Month: March 2021

The Wizard of Oz (1925)

The Wizard of Oz (1925)
Article 5542 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-20-2018
Directed by Larry Semon
Featuring Larry Semon, Dorothy Dwan, Oliver Hardy
Country: USA
What it is: Not quite what you’d expect

Court intrigue in the land of Oz affects the lives of several residents of a farm.

I’d heard about this movie for years, but I’d never seen it until now. I was mainly curious as to why the movie had such a poor reputation. Sure, I didn’t expect it to live up to the 1939 version, but not many movies do. But what really ended up startling me about this film was something I really didn’t expect; its fantastic content is in question. Instead of Oz being a fantasy land, here it’s just another in a long line of mythical countries. Munchkins, flying monkeys, witches, talking trees, magic of all sorts – none of these things are to be found here Sure, there’s a wizard, but he’s established as a charlatan huckster in the opening reel. Yes, we have a scarecrow, a tin woodsman and a cowardly lion, but not as separate entities; they’re all disguises taken on by the farmhands for one reason or another. What we have left is an alternate take of the Baum story, stripped of its fantasy elements and made to serve the purposes of slapstick comedy; it only qualifies as marginally fantastic due to the mythical country angle and some cartoon-like moments of comic exaggeration. Most of the movie consists of either court intrigue or slapstick antics, and most of that is pretty lame. It does have a few items of interest; one is the presence of Oliver Hardy lacking his moustache and some of his poundage. The other is that this is the earliest movie I know of to have a recurring slapstick concept – that of somebody mistaking a wild animal for a man in a costume. No, the movie’s not a total loss, but if I were a big Baum fan going into this one with certain understandable expectations, I’d be appalled.

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Gaslight (1940)

Gaslight (1940)
Article 5541 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-13-2018
Directed by Thorold Dickinson
Featuring Anton Walbrook, Diana Wynyard, Frank Pettingell
Country: UK
What it is: Crime thriller

A husband is using manipulative tactics to drive his wife crazy. Why is he doing this? And can he be stopped before he succeeds?

I’ve mentioned GASLIGHT before in this series, usually in the sense that I’m not fond of those movies which borrow its central premise; think THE SCREAMING SKULL or TERROR IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE as examples. What I never liked about the premise is that they mostly consist of a woman of delicate mental balance being tormented, which I find more unpleasant than fun. Having now seen one of the originals, I’m glad to say it works much better than its imitators. What makes the difference is that the script is much more solid and nuanced than those of its imitators, and the acting is also superior; instead of finding it merely unpleasant, I get drawn in by the character touches and the mystery elements. It also helps that the movie establishes the character of the detective early in the story, thus not leaving us with the sense that the woman’s plight is hopeless. In fact, I found the movie effective and worthy, though I do think I’d like to read the original stage version because I suspect that the ending may have been changed. So why did it take me so long to get around to this one when I’ve covered several of its imitators? It’s because the original movie is only very marginally genre; outside of the presence of the theme of madness, it does not unfold or play like a horror movie in any way.

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Seven Golden Men Strike Again (1966)

Seven Golden Men Strike Again (1966)
aka Il grande colpo dei 7 uomini d’oro
Article 5540 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-3-2018
Directed by Marco Vicario
Featuring Philippe Leroy, Rossana Podesta, Gastone Moschin
Country: Italy / France / Spain
What it is: Spaghetti heist

A criminal mastermind and his henchmen are captured by the authorities, but agree to help them in the kidnapping of a South American dictator in return for their freedom. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t have their own plot on the side…

Along with the various Spyghetti movies I’ve covered, Italy also put out an assortment of super-criminal movies as well which share the spy genre’s love of gadgetry. There’s a lot of gadgets in this one (including jet-packs) that pushes the movie into science fiction territory. It’s a sequel to SEVEN GOLDEN MEN (which I haven’t seen), and is played more for laughs than thrills; the gang here is more apt to out-talk than to out-shoot their adversaries. I found the movie witty and fun, with my favorite scene being one in which the leader quenches a rebellion among his henchman. It’s not a great movie, but it’s an entertaining little time killer.

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Isle of Dogs (2018)

Isle of Dogs (2018)
Article 5539 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-9-2018
Directed by Wes Anderson
Featuring the voices of Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton
Country: USA / Germany
What it is: Boy and his dog story… among other things.

