Nein, Nein, 99... The Mystery of the "9" List

My very good pal Egg of the Dead left a comment for me earlier today, and rather than have both it and my reply end up lost on the bottom of a post that will largely go unread, I felt that I would rather place them in a post of their own as well. This way, they can go largely unread on an even larger scale. But the questions raised tie in with my general philosophy of movies, movie ratings and the impatience of the average moviegoer.

Egg of the Dead's quiet request from Friday, October 10, 2008 4:22:00 PM:

Is there a list somewhere of your "9" rated movies that have cleared the 10-year hurdle? I'd like to see that.
Not that I give a damn what YOU think ;-)

My incredibly condensed answer:

Hmmm... maybe what I should do instead of that list of my favorite films on the sidebar is to put up a list of my highest rated films. (There is a big difference, you know..)

One could click on the link to my ratings on IMDB, but that list is always a work in progress, and I am still adapting films that I rated years back to my more recent "9" system. And adapting films at all levels to it as well.

And unlike Spout, where I have rated something around 6,000+, I only have just under 5,000 on IMDB (probably because it is easier to rate films in batches on Spout).

My basic rule about the "ten year hurdle" is that we are all so quick to declare that the latest film we have seen is the greatest thing ever. If you were to ask a five year old after they have left a film what their favorite movie is, most likely they will answer the name of the film they have just seen. I would like to believe that adults have a little longer memory on this, but time and time again, I find myself disappointed on my count. The way I size up or get to know new people I meet is to ask them (and I do this with everyone) what their favorite all-time film is. The vast majority of these people will claim something they have seen in the last six months, if not less. This is fine, especially if they are really, truly being sincere.

But it's not so fine when a movie site is relying on considered opinion, but is more often subjected to knee-jerk reaction or bubble-headed fumbling. I was recently tagged by someone new on Spout, and when I checked their profile, they had rated somewhere around 675 films, and everyone was marked with a five (out of five) star rating. From Hailey Duff video flicks to The Dark Knight and Space Chimps. Five stars on Spout means "I loved it", an abhorrent system for rating films, but there it is. Either this person, supposedly a teen or young college age girl, is someone who just loves everything she watches, and possesses zero critical faculties, or "she" is a middle aged dude desperately trying to pass himself off as a teen girl as a gag. If she is really the first thing, then she might be in the right place, because Spout's catchphrase is "Find Movies You'll Love." (Perhaps I am in the wrong place at Spout, since it's more than likely I won't love something, but in a small bit of foreshadowing, that will all come out in the wash in a few days anyway.)

Sure, I come out of films all fired up and raving how brilliant they are. But I wait a few days to write about them, if I do at all. Why? Because while I may have felt that initial thrill from going to the movies, I let myself come back to this horrible reality and muse on what I have seen for a while. For me, there are no films where "I don't want to have to think." That to me is a weakness. Even when I go to a monster movie, where many people feel they can check their brain at the door, I have to remain on point. There's too much at stake for me. There is a feeling that I get when I see a film I love that is better than any manufactured or nature-grown opiate. But even when I see that film, I still let myself come off the high. I need to reflect. I need to reassure myself that what I just saw is worthy of my further interest.

Somewhere out of this method, I have built the ten-year hurdle. It keeps me from rating films on IMDB with tens as soon as I get home from the theatre (well, nines now, I guess). It allows me to get angered when EW puts out "Greatest This and That of All Time" lists and then toploads them with films its reviewers saw in the past five years, to keep their forever younger audience from running away crying. It makes me not put my highest rating on something like Pulp Fiction until just a couple of years ago, when I was certain that my devotion was true. It proved itself to me, and I, in return, proved true to it.

So, my answer would be "No, there is not really a list, because I really haven't finished it yet." But I could take a crack at it. Looking at the films on my IMDB "9" list that were most recently released, there is Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, The Shawshank Redemption, Schindler's List and Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. There are others that I will probably add in up through the late '90s, but I just haven't yet. Still doing that updating, but likely I will move Ed Wood, Crumb, Election and The Killer onto that list, amongst others, eventually. Recent films which could likely go on in a few more years would be The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Brick, The Incredibles and City of God.

