THE SKIPPING CHEESES (1907)
aka Les fromages automobiles
Article 4262 by Dave Sindelar
7-9-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Bizarre trick short

When an argument about the odor of the wares of a cheese vendor result in her arrest, her own wares come to her rescue.

I’ve shown several of Melies’s shorts to my friends, and for some reason, this little oddity seems to have become the favorite of the bunch. It’s not really Melies’s special effects expertise that is the reason for its popularity; it’s the sheer absurdity of the premise coupled with the “English as a second language” narration by a Frenchman. The vision of a police department under attack by murderous cheeses is something to be reckoned with, and the deadpan description in particular of the death of the magistrate is pretty hilarious to these ears. No, it’s not one of Melies’s best, but it is one of the more jaw-dropping concepts he’s worked with.

SIGHTSEEING THROUGH WHISKY (1907)
aka Pauvre John ou Les aventures d’un buveur de whiskey
Article 4261 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-7-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Drunken visions

A lazy servant on a tour of ancient ruins decides to lag behind and get drunk on whisky. He collapses and has strange visions.

Maybe it’s because I’ve had a bit of a movie drought lately, but I rather enjoyed this Melies short, despite the fact that it has a fairly poor reputation. Still, one of the accusations made against this short must be reckoned with, and that is that Melies doesn’t break any new ground; it’s mostly a series of “things-appearing-out-of-nowhere” tricks that he’s done before, and even the most surreal moment (in which the drunkard is tormented by a bunch of dancing girls with mops) has popped up in an earlier short. I think I may have liked it a bit more because the title had me expecting a rehash of THE DREAMS OF A RAREBIT FIEND, and the short goes in a different direction; still, that doesn’t mean it went anywhere new. And, if you’re like me, you may spend some time wondering when the sleeping woman in the foreground will play into the action, but you’ll have to be patient; she’s there to set up the final gag.

THE SHRIEK OF ARABY (1923)
Article 4260 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-6-2013
Directed by F. Richard Jones
Featuring Ben Turpin, Kathryn McGuire, George Cooper
Country: USA
What it is: Movie parody

A cross-eyed bill poster dreams that he takes the place of Rudolph Valentino’s character in THE SHIEK.

I’ve not seen much of Ben Turpin’s comedic output; the most prominent role of his I’ve seen so far was some cameo scenes in MILLION DOLLAR LEGS. I will say this much for him, though; he had one of the most iconic faces of silent comedy, and may be the most instantly recognizable comedian of the era next to Charlie Chaplin. Unfortunately, if this movie is representative of his work in general, then it’s for his face he will mostly be remembered. It’s not that the movie is bad, mind you; it’s just that it’s pretty ordinary. Beyond the admittedly funny concept that Turpin is taking on a character played by Valentino, he doesn’t really come up with a particularly engaging personality to set himself apart from the pack. It also lacks the comic inventiveness that would help people like Buster Keaton rise to the top of the craft. For me, the funniest gags were the ones that played off the domestic life of a sultan of the desert being pretty much like the domestic life here at home; my favorite moment has the sultan’s wife going out of the tent to pick up the newspaper and milk, and that’s a pretty mild gag. Oddly enough, the original Valentino movie doesn’t qualify for this series; this one does via the appearance of a magician who can do real magic. Again, I haven’t seen much of Turpin’s work, so maybe he will grow on me, but at this point, I do find myself a little disappointed.

THE SHADOW GIRL (1902)
aka La clownesse fantome
Article 4259 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-4-2013
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Melies trick film

A magician and his clown assistant make a woman appear, change into a man, and then back to a woman.

It’s another one of Melies’s magician shorts, and like most of them, there’s no real plot; it’s just a series of tricks. The print isn’t in the best of condition, but some of the tricks are handled quite smoothly here. Nevertheless, there’s nothing really special about this one and is a pretty minor entry into his oeuvre.

SCRAPPY’S TELEVISION (1934)
Article 4258 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-1-2013
Directed unknown
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Mid-thirties cartoon

Scrappy tries to demonstrate his new invention (a television set) to a not-entirely-appreciative audience.

In the opening credits sequence, the still picture of Scrappy makes him look vaguely Peter Lorre-ish, but in the animation, he’s fairly characterless, though he does have a Mickey Mouse style voice. If there’s a highlight to this rather dull cartoon, it’s the boxing match that is shown on the television that makes up the last half of the cartoon; in it, a boxer who looks like the Frankenstein monster takes on a boxer who looks like Ed Wynn (complete with fire hat). This sequence really isn’t much funnier than what went on earlier in the cartoon, but the animation is more ambitious. Overall, this one is pretty forgettable.

SUPERBUG, SECRET AGENT (1972)
aka Ein Kafer gibt Vollgas
Article 4233 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-20-2013
Directed by Rudolf Zehetgruber
Featuring Rudolf Zehetgruber, Joachim Fuchsberger, Kathrin Oginski
Country: West Germany / Switzerland
What it is: Alleged comedy

Jimmy Bondi and his enhanced car, Dodo (aka Superbug) become embroiled with a gang of counterfeiters.

Given the fact that the primary human character of the Superbug movies has the name of Jimmy Bondi, it’s no surprise they should take a stab at the superspy genre. Still, the James Bond series weren’t quaking in their boots with the encroachment of the Superbug series into their territory any more than the Herbie the Love Bug series did. I can’t honestly say that the movie disappointed me, but that’s because I’ve seen enough Superbug movies to keep my expectations where they belong (extremely low), and the movie was just as bad as I expected it would be. For the uninitiated, Superbug is a Volkswagen with a personality; it talks, and assaults anyone that insults it by hitting it with tires, hood ornaments, door handles, etc. It’s big trick this time around is that it travels on water, and the movie is obsessed with showing this footage as much as possible. The movie is sluggish and painfully unfunny. However, I would like to make a few observations.

