ofumalow Reviews

Damaged Lives (1933)

Edgar Ulmer, Budgetary Genius

[5/10 · 4 May 2024]

Ulmer's first U. S. film has been classified as an exploitation cheapie a la "Reefer Madness," but despite the sensational subject matter (VD), some brief grisly medical footage, and a supposed budget of about $15,000, it looks like the figurative million bucks. Part of that can be attributed to the director's ability to get the maximum amount of style and production value from minimal resources, as his later career proved over and over. But quite likely those resources weren't quite so minimal after all: In truth "Damaged Lives" was made by Columbia, no doubt making full use of first-rate crew, elaborate sets, et al. From its higher-profile productions. There is nothing cheap about it, and the performers are also a definite cut above what you'd find in an actual tent-show exploitation pic of the era. Although that's how it was released--the studio decided it was too embarrassed to release this drama about a taboo issue under its own name, so it created a fake distribution arm and basically let it play the same kinds of gigs as "Reefer," "Mom and Dad," and other shocking "adults only" titles.

So anyway, that explains why this is a very glossy film for a supposed Poverty Row enterprise. Ulmer is terrifically assured already as a filmmaker, and if the script is not exactly sophisticated, he nonetheless manages a significant feat in getting pretty good performances from actors despite the feeble lines they have to deliver. Short as it is, though, the movie starts to plod when it gets to the horrible-consequences-of-sin part, with the last few scenes' really dragging pacewise. As nicely done as it all is, there still isn't enough depth or weight to ballast the eventual gloom, and of course it's more than a mite simplistic that the lesson learned is basically "Fool around...and you'll end up a suicide!"

So, worth seeing as a very precocious early feature for a notable director, though very much constrained in the end by the rather dully earnest treatment of a "shocking" theme--this is a much better-crafted movie than most you might compare it to from the period, but at the same time that means it lacks some of those genuine cheapies' giddy unintentional comedy.

War of the Zombies (1964)

Colorful silliness

[6/10 · 15 April 2024]

This is no "Hercules in the Haunted World," and it has no actual zombies (there's a sort of ghost army, plus some people who are hypnotized)--nor, perhaps more surprisingly, any musclemen--but it is definitely above the peplum average for incorporating some fantasy elements in a colorful way. The bad guys worship their bad god on a set that looks like it's left over from "Cobra Woman," and there are some simple, tacky but fun superimposition effects towards the end.

It's not a truly memorable film or even a particularly coherent (let alone original) fantasy, but if you've sat through enough Italian sword-n-sandal epics, you know how cheap and boring many of them can be. So this one definitely gets points for trying harder, and providing some sort of cheesily psychedelic effects along with the usual battle scenes and palace intrigue.

Die Frau meiner Träume (1944)

The hills are alive with the sound of denial

[5/10 · 15 April 2024]

This was sort of a last hurrah for big-budget Nazi cinema, as unsurprisingly the failing war effort was draining resources for such frivolities. But it makes a big effort to provide a booster shot of escapism to audiences who were no doubt in desperate need of it by then. This is basically a German equivalent to a Betty Grable movie--a gaudy color extravaganza with a silly romantic comedy plot and some pretty lavish production numbers, plus of course excuses for the star to run around half-dressed. (Though that's still more dressed than Grable would have been.) Of course, the Hollywood version would be brassy, while this is more kitschy, with an operetta-ish rather than Broadway feel. (The popular female star Marika Romm indeed performed in many stage operettas after the war.)

The plot, involving a runaway stage star taken in by two mountain-tunnel engineers who become rivals for her love, is nothing special, with no great chemistry between the competent leads and routine comedy relief from supporting actors. What is worth looking at are the big numbers, which are well-sung and produced. But they're not really INTERESTING, in terms of ideas or choreography or anything else. It's weird to see some "novelty" bits incorporating "exotic" foreign music and costume motifs, given the Nazis' extreme notions of racial/cultural superiority. (For the same reason, it's also a little strange that none of the leading characters are blond.)

Anyway, this is a curio fascinating in historical terms, but no great find as entertainment--for all the high production polish on display, the material is innocuous and its execution lacks much personality. I'm sure it did take Germans' minds off the war for a couple hours. But it can't hold a candle to the better Hollywood screen musicals of the same era.

Get Mean (1975)

Eccentric ideas, mediocre execution

[5/10 · 15 April 2024]

This curious very late spaghetti western really goes out on a conceptual limb, sending Tony Anthony's rascally Wild West "Stranger" across the Atlantic with a Spanish princess. In Europe he somehow gets mixed up with both Elizabethan-era Spaniards and Viking-style "barbarians," while another character seems to parody Shakespeare's Richard III.

It's goofy stuff that has been compared to "Army of Darkness," and does bear a superficial resemblance in its goofy quasi-historical incongruities. But while the movie does have a sense of humor, it's pretty crude--rather than absurdist, which would much better suit this out-there concept. It's also particularly hard now to take the simpering old-school screaming-queen stereotype played by the star's brother.

