2016 - TRAILER TRAUMA 2: DRIVE IN MONSTERAMA, more of the same from the previous Trailer Trauma films

Almost three and one half hours of film trailers for exploitation films, crummy action films and cheap horror films circa the 1970's and 80's.  Trailer Trauma 2: Drive In Monsterama is a stroll down a film world that has pretty much gone away now since the demise of the drive-in and the ascendancy of the streaming world.

 If you have a lot of time to kill and there are a lot of sleazy trailers to watch in this compendium,  this film might be for you.

 

203 minutes.

2020 - TRAILER TRAUMA V, 70'S ACTION ATTACK!

183 minutes of movie nerd heaven. 

3 hours of scratchy beat up movie trailers with an enjoyable commentary from Nathaniel Thompson and Howard S. Berger,  2 guys who know way more about these films than they should.

Highly recommenced especially for movie geeks.

2015 - A VERY MURRAY CHRISTMAS, not amused

20 minutes into this smarmy Christmas Special I pretty much had my fill of this supposed "cool" holiday show.  Bill Murray can't sing and to listen to him sing song after song was pure torture.

I get that the makers of this special are trying to have it both ways, deconstruct a typical Christmas Special like something Andy Williams or Perry Como would do, but the joke wore itself out after a while.  This show also attempts to trade on the cool guy persona of Bill Murray as he brings in a bunch of his Hollywood cronies to worship at the feet of cool guy Murray.

You know a musical comedy show is pretty bad when you are actually looking fotward to Miley Cyrus showing up during a dream sequence.  Maya Rudolph supposedly can sing but you would never know it from the piss poor sound recording of her Christmas performance.

Frankly the Bill Murray "coolest guy in the room" persona is getting a little tired and let's face it Murray's looking a little old to doing it.

 56 minutes.

1934 - MAMA'S LITTLE PIRATE, an Our Gang short.

Championed by Leonard Maltin as the inspiration for The Goonies.  Mama's Little Pirate is just another version of Jack and the Beanstock. About the only thing these two films have in common is the search for treasure.  Sorry Leonard I think you might have got it wrong this time. 





18 minutes.

1957 - THE GROWLER STORY, another odd career moment for John Ford

Film director and navel reserve officer John Ford was asked to dramatize an incident for the US Navy.  During World War II when the Captain of the USS Growler, Howard Gillmore was wounded during an attack by a Japanese patrol boat.  Gillmore ordered the sub to dive with him on the deck in order to save the ship from being sunk by the Japanese.

Ford brought along two of his actor cronies, Ken Curtis who played the captain and Ward Bond who played a typical Ward Bond character a loud mouthed sailor named Quincannon.

Shot in color with 16mm film by a navy camera crew, this film is mostly amateur hour with occasional moments of the John Ford touch.  Ford really indulges him self with lots of sloppy sentiment about navy traditions, (marching bands, the professional of arms, corny humor etc).  The battle scenes are rather poorly filmed, it's tough to know what exactly is going on.  But you have to give the actor Ken Curtis some credit since it appears he actually laid on the submarine's deck while the ship dived.

Well at least it's short.

22 minutes.

1949 - LES SANG DES BETES or BLOOD OF THE BEASTS, a short documentary about a slaughterhouse

Franju's documentary about a couple of slaughterhouses in the suburbs of Paris is oddly intense and poetic.  Franju doesn't look away from the animal killings or the processing of the carcass by the workers in these factories.  The film acknowledges that if the human race wants to eat meat this is the manner in which we will get it, violent, gruesome and very messy.

Sheep are tipped over and placed on a table while workers walk along and slit their throats open one at a time.  The reflexive nerves of their bodies shake while the workers hold these creatures down to finish the job.  Calves get their heads cut off so as not to contaminate the meat with blood for veal. Horses at a rendering plant are stunned to death prior to be skinned and eviscerated.  I might have to rethink this meat eating thing.

I suppose Blood of the Beast could be making some allusions to The Holocaust or the World Wars with their massive destruction of human life, but what I came away with was the almost technical precision that the human race has achieved in killing any living creature.

20 minutes

2013 - FROM ONE SECOND TO THE NEXT, Werner Herzog's texting while driving documentary is good but mighty harrowing

Apparently the major cell phone providers approached Herzog about directing a PSA about the dangers of texting while driving.  They certainly picked the right man, This is a very good documentary and really tough to watch short film.

