Category: Film Review

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 7 minutes, rated 6.1 by 202 cinematizens
Genre: Old Dark House

Verdict: It took a long time to get to the Old Dark House.

Querulous relatives unite, briefly, to have elderly Aunt Cassandra certified so that they can get their hand on the dosh she teases them about – more than two million smackers which in today’s geld is about 30 million iron men — which she says she has secreted in her Old Dark House. Whoa!

We start in a courtroom where Cassie appears crazy like a fox. But then what law school did that attorney attend? His prime argument for her being nuts is that she puts vinegar on apple pie. Really! Who doesn’t?

The vultures of the press enjoy the spectacle. The judge gavels Cassie into sanity.

To show how much she enjoyed the outing Cassandra invites the mob of scheming relatives to her Old Dark House (at last) for a week while she will decide how to divvy up the dosh. They have to go and go they do, one at a time.

No sooner do they arrive than the body count starts. Stabbings, shootings, poisonings here and there reduce the number of relatives. Is Cassie getting her revenge? Did Hillary do it, again? Was the vinegar off?

A newshawk and gal pal have insinuated themselves into the proceedings and Cassie finds that funny. The local sheriff is off work from the circus where he is the clown.

Turns out…. [Spoiler a-coming!] one of the relatives is reducing the number of claimants. To add to the confusion the villain(s) keeps moving the stiffs around. No explanation is ever revealed for this mystery. What, why, and how all are left to the memory-hole.

We also have the house staff, mercifully free of a black comic relief stereotype, a lugubrious butler, a greasy chauffeur, a snippy maid, a jolly cook. There is also an ever present nosy neighbour peering in windows to add to the soup.
The denouement is unexpected, though it is historically inaccurate as we pedants have to say. The Confederate States did not print a $10,000 bill. Tsk, tsk. It also turns out the neighbour is more than a neighbour. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Phil Rosen directed with panache the crisp story by George Brickner.

The best part may be the end, when one of the players breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience saying the Hays Office (1930-1968) will not like this film.

For those born yesterday, the Hays Office was a voluntary production code for the Hollywood factory. The code permitted chaste kisses, but not too many. No profanity and, of course, no nudity. No mixing of races. No adultery. And, hardest of all, law enforcement officials had to be portrayed positively. In its first and last decades it was largely toothless but between 1942 and 1955 it dictated much. As significant as it was, this is the only time I have noticed a reference to it in a movie, and this one is irreverent.

Sharp eyes will spot Hays Code certification as above on many films from that era.

The players were diverting in this exercise. Wallace Ford, a perennial supporting actor, made the most of the male lead. Marian Marsh as his wise cracking assistant held up her end of the partnership.

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 25 minutes but it seemed like m o r e, rated 4.3 by 48 members of the cast.
Genre: Amateurism and Sy Fy

Verdict: The 1957 Chevrolet is the star of the show, along with some (not enough) period music.

A group of thirty-year olds pretend to be high school students wearing saddle shoes, poodle skirts, a-lines, letter sweaters, sporting duck tails, and so on. The period detail was the best part of the effort.

Dweeb’s date with Date is interrupted by Bully and company at the soda shop. After an embarrassing departure, Dweeb and Date go parking, where is seems Dweeb does not know what to do. Did he sleep through human biology in eleventh grade or what?

The inaction is punctuated by a platoon of zombies who could not get date and hence were available to be suborned by Martians claiming to be Republicans. The zombie make-up is far better than any production that starred John Agar, and when I think of that old stone face, I realise the acting here has some energy.

Dweeb and Date are joined by Escapee from Zombieism and the three of them battle the Martian scourge, only two of whom were seen earlier. In a decaying farm shed they find a DIY manual to make an anti-Martian ray gun which they proceed to do. The manufacture is cloaked by the insertion of comic books frames, which were rather cute.

Somewhere, some how, some time along the way we learn that the Martians have ordered the zombie army to zombie-nap teenage girls because ‘Mars Needs Women’ (1967) [discussed elsewhere on this blog]. The zombies are such more respectful and polite to their victims than most jocks on a Saturday night date.

They blast the zombies, who let us remember, were innocent teenagers trapped by the two green Martians dressed up in Masonic gear we saw near the beginning.

These victims were shown with bongo drums, and the whiff of marijuana in the air, berets, beards all the usual paraphernalia of beatniks in the 1950s. They each also have a large number ‘3’ on their labels. Where were ‘1’ and ‘2’? Who knows? Not even close watching revealed the answer to that mystery. Number ‘6’ is way beyond this effort and the fraternity brothers.

