NUMBER 4: MANTECA (1947)
Article 5285 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-29-2016
Directed by Harry Smith
No cast
Country: USA
What it is: Abstract animation

No plot.

My collection of Harry Smith shorts has them all strung together without the benefit of chapter breaks, and since no titles appear, I can only guess which title matches which piece of animation. I think this is the clip involving four long skinny rectangles placed together in sort of an elongated tic-tac-toe pattern. In some ways, it doesn’t matter; watched together, they seem all of a piece, with the same jagged style in each section. I had trouble really describing the other shorts I’ve seen of his, and this one is no different. It’s only fantasy in that it’s certainly not realistic. I do think it’s interesting to watch these, but I wouldn’t make a steady diet of it.

NEVER KICK A WOMAN (1936)
Article 5282 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-25-2016
Directed by Dave Fleischer and Seymour Kneitel
Featuring the voices of Mae Questel and Jack Mercer
Country: USA
What it is: Popeye short

Popeye takes Olive Oyl into a gym to teach her the art of self-defense, but she doesn’t take to it… until a sexy female boxer starts flirting with Popeye.

This cartoon pops up in my collection of banned cartoons, but it doesn’t appear to be due to any racial stereotypes. Rather, I think it’s the cartoon’s flirtation with domestic violence as comedy that is the controversial element; after all, Popeye only manages to get Olive Oyl into the gym by nearly assaulting her. Still, I should point out that Olive Oyl here ultimately manages to take care of herself, even if she has to eat a can of Popeye’s spinach to do so. I also need to point out that the can of spinach and the superpowers it brings about remains the only fantastic element here; there are no anthropomorphic animals here to contend with, even if the female boxer describes Popeye as a “fascinating monster”. Overall, this is a pretty good Popeye cartoon, with the mutterings of both Mercer and Questel adding to the fun, as well as whoever voices the female boxer (as a Mae West impersonation).

NOCTURNE (1954)
Ariticle 5234 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-21-2016
Directed by Alexander Alexeieff and Georges Violet
No cast
Country: France
What it is: Animated blanket advertisement

A butterfly represents the ideal body temperature for sleeping.

At the time this short/advertisement was passed on to me, I was told that that it was perhaps the least interesting work from animator Alexeieff as well as the one with the least fantastic content. Now, I’ve had one other encounter with Alexeieff in my cinematic journeys (NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN from 1933), so I know how interesting he can get. This one consists mostly of a fluttering stop-motion butterfly whose only function is to represent 37 degrees Centigrade, the ideal body temperature for sleeping; it’s a blanket commercial. If this doesn’t sound compelling… well, it isn’t. The butterfly is well animated, but without anything to really do, it never rises above what it is. And, for that matter, an animated fluttering butterfly hardly qualifies for fantastic content, either.

A NYMPH OF THE WAVES (1900)
Article 5233 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-20-2016
Director unknown
Featuring Catarino Bartho
Country: USA
What it is: Not much

A woman dances while superimposed waves roll by.

Pardon me while I kick myself. This short is listed as a 1903 movie in the Walt Lee guide. When I searched on the title on IMDB, I found a movie from 1900 and one from 1903; naturally, I chose the one with the matching date. Since the 1903 listing has a handful of votes on IMDB, I did several searches for the movie over the years and found myself frustrated because all the hits I found on the movie turned out to be the 1900 movie of the same title; after a while, I got very annoyed with this. Finally, the movie was about to hop into my “ones that got away” list, and while preparing the write-up for it, I went back and double-checked the Walt Lee guide for the nature of its fantastic content. It was only then that I realized something. Though the Walt Lee guide listed the 1903 date, the cast list and company name didn’t match the IMDB movie; instead, they matched that of the title listed for 1900. So, for three years or more, I’ve been hunting for the wrong movie and getting annoyed at the fact that I’ve been only been finding the right movie. And, to top it all off, what does the movie consist of? Nothing but a dancing girl superimposed over rolling waves. That’s it! Okay, maybe she’s supposed to be a nymph, but I can’t think of a bigger cheat in terms of its fantastic content since I covered ELLA LOLA A LA TRILBY.

