Time for more Science In The Reel World! Sometimes movie science turns up in the strangest places. Over the last couple of weeks I have, quite unknowingly, stumbled upon two romantic melodramas from the Golden Years Of Hollywood in which the hero turned out to be a scientist.

The other thing that these films have in common is that, in thus describing them, I’m using the word “hero” very loosely indeed…

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HIS BROTHER’S WIFE (1936) - which manages to transport Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck from the nightclubs of New York to a laboratory in an unidentified jungle, and sees them swapping cocktails and gambling for spotted fever research. The results are about as credible as you might imagine.

DISHONORED LADY (1947) - in which disillusioned party girl (and closet nymphomaniac) Hedy Lamarr finds romance and a new way of looking at life when she falls for the poor-but-honest scientist living in the apartment below her own. However, her course of science for the soul is interrupted by a nasty case of murder…

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Some call him the Colombian Ed Wood. He prefers to be called the Colombian Hitchcock. The best description of all is simply the Original Jairo Pinilla.

Pinilla was one of the first Colombian film-makers to turn his attention to horror and fantasy. Unfortunately for him, the Colombian film industry at the time expected its artists to make serious dramas, or short documentaries about poverty and social issues. Pinilla’s movies were considered an embarrassment. Even more embarrassing? The local audiences loved them: Pinilla’s first film held the box office record for a Colombian film for years.

Eventually, the Colombian film commission found a way to put him out of business in 1985*. But before that happened, he managed to put out a very unusual body of work. Funeral siniestro (1977), for all its rough patches, is still a remarkably assured first film; 27 Horas con la muerte has a story that Poe might have chuckled over (and then rejected); while Extraña regresion may very well be the film that got Pinilla the “Ed Wood” title.

* Thanks to afforable video, he’s now back making films.

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970) — written and directed by Argento, in his first directorial effort — is not only beautifully shot and composed, but it is also serviceable in the plot department. I wasn’t captivated by the story, but it moved along gracefully enough that it didn’t distract from the compelling camera work which is, really, the movie’s claim to fame.

There’s a film missing from this update.  One of the screener DVDs I meant to review wouldn’t play on any of my equipment, so the promised “experimental weirdness” will not be forthcoming.  I’m sure you’re all terribly broken up about that, huh?  As for the movies my DVD player would accept, we have…

Alien Resurrection (1997), in which the good names of a great many talented people are dragged enthusiastically through the mud…

Hardware (1990), in which we see what a hazardous undertaking giving your girlfriend a present can be when you live in a post-apocalyptic future…

and…

My Body Burns (1972), in which dirty old men, coniving young women, and rabidly jealous lesbians team up to power some of the least erotic erotica since Anais Nin blessedly returned her pen to the desk drawer.
 
 
 

And I had such plans… But then my design/publication program and my server decided that they had irreconcilable differences; the upshot being a fortnight spent predominantly on hold. (And if I never have to listen to David Bowie’s “Golden Years” again…)

There are moments when I really think that the Luddites were onto something.

Time was short, and so is my main subject; so short, indeed, that it comes with a supporting feature…

THE WIZARD OF OZ (1933)

Aka The Long And Winding (Yellow Brick) Road: Part 4. In which we take a brief look at the history of Technicolor, and ponder whether this obscure, independently-produced cartoon is in fact one of the most influential films of all time.

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HOMESDALE (1971)

Six guests gather at an island retreat for a weekend of fun, games, introspection, role-playing, performance art, ridicule, abuse and violence…

A critical step in the early career of Peter Weir, forming a bridge between the early, experimental shorts on which he cut his teeth and the feature-films that followed, Homesdale was also an important factor in the re-birth of Australian film at the beginning of the 1970s.

