40 when this is filmed and he doesn't look a lot younger than that) to a woman he's known since Grade Two. His closest friend, Steve, is also unmarried. I told myself not to go there for once, and kept watching.
The plot's very basic; aliens need to breed, come to earth, suck men into their spaceship, copy them; send them out to impregnate women. I assumed Nick, RB's character, was dead so it was a nice surprise to find all the men in the ship at the end, completely fine, apart from the traumatic experience which would be enough to freak me out for life.
It bothered me that I couldn't quite work out if the remake was set in modern times or still in the 50s. The women all wore dresses with sticky-out skirts and the TVs were small and square, so I'm guessing late fifties setting but it wasn't firmly anchored in that time, if that makes sense; Nick and Kelly are sleeping together before the wedding without it being too much of a secret, for instance.
The change in the men once they're aliens is dramatic, although I'm not sure bars would shut down quite that fast just because the aliens are teetotal (I guess it has to be the fifties; there're never any women in the bars, heh.) There's a hilarious bit where RB drinks some champagne to celebrate the upcoming baby news and then dashes to the loo to throw up. Okay, that doesn't sound funny, but it was...
Ack. Babbling in a diffuse, aimless way here.
Never mind the plot (which ends on an entirely obvious flash of purple (ALIEN!!!) in the cutesy baby's eyes -- and why didn't she have an abortion? She KNOWS it's an alien baby and not Nick's, for heaven's sake! Let's focus on RB.
He does his usual good job of being charming, gets his shirt off a lot (mm), and does an equally good job at being both vulnerable (you really do believe him at the end when he tells Kelly he loved her as he melts into a puddle of purple) and scary.
Yes, scary. RB does violent and aggressive really convincingly as anyone who watched him on Las Vegas can testify to, not to mention the hospital scene in 24. There's a scene on the wedding night where he, after watching something kind of soft-porn-like on the hotel TV (something which swung me back to thinking it wasn't the fifties) copies it with his new wife and comes on way too strong. Jim Ellison gets angry and he can be positively menacing in some of his interviews, but it's a little jarring seeing RB unleash this darker side of his repertoire when I'm mostly familiar with him as the hero.
Have to say, as an actor, he's got a wide range; I've seen him play hero, charmer, sleaze, evil, funny, goofy, menacing, vulnerable, gay, straight and he makes them all work.
And in this movie he kills a puppy.
...
And his wife sort of doesn't call him on it.
...
That threw me more than a little, I have to say.
The film's a little uneven; it's sometimes funny; Nick mowing the lawn (well, scrub grass) in a crop circle not straight lines, made me snicker, and sometimes a nice homage to the genre, but bits are darker; the miscarriage of the alien baby Kelly's friend, Linda is carrying is distressing and the scene where Steve, now Linda's husband (wonder if the human Steve married Linda after he was freed?) drowns as the men/aliens all stand silently watching is creepy, too.
But overall, it's pretty PG13. I can see me watching it again, maybe on fast forward in bits.
So... thoughts on the RB one, as this got long when I did both together, cut for spoilers. Be aware of my inability to remember names of either characters or actors. I suppose I could get the cast list up... hang on.
OMG, I am so dim! RB's wife in this is his wife in Point Pleasant! Susan Walters has dark hair here; blonde in PP, which threw me off the scent, I guess. Wow.
Okay, that has nothing to do with anything. I don't know the original 1958 movie but I love that it kept playing on the TV throughout the movie. Very neat.
RB looks good in this. I should just cut and paste that because, let's be honest, I pretty much always think he looks good.
It starts with his as a smoking, drinking, pool playing bachelor boy about to get married (kind of late in life; RB's 40 when this is filmed and he doesn't look a lot younger than that) to a woman he's known since Grade Two. His closest friend, Steve, is also unmarried. I told myself not to go there for once, and kept watching.
The plot's very basic; aliens need to breed, come to earth, suck men into their spaceship, copy them; send them out to impregnate women. I assumed Nick, RB's character, was dead so it was a nice surprise to find all the men in the ship at the end, completely fine, apart from the traumatic experience which would be enough to freak me out for life.
It bothered me that I couldn't quite work out if the remake was set in modern times or still in the 50s. The women all wore dresses with sticky-out skirts and the TVs were small and square, so I'm guessing late fifties setting but it wasn't firmly anchored in that time, if that makes sense; Nick and Kelly are sleeping together before the wedding without it being too much of a secret, for instance.
The change in the men once they're aliens is dramatic, although I'm not sure bars would shut down quite that fast just because the aliens are teetotal (I guess it has to be the fifties; there're never any women in the bars, heh.) There's a hilarious bit where RB drinks some champagne to celebrate the upcoming baby news and then dashes to the loo to throw up. Okay, that doesn't sound funny, but it was...
Ack. Babbling in a diffuse, aimless way here.
Never mind the plot (which ends on an entirely obvious flash of purple (ALIEN!!!) in the cutesy baby's eyes -- and why didn't she have an abortion? She KNOWS it's an alien baby and not Nick's, for heaven's sake! Let's focus on RB.
He does his usual good job of being charming, gets his shirt off a lot (mm), and does an equally good job at being both vulnerable (you really do believe him at the end when he tells Kelly he loved her as he melts into a puddle of purple) and scary.
Yes, scary. RB does violent and aggressive really convincingly as anyone who watched him on Las Vegas can testify to, not to mention the hospital scene in 24. There's a scene on the wedding night where he, after watching something kind of soft-porn-like on the hotel TV (something which swung me back to thinking it wasn't the fifties) copies it with his new wife and comes on way too strong. Jim Ellison gets angry and he can be positively menacing in some of his interviews, but it's a little jarring seeing RB unleash this darker side of his repertoire when I'm mostly familiar with him as the hero.
Have to say, as an actor, he's got a wide range; I've seen him play hero, charmer, sleaze, evil, funny, goofy, menacing, vulnerable, gay, straight and he makes them all work.
And in this movie he kills a puppy.
...
And his wife sort of doesn't call him on it.
...
That threw me more than a little, I have to say.
The film's a little uneven; it's sometimes funny; Nick mowing the lawn (well, scrub grass) in a crop circle not straight lines, made me snicker, and sometimes a nice homage to the genre, but bits are darker; the miscarriage of the alien baby Kelly's friend, Linda is carrying is distressing and the scene where Steve, now Linda's husband (wonder if the human Steve married Linda after he was freed?) drowns as the men/aliens all stand silently watching is creepy, too.
But overall, it's pretty PG13. I can see me watching it again, maybe on fast forward in bits.
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