Month: June 2017

Sombra, the Spider Woman (1966)

SOMBRA, THE SPIDER WOMAN (1966)
Feature Film Version of the serial THE BLACK WIDOW
Article 1932 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-29-2006
Posting Date: 11-26-2006
Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet and Fred C. Brannon
Featuring Carol Forman, Bruce Edwards, Virginia Lee

An evil woman who is actually an alien from another planet is trying to get the plans for a gyro rocket with which her people can attack the earth.

These feature-film versions of serials made in the mid-sixties were intended for TV viewing, and I suspect that’s the best way to enjoy them. Watching them straight through, all I’m really aware of is the lack of story flow and the abrupt editing as the editors do their best to jump to the next action sequence by cutting as much exposition as they possibly can. If you imagine commercials popping up between these jumps, they seem less annoying. It actually might be fun to take some of these feature versions, and edit in commercials (from Ronco or K-Tel) or TV spots for movies or maybe some dialing-for-dollars footage. I’d enjoy them more that way, anyway.

Biggest non-surprise: Anthony Warde plays the main henchman.

Biggest surprise: Gene Roth plays a good guy.

 

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The Savage Curse (1974)

THE SAVAGE CURSE (1974)
aka KISS ME AND DIE
Article 1931 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-28-2006
Posting Date: 11-25-2006
Directed by John Sichel
Featuring Jenny Agutter, George Chakiris, Anton Diffring

An American detective tries to figure out what happened to his brother who disappeared right after having been invited to a party at an English manor. The head of the manor is a possessive father with a fascination for the works of Poe.

This movie was apparently part of a British series known as “Thriller”. From its rating of 9.0 on IMDB at the time of this writing, I can only conclude that the movie has something of a strong following, and I’m sure that part of this is due to the presence of Jenny Agutter, an actress with a strong cult following. She does a fine job here, but it’s Anton Diffring’s performance as the possessive father that catches my attention the most. In fact, the whole cast does quite well; however, I’m less impressed with the story as a whole, which I think is slow-moving, talky, and a little too obvious. Once you meet the father, hear about his fascination with Poe, and learn that his daughter’s boyfriends have all disappeared mysteriously, there’s not much in the way of surprises to help hold the interest. Granted, it’s also a TV-Movie, which is a form I usually only warm up to if the production is exceptionally good, and this one is just a bit too ordinary for my taste. Most of the fun is due to the acting and the Poe references, but a more interesting story would have helped immensely.

 

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Sakima and the Masked Marvel (1966)

SAKIMA AND THE MASKED MARVEL (1966)
Feature version of the Serial THE MASKED MARVEL
Article 1930 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-27-2006
Posting Date: 11-24-2006
Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet
Featuring Johhny Arthur, Tom Steele, Louise Currie

The Masked Marvel does battle with an evil Japanese saboteur named Sakima.

During the mid-sixties, several Republic serials were edited into features, and this is one of them. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the serial version of this one, so I didn’t find it overly familiar. For those who need a refresher course, the Masked Marvel was a slender, athletic and sharply dressed hero who is one of four insurance detectives, all four of which were slender, athletic and shared a tailor between them. They were also fairly bland and forgettable as characters, so it really doesn’t matter which one is the Masked Marvel, no matter how many times the movie tries to make it sound like it’s really important to know. It’s pretty ordinary as these things go; each episode is reduced to a five-to-ten minute sequence and strung together for non-stop but fairly repetitive action. In particular, prepare yourself for seeing lots of scenes of dolls falling from great heights. The most familiar face in the cast to me was Anthony Warde, who plays (as he usually does in this type of thing) the main henchman. I didn’t recognize him, but Professor Macrae was played by an uncredited Edward Van Sloan.

 

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Spaceflight IC-1 (1965)

SPACEFLIGHT IC-1 (1965)
Article 1929 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-26-2006
Posting Date: 7-23-2006
Directed by Bernard Knowles
Featuring Bill Williams, Norma West, John Cairney

When a woman commits suicide as a result of a meeting with the dictatorial commander of an interstellar colonization vehicle, her husband, the ship’s doctor, inadvertently takes part in a mutiny.

This is one of those movie I quite admire. It’s a real attempt at a science fiction drama, one in which the characters are allowed to be real people in the way they react to the various situations they encounter; even the dictatorial commander is played with a strong sense of humanity. It avoids the usual cliches of space travel; there isn’t an encounter with a meteor cluster to be found, and it actually tells a fairly complex story in a very short running time of 65 minutes. However, it’s so intent on not stooping to melodrama that it never really comes alive; despite the interesting story and characters, there’s a dullish cast to the proceedings. I also dislike the beginning, but then, I’ve never liked movies where a narrator introduces the characters to you rather than allowing you to meet them on their own; it’s a bit like going to a party and immediately being introduced to twenty people you’ve never met and then be expected to remember them all as you encounter them again. They also have a potentially interesting character in the man who has been converted into a cyborg, if an immobile one. Unfortunately, they never give this character anything significant to do during the proceedings. In short, it’s a movie I like more for what it attempted than for how well it pulled it off.

