Category: Film Review

Race to Mars (2007+)

IMDb meta-data is four episodes of 46 minutes each, rated 6..8 by 287 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy fact

Verdict:  Only for Mars junkies.  

An international team (code for American, though all the actors are Canadian only one wears that flag patch in this Montréal production) embarks on a two year mission to Mars in 2030.  The trip is long, the arrival short.  Along the way the main obstacles are boredom and the shortcuts taken by the McKinsey-managed low-bid contractor.  Yes, it is all very realistic.  Produced by Discovery Canada, great pains were taken to get the science right.  It is shot in HD and looks great.  

Computer faults arise en route and have to be worked around, not once but twice.  ‘That should work’ fixes don’t (fix it) and more fundamental efforts are needed.  That is an IOS update while in flight.  I did warn them against Catalina, but as usual shouting at the screen has no effect.  

When the crew members were selected for compatibility they must have had some surgery because there is not a spark of sexual tension in the nine month close quarters voyage among the four men and two women.  Definitely rated G on that dimension.  There are a few expletives by way of compensation.  

The master narrative in the title is that the Chinese have sent a robot ship to Mars to drill for water (as the source of life).  Though launched shortly after the International Mission, the Chinese craft will get to Mars first.  Why?  Because it is robotic and without a human crew it can travel faster.  It does not need to provide artificial gravity.  It does not need to liftoff slowly so as not to crush the crew   It does not need a long and slow deceleration to allow the crew to adjust. It does not need to dock and change crafts for ascent and descent. The one bus will make all stops.  But will it get to water first, that remains to be seen. 

Much time and effort is expended in landing, assembling equipment, withstanding the first dust storm, and setting up the drill.  They do not do any exploring and there is never any discussion of that. No one wants to look around. Instead we have occasional views of travelling matte expanses.  (This was not filmed in either Jordan or Morocco and it shows. These countries are favourites for big-budget Mars scenery.) They were sent to drill, and drill they do.

One of the Red Shirts breaks his arm in arraying equipment, and that increases everyone else’s workload.  This is an industrial accident, not a Martian curse, and at this point the fraternity brothers passed out.  Later another low-bid contractor puts in an appearance when the drill breaks.  

Meanwhile the Chinese robot ship (very much like the cute little June bug spacecraft in Mission Stardust [1968], see comments on this film elsewhere on this blog) has struck….salt water.  There is so much salt that no life could exist in it.  Think Dead Sea and there it is.  Think of the Great Salt Lake.  No, wait, don’t.  Anyway the smarty-pants Chinese have come up with nada.  

Then off-camera, with the consent of ground control, suitably lagged for communication, our heroes get permission to cannibalise the Chinese rig for its drill, and they spend the best part of one forty-minute episode fitting it to their equipment, measured in inches, while the Chinese used abaci.  (Joke.)  

Not soon enough they hit water because their drill site is far away from the area the Chinese used and they have a geyser.  In fact, it is too much and it blows the rig apart and shrapnel kills the Red Shirt.  Much guilt follows, but no Christian ritual. 

Now they have water and it seems anti-climatic since the samples are sealed and will only be analysed later on the ground after this series has long ended.  Oh.  It is all race and no finish.  

Though there is much docking and rendezvousing which is passed in silence, and they start back when more computer failures threaten everything and no sooner is that fixed, then a damaged panel requires the Sy Fy mandatory EVA in which another member of the crew is injured.  Was their equipment built by Trabant?  Then they return to Earth orbit.  The End.  

No meteor showers, no flesh-eating plants, no exploding heads, no monsters of the deep, no creepy caves, no crappy special effects, just hard work and difficult decisions, industrial accidents, personal tensions, though the captain seems to wear his decisions lightly.  That seems far fetched in such small group.  The more so considering there is no military discipline in sight.  I would expect more blowback. The extra shifts, first to compensate for the injured crewman, then to adapt the Chinese drill, then to make the deadline for the departure window, exhausts everyone.  Tempers get shorter.  Personal hygiene is absent.  

