Month: December 2019

Adventures of William Tell (1898)

ADVENTURES OF WILLIAM TELL (1898)
aka Guillaume Tell et le clown
Article 4020 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-1-2012
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Comic trick short

A clown keeps trying to build a statue of William Tell only to have it come to life and assault him.

Woe be it to anyone who only reads the English title and expects this one minute short film to have anything to do with the story of William Tell. The French title (which translates as WILLIAM TELL AND THE CLOWN) is much more accurate. The short is fairly amusing, and there’s a lesson to be learned – Never send a clown to do the work of a sculptor. In fact, I would be hard pressed to think of a profession in which it would be appropriate to hire a clown, except, of course, if you’re looking to hire a clown in the first place.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Easy Street (1917)

EASY STREET (1917)
Short
Article 4019 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-31-2012
Directed by Charles Chaplin
Featuring Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell
Country: USA
What it is: Comic short

When the little tramp falls for a beautiful organist at a mission, he reforms and gets a job as a cop. However, his first beat takes him into an encounter with an enormous and nearly indestructible bully.

I’ve only had the opportunity to cover two other Charlie Chaplin movies for this series, and one (MONSIEUR VERDOUX) could hardly be called representative, while the other (HIS PREHISTORIC PAST) caught him at his weakest. This one is much more representative, and does capture him with his strengths intact. However, the fantastic content is a little ambiguous; the Don Willis guide talks about a mad scientist’s formula making Chaplin super strong, but I think the Walt Lee guide, which merely says that Chaplin is injected with a hypo that makes him hyperactive, is much closer to the truth. The impression I got from watching the movie is that the man with the hypo is not a mad scientist, but some sort of drug addict, which fits the setting and the action much better. Nevertheless, this element only plays into the story momentarily near the end; one could also make the argument that the movie qualifies by the fact that the nearly indestructible bully has superpowers, as he can resist repeated hits on the head with truncheons, and is powerful enough to break out of handcuffs. Still, that’s more in line with the idea of comic exaggeration. Much of the movie is slapstick antics, but you notice Chaplin’s talent much more in the quieter, less frantic scenes. All in all, this was a lot of fun.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Las ratas no duermen de noche (1973)

LAS RATAS NO DUERMEN DE NOCHE (1973)
aka Crimson
Article 4018 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-30-2012
Directed by Juan Fortuny
Featuring Paul Naschy, Silvia Solar, Olivier Mathot
Country: Spain / France
What it is: Scrambled brains movie

When a gangster is shot in the head during a heist, his henchmen take him to a brain specialist to fix him up. The specialist can’t help him without a brain transplant, and the henchmen decide to use the brain of the gangster’s arch enemy, another gangster known as the Sadist. However, which brain will prove the more powerful…?

Paul Naschy films usually have a classic horror point of reference to them, and this one digs into one of the lesser subgenres of the thirties and forties in which two minds end up occupying the same body, with a resulting personality clash; BLACK FRIDAY is perhaps the most famous of these movies. Usually these movies provide a plumb acting role for one actor, which is whoever is playing the recipient of the brain transplant, and, of course, it’s Naschy here. Given Naschy’s penchant for roles in which he plays both the hero and the villain, you’d think this one would give him another opportunity in that regard. However, since he’s a gangster to begin with, it’s hardly that big a change of personality for him to get another gangster’s brain. Furthermore, the script simply doesn’t give him any leeway to produce a great performance; we barely get to know him before he’s shot, and he spends almost the entire first half of the movie in a coma. In fact, he ends up with less screen time than most of the other major characters, so the acting challenges are pretty slim for him here. Granted, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell with the English language version I saw; the dubbing is particularly bad. It’s not so much the lip-syncing that is horrendous; it’s the choice of character voices that is badly done, with too many of the criminals sounding like whiny, scared children. The movie’s biggest problem, though, is simply that it takes forever to get going; the movie is tiresomely talky until things start moving in the last twenty minutes, and the talk is obvious and uninteresting. No, this is not one of Naschy’s better efforts.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Death Ray 2000 (1981)

DEATH RAY 2000 (1981)
aka T.R. Sloane
TV-Movie
Article 4017 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-29-2012
Directed by Lee H. Katzin
Featuring Robert Logan, Dan O’Herlihy, Penelope Windust
Country: USA
What it is: Bond TV show pilot, Quinn Martin style

When a super-dehydrator is stolen (a virtual death ray), a special agent named T.R. Sloane is called out to find the culprit.

