HERCULES, PRISONER OF EVIL (1964)
aka Ursus, il terrore dei kirghisi
Article 3222 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-13-2010
Posting Date: 6-10-2010
Directed by Antonio Margheriti and Ruggero Deodato
Featuring Reg Park, Mireille Granelli, Ettore Manni
Country: Italy
What it is: Sword and Sandal

A monster is loose in the vicinity, and so far, Hercules has been unable to track it down. An evil king decides to use the situation as a pretense to invade the region, claiming that the monster is a creation of Hercules and its residents. However, complications arise; Hercules is in love with he woman who is the rightful heir to the throne, and not everyone is who they seem…

Whatever flaws this particular sword-and-sandal movie has, I’ll definitely give it credit for one thing; it avoids the trap of merely repeating the tired story lines that usually mark this genre. The key wild card that has been thrown into the mix is the monster, and the mystery surrounding it and its elusiveness sets up some very interesting plot twists indeed. Technically, it’s not a Hercules movie; the Italian movie indicates that the main character is actually Ursus. Another piece of trivia; this is the first directorial work for Ruggero Deodato, who would go on to direct the notorious CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST; he’s only credited as assistant director, but according to IMDB, he was an uncredited co-director. The story gets a little confusing at times, and parts of it are unsatisfying, but the unusual story line and revelations make this one of the more interesting examples of the genre.

HILDE WARREN AND DEATH (1917)
aka Hilde Warren und der Tod
Article 3196 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-19-2010
Posting Date: 5-15-2010
Directed by Joe May
Featuring Mia May, Bruno Kastner, Georg John
Country: Germany
What it is: Depressing drama

A vivacious actress turns down an honest man’s proposal of marriage and instead weds a criminal. This event causes her life to enter a downward spiral…

My print runs only about 42 minutes, but though there are obviously some scenes missing, the main gist of the story seems to be intact. The script is by Fritz Lang, though the movie is not directed by him. It opens with a man telling a lively, vivacious actress that she won’t understand his play about a woman embracing death because she herself is too full of life. Of course, this is foreshadowing, and what follows is simply the chain of events that causes her to lose all the love of life. This is one depressing movie, largely because it’s pretty unrelenting in putting her through the wringer. The fantastic content consists of her seeing visions of death personified at various moments in the story, though I would stop short of calling it a horror movie. Though it’s not one of the better efforts from Lang, it does give an idea of some of the places he would go later in his career, and in its own bleak way, the movie is rather engrossing.

THE HAUNTED CASTLE (1896)
aka Le manoir du diable
Article 3164 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-11-2010
Posting Date: 4-13-2010
Directed by Georges Melies
Featuring Jeanne d’Alcy and Georges Melies
Country: France
What it is: The first horror movie

Two travelers arrive at an ancient castle and find themselves tormented by Mephistopheles.

The first horror movie? The claim is pretty good; unlike many of Melies’s films, he doesn’t appear to be trying for laughs here. It’s a simple, straightforward compendium of basic Melies tricks, with items and people vanishing, reappearing and transforming in front of your eyes. It must have been a real sensation in its day, and is certainly important historically.

AN HALLUCINATED ALCHEMIST (1897)
aka L’hallucination de l’alchimiste
Article 3163 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-10-2010
Posting Date: 4-12-2010
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Trick short

An alchemist has a nightmare in which visions appear in a giant retort.

I got a strong sense of deja vu from watching this early Melies short (which, thanks to a recent collection of his works, has been rescued from my Lost list), but that’s because some of the ideas here would pop up in later shorts of his as well; in particular, this one reminds me of THE MYSTERIOUS RETORT. Still, the hand-colored print I watched was beautiful to look at, and, even at this late date of time, some of the effects are actually quite good. Still, this is one of Melies’s more minor shorts.

ADDENDUM: It has come to my attention that the movie I watched here has been mistitled; it is not the title given above, but is actually just a shorter version of THE MYSTERIOUS RETORT. In short, this review is for the wrong movie. I’ll let it stand here as a monument to the fact that mistakes will always be made.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE (1929)
Animated short
Article 3159 by Dave Sindelar
viewing Date: 2-5-2010
Posting Date: 4-8-2010
Directed by Ub Iwerks
Featuring the voice of Walt Disney
Country: USA
What is is: Animated comic horror

Mickey Mouse is forced to seek shelter in a spooky house during a storm. There he is terrorized by skeletons who force him to play the organ.

I found this cartoon on one of Disney’s tin box collections; this one covers Mickey Mouse’s black and white cartoons. Rather than appearing in the main menu, it is consigned to the “From the Vault” section because it indulges in some racist stereotyping; at one point, Mickey is in total darkness, and all you can see is the white around his face, and he breaks into a few calls of “Mammy!” I’m glad the company chose to present the cartoon uncut, albeit in a section of the DVD where a child would be less likely to stumble across it; it would have been easy to just remove the offending section (which must run no more than three seconds) without compromising the whole cartoon (though some of the others on the set might well prove more difficult).

In the opening section of the DVD, Leonard Maltin talks about the reasons for the popularity of Mickey Mouse in particular amongst the cartoon characters of the era. Part of it may be due to the fact that Mickey was the star of the first talking cartoon. Maltin suggests it may have been his similarity to Chaplin in some regards. My own belief is because he was the central character of the studio when they were in the animation vanguard, while many of the other animation studios of the same era were mostly using cartoons with clear imitations of Mickey. This type of imitation just reinforces things; when you watch a cartoon featuring an imitation of a famous character, you rarely find yourself more impressed by the imitation than the original.

