Some Call it Loving (1973)

SOME CALL IT LOVING (1973)
aka Sleeping Beauty
Article 5120 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-28-2016
Directed by James B. Harris
Featuring Zalman King, Carol White, Tisa Farrow
Country: USA
What it is: Modern re-imagining of a fairy tale

A jazz musician purchases a “sleeping beauty” act (with an authentic sleeping beauty) from a carnival. He awakens her, but as a result, finds himself taken on an unexpected emotional journey.

According to IMDB, this movie was a sensation in Europe, but died a quick death in the U.S. due to poor critical reception and poor distribution. And, truth to tell, it is an art film and not one that easily gives up its secrets. The reviews on IMDB do seem to indicate that the movie is often disliked and dismissed, and the small number of them also indicates that few people have really seen it. Me, I have to admit to being entranced and fascinated by it; though it often made me think of other movies I’ve seen (both NIGHT TIDE and LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD come to mind), it carves out a special niche for itself. I think the main theme of the movie may be the concept of control; the main character longs both for control and loss of control, but the latter is also something he fears. Once I realized this, the existence of Richard Pryor’s character here as the musician’s best friend who appears to be an addled junkie, while initially seeming out of place, actually makes a great deal of sense; his total lack of control makes him the perfect alter ego to the musician. I ended up being quite moved by the movie, but I can also fully understand those who might be put off by it. Incidentally, the fantastic content is the “fairy dust” that surrounds the “sleeping beauty” concept, but, in its own way, the movie does feel like a fantasy.

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Massive Retaliation (1984)

MASSIVE RETALIATION (1984)
Article 5119 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-27-2016
Directed by Thomas A. Cohen
Featuring Tom Bower, Karlene Crockett, Peter Donat
Country: USA
What it is: Nuclear war survivalist drama

When international tensions turn into a shooting war, three families fearing nuclear holocaust hole up in a cabin in the woods in the hope of surviving. However, things do not go smoothly, especially when it is discovered that their children have all been stranded far from the cabin…

This movie is something of a cross between PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! and DAY THE WORLD ENDED, only with less overt exploitation elements. I admire what it’s trying to do, but it’s not quite successful. I do like the basic premise, and I find the story surrounding the story (which is to say, the reports of the war itself and the ways various people react to the news) to be very interesting. It’s when the movie focuses on the central characters that I have problems; much of the dialogue is clunky, it occasionally descends into soap opera, and there are moments where the movie hits some really false notes. In particular, the character of the dictatorial doctor who is the head of the survivalists starts to come across as a caricature rather than a real person. On the other hand, I did like the subplot involving a seventeen-year-old boy’s mini-odyssey in his quest for a water pump for the van, a story that manages to be both comic and tense. This one could have been a lot better.

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Tiger Claws (1991)

TIGER CLAWS (1991)
Article 5118 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-26-2016
Directed by Kelly Makin
Featuring Cynthia Rothrock, Jalal Merhi, Bolo Yeung
Country: Canada / USA
What it is: Martial arts action flick

A female cop who wants to prove she can handle a big case teams up with a rebel cop who tends to things his own way in order to catch a serial killer who specializes in martial arts masters.

Well, I will say this; a serial killer who specializes in martial arts masters isn’t doing it the easy way. Still, that’s the sole fantastic element in the movie, and since it doesn’t play up the horror aspect of that idea at all, this movie remains really marginal. The two leads are appealing and some of the action sequences are decent, but that’s about it for the positives. The script is a compendium of cliches and the acting varies from acceptable to pretty bad. The musical soundtrack is a bit unusual for this kind of fare, but it’s not annoying or intrusive, so that’s a plus. For what it is, it’s passable but not remarkable fare.

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Cold Sweat (1993)

COLD SWEAT (1993)
Article 5117 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-25-2016
Directed by Gail Harvey
Featuring Ben Cross, Adam Baldwin, Shannon Tweed
Country: Canada
What it is: Erotic thriller

A frustrated businessman hires a hit man to knock off a business associate that is having an affair with his wife. Things go awry.

