Oasis of the Zombies (1982)

OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES (1982)
aka La tumba de los muertos vivientes, Grave of the Living Dead
Article 4990 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-16-2015
Directed by Jesus Franco
Featuring Manuel Gelin, Eduardo Fajardo, France Lomay
Country: France / Spain
What it is: Zombie movie

A company of Nazis with a shipment of gold is slaughtered in an oasis. Visitors find themselves attacked by the zombies of these men.

Franco has his defenders, and even I will admit that he is capable of good work on occasion. But even his defenders don’t seem to have much good to say about this one, and I certainly don’t see much treasure to be found here, either. I did get to the point where I felt the best way to appreciate the movie was to try to enjoy discrete visual moments that show a little evocative poetry. But that was only after I realized that nothing interesting was going to happen in the story, none of the characters were memorable, there was no quotable dialogue (except for the line about about the zombies coming out of “the sand which is there” which amused me because it could be heard as “the sandwiches there”), and the same musical motifs, though effective when used sparingly, would drone on and on until you were sick of them. I got really tired of Franco’s style here; he relies so much on close-ups of everything and everybody that it’s impossible to get any sense of the physical location of anything; it’s really hard to work up any suspense during a zombie attack when you don’t where the victims are in relation to the zombies. You shouldn’t come out of a horror movie feeling not much of anything, but that’s the case here. It’s Franco at his worst.

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The Giant Spider Invasion (1975)

THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION (1975)
Article 4989 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-15-2015
Directed by Bill Rebane
Featuring Steve Brodie, Barbara Hale, Robert Easton
Country: USA
What it is: The bigger they are, the goofier they look

A small Wisconsin town is overrun with giant spiders when a black hole lands from space.

This is the best Bill Rebane movie I’ve seen so far. Of course, you have to bear in mind that when I say that, I only mean that it’s more engaging than the bottomless pit of nothingness that is MONSTER A-GO GO (and it’s hard to find something that isn’t) and more entertaining than the dreary THE ALPHA INCIDENT. Make no mistake – this movie is bad, but at least you can get some laughs out of it. The unconvincing spider effects are already the stuff of legend (with Volkswagens used for some of the spiders’ bodies), and the real spiders used in the movie only make the giant ones look more fake. Still, for my money, the worst special effect is the black hole itself (which looks like and probably was a big pile of dirt). The dual-personality script jumps back and forth between serious and comic, due to the fact that two different writers worked on it; still, the attempted laughs fall flat while the real laughs are in the effects. Still, I can’t help but admire the ambition shown here when you consider the budget was only $300,000. And I will credit the movie with having one good well-timed scare when you’re thinking the scare will come from one place but it comes from another; the only reason it doesn’t work is because the special effects once again aren’t up to snuff.

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Naked Girl Killed in Park (1972)

NAKED GIRL KILLED IN PARK (1972)
aka Ragazza tutta nuda assassinata nel parco, That Cursed House Close to the Mushroom Bed
Article 4988 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-14-2015
Directed by Alfonso Brescia
Featuring Robert Hoffmann, Irina Demick, Pilar Velazquez
Country: Italy / Spain
What it is: Giallo

When a man who recently had taken out a million dollar insurance policy is found dead in the car of a “House of Horrors” ride with a bagful of money, an insurance investigator is sent out to find the truth of the matter.

My source for this movie lists it under the title THAT CURSED HOUSE CLOSE TO THE MUSHROOM BED; I found no match to that title on IMDB. However, doing some extra research on the directing and acting credits, I was able to ascertain that this was the movie, which has the much more exploitable title under which I found it. Though giallos are often considered part of the horror genre, they’re a bit closer to mysteries for the most part; however, there is a plot point in this one where we’re led to think a man may have returned from the dead. As for the movie itself… well, maybe it’s because the copy I found was pan-and-scanned, had bad color (I’ve never seen so many people with green hair in all my life), and rotten sound. Maybe it’s because the dubbing often doesn’t match the lips of the speakers. Maybe it’s because the movie takes forever to get going, and when it finally starts moving, it isn’t even particularly engaging then. Maybe it’s because the jerky, jittery camerawork makes the viewing of the movie an annoying experience. Maybe it’s one thing or another, but whatever the culprit is, I found this one to be not engaging at all; it was one of those movies that swiftly brought me to the point where I simply didn’t care what was going on. It can’t even fall back on the stylistic flourishes usually found in the form, because they aren’t here. It’s one of those cases where the title is a lot more entertaining than the film itself.