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Nikka/Nikkatsu month marches on…

3 SECONDS BEFORE THE EXPLOSION
Yabuki’s task is to find the jewels if he can, though it’s more important that he keep them out of the hands of certain other parties than it is that he actually get them into his own hands. Those other parties include a shady businessman named Takashima (Takashi Kanda), who actually possesses the jewels, and a gang of international drug smugglers staffed by an assortment of classic Eurospy archetypes: the competent hitman, the abusive underboss, the karate guy, the guy in a slim suit and fez, and of course, the German mastermind played by an American actor (Erik Neilson) doing the worst German accent ever and occasionally tossing out words like, “Achtung!’ and “Wunderbar!” to enforce the illusion that he is German. Everyone is in overdrive with their various plotting, because the deadline for the jewels becoming fair game for anyone who has them is fast approaching. I don’t quite understand why the deadline means so much for the jewel thieves. One assumes that they would be just as happy to steal the jewels from Takashima after he could claim to be the rightful owner. You know, what with them being a murderous gang of thieves and all.

And what to drink while watching a silly Japanese spy film from the 1960s? How about Nikka’s 17 year old Taketsuru Pure Malt?

Just minutes ago, I put up the 500th review on The Unknown Movies. I never imagined years (and years) ago when I first started, I would get this far. I wish to thank Chris and Scott, the good folks at Stomp Tokyo, for sponsoring my site. I also wish to thank my fellow B-Masters for letting me join them and for all their support. Anyway, it’s business as usual, though I thought that for a fantastic occasion I would review something to do with the fantastic. That movie is Maxie, a major studio movie with Glenn Close dealing with spirits from the afterlife. As you might have guessed, there’s a good reason why you haven’t heard of this particular major studio movie.

Nikka/Nikkatsu month rambles on, this time with David serving up:

BRANDED TO KILL
The job is a fairly simple one. It is to transport a bigshot business man to Nagawa, but from the outset there are signs that this job is a little strange. Firstly, when they collect the car provided for them, Hanada and Kasuga find a dead body on the back seat. Hanada simply assumes it was the previous owner of the vehicle and arranges to dump the body on the way. Once they collect their ‘passenger’, a mysterious black car begins to tail them. In fact, at every length of the journey it appears that they are being followed. The tension begins to take its toll on Kasuga who begins to drink heavily — it is intimated that Kasuga was kicked out of the Yakuza because he has lost his nerve, and now drinks to conceal his fears.

Also, I have myself a dram of Nikka Whisky from the Barrel.

Blonde Ice was supposedly considered a lost film by the mid-’70s, though obviously prints have since surfaced. To label something a “lost film” conjures images of hidden treasure and holy grails, which in this case is certainly overselling what was found. It’s not a bad film; instead, it’s a mostly competent little B-list suspense-drama, the likes of which there dozens and dozens of examples among the non-lost films most of us have never seen.

Plus: Take the poll for Reader Revenge Month slot #2!

Yeah, okay.  So I didn’t quite manage my goal of plugging the most glaring holes in my coverage of the last decade before the new one began.  No matter.  I can always take the pedant’s way out by claiming that the absence of a Year Zero in the Gregorian Calendar makes 2010 technically the last year of the aughts rather than the onset of the teens, right?

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), in which you’d retreat into a private fantasy world, too, if this were your childhood…

The Ruins (2008), in which the irritating stick-in-the-mud is right, as always…

Saw (2004), which is basically a full-contact version of those extra-credit logic puzzles you always got wrong in school…

and…

Silent Hill (2006), in which the underground coal fire that’s been raging for 30 years is honestly the least of the town’s problems.
 
 
 

Nikka/Nikkatsu Month continues with

VELVET HUSTLER
Velvet Hustler is the story of a cocky, carefree Tokyo hitman named Goro (Nikkatsu action star Tetsuya Watari). When we first meet him, he casually steals a smart red convertible sportscar from an airport, pulls up next to a limo, and blows away the occupants before casually returning the car to the exact same parking spot at the airport and leaving town to lie low in Kobe. Goro expects to be back in Tokyo in six months, but a year later, he’s still stuck cooling his heels in Kobe, waiting for the heat to die down. He spends most of the day sitting in a rocking chair on the docks, waiting for the foreign ships to dock so his crew of touts can pick up the gaijin men and spirit them away to associated nightclubs. Goro himself seems neither disappointed or enthused by his small-time pursuits. His only regret is that he can’t yet go back to his beloved Tokyo. It’s a sentiment he shares with Pepe Le Moko, stuck in The Casbah and forever dreaming of returning to Paris, the title character from the movie that originally served as the inspiration for this film’s inspiration, Red Quay.

