Category: Film Review

IMDb meta-data runtime is 55 minutes, rated 6.9 by 92 cinemitizens.
Genre: Docudrama.

An episode of the long-running CBS television program ‘Studio One.’ It combines narration by Murrow with re-enactments.

Verdict: When Ed Murrow speaks, I listen.

In this case it is a dramatisation of a CBS radio broadcast in 1938 of a story published 1898 in Great Britain. The result was headline news across the United States and the world. Huh?

On Halloween night, October 30, 1938, Orson Welles’s Mercury Players of the Air performed an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s ‘War of the Worlds.’ It took the form a news report, including a reporter in the field at Grovers Mill in New Jersey. We see all of this being simulated in the CBS radio studio.
Those who heard the broadcast and reacted included a teenage babysitter, card playing college boys, patrons at a neighbourhood bar, and a police officer at a switchboard. Some people went nuts. Others ran amok. Others loaded shotguns. Many hid under the bed. Some fled. Fleeing was hard since no one knew where Grovers Mill was. All of this in response to a radio broadcast.

The next morning the ‘New York Times’ thundered the news of the national panic caused by the broadcast!

Why the panic?

The program was advertised long in advance in newspapers and magazines. The newspaper radio listings, including those in the ‘New York Times,’ clearly identified the program as an entertainment. The on-air introduction made that clear, too.

However, ‘The Mercury Players of the Air’ was a sustaining program owned by the CBS network. It had no commercial sponsors so there were no commercial breaks. It ran straight through for one hour. Once it started off it went, and as later research found, many people were dial surfing and missed the introduction and had not read the listings but tuned in part way through.

Many a PhD has since dined out on the aftermath. Was there really a panic? Whoa, here comes the Four Horses of Definition. What explains the reaction? Sociological, psychological, dietary, demographic, ethnic, swamp gas explanations have all been seriously offered and seriously considered in PhD dissertations. Faux News denies it ever happened or Hillary did it. One or the other.

Murrow put the programming in the context of the news of 1938 from Europe and Asia. In the East Japan was devouring Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, China, and Shangri-la. From Europe the air fleets of Nazi Germany featured in every movie newsreel. It had re-occupied the Rhineland. Seized the Saar basin. Anschlussed a very willing Austria. Carved the Sudeten out of Czechoslovakia only a few days before with goose-stepping automatons.

Pundits were describing ever more terrible weapons of modern war beneath the seas and from the skies. These combined with memories of chemical weapons in the Great War. What a brew!

For some auditors, who missed the newspaper advertisement, the program listings, and the introduction, the descent on Grovers Mill might well have been the spawn of Naziism. To listen to the broadcast now there are only a few gasped, terse descriptions of the Martians and someone in distress might not fathom those. Or just conclude that these were the creatures of the Asiatic Japanese or Satanic Naziis.

That was one of the findings of Hadley Cantril’s ‘Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic’ (1940): Many who heard part of the broadcast were prepared for catastrophe by all the bad news that just kept coming.

These prepared people had endured the unimaginable for a decade: the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, armies of the unemployed, starvation, diseases out of control, along with the Asian and European political news. The times, they were apocalyptic.

The story is that Cantril in Princeton heard the broadcast and then read the ‘New York Times’ the next morning, and mobilised the research project within hours to identify and interview auditors. Quite impossible today with months of Ethics Committee vetting, budgets laid down years in advance, KPIs that suit research managers, corporate plans, the annual cycle of research grants, and more.

But now back to the film, there is a raft of new faces in the re-enactments, including Ed Asner, John Astin, Warren Beatty, James Coburn, Vincent Gardenia, and Warren Oates. Babysitter Susan Hallaran eats the wallpaper as they say in show biz, though this was her last credit on the IMDb.
Alexander Scourby is the radio announcer with the mellifluous voice, and he carries the show on radio. The son of Greek immigrants who learned English from Shakespeare.

