Hey, that’s how you get back to doing single movie reviews – become outlandishly busy in all other aspects of your life!
Normal movie-watching and writing time has gotten usurped by the Numerous Jobs and the utterly bizarre circumstance of having a son who is preparing to go to college (pause for look of shocked incomprehension). This has meant, oddly enough, forsaking my usual practice of delaying income tax preparation until the last possible day so I can do it all in a rush while shooting the finger at the government (“I hope they can see this because I’m doing it really hard“). This is because the paperwork is needed for financial aid. While I can’t say doing it without the ongoing reek of desperation and looming deadline was exactly pleasant, it wasn’t all that horrible. It was made much more tolerable by the gift of new music by pal Tim Lehnerer, in fact.
Taking two days to do it rather than one ugly bloc was good, too. But that was two days gone.
Anyway, after finishing them, I wanted something as freaking far away from 2015 and taxes as was possible, and something reasonably short, as it was late in the evening, and the shorter work week after President’s Day (the Day Job is at a state college, after all) means longer hours than usual.
…or not.
So, hello to Dark Eyes of London, which I guess is far too fanciful and poetic for us Yanks, so we call it The Human Monster.
Inspector Holt (Hugh Williams) of Scotland Yard is dealing with a spate of apparently accidental drownings in the river Thames. Meantime, the philanthropic Doctor Orloff (Bela Lugosi) is lending money to Stuart, a down-on-his luck inventor, until his new invention is picked up by the government. Orloff sings the praises of philanthropy, especially his work with the Home for the Blind run by the Reverend Dearborn, who is himself blind.
It should be noted that Orloff’s philanthropy extends to paying for Stuart’s life insurance policy, as security for the loan. After Stuart promises to visit Dearborn’s Home to do some philanthropy of his own, Orloff does other odd things, like type out a message in braille to throw at the blind violinist playing outside his office.
At Dearborn’s center, one of the blind men is a brutish fellow named Jake, and if we’ve learned anything from the movies, it’s that doctors named Orloff with brutish blind henchmen cannot be trusted. Orloff is, in fact, insuring men and luring them into the Home for the Blind, where Jake drowns them in a iron tub and then throws them out a window into the Thames.
Holt is going to slowly grow wise to this scheme, even if he is saddled with O’Reilly, a wise-cracking cop from Chicago (Edmon Ryan), who escorted comedy-relief forger Grogan (Alexander Field) back into custody. As there is only one evil scheme afoot in England at any one time, Grogan is naturally involved in Orloff’s, forging dead men’s signatures. Balancing out O’Reilly’s involvement is Stuart’s daughter Diana (Gloria Gynt), a plucky lass who goes undercover as Dearborn’s secretary to aid Holt in his investigation.
This is based on popular novelist Edgar Wallace’s The Dark Eyes of London, and it is, at its heart, a cracking good pulp story. Wallace was one of the first crime novelists to use policemen as protagonists instead of amateur sleuths, and watching Holt piece clues together (aided by the proficient specialists of the Yard) is great fun. The comic relief is actually pretty amusing, and the crimes suitably horrific.
In 1939, Lugosi’s star was beginning to wane, but he was still capable of powerful performances. Orloff should be ranked among his best, a character equally as cold-blooded as Murder Legendre, but also convincing in his portrayal as a concerned champion of the downtrodden. Lugosi is really chilling as he goes about his murderous business – that title is well fulfilled by the movie’s end.
I guessed the big twist of the mystery only about a minute before the reveal, but I have to admit that the story relied so much on my understanding of Lugosi and his career that I have to admire the trickery here. I don’t mind playing the sap when I’m played so well.
Man, the publicity photos really liked Gloria Gynt in that straitjacket.
The Human Monster was a nice distraction after a weekend of pain, both physical and emotional. I went in expecting old school claptrap and was actually rewarded with a nice little thriller that is a bit repetitious, but also pretty chilling. It’s the first movie that Britain released with the “H” rating – for “Horror” – and it actually earned that. Not just in ’39, but here in the more brutal 21st century, it still has moments with the power to make you shiver.
I can say that I’m going to stop doing multiple movies in each post, and I will have to admit that I am lying. To accomplish this I would have to A) Write more often; or B) Watch fewer movies. Neither is likely. My berserk schedule does not allow that much flexibility, and February has turned into a month of burdensome obligations. But never mind that:
Once Upon A Time in America (1984)
For instance: I’m not sure how long the average post takes me to write; six to eight hours sounds about right, unless I’m talking about my favorite movie, and then it takes more like two weeks. Now consider that in the time it took to watch Once Upon a Time in America, I could have written two-thirds of this column. Of course, watching the movie is what this is all about, so that’s a specious comparison, but I am here to say that at four hours and eleven minutes, this is not a short movie.
Nor should long movies frighten us; in the right hands, they yield amazing dividends. The only slightly shorter Andrei Rublev is an incredible experience, but it also has the allure of the exotic going for it, being set in medieval Russia, whereas Once Upon a Time rests in somewhat more familiar territory, with the early 20th century providing a taste of antiquity, but only a taste. It’s the story of four Jewish kids growing up in New York and working their way into the Underworld, eventually becoming big time bootleggers during Prohibition. By that time the kids have grown up into Robert DeNiro, James Woods, William Forsythe and James Hayden. Elizabeth McGovern, Tuesday Weld, Larry Rapp and Darlanne Fluegel round out the core cast.
The movie starts with DeNiro’s character, Noodles, on the run for snitching on Woods’ character Max (and its consequent bloodbath), and finding that a million dollars he had stashed away is mysteriously missing. The movie is going to flash forward to 1968 and then back to the 1900s, throughout Noodles’ life as he attempts to put together exactly what happened, and taking the audience along with him. Somebody tracked him down in his new life and is leaving clues for him to pick up. If the biographical parts don’t interest you – and they will – the central mystery will certainly keep you hooked as the movie progresses.
There are a lot of people that are going to argue that Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is his crowning achievement, and I would have held out for Once Upon a Time in the West, but that was before I saw Once Upon a Time in America. It’s quite possible that anyone who lobbies actively for the first two had only seen the truncated theatrical cut, slashed down to two hours and twenty minutes – almost half its running time! – a cut that Treat Williams (playing an idealistic Union boss who turns to the dark side) claimed couldn’t possibly make any sense. The version I saw had footage spliced in that was obviously from the cutting room floor, lacking the shine and gloss of finished product, and at least one lengthy scene has such an essential plot point that I was amazed it was cut. A filmgoer who had paid attention up to that point could have filled in the details later… but I’m finding more and more that filmgoers that pay attention are rare animals.
