Month: January 2015

Ghost Patrol (1936)

GHOST PATROL (1936)
Article #360 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-10-2002
Posting date: 7-27-2002

Tim “big-hat” McCoy is an agent for the Department of Justice hunting down crooks who are using a machine that downs airplanes carrying bonds.

Despite the title, this is not a horror western (unless you’re scared of guys in big hats). There are no ghosts in this movie (and if there were, I wonder if they would also wear really big hats). It is, however, a science fiction western, due to the existence of a machine that can short out the electrical systems of airplanes (and perhaps a secret machine our hero uses to keep his really big hat on his head). It stars Tim “My-hat-is-bigger-than-yours” McCoy. It gets a little tedious about the half-way point, but one of the benefits of watching B-westerns is that they’re over before you know it, so you’ll pull through (and you can always distract yourself by trying to figure out how many beans would fit into Tim McCoy’s big hat).

I’ll give you one guess as to what aspect of this movie made the biggest impression on me.

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Homicidal (1961)

HOMICIDAL (1961)
Article #359 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-9-2002
Posting date: 7-26-2002

A blonde woman murders a justice of the peace under the name of a woman who runs a flower shop.

William Castle’s take on PSYCHO does a pretty good job of emulating that movie without stealing from it outright; the first murder definitely comes as a surprise. I was able to figure out the final twist the first time I saw it, largely as a result of noticing that a certain character’s voice had been dubbed, but it was still a fun movie experience. This is one of the Castle’s movies which actually has the gimmick built into the movie itself; a 45 second fright break near the climax of the movie. The gimmick seems fairly lame, but it’s really a lot of fun to read about the full set-up, where people who took advantage of the fright break to get their money back had to sign a yellow card that said “I am a bona fide coward,” plus having to go to the yellow-lit coward’s corner, where a speaker would proclaim that they were too chicken to see the end of the movie. My wife would love to have one of the yellow cards!

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The Alien Factor (1977)

THE ALIEN FACTOR (1977)
Article #358 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-8-2002
Posting date: 7-25-2002

An alien spacecraft crashes on Earth, unleashing several wild beasts on unsuspecting earthlings.

All right, there’s one monster that is kind of interesting looking; it’s the tall one that kind of resembles a satyr. That should cover the good points I found in this Don Dohler film. I think I spent more buying the DVD than was budgeted for this film. The acting is non-existent when it isn’t bad, and the direction looks like it was inspired by Larry Buchanan, though without Buchanan’s slightly stronger sense of character. Sure, it has a bit of a twist at the end, but in order for a twist to work, you have to care about the rest of the movie. At least the movie is only eighty minutes long. This one is primarily for bad movie fanatics.

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Juve Vs. Fantomas (1913)

JUVE VS. FANTOMAS (1913)
(a.k.a. JUVE CONTRE FANTOMAS)
Article #357 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-7-2002
Posting date: 7-24-2002

A police detective matches wits with a master criminal.

I’m not even sure this should be included, as it is very marginal to say the least. My book lists a serial called FANTOMAS, which is supposed to come in five parts. Each part has a separate listing in IMDB, and as far as I can tell, each of these parts is made of smaller episodes of the serial. This is the second of the five movies, and it looks as if it was made up of several episodes of a serial strung together; it starts seemingly in the middle of a story, and ends on a cliffhanger, so I can’t really say much about the arc of the story as a whole. Still, the set pieces where Juve (the detective) tries to outwit Fantomas (the criminal) are amusing indeed; it would be nice to see this in its entirety someday.

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The Eyes of the Mummy (1918)

THE EYES OF THE MUMMY (1918)
Article #356 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-6-2002
Posting date: 7-23-2002

An explorer saves a woman from an evil Egyptian who is holding her prisoner.

One of the problems of doing a comprehensive review of fantastic cinema is that you have to face up to the fact that some movies just haven’t been prepared for English-speaking people. All the title cards in this silent are in German, and though I have a little familiarity with the language thanks to my dim and distant high school education, I could hardly call myself fluent in the language. Thus, it’s actually a bit hard to say whether this melodrama about obsession actually belongs to fantastic cinema or not; the Emil Jannings character may be a mummy, but nothing I’ve seen makes that a definite. He’s not swathed in bandages, though he does seem to have a certain hypnotic power over the Pola Negri character. I also remember a comment from yesterday by Henry Nicolella that the Pola Negri character is, in fact, the mummy; someday when I get a version of this with English titles, I’ll sort it out. At this point, I think the title is the main thing that contributes to this movie being thought of as horror; right now I think of it rather as fatalistic melodrama with a slight horror backdrop. Incidentally, this was an early film by Ernst Lubitsch, better known for his sophisticated comedies of the thirties.

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The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)

THE DREAM OF A RAREBIT FIEND (1906)
Article #355 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-5-2002
Posting date: 7-22-2002

A man has nightmares after eating and drinking too much.

There’s really not an awful lot to say about this comic special-effects extravaganza by the man who directed THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY; largely a man eating, walking home drunk (this sequence, in which the lamppost sways and the world rushes by in a haze, is the most effective part), and then goes to bed and has Melies-style nightmares. It’s entertaining enough, but not quite as insanely bizarre as a Melies film would be.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913)

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1913)
Article #354 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-6-2002
Posting date: 7-21-2002

Dr. Jekyll experiments with a drug to bring out his evil side.

Uhh, King Baggott? Your Dr. Jekyll was stagey and artificial, but I’m quite willing to chalk that up to taste. But whoever told you that the way to make Mr. Hyde scary and threatening was to look like Jerry Lewis and walk like Groucho Marx was joking; I wouldn’t follow their advice if I were you.

Basically, another short (about 25 minutes) early version of the tale, and one of the weakest. Opt for Barrymore or Cruze; you’ll be glad you did.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912)

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1912)
Article #353 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-5-2002
Posting date: 7-20-2002

Dr. Jekyll experiments with drugs that bring out his evil side.

There’s not much you can do with a story in only ten minutes other than give a quick summary of the high points, but this one is not too bad. James Cruze actually does a quite good job in the role, and it covers most of the significant events in the story. Actually, not a bad introduction to the story, though you will want to choose one of the longer versions to flesh it all out.

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The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915)

THE DINOSAUR AND THE MISSING LINK (1915)
Article #352 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-4-2002
Posting date: 7-19-2002

Prehistoric shenanigans involving hapless cavemen, a dinosaur, and a missing link.

It’s described as a “prehistoric tragedy,” but in order to be that, you have to have something of a story. And though this early animated Willis O’Brien short is fun to watch, it really doesn’t have a story to speak of. The missing link is an ape-like creature in a tree.

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The Beast With a Million Eyes (1955)

THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES (1955)
Article #351 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-3-2002
Posting date: 7-18-2002

A creature from outer space lands in the desert and takes control of the animals in the vicinity.

This is another of the very early movies put out by AIP back when they were known as American Releasing Corp., and it looks extremely cheap and shows the work of people who were still in the process of learning their craft. It’s slow-moving, somewhat confusing, and the acting is wildly uneven. A lot of the animal attack scenes don’t work, simply because the cheapness of the production kept them from doing them effectively, but you get the gist of what’s going on anyway. In fact, the movie almost feels like a rough draft of a better movie, and you wonder how much better it might be if the makers had the time and money to work out its rough edges. Nonetheless, though the total effect ends up being somewhat surreal, it was entertaining enough and I enjoyed it. It features Paul Birch and a puppet of Paul Blaisdell’s.

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