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Night of the Living Dead (1990)
They're coming to get you Barbara
Night of the Living Dead was one of the very first movies I ever wrote about, and I can't possibly express enough praise for George Romero's 60s horror masterpiece which essentially created a whole new subgenre of creepiness. Even though it's old, the movie is still disturbing today, and serves to remind people of Romero's legacy; without him, zombies as we know them wouldn't be around. If I was the one who directed it, I would have stopped right there and left well enough alone. For whatever reason, they decided to make almost a carbon copy of this movie (updated for then modern audiences) and everything in the script is almost the same as the original, with a few subtle changes. Directed by Tom Savini, the person who did the very gory effects for many of Romero's other films, Night of the Living Dead will not really surprise you if you've seen the movie it's based on, but they did change the events a little bit, especially towards the end. The story begins in late summer, when a girl named Barbara (Patricia Tallman) and her brother Johnny visit their deceased mother's grave in Pennsylvania. While there, an old man with a wound on his forehead bumps into them and then walks away. Johnny is then attacked by a zombie and killed. Barbara flees the cemetery and comes across what looks like an abandoned farm house. There are zombies here too, presumably the former owners, but they are killed by a man named Ben (Tony Todd) who tells Barbara they have to stay here until help can arrive. The two of them start boarding up windows and then discover that the house holds more survivors: Harry Cooper, a rude man who is soon always at odds with Ben, Cooper's wife Helen, and their daughter Sarah, who is now seriously sick after a zombie encounter. There's also two teenagers, Tom (nephew of the guy who owned the house) and his girlfriend Judy. Cooper insists that the basement is the safest place in the house, but Ben points out that if there's too many zombies, reaching a kind of critical mass, there's going to be no way out if everyone goes in there. Ben, Barbara and Tom continue to fortify the house while Cooper yells at his wife downstairs. He is convinced this whole thing will be over soon, but his daughter is getting more ill and he's running out of time. The constant banging upstairs attracts a large horde of zombies to the house. After finding a lever action rifle, Barbara suggests they try to leave the house on foot, since the zombies are slow and barely aware of where they're going. The group comes up with an escape plan to refuel Ben's truck with a nearby gas pump. Unfortunately, Tom's uncle kept the pump locked, and the key could be anywhere. Tom finds a set of keys in his dead uncle's pocket, and Judy gets in the driver's seat. As the truck starts up, Ben hops in the back, but he is thrown overboard during a tight turn and quickly surrounded by zombies. Meanwhile, Judy and Tom arrive at the pump, only to find to their horror that they found the wrong keys. Tom shoots the gas pump in frustration with a shotgun, not realizing Ben left his torch in the truck bed. The fuel reaches the torch and the entire area explodes, incinerating Tom and Judy. Ben now has to make his way back to the house with no weapon, and things are starting to get desperate. Cooper wrestles Barbara's rifle away from her, and the zombies break through the barricades. In the basement, Sarah dies and is resurrected as a zombie. She kills her mother with a garden trowel and heads upstairs. When Ben sees what she's become, he tries to get Cooper to kill her, which he refuses to do. When Ben tries to make the decision for him, Cooper shoots Ben. Barbara kills Sarah, and is told by Ben to run away from the house: he's too badly wounded to go with her. Cooper pulls down the stairs to the attic and hides up there, while Ben limps down to the cellar, where he comes across the zombified Helen. After shooting her, he sits down at a desk and realizes the key to the gas pump has been right here this whole time. Before dying, he laughs at the horrible irony of this whole thing. Meanwhile, Barbara wanders into the countryside looking for help. She comes across a group of armed men who are clearing the area of zombies. The men and Barbara make their way back to the house, where they encounter the reanimated Ben. Before being killed, he seems to recognize Barbara. Finally, Cooper comes out of the attic alive, but is shot dead by Barbara for everything he did to Ben. Upon finishing this film, my first reaction is thinking it doesn't hold a candle to the original. Like I said earlier, the original basically started a whole genre. How can you top that? I think Savini and everyone involved knew that it would be impossible to live up to the classic version, so they didn't try to usurp it. At the same time though, this movie is almost identical to the original in terms of everything that happens: the characters hole up in a house, zombies eventually break through, and everyone but one person is dead by the end. In this version however, Ben is not killed by vigilantes who mistake him for a zombie, and Barbara survives the whole nightmare. Romero himself had almost nothing to hide when it came to explaining why he wanted this movie: he said the original didn't make enough money, and indeed the original film has a copyright oversight that put it right into the public domain the second it came out. Apparently, Romero eventually got his production company to fix this, but they were defunct before they could collect anything. As for Savini, he found the idea of being involved with a remake of NOTLD desirable, as he did not do the effects for the original. Something you might notice about this movie is that there is a severe lack of gore and over the top violence, which is surprising given who the director is. This was done on purpose, as Savini didn't want to disrespect the original with a total bloodbath (despite his reputation). Overall, this movie isn't that bad, but it's not that great either. Romero's decision to redo his breakout into horror paid off, but only in a literal sense. He remade it because it was to be a cash grab from the start.
On the Shores of Nova Scotia (1947)
Gone fishing
Whether it's the wide open plains of Saskatchewan, the frigid north of Nunavut, or the long coastlines of British Columbia, Canada has always been a country renowned for its physical splendor. In this Traveltalks, we go on a journey through Nova Scotia, a place just as beautiful as it is important to maritime history. We start in Lunenburg, which is a formerly French fishing town that was later settled by German families. We see a lot of old ships lined up in a harbor, some being centuries old. Despite this, they still serve the canadian navy on deep sea fishing expeditions, and lunenburg is home to one of the best deep sea fishing teams in the nation. Due to where nova scotia is situated, the people here build their own ships, which range from fishing vessels to things more suited to enjoyment, like yachts. The many waterways of the province help to accomodate these floating mansions. We then see a fishing village and are told about how nova scotia holds the world record for the heaviest tuna fish. It's not unheard of for people here to catch one that weighs almost half a ton. On a more remote waterway (where people fish for things like salmon), we see how people just coming home from World War II adjust back to a civilian lifestyle. On a small kayak are two guys fishing, one of which has no right arm. He still manages to fish as well as anybody, and a catch is recorded on camera, which is more rare than you might think. Finally, we travel to Blue Rocks, which is another fishing settlement that specializes in lobster. Once again, nova scotia holds the record on lobsters caught, and using wooden traps filled with food, they have been known to catch ones weighing up to 35 pounds, which is a bit terrifying. All in all, nova scotia is one of the world's most important areas when it comes to the fishing industry, and one that is nearly unmatched if you like vast expanses by the sea that look incredible. Unlike most Traveltalks, this one isn't even 8 minutes. No doubt this place has changed since the 40s, and there aren't really any cars to be seen in this short, which is kind of strange. While most of this series is pretty average, my favorite installments are the ones that focus on areas that are far away from urban centers and more representative of the wilderness, since there's enough shows/movies that take place in areas like Los Angeles. While today's nova scotia is more urban than shown here, the modern improvements made to it were still made with not detracting the nature around it in mind, unlike in America where whole areas are bulldozed to make room for 1000 foot tall rectangular monstrosities.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Pagan rituals
Although the Halloween series of movies has some of the fastest drops in quality I've ever seen in a franchise (with even just the second film being almost universally criticized) I had high hopes for this seeing as how it's the first one without John Carpenter's direct involvement. This same year, he directed his reimagining of the 50s horror classic The Thing, which would go on to become one of the most original and disturbing horror films ever. However, he only agreed to participate in Halloween 3 as long as it was not a direct sequel to the second movie. With this in mind let's look at the biggest problem this movie has: I have never seen anyone trash it without focusing all their hate on the fact that Michael Myers is not in it. The unstoppable masked killer from the first two films is gone, and Carpenter thought he could turn Halloween into an anthology series with each movie having its own theme, storyline, and characters. While I don't really think this was the right thing to do, I suppose it's better than having each film degrade in quality by introducing ridiculous plot points such as Michael being a killer because he is being controlled by a sect of occultists. Anyway, Halloween 3 starts promisingly enough. Around a week before Halloween 1982, a California shop owner named Harry is holding a jack o lantern mask and is being chased by two guys resembling government agents. He is almost killed by them, but is discovered by another shop owner and taken to hospital. There, he is looked after by Dr. Daniel Challis (Tom Atkins), who has an estranged ex-wife and two children. Later that night, Harry is visited in his room by another suited man, who kills him by suffocating him. As Daniel tries to chase him down, the man enters his car and deliberately causes it to explode. Harry's daughter Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) arrives and wants to investigate the circumstances around her father's death, so she and Daniel travel to Santa Mira, home of a factory owned by a corporation called Silver Shamrock. This company made the type of mask her father was carrying when he was killed. As they drive into Santa Mira, strangely silent residents of the town watch their every move, and there's cameras everywhere. Daniel and Ellie decide to stay at a motel, and meet Marge, another guest that is staying next door. She soon discovers a microchip on the back of one of the medallions attached to each Halloween mask. While examining it, it suddenly projects a beam of directed energy into her face, mutilating it and killing her. Men in lab coats are soon on the scene, taking her body out in a stretcher. Also here is Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy), owner of Silver Shamrock. Dan tries to get involved by letting the men know he's a doctor, but they snub him and Cochran informs him she's being taken to the factory to heal. As he walks away, Daniel overhears Cochran describing a "misfire." At a factory tour offered by Cochran the next day, Ellie discovers her dead father's car in a garage, but is confronted by more silent men in suits when she tries to get a closer look at it. Disturbed by this point, Ellie wants Daniel to take her out of the town, but that night she is kidnapped. Daniel runs all over the deserted town and infiltrates the factory, finding evidence that the guards Cochran employs are actually androids created by him. He is eventually captured by them and taken to a large, underground chamber, which houses a 6 ton part of Stonehenge Cochran stole. The microchips on each mask also contain a piece of it, and upon viewing a Halloween commercial instructing kids to put on their masks, the chip activates and kills the wearer. After this, a swarm of insects exit the mask. Cochran locks Daniel in a room with a television and forces him to wear one of the masks, saying he plans to bring back the sacrificial, Pagan origins of Halloween, which were commonplace in the Celtic lands most of Santa Mira's population descend from. Daniel manages to smash the tv and unties himself, then escapes via a vent and looks for Ellie. After saving her, he sneaks onto the catwalks above the control center, pours hundreds of medallions below and plays the Halloween commercial on all the televisions, killing everyone. Cochran is killed by a beam of light emitted from the stonehenge fragment and a fire levels the factory. As he drives away, Daniel is suddenly attacked by Ellie, who has been replaced with an android. She causes him to crash, but he manages to decapitate her with a tire iron. Daniel runs to a gas station, with only a few minutes to go until 9 o'clock: the time when the commercial will kill everyone wearing a Silver Shamrock mask. He frantically tries to call tv stations and get the commercial pulled off the air, but channel 3 refuses to comply. Despite yelling into the phone, the movie ends with Daniel seemingly failing to save millions of children. Originally slated to be directed by Joe Dante, a newcomer named Tommy Lee Wallace was brought in instead when the former had to direct part of the ill fated Twilight Zone movie. Maybe this is why this movie is so lackluster, but I think nothing could have saved this plot from itself. It's just not that interesting. Carpenter's synthesizer music is once again really creepy, and was important in setting up the atmosphere of the movie, but music will only carry a film so far. I thought Halloween 3 tries too hard to shock the audience since this is the only movie I can think of that shows kids getting killed, and this left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. The 80s were probably the start of horror films that were more grotesque than psychologically haunting. I wasn't really afraid while watching this, except for maybe one or two scenes. There's also a pretty gaping plot hole in Cochran's plan to wipe out kids all across the US, since the masks are supposed to activate at 9 at night, but since the movie takes place in california, it would be midnight on the east coast simultaneously. Most parents wouldn't let young kids be up this late, so they would miss the commercial and escape death. Overall, this movie is mostly a mess, but at least Michael Myers is not in it, meaning its pretty bad storytelling doesn't have a chance to poison the rest of the series. Later in this franchise, the plots were getting so farfetched and ridiculous that they pretty much ruined the backstory of the main villain. Halloween 3 gave us something new. Might not be much, but it's a different story with a new angle and characters.
