SLAPSTICK (OF ANOTHER KIND) (1982)
Article 4664 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-26-2014
Directed by Steven Paul
Featuring Jerry Lewis, Madeline Khan, Marty Feldman
Country: USA
What it is: Attempted comedy

An affluent couple gives birth to what they think are deformed idiots. In truth, they are extraterrestrials who become super-geniuses when in physical contact with each other.

There was a time when I was a huge fan of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and I remember reading the novel on which this was based at the time of its release, and being incredibly disappointed by it. If there’s any one thing that this movie makes me want to do, it’s to give the novel another shot, at least partially to see if I appreciate it more nowadays and partially to see just how badly this movie handles it. To be perfectly fair, I doubt that I’ll feel that this movie screwed up a promising premise; what I think I’ll feel is that there was no way to effectively translate the novel to the screen in the first place. Certainly, I wouldn’t have tried to make it a slapstick comedy, despite the title; in fact, this movie is never worse than when it resorts to that sort of thing. I certainly wouldn’t have filled the cast with actors known for broad comedy; I would have tried for actors capable of subtlety and satire. At the very least, I would have tried to capture a sense of Vonnegut’s work, and I think this movie misses the boat completely in that regard. About the only thing I liked about the movie were a couple of fleeting moments where the movie featured cameos by actors impersonating famous comic actors; I spotted Laurel and Hardy at one point as well as Leo Gorcey, and the fact that they existed as nothing more than reference points (they performed no shtick) seemed somehow to be the right touch. As it is, the movie is an extremely bad example of an adaptation that probably wouldn’t have worked even under the best of conditions.

SHE WAITS (1972)
TV-Movie
Article 4662 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-23-2014
Directed by Delbert Mann
Featuring Patty Duke, David McCallum, Dorothy McGuire
Country: USA
What it is: Possession thriller

A man brings his new wife to his mother’s home, where his previous wife died. It appears that the original wife had been murdered, and now she seeks a way to take possession of the new wife to avenge her murder.

She waits…. and if you’re on the watch for something exciting or original to happen in this TV-Movie, you’ll be waiting, too. The premise isn’t particularly original to begin with, and the bland, witless script doesn’t do a particularly good job of developing it into a full length movie. As a result, we have stretches of time where simply nothing is happening, constant recycling of the same plot points over and over again (it might be fun to count how many times the characters tell us that Elaine is dead), and long, tiresome conversations where people avoid telling each other what the need to know or taking forever to sort out revelations that we viewers have picked up on immediately. The acting is adequate but far from inspired, and the direction isn’t particularly strong. Only the music editor seems to be really committed to making the movie as scary as possible, although he uses the most obvious means at his disposal to do so. The end result is one of the more tedious TV-Movies I’ve seen for this series.

SHAME OF THE JUNGLE (1975)
aka Tarzoon, la honte de la jungle
Article 4661 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-22-2014
Directed by Picha and Boris Szulzinger
Featuring the voices of Johnny Weissmuller Jr., Christopher Guest, Bill Murray
Country: France / Belgium
What it is: Bawdy animated parody of Tarzan

An evil woman plans to take over the world; however, she’s self-conscious about being bald and seeks the hair of a jungle woman named June. June, however, is the the girlfriend of Shame of the Jungle, who sets out to rescue her.

This movie is rather like a cross between a Tarzan movie, a Ralph Bakshi cartoon, and FLESH GORDON. The movie is full of sex, nudity, gross-out gags and indescribable non sequiturs, such as the whole sequence with the beer-guzzling man who is flown around on a carpet by a group of enslaved birds. It’s not really sexy (the bawdy humor is just too weird to elicit that sort of reaction), nor is it particularly funny (it’s trying so hard to be outrageous that it forgets to try for laughs). Way too much of the movie involves the evil woman’s palace guard (or “phallus guard”, as the case may be) which consists of a tribe of mobile penises; I wouldn’t be surprised if fully half of this movie consisted of footage of these guys, and any humor they generate gets old quickly. Perhaps the main reason the movie still held my interest is that I’m a fan of animation. Perhaps the most interesting things about the movie for me were the presence of Johnny Weissmuller Jr. as the voice of Shame, the presence of some Saturday Night Live Alumni in various roles (including John Belushi), and a cameo appearance by Tintin which was probably a lot more amusing to French/Belgian audiences than to American ones. The user reviews on IMDB seem to indicate that the movie is mostly well-remembered by those who saw it when they were fourteen years old, and I can see that. As it is, I find it mostly a curiosity.

