Operation Atlantis (1965)

OPERATION ATLANTIS (1965)
(a.k.a. AGENTE 003, OPERACION ATLANTIDA)
Article #1582 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-14-2005
Posting Date: 12-11-2005
Directed by Domenico Paolella
Featuring John Ericson, Bernardina Sarracco, Cristina Gaioni

Agent George Steele is hired by a scientific research agency to investigate reports of radioactive elements in the world of Atlantis in the African desert.

This is one of the many Italian pseudo-Bond spy movies of the mid-to-late sixties. At their best, they can be charming low-budget fun. They give the viewer the novelty of seeing likable heroes romance beautiful women while taking on dangerous enemies without the benefit of a the budget or stunt expertise of a Bond movie, and the bad dubbing merely adds a bit of quaint charm to the proceedings. At their worst, they are incoherent jumbles of difficult-to-follow plots, bad editing, charmless heroes, confusing characters and horrible editing; in these cases, the bad dubbing merely adds to the mounting headache the movie is giving you. Unfortunately, this is one of the latter, and the fact that the science fiction aspects are stronger than usual this time (what with the Atlantis storyline and the existence of a super-radioactive mineral from the asteroid belt) does nothing to enliven the proceedings. In fact, there’s only one thing I like about this movie, and that is that one of the assassins in this movie uses as his weapon a giant spiked claw. If this were a real James Bond movie, we would be guaranteed a big fight between the hero and the claw-wielding assassin; we’re in no such luck here. Avoid this one like the plague unless you’re a really big, uncritical fan of Italian pulchritude or just have to see that big claw.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Pirates of Prah (1956)

PIRATES OF PRAH (1956)
(a.k.a. MANHUNT IN SPACE)
Article #1581 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-13-2005
Posting Date: 12-10-2005
Directed by Hollingsworth Morse
Featuring Richard Crane, Sally Mansfield, Robert Lyden

Rocky Jones is sent out to investigate reports of space pirates when Vena is kidnapped by them.

Originally, I thought that covering this one would serve as a benchmark for me by being the first movie I covered that wasn’t listed in IMDB; PIRATES OF PRAH is not listed there. Granted, I expected that the reason for this was that these particular episodes of “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger” hadn’t been edited into movie form, thereby disqualifying itself somewhat from being covered. This might have served as an issue of debate had I been correct; however, as it is, I found alarm bells going off in my head during the first ten minutes of this group of episodes; I knew I had seen it before, and after a little research, I discovered that PIRATES OF PRAH had indeed been edited into a feature, only under the title MANHUNT IN SPACE, which is listed in IMDB. Since some of my sources list both titles as distinct entries in the Rocky Jones series, you can understand my confusion.

As for the movie itself, it’s pretty much what I’ve come to expect from the series. It’s three episodes of the series, each of which has a distinct storyline while at the same time telling a story arc that lasts all three episodes, thereby making them work both as individual episodes as well as a movie. Granted, it helps if you take breaks between the episodes; otherwise, the deliberate pace (tolerable in episode-size chunks but exhausting over the course of the whole movie) will get to you. It’s primitive and juvenile, but with a certain degree of imagination and creativity. The acting is variable but watchable, it’s silly but earnest, and it all somehow exudes a certain charm if you take into account its early television origins. If you’re a Rocky Jones fan, you’ll like it. If not, you won’t. Simple as that.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Panda and the Magic Serpent (1958)

PANDA AND THE MAGIC SERPENT (1958)
(a.k.a. HAKUJA DEN)
Article #1580 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-12-2005
Posting Date: 12-9-2005
Directed by Kazuhiko Okabe, Taiji Yabushita, Robert Tafur
Featuring the voices of Marvin Miller, Mariko Miyagi, Hisaya Morishige

When a young man falls in love with a beautiful maiden who is actually a magic serpent, a wizard, believing she is evil, tries to break up the relationship.

