THE PHABLE OF A BUSTED ROMANCE (1916)
Article 5293 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-9-2016
Directed by Tom E. Powers and Raoul Barre
No cast
Country: USA
What it is: Early animation

A man returns a purse to a rich lady. What will be his reward?

Most of the early animation I’ve covered so far has been from innovators and pioneers like Emile Cohl, Winsor McCay and Wladyslaw Starewicz. Their stuff is outstanding and fascinating. However, there was also a lot of early animation that is primitive and forgettable; here’s one of them. It’s a somewhat confusing moral fable about a man who gets rewarded for a good deed in such a way that leaves him actually worse off than before, though it’s difficult to glean exactly what we’re to learn here. And the fantastic content? There’s no anthropomorphic animals here, and there’s really nothing in the story to merit the fantastic label. The closest I can get is that the main character’s “car” looks vaguely science-fictiony, and before the abrupt cutoff, I thought I might have seen a couple of dolls walking of their own volition, but this went by so fast that I’m probably mistaken. At any rate, this one is hardly essential viewing.

A PEE-KOOL-YAR SIT-CHEE-AY-SHUN (1944)
Article 5292 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-8-2016
Directed by Sid Marcus
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Li’l Abner Cartoon

Daisy Mae tries to make Li’l Abner jealous by saying she’s going to marry Disgustin’ Jones. The ploy works, but Li’l Abner has a problem; he has to get past Disgustin’ Jones’ bodyguards to win Daisy Mae back.

It looks like the animation department for Columbia took a shot at producing several shorts based on the L’il Abner comic strip during the mid forties. Given the low user rating for this one on IMDB (4.3), I’m guessing that fans of the comic strip were not charmed by these shorts; they certainly seem more slapsticky than satirical. I actually thought the animation was decent, and some of the gags weren’t too bad, but I was very disappointed by the voice acting; for some reason, they lacked the flavor of the voices in my head when I read the strip. Also, there’s the issue of fantastic content again; the lack of anthropomorphic animals means that most of it would come from the exaggeration of the comic gags. Still, I suppose it could be argued that Mammy Yokum has super-powers, given the way she mops up the place when she swings into action. At any rate, the cartoon is probably mostly for those who were curious to see how they came out.

EL PLANETA DE LAS MUJERES INVASORAS (1966)
aka Planet of the Female Invaders
Article 5280 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-23-2016
Directed by Alfredo B. Cravenna
Featuring Lorena Velazquez, Elizabeth Campbell, Maura Monti
Country: Mexico
What it is: Mexican space opera

Female outer space invaders have trouble breathing in our atmosphere, so they kidnap some humans in order to see if lung transplants can solve there problem. Can the earthlings be rescued?

With a title like this one, I was half expecting that Santo or one of his masked wrestling cohorts would be on hand in this one, but no such luck. This is not to say that the presence of a masked wrestler would have necessarily improved the movie; rather, the presence of one would have thrown the movie more solidly in the action genre, and given the fact that the print I found of the movie was in Spanish without English subtitles, an action movie would have been much easier to follow. As it is, I had to use the Phil Hardy guide to flesh out the plot description. There is the female eye candy on display to compensate, and I did pick up at least one amusing touch; the aliens kidnap their victims by having their flying saucer pose as an amusement park ride. However, the movie is mostly talk, and I suspect the story is on about the level of QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE. The special effects are on the level of the old Flash Gordon serials, which isn’t really a bad thing; it’s just an observation. Still, in all fairness, I can’t really evaluate this movie fully, though given what I’ve seen, it doesn’t really look promising.

A PIPE DREAM (1905)
Article 5245 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-8-2016
Director unknown
Cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Silent special effects short

A smoking woman causes a little man to appear out of the smoke on to her hand. He begins pitching woo. How will she respond?

This is one that had fallen onto my “ones that got away” list, but has now been rescued from it. When I did my earlier write-up of it, I was rather dismissive of it based on what I knew about the plot at the time, but then, with a one-minute running time, just how much of a plot can you have? Surprisingly enough, there is a bit of a plot, and thanks to an effective performance by the smoking woman, this little short pulls it off with a certain amount of wit. I’m glad this one showed up; it’s much better than I expected it would be.

