Month: May 2020

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968)

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (1968)
Article 4550 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-1-2014
Directed by Peter Hall
Featuring Derek Godfrey, Barbara Jefford, Nicholas Selby
Country: UK
What it is: Shakespeare

Two pairs of lovers fall into the hands of mischievous sprites on a midsummer’s night.

This is perhaps the Shakespeare play with the greatest amount of fantastic content; only “The Tempest” really gives it a run for its money. As far as this version goes, I have no problems with the script (and even if I had, it isn’t like I could bring in the original author for a rewrite). Nor do I have any problems with the cast; given that it features members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and given the number of name actors in the cast (David Warner, Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and Ian Holm, just to name the most familiar), it’s on very solid ground from an acting standpoint. However, I am less taken with the direction. It isn’t that the production fails to try to keep it from coming across like a photographed stage play. It’s more that it overuses many of its various tricks; in particular, there are far too many close-ups, and its only real special effect (having people appear and disappear out of and into thin air) is overused. It also has a tendency to break up scenes that should be left whole, and it even has some changes of location within monologues, and the result is some jarring breaks in continuity. Even despite these attempts, the movie still comes across like a photographed stage play, and this may be partially due to the decision not to have a musical score on the soundtrack; I think that alone would have made it flow better and feel more cinematic. At any rate, despite the talent on display here, I’m more partial to the 1935 version.

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Doktor Faustus (1982)

DOKTOR FAUSTUS (1982)
Article 4549 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-31-2014
Directed by Franz Seitz
Featuring Jon Finch, Andre Heller, Hanns Zischler
Country: West Germany
What it is: Literary adaptation

A composer makes a pact with the devil so that he can find inspiration to develop new forms of music that are not an imitation of what has already been produced. However, his agreement requires him to forgo love, and this price may be too high to pay…

One theme for which I’ve had no shortage in my foray through fantastic cinema is that of the Faust variation, so the idea of sitting through another one that ran nearly three hours hardly filled me with excitement. This one is definitely more of interest to fans of literary drama than to lovers of the fantastic; it plays out primarily as a drama, and there’s not much in the way of special effects. For a while, it looks like there may be no fantastic content at all and that the deal with the devil will be purely metaphorical; however, the devil finally shows up in a more explicit sense, and a definite deal is made. The movie is based on a novel by Thomas Mann, and though I haven’t read it, I’ve read THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by him, so I have a bit of a feeling for his work. One thing I remembered about him was discussed in Clifton Fadiman’s “The Lifetime Reading Plan”, which talks about the exhaustive detail of his work and how it makes him such an interesting writer. It’s his willingness to fill in the background detail that may explain why it takes so long for the movie to get around to the actual deal with the devil; the movie is close to the halfway point before this happens, and that puts it well past an hour into the movie. Furthermore, it’s not until certain events occur in the final third of the movie that things really start taking form. In the end I really liked the movie and found it quite thoughtful, but I do think it’s more for those with a literary bent, and I suspect that it doesn’t quite do full justice to the novel.

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The Other (1972)

THE OTHER (1972)
Article 4548 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-30-2014
Directed by Robert Mulligan
Featuring Uta Hagen, Diana Muldaur, Chris Udvarnoky
Country: USA
What it is: Unsettling horror

A boy named Niles, his twin brother Holland, and his emotionally-delicate mother live with relatives on a farm. However, there are secrets and mysteries involved with the boys, and people will die before they are sorted out…

One thing that becomes readily apparent during the opening scenes of this movie is that the story is not going to be laid out for you in clear detail on a silver platter. Though there is at least one definite mystery that is clearly revealed (and which you’ll probably figure out in advance if you take note of the vast difference in how people interact with each of the two boys), it opens up further questions, and after a while, I began to doubt whether it would all ever be fully explained. In some movies this would bother me; in this one, it is highly intriguing, and it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a movie that fascinated me on so many levels; the movie is psychologically rich, very well acted and directed, and positively haunting. It’s interesting to speculate on the various aspects of the movie – What is the game, and why is it significant? Is the ring an active or passive force in the movie? Can Nile’s memories be fully trusted? Are we dealing with ghosts, multiple personalities, and/or psychic powers? I wouldn’t be surprised if different people came up with different theories as to what is actually happening, and that’s part of what I loved about this one. This one is highly recommended. Incidentally, writer (of both the screenplay and the novel on which it is based) Tom Tryon is remembered to fans of fantastic cinema for having appeared in I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE.

