Month: July 2020

The Headless Horseman (1922)

THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN (1922)
Article 4729 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-5-2015
Directed by Edward D. Venturini
Featuring Will Rogers, Lois Meredith, Ben Hendricks Jr.
Country: USA
What it is: A tale of rival lovers

A superstitious Yankee teacher takes up his profession in a small Dutch village and begins romancing the daughter of a rich landowner, much to the chagrin of another suitor of the daughter. However, tales abound of a ghost known as the Headless Horseman…

If I were to make a movie about the Headless Horseman, I would jettison the Washington Irving story about it and build my own one around it. Why? Because I’ve always had personal problems with the story. The horror fan in me wants the Headless Horseman to be a real supernatural entity, and, if my memory is correct, nothing in the story explicitly states that it isn’t. However, there’s a part of me that wants the tale as told to be a single, unified whole, and if the Horseman is truly a supernatural entity, then that leaves the whole story of Crane’s and Bone’s struggle for the woman’s hand to be so much filler, and that hardly leaves one with the sense of a unified whole. As a result, the story never totally satisfies.

I bring this up because if there’s one thing I will credit this movie for, it’s for making explicit the nature of the Headless Horseman. So perhaps I’m not surprised that the movie has a weak reputation; almost every review on IMDB sees it as a pretty pallid affair in compare to the Disney version from the forties. And, to tell the truth, it is rather pallid. I do find the presence of Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane interesting, but the sad fact of the matter is that Will Rogers’ humor was mostly verbal, and a silent movie gives him little opportunity to display it. Furthermore, another problem with the story is that neither Crane nor Bones are sympathetic characters; you grow to dislike them both, and you find yourself wishing that the woman would opt for neither one. As for the Headless Horseman himself, outside of a short token appearance near the beginning of the movie, he doesn’t pop up until the last four minutes, so I suspect horror fans will be rather disappointed by this one. And though I do have problems with the Disney version, at least that one is consistently entertaining.

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Time of Roses (1969)

TIME OF ROSES (1969)
aka Ruusujen aika
Article 4728 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-4-2015
Directed by Risto Jarva
Featuring Arto Tuominen, Ritva Vepsa, Tarja Markus
Country: Finland
What it is: Science fiction art film

In the year 2011, a civil servant who makes documentaries for the state chooses as his subject an ordinary woman forty years earlier and studies her life in order to gain an understanding of the time. Towards that end, he recruits a woman who looks like her, but this woman associates with people who disapprove of the documentarian and the policies of the state.

Here’s something you don’t encounter everyday; a Finnish science fiction art film. As I’d expect from such a movie, it’s light on special effects and heavy on political talk. My copy was apparently designed for English speaking audiences; not only does it have English subtitles, but the opening scenes feature long voice-overs in English explaining the basic situation of the movie; I suspect that these voice-overs were not in the original Finnish version. Actually, I’m grateful for them; given that my copy of the movie is hardly in pristine condition, it makes up for the fact that many of the English subtitles (in white on a black-and-white film, which means that when the background is white, you can’t read a thing) are unintelligible. The theme is basically about political manipulation of the media, which is certainly a topic that is still relevant today. The movie does make a few bows to being a science fiction movie; we see a strange new sport which looks like a cross between basketball and soccer, the movie seemingly predicts the use of personal cell phones, and there’s a scene where dancers in a nightclub wear headphones so no one else is bothered by the music. I’m less impressed by the scenes of (I think) drug use, where people sit in heap together and make strange hand gestures. I suppose it takes place in a dystopia of sorts, but except for a scene where a striker is murdered for breaking into the airwaves, we don’t get a lot of insight into just how this dystopia represses its citizens. All in all, I found it an interesting if flawed movie, but it’s pretty much for the art movie crowd.