But the star of the show is neither named nor given any lines: Orson Welles.
The wunderkind at work that very night.
He wanted nothing to do with this reprise. Whether the broadcast caused a panic, there was a sizeable reaction to it. CBS was cross-pressured because on the one hand it wanted the acclaim of such great influence (to lure advertisers in the future) but it wanted no part of the complaints. It did what every large organisation still does and delegated responsibility downward. The fact that Welles, for once, had done everything through channels and had approvals all the way to the top, was conveniently forgotten by the professional amnesiacs of management in CBS. Such amnesia is surely the subject of one McKinsey management seminar.
It was left to Welles alone to eat a lot of crow by way of apology. This was not something that came easily to this mercurial Zeus, and he had no wish ever to re-visit it. That is, he never wanted anything to do with CBS again, as Murrow obliquely noted.

The gossip on the inter-web is that H. G. Wells and Orson Welles met a year later in San Antonio Texas where each was on a speaking tour. Hope they stayed in a better hotel there than I did once upon a time.

Murrow’s documentary makes no mention of the 1953 film. Yet it would have come to mind for many in the audience. There are several other documentaries about the broadcast, one or two with similar titles.

IMDb meta-data runtime is 56 minutes, rated 6.2 by 103 cinemitizens.
Genre: Old Dark House

Verdict: Sly fun.
Perry White and Mrs live in an Old Dark House at the end of a very long causeway. Otranto mansion comes equipped with a black stereotype, the ever ready Will Best, and a vast garage.
Then one dark and stormy night a party of relatives knock on the door! Perry is a perfect host, and why not when one of the guests is the first Superman disguised behind a pencil moustache. The guests all have letters of invitation:

But neither Perry nor Mrs Perry sent any such invitations. That puts arrowroot into the plot.
Guess what! No sooner are they assembled than the lights go out, the telephone goes dead, the cars are immobilised, the weather turns violent, and then it gets worse. They are alone! They are cut-off! They are in an Old Dark House movie! [Gasp!]
Among the guests is the redoubtable Veda Ann Borg who plays a double role. That sounded good to the fraternity brothers since Veda is one live wire. Regrettably, one of the twin sisters she plays is snuffed at get-go, while the other reacts by locking herself in a room. Not even Veda can do much in those circumstances.
Also invited (by someone unknown, and it stays that way) is the ever thuggish Grant Withers who was the short-priced favourite as villain from the start. Mr Smooth insinuates himself in the party. Now and again faces appear at the window.
Smooth knows something the others don’t. Some dastardly cur has stolen the radium from the watches of the doctors at a nearby hospital and that thief is amongst the denizens of the Old Dark House, though how and why are never explained. How could it be stolen? Why come to the island with it? Who did invite all these people? To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, and how many times does that happen in a movie review, ‘whereof one does not know, one must not speak.’ In plain English that is ‘Dunno.’
Winsome Girl does not live up the the billing but how could she: ‘OUT OF THE FOGS OF FEAR! STORMS OF TERROR!…came this amazing person…to thrill you!’ However, she was cool-headed, resourceful, and capable of surprising even Mr Smooth. No screaming. No fainting. No tripping. None of the usual tropes for women to make snowflake men feel superior. She and Smooth combine in a neat deception at the end to reveal the conspicuous villain. The screen play breezes along. The direction is crisp.
Believe it or not the spindly Kirk Alyn played Superman in the first film in 1948. He must have gotten the job after posing as the 98-pound weakling in Charles Atlas advertisements and the casting director called the wrong guy.
As this picture travelled across the United States the yellow telegrams from D-Day started to arrive. Three thousand were sent in one day.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.1 by 254 cinemitizens.
Genre: Old Dark House.