There was a resurgence of popularity in the James Bond movies in the late seventies/early eighties, resulting in an assortment of rip-offs. This pilot for the TV series “A Man Called Sloane” is one of them, though a few changes were made for the TV series; the rather uninteresting Robert Logan was replaced by Robert Conrad (who, having played James West in “The Wild, Wild West”, already had his James Bond imitation credentials in order), and the henchman villain of this movie (Ji-Tu Cumbuka) would be resurrected as one of the good guys, both of which probably helped the series, albeit not enough to make the series last for more than half a season. The movie pilot itself isn’t particularly impressive; in fact, much of it feels silly and forced. Dan O’Herlihy probably steals the movie performance-wise, and Clive Revill and Cumbuka aren’t bad as the villains, but the hero is dull and the pacing is poor. All in all, this one is pretty forgettable.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Something Evil (1972)

SOMETHING EVIL (1972)
TV-Movie
Article 4016 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-28-2012
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Featuring Sandy Dennis, Darren McGavin, Ralph Bellamy
Country: USA
What it is: House with a malignant force

A couple buys and moves into a country farmhouse, only to discover there’s a demonic presence there.

A house with a malignant evil in it is hardly an original idea, and the weakest thing about this movie is the script, which dabbles in cliches and occasional fits of silliness; I find it hard to take seriously either the crying jar of goo or the demon eyes in the window. Still, the movie redeems itself with a solid cast (which also includes Johnny Whitaker, Jeff Corey and Bruno Ve Sota), creative direction from Steven Spielberg, and some effective camerawork; I particular like how the climax of the movie is handled. What I enjoyed most about the movie was seeing Spielberg honing his craft; I like the way he handles the party and crowd scenes and little touches like the conversation between the wife and her friend’s son in which we see their expressions through the chain lock on a door. It isn’t one of Spielberg’s great movies, by any means, but it probably would have been somewhat weaker in someone else’s hands. And there is something genuinely upsetting about seeing the likable family start to come apart when the evil sets in.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Boogeyman II (1983)

BOOGEYMAN II (1983)
Article 4015 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-27-2012
Directed by Bruce Starr and Ulli Lommel
Featuring Suzanna Love, Ulli Lommel, Shannah Hall
Country: USA
What it is: Sequel

A woman who suffered possession by an evil mirror goes to stay with a friend in Hollywood who is married to a movie director. When she tells her story, the movie director is urged by various people to make a movie about it. But a shard of the mirror still exists…. and it doesn’t want a movie made about it.

To start with, I’m going to point out that a good fifty percent of this movie consists of footage from the original THE BOOGEYMAN. When this movie popped up on my list, I quickly found out that a DVD release of this movie was not to be trusted; apparently, it featured new footage of Ulli Lommel telling the police about the events in the first two movies, cuts twenty minutes of the new footage added for this sequel, and substitutes even more footage from the original movie. I therefore held off on trying to net the DVD version of this one, and opted for one of the original VHS recordings of the movie. Yet, I can’t help but feel a bit nagged by the sense that fighting for the integrity of seeing the original version of this sequel seemed something of a silly cause for me, especially as I have little love for the movie to which it is a sequel. Still, though I think this sequel comes across as cynically motivated, the DVD re-edit seems even more cynical.

Now, to the movie. If it has any advantage over the original movie, it’s that it’s a bit more coherent. But that’s only because the mirror seems to have an agenda in this one, where in the original, it just killed anyone around. On the other hand, the murders are sillier and even more poorly staged than in the original, the script is agonizingly bad, and the acting is phoned in; I’m not surprised that the writer was given no credit. I gave Ulli Lommel a co-directing credit above because IMDB did (with the comment that he was uncredited), though I don’t know if it was solely for the fact that half of the movie is from the original, which he did direct. The credited director is Bruce Starr, and it’s is sole directorial credit, and I assume that he’s responsible for the dreariness of the new scenes.

I’d dismiss the movie utterly if it weren’t for one thing; I’m a little intrigued that Lommel is playing a film director in this one who is ambivalent about selling out to do a horror film. If the trivia section in IMDB is true, Lommel could have had a bigger budget for this movie, but he didn’t want to work for a bigger studio and wanted to make it as an independent film, hence the re-used footage and the cost cutting. For some reason, this leaves me wondering just how much Lommel’s character was a reflection of what he was really thinking and feeling at the time. It’s all speculation, of course, but for me, that was easily the most interesting element in this otherwise worthless sequel.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Touch Me Not (1974)

TOUCH ME NOT (1974)
aka The Hunted
Article 4014 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-26-2012
Directed by Douglas Fithian
Featuring Lee Remick, Michael Hinz, Ivan Desny
Country: UK / Spain / West Germany / France
What it is: Thriller

Industrial spies send an agent to romance the secretary of an oil magnate while tapping his phone lines. The spy is not above killing to cover his tracks, and when the secretary discovers the truth…

