Month: October 2020

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (1969)
Article 5029 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-25-2015
Directed by Peter R. Hunt
Featuring George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas
Country: UK / USA
What it is: James Bond film

James Bond saves the life of a troubled woman, an act which eventually puts him on the trail of his old nemesis, Blofeld from SPECTRE.

This was the first movie of the Bond series that did not feature Sean Connery as Bond, and his replacement, George Lazenby, was so poorly received that he did not return to the role. Having watched this one again, I can understand why; though I don’t think his performance is bad, there’s a certain quality to Bond that I can’t quite define, but which I don’t think Lazenby possessed. However, I think this particular entry in the Bond series makes good use of him; this is, in many ways, one of the least typical entries of the series. For one thing, it’s one of the only ones I’ve seen where Bond’s emotional attachment to a woman plays a profound role in the proceedings; I find it interesting that this seems to be the series entry where none of the female characters has a sexy double-entendre name (unless Irma Bunt qualifies). It’s also less sprawling than the others; most of the action takes place in Switzerland in or around Blofeld’s fortress there. Most of the action sequences take place in this snow-covered location, with the sled chase my favorite one of these. It runs on a bit too long, but its ending is genuinely moving, and truth to tell, I’m not sure I would have bought into it quite as completely if Connery had been playing him in this one. Besides, Connery wouldn’t have been given Lazenby’s funniest line in this one (the one right before the opening credits). Some Bond fans don’t care for this one, but I have real fondness for this one. Besides, it has Diana Rigg as well. And furthermore, given that there’s a Christmas scene in this one, this is one of the few times where my movie for Christmas day actually could be called a Christmas movie.

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El amor brujo (1967)

EL AMOR BRUJO (1967)
aka Witch Love, Bewitched Love
Article 5028 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-24-2015
Directed by Francisco Rovira Beleta
Featuring Antonio Gades, La Polaca, Rafael de Cordoba
Country: Spain
What it is: Drama

Two men vie for the heart of the same woman.

The only copy I was able to find of this one was in Spanish without subtitles, so I had to do a little research on it. The movie is based on a ballet about a woman in an arranged marriage who loves another man. When her husband dies, she thinks she’s free to pursue her true love, but the husband’s ghost refuses to let her go, and she must find a way to get rid of him to win her true love. However, the movie version appears to modify this plot, largely removing the ghost angle and turning the story into two lovers, one good and one evil, competing for the same woman. However, the ghost angle does not appear to have been jettisoned completely; at the beginning of the movie, she thinks her husband is dead and that his reappearance is that of a ghost.

Despite having been based on a ballet, the movie is not one, though it does use dance extensively, particularly in some rather striking and eerie dream sequences, particularly one in which the woman is chased by several zombie-like characters. The language problem prevented me from effectively following the plot, but it is directed with a striking visual sense and is very well acted. It was an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film for the year it was released, so it’s definitely a more cultured affair than most of the Spanish movies I cover for this series (which usually star Paul Naschy). I was able to enjoy many of the visual elements, but until I get around the language problem, my enjoyment of this one will be somewhat limited.

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The Black Panther of Ratana (1963)

THE BLACK PANTHER OF RATANA (1963)
aka Der schwarze Panther von Ratana
Article 5027 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-23-2015
Directed by Jurgen Roland
Featuring Roberto Bianchi Montero, Horst Frank, Heinz Drache
Country: West Germany / Italy / Thailand
What it is: Krimi, sort of

Four men take part in the heist of a sapphire from a temple, but two of them are double-crossed. Years later, one of the latter men locates one of the men who betrayed him, but enemies of this man tend to fall victim to panther attacks…

I used the phrase “sort of” above to indicate that in some ways this movie resembles the German krimis of the era; it has a somewhat involved crime plot with surprise twists, some comic relief, and a bit of horror feel to the proceedings. However, in many ways it feels very different; it has no association with Edgar Wallace, is in color (most krimis of this period were in black and white), and was shot on location in Thailand rather than taking place in London, the usual location for the form. The movie’s refusal to show us the panther responsible for the attacks and the extreme convenience for certain individuals in its choice of victims will certainly clue you in that there’s no real panther on the loose, and the horror content is rather slight, so this is fairly marginal in terms of its genre content. The plot is also somewhat easier to follow than is usual the case for krimis, and you’re not going to be too surprised by some of the final revelations. For what it is, it’s a passable enough entertainment, but it’s probably more noteworthy for crossing the krimi and adventure genres than for anything else.

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Never Say Never Again (1983)

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN (1983)
Article 5026 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-22-2015
Directed by Irvin Kershner
Featuring Sean Connery, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Kim Basinger
Country: UK / USA / West Germany
What it is: Off-series James Bond film

James Bond is called back into active duty to track down the location of two nuclear bombs stolen by a SPECTRE agent.