I tend to look askance at any movie classified as an “erotic thriller”; for every one of them that does something interesting with the concept (THE FOURTH MAN, for example), there are about ten others which are little more than variations of “I slept with a psycho” or ordinary thrillers with a lot of sex slathered on. This is one of the latter; it’s mostly “love triangle” type of thriller with an extra point, as the wife of the businessman is messing around with TWO other men rather than just one. One interesting touch is that the businessman is played by comic actor Dave Thomas from SCTV, and if he doesn’t quite succeed in the role of the movie as it is, it does give me a hint of as to how this movie would have worked better, and that is if it had fully gone the distance and become an out-and-out comedy. The plot is so ridiculous that it’s halfway there already. This brings us to the weirdest plot element and the one that provides the fantastic content; the hit man is haunted by the ghost of a female victim who became an inadvertent witness to his last hit. This serves as only a subplot to the main story line, and I myself would have rather seen the movie in which this was the main plot element. However, that plot wouldn’t have had all the gratuitous sex of the one the movie chose, so it wouldn’t have been an “erotic thriller”. After all, I’m sure the makers of the movie knew what they wanted.

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45 Minutes from Hollywood (1926)

45 MINUTES FROM HOLLYWOOD (1926)
Article 5116 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-24-2016
Directed by Fred Guiol
Featuring Glenn Tryon, Charlotte Mineau, Jack Rube Clifford
Country: USA
What it is: Slapstick comedy

A young man goes to Hollywood to pay off a mortgage, but he is robbed when he ends up running into a bank robber dressed as a woman.

Let’s get the fantastic content out of the way first. After having seen this short, I had to go back to the Don Willis book to see what the fantastic content was supposed to have been, and it was supposed to have featured dinosaurs at some point. If it does, it’s in a sequence that is missing from the print I saw. The only point where I think it might have occurred is during a tour of Hollywood in which we see footage of some famous Hollywood personalities, such as Theda Bara and the Our Gang kids. If my print is complete, than this is a false alarm.

As for the short itself, it’s probably most famous as an early pairing of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, though not as a team. Stan Laurel plays a starving actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to James Finlayson, while Hardy plays a hotel detective. As far as I can tell, they don’t appear in any scenes together. Most of the comic antics involve Glenn Tryon, and they’re not particularly good; Ollie gives the most memorable performance here, and it’s a supporting role. I have to admit to having been disappointed with this one, but I went into it expecting a typical pairing of Laurel and Hardy, and that’s not what I got.

NOTE I have since discovered that my print was indeed missing footage. However, the dinosaur is so fleeting and distant, you’ll be lucky if you find it.

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The Fatal Hour (1940)

THE FATAL HOUR (1940)
Article 5115 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-23-2016
Directed by William Nigh
Featuring Boris Karloff, Marjorie Reynolds, Grant Withers
Country: USA
What it is: Mystery

Mr. Wong helps Captain Street investigate the murder of a fellow cop who was investigating a smuggling racket.

I have a copy of this movie in a fifty-movie megapack from Treeline called “Horror Classics”, but it doesn’t belong; it’s clearly a mystery, and never even nudges into horror. It does nudge into science fiction, however; one of the murders involves a “radio remote”, which can work from 200 feet away from the radio, and I suspect this was beyond the technology of the time. The use of this gimmick is certainly the most novel thing about this movie; the rest of it is a poorly written compendium of cliches and sometimes embarrassingly bad dialogue. Karloff does what he can with what he is given to work with, but far too much time is spent on the byplay between Grant Withers’ cranky cop and the intrusive female reporter played by Marjorie Reynolds. I’ve only seen one other movie in the Mr. Wong series for these reviews, and that one was superior to this one.

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The Ghost Dance (1980)

THE GHOST DANCE (1980)
Article 5114 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-20-2016
Directed by Peter F. Buffa
Featuring Julie Amato, Victor Mohica, Henry Bal
Country: USA
What it is: Historic evil (meaning it’s not quite ancient)

When an archaeological dig on an Indian reservation finds a body, evil is unleashed and people begin to die.

Let’s face it – at heart this is a “mummy’s curse” type of movie, only with Native American legends standing in for Ancient Egyptian ones; the basic modus operandi is the same. I admired the first few minutes in that they were effective at setting a mood without a word being said. However, it’s followed with one of those night sequences which are so dark that it’s nearly impossible to make out what’s going on. Then the characters start talking, and you notice the acting isn’t really up to scratch, and a rather tired hangdog air takes over the proceedings. The movie then plods through the usual paces, though there is a creepy moment or two in the mix. All in all, the movie comes across as tired and over-familiar. The oddest thing to me, though, was to realize that they body they dug up was from the 1890s, which seems an entirely too recent period of history for archaeological exploration.

