A MESSAGE FROM MARS (1913)
Article 4739 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-18-2015
Directed by Wallett Waller
Featuring Charles Hawtrey, E. Holman Clark, Crissie Bell
Country: UK
What it is: The reformation of a scoundrel

A Martian is sentenced to exile on Earth until he reforms a resident there of his selfish ways.

This is no doubt one of the earliest full-length science fiction movies ever made, and therefore it has a certain amount of historical and novelty value. It is also, however, little more than a variation on A CHRISTMAS CAROL with the substitution of a Martian for the various ghosts of that story; in this movie, the Martian is little more than a variety of supernatural creature. It is also, sadly, a very slow-moving movie. It was based on a stage play, but it appears that the makers weren’t quite sure how to find a good visual substitute for the missing dialogue, and the end result is that a bare-bones plot is stretched out to a full length movie by padding out everything; each scene feels as if it runs three times longer than it needs to in order to make its point. There are a couple of nice moments, though; my favorite is a comic bit where the selfish-man-to-be-reformed thinks that he can back track on the Martian’s command to go a certain direction, but when he does, he discovers he can only walk backwards. Most of the rest is obvious and overlong; despite being one of the first full-length SF features, it would have worked better as a short.

MAGIC BRICKS (1904)
aka Japonaiseries
Article 4720 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-27-2014
Directed by Gaston Velle or Segundo de Chomon
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: “Magic Trick” short

A Japanese magician performs tricks, some of which involve a box and a set of magic bricks.

When this movie first entered my hunt list, I consulted a source of mine on its availability, and my source discovered that this title was the original French title of the movie better known as MAGIC BRICKS, which is relatively easy to find. There are, in fact, two listings for this movie on IMDB, one for each of these titles. There is a problem in reconciling the data on the listings; the two titles have different dates (1904 and 1908), and different directors are attributed to the movie (Velle and Chomon), but I suspect the earlier date and Velle are the correct ones. Like yesterday’s movie, it’s a Japanese-themed “magic trick” short. Most of it is pretty ordinary, but the cinematic effects involving the magic bricks (in which a film of a child playing is taken apart brick by brick) is pretty striking. That’s the moment for which this short is best remembered.

And thanks, doctor kiss, for your help!

MAGNETIC UMBRELLA (1911)
aka Le parapluie magnetique
Article 4706 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-12-2014
Director unknown
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Comic trick short

A scientist creates a potion that, when poured on an umbrella, causes it to influence objects and people when it is opened. A child runs off with the umbrella to test it.

This movie was just recently consigned to my “ones that got away” list, but almost immediately someone was able to supply me with a copy. When I first entered it on that list, I found myself wondering why anyone would want to make an umbrella magnetic. After having seen the short, I know the answer; since an umbrella has two states (closed and open), it gave the object a metaphorical “on/off” switch. Now my question is why the word “magnetic” is used at all. Magnetism implies that it will attract objects to it; when the umbrella is “on” here, it instead makes all surrounding objects and people move around wildly at an exaggerated pace, which, while interesting to look at, is hardly magnetic. That being said, the speeded-up special effects make it fun to watch, though the story is pretty common for these types of shorts. It’s always nice to have a rarity like this show up.

THE MAGIC GLASS (1914)
Article 4676 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-9-2014
Directed by Hay Plumb
Featuring Reginald Sheffield
Country: UK
What it is: Comic short

A tyrannical father creates a substance that can make glasses capable of seeing through doors and walls. He uses it to keep his family in line.

This is the type of concept that seemed fairly straightforward to me, and I anticipated that this movie would consist of nothing more than scenes where the user of the glass surprises his subjects by revealing his knowledge of secrets that he isn’t expected to know. What did surprise me with this one was that it actually has a bit of emotional impact as well. The father is a tyrant who uses his knowledge to humiliate and browbeat his family, and though the family members are hardly saints themselves, you find yourself siding with them and hoping for the father’s comeuppance. Fortunately for them, the boy discovers the father’s secret for preparing glasses and uses them on both his magnifying glass and his mother’s as well. It then becomes apparent that the father is a bit of a hypocrite as well. My copy of the short ended a bit abruptly, so I don’t know if that’s just the way the short is or whether there might be a little footage missing, but I definitely found it interesting that the short added a little more than just some special effects trickery to the mix.

