1960 - THE LEECH WOMAN, not to be confused with The Wasp Woman or Invasion of the Bee Girls

Another in the Universal monster movie package and probably one of the worst one.  The Leech Woman is a cross between The Man in Half Moon Street, Dracula, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and a Bomba the Jungle Boy, film. 

A sleazeball scientist looking for an anti aging formula ends up in Africa with his old croon of a wife where they discover a secret orchid mixed with the hormone from the human pituitary gland.  This goop makes the old croon young and beautiful again but naturally the anti aging compound only works temporarily, so the usual movie killing spree kicks in.

Lots of stock footage in the jungle mixed with the good old Universal back lot, a B list of actors, a stupid plot, latex monster makeup and a short running time.  Usually this type of film could be campy fun but in this case it's not much fun and not very campy.   The film just crawls along from one no fun scene to another. 

This wraps up the Universal Classic Science Fiction box set for me.  My score, The Incredible Shrinking Man, the best in the series, Tarantula, the runner up.  The Mole People, stupid but fun, The Monolith Monsters, boring and The Leech Woman, the bottom of the barrel.

77 minutes with a lot of stock footage which if removed probably would have made it about 44 minutes.

2010 - KNIGHT AND DAY, Romantic action, comedy, thriller, blah, blah, blah

Pretty much an overblown updating of an old Avengers TV episode, Tom Cruise is the John Steed character, Cameron Diaz gets the Emma Peel part.  The film has a Hitchcock McGuffin with the two stars running around chasing something which is really just an excuse for lots of action set pieces.

The film is trying to be light on its feet by going for the Charade/Arabesque type of a film.  But it's more frenzied than clever and witty.  It's supposed to be an action thriller but there is a little too much confusing action and certainly way more phony looking CGI in most of the action scenes which really spoils them.

The two stars try to play to their strengths and maybe it's a little unfair to say it but they are not exactly a couple of spring chickens these days.  Diaz must be in her late 30's and Cruise has to be pushing 50.  They are a rather  mature couple playing basically immature characters. As if to prove they still have sex appeal they both slip on swimming suits halfway through the film.  Audrey Hepburn and Cary
Grant didn't have to stoop that low in Charade. 

This was apparently a rather troubled production going through 12 writers, two directors and an assorted number of stars before filming.  Knight and Day could have used an Alfred Hitchcock in his prime to mix the thriller and romance elements instead if got a director named James Mangold who is no Hitchcock.

110 pointless minutes.

1968 - LA PRISONNIERE, Clouzot's very odd and kinky final film

Henri-Georges Clouzot's final feature film is about bondage, submission and the kinetic art movement of the 1960's it doesn't really come together, the film isn't brave enough to go with Clouzot's ongoing theme of exploring the dark side of human nature.

Josee, the wife of an artist becomes involved with her husband's art dealer, Stan.  It seems that good old Stan likes posing women in submissive and bondage situations that he then photographs, but that's about as far as he goes.  Josee, for reasons that remain entirely unclear, decides she wants to go down this bondage road with Stan and enters into a rather bizarre relationship with him.  Eventually Josee and Stan become a couple but Josee falls in love with him and attempts to move their relationship towards a more conventional path.  Stan isn't really on the same page as Josee and things go downhill from there.  

La Prisonniere has some interesting scenes, after all this is a Clouzot film.  An encounter on a rooftop between Stan and Josee's husband, a car train wreck and a beautifully filmed scene at the sea shore with the couple standing on a rock getting soaked by ocean waves.  The sea shore scene looks very cool filmed in slow motion,  although two people getting really pelted with water seems a little silly.  La Prisonniere also picks up where Clouzot left off with the bizarre visual imagery he experimented with in his unfinished film  L'Enfer.

La Prisonniere fails because Clouzot like his character Josee can't decide how far he wants to go into the subculture of dominance and submission.  Clouzot seems to want to explore it but looks away in digust as he continues to get closer and closer to it.

106 minutes, screenplay by Henri-Geoges Clouzot.