Leone had reportedly been offered The Godfather and turned it down, to his regret. There is a lot of the epic flashback stuff in Godfather 2 that is an obvious influence here, but Leone’s recreations of early 20th century New York are breathtaking. This is a four hour movie that only felt like three hours. It’s the longest movie on this year’s List, and I glad it’s out of the way, but I’m also very, very glad I saw it.
Yeah, it was with a little sarcasm that I followed up with Little Caesar, going so much in the opposite direction that it was absurd. The movie gives us the rise and fall of a crime kingpin in a slim 80 minutes. It may go by faster, but it also seems much slighter, certainly far less dense.
Edward G. Robinson delivers a star-making performance as Rico, who starts out the movie sticking up a gas station, but deciding to head to the Big City because he’s made for bigger stuff, see? Going along with him is his partner, Joe (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) who sees the City as his big chance to become a dancer. Rico signs onto a mob easy enough, even though the boss (Stanley Fields) is a little concerned about Rico’s willingness to use his gun.
Joe does get a job as a dancer at a night club (it was a different time, I tells ya), and slowly removes himself from Rico’s sphere. Rico does stage a hold-up at the nightclub, and winds up shooting a local Commissioner. After that, his rise to the top of the Underworld begins, and it is as meteoric as his fall, precipitated when he tries to force Joe back into his gang, and Joe’s lover convinces him to turn state’s evidence against Rico. His loyalty to Rico is, shall we say, bruised when Rico tries to kill him, but can’t bring himself to pull the trigger.
Rico will end up hiding out in a flophouse, but is roused to action by the head cop who’s been dogging him all movie long starts insulting him in the papers, leading up to a shootout and those famous words, “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”
It all feels very 1931, if you catch my drift. Stilted and somewhat mannered, even given the subject matter. Sources are conflicted as to whether or not Rico is based on Al Capone or Salvatore “Sam” Cardinella, another violent Chicago mobster, but that doesn’t really matter. From this comes The Public Enemy, Scarface and any number of other gangster movies – but the real reason to watch is Edward G. Robinson. Robinson was a serious student of drama, and watching him act is always an unalloyed pleasure. He’s probably one of the finest character actors of the 20th century, and that he’s unrealized as such, and is instead relegated to the ranks of cartoon characters, ending every sentence with a “nyah!” is the true crime here.
In the spirit of due diligence, I should reveal that I entered in a contest in December, sponsored by Classic Movie Hub and Kino-Lorber. I won the first week, and the prize was my choice of eight Kino-Lorber blu-ray titles. They were all tempting (and more than a few I have purchased in the meantime) but the only one I had never seen was The Mask, though it had haunted most of my adult life when it was the cover for RESearch magazine’s Incredibly Strange Films issue.
The Mask is notable for several reasons. First, a somewhat novel use of 3-D, especially considering that cinematic craze was over by 1955 and The Revenge of the Creature. It is also the second film by Julian Roffman, who almost single-handedly jump-started the Canadian feature film industry. It was felt that a horror movie like The Mask would be more successful commercially than his first effort, a crime film called The Bloody Brood, starring Peter Falk.
Psychiatrist Allan Barnes (Paul Stevens) has a particularly distraught patient in Michael Radin (Martin Lavut), a young archaeologist who’s been having nightmares and blackouts. Radin feels it is somehow the fault of a strange South American ritual mask he discovered recently; he claims it is exerting an unholy, murderous power over him.
Barnes dismisses Radin’s fears, because unlike us, he did not watch the beginning of the movie where Radin pursued and strangled a young lady. Even more distraught, Radin leaves the office, mails the mask to Barnes, and blows his brains out.
So Barnes finds himself in possession of what his deceased patient claimed had taken over and ruined his life, and like any curious person in the same room with the Necronomicon, he just has to have a look. The ominous voice in the soundtrack intoning “Put the mask on… NOW!!!” probably wasn’t helping, either.
This is the point at which theater-goers were supposed to put on their own mask, ie., the red/green glasses that made 3D work in those days. Barnes finds out that wearing the mask immediately results in a bad LSD trip, full of horrifying and bizarre imagery. He also feels himself compelled to wear the mask over and over, as he slowly succumbs to the same paranoia and murderous delusions as his patient.
Now the first thing one is going to ask (particularly if “one” is me) is – so how are the bad acid trip images? And the answer is pretty darn good, actually. Roffman had gone so far as to consult avant-garde artists in the design of these sequences (ironically, he abandoned their concepts as too unrealistic, especially on his budget) and employ groundbreaking electronic music. These parts are refreshingly forward-thinking. The images are strange and actually unnerving, aided immeasurably by the fact that Roffman uses his 3D very constructively, even when things aren’t flying out or reaching toward you from the screen. Objects in the foreground and the background provide nice parallax scrolling, for instance. The Kino-Lorber blu-ray, in association with the 3-D Film Archive, is sharp and flawless and produced for people with 3-D players and TVs, neither of which apply to me. The trip sequences are supplied in red/blue anaglyph as an extra, but, alas, not as a part of the 2-D presentation. The anaglyph presentation is really strong, as well – but you’ll need to provide your own glasses.
Sad as this is, it does force the poorer viewers among us (like me) to judge The Mask on its own merits. It has a reputation as being slow-moving, but hey, welcome to low-budget genre films in the 50s and 60s. Most people watching The Mask came to see the 3D sequences, and under those circumstances, anything not mask-related is doing to be greeted with impatience. Bereft of that gimmick, we can see The Mask as it really is: sightly clunky, repetitious and padded, but no less so than a lot of its contemporaries. And those mask sequences, appearing at roughly a half hour, 45 minutes, and then ten minutes before the end – are really something. I’m unsure of the disc authoring voodoo necessary to make such things happen, but I really wish they could have used the branching capabilities of the technology to make a 2-D/anaglyph viewing of the movie possible, just like in the theaters.
