Luana Anders' Underwear Blooper in "Dementia 13" (Francis Ford Coppola, 1963) (video)

"Dementia 13" was Francis Ford Coppola's first movie (not counting a nudie flick or two).

It's a terrifying tale starring the sublime Luana Anders (Easy Rider, The Last Detail).

The scariest scene...

(besides the one with the obvious boom-mic shadow)

...is Luana's midnight swim in a dark, murky pond.

So scary, in fact, that we almost don't notice...

...that her underwear changes color when she goes underwater.

Read our review of DEMENTIA 13


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

BURN AFTER READING -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 12/13/08

 

One thing about the Coen brothers--you never know what to expect when you sit down to watch one of their films. This is especially true of their comedies, which can range from lowbrow slapstick (RAISING ARIZONA) to chilly, intellectual aloofness (THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE).

As for their latest, BURN AFTER READING (2008), I just watched it twice and I still don't know what to make of it. It's an intense political thriller filled with intrigue, except that there aren't any politics and the intrigue all stems from a complex web of misunderstanding, paranoia, and just plain stupidity. It's like a BOURNE movie in which Matt Damon has been replaced with the Three Stooges.

John Malkovich plays Osbourne Cox, a low-level CIA analyst who quits in a huff after being demoted due to a drinking problem, and then sets about writing his memoirs, which somehow end up in the hands of Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt), a couple of dingbats who work at a health club.

Certain that they've stumbled onto some vital classified information, Linda and Chad attempt to blackmail Cox so that Linda can finally afford a series of cosmetic surgeries that will improve her social life. When Cox refuses to pay, they take the floppy disc to the Russian embassy, where a bemused official named Krapotkin doesn't know what to make of it or them.

 

Meanwhile, Cox's ice-cold wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) is having an affair with their health-nut friend Harry (George Clooney), a sex addict who has also hooked up with Linda through a computer dating service. Katie's planning to divorce Osbourne and marry Harry, while Harry still loves his wife (who's planning to divorce him and is having him shadowed by a detective) and also is falling for Linda.

When Linda sends Chad to Osbourne's house to try and dig up more secret information, he runs into Harry, who thinks he's a spy. The increasingly paranoid Harry then discovers that Linda's involved in the whole thing and thinks she's a spy, too. An important element in all this is that Harry's job requires him to carry a gun, which isn't a good idea under the circumstances.

It's a hard story to put into a nutshell, and it's even harder to convey just how goofy and off-the-wall this movie is. All the trappings of the political potboiler are here--car chases, shootings, break-ins, deceptions, people being followed by shadowy figures, the whole shebang--but while one half of the cast is made up of serious people living their lives in the really real world, the other half is composed of colossal idiots blundering their way into this serious milieu and gumming up the works with catastrophic results.

The Coens direct it like a straightfaced thriller with the chameleonlike Carter Burwell supplying a pulse-pounding musical score, and their deadpan approach to this material makes it delightfully fun to watch. It's also wonderfully unpredictable--I dare anyone to try and figure out what's going to happen next at any point in the story--with one or two developments that are wild enough to give the viewer whiplash. Like Janet Leigh's fatal shower in PSYCHO or the jaw-dropping ending of TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., this story often manages to whip the rug right out from under us with prankish glee.

Frances McDormand gives us another quirky, memorable Coen character here, but unlike FARGO's Marge Gundersen, her Linda Litzke is a ditzy wacko. Brad Pitt has a great time playing the equally idiotic Chad, and together they make quite a pair. George Clooney is hilarious as the increasingly frazzled Harry, whose life is flying to pieces around him for reasons he can't even begin to understand. Malkovich, of course, is fascinating to watch as the equally paranoid Osbourne Cox, as he tries to figure out who the hell Linda and Chad are and what insidious government conspiracy is closing in around him.

As his wife Katie, Tilda Swinton is about as cold and ruthless a bitch as you could imagine. Another Coen regular, Richard Jenkins, expertly underplays his part as usual and is probably the film's most sympathetic character. In lesser roles, David Rasche and J.K. Simmons are pitch-perfect as a couple of bland, weary CIA officials struggling to make sense of the whole twisted affair--their final scene together is a subtle, deftly-played wrap-up that had me howling in giddy disbelief as the closing credits appeared, aghast that the Coen brothers had pulled off something so audaciously messed up.

The DVD is 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1, and it looks and sounds fine to me. There are three brief bonus featurettes: "Finding the Burn", a making-of short; "DC Insiders Run Amuck", a look at the film's talented cast; and "Welcome Back George", which marks George Clooney's third collaboration with the Coens.

BURN AFTER READING won't appeal to everyone, which is something Joel and Ethan Coen have never seemed overly concerned about. They appear content to make whatever kind of film strikes their fancy at the time and let it find whatever audience happens to latch onto it. I'm glad I latched onto this one, because not only did I have a grand time watching it, but the characters have been running around inside my head all day reenacting scenes from the movie, and I kinda like it.

 

All The Wasp Woman Scenes From "THE WASP WOMAN" (1959) (video)

Susan Cabot plays beauty products tycoon Janice Starlin...

...whose dangerous experiments to achieve eternal youth...

...turn her into a hideous, bloodsucking wasp woman!

(SPOILERS!)


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!

3 Stooges Mocked Hitler Before Chaplin ("You Nazty Spy!", 1940) (video)

Charlie Chaplin's famous anti-war film "The Great Dictator" was released in October 1940.

In it, he plays a ridiculous caricature of Adolf Hitler.

But in January of that same year, the Three Stooges released "You Nazty Spy!"

In it, Moe became the first screen actor to lampoon Adolf Hitler...
...almost two years before America's entry into World War II.

In 1941, the Stooges followed this up with "I'll Never Heil Again."


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

The Scene That Gave Jerry Lewis A Heart Attack ("Cinderfella", 1960) (video)

Jerry proved himself an agile comic performer and dancer in this comedy classic.

In addition to his famous stairway descent at the Princess' ball...
...he was also a graceful dancing partner.

But it's his headlong dash up 63 steep steps that almost finished him.

The feat took such a toll on Jerry that he's said to have suffered a heart attack...
(Jerry himself confirmed this)
...which sent him to the hospital and delayed filming for weeks.

Other accounts limit the damage to severe exhaustion.

At any rate, Jerry definitely suffered for his art.

(Read our review of "Cinderfella" HERE)


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

MAN IN A SUITCASE: SET 1 -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 1/16/11

 

Fans of 60s British spy shows such as "Secret Agent" and "The Avengers" should get a bang out of "Man in a Suitcase", which graced UK tellies for a single season back in 1967.  (American viewers got to see it on ABC-TV a year later.)  Acorn Media's DVD collection MAN IN A SUITCASE: SET 1 offers the first 15 out of 30 episodes on four discs, and is just plain fun to watch. 

Texas native Richard Bradford (THE UNTOUCHABLES, A TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL) stars as ex-American Intelligence agent McGill (his first name is never revealed, although he's often referred to as "Mac"), who was framed for treason by his own agency in order to protect the identity of a double agent working in Russia.  While fighting to clear his name, McGill survives by taking various odd jobs as a private detective, bounty hunter, or bodyguard, and is often enlisted by his former superiors in Intelligence to perform dirty jobs for them against his will.  As one character describes him in an early episode: "He's a Yank.  Not bent, not straight.  Works for himself."

