Month: September 2020

Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979)

MISSION GALACTICA: THE CYLON ATTACK (1979)
TV Movie
Article 4926 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-12-2015
Directed by Christian I. Nyby II and Vince Edwards
Featuring Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, Lorne Greene
Country: USA
What it is: Space Opera edited from TV episodes

The Galactica encounters the Battlestar Pegasus after having believed it was destroyed in a previous battle. However, the Pegasus’s commander, though a brilliant military tactician, is also obsessed with glory, and tries to force the Galactica to join it on a foolhardy attack on a Cylon outpost.

As stated in my review of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, I’ve never seen the original series, though the fact that many of the episodes were edited into TV movies will ultimately result in me watching quite a bit of it. This one edits together three episodes of the series; “The Living Legend” (parts one and two), and “Fire in Space”. I didn’t know that as I was watching this. Knowing it now, I recognize that what I saw had the dirty fingerprints of what happens when you edit together different episodes of a TV series; you get a lopsided plot that does not feel like an organic whole. This one is particularly annoying in that it never resolves the story arc that takes up the first two-thirds of the movie (which is actually a rather intriguing story); it gets mired in the “Fire in Space” episode and then practically dismisses the original story with a couple of lines of dialogue. One thing I have discovered from watching this, though; I dislike the Cylons as villains, and I found the character of Baltar (who I gather is a renegade human helping the Cylons) particularly tiresome, as he seems to spout nothing but evil-villain cliches. At this point, based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d have to say that the original series was a very mixed bag indeed.

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La petite parade (1928)

LA PETITE PARADE (1928)
aka The Little Lame Soldier
Article 4925 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-11-2015
Directed by Wlaydslaw Starewicz
Featuring Nina Star
Country: France
What it is: Animated fantasy

When the toys come to life, a devil lures an ugly nutcracker into trying to woo a beautiful music box dancer, but the latter is under the protection of a toy soldier.

Yesterday’s foray into the world of Starewicz was a mostly live-action drama that only lapsed into fantasy when the animation came into play. Today’s is more of a full-blown example of the animator’s imagination and creativity; except for a couple of short moments, it is fully animated and contains dozens of characters. Yesterday’s was charming; today’s is breathtaking. My copy had French dialogue without English subtitles, but the dialogue is superfluous; the short was originally filmed as a silent and can be easily understood without the dialogue, which was added later to turn a silent into a talkie. It’s based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale that I know I’ve seen before, and like the other version, the ending is sad. Nevertheless, with the amazing animation of toys, rats, mermaids, soldiers, devils, etc, it’s a truly magical adventure, and I often wonder just how Starewicz was able to pull off such amazing effects. It’s not up to the level of THE MASCOT (Starewicz’s masterpiece), but it’s a fine addition to his oeuvre.

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La petite chanteuse des rues (1924)

LA PETITE CHANTEUSE DES RUES (1924)
aka The Little Street Singer
Article 4924 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-10-2015
Directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz
Featuring Nina Star
Country: France
What it is: Charming fantasy

After her and her mother are thrown out of their home by a cruel landlord, a little girl, along with her pet monkey, tries to fend for herself by becoming a street singer. When they encounter the landlord again, the monkey decides to take things into his own hands…

I was a little surprised at first at how this movie seemed to be live-action; after all, Starewicz was known for his animation. However, a little ways into the short, you notice that the monkey isn’t always played by a monkey; it is sometimes, in fact, an animated Starewicz creation. It’s the antics and cleverness of the animated monkey that add the elements of the fantastic to this little tale; it’s called on to perform tasks that display an uncommon intelligence for an animal. Starewicz adds so much character to this creation (and he doesn’t do a bad job with an animated snake that pops up as well) that it makes this short a thoroughly charming affair. Plus, it all has a happy ending. I truly enjoy this man’s work.

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All of Me (1984)

ALL OF ME (1984)
Article 4923 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-9-2015
Directed by Carl Reiner
Featuring Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Victoria Tennant
Country: USA
What it is: Comedy

A female tycoon, sickly from birth and now dying, plans to migrate her soul into the body of another female so she can live a new, full life. However, an accident causes her soul to be deposited into the right half of a male lawyer, so that the two of them are trapped in the same body.