Verdict: There was still life in the Old Dark House.
Wealthy aunt Lorna invites all her carnivorous and rapacious relatives for a weekend at her Old Dark House. Along with a few stragglers there are married couples who bicker among themselves and a decorative nurse who has no duties, each hates Auntie, and all fear that Auntie’s companion, Mary, will inherit the dosh. Fortunately Mary’s beau is none other than Peter Gunn.
Auntie has plans of her own and starts by sending a cake full of steel files to her brother who is slammed up in an asylum for criminally bad actors. He is Milton Parsons whose bug-eyes have graced many a Charlie Chan film from this era. Once Miltie has outwitted the prison officials by walking out the door, while they are smoking, he secrets himself in the Old Dark House’s secret passages, concealed sliding panels, and trapdoors. This ODH has all melodramatic-conveniences including a black stereotype to do the work.
Auntie recruited bro to protect Mary from the Huns, i.e., the relatives. Then the fun begins when Auntie’s pet raven, named Poe — what else, dies after eating a biscuit from her plate. Next thing you know, Auntie is dead. The carrion move from bickering to murder.
Miltie was looking forward to trying his hand at murder, again, but they keep dying before he can get to them. Are they murdering each other, or….is there another presence?
Thereafter they drop like….ravens. Six by the fratenity brothers’ count.
Auntie and Miltie are superb. There is a neat trick with a wall decoration. An even neater trick with the doctor and his needle. A fine denouement. And a lot of energy all around. Miltie’s bug eyes behind the filigree of an air vent occurs just enough times to be startling.

Yet the ‘New York Times’ gave it a bored and boring review in 1942. The condescension of many reviewers in that inflated organ is noteworthy. Most them don’t seem to like movies.
As usual Will Best realises something is afoot long before this superiors who each dismiss his warnings. Though admittedly his reactions are put in more context than usual.
The day after the release of this film, Operation Torch landed American troops at nine points along the coast of North Africa. This task farce sailed directly from Norfolk Virginia in secrecy. Surely the longest amphibious invasion ever launched.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 40 minutes, rated 7.1 by 584 cinemitizens.

Verdict: Mr Data before Mr Data.
After being unable to finish Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Planet Earth’ (1974), reviewed elsewhere on this blog, I feared the worst when I saw his name on this one. Wrong. This is a winner.
A team of wizards creates an android in a billion dollar project funded out of my taxes. Saskatchewan’s own heartless villain John Vernon manages the project. James Shigeta is there without an Hawaiian shirt. Ensign Chekov is also to be seen, briefly, but not heard. The team works from the manual left by the mysterious and now vanished Dr. Professor Comrade Lew Vaslovik. Moreover, the team members insert components Vaslovik prepared without knowing how or why they work. Yes, just like driving a car or assembling IKEA furniture.
They produce a Ken Doll that lies there. Well, there goes that billion! They turn off the lights and head to social media to tell all to everyone. Meanwhile…..in the darkened laboratory the doll comes to life, and continues to assemble himself into Valnikov. This is one clever Ken Doll.
Having concluded that his programming tapes were damaged, Valnikov goes to the library to find out who won the World Series. He reads – a lot and quickly. In no time at all he is ready to go on ‘Eggheads.’ However, he wants to correct those damaged programming tapes and to do that he has to find the mysterious and missing Vaslovik. Where in the world is Carmen Miranda, she must know where Vaslovik is. Cherchez la femme!
When he tries to communicate with a librarian, it is clear that he is a nerd supreme. His idea of small talk is ‘Quiet, I am reading.’ ‘In the dark,’ she asks? See, he is not too good at fitting in. Meanwhile, Vernon has gone all crazy to find this walking billion dollars, because otherwise he will have to go back to Saskatchewan and work it off shovelling snow.
Valnikov realises he needs a translator and guide along on the road trip to Bronson Canyon to cope with the social side of things and to turn on the lights. That is where BJ comes in as his companion. Plus BJ has an AMEX card for expenses. Off they go following clues that lead them to Becky Driscoll. ‘Hmmmm,’ whispered the fraternity brothers, ‘good thing the (‘Invasion of the) Body Snatchers’ (1956) did not get her.
This was the feature-length pilot for a television series and Paramount bought it on condition that Roddenberry drop BJ and add a love interest for the android. BJ is boring but on a road trip an android needs a buddy, otherwise how can it be a mis-matched buddy picture? Though Valnikov does say Mr Data’s famous line….. Roddenberry would not compromise on what he regarded as the essential point and turned down the offer. We had to wait from Mr Data to find out more about droids.