This was getting quite a bit of buzz at the end of the year, and the premise is pretty unique, so I knew I was going to have to watch it, even if just for the cast. And man, what a cast; I am going to single out casting director Matthew Maisto right here for some lavish praise.
Because right at the beginning, we meet two cut-throat western bandits (literally – the very first image of the movie is a man getting his throat cut) played by Sid Haig and David Arquette. And dammit, any movie that starts out with Sid Haig is okay in my book. Not that these guys are going to last long – while vamoosing because they hear horses approaching, they blunder through what is obviously an Indian burial ground of some sort, and before you know it, Sid is festooned with arrows.
But having had our nerves jangled, let’s go over to the little frontier town of Bright Hope several days later, where cattle boss Arthur (Patrick Wilson!) is recovering from a broken leg. His wife Samantha (Lili Simmons) is the backup for the local drunken doctor (luckily for Arthur) and she is called to the jail one night to tend a drifter who got into an altercation with Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell!), and got shot in the leg. That drifter is David Arquette, so we’re pretty sure something bad is in the offing.
The next morning a local stable boy is dead and disemboweled, the horses he was tending are missing, and so is the drifter, the Deputy, and Samantha. The local educated Indian, the Professor (Zahn McClarnon) identifies the unique bone-tipped arrow left behind as belonging to “The Trogylodytes”, a tribe the other tribes leave strictly alone because they don’t want to die. He points the way to a series of canyons where the Trogs make their home, and a sadly small party of Hunt, Arthur, a dandified Indian fighter named Brooder (Matthew Fox!) and the “backup deputy” Chicory (Richard Jenkins!) set out to rescue their townsfolk.
This core ensemble works so incredibly well together that I yearned for more adventures with them. Matthew Fox’s appropriately-named Brooder is a fun departure for him, but the real revelation is Richard Jenkins as Bone Tomahawk‘s Walter Brennan character. Unrecognizable in the role, Jenkins very easily steals the show from the other three, and that is no small accomplishment. It wasn’t until almost halfway through the movie I realized who he was!
Patrick Wilson’s Arthur has been given an interesting obstacle for his character to overcome: that broken leg. No devil from hell is going to stop him from rescuing his wife, but the constant re-injuring and threat of gangrene puts a particular edge to his struggle.
Oh, and the Trogylodytes, it turns out, are cannibals, so in the last half-hour it turns into an Ruggero Deodato movie. There’s a reason I can’t expect to see more movies with those four characters.
(To return to the cast once more, I should mention that among the citizens of Bright Hope can be seen – briefly – James Tolkan, Sean Young and Michael Parê. Good work, Mr. Maisto!)
This is S. Craig Zahler’s first movie as a director (and his second as screenwriter) and it does nothing but make you hungry for the next one. The dialogue is so damned good, the characters so well-delineated, that the movie was a genuine pleasure to discover.
Also, if the Universe could continue to cough up two new westerns a year starring Kurt Russell (and maybe Sid Haig, too), I would be very appreciative.
So why not finish up with another story of savages? Or more appropriately, I started with the longest movie on the list, I might as well finish up with the shortest, at only 44 minutes.
Zero for Conduct is about four boys in a repressive boarding school, their lives little better than that of prisoners, who cook up an act of rebellion during the school’s annual celebration of its very existence. This is Jean Vigo’s third film – he only made four – and it was thought so scandalous and subversive that the French censor banned it until 1947. Vigo himself was quite the anarchist, and it shows in his movies to this point, a mixture of irreverence and surrealism. The new schoolteacher, Hugeut (Jean Dasté), little more than a boy himself, draws a caricature of a fellow teacher that animates itself; the dominating headmaster is a bearded midget (Delphin), and in the annual celebration, the grandstand full of dignitaries is quite obviously a bunch of literal dummies.
Zero is tagged as influential, with many descendants like The 400 Blows quoting it. There is at least one sequence of thrilling, otherworldly beauty; possibly the first “shit” ever uttered in a French film (twice), and, sadly, the feeling that this might be a longer project trimmed down due to time and money. In any case, certainly worth a watch, definitely since I’ll soon be watching Vigo’s final film, L’Atalante.
“When you do an A-Z horror movie challenge, you’re likely going to end up with zombies.”
– Tim Lehnerer, probably
Well, this is about the most blatant personification of that statement, isn’t it? No second word, no number, no nothing. Just: ZOMBIE.
Yeah, I’ll stop you right there, because you’re about to inform poor ignorant me that this actually does have a number, it’s really called Zombie 2 because it was a sequel to Dawn of the Dead which was a big hit in Europe but it was called Zombie there and shouldn’t you know more about horror movies before you try writing about them?
Listen, troll (I would have to reply), if you were paying attention you would know that the movie is called Zombi 2 (no final e) and for some reason Zombies 2 in the international trailers and it was never a sequel to Dawn of the Dead and was, in fact, written several months before Dawn‘s European release but that was some nice low-hanging publicity fruit, wasn’t it, especially since this production company had a better lawyer than Dario Argento, and thus was paved the way for Zombie numbers 3-8 and every other crap Italian zombie film throughout eternity.
So there. Troll.
I saw Zombie in probably semi-ideal circumstances for me, which is to say I saw it on a double bill with Blood Beach at a drive-in on a warm Texas night (Zombie kept cropping up at drive-ins with different dance partners for several years). That was 35 years ago, and it was with some interest I put the Blue Underground blu-ray into the player for a return bout. (Movie Challenges like this are largely about making me watch movies I haven’t seen, but I do make an exception for anything I haven’t seen in 20 years, like The Quatermass Xperiment. Zombie definitely qualified.)
So stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an apparently abandoned sailing ship drifts into New York Harbor, causing all sorts of traffic problems until the harbor patrol boards it and finds a) rotting food, b) a chewed-up hand, c) the fattest zombie you have ever seen. (Guillermo del Toro: “You just know he ate everybody else on the boat.”) After biting out one cop’s throat, Tubby is shot several times and falls into the bay.
These are the circumstances that bring together Anne (Tisa Farrow), the daughter of the owner of that boat, and Peter (Ian McCulloch), a reporter. They have a meet cute while searching the boat under the nose of a police guard, during which Peter finds an undelivered letter from Anne’s father, who is dying of some terrible disease on a Caribbean island called Matool.
