A Movie a Day 5: Die Movie Die

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Eh, nobody ever accused me of quitting while I was ahead.

I did four of these topics from September 2011 to January of this year, but I haven't done any since then for various reasons, only one of them being that I've been away from WP for a long time. In case anyone didn't catch A Movie a Day 1, 2, 3, or 4, I watch at least one movie a day (hence the title) and I share what's usually my pain and suffering here. I'll watch just about anything, for the most part movies I've never seen, but I'll occasionally throw in something I'm familiar with. The only difference this time is that I'm posting several movies at a time once or twice a week instead of a movie at a time since it's easier for me that way, hence the length of this post.

Let's get on with it.

Monday 20 August 2012:
The Return of the Vampire (1944)

Officially, Bela Lugosi only played Dracula in two films: Dracula (1931) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). But he played practically the same character about half a dozen more times for various film studios, always under a different name to avoid lawsuits. The Return of the Vampire is one of these various unofficial sequels to Dracula, and it's probably a more legitimate follow-up to that movie than Dracula's Daughter (1936), which didn't feature Dracula or Lugosi at all. The first ten minutes of the movie feel like a recap of the events of Dracula and then the story picks up from there, but it really feels like a rehash from start to finish.

It's a decent enough movie, although I doubt that it would be worth watching without Lugosi, since most of the supporting cast seems either sedated or anxious to get through their dialogue as quickly as possible so they can pick up their paycheck and go home. The screenwriters didn't seem to be making a huge effort here. Aside from rehashing the story of Dracula, the references to World War II go nowhere (probably a half hearted attempt at relevance) and I couldn't make any sense out of why Dracula's assistant (who looks like Vincent D'Onofrio) sometimes transforms into a werewolf or what causes it. It's lazy all around, but Lugosi has enough presence to make it worth a watch.

Tuesday 21 August 2012:
The Stranger (1946)

When I saw that there was a movie starring Orson Welles called The Stranger, I was hoping that it was an adaptation of the Albert Camus novel, but I should have known that this was too much to hope for. Fortunately, it's still pretty good. The plot is similar to The Third Man, which Welles wouldn't make for another three years. In both films, he plays a criminal who's gone into hiding, and the authorities convince someone close to him to aid in his capture.

Unsurprisingly, Welles is the best actor in the movie, and it's fascinating to watch as he manipulates those around him. It's very well made (Welles also directed) with plenty of stylish film noir shadows and creative camera angles, and lots of nice little details, like Welles doodling a swastika on a notepad (he's a former Nazi) in a phone booth while talking to his wife. Overall, it's not quite as good as The Third Man, but I still like it quite a bit, and it's got at least two advantages over the other film: Welles has more screen time here, and in The Third Man he doesn't have this wonderful porn 'stache:



Wednesday 22 August 2012:
Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952)

Poor old Bela Lugosi. In the 1950s, he had a debilitating addiction to heroin and he was forced to accept roles in movies like this because he couldn't get anything better, and I'm not sure which was worse. He's not even the star – that would be Sammy Petrillo, who looks and sounds almost exactly like Jerry Lewis, only he's even more of an obnoxious and annoying a**hole. And of course he's got a partner (Duke Mitchell) who rips off Dean Martin, so in addition to a lot of awful comedy, we have to suffer through a handful of really bad lounge and big band type songs.

Lugosi looks like he's hating every minute of it. In one scene, we see him getting drunk in a lounge chair, and I suspect that he was being filmed without his knowledge. I can't blame the guy – I would have been getting wasted at every opportunity if I had to make a movie with these guys. For a minute towards the end, I thought maybe the film had redeemed itself when Lugosi shoots Petrillo dead with a hunting rifle, but of course it all turns out to have been a dream. The director, William Beaudine, later made Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, and I fully expect to die of a stroke whenever I inevitably sit down to watch that particular cinematic colostomy bag.