Anthony's sort of proto-Lebowski wiseacre carries things to an extent, and the film has an impressive scale at times, particularly since the Euro western genre was way past its commercial peak in 1975. But the direction by a mostly undistinguished toiler in Italian B movies (he did make a handful of decent giallos, straight-faced spaghettis and other genre entries) doesn't rise to the occasion, and beyond its premise nor does the script. This is one of those enterprises that sounds so deliciously nutty it can hardly go wrong...until you actually watch it, and realize it's not nearly as much fun as it sounded.

I've seen contrary information on the film's commercial fate, some indicating it ran into distribution problems, others indicating it made $10 million (which would have been a lot then, and seems highly improbable). I suspect the truth is that it didn't do well, because apparently Anthony had hoped to kick off a whole new series of "Stranger" films. Instead, he never made another--which suggests financiers didn't want to take the risk.

The Living Skeleton (1968)

Sometimes style is enough

[6/10 · 21 March 2024]

This low-budget horror movie very much benefits from the typically excellent craftsmanship expended even on such low-end efforts by major studios in Japan at the time. I can't concur with others that it reminded me at all of "The Fog," apart from liekwise involving ghostly vengeance for death at sea. The script is a bit confused, particularly once we get towards the end, when in addition to the supernatural element it turns out there's a sort of mad-scientist thing going on--making for a narrative agenda rather sillier and more overloaded than this movie can pull off.

Still, that doesn't matter so much, because the atmospherics are very effective in their widescreen B&W handsomeness, despite the fairly cheap FX. (Particularly the kind of tank miniatures more familiar from Godzilla-type films, with "stormy seas" clearly not much more than bathtub splashing in slo-mo.) The performances are decent enough, and while the story isn't terribly scary, there's a nice mood of creeping dread--you can almost feel the ocean air permeating inland, bringing ghosts and violent death with it.

Night Games (1966)

One definition of Eurotrash

[4/10 · 21 March 2024]

Pauline Kael called this movie a combination of "the worst of Fellini and the worst of Bergman," and glib as that sounds, she's right--it exactly locates the leading pretensions of the era's art cinema flavors, and combines them in a particularly superficial and flashy way that lacks either great director's depth, originality or humor. The rather confused structure interweaves past and present as the grown heir to a country estate brings his fiancee there, where he recalls his difficult childhood being alternately amused, abused and ignored by self-absorbed parents. The latter use their wealth and privilege to be kingpins of a cartoonishly decadent social scene. But the film isn't satire--we're meant to take its grotesques very seriously as some statement about, you know, Society, though they only resemble figures from other movies. At the end we're apparently to understand that the present-day characters have somehow been liberated from the chains of the past, but that catharsis rings hollow, particularly since those characters are just as one-dimensional as the wealthy sinners in the flashbacks.

Zetterling's other directorial movies are said to be good, so maybe this was just her auteurist folly, all too obviously derivative of other auteurs' follies. But the imitative quality robs of it any genuine emotion, or even pleasure in flamboyance, though it's well-shot and edited. There's some nudity, a scene about (though not graphically depicting) masturbation, and other content that must have seemed terribly shocking in 1966. (Indeed, the film's most lasting notoriety came from Shirley Temple Black having quit a festival jury in a highly publicized huff over the inclusion of this "pornography." Little did she know how much more pornographic movies would get, or how soon.) But the problem here is that there's nary a single moment that feels organic--everything is trying so HARD to be "shocking." Which pretty much kills any shock value, at least for me.

Anyway, it's a garish, self-important but empty-headed effort that was never a good movie, but now serves as a vivid time capsule of just how merrily (and self-consciously) taboos were being freshly broken at the time of its making. Somehow the overstaged quasi-orgies and such aren't much fun, even without the equally bogus "But think about the child!!" hand-wringing accompanying them. But if you wanna see a personification of what was then called (among other things) "the New Permissiveness," this is it, in a nutshell. Of COURSE Shirley Temple was appalled. You can practically sense the filmmakers congratulating themselves that she would be.

Isabel (1968)

Slow, dull, obscure

[4/10 · 11 March 2024]

Bujold was married to this director at the time, and they made several films together. She plays a young woman who returns from Montreal to the rural Quebec community she was raised in because her mother is dying--though unfortunately she's already passed away by the time her daughter gets there. She sticks around ostensibly to care for a spinster uncle, though he doesn't really seem in need of care mentally or physically. She meets a handsome young newcomer (Mark Strange), who at first vaguely frightens her, then doesn't. She fends off some grabby-handed locals. She sees ghosts, or perhaps specters from her own troubled past here. None of this really goes anywhere.

