Movie-a-Day week three
A day late, and more than a few bucks short, but what's that got to do with movie reviews?
13: The Terror of Tiny Town (1938/USA) D: Sam Newfield W: Fred Myton
A perfectly ordinary studio B-western of the 1930's, except for one thing: an "All-Midget Cast"!!! Apparently, since someone went to the trouble of assembling a huge cast of little folks for MGM's The Wizard of Oz, someone else figured they'd take advantage of said assembly and crank out a quick gimmick flick. The script, on the other hand, appears to be just a standard oater the studio had lying around; there's no verbal mention of the characters' heights. (The screenwriter must have been mighty surprised...) So instead of height-related puns, we're treated to a slew of height-related sight gags. The cowboys ride around on Shetland ponies, cast members walk under hitching rails and saloon doors, the heroine pulls a relatively huge pistol... that's about it, really. This used to be a staple of "Night Flight" back in the 1980s. I suppose there's enough dumb surrealism in this film to keep an especially slow-witted stoner happy, but my attention began to wander after 20 minutes or so. Good thing it's only 62 minutes long. Director Newfield made 15(!) other films in 1938. He has 271 directing credits on IMDb, from 1926 to 1964, nearly half of them westerns. MST3K fans will remember him less than fondly for The Lost Continent and Radar Secret Service. Heroic lead Billy Curtis had a long film and TV career, starting with The Wizard of Oz, and continuing until the 1980s. He worked with Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock, was in The Incredible Shrinking Man and High Plains Drifter, and was featured on "Batman", "The Monkees" and "Star Trek"! Far more respectable than his director. (DVR)
14: Mr. Moto's Gamble (1938/USA) D: James Tingling W: Charles Belden and Jerry Cady, based on characters by John P. Marquand
The third Moto film (I saw the second, Thank You, Mr. Moto, last year) was originally supposed to be the 17th Charlie Chan film, until Warner Oland had a breakdown (mental and physical) and had to drop out. Not wanting to waste already built sets and already hired cast and crew, the studio ordered a quick re-write and voila! Instant Moto! Oddly, this means Moto is teamed with Number One Son Lee Chan (Keye Luke) who tells Moto about a letter from his Pop at one point early on. Moto is teaching a class on detective methods in an unnamed American city (LA, I guess) when he gets involved in the murder of a boxer, who died in the ring during a bout. Lee naturally tags along (it's what he does, after all) along with tag-team comedy relief partner "Knockout" Wellington (played by ex-boxer "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenblum). Sadly, it doesn't quite feel like a Moto film. He's not nearly as sneaky as usual, tends to spout Chan-style aphorisms, and bareley gets to use judo at all! Still, a decent lightweight mystery for its time. James Tingling had directed Charlie Chan in Shanghai. The cast features Lynn Bari (two Chan films), Douglas Fowley (2 Chans), Jayne Regan (Thank You, Mr. Moto, as a different character), Harold Huber, 5 Chans, one more Moto, and The Thin Man), John Hamilton (Mr. Wong, Detective) and Ward Bond (one more Moto and The Maltese Falcon!) Keye Luke went on to a long and varied career (though a distressing number of his 1940's post-Chan roles are "waiter", "houseboy", or "servant".) He's one of the few if not the only Asian American actor to play one of the Asian detective series characters (Mr. Wong in Phantom of Chinatown), he featured as Kato in the two Green Hornet serials of the 1940s, had worked with Peter Lorre before in Mad Love, and spent much of his late career appearing in guest roles on TV shows from "Star Trek" to "Magnum P. I." Of course, he played Master Po on every episode of "Kung Fu", and did a good deal of voicework for Hanna Barbera, where he played Charlie Chan on the otherwise execrable "Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan." But most importantly, he was the original voice of Brak on "Space Ghost" in 1966 Yowza! (rental DVD)
15: House of Traps (aka Chong xiao lou; 1982/Hong Kong) D: Chang Cheh
Pseudo-historical kung fu from Shaw Brothers studio and director Chang Cheh, House of Traps features several of Chang's late 70s ensemble of action stars known to fans as "The Venoms" (after Chang's Five Deadly Venoms, the film that first combined a significant number of them.) A disenfranchised Prince is assembling a conspiracy of heroes and has hidden the list of conspirators, along with some stolen imperial treasures, in the House of Traps, a deviously protected edifice which more than lives up to it's name. A righteous magistrate is sent to investigate, and recruits several sympathetic heroes of his own. This is the sort of kung fu film where characters have names like The Butterfly or The Five Rats. It's common in this genre for several heroes to team up against a very formidable lone villain at the climax; here, that fearsome fighter is a building! Trap doors, spikes, blades and the Copper Net of Death take quite a toll on the heroes. The action is decent, but this is not Chang's best work. The character who turns out to be the true protagonist doesn't appear until a third of the way in. The "villain"'s cause is not unreasonable (the current emperor got the throne through treachery and murder), which casts doubt on the "good guys". Still, Chang is at least aware of this aspect of the story, or he wouldn't have ended up focusing on shifty, rebellious thief Black Fox, the least political man in the room. HoT has all the Chang staples: brotherhood, bare chests (male, sorry 90% of the guys), bloody abdominal wounds and, in this case, no women whatsoever. (purchased DVD)
