Category: Film Review

IMDb meta-data is twenty-seven hour-long episodes rated 8.0 by 51,306 idiots.  

Genre:  Derivative

Verdict: The Bickersons in space. (Well, not that good, but like that.)

A group of Star Trek wannabes mix with CGIs while imitating a Seinfeld episode. Oh hum.  

No characters, no character development, no narrative, no mystery, no awe, no story, just a few ever more lame gags that could have been situated anywhere, decorated with a lot of rubber face masks.  The mental level was frat boy with keg.

I did like Arbor Day and the best use of the Kardasians, but not enough to persevere after episode three.  It was mercifully free of the repetitive high volume shoot ‘em ups that now comprise Star Trek movies. 

Though in one shoot-out the determined efforts of one alleged character to present right profile regardless of the circumstances was apparent. So was the absence of officers from the bridge on several occasions. Is that anyway to run a starship?

The name Orville I suppose is a tribute but nothing is made of it. Apollo 11 carried a splinter of a strut from Kitty Hawk lend by the Smithsonian Museum.  (Figure it out, Bro.) Now that was a tribute.  

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 6.2 by 72 cinematizens.  

Genre: Mystery

Verdict: A lost picture found.  

The set-up:  Captain Hugh Drummond, called Bulldog for no reason whatever, embarks on his twentieth film, played in this instance by that irresistible sot, Tom Conway who has his brief way with women, one after another.  The fraternity brothers lost count at two.  Situation normal. 

Bulldog tracks down a set of stolen lead soldiers to find a long lost Anglo-Saxon treasure trove stashed just before the Battle of Hastings.  It is a tried and true formula used by Arthur Conan Doyle and many others.  Bulldog borrows some gear from Lara Croft and sallies forth with a cast of flunkies and leading ladies in his wake.  

This is one of the many studio B quickies done in five days of shooting and subsequently lost to the ravages of indifference, until 2001 when a much deteriorated 16mm print turned up on Ebay from which the You Tube offering derives. It is nearly impossible to watch. The images are stretched, the surface flyblown, and the dialogue out of sync. All too much like a keg party at the House. Think of it as a Salvador Dali version of a film.  It is available on DVD now in a cleaned up copy but I am not motivated that far.  

IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 6.4 by 1192 cinematizens.  (I do worry about some cinematizens when I see ratings like this.)

Genre: noir

Verdict: Oh hum.

In his first feature film a rake-thin Dr Leonard McCoy has a bad dream and tells the world about it, repeatedly.  His Georgia origins are pronounced.  (Get it?) He was born Jackson DeForest Kelley.  Can you believe any parents would do that?  

The dream opens proceedings and it is very well done, with spinning and shadows.  In it there is a femme fatale, to be sure, and man bent over a safe in conservatory with four mirrored doors. 

A robotic, and so perfectly cast, McCoy emerges from behind one door while the couple are intent on the safe behind another door, and he stabs the man to death while the femme scoots.  

He then wakes upon a sweat, and begins to blab, while striving not to blab, he blabs to his brother-in-law of the chiselled chin (Paul Kelly) who laughs it off, slaps him around to straighten him out, and finally begins to think something might have happened.  Chin is a copper and he has his ways of finding out things, namely, a slap on the chops.  After the pair of them with their wife and girlfriend, respectively, just happen to go on a picnic on the grounds the very mansion possessed of a conservatory with four mirrored doors.  Small world.

Sidebar:  By now the fraternity brothers had passed out from boredom and beer in equal measure.  

Thereafter Kelley and Kelly are on the case.  McCoy cries, faints, trembles, and is useless, while Chisel-chin does all the running, thumping, and shooting.  As we Noiristas realised from the second act, the harmless little man next door was an evil genius who had hypnotised weak-minded McCoy into hiding in the conservatory closet to surprise the safe cracker and moll.  

The moll was Harmless’s wife who was going to run off with the cracksman after he cleaned out Harmless’s safe. Not nice to be sure.  

Turns out robot McCoy had no responsibility because the yegg attacked him when he appeared out of nowhere ergo he acted in self defence.  Sure, tell that to the judge, which he did. The end.  

The dream sequence at the beginning derives from ‘Spellbound’ (1945) and anticipated later imitations. In this outing it lacks the gravitas imparted by Alfred Hitchcock who added doses of Salvador Dali hyper-reality to it in ‘Vertigo’ (1958).  Strangely ‘Fear in the Dark’ is not included on the IMDb list of more than a thousand films with a dream sequence, but it does index many Donald Duck cartoons.  Did A.I. compile that list?