So what does a movie from UK / Spain /West Germany / France look like? Well, if this one is any indication, it looks roughly like one that came from Canada. In fact, given some of the misinformation I’ve encountered with this one, I’m wondering if we’ve got a case of mistaken identity here. My source for this title (John Stanley’s CREATURE FEATURES MOVIE GUIDE STRIKES AGAIN) describes it as a version of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. However, beyond the fact that we have someone being stalked by someone else, there is simply no connection between the two movies. In fact, if it weren’t for a left-field plot twist which reveals that one of the characters involved isn’t playing with a full deck (thus throwing a bit of madness into the mix), there wouldn’t be anything here to qualify this one even marginally as genre. As it is, the first two thirds of the movie is dull industrial espionage, mostly highlighted by an interesting performance by Michael Hinz as the savvy industrial spy pretending to be an awkward suitor. The stalking sequence doesn’t come into play until the final third of the movie, and that part of the movie isn’t particularly engaging, either, thanks mostly to dull direction. And I found the twist, as unexpected as it was, actually had the effect of reducing the little suspense there already was. No, there’s little to recommend here.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Reno and the Doc (1984)

RENO AND THE DOC (1984)
TV-Movie
Article 4013 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-25-2012
Directed by Charles Dennis
Featuring Kenneth Welsh, Henry Ramer, Linda Griffiths
Country: Canada
What it is: Comedy

A con man hooks up with a solitary middle-aged country man who happens to be an excellent skier. He talks the man into becoming a champion skiing competitor.

The fantastic content is that the con man and the country skier have a psychic bond somewhat similar to that of the Corsican brothers. The reason I didn’t mention that detail in the plot description is that, despite the fact that it does play a bit of a role in the story that follows, it nevertheless remains less of a “plot driver” and more of an “odd touch”. There’s a few other odd touches as well, such as a woman who suffers from oral dyslexia and the skier’s ongoing feud with a group of eccentrics known as the Kukamungas. These odd touches might have gone a ways towards jazzing up the rather tired story line of an unhappy loner being pulled out of his comfort zone so he can eventually gain confidence and self-reliance. Unfortunately, the direction, the acting, the score, the editing, etc. all seem to be in the hands of people who seem only interested in pulling in the paycheck; the movie is so lacking in inspiration and spirit that it seems to evaporate right in front of your eyes. As a result, despite the feel-good ending of it all, I emerged feeling more vaguely depressed than anything else. The odd touches simply can’t redeem a movie this spiritless.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Mr. Freedom (1969)

MR. FREEDOM (1969)
Article 4012 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-23-2012
Directed by William Klein
Featuring Delphine Seyrig, John Abbey, Donald Pleasence
Country: France
What it is: Superhero satire

An American superhero is sent to France to save the country from communism, and he uses drastic means to achieve his goal.

Though it uses a superhero motif, this movie is less a parody of the superhero genre than it is a counter-cultural satire on the United States and its policies during the era of the Vietnam War. Mr. Freedom himself is a parody of the extremist right-wing mindset. Some of the satire is still relevant; after all, extremism isn’t restricted to any particular era of history. My problem with the movie is that once you see where it’s coming from, it’s all a little too obvious, and I’m afraid that the humor that is supposed to redeem it falls pretty flat for me. And though Klein is a creative director (I’m intrigued, for example, by the way he handles Mr. Freedom’s encounter with a window-washer), without the laughs the movie becomes loud, busy, distracting and overbearing. It’s also one of those movies that is so focused on its political viewpoint that it never conjures up a single real, living, breathing character amid the caricatures. I’m afraid I found this one a disappointment.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Psi Factor (1980)

PSI FACTOR (1980)
Article 4011 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-23-2012
Directed by Bryan Trizers
Featuring Peter Mark Richman, Gretchen Corbett, Tom Martin
Country: USA
What it is: Alien conspiracy thriller

When a civilian scientist attached to a military space probe project stumbles across evidence of extraterrestrial life, he finds himself on the run from those who want to cover up the discovery… as well as from the aliens themselves.

The minute I saw the names Sandler and Emenegger in the opening credits, I knew three things. 1) Steven Spielberg’s sister was going to be involved as well in some capacity (she’s an associate producer); 2) I could probably cobble together an equivalent production budget by raiding a line of gumball machines, and 3) despite the lack of means to effectively tell the story and the various problems that crop up, the movie will still have something going for it. Granted, the most satisfying elements in this movie come near the very end; for most of the running time, it plays like a bad conspiracy thriller with annoying characters (both the scientist’s girlfriend and the comic-relief pilot got on my nerves) and cliched dialogue. The oddest touch is a series of obviously symbolic scenes of children playing with insects; it happens enough that you know they mean something, but it’s not until the end of the movie that you’ll know what. The movie overall seems like a variation of the associate producer’s brother’s more famous CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, but at least the final revelations are its own. Make no mistake; most of the movie is pretty bad, but I didn’t walk away empty-handed, and that’s always a plus.

0 CommentsLeave a comment