Month: September 2019

The Virgin President (1969)

THE VIRGIN PRESIDENT (1969)
Article 3823 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-22-2012
Posting Date: 2-1-2012
Directed by Graeme Ferguson
Featuring Severn Darden, Richard Neuweiler, Andrew Duncan
Country: USA
What it is: Political satire

A cabal of political advisers decides to assassinate the president, and then to use their powers of persuasion to control his successor, the president’s son who has been locked away in a bunker since he was four.

This movie takes place in the future, thus giving it a certain amount of science fiction content. It also features a ghost and a seance, thus giving the movie some horror content as well. Overall, it’s a comic political satire in black and white and what seems to be an incredibly low budget. The most striking credit in the movie is that the writing is credited to the actors, implying that the movie is improvisational in nature, but I can’t help but notice that IMDB credits only director Graeme Ferguson and star Severn Darden in that capacity, implying that it isn’t quite as improvisational as it seems. Still, it does feel improvised at times; the opening sequence makes you feel that you’re catching the film in the process that it’s being made, and there’s at least one on-camera crack-up to be seen. It’s a pretty amusing movie, but it’s perhaps played a little too broadly for its satire to work, though I can’t help but admire that the premise that this president’s destruction of the USA ends up having a very different definition of “destruction” than is usually thought, and it ultimately becomes the punch line of the movie. Outside of Darden, the only actors I recognized from elsewhere were Paul Benedict and Peter Boyle. Director Ferguson mostly works in the documentary field with an emphasis on movies about space exploration.

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Sette scialli di seta gialla (1972)

SETTE SCIALLI DI SETA GIALLA (1972)
aka Crimes of the Black Cat
Article 3822 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-21-2012
Posting Date: 1-31-2012
Directed by Sergio Pastore
Featuring Anthony Steffen, Sylva Koscina, Giovanna Lenzi
Country: Italy
What it is: Giallo

A murderer is killing models in Copenhagen using a black cat whose claws have been dipped in curare. A man overhears a conversation which may reveal the murderer… but he is a blind pianist who can’t visually identify the killer.

I hear there’s a version of this one out there with English subtitles, but that’s not the one I ended up with; my copy is in Italian with no subtitles. Giallo is one of those genres that is very difficult to follow under such circumstances, though a few plot descriptions here and there did give me an inkling of what was going on. One says the plot is largely copied from BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, so watching that one again may help. Based on what I could follow, this is probably a fairly decent giallo, though its stylistic touches are the type I find more irritating than enticing – specifically, its high-speed multiple zooms during the murder sequences. In terms of the gore content, this is for the most part one of the milder examples from the genre, but it’s mostly to put you off your guard; there’s a murder near the end that’s in the running for one of the most gruesome ever committed to celluloid. My favorite scene has the blind pianist drawn into a treacherous environment where his blindness may be the death of him.

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A Boy and His Dog (1975)

A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975)
Article 3821 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-20-2012
Posting Date: 1-30-2012
Directed by L.Q. Jones
Featuring Don Johnson, Susanne Benton, Jason Robards
Country: USA
What it is: Science fiction satire

It’s after the apocalypse. A young man roams the wasteland with his telepathic dog; he finds food for the dog, and the dog finds girls for him. However, there’s an underground society that has been watching the boy who they want for their own purposes… and they send out a girl as bait to lead him into a trap.

I remember recently looking through my cable movie schedule, and this movie was slated to show at one of the family-oriented channels, a circumstance I attribute to the fact that title of the movie makes it sound like something other than it is. Out of curiosity, I set it up to record, and sure enough, when the time came for it to run, another movie had been substituted in its place. It looks like someone took the trouble to double-check the movie before showing it.

The title is one of the most prominent jokes in the Harlan Ellison story on which this movie is based; the story itself is the antithesis of wholesome, what with its incessant foul language and its subject matter in which the main character is something of a serial rapist (as is practically every other male roaming the wasteland). If anything, the movie cleans up the story a bit by toning down the language, though it remains true enough to its source story that it still nets an ‘R’ rating. This is the third time I’ve seen this one; I was familiar with the story long before I ever saw the movie version. Perhaps the most striking changes from the story occur when the drifter enters the underground civilization; some of the changes are really bizarre, such as having all the residents wear clown-like makeup on their faces, and some of the changes make the movie more conventional than the story; in the movie, I get the impression that anyone in the drifter’s place would want to escape the underground world, whereas in the story, I get the impression that the decision was shaped much more by his own character, which I found more interesting. Still, it is a striking movie in many regards, and it’s the last of the handful of movie L.Q. Jones co-produced with Alvy Moore, who here also plays a doctor in the underground world. My favorite performance is probably Tim McIntire, who provides the voice for the wise-cracking dog. Reportedly, the movie is slated for remake this year.

