Skyrim Interlude

(HA HA! YOU THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DISCUSS THAT OTHER GAME  WITH A ROMAN V IN THE TITLE THAT HAPPENS TO BE IMPORTANT THIS WEEK.)

Like pretty much all Bethesda games, I was late to the party for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Not that I didn't want to play the game when it was brand new, but because I knew that Bethesda is consistent about putting out “game of the year” editions with their expansions bundled in, and at a considerably cheaper price.

So anyway, Skyrim. It's got pretty mountains. Killing dragons has a nice feeling of accomplishment to it. Jeremy Soule's soundtrack is amazing. It's an entire province populated by Not-Vikings. Combat isn't quite as janky as in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. These are all good things.

Like Oblivion before it, the story is fairly bog standard and...not really engaging. Oblivion had the hilarious but kind of odd trait of casting you as the highly competent sidekick of the actual hero and sent around the kingdom to help him get ready to save the world. Here, you turn out to be a pretty big deal, a dragonborn capable of learning magical shouts when you kill dragons by absorbing their souls. And yes, the first shout you learn is how to yell so hard it knocks people over.

But the plot itself of Skyrim is standard fare. There's a civil war between two factions and you get to throw in with one of them. Worse, ancient dragons, not seen for centuries, begin flying around and tearing shit up. You see this firsthand at the beginning of the game as a prisoner caught up in this civil war on your way to execution in a fortified town when BOOM! DRAGON. You escape in the confusion and the town gets destroyed and from there the world opens up for you to explore as you wish. Ancient evil, need to find a way to stop it, need to level up by finding people to give you quests. Not my first rodeo, but one I still enjoy paying the price of admission for.

The main quest might not be amazing overall, but this and the hundreds of side quests propel you into what the series is amazingly good at: exploration. It gives you a big map with undiscovered locations and begs the question “What's over that hill?” “What's in that ruin?” Sometimes it's bandits. Sometimes it's an impressive view. Sometimes its just a mudcrab. But then there's the next hill, and what looks like a fort over to the left, and a dirt road running through a dense forest to the right.... That right there is where the “actual” story of an Elder Scrolls game is: the emergent personal story of you the player deciding to go explore something.

Case in point, this weekend I finally had my first real “whoa” moment. Playing for maybe an hour, I end up wandering back to the town from the prologue just to see what's there. Not much, it turns out. Some bandits, a few chests to open with some minor loot, and the burned out ruins of a small town. Following dirt road outside the town, I get attacked by a wolf. At level 9, a lone wolf is no problem and swiftly dispatched. Around the bend is a smear of blood and what's left of a campsite. There are two corpses labeled “refugee.” The location does not show up on the map as something discovered.

I think “man that sucks,” and proceed to loot their corpses. As sociopathic as it sounds, that's just one of the things that you do in these types of games. Its not like you've got the option to give them a proper burial. Beyond their pittance of gold there's nothing else of interest and I move on down the trail. A quartet of bandits is easily dispatched, then a small hill campsite with two bandits that got hostile as I approached.

On guard, I keep on truckin' and see a canine shape ahead that doesn't run away like a fox. “Probably another wolf” I think and get my axe ready. It does not run. It does not attack, either. I get close and its a stray dog.

Huh. I've been attacked by dogs in the game before, so I'm still on guard, but if he doesn't attack, then I've got no beef.

He doesn't attack. The game gives me the option to “talk” to him. I do, and all that happens is that he sits down and whines a little then wags his tail. I thank the game for a random encounter that doesn't want to kill me, and proceed into a nearby cave with my AI companion because CURIOSITY!

Inside the cave is an ice cavern with a bunch of skeletons (human and mammoth), an ice bridge, and a saber toothed cat.

Before you can say “Fighty Time!” I hear a bark and see a dog run at the cat along with my companion.

“Wait, is that the stray dog from... Shit, better kill that monster.”

The cat goes down and I look at the dog. Yep. Stray Dog. He sits down and wags his tail.

“Well damn. Thanks little buddy. Guess you're following me around. That's cool.”

And then I remembered the campsite, the wolf, and the dead refugees. Putting the pieces together into an entirely assumed conclusion, I decided that this poor mutt was the last survivor of that wolf attack.

At which point I made myself a promise that I'd get this dog to a settlement. Maybe a town. Maybe a farm. Maybe let him follow me around some more.

I exit through the other side of the cave with two companions in tow and see some ruins and one of the shrines that unlocks Dragonborn shouts. “Cool. New stuff!”

Then the music ramps up and a dragon soars overhead. I pause the game and weigh my options, and then I exited out. Not because I was worried I couldn't take it down, but because I was certain that dog was going to turn into literal toast. Plus, I had other stuff I had to do.

Right then and there was where I got onboard with Skyrim. It had just given me a Moment. No dialogue, not even text or any kind of exposition whatsoever, just context cues pulled from possibly unconnected incidents. The campfire ruin was coded for that spot, obviously, and apparently stray dogs appear at various places on the map to be rescued from immediate peril, yet I had no confirmation that these two were related. I made that connection in my head, and I'm not even much of a pet person.

This isn't a review or anything even close to that, nor is it weighing in on the “games are totally art, man” argument. It's just highlighting a brief yet oddly profound storytelling moment in a game that I been enjoying from a more...I guess “academic perspective” is the right phrase. Ironically for a game that prides itself on an epic story and scale, the best moment so far has been the exact opposite on the scale of intimacy.

So yeah. Skyrim's pretty neat. The main storyline is kind of blah, but that's not why I come to Elder Scrolls games. It's for the moments of exploration/discovery, the emergent narrative that the player is encouraged to build up around their blank slate of a character, and for the weird exploits possible that let you break the game. (For instance, by the time I finished Oblivion, I was a sword and board warrior with boots that let me run on water, an amulet that let me breathe underwater, and a unique unbreakable lockpick that essentially meant that I could go pretty much anywhere and take anything.)

Combat's still pretty janky though.

“When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”

So this is the big one of the Dollars Trilogy. The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly AKA Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo from 1966. The one that a lot of people point to as “the best Western ever.” I don’t exactly agree with that.

Plot

During the later stages of the American Civil War, an uneasy duo of bounty hunter and outlaw hustle law enforcement, until the bounty hunter decides to finally sell out the outlaw. The outlaw wants revenge, and his pursuit of the bounty hunter sets them both on a collision course with buried treasure and a sinister Union officer. 

The movie is much longer than that, though.

Characters

“Blondie”: Clint Eastwood (as usual) continuing to be mysterious and inscrutable. He’s still kind of a dick, too, teaming up with Tuco to scam and split bounty rewards. Curiously, he doesn’t start out the story with his trademark poncho. He gets that and his other accoutrements over the course of the movie. That, and his increasing number of occasional kind acts (he is “The Good” after all), hints at character development, which is not something our nameless protagonist has had much of over the trilogy. It’s also never outright stated, but the Civil War setting and aforementioned poncho acquiring implies this is a prequel of sorts to the first two movies. Does it matter from a narrative perspective? Not really.

Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez (known as “The Rat”): Eli Wallach is our viewpoint character, and if Blondie’s kind of a dick, Tuco’s a complete bastard. Robbery, murder, torture, fraud, scamming everyone he meets…Tuco is a survivalist well-suited to the harsh landscape and looks out only for himself. It’s a credit to Wallach’s hammy yet intense performance that he makes such a repulsive character so entertaining to watch. Yet when he gets his occasional comeuppances, its actually pretty deserved, and even in the prison camp interrogation, it’s hard to feel sympathy for Tuco, since he’s been such a backstabbing bastard up to that point. But there are moments where you almost do feel sympathy for him, especially in the monastery where he meets his brother and the viewer gets a glimpse at what makes him tick. He may not be beyond redemption, but he is certainly “The Ugly” and one of the great screen rogues.

