A couple of weeks I discovered the lost First Doctor serial DOCTOR WHO: Galaxy Four was streaming on Tubi. This past week I made time to watch it. The Doctor, Vicki and Stephen land on a planet on the brink of exploding. The female Drahven (one female leader and three clones) ask him to help them seize the spaceship from the monstrous Rials so they can escape — and if the Doctor and his friends won’t cooperate, well, they’ll make them. The Rials, however, are not the monsters they’re supposed to be …
Not a classic, but I enjoyed it. Peter Purves (Stephen) didn’t care for it as it was originally written for Barbara and Ian and he wound up getting a lot of Barbara’s lines. “They said I would need soldiers — but why am I the only one who can think?”
As a fan of the Kung Fu TV series from the 1970s (I also enjoyed the recent CW reboot), I’ve had the 1986 KUNG FU sequel movie/reboot pilot on my Amazon wish list for a while. My friend Ross bought it for me for my Christmas gift and it holds up well.
We open with Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine) working among other Chinese immigrants in a California port town. When a young man ends up dead while trying to expose an opium smuggling ring, Caine gets involved in helping the man’s widow (Kerry Keane) dig into the mystery. Trouble is, an elderly Chinese man (Mako) and a young martial artist (Brandon Lee in his first appearance) have shown up gunning for Caine — what do they want? And can Caine free the young man from the older one’s control?
This got a mention in the appendix of Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan because not only does Mako have some magic tricks, Caine’s now able to levitate. That note aside, this is a good movie, hewing to the spirit of the show; a shame this didn’t go to series rather than the later Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. “Here becomes there as today becomes yesterday.”
I spend some of my Christmas gift-certificate money on LA VALLEE (1972) and boy, do I regret it. In this French film, a diplomat’s bored wife stuck in New Guinea joins some hippies on an expedition to find a lost valley never seen by white people. The result is tedious, with little plot or character — the selling point is the pretty images (well, and a Pink Floyd score but that didn’t improve things for me) and I’ve seen such things done better (Emerald Forest to name one example). “In the decadent west, where we’re from, the dragon stands for evil darkness.”
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