THE LIVING HEAD (1963)
(a.k.a. LA CABEZA VIVIENTE)
Article #1204 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-1-2004
Posting Date: 11-28-2004
Directed by Manuel San Fernando and Chano Urueta
Featuring Mauricio Garces, Ana Luisa Peluffo, German Robles

When scientists remove artifacts and bodies from an Aztec burial tomb, they come under the sway of a curse that threatens to destroy them all.

Those Mexicans sure knew how to pile it on. Though at heart this is your basic mummy movie, we get a lot more here than just a mummy killing people. Our mummy in this case isn’t bandaged, and though he walks stiffly at times, at others he’s unexpectedly limber and agile. He’s also a talker; if he catches you, rest assured that you will be treated to a long boring speech about the nature of your sacrifice before he finally kills you. Of course, he’s not the brains of the outfit here; credit for that must go to the living head of the title. This head has amazing powers; he can glare at you, he can make his mask magically disappear, and he can have big fake spiders crawl over his face without letting it freak him out. He himself gets a little loquacious towards the end of the movie. And if this terrifying duo isn’t enough, they also have their human slave; apparently anyone who wears that flashing mood ring found in the tomb can come under the power of that head. This person is absolutely necessary; after all, with the mummy busy killing and talking the ears off his victims, we need someone to tote that head around. Unfortunately, the mummy isn’t allowed to kill the third person in the series (I can only assume that this is some sort of obscure Aztec law), and the last fifteen minutes of the movie deals largely with the difficulty of getting those pesky human slaves to do what they’re told (good help is hard to find) and trying to sort out just who is allowed to kill who; it’s at this point that the living head starts putting in his two cents. This last sequence of the movie makes for some great comedy, but it doesn’t quite make up for the fact that most of this movie is slow-moving and dull. Fans of THE BRAINIAC will recognize some of the actors, some of the music, and even some of the dates that flash by on the screen to indicate the passage of time.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)
Article #1203 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-30-2004
Posting Date: 11-27-2004
Directed by Wes Craven
Featuring Sandra Cassel, Lucy Grantham, David Hess

Two teenage girls are kidnapped by a group of sadistic rapist-murderers.

I’ll openly admit to having gone into this movie with a high degree of nervousness; after all, its reputation precedes it. Some people consider it a horror classic; others revile the movie, considering it sickening and repulsive, and with these extreme reactions, I was really wondering what I would ultimately make out of the movie.

One thing I did do out of curiosity before I watched the movie was to check out its user ratings on IMDB. Given the extreme reactions to it, I expected to find that most of the votes would place clearly at the bottom or the top of the rating scale. Instead, I found a fairly even distribution of votes throughout the whole spectrum of ratings. I certainly didn’t expect the grey area between classic and atrocity to be as heavily inhabited as it was. Finally, I sat down and watched the movie.

It’s easy to understand why the movie is disturbing; the characters of the two girls and their captors are unusually well-drawn and fleshed out, and we do get a sense with these characters that we’re seeing real people rather than one-dimensional caricatures. As a result, the violence and brutality has a truly unsettling power to it, and some of the scenes will etch themselves into your memory. If the whole movie had maintained this sense of reality, it would indeed have been a movie to be reckoned with.

However, the movie shoots itself in the foot by the introduction of the comic relief cops. Instead of projecting that same sense of reality that the central characters manage to do, they come off as pure cinematic caricature. Furthermore, the good-timey folk music that pops up on occasion is so jarringly counter to the mood that it’s disconcerting. Though I don’t necessarily think it was intended, both these elements send out a message to the viewer that he’s watching a “fun” horror movie not to be taken seriously, and this implies that the scenes of sadistic torture are just “part of the fun”. With the movie sending out these mixed messages, it’s no surprise to me that some people find the movie vile.

Initially, my reaction to this mix of scenes was one of annoyance; I really began to feel the filmmakers were just jerking me around. As the movie progressed, the damage became greater; any sense that the events in the movie were really happening started to dissipate, and by the time the final credits rolled, the movie had managed to for me what the ad campaign had told me that I’d have to do for myself; it convinced me that it really was “only a movie” and that none of it really happened. And my final reaction to the movie wasn’t one of having been deeply moved or deeply outraged; it was merely one of having been vaguely disappointed.

In the end, I just don’t know what to make of the movie. If it was supposed to be a “fun” horror movie, it went too far. If it was trying to be something more than that, it fumbled the opportunity. Having now seen it, I can understand the reason why the ratings are all over the board on IMDB; when it works, I can see why some consider it a classic, and when it doesn’t, I can see why some people hate it. I can also see how people would be able to perceive both its strengths and its flaws and leave it hanging somewhere in the middle. My own feeling is that as a whole, the movie fails to convince me that the sadistic violence of its central scenes is really artistically justified, even if it came close.

At any rate, I’m certainly not nervous about this movie anymore.

THE LION MAN (1936)
Article #1197 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-24-2004
Posting Date: 11-21-2004
Directed by John P. McCarthy
Featuring Kathleen Burke, Jon Hall, Ted Adams

A boy whose father was killed in an ambush by a double-dealing sheik is rescued by a woman and raised by a man who brings him up with lions. He grows up to defend others who are being victimized by the same sheik.

I was wondering for a bit while watching this as to what was giving this movie that slightly poetic feeling to it; it was then that I realized that all the Arabs were speaking in a somewhat Shakespearean “thee-thou-thy” mode. Once I realized this, though, that slight poetic feeling gave way to a sense of silliness instead, but I will admit that it lends a certain odd dignity to the proceedings. This one was based on a story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and given the title, I thought it was largely going to be a Tarzan variation with a man raised in the desert by lions (whereas Tarzan was raised in the jungle by apes), but that’s not really the case; the boy is raised by a human who associates with lions. Actually, it would be kind of nice to see someone interact with the lions, but the full grown lions never appear in the same scenes as the humans; we do see humans cuddling lion cubs on occasion. The only fantastic aspect to this one is that slight air of fantasy that comes with setting a melodrama in an exotic location, so this one remains thoroughly marginal. Overall, it’s an odd and not quite effective movie; the beginning is strong and it ends all right, but the soap opera subplot that makes up most of the middle of the story largely exists to mark time until the end of the movie. It’s mostly of interest to those who want to try out an adaptation of one of Burrough’s lesser known works.