 

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Kong Island (1968)

KONG ISLAND (1968)
aka Eve the Wild Woman, King of Kong Island, Eve the Savage Venus, Eva al Venere selvaggia
Article 1928 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-25-2006
Posting Date: 11-22-2006
Directed by Roberto Mauri
Featuring Brad Harris, Esmerelda Barros, Marc Lawrence

An ex-mercenary is hunting down a man that left him for dead after a payroll robbery. His quest takes him into the middle of a jungle, where a hunt for ‘The Sacred Monkey” leads him to an encounter with gorillas who are under the scientific control of a madman.

What a cornucopia of titles to choose from; let’s eliminate a few. Any movie with both words “King” and “Kong” in the title should make some attempt to fit a giant ape in the plot, so let’s throw out KING OF KONG ISLAND. In fact, just KONG ISLAND still promises some giant monkey action; let’s face it, you have a right to expect it from any movie that contains the word KONG without the word HONG, so out it goes. Eve is wild enough, I suppose, given that she runs around the jungle topless; not that you see anything, though, thanks to her long black hair which she wears combed down in two long strands in front. Still, she’s the least violent member of the cast, so I’m throwing out all titles that imply otherwise.

Hey, we’ve just thrown out all the titles! Let’s go whole hog and throw out the movie as well. This astonishingly bad compendium of evil experiments on men-in-gorilla-suits, love triangles, vengeance quests, betrayals and Double-Stuffed Safari-O simply wanders all over the place without rhyme or reason for the most part. The music is probably the worst; it’s mostly vaguely exotic easy-listening music, and it’s repetitive as well. It’s a mean, ugly and dull movie that just isn’t much fun. I’m glad this one is out of the way.

 

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The Tell-Tale Heart (1928)

THE TELL-TALE HEART (1928)
Article 1927 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-24-2006
Posting Date: 11-21-2006
Directed by Charles F. Klein
Featuring Otto Matieson, Heurford de Feurberg, Darvas

An insane man kills an old man because he can’t stand his eye, and then hides the body. He must then contend with an investigation from the law.

I was delighted to discover that my wife had in her collection a movie that had eluded my hunting efforts for several years. This silent take on the Edgar Allan Poe story stays scrupulously close to the original story, though it understandably foregoes the elaborate dismemberment of the body. It doesn’t turn the old man into a tyrant in an attempt to make us understand why he is killed; it is clearly established that it is the protagonist’s madness that impels him. This silent short is quite audacious; the sets are done in the style of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI , it uses a jagged writing font for the title cards, and makes plentiful use of double (and sometimes triple) exposure to tell its story, and effectively uses the image of a pounding mallet to represent the beating of the heart. My favorite touch, though, is the portrayal of the two policemen, who speak and move in unison when addressing the young man, and who investigate the guilt in his eyes with a big, bizarre magnifying glass. All in all, this is the most satisfying take on the tale that I’ve seen to date.

 

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Dark Star (1974)

DARK STAR (1974)
Article 1926 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-23-2006
Posting Date: 11-20-2006
Directed by John Carpenter
Featuring Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Dre Pahich

A group of space travellers are travelling throughout the universe, destroying planets with unstable orbits so that the solar systems will be safe for colonization. However, they’ve been in space so long, they’ve become careless, clumsy and hostile to each other.

At the time of this writing, this is my favorite John Carpenter movie. It’s important to bear in mind, though, that I am by no means well versed in his oeuvre; for example, I’ve never seen HALLOWEEN, largely due to the role it played in kicking off the whole slasher genre, a trend for which I have little affection. However, I’ve been intrigued about this movie ever since I read about it in Danny Peary’s Cult Movie books, and once I managed to catch it on TV one evening, I’ve been a big fan of it ever since.