Sentenza “Angel Eyes”: Lee Van Cleef returns, this time as the villain of the piece. Angel Eyes is introduced as a sinister assassin who honors his contracts and can’t be negotiated with by his victims, but doesn’t hesitate to kill his employer for another contract. Utterly ruthless, merciless, and pragmatic, he‘s also less disturbing than El Indio. Van Cleef does the role well, but it lacks the nuance and development that Colonel Mortimer had in the previous film. Even his motivation for wanting the gold is vague. Greed, I suppose, but the character is “The Bad” and lacks the layers that make him more than simply cold-blooded.

Alcoholic Union Captain: Aldo Giuffrè plays a side character so minor that he doesn’t even register a name in the credits, yet he is a scene stealer. An officer who knows the back-and-forth fight for an inconsequential bridge is accomplishing nothing but the slaughter of his own men, he copes with nihilistic alcoholism. Until Blondie and Tuco show up and give him an explosive sendoff. 

The Sights

Director Sergio Leone displays a technical confidence in his filmmaking here. Gone are the day-for-night scenes from Fistful. Easily the most polished of the three in editing, composition, and cinematography. Juxtaposition of desolate long shots and extreme close-ups of weathered, craggy faces are also done very well. It’s also the biggest in sense of scale, with large crowds of extras in the towns and even a Civil War bridge skirmish that ends in a sizable explosion. For being about such ugly subject matter, this movie sure is pretty.

The Story

Story by: Luciano Vincenzoni & Sergio Leone. Screenplay: Agenore Incrocci, Furio Scarpelli, Luciano Vincenzoni, & Sergio Leone. English version by Mickey Knox. That’s a fair number of names, and the script seems to be the weakest element. Not for the core plot, that’s tightly arranged, and the climactic scene is one of the most amazing showdowns in movie history. Seriously, it is THAT good.

I didn’t warm to the episodic nature of the film. This is a very, very long movie that wanders around in some places.  These scenes aren’t bad by any means, but they lack the narrative tightness of the previous two movies. Things are a little more stretched out. There’s less sense of urgency or of the stakes being as high or immediate to the characters. The bridge battle has nothing to do with the rest of the movie other than “Blondie and Tuco stumble upon it” like it was some random encounter. It’s a well-done scene and hey, I’m not anti-explosions, but it could conceivably be cut and the film wouldn’t lose much. Tuco & Blondie don’t really develop further as a result of it. It just feels like a heavy-handed way of getting across the message that war is full of pointless loss of life over arbitrarily chosen objectives. 

A curious aspect of the film is its sympathetic portrayal of the Confederacy. Obviously not for the slavery aspect of the South, but the only Confederates we see in the movie tend to be maltreated prisoners of war: the infantry, the cannon-fodder, the schlubs. The Union has a more even spread of sympathetic and unsympathetic characters (about two and two, regarding speaking roles). Yet this is a movie released in 1966, when racial tensions ran high, and if this were an American production, it is highly unlikely that the Confederacy would have received such a portrayal. Not to imply that there weren’t sympathetic people among the Confederacy. Both sides in a war have good and bad people caught up in them, and a large number of rebel soldiers in the Civil War were not themselves slave owners…

And I’m getting off topic. Suffice it to say, historical reality is a complicated thing, and it is curious that the movie is so well regarded in a country where the shorthand opinion of the Civil War is “Confederacy = Bad.”

The Sounds

Original Music by Ennio Morricone. He really knocked it out of the park on this one. The incredible Main Theme, the Ecstasy of Gold, etc. Like the rest of the trilogy, this is the glue that really holds the movie together and elevates it to another level of quality. It can’t be stressed enough.

The Verdict

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is a good movie, no doubt. Best Western? Nah, that’s a hotel chain. Best Spaghetti Western? Maybe. It’s technical skill is superlative and the climax is amazing. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that the overall package is somehow less than the sum of its excellent parts. For me, the best of the trilogy is For A Few Dollars More, which features more consistently good character work, a tighter plot, and fewer digressions about social commentary that lack subtlety. 

Watching this movie is definitely worthwhile, but seeing only this one does a disservice to the rest of the trilogy, which is very, very good overall.


*Note: The trailer lies and switches the Bad with the Ugly.

“When the chimes end, pick up your gun.”

A year after the success of A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood re-teamed in 1965 to make For a Few Dollars More (AKA Per qualche dollaro in più), which has the benefit of not being a remake of Yojimbo.


The Plot
Two bounty hunters, Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) and a man referred to as “Monco” on account of him using his left hand for everything except shooting (Clint Eastwood) ply their trade across the west when a vicious bandit, El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) and his gang break out of prison.  El Indio’s got a hefty bounty out for his gang, and the two bounty hunters cross paths and eventually decide to team up take down the gang as it plans an ambitious bank robbery.

Volonté returns from the last movie as a new bad guy, and manages to be even more psychotic and disturbing than Rojo was. To give you an idea of how villainous El Indio is, he tracks down the man responsible for putting him in prison, tortures him, then has his wife and 18 month old baby shot offscreen, then, satisfied that the man hates him enough, he flips open a musical watch. When the music stops, its time to shoot. Naturally Indio wins. Beyond mere sadism, Volonté gives the character a manic-depressive personality that he switches between with alarming suddenness. The impression it gives is of a man who gets any kind of enjoyment out of life by pushing people to the point of violence against him, then giving them a chance at revenge with the odds skewed in his favor, and then finishing them off. Which is really messed up. Oh, and one of his henchmen, Juan the Hunchback, is played by Klaus Kinski.

 Colonel Mortimer has more complicated reasons for going after El Indio. Revenge reasons. Without spoiling anything, he’s got some pretty damn good reasons for hating El Indio. More relatable than Monco, Mortimer is essentially the real protagonist, since he’s the one you can relate to more. Van Cleef really nails the old soldier archetype as he plays a wily veteran next to Monco’s more youthful bravado, but Mortimer’s also a character with a lot of pain locked away. That sadness and hatred really come to the surface in the final shootout, which is all done and seen in Van Cleef’s eyes. That’s some amazing acting right there.

The Visuals
Sergio Leone had a real budget this time! No more obvious day-for-night scenes and the whole movie has a more polished feel to it. Much like the previous film, it sets a fantastic mood with harsh landscapes and supporting characters with equally harsh features.  Leone even adds some artsy flourishes, such as ending a scene on El Indio laughing madly and cutting to a wanted poster of him with that same expression. Little things like that.

The Story
Screenplay by Luciano Vincenzoni & Sergio Leone. Dialogue by Luciano Vincenzoni (and Uncredited Fernando Di Leo & Sergio Donati). On a superficial level, its rather similar to A Fistful, since it involves Clint hunting bad guys in the name of a lot of money. Eastwood’s poncho wearing drifter is much the same here. Mysterious, deadpan, and essentially motivated by greed. Then again, it works quite well, so why mess with it?

Volonté returns as a new bad guy, and manages to be even more psychotic and disturbing than Rojo was. To give you an idea of how villainous El Indio is, he tracks down the man responsible for putting him in prison, tortures him, then has his wife and 18 month old baby shot offscreen, then, satisfied that the man hates him enough, he flips open a musical watch. When the music stops, its time to shoot. Naturally Indio wins. Beyond mere sadism, Volonté gives the character a manic-depressive personality that he switches between with alarming suddenness. The impression it gives is of a man who gets any kind of enjoyment out of life by pushing people to the point of violence against him, then giving them a chance at revenge with the odds skewed in his favor, and then finishing them off. Which is really messed up. Oh, and one of his henchmen, Juan the Hunchback, is played by Klaus Kinski.

 Colonel Mortimer has more complicated reasons for going after El Indio. Revenge reasons. Without spoiling anything, he’s got some pretty damn good reasons for hating El Indio. More relatable than Monco, Mortimer is essentially the real protagonist, since he’s the one you can relate to more. Van Cleef really nails the old soldier archetype as he plays a wily veteran next to Monco’s more youthful bravado, but Mortimer’s also a character with a lot of pain locked away. That sadness and hatred really come to the surface in the final shootout, which is all done and seen in Van Cleef’s eyes. That’s some amazing acting right there, and it’s the culmination of an entire movie’s worth of build up.

