TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970)
Article 2797 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-3-2009
Posting Date: 4-10-2009
Directed by Peter Sasdy
Featuring Christopher Lee, Geoffrey Keen, Gwen Watford
Country: UK

Three respectable gentleman, pursuing a secret second life of sensualist decadence, hook up with a libertine who promises them a sensational experience. This involves drinking the reconstituted dried blood of Count Dracula, but the three gentlemen back out at the last moment and kill the libertine after he ingests the blood. The libertine is transformed into Dracula, who vows vengeance on the three gentlemen.

I really like the first half of the movie, despite the fact that I don’t care for Ralph Bates’s performance as the libertine. It’s fascinating in the way it deals with the double nature of the gentlemen, who are respectable (even self-righteous) on the outside but debased on the inside. I also like the novel way it has of resurrecting Dracula. It’s only after the resurrection that the movie loses steam; it loses interest in the themes that drove the first half of the movie, it becomes over-familiar and sloppy, and the ending of the movie is particularly weak. It’s also one of those movies where you understand why Christopher Lee wasn’t particularly fond of the dialogue he was given; quite frankly, he could have conveyed everything without a single word, and the movie would have been better had it omitted his few lines. Overall, it’s not bad, but a stronger second half would have made a world of difference.

TALES THAT WITNESS MADNESS (1973)
Article 2796 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 1-2-2009
Posting Date: 4-9-2009
Directed by Freddie Francis
Featuring Jack Hawkins, Donald Pleasence, Georgia Brown
Country: UK

A director of an asylum presents four of his cases in an attempt to prove his theory.

I have to admit to rather liking this anthology movie, though it may be simply for having a different feel from the Amicus anthologies on which it was obviously modeled. This is not to say that the movie doesn’t have its problems. For one thing, the stories are fairly predictable. You know how the first story is going to end the second you discover the nature of the young boy’s imaginary friend. The third and the fourth stories (about a human-looking tree stump and a promise to a mother) pretty much follow the routes you’d expect. Only the second (about a portrait of a man named Uncle Albert and a bicycle) has the novelty of being unpredictable; unfortunately, it’s not particularly satisfying, as we never get an idea of exactly what Uncle Albert is trying to accomplish. The framing story is curious, and I’m not quite sure exactly what is happening when it winds down at the end of the movie. Yet, in its way, I found the whole thing entertaining enough, and it does have the advantage of not running on too long.

TWINSANITY (1970)
aka Goodbye Gemini
Article 2789 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-26-2008
Posting Date: 4-2-2009
Directed by Alan Gibson
Featuring Judy Geeson, Martin Potter, Michael Redgrave
Country: UK

A pair of twins (one male and one female) live in a world of their own. When they move to London, they become embroiled with a lowlife who attempts to drive a wedge between them. However, he isn’t aware that the twins aren’t quite sane…

Though I’m not sure it can strictly be described as a horror movie, there’s no doubt that the theme of insanity is here very strongly. Furthermore, the central murder in the story is definitely the stuff of horror. Overall, it’s a curious, bizarre, and not quite satisfying movie; it gives us a glimpse of some of the seedier sides of London counterculture, but somehow the characters never quite become engaging. It was based on a novel by Jenni Hall called “Ask Agamemnon”; Agamemnon is the name of the black teddy bear that plays a central role in the games of the twins.

TURKEY SHOOT (1982)
aka Escape 2000
Article 2758 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-25-2008
Posting Date: 3-2-2009
Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith
Featuring Steve Railsback, Olivia Hussey, Michael Craig
Country: Australia

In a totalitarian future, nonconformists are taken to a prison camp for “re-education”. The commander of the camp decides to offer five of the inmates a chance for freedom… if they survive an ordeal in which they are the prey in a hunting expedition.

Let’s see here – we have a dystopian near-future prison camp movie crossed with THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME with obvious one-dimensional characters, a helping of nudity, an incredibly large slice of sadistic violence, and one of those plots that you see mapped out for you within two minutes of the movie starting. If you like bloody violence and hate surprises, this is a movie for you. I was easily able to predict most of the plot developments in this movie, including who would live and who would die; the only mistake I made was in the ending, and that’s only because I failed to take into account that we were no longer in the pessimistic seventies when this was made.

I’ve been quite disappointed in recent years to discover that my local Borders bookstores classify science fiction in the action section. It’s movies like this that are the reason why.

THOSE FANTASTIC FLYING FOOLS (1967)
aka Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon
Article 2721 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-18-2008
Posting Date: 1-24-2009
Directed by Don Sharp
Featuring Burl Ives, Troy Donahue, Gert Frobe
Country: UK

P.T. Barnum attends a lecture on a new explosive and decides to finance the building of a rocket to the moon using the explosive as propulsion. However, he runs into trouble with spies and saboteurs.

At heart, this comic take on Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” is really not very good; the pace is slow (it seems a lot longer than its 95 minute running time), the plot is contrived, and it’s a little short of laughs. But it does have a good cast (which includes Terry-Thomas, Lionel Jeffries and Dennis Price as well as those listed above), and its sense of geniality help make it fairly watchable, and there are some decent laughs in the mix. The best part is the beginning, where we see several scientific endeavors go awry. And, whatever its flaws, it’s a lot more entertaining than the snooze-inducing straight version of the story from the fifties.

TIME TRAVELERS (1976)
TV-Movie
#2696
Viewing Date: 9-18-2008
Posting Date: 12-30-2008
Directed by Alexander Singer
Featuring Sam Groom, Tom Hallick, Francine York
Country: USA

An outbreak of a disease thought extinct but with a high mortality rate causes a doctor to take an opportunity of travelling into the past to find the secrets of the only doctor who had proven successful at combating the disease. The problem is that he arrives in the past only twenty-nine hours before the Great Chicago Fire will destroy the doctor and all of his records, so he must find the solution in that time.