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Mirage (1965)

MIRAGE (1965)
Mirage (1965)
Article 4987 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-13-2015
Directed by Edward Dmytryk
Featuring Gregory Peck, Diane Baker, Walter Matthau
Country: USA
What it is: Mystery thriller

A man is disoriented when he finds himself in a skyscraper with the electricity off from which another man has fallen to his death. People he knows claim to have not seen him in a long time, and he finds himself threatened by someone known as the Major. Is he crazy? Is he the target of strange conspiracy?

This is one type of movie that I love; it starts eerily with an intriguing mystery that keeps getting deeper, and the main character must unravel the mystery to save his own life. This is a good one; because you don’t know any of the details or the rules of the situation in which he is immersed, you become as interested as he is finding out just what is going on. It’s also one of those movies where you end up trying to sort out the fantastic content; does it qualify because his situation adds a thick air of unreality to the situation, or will some element of the film clearly emerge as that content? As it so happens, a clear element does emerge in the film. Ultimately, the story involves an amazing scientific discovery, but since the discovery is used primarily as a Gizmo Maguffin, the movie remains marginal from a genre perspective. What is interesting is that it’s not the primary Maguffin of the main story, but rather, it’s the Maguffin of the story behind the story. I won’t go into any more detail than this, and I’ve been purposefully vague about a lot of this simply because this is one of those movies that is best appreciated if you go into it blind. That being said, it is an exciting and gripping movie, with excellent performances from all (especially from Matthau). This one is highly recommended.

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Full Moon High (1981)

FULL MOON HIGH (1981)
Article 4986 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-12-2015
Directed by Larry Cohen
Featuring Adam Arkin, Roz Kelly, Ed McMahon
Country: USA
What it is: Werewolf comedy

When a high school football player contracts lycanthropy on a trip to Romania, he drops out of school and travels around the world right before the big game. Twenty years later he returns and goes back to school, hoping to break the curse by making a touchdown in the big game.

Larry Cohen is a very interesting writer and director, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he has a flair for comedy. I will admit there are some fun lines and entertaining moments in this werewolf comedy, and the movie actually starts strongly enough that I thought I was going to enjoy this one. Alas, when it doesn’t work (which sadly is most of the time), it feels forced and awkward, and occasionally even desperate. I gather that Cohen was also intending to make some observations about how times and people change, and I can see some attempts being made in that direction, but the movie is a little too silly to make it stick and it gets lost. It’s also rather disappointing that the werewolf makeup is extremely lame. For me, the best thing about the movie was a surprise appearance by Adam Arkin’s father Alan as a psychiatrist that treats his patients by insulting them; he’s the only thing in the movie that is consistently funny. The movie may also have the single weirdest variation I’ve seen on the shower attack scene from PSYCHO, and though it feels out of place, it’s far from the only thing in the movie that does. All in all, I thought this one was a bit of a mess.

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Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984)
Article 4985 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-11-2015
Directed by Joseph Zito
Featuring Erich Anderson, Judie Aronson, Peter Barton
Country: USA
What it is: Story problem illustrating subtraction

Teens…Crystal Lake… Jason… fewer teens… still fewer teens…

From the user comments on IMDB, I gather that fans of the series consider this one one of the better sequels. Maybe it is; not being a fan of the series, I don’t find a real appreciable difference to set this one apart from the others. The killings come pretty much at the points I suspect they will, and the methods of dispatch aren’t noticeably more clever than the ones before. In fact, I’d have to say the only surprises here are the surprises that you’d expect, which is to say they really aren’t surprises. There’s a couple of names in the cast who have become familiar enough (Crispin Glover and Corey Feldman), and I suppose that adds a hair of novelty. I will give the movie credit on one point, though; Jason’s fate here is one of the more memorable moments of the series. Still, the movie pretty much follows the formula I’ve come to expect. Oh, and the title is a lie, but everyone already knows that.

