Category Archives: movies

Giving Up On Godzilla

Posted on April 26, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

That sounds a little harsh, doesn’t it? If Godzilla’s feelings are hurt, please tell the big guy I’m not really giving up on him. However, the first Godzilla movie I actually watched kind of left me cold, and you know how I love to put alliteration in my titles.

Spoiler Alert! I am going to give away almost the entire plot of Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1954). That is, the stuff that is in addition to Godzilla stomping Tokyo, which you probably already knew about. Come to think about it, most people only watch these flicks for the Tokyo stomping or other mayhem, so I guess I’m in the clear.

When I saw a Godzilla movie was on TCM, I thought surely my search for cheese had found a prize. Not just a big monster — THE big monster! The king of monsters, according to the title.

Actually, I think that’s a little false advertising right there. It turns out Godzilla is the only monster in the picture. I was kind of hoping for a battle of the beasts, so Godzilla would be, you know, king of somebody. But, no, it was pretty much a straight Godzilla-stomping-Tokyo-what-are-we-going-to-do that one expects when one see Godzilla in the title.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Any number of delightfully entertaining cheesy movies have been made around just that plot-line: people meet monster, monster terrorizes people, people destroy monster. It’s not the tale, it’s the telling.

The telling of this tale is dull. It starts out promisingly enough: we open on a devastated Tokyo and a ponderous voice-over lamenting the destruction. We find it’s Raymond Burr, in the handsome leading man role, which was kind of refreshing. I’m used to seeing him as the heavy or as Ironside.

Soon we are flashing back to our story thus far (viewers such as my husband Steven will be happy to hear that the whole movie isn’t a flashback) (he hates that framing device). Burr is a newspaperman. I think. Oh, all right, I didn’t pay any attention to the story except for one plot point, which I am about to spoil for you.

It seems there is this scientist who has a beautiful daughter who does NOT turn out to be Burr’s love interest (he doesn’t get a love interest. I bet Burr was pretty miffed about that: finally gets to be the leading man, doesn’t get a love interest! What’s that all about?). She is engaged to some big shot scientist — some arranged marriage bullshit — but has fallen in love with another guy. Burr intones (I mentioned it was a ponderous voice-over, didn’t I?) that a love triangle is nothing unusual, but this one will have Implications in our story.

I was all agog to find out what the implications would be. Would the spurned fiance sic Godzilla on the usurper? Would he be bitter enough to CREATE Godzilla?

Once again, I should have had a job writing 1950s monster movies. My wild ideas of what might happen next are much more exciting that what the actual writers came up with. Or perhaps I flatter myself.

I did not see that there were any implications at all. The girl goes to break if off with the fiance — whom she has liked and respected all her life — but before she can, he shows her… something horrible. So she’s too upset to break up. Later on, when a gazillion volts of electricity (I didn’t make a note of the number) fail to kill Godzilla, she breaks her vow of secrecy to reveal that the horrible thing was a weapon the guy discovered quite by accident that will destroy EVERYTHING in the water within a certain radius.

So the girl and the third point of the triangle go to convince the scientist to unleash his powerful weapon. I forgot to mention that the reason he is keeping it a secret is so it will not fall into the wrong hands, because he didn’t invent anything to counteract or fight against it. The fact that the girl cheated on him and wants to break up with him does not even enter the conversation. My personal suspicion is that he was never all that into her to begin with.

I may be selling the movie short. It was obviously dubbed from the original Japanese, so perhaps things were lost in the translation.

What remains, though, is deadly serious, and I think that was why the movie ultimately lost me. I don’t mind a movie that takes itself seriously; that often adds to the cheese factor. In this case, however, the seriousness leads to a dirge-like pace and one thing a monster movie needs is a good, brisk pace. In fact, the pace of this movie is so slow, I watched it in two parts. You know a movie is slow when you don’t mind pausing it to go to bed early. That’s what gave me the idea for today’s title, by the way.

To end on a positive note, the effects are very good, especially for the time. They used miniatures and pretty much kept people and Godzilla in different frames, so nothing looked obviously superimposed. It was good miniatures too: I never felt like I was watching a toy stomp dollhouses. Of course, that would have made the movie more cheesy, and you know how I love my cheese.

I discovered after I wrote this post that Godzilla, King of the Monsters was the original Godzilla movie. As such, perhaps some of you feel I should have treated it with more respect. Oh well, too late now.