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 29 minutes, rated 2.9 by 623 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy, Belaboured

Verdict: More fun to edge the lawn with hand clippers.
Randy summons many green men from Mars who get in everyone’s way, telling the sort of jokes favoured by those without a sense of humour. Why do I think of D…….
Randy is a likeable chap but there is not much for him to do, and so that is what he does. His girlfriend is feisty but likewise underemployed.
Dr Jane of the lacquered, vapid, and calm exterior, aka Madame Zenobia, steals the show for the few scenes she has, along with the aspiring gentleman burglar. Ronny Cox once again does a better job at being the president than the incumbent. Of the Martians, described as millions, only two are seen — again and again. And again.
The screen play bears no relationship to the Fredric Brown story from which it ostensibly sprang. More is the pity.

Drowned in the tsunami of tedious, repetitive, and boring jokes is Brown’s premiss that society is based on secrecy, privacy, and lies, otherwise known as politeness. If social relations are stripped of these concealments, we cannot live with each other.
In a surprising display of judgement, it did not get a cinematic release, and this was the director’s last work. His first, too.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 5.8 by a horde of 20237 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: ‘Max, you shouldn’t have done that.’
The set-up. At some point in the distant future a space exploration vehicle is in ‘search of habitable people,’ declares Dr Weena. Don’t blame her. She says the line written for her.
Still maybe that line makes sense considering that Norman Bates is in the crew, along with Nick Tana and Quinton McHale. Stop there. McHale is woefully miscast as the geriatric but ambitious reporter for a newspaper that still exists in this far distant future. Which is the worse blunder? That McHale is still at work, or that newspapers are still in print? (Yes, I have fond memories of ‘Marty’ [1955] before he went into the navy. Say no more.)
To prepare for this mission, Weena has had her eyebrows plucked into perfect arcs. Is that significant? We’ll never know.
Way out there they encounter a very colourful black hole. It is not black at all, despite what people say. And nearby is a Very Big Space Ship designed like the Pompidou Centre, i.e., badly. Inside the VBSS is Franz von Gerlach who is still in hiding. Having learned nothing in Altona he has committed more crimes, and plans still more. There is no keeping a good war criminal down.

To aid him Franz has Red Max clanking around.
Franz has plans for these hapless wayfarers but first he has to charm them with his Viennese accent, and play hide-and-seek behind his Moses beard, lent to him by Chest Heston. Franz is completely nuts and so naturally Norman signs up with him to enter the black hole which isn’t black. Quoting Martin Heidegger, he says that it is a portal to transcendence or something. At merest mention of Heidegger, the fraternity brothers fell asleep, and why not. This is the giant mind who once said ‘clarity is suicide for philosophy.’ There was never any danger of suicide in his case.
For reasons the fraternity brothers missed, Franz will not let the travellers go. Why he needs this crew is anyone’s guess. Shoot ‘em up ensues….for about thirty minutes. Fortunately, Franz’s hench-robots stand perfectly still in the fire fights and go down like [censored]. I would like to say that they all vanish down the rabbit hole, oops, the black hole, but not quite. The end has to be seen to be believed. Just think, someone wrote that. Just think someone paid them for writing it. Refer to the tag line above about Max.
This was a Disney production, touted as the first Disney film to be aimed at grown-ups. Ah huh. To this observer it is ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ with Pac Man. The set designs, stunts, the cosmos as it appears out of the bay windows on the VBSS are all fine. Red Max is pretty clearly something to avoid at all times.
If one can overlook, McHale, Weena’s eye brows, Norman, and the beard, well, then the acting is good. Nick Tana is as always in focus. Franz had long experience at being nuts, and does it effortlessly, though why the beard was a question that preoccupied the fraternity brothers. His chin isn’t that weak.
But really, Max, you shouldn’t have done it.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated a generous 5.8 by 571 insomniacs.
Genre: Sy Fy.

