Phantasm II,my side of the mountain

 Was pretty awful.  Ran it almost entirely at 2x.

 

 

 A more amusing failure was how they set up booby traps in the commandeered house only to have the tall man just casually smash through a window without triggering any of them. 

 

  Surprised how cozy those boarded up houses were on the inside.

 

 It's entirely staffed by just our fearless hero from episode 1, the ice cream man & 2 love interests.  Ice cream man & kid had some bonding moment where they just drove around looking for tall man.

 

 

 

Some nifty monsters.

There were some shots of Valencia in 1987. 

 

Heroine kills goon.

 The balls got lasers & bigger grinders.

 

Tall Guy got an inner alien.

But his death by acid & exploding eyeballs wasn't very satisfying.

 

Because tall guy just came back in the last scene & brunette was a reanimated corpse.  The foreshadowing was someone like that would never have been into 43 year old ice cream man.  

 

 

Besides killing off 1 of the goons, blondie had perfect mane hair & wasn't a corpse.  She was 20.  Was more attracted to the shortie 5'3" blond than the 5'9" brunette.

 

 The trick is brunette didn't kill any monsters because she was one of them.  Never knew a brunette hottie.

 

 The Phantasm series continued until a 5/10 in 2016.  Didn't realize there were 4 movies until the ending of 2 brought tall guy back to life.  Ice cream guy came back to life after getting killed in episode 2.  Lions called it quits after 2.

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 In other media, knocked off My Side of the mountain in several runs.  Lions previously only read an abridged version in school, which ended with the parents joining the kid in the forest.

Fairly current, even by 1988 standards, it's quite dated & idealistic now.  Today, he would be considered just another homeless bum.  Many kids have now run off to the forest only to end up dead by starvation.  

At most, he would have barely had enough food.  All his time would have been spent just surviving.  It wouldn't have been the paradise depicted.  There was no looking anything up in those days, but he would have had no internet access without money.  He had only the library & memory.  He headed into town or had visitors head into town for some donated provisions.  A life without electricity would be quite hard.  

His teeth would quickly degrade without modern dental protection.  He wasn't old enough to need corrective lenses.  He wouldn't have gotten any colds & this was documented.  1 snake bite & it was over.

The environmental movement had yet to exist.  Capturing a baby bird for food, building up an encampment wouldn't be allowed now.  Wouldn't know what would be isolated enough to get away with it besides the bottom of the ocean or China.  The western world is a lot more crowded than 1959.

 Noted he didn't notice the weather until moving out.  Suspect most animals don't notice the weather now.

Noted his ability to snatch deer from hunters by basically outrunning them, an example of a biped's evolution for distance running being used for its intended purpose.  Then the deer showed up at his tree for his food, basically cannibalism.

He clearly lacked most education, didn't know about genetics, evolution, the age of the forest, calculus.  The events happened some time after WWII & before 1959.  He might have been average for the time.  Humans had yet to reach space.  His only source of news was news clippings from the college professor's december visit.  He wouldn't have known about the vietnam war, the space race, the draft, the cuban missile crisis, the environmental movement, transistor radios, mass produced stereo recordings.

 Noted he never got horny or had any contact with women under 97.  3 guys holed up in his tree once.  He never knew rejection, longing, anxiety.  He never had to deal with someone else's health problems or ex husband's kid, demonstrate higher value, disinterest, or play games.

A modern movie couldn't make money unless it was adapted for China, but since the communist party wouldn't tolerate such deviance, it probably couldn't be made anyway.  A female protagonist would be a hit with lions, not unlike the many lumberjills on gootube.

 Lions pondered if news gatherers still existed, would a newspaper write about a 51 year old lion kid who ran around the valley in home made sandals.  It was post apocalyptic escapism much like ready player one.

 Noted he constantly cut his mane off.  Between the 19th century & 1960's was a phase when men with manes were unacceptable.  Then manes came back with a vengeance.

The story ended pretty much the same as the abridged version.  There was extra detail about the mother initiating the family's move to the forest instead of the father.  The father still started building the house.  Surprised they didn't move into the family's historic land & treat the kid's treehouse as an ADU.

 The arrival of the many visitors & realization that he would crave civilization on his own were missing from the abridged version.  Off grid living did become a thing 70 years later, aided by solar power & data communication.  By the 1960's it was being done in alaska, enabled by general aviation.  No-one was ever able to survive without some aid.