Month: November 2016

The Hand (1960)

THE HAND (1960)
Article #1525 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-18-2005
Posting Date: 10-15-2005
Directed by Henry Cass
Featuring Derek Bond, Ronald Leigh-Hunt, Reed De Rouen

When a drunkard is picked up in the street with his right hand amputated and carrying a wad of cash, the police investigate his story that he was paid to have it amputated.

Fantastic content: I would say that this movie is rather marginal. The horror content is mostly due to the grisliness of the concept of hand amputations.

This movie actually starts out with a bang; there’s a dramatic sequence in a prisoner of war camp, and then the story jumps to the rather intriguing mystery as described above. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there; the story becomes increasingly muddled and confusing, and it ends with an obvious and contrived ironic twist. Perhaps the worst problem, though, is that when you hold the story up to the light, it seems lame and poorly developed, and you end up wondering if you wasted your time.

Nevertheless, I find myself reluctant to abandon the story altogether. Though the story doesn’t work in this context, there are some hints of a more complex story underlying it all, enough so that I began to feel that it isn’t so much a bad story as a good story very badly told. If I had written that underlying story, I would have jettisoned the detective plot and concentrated on a more straightforward and character-driven version of it, because this story could only work if the characters are carefully developed (something this movie fails to do).

Even if I had been required to keep it a mystery, I would make one major change; I would move the opening prisoner-of-war sequence at the beginning to the accompanying flashback at the end of the movie. The reason for this is that it reveals too much; the mystery would have been a lot more engrossing had we not already known how certain characters lost their hands. Quite frankly, the sequence is too strong for this movie; you keep waiting to get back to it and the mystery plot starts to become a coy annoyance. At any rate, this is all speculation. In it’s present form, the movie falls flat.

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Grimm’s Fairy Tales for Adults (1969)

GRIMM’S FAIRY TALES FOR ADULTS (1969)
(a.k.a. GRIMMS MARCHEN VON LUSTERNEN PARCHEN)
Article #1524 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-17-2005
Posting Date: 10-14-2005
Directed by Rolf Thiele
Featuring Evelyn Dutree, Gaby Fuchs, Walter Giller

Fairy tale characters engage in bawdy shenanigans.

I had originally planned to write my review of this movie before seeing it, and guessing what it was going to be like based solely on the title. Though I ended up seeing the movie first, I can let you know what I was going to say in advance 1) that it was a soft-core porno version of several fairy tales, 2) that it was going to be really dumb, 3) that a lot of characters would be unclothed, 4) and that the plot (such as it is) would involve voyeuristic dwarfs and pseudo-bestiality (you know, sex between a human being and another human being in an animal costume). Given the title, the first three points were no-brainers. The fourth was a shot in the dark, but I figured we were bound to have talking animals, and in this type of movie, if they can talk they can do other things. I also strongly suspected there was going to be a parody of Snow White in the mix, and that being the case, I concluded that Prince Charming was going to do more than just kiss Snow White, and that while he was doing that, those seven dwarfs would have to be keeping themselves occupied somehow.

Well, I have seen the movie, and the only thing I’m not sure about is number two. Sure, it looks really dumb, but since my print is in unsubtitled German, I couldn’t understand the jokes well enough to say whether they were dumb or not. I also didn’t anticipate that the movie would be fairly bloody as well; in fact, it slips into horror on occasion. Actually, this may not be as outrageous as it seems; I’ve heard tell that the fairy tales told to children are often expurgated versions of much more grotesque stories, and the example I’ve seen trotted out most often is that Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters took certain extreme measures to ensure their feet would fit into the glass slippers. The slippers here aren’t glass, but the extreme measures are here in full glory. Still, the most upsetting thing about this movie is that some of the animals are treated horribly; in particular, a pig is rather badly mistreated at one point. Grimm indeed!

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Grave of the Vampire (1974)

GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE (1974)
Article #1523 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-16-2005
Posting Date: 10-13-2005
Directed by John Hayes
Featuring William Smith, Michael Pataki, Lyn Peters

A woman is raped by a vampire in an open grave in a cemetery. Many years later, the son born as a result of this vows to track down his vampire father and destroy him.

