THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE (1913)
Article #410 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-29-2002
Posting date: 9-22-2002

A poor student sells his reflection to a strange man in order to have enough money to win the woman he loves. He then finds himself haunted by his own reflection.

Sometimes persistence pays off; the first time I watched this early German horror film, I was left scratching my head, as the title cards were all in German and my few years of high school language classes were of little help. However, on a second viewing, I was able to sort out the story much better. This is one of the very few horror movies made about a doppelganger, and it’s a fascinating little story; I wouldn’t mind a remake (there’s at least one out there), as it’s one of those concepts that is relatively unexplored in horror cinema, and I’m sure there are interesting things to do with the idea. Some great acting by Paul Wegener adds to the fun.

SPOOKS RUN WILD (1941)
Article #409 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-28-2002
Posting date: 9-21-2002

The East Side Kids take refuge in a haunted house, where they match wits with a man they believe to be a killer.

This was the Bowery Boys back when they were the East Side Kids and young enough to still be thought of as kids. The movie is designed around them; the story is inconsequential, the character development is time-filler, and Bela Lugosi and Angelo Rossitto are just scary window-dressing. Ultimately, how much you like this movie depends on how much you like the East Side Kids, and a little goes a long way with them. Still, compare them to some of the other comedy acts that Bela worked with over the years, and they look pretty good. Unfortunately, you can only handle so many gags about being scared, and the movie wears out its welcome long before it’s over. I do prefer it to their other collaboration with Bela, GHOSTS ON THE LOOSE.

SHE (1911)
Article #408 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-27-2002
Posting date: 9-20-2002

This is a short adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s novel about She-who-must-be-obeyed, an apparently immortal woman who rules a hidden kingdom and her love for a man she killed many years ago.

James Cruze also appeared in a short version of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, which was somewhat more successful than this one is. Fully half the running time of my print of this movie (which runs about twenty minutes) is backstory, leaving only about ten minutes to cover the main story, and there’s really not much of the story left. What is there seems arbitrary, and

SPOILER

I have to admit at this point that I have never quite understood why the fire makes the woman old the last time she uses it; I suspected it might have been better explained in the novel, but apparently it’s just as vague about the reason for this phenomenon as any of the movies. Oh, well.

THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR RX (1942)
Article #383 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 4-2-2002
Posting date: 8-26-2002

A series of murders against criminals who have successfully evaded the justice system is being committed by a character known as Dr. Rx, who leaves a label with the Rx symbol attached to each of his victims.

Oh, good! A horror movie with a gorilla and Lionel Atwill! No, sorry, it’s actually a mystery with slight horror elements.

Well, it has a scary lab scene, doesn’t it? Yes, it does, but it appears so late in the movie and is so out of place with the rest of the movie that it simply doesn’t work in this context.

But it has Lionel Atwill, doesn’t it? Yes, it does. He has about four minutes of screen time and about four lines of dialogue. This hardly even qualifies him as a red herring, though it does give the marketing people something to put on the poster.

Well, I bet at least it’s an exciting mystery, isn’t it? Oh, it might have been, if there had been any detective work; instead, most of the screen time is dedicated to the detective’s relationship with his girlfriend (and later, wife) and endless scenes of people either trying to talk him into taking the case or people trying to talk him into dropping the case.

Then what does this movie have? Well, it does have Mantan Moreland and Shemp Howard. At least they manage to net a few laughs. They even have a (serious) car chase scene, one chasing the other, which is probably a novel moment in film history.

I saw this one years ago on my local Creature Feature. I was curious to see how well it stood the test of time. Now I know.

SILENT RUNNING (1971)
Article #340 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 2-18-2002
Posting date: 7-5-2002

A crewman takes drastic measures to save the last forest in existence, a forest that is preserved on a space station going around the orbit of Saturn.

After watching this movie, I popped into the user reviews on IMDB and got the definite impression that a lot of people love this movie. Actually, I can see why, and by all rights, I should love it, too; it’s science fiction, it involves ecology, which I do think is an important cause, the special effects are great, and there are some individual scenes that work very well indeed. However, upon my first viewing of the movie, I was so disgusted with it, I trotted off an angry and rather dismissive review which I have now thrown out and rewritten. Not that I love the movie now; I just felt my first review was unfair, and largely based on my distaste for propagandistic movies of any type. I’ve now had a long time to consider the movie and I feel better able to write something that better expresses just what were the problems I had with the movie.

At heart, there’s a central contradiction to this movie that drives me crazy. On one level, it’s a message movie about the environment; on another, it’s a portrait of a man who engages in extreme measures for his cause. Unfortunately, the first level involves turning the Bruce Dern character into a hero, while the second leads me to believe he is unbalanced, at least partially homicidal, and not a healthy person by any means. I have serious trouble reconciling these two outlooks. I also have serious problems with a movie that tries to get me to hate most of the human characters, and then turns around and tries to make me fall in love with three robots by anthropomorphizing them (I detect more than a hint of misanthropy here), and when at one point the Bruce Dern character spent five minutes fretting over his inablility to figure out why the forest is dying when I had been able to zero in on the reason within two seconds, I lost any and all motivation to like the character or the movie. Thus, the potentially powerful end to the movie left me feeling just empty and depressed, and not in a cathartic sense.

