LucyCannon Reviews

Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965)

A tip o' the brim to Castro Street?

[5 January 2004]

Our little group saw this on our own "Bad Movie Night" and speculated that this was a sly homage to San Francisco's gay community. Certainly there was no obvious reason to film it there, besides the fun involved in careening down Lombard Street between Hyde & Leavenworth (allegedly the crookedest stretch of paved road in the USA) during the chase scene.

Why? Because Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman seem almost disinterested in Dr. Goldfoot's sex-bots at first, and, once they find each other, they hold on to each other for dear life. Vincent Price camping it up in silk smoking jacket doesn't help. All of us viewing in this session were straight, so those of you with acute pre-Stonewall Hollywood Gay-dar should check this out to see if we're just a clueless bunch of breeders. There may even have been clues we missed.

A few things that make us go "Hmmm": Why would someone who obviously has the means to construct an opulent underground lab with fancy decoration and fabulous machinery need to use it to soak rich guys? Why does Igor look and act like just a normal schlub pulled off the street, rather than a revived corpse (did the SFX budget run out after all those gold bikinis)? How does making her scrub the floor punish a robot? (Unless she's Marvin the Paranoid Android.) What ever became of Igor's impersonation of the SIC chief visiting the local department? And why does a movie that advertises "killer sex-bots" have little violence, and essentially no sex, in it -- not even of the off-screen early-60s sex-tease sort?

Aww, so the hell what? IT'S A REALLY STUPID MOVIE ALL ROUND. ***, one of them just because Vincent Price is simply mahvelous.

Chushingura (1962)

Can other viewers please clarify something?

[5 January 2004]

I read the old play in an Asian History class in college some quarter-century ago, so I don't remember a lot of the "classic" plot. So I came to this movie almost cold, only knowing that there were 47 masterless samurai bound to avenge their master. This no doubt colored my view of the pacing, which to my mind took a very long time to get to the point where the young Daimyo Asano was provoked into his fatal breach of protocol.

I thought that the villain, Lord Kino, was painted awfully black, a shameless greedhead and womanizer and a coward to boot, as well as playing petty personal politics. Since it had been so long since I read the play, I don't know whether the traditional portrayal of this character is quite as one-sided as here, or whether he is traditionally portrayed as believing himself to have been morally in the right, rather than merely self-serving. Portraying Kino as believing he was himself an honorable man would have made the young Daimyo's choice between defending his personal honor, and violating formal protocol, more poignant. Thus the ronin's own dilemma would have not only been between conflicting expectations of traditional duty, but a question of which course of action would be Doing the Right Thing in an abstract sense.

I found the way the movie was edited made it difficult to distinguish one sequence from another -- I could not always tell whether a new sequence was begun, or the cut was a continuation of the current overall scene.

Near the end, as the ronin are gathering for their final assault of Kino's palace, we cut to a brief scene, in which one woman, hidden in a hooded cloak, attacks another woman with a blade while she is sleeping. The sleeping woman awakes and subdues her attacker, pulling back her hood so we can see her face. My partner and I could not figure out which women in the story these were, nor how this fit into the larger plot. Could one of you who has seen this movie multiple times clue me in on what happened here?

The Phantom Empire (1935)

Stop me before I yodel again

[5 January 2004]

I guess you really do have to be under 12 and never seen 1977's "Star Wars" to enjoy this one for what it is when viewing it for the first time. A little like raw cookie dough, it doesn't taste quite right when you're over 30, except in a setting of group intoxication. I also do not recommend seeing more than a few episodes at a single sitting, and there are 12.

Gene Autry's old-timey Hollywood Western music, and his bandmates' yokel humor, are the two brightest notes in this cheesy tin-hat sci-fi serial. Everybody wears an exceptionally goofy hat, it seems, except Queen Tika in her relatively sedate tiara; even the silvery robots wear hats. Why the elevator is powered by a robot cranking it rather than being fully automated, perhaps belies the "advanced technology" of the Muranians (although they do have TV, a novelty in 1935). Why the Muranians thunder across the plain en masse on horseback, if they were hoping not to be discovered by surface folk, is another mystery. More baffling still is why the Muranians need breathing apparatus at the surface, while Gene Autry and his buddies need none when they are kidnapped to the underground kingdom. And (*SPOILER WARNING!!*) if the death ray, run amuck, can destroy the entire city, there's nothing stopping it from continuing to destroy everything in the beam's path until it reaches the Earth's surface -- which it doesn't. Note also that Queen Tika is the only female to be seen in this society. They must breed like bees.

One of our party also notes that Gene seems to die more often than South Park's Kenny, only to be revived by the next episode. The Junior Thunder Riders, kids modeling themselves on people who at that point in the story are considered villains, look remarkably like the Klansmen riding to the ostensible rescue in "Birth of a Nation." A female championship trick rider is apparently only there to be the young-girl-in-jeopardy.

If you are over 21, rent this one with some friends and plenty of beer and popcorn. It deserves to be shared, but do take a break now and then lest you hurt your brain.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)

5 as an adaptation, 6 on its own merits

[17 July 2003]

I'm old enough to know that when one of my favorite books (in this case, comic-book mini-series) is adapted as a movie, something's going to get lost, so I try to judge the changes by whether they work rather than whether they slavishly stay true to the original. But I have to say that "League"'s changes from Alan Moore's comic were on the whole for the worse.

The comic was very up-front in being in the "steampunk" genre, an alternate 1890s in which some of the technology we associate with the 20th century had already appeared, in non-electric form, in the 19th. This is admittedly hard to convey in a movie, so I'm willing to let it go.

The plot was completely different, as well, although if the new plot had hung together better I would be more forgiving; the Phantom of the Opera as the putative villain (in place of Fu Manchu) I can accept. As it was, you could drive the Nautilus through the plot holes. Hyde saves the Nautilus from the water pouring in from the holes shot in it (at all levels) by pulling some switch in the bottom? Even releasing all the ballast is not going to bring her to the surface -- you need air pressure to force the water out of the upper decks. The man who sent them to Venice to protect the non-existent conference is the villain? He could have had his way with them in his office (or a "secret location") early on and skipped the wild goose chase. Oh, and is he (M) really Mycroft Holmes or James Moriarty?

The ways in which they changed the team were largely unnecessary, with the possible exception of making Mina a vampire (in the comic book, she is not, but still hides the scars of her encounter with Dracula). Otherwise it's not easy to tell what's "extraordinary" about her, save her (in the comic) prodigious detective skills and plain bloody-mindedness -- necessary for her role as field-group leader. Can Hollywood deal with an assertive woman like that? It's tried, but this time it chickened out.

Dorian Gray, though lovely, is superfluous on several counts: First, in the comic, the sexual tension is between the smoldering ice-queen Mina and the tired, recovering-opium-addict Quatermain; surely Connery would have relished at least one more role playing the romantic leading man against a younger woman of sufficient caliber. Second, if they had kept the original Invisible Man, they would already have their team member who can't quite be trusted (in the comic, we first "see" him molesting the boarding students in a girls' school dormitory). By splitting out these roles into a different character, they had to change the other characters enough that the team chemistry that was so appealing in the comic was largely lost.

As for Tom Sawyer, I will only say that I would suspect, considering the time in which the original adventures of Tom Sawyer must have taken place (before the American Civil War), by 1899 Tom should be in is forties at least, perhaps fifty, hardly the one to play the ingénue any more.

A few anachronisms were grating -- Germans weren't wearing those kinds of helmets in 1899, while Daimler had already built a motorcar (although not of that design) by 1899, sound recordings were not yet on disks but on cylinder -- but if those had been the worst problems I could ignore them.