Month: August 2015

Three Missing Links (1938)

THREE MISSING LINKS (1938)
Article #810 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-3-2003
Posting Date: 10-31-2003
Directed by Jules White
Featuring Curly Howard, Moe Howard, Larry Fine

The Three Stooges are hired to appear in a movie due to Curly’s resemblence to a gorilla.

Title check: The title is apt enough, though I do blanche at the thought that these guys may be distant ancestors of mine.

At their best, the Three Stooges were good enough that I have no trouble seeing why they have the cult following they do; at their worst, I can sympathize with those who find them terminally unfunny. But whether they were at their best or at their worst, they worked in pretty much the same slapstick mode; how good they were depended on how sharp their timing was. The timing is only so-so here, so it really didn’t catch them at their best. I think part of the reason is that this short puts so much emphasis on Curly that the other Stooges are kind of left in the dust, and though I will admit Curly was the funniest, it was Moe that really grounded the group, and here he recedes to the background. The funniest moment has Curly doing an imitation of a chicken with his head cut off, and even this is somewhat sloppy, loud and unfocused. Nevertheless, since the Stooges largely worked in shorts, at least they don’t outstay their welcome. The plot involves witch doctors, love candy, gorillas and Neanderthals (that’s how Moe and Larry were cast in the movie), so it does slip into fantastic territory. And it does indeed portray one solid rule; if a comic character dons a gorilla suit at one point, it’s almost sure money to bet that a real gorilla will show up sooner or later.

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Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (1925)

DR. PYCKLE AND MR. PRYDE (1925)
Article #809 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-2-2003
Posting Date: 10-30-2003
Directed by Percy Pembroke and Joe Rock
Featuring Stan Laurel and Julie Leonard

The famous scientist Dr. Pyckle concocts a potion to turn him into the fiendish Mr. Pride.

Title check: As good a title for a parody of the Jekyll/Hyde story as any.

Considering just how many silent versions were ultimately made of the Jekyll and Hyde story, it’s nice to see that at least one comic version has survived the years. This one is quite interesting for anyone who would like to catch Stan Laurel in something other than his usual Stan Laurel role; he plays both Dr. Pyckle and the fiendish Mr. Pryde (obviously modeled off of Barrymore’s take on the character). I don’t know if “fiendish” is the proper description, though; it really depends on how you feel about practical jokes. It’s a pretty minor comic short, but amusing enough for all practical purposes.

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King Dinosaur (1955)

KING DINOSAUR (1955)
Article #808 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-1-2003
Posting Date: 10-29-2003
Directed by Bert I. Gordon
Featuring Ignatz, Rumsford, Little Joe the Honey Bear

Astronauts land on a new planet in the solar system and do “scientific research.”

Title check: “Serf Slurpasaur” is more like it.

Ten thoughts on KING DINOSAUR.

1) This was the first movie directed by Bert I. Gordon, though it was not the first one he produced; I believe that honor goes to the yet unseen (by me) SERPENT ISLAND.

2) He got better.

3) A LOT better.

4) Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but if I had organized this expedition, I would have started out by making sure that everyone’s gator-wrestling skills were up to snuff.

5) I would also have sent along some Raid. A BIG can of Raid, that is.

6) If I were making a movie called KING DINOSAUR, I wouldn’t wait until two-thirds of the way through the movie to add the dinosaur.

7) I’ve heard that the dinosaur footage is from ONE MILLION B.C., but if it is, it isn’t the usual footage I’ve seen from the movie. But I will say that the slurpasaur fights are very nasty looking, and I don’t think the blood is faked. I’ve asked Ignatz and Rumsford about it, but they don’t feel inclined to talk about this movie. Somehow, I don’t blame them.

8) The movie doesn’t have the worst soundtrack I’ve ever heard (not while copies of JAIL BAIT or MESA OF LOST WOMEN exist anyway), but it is repetitive and annoying.