The Unfaithful (1947)
Painful secrets
Recently, I said how the subject of World War II doesn't appear in enough noir movies despite just having ended while this genre was at its height. I think I take this back since this whole movie is about what a war of such huge scale (or any war actually) can do to the stability of relationships. The movie begins with a woman named Chris Hunter (Ann Sheridan) learning that her husband Bob is flying home tonight after 10 days out of town. Shortly before he arrives back, Chris is confronted by a man who forces himself into her house and threatens to kill her unless she removes her jewelry. In self defense, Chris kills him with a Japanese knife her husband brought back from the South Pacific. By the time Bob (Zachary Scott) reaches his house, he finds a crime scene with a bunch of detectives questioning his wife. Chris says she did not know the guy who attacked her, but it's revealed his name was Michael Tanner and that he was a sculptor. When she is soon brought in for questioning, she is screamed at by Tanner's widow, who wants to see Chris suffer the way she has. Soon, an art shop owner, Mr. Barrow, invites Larry (Chris' lawyer) to his store to show him something he thinks he ought to see. He owns a bust of a woman that was created by Mr. Tanner, and the model used was Chris. Larry now knows that Chris was lying about not knowing who Tanner was. Barrow attempts to blackmail Larry, saying he will give the cops the statue unless he buys it for 10 grand. Larry refuses and threatens legal action if Barrow asks again. Larry meets up with Chris, who is told about the statue. Her heart sinks. She knows that she needs it in her possession right away, as her husband cannot ever be allowed to see it. After listening to this, Larry begins to understand why Chris has been so desperate to hide the fact that she knew Tanner away from Bob; she cheated on him during the war. Chris pleads with Larry to help her acquire the statue, and more importantly, keep it out of the hands of Mrs. Tanner, as she won't hesitate to show it to the cops. Larry asks why he should defend Chris after she cheated on her husband, to which Chris says she's not doing it for herself: Bob will sink into a depression if he finds out. Chris rushes over to Barrow's art store to buy the statue, but she's too late; he already gave it to Mrs. Tanner. She wants Chris punished for seeing her husband, but Barrow convinces her it would be more damaging to show Bob, as he would have to pay them to avoid a scandal. When Bob is taken by Barrow to see the bust, he confronts Chris and is livid. Chris expects no forgiveness and says she did keep seeing Tanner while Bob was away. He then says he wants a divorce. Chris is then charged with murder and Larry has to defend her in court. He eventually wins the case for her by convincing the jury that the trial is not about cheating (which she did), but about how she stabbed someone to save her life. Bob receives news that his wife has been acquitted, and is no longer pushing for divorce. Larry persuades the two of them that they should try to save their marriage, as many couples divorce just because they are weak and unwilling to settle their differences by acquiring maturity. After seeing countless noir films that are just uninteresting due to how much they rely on murders, I wasn't expecting much from this, but I underestimated it. Make no mistake, the last quarter or so isn't that interesting since it's mostly a trial and then Bob and Chris talking, but I would say this movie has it where it counts. The most powerful moment for me is when Chris is confronted after Bob learns about the statue. As she takes the brunt of his wrath, she says she started going out with Tanner because she wasn't sure she'd ever see Bob again, and he retorts that millions of women during the war had husbands in the services. They had to wait years for their relationships to go ahead, but they didn't resort to cheating. A lot of these men never came back at all. Wars may end, but the things they do to society and entire families can remain forever. The only other noir film I can think of that has Ann Sheridan in it is Woman On the Run, something I saw too long ago to remember my opinion on. Zachary Scott though is always good and I was really expecting his confrontation with Chris in the kitchen to just end with her flat out dead. While I felt this movie was kind of too long, and you could probably cut a large section of the waning moments out of it without losing much, my ultimate decision on The Unfaithful is that it is an interesting movie that shows how wars don't just change people, but their trust in each other. Seeing the inside of the Bradbury Building again was nice too.
Hyde and Hare (1955)
I wish my brother George was here...
I don't write much about Bugs Bunny cartoons (let alone cartoons in general) but within the mood of this particular month, I feel like I must discuss this one as it essentially combines two classics of completely different genres: Robert Louis Stevenson's tale of how a potion unleashes a man's inner evil, and Looney Toons. The story begins with Bugs Bunny coming out of his rabbit hole in a public park, which is frequently by a nice elderly guy who feeds him carrots every day. Bugs seems quite ungrateful for the man's kindness, saying he only pretends to be a timid, harmless rabbit to get some free food. Bugs later expresses a wish to be the man's pet, and as he is carried home by him, calls him Doc. Ironic, seeing as the sign above his apartment door reads "Dr. Jekyll." Inside the house, Bugs sits down to play Chopin on a grand piano while the doctor goes into a lab. After drinking a bright orange potion, he is transformed into a green-skinned monster and goes to hunt down Bugs. Thinking he is an ill person, Bugs takes the monster's hand and leads him to go find Jekyll, but quickly realizes his mistake when the monster swings an axe through a lamp, narrowly missing him. The man randomly changes between Jekyll and Hyde, leaving Bugs confused and attempting to shelter the poor doctor from his murderous other self. Bugs decides he's going to leave, but Jekyll tries to tell him Hyde won't bother him anymore as long as he gets rid of the potion. Upon looking in the lab, Jekyll finds it's already gone, not having any memory of consuming it. When he asks Bugs if he drank it, Bugs, disgusted at the accusation, storms out. With his new friendship ended, Bugs heads back to the park, where at least his dignity has never been insulted. Once there, he turns into a green, monstrous version of himself, scaring everyone away. As he eats a carrot, he questions if these people have ever seen a rabbit before. This is a pretty well known short, as most things featuring Bugs often are, but I don't feel it was as funny as a lot of other looney toons shorts. Of course this was probably done on purpose because of the book that's being referenced, but Mel Blanc yelling is always hilarious. While the ending is quite predictable, this is one looney toons installment where the joke is both on Bugs and somebody else; the unsuspecting doctor in the first part, and Bugs in the second once he encounters the monster. There's also been a lot of music by Chopin in random things I watch recently, so of course the piece Bugs sits down to play here is by him as well. Overall, I enjoyed seeing Bugs encounter someone whose guise was mostly there for show, as Jekyll's gentle demeanor is basically there to reinforce the deception that he is a weak old man.
Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007)
Lurking in the dark
There are many people in movie history the likes of which will probably never be seen again, since many great films are a product of a person existing at a certain point in time and having certain ideas. Val Lewton, while not a director, is legendary in the realm of old horror movies for producing some of the most groundbreaking pictures of 40s cinema, such as Cat People, The Ghost Ship, I Walked With a Zombie, and Isle of the Dead. Born in the Russian Empire in 1904, Volodymyr Ivanovich Leventon was brought with his mother (who left his father behind in Berlin) to America via a ship which sailed from Hamburg. Once in New York, he eventually changed his name to Val Lewton. His first major claim to fame in the movie industry came in 1932, when a Clark Gable and Carole Lombard film (No Man of Her Own) was released. While not involved with the movie, Lewton had written a novel called No Bed of Her Own, which served to inspire it. He continued to acquire experience by working at MGM's publicity office, providing magazines comic versions of trending films. He would eventually leave this position when he had 3 subsequent novelizations that weren't very successful. Flying to California to meet with future Gone With the Wind producer David O Selznick, he was tasked with writing a possible script for a movie based on the russian novel Taras Bulba. The film never got made, but Lewton held onto his new position of being David's assistant. Although not a well known fact, Lewton actually was involved with Gone With the Wind, writing the part that shows countless wounded and dying Confederate soldiers in the city of Atlanta, then under attack from Northern forces. It is this morbid scene that gives the world a taste of what Lewton will be known for a few years later. In 1942, Lewton was given control of his own unit at RKO pictures. Tasked with making horror films that could rival Universal's monumental classics such as Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde, Lewton nevertheless had to follow a set of rules. He was not allowed to make use of more than 150 grand, he could not make up the titles, and none were to exceed an hour and 15 minutes. He first threw his hat in the ring with Cat People, a 1942 production that focuses on a newly married Serbian immigrant woman who believes she is cursed to become a panther every time a man gets intimate with her. The movie defied expectations and Lewton had the last laugh: it was cheaply made, but grossed over a million dollars. He followed up with I Walked with a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur (who also did the previous one). Still very creepy today, the movie focuses on a girl that two brothers both like, and the nurse that takes care of her on a remote island in the Caribbean. While RKO was basking in the success Lewton had reaped for them, he finally was in a position to make his next movies without them really getting in his way. While RKO decided to promote Tourneur to directing higher budget movies, Lewton stayed where he was, which was probably just as well; the more expensive your movie, the more you have to deal with studios breathing down your neck. With Tourneur out of the picture, Lewton gave Robert Wise and Mark Robson director status. The Body Snatcher followed in 1945, which features Boris Karloff as a horse carriage driver who secretly commits murders at night in order to deliver corpses to a medical professor for use in his class. Lewton walked on thin ice with this one, as the Production Code wanted less violence in movies, but RKO wanted more of it. Boris also appeared in Isle of the Dead that same year, which is about a military officer (played by Karloff) who goes to a plague-infested island in 1912 to visit his wife's grave. Karloff later credited Lewton with saving him from being hopelessly typecast as Frankenstein for the rest of his life. In terms of good movies, this was about the end of the line for Lewton. In 1946, RKO boss Charles Koerner died, and the studio fell into chaos. Lewton fled RKO and found a new job at Paramount, producing My Own True Love in 1949. After this, Lewton went back to MGM in order to produce the comedy Please Believe Me, starring Deborah Kerr. It should be said that comedy was not Lewton's strong suit. Around this time, Lewton tried to do what he always wanted and start his own production company with his old friends Robson and Wise, where he had the power to choose what to produce. Lewton was eventually forced away from them after they couldn't agree on what to produce. In 1951, he produced his last film, Apache Drums. Although it was to be his final movie, it incorporated two firsts for him, as it was a western that was in color. After this, he would be offered a production job at Columbia working alongside Stanley Kramer, but the pressure of producing so many films so fast caught up to him, and he died of a heart attack at only 46. It is maybe correct to say the film business killed him, but as morbid as his movies were, Lewton was an important part of film history. If he was a more cheerful and positive person, we probably wouldn't have these films. As someone who has barely ever heard Scorcese's voice, this was a good documentary on a person who has produced some of my favorite old movies. There's a few I have not mentioned, but put simply, they can't be described with words. You'll have to see them in order to observe how Lewton deftly combined light with shadow, and darkness with mysterious wonder. Lewton's movies were special since they have that quiet and cozy feel to them, the perfect things to watch during a storm for instance. I used to think all old movies had this trait, but it's more rare than you think. Lewton's ability to tell great stories with engaging characters played by underappreciated actors made him a genius in the film world. He didn't have money for special effects, but he didn't need them.
The Addams Family (1964)
"Thank you, Thing"
Throughout the history of television, there probably hasn't been a series about a family of eccentrics as famous as this one. The original Addams Family tv show (released in 1964 for ABC) is something that has been in a lot of people's minds for decades and decades at this point. Even if the plots of some of the episodes start to get repetitive after a while, the novelty of it being a show about a biologically normal family going about their lives in a macabre way makes it a classic archetype of the gothic genre. If you've ever watched it, you'll know the stories vary from each episode to the next, but the basic premise focuses on an extended family consisting of Gomez Addams (John Astin), his wife Morticia (Carolyn Jones), their two children Pugsley and Wednesday (Ken Weatherwax and Lisa Loring respectively), Grandma (Blossom Rock), and Morticia's wild Uncle Fester (Jackie Coogan). Finally, there's Ted Cassidy as Lurch (the frighteningly tall butler) and a disembodied hand called "Thing", which usually appears out of boxes around the house to assist in various daily activities. The Addamses live in a large mansion that is just as foreboding on the interior as it is when viewed from the street. In the main lobby, a rug made of a polar bear pelt can be seen, and a moose's head is mounted on the wall with its antlers positioned wrong. Sadly, this is about as much as I can write without bringing up this show's most glaring weaknesses, and that's two things: the reactions characters have towards the Addams family, and the fact that this show's biggest competitor is always living in its shadow (or maybe it's the other way around). Either way, I was introduced to this show a while later than my true favorite horror-themed sitcom, that being The Munsters. For reasons I never quite grasped, most people think that show is much less funny than this one, and this criticism makes no sense once you realize pretty much the same things happen in most of the episodes; people visit the Addams family, get creeped out by their decor and behavior, and then leave without completing whatever they came to do. It gets old very fast. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any standouts this series had, as most of the episodes just blend together and feel the same. The Munsters wasn't like this at all, and while I can't remember every single classic episode, there are a bunch of them I can list right off the bat. The fanbase of The Addams Family is for the most part very divided on how they feel towards The Munsters, with a lot of them saying it plagiarized the formula of this show by being about a family of misfits, to which I have to say this: The Munsters is about a bunch of monsters trying to be normal Americans, and Addams is the opposite. I do know that both these shows premiered within a week of each other (with Addams Family being first) but I can't help but feel The Munsters is still better. So I've made it clear the show usually gets trapped within its own cliches, but this doesn't just affect the storylines. The characters themselves all seem to fall back on these quite unnecessary gimmicks most of the time, such as Morticia's obsession with feeding her carnivorous plants, the contrast of Wednesday being a small girl but still fascinated with spiders and other grotesque things, and Uncle Fester putting that lightbulb in his mouth. Just like with the plots, these things get pretty tiring and they show them all throughout the series. I'm still aware that The Munsters isn't immune to this, as it was common for Herman to jump up and down excitedly and nearly destroy the house in the process, but it wasn't utilized nearly as much. If you're looking at it from a modern standpoint, Addams Family doesn't really offer much that will impress you. It's a very simplistic show with a handful of different locations, and once again I can't recall a single episode that doesn't take place in the house. The best way I can summarize it and my feelings on it is by saying it's not really famous for what it is, but for what it started; there are a great deal of Addams Family related feature films and even an ongoing Netflix series solely based on Wednesday and her exploits, and unlike the derivatives of The Munsters, they're actually quite good. I don't know what it is, but there just simply could not exist a competently made Munsters movie. They are utter trash. While the contemporary Addams Family related media is beyond the realm of the things I typically write about, I can't ignore their edge over my favorite sitcom in terms of influence. Addams Family is just more well known than The Munsters, and while the films arguably had more to do with that than the show itself, there wouldn't be those films if this show was never made. As average as it is, it is still one of america's most famous 60s shows.
Walk Softly, Stranger (1950)
"Taking things without paying for them"
I am probably going to be accused of not understanding the "deeper meaning" behind films such as this, but I have to say, I am so exhausted of seeing love stories in noir films. They rarely work, take away attention from the crime related goodness we could be experiencing, and feel shoehorned in since the move is still mostly about crime. Case in point, Walk Softly, Stranger. This film you would hope, would be decent, since it costars who was often considered the only European actress to approach Marlene Dietrich levels of fame during this era. The story begins when a guy named Chris Hale (Joseph Cotton) comes to a house in Ashton, Ohio which belongs to an old woman named Mrs. Brentman. After Chris explains that he once lived in this very house and he ran away from it, Brentman invites him inside. He is given a place to stay and takes a job at the Corelli shoe manufacturing plant. Later, Chris goes into a country club and meets Elaine Corelli (Alida Valli), the daughter of his boss, who is unfortunately confined to a wheelchair. Chris tells her that as a kid, he would deliver papers to her house and was entranced by her. When tomorrow arrives, Chris meets with Elaine's father, who lets him know that his daughter also likes Chris back, and wants to see him make more money. Chris doesn't take the offer, but will explain to Elaine why he doesn't want it. Being a self-admitted gambler, Chris' explanations to her aren't very clear. Chris then flies to another city to meet up with a criminal named Whitey Lake (Paul Stewart) in order to steal 200 grand from Bowen, a gambling house owner. After dividing the money and telling Lake to go under the radar, Chris heads back to ohio. Chris takes Elaine to a nightclub and is denounced in front of her by Gwen, Chris' secret double date. He proceeds to win a bet with Elaine in which he says he can get Gwen to dance with him, but the paralyzed girl becomes dejected upon seeing this. She leaves for Florida, confident that Chris will come to hate her disability. However, she returns for Christmas and begins seeing him again. Chris' newfound joy quickly ends as Lake shows up, asking for money. He suggests he stay in Mrs. Brentman's house, and her permission is granted. Soon, Lake starts turning Chris' room upside down trying to look for his half of the stolen money. Lake then finds out that Chris is sending Brentman away to visit her son's grave, and is convinced Chris means to kill him while she is gone. After dropping off Brentman at the airport, Chris realizes he is being pursued by a mysterious black car, but still manages to reach Elaine. He tells her everything, and Elaine says he should give up the money, as it's not worth being killed over. She also says she knew Chris was lying about his past this whole time. Upon reaching Mrs. Brentman's house, Lake is already dead and the mobsters in the car took the money. They abduct Chris and drive him to meet with Bowen. When they reach him, he also gets in the car and says his boys should also rob Chris' crippled girlfriend. Boiling over with rage, Chris pulls a blanket over his head and begins to choke him, but Bowen manages to blast Chris 3 times with his pistol. The car smashes through a billboard and flips over, killing Bowen and his thugs, but Chris survives. He is taken to a police hospital, where Elaine visits him. Although he is about to be imprisoned, Elaine promises to wait for the day where he will need her, just as she needed him. I really don't think there was a reason to end the movie this way. While not terrible, this film wasn't very good either, and Cotten (a normally great actor) is largely to blame. He is nearly 2 decades older than Valli at the time of filming, and the tension between them never hits its apex. There's barely any music either, so it really falls on its face in the story aspect. Even the crime related bits (the movie's one saving grace) aren't that great. A mobster sends hitmen to take back what's his; this is such as overused plot device it was putting me to sleep. Cotton's reputation as a plain actor works against him here, since the story takes too long to become interesting. I also felt having someone as well known as Valli playing the girl was a waste, since she is absent from a large part of the movie. Maybe everything I have just said is wrong, and this movie is actually awesome, but if I'm watching something and I simply struggle to enjoy what's being shown on the screen instead of taking a liking to it naturally, it's a good indicator that the movie is not worth it. Even great actors have missteps on the stairway to glory.