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Attack of the 50 ft. Cheesy Movie

Posted on April 11, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

Spoiler Alert! Although I must say, I don’t know how much you can really spoil about a movie titled Attack of the 50 ft. Woman. I mean, doesn’t that kind of tell you everything that happens?

I know they did a re-make of Attack of the 50 ft. Woman (1958), so I thought that meant it must have been a “good” movie. I put good in quotes because I’m not sure what it means in this context either. At least I was afraid it would not be cheesy enough for my purposes. I need not have worried.

The movie opens on a newscast about UFO sightings. The newscaster thinks the whole thing is a joke or else that all the sighters are crazy. He tracks the sightings on a globe (handily if inexplicably located right behind him), then declares with a smile that the spaceship should be right overhead soon.

This struck me as a big “Waaait a minute!” The alien ship is apparently sailing around the world. The newscaster shows with his finger that it was here, then here — a quarter of the globe away. Then it stops and STAYS in California? Oh well, perhaps it’s not such a plot hole at that. Maybe California is a mecca for aliens and the ship was headed there all along (cue California jokes) (I hope any California readers have a sense of humor).

The movie continues not cheesily but sleazily, with a guy and girl making out in one of those movie “bar and grills” that really look more like a diner. It transpires that the guy’s wife has stormed out because the guy and girl made eyes at each other. It looked to me like the wife has a legitimate beef, but the guy — Handsome Harry is his name — feels all ill-used.

It seems he started dating the chippy (I’d call her the Blonde, but the Wife later refers to her as a redhead; you know these black and white movies) when he was separated from his wife. He let himself be talked into reconciling and regrets it. He went back because community property “only works for women.” We later find out it’s all her money anyways. What a slime bucket gold digger! I couldn’t wait for the wife to grow to 50 feet and kick his ass!

But wait is what I had to do. First Wife has to encounter the spaceship, which she calls a satellite but looked to me more like an orb. She’s driving down the highway at breakneck speed and slams on the brakes to keep from hitting it. When the giant comes after her (all we see is the hand), the car won’t start again and she runs away.

So right away I liked her better than your usual movie female, because she doesn’t just stand there and scream. She runs! Oh boy does she run! A little later when the unbelieving sheriff drives back with her to check it out, we get an idea of just how far she ran. In pumps, too! What a woman!

Naturally the satellite/orb and giant are gone, and a lot of time is wasted with Handsome Harry trying to prove Wife is crazy and Wife trying to get somebody to believe her. There are a couple of marginally interesting plot twists before she finally gets to be a giant husband-killing monster.

The effects are about what you would expect from a 1958 movie. The ending, too, is about what you expect to happen. I was sorry chippy didn’t meet a more dramatic fate, but one can’t have everything. In general I would label this a fun movie to make fun of.

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Come On, Description Writers!

Posted on April 4, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

I first tried to watch The Hypnotic Eye (1960) on Friday, the day I wasn’t feeling well. I blamed my inability to watch it on my lightheadedness. When I managed to sit through the whole thing on Saturday, I realized it wasn’t me. It’s a dull, stupid movie.

As far as a Spoiler Alert is concerned, I feel I don’t need to give one to anybody who read the little description of the movie in the Guide on Digital Cable. It gives away everything, including the big reveal at the end! For all others, Alert: I’m going to spoil everything.

One doesn’t realize what a spoiler it is when one reads the description: a hypnotist causes beautiful women to deform themselves at the behest of his ugly assistant. As a starting point, that sounds promising. One could get some suspense out of a plot like that.

But, no, the movie is a mystery. We’re not supposed to know why these women are deforming themselves. Of course the hypnotist is under suspicion right away — why wouldn’t he be with the title being The HYPNOTIC Eye? But the assistant part is a little less obvious. And she’s not even very ugly till the very end.

Come on, description writers! We could have spent the whole movie wondering WHY he’s doing this. We would have felt clever for noticing the subtle signals the assistant sends him as he selects his next victim. Instead we sit there thinking, “She’s not that ugly.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The movie starts out cheesy enough for most palates. A beautiful young lady in a slip glides into a kitchen, pausing silhouetted in the doorway so we can admire her shape (if we like). She rubs some stuff from a bottle in her hair, then bends over the gas stove, burner on. And catches her head on fire! There’s wonderful shot where they show the fire superimposed over her hair. These days they would have used CGI to show her blistering skin, which some people would have liked better (um, I’m not one of them).