Herzog focuses on four different stories the two middle stories in particular are extremely moving.  Herzog is one of the masters of the modern documentary form although I can't recall him making a film which delivers a real "in your face" message about texting while in a moving vehicle.

Here's the YouTube link.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BqFkRwdFZ0

Film making as a manipulative emotional teaching tool, extremely well done.

35 minutes.

1976 -1981 THE SCTV COLLECTION, all 21 discs.

What a disappointment.  This TV series is now hopelessly dated.

The sketch comedy revolving around a fictitious TV station satires most of the current personalities and trends that were popular during the mid 70's and early 80's and that seems to be the big problem,  none of the humor is very timeless.

Nobody would argue that the cast wasn't talented, everyone performed at a very high level, the problem is that their comedy bits are just not very funny.  I wonder if anyone even remembers the personalities being satirized, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Joey Heatherton, Lola Falana, Bob Hope, Merv Griffin, Connie Francis, The Five Freshman.  All these people in one way or the other were fixtures on televison.  But television is also a medium that is very fleeting at times.  One day you're hot and  the next day you're not.  "Mama Mia that's a spicy meatball" or Where's the beef."

A big disappointment from another time.

1890 minutes (approx)

2002 - SLAPSTICK ENCYCLOPEDIA VOL 9, THE RACE IS ONE, VOL 10 TONS OF FUN THE ANARCHIC FRINGE.

Two discs in a row is a lot of silent slapstick comedy to watch in one sitting, still there is a lot of good stuff:

1.  Charlie Chaplin stars in Easy Street, one of his famous shorts.  This is fairly funny stuff with Chaplin appearing as his little tramp character, taking on a gang of bullies.  A typical but well done Chaplin short film.

2.  Laurel and Hardy star in Big Business a film with a very high reputation however it seems kind of overrated to me.  The film has some big Hollywood talent attached,  George Stevens photographed it and Leo McCarey directed.   Laurel and Hardy are Christmas tree salesmen who end up destroying the house of a potential customer.  It's supposed to be funny as the destruction slowly builds up but it seems to never end. 

3.  Monty Banks shows up in an excerpt from his film Play Safe.  The runaway train sequence excerpt is really something to see with some pretty wild stunt work.

4.  Probably the outstanding film in this collection is Buster Keaton's One Week.  Keaton and his new bride have a prefab home which they assemble incorrectly.  This setup allows for some incredible surreal sequences,  an amazing film.

For the Keaton and Monty Banks films alone these DVD's are worth checking out.

1944 - HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN, Hollywood pats themselves on their collective backs

The Hollywood Canteen was an entertainment center started by Bette Davis and John Garfield to entertain servicemen either shipping out for combat or returning from combat.  Never an industry to pass up a chance to make themselves look good, Warner Brothers produced this butt kissing salute to how wonderful they were.

The film is loaded with lots and lots of 40's star mostly and unsurprisingly from the Warner Brothers studio.   There is actually a sort of plot to this film.  A soldier recovering from war wounds wants to meet his crush Joan Leslie.  This is an excuse for the soldier to run into a lot of stars.  Look it's Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Jane Wyatt, Eddie Cantor, Joe E Brown, you get the picture lots of actors that no one remembers today.

The film has a lot of musical numbers and little comedy bits from the stars.  It's harmless stuff, kind of boring and extremely dated.  In 1944, people watching this film could take comfort that "the stars" were ordinary people just like you and me.

Hollywood Canteen is over two hours but seems a lot longer.  Some of the musical numbers aren't too bad but the flag waving looks mighty corny these days.  Oh and the soldier "Slim" does get to go out on a date with Joan Leslie, God Bless America.

124 minutes, the director Delmar Daves also wrote the screenplay.

1962 - RED NIGHTMARE, defense department film about commies ain't subtle

This one's been kicking around the Internet for a while.  Red Nightmare was a defense department propaganda piece about the dangers of communism.  The film is narrated by Jack Webb in his "Joe Friday" voice.

Apparently in the middle of the Soviet Union circa 1960, a replica of a typical Midwestern town is being used by the Russkies to educate would be spies and saboteurs about the American way of life for their own sinister purposes.  But enough of that fear mongering , lets get to the actual story.

