What was the last movie you saw?

[Jeffbert]

THANKS, GUYS! though I usually write longer reviews, I could not touch Victoria Silverwolf's depth.

 

[Nozzle Velocity]

This kind of trivia...

There's one of those godawful Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episodes from the 60s where they find a sole survivor of an ancient undersea race. He's all silver and talks funny. It's Robert Duvall.

Also, there's an episode of Andy Griffith where Aunt Bee sits on a jury to decide Jack Nicholson's fate.

 

[Jeffbert]

I had borrowed Voyage to the bottom of the sea DVDs from NF, but as I recall, they were data on both sides, and played very poorly. Maybe available streaming on Prime or HULU; guess I will check. Robert Duvall was in an episode of The Outer Limits; just thinking about that episode makes me laugh.

Saw the Bond film with the Media megalomaniac guy who makes bad things happen, so he can sell more newspapers. I think it was Tomorrow Never Dies.

Godzilla is TCM's monster of the month; Gojira (Japanese original version) followed by the Americanized version Godzilla, King of the Monsters!; 'starring' ex-Noir heavy Raymond Burr. 3 more Godzilla films follow. It all starts at 8 PM tonight!

 

[Randy M.]

I recorded the original Suspira last night and hope to get a chance to watch it after next week. It's been years since I've seen it.

TCM October schedule

For anyone who gets Turner Cable Movies, horror and fantasy movies are concentrated on Thursdays and Fridays but there are others scattered throughout the rest of the month, as well. As usual, a lot of the Val Lewton produced movies from the 1940s, and a fair amount of Hammer, too.

Randy M.

 

[Parson]

There's one of those godawful Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episodes from the 60s where they find a sole survivor of an ancient undersea race. He's all silver and talks funny. It's Robert Duvall.

Also, there's an episode of Andy Griffith where Aunt Bee sits on a jury to decide Jack Nicholson's fate.

That was exactly the one episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea that I can recall and have thought about it once in a while over the years. I remember the scene with the chess pieces (I remember it in a bit of detail but will try not to spoil it for anyone else.)

I also saw the A.G. show with Aunt Bee on the jury. But hadn't thought about it in decades! --- Never would have guessed the character was Jack Nicholson!

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Death Laid an Egg (La morte ha fatto l'uovo, 1968)

Genuinely weird combination of giallo, satire, and art film surrealism. Any plot synopsis will make it sound a lot more linear than it really is, given all the flash forwards, flashbacks, and seemingly unrelated images. Starts with a guy watching another guy kill a woman. Killer is married to a rich woman (Gina Lollobrigida, of all people) who owns a super-high tech chicken farm. There's also a young secretary (Ewa Aulin, who played Candy in the infamous film of the same name) around, having an affair with the killer. A publicity guy for the chicken association shows up, and the plots and counter-plots begin, leading to an ending full of tricky twists and turns. So much for the basic thriller story line, which makes up only part of the film. Did I mention the game a bunch of rich people play at a party, where they empty a room of all its furnishings, lock two people up at a time inside it, and have them tell the truth to each other? Or the mutant chickens created by the factory's Mad Scientist, that are alive despite having no heads? Or the scarf printed with weird symbols? There's also atonal, jarring music on the soundtrack, to add to the bizarre mood. Beautifully filmed and strangely compelling.

 

[dask]

Super-high tech chicken farm? Put it in my cart at Amazon as quick as I could click.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Black Gestapo (1975)

Despite the shocking title, for the first half or so this is a fairly typical, if rather cheaply made, blaxploitation flick of the fight-back-against-the-white-criminals subgenre. The hero is a guy who leads the People's Army, a group of do-gooders in khaki uniforms and red berets. Despite the military trappings, they seem to do nothing but charity work; they even get grants from the (white) government. When the crooks start attacking folks, the leader reluctantly allows his second-in-command to start a small group of armed soldiers, strictly for defense only. Of course, after a while this gets out of hand. The second-in-command takes over the criminal activities instead of stopping them, and builds his private army into a large force, trading the more-or-less benign uniforms for black ones that look a lot like Nazi outfits, even including the infamous death's head symbol of the SS. It all builds up to the hero invading the bad guy's headquarters in a one-man commando raid. Violent and sleazy, yet fairly dull for the most part, although the final attack sequence isn't bad.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Dance Hall Racket (1953)