Thursday 23 August 2012:
RiffTrax: Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959/2009)

I tried watching Plan 9 from Outer Space during the first Movie a Day topic, but I turned it off less than halfway through and never reviewed it. It's supposed to be entertaining in its awfulness, but I was just bored. Or maybe I had just grown too accustomed to viewing movies like this with Mystery Science Theater 3000 style commentary, so I watched the RiffTrax version this time, and they finally made it bearable for me. The first ten or fifteen minutes aren't very funny at all and I was wondering if Mike and the crew had lost their magic, but luckily they pick themselves up and I laughed pretty steadily from then until the end. Not much more to say about this one, so I'll just quote my favorite line from it:

Soldier: "Looks like we beat them off again, sir."
Colonel: "What do they want? Where are they going?"
Mike: "And why are we beating them off?"

Friday 24 August 2012:
The Expendables 2 (2012)

I haven't seen The Expendables and wasn't really planning on seeing the sequel, but I got dragged along to a theatre and we sure as hell weren't going to see Ice Age: Who Cares or The Bourne Redundancy or that propaganda movie about how Obama is the devil. I'm glad I went along, because it's the best action movie I've seen in a long time.

The action is intense, brutal, and frantic, but luckily it's mostly filmed in such a way that you can actually tell what the hell is going on. (The director is Simon West, who made Con Air, which is sort of like what a Michael Bay movie would be like if Michael Bay had any talent whatsoever.) Every single cast member manages to be good, which is sort of amazing, and none of them get sidelined. Everyone gets some good action scenes of their own and a few good lines of dialogue, even the ones who only get one or two scenes (Jet Li, Chuck Norris). It's nice to see Jean-Claude Van Damme in a theatrical movie again; he should play more villains, because he's excellent here.

I only have a few nitpicks. Liam Hemsworth is surprisingly good, but his character is written about as poorly as you can imagine. The moment he starts talking about his girlfriend back home and how he wants to quit soon, there may as well be a flashing neon sign next to him that reads "THIS CHARACTER WILL DIE SOON." Also, while the humor mostly hits the mark, there are a few too many jokes along the lines of Bruce Willis saying "I'll be back" and Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "Yippie ki yay" and that sort of thing. (Get it? They used each other's catch phrase. Hardy har har.) And yes, Chuck Norris makes a Chuck Norris joke. I'm sure someone thought that was clever, but I was glad that there was only one of them.

Now I'll have to rent the first one out of curiosity, although I've been told by several people that it's not nearly as good as this one. If only these people knew that I spend my time watching movies like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, they wouldn't feel a need to give me such a warning.

Friday 24 August 2012:
Muppet Treasure Island (1996)

I'm not exactly a huge fan of pirate stories, but Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island is a pretty damn good one, and I'm looking to check out some of the film versions. I guess the Muppet version with Tim Curry is as good a place to start as any, because who the hell doesn't want to see a Muppet movie with Tim Curry? Unfortunately, while you would think that Curry playing a pirate would be splendidly over the top, he actually tones it down and comes off as one of the least flamboyant characters in the movie. I can't complain too much since I would happily watch him read the phone book, but it's slightly disappointing.

My other complaint is with all the singing. When the characters break out into song and dance, it usually feels as if they're doing it only because someone dictated that all Muppet movies must be musicals and need songs inserted arbitrarily, and the singing is especially annoying when Jim joins in with his high-pitched, ten-year-old girl's voice. (Luckily, he only sings in the first two songs, and stays out of the rest.) The songs are invariably the least funny and entertaining parts of the movie, and whenever one of them started, my attention drifted off and only came back when they wrapped up.

But despite all this, it's still pretty enjoyable overall. The humor is, of course, G-rated stuff that won't offend anybody, but most of it managed to make me laugh. Favorites include the schizophrenic Fozzie Bear who thinks there's a small man living in his finger, speculation about what kind of animal Gonzo is (even he doesn't know), and... well, I've already forgotten most of it, but it was pretty funny at the time. Something tells me I haven't seen the worst of the Treasure Island adaptations yet...

Last edited by Jory on 26 Aug 2012, 3:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Cinematic colostomy bag? Man, you should be reviewing films for the Chicago Sun. You're pretty funny. To get these films I'd probably have to torrent them go visit the Ye Olde Video Shoppe here in Seattle. I think it's called Scarecrow but I'm not sure. Too bad I missed your I-IV, though. I sure they were as insightful as this. I can only imagine what you think about B-horror movies like Nekromantik, Whatever of the Dead, and those Italian cannibal slashers.

