Month: August 2018

13 Ghosts (1960)

13 GHOSTS (1960)
Article 2807 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-13-2009
Posting Date: 4-20-2009
Directed by William Castle
Featuring Charles Herbert, Jo Morrow, Martin Milner
Country: USA

A family that is struggling financially inherits a house that they can only keep if they live in it. The house contains a fortune hidden by the former owner… and it also contains ghosts collected by him as well.

William Castle was the king of the gimmicks, but, if you look at his movies, for the most part the gimmicks were momentary side issues to the plot; the floating skeleton in HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL affected only one scene, the “choose the ending” scenario in MR. SARDONICUS only came into play at the end of the movie, as did the Coward’s Corner gimmick for HOMICIDAL, etc. This is the most significant exception; the glasses could be used several times throughout the movie, and it seems to me that the movie was actually built around the use of the gimmick. I think this is somewhat responsible for my dislike of this movie; I was extremely disappointed by it on first viewing, and though I’ve given it couple of other chances, I think it falls flat. One of the problems is that many of the ghost scenes end abruptly, which somehow kills any suspense that it may have built up. Another problem is that the dialogue sounds forced and phony; someone like Vincent Price might have made it work, but he’s not in the movie, and the cast here looks rather lost with most of it. In the end, I just don’t find it anywhere near as much fun or as scary as his better films, and I suspect the primary appeal of the film depends on the gimmick; it’s probably a lot more fun if you have the glasses to play with. Still, it doesn’t help that the glasses used in the movie itself look pretty silly. Margaret Hamilton plays the housekeeper, and though some talk is made about her being a witch, it just doesn’t really hold much water here. I consider this one of Castle’s bigger disappointments.

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The Terminal Man (1974)

THE TERMINAL MAN (1974)
Article 2806 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-12-2009
Posting Date: 4-19-2009
Directed by Mike Hodges
Featuring George Segal, Joan Hackett, Richard Dysart
Country: USA

A man suffers from a mental condition that causes him to become homicidal on occasion. Scientists install chips in his brain designed to stop the violent episodes when the conditions that bring them on appear. The operation appears to work, but the scientists discover a flaw in the concept that could make him even more dangerous. Unfortunately, by that time, the man has escaped from their care and is on the loose…

You don’t need to be an expert on Michael Crichton to know about his basic theme of technology going wrong, and if you keep that in mind when watching this movie, you know basically what’s going to happen very early on. The appeal is in the details, of course, and I find the description of the central flaw in the process to be a very compelling little detail that sounds quite convincing. In fact, once this point in the story is in reach, the movie has the makings of a neat and tense little thriller. Unfortunately, the movie is shot with a somewhat arty feel to it that is a little too distancing, and it remains distant when it should really be pulling you into it. Furthermore, the arty touches make the movie feel like it should be more complex and original than it is; all in all, the story is very standard, and it jars a little with the artiness, especially when the movie breaks into cliche territory. It’s a shame; this could have been a tense little variation on the serial killer theme.

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The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973)
aka El Espiritu de la colmena
Article 2805 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-11-2009
Posting Date: 4-18-2009
Directed by Victor Erice
Featuring Fernando Fernan Gomez, Teresa Gimpera, Ana Torrent
Country: Spain

A young girl in a rural Spanish village in 1940 becomes obsessed with the Frankenstein Monster after seeing the movie FRANKENSTEIN. She begins to imagine that she can conjure his spirit, and he becomes a part of her fantasy life.

It’s a Spanish art film rather than any sort of a horror movie, and I won’t pretend to have a thorough understanding of everything that goes on in this one, but if you’re familiar with the James Whale version of FRANKENSTEIN, you might well find this as fascinating as I did. In particular, I like the way several incidents parallel or recall incidents in that movie. For example, there’s a scene in a schoolroom where the kids are called upon to put the missing organs back on a cardboard cutout of a man (called Don Jose), a scene which recalls the creation of the monster. The movie gets deeper and deeper into the girl’s fantasy life, and much of this is no doubt brought about by the distance that so many people put between themselves and others; outside of the two sisters, we rarely see any of the members of the family in the same frame with each other. The fantasy life reaches a crucial turning point when an escaped criminal hides out in the abandoned house where the little girl believes the spirit of the Frankenstein monster lives. It’s really an indescribable movie, and must be seen to be appreciated.

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Quintet (1979)

QUINTET (1979)
Article 2804 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-10-2009
Posting Date: 4-17-2009
Directed by Robert Altman
Featuring Paul Newman, Vittorio Gassman, Fernando Rey
Country: USA

During an ice age after the apocalypse, a drifter arrives at a city to find the residents obsessed with a game called Quintet. When his pregnant female travelling companion is killed in a bombing, he tries to track down the killer, only to find a list of people involved in a Quintet tournament who are being killed off one by one.

