Up From the Depths (1979)

UP FROM THE DEPTHS (1979)
Article 5140 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-26-2016
Directed by Charles B. Griffith
Featuring Sam Bottoms, Susanne Reed, Virgil Frye
Country: USA
What it is: Bottom of the fish barrel

An aquatic man-eating monster threatens people staying at a Hawaiian resort.

There’s a user comment on IMDB from someone claiming to have played a photographer in the movie, and he claims that both the soundtrack and original script were lost at one point, and so the remaining actors tried to redub the movie based on the lip movements on the footage and their memories about what was being said. If this is true, then it goes a long way toward explaining why there seems to be a bizarre and jarring disconnect between action you’re seeing and the words you’re hearing. Granted, even without this problem, this movie would have been fairly weak tea; the special effects are horrid and the humor invariably falls flat. It was directed by Charles B. Griffith, who is most famous for having penned some of Roger Corman’s better movies from the fifties and early sixties. Based on what I see here, he reached his level of incompetence as a director. It almost comes across as a cross between JAWS and CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA, which Griffith penned, although he apparently didn’t pen the script for this one, which is credited to Alfred M. Sweeney, but given that this movie is his sole screen credit, I smell the faint odor of a nom de plume. There’s a couple of interesting plot elements in the movie, but most of it is an incompetent and incomprehensible mess. The best thing about this one is the poster.

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When Mousehood Was in Flower (1953)

WHEN MOUSEHOOD WAS IN FLOWER (1953)
Article 5139 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-25-2016
Directed by Connie Rasinski
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Mighty Mouse cartoon

In days of yore, an impoverished noblemouse is unable to pay the tax on his castle unless his heroes win the jousting tournament. However, the tax collector is the infamous Black Knight, who appears unstoppable. Can Mighty Mouse come to the rescue?

This is Mighty Mouse in full operetta mode, although it does dispense with the serial trappings of some of the others. It’s a fairly routine entry in the series. Having watched several of these fairly recently, I do find myself wishing that the Terrytoons era Mighty Mouse had been given a more elaborate character; as it is, he’s simply a superhero archetype embodied in a tiny animal, and it never really goes beyond the gimmick stage. All the other characters are standard melodrama stereotypes, and so the cartoons primarily have to rely on their gags, which are usually passable but rarely inspired. As a result, the cartoons in this series feel like mechanical regurgitations of the same plot over and over again. But then, we have to remember that many of the cartoons were made for children, who are more inclined to like repetition. For some of us, they get a little monotonous.

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Goons from the Moon (1951)

GOONS FROM THE MOON (1951)
Article 5138 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-24-2016
Directed by Connie Rasinski
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Mighty Mouse Cartoon

A planet of outer space cats invades the mouse city of Terrytown and begins kidnapping all its residents. Can Mighty Mouse save the day?

Technically, the goons aren’t from the moon; they’re from some unnamed other planet and a gag at the end involving the moon makes that clear. That being said, this is one of the more energetic and ambitious Mighty Mouse cartoons from this era. It moves fast, the gags are decent, and they even have a bit of “out of the inkwell” fun because Mighty Mouse has to get drawn before he can come to the rescue. Mighty Mouse sings one line in operetta style, but this isn’t one of those cartoons; other than the reports of a radio journalist, there’s very little talk and mostly comic action. Mighty Mouse is very powerful here; he can even move planets if he needs to. I consider this one one of the more entertaining entries in the series.

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Prettykill (1987)

PRETTYKILL (1987)
Article 5137 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-23-2016
Directed by George Kaczender
Featuring David Birney, Season Hubley, Suzanne Snyder
Country: Canada / USA
What it is: How can I say? The movie itself doesn’t know.

A detective frets about cracking a drug dealing case. His girlfriend is a madam who employs a new woman whose sanity is questionable. Someone is killing prostitutes. Viewer goes “Huh?”