Be that as it may.

After saving the world by seeing off the Martians, Dweeb has the confidence to sock Bully.

The end.

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 4 minutes, rated 5.7 by 343 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Whodunit?
In Pea Soup London a turbaned Stereotype is up to no good on the docks, observed by Smooth. Turns out Smooth and Stereotype are residents of a rambling boarding house whose residents include keyhole peepers, sidlers, creepers, sneakers, priers, snoopers, and suspicious characters all.
Smooth gets stabbed, often, to death; plod appears. He ready to charge anyone and everyone. As the bodies pile up, Plod blames each murder on the next victim. He does not notice this. Well, he is consistent.
Writer-in-residence and Belle, daughter of the manager of the boarding house, take up the investigation while Plod smokes a pipe. They discover everyone’s secrets, including the cross-dresser.
Ha, ha, ha, turns it was all a joke, since it makes no sense otherwise.
Despite the regiment of genuine British accents, it was made by Warner Brothers in Burbank California with denizens of the Hollywood British colony. Many are familiars from the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films of the time.
It was the first Hollywood film for Turhan Bey, the Austrian Jew who fled Anschluss to play stereotypes in Tinsel Town.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 5.1 by 233 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery

Verdict: Where is the old dark house?
While visiting London a brash American chipmunk inherits a House of Secrets. Whacko! Off he goes to claim the abandoned, empty, vacant, House of Secrets only to discover it is occupied and the occupiers have barking dogs and shotguns to prove it. They seem strangely indifferent to his legal claims, as do the local Bobbies.
Meanwhile back at the ranch lawyer’s office there are many phone calls to people with plummy accents. Now the lawyer tells him to sell and skedaddle. Meanwhile he has fallen in lust with a wispy blonde lurking about the House of Secrets. No way is he going to leave this damsel behind.
The next 55 minutes consists of Chipmunk asking a number of people — the lawyer, Bobbies, plummy accent 1, plummy accent 2, wispy blonde, shotgun totting butler — what is going on. They respond by saying they cannot tell him.
Why not? Because it is not in the script.
Meanwhile also in London are three American stereotypical hoodlums who want to break into the House of Secrets and find the treasure. Treasure? Well, any House of Secrets is bound to have treasure, right? Huh? How it got there is…. contrary to the laws of physics.
In the last five minutes, they break in, the secret is revealed, and a treasure is found.
Spoiler coming.
The house is being used to experiment on an anti-poison gas. Evidently no research facilities are available for such a purpose. Budget cutters had been at it again. The ace scientist was also given to acting like a Republican — screaming, grabbing, and going all sanctimonious all at once — and had to be sequestered and sedated far from prying eyes. Further, please, shouted the fraternity brothers. Usually these types get Senate seats.
The house is hardly used apart from a basement. Where are the sliding panels, secret doors, spy holes, remote switches, cobwebs, and the other conveniences of the Old Dark House? Nor is the damsel in distress until the gangsters appear, partly led there inadvertently by Chipmunk.
It was filmed at the Gower Street studios of RKO in Hollywood. The plummy accents all came from the British colony in Tinsel Town at the time.
Poison gas was the atomic bomb of the age, and any British audience would have shuttered at its mere mention. Ditto many in an American audience like Rondo Hatton, as is discussed in another post on this blog. But it is also mentioned in the last ten minutes and has nothing to do with Chipmunk, the gangsters, or much else.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 5.5 by 270 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Charming.
Beau collects old cameras and finds in one exposed film from August 1969 which he develops in his home dark room closet. Whoa! It’s ‘Paul’ (2011) and his brother Asgards on film. Aliens with bulbous heads like ‘My Favourite Martian.’ What to do?
Well he is a free lance (aka unemployed) photo-journalist so he tries to sell the pictures. Editors dismiss them as fakes. He takes them to the Air Force where Chief Gillespie reads him the official word on UFO-riding aliens. Gillespie played the same bumptious fool in ‘Mars Attack’ (1996) discussed elsewhere on this blog. Do I see the hand of the IRS compelling this old stager on to the old stage, again and again?
Then Prince Nerd comes to his door with a thousand smackers for the pictures for his personal UFO collection. Bingo!
Beau soon discovers that Prince Nerd is a paid Liar, that is, he works for Faux News which has plastered the pictures along with Beau’s own countenance across the nation. Faux News blames the aliens on Hillary and this makes Beau a laughing stock.
Righteously indignant he goes to sock Prince Nerd where he meets Frail, who is the daughter of one of the men pictured with the aliens. Her dad and his pal disappeared that very night in 1969. She was there to find out what happened to Dad.
The two join … forces to figure it out. They meet a relentless real estate agent for whom ‘NO!’ is a bargaining gambit, an accordion playing retired football star, UFO nuts who begin to seem sane, some cagey trailer trash, and — well, yes — some aliens without bulbous heads. They read micro-cards, interview witnesses, explore dark houses, and find bright lights. That’s entertainment!
It is slow, low key, shorn of special effects, not a CGI in sight and relies on the droll script and the deft players to move things along. The direction gives it a gentle pace. Accordingly, mouth-breathers score it at 1 or 2 on the IMDb. Ah the benefits of a free public education wasted again.
Way over budget are some of the players, including Jill St John, Billy Bob Thornton, and Rod Steiger along with Mr Hom.