This movie was not a part of the regular James Bond series. Kevin McClory, who produced and co-wrote THUNDERBALL for that series, won a legal battle against Ian Fleming to make his own one-off Bond movie, provided it was based on that same story, so this is a loose remake. It doesn’t appear to be a favorite of James Bond movie fans, and it lost a box office battle with the official Bond release from the same year, OCTOPUSSY. Me, I’m rather partial to this one. I like the fact that the movie uses Connery’s age as a bit of a gimmick by playing up the “middle-aged Bond” theme. I also love Klaus Maria Brandauer’s performance as Largo; he has an offhand easy charm that works against his character becoming a villain stereotype, and his duel with Connery in the “Domination” game is a highlight of the movie. Barbara Carrera is also memorable as Fatima Blush; she plays her femme fatale role with a winning glee. Unfortunately, there’s really no standout action sequence, and the movie feels a little bland stylistically. The movie also features the feature film debut of actor Rowan Atkinson, and though I really like the performer, I’m glad the movie uses his comic character sparingly. I also like the idea of Max von Sydow playing Blofeld, but he’s used so fleetingly that he can’t really make much of an impression. All in all, I quite like this one, and it has what is for me the single funniest moment of all of the Bond movies; I’m talking, of course, about the contents of a beaker of fluid that Bond uses in a battle against a powerful assassin.

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Human Experiments (1979)

HUMAN EXPERIMENTS (1979)
Article 5025 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-21-2015
Directed by Gregory Goodell
Featuring Linda Haynes, Geoffrey Lewis, Ellen Travolta
Country: USA
What it is: Mad scientist, WIP style

A singer is mistakenly sentenced for the mass murder of a family, and is sent to prison. There she becomes the target of a psychiatrist who is experimenting with an extreme therapy technique designed to make her a decent citizen…but which has only brought death to its subjects so far.

Most of the movie plays like a depressing, dreary women-in-prison film, somewhat less exploitative than others of its ilk. The rest of the movie is mostly concerned with the woman undergoing the therapy technique, the implementation of which strikes me as pretty unbelievable on any level. This movie is one of many which ended up on a “video nasty” list of movies that were banned in Britain. I’ve seen most of the others on this list, and this is easily the mildest of the bunch; in fact, I would imagine anyone drawn to this one for the gore and nastiness would go away very disappointed. The most grotesque scene has our heroine trapped in a cell with a lot of creepy-crawly insects, a scene which is rather disgusting but it also strains credibility, given the situation. Throw in one of those ambiguous endings, and you have just one more thing not to like about the movie. In some ways, the movie is watchable enough, largely because there’s a certain in curiosity value in finding out what is going to happen, but overall it’s a very unsatisfying experience.

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Moonraker (1979)

MOONRAKER (1979)
Article 5024 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-20-2015
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
Featuring Roger Moore, Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale
Country: UK / France / USA
What it is: James Bond movie

James Bond undertakes an investigation having to do with the hijacking of a space shuttle being flown to England,

As I’ve said before in this series, I don’t really “get” James Bond; I’m not a devotee of the series and I don’t really feel very strongly about it. However, the breadth of coverage being what it is, I’ll be watching all of them because its reliance on gimmicky gadgetry usually has it pushing up against the science fiction genre. This is perhaps the entry from the series that most falls within the genre, with the plot eventually involving a hidden space station orbiting around the earth and a storyline involving the possible eradication of all human life on earth. It’s not a favorite of Bond fans, and I’m going to make some guesses why. Though the Bond films are essentially parodies of spy films, the tone of the parody should be sly and sexy; if it becomes blatantly comic, it destroys the tone, and the gondola chase scene as well as the moment when Jaws gets a girlfriend break that rule. Drax is merely an adequate main villain, and the only memorable henchman is Jaws, who unfortunately is a retread from THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and isn’t particularly well used here. There’s also only one really truly memorable action sequence here, and that’s the one before the credits role. I know some people don’t care much for Roger Moore as Bond, but I more or less accept him in the role, but then, as stated earlier, I’m not a big fan of the character. I suppose I could claim that the final battle at the space station strains credibility, but the Bond series does that on a regular basis; however, I do find it strange that they feel compelled to use laser blasters as weapons of choice in space but not on Earth. At any rate, this isn’t the series at its most compelling.

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The Mind Snatchers (1972)

THE MIND SNATCHERS (1972)
aka The Happiness Cage
Article 5023 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-19-2015
Directed by Bernard Girard
Featuring Christopher Walken, Joss Ackland, Ralph Meeker
Denmark / USA
What it is: Science fiction drama

A private in the army who has major disciplinary problems is arrested by the MPs, but instead of being taken to a stockade, he is taken to the clinic of a physician who is experimenting on human patients.