I rather liked that low key approach, but the direction is leaden. The camera goes face-to-face for reaction shots every time a line is spoken.  One speaks and we get five reaction shots. It lingers while the actor remembers the next line, and then on to the next actors.  The result is that even the simplest scene is attenuated beyond its dramatic weight.  While the asinine comments in user reviews about it are just that, it is also true that the film invites this reaction with its lethargic pace.  It is one of slowest movies one is ever likely to see with the word ‘race’ in the title.  Every actor gets plenty of close-ups for the demo disc without advancing the story or deepening the character   

It was filmed in Montréal and I did not recognise any of the players but they all have extensive credits in Canadian television.  It won several Gemini Awards for being Canadian.  That the voice of ground control with an egregious Texas accent traces back to an Anglo actor from Montréal.  

It is so low key that only one external reviewer was linked to the IMDb page when I looked.  Moreover, or lessover there is not a single still photograph associated with the IMDb entry. This is the first time I have encountered that.

Murder in the Clouds (1934)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 6.0 by 186 cinematizens.

Genre:  Mystery

Verdict:  Go girl!

Clichés have to start somewhere.  Nebraska’s own Lyle Talbot before he descended to the ranks of character actors is Three Star, a hotshot flyboy who boasts, brags, and shows-off, reminds me of that midget.  We never do know if Three Star’s flying days began in the Great War, nor why he is called Three Star, apart from the three stars tattooed (it seemed) on his narrow, pasty chest. Why not four star? No room.  Or just Star?  Still I rather like it that there is no tedious backstory.  

Before LAX ate Westchester a number of small airports served Los Angeles, and one, now long gone, was at Glendale.  This drama takes place in the wide open spaces there.  

Three Star, after character-establishing antics, is assigned a top secret mission, while unnamed enemy agents listen in, and then Three Star promptly goes to a bar and gets into a fist fight set up by the nefarious villains, which he loses, three to one.  The next morning when he is a no-show for the top secret mission, there just happens to be another pilot right there to volunteer for it.  Guess!  Yes, this one is another plant by the unnamed enemy.  

The co-pilot for this flight is the callow younger brother of Ann Dvorak, the airline’s only cabin crew.  On board is an egghead with his invention, which is something to make boom, as if we are ever short of that.  Whoops!  The plane blows up in mid-air.  Was it a Boeing Max? Well maybe, but skulduggery is afoot.

To keep it simple, the plant pilot (after eating Mexican beans) gassed the crew and passengers, took the secret device, and parachuted out after setting a time bomb.  Kablooie!  Four dead ducks. Some design fault. 

Three Star with a nary a word of regret or apology sets out to recover the device, once it is not found in the wreckage.  So far, so standard.  

Here’s where it gets more interesting.  Dvorak, seeking information about her now missing brother, the co-pilot, gets taken in by the villains, led by the redoubtable Russell Hicks, tall, distinguished, thoughtful, cultured, impressive, avuncular, and evil.  Hicks and company trick her into helping them abscond with the device.  So they think.  

In fact, she soon realises their murderous larceny by accident and in a great scene thinks through in silence what she has heard and seen, and arrives at the conclusion to out trick them, and she does with a little help from the McGyver Manual. Marvellous!  

She had overheard the news that her brother was dead, but stifled the stereotypical consequent female hysteria in the screenwriters paucity of imagination and turned the tables on the villains.  Go girl!  

Three Stars then flies around for ten minutes at a time.  Remembers those underwater sequences in Thunderball (1965) that go on and on without advancing plot or character.  Ditto here.  It no doubt had novelty value at the time of release, 15 December 1934, and it is nicely done, but too much is too much (except for Dolly Parton and Arnold Schwarzenegger). 

Ann Dvorak had a reputation in Hollywood for being difficult, according to the Harvey Weinsteins of the day.  She was not compliant with his sort, whatever that may be, and, in addition, she resiled at the fluff she was forced to play and complained about it a lot.  One suspects that her attitude influenced the portrayal of this disciplined, resourceful, and determined heroine.  No doubt her personality was the result of reading too much, because her IMDb biography terms her a bibliophile who collected first editions.  