The theme song running over the ending credits features this lyric – “A thousand pieces in my mind, but no center can I find.” And that is one of the most striking examples of a movie supplying its own review that I’ve ever seen. The movie has no center. It has plot elements and incidents which somehow interact with each other, but none of the interaction seems meaningful. If it’s a drama, it has no focus; is it about the policeman’s frustration with official procedure, the prostitute’s struggle with her mental condition, or about the madam’s attempts to come to terms with her own profession? If it’s a thriller about a psycho killer, why doesn’t it try to build a modicum of suspense rather than meandering all over creation? It’s impossible to say. All I will say is that Suzanne Snyder (as the dual-personality prostitute) gives a performance of awesome ineptitude, and I almost hate to say it because she’s obviously putting everything she can into the performance; it just hits wrong notes at every step of the way. Nevertheless, it’s about the only thing likely to be remembered in this muddled mess of a movie.

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This Stuff’ll Kill Ya! (1971)

THIS STUFF’LL KILL YA! (1971)
aka The Devil Wears Clodhoppers
Article 5136 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-22-2016
Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
Featuring Jeffrey Allen, Tim Holt, Gloria King
Country: USA
What it is: Moonshiners versus revenuers.

A moonshiner posing as a preacher has to deal with the problems of his trade.

Talk is cheap, and so is Herschell Gordon Lewis. This is just my way of saying that there’s a reason Lewis is known as the “Godfather of Gore” rather than the “Dean of Dialogue”. At least in his gore movies he has something to catch the attention; in this movie, though there are a couple of smidgens of gore (and a serial killer subplot to add what little fantastic content there is to the mix), the emphasis is mostly on long-winded talking, and when it comes to writing dialogue, Lewis has the same ability as Jerry Warren, in that he knows how to write a dialogue scene that will cause you to zone out twenty seconds after it begins because you know nothing of interest is going to be said. Furthermore, the bad sound (par for the course for Lewis) just makes it worse. It certainly doesn’t help that it’s one of those movies with only the barest thread of a plot; it just makes you realize that even if you try to follow the dialogue, it probably won’t lead you anywhere. The end result is one of Lewis’s dullest stretches of celluloid. No, it won’t kill ya, but it may just put you into a deep sleep.

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The Young Rajah (1923)

THE YOUNG RAJAH (1922)
Article 5135 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-21-2016
Directed by Phil Rosen
Featuring Rudolph Valentino, Wanda Hawley, Pat Moore
Country: USA
What it is: Exotic romance

In India, when a usurper takes over the throne, the young prince is rescued, given the gift of precognition, and is adopted by Americans. Once grown, he romances a woman, but the usurper discovers that the prince still lives, and wants him killed.

Of course it’s an exotic romance; look at the lead actor. This movie was considered lost for many years, but the final three reels and a few fragments were unearthed, and a reconstruction of the film using stills to fill in the missing footage was put together; I’m sure the original film ran longer than the 52 minute version I saw. The precognition is the primary fantastic content, and much of it is peppered with Indian mysticism as well. The precognition is used to enhance one of the themes of the movie, which is destiny; the movie plays with the idea that our fates are not in our own hands. In its present form, it’s moderately entertaining, but because it’s at least partially a stills reconstruction, it does feel a bit distant. Those who are primarily interested in the exotic action of the story will have to wait a bit; most of the action is centered on the American romance.

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Bad Bill Bunion (1945)

BAD BILL BUNION (1945)
aka Mighty Mouse Meets Bad Bill Bunion
Article 5134 By Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-19-2016
Directed by Mannie Davis
Voice cast unknown
Country: USA
What it is: Mighty Mouse cartoon

Mighty Mouse goes out west to take on the desperado, Bad Bill Bunion, whose latest scheme is to kidnap a saloon singer named Belle.

As far as quality goes, I found this one to be a little below average for the series; most of the gags are pretty lame. The best one has the saloon singer warbling “Belle of the Golden West”, and then making bell sounds with her hoop skirt while swinging from a tree limb. That being said, I do have a few observations about this one. The first is that there doesn’t seem to be a consistent mythology for Mighty Mouse; here he lives in a skyscraper penthouse, is informed of his tasks through a TV set, and spends the entire cartoon interacting with human beings where he usually interacts with anthropomorphized cats and mice. This is also one of the non-operetta cartoons. Second, there seems to be some inconsistency with how his size is portrayed. When he enters the skyscraper, he looks roughly the size of an average human being, and when he first shares the frame with Big Bill Bunion, they look roughly the same size. However, when they get to one-on-one battling, he’s much smaller. One last detail is that there’s the possibility that I have the wrong cartoon; there’s a user comment on IMDB which describes a totally different cartoon, but since Bad Bill Bunion starts that one in prison, I suspect there was a sequel made. It is a bit of a shame I didn’t see that one, though; it has cameos of both Dracula and the Frankenstein monster.

