Category: Film Review

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 6.1 by 406 cinematizens

Genre: ODH

Verdict: Whoosh!

Firecracker Joan Blondell plays a nurse in an Old Dark House inhabited by odd balls from the hunchback butler to the squinting, sinister maid, and the suspicious looking doctor (C. Henry Gordon who always looks dyspeptic). The Nurse’s Secret (1941) was a re-make almost word for word, and is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

Blondell gets top billing and dominates the camera, as usual, as she gathers the pieces of the puzzle. The plot is…., wait, what plot?  Nor is much made of the ODH, more is the pity.  While there are plenty of menacing shadows to rouse a scream, there are no sliding panels, hidden chambers, eyes moving on portraits, ejection seats, or any of that good stuff.  Instead we have repeated shots of those shadows.  Oh hum. 

Indeed, it is a vehicle for the winning ways of Miss Pinkerton, as she is nicknamed.   

A prize goes to the viewer who can infer what the dying statement of the mother revealed, because it is not revealed in the film, though much is made of it.  

IMDb meta-data is: broadcast on 19 September 1964 for 52 minutes, rated 7.9 by 426 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Meow!

This IMDb summary leaves out the best part:  A soldier from the far future is accidentally teleported through time back to 1964. The psychiatrist assigned to examine the soldier realizes that he has been bred purely as a killing machine, but tries to reawaken the warrior’s humanity. Meanwhile, a second soldier arrives, dedicated to hunting and killing his enemy.  Yada, yada…

There is an opening scene on a vast no man’s land, potted with shell holes, mangled trees, laser blasted rocks, and a miasma hangs over it all as Cochise in body armour with a visored helmet creeps from shelter to cover. 

Just as Cochise closes in to kill Enemy in single combat, the two of them trip over a script and are hurled back in time 1800 years to era of the Yankee Dynasty in MLB.  Poor saps.  Once there an emeritus Mike Shayne sets about boring Cochise back to his lost humanity. There is marvellous scene when the suspicious Cochise, who thinks he has been taken prisoner by a clever and deceitful enemy disguised as an inept pensioner, sees a house cat and tries to communicate with it to escape these fiendish do-gooders.  This, however, is not a battle cat and scoots to the bowl.

Mike Shayne feels very smug in rekindling Cochise’s suppressed humanity with psycho-babble, right up until Enemy from that no man’s land arrives in his living room!  Human or automaton, a stereotype has got to do what a stereotype has got to do.  

After seeing this episode, no cat will ever look the same. I watched it again recently when I found it, after some searching, on Daily Motion, where finding anything happens by chance.   

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 2 minutes, rated 5.9 by 290 cinematizens.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Woof! 

The dogs have been replaced by the design of a warplane, but much else is word-for-word of The Kennel Murder Case (1933).  In recognition of its original two dogs feature in this version.  

After twice-over befuddling the inept secret police of an unnamed foreign power Philo (autocorrect insists that he is ‘Photo,’ regrettably we know better), Philo returns to the Big Apple to thwart the nation’s Republican enemies on home soil.

While in the European power’s inner sanctum he had learned that the plans of a top hush Yankee warplane were already on file there.  How did they get there?  Can we close the barn door now that Pegasus has bolted? ‘Do we care,’ chorussed the fraternity brothers on the way to the beer refrigerator in a well-worn path?

This rather brash and energetic incarnation of Philo inserts himself into the household of the aircraft owner and designer only to find him dead – three times over.  He was clubbed, stabbed, and shot.  This is a man with enemies. Was he a dean?  

Suspicion falls with a thud on the victim’s errant brother who is nowhere to be found until, thanks to one of the dogs, someone opens the hall closet.  Thump. Body number two.

Not to worry, Philo sorts through it all.  The jilted girlfriend, the grasping sister, the fiancée, the ever-present butler, the next door neighbour and her dog, his own dog, his buffoon sidekick who is stuck with some terrible lines but mans-up for them, and others now forgotten.

In the great tradition, the least likely suspect did it as revealed in a final punch-up.

Among the cognoscenti there are those that claim to prefer the 1933 original in which Philo was played by William Powell, who finally learned his lesson and never did that again.  Me, I am agnostic on this important question, at least until I can watch The Kennel Murder Case (1933) again. N.B. I tried reading it and found it so mannered, laboured, forced, and fey that I stopped when the Kindle sample ended, leaving me a wiser and happier man.    

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 4 minutes run time, rated 5.8 by 150 cinematizens,

Gerne: ODH

Verdict:  Lee!

After superb opening credits with an animated, silhouetted nurse in white casting the light of a torch around an Old Dark House, Lee Patrick comes to the rescue as the nurse.  It seems that in the ODH the heir apparent has had his brains blown out: suicide, accident, or murder?  