And that's what I think. Not that YOU give a damn. ;-)

Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 3: Karloff

The Boris Karloff Collection: The Franchise Collection
featuring:
Night Key (1937)
Director: Lloyd Corrigan

Tower of London (1939)
Director: Rowland V. Lee
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

The Climax (1944)
Director: George Waggner

The Strange Door (1951)
Director: Joseph Pevney

The Black Castle (1952)
Director: Nathan Juran

Icons of Horror Collection: Boris Karloff
featuring:
The Black Room (1935)
Director: Roy William Neill
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)
Director: Nick Grinde
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

Before I Hang (1940)
Director: Nick Grinde
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942)
Director: Lew Landers
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

Sometimes you have to jump on these things before they're gone.

Trying to play catch-up with DVD releases already out of print has left me a little short-winded -- which would prove a surprise for anyone who knows me personally -- and so I decided to take another tack for once. With my interest drawn in other areas, I have been putting off, for quite some time now, the purchase of a couple of sets -- one released by Universal, one by Columbia -- featuring decent handfuls of old Boris Karloff flicks. Not the latter day, mostly-miss efforts in his catalog from his dotage, but films that largely comprised his constantly working but constantly typecast days of the late 30s and early 40s. With the exception of two films from the early 50s, these films all stem from that era.

Naturally, one would assume that I'd have jumped on these sets from the day of their release a couple years back, but as I said, I get distracted. And I only have so much money to spend at one time. That said, with the recent release of a couple more entries in the "Icons of..." series (but all Hammer films this time), I figured it might be only so much longer before what appears to be an excellent slice of Karloff ends up in the hands of evil speculators, and not true fans. As for the Franchise Collection above, I cannot explain why I didn't leap at it since it contains four out of five films (I have seen Tower of London numerous times) that have remained stubbornly out of my reach for double-four years.

And now I have them. To be sure, not even having seen those four films, I can still say with relative assurance that the gem out of these nine flicks is going to be The Black Room, a most entertaining Roy William Neill (director of a majority of the Rathbone/Green Holmes mysteries) venture with Karloff in dazzling form as twins at odds whilst encased in power struggles and murder in a tiny European country. The Icons of Horror Karloff set replaces this film in my VHS collection, as it also does for the other films in the set, which represent three of the so-called "Mad Doctor" series Karloff churned out while under contract with Columbia. The Mad Doctor films might seem like more of the same for good Boris on the surface (and he may have felt that way at the time), but they all good fun, and Nick Grinde, director of the two Hang features, keeps things moving along quite briskly, and may have had something of a rapport with his famous star, judging from how lovingly the films frame Karloff throughout. Somehow, despite their lower origins, they come out oddly engaging to this day.

I wish I could speak with any comfort on the rest of the films, not having seen them, but that is precisely why one dives in to buy sets like this. And, of course, the purpose of getting them in the month of October is to add to the Halloween spirit. So, I don't know what you are going to be watching as the spirits accumulate throughout the month -- hopefully not Saw V -- but I'm going use my spare time to catch up with an old friend. Having four unseen Karloffs ahead of me, I can't think of a better time, no matter the quality.