Twenty years in the future, the city of Megasaki banishes its entire dog population to an island used for trash, ostensibly to prevent a canine plague from passing on to humans. However, a young boy arrives on the island, intent on finding his dog, and a pack of dogs helps him on his quest.

I’m glad to be covering a Wes Anderson film here, as he’s one of my favorite directors; I haven’t covered him so far because for a long time my series didn’t cover recent movies. His previous animated film, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, worked as both a good example of his oeuvre and as a children’s movie. This one is decidedly more adult, which means that its probably destined to remain in the art house circuit. Still, I found it a fascinating and thrilling film, so visually rich that I suspect it might take several viewings to catch all the details hidden around the edges. It’s both science fiction (futuristic setting, technology, robot dogs) and fantasy (talking dogs), and it could possibly be described as a political satire (and, given its theme of political scapegoating, a very relevant one) masquerading as a weird variant of the “boy and his dog” story. Many of the scenes are signature Anderson, and the movie is infused with a great deal of Japanese culture. Despite the fact that a good number of name actors provide the voices for the characters, this never becomes a distraction where you keep noticing the voices; the focus remains squarely on the characters. If I had to pick my favorite touch in the movie, it’s that the scenes that take place on the various television screens in the movie are done in a different style of animation as the main movie. If you’re not a Wes Anderson fan, I doubt this one will convert you, but for me, it was a real treat.

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Shamus (1958)

Shamus (1958)
Article 5538 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-8-2018
Directed by Eric Marquis
Featuring John Francis Rooney, Tiny Littler
Country: UK
What it is: Children’s fantasy

An Irish boy manages to get his hands on a leprechaun’s pot of gold, but is placed under a curse by the leprechaun so that he has the tale of a monkey which will only go away when he meets an Irish donkey.

Here’s another title that ended up on my “ones that got away” list until it recently showed up on YouTube. For those not familiar with that list, it consists of movies that ended up on my hunt list but which I was never able to find for one reason or another and which I eventually purged from my hunt list by leaving them on this one. Many of these movies are known to be lost. Some of them I simply don’t know if they still exist or not (and in some cases, they may never have existed). The rest are, like this movie, known to exist but are beyond my reach for one reason or another.

This movie had me thinking about reasons why I’ve not been able to find some of these movies in the last category, and I think there’s at least one simple reason – many of these movies simply don’t generate enough interest to merit their being released on home video or otherwise made available to the general public. Take this movie, for example. It’s a low budget children’s movie with no big or familiar names in the cast or crew, and it contains little in the way of special effects. The movie is not awful enough to garner a camp following, nor is it good enough to really capture the imagination of many children. For what it’s worth, it tells its story efficiently, and it keeps things moving enough to fill it’s short running time (less than an hour). Still, for a movie with a magical premise, there’s not much magic here, and it would largely go unmourned if it faded into obscurity. Yet I’m always glad to find and see one of these movies, if for no other reason than its rarity and my memory of not having been able to find it initially. But I could only recommend it to completists who have to see everything.

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The Attack of the Super Monsters (1982)

The Attack of the Super Monsters (1982)
Article 5537 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-31-2018
Directed by Toru Sotoyama and Tom Wyner
Featuring the voices of Tom Wyner, Dan Woren, Robin Levenson
Country: Japan
What it is: Tokusatsu on a budget

A squad of monster fighters do battle with a horde of loquacious underground dinosaurs intent on taking over the world.

When I first saw this on VHS about 25 years ago, I had never seen anything so ridiculous in my life. Since then, I’ve become much more familiar with Japanese tokasatsu series, of which this is merely a severely-budget-strained example. It’s actually four episodes of an obscure series named KYORYU SENSO AIZENBOGU edited together into a faux feature. The individual episodes are rather repetitive; Tyrannos the dinosaur dictator unleashes a giant dinosaur monster and a group of possessed animals (dogs, bats, rats) upon the world, and the squad of heroes must defeat them, which always involves two of the team members combining into an ambisexual super pilot. If anything sets this apart, it’s that it uses a very jumbled array of special effects techniques; the monster are suitmation, but the dinosaur leader Tyrannos seems to be a puppet. The sections with the humans are done in very limited animation style, and we never get to see a human and a dinosaur in the same scene. It’s pretty bad, but it has some great funny lines; my two favorites are “I don’t appreciate you’re telling me what to do with either my money or my blouse!” and “You’re a pathetic excuse for a super monster!” And, once again, I must confess I find this kind of thing irresistible.