I linked to Parts 1-4 in the original post. Here they are again if you want them:

One
Two
Three
Four

I don't really fancy myself a film critic at all; these topics are just the result of boredom, a willingness to watch nearly anything, and access to a lot of movies via Netflix, the Internet Archive, and YouTube.

I don't torrent anything; I don't even know how to torrent. A lot of the stuff I watch is either in the public domain, or so neglected that the studios who hold the rights don't care if people upload them to YouTube without permission.

I've never seen (or even heard of) Nekromantik, and I'm not as familiar with the Italian trash cinema as I probably should be, but if you read through the previous topics, you'll see that I watch a whole lot of horror. Classic Universal Horror, Hammer Films, b-movie crap from studios like PRC, Roger Corman, George Romero, Masters of Horror, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, you name it.

I have a tendency to obsessively watch one kind of movie for a stretch: first it was Sherlock Holmes, then Corman's Edgar Allen Poe films, then H. P. Lovecraft adaptations, and so on. I think I watched about nine or ten versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles in the other topics. And now I've got more versions of Treasure Island ready to go than any sane person would ever want. It's gonna drive me insane, but then I'll be back with A Movie a Day 6 before you know it. C'est la vie.

Last edited by Jory on 26 Aug 2012, 2:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Never heard of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla before, but today I see it mentioned twice. Here, and when I was randomly clicking around earlier, reading about gorillas.

Weird.

The other reviewer hated the Lewis/Martin wannabes even more than you did.

Saturday 25 August 2012:
Treasure Island (1950)

I love G-rated Disney violence. You can knock a man unconscious with the weakest of punches, and he'll die immediately after getting cut on the shoulder in a swordfight. Of course, the young hero survives getting a knife through the shoulder, because he's the hero. It's strangely hypocritical like that; one moment it feels like the filmmakers were afraid of violence, and the next someone is getting impaled through the chest.

This was apparently Disney's first live-action movie. Robert Newton, who looks like Russell Crowe's fatter brother and sounds like a pirate version of Harvey Fierstein, plays Long John Silver. Bobby Driscoll, who looks like a cross between Leonardo DiCaprio and Renee Zellweger and sounds like an annoying kid, is Jim Hawkins. One of these two is great and makes the movie worth watching. Guess which.

Sunday 26 August 2012:
Long John Silver (1954)

It's a shame that Robert Louis Stevenson never wrote a sequel to Treasure Island, but filmmakers have been more than willing. This one was made without Disney but once again stars Robert Newton as Long John Silver (it's got the same director as the last movie, too). It's not a half bad flick but it's certainly got problems, the primary one being the toning down of Silver. He's still a scoundrel but more of a Han Solo type anti-hero than a villain with some redeeming qualities. (The screenwriters made sure to add a real villain to make Silver look good by comparison.) Other problems are the lower budget and the awful comic relief, which takes the form of a nagging old lady who wants to marry Silver. Overall, though, it's fair.

Monday 27 August 2012:
Treasure Island (2012)

This is only the third adaptation of Treasure Island I've watched and I've got several more to get through, but it's hard to imagine them getting any better than this. I can't remember the last time I watched a three-hour movie without once feeling bored. Eddie Izzard is terrific as Silver; he thankfully avoids the stereotypical pirate talk. In fact, the whole movie avoids the cliches and just focuses on the characters and drama. There isn't a single bad actor in it. It's very well directed, and instead of using the long running time to include every single scene in the book, it adds some new backstory and expands on some of the minor characters by giving them more to do. It's movies like this that make up for the sewage I usually watch during these topics.

Tuesday 28 August 2012:
Postal Inspector (1936)

Speaking of sewage...

"The only musical featuring Bela Lugosi," says the Internet Archive's description of this film. "The only Bela Lugosi movie that made me contemplate suicide," says Jory.

Just kidding. Several of them have made me want to die.

This one stars Ricardo Cortez, the Jewish guy with the Latin name from the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon, as a postal inspector who gives lots of speeches about how the postal service will always get the job done no matter what the conditions, making me wonder if the movie was financed by the government.

Lugosi plays the villain, of course, and I guess I should count myself lucky that he doesn't sing. Plenty of other people do, though, and it's awful every single time. It's also packed with racist stereotypes and bad, bad, bad 1930s style humor. It's better than Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla by default since it's shorter, but it's still garbage.