16: Twitch of the Death Nerve (aka Reazione a catena; aka Chain Reaction; aka A Bay Of Blood; aka Antefatto - Ecologia del delitto; aka Carnage; aka Bloodbath; aka Bloodbath Bay of Death; aka The Last House on the Left, Part II; 1971/Italy) D: Mario Bava W: Mario Bava, Filippo Ottoni, story by Franco Barberi and Dardano Sacchetti
Wow, that's a lot of titles. This sterling example of Body Count Cinema (13 corpses total! Collect them all!) apparently had some distribution trouble back in the 1970s. Was it the gal who went skinny dipping in broad daylight? The double-spearing, mid-coitus? The close up of the inside of a neck, post ax-whack? Hard to say. What is easy to say, though, is this is a much cleverer film than the post-Halloween species of by-the-numbers slashers. For one thing, filmmaker Mario Bava (Black Sunday, Danger: Diabolik) has here created a series of murders minus the serial killer. This is closer to Agatha Christie territory, though with none of that old English restraint (perhaps the film's presence on England's notorious "Video Nasty" list might help explain the proliferation of titles and versions?)The script is by no means an undiscovered literary classic, and the whole thing basically amounts to a bunch of schemers bumping each other off (plus a few innocents who stumble into the path of bloodshed). But the film looks great, moves well and manages to sketch its characters quite clearly, considering their lifespans. Plus, I can't take the ending any way but as a sick little joke, and I'm quite all right with that. Plus, skinny dipping gal. Just sayin'. Featuring Claudine Augur ("Domino" from Thunderball). Screenwriter Sacchetti is responsible for a laundry list of Italian genre films, including Cat O' Nine Tales, Zombie and The Gates of Hell. MST3K fans will remember him, with chagrin, for Devilfish. (rental DVD)
17: Island of Lost Souls (1932/USA) D: Erle C. Kenton W: Waldemar Young and Philip Wylie, based on the novel "The Island of Dr. Moreau" by H. G. Wells
Considered by connoisseurs to be one of the best 1930's horror films, I hadn't taken the opportunity to watch Island until now. Had to go rent the VHS from Video Vault, because, for some damned reason, it's never been on DVD in the US. (The Strange Door is on DVD, but not this? WTF?) Well, let's say it lives up to its rep. Filmed the same year as King Kong, we have here another forsaken jungle hell of an island, also full of strange beasts and awkward sexual curiosity, but there the resemblance ends. Kong is a balls-out action film, but IoLS is a pressurized melodrama that boils over into complete chaos at the end. Based on Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau", the premise at least will be familiar to most (mad scientist messes about turning animals into men), but the atmosphere of the thing overwhelms any sense of familiarity engendered by decades of cheesy knock-offs. This must have come as rather a shock back when the ideas were fresh. Wells himself hated the film for turning his novel into something vulgar and sensational, and the themes were sure to keep this film from being shown in theaters after enforcement of the Production Code a few years later. (It also probably helped keep it off TV in the 1950s.) Charles Laughton (Jamaica Inn) gives a surprisingly restrained performance as mad Doctor Moreau (restrained for Laughton, anyway; he didn't get that way by going easy on the scenery.) Bela Lugosi is featured in the small but vital role of Speaker of the Law, whose recitation inspired both Devo and Oingo Boingo. Much of the advertising seems to have focused on "the Panther Woman," so we see the bread was buttered on the same side as always, even back then. Erle C. Kenton later directed Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, to far lesser effect. Screenwriter Waldemar Young had scripted several Lon Chaney silents, including The Unknown and The Unholy Three. Screenwriter Philip Wylie is best remembered for his science fiction novels such as "When Worlds Collide" (1933; its sequel was "After Worlds Collide", of course) and "The Gladiator" (1930, an inspiration for both Superman and Doc Savage.) See it if you can find it! (rental VHS)
18: War of the Robots (aka La guerra dei robot; 1978/Italy) D: Alfonso Brescia W: Alfonso Brescia and Aldo Crudo