Flying to St. Thomas, the only boat they can find to take them to Matool – “a cursed island” – are working vacationers Brian and Susan (Al Cliver and Auretta Gay) who are spending two months sailing the islands and doing underwater photography. This will become significant when Susan goes scuba diving to get the day’s pics within sight of Matool and runs into an underwater zombie, who, in one of the movie’s signature scenes, has a fistfight with a shark, and loses that fist.
(One of the many interesting factoids on the disc’s extras is the Underwater Zombie and “Shark Trainer” is Ramón Bravo, an underwater photographer of no small repute, best known for Tinterero!)
So our four “Americans” make it to Matool but bend their propeller, meaning Brian and Susan can’t dump Anne and Peter there, as was their original intent. They meet up with the island’s physician, Doctor Menard (Richard Johnson) who is not only fighting some sort of plague, but is also trying to find a scientific explanation for the zombies that have been cropping up lately. One of the few island natives that has stayed faithful to the doctor (Dakar) fills us in that a new witch doctor has been getting everybody worked up, and they all gone to the island’s interior to bang on drums and wake the dead.
Which is all the explanation you’re going to get, so just ride with it. That’s okay, we came to see a movie whose poster was some rotten corpse with worms in its eyes and the slogan WE ARE GOING TO EAT YOU, and it has to be admitted that the movie in its last half gets down to that business with gusto.
This is generally pointed to as director Lucio Fulci’s first horror movie (if you don’t count some highly-regarded gialli). His output to this point had been all over the genre map, but this one pretty much locked him into the creepshow stuff for the 80s and 90s. Now what surprised me in this re-visit so many years later is how well-made this movie is. That projector trying to cut through the humid Texas night air and subsequent VHS releases in pan-and-scan did Zombie absolutely no favors. Fulci knows where to put his camera and how to get bang for his comparatively few bucks on the screen, and the blu-ray is an absolute revelation in that regard.
The low budget also necessitates a different look to the zombies, which helps the movie achieve its own identity. A reliance on clay instead of latex actually helps these revenants look like they just clawed their way out of the ground.
I bet you thought I was going to talk about the splinter-through-the-eyeball scene (damage to eyeballs seems a particular motif for Fulci). Everybody talks about the splinter-through-the-eyeball scene. It’s still grueling, even when you know it’s coming, but another factoid dropped was Zombie played in Italy with an intermission, as was the custom, and I had forgotten the splinter-through-the-eyeball happens at the halfway point. Think about that being what you took out into the lobby with you.
They probably didn’t sell much gelato during that intermission.
Another thing which helped immensely with this re-visit: being able to turn on the original Italian language track with English subtitles. Fulci’s movies have had some of the worst English dub tracks I have ever had to endure, and subconsciously that drags down the perceived quality of the movie.
When I logged my re-watch of Zombie on Letterboxd, I knew that I had entered it earlier in my relationship with the site, but it was amusing to see that when I did so, I had rated the movie four stars out of five; I stand by that rating, but I don’t remember holding it in such high regard (due to washed-out projection and VHS dubs). So it is satisfying in that way that you see an old friend for the first time in years, and you say, “You look great!” and mean it.
I know what you’re saying. You’re saying “That doesn’t begin with a Y.”
Shut the hell up, I explain.
Do you know how many horror movies start with the letter Y? How many movies, period? Not a whole hell of a lot, that’s how many. I just watched Xtro 3 because the letter X has the same damned problem and I am out for blood. Do not cross me.
The subject was brought up as we were planning this expanded Hubrisween, and the guru Tim Lehnerer came up with the Blank Scrabble Tile rule. There are two possibilities, currently: If you cannot find a movie with a troublesome initial, you can use the letter to either side of it (X and Z, riiiiight); or: you can substitute a title that begins with an actual number.
I’LL TAKE THAT.
So here we are in the tiny city of Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in America. So northern they go through a night thirty days long, just like in the title. Its population dwindles by two-thirds during that month; not everybody can take that much dark.
This time around, there’s a few problems. Sheriff Eben Oleson’s (Josh Hartnett) estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) misses her plane and is stuck there, for instance. There’s trouble with the phones. There’s also a stranger in town, and it turns out he ‘s trashed the local helicopter. And killed all the sled dogs.
Oh, and there’s a pack of vampires following him.
So what we have here, in a way, is yet another zombie siege film, with the added complication that the undead are intelligent, smart and vicious. Not having to worry about sleeping during daylight hours, the vampires massacre most of the remaining town openly, until we are down to a small band of survivors who keep moving from location to location as their numbers dwindle due to one misadventure or another.
So right there we have one of the major reasons I put off seeing this; if you’ve been here any length of time you know about my ten-year moratorium on zombie movies. What is not as common knowledge is there was a similar moratorium earlier, on vampire movies. Not all of you may be old enough to remember the glut of bloodsucker flicks in the 90s, but it takes quite a few of any sort of movie for me to say “Alright, jeez, enough” and there were quite. A. Few.
That being said: 30 Days of Night has a good concept, and is well-made. The vampires are cool, animalistic yet speaking their own language. There is a third act twist which is unexpected and welcome.
So why don’t I like it?
The aforementioned mixture of zombie and vampire movies, I suspect. The lapses in logic that seem almost inevitable in a horror movie, but are they? Really? (These are some pretty wasteful vampires. Horrific as the slaughter is, why so many at one time, when you have a month ahead of you? Then other survivors keep cropping up as the 30 days wear on, just because we need a complication or a reason for our protagonists to endanger themselves) I wasn’t in the mood for a vampire Diary of Anne Frank (the survivors leave that attic hideout before too long, anyway). I kind of like my horror movies to cash in at the hour and a half mark. This one is close to two hours.
None of these are, in and of themselves, enough to kill a movie for me, and I suspect that had I not seen 30 Days of Night at the very end of a month of watching horror movies, I might have been a little more kindly disposed toward it – but only a little. As it is, I don’t find it terrible, I just don’t find it exceptional enough to excite me in any way. It did all right without my support, though, spawning at least one sequel, so I’ll leave it here with a sort of a shrug. This situation reminds me of Stakeland, which is another movie that should be completely in my wheelhouse, and yet I just don’t care for it. Your mileage may vary, this movie may press all the necessary buttons for you, and that’s cool.
