Month: June 2018

A Stolen Airship (1967)

A STOLEN AIRSHIP (1967)
aka Ukradena vzducholod
Article 2651 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-10-2008
Posting Date: 11-15-2008
Directed by Karel Zeman
Featuring Hanus Bor, Jan Cizek, Jan Malat
Country: Italy/Czechoslovakia

Five boys fly off in an airship and land on a desert island.

Karel Zeman is such a visually inventive director that it goes a long way to make up for the fact that my print of this movie is in the Czech language. Oh, sure, it’s subtitled, but the subtitles are in Chinese (I think). At any rate, much of the plot is hard to follow, though I do believe that Verne’s “The Mysterious Island” is at least one of the sources for the story, and I suspect there are more. It’s a dizzying array of animation, stylized special effects, adventure, fantasy and surreal slapstick humor. The movie is full of strange images, such as a welter of strange airships (including one that can be rowed and one that harbors a set of can-can dancers), spies with fake arms, and a shark stranded on the bottom of the ocean for having eaten a too-heavy torpedo. The “Nautilus” and Captain Nemo show up for a short sequence as well. It’s a lot of fun, but I hope someday to see either a dubbed or English-subtitled version to clarify some of the plot points.

 

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Sole Survivor (1970)

SOLE SURVIVOR (1970)
TV-Movie
Article 2650 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-8-2008
Posting Date: 11-14-2008
Directed by Paul Stanley
Featuring Vince Edwards, Richard Basehart, William Shatner
Country: USA

The wreckage of a military plane lost for seventeen years is found in the Libyan desert. The military investigates the wreckage, with the sole survivor of the plane’s last crew on site; he was rescued seven hundred miles away in the Mediterranean and is now a general. He claims that he bailed out with the rest of the crew, but, in truth, he deserted the plane against orders. However, the plane is haunted by the unseen ghosts of the former crew members who intend to prove to the investigators what really happened.

Though I’m not fond of TV-Movies in general, I’m always glad to find one with an interesting premise, an excellent script, and strong acting, and this has all three. There are a number of memorable scenes; my two favorites include the opening sequence in which the ghosts gather to play baseball, and the scene where an investigator approaches the ghosts who are standing in formation and saluting, looks toward them, lifts his hand and… adjusts his hat. The movie makes excellent use of the desert location, and Vince Edwards, Richard Basehart and William Shatner all give excellent performances. Oddly enough, it’s based on a true story. The ending is very memorable.

 

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The Cold-Blooded Beast (1971)

THE COLD-BLOODED BEAST (1971)
aka Slaughter Hotel, La Bestia uccide a sangue freddo, Asylum Erotica
Article 2649 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-7-2008
Posting Date: 11-13-2008
Directed by Fernando Di Leo
Featuring Klaus Kinski, Margaret Lee, Rosalba Neri
Country: Italy

Women at a luxurious mental clinic are being murdered by a psycho.

Some mental clinic; it’s in a luxurious mansion laden with easily accessible offensive weapons (axe, crossbow, sword, etc), and even has a working iron maiden in the lobby for anyone to use. Of course, one of the patients is a nymphomaniac (who gets an inordinate amount of screen time), but there’s a lesbian nurse and her favorite patient as well, and a woman with sudden homicidal cravings, too. The movie tries to be stylish, but since every scene goes on too long (especially the scenes in which it tries to establish mood and suspense) it just becomes dull. If there’s a real plot here, it’s given short shrift so they can have the requisite scenes of sex and nudity. I wouldn’t doubt that there’s probably a subtext to all of this, but I find little more here than a compendium of its own excesses. It comes across like a cross between DON’T LOOK IN THE BASEMENT, any given slasher film, and a foreign soft-core porno movie.

 

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El hombre sin rostro (1950)

EL HOMBRE SIN ROSTRO (1950)
aka Man Without a Face
Article 2648 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-6-2008
Posting Date: 11-12-2008
Directed by Juan Bustillo Oro
Featuring Arturo de Cordova, Carmen Molina, Miguel Angel Ferriz
Country: Mexico

A detective is obsessed with catching a serial killer who goes after women. He has nightmarish dreams about the killer.