Wednesday 29 August 2012:
House of Dracula (1945)

John Carradine must have been the thinnest man in history. He looks like a cartoon character after getting run over by a steam roller:



I didn't squish that picture in PhotoShop or anything; that's what the guy really looked like.

I watched and reviewed House of Frankenstein for the first Movie a Day topic, and it was such a boring waste of time that I didn't even consider watching its companion piece, House of Dracula. But I finally got around to it, and it's not as soul-suckingly awful as I was dreading. Not that it's any good, but it didn't make me want to die.

Carradine is a lousy, boring Dracula. Not threatening at all, not that he's even trying to be. Instead of being a monster of prey, he's complaining about his vampire curse and seeking a cure from a doctor. The movie also features Lon Chaney Jr. once again as the Wolf Man, also seeking release from his curse. Every time he's killed, the full moon resurrects him again. Why doesn't the guy just jump into a volcano or something? Oh, and the Frankenstein monster shows up again, but he's only brought to life in the last two minutes of the movie (literally).

It sucks. But I guess at least it isn't House of Frankenstein. Or even worse, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.


Thursday 30 August 2012:
Boo (1932)

This is just bizarre. It's a 10-minute short film from Universal featuring a narrator doing Mystery Science Theater 3000 style commentary over footage of films like Nosferatu and Frankenstein. Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula that Universal considered a threat to their own Dracula film, and it's surprising that they even considered using this footage.

Oh, and it's not funny at all.


Thursday 30 August 2012:
Castle Freak (1995)

Directed by Stuart Gordon, starring Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, written by Dennis Paoli, music by Richard Band, based on a story by H. P. Lovecraft... no, it's not Re-Animator. It's not even From Beyond. Castle Freak is unfortunately a lot closer in quality to a later Gordon/Paoli Lovecraft adaptation, Dagon. It's boring and it sucks. This particular filmmaking team should have stuck to comedy. Castle Freak, like Dagon, isn't remotely scary, creepy, or disturbing, and every character is an unlikable prick. Needless to say, it captures nothing of what made Lovecraft's writing so impressive.


Friday 31 August 2012:
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

The last of the nine Dracula movies from Hammer Films, and the only one in which Dracula is played by someone other than Christopher Lee. I won't even bother to mention the name of the actor who plays him here, because I guarantee you've never heard of him. All you need to know is that he looks f**king ridiculous:



Looks like a drag queen dressing as the Joker for Halloween. Quite a step down from this, I think:



I guess the filmmakers had enough good sense to know that they wouldn't be able to get away with this guy for very long, because he transfers his soul into the body of a Chinese warrior in the opening ten minutes. At least that's what I think happens. It's also possible that he kills the guy and then morphs into him, but as with most of the Hammer Dracula films, when it comes to stuff making sense, no effort at all seems to have been made.

The movie represents Hammer's last desperate attempt at relevancy by combining their brand of Gothic horror with the kung fu films that were popular at the time. It's exactly like every 1970s kung fu film you've ever seen, where the sound effects go all whish whish whish as the fists are flying. It's beyond ridiculous, but at least they were trying something new, and at least it's never boring, which is more than I can say for some of the other Hammer Draculas.

Luckily, Peter Cushing had less shame than Christopher Lee and didn't refuse to star in this one. He gives these silly movies a dignity that they wouldn't have without him, since he has the uncanny ability to read the worst dialogue in the world and make it sound like Shakespeare. It's fun to see the 61-year-old actor kicking ass in the fight scenes without a stunt double. He never swings a sword or busts out kung fu (he leaves that to the many Chinese characters who accompany him on his vampire-killing quest) but he does swing around a torch, and luckily for him, the vampires he's after seem to be extremely flammable.

Saturday 1 September 2012:
Treasure Island (1934)

That's right, another Treasure Island adaptation. I'm just watching them to get them out of the way at this point. Wallace Beery, who may or may not have beaten Three Stooges manager Ted Healy to death (seriously, look it up), plays Long John Silver in this one. He looks like Meat Loaf and sounds like Tom Waits. Nigel Bruce is here, and he plays his character exactly the same way he played Dr. Watson when he later starred in 14 films alongside Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes. Lionel Barrymore steals the show in the opening scenes, and he really should have played Silver. Jackie Cooper, who plays Jim Hawkins, shouldn't even have been in the film. Bad actors are a dime a dozen, but rarely have I seen such a black hole of talent, and I felt sorry for the actors who had to play scenes with this kid and pretend that everything was okay. And who the hell told him to say "bless my soul!" every five minutes? He's beyond awful and damn near ruins the whole movie.