1987 - MASQUES another Claude Chabrol hate letter to the French bourgeois

Not the best Chabrol I've seen but not bad.  Philippe Noiret is a game show host who's one of those jolly good fellow type of guys.  Since this is a Claude Chabrol film he has a few skeletons in his closet. 

Chabrol's very smooth style is once again in action.  Everything is well staged and photographed.  All the actors give good performances.  Where he gets into trouble is with his story, with the exception of Noiret most of the characters are underdeveloped and the mystery part of the story is kind of uninteresting.

Masques is well made and not bad, however for a suspense thriller it's a little lazy.   Noiret gets to give a great "screw you" speech at the end of the film as things are closing in on him which is fun to watch.

100 minutes written by Odile Barski and Claude Chabrol.

1976 - THE BAD NEWS BEARS, tame comedy and social satire

Nobody remembers Michael Ritchie or his films anymore.  For a while he was known as a director who could mix social satire into his stories in an entertaining way. 

The Bad News Bears is actually a typical sports film.  A group of misfits on a ball team rally together to become friends and compete in the big championship game.  The novelty in this film was to make the team a bunch of Southern California kids with little potty mouths, there is lots of little kid swearing.

The film is pretty conventional and follows the predictable story path leading to the big game.  There's lots of heartbreak and bonding and moments of self discovery, etc.  The satire in the film is also very mild with some tame criticism's about the competitive nature of team sports. 

Walter Matthau good as usual is the drunken team coach of the Bears.   Vic Morrow is also good as the type A coach of the opposing team.  Tatum O'Neal was a pretty hot kid actor at this time so she was cast as the tomboy pitcher for the Bears.  The rest of the cast is a bunch of kids where the main entertainment for the audience  is to watch them screw up on the softball field.

The Bad News Bears was a big hit for Michael Ritchie but in a way it was the high point of his career.  Ritchie for the most part stopped adding social satire into his films and moved into  a more mainstream Hollywood career making mostly uninteresting films after this. 

102 minutes, written by Bill Lancaster.

1958 - MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS, does he have office hours?

Well you see there's this professor at this community college who gets the school to buy him a million year old fish.  The fish has some kind of slime in it, so if you touch it or inject it or smoke it you revert to some kind of prehistoric beast or monster as the professor unfortunately finds out. 

Short and silly from the 1950's  Universal monster cycle and with that monster mask and those crazy rubber hands it's hard to believe this ever scared anyone.  Probably if the film has any inventiveness to it at all it's the ridiculous ways they find to get the professor to change into a monster.  The fish blood dripping into the pipe tobacco is certainly original if completely ridiculous. 

Between all the scenes of creepy hands sticking out from behind bushes and trees, it's hard to not laugh at the professor/monster's have baked musing about the nature of the human beast as if anyone is supposed to take that seriously. Still Monster On The Campus is a lot more fun than Inception.

Silly as this film is, it was remade as the big budget science fiction film Altered States, 22 years later.  Guess which version is more entertaining?

77  monstrous minutes

1935 - CHINA SEAS, mash up of Dinner At Eight and Grand Hotel on a boat

From the Cadillac of film studios.  MGM sure pumped out a lot of stuff like this.   The very manly Clark Gable, is the manly captain of a ship sailing in the China Seas.  1930's sex bomb Jean Harlow plays a character named China Doll.  Wallace Berry is the passenger with funny business on his mind. American Rosalind Russell plays a very proper English woman named Sybil, who is involved with manly Clark in a love triangle with at times bra less Jean Harlow, and so it goes.

The screenwriter Jules Furthman was a go guy for making this pack of cliches interesting. The director Tay Garnett a very underrated film maker is skilled enough to keep this interesting and succeeds most of the time.  

The film has a lot going on.  There's a hurricane scene where a steamroller of all things, on the deck of the ship getting lose and rolling around flattening a few coolies.  Almost immediately after that pirates attack the ship but manly Clark Gable gets the upper hand with some kind of a cannon he just happens to have on board his ship. 