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Waking Up the Town (1925)

WAKING UP THE TOWN (1925)
Article 4547 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-29-2014
Directed by James Cruze
Featuring Jack Pickford, Claire McDowell, Alec B. Francis
Country: USA
What it is: Odd little comedy

A young inventor dreams of getting the financing to build a hydroelectric plant to harness energy from a nearby waterfall. How will he accomplish this?

IMDB lists the length of this movie as 63 minutes. I found it in a version that runs 41 minutes. The Don Willis guide from which I culled the title claims the fantastic content consists of a dream in which the world comes to an end. At this point, I can only conclude that the dream in question is among the 22 minutes that is missing from this print; though an amateur astronomer goes on about a coming apocalypse (in eighteen months and three days exactly), it remains only talk. However, there is some gadgetry in the movie to give it at least some tinges of science fiction content. As for the story, there’s not a whole lot here to speak of, but that may also be the result of missing footage. In its present form, almost the first half of the movie involves the meet cute between the inventor and the amateur astronomer’s granddaughter, which doesn’t do a thing to advance the plot. The plot itself is about how a local banker is convinced to invest in the inventor’s plan, and this is all pretty threadbare. And, given that the movie isn’t particularly funny, the movie ends up mostly being a curious oddity more than anything else.

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House of the Living Dead (1974)

HOUSE OF THE LIVING DEAD (1974)
Article 4546 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-28-2014
Directed by Ray Austin
Featuring Mark Burns, Shirley Anne Field, David Oxley
Country: South Africa
What it is: Strange family doings

A woman comes to the South African plantation of her fiance, and finds herself dealing with witchcraft, hostility, murder, and a mysterious recluse brother who is doing strange experiments.

There are elements of interest in this movie, not least of which is its setting on a South African plantation. There’s also some plot elements that are a little on the offbeat side. Unfortunately, the problems overwhelm the movie. The mixture of witchcraft and mad science never quite gels. Much of the movie is a compendium of cliches of the “mysterious mad family in a decaying mansion” subgenre. The movie often tries to milk fear from things that just don’t scare; neither an old woman looking through a window or glowering looks from a series of paintings are the stuff of horror. But worst of all, the movie is turgidly paced and very dull for most of its running time; there’s something very depressing about a movie that almost makes you lose interest completely due to its endless opening credit sequence, for example. When you get right down to it, the interesting elements aren’t enough to compensate for the general dullness of this entry.

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The Toolbox Murders (1978)

THE TOOLBOX MURDERS (1978)
Article 4545 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-27-2014
Directed by Dennis Donnelly
Featuring Cameron Mitchell, Pamelyn Ferdin, Wesley Eure
Country: USA
What it is: Nihilistic gore

Someone is using various appliances from a toolbox to murder women in an apartment complex. One woman has not been killed, but appears to have been kidnapped. Police investigate. The brother of the kidnapped girl goes on his own investigation.

I suspect that this unpleasant and bloody piece of mayhem will mostly appeal to gorehounds and fans of nihilism. The first third of this movie will mostly appeal to the former; most of the murders occur during this segment, and for a while it looks like it will rack up one of the higher body counts if the genre. When describing the movie, most of my sources like to give away the identity of the killer, but the movie isn’t quite as cut and dried as all that; truth to tell, I’m not sure who killed the women during the first part of the movie. My problem is with the script; there’s a lot of clutter and unnecessary scenes (especially in the middle third of the movie), and there are times where I feel the movie is being made up as it goes along. In the end, I’m not sure that the movie makes much sense, especially once you realize that you’re dealing with two psychos, and the nihilism feels mostly like a convenient way to end the movie. The ending crawl reveals that this is based on a true story, but I never take comments like that at face value, and even if it was, that doesn’t mean that things played out just as they do here.

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Ne le criez pas sur les toits (1943)

NE LE CRIEZ PAS SUR LES TOITS (1943)
Article 4544 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-26-2014
Directed by Jacques Daniel-Norman
Featuring Fernandel, Robert Le Vigan, Meg Lemonnier
Country: France
What it is: Comedy

A professor who developed a formula to transform seawater into gasoline dies, and various parties seek out the professor’s assistant under the belief that he knows the formula as well. Unfortunately, the only formula known by the assistant involves making flowers imperishable. Misunderstandings ensue.