The prospect of seeing Bujold in a "Repulsion"-type thriller is appealing, because she's almost always a compelling actor...but this movie can't decide whether it wants to be "Repulsion," "Straw Dogs," a ghost story, or what. We get hints that her character may be mentally unstable. Yet that turns out to be sort of a red herring, as does really every plot element in the very sketchy script. There's a sexual/violent assault towards the end that comes out of nowhere, and is so darkly staged you can't really tell what's going on anyway.

For a while the atmosphere is intriguing enough, despite the irritating, then-voguish overuse of jump cuts. But after a while it becomes clear the movie can't/won't develop any of its ideas enough to generate suspense, character insight, or any kind of point to the narrative, and that Bujold alone can't carry the whole undercooked enterprise. One always hopes these obscure, often hard-to-find Canadian features will turn out to be gold. But so frequently it's the case--as here--that they are forgotten because they were conceptually muddled and executed without enough boldness of style to compensate. This is just another theoretically interesting misfire that is ultimately rather tedious and unrewarding to watch.

Curse of the Oily Man (1956)

Slick and strange

[6/10 · 8 February 2024]

I saw this Run Run Shaw production on YT, where it was posted as being from 1958--evidently confusing it with a different "Oily Man" film from that year which appears (as far as I can tell) to be lost. They and other films are based on a figure of Malay folklore, although here the "Oily Man" doesn't turn up until the last 15 minutes or so...and you could say it's an irrational appearance, since the hero has been wronged exclusively by men, yet as the "Oily Man" he avenges himself only on women.

Anyway, before it becomes a monster movie (with a great, bizarre ending) in the last lap, this is an odd mixture of other things. It starts out as a sort of "Hunchback of Notre Dame" thing in a remote village, where bullies torment the artistically talented but shunned protagonist because he is misshapen of face and body. When things go from bad to worse, suddenly he is in a studio-soundstage "heaven" of sorts, where he is allowed one wish--to be handsome--and falls in love with a beautiful elf. (At least that's how she's identified in the subtitles.)

This section is goofy and fun, with musical numbers. Unfortunately, he is not allowed to stay there, and his triumphant return to Earth as a good-looking, elegantly dressed man goes wrong when he breaks the one rule he had promised to observe in exchange for his physical transformation. His punishment is to become..."The Oily Man." Though as I said, it doesn't make much sense that in this guise he runs around attacking innocent women, rather than his erstwhile tormenters.

This is a lively, eccentric and polished movie that doesn't fit into any precise genre category, but manages to pull off its sometimes-clashing different elements (sob story, celestial fantasy, horror, musical) with sufficient professionalism that it all provides giddy entertainment value--even if it hardly seems an organic mix. Apparently the central actor was the preeminent Malay screen star of this era, a period that is probably worth investigating further, as I really don't know a thing about it and quite enjoyed this somewhat campy but well-made artifact. In terms of production values, it's on the level of an above-average U. S. major-studio "B" film of the era, albeit with a few scenes featuring large #'s of extras as dancers/villagers. Or a "cast of hunderds," as the opening credits rather awkwardly put it.

New Year's Evil (1980)

Annoying killer, annoying target

[5/10 · 2 January 2024]

This Golan-Globus production is a bit slicker than most non-major-studio slashers of the era, and the polish helps it move along painlessly--except for the onscreen victims of course. Roz Kelly plays an obnoxiously self-absorbed radio celebrity hosting a New Year's Eve "New Wave" bash--we get a lot of generic rock music located somewhere between lesser 70s power pop and 80s lite metal. (The musicians in the presumably fictitious bands playing probably grew their hair out and tried to be "the next Poison" a few years later.) Before her hosting duties begin, she gets a call from an anonymous, vocally distorted man who insists she call him "Eeeeeeeevillllll" and says he's going to kill on the hour each other before midnight, at which point it will be her turn. Trouper that she is--or perhaps just too abrasive to care--our protagonist goes on with the show, while the killer gradually approaches the venue, killing people on the way.

The story is pretty thin, such as it is. There's a late hint of something unsavory going on between the heroine's son and husband (it's unclear whether he's the boy's father), both of whom have cause to hate her guts, but the film doesn't have the nerve to really "go there." It aims mild satire at both the Hollywood and punk scenes, but those caricatures are too familiar to be effective. Roz Kelly was said to be a piece of work offscreen--she acknowledged she was known as "pushy," which is maybe what got her sacked from her most famous role on "Happy Days"--so this role seems tailored to her as a glam, flashy but unsympathetic entertainer who is oblivious to others (even at her own peril) and bosses everybody around. The villain's "scary voice" on phone calls is ridiculous, his dialogue worse, his motivation flimsy, but then you don't go into a movie like this one expecting much psychological depth.

Despite the fair number of deaths, none of them are particularly memorable in deed or staging; the only good idea is a climactic scene in which someone is very unhappy to find themselves dangling from the bottom of an elevator as it rockets up and plunges down the shaft.

In short, more watchable than some more poorly-produced slashers of the time, but just OK, with both a protagonist and antagonist that are a little too effectively annoying as personalities.