IMDb runtime of far too long at 1 hour and 15 minutes, rated a generous 2.2 out of 10 by 229 slackers.
Genre: Sy Fy and Boredom.

Verdict: So bad that it’s bad.
A flaming orb lands on Earth and after toasting an Indian or two it then hides in a lake for three hundred years. That prelude took fifteen minutes as we watch the same segment of the Indian running down a hill in a five minute loop.
A geologist digs up some opals which stimulate the flaming orb which has been Rip Van Winkle-ing at the bottom of the lake. Yes, the flaming orb was hiding in the bottom of a lake. Cute trick. Awakened, flaming orb toasts various people in the hills.
No one finds this strange because the Surgeon General has said smoking kills. And where there is smoke there was fire. Great logic that.
The geologist and his squeeze investigate since the authorities are too busy practicing their bumpkin accents.
The flaming orb lurks around keeping an … [a what?] on Geologist in between toasting others. Why flaming orb does not toast Geologist and spare viewers more treacle is unknown.
Consulting the NRA play book, victims try shooting the flaming orb. More toast is the result. Finally Geologist figures out something or other and finishes off flaming orb. At last.
What the orb was, what it was doing, and who cares all are questions left unanswered.
It is a Roger Corman production. Hmmm. It is poorly lit so most of the scenes are lost in the murk. The editing destroys continuity. The acting is … well, it is the first and last credit on the IMDb for most participants. The direction is absent.
Director Harry Essex wrote two excellent screen plays: ’The Creature from the Black Lagoon’ and ‘It came from Outer Space.’ Each is discussed elsewhere on this blog. He also wrote this slop. Naughty Harry!
That inflated 2.2 includes several 8’s from raters who rated it so bad it is good. Imbecilic but true.

IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 22 minutes, rated 5.4 by 144 cinematizens.
Genre: Bio-pic and Disappointment

Verdict: Read the books.
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), just wanted to fly, and fly he did. In 1908 he saw his first airplane and seldom had eyes for anything else after that.
Bruno Ganz plays Saint Ex, as he was called even by his sisters. He had a vexed relationship with Consuelo and that is the focus of this film where she is played by Miranda Richardson as a selfish, manipulative, petulant woman with no interest or activities of her own part from making him miserable. Blame the screen writer.
Ganz and Richardson were enough to capture my interest, plus the prospect of some flying sequences. But alas, the actors have little to do, though they try their best to make the most of it, and the flying sequences. Well, what flying sequences? We had a better flying sequence against a green matte in Amsterdam once making a tourist video. What we see here is clumsy, patently fake, and all too much like a school play.
Moreover the story dwells on ‘The Little Prince’ from go to whoa as his alter ego, though in fact he tossed that off in a few weeks while travelling the United States to raise money for Free France. It was not a lifetime preoccupation as implied here.
By concentrating on ‘Le Petit Prince,’ the story elides and ignores most of his career as a world travelling aviator, international journalist, and published novelist. Occasionally some passages from his elegiac prose are narrated, and that is the best part of the film because it communicates a feeling for the sky, the wind, the earth below, and the eternity of the stars. But alas, there is too little of that.
Try ‘Southern Mail’ (1929), ‘Night Flight’ (1931), ‘Wind, Sand, and Stars’ (1939), and ‘Flight to Arras’ (1942).
This is the last photograph of Saint Ex.
It has Ganz declare in the last scene that he is a ‘fighter pilot.’ Not so, he flew reconnaissance and the Lockheed P-38 he had was unarmed, despite appearances in this movie, to make it lighter for distance and speed. It was also a notoriously difficult plane to fly even for pilots trained in its peculiarities with youthful reflexes, unlike the forty-four year old St Ex. Did he have a self-destructive streak? Perhaps.
The archival interviews with people who knew him are informative, though at the end when the credits roll the camera work on some of them is demeaning and gratuitous. Really!
There are no linked critics and no user reviews on IMDb. Never before have the opinionators failed to fill a vacuum on the IMDb. However, all was not lost because the entry on Amazon for the DVD is accompanied by some idiotic comments, including one that has Saint Ex dying to prevent Charles De Gaulle from making France socialist. Don’t believe me. Look for yourself. It restored my faith in the endurance and proliferation of human idiocy.

