This Week in Rixflix #15: June 16-22, 2017

As I predicted in last week's column, my revived interest in westerns due to the online film course in which I was taking part found me continuing my deep plunge back into the genre. While I purposefully avoided them for the first three days of the week in question, six of the last eleven films I watched were in the western genre, including my 84th John Wayne feature, Dakota, as well as The Hangman, The Last Frontier, Comanche Territory, and The Kentuckian. I had planned to watch the Duke in The Undefeated (and had announced it last week too), but it fell by the wayside at the tail end of the week when I ran into a 1946 Jacques Tourneur film called Canyon Passage.

With but a single viewing, I already have to count Canyon Passage amongst my favorite films in the western style (though it is more of a "pioneer" film and mostly takes place in a forest area). Tourneur, who directed many of my favorite horror films from the Golden Age such as Cat People, Night of the Demon, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, as well as the noir classic Out of the Past, is always on my must-see list, and being able to track down another one of his westerns had me diving into the film the moment that I found it online. For that matter, being a fan of Dana Andrews' acting too, it was grand to see him outdo himself in one of his finest performances here. Helpful, too, was the inclusion of Susan Hayward in the female lead, in a place where I would not have expected her. The best role was that portrayed by songwriter Hoagy Carmichael as a neighboring business owner who seems to end up in the middle of everything while roaming about playing his ukulele and singing songs (and getting an Oscar nomination to boot). Fully loaded with tough guy fist-fighting, swirling gun action, sordid business dealings, a romantic triangle bound for trouble, and those swell Carmichael tunes, I am most certain that Canyon Passage will get watched again by me rather soon.

I found myself with some unexpected downtime this week, and as a result, my numbers were really up overall. I had hoped by this time of the year that I would be tailing off and perhaps get down to just one or two films per day, but I have been far more focused on watching things lately than writing about them, or even in doing other projects. That will have to change – in fact, I rather demand that I change it by force – but with the TCM Hitchcock online course just starting (as of this writing), in which I will be most likely attempting to watch all 42 features (and two short films) of Hitch's they are spotlighting through the month of July, it will be interesting to see what happens. I also have some time on the road to see family coming up soon, and thus I will have no access to my normal channels for viewing in that span (though I will have an iPad with me). The two events should even each other out, but then again, with my ability to cram in film viewings at any given opportunity, you never know. (Hmm... maybe I will get my dad to watch Canyon Passage with me. That's right up his alley...)

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 26; 19 first-time viewings and 7 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length film: The Big Sleep (1946) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature films: Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) – 2/9
Average films per day in June so far: 3.13
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 191

The Reviews:

Raiders from Beneath the Sea (1964) Dir.: Maury Dexter – I record an awful lot of films simply because I hope that there will be a shark scene or two inside one of them. Quite often it is because I have heard there might be such a scene, but mostly, I look at the premise of the film or the shooting location or, in the case of this film, merely the title, and see promise that I might be graced with the presence of toothy, finny friends. A low budget creaker from "B" movie vet Maury Dexter (The Day Mars Invaded Earth, Surf Party, Hell's Belles), Raiders from Beneath the Sea is a true snooze-fest about four Neanderthals planning the dumbest armed robbery in the history of dumb armed robberies, specifically, holding up a small bank on Catalina Island while walking all the way from the pier and back in full scuba gear. Yeah, it doesn't go smooth, and while you only have to wait about an hour to get to the heist, that hour seems to take about fourteen. Sure, these raiders do indeed come from beneath the sea to do their crimes, but they barely hit the water in the buildup to those crimes. The bad guys certainly talk about diving a lot, but most of their time on the water is spent timing out their trips to the island via its famous ferry and working out how to make off with the loot afterward. (As it turns out, a magnetized plate that they slap to the underside of the ferry.) When they finally do get in the water, it is for the briefest, murkiest underwater footage this side of Catalina Caper, another 1960s heist flick that at least made some attempts at intentional humor, however hackneyed. (And if you've watched Caper as it was tortured on MST3K, it then became truly fantastic.) This one, though, has no such such saving grace; poorly made, poorly filmed exploitation, but apart from some peeping tom shenanigans on the part of the lead character's creepy, drunken brother as he gets off to Merry Anders, Raiders' tank barely allows it to make it offshore. And by the end, there is not one damn shark to be seen. At least Catalina Caper had an animated one in its opening credits.   – TC4P Rating: 3/9

S if for Stanley (2015) Dir.: Alex Infascelli – Hardly a week goes by that I am not surprised by the appearance of some new documentary on Amazon Prime, Hulu or Netflix about the making of a particular film or the work of a filmmaker. Last week, it was Becoming Bond; this week, there are two such films that I will cover, the first being S Is for Stanley, the story of Emilio D’Alessandro, Stanley Kubrick's driver and personal assistant for a thirty-year period beginning in the early '70s when Kubrick was making A Clockwork Orange. It seems that Kubrick was impressed by Emilio's demeanor when he showed up as the delivery man for that certain, massive ceramic phallic piece that is used in one of the attack scenes in that epic of ultra-violence, and instantly hired the man to be his Man Friday. The film takes us through each Kubrick film all the way through Eyes Wide Shut and Kubrick's death in 1999, mostly told by Emilio himself, a former race car driver who suddenly found himself immersed in Kubrick's obsessive nature. (His wife also plays a big part in relating events to us.) It is clear, at least from the material given here, that he and Kubrick formed a close bond that could not be shaken, even when Emilio left his employ for a handful of years. Usually, I find that a film documentary that is not rife with clips from the films under discussion is usually to be found lacking in flavor, but that is not the case here. There are enough behind the scenes details and set photographs to keep one interested throughout, and it is almost enough that Emilio has plenty of marvelous vignettes about his life spent catering to Kubrick's every possible whim that the film never gets tiresome. D'Alessandro is an engaging interviewee with a rather introspective way of looking at life, and it is perhaps that very quality that kept him at Kubrick's side for so long. I do wish someone from Kubrick's family had weighed in here and there, but overall, an enjoyable look at a side of filmmaking well off the set most of the time. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