The Twilight Zone: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (1963)
Night flight
I have waited a long time to talk about this episode, but I simply could not do it in any month but October. With The Twilight Zone being one of the most iconic shows of all time, and this being one of its best creepy episodes, now is the perfect time to write about it. Like many TZ installments, the backstory to making it is arguably just as interesting as the story, so I'll talk about that as well. The story in this focuses on a paranoid man named Robert Wilson (William Shatner). Recently released from a psychiatric institution for suffering a breakdown on a plane months before, he is now apparently ready to fly again. He and his wife Julia (Christine White) take their seats on a commercial airliner. Knowing that if he suffers any attacks again he is likely to be recommitted, Bob hopes this will be a normal trip. However, not long into the flight, Bob sees a furry gremlin-like creature on the left wing of the aircraft. He stares in disbelief for a few seconds before trying to wake up his wife, but by the time she looks out, the thing is gone. Bob seems to still be insane to everyone around him whenever he claims to see this creature, but he knows he must do something when he sees the gremlin return and begin damaging one of the engines. Eventually, the flight engineer comes to see Bob about his concerns, and lets him know that he sees the creature too, but they can't talk about it since it will alarm everyone else. Bob realizes the engineer is putting him on so he refuses to talk to him. The stewardess eventually gives Bob a sleeping pill, but he waits until she leaves and then spits it out. The gremlin outside continues to damage the engine during a thunderstorm, and Bob needs to act or else the plane could crash. Carefully, he steals the revolver of a sleeping cop, puts on his seatbelt to avoid being sucked out of the plane, and pulls the emergency exit on the window. The outside air violently rushes in, much to everybody's horror, but Bob is able to get a clean shot at the gremlin and dumps all 6 rounds into it. The mortally wounded creature falls off the plane's wing. Once the plane lands, Bob is taken outside in a straitjacket, as everyone thinks he is still nuts. Julie tells him he's safe now, but Bob says he's the only one that knows for sure he is safe. As the camera pans out, we see he wasn't imagining things after all; a big piece of the engine cowling is peeled back, with wires underneath exposed. I shouldn't have to say this, but this is a classic within a classic. Being one of the best tv show episodes of all time, Nightmare at 20000 Feet had to fight for this distinction since production of it was far from easy. Based on a 1961 story from Alone by Night, Richard Matheson adapted it into this and made some changes. The episode manages to avoid a cliche common to the Twilight Zone, which is when the main character sees something outrageous and nobody will believe him. Here, the first person Shatner must convince of his sanity is himself. He knows far more is at stake if his fellow passengers think he is crazy: not only will they not believe him, but he will go right back into an asylum. In the end, he kills 2 birds with one stone, and gets rid of the gremlin while also receiving proof that he is sane. Richard Donner was brought in to direct. Although having basically no experience with special effects, he managed to do well with the disaster of a set they gave him and Nick Cravat: Burt Lancaster's acrobat partner who plays the gremlin here. The set of this episode was a nightmare in and of itself, as it consisted of the fuselage of an aircraft with the left wing hanging outside over a large vat of water. This was so that all the "rain" had a place to go. The problem with this set was there were tons of things going on at once, such as Cravat swooping in on wires, fog effects, or people walking inside the plane. Any one of these things could cause a jolt in the movement of the plane's fuselage, and the whole take would be ruined instantly. Although it was a total pain to film this way, the cast succeeded and Shatner definitely put on one of the most unforgettable performances of 60s television. There is one last funny anecdote related to this installment, and it involves Serling taking a flight just a few months after this had aired (no pun intended). He was planning to travel with Matheson on a propeller airliner, and had a large image of the gremlin's face plastered to the window where Matheson was supposed to sit. When the day came, Serling obscured it with curtains, and when Matheson pulled them back, there was nothing to be seen. Unfortunately, the thing just couldn't hang onto the side of a moving plane very well, and Rod was upset. I guess you can't have everything.
High Tide (1947)
"Smash anyone who gets in my way"
Every single film genre has its own stereotypes. For horror movies, it's common to see a character trip over seemingly nothing and be killed as a result. For noir, the equivalent would be the presence of a detective. Detective noirs are not enjoyed much by me, since the image of a private eye is probably one of the first things you think about when picturing the genre. As a consequence, I rarely take detective noir films seriously, as seeing a private eye in the cast somewhere basically lets me know what follows is going to be generic. Not only this, but the movie has a backdrop of a newspaper business, which just doesn't really interest me. The only film I've seen pull it off successfully is Sweet Smell of Success, but I'm getting off topic. High Tide begins with a wrecked car on a coastline. Its occupants, Hugh Fresney and Tim Slade (Lee Tracy and Don Castle respectively) talk about how ironic it is that their bad decisions caused them to end up in this situation, with the tide soon threatening to kill them both. The rest of the movie goes over these events. Hugh, an LA newspaper editor, offered a job to Tim in order to serve as a guard for him; Fresney investigates people, and it gets him a lot of enemies. He continues to publish stories despite the concern of publisher Clinton Vaughn. Vaughn's wife Julie (Julie Bishop) had previously been in a relationship with Tim and wants to ditch Vaughn now that he's back. At a party one night, Tim and Julie are seen together by Vaugn, infuriating him. They both leave the party, and not long after, Julie just so happens to write an incriminating note saying how much she hates her husband and wishes he was "out of the way" so she can be with Tim. The timing couldn't be any worse as Vaughn actually dies after this, and the letter catches the attention of detective O'Haffey (Regis Toomey), who constantly tails Tim for the rest of this film. Everyone becomes a suspect once Vaughn is killed, including Dana, his secretary that many speculate he liked. Eventually, Tim travels to an apartment thought to hold information on who killed Vaughn, and he is confronted there by O'Haffey. Tim pulls a gun on the detective and manages to get away, but is ambushed outside by a group of thugs sent by Nick, the gangster that Hugh was discrediting so much in the first place. The thugs stuff Tim into a car and drop him off at some backwater street, where he has to walk to Julie's apartment. She knows about his plans to take over the paper, and says she called O'Haffey on him because she had no choice. He soon shows up there to arrest him, but by the time he does, Tim is gone. He gets in a taxi, but notices he is being followed by a car driven by two more detectives, so offers the cab driver 5 bucks if he can outrun them. He soon arrives at a beach house, with Hugh already inside. What he doesn't know is Nick is also here with his gun drawn. He wants a briefcase that contains information Vaughn and Hugh had been collecting together on him, which is incriminating enough to get him executed. Before Nick can force Tim to open it, he's shot dead by Hugh. He and Tim then drive away from the house. It finally occurs to them that the guy responsible for killing Vaughn is sitting right next to him. He pieces everything together and realizes Hugh killed Nick since Nick was his ally and wouldn't have expected such a move, even though he was trying to get control of the paper for Hugh. Hugh later hired Tim to get Vaughn out of the way, knowing that Vaughn already hated Tim because of Julie. Hugh later murdered Vaughn and then shot himself in the shoulder to make himself look innocent. After killing Nick, Hugh tried to get rid of Julie since she tried to turn the paper over to Tim. Finally, Tim says he knows about Hugh's plan to send Nick to get that briefcase, and anticipating this, he gave the real one to Dana so O'Haffey can confiscate it; the one in the car is fake. Knowing all his options to kill Tim have failed, Hugh has one last little trick. The movie comes full circle and Hugh turns the wheel hard right, sending the car over a cliff. It eventually comes to rest near the ocean. Both Tim and Hugh are badly hurt, but only Tim is able to walk away from the car before the sea engulfs it. While this movie was on the verge of being lost until recently, I don't think we would have lost much if it did end up being forgotten. The story in this is pretty confusing, the characters aren't that great, and I was constantly waiting for at least one moment to stand out to me as entertaining. It never happened. Even if it wasn't for this, movies that begin with a certain event and then go back in time to show the audience how it got to that point annoy me. I never felt that the beginning of a movie is the right place to show the ending if you know what I mean, but some films like All About Eve get away with this. Overall, High Tide is yet another really average noir that did little to impress me. I try to watch at least one of these films a week, but it doesn't pay dividends as much as I would hope.