Ultra-low budget crime film, notable only because it was written by and features Lenny Bruce. Bruce plays a hoodlum who works for a guy who runs a dime-a-dance joint, which is a front for diamond smuggling, among other implied criminal activities. The plot is simple enough. The boss has a scam where he buys diamonds from sailors, pays them, gives them Mickey Finns, then takes the money back. During one of these schemes Bruce knifes the guy to death, apparently because he's jealous of the way the guy was playing up to the voluptuous dance hostess Rose (played by Bruce's wife Honey.) By the end of the film, Bruce kills his boss for the same reason, and an underground cop investigating the place kills Bruce. The less-than-an-hour running time is mostly filled up with random scenes of the guys who work for the boss, the dance hostesses, and their customers. There's also a Swedish-accented guy who provides intolerable comic relief. Bruce's mother, Sally Marr, is in the cast, and dances the Charleston. Not much to it, really.

 

[Vince W]

Spiderman: Far From Home. Have you ever seen any of those comedy shows where they've run out of ideas so they send them on a trip abroad? Well, this is the Marvel film equivalent. The first half was fairly pointless and the second half could have been condensed into about 20 minutes of tight storytelling. All in all a disappointment.

 

[Jeffbert]

The Black Gestapo (1975)

Despite the shocking title, for the first half or so this is a fairly typical, if rather cheaply made, blaxploitation flick of the fight-back-against-the-white-criminals subgenre. The hero is a guy who leads the People's Army, a group of do-gooders in khaki uniforms and red berets. Despite the military trappings, they seem to do nothing but charity work; they even get grants from the (white) government. When the crooks start attacking folks, the leader reluctantly allows his second-in-command to start a small group of armed soldiers, strictly for defense only. Of course, after a while this gets out of hand. The second-in-command takes over the criminal activities instead of stopping them, and builds his private army into a large force, trading the more-or-less benign uniforms for black ones that look a lot like Nazi outfits, even including the infamous death's head symbol of the SS. It all builds up to the hero invading the bad guy's headquarters in a one-man commando raid. Violent and sleazy, yet fairly dull for the most part, although the final attack sequence isn't bad.

This was one of the 1st films I watched when I 1st joined NF, so very long ago. Thanks for the post, Victoria Silverwolf!

Godzilla (1954)
Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956)
Godzilla Raids Again (1955)
Mothra (1961)

Still need to watch Mothra Vs. Godzilla. For some reason, TCM ran this one before Mothra.

Godzilla (1954) / Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956). The 1st 2, which really are the same film, just one is the original, while GKotM (1956) is the Americanized version with added footage of ex-Noir heavy Raymond Burr in order to make it more appealing to American audiences. For the most part, I watched about 15 minutes of one, then 15 minutes of the other, noting additions or cut in the USA version. Unlike most of you, I am retired, and just killing time, waiting for death.

So, anyway, said to be a metaphor or an allegory of the atomic bomb, Godzilla is fairly brutal in its depiction of death and destruction caused by the creature awakened by H-bomb testing in the Pacific islands. The most horrible scene was of a young mother hugging three small children, telling them they will be joining papa soon. A real tear-jerker!


Godzilla Raids Again; After Godzilla is dead and dissolved, another Godzilla arises and is seen fighting a so-called ankylosaurus (though one of appropriate size) which Dr. Kyohei Yamane (Takashi Shimura, reprising his role in Godzilla), says is carnivorous (which is news to me). Unlike his opinion in Godzilla, which was insane, to say the least, here he has no desire to study Godzilla, but, concurs with everyone else, wants to destroy it. TS is one of my favorite Japanese actors, and has appeared in a ton of films.