A Canterbury Tale (1944) Dir.: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – With every film by the Archers that I check off my list, I feel my cinematic knowledge and eye becoming purer and sharper. Such is the way that the films of Powell and Pressburger play off of me, always elegant, always studied, always balanced deeply with wit, irony, grace and heart. In A Canterbury Tale, while it starts out with a visual nod to the older work by Chaucer, this tale swiftly transports itself to then-modern times – during World War II in the British countryside – as we are introduced to a trio of "pilgrims" all making their way to the same location, or thereabouts, for differing reasons. We are given army sergeants both British (Dennis Price, the lead from one of my all-time faves, Kind Hearts and Coronets) and American (actual U.S. Army sergeant John Sweet) and a "Land Girl", a term used for women hired during the war to replace men on farms who were off serving in the army, here played charmingly by Sheila Sim. The three bond almost instantly over a mystery that they encounter when they reach the fictitious town of Chillingbourne (though supposedly set near Canterbury), when Sim has glue poured into her hair by a shadowy assailant. The mystery will consume most of their time and direct their actions during the film, during which they encounter the fourth major character of the film, the local magistrate played by Eric Portman, who will prove both daunting and helpful in turn during their investigations. Films by the Archers are almost always more than merely the sum of their parts, and that is the case here. There is so much going on in every scene, that it is easy to lose the plot because the characters and scenarios are each individually engaging enough to make you want to live inside the film for days. Especially effective is the non-actor Sweet, whose off-the-cuff but oddly effective delivery of his lines make you wish he had found greater acting opportunities on the screen elsewhere. (His IMDb resume only lists one other film, both biographical details do say he did some theatre in the ensuing years before he died in 2011 at the age of 95.) A very worthwhile and lovely experience, as is nearly every film by Powell and Pressburger. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary (2017) Dir.: John Campopiano and Justin White – This is the other film documentary that I mentioned briefly above in the S Is for Stanley review. Popping up on Amazon Prime at the exact moment that I really needed this type of film to fill some open time, Unearthed and Untold is a pretty detailed look at the production of the late '80s horror classic (yeah, I said it) Pet Sematary. While I was never a huge fan of the film at the time (though I liked it just fine), I have grown fonder of it over the years, during which I have had the opportunity to see it a couple of times more. Unearthed and Untold gathers just about any artist and actor who worked on Pet Sematary that was willing to recount their tales of working on the film, and despite there not being any actual final film footage from the production (probably because they didn't have the budget for it), this film is pretty thorough with its excellent use made of behind-the-scenes photos and video that gives us a neat glimpse into how it all went down on the set. Visits to the location sites in Maine are an added and sometimes rather creepy bonus. Even Marky Ramone, the sole main member of the Ramones left alive today, gets in briefly to talk about how they were brought in to provide songs on the soundtrack and record the title song. The big question is whether tiny Miko Hughes had turned into a murderous psycho after being subjected to some truly horrific scenes as a two-year-old (they even talk about being worried about at points in the film), but no... Miko is just fine and still acting at age 31, and seems a normal guy here in his interview scenes. The doc is sorely missing the inclusion of a fresh interview with King himself about the film, but I don't know that they didn't try to get one, so I will leave that as a stray thought. I am certain that somewhere in the near future, my writing partner Aaron and I will be re-reading Stephen King's original novel and watching Mary Lambert's film freshly to review and compare both for our Stephen King site, We Who Watch Behind the Rows. (Yes, this is an unabashed and unashamed plug.) – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) Dir.: Sean Patrick O'Reilly – There are many things that I really hate in films, but two of them are very evident here in Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom. First, I hate badly done computer animation. I can live with a single bad CGI shot or two in a larger film if their harm to the film is contained to a few seconds, and I can be accepting of a limited animation budget if the film in question is a mere few minutes and at least has a clever premise or voice performance to counter it. The other thing I hate is "Muppet Babying," where a franchise or character is cleaned up and/or dumbed down from its original form to appeal to a younger audience. This video feature is pretty much just "What if H.P. Lovecraft was a kid?" and has him having all sorts of misadventures on another dimensional plane with a monstrous tentacled pal that he names Spot, not knowing the creature is actually a younger form of the Elder god Cthulhu himself. I am a fan of Lovecraft's writing, but I am fairly certain that I am happy with the proper age for discovering his writing being approximately around the same as when I did, as a middle teenager, and not when young readers are six or seven, which seems to be the target audience for this film. It's not so much the existential dread and horrific implications of his words that causes me to state this, but rather the more than casual racism that also lurks within his stories, perhaps not in all of them but lightly throughout most and pretty hard in some. Such words might fly over the heads of many younger readers, especially since the style of his writing is itself antiquated enough by today's standards that his stories may seem rather dull to a generation that banks upon immediate thrills and not slow-boiling suspense and atmosphere. This is all for the better, and I find it fairly hard to believe that watching this animated crap pile will inspire anyone to seek out anything written on paper except perhaps to carefully edit their own self-penned suicide note.

