Vanishing Lady (1898)

VANISHING LADY (1898)
Article 4940 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-26-2015
Directed by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith
Featuring Albert E. Smith
Country: USA
What it is: Early trick short

A magician makes a lady vanish.

The above plot description captures what I saw in its entirety; it’s like a shorter and less interesting version of Melies’s movie of almost the exact same name (THE VANISHING LADY) from two years previously. I found it on YouTube in a set of short silents edited together, but it clearly says that the Edison movie VANISHING LADY is among them. Still, it’s always a little difficult to tell if you’ve actually netted the correct version of a movie. Just a few weeks ago, I was hunting for a movie titled THE VANISHING LADY from 1897 from the U.K. which was a attributed to Robert W. Paul. I found a site on YouTube that claimed that it was that movie, but it was actually Melies’s PYGMALION AND GALATHEA. If there’s not much to say about today’s movie, I just wanted to take this time to note how tricky and confusing it can be sometimes to know if you’ve located the right one. I do know this one is not the Melies version, so I’m going on trust that this is indeed the Edison version.

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The Brood (1979)

THE BROOD (1979)
Article 4939 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-26-2015
Directed by David Cronenberg
Featuring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle
Country: Canada
What it is: Cronenberg horror movie

A man’s wife is being held in therapeutic isolation by a doctor who practices a technique known as psychoplasmics, in which patients manifest their anger as growths on their bodies. When the husband begins to fear for the safety of his child, relatives of the couple begin dying at the hands of murderous deformed dwarfs.

I saw this one many years ago on one of those commercial cable channels, which is rather ridiculous in retrospect; Cronenberg’s imagery is both so grotesque and so essential to the essence of the story that to watch a censored version of one of his movies is pointless. I haven’t seen all of Cronenberg’s genre works yet, but with the exception of THE DEAD ZONE, this is the best of the ones I’ve seen so far. The story is certainly more focused than the ones I found in RABID or SCANNERS. It’s intense, well-acted, and on top of the Cronenberg’s usual theme of the ways our bodies can turn on us, it deals with divorce, rage and the cycles of abuse that pass from generation to generation. It’s disturbing, powerful and sad as well, and is definitely not for children. This is one I recommend, but I usually do so with Cronenberg.

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Il tunnel sotto il mondo (1969)

IL TUNNEL SOTTO IL MONDO (1969)
aka Tunnel Under the World
Article 4938 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-25-2015
Directed by Luigi Cozzi
Featuring Alberto Moro, Bruno Salviero, Anna Mantovani
Country: Italy
What it is: Art film science fiction

A man finds himself living the same day three days in a row and finds the world oddly changed.

I was a little bit surprised to see a well-known science fiction author credited as the source of the original story of this one, and I wondered if the story was as strange and fractured as this movie was. A quick check at Wikipedia gave me the impression that Frederik Pohl’s original story was more or less coherent, and therefore the arty disconnected feel of the movie was more the result of director Luigi Cozzi than a part of the original story. This in itself was a surprise; I was familiar with Cozzi from such movies as STARCRASH and CONTAMINATION, and those movies are light-years away from the art-film approach of this movie. From what I can tell, the script takes key scenes from the story and presents them in a disconnected, hard-to-follow fashion; plot points and clear revelations are hidden if they’re there at all. Actually, I found myself considering the similarity of this movie to those old silent shorts that would take well-known novels and fairy tales and present selected scenes as tableaux, only I’m not sure if all of the scenes in this movie have any relation to the story. Certain individual moments of the movie work well enough; I particularly liked the opening sequences which loop back to the same events only with minor variations, and a scene involving a man having a conversation with a computer that is trying to learn about God. Most of the rest of the movie was baffling; though I can see how some of the scenes fit in with the plot description I read of the original story, others just left me scratching my head, such as the scenes involving a couple of murderous men in Santa suits. As with other movies of this sort, my evaluation is based more on feel than what I was able to understand, and at this point it appears to be a very mixed bag to me. However, it did intrigue me more than Cozzi’s other movies have.

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Born in Flames (1983)

BORN IN FLAMES (1983)
Article 4937 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-24-2015
Directed by Lizzie Borden
Featuring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield
Country: USA
What it is: Independent feminist tract

In the future, ten years after a peaceful socialist revolution in the United States, a group of women form an underground organization to battle the injustices of the political system. They try to work peacefully, but when one of their number is arrested and dies in prison, they decide to change their peaceful strategy.

