Painful Viewing

My shifting about of washing machines the other weekend has finally caught up with me.  Despite thinking that I had gotten away with it in the first days after installing the new washing machine and moving the old one, (thanks to the pandemic, companies will only deliver and take away white goods just inside your front door - leaving you to do the rest of the shifting),  by the end of last week, my right hip was in agony and it just got worse over the weekend.  Currently, my back is so bad that just getting out of bed is a major undertaking - as for getting my socks on, well, I have to allocate half the morning to that.  I finally gave in this afternoon and took some aspirin to try and ease the pain - with all the other drugs I take for my blood pressure and diabetes, I'm loath these days to pop any other pills - which, while not killing the pain completely, has given me a bit more movement.  Right now, it doesn't feel as if this is going to get better any time soon, so all my plans are off.  

Despite the agony, I did manage to get through a number of B-movies this weekend, including a double bill of The Black Scorpion and The Monster That Challenged the World.  I enjoyed these two so much that I sat down, (as best I could), and followed them up with the grand-daddy of the prehistoric-monster-awakened-by-nuclear-tests-on-the-loose movies, The Beast From Twenty Thousand Fathoms.  It seems like an age since I last saw a youthful Lee Van Cleef shoot the Beast with the radioactive bullet from atop that roller coaster.  (That's the main lesson I took away from the film as a kid - prehistoric monsters don't like roller coasters - even before he was shot, he was tearing the whole thing up, in a manner reminiscent of the way the cat used to demolish my clockwork train set when I was a child).  A change of pace for Sunday when I caught up with The Passage (1979), a long unavailable war movie which has recently resurfaced on Sony Movies Action.  A curious attempt to blend the traditional war-adventure film with latter day sadistic nastiness, it isn't difficult to see why, despite an all star cast - Anthony Quinn, James Mason, Malcolm McDowell, Patricia Neal, Christopher Lee - it was a huge box office flop which then vanished from public view.  The photography is murky to the point that, in some scenes, it is difficult to see what is going on, the action confusingly directed, the budget so restricted that, for a climactic avalanche sequence it lifts stock footage from On Her Majesty's Secret Service and the script lacklustre.  Only a scenery chewing McDowell as a nasty Nazi gives a memorable performance, (for all the wrong reasons).  For director J Lee Thompson it was pretty much the last gasp of his career (he had directed far more successful war movies like Ice Cold in Alex and The Guns of Navarone).  Always a pedestrian director with little sense of pace, here he pretty much grinds to a halt.  As a completest, I'm glad that I've finally seen it (it was one of those movies I remember being released, but never saw at the time) I'm surely glad that I didn't pay to watch The Passage.