This video pretty much jettisons anything worthwhile in Lovecraft's writing and mostly co-opts character and place names along with the occasional magical spell and slams them into a stiffly animated, witless, cliched children's film. The look of some of the goblin guards from Disney's version of Sleeping Beauty are also swiped for that of the villainous henchmen throughout the film as well. I have not read the graphic novels that form the basis for this film (nor for the planned sequel and the inevitable third production, since there are three comics in total), but taking a quick look at the first few pages of the Frozen Kingdom volume reveals that hewing closer to the style of the comic would have been a far more intriguing direction. At least in a visual sense, the comic doesn't look half bad (though a little generic). Instead, in the film version we get a design that pretty much made me feel like I was watching the truly atrocious Food Fight again, and goddamnit, I never needed to have that feeling! I've lived through it once. The only compliment I can give is that at least the story made a little more sense scene to scene than Food Fight, and for that I am truly thankful. The other thing that got my notice in Frozen Kingdom is that there are hammerhead sharks in the tank of the villain's fortress. Sure, they swim the same exact way, over and over again, in every single shot in which they appear, but there are at least sharks here. Otherwise, this video is a bloody mess. But without the blood, of course... this is for the kiddies, after all. Poor, poor kiddies... – TC4P Rating: 2/9

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016) Dir.: Dominik Hartl – Oh, it is Wednesday? Must be time for yet another goddamn zombie movie... OK, despite my living dead ennui here in 2017, I will say that if I had encountered Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies in 1988, I would have loved it without any reservations. However, it is 2017 and I am where I am at currently, having seen so many zombie films by now that I think I might be one. Sure, Jen and I love iZombie and watch it reverentially (it thrills me to no end that Jen loves a zombie show), but for me, that reverence might be mostly out of obeisance to Ms. Rose McIver. And I still love all the old zombie flicks that I grew up with in the '70s and '80s, and even many of the newer ones, but there are just so many out there now, and they just keep coming... almost like a zombie apocalypse. And everyone thinks they have the greatest, newest twist on the genre, and really, nearly all of them don't. But would I want everyone to stop trying? Of course not. That would block even the occasional innovation, and I don't want that. Lederhosen Zombies is a full-on slapstick gore comedy filmed at a ski resort in the Alps of South Tyrol where someone stupid has the idea to use this untested formula to create instant snow, but of course, what the formula really does is make someone sick enough to turn into an instant zombie instead and the fun begins. Crazy, non-stop action, Rube Goldberg-style gags involving snowboards and skiing equipment, a genuinely insane Austrian barmaid with a fully stocked arsenal for fightin' the undead, and some pretty noxious moments that even had me thinking about blowing chunks early on in the action... that sounds like fun to me. However, many of the jokes are too stilted and don't land with the impact that the filmmakers thought, the editing is pretty haphazard, and the (dubbed) acting is fairly wooden on occasion. Still the insanity is as infectious as a zombie plague, and the film goes by incredibly smoothly at under 80 minutes. A good film for a party night of horror heads. Not that I have been around one of those for, oh, far too many years. (I miss my horror peeps...) I can't rate this one too highly due to its many faults, but I will no doubt watch it again for kicks. – TC4P Rating: 4/9

This Week in Rixflix #11: May 19-25, 2017

Forgive me if I am still trying, eleven attempts deep, to figure out exactly how I want to do things around here. I have been seeking the best approach in how to present these (meant to be) brief looks at the films that I have seen each week, without either overwhelming the reader with nearly two dozen reviews through which to sort nor destroying my own personal goals by not leaving any time for me to work on other projects and writing.

A couple of notes on what you have seen on these posts up to now and where I plan to go this and the following week in experimenting with my form...

Header Images
When you see a header image at the top of each article (which appears even larger on the home page at first), the tiny posters seen within that image really do represent the films that I have seen that particular week. They are not just random posters that have been assembled to form a backdrop. I seek out the original poster images, format them inside sizing templates I have built, and then combine them for the final image to give you a quick glance at the previous week's viewing. I have templates built for various quantities of 12, 15, 18 or 21 films; if I miss any of those numbers in the week, I can fill it in (as I have a couple of times) by dropping in other things that I have seen along the way, such as posters for stand-up specials, miniseries, or TV shows that have dominated my mind in the course of the previous seven days. In one case, I built a graphic inside one header to represent the National Film Board of Canada animation festival that I spent poring over one weekend. It all goes towards the same purpose: I have been watching, and this is how it looked.

Choosing Films for Focus
Like anyone, it's no surprise that I get emotional about things I see on a movie or television screen. We all have loves and hates. When I watch new movies or revisit old favorites each week, it is inevitable that I will get truly excited about a couple of them, like several others, but dismiss most as mere product. Because I try to keep things on a mostly even keel, however, and try not to generally watch things purposefully that would upset me or that I would obviously think were stupid and annoying, there is less chance that I will get really riled up in a negative way about most films. Every once in a while, though, something will catch me completely by surprise, and have me straining for adjectives of the lowest form to describe that film. It is the reason why it is important, even if you are highly anticipating the release of a project to the public (as I do with super-hero and giant monster flicks), to approach the film as composed and centered as possible before finally watching the film, so that all stories are given equal opportunity to either capture your imagination or repel you.

I will not go into why I choose to watch certain films at this juncture. That is a massively intricate and even more long-winded discussion that I have already spoken about in pieces elsewhere all over this website. The real question here is: After having watched 14 to 20 (or so) films per week, why do I choose what I choose for inclusion in these pieces?

Let's take a look at this week for an immediate example. Going through the movies from left to right in the image and down through each row, the first that stands out is Alien: Covenant, which was released on the Friday of that week. Clearly, as the original Alien is in my Top Ten films of all time, I will probably have something at length to say about the latest film in the series, so I put that one to the side. The next that stands out is the 1983 monster rat film, Of Unknown Origin, which I had not seen for over 30 years when I watched it that week. I am planning to launch a potential new series about movies that went into the vaults for me until I rewatched them more recently, and so that title too gets set aside for future plundering. Next up is Jonathan Demme's Ricki and the Flash, which naturally will be included soon in the next installment of All or Nothing. Angels Hard as They Come (while seen previously) will likely be discussed at least tangentially in All or Nothing at some point (possibly Part 5) since Demme wrote the screenplay for it. Certain types of films are always up for further expansion on the site, such as Godzilla flicks or David Lynch's work (especially with the buildup to the new Twin Peaks, which premiered during this week), so they too go into the File Later pile. The 1972 Disney flick Napoleon and Samantha falls into two categories: 1) a film I have not seen since I was a kid, and 2) a Disney flick, for which I am hoping to start yet another new series. As a result, that film is set aside for further commentary.