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Coco (2017)

Coco (2017)
Article 5536 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-18-2018
Directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina
Featuring the voices of Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt
Country: USA
What it is: Animated feature, Pixar style

A young Mexican boy dreams of being a musician despite his family’s anathema to the profession. When, on the day before the Day of the Dead, he desperately attempts to steal the guitar of a famed music star so he can play it in a music competition, he finds himself trapped in the world of the dead and can only return to the land of the living if he can get the blessing of one of his dead blood relatives.

Though this is the first time I’ve reviewed one of their features, I’ve been a big fan of Pixar for a while, and even though as a whole they aren’t quite as consistent as they were about ten years ago, they’re still able to deliver a top-notch animated feature when their quality-control department is working in top form. This one is inspired; it uses a traditional Mexican holiday as the springboard for a multi-leveled exploration of several subjects, including family, music, memory, and, of course, death. It confidently walks the line between drama and comedy, the characters are well-drawn (in every sense of the word), and it manages to be hilarious one moment and deeply moving the next without straining for effect. Furthermore, the visualization of the world of the dead is stunning, and Pixar’s push to expand the range of animation is also on full display. Whenever Pixar is in top form, I have a harder time deciding which of their features I like best; this is another one that is in the running.

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My Big Emergency (1936)

My Big Emergency (1936)
aka Oira no hijoji
Article 5535 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-11-2018
Directed by Sanae Yamamoto
No cast
Country: Japan
What it is: Japanese animation

The peaceful members of the world of Frogland have to defend themselves when they are victims of a sneak attack by an evil horde of airplane bombers.

I don’t know if I’ve correctly assigned the Japanese title to this animated short that was passed on to me under the main title above, but it was the only movie listed on IMDB from 1936 that is credited to Sanae Yamamoto, so I’m making a leap of faith. Of the early Japanese shorts I’ve been watching lately, this is the one closest in style to equivalent American cartoons of the era. It has some Felix the Cat touches, and the pilots of the bombers look quite similar to the character of Bimbo from the Fleischer brothers shorts. It’s actually quite creative and very well done, with the anthropomorphic animals being the main fantastic content. However, as an American, I can’t view the cartoon without feeling a great sense of irony in the fact that this short about a clearly evil sneak air attack came from the same country responsible for the sneak air attack on Pearl Harbor.

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Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995)

Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995)
aka Gamera daikaiju kuchu kessen
5534
Date: 3-4-2018
Directed by Shusuke Kaneko
Featuring Tsuyoshi Ihara, Akira Onodera, Shinobu Nakayama
Country: Japan
What it is: Japanese monster mayhem

A flying fanged turtle does battle with a group of giant man-eating birds.

In its original incarnation, the Gamera series was largely a poor man’s imitation of the Godzilla series with an extra dose of juvenile pandering and goofiness. Still, the series did last a while, so I’m not really surprised that the attempt to revive it was made. What is surprising is that they did such a bang-up job of reviving it; the special effects are excellent, the juvenile approach has been jettisoned, and this movie is arguably better than any of the movies from the Godzilla revival of the eighties and nineties. It’s basically a remake of GAMERA VS. GAOS, with Gaos redesigned to look frightening rather than silly. Granted, it’s still a Gamera movie, and it pretty much follows the basic template of one, but it does it with a visual flair that puts it over well enough. It also makes better use of the female character with the psychic link to Gamera than the Godzilla series did with a similar character. At any rate, this certainly the best entry from the Gamera series that I’ve covered to this date.

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A Day After a Hundred Years (1932)

A Day After a Hundred Years (1932)
Article 5533 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-26-2018
Directed by Shigeji Ogino
Featuring Shigeji Ogino
Country: Japan
What it is: A vision of the future

In the year 2032, a man resurrects one of his ancestors to show him the world of the future.

This is directed by the same man who gave us DETECTIVE FELIX IN TROUBLE, but I think this one is much more interesting. It’s basically a compendium of futuristic devices to show what life might be like in the future; my favorite is a magic television that can show any event in the past. There’s really not much of a plot, and with only a ten minute running time, it can’t show you a great deal, but it also doesn’t wear out its welcome. The animation this time is a sort of shadow animation, though it’s certainly a lot less elaborate than similar work from Lotte Reiniger. There is a bit of live-action footage of the ancestor using a Pathe camera, and I’m assuming that the ancestor is Shigeru Ogino himself, and that he plays himself in that footage as well. The ending is curious and not really satisfying; I myself would have liked to have seen the promised vision of Mars.

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