The deceased was a caddish wastrel unloved and unmissed, but a mess there on the floor.  While there was no money to inherit from his bed-ridden mother there is a whopper of an insurance policy on Cad himself, which will not be paid for suicide!  So the household preference is for accident. He shot himself in the back of the head while cleaning his finger nails.  Sure. 

Bernie Olds is too smart to fall for that old dodge and he insinuates into the household his squeeze, the one and only Lee Patrick to nurse the bedridden mother. She takes the lead from there on in. A steam roller she keeps at it despite roadblocks, disincentives, threats, assault, and another assault.  It is her picture and the better for it.

Skulduggery abounds.  Who can be trusted?  The peeping butler?  Cad’s jilted girlfriend?  The girlfriend’s paramour de jour? The secret wife of Cad?  The gloomy doctor?  Assorted retainers? The ever so correct lawyer?  

No prizes for guessing.  When everyone else is eliminated that leaves the ever so correct least suspicious one as the cape-wearing shadow.  Though it is hard to picture this geriatric villain carrying around a roof ladder.     

It was released on 21 May 1941 when theatrical newsreels featured the German victories in Crete and Libya.  While secretly in Moscow, the Soviet head of military intelligence argued that Germany was preparing to invade Russia.  Stalin rejected the assessment and when the intelligence officer insisted, Stalin had him arrested and shot.  When will that happen in DC now that the Thief-in-Chief has unlimited power.  

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 22 minutes of run time, rated 5.7 by 470 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Bland leading the bland.  

The chic fashions of Eastern Europe1972 abound, whence space flight is routine as far out as the Third Ring.  (I took that to be a reference to Asteroids, but I’ll never know.) Then a number of space ships bound for a space station disappear.  (The actors say ‘acht‘ but the subtitles say ‘ten.’) No distress calls, no nothing.  Well, a lot of nothing. Then the space station itself goes dark.

Back on Earth high command ponders in a plenary session where Asians and Africans are conspicuously numbered among the socialist siblings. On the one side is Belle who wants to stop all flights and send a rescue mission.  On the other is Tubby who prefers to continue as usual and wait and see.  She prevails. Stress that: the head of operations is a woman and in 1972 she prevails against a male colleague.  

The rescue mission sets off with Belle on board.  By luck en route they encounter one the missing ships and try to board it, but it rockets off; apparently it is not a ghost ship.  They continue on to the vast space station, part refinery, part parking garage, part YM/WSA (Young Men’s/Women’s Socialist Association), part science lab.  It is about the size of the IKEA store in Tempe, vast and largely uncharted. 

They find only starving laboratory animals, but then half of the station is sealed off, that is, the parking garage.  Belle and the rescue crew show no interest in what is behind that green door.  

There occurs a comic interlude with a tin man that is completely superfluous and annoying.  

There has been a sidebar with a bored space miner on asteroid who misses Belle.  (Who wouldn’t.). Many flashback to the good old days on Earth.  Many.  Too many.

Among the flash backs are some with Tubby who muses about Eolomena, which is the name acolytes have given to a point of light that appears every twenty-four years in the starry night sky.  Is it a signal? He wishfully thinks so for no discernible reason. Why that name and rather than, say, Light in Sky was not explained within my attention span.  

Now back to the space station for the denouement replete with SPOILERS.  Tubby has by unknown means convinced the ten missing space ship crews and all the space station personnel to take one-way tickets to Eolomea. They have been sanding the wheels on their space ship wagons in the garage getting ready to blast off, while their ostensible rescuers wander about in Space Station IKEA. When the bored miner is offered a one-way ticket, he forsakes Belle and goes along. (‘What an idijit,’ cried the fraternity brothers! ). So the numerous, lengthy flashbacks to their courtship come to naught. End.

It is mercifully free of any AgitProp, beyond that implied by the composition of the plenary session where the Third World members sit quietly waiting for the assistant director’s cue to vote for Belle. 

Points of interest…are two. In 1972 it portrays two things unusual for the time. First and foremost is that Belle is in charge and stays that way. There are no demeaning asides from the chaps as there were in innumerable 1972 films. Nor is she riven by self doubts – scientist versus woman – that mar so much Hollywood and Pinewood tosh from the day. Full Ost Marks for that.  

Second, asteroid mining is dreary, dull, and boring blue collar work.  There is no glamour in space.  When Ridley Scott made space flight industrial in Alien (1979) he hailed himself a genius, but it was old news.  

But overall, there is zero tension in Eolomea. There are no equipment failures, but then there were probably no low-bid contractors in the script, to generate some tension.  Meteors seem to have taken the day off because there are none of them either. The debate between Belle and Tubby is oh-hum. That Tubby has suborned all those people into a one-way mission is taken as Red without explanation. Bland is the word.