Because of the big-budget excesses of many recent films, I think there has been a reaction on the part of many moviegoers to equate big budgets with bad movies and small budgets with good movies. Though I think there’s more to admire in making a movie on a low budget, I don’t buy into this theory myself; if you’ve got a lousy script, it hardly matters what kind of budget you have, since you’ll end up with a lousy movie. However, if you’ve got a good script that doesn’t demand an elaborate budget, a small budget will do just fine. This is one of those small budget movies that benefits from a good script. The story itself is quite interesting, and it is peopled with interesting characters well played by a group of little known but capable actors. I found myself really caught up in this one, and what I find most surprising about it is that it is a vampire movie. Vampires are one of the most popular horror monsters of all time, but as a result of this, the stories surrounding them are often retreads of the same plot elements. This movie found some fresh blood in the concept, which is, of course, something that a vampire story really needs. My only real complaint is a silly ending title card that is almost as bad as the dumb pun that I used in the previous sentence.

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The Ghost and the Guest (1943)

THE GHOST AND THE GUEST (1943)
Article #1522 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-15-2005
Posting Date: 10-12-2005
Directed by William Nigh
Featuring James Dunn, Florence Rice, Robert Dudley

Newlyweds move into old dark house. Coffin containing corpse of gangster arrives. Hilarity ensues.

If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all, I’ve often been told. Bearing this in mind, here are ten good things about this movie.

1) The cranky ex-hangman who serves as caretaker for the old dark house is actually rather amusing.

2) The title is actually somewhat clever. Not only do the words ‘ghost’ and ‘guest’ sound somewhat alike, but if you remove the ‘g’ from ‘ghost’, you get ‘host’, which is the opposite of ‘guest’. This cleverness is somewhat marred by the fact that the movie has no ghost and a plethora of guests.

3) My print runs only fifty-five minutes. If you have an hour to kill, you can watch this movie and still have time to trim your toenails. Real overachievers can perform both tasks at once.

4) This movie completely avoids any mind-stretching expansions in cinematic art, so watching it will not force you to painfully stretch your mind to encompass it in your definition of a cinematic experience.

5) For those into genre pigeon-holing, this is a piece of cake. Just file it under “old dark house comedy”.

6) If you’re a babysitter, and you’re caring for a bratty child who you want to go to sleep but who insists on staying up to see a scary movie with the word ‘ghost’ in the title, you can show him this movie with full confidence that not only will he not be over-frightened, but also that you will have no problem getting him to fall asleep.

7) If it only hurts when you laugh, this one won’t hurt hardly at all.

8) The VHS cassette on which the movie comes can be used to adjust a table with an uneven leg.

9) For those into more high-tech formats, the DVD makes an ideal coaster.

10) Since it is highly unlikely that you will ever be at a cocktail party and find yourself in the awkward position of being left out of the scintillating conversation about THE GHOST AND THE GUEST, you can feel blissfully free of having any social obligation to see this movie.

So there you are; ten nice things about THE GHOST AND THE GUEST. And I bet you thought I was going to poke fun at the movie.

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Gas-s-s-s (1971)

GAS-S-S-S (1971)
Article #1521 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-14-2005
Posting Date: 10-11-2005
Directed by Roger Corman
Featuring Bob Corff, Elaine Giftos, Bud Cort

When a gas is released that kills everyone in the world over the age of 25, several hippies take off on an odyssey to an oracle.

Some people hate this rather silly counter-culture curio, but I’m not one of them. Maybe it’s because I always had a bit of a yearning to be a hippie; unfortunately, I spent my late teens/early twenties in the era of disco, an empty experience indeed. Still, I have little use for a lot of these hippie curios; they’re usually pretty ugly, unpleasant, and filled with bad music. Not this one; I like the music here, mostly supplied by Country Joe and the Fish. I also found the characters quite likable in their own ways, even some of the bad guys. The best thing about the movie is its lightness of touch; the movie never really takes itself too seriously, which is a good thing for one that flirts with pretentiousness as well as touching upon some rather unpleasant themes. And some of the scenes are genuinely amusing. There’s the scene where the hippies engage in a gunfight with a highway bandit named Billy the Kid in a used car lot; every shot is punctuated by the calling out of a name of a western movie celebrity (“Johnny Mack Brown!” “William S. Hart!” “Gabby Hayes”, etc.). There’s also the scene where the hippies dress up as regular people so as not to call attention to themselves, but end up finding that the local golf course has been taken over by a cycle gang. Then there are the Indians who have decided to give everything back to the white man that was given to them (including smallpox and the English language). I also like the Greek chorus-like Edgar Allan Poe character who tools around on a motorcycle with a raven on his shoulder. All in all, it felt like a parody of the post-apocalyptic movie, with the heroes meeting any variety of odd cultures that have developed in the wake of the release of the gas. This would also be the last movie Corman would direct for American International Pictures; he objected to their editing the movie against his wishes.