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The Starlost: The Beginning (1980)

THE STARLOST: THE BEGINNING (1980)
TV-Movie made up of episodes from “The Starlost”
Article 3820 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-19-2012
Posting Date: 1-29-2012
Directed by Harvey Hart
Featuring Keir Dullea, Robin Ward, Gay Rowan
Country: Canada
What it is: Episodes from a low-budget SF series

A rebel from an agrarian community discovers that his world is one of many aboard a giant space ark.. and the ark is in danger.

Despite the title, this marks the end for me… which is to say, it’s the last time I’ll be covering a movie cobbled together from episodes of the TV series “The Starlost”. I’ve been pretty harsh on this series in my other reviews, but this one has the pilot episode, “Voyage of Discovery”, which showed a bit of promise. The other episode pillaged for this was “The Goddess Calabra” which also seems to be the one of the better episodes, but you can already see the deterioration of the main characters into nonentities and the turgid pace that would plague most of the series. You know, it’s a shame this show never worked out; the central concept would have made for a decent series had the cheapness and lack of care in the production not crippled it. Still, of all of the movies I’ve seen edited from the series, this is the one that most gives me a sense of what it could have been. Well, maybe someday someone will take this idea and run with it.

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Sandokan, la tigre de Mompracem (1963)

SANDOKAN, LA TIGRE DE MOMPRACEM (1963)
aka Sandokan the Great
Article 3819 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-18-2012
Posting Date: 1-28-2012
Directed by Umberto Lenzi
Featuring Steve Reeves, Genevieve Grad, Andrea Bosic
Country: Italy / France / Spain
What it is: Action adventure

A British Lord plots to capture a Malaysian pirate/rebel who is intent on freeing his island from British rule. He captures the pirate’s father in a hope of catching the pirate in a trap. Can the pirate escape the trap, save his father and free his people?

Once again I find myself taking issue with the classification of a movie as belonging to the fantastic genres when it really doesn’t. The only reasons I can think this one might qualify is the presence of Steve Reeves and his association with the sword-and-sandal genre, and the appearance of headhunters at one point of the proceedings; to my mind, neither of these are reasons enough. Steve Reeves’s character has no super-strength, so it can’t qualify in that regard.

Nevertheless, taken on its own terms, this is a fairly decent action/adventure flick. The presence of Reeves usually means that the movie will be made with more care and skill than others of its ilk, and this one is no exception. Even the dubbing is done with a lot more care, and that always makes a movie seem classier. All in all, it’s entertaining and well done; however, from a genre perspective, it’s too marginal.

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Murder at 45 R.P.M. (1960)

MURDER AT 45 R.P.M. (1960)
aka Meurtre en 45 tours
Article 3818 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-17-2012
Posting Date: 1-27-2012
Directed by Etienne Perier
Featuring Danielle Darrieux, Michel Auclair, Jean Servais
Country: France
What it is: Suspense thriller with twists

A songstress in an unhappy marriage with a songwriter is secretly in love with her pianist. When the songwriter dies in an automobile accident, the songstress and the pianist suspect each other of having murdered him. But could it be possible that he’s not really dead…?

The horror content here is that the plot touches at one point on the possibility that the songwriter may have returned from the dead, but this touch is pretty light, and there’s really nothing else here to to make this one anything more than marginalia as far as the this project is concerned. I found the movie passable. What I liked best is how the movie plays with your expectations by the presence of a single scene of a man trying to hitch a ride shortly before the accident occurs; I couldn’t help but notice how this scene really sets up a situation that keeps you wondering about the truth of the situation until it is finally resolved at the end of the movie. Still, one problem that this movie has is that it all has to be explained sooner or later, and the explanation here starts falling apart the minute you give it any serious thought. Still, I think it worked well enough as an okay thriller.

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Murder Motel (1975)

MURDER MOTEL (1975)
TV Episode of British TV series “Thriller”
Article 3817 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-16-2012
Posting Date: 1-26-2012
Directed by Robyn Millan, Ralph Bates, Edward Judd
Country: UK
What it is: Suspense thriller

When her boyfriend mysteriously disappears after being suspected of embezzling, a woman traces him to a hotel, where she attempts to discover his fate. What she doesn’t know is that the boyfriend has been killed by the hotel staff, who are part of a ring of assassins for hire.

