Logan’s Run (1976)

LOGAN’S RUN (1976)
Article 3230 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-22-2010
Posting Date: 6-18-2010
Directed by Michael Anderson
Featuring Michael York, Richard Jordan, Jenny Agutter
Country: USA
What it is: Dystopian science fiction

In the future, humanity lives in domed cities isolated from the rest of the world. People are only allowed to live to the age of 30, when they are “reborn” through a process known as “carousel”. Those who try to evade “carousel” are known as “runners”, and a group of men known as sandmen have the job of chasing down runners and terminating them. One sandman is chosen for a special mission; some runners have escaped to a place known as Sanctuary, and he must find the place. But what will he really find…?

It’s certainly one of the more ambitious science fiction movies of the seventies, and at its best, it does tap into a real sense of wonder; the opening “carousel” sequences are particularly interesting. Overall, however, I didn’t find the movie particularly satisfying. One problem is that the movie as a whole never builds a sense of tension and urgency; we seem to saunter from one scene to the next, and this leaves the movie feeling a bit aimless. The ending of the movie also feels contrived and convenient, which certainly adds to my lack of satisfaction. There is a nice sense of fun at moments, though; I like the scenes in the overgrown Washington D.C. settings, and Peter Ustinov seems to be having a lot of fun as an old man, so much so I found myself wondering if much of his dialogue was ad-libbed. Overall, it seems more of a triumph of production design over script, and I would like to read the original novel some time to see just what has been changed.

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The Last Dinosaur (1977)

THE LAST DINOSAUR (1977)
Article 3229 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-21-2010
Posting Date: 6-17-2010
Directed by Alexander Grasshoff and Tsugonobu Kotani
Featuring Richard Boone, Joan Van Ark, Steven Keats
Country: Japan / USA
What it is: Dinosaur movie

A big game hunter forms an expedition to explore a hidden area in the Arctic regions that is said to harbor dinosaurs. Though he claims he’s doing it for the sake of science, the question remains – is he actually going there to hunt it?

What we have here is a cross between THE LOST WORLD and “Moby Dick”. Like KING KONG ESCAPES, it’s a Japanese/American co-production with Rankin/Bass and a Japanese film company, in this case Tsuburaya Productions. The dinosaurs are, like most Japanese monsters, men in suits, and are acceptable enough (to these eyes, anyway). I like the movie, but wish I liked it more. It starts out looking fairly interesting; Richard Boone’s performance is odd enough that it caught my attention, and Joan Van Ark looks at first like she’s going to be a fairly feisty female addition to the expedition. However, once they get to this lost world, they become less interesting, especially Van Ark as she quickly becomes the typical screaming female in distress. The movie is hoodwinked by a weak script that often belabors cliches, leaves the potentially interesting character of Bunta undeveloped, and makes the character of the employee who first spotted the dinosaur an unlikable, abrasive man. Furthermore, the score doesn’t know when it should leave well enough alone and constantly tries to underline moments that would be best left in silence. Still, when it does work (which is sporadically), it is entertaining enough. I saw the complete version which runs about 11 minutes longer than the version that was released to TV in this country; I suspect that the footage that was cut involves the expedition’s encounter with a tribe of caveman. This one is a real mixed bag.

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It’s Alive! (1969)

IT’S ALIVE! (1969)
TV-Movie
Article 3228 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-20-2010
Posting Date: 6-16-2010
Directed by Larry Buchanan
Featuring Tommy Kirk, Shirley Bonne, Bill Thurman
Country: USA
What it is: Horror in Buchananland

Two vacationers get lost in the backwoods of the Ozarks and encounter a man who maintains a makeshift zoo. He locks the vacationers (along with a visiting paleontologist) in a cavern in the hopes they will serve as food for a prehistoric monster dwelling there.

Larry Buchanan’s best fantastically-themed movie? Well, I wouldn’t go that far; there’s something that just doesn’t sit right with me to put “Larry Buchanan” and the word “best” in the same sentence. It is, however, one of the rare times that I do have something good to say about one of his movies, and that is that the performance of Buchanan regular Bill Thurman is rather effective; he does a decent job of portraying a character that seems friendly on the surface but turns out to be an abusive madman underneath. Granted, his performance is uneven; it falters whenever he’s required to maniacally overact. The movie also has the advantage of not being a remake of a better AIP movie, so you can’t compare it to a better version of the story; still, this was because the script was not pursued at the time. Thurman’s performance aside, however, the movie is a stinker, with too many dull stretches and a particularly ill-conceived monster. The latter uses the same outfit that Buchanan used for CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION; it was a lousy monster suit to begin with, but at least in that movie it made a little sense. Here, it’s supposed to be a giant dinosaur, but it never once conveys any sense of real size, and it looks not the least bit dinosaurish. Still, the movie does make me want to see the movie AIP had originally planned to make with the script; it would have featured Elsa Lanchester and Peter Lorre. I’m assuming Lorre would have had the Thurman role, and I would love to see what he would have done with it; furthermore, he would have made the maniacal overacting scenes a lot more fun.