Sunday 2 September 2012:
Treasure Island (1990)

Hi, I'm the ghost of Jackie Cooper. Jory asked me to finish this review for him because he says he's sick of Treasure Island adaptations, and he said that he'll "drink a quart of bleach" if he tries to write about another one. Bless my soul! Say, it was awful mean of Jory to criticize me the way he done. I was just a kid, after all, and it's not my fault I had no talent whatsoever. Bless my soul! Since I can't do anything without being completely awful, instead of writing a full review here, I'll just consult the notes that Jory made on his cell phone while watching this movie:

"young christian bale is jim. just as wooden and emotionless as he is as an adult. charlton heston is silver. not terrible but sounds silly doing pirate talk. christopher lee has a cameo. could they only afford him for one day? waste of talent. why is this no different from the book or any of the other films? why has nobody updated this story for the modern day? it's numbing my brain watching so many films that are exactly like the book."

Monday 3 September 2012:
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

Nicholas Meyer, who wrote this movie and the novel it's based on, later directed Star Trek II. Too bad he didn't direct this one as well. The book has a great story, which involves a cocaine-addled Sherlock Holmes getting treatment for his addiction by Sigmund Freud, who later joins him on a more traditional adventure. The movie somehow manages to make this boring. It's too long, filmed too blandly, and aside from Alan Arkin's wonderful Freud, miscast. Nicol Williamson tries so hard to make Holmes manic that he paradoxically makes him a tiring bore, and Robert Duvall's Watson is a joke thanks to his awful English accent. It's not a total waste of time, but I was glad when it was over.

Tuesday 4 September 2012:
I, Monster (1971)

Put Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in a movie together and I'll watch it, whether it's brilliance like Horror of Dracula or garbage like Dracula A.D. 1972. This one is somewhere in between but closer to the former, thankfully.

It's an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and a pretty faithful one, but for some reason the title and the names of the main characters were changed: Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde became Charles Marlowe and Edward Blake. (The supporting character names weren't changed.) Lee doesn't use much makeup in his transformations; it's all in the performance, and he pulls it off splendidly for the most part, although it's slightly ridiculous that nobody who knows Marlowe recognizes Blake.


Tuesday 4 September 2012:
The Muppet Movie (1979)

Most people say this is the best Muppet film. I say: hmm. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood, but I was bored. There's way, way, way too much singing, and the songs sound so similar that they all just blend together. There are lots of celebrity cameos, but none of them are funny and they just tend to distract. How this is considered the best Muppet film and Muppet Treasure Island is considered one of the lesser films is beyond me.


Wednesday 5 September 2012:
King Solomon's Mines (1937)

This is the most amazingly, astoundingly, soul-suckingly boring movie I've seen in a long time, maybe ever. It's supposed to be an adventure, right? Waiting at the DMV isn't this bad. Listening to your grandfather tell a story isn't this bad. Watching C-SPAN isn't this bad. I was only able to handle half an hour before shutting it off, and I've been trying to finish it by watching it in five minute installments every day. I still have about half an hour left, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get through it.


Thursday 6 September 2012:
The Expendables (2010)

Sometimes people try to defend garbage like Transformers by saying, "It's just a big dumb action movie. What did you expect?" It's a nonsense argument which assumes that big dumb action movies can't be good. The next time someone tries to pull this crap on me, I'll point them to The Expendables. It's a big dumb action movie done right. It's well directed, written, and acted, and the characters feel genuine, things that can't be said about Michael Bay's soulless excuses for action films.

Overall it's not quite as good as The Expendables 2, but it's still pretty damn enjoyable. And it does have a few advantages over the sequel: it's got Mickey Rourke, Jet Li gets more screen time, and there's one action scene in particular that's better than anything in Part 2. I've liked these Expendables movies a lot more than I was expecting to. They don't quite reach the heights of Die Hard, Predator, or Terminator 2, but they're better than anything else in recent memory. I'll be ready for Part 3.