The years immediately following Star Wars were heady times indeed. While few American producers were emboldened to embarrass themselves failing to live up to the technical standards of GeorgeLucas' relatively inexpensive epic, the rest of the world was lining up to do just that. (To be fair, Hollywood had several embarrassments which cost much more than Star Wars, so: "Who is more foolish?") With everyone from Japan to Turkey weighing in with their robot spaceship and cheapo alien filled adventures, it took the ever-opportunistic filmmakers of Italy to perfect the art of crappy space battle flicks, with such prime entries as Starcrash, Cosmos: War of the Planets, and the gem currently under discussion, War of the Robots. Golden, page-boy-haired alien androids kidnaop a aprominent professor (and his assistant, Lois), and the Earth's (only?) nuclear reactor will explode if they don't get hiim back! It's up to crack plastic/lycra-jumpsuit-clad spaceship crew led by Antonio Sabato (senior, mind you; not the soap star but his dad) to retrieve the professor (and Lois) before diaster occurs! Subterranean asteroid dwellers, armies of (useless) golden androids and other perils await our intrepid heroes, but are they prepared for the surpises that await once the professor (and Lois) is found? Are you prepared??? No. No, you're not, because this makes NO SENSE AT ALL, and I mean that in the best way possible. Not as polished in it's idiocy as Starcrash (or in its art design, which is really sad), WotR nevertheless manages everal points of sublime badness. Whatever else may be said, WotR is not a dull time. There's always some new derangement ready to rear its head; though these derangements are mostly conceptual (there are a couple of the most gloriously maddening dialogue exchanges I've ever heard in here), there are some visual pleasures to be had, such as the relentless way in which the alien robots pile into a room and fall over when the heroes point their flashing lights (er, I mean ray guns) at them. And then of course, there's Lois, about whom I will say little because of spoilers (I've said too much already!) Director Alfonso Brescia (aka "Al Bradley") directed a few other Star Wars riffs (Cosmos: War of the Planets, War In Space (aka Battle of the Stars) and Space Oddyssey (aka Metallica); oddly (or maybe not so oddly) all three of these feature actress Yanti Somer, who plays cute crew-cut crew member Julie in WotR). ten years later, he was responsible for Iron Warrior, one of the lesser Ator films. (friend's DVD; thanks, Brian W.!)
13: The Terror of Tiny Town (1938/USA) D: Sam Newfield W: Fred Myton
A perfectly ordinary studio B-western of the 1930's, except for one thing: an "All-Midget Cast"!!! Apparently, since someone went to the trouble of assembling a huge cast of little folks for MGM's The Wizard of Oz, someone else figured they'd take advantage of said assembly and crank out a quick gimmick flick. The script, on the other hand, appears to be just a standard oater the studio had lying around; there's no verbal mention of the characters' heights. (The screenwriter must have been mighty surprised...) So instead of height-related puns, we're treated to a slew of height-related sight gags. The cowboys ride around on Shetland ponies, cast members walk under hitching rails and saloon doors, the heroine pulls a relatively huge pistol... that's about it, really. This used to be a staple of "Night Flight" back in the 1980s. I suppose there's enough dumb surrealism in this film to keep an especially slow-witted stoner happy, but my attention began to wander after 20 minutes or so. Good thing it's only 62 minutes long. Director Newfield made 15(!) other films in 1938. He has 271 directing credits on IMDb, from 1926 to 1964, nearly half of them westerns. MST3K fans will remember him less than fondly for The Lost Continent and Radar Secret Service. Heroic lead Billy Curtis had a long film and TV career, starting with The Wizard of Oz, and continuing until the 1980s. He worked with Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock, was in The Incredible Shrinking Man and High Plains Drifter, and was featured on "Batman", "The Monkees" and "Star Trek"! Far more respectable than his director. (DVR)
14: Mr. Moto's Gamble (1938/USA) D: James Tingling W: Charles Belden and Jerry Cady, based on characters by John P. Marquand