Though it is possible to argue that paid assassins could be lumped in with serial killers, that’s a pretty big stretch for me in terms of horror content, and, truth be told, I don’t think this one qualifies as horror. It’s also not one of the better episodes of the TV series in question; it starts out all right, but it gets a little repetitive once you’ve established the premise, and I didn’t care for the nervous, fidgety performance of Robyn Millan as the heroine of the piece. There’s a few good moments here and there, but that’s not enough to really redeem this one.

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Moon of the Wolf (1972)

MOON OF THE WOLF (1972)
TV-Movie
Article 3816 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-15-2012
Posting Date: 1-25-2012
Directed by Daniel Petrie
Featuring David Janssen, Bradford Dillman, Barbara Rush
Country: USA
What it is: Made-for-TV lycanthropy

When a young girl is found dead in the bayou, the belief is that wild dogs were responsible. However, an autopsy reveals that the killer was no wolf. And when more deaths occur, it becomes apparent that the killer has superhuman strength. And why does a dying old man keep referring to a loup-garou?

I really didn’t watch many of the made-for-TV horror movies when I was a kid in the seventies, but this is one I caught… at least for a while, until I lost interest in it. I’d been disappointed because the ads made it look like a horror movie when it was really some sort of a mystery, and for many years, I carried the belief that this was one of those movies which pretended to have fantastic content and didn’t. The problem was that I didn’t wait long enough, and having watched it now, I realize that I was dead wrong; yes, the first half plays more like a mystery, but ultimately it doesn’t cop out of the horror genre. Of course, as a kid, I expected the monsters to be trotted out early and often; as an adult, I’m more patient, and I found myself enjoying the movie more than I did as a kid, at least partially because the script is reasonably well-written and it’s well acted. In fact, it’s the horror content that is the most disappointing thing here; the werewolf makeup is not very impressive, and the climax is fairly unmemorable. For me, the most disappointing thing was the way it trots out the “loup-garou” word and plays all mysterious about it before finally explaining what it stands for; I knew what it stood for immediately and was annoyed that no one else in the movie knew, but that may be an individual reaction. All in all, it was watchable enough, but merely okay.

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Kuroneko (1968)

KURONEKO (1968)
aka Yabu no naka no kuroneko, Black Cat
Article 3815 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-14-2012
Posting Date: 1-24-2012
Directed by Kaneto Shindo
Featuring Kichiemon Nakamura, Nobuko Otowa, Kiwako Taichi
Country: Japan
What it is: Ghosts and samurais

A man, taken away to fight in the wars, becomes a samurai after defeating a terrible enemy. He is sent on a mission to destroy monsters who are killing and drinking the blood of samurai warriors. He discovers the monsters are ghosts of his wife and mother, who have sworn to drink the blood of all samurais.

I’ve seen enough of these type of Japanese horror movies that they don’t seem quite as novel as they used to be for me. As a result, this one didn’t startle me quite as much as it might have done had I seen it earlier. Nevertheless, I think it’s a very solid movie, and it anchors itself in fascinating dramatic problem in which the samurai must choose between the honor of his profession and his love for his family, while the ghosts also have the same issue, with a conflict between their oath to the evil gods and their love for their son/husband. This tragic air is what gives the movie its extra power, and, like several other Japanese horror movies of this type, it has some wonderful imagery. This one is recommended.

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Out of the Devil’s Reach (1959)

OUT OF THE DEVIL’S REACH (1959)
aka Kam cert nemuze, Where the Devil Cannot Go
Article 3814 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-13-2012
Posting Date: 1-23-2012
Directed by Zdenek Podskalsky
Featuring Miroslav Hornicek, Jana Hlavacova, Vlastimil Brodsky
Country: Czechoslovakia
What it is: Faustian romantic comedy

A physician suffering from ennui finds himself followed by a woman who may be an incarnation of Mephistopheles and who wants his soul.

You know, there are some movies where it’s simply maddening to try to avoid plot spoilers, especially when those spoilers play a major role in defining the fantastic content of a movie, which is one of the main things I hope to touch upon in these reviews. Such is the case here, but I’m going to try to discuss it without letting the cat out of the bag in its entirety. Suffice it to say that the movie’s initial premise concerning a man tempted to sell his soul to the devil is a smokescreen for what is really going on. Still, there is a bit of spookiness to a couple of scenes, and there’s just a touch of ambiguity in the reappearance of a black cat at certain times in the story. Still, the movie is primarily a comedy, and a pretty strange one at that; it’s amusing enough, but will leave your head swimming at times. Outside of the Faustian parallels, the only other content that could be called even the least bit fantastic is that it flirts just a little bit with the theme of madness, though this flirtation never really ventures into real horror territory. This one is odd, but not uninteresting, and it’s a nice change of pace from what I’ve been watching recently.

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