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Destination Moonbase-Alpha (1978)

DESTINATION MOONBASE-ALPHA (1978)
Article 4984 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-10-2015
Directed by Tom Clegg
Featuring Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Catherine Schell
Country: UK
What it is: TV-Movie of two episodes of “Space 1999”

Moonbase Alpha is visited by a spaceship from Earth, which has developed faster-than-light travel and is offering to take them all back home. However, all is not what it seems, and Commander Koenig is the only one who sees the truth about the visitors…

Yes, it’s another TV-Movie edited from two episodes of a TV series, but at least the two episodes in this case are of a two-part story, so it’s not plagued with the lack of focus that often happens when they try this sort of thing. The episodes are “The Bringers of Wonder”, part one and two. The two episodes are from towards the end of the second season, so it doesn’t suffer near as much from the stodginess that plagued its first season. Still, I’m not impressed with the writing in these episodes; some of the exchanges of dialogue are embarrassingly awkward, some of the behavior of the characters doesn’t make any sense, and it’s become pretty obvious by this point that the character of Maya the Metamorph (who only came on board during the second season) had become an all purpose plot convenience. The opening crawl kicks the action about 100 years down the line to the year 2100; probably somebody figured out that the technology seemed too advanced for 1999. The copy I found was on YouTube, but it’s a little suspect; it runs for two hours and thirty minutes and looks like it has another episode tagged on (which I didn’t watch, as all my references only mention the two episodes I did watch), and I suspect that I may not be watching the movie version, but the opening credits attached to the two episodes. At any rate, it’s not a very impressive affair, and though the second season seems to have addressed some of the problems with the first season, it still comes across as pretty weak.

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Firefox (1982)

FIREFOX (1982)
Article 4983 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-9-2015
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Featuring Clint Eastwood, Freddie Jones, David Huffman
Country: USA
What it is: Spy thriller

When the U.S.S.R. develops a powerful new military aircraft, American intelligence recruits a veteran pilot from Vietnam to take part in a mission to steal the aircraft and bring it to American.

For some reason, I always thought this was an odd choice for Clint Eastwood; a high-tech special effects thriller just didn’t strike me as the sort of thing he’d be interested in. Having seen it now, it strikes me that the movie feels like two different movies. The first two thirds is a serious (as in non-James Bond style) spy thriller that gains its depth by having Eastwood’s character trying to come to terms with the extent to which is associates are willing to risk their own or other’s lives in the pursuit of their mission. It’s only the final third of the movie that it turns into the high-tech special effects thriller I had been expecting. This section almost feels like a lift out of STAR WARS, and though I don’t necessarily mean that disparagingly, it seems to lose its human touch in the face of all the special effects pyrotechnics. Maybe that’s why I don’t emerge from the movie quite satisfied with it all; the two sections of the movie don’t fit well together, and it’s lengthy running time (two hours and sixteen minutes) starts to wear on me as well. Reportedly, the movie was popular, but Eastwood has done much more interesting things.

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Deadly Lessons (1983)

DEADLY LESSONS (1983)
Article 4982 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-8-2015
Directed by William Wiard
Featuring Donna Reed, Larry Wilcox, David Ackroyd
Country: USA
What it is: TV-Movie Mystery thriller

A serial killer is knocking off girls at an exclusive school. Is it the school’s headmistress? The new student? Someone else on the staff? One of the other girls?

The presence of a serial killer is the horror element here, but despite that, this one doesn’t quite make the leap into horror territory. That’s because it doesn’t use the serial killer like a horror creation; there are hardly any stalking scenes, the murders take place off the screen, and in some cases you don’t even get a chance to see the dead body. In fact, it’s treated more as a mystery; the movie spends a lot of its running time on the police investigation or the attempts of the girls to figure out the killer’s identity. As a mystery, it’s not too bad; trying to figure whodunit is fun, and the characters actually become a bit more likable as the story continues, but that last phenomenon may be due to the fact that it’s the unpleasant characters that get knocked off. I rather liked the film, but that’s because I warmed to its mystery approach; those expecting a full-blown horror movie will be bored quickly by this one.

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Deadly Intruder (1988)

DEADLY INTRUDER (1988)
Article 4981 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-7-2015
Directed by John McCauley
Featuring Chris Holder, Molly Cheek, Tony Crupi
Country: USA
What it is: Psycho killer on the loose

A serial killer is on the loose. Will a woman living alone in a country house be safe?

To its credit, this movie has one real surprise up its sleeve, and it plays it well; though I was able to guess half of it, the other half caught me off guard. The question is: how many people are going to make it far enough into the movie to reach the surprise? Up to that point, the movie had done such a good job of convincing me that nothing new or interesting was going to happen that if I weren’t dedicated to sitting through all of these movies, I might well have given up on this one after the first thirty minutes or so. For that matter, the movie doesn’t do much else that is interesting after the surprise, either. Other than that, the only other interesting thing about the movie is that it features one-time child star Danny Bonaduce in the cast. It’s mostly just a tired serial-killer movie of which there are better examples out there.

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