LE REVE DES MARMITONS (1908)
aka Scullion’s Dream
Article 4799 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-14-2015
Directed by Segundo de Chomon
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Strange trick short

A group of kitchen workers drink a potion left by an imp. This puts them all to sleep, and then the imp cuts off their hands, which then work independently of the bodies.

If there’s one thing I can say about Segundo de Chomon, it’s that he’s quite capable of getting extremely weird in his work. That’s also the time when he’s most likely to come out from under the shadow of Melies and make his own mark. Most of the effects in this short make use of stop-motion animation, and some of it is quite impressive; a sequence where a basket is woven magically is quite impressive. And, what with all the hand dismemberment going on, it’s a rather grotesque short as well, but fortunately, the imp has the good manners to reattach everyone’s hands. The title implies that it’s all a dream, but I’m not sure who the dreamer is; maybe they’re all dreaming. At any rate, this is one of Chomon’s most striking shorts.

REMOTE CONTROL (1930)
Article 4797 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-11-2015
Directed by Nick Grinde, Edward Sedgwick and Malcolm St. Clair
Featuring William Haines, Charles King, Mary Doran
Country: USA
What it is: Comedy / Thriller

A cocky opportunist attempts to save a dying radio station by hiring new talent. However, he ends up hiring a phony spiritualist who uses his airtime to pass info on to a criminal group known as the “ghost gang”.

From what I read on IMDB, William Haines was a phenomenally popular actor of the time who was one of the top draws near the end of the silent era. He is the one who dominates this film and I gather from this movie’s high rating on IMDB (7.6 at the time I write this), there are many who find his shtick irresistible. Unfortunately, I don’t appear to be one of them; I sat stone-faced through his antics in this film, though I will entertain the possibility that he may have to grow on you a bit, as I found myself growing less annoyed with him as I got used to him. At any rate, the most amusing scene in the movie is when he auditions a series of questionable radio-star-wannabes, including a hog caller and a stuttering piccolo player. The movie eventually becomes more of a crime thriller when Haines gets kidnapped by the gang, and must find a way out of his captivity and to let the police know where the gang will strike next. The fantastic content is the phony spiritualist act, which really doesn’t come into play that much during the movie, so it’s pretty light in this regard. Ultimately, I would probably only recommend this to Haines devotees.

ROAD HOGS IN TOYLAND (1911)
Article 4791 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-2-2015
Directed by Arthur Melbourne Cooper
No cast
Country: UK
What it is: Early stop-motion animation

Several racing cars wreak havoc in a small town.

I’ve seen a couple of other works by this stop-motion pioneer, and I’m beginning to see a pattern. The actual stop-motion animation is rather crude (but then, so were some of Willis O’Brien’s early efforts), but they’re fascinating to watch nevertheless because he usually has several planes of action going on at once. There’s not much in the way of a plot; various characters interact in the scene, and then the racing cars show up, destroy things and run over people, which gives a rather dark and slightly disturbing edge to what is supposed to be comic. All in all, this is an interesting curio from a past time.

RABBIT PUNCH (1948)
Article 4789 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-29-3015
Directed by Chuck Jones
Featuring the voices of Mel Blanc and Billy Bletcher
Country: USA
What it is: Bugs Bunny cartoon

When Bugs heckles a brutal boxing champion, he finds himself tossed in the ring and forced to go several rounds with him.

Though I have a slight preference for the partial remake (BUNNY HUGGED), this is still an example of prime Bugs Bunny. As usual, Bugs is up against an all-brawn no-brain adversary (whose name is McGook if I heard the opening announcement correctly) who finds himself befuddled by Bugs’ stratagems. Oddly enough, Bugs doesn’t always come out on top in this one, but he proves far more competition than the champ ever expected. One gets the sense this cartoon could have gone on forever if it didn’t make a bizarre detour into a surreal world in the final round, where it turns from a parody of a boxing match to something that looks like it was out of an old time serial and ends with a gag worthy of Tex Avery. This one is great, solid fun.

LA REVANCHE DES HUMANOIDES (1983)
aka Revenge of the Humanoids
Article 4743 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-27-2015
Directed by Albert Barille
Featuring the voices of Annie Balestra, Roger Carel, Claude Chantal
Country: France
What it is: Animated space opera

Space travelers have adventures and battle evil.