9) If I were organizing an expedition like the one in this movie, I would not send the four people who ended up going, and…

10) …Most importantly, I wouldn’t send an A-Bomb with them. Especially if they have any intention of “bringing civilization” to the new planet.”

There’s some tough competition out there, but for my money, this is the worst dinosaur movie of them all.

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I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957)
Article #807 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-31-2003
Posting Date: 10-28-2003
Directed by Gene Fowler Jr.
Featuring Michael Landon, Yvonne Lime, Whit Bissell

A teenager having trouble controlling his rage hooks up with a psychologist who performs unethical experiments on him.

Title check: Technically, it’s accurate, and in its own way, the title is a classic of its sort, but it makes the movie sound a lot cheesier than it is.

This movie that attempts to combine teenagers and monsters is surprisingly effective on several levels; certainly, Michael Landon’s performance gives a lot of richness to the role. In fact, all the performances are good; the characters are solid, convincing, and have dimension. Some of the scare scenes are handled beautifully, particularly the walk through the woods sequence and the attack of the gymnast. In fact, I only have two real problems with the movie; the colorful old-world janitor who knows all about werewolves, as fun as he is, is pretty cliched and detracts from the believability of the movie, and the rationalization that the scientist uses for his experiments (that mankind is on the brink of destruction and can only be saved by regressing man back to his primitive instincts) is somewhat akin to saying that nuclear weapons are so dangerous they should only be left in the hands of paranoid schizophrenics; in short, it’s the biggest piece of crap I’ve ever heard in my life. Nonetheless, the good points far outweigh the weak ones, so much so that I’ll even forgive the musical number (“Eeny Meenie Minie Moe”), though I do wish they had synced up the singing with the music. By the way, the detective is played by Barney Philips, who would later grow a third eye for an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

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Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956)

FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE (1956)
(a.k.a. FIRE MAIDENS OF OUTER SPACE)
Article #806 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-30-2003
Posting Date: 10-27-2003
Directed by Cy Roth
Featuring Anthony Dexter, Paul Carpenter, Susan Shaw

Astronauts find the lost civilization of Atlantis on the third moon of Jupiter. It’s a civilization of beautiful females and one doddering old man.

Title check: Oops; I forgot to check if my print said FIRE MAIDENS OF OUTER SPACE or FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE, both of which are now believed to have been legitimate titles for the movie. We are in outer space, there are maidens, and when they worship, there is fire, so I guess I can’t blow the whistle on the movie on any of these points.

Imagine you’re sitting in a doctor’s office. You’ve gone to the doctor to have him check out a rather dull but persistent pain in your back; it’s not extremely painful, but it never allows you to relax enough so you can forget that it’s there. You’ve been waiting thirty minutes for the doctor to see you. None of the magazines are interesting, and the TV is running footage of the Senate in session, but the sound is turned too low to hear anything. The nurse keeps entering, and you hope that she’s about to call you in, but she never does. The only other person in the waiting room is preoccupied and doesn’t want to talk. So you find that you only have your own thoughts to keep you company, and you can’t think because the pain keeps distracting you. There’s a newspaper which you’ve already read, but you turn to the crossword puzzle for something to do, but it’s already been done. You check the clock on the wall; thirty seconds have passed since the last time you checked it. You can’t sleep because you’ve just drank some coffee. All you can do is wait.

If you can imagine what the above experience would be like, than you’ve been prepared to experience what watching FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE would be like. It’s part of the rather dumb but highly exploitable subgenre of all-female civilizations like CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON or QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE. Sure, it has beautiful women in short skirts in it, but so do all those other movies (and QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE is in color, to boot), so there’s really no excuse for this one; it really is a waste of time. It’s worst aspect is its tendency to throw in repetitive scenes where absolutely nothing happens; we sit there a great deal of the time and just watch the actors sit there and look at each other, and we wonder why this scene is in the script. I suspect that a lot of the scenes are just padding to stretch the thing out to eighty minutes, but at least other directors would know that you need to have something happening in the padding. No doubt there will be those that will hunt this out just because it has a civilization of beautiful women in it, but I can’t emphasize enough that there are other options.