That leaves me with about 14 other films in the graphic, and because I saw more than 21 films that week, there were a couple more titles that did not make the final cut (mostly out of not being to find appropriate posters). So, out of 16 films, I have decided to review six of them; in future installments, I hope to get the total number of reviews up closer to the full amount of films that week.

Sizing Down the "Capsule Reviews"

Now this has been a problem. It's my site, and I have no lack of space for expounding upon a film as much as I would like, and no editor but myself to hold me back. However, in some scenarios, I would rather practice some form of brevity. I have been calling the reviews in these pieces "capsule reviews," but they hardly ever are, and so it has become a joke to me. I might go into a review hoping to write just three or four lines at most, but those few lines become full paragraphs pretty quickly for me, and then that one paragraph becomes several. This would be fine if I were referring to a larger quantity of reviews, but the expansive and exploratory tone of my writing seems to take over nearly every film. 

As a result, this time around I have given myself a hard-centered limit of 250 words per review, which is approximately the amount of text that I need to carry the review just past the sizing of the accompanying poster image to the right. (Really, that's the only reason for the choice of number of words.) When I reach the limit, allowing for some room to breathe on either side (perhaps 300 words maximum, 200 minimum), then I must move on to the next film. 

I am treating this as a writing and editing exercise, as an opportunity to see if I can produce something short and to the point. In future installments, I hope to have shorter reviews for more films each week, though because of a time crunch, I am only going to do six this time. Let's see how it goes...

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 23; 16 first-time viewings and 7 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length film: Eraserhead (1977) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature film: Spine (1986) – 3/9
Average films per day in May so far: 2.80
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 163

One note: I have added a new line at the bottom about the number of consecutive days in a row, I have watched at least one feature-length film. This number extends back to mid-December after I lost the job at Amazon due to injury. (I will add that the current total is nearing 170 at the time of this writing.)

The Reviews:

Viral (2016) Dir.: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman – A perfect choice with which to start, because I would normally go on quite easily for about three years regarding my struggle with watching the zombie horror subgenre today. With my new rules in place, I now just have to dig in and say that I was rather rooting for this film in its early stages. The lead actress, Sofia Black-D'Elia, is well cast and quite appealing as Emma, a recently displaced teen who not only has to deal with a zombie apocalypse outside her door in a new town, but also with the fact that her older sister Stacey, played by Analeigh Tipton, is being slowly taken over by the parasitic worms who are the cause of the outbreak which has already killed billions worldwide. Seeing the rest of the world turn into hell before them, they barricade themselves in their own home, but Stacey goes more than a tad stir crazy, hence the results of her infection. The tone in the early going of this film is pretty much dead on, helped immeasurably by the surprising turns from the two main actresses. But as parasitic worm living dead films go, it is hard to top Night of the Creeps and Slither for me. Despite this, I wish the film had gone a little deeper into the science fiction angle to distinguish it from the hordes of other undead pretenders to George A. Romero's legacy. However, idiotic plot turns (that dumbass party sequence) and needless jump scares (surprise, the same directors gave us Paranormal Activity films 3 and 4, not to mention the odd documentary Catfish) rather ruin the early promise. – TC4P Rating: 5/9

