Month: January 2016

Alien Attack (1976)

ALIEN ATTACK (1976)
Article #1096 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-15-2004
Posting Date: 8-12-2004
Directed by Charles Chrichton and Lee H. Katzin
Featuring Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Barry Morse

The moon gets exploded out of earth’s orbit, drifts out to space, and gets attacked by aliens.

I remember when “Space: 1999” was first announced to the world, and was heralded as the finest science fiction series since “Star Trek”. It wasn’t picked up by any of the major networks and was only available through syndication, and I was quite excited when one of the local TV stations decided to air it in prime time. On the night it premiered, I was right in front of the TV set, all ready for this new show. I was promptly underwhelmed.

I continued to watch the series, but as each episode went by without firing my imagination, it became more and more of a duty and less of an event. The odd episode would catch my attention, but for the most part I sat their in dull disappointment. It just didn’t have the spirit of “Star Trek”, and I think it had to do with the lifelessness of the characters. Barbara Bain seemed to be going to great lengths to avoid showing any emotion whatsoever, Martin Landau was competent but unexciting, and almost all of the other characters made no impact on me whatsoever. The only actor I enjoyed watching was Barry Morse, as he was the only one who seemed to show any interest in the proceedings. The central concept was also hard to swallow; with only 311 people on Moonbase Alpha, I was always amazed at how many casualties they suffered and how much destruction occurred without impacting what must have been a very fragile economy. I would like to figure out sometime just how many of those Eagle ships were destroyed during the course of the series.

When the second season rolled around several changes were made. When I heard that one change was the elimination of Barry Morse from the cast, I just gave up on the show. Actually, it wouldn’t have mattered what I did; the ratings had been so poor that our local affiliate didn’t bother to pick up the second season. This would also be the last season for the show.

Naturally, without a sufficient run of episodes to make an effective stab at returning the show to syndication, the decision was made (as for several other series suffering from the same problem) to recycle the episodes by editing them together into movies. I’ve always considered this a pretty cynical way to create product, but I suspect that nobody even cared if people could tell that they were being given two episodes of a TV show rather than a real movie.

That’s what ALIEN ATTACK is; two episodes of “Space: 1999”. The first episode is the beginning of the series, and the second episode involves Moonbase Alpha undergoing massive destruction at the hands of a planet whose residents “live without fear” through the help of a universal mind. My feelings haven’t really changed much for the show over the years; I still look to Barry Morse as the main acting asset. There are visual moments that are well done here and there, including a nice scene where we see one of the members becoming infected with a strange illness. There are also some interesting ideas at times, particularly in the second episode. The only problem is that without a strong story to support them, the ideas either reduce themselves to cliches or become rather muddy. Incidentally, my tape is part of a series of Adventure videos hosted by Sybil Danning, who introduces the episode by standing there in a skimpy outfit, clutching a futuristic-looking gun, and then dully talking about the thrills and excitement you are now going to undergo. I’m sure this will trip some people’s triggers; as for me, I really grew to appreciate the sense of fun that Elvira puts into her hosting duties.

Nowadays, this movie sits on IMDB with a 6.7 rating and the series is easily available on DVD. It seems that the series must be popular and well-loved in some circles, and maybe it is. All I know is that over the years I’ve heard practically every science fiction series ever made championed and praised by some group of people. Oddly enough, I’ve never heard this series praised in this regard, though I know its supporters are out there. Maybe someday I’ll hear from them…

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The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961)

THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (1961)
Article #1095 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-14-2004
Posting Date: 8-11-2004
Directed by Coleman Francis
Featuring Tor Johnson, Bing Stafford, Larry Aten

A defecting Russian scientist gets caught in a nuclear explosion while being chased by KGB agents, and is transformed into a mutated murdering beast.

