THE SADIST (1963)
Article #639 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-14-2002
Posting Date: 5-9-2003

Three travelers try to get their car repaired at a junkyard and become captives of an insane psycho.

If I mention the names Arch Hall Jr. and Marilyn Manning, you might recognize them as the teenage couple from EEGAH: well, here they are again, and the resemblance ends there. For one thing, they were the heroes in that movie; here they are the villains. This is particularly apt in Arch’s case; despite the fact that he was supposed to be cute and cuddly in EEGAH, he was actually creepier than the monster; here, cast as a psycho, he looks the part. This would be damning him with faint praise if I left it at that, though; he also acts the part, and convincingly; he is one of the scariest psychos in screen history, and if there is any justice in this world, he will be judged by his terrifying performance here rather than as a teen idol or a rock star. In fact, this movie is an unbelievably harrowing thriller; you’re sucked in early on and it doesn’t let go until the final moments. In fact, I feel like trotting out an endless succession of suspense cliches, such as pulse-pounding or heart-stopping, because this movie actually lives up to them. It is a little unsteady at times, particularly in the opening scenes, where the dialogue sounds a little forced and contrived at times, and the ending is a shade disappointing, but these are minor quibbles in a movie that tightens the screws this well. A rarity, and a triumph.

SHADOW OF THE EAGLE (1932)
(Serial)
Article #610 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 11-15-2002
Posting date: 4-11-2003

The board of directors of a corporation is being threatened by a shadowy form known as the Eagle, who they believe is an ex-World War I pilot who was also known as the Eagle in his day but who crashed and was believed dead but turned out not to be and who had also created an invention which the corporation had stolen from him but is now supporting himself by running a carnival. His stunt-fighter tries to solve the mystery with the aid of the carnival owner’s daughter, a midget, a strong man and a ventriloquist with uncanny abilities of voice imitation.

It may be my imagination, but I’m beginning to notice that there’s something utterly cheesy about any serial I’ve seen so far that came from Mascot. Despite having a fairly complex story (the above plot description blurb gives you a feel for just how convoluted the backstory is), it still spends a good amount of its running time spinning its wheels. On the plus side, it has a young John Wayne in the role of the hero/stunt pilot, and he’s a name that hasn’t popped up yet in this series of reviews. It also doesn’t suffer from cheating cliff-hangers; unfortunately, the cliff-hangers themselves aren’t particularly good. Still, the odd milieu adds a bit of fun to the proceedings, and it’s always fun to watch John Wayne.

Some serial rules:

1) If you are a criminal trying to convince the hero to do something that will cause him to fall into a trap, and he questions you on certain suspicious behaviors of yours, the best way to answer these questions is with these three magic words, “Never mind that.”

2) If crooks and heroes are fighting in a room, and the cops come in, and the crooks claim the heroes are the crooks, they will always be believed.

3) The quickest way to commit suicide in this movie is to say, “Okay, I’ll confess. I know who the Eagle is. He is …” and wait for the bang.

THE SWORD AND THE DRAGON (1956)
(a.k.a. ILJA MURAMETS)
Article #590 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-26-2003
Posting Date: 3-21-2003

This is the story of Ilja Muramets, a hero who fights againt the evil Mongol Kalin.

This reminds me a little of the 1939 version of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, in that a great deal of the pleasure I get from watching it is the result of the sheer scale of the undertaking; the ads claimed that 100,000 people were involved in the making of this movie, and after taking a gander at some of the crowd scenes, that may not be quite the exaggeration it seems. Granted, the fact that I watched a dubbed, badly faded print does somewhat blunt its effectiveness, and I also wonder just how badly the movie was cut when brought to the U.S.; it runs a hair over eighty minutes, but IMDB does not list an alternate running time, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find out that the original ran quite a bit longer. The special effects aren’t always convincing, but at least they have the same grandness of scale as the rest of the production, so I’ll let that slide. Besides, it also contains the largest human pyramid in movie history, and that must count for something.