IMDb meta-data is six episodes of 50 minutes each, rated 7.2 by 2459 cinematizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Leaden.  

Bucharest in Romania 1983 that most communist of the satellite states, where Red is best.  A typical cop show with an imagination-deprived screenplay saturated by tropes seen scores of times before.  Our unkempt and odiferous hero is a man’s man and has the snarl to prove it.  He and his partner set out against orders to make a big bust, spouting Communist slogans as they go. They will be worker-heroes, again. Parody, I know, but — news flash! — that does not make it funny. 

Yes, the Fraternity Brothers anticipated it.  

This time Macho and macho are the fall guys and his partner — aka as ‘Little Macho’ — is murdered before his very eyes, though strangely both the CIA drugs imported to sap the Red Will of the people and the American dollar payoff Monopoly money are left behind.  Even stranger the villain wears a Ronald Reagan mask and ascended from two stories out of a window by means unknown, but not before he leaves a hand written message which must have been prepared in advance for his hirsute hipster pursuer.  Sure.

Aside, in effecting escape this Reagan neatly and gratuitously shot dead an old babuška in an apartment he ran through but no one gives this victim a second thought. It is all about the partner.  

Needless to say Snarly feels guilty about the partner, not the babuška, and takes it out on his new partner with whom first has a macho fistfight and then he promptly engages in an unsanctioned investigation into the murder of dead Old What’s Name. Psst, Little Macho was his name. 

Time to reveal the obvious.  It was made in 2017 as though it were a cop show made in 1983. Hence the rich array of clichés, like the unity of the fist.  Fists were much used in Romanian law enforcement it would seem.  Few things change. 

In 1983 Romania was the front line of the Cold War!  Not even the Soviets can be trusted with the Red Grail. There is no crime and corruption in Bucharest except that fomented by AMERICAN agents who, there among the dust bunnies, are to be seen under every bed. The film makers add their own prejudice by making the US Ambassador a drawling and drooling southerner who seems to have the run of the city for no other reason than to annoy our Heroes.  Yet they do not notice the diplomatic-plated limousine when parked a few meters from a crime scene in a direct line of camera sight. Macho get an eye test from the Red health service!  

The parody is supposed to be intriguing and funny I guess but the hand is so heavy even the fraternity brothers pined for the finesse of Rambo.  To cite one of many examples.  Our Heroes investigate the murder of their colleague by going to the American Embassy often where they yell anti-capitalist slogans. Take that! A police procedural it is not.  On each visit in the lobby of the Embassy are two obese men (one wearing a baseball hat) wolfing down an enormous pile of hamburgers. See what I mean about subtle?  See what I mean about writer’s own prejudices?

There are non sequitur David Lynch touches as when first meeting the Ambassador they see an elderly woman drinking tea, who does not thereafter figure in the actions. What is it with these babuškas?  

It was filmed on location with Romanian actors in some of the roles, and it does offer some travelogue of Bucharest. The slogans on the crumbling walls celebrate the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime — amid the grime, ruin, disappearances, and poverty — for saving the people from clean water, sanitation, and other fiendish Western plots.  Why do I think of Comrade Numero Uno in Cuba?  

Somewhere I saw discussion questions for parents with children.  I guess they could discuss why ‘f***’ is pretty much every fourth word.  

Romania’s current efforts to look to the west are many, and this film is probably one example.  It pokes fun at Romania’s Red Past, while today earning Euros.  

We saw a Rick Steves travelogue about Bucharest the other night that made it seem nice.  But the EU doubts the commitment to the rule of law, rather than fists, by the quasi-fascist regime.  That did not deter the film makers.  

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 28 minutes, rated 6.9 by 2455 cinematizens. 

Genre: ODH (Old Dark House)

Verdict: Curate’s egg. 

An heiress is reunited with her long lost father, accompanied by her friend, Joan ‘Firecracker’ Blondell, who steals the show, as usual.  Roland Young is her hapless victim. Don McBride plays the hopeless Plod, again for the hundredth time.  

Death is only the beginning for Joan, returning as a ghost.  Firecracker saves the day when she clobbers the villain.  She recruits Roland to help.  Eddie (Rochester) Anderson plays the black stereotype, pining for Mr Benny; nonetheless, he has the best line in the film – ‘every hair on my (fur) coat is standing up.’

Daddy’s house is replete with suspicious stereotypes starting with that master of menace, that doctor of dread George Zucco, a grim house keeper, an icy butler, and more.  They all skulk around looking for the plot with no success. Later there are trap doors, sliding panels, and hidden passages.  

The villain goes around in an invisible man get-up with a cape. This is a look that will catch on Newtown.  It has quite a twist at the end which remains my little secret.  