Ghost Keeper (1981)

A wintry chill

[5/10 · 1 January 2024]

Atmospherics go a long way, if not quite far enough, in this Canadian tax-shelter film that apparently ran out of money mid-production, so they basically had to improvise the remainder of a shootable script without funding. Which does explain how there's more of a premise than a real plot here, with things never quite kicking into high gear in terms of either narrative or action--though there's enough creepiness and death for this to unquestionably qualify as a horror film of sorts.

The three snowmobilers staying at a resort--two obnoxious enough that you can guess they won't likely live to see the final fadeout--go off-trail during heavy snow, ending up at a seemingly abandoned old hunting lodge. But it's not quite abandoned. There's a weird older lady creeping about, and then it turns out some others, more elusive as well as murderous.

The remote winter setting gives the movie a nice visual flavor, and an eerie score is a big help in maintaining some suspense in a progress that otherwise might seem close to rudderless. Despite the sparse writing, the film is well-paced enough to hold interest. But it's more an example of resourceful people making something of very little under difficult circumstances, than it is of those people creating something of real substance. You do have to wonder just how different the movie would have been if the funding hadn't fallen through--was there a more ambitious (or at least better-developed) story in the original script? Maybe we'll never know.

Bloody New Year (1987)

Carnival Oops I Mean Island of Miscellaneous Horrors

[5/10 · 1 January 2024]

This final feature by UK schlockmeister Warren--apparently so unhappy an experience he didn't want to make any more--has an enjoyably daft, anything-goes approach to horror that would be more fun if the film were better made. Six youths visit a fun fair, then run afoul of some nasty carnies. (The highpoint of this is when they manage to shake off from a speeding vehicle the three carnies, each of whom magically falls onto a separate, conveniently located pile of empty cardboard boxes.) Then the youths are suddenly on a boat, which runs aground near an island occupied by an abandoned resort hotel that has apparently been frozen in time since 1960.

Of course, our protagonists are soon prey to terrors and death, but even basic binding fantasy logic is missing. There are ghosts, zombies, monsters, inanimate objects (appliances, a wooden carving, a snooker table, an elevator wall) that "come to life"...even those malevolent carnies return, though god only knows how they got here. It's a little like a low-budget "Shining"--except as arbitrary in its perils as something like "Hausu"--except with little filmmaking style or basic competence to make the nuttiness seem more inspired than just silly.

We've all seen worse, and the sheer randomness of the ideas provides a certain amount of entertainment value. Still, this falls short as both "so bad it's good" and the kind of movie that can actually pull off its deliberate senselessness with panache. It's a medium-hot mess that isn't exactly dull, and has the virtue of not being a formulaic slasher, but is just too sloppily put together to provide more than a few disbelieving yoks.

A Hard Look (2000 TV Movie)

Fun, but insubstantial

[5/10 · 20 October 2023]

I disagree with the other reviewer here--most of his criticisms are valid enough (if more vehement than I felt), but I don't think the film makes Laura Gemser look stupid. She just has an amused, flippant attitude towards her participation in the series--she makes it clear that she didn't care if the films weren't much, she was just happy to be paid to travel to interesting far-flung locations--so her memories aren't terribly specific or extensive. Sylvia Kristel is more articulate, but then this is the role she'll always be known for, and she was taken somewhat seriously as a sexual liberator (rather than just an exploitation movie star) in that capacity at the time.

Some of the other interviewees are indeed trivial--Patrick Bachau gets a lot of screentime despite his only being in one film, and shoehorning Dennis Hopper in is particularly irrelevant. It's also annoying whenever Alex Cox is onscreen, playing a sort of "host" for this superficial overview. He's not as funny as he thinks he is, and god knows he's made enough bad movies that he shouldn't be condescending to anybody else's. Nonetheless, this is OK as an introduction/homage to the Emmanuelle movies, though it's hardly exhaustive and tends to jump around a lot. There are some interesting anecdotes, even if sometimes (as between the recall of Kristal and Just Jaekin) they clash with one another. But hopefully someday someone will make a better documentary on the subject. This one feels like a glorified blu-ray extra.

An Eye for an Eye (1973)

Dull, square handling of outrageous idea

[3/10 · 3 September 2023]

Like the director's prior "The Pink Angels"--an incongruous, campy gay biker movie made at the height of the conventional biker-movie trend--this is a movie with a small cult following because of its outrageous concept, but hard to actually sit through because it's so poorly executed. A children's TV puppet show host who already seems rather creepily infantile (like Peewee Herman minus the humor) becomes aware that some children in his audience and neighborhood are the subject of abuse from their variably drunken, slovenly or just sadistic parents. So he begins stalking and murdering them, as police investigate the trail of crimes.

