Month: November 2018

La fille de Dracula (1972)

LA FILLE DE DRACULA (1972)
aka Daughter of Dracula
Article 2963 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-18-2009
Posting Date: 9-24-2009
Directed by Jesus Franco
Featuring Britt Nichols, Anne Libert, Alberto Dalbes
Country: France / Portugal

A woman learns that she is a descendant of the Karnsteins. She opens up a crypt and unleashes Dracula, who begins terrorizing the area. She turns into a vampire as well, and engages in lesbian sex. Police investigate.

Well, it’s a damn sight better than yesterday’s movie, I’ll give it that much. Still, it looks like your typical Jesus Franco movie to me. The two most interesting things I found about this one is that it comes up with an alternative way to dispatch of vampires, and Franco has a more prominent acting role in this one than is his wont. Other than that, I found little to hold my interest here, and the fact that the English subtitles were so dinky on my print just made it a bit annoying. I’m beginning to suspect that I’ll never understand why Franco advocates find his work so brilliant, and that may well be my loss.

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Caged Terror (1973)

CAGED TERROR (1973)
aka Golden Apples of the Sun
Article 2962 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-17-2009
Posting Date: 9-23-2009
Directed by Barrie McLean and Kristen Weingartner
Featuring Elizabeth Suzuki, Percy Harkness, Leon Morenzie
Country: Canada

A man and a woman go out to the forest. They encounter strangers. Things happen.

Here is the tagline of this movie – “Behind these bars lies an unbridled fury. A tale of madness, infidelity and revenge.” Sounds like a thriller, right? In truth, what we have here is one of the most annoying art movies I’ve seen in years, full of annoying symbolism (the strangers are nice to rabbits while the man with the woman kills one) and pretentious dialogue (about fish and pomegranates). One review I read of this one says that most of the movie seems to consist of people walking very slowly in the distance, and that’s fairly accurate. The fantastic content consists of the strangers terrorizing the couple, and most descriptions of the movie focus on this event, but this part of the movie doesn’t even begin happening until it is eighty percent over. Potential viewers should be warned that there’s a whole lot of nothing going on in this one, and that nothing is pretty pretentious.

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The Billion Dollar Threat (1979)

THE BILLION DOLLAR THREAT (1979)
TV-Movie
Article 2961 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-16-2009
Posting Date: 9-22-2009
Directed by Barry Shear
Featuring Dale Robinette, Ralph Bellamy, Keenan Wynn
Country: USA

A government agent is sent to Utah to investigate reports of UFOs.

Apparently, the continued financial success of the James Bond franchise in the late seventies inspired some attempts to resurrect the spy genre for TV; this pilot was one of those attempts. With its rating of 3.9 on IMDB, I can only conclude that it is not a popular favorite, but I have to say that it does about as good a job as I’d expect a TV-Movie/series pilot in emulating a James Bond movie. Perhaps the problem is that it emulates it a little too well; the movie never takes on a life of its own and remains at all times an example of ersatz low-budget Bond. Still, I found it enjoyable enough in this regard, and the cast (which includes Ralph Bellamy, Keenan Wynn and Patrick Macnee) do help to make it fun. Furthermore, some of the location footage is quite beautiful. Take it for what it is, and you could do worse.

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Blood Relatives (1978)

BLOOD RELATIVES (1978)
aka Les liens de sang
Article 2960 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-15-2009
Posting Date: 9-21-2009
Directed by Claude Chabrol
Featuring Donald Sutherland, Aude Landry, Lisa Langlois
Country: Canada / France

When a young woman is murdered in an alley, her cousin, the only person who witnessed the crime, turns up at the police station bloody from knife wounds. She offers a description of the assailant, but then changes her story by accusing her own brother of the crime. The detective on the case hopes to learn the truth of the matter by reading the diary of the murdered girl… if he can find it.

This is not a horror movie; its horror content is mostly due to the savage murder that starts the plot rolling. The biggest clue to what this movie was going to be like comes early on, when the credits mention that it is based on a novel by Ed McBain, a mystery writer who specializes in police procedurals. And indeed, that’s what it is; we follow the investigation of the crime as the police finger several suspects, hunt down clues, interview people, and try to piece the puzzle together. The surrounding details and the final solution turn out to be very dark indeed; I suspect that the movie’s R rating is more for the nature of the plot elements (which include incest and child molestation) than for the actual murder details, which are nowhere near as bloody as they could have been. I was able to figure out who the murderer was going to be, but that didn’t destroy my pleasure with the movie, because it gave me a chance afterward to explore the various plot details and figure out why certain events happened when they did; for one thing, you’ll figure out exactly why the witness changed her story when she did. The cast is quite good, though Donald Pleasence is particularly memorable in a cameo as one of the suspects.

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Carol for Another Christmas (1964)

CAROL FOR ANOTHER CHRISTMAS (1964)
TV-Movie
Article 2959 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-14-2009
Posting Date: 9-20-2009
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Featuring Sterling Hayden, Ben Gazzara, Steve Lawrence
Country: USA

A wealthy isolationist is bitter over the loss of his son in the war, and has chosen to politically and personally detach himself from the world. However, on Christmas Eve, he is visited by three ghosts that seek to have him re-explore his life.

Rod Serling was a great writer. He was also given to preachiness, which makes some of his work a little difficult to sit through. In this, his updated revamp of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”, he’s got a message, and those who don’t want to hear what he has to say will find this one tough going. However, for me, he’s a good enough writer that I’m willing to listen to what he has to say, especially when the vehicle he uses to say it is impeccably directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and features an impressive cast that features Sterling Hayden, Eva Marie Saint, Ben Gazzara, Steve Lawrence, Pat Hingle and Britt Ekland, with special kudos to Robert Shaw and Peter Sellers in their respective roles. The message is quite relevant to the modern world; in the age of airplanes, radio, satellites and nuclear war, we can no longer embrace a policy of isolationism (either politically or as an individual) and hope to survive, and Serling argues the point very well through his various mouthpieces. It’s talky, all right, but the talk is intelligent and engaging, and the performances add to enjoyment here. And, lest we forget, it is relevant to Christmas as well, as it is the time for “goodwill to all men”. This is one of the better “loose” adaptations of the Dickens story out there.

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Drums of the Congo (1942)

DRUMS OF THE CONGO (1942)
Article 2958 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-13-2009
Posting Date: 9-19-2009
Directed by Christy Cabanne
Featuring Ona Munson, Stuart Erwin, Peggy Moran
Country: USA

An American agent is sent to Africa to find the location of a newly-discovered radioactive mineral. Unfortunately, foreign spies are also after the mineral.

What happens when you cross the Gizmo Maguffin plot with the Double-Stuffed Safari-O? If your answer was “not a hell of a lot”, you’d be right. About the only novelty in this forgettable jungle adventure is that the search for a woman’s missing father is just a ruse by the spies; other than that, it’s the same old safari adventure, chock-full of story-stopping stock footage. The cast also features Turhan Bey (as a quick-to-die villain) and Dorothy Dandridge.

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Alfalfa’s Aunt (1939)

ALFALFA’S AUNT (1939)
Short
Article 2957 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-12-2009
Posting Date: 9-17-2009
Directed by George Sidney
Featuring Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer, Marie Blake, Barbara Bedford
Country: USA

Alfalfa believes his aunt means to murder him when he reads a paper she dropped, unaware that it is a page from a mystery novel she is writing. He calls in the gang to help scare her out of the house.

I’m not a big fan of the Our Gang/Little Rascals series, probably because I’m not big on cute kid antics. Still, I will give this short some credit; at only ten minutes, it never runs the risk of being boring. It also doesn’t leave time for more than a handful of scare-the-aunt gags, as most of the running time is dedicated to setting up the plot. For those who want to keep the kids straight in their minds, Alfalfa is the one with the rogue cowlick. Passable and painless.

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The Fear Chamber (1968)

THE FEAR CHAMBER (1968)
Article 2956 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-11-2009
Posting Date: 9-17-2009
Directed by Jack Hill and Juan Ibanez
Featuring Boris Karloff, Julissa, Carlos East
Country: Mexico / USA

A scientist discovers a living rock in the depths of the earth, and connects it to computers in the hopes of discovering its secrets. However, in order to keep it alive, it has to be fed with a substance that is only produced in the bodies of people in mortal terror. Eventually the scientist ends the experiment, but two of his assistants decide to continue…

This is the last of the four Mexican films Boris Karloff made at the end of his life that I’ve covered for this series. If anything, I’ve been a little too nice to these awful movies, and I’ll probably be so with even this one, which is the one I loathe the most. Visually, it’s the most interesting; in fact, it’s almost arty at times. I also like the concept of scientists attempting to converse with an intelligent rock. Nevertheless, beneath the novel concept, we have that basic concept of scientists driven to commit atrocities in the pursuit of knowledge. Furthermore, the idea that people (usually beautiful young women in various states of undress) must be nearly frightened to death to produce a substance to feed the rock is extremely contrived, and that idea contributes to the sadistic mean-spiritedness of the movie that renders it rather repellent; it’s this joyless nastiness that makes me loathe the movie. In short, this movie has none of the charm I would associate with either Boris Karloff movies or Mexican horror movies. Karloff does what he can, but it’s not enough.

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Face of Terror (1962)

FACE OF TERROR (1962)
aka La cara del terror
Article 2955 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-10-2009
Posting Date: 9-16-2009
Directed by Isidoro M. Ferry and William J. Hole Jr
Featuring Lisa Gaye, Fernando Rey, Virgilio Teixeira
Country: Spain

A scientist tests a new method of plastic surgery on a horribly scarred young woman. However, he is unaware that the woman is an escapee from a mental institute…

In some ways, I really admire this movie. It has one of the greatest Spanish actors in the role of the mad scientist (Fernando Rey), and the character is given more rounding and fullness than it might have gotten otherwise. This greater attention to character includes the woman escapee as well; once she’s had the operation, she just doesn’t go out and begin killing people, but sets out initially to live a normal life. Still, despite these touches, the story is utterly humdrum and predictable, and at least one scene is extremely bad; really, if you were in the midst of blackmailing an escapee from a mental institute, would you force open a pair of elevator doors to stare down the open shaft with the escapee right behind you? The dubbing is merely passable for the most part (it sounds like everyone is in an echo chamber), though the dubbing for Rey is quite good; I wonder if he dubbed himself here.

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Slaughter (1976)

SLAUGHTER (1976)
aka Dogs
Article 2954 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-9-2009
Posting Date: 9-15-2009
Directed by Burt Brinckerhoff
Featuring David McCallum, Sandra McCabe, George Wyner
Country: USA

In a small California college town that is the home of a secret government experiment, dogs start banding together to kill people.

Sometimes you can just tell, can’t you? Though this is not a TV-Movie (it’s far too bloody for that), there was something about this the one (the style of photography, the pacing, the choice of music, etc.) that just screamed TV-Movie, and a quick check on Burt Brinckerhoff’s oeuvre shows only a tiny handful of feature films and a huge amount of TV work. There’s one or two chills here, but the rest is a cheesy concoction made of one part NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, one part FROGS, and a bit of JAWS (and I’m willing to bet that somewhere along the line somebody was thinking of calling it PAWS). No explanation is ever given for the dogs acting this way, though I’m sure the film-makers assumed you would tie it to the secret government project about which we know nothing. Two things in particular stood out on the negative side of things here; Sandra McCabe has one of the worst screams in cinema history (it sounds like she’s auditioning badly for an opera), and the ending (which implies that another group of pets will also start going on the rampage) made me snicker rather than shudder. This one makes THE PACK look pretty good.

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