Have to give Tay Garnett credit, he slips in as much sex and sadism as he can get away.  During the typhoon scene, Harlow in an already tight gown gets soaked with water which leaves little left to the imagination.  Manly Clark Gable is tortured by some kind of gizmo called a "Chinese boot" something apparently invented for this film.  Garnett also isn't afraid to have a few bodies flying across the screen when manly Clark Gable starts blasting the pirates with his cannon.

A lot of MGM's reputation as the classy prestige studio rests on  films like Ben Hur, Mutiny On The Bounty, and Romeo and Juliet.  However films like China Seas is what the audiences came to watch and MGM knew it.

90 quick minutes.

1994 - BULLETS OVER BROADWAY Woody Allen's comedy about creating art

Woody Allen's film about creating a play with all the compromises and crap that comes up is a very funny film.  Allen mixes 1930's gangsters with pretentious theatrical people for a pretty funny film

Woody Allen was really on the ball with this cast.  Dianne Wiest is the pompous windbag Broadway star who can manipulate the writer of the play with absolutely no problem.  Jennifer Tilly is the girlfriend of the gangster financing the play with a voice like a cockatoo, it's a cliched part but she brings if off.  John Cusack is the actor who gets to be the stand in for Woody in this film as the half assed intellectual who isn’t as deep as he thinks he is.

The film has a lot of other good actors, Jack Warden, Harvey Fierstein, Tracey Ullman and  Jim Broadbent, just to name a few.  Trivia note, the film also has Stacey Nelkin, the actual teenager Woody Allen was involved with (see Manhattan) in the 1970's.

After setting up the comic situations, Bullets Over Broadway runs out of gas towards the middle of the film.  The film runs a little over 90 minutes but it would probably would have played better if it was a little shorter.  However, this is one of his better 1990's films.  

98 minutes, written by Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath.

1977 - NEW YORK NEW YORK, no fun, no fun or Travis Bickel learns to play the saxophone

Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro drag Liza Minnelli along for  A Woman Under The Influence meets A Chorus Line or Guys and Dolls or something.  The idea of the film seemed to be to make a mainstream musical drama and mix it with contemporary improvisational techniques. 

Working mostly on sound stages, Scorsese goes for that old Hollywood look, he even edits the film to look like a 40's movie, with old fashioned montages and camera angles.  Trying to update the musical genre, Scorsese has De Niro and Minnelli perform long improvisational scenes which in theory should give insight into their relationship. But method actor De Niro and the more old school Liza Minnelli don't really mesh together with all their "good acting" scenes which only make this long film seem longer.

This is just not a good Scorsese film even with Robert De Niro in it.    He's supposed to be a hotshot musician wheeler dealer, but he mostly comes off as a psycho.  De Niro seems all wrong for the part with his mister intense acting style.   One thing to Scorsese's credit, he manages to keep Liza Minnelli under control which was probably no small challenge, she keeps her special brand of hysterical acting in check for a change.  However, it seems pretty tasteless to have her dress and look like her mother Judy Garland towards the end.  

This film is an ordeal to sit through.  You're better off watching The Helen Morgan Story with Paul Newman and Ann Blyth instead.

163 very long minutes.

1946 - THE KILLERS, better version of the Hemingway short story

Although the 1964 version is not without it's good points, mainly Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager as the killers,  the 1946 version has it all over that film.  This is a good 1940's film noir well directed by Robert Siodmak and produced by Mark Hellinger a guy who actually had some taste and talent. The Killers was written by Anothony Veller with uncredited help from John Huston.

Somebody had the smart idea to actually use the Hemingway short story for the opening scenes in the film.  It sets the mood for the rest of the picture.  After that opening, the film uses the same story structure as Citizen Kane as the insurance investigator tries to put together why a man would wait to be killed. 

The Killers has a fine cast, with Burt Lancaster as the victim and Ava Gardner as the femme fatale.  But probably the two standouts in the film are a couple of character actors, Edmond O'Brien as the insurance investigator and Sam Levine as the cop helping him solve the murder.  Try making a film today where two character actors are as important as the main leads.