Mothra (1961) Takashi Shimura is a newspaper editor this time. Sadakatsu Amano, Nitto Editor, when he learns of two tiny woman (Barbie doll sized) who were discovered on a remote island, is not too happy that his reporters did not get photos of them. Portrayed by twins known as the Peanuts, they are abducted by a guy who puts them in a stage show, complete with natives in loin cloths dancing around them. Hmm., this reminds me of some other film, made in the 1930s. Could it be King Kong? So, the spirits of the island are very angry that their two tiny women were taken away, and the natives perform dances to cause Mothra's egg to hatch. At first, a sea worthy caterpillar, Mothra comes to Japan, makes a cocoon on Tokyo Tower, then starts flapping her wings, and causing more destruction than she did before the metamorphosis.

Only by releasing the two enslaved doll-sized women, can Mothra be stopped.

 

[Alex The G and T]

From the "I can't believe I watched the whole thing" files. This will be a spoiler; but no one should care about that in the least.

The Grey. 2011

Liam Neeson loses his girlfriend. In a pique of despair, he hires out as the big meanie sniper guy to protect arctic oilfield workers from vicious, man-eating wolf packs. Liam kills one wolf. Then, for no discernible reason walks out on the ice pack and refrains from blowing his own head off.

Suddenly, without explaination Liam finds himself on an airplane, filled with crass roustabouts, flying through a nasty arctic storm. The plane crashes. All of the dead guys are eaten by wolves.

Liam rounds up seven survivors and endeavors to lead them South, through a frozen wasteland, toward a mythical outpost of "Civilization"

Liam's sniper rifle had been stowed tidily in the overhead bin, at the outset of the flight; yet some how, he failed to rescue it from the largely intact wreckage.

All of the remaining malcontents, weaklings, and whiners got eaten by wolves; despite Liam's best efforts to fend them off with flaming sticks, and the victim's own existentialist whinings about the meaning of death. (Which ability for fire-starting was about ridiculous, considering the weather conditions; and it's a little late to get all philosophical)

In the End, Liam is left alone to face down the Dread Alpha Male Wolf, in a snow bank, with naught to hand but a pointy stick.

And then... closing credits. Huh?!? WTF?

Shoulda followed my wife's advice and nodded out on the couch.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Feline-Themed Gialli Triple Feature:

The Crimes of the Black Cat (Sette scialli di seta gialla, 1972)

Typical giallo notable mostly for the most outrageous method of killing I've ever seen. Starts with a woman sending a written note to a blind pianist/composer, breaking off their affair. (Yes, a written note. The blind man has to have his servant read it to him.) Meanwhile, he overhears part of a conversation in a restaurant in which somebody pressures a woman into doing something that night. We (but not the blind man) see somebody wearing a white hooded robe and purple gloves walk out of the place. Our typical hidden killer? Well, no, not exactly, although she turns out to be the real killer's tool. We get to see her face and groovy outfit, and watch her place a wicker basket in a certain room in a fashion designer's place of business. (With the hooded cape and the basket, it's impossible not to think of Little Red Riding Hood, except White.) The next day, the woman who broke off her affair with the pianist walks into the room, puts on a yellow scarf (source of the original Italian title), open the basket, screams, and drops dead, the only wound a few small scratches on her face. We'll find out later that the hooded woman, forced to cooperate with the killer because she's a drug addict being supplied by the murderer, left a black cat with curare on its claws, and that the yellow scarf contains a chemical that people can't detect but that makes cats go wild. As I said, an outrageous way to kill someone. Since the murderer uses other, much simpler methods later, it's hard to explain why anyone would go to all this trouble. Anyway, the blind man, his servant, and the dead woman's roommate investigate the murder, more killings follow, and the culprit is revealed at the very end of the movie, with the motive explained in a rapid-fire bit of narration that only lasts a few seconds, so I had to watch it again to make any sense of it. Other than the bizarre means of murder, it's an average example of the genre. Feline content: the murder weapon.