But oh my God am I ready to watch something non-horror related.
This is an open call for filmmakers everywhere to make more movies starting with the letter X. The reason why should be clear: here I am watching goddamn Xtro 3.
Back during another A-Z challenge (off-season, as it were), I watched the original Xtro. I didn’t care for it, but it did have some creative ideas that set it apart from other cash-in-on-E.T. movies. Last year I watched Xtro 2, which was remarkable only for the number of movies it managed to rip off. So here we are, this year, with the inevitability of a doomed character trapped in a hidebound franchise, with Xtro 3: Watch the Skies.
The first thing you need to know is that a spaceship crashed on Earth in 1955 in a welter of poor video-generated effects. This was covered up by the government, because that is what they do. This is relayed in a tongue-and-cheek 50s newsreel that wants to be cuter than it is.
“Oh, yeah. These are Marines, all right.”
In the present of 1995, a man meets with a reporter in a low-rent motel, and he tells her the tale that will grind away our next 90 minutes. He is Marine demolitions expert Kirn (Sal Landi), who receives orders from his commander (Robert Culp, who hopefully made his mortgage payment off this) to head up a hand-picked crew that will go to an island 200 miles off the coast to blow up some leftover WWII ordnance so an airfield can be built there. This is fine with Kirn, as he wants to “get out of the classroom”, but he recognizes the “hand-picked crew” from his classes; they are all losers, discipline problems, and “borderline psychos”.
You might immediately suspect that all these soldiers might as well have EXPENDABLE stamped on their dogtags, and you will proven right when the guy in charge of the operations shows up, a beret-bedecked spook named Fetterman (Andrew Divoff), who tells the crew that there was also an internment camp there, so any documents they might find are classified and should be taken directly to him.
“Did the check clear? Okay, you got 30 more minutes.”
You are now going Hmmmm enough that you might as well be humming a happy song culled from other movies you have seen. One detonated bomb uncovers a concrete structure. In the course of the movie, we will find out that this is where the gummint brought the spaceship, and the two aliens inside. They vivisected one alien in full view of the other, and the remaining alien got pissed off, broke out, and proceeded to slaughter everybody. The authorities had to wait until it went back into the ship and poured concrete around it to trap it. Or so the one wild man who’s been on the island for 40 years tells in a moment of lucidity.
Well, now that one stoned soldier blew a hole in the structure, the alien is loose again, and quite possibly insane, as it seems to want to constantly re-enact the vivisection of its (presumed) mate on whoever is unlucky enough to be around.
Once the spook splits with the boat after the spaceship is uncovered, our crew has to survive the alien, then the bombing run that the spook sends to kill them, and then the kill team the spook himself leads to off any survivors. Trouble is, the spook doesn’t really know about the alien…
This all sounds like a pretty good movie, and it’s certainly better than Xtro 2. It almost succeeds in forging its own identity, but then director Harry Bromley Davenport (who directed all three of these) still has to go to the rip-off well again. The Alien can camouflage itself like the Predator. And a healthy dose of exposition is delivered by an Alien Autopsy style film reel kept by that survivor (luckily, he also kept the movie projector in good working order).
“Is the movie over yet?” “No.” “Please shoot me.”
So much of Xtro 3 is poorly thought out or executed that you feel bad about it constantly shooting itself in the foot. Was the alien also trapped in the concrete, or just the ship? I can accept the characters being confused on that point, but that concrete structure is large and square – an explosion big enough to uncover it would do more than blow a hole in a corner. And accepting that our two Marines just didn’t notice a square bunker in a bunch of rock outcroppings is a bit much to handle, even if one of them is supposedly stoned to the gills.
Sequences that should be nerve-wracking are hampered by insane logic whose only purpose is to draw out the running time. And yes, this is another instance of my constantly tracking the time remaining as I watched. Even the Alien is given to the same fitful treatment; there are times it looks remarkably alive, and menacing; most of the time however, it looks and moves exactly like the puppet it is.
As I said: it is at least better than Xtro 2, but that was a bar set so low, it was resting on the ground.
I always like to slip a Hong Kong horror movie into these proceedings, but rarely do they match up with a space in the alphabet that needs filling. But lookie here, there’s a disc I’ve owned for a number of years but never watched, and it starts with a V: Vampire vs Vampire. Don’t bother looking for it on Amazon.
This is not as I expected, the fourth movie in the Mr. Vampire series, though it carries over a ton of characters from the first movie. If you haven’t seen Mr. Vampire, that is something you need to remedy, and soon. Lam Ching-ying is The One-Eyebrow Priest, a Taoist master who always has to intervene when supernatural creatures start causing trouble. He has two comical apprentices, the elder of which is again the criminally under-rated Chin Siu-ho; the younger (and usually stupider) is played by a variety of actors, this time it’s Liu Fong. The first Mr. Vampire sequel added another character to the household, a Little Vampire who’s not evil like your typical hopping vampire. But like I said, this isn’t a Mr. Vampire movie.
Except it is.
It’s complicated.
After taking care of a nasty Palm Tree Spirit, Lam is called upon by the village elders to figure out what’s wrong with their water supply. Turns out there’s too many bats in it (literally) so Lam does a complex fung shui ritual to find a better place to dig a well. All very well (ha!) and good, except a flock of bats moves the marker so the crew will dig in the wrong place.
There’s also a ruined Catholic church nearby, which a group of sisters is working to re-open. Another stock character in the Mr. Vampire company, the local Captain, wants his men to burn down the place because he thinks the bats are coming from there; Lam intercedes, and he and the Mother Superior (Maria Cordero) find the skeleton of one of the original priests who built the church, supposedly vanishing after sending word that he and his companion were battling demons. As this skeleton apparently died by shoving a cross into its own heart, Lam deduces the demons were defeated, and bravely, too. Unfortunately neither he or the Mother look up, because the ceiling is covered by bats.
The well being dug in the wrong place uncovers a decaying body, also with a cross in its heart, but this cross has a ruby embedded in it, which the Captain must have to satisfy his equally venal fiancée. This causes him to swap bodies on the pyre which Lam insists upon, so he can have time to saw the jewel off. The cross is finally removed, which as we all know, is how vampires come back to life in movies like this.
This is going to set up a mighty pitched battle at the end, as Lam discovers that all his Taoist tricks do not much affect a European vampire, and things become pretty uncertain, but highly kinetic.