Recently Rated Movies #65: Broadcasting Half Alive

Talk to Me (2007)
Director: Kasi Lemmons
Cinema 4 Rating: 6
Notes: Talk to Me nearly smooth-talked me, alright. Pulled right in from the start, I became convinced that, once again, Don Cheadle was robbed of an Oscar, and also convinced that Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is fast becoming a favorite of mine, should be nominated constantly for the next ten years. I was deep in admiration for this film -- and then the last 45 minutes happened. It has nothing to do with disliking anything in particular which happens in that time, but it has everything to do with watching a film rush too quickly to its dénouement, to the point where I didn't even recognize characters with whom I had just been enamored a short half hour before, watching them devolve into mere cartoons in the name of tidying things up neatly. Edges dissolve, tears are shed, and I was waiting impatiently for the credits to roll. Great detail, though, in the sixties scenes, and the riot scenes are devastating.
Replay/Purchase Meter: Cheadle and Chiwetel (that has something of a ring to it... perhaps a great new team?) need to be seen, and I will watch this again just for them. No purchase though.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Le Scaphandre et le Papillon] (2007)
Director: Julian Schnabel
Cinema 4 Rating: 8
Notes: I am so close to giving this my highest rating straight off (that would be a "9"), but that would be disregarding my rule of not allowing such a thing until a film has been out at least a decade, no matter how much I love it. It's a built-in device, of the sort that I wish many movie sites would employ, On my list, there are some very beautiful or amazing films waiting for their tenth year to run out. Not that it means a damn thing to those films or their makers; I am but a lowly, but highly-opinionated, worm, but that holding back on a "9" blessing means a lot to me. Having stern lines drawn and following through on them makes the guts of my inner world ripple far more tautly than the guts of my physical being. And sometimes, having such control of my hidden self is all I need. But my inner world is self-imposed, unlike that of the Diving Bell's main figure, Jean-Do, paralyzed except for a single eye, who increasingly has to maintain his sanity through an elaborate fantasy life which he can only spell out to the world by learning how to write by blinking his left eyelid. Sound too crazy for words or images? True story, people. And as horrifying and humiliating as some of his hospital life seems in such a direct context, the film cannot be turned away from. It is hypnotic from the first scene. The main thing I learned from Diving Bell is that, if one is going to lose most of their facilities, hopefully they will have had the good fortune to have edited a high-gloss fashion magazine in their movable past. 'Cause even in his shabbiest moments, Jean-Do finds himself surrounded by beautiful women. Or maybe it is one of the more subtler hints in the movie that due to Jean-Do's increasing distance from those of the opposite sex, every women appears beautiful to him. Hard to know; haven't read the book. Probably should.
Replay/Purchase Meter: Yeah, this one is joining the collection. Can't imagine even fully-limbed life without it now.

Nightfall (1957)
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Cinema 4 Rating: 7
Notes: Here's to rediscovering actors that we once wrote off for obscure or dopey reasons. In my youth, I became convinced that Robert Ryan was terrible because I saw him in a couple of rather shabby productions late in his career, and so I avoided a great many other films out of which I may have gained varied amounts of pleasure due to his appearing in them. Then, I saw a couple of old westerns, and when it dawned on me that the actor on whom my attention was locked magnet-tight was Ryan, I had to rewrite my internal film textbook. Recently, I have to do a similar repair job on Aldo Ray, whom I have always mildly enjoyed (We're No Angels, especially) but for whom I have never held any great respect. This may have been due to my seeing a porno movie (Sweet Savage with Carol Connors, aka Thora Birch's mom) in the late '70s which feature Ray in a bit part, and from that point on, I thought of him primarily as a sad has-been. And then I watched Nightfall on TCM last week, a missing film on my Tourneur list, which is every bit as tough as another great noir flick from relatively the same period, Kiss Me Deadly. The film jumps through hoops to keep you on your toes, Brian Keith and Rudy Bond are a truly sadistic pair as the villains, and Anne Bancroft is stunning as the possible love interest. And then there is Ray, seemingly as sweetly meat-headed as ever, but with a determined mien that is positively contagious, drawing the viewer (and Bancroft) deep into his plight, no matter how tightly the noose seems to be pulling around his neck.
Replay/Purchase Meter: Since this one seems to be more obscure, it's not available on DVD yet. Tourneur fans need to see this one, and until it hits a disc, I am going to watch this on TCM every chance I get.

Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 2

Phase IV (1974)
Director: Saul Bass
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)
Director: Terence Fisher
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

I remember exactly where I was when I first saw Saul Bass' insect politics thriller, Phase IV. I just don't remember the "who" of the story.

It was a Friday night, and there was someone at our house. Was it an uncle, and not one with quotations around it? Was it just a friend of ours from the neighborhood, or my cousin Brad, and was my father actually even around for this? Was it him? I don't fully recall the name of the person who filled in that particular role in this story, but I am fairly certain it was one of her abhorrent dates following my parents' then soul-wrenching but actually perfectly timely divorce.

I only recall that this person who probably ended up banging my mom bet me a dime for every thirty minutes I could shut completely up for the evening. I was still young enough where a thin dime still meant a good deal to me -- 10 cents would still buy me a pack of baseball cards at that time -- but I was already engaged enough verbally where I could drag any sane adult to the dark side in no time flat. Much like today, it seems. And thus, the deal was born. I sat down, shut up, and decided to watch whatever movie was coming on that evening. In the '70s, ABC had an amazing penchant for showing horror and science-fiction movies in prime time on Friday nights, most of them made-for-TV (and that is no knock on their quality, for there were some excellent ones) and some of them theatrical releases. (Click here for the opening to their show.)