The Munsters (2022)
The collapse of a franchise
While it didn't really get the widespread respect it should have gotten in its own era, The Munsters is one of my favorite old tv shows. Maybe this is what draws so many people to it, including famed musician Rob Zombie. While I felt there have been enough bad movies based on this show, some people just cannot leave well enough alone and produce their own reimaginings of it, believing it will do anything but degrade the already lackluster reputation of Munsters films. As a lifelong fan of the series, making a full length movie based on it was a long time coming for Rob, his first effort being in 2003. Right from the very start, we are screwed; the movie is in color. While I can't blame executives for making this decision, the tragedy is that Zombie himself didn't want it this way. He realized that in order to make a faithful presentation based on The Munsters, you must stick to the 30's horror movie look of the original. Well, I guess complaining isn't going to get us anywhere so we'll just have to deal with it. The movie begins with a mad scientist named Henry Augustus Wolfgang and his assistant named Floop attempting to rob graves in Transylvania. They are looking for body parts in order to create a monster that can behave akin to a normal human, but much smarter. Wolfgang instructs Floop to steal the brain of an intelligent scientist, but he accidentally steals the brain of his deceased comedian brother, Von Rathbone, instead. Wolfgang uses electricity to channel life force into his creation, whom Floop christens Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips). Meanwhile, a Gypsy woman named Zoya wants to get revenge on her ex-husband The Count (Daniel Roebuck), a vampire who lives in a big castle, so she threatens his werewolf son Lester into letting The Count give up his castle to Zoya. If he doesn't, Zoya's brother Bela will execute him. Lester calls his father and explains the proposal, but when the vampire hears about how Zoya wants to turn it into a theme park, he instantly hangs up. After getting his servant Igor to make him breakfast, The Count talks to his 150 year old daughter Lily (Sheri Moon Zombie) about her disappointing recent date with Count Orlock (Nosferatu). She and her father then watch a show called Good Morning Transylvania, which features an assortment of weekly guest stars. On this particular day, Doctor Wolfgang is on the show, unveiling his pride and joy Herman Munster. Lily knows immediately that this is the man for her, but her father is disgusted by Herman's ridiculous stand-up comedy act. Herman later starts playing in a punk band, with Floop acting as his agent. One night, Lily goes to see him, and they set up a date at her father's castle. The next night at dinner, The Count continues to let his daughter know that her boyfriend makes him sick, even in his presence. The Count won't stop being dismissive of Herman, so he and Lily leave the castle to go for a walk. In their absence, Igor and his master try to come up with a spell that will get rid of Herman for good. After a week of dating, Herman proposes to Lily on an island meant for prisoners and she accepts. Herman meets his future brother-in-law Lester for the first time, the latter tricking him into signing away the castle's deed by promising a business venture. The next day, Herman and Lily are married. For their honeymoon, they travel to Paris, where Herman manages to capture a cute reptilian monster stalking the sewers. After Lily decides to name the creature Spot, she and her new husband are visited by his father-in-law. The Count is infuriated, as due to Herman not reading what he signed earlier, Zoya is now in the process of evicting him. With her and her father about to be homeless, Lily says she will call an extremely crooked lawyer once she's back in transylvania. However, the lawyer is currently incarcerated and he states Lily and her father have no chance of winning a case against Zoya. On the television, Herman watches a buffoon in a costume named Zombo make a fool of himself and gets an idea: if someone like that can make it in America, why not him? After flying to america, the Munsters do business with a realtor named Barbara who gives them a tour of a California suburb named Mockingbird Heights. Barbara tries to get them to purchase a boring ranch house, but the Munsters insist they want the ominous looking mansion next to it instead. That night, the Munsters join their neighbors for a Halloween party, but are unaware of the holiday and assume that everyone looks like this normally. Assuming the family is wearing the best halloween costumes they've ever seen, the Munsters are given a 1500 dollar prize. After the party ends, Herman is approached by his future boss, Mister Gateman, who offers him a job at a funeral parlor, which he gleefully accepts. When Herman leaves for his first day on the job, he is horrified to realize he is living among normal looking humans. Finally, Lester shows up to the house, much to Lily's anger after what he's been responsible for. However, Lester informs the family that they are now rich; Lester used the money Zoya put down for the castle to gamble, and he is giving half of it to his brother-in-law. I have to say, this was not as painful to sit through as I imagined, but it's still quite hard to watch. I do at least appreciate the attention to detail Zombie put in it, since we see characters from the original show, as well as references to it, such as Lily playing the harp or explaining how Igor was turned into a bat. Still, my gripe with this movie is the cast. Fred Gwynne, Al Lewis, Yvonne de Carlo and the rest of the original cast are timeless, and without them, you're never going to compute a modern day film into what made them so special. I didn't think Rob's wife's performance as Lily was horrible, as she does pay tribute to de Carlo's acting: the hair, makeup and all that. The thing is, Herman is the focal point here, and seeing someone portray him as obnoxiously as this was profoundly unsatisfying. It's probably intentional so we can get an idea of why Lily's father doesn't like him, but the actor has none of Gwynne's loveable demeanor. He's just irritating. Eddy's not in this movie, but I suppose Butch Patrick is grateful for that. As a prequel, the movie tries to set up how Herman was created, how he met Lily, why they left transylvania, and a bunch of other things that I would have preferred to leave unanswered. It ruined the mystery behind the original show, and Rob most likely felt nothing was wrong with doing so as most people involved in this were either his family members or close friends. Overall, I don't know what I was expecting, and this is probably going to be the nail in the coffin for this whole series. This movie is mostly trash, but my big question (that nobody will answer) is who was it made for? Definitely not people who are fans of the original series, or modern day horror aficionados. It disappoints in both ways.
Mr. Soft Touch (1949)
"Everybody does the best they can"
With Glenn Ford being among the best actors of the noir genre (one of my favorite genres) it should be a no brainer that every noir he is in is going to be good. This time, even though he's trying his best to be close to a woman that inflames his tortured psyche, I don't think even he can save the entirety of this plot. Ford plays Joe Mirakowski, a Polish American who returns from World War II to find a nightclub in California he used to own has been seized by the mafia. His former partner Leo has also apparently been murdered. Victor, brother of Leo and Clara, (his wife), buy Joe a boat ticket after he steals 100 grand so he can flee America. However, he finds out the ship sails on Christmas Eve, two days away. Knowing it's going to be really hard to hide until then, he deliberately causes a disturbance and gets himself arrested so he can spend the night in jail. A social worker named Jenny Jones (Evelyn Keyes) foils Joe's plans and gets the judge to release him into her care instead. Joe is taken to a settlement house where poor people are taken care of. While Joe likes Jenny, she rejects him as she thinks Joe is Victor. Joe later falls from a ladder while decorating the gym for Christmas and breaks a piano, so he buys another one while wearing a detective disguise. There, he is recognized by a columnist named Henry Byrd, who wrote about Joe stealing the money from his old business. Joe anonymously sends linens and a brand new grand piano to Jenny and her coworkers. Byrd later shows up to Jenny's office, trying to find out from her if Joe is using it as a hideout, but she keeps her mouth shut. Due to how Byrd describes Joe's appearance, Jenny realizes he isn't Victor. When Jenny finds out Joe has a gun, she demands he leaves the place. Joe argues with Jenny about how she had a nice upbringing and never had to fight to get out of bad situations like he has his entire life. Jenny humbles him by saying her drunk father hit her in the face when she was a kid, destroying the use of her ears, so she has to use a hearing aid. Byrd confronts Joe and wants him to give up the name of the guy giving protection to the criminals, but Joe says nothing. He collects his hidden 100k, which causes Jenny to protest; she wants to start a new life with him. The goons force Clara to say where Joe is hiding, so they incinerate the charity house to burn him out. The house is in ruins, and Joe tries to defend his actions to Jenny, but she accuses him of only doing things for money and storms off. The thugs then recover Joe's cash. Joe sneaks into the gambling joint (located behind the piano store) through a passageway and breaks Barney's (the crime boss) fingers with a crowbar. He then steals the money back and drives off. As Barney's goons chase him down, Joe disguises himself as Santa Claus in order to pass a police checkpoint and sneak into the settlement house ruins. There, he leaves Jenny the 100 grand to pay for the damage and leaves. As Jenny realizes who this Santa really is, she chases after him and calls his name. As Joe crosses the street, a cowardly mobster sent by Barney shoots him in the back 3 times. Jenny runs up to a dying Joe, saying he's not in the proverbial gutter anymore, and the movie ends without telling us if Joe dies. While this movie is quite depressing, I would think it counts as a Christmas film. For me, it has too much comic relief to really count as noir. It gets sadder towards the end, but there are a lot of funny moments such as when Joe wakes up the neighbors with a bell or breaks the piano by falling on it. You might disagree, but these moments really don't have a place in noir in my view. Until Joe's ship literally sails, all he can do for most of this movie is hide like a rat. The movie does have a noir element that I'm starting to notice a lot more, which is a ww2 vet getting screwed over and having to do illegal activities. While I thought this was nice to see, I'm kind of getting sick of the california locations. While Keyes isn't your typical noir woman who is just as dangerous as the protagonist, she still makes sparks fly due to her interactions with Ford. Don't get me wrong, Mr. Soft Touch is not Gilda, and will never be as well known or respected as that film. There's definitely reasons for that, but I still thought it was ok.
