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The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers/Return of the Musketeers (1973/1974/1989)

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In a coincidental tribute to Raquel Welch following her passing a few weeks back, over the course of a few nights we watched  The Three Musketeers ,  The  Four Musketeers , and Return of the Musketeers  in The Slaughtered Lamb.  The first two films were shot as a single feature, and subsequently split and released a year apart (much to the chagrin of cast and crew members who were paid for a single film!), with the third film reuniting the cast and director fifteen years later. Produced by the Salkind's (who would go on to produce the original Superman films a few years later), and directed by Richard Lester (who was responsible for the classic Beatles films A Hard Day's Night and Help! ), I will admit that I went in with pretty high expectations. In retrospect, coming from the Salkinds I think I was looking for the tale of the Three Musketeers by way of Richard Donner (director of the original Superman and far too many great films to list here), rather than Richard Lester (
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Magic Mike XXL (2015)

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  I'm a fan of Steven Soderbergh (and appreciate the fact that his projects tend to cover a pretty wide spectrum of genres), so we had seen and enjoyed the original Magic Mike on Blu Ray. Having booked tickets to take Vonna to see Magic Mike's Last Dance this weekend, it was only appropriate that we not risk missing out on the subtle story nuances that could be lost on us if we didn't watch the initial sequel, Magic Mike XXL , so we decided to check it out in The Slaughtered Lamb last week. What I didn't realize until the credits rolled was that unlike the first and third films in the series, the second was produced but not directed by Soderbergh himself. Which allows me to give it a bit of a pass for lacking in the story department. What we're served up is basically a road trip movie, with a requisite stop every few minutes for an obligatory stripper scene. Having seen more than enough exploitation films in my life, I can't fault this one for pandering to its
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Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Director's Edition (1979/2022)

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I've always been more of a Star Wars fan than a Star Trek fan, but I've enjoyed much of the original series, and a number of the films with the original series cast. But based on its reputation, I had never sat down to watch  Star Trek: The Motion Picture in its entirety. Oddly enough, as a fan of Jerry Goldsmith's wonderful score (which forever redefined the Star Trek theme), I had sat through the opening overture a dozen times or more through the years on different formats. When a Director's Edition was released on DVD in 2000, I picked it up thinking that I would finally sit down to watch it. But I never got around to it. So my patience worked in my favor, as 22 years later, the Director's Edition was remastered for 4K with a Dolby Atmos soundtrack.  While no amount of revisionism was going to make this more entertaining than  Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , it does feel like a film that was trying to appeal to the fans of the original series. But in a post
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Film 52/52: Zodiac (2007)

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We officially close out this series with David Fincher's Zodiac . He assembled quite a cast to tell the story of the serial killer who haunted the Bay Area for several years from the late 60s to early 70s. I recall reading Robert Graysmith's book (on which the film is based) when I worked at the bookstore back in the late 80s, but had forgotten most of the details of the case since then. What I did know was that the case inspired Scorpio, the killer Clint Eastwood took out in the original Dirty Harry  (1971). Jake Gyllenhall plays Robert Graysmith, who was an editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. Robert Downey Jr. plays Paul Avery, a writer at the Chronicle . And Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards play SF PD Inspectors Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong. (Inspector Toschi was also the inspiration for Steve McQueen's Frank Bullitt in 1968.) Other notable performers include Brian Cox as Melvin Belli, Dermot Mulroney, Chloë Sevigny, Elias Koteas, Adam Go
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Film 51/52: Yojimbo (1961)

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One of the greatest things about this series has been the opportunity to make time for classic films that we've had in the library for years, and have never gotten around to watching. Akira Kurosawa's  Yojimbo is one such film. I've long been a fan of Toshiro Mifune (who we saw most recently in our screening of Steven Spielberg's 1941 ), and A Fistful of Dollars — Sergio Leone's take on the film with Clint Eastwood in the lead role. Earlier in this series, we watched Walter Hill's lesser adaptation, Last Man Standing , starring Bruce Willis. While the Eastwood film will always hold a special place in my heart as the first version of the story I experienced, Akira Kurosawa's original film is a close second.  The basic story is of a lone samurai, Sanjuro, who arrives in a small town and sets out to play two warring factions off one another as a bodyguard (the translation of the title — yojimbo ). Now, there's something about Eastwood gunning down bad guy
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Film 50/52: Xtro (1983)

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Had things gone as originally planned, our 'X' movie would have been Ti West's X  — which we were scheduled to run as part of our year-end wrap-up marathon in The Slaughtered Lamb Cinema this week. Unfortunately, a positive Covid test put those plans to rest, and in the hope that we might be able to salvage some of that event at a future date, I opted to go with a different 'X' title — one that I hadn't watched since renting the original Thorn EMI videotape nearly 40 years ago. My recollection of Xtro was that of a sleazy sci-fi/horror hybrid, with the feel of an 80s Italian horror film, containing an unforgettable scene of a woman giving birth to a fully grown man after being impregnated by an inelegantly designed alien creature. In addition to reviewing trailers of several possible 'X' films, I watched Siskel and Ebert's review of Xtro to see what they said about it at the time, which I've inserted below in case you're interested in their
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Film 49/52: Warlords of Atlantis (1978)

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Growing up, Doug McClure was a staple of weekday afternoon television thanks to three Amicus Studios fantasy films he starred in based on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs ( The Land That Time Forgot , The People That Time Forgot , and my favorite,  At the Earth's Core , in which he starred opposite Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro). I was surprised years later to discover that he did a fourth fantasy film (not for Amicus, and from an original screenplay), Warlords of Atlantis . I've had a copy in the library for years, but after showing Vonna the trailer (which showcases several of the films interesting creatures), we selected this one for our 'W' film. McClure is the creator of a diving bell helping a scientist and his son interested in finding the lost city of Atlantis. On their first dive, they're attacked by a sea creature, and after a narrow escape they find a golden statue — an artifact of Atlantis. The ship is attacked by a giant octopus, and several of the
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