There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #4 – October Night by Todd Chappelle (2014)

Oh, it's on, Hallmark Channel! It's fucking on!

For years on end now, the talking heads in the right wing media have been screaming and whining about a supposed "War on Christmas" propped up by liberals in this country. We have to hear their self-righteous talking points replayed every single holiday season. They get weepy when someone says "Season's Greetings" to them, and insist that people say the word "Christmas"... or else they will... well, you know... They seem to start up a nuclear countdown clock annually for when Starbucks rolls out their new holiday cups, and then go apoplectic when the cups don't don't have what they feel is the right amount of Jesus sprinkled on them. This is all the evidence we need to prove that this group – that thrills at calling liberals "snowflakes" because they are supposedly sooooo precious and breakable – are actually the biggest whiners and babies out there when they don't get a thing they want. If this were built into a Speak 'n' Spell, it would go "Sean Hannity says, 'Waaaaaaa... mama!!'" 

The roots of this imagined "War on Christmas" are, when you dig to its deepest point, purely a racial thing. What these storefront white supremacists – you know, the prettier ones they can actually put before the public on display, as if the TV screen were a shop window – are really upset about is what they believe to be encroachment upon their precious Christmas Day by three of the four racial groups they hate and fear the most: the Jews with Hanukkah, African-Americans with Kwanzaa, and occasionally (but not this year and not for a good while, because the holy month shifts consistently on the shorter Islamic calendar), the Muslims with Ramadan. (The fourth group they hate and fear would be Hispanics, but they get Christmas right, as long as they say it in 'Murican.) These pinhead "Warriors for Christmas" bristle at the thought of their addled brains needing to be inclusive and consider everyone else that might be enjoying the same general holiday season with their families and friends, whether or not it involves Christmas. 

Look, not everyone celebrates Christmas, and that is exactly what drives Warriors for Christmas batty. They hate that everyone is not the same as them, and not celebrating the same things the way that they determine is correct. Don't want to play by our rules? Fuck off! Everyone else that doesn't look like them to too scary, too foreign, and not 'Murican! Me, I'm an atheist and very open about it; I just don't pester people with it the way that Christopher Hitchens did while he was alive and Richard Dawkins still does before he is dead. That's not my game. I don't believe in your god, and you had better be fine with that, because I am just fine with your fairy tales. I want everyone to get along, and I want people to believe how they need to believe in order to find some form of solace with the endless, dark void that will, not so much confront them, but consume them at the ends of their lives.

This "War on Christmas" junk angers me beyond belief. As I said, I am an atheist, but I freakin' love Christmas, and I don't shy away from it at all. Jen and I like to take an afternoon and drive around to look at Christmas decorations on houses every year. My friend Adrian would say that I what I really celebrate is Saturnalia, and he is both wrong and right about that. The roots of what we celebrate today commonly are to be found partially in that ancient Roman celebration, but there is so much more from other pagan traditions and folk beliefs and also from, yes, Christianity, that it really is a separate thing from any ancient holiday that inspired it. There is a way into the holiday that is as open to almost anyone from anywhere as to be all-encompassing. Like other holidays, we pick and choose whatever trappings we wish to employ, and no one except a truly devout fundamentalist is going to whine about it. And if they want to whine about it, that's fine; just don't whine on my time. 

But even with my rampant atheism, Christmas is not just a "presents, Rudolph, and Santa Claus" thing with me. I enjoy the trappings of the traditional Christian-based holiday as well, many of the hymns (along with the popular, secular carols), and manger scenes can be lovely when they aren't glowing in crazy-ass neon on someone's front porch. I may not say the prayers if I am in a situation where someone actually says prayers today, but I remain respectful, close my eyes, and let my friends or family have their moment with their deity. And then, pass those goddamned potatoes, please... that bowl needs to be emptied! 

Out in the aisles of your local box store, it's a whole different matter to me. The stores jump to Christmas far too quickly, and they have since, well, forever. Personally, I don't ever think of shopping before perhaps mid-November, and hardly ever do it until early December anyway, so the shopping early thing is lost on me. I suppose there are true wackos out there who do these things early, especially moms if they have very large families. And if they are shopping early, they aren't even celebrating the "real Christmas" anyway, you know, the one where the Christ child is born (though most likely not on Dec. 25). What they are celebrating is the American commercial side of the holiday, where it is more important to get lots of prezzies than to not give giant corporations loads of money so they can merge with smaller companies and become ever more giant corporations. They are celebrating the secular side, not the religious version. So, what's their beef? Why do they have to get all up in arms if those who don't necessarily identify as "Christian" wish to say "Season's Greetings!" instead?