The Desert Rats (1953) Dir.: Robert Wise – It is possible that I may have skipped this film out of confusion with The Desert Fox: The Edwin Rommel Story, released two years earlier (in 1951) with James Mason in the lead. Since I am watching these films eons later than their release, that shouldn't be a problem. The twist here is that Mason plays Rommel in this semi-sequel to that film, and he plays it mainly in German, which is a nice touch. (Heck, they don't even subtitle him.) I am very pleased that I decided a while ago to become a completist of Robert Wise's filmography in the past year, and finally hit films like The Set-Up (now one of my favorites) and Odds Against Tomorrow (which may one day be on that list as well). The Desert Rats doesn't quite reach that same level, but it is still a fine example of a tense, nerve-rattling war picture. Burton is his usual tense, spitting self, which comes in handy as his character is supposed to be disliked heavily at first by the Australian division of troops under his command who are called upon to hold the important port city of Tobruk against the Rommel and the Nazis in 1941. Robert Newton, Chips Rafferty, and Torin Thatcher are the main supporting actors at Burton's side, and they bring a lived-in, seen-it-all humanity to a film that could have been nothing but a rote actioner in lesser hands than Wise's, who knows exactly how to ratchet up the tension when needed. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Look Back in Anger (1959) Dir.: Tony Richardson – Speaking of Burton, I find it hard, merely as an outside observer, to believe that he could have ever been well-liked at all except perhaps by those who were on the same, exact plane of celebrity existence as he. This opinion is based first on my impression of the press that I have seen during his career, but mainly on his performances, where he seems miles beyond the ken of anyone in his presence in the terms of both skillful technique and unnecessary bombast. If there is an actor where I can both admire and be annoyed by him in the same scene, it is Burton. So it goes with Look Back in Anger, a film that I have probably tried to start watching about a dozen times in my life, but had always pulled back because I knew the play fairly well, and just didn't want to deal with it for another two hours. It's a stunner, and I regret not having seen it before, and most of the credit goes to Burton. He is fiery, cuttingly humorous, pouty, spiteful, whiny, drunken, angry (of course), and quite simply monumental in this prototypical example of the "angry young man" subgenre of drama. I have a short span of interest in the type, but when produced with such conviction and an explosive style by Tony Richardson (Tom Jones), where it feels like Burton will quite literally implode if he doesn't spew his rage at his wife, his best friend, and his lover (Claire Bloom, equally his match) at every given opportunity, the film becomes indispensable. This is one of the prime Burton roles, and should be seen to be believed. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Crime of Passion (1957) Dir.: Gerd Oswald – Yet another find from watching Eddie Muller's Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies, Crime of Passion is the perfect answer when one wishes to get lost in a film loaded with suburban angst, wifely betrayal, and police corruption. And heavy on the suburban angst, please, as a former S.F. newspaper reporter played by the always terrific Barbara Stanwyck thinks she has found the perfect marriage with L.A. cop (a rock solid Sterling Hayden). She leaves her city for his, and ends up as an intensely bored housewife in the middle of dull tract housing and ceaseless dinner parties which always end up with the women in one room talking about their nothing lives, and the men in another playing poker and talking about their own nothing lives. Worst of all, the women are never supposed to intrude upon the men's time. The still highly ambitious Stanwyck slowly goes nuts in this new arrangement, starting first with manipulating her husband up the chain of command, then with having an affair, and finally, a burst of violence. It is a surprisingly cold film, both in its portrayal of then-modern suburban aspiration and in the relationships between its main characters. I consider Stanwyck one of the top actresses of all time, and so it was revelatory to see her in this role during the final stage of her film career, before she made the leap to television success in The Big Valley in the late '60s.    – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's the Fantastic Four (2015) Dir.: Marty Langford – Once upon a time there was a film produced in 1992 by Roger Corman called The Fantastic Four. It was ultra low in budget, was made at the last second in a desperate attempt to sustain a copyright over some comic book characters borrowed from Marvel Comics, and was never released to movie theatres despite having been announced to be released. The people making it, mostly the cast, felt they had been cast adrift during filming by the producers, and couldn't understand when the hard work they had done seemed to disappear into the ether forever. Well, almost forever... the film popped up on the interwebs, becoming a treasured monument of the YouTube age, where it can be found in various places today. The film is not very good, of course, but has a charm and innocence to it that was not captured by the subsequent, high budget films featuring the same characters released in 2005, 2007 and 2013. Doomed!, taking its name from the FF's primary foe, Doctor Doom, is just about as fun as a documentary about a small stakes cult film could be. I watched it on the same day as Batman and Bill, and while that comic book doc has an emotional core that Doomed! can't touch, this one is completely charming and earnest, a mood best captured by the interviews with 1992 film's still bewildered cast members. If you don't care about comics or the films made from them, you still might take a swing at this one. It's a fascinating tale.  – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Ducks and Drakes (1921) Dir.: Maurice Campbell – Whenever I need a real refresher, I turn back the clock to the silent days. I especially love to dig into silent comedies, and am completely happy when discovering a film whose path I had not yet crossed. TCM's Silent Sunday Nights program is usually the source of most of these types of films, and they had a winner with me in their airing of Ducks and Drakes recently. Bebe Daniels was born in 1901 and acted in films from the age of four. She made numerous short subjects, some of which still exist, and became a big star in the 1920s, even though most of her features are lost to time, and eventually broke through in talkies, including 42nd Street, before retiring.. I knew her since I was a teenager in a 1930 comedy called Reaching for the Moon, but I had never seen her silent work until Ducks and Drakes, and she is a terrific comedic presence in the film, as a flibbertigibbet who enjoys ignoring the man to whom she is engaged, but carries on flirting with his two best friends, none of whom are aware of the others flirting with her. Best of all are the scenes where she mercilessly tortures her haughty, bluenose of an aunt, but the comedy everywhere is fast paced and fun, if not more than a tad obvious in places. A grand find even if it is not top drawer, and I look forward to finding more of Daniels' work in the future.  – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Mr. Mixtape-ptlk, Track #4: "The Monsters Hop" by Bert Convy (1958)

Bert Convy was more than just a square guy in the 1970s who hosted one of my then favorite game shows (Tattletales) and several others throughout the decade and into the '80s. Sure, Tattletales is where I learned his name and where I chiefly saw him as a kid, but I didn't know how important that stupid game show and its host would be to me.

Since my childhood, Bert Convy grew into (and continues to be) a big player in my canon, a personal cult figure along the lines of Jack Cassidy and Charles Nelson Reilly, for reasons sometimes tongue in cheek but not always. Any appearance by Convy in even the lowest level production was always a worthwhile stop for me. The Love Boat? Super Password? Charlie's Angels? Fantasy Island? Win, Lose or Draw? I watched them, sometimes because Bert was the host and sometimes because he was in a guest role. He didn't act in movies a whole lot, but he does make brief appearances in The Cannonball Run, Hero at Large, and Semi-Tough. His most notable film appearance for me, however, is a small role in Roger Corman's marvelous A Bucket of Blood (1959), where he acts alongside the great Dick Miller (playing his most famous character, Walter Paisley).

Bert won a Daytime Emmy as Outstanding Host for Tattletales in 1977, which was right around the time my strange obsession with the pearly toothed man wearing a tight, white guy 'fro was solidifying, especially after I watched him on a mid-summer replacement series on CBS called The Late Summer Early Fall Bert Convy Show. (I was a sucker for variety shows in those days.) It was hard for me not to find Bert Convy on the TV in the '70s and '80s, because the guy appeared in everything. Well, close to everything. With acting credits going back to the late '50s, besides the shows previously mentioned, Convy guested on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, McMillan and Wife, The Untouchables, Police Story, Banacek, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hawaii Five-O, Bewitched, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Perry Mason, Night Gallery, Mission: Impossible, Love American Style, Murder She Wrote, Hotel, and The Partridge Family. The guy would be the definition of the word "ubiquitious," if that job wasn't already taken in the dictionary.