This is a movie I managed to rescue from my “ones that got away” list; once I posted it there, it was made available to me. When posting it there, I couldn’t help but feel the plot was very familiar, and it turns out that the movie was remade in Mexico under the title EL SUPERSABIO, which I’ve already covered. That movie was in Spanish without English subtitles; this one is in French without English subtitles. Also, like its remake, the story is much heavier on dialogue than on visual details, making it quite impossible to make any real judgment call on the movie. I will admit that Fernandel has a very interesting face, but beyond that, I don’t have anything else I can really evaluate about the movie.

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The Committee (1968)

THE COMMITTEE (1968)
Article 4543 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-24-2014
Directed by Peter Sykes
Featuring Paul Jones, Tom Kempinski, Richard Langdon Lloyd
Country: UK
What it is: Odd little art film

A hitch-hiker decapitates the man who picks him up, but changes his mind and sews the head back on. A few days later, he is called to be on a committee, and he discovers the man who he decapitated is also there. Could the purpose of the committee have something to do with the earlier event?

From what I gather about the way this 56 minute film is promoted, it is mostly remembered nowadays for having a soundtrack featuring Pink Floyd. The odd thing is that despite their presence, the most interesting musical moment comes from a performance by Arthur Brown (of “The Crazy World of…”). Even at that, I’m not sure the performance has any real connection with the rest of the movie, which seems to be mostly conversational speculation on the way we relate to the world and other people. There are some really striking moments here as well as some rather dull moments; probably the two scenes that will stick in the mind the most are the aforementioned performance by Arthur Brown and the opening sequence with the decapitation. At least there is clear fantastic content involved in the story in that once the decapitated man has his head back, he returns to life and carries on as if nothing has happened; a lot of art/experimental films have much vaguer fantastic content. Even at the movie’s short length, it’s a bit overlong; it probably should have been done as a short. It’s odd and often interesting, but not completely successful.

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Zapped! (1982)

ZAPPED! (1982)
Article 4542 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-23-2014
Directed by Robert J. Rosenthal
Featuring Scott Baio, Willie Aames, Robert Mandan
Country: USA
What it is: Teen comedy with telekinesis

A high school science student has a lab accident that gives him telekinetic powers. Hilarity ensues.

The one thing that really struck me about this teen comedy was that it never really seemed to decide what it wanted to be. Most of the movie feels like a Disney shopping cart movie (albeit one with little in the way of energy or inspiration), but when it doesn’t feel like one, it goes for ANIMAL HOUSE-like crudity and sex comedy with lots of nudity. However, one aspect of the movie remains utterly consistent; it is witless throughout. Not only did I not laugh once throughout the movie, I hardly ever even got close to being vaguely amused; the closest I ever got was early on, when I heard the explanation for the diving mice experiment. There are scattered references to other movies; TAXI DRIVER, CARRIE and THE EXORCIST come to mind, but they don’t really add more than a vague sort of annoyance to the proceedings. You know, when it comes to movie-watching, I don’t think anything is quite as depressing as a comedy that totally fails to amuse, and I think this is one of the worst examples I’ve encountered in some time; even the execrable THE WORM EATERS was funnier.

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The Six Million Dollar Man (1973)

THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN (1973)
TV-Movie
Article 4541 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-22-2014
Directed by Richard Irving
Featuring Lee Majors, Barbara Anderson, Martin Balsam
Country: USA
What it is: TV-Pilot (Successful variety)

When a former astronaut is badly injured in an accident, a secret government organization finances an operation to replace his missing parts with bionic, super-powerful replacements. But what will they ask the injured man in return for it?

I was a fan of the TV series for the first couple of seasons, though I stopped watching when I tired of it. I never saw the pilot, though, and it’s always a bit strange to watch a pilot once one is already familiar with the series, as there are usually some significant changes made to the format during the transition. In this case, the biggest difference is the absence of Richard Anderson; in the pilot, the person in the equivalent role is Darren McGavin. Quite frankly, I would have preferred McGavin; one cannot entirely trust his character, and that extra layer would have added more intrigue to the series than was ultimately there. The movie is mostly concerned with the backstory of Steve Austin with a token action setpiece near the end to give an idea of what the series would be like; it’s solid, well-done, and quite entertaining, and it does a good job of demonstrating that the concept would work well as a TV series, which is the ultimate goal of a pilot. My only problem is that it hints at how the TV series itself could have been a lot better.

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