The B-Masters Cabal

Continuing to fill up the Rubber Soul Roundtable…

THE MAZE
There are a lot of times when I don’t remember a movie (sometimes mere hours after watching it), but I remember a particular scene or vague theme from the movie. All I could remember about Treasure of the Four Crowns was the scene where fireballs on ridiculously visible wires were flying around. With Sword and the Sorcerer, it was “guy falls into room of naked women” and “guy makes witch’s chest explode, then catches her heart.” Although there are many times when I remembered both the scene and the title of the movie, there are many other times when I have no recollection at all of the film’s title. It is in these instances that the Internet has proven to finally be worth all the trouble. Thousands and thousands of years of social and technological evolution finally lead to the moment when I can look up “screaming banshee on moors” and find out in which movie it appears. And the internet was there for me again, very recently, when I was trying to remember the title of a movie about which all I could recall was, “frog man in center of hedge maze.”

It’s time for the latest Video Binge over at Cold Fusion, which is an entire month of first sequels to movies I’ve previously reviewed. Can’t you just feel the electricity in the air?

First up is 666: The Beast (2007), which is a sequel to a knockoff of a remake of a knockoff. Which pretty much tells you how good it is.

And then there’s Femalien 2 (1998), which has exactly the same things going for it as the original Femalien. Wink wink, nudge nudge, yawn yawn.

It’s time for another chapter of That Was Then, This Is Now, in which Chad Denton of The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and I take a look at Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel, The Lodger, and some of the films adapted from it.

Warning: All three reviews plus the discussion that follows contain explicit spoilers of the novel and the films. Proceed at your own risk!

The Lodger (1927) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

The Lodger (1932) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

The Lodger (1944) at The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The discussion….with special guest literary critic!

Todd chimes in with the first of Teleport City’s contributions to the Rubber Soul roundtable:

HANUMAN AND THE SEVEN ULTRAMEN
When I’m writing about a movie, I’m much less interested in telling you how good or bad it is than I am in justifying the time I spent watching it. As such, I’m looking for those points of interest–either contained in the film itself or in the circumstances of its production–that will make the whole endeavor seem worthwhile. Providing a break from the rigors of that approach are those occasions on which I encounter films whose WTF quotient is so high that they exist on a plane beyond simple judgments of good or bad–the mystery of whose very existence overshadows any questions of quality. Hanuman and the 7 Ultramen is such a film. And like another fine example of the species, the Turkish superhero mash-up 3 Dev Adam, Hanuman achieves that rarified WTF air by means of positioning some very familiar elements within a very foreign context. It’s just hard to dismiss a shockingly gory movie that teams the world’s most beloved giant Japanese superhero with the Hindu monkey god for not measuring up to some notional standard of “coherence” or “watchability”.

May is another B-Masters’ Roundtable month! Drop in over the next 31 days - particularly on the 31st day - as this time around we pay tribute to some of the most important people in B-Movies. Directors, writers, stars— Bah! Where would any of us be without - the guy in the suit !?

It’s RUBBER SOUL: all this month at the B-Masters’ Blog.

If I wanted to craft the worst metaphor you’d see all week (on this site, at least), I’d say the following:

“Dark Corners (2006) demonstrates that now matter how gorgeous and durable your collection of yarn is, it doesn’t mean a damned thing if you don’t knit the stuff into a sweater.”

But, of course, I have no ambition of presenting you with a really bad metaphor.  So that comment above?  I never said it.  Must have been a bad dream.

Be-Sharam
If you wanted to, it seems like you could draw up a sort of family tree of the films Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan made during his late seventies to mid eighties prime, tracing each of those movies’ origins along three very distinct lines, each leading back to a particular career-defining blockbuster that provided the template for much of what was to come. Of course, while Bachchan would star in films that were virtual remakes of Deewaar, Sholay and Don over the course of his career, the lines leading back to those three classics would not always be perfectly straight. For one would also have to consider films like 1978’s Be-Sharam, which draw upon elements of all three.

Casus Kiran
It’s hard to write about these old Turkish superhero movies–especially those directed by Yilmaz Atadeniz–without making reference to the Republic serials of the 1940s. The problem with doing so, however, is that many of you young people out there, with your newfangled transistor radios and souped-up hotrods, will have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. I suppose the appropriately curmudgeonly response to that would be to refuse to continue this review until you’ve educated yourselves on the topic, instead filling space with horrific, Andy Rooney-like ruminations on how butter doesn’t taste the way it used to and why on earth is the print in Reader’s Digest so small until you return with at least one complete viewing of The Perils of Nyoka or some-such under your belts. But, as much as the thought of such an exercise appeals to me, I’m afraid I can’t do so in good conscience. The fact is that those serials were meant to be seen in a very specific context, a context which simply doesn’t exist anymore.

For the few of you who keep track of such things, I am phasing out updating the Leisure section of Teleport City in order to focus the site on the reason everyone comes to it: film. The Leisure material is being migrated, along with a bunch of new stuff, to The Astounding Cabinet of Wonders:

http://teleport-city.com/wordpress/

Click on it now and you can see pictures of me climbing, which looks bad-ass as long as you don’t know that 1) that’s a picture of me realizing I have nowhere else to go, and 2) some barefoot little Bad News Bear looking kid scurried up the same route immediately after I dropped down.

But none of that will prepare you for A-Chan, the little girl who makes me hate not liking children, because she reminds me that some little kids are beyond awesome and at like age 7 have the climbing skills of a fearless gibbon.

And now, back to trying to finish my review of Pepe Le Moko and Algiers.

Paid to Kill (1954) a Hammer film noir with some actual noir content!  Also suspense, betrayal, and a huge company with a meaningless name!