I saw Bert in fresh TV episodes and I saw him pop up in older shows in syndication. He even got a directing credit under his belt, helming what is presumably meant to be a wacky Air Force comedy, starring Chris Lemmon, titled Weekend Warriors in 1986. (I must admit that I have not, as of this writing, seen that movie, but it is on my list.) When Bert wasn't acting or hosting, he would even appear on other game shows like Match Game and What's My Line?, the two game shows that rule my world. So tied was he to the world of game shows, that Convy even played himself as a Mystery Guest in a game show sketch hosted by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live in 1980.

Convy's last television role was as himself (appropriately) in the wedding episode of It's Garry Shandling's Show! in 1990, where Garry's character (also himself) nearly marries his girlfriend Phoebe (played by Jessica Harper) a couple of times, but circumstances keep interfering. After the hotel where they plan to get hitched burns down mysteriously, the network steps in and offers to build an exact replica of the hotel premises on the set of an all-star variety show (supposedly starring, amongst others – but not really – Scott Baio, Dr. Haing S. Ngor, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans). Tai Babilonia, Randy Gardner, Connie Stevens, and Ned Beatty do show up as themselves, Bert Convy is the host, and the director (on screen) is none other than Charles Nelson Reilly. And in the middle of everything, everyone breaks into a ridiculous musical number. After Garry and Phoebe run out on the second ceremony, their friends gather in Garry's home to console them. One friend says, "I had looked forward to this day for all of my life!" and Garry's buddy Leonard Smith (played by Paul Willson, Paul from Cheers) says, "Me, too! I never met Bert Convy!"

Convy died the next year of a brain tumor, but I have never stopped my strange worship of the man. He became my standard set answer when people asked me a question such as "Who did that?" or "Who said [such and such a quote]?" Some of my friends like to purposefully answer wrongly, "Jesus" in the same way, and I found out quick that the problem with answering "Bert Convy" in that manner is that you usually don't then have to spend five minutes reminded everyone in the room who Jesus was. Such is the way of a Bert Convy fan.

To this day, I delight in running into a Convy appearance. And he seems to be an unending source of odd trivia as well, thanks to his wide array of talents. Even in researching this piece, I read a couple of bits about the man that I did not know, such as that he was drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies as a teenager and played two years of minor league ball. (You can see his stats by clicking here.) He also originated the Broadway roles of Perchik, the revolutionary scholar who marries Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof, and Cliff Bradshaw in Cabaret.

But about a dozen years ago or so, and most joyously surprising to me, I found out this about the man when I was going through a random collection of older songs that I had obtained: Bert Convy was also a square guy from the 1950s that sang this ode to a crew of scary monsters holding one of those parties that monsters seemed to really enjoy holding back in those days:

THE MONSTERS HOP

(Bert Convy-Robert E. Emenegger) Contender 1314 CT-510, 1958

I heard strange noises comin’ from a house on the hill,
So I crept up to the window and looked over the sill.
My heart almost stopped, I nearly died of fright ---
By the dim candlelight, I saw the strangest sight!

[Chorus]
There was Frankenstein and Dracula and Wolfman too,
Dancin' with some zombies, what a ghastly crew!
The ol' ugly vampire was doin’ the bop,
And everything was rockin’ at the monsters hop!

The bats were flyin’ and the room was full!
The crazy witch doctor was dancin’ with a ghoul!
The organ was playin’, but no-one was there,
And the headless horseman was combin’ his hair!

[Chorus]
There was Frankenstein and Dracula and Wolfman too,
Dancin' with some zombies, what a ghastly crew!
The ol' ugly vampire was doin’ the bop,

And everything was rockin’ at the monsters hop!

I can't forget that empty house upon the hill
The night I saw the monsters dancin’… ooooh, what a thrill!
The wind did howl, the night was black;
I nearly lost my mind... I'm never ever going back!

[Chorus]
There was Frankenstein and Dracula and Wolfman too,
Dancin' with some zombies, what a ghastly crew!
The ol' ugly vampire was doin’ the bop,

And everything was rockin’ at the monsters hop!

The song was co-written by Convy, and he and songwriting partner Robert Emenegger also did the song on the flip-side, The Gorilla, which itself has a neat tie-in to the sci-fi genre, by having the Purple People Eater, who was popular from Sheb Wooley's #1 hit song of the same name from earlier in 1958, make a cameo appearance at the end of the Convy song:

The Gorilla is a much, much weirder song than the relatively more straightforward The Monsters Hop. That is, if you don't think that monsters holding parties in song after song is all that weird. The Monsters Hop predates Bobby "Boris" Pickett's phenomenal Monster Mash by about four years, but don't think that good ol' Bert was at the start of a trend. There were already several songs about monster parties floating around by 1958-1959, including Screamin' Ball (at Dracula Hall) by the Duponts, Mad House Jump by the Daylighters (which also name-checks the Purple People Eater), and At the House of Frankenstein by Big Bee Kornegay, just to name three. Monster Mash was certainly at the zenith of the subgenre (or the nadir, depending on your taste, but Mash is in my Top Song list of all time).

Of the Convy songs, I definitely prefer The Monsters Hop over The Gorilla (a little harried, that one). His character does sound a bit like he has been through the wringer after seeing what he has encountered. Though you might think, "That party sounds like a great time!" and that Convy is a real pussy for being afraid of it, do keep in mind the song is from a different time, almost sixty years ago. The notion is that while the monsters are having a dance party, which might seem cute and even quaint today, monsters are still freakin' monsters! They are supposed to be scary, and this song (and its narrator) doesn't forget that. While Frankie might not do you in right away, Dracula, Wolfman, and those zombies would probably feast on you right away.

Oh, just one more thing, which I never knew until today... Bert Convy had a Top Ten hit earlier in the decade, in 1955, with his vocal group, The Cheers, that was one of the very first songs to mention motorcycle gangs, Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots. One of the earliest hits by the ultra-famous songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, it was also one of the earliest in the "teen death tragedy" song genre. I knew the song and even own a copy of it on a couple of different collections. I just never realized that one of the voices I was hearing was Bert Convy, but I sure could make him out when I listened to it again.