I’ve always believed that Ed Wood’s infamy was at least partially the result of his being spotlighted in the Medveds’ Golden Turkey awards books, and that Andy Milligan’s was the result of a passing comment in Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Movie Guide (“If you’re an Andy Milligan fan, there’s no hope for you.”). In the case of Coleman Francis, it was “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” that first brought his name to light, but unlike the other two directors listed, I have yet to encounter any defenders of the man’s oeuvre. Myself, I’ll give him a little credit for giving us the occasional interesting visual moment in this movie, but that’s where the praise ends. This movie is similar to THE CREEPING TERROR in that the soundtrack consists almost entirely of narration and the occasional post-dubbed voice (almost always with the actor’s back to the camera so the syncing of sound and movement doesn’t become an issue); although it feels that it was handled somewhat more professionally here than it did in the other movie, it isn’t any more successful. The narration is maddening; it’s alternatively pretentious, cliched, repetitive, opaque and useless, either telling you what you already know, pounding its themes into the ground with a sledgehammer (just how many people are caught in the wheels of progress?), and eschewing full sentences in favor of annoying sentence fragments (“Joseph Javorsky…Noted scientist…Caught in the wheels of progress… Flag on the moon… How did it get there?…etc, etc.). The editing is annoyingly bad and repetitive as well (just how many shots do we need to see of the concerned mother waiting in a forbidden wasteland for her children to return?). I don’t know if there’s a real story or any point to this movie, despite the narrator’s parade of messages; the sequence where the police try to shoot down an innocent man should have some impact on the movie, but it doesn’t appear to add anything to the movie as a whole. So what you have here is a movie which, from the opening scene in which a woman in a towel is strangled to the last shot of a dying Tor Johnson fondling a bunny, does nothing but make you aware of the slow march of time which turns this hour-long movie into eternal boredom. I’m afraid Tor was better off with Ed Wood.

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The Atomic Submarine (1959)

THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE (1959)
Article #1094 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-13-2004
Posting Date: 8-10-2004
Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet
Featuring Arthur Franz, Dick Foran, Brett Halsey

When several ships are destroyed near the North Pole, an atomic submarine is sent to the area to investigate. The culprit turns out to be a flying saucer.

Director Bennet is largely remembered as a director of serials, though he has several features under his credits. This is perhaps the best known of them. For me, this movie just doesn’t come to life until the last twenty minutes when some of the crew manages to sneak aboard the flying saucer. Before we reach that moment, we are largely subjected to war-movie style cliches, heavy-handed and unnecessary narration and a collection of the most poorly developed characters I’ve ever seen in a movie, and it’s only enlivened by the very occasional visually arresting moment and a bit of campiness. The big conflict on the sub is between Arthur Franz and Brett Halsey, but it’s written in such a painfully heavy-handed and clumsy manner that it feels artificial. Once aboard the flying saucer, things get a lot more interesting; we get some horrible (even gruesome) deaths and an alien which looks unique (if not necessarily convincing). Despite its flaws, this movie seems to be well-loved in certain circles, though I suspect this is primarily due to the strange-looking alien. As for me, I would recommend that you keep your finger near the fast-forward button of your remote for the first fifty minutes.

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The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe (1972)

THE SPECTRE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE (1972)
Article #1093 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-12-2004
Posting Date: 8-9-2004
Directed by Mohy Quandour
Featuring Robert Walker Jr., Cesar Romero, Tom Drake

When Lenore goes into shock after almost being buried alive, Edgar Allan Poe takes her to an asylum to recover, unaware that the head of the asylum is performing snake venom experiments on patients.

Title check: Shouldn’t there be a spectre in this movie?

I remember reading somewhere that the reason Andy Milligan made his horror movies as period pieces was so he could re-release them over several years without people knowing when they were really made, which I must admit is a clever bit of low-budget exploitation thinking. The problem is that you need a fairly decent budget to create a convincing period environment. This movie features Edgar Allan Poe as the main character, so I can only assume it takes place in the nineteenth century, but the sets are singularly poor in conveying the period convincingly, and while watching it, you would probably guess it was made some time in the early seventies (which it was). It also puts forth the idea that it was these events in Poe’s life that caused his mind to turn to the subjects of death and decay that pervaded his works, a concept that the movie itself undermines when Poe’s friend introduces him to the head of the asylum as a writer of the macabre. I haven’t read a full biography of Poe, but when I do, I’m willing to bet that I find nothing about this episode of his life, though I suspect the movie isn’t really trying to convince us that it’s biographical. The movie has some eerie moments, but it’s sluggish, badly lit, indifferently acted for the most part (though it is fun to see the familiar faces of Cesar Romero and Carol Ohmart), and not particularly original. This is the sole movie by director Mohy Quandour.

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Vice Versa (1948)

VICE VERSA (1948)
Article #1092 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-11-2004
Posting Date: 8-8-2004
Directed by Peter Ustinov
Featuring Roger Livesey, Kay Walsh, Petula Clark

A boy and his father wish upon the eye of an idol from the temple of the laughing hyena and end up switching bodies.

Switcheroo comedies are really not all that common, so it’s actually pretty strange that I would run into two in a row, as this one follows right on the heels of TURNABOUT, but that’s the way things fall out. This is a British take on the concept which takes place at the turn of the century; the credits are presented in the form of a slide show of old placards that is quite amusing. In its way it’s as wild as TURNABOUT, though it’s more in that British absurdist mode where the world itself seems to have gone mad; it’s quite surreal at times and occasionally reminiscent of Monty Python. Roger Livesey and a very young Anthony Newley play the father and son, and a young Petula Clark also appears as the daughter of the cruel headmaster. I found it all very amusing, but you do need to be a fan of British comedy of this sort.

