Natas: The Reflection (1986)

NATAS: THE REFLECTION (1986)
Article 5148 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-6-2016
Directed by Jack Dunlap
Featuring Randy Mulkey, Pat Bolt, Craig Hensley
Country: USA
What it is: One of the more questionable Ancient Indian legends

A reporter researching an ancient Indian legend is tasked with the quest of defeating the guardian of the gates of Hell and releasing the souls held prisoner within.

There are lots of bad movies out there, but I think what makes some of the most famous ones as interesting as they are is that they seem to have their own demented voice that keeps them from seeming to be mere imitations of other movies. I’d have to put this one in that group; once our hero arrives at a ghost town full of stereotypical western characters who all happen to be rotting zombies as well, I knew that it had found its own voice. Oh, it’s dumb, all right; what kind of ancient Indian legend references Satan (“Natas” reflected) and reveals its secrets in couplets that rhyme in English? The dialogue is rife with cliches, the acting is often very bad, and the special effects are not what you would call convincing. Still, there’s something engagingly silly about this nonsense, though it will require a bit of patience to get through it all. The credits claim that the woman playing Smohalla was 109 years old when this movie was made, but she probably never got to see the film; she died the year after it was made, and the movie sat on the shelf for three years before it was released.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Adventures of Robert Macaire (1925)

THE ADVENTURES OF ROBERT MACAIRE (1925)
aka Les aventures de Robert Macaire
Article 5147 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-4-2016
Directed by Jean Epstein
Featuring Jean Angelo, Alex Allin, Suzanne Bianchetti
Country: France
What it is: Roguish adventures of a bandit

Noted bandit Robert Macaire and his faithful assistant Bertrand arrive at a new town and begin to ply their trade. But will there affections for the women they love be their undoing?

I’ve encountered Jean Epstein before. He directed that excellent, highly stylized French version of THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER from 1928. This movie is three times the length of that one and, as far as style goes, is almost distressingly ordinary. This is not to say that the movie doesn’t have its moments; Jean Angelo is truly charming in the title role, and many of the situations are rather amusing. It’s just not quite amusing enough to make you forget its three hours of length. Also, since it’s primarily about the larcenous adventures of a pair of rogues, it’s certainly marginal in the fantastic content department. However, three touches do cause it to nudge up to the fantastic. One of the tricks they play involves them disguising themselves as the ghost of a saint and a gold-smelling hog from purgatory. Then there is a minor plot element in which Bertrand mistakes someone for a ghost. The most prominent has the two bandits pulling off a phony mind-reading scam. It’s mildly entertaining, but overlong.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

A propos de Nice (1930)

A PROPOS DE NICE (1930)
Article 5146 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-3-2016
Directed by Jean Vigo
Cast unknown
Country: France
What it is: Avant-garde documentary

A fractured day in the life of the resort city of Nice is portrayed.

Jean Vigo was an openly political avant-garde filmmaker who was hoping to inspire revolution with his work. Whatever his intentions, one thing he was clearly able to do was to imbue seemingly ordinary scenes with a kinetic, visual rhythm that makes them fascinating, and I found it hard to tear myself away from this twenty-five minute barrage of bizarre images. Though it can’t really be described as fully genre, it does manage to lapse into scenes of fantasy at times, such as a scene where a woman sitting cross-legged in a chair appears in various items of clothing until we reach a shot where she is naked. Sexual imagery abounds, some of it subtle, some of it less so. It’s quite surrealistic at times, and there are moments where the movement of people is made to look like it’s mechanical, or even similar to the flow of blood through the veins. Part of the action takes place during a carnival with people wearing grotesque costumes, and it’s hard to miss a political statement of some sort where we see a person peering out from one of the costumes in a way that makes him look like he is imprisoned in jail. Jean Vigo directed only a tiny handful of films, and this is the third of the four he made that I’ve seen. So far, this is perhaps my favorite of the bunch.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Before the project….

If there was any root cause that was the source of my interest in the fantastic genres, it was my childhood love of monsters.

I don’t know where this interest originally came from. All I know was that as a child, if a show or a movie on TV had a monster, I was there. If there was a book in the library that had pictures of monsters, I had to check it out (and I resisted checking it back in). Through these I would discover the names of the stars of movies that had monsters, and made lists of movies I wanted to see.