I thought it was a beauty treatment gone horribly wrong; the heat from the stove was supposed to activate something. But, no, the woman mistook the stove for the sink. That’s some good hypnosis!

Of course the cop on the case doesn’t know it’s hypnosis. There’s a whole bit with him and his colleague (not sure if that guy is another cop or a doctor or what) (you know how I never pay attention to these details) about how hypnosis is a valuable tool in medicine and psychology, but these entertainment hypnotists are nothing but charlatans.

And from there it moves slowly.

There is some suspense along the way. The cop’s girlfriend, in true movie female fashion, puts herself in harm’s way to try to catch the criminal. The big reveal — The assistant is really ugly! That’s why she hates beautiful women! — comes as no surprise, probably not even to people who didn’t read the little description. Why the hypnotist feels compelled to do the assistant’s bidding is never revealed.

In summary, this is a movie that could definitely have used robot heads, especially if you are unfortunate enough to watch it on a day when you feel too lightheaded to make up your own jokes.

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One Cheese, Two Cheese, RATS!

Posted on March 22, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

When I closed yesterday I thought I might take today to come up with a rating system for my cheesy movie reviews. A Facebook friend suggested servings of cheese. I had thought maybe kinds of cheese — this one’s cheddar, that one’s Velveeta. That strikes me as rather qualitative and subjective. Then again, who cares about that? They’re my reviews, and any review is perforce subjective. Then again, not everybody likes the same kind of cheese.

For example, when I think “cheddar” I think dry, aged, classy, substantial, delicious. Others might think, can’t have it without crackers, gets lumpy when it melts, I’d rather have American. For another example, I find Cheez Whiz a delicious treat, whereas cheese snobs find it unbearably tacky and I daresay many refuse to try it. Hmmm. That one’s kind of a metaphor for the sort of movies I like.

But now I’m thinking, if I have to explain what I mean when I rate a movie “cheddar,” I may as well leave off the cheddar and just explain. Which is pretty much what I do now. I say, “Worth a watch,” or, “Good if you want a stupid movie to make fun of.” I don’t know that I’ve ever used it in the blog, but my ultimate pan of a movie is “It needs robot heads.”

This, of course, is a reference to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, in which a guy and two robots make fun of cheesy movies. Delicious show. I think if a movie needs robot heads, it’s not just cheesy, it’s dull. I did find one movie so dull even robot heads couldn’t get me through it. The next time I find myself without a feature on a Saturday afternoon, I may attempt it again and write about it.

Where does that leave us? One cheese, two cheeses, Rats! I never should have watched this movie! But am I rating how cheesy a movie is, how good it is, or how enjoyable? I think I’m better off sticking to my descriptions.

So now I’ve wasted a whole blog post deciding to just keep doing what I’m doing. Maybe I should have saved this one for Lame Post Friday.

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Add a Robotized Dead Brother

Posted on March 21, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

Spoiler Alert! Actually, I’m not sure how much I’ll actually spoil, but I’m used to putting these in now.

I DVR’d The Awful Dr. Orloff with high hopes. Full disclosure: as I currently write this (in my new spiral notebook while on a break at work), I don’t quite remember the doctor’s name or if he was Awful or Horrible or some other adjective. The description said something about using his robotized dead brother to kill women in order to keep his wife beautiful. Kidnapping and/or killing women in order to make or keep another woman beautiful is, of course, a staple of the cheesy horror genre. Add a robotized dead brother and what’s not to like?

I had a bad moment at the beginning of the movie when I realized it was in French with subtitles. For one thing, foreign films have that cachet — ooh, it’s European, it must be classy! More importantly, I was not at all sure I could knit and read subtitles at the same time. I might drop a stitch and I never know what to do when that happens (I’m not that good at knitting). So I had to make more of an effort at this movie, especially when the subtitles and the background blended together. I persevered though, because lately it seems cheesy movies are hard to come by.

This one starts right out looking like a cheesy horror movie should, on an eerie, darkened street, with a beautiful but not very classy woman fleeing in terror from… it could only be the robotized dead brother. That cadaverous gait! Those wide, unseeing eyes! I’d run, too! He catches her, kills her and carries her away, in view of witnesses.

The time is probably the late 1800s: flickering street lamps, horse-drawn carriages. Of course, movies are known to play fast and loose with period. If anyone says, “Here we are in the year blahblah,” I missed it. At least the atmosphere is good, and I think a mad scientist plays better in a period piece.