IMDb runtime is 1 interminable hour and 14 elastic minutes that stretched and stretched, rated a generous 3.9 by 980 spaced out viewers.
Genre: Sy Fy, Boredom

Verdict: Why did I do it?
Robert Clarke’s allergy to shirts continues in this exercise. Playing (off camera) with atoms he exposes himself (see reference previously to no-shirt) to radiation and is rushed (ever so slowly) to a hospital where he seems….. like Robert Clarke, i.e., shirt on, shirt off.
It is quickly discovered that if he is exposed to sunlight from the big nuclear reactor in the sky (N.B. as soon as Greens figure out it is a nuclear reactor, they will want to close it down), he gets all rubber lizard-suited in the tradition of cheapie Roger Corman movies. He goes all nasty, ripping, tearing, chasing, killing, devouring, all within the Hollywood code. (The only Hollywood monster permitted beyond the code was HUAC.) This is not something he likes but he has no control once he is sun burned. Sort of like the fraternity brothers after the second keg.
The reptilian Clarke is an instance of reverse evolution, explains one doctor (ever so slowly for those taking notes). HE MUST AVOID SUNLIGHT AT ALL COSTS.
Guess what comes next! He gets sunlit and goes all reptilian like a Senate Republican leaders.
Not even the Hollywood police, who have seen it all, they thought, can ignore this. Off they go in a chase that goes on, and on, and on, and on. He is an incompetent runner and they are KeyStone Kops without the laughs.
As entertainment, well,….. The Fast Forward is the viewer’s friend.
Shirtless Clarke was the producer, director, writer, and star, and one critic linked to the IMDb entry says it was filmed in his home for a $5000 (app. $43,000 today). The word is most of the players were friends and family who worked for the absolute minimum. It all shows. It was his first and last effort of this kind.
When Lon Chaney, Jr became the Wolf Man that story and that actor endowed the metamorphosis with pathos, loss, anger, distress, resignation, and confusion. What we have here is bathos. (Look it up.)
The lizard suit is pretty much it. Although the fraternity brothers liked the bar scenes. Typical.
On the IMDB Clarke has a long list of credits (many where the B movie budget did not run to a shirt), including several films discussed elsewhere on this blog: ’The Man from Planet X’ (1951), ’The Astounding She Monster’ (1957), ’The Incredible Petrified World’ (1959), and ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’ (1960). Mostly his later entries are in television, many uncredited.

He was movie struck as a boy in Oklahoma and went to California to be discovered. When John Agar was in the tank, Clarke got the nod, it seems.

IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 51 minutes, rated 7.2 by 5708 cinematizens.
Genre: Docudrama.

Verdict: Wow!
During the Cold War in 1985 with Ronald Reagan in the White House and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, the Soviet space station Salyut 7 (S7) went haywire. During a period when it was unoccupied, S7 lost flight integrity and began to spin on all three axes in a way that threatened a crash on earth. There was no way to control it from the ground.
Time to send in the flyboys. Their mission is to fix it or destroy it. A crash would be terrible but even worse would be a capture of the space station by the irritating and tiresome Americans. If they used a space shuttle with a Canadarm to grab the station, then they would have all the latest Red technology on board, coffee cups, screw drivers, burned out oxygen canisters, pinup pics of Comrade of the month, and so on.
There are the complications, of course. One of the flyboys was grounded but the engineer chosen for the assignment wants him back. Why, we never find out. That he was grounded is the start of the film, and let’s just say it reminded me of something John Glenn once said, and wisely never repeated. But it means that this flyboy is not high on the short list of those trusted. The Ground Control commissar (Cap Con in NASA-speak) has to fend off military and political pressures which mount up.
The two have a deadline to meet, which was set both by the erratic orbit of S7 and the American salvage hunt. To add spice, each has a crisis of sorts in his personal life. Whew, what a lot of competing story lines.
Off they go!