The movie is extremely cheap, somewhat off-putting, a little dullish at times, the acting is inconsistent, but it also had me doubled over with laughter for a good stretch of its running time. In particular, the two main comic set-pieces of this movie are classics. The first involves an attempt by one of the crew members to force a now-hated alien-turned-pet (“When I brought you on board, I thought you were cute!”) back into his room, a quest that lands the crew member into hilarious peril in an elevator shaft. Dan O’Bannon, who wrote the script and plays the part of the hapless crew member Pinback, would later retool some of these concepts for his script for ALIEN . The other scene involves the crew trying to contend with the fact that one of their sentient planet-destroying bombs, primed and ready to explode, cannot be dropped from the bomb bay due to a computer malfunction and is preparing to destroy them all. I won’t give away the details of how this crisis was handled other than to say that there are times when a solid grounding on philosophical concepts can save your life. Beyond that, my favorite scene involves the playback of Pinback’s video diary (which looks suspiciously like an eight-track). The theme song is a bizarre little country song called “Benson, Arizona”, and music from “The Marriage of Figaro” is also used to great comic effect. The ending of the movie owes more than a little to Ray Bradbury’s short story, “Kaleidoscope”; in fact, the similarities are so startling, that I do find myself wondering whether they were purposefully lifted from the story. Nonetheless, this is my favorite science fiction comedy. It also makes the best use of a beach ball I’ve ever seen in a movie.

 

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Junior G-Men of the Air (1942)

JUNIOR G-MEN OF THE AIR (1942)
Serial
Article 1925 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-22-2006
Posting Date: 11-19-2006
Directed by Lewis D. Collins and Ray Taylor
Featuring Billy Halop, Gene Reynolds, Lionel Atwill

A group of street kids find themselves facing off with an organization of Japanese saboteurs called the Black Dragon.

This, the last of the three Dead End Kids / Little Tough Guys serials, must have gone into production shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s very heavy on the propaganda, with stirring pronouncements made over the opening credits about the bravery of these boys in dealing with the horrible Japanese threat. Oddly, it takes place before Pearl Harbor; the acts of sabotage are meant to coincide with the attack. Once again, I find a bit of novelty value in that the main characters here are a bunch of street kids rather than the usual serial hero, and there’s also some fun in having familiar faces Lionel Atwill and Turhan Bey as the main baddie and one of his henchmen. The science fiction elements are sporadic, though the development of a muffler for an airplane is the most prominent. It starts out well, gets rather dull in the middle sections, but then picks up again in the final episodes, where an army-load of stock footage comes into play. Keep your eyes pealed for a cameo of Billy Benedict, once again playing a character named Whitey; he first used the name in THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL , and it would remain his character name during his stint with the Bowery Boys. Not bad, but I always find myself wishing that Leo Gorcey had been in the mix somewhere.

 

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Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959)

DARBY O’GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE (1959)
Article 1924 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-21-2006
Posting Date: 11-18-2006
Directed by Robert Stevenson
Featuring Albert Sharpe, Janet Munro, Sean Connery

On the verge of losing his job to a younger man, an old tale-spinner manages to capture the king of the leprachauns. He decides to keep the king prisoner until he decides how he can best help his daughter with his three wishes.

I’ve never quite warmed to Disney’s live-action fantasies as well as their animated ones. In the animated movies, there’s plenty of energy on display even when there’s not much going on story-wise, but when things slow down in these live-action ones (as happens several times during the first hour of this one), I start to lose interest. Still, the movie remains at least mildly charming throughout; the scene with the dancing leprachauns is quite memorable, Janet Munro and Sean Connery make for a likeble couple, and Albert Sharpe and Jimmy O’Dea are fun. And when the movie takes a darker turn during the last half hour, it becomes quite compelling and scary. This last part is done so well that I feel compelled to overlook a story element that has never quite settled well with me; if the legend about the fourth wish is true, wouldn’t Darby be denied the benefits of his third wish in its entirety rather than just partially?

 

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The Curse of the Doll People (1961)

THE CURSE OF THE DOLL PEOPLE (1961)
aka Munecos infernales
Article 1923 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-20-2006
Posting Date: 11-17-2006
Directed by Benito Alazraki and Paul Nagle
Featuring Ramon Gay, Elvira Quintana, Quintin Bulnes

Several men fall under the spell of a voodoo curse when they steal an idol from a temple. The curse takes the form of murderous dolls that stalk and kill their victims.

I have to confess that I find this movie a mixed bag. On the plus side, the killer dolls are truly unnerving. They bear the faces of their previous victims, and the effect is truly eerie; quite frankly, they’re some of the scariest monsters to come out of a Mexican horror movie. They also aren’t strictly automatons, and some of them actually end up engendering a certain amount of sympathy in the process. The zombie isn’t quite as effective, but he does add to the scares a little. On the down side, the pacing is pretty awful, and the repetitive and dull soundtrack really drag the movie down quite a bit. The dubbing is none too good, either, but I’m used to this enough that it didn’t really hurt as much as the pacing. Still, those dolls are certainly memorable, and for many people this may more than compensate for the movie’s weaknesses.

 

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