Seven Deaths in the Cats Eye (La morte negli occhi del gatto, 1973)

Combination of a giallo plot and a Gothic mood. Starts with a title sequence in which some guy is killed by a unseen person, the body dragged down a flight of stone stairs and fed to rats. The cat watches, as it will watch all the murders. We won't find out who the victim is until the end. Meanwhile, a young woman comes home from a Catholic boarding school to a spooky old Scottish castle. The time seems to be about the 1920's. Present at the castle are her mother; her aunt, who is the Lady of the place; the aunt's son, the Lord of the place, who is said to be insane and is rude to everyone; the Lord's French tutor; a doctor; and a priest. As time goes on, we'll learn about all the plots going on among these folks. The French tutor was really brought there by the scheming Lady and doctor, who are lovers, to seduce the Lord; but the doctor is also carrying on with the tutor. The darkly handsome, brooding Lord becomes the young woman's lover; since they're first cousins, you might think of this as incest. Anyway, the plot starts moving as the inhabitants of the castle get killed off one by one. By the time the killer is revealed, there aren't enough suspects left to make it much of a surprise. The Gothic content comes in the form of secret passages, flocks of bats, and a legend that any member of the family who is killed by a relative will come back as a vampire. This is, of course, a total red herring. There's also the Lord's pet gorilla, which everybody calls an orangutan, who is not only a red herring, with a nod to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but who turns out to be one of the victims! It's not bad, if you don't mind the very slow pace. Feline content: An innocent bystander.

The Cat's Victims AKA Watch Me When I Kill (Il gatto dagli occhi di giada, 1977)

Back to pure giallo. Woman happens to be outside a drugstore when the pharmacist inside is killed. Killer breaks into her home but is scared off by a neighbor's dog. Woman moves in with her boyfriend. He's a sound engineer, and he manages to make some sense of a tape that an older neighbor made of an eerie, distorted series of sounds recorded over the phone. A woman associated with the older man is the next victim. The boyfriend figures out that both victims were on a jury that convicted a man for murder, and that the felon just broke out of jail. This happens early in the film, so we know it's a red herring, but it's cleverly tied into the real plot. More killings follow, and the murderer turns out to have a much stronger motive than usual for this kind of movie. Better than average for its type, with a good soundtrack. Feline content: None! All of the titles are misleading. There isn't any cat at all, let alone one with jade eyes. During the titles, and very briefly during one of the killings, we see a close-up of the eyes of a toy animal, but it doesn't look like a cat, and it has black eyes. As for the other non-feline title, the killer certainly doesn't want to be watched, and never is.

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

I watched The Dambusters, recently a cracking classic film. I'm not sure if you could get away with some of the outdated language. Ie. Nigger the dog, which when he gets killed and is remembered as a code word for the destruction of one of the dams. Brilliant 10/10.

 

[J Riff]

"a super-high tech chicken farm" is tempting. And thanks for the warning Alex G and T, I mite have suckered for that one.
Here, The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County 1970 plays, and despite everyone in the star-studded cast is a bumbling fool, Dan Blocker the blacksmith and Jack Elam the bounty hunter do have a few funny scenes. Wholesome family fun, despite they do all drink themselves senseless, till there is no booze left in the entire town.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Creeper (1948)

