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If there's anything that sets the films of Bobby Suarez apart from the films of Cirio Santiago, it's that most of them make some sort of sense, at least relative to the universe about which we're talking. But even Suarez was unable to resist the siren song of making a batshit insane post-apocalyptic action movie. And so where Santiago gave the world Future Hunters, which featured a leather-clad future hero, a tribe of midgets, Robert Patrick in his tighty whities, and a lost society of Filipino Amazons, Bobby Suarez gives us Warriors of the Apocalypse, which featured a leather-clad future hero, a tribe of midgets, and a lost society of sexy multi-ethnic Amazons. What it lacks in Robert Patrick buffalo shots, however, it certainly makes up for with what has to be the very final word in post-apocalypse shoulderpad jackets.
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So we were at Bourbons Bistro Friday night for dinner and bourbon flights with my sister, brother-in-law, and my dad, who had been drinking since nine that morning after conning his way into the VIP tent at the Ryder Cup, where he apparently drank free beer and Woodford Reserve while reclining on leather couches and eating free prime rib. At some point, I think they watched some golf, but I could be mistaken. We put together two of our own bourbon sampler packages. Ellie and I put together the first flight, consisting of Pappy Van Winkle 15 YO, Pappy 20 YO, and Buffalo Trace's experimental Cab Franc finish. It turned out they were out of Pappy 15, so they substituted the 23 YO at no additional charge. My dad and sister put together the second flight, consisting of Blanton's, Elmer T. Lee, and Buffalo Trace's experimental Chardonnay finish.
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The wonderful thing about Battle Beneath the Earth is that it allows even an underachiever like myself to feel that he has a breadth of scientific knowledge superior to that of its makers. On more than one occasion while watching it I was able to point at the screen and exclaim, "Der, that can't not happen! Har!" For instance, I don't know anything about geology, but I know that molten lava is hot, and that you can't just daintily step over a stream of it as if it were a crack in the sidewalk. Also, if digging a tunnel between China and the U.S. were as easy as this film makes it out to be, China's biggest problem would be the steady influx of six-to-eight year-old American boys constantly emerging from holes hither and yon to excitedly wave their shovels at people.
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Our first stop after arriving in Kentucky for the Bourbon Festival was the Heaven Hill Bourbon Heritage Center, a slick combination of Heaven Hill gift shop and museum of bourbon whiskey history. Opened in 2004, the Bourbon Heritage Center is an immaculately maintained mini-museum that showcases a hall of wall placards detailing the birth and growth of whiskey in the United States, accompanied by collections of vintage bottlings from a myriad of distillers, most of whom no longer exist but sure did have awesome labels. The displays are only somewhat Heaven Hill-centric, but since two of the distillery's signature bourbons are named after a couple of the founding fathers of whiskey -- Elijah Craig and Evan Williams -- I suppose it happens by coincidence.
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When I recently set about the task of converting all my old VHS tapes to DVD-R, I started rediscovering a lot of films I hadn't watched in years, not since first I plucked them out of the dollar bin at whatever video store was trying to get rid of them. It was a big chore, because I had a lot of VHS tapes, and some of them were copyguarded for reasons I will never fathom. Who in the hell copyguards Archer: Fugitive from the Empire? Half those tapes are so old and worn at this point that they could snap at any moment, and what then? What happens when Archer: Fugitive from the Empire finally gets eaten by my aging VCR? What happens when The Barbarians can't be played anymore? So I decided to take my holy assignment one step forward and make sure I reviewed as many of these films as possible, because the internet is going to last forever, and one day we will create sentient computers by downloading the whole of human knowledge as represented by the contents of the world wide web into it's databases. At that time, the computer will become a living, thinking creature. It will also be an idiot, thanks to the fact that most of what's on the internet is blogs written from the viewpoint of someone's cat or reviews of movies like Solar Force starring Michael Pare.
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Time to travel back, back in time to the very dawn of cinema. This time around, the B-Masters pay tribute to the silent era of filmmaking. From master criminals to outer space to the wild, wild Alps, this roundtable showcases the fact that silent films were often far more lavish, experimental, and daring than modern audiences seem to recall. There's a lot more to silent film than people in heavy make-up making really exaggerated facial expressions. So join us for a lesson in film before sound.
Our Contributions: The White Hell of Piz Palu in which Leni Riefenstahl and her friends climb The Alps and run into all manner of danger, The Godless Girl, in which Cecil B. DeMiller teaches us that there's nothing atheists love more than handing out pamphlets, and finally Fritz Lang's epic Dr. Mabuse The Gambler, the film that would serve as the template for all movies about criminal masterminds that were yet to come.
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