The Sounds
Ennio Morricone’s score continues to be an essential cog in the Leone Western. Here, it ups the ante a bit by integrating the musical watch theme brilliantly into the movie. As an omen of impending death, the watch begins as a haunting, melancholy, almost sinister sound. By the final showdown, it transforms into a harbinger of vengeance. Hard to explain in words, but damn. It works so damn well.

The Verdict
For A Few Dollars More is an amazing movie. A tight script, great acting, slick visuals and an incredible score knock it out of the park. A damn fine Spaghetti Western, and a damn fine Western, period.

“When a man’s got money in his pocket he begins to appreciate peace.”

That was a hiatus that went on longer than expected. Hard work is hard.

I've covered a few Spaghetti Westerns here at RMWC before, which tend to be fun and wacky, and often blatant imitations of Sergio Leone's seminal Man With No Name trilogy. Leone obviously didn't invent the Western, nor was he the first man to film one in Europe with mostly European actors, but he sure as hell put his stamp on it.

In 1964 A Fistful of Dollars (AKA Per un pugno di dollari), an “unofficial remake” (that led to a lawsuit by Japanese Studio Toho) of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 film Yojimbo (which was itself inspired partly by the Westerns of John Ford). And in turn, Yojimbo/Fistful was remade as Last Man Standing. 

Legal stuff is complicated.

Story

Clint Eastwood shoots dudes. 

Ok, fine, there’s more to it. A mysterious drifter rides into the little town of San Miguel and finds two gangs fighting over who will get to run the town. Sensing there’s money to be made, he starts playing off both sides, hiring himself out as a gunfighter to both groups at his convenience. 

Characters

“Joe”: Clint Eastwood’s breakout role as the flint-eyed stoic anti-hero of the movie. Joe’s not his name, its just what some of the locals take to calling him. While certainly not a bad guy (he doesn't kill any innocents) he’s still a greedy, selfish, callous man. Exactly the kind of man to thrive in a world as harsh as the one Leone builds for him. There certainly isn't a lot of variety to his expressions in this movie, but Eastwood clearly displays the steely nerve that cemented his future roles as relentless badasses. Which isn't to say he’s completely mirthless. The scene where he demands an apology from four thugs for insulting his mule is some fun black comedy, but “Joe’s” sense of humor is a deadpan, sardonic sort that only surfaces rarely. He also has an awesome poncho and a fondness for stubby cigars. 

Don Miguel Benito Rojo: Antonio Prieto is the nominal leader of the Rojo gang. The Rojos sell liquor but want to move in on the rest of the shady dealings in town. He’s not a handsome man, but is arguably the friendliest Rojo to “Joe.”

Esteban Rojo: Sieghardt Rupp plays the youngest and most headstrong Rojo. Brash and kind of dumb, Esteban dresses fancier than his brothers, likes pistols, and has a screechy laugh that just makes you want “Joe” to shoot him.

Ramon Rojo: Gian Maria Volonté is the real brains behind the Rojo operation. Brutal and controlling, he’s incredibly clever and a monster to women. Exactly the kind of villain you want to see our hero destroy.

Chico: Mario Brega plays the main Rojo goon. Not much to say about him other than he’s trusted by the gang, is a chubby guy, and shows up on screen a fair amount.

Marisol: Marianne Koch plays “Ramon’s woman” and boy is she unhappy about it. See, Ramon keeps her under guard in a shack outside town and her husband Julio and son Jesus have moved into the shack thirty feet away. At first she’s little more than a pawn for “Joe,” but as the movie progresses (and so does “Joe’s” war on the gangs, he shows her family some genuine kindness. Oh, and her son is dubbed with a really annoying, whiny voice. Yes, I know the little kid’s sad and abused by the bad guys, but he still set my teeth on edge whenever he spoke.

John Baxter: Wolfgang Lukschy is the “sheriff” of town and patriarch of the Baxter family. His gang run and sell guns illegally. Slightly less ruthless than the Rojos, they’re also less interesting, clever, or menacing.

Silvanito the barkeep: Jose Calvo plays one of the few characters who become acquaintances/helpers for “Joe.” Silvanito also provides exposition as needed, in fine Movie bartender tradition. 

The Visuals

Directed by Sergio Leone, the film looks really good in daylight and interior shots. The heavy use of day-for-night though, betrays the film’s lower budget origins. That bit of cost-cutting doesn’t detract from the quality of the rest of the movie. Action sequences are nicely shot (and with great build-up). Leone also uses extreme close ups on faces to good effect as well. Most of these faces are as weathered as the landscape, and Leone really plays up the harshness of the West. Case in point: “Joe” gets the crap beaten out of him something fierce a third of the way through the movie, and it is very effective in its brutality. 

Oh, and this movie totally stole Marty McFly’s gunfight strategy against Mad Dog Tannen in Back to the Future Part III.

The Story

Story by A. Bonzzoni, Víctor Andrés Catena, & Sergio Leone. Screenplay by Víctor Andrés Catena, Jaime Comas, & Sergio Leone. Dialogue by Mark Lowell (and Uncredited: Fernando Di Leo, Duccio Tessari, & Tonino Valerii). Character motivation is quite simple, and most of the cast are painted in broad strokes with a few character traits to define them. The plot is the real focus of the story, with intrigue, betrayal, and manipulation taking center stage (and that’s exactly what “Joe’s” doing). The twists and turns of the story, along with how Joe reacts to them in his game of cat-and-mouse with the gangs is great fun to see play out. 

The Sounds

I've read arguments that Ennio Morricone single-handedly elevated the Man With No Name trilogy to greatness by the awesomeness of his score alone, and there is some credence to that. The variety of moods that Morricone can set with little more than a piano, guitar and a whistle is inhuman. 

The Verdict

A Fistful of Dollars is a damn fine movie and an interesting alternative take on the Western genre. Moody and amoral, its quite a difference from the more forthright heroics of the American-grown Westerns that John Wayne became a fixture of. I hesitate to say Leone made a superior version of the Western (I have good things to say about Stagecoach as well, for instance), but he definitely helped make Spaghetti Westerns a legitimate, and stylish sub-genre. The direction, Eastwood’s intensity, and Morricone's amazing music make this well worth watching. 

“Nobody likes a smartass truck.”

Monster Trucks. Man, those were popular in the 80s, weren’t they? Big ol’ trucks with giant wheels, it seems like their entire purpose was to see how many cars they can crush in one jump. In 1987, the cinematic auteur behind Giant Spider Invasion and at least partly responsible for Monster A Go-Go, Bill Rebane, gifted the world Twister’s Revenge! It features Wisconsin, rednecks, and a sentient monster truck named Twister.

Hope you brought your E-Z Pass, because we’re on the turnpike to WACKINESS.

We open with some monster trucks at a state fair, and three rednecks trying to pull off various schemes. They’re Dutch (Jay Gjernes), Kelly (David Alan Smith), and Bear (R. Richardson Luka, who, despite not being a good actor ends up being the most, er, likable of the speaking characters) and they will be our villains today. Kelly has anger issues and Bear gets hit a lot (frequently in the balls) and Dutch sort of gets caught in between the two like Larry, if we’re going for a Stooges comparison.

Our heroes are at the fair as well. Dave (Dean West) is a cowboy mechanic/monster truck driver and his fiancee/new bride Sherry (Meredith Orr) is the computer expert who installed the AI into Twister. This sounds like it would’ve been an awesome 80’s TV show,  like “Knight Rider” meets “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Sadly, it doesn’t live up to the promise.

So anyway, the three goons try to steal Twister so they can pawn it, fail, then decide to kidnap the girl and force Dave to give them the truck as blackmail. It takes them several attempts to actually grab her, which involve TWO Scooby-Doo style chase scenes (one on foot and one in cars), the newlyweds deciding to spend their honeymoon in their van (!), and an elderly lady hitting Bear in the junk with her purse after his friends slashed the tires of her van. It’s not nearly as funny as that sentence.