This is one of the arresting visuals as the rocket ship pierces the clouds and leaves earth.
It is the usual management squeeze: they are told to use their initiative but to obey orders. They are told to use their own judgement but wait for directions from Cap-Con. The McKinsey management manual has a Russian edition.
Anyone crazy enough to go on this mission has to be crazy enough to see it through and they do, not always obeying orders and not always waiting for instructions. They see the job and do it.
Nits to pick there are a few. If the Red Tech is so hot how come earlier they let that French astronaut on board and then let him go to work for the Americans. Hasn’t he already told all. Most Frenchmen do. This Frenchie is mentioned early on and then forgotten, though not by this correspondent.
The international irresponsible media makes much of the problem, but all examples of this perfidy we see come from beyond the Soviet sphere. Inside Russia no one knows what is going on or so it seems.
Wow! The special effects are very special. According to the film publicity about twenty minute of screen time came from S7 in space. Fabulous. Another forty minutes came from cosmonaut training. Verisimilitude is high. The travelling mattes for the space photography are glorious. Far too few space film have anything of the grandeur and emptiness of space in them, but this one does.
The gorgeous photography brought to mind ‘Gravity’ (2013) but this film had a story, whereas ‘Gravity’ had only Sandra Bullock taking her clothes off, repeatedly. The fraternity brothers rated is 6 out of 5. (That’s their idea of wit.)
The exploits of the cosmonauts are there, but played in a low key, and the better for it. The emphasis is always on doing the job, and how hard it is with all those laws of physics. This is what has to be done. Do it.
I also like the distribution of heroism between the two flyboys and the Cap-Con on the ground. They each had a role in making it happen. And nothing is soft-soaped.
What is not to like is the role of women. The only woman in action we see is there to be rescued from herself in the opening. Thereafter the only women we see are the wives, who are treated condescendingly by everyone. There is an MD at Ground Control who is constantly ignored and patronised. No doubt realistic, but rankling all the same. Marie Windsor would not have put up with that. See the discussion of ‘Cat-Women of the Moon’ (1953) elsewhere on this blog for edification.
I expect the film is no more realistic than ‘Apollo 13’ but it is great entertainment. But with all those competing storylines something had to give, and some of the elements are lost in the shuffle. It should have been cut to 90 minutes as the laws of physics demand. In this case, the physics of me sitting still and reading subtitles.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 5.7 by 307 cinemitizens.
Genre: Horror, Mystery

Verdict: Not enough Bela!
At the Rinehart estate, upstart Beau is a scientist who is about to experiment on himself by slowing his bodily processes to nearly nothing to be buried alive, and then dug up later. Nutso, right? Right! On the other hand think of the market for a drug that could do that. Before every McKinsey management training session with a twelve-year-old trainer the victims, the old salts, could deaden themselves to the nonsense and revive at the end. Hmm, sounds good, but back to the film at hand which does not sound so good.
Outside a Maniac is murdering so many people that the fraternity brothers ran out of fingers.
Meanwhile, the faithful servant Bela Lugosi peers around corners, creeps down hallways, probes into recesses. Is he the Maniac? No, we know he is not from the opening scene and that steals much thunder from the get-go.
Because they are wealthy and beautiful the Rineharts suppose they are safe. Just before being murdered they say ‘I’ll be all right.’ They aren’t. Did Hillary do it? Who insured their lives? Fired!
Yes, Maniac finds rich pickings in the Rinehart mansion on the Rinehart estate on Rinehart Drive in Rinehartville. Dad Rinehart is murdered and his will divides his fortune equally among the surviving relatives. That is not enough for any of them, and they fall to bickering, and cheer Maniac on when he murders again.
Bela continues to peer. His mystic wife goes into trances at the drop of a knife. Yet the proceedings are lugubrious. Then the comic cop shows up in the pre-code film where the police were often the comic distress. After the Hayes Code police had to be portrayed positively in works of fiction.
There are some fine players like Wallace Ford as the cynical newsman who injects energy, and Sally Blane, aka Loretta Young’s little sister. Even Beau is well played by George Meeker who is just too oily to be true.
Turns out Beau had a plan of his own, and it did not involve lying quietly waiting to be disinterred but how he managed to combine that with Maniac is anyone’s guess. The screenwriter did not even try to cover that. Bela was but a red herring. What a waste of this master of menace.