One of the reviews attached to the IMDb entry – Film Noir of the Week – goes on and on for about 3000 words interpreting the film as a homosexual love story between Chisel-chin and trembling McCoy.  Believe it, Ripley!  I watched a different movie.

McCoy had just come out of the army and was branching out from his pre-war career  as a radio singer. (!) His acting peaked in this outing, though he had a career as a villain in westerns on television before The United Federation of Planets was desperate enough to draft him.  He remained robotic.  

IMDb meta-data 44 minutes, rated 5.3 by 74 cinematizens.
Genre: mystery, comedy

Verdict: Padded even at 44 minutes.

It opens with the characters introducing themselves to the fourth wall. Never seen that before or since.

PI Tom leaves his Squeeze in charge of the office while he does mens business. A client appears and Squeeze accepts an assignment to take a picture of a woman in a divorce case. What can go wrong?

Well, to avoid being seen with a camera it is hidden in the titular hat box. Got it?

Well get this, Squeeze does not look into the hat box but takes the client’s word for it. This client is wearing a stick-on goatee, a greasy wig, and looks like he missed the clown car. Dutifully Squeeze stakes out the target and when she appears, Squeeze deploys the hat box and discovers that within is a gun not a camera, and she really did shoot the woman. Bang! Dumb!
Tom returns to sort this out. No one noticed until the last five minutes that the gun in the hat box was Tom’s very own gat which Goatee had snitched from Squeeze’s desk while she was licking the tip of a pencil to write a receipt. Nor did anyone realise until the last five minutes that the murder bullet did — Spoiler alert! — not come from the gun in the hat box.
It gets sillier as it goes on. Yet it went on … to a sequel, ‘The Case of the Baby Sitter’ (1947).

There is an in-joke. The ubiquitous Allen Jenkins is Tom’s gofer and he is nicknamed ‘Harvard’ because he did not go to Yale. Get it? No, me neither. See below for the explanation.

Tom Neal stars as Tom. He was a privileged scion with a Harvard law degree who was better known in Hollywood for fistfights, adultery, allegations of rape, drunk-driving, and finally a murder trial. It seems someone shot his wife in the head. He served six years for manslaughter. Justice is certainly blind. However he was finally blacklisted and he disappeared from the silver screen.

When the credits start with Robert Lippert’s name, we all know it is a Filene’s Basement production.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.8 by 1529 cinematizens.
Genre: droll and catatonic.

Verdict: Nice and easy reprise.
In the town of Dog River — population few, location distant — on the Canadian Prairies nothing ever changes because nothing ever happens. Then it does. The Global Financial Crisis ate the town’s budget in a single gulp. Electricity, water, police, trash collection, and schools stop. No more nanny state for these survivalists.
Tim Horton’s proposes to buy all the real property in the town and pay all outstanding debts to build an All-Canadian donut factory that will supply the entire country with bad donuts to go with the legendary bad coffee. ‘It may be bad but it’s ours,’ cry the Ca-nationalists!
Residents react by blaming each other, drinking, and gambling. That part was social realism. Then they rally together to save the town. That part was Disney.
There is a series of sit-com vignettes to stretch it out to feature length. Some are amusing, others are funny, and most are neither. At the start and finish are nice shots of the landscape with fields of mustard seed, wheat, and sorghum. I wanted more of that at sunrise and sunset on the vastness of the flat lands.
It was, of course, a reprise of the eponymous television series that ran for six years and one hundred and seven episodes of thirty minutes each on CTV. Watched them all, more than once.
What I learned: pregnant women should not watch film noir because of all the smoking. Horsepower can take several forms. There are no Canadiens in Canada West. It was all so low key that the fraternity brothers passed out before the first word of dialogue.
N.B. In the end credits the entire population of Saskatchewan including expatriate is listed.

IMDb meta-data is one hour and twelve minutes, rated 6.5 by 73 cinematizens
Genre: Mystery.