NOTE I have since discovered that I did have the correct cartoon here.

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The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan (1979)

THE TWO WORLDS OF JENNIE LOGAN (1979)
Article 5133 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-19-2016
Directed by Frank De Felitta
Featuring Lindsay Wagner, Marc Singer, Alan Feinstein
Country: USA
What it is: Romantic time-travel TV-Movie

A housewife having trouble dealing with her husband’s episode of infidelity moves into an old house and discovers a dress that takes her back in time, where she falls in love with an artist that she knows to be doomed.

For those who have read my review of SOMEWHERE IN TIME, you already know that I’m not particularly keen on the “time travel romance” subgenre. Well, here’s another one, and I really don’t have much use for this one, either. It does, however, make me appreciate the elegant way that SOMEWHERE IN TIME used its fairy dust to make the story work; here the fairy dust (a magic dress that takes the heroine back in time) seems downright mundane. Still, I can’t fault the acting here, especially from Lindsay Wagner, who does an excellent job as a woman whose marriage is troubled. I find the script itself rather uneven, especially in the second half, where the action often gets mired in arguments about whether the heroine is really travelling in time or whether she’s crazy. It does appear to mine its romantic ore competently, at least based on some of the IMDB comments which show that the movie is fondly remembered. Those who do have that romantic streak will appreciate this one best.

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The Man in the Back Seat (1961)

THE MAN IN THE BACK SEAT (1961)
Article 5132 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-18-2016
Directed by Vernon Sewell
Featuring Derren Nesbitt, Keith Faulkner, Carol White
Country: UK
What it is: Crime thriller

Two criminals attempt to rob a bookie, only to discover that his money is in a bag that is chained to his wrist. They steal the bookie’s car, stash him in the back seat, and try to find a way to get the money off of him and then figure out what to do with the body. Things don’t go well.

There’s something to be said about efficiency. This movie runs only 57 minutes, and it manages to fit enough plot to fill twenty minutes in another movie into the first five minutes here, and it maintains that same tense pace throughout. It is also one of those movies that hovers on the edge of being a black comedy; all it would take is a slight change of tone to underscore the fact that what happens to the two would-be thieves is a series of unlikely and somewhat comic coincidences; these two are almost cursed. As it is, the strong script, the tight direction, and the solid acting really make this a memorable crime thriller. However, I’m going to have to remain silent on the nature of the fantastic content in the movie, but I will say this much; it exists (though it may be a psychological manifestation), and it doesn’t come into play until the very end of the movie.

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The Tower (1985)

THE TOWER (1985)
Article 5131 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 4-17-2016
Directed by Jim Makichuk
Featuring George West, Ray Paisley, Jackie Wray
Country: Canada
What it is: Thriller, Canadian TV-Movie style

A skyscraper is built with a new special energy system that draws from the heat of the human beings inside. However, the computer that controls the energy decides that it can derive more energy from its sources if it consumes them completely…

I like the basic premise of this movie, and the basic story would make for a nifty little thriller. But this movie has problems, and though I’m tempted to blame them on the low-budget of the movie, I don’t think that’s the real problem. One major problem is that much of the acting is way below par; there are numerous bad line readings and examples of poor character interaction. However, the main problem is a combination of two factors; slow pacing and a poorly constructed script. These are forgivable during the first two-thirds of the movie; you expect the opening exposition to be a bit on the slow side, and the middle section of the movie does a decent job of setting up the tension necessary for the final third. However, when we get to that final third, the movie inexplicably slows to a crawl, with endless scenes of people walking around and dull conversation sequences that should have been earlier in the movie if not cut altogether. The movie runs an hour and 42 minutes, and a good half hour could have been cut easily. The end result is a movie that could have been much better.

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