THE SECRET GARDEN (1949)
Article 2119 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-3-2007
Posting Date: 6-1-2007
Directed by Fred M. Wilcox
Featuring Margaret O’Brien, Herbert Marshall, Dean Stockwell

An orphan whose parents have died in India from cholera is taken in by an uncle, who is in grief at the passing of his wife. The girl hears screams in the castle at all hours and discovers a locked-up garden on the grounds.

I’ve not read the Frances Hodgson Burnett novel on which this is based, but I have seen one other movie version of the story, though I don’t remember it well enough to make any meaningful comparison. It’s not really genre, though it might be considered a fantasy depending on how you interpret the final scene. Nonetheless, the scenes in the mansion during the first half of the movie have a definite horrific quality to them, what with the shadowy corridors and the mysterious screams, as well as the rumor that the Uncle is a hunchback (as far as I can tell, he isn’t). It’s basically a story about grief and healing, and one of the most interesting things about the story is how most of the major characters come off as unlikable when we first meet them. Yet, we grow to care about them, because they are all unhappy and grieving, and it takes outsiders in one capacity or another (Dickon the village boy, Dr. Fortescue and finally Mary the orphan herself) to bring light and healing in one form or another to the house. Horror fans will recognize Elsa Lanchester as a maid, and George Zucco has a great role as Dr. Fortescue, whose refusal to kowtow to the Master’s wishes marks a turning point in the story for a certain character.

SHERLOCK HOLMES BAFFLED (1900)
Article 2093 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-8-2006
Posting Date: 5-6-2007
Director and Cast Unknown

Sherlock Holmes encounters a thief who vanishes. This baffles him.

As the earliest cinematic incarnation of the character of Sherlock Holmes, this has a certain amount of interest value. However, as a Sherlock Holmes story, it is nearly worthless, but with a running time of thirty seconds, what do you expect? Personally, I think the thing that baffles Holmes here is what he’s doing in this subpar Melies imitation. A curio, but little else.

STOLEN FACE (1952)
Article 2076 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-20-2006
Posting Date: 4-19-2007
Directed by Terence Fisher
Featuring Paul Henreid, Lizabeth Scott, Andre Morell

A plastic surgeon, in love with a woman promised to another, undertakes to perform plastic surgery on a deformed female criminal and gives her the face of the woman he loves.

This movie is anchored by a good performance from Lizabeth Scott in a dual role as both the object of the doctor’s affection and as the criminal whose face he reconstructs and whom he marries. Paul Henreid also does fine as the surgeon. Nonetheless, I wasn’t very impressed with the movie. It does surprise me that it didn’t quite go in the direction I expected, but I wasn’t particularly impressed with where it did go. Part of the problem is that the movie never really does anything significant with its central gimmick; even though the fact that the doctor does this act gives us a glimpse inside the doctor’s psyche, he’s not really that interesting enough a character for this to be truly effective. The only other use the movie makes of its concept is that one of the two women gains information through being mistaken for the other one, but with some very minor plot changes, they could have gotten the information in other ways. Take away the central gimmick, and there’s really nothing more here than a rather ordinary romantic melodrama. The ending, though an example of poetic justice, is also a little too pat for my taste.

STUDENT BODIES (1981)
Article 2020 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-25-2006
Posting Date: 2-22-2007
Directed by Mickey Rose and Michael Ritchie
Featuring Kristen Riter, Matthew Goldsby, Richard Brando

A killer known as The Breather is on the loose knocking off homecoming queen candidates and their boyfriends.

I’ve barely touched upon the slasher genre in my series so far, and here I am already covering a parody of the genre. Since this movie was written and partially directed by a collaborator with Woody Allen on some of his earlier films, it’s no surprise that the movie has some good moments and ideas; I like the on-screen body-count, the highlighted emphasis on plot points, the scene where the killer chooses his weapon from a roll-top desk, and the bizarre emphasis on horse-head bookends, to name a few. But for every good gag, there’s a plethora of bad ones, pointless ones, and crude ones that miss the mark. For a parody of an extremely bloody and skin-filled genre, there’s a surpising scarcity of blood and nudity, so much so that the movie has to go out of its way to get its R rating (one of the funnier scenes of the movie). It even manages to sneak in some parodies of CARNIVAL OF SOULS and THE WIZARD OF OZ in the mix, and if you’ve seen CARRIE, you’ll see the final gag coming. All in all, it’s pretty dumb, but at least its opening “This is based on a true story” explanation is honest.

STEREO (1969)
Article 2019 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-24-2006
Posting Date: 2-21-2007
Directed by David Cronenberg
Featuring Ronald Miodzik, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing

A Canadian institute engages in experiments on telepathy and eroticism.