Soon we meet the hero and heroine, a detective and an opera singer who have fallen in love. When he is assigned the case of the mysterious killer, the newspapers have a field day printing headlines about how he’s dallying with his girlfriend instead of solving the case. So, no intrepid girl reporter, much to my disappointment. No reporters at all, actually, just headlines. Sorry, journalism.

The mad scientist, it turns out, doesn’t know how to transfer the beauty from his murder victims to his deformed daughter — not wife as I was sure it said in the description (I couldn’t get back to the description on digital cable and check). He just keeps trying different experiments. There’s one boob shot when he slices a woman open. Oh, these French films!

The robotized dead guy, by the way, is not not a common or garden dead brother. He was executed for murders including parricide. I thought they guillotined convicts in France. At least, they did on some Frankenstein movies I saw (and wrote blog posts about). I guess I shouldn’t take those as historic fact. No matter, he was a bad man before he was dead and robotized and he’s a bad robotized dead guy now.

That doesn’t stop the mad scientist’s assistant from feeling sorry for him. At least, I don’t know if she’s an assistant. She’s a beautiful woman the mad scientist broke out of prison by making it look like she was dead. I guess she liked him well enough before, but now she thinks he’s mad as well as evil.

The detective’s girlfriend gets to be intrepid, going undercover to try to catch the killer. She’s not completely stupid about it, either. It’s not her fault her detective boyfriend fails to read the note she sends him because he thinks it’s from some random crazy woman. Oh well, it makes for more suspense.

It’s actually a pretty good movie. You just need a large capacity crane to suspend your disbelief. As cheesy entertainment, I say it is worth a watch. Once again, I think I need a rating system, like thumbs up or three stars. Maybe I could discuss a few possibilities on Non-Sequitur Thursday.

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So That’s a Cyclops?

Posted on March 15, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

I DVR’d Cyclops (1957) from TCM with high hopes and it did not disappoint. Oh, it was not a good movie by any stretch. But I had a good time making fun of it.

Oh yeah, Spoiler Alert! I’m probably going to spoil practically everything.

In the first scene, a girl is meeting with a Spanish-accented official who is denying her permission to fly… somewhere, looking for her fiance whose plane crashed there some three years ago.

So let’s start with that. Three years ago? If your fiance disappears in a plane crash, how do you wait three years before going to look for him? Or am I asking too much of a movie female? I suppose the expedition was a little complicated to arrange. For one thing, the girl couldn’t finance it all on her own (I can go on calling her “the girl,” because she’s the only one in the picture). She has joined forces with a guy who has invented something that detects uranium. Gee, do you suppose he is in this only to make a buck and is likely to cause trouble later?

The official plans to send someone with them to make sure they fly straight home and nowhere else. It’s not really spoiling anything to tell you that they circumvent the official and head for the restricted place, is it? I was hoping they would do something at least marginally clever and fool the guy, but no, Lon Chaney, Jr. sucker punches him and they take off. Nobody follows them.

In retrospect it occurs to me that they could have used that fact as foreshadowing: the place is so dangerous the officials will leave them to their fate. I think the script writers got lazy (if they ever invent a time machine, I may try to get myself a job as a movie writer in the ’50s). Well, that’s OK, we want to see the mysterious, dangerous place with the Cyclops; we don’t want to spend the whole picture getting there.

Regarding Lon Chaney I kind of got my hopes up when I saw his name in the credits. Well, I guess actors have bills to pay, too. Actually, Chaney does a good job as the uranium-seeking trouble-maker. It’s just that I had kind of wanted to see him get turned into a Cyclops.

And may I just insert a word about movie slugs? In movies and on television, one sock to the jaw is all it takes. The slugee is down for the count. Men especially like to do this to women “for their own good.” So the man can go off and have all the adventure while the girl stays “safe” (I use the terms “man” and “girl” intentionally). No women get slugged in this picture, so it’s got that going for it.

Lon Chaney is apparently a very good slugger. His next is administered to the pilot of the plane. Even in the close confines of the cockpit, he knocks the guy out so he can grab the controls. Chaney wants to land while his whatevermeter is clicking high. He almost gets his wish in a big way as the plane plummets toward the earth. You see, the other guy has grabbed him from behind and pulled him away from the controls.

Excuse me, what? The pilot is out cold. Why are you pulling the one left awake away from the controls? Luckily the girl shakes the pilot awake in time to avert disaster. I’ll pass over my wonderment that you can shake somebody awake in that situation. Likewise I’ll pass over their extreme luck in finding, inches before impact, a strip of ground sufficient to land on in a huge mountain range. I know, I have to suspend some disbelief. I didn’t even blink when the girl’s map shows they are very close to where the fiance’s plane went down.