According to IMDB, this is the first color, feature-length anime film, though I would have to say that the character style is certainly a far cry from what we think of as anime today. Watching these types of movies can be an interesting experience; one senses a big cultural difference while at the same time seeing the universalities of certain stories. Though this movie looks nothing like what you’d expect from Disney, the story itself embraces a fairly common theme about the non-smoothness of the true course of love. Some of the plot points are very familiar; when the enchantress decides to give up her powers and her immortality for the sake of the one she leaves, I found myself hearkening back to similar scenes from SUPERMAN II and one of the Steve Reeves Hercules movies. Actually, the bizarre dubbing is the most jarring aspect of the movie; it’s hard to believe that the panda would have such a deep voice, and having a voice translate the Japanese lyrics of some of the songs after they have been sung is rather unusual. My favorite sequence is the battle of the wizards, and my favorite character is the enchantress’ perpetually smiling handmaiden. And then of course, there’s the giant catfish – er – dragonfish – who pops up at the end. Despite the headache-inducing dubbing, I must admit that I liked it; I’m just not sure how much yet.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937)

ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN (1937)
Article #1579 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-11-2005
Posting Date: 12-8-2005
Directed by David Butler
Featuring Eddie Cantor, Roland Young, Raymond Scott

A hobo makes it to Hollywood in the hopes of filling up his autograph book. He ends up being hired as an extra in an Arabian Nights movie, but falls asleep in an urn and dreams that he has been transported to the land of the Arabian Nights.

I found myself trying to remember the name of the Eddie Cantor movie I’d seen previously for this series. Once I remembered it was ROMAN SCANDALS, I immediately knew why the premise of this one seemed so familiar; in both movies, Cantor falls asleep and finds himself in another world. I also knew what was missing from this one; the stunning musical choreography of Busby Berkeley is sorely missed, and this post-code movie simply lacks the daring and the darkness of the earlier movie. To compensate, we have Roland Young as a sultan, and John Carradine in three different roles (as a studio exec trying to get Cantor to sign a release form after he suffers an accident, as a scheming Arab, and as himself). As for Cantor, he’s not bad, but as a comedian, a little of his perky brightness goes a long way with me. The musical numbers are good, but it’s here I miss Berkeley the most as well. The satire is more cute than pointed, and much of it is fairly dated anymore. Still, the end of the movie has the best moments; there’s a stunning sequence involving a ride on a flying carpet that is the high point of the movie, and the final scene in which the Hobo attends a Hollywood movie premiere features lots of entertaining cameos, and sets up the best joke in the movie when the REAL Eddie Cantor shows up. Another good moment has Cantor trying to figure out the native language of a group of African musicians and discovers that they speak Cab Calloway.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Orpheus (1949)

ORPHEUS (1949)
(a.k.a. ORPHEE)
Article #1578 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-10-2005
Posting Date: 12-7-2005
Directed by Jean Cocteau
Featuring Jean Marais, Francois Perier, Maria Casares

A poet has a strange encounter with a woman in black known as the Princess, and then begins to hear bizarre poetry on the radio of the princess’ automobile.

There’s a moment in this movie where the poet puts on a pair of clear gloves that will help him to pass through a mirror. Instead of showing footage of the poet donning the gloves in a straightforward fashion, Jean Cocteau used footage of the poet taking off the gloves and ran it backwards. On the basis of purely practical story-telling, this use of footage is eccentric and useless, but in terms of adding that special touch of surreal lyricism and giving the sense of truly other-worldly action, it’s a brilliant moment. That is certainly one of Cocteau’s charms; he uses special effects not to give a sense of reality to fantastic events, but to give that sense of exotic unreality that underlies much of his work. The fact that some of his special effects techniques are obvious (he loves to run footage backwards and does it quite a bit during this movie) does not in any sense reduce its cinematic power.