Yes, the plot description is extremely vague, but that’s because the only copy I could find of this one was in French. Usually, when the plot is a simple good-vs-evil story, that’s not a big problem; however, I’m not sure that summary is quite accurate for this one, though it seems so at first. I had quite a few impediments in trying to follow the story visually. The first problem is simply that the movie is several episodes of an animated series edited together; the series was a French animated series called IL ETAIT UNE FOIS…L’ESPACE, and any time you edit a series like this into a movie, it’s usually hard to follow even if you understand the language. Furthermore, because much of the animation is of the limited variety, you can’t read character expressions very well to tap into the emotional sense of the dialogue. Combine that with a bewildering array of characters, and the movie becomes rather impenetrable, and the fact that several sequences seem to be flashbacks certainly doesn’t help. So I’m mostly at a loss with this one; all I can say is it starts out feeling like an animated STAR WARS imitation but seems to end on cosmic/mystical note. Well, at least I can mark this one as “seen” on my list.

ROBOT HOLOCAUST (1986)
Article 4705 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-10-2014
Directed by Tim Kincaid
Featuring Norris Culf, Nadine Hartstein, J. Buzz Von Orsteiner
Country: Italy / USA
What it is: Awful sci-fi epic

After the Robot Holocaust, humanity is enslaved by an evil being known as the Dark One. A band of fighters decide to invade his power station and defeat him.

One of the biggest factors that played into whether a movie would be given the MST3K treatment was the affordability of the movie; that’s why they did so many public domain offerings. What does it say for this movie that it became affordable enough for them to use a mere four years after its release? Yes, it’s atrocious; it’s devoid of suspense, the action scenes are embarrassing, the script is a compendium of poorly-executed cliches, and the characters fall into one of two categories – devoid of personality or actively annoying. There is, however, one element of this movie that makes it stand out from the crowd, albeit not in a good way, and that is the awesome ineptitude of Angelika Jager’s performance as the Dark One’s female henchman, Valaria; she makes the rest of the cast look good, and they aren’t. It’s really hard to decide what aspect of her performance is the worst; her body language is twitchy, unmotivated and inappropriate, her facial expressions give us the impression that she’s trying to look hot in a model session for some fashion magazine, and her poorly-enunciated line deliveries come across as if she’s trying to project a stylistic and aggressive boredom. Throw in a pathetic comic-relief robot and some horrible special effects, and you have a stinker of the first class.

THE RETURN OF THE KING (1980)
Article 4684 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-17-2014
Directed by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, Jr.
Featuring the voices of Orson Bean, John Huston, Theodore Bikel
Country: USA
What it is: Tolkien adaptation

Samwise must figure out a way to rescue Frodo from the tower of Cirith Ungol, while Minas Tirith must prepare for an invasion by the legions of Sauron.

When it became obvious that Ralph Bakshi had no intention of making a follow-up to THE LORD OF THE RINGS (which takes us a little less than halfway through the trilogy), Rankin-Bass (who had previously helmed an adaptation of THE HOBBIT) decided to mount their own adaptation of the third book in the series. Between these three movies, it could probably be said that roughly the whole series had been filmed before Peter Jackson tried it, and in fact, I saw the three movies all packaged together in a Best Buy recently. Still, I would imagine anyone watching the whole set as a single whole would be rather disconcerted by the change of voices in the movies as well as the stylistic differences between Bakshi and Rankin-Bass, not to mention that huge chunks of “The Two Towers” are missing from the story. However, taken as a stand-alone film, THE RETURN OF THE KING can’t help but be a clumsy affair; the story is so lopsided and rushed that it is anything but a satisfying experience. It doesn’t help that the movie comes to a screeching halt every five minutes for song after song after song. Granted, the songs have the proper epic atmosphere for the story, but there are just too many of them. Nevertheless, I’d definitely jettison that “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” orc marching song for the title alone. Most of the voices are well chosen, but I’m afraid Casey Kasem’s as Merry has such a familiar voice in TV animation (he was Shaggy in the Scooby-Doo cartoons, among others) that it takes me out of the movie every time Merry opens his mouth. All that being said, the movie does manage to maintain the right tone, and the book is taken seriously enough, even though the dialogue is often stilted and melodramatic. Still, if you aren’t familiar with the book, you’ll probably have a hard time figuring out what’s going on in this one.