I was a big fan of Steve Martin during his stand-up days, but I found his movie career to be rather uneven, because his stand-up style really didn’t translate smoothly into that form. I quite liked this one though, at least partially because it gave Martin a real comic acting challenge – how to play a person whose body halves are inhabited by different people, and he makes the most of the physical shtick that results. Tomlin is also quite good as the tyrannical woman whose soft side only comes out because she can’t really hide it while in someone else’s body; after her death, she only appears physically in mirrors. Richard Libertini almost steals the movie as a foreign guru whose grasp of English is not the best; yes, the laughs he gets are a bit on the cheap side, but they’re still pretty funny. The plot contrivances are a bit silly and pat at times, but for the most part, the movie works and is a great deal of fun.

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Thor and the Amazon Women (1963)

THOR AND THE AMAZON WOMEN (1963)
aka Le gladiatrici
Article 4922 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-8-2015
Directed by Antonio Leonviola
Featuring Susy Andersen, Joe Robinson, Harry Baird
Country: Italy / Yugoslavia
What it is: Sword and Sandal

Musclemen Thor takes on the Amazons and their evil queen.

There’s a conceptual problem at work in this movie. Consider these two facts: 1) Thor’s enemies are the Amazon warriors, and 2) Thor is too much of a gentleman to fight women. I’m sure you see the central problem here. Maybe that’s why Thor is used so sparingly during this movie; he barely appears in the first half of the movie at all. Maybe that’s why the evil queen, despite the fact that she is convinced of the superiority of women to men in all regards, maintains a private coterie of (male) guards for herself; after all, Thor has to fight someone. Most of the movie concentrates on the inner dealings of the female prisoners who must fight in the arena for their freedom, known as the gladiatresses (a word I didn’t even knew existed). The movie itself looks rather chintzy, and there aren’t even many familiar sword and sandal faces here. Though a great deal of talk is made about Thor’s great strength, the only two manifestations of it are in his one direct physical altercation with the Amazons, a glorified version of tug-of-war, and a flashback sequence in which a man defeats a big ape in combat, which looks like it’s stock footage from something else. The movie is also rather sexist; it takes the stance that leadership by women is utter presumption. In order to back up this stance, it even makes the unexpected move of killing off a specific character (the only real surprise in the movie) for the sole purpose of making sure that the character who ends up on the throne at the end is a male. This is not the genre’s finest hour.

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Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959)

TARZAN’S GREATEST ADVENTURE (1959)
Article 4921 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-7-2015
Directed by John Guillermin
Featuring Gordon Scott, Anthony Quayle, Sara Shane
Country: USA
What it is: Tarzan movie

A group of criminals have been raiding villages in Africa for supplies that will help them reach a diamond mine. Tarzan vows to bring the criminals to justice, and discovers that their leader is an old enemy of his.

I’m not quite sure if I’d call this his “Greatest Adventure”, but if I were to make a list of the best ones I’ve seen, this one would be in the running. It’s an impressive entry in the series. There are only seven significant characters in the story, but they’re all uncommonly well-developed and well acted. Tarzan’s savagery is on display here; in fact, one of the themes of the movie is that Tarzan may be as motivated by personal revenge as he is by justice in his obsession with facing off with the main villain of the piece. The cast is excellent, and also includes Niall MacGinnis and a pre-Bond Sean Connery. The movie is filmed on location in Kenya, and this adds a great deal of flavor to the production. It’s one of the more adult entries in the Tarzan canon, but it’s also one of the most problematic for this series, as it’s one of the slimmest in terms of fantastic content; outside of the marginal fantasy content of Tarzan’s existence, there’s nothing. Still, this one is intense and gripping, and a short “Tarzan takes a swim” sequence is its sole nod to cuteness. This one is recommended.

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La sombra del murcielago (1968)

LA SOMBRA DEL MURCIELAGO (1968)
aka The Shadow of the Bat
Article 4920 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-6-2015
Directed by Federico Curiel
Featuring Jaime Fernandez, Marta Romero, Blue Demon
Country: Mexico
What it is: Mexican wrestling movie

A horribly scarred man who wears a mask becomes enamored with a singer at a nightclub, and kidnaps her. He also kidnaps wrestlers so he can have death matches with them to get the cheers of an imaginary audience. Can Blue Demon defeat him?

There’s something rather comforting to me to know that Mexican wrestling movies exist; just knowing that the world is big enough to have this kind of cinematic weirdness helps me to sleep better at night. This movie is the result of what would happen if you reimagine THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA translated into a Mexican wrestling movie. In some ways, it hardly matters that the copy I found was not dubbed or subtitled in English; the basic action and story are pretty clear once you know the PHANTOM connection. There’s five wrestling scenes; one in the ring, one in a training session, and three death-matches with the villain. There are four musical numbers, my favorite of which has Mexican teenagers boogieing to a Spanish version of “Wooly Bully”. The heroine screams her head off every time she sees a rat; for that matter, she screams her head off when she sees practically anything. And it all takes place in that world where the police wouldn’t solve any crimes were it not for the help of masked Mexican wrestlers. If you’re a fan of this genre, this is an entertaining one.