This interesting premise--you never know what he'll be involved in next--makes it possible for McGill to take part in a wide variety of dangerous and unpredictable adventures.  Bearing a closer resemblance to "Secret Agent" than the more fanciful "The Avengers", this gritty Cold War thriller is marked by snappy, hardboiled dialogue, wry humor, and frequent violence.
 

The latter is most often directed at McGill himself, who often gets bludgeoned, stabbed, beaten up, drugged, and even shot during the course of an episode.  Despite his attempts to look spiffy in cool-cat tailored suits with narrow ties, he usually ends up pretty ragged before the fadeout.  On several occasions, in fact, he spends much of the episode either staggering in a daze or struggling desperately just to stand up.

McGill takes all of this in stride because he has to.  As played by method actor Bradford--whose distinctive look includes prematurely gray hair and an ever-present cigarette jutting from his lips--he's gruff and hardbitten on the outside but sensitive and sympathetic on the inside, often getting into trouble by helping out an old friend or being drawn into an ill-fated romance.  We know he's a good guy and a skilled agent, yet the abuse and betrayal he's endured from both enemy agents and former allies makes him wary and suspicious of everyone.

While McGill keeps a London apartment, most of what he owns is contained in his beat-up suitcase, which he may have to take into action anywhere in the world at a moment's notice.  To this end, the backlot of Pinewood studios serves as various "exotic" settings.  Actual London locations are used to good effect as well.


Though the series takes place in the late 60s, it's refreshingly free of that era's usual "mod" nonsense.  Sets are low-budget but interesting, and heavy on the pastels characteristic of early color television.  On a technical level, the show is quite well done, with much of the 2nd unit direction and editing by five-time "James Bond" director John Glen.  The nifty animated opening titles are accompanied by Ron Grainer's cool theme.

Episode one, "Brainwash", finds McGill being held captive by deposed South Africa governor Colonel Davies and subjected to heavy psychological torture for unknown reasons.  It's a strange episode to start out with as McGill spends much of it confined in a cell in a drugged stupor, but it does demonstrate his resourcefulness and resolve.  He also gets knocked out, beaten up, and shot, barely surviving the ordeal. 

In episode two, "The Sitting Pigeon", McGill must babysit a surly, uncooperative gangster who's scheduled to testify against his own brothers and is marked for death.  Besides being one of the funnier and more suspenseful stories in the series, it boasts a guest appearance by none other than legendary "Monty Python" babe Carol Cleveland, here sporting an auburn beehive along with her miniskirt.  The next episode, "Day of Execution", features a young pre-stardom Donald Sutherland. 

"Variation on a Million Bucks", a two-parter with guest stars Yoko Tani (FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS), Norm Rossington (A HARD DAY'S NIGHT), and Aubrey Morris (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, "Deadwood"), is one of the best in the series.  McGill is given the key to a safety deposit box containing a million dollars by an old friend, a former Russian agent, as he lies dying of a gunshot wound.  Trouble is, the money is in Turkey and McGill must illicitly buy passage on a ship populated by cutthroats who will do anything for the key.  As par for the course, he ends up getting conked out, beaten up, stabbed, and shot--in addition to losing his girlfriend! 

With episode six, "Man from the Dead", we finally get to see the series pilot and find out the details of how McGill was originally set up as a fall guy.  Stuart Damon guest stars.  Next, Judy Geeson is "Sweet Sue", a spoiled rich girl whose father hires McGill to expose a couple of hipster hucksters who are taking her to the cleaners.  "Essay in Evil" is a tale of blackmail and murder directed by Freddie Francis, the highlight of which is a fight between McGill and a brawny Bond-style henchman.
 

"The Girl Who Never Was" concerns a lost Botticelli painting and features Bond regular Bernard Lee.  Barbara Shelley (FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH) appears in "All That Glitters", in which McGill is hired to locate a kidnapped boy.  "Dead Man's Shoes" finds McGill in a small village beset by marauding thugs.  In "Find the Lady", he's hunted by a homicidal jewel thief in Rome and joined by Jeanne Roland (YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE) and Patrick Cargill (HELP!, "The Prisoner"). 

The final three episodes in the set, "The Bridge", "The Man Who Stood Still", and "Burden of Proof", feature such familiar faces as Jane Merrow (HANDS OF THE RIPPER), Rupert Davies (THE OBLONG BOX, DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE), and John Gregson (THE LONGEST DAY).  More astute fans of British television will probably recognize several more.

The 4-disc DVD set from Acorn Media is in full-screen with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound.  No subtitles.  Picture quality is good, with occasional flaws--which, to me, just add to the nostalgic ambiance.  Each disc contains a photo gallery.  The smartly-designed menus are also adorned with some nice pics, along with episode summaries.

There's just something about these vintage British spy shows that I find appealing and fun.  An "Avengers" fanatic as a kid, I never seemed to connect with this particular show during its initial run.  But thanks to MAN IN A SUITCASE SET 1, I'm finally catching up with a really cool series.

Read our review of Set 2

THE RED GREEN SHOW: THE DELINQUENT YEARS -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 3/21/11

 

Making its TV debut at about the same time as Tim Allen's "Home Improvement", the similarly-themed Canadian comedy "The Red Green Show" (1991-2006) follows the adventures of a not-so-handyman who broadcasts a live-audience TV show from the rustic Possum Lodge somewhere in the Great White North.  But where Tim Allen's character was addicted to shiny, high-tech gadgetry with "more power", Red Green's forte is to fashion elaborately worthless contraptions out of scrap parts and duct tape ("the handyman's secret weapon"). 

Acorn Media's THE RED GREEN SHOW: THE DELINQUENT YEARS contains seasons 7-9 (1997-1999) of the popular show on nine discs and is more unabashedly-goofy fun than you can shake a hockey stick at.  Co-creator Steve Smith plays the gray-bearded Red with a low-key charm and a way with both deadpan one-liners and folksy words of wisdom.  A laidback lug in flannel shirt and suspenders who revels in his "guy-ness", Red is so perversely ingenious with his money and labor-saving inventions that they often go beyond the ridiculous to the downright dangerous. 

He gets this DVD collection off to a good start by duct-taping two junk cars together to create his own budget-priced Hummer.  In another episode, Red turns a full-sized city bus into a cigarette car by putting the steering wheel in the back and sawing off the roof to create a really long hood. 

Transforming his garage into a car wash or turning a washing machine into a homemade bread maker are child's play for this guy.  As the seasons progress, the writers keep topping themselves by coming up with wilder and more mind-boggling inventions, some of which, God help us, actually work if they don't explode first.

Red's co-host is his incredibly nebbishy nephew, Harold, who wields a keytar-like instrument with which he directs the show.  It took an episode or two for me to get used to Patrick McKenna's over-the-top portrayal, but I eventually realized that this guy is a scream and is the perfect foil for the down-to-earth Red.
 


Sort of a cross between Jerry Lewis and Pee-Wee Herman (with a big nod to Robert Carradine in REVENGE OF THE NERDS), the bucktoothed, bespectacled Harold is often the squeaky voice of reason in the face of Red's outlandish schemes but usually ends up getting caught in the backfire.  Harold helps run the lodge meetings that we see during each episode's closing credits and emcees many of the show's various segments such as "Possum Lodge Word Game" and "Ask the Experts."  His dream girl is Sandra Bullock, but in the meantime he'd settle for any girl.  

Each episode begins in the Possum Lodge and contains some basic storyline upon which to hang a series of recurring comedy sketches.  Whether it's a fishing tournament against a rival lodge, an attempt by Red to turn the lodge into a tax-exempt religion, or an effort to purify the rancid Possum Lake by having each lodge member drink 47 gallons of it in three weeks, the subplots help keep the show moving but rarely get in the way of the random dumb fun. 