As anyone who follows this series knows, I’m not a fan of Irwin Allen or TV-Movies, but I must admit that I like this one better than I do most of Allen’s other work. Part of the reason I like it is that I like the central concept of trying to solve a medical problem in a limited amount of time; it brings back fond memories of THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN. Not that this movie ever achieves that level; there’s too much stupid dialogue, an unnecessary romantic subplot, unconvincing special effects, occasional bits of overacting, a really bad fake headline, and at least one totally unbelievable moment (if two men materialized out of the future onto a crowded stairway, wouldn’t someone on the stairway notice?). Fortunately, the movie has another great thing about it; Richard Basehart is surprisingly memorable as the doctor from the past who doesn’t really know how he cures his patients. The story was conceived by Irwin Allen and Rod Serling, and I suspect I know which one came up with the plot elements I liked. All in all, I found this one quite watchable.

THE THIEVING HAND (1908)
Article 2692 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-10-2008
Posting Date: 12-26-2008
Directed by J. Stuart Blackton
Featuring Paul Panzer
Country: USA

A one-armed beggar returns a valuable item to a man who dropped it. The man rewards the beggar by buying him a prosthetic arm to replace his missing one. Unfortunately, it turns out that the prosthetic limb has a mind of its own… and is a kleptomaniac.

Don’t you hate it when good deeds bring us to a bad end? One can’t help but feel sorry for the poor beggar in this comedy, who, despite his best efforts, finds himself plagued by his own artificial limb; it even engages in thievery when detached. It may be the first crawling hand movie, as well as being something of a forerunner of the various versions of “The Hands of Orlac”. All in all, this is an amusing and interesting silent short.

THE THREE FACES OF EVE (1957)
Article 2685 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-3-2008
Posting Date: 12-19-2008
Directed by Nunnally Johnson
Featuring Joanne Woodward, David Wayne, Lee J. Cobb
Country: USA

A doctor discovers that a patient of his suffers from multiple personality disorder.

No, it’s not a genre movie; it’s another case where certain horror elements (both mental illness and hypnotism are here) are used in a non-horror environment, and it’s the existence of those elements that lead certain people to include this as a genre item. I actually have a lot of admiration for the movie; it strives to be as realistic as possible, it is anchored by a standout performance by Joanne Woodward, and it chooses to avoid a sensationalistic view of the topic. I also found the movie very interesting and watchable. Its biggest problem is that it was a product of its time (where certain subjects could not be discussed), and to modern eyes, the movie comes across as naive and rather simplistic. Apparently, the book itself had some of these problems and was, in fact, premature; the woman on whom Eve was based turned out to have something on the order of 27 personalities, of which only three or so would be prominent at a time. Furthermore, the traumatic event that was the movie’s cause of the personality split seems highly unlikely; though the event itself may have occurred, I’m sure that it was just one of many events that caused the split, most of which probably couldn’t even be mentioned in a movie from the time. For a much more sophisticated movie on the subject, I recommend SYBIL, and it’s interesting to note that Joanne Woodward also appears in that movie.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW (1974)
TV-Movie
Article 2684 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 9-2-2008
Posting Date: 12-18-2008
Directed by Dan Curtis
Featuring Lynn Redgrave, Jasper Jacob, Eva Griffiths
Country: USA

A governess takes a position teaching two children at a country home. She begins to feel that they have been corrupted and possibly possessed by two former employees (now both deceased) of the home.

Of the various nineteenth century horror classics, I must admit that this is the one whose adaptations I’m most likely to watch only out of grudging duty than out of eagerness. My problem is with the inherent vagueness that permeates the story; though this quality is necessary to maintain that sense of unease and ambiguity that gives the story its depth, it’s also off-putting, somewhat tiresome, not much fun, and manifests itself in adaptations by giving us long scenes in which characters discuss things they either don’t want to discuss or for which they have very little concrete information. In this specific adaptation, we get lots of conversations between the governess and the housekeeper, mostly involving the governess trying to get information out of the housekeeper that she’s reluctant to give, and this gets repetitive. Combine this with the facts that the ghosts do little more than just stand around, much of the story is told via narration, the period dialogue somewhat strains the attention, and maybe you can understand why this is one story I just don’t care to revisit very often. This version of the story is far from awful, but, with THE INNOCENTS out there, it also seems distinctly unnecessary, and Dan Curtis’s direction fails to make this version special in any way. I may have to take a stab at reading the Henry James story; there’s something about the various versions I’ve seen that seems to indicate that there may be something unfilmable about the story.

TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES (1973)
aka Die Zartlichkeit der Wolfe
Article 2678 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 8-27-2008
Posting Date: 12-12-2008
Directed by Ulli Lommel
Featuring Kurt Raab, Jeff Roden, Margit Carstensen
Country: West Germany

A serial killer who preys on young men and boys is loose in Germany. The police begin to suspect that a black marketer they deputized to round up other criminals may be the culprit.

I’m not familiar with the work of Ulli Lommel either as a director or as an actor who had a long association with cult item Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but I’ve gotten the impression that most of his directorial work is pretty weak. If the ratings on IMDB are any indication, this is far and away his best movie, a crime/horror thriller based on the exploits of serial killer Fritz Haarmann (who killed his victims by biting their necks, and then, with the help of his assistant, cut up the bodies and sold them for meat) and modeled somewhat off of Fritz Lang’s M. One can definitely see Lang’s influence on the style of this movie, and Kurt Raab (who gives a strong performance) even looks like Peter Lorre. In terms of violence, the movie is fairly mild, but its emphasis on the gay sexual orientation of the killer is likely to alienate many viewers. Fassbinder has a small role in the film.