Friday 7 September, 2012:
Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966)

After watching Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, I was expecting to hate Billy the Kid vs. Dracula a lot more than I did. (It's from the same director.) Don't get me wrong, it's f**king garbage, but it didn't make me want to inject paint thinner into my neck.

It's silly and stupid as hell, the dialogue is awful, the characters are all idiots, and the special effects are a joke, but it at least moves at a decent pace, it features no obnoxious comic relief characters, and John Carradine is actually a more effective Dracula here than he was in House of Dracula, since he's allowed to simply be evil instead of complaining about being cursed with vampirism. So it wasn't exactly torture, although I'm glad that the director doesn't have any more stupid movies like this for me to suffer through in the future...



Oh, goddamnit.

Saturday 8 September 2012:
Bluebeard (1944)

No, it's not a pirate movie. It's about a puppeteer played by John Carradine (the boring Dracula from the 1940s) who's secretly a serial killer. Unfortunately, he never beats anyone to death with a marionette, which would have redeemed the film. It's not completely terrible, but when John Carradine is the most interesting and least boring actor in your movie, something has gone horribly wrong. It's 72 minutes long, and I probably would have shut it off around the 75 minute mark if it had been any longer.


Sunday 9 September 2012:
Dark Star (1974)

John Carpenter's first film is... interesting. Sometimes. Certainly not in the opening half hour, which is boring as hell. It spends a long time establishing the characters, which is useless since the movie ends up not being about the characters at all. It's filler. Carpenter later showed a strong talent in letting a story unfold slowly with movies like The Thing, but it's just tedious here. Fortunately it picks up a bit, but it keeps going back and forth between comedy and seriousness, and the comedy is the only stuff that works. It seems to be a parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it's fun to watch one of the characters talk the computer out of blowing up the ship by arguing philosophy with it, and another fighting with an alien that the special effects team made out of a beach ball. Overall, I'm glad I watched it, but I'm mostly just glad that I got it out of the way.


Monday 10 September 2012:
Dementia 13 (1963)

Nine years before The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola directed this decent but unremarkable Psycho rip-off. It's got a couple of great scenes, one involving a radio sinking to the bottom of a lake after a murder (the song slowly dies out and it sounds quite creepy) and a sudden axe decapitation that was probably quite shocking in 1963, but there isn't a whole lot here to suggest the brilliance that was to come a decade later.


Tuesday 11 September 2012:
Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966)

My reaction to this movie was pretty much the same as my reaction to its companion piece, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. These movies are complete trash, exactly the kind of stuff you expect to see on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but they move at a quick enough pace that they're rarely boring. My only complaint with this one is that Frankenstein's granddaughter (not his daughter, despite what the title says) disappears after the opening and doesn't show up again until the third act, and the middle section of the film is more or less a traditional western. But at least there's an actual showdown in that final third, unlike the Universal monster sequels from the 1940s like House of Frankenstein, in which the monsters only encounter each other in the final 30 seconds of the movie.


Wednesday 12 September 2012:
The Devil Bat (1940)

Imagine a little bat in a little devil costume, with little horns and a pitchfork. Adorable, isn't it? What you're picturing in your mind is more interesting than anything in this film. The devil bat of the title is a bat the size of a kite which is bred by a scientist played by Bela Lugosi. He's pissed off at somebody for some reason and wants to kill them, so he tricks them into splashing shaving lotion on themselves, which attracts the giant bat. The movie suffers from a problem that was unfortunately very common in films from the 1930s and 40s: the protagonists are unlikable pricks. Even worse, they think they're funny, and anyone who's read any of my previous Movie a Day topics knows how I feel about comic relief from this era. It's not excruciating, but it's not something I'll ever want to see again.


Thursday 13 September 2012:
Taken (2008)

The first 20 or so minutes of Taken are so bad that I'm frankly shocked at how good the remaining 70 are. Liam Neeson is a former spy with bad-ass fighting skills, and he doesn't get along with his ex-wife: you'd think that this could be covered in less than five minutes, but the movie just beats the audience over the head with it, with some of the worst expositional dialogue I've ever heard. But then Neeson's daughter is taken by a bunch of a**holes who want to sell her into forced prostitution, and suddenly I'm watching the best action movie in years. Taken reminds me of the Hammer Horror films of the 1950s and 60s, when actors like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing would treat their trashy material like it was Shakespeare. Neeson's part could have been played by someone much less talented, but he doesn't half-ass it at all. It's about what you'd expect from a movie produced by Luc Besson, but it's better than The Transporter or District 13. I may have to drag myself to a theatre to see the sequel next month.