Verdict: Don’t.
A decade after Star Trek Gene Roddenberry tried again with this pilot for a television series. In design and context, it recalls its predecessor, ditto in being didactic and talky. We even have a combination Vulcan mind meld grip.
But to get to the story. Rip van Carmine Orrico awakens after a long nap to the Twenty-second century where the Planet Earth is recovering ever so slowly from the Republican Apocalypse. He is among civilised Pax scientists who go around dissecting anything and everything. So advanced is their science that they fit him with a hair piece that stays in place.
Elsewhere on Planet Earth are roving bands and isolated enclaves of Mormons, Chicago Cub fans, Mad Maxxers, Vegans, Esperantoists, Tea Partiers, and other nut cases. It is dangerous out there!
The chief gimmick is that only the Paxxers have Opal cards for the metro underground that is everywhere, so they can take the train to adventure. It is every rail commuters dream to have the train system all to oneself! No one on Town Hall Station platforms but thee! Hallelujah!
One of Pax’s top scientists has gone missing and Carmine with Lurch, a petite woman, and an albino set out to find him. This crew would stand-out even on King Street Newtown on Saturday night.
Lurch keeps knocking his head on door lintels. The little woman falls down on cue. The Albino is so weak he has to sit on it.
Only Carmine is up to it. Is he ever! No stunt man is safe from his stunt double as he punches, shoots, kicks, wallops, blasts, and jabs. All the while, the hair piece stays in place. Amazing. Awesome.
Then he falls into the hands of Diana Muldaur. ‘Lucky him,’ said the fraternity brothers. She can make ‘Hello’ sound like both an insult and an invitation. She lives in a community of über liberated women who have enslaved men, and Carmine is just another hunk. He is a slow learner and has to be beaten into submission. Protected by the script sewn into his clothing, he is tough and they run out of whips. There is talk of breeding…..and, the fraternity brothers started to pay attention. But it is only talk.
Meanwhile, the Mad Maxxers draw nearer. And so on and on…. The fraternity brothers fell asleep and their soporific sounds….. Confession: We did not make it to the end.
The script is paper thin! Ha! Ha! That is despite the fact that the writing credit goes to ‘Rockford Files’ wordsmith Juanita Bartlett. And the direction is turgid though credited to Star Trek journeyman Marc Daniels, and produced by another ST veteran, Robert Justman. It is a good team, but this time there no air in the ball.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour even, over-rated 4.0 by 971 masochists.

Genre: Sy Fy and Snooze
Verdict: No brains were eaten in the making of this movie. Nor were any used.

In Illinois farmland a silo appears. Well, a cone. There were already plenty of silos but no one notices them.
The cone sits there. Cone sitting.
Anticipating a plague of Cone Heads, a loud mouth Senator in Washington is granted executive authority by the President, who did neither constitutional law nor political science, to deal with the cone.
Big Mouth goes to Illinois and orders everyone around. Yawn, went the fraternity brothers. Ed crawls into the cone and finds nothing. The mystery deepens.
Meanwhile there have been three or more murders in the nearby small town. Huh? We see one in the opening sequence. A few people run around with a glowing basketball tucked under their coats. Hoosierland is indeed hoop country.
See.
There is one excellent scene early in the mayor’s office where he behaves oddly. Very. It is very well shot, a la Orson Wells, askew. Mayor goes ballistic. Literally. With a gun. Something is wrong! Got it. This scene is very well acted by the distraught mayor and nicely filmed. Much better than anything else in the picture. So much so, the fraternity brothers wondered if it was excerpted from another movie. The more so, since we never see or hear of the mayor again. Perhaps he was desperate to escape the rest of this movie. A wise man he proved to be.
More milling around and yelling occurs. Big Mouth makes many telephone calls, sends telegrams, tells a…. Ooops. No one replies to his missives. That cannot be right, he yells. I am too important to be ignored! Really? Think so?
Meanwhile the clock is ticking. Ever so slowly.
They realise the cone, which has been the focus of such attention as there has been, is a decoy. The real threat is elsewhere. Quick on the uptake, not. The attackers are moles from underground, not aliens from the stars. Huh! So that flash of light at the start was…a blown bulb, or what.
Meanwhile more and more people adopt the Quasimodo look. Finally there is a confrontation with Mr Spock, a noble suicide, a crashing bore, and the end.