Prometheus (2012)
Big things, small beginnings
When I got done with Alien Resurrection, I mentioned that I had little hope in seeing this franchise deviate from its macabre origins. Basically every one of these films is overly gory, mostly just for the sake of shocking the audience. However, I think it worked in the first movie since the Xenomorph was seldom shown killing people, and the story itself was self-contained. Basically everyone except the main character is dead by the end, but the way the ending was handled left open the possibility of a sequel. Here, we get a lot of questions that go unanswered, even after watching all the film has to offer. To my mild dismay, this movie is a prequel. While not stated in the first film, the events begin in roughly 2122. Prometheus begins in 2089. Before meeting the characters, we first see a spaceship leave a distant planet, and a tall being resembling a human with pitch black eyes drinks a strange liquid which causes his body and DNA to dissolve. After the alien's corpse falls into a waterfall, the DNA starts to form together again. In 2089, two archaeologists named Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway (Noomi Rapace and Logan Marshall-Green respectively) come across some cave paintings in Scotland that depict early human beings pointing to some object in the sky: an object that's shown up in other ancient cultures that never knew each other existed. The alien race responsible for creating humanity, the Engineers, must be behind these inscriptions (according to Shaw) so she and her boyfriend embark on a 4 year long interstellar journey to a moon called LV-223. It is financed by Peter Weyland, the century old CEO of the organization that owned the mining spaceship destroyed by Ellen Ripley in the first movie. On the way there, the human occupants of the ship sleep in cryogenic stasis for years on end in order to halt their aging, and are monitored by David (Michael Fassbender), a caring, though technically emotionless android. On Christmas, 2093, the crew of the scientific spaceship Prometheus finally arrives at its destination. After landing on the barren moon, the crew discovers a large, circular structure that is not natural; somebody put it there. Upon going inside, they discover odd stone vases, a huge statue of a head, and the corpse of a tall alien missing its own head. Other corpses of this type of alien are found, leading to speculation that they died out. A crew member named Millburn and his friend Fifield (a geologist) are disturbed by the discoveries and want to head back to the ship, but they get lost in the huge structure on their way out. The journey is cut short when a big dust storm arrives and everyone has to evacuate. Charlie takes one of the vases with him, which secretes an unknown black liquid. In the Prometheus' lab, it is found that alien DNA recovered from the corpses matches human DNA, implying they are our precursors. Meanwhile, David looks at the cylinder's contents and, unbeknownst to Charlie, contaminates his drink with it. That night, Charlie and Shaw sleep with each other. Concurrently, Millburn and Fifield are still trapped inside the structure due to the dust storm, and the ship's crew can't pull them out. A snake-esque creature bearing what looks like a cobra's hood kills Millburn by coiling around his arm and breaking it, then goes after Fifield. By the time the crew gets back to the structure, they find the mutilated corpses of Millburn and Fifield. They also find an Engineer (as the tall aliens are called) still alive, sleeping in a stasis chamber. However, Charlie rapidly becomes sick out of nowhere and is taken back to Prometheus. Mission overseer Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) refuses to permit him entry, fearing more for the safety of the mission than her coworkers. As Shaw begs Vickers to let Charlie on the ship, he intentionally commits suicide by ignoring Vickers' orders to stay back, forcing her to burn him alive with a flamethrower. Later on, a traumatized Shaw gets even more devastating news: she is somehow (despite being infertile) pregnant with some type of fetus, the species of which is unknown. When David refuses to show her what it looks like, she attacks him and runs to an automatic surgery table to have it cut out. After cutting her midsection, the machine extracts a grotesque grey creature resembling a tiny squid. She locks the creature in the operating room, not knowing what it is. A resurrected Fifield (thought to be dead) returns to the Prometheus and attacks several crew members before being killed by Janek, the captain. He thinks the artificial structure is an Engineer base that was meant to contain some kind of bioweapon. It also houses a spaceship; one of the wishbone-shaped vessels seen in the first movie. During their next trip to the structure, David and Shaw bring along Peter, who has been kept in stasis during the journey. David, being the only one who can communicate with the still alive Engineer, speaks to him in Proto Indo European to try and find the key to what Peter wants the most: immortality. To answer his question, the engineer decapitates David and kills all other members of the team except Shaw. As she tries to run away, the Engineer sits in the center of the chamber and reactivates the ship. Shaw makes it outside and contacts Janek, telling him that if the ship gets away, it will unleash its horrible cargo on Earth to kill everything. Janek and the remaining crew members (except Vickers) sacrifice themselves by crashing the Prometheus into the alien ship, preventing its departure. The ejected lifepod Vickers was on is crushed by the disabled ship. Shaw, the only crew member still alive, goes to the lifepod (which contains the operating room) and finds the squid creature has become enormous. Shaw is then warned by David's disembodied head that the Engineer is coming for her. She manages to deflect the creature's attention onto the Engineer, which attacks him with its tentacles. Shaw heads back to the crashed ship and collects David's remains. Using him, she's able to activate another ship and leave LV-223, intent on finding out why the Engineers tried to destroy all humans. Back on the moon, the very first xenomorph emerges from the Engineer's corpse and screams. While Ridley Scott directed both this film and the original Alien, he doesn't have as much foresight this time around. Most people remember that strange creature from the first movie, found in the cockpit of the crashed alien ship which looks identical to the one in this film. There's nothing in the movie explaining what that alien is or where it came from, but they put it in the movie back then knowing that its story would be fleshed out one day. Prometheus was Scott's long awaited chance to do this, but not everything gets established properly. The movie is called Prometheus because the Titan of the same name tried to steal fire from the Greek gods and give it to humanity, for which he is eternally punished. Similarly, humans in this movie want to contact their creators just so they can selfishly ask for not being able to die. Some things are just not meant to be asked about. While I felt Weaver not being in this movie hurt it quite a bit, Rapace is similar to her. They're both the last survivors of their respective expeditions, and both have to undergo awful circumstances to make it out alive. I thought Resurrection would be the most violent in this series, but that C section part was horrific. If the future of humanity is exploring worlds like this where unknown horrors can appear from anywhere, I want no part of it. I also felt the 2080s are way too early to have technology such as faster than light travel, as unless we rewrite all we know about science, it will never be possible. We're never actually given a reason as to why the Engineers tried to kill their own creation, and this frustrated me. I realize there's a sequel to this, but my expectations are not all that high. The designs for everything in Prometheus still has that HR Giger feel to it, but I just couldn't care less about the characters. From what I understand, this movie is not all that well liked by avid fans of the Alien series, which I can completely get. Weaver is gone, and she hasn't returned to the series since (don't blame her). While the plot of this movie may not make much sense, it was quite stressful and hard to watch, which will most likely please the masochists who want science fiction to be about humans being killed in horrible ways by aliens. Like many prequels, its plot is mostly all over the place and it doesn't know what questions it wants to answer.
Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)
Mental casualties of war
After seeing The excellent noir The Killers (starring Burt Lancaster), I wanted to see how his career in this particular genre of film progressed. The Killers was Burt's first ever film, so this seemed like a logical next step for him. The movie deals with a topic that we don't really see a lot in this genre, but one that should appear more due to it just having ended: World War 2. Although it only has an indirect involvement with the plot, it is still important since the main character has PTSD. Bill Saunders (Burt Lancaster), a former prisoner who spent two years in a Nazi camp, goes to live in England, but because of his experiences, he is violent and unpredictable. While drinking in a pub, he gets into a fight and punches someone, causing him to hit his head and die. Bill flees to wherever he can evade the cops the fastest, and climbs into the apartment of a nurse, Jane Wharton (Joan Fontaine), who believes that Bill killing the guy was accidental. He and Jane go to the zoo, but he appears nervous and has unpleasant visions of the war after seeing the animals caged up (just like he was). While at the zoo, he also runs into a mysterious man named Harry (Robert Newton), who seems to want his help for something illegal. Bill tells him to get lost. Later on, Bill is arrested for attacking a cop and is sentenced to a session of whipping as well as 6 months hard labor. Jane, now in love with Bill, secures a driving job for him when he gets out. His task is to deliver drugs for Jane's clinic. He likes the job well enough, but Harry pursues him and blackmails him into stealing penicillin to illegally sell. If Bill doesn't say yes, Harry (being a witness to that bar fight) will go to the cops and expose Bill. On the night of the planned robbery, Jane shows up and says she wants to ride along with Bill. Rather than put his love interest in a dangerous situation, Bill confronts Harry in a dark alley and says the job is off. When Harry doesn't take no for an answer, Bill pummels him and his thugs. Harry's mind is now made up. He pays a visit to Jane and threatens her, saying he's going to expose Bill. When Harry puts his hands on her, she stabs him with scissors, but he does not die. Harry later bleeds to death in another room after he nearly shoots Bill. With a truckload of drugs under his command, Bill frantically tries to bribe the captain of the ship making the black market run. The captain rejects him unless he brings the penicillin. Knowing that if he goes back on his decisions they'll put his neck in a rope, Bill nevertheless decides to face the consequences of his actions. Jane wants to do the same. After seeing this, I couldn't help but feel the ending is way too fast and disappointing. I was actually surprised the movie ended so fast, since it left a few unanswered questions. I wanted to see if Jane and Bill make it out of this alive, or if the ship captain gives them to the police. Based on a book by Gerald Butler, the film has one of the most savage titles in noir history, but hardly ever gets mentioned among old movie fans. Just like basically every single movie he's ever been in, nobody can deliver a noir performance like Lancaster. Even when playing someone who is battered from the horrors of war, he is a force of nature. Damaged, but with spirit unbroken. Robert Newton as Harry is really creepy, and the part in Bill's room where he closes in on Jane is quite disturbing. Just like a bad omen, he always seems to show up when things are going good for Bill just to ruin everything. He's an archetype we've seen many times in these types of movies: someone who has serious dirt on the protagonist. All Bill wants to do is leave the past behind him, but Harry holds his actions over his head. Ironically, despite their chemistry in this film, Fontaine thought very little of Burt and held this view the rest of her life. It wouldn't be a noir without a particular scene of a female character realizing her ability to kill, and Jane is definitely just as dangerous as Bill when her other options are exhausted. Overall, this is quite a good film. Seems like noirs taking place in Britain are always good, and this one is no different, but the ending could have been done better. One interesting thing about Kiss the Blood Off My Hands is Lancaster toured different locations doing acrobatics in order to promote it. His partner in this was none other than Nick Cravat, probably best known today as the gremlin that terrifies William Shatner in the famous plane-centric Twilight Zone episode.