This was Lam Ching-ying’s first time as film director (though he had been action director for numerous movies), and he doesn’t try to do anything too extraordinary, but as usual, the action sequences are top-notch. Again, if you’ve seen any of the Mr. Vampire movies, you know what I’m talking about: Lam’s dance-like, confident approach to magic looks real and is quite convincing. The fact that, if magicdoesn’t work, he can kick you seven ways to Sunday is a good back-up plan. There are at least two plot lines that are not resolved when the movie ends, but hey – welcome to Hong Kong cinema. The Big Bad Guy is vanquished, what more do you want?
Another staple of the Mr. Vampire movies (of which this is not one) involves the old-fashioned priest coming up against modern, Western ideas and failing to understand them to some comic effect. This time out it’s the nuns of the convent trying to save the Priest’s soul when all he’s trying to do is conceal the fact they interrupted his bath and he’s not wearing any pants. In 1993 there would be a much better exploration if this sort of cultural clash with Exorcist Master, which is basically The One-Eyebrow Priest versus Dracula. At the end Lam and the Chinese Catholic priest he’s been knocking heads with the entire picture realize they have to combine the spiritual powers of East and West to defeat the King of the Vampires, and it’s pretty damned cool.
Anyway, I’ve long been a fan of Lam Ching-ying. He probably chafed at being typecast by his most famous movie, but man, was he ever good at playing that role. He elevated several movies simply by his dignified presence, even mean-spirited drivel like Skin Stripperess. He succumbed to liver cancer in 1997, and the world became a much less magical place.
YouTube has not recognized the brilliance of Lam Ching-ying yet, so we’ll just have to be satisfied with this tribute video by Lily Wang:
This is one of those movies whose fate leaves you scratching your head, and wondering about the whys and wherefores of culture. There are several things that contribute to Tourist Trap‘s longevity, chief among them a very positive review by Stephen King in Danse Macabre, and a PG rating, insuring it could be run on TV with little or no trimming.
There are two groups of young’uns on the road for mumble mumble something or other. They’re in two cars, so when the lead car has a blow-out, Woody (Keith McDermott) rolls the flat spare to the nearest gas station, leaving Eileen (Robin Sherwood) behind. The second car, driven by Jerry (Jon von Ness) and carrying Molly (Jocelyn Jones) and Becky (Tanya Roberts, very early in her career) catches up to her, she climbs aboard, and they head down the road to look for Woody.
Woody has found a gas station, but it is deserted. Except for a self-locking back room with cackling mannequins and objects that fling themselves willy-nilly at him. The capper is the pipe that nails him to the door. This is a superb opening sequence, and it scarred a lot of young kids during matinees.
Our surviving youngsters manage to miss that abandoned gas station and instead find themselves at the all-but-abandoned Slausen’s Lost Oasis and Wild West Museum, where their car mysteriously ceases to function. Who should show up but Slausen himself (played by Chuck Connors), who lets the ladies stay in the museum while he and Jerry try to fix the car. Oh, but don’t go out to the house in back – Davey lives there.
So of course, one by one, they go out to the house in back. Where Davey undeniably is, with a small army of creepy mannequins that Davey can apparently control with some sort of Carrie White telekinesis. Davey (Slausen will explain it’s his brother) also wears a mask that makes him look like one of the mannequins. Or that’s the intent, anyway – I think it makes him look like Jay Leno. Given that the movie is almost 40 years old – and that it really doesn’t conceal the twist all that well – Davey and Slausen are the same person, and he is, to put it bluntly, insane, and our party is going to get whittled down to the Final Girl over the course of the flick.
What Tourist Trap has going for it is some novelty and some of the creepiest damn mannequins ever assembled for a movie. The scenes with them are beautifully realized and nightmarish; when the movie breaks away from them so another of the teenagers can get killed, that stuff – which, admittedly, is the stuff that most of the movie goers paid money to see – seems grafted on, like we dropped in on another movie set. The kills are fairly bloodless, including the most famous one, where Davey murders yet another traveler caught at the gas station (Dawn Jeffory) by layering plaster on her face until she suffocates (though he assures us she dies of fright) still doesn’t breach the PG limit.
So there is the likely basis for Tourist Trap‘s failure at the box office. It was a PG oddity floating in a sea of R-rated dead teenager movies. The setup is strictly Texas Chainsaw Massacre without the Hitchhiker – hell, the kids are driving a Volkswagen Thing instead of a VW van. No gore, no nudity – there are chances for both, but they go unfulfilled. What remains is more dark fable than slasher movie, a tale of obsessive madness that gradually includes the audience (as well as Final Girl) in the delusion. Real people become mixed in with the mannequins, until it is impossible to tell which is which, or who is insane.
This is not what the audiences were looking for at the time.
If you’re only familiar with Chuck Connors from The Rifleman re-runs, and not some of his other film work, like, say, The Big Country, you might be surprised to find him here (which is why it’s great casting). He finds the top and goes over it several times, but there are also times he is deliciously subtle. There is one scene toward the end when he goes from slobbering madman to sorrowful confession that actually had me thinking holy crap that was some really good acting. The cast is uniformly good, sometimes better than the material actually deserves.
Writer/director David Schmoeller is better known for the Puppet Master series that arguably kept Full Moon Pictures’ doors open for years. Tourist Trap may not be able to tell if it really wants to be Chainsaw or Carrie or Psycho, but it is a pretty solid piece of Halloween creepiness. Those mannequins, man. Urrrrrrrr
I watch a lot of oddities in my peregrinations around the world of cinema. Some are weird because of plot devices, effects, accidents. Some are weird because of their casting. And that is what brings us to The Return of Dr. X, the sole horror movie credit of one Humphrey Bogart.
The plot will be semi-familiar to folks who saw the original 1932 Dr. X. even though it’s not a sequel. A wise-cracking reporter, Garrett (Wayne Morris, trying way too hard) finds a murdered actress in her apartment, but when the cops come, the body is gone. She also shows up at the newspaper the next day, quite alive, and threatening to sue the paper over the story of her death (this is apparently before the days of “no bad publicity”). The reporter teams up with a surgeon pal, Michael (Denis Morgan) to figure out what happened, and both get embroiled in a series of murders of people with a rare blood type. A second blood type is found at a murder scene, which the police cannot identify. The brilliant hematologist Dr. Flegg (John Litel) and his strange, pale assistant Quesne (Bogart) seem to be somehow involved.