It's not at all a bad idea, but "Psychopath" aka "An Eye for an Eye" seems oblivious to how badly its elements match up. The actor who plays "Mr. Rabbey" (the kidshow host) gives one of those bug-eyed, over-the-top performances that at first makes you think "Where's he gonna go with this?!?" Then you realize he's not going anywhere with it--that weird, artificial, simultaneously effeminate and childish affect is all he's got in his bag of tricks. It makes his character silly, rather than frightening, and underlines the absurdity of other, normal-acting figures not discerning that Mr. Rabbey is a mental case from the get-go. The other performances range from shrill caricatures (the bad parents) to routine competence (everyone else).

But given its bad-taste conceit, you'd think "Psychopath" would have some fun with it. Nuh-uh. It's dully earnest, with no flair for suspense or even violence (the latter is generally kept to an on-screen minimum), the utterly middle-of-the-road aesthetic of an early 1970s TV movie, and seemingly no awareness at all that even Mr. Rabbey's TV show comes off as grotesque. (We're told the kids just love him, but that's laughable--Anthony Perkins in "Psycho" would have more juvenile appeal.) You'd think this story could only be played as black comedy, yet the film is as simplistically sincere about saying "child abuse is bad" as a PSA. And that social ill is presented in such crude terms, you can't even accept the sincerity of the message--it's on the level as a warning of "stranger danger" painting that peril as consisting of middle-aged men in trenchcoats skulking behind suburban shrubbery.

As a curio, this might be worth looking at for five minutes, in which span you'll get as much as you're going to get from the whole feature--nothing improves, or surprises, later on. But it's pretty abysmal, and even the elements that are relatively professional (in terms of technical polish and some performances) only serve to blandly take the edge off whatever tension or shock value was intended here.

Beauty and the Beast (1978)

Pretty, but not much else

[5/10 · 2 September 2023]

I've certainly enjoyed other Eastern European fairy tale/fantasy films, so this came as a little bit of a disappointment. It's got all the lush visual invention of others you might have seen (if on a somewhat reduced production scale), but there's really nothing else going on, not much narrative drive or chemistry between the characters/actors.

It starts out promisingly enough as a more folk-horror-ish take on the familiar tale, but as soon as the vapid heroine is in the "beast's" lair as his willing captive, any imagination outside production design and photography ceases. She's vanilla-sweet, he's sorta scary but trying not to scare her...nothing happens, we just wait an hour for the inevitable transformation to occur. You'd think this would be leavened somewhat by glimpses of the homelife left behind, but that too is unimaginative--the heroine's sisters are just Cinderella's stepsisters, vain and trivial, caricatures too monotonous to be entertaining.

Apart from the film's atypically gloomy look (the "beast's" castle is much more damp and decrepit than usual), it just doesn't bring any fresh perspective, dramatic urgency, or much else to a familiar story told in bare-bones style. The beast's look IS a little odd (in that he's halfway between Cocteau's vision and a "bird man," not unlike the guy in Vadim's stupid "Night Games" a couple years later), but that's not enough to make much difference.

H2S (1969)

Apparently barely-released sci-fi fantasy whatsit

[6/10 · 31 August 2023]

This movie was apparently barely released, then forgotten, and has been basically inaccessible for decades. There were a lot of misfired experiments in its era, but god knows this is hardly among the worst of them-or even the least commercial.

But then, it's also one of those movies that seems almost entirely to have been created for the sake of its set design, rather than the other way around. There's not much to the script, beyond a familiar bare outline (moderately rebellious individual rebels against controlling society), and the point is vague because the satire (or whatever) is so subservient to the visual design. Nonetheless, the visual invention (plus an interesting Ennio Morricone score) is enough to hold your attention. Most of the interiors (and even some exteriors) are almost entirely white-on-white, with an op-art feel amplified by costume and sculpture elements.

You can see why the young male British lead didn't have a major career (he's effortful without being very appealing), Lionel Stander is OK as his chief tormentor, and the only other actor to make an impression is Carol Andre as a somewhat crazy young woman the hero shacks up with (in makeshift igloo) after fleeing the oppressive society, and before returning to it.

There are some moments that anticipate aspects of "THX-1139" and "A Clockwork Orange," although of course without the stronger narrative or guiding directorial visions of either. What does it all mean? Not a lot, I'd guess. But "H2S" is still one fo those films whose indulgence and eccentricity couldn't have happened at any other time, and if you keep your expectations modest, it's a rather enjoyable curio-lively enough not to be just a failed experiment, even if the humor that leavens it isn't necessarily its strongest point. I'm giving it a six, which is a little generous, but a five would seem too stingy.

Arcane Sorcerer (1996)

A slow but rich exercise in gothic style

[7/10 · 31 August 2023]

This lesser-known Avati wade into the fantastical is nonetheless highly accomplished, even if you handle that the supernatural elements don't really kick in until halfway through, and then not in a terribly flamboyant way. A disgraced young seminary student is dispatched to the remote castle of an aristocratic hermit rumored to be dabbling in occult matters. (And some locals have disappeared, adding fuel to the rumors.) Needless to say, the new helpmate eventually discovers this is true.