This evening, they were showing what appeared to be a really spooky looking film called Phase IV. Anything with bug attacks at that age, I was there. It's what tricked me into actually seeing The Swarm in a theatre. And so, having dragged a sleeping bag into the living room, I crawled inside and shut my trap, counting out how many cards I could buy if I did not squeak a single word for the next three hours. (That would be, for the curious, sixty cards.) And then, over the next two hours, I found myself losing the ability to speak anyway. Thanks to Phase IV, which had me so scared I couldn't even get out of the sleeping bag to go down the hall to the bathroom on commercials, I was cheating whoever it was out of their money.

At first, I remember being bored, but then, as the implications of what was happening in this oddly located film were growing, and as the tension built up, I found myself unable to turn away. I didn't really understand what was happening, but that didn't matter. It was about the moment, and that moment found me not just easily earning the first two hours of that cash, but in the end found an entire dollar being slapped into my hand. Never has silence been so golden. I maintain that if the entire world would just pay me hush money in this same manner, I would leave everyone alone. I wouldn't yell about organized religion and idiot Republicans (and, occasionally, idiot Democrats) and crazy Hollywood cults and everything else that pisses me off.

If only I could get people to listen to me in the first place, this would be a great way of life for me.

I also remember where I was when I first saw The Man Who Could Cheat Death. OK, not the full movie, but I did see it in sixth grade at our graduation prize summer camp. The people running the camp had a series of 8mm ten-minute versions of various monster films -- the kind that I would ogle in the back pages of Famous Monsters magazine but never have the guts (or the cash -- I apparently wasn't being paid to shut up enough) to order them -- and as a gift for winning Capture the Flag earlier that morning on our second day there, our class was treated to a night at the movies, camp 8mm style. Popcorn, hot dogs and condensed versions of Christopher Lee Dracula and Peter Cushing Frankenstein films.

In this mix was the miniaturized version of The Man Who Could Cheat Death, with Anton Diffring as a sculptor who appears to be 40ish, but is in reality an increasingly mad Dorian Gray type who has lived for 104 years by replacing certain glands in his body with those of gullible, much younger victims. Chiefly, I remember the final sequence, which I will not relate here in the interests of those who have yet to see what is actually a middling though handsome Hammer production. Of course, being a Hammer film, most likely all will not work out for the villain in the end, so if I were to say that the sculptor is not just flaming in spirit, you can work it out for yourself. The scene, though, did make quite an impression on me, as did the appearance of Christopher Lee, with whom I was beginning a definite fascination. Within the next year, I would start watching the full versions of these same Hammer horror films.

But I got my Hammer start by watching the 8mm renditions, all truncated and jumpy on an old projector -- also, completely silent, so we had to provide our own soundtrack -- inside a cabin that split the difference between a cafeteria and a congregation room for this camp usually attended by the biblically minded. That I would totally discard any attempt at connecting with established religion within the next couple of years, and then possibly replaced such worship with a devotion to the very films that I saw that night in the camp is perhaps an irony worth far more delving on my part. But, I will save that for another time. For now, and for once, I will just shut up.

After all, it's your dime. And soon it will be mine...

Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Growling at Best Buy's Exclusivity...

Warner Home Video Sci-Fi Double Features
Disc #1
Moon Zero Two (1969)
Director: Roy Ward Baker
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
Director/Writer: Val Guest
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

Disc #2
Battle Beneath the Earth (1967)
DirectorMontgomery Tully
Cinema 4 Rating: 3

The Ultimate Warrior (1975)
Director/Writer: Robert Clouse
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

Disc #3
World Without End (1956)
Director/Writer: Edward Bernds
Cinema 4 Rating: 5

Satellite in the Sky (1956)
Director: Paul Dickson
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

Quite regularly, I sift through a seemingly endless list of titles which I am hoping will get released onto DVD so I can replace old versions of these same films. Most of these films were taped off of cable television anytime in the past twenty to five years, though a certain number of them were prerecorded version officially released by their respective studios. No matter how I might have them in my collection, it is still my fervent hope that they shall be released onto disc form, and thus save space in our crammed little hovel (it's amazing the space saved when comparing discs versus tapes) and also, the hope remains that the print in which they are burned onto disc will far outweigh my previous versions in overall quality.