When she realised she was being paid the same as the juvenile actors in one film, she bought herself out of the Warner contract. Gutsy, indeed, in that fraternity.  The material was bad enough, but to be paid peanuts for it was the last straw.  Later she married a Brit and moved to Old Blighty where she drove ambulances during World War II in the Blitz.  No bone spurs were detected.  

The Shadow (1933)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.1 by 99 cinematizens.

Genre: Old Dark House (Honourary). 

Verdict: It seemed longer.

N. B.  This is not  T-H-E  Shadow of Mutual Radio though the time coincides with the eponymous Shadow.  Confusing? This is a very British production quite independent of that radio program. Got it?  Repeat after me:  this is a shadow but not T H E Shadow.  

The Set-Up:  A masked figure has been blackmailing wealthy personages (see, it is a British film and they are personages, not just people), driving several to suicide.  Wow! What did he have on them! I’d like to know.  Where did he get it?  Wikileaks? Pox News? Is there more there?  These are all excellent questions that are never addressed by the stiffening lips. Instead the forces of order gather to protect these child molesting aristos.  Nothing ever changes.

Clues and leads are few, but one Scotland Yard stalwart lays a cunning trap for this murderous Shadow.  It is so cunning that One forgets to load his gat and the Shadow makes short work of him.  Dick One is a dead dick in the first five minutes.  Maybe not so cunning after all.  

A Second Dick is assigned the case and sets about annoying dialogue with the Head of the Criminal Investigation Branch, Sir Forgotten Name.  In the midst of the most terrible crime wave of the century (since if concerns wealthy personages being blackmailed for the heinous crimes they had committed) Name sets out for his country estate for the weekend to play golf.  Hmmm.  What does that remind me of? 

Ah, at last, an Old Dark House, hoped the fraternity brothers.  

For reasons unknown to the scriptwriter the Shadow is there, too, and for reasons unknown to the scriptwriter Second Dick knows that the Shadow is there, and rushes — ever so slowly — to warn Sir Name, when….!  Second Dick is shot to death on the winding five-mile driveway of the country estate.  Maybe a poacher shot him by accident, but is that likely? Well, yes in Midsomer, but the end result is: Two dead dicks!  

Well, never mind, there are more dicks where those two came from and another middle aged, overweight, dolt is called to the country estate who confirms that Dick Two is dead.  Enter the  Third Dick.  

In the Old Dark House are gathered the usual suspects: a butler, a scrumptious daughter, her unsuitable suitor, a toff of no apparent value who blunders about looking for the other two stooges, a maiden aunt who still hopes for the best, along with a sneak thief who passes himself off as a gentleman with an Eton tie, his girlfriend, and someone else whom I have overlooked.  They do not add up to ten and soon subtraction begins.  

There is also a ringer who passes briefly through the halls before being killed. This latter is the butler’s son escaped from a conveniently located nearby looney bin. (See any version of Hound of the Baskervilles for the prototype of this plot device.)   Ringer makes the mistake of getting in the way of the Shadow and clonk he goes back to central casting.

The Third Dick with a body guard assistant muddies the waters.  Much this and much that follows on the Dali watch.  Frail swoons. Toff toffs.  Plod plods.  Name names.  Butler butlers.  Got it?  Care?  

Spoiler ahead!

Then Third Dick reveals all by means of reading the script off camera.  In standard operating procedure screenwriting the least likely did it.  No, wait, not the maiden aunt, but rather….[pause] the garrulous Toff.  He transform from tiresome bore to tiresome villain.  Now Richard Dix could have made this transformation worth watching but in this case one Henry Kendall could not and did not.  We were all just glad to see The End. 

There is one scene with some acting in it when Name comforts the Butler about the death of his psycho son, but that two minutes is not worth the rest.  It has nothing to do with the plot.  

There is also an oddity on the IMDb entry, where there are 184 photographs linked to this title.  That is an extraordinary number for any film, let along one of this era, and from Great Britain.  The Shadow Laughs (1933) has two photographs and that is a typical number, and this is the real Shadow, too!

The Casketeers (2018+)

IMDb meta-data is 14 episodes of twenty-five minutes rated 7.0 by 270 cinematizens.

