Month: December 2016

Love Slaves of the Amazons (1957)

LOVE SLAVES OF THE AMAZONS (1957)
Article #1590 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-22-2005
Posting Date: 12-19-2005
Directed by Curt Siodmak
Featuring Don Taylor, Gianna Segale, Eduard Ciannelli

An archaeologist agrees to make an expedition into the jungles of Brazil to find a lost city of Amazons.

Here it is, three days running and I’m still in the jungle. I think I’ve contracted jungle fever as well. This might explain why I was unable to pick up the early clues to the real nature of this movie. The first is the title itself; just how seriously can you take a movie with this title? The second is the fight scene that occurs about one-third of the way into the movie. When a fight scene largely consists of people being thrown into mud, it’s more of a sign of comedy than drama. No, I was taken in by the fact that the movie more or less carries itself with a certain amount of seriousness and dignity for its first half. Still, even if I had heeded the clues, I don’t think I would have been prepared for the quantum leap in goofiness the movie takes once our hero is captured by the Amazons, and a scene where the hero is forcibly given a bath by a gaggle of giggling elderly Amazon women left my mouth hanging open. The next twenty minutes consists largely of giggling and catfighting (on the part of the Amazons) and leering and gawking (on the part of the hero). Sure, the movie makes a half-assed attempt to take itself seriously again once he escapes, but by that time you pretty much know you’ve watched a comedy. Incidentally, this movie was shot in Brazil, with what looks like an assortment of Brazilian actors in the cast. This goes a long way towards explaining why several of the characters sound like Paul Frees.

2 CommentsLeave a comment

The Lost Tribe (1949)

THE LOST TRIBE (1949)
Article #1589 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-21-2005
Posting Date: 12-18-2005
Directed by William A. Berke
Featuring Johnny Weissmuller, Myrna Dell, Elena Verdugo

Jungle Jim tries to keep greedy white men from despoiling a hidden city in the jungle that contains a great deal of wealth.

From QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS to THE LOST TRIBE, huh? I guess once you step into the jungle, it’s hard to find your way out. Still, for a Jungle Jim movie, it’s pretty good, even if the plot is as old as the hills. It moves quickly, has lots of animal encounters, and builds up to a bizarre but memorable ending which must have used every gorilla suit they could get their hands on. It’s probably a pretty average movie all around, but it looks really good compared to QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS; I’m just grateful that you don’t overdose on the stock footage.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Queen of the Amazons (1947)

QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS (1947)
Article #1588 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-20-2005
Posting Date: 12-17-2005
Directed by Edward Finney
Featuring Robert Lowery, Patricia Morison, J. Edward Bromberg

A woman hires a party to go into the wilds of Africa to find her lost husband. She hires a guide who considers women a nuisance who is also searching for ivory poachers.

I was going to dismiss this one as a Double-Stuffed Safari-O, but frankly, that classification is too good for it. Rather, this is an example of what I think of as Stock Footage Clearing House Cinema. Now, I can understand the use of stock footage to flesh out and add atmosphere to a movie in a cost-effective way. However, when a movie seems to only exist to make use of stock footage, you have the cart ahead of the horse. Yet, that seems to be the case here; the movie is filled with bits that seem designed to set up the use of stock footage. Certainly, the scenes of exposition and plot development are shot in such an uninvolving way (characters stand still and talk to each other) that I never felt that anyone cared about the story, and this is only enhanced by the fact that there’s very little in this hackneyed compendium of cliches to care about. As a result, the best part of the movie is, unsurprisingly, the stock footage. The fantastic aspect is little more than the mild fantasy value of having a tribe of Amazons on the loose.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Futz! (1969)

FUTZ! (1969)
Article #1587 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-17-2005
Posting Date: 12-16-2000
Directed by Tom O’Horgan
Featuring John Bakos, Seth Allen, Peter Craig

This movie is about a man who is in love with a pig. I also found it to be well nigh unwatchable. The amazing thing is that these two facts aren’t really connected. As offensive as the bestiality story line is, the movie is so stylized and packed with audience distancing techniques that you never once really believe that you’re watching real people engaging in real acts; as a consequence, it never seems real enough to offend. No, the reason I found it nearly unwatchable is that stylization is so excessive the movie becomes actively annoying. It’s based on an avant-garde stage play that tried to combine stylized acting, music, poetry, dance and contortionism to create a thrilling new art form; in other words, it’s pretentious and self-indulgent. It may have worked better on stage than it does on the screen, but I certainly wouldn’t waste my time trying to mount a stage production of it to find out if that’s true; I can only see so many scenes of people delivering lines and making pig sounds while standing on their heads before my mind rejects the experience. I also suspect that the message of the movie may be a little too trite to merit this level of artiness, but I’m not even sure there is a message or whether I’m just reading something into it. The only reason I’m covering it for this series is that the ending has some horrific touches to it, but it’s by no means a horror movie. It’s not even good for campy laughs, for that matter. This one is only for fans of screen versions of avant-garde theatre.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Yellow Cab Man (1950)

THE YELLOW CAB MAN (1950)
Article #1586 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-18-2005
Posting Date: 12-15-2005
Directed by Jack Donohue
Featuring Red Skelton, Gloria DeHaven, Walter Slezak

An accident-prone inventor tries to demonstrate his new unbreakable elastiglass to a cab company, but finds himself beset by industrial spies who want the formula for themselves.