The director Robert Siodmak worked on a lot of horror movie junk at Universal before he got better assignments, directing entertaining crap like Son of Dracula and Cobra Woman.  Siodmak really pours on the atmosphere in this film, he also has a  one take shot of a payroll robbery that's very well done. 

Don Siegel claimed he used nothing of The Hemingway short story or scenes from this film for his version of The Killers.  Not true, the basic idea of a man waiting to die is from the Hemingway story and the flashback structure in this version were borrowed for the 1964 film.  

A very well done film.

103 minutes, screenplay by Anthony Veiller.

1964 - THE KILLERS, made for TV film of the Hemingway story, sort of.

Supposedly the first made for TV film that was released instead in the theater because of it's violence.  The Killers is kind of a lame looking film with lots of sloppy back projection, cheap looking studio sets, crappy back lot filming and over blown music from John Williams no less.

The film was directed by B movie ace Don Siegel who had a good cast.  Lee Marvin and Clu Gulagher are the ultra cool killers possibly an inspiration for the Blues Brothers.  Angie Dickenson is the femme fatale in full fatale mode.  Ronald Reagan the criminal mastermind who earns his reputation as the second string actor he always was.   John Cassavetes is also in the film, this is the kind of crap he did to finance his own independent films. 

Since this was a cheapskate Universal studio production, Siegel probably did the best he could do under the circumstances.  Siegel tries to stick a few stylistic flourishes into the film but it's pretty much an uphill battle.  When it's all said and done probably the only interesting stuff in the film is Lee Marvin's very cool killer.

A film with a higher reputation than it deserves probably due to the weirdness of having Ronald Reagan in his final film playing a screen villain.  The Killers is another Criterion disc like the Blob where the bonus materials are better than the actual film.

93 minutes.

2010 - THE WALKING DEAD, another zombie film because the world is geting sick of teenage vampires?

Caved into the hype and watched the new AMC series, The Walking Dead.  Flesh eating zombies are everywhere, in this case Atlanta, Georgia.

Based on the comic book, this is an expensive pilot film for the upcoming TV series written and directed by Frank Darabont who has some experience with  horror films.  Since the zombie genre has pretty much been worked over for the most part,  Darabont's approach appears to be to focus on the uninfected (uneaten?) characters and there reactions to a zombie apocalypse. 

The pilot is well produced but I can pretty much see where this story is going. The deputy sheriff in search of his wife is going to find her only to realize that she is now involved with his former partner. The Walking Dead is going to end up like a zombie version of All My Children.

I think the question will be, how much money will AMC pump into this series to maintain the high production values of the pilot episode?  My guess, not much after they hook viewers on the first couple of episodes.  After all how much can it cost to smear a bunch of blue makeup on some extras and have they drag themselves around in the woods as they pretend to eat people?

70 zombie shuffling minutes.

1950 - THE BLACK ROSE, standard adventure stuff in Technicolor!!

Pretty boring Tyrone Power adventure story, shot on location in England and Morocco. 

Power is supposed to be a young English scholar in search of adventure.  Power looks to be in his 40's so he doesn't exactly have that young scholar thing going for him.  Tyrone Power doesn't even attempt an English accent and maybe that's for the best.  Orson Welles shows up as a Genghis Khan type of character and he actually underplays his scenes for a change and is pretty good.  A french actress Cecile Aubrey, is the love interest and she acts so infantile she seems like she's brain dead. 

The director is Henry Hathaway who should have been able to do this kind of adventure story in his sleep and maybe that was the problem, he must have been half asleep, the film has no energy, it's basically a technicolor travelogue.  The cinematographer was the legendary Jack Cardiff, but this film isn't up to the level of the Powell and Pressburger pictures he worked on.

The Black Rose is known as the film Orson Welles raided for costumes and props for his film version of Othello, in particular the fur coat he wears throughout that picture.  Othello is certainly a much better film than this.  Welles provides the only interest in this film

120 minutes.

1955 - THE COBWEB is about picking out curtains

The Cobweb has an all star cast, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Gloria Grahame, Charles Boyer and Lillian Gish. The Cobweb was filmed in Cinemascope.