Mr Spock is credited as Leonard Nemoy. Ah huh. He got the last laugh.
The inference is that the glowing basketballs were eggs and when they hatch the tribbles that emerge fasten onto the nearest human spinal column and munch away. The infected human becomes a soulless automaton perfect for attending McKinsey management training seminars ad nauseam.
There is intrusive narration. When our heroes go to the telegraph office, the voice over tells us that they are at the telegraph office in case we missed the big sign that said ‘Telegraph Office.’ And so on. Perhaps that was a service for blind members of the audience. The use of such voice overs rather than dialogue indicates the lack of sound technician. One of the many lacks in this case.
Without a doubt it is derived from Robert Heinlein’s Sy Fy novel ‘The Puppet Masters’ (1951). Heinlein sued and settled out of court. Executive Producer Roger Corman agreed, says the web gossip, to buy the screen rights to two Heinlein books and not to put Heinlein’s name anywhere near this one. Corman did not use the rights he bought. That is very unlike Mr Tightwad. It took another forty years for ‘The Puppet Masters’ to be filmed, as reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

IMDb runtime is 1 hour and 49 minutes, rated 5.9 by 7552 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Des Moines never looked better
In a small town in Iowa, but not blue-eyed Riceville, a spaceship lands and thereafter everyone is as dead-eyed as a born again Republican. They lose interest in sex and, believe it or not, in football!
The Masters proliferate at an alarming rate endangering the future of the Iowa caucus. To avert that catastrophe the resources of the distant and oppressive Federal government are mobilised in the person of a Canadian. Huh! Go with it.
The Masters attach themselves to the backs of victims, who seem to enjoy the experience, without leaving a wrinkle in a shirt or a hump under a blouse. Amazing.
The first fifteen minutes are whiz bang. The ship lands. Teenage boys find it. A baseball bat figures. Next thing you know everyone in town has a Master. The Feds come to check and shoot ‘em erupts in the local television station’s office.
After that rattling start the pace slows, and slows, and slows, punctuated by gratuitous fisticuffs, shoot ‘em ups, and chases that go around in circles. Regrettably it does not feature the (infamous) Des Moines Sky Walk, about which more below.
The Masters turn hosts into automatons who hate immigrants, blacks, homosexuals, success, table manners, Democrats, and good sense. Hmmm.
While there are two scenes where communication occurs between a Master and a man, these aliens seem to have no program. They are there to destroy, not to do anything more. Many have concluded that they were Republicans. I couldn’t possibly say. They make no plea that they have to do this to survive, that their home world has or is going to perish, that they bought Earth in good faith at a Milky Way real estate auction, that God told them to do it, that their KPIs require it, or any of the other standard tropes of the genre. In this respect the Masters fall short of ‘Teenagers from Outer Space’ (1959) who came to farm lobsters, a film reviewed elsewhere on this blog, hidden in a collective comment on several films. Search away. Or for that matter, ‘The Lobster Man from Mars’ (1989) who came to steal oxygen, also reviewed on this blog. Get to clicking to find it.
I cannot remember the book, which I read as a teenager, well enough to add anything sensible. ‘Guffaw,’ went the fraternity brothers. Right on cue. [Subsequent note, I did try to re-read after drafting these words of wisdom but found its 1950s machismo hard going. It reminded me vaguely of the stories in men’s magazines of the era in barbershops.]
The film is repetitive and violent and the FBI warning contains the following note. The film has ‘violence, gore, and BRIEF LANGUAGE.’ Yep. That put the fraternity brothers on high alert. Violence? Check. Gore? Check. But, whoa, brief language? Nope. There is a lot of yapping.
There is much running around in Des Moines car parks and the city hall environs. The energy is high; the meaning is low; the character development is zero. Muscle is supposed to be Canadian’s alienated son. ‘So what,’ asked the fraternity brothers. Good question, since we never do find out what to make of that except that Canadian wears Armani suits. There is sex interest in an exo-biologist but there is neither spark nor sparkle there. Linda Fiorentino would have burned a hole in the screen in that role, but this player is bland on bland. By the way, Keith David nearly steals the show in a supporting role. Don’t blame him for the final turn which came from the writer and the director, not the player.

