Month: June 2020

The Genii of Fire (1908)

THE GENII OF FIRE (1908)
aka La genie du feu
Article 4671 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-3-2014
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Special effects horror short

A pair of tourists explores an ancient temple despite the warnings of a guard.

Around this time, Melies seems to have been concentrating on the story-telling aspect of his craft, and he wasn’t always successful. On that level, this is one of his better efforts in that, from a story perspective, it’s fairly easy to follow. Granted, with a running time of about four minutes, it isn’t exactly a very complex story, and the special effects attached to the story are pretty much standard Melies fare; they’re well done, but they’re also nothing new. It’s also one of his more serious outings; at any rate, it’s about as serious as he can make it despite the ubiquitous tumbling imps and contortionists he likes to use in his shorts. Still, it is one of his lesser shorts.

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Gee Whiz-z-z-z-z-z-z (1956)

GEE WHIZ-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z (1956)
Article 4670 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-2-2014
Directed by Chuck Jones
Featuring the voice of Paul Julian
Country: USA
What it is: Road Runner cartoon

A coyote continues with his hapless attempts to catch a road runner.

I can’t exactly say the fantastic content in this cartoon involves talking animals; outside of the innocuous “beep beep” sound the road runner makes, the animals don’t talk. However, the characters (the coyote in particular) can be considered anthropomorphic, and he does communicate in English via hand-held signs. Furthermore, the cartoon qualifies as a fantasy in that the laws of physics don’t get a lot of respect here; the only law that seems to apply is that whatever disaster happens, it will happen in the funniest way possible. There’s a bit of super-hero shtick in this one with a Batman costume and even a touch of science fiction with a jet motor with handlebars attached; Wile E. Coyote was quite an inventor, though that never compensated for the fact that the character was one of the most cursed creations in cinema history. The Road Runner cartoons rarely had plots; they were mostly a series of black-out gags, and you tend to remember individual gags more than whole cartoons. This one featured a gag with a stick of dynamite attached to a long-range hand extender, a gag with an outrun bullet, a gag with a large painting of a bridge being out, and the final classic moment where the coyote, falling once more from a height, makes a request of the animators that is mercifully granted. No, they’re not the best work from Chuck Jones, but I love his Road Runner cartoons anyway.

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Space Warriors 2000 (1985)

SPACE WARRIORS 2000 (1985)
TV-Movie
Article 4669 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-1-2014
Directed by Marc Smith and Sampote Sands
Featuring the voices of Nicholas Curror, Wendy Danvers, Bob Sessions
Country: Japan / Thailand
What it is: I’m not sure, but I hope aspirin helps

A boy receives a toy model of Ultraman as a gift. However, it is actually a relic that allows the boy to experience a non-ending series of Ultraman battle footage with new dubbing and music added.

This “movie”, which mostly consists of footage from the Ultraman franchises, was made without the permission of Tsuburaya Productions, and it had a few TV airings before it was permanently yanked from the TV schedules. However, this wasn’t before someone managed to record a copy of it, and now, many years later, it has popped up on YouTube so I can review it. Now, I’ll openly admit that I have a weakness for Japanese giant monster mayhem, but after this one, I had to lie down and let the headache wear off. Of course it’s incoherent; it’s never trying to cohere in the first place. It’s trying to be funny, but all of the newly-created dialogue (mostly between the giant monsters) is witless and stupid. All it really is is a string of camped-up redubbed battle scenes jumbled together until the ninety minute running time is filled up. Even the credits don’t take the movie seriously (and, despite what they claim, Mothra never makes an appearance). All I can do is shake my head and contemplate the depths to which certain people will sink in order to produce pieces of product for consumption with no regard to quality or common sense. Just ghastly.

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Whispering Wires (1926)

WHISPERING WIRES (1926)
Article 4668 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-31-2014
Directed by Albert Ray
Featuring Anita Stewart, Edmund Burns, Charles Clary
Country: USA
What it is: “Old Dark House” mystery

An inventor who has escaped from prison embarks on a spree of vengeance against the family of the man who sent him to jail.