One of the films on this list, which I began compiling a full decade ago, was Hammer Films' special effects-heavy follow-up to One Million Years B.C., When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

Every couple of months since I moved down here to Cali, I have gone through most of this list, and one of the first films I always look up is When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Not that it is any great shakes as a film per se, but it is highly sought by fans of stop-motion animation for its exquisite dinosaur footage by Jim Danforth and Roger Dicken. (While I am at it, I should mention that David Allen, amongst others, also worked on the effects as an assistant, though only Danforth and Dicken were actually nominated for an Oscar at the 1972 awards.) It is for this reason alone (OK, the cave girls play a part too) that I embraced the film as a teenager, and made sure to grab a copy on VHS when it came out in the '90s. And this is without knowing that the original story for the film was devised by none other than J.G. Ballard, writer of Crash (the wonderfully twisted and kinky Cronenberg one) and Empire of the Sun.

But I had always heard there was a slightly longer version of the film, one that took the cavegirl stuff even further than when Raquel Welch leaped about in a fur bikini in B.C. Supposedly, the film originally held a handful (more than a handful, as they say, is a waste) of topless shots, both innocent (swimming about in mucky, sea monster-infested waters) and randy (mild cavepeople whoopee, apparently), as well as a scene where lead Playboy bunny/"actress" Victoria Vetri gets stripped down in a cave (appropriately) by her would-be cave beau. Gee, I'm was actually only here for the dinosaurs, but I can you heap some of this, too, on my plate? All the more reason to remain impatient over an official special edition.

And yet, I could never find this one, even while the entire Harryhausen oeuvre and much of the Hammer library had been released already. I felt certain that it was bound to come out sooner or later, because if there is one diehard fanbase out there, it's the one for special effects epics -- dinosaurs, spaceships, aliens, or what have you. But, as I kept checking over the last few years to find news of its arrival on DVD, I found nothing. My searches came up empty, over and over again. And then, the other day, I found out why: I had been primarily looking on Amazon.

Cut to last week, as I decided to take a quick first look at the new neighborhood Best Buy store. There, sitting in plain sight on a shelf in the science-fiction DVD section, was a single copy of a Warner Home Video Sci-Fi Double Feature disc holding, of course, two movies. The first was of no real consequence to me, though I had seen it years earlier: Moon Zero Two, often described (self-described, really) as the "first space western." But who could care when the other film on the disc was When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth? After the usual shake of the head and pinch of the skin to clear things up for me in as cartoonish a way as possible, I grabbed the copy and refused to let go of it until I arrived home.

I didn't get a chance to watch the film until yesterday, but in the meantime, mostly out of consternation over how I discovered the disc, I went online to research it once more, knowing full well I had been on Amazon just a couple of months prior and had seen nothing on WDRTE. It turns out there is now an entry for it on the site, but it is for an outside party trying to make some cash selling "used/new" copies of the disc. And in the description? The words "Best Buy Exclusive."

This is not the first time I have come at odds with this "Best Buy Exclusive" scenario. I also did this for years looking for Ernest B. Schoedsack's sweet 1940 mad science thriller Dr. Cyclops (the absolute inspiration for The Krofft Supershow's Dr. Shrinker, a crappie but fun show from my youth). I had the Universal VHS release, but was hoping for it on DVD, to accompany the rest of my Cooper and Schoedsack DVD library. Then I found out that Best Buy had been selling it for months as an exclusive set with several other prime golden age horror and sci-fi flicks, including two more on my list, The Land Unknown and The Deadly Mantis. A rush to Best Buy found me a copy all right, but the fact that it said "Volume 2" on it meant that there was an entire first volume of five possible films that I didn't have, and I finally procured a copy off of someone on Amazon for about fifteen bucks over retail in new condition. Which is how I landed The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Mole People and Tarantula in my DVD collection, after years of frustration, and also how my ire was first raised over these exclusive deals with Best Buy.