Then, finally, I learned about a late-night movie show called “Creature Feature”. I didn’t have much control over the TV in my family’s house, but I did manage to stake out that time as my own, and every week I would sit down and take in whatever horrific creation they were running that week. Not all the movies satisfied me; they would occasionally run monsterless movies like ISLE OF MISSING MEN that barely held my attention, but most of the time, I got my monster fix.

This wonderful time came to an end in the late seventies. One night, I turned on the TV and, instead of the usual wind, thunder and creaky house effects I was expecting, some late night comedy show appeared in its place. I hung on in the belief that it was just some short-term item that would probably last no more than thirty minutes, but it dragged on and on, and it didn’t release its stranglehold on the television until midnight, when finally, my show started. Yes, I had witnessed the birth of “Saturday Night Live”, but I never forgave it for pre-empting my monster movie show.

Midnight was a much more difficult time to negotiate; the audience for the show shrank and the budget got cheaper, and the movies got chintzier and duller. Furthermore, once I went to college and no longer had access to a TV set I could call my own, I abandoned it. It did manage to hang on until I was finished with college, but it was a shadow of its former self, and when the man who played the horror host for the show passed on, the show vanished.

Not that this marked the end of my love for fantastic cinema, but that story will continue in my next post in the series…

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Le retour d’Ulysse (1909)

LE RETOUR D’ULYSSE (1909)
aka The Return of Ulysses
Article 5145 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 5-2-2016
Directed by Andre Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy
Featuring Paul Mounet, Madame Bartet, Albert Lambert
Country: France
What it is: Homeric adaptation

Ulysses returns after a twenty-year delay from the Trojan War to deal with suitors to the queen Penelope.

Anyone familiar with Homer’s “The Odyssey” knows the story is full of fantastic content, with the most famous part of the story involving Ulysses’s encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus. However, the main thrust of the story involves the hero’s return home to deal with a group of abusive suitors who are trying to force the wife of Ulysses to pick a king, and this segment of the story is much lighter on the fantastic content, and it would be possible to adapt it without any fantastic content whatsoever, especially if you eliminate the roles of the gods and goddesses. This bare-bones version of that part of the story does have a little fantastic content; Penelope has a precognitive dream of Ulysses that makes it appear as if he disappears into thin air at one point, and references are made to the goddesses Calypso and Minerva in the title cards (the latter supposedly stopping time) but not appearing as characters in any capacity. The short mostly deals with the more famous aspects of that part of the story – the tapestry ruse and the bow-bending competition. As such, it’s a passable if uninspired adaptation of that part of the epic, though the actress playing Penelope really chews the scenery. Still, there are other versions of the story preferable to those seeking the fantastic content.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Honeymoon Killers (1969)

THE HONEYMOON KILLERS (1969)
Article 5144 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-30-2016
Directed by Leonard Kastle and Donald Volkman
Featuring Shirley Stoler, Tony Lo Bianco, Mary Jane Higby
Country: USA
What it is: Crime / romance

A lonely, overweight and miserable nurse meets and falls in love with a Spanish man through a lonely hearts club. She discovers he is a gigolo who romances women for their money, but she loves him enough that she decides to stay with him and aid him in his schemes. But she’s a jealous woman, and when pushed, she begins using murder to eliminate her lover’s marks.

Most of my sources do not list this as a horror movie, and though it does to some extent deal with serial killing, it is very marginal in that regard. Plotwise, it’s something of a cross between MONSIEUR VERDOUX and PRETTY POISON, but the emotional center of the movie is a love story; most of the pivotal events in the movie are the result of the characters’ love for each other. Because of that emotional center, you do become somewhat attached to these characters and you care about them, even though they engage in some heinous activities. One of the most interesting aspects about the movie is that the two lovers look nothing like your usual Hollywood love interest, and because of this, you keep expecting that the love will ultimately fail or that someone is merely using the other person. The movie is fascinating, though it isn’t perfect; things get rather slow in the middle of the movie when it spends too much time with the attempt to bilk a somewhat paranoid older woman of her money. The ending is, however, truly memorable, and is one of my favorite parts of the movie. This one is worth catching, even if it remains marginal in a genre sense.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Maudite soit la guerre (1914)

MAUDITE SOIT LA GUERRE (1914)
aka Damned Be War
Article 5143 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-29-2016
Directed by Alfred Machin
Featuring Baert, Suzanne Berni, Fernand Crommelynck
Country: Belgium
What it is: Anti-war movie

A young man goes to another country to become an airplane pilot, and ends up staying with a family there, befriending the son and falling in love with the daughter. When war breaks out between the two countries, he must return home and fight for his country. When he becomes a successful bomber pilot, the son is assigned the task of bringing this enemy down, unaware it is the man he befriended. Things do not end well.