I’m really starting to like this website…

Ten Scenes of Brutal Violence Guaranteed To Make You Laugh

The 30 Most Ill-Conceived Monsters

Hey, you know those horror movies where six idiots manage to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, and then they get gruesomely slaughtered one by one, and then the director and the screenwriter look at each other and realise they still have half an hour’s footage to shoot, and then all of a sudden more characters turn up out of the blue complaining about engine trouble?

It is in this spirit that we warmly (if a tad belatedly) welcome into the B-Masters fold Steve Billups of Gangrene Widescreen. Play friendly, children!

Six black slaves rise from the grave, grab up some weapons, and begin killing white people, in another zombie romp from director Umberto Lenzi. Features include, “Waking the Dead for Dummies,” “Zombie Film Cliche List,” and another music video from Grady. Jessica gets all the best lines…

Watch or download the video on Vimeo.com

TOOFAN
All of this is a shame not just for the audience, who must suffer through Toofan’s vast stretches of unengaging filler, but also for Amitabh Bachchan, who so desperately needed for the movie to be a hit. Because, as I’ve indicated, Toofan contains all the makings of a very entertaining film; it’s just that those involved in its creation were too busy throwing anything that they thought might stick at it to take stock of exactly what those makings were. And so a lot of fun, cheesy thrills–as well as a serviceably heroic performance by its star and some pretty well-staged scenes of violent action–ended up getting buried in a storm of half-baked contrivances and unnecessary shtick. As a result Toofan was a film that was pretty hard to love–and Amitabh was still left with a long climb ahead of him in his struggle back to the top.

EVENT HORIZON
I didn’t see Event Horizon when it was released. I’m not sure why. I mean, it’s a gory film about a spooky spaceship. I think, however, in 1997, I saw maybe three film the entire year, and that was when I went out on dates with a lovely Southern belle. Somehow we ended up at a screening of Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation. So shamed was I that I just packed up and left North Carolina for New York, hoping to lose myself in the throng and hide my shameful secret. But the Netflix Diaries experiments have, in a way, become a curious place for dragging my own horrible secrets into the light for all to see, and on the scale of shameful secrets, “took a date to see Mortal Kombat II: Annihilation” is much worse than “burning passion for Catalina Larranaga” or even “took a date to see Wicked City.” It’s probably not worse than, “invited a girl over, cooked her a crappy dinner, then made her watch Black Devil Doll from Hell,” but it’s pretty close.

Blood Oath (2006) is one of the new crop of indie slasher flicks, so you know you’re going to get a thigh-deep heap of “homages” to movies that were forgettable when they originally showed at the drive-in, and characters who are are periodically lobotomized so that they’ll behave as only characters in slasher flicks behave.  It’s hard to measure the success of a movie which aims so low.

The Moonstone
The Moonstone marks our first real foray into a universe in which we will be spending a lot of time as I work my way through this latest round of Netflix Diaries: the Poverty Row thriller. An understanding of what Poverty Row was — if not an actual appreciation for its product — is an important part of any cult film education (and given the way you kids are allowed to make up any damn thing and call it a college major these days, you can probably go PhD in Cult Film Studies or some such nonsense, when you should be spending your time in college learning about Hammurabi, thermodynamics, and beer funnels), because Poverty Row is where the b-movie was born.

Iron Claw The Pirate
In the course of doing my usual rigorous research in preparation for bringing you the most carefully considered review of Iron Claw the Pirate possible, I came upon some information that seemed to suggest that it was the second film in a series of Iron Claw movies. That made sense to me, because Iron Claw the Pirate is a film that seems to start in progress, without any introduction of the characters or ongoing conflicts. However, what makes sense does not always prove to be so–especially in the case of Turkish action cinema–and I later determined that I had misinterpreted that information. In fact, it was Iron Claw the Pirate that was the first film, followed immediately by its sequel, Demir Pence Casuslar Savasi. Still, the reality of the situation makes its own kind of sense, simply because that’s just the way that these movies are. Any amount of exposition or character development would most likely have been seen by the makers of Iron Claw the Pirate as a waste of valuable time that could otherwise have been devoted to fist fights, shootouts, and fleshy women doing exotic dances.

For some reason, it was just one really good movie after another this update cycle.  So naturally, I had to break the streak by watching something produced by David Friedman…

Bummer! (1973), which would be indistinguishable from a 1930’s vicesploitaion movie were it not for all the ugly clothes, ugly hair, and ugly music…

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), in which Jodie Foster illuminates the gentler side of Rhoda Penmark…

Marooned (1969), in which the Apollo 13 crisis arrives two years early…

Sisters (1973), in which Margot Kidder sadly does not carry around a big wicker basket…

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), which blows my mind by causing me to rave about a Disney movie derived from Jules Verne…

and…

Weird Woman (1944), in which a much more deserving novel is adapted in such a way as to provoke no raving whatsoever.

Dark Heroine Muk Lan-Fa
The Jane Bond films, in most cases, were cheap, hastily-made affairs, and The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa is no exception. With its monochrome photography and Spartan sets, the film bears as much similarity to the Republic serials of the forties as it does to the spy films of its era, and while watching it, there are times when it’s easy to forget that you’re watching a film made in the mid sixties. This, happily, is remedied by the periodic appearance of odd pop art touches, like the comic book-inspired starburst wipes that take us from one scene to the next, and the cropping up here and there of unmistakably mod pieces of fashion and furniture. Another element that anchors The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa firmly in the 1960s is its soundtrack, which is almost entirely pilfered from John Barry’s James Bond film scores — mostly Goldfinger, as far as I can tell.