In the real world, I say "Merry Christmas!" equally as much as I say "Season's Greetings!" I like saying these things to people, even in just passing, and I do it just to have something different to say than "How are you?" or "Hello..." meekly as they go by me. But I try to size up the situation before I say either one. You might even say this sizing up of potential hearers of my greeting comes down to a form of racial profiling, an act which is bad in most cases, but I feel very apt when a "War on Christmas" is being fought by only the one side that perceives it as such. This is how I do it... 

If I – a very blonde, white male myself – am speaking to someone who seems uptight about life in general, and they seem on the edge of pitching a bitch about whatever you say, regardless – which, the bulk of the time, means they are very clearly, translucently white – I say "Merry Christmas!" In ALL other cases, I say, with a sincere and very pleasant smile, "Season's Greetings!"

Because I know they aren't babies and won't cry about it later...

The Real War: The War on Halloween

Meanwhile, let's talk about the real war that has been occurring since time immemorial: The War on Halloween. Just like in the retail stores, Christmas tiptoes in ever earlier each year on television. And the first salvo was taken this year by the Hallmark Channel; you know, those creeps who prop up most of the major and some minor holidays just so they can increase their card, paper, ribbon, ornament, and stuffed animal sales. Hallmark Channel has the biggest boner for Christmas than any other channel on cable. They even program an entire month for Christmas in July.

The worst part though, is their annual Countdown to Christmas. During most of the year, in addition to their most banal, crappy movies (I've seen a few here and there in order to learn the truth, so I know), Hallmark likes to shoot down Thanksgiving altogether and push their Christmas movie programming to nearly two months ahead of the actual holiday. This puts them into late October.

Jen and I use the Hallmark Channel. Well, we only use it until their Countdown to Christmas crap starts, and then there is a reason we turn to something else. Seriously, we don't really watch it so much as we use it as a nightlight while we sleep, because they play reruns of Frasier, Cheers, and I Love Lucy from about 1:00 a.m. until 8:00 a.m. when we rise. Jen can't sleep without the TV on, and we have to find something comforting for me to be able to actually sleep at all. So we choose a channel that has something we both love, and all is well. However, I am often awake in the middle of the night, so I end up watching at least one episode of Frasier more often than not. 

One night a couple weeks back, a horrendous Hallmark Channel ad came on during Frasier that almost immediately sent me looking for an axe to destroy the television. The ad starts out with what looks like a big, friendly house with pumpkins on the porch. (Naturally, the porch is painted white.) But then it becomes apparent that the scenes carved into the Jack-O-Lanterns are actually wintry, Christmas scenes. The last carving is of stockings hanging over a fireplace. Then two final pumpkins are shown as the camera pans upward. The first says "Countdown to Christmas" and the second bears the channel's name. A graphic then shows the date of October 28.. THREE WHOLE DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN EVEN HAPPENS!

This is the shit that drives me crazy! Why in such a rush to get to Christmas, a season that causes more depression than any other holiday? Can't wait to be upset and frustrated from shopping tension and a depleted bank account? What is the damn hurry? And things like this happen every year – for decades – with stores that start taking down shelves of Halloween stuff days before Halloween occurs, and with church organizations seeking to tamp down what they consider a "demonic" holiday (I wil have a piece on the vile but thoroughly entertaining Bob Larson in a few days).  

Here's a fun and very clever song that ties in with my "War on Halloween". It is a parody of the classic hymn, O Holy Night, and is sung quite nicely by Mr. Todd Chappelle, a comic singer-songwriter from Pennsylvania. I have heard many of Todd's other songs, but when I heard this one on Ben's Wacky Radio, I just had to add it to my mixtape for this year. Enjoy...

October Night [A parody of O Holy Night]
Words by Todd Chappelle

Original Music by Adolphe Adam (1847)

"October night, we should be carving pumpkins
Instead the stores have their Christmas displays
Can't stand the sight of Santa and his reindeer
Please take them down, we still have 80 shopping days

No Christmas trees, no giant plastic snowmen
We don't need Santa on Columbus Day
Screw Halloween, and also screw Thanksgiving
I don't want to fight
I haven't even raked my leaves

This just isn't right

On this October night"


Todd's got the right idea here. Just take it right to 'em. Look, he even throws Halloween and Thanksgiving right under the bus tires just to prove how much of a social crime it is that Christmas is all over the goddamned place this early before the actual holiday.