So she and the other guy go off hiking into the jungle (yes, a jungle in the mountains, get over it), leaving Lon Chaney to try to talk the pilot into flying him home so he can “stake his claim” to the supposedly uranium-rich area. OK, so they weren’t even allowed to fly there legally, but this guy can just claim it for his very own, like in the Old West? The knock-out slugs and safe landing were easier to swallow than that one!

Never mind, it’s a movie. Let’s get to the monsters. Through the miracle of perspective, we get giant lizards, a giant mouse and a giant hawk. The first time a character sees a giant lizard, he stands there watching it and smoking his pipe in a contemplative fashion. When the lizard retreats behind a rock before anyone else can see it, the guy says it must have been his imagination.

You see where this is going, right? Fiance isn’t dead, he’s a giant. And his face has been hideously deformed by reasons which are never made clear (after all, the animals are all intact) so that he only has one eye and can only talk in grunts. We don’t know if he can understand anything, but the girls tries to talk to him.

Bringing movie female stupidity to new heights, she does not realize that this scary creature is her fiance. She just wonders why looking at him makes her sad. Come on! Even I know who he is, and I never met the guy! Oh well, I suppose three years and radioactive deformities can change a person.

The movie is full of “Why would they…?” moments. For example, why does the Cyclops block the people into a cave with a big old rock which he is then unable to reach them over, as he tries to do? Then he leaves (why?) and they do NOT (a) look for an alternative escape route, (b) see if he’s still there, or (c) try to come up with SOME plan. Instead they opt for (d) go to sleep. I thought it was still morning!

At least this gives Lon Chaney a chance to steal the rifle, which eventually leads to his coming to a not very exciting end at the hand of the monster (who can only get one hand into the cave far enough). Oh, but first he goes back to sleep, and when they all wake up, nobody says, “Hey! Gimme that rifle back!”

The movie can’t seem to make up its mind if the Cyclops is scary or sad. They kind of go back and forth, ending up on scary in one of those “Oh, now the movie is over” endings. I see I’m over 1000 words and I haven’t even started on how that’s not what I thought a Cyclops was. I guess I’ll just end with, if you like a stupid movie you can make fun of, Cyclops is a good choice.

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Witness to a Lucky Murderer

Posted on March 6, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

Spoiler Alert! I’m pretty much going to recount the entire plot of Witness to Murder, including the dramatic climax.

I did not think Witness to Murder (1954) was going to be particularly cheesy when I saw that it starred Barbara Stanwyck, but you never know. They were still cranking out movies at a pretty good pace in the ’50s. They couldn’t all be cinematic masterpieces.

Things start right out excitingly with Stanwyck looking out her window to witness a murder (hence, the title) in an apartment across the street. She really has quite a good view. Some may carp over a murderer acting in front of an open window with the lights on, but, hey, it almost worked for Raymond Burr in Rear Window. Anyways, when we meet the murderer, played by George Sanders, we quickly learn that he is egotistical enough to feel he can get away with anything.

Stanwyck quite sensibly calls the police. This is about the last sensible thing she does, but we can’t really complain about that, because the movie would have been much shorter otherwise. Also, Sanders would have probably gotten away with murder and that character is definitely not likable enough for us to want that to happen.

Gary Merrill and Jesse White play the cops that show up to investigate. White doesn’t really have much of a part. His presence at least enabled me to make a couple of bad jokes about the Maytag repairman, but I must also say, kind of a waste of a good comedic actor.

Sanders is one of those lucky movie murderers who is easily able to cover his tracks. He has one bad moment when he freezes, mid-drag while moving the body, to stare at the elevator dial, afraid the cops are in it. Which struck me as a little silly. I guess I don’t think like a movie murderer, but if I’m dragging a dead body by the elevator and think the cops might be on it, I think I would be more likely do drag the body FASTER, not stand staring at the elevator to see if I’m right.

Now that I’m pondering the point, though, it occurs to me that perhaps he thought the dead lady’s high heels would ka-thunk on the floor and the cops would hear. Maybe he was trying to come up with a good story, one that might begin, “Thank God you’re here! Look what I just found!” We’ll never know, because the elevator passes by, and Sanders is able to stash the body in a handily located empty apartment (did I mention he’s a lucky murderer?) and change into pajamas in time to open the door to the cops, all sleepy-eyed innocence.