I’ve not heard good things about this Robert Altman movie, but I found it to have its uses. Granted, most of the things I like best are on the periphery; I like the detail of what happens to dead bodies in the city, the recurrence of the number five in various details, the use of a multi-national cast (on the cast list on IMDB, I had to go down all the way to the tenth name to find someone who came from the same country as one of the other actors, and I couldn’t help but notice that the character played by that actor is impersonated by another character in the movie who happens to be from the same country. I also have a great admiration for director Robert Altman; he doesn’t pander, and he takes risks. Unfortunately, taking risks sometimes backfires, and when one of his movies fails to connect, it’s a big problem. This one is far too long, and it has a fair amount of dead space (particularly in the first half). Conversation is often so sparse that Altman’s actors don’t get much of an opportunity to engage in the energetic improvisation of some of his other movies. The mystery isn’t very mysterious, and the movie is totally dull whenever it tries to be vaguely “meaningful”. Nevertheless, I don’t feel I came away from this one empty-handed, and I would be curious to know what the rules are for the game Quintet; though it’s clearly a fictional game, I wouldn’t put it past Altman to have actually constructed a clear set of rules for it.

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Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974)
Article 2803 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-9-2009
Posting Date: 4-16-2009
Directed by Brian De Palma
Featuring William Finley, Paul Williams, Jessica Harper
Country: USA

When his rock cantata is stolen by a legendary music impresario, a musician seeks revenge, but gets horribly mutilated in a record pressing machine. He dons a mask and haunts the rock palace constructed by the impresario, but gets drawn into a pact with the devil when he seeks to have a female singer perform his music.

Given my general dismissive attitude towards musicals, my ambivalence about the oeuvre of Brian De Palma, my dislike for THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, and the fact that I have little use for singer/composer Paul Williams, one might well be expected to conclude that I would dislike this one intensely. Well, surprise of surprises, I really liked this one for the most part. I’m not particularly taken with the music (to its credit, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW wins out in this regard), but I think De Palma keeps his most irritating habits in check with this one; the style underscores the comedy quite well, it uses split screen effectively, and the Hitchcock references don’t seem forced. In fact, the reference to PSYCHO is one of my favorite laughs in the movie. Furthermore, I like speculating on who might be the models for the various characters in the story; I suspect Swan is Phil Spector, the group The Juicy Fruits is Sha Na Na, and Winslow Leach is (at first, anyway) a take on Elton John. There’s also a general parody of the shock rock/glam rock world of Alice Cooper and David Bowie thrown in. Unlike THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, it has a story; it’s a mutated cross between the Faust story and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. And however I feel about Paul Williams’s music, he gives a hell of a performance as the narcissistic Swan. Still, I did say “for the most part” above, and I have to admit that the movie starts to unravel in the final reel; it loses its comic edge and becomes just weird. Nevertheless, I think ultimately its strengths win out, and this goes under the list of De Palma films I really like.

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Patrick (1978)

PATRICK (1978)
Article 2802 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-9-2009
Posting Date: 4-15-2009
Directed by Richard Franklin
Featuring Susan Penhaligon, Robert Helpmann, Rod Mullinar
Country: Australia

A woman, separated from her husband, gets a job nursing a young man who went into a coma after murdering his mother and her lover. She begins to suspect that he’s not entirely dead to the world… and may have developed psychic powers.

Though it has a somewhat offbeat approach and doesn’t feel like a ripoff of any other movie (calling it a cross between COMA and THE FURY just doesn’t do it justice), I found this Australian thriller curiously uninvolving. Part of the problem may be that, with a central character who spends the entire movie lying in bed and staring off in the distance, it’s a little difficult making him compelling. Most of the action falls onto the shoulders of the character of the nurse, and she spends most of the movie doing the one thing that is most likely to weary me; she spends it trying to convince people that the events she’s witnessing are real and ends up only making herself look crazy. Overall, the movie feels somewhat confused and oddly edited, but, given that the movie was cut from an original running time of 140 minutes, that’s understandable. Still, it’s hard for me to believe that this movie could have sustained that length; I started to get antsy and bored early on waiting for things to start rolling. The movie must have been popular enough, though; it inspired a sequel, albeit one that was made in a different country. On a side note, this is the second movie in a row to feature a troubled woman having bad experiences involving a typewriter.

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The Nesting (1981)

THE NESTING (1981)
Article 2801 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-7-2009
Posting Date: 4-14-2009
Directed by Armand Weston
Featuring Robin Groves, Christopher Loomis, Michael David Lally
Country: USA

A woman writer who suffers from agoraphobia moves into a country house which she discovers for the first time, despite having described it in detail in a novel she’s written. It soon becomes obvious the house is haunted and the ghosts want revenge, but upon who? And why?