The cartoon itself is plotless, but quite tight. It mostly consists of skeleton dancing gags. You’ve seen this sort of thing before, but the presentation is tighter and more streamlined. Some of the humor is a bit on the bawdy side, including an obsession with chamber pots, the discovery a male and female skeleton in bed together, and an outhouse gag, but these are also common for the time. It’s a fairly fun Mickey Mouse cartoon.

HUIS CLOS (1954)
aka No Exit
Article 3155 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-1-2010
Posting Date: 4-4-2010
Directed by Jacqueline Audry
Featuring Arletty, Franck Villard, Gaby Sylvia
Country: France
What it is: A vision of hell

Three people go to hell, where they share a room together. They soon discover that hell has no demons or torturers of their own, and that it is they themselves that will perform those functions on each other.

This movie was based on a one-act play by Jean-Paul Sartre, and it is the source of a famous four-word phrase (in English, that is) that announces its theme. I knew before watching the copy I came by that it was going to be in French with German subtitles, and that it was going to be heavy with talk and light with action, but since the play is well-known, I managed to read about half of it before I watched the movie, so I was better prepared for it than some others. Since the play was only a one-act, has only four characters (the fourth is a valet that pops up to make sure the guests are (un)comfortable), the movie opens things up by giving us a sequence before the characters enter the room, where they spend time in the lobby of hell and learn such things as the uselessness of bribery. It also gives them a window in the room out of which they can see events taking place in the world of the living after their deaths; in the play, they only see visions, while here, we see them too. The theme (and for those of you not familiar with the phrase, it is “Hell is other people.”) is handled convincingly; we all know people we would hate to be trapped in a room with for eternity, and the presence of three gives the opportunity for shifting temporary allegiances where two characters can gang up on the third, but no victory is ever permanent and all will get the chance to be victimized. The title’s meaning is simple enough and the meaning becomes significant by the end of the movie. It’s interesting, but it does get a little tiresome; after all, there’s a reason the play was only a one-act.

HIROKU KAIBYODEN (1969)
aka The Haunted Castle
Article 3140 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-11-2010
Posting Date: 3-20-2010
Directed by Tokuzo Tanaka
Featuring Kojiro Hongo, Naomi Kobayashi, Rokko Toura
Country: Japan
What it is: Japanese horror film

A lord’s family and house are haunted by a murderous ghost cat that turns into a female vampire.

Given that the print I saw was in unsubtitled Japanese, I’m hard pressed to ferret out plot details, but the situation is familiar; it’s your basic “revenge from beyond the grave” tale. It’s very moody, and makes excellent use of color, shadow, startling imagery (including a scene where a cat laps up the blood of a woman who has committed suicide), and especially sound; I watched this one on my computer with headphones, and the sudden shrieks and noises are really effective. The music is mostly effective, though there were a few times where certain musical motifs were overused. It’s based on a legendary “ghost cat” story from Japan, and this is the first version I’ve seen, and the thrust of the story isn’t really a whole lot different than the various “Ghost of Yotsuya” movies I’ve seen; the concept that ghosts will lure you into killing those around you is used at one point.

HABEAS CORPUS (1928)
Article 3134 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-26-2009
Posting Date: 3-14-2010
Directed by Leo McCarey and James Parrott
Featuring Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Richard Carle
Country: USA
What it is: Classic comedy with macabre overtones

A mad professor hires two panhandlers to procure him a body from the local cemetery.

It’s great to see another Laurel and Hardy short, and this marks the first of their silent shorts I’ve seen. It’s a fun idea to put these two in a Burke-and-Hare scenario; even though some of the humorous content is obvious (Stan is scared), it’s still timed so well it works. Still, despite the visual gags, my favorite moment is a verbal (albeit in title cards) one in which Hardy reassures Laurel about the sanity of the professor. There’s a man disguised as a ghost and a bat to add to the horror content.

DIE HEINZELMANNCHEN (1956)
aka The Shoemaker and the Elves
Article 3123 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-15-2009
Posting Date: 3-3-2010
Directed by Erich Kobler
Featuring Nora Minor, Dietrich Thoms, Elke Arendt
Country: West Germany
What it is: Fairy tale

Every 100 years, elves appear in a small town and help the villagers with their work. They help a shoemaker, a baker, and a tailor. They also have to contend with a thief and a shrewish wife.

Just how long can you watch a group of children dressed up as elves do work to sprightly music without wanting to take a nap? I’m willing to bet that it’s not half the amount of time that this movie dedicates to showing you that very thing. The first twenty minutes introduces the human characters; the shoemaker, the tailor, and the baker and their respective families, as well as the thief and the local constabulary. Then we get a good thirty minutes of toiling elves, and that’s a good twenty-five minutes too long. The littlest elf does a few magic tricks for us to enliven things (to no avail), and the action is interrupted by a slapstick sequence in which the elves outwit a thief, another scene that wears out its welcome before its done. After this nonstop whimsy, we have another ten minutes of villagers reacting to the elves’ work while an elf who failed to vanish with the others at daybreak must elude capture. Then it’s night again, and the elves come back and…start working some more. After five minutes more of this they have a little change of pace (so you can stop climbing the walls) by having one of the elves break into a drum solo, and the other elves start playing along on makeshift instruments of their own (and guess what? They’re awful!) And then the shrewish wife tries to capture them, and I’ll be merciful and not give away the ending of the movie.

I found this one on YouTube in undubbed German, but it doesn’t really matter; after the first twenty minutes, there’s very little dialogue, and it’s not as if the story is unfamiliar in the first place. However, I suspect even children will have their patience tried by this one; there’s only so much whimsy you can get out of working elves, and that whimsy gets spread way too thin here.