PRINCESS IRON FAN (1941)
aka Tie shan gong zhu
Article 5193 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-26-2016
Directed by Wan Guchan and Wan Laiming
Featuring the voices of Wan Chaochen, Wan Guchan, Wan Laiming
Country: China
What it is: Animated fantasy allegory

A monk and his three apprentices are on a quest, but their way is blocked by a mountain of fire. A nearby princess has an iron fan with which to quench the flames, and the monk sends his three apprentices (a monkey, a pig and a stuttering man) to get the fan. This may prove a difficult task.

There’s a lot of novelty value to this one; it was the first full-length animated feature from China, and it was made while the country was under occupation by the Japanese. Much of the animation was rotoscoped, which is very apparent in certain scenes. The characters are apparently well-known Chinese archetypes, with the monkey character having been especially popular; I suspect Asians and those steeped in Asian cultures will probably be the ones most likely to appreciate this one. I do find it interesting that the opening titles seem to want to distant this obvious fantasy from the fantasy genre by insisting it’s an allegory rather than a fantasy; I don’t think the former necessarily cancels out the latter. It does take a little while to adjust to the different animation style, and the humorous sections don’t seem to translate very well. At any rate, it makes for a novel viewing experience.

POSSESSION (1981)
Article 5157 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-15-2016
Directed by Andrzej Zulawski
Featuring Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen
Country: France / West Germany
What it is: Intense Art-house horror

After returning home from a mysterious business trip, a husband discovers that his marriage has crumbled and his wife is leaving him. The discovery unhinges him and he begins taking desperate actions to win her back. But the wife is fairly unhinged herself, and she’s harboring a secret that is truly disturbing…

According to IMDB, it is rumored that director/writer Andrzej Zulawski was going through a divorce at the time he wrote this. If so, it must have been one unpleasant experience to yield this movie. Given the fact that it’s something of an art film, you might find yourself suspecting the horror classification will turn out to be something of a false lead; certainly, the first forty-five minutes will lead you to be believe this is mainly an intense and sometimes shrill divorce drama. It’s only when you find out what’s inside the wife’s new apartment that the film takes its turn into horror, and not just a mild turn, either; there are reasons this one ended up on the UK’s “Video Nasties” list. Nevertheless, it is an art film; parts of it don’t really make rational sense, and it comes as very much a personal expression from a man who is in a very bad place. It’s loud, hysterical, frantic, bloody, and hard to sit through (you will get tired of hearing people constantly scream at each other), but it does feel that it was meant to be cathartic. Isabelle Adjani apparently said it took her several years to recover from this role, and I believe it; many of her scenes look utterly exhausting. I’m not sure if I quite believe it is a classic, but it does appear to be one of those movies that needs to seriously be reckoned with.

PSYCHO FROM TEXAS (1975)
aka Wheeler
Article 5149 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-7-2016
Directed by Jack Collins and Jim Feazell
Featuring John King III, Herschel Mays, Tommy Lamey
Country: USA
What it is: Southern crime movie

A sadistic serial killer is hired to kidnap a retired oil baron for ransom. However, good help is hard to find…

If there’s any lesson to be learned from this movie, it’s that serial killers may not be the best people to hire for a job; instead of doing their job properly, they may leave the work in the hands of a dimwitted sidekick while they run off pursuing their hobby. But then, there’s another lesson to be gleaned from this; if you’re coming to town to take part in a kidnapping, you shouldn’t first introduce yourself to the kidnap victim, his daughter, and the local sheriff, especially if you find it necessary to kill the latter’s daughter before it’s all through. But I guess being a serial killer doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart. For the most part, this is just a silly crime movie with a serial killer subplot, and since the most potentially exciting scene (the kidnap victim trying to escape from the stupid sidekick) is played for laughs (including encounters with skunks and hogs), it’s really hard to figure out just what effect the movie is going for. The editing is very clumsy when the movie tries to follow several story threads at once, the music is all over the board and not always right for the scene, and some of the scenes are downright embarrassing (such as when the black housemaid finds a dead body). The movie seems to be mostly remembered for featuring the debut of Linnea Quigley, who does a nude scene, but you might feel a bit queasy about it; she was born in 1958, and if you consider the year of this movie… well, I’ll let you do the math. However, not to worry – It looks like the Quigley sequence was added to the movie in 1979, four years after the rest of the movie was made.