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Journey to the Unknown (1969)

JOURNEY TO THE UNKNOWN (1969)
Article 5113 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-19-2016
Directed by Don Chaffey and Michael Lindsay-Hogg
Featuring Joan Crawford, Vera Miles, Patty Duke
Country: UK / USA
What it is: Movie cobbled together from episodes of a TV series

Joan Crawford hosts two stories of endangered women. In the first, a mystery writer finds herself trapped in a library and transported into the past where a serial killer murdered a librarian. In the second, a woman trying to get rest at a seaside hotel finds herself threatened by a mysterious bespectacled figure.

This TV-Movie is cobbled together from two episodes of a British TV series produced by Hammer called “Journey to the Unknown”. The two episodes chosen were “Makahitas is Coming” and “The Last Visitor”. Based on the IMDB ratings, these were two of the highest rated episodes of the series, and they’re both quite good; the “Makahitas” episode (in the library) is particularly striking . As individual episodes, they receive an 8.3 and an 8.0 rating respectively. Yet, oddly enough, this movie is sitting on IMDB with an embarrassingly low 2.7 rating. Why? I don’t know. I doubt it’s the new footage of Joan Crawford introducing the episodes; the sequences are a bit on the awkward side, but they’re too brief to significantly impact the movie as a whole. It’s almost as if a group of people came in and gave the movie the lowest rating a propos of nothing. Yes, it should lose a few points for not really being a “movie”, but it actually works better than some other examples of this sort of thing I’ve found. As it is, it does make me curious about the series as a whole. I quite liked this one.

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The Black Rider (1954)

THE BLACK RIDER (1954)
Article 5112 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-18-2016
Directed by Wolf Rilla
Featuring Jimmy Hanley, Rona Anderson, Leslie Dwyer
Country: UK
What it is: Spy thriller

A reporter romances his girlfriend, tries to solve the mystery of the mysterious black rider, and tools around on his motorcycle.

The fantastic content? Legend has it that the black rider (who is supposed to be riding a horse) is the devil himself. We, the audience, know from square one that it’s just a smuggler tooling around on a motorcycle, and though the method of locomotion is supposedly equipped with a silencer to make it sound like hoofbeats, it never sounds like anything else but a motorcycle to these ears. There may be a tinge of science fiction in the fact that the smuggling involves a new type of atomic device that’s small enough that its parts can be easily smuggled, but that about covers the fantastic content. It’s really just a routine spy thriller with an inordinate amount of screen time dedicated to various British men tooling around on motorcycles; the story itself practically takes a back seat to all that. It’s competently mounted and efficient, but there’s really not much to this one. And it is pretty depressing in terms of fantastic content that even the historical evidence for the black rider cited in the movie reveals that he was really just a smuggler.

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200 Motels (1971)

200 MOTELS (1971)
Article 5111 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-17-2016
Directed by Tony Palmer and Frank Zappa
Featuring Mark Volman, Howard Kaylan, Ian Underwood
Country: USA
What it is: Frank Zappa’s idea of a concert film…maybe

The members of a rock group on tour in the fake town of Centerville worry about getting beer, getting paid and getting laid.

The best way I think of to prepare yourself for this movie is simple; just listen to some of Frank Zappa’s music when he was head of The Mothers of Invention. This movie is the visual equivalent of the jagged, bizarre montage music of the band, and on that level, nothing in the movie really surprises me; it was as freakishly non-linear and visually trippy as I thought it would be. I suspect that one’s reaction to it will be somewhat equivalent to one’s reaction to Zappa’s music in the first place. I admire Zappa quite a bit; he’s very true to his distinct musical vision, and he hovered in a strange area between classical, jazz, rock and experimental music that no one else inhabited. Still, I mostly enjoy his work in smaller doses; this movie is a bit much to take in one sitting. The movie is supposedly about how touring can make you crazy, and its non-realistic approach is its primary fantastic content, though any movie that features a man playing a vacuum cleaner is in a world all its own. Zappa wanted a number of famous people for the movie (including Christopher Lee, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Pete Townshend, John Lennon and others), and he did manage to get a few names in the cast; Theodore Bikel comes the closest to actually playing a coherent role of sorts, Keith Moon plays a hot nun, and Ringo Starr plays Larry the Dwarf who plays Frank Zappa. Zappa himself appears, but has no dialogue and is mostly seen either playing instruments or conducting the orchestra. The movie is full of bizarre visual tricks, montage effects, and even has an animated Dental Hygiene film in the middle. There’s no plot.

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