Month: May 2019

La Police en l’an 2000 (1910)

LA POLICE EN L’AN 2000 (1910)
aka Police of the Future
Article 3506 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-24-2011
Posting Date: 3-21-2011
Director unknown
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Science fiction comedy

IN the year 2000, policemen nab criminals with the help of their flying machine.

This one is pretty amusing. In order to nab the criminals, the police observe them from their flying craft with telescopes and binoculars, and then use long poles with hooks on the end to grab the criminals, haul them up to the flying craft, and dump them in a cell. They even do some dog-catching on the side, as they grab a stray dog eating sausages. Or maybe this was to prevent him from becoming a cannibal, considering how many dogs-into sausages movies were made in the early silent era. It looks like the real world has yet to catch up with this idea.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

L’Homme aimante (1907)

L’HOMME AIMANTE (1907)
aka The Magnetized Man
Article 3505 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-23-2011
Posting Date: 3-20-2011
Directed by Louis Feuillade
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Comic science fiction short

A man terrorized by ruffians decides to protect himself by buying some chain mail. However, the delivery boy leaves the chain mail next to a dynamo, thus magnetizing it. When he delivers it to the man, hilarity ensues.

Here’s another silent short that ended up on my “Ones that got away” list, but I was pointed in the direction of a French film collection that contained it. In fact, the collection will supply me with several days of silent shorts. This one is quite amusing, though a little obvious; the magnetized armor attracts store signs and a manhole cover. Actually, the movie gets a little risque when the man encounters some gendarmes; the rising of their swords in attraction to the armor looks quite suggestive, and the movie plays it up for all that its worth. Minor, but fun.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Werewolves on Wheels (1971)

WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS (1971)
Article 3504 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-22-2011
Posting Date: 3-19-2011
Directed by Michel Levesque
Featuring Steve Oliver, D.J. Anderson, Gene Shane
Country: USA
What it is: Bikers and beasts

When a biker gang crosses swords with a Satanic cult, they find themselves under a curse that begins killing off the members of the gang one by one.

I’ve got to be honest; with a title like this one, I certainly wasn’t expecting a good movie. I did harbor the hope that the movie would at least deliver on the one visual it seemed to promise – a shot of a gang of biker werewolves tooling around on their choppers. Not only does the movie never give us that visual, but it plays all mysterious about the werewolf angle, not giving us a good view of one until very late in the movie. And though one of the werewolves eventually does get on his motorcycle and ride around, that’s still only one, and most of the footage is too dark to appreciate. So what we mostly get is bikers doing biker stuff – terrorizing passers-by and living their hedonistic lifestyle. If this is your idea of a great time, you’re welcome to it; it’s a better biker movie than it is a horror movie, for what it’s worth. There is at least one memorable scene, though, in which the gang of bikers disappears into a dust storm; it’s the eeriest moment in the movie.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971)
Article 3503 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-21-2011
Posting Date: 3-18-2011
Directed by Dalton Trumbo
Featuring Timothy Bottoms, Kathy Fields, Marsha Hunt
Country: USA
What it is: Anti-war drama

A young soldier suffers from a shell attack that leaves him a quadriplegic who is also unable to see, hear, or speak. The doctors and the military also believe he is brain-dead, but he is aware. How can he keep sane, and will he ever be able to communicate to those around him?

Like yesterday’s movie, this is also a winner at Cannes; it won the FIPRESCI Prize as well as the Grand Prize of the Jury. It’s also interesting to compare this to TRACKS, another anti-war movie with fantasy sequences that rise from the mind of its protagonist. But whereas the other movie lost a lot of its power due to a certain self-indulgence and lack of focus, this one remains focused and powerful, especially at the end. It’s also a rare instance where the author of a novel not only writes the screenplay (with a slight assist from Luis Bunuel) but gets to direct it as well. The movie is at its weakest when it tries to make its anti-war statement explicit, but this is fortunately confined to a stray statement here or there. Most of the movie is concerned with the protagonist’s trying to hold onto his sanity by exploring his past and dwelling on fantasy repercussions of those events; incidentally, the scenes with Donald Sutherland as Jesus Christ were written by Bunuel. The most emotionally involving scenes involve the protagonist trying to communicate with those around him; two of the most powerful scenes in the movie involve breakthroughs, one in which a nurse discovers a way to wish him a “Merry Christmas”, and the other when he finally figures out how to communicate with those outside of his mind. This would prove to be Trumbo’s sole directorial credit, and it is a truly powerful movie.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Empire of Passion (1978)