Modest little B horror film with a confusing plot. Starts with our heroine walking in her sleep, past her father, who is asleep in a chair. She picks up a gun, puts it under her pillow, and gets back in bed. Dad retrieves the gun, waking her up. He makes some feeble excuse that he was cleaning it. An interesting opening scene, but all it really does is establish that our heroine has bad dreams, and that there's a gun in the house. The plot really gets going with the arrival of glass tubes of serum from the West Indies at the lab where our heroine works, along with Dad, his Vaguely Sinister partner, and their Vaguely Sinister blonde assistant. It turns out that all the tubes are broken. There's a hint that somebody did this deliberately, but this goes nowhere. We'll get hints now and then as to the convoluted back story. As best as I can work it out, our heroine and dad and VS partner and VS blonde did research on cats in the West Indies. Our heroine got a fever and, given the local superstition among the "natives" that their souls turn into cats after death, she developed ailurophobia. Meanwhile, the wife of their local assistant died. For some reason or other, our heroine thinks she might have died as a result of Dad's experiments. We never find out what really happened to her. Anyway, VS partner brings the cats from the West Indies, along with the local assistant, to create more serum. (No explanation is ever given as to why they have to use West Indian cats.) Meanwhile, our hero shows up, another science guy, who has a Vaguely Sinister partner of his own. Our hero was engaged to VS blonde, whom he hasn't seen for four years, but quickly makes a play for our heroine. Dad is slashed to death by somebody or something. Was it our heroine, during one of her freak outs? Was it somebody trying to drive our heroine even further into madness. Or, could it possibly be a cat monster? Despite a nonsensical story, really bad acting from our heroine, laughable special effects, and some truly goofy Mad Science, it's worth a look for fans of creaky old scare flicks.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Early Italian Bloodsuckers Double Feature:

The Slaughter of the Vampires (La strage dei vampiri, 1962)

Starts with a man and woman running away from an angry mob carrying the traditional torches and pitchforks. You can tell they're vampires, because the man is wearing a cape and the woman is wearing a filmy gown. The woman trips and gets killed by the mob, the man escapes. Cut to a fancy party at the old castle into which a married couple have just moved, not aware that the vampire is hiding in their wine cellar. The time seems to be the late 19th century. The vampire shows up at the party, dances with the wife, and pretty quickly winds up with her in her bedroom. This is very much a vampire-as-romantic-seducer film. She slowly wastes away, husband goes off to Vienna to fetch a doctor to save her life. They arrive just as she dies, but of course she's not really dead. The rest of the film is the doctor, in the Van Helsing role, battling the vampires. Pretty typical vampire stuff, with good production values and a lush musical score. Notable for a little girl as one of the vampire's intended victims.

The Vampire of the Opera (Il mostro dell'opera, 1964)

In the tradition of The Playgirls and the Vampire (L'ultima preda del vampiro, 1960) and The Vampire and the Ballerina (L'amante del vampiro, 1960), this features a bunch of sexy female dancers threatened by a vampire. Unlike those two offerings of chills and cheesecake, this one is very weird. The opening dream sequence shows us the heroine chased by the vampire, who attacks her with a huge pitchfork. An older guy tries to help her, but is held back by some kind of force field. She manages to escape, but falls into a creek, where the vampire catches her, and she wakes up. In the real world, the leader of the dance troupe rents an old theater for their next production. The caretaker of the place is the older man in the dream. The vampire doesn't show up again until more than halfway through the film. Meanwhile, we get the playful antics and romantic entanglements of the dance troupe, who act more like high school theater majors than professionals. There are also a lot of dance sequences mixed with vague spookiness; at times this seems like Bob Fosse's Dracula. Finally the formally dressed vampire arrives, and things get really odd. He takes the lead dancer of the troupe, our dreamer, off with him. It seems she's the reincarnation of his lover centuries ago, a married countess. He got buried alive for his adultery, and now he wants to punish her for what happened to him, although he still loves her. By forcing her into his coffin, they both wind up somewhere else, where there are a bunch of scantily clad vampire women chained to the wall. She later returns to this other place by going into a painting. Since we haven't had enough dancing yet, there's a really bizarre scene where the troupe is prevented from leaving the stage by our old friend the force field, and they dance wildly, afraid to stop lest they be destroyed. It wasn't clear to me at all whether the vampire was somehow making them dance, or if they were dancing in an attempt to avoid being controlled by the vampire. The vampire is eventually destroyed because an inscription on the teleporting painting gives the troupe a clue on how to kill him. The whole thing is much odder than you'd expect from the sexy-dancers-and-vampire genre.