Christians and right wing groups make themselves look like the victims by saying their rights are being trampled by political correctness and the expansion of civil rights to everyone else in America. I mentioned the four racial groups that make up what is considered the menace in the fake "War on Christmas", but in the "War on Halloween," the LGBTQ-plus-whatever-else crowd, by and large, has adopted Halloween as their special day of the year, with many people even calling it "Gay Christmas". I don't have a problem with this, because any day can be what you need it to be. Halloween is mine to celebrate my way, and anyone else can make it theirs, too, and do it their way. But, largely, the same groups that don't like Christmas being "Season's Greeting"-ed to death tend to not look too kindly on gay rights, marriage and whatever else they have fought for and rightfully won for themselves. So, why not silently and stealthily eat away at Halloween's exposure by lengthening Christmas' reach on television, in the stores, and in the public eye. 

"What are you doing over there? Halloween? Look, we have Christmas over here! Shiny, glistening Christmas! Is that candy? Mere candy? Bah! We have presents over here... colorfully wrapped presents! You never know what you might get!"

Maybe all of this is Tim Burton's fault. He had Jack Skellington take over Christmas over twenty years ago, and the two holidays blended. That could not have sat well with the religious right, though most people don't have a problem attending the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland every Halloween and straight through December. Jack Skellington has taken that over as well, and most people seem fine with it. (Myself, I prefer the traditional Haunted Mansion, but I like both.) I am pretty certain a whole lot of the people riding it probably identify as Christians, and even if they don't like it, they seem to keep going in droves. On the flip side, I am 100% unlikely to ever ride anything at a theme park that denies evolution, so has the stronger sense of values?

So, maybe the real problem are the talking heads in the right wing media, tossing about barbed, farcical darts willy-nilly in order to hit anything that supports their dark agenda for America. Why not just make up and scream ceaselessly about an imagined "War on Christmas" just to get people riled up for no reason?

That's exactly what I am doing with this "War on Halloween" stuff... just 'cause I can... 

RTJ

And, before I go, here's a video of Todd doing the song live on stage. The guy has some lovely pipes...

Buy Todd's music on iTunes and check out his website at http://www.toddchappelle.com/.

It's A Very Special Cel Bloc Xmas... "The Unwrap-pening"

So, did you get everything that you wanted for Christmas?

What I wanted was a little reconciliation with a holiday with which I have increasingly lost touch, and perhaps to hide myself a bit from the rest of this truly substandard year. So I decided to dig into some old holiday Christmas cartoon "classics," some which I love, and some for which I run hot and cold depending on when I watch them.

In getting my animation blog, the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, restarted over the past three months (at the same time as The Cinema 4 Pylon, my main site), part of the reason was for me to really dive back into getting reacquainted with many of these cartoons after concentrating so deeply on feature films for the past few years. Cinematically, animation -- especially the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons of Warner Bros. and Donald Duck shorts -- was my first love, not surprisingly, since cartoons are how many kids first get a notion of popular entertainment. And honestly, when I was a kid, I thought Bugs Bunny cartoons were just made for seeing on television, until my parents explained to me that they used to see them in theatres when they were kids.

It wasn't until I started discovering, mostly under my own volition, the films of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye, Ray Harryhausen, Orson Welles, and Hammer and Universal horror flicks (for example) that I really started getting a sense of the true expanse of the history of cinema. And in gaining that sense, I began to learn more about animation, and how so many of the characters that I was seeing on Saturday morning television, as a wee child in the late '60s and through my true growing up period in the '70s, had their roots in movie theatres. I always kind of knew that about the Disney films. since some of my earliest movie-going experiences were Pinocchio and The Jungle Book, and in watching episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney (a mainstay of my youth) where they often had old intros by Walt himself, I was able to ascertain the connection between his film work and the television world into which he expanded his empire.

But apart from Disney, so many of the characters that I knew only from TV: Bugs, Daffy, the Road Runner, Popeye, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Woody Woodpecker, Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse, the Pink Panther, Tom and Jerry, Droopy, etc., had all been created initially to be seen on the big screen, not just by children in a ghettoized set of hours on a single day on the weekend, but in theatres on any day, with any showing, and by adults as well as children. I found books on animation at the local library and even in my school library, and also read biographies on Walt Disney (a book by Bob Thomas, which I know now was a suck-up job to the Disney family, but loved then) and Tex Avery (Joe Adamson's Tex Avery: King of Cartoons... find one). I was drawing a lot then, and made my own stupid attempts at animation, though not with using a camera. Finding flip animation too dull and having limited resources (i.e., no movie camera), I did have a very beloved and well-used typewriter at my disposal, and I got deep into writing screenplays for cartoons that would never get made.