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Das Schloss in Flandern (1936)

DAS SCHLOSS IN FLANDERN (1936)
aka Castle in Flanders
Article 3227 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-19-2010
Posting Date: 6-15-2010
Directed by Geza von Bolvary
Featuring Martha Eggerth, Paul Hartmann, Georg Alexander
Country: Germany
What it is: Love story

During World War I, six soldiers are bound together by repeated listenings to a phonograph from a beautiful singer. Years later the singer, while trying to evade a host of suitors, takes refuge in a castle in Flanders where she meets and falls in love with one of the soldiers. However, she loses him again, and discovers that there may be some dark secret about him…

IMDB classifies it as a romance, and the plot description at All Movies doesn’t give any info about fantastic content. My copy is in German with French subtitles, and for the longest time I was wondering if I would ever grasp what I assumed was going to be some very marginal fantastic content. Because of the language difficulties, the plot was very hard to follow, but I was able to piece together at least one crucial bit of info that makes it seem that the woman may have actually encountered a ghost. Even though further developments give a different interpretation of certain events, the possibility does seem to exist at one point, so that does give us a certain degree of fantastic content. However, another element exists; the singer’s last big musical number in the movie involves a machine that churns out robots, given an unexpected science fiction angle to the song; science fiction fans might like to hunt up the movie for this scene alone, as it’s quite impressive in its way. As for the movie itself, the language barrier really prevents me from making any meaningful overall judgment, but there are some striking visual moments; my favorite involves a scene at a concert where the singer notices the soldier in the audience, and breaks into the number that was on the phonograph, and the movie gives a nice suggestion visually that she is doing the song for him and him alone.

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Umorismo in nero (1965)

UMORISMO IN NERO (1965)
aka Death Travels Too Much
Article 3226 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-18-2010
Posting Date: 6-14-2010
Directed by Claude Autant-Lara, Jose Maria Forque, Giancarlo Zagni
Country: Italy / France / Spain
What it is: Black comedy anthology

Three comic tales involving death are told. In the first, an old woman believes the pain in her head is caused by a bug in her ear, and she visits a healer. In the second, a circus performer attempts to frame her assistant for the murder of a romantic rival. In the third, a hunter believes the beautiful woman he has encountered is actually Death.

This anthology film features three separate stories directed by three different directors in three different languages; in whichever country you saw it, at least two-thirds of the dialogue was dubbed. This was the one released in Spain, and since I saw it without subtitles, it was a bit difficult to follow. However, I could tell it was lightly comic more than darkly satirical, and it looks like a lot of fun. The first tale does feature a healer who dresses up like a personification of Death at one point, and this gives it a certain fantastic content. The second story climaxes with scenes involving a magician’s act, which adds a bit of fantastic content to that one as well. However, the massive amount of fantastic content is in the third story. This one is the most difficult to follow, but it looks fun; there’s a scene in a crypt involving a man coming out of a burial place with a skull strapped to his head, various attempts to murder Death (who survives and reappears with ease), and some other horror imagery; nonetheless, it’s played for laughs. This is one I wish I could see with subtitles.

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I, Monster (1971)

I, MONSTER (1971)
Article 3225 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-17-2010
Posting Date: 6-13-2010
Directed by Stephen Weeks
Featuring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Mike Raven
Country: UK
What it is: Jekyll and Hyde by another name

A psychiatrist develops a drug that is capable of suppressing the superego. His experiments on himself begin to turn him into an increasingly ugly psychopath.

There are some interesting changes to the Jekyll and Hyde story in this version. I do like the fact that in this one, the Jekyll character (here named Marlowe; for some reason they change the names of the title characters but leave the names of the others untouched) is an early follower of Freud, which underlines the psychological subtexts of the story. They’ve also increased and fleshed out the character of Utterson, making him more prominent and less of a literary device; in the original novel, he was telling the story. The movie is enhanced by very good performances from Christopher Lee (as Marlowe/Blake) and Peter Cushing (as Utterson), and the movie itself keeps fairly close to the original story. The biggest problem with the movie is the lifeless direction; if the performances were less accomplished, this movie would have been a major snoozefest. The movie came from Amicus, and was originally intended to be viewable in 3D through the use of the Pulfrich effect, which requires careful choreography and camera movement in order for it to work; that may explain why some of the scenes seem so oddly directed, particularly a tavern scene in which the movement really calls attention to itself.

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House of Dark Shadows (1970)

HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS (1970)
Article 3224 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-16-2010
Posting Date: 6-12-2010
Directed by Dan Curtis
Featuring Jonathan Frid, Grayson Hall, Kathryn Leigh Scott
Country: USA
What it is: Theatrical adaptation of supernatural soap opera

A seeker after a hidden fortune releases a vampire from captivity, who returns to his native home. The vampire eventually falls in love with a woman who resembles his bride-to-be from 200 years ago, but what will the future hold for them?