Red Skelton is often referred to as a great clown, and I have no trouble with this assessment as long as the word “clown” is understood to refer to a practitioner of a very specific type of comic discipline. Red Skelton’s use of comic pratfalls and expressions is very much the stuff of clowns, but I find clowns only mildly amusing, and as a result, despite the fact that I have a certain nostalgia for him (his TV show was a mainstay in my house when I was young), I don’t quite put him in the front row of the great comedians as I would W. C. Fields. Still, I really liked this movie a lot, largely because it aspires to a certain type of Fieldsian lunacy and surrealism at time, and also because Skelton shares the screen with a number of truly enjoyable character actors. James Gleason, Jay C. Flippen, Edward Arnold and Walter Slezak are all on hand here, and they all have wonderful parts and great moments. At least one sequence is truly great; an attempt by novice cabbie Skelton to pick up his first cab fare results in a twisted series of events that leads to perceptions of both a bomb scare and a kidnapping. And some of the dream sequences are really strange; in one he finds himself at the North Pole talking to Walter Slezak in a walrus costume, and in another he has nightmare visions of all sorts of motor vehicles and pedestrians warped out of proportion (thanks to trick photography). In fact, the set pieces show a real inventiveness throughout this movie, and this adds a lot to the proceedings. I haven’t seen a lot of Skelton’s cinematic work so far, but from what I’ve seen so far, this is the best.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Circus of Fear (1966)

CIRCUS OF FEAR (1966)
(a.k.a. PSYCHO-CIRCUS)
Article #1585 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-17-2005
Posting Date: 12-14-2005
Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey
Featuring Christopher Lee, Leo Genn, Anthony Newlands

Detectives investigate a robbery that resulted in the murder of a guard. Their investigation leads them to a circus populated by any number of sinister characters.

It is best to warn horror fans from square one; despite the title and certain horror elements (the presence of Christoper Lee as a lion tamer who wears a hood to hide his hideously scarred face, several knife murders), this is far more of a crime / mystery thriller than a horror piece. Actually, this isn’t so different from the common practice in the thirties to pass off old dark house mysteries as horror films, so it’s hard to get really offended over this. For a crime / mystery thriller, it’s not too bad; it has a few decent surprises and some interesting moments. It’s not particularly well done, though, and it misses a few opportunities; much as I like the fact that one scene involves two people having a fight in a ring filled with trained elephants, I don’t think the director made this moment as exciting as it could have been. Still, I have to grouse about one thing, and that is how often Klaus Kinski is wasted in movies like this; he’s a great actor with a memorable face, but he seems to be used for cameos more than anything else when he should be front and center. For the record, the movie’s most disappointing moment is getting our first look at the animal trainer’s hideous countenance.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Possessed (1965)

THE POSSESSED (1965)
(a.k.a. LA DONNA DEL LAGO/THE LADY OF THE LAKE)
Article #1584 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-16-2005
Posting Date: 12-13-2005
Directed by Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini
Featuring Virna Lisi, Peter Baldwin, Philippe Leroy

A visitor arrives in a small Italian town in search of a woman. He finds the inhabitants acting strange.

The above plot description is vague because I myself am vague about what happens in the movie. The plot descriptions on IMDB and in the John Stanley book say they’re acting like zombies, but I certainly didn’t see anything that resembled either the voodoo or the Romero variety of zombie, though a few people seem distant. There’s a lady involved, of course, and there’s a lake, a deal of love-making, a mysterious house, and lots of talk. Unfortunately, the key to it all is hidden in that talk, and since my copy of the movie is in unsubtitled Italian, the key remains currently out of my reach. It uses sound effectively at times, has some genuinely moody moments, and does seem to be off the beaten path somewhat. But until I see a print I can understand, I have little to say.

For those of you following this series in the hope that I’ll have more to say about these movies than I sometimes do, I apologize. The fact of the matter is that the project is a bit on the expensive side, and it’s also time-consuming. As nice as it might be to hold off on reviewing these until I can find a copy in English, I would then have to watch a whole second movie to keep up with the series, plus take the trouble to actively hunt out new sources. If this project were my livelihood or my sole hobby, I might do so, but such is not the case. Maybe someday I’ll return to movies like this and be better able to describe them, but until that time, this rather vague coverage will have to do.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Planet Outlaws (1953)

PLANET OUTLAWS (1953)
Article #1583 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-15-2005
Posting Date: 12-12-2005
Directed by Ford Beebe, Saul A. Goodkind and Harry Revier
Featuring Buster Crabbe, Jackie Moran, Anthony Warde

Buck Rogers does battle with Killer Kane.