Genre:  Documentary (according to the IMDb) 

Verdict:   Amusing, touching, informative, uplifting

The day-to-day activities of a funeral business in Auckland, specialising in Maori rites and rituals, might not be to everyone’s taste, but this is done very well, combining the human comedy of everyday life – will Francis ever find a way to sneak that fabulously  expensive leaf blower past his accountant wife Kaiora? – with the solemn, sad, and serious business of death, loss, grieving, denial, injustice, and anger.  

Francis is the micro-manager par excellence in his drive to offer clients a perfect service, right down to scrapping gum from the sidewalk in front of the business.  He also likes boy-toys like that NZ $1,300 ultra, high-powered leaf blower, and then there was that white van. What was he thinking when he bought that bucket of bolts?  Not even he knows. His conversation with the mechanic who tells him it is not worth repairing is classic when he says it is worth to him [to avoid hearing those four words he fears most from Mrs, viz. ‘I told you so’].  

On the other hand Francis seldom asks for or gets the list price on the funerals he sells.  More often than not at the sight of grieving relatives he offers discounts, adds extras at no cost, and volunteers more labour for nothing.  The accountant grinds her teeth but draws the line at the leaf-blower.

It put me in mind of a marvellous Japanese film Departures (2008), discussed elsewhere on this blog.  Click away.  

By the way it offers a small window on Maori life and culture that is informative, compelling, and thoughtful.  My faith in the enduring idiocracy was confirmed by reading the 1.0 ratings on the IMDb.  

The Republic of Doyle (2010 +)

IMDb meta-data is 78 episodes of 55 minutes each, rated 7.2 by 2888 cinematizens.

Genre: PI 

Verdict: Location, location, location!

It has all the clichés of the genre cosmetically refreshed by the location among the goofie Newfies in St John’s Newfoundland.  Anne of Green Gables, Joey Smallwood, and Annie Proulx are nowhere to be seen. 

A wannabe Jim Rockford approaching forty and living at home with father, much to the annoyance of stepmother, is PI together with Dad. It is all by the numbers thereafter without the laconic charm of Rocky, but at least there is no annoying Angel on the scene. Out hero is unkempt, unshaved, and childish, a clear case of arrested development that appeals to its like. His private life is a mess and dominates his professional life as a PI.  He drives an old banger. All boxes checked.  It is easy to imagine the checklist in the screenwriters manual consulted for this project. 

Still the setting in and around St John’s Newfoundland is distinctive and the cinematography makes the place look attractive.  It’s not, but it looks that way on film.  The soundtrack, for once, also adds something to the ambience.  

Despite my quibbles it is one thing many Canadian film productions are not.  It is Canadian.  It looks and sounds it. Many Canadian productions are so deracinated for the international market that they are anonymous, e.g. Street Legal, Da Vinci’s Inquest, Traders,…. [so anonymous that they are forgotten]. 

Wellington Paranormal (2018+)

IMDb meta-data is 19 episodes of 25 minutes to date, rated 7.5 by 101,362 Kiwis.

Genre: Horror

Verdict: 3D (Dry, Droll, and Deadpan)

Tip One: Watch in sequences. You’ll see why.  Tip Two:  The delivery is often fast, there are asides, and sotto voce comments that are best appreciated by turning on subtitles. We have seen all the episodes and we are watching them again but to be specific these comments concern Season 2, Episode 6 Mobots. 

Sergeant Ruawai Maaka briefs the duty watch at Wellington Central Police for the morning. Once again he urges officers not to use of pepper spray on lunch!  Too late for those who tried it for breakfast but had the nozzle turned the wrong way around.  Captain Frank Furillo never had this problem.  

After the others have their assignments, e.g., assisting the spray victims to the medic, changing the channel on the television, making tea, Sarge turns to the crack Hardly Normal Squad of Officers Karen O’Leary and Mike Minogue.  These secret squirrels retire to the concealed room behind the bookcase in the back hall. What’s going down?  All over the Mt Victoria area old mobile phones and other discarded electronics have disappeared from kitchen drawers, sheds, garages, under stairs, attics, coat pockets, and closets.  First these items disappeared into these recesses and then they disappeared from them.  Wow! 

