Brain Twisters (1991)
Article 5749 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-23-2020
Directed by Jerry Sangiuliano
Featuring Farrah Forke, Terry Londeree, Joe Lambardo
Country: USA
What it is: Brain snoozers is more like it

A college scientist is testing video game graphics on his students for a corporation. However, the students begin going crazy and becoming homicidal…

Ever since they became popular, video games have been blamed for a number of ills; in particular, they can serve as a scapegoat for violent behavior. I wouldn’t be surprised if this concept is what inspired this movie. The story is fairly obvious, but that’s not what’s the real problem here. It’s that once it has established its central situation, there’s nothing to do but wait until the movie gets around to resolving the situation, and what follows is a tedious slog through tiresome incident involving uninteresting characters with no real surprises to pep things up. It’s one of those movies I suspect I will completely forget about after a couple of days have passed. However, it gets a point for having one amusing laugh line about olive oil. It’s rather sad when the high point of a movie is a single joke.

The Boy Who Could Fly (1986)
Article 5748 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-22-2020
Directed by Nick Castle
Featuring Lucy Deakins, Jay Underwood, Bonnie Bedelia
Country: USA
What it is: Almost, but not quite

A formerly married woman and her two children move to a new neighborhood with an autistic boy living with his uncle next door. The boy believes he can fly. Can he, and how does that effect the newcomers?

The opening two-thirds of this movie in which the daughter bit by bit establishes a real relationship with the autistic boy is very effective; there’s something very real and very moving about most of what’s happening. However, even early on there was something that made me feel rather ambivalent about the movie. I think it was that the references to other movies and stories (TO CATCH A THIEF, “Peter Pan”, “Romeo and Juliet”, to name a few) felt a little too self-consciously clever and a bit forced. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the final third of the movie (where the issue of whether or not the boy can really fly becomes overly important) disappoints, and it left me with the feeling that the director was more interested in making his own variation on E.T.. At this point, the movie stops feeling like a slice of life and more like an inspirational poster. It’s a shame; for a good portion of its running time it was really something special. I do consider it ironic, though, that the more overt the fantastic content is, the less interesting the movie becomes. I would have liked this one more if it had stayed in the realm of marginalia.

The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976)
Article 5747 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-21-2020
Directed by Randal Kleiser
Featuring John Travolta, Glynnis O’Connor, Robert Reed
Country: USA
What it is: Biography of a boy in an extraordinary situation

A boy born without an immune system is forced to live his entire life in a sterile environment. How will this effect his life?

The Lentz guide includes this title, but since this is a fictionalized biography (it’s based on the experiences of two different people) and the science appears to be based on true experiences rather than speculative ones, I’m not sure it qualifies as belonging to the fantastic genres. There is, however, a touch of science fiction when the boy in the bubble speculates that he may be part of an exchange program from another planet (called Thermopolis), which is probably just a joke. The movie set from which I watched this classifies it as a cult item of sort, and the presence of John Travolta just prior to his breakout role in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER may be the reason why. At heart, the movie is primarily a love story; his relationship with the girl next door is the force that drives the main character’s actions. It’s not great, but it’s watchable enough. However, it is a bit weird watching it at this time (for those reading this in the future, we are currently undergoing the coronavirus pandemic); after all, isn’t the main character here undergoing a very extreme sort of social distancing?

A Bout with a Trout (1947)
Article 5746 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-20-2020
Directed by Izzy Sparber
Featuring the voice of Cecil Roy
Country: USA
What it is: Little Lulu cartoon

Little Lulu plays hooky in order to go fishing. Will her conscience bother her?

I think I’ve covered one of the Little Lulu cartoons before, so here’s another one of them. This one gets its fantastic content from a dream sequence in which Lulu dreams of the great things that will happen if she goes back to school and the horrible things that will happen if she continues fishing. We see angel and devil versions of her having an argument about what she should do, and there are talking schoolhouses, dancing letters of the alphabet, and three singing stars with the faces of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Jerry Colonna. It’s one of the more interesting of the Little Lulu cartoons, though it is probably one of the preachiest.

Bosko in Bagdad (1938)
aka Little Ol’ Bosko in Bagdad
Article 5745 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-20-2020
Directed by Hugh Harman
Featuring the voices of Lillian Randolph, Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas, Zoot Watson
Country: USA
What it is: Bosko cartoon

Bosko is sent by his mother to deliver a basket of cookies to his grandmother. However, he encounters a frog genie in the woods that sends him to Bagdad, where the Sultan will stop at nothing to get the cookies for himself..

This isn’t quite the same Bosko as the one in the early Warner Brothers cartoons. By the time he was a character at MGM, he was a standard-issue black boy. As might be expected, this cartoon short is awash with stereotypes, though it is a little jarring to see them put forth from giant green frogs instead of the usual black caricatures. Still, this is a pretty weird cartoon; it starts out looking like a parody of “Little Red Riding Hood”, but then mutates into a bizarre jazz-tinged Arabian Nights story, and it ends up being rather surreal in a somewhat queasy manner. Despite the fact that I love surreal stuff, this one didn’t quite work for me; there’s a touch of unpleasantness to the whole affair. There is quite a bit of fantastic content, though.