The cops are easily convinced that Stanwyck dreamed the whole thing. They are later on very amenable to being convinced that she’s crazy. Stanwyck obligingly has hysterics when confronted with Sanders’ trumped up evidence, landing herself in the loony bin.

I was a little disappointed she doesn’t spend more time in the Snake Pit (it isn’t really very snakey or even very pitty, but I thought I’d throw in another old movie reference to sound more erudite) (did it work?). For one thing, she might have reformed things, like that lady did in Bedlam (perhaps you read my blog post about that movie).

She gets sprung fairly quickly and easily, I believe due to the good offices of Merrill. You may have guessed the two of them fall in love. I always enjoy a love interest, especially when the guy falls for a girl who has a little on the ball, which Stanwyck does, even though the script calls for some typical stupid movie female behavior.

Which brings us to the dramatic climax.

OK, Stanwyck has figured out how Sanders broke into her apartment to type the poison pen letters that convinced the cops she was crazy (yeah, I didn’t explain that part very well earlier, but I’m sure you can keep up). However, she does not, for example, call an all-night locksmith to put in a dead bolt or even spend the night with a girlfriend (actually, I’m not sure Stanwyck has any girlfriends in this; the producers didn’t really spend a lot on minor characters). Well, I suppose one can’t think of everything. She is awfully tired, having not gotten a lot of sleep in the loony bin.

Anyways, guess who’s waiting for her in the bedroom, having already typed a fake suicide note. Stop! As I type this in, I suddenly say, “Waaaait a minute!” The police have Stanwyck’s typewriter. They took it to prove she typed the poison pen letters. Either they nicely put it back rather than properly in the evidence room, or Sanders, in addition to being lucky, is foresighted enough to have ALREADY typed the note. But I digress.

Sanders’ plan is to pitch Stanwyck out the window. Suddenly a lady cop shows up, sent by Merrill to check on Stanwyck. Sanders is, of course, ready with his story, that he was trying to STOP this poor, suicidal crazy woman. Does Stanwyck realize she is now safe? Sanders can’t possibly thrown her out the window and pretend it’s suicide with a lady cop standing right there, for heavens’ sake!

In her second biggest Stupid Movie Female Move of the picture (stand by for number one), Stanwyck runs away screaming. Nobody seems to believe that the guy chasing her wants to kill her, but for some reason they all join the chase. Soon a whole crowd is after her. Boy, can that woman move in a pair of high heeled pumps! Sanders is the only one who can keep up with her!

Then she does the single, absolute biggest Stupid Movie Female Move imaginable: she runs all by herself into a deserted high rise building, all the way up all the stairs and OUT ONTO THE ROOF!!! What a good place to go when you are running away from a man who wants to throw you out of a building and pretend it’s suicide.

It’s a good thing this was the climax, because I was ready to wash my hands of the Stanwyck character after that.

Predictably, nobody in the busybody crowd follows them up the stairs. Equally predictably, Merrill arrives on the scene, armed with Proof that Sanders is a killer. I don’t suppose anybody will be surprised to know that Merrill’s proof is a spurious as the stuff he’s been rejecting from Stanwyck all through the picture.

No matter. This is a movie, he’s the hero, and he’s going to save the day. I didn’t need to include another spoiler alert before I told you that, did I?

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More Vegetarian Zombies

Posted on February 20, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

Spoiler Alert! I don’t know why I bother with these Spoiler Alerts. Real movie reviewers never do. Then again, I think it’s clear I’m not a real reviewer. You probably didn’t need a Spoiler Alert to tell you that.

I was thinking of Monster Movie Monday when I watched King of the Zombies (1941) on Steven’s collection of 50 Horror Classics (so I missed it by a day). Speaking of spoiler alerts, the blurb in the booklet that comes with the collection tells you almost everything. I should have known better than to read it. Really, the word “zombies” in the title tells me everything I needed to know.

The movie opens on three guys on a plane about to make an emergency landing on — what else? — a mysterious, uncharted island. They seem to be getting some radio transmission from the island but they can’t understand it. This makes them hopeful (radio transmission) rather than suspicious (can’t understand it). Of course, the characters don’t know they’re in a monster movie. That kind of ironic pose did not happen in movies till much later (although I do seem to remember Heckle and Jeckle knowing they are cartoon characters. Does that count?) (But I digress).