This is another one of those movies where most of the plot descriptions I found like to engage in spoilers; they tell you the nature of the doctor’s experiment, and in the movie itself, this isn’t revealed until the final third. Though this knowledge may not necessarily ruin your enjoyment of the movie, it does remove a mystery aspect of the story, and it could make you impatient with the middle third of the movie in which it explores the personalities and relationships between several of the major characters. The movie (which was based on a stage play) is a bit on the stodgy side, but it compensates for that by having interesting characters played by strong actors; in particular, Christopher Walken (as the soldier) and Ronny Cox (as his roommate in the clinic) are memorable. I won’t give away the nature of the experiment myself, but it does place the movie into the genre of science fiction, and thematically it touches upon one of themes of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. I will reveal this much, though; the experiment involves one of those concepts that seems benign on the surface but proves nightmarish in application. And, given what you see on the screen, the final line of the movie is truly chilling. I liked this one.

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The Mighty Peking Man (1977)

THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (1977)
aka Xing xing wang
Article 5022 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-18-2015
Directed by Meng Hua Ho
Featuring Evelyne Kraft, Danny Lee, Feng Ku
Country: Hong Kong
What it is: King Kong, Hong Kong style

An expedition seeks to capture a giant gorilla known as the Mighty Peking Man, but it is discovered that the gorilla obeys a woman who grew up in the jungle after her parents crashed.

This Hong Kong attempt at KING KONG crossed with a female Tarzan subplot is a favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s, and many people find it the most drop-dead hilarious of the various bad giant ape movies made over the years. Still, when it comes to campy hilarity, there’s a lot of differing tastes between people, and though there’s no doubt the movie is bad, I’m more apt to get my laughs from THE MIGHTY GORGA and a few others. And as far as bad giant ape movies go, this is actually a lot better than some others; the aforementioned GORGA comes to mind, as does the truly atrocious Korean movie APE. At least this one is fairly energetic, but then, being a Shaw Brothers production (the company who gave us the irresistible INFRA-MAN), I’d expect they’d know how to keep things moving. Still, I do find myself a bit bored whenever the movie goes into ’70s romantic mode (with a theme song popping up as well), no matter how skimpy a costume the Tarzaness wears (and believe me, folks, this one is pretty skimpy), but at least in most such scenes we don’t usually see a woman tossing a leopard around. The usual culprits are here; cheesy music, bad dubbing, ambitious but unconvincing special effects. It’s a bad movie favorite of many; it’s just not one of my favorites.

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The Manipulator (1971)

THE MANIPULATOR (1971)
Article 5021 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-16-2015
Directed by Yabo Yablonsky
Featuring Mickey Rooney, Luana Anders, Keenan Wynn
Country: USA
What it is: Art film

An insane man keeps a woman hostage in an old warehouse full of theatrical props. There he imagines he is directing her in a movie production of “Cyrano de Bergerac”.

IMDB describes this movie as a “horror/thriller”. And maybe it is. Certainly, the plot description and the basic situation lends itself to that approach, and there are moments when the movie is downright nightmarish. Unfortunately, the director seems more interested in indulging himself in all sorts of arty distancing techniques; there’s weird camera angles, dream sequences, slow motion and fast motion, all of which seem to add a bizarre drug-tinged haze over the proceedings, and the script is a rambling mess that probably only makes sense in the mind of a madman. I certainly don’t blame Mickey Rooney for any of this; he dives into his role of the insane would-be director with gusto and real commitment, and in terms of showing us just what he was capable of, it’s an impressive performance. But in the context of this movie, the performance starts to feel like little more than another artistic distancing technique, and the fact that the only other two speaking actors in the movie (Anders and Wynn, the latter in a cameo) don’t seem particularly sane either, it doesn’t really have an effective context in which it can shine. The end result is a movie that wears out its welcome very rapidly; it’s unpleasant, annoying and distracting. As impressive as Rooney’s performance is, it really needed to be in a much better movie.

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Choke Canyon (1986)

CHOKE CANYON (1986)
Article 5020 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-16-2015
Directed by Charles Bail
Featuring Stephen Collins, Janet Julian, Bo Svenson
Country: USA
What it is: Action movie

A physicist testing a theory about converting sound waves into energy crosses swords with a corporation intent on using his location as a dumping site for toxic waste. Much action occurs.

I will give this movie credit for one thing; there’s some impressive stuntwork here. In the first half of the movie there’s a stunt involving a horse, the scientist, and two all terrain vehicles that is pretty impressive, and the second half of the movie has an extended action sequence involving a helicopter, a biplane, a round sphere of toxic waste, a bus, one of those trucks that hauls new cars around, a landing on the main street of a town, and a couple of construction vehicles. This increasingly outrageous last series of stunts is so off-the-wall that the movie seems to make the transition from straight action movie to parody, especially when it asks the question “Is it possible to do science while engaged in a knock-down fist fight?” Nevertheless, it does need to be pointed out that the science in the story never really becomes anything more than a Gizmo Maguffin, which somewhat marginalizes the movie in terms of its fantastic content. And when you get down to it, the overall story is pretty run-of-the-mill stuff. All in all, if the movie is worth catching, it’s for the stunts and the presence of Lance Henriksen, though his part is a bit disappointing.

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