THE SORCERER’S SCISSORS (1907)
Article 4647 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-6-2014
Directed by Walter R. Booth
Cast unknown
Country: UK
What it is: Trick film

The hands of a sorcerer use scissors to cut out of paper the figure of a woman, which takes form as a real woman and performs a dance. Other similar tricks follow.

There’s no real plot here; it’s more of an illustration of a trick technique where hand-manipulated inanimate objects transform themselves into real people and back again. In some ways, it’s similar to the Melies technique of statues coming to life, but the rapid-fire linking segments give a very distinct look to this one that owes nothing to Melies. I do rather wish the woman who is constantly recreated would do something more than perform dances, but that’s par for the course of early silent cinema. Though I can’t list any examples of the top of my head, I get the impression that the techniques in question were mostly used in later years during TV and Movie opening credits sequences. It’s an interesting work in pioneer cinema.

SON OF THE WHITE MARE (1981)
aka Feherlofia
Article 4603 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-9-2014
Directed by Marcell Jankovics
Featuring the voices of Gyorgy Cserhalmi, Vera Pap, Gyula Szabo
Country: Hungary
What it is: Fantasy epic

A white mare gives birth to three sons, the third of which swears to go into the underworld and rescue three princesses held prisoner by dragons. Towards this end, he teams up with his two brothers and embarks on his quest.

This animated Hungarian movie was based on Hungarian folk tales and legends, and uses experimental animation techniques to tell the story. The result is, quite simply, a stunning visual feast with its animation roots as far back as the early films of Emile Cohl, though I do sense a certain kinship to YELLOW SUBMARINE as well. The use of color and the ways the various scenes melt into each other are simply breathtaking, and though I sense some might not warm to the visual style of the piece, I consider this one of the finest animated movies I’ve seen. While watching this, I found myself thinking about the 3D computer animation techniques that have risen up during the last couple of decades and now seem to dominate the animation landscape. Many fine movies have resulted from this style, but I can’t help but feel that this technique still lacks the breadth of creativity of the older animation techniques; I wonder if these new techniques will ever lend themselves to anything like this movie I’ve just seen. Still, the new animation has many years to grow yet; perhaps it will reach those levels someday.

SPOOK SPORT (1939)
Article 4590 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-26-2014
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute, Norman McLaren, Ted Nemeth
No voice cast
Country: USA
What it is: Arty graveyard dance

It’s midnight, and the ghosts rise from their graves and cavort.

Here we have another cartoon, but this one is somewhat different from the ones I’ve been seeing recently; this one is an experimental art film combining music and animation into a ballet of sorts. I’ve seen some of these before, and most of them I cover because the abstraction of the animation places them somewhat into the category of fantasy. However, this one has a definite horror theme and setting; the shapes represent ghosts and bats cavorting through a graveyard to the tune of “Danse macabre”. In some ways, this is merely a more abstract version of the various “skeleton dance” cartoons that were popular during the thirties, several of which I’ve also covered. Nonetheless, the presence of a definite theme and the fact that the abstract shapes often take on recognizable forms appropriate to the theme make this one one of the more accessible of the abstract musical cartoons I’ve seen; it would fit in nicely in a collection of more conventional Halloween cartoons. I quite liked this one.

THE STRANGE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER (1943)
Article 4575 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-9-2014
Directed by James P. Hogan
Featuring Ludwig Donath, Gale Sondergaard, George Dolenz
Country: USA
What it is: Wartime propaganda thriller

In occupied Austria during World War II, a clerk with an amazing facility for voice mimicry is arrested by the Gestapo after giving an uncanny imitation of the Fuhrer. His family is led to believe he has been shot as a traitor; in reality, he is forced to undergo plastic surgery to make him resemble Adolf Hitler. The motive behind this is that he will serve as decoy to stave off assassination attempts.

This is first and foremost a piece of wartime propaganda, with the intent of showing the evils and the brutality of the Nazi regime, though one should bear in mind that the movie was made before the death camps were public knowledge. It’s somewhat similar to THE MAGIC FACE, though that movie was made after the war was over. It’s a decent enough thriller and propaganda piece, but I most like to speculate about its fantastic content. As a movie of its own era, it might qualify in terms of being speculative political fiction in that it takes place on the world stage. However, it’s also the type of movie that, if events had fallen out a certain way, might have qualified as alternate history after the fact. Without engaging in spoilers, I can’t give away whether the events fall out that way; suffice it to say that the movie remains pretty marginal in terms of its fantastic content. The most interest theme here involves a discussion as to whether or not the death of Hitler alone would be enough to undo the Nazi cause, a question I’m not sure history has really answered. This one is not bad for what it is.