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A Polish Vampire in Burbank (1985)

A POLISH VAMPIRE IN BURBANK (1985)
Article 4919 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-5-2015
Directed by Mark Pirro
Featuring Mark Pirro, Lori Sutton, Bobbi Dorsch
Country: USA
What it is: Vampire comedy

A painfully introverted vampire, after having been supplied blood by his father for many years, is forced to go out on his own and claim his own victims, but he falls in love with the first one he meets.

This movie was better than I thought it was going to be, but that may not be saying much; given the title of the movie, I was expecting the absolute bottom of the barrel. Yet, to its credit, some of the ideas are fairly decent and some of the jokes do register. Any movie that makes me smile at the company’s logo at the very top of the movie is doing something right. IMDB estimates the cost of the movie at three thousand dollars, and it looks it, and the movie is about as lowbrow as you can get, but I thought the movie’s heart was in the right place, and I rather liked it. Therefore, I found myself forgiving some of the movie’s worst aspects, particularly the way it belabors the vampirism-as-sex metaphor and its tendency to beat its running jokes into the ground. Oddly enough, one of its better aspects is one of the few ideas it lifts from the movie which inspired its title (AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON), in that the main character is constantly visited by the chatty skeleton of his dead brother (played by Eddie Deezen). In the end, the movie got by on its likable qualities, and I will say this much; as bad as the movie’s title is, it’s better than the title of the fake vampire movie that appears in a theater in the movie – ENEMA VAMPIRES.

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Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966)

TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD (1966)
Article 4918 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-4-2015
Directed by Robert Day
Featuring Mike Henry, David Opatoshu, Manuel Padilla, Jr.
Country: USA / Switzerland
What it is: Tarzan movie

When a boy emerges from the jungle who is believed to be the resident of hidden tribe with a valley full of gold, a crimelord kidnaps him in order to get the gold for himself. However, Tarzan may put a stop to his scheme…

Someone in charge of this movie decided that the Tarzan formula needed to be updated a little. The solution? How about adding some James Bond touches to the mix? Fortunately, the movie only emphasizes this approach during the first twenty minutes or so; things return to normal once Tarzan is back in his loincloth and in the jungle. The fantastic content is pretty marginal; there’s some gadgetry on hand (the main villain’s hobby is designing miniature booby traps) and we have one of those hidden civilizations that pop up in these jungle movies from time to time. The movie is adequate, but no better than that; the pace is rather sluggish and the action sequences aren’t particularly well staged. Mike Henry has a good physique for Tarzan, but as a character in this movie, Tarzan is fairly one-dimensional. There’s quite a bit of animal footage, but even Dinky the chimp doesn’t register much in the way of presence. All in all, the series was getting pretty tired by this point. Still, this is the only movie I’ve seen where a man is killed by a giant cola bottle.

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The Serpent’s Egg (1977)

THE SERPENT’S EGG (1977)
aka Das Schlangenei
Article 4917 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-3-2015
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Featuring Liv Ullmann, David Carradine, Gert Frobe
Country: USA / West Germany
What it is: Period drama

An alcoholic Jew who was once a member of a circus acrobat team finds himself trying to survive in Berlin during the economic collapse of the nineteen-twenties.

It’s been a while since I’ve covered any works by Ingmar Bergman for this series. This one was filmed in English with an international cast, and though it is well-produced and directed, it remains a bit of a disappointment. This is not to say that the movie is bad; far from it; it’s a solid and quite dark drama about an important subject, but from Bergman, we expect something more in the philosophical department that doesn’t seem to be present here. Part of the problem may be David Carradine’s performance as the main character; it’s very difficult to understand or care about his character because he remains something of a cipher. As for the fantastic content, I’m not sure the movie really qualifies as well; the latter doesn’t really show up until the end of the movie, where we discover the truth about the clinic at which Carradine’s character is working, and though it’s certainly horrific (think of the experiments of Dr Mengele), it doesn’t quite turn into horror. My favorite scene is the one which I feel is the most Bergmanesque; it involves a cameo by James Whitmore as a priest who proves singularly unhelpful to Liv Ullmann’s character. It’s an interesting movie, but again, it’s not Bergman at his most compelling.

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