WOLF BLOOD (1925)
Article 3998 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-5-2012
Directed by George Chesebro and Bruce M. Mitchell
Featuring George Chesebro, Roy Watson, Milburn Morante
Country: USA
What it is: Lumberjack lycanthropy

When the head of a logging camp is injured in a fight with rival loggers, an emergency transfusion is given to him of blood from a wolf. The rumor begins to go around that he is now a loup-garou.

The movie is nearly half-way through before we even get to the fight that mentioned in the above plot description; most of the movie to that point has been a romance/melodrama involving rival logging camps and a love triangle between the foreman, the doctor and the female owner of the logging camp. Pretty much nothing in the movie earlier than that hints at any turn into horror. Still, once it does take the final turn into horror territory, it has its moments; there are some scenes of the foreman being tortured by the thoughts of what he might have done, and there is a nice sequence of him following a ghost pack of wolves into the forest. Incidentally, the ghost pack is all in the foreman’s mind, and that’s not the only product of an over-active imagination at work here, either, and if you’ve seen enough horror movies that emphasize people fretting over what they don’t remember doing but thing they might have done, you won’t be surprised at the final revelations. Overall, it’s not bad, but not quite satisfying for the full-blooded horror fan.

WILD THING (1987)
Article 3996 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-3-2012
Directed by Max Reid
Featuring Robert Knepper, Kathleen Quinlan, Robert Davi
Country: USA
What it is: Tarzan in the city

A young boy, after having witnessed the murder of his parents by a drug lord and a corrupt cop, is brought up in the streets of the city by a mad woman. When the woman dies, the kid grows into a legendary figure known as the Wild Thing, who does battle with the forces of evil in the city.

I’ve covered quite a few Tarzan movies for my series here, but I’ve always considered the Tarzan series to really belong to the marginalia of fantastic cinema. Transplanting the Tarzan stories to an urban setting (the “asphalt jungle”) is, to my mind, another half-step away from the realm of the fantastic, and despite the fact that the legends say that Wild Thing can turn into a cat, there’s really nothing in the movie to back up anything other than the fact that he keeps a cat as a pet. Still, I couldn’t help but notice that the original story came from John Sayles, and I suspect that he’s responsible for some of the touches of wit and bizarre, offbeat characters in the movie; because of this, the movie is often a lot more fun than it might otherwise be, and there’s even a reference to ALLIGATOR before it’s all over. Still, the movie is somewhat doomed to succumb to the cliches of the urban action movie, and it does that indeed, especially in the Wild Thing’s final standoff with the drug lord. Still, this isn’t too bad for what amounts to an odd little curio.

WATERSHIP DOWN (1978)
Article 3994 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-30-2012
Directed by Martin Rosen
Featuring the voices of John Hurt, Richard Briers, Michael Graham Cox
Country: UK
What it is: Epic animated rabbit fantasy

When his rabbit warren is threatened by a human housing development, a rabbit named Hazel leads a small group of escapees on a quest to find a new warren, encountering perils along the way.

I’ve read the novel by Richard Adams, but it was many years ago; nevertheless, I was impressed that it managed to turn an unlikely subject into what amounts to an epic fantasy quest. Whatever flaws this animated adaptation of the work has, reducing the basically serious tone to one of whimsy and cuteness is NOT one of them; the movie remains serious, and even downright grim at times. The closest it comes to whimsicality is the names of some of the rabbits (Pipkin, Dandelion, Cowslip, etc.), and even the song warbled by Art Garfunkel manages to have those tinges of darkness around the edges. The movie does have a few problems; because most of the rabbits look the same, it’s sometimes hard to tell one character from another, and because the movie is forced to condense the book somewhat, certain characters never get fleshed out as well as I’d like. Still, the movie works very well; the fact that the bittersweet ending nearly brought a tear to my eye convinced me of that. The movie, however, is nearly stolen by Zero Mostel’s performance as Keharr, a lost and injured seabird who befriends the rabbits; his fractured syntax and cranky demeanor provide a welcome dose of humor, but manages also to avoid cuteness.

WHITE GODDESS (1953)
aka Ramar of the Jungle
Article 3991 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 7-26-2012
Directed by Wallace Fox
Featuring Jon Hall, Ray Montgomery, M’liss McClure
Country: USA
What it is: Jungle TV-movie cobbled together from TV episodes

Two doctors explore the jungle in search of a white goddess in the hopes of discovering her secret of eternal youth.

This movie almost ended up on my “ones that got away” list, and therein lies a tale. The movie first entered my hunt list with the title RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE, which matches the name of the TV series from which episodes were culled to produce it. Yet, IMDB did not list a movie with the same title, and though I found ample evidence that several movies were culled from the series, none of the lists I found made any mention of one of them having the same title of the series. It wasn’t until I was preparing to move it to my “ones that got away” list that I found the clue I needed; a check against CITWF indicated that RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE was a rarely used alternate title to a movie called WHITE GODDESS. A listing of that movie did exist in IMDB, and the cast and the plot description indicated I was on the right track.

However, it quickly became clear that the movie itself wouldn’t be easy to find; I found no sources for it. Still, I’ve had this problem before with movies culled from TV series; if I could find the individual episodes that made up the movie, I could watch those. After a bit of searching, I discovered the names of the episodes; they were “Evil Trek”, “Tribal Feud” and “White Savages”. All of these episodes were conveniently located on YouTube.

So I’m cheating a little once again, but I’ve made a habit of it in these cases, so why stop now? At any rate, I get the impression that the series, though not badly done, largely existed to regurgitate all the usual jungle movie cliches. Some of the movies culled from the series didn’t have any fantastic content, but this one features the youth-preserving drug that centers around two of the episodes. All in all, it was okay, but little more than that. Still, the fact that I was able to solve the mystery surrounding it and keep it from falling into my “ones that got away” list does give me a certain sense of victory.