MORE WILD WILD WEST (1980)
Article 4644 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-3-2014
Directed by Burt Kennedy
Featuring Robert Conrad, Ross Martin, Jonathan Winters
Country: USA
What it is: TV-Movie update of an older TV series

James West and Artemus Gordon are called out of retirement to hunt down a madman who has the ability to make himself invisible… and has created a devastating bomb that may help him take over the world.

This is the second TV-Movie revival of “The Wild, Wild West”, my favorite TV show as a child. For those interested in my reaction to the earlier TV-Movie (THE WILD, WILD WEST REVISITED), go check my review on it. This is cut from the same cloth, and it has roughly the same strengths (it captures some of the ambiance of the original series, Robert Conrad and Ross Martin work well together, etc.) and weaknesses (it replaces the slyly satirical spy story played straight with overt comedy). The odd thing for me about watching this one is that I found I was getting used to that shift; as jarring as it was with the first movie, I found myself settling in and growing to accept it with this one, even if I did sense that it left the show in a weird limbo where it was neither fish nor fowl. All I can say is this; if the TV series had been revived (it was discussed, but the death of Ross Martin the next year put an end to that plan), it would’ve needed much better scripts and funnier jokes than there is here; despite my acceptance of the shift, I still didn’t find much to laugh at here. The thing that I liked the best here was to see Victor Buono appear as a parody of Henry Kissinger; he pretty much steals what there is to steal. I do think it’s a shame that I’ll not be covering anything from the original series, as none of the episodes have been edited into movies.

THE MAGIC DICE (1905)
aka The Crystal Casket, Le Phenix
Article 4633 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-18-2014
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Magic short

A magician performs magic with giant dice.

Apparently, this is only a fragment of the complete film, and usually that means that I wouldn’t bother with it. However, given that it appears to be a somewhat plotless magic film, it’s not like there’s a lot of story missing; the missing footage would probably have consisted of more magic. I don’t know how long the entire short was, but the fragment is fairly entertaining; it looks like it would have been one of the better films of this type from Melies.

MAZES AND MONSTERS (1982)
TV-Movie
Article 4630 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-14-2014
Directed by Steven Hilliard Stern
Featuring Tom Hanks, Wendy Crawson, David Wallace
Country: USA
What it is: Cautionary (?) drama

A group of college students who engage in role playing games decide to use some local caverns for live-action play. One of the people loses touch with reality and becomes the character he was playing.

There’s a scene here near the end of the movie where the mother of the student that goes crazy tells the other players of the game that she doesn’t hold them responsible for what happened to her son. However, I’m not sure whether she is speaking merely for herself or the movie in general. This movie has a 4.1 rating on IMDB as of this writing, and though the movie is heavily flawed (it’s indifferently directed, many false notes are struck, and some of the dialogue is quite bad) it does have its fleeting moments. Still, I don’t think that it’s just the quality of the movie that’s at issue here; I think that’s the reaction to the perceived message of the movie, which is that these role-playing games are dangerous destroyers of our youth, driving them crazy and sending them around the bend. Now I don’t know if that message is intentional or not, but I do know that the end of the movie left me with the feeling that it was made by those who do not like or approve of these games. I do know this much; if I were to have made a movie on the same subject, I would have made it a comedy, because as a drama it comes across as silly and unconvincing. The scenes at the beginning where we meet the characters and their parents in particular feel like a parade of child/parent conflict cliches, and whenever the movie starts dealing with the various character’s personal problems, it comes across as phony and facile. In other words, as propaganda, it just doesn’t convincingly sell its subject. As for the movie’s fantastic content, the very game under discussion provides at least a little of that, though this is augmented by the fact that there are scenes where we see the hallucinatory fantasy world of the main character, and the theme of madness is there as well. Still, I suspect those that love the worlds of the fantastic will be the ones who like this movie the least.