Likewise, Will Patton, as the nerd boy who figures a lot of it out, is a pleasure to watch.

But we don’t get a lot of thinking in this slam-blam adaptation. Yaphet Kotto is entirely wasted as an empty uniform.
Sometimes killing the host kills the parasite and other times it does not. Mostly it does not, but when the parasite ridden bodyguards of the President are mowed down, the parasites go quietly. That puzzled the fraternity brothers, briefly. Nothing stays with them long.
The stunt work is fabulous with nary a CGI in sight. The night para-glide into the heart of darkest, alien infested downtown Des Moines was great fun. But once there it is the same old, same old. The running, jumping, falling, fighting, shooting was masterful if one wants it. But after the fourth or fifth time with no forward progress in the story or the people, well, who cares.
While the critics linked to the IMDb comment on the small budget, it seems to be large and talented cast with plenty of money for stunt work. The list of stunt men and women acknowledged in the credits rolls on and on.
The story comes from Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel, in which it is clear that the parasites are Commies sapping the vital red, white, and blue juices from Americans who are too dumb to know that they are being drained. Heinlein has a claim to be the Dean of Sy Fy in the 1950s. He was an Arctic Cold Warrior – seeing reds as slugs, bugs, and cruds. Slugs in this outing. Bugs in ‘Starship Troopers.’ And cruds in ‘Red Planet.’ And under every bed, disguised as dust bunnies.
The patience of readers to this point is rewarded with a comment on the Des Moines SkyWalk.

It was built in the 1970s to allow downtown office workers to traverse its four miles of elevated walk ways in comfort, out of the weather of the Great Plains. It connects to several large car parking garages, a bus exchange, office blocks, city hall, retail malls, a sports complex, hotels, and is dotted with cafés, fast food franchise, laundries, and the like. It served two purposes, one, to keep jobs in the downtown area rather than in outlying business and industrial parks, and, two, to attract companies to locate in Des Moines.
We used the SkyWalk in Des Moines and learned a sad lesson. Everywhere else in the known world North is always at the top of a map. Not so in Des Moines. When we paced the SkyWalk we saw helpful, illuminated maps at every junction and read these to navigate. BIG MISTAKE. Soon we were going around in circles and off course. Why? How could this be? We looked more closely at the maps, one after another. On some North was at the top, where it should be. But on others it was to the right, or left, or a diagonal, or at the bottom. No two consecutive junction maps had the same orientation. Believe it or not, Ripley!
The maps were useless to outsiders. And no doubt were never consulted by locals. While there is some information on the SkyWalk to be found on the internet none of it addresses this fundamental point. Is it any wonder that no famous explorer ever came from Iowa? Couldn’t find north.
There is an app. Wonder where north is on it? No plan to find out.
While the RÉSO in Montréal has far fewer maps, they are consistent and put the true North, strong, brave, and free where it should be.
It seems the SkyWalk has kept jobs in the downtown, about 75,000 of them according to the Chamber of Commerce, and in so doing has brought new opportunities to Des Moines. It has also obeyed the law of unintended consequences and nearly destroyed street level commerce. Everyone uses the SkyWalk in preference to the street. There are virtually no walk-ins to businesses on the streets. The space for businesses on the SkyWalk is much less than on the street, so the net effect is to squeeze out small businesses from downtown.
So it is said. I would say Iowans are going around and around on the SkyWalk because they cannot find north.