Let me save you some trouble (even at 62 minutes, this thing is too long): the reason the blood can’t be typed is it’s synthetic, an invention of Dr. Flegg. Quesne is actually Dr. Xavier, who had been electrocuted several years earlier for ghoulish experiments that resulted in the death of a child. Flegg was able to resurrect “Dr. X” with the hematologist’s own experimental process and synthetic blood. This process is less than entirely successful, though, and Quesne is now a medical vampire, requiring the rare blood type to live.
If you have seen the original Dr. X, you are definitely going to be pining for Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, though John Litel does sterling work as the conflicted Dr. Flegg. But we’re here to see Bogie, aren’t we? Jack Warner wasn’t above punishing his actors when they acted up, and Bogart had been fomenting for something more than minor gangster roles for some time, and Warner threw him into this “be careful what you wish for” role.
And truth be told, Bogart is actually pretty good, though his part is still small for a title character. Pale, with a shock of white hair, he’s quite striking, and you actually wish we had more of the character. Bogart applies just the right amount of creepiness to the character to make him off-putting, but not particularly evil. Given more screen time – and a lack of punitive casting – he might have been able to do more with it. As it is, it’s not a portrayal to be ashamed of. This strange lack of Bogey won’t be the only disappointment in the movie, either, when our medical vampire is dispatched in a shootout with the police, straight out of any of the gangster movies that had caused Bogart to raise a ruckus in the first place.
Two years later would bring They Drive By Night and High Sierra. Three would bring The Maltese Falcon. This was director Vincent Sherman’s first movie, and it rather creaks in all the wrong places; Mr. Skeffington and The Adventures of Don Juan were still in the future. He inherited the project after months of troubled development which went nowhere. At one point it was to be a 19th century period piece, starring Boris Karloff, which would likely have been more interesting.
Get ‘im, Huntz.
And just to be mean, I’ll point out that our comic reporter is easily upstaged in the humor department by Huntz Hall, years before the East Side Kids or The Bowery Boys, as the overburdened copy boy, Pinky.
The oddest thing of all is watching the trailer for the movie after watching the movie itself: it seems to be made entirely of alternate takes and scenes which do not appear in the finished product at all, promising a remarkably different picture.
Oh dear God, not Jess Franco again! Why? Whyyyyyyyyy
What’s that you say? It’s not Jess Franco? It’s Pierre Chevalier? And what is more, you claim that after the first ten minutes, I am going to be begging for the return of Jess Franco? Pish tush, I say! And furthermore, folderol!
You are, incidentally, going to be right.
This is known by many names – even on its own DVD. Sure, the cover says Orloff and the Invisible Man, but the menu claims it’s Orloff Against the Invisible Man. Go to the IMDb and it’s Dr. Orloff’s Invisible Monster. In the UK, The Invisible Dead. And if you use Letterboxd, it’s the original title, The Love Life of the Invisible Man. That last one is going to turn out to be – rather horrifyingly – the movie’s raison d’etre.
We are apparently once a-goddamn-gain in some superstitious 19th century Carpathian village, and the new doctor in town can’t understand why no one wants to take him to the castle of Professor Orloff for an emergency call. At least the doctor in Kill Baby… Kill! made it almost to his destination, this poor sod gets ditched in the middle of nowhere, and in a rainstorm, to boot.
Dr. Garandet (Paco Valladares) finally makes it to Castle Orloff, where the two remaining servants also refuse to tell him what’s going on. He finally talks with Orloff’s daughter, Cecile (Brigitte Carva), who tells him she’s seen an invisible man, and also her father is always in his laboratory. Papa, of course, is Professor Orloff (Howard Vernon), who not only somehow survived our last encounter with him at the other end of the alphabet, but also managed to add an “f” to the end of his name.
Oh, good God, why keep pretending? This has absolutely nothing to do with that Orloff except it’s still Howard Vernon, and he’s still tampering in God’s domain like a mofo. In this case, he has created an Invisible Man (exactly how is never revealed), an entirely new form of life which is “Intelligent and obedient” and will rule the world, or something mad science like that.
But never mind that, let’s while away the next twenty minutes with the tale of how, six years ago, Cecile had some sort of cataleptic fit and was interred alive, and saved only by two wicked servants robbing her grave for the jewelry. When she revived, they panicked, stabbed her, and ran off. Well, the smart one, the woman (Isabel del Rio) ran off, the man stuck around to be used for experiments. Oh, don’t worry, the woman is tracked down with dogs, which causes her blouse to unbutton.
This suspiciously modern underwear does not appear in the actual movie.
You see, to get back to the Invisible Man stuff, and the Love Life thereof, if you see a woman under the age of 30 in this movie, you can rest assured that at some point you are going to see her naked. Isabel del Rio, to convince her fellow servant to do some grave robbing, will coquettishly (ie., slowly) change into a nightshirt. Then take it off and put her clothes back on for some resurrectionist action. The one remaining female servant in the castle – who is the one who sent for Garandet – will be punished by handing her over to the Invisible Man, mainly because Orloff “wants to see what he will do with a human female.” It involves the poor girl jerking herself around, trying to convince us that she is being pulled along by something invisible, and then manhandling herself on a bed of hay. Then, when we thankfully start running short on time, the Invisible Man also wants to rape Cecile, so say goodbye to that particular nightgown, too.
(I must give Image Entertainment props for giving us, as a DVD extra, the Alternate Clothed Footage of these scenes, unlike yesterday’s feature)
SCIENCE!
In other words, a better title would have been The Rape Life of the Invisible Man. The plot is entirely superfluous, and were we not distracted by naked breasts and unshaven pudenda (I would like to thank modern pornography for making pubic hair exotic again), the entire enterprise would be so generic and unoriginal, so padded with lugubrious claptrap, that the only way to deal with it would be to take a restful nap or perhaps read a book while you coexisted in the same room with it during its mercifully brief 82 minutes.