I remember trying to get home in time to see “Dark Shadows” on TV when I was a kid, but I rarely did and only caught the show sporadically. I remember Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, and a few of the other actors and actresses, but for the life of me, I can’t remember a single story line. So I can’t say if this movie adaptation was modeled off of specific story lines from the show, but the story line is somewhat fractured and a little meandering, and this does give me the feeling that it did adapt some of the story lines from the TV series. I thought the movie was a little too coy in keeping us from seeing the face of Barnabas Collins for as long as it does; since I suspect that the movie was mostly geared for fans of show who were expecting to see Frid and knew what he looked like, it hardly seemed necessary. The movie has some good things and some not so good things; of the latter, the music is repetitive and tiresome and the characters sometimes feel inadequately developed. Still, the acting is solid (especially from Frid, Thayer David and Grayson Hall), there are a few pleasant surprises (for example, when the policemen show up to do battle with a vampirized Carolyn, they actually are armed with crosses and know how to use them), and you’re never quite sure who will prove to be the ultimate hero. I still think it’s a bit of a shame that the next movie didn’t feature Barnabas Collins; the charismatic Jonathan Frid was really the center of attention here, and the sequel suffered for his absence.

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He Knows You’re Alone (1980)

HE KNOWS YOU’RE ALONE (1980)
Article 3223 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-15-2010
Posting Date: 6-11-2010
Directed by Armand Mastroianni
Featuring Don Scardino, Caitlin O’Heaney, Elizabeth Kemp
Country: USA
What it is: HALLOWEEN clone

A psycho killer who specializes in prospective brides (and anyone else he feels like) is on the loose. A detective (whose own bride-to-be was murdered by the psycho, who happened to be a jilted boyfriend) has vowed to catch him. A woman about to be married is the killer’s next target.

It’s a slasher script, modeled off of HALLOWEEN rather than FRIDAY THE 13TH, which means it’s more interested in the suspense than the gore. But Armand Mostroianni is no John Carpenter (but this was only his first movie, and he got better), Caitlin O’Heaney is no Jamie Lee Curtis, and Lewis Arlt is no Donald Pleasence. We get lots and lots of lines like “I think I’m being followed” and “Is someone there?” and unending conversations on the woman’s doubt about her impending marriage (all designed to lead up to a lame twist ending). There’s a few good moments; the opening murder is well-staged, and it effectively sets up a clever hint that the killer is in the house at one point (if you can count to five, you’ll know what I mean). However, the movie way overdoes its attempts to ratchet up the suspense; all too often it comes off as annoying rather than scary. By the way, this was Tom Hanks’s first movie; his character was originally supposed to be killed, but he turned out to be so likable that the murder was taken out of the script.

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Hercules, Prisoner of Evil (1964)

HERCULES, PRISONER OF EVIL (1964)
aka Ursus, il terrore dei kirghisi
Article 3222 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-13-2010
Posting Date: 6-10-2010
Directed by Antonio Margheriti and Ruggero Deodato
Featuring Reg Park, Mireille Granelli, Ettore Manni
Country: Italy
What it is: Sword and Sandal

A monster is loose in the vicinity, and so far, Hercules has been unable to track it down. An evil king decides to use the situation as a pretense to invade the region, claiming that the monster is a creation of Hercules and its residents. However, complications arise; Hercules is in love with he woman who is the rightful heir to the throne, and not everyone is who they seem…

Whatever flaws this particular sword-and-sandal movie has, I’ll definitely give it credit for one thing; it avoids the trap of merely repeating the tired story lines that usually mark this genre. The key wild card that has been thrown into the mix is the monster, and the mystery surrounding it and its elusiveness sets up some very interesting plot twists indeed. Technically, it’s not a Hercules movie; the Italian movie indicates that the main character is actually Ursus. Another piece of trivia; this is the first directorial work for Ruggero Deodato, who would go on to direct the notorious CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST; he’s only credited as assistant director, but according to IMDB, he was an uncredited co-director. The story gets a little confusing at times, and parts of it are unsatisfying, but the unusual story line and revelations make this one of the more interesting examples of the genre.

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Cagliostro (1910)

CAGLIOSTRO (1910)
aka Cagliostro, aventurier, chimiste et magiien
Article 3221 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-13-2010
Posting Date: 6-9-2010
Directed by Camille de Morlhon and Gaston Velle
Featuring Jean Jacquinet, Jacques Normand, Helene Du Montel
Country: France
What it is: Version of the Cagliostro story

Cagliostro kidnaps a gypsy girl and uses his hypnotic powers to turn her into a medium.

Sometimes you just accept these short silent films for what they are, but others you find yourself acutely aware that the story can’t be told in the time allotted. That’s the feeling I had about this one; in terms of story, there is a perfunctory feel about the whole affair here. However, I suspect that it isn’t so much about the story as the special effects; the beginning scene (in which a wizard uses special effects to show Cagliostro the gypsy girl) and a party scene (which is basically Cagliostro using the girl in his magic act) seem to exist solely to make extensive use of camera tricks. Nevertheless, it was nice to see another version of the Cagliostro story; I have had several on my hunt list over the years, but most of them seem unfindable.

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