THE SPECKLED BAND (1931)
Article #560 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-26-2002
Posting date: 2-19-2003

Sherlock Holmes investigates the situation of a woman who is afraid that her stepfather is intent on murdering her.

Fans of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories will immediately recognize the title as belonging to one his most memorable stories; so memorable, in fact, that I’ve never forgotten the denouement. The upshot of this is, of course, that I went into this movie with a fairly solid idea of how it would end as long as it stuck to the story. And it does, once you get past some clumsy backstory in the first half and a strange sequence in which Holmes interacts with an intercom (or a tape recorder, or both; I’m not quite sure) and an early type of computer (unless I’m badly mistaken about that machine, but that’s what it looks like); obviously the series has been moved out of nineteenth century London. Actually, knowing the ending, rather than ruining the movie for me, helped me to enjoy it; rather than identifying myself with Watson (which is how you usually feel when reading a Sherlock Holmes story for the first time), I identified myself with Holmes, and could see that he knew the solution and was merely looking for the necessary details to back up his theory. It may not be quite as enjoyable if you don’t know the solution in advance; I can’t really say. But having been made in the early years of sound, it is slow-moving, stagey, and static. It does strike a home run in one way; Raymond Massey is a wonderful Holmes, spirited, witty and thorougly enjoyable; I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed this man as a performer quite as much as I did here.

THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK (1946)
Article #558 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-24-2002
Posting date: 2-17-2003

A woman gets a job as a companion to a blind woman in a small town, but strange events make her suspicious.

Despite the title and the presence of Gale Sondergaard, there is no connection between this movie and the Sherlock Holmes opus THE SPIDER WOMAN. It’s actually a pretty standard mad scientist movie of sorts, though actually I found it a fairly interesting one. It’s plotted with a decent amount of mystery; you only find out what’s going on piece by piece, and it reveals its secrets at just the right pace to hold your interest till the end of the movie. It’s also helped by the presence of Sondergaard, an extraordinary character actress who adds a great deal of class to her role. It’s also helped by Rondo Hatton; he had a certain brutish eloquence in the physical aspect of his performances that he couldn’t match vocally; here, playing a mute, he is allowed to play on his strengths as an actor rather than his weaknesses, and it is perhaps his best performance. The ending is somewhat arbitrary, almost as if they never really knew what to do with the story at that point, but overall, this is a pretty decent low-budget programmer.

SPACEWAYS (1953)
Article #557 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-23-2002
Posting date: 2-16-2003

When two people vanish at the time of a rocket launch that went wrong, an investigator suspects one of the scientists of having committed murder and having hidden the bodies aboard the rocket.

This movie was based on a radio play, and I could see how it might make a pretty decent one; the shorter running time would have made it necessary to keep the pace at a pretty rapid clip. That is precisely the problem with this movie; it takes a fairly leisurely pace, and after a while you can’t help but notice the dead air between the lines of dialogue. This wouldn’t be a problem if the movie were visually compelling, or if the characters or situations were novel, unusual or inventive, but that’s not the case here; it’s a pretty basic melodrama, with touches of romance, espionage and mystery added to the mix, and it really doesn’t come to life until the last third of the movie. Having frenetic music pop up on the soundtrack every twenty minutes or so really doesn’t fix things, either. Ultimately, the most interesting thing abou this movie is that it would be Hammer’s first attempt at science fiction, and it wouldn’t be until they made the acquantance of a man named Quatermass that they would get it right.

SNAKE WOMAN (1961)
Article #556 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-22-2002
Posting date: 2-15-2003

A scientist uses snake venom on his wife to cure her mental illness, but when she dies giving childbirth, her daughter has reptilian qualities.