SUPERMAN IN EXILE (1954)
Article 4562 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-16-2014
Directed by George Blair and Thomas Carr
Featuring George Reeves, Noel Neill, Jack Larson
Country: USA
What it is: Superhero TV-to-Movie by editing

Superman has three adventures. In the first, he saves the city from a nuclear accident, but goes into exile when he is soaked with deadly radiation that makes him dangerous to be around. In the second, a criminal gets plastic surgery to make him look like Superman, and he starts a crime wave. In the third, an eccentric scientist accidentally creates a super-explosive, and Superman must prevent it from falling into the hands of criminals.

I’ve done it before and I’m doing it again – I cheated. That is to say that I’ve not actually seen this movie as such. It was part of a group of movies that were made by editing together episodes of the “Adventures of Superman” series and sold overseas. These movies haven’t been seen in ages, but the episodes from which they were edited are readily available, so I watched the three episodes of the TV series that made up this one: “Superman in Exile”, “The Face and the Voice”, and “The Whistling Bird”.

One of the things I’ve liked about the episodes I’ve seen in the series is that they emphasized stories in which Superman has to use his powers carefully and thoughtfully; in the first story here, he has to figure a way to capture criminals who have stolen crown jewels and are holding Lois hostage without getting close enough to irradiate them. In the third story, I love the fast thinking he uses in preventing a volatile flask of liquid from exploding and destroying the lab; it’s the comic highlight of a mostly comedic story. The second one gives George Reeves a dual role; on top of playing Clark Kent/Superman, he also plays the dull-witted thug who imitates Superman, and is a lot of fun in the role. All in all, these aren’t the most impressive episodes of the series, but the entire series was of high enough quality that these remain fun to watch.

THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN (1973)
TV-Movie
Article 4541 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-22-2014
Directed by Richard Irving
Featuring Lee Majors, Barbara Anderson, Martin Balsam
Country: USA
What it is: TV-Pilot (Successful variety)

When a former astronaut is badly injured in an accident, a secret government organization finances an operation to replace his missing parts with bionic, super-powerful replacements. But what will they ask the injured man in return for it?

I was a fan of the TV series for the first couple of seasons, though I stopped watching when I tired of it. I never saw the pilot, though, and it’s always a bit strange to watch a pilot once one is already familiar with the series, as there are usually some significant changes made to the format during the transition. In this case, the biggest difference is the absence of Richard Anderson; in the pilot, the person in the equivalent role is Darren McGavin. Quite frankly, I would have preferred McGavin; one cannot entirely trust his character, and that extra layer would have added more intrigue to the series than was ultimately there. The movie is mostly concerned with the backstory of Steve Austin with a token action setpiece near the end to give an idea of what the series would be like; it’s solid, well-done, and quite entertaining, and it does a good job of demonstrating that the concept would work well as a TV series, which is the ultimate goal of a pilot. My only problem is that it hints at how the TV series itself could have been a lot better.

THE SPIRIT OF 1976 (1935)
Short
Article 4533 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-13-2014
Directed by Leigh Jason
Featuring Walter Woolf King, Betty Grable, Lynne Carver
Country: USA
What it is: Utopian satire

In the Utopian society of 1976, the new leader outlaws work and opens the treasury to the people so they can live in perpetual leisure and vacation. However, after several months of this, a rumble of revolution is heard among the people, who start participating in the illegal activity of work.

What we have here is a 21-minute musical, and if you think about it in any realistic terms, it’s pretty silly. Still, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have its uses as satirical science fiction. For one thing, it explores the attractiveness of illegal activities, and it’s pretty easy to find the parallels here to Prohibition and bootlegging, as the short makes it pretty clear. It also deals with the issue of man’s need to create, an activity that clearly requires work. Still, I think the ultimate theme being explored here is that of moderation; after all, the solution the short ends up tendering to solve the Utopian problem at hand is even more ridiculous and extreme than the initial premise, and it’s pretty clear that the public will soon get even more sick of the solution than the problem. In short, despite the fact that what we have here is a silly musical short, it does provide food for thought and speculation.