This is one of those independently made art films which, to these eyes, functions primarily as a call to arms for radical feminists. On the surface, it appears to be a science fiction movie, but there’s nothing that appears remotely futuristic in the movie, and I don’t see any ways in which this society works that is inherently different from how it worked at the time. Granted, the movie’s fractured, jagged presentation (though the movie is not presented as a documentary, it’s filmed in the style of one) makes it often difficult to tell what’s going on, and since most of the movie focuses on the members of the underground, we don’t get much in the way of detail of this future world. I suspect the science fiction aspect of the movie only exists so the movie can make the point that a “peaceful” revolution will solve nothing. Some of the music in the movie is not bad, but unfortunately, the title song (which plays at least four times during the movie) is rather screechy and unpleasant. Most of the movie seems to consist of revolutionary rhetoric, and this gets old if you’re not a revolutionary. I suspect the movie would best be appreciated by radical feminists; the rest of us might be hard pressed to find something to like about it.

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Body Double (1984)

BODY DOUBLE (1984)
Article 4936 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-23-2015
Directed by Brian De Palma
Featuring Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry
Country: USA
What it is: Hitchcockian thriller

A claustrophobic actor becomes a peeping tom when he takes over house-sitting an avant-garde home. He begins the suspect that the woman he is watching is being followed by an ugly Indian with ill intentions.

Yesterday, I watched an extremely low-budget director try to do a copy of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Somehow it’s fitting that today I deal with a big-budget director who almost made a career of trying to emulate Hitchcock. This movie is Brian De Palma’s attempt to redo VERTIGO with touches of REAR WINDOW and with lots of nudity and sex thrown into the mix. Generally, I prefer De Palma when he’s not wearing his love for Hitchcock so blatantly on his sleeve; if you’re familiar with VERTIGO, you’ve got a handle on about ninety percent of the plot of this one. The thing is that De Palma didn’t really need to imitate Hitchcock this much; he could be very memorable in his own way when staging some of his scenes, and at least three sequences in this movie stuck with me for years from the first time I saw the movie. Still, my original viewing did leave something of a negative impression on me; I never cared much for the characters, I found the plot pretty far-fetched, and I found its descent into the porn industry during the final third to be rather unpleasant. I’m a bit more forgiving of much of this on this, my second viewing, but I noticed another problem; there is a lot of dead space in between the big, memorable scenes, and I do think that at least twenty minutes could be pruned from the running time if the movie just picked up the pace. Genre-wise, this is mostly a mystery thriller, but horror pops up in the story in two ways; the opening and closing scenes involve the filming of a horror movie, and the murder that is the centerpiece of the movie is truly horrific. All in all, I liked the movie a little better on this second viewing, but I do think it’s far from De Palma’s best work.

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Three on a Meathook (1973)

THREE ON A MEATHOOK (1973)
Article 4935 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-22-2015
Directed by William Girdler
Featuring Charles Kissinger, James Carroll Pickett, Sherry Steiner
Country: USA
What it is: Serial killer concoction

A young man living on a farm has been told by his father that he is responsible for several killings of women, though he has no memory of it. What is the truth behind it all?

Like PSYCHO, DERANGED and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, this is another cinematic stab at the Ed Gein story. I found this one on YouTube, and the copy I saw looked like a transfer from VHS that’s a little ways down the dupe line, and oddly enough, this made the viewing experience seem to be a little more effective; somehow, I think a pristine copy would have made the flaws more blatant. It’s not that the flaws aren’t already fairly apparent; most of the movie lifts its structure from PSYCHO (this is especially noticeable towards the end of the movie), and when it doesn’t lift from PSYCHO, it putters around without an idea of where to go. Two things that feel really out of place in a horror movie are to give its character an inspirational theme song and to have scenes of typical early-seventies “romantic frolicking through the fields”. Still, the movie does have a couple of surprises up its sleeve, which is more than I expected from it. It’s the weakest of the Ed Gein movies I’ve seen to date, but when you consider its competition, that’s not as damning a statement as it might seem. And I will have to give credit to actor James Carroll Pickett; he does manage to make you care about his character.

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Three Orphan Kittens (1935)

THREE ORPHAN KITTENS (1935)
Article 4934 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-21-2015
Directed by David Hand
Featuring the voice of Lillian Randolph
Country: USA
What it is: Disney Silly Symphony

Three kittens, abandoned in a snowstorm, take refuge through an open window into a house, and interact with the environment there.