Friday 14 September 2012:
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

One thing I never thought I'd see in a movie is Peter Lorre fighting with Kirk Douglas... and winning. The real star, though, is James Mason, who plays the hell out of Captain Nemo. There are a handful of impressive special effects scenes (including a giant explosion that would make Michael Bay piss himself, and a giant squid attack that looks good despite the goofy squid puppet) but the filmmakers made the wise decision to focus on the character of Nemo, and Mason nails it. Lorre is hilarious, almost as much as he was in Tales of Terror. Douglas is your typical loud American stereotype, but he makes his character work.


A preview of the coming week: I hated Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome when I watched it for A Movie a Day 2, and because I'm an idiot and a masochist, I have to watch a few more of these horrible 1940s Dick Tracy movies. Also, a couple of horror films starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, because they help me to keep what's remaining of my sanity as I slog through insufferable crap like Castle Freak and Postal Inspector.

Last edited by Jory on 22 Sep 2012, 1:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Jory ! ! So good to see you posting again ! !

As usual, great stuff. Honestly, you write better than some film websites I read, which tend to be much too much fanboy fare.

The next update will probably be the last for this topic. I can't do these things for more than a month before getting sick of them, and I find myself struggling to find something to write.

Nonetheless old boy, I enjoy the freshness of your writing. I read aintitcool, but the writing is sophomoric. Then there is badassdigest, which runs the gamut. You beat either one, hands down.

Saturday 15 September 2012:
Eastern Promises (2007)

As good as Eastern Promises is, it actually disappointed me simply because it was so close to being great but didn't quite get there. A trashy movie like Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance may not be as good, but in a weird way it was more satisfying because it was content to be the trash it was. And if I had to nitpick some more, I guess I could say that I prefer my David Cronenberg movies to be weird mindf**ks (like Videodrome and eXistenZ), and this is a pretty straightforward gangster flick. But it's good, so what the hell am I complaining about?



Sunday 16 September 2012:
Queen of Blood (1966)

I never expected to see Basil Rathbone and Dennis Hopper in the same movie, but here we are. Queen of Blood is one of the handful of movies that Dan O'Bannon ripped off when he wrote Alien. (The other main ones are It! The Terror from Beyond Space and Demon Planet, aka Planet of the Vampires.) It's fascinating to watch these films and see the plot elements that would later show up in O'Bannon's. Demon Planet is by far the best of these proto-Alien films, but I've enjoyed them all to some extent. Queen of Blood suffers from two flaws: it's extremely slow (it's only 80 minutes but feels much longer) and the villain is dispatched far too easily. Overall, though, it's entertaining enough. Actors like Rathbone, Hopper, and John Saxon lend it some personality that it wouldn't have had otherwise.



Monday 17 September 2012:
Dick Tracy (1945)

Dick Tracy hunts a criminal named Splitface. Unfortunately, it's not the same Splitface from The Thing:



It's just some a**hole with a scar on his face. Why don't these old Dick Tracy movies ever use any of the cool villains from the comic strip? Where's Flattop? Pruneface? B.B. Eyes? Rhodent? The Blank? The Brow? Shoulders? Are villains like Gruesome and Splitface and Cueball even from the comics? (Answer: According to Wikipedia, no.) It's like making a Batman movie in which Batman fights regular criminals with no gimmick. We're not here for Dick Tracy, guys. He's just a boring cop with a coat and a hat. The best thing I can say about this movie is that it's short, and I guess the guy who plays Tracy is a bit more appropriate for the part than the guy who played him in Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome. Overall, though, it's a big pile of who gives a f**k.