Thereafter Sarge Maaka offers the running commentary of a police reality television show as O’Leary and Minogue scope the doings, starting with O’Leary’s mum who lives in the area.  Yes, this is Mrs O’Leary without a cow.  The cow turns up in another episode.

There is a delightful scene with a snake, sort of, and a taser that makes Davis Quinton of Dog River look responsible. 

To assist the field officers Sarge has called in a tech head, who begins by undoing everything his predecessors did, reinstalling all the software, and then rebooting in the middle of the operation for beta testing. Doing all this gives Tech time to pick his nose.  

Loved the interrogation with the transformer.  Updates are indeed dangerous. Try this IOS, Punk! After seeing  this object lesson, for the moment I am holding off Catalina.  

So far we have had no references to the Bee Hive in Wellington, though surely that is a tempting target.

The Terrornauts (1967)

IMDb meta is 1 hour and 17 minutes, rated 5.1 by 332 cinematizens

Genre: SyFy

Verdict: Incomprehensible 

Somewhere in middle England Dr Joe uses a radio telescope half an hour a week. This access infuriates the Director who tries to KPI Joe off the ear piece.  There is much gobbledegook about the radio telescope for connoisseurs. It seems a storm in a screenwriter’s teacup.  

Doc has a loyal secretary who is sometimes Sandy and at other times Zena.  Continuity editor please note. He also has an underling to order around.  

But (what a surprise) a few hours before the plug is pulled Dr Joe gets a call:  from outer space!  He answers the call.  Big mistake. He was warned not to do so by the Carry On accountant who just happens to be there for annoyance.  

Next thing you know a Dalek on an asteroid sends a robo-ship to Earth to space-nap the lot and plonk them down in a one room set and they end up donning shower caps with USB cables on them.  No Hollywood ego would have put those on, although it was amusing to imagine it.  

Once they plug in they become Eggheads!  No, they become the Solar System’s first and only line of defence.  Oh?  Let’s review this A-Team: Doc who cannot get a research grant, underling who waits for loser Doc to tell him what to do, a secretary who doesn’t know her own name, a Carry On accountant, and the cleaning lady (who sensibly refuses to wear a shower cap).  This is it.  This is the best we’ve got. Only they can save us from a Republican apocalypse. We’re doomed!  Doomed!  

There is an unrelated aside with human sacrifice, as per the marketing tg line cited above. Ho hum. The knife man moves so slowly the fraternity brothers fell asleep during this episode.  Really he will never fulfil his Killing Performance Indicators at that speed and doesn’t.     

They play a PAC Man arcade game with the unnamed, unidentified, and unknown invaders — probably Europeans looking for terra nullius — and win!  ‘Fire!’ is repeated eight times in this segment to give the illusion of action.  [No sale!]

Journeyman Sy Fy author Murray Leinster wrote the story which was adapted into a screenplay by John Brunner.  That is a good pedigree but it hardly shows in the finished product.  Admittedly there is some awareness of the laws of physics in contrast to so much Sy Fy: There is a lag in signals.  The angle of declination is determinate. Yet we have flames in space.    

More importantly, we have a title that makes no connection to the story and some very poor acting.  

White Tiger (Belyy Tigr) (2012)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 44 minutes, rated 6.5 by 3213 cinematizens. 

Genre: War, Fantasy.

Verdict:  Ahab, tank whisperer. 

Context.  In the July and August of 1943, near Kursk in South West Russia, an enormous tank battle occurred as the Nazis launched their last major Eastern offensive, putting into the maw a million men (Germans, Austrians, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovenians, Croatian, and more) with 3000+ tanks.  Big, huh?  But the Soviets saw that bid and raised it, offering to Ares more than two and half million men with 7000 tanks. The air fleets were likewise enormous. Events far away determined the eventual outcome when the Western Allies invaded Sicily leading the Nazis in Russia to fall back because reserves of men and material intended to sustain a counter-attack in Russia were diverted to Italy. 