I’m not quite sure exactly what the fantastic content is here, but it might qualify as a prediction of World War I and the use of planes in warfare; the Walt Lee guide says it “anticipates horrors of war”. but the main horrors this one emphasizes are not technological ones but human ones; friends killing friends and people losing those that are dear to them. The story itself is no surprise; a movie with a title like this is not going to have a happy ending, and the plot may be a hair too dependent on coincidence, as the set-up is a little too neat. It also might have been a little more effective if the acting had been a little subtler; it does manage to avoid hamminess, but some of the physical reactions are a little too cliched. Still, the movie is a bit on the mild side; compared of the real horrors that would arise with WWI, this is pretty weak tea, though it certainly does personalize the horror. The print I saw does have some truly excellent hand-coloring, though.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Woodpecker from Mars (1956)

WOODPECKER FROM MARS (1956)
Article 5142 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-27-2016
Directed by Paul J. Smith
Featuring the voices of Del McKennon and Grace Stafford
Country: USA
What it is: Woody Woodpecker cartoon

Woody is mistaken for an extraterrestrial bird and becomes the subject of scientific experiments.

The cartoon slapstick content here is pretty lame and obvious. However, there are points of interest. One is that the cartoon adopts a UPA style of animation that is occasionally quite striking, even though Woody himself seems a little out of place in it. The other is that the cartoon has some interesting satirical aspects, particularly at the beginning when Woody takes part in a juvenile science fiction TV show that is far more interested in hawking products than providing adventure. It’s these other elements that elevate what would otherwise be a very weak cartoon.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

Intro to Genre Overlap

I’ve decided to start a series of posts exploring one of my favorite subjects – the way various movie genres overlap with the three genres that make up what I call “Fantastic Films”, namely –

a) Fantasy

b) Science Fiction

c) Horror

If you’ve spent any time on my site, you’ll notice that most of my reviews are for movies that clearly belong to one of these three genres. Yet, you’ve probably also noticed that there are quite a few reviews of movies which belong to other genres. I’ve covered westerns, mysteries, film noir, jungle movies, action/adventure, sword and sandal…and many others.

In some ways, I’m surprised I covered such a wide swath of movies. Yet, these movies were listed in guides to Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror movies.

These series of articles will discuss the ways these other genres intersect with the Fantastic Films genres. I’ll begin by talking about the history of my project, then some coverage as to what (in my mind) defines the Fantastic Film genres. Then I’ll begin discussing other genres and the ways they intersect.

I hope this will prove an enjoyable discussion.

NEXT ARTICLE: The project, what it is, and how it began.

0 CommentsLeave a comment

The Sleeping Princess (1939)

THE SLEEPING PRINCESS (1939)
Article 5141 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-27-2016
Directed by Burt Gillett
Featuring the voices of Sara Berner and Mel Blanc
Country: USA
What it is: Animated cartoon

When the Fairy of Destiny is not invited to the christening of a new princess, she places a curse on the child that she will fall asleep for a hundred years when she reaches her sixteenth birthday.

In case you haven’t figured it out, this is a cartoon parody of the Sleeping Beauty story. As such, it’s a passable though uninspired take on the subject. It gets most of its comedic content from the antics of the aged fairies and from the reluctance of both the princess and the prince in performing the duties assigned them in the stories; the princess doesn’t want to touch the spinning wheel and the prince is too shy to kiss the princess. Personally, when it comes to comic takes on fairy tales, I prefer the way Jay Ward and friends would turn them on their ears in “Fractured Fairy Tales”; in comparison, cartoons like this seem pretty timid.

0 CommentsLeave a comment