Recent Viewings, Part 2

[M.10rda]

FFC, I feel like it bears mentioning that Cab Calloway doesn't contribute a cameo - he's basically the third lead, and he's outstanding. Really love that Landis helped immortalize him for several generations of film fans that otherwise might not know him.

[Rev. Powell]

MARKETA LAZAROVA (1967): In the early Middle Ages, a pair of petty noble brothers rob a caravan under protection of the King, setting off a chain of events that eventually leads to the kidnapping and rape of Marketa, a virgin pledged to the convent. A black and white Czech epic that's beautifully shot with an eerie medieval soundtrack by Zdenk Liska, it is confessedly difficult to follow: it took me at least an hour to sort out the characters and which clan they belonged to, a difficulty exacerbated by director Frantisek Vlácil's occasional use of dream sequences. 4/5

[pacman000]

Ben-Hur (1959) - "This is only 2.5 hours, that's what it says when I pause it. Oh, there's another disk. Nevermind."  Still, not as slow as I remembered. Good movie, even if it did take all day.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Meatballs" (1979)
Bill Murray (making his movie debut) and his fellow counselors at humble Camp North Star goof off, play pranks, and chase girls before leading their pint-size charges into a climactic series of contests against the hoity-toity rich kids' camp on the other side of the lake. Murray totally steals the movie and chews the scenery for all he's worth (legend has it that he ad-libbed virtually all of his character's dialogue) but otherwise this is a pretty standard, mostly plotless summer-camp comedy. It wasn't terrible, but I seem to remember thinking it was a lot funnier when I was 14.

[Rev. Powell]

ORIGIN (2024): Pulitzer-prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson deals with personal tragedies while working on her book "Caste," which compares India and Nazi Germany with the American class system and argues that the idea of caste is actually more important than race. The movie's odd structure, which mixes biopic with a lecture illustrated through dramatic re-enactments, leads to unevenness and a few clumsy-feeling moments; when the script focuses on Wilkerson formulating her thesis, it works well as an advertisement for the not-Ron-DeSantis-approved book. 3/5.

[M.10rda]

LE HORLA (1966):
This full-color French art flick runs 35 minutes and suggests some connective tissue between MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON and David Lynch's early work. A young bachelor begins to suspect he's experiencing sleepwalking episodes and slowly starts to suffer a paranoid breakdown over his inability to remember his nocturnal activities. Gradually a new idea occurs to him: is an invisible ghost entering his apartment each night and messing with him? Although his sanity is already well in question, there's some reasonable onscreen indications of a supernatural third party actually tormenting the guy....... so what's a loner weirdo to do?

LE HORLA has two pretty significant shortcomings, to my mind. One is that this non-linear film's resolution is given away too early and much, much too often, so the suspense (if that's what you're looking for) is rather limited. The other is the entirely too dense dialogue (or rather, monologue) adapted directly from Guy DeMaupassant's first-person short story. It does wear on one's nerves after awhile and the film would've been more effective w/ less narration. (Plus the English subtitles translate "le horla" as "the whore", which caused me some confusion, when the actual translation is "the outsider".) That second complaint is largely ameliorated, though, by the one-man show delivered by actor Laurent Terzieff, yet another European actor with a long list of credits who is undeservedly unfamiliar to me. Terzieff sells the text with his voice (sometimes in VO, sometimes to the camera) but really shines in the wordless passages, using his posture and (often eerile) movement to keep our attention and convince us he's a man haunted (or possessed). Because of Terzieff and because of a handful of truly unsettling if understated visuals, LE HORLA is well worth a view for fans of surrealism and the uncanny.

3,5/5

[Jim H]

King of Prodigal Boxers - This is a VERY bad early 80s action drama from Taiwan.  It's on Tubi.  It has a couple of real names in it too, Chen Kuan-Tai is in some quite good kung fu films (Boxer from Shantung and Executioners from Shaolin are recs), and fans of kung fu films might recognize a couple other faces like Michael Chan.  It's about two guys, one a boxer the other a businessman, who end up wanting revenge on the same guy and eventually go for that.  This is one of the worst edited films I've ever seen.  Every scene is chopped to hell and looks like they did not have enough footage to do it right.  The storyline is barely coherent.  Characters are really bad.  There's not nearly enough action sequences - but, actually, what little action we have is fairly decent and is the highlight of the film.  The film also steals a piece of music from Once Upon a Time in the West to use in a scene exactly how it was used in that film (C'Era Una Volta Il West is the track title). 

One surprising bit - the businessman character is played by Wang Kuan-Hsiung, and he's a pretty good actor and his performance still comes across despite some terrible english dubbing.

[M.10rda]

NIGHT OF WALPURGIS aka WEREWOLF'S SHADOW aka WEREWOLF VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMAN (1970):

First-time viewing of one of the best-known and most successful of the fifteen or so (!) "Waldemar Daninsky" movies where Spanish Jacinto Molina aka Paul Naschy plays Polish werewolf Wally D. This movie is a pristine example of why this wonderful website exists - it's poorly made and stoopid in many ways, but it's still a good deal of fun. This entry begins in medias res, in the style of many of the Hammer Frankensteins, as if it's continuing directly where the previous film left off. But Daninsky was a college professor in the last one and now somehow he's a rural nobleman... sometimes he'd be a mountain climber... sometimes he'd be a gaijin samurai! Really these films just follow Naschy's whimsy wherever it leads. Surprisingly (as I'd never read or heard this observation before), WVTVW has Naschy (who wrote all his own screenplays) lifting the major plot points from Bava's BLACK SUNDAY: goth-looking demon-worshipping vampire queen is revived with drops of blood and goes on a spree. The big question is, would the addition of a crazed werewolf have improved BLACK SUNDAY? Based on the evidence here... maybe so!