And that was pretty much the deepest I got into animation as my teens came along. I became a bit of a lost cause to most people, my studies suffered greatly, and I concentrated more on the history of film in general rather than solely on animation. Through the early VHS years, I became a horror fanatic, though I still purchased nearly any cartoon collection that came along. Years later, with a massive stack of cartoons at my disposal, I would organize a couple of animation marathon sleepovers, where a passel of friends would crash on my living room floor and attempt to stay up all night watching hours and hours of cartoons. The fact that Anchorage, Alaska at that time had the world's first 24-hour cartoon channel on UHF also played a large part in the resurgence of animation in my life.

And through all of this, I always had a bit of a fascination -- almost like a sub-genre of fascination -- with cartoons that had a Christmas theme. There weren't a lot of them, surprisingly; most of what we tend to consider as the classics of Christmas animation, justifiably, were specials created directly for television, such as the Rankin-Bass multitude of shows, and the Charlie Brown special. But as for theatrical cartoons with holiday themes, they mostly tended to just get mixed in with the rest of the cartoons. Take the Warner Bros.' output as an example. With over a thousand theatrical released from 1930 through the late '60s when they ceased production, there are only a handful of Warner Bros. shorts that have a holiday theme, even in a light way. You'd think that with such a long run and success, that there would be annual Christmas shorts from their studio, but such was not the case. (Were they operating as such capacity today, they would undoubtedly do such a thing; the holidays are just too, too big a business now.)

VHS was a good place to find a concentration of these cartoons, as I mentioned in one of my posts this month (the one on Snow Foolin'). However, these tapes were usually rather cheap and contained often terrible prints of the same public domain cartoons over and over again. But as the only way to see many of these shorts consistently, you took what you could get. (The same situation with cheap PD cartoons continues on DVD today; they are all over the Amazon site. Anyone can put one out and sell it.)

As for the cartoons that I selected for this month of Christmas/winter celebration, I tried to mix things up a bit, and not go too heavy on one studio or director. I also tried to mix a bit of the more obscure in here as well. Did I succeed in allaying my blues of the past year, and in reconnecting with Christmas? A bit of both, I suppose. Posting these articles allowed me to lose myself in the creative process as I prepared myself for the coming year. I got to put each of these cartoons under my microscope and get to know them more fully. The ones that I loved going in I now probably love a little more, and the ones that were on the fence mostly got off it in either direction, but I at least have a more definite opinion as to how I feel about each one.

Most of all, I came out of the experience still loving the holiday. And still loving cartoons. So if that is the best present that I will get this year (though the 50" Smart TV Jen's mom surprised us with last night is definitely in the running), then that is just fine.

Here are the holiday cartoons that I reviewed over the past month as part of this theme. Each photo and title are linked to the article for that cartoon:

Tom Turk and Daffy (1944)

The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives (1933)

Toyland Premiere (1934)

Jack Frost (1934)

Santa's Surprise (1947)

Hector's Hectic Life (1949)

Snow Foolin' (1949)

Broken Toys (1935)

Ginger Nutt's Christmas Circus (1949)

Gift Wrapped (1952)

Bedtime for Sniffles (1940)

And if you are still in the mood for more Christmas cartoon goodness:

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1948)

And finally, here is a Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse cartoon without a Christmas or winter theme, but has a pretty good Santa Claus gag right smack in the middle of it:

L'il Ainjil (1936)

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope you have been enjoying these cartoons as I did.

RTJ

Holiday Remix of the Return of the Son of Terrible Movies Promo Blowout! [Pt. 3]

[To read Pt. 1 of this series, click here, and for Pt. 2, click here.]

Having established the importance of the late night horror movie programs, The World's Most Terrible Movies and Son of Terrible Movies, in my personal development as a movie fanatic, I still have some unfinished business to impart to you. Namely, I have just a few more promos from these programs that I have not shared yet, and a couple of them tie rather coincidentally to both the time of year and to a recent major release currently in movie theatres at this moment.