This movie opens and closes with a commentator talking about flying saucers, aliens from other planets, and the need to use our scientific knowledge to help us defeat extraterrestrial invaders. To illustrate his point, we are then subjected to a sixty-minute edit of the BUCK ROGERS serial. Unfortunately, I think the message gets gummed up in the process. Despite the fact that BUCK ROGERS does include humans at odds with aliens, the context of the serial (where the aliens are helping good-guy revolutionaries do battle with the evil-regime status quo) is utterly different from the context of the commentary (where bad-guy aliens are trying to destroy our good-guy status quo). Now, I’m tempted to fault the movie for failing to effectively deliver its message, but in truth, I never believed for one moment that this movie was made -er- edited with the intent to deliver any such message. Rather, I think the message was slapped on to try to add some sort of trendy touch to footage taken from a fourteen-year old serial. Sure, it’s lame, but I don’t honestly think they ever thought anyone was going to pay attention anyway.

As for this attempt to make a feature out of a serial, I’ll say it’s better than DESTINATION SATURN but not much. It’s biggest advantage is that it’s shorter and less intent on getting all the action in, making it easier to watch. Still, it is like trying to read a Cliff’s Notes version of the serial but skipping every other paragraph in the process, and it’s hard to follow. Still, this one is somewhat less painful than this form usually is.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Operation Atlantis (1965)

OPERATION ATLANTIS (1965)
(a.k.a. AGENTE 003, OPERACION ATLANTIDA)
Article #1582 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-14-2005
Posting Date: 12-11-2005
Directed by Domenico Paolella
Featuring John Ericson, Bernardina Sarracco, Cristina Gaioni

Agent George Steele is hired by a scientific research agency to investigate reports of radioactive elements in the world of Atlantis in the African desert.

This is one of the many Italian pseudo-Bond spy movies of the mid-to-late sixties. At their best, they can be charming low-budget fun. They give the viewer the novelty of seeing likable heroes romance beautiful women while taking on dangerous enemies without the benefit of a the budget or stunt expertise of a Bond movie, and the bad dubbing merely adds a bit of quaint charm to the proceedings. At their worst, they are incoherent jumbles of difficult-to-follow plots, bad editing, charmless heroes, confusing characters and horrible editing; in these cases, the bad dubbing merely adds to the mounting headache the movie is giving you. Unfortunately, this is one of the latter, and the fact that the science fiction aspects are stronger than usual this time (what with the Atlantis storyline and the existence of a super-radioactive mineral from the asteroid belt) does nothing to enliven the proceedings. In fact, there’s only one thing I like about this movie, and that is that one of the assassins in this movie uses as his weapon a giant spiked claw. If this were a real James Bond movie, we would be guaranteed a big fight between the hero and the claw-wielding assassin; we’re in no such luck here. Avoid this one like the plague unless you’re a really big, uncritical fan of Italian pulchritude or just have to see that big claw.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Pirates of Prah (1956)

PIRATES OF PRAH (1956)
(a.k.a. MANHUNT IN SPACE)
Article #1581 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-13-2005
Posting Date: 12-10-2005
Directed by Hollingsworth Morse
Featuring Richard Crane, Sally Mansfield, Robert Lyden

Rocky Jones is sent out to investigate reports of space pirates when Vena is kidnapped by them.

Originally, I thought that covering this one would serve as a benchmark for me by being the first movie I covered that wasn’t listed in IMDB; PIRATES OF PRAH is not listed there. Granted, I expected that the reason for this was that these particular episodes of “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger” hadn’t been edited into movie form, thereby disqualifying itself somewhat from being covered. This might have served as an issue of debate had I been correct; however, as it is, I found alarm bells going off in my head during the first ten minutes of this group of episodes; I knew I had seen it before, and after a little research, I discovered that PIRATES OF PRAH had indeed been edited into a feature, only under the title MANHUNT IN SPACE, which is listed in IMDB. Since some of my sources list both titles as distinct entries in the Rocky Jones series, you can understand my confusion.

As for the movie itself, it’s pretty much what I’ve come to expect from the series. It’s three episodes of the series, each of which has a distinct storyline while at the same time telling a story arc that lasts all three episodes, thereby making them work both as individual episodes as well as a movie. Granted, it helps if you take breaks between the episodes; otherwise, the deliberate pace (tolerable in episode-size chunks but exhausting over the course of the whole movie) will get to you. It’s primitive and juvenile, but with a certain degree of imagination and creativity. The acting is variable but watchable, it’s silly but earnest, and it all somehow exudes a certain charm if you take into account its early television origins. If you’re a Rocky Jones fan, you’ll like it. If not, you won’t. Simple as that.

0 CommentsLeave a comment