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Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1908)

RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE’S NEST (1908)
Article #805 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-29-2003
Posting Date: 10-16-2003
Directed by J. Searle Dawley
Featuring Henry B. Walthall, D.W. Griffith

A woodsman saves his child from the clutches of an eagle.

Title check: Let’s put it this way; they either had to call it that or D.W. GRIFFITH WRESTLES A TURKEY.

The eagle is played by a stuffed bird from a taxidermist shop with movable wings. That this pathetic little critter could haul off a baby (who looks more puzzled than scared) is about the only fantastic premise I could find in this silent short. Fifty years later we would see people running and screaming from a Mexican bird puppet in THE GIANT CLAW, which just shows that history repeats itself. And yes, that is D.W. Griffith himself as the woodsman. Once again, this is another review that took longer to write than it took me to watch the movie. Is this an efficient use of my time?

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Two Weeks to Live (1943)

TWO WEEKS TO LIVE (1943)
Article #804 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-28-2003
Posting Date: 10-15-2003
Directed by Malcolm St. Clair
Featuring Chester Lauck, Norris Goff, Franklin Pangborn

A small-town grocer inherits a railroad, and takes his friend to the big city to claim it, but runs into problems.

Title check: Since the plot eventually starts to revolve around Abner Peabody’s mistaken belief that he will die in two weeks, the title is quite apt.

“Lum and Abner” were characters from a radio show who also appeared in a largely forgotten series of B films during the forties. This is a fun but minor outing that ends up rubbing up against the world of fantastic cinema several times during its running length. The basic premise that drives this is that Abner takes on dangerous jobs to help earn enough money to pay a debt; after all, if he’s going to die in a couple of weeks, he’s not risking much. So he ends up encountering Dr. Jekyll, who wants him to test a potion that could change him into an animal; a tame gorilla who is most likely played by Charlie Gemora, as it is clearly his costume (you know you’ve watched too many of these movies when you can start spotting the men in the gorilla outfits); a haunted house, and a rocketship to Mars. It never really completely enters the realm of the fantastic (they never even make it to the haunted house), but I’ve never seen a movie before get so close so often and still remain marginalia. By the way, after seeing this, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to discover that Buddy Ebsen’s character of Jed Clampett on “The Beverly Hillbillies” was inspired somewhat by the character of Lum Edwards who, despite being more of an opportunist than Jed ever was, bears a remakable resemblance to that character. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit more than I expected, but I suspect that some of it was simply that I needed a good laugh after OLD MOTHER RILEY’S GHOSTS.

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Old Mother Riley’s Ghosts (1941)

OLD MOTHER RILEY’S GHOSTS (1941)
Article #803 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-27-2003
Posting Date: 10-14-2003
Directed by John Baxter
Featuring Arthur Lucan, Kitty McShane, John Stuart

Old Mother Riley hooks up with an inventor and inherits a haunted castle.

Title Check: It’s a perfect title… for about two minutes of the movie. As for the rest of the movie, a better title would have been OLD MOTHER RILEY AND THE PORTRAIT OF HIS (pardon me; HER) DECEASED HUSBAND.

Back when I watched the admittedly quite bad MY SON THE VAMPIRE (a.k.a. OLD MOTHER RILEY MEETS THE VAMPIRE), I actually managed to find a smidgen of charm in that bottom-of-the-barrel slapstick comedy. It must have been Lugosi; this is pretty much the same, only without the smidgen of charm. Arthur Lucan is truly annoying this time around in the title role; he is strident and frantic, and tries to get laughs chiefly through screeching, mugging and wild gesticulating; the small handful of funny lines (the best of which involves a comment about someone having “designs on her underwear”) are lost in the melee. The ghosts have about a minute of screen time (and we know ahead of time that they’re being faked), but since part of the plot involves the invention of a new fuel engine, there’s also a smidgen of science fiction in the mix. Not that it makes this particular recipe that much more inviting, but it is useful to know what’s in something before you ingest it.