Among the many supporting characters are familiar actor Graham Greene (THE GREEN MILE, DANCES WITH WOLVES) as amateur explosives enthusiast Edgar K.B. "Ka-Boom" Montrose, Gordon Pinsent (BLACULA, COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT) as habitual liar Hap Shaughnessy, Bob Bainborough (THE LOVE GURU, DEAD RINGERS) as the grumpy Dalton Humphrey, and Wayne Robson (WRONG TURN, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD) as cheerful, diminutive ex-con Mike Hamar, who just can't seem to stay out of legal trouble.  Comic Jerry Schaefer plays the extremely nervous animal control officer Ed Frid.



Co-creator Rick Green is hilarious in the "Adventures With Bill" segments, which are pure silent-movie slapstick with the accident-prone Bill engaging in delightfully wrongheaded and hazardous pursuits as Red looks on in awe.  Two things always happen during an adventure with Bill--one, Bill gets seriously injured (but bounces back like a cartoon character), and two, he always manages to knock the mirrors off Red's Possum Van. 

Besides Bill, my favorite supporting character is the deceptively normal-looking Ranger Gord.  Gord has spent several years alone in a firewatch tower, which has warped his mind in a variety of ways.  His emotional relationships with the forest animals and even the trees themselves are creepy enough to have even Red and Harold squirming in their seats during one of his bizarre personal accounts.  During the 1999 season Gord starts making his own public service cartoons which are a real hoot.  Playing Ranger Gord is Peter Keleghan, known from such films as SCREWBALLS and COOPERS' CHRISTMAS, along with the "Non-Fat Yogurt" episode of "Seinfeld."

Unfortunately, both Patrick McKenna and Rick Green left the show at the start of the 1999 season and, while some of the lesser characters were promoted to help fill in the gap, the absence of these two key performers is keenly felt.  McKenna makes frequent guest appearances during segments in which Red visits Harold in his new job as an accountant in Port Asbestos, but it just isn't the same. 

The nine-disc, 47-episode collection from Acorn Media is in 4:3 full screen and Dolby Digital stereo.  Each season comes in its own three-disc keepcase.  Extras consist of text biographies of Red and Harold, plus Steve Smith's production notes on the show--these appear in all three sets, with season three containing some additional bios of other characters. 

One of the reasons I like THE RED GREEN SHOW: THE DELINQUENT YEARS so much is that it's like a skewed adult version of some of my favorite kids' shows such as "It's Howdy Doody Time" and "Captain Kangaroo", by way of "The Uncle Floyd Show" and "Pee-Wee's Playhouse."  The main difference, besides the lack of talking animals, is that Red isn't concerned with being a good example or teaching us sensible life lessons--he's happy just to cheer us up, make us feel a little better about getting older, and allow us to vicariously revel in the joys of being totally irresponsible.

DEADLINE -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 11/17/19

 

One thing 50s and 60s television did so well, and which seems to have been lost these days, was the powerful half-hour drama. This is especially true of the better written and produced anthology shows of the time, including the hardboiled, often riveting journalism drama "Deadline."

Film Chest's new 3-disc, 39-episode DVD collection DEADLINE ("When Reporters Were Heroes") contains the entire run of the show (which aired sporadically from 1959 to 1961), with each episode covering various true-life news stories and the dogged reporters who unearthed them, often putting their lives in jeopardy to do so.

Paul Stewart (CITIZEN KANE) lends the show a distinguished air as the gravel-voiced host who, while sitting in a busy newsroom amidst diligent reporters and other workers, introduces each front-page story and the journalist who broke it.

Most of the stories are crime-related, as the reporters often work alongside police detectives on cases involving murder, robbery, arson, kidnapping, extortion, prison riots, mad bombers, juvenile delinquency, shoplifting, and political corruption.

The reporters track down leads and confront bad guys like hardnosed cops, sometimes giving the show the feel of a "Dragnet" episode.  The low budget and abundance of location shooting in the heart of the city also give it a gritty, realistic look. (Listen for some familiar "Plan 9 From Outer Space" library music within the show's score.)

Some stories are particularly powerful, as when a man (actor/director Mark Rydell) is accused of planting a bomb in his mother's suitcase and killing an entire planeload of people for her insurance money.  In another, a college student's thesis on how to commit the perfect murder is tested with the cold-blooded killings of two innocent men.

In addition to these subjects are the ones more related to human interest and social justice, with the reporters often being portrayed as crusading angels and pillars of moral virtue. Indeed, the series goes to great lengths to dispel any popular notions regarding the profession which are anything but positive.

Here we witness stories of amateur spelunkers being rescued from a cave (a very young Christopher Walken is billed as "Ronnie"), a pair of Burmese nurses being saved from deportation by a reporter (Frank Sutton, "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.")  whose life they once saved in a makeshift army hospital, and another reporter going undercover to expose the exploitation of illegal immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.  There's even a heart-tugging Christmas episode.

The stories are lean, terse, and to the point. They're also somewhat addictive, making them good binge-watching material for those so inclined. Like many anthology shows of the time, "Deadline" was a place for writers and actors to hone their talents, often doing work that is inspired.

The film quality of these black and white episodes is generally pristine save for occasional rough spots, which I think only add to their character. According to the promo information, these films were lost and forgotten in a garage in New Jersey for over 50 years before rediscovery.

Stewart himself plays the lead in many of the episodes. Other familiar faces include Telly Savalas, Peter Falk, Simon Oakland, Malachi ("Mal") Throne, Diane Ladd, Joanne Linville, Robert Lansing, George Maharis, Sydney ("Sidney") Pollack, Bibi Osterwald, Frank Overton, Lee Bergere, Jan Miner, Bob Hastings, Walter Brooke, Dana Elcar, Lonny Chapman, Jason ("Herb") Evers, Micheal Conrad, and Alfred Ryder.

As mentioned, the show glorifies the reporter's role as a crusader for justice and defender of all that is good, vowing (also quoting the promo info) to "uphold everything that our civil society stands for."

The text material found in the enclosed episode-guide booklet stresses how tarnished the reporter's image has become in recent years, blaming this not on any failing on the part of today's mainstream media but on its being undermined by alleged "fake news" being spread by the internet and other independent sources.

I find this either willfully naive or intentionally misleading, considering the fact that, in recent years, major print and television news sources seem to have relinquished a great deal of their former integrity while much of the actual truth one is able to glean these days does, in fact, come from the internet. 

Not only that, but the booklet's text as well as a DVD interview with a noted broadcast journalism professor seem to be just as politically biased as is much of today's mainstream media.

Putting such gripes aside, however, DEADLINE is a rich source of entertainment for vintage TV lovers, and Film Chest has done a fine job of preserving and presenting these exciting episodes that are such a valuable part of television history.