The third Moto film (I saw the second, Thank You, Mr. Moto, last year) was originally supposed to be the 17th Charlie Chan film, until Warner Oland had a breakdown (mental and physical) and had to drop out. Not wanting to waste already built sets and already hired cast and crew, the studio ordered a quick re-write and voila! Instant Moto! Oddly, this means Moto is teamed with Number One Son Lee Chan (Keye Luke) who tells Moto about a letter from his Pop at one point early on. Moto is teaching a class on detective methods in an unnamed American city (LA, I guess) when he gets involved in the murder of a boxer, who died in the ring during a bout. Lee naturally tags along (it's what he does, after all) along with tag-team comedy relief partner "Knockout" Wellington (played by ex-boxer "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenblum). Sadly, it doesn't quite feel like a Moto film. He's not nearly as sneaky as usual, tends to spout Chan-style aphorisms, and bareley gets to use judo at all! Still, a decent lightweight mystery for its time. James Tingling had directed Charlie Chan in Shanghai. The cast features Lynn Bari (two Chan films), Douglas Fowley (2 Chans), Jayne Regan (Thank You, Mr. Moto, as a different character), Harold Huber, 5 Chans, one more Moto, and The Thin Man), John Hamilton (Mr. Wong, Detective) and Ward Bond (one more Moto and The Maltese Falcon!) Keye Luke went on to a long and varied career (though a distressing number of his 1940's post-Chan roles are "waiter", "houseboy", or "servant".) He's one of the few if not the only Asian American actor to play one of the Asian detective series characters (Mr. Wong in Phantom of Chinatown), he featured as Kato in the two Green Hornet serials of the 1940s, had worked with Peter Lorre before in Mad Love, and spent much of his late career appearing in guest roles on TV shows from "Star Trek" to "Magnum P. I." Of course, he played Master Po on every episode of "Kung Fu", and did a good deal of voicework for Hanna Barbera, where he played Charlie Chan on the otherwise execrable "Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan." But most importantly, he was the original voice of Brak on "Space Ghost" in 1966 Yowza! (rental DVD)
15: House of Traps (aka Chong xiao lou; 1982/Hong Kong) D: Chang Cheh
Pseudo-historical kung fu from Shaw Brothers studio and director Chang Cheh, House of Traps features several of Chang's late 70s ensemble of action stars known to fans as "The Venoms" (after Chang's Five Deadly Venoms, the film that first combined a significant number of them.) A disenfranchised Prince is assembling a conspiracy of heroes and has hidden the list of conspirators, along with some stolen imperial treasures, in the House of Traps, a deviously protected edifice which more than lives up to it's name. A righteous magistrate is sent to investigate, and recruits several sympathetic heroes of his own. This is the sort of kung fu film where characters have names like The Butterfly or The Five Rats. It's common in this genre for several heroes to team up against a very formidable lone villain at the climax; here, that fearsome fighter is a building! Trap doors, spikes, blades and the Copper Net of Death take quite a toll on the heroes. The action is decent, but this is not Chang's best work. The character who turns out to be the true protagonist doesn't appear until a third of the way in. The "villain"'s cause is not unreasonable (the current emperor got the throne through treachery and murder), which casts doubt on the "good guys". Still, Chang is at least aware of this aspect of the story, or he wouldn't have ended up focusing on shifty, rebellious thief Black Fox, the least political man in the room. HoT has all the Chang staples: brotherhood, bare chests (male, sorry 90% of the guys), bloody abdominal wounds and, in this case, no women whatsoever. (purchased DVD)
16: Twitch of the Death Nerve (aka Reazione a catena; aka Chain Reaction; aka A Bay Of Blood; aka Antefatto - Ecologia del delitto; aka Carnage; aka Bloodbath; aka Bloodbath Bay of Death; aka The Last House on the Left, Part II; 1971/Italy) D: Mario Bava W: Mario Bava, Filippo Ottoni, story by Franco Barberi and Dardano Sacchetti
Wow, that's a lot of titles. This sterling example of Body Count Cinema (13 corpses total! Collect them all!) apparently had some distribution trouble back in the 1970s. Was it the gal who went skinny dipping in broad daylight? The double-spearing, mid-coitus? The close up of the inside of a neck, post ax-whack? Hard to say. What is easy to say, though, is this is a much cleverer film than the post-Halloween species of by-the-numbers slashers. For one thing, filmmaker Mario Bava (Black Sunday, Danger: Diabolik) has here created a series of murders minus the serial killer. This is closer to Agatha Christie territory, though with none of that old English restraint (perhaps the film's presence on England's notorious "Video Nasty" list might help explain the proliferation of titles and versions?)The script is by no means an undiscovered literary classic, and the whole thing basically amounts to a bunch of schemers bumping each other off (plus a few innocents who stumble into the path of bloodshed). But the film looks great, moves well and manages to sketch its characters quite clearly, considering their lifespans. Plus, I can't take the ending any way but as a sick little joke, and I'm quite all right with that. Plus, skinny dipping gal. Just sayin'. Featuring Claudine Augur ("Domino" from Thunderball). Screenwriter Sacchetti is responsible for a laundry list of Italian genre films, including Cat O' Nine Tales, Zombie and The Gates of Hell. MST3K fans will remember him, with chagrin, for Devilfish. (rental DVD)