It's a slow but genuinely sinister tale that is very well put across by the two lead actors and Avati's great care with the visual presentation--this is hardly an extravagant production, but the modestly scaled period production design, the compositions and camera movement convey much more atmosphere than many a more expensive, FX-laden enterprise. There's probably not enough "payoff" for those who want conventional horror content in terms of kills and gore, but this is an admirably restrained exercise in supernatural creepiness that never goes slack.

Adam 2 (1968)

Striking minimalist adult animation feature

[7/10 · 31 August 2023]

Why isn't this movie better known? It's very much in the Soviet era Eastern European animation tradition of sardonic, macabre, implicitly political satire/allegory, though you'd think its relatively rare feature-length status among such films would have resulted in a larger reputation. It's a plotless (and almost completely wordless) but always engaging series of surreal forced metaphormoses for our everyman hero, whom institutions, industry and nature itself seem compelled to constantly force into new, reductive incarnations--as if any amount of individuality were something to be rigidly stamped out. The animation style is composed primarily of stark, simple graphics, often with a collage element--you might be a bit reminded of Terry Gilliam's such contributions to "Monty Python's Flying Circus," and indeed it seems likely he was influenced by this director's work, though the latter's impact is more deadpan than antic. You can't exactly say "Adam 2" is a "delight," since its message is essentially so depressing--human individuality inexorably squashed by one insidious system after another--yet, well, it sort of is anyway. It's inventive, humorous, and always arresting to look at, turning an economy of means into a bold aesthetic.

Lake of the Dead (1958)

Fair supernatural mystery

[5/10 · 31 August 2023]

This was a bit of a disappointment after having heard very intriguing things about it. A group of friends go to a lakeside rural cabin that has "mysterious disappearance"/haunting-type legends attached to it, and where one visitor's brother was last known to be--but he's seemingly disappeared. The setup is fine, but the movie plays a bit like a television omnibus hour from the era (like "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or "Suspense") in that its generic, overlit professional craftsmanship doesn't really suit the material--nor does the over-emphasis on character comedy. There's way too much talking, and when all is finally explained, it's a garrulous muddle of the pedantic and the fantastical that is offered in the undifferentiating lecture tones of a science class. This would actually be a better movie if it were less slickly produced--but then, others found it highly "atmospheric," while I thought that was its worst lack, so go figure.

The Punk (1993)

Mildly interesting cultural time capsule

[5/10 · 31 August 2023]

I had been trying to see this rare later movie the director of "Myra Breckinridge" and "Joanna" for decades, with no luck, then as these things happen it suddenly turned up in an obscure corner of the internet.

My amazement and gratitude ultimately outweigh the fact that, well, it's not that good--but hey, it's off the bucket list at last. You can tell the film is trying hard to be something along the lines of "My Beautiful Laundrette," with a similar flippant mix of culture-clash seriocomedy amongst various stratas of London. But particularly compared to that breakout, which deservedly got wide theatrical release (after premiering on TV), this is clearly a TV project that is not particularly well-written, unevenly cast, and rather sloppily directed, though it has its moments.

The leads are appealing enough, but the very loose "updating" of "Romeo & Juliet" is never anything more than a gimmick; the material never seriously addresses that source, it just occasionally remembers to riff off it a bit. As for the "punk" milieu, well, by 1993 that wasn't exactly breaking news, and the best you can say about the treatment here is that it provides some snapshot of a scene at a point when nobody much was paying attention anymore. (Not that the music on tap is particularly "punk," anyhow.) Anyway, this is more in the realm of an amiable goof with a few charming moments than anything of substance or even much style.

I wish Sarne had had more directorial opportunities, but he only partially manages to transcend the budgetary and conceptual limitations here. It's a mildly cute, contrived movie--sorta like a cheaper, pseudo-punkier version of a John Hughes joint like "Pretty in Pink," another quasi-edgy teen romcom--that does not leave much lasting impression.

The Castle of the Living Dead (1964)

Meh

[4/10 · 24 April 2023]

This rather cartoonish castle-of-terrors horror suffers from lacking original ideas, not to mention the style or atmosphere to distinguish its pastiche of familiar ones. Christopher Lee is in atypically dull form with amateurish corpse-like makeup as the aristocrat-cum-mad-scientist who lures a group of traveling players in order to experiment on them. The other performers are OK but hobbled by worse-than-usual dubbing in post. (Apparently that occurred somewhat late, when parts of the script had been lost, so some of the dubbed dialogue had to be ad-libbed. I'm still not convinced that's even Lee's voice.) There's the curiosity value of Donald Sutherland's screen debut, but his multiple roles (one in drag, as an old crone!) are all brief. The action moves along fast enough to prevent the film from being outright dull, but it has no tension, no visual flair, and no commitment to getting the most from its more macabre notions--so they come off as kind of half-heartedly tongue-in-cheek. In the end, it's just pretty silly film, though god knows we've all seen worse.