Promos for local television tend to be rather bland, but every once in a while, you see something different and special. In the late '70s, Richard Gay and his fellow staffers at KIMO-TV were clearly having fun with a phenomenon that was still pretty fresh back then, but which is having a massive, worldwide resurgence right now: Star Wars. Perhaps you have heard of it. In the promo above, film reels have a laser battle in space with a microphone or a stack of dixie cups on top of a microphone, or something like that. Sure, it is about as cheap as cheap can be, and is all the more wonderful for it. Seeing something like this on late night TV was what utter joy was all about for a kid, especially one who was already stoked from dreams of joining the rebellion thanks to Star Wars mania.

The World's Most Terrible Movies programs weren't always relegated to late night, however. They also sometimes moved around on the KIMO-TV Channel 13 schedule depending on the situation; for example, Christmas. The promo above for Santa Claus Conquers the Martians was for an afternoon showing on Christmas Day. I was introduced to this film on a similar showing, though not the one being promoted, a few years earlier on one of the local channels (my memory has it as Channel 2, the NBC affiliate, KTUU). It was probably the first truly awful film that I saw where I realized it was awful but was enjoying it tremendously at the same time. For kids, you either love or hate something, and watching something purposefully because you are aware that it is bad really wasn't a thing back then for the junior set. I'm still not sure it is, though as an adult, I do it almost weekly.

Some films that were shown on the programs didn't really stick with me, at least in my accessible memory. The promo above for 1974's The Night of the Sorcerers, from Tombs of the Blind Dead auteur Amando de Ossorio, is one that I do not remember seeing, though it is likely that I may have. If I had seen it on one of the Terrible Movies shows, however, I can't imagine I would have forgotten it for a very certain reason. If you watch the promo about two-thirds of the way through, there is what is popularly known as a "nipslip," in this case, it seems that when they were editing the promo, they either accidentally (or purposely) left in a quick shot of a nipple. Since one of the reasons I loved to stay up to watch the early Hammers and other '60s and '70s horrors was for the ladies, I am mad that I can't remember this one. I wonder if they showed the film unedited as well?

Going in the opposite direction, they also occasionally showed much older classic horror films too. The promo above for 1932's The Mystery of the Wax Museum is an example. By no means a "terrible" movie, unless you just outright hate horror films, Mystery would be remade in 1953 in 3D as House of Wax with Vincent Price. I love both versions, but this one has its stamp on history as well. A daring picture that has "pre-code" elements such as drug use and language, Mystery was one of two Warners' pictures released (Doctor X being the other) that were the last narrative films made using the two-strip Technicolor process. Definitely worth a visit for a variety of reasons, but my main one is the lovely Fay Wray. I can never get enough of her.

One more bit for this go-around. The promo I remember most from The World's Most Terrible Movies show was the one above where a long-haired guy goes fishing in what I believe is Ship Creek in Anchorage and catches a movie reel. He even clubs it after catching it, and then has another passing fisherman take a picture of him with his catch. This clip definitely has the most Alaskan flair to it out of all the promos, not something I normally take pride in, but I will say this particular one always stuck with me the most. It may be that now I am down in Southern California that I have became more protective of my Alaskan status. I have never cared for the thought of belonging to a particular culture or group, but I will admit that growing up in a certain environment does color how you approach or perceive every other thing you encounter in your life.

I hope you enjoyed the third part of my ongoing feature on The World's Most Terrible Movies program. I would once again like to thank Richard Gay, who created and produced the show, for contacting me a few years ago and allowing me to use his catalog of clips online. And if you have not read the first two parts, links to each article are at the top of this post.

You can also watch all of the clips on The Cinema 4 Pylon YouTube channel.

[Note: The fourth and final part of this series will be posted in October 2016.]

Recently Rated Movies: Michael Gough and the Ice Cream for Crow

Find the Blackmailer (1943)
Dir.: D. Ross Lederman
TC4P Rating: 6/9

"Why, the nerve o' that tuh-mat-uh!"

Sure, watching "classic" classic film is often pretty great, though you sometimes find a dud among the films generally considered the greatest of all time. But "B" pictures are where the fun of classic film is really at, but you sometimes have to squirm your way through a lot of dross to find the real... well, "gems" may not be the word, but when you find a good one, they sparkle like any bonafide diamond. Of course, when you are hanging around such low-class digs, that gem may just be made of out paste instead.