This, like CRIMES OF THE FUTURE , is one of David Cronenberg’s very early art films; apparently, he got funding for the film from the Canadian government by pretending that he was writing a novel. I find this little piece of trivia rather interesting; the style of the movie (black and white photography, no dialogue, incidental sound or music, action explained (or not) by various narrators) leaves me feeling like I’m reading a book rather than watching a movie. Unfortunately, the book is rather dry; the narration sounds like passages from a scientific report, and even the most sympathetic viewer will find the movie a trial to get through in one sitting; it has, if possible, even less discernible plot than CRIMES OF THE FUTURE. Which is not to say that the movie isn’t interesting; Cronenberg’s works can be intellectually stimulating, and there is plenty food for thought here. It’s just rather exhausting, and the visceral touches never quite make up for that. Still, like CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, there is much here that fits in neatly with Cronenberg’s obsessions and interests, and I suspect that his early movies might well benefit from sympathetic reviewings, dry as they are.

SERPENT ISLAND (1954)
Article 2018 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date:9-23-2006
Posting Date: 2-20-2007
Directed by Tom Gries
Featuring Sonny Tufts, Mary Munday, Tom Monroe

A woman hires a hard-drinking harbor bum to accompany her on a quest for a fortune of gold. However, the captain she hires to take them to Haiti also has his eyes on the prize….

Don’t let the fact that Bert I. Gordon produced this movie fool you; there are no giant monsters to be found in this rather lame tropical island/jungle tale. The fantastic aspects consist of stock footage of a voodoo ceremony, an element which really doesn’t play into the story at all, but merely serves as a mood enhancer once the action moves to the island during the second part of the movie. The first half of the movie mostly takes place on the boat, with a budding romance between the two main characters and someone trying to steal the letter with the info about the treasure. You should be able to figure out who the latter character is; you know it isn’t one of the two main characters, and of the only other three characters who exist in the cast outside of the stock footage, only one is on the boat. The acting is weak, the dialogue is clumsy, and there is little to recommend here; the best thing about it is that it manages to be just watchable enough to see you through the length of the movie, much of which is due to the fact that the hokey dialogue is good for a few laughs. Both Gordon and director Tom Gries would go on to better movies.

SAVAGE WEEKEND (1979)
Article 2017 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-22-2006
Posting Date: 2-19-2007
Directed by David Paulsen and John Mason Kirby
Featuring Chrisopher Allport, Jim Doerr, David Gale

Several people from New York City go upstate to supervise the building of a boat, and find themselves targets of a masked killer.

Apparently this slasher movie was filmed in 1976 before HALLOWEEN kicked off the genre, but was not released until afterwards. I can see why. I found it extremely dull, despite the copious amount of nudity, sex and fetishism. Part of the reason is that the acting is quite poor at times, but the fact is that most of the characters are so unpleasant that you don’t really care what happens to them. It’s also littered with some uninteresting subplots. The movie can’t even work up much suspense when the murders start happening. It does work up a bit of excitement towards the end when two central characters engage in a fight, one armed with a machete and the other with a chainsaw, but it’s too little, too late. Not recommended.

THE STORY OF MANKIND (1957)
Article 1996 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-1-2006
Posting Date: 1-29-2007
Directed by Irwin Allen
Featuring Ronald Colman, Vincent Price, Cedric Hardwicke

When mankind invents the Super H-Bomb several decades too early, a high tribunal is called to decide whether mankind should be destroyed or allowed to continue its existence. Mankind is put on trial, with Mr. Scratch, the devil, serving as prosecuting attorney, and the Spirit of Mankind serving as defense attorney.

Whatever its merits, there is no doubt that this movie possesses a very high curiosity value; its array of stars playing various historical figures guarantees that. Just listing the names could take up this whole review, but let’s get it over with; Ronald Colman, Hedy Lamarr, the Marx Brothers, Virginia Mayo, Agnes Moorehead, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Charles Coburn, Cedric Hardwicke, Cesar Romero, John Carradine, Dennis Hopper, Marie Wilson, Helmut Dantine, Edwart Everett Horton, Reginal Gardiner, Marie Windsor, and, now just picking a few noticeable names out of the rest, Franklin Pangborn, Henry Daniell, Francis X. Bushman, Nick Cravat, Anthony Dexter, Don Megowan, William Schallert, Abraham Sofaer, Bobby Watson (as, of course, Adolf Hitler) and Angelo Rossitto.

Given that this is an Irwin Allen movie, I pretty much discarded from the outset any possibility that the movie would actually manage to say anything profound about human nature, and sure enough, the movie’s philosphical pursuits are vulgar, obvious, muddled, and often dull Still, the actors forced to reckon with these sections of the story (Colman, Price and Hardwicke) come off with their dignity intact, and Price did get a laugh out of me with a passing comment about his views of painting. For the rest, it’s mostly an adventure to see how well the various name stars fare against utter miscasting and abysmal writing. Some come out all right; at least Groucho (as Peter Minuit) is allowed to ad lib to his heart’s content, Dennis Hopper wisely underplays his Napoleon, Cesar Romero retains his dignity, and Harpo plays Harpo. Others get by as best they can (Carradine, for example), and some are forced to overact by the necessity of the script (Peter Lorre as Nero), while others overact of their own free will (Agnes Moorehead as Queen Elizabeth manages to give perhaps the worst performance of her career here), while others are thoroughly wasted (Edward Everett Horton’s role consists of nothing more than having a flagon of beer poured over him, and Chico Marx is relegated to trading a few non-humorous lines with Anthony Dexter, who is playing Columbus). Two-thirds of the movie is made up of the philosophical discussions and the cameos; the rest is stock footage.