This may be his best-known work after his masterpiece, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. It’s not the equal of that one, largely because the story itself (an update of the Orpheus story) is more obscure and difficult than the one of the earlier movie. It is also very difficult at time to fathom the motives of the main character; in particular, I’m never sure how Orpheus really feels about either the Princess or Eurydice. But the imagery has a definite staying power, and there’s something rather compelling about the vision of the world of Death and the dead as it is portrayed here. At any rate, the visions of Orpheus travelling on the other side of the mirror with the chauffeur have stayed in my memory from my first viewing of the movie years ago. It makes me rather sad that Cocteau only directed 10 movies in his life, but other than an obscure silent film and the short BLOOD OF A POET, he really didn’t start directing until he was well into his fifties. Cocteau was one of the filmmakers being emulated by Herk Harvey when that man directed CARNIVAL OF SOULS.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1962)

AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE (1962)
(a.k.a. LA RIVIERE DU HIBOU)
Article #1577 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-9-2005
Posting Date: 12-6-2005
Directed by Robert Enrico
Featuring Roger Jacquet, Anne Cornaly, Anker Larsen

A Confederate spy is being hanged off of a bridge by Union soldiers during the Civil War. When the rope unexpectedly breaks, the spy makes a desperate attempt for freedom.

This short French film won an award at Cannes, as well as taking the Academy Award for Best Short Subject in the live action category. Though these are indeed great honors, this movie would have most likely faded into obscurity over time. However, fate had one more surprise in store for it. The producer for the final season of “Twilight Zone” had seen the short, and since the season for the show was running over budget, he decided to buy the television rights to the short and then showed it as an episode of the series. It was an excellent choice; not only does the mood of the short fit well with that of the series, but since there were only a handful of lines of dialogue (and these were in English), no dubbing of lines was required.

Another reason the short fit the format is that the whole movie builds up to a single final twist, and this twist is essential to the tale; without it, the story becomes merely an adventure story (exquisitely directed, but rather ordinary). The twist is what gives this one its power, impact and haunting quality. Still, the movie is only marginally genre; the only quality that makes it so is that there is something rather horrific about the twist. Still, I do find myself wondering as to whether Terry Gilliam was familiar with this story when he made BRAZIL.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Non-Stop New York (1937)

NON-STOP NEW YORK (1937)
Article #1576 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-8-2005
Posting Date: 12-5-2005
Directed by Robert Stevenson
Featuring John Loder, Anna Lee, Francis L. Sullivan

When a mob lawyer is murdered in New York, the authorities arrest and convict an innocent man. The only person who can save him from the electric chair is an English actress who can prove his innocence, but the mob has whisked her away to England in the hopes that she will be unable to clear him.

When I appeared in a production of “Witness for the Prosecution” a few years ago, I remember the director telling all of us who played the trial witnesses that he wanted each one of our characters to be little gems of character acting. Someone must have given that same note to the actors in this thoroughly delightful thriller; it is packed to the gills with fun and offbeat characters. As a result, this makes for one of the most engaging thrillers this side of Hitchcock; in fact, writer E.V.H. Emmett (who is credited with ‘additional dialogue’) had previously worked on Hitchcock’s SABOTAGE. The fantastic content appears only in the latter half of the movie, when most of the interested parties board a new luxury airplane (with cabins, observation decks, dining rooms and no seat belts), but it provides a truly memorable setting. The performances are uniformly excellent, but special notice should go to Anna Lee as the English actress who knows too much, Francis L. Sullivan as the mob boss who disguises himself as a Paraguayan general and who has a novel way of lighting his cigars, and Desmond Tester who takes a potentially annoying role (as a precocious and sassy musical child prodigy) and makes it hilarious. Fans of DR. STRANGELOVE will immediately recognize actor Peter Bull as a man who has the presence of mind to save a torn-up letter to sell to a blackmailer. This one is definitely recommended, especially to fans of Hitchcockian thrillers.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Night of the Sorcerers (1974)

THE NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS (1974)
(a.k.a. LA NOCHE DE LOS BRUJOS)
Article #1575 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-7-2005
Posting Date: 12-4-2005
Directed by Amando de Ossorio
Featuring Mario Kosti, Simon Andreu, Kali Hansa

An exploration team in Mumbasa find themselves victims of the curse of the leopard people.

This movie opens with a bunch of African natives performing a sadistic ritual on an unwilling white woman. They have just completed the ritual when a surrounding military force opens fire on the natives and kills them all. Then there is a startling twist that would have worked a lot better if it had been edited well, but in some ways, this moment is indicative of the whole movie; one hand giveth, while the other hand taketh away.