BONUS FEATURES
Episode Synopses • Photo Gallery • Trailer •
Trivia • Extended Synopsis: Journalism Past and
Present Overview • Interview with Broadcast
Journalism Professor Joe Alicastro


SKU: FC-647
UPC: 874757064796
SRP: $19.98
Street Date: 11/19/2019
Pre-Book: 11/5/2019
Discs: 3
Box Lot: 30
Production: Arnold Perl
Run Time: 1,006 Mins
Format: DVD
Color/B&W: B&W
Aspect ratio: 4x3
Year Prod: 1959 - 1961
Sound: Mono
Studio: Film Chest
Rating: Not rated
Genre: Television, Crime, Drama
Actor(s): Paul Stewart (narrator), Peter Falk,
Diane Ladd, George Maharis, Robert Lansing
and many more.               
Director(s): Various

THE H.P. LOVECRAFT COLLECTION, VOLUME 4: PICKMAN'S MODEL -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 12/18/11

 

THE H.P. LOVECRAFT COLLECTION, VOLUME 4: PICKMAN'S MODEL, conceived and produced by Andrew Migliore for Lurker Films, is part of their continuing effort to bring us the best of the short films based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.  The previous volumes were entitled "Cool Air", "Rough Magik", and "Out of Mind."  Here, Lovecraft's chilling tale "Pickman's Model" is presented in three different interpretations, supplemented by two other short films.  Collectively, they add up to a couple of hours of solid entertainment for the Gothic horror fan.

I was unwilling to start another Lovecraft film review with the disclaimer "I've never read any of his stories, but...", so I found a website containing his complete works and gave "Pickman's Model" a read.  It's the eerie story of Richard Upton Pickman, a deranged artist whose paintings depict scenes of carnage and depravity so realistic and repellent that he is shunned by the "tea table" art crowd.  All except for a man named Thurber, who is morbidly fascinated by Pickman's work and wants to see more.  Pickman obliges him by inviting Thurber to the dark, haunted cellar where he does his most gruesome work and showing him exactly from whence springs his malevolent inspiration.  Which, as you might guess, turns out to be a rather unsettling experience for the unsuspecting art lover.

It's a very short story told in flashback by Thurber to his friend Eliot after the fact, and any filmization must be augmented by extra dialogue and events.  At 43 minutes, the 2000 TV-film "Chilean Gothic", directed by Roberto Harrington from an adaptation by Gilberto Villarroel, is the longest and most altered version on this disc. 

Here, the "Thurber" character is a journalist named Gabriel (Rodrigo Sepúlveda) who is investigating the violent death of his friend Anibal, whose last known whereabouts were in the company of the renegade artist Pickman.  He interviews Pickman's only friend, an eccentric old professor named Mattotti, and the slovenly caretaker of a crumbling apartment house where Pickman once lived.  Both meet a violent end on the same night that Gabriel is lurking through the hidden tunnels beneath the apartment house, where he finds human remains. 



Tracking Pickman down to a remote island, he finds him inhabiting a large, shadowy mansion surrounded by paintings and sketches of unimaginable, otherworldly horror.  Here, Pickman is played by Renzo Oviedo as a frizzy-haired wild man--the other versions will each interpret him quite differently.  Gabriel's confrontation with Pickman leads to an event which is common to each of these films, which is the emergence of some terrifying, unnameable beast from a brick well within the cellar of Pickman's house.  This leads to a final revelation for Gabriel which is unique to "Chilean Gothic" and not found in any other version.  It comes as a pretty satisfying shock ending.

Sepúlveda and Oviedo are intense in the lead roles and the film unfolds as a scintillating mystery that is well told, with an atmosphere of dread that lets us know things aren't going to end on a happy note.  Aside from some shock cuts of Aribal's ravaged body, most of the horror is left to the viewer's imagination, including Pickman's paintings themselves.  As Thurber tells his friend Eliot in the short story: "There's no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify."  Director Harrington reveals only oblique glimpses of the paintings to give us an idea of their content, with one notable exception: a full-on view of Francisco Goya's horrific "Saturn Devouring His Children", which will also pop up in the Italian version next on the disc.

Producer-director Giovanni Furore's "Pickman's Model" (2003) begins with a young woman answering an ad for a painter's model and ending up as an entree for the creature in Pickman's cellar.  Then we veer a bit closer to actual Lovecraft territory as a distraught Howard (Vittorio de Stefano) stumbles into the home of his friend Russel (Alessandro di Lorenzo) one night with a cloth-covered painting and a strange story.  The painting is a Pickman original, which piques the interest of art-lover Russel, and the story is similar to Lovecraft's, with Howard and Russel standing in for Thurber and Eliot. 

This time, the Pickman that Howard meets at an art exhibition is portrayed by Lorenzo Mori as a twisted, spidery hunchback with a really evil leer.  He leads Howard through some creepy old Italian backalleys to a dark, spooky house with stone passageways dripping with water and a cellar with the usual brick well.  As before, the content of Pickman's paintings is only hinted at, but this time we get a disturbing impression of them via subliminal flashes of some truly demented photographs--you'll want to go back and do some frame-advancing to get the full effect.  At one point, the wooden lid to the well starts to rattle violently, and Pickman grabs a gun and locks Howard out of the room, saying something about "rats."  Well, once we hear the blood-chilling racket going on in there, we know it ain't rats--the sound effects alone are enough to give you a large case of the willies. 

The rich cinematography here is nice after the grainy visuals of the Chilean effort, and Lorenzo Mori's scuttling, sinister Pickman is delightfully loathesome.  The story builds nicely to an ending that explicity follows the one in the short story, right down to a shot of the cellar creature itself.  It's still a bit less than our imaginations are capable of conjuring up, but the set-up and pay-off for the twist ending are well-handled. 

Next comes my favorite of the bunch, Texas director Cathy Welch's 1981 college thesis film "Pickman's Model."  The low-budget black and white photography makes it look like something out of the 60s--in fact, the dark, moody atmosphere and nightmarish locations give it the same oppressive aura that hung so heavily over Francis Ford Coppola's DEMENTIA 13 and Herk Harvey's CARNIVAL OF SOULS.  This time we finally get an actual Thurber, although his friends call him "Bill" (Mac Williams), and he's relating his strange story to his gal-pal Ellen (Nancy Griffith), which is pretty close to "Eliot." 

Bill and Ellen are members of an art club that consists mainly of straight-laced conservatives with little appreciation for the ghastly canvases of the eccentric Pickman (the director's brother, Marc Mahan).  As Bill enthusiastically tells Ellen, "Pickman dredges up our darkest fantasies...the ancient terrors in our collective subconscious," while she cautions him, "There's a trick to being fascinated with the perverse without becoming perverse yourself." 

Marc Mahan portrays Pickman as a man with a deceptively bland yet somehow ominous appearance which masks the keenly decadent and ultimately dangerous intellect within.  When he is expelled from the art club, Bill goes with him, intent on finishing his manuscript about Great Painters He Has Known with a special section on Pickman.  He gets invited to the man's house for a look at some of his latest works, and after proving his worthiness, is then taken to Pickman's super-secret studio where he does his really undiluted and downright freaky stuff. 



Deep in the heart of old Boston, a richly-historical setting haunted by the ghosts of the past and resonating with leftover evil from the days of the Salem witch trials, Pickman's crumbling old mansion is a nightmare-inducing spook house.  The well in the cellar, which in the other versions of the story is simply a generic doorway to Hell, is here directly related to the Salem witchcraft days in that it is a doorway to the underground passageways that were said to allow the witches and other creatures of the night to secretly commune with one another, and which may still contain something best left alone.  Pickman himself is part of that lineage--as he tells Bill, his four-time great-grandmother was hanged as a witch under the stern gaze of none other than Cotton Mather. 