This movie opens in a strange dream-like world. The detective sits on a bench and watches a funeral procession going by with several coffins. His mother appears to him and begins talking. His attention is directed to a shadowy figure walking under some lampposts. The detective empties his gun into the figure, who, rather than falling, merely stops in his tracks. The detective attempts to look at the figure’s face, and finds that his face is blank…

This is the incredibly striking beginning of this movie, and it made me wish intensely that I was watching a version of it that had subtitles; my copy is in Spanish, and much of the detail of the movie is buried in the dialogue. I was only able to figure out that the main character was a detective by reading another plot description; I wish I’d known it at the outset, because it would have helped quite a bit in understanding what was going on; as it was, I made an assumption I don’t think I would have made had I known this fact. That’s one of the perils in watching movies in languages that you don’t understand. Nevertheless, I suspect that this is a great film; certainly, the eerie dream sequences are wonderful. The box in which I received the movie said it showed a certain resemblance to PSYCHO, though I also found it reminding me of the Canadian thriller THE MASK. At any rate, this is another one of those Mexican horror movies that convinced me that they made some truly excellent ones over the years, and I only hope a subtitled edition of this one shows up in the near future.

 

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Sinfonia per due spia (1965)

SINFONIA PER DUE SPIA (1965)
aka Serenade for Two Spies, Serenade fur zwei Spione, Sympathy for Two Spies
Article 2647 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-5-2008
Posting Date: 11-11-2008
Directed by Michael Pfleghar
Featuring Hellmut Lange, Tony Kendall, Barbara Lass
Country: West Germany/Italy

A spy attempts to get his hands on a laser device…

…or so the plot descriptions I’ve found seem to tell me. I couldn’t make heads of tales out of this one, but then, I watched it with the worst possible print. Apparently, the English language version is lost, so I watched it on a bootleg DVD in unsubtitled Italian with faded color, horrible pan-and-scan cropping, and a running time that is only slightly more than half of the length of the movie on IMDB (they say 87 minutes, my copy runs 45 minutes). Under these circumstances, I’d be surprised if it made sense. Apparently, it’s a comedy, but it’s hard to tell. It takes place in the United States, it has a soundtrack that sounds as if it were more appropriate for a cheesy travelogue than a spy movie, and it features what may be the most jaw-droppingly unconvincing underwater sequence in cinema history. Beyond that, the movie is a question mark.

 

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Richard III (1956)

RICHARD III (1956)
Article 2646 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-4-2008
Posting Date: 11-10-2008
Directed by Laurence Olivier
Featuring Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke
Country: UK

A deformed courtier with aspirations to the throne decides to murder those in his way.

I think this is only the second straight adaptation of a Shakespeare play that I’ve done for this series, the other being the 1935 version of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. I’m actually rather surprised by this; since fantastic elements crop up in some of his more famous plays (“Hamlet” has a ghost, “MacBeth” has witches, etc.), I find it odd that my sources omit those while including this one, whose fantastic content consists largely of the fact that the title character is deformed, which seems to me to be not as strong an element. Still, the same basic story here inspired both the 1939 and the 1961 versions of THE TOWER OF LONDON, both of which are often classified as horror and feature horror stars (Boris Karloff and Vincent Price) as well.

This one is considered a classic as well as having perhaps Laurence Olivier’s finest role, and there is no doubt he is mesmerizing here. He directed the movie himself when he failed to convince Carol Reed to do so, and the movie often walks a thin line between the cinematic and the theatrical; the camera roves about in a clever and cinematic fashion, and the final scenes of the movie spend less time talking about the action than showing it, but the movie retains the theatrical origins in the declamatory delivery of many of the actors, Olivier in particular. Unless you’re an expert on Shakespeare or know the story very well, the movie will be a bit bewildering at times because of the confusing wash of characters and the difficulty of the language, but you’ll get the basic gist of what’s going on. The cast also features John Gielgud and Claire Bloom, and, for fantastic movie fans, keep your eyes open for Michael Gough, Michael Ripper and Patrick Troughton, all three playing murderers.

 

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It’s a Dog’s Life (1955)

IT’S A DOG’S LIFE (1955)
Article 2645 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-3-2008
Posting Date: 11-9-2008
Directed by Herman Hoffman
Featuring Jeff Richards, Jarma Lewis, Edmund Gwenn
Country: USA

A bull terrier tries to survive on the streets of the city with his mother. He discovers the secret of his birth, and then his mother vanishes. He vows to find his mother so he can take care of her, and to find his father so he can kill him.

The story is a borderline fantasy because we’re told the story from the dog’s point of view. This basic premise could have been used any number of ways, but I really like the way they went. An uncredited Vic Morrow provides the voice for the streetwise bull terrier called Wildfire, and he manages to give the dog a really engaging personality. It also helps that the movie does not shy away from darkness; the dog is trained as a fighting dog, and though we don’t actually see the dogs fighting (Wildfire accurately tells us that we don’t need to see it to know what’s going on, and even name-drops the Humane Society and the ASPCA at one point), we still get to see enough of the ugliness and seediness of this world to make us really care about the the dog’s fate. The story lightens up somewhat when the dog is befriended and adopted by a kindly old man, but somehow the sense of potential darkness and tragedy never entirely dissipates. The movie even achieves an unexpected depth when the dog finally wins over the unhappy owner of the estate; their bond turns out to be that they’ve both stared death in the eye. With all that, the movie manages to retain a charm and wit that really brings it to life.