Anyway, our boring, stupid hero goes back to the shop and Twister starts talking to him like a hayseed version of K.I.T.T. Except the audio is so bad you can barely understand the garbled dialogue coming from the truck. And now the “meat” of the story can begin.

One’s an idiot in a cowboy hat. The other’s a condescending monster truck. THEY FIGHT CRIME. Or try to. Dave goes to a bar and the movie nosedives into weirdness. Words can’t really describe it.

What’s with the Bat Guy? That just raises so many questions. Is he a mutant? An alien? A guy in a mask? What’s he doing drinking in a Wisconsin dive bar? Why is his mask so well made, with a working jaw hinge? Is it really a mask?

Anyway, Dave gets beaten up by a biker for going up to him and saying “Excuse me, I need some information.”  And then Twister drives over a car. Because that’s really all monster trucks are good for, and rescues Dave.

Bear goes to a slutty woman’s shack to, well, shack up, I guess. She’s girlfriend I guess, and hasn’t had it in a while. Twister & Dave follow. Twister drives over the shack then chases slutty woman through the countryside. For giggles, I suppose. OUR HEROES. (The slutty girl running panicked through the woods becomes a running “gag” at random points of the movie.)

After this the movie wanders from inane “what?” moment to “what?’ moment. Twister and Dave search for Sherry and end up driving over cars and through houses that belong to innocent people, Bear gets hit in the junk, Sherry is tied up in a mine with a ticking time bomb, and the soundtrack limps along halfheartedly while at time riffing on the “Jaws” theme and, for some reason, “Good King Wenceslaus” during an overly long chase/battle scene between Twister and an M60 Patton tank the antagonists call “The Big One.” They drive around, disrupt a small town, destroy some barns (that explode by driving through them), but the movie somehow makes a tank causing havoc in a small town boring and drawn out.

Conclusion
Overly long and painfully not funny. That’s Twister’s Revenge! in a nutshell. And yet… And yet it is incredibly captivating watching the movie steadily sink lower and lower into dull madness. Each new scene leaves you asking the screen “somebody thought this was funny? How??”  It leaves you staring in slack-jawed wonder that something like this exists.

Then, when the dust settles of the anticlimactic tank/truck battle, and the lovers are reunited, the movie takes time for one last gag before the credits. It cuts back to the slutty girl, still running through the woods at that cranked up Benny Hill show speed, only now its winter. The implication being that she’s been running in nonstop terror from the monster truck for months now. I don’t know if it was because the movie had finally beaten me down or had somehow managed to deliver an actual, slightly amusing joke, but I chuckled.

That doesn't mean I can recommend it in good conscience, but it is bizarrely watchable.

“Shark god angry long time now.”

1958’s She Gods of Shark Reef is a painful cheapie from Roger Corman. Two brothers, the blonde Chris “Christy” Johnston (Bill Cord) and dark haired Jim “Lee” Johnston (Don Durant) are sailing in the pacific and get blown off-course and hit a reef and they get rescued by some ladies in floral print swimsuits and catamarans. They are told about the large number of sharks around this reef, hence “Shark Reef.” The brothers (they had a third guy with them who had no lines but he swam out of the movie within the first five minutes and is presumed drowned) discover that they’re on an island owned by “The Island Company” and is populated solely by women, and is managed by the stern matron Pua (Jeanne Gerson) and IMDB tells me she’s a queen. Or something. The women collect pearls for the Company.

Anyway, Pua doesn’t like these two men hanging around an island populated entirely by naïve, pretty young women. Christy’s a decent fellow with an interest in marine specimens. Lee’s a jerk with an interest in crime. It was his vaguely filmed criminal antics at the beginning of the film that caused them to take a boat and sail away from the law. Pua dislikes everything, and Lee gets paranoid about her signaling/semaphoring/radioing the US Navy to pick the men up. The guys also change into floral-print mini-skirts, which is understandable for an island of women, but it doesn’t make it any easier to look at.

Here’s what happens. Chris flirts/falls in love with Mahia (Lisa Montell), the girl who fished them out of the water. Lee plots to escape/steal the pearls, and Pua disapproves of EVERYTHING. Pua thinks that when Mahia saved the guys, that made the gods even angrier than before, and sees it as a perfectly good excuse to sacrifice Mahia to the Shark God Tangaroa. There’s some hula dancing along the way too.

Not one of Roger Corman’s better works. I presume the bulk of the film’s budget was spent on shooting on location in Hawaii and was shot in something like two weeks. The film is in color, but the print I saw is terrible. The soundtrack by Ronald Stein is mostly disembodied ambient drumbeats with a few anemic touches of score thrown in. 

What’s worse is the screenplay by Robert Hill and Victor Stoloff. The whole setup makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. I mean, I don’t have an MBA, but from a business standpoint, the Island Company is making a lot of questionable decisions. Okay, we’re told they take good care of the workers in exchange for the pearls. Fine. I guess. I suppose someone tried to teach them English along the way but stopped. Script make natives talk incomplete English. Mean they not civilized like smart westerners. 

Fine. Whatever. I’m not even going to go into the whole impracticality of sustaining a permanent population of only one gender over several generations because that’s just a riff on the ancient Amazonian fetish. But not only are these island women pagans, they worship a god that demands the blood sacrifice of virgins. Who are also employees of the company. And there’s only about 30 of them. Over the course of the movie, Pua has several girls bound and thrown into the water to appease the Shark God. Only Mahia is rescued and the other two are chum. 

I’m curious, does the Island Company sign off on this? Human sacrifices don’t seem conducive to company morale (none of the girls are thrilled at the prospect of becoming sacrifices) and also you’d think they’d have to replace said lost workers. How is this a profitable business practice for the Island Company to turn a blind eye toward. Unless Pua writes it off as a “workplace accident,” in which case she comes off as even more unlikable than before (no mean feat) since she’s effectively running the island as a franchisee/dictator (with a hint of cargo cult). I just don’t see how this is a valid business plan. Oh, and Lee steals a bunch of pearls in the escape attempt and said pearls are lost on Shark Reef in the climactic struggle, so there goes a big chunk of the shipment the Island Company will be coming to pick up in a few days. I imagine some executive somewhere is going to get fired when the report comes back. 

The reason I dwell on this is because there is absolutely nothing else to discuss about the movie. It is badly acted, vaguely shot, atrociously written, and uncomfortably boring to sit through. The characters are so detestable I was rooting for the escape boat to capsize on the reef and for Tangaroa’s (who is an actual Sea God in Maori mythology. But not a She God) sharks to just devour everyone. A better print might have helped the experience since Hawaii is noted for its scenery after all. 

I do not recommend it, but the movie exists for free on Youtube. You're better off just enjoying the way better movie poster and the surprisingly good-quality trailer over on Trailers From Hell. The embed isn't working, so just follow the link above. 

“That's the trouble with you eggheads - you jump to conclusions! I know what I see and I see a dead man, but, uh, I don't see any spider.”

Time once again to jump into the processed-shot world of Bert. I Gordon. Today’s entry is 1958’s Earth Vs. The Spider AKA The Spider.

Story
In River Falls, (I presume) California, a teenager and her insensitive boyfriend look for her missing dad. Dad had a reputation as a drunk, but when the kids find his wrecked truck and some bloody clothes near a cave, it seems drunk driving was not the problem. No, that problem is a giant spider that the teens barely escape. The High School science teacher arranges to spray the monster with enough DDT to fill Lake Mead, and the spider’s corpse is stored in the school gym because it’s the only place large enough to study it.

And then the janitor lets a band into the gym to rehearse for the school dance, and they in turn are followed by the drama class who start shaking, rattling, and rolling, and the power of rock music rouses the spider from its slumber, sending it on a murderous rampage across the city before it’s killed in its original cave through a complicated series of events where the two teenagers from the beginning are trapped inside when a road crew blasts the entrance shut, then has to dig an entrance to rescue the kids, and the science teacher electrocutes the hell out of the beast.