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Dream City (1973)

DREAM CITY (1973)
aka Traumstadt, Dream Town
Article 4727 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-3-2015
Directed by Johannes Schaaf
Featuring Per Oscarsson, Rosemarie Fendel, Olimpia
Country: West Germany
What it is: Art film

An artist and his wife are invited to live in a hidden city where the residents have complete freedom to pursue their work. However, they discover that “complete freedom” has a way of taking its toll on the human condition.

IMDB lists one of the taglines for this movie as “Bizarre like Fellini. Surreal like Bunuel. Explosive like Cocteau.”. I can see that. It’s also sometimes maddening like Kafka and funny like Monty Python. The trouble is I’m not sure that the movie achieves transcendence like the best works of any of those other people. I’m also not sure whether the movie ultimately has anything more to say than the attempt at this sort of Utopia would result in chaos and madness, a concept that seems rather obvious to me. What I do know is that the more chaotic and out-of-control the situation gets, the more strident and annoying the movie becomes. Maybe that’s why I prefer the first half of the movie when the city comes across as colorful and eccentric. My favorite scene in the first half involves the artist trying to get an audience permit to meet the founder of the city; my favorite scene in the second half is when we finally discover where the white horse that carries bodies through the city is going. In the end, I half like and half dislike the movie, but so much of it seems self-indulgent that I doubt I’ll be giving it another viewing any time soon.

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The Devil’s Man (1967)

THE DEVIL’S MAN (1967)
aka Devilman Story
Article 4726 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-2-2015
Directed by Paolo Bianchini
Featuring Guy Madison, Luisa Baratto, Diana Lorys
Country: Italy
What it is: Pseudo-Spyghetti

A journalist investigates the kidnapping of a scientist. His trail leads him to a secret in an African desert.

Because our hero is a journalist rather than a superspy, this doesn’t entirely qualify as an example of “Spyghetti”. However, it could be argued that that is the only sticking point here; the way the movie is plotted is pretty much identical with one of those movies, and the hero could have just as easily been a spy. it does, however, have a significant degree of science fiction content above and beyond the usual gadgetry found in that genre; several of the villain’s minions appear to be under a hypnotic control, and the plot involves the creation of an artificial brain capable of being placed in someone’s head that is not susceptible to the flaws of our organic ones. I don’t want to be too hard on this one; it’s a bit of a rarity, and my copy is in fairly wretched shape, and that makes watching the movie a little difficult; however, based on what I can make out, the movie seems ordinary at best, and like yesterday’s movie, it feels churned out. I’d have to see a better copy before I could give a more detailed critique.

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Urban Warriors (1987)

URBAN WARRIORS (1987)
Article 4725 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-1-2015
Directed by Giuseppe Vari
Featuring Bruno Bilotta, Alex Vitale, Bjorn Hammer
Country: Italy
What it is: An hour and a half of footage

Three computer technicians escape from their underground bunker to discover that it’s after the apocalypse, and roving gangs are killing people. They seek out other human beings (who are not in roving gangs killing people).

You know, every once in a while you encounter one of those movies whose sole reason for existence is to 1) employ stuntmen and second-unit directors, 2) provide fodder for the grindhouse circuit, and 3) serve as a platform for the use of stock footage. One gets the sense that the least important person in the making of the movie is the writer, and though it might be possible that the script and dialogue might be better in the original Italian version of the movie (rather than in the dubbed English version I saw), I really rather doubt it in this case. About the only plot element that is the least bit novel in this one is that the roving gangs are after spinal cord fluid (apparently as a side effect of the radiation), and that idea feels like it was lifted from an old forties horror movie. Furthermore, that plot element doesn’t make one iota of difference in the way the movie unfolds. So all we really have here is a lazy, bare-bones version of the after-the-apocalypse movie with as little intelligence used or care taken as possible. It’s ninety minutes of footage that has all been done better elsewhere.