Good old American citizen Jerry Donovan takes his family and his freedom for granted in some nondescript middle American town.  But he is about to learn a lesson.  One night AKA It's a Wonderful Life.  He finds himself living in a country controlled by commies.  Jerry races around small town USA and finds that the ordinary citizens which include his family are acting like a bunch of mind controlled robots.  Arrested by the secret police and put on trial, Jerry makes an impassioned speech about the loss of his rights.  As he is being executed by authorities, he wakes up to find it was all a dream.  Jerry has learned his lesson about liberty. 

Red Nightmare may have been produced by the Defense Department, but it is a Warner Brothers film all the way. The writer, director and actors were all from the studio and apparently the whole thing was actually supervised by Jack Warner himself.

Red Nightmare would be a great double feature with Warner's left wing piece of  propaganda film Mission to Moscow.  It would be a something for everyone kind of movie night for leftie nuts and right wing extremists.

25 minutes

1974 - PLACE DE LA REPUBLIQUE, a unique documentary.

Louis Malle and a small camera crew stroll up and down a Paris street interviewing French citizens in this example of spontaneous film making.

Shot over a period of around 10 days, Malle attempts to interview people about their lives and interests.  This could have been an awful film but as it turns out to be a pretty fascinating one.  It's amazing how personal people get with Malle when there is a camera and a microphone pointed in front of them.

Considering some of the nut balls that Malle interviews and particularly one right wing nut case, he is incredibly nonjudgmental.  Amusingly, one woman being interviewed is the daughter of an actress that Malle had worked with, she can't say enough bad things about her mother.  

This is not a perfect film, some of the interviews kind of ramble and it does have some slow spots.  But considering the challenge of a film like this,  it's a fairly successful  premise for a documentary.                                                                              

94 minutes.

1962 - VIVE LE TOUR, very good documentary on the Tour de France bike race,

The french filmmaker Louis Malle filmed this short documentary in the early 1960's.  It's under 20 minutes but is packed with a lot of interesting information about the race which includes such things as exactly how one goes to the bathroom during a bike race.

This is film making at a very high caliber.

19 minutes.

1940 - THE POWER AND THE LAND, 1933 - INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN, a couple of short "classic" documentaries.

I doubt The Power and the Land would even be produced today by the United States Government since it glorifies rural electric cooperatives and the government's involvement in bringing power to the rural areas of the country in the late 1930's, this stuff is way to socialist for the present mood of the country.

The real life farm family in The Power and the Land.

The Power and the Land has some nice photography but not unexpectedly looks hopelessly dated, with the narration glorifying the "simple people" working the land.  Television has completely killed this kind of informational film.

38 minutes.

Industrial Britain is just hopeless.  The film was started by Robert Flaherty for the Grierson film unit and then taken out of his hands and reedited.  The stereotypical British narrator intones about the merits of industrialization across the British empire.  The word "stogy" comes to mind.  This is the kind of short film that played before before the main feature in theaters during the 1930's and 40's.  It's primary function was to torture the audience by boring them to death.

22 minutes

1994 - BOTTLE ROCKET, Wes Anderson short film

Bottle Rocket is Wes Anderson's really low key comedy about a couple of small time thieves.  It's also the first film for Anderson and like Spielberg's Amblin' it defines his style for all of his subsequent films.

It's either interesting or depressing to see a director continue to make films in the same style as his first short film.  Everyone knows what a Bergman, Hitchcock, Fellini or Welles film looks like, but these were guys who had years to develop their craft, Anderson has been  rigidly locked into a very formalized style since this first film.

Anderson's made some good films, but he reached his peak of artistic indulgence with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film so inside and indulgent nobody knew what to make of it.  It also flopped at the box office.

This short film has it good points and bad points, some funny if very quirky humor and an overall utter pointlessness.

13 minutes, written by Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson.

1965 - THE RAILRODDER & BUSTER KEATON RIDES AGAIN

The National Film Board of Canada's films about Buster Keaton's railroad ride from the eastern part of Canada to the western border.  Two films were made, The Railrodder, a short film which attempted to recreate the feel of a silent film and a documentary about the making of The Railrodder, Buster Keaton Rides Again.

 The Railrodder has Keaton racing along a railroad track in a maintenance vehicle called a "speeder."  The film has some nice scenery and Keaton the great stone face.  For a 70 year old man, Keaton is remarkably nimble and does an amazing number of his own gags.  The film is moderately entertaining.

Probably more interesting is the documentary Buster Keaton Rides Again.  Here you get a glimpse of Keaton the filmmaker as he takes on the actual director of The Railrodder, Gerald Potterton.  You actually have to feel a little sorry for Potterton as he tries to get Keaton to perform the gags he has devised and generally failing in his attempts to motivate Keaton.  However the reality is that the stunts and gags Keaton thinks up are probably the funniest in the film.