Let’s take care of the fantastic content first. By dint of its use of talking and/or anthropomorphic animals, the vast majority of cartoons qualify for fantastic content on those grounds alone. This is one of the exceptions; the three kittens who are the main characters of this cartoon act like real kittens rather than anthropomorphized versions of them. Of course, that’s where the real appeal of this cartoon lies; it’s the superb animation of three kittens who are acting like kittens that gives the charm to this piece of animated whimsy. The fantastic content mostly manifests itself in the presence of certain animated exaggerations, such as the fact that when a kitten has his head stuck in a bottle, the head is somewhat shaped like the bottle, or in a scene where a kitten appears to be spanked by the hammers of a piano. Still, this is one of the more realistic of the Silly Symphonies. All in all, there’s not much of a story; outside of the uncertainty as to how the kittens will be greeted when their presence within the house is known, it’s mostly just a series of cute setpieces. This one is quite entertaining.

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Bloodsuckers from Outer Space (1984)

BLOODSUCKERS FROM OUTER SPACE (1984)
Article 4933 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-20-2015
Directed by Glen Coburn
Featuring Thom Meyers, Laura Ellis, Dennis Letts
Country: USA
What it is: Regional horror comedy

A strange force from outer space is transforming Texas farmers into bloodsucking zombies.

Given the fact that this is a regional film with no doubt a tiny budget, I should probably cut it a little slack. As a horror film, it’s not scary; it does, however, have some very low-budget gore scenes that might interest that crowd. As a comedy, it scores with one line (about incidental music), but that’s about it. Not only are the rest of the attempted laughs not funny, but there are too few of them, which is my way of saying that there’s a lot of dead space. The most interesting thing about the movie is the occasional descents into sheer weirdness; for example, the main characters’ drug of choice is nitrous oxide, the hero responds to a flat tire by destroying his entire car, and a local janitor is obsessed with the word “weird”. I know these scenes are supposed to be funny, but they work better as odd touches. Acting, direction and editing are all subpar. The only names I recognized in the casts were a couple of cameos from Pat Paulsen (as the President) and Jim Stafford (as an idiot). Still, the movie has its fans, but if what the film has to offer you leaves you cold, this may be one of the worst films you’ll ever see.

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Evilspeak (1981)

EVILSPEAK (1981)
Article 4932 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-19-2015
Directed by Eric Weston
Featuring Clint Howard, R.G. Armstrong, Joe Cortese
Country: USA
What it is: Bloody horror

An outcast at a military academy discovers a demonic sanctuary underneath an old church and calls forth a demon to take revenge on his tormentors.

This is what happens when you cross CARRIE with THE OMEN and DADDY’S DEADLY DARLING; a bloody revenge story with Latin chants on the soundtrack and deadly killer pigs. It does get quite bloody before it’s all over, but things don’t really start happening until the final third of the movie. Reportedly, the violence was so extreme that the movie had to be cut to get an R rating. The Blu-Ray I watched of this claimed that all of the gory footage had been restored, but given that the movie still runs four minutes shy of its longer running time listed on IMDB, I have my doubts. The movie is just okay; part of the problem I have with it is that the tormentors are such a one-dimensional bunch that it becomes a little cartoonish, and since the first two-thirds of the movie is mostly just the main character being tormented, it gets a little tiresome. The use of the computer seems more gimmicky than necessary, though I will admit the language translation software that is used by the computer seems to be more advanced that any modern ones. How scary it is may well depend on just how scary you find a sword-wielding demonic floating Clint Howard.

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Those Beautiful Dames (1934)

THOSE BEAUTIFUL DAMES (1934)
Article 4931 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-18-2015
Directed by Friz Freleng
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Cartoon

A poor girl trudges to her poverty-stricken home on a snowy night and is unable to keep the fire lit. Then, after she falls asleep, a troupe of toys show up, redecorate the home, and throw the girl a party.

Here’s another early Warner Brothers effort; this was before they developed a solid coterie of cartoon stars. They were content to make cartoons that mostly served to highlight chosen songs for which the company had the rights. It’s certainly more whimsical than funny, though it opens poignantly by emphasizing the girl’s poverty, then engages in some mild whimsy as the toys redecorate, and then does a couple of renditions of the title song. Like many of the cartoons from the studio during this time, it’s passable but uninspired.

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