Month: April 2015

Love Wanga (1936)

LOVE WANGA (1936)
(a.k.a. OUANGA/DRUMS OF THE JUNGLE)
Article #470 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-28-2002
Posting date: 11-21-2002

A light-skinned voodoo priestess falls in love with a white plantation owner, and vows to get rid of the woman he loves.

I thought this movie seemed very similar to THE DEVIL’S DAUGHTER, and it turns out that the later movie was a reworking of the script for this one. I found this out from the “Forgotten Horrors” book by Turner and Price, which also includes the background story for the movie which would make a movie in itself; apparently, the makers of the movie went to Haiti to observe actual voodoo ceremonies, but angered the natives when they wanted to capture them on camera. From that moment onwards, the movie was plagued with bizarre production problems; it was eventually shot in Jamaica. If the one voodoo priest in love with the main character looks a lot like Sheldon Leonard, that’s because it is. The story is pretty ordinary, but there are some interesting visual moments, some nice atmosphere here and there, and some very nice editing every once in a while, particularly one that contrasts the dancing of the white characters with those of the blacks.

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Lost Continent (1951)

LOST CONTINENT (1951)
Article #469 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-27-2002
Posting date: 11-20-2002

A military expedition is undertaken to recover information from a lost missile that crashed on its test run. The expeditioners discover a prehistoric land on their quest.

This cold-war take on the Lost World theme starts out with an appealing group of actors (Cesar Romero, John Hoyt, Whit Bissell, Sid Melton, and Hugh Beaumont are all on hand) with some not uninteresting characters. Unfortunately, once the expedition begins, it finds precious little to do with them. The stop-motion animated dinosaurs don’t appear until about three-quarters through the film (and they’re no better than so-so at best), and until then, we have scene after scene of them walking through the jungle or climbing the mountain, broken up by scenes of them talking to one another, and their characters aren’t quite interesting enough to compensate for the lack of a story for most of the middle of the movie. It almost feels as if the dinosaurs were thrown in to try to spice up a dull script, rather than the story revolving around the dinos in the first place. There are some nice individual moments, but its a dull ride between them.

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Five (1951)

FIVE (1951)
Article #468 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-26-2002
Posting date: 11-19-2002

Several survivors gather together near an isolated house and try to survive after nuclear war.

The Granddaddy of all nuclear war survival films, and later movies such as ON THE BEACH; THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL; and (especially) THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED all owe a bit of a debt to this one. Written by Arch Oboler of radio fame, it has a lot of talk, but the talk is fascinating, tragic, touching, and always holds my attention; I attribute this to Oboler’s radio experience, where he surely learned how to make conversation interesting. There’s even a number of memorable visual images scattered throughout the film. Plotwise, it is a little predictable; if someone gave you a list and a description of the survivors and told you how many of them would be alive at the end, you’d probably be able to figure out who without any problem. Incidentally, the title could be SIX, as we actually have a sixth character who plays into the action. Whatever flaws this movie has, it is powerful and memorable.

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The Fall of the House of Usher (1949)

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1949)
Article #467 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-25-2002
Posting date: 11-18-2002

Sir Roderick Usher discovers that a curse has been placed upon his house.

After an introduction in which several men stand around talking about scary stories, one of them decides to read a Poe story to the rest. What follows is about thirty minutes of a plot that involves an old hag and a severed head, and I wouldn’t blame anyone who switches this one off in disgust at this point and wonders what any of this has to do with the actual Poe story (not that I actually expect every movie adaptation to be an accurate adaptation of its source, but if somebody is reading the story out of a book in the movie, you’d expect it to be more faithful). Don’t worry; the movie jumps back to the original story shortly after the halfway point, and follows it pretty closely from that point, only with the earlier subplot layered onto it. It feels for all the world like a short that was clumsily expanded to a feature length movie. There are some good moments, and much that is less so, and there are far too many “meaningful” shots of the severed head. I don’t think this movie really provides much competition against either the silent Epstein version or the Price/Corman version. It’s a bit of a curiosity that is more likely to elicit shrugs than scares.

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Don Winslow of the Navy (1942)

DON WINSLOW OF THE NAVY (1942)
(Serial)
Article #466 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-24-2002
Posting date: 11-17-2002

Don Winslow investigates saboteurs on Tangita island.

This serial is pretty good; it has a fairly decent story that keeps moving without repeating itself endlessly, and other than the first couple of episodes, it avoids cheating cliffhangers. Fans of fantastic cinema may be a little disappointed; there are some slight science fiction elements (a two way visual communication screen used by the minions of the Scorpion, and a Human Torpedo) and some slight horror elements when the plot turns to the planting of a microphone in the mouth of a stone idol, but other than that, it’s pretty much straight action-adventure. Still, I enjoyed it throughout; nothing amazing, but good fun nonetheless.

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Homunculus Part IV (1916)

HOMUNCULUS PART IV (1916)
(a.k.a. HOMUNCULUS, 4. TEIL – DIE RACHE DES HOMUNCULUS)
Article #465 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-23-2002
Posting date: 11-16-2002

Plot description may follow someday when I understand German.