This movie was just recently consigned to my “ones that got away” list, but fortunately, it turned out that a friend of mine had a copy and allowed me access to it, for which I am very grateful. I’d read about this movie beforehand from the book “American Silent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films 1913-1929”, which I highly recommend (consider this a plug), and it pointed out that the movie somewhat shoots itself in the foot early on by giving away the identity of the killer as well as the method of murder very early on in the proceedings, and though this does slightly increase the suspense value of a couple of scenes, I think it loses a lot more than it gains by giving away the game so early. But then, I found myself wondering if suspense and mystery was what the movie was really going for. Not only does the movie have too many comic relief characters (two incompetent assistant detectives and the scared black manservant), but I wouldn’t be surprised that if you timed it out, a good sixty to seventy percent of the footage of the movie is spent on those three characters, and they’re far from consistently funny. The end result is more tiresome than entertaining. This is certainly one of the lesser of the silent “old dark house” movies.

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Schneeweisschen und Rosenrot (1955)

SCHNEEWEISSCHEN UND ROSENROT (1955)
aka Snow White and Rose Red
Article 4667 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-30-2014
Directed by Erich Kobler
Featuring Rosemarie Seehofer, Ursula Herion, Ruth von Zerboni
Country: West Germany
What it is: Fairy tale

A prince is changed into a bear by an evil thieving dwarf. Both the bear and the dwarf encounter two girls living in the forest, and are both helped by them, though the dwarf is not grateful for their help.

I knew when I found this movie on YouTube that it was most likely going to prove another case in which there would be no English titles or dubbing to it, but since it’s based on a fairy tale, I found a summary of the story and took that in before I watched the movie. One impression I had of the story was that there just wasn’t a whole lot to it; it might be long enough to fill a twenty-minute short, but it would take quite a bit of work to stretch it out to fifty-five minutes. The movie uses two primary strategies to stretch out the story; we get some footage of the girls encountering and playing with forest animals (harmless and even somewhat pleasant for animal lovers), and we get a lot of footage of a comic relief character named Knicklebein (painful and unfunny, and he’s not saved by the fact that I didn’t understand the language because all his shtick is visual). On the plus side, the print I found was very nice, and it does capture a bit of quiet fairy tale atmosphere. It’s also more than a bit static and lacking in energy, and it doesn’t help that the most energetic characters are the unlikable dwarf and the comic relief. Still, at least it didn’t run any longer than it did.

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Snow White (1916)

SNOW WHITE (1916)
Article 4666 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-27-2014
Directed by J. Searle Dawley
Featuring Marguerite Clark, Dorothy Cumming, Creighton Hale
Country: USA
What it is: Fairy tale

A jealous queen seeks to have her stepdaughter killed, but the latter escapes and finds refuge in the home of seven dwarfs.

One of the pitfalls of a project like mine is you’ll find yourself encountering the same stories over and over again, and that’s especially true when the stories are as pervasive as the fairy tales. Therefore, I’m rather glad that this take on the story of Snow White varies the formula by giving the characters more back stories and establishing relationships between the characters, often motivating plot points that are taken for granted in the story. As a result, I found this version of the story charming and enjoyable in its own right, and it manages to have a number of plot differences from the most famous version of the story (the Disney version). In fact, if the trivia on IMDB is correct, this movie was crucial in shaping that later version; it was the first movie that Walt Disney saw, and there’s a few touches here and there that may have inspired similar moments in that later version. All in all, this is a worthy version of the story.

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The Frozen North (1922)

THE FROZEN NORTH (1922)
Article 4665 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-27-2014
Directed by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton
Featuring Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts, Sybil Seely
Country: USA
What it is: Comic melodrama

A bad man has a variety of adventures near the North pole.

This was listed in the Walt Lee guide, and according to this source, its fantastic content consists of the fact that the subway goes all the way to the North Pole. Well, that takes care of the opening gag of this Buster Keaton short, and that makes for slight fantastic content, but I spotted a possible second thing; there’s a scene of a policeman driving what can only be described as a “motorcycle sled”, a vehicle which I suspect doesn’t really exist (though I could be wrong). At any rate, any fantastic content in this short is fairly minor.

As for the short itself, my copy opens with a note that the short exists only in fragmentary condition. If it does, it’s rather hard to tell, as there doesn’t appear to be any real story; it’s just a series of gag set-pieces involving either the snowy locale or tied to the fact that the short is a parody of the movies of William S. Hart. Now I’ve seen a handful of William S. Hart shorts, but hardly enough to be really familiar with the man’s work, so there’s a chance that some of the parody is lost on me. Still, there are some fun moments here (such as his robbery of a casino), and I enjoyed it despite the fact that it is a bit uneven. Still, it’s not one of Keaton’s better shorts.