Characters
Carol Flynn: June Kenney plays an average small town girl with average issues like occasional disagreements with her boyfriend and a father with a reputation as a bit of a drunk. Actually, her attachment to her father moves the plot along several times (sometimes stupidly) because she is devoted to keeping and recovering his last gift to her (a piece of jewelry) that she is willing to run back into the giant spider’s cave to find it after the plot has decided that she dropped it in there.

Mike Simpson: (Eugene) Gene Persson plays Carol’s rather dense and unintentionally insensitive boyfriend. Mostly he serves to follow Carol around and voice doubts about various things. Oh, and to drive a car. His dad owns a movie theater.

Sheriff Cagle: Gene Roth plays the simple, and extremely skeptical provincial sheriff. Like any B-movie sheriff, he doesn’t believe the teens when they tell him there’s a giant monster attacking people. It takes a few dead deputies to convince him that yes, there is indeed a giant monster attacking the town.

Professor Art Kingman: Ed Kemmer plays the actual hero of the film. He’s a high school science teacher and the first person to believe the teens when they tell him what they’ve seen. He’s also the guy who comes up with effective plans to stop the creature. However, after the spider is put down the first time, he’s determined to study it (like all good scientists do) and makes the miscalculation that the beast is dead instead of dormant. Still, he’s the only character that does anything truly proactive in the movie.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Bert I. Gordon, it works in Gordon’s signature processed shots to make things really big on a small budget. In this case, it’s a tarantula, and the effects are generally decent (though issues of scale come into play for differing shots). The spider’s web is very obviously a standard (and large) rope net. The film also uses Carlsbad Caverns as the “location” of the spider’s cave, but there’s some very obvious matte work and I suspect it was just cheaper to use elements from, say postcards, than to actually shoot in the actual caverns. There’s lots of cost and time cutting cheats in this genre and this movie is no different.

There is a random insert shot of a baby crying (presumably orphaned or abandoned) in the street amid the wreckage of the spider's rampage that is rather inexplicable. It only lasts a few seconds and I guess the purpose of it is to show the tragedy of this destruction, but it doesn't fit into a big, dumb giant spider movie like this which is full of lots of really, really dumb goofiness. All it manages to do is provide a few seconds of mood whiplash before jumping right back into "holy crap, how do we stop a giant spider!?"

Writing
Story by Bert I. Gordon, Screenplay by Laszlo Gorog and George Worthing Yates. Well, it’s a giant spider movie. It definitely provides that. The characters are not very interesting and the plot is by its nature far-fetched. Still, unlike some other contemporaries, it’s not boring and scenes don’t linger as long on pointless padding conversations as other movies. (They’re still present, but pacing at least exists in this movie).

Sound
Albert Glasser provides an enthusiastic and bombastic soundtrack to the movie. There’s also some Theremins thrown in for good measure. Because its not a 50s Sci-fi movie without Theremins.

Conclusion
Earth Vs. The Spider is an acceptable representative of the 50’s Giant Monster craze. Not the best, but not the worst. It’s bad, sure, but it has enough crazy images, concepts, and stuff going on that it’s at least entertaining.

“White people shouldn’t live too long out in the jungle.”

In 1951, Curt Siodmak, a screenwriter probably most famous for the very excellent Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man, wrote and directed Bride of the Gorilla, which recycled a ton of elements from The Wolf Man.

Plot
In South America, a brash young plantation manager is having an affair with his employer’s beautiful young wife. There’s an argument at dinner and he gets fired by the old man, and the argument continues outside. The two struggle briefly, and the manager lets a deadly snake bite the old man and kill him. This would be great news for our protagonist, but the deed is seen by the creepy old native witch who works on the plantation. She was following our protagonist to get revenge on him for abandoning a local lover, and she takes the opportunity to curse him (and starts slipping a magical plant into his drink to facilitate the curse). The manager inherits the plantation and marries the widow, but soon starts seeing himself transform into a bestial creature. Not coincidentally, a bestial creature begins terrorizing the region at night, and a local police commissioner begins investigating.

Characters

Barney Chavez: Raymond Burr! Clearly not Hispanic. Or Spanish. Barney is a terrible plantation manager who slacks off constantly and is juggling at least two love affairs before his boss fires him and the fateful confrontation happens. Afterwards, things seem pretty great for him, he gets a profitable estate and a beautiful bride that loves him. Then he starts seeing his hand get hairy, then sees a gorilla costume instead of his reflection in the mirror. The curse starts driving him up a wall and he starts spending more time out in the jungle than with his wife. The natives begin whispering of the “sukara” a beast that is tall, red, and somewhat man-like (In other words, a gorilla costume). For a while its up in the air whether Barney is actually turning into a creature or its all in his head.

Dina Van Gelder: Barbara Payton plays the young, materialistic trophy wife of the plantation owner. She’s not happy in her marriage, since she doesn't love her husband and they live in the middle of nowhere. So when the young stud Barney starts up a relationship with her, she goes for it. Blinded by love, she doesn't realize (at first) that Barney’s really responsible for her husband’s death; she loves him unconditionally. Dina bet on the wrong horse though, since Barney starts losing it and would rather frolic in the jungle than spend evenings with her. Yes, he cheats on her with the Jungle. She still loves him and wants to get them away from the plantation, which leads to dire consequences.

Klaas Van Gelder: Paul Cavanagh plays Dina’s sickly husband. He’s not in the movie long, but gets to express his intense dislike of Barney and feels bad that he can’t make Dina happy. Then it's snakebite time.

Dr. Viet: Tom Conway plays the family physician who gets caught up in investigating the mysterious goings-on. He’s ALSO got romantic feelings for Dina, but she doesn't even notice, probably because he’s older than Barney and thoroughly boring. 

Police Commissioner Taro: Lon Chaney Jr. is also clearly not Hispanic, but plays one anyway. He’s effectively the hero of the movie, a local boy made good who came home and is now putting the pieces of a murder mystery together. He’s also a creature between two worlds, but he knows it (and doesn't kill farmers in the night). City educated and sworn to uphold civilized law, he’s also well-versed in local legend and superstition and the more…flexible form of justice found in the jungle. 

Al-Long: Giselle Werbisek plays the creepy housekeeper and witch woman. She’s got an illegal plant that she can do magic with. The locals all hold her in awe and fear. She actually witnesses Van Gelder’s death from the bushes but doesn’t do anything about it, instead leaning over his dead body and cursing Barney Chavez to become like an animal. At the inquest she gives false testimony that helps acquit Barney, but then she holds what she knows over Barney’s head and quietly keeps drugging him with the plant. She comes across as sinister and unlikable.

                               Man, I wish I had this as a .gif

Visuals/Effects

This was one of the few movies directed by Curt Siodmak. Siodmak was an interesting guy. Born in Germany in 1902, he was part of the mass exodus of Jewish filmmakers who fled the Nazis prior to World War II and he had a long, healthy career as a screenwriter and novelist. His older brother Robert Siodmak had a much more prominent career as a (more successful) director. 

As far as the visuals of this movie go, it's okay I guess. The budget is obviously low and the gorilla costume is not very good. I presume the filmmakers realized this, as they kept it off the screen as much as possible. Sure, it was probably also minimally used to build tension and uncertainty, as they use it in reflections and for hands, but I think the look of the gorilla costume was also a factor. The rest of the movie is a very workmanlike production.

Writing

Written by Curt Siodmak, I really can’t help but focus on the similarities to The Wolf Man. Its got a curse, a gypsy-like wise old woman, the elements of a love triangle, the notion of the bestial nature of man as a curse, and its even got Lon Chaney Jr. The major thematic difference is that Barney Chavez is a brutal, unsympathetic murderer and Larry Talbot was a sympathetic, likable guy. Outside of the commonalities, the dialogue, characters, and plot are all quite pedestrian. I suppose it's also worth noting that gorillas are not native to South America. At all.

Sounds

Original music by Raoul Kraushaar and Mort Glickman (uncredited). It’s…there, in a forgettable way. 