Keaton is considered one of the three great comedy geniuses of silent film along with Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.  But of the three Keaton was probably the one who understood how to use the camera with a sophisticated visual style that completely eluded Chaplin his entire career.

24 minutes The Railrodder.

55 minutes Buster Keaton Rides Again.

1968 - AMBLIN' early Spielberg film is kind of an ordeal to sit through

Steven Spielberg's early short film about a couple of hitchhikers in the desert.  The story what there is of it is entirely silent. 

Spielberg says he has great affection for Amblin' and why wouldn't he.  The film was seen by executives at Universal Studios and on the basis of it he was offered a job directing television shows for the studio.  The rest as they say is etc.

This isn't just any early short film by a future big name director.  It was shot in 35 millimeter and had Allen Daviau the cinematographer who would go on to film E.T. and The Color Purple for Spielberg.  It's a highly polished piece of movie making.  This is also a very slick piece of product, without an honest moment in the entire film.

Amblin' is the beginning of Spielberg the director as provider of commercial junk like, Hook, Jurassic Park:  The Lost World, Always, The Terminal and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. 

For every Schindler's List, the public is expected to sit through something like The Terminal or Amblin'.

26 minutes, written by Steven Spielberg.

1976 - CHESTY: A TRIBUTE TO A LEGEND, John Ford's final film as a director

John Ford's tribute to the United States Marine's most decorated soldier is virtually unknown.  The production was a cheap one and the majority of the film is made up of combat footage from World War II and the Korean War.

Ford appears in the film interviewing General Puller, both of these old guys are as stiff as a couple of boards.  Narrated by John Wayne in his cowboy costume, the whole thing seems outdated and a little out of it. When this documentary/tribute was filmed, the country was in the coma of the Vietnam War.  The general public probably wasn't in any mood for a tribute to tough marines.

Chesty:  A Tribute to a Legend, is interesting for the war footage that Ford incorporated.  The scenes of the Korean War, are more fascinating than the stuff Ford filmed for his terrible documentary This is Korea.

This film isn't particularly well made and with the exception of the marching bands and the usual military ritual stuff it would be impossible to tell that it was directed by Ford.

Serving in the navy during World War II had been the pivotal point in Ford's life, so it's not unexpected that Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend, is more about Ford's fascination with military life and ritual.

Edited into two different lengths, the short version doesn't seem much different than the long version.

27 minutes

47 minutes

1960 - UNIVERSE, space is the place.

Universe is a short documentary film from The National Film Board of Canada.  This is the kind of film that your teacher would run in science class to kill 30 minutes of lecture time.  In other words this is an educational short film.

Universe is known as the film that supposedly influenced Stanley Kubrick during the  making  2001: A Space Odyssey.  Kubrick hired one of the co-directors of this film Colin Low to work on the special effects for 2001.  Douglas Rain, the narrator of Universe was also the voice of the HAL  9000 computer. 

The now low tech observatory and telescope provide most of the entertainment value with the nerdy crew cut scientist consulting star charts and hand positioning the telescope to shoot some pictures of star formations.  Even for 1960 this seems a little antiquated.

Universe ends with the narrator spouting some junk about "man's place in the universe" as the sun rises over the observatory.  We see the scientist drive away,  probably rushing home to watch Our Mr. Sun.

29 minutes, written by Roman Kroitor and Stanley Jackson.

1970 - DIONYSUS IN 69 - film record of an interactive theater performance

Dionysus in 69 is a film by Brian De Palma that captures a performance of Euripides' The Bacchae by a theatrical troupe called "The Performance Group."

This play is an interactive audience experience performed apparently in a garage or a warehouse.  The performers at times enter a frenzied state with and without their clothes.  There is a significant amount of nudity or near nudity at times.  You can see the discomfort in the faces of the audience.

This is also a very imaginatively filmed performance of a theatrical production, De Palma uses his split screen technique to capture the play from different viewpoints.  At times he focuses on a single performance from two different angles perfectly blending it into the split screen.

This film is an excellent record of the type of experimental theater that was going on in the late 1960's that was challenging the conventional staging, performance and even structure of a theatrical play.   An exciting, uncomfortable and at times very difficult film to watch but extremely worthwhile.

85 minutes.