This wouldn't be a problem with me if they would do a general release a few months later, but from what I can gather from some movie boards is that there is a group of people who rush out and buy up every copy of these exclusives just so they can sell them later to needy, hungry fans once the discs go out of print. It's ticket-scalping without the tickets, I guess -- if you really want to see the movie, you are going to have to pay the price. As proof of this, another "exclusive," a set of generally low-grade horror thrillers thrown into a box called the Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive, is already selling for far above what I would be willing to pay for it (example: click here). Even though the undiscerning horror fan in me (which is the same one that embraces even the truly terrible films on the discs discussed above) would love to add those films to my overall collection, I already own four of them on tape, and none of them are truly essential by any means.

None of the six films in the three discs I did discover at Best Buy as exclusives last week were really essential to me either... except for the Hammer cave girls and dinosaurs epic. Truthfully, I could have saved the money on the other two discs, though I really did love Yul Brynner's The Ultimate Warrior as a kid, and also watched Battle Beneath the Earth lo those many years ago on that beloved after school sci-fi matinee show on KTVA. The upside is that I will be replacing five different tapes in my collection with these three discs (Satellite in the Sky is the only one of the six I did not previously own), and the purchase does give me widescreen versions of all of these films, which is a great addition to the collection too.

And now I have the apparently uncut version of WDRTE. Yes, the disc does say it is rated "G" on the case and shows a running time of 96 minutes. Watching it, you get at least some PG nudity antics and 100 minutes of cave girls tumbling about the animated dinosaur attacks. I found a few entries online talking about Warner recalling this disc from the Best Buy stores, but also some entries offering up different versions of the confusion from various locations. Who knows why it was recalled? My disc works, Vetri doffs her clothes, I couldn't care less about film ratings anyway (I am an adult, can watch anything I damn well please, don't believe in censorship at all, and do not pay attention to ratings or the bluenoses who maintain them), and everything is peachy keen once again in my universe...

...until I remember to ask: Where the hell is Roogie's Bump? Or It Happens Every Spring? Damn it...

Recently Rated Movies #64: Resurgence, Step the One

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Director: Sidney Lumet
Cinema 4 Rating: 7
Notes: This one had me tensed up for about 3/4 of its running length, and while some would say it ends unsatisfactorily, I found its ending inevitable and tailored to the atmosphere. Unique, along with both Linklater Before flicks, Sunset and Sunrise, as being part of a trio of the only films where I don't wish to travel back in time and rip out Ethan Hawke's larynx before Dead Poet's Society started filming. For once, he seems well-suited to a role. It's only coincidental he is such a stammering, ineffectual nebbish in the film. And for fans of Marisa Tomei nudity... Jeezie-Creezie, this is the film for you! (Which means me, of course...)
Reply/Purchase Meter: I could watch it again. If I were collecting Lumet, certainly. A top-notch effort for the legend, but not planning to buy it at this time. (Then again, that Tomei nudity could tip the scales the other way...)

The Brave One
Director: Neil Jordan
Cinema 4 Rating: 6
Notes: My gosh, Jodie Foster is truly a force of nature. Both in and out of this film. Setting aside how awesome I find her overall as a human being, I must admit to feeling a tad creepy watching her basically turn into Travis Bickle, though I find her motives here -- she is beaten and left for dead with her fiance by a street gang marauding a quiet park -- a little more honest than his as a gun-toting vigilante killer. I think the device here involving her work on a New York radio show is clunky at best, but her interplay with Terence Howard is the best part of the film, even if the makers wimp out on carrying it as far as it should (both the relationship and the storyline). An interesting choice for Foster, whose earlier character in Taxi Driver let Bickle take care of this problem for her. I don't know if entertaining is a word for this film, but it is certainly provocative. Just not really believable in how it sums up.
Reply/Purchase Meter: Roughly persuasive the first time; would probably melt under a second viewing. No.

