Silent Madness (1984)

SILENT MADNESS (1984)
Article 5090 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-25-2016
Directed by Simon Nuchtern
Featuring Belinda Montgomery, Viveca Lindfors, Solly Marx
Country: USA
What it is: Slasher film

A clerical error results in the release of a homicidal maniac from a mental hospital. A female doctor tries to track him down while the rest of the staff institutes a cover-up.

This movie throws in a conspiracy/cover-up subplot to augment the usual slasher set-up, which has the novelty of giving slightly more plot to the mix. Nonetheless, gorehounds will probably find this one rather disappointing; despite a fairly high body count, there is very little blood here (unless it’s to be found in the six minutes of footage that appears to be missing from the print I saw). The movie was apparently filmed in 3D, but some of the effects used to highlight it look pretty pathetic, especially one of a thrown axe that looks singularly unreal. The movie looks shoddy and is rather tacky and sleazy as well. About the only satisfaction that the movie gives is when the killer does away with a couple of characters even slimier than he is. This is not essential viewing.

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Scared to Death (1980)

SCARED TO DEATH (1980)
Articles 5089 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-24-2016
Directed by William Malone
Featuring John Stinson, Diana Davidson, Jonathan David Moses
Country: USA
What it is: Monster movie

Something is killing people in the Los Angeles area. Will an ex-detective help the police in locating whatever it is that’s doing the killing?

I’m going to start out by giving some credit to actor John Stinson; he takes a potentially annoying character with bad dialogue and manages to craft a likable character out of it. However, it doesn’t quite cover up the fact that his scenes during the first half of the movie are so divorced from the main story of the movie that you’re tempted to fast-forward through them. That’s more the fault of the script, though, and that’s the biggest weak point in this very low-budget movie. It’s partially modeled off of ALIEN, though it’s hardly a slavish imitation. Given the fact that the budget was only $74, 000 for this movie, I’m actually a bit impressed with what director Malone pulls off here; it looks more expensive than it is, and the acting is mostly competent enough to compensate for script and pacing deficiencies. Still, there are lots of dead spots, and the pacing drags until the last twenty minutes. It’s certainly no classic, but I’ve seen a lot worse movies with much bigger budgets.

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Luttes extravagantes (1899)

LUTTES EXTRAVAGANTES (1899)
aka An Extraordinary Wrestling Match
Article 5088 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-23-2016
Directed by Georges Melies
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Trick short

Wrestlers show off the latest moves, such as how to turn into someone of the opposite sex and how to tear apart and reassemble an opponent.

This one just recently went on my “ones that got away” list only to show up about a week later. Those who have seen FAT AND LEAN WRESTLING MATCH (also from Melies) will find this one very familiar; that film was a an almost virtual remake of this one, with a second sequence added at the end. At any rate, the film is still rather amusing, and it’s always welcome to find that another of Melies’s films is indeed extant.

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Witchboard (1986)

WITCHBOARD (1986)
Article 5087 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-22-2016
Directed by Kevin Tenney
Featuring Todd Allen, Tawny Kitaen, Stephen Nichols
Country: UK / USA
What it is: Evil ghost possession story

When a woman becomes obsessed with a friend’s Ouija board, she unleashes a malevolent spirit that wishes to possess her.

On the positive side, I really like how this movie cares about its characters enough to develop them; that’s not something that usually happens with horror movies. On the other hand, it has a fondness for cliche phrases (you’ll have a bad feeling about that), annoying secondary characters (like the psychic and the policeman), and really bad false scares (way too many and not well done). Taken in the balance, though, I do have to say I was moderately entertained by this one, though I do find the final confrontation with the evil a tad disappointing. And for someone’s first movie, this is actually pretty good.

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Cannibals (1980)

CANNIBALS (1980)
aka Mondo cannibale, White Cannibal Queen
Article 5086 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-21-2016
Directed by Jesus Franco and Franco Prosperi
Featuring Al Cliver, Sabrina Siani, Jerome Foulon
Country: Spain / Italy / France
What it is: Cannibal film

An explorer escapes from a tribe of cannibals after his wife is devoured and his daughter is kidnapped by the savages. Years later he returns with another expedition to get his daughter back.

According to the trivia section of IMDB, Jesus Franco reportedly hated the cannibal genre and refused to make any more after this, his second foray into it. Certainly the script he penned for this one shows little interest in the way the genre was developing; it’s little more than a double-stuffed safari-o with a “white goddess” plot and paper-thin characters. At least he leaves the animals out of it; there’s no gratuitous animal snuff footage in this one. Still, it’s a pretty tired affair, and it may be one of Franco’s worst. I do find myself wondering, however, if the actual cannibal footage may have been grafted onto the movie after the fact; it looks like it was shot at a different time and in a different style than the rest of the footage, and I notice IMDB credits a second director. Certainly, the awful English-dubbed print I saw makes the movie seem even worse than it may have possibly been originally. Still, I’ll make a couple of observations. One is that it’s pretty weird to hear the natives occasionally breaking into English (though they usually have little more to say than “I’m going to kill you!”, which didn’t need to be said), and I wonder if the original movie had them breaking out into Italian. Secondly, the “white goddess” plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when most of the cannibals are played by white men.