Verdict

The movie essentially takes Siodmak’s Wolf Man premise and recycles it into the South American jungle with an ape. Curt Siodmak cribbing from his earlier, better script but with a much lower budget is somewhat interesting, but not particularly compelling. There are worse movies out there, but considering the talent involved in making this, Bride of the Gorilla is simply mediocre and mostly boring. Sure, it's in the public domain and easy to find, but you're not missing anything by not seeing it.

“Before we get through this thing, we may uncover sins that even the Devil might be ashamed of.”

Yeeaaaahhhh buddy! October returns and once more its time to open up the dusty doors of Castle RMWC to a month of horror, the macabre and the weird. Well, more weird, at least. This year will continue the tradition of mixing in new stuff with old, significant and often overlooked pieces from the past, and pure schlock. Thus, I bid you welcome. Enter freely and of your own free will, as we spend the month dancing with the weird.

I miss Voodoo zombies. Zombie. Zuvembie. Xombi. Zombi. You know, OG Zombies.

So why not go back to the source? 1932’s White Zombie is pretty much the first feature-length zombie movie, and the granddaddy of every other walking dead movie made. Rob Zombie’s band was named after this movie, so there's that going for it.


Plot
A young couple arrive at a Haitian plantation. It belongs to a mutual friend, who is also the third wheel in a love triangle who schemes with a sinister local mystic to take the woman for himself. After getting friend-zoned one last time, the plantation owner goes through with his plan, slipping the bride a potion at the wedding dinner that slips her into a death-like trance. Distraught and drunk, her widower finds her tomb empty one night and starts investigating, while the plantation owner begins having second thoughts about his deal with the mystic, since his beloved has been transformed into a zombie.

Characters

Charles Beaumont: Robert Frazer plays the jealous plantation owner. It was his suggestion for the couple to have the ceremony at his Haitian mansion, where he not-so-smoothly tries to woo Madeline away from her fiancee right before the wedding ceremony. Beaumont is unhealthily obsessed, and he eventually realizes this, seeing as the raw deal he makes transforms Madeline into an emotionless puppet not even under his control. 

Neil Parker: John Harron plays our hero. He works for a bank and is incredibly in love with his fiancee. To be honest, he only gets interesting after Madeline’s “death.” Then he becomes a drunk, alternating between drinking his sorrows away in bars and grieving in the cemetery. It's at one such cemetery visit that he find’s Madeline’s tomb empty, triggering his investigation.

Madeline Short Parker: Madge Bellamy plays our heroine, though for most of the movie she’s in a passive trance. Before the wedding, she’s not fleshed out much, being somewhat creeped out by the Haitian locals and talk of Voodoo. She doesn't get to enjoy being Mrs. Parker long, since Beaumont’s obsession with her ends up literally objectifying her. 

Dr. Bruner: Joseph Cawthorn plays a Christian missionary who feels uneasy about Beaumont’s estate and urges the Parkers to leave right after the wedding. After Neil’s shocking discovery, Bruner’s local knowledge and connections help the duo track down Legendre’s hideaway. Interestingly, one of his oldest friends and connections is a Haitian witch doctor named Pierre.

“Murder” Legendre: Bela Lugosi outright steals the show with his creepy eyes, sinister goatee and gleeful villainy. Part devilish dealmaker, part super villain, his past is vaguely hinted at. While the movie makes it clear that its possible for these zombies to return to normal from their drugged state, Legendre still has supernatural powers: he has an affinity to birds of prey and he can silently and mentally command his zombies. He learned voodoo from a local expert, then converted him into his first zombie. Legendre then went on a zombie-making spree, using them as cheap labor in his sugar mill and, to his unending delight, he made his former enemies into his zombie A team (i.e. the ones you see on screen a lot). He plays Beaumont for a fool: Legendre is the true master of zombie-Madeline, and once Beaumont starts turning against Legendre, the bokkor slips some poison into Beaumont’s drink and cheerfully sits down to watch his former partner slowly and painfully turn into a zombie. Lugosi’s fantastic in this.

Visuals/Effects

Directed by Victor Halperin (and co-produced with his brother), this is clearly a low budget movie compared to the Universal stuff from 1931. There’s a rough-around-the-edges quality to it. Some of the edits are a little sloppy. Though there are some great touches. First is the makeup effects by Jack Pierce. His zombies are the slow, wide-eyed kind, but each one looks unique and has “personality.” You can tell that they had lives prior to their weird state of unlife, and their costumes reflect that. Some of the sets, particularly Legendre’s estate and his sugar mill, are incredibly atmospheric and eye-catching. The Mill stands out as the most visually striking scene, with the large gears all being operated by zombies, and when one accidentally falls in, the others keep pushing away without a pause. Effectively creepy in a movie where the acting is very theatrical. 

There’s also an interesting split-screen effect near the end where Neil and Madeline are shown: Neil is swooning from fever on the beach below Legendre’s castle and Madeline is standing in a trance inside one of the rooms therein. It doesn’t quite work right, since the effect is a little jerky, but it still conveys the mood quite nicely, showing both character at respective low points. I applaud the ambition of the effect.

Writing

Story and Dialogue by Garnett Weston and based on (uncredited) the novel “The Magic Island” by William Seabrook. The plot has roots in sensationalism: White people go to exotic location and are bedeviled by exotic local magic. Zombies were one of the new, hot supernatural things at the time. 

As for the character work, its mostly bland. Neil only gets interesting after he turns into a mournful drunk prone to bouts of swooning. Madeline is more of a plot device/object of desire than a complete person. Dr. Bruner is cut from the exact same cloth as Abraham Van Helsing. Beaumont’s arc is thoroughly predictable in its path from “obsession” to “I’ve made a huge mistake.” Even Legendre is two-dimensionally evil, but Lugosi manages to elevate the material above the unimpressive script.

Sounds

Original music by (uncredited) Xavier Cugat according to IMDB. According to Wikipedia, most of the soundtrack is a hodgepodge of classical pieces recorded for the film including works by Mussorgsky, Liszt and Wagner. There is also a Voodoo-sounding chant that plays over the opening credits that establishes the exotic tone right away. 

Verdict

White Zombie is actually rather good. Bela Lugosi is playing up his gleeful devilishness and cuts a sinister figure much less restrained and aristocratic than Dracula. Which is good, because he carries the film entirely by himself. The other actors are…there, and play their roles, but what sticks with you after this movie is Bela and the great zombie makeup by Jack Pierce and the overall spooky mood. Respect most definitely due. 

The film's also in the public domain, so it's extraordinarily easy to get a copy of it. Hell, four of the first five results for "White Zombie 1932" on Youtube are the full movie.

“Thong, the fish is ready!”

Conan the Barbarian was a success, and success breeds imitators. The 80s saw a string of barbarian hero movies. Perhaps one of the strangest that isn’t Robot Holocaust *shudder* comes from the land of spaghetti and frequently dissolved parliaments: Italy! It’s 1984’s Ator l'invincibile 2 AKA The Blade Master aka Cave Dwellers. And yes, the 2 in the title does indeed note that there was a First Ator movie. So what makes this barbarian different from Conan? He fights evil…with SCIENCE!

Wha?

If you wonder why I actually liked the 2011 Conan remake, THIS is one of the reasons.

Story
After an opening scene where a bunch of cavemen fight for no reason whatsoever and have no connection to the plot proper, we meet  an Archimedes-type of guy and his hot daughter. He proceeds to explain that he’s got some sort of dangerous invention very important to mankind’s future and then gives a long and confusing flashback using footage from another Ator movie to establish his warrior credentials. He sends her away to find our hero while he is captured by a somewhat…swishy warlord who was once his student. The Warlord wants the secrets of the Macguffin that will help him conquer…the world I guess. However, the girl makes it our hero’s place (who also happens to be a former student of the sage’s) and convinces him to go rescue her dad.

So off they go in search of ADVENTURE! Along the way they run into some vaguely samurai-looking goons, a magical mist that gets them lost, an extremely well-lit Cave filled with cannibalistic Dwellers (DUN DUN DUN), some invisible monsters, make it to Ator’s home village which is now forced to pay tribute in human sacrifices to a snake cult, get captured by said villagers when he tries to organize a defense against the snake cult, watches the village get burned down by the snake cult, then fight their way out of the Snake Cult’s Snake God’s lair, conduct an air assault on the villain’s fortress and have a final duel (because it always ends in a final duel). So you can’t say that nothing happens in this movie.