As brisk (just 55 minutes long) as it is fun, Find the Blackmailer is a speedy little detective yarn featuring Jerome Cowan as D.L. Trees (his secretary is named Pandora Pines, so you get the gist of what is going on here), a private eye so far below public scrutiny that he gets the job in this picture just because nobody knows he is a detective. When a mayoral candidate (Gene Lockhart) gets involved deep with some gangsters, it is up to Trees to figure out the exceedingly convoluted mystery (involving the search for a talking crow) and save the day.

Find the Blackmailer is just a simple potboiler, but the performances are all engaging (I especially like Lockhart, but I like him in almost everything). The film is a wonderful showcase for Cowan, who played a lot of second bananas in his four-decade film career, including his supporting role in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, two years before this picture, where he played the tragic part of Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer, who gets bumped off by Brigid O'Shaughnessy. But Cowan is the man here, an unlikely tough guy who is able to think his way out of rough spots, and is able to smart talk his way into uneasy alliances when he needs to do so.

And of course, some of that smart talk is what slowly endeared this movie to me, with lines like ""Beat it, before I throw a moth in your muffler!" Yeah, that kind of stuff gets me right here, as does all the silliness with the talking crow, which itself might be a not so subtle ribbing of The Maltese Falcon. There are worse films that have been nominated for Best Picture awards, so why not skip all of that high-falutin' garbage and just settle for a fun "B" pic? 

[Find the Blackmailer is available in the Warner Archive set, Warner Bros. Horror/Mystery Double Features, along with 5 other films. If you like "B" pictures, this is a must have set, especially for Sh! The Octopus.]


Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (1972)
Dir.: R. Winer / Barry Mahon "Thumbelina" portion
TC4P Rating: 2/9

This one is currently frightening audiences -- and generating big laughs -- by being shown in trailers all over the country as part of a Rifftrax program being promoted in theatres right now. Unfortunately for me, seeing a truly bad movie as part of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or its offshoot riffing shows does not count as my having seen the actual film. And so I had to knock off a major blank spot on my film-watching resume by sitting down to watch a full version of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.

I said "watch a full version" rather than "watch the full version," because there are actually two different takes of this film. The Santa portion of the film is actually nothing but a wraparound segment that introduces a film within the film, a separately filmed fairy tale that could either be the story of Thumbelina or Jack and the Beanstalk (both filmed by exploitation director Barry Mahon), depending on which release you were unlucky enough to have caught. The films within the film are both longer than the combined before and after Santa segments, thereby rendering the title characters to also-ran status in their own movie.

As for the quality of the film, that varies between segments. The Santa portion looks like it was filmed outside someone's Florida beach house. After first hearing some completely talentless kids dressed at elves attempt to sing (and fail) about why Santa Claus hasn't returned to the North Pole, we see Santa use his mind control powers to enlist several local kids (some of the same ones playing the elves) to help him get his sleigh out from the beach sand holding it down. The kids get various animals to try and pull the sleigh free -- a gorilla, a warty pig, a sheep, and a cow -- but all to no avail. Why Santa doesn't get his fat ass out of the sleigh when the gorilla is pulling it will tell you all that you need to know. For some strange reason, we are shown shots of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fiddling about on a raft in the water (with Ol' Man River on the soundtrack). As the kids give up hope, Santa tells them the story of Thumbelina.

The Thumbelina film not only has a different director, but is far better filmed than the Santa part. However, this is not praise, just a notice that the Santa scenes are some of the worst filmmaking that has ever been released theatrically, while the Thumbelina story is just a generic attempt at low-budget children's filmmaking. (It does raise my rating of the overall film just a tad since it so much better than the Santa wraparound.) We watch a pretty girl walk around the defunct Pirates World theme park in Dania, Florida, and she happens upon a series of diorama telling the story of Han Christian Andersen's Thumbelina. She imagines herself into the story, and then we get over an hour of slow-moving drama involving the birth of Thumbelina and her impending marriage to Mr. Mole. The songs are better than the ones in the Santa part of the film (and clearly a better songwriter too) though still not all that good. For the animals in the story, they have chosen to go with full head masks rather than makeup on the actors, and so all of the voices seem disembodied. It's dull but its better than what came before, and what will come at the end.

Returning to Santa, after the story, the kids depart for reasons unknown to the profusely sweating old elf, and thankfully he waits until they are gone to strip from his coat and belt down to his red t-shirt. When they return, all two dozen of them are hanging onto a red jalopy being driven by a poor guy trapped inside the silliest white rabbit costume that has every existed. It is the Ice Cream Bunny to the rescue, in a scene that only goes for the last ten minutes of the film, but seems to amble on for about three hours. And then these horrid urchins sing again... they... sing... again. (I'm sorry, but this film made me look up the definition of singing in the dictionary, because surely, this can't be what is meant.)