Your Ship in Action! (1942)
Denver sets sail
By early 1942, the Depression was over and America's economy was in full swing again, busy producing ships, guns, and other things in order to defeat Nazism and Japanese Fascism. This US Navy color film goes over the construction and launch of a Cleveland class light cruiser, the USS Denver, and how it (and dozens of other ships like it) will contribute to american victory over japan in the Pacific war. The Denver was manufactured in April 1942 by a shipbuilding corporation based in Camden, New Jersey. Captain Robert Carney was chosen as commanding officer. The ship's life begins in the camden shipyard where it was made. The area is populated by tall cranes, used by employees to swing the keel of the ship into place. After many work hours, the ship is completed and comes off the slipways. The Denver's future servicemen are seen standing attention at a ceremony; they will soon become the warriors america needs them to be. Before it sets out to war, the ship is loaded with supplies, both for taking the fight to the enemy as well as providing accommodations for its sailors. The ship's magazines are filled with armor piercing shells for its 150 millimeter main batteries. These guns can hurl a shell capable of punching right through a japanese ship over 11 miles away. Food is also brought onboard, which seems obvious, but the cooks on the Denver must provide 3000 meals a day, which is kind of insane to even think about. We then see the men who operate the anti-aircraft batteries undergo training. Later in the war, american ships will utilize the excellent 40 millimeter Bofors AA gun from Sweden. With its explosive rounds and venomous accuracy, japanese pilots knew to fear it. Below deck, we see how the Denver has its own pharmacy, barber shop, and a general store selling everything from soda to razors. We then get a view of the kitchen, and cooks are preparing steak. For holidays, there's turkey. The last place anyone wants to spend Thanksgiving is a warzone, and things like this make home feel not so far away. The ship eventually arrives at the Panama Canal, giving it entry to the south pacific. An unidentified island comes into view, one of the stepping stones troops will use on their way to subdue japan. US forces finish an airfield, and then blast japanese resistance off the rest of the island. As men ride in jeeps and transport rocket launchers, we see living conditions on the island: it's not good news. Part of what made the pacific war so hard was the environment. Not only did japanese forces seek advantages in the terrain, but the land itself was extremely humid, leach-infested, and Malaria ridden. Later, a PBY Catalina seaplane spots what appears to be an enemy force advancing up the island. Grumman Hellcat fighter planes take off from the island to attack enemy bombers. The Denver's gunners succeed in shooting down a japanese observation plane. At night, the ship enters combat with japanese ships. After the battle, we see the shattered hulks of once proud japanese ships littering the shore. The Denver's first mission is completed, and a japanese rising sun flag is painted on the ship's side to indicate one battle it has participated in. However, each battle has a cost. The last thing we see is a burial at sea conducted for the men who did not survive the entanglement. This was a pretty interesting World War 2 film. I never heard of this ship in particular, but it goes to demonstrate how big of a conflict ww2 was: people still find out new things about it decades later and how these experiences tie into what you're familiar with as a person. New Jersey is not that far from me, and it's cool to think just how many ships involved in the war started their journeys there. No matter where you are, important history is around you if you look into the backstory of your surroundings.
Troop Train (1943)
Fueling the war effort
While Germany during the Second World War had the technological upper hand in terms of vehicles (at least ground vehicles), their tank designs were very expensive and heavy compared to what America was using. This means that they weren't able to deploy as many of them, or were beaten to their objectives by lighter, more agile vehicles, which can make the crucial difference between winning and losing on the battlefield. This film shows how the american military used railroads to assist in logistics during the war, with an emphasis on moving personnel around. The film is odd since it basically has no narration and barely any dialogue from the characters, but what is happening is told to the audience via text on the screen. Instead, this important story of movement is told through images. We see a bunch of M3 Stuart light tanks being loaded onto flat cars that the train will tow. An Army band plays as US soldiers approach the train cars in formation. Going by the chevrons on the conductor's shoulder, he appears to be a Gunnery Sergeant. As the troops get onboard and take their seats, the train starts pulling away. We see several shots of just how long this train is, and how many different types of vehicles it is carrying. Not just tanks, but GMC trucks that will no doubt serve a myriad of valuable purposes on the frontline, whether it's as an ambulance, ammunition carrier, or some other variant. On the train, we see enlisted men taste testing soup and other food that they are given in rations. Food is a huge part of war logistics and the cooks of the military deserve as much recognition as any active duty soldier for ensuring america's best are the fighters we need them to be. The troops are then told they'll be stopping at the next station and will disembark. After some R&R, we're shown another train and how the guys on it pass the time while being sent to an unspecified port. Although they don't know where they're going or where the military will deploy them, they're no doubt ready to face what lies ahead. As long as america has enemies, they will answer her call. And so, bound for the battlegrounds of the world, the train steams on. Just like most things related to my favorite historical subject, this film was interesting to watch just because it's attached to world war 2. There's not much to the film, but it does at least depict how the common fighting man did not let his concerns about the future get in his way. Many of the people shown here were probably later killed in action, but they still socialize, play cards, and carry out orders. This whole generation understood well that doing something (anything) was better than inaction. The train is also quite nice looking, and just like with cars, trains started to look less and less cool as the years went by. If I've identified it correctly, only 6 of these specific trains were ever made.
Buying Food (1950)
50s shopping
America in the 1950s was quite possibly the best place and time to be alive in human history, and with such a good economy, the nation was producing many things that the public wanted to spend money on, sometimes frivolously. This short shows how to be smart with what you buy, and how to avoid wasting money on things you will come to regret. The short starts by showing a woman grocery shopping for her husband. It's easy to get overwhelmed in stores due to the sheer amount of attractive things that people tend to gravitate towards, but you have to resist this. Using a list of things to buy is one way, as it tends to eliminate the urge to just mindlessly buy something because you want it. A comparison is made between the wife and a guy named Henry, who goes into the same store. Henry buys 3 pints of oysters, a new type of vegetable he's never seen before, and some cake just because he's hungry. He does not take into account how he's going to feel hours from now, he only cares about his immediate wants. When dinnertime comes, Henry ended up wasting nearly 2 thirds of the oysters he bought, and his wife didn't care for the new vegetable. Most of the things he bought are wasted, and so is his money. We're also told how when faced with a decision to buy either a large or small can of food, the one that's right for you depends on the situation. If you have a lot of people you're going to eat with, the big can makes more sense, but purchasing it when you're by yourself means a lot of it might be wasted. In addition, many foods expire quickly, so buying a large quantity of them at once is not a good idea. If you plan to buy fruit, it makes the most sense to buy it when that specific one is in season; it's not going to cost a lot to buy strawberries in summer. In winter, they're more expensive since you are also paying for a truck's ability to transport it from the climate in which it's grown to the supermarket. This is also why things like pomegranate juice are so expensive, as extracting the seeds is a long and frustrating process. You can also save money by canning fruits and other foods yourself. Finally, we see how through creative thinking, good dinners can be made from even the less expensive cuts of an animal, such as tiny burgers or frankfurters. Lastly, you should know milk is one item you shouldn't buy a cheaper version of just because you want to spend less money: it's easy to get sick on it if you're not careful. Because this film is basically something they would likely show to you if you were a 50s kid taking a class on economics, I can't expect much. The tips it gives you can still be used today, but it should be common sense not to buy as many things as you can just because you have enough cash. One thing I'll say though is I feel bad for whoever has to eat the stew in this short. It's harder than you might think to find 1950s meals that actually look good. Even though this film is nothing special, I enjoy watching things from this time period just to see how the stores looked and what things they were selling. Odds are they're long gone.
The Killers (1946)
Double crossing dame
Upon completing this film, my first reaction (even when I was watching it) was to think of it as Citizen Kane. I'm going to be referencing that movie a lot, but in this case, it makes sense because of what happens right at the beginning, as well as what takes place throughout the rest of it. The first thing we see happen is two hitmen enter a diner in New Jersey. They talk with the owner, saying how they plan to kill Pete Lund, a former boxer known as "The Swede." The diner's owner leaves to warn Pete, but he seems remarkably uncaring and thinks righteous judgement is upon him. The thugs gun down Pete (Burt Lancaster) in his room and he is killed. After the crime, Pete's real name is uncovered: Ole Anderson. An investigator named Jim (Edmund O'Brien) is tasked with finding the recipient of Pete's 2500 dollar life insurance policy. He tracks down and interviews people who used to know The Swede, one of the most helpful being a Pennsylvania cop named Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene). In a flashback, Lubinsky says how Pete's boxing career came to a close after he irreparably damaged the bones in his hand. Rejecting an offer from his friend to become a cop, he instead gets involved with a mob boss named Colfax (Albert Dekker) and leaves his current girlfriend Lilly for Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner). Lubinsky is now married to Lilly, and goes to a restaurant to meet with his friend. While there, he sees Kitty wearing stolen jewelry and plans on taking her in. When Pete fails to persuade his friend not to arrest her, he admits he stole the thing himself, so Lubinsky punches him out and leaves. Pete serves 3 years in prison. As soon as he gets out, Pete (and 2 other criminals) participate in a robbery put together by Colfax, but by this point, Kitty is now with him. The robbery gets the gang a quarter of a million bucks. However, the boarding house the men were supposed to meet in mysteriously burns down before the cash can be divided, so all the gangsters (sans Pete) are told to meet at another place. When Kitty visits Pete and lets him know this, he plans on doing to the gangsters what they plan to do to him. He shows up at the new house, steals the money, and shoots holes in the tires of their cars so he can't be chased. As far as Pete's side of the story goes, this is the end of the line for the cash. At an indeterminate point sometime afterwards, Kitty takes the money for herself and flees. Back in current time, Jim scopes out the hotel where Pete was murdered and sees Dum-Dum (one of the gangsters) go inside. Jim follows him, hoping he'll reveal the money. Jim tries to interrogate Dum-Dum, but he steals Jim's gun and leaves him there. Jim then positively learns that something isn't right: apparently the safehouse was burned down hours later than anticipated, meaning Kitty had an accomplice. Jim goes to see Colfax. Six years after causing Pete's death, he's a building contractor in Pittsburgh. He says he doesn't know what Jim's talking about. Kitty later contacts Jim and wants to meet in a nightclub. As they sit down, Jim keeps things simple; if Kitty doesn't say where the money is, she is going to jail for a very long time. Kitty says she lied to Pete and said the others were setting him up so that he could take her away from Colfax. She offers to give up Colfax to save herself. As she gets up to go to the bathroom, the two assassins from the start of the movie enter the scene, set on killing Jim. He manages to shoot them both before this can happen. In the confusion, Kitty uses an open window in the bathroom to get away. Lubinsky and Jim get out of the nightclub to head to Colfax's mansion. By the time they get there, they find Dum-Dum and Colfax both mortally wounded from a shootout that happened not even a minute ago. Lubinsky asks Colfax before he departs to the void why he had Pete killed. He confesses he did it to betray everyone working under him. He didn't want the other gang members to realize he and Kitty were saving the money for themselves. Kitty pleads with her husband to say she is innocent, but he dies first. After seeing this, it should be obvious why it will remind you of Citizen Kane: the narrative is very similar. You have a detective going around asking people who knew the main character about how he was before he died. Not only this, but Pete dies right at the start of the movie, which is the same thing that happens to Orson Welles in Kane. As for this movie, I think they handled the Ernest Hemingway source material in the best possible way. The first 10 or so minutes with the two guys creeping around the diner is as close to perfect as noir gets. You can just tell things are about to get real bad. While being the embodiment of a woman who is willing to use underhanded tactics to get what she wants, Ava Gardner doesn't have much opportunity to cultivate into an actual character. She's just there to steal the money and betray Pete, which we all know is going to happen since this is noir. Pete may pave the way for her with his bravado and willingness to stand up to his fellow gangsters, but he will not stop her greed. Even though Lancaster does a good job in pretty much every movie he appears in, my biggest problem with his acting here is we're never actually given a reason why he was just willing to let himself be killed. Still, if you like crime movies with complex stories that have to be pieced together gradually, The Killers is one of the best in the genre. When you combine Siodmak's direction with John Huston's (uncredited) screenplay, expect something rewarding.