EMPIRE OF PASSION (1978)
aka Ai no borei
Article 3502 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-20-2011
Posting Date: 3-17-2011
Directed by Nagisa Oshima
Featuring Tatsuya Fuji, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Takahiro Tamura
Country: Japan
What it is: Erotic ghost thriller

The wife of a rickshaw driver has an affair with a man 26 years younger than her. Her lover talks her into helping him kill her husband and dump his body in an old well. But afterwards, the fear of discovery keeps the lovers apart, and people are starting to dream about the fate of the rickshaw driver… and his ghost begins appearing.

Nagisa Shima is an important Japanese new wave director who is best known in the US for having directed the controversially explicit IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES. This movie was screened at Cannes and won Shima the Best Director prize. This was his only foray into the Japanese ghost story genre, and some of the scenes are quite spooky; I’m particularly partial to the scene where the ghost appears to his former wife with his rickshaw, offering her a ride which she initially rejects, but then changes her mind. Overall, the movie is good, but I’m afraid I came away slightly disappointed, because I was expecting something that would be a little bit more than merely good. As it is, the movie gets a too mired in the theme of the guilt that the lovers feel (there’s a chance that the ghost may be part of their overactive imaginations). It’s interesting when they do such things as try to remove the body from the well; it’s dull when they endlessly argue with each other, fall into despair, have sex, and offer to take the blame for the murder so that the other will be let free. In short, the movie spins its wheels a bit too much, and the potentially shocking ending loses its punch because it was simply too long in coming. I don’t find the movie quite as interesting as some of the other Japanese ghost stories I’ve seen.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Doc Savage The Man of Bronze (1975)

DOC SAVAGE THE MAN OF BRONZE (1975)
Article 3501 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-19-2011
Posting Date: 3-16-2011
Directed by Michael Anderson
Featuring Ron Ely, Paul Gleason, William Lucking
Country: USA
What it is: Pulp hero parody

When an attempt is made on his life and the last communication from his father is destroyed, Doc Savage takes his band of heroes (known as the Fabulous Five) on a mission to the country where his father passed away, where he hopes to unravel the secrets that resulted in his father’s death.

Back when I covered BUCKAROO BANZAI, some of the replies made passing comments to the pulp origins of that type of story, with a special mention of Doc Savage as a prototype for Buckaroo Banzai. I’ve not read any of the Doc Savage books, but having now seen the movie, I can appreciate the influence, and it’s made me quite curious to find some of the Doc Savage novels and get to know the world he lived in. Since I’ve also heard that this movie doesn’t really do him justice, that seems even more like a good idea. There are things I like here much better than in BUCKAROO BANZAI; in particular, I think the Fabulous Five are a much more well-defined group than the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Unfortunately, for this, his last film, George Pal chose a camp approach to the material, and the camp humor is obvious, intrusive, and simply not very good. As a result, the sense of adventure and excitement is muted and compromised; because the movie doesn’t take itself seriously, neither do we. Furthermore, the movie is slow and leisurely when it should be fast-moving, and a poorly conceived musical score only makes things worse. At times, the movie is just pointlessly weird; why does the one villain sleep in a giant rocking crib? There’s enough fantastic content for genre fans, with the eerie phantom snakes being only the most striking example. Still, the movie is a missed opportunity.

1 CommentLeave a comment

Le charcuterie mecanique (1895)

LE CHARCUTERIE MECANIQUE (1895)
aka The Mechanical Butcher
Article 3500 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-17-2011
Posting Date: 3-15-2011
Directed by Louis Lumiere
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Early science fiction

A pig is fed into a machine and pork products come out the other side.

One of the first names you’ll encounter in any comprehensive history of film is that of the Lumiere brothers, whose filmed snippets of everyday life were the the very first movies ever made. Most were plotless, and did little more than capture everyday events; people walking out of a factory, babies being fed, children playing, men at work…that sort of thing. I do remember reading somewhere that these films weren’t always quite as spontaneous as they seemed; the action was sometimes rehearsed to make for an interesting visual sensation. A few were obviously contrived; there’s one involving a prank with a hose that was obviously being acted, and in this one, the machine in question is obviously made up. This is the first science fiction movie, and, unless the machine counts (it’s a box with a spinning wheel in back), there’s no special effects; they put a pig in one end and pull out pork products from the other, all in one take. Oddly enough, there would be a trend of similar films, usually involving dogs being turned to sausages. This is now officially the earliest film I’ve seen for this series.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Tracks (1977)

TRACKS (1977)
Article 3499 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-15-2011
Posting Date: 3-14-2011
Directed by Henry Jaglom
Featuring Dennis Hopper, Taryn Power, Dean Stockwell
Country: USA
What it is: Postwar Vietnam drama

A soldier returns from Nam with the body of his friend and accompanies it on a train across the country to where he believes his friend will receive a hero’s welcome. However, the experience at Nam has left the soldier rather disturbed.

According to John Stanley’s CREATURE FEATURE MOVIE GUIDE STRIKES AGAIN, this movie qualifies due to the fantasy nature of the hallucinations of the soldier. Still, I’m not sure whether these sequences really take us into the realm of fantasy, though he is obviously imagining things that aren’t happening. Of course, there’s the theme of madness to contend with, but it’s obvious that the main brunt of the movie is about a man who fought in a war that no one cares about; except for the moments where the soldier brings it up himself, nobody talks about the war. The movie is about the great distance between the soldier’s perceptions about what war should be (it’s fitting that all the music in the movie is from World War II, perhaps the most romanticized war of the twentieth century) and what it turned out to be in this case.

I recall having seen a Henry Jaglom movie years ago, but I don’t remember it much. If you like bizarre snatches of conversation, he will probably appeal to you, but I do find that over the length of a movie, it does wear thin. Dennis Hopper is excellent as an extremely neurotic man having trouble adjusting, but that gets a little old after a while as well. It’s an intermittently interesting watch, but those wishing to view it for its fantastic content should go elsewhere.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Clair de Lune Espagnol (1909)

CLAIR DE LUNE ESPAGNOL (1909)
Article 3498 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-13-2011
Posting Date: 3-13-2011
Directed by Etienne Arnaud and Emile Cohl
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Early trick short

A man takes a balloon into outer space where he gets into trouble for taking potshots at the moon.

This movie does owe something to the Melies and de Chomon fantasies of the time in style and action. What really sets this one apart, though, is the fact that it features animation from an early pioneer in the field, Emile Cohl. The moon is the main animated part of the movie, with the traveler’s interactions with it being one of the highlights of the movie. The short is not complete; the first minute of the movie which features the actual voyage into space is missing, but the movie is still quite satisfying even with this segment missing. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more of Emile Cohl’s work as time goes by.

NOTE: I’ve now seen the full version of this one, and the opening is mostly life action and is concerned with events in a pub that lead up to the man being taken away by the balloon.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Starik Khottabych (1956)

STARIK KHOTTABYCH (1956)
aka Old Hottabych, The Flying Carpet
Article 3497 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-11-2011
Posting Date: 3-12-2011
Directed by Gennadi Kazansky
Featuring Nikolai Volkov, Aleksei Litvinov, Gennadi Khudyakov
Country: Soviet Union
What it is: Children’s fantasy

A child discovers an urn which contains a genie who has been sealed up for 1000 years for being obstinate. The genie wishes to serve his new master and make him happy, but his willful nature causes the boy more problems than it solves.

This being a Russian movie, it has a tendency to get a little propagandistic at times; the children in particular seem a little unnatural in their unswerving dedication to the communist cause. That aside, the story takes an interesting tack in that it is really not a story about the possibilities that the genie opens up for the boy (the usual approach). Instead, it is a fish out of water story; the genie’s detachment from the world during his confinement has left him ill-suited to understanding the modern world, and his knowledge is antiquated. To this mixture is added a genuine warmth and affection (the genie and the child truly care about each other), and when the genie’s magic causes things to go awry, he is honestly upset and confused. Nikolai Volkov’s sly performance as the genie is the glue that holds it together, and this turns out to be an interesting and entertaining children’s fantasy. One of the alternate titles is THE FLYING CARPET, but that item plays a part in only a short segment of the proceedings.

0 CommentsLeave a comment