And to think I liked snake cults before having to type the above paragraph. Snake cult, snake cult, snake cult.

Wait, air assault? Yeah, that’s a thing that happens in this movie.

Characters:
Ator: Miles O’Keefe is our beefy, loin-clothed hero. He’s pretty handy in a fight but manages to get captured more than once. Oh, and he can construct a fully functional hang glider that he can drop bombs from. Yes, that happens in this movie.

Mila: Lisa Foster is our heroine and she’s easy on the eyes. Once she finds Ator she doesn’t really do much besides follow his lead, have conversations, and get captured. She wears a hubcap on her chest and can travel great distances with an arrow sticking out of her chest.

Akronas: Charles Borromel is our egalitarian sage. He talks…very…slowly and is full…of exposition.

Zor: David Brandon as David Cain Haughton is our Villain. He’s got a gigantic helmet and a gigantic moustache, both goofy. Oh, and eyeliner. He and Akronas trade passive aggressive “banter” back and forth for the bulk of the movie.

Thong: Kiro Wehara as Chen Wong is Ator’s hyper-competent sidekick who is the one who actually does most of the heroism. He’s also got the best dialogue in the movie. See, since he doesn’t speak, implying that the dialogue isn’t very…ah forget it. Regardless, he’s the badass of the film.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Joe D’Amato as “David Hills” and cinematography by Joe D’Amato as “Federico Slonisco.” The visuals are uninspired and there are all manner of anachronisms and gaffes throughout the movie. Like hand rails and tire tracks. Costume design…isn’t very good either.

Writing
Written by Joe D’Amato as “David Hills,” the story fares a little bit better. It follows standard fantasy movie conventions for a while. Threats are encountered, then somewhat unceremoniously defeated so they can move on to the next fantasy cliché situation. And then we get the hang glider scene and we jump off the cliff from fantasy clichés into surrealism and then at the end we have a shot of a nuclear mushroom cloud and some narration that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the movie.

Sound
Original music by Joe D’-- Oh. No, actually its by Karl Michael Demer and Carlo Rustichelli. Lots of synthesizers.

Conclusion
Ator L’invincible 2 is one weird low budget fantasy movie, which makes it eminently riffable and oddly enjoyable. It manages to be weird and not boring. In that regard, its actually quite entertaining and watchable.

Note I didn't say "good" anywhere up there.

“The monster can destroy everything with his tongue.”

What’s this? MORE Gamera the giant nigh-invincible turtle?? Yep. Here’s 1966’s Daikaijû kettô: Gamera tai Barugon (AKA Gamera Strikes Again AKA War of the Monsters AKA Gamera vs. Barugon), the first Gamera movie to be in color.

Yay?

Story
We pick up right after Gamera the Invincible with a meteorite/asteroid hitting Gamera’s rocket almost immediately and releasing him from his prison. So much for the Z Plan. Being Gamera, the big turtle is able to fly back to Earth and attacks a power plant because of the whole feeding on heat energy thing. Gamera loves flames. Then he flies away.

Then we have a pilot getting recruited into a shady treasure hunt to (at least in the English dub) New Guinea to recover a huge opal that was stashed there during the war (WWII, presumably). A team of three (and thankfully no little kids in sight) arrive, are warned by the natives to not go, they go anyway, find the opal and of course, one of them gets really dead, one gets really greedy, and one (our hero) gets really almost blown up. He’s rescued (then berated) by the villagers and the girl in the village decides to go after it to return it (our hero agrees to go with her to fix his mistake). The traitor high-tails it back to Japan, but along the way, the Opal is irradiated and starts to hatch. Turns out its not an opal at all.

At landfall, BARUGON busts out of the ship, a giant four-legged dog/lizardy thing with a tongue that can shoot out and catch stuff, breath that can freeze things and a back that can shoot out a deadly rainbow. Wait, deadly rainbow? Barugon freezes Gamera when he shows up (effectively removing him for most of the movie) and goes on a rampage. According to legend, his greatest weakness is water, so the humans try their hardest to lure him into a lake so he can drown. Doesn’t work. They also construct a giant mirror system to reflect the rainbow back onto Barugon. It sort of works. Then, when all hope seems lost, Gamera thaws out and beats Barugon in an incredibly anticlimactic fight: by grabbing the beast and dragging him into the water where he promptly drowns.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Shigeo Tanaka, the visuals are fairly standard for the genre. The Gamera and Barugon suits aren't bad, but they do look a little lower quality than contemporary Godzilla kaiju costumes. The monster fights themselves are disappointingly brief and most of the movie is spent alternating between the humans and whatever model set Barugon is currently demolishing.

Writing
Written by Nisan Takahashi, the story feels a little…divided. Gamera is barely in it, so he feels tacked on, the human stuff isn’t really bad at all, it just feels like a kaiju was shoehorned in to its original pitch. Barugon isn't really a well defined monster: he’s just a baby from a race of “demons” that hatch every 1000 years on his island and when one does, the villagers just throw a giant diamond into a large body of water and said monster drowns. It begs the question: “why?” Why is Barugon’s species drawn to shiny objects like that? Why is submersion an instant kill? Why a rainbow attack?? Why isn’t Gamera in the movie more?

Sound
Original music by Chûji Kinoshita, which is fine for the genre. Additionally, the sound effects for Barugon aren't all that great. The beastie makes a kind of snap-hissing sound for almost everything.

Conclusion
Well, Gamera vs. Barugon isn't very good. It’s kind of a slog and there’s not enough Gamera in it to truly justify him getting top billing. Barugon is plenty weird though, with his tongue, rainbow death ray and amazingly specific weakness. Major props for not having a massively annoying kid, too.

“Trumpy, you can do magic things!”

In the international spirit fostered by the Olympics, how about a low budget Spanish/French horror movie that got a cutesy plot about a kid adopting an alien tacked on because E.T. was a huge success? Or a cutesy movie about a kid adopting an alien with a horror movie tacked on because it was too similar to E.T. 1983 produced Los Nuevos Extraterrestres, AKA The Unearthling AKA Extraterrestrial Visitors AKA The Pod People (there are no pods. There are eggs, but not pods.)

Nothing good will come of this.

Story
Well, we’ve actually got 3 plots. Plot A involves a group of rather bored looking poachers sneaking into a park to, well, poach. One of them wanders into a cave and finds a bunch of weird eggs, so his first instinct is to start smashing them up. He destroys most of them before being killed by the camera--err, monster, who then goes a-huntin’ for humans.

Plot B involves a bunch of unlikable but innocent (bad) musicians going camping in the same woods for the weekend and they get systematically killed off by the same monster.

Plot C involves a weird little kid named Tommy who lives with his mother and grandfather in a house in the same park (??) who finds the last egg and hatches it. It grows into a short fuzzy thing with an elephant snout that he calls Trumpy. Trumpy has incredible powers over time and space that he uses to do really dumb stop motion effects.

The three storylines collide, people die, the audience is left confused because nothing makes any sense.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Juan Piquer Simón, the visual elements of the movie never mesh. The best scenes are the big establishing shots of foggy mountains. When that’s the best the movie has to offer, it’s a bad sign. The rest of movie? Not so good. The alien costumes are really, really bad and there’s WAYYYYYYY too much fog. Pacing is also an issue, as well as mood whiplash because you go from a monster stalking teens in the woods to a friendly monster befriending a disturbingly sheltered kid.

Writing
Joaquín Grau and Juan Piquer Simón on scripting duty. 3 storylines, 2 different moods. It doesn’t work. At all. Doesn’t help that the characters are all universally unlikable. Although two of the dumb poachers are at least somewhat amusing, but they get killed off halfway. Trumpy is somewhat likable, but he doesn’t speak (which is probably part of his charm).

Sound
The music is really, really bad.  There is one musical number because the teenagers are in a recording studio because they’re a band, but the lyrics are near unintelligible.