Man, just like monster dance parties that pop up out of nowhere, Bert Convy, 25 years after his death, just keeps on surprising me.

RTJ

Those Eyes, Those Eyes!: Watch "White Zombie" (1932) with Bela Lugosi

It's another public domain feature horror flick found on archive.org! The classic White Zombie from the Halperin brothers in 1932, featuring the iconic image of those crazy, scary Béla Lugosi eyes, used many times over in other non-Lugosi productions. Lugosi's character, who is the master of a crew of zombies that run his sugar cane mill, has the fantastic name of Murder Legendre, and it's all over-the-top hysterics and sinister atmospherics from that point forward. Enjoy... if you dare!

Psychotronic Ketchup: Sugar Hill (1974)

Director: Paul Maslansky
AIP, 1:31, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

You jive turkeys won't believe this, but I have been seeing a lot of "blaxploitation" films lately. True, ever since I started the Psychotronic Ketchup project, I have been watching films in many genres that I normally avoid, like that passel of generally cruddy biker films I bundled up into one weekend about a year ago. And I've never really avoided "blaxploitation" flicks anyway. I am fairly well-versed on Blacula, Slaughter and the Pam Grier epics -- and even a little Dolemite for good, stupid measure. But recently I have been -- I don't know if "treating" is the correct term, but what the hell -- treating myself to their like far more regularly than I used to do.

This course now brings me to Sugar Hill, a film which I probably would have watched anyway given that it involves zombies. Not the Romero type of living dead, mind you, but the original things -- VOODOO zombies. Not voudoun either, the real religion from which the popular notion of voodoo stumbled like a victim on fugu poison, but good ol' fashioned, silly movie voodoo. The filmmakers even take a character from the most recent James Bond flick at that time, Live and Let Die, and appropriates him for their own nefarious purposes. I am not sure if Baron Samedi is an actual popular character in voodoo myth, or if he was created wholesale for the Bond film, but here he is -- booming laugh, scary fashion sense and all -- making things miserable for those who would bring harm to his eager-for-revenge patrons.

But in Sugar Hill, Samedi isn't played by Live's marvelous Trinidadian 7-Up pusher, Geoffrey Holder, the multiple Tony Award winner. Instead, Don Pedro Colley gives an almost equally intriguing turn in the role, demolishing all who would usurp him on the screen with a lascivious sneer and burning eyes, as he summons his zombie corps to do his bidding. (He also apes Holder's version to a certain measure, approximating that basso laugh for all he's worth, which is about halfway there.) Colley seems to have acted in just about every memorably cheesy TV show from the sixties into the nineties, and just as those appearances probably didn't serve him to the extent which his talent probably deserved, neither does he have nearly enough screen time here. For the few scenes which he does have, I found him magnetic.

He's matched here in watchability by Marki Bey, as the titular character, though the impulse to seek out her performance should only be due to her general foxiness, and not her acting, which tends to waver here and there depending on the intensity of the scene. (There might be a very good reason why she only appeared in a handful of films.) "Sugar" is only a nickname, given to Diana Hill by her fiancé who, in order to give the movie some semblance of a plot, is murdered by Mafioso led by Count Yorga -- er, I mean the guy who played the Count -- Robert Quarry. Sugar seeks out a voodoo woman named Mama Maitresse, who magically hooks Sugar up with "voodoo god" (as she says) Baron Samedi... and all of this is merely so we can get a good solid 90 minutes of zombie action. Well, also so Sugar can get into a ridiculous catfight with a skeezy redhead mistress of Quarry's, which never goes as far as it should to keep our continued interest. But mainly, this film is about the zombies.

Let me enter into this paragraph speaking as someone who is still creeped out by Sleestaks. Zippers up the backs notwithstanding, as a kid growing up in Alaskan winters half-marked with darkness in any hour where I wasn't at school, having to walk home through the woods alone, I deeply believed in every monster that I saw. It didn't matter. This was mainly because I kept stupidly watching scary shows (on late night TV, nonetheless...), when I clearly couldn't handle them emotionally. And then I would have to go to the bathroom, but I would be too scared to make the short distance from my doorway to the toilet, and I would stand there staring into the darkness until I either passed out or convinced myself that the monsters were otherwise distracted. Once, I even peed in a cardboard box and flung it towards the front door, planning to take it out at morning's first light before my mother awoke; more than once I would pee in a glass and pour it down the sink later.

These zombies -- the Sugar Hill zombies -- would have made me crap my pants in those bygone childhood days. Covered in cobwebs, a shuffling gait, grasping hands or fingers gripping machetes, bulging eyes that betray no sense of a pupil, just ghostly, unrelenting whiteness... I would squarely not have been able to handle them. Nowadays, while I have certainly seen a thousand things more eerie or frightening by this point, I can still well up that feeling of my youth, and recognize the image of these zombies as being something quite cool and scary. I would suggest to anyone even partially interested in the history of zombies on film to at least check out the attack scenes in this film for some contrast. Their design is marvelous, and their gruesomeness in these scenes is carried off fairly well.

Would that the remainder of the running time excelled in even the smallest measure. Quarry seems highly bored by the filming, Bey, as said, is merely adequate but cute in a variety of far-out fashions, and the remainder of the actors (outside of steady Richard Lawson as police detective, and old Sugar flame, Valentine) are wholly unremarkable, sometimes even awful. The supernatural scenes have some decent mood, but outside of this, the film is stiff. Once the initial premise is set up, there are no surprises to be had at all. And in a genre like blaxploitation, which at least, even in the wildest of scenarios, could still makes the eyes spring out with crazy, left-field incidents, this is a shame. This one had some real potential, especially given that the zombie parts (which you'd think would be the hardest part to pull off) are so solid. Clearly, not everything is so sweet on Sugar Hill, and neither am I.