Set-up. After one tank engagement in the weeks this battle dragged on, a badly burned Ahab is pulled from a T-34 and miraculously recovers from his near fatal wounds in ten minutes.  This is Comrade Found who becomes the tank whisperer.  He communes with the steel hulls of burned-out hulks and confirms that his tank was destroyed by the titular White Tiger tank.   

This is a long way from the Soviet propaganda films about the Great Patriotic War like Two Soldiers (1943), It Happened at the Donbass (1945), The Star (1953), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), ….. where bare and barrel-chested hero workers rip German tanks apart with one hand while hold Lenin’s testament aloft in the other. In this film there is blood and grit, and no one turns to Lenin for solace.  Moreover, the tank whisperer is a non-entity, pigeon chested, cross-eyed, monosyllabic, and stooped.  This is no Hollywood hunk taking time off from the steroids and the gym.    

But once Found recovers in record time from burns — he is reborn, he is back in a tank seeking out the White Whale of a Tiger in some mixed up zoology.  White proves so destructive and elusive that the Soviet Army dedicates a small unit led by the Tank Whisper to seek and destroy it.  Shoot ‘em ups occur.  Tank whisperings save Ahab but the great White gets away again and again.  There is talk that it has a ghost crew as well as magical powers to cloud men’s mind.  It is the S-H-A-D-O-W tank!  Talkative German prisoners tell everything they know which is not much without even getting a cigarette in return.  

That occupied the first hour plus, then — inexplicably — we cut away to a ceremony led by Russians with a German Field Marshall surrendering in the presence of American and British flags and at least one American general officer uniform. The Nazi delegation includes all arms: Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe. Huh? From 1943 to 1945 in a flash. The White Tiger made no further appearance in the last two years of the war.

There follows another half hour with several pointless scenes in a ruined city, perhaps Berlin, which I watched with one eye.  It ends with an incomprehensible monologue from guess who? Only one ear was required for that: Found says the White is still out there waiting.  Ah huh…, and….   Nothing.  

By the way, there are no women in the film after Tank Whisperer leaves the hospital, apart from a few passing in street scenes at a distance.  

Leaving aside the last half hour it had some mystery, which was never resolved, and so just became an excuse for blown ‘em up and shoot ‘em up. Tant pis. The early musings of a couple of the characters were a good start but they became repetitive rather than informative, not a patch on similar musings in The Thin Red Line (1998) or Castle Keep (1969).  Still when I compare it to the trailers I have seen of recent Anglo-American war films White Tiger has a verisimilitude completely lacking in them. There is not a bareheaded, bare chested Brad Pitt in sight reminding us his food-fad diet, the hours a day he spends in the gym and at the make-up chair.

I cannot forbear, and why should I, from mentioning that one reviewer on the IMDb refers to the setting as the winter.  Winter in July, well maybe, in Boston but not in west central Russia.  

Not my usual far but I found some references to it that made it sound more thoughtful than the usual shoot ’em up. Not so, I found.

The Shadow Returns 1946

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute run time, rated 5.7 by 128 cinematizens

Genre: Howdunnit (not Whodunnit).  

Verdict: All hat, no oil. 

‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!’ 

Unlike The Whistler, The Shadow did not need to spy on people to find out their secrets: he got up in the morning knowing them.  Moreover, The Shadow had ‘the power to cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him,’ completely unnecessary where the fraternity brothers are concerned, but handy nonetheless. Still it left the brothers wondering about women’s minds. Nor did The Shadow need a gimmicky off-key whistle like you-know-whom.  Finally, he was voiced once by Orson “I am a Genius” Welles.  It ran to 677 episodes from 1937 to 1954.  Most of which have been lost to ravages of indifference. But some can be had from Audible. 

What a pedigree to take to the movies!  What a flop the movies were and are!  

In the movies he knows from nothing and back again.  His mind is the only thing clouded.  His gimmick is a black cat suit for a costume party.  He is surrounded by people who know his secret.  

Lamont Cranston interferes in police investigations to the amusement of his uncle, the Police Commissioner.  His faithful driver is an oaf. He ridicules his girlfriend, Margo Lane whose single contribution to proceedings is to wear silly hats.  Yet this is the Shadow. Hardly! A mere silhouette of his radio self.   