Boo Moon (1954)
Article 5744 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-19-2020
Directed by Izzy Sparber and Seymour Kneitel
Country: USA
What it is: Caspar cartoon

Lonely Caspar goes to the moon because it looks friendly. He is captured by miniature moon men.

It’s a bit ironic that one of my least favorite cartoon franchises is one with guaranteed fantastic content; after all, Caspar is a ghost. Well, I’ll give them credit for varying the routine, at least; this one basically lifts the premise of “Gulliver’s Travels” with Caspar in the Gulliver role. As to be expected, the moon men are too scared of Caspar to make friends with him (though they consider him a monster rather than a ghost) until he saves them from an attacking horde of giant moon tree men. I couldn’t help notice that the character designs for the moon men are very similar to those of the Fleischer GULLIVER’S TRAVELS feature. The extra fantastic content adds a little bit to the cartoon, but it’s still rather weak.

The Bookworm (1939)
Article 5743 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-19-2020
Directed by Friz Freleng and Hugh Harman
Featuring the voices of Mel Blanc, Frank Elmquist, Martha Wentworth
Country: USA
What it is: “Books Come to Life” cartoon

In a bookstore, the witches from “MacBeth” send the title character from “The Raven” out to catch them a worm to add to their witches’ brew. However, the bookworm the raven encounters proves difficult to catch.

You can probably get a good idea which books were popular and well-known in the late thirties/early forties just by watching the several cartoons of the era in which books come to life. Here’s another one, and it’s a bit heavier in the horror department, as several characters from the scarier books of the era pop up. Like the others, it’s fairly amusing, but it does engage in some unfortunate racial stereotypes (always watch out when the book “Black Beauty” gets referenced). Most of the ones I’ve seen previously have been from Warner Brothers, but this one is from MGM.

Bomba, the Jungle Boy (1949)
Article 5742 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-18-2020
Directed by Ford Beebe
Featuring Johnny Sheffield, Peggy Ann Garner, Onslow Stevens
Country: USA
What it is: Double-Stuffed Safari-O

A man and his daughter are on safari in a studio jungle set. The daughter gets separated and finds herself in peril from stock footage. Can Bomba save her and return her to her father?

The Lentz guide includes this title, but I’ve come to accept that that does not necessarily mean anything, and given my own choice on the matter, I’d probably skip this one for its lack of real fantastic content. It was the first of a series of jungle shorts to star the former Boy of the Tarzan series, Johnny Sheffield, and given the way this sodden lump of a movie just sits there and lets its ghost of a plot unwind, I’m surprised that they even bothered with the sequels. This lethargic and uninspired movie may be one of the dreariest examples of the jungle flick; I suspect they only made a lot of them because the convenience of standing jungle sets plus the existence of a cornucopia of stock footage made them cost-effective entertainment. When the best thing you can say about a movie is that some of the scenes are in slow motion, you’re not in a good place. For jungle movie completists only.

Bluebeard’s Brother (1932)
Article 5741 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-16-2020
Directed by Frank Moser
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Early Terrytoons Talkie

A spouse-murdering spider sets his sights on another victim, a female acrobat at the circus.

The early thirties wasn’t the best time for animation, but it certainly was one of the weirdest, and if there’s anything this cartoon illustrates, it was that it could be almost as weird as a Fleischer cartoon from the era. This one is pretty high on the horror content; with the main villain being what appears to be a spider (though he only has six legs) which can command a legion of flying bats to do his bidding, there’s enough fantastic content to make it qualify. There are also other touches, such as two-headed giraffes, flying unicorns and leopard spots being used as machine-gun ammunition, which will make you scratch your head. It’s more jaw-dropping than funny or exciting, but maybe that’s what it was trying for. At any rate, it’s a lot more entertaining than most of what I’ve seen from the studio.

Blinkity Blank (1955)
Article 5740 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-12-2020
Directed by Norman McLaren
No cast
Country: Canada
What it is: Abstract animation… sort of

The story of a conflict between a bird and its cage.

The plot description is from the one on IMDB, and though that’s not quite what I had in mind while watching, it’s as good of a plot description (if an abstract film of this sort can really have a plot) as any. I’ve got a five-DVD set of McLaren’s work, and I’m just starting to delve into it, and it appears that the introductory screen to each short features an enlightening quote from McLaren. For this one, the quote reflects that he would often try to make a purely abstract short, but he would realize that the audience would be bored so he would add a certain amount of representational animation to the mix (such as things that resemble birds). And he does; there are clearly some bird-like images throughout this short, and with the addition of representation comes the hint of something resembling a “plot” (bird vs. cage?) as well.

Well, whatever his conscious intention, the end result is fairly engaging and fun. I don’t know if the music used here was made specifically for the short, or if McLaren built his short around the music, bit it does add to the flavor quite a bit; it’s somewhere in a realm between Igor Stravinsky and Carl Stalling. At any rate, I’m beginning to look forward to seeing more of McLaren’s work, and I’ll review the ones that have listings in the Walt Lee guide.