Despite the fact that the movie crosses two very familiar horror storylines (the haunted house and the revenge from the grave plots), it still manages to be offbeat enough to hold my interest, and manages to have some interesting details. This is good, because the movie definitely suffers in several regards; some of the acting is quite weak, the dialogue is often clunky and some of it is quite awful, there are plot elements that are never explained (why do the ghosts go after the doctor?), and it has a big ending where none is needed. There are some nice touches, though; I love the scene where the writer is talking on the phone in the foreground while we see a central character appear in the background, listen to the conversation, and depart before she knows he’s been there. John Carradine does a good job in a role that gives him a bit more to play with than most of his other roles at the time. This was also Gloria Grahame’s last movie, and she might have been more effective if her big scene wasn’t one of the clunkiest in the movie. Despite certain nice touches, this movie has a very poor reputation (its rating on IMDB is 2.7), so let the viewer beware.

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Gibel sensatsii (1935)

GIBEL SENSATSII (1935)
aka Loss of Feeling
Article 2800 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-6-2009
Posting Date: 4-13-2009
Directed by Aleksandr Andriyevsky
Featuring Sergei Vecheslov, Vladimir Gardin, M. Volgina
Country: Soviet Union

In order to solve the problem of workers going crazy on the assembly line, an inventor creates a corps of robots to do the work.

Because my copy of this movie is in unsubtitled Russian, it was rather difficult making heads or tails out of some aspects of the plot. However, knowing that the movie was made in the Soviet Union (a country which practiced governmental control of motion pictures with the aim of spreading Soviet philosophy) and given their probable stance on machines that would take the place of the proletariat, I wasn’t really surprised at the attitude of the movie towards the robots; the key piece of information that I found out from a plot summary after watching this was that it does not take place in the Soviet Union, but in an “English-speaking capitalist land”. It’s visually inventive, and has some truly memorable scenes, including a cabaret number about robots, and a stunning scene in which a saxophonist performs a solo amidst an army of 9-foot tall robots who are waving their massive arms about. From what I can tell, it’s very well done and quite effective; the fate of the saxophonist is particularly shocking. The opening scene conjured up visions of both METROPOLIS and MODERN TIMES, and you might suspect it’s a version of R.U.R. when you see that acronym emblazoned across the robots’ chests, but it’s not based on the Capek play and has an entirely different viewpoint. Let’s hope that someone eventually gets some subtitles on this and it gets an official release; it looks to be one of the great early science fiction movies.

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The Thirteenth Hour (1927)

THE THIRTEENTH HOUR (1927)
Article 2799 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-5-2009
Posting Date: 4-12-2009
Directed by Chester M. Franklin
Featuring Lionel Barrymore, Jacqueline Gadsden, Charles Delaney
Country: USA

A murderer / burglar is on the loose who always commits his crimes in the hour after midnight. A detective is on his trail, and has the help of his trusty dog Rex.

What we have here is a basic “old dark house” setup (the house has secret passages, and the criminal has a device that can see through walls and control the doors of the house) with a heroic animal thrown into the mix. It’s pretty silly stuff, but then, most “old dark house” movies were fairly silly, and that doesn’t mean they weren’t fun. If you like Lionel Barrymore or heroic dogs, you’ll like this one just fine. It has more clutching hands than I’ve ever seen in a movie, it has a curtain that kidnaps people, and it ends with an exciting battle on a rooftop. All in all, it’s a fairly fun bit of nonsense.

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They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1963)

THEY SAVED HITLER’S BRAIN (1963)
TV-Movie
Article 2798 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-4-2009
Posting Date: 4-11-2009
Directed by David Bradley
Featuring Walter Stocker, Audrey Caire, Carlos Rivas
Country: USA

A scientist who knows the formula for an antidote to a poison gas is kidnapped. His family follows the trail of his kidnapping to the small country of Mandoras, where a gang of Nazis keep a sinister secret…

Some secret – the title gives it away. Incidentally, THE MADMEN OF MANDORAS (the source from which this movie was cobbled together) is treated as a separate entity by IMDB, so I will give it its own separate review when the time comes. I saw it once many years ago, when my attempt to buy this version of the movie resulted in getting that one. Until I rewatch it, all I can remember about it was that, outside a couple of campy moments, it was a dull movie.

This version was doctored up for television release, adding new footage about a couple of agents of the CID who are on the trail of the kidnappers of the doctor. Just why this footage was added is a mystery; maybe it was intended to add more action to the story. As it is, it only adds confusion and a sense of weirdness, as it is patently obvious that the new footage does not match the footage of MANDORAS in any way. Furthermore, I’m sure the date above cannot be trusted for this TV release version; the hairstyles and fashions in the new footage are obviously from several years later.

Still, it doesn’t really change much. Though the movie has a reputation as one of the great bad movies, it really only has a great bad title and a couple of campy scenes that entertain; the rest is snoozefest incarnate. I suspect that I’ll end up saying much the same about THE MADMEN OF MANDORAS when it comes time to tackle that one as well.

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