Someday I hope to read up on silent serials; from what I’ve been able to gather so far, early serials were a somewhat different animal than the “twelve eighteen-minute episodes that appear after the short subjects but before the movie” creature that we are largely familiar with. HOMUNCULUS was a German serial that had six episodes and ran in its totality about seven hours; in other words, each of its episodes ran about the length of a short movie; in one sense, it’s more akin to the modern TV miniseries than to a serial. IMDB gives each of the episodes a different listing, and that’s how I’m going to handle them, but don’t worry; you’re not about to get a whole string of “I can’t understand this; it’s all in German” MOTDs. That’s because episodes one, three, five and six are lost to the world, and only a fragment survives of episode two. Episode four is the only complete episode, and I can’t understand it, because it’s all in German. Still, there were a couple times that visions of the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN popped into my mind; there are a few sequences of villagers running around in that monster-hunting fashion so common to the Frankenstein movies, and there’s a sequence showing the remains of a fire that looks for all the world like it took place at a mill. The Homunculus himself looks human enough; it is his lack of a human soul that made him monstrous. This is another one that goes into the “further research necessary” category.

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The Great Gabbo (1929)

THE GREAT GABBO (1929)
Article #464 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-22-2002
Posting date: 11-15-2002

A ventriloquist splits with his assistant in the early days of their act, and then each becomes successful independently, and then they meet each other again.

It sounds more like a soap opera than a horror movie, doesn’t it? That’s because it is; despite the fact that Erich Von Stroheim (as Gabbo) talks to his dummy Otto as if he were real, and that madness plays a certain role in the proceedings, it is only horror in the slightest of ways. There also isn’t much of a plot, and it’s stretched out over an hour and a half with lots of musical numbers tossed in, some of which are scarier than anything else in the movie (particularly one involving the dancers dressed up as flies in a giant web). Stroheim is always fun to watch, as usual, being just as unlikeable as you’d expect him to be. Most of the best scenes are at the end, but there is a lovely sequence in the middle where he holds a kindly conversation with his dresser (in German with no subtitles), and then turns mean again at the drop of a hat. Still, this may be a long, hard road unless you’re partial to big Hollywood musical numbers.

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Gabriel Over the White House (1933)

GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE (1933)
Article #463 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-21-2002
Posting date: 11-14-2002

When a newly elected and irresponsible president gets into an automobile accident and is near death, he is transformed by the angel Gabriel into a man dedicated to solving the problems of the world.

If you ever want to see an example of a movie that is a product of its time, this is the one; it was made during the bleakest times of the Great Depression, one of the most desperate times for the American people. The president tackles three problems; widespread unemployment, racketeers, and the repayment of debts abroad, but the methods he uses to accomplish these tasks (he becomes a dictator and runs roughshod over whomever opposes him) is enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies. Apparently, William Randolph Hearst had become a big fan of FDR, and had this picture made as an example of what he the man would do as president; before the accident, the president in the movie is obviously supposed to resemble Hoover; after, he is supposed to resemble FDR. The movie was made while Hoover was president, and Louis B. Mayer (a staunch republican) shelved the film until FDR was elected, and then released it hoping the public would see it as a criticism of FDR. Unfortunately, the president’s actions ended up resembling those of Hitler’s, and once people began to see the results of that administration, the movie was removed from circulation and shelved for years. In its way, it is a priceless document of how desperate the times were; it is probably the only time in American history when a major studio would have made a movie that would have made dictatorship seem holy, inspired and a positive necessity. The gangster sequences, however, are just plain surreal.

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The Mask of Diijon (1946)

THE MASK OF DIIJON (1946)
Article #462 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-20-2002
Posting date: 11-13-2002

A stage magician discovers that he has developed real powers of hypnotism, and decides to use them to seek revenge on those who he imagines have wronged him.

It’s always interesting to watch Erich Von Stroheim in action; he had the ability to imbue even the most mundane of phrases with sinister undercurrents of meaning. Unfortunately, not every role is right for him, and despite the fact that he is the most interesting thing here, there’s a limit to what he can do with the role. The movie works all right throughout the first half; it’s only after he mistakes an innocent moment between his wife and a friend of hers for philandering that the movie really becomes quite predictable; you can only watch Stroheim hypnotize people so many times before it becomes tiresome. And the ending –

SPOILERS
– in which he barricades himself in a magic shop and engages in a gunfight with the police is clearly not the sort of thing that was right for this actor. The ending is also far-fetched and a little too convenient. Stroheim really needed a role to match his talents.

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Night Monster (1942)

NIGHT MONSTER (1942)
Article #461 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 6-19-2002
Posting date: 11-12-2002

Strange strangulation murders are being committed in the vicinity of a mansion owned by a man suffering from paralysis.

I’ve never quite understood the logic of casting horror stars like Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill, and then consigning them to worthless and immemorable roles, as this movie does. There’s not much to Atwill’s role at all, and he vanishes from the story about half-way through, and Lugosi is once again consigned to the butler role, where he doesn’t even function as a red herring. Yet during the opening credits, it’s their names that are front and center to bring in the viewing public. It’s no wonder Lugosi made so many movies with Monogram; at least when they cast him, they gave him a role as prominent as his listing in the credits.

These are all side issues, of course; as for the movie itself, it’s a minor Universal horror film, to be sure, but it’s probably my favorite of their lesser ones. There’s very little padding or wasted space, and it has the courage of its convictions in that it isn’t simply a mystery disguised as a horror film (which one might suspect, given the fact that the movie is sort of a variation of the “Old Dark House” type of movie). The first time I saw this movie was in unusual circumstances; my local Creature Feature had mixed the final reels of this movie with the opening reels of THE MUMMY’S HAND, and I found myself suddenly thrown into another plot halfway through the movie. Nevertheless, at least one scene remained stuck indelibly in my memory; this is the scene where we learn the truth about the paralysis suffered by the patriarch of the house. Also, the clever use of sound is memorable; the croaking frogs in the vicinity become quiet whenever the murderer is around. The movie uses this devise sparingly, but very effectively. This was one movie I hadn’t seen in years until I saw it for this series of movies. It was nice to see how well it held up.

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