Bill becomes increasingly disturbed by Pickman's paintings as we finally get to see some of them as described in Lovecraft's short story.  The renderings are crude but interesting, especially a portrait of a Puritan family in quiet prayer.  They're all bent in solemn communion with God except for the little boy, who is leering at the viewer with anything but pure thoughts.  Other paintings show victims being attacked and devoured by strange canine-human hybrids in graveyards and subways.  One of them, which depicts one of these beasts killing a boy, is brought startlingly to life in a shocking makeup-effects shot that is cheap but effective.  But most disturbing to Bill is the fact that Pickman's paintings are starting to dredge up primal fears within him that seem to be connected to past experiences that his memory has suppressed.

The sequence in which the unknown creature begins to emerge from the well is handled better here than in any of the other versions.  Bill is locked out and must listen to the blood-curdling noises behind the door until finally Pickman emerges.  There's something different about him now--he's hairier, his hands and face are twisted, and his teeth are sharper--in other words, he's beginning to resemble one of those creatures in his paintings.  At that point, Bill suddenly remembers something he had to do somewhere else, and gets his hindquarters out of there.

Lovecraft's story ends with the main character revealing that he swiped a photograph that was pinned to one of Pickman's canvases and stuffed it in his pocket.  Pickman always took photographs from which to better render the background details for his paintings--or so he said.  In the short story, as in this and the Italian film version, a final revelation concerning Pickman's photographs supplies the twist ending.  But here, there's an added sequence that pushes Cathy Welch's interpretation of the story even further into horror film territory and gives it a chilling ending that's right out of your worst nightmares.  Which is just one of the reasons I consider this film to be the highlight of the collection.

The six-minute short that follows is a distinct change of pace.  Based on a single sentence from an unfinished story by Lovecraft, Holland's "Between The Stars" (1998) features Jos Urbanis as Minnekens, an increasingly self-absorbed office drone whose only pleasure in life is to lie on his back with his head sticking out the window and gaze up the airshaft between the surrounding apartment buildings at a single square of star-bedecked night sky.  Another beautifully-shot black and white entry, Djie Han Thung's film is reminiscent of David Lynch's ERASERHEAD in style and content.  We really get into this guy's head as he wanders totally detached through his daily life, preoccupied with the facial pores of a chattering coworker or the miniscule white specks in the printed letters of a book.  A strangely upbeat ending ties this odd entry off rather neatly.

Finally, we get some primitive, old-school computer animation in the form of Geoffrey D. Clark's adaptation of Lovecraft's "In The Vault", the story of a vile cemetery caretaker named George Birch.  This drunken old sot isn't above tossing the dear departed into mismarked graves, robbing them of their valuables, or burying two of them together to save the effort of digging separate holes.  When a long freeze makes gravedigging impossible, the bodies are stored together in a vault until the spring thaw.  As fate would have it, George gets locked into this vault one night and must figure out a way to escape.  But before he does, the meanness and cruelty he has shown to his vault-mates in both life and death comes back to haunt him in a big way.

Clark's rendition of the story is short and simple--more of a childlike fairytale than a horror story--and it comes and goes leaving little lasting impression.  So I read the original story to see if there was more to it than that, and sure enough, it's a dark and disturbing tale of terror that could've yielded a much better adaptation than this.  As it is, Clark's "In The Vault" is a pleasant diversion, sort of like the cartoon that theaters used to play along with the feature, but it had the potential of being memorably frightening if only the source material had been better utilized.

I'm glad I watched THE H.P. LOVECRAFT COLLECTION, VOLUME 4: PICKMAN'S MODEL, because not only did it prompt me to finally start reading Lovecraft after all these years, but it also provided me with a highly-enjoyable evening's worth of really good Gothic horror.  Seeing how a single short story can yield such a mix of wildly-different styles and interpretations makes it consistently interesting.  And it's a great example of how mood and atmosphere can be just as effective, and sometimes more so, than a bunch of shock cuts and gore effects.

Black and White Horror Movies With One Color Scene (video)

Black and White Horror Movies With One Color Scene

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
The Return of Dracula (1958)
How to Make a Monster (1958)
War of the Colossal Beast (1958)
The Tingler (1959)
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1958)

(spoilers)

I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

THE PARTING OF THE RED SEA: Five Different Versions (video)

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (Cecil B. DeMille, 1923)

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)

THE PRINCE OF EGYPT (1998)

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (2006 Mini-Series)

THE BIBLE (2013 Mini-Series)


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it.  Thanks for watching!

BATTLE FOR INCHEON: OPERATION CHROMITE -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 1/5/17

 

It has one of those annoying double titles separated by a colon, as though they couldn't make up their minds, and a cover that more than whispers "direct to DVD junk."  But make no mistake--BATTLE FOR INCHEON: OPERATION CHROMITE (2016) is the real thing: a lavish, impressively-produced Korean War film that begins with a suspenseful espionage mission and ends with a full-scale invasion.

Based on true events, the story concerns a group of South Korean soldiers led by special forces captain Jang Hak-soo (Lee Jung-jae) who pose as a North Korean inspection unit in order to try and locate the placement of mines in Incheon Harbor before the invasion which is to be led by General Douglas MacArthur (Liam Neeson).

Their chief obstacle in this attempt is Commander Lim Gye-jin (Lee Beom-soo), a protege' of supreme leader Kim Il-sung who's in charge of fortifying the harbor against an impending attack.  Not only is Lim Gye-jin tight-lipped about where those mines are, but he's also one of those arrogant, sadistic, and supremely suspicious little bastards who always sizes you up with a sideways leer and a hand poised over his holster. 

Few situations are more suspenseful than an undercover mission in which the good guys have to maintain their false identities amidst constant scrutiny by a ruthless enemy.  (It's an atmosphere of constant fear and paranoia in which even civilians have to keep their sh** wired tight at all times.)  Naturally, Lim Gye-jin and his men eventually must resort to the most desperate measures imaginable to try and procure a map of those mines, leading to their discovery. 

Their attempt to escape is the first blazing action setpiece of several during this film, each of which is masterfully shot and edited.  Director John H. Lee has a smoothly competent visual style complimented by some expert rapid-fire editing that crackles like a live wire without ever becoming cluttered or confusing.  In other words, this is red meat for action junkies.

A furious shootout in a hospital (during which an emotionally-conflicted young nurse must decide whether or not to abandon her current life and join the opposition) and other heated gun battles throughout the film are comparable to those in James Bond films or the works of John Woo.  And giving the story added depth is its attention to the combatants as human beings with their own dreams of freedom and yearning to return home to their loved ones. 

While all of this is going on, of course, there's Liam Neeson all made up as General Douglas MacArthur, complete with corncob pipe and shades, trying to add a new dimension to his career as an older character actor.  Once we stop thinking of him as Liam Neeson, his MacArthur is sufficiently convincing. Actually, I never stopped thinking of him as Liam Neeson, but I enjoyed watching him play the character anyway.

Lee Jung-jae makes a sturdy, likable good guy as Jang Hak-soo--he's the opposite of the usual soulless action hero and we're always aware of the depth of his feelings throughout the mission.  As Lim Gye-jin, Lee Beom-soo is a delight, albeit a perverse one since his character is such a smoothly evil little monster.  The rest of the cast are uniformly on point, making us feel each tragic and heartrending detail of their emotional turmoil when the mission begins to go all to hell.

With all this going on, BATTLE FOR INCHEON: OPERATION CHROMITE would've been enough with just the undercover mission alone.  But damned if it doesn't end with nothing less than the full-scale invasion of Incheon, with MacArthur leading a fleet of ships cutting through the churning waves and what's left of Jang Hak-soo and his men battling for their lives on the shore along with hundreds of other clashing warriors. 