PRETTYKILL (1987)
Article 5137 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-23-2016
Directed by George Kaczender
Featuring David Birney, Season Hubley, Suzanne Snyder
Country: Canada / USA
What it is: How can I say? The movie itself doesn’t know.

A detective frets about cracking a drug dealing case. His girlfriend is a madam who employs a new woman whose sanity is questionable. Someone is killing prostitutes. Viewer goes “Huh?”

The theme song running over the ending credits features this lyric – “A thousand pieces in my mind, but no center can I find.” And that is one of the most striking examples of a movie supplying its own review that I’ve ever seen. The movie has no center. It has plot elements and incidents which somehow interact with each other, but none of the interaction seems meaningful. If it’s a drama, it has no focus; is it about the policeman’s frustration with official procedure, the prostitute’s struggle with her mental condition, or about the madam’s attempts to come to terms with her own profession? If it’s a thriller about a psycho killer, why doesn’t it try to build a modicum of suspense rather than meandering all over creation? It’s impossible to say. All I will say is that Suzanne Snyder (as the dual-personality prostitute) gives a performance of awesome ineptitude, and I almost hate to say it because she’s obviously putting everything she can into the performance; it just hits wrong notes at every step of the way. Nevertheless, it’s about the only thing likely to be remembered in this muddled mess of a movie.

THE PLUMBER (1979)
Article 5126 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-7-2016
Directed by Peter Weir
Featuring Judy Morris, Ivar Kants, Robert Coleby
Country: Australia
What it is: TV-Movie thriller

A housewife’s life is upended when an eccentric, intrusive plumber shows up at her apartment to work on the plumbing.

I’ve never been keen on the “psycho terrorizing people in their own homes” movies, but the presence of Peter Weir, who gave us PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK and THE LAST WAVE, gave me reason to hope that this one would prove a little different. Sure enough, it is; in fact, I’m not even sure it’s genre. IMDB classifies it as a horror thriller, but I think it’s far more accurate to call it a psychological black comedy. The plumber is certainly not a psycho in the classic horror sense; he’s much more neurotic than psychotic, and any terror he inflicts is more in the social than physical sense. If it’s a horror movie at all, it’s in the metaphorical sense, though it does share with certain horror movies the theme of how stress can drive a person to perform acts that would be beyond the pale. It wasn’t as strong as Weir’s other movies that I’ve seen, but it is quite interesting. It’s just better not to go in expecting a horror movie.

THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (1985)
Article 5039 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-4-2016
Directed by Woody Allen
Featuring Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello
Country: USA
What it is: Fantasy

During the depression, a neglected and abused housewife seeks solace by going to the movies. After seeing a particular movie several times, one of the characters takes notice of her and comes out of the screen to be her lover and to live in the real world.

According to the trivia section of IMDB, Woody Allen was asked why the movie didn’t have a happy ending. Allen replied that the ending it had “was” the happy ending. If this doesn’t make sense at first, it’s important to keep in mind that the movie is about our love for the movies themselves, and not necessarily for specific actors or characters. It borrows a concept developed by Buster Keaton for SHERLOCK, JR. and uses it brilliantly for both comic and poignant effects. It’s no surprise that he chose the time of the Great Depression as his setting; it was perhaps the time in history when the movies were at there most vital at keeping up the spirits of the average American. The scenes where the characters on the movie screen try to deal with the departure of one their own and there conversations with some of the audience members are some of the funniest lines written by Allen, and the script is one of the most focused of the ones I’ve encountered. The cast does fine work throughout, particularly Jeff Daniels in a dual role. I don’t know if this is Allen’s best movie, but I’m willing to bet that this may be the best movie of his that I’m going to cover for this series.