To give an example of what I mean, some of the horror scenes here are really eerie and effective, particularly when the dead natives pull themselves out of the cairns built for their bodies. Other moments are unintentionally hilarious; any sequence with the fanged leopard women cavorting around in their fur bikinis in slow motion is more likely to elicit snickers rather than shudders. At least one thing both of these types of scenes have in common is that they’re still better than scenes of conversation between the main characters; for some reason, director Amando de Ossorio just can’t bring these scenes to life.

Still, I think I’ll cut the movie a bit of slack. It’s a lot better than MALENKA, for one thing. For another, I have the short dubbed-in-English print, and this of course drags down the quality a little. Still, this one just doesn’t hold a candle to Ossorio’s Blind Dead movies.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Night After Night After Night (1969)

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1969)
Article #1574 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-6-2005
Posting Date: 12-3-2005
Directed by Lindsay Shonteff
Featuring Jack May, Justine Lord, Gilbert Wynne

A series of ripper murders are being committed by a repressed judge, but the policeman handling the case believes the culprit is a young womanizer.

When faced with a title like that, the first word that comes to mind is repetition. Unfortunately, that word ends up applying all too well to this psycho-killer movie. Though I appreciate the fact that the relaxing of standards of censorship opened up opportunities for movies to be more explicit, there is such a thing as excess. You see, our slasher here is determined to put an end to the evil in the world by killing those evil temptresses, women. Then, to illustrate these temptations, the movie embarks on an endless array of scenes of scantily clad women, leering perverts, double entendres, make-out sessions, voyeurism, etc. etc. etc.. Now, I can appreciate how some of this may be essential to understanding the characters and the situation, but this movie is so incessant with it that it comes fairly close to soft-core porn. For example, we know that the judge has a secret room full of pin-ups of naked women; do we need the camera to pan endlessly across the pinups every time we enter the room? There are a couple of good ideas in the mix; I especially like the fact that the man arrested for the murders finds himself being tried under the judge who is actually guilty of them. But the blatantly exploitative approach to the story puts me off and starts to grate after a while.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Neutron Vs. the Maniac (1962)

NEUTRON VS. THE MANIAC (1962)
Article #1573 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-5-2005
Posting Date: 12-2-2005
Directed by Alfredo B. Crevenna
Featuring Wolf Ruviniskis, Gina Romand, Rodolfo Landa

Neutron tries to catch a knife-wielding maniac who films his victims.

Break out the party hats—it’s another Neutron movie! You remember Neutron, don’t you? Well, if you don’t, the title cards will remind you that Neutron is the Atomic Superman. This is all well and good, except for the fact that he’s not atomic (though you could have a lively debate about just what makes someone atomic or not) nor is he a superman (no superpowers, average strength). In short, he’s a masked Mexican wrestler, except he doesn’t wrestle. So how does the movie compensate for the lack of wrestling scenes? It substitutes musical numbers, all of which have been left in their native Mexican language (though I really wish I could follow the lyrics of the novelty doo-wop number).

Neutron is trying to figure out the identity of the maniac. The only person who has seen him is a blind pianist (who isn’t blind, though he plays the piano). All the pianist really knows is that the killer made his escape to an asylum. The question is—which person in the asylum is it? Is it the suspicious doctor? One of the thuggish attendants? The battle-fatigued soldier? The mystic? The Russian royalty with the gout (who doesn’t really have the gout)? Or is it the unbeatable wrestler who loses every match (I take it back; the movie does have wrestling scenes)? The famous actress who is neither famous nor an actress?

Of course, the dubbing is atrocious and the translation feeds us a number of hilarious lines. Taken as a whole, the story is pretty muddled as well. Nonetheless, the setup for the mystery is pretty amusing, and the revelations in the final scene are very entertaining, though it has more twists than you can shake a stick at. I also have some fondness for the comic relief character; his encounter with the maniac is really memorable. In short, this one is dumb, but fun.

0 CommentsLeave a comment