So what’s the verdict? Given the lack of real philosophical insight as a forgone conclusion, the question becomes – is the movie much fun? Sadly, the answer is – not really. A few moments stand out, the curiosity value will draw you in occasionally, but mostly the movie is on the dreary side. Most of the fun I had was spotting some familiar faces, my favorite being that of Angelo Rossitto as a dwarf chasing a woman during the Nero sequence. Even given my expectations, this one proved disappointing.

THE SEVENTH VEIL (1945)
Article 1995 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-31-2006
Posting Date: 1-28-2007
Directed by Compton Bennett
Featuring James Mason, Ann Todd, Herbert Lom

A psychiatrist tries to tap into the mind of a female pianist who attempted suicide after escaping from her hotel room. He learns her life story, which involves a guardian who has a Svengali-like hold over her.

At the outset, I’ll point out that the fantastic content here is very slight. We deal somewhat with mental illness, hypnotism comes into play (though not in a menacing sense), and these are both elements of horror, but probably the biggest element has to do with the fact that the story is somewhat modeled after the Svengali/Trilby story, though it should be pointed out that the nature of the hold that the guardian has over the pianist is something a lot more subtle than the hypnotism of the source story; in a sense, this movie’s fantastic content is by proxy only.

At first, this movie didn’t impress me much; the beginning scenes made it look as if they had merely taken the Svengali story and filtered it though “Jane Eyre”, and most of these early scenes felt overly familiar. However, the movie took what I thought was a surprising left turn at the halfway point, when the pianist gives her first concert which, due to the presence of certain people, I expected to be a failure, but instead turned out to be a triumph. It as at this point that the movie really comes into its own, and I think much of the credit to this movie’s power goes to Ann Todd’s exquisite performance as the pianist. Despite the fact that she’s got plenty of acting competition from the rest of the cast (including James Mason, Herbert Lom, Albert Lieven and Hugh McDermott, who are all excellent), she’s the one who really pulls it all together, and her piano playing looks so convincing that I wonder if she actually was classically trained on the instrument. Still, fans of fantastic cinema will certainly get some fun out of seeing two famous Captain Nemos in the same scene. Though in some ways this is a love story, it’s actually less sexist than many of them when you consider just how important the pianist’s career is in making her life decisions. Very well done.

THE SECRET CODE (1942)
Cereal
Article 1976 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-12-2006
Posting Date: 1-9-2007
Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet
Featuring Paul Kelly, Anne Nagel, Trevor Bardette

A policemen is taken off the force for having become undependable, and he ends up joining a Nazi spy ring. However, it’s all a trick; the policeman is actually on a secret assignment to get the Nazi secret code. However, when the only other man who knows of the secret assignment is murdered, the policeman must succeed in his operation in order to clear himself. Even his alternate ego, The Black Commando, is thought of as a criminal.

I’m sure everyone caught the misspelling in the classification above by the movie’s title. I just thought it might be interesting to compare serials to cereals, or this one, at least. I think there are some similarities; cereals are mostly processed from the same ingredients so that most of them are pretty similar, and personally, I think the same could be said of serials. This one has some good ingredients; it takes the “Blinky McQuade” concept of a good guy pretending to be a criminal in order to get inside info, and it also uses the concept of “The Spider” in that the masked hero is considered a criminal by the law. What makes it rather unique is that here our hero can fall back on no law-abiding persona, and this definitely ups the ante on his part. It’s really not until the second half of the serial that he manages to convince anyone that he’s really working on the side of good.

Unfortunately, this serial is also like a box of Raisin Bran where all the raisins have fallen to the bottom of the box; you have to get through half of the box before you get to the good stuff. As usual, the first episode is pretty strong, but after that it falls into a purely routine pattern, in which the hero hears of a Nazi plot, but, because the spies don’t trust him, he is either being watched or locked in a room while the sabotage is occurring. He must escape, get into costume, stop the sabotage, and return back to where the gang left him so they won’t suspect that he is really The Black Commando. It’s not until he convinces his best friend of his true intentions that more variety is added to the plot line, but things pick up strongly in the final half. And the final fight in the serial shows a surprising amount of humor; it’s the only final fight I’ve seen in a serial that features a pie in the face.

The main reason I made the cereal comparison, though is that this one, like many cereals, has a free prize inside. In this case, after we have reached the cliffhanger, we have a short sequence featuring Major Henry Barton (Selmer Jackson) showing us how to crack secret codes; each episode is dedicated to a different kind of code, and it illustrates how to crack them and often how they are hidden. I found these sequences immensely entertaining, and I looked forward to them more than I did the actual serial.

As for the fantastic content, this serial features a few science-fiction style inventions, with the most obvious being a goofy-looking machine that the Nazis use to crack their secret codes.