I don't know how jaded the average young movie watcher is these days, but I think the generous amounts of CGI used to give the sequence added scope and big-budget appeal are rather impeccably rendered and eye-pleasing.  I mean, to me the battle scenes just look really well-done.  Others may disagree.

The DVD from CJ Entertainment is in 16x9 widescreen with Dolby 5.1 and 2.0 sound which you can watch in either dubbed English or the original Korean with subtitles.  Extras consist of a brief making-of featurette and trailers for this and other CJ Entertainment releases.

I had low hopes for BATTLE FOR INCHEON: OPERATION CHROMITE going in--from the looks of it, I was expecting something along the same cheapo lines as THE LAST DROP or something similarly horrible.  I love it when my first bad impressions of a film are proven wrong, and I end up having a great time watching what turns out to be a surprisingly well-crafted and entertaining film.

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP -- Movie Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 12/16/11

 

I'm not sure how the average H.P. Lovecraft fan will react to it, so my impressions of BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP (2006) were based solely on the movie itself and not on how well or how badly screenwriter Barrett J. Leigh adapted it from Lovecraft's short story.  As such, I found it to be one of the creepiest and most over-the-top horror films I've seen in recent years.

The story takes place in one of those nightmarish insane asylums (circa 1911) in which the grievously abused and neglected patients serve as guinea pigs in the mad experiments of crazed doctors.  Young Dr. Eischel (Fountain Yount) is conducting his own really interesting experiment on a catatonic, cadaverous-looking woman named Ardelia--strapped to a chair, her skull has been sawed through for easy pop-top access to her brain, into which Dr. Eischel sticks electrodes that are hooked up to a device he uses to stimulate various nerve centers.  I was never really sure what his goal was (something about harnessing the enery of thought), but it didn't really matter because the whole thing was wonderfully weird and horrific. 

Meanwhile, Dr. Wardlow (Kurt Hargan), a profoundly cruel, power-mad alienist (okay, I had to look it up--"alienist: n. 'A physician who has been accepted by a court of law as an expert on the mental competence of principals or witnesses appearing before it'", according to www.answers.com) is presiding over the hearing of a wretched piece of human flotsam named Joe Slaader (William Sanderson, BLADE RUNNER, "Newhart"), who has been caught butchering a bunch of his fellow inbred hillbillies and running around in the woods with one of the severed heads.  Dr. Wardlow delights in pointing out Joe's myriad less-appealing qualities, including a large hump in his back that resembles a human face--the result of a fetal twin that didn't quite successfully make it through the gestation process. 

Wardlow, who can't wait to get this guy on an operating table for some good old surgical fun, applies leeches to Joe's body to "suck out the madness" and suggests cutting out the malformed twin, but Dr. Eischel contemptuously derides him as an idiot, initiating an intensely confrontational relationship between the two.  When Dr. Eischel later finds the chance to examine Joe on his own, he discovers that the fetal twin is alive and conscious--in fact, it is the dominant consciousness within the shared body, coming to the fore whenever Joe goes to sleep and telekinetically ripping people to bloody shreds (one of the few coherent things Joe ever says is the chant, "I kiss my loved ones...I go to sleep...I wake up with bad things").  Giddy with anticipation, Eischel vows to circumvent Dr. Wardlow's surgical plans and get Joe hooked up to his brain machine. 



And that's just for starters.  Believe me, this is one weird movie, and it gets weirder by the minute, eventually culminating in a grand, blood-drenched finale in which skulls are drilled, electrodes are implanted into living brains and the brains of several severed heads on spikes, and a terrifying Netherworld creature named Amducious claws its way into our dimension (via some not-so-great CGI). 

Along the way, some of the patients in the asylum find themselves hanging upside-down in their cells by some unseen force as all the flesh is ripped from their bones, and the lovely Ardelia, her body reanimated by Amducious' will, pries the head off of the recently-ousted asylum director who has discovered her in the basement, just as he is about to gleefully rape her.  One thing you have to say about this movie--it's pretty eventful.

It's also very deliberately stylish, and stylized--filmed in black-and-white, with color appearing only in the scenes in which Amducious' presence is felt, BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP is a dizzying collage of wild camerawork and sometimes rapid-fire editing, especially in the deeply unsettling dream sequences.  The most unique thing about it, though, which is also the thing that will turn off many viewers, is the highly stylized acting.  Everyone in the cast attacks their characters as though they were performing in a silent movie or perhaps the most melodramatic Grand Guignol theater presentation imaginable, manically emoting for the people in the back row, and this effect is even carried over into the stagelike makeup, costumes, and set design. 

It's purely intentional on the part of directors Barrett J. Leigh and Thom Maurer, and contributes to the heavy layer of black humor that permeates the entire movie, as well as its oppressive sense of unenlightened antiquity.  I'm sure a lot of people will simply regard this as horrible acting, which, in some cases, it may be.  But it worked for me. 

Will Lovecraft fans like this movie?  I have no idea, but judging from their reactions to most of the previous cinematic adaptations of the author's works, probably not.  On its own terms, however, I found it to be a wildly inventive, nightmarish, shocking, funny, and unabashedly bizarre experience that was enough fun for me to disregard its faults.  Plus, it's a visual feast for gorehounds, who will also be pleased to see Tom Savini in an all-too-brief role early on. 

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP is a film that is definitely not for everyone, but if you get hooked into it just right, you may have almost as much fun as Ardelia does when Dr. Eischel sticks an electrode into the pleasure center of her brain and turns up the dial.

THE FORLORNED -- Movie Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 10/14/17

 

It seems as though ghost stories are one of the hardest kinds of movies to make, or at least make scary.  Most are lucky if they manage to be scary half the time, usually starting out strong before fizzling out toward the end. 

In these cases, a bunch of spooky peripheral glimpses and some nerve-jangling jump scares keep us on edge until the story gets in the way and things start being a little too literal and on-the-nose expository. 

THE FORLORNED (2017) suffers from this problem, but fortunately it doesn't suffer too terribly much.  Why?  Because it's such a likable effort and builds up so much goodwill in the first half that we're willing to go along with it to the end even when it isn't creeping us out.  That first half, while not exactly heart-attack-inducing, is all goosebumpy, Halloween-style fun.   

The setting is a big old mansion on a remote, fog-swept island in New England (the movie was filmed on location--in Montana) next to an abandoned lighthouse.  Bad, and I mean VERY bad things are said to have happened on that island, dating back to the War of 1812 when some really horrible atrocities took place.  Since then, anyone setting foot on the island has terrifying ghostly experiences that are whispered about in reverent awe by the townsfolk.

Tom Doherty (Colton Christensen), a young carpenter desperately in need of money, sets foot big time by getting hired to stay in the house by himself for several weeks doing renovations. He's one of those "ha ha, I don't believe in that kind of stuff" types until colorfully grizzled old local Murphy (Cory Dangerfield), who owns a pub on the mainland, helpfully lets him in on all of the island's terrifying ghostly history in graphic detail.

Thus the stage is set for that first half of THE FORLORNED that keeps us all giddy and tingly as Tom experiences all sorts of noises, fleeting glimpses, an old radio that keeps coming on by itself, and electrical failures that must be remedied at the breaker box located in--you guessed it--the basement, into which Tom must venture in pitch dark as we're thinking, "Uh...no. Just no."  And I haven't even mentioned the man-eating ghost warthog.