This Shadow is so pathetic he has to hold a gat on the cops while he explains things to them. Not a cloud in sight.  However in this outing the police do figure it out and there is a nice scene toward the end when the Irish Inspector No-First-Name Cardona and Lamont piece it together based on nothing but the clock and the script.    

But to back up:  Four sneaky types fall off balconies to break their necks and die, apparent suicides. Each was alone when taking the concrete dive. No one pushed them. Were they drunk or drugged?  No.  Were they following a Des Moines Sky Mall map? No. Were they by some scriptwriting coincidence suicides?  No.  Were they raptured by the Kool Aid?  No. What then? 

That is intriguing but the weary and dreary direction undercuts the suspense. Later the explanation involves either Indiana (Jones) or Australia, sort of.

There is also a neat idea about a secret lab in a warehouse that is not integrated.  The only critic linked to the IMDb entry who bothered to comment on it said the plot was ‘not wholly coherent,’ exemplifying understatement.   

Kane Richmond as Lamont Shadow has the profile of a superman double, chiseled features, powerful jaw, a brow untroubled by thought, a masterful baritone voice, broad shoulders, an effortless glide of step, a toothy grin, and the confidence of a schoolyard bully. Yet, strangely, he has no presence on the screen.    

Margo gets some compensation for the twenty-four carat sexism throughout. Her best line is a reply to Lamont is:  ‘Don’t yell at me until after we’re married and then don’t you dare!’  Even better when Lamont is trying to open a safe with much manly posturing as he prepares to pick the lock, she reaches past him and opens the door which she had noticed was not closed but which Lamont had not, so busy was he preparing for his display of masculine genius.  Hssss [sound of ego deflating]. 

On the radio The Shadow and The Margo were a team and all business but on film they seem to be auditioning for a comedy show on the way to a masked ball, and failing. There is much, too much, slapstick with the black costume that he always has handy.  The comic relief is annoying as usual.

It is little wonder that translating this successful radio serial to film failed. The radio audience would have found it to be a failure as above. The scriptwriter used bait and switch, and the audience switched back to radio.  

The Old Dark House (1932)

Genre: Old dark house, Gothic

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 7.1/10.0 by 8062 cinematizens

Verdict: In the beginning.

The Set-up:  Monsoon rains in Wales wash out roads and lead two separate travelling parties to pitch up at the Old Dark House of the Femm family.  If only the travellers had been able to read the map where it said ‘Do Not Stop Here.’  But it was too wet, too dark, and the director was in too much of hurry for that warning.

There they find the hirsute, mute butler, Frankestein’s monster, moonlighting in a second job. Melvyn Douglas wise cracks; Raymond Massey looks serious; Lillian Bond just looks as does the very talented Gloria Stuart (of Titanic) in this pre-Code film; but Charles Laughton has the best part and plays it superbly.  Then there are the cross-dressing Femms, Horace, Rebecca, Saul, and Roderick engaged in a race to the nut house.  

Enthusiasts for creepy old dark houses, ahem, like me, are in for a disappointment.  There are no secret passages (from which chain saw wielding cats leap), no sliding panels (to reveal a torture chamber), no peep holes (through which to see terrible sights, like a Republican), nor does anyone flounce around in a cape (the most common ensemble for villains in Old Dark Houses).  

On the other hand, the Femms do provide compensations. Horace jumps every time someone scratches.  Rebecca screeches denunciations of all as sinners. Roderick is the cross-dresser. Saul likes fire. Lots of it.  

We never do find out anything about the travellers and they all survive the night to continue being unknown though in a slightly different configuration. In these days Douglas often played the wise-cracking wastrel, belying his later, memorable dramatic roles. 

James Whale of Frankenstein directed, wasting Boris Karloff behind some hairy make-up, from the novel Benighted (1927) by J.B. Priestly; the screenplay closely follows the book.  Among the nice touches are many visuals, nobody can open a door like Frankenstein’s monster, or the split mirrors before Gloria Stuart, the shadows on the dining room wall, and never did the phrase ‘Have a potato!’ seem so strange.  By comparison the Hammer remake in 1963 is a toga party.