The three guys are the pilot, a jaunty Irishman; the purported hero; and his valet, a black man. I guess they referred to African Americans as “colored” at this time.

It is no secret that movies of this era reflect the racism rampant in the country at that time. When black people got parts in movies they were usually servants or natives. They sometimes got to sing songs. They sometimes got to act really scared. They were often the comic relief. In this movie, the valet gets to act scared, provides comic relief and is easily the most interesting character in the picture.

The proprietor of the island assures the three that he has no radio, although he is happy to welcome them as his guests. He has a catatonic wife, a beautiful niece and an extremely creepy butler. The Valet is not best pleased when the bad guy (oh you knew he was the bad guy as soon as I mentioned him; I’m not going to keep calling him the proprietor for the rest of the post) sends him off with the creepy butler to the servants’ quarters.

Things look up for Valet when he meets a pretty maid in the kitchen. They take a turn for the worse when she warns him of zombies — dead people who walk. Oh, there’s also an old witch-doctor-looking woman brewing something in a pot.

A lot of time is wasted with Valet seeing zombies and his boss and the pilot not believing him. Not a whole lot is done with the catatonic wife and beautiful niece (it’s the wife’s niece; she’s only related to the Bad Guy by marriage, in case anybody was worried).

That was actually OK with me, because Valet and Pretty Maid were my favorite characters anyways. The Irish Pilot was pretty cool, too, but he didn’t really have enough to do, except die and get made into a zombie. Oops. Well, that’s why I put in the Spoiler Alert.

The zombies in this picture, once again, are not flesh-eating monsters. In fact, Pretty Maid serves them up some stew-looking stuff that is apparently pretty bland. She realizes Valet has not in fact become a zombie when he asks for salt. Apparently zombies can’t eat salt (high blood pressure in the undead? News to me, but, whatever). She puts too much on just to be sure, so I don’t think the poor guy gets any dinner.

I kind of stopped paying attention by the end. I seem to think the zombies revolted; in fact, I remember reading that on the blurb. As in Revolt of the Zombies, it’s not such a much.

I feel I should mention that I watched this movie almost two weeks ago and have been having trouble with the write-up. In these not-as-post-racial-as-one-would-hope times, I hesitated over my description of the black characters. Then I thought maybe I could write a whole blog post thrashing out my dilemma. Before I wrote that post, I re-read my draft of this one and thought, “Hmmm, it’s not so bad. Maybe I’ll publish it after all.”

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And I’m Still Mad About the Dog

Posted on February 19, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

Spoiler Alert: I am pretty much going to recount most of the plot of today’s movie. I feel no qualms of conscience in doing so, because the only reason to watch this movie is Lionel Barrymore’s performance and you can enjoy that in any case.

Calling Dr. Gillespie also stars Donna Reed as a young and beautiful girl about to graduate from some girls boarding school somewhere. At the beginning of the movie she is meeting her young man. Donna’s father has at last consented to their engagement (cue romantic sigh from Donna’s young, impressionable roommate).

The fiance wants to elope right away, but Donna’s father has stipulated that she must finish school first (Yay, Dad, insisting on education! I’m a little sorry we never meet that character).

“I always get my way,” says Fiance with that demure, psycho look you often see in these movies.

“Not this time,” Donna tells him gently. He immediately kills a perfectly nice dog with a rock.

What the hell! I saw the dog and had fears for its well-being, but I hoped the poor thing would make it to the second reel at least. Donna is also upset, but not as upset as me, because she does not immediately terminate the engagement. She asks advice of the understanding headmistress, who recommends a psychiatric evaluation. She calls Dr. Gillespie (Barrymore), in hopes that it can be done so discreetly that even the fiance doesn’t know about it.

Dr. Gillespie calls in a brilliant young surgeon on staff at the same hospital. This young man wants to branch out into psychiatry but has so far been denied by the head of the hospital. The two of them go to the girls school. While Dr. Gillespie holds court with a number of fascinated young girls, Brilliant Surgeon takes Donna and the Fiance for a walk and asks some questions so subtle even I didn’t know what he was getting at.

Dr. Gillespie, Donna and Brilliant Surgeon meet with Fiance’s parents and family doctor. Fiance might be a mental case, our heroes say. Nonsense, says Family Doctor. Who do you think the parents believe?

Luckily, another demonstration of Fiance’s mental imbalance soon follows. No animals are harmed, but he smashes the window of a toy store and wrecks a plane, muttering threats against Dr. Gillespie.