It's ideal entertainment for that eerie Halloween mood, even throwing in a couple of effective gross-outs (chocolate cake with maggot filling, a flashback of early 1800's sailors turning into ravaging flesh-eaters) and the kind of queasy haunted-house stuff that makes certain people recall films such as THE CHANGELING and THE OTHERS so fondly.  (This big, creepy old house, by the way, is an ideal setting for the film, aided by some effective CGI-generated environs.)

Eventually, Tom is joined by Amy Garrity (Elizabeth Mouton), a plucky young woman who lived in the house as a little girl and is back seeking closure for the mysterious death of her father and disappearance of her mother.  She's a good character and we like her, but it's right about here that the film starts to get less scary and more talky, especially when Tom's body gets "occupied" by a surprise guest ghost and Colton Christensen's previously understated performance becomes big and theatrical, as though the final scenes were part of a broad dinner theater play. 

Still, by this time we're pretty invested in the story and don't really mind that it's no longer all that blood-curdling.  It all comes to a mostly satisfying conclusion and leaves us feeling as though we've just heard a particularly effective sleepover story.  And if that's what THE FORLORNED was aiming for, then it pretty much succeeded. 

EXTRAORDINARY MISSION -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 1/29/18

 

One of the most suspenseful plots I can think of is the straight-arrow cop going undercover as a bad guy and having to live the lifestyle 24 hours a day, with imminent discovery and death always a hair's breadth away. 

It's what made "Donnie Brasco" (the non-fiction book and the movie) so harrowing, and it's what gives the Hong Kong action extravaganza EXTRAORDINARY MISSION (Cinedigm, 2017) such a visceral and emotional charge.

Directors Alan Mak and Anthony Pun and writer Felix Chong (THE DEPARTED, INFERNAL AFFAIRS) wring all the nerve-stretching tension they can from the concept before blasting the doors off with a final act that's pure rocket-fueled action. 

Huang Xuan (THE INTERPRETER) plays Lin Kai, the incorruptible cop whose (mis)fortune it is to be chosen for the task of entering the world of high-stakes drug trafficking with the goal of finding the biggest fish and the pond he swims in. 

Naturally, in order to gain the trust of his criminal cohorts he must engage in highly dangerous and often deadly exploits, with his life on the line at every turn.

This leads to some early action sequences that get us stoked for what's to come. But the main gist of the film's first two-thirds or so is to show Lin Kai using his wits, along with sheer guts, to climb the ladder toward the higher levels of the drug trade. 

The higher up the food chain he goes, the farther down the rabbit hole he descends.  And every time you think you've finally met the biggest, baddest bad guy, there's always someone worse who he must answer to. 

When our hero finally reaches the heart of darkness, we're treated to some stunning twists and revelations that give Lin Kai's mission and everything about it a whole new, shockingly different perspective.  The story keeps the now-familiar "undercover mole" concept fresh by adding intriguing angles to it which give it zing.

But that's nothing compared to what happens when Lin Kai, the ultra-ruthless drug kingpin, and one or two other surprise participants all engage in one of the most furious, action-packed shoot-em-up chase sequences ever filmed. 

Once it starts you might as well buckle up because this is non-stop blazing action that doesn't let up until we've gone back and forth through the wringer at least half a dozen times. 

It's dead serious (no wisecracks or one-liners) with an emotional core that gives the story heft, plenty of suspense, and enough frantic, mind-numbing action coming at us in the last 20-30 minutes for three movies.  EXTRAORDINARY MISSION is one super-charged thrill ride.


EXTRAORDINARY MISSION BLU-RAY™                   
Price:                  $19.97

Street Date:         February 6, 2018
Language:           Mandarin                 
Runtime:             120 minutes             
Rating:                Not Rated
Subtitles:            English

EXTRAORDINARY MISSION DVD BASICS                
Price:                  $14.93

Street Date:         February 6, 2018
Language:           Mandarin                 
Runtime:             120 minutes             
Rating:                Not Rated
Subtitles:            English

Extras: Making-of featurette, trailer

SLEDGE HAMMER!: THE COMPLETE SERIES -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 12/8/11

 

Having just watched the 5-DVD set SLEDGE HAMMER!: THE COMPLETE SERIES, I find that, once again, I dislike something at first and then end up liking it after further consideration.  This proves either one of two things: (a) I'm wishy-washy, or (b) you can't always go by first impressions.  I'm going to go with the second alternative, since it's less uncomplimentary toward me.

I have a vague memory of seeing an episode of this show during its first run (1986-88) and dismissing it as a crappy "Police Squad!" wannabe.  That criminally brief 1982 series (six big  episodes and out) by the Zucker brothers, which introduced Leslie Nielsen's celebrated "Frank Drebin" character and inspired the NAKED GUN movie trilogy, continued the same outlandishly farcical yet totally deadpan vibe of the Zuckers' AIRPLANE! on a smaller scale. 

Naturally, I was disappointed when I approached "Sledge Hammer!" expecting it to be more of the same.  What I finally realized after watching several episodes, however, is that this show is its own addlebrained entity--it's still a lightheaded farce that often resembles something out of MAD Magazine and celebrates silliness for its own sake, but the deadpan humor is shot through (pun alert!) with heaps of pure, giddy goofiness.  In fact, "Sledge Hammer!" works both when it's aping the bone-dry "Police Squad!" comedy style and when it's making funny faces at us.



It takes awhile to get its groove on, though.  The first episode is a bit of a mess--production values are murky, the direction and editing are flabby, and, worst of all, there's a laugh track pointing out the funny parts to us.  Still, it has John Vernon (ANIMAL HOUSE) as the mayor, who demands that Sledge be let loose on the case when his daughter is kidnapped by terrorists. 

There are some funny bits and Hammer's character, who is a cross between Dirty Harry and his watered-down TV equivalent "Hunter" (also a likable fascist cop with a female partner), is well established when he uses a bazooka to demolish an entire building in order to stop a sniper ("Trust me, I know what I'm doing" is his oft-heard motto).  Overall, though, it's pretty limp.

We get to watch the show get its bearings and start firing on more cylinders as the season progresses, with the scripts getting funnier and more daring, and the direction improving (Bill Bixby eventually helmed eight of the series' best episodes, with Dick Martin of "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" contributing a couple of good ones).  Despite its lesser moments, there's a relentless quality to the hot-and-cold-running gags and a sort of earnestness from the stars that makes the first season somehow likable.  And some of the gags actually score big laughs, as when Hammer and an informant (guest star Dennis Fimple) conduct a secret conversation via adjoining pay phones.



Before long, the chemistry between Hammer and his female partner Det. Dori Doreau starts to click.  RUNAWAY's Anne-Marie Martin (who, incidentally, co-wrote TWISTER with Michael Crichton) is an appealing foil for Hammer even though her comedic skills take awhile to develop, and their relationship has a certain charm--Doreau sees the good behind Hammer's fascist, violence-loving, ultra-right-wing exterior and eventually finds herself falling for him even though Hammer's first love is his gun, which he talks to and sleeps with. 

As Hammer, David Rasche (BURN AFTER READING, UNITED 93) has a firm grasp on the character from the start but also gets better as he goes along.  Rasche has a field day in the role, with his trigger-happy detective shooting first and asking questions later while gleefully roughing up everyone from jaywalkers to the mayor's wife.  He reels off one-liners like nobody's business--when a nagging reporter asks if he has any predictions, Hammer's deadpan response is, "Yes...scientists will perform the first brain transplant, and you'll be the recipient."  We eventually learn that Hammer thinks the death penalty is too lenient, his favorite song is "Taps", and the only thing he fears is world peace.