Spinning Gold (2023)

Atrocious

[3/10 · 1 April 2023]

This movie did recall the 1970s for me, but not in the way intended--it brought back completely plastic bad films of the era like "Viva Knievel!," "Roller Boogie" and (the Casablanca Records-affiliated) "Thank God It's Friday." I didn't even realize some of the cliches utilized were still in anybody's memory bank.

The idea of a movie about Casablanca and its founder had a "Boogie Nights" type appeal in that it could show the good, bad and ugly of the Me Decade at its most flamboyant and decadent. They apparently had major-league talents (including Spike Lee) involved at various points. Yet somehow it ultimately fell to the subject's own surviving family members to make it. So this ends up the worst possible case of exactly the wrong people making a dumbly idealized portrait of a complicated figure, without having the filmmaking chops even to pull off that kind of sugar-coating well.

This movie immediately hits notes that are meant to be big, bold and splashy, but instead come off as incredibly simplistic and ineptly done. Not to mention the performers cast as famous recording stars who look and sound nothing like them (hello, "Donna Summer"). The guy in the lead is tasked with playing Neil Bogart kind of as "The Music Man," in that we're supposed to think of him as a tiny bit of a con man but a terribly charming, persuasive one. Admittedly, this actor gets no help from the awful script, and for all I know he's fantastic in Broadway musicals (where he was recruited from). But this movie bets heavily on a star turn with oodles of charisma, and instead right away have the same allergic reaction you do when a parent says "Look how cute!" at the antics of their bratty child: You grimace and think "Please god get me away from this obnoxious little twerp as fast as possible."

I'll admit I didn't make it all the way through--it was just too painful. Even the music isn't redemptive, because I don't think they used the original recordings (or at least just the backing tracks, with new vocals). This movie may ripen into camp gold one day, because it certainly has the wall-to-wall cliches, bad dialogue et al. Required. But for now it's just a grotesquely ill-made (and very, very long) slog that wastes a potentially good real-life music industry story no one will likely ever try to dramatize again. Which is a pity.

Sex Wars (1985)

In space everyone can hear you cream

[5/10 · 13 March 2023]

I tracked down this movie because I read a new book about the late drag celebrity Doris Fish and was curious to learn that before designing and starring in the camp sci-fi spoof "Vegas in Space" s/he made an appearance and did makeup on this straight XXX sci-fi spoof. You can spot Fish and some pals from that world in the scenes that pay homage to the "Star Wars" bar scene.

Anyway, I figured it might have more visual interest than your average porno from the period, and it does...but not really enough to make a huge difference, despite some eventual solarized images and a few deliberately tacky special effects. (Plus a disco soundtrack, of course.) It's still basically just an adult film, with mild spoofy genre elements and the expected lame verbal humor. Maybe if I'd seen something better than a VHS dupe it would have been more impressive, since some care did go into colorful lighting and (to a more limited extent) sets. The climactic scene is a sort of more sci-fi/drag-fantastical version of "Behind the Green Door's" big orgy (with many views of a green-skinned Doris), though the graphic action definitely stays on one far end of the Kinsey scale.

Overall, this is of minor curiosity interest, and probably what would turn out to be one of the last few movies of its type to bother acting like a real feature (however silly the story), rather than just a series of disconnected sex scenes. If I were a serious aficionado of "golden age" porn, I'd probably give it a 6 or 7. For non-XXX entertainment value, maybe a 4. Hence the median of a 5.

Changes (1969)

Glossy rarity without a lot of depth, but interesting

[5/10 · 12 March 2023]

Finally saw this very hard-to-find counterculture film, albeit in a version that presumably for reasons of music rights difficulties had several soundtrack passages muted. (The Tim Buckley songs were intact, though, as well as a couple atrocious new songs by the original score composers.) It was letterboxed, which was great because as with Bartlett's best-known film, the rather notorious flop "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," "Changes" is very strong on slick visuals. Storywise, it's not so strong, although why this movie went nowhere while "Easy Rider" became a phenomenon the same year is an open question. Maybe that film's obvious "rebels" more fit a youth audience's image of themselves at the time, while the vaguely disgruntled, clean-cut, middle-class hero here was a figure a little too close to their reality. Neither film has aged all that well, but they're both time capsules.

Kent Lane is the college student who drops out because...well, because he wants something, and...well, he doesn't know what it is, but...well it's definitely not going that whole square degree-to-job-to-cult-de-sac route. This upsets his parents (who as usual in movies of this time seem to be way too old to have a child of his generation), but oh well. So he goes off to "see America," first stopping at his friend Sammy's (Bill Kelly) racetrack and hippie commune-type place, soon crashing his own car, then hitching a ride with a sort of roving youth reporter (Marcia Strassman), then falling in with a mercurial Southern beauty (Michele Carey), at which point the movie bogs down somewhat in conventional romantic histrionics between two characters who are demanding and petulant but resistant to being tied down. Our hero is also on the run from the memory of an ex-girlfriend who killed herself, it seems, I wasn't quite clear why.