Much, too much, is played for slapstick. The heiress is the luminous Carol Landis. Her duties include posing, fainting, and screaming. She had 49 credits. The best in my book is It Happened in Flatbush (1942).  At 29 she committed suicide with an overdose of drugs after five failed marriages, the first at 15, recurrent but unspecified health problems, depression, and a stalled career.  Tant pis.

What Topper has to do with it is anyone’s guess.  Anyone?  

It was released on 21 March 1941. At the time Australian troops participated in the Siege of Giarabub in Libya.  

Genre: Mystery

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 2 minutes, rated 6.1 by 102 cinematizens.

Verdict:  S l o w.

Philo needs vitamins to perk up.  He is slow as molasses in this outing. stopping in front of every mirror to check his pencil mo, or so it seemed.  I have never warmed to Mr Vance.  Maybe it is that first name: Philo. If ‘Phil’ was good enough for Marlow why isn’t for Vance? Mail your answers to someone else as soon as possible. 

Jewel thieves double cross each other, and Philo sorts them out with a very little help from Plod.  

Dan Seymour is always a good heavy but he is murdered in the first act, well…after that not much is left.  

The body count is high.  There are so amusing touches with the butler’s tweenager niece that single this screenplay out.  But not much else.

Released on 12 April 1947, the month that Jack Robinson broke the colour barrier in baseball in a one-man Iliad.  

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 13 long minutes, rated the 5.4 by 1152 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict:  Jekyll and Hyde part.

Dauntless globe trotting foreign correspondent goes to interview a reclusive Japanese Mad Scientist in a lab located on a remote mountain fastness before returning to home and hearth.  In a step up from the norm, this Mad Scientist has a Fetching assistant rather than a deformed Igor(ess).  Journalist turns on the worldly charm by lighting cigarettes.  S-m-o-o-t-h.

Mad Scientist has been experimenting on his family and has succeeded in turning them into monsters.  Well, monsters are good, but he wants expand the boundaries of knowledge still more to control evolution or devolution.  The fraternity brothers wanted to rush some of these monsters.  

Mad Scientist has run out family and invites the journalist to hang around…the fetching assistant, while he prepares a new experiment!  In no time at all, well it seemed a lot longer, Foreign Correspondent gets an injection of (d)evolution juice in the neck!  While the drug is working he whines and dines Fetching, ignoring telephone calls from his New York wife to come home and fix the backdoor.  Whines is right.  He feels very sorry for himself.  

Then, like some deans I have known, Foreign Correspondent grows a second head!  Yes, if one dean is bad, imagine a double dose demanding budget cuts, throughput increases, and improved morale!  Two budget cuts!  Twice as much teaching! Twice as many research grants! Half as many staff. Dancing in the hallways!  

At the denouement there is an unexpected but rather striking division of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde into two creatures: the monster and the man, hence manster.  Oops, that is a spoiler. 

There are some discernible themes in this mishmash.  One is the Japanese culture is threatening, corrupt, lascivious, decadent, and it weakens the moral resolve of American Foreign Correspondent.  He goes all animal when overexposed to Japisms, Geishas, sushi, public bathing, sake, and…..[see Geishas above].  

Everyone smokes and drinks like real men.  His distant wife is a clinging vine.  Why Fetching shuts herself away on the mountain top with Mad Scientist is a puzzle and stays that way.  Correspondent spends a lot of time feeling sorry for himself because of how hardworking he is, yet the only thing we see him do is chat, drink, and smoke.  Exhausting!  The ostensible interview with Mad Scientist consisted of smoking and drinking.  No notes are taken, no information is imparted and Correspondent seems happy with that.

It is a Japanese production with United Artists shot in English with European leads. Currency restrictions meant profits from United Artists films shown in Japan could not all be taken out, so some was used to make films like this.  Though, rather unusual for the time, some of the extras speak Japanese, but all of the principle Japanese speak English.  

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 26 minutes, rated 5.0 by 2321 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Cheap and nasty.

Near a secret research laboratory men are dying…of cardiac arrest…after sex.  Time to send in a top agent who flashes his way into the library. Cheap.

One of the best moments is a town meeting dominated by the beer-swilling bully.  Seems realistic to me.  

That top agent orders a pizza delivered while his new girlfriend is nearly raped. Nasty. He comes in time to beat up the three drooling NRA members, and another guy to keep in practice.  

The body count rises, but we see more deaths, than agent man is aware off, and he never does catch on.  S l o w.

By accident cosmic rays have turned the women at the laboratory into queen bees who seduce men into drones.  In the middle is a tedious documentary about bees to add to the pace.  Not.  

The film has hints of lesbianism, women’s liberation, Amazon warriors, safe sex, and stupidity to go with the sexploitation.  

For a comparison seen Roger Corman’s Wasp Woman (1959), though truth to be told those wasps were bees in disguise.