So Family Doctor prescribes a long rest and a trip somewhere. Fiance smiles charmingly from the bed and says he feels fine. He doesn’t remember anything about the dog or the toy plane. As soon as he’s left alone he smashes Donna Reed’s picture and escapes out the window.

In talking with Donna, Brilliant Surgeons realizes that what triggers Fiance’s episodes of madness is the sound of a train whistle. You know, I don’t think the Hollywood screenwriters involved ever took a psychiatry course in their lives. For one thing, I never herd another train whistle for the rest of the picture, but Fiance kills two random guys to get a hot car to impress a dime-a-dance girl he’s trying to make time with.

Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t that a little inconsistent? Smashing a poor dog or a shop window because you’re frustrated and hear a train whistle strikes me as a slightly different psychosis from killing people to obtain a material object. Of course, his little murder for gain in a clumsy, short-sighted act, and the police are soon after him.

Donna Reed looks out her window and screams, because the first place he heads in the school garden. Headmistress, immediately consulting via telephone with Dr. Gillespie, sends Donna to the hospital with the school chauffeur, where she will supposedly be safe. Guess where Fiance is headed.

It is a big hospital. Fiance is able to kill a doctor and steal his glasses and his identity fairly easily (we don’t find out till later the poor other doctor is dead) (and we never meet him either, which saved the producers paying another actor). My first reaction was, “Oh, great disguise. They’ll NEVER recognize you with those glasses one!” But he only runs into people who don’t know him or the dead doctor as he continues to stalk Dr. Gillespie, intent on revenge.

Donna Reed, meantime, is hiding out in Brilliant Surgeon’s office suite, which includes sleeping accommodations (she does not avail herself of the invitation to put on a hospital gown, so don’t get your hopes up) (you know who you are). How fiance figures out she’s there so he can call her is never explained, but she ends up on hand for the final confrontation.

The thing that really annoyed me was Donna’s wailing at the end, “But it wasn’t really his fault!” Three men and a dog are dead! Why are you feeling more sorry for the killer? I’m thinking she doesn’t know about the dime-a-dance girl, for one thing.

On the whole, I thought it was a pretty dumb movie. It was saved for me by Lionel Barrymore and a few of the minor characters. There are a couple of nurses he spars with, as fictional doctors and nurses tend to do. A large, kind of doofy orderly is recruited to act as his bodyguard, unbeknownst to the prickly Dr. Gillespie. I also got a few chuckles from Donna’s roommate, a budding photographer and paramour.

In closing credits they advertised another Dr. Gillespie movie. I’ll have to watch for it. I do love that Lionel Barrymore.

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Be Kind to Animals, Hollywood

Posted on February 18, 2013 by mohawkvalleygirl

What is it with animals coming to bad ends in movies?

I recently wrote about What’s the Matter with Helen?, in which some very beautiful white rabbits suffered at the hands of a lunatic. I watched a movie yesterday in which a perfectly nice looking dog had an even shorter and more thankless role. And now I am looking at a movie where every third or fourth scene, I hear myself saying, “Nothing bad better happen to that cat!”

So far the worst thing that happened to the cat is a lady took away the yarn he or she was playing with. I only wrote my remark about nothing bad happening in the TV Journal once, but as I continued to repeat it, I thought to myself, hey, this could be a blog topic.

Many of us get more upset when bad things happen to animals than we get when bad things happen to people, especially in the movies. After all, animals are more defenseless and often more harmless. Most of them are a good deal less annoying than some people, especially in a work of fiction.

You know, now that I’m writing this, I believe I have touched on the topic before. My defense for repeating myself is: I think it was previously a remark in passing and now it is the topic of the post. Also, it is a topic that bears repeating. Who doesn’t love cats, dogs and beautiful white rabbits (or at least one of the three)?

Hollywood, apparently.

Sometimes it is movie shorthand for a really, really bad person. Ooh, look at them, they were mean to a dog! They can’t be any good AT ALL! Just in case the viewer was looking for socially redeeming characteristics. Now we know there are none to be found.

I still don’t like it. I just don’t LIKE to see bad things happen to good animals. I don’t particularly like it when characters I like die either, but at least I can comfort myself with the thought that actors like to play death scenes. I don’t know that any animals feel the same way.

I don’t think any Hollywood screenwriters are likely to heed my words and start writing movies where all the animals live happily ever after (humans can take their chances). But I wanted to express myself. Now I’ll go back to the movie I was viewing and check out what happens to that cat.

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