MYSTERIES FROM BEYOND EARTH (1975)
Article 4616 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-29-2014
Directed by George Gale
Featuring Lawrence Dobkin
Country: USA
What it is: UFO paranormal science smorgasbord

What is the truth about UFOs? What does it have to do with Atlantis? or Witches? or Bigfoot? or….

Here’s another foray into the world of unexplained phenomena, and I’m beginning to wonder just how many documentaries were made on this subject during the seventies; it seems almost as if every six months or so, another pops up on my list. It’s no surprise that this one covers a lot of the same ground that many of the other movies of this ilk have covered, but it’s also no surprise that it occasionally wanders into areas that the other movies haven’t touched. Still, this one’s insistence on wandering all over the spectrum (on top of UFOS, we get Bigfoot, witches, Kirlian photography, auras, the hollow earth theory, cloning, the Bermuda triangle, black masses, black holes, haunted houses, etc.) that it reminds me of AMAZING WORLD OF GHOSTS; to its credit, this movie doesn’t come across as unfocused as that one was, though it comes close. In the end, when a movie like this ranges this far and wide with its subject matter, it’s very difficult to pin down any particular point or purpose to the project, unless all it’s trying to tell us is that lots of bizarre unexplained stuff going on. This one got very boring quickly, and the moment I found most interesting was at least partially due to the outlandishness of the theory presented: to wit, that the various Bigfoot/Sasquatch creatures might be test subjects dropped off by flying saucers to see if they could survive on this world.

MICROWAVE MASSACRE (1983)
Article 4615 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-28-2014
Directed by Wayne Berwick
Featuring Jackie Vernon, Loren Schein, Al Troupe
Country: USA
What it is: Exploitation horror comedy

A construction worker flips out due to his wife’s obsession with gourmet dishes and kills her. He dismembers the body and hides it in the freezer. He ends up eating one of her hands in a fit of hunger and decides he likes the taste…

If the main image for this movie on IMDB is of any indication, this is one of those movies that eventually tried to market itself to the camp audience, billing itself as “The Worst Horror Movie of All Time”. It’s not. It’s just a cheap, lame, tacky low-budget comedy with horror and sexploitation elements tossed into the mix, and I don’t think the real “Worst Horror Movie of All Time” would aspire that low. Oh, there’s the odd joke here and there that works (which is more than I can say for some other comedies), but most of the jokes are either ones that would have been funnier if they had been handled better, or ones that simply never had a chance to begin with. There’s lots of pointless and gratuitous nudity as well, and it is a little weird to hear Jackie Vernon (who is probably most famous for having given voice to Frosty the Snowman in a couple of Christmas specials) in these circumstances. Probably the campiest element of the film is one of the hugest microwave ovens I’ve ever seen, one which doesn’t even turn off when you open the door. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, but I will give it this much; it’s better than the soft-core remake of that movie known as PLEASE DON’T EAT MY MOTHER.

MALATESTA’S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (1973)
Article 4614 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-27-2014
Directed by Christopher Speeth
Featuring Janine Carazo, Jerome Dempsey, Daniel Dietrich
Country: USA
What it is: A walk through a strange world

A family takes up employment at a carnival, where they encounter murder, mayhem, madness and cannibalism.

There’s the basic outline of a plot around which this movie is built, but this is one of those movies where the plot is of no importance. What matters in this movie is the disorienting sense of random madness that permeates every moment. It hovers in a strange grey area located somewhere on the edges of such movies as THE FUNHOUSE, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, RAW MEAT and THE INCREDIBLY STRANGE CREATURES WHO STOPPED LIVING AND BECAME MIXED-UP ZOMBIES?!!, done at what obviously must have been a tiny budget and served up as a cross between a horror movie and an abstract art film. There are scenes of the ghoulish residents of the carnival watching silent films; I recognize both THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME there. Bizarre set dressing, weird camera angles, unsettling characters… the movie leaves you with the sense of trying to recall a half-remembered fever nightmare. I’m not sure I can really say the movie is scary (it’s way too fragmented for that), but it leaves a mad residue in its wake. The only recognizable name in the cast for me was Herve Villechaize, but the character you’ll probably most remember is the affected and creepy Mr. Blood played by Jerome Dempsey.