There are points at which somebody on the crew said, “Hey, you know, that Bava guy’s been doing some pretty cool stuff” and breaks out the colored gels in the numerous catacomb scenes, but overall the scenes are way too brightly lit – there are obviously big lights on the other side of the camera, eliminating all atmosphere and period ambience. There is also a bizarre reliance on close-ups that are out-of-focus, but now perhaps I’m just being bitchy.
The invisible effects are, at least, handled pretty well… at least until Garandet tosses some flour on the Invisible Man and we discover it was a man in a monkey suit all this time. Don’t believe me? Here:
I’ve gone on record that most movies featuring more than two horror icons tend to be pretty dreadful. I have to say the inverse is true for movies featuring multiple 80’s scream queens, because, despite all my worst intentions, I wound up enjoying Nightmare Sisters.
Your three Scream Queens in question are Linnea Quigley, Michelle Bauer, and Brinke Stevens, all of whom spend the first half of the movie trying to make themselves look unattractive. They’re playing what the ad copy calls “geeky sorority sisters”. Melody (Quigley) has buck teeth, Mickey (Bauer) is wearing a fat suit and has some cotton stuffed in her cheeks, and Marci (Stevens) wears glasses and needs some hair product. All are alone in their sorority house for the weekend, so the only one who knows a boy on campus (that would be Melody) calls up the guy she had a disastrous date with a month before and invites him and two friends over for a party.
This proves only slightly less disastrous than that date a month ago, involving scrapbooks, bad sing-alongs, and a game of Twister that ends in injury. Finally they decide to have a seance with the crystal ball Marci bought at a flea market earlier that day. If the kids had been watching the movie before their part, they’d know that the crystal ball belonged to a medium who had used it to track a client’s missing husband, and discovered the chap had been killed by a succubus… who then reached through the ball to rip off the medium’s head.
Well, the succubus is still hanging around the orb, and decides to possess the three girls, transforming them instantly into Scream Queens. Topless Scream Queens (they were apparently supposed to be nude, but Stevens objected). Extreme debauchery seems to be in the offing, but the one sensible freshman suspects that something may be up.
There are also three upperclassmen from the boys’ frat who are determined to ruin our “heroes” night by substituting themselves for the unfortunate freshmen. Unfortunate is in the eye of the beholder, however, as this means that each charming member of the WASP Hitler Youth club gets reduced to ashes via fanged mouths on their little Hitler youths. There’s nothing left to do but call an exorcist our heroes find in the local Yellow Pages. (“California! Go figure.”)
If you are thinking, with the plentiful and exceedingly gratuitous nudity, that this sounds like a David DeCoteau movie, congratulations! You did not fall off the B-movie turnip truck yesterday! This project was apparently shot on leftover film stock, using a script that was written in seven days. No word on the shooting schedule, but the credits do mention a “Four Days Wonder Group”, which may provide a clue. I’m thinking the ladies provided their own costumes. When they’re wearing any, I mean.
As I mentioned, I was really expecting to hate this. But dammit, it won me over. The script is cheesy, to be sure, but bizarrely good-natured, seldom mean. Except where the frat boy monster fodder are concerned, but come on, they’re asking for it. The most overt nod to self-awareness is an early line from Quigley, who says she’s doesn’t like scary movies because “One zombie movie was enough for me.” (Return of the Living Dead was in ’85, in case you were wondering) Quigley, Bauer and Stevens seem to be having fun playing theoretically unattractive versions of themselves, which really helped.
And, okay, there was a chink in my armor anyway, and that is Michelle Bauer. I’ve followed her career through a bewildering variety of aliases and a number of genres, some of which *harrumphharrumph* probably shouldn’t be spoken of here. The thing is, in addition to her obvious beauty, if called upon to do so, the lady can actually act, which has made all the difference in some pretty scuzzball movies. That’s my kryptonite, right there. Cute and talented? Go ahead and start chiseling my tombstone.
I was entertained while watching it, but there was one thing that niggled at the edge of my concentration: I knew I had seen part of this on USA Up All Night, the question became, how was this even possible? Apparently the nude scenes were replaced with lingerie shots, and a three-way bubble bath was replaced by the three lingerie-clad demons frolicking on a bed with balloons and blowing bubbles, to match (as well as, um, possible?) the existing dialogue track. Honestly, I would liked to have seen this stuff as an extra on the DVD (which I see now fetches a ridiculous price on Amazon).
I’m not sure which amazes me more: that the movie had enough of a budget to shoot alternate scenes, or that they were optimistic enough to think that such footage would even be necessary. You know this thing was destined for a quick VHS release, and not much more.
Well, there’s none of that alternate footage stuff here, so don’t go watching this at work:
Normal movie-watching and writing time has gotten usurped by the Numerous Jobs and the utterly bizarre circumstance of having a son who is preparing to go to college (pause for look of shocked incomprehension). This has meant, oddly enough, forsaking my usual practice of delaying income tax preparation until the last possible day so I can do it all in a rush while shooting the finger at the government (“I hope they can see this because I’m doing it really hard“). This is because the paperwork is needed for financial aid. While I can’t say doing it without the ongoing reek of desperation and looming deadline was exactly pleasant, it wasn’t all that horrible. It was made much more tolerable by the gift of new music by pal Tim Lehnerer, in fact.
At Dearborn’s center, one of the blind men is a brutish fellow named Jake, and if we’ve learned anything from the movies, it’s that doctors named Orloff with brutish blind henchmen cannot be trusted. Orloff is, in fact, insuring men and luring them into the Home for the Blind, where Jake drowns them in a iron tub and then throws them out a window into the Thames.
Holt is going to slowly grow wise to this scheme, even if he is saddled with O’Reilly, a wise-cracking cop from Chicago (Edmon Ryan), who escorted comedy-relief forger Grogan (Alexander Field) back into custody. As there is only one evil scheme afoot in England at any one time, Grogan is naturally involved in Orloff’s, forging dead men’s signatures. Balancing out O’Reilly’s involvement is Stuart’s daughter Diana (Gloria Gynt), a plucky lass who goes undercover as Dearborn’s secretary to aid Holt in his investigation.
In 1939, Lugosi’s star was beginning to wane, but he was still capable of powerful performances. Orloff should be ranked among his best, a character equally as cold-blooded as Murder Legendre, but also convincing in his portrayal as a concerned champion of the downtrodden. Lugosi is really chilling as he goes about his murderous business – that title is well fulfilled by the movie’s end.
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