Month: January 2020

Wonder Women (1973)

WONDER WOMEN (1973)
Article 4104 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-12-2012
Directed by Robert Vincent O’Neill
Featuring Nancy Kwan, Ross Hagen, Maria De Aragon
Country: USA / The Philippines
What it is: Faux James Bond, Filipino style

An evil female genius is kidnapping athletes to use their bodies as receptacles for brain transplants from unscrupulous millionaires. A man is hired by an insurance agency to investigate the kidnappings.

Though it’s not a spy movie, it’s pretty much in the James Bond mold; our investigator’s techniques are along the same lines, and the villainess is also in the same mode. It’s pretty cheap and features some of the lousiest martial arts fight scenes I’ve ever seen; all the editing in the world can’t cover up the fact that the only thing the fighters seem to know about karate is that you open by holding your hands in a certain way. There’s some perfunctory nudity (it’s only PG, you see), and features a brain sex machine, hideous mutants, Sid Haig (who is having a lot of fun) and Vic Diaz. It’s hardly what I would call good, but it does have that certain watchable grindhouse charm to it. And I will say this much; it’s a vast improvement for Robert Vincent O’Neill, whose previous genre movies I’ve covered are THE PSYCHO LOVER and BLOOD MANIA.

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UFO Journals (1978)

UFO JOURNALS (1978)
Article 4103 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-11-2012
Directed by Richard Martin
No cast listed
Country: USA
What it is: UFO documentary

UFOs are discussed and speculations are made.

Back when I covered WHEN MICHAEL CALLS some years back, I quoted extensively from the blurb on the back of the DVD of the movie, compared the description with the actual movie, and came to the conclusion “Never trust a blurb writer.” Well, it’s time to trot that lesson out again, as the blurb on the DVD of this one says, “This full-length feature film takes a hard, scientific approach to the whole question of UFO existence. Combining current knowledge of space mechanics and navigation with detailed accounts of historical sightings, the producers offer their own investigation of purported landings and visits. The end result is a better understanding of these previously inexplicable phenomena.”

So what do we get? We get lots and lots of still photos of UFOs, none of which I’ve seen before and some of which look very unconvincing. We get lots of anecdotal musings by various people, all of whom are absolutely convinced of visits by extraterrestrials and some of which have “Dr.” in front of their names. We get musings on the destruction of Atlantis. We get to see an arc-like model based on dimensions of the ark in the Bible that is supposed to prove that Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong. We get a man who is psychically connected to an alien named Zoltar. We get claims that mankind came from the planet of Moldec, which existed where the asteroid belt is now found. We get to see an expert on Kirlian photography play a harmonica solo. We get to hear the story of the man who, while in a trance, tattooed a spider onto his arm. We meet a man who can provide proof that he met an extraterrestrial because he has a crystal. And we get lots and lots of references to the Bible, which, whatever positive things you might say about the book, is not a good reference source for those seeking a “hard, scientific approach.” And you get a documentary that feels like it was thrown together randomly from whatever odd bits and pieces that were lying around that could be remotely connected to UFOs, and which simply muddies up the UFO waters rather than clarifying them. And, for all that, this may be one of the dullest documentaries of its sort.

Now I don’t know how this movie was marketed back when it was made, but I suspect it was no better back then than it is now. However, the blurb was right on one point – this was a full-length feature film.

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The Famous Box Trick (1898)

THE FAMOUS BOX TRICK (1898)
aka Illusions fantasmagoriques
Article 4102 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-9-2012
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: Magic short

A magician does several tricks on a small child that he pulls from a box.

This is one of Melies’s magic shorts, where a magician appears and does a variety of tricks. This is one of his earlier examples, and I couldn’t help but notice that he seems to have taken extra care with the jump cuts in this one; they’re some of the smoothest I’ve seen from his oeuvre. My favorite bit has him using an ax to cut the boy into two duplicates of himself. In and of itself this one is nothing special, but at least it was made early enough in his career that it doesn’t feel that he just churned this one out.

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Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer (1970)

SIGNALE-EIN WELTRAUMABENTEUER (1970)
aka Signals – An Adventure in Space
Article 4101 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-8-2012
Directed by Gottfried Kolditz
Featuring Piotr Pawlowski, Yevgeni Zharikov, Gojko Mitic
Country: East Germany / Poland
What it is: An adventure in space

A spaceship disappears. Another spaceship goes out to find it.

The bare-bones plot description is just my way of saying that the movie is in unsubtitled German, and ended up being mostly incomprehensible to me; even the details I did find were mostly due to finding a few short plot descriptions. That leaves me mostly with the visual look of the movie to cover, and I will say that it does look like it’s learned a few good lessons from its no-doubt stylistic model, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. The trouble is that knowing a few cinematic tricks isn’t the same thing as using them wisely, and the few this movie has learned get repeated ad nauseum; people appearing upside down in the frame and rotating camera whirls are the biggest culprits, with the latter nearly giving me dizzy spells. Once again, it’s not strictly kosher for me to comment on the story, as I couldn’t follow it, but I sense that there’s a lot of dead space and arty padding, and there’s something about how the final moments play out to give me the sense that the story isn’t particularly special in the first place. And, given this movie has a rating of 3.7 on IMDB, I suspect my instincts will prove to be right. Still, the movie has some sequences that are just plain weird; I’d like to know why we have all the footage of gymnasts on the beach, and what the animated segment (showing one character’s love affair with a beautiful woman with eyelashes half the size of her body) has to do with anything.

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