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Turnabout (1940)

TURNABOUT (1940)
Article #1091 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-10-2004
Posting Date: 8-7-2004
Directed by Hal Roach
Featuring Adolphe Menjou, Carole Landis, John Hubbard

A constantly bickering married couple agree on only one thing, and that is that they wished they could switch places with each other. A mystical statue grants them their wish.

The Switcheroo theme is a fairly standard comic plot, even if it isn’t used that often. The basic plot is simple; two people switch places and live each other’s lives for twenty-four hours. They both discover how hard it is to be the other person and switch back, their lives changed by this very important lesson. That’s pretty much the plot of this one in a nutshell, but since the story is based on a novel by Thorne Smith (the man who gave us the stories for TOPPER, NIGHT LIFE OF THE GODS and I MARRIED A WITCH, among others), things are a hair more outrageous than the usual take on the theme. The movie gets a lot of comic mileage from the simple ruse that when they switch bodies, they do not switch voices (or wardrobes, for that matter), and must find excuses for the sounds of their voices. The movie is peopled with eccentric characters, bizarre situations (when the husband buys a Pekingese dog for his wife, it accidentally gets switched with a little bear), and some risque situations that must have worried the Hays office (this may be the first movie to feature a pregnant man). Even though the various Thorne Smith novels have been directed by different people, there are definite qualities of his that consistently shine through that I quite like. Though he stops short of anarchic comedy, you never really know how outrageous he is going to be from moment to moment, and there’s always a surprise around the corner. Other fun things in the movie include performances by Donald Meek as a butler who must deal with the changes in his employers, and Marjorie Main, whose commentaries on the action alternately remind me of ones you’d expect to hear from W. C. Fields or Groucho Marx. There’s also a relaxed but hilarious scene where Adolphe Menjou and William Gargan try to destroy a radio so they won’t have to hear the advertisements of the sponsor whose account they have lost.

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The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951)
Article #1090 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-9-2004
Posting Date: 8-6-2004
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Featuring Moira Shearer, Ludmilla Tcherina, Anne Ayars

A poet relates to the guests at an inn the tales of his three great loves.

It’s opera again, folks, and I didn’t expect another one to pop up so soon, but here we are. As I mentioned during my review of THE MEDIUM, I’m not an opera buff and I find the form a little alien. As for my comments that the vocal phrasing in opera was the equivalent of listening to your native tongue in a bizarre dialect, all I can add to that is that my wife sat down and watched about ten minutes of this movie with me, and then asked what language it was in. This opera is, like THE MEDIUM, in English.

Fortunately, it’s directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the same team that gave us A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, and the visual sense that pervaded and enhanced that movie are in full sway here as well. This movie is simply stunning on a visual level, and it uses color in such a memorable, daring and evocative way that it makes most color movies look like they’re in black and white. It’s by no means merely a photographed opera; it’s a thoroughly cinematic experience, taking full advantage of the flexibility that marks one of the advantages that films have over live productions. I heartily recommend the movie to anyone interested in brilliant direction, the works of Powell and/or Pressburger, and anyone interested in opera.

However, it is opera, and as such, there came a point for me where the dazzling visuals couldn’t quite overcome my exhaustion at trying to figure out what the characters were warbling, and my attention began to stray quite badly during the second tale. Fortunately, the last tale turned out to be the easist of the three to understand in terms of hearing what the characters were saying, and it drew my interest back in long enough for me to truly appreciate the rest of the movie, including the ironic and sad denoument of the framing story. Incidentally, all three of the stories are fantastically themed; the first has Hoffmann falling in love with a dancing marionette whom he watches through a pair of magic spectacles. The second involves a woman who is under the spell of a magician who steals the mirror reflections of his victims. The third is about a woman who labors under a curse that she will die if she should sing (considering that they do nothing but sing during an opera, how long do you think she will last?).

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Six Hours to Live (1932)

SIX HOURS TO LIVE (1932)
Article #1089 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-8-2004
Posting Date: 8-5-2004
Directed by William Dieterle
Featuring Warner Baxter, Miriam Jordan, John Boles

When a representative of the country of Sylvaria becomes the sole dissenting voice in the adoption of an economic treaty, he is targeted for murder by his foes. When he is murdered by strangulation, he is brought back to life by a scientist testing a new machine, but he discovers that he will only live for six more hours.