The whole affair really makes you start to hate the commercialization of Christmas even more, because without an audience out there willing to watch anything to do with the holiday, this movie doesn't get made. Maybe what we should have been teaching our children first all along was good taste. Manners, letters, numbers, potty training... that can all come later.

Oh, and singing. We should teach them to sing well too. That's something my ears learned from Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny.


Black Zoo (1963)
Dir.: Herman Cohen
TC4P Rating: 5/9

Michael Gough. If there is one name that must be placed amongst the pantheon of the World's Hammiest Actors, Michale Gough must surely have a plaque there. You might know him best as Alfred the Butler in the four Burton/Schumacher Batman films, but Gough had acted for a very long time before that. For the purposes of this quickie, let's concentrate on a very small period in that career. In the late '50s and early '60s, he tore the horror world up in a trio of films for producer (and sometimes director) Herman Cohen, and where he really made the raised eyebrow and out-of-place tone of voice an art form.

My favorite of the three films has always been Horrors of the Black Museum, the first and best of the set, a Grand Guignol piece that I first saw as an older teenager and have never been able to get out of my system. (And it is one of the films to which I was tipped off by Stephen King's seminal non-fiction work, Danse Macabre.) The least of the trio is Cohen's giant gorilla epic, Konga, which while being highly derivative of better (and some worse) films, pushes the crazy factor just enough to make it interesting. Through both pictures, Gough controls your gaze for every second, his indignant face ready to burst (sometimes inappropriately) in every scene at the slightest provocation or perceived slight. And when things really start to not go his way, watch out!

But until this week, I had not seen the last film in the three Cohen/Gough team-ups, Black Zoo from 1963. After a beautiful girl is killed by a loose tiger on the street, we meet Michael Conrad (Gough), a British expat who runs a private zoo in Los Angeles called Conrad's Animal Kingdom. Even with Gough running about, all seems on the up and up at Animal Kingdom. Conrad leads tour groups to meet his lions, tigers, apes, and bears, and his wife runs a chimpanzee act that thrills audiences. Conrad himself seems to have an odd rapport with his predatory creatures, and he is seen to play his organ for his big cats while they fall asleep loose in his own home.

Jerome Cowan, whom you might remember from the first review regarding Find the Blackmailer above, shows up as someone attempting to swindle Conrad out of his immense property, and you can imagine how that works out. Anyone who crosses Conrad starts to disappear, and the police become increasingly suspicious, especially when the evidence at the crime scenes seems to point to animals as the killers. 

Once again, the result is a very derivative film, but what sets it apart from others of its ilk is its lead role featuring the nearly always sinister Gough. It is hard to watch this film in this age when all one can think about is the working conditions for the animals (except for the gorilla, which is not only a guy in a suit, but possibly the same suit from Konga). Even with some cool names showing up in the cast -- Elisha Cook Jr., Jeanne Cooper, Marianna Hill (yum!), Virginia Grey, and Edward Platt -- Gough is the whole show here. Like the other Cohen films, the main reason to watch is to see him puff and pout and plot his way out of and into situations. And he does it in the grandest way possible.

Yes, his hamminess is the big draw, but he was also an actor with a broad range -- appearing in Ealing comedies, Hammer and Amicus horror, Disney historical epics, and even winning a Tony Award for Best Actor in 1979. Gough, in any role, is always worthwhile, even when you really hate where they went with Alfred in the last two Batman films. Then again, I really hate where they went with every character in the last two Batman films, so I suppose that I should cut him some slack. He was just doing his job like any other working stiff actor.

It's A Very Special Cel Bloc Xmas!

I am just a little bit lost this Christmas season. Not feeling particularly festive, and even less so than last year, which really sucked. This is even after we spent the day after Thanksgiving decorating our new home for the first time.

Why? The reasons are varied, but I have decided to combat it the only way I know how: writing about Christmas cartoons. I have selected 9 cartoons about which I have never written before, all with holiday themes, and will be posting them throughout December.

The first of the batch, Warner Bros.' The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives (1933) is online now at the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc at http://bit.ly/1PwLI5S. I have also embedded the video into the article in case you have never watched the cartoon.

I'll see you over there!

Post-Xmas Toy Hangover Blues...

So, you've built a 1,045 piece Batmobile out of Legos. Now, what are you going to do for Christmas?