There's not much in the way of plot here--"Changes" more wants to catch a questioning mood common at the time among youth, one that now feels pretty trite and cliched. You know, the old "I don't know what I want! I just don't want what my parents want for me! That's a drag!" There isn't a lot of dialogue (until the bogged-down later going), and the little that there is tends to reinforce that there's not much deep thinking going on there. It's one thing for our hero to constantly be photographed in nice settings looking "thoughtful," but the movie never conveys that there's anything interesting or surprising on his mind. (Kent Lane is OK, but he doesn't provide much personality or charisma to fill in that blank, so you can see why his career didn't get much further.) On the plus side, that photography really is fine, and it eschews nearly all of the gimmicks then trendy in films (like zoom lensing). There are a lot of pleasant montages to music that are often from Tim Buckley's "Goodbye and Hello" LP, a record that has only improved with age. But some songs by other artists (including Judy Collins and Neil Young) were silenced on the print I saw, creating long stretches of empty audio.

All in all, a technically very well-crafted if not particularly resonant memento from the era that I'm glad to have finally seen...even if it proved no lost classic. Among familiar faces glimpsed in bit parts, Teri Garr gets a bit as a waitress, with the sole line "Burger!!" I suspect a lot of actors here shot dialogue that was eventually cut as the film leaned more and more towards musical montage in the editing room.

Kamouraska (1973)

Unique, striking, but also something of a failure

[6/10 · 14 February 2023]

I'd always wanted to see this, preferably in the director's preferred three-hour version, and finally managed it. (Though not on the big screen, alas.) "Mon Oncle Antoine" is such a great film, and it was hard to believe this movie best remembered (if at all) as an expensive flop didn't have major redeeming factors as the same team's followup. Though very different from that preceding movie's warm, nostalgic take on rural Quebec life, it still has great atmospheric and visual appeal in illustrating the period setting--genteel life (however rocked by inappropriate passions) in remote towns and farms of the later 19th century.

The problem is that while an episodic, anecdotal structure was right for "Antoine," a more unified approach is required here, and Jutra doesn't even try. Instead, he seems to lurch from one tone and episode to another, sometimes playful, sometimes cold, sometimes providing odd distancing devices (one scene is played sped-up, like a silent movie at the wrong projection speed). None of this provides any continuity for the main actors, whose characterizations thus never quite snap into focus--despite their obvious talent--and it depletes the movie of emotional depth as well as epic sweep. This is definitely problematic in what's essentially an amour-fou triangle, in which mad desires stir infidelity and even murder within a staid, respectable society. We never feel any such passion (save in the crazy husband's self-contained mood swings, perhaps), so there's no force to the love--or whatever it is--between Bujold and Jordan. Indeed, those actors often seem to be obeying directorial commands more suitable to a staging of Strindberg or something else well outside the realm of naturalism. They're game, but the effect seldom adds up to more than arbitrary stylization.

This story from Anne Hebert's novel IS a melodrama, and while Jutra makes it clear he's commenting on melodrama rather than playing it straight, the nature of his commentary is never clear--the movie just doesn't have any clear perspective on material that it both visualizes handsomely and resists.

Still, "Kamouraska" isn't quite like anything else. It's oddly timeless in its oddity, with an overall feel that has dated less than just about anything from 1973 you could name. Whatever it was aiming for, it didn't quite hit the mark. But what it did achieve is nonetheless highly distinctive, for all the obvious flaws of pacing, narrative cohesion and dramatic involvement.

Bronco Bullfrog (1970)

Realistic but inert

[5/10 · 12 February 2023]

It was interesting to see this long-forgotten independent English feature, which was barely seen when it came out. But the kind of over-excitement that tends to pronounce any "rediscovered" film some kind of classic would really be wrong-headed in this case. The main problem is that while it's understandable to want to cast nonprofessionals in order to get a more "realistic" ambiance in this kind of drama, you still have to give them SOME kind of basic training so they don't look like deer before headlights in front of the camera, just reciting their lines and holding themselves stiffly as if for a still photo. And that's exactly what happens here.

The adults playing parents are OK, but the juveniles are stilted, and the two who were deemed good-looking enough to be leads are so wooden we feel nothing for them. Eventually the barely-there plot hinges on their running away to have some alone time (since both their single parents are hostile towards their being together), and I guess we're meant to root for Young Love, but these two can't express anything--whether love, lust, or just some basic intelligence.

The only real point of interest is the location shooting, and glimpsing a side of (East) London that obviously never got the least "Swinging." There's also a decent enough rock soundtrack. But whether we're focused on the mildly criminal doings of the first half or the runaway couple of the second, there's no narrative tension, and the actors are stiff as boards. A 5 is actually a very generous rating in terms of any entertainment or dramatic value, but I boosted it up from a 4 just for the sake of it providing a time capsule.