Half Nelson
Director: Ryan Fleck
Cinema 4 Rating: 7
Notes: Ryan Gosling's multi-layered (and Oscar-nommed) performance aside, I actually found the short film which served as a studio pilot for Half Nelson -- Gowanus, Brooklyn (written about by me for Spout here) -- a little more intriguing than the full version. Maybe I just didn't need to know much more about the characters than I already did from the 19-minute glimpse. This is certainly a reversal on how I felt after watching Gowanus, where I did want to spend more time. Not that the characters aren't interesting, and this film is extremely watchable, but I felt like it was just too much of a padding out of a thin storyline. A slightly younger Shareeka Epps is a bit more effective in the shorter version as well.
Reply/Purchase Meter: Won't turn down future run-ins with it on cable somewhere, but renting and/or purchase are definitely out.

Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 1

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996)
Director: Jim Mallon
Universal, 1:13, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

Icons of Horror Collection: Sam Katzman
featuring:
The Giant Claw (1957)
Director: Fred F. Sears
Columbia, 1:15, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 2

The Creature with the Atom Brain (1955)
Director: Edward L. Cahn
Columbia, 1:09, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

Zombies of Mora Tau (1957)
Director: Edward L. Cahn
Columbia, 1:10, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 3

The Werewolf (1956)
Director: Fred F. Sears
Columbia, 1:19, b/w
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

You might wonder why I would bother to purchase the Sam Katzman collection in the Icons of Horror series if it is quite clear from the ratings I have given three of its four films that most of this is utter (though not uninteresting) crap.

Ah, but that fourth movie, The Werewolf... what terror and joy that film brought to my youth, which was spent surrounded by snow and creepy, wintertime forests in Alaska. As it was well known to the kids of my neighborhood, which lay below a mountainside in our little town of Eagle River, the woods were most assuredly laden with all manner of bears, Sasquatch and the occasional dragon, in addition to a large family of werewolves. My identification with The Werewolf is mostly due to locale, as the predominate backdrop to this movie is indeed snow and creepy forests, as it was filmed around Big Bear Lake here in California. And don't think I didn't dwell on this picture once more early last year as I traipsed about the woods around Big Bear during a couple of blizzard-laden days on a marketing think-tank retreat there. (There wasn’t a whole lot of thinking done at this retreat, and as a result, it definitely tanked.)

My interest in the film goes beyond just our common setting of woods-bound terror. The Werewolf is that exceedingly rare (for its time) lycanthropy flick where the condition is brought about through biological means rather than via a supernatural curse. This aspect is far more interesting to me now that I am older, because when I was a kid, I was mostly scared to death of walking home through the woods after school in the winter, and this film did not help me any. The makeup job on actor Steven Ritch is certainly not so frightening now, but it didn't matter to me then. Already frightened to death to be outside at night by every single televised Bigfoot special that hit the airwaves in the mid-to-late '70s, as well as a library book full of chilling woodcut illustrations from the 17th and 18th centuries, The Werewolf placed a blood-soaked cherry on the sundae of fear that kept me rushing through the snow in the dark woods every single year far beyond the age where such behavior is even halfway reasonable.

I should mention that this was seen by me, along with The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, long before The Wolf Man and The Curse of the Werewolf, two far more famous and influential lycanthropic flicks. Certainly it is nowhere near as accomplished as those films, nor does it have the same budget, but having it watched it in the past year, The Werewolf still holds up as a surprisingly tense little thriller, and it is a kick watching Ritch muck about the woods looking like a well-dressed and very hirsute preacher. I am definitely looking forward to sitting down here in October and spending an afternoon getting cozy with this old furry friend/fiend, and perhaps even catching up with a couple of those lesser films in the collection as well.

Definitely fully welcome in the household is the DVD re-release of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. Somehow, I missed it the first time around (though I did see it in the theatres twice on its original release), and having not heard about it coming out again, I was stunned to wander into a stack of them at Best Buy the other day. Not really one of their best outings -- Mike and the 'Bots tackle Universal's This Island Earth this time around (a favorite sci-fi flick of mine, but I am not grousing about it like some people did) -- the film is hampered by making the switch from TV to the big screen, where the expectations of a paying audience change the game somewhat. Even counting it as a more-or-less average episode, MST3K: The Movie is still essential to any fan of the series, if only to see what they can do with a slightly higher budget. Seeing it on the shelf at that store, there was no hesitation on my part, except to briefly reflect on whether I was dreaming or not. "Didn't this go out of print? Why do they have so many copies?" Always read the fine print, my friends. "Copyright 2008" means brand new. Well, at least this year, it does.