RABBIT TEST (1978)
Article 4651 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-10-2014
Directed by Joan Rivers
Featuring Billy Crystal, Alex Rocco, Joan Prather
Country: USA
What it is: Pregnant man comedy

After a one night stand, a man discovers he is pregnant. He tries to cope with his condition but becomes an international celebrity.

Ideally, I feel that I should give every movie I see a fair shake, but sometimes you can’t help but feel trepidation about certain movies. This one had three strikes against it going in. First, I’ve never been a fan of Joan Rivers, and I can’t think of a single joke she ever made that even made me smile, much less laugh, though I am willing to believe this may simply be due to the fact that I’m not part of the audience she was trying to reach. Secondly, if I were to make a list of the fantastically-themed subjects that would least draw me into seeing a movie, I’m pretty sure that the concept of the pregnant man would make that list, somewhere just above the antics of the Smurfs and just below the adventures of Care Bears. Thirdly, I noticed the rating on IMDB for the movie was 2.9, which is shockingly low. As a result, I didn’t go into this movie with a positive frame of mind. Having seen it, I’m afraid I have to say that it is as bad as I feared it would be. What I didn’t anticipate was just how weirdly bad it would turn out to be; not only do the vast majority of the jokes miss the mark, but with quite a few of them, I had no idea what or where the mark was. I think the movie’s main problem was Joan River’s direction; it’s her sole directorial effort, and she just doesn’t seem to have a knack for it. I suspect a more skilled, experienced comedy director would have made a number of the gags work. The movie is so weird at times that it exudes a certain fascination, but that wears off rather quickly, and after awhile, the most fun is had by spotting the guest stars; there’s Paul Lynde, George Gobel, Roddy McDowell, Billy Barty, Jimmie Walker, Alice Ghostley, Rosey Grier and a few others as well. The movie tries to be energetic, but feels distant and detached; it’s alternately crude, politically incorrect and impenetrable. It’s just not funny.

ROUND TRIP TO MARS (1957)
Article 4589 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-25-2014
Directed by Paul J. Smith
Featuring the voices of Dal McKennon and Grace Stafford
Country: USA
What it is: Woody Woodpecker cartoon

When his vacation is interrupted by a professor’s attempt to build a rocket to Mars, Woody Woodpecker hoodwinks the takeoff so the professor lands back on Earth, and then pretends to be a Martian.

Ordinarily, a movie with a title like this in which it turns out all the action takes place on the Earth would have its fantastic content seriously compromised, but since we’re also dealing with a talking woodpecker, we’re still pretty solidly in fantastic territory. Yes, it’s another cartoon, but it’s interesting to see examples from different studios so close together, as it gives me something to compare. Already you can see that Walter Lantz was toying with limited animation, but it’s still more elaborate than the last Terrytoons cartoon I saw. The gags are of the variety you would expect from a Looney Tunes cartoon, but the presentation is weaker; the timing is not quite as good, the voice acting is merely adequate, and the score doesn’t add much to the mix. In short, it’s somewhere in between; it’s better than a Terrytoons cartoon but not as good as a Warner Brother’s. Still, it’s always a bit depressing to watch how limited animation wormed its way into theatrical cartoons; one is aware of how much richer the animation was in the previous decades.

REMBRANDT 7 ANTWORTET NICHT… (1966)
aka Z7 Operation Rembrandt
Article 4490 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-30-2014
Directed by Giancarlo Romitelli
Featuring Lang Jeffries, Joachim Hansen, Christiane Maybach
Country: West Germany / Italy / Spain
What it is: Spyghetti

Secret Agent Mark Donen is sent out on a mission to prevent criminal elements from getting the secret to a German scientist’s new super-weapon.

Here’s another movie I’ve only been able to find in an unsubtitled foreign language edition; it’s cobbled together from a couple of different prints of the movie in different languages, but the only thing in English is the title song. As a result, I couldn’t really follow the story, but I wish I could; this one looks pretty good. The fact that the super-weapon is a death ray of sorts is the type of thing that usually fails to impress, but the opening scene where it is used is pretty impressive. In fact, it looks like there’s quite a bit of gimmickry to add to the fantastic content, and there are plot points having to do with making an exact duplicate of a man and a secret hidden on a painting. It looks efficient, fast-moving and exciting, and I suspect it’s one of the better examples of the Eurospy genre.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
Article 4488 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-28-2014
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Featuring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman
Country: USA
What it is: High adventure

In 1936, an archaeologist is recruited by the US government to find out what the Nazis are looking for in an archaeological dig near Cairo. It turns out to be the Ark of the Covenant, and the archaeologist is sent on a mission to lay his hands on it before they do.