Still, I couldn’t help but ponder sadly over what would happen to this movie if it were made today. No attempt is made in this movie to make the dog look like he’s actually talking; nowadays, I’m sure they’d go the route of using the talking animal effects we see in so many movies and TV commercials, and that fragile sense of reality that this movie retains would be lost. Furthermore, the darker aspects of the movie would be traded in for a series of “dogs sniffing butts” jokes, and the whole movie would probably end up like the chaotic dog show that makes for what I felt was the weakest scene in this movie. The very thought of this saddens me somewhat.

 

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Reflections of Murder (1974)

REFLECTIONS OF MURDER (1974)
TV-Movie
Article 2644 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-2-2008
Posting Date: 11-8-2008
Directed by John Badham
Featuring Tuesday Weld, Joan Hackett, Sam Waterston
Country: USA

A teacher at a private school is married to a cruel husband who has been trying to force her to sell the school for the money. The wife and the husband’s mistress hatch a plot to murder the husband so they’ll both be free from his tyranny. However, things don’t go quite as planned…

Had anybody asked me what I thought of the idea of a TV-Movie remake of DIABOLIQUE, I would not have expressed encouragement or felt excitement. I still think this TV-Movie is unnecessary, but I will admit that it does a very good job with the property; good performances from all of the cast and strong direction from John Badham all contribute to making this one work. Still, if you’ve seen the original, there’s not much in the way of surprises here, though it does have a very final twist that I don’t remember from the original movie (though this may be faulty memory on my part). It’s easy to see why John Badham would eventually graduate from TV to feature films; this movie deftly avoids the usual TV-Movie touches that tend to make me dislike them.

 

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Psycho Sisters (1974)

PSYCHO SISTERS (1974)
aka So Evil, My Sister
Article 2643 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-1-2008
Posting Date: 11-7-2008
Directed by Reginald Le Borg
Featuring Susan Strasberg, Faith Domergue, John Ashton
Country: USA

When her husband dies in a car accident, a woman decides to stay with her sister, who secretly spikes her coffee with pills and keeps an axe-wielding simpleton with a record of homicides as a handyman. The widow has nightmares and meets a surfer who is actually an undercover cop.

If you want to see a fifty-year old Faith Domergue take a shower, or if you want to see Susan Strasberg in a swimsuit, or if you want to see the goofiest mask of a man burned in a car wreck ever, this is the movie for you. If you want a story that makes sense and in which the plot twists seem clever and not at all contrived, this is one to avoid. Still, since this was Reginald Le Borg’s last movie, it has a little curiosity value, though it’s perhaps his weakest directorial effort (unless you count HOUSE OF THE BLACK DEATH, in which he did some uncredited direction, but when one of the other directors is Jerry Warren, I find it hard to put the blame on Le Borg). Even with this one, I put more of the blame on the script by Tony Crechales, who also gave us BLOOD MANIA; quite frankly, this movie dredges up some of the dumbest plot twists I’ve ever seen in a movie.

 

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Siren of Bagdad (1953)

SIREN OF BAGDAD (1953)
Article 2642 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-30-2008
Posting Date: 11-6-2008
Directed by Richard Quine
Featuring Paul Henreid, Patricia Medina, Hans Conried
Country: USA

The dancing girls in a magician’s troupe are kidnapped by thieves from Bagdad, where an evil grand vizier has usurped the throne from the true sultan. The magician combines forces with the deposed sultan to restore him to the throne and to get his dancing girls back.

Arabian Nights epics must have fallen on hard times during the fifties; the last one I saw came from poverty row studio Monogram (and which also featured Patricia Medina), and this one was produced by budget-conscious Sam Katzman. To its credit, this one plays it for laughs rather than thrills. “The Motion Picture Guide” makes a comment that it bears a certain similarity to the Hope/Crosby Road movies, which is an observation I found rather shrewd; though this movie has far more of a plot than you’d ever find in a Road movie, there’s no doubt the Hans Conried’s character, lines, and shtick sound ready-made for Bob Hope. It also has that same sense of surreal non-reality that pushed the Road movies into marginal fantasy, though this one has lots of magic to qualify it for the genre. All in all, I found this one quite enjoyable, with Hans Conried’s comic battle with the fake sultan (in which each combatant seems reluctant to attack) a highlight.

 

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