The Abominable Snow Rabbit (1961)
Article 5588 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-28-2018
Directed by Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble
Featuring the voice of Mel Blanc
Country: USA
What it is: Looney Tunes

Bugs and Daffy get lost on their vacation and end up in the Himalayas, where they encounter an abominable snowman seeking a pet.

Warner Brothers’ cartoons were in their waning days in the early sixties, and though this cartoon is one of those from the era that is more fondly remembered, one can notice that the gags and the timing aren’t quite as sharp as they used to be, and the absence of Carl Stalling is very noticeable. Still, the reason this one is fondly remembered is that it is the most famous use of a gag they used several times over the years, in that one of the characters is modeled off of Lenny from “In Mice and Men”; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if more people are familiar with this cartoon than with the Steinbeck story. The presence of the snowman is a catalyst for another battle of wits between Bugs and Daffy, with the usual results. Initially, the snowman was a one-off character, but would be brought back in a few attempted revivals of Looney Tunes cartoons during the seventies and eighties.

Aan (1952)
Article 5587 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-24-2018
Directed by Mehboob Khan
Featuring Dilip Kumar, Nimmi, Prem Nath
Country: India
What it is: Epic romance

When an ambitious and tyrannical prince usurps the throne, he is opposed by a heroic peasant who has fallen in love with the princess.

For those who’ve noticed that I’m watching a lot of movies that began with AA, that’s because right now I’m going through Walt Lee’s Reference Guide to Fantastic Films in alphabetical order and watching any movie I can find on the internet listed there. As it turns out, there’s a heavy dose of films from India near the beginning of the book, and it seems they’re easy to find on YouTube.

Still, that doesn’t mean that they’re easy to find with English subtitles (even though I know prints do exist with them), and so I had to watch it in Hindi without subtitles. Fortunately, I had some plot descriptions to help work out the general story. It’s something of a cross between your typical palace intrigue story crossed with “The Taming of the Shrew”; the fantastic content (according to the Lee guide) is a dream sequence which includes some magic in it. Still, I have to say that the dream sequence (which is, of course, a long musical number) is only slightly weirder than some of the other musical numbers in this ambitious but bizarre drama. It was the first Indian film shot in Technicolor, and it makes as much use of the color as it can. Even with the plot descriptions, this one gets confusing at times, but it is loaded with spectacle, some of it quite jaw-dropping. Still, the most memorable thing I found in this one was the acting of female star Nadira as the princess, whose ability to overact with her eyes (and I do mean overact) is almost beyond human comprehension. Still, at least I didn’t need English subtitles to know how she was feeling.

Aadmi (1968)
aka The Man
Article 5585 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-18-2018
Directed by A. Bhimsingh
Featuring Dilip Kumar, Waheeda Rehman, Manoj Kumar
Country: India
What it is: Drama

A rich young man falls in love with a woman, but the relationship is threatened due to a secret from his past.

I originally started watching this in a version without English subtitles, so I decided to go hunting around for a plot description to help me. When I found a fairly elaborate one to help me, I couldn’t help notice that the screen shots seemed to indicate that there was a version of the movie that bore English subtitles, so I looked a little further and managed to find it. It’s a good thing, too; had I not had the subtitles, the movie would have been impenetrable to me. It’s primarily a drama (in soap opera mode) rather than a genre movie, but it has a few fantastic touches; there is a miraculous occurrence near the end of the movie, and throughout certain characters seem to be taunted by disembodied voices; this is as described in the Walt Lee guide. However, the most impressive moment of fantastic content has the hatred of the protagonist manifesting itself as a giant doppelganger who tries to talk his real self into committing murder; it’s an impressive effect. As a whole, the movie is fairly good, but I didn’t really care much for the musical sequences, and its length (two and three quarter hours) becomes a bit oppressive.

Adhi Raat Ke Baad (1965)
aka Aadi Raat Ke Baad
Article 5584 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-11-2018
Directed by Nanabhai Bhatt
Featuring Ashok Kumar, Ragini, Sailesh Kumar
Country: India
What it is: Action thriller

When he is suspected for the murder of his girlfriend’s lover, a man who knows the secret of invisibility goes on the run and tries to discover the real culprit.

It takes so long for this movie to get to its first musical number that for a while I was wondering if I stumbled across and Indian movie that wasn’t also a musical, but such is not the case. Which is a good thing, in this case; as this movie was in Hindi without English subtitles, I found it very difficult to follow and ultimately ended up enjoying the musical numbers best because they didn’t require knowing the story line. I did figure the plot point of an invisible man wanting to prove his innocence, but as the movie progresses, the plot only becomes more obscure. Initially, I thought it was a comedy based on the mood of the earlier scenes, but it becomes steadily more serious and somber as it progresses. Though I can’t really pass judgment on this one due to the language barrier, I did feel there were a number of scenes that seemed unnecessary. As for the invisible man special effects, they’re very primitive here, and as the film progresses, we see fewer and fewer of them, almost as if the invisibility gimmick has become invisible. I can’t really say I cared for this one, but that may only be due to the language barrier.

A Compadecida (1969)
aka Our Lady of Compassion
Article 5583 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-8-2018
Directed by George Jonas
Featuring Armando Bogus, Antonio Fagundes, Felipe Carone
Country: Brazil
What it is: Comedy

A con man/practical joker plays jokes on everyone he meets.

My plot description is pretty vague, but, given that the copy I found of the film was in Portuguese without English subtitles, it wasn’t easy to figure out. However, certain things do come through. For one thing, though IMDB classifies this as a drama, the general feel of the movie makes me suspect that it’s a comedy, albeit one that gets a little dark at times. It would be nice to know what is going on with some of the practical jokes (one involves a funeral for a dog, I gather), but the only one I was able to appreciate involved tricking an armed invader into believing he can bring people back to life with a harmonica. As to why I’m covering this movie, I’ll only say that final third of the movie involves events in the afterlife. Like many foreign language movies without English subtitles, I can’t really give a full-blooded evaluation of the movie, but I quite liked some of the bits.

A (1965)
Article 5581 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-31-2018
Directed by Jan Lenica
No cast
Country: West Germany
What it is: A painful way to learn the alphabet

A man’s life is invaded by a giant letter A which torments him.

Here’s a bizarre but amusing animated short in which a man’s daily life is threatened by an incomprehensible event; a giant letter A, seemingly indestructible and decidedly malicious appears in his room. As you might expect, this is absurdist and surreal, so it helps if you have a taste for this sort of thing. Amazingly, the short almost has a happy ending… that is, until you realize that A is just the first letter of the alphabet. I quite liked this one.

L’auberge rouge (1923)
Article 5557 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-26-2018
Directed by Jean Epstein
Featuring Leon Mathot, Gina Manes, Jean-David Evremond
Country: France
What it is: Crime / mystery

Two travelers encounter a diamond merchant at an inn. One of them is tempted to murder and rob the merchant, but doesn’t… only to wake up and find the merchant murdered and robbed.

My main familiarity with Jean Epstein is as the director of a 1928 version of THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, a movie that is so visually stunning that I overlook that in terms of story-telling, he’s not quite as successful. There are some nice visual touches to this movie as well, but it’s not as striking in that regard as the later movie, and so I notice that this one is slow and not always effective. For one thing, it spends too much time on the framing story (in which the events are told as a tale at a dinner table) than it does on the meat of the tale. Granted, the print I saw was about eight minutes short of the running time listed on IMDB, so there’s a chance I’m missing some details, but overall, I consider this one less effective. The fantastic content mostly revolves around the presence of a fortune teller that predicts the upcoming murder.

The Avenging Hand (1936)
Article 5544 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-23-2018
Directed by Frank Richardson and Victor Hanbury
Featuring Noah Beery, Kathleen Kelly, Louis Borel
Country: UK
What it is: Comic crime movie

An American gangster in England turns detective when an innocent man is murdered at a swanky hotel.

I’m covering this movie because it appeared on my suggestions list; these are movies that have been suggested by others for me to cover. On my own judgment, I wouldn’t be covering this one; despite a title that may hint at the horrific and a certain very slight resemblance to an “old dark house” movie, there is no fantastic content to be found. The movie is fairly confusing at times and is sometimes clumsily edited, but it gets by as a result of Noah Beery’s performance as the gangster-turned-detective; he’s obviously relishing the role and his sense of fun is passed on to the viewer. The uncredited James Harcourt is also entertaining as the murder victim, a simple man given his first taste of luxury who gets endless pleasure just riding the elevator. Between the two of them, they enliven what would otherwise be a very dull crime thriller.

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.

Alerte au sud (1953)
aka Alert in the South
Article 5532 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-20-2018
Directed by Jean Devaivre
Featuring Jean-Claude Pascal, Gianna Maria Canale, Erich von Stroheim
Country: France / Italy
What it is: Foreign Legion Spy Thrills

Two foreign legionnaires stumble upon a plot involving a death ray that can shoot planes from the sky. When one of them is murdered, the other continues to investigate to solve the mystery and avenge his friend.

Like many foreign movies that have been consigned to my “ones that got away” list only to be reprieved later upon my finding a copy, this one is not subtitled in English, and given that most of the first half of the movie is talk, it wasn’t particularly easy for me to follow. Still, I did find a plot description or two, and this helped a little; however, I would have to say that for the most part this is a Gizmo Maguffin affair; the fantastic content is mostly there to drive the action/espionage story. The proceedings are brightened a little by a couple of familiar faces; you’ve seen Stroheim’s name in the credits above, and the cast also features Peter van Eyck, who I recognized from several Edgar Wallace krimis of the sixties. If the language isn’t a barrier to you, it’s probably entertaining enough, but nothing special. I don’t know if the death ray actually gets used or not, since I didn’t notice anything manifest itself visually. It does, however, have a lot of dancing and camel noises. Which, come to think of it, is not really an adequate trade-off.