I need to lie down.

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Planet of the Vampires (1965)

PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965)
(a.k.a. DEMON PLANET)
Article #802 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-26-2003
Posting Date: 10-13-2003
Directed by Mario Bava
Featuring Barry Sullivan, Norma Bengell, Angel Aranda

Space travellers find themselves trapped on a strange planet inhabited by sinister beings.

Title check: There’s a planet, all right, but they’re not vampires and they’re not demons, but they couldn’t call it the PLANET OF THE WE’RE-NOT-SURE-WHATS, could they?

Some of the dubbed dialogue is pretty clunky, and the story moves rather slowly at times, but overall this is a pretty memorable movie. Mario Bava rarely ventured into SF, but it’s no surprise that when he did, he added a strong dose of horror to the proceedings. To start with, the movie is absolutely breathtaking to look at, and there are some scenes that I remember from having seen it years ago, in particular a sequence where men rise from their graves and tear themselves out of the cellophane that they were wrapped in, all in moody slow motion. There’s also a scene aboard an alien spaceship that I suspect was enormously influential on a similar scene in ALIEN, and some truly grotesque imagery of bodies that are not in the best of condition. I saw this one as a child and I never forgot it; this was one of the only Mario Bava movies my local Creature Feature ever ran, and it made a great impression on me. And since I never noticed the slowness of the plot until this viewing (my fourth), I’m more than willing to believe that this may be due more to my over-familiarity with the movie (depriving it of its ability to surprise) rather than a problem with the movie itself. It is probably the finest Italian science fiction movie I’ve ever seen.

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A Clockwork Orange (1971)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)
Article #801 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-25-2003
Posting Date: 10-12-2003
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Featurning Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates

A violent hoodlum in the future is sent to prison, and ends up taking part in an experimental behavior modification technique in order to get an early release.

Title check: Actually, I once read an article somewhere about the titling of movies that made specific mention of this one; the gist of the article was that the title makes no sense unless it’s explained to you. The book includes the explanation, but the movie does not. I’d say this pretty much sums up anything I might say about the title.

This is a tough movie to cover, at least partly due to the fact that I’ve read at least one essay about the movie (in Danny Peary’s Cult Movies book) that has had a huge effect on my own thoughts on the movie, and a great deal of what I would say about it has already been covered there; consequently, I can’t really claim that much of what I’ll say will be truly original, those who want to go to the article mentioned should feel free to do so.

I won’t argue about the brilliance of the movie; Stanley Kubrick has a sharp visual sense, and he actually does an amazing job of presenting the story in such a way that the repugnance doesn’t drive you away. However, he handles the movie in such a way that he tries to make you sympathize with Alex, a truly repellant character. He does this by making him the only character with many sides to his personality; for the most part, all the other characters are only shown at their least endearing. Unfortunately, this sets up some real moral conflicts for me as a viewer; I don’t want to sympathize or identify with this man, but he’s the only character for which I’m given this opportunity. As for the message of the movie, I’m not sure what it is or whether one even exists, though it is quite possible that I just don’t see it (or don’t want to see it). If there is anything I do get out of this movie, it’s that film can be a very powerful thing; not only are movies used as a crucial manipulative element in the Ludovico technique in the movie itself, but the movie’s strong attempt to try to get us to identify with the main character further bears that out. Still, it is important to realize that the movie is highly stylized; some of the characters are cartoons (the Michael Bates character in particular), and others are used in a purely manipulative fashion. Consequently, any messages the movie might deliver may have little relevance in the real world, and caution should definitely be used to apply them to a real world environment.

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