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER (1984)
Article 5173 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-1-2016
Directed by Tom Schiller
Featuring Zach Galligan, Apollonia van Ravenstein, Lauren Tom
Country: USA
What it is: Art film of sorts

An aspiring artist returns to New York in the hope of finding out what type of artist he should be, but when he fails the art test, he is consigned to supervising drivers entering the Holland tunnel. However, his kindness to a bum outside of Carnegie Hall has unexpected results…

Director Schiller’s writing and directing credits are mostly for “Saturday Night Live”, and the fact that the producer for this movie is Lorne Michaels and the credits include Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd would lead one to believe that it’s primarily a comedy. And, truth to tell, perhaps it is. However, that’s far from an apt description that is part art film, part cultural satire, part stylistic exercise, and part love story. It may be science fiction with the action taking place either in the future or in an alternate universe, but it would be better described as a surrealistic fantasy. The movie is shot in the style of an old-time Hollywood movie; it’s mostly in black-and-white, though color creeps in during two pivotal scenes. There’s quite a bit of stock footage and references to other classic movies; there are scenes from UN CHIEN ANDALOU, INTOLERANCE, and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, among others. The satire is mostly aimed at pretentious conceptual art (which is a tad ironic for an art film) and consumerism. The plot involves a secret society hidden under the city and bus rides to the moon. Does it work? I’m not sure it really does; there’s a lot going on here, but I can’t say it all really hangs together. There is a definite charm to the proceedings, though, and I did find the movie modestly enjoyable. The cast also features Sam Jaffe and Eddie Fisher, the latter playing himself.

NATAS: THE REFLECTION (1986)
Article 5148 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-6-2016
Directed by Jack Dunlap
Featuring Randy Mulkey, Pat Bolt, Craig Hensley
Country: USA
What it is: One of the more questionable Ancient Indian legends

A reporter researching an ancient Indian legend is tasked with the quest of defeating the guardian of the gates of Hell and releasing the souls held prisoner within.

There are lots of bad movies out there, but I think what makes some of the most famous ones as interesting as they are is that they seem to have their own demented voice that keeps them from seeming to be mere imitations of other movies. I’d have to put this one in that group; once our hero arrives at a ghost town full of stereotypical western characters who all happen to be rotting zombies as well, I knew that it had found its own voice. Oh, it’s dumb, all right; what kind of ancient Indian legend references Satan (“Natas” reflected) and reveals its secrets in couplets that rhyme in English? The dialogue is rife with cliches, the acting is often very bad, and the special effects are not what you would call convincing. Still, there’s something engagingly silly about this nonsense, though it will require a bit of patience to get through it all. The credits claim that the woman playing Smohalla was 109 years old when this movie was made, but she probably never got to see the film; she died the year after it was made, and the movie sat on the shelf for three years before it was released.

NIGHT CALL NURSES (1972)
Article 5110 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-16-2016
Directed by Jonathan Kaplan
Featuring Patty Byrne, Alana Stewart, Mittie Lawrence
Country: USA
What it is: Nurseploitation

Three nurses who work in a psychiatric hospital deal with patients, stalkers, and their love lives.

The fantastic aspects are slight. There’s a minor subplot involving a psychotic stalker to add a bit of horror to the proceedings, and we get to experience some of the strange hallucinations of a pill-popping truck driver for a bit of fantasy content. And that’s really about it for what is mostly a rather plotless drama about women getting into situations that often involve them appearing topless. What plot there is mostly involves a hospitalized black revolutionary who is being held captive at the hospital and the attempt to free him. It’s mostly forgettable mid-seventies drive-in fare, though first-time director Kaplan shows some skill in setting up some of the scenes. Most of the cast is unfamiliar to me, though two names I recognize are Tristram Coffin and (or course) Dick Miller.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)
Article 5105 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-11-2016
Directed by William Peter Platty
Featuring Stacy Keach, Scott Wilson, Jason Miller
Country: USA
What it is: Drama

A new psychiatrist arrives at a castle where an assortment of military men suffering from psychoses are kept. He is intent on using all his power to cure them, but he may be suffering from his own problems…

William Peter Blatty directed this movie based off his own novel, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane”, and he claims that it’s the true sequel to his novel “The Exorcist”. It’s certainly not a sequel in the conventional sense; for one thing, it’s hardly a horror movie (though its exploration of madness nudges it up against the genre), and its sole real element of fantastic content (at the very end of the movie) belongs to the realm of the mystical rather than the horrific. Rather, it’s a thematic sequel; if “The Exorcist” was about evil, this is about good. One of the pitfalls of writing about good, or course, is that dramatically it’s less interesting than evil, but Blatty was wise enough to make it a story of redemption, which means it acknowledges an initial evil and keeps us aware that that evil could return. The movie itself starts out slowly as we get to know the characters and the environment, but it’s hardly uninteresting. The main thrust of the story doesn’t really become apparent until the second half of the movie, and then it becomes intense, powerful and quite sad. There are excellent performances from the whole cast, with Stacy Keach (as the psychiatrist) and Scott Wilson (as an astronaut who cracked up) giving the most memorable performances. I found the movie memorable and compelling, and I do recommend it with the warning that one should go in expecting something very different from THE EXORCIST.

NIGHT OF HORROR (1981)
Article 5069 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-3-2016
Directed by Tony Malanowski
Featuring Steve Sandkuhler, Gae Schmitt, Rebecca Bach
Country: USA
What it is: How low can your budget go in Baltimore?

Four travelers get stranded. They encounter ghosts from the Civil War that ask a favor.

According to IMDB, the estimated budget for this movie was about four thousand dollars. And, if you assume that the Civil War footage that takes up about ten minutes of the screen time is stock footage (I’m guessing it’s from a Civil War reconstruction event of some kind), then, yes, I’d say that’s about how much it looks went into this movie. The movie is horrid, and it’s not necessarily due to the low budget; the opening scene of the movie is a ten-minute conversation between two men at a bar in which both of the characters spend most of the time with their backs to the viewer is a good example of a bad directorial choice that has nothing to do with budget. The script is another problem; there’s about five minutes of story here with a running time of fifteen times that, so most of the movie involves trying to pad things out. So we get fifteen minutes of framing story (the two guys talking at the bar), lots of scenes of an RV tooling around, several other static conversation scenes, the arbitrary aforementioned Civil War footage, and, by having the ghosts speaking in halting, hard-to-hear distorted voices, it manages to make them take twenty minutes to explain what could be easily managed in thirty seconds. In style, the movie reminds me of MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE, but it even lacks that movie’s unsettling qualities; this one just drones on to no good effect. Quite frankly, this is one of the dullest stretches of celluloid that I’ve had the misfortune to negotiate in some time.

NIGHT CRIES (1978)
Article 5068 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-2-2016
Directed by Richard Lang
Featuring Susan Saint James, Michael Parks, Jamie Smith-Jackson
Country: USA
What is it: Psychological or psychic?

After losing her daughter at childbirth, a woman finds herself plagued by nightmares about her baby being alive, and she starts becoming distant from her husband. She finally decides to see a psychiatrist who specializes in dreams, but are the dreams merely symbolic… or is her baby still alive?

This is a strong and intriguing TV-Movie which gets a great deal of its power from a strong performance by Susan Saint James as the distraught mother. Given that my series revolves around movies with fantastic content, I’m naturally drawn to the hope that there is a psychic element to the dreams. However, James’ performance as a woman who is haunted by painful repressed memories and who is in denial is so compelling that I found myself really hoping for a psychological explanation to the dreams, at least to find out what skeletons there are in her (literal) closet. At any rate, I’m glad that the movie ends up pulling off a nice trick by recognizing that two different explanations may not necessarily be mutually exclusive. The movie also has a nice performance from William Conrad as the psychiatrist. I quite liked this one.