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starring Dr. Hal !
ARMAGEDDON, WITH REAGAN & MONSTERS
January 4, 2019 10:00pm

 

Ask Dr Hal
ARMAGEDDON, WITH REAGAN & MONSTERS
In this hard-hitting episode, fearless Dr. H. Owll shows a vision of omnipresent destruction, with the aid of Ray Bradbury's prophetic story THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS, which he reads. Before that, the word-music of Dylan Thomas. After that, the arrival of Puzzling Evidence in the Studio heralds the second petal of our triune blossom: a narration of the film HELLCATS OF THE NAVY, featuring Arthur Franz and, yes, Ronald Reagan, with a shore-side romance with the ankylosed, angular former Nancy Davis (we should do DONOVAN'S BRAIN sometime). In this Morningside picture, Ron keeps a stiff upper lip, along with the rest of his anatomy, while intrepidly piloting a submarine into Japanese waters. Based on something that actually happened somewhere and sometime, hidden and distorted by layers of scriptwriting and the standard patriotic homilies, the picture begins with Admiral Chester Nimitz (in Berkeley, California) and veers between a back-lot Guam and a submarine interior familiar to those who watch IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA. For this potboiler was cooked up by Columbia producer Charles Schneer, who worked with Ray Harryhausen. Some of the shots in HELLCATS also make it into IT CAME, the movie about the bulbous, thousand-foot-long octopus, actually a sextopus in the movie, which tears down the Golden Gate Bridge. Moreover, this Reaganesque clunker is directed by Nathan Juran, whose filmography includes THE DEADLY MANTIS, ATTACK OF THE FIFTY-FOOT WOMAN and the Harryhausen pictures TWENTY MILLION MILES TO EARTH, THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD and THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON. All this is actually of great interest to some of us. You know who you are, Etherettes and Rocket Rookies... eh? Lastly, we drag things out with a co-presentation of the lugubrious British comedy, CARRY ON SCREAMING. You know, the one with "Oddbod." And this carries us on (heh, heh) to the end,


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