For some reason, I like reviewing a movie that lends itself to comparison with several other movies, and this one does; it exists at that point where the movies D.O.A, THE WALKING DEAD and CHARLY meet. The idea of a man tracking down his own murderer while suffering under a time constraint dictated by his own mortality is certainly similar to D.O.A., though this movie throws in a science fiction angle that movie does not have. Like THE WALKING DEAD, our protagonist returns to life with knowledge he did not possess at the time of his death. In some ways, however, the similarities to CHARLY are the most striking because of the surface differences in the plot; for one thing, this movie is more drama then melodrama, and it’s also another movie in which a man undergoes a medical experiment and finds his life bound inextricably with that of the test animal that also underwent the experiment (in CHARLY it was a white mouse, here it is a white rabbit). The fact that this movie predates the other three signifies that if any of these works were influenced by the others, it’s they that would have been influenced by this one.

On its own terms, this movie is a standout. It has an excellent script in which practically every character has greater depth and dimension than you might imagine and dialogue that always sounds fresh and real. It also has top-notch performances by everyone, though special notice should go to Warner Baxter as the man brought back to life. Furthermore, it has exemplary direction by William Dieterle; I can somewhat tell that this movie was brought to us by the same man who gave us the 1939 version of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and PORTRAIT OF JENNIE, because it has some of that some visual flair. I love the subtle portrayals of some of the characters; in particular I like the way that the Professor’s big hulking deaf-mute assistant is not portrayed as a monster (though some people definitely react to him with fear), and the character of the butler, who tries to give the protaganist two very different items at two separate points in the story (his item is rejected both times, but one of them is eventually kept). Like DRACULA, this movie has no musical soundtrack; unlike that movie, I find the drama so breathtakingly powerful at every point of the story that I never once feel like nodding off. In my opinion, this science fiction drama with mystical overtones should be recognized for the classic it is rather than to lie forgotten in the mists of cinema history. This one is worth tracking down and checking out.

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Wonder Man (1945)

WONDER MAN (1945)
Article #1088 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-7-2004
Posting Date: 8-4-2004
Directed by H. Bruce Humberstone
Featuring Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo, Vera-Ellen

When a nightclub entertainer comes forth as a witness to a murder committed by a notorious gangster, he is knocked off before he can testify. The entertainer’s ghost then persuades his bookworm twin brother to take over his identity for a few days.

Danny Kaye was known for his comic singing and monologues, and it’s really no surprise that this movie takes every opportunity to drop the story momentarily in order to jump into one of them. He plays a dual role here, but this doesn’t seem particularly novel in his case, as he would constantly change characters as an entertainer; he does very well as you might expect. The special effects are top-notch (it won an Oscar for them), and there are a number of familiar faces in the supporting cast, including Edward Brophy, Natalie Schafer, Huntz Hall (as a sailor who punches Kaye at one point) and Otto Kruger. My only complaint is that the comic bits do rely a little too much on the repetitions of two situations; jokes hinging on the fact that the living brother is the only one who can hear and see the dead brother, and the living brother’s constantly being stuck in situations where he needs the spirit brother to take over his body, but the spirit brother doesn’t show. This is somewhat compensated for the final musical number, which both highlights Kaye’s talents and advances the plot.

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Remember Last Night? (1935)

REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? (1935)
Article #1087 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-6-2004
Posting Date: 8-3-2004
Directed by James Whale
Featuring Edward Arnold, Robert Young, Constance Cummings

When a murdered body is found in the mansion of rich partiers, nobody can remember what happened since they were all too drunk to recall the circumstances.

This comedy-mystery directed by the man responsible for some of the greatest horror films of all time has a lot going for it; it has a great cast, beautiful sets, an energetic, almost dizzying pace, and Whale’s wonderful visual sense. I don’t think it’s quite as hilarious as it sets out to be; the first quarter of the movie consists almost entirely of the antics of rich drunken people, and except for Arthur Treacher’s long-suffering but contemptuous and curt commentary on the proceedings, I get fairly tired of the endless partying. The story also gets very confusing as it progresses, though its strong points are such that I would be more than willing to give it all a second viewing. The fantastic aspects are minor, but memorable; Gustav von Seyffertitz makes a memorable appearance as a hypnotist, and this sequence is definitely a high point in the movie. There are also direct verbal references to both THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (though the latter hadn’t been released yet), and some of the later scenes also have a slight horror feel to them. There are many familiar names in the cast, include Robert Armstrong, George Meeker, Edward Brophy, Gregory Ratoff, and Regninal Denny. E.E. Clive has a priceless bit as the coroner’s photographer.

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