This is an excellent adventure tale, exciting and well made, it has definite elements of the fantastic, and it’s probably the best movie I’ve seen in the last few months. Yet, I have to admit that I’ve been dreading the time when this movie would come up on my hunt list. This is largely because it’s one of those movies that has been somewhat spoiled for me by the extreme hype that I’ve been subjected to about the film over the years. It’s not just that a lot of people were telling me that it was really good; it’s more that so many of them were carrying on as if this movie was the single finest accomplishment by all humanity since time immemorial. Yes, I’m exaggerating a bit, but not by much. I have to admit that I’m a bit of a contrarian; if a lot of people keep insisting to me that I’m absolutely going to love something, I feel very inclined to hate it for that reason alone. When I finally saw it years ago, I didn’t expect it to live up to the hype (nothing could have done that), and I was really curious what I would end up feeling about it. In the end, it turned out to just what I expected it would be – a very good and well made action/adventure film. But in order for it to even get close to the hype I encountered, it would have to have been something very special above and beyond that, and, sadly, for me, it wasn’t. Part of it is that I’m not a big action fan to begin with. Nor am I a big fan of Harrison Ford. Still, I do have to admire one aspect of this movie’s history that makes it a fairly rare animal; it’s one of those big-budget blockbusters with a huge fandom that appears to have avoided generating a backlash of those who hate it. That’s something that certainly doesn’t happen very often.

LA REVOLTE DES PRETORIENS (1964)
aka Revolt of the Praetorians, La rivolta dei pretoriani
Article 4474 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-14-2014
Directed by Alfonso Brescia
Featuring Richard Harrison, Moira Orfei, Piero Lulli
Country: Italy
What it is: Sword and Sandal epic

In ancient Rome, a hero known as the Red Wolf fights against the tyranny of the emperor Domitian.

According to my sources, the fantastic content in this foray into Sword and Sandal territory is the existence of a conjurer. I wonder if they mean the priestess of Isis who is in league with Domition. If so, I don’t recall her having any special powers or doing anything more than giving her goddess lip service. There’s also a line of dialogue about the hero’s fantastic strength, but I don’t see him doing much of anything that I would call superhuman. So that leaves us with a movie that is pretty empty in the way of fantastic content, and the basic tyranny-vs-revolution plot doesn’t have much in the way of real interest value to compensate for that, at least to these eyes. It is fairly well made, though, and it does get some points with coming up with a fun little gimmick towards the end of the movie, when the revolutionaries get the help of a troupe of entertainers to help them; their involvement in the battle scenes adds some real fun to the proceedings. Nonetheless, I found this one mostly dull.

THE RED CLUB (1914)
aka Den rode klub
Article 4427 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-22-2014
Directed by Knud Lumbye
Featuring Edith Buemann, Tronier Funder, Peter Kjaer
Country: Denmark
What it is: Thriller

When a Prince is forced into a political marriage, his embittered ex-lover, a Baroness, joins a mystical society intent on assassinating the Prince. A captain under the Prince discovers about the plot, but can he act in time to defeat the society?

Apparently, the only existing print of this one is from an Italian archive that has been censored; the scenes involving the rituals of the mystical society have been removed. Unfortunately, that seems to be the primary fantastic content of the movie, though there is a scene involving electrical wires in an underground room that adds a touch of science fiction to the proceedings. Overall, the movie has a serial-like feel to it, in that it seems to involve a succession of perils and escapes; I found myself noticing a certain resemblance to the Louis Feuillade serials from France during this period. Yes, it’s a bit confusing (especially when you consider the missing footage), but it does have its moments and is entertaining enough. I’m just glad that I got an opportunity to catch this one.

RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR (1984)
aka Rats – Notte di terrore
Article 4417 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-9-2014
Directed by Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso
Featuring Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, Geretta Geretta, Massimo Vanni
Country: Italy / France
What it is: Killer animals

After the apocalypse, a gang of land-dwelling humans is trapped and terrorized by killer rats.

So, is it a “nature gone wild” horror movie with an unusual setting? Or is it a ROAD WARRIOR variation with a totally different plot? Actually, I prefer to see it in a slightly different way – it’s a version of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD with rats instead of zombies and taking place in the future rather than the present, full of badly-dubbed laugh-inducing dialogue and lots of gross-out effects. This, combined with idiotic behavior on the part of the most of the characters, make it very hard to take the movie seriously, but at least it makes the jump to entertainingly awful rather than excruciatingly awful (except for the scenes where people go into screaming fits, which are annoying). As tempted as I am to dismiss it with a shake of my head, I have to admit that it’s demented movies like this one that help make this cinematic journey I’m taking so interesting.

THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)
Article 4350 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-28-2013
Directed by Dan O’Bannon
Featuring Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa
Country: USA
What it is: Zombie comedy

Canisters containing a gas that resulted in the zombies from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD being created are misdelivered to a medical supplies warehouse. When one of them breaks open, a local cemetery is doused with the gas, resulting in a an outbreak of zombies.

I read a lot of trivia on this one, but I can’t vouch for how much is true, so if I’m wrong on some of this, bear with me. The original screenplay of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was co-written by George Romero and John Russo. They had a parting of ways, and for the rights to the story, Russo got the “living dead” phrase, while Romero had to use “the dead” for his sequels. Russo’s treatment sat on the shelf for several years until it was offered to Dan O’Bannon for his first directorial assignment; O’Bannon refused to take the original treatment due to its being overly similar to the original movie, and rewrote it to make it a comedy. This is the result.

As far as I’m concerned, O’Bannon was on the right track. Done straight, this would have been just another zombie movie. As it is, the frantic pace is ideal for comedy, and O’Bannon (who penned the scripts for both ALIEN and DARK STAR) certainly knew his way around the genres. It’s only a semi-sequel to the original movie; the movie uses the explanation that the original movie was based on a true event, but the makers were denied the right to tell the story truthfully by the military, and changed a lot of the facts around. As a result, this movie uses the opportunity to change the zombie lore. The zombies move a lot quicker, they’re able to talk, they’re able to reason, and they don’t eat people in their entirety; they’re just after brains. They’re also nearly impossible to kill. All these changes are used for both horrific and comic effect, and the movie ends up being fast-moving and fun. It’s so fast-moving, in fact, that I was seriously wondering whether the movie would have enough incident to keep enough characters alive to fill out a 90 minute running time. This is also the movie that made Linnea Quigley (who spends most of her running time naked) a scream queen. All in all, this was a worthy reworking of the “living dead” concept of the original.

ROCKETEERS (1932)
Article 4256 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-25-2013
Directed by John Foster and George Rufle
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Cartoon

Tom and Jerry plan to take a rocket into outer space, but the rocket fizzles and they end up on the bottom of the ocean.

When it comes to cartoons, everyone remembers “Tom and Jerry”, but only completists remember “Tom and Jerry”. What I mean by this is that there were two cartoon groupings called “Tom and Jerry”; the latter (and more famous) one was the cat and mouse duo at MGM, while the earlier (and more obscure) one was a pair of men, one tall and thin and the other short and fat. Come to think of it, that description may also serve as complete character descriptions of them as well; if there are any differences in personality between the two characters, they are well hidden here, and it’s somehow fitting that one of the most surrealistic moments here has the two characters’ mouths melding together into a single one. Come to think of it, I’m not sure if there’s enough personality between them to make for even one character; they are animated ciphers. Despite the title, there is no outer space adventure here; almost all of its action is at the bottom of the sea, with various sea monsters, anthropomorphic fish, shipwrecked skeletons, mermaids, and Neptune all making appearances. This one manages to get by by virtue of its weirdness at times, but even taking that into account, it’s still pretty weak, and serves as another example why, with certain notable exceptions (from Disney or the Fleischers), the early thirties was one of the weakest eras for theatrical cartoons.

RIP VAN WINKLE (1903)
Article 4255 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-23-2013
Director unknown
Featuring Joseph Jefferson
Country: US
What it is: Adaptation of the legend

Rip Van Winkle encounters a group of dwarfs and sleeps for 20 years.

This movie was listed in my source book with a year of 1896, but I was unable to find a movie with that title from that year. However, it lists an alternate year of 1903, and it matches this one. The reason for the double dates is interesting; this movie was originally from a series of short films made in 1896 that were edited together and copyrighted in 1903 by Biograph. This movie is sitting with a lowly 4.8 rating on IMDB, and, judged as a 1903 movie, it probably merits the rating; it looks static and primitive for that time. However, judged with an 1896 year, then it looks considerably more ambitious, and one thing I can sense is that actor Joseph Jefferson (who also wrote the play adaptation from which this was based) actually does give a skilled performance. I do wonder if I’m going to end up watching the individual films, though taken as such, not very many of them may have fantastic content.