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 9 minutes, rated at paltry 7.2 by 9211 cinemitizens. Released on 30 April 1943.
Genres: Horror, Drama

Verdict: Jane Eyre in the West Indies.
On a blustery day of snow and wind in frozen Ottawa a pert young nurse is offered a post on a tropical island at a good rate of pay, expressed in dollars.* Off Nurse goes to San Sebastien where she meets the half-brothers Smooth and Touchy. Her assignment is to look after Mrs Smooth. ‘An invalid?’ she asked. No….. She meets Mrs later that night as a hot wind stirs the palm trees and rustles the cane fields. Disturbed by the sound of crying, Nurse finds the sleepwalking Mrs in a spooky tower.
There is tension between the brothers and it seems to relate to Mrs. James Bell gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the local doctor who mediates between medical science and the voodoo gods. The ambiguity remains throughout.
Smooth says that his family is cursed by its history as slavers. He is as morose on this island paradise as a doomed, grey man in the Nordic ice fields written by Henrik Ibsen, bearing the sins of his fathers. While Touchy defers to Smooth as the elder brother and as manager of the cane plantation, he assiduously undermines him. (Reminds me of so many people I have worked with in that passive-aggressive mien.)
The slave past remains in the local culture. When a baby is born the blacks cry for the pain and grief of slavery it will endure. Death is a time to celebrate release from those pains.
There is one creepy segment in a sugar cane field at night.

This episode might be the most memorable in the film, especially the line, ‘She does not bleed.’
A number of blacks populate the scenes, mostly in the background. But the crooner has some very pointed lyrics, delivered twice. He is credited as Sir Lancelot, born Lancelot Victor Edward Pinard and raised in New York City. Theresa Harris lights up the screen as Alma, who knows far more than she says. She has more than a hundred films on the IMDb, often uncredited and inevitably as a maid. Darby Jones

was cast for his bug eyes yet he remains dignified. He made a career out of jungle movies. The dancer who compels Mrs is the dynamic Jieno Moxzer. This is one of only two credits on the IMDb. Our loss.
None of the blacks is reduced to the comic stereotype so tiresomely common at the time in movies. That in itself is noteworthy. Added to that is the guilt of slavery articulated by Smooth, and it is a surprise package. Though there are some disparaging remarks in the script that irritated the fraternity brothers.
The screenplay is by Curt Siodmak, he of a long list of Sy Fy and Horror credits, and Ardel Wray. Some of the internet opinionators argue, well, assert, that the story is unusual for Siodmak. Not so sure myself. The air of menace, showing rather than telling, the concentric circle of stories are all motifs Siodmak used. But there is no doubt this one has emotional depth that may have come from Ardel Wray.

She, by the way, for refusing to rat people out was grey-listed during the Witch Hunts a few years later. Ergo her film credits are few. Grey-listing led her to work as a reader and editor in the back office at Warner Brothers. No longer getting screen credits kept her profile low.
After the debacle of Citizen Orson Wells at RKO, the studio was in dire financial straits. It was imperative to get revenue and there was little or no money. Val Lewton was appointed head of the B-Movie unit at RKO and he was handed a backlog of properties with deadlines for completing them. The KPI was $.
Val Lewton
Most of these properties were short stories, which had been purchased to get the titles, not the narrative, in the way that one today might purchase an internet domain to get the name, not the content. He then assigned titles to writers to produce screenplays quick-smart. Likewise he had to work with directors, technicians, and actors already on contract.
This film is one result. It was made on a micro-budget but with clever lighting, accomplished camera work, skilled editing, and brisk direction, it looks like an A-movie. Much of the credit for all the preceding qualities has to go to the director, Jacques Tourneur. His other credits include ‘Cat People’ (1942), ‘Leopard Man’ (1943), and ‘Out of the Past’ (1947). Winners all. He specialised in film noir. He, too, suffered from the Witch Hunts of the time, finding it opportune to return to his native France for extended vacations at times.
Though barely more than an hour long it is chocked full of characters and incidents, each carefully defined. Yet it does not seem rushed or crowded. It is another exhibit for a masterclass on film-making.
*One quibble though, it was only in 1949, per the fount of Wikipedia, that Canada introduced its dollar to replace the British pound.
Careful viewers will note that as the opening titles roll there is a disclaimer that ‘any similarity to any persons living, dead, or POSSESSED, is entirely coincidental.’ I put the capitals in for emphasis.