Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 31st, 2007
Synopsis
After a whirlwind romance leads to a quick marriage, Gary Cooper’s introduction to his new in-laws ends in fiery catastrophe. The marriage annulled, he returns to his small town home and an earlier romance despite the best advice of father-in-law-to-be Frank Morgan, who wants to save his friend from the horrors of marriage. But when a critical number of months later, Cooper receives word that he is to be a father, and that his former wife (Theresa Wright) is planning on giving the baby up fo... adoption, he kidnaps the infant and holes up in a hotel, trying to raise the baby himself.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 30th, 2007
Synopsis
Gary Cooper plays the title character, sent by his father on a perilous journey to the Far East to open up trade relations with China. Once in the court of Kublai Khan, he becomes involved in the palace intrigue, falling in love with the emperor’s daughter, and running afoul of evil councillor Basil Rathbone.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 25th, 2007
Synopsis
Gary Cooper and seven colleagues are introverted academics working on a new encyclopedia. When Cooper realizes this his slang entry is hopelessly out of date, he bravely ventures outside the ivory tower to learn what the new lingo actually is. The most fluent slang speaker he encounters is nightclub performer Barbara Stanwyck. When her gangster boyfriend (Dana Andrews) is wanted for murder, she hides from the police by moving in on the professors, ostensibly to help them with their project. ...hey all fall for her, of course, especially Cooper, and she beings, despite herself, to see them as something more than useful pawns.
Posted in: Brain Blasters, News and Opinions by David Annandale on May 25th, 2007
On May 21, Bruno Mattei died. He was the director of uncounted low-end Italian exploitation films, occupying a niche of horror and sex (frequently both) not unlike that owned by Joe D’Amato. It would be stretching the truth rather too far to say that he left us some good films, but he did leave us some entertaining ones. Viewers wanting a taste of his work should steer clear of Hell of the Living Dead, a zombie film that unfortunately is as dull as it is ludicrous. But Rats: Night of Terror (1983... out on DVD from Anchor Bay) is a different animal altogether, and as party movies go, this one is hard to beat. Be warned now, there are spoilers ahead. If you want to hit this film cold, stop reading now and go track it down.
A barely comprehensible crawl informs us that we are some two centuries after nuclear war. Our heroes are a group of bikers foraging for food and shelter in an unnamed metropolis. The movie is nothing if not a shameless pastiche of other (wildly disparate) flicks, and our first bit of artistic theft is from The Road Warrior. Or, at least, that is what the audience is meant to think. But these bikers are hardly threats either to Mad Max or to the Humongous. Their costumes are so varied and silly, they appear to have been lifted from several different movies. Add in the fact that, in this post-apocalypse world, copious amounts of hair care products and eyeliner are still available to both men and women, our bad-ass group appears to consists of Chuck Norris, Olivia Newton-John, Janet Jackson and the Village People.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 24th, 2007
Synopsis
Emilio is a Grade 11 student smitten with Jacklynne, the most popular girl in the school. She, of course, doesn’t even know he exists. He decides to get her attention by running for president of the Student Council, but no sooner does he declare himself as candidate then he discovers that his opponent is Jacklynne herself. Oops. He is now forced to run, but plans, with the help of his friends, to sabotage the results of the election to make sure he loses, but the is fraught with risks, most ...otably running afoul of the tyrannical principal and her hall monitor toady.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 22nd, 2007
Synopsis
Cord (Jeff Cooper) is a martial arts expert in a mythical land who competes for the right to go on a quest to confront a legendary master (Christopher Lee) who protects a mystical book. Cord cheats and is disqualified, but heads out on the quest all the same. Along the way he encounters various threats (all played by David Carradine) and a supernaturally talented blind man (also Carradine), not to mention oddities such as Eli Wallach sitting in a barrel of oil as part of long-term project to...dissolve his penis.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 21st, 2007
Thora Birch (remember when she was the lead and Scarlett Johansson was her support?) Is a young woman with a loving husband. She is struggling to deal with anxiety as she undergoes fertility treatments, and is having vivid nightmares in which she is living in a run-down apartment, working in a grotesque mortuary, is beset by strange visions, and is being stalked by a murderer. Or is it the other way around, as this young woman keeps dreaming she is the young married. And that murderer stalks both worlds. What’s going...on?
Writer/director Ray Gower cites David Lynch among his film’s major influences, but he leaves out the most painfully obvious one: Jacob’s Ladder, which this film mimics both in narrative structure (jumping back and forth between possible realities) and in groaner ending that makes a hash out of what has come before. Sorry, but that kind of third-hand Twilight Zone gambit simply doesn’t cut it. Along the way, there are some effectively gruesome sequences, nicely spooky imagery, and though the performances are uneven (a television newscaster is painfully amateurish, but Birch acquits herself well), the story is still interesting enough that the viewer will stick with the film long enough to be miffed by the conclusion.
Posted in: Brain Blasters, News and Opinions by David Annandale on May 18th, 2007
It has been a commonplace for quite some time now to take for granted that the B-movie, as we used to know it, has died. The types of stories we used to get in those films, from, for the sake of argument, the 30s to the late 70s, have been taken over by the blockbusters. So we get the same narratives, but with budgets in excess of 100 million dollars. So not only has the B-pic lost its turf, but it has also lost its natural habitat. The drive-in is almost extinct, and anyway, it is almost impossible for such films to...achieve any kind of theatrical distribution at all.
But the form isn’t quite dead. Roger Corman, king of the Bs, saw the writing on the wall some time ago, and shifted his focus almost exclusively to producing product for home video and cable TV. That is where the B-movie now resides. And while much of that product is deservedly maligned (does anybody really deserve to be put through another Jim Wynorski film?), and equally deservedly consigned to the remainder bins of video stores, let us reconsider our instinctive bile for a moment.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 18th, 2007
Synopsis
Peter O’Toole plays Maurice, an actor now reduced largely to playing corpses (or near corpses) and watching his days fade away in the company of his similarly elderly friends. Enter Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), the grand-niece of one of those cronies. Maurice is taken with her, and the story then takes a decidedly Pygmalion-esque turn as sullen young woman and ageing Lothario learn from each other.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 15th, 2007
Synopsis
Here we go: all 30 episodes of the first season, wherein we follow the adventures of Flipper, a dolphin owned by youngsters Bud and Sandy. All three are watched over by their father, Chief Ranger Ricks of Coal Key Park. The formula for each episode generally sees either someone who needs rescuing (from drowning, shark attack, that sort of thing) and Flipper must help out, or the boys and the dolphin wind up in trouble after poking their noses somewhere they shouldn’t. It’s all very familiar,...but damn if the show doesn’t still generate a certain degree of suspense with its cascade of predicaments. Also fun is the behind-the-scenes talent. Co-creator and director of many episodes is Ricou Browning, who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the underwater sequences of that film. He gets to recreate that role in the final episode of the season, as a monster movie is being shot at Coral Key, and Browning plays the monster (the costume appears to be repurposed version of the one used in The Monster from Piedras Blancas). There are moments in this episode which are deliberate, happier echoes of the original Creature. Curiously, the Creature was played in the land scenes by Ben Chapman, and that name shows up in the credits too as production supervisor, though in this case the name is a coincidence.