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The Fury of the Wolfman (1972)

THE FURY OF THE WOLFMAN (1972)
(a.k.a. LA FURIA DEL HOMBRE LOBO)
Article #1520 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-13-2005
Posting Date: 10-10-2005
Directed by Jose Maria Zabalza
Featuring Jacinto Molina (Paul Naschy), Perla Cristal, Veronica Lujan

A man carrying the curse of the werewolf comes under the control of a female scientist who uses mind control on him.

With this entry we reach another milestone in the MOTDs; this is the first movie I’ve covered to deal with cult actor Paul Naschy. There seems to be a lot of affection for this actor. I suspect this has to do with the fact that he chose a career as a horror actor at a time when this kind of thing was falling out of favor, and had a love of the classic monsters and would trot them out in his movies with glee. Still, I must say that I have yet to see a movie of his that I would actually describe as being good. Now I’ll give myself a couple of outs to that last statement; I’ve only seen a handful of his movies at this point, and those that I have seen have all been of the pan-and-scan dubbed variety, so I can’t say that I’ve seen him under the best of circumstances.

At any rate, this movie shares the same problems I’ve had with some of his other movies. I find the story incredibly muddled; though there is a fair amount of incident, the context for much of it remains a mystery to me. In short, I don’t know why what does happen happens. Furthermore, I’m not impressed with the acting. This is, of course, a questionable statement when dealing with a dubbed movie; I can’t really judge a man’s performance when he’s been dubbed. Still, there are aspects of acting that aren’t affected by dubbing, such as body language and facial expressions, and all too often in this movie I see people not reacting to significant events, looking bored, and failing to express any recognizable emotion. Even Naschy himself gives me that problem; even though he’s played Waldemar Daminsky many times, I still find the only interesting thing about the character is that he becomes a werewolf. Outside of that, he’s terribly uninteresting; the fact that he becomes a werewolf has virtually no effect on his personality. Still, he does work up the necessary energy in his wolfman scenes, even if he lacks the animal grace that Lon Chaney Jr. brought to the wolfman role; Naschy walks and acts like a human being when he’s a werewolf. The ending isn’t bad, but sometimes I think that’s the only part of the movie worth catching. Still, there’s always the chance that a better presentation may make his movies work better, and someday I hope to see some of his movies in proper widescreen and with subtitles. At heart, though, I doubt that I’ll find a significant improvement.

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Fright (1971)

FRIGHT (1971)
Article #1519 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-12-2005
Posting Date: 10-9-2005
Directed by Peter Collinson
Featuring Honor Blackman, Susan George, Ian Bannen

A babysitter is terrorized by the insane ex-husband of the mother of the child she is caring for.

The first half of this movie plays out like an early slasher flick. The main difference between this movie and those of that genre is that the killer lurking outside of the house isn’t just a faceless killing machine, but an actual character, and so the second half of the movie plays out with a little more complexity than your average slasher flick. However, that doesn’t automatically make the movie great, or even good, and at heart I don’t think the movie really works. The problem is that, despite its attempts at character development, it ultimately fails to develop them sufficiently for me to care about them. In particular, I never believe there is a real character behind the psychotic ex-husband; sure, he’s all over the emotional map, but I don’t feel there’s a real person inhabiting the loony facade, and for the twist ending to really work, we need to believe there was a real character there. Sure, there are a few scares and a little tension here; with a psycho threatening a child with a large shard of glass, there’s bound to be. But it misfires too often, and whenever the psycho gets really agitated, his angry rants remind me of an enraged Yosemite Sam or Tasmanian Devil, and if you’re trying to be scary, these are characters you shouldn’t be channeling. The best moments are near the beginning, where the movie effectively uses sound to build attention.

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Frenzy (1972)

FRENZY (1972)
Article #1518 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-11-2005
Posting Date: 10-8-2005
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Featuring John Finch, Alec McCowen, Barry Foster

An out-of-work divorced man becomes the prime suspect in a series of sadistic necktie killings when his ex-wife is found murdered.