This being said, I’m sure some people will believe that my dislike for this movie marks a serious lapse of taste on my part, and maybe they’re right. All I can say is I wish I did like it; it would have made writing this Musing a lot easier. As it is, one thing I can say is that I thought longer and harder about this review than anything else I’ve written for this series, and any movie that can inspire me to that much effort must be worth viewing for no other reason that it does make you think. And that is a lot more than many other movies do.

THE SPY WITH MY FACE (1966)
Article #332 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 2-10-2002
Posting date: 6-27-2002

THRUSH comes up with an agent that is the exact duplicate of Napoleon Solo, and uses him in a scheme to steal top-secret information.

I don’t know if this feature-length version of the TV show “The Man from UNCLE” is actually made up of episodes of the series or not, but I do know that it looks more like a TV show than a movie. I’ve never really seen much of the show, but the movie gives me the impression that it was James Bond Lite, lacking the flashy gimmickry of those movies. Entertaining enough, I suppose, but I have to admit I’ve never really been a big fan of the genre, though many of them do qualify as borderline science fiction with its emphasis on gadgetry of all sorts.

THE SECRET WITNESS (1931)
(a.k.a. TERROR BY NIGHT)
Article #309 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 1-18-2002
Posting date: 6-4-2002

A murder is committed in a penthouse apartment, and several suspects are held for questioning.

The horror genre is closely aligned in spirit with the mystery genre, causing a certain amount of slopover between the two. This is one of the most marginal I’ve run into, as its only horror element seems to be a chimp who can shoot a gun, and that doesn’t even play a real part in the solution of the mystery. This one is okay, but it does get a bit tiresome before it is all through, though you do get caught up in whether or not Zasu Pitts will finally be able to go dancing with Elmer. The movie also features Nat Pendleton and Una Merkel, and is also known as TERROR BY NIGHT; don’t confuse it with the Sherlock Holmes movie of the same name.

STANLEY (1972)
Article #306 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 1-15-2002
Posting date: 6-1-2002

An American Indian who love snakes deals harshly with unsavory characters who don’t like American Indians and kill snakes.

Maltin describes the movie as “WILLARD with snakes” and though I usually don’t like to quote other peoples’ reviews, it’s just too apt a description to pass by. For all that, it’s the best movie of William Grefe’s I’ve seen; however, that’s not saying much when you consider the other movies I’ve seen of his are DEATH CURSE OF TARTU and STING OF DEATH. It does manage to be actually quite touching when Stanley (the snake) becomes a father; it’s Chris Robinson’s best moment in the movie. Otherwise, it’s business as usual in the swamps of Florida, with a stupid snake-skin belt entrepeneur (it’s never a good idea to try to make business deals with the sons of people you’ve killed), a bizarre but addled psycho (named Psycho; why didn’t they name the two guys he was with Victim Number One and Victim Number Two?), and an unattractive man who spends a couple of minutes admiring himself in a mirror before the snakes get him; believe me, William Grefe did know how to make you glad to see someone buy it. There’s also three singer/songwriter ditties to enliven the proceedings. Administer therapy immediately.

The hero wears Stanley the rattler around his neck in most of the scenes. This made me wish for an ending that I knew I wasn’t going to get; after killing off all the bad guys, I wondered if our “hero” was going to meet his own fate when he absent-mindedly tried to tie his tie.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE SPIDER WOMAN (1944)
Article #305 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 1-14-2002
Posting date: 5-31-2002

Sherlock Holmes investigates a series of suicides of known gamblers. He begins by faking his own death to put the culprit off of her guard.

I don’t know how many of the Sherlock Holmes movies will qualify as fantastic cinema; this one gets by because of its use of spiders as a weapon of murder, which places it at least marginally in the horror category. I never got a chance to see many of these as a kid (despite being a strong fan of the original stories), so this is probably the first time in almost thirty years that I’ve had the pleasure of seeing one. They weren’t exactly faithful to the source, but if this movie is any indication, they were a great deal of fun nonetheless. I think a lot of it had to do with the ease that Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce worked together; they made a highly entertaining team, with Watson even beating Holmes to the punch with an observation at one point. Gale Sondergaard plays the villain in this one, and even though he isn’t listed in the credits (he doesn’t have a speaking role), I thought I recognized Angelo Rossitto as the pygmy. This is good, old-fashioned mystery fun.

THE SEA BAT (1930)
Article #304 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 1-13-2002
Posting date: 5-30-2002

The opening lines of this movie set the tone. “Portuga island…through the night, the weird chants of voodoo worship…through the day, the weird industry of sponge fishing…” I don’t know about you, but to me this doesn’t bode well.

So what is this movie about? Well, you learn early on that a sea bat is a really big manta ray, so this means we’re in the same territory as the infamous DEVIL MONSTER; well, it is at least better than that movie. So, is it about sailors facing the perils of the sea bat? It is, for about fifteen minutes. Then the fake preacher shows up and it turns into a variation of Somerset Maugham’s “Rain,” with a romance erupting between the fake preacher (who is actually an escaped convict) and the bitter woman who has turned away from Christian beliefs because her brother was killed by the sea bat while carrying a cross. However, the convict is finding that carrying a Bible around does have an effect on one’s soul…

That should tell you all you need to know. The sea bat footage is actually pretty good, and if you keep your eyes open, you might spot Boris Karloff a couple of times before his character dies (offscreen). The only other name that rang a bell in the cast was Raquel Torres as the sister; she also appeared as the woman tempting Groucho Marx in DUCK SOUP.