 

[J Riff]

The Mutations 1974 - this one starts with time-lapse photgraphy of plants and whatnot, and I notice a Basil Kirchen soundtrack so it can't be all bad, some terrific weird music and sound FX and: - our university teacher scientist guy seems respectable except he has a seriously mutated tall freak pal named Lynch who chases down women, so our Prof. can experiment on them. He's into plant/animal hybrids.. and at his lectures he has a big machine that can turn an orange green with fungus, then change it back into a juicy fresh orange. In his lab he has a plant/hamster thing in a glass tube, and other big weird carniverous plants.
Next, he feeds a rabbit to a giant growling plant... this mad Prof. wants 'a new race of men with all the miraculous qualities of a plant'.
but he's still working out the bugs. The circus freak pals of our Prof's mutated henchman Lynch are onto him but can't do much. We see a truck driving by advertising the half human/half monkey woman, and friends of kidnapped Briggette attend the fair... the Tibetan Lizard Woman?
Human Pincushion... Frog Boy, obviously a bit of a remake of the original Freaks but with much worse dialogue.
Human Pretzel man! Popeye has the crowd in a hubbub.
It looks like Brigette has been transformed into the Tibetan Lizard Woman. Her BF sneaks into the fair at night, Lynch spots him and clobbers him, he will probably be the next victim of the Mad Prof. Lynch wants a cure, hates the Freaks, who taunt him and he gets angry and drools and then in his best scene, kicks bottles to bits, steps on cakes then rages incomprehensively off into the night.
BF Tony is transformed, but he escapes and goes to see his GF, he is a plant-monster, she screams, a Bobby chases off Tony the Plant-thing.
The Freaks are freaking out about Lynch, as Tony attacks and apparently absorbs a rubby vagrant sleeping in an alley. Then he goes to see his GF, sneaks in and covers himself with a blanket so she won't see him, and tells her what's what. He leaves, Lynch appears and hauls her off to the Prof's lab. Tony, pursued by a dog pack, appears at the lab, so does BF, and the Freaks, and Lynch is stabbed,
Tony the human Venus Flytrap smashes through a skylight and lands on the Prof. He is absorbed by Tony, fire breaks out, nude GF on operating table is saved by heroic BF, all evil plants burn along with Tony. We end with a romantic kiss in a car, but of course GF is turning green just like Tony, and it's The End. The Freaks and the swell soundtrack help overcome the trite dialogue in this one.

 

[CupofJoe]

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets [2017] written and directed by Luc Besson
First of, I’ve not seen the printed source stories, so I’m only looking at is a film and not as an adaptation and there is probably a minor spoiler in the review. It is a spectacular candyfloss of a film that looked amazing and had enough plot to justify the run time. I though Cara Delevigne was more than up to the role of Laureline and there was a nice mix of the expected and unexpected in the casting but what went wrong with Dane DeHaan as Valerian? I don’t remember the Actor in other roles, and I’m not surprised. There was no charisma coming from him on screen and no spark between him and Cara Delevigne as the two leads [apparently deeply in love – or at least headed that way, with each other]. I wanted Laureline to end up with someone better.
...Oh, he was prepared to give up his “play-list” to be with her… Big deal!
Laureline! He isn’t worth it.
I’ve liked Luc Besson as a writer and director from the first time I saw Léon: The Professional. [possibly Gary Oldman's best role - and that is saying a lot, Jean Reno and an incredible Natalie Portman]. And if you haven’t seen them: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec or [the first and French original] Taxi – go watch them! Not "deep" films but a lot of fun. He has an aesthetic [along with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, admittedly often much darker] that I just don’t see in American films.

 

[Phyrebrat]

@Victoria Silverwolf havr you reviewed ‘The House with the Smiling Windows’ by any chance? I’ve been watching it over the last few nights on YouTube and it’s reminded me of your giallo reviews.

pH