In many ways, this is pretty standard horror fare similar to CULT OF THE COBRA; however, unlike that movie, I found this one quite compelling and it held my attention throughout. Probably the main reason is that it pays attention to the interesting details of the situation; the detective sent to the scene of the murders is told by his boss to try to keep an open mind, so instead of an endless series of “That’s impossible; it just can’t happen” type of scenes, we end up with a character who is willing to give things a shot even when he is in doubt; I really like the scene where the local “witch” gets him to shoot three bullets into a voodoo doll in an attempt to break the curse. I also like the observation that the witch can’t kill the snake woman herself because she was its midwife, and helping to bring her into the world alive made her lose the power of death over her. It’s fantasy logic, to be sure, but it’s the kind of fantasy logic that adds color to these sorts of movies. It’s also helped by the fact that it doesn’t overstay its welcome; it runs a scant 68 minutes, which is pretty darn short for a movie made in the sixties. Not a great movie, but one where you can see that some people were approaching the ideas with a certain amount of creativity and a sense of fun.

THE SHE-CREATURE (1956)
Article #555 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-21-2002
Posting date: 2-14-2003

A hypnotist regresses a woman to prehistoric times, causing an early monster version of her to rise out of the sea and commit murders.

There is a clever concept behind this attempt to combine the Bridey Murphy concept with a monster movie; unfortunately, a poor script and some ineffectual acting hamstring the attempt. The script is too cluttered, spending too much time on unnecessary subplots or issues; the romantic triangle has nothing to do with the main story, and the whole storyline involving the entrepreneur who is trying to make money off of the mentalist could be eliminated. The character of the skeptic trying to debunk the claims of Dr. Lombardi are also poorly handled, as he makes no attempt to figure out how Lombardi is pulling off is tricks and merely stands there being skeptical; it was almost as if the writer didn’t know what to do with the concept. Marla English’s character is also poorly developed; I would have traded much of the wasted screen time for some insight into how she hooked up with Lombardi in the first place. I also found both Chester Morris and Lance Fuller less than satisfying in their respective roles; they both need a much wider range of emotions than they display, in particular, a scene where Fuller is threatened by a mad dog requires a lot more from the actor than is ever given. On the positive side, Edward L. Cahn tries his best, with a few scenes that have a nice visual sense to them. One particularly nice sequence near the end involves Erickson convincing policemen to shoot at a fire in which they don’t see anything. And the monster outfit is perhaps Paul Blaisdell’s crowning achievement. Incidentally, the scandinavian butler is El Brendel, who was pulling off that same shtick as far back as JUST IMAGINE.

THE SAGA OF THE VIKING WOMEN AND THEIR VOYAGE TO THE WATERS OF THE GREAT SEA SERPENT (1958)
(a.k.a. THE VIKING WOMEN AND THE SEA SERPENT)
Article #554 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-20-2002
Posting date: 2-13-2003

Viking women leave their native land to go in search of their men. They encounter a sea serpent, among other things.

Nice title.

Okay, that’s rather dismissive, but Roger Corman’s attempt at this historical epic always tends to leave me without much to say. It’s not what I would call a good movie, but it’s neither so bad as to be either laughable or painful. There’s action and women in short skirts to make up for the fact that there’s not much of a story here. I do have one comment, though; if I see a movie with the word “viking” in the title, I think I should be entitled to see at least one big burly guy in a big beard with a horned metal helmet standing in a boat with a dragon head waving a big axe and roaring; I don’t think this is unreasonable. As it is, it looks like they got the cast for “Beach Party Norway” instead.

SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN (1951)
Article #542 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-8-2002
Posting date: 2-1-2003

An oil well breaks through to the center of the earth, and mole men come up out of it. Their presence causes a wave of hysteria that Superman must quell.

This was the feature film debut of the Superman character and the debut of George Reeves in that role. I’ve never seen the TV series inspired by this feature, but after seeing this, I can understand something of its appeal. Though the later big-budget adventures of the character had better acting, there was a definite unpretentious charm to George Reeves and his performance that made him tremendously likeable in the role. I was expecting initially that the mole men would be the villains, but the story takes a different direction, in which the real villains are human beings who have let fear get the best of them; in some ways, it is reminiscent thematically of both THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and THE MAN FROM PLANET X. It makes the theme work by focusing on the confusion and the fear of the Mole Men; the scene of the terrified mole man in the burning shack is surprisingly effective. This movie has certainly raised my interest in someday checking out some episodes of the TV series.