RAW FORCE (1982)
aka Kung Fu Cannibals
Article 4679 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-12-2014
Directed by Edward D. Murphy
Featuring Cameron Mitchell, Geoffrey Binney, Hope Holiday
Country: USA / Philippines
What it is: Action movie

Vacationers hope to visit an island that is rumored to be the place where disgraced martial artists go to die. The island is inhabited by monks that can revive the corpses of the dead martial artists by cannibalizing women. The vacationers run afoul of criminals who sell women to the monks in return for large jade deposits on the island.

I usually don’t go into all that much detail on my plot descriptions, but there are times when a more elaborate list of the various plot elements can tell you a lot more than I can do in my commentary. Be aware that the movie features lots of gratuitous nudity and violence, zombie martial arts masters, sinister monks, cannibalism, white slavery and Cameron Mitchell. All of this together in one movie just screams “grindhouse” to me, and it’s a warning that the movie isn’t to be taken very seriously. For that matter, nobody on hand seems to be really taking it seriously either, and perhaps that’s for the best; it’s silly and dumb but free from any pretensions, and if you watch it on that level, it’s passable enough. I am a bit disappointed that the zombies are a pretty anemic bunch, but I do find it hilarious that the vacationers are actually drawn to this island by a travel brochure on it. It’s one of those movies where you just shake your head and take it all in.

RIDING WITH DEATH (1976)
TV-Movie
Article 4653 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-12-2014
Directed by Alan J. Levi and Don McDougall
Featuring Ben Murphy, Katharine Crawford, Richard Dysart
Country: USA
What it is: Two episodes of “Gemini Man”

A secret agent with the power to turn invisible is sent out on two missions. In the first, he is sent out to deliver a super-fuel, unaware that the fuel is unstable. In the second, he goes undercover at a race track to find proof against a man believed guilty of sabotage.

According IMDB, this movie’s rating is just a hair above the one for yesterday’s atrocity. It’s actually not near as bad as yesterday’s movie, but this one suffers from the burden of having been an episode of MST3K, the fandom of which is known to give every movie featured on the show the lowest possible rating on the site. This, combined with the fact that the movie has few defenders (or even people who have bothered to see it outside of its appearance on MST3K), is what makes the rating so low. Granted, there’s not a whole lot to defend here; it’s one of those movies edited together from two weak episodes of a poor short-lived TV series (“Smithereens” and “Buffalo Bill Rides Again” from GEMINI MAN) that is largely forgotten, and it’s not even much fun on a campy level. The two episodes have a few other things in common; they both feature singer Jim Stafford as a guest star, they both prominently involve driving vehicles, and they both feature the same climax in which the hero has to drive a dangerous vehicle about to explode out of a crowded area to save the lives of the innocent. The fact that two episodes out of a twelve-episode series had to make use of the same climax certainly doesn’t bode well for the quality of the series, but the most disappointing thing is that it barely makes use of the invisibility gimmick; each of the episodes could have been adapted so the invisibility played no part of it. Nor is the concept of the series particularly novel; the TV series THE INVISIBLE MAN from the year before largely had the same approach, and thought it was a little better, it lasted about as long as this one. All in all, this one is pretty forgettable.

REEL HORROR (1985)
Article 4652 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-11-2014
Directed by Ross Hagen
Featuring Alexandra, John Hayden, Howard Honig
Country: USA
What it is: Recycled

A female exorcist arrives at a movie studio that is being haunted by footage from old movies.

Well, here’s one way to recycle your old movies, though not a good way. Five movies from the seventies are edited down into roughly fifteen minute bits, and the footage is interspersed with new footage showing how each of these movies is haunting someone working at the studio. The five movies are DADDY’S DEADLY DARLING, CYCLE PSYCHO, NIGHT CREATURE, MAXIE and NICOLE. I’ve seen the first three for this series, but not the other two, and based on the fact that I found it nearly impossible to follow the plots of those two, I’d say the editing of the movies isn’t particularly good. All five of these movies looked like they were low-budget affairs, but the new footage looks even cheaper. I suspect the new footage is supposed to be funny, but it’s just pathetic. IMDB shows a DVD image from the movie which prominently features John Carradine’s name, but his footage takes up about two seconds of screen time. Is the movie any good? I’d say it would be better to ask if the movie is a complete waste of time, and if you did, I’d say yes. This is perhaps the most worthless thing I’ve seen in the last year or so. The best thing I can probably say about it is that the promised sequel, REEL MONSTERS, appears never to have gotten off the drawing board.