Verdict: A misfire.
Affable but cynical Dennis persuades the sponsors of his failing radio mystery program to offer a reward for a notorious cracksman name of Jimmy Valentine. The search narrows his location down by means of the script to Smallville, where everyone suspects everyone else of being Jimmy. Or do they?
Meanwhile, Dennis finds a squeeze, gets to like the town, and, oh incidentally, finds Jimmy but does not. Huh? Yeah, that is what the fraternity brothers said.
It turns out Jimmy has company. The first half is farce and the second half is more serious and there is a nice denouement if the viewer can last that long.
Though radio precipitates the action no further use is made of it. Too bad.
The original story came from that master of irony, O’Henry in ‘Retrieved Reformation.’ Director Bernard Vorhaus handled it well. His HUAC blighted career is described elsewhere on this blog. This film was cut to fit a fifty minute television spot as ‘Unforgotten Crime’ which made it memorably incomprehensible.
Contextual note: In April 1942 the Bataan Death March began when 80,000 exhausted and starving Filipino and American prisoners of war were marched 100 kilometres with neither food nor water. As many as a third died en route. The subsequent surrender of the bastion on Corregidor yielded another 15,000 prisoners. Filipino officers were singled out for torture, abuse, and murder. The defence at Bataan and on Corregidor threw off the Japanese timetable by three months which significantly slowed and impaired the descent on New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. While news of the defeat figured in the newsreels in theatres before movies like this were shown, the story of the death march was suppressed until late in 1944.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of one hour an eleven minutes, rated 5.9 by 86 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Oh hum.
The irrepressible Wallace Ford returns from a media assignment in the sticks with a naive bride and sets up house in glamorous New York City. She is agog. The wives of other journalists visit her to tell her the bad new about being married to a hack. Her head spins.
Meanwhile Ford is rushing back and forth. After all it is not everyday that a well known public figure falls out of high window to his death — splat — in front of his very eyes. Off he goes in pursuit of this scent and that leaf like a dog in the park.
The date is important. The faller was the chair of an America First Committee. Was his death an accident or murder? If the later did it have to do with his seedy private life, or the Committee? Ford tangles all these questions up, observed by some stereotypes.
The stereotypes try to mislead Ford but without success so a more direct approach is taken. It seems the faller had disrupted some criminal plans and Ford, being the first upon the body, may have taken an important piece of paper from the dead man.
These villains erred in bringing Sheriff Micah into their scheme and he turns coat and joins forces with Ford. Meanwhile the naive wife makes dinner and watches it go cold. Night after night.
The villains are Nasties bent of disrupting rubber supplies to the US Army, and the faller had sniffed them out. Ford never does seem to know what is happening. Typical journalist, a lot of noise and little substance.
The ingredients are there for a good story and the players could do it. But the story is incomplete and while the directing is lethargic, the elastic is stretched too thin.

IMDB meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 5 minutes, over rated 4.9 by 130 cinematizens.
Genre: Allegedly mystery.

Verdict: Clank goes the Tin Man.
Here is the set-up. Take notes or take a walk.
Tin Man is the chess reporter for a rag in California. A nephew of the rag owner, he observes the state chess championship which ends in a riot that he does not notice. He is as literal-minded, inept and imperceptive as a dean numbed by McKinsey management training seminars and bayoneted with KPIs.
In frustration the managing editor sends him to Grape City or Center, or what is the difference. To get there he takes the product placement Greyhound bus where we met the cast.
Tin Man tries to play chess on a large lap set, jostled by his seat-mate. The lap set attracts the attention of other travellers. On board is an antique shop sales clerk that Tin Man has, against the odds, noticed. Also present is the dynamite called Veda Ann Borg. Riding along is a whiz kid and minder, who provide the chorus.
The bus stops at a motel in Grape Center or City and the malarky begins in earnest. Tin Man’s seat-mate stopped jostling him, because…. someone stabbed him in the back. Whoa. The bus passengers are held in the motel, owned by an identical twin actor. These twins are each chess nuts who never speak to each other. In the basement are swinging wall panels, concealed doors, and spooky shadows. The ingredients are there but it fizzles.
Meanwhile, a notorious murderer has escaped from the slammer with his gang and he making for….? Yep, the motel because..… There is a valuable chess set that Kubla Khan gave to Marco Polo somewhere, and antique girl has some of the pieces, and someone else, others, have the remainder. I never did sort that part out. Neither did Tin Man. It did not seem to matter.
There is much to’ing and fro’ing in the interstices of the motel, while Tin Man mugs. Think about that, a Tin Man trying mug. Very trying, indeed.
The menacing Barton MacLane is limited to a line or two, and wasted. The director must have confiscated Veda’s detonator because she just mopes around. The annoying whiz kid is annoying.
But mostly all the actors stand around waiting for the Tin Man to mug. Is the director Frank McDonald responsible for the lifeless result? We will never know. It has also been released under the title  ‘Treasure of Fear.’ Be warned.