Alfred Hitchcock was no longer at the top of his form during his final decade of directing, but this is probably his best movie from the period. Despite the fact that, like PSYCHO and THE LODGER, it deals with a psychotic serial killer, it’s not really a horror movie but more of a suspense thriller, though the killer does push the movie into marginalia in that regard. It’s also a little slow out of the gate; despite the fact that it contains the most graphic murder of Hitchcock’s career, the first two-thirds of this two hour movie drags a little bit, but once the murderer discovers that he left an important clue on the body of his last victim, the movie takes off and never lets up until the end. Still, I find it hard to complain; after all, Hitchcock was an expert at setting up the dominoes, and it’s worth it to be patient during this part of the process. And it’s always graced with Hitchcock’s wonderful sense of macabre humor; as horrible as it is, the scene in the potato truck is quite hilarious. Much has also been made about the use of food in this movie, so this connection is obviously not an original observation of mine, but I can’t help but notice that the movie with Hitchcock’s most graphic murder also has some of the most disgusting meals on film; practically ever meal served by the detective’s wife is likely to turn your stomach, and when she trots out the ingredients of a soup recipe in French, I found myself rather glad that I don’t understand the language.

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Follow Me Quietly (1949)

FOLLOW ME QUIETLY (1949)
Article #1517 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-10-2005
Posting Date: 10-7-2005
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Featuring William Lundigan, Dorothy Patrick, Jeff Corey

Police are hunting for a serial killer known as the Judge.

When I first picked up Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s album, “Damn the Torpedoes”, I found myself rather disappointed by it. My problem was that Petty performed his songs with such drama that I was led to believe that the songs themselves would have a little more substance to them when, in fact, I found them to be fairly ordinary love songs for the most part. I was left feeling that the drama was merely a pose.

I feel somewhat the same about this movie. It is full of wonderfully powerful moments that lead you to believe that there’s going to turn out to be a little more to it than there actually is. The end of the movie left me disappointed; I was expecting something more than just a crime thriller, but that’s all I really got from it.

Still, I should have seen it coming; the romance between the detective and the tabloid journalist that makes up a goodly portion of the running time never once felt to me like it was going anyplace interesting, and sure enough, it doesn’t. In fact, the amount of time spent on it only convinced me that they didn’t really have much of a story. Still, when all is said and done, it’s the strong parts of this movie that will stick with you, because they’re fairly breathtaking. The movie certainly uses rain effectively to build up tension, and the dummy modeled off of the killer adds an eerie touch to the proceedings (and even has a good payoff scene). Still, the finest moment in the movie is when the killer comes to the realization that the police are waiting for him at just the moment when we first see the killer’s face; this scene will stick in your memory long after you’ve forgotten the rest of the movie. So, in the final evaluation, this one is worth catching for its high points. Just don’t expect it to transcend itself. Fans of fantastic cinema will recognize Jeff Corey and Nestor Paiva, and that’s Douglas Spencer (Scotty in THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD) as the man who confesses to the crimes.

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The Dead Are Alive (1972)

THE DEAD ARE ALIVE (1972)
(a.k.a. L’ETRUSCO UCCIDE ANCORA/THE ETRUSCAN KILLS AGAIN)
Article #1516 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-9-2005
Posting Date: 10-6-2005
Directed by Armando Crispino
Featuring Alex Cord, Samantha Eggar, John Marley

When murders are committed in an Etruscan tomb, detectives investigate several suspects, including an alcoholic archaelogist and a bad-tempered conductor.

The reaction you have to a movie is often dependent on your expectations. Given the fact that the title is THE DEAD ARE ALIVE, the alternate title is THE ETRUSCAN KILLS AGAIN, and at least one source talked about the movie in terms of marauding zombies, I went in fully expecting to find a movie about Etruscan living dead. Yet, a little ways into the movie, I began wondering why their was so little mention of the zombies and a lot of time spent on the criminal investigation and the soap-opera love lives of all concerned. It began to dawn on me that either the movie was spinning its wheels or was going in another direction than the one implied by the titles, promotional materials and the various sources. As it turns out, the latter is the case here. It’s still a horror movie, but a very different one than I expected. Yet, I really think the movie would have been more effective if I hadn’t been deceived about the nature of the movie.

Other factors can also affect your reaction to a movie. My print of the movie is splicey, faded, and has really bad sound. The latter is particularly problematic, as certain points of the movie use sound for its shock moments, and when the sound is this bad, it blunts the effect. Being vaguely aware that this moment should have made you jump isn’t the same thing as the moment actually having made you jump. Furthermore, my print seems to be incomplete; the movie ends abruptly before the final credits role and takes you to the DVD menu.

There are other problems with the movie not related to these particular bad circumstances, of course. I think the script is muddled, the characters unlikable, the dialogue quite bad at times. Though the latter is somewhat mitigated by the fact that it’s partially dubbed, this doesn’t change the fact that several of the major characters are speaking English as their native language, and their dialogue is no better. Still, it does have some effective shock moments, and had the other circumstances surrounding my viewing of this movie been different, I might have actually liked it a lot more than I did. As it is, this was a drab and dreary experience.

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