V For Voluminous: Book of the Dead

Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (2005)
by Jamie Russell
FAB Press | 320 pages

I have umpteen books in my library detailing the histories of just about any genre -- OK, maybe not chick flicks or romance -- but otherwise, I am doing just fine. Even when it comes to sub-genres, I have a few select volumes on various subjects (kaiju, aliens, slapstick, German expressionism, etc.), but never before did I consider that I would require an entire volume detailing the history of zombies and the undead (sometimes two very different things) in my collection.

Hell, I never even considered that I would want an entire book on zombie cinema in my home. This is based on my perception of the people that I know who are deeply into zombie films. Outside of my pal Aaron -- aka The Working Dead, who does have considerable critical faculties (check his blog out by clicking here) -- most of my acquaintances who thrive on zombie flicks pretty much just outright love anything with a zombie in it. Sensing this might be the case for someone perversely intent on filling 300-plus pages on the subject, please understand my reticence, and outright lack of consideration, in this regard.

Unbelievably, a pair of trips to the super-scrubbed squeaky-clean Downtown Disney changed my mind on this matter. Just enough time for a quick five-minute perusal at Compass Books, right before going to a film in the adjacent theatre, left me swiftly scanning the entertainment section, where I saw my first copy of Book of the Dead by Jamie Russell. Subtitled The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, the book's grimly beckoning cover (portrayed at right) naturally made me pick it up. Thanks to the intriguing pair of hair-bedecked skulls with glowing yellow eyes peeking out of their graves, I had to check it out to see if perhaps I would be proven wrong by my long-ingrained belief about the zombie-obsessed.

Here's the first shocker: that this book is allowed within two miles of Disneyland. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad it was there, and it certainly proved me wrong (which provides the second shocker). A fairly good-sized volume (320 pages, heavy paper, 7-1/4"x10"), even a cursory glance at the book revealed a well-researched and seemingly thorough trip through the nearly eighty -- yes, that's right -- eighty-year history of zombie films, from Bela Lugosi's White Zombie (1932) on down to Romero's Land of the Dead. Flipping through the book, I found two incredibly generous sections of garish color plates, showing innumerable classic and non-classic zombie movie posters and some wonderfully bloody scenes. And finally, it has a comprehensive filmography, not necessarily (as the author suggests) a "complete" one, but built on the movies that make up the referenced films in the text, including some that are not specifically "zombie" films, such as Romero's The Crazies, but ones that are important to the discussion of the subject peripherally. Nor did the author seek to maintain a full list of films; indeed, mere minutes after getting the book home, I discovered that Richard Elfman's Shrunken Heads was nowhere to be found in the book, despite involving both voodoo and the living dead. (Maybe the next edition, eh?) Despite my delight with this initial look at the contents, I did not buy the book. After my allotted time expired, it was off to the movies for Jen and I, but I did mark the title down in my notebook to remind myself to seek it out at a later date.

That later date came during my next trip to Compass, and after zipping once more through the book's contents before we hit Ocean's Thirteen, I at last purchased Book of the Dead (which is a tad expensive at a nickel under thirty bucks) while waiting for Jen to get off work to join me. It was an absolute joy to read the book while standing around Disneyland, with a very bloody ghoul hanging about on the back cover, grabbing the odd stare from disturbed mothers as they passed by me. (You can take what I mean by the phrase "disturbed mothers" any way you wish. I meant them all...) Certainly there are books within Compass which might not be exactly "family" material, but in a bookshop that is half devoted to children's fare, to find this volume, with its graphic depictions of gore and nudity, couched between the latest Roger Ebert effort and, inexplicably, a half-dozen books on Audrey Hepburn (did I miss something recently?), and sitting out prominently on a shelf at the eye level of a five-year-old certainly caught me by surprise. I'm not demanding they don't carry such things -- I readily encourage that they do -- I was just surprised to find it there, since they tend to only carry bestsellers in most categories, or the latest in mainstream-safe blather.

Reading the book at home has proven an exhaustive effort. Beginning with William Seabrook's seminal zombie travel opus The Magic Island, the book that made zombie talk an American fad in the early part of the 20th century, Russell breaks down each film in his narrative in such detail and with attention to their metaphorical implications that it becomes almost necessary to stop reading and review the actual films oneself before continuing forward with one's reading. I have seen White Zombie a handful of times, but I still found myself revving up my copy to make sure I had not seen a different film than the one of which Russell speaks. Suffice to say that Russell has turned out to be a very astute guide through most of the movies thus far, and while the short film reviews might come up a little more scant on detail than I wished, Russell is not one to give an easy pass to a film just because he is a hardcore fan of the subgenre. It turns out Russell is much like me: deeply in love with a couple handfuls of these films, and more than willing to sternly (though sometimes lovingly) critique those that fall short of his standards. Also, kudos must be given to Russell for including any number of zombie-oriented pornographic titles in his book, which helped toward showing me that he has left no stone unturned in his search for as many zombie films as possible, even if it might have something icky underneath it. One cannot be afraid of the icky when discussing zombies. Or if one orders a book on them for a Disney-locked bookstore. (Either their book buyer knows full well what he is doing, or he doesn't haven't a clue. Or maybe both.)

So, now I have a book in my library about zombie films, and I am happy with this. My fears of being trapped inside a book by an uncritical zombie nut have abated. Most of my friends, though, will have zero interest in seeking out or even paying for this book, but I didn't write this review for them. It is directed at two of my friends specifically. Andrea and Aaron: this book is for you. Don't delay in its immediate purchase. Shouldn't be hard to find... the dead do walk the earth, and they don't buy books like this. They buy Tim LaHaye books and Celine Dion CDs...