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Transmutations (1985)

TRANSMUTATIONS (1985)
aka Underworld
Article 4724 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-31-2014
Directed by George Pavlou
Featuring Denholm Elliott, Steven Berkoff, Larry Lamb
Country: UK
What it is: ’80s Horror

A prostitute is kidnapped by a gang of mutated humans. A crimelord hires a detective to track down the missing prostitute. It’s all tied to a mysterious drug that no one wants to talk about.

I really don’t have a strong familiarity with the work of Clive Barker at this point, but I’m aware of his reputation, and I know I’ve read at least one short story of his. This appears to be the first feature-length movie for which he wrote the script, so that makes it at least of historical interest. However, I’m aware that Barker himself has disowned the results, and the movie has a pretty low reputation; it’s rating of 3.6 on IMDB certainly doesn’t make it appear that the movie is viewed with great affection. As a result, I went into this one expecting the worst. Instead, I found myself liking a few things about it; there are offbeat touches to the story, and there’s the occasional moment I liked, such as the scene where the detective traps the thug who is tailing him… and invites him out for a drink. Granted, that doesn’t mean that the movie works; the movie is packed with an assortment of cliches, the pulsing eighties music is an annoyance, there’s a certain amount of silliness, and the direction isn’t exactly inspired. Ultimately, the weaknesses do dominate the movie, but that doesn’t mean that it’s devoid of interest; it’s a case of some good ideas having been badly handled. It’s bad, but hardly the worst I’ve seen.

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Shogun Assassin (1980)

SHOGUN ASSASSIN (1980)
Article 4723 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-30-2014
Directed by Robert Houston
Featuring Tomisaburo Wakayama, Kayo Matsuo, Minoru Oki
Country: Japan / USA
What it is: Mystical samurai bloodbath

After his own master attempts to have him assassinated, a samurai executioner wanders the world pushing his son in a cart, seeking revenge and working as a paid assassin.

I’d heard about the Lone Wolf and Cub series years ago, but I was never sure whether I’d encounter any of the movies in my cinematic excursions. Well, here are the first two episodes of the series condensed into a single feature and given English dubbing. It’s as bloody as I’d been led to believe it would be (possibly even more-so), and some of the action is pretty outrageous. Yet, for some reason, it never really seems gratuitous nor falls into camp; there’s something elegant and poetic about the proceedings, even operatic at times. it’s one of those movies where a character, dying from having his throat slashed, waxes philosophic about the sound of the spray of blood from his neck… and you don’t roll your eyes in disbelief, because it just seems right for this movie. The fantastic content is a bit elusive, but there are comments about the assassin’s sword having mystical qualities, some of the assassin’s powers seem superhuman, there’s a definite surreal air to the proceedings, and the whole thing may take place in a fantasy land of some sort. At any rate, I found it hypnotic and entrancing, sometimes touching, and sometimes quite funny as well. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to react to this movie, but in the end, I was rather entranced by the whole thing.

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Terror of Frankenstein (1977)

TERROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (1977)
aka Victor Frankenstein
Article 4722 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-29-2014
Directed by Calvin Floyd
Featuring Leon Vitali, Per Oscarsson, Nicholas Clay
Country: Sweden / Ireland
What it is: Literary adaptation

Victor Frankenstein becomes obsessed with the creation of life, but abandons the creature he has created. The latter soon discovers his origins and seeks revenge against his creator.

Those seeking an adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel that is reasonably faithful to the novel will probably be satisfied with this one; though it omits certain plot elements, they’re the ones that really slow the story down in the novel. Those seeking a lively adaptation of the novel however may find themselves disappointed by this one, as I was. There’s no doubt it’s trying to be cinematic (note how many scenes unfold without a lick of dialogue), but it often feels like it’s doing so self-consciously, and the lack of any background music only makes it seem worse. The lack of intensity is also an issue; this is one of those movies where none of the scenes feels any more important than the others, and that makes for a dull watching experience. Every once in a while there’s an effective moment, but the movie often feels unimaginative and uninspired. I’m afraid I found this version of the story to be ineffective.

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