Luckily for me, I've got an awesome girlfriend like Jen, so if I chose to, I could've watched my new three-disc Criterion Collection version of Kurosawa's Shichinin no samurai (The Seven Samurai to those of us who speak a more barbaric tongue). I already had the original Criterion release of this film from several years before, and had watched it numerous times, so I wrestled originally with even placing this title on my Christmas list. After all, lately I have been an advocate of not repurchasing titles that I already own, no matter what extra bonus features were crammed on the new version. In fact, I have gotten away from watching bonus features at all -- most commentaries are boring affairs for films not really worth commenting on in the first place -- and I have taken to weighing a film's price against the film only to judge whether I wish to own it. The bonus features have become gravy to me, and if I choose to watch them later, that's fine, but I will no longer purchase something just because there are ""4 deleted scenes!" on it. (Don't even get me started on the "alternate ending" crap...) It is the film that matters.

But what happens when a company goes over and above the call of duty and sends out the massive tsunami of info that comes with the 3-disc Samurai set? The original release was practically a bare-bones situation, with a rather dry (though richly informative) commentary by film historian Michael Jeck. Add the original U.S. trailer in, and that's it! The new version still includes that material, but adds a second commentary with a quintet of film scholars, a gallery of production stills and posters, more trailers and teasers, and well over THREE hours of documentary footage on the making of the film, the samurai tradition in Japanese film, and an intimate (and lengthy) conversation with Kurosawa-san himself. Oh, yes... there is also a gorgeous 58-page booklet included in the package with essays by top film historians about the master and his masterpiece, which also includes a piece by Toshiro Mifune, the star of the film.

So, yeah, I really had no choice but to include this on my Christmas list blog entry over a week ago. That Jen actually used the list was sweet, and that she got me one of the movies on my list is even sweeter, but her trip to the Pylon also represents the first time that she has actually read anything on this site. (I told her "You really should. You are the female lead character in it.") And the list also came in handy for my Secret Santa at work, who took the cue and slid a copy of Elf my way at the office party last week. Thanks, Secret Santa. Without this disc, I would feel like a cotton-headed ninny-muggins!

Kurosawa and Will Ferrell... who knew those two were connected?

Disapproval Would Be Folly...

Several times over the last couple weeks, people have asked me this question: What is your favorite Christmas movie? Of course, they sometimes ask this when I am decked out in my sweet Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas Jack Skellington silk shirt with the Jack-faced buttons running down the front. Or often they will ask this when I am standing in front of them in my Jack scarf, striped and with Jack's smiling, beguiling face on either end. I am often surprised, though, how many people don't identify Nightmare as a Christmas flick, when it most certainly is one. I am equally surprised at the number of people who have yet to see it.

But Nightmare, while it would seem it is a given, is not my choice. Even though it is one of my very favorite movies, on my list of Christmas movies (this does not include TV specials, mind you) there can really only be one choice: the original 1947 version of Miracle on 34th Street (in black and white, thank you very much!) While I am not normally given to the accepted ideas of family in our society, this one gets to me, and while I watch it, nothing becomes more important to me than whether sweet little Natalie Wood (so smart, so unmoved by the fantasy trappings of Christmas) gets the home she has always wanted, and whether her mother will hook up with "Uncle Bob", the lawyer neighbor who has won their hearts, and finally give her a complete family unit again. Oh yeah, and whether she will finally believe that the twinkly-eyed old gentleman named Kris Kringle (played by Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner Edmund Gwenn, the most charming Santa ever) who has entered her world is really the Kris Kringle, the Santa Claus that her mother has taught her is nothing but stuff and nonsense. And also whether we, the viewers, believe he is...

I'm telling you, this one gets to me. To use Kevin Smith's term for the manner in which men weep during movies, the room got "dusty" about three times during Miracle on 34th Street for me, and I can't friggin' help it. Jen mocked me just a little for this (though she didn't watch it with me, but did see some of it later in the evening when it ran on TCM), but I can't help it. It's been this way with this movie since I was a kid. Especially when little Susan Walker (Wood) asks her mother (a gorgeous Maureen O'Hara) whether Kris is sad because of all the trouble he is having in the film. She answers, "Yes, I suppose he is..." ---

Oh! Hey! Did a wind whip up or something? Is there a tornado coming this way? Is there something in the air content? Because something is making my eyes water... what the hell? Ah, it got to me again just writing about it. Merry Christmas everyone!