Conclusion
I read somewhere that the director was never happy with the end result, and I can see why. The Pod People/Extraterrestrial Visitors/The Unearthling/Los Nuevos Extraterrestres is a mess of conflicting moods, bad characters and bad effects. Although the MST3K version is a riot.



Good? He's the BEST!

“Oh my god, its Glenn.”

You would think that every movie with the word “Ninja” in the title is a gateway to cheesy, borderline stupid, fun. I was once like you, naive and innocent. Not anymore. I saw Ninja Empire. Which IMDB tells me is actually originally called Ninja Phantom Heroes (sometimes with USA added on) and was released in 1987 by producer Tomas Tang and director Godfrey Ho and re-titled to Ninja Empire in a boxed set I have, which is made even more confusing because Godfrey Ho released a different movie called Ninja Empire in in 1990.

Even trying to dig up information about this wreck makes my head hurt.

Story
Well, its another result of a foreign film getting edited up with some new footage of Americans. For instance, the main body of the movie is some kind of 70s Hong Kong crime story that features characters being introduced and killed off left and right without even knowing their names or any kind of investment in them, our fine producers decided to edit in a plot about a former prisoner who also happens to be a ninja (we called him “Camo Ninja” because of his outfit) getting his rank back and sent to spy on stuff in Hong Kong and running in to his arch enemy “Painter Ninja” (because of his suit as white as his bleached hair). What are their names? I think they’re Ford and Morris respectively, but that's irrelevant. There’s a Hong Kong cop named Christine who partners up with Camo Ninja as well, but again, that’s irrelevant aside from getting captured. They fight here and there, but the real story seems to be about a kind of dynastic struggle between some crime families. I dunno. The ninja are just tacked on. There certainly isn’t an empire of them and they certainly don’t have anything to do with large chunks of runtime involving gangsters.

Visuals/Effects
The edited in stuff is way, way, way cheaper than the Hong Kong gangster movie stuff. The crime movie stuff doesn’t have any ninja. Sadly, the ninja segments are also the most entertaining bits, since at least there’s fighting and ninjas exploding upon death. Yes, ninjas explode upon death in this movie. I don’t think that’s how they actually work, but who cares, its something happening on screen that you can sort of follow. I will concede that the fight choreography isn't that terrible. In addition to the overall badness of the mashup, the editing is schizophrenic, where things will cut violently to a completely unrelated scene. Stuff I’ve read on the internet also implies that there’s a longer 90 minute cut out there. The version I saw was 78 minutes long, which is more than long enough.


Behold our villain, and his ninja training...playground.


Writing
Pretty much everything I complained about for Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women also applies here. Trying to shoehorn a completely different plot in just doesn’t work and the result is that both sections are incomprehensible. Whatever was written on the disc sleeve by way of a synopsis was for the 1990 Ninja Empire and not what this movie contained. I have no idea who these characters are, nor what they are trying to accomplish, nor why should I care.

Ninja Phantom Heroes/Empire goes an extra step by throwing in one of the most bullshit endings I’ve ever seen. Painter Ninja infiltrates Camo Ninja’s base to rescues his buddies, fights some more ninja, fights Camo Ninja, lots of crazy things are happening, ninjas are exploding, then there’s running around, and Painter Ninja turns around, ready to square off for a final showdown as Camo Ninja rescues the girl…

AND THE MOVIE JUST ENDS. No end credits. Just “The End.” IT JUST ENDS. As you sit in the ensuing darkness and silence, you feel two things: confusion as to what just happened followed by relief that the nightmare is over.

Sound
The sound is bad. The dub is atrocious and difficult to understand. Sound effects for things like shuriken are absurd. The music may be ripped off from other movies, according to some of the comments on YouTube (like reading YouTube comments is ever a wise decision).

Conclusion
Four-letter words. The angry kind that you don’t normally use in polite company. That’s what I would use to describe this movie. Hell, that’s what I DID use to describe this train wreck. I have a very high tolerance for schlock and can put up with a lot of crap but Ninja Phantom Heroes (USA)/Ninja Empire actually hurt. As bad as its two component stories are, they are much, much worse together. Zardoz is a coherent masterpiece compared to this. Troll 2 is a pleasant romp. About the only thing that I’ve seen that surpasses this movie in terribleness is Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. Ninja Empire is only slightly more watchable because things actually happen on-screen.

No trailer, but holy crap, this clip contains most of what happened after "THE END" of the cut I watched.

I'd say I was surprised that the fight devolves into Painter Ninja throwing tin plates at Camo Ninja, who fends them off with an umbrella that shoots bottle rockets, but I'm not. I just wish the rest of the movie was that memorable. 

"Hollywood is Running out of Ideas" 1934 Edition

There’s one complaint that gets trotted out whenever anything like an adaptation or a remake gets announced, like the new Total Recall. You know the gripe. “Hollywood is running out of ideas.” Its never just the phrase either, but the intonation, too. As though this is a new, fallen era of cinema that pales compared to the long-lost Golden Age, where every successful movie was an original or some hash. Despite the veneer of classiness the Golden Age of Hollywood was as full of remakes and adaptations of novels as they are today.

Don’t believe me? I went to IMDB and looked up the most popular films from 1934, the same year the Hays Code was starting to be enforced. (most popular according to user rating, that is, meaning that people now are still watching and enjoying such films. Maybe not the most scientific benchmark but whatever, I just threw this together as a brief survey). Let’s take a look at the top 20 and see how many of 1934’s greatest films were original ideas. 

In other words: Hooray YouTube links!

1. It Happened One Night. Frank Capra’s comedy won 5 Oscars and was based on a short story. Adaptation.

2. The Thin Man. Fantastic detective comedy (and one of my favorite things ever) based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. Spawned 5 sequels (none of those based on a novel). Adaptation.

3. The Man Who Knew Too Much. Hitchcock thriller starring Peter Lorre. Hitchcock himself remade it in 1956. Original story.

(it says "trailer" but seems like its just the first 10 minutes of the film, but its the best I could find on short notice)



4. The Black Cat. Boris Karloff & Bela Lugosi horror movie very, very loosely based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Adaptation.




5. L'Atalante. French drama/romance (okay, not made by Hollywood at all, but its regarded as a classic). Original script.




6. Babes in Toyland. Laurel & Hardy musical comedy. Adaptation of a play/operetta.

7. Imitation of Life. Drama based on a novel by Fannie Hurst. Adaptation.

8. The Gay Divorcee. Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers musical comedy. Based on a musical play.

9. The Count of Monte Cristo. An adaptation of the novel AND a remake. Film versions date back to 1908.

10. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Adaptation of the novel and a remake of a 1917 film.

11. Tarzan and His Mate. Adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs characters and a sequel. Tarzan movies go back to 1918.

12. Of Human Bondage. Bette Davis movie based on the novel.

13. The Scarlet Empress. Historical drama starring Marlene Dietrich about Catherine the Great and technically an  Adaptation of her diary.

14. Manhattan Melodrama. Crime drama starring Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy. Original.

15. Cleopatra. Cecil B. DeMille epic and an adaptation of historical material and probably a hefty dose of Shakespeare.

16. Death Takes A Holiday. Romance adapted from an Italian play.

17. Palooka. Comedy based on a comic strip.

18. Twentieth Century. Based on a play.

19. Blue Steel. John Wayne western. Original story.

20. The Merry Widow. Musical comedy/romance based on an operetta. And a remake of sorts.

No embed but the Trailer is here: http://youtu.be/hT3t_h4MVGc

Still here? Good


Its silly to think that Hollywood is any more out of ideas now than it was back then. Of the 20 movies I listed, only four of them were from original stories written specifically for the screen. I didn’t pick box office rankings because, well, these are ratings by living users who tend to be the same ones complaining about Hollywood being out of ideas. It’s not a legitimate complaint. Find a new dead horse to beat. PLEASE.

Now the quality of said remakes and adaptations, that’s a different, and entirely valid argument. But if that’s your beef, then say so.