This movie ain't perfect. Two of the leading ladies (Gaby Fuchs as the love interest and Patty Sheppard as Barbara Steele) have no characterization to work with and thus just zone out/sleepwalk through the film. (The third, less famous female lead is very cute however and performs her role with some gusto.) Director Leon Klimovsky had a long career directing Naschy's films and other Euro-horror, but so much of WVTVW is so stagy, sedentary, slow, underlit, inept, and just jejune that you'd think he was a first-time director or Naschy's nephew or something.

That said, Klimovsky does occasionally get some things quite right in spite of himself. The bright-eyed, bright-lipped, pale-skinned vampire ladies (plural) look sublime, and in advance of most of Jean Rollin's stylish sexy vamp movies. Isolated shots of them ogling the necks of other dames or laying their throats open to feast definitely deliver what the French like to call "frisson". Klimovsky also manages to accomplish something few other bad horror movie directors can pull off: he uses slo-mo extremely well. The slo-mo sequences of the vampires gleefully advancing on their victims are damn cool, and there's one slo-mo face-off between Naschy and a vampire that plays out almost exactly like a spaghetti western gunfight. Nice stuff.

As for Naschy, he's an acquired taste for sure. From the kindest angles he looks like a slightly paunchy John Saxon; most of the time he looks like John Belushi with a nice haircut. No matter which Naschy film you watch, you will likely slap yourself at some point and wonder aloud, "Why are these hot broads making out with this guy and professing their undying love to him?!" It's gotta' be his simmering intensity, which is well-restrained here in service of playing a lonely rich guy who just wants a friend. When Daninsky hulks out, though, Naschy literally and dramatically transforms to great effect. The Chaney-style werewolf here looks great and is completely vicious, actually foaming at the mouth, and frankly is kind of an a**hole. He'll maul absolutely anyone on sight with no provocation. A couple of bit players are so dazed by this unmotivated aggression that they just freeze up and let Naschy steamroll 'em.

No bad movie would cut muster without at least one moment of jaw-dropping incompetence. This one's got at least two. The best is when an angry villager attempts to stab human Naschy with what is very clearly a retractable blade. Viewers are supposed to understand that werewolves are supernaturally protected from all physical harm - but how does that protection extend to their expensive leather jackets?! There's also a hilarious full-body dummy that gets decapitated in an extended long shot. Klimovsky and his editor weren't even trying there. This kind of filmmaking is what inspired me to make laughably bad horror movies as a young person - 'cause hey, WVTVW got international distribution, why can't I?

3/5
Vive la lobos hombre!

[indianasmith]

Friday night double feature:
BARBIE (2023) - My wife and daughters saw this last summer; I taped it off of HBO and finally watched it yestereve.
I found it to be a fun, silly social satire that never let its message get in the way of its entertainment value.  Perfectly cast and written with a wry wit, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  5/5
GINGERDEAD MAN VS. EVIL BONG (2013) You can still count on Full Moon pictures to deliver Joe Bob Briggs' "three B's" without much in the way of a comprehensive plot to get in the way of the pure cheese. This was an awful movie, about fifteen minutes of its 83 minute runtime was wasted on opening credits or flashback scenes from the previous movies in the franchise.  Pure silliness with some gore and copious nudity, which Joe Bob would insist was "absolutely essential to the plot" - or it would have been, had the movie had one.
I was entertained.

[Trevor]

Bad insomnia last night so I watched THE LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE: that was a bad idea because I was then scared to go sleep after 😳🐢

[FatFreddysCat]

"Shock 'Em Dead" (1990)
A wanna-be guitarist makes a deal with the Devil and is transformed into a six-string Rock God. Of course he uses his newfound supernatural powers to pursue his dream girl (former XXX queen Traci Lords). This cheap, cheesy heavy metal horror/comedy (though I'm not entirely sure the comedy is intentional) doesn't have much gore but there's plenty of T&A. "Shock 'Em Dead" is crap, but at least it was entertaining crap.

[indianasmith]

GERALD'S GAME (2017)  - I read this book many years ago, but had never seen the movie adaptation until tonight.  I thought it was one of the best Stephen King adaptations I've seen - the casting was brilliant, the cinematography excellent, and the main character's hallucinations were handled very skillfully.  Also, the guy who played the ghoul Joubert was absolutely terrifying. Highly recommended!  5/5

[Alex]

Wish.

Went to show the latest offering from Disney at the cinema club. No one turned up to watch it, which is unusual for a kids film at the weekend. We sat down to just see it ourselves. After what I am guessing was about 20 mins to half an hour we just put it off and walked out. The songs and animation seemed bland and uninteresting. Ash's attention is normally caught by animation but he just wasn't interested in it either making it one of the few movies that all three of us agree is a flop.

[RCMerchant]

DOWNFALL (2004)

It's 1945, and Hitler's world is caving in around him. Down in his bunker, his top Generals an aides betray him and he sinks into delusion and madness, and eventually, suicide. This is the movie all those dubbed Hitler videos of him going off the rails for various reasons uses scenes from.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Jack of All Trades" (2018)
 The son of a big time 1980s sports card dealer discovers a large stash of his estranged Dad's collection and thinks he's hit the jackpot, but when he tries to sell the cards, he learns that they are basically worthless in the 21st century. This leads him on a quest to find out why and how the multi-million dollar sports card business collapsed during the 1990s, and also to re-connect with his father, whom he hasn't seen or spoken to in 20 years. I would've preferred if this documentary kept its focus on the hobby and spent less time on the soap opera family drama stuff, but it was still a decent watch.