Around the World in California (1947)
Cities and deserts
The last installment in James Fitzpatrick's Traveltalks series I saw focused on California. So does this one, but now it's geared more towards the culture of the state and how pioneers made it a habitable place on the west coast that would eventually become the richest US state. The first thing Fitzpatrick says about california has to do with its climate. The state has what is most likely the widest range of landscapes in America, and basically any type of climate can be found here, from snowy mountain trails to arid deserts. This variety makes it the ideal place for film production, since no matter what climate you want for your movie, california has it. It should come as no surprise then that the movie capital of planet Earth is found here. We see a large highway in the desert that connects california and its neighbor state of Arizona, which wouldn't have been possible without great irrigation efforts. We also see rows of a special species of palm tree lining the streets, which originates from Egypt and Palestine. Although california's Spanish colonizers mainly made use of one architectural style, many different ones exist in california as of this filming. We can see an example of this is San Francisco, where the first spanish aristocratic houses were made in the late 18th century. Also in san francisco is Chinatown, which at the time only held about 3000 residents of mostly east asian ancestry. The older ones living here tend to still follow the customs and religion china has had for millennia, while their children are more accepting of western styles of dress. Finally, we are taken to a Mexican quarter in Las Angeles called Olvera Street. Because that california used to be mexico, the street is named after someone who was a ranchero in 1800s california. After this, our trip to late 40s california is over. This was a pretty average addition to the series with no real standouts, but I thought it was odd how even in this time a street that is basically a tourist attraction has street musicians. In this case, a guy playing a harp. Also shown is someone making a pot using a spinning wheel, which is a tool that goes back in time to the earliest civilizations. While I do enjoy these shorts, I feel like Fitzpatrick spends too much time in this geographical area; like 9 Traveltalks are on mexico alone. Looking at the disc I own, I can see the next one is on Nova Scotia. I hope to see more locations on this series that have low population densities.
Don't Bother to Knock (1952)
"I own a big turtle I'm gonna ride on his back"
I never thought of Marilyn Monroe as an actress. She was in a small part in All About Eve (one of the best movies ever made) but beyond this, her reputation today mostly stems from being what women back then wanted to grow up to be. This movie was unexpected for someone like her, since it shows how she fares in a part that is actually kind of deranged. The movie is mostly set in a hotel in New York. A singer named Lyn (Anne Bancroft) brags to a bartender about how she has ended a relationship with a pilot, Jed Towers (Richard Widmark). The reason for this quickly becomes obvious. He is very rude to people, even those he doesn't know, leading Lyn to think he has no potential for understanding. After telling him how she feels, Jed goes to his room. Concurrently, an elevator operator named Eddie (Elisha Cook Jr.) allows his niece Nell (Marilyn Monroe) to meet a couple named Peter and Ruth. Nell is to act as a babysitter for their daughter, Bunny. After putting Bunny to bed, Nell tries on Ruth's negligee and cosmetics, then notices that Jed (located in the hotel room opposite an air shaft) is attempting to call her. She answers the phone, but when it becomes obvious he wants to be her boyfriend, she pulls the blinds on him. Eddie enters the room and is disgusted to see Nell wearing what she's wearing, saying she needs to get over the death of her ex-boyfriend Philip, who was killed in a plane crash during the war. Once he leaves, Nell puts the cosmetics back on and wants Jed to show up. Once he does, he pours whisky for himself and Nell, who is now spouting off a series of lies about her being famous and rich. When she learns that Jed is a pilot, she is taken by surprise, given her ex-boyfriend's fate. Bunny wakes up and wants to know what they're talking about. When she starts asking questions, Nell's facade is broken, so she angrily urges her to go back to bed. Jed wants Bunny to stay up with them. When she peers out a hotel window, Nell has to resist the temptation to push her to her death. When Jed isn't paying attention, Bunny is put back to sleep by Nell, who is soon begging Jed not to leave her room. When he's about to leave, Jed notices razor scars on her wrists. Nell admits to him that she tried to kill herself after her boyfriend died. When Eddie is done working, he once again sees what Nell is up to, and is enraged to learn she's still wearing Ruth's possessions. When he goes to see if there is anyone in the bathroom, Nell hits him over the head with a large ashtray to prevent Jed's cover from being blown. While Jed tries to make sure he's alright, Nell goes into Bunny's room. Emma, an old woman who saw Bunny almost get shoved out the window earlier, shows up at Nell's door and demands to know what's going on. When Jed finds out Bunny is no longer crying because Nell bound and gagged her, he slips out of the apartment. Emma notices this and thinks he intruded. More curious than ever, Emma goes in the room and calls the hotel detective. By this point, Nell is mentally ill enough to think Philip and Jed are the same person. At the bar downstairs, Jed tells Lyn about Nell's behavior. Ruth returns to the room and sees her daughter tied up. She fights with Nell, the latter managing to slip away before the detective shows up. Eddie tells Ruth Nell was in a mental hospital for 3 years in Oregon for attempting suicide, but was thought to be all better. Nell goes down to the lobby and, stealing a razor from a display, plans to kill herself. Lyn and Jed arrive and demand she drop it. Jed assures Nell that she will be cured by being in the care of another institution, but she must accept Philip is dead. Realizing Jed is not so heartless towards others after all, Lyn is open to a reconciliation. After watching tons of old movies that use terms and locations not everyone is familiar with as part of their storylines, this one felt refreshingly simple. Aside from being easy to understand, this movie is probably Monroe's most dramatic performance, where her character is just a step away from killing herself. For those that think she was just a sex object, she shows how bad self harm is in an era where it was mostly unheard of. If somebody wanted to commit suicide, they typically did so and didn't have to live with the injuries it leaves on their physical selves. Marilyn plays someone who may say she wants to kill herself, but what she actually wants is for her past to stop hurting her. She is unwilling to find someone to take Philip's place, and seems to think Jed is the only one who approaches his abilities, as they're both pilots. Less impressive than Marilyn is Widmark, which is odd since he was great in Night and the City: a movie in which he is basically killed for making everyone else look bad. He just doesn't seem that excited about his role here, but because this is a thriller that could be mistaken for noir it wouldn't feel right with most other actors. However, just like most movies Monroe was in, she takes away stage presence from the other actors pretty easily. This is helped by the fact that it's one of her most serious parts as well. In general, I feel that Don't Bother to Knock is a mostly ok movie that doesn't offer much in the way of a story, but I would rather it not have a convoluted plot than drag on for nearly 2 hours. It must be looked at as an advertising vehicle for Monroe, but it was still early in her career.
Alien Resurrection (1997)
Why
By this point, I had little hope of the Alien movies ever changing their pattern. They are (for the most part) science fiction bloodbaths where either humans, the aliens, or sometimes even both, die in huge numbers. The first in the series was special and something new for the horror genre, since it incorporated a truly disturbing setting of being in an isolated spaceship, stuck with a creature that can easily kill a person, which gets more and more likely as the survivors are hunted down. This one on the other hand is mostly just a gore exposition, and there's hardly any subtlety at this point. We all know humans and some aliens are going to get killed, so it should come as no surprise here. The film takes place an entire 2 centuries after Alien 3. At the end of that, we were shown how Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) killed herself in the forge of a prison to prevent the Xenomorph queen inside her from ever becoming a threat. Now, scientists on a spaceship called the USM Auriga have managed to clone her using her DNA before she died. The scientists operate on Ripley and pull out the embryo of another Xenomorph queen, planning on raising it while keeping "Ripley" alive to study her. Because her genetics have been combined with that of the alien's, she has corrosive blood and some kind of mental link with xenomorphs. A band of soldiers for hire, including a female android named Call (Winona Ryder) dock with the Auriga using their own spaceship, the Betty, in order to give the scientists a bunch of frozen humans. The Auriga's crew will use them as hosts for the aliens. The mercenaries soon come across Ripley 8 (as her clone is named). Call recognizes her and what role she played 200 years ago in order to safekeep the xenomorph queen, and tries to kill her. Call is too late as the fully grown aliens escape their holding cell by killing one of their own and using its blood to melt through several decks of the ship. The aliens kill most of the Auriga crew who can't evacuate in time, including its commanding officer. Ripley decides to tag along with the mercenaries and learns from a scientist, Dr. Wren, that in case anything goes wrong on the Auriga, its default protocol is to return to Earth. Knowing this will probably mean the end of humanity if the aliens get there, the mercenaries, Wren, a soldier not affiliated to the mercenaries (DiStephano), and a xenomorph host named Purvis try to head to the Betty and use it to blow up the Auriga. As the group go through the ship, two xenomