FRIGHTMARE (1974)
(a.k.a. FRIGHTMARE II)
Article #1188 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-15-2004
Posting Date: 11-12-2004
Directed by Pete Walker
Featuring Rupert Davies, Sheila Keith, Deborah Fairfax

A woman tries to bring up her younger sister without telling her of her parents, who were committed to an asylum many years ago for acts of cannibalism. Unfortunately, her parents have been recently released…

The seventies were not a time for the meek horror fan; the permissiveness of the sixties combined with a disturbing nihilism to produce some truly unpleasant horror movies. During 1974, audiences in the States would contend with Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE while British audiences were given FRIGHTMARE, both movies about families of cannibals. In a sense, the movies would make interesting companions. TTCM was a low-budget independent film which places us among the victims in their attempt to deal with a family of ferocious monsters. This one is much more professionally made, and it unsettles you by allowing you to spend a lot of time with the cannibalistic family itself, and these are people you don’t want to spend a great deal of time with. It’s not quite as effective as the Tobe Hooper movie; it’s a lot more predictable, for one thing, and some of the shocking revelations aren’t exactly surprising, as the shocks are somewhat telegraphed. Still, it has its moments, though it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. Incidentally, when this movie was released on video, it had to contend with the fact that another movie had been made in 1980 with the title FRIGHTMARE. Their solution? They released this one as FRIGHTMARE II. Talk about a confusing way to avoid confusion.

FEMALE VAMPIRE (1973)
(a.k.a. EROTIKILL/LES AVALEUSES)
Article #1177 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-4-2004
Posting Date: 11-1-2004
Directed by Jesus Franco
Featuring Lina Romay, Jack Taylor, Alice Arno

A female vampire is on the loose sucking the life out of her victims.

Yes, folks, it’s Jess/Jesus Franco again. I wish I could describe this as a vampire movie with sex in it, but in truth it’s a sex movie with a little vampirism in it. It’s one hour and forty-five minutes long, and if you take the sex out, it would probably run about 15 minutes or so. Those fifteen minutes consist of the movie’s efforts to convince me it had some sort of story.

The movie did inspire me to do a little research, and I’ve decided to share the results of that research.

Larry Buchanan directed 29 movies.
Ed Wood directed 18 movies.
Andy Milligan directed 27 movies.
Herschell Gordon Lewis directed 37 movies.
Phil Tucker directed 7 movies.

Now, I think Jesse Franco is probably more competent than any of those directors. Nonetheless, this movie has convinced me of one thing, and that is that Franco is a director who will probably end up wasting my time far more than those other directors (though I may revise that statement when I actually see an Andy Milligan film). And when you consider that he’s directed 182 films (not all of which are fantastically themed, but I’m willing to bet a significant ratio of them will qualify), I start to get an inkling of just how much time he could take up.

Oh, and one more stat: Franco has more than sixty nom-de-plumes. That must be some sort of record.

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER (1965)
Article #1156 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-14-2001
Posting Date: 10-11-2004
Directed by Robert Gaffney
Featuring Marilyn Hanold, Lou Cutell, Robert Reilly

Space aliens planning on kidnapping Earth women for breeding stock destroy a rocket manned by a robot, which is then damaged so that it goes on a murderous rampage.

When you see a movie with the name “Frankenstein” in the title, you have every right to feeling ripped off if the movie has nothing to do with Frankenstein or his creation. The title here is akin to that of some sword and sandal movies in which Hercules as such does not appear; the hero is just some guy who is real strong, so they call him Hercules. Here the robot’s murderous rampage elicits a comment from someone that he’s turned into a “Frankenstein”; hence, the title.

Actually, I remember this movie well enough from having seen it on my local Creature Feature years ago; the monster, the creepy alien Dr. Nadir, and the fact that the robot uses an axe to kill a man all stuck in my memory. There’s no doubt that the movie has a certain drive-in appeal. Beyond that, there’s very little to recommend in this cheap little movie unless the succession of kidnapped bathing beauties (who submit passively to whatever the aliens want them to do because it spares them from actually having to act) is enough for you. For me the cheapness and the tediousness of some of the scenes (including endless scenes of people tooling around on a motor scooter while one of the soundtrack’s two swinging sixties songs plays) became overly repetitive. This one is largely for fans of cheap drive-in fare.

FLIGHT TO MARS (1951)
Article #1155 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-13-2004
Posting Date: 10-10-2004
Directed by Lesley Selander
Featuring Cameron Mitchell, Marguerite Chapman, Arthur Franz

Five people go to Mars to discover a dying society.

I find it somewhat surprising that the poverty row studio Monogram would try to undertake a color science fiction epic. However, I’m not surprised that the result ended up like this. On the plus side, there are the familiar faces of Cameron Mitchell (looking so young I can hardly recognize him), Marguerite Chapman, Arthur Franz and Morris Ankrum (as the bad guy, of all things). It also is full of pretty colors, and the women of Mars where extremely short miniskirts (which counts for a lot in some quarters). On the down side, we have the plot (one half ROCKETSHIP X-M, one half tepid melodrama) and the uninspired direction in which almost everything that happens is reduced to scene after scene of people standing around (or sitting around) and talking while the camera just takes it all in. All the action is saved for the last one and a half minutes of the movie, and its ending is almost as abrupt as the one in CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. It has its charms, I suppose, but I’d rather watch ROCKETSHIP X-M or DESTINATION MOON anytime.

FIRST MAN INTO SPACE (1959)
Article #1154 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-12-2004
Posting Date: 10-9-2004
Directed by Robert Day
Featuring Marshall Thompson, Marla Landi, Bill Edwards

A pilot defies the orders of his commander and takes a test plane into the reaches of outer space.

The first half of this movie is a draggy bore; the conflicts between the main characters are cliched, and the director does nothing to make the exposition exciting or interesting. However, once we find ourselves dealing with a blood-thirsty monster in the second half, the movie perks up considerably, and even manages to work itself up to a fairly strong sequence near the end where the heroes try to steer the monster to a pressure chamber by appealing to its reason while keeping far enough away from it so as not to suffer damage. It even manages to be touching enough near the end to get away with a line that must have looked awful in print (it’s the line that includes the title of the movie), though some of that credit should go to Bill Edwards (if that’s him doing the voice at the end), who manages to delivery with just the right touch of emotion to make it work. Still, for me the most interesting thing about the movie is the presence of Roger Delgado in a small role as a bullfight entrepreneur who is seeking restitution for damages done to his arena when a passing missile caused a mishap in the bullring; for those not familiar with the name, he is most famous for having played the Master during the Jon Pertwee seasons of “Doctor Who.” Delgado was a wonderful actor, and he turns his role into something special and memorable.

FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966)
Article #1153 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-11-2004
Posting Date: 10-8-2004
Directed by Francois Truffaut
Featuring Oskar Werner, Julie Christie, Cyril Cusack

In the future where all books are burned, a fireman defies the law and begins to read.

Ray Bradbury was one of my favorite authors as a kid, and I still love his work today. Yet despite this, I’ve never quite warmed up to his most famous novel, which is odd, because I’m inordinately fond of his novella, “Pillar of Fire”, which covers much of the same thematic ground. Furthermore, I’ve seen a few of Francois Truffaut’s movies, and I must confess that I have real trouble appreciating them; there’s something about his style that doesn’t speak to me. It should then come as no surprise that I have some problems with this movie. I think it’s overlong, I find Oskar Werner entirely too distant in the role of Montag, and there are times where I really find myself pining for the visual equivalent of Bradbury’s prose for good stretches of this movie. Still, this movie is far from a washout; on the plus side, Julie Christie’s performances in both her roles are memorable and Cyril Cusack is simply wonderful as the captain of the firemen whose poetic dismissal of the whole book culture is so ringingly beautiful to the ears that it serves to slyly undercut the very gist of his message. I also admire the way the printed word has been almost completely expunged from the sets; even the opening credits are narrated so as to deprive you of the pleasure of reading them. Plus, the movie has at least two unforgettable scenes that more than compensate for any of my other objections; namely, the sequence where the old lady with the secret library takes matters into her own hands with a box of matches, and the entire end of the movie with the book people, a sequence that is sad, beautiful, charming and sometimes quite funny and which never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

Half empty or half full? Me, I’ll probably watch this one again, but I hope you’ll excuse me if I keep the fast forward handy.

FINGERS AT THE WINDOW (1942)
Article #1028 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-7-2004
Posting Date: 6-5-2004
Directed by Charles Lederer
Featuring Lew Ayres, Laraine Day, Basil Rathbone

An out-of-work actor saves a woman who is being stalked by an axe-murderer. Then, when another axe-murderer shows up, he begins to suspect there is more to the situation than meets the eye.

This movie has a nice premise (there is a rash of axe murders being committed, though all by different mental patients whose last names begin with a “B”, and the opening of the movie is scary and suspenseful. Unfortunately, the movie loses steam as it moves along, partially because the story emphasizes the exploits of a chatty actor (Lew Ayres) whose presence is more apt to destroy the suspense in a scene rather than add to it; had the focus been on the woman being threatened, the movie would have worked better. As it is, the movie leaves you a little too much time to notice that the story doesn’t hold together very well, and the ending turns out to be rather disappointing. And though I’m no expert on psychiatry, I do know that paranoia, schizophrenia and split personality are all distinct and separate mental illnesses, whereas this movie almost uses them interchangeably.

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN (1980)
Article #989 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11/29/2003
Posting Date: 4/27/2004
Directed by Don Taylor
Featuring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross

An aircraft carrier goes through a time warp and ends up in 1941, just prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

If you’re in love with military technology and really enjoy endless shots of planes taking off, fueling and landing, then you’ll probably enjoy this movie well enough; as for me, I’m not particularly keen on that sort of thing, so I have to rely on the plot to hold my attention. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to see this movie before I’d heard about the ending (several times over, in fact), and it is one of those endings that tends to make the action that leads up to it seem rather pointless. It’s also the type of ending that would probably feel more effective in a thirty-minute Twilight Zone episode than in a full-length movie; as it is, this movie feels more like a missed opportunity than anything else, one that sets up some intriguing hypothetical situations, and then fails to really deliver on them. In short, the movie chickens out. This being said, it still has its uses; you can watch the first ninety-percent of the movie and speculate on what could have been. And as a side puzzle, see if you can figure out the identity of Martin Sheen’s mysterious boss before the final reel.

And incidentally, this movie marks the MOTDs first foray into the decade of the eighties.