Tuesday 18 September 2012:
The Three Stooges (2012)





Wednesday 19 September 2012:
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965)

It's an anthology film with five short segments. The first one is so boring and uninteresting that I couldn't remember what it was about when I tried to think back to it toward the end of the movie. The final segment is also pretty weak, notable only for a mildly clever twist ending and a decent performance from a young Donald Sutherland. The third one is alright. It's the second and fourth that really stand out. It's the actors (Bernard Lee, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough) who make these segments work more than the filmmakers, although there's at least one genuinely creepy moment in one of them that involves a severed hand crawling around outside a window like a spider. Peter Cushing appears in the frame story but unfortunately in none of the segments. It's decent overall but nothing I'll ever want to see again.



Thursday 20 September 2012:
Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946)

There's a character in this movie named Mr. Sparkle, which made me think of this:



Thinking of this while watching the movie provided more entertainment than the movie itself. Cueball is just a bald guy. Were bald guys so rare in the 1940s that they were considered bizarre? Now we've got Bruce Willis, one of the biggest stars in the world, running around in his action movies without a single hair on his head. How the times have changed. Or maybe the filmmakers were just lazy. Which do you think it is?



Friday 21 September 2012:
Horror Express (1972)

My theory that Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee can make any movie, no matter how awful, at least somewhat entertaining is being seriously tested by movies like this. They do their usual good work, but they're not charismatic enough here to make it interesting. Thankfully, Telly Savalas shows up in the final third to chew the scenery and give the film some much-needed life. I may have fallen asleep if he hadn't. The plot, which involves demonic possession and plays out similarly to The Thing, also gives the movie a kick when it finally unfolds, but it takes far too long to do so. It feels like a half-hour Twilight Zone episode padded out with lots of filler.



I'm not sure yet if I'll stick with this topic or if it ends here. I won't be making any special effort to watch at least one movie a day from here on, but I watch so much crap that it won't surprise me if I end up watching that many without even trying. If not, then I'll just post in the "What movies have you seen recently?" topic if I have anything to comment on.

It's over. I've been watching an obscene amount of material lately, but the vast majority of it is made up of TV episodes. I only managed to watch three films this past week, so I'm gonna write them up (even though it's cheating according to my rules) and end the topic here.


Sunday 23 September 2012:
Student Bodies (1981)

"Ladies and gentlemen, in order to achieve an R rating today, a motion picture must contain full frontal nudity, graphic violence, or an explicit reference to the sex act. Since this film has none of those, and since research has proven that R-rated films are by far the most popular with the movie-going public, the producers of this motion picture have asked me to take this opportunity to say: f**k you."

It's basically Scary Movie, only slightly more funny. The opening ten or so minutes are hilarious and I would recommend this part to anyone. It goes downhill from there, but it's never terrible. Wikipedia tells me that most of the cast never made another movie again, although Richard Belzer was apparently the voice of the killer on the phone, and the director also made The Bad News Bears, Fletch, and The Scout. It's on YouTube. Check out the opening if you want some laughs, but you don't really need to see the rest of it.


Tuesday 25 September 2012:
Mission: Impossible III (2006)

One of the TV shows I've been watching a lot of lately is Mission: Impossible, and I've fallen in love with it. It's made me want to catch up on the two most recent film versions, neither of which I had ever seen. The first movie was directed by Brian De Palma, who also made Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way. The second was directed by John Woo, known for A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled, Broken Arrow, and Face/Off. This one was made by J. J. Abrams, a guy who's produced a bunch of spy and mystery TV shows I've never seen. Maybe that's why it feels like a long episode of 24.

It's not bad at all, but it does a good job of illustrating the significant recurring problem with most of the Mission: Impossible films: their star is always the most boring and bland character in the movie. Some people love Tom Cruise and others hate him, but I can't work myself up to feel anything at all about him. He's a great stuntman, but put him on screen with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Simon Pegg, and Laurence Fishburne and he can't keep up. You just end up wondering why none of these people are playing his part instead.


Friday 28 September 2012:
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

Mission Colon Impossible Dash Ghost Protocol is the first Mission Colon Impossible movie that actually feels like the TV show to any significant degree, which is to say that the focus is more on a team of spies than a single person, and there's more humor. That last part is no doubt in part due to hiring Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, to direct. It's better overall than M:I:III, but that movie did have a couple of advantages: it had a better villain and more Ving Rhames. This movie, though, has more Simon Pegg, better action scenes, and the emphasis on teamwork goes a long way toward making the whole thing feel like a legitimate Mission: Impossible movie.