As season one comes to a close, just about the time Patrick Wayne does a delightful guest shot as Hammer's long-lost brother, the show really starts getting serious about being funny.  The season-one cliffhanger is insane, opening with a introduction by Robin Leach in which he announces that the series is making a bid for renewal by packing more sex and violence into the upcoming episode and ending with Hammer frantically trying to disarm a nuclear warhead that could annihilate the entire city.  Cult star Mary Woronov plays the mad villainess in this one, which actually does end with a nuclear explosion. 

How they resolve this open-ended situation at the start of season two is undoubtedly one of network television's nuttiest moments, with the show even changing its name temporarily as part of the joke!  And this is just the beginning of a series of episodes that get progressively more willing to be weird, while cast and crew all seem to be on the same page at last and making funny things happen.  Movie spoofs dominate, with films such as SHAMPOO, JAGGED EDGE, and VERTIGO getting the treatment (with the occasional misfire such as a weak parody of PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM). 

"Hammeroid" finds Hammer seriously wounded by a juggernaut robot (which is reminiscent of a similar character on the cult series "The Avengers") and turned into a cyborg a la ROBOCOP.  Fans of that movie should love this affectionate spoof, while Bela Lugosi fans are in for a treat with "Last of the Red Hot Vampires", in which "Love Boat" alumnus Bernie Kopel does a surprisingly good Lugosi imitation.  (The episode is "dedicated to Mr. Blasko", the actor's real last name.)



In "Jagged Sledge", Rasche gives a tour-de-force performance when Hammer must defend himself while on trial for the murder of a mob boss (the great Tige Andrews of "Mod Squad" fame).  Another episode, which finds Hammer going undercover as a prison convict involved in a breakout attempt, actually beats NAKED GUN 33 1/3 (1994) to the punch with a strangely similar premise.

Harrison Page (CARNOSAUR) is undoubtedly the funniest supporting actor in the role of Captain Trunk, a dead-on spoof of the perpetually screaming squad captain whose blood pressure is always sky-high thanks to Hammer's destructive hijinks.  Avoiding what could've been a one-note performance, Page is one of the best things about the show and is a constant delight.  In addition to those already mentioned, a sterling roster of guest stars includes Ronnie Schell, Bill Dana, Nicholas Guest, Ray Walston, David Clennon, Armin Shimerman, Richard Moll, Adam Ant, Brion James, Bud Cort, Mark Blankfield, and Russ Meyer regular Edy Williams.  Directors Bixby and Martin pop up in cameos.

The 5-disc DVD (22 episodes) from Image Entertainment is in 1.33:1 widescreen with Dolby Digital mono.  No subtitles or extras.

It's interesting watching a show go from blah to good as we see with SLEDGE HAMMER!: THE COMPLETE SERIES.  It may not be perfect but it's just plain fun, and by the time the last few episodes rolled around, I didn't want it to stop being Hammer Time. 

THE ABANDONED -- Movie Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 11/19/10

 

I have to go to the bathroom real bad, damn it.  But the bathroom is at the end of a dark hallway which is behind a closed door, and it's late, and I'm by myself. 

Watching scary movies by myself at night isn't the same as it was when I was a kid; rarely do I see one that cuts right through my adult sensibilities and makes me afraid to go down a dark hallway because there might be something creeping up behind me or because when I turn on the bathroom light that same something will be standing in there ready to lunge at me.  THE ABANDONED (2006), however, is one of those movies.

The story begins as Marie (Anastasia Hille) arrives in Moscow to track down her origins, having been adopted as an infant after her Russian mother was found brutally murdered.  She discovers that she has inherited the old home place, a sprawling, dilapidated farmhouse in the middle of the deep, dark woods between nothing and nowhere, and hires a farmer to take her there in his truck.  Before they leave, an old Russian woman pleads with her not to go, while other bystanders regard her with fear and sorrow.  It's very similar to the scene at the beginning of DRACULA in which the villagers beseech Renfield not to travel to the evil Count's castle, and we all know what happened to him.

After what seems like hours of travel, the driver leaves Marie alone in the woods at night, within walking distance of the house.  Out of the corner of her eye, Marie thinks she sees a ghostly figure glide across the path up ahead.  She reaches the really, really spooky old house and goes inside, peering into the deep darkness with her flashlight and making her way slowly through shadowy, cobwebbed rooms and corridors.  She hears noises.  And maybe a voice or two.  I'm thinking, "Would I be in that house at that time?  No, I would not."  I'm also thinking that there's gonna be a "jump" shock any second now, and I'm right--there is.  But expecting it doesn't help.  In fact, it just makes it worse.


A lot of horror flicks these days depend on jump shocks, which can startle the crap out of you for a few seconds but are soon forgotten.  This film is filled with them, but they're often only the beginning of a long sequence of sustained fear that doesn't subside after you've been soundly goosed.  The interplay of the various cinematic elements is masterful in these scenes--direction, photography, special effects, and acting are all outstanding--creating the sort of sustained terror that usually comes along only in your worst nightmares.  This movie, in fact, is like one long nightmare that you don't even fully wake up from when the end credits start rolling.

But back to Marie.  After the first really scary stuff happens, she discovers that there's someone else in the house with her.  That is, another living, flesh-and-blood someone.  He turns out to be her twin brother, Nicolai (Karel Roden of BLADE II and HELLBOY), who has also been drawn to the house trying to find out what awful thing happened to their mother there, forty years ago.  After suffering through one hellishly terrifying ordeal after another, they finally find out.  I'm not going to tell you any more of what happens, but when Nicolai has a sudden realization and says ominously to Marie, "We're haunting ourselves...", you just might be thinking: "No sh*t!"  One thing's for sure--the old "blank white eyeballs" thing has rarely looked scarier.

The last haunted house movie that tried to scare me was THE MARSH.  But it tried to do this with a bunch of obvious CGI and noisy, flashy effects.  THE ABANDONED has some CGI, too, but it's the best kind--the kind that tries not to look like CGI.  Both of these films contain a similar scene in which a decrepit old room goes backward in time to its original state, but the difference is stunning.  One scene seems to say "Look at this cool CGI!", while the other is more interested in maintaining your level of involvement in the scene itself.


THE ABANDONED looks great, with beautiful photography and imaginative editing worthy of an art film, always establishing and maintaining the right mood without being merely for show.  The sound design and haunting score also contribute substantially to the ominous atmosphere, making even the scenes of Marie arriving in Moscow seem forboding and pulsing with bad tidings for what's to come.

The house itself is a marvel of production design, a labyrinth of dingy rooms, spooky corridors, and ominous passageways that constantly had me muttering "Don't go in there!"  And with it, the stage is set for Spanish director Nacho Cerdà to do his stuff.  To paraphrase a line from POLTERGEIST, he knows what scares you.  His handling of this type of material is masterful compared to the ham-fisted direction often seen in similar films.  And the two leads, Anastasia Hille and Karel Roden, are so good that they put the whole thing across with utter conviction.  It didn't even bother me that the last few minutes didn't really seem to make total sense, because the worst nightmares rarely do. 

I've seen a lot of horror films, especially of the haunted house variety, that tried their best to be scary but just didn't know how to do it, or how to sustain it all the way through to the end.  But THE ABANDONED knows how.  Boy, does it ever.  It left me feeling drained, stunned, entertained yet uncomfortably uneasy and disturbed; and most of all, really, really creeped out.  And I still have to go to the bathroom real bad, damn it.