I remember when I first saw Black Sabbath at the video store as a child, and I turned my nose at it because it was an “old” movie. But I’ve now matured, at least in this regard, and I was now eager to watch it, and give me something to warm up with in my preparations for my site’s 500th review in a few weeks. That is, if I can get online – my computer is falling apart, and I could barely put up this latest review and this announcement. Time to get a new computer, so please cross your fingers and hope there’s no delays.

The Werewolf Reborn! (1998)

Like Frankenstein Reborn! before it, The Werewolf Reborn! banks hard on the fact that the default shooting location for practically all Band-related flicks in that time period was Romania, which lends itself well to the Old World origins of the “classic” monsters. There’s also the fact that, since the silent short The Werewolf in 1913, there have been a crapload of werewolf movies. It’s well-trodden territory, and the Benjamin Carr 2.0 Script-O-Matic simply had to churn out the most shop-worn — excuse me, “timeless” — elements of werewolf mythology, slap on a teenage protagonist, and call it good, or at least done.

Plus: Reader Revenge Month is coming! Vote in the poll in the sidebar to determine what I’ll review!

Ah, Exorcist rip-offs! – God love ‘em.

L’ANTICRISTO (1974)

Built around a remarkable performance from Carla Gravina, this is a surprisingly compelling hodge-podge of devil-worship, reincarnation, incest, possession, and some other stuff I don’t dare mention on the front page of the blog…right up to about the two-thirds mark, at which point everyone threw up their hands and said, “Oh, bugger it! – let’s just rip-off Friedkin!” The fact that they proceeding to do precisely that, and on an effects budget that wouldn’t have covered The Exorcist‘s use of pea-soup, makes the final third compelling for all the wrong reasons.

[Caution: some images NSFW!]

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Kicking off the new year by reveling in two of our favorite things: movies from Japan’s Nikkatsu Studio and whiskey from Japan’s Nikka distillery. Yeah, no relation, but I need only the flimsiest of excuses to kick back and watch chipmunk-cheeked hitman Joe Shisido knock off wise guys while I down a dram or two of Nikka whiskey. And first up:

CRUEL GUN STORY
Cruel Gun Story is –- like Nikkatsu’s Youth of the Beast, Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! and 3 Seconds Before Explosion before it –- based on a book by hardboiled crime novelist Haruhiko Oyabu. It tells the story of Togawa, a con who is sprung from prison early via the machinations of a mysterious underworld kingpin who communicates with him through an emissary, a former mob lawyer named Ito. Ito and his boss want Togawa to carry out a robbery that they’ve planned, involving an armored car shipment of racetrack receipts worth 120 million yen, and have hand selected a crew of four men to assist him in the task. They also seem to know an awful lot about Togawa, including the fact that he has a younger sister who was disabled in an accident that Togawa feels at least partially responsible for –- a fact which makes the cash-strapped felon that much more likely to take them up on their offer.

Have also added new screencaps to Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter and Bloody Territories.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Is everybody still suitably hung over? Good! Then let’s celebrate the end of the Naughties, and the beginning of the Teens, with a movie from the 1960′s that tried to make a 50′s-style horror film out of two flicks from the 40′s. Yes, it’s time for a Jerry Warren film… and not just any Jerry Warren film, but one of his least known, least sought-after and least interesting movies!

But just in case you thought that wasn’t mind-numbing enough… I’ve also unearthed the two Spanish-language films that Warren cannibalized for his, uhh, unique vision. In fact, this review really has much more to do with La casa está vacía (1945) and La Dama de la muerte (1946) than Warren’s film, Curse of the Stone Hand (1965). If you’ve ever seen Curse of the Stone Hand, I think you’ll understand why.