17: Island of Lost Souls (1932/USA) D: Erle C. Kenton W: Waldemar Young and Philip Wylie, based on the novel "The Island of Dr. Moreau" by H. G. Wells
Considered by connoisseurs to be one of the best 1930's horror films, I hadn't taken the opportunity to watch Island until now. Had to go rent the VHS from Video Vault, because, for some damned reason, it's never been on DVD in the US. (The Strange Door is on DVD, but not this? WTF?) Well, let's say it lives up to its rep. Filmed the same year as King Kong, we have here another forsaken jungle hell of an island, also full of strange beasts and awkward sexual curiosity, but there the resemblance ends. Kong is a balls-out action film, but IoLS is a pressurized melodrama that boils over into complete chaos at the end. Based on Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau", the premise at least will be familiar to most (mad scientist messes about turning animals into men), but the atmosphere of the thing overwhelms any sense of familiarity engendered by decades of cheesy knock-offs. This must have come as rather a shock back when the ideas were fresh. Wells himself hated the film for turning his novel into something vulgar and sensational, and the themes were sure to keep this film from being shown in theaters after enforcement of the Production Code a few years later. (It also probably helped keep it off TV in the 1950s.) Charles Laughton (Jamaica Inn) gives a surprisingly restrained performance as mad Doctor Moreau (restrained for Laughton, anyway; he didn't get that way by going easy on the scenery.) Bela Lugosi is featured in the small but vital role of Speaker of the Law, whose recitation inspired both Devo and Oingo Boingo. Much of the advertising seems to have focused on "the Panther Woman," so we see the bread was buttered on the same side as always, even back then. Erle C. Kenton later directed Ghost of Frankenstein, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, to far lesser effect. Screenwriter Waldemar Young had scripted several Lon Chaney silents, including The Unknown and The Unholy Three. Screenwriter Philip Wylie is best remembered for his science fiction novels such as "When Worlds Collide" (1933; its sequel was "After Worlds Collide", of course) and "The Gladiator" (1930, an inspiration for both Superman and Doc Savage.) See it if you can find it! (rental VHS)
18: War of the Robots (aka La guerra dei robot; 1978/Italy) D: Alfonso Brescia W: Alfonso Brescia and Aldo Crudo
The years immediately following Star Wars were heady times indeed. While few American producers were emboldened to embarrass themselves failing to live up to the technical standards of GeorgeLucas' relatively inexpensive epic, the rest of the world was lining up to do just that. (To be fair, Hollywood had several embarrassments which cost much more than Star Wars, so: "Who is more foolish?") With everyone from Japan to Turkey weighing in with their robot spaceship and cheapo alien filled adventures, it took the ever-opportunistic filmmakers of Italy to perfect the art of crappy space battle flicks, with such prime entries as Starcrash, Cosmos: War of the Planets, and the gem currently under discussion, War of the Robots. Golden, page-boy-haired alien androids kidnaop a aprominent professor (and his assistant, Lois), and the Earth's (only?) nuclear reactor will explode if they don't get hiim back! It's up to crack plastic/lycra-jumpsuit-clad spaceship crew led by Antonio Sabato (senior, mind you; not the soap star but his dad) to retrieve the professor (and Lois) before diaster occurs! Subterranean asteroid dwellers, armies of (useless) golden androids and other perils await our intrepid heroes, but are they prepared for the surpises that await once the professor (and Lois) is found? Are you prepared??? No. No, you're not, because this makes NO SENSE AT ALL, and I mean that in the best way possible. Not as polished in it's idiocy as Starcrash (or in its art design, which is really sad), WotR nevertheless manages everal points of sublime badness. Whatever else may be said, WotR is not a dull time. There's always some new derangement ready to rear its head; though these derangements are mostly conceptual (there are a couple of the most gloriously maddening dialogue exchanges I've ever heard in here), there are some visual pleasures to be had, such as the relentless way in which the alien robots pile into a room and fall over when the heroes point their flashing lights (er, I mean ray guns) at them. And then of course, there's Lois, about whom I will say little because of spoilers (I've said too much already!) Director Alfonso Brescia (aka "Al Bradley") directed a few other Star Wars riffs (Cosmos: War of the Planets, War In Space (aka Battle of the Stars) and Space Oddyssey (aka Metallica); oddly (or maybe not so oddly) all three of these feature actress Yanti Somer, who plays cute crew-cut crew member Julie in WotR). ten years later, he was responsible for Iron Warrior, one of the lesser Ator films. (friend's DVD; thanks, Brian W.!)