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Welcome to Blood City (1977)

WELCOME TO BLOOD CITY (1977)
Article 5085 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-20-2016
Directed by Peter Sasdy
Featuring Jack Palance, Keir Dullea, Samantha Eggar
Country: UK / Canada
What it is: Not what it seems

Five people find themselves lost in a wilderness without any memory of their past lives and the only identification is a card telling them how many people they’ve murdered. They find themselves in a western town where a persons’ status is dependent on how many people they kill. One of them begins having flashbacks of this previous life…

Jack Palance is an intriguing actor; even in a role that seems tailor-made for him like he has here, he never quite gives the performance you’d suspect, and here he imbues his role with a touch of comic weirdness. For that matter, Keir Dullea also gives a rather odd performance, and I don’t mean these comments as criticisms, because their performances contribute a great deal to the atmosphere of this rather odd movie. All we really know at the beginning of the movie is that there’s something not-quite-right about the western scenario the characters are trapped in, and as the movie progresses, we learn more about the truth of the situation, revelations that push the movie into the dystopian science fiction popular during the seventies. Other aspects of the movie are less interesting; the direction is fairly indifferent, the script has some problems and the ending it a bit too pat. Nevertheless, the movie does make for an offbeat viewing experience.

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Roger Corman: Hollywood’s Wild Angel (1978)

ROGER CORMAN: HOLLYWOOD’S WILD ANGEL (1978)
Article 5084 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-19-2016
Directed by Christian Blackwood
Featuring Allan Arkush, Paul Bartel, David Carradine
Country: UK / USA
What it is: Documentary

This is an appreciation of Roger Corman and his facility for finding and introducing major new talent into Hollywood.

I was posed with a dilemma today; I could either spend forty dollars on an old VHS copy of this hour-long documentary, or I could watch in for free on YouTube with the catch being that the YouTube presentation featured additional voices translating the narration and interviews into Spanish. Hmmm, decisions, decisions….

Well, I just finished watching this documentary with the equivalent of someone yelling Spanish into my ear the whole time, Did this interfere with me fully appreciating the movie? I’d be lying if I didn’t say that, yes, it did interfere. However, I was able to catch some of what was said, and fortunately, when trailers were used, the change to less-intrusive subtitles was less problematic. Still, at only an hour’s length, one wonders just how much depth the movie could have gone into, and I figure I’d probably get a lot more from a good book or article about Corman anyway. The first half of the movie concentrates on his work as a producer during the seventies, and we get interviews from several directors and actors he worked with. Most of the movies in this half are action/exploitation pictures, with HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD and DEATH RACE 2000 being the ones with the most fantastic content; we see clips from both films. The second half features footage from the sixties where he was still primarily working as a director, and we get footage from A BUCKET OF BLOOD, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, THE TOMB OF LIGEIA, THE RAVEN, DEMENTIA 13, THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH and GASSSS! It gives him a chance to highlight some of the discoveries who weren’t interviewed for the film (Jack Nicholson and Francis Ford Coppola in particular). All in all, it looks mildly interesting, but I doubt it would have been worth the forty dollars I would have had to fork out to see it without the Spanish. And, looking over at Amazon.com, I see several books that would not only tell me more, but would much more affordable.

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Warp Speed (1981)

WARP SPEED (1981)
Article 5083 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-18-2016
Directed by Allan Sandler
Featuring David Chandler, Camille Mitchell, Adam West
Country: USA
What it is: Space mystery TV-Movie

When a spaceship bound for Saturn returns home stripped of its equipment and missing its crewmen, a psychic is sent aboard the spaceship to track down the events that happened.

I’ve encountered Allan Sandler before; he’s co-directed/co-produced a few movies with Robert Emenegger, sometimes in concert with Steven Spielberg’s sister Anne and various relatives of Cameron Mitchell (two of which appear in this movie). The movies generally have interesting ideas and concepts, but are otherwise not particularly well done, and sometimes it’s a bit of a close call trying to figure out whether its strengths or flaws dominate. This is one of those where the strengths win out; the acting and direction may be uneven, but I did find the story interesting enough to hold my attention, right up to a bizarre but not-entirely-unexpected twist ending. It’s a little confusing at first, and the cheapness of the production is a little off-putting, but I found it was worth the effort to stick with it. It’s probably the best of the movies I’ve seen from this director and his cohorts.

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A Delusion (1902)

A DELUSION (1902)
Article 5082 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-16-2016
Director unknown
Cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Very short trick film

A photographer becomes frustrated when the beautiful woman he is trying to photograph keeps turning into a rather dumpy man.

Here’s another “one that got away” that finally made itself available to me. This one is less than half a minute long. and usually I don’t expect much from something that short. However, in its own modest way, it’s well acted (I like the photographer’s reactions to the situation) and even has something of what might be called a “plot”. It’s rather amusing as well, at least partially because the “dumpy man” is particularly unappetizing. For its brevity, this one works extremely well.

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Venom (1981)

VENOM (1981)
Article 5081 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 2-15-2016
Directed by Piers Haggard
Featuring Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed, Nicol Williamson
Country: UK
What it is: Crime thriller with a touch of horror

A trio of criminals plans to kidnap a boy for ransom, but the plan goes awry when the boy (who collects exotic pets) is inadvertently given a deadly poisonous black mamba snake.

For the most part, this is a crime thriller, and plays out like one. The sole horror element is the presence of the black mamba, which brings it into the “scary animals” horror category. Actually, the presence of the snake is the most problematic element here from a story perspective; its very existence has the air of being a deus ex machina in the making, and this somewhat short-circuits the suspense of the basic situation. Nonetheless, I rather enjoyed the movie, thanks in part to some familiar faces (Klaus Kinski and Oliver Reed in their only film together, Sterling Hayden and a cameo from Michael Gough). From reading the trivia on IMDB, this movie had a very troubled production; Piers Haggard was pulled in as a replacement for Tobe Hooper, and Reed and KInski didn’t get along at all; Haggard was quoted as saying that the snake was the nicest person on the set. Incidentally, the character played by Michael Gough was based on a real-life reptile expert from the London Zoo who helped with the production. Incidentally, the movie sets itself up for a sequel that never happened.

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