1) The part of the movie that most successfully makes an attempt to amuse me involves a villain being whacked on the head by Superbug’s hood ornament, leaving a VW signal imprinted on his forehead.

2) In the English dub of this movie, someone had the good sense to redub the car with the name of Dodo, because even being called a name of an extinct bird known for its stupidity is better than its original name, which is Dudu.

3) For several minutes the movie turns into a travelogue of Lisbon. In most other movies, that would be filler; here it is a high point.

4) Two repeated phrases would make for a good true/false quiz on the movie. The false statement – “I may look stupid, but I’m not.” The true statement – “That’s not funny!”

THE SPOOK RAISERS (1915)
Article 4208 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-21-2013
Directed by Chance Ward
Featuring Lloyd Hamilton, Bud Duncan, Harry Griffith
Country: USA
What it is: More slapstick shenanigans

While trying to escape from the police, two bums stumble into the home of a fake medium plying her trade. When they discover the medium’s tricks, they steal her paraphernalia and decide to go into the spiritualism racket for themselves.

Sometimes for this project, I’ll buy whole collections of shorts to get one title I’m looking for. One of the positive benefits of this is that sometimes those collections turn out to have more than one title I’m searching for. Yesterday’s movie featured a comedy team from the silent era known as Ham and Bud (Lloyd Hamilton and the diminutive Bud Duncan), and it turns out that the collection of shorts I purchased not only had HAM AND THE SAUSAGE FACTORY, but a couple of others that were on my hunt list, such as this one.

Lloyd Hamilton, though mostly forgotten nowadays, has a bit of a cult following, but most of it seems due to his work after he left this team. In these earlier shorts, he sported a huge bow-tie shaped mustache and engaged in fairly primitive slapstick antics with his team member. Even by slapstick levels of the time, the humor is pretty lowbrow; for example, in yesterday’s short, one of the big gags has Ham sticking a knife in Bud’s butt, and Bud running around in pain with the knife still protruding.

This one doesn’t sink quite as low, though I do gather from what I’ve seen of them so far, one of their common tricks is to hit people over the heads with huge mallets. The humor in the first half is mostly of the “it’s spooky and I’m scared” variety, with Ham panicking over the appearance of a ghostly Indian guide and Bud being terrified by a dancing skeleton in a closet. Yes, the fantastic content is faked, but that’s part of what drives the plot, such as it is. Probably the biggest laugh here is when Bud appears as a hyperactive ghost near the end of the short.

SECRETS OF SEX (1970)
aka Bizarre
Article 4117 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-27-2012
Directed by Antony Balch
Featuring Richard Schulman, Janet Spearman, Dorothy Grumbar
Country: UK
What it is: Anthology involving sex

A mummy narrates a series of stories involving the battle of the sexes.

To be truthful, I was expecting a movie that would settle for little more than a series of sex scenes, and the cover of the DVD package certainly did little to convince me otherwise. I turned out to be wrong; the movie has a theme (namely, the stranger manifestations of the battle of the sexes) and it sticks to it, as each of the sequences does deal in some way or another with sexual politics and manipulation, and not just sex per se. In fact, some of the sequences don’t even involve nudity; the opening story about a man who thinks his wife’s lover may be hidden in a trunk certainly has none. It doesn’t quite live up to the claim to be one of the strangest movies ever made, but it gets a lot closer than I thought it would. Outside of the framing device (an ancient mummy narrates the various stories), a couple of the stories do have fantastic content; the story about the photographer doing a study on torture lapses into horror before it’s all through, there’s a spy pastiche among the stories, and the story about the old woman and the greenhouse has some fantasy elements. Those catching it for the sex scenes only will be the ones most disappointed; I found myself rather intrigued and amused by the whole thing. I found this one to be much better than I thought it would be.

SIGNALE-EIN WELTRAUMABENTEUER (1970)
aka Signals – An Adventure in Space
Article 4101 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-8-2012
Directed by Gottfried Kolditz
Featuring Piotr Pawlowski, Yevgeni Zharikov, Gojko Mitic
Country: East Germany / Poland
What it is: An adventure in space

A spaceship disappears. Another spaceship goes out to find it.

The bare-bones plot description is just my way of saying that the movie is in unsubtitled German, and ended up being mostly incomprehensible to me; even the details I did find were mostly due to finding a few short plot descriptions. That leaves me mostly with the visual look of the movie to cover, and I will say that it does look like it’s learned a few good lessons from its no-doubt stylistic model, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. The trouble is that knowing a few cinematic tricks isn’t the same thing as using them wisely, and the few this movie has learned get repeated ad nauseum; people appearing upside down in the frame and rotating camera whirls are the biggest culprits, with the latter nearly giving me dizzy spells. Once again, it’s not strictly kosher for me to comment on the story, as I couldn’t follow it, but I sense that there’s a lot of dead space and arty padding, and there’s something about how the final moments play out to give me the sense that the story isn’t particularly special in the first place. And, given this movie has a rating of 3.7 on IMDB, I suspect my instincts will prove to be right. Still, the movie has some sequences that are just plain weird; I’d like to know why we have all the footage of gymnasts on the beach, and what the animated segment (showing one character’s love affair with a beautiful woman with eyelashes half the size of her body) has to do with anything.