 

  
The Cobweb is based on a book by William Gibson, the author of The Miracle Worker . The Cobweb has one of the first twelve tone scores used in a film which was composed by Leonard Rosenman. The Cobweb was produced and directed by John Houseman and Vincente Minnelli the team from Two Weeks In Another Town.

 The Cobweb is about picking out curtains.
 

That's all The Cobweb is about, picking out curtains.

124 "oh come on does it really need to be this long" minutes. 

1923 - A WOMAN OF PARIS, impressive drama from Charlie Chaplin

A sophisticated dramatic film from Charles Chaplin. 

Looking to stretch himself as a filmmaker, Chaplin put his leading lady/lover/girlfriend in a film he didn't appear in and wasn't a comedy.  A Woman of Paris was made as Chaplin was coming off his series of Mutual short films.  Chaplin subtitled the film "a drama of fate" and even put in a disclaimer to the public that he did not appear in it.  The film was not successful which is unfortunate, this is one of his best films. 

Chaplin had a close relationship with his star, Edna Purviance and was looking to launch her as a major leading actor, unfortunately that didn't work out.  Edna Purviance gives a very good performance going from country girl to the mistress of a rich millionaire.  Her acting is somewhat spoiled by some ridiculous head pieces she wears which are a minor distraction.

Incredibly Chaplin filmed A Woman of Paris, without a script, and in sequential order.  What could have been a melodramatic mess of a film is completely redeemed by his skill with the actors and his use of small bits of comedy to temper the melodrama of the film, very effective. 

An impressive film without all the sloppy sentiment that tended to overwhelm his films.  A Woman of Paris is clearly an influence on directors like Ernest Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock with it's skilled mix of comedy and drama .

One of Chaplin's best films.

93 minutes.

1964 - BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, giallo film is some sort of icky classic

Essentially a series of murders brilliantly staged by the director/co writer Mario Bava. 

The "who really cares" plot has something to do with a diary kept by a fashion model that will incriminate certain individuals.  The film is an excuse to murder some Italian fashion models in if I dare say the word "artistic" ways.  Blood and Black Lace also has a complex murder mystery plot that really adds nothing to the film.  The focus is completely on creative ways of sadistically killing beautiful women.

This film is not Son of Psycho, there is nothing of the careful character detail and psychological motivation that Hitchcock worked so hard to achieve.  Mario Bava was a very good cinematographer and he did a lot of the photography on the films he directed.  The film does look very good in a gaudy color kind of way.

I would love to say this film was influential on the horror/slasher genre, with films like the Friday the 13th series and the Halloween series, but I've never seen any of those films...

Blood and Black Lace walks a very fine and not subtle line between eroticism and sadism.  A very disturbing film.

88 murderous and intense minutes.

2001 - ATLANTIS THE LOST EMPIRE, Disney's animated adventure epic was probably a poor choice for a film

For reasons probably only known to the executives of the Walt Disney company, the animation department produced this beautifully made animated epic adventure.  That's the main problem, it's an animated adventure epic. 

No singing princesses, no singing birds, no singing teacups and no large overblown Broadway style production numbers.  What the film did have was a neat submarine, a monster, a volcano blowing up and a Star Wars type air battle at the end which was actually pretty cool. 

Atlantis The Lost Empire has a princess but she didn't sing one note, it also has a lot of comedy relief.  The basic appeal for Disney's audience of young girls was going to be nothing,  and an audience of young boys probably wasn't going to be caught dead at an animated adventure film, from the unhip Disney Studios. 

2001 was the year of Harry Potter, the first Lord of the Rings film and yet another Jurassic Park film.  These were more in line with where kid's heads were at.

Atlantis the Lost Empire is a well made, very well designed and good looking film with lots of action.  It just shouldn't have been made. 

This is the first, second,  third film I've watched this year about the lost continent of Atlantis and surprisingly I've enjoyed them all.

The running time, 96 minutes.  Written by Tab Murphy.