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Slapstick (of Another Kind) (1982)

SLAPSTICK (OF ANOTHER KIND) (1982)
Article 4664 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-26-2014
Directed by Steven Paul
Featuring Jerry Lewis, Madeline Khan, Marty Feldman
Country: USA
What it is: Attempted comedy

An affluent couple gives birth to what they think are deformed idiots. In truth, they are extraterrestrials who become super-geniuses when in physical contact with each other.

There was a time when I was a huge fan of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and I remember reading the novel on which this was based at the time of its release, and being incredibly disappointed by it. If there’s any one thing that this movie makes me want to do, it’s to give the novel another shot, at least partially to see if I appreciate it more nowadays and partially to see just how badly this movie handles it. To be perfectly fair, I doubt that I’ll feel that this movie screwed up a promising premise; what I think I’ll feel is that there was no way to effectively translate the novel to the screen in the first place. Certainly, I wouldn’t have tried to make it a slapstick comedy, despite the title; in fact, this movie is never worse than when it resorts to that sort of thing. I certainly wouldn’t have filled the cast with actors known for broad comedy; I would have tried for actors capable of subtlety and satire. At the very least, I would have tried to capture a sense of Vonnegut’s work, and I think this movie misses the boat completely in that regard. About the only thing I liked about the movie were a couple of fleeting moments where the movie featured cameos by actors impersonating famous comic actors; I spotted Laurel and Hardy at one point as well as Leo Gorcey, and the fact that they existed as nothing more than reference points (they performed no shtick) seemed somehow to be the right touch. As it is, the movie is an extremely bad example of an adaptation that probably wouldn’t have worked even under the best of conditions.

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Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

WHIRLPOOL OF FATE (1925)
aka La fille de l’eau
Article 4663 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-24-2014
Directed by Jean Renoir
Featuring Catherine Hessling, Charlotte Clasis, Pierre Champagne
Country: France
What it is: Drama

Upon the death of her father, a young woman loses her inheritance to her wastrel uncle, and ends up taking up with gypsies. However, she is also abandoned by them and finds herself all on her own.

Since there’s no mention of it in the plot description, let’s get the fantastic content out of the way first. At one point in the proceedings, the woman, alone and sleeping outside during a thunderstorm, has a hallucinatory nightmare that we get to experience as well, and it’s bizarre enough that, for that sequence, the movie turns into a fantasy. As for the movie as a whole, I regret to say it’s one of those types of stories of which I’ve grown tired of encountering. It is, in fact, a “wringer” movie. Those are movies in which our lead character (usually a young woman) is put through the wringer by having a continuous series of bad events and setbacks happen to her. These movies can be effective at times, but I find them frustrating; you just know the worst is going to happen, and if anything good DOES happen, you know she’s only being set up to have the next bad thing take it all away. After a while, these movies seem rather mechanical, and the only real suspense comes from not knowing whether the movie is going to end in an upbeat fashion (bad things stop happening to her) or a downbeat fashion (she dies or suffers some other irreparable fate), and it pretty much comes down to what the writer or director decides to do. I can’t say I really enjoyed this movie all that much, but it does have some nice visual moments, and I did find the hallucinatory dream (the highlight of the movie for me) to be effective. And I won’t tell you which ending the powers that be opt for in this one.

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She Waits (1972)

SHE WAITS (1972)
TV-Movie
Article 4662 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-23-2014
Directed by Delbert Mann
Featuring Patty Duke, David McCallum, Dorothy McGuire
Country: USA
What it is: Possession thriller

A man brings his new wife to his mother’s home, where his previous wife died. It appears that the original wife had been murdered, and now she seeks a way to take possession of the new wife to avenge her murder.

She waits…. and if you’re on the watch for something exciting or original to happen in this TV-Movie, you’ll be waiting, too. The premise isn’t particularly original to begin with, and the bland, witless script doesn’t do a particularly good job of developing it into a full length movie. As a result, we have stretches of time where simply nothing is happening, constant recycling of the same plot points over and over again (it might be fun to count how many times the characters tell us that Elaine is dead), and long, tiresome conversations where people avoid telling each other what the need to know or taking forever to sort out revelations that we viewers have picked up on immediately. The acting is adequate but far from inspired, and the direction isn’t particularly strong. Only the music editor seems to be really committed to making the movie as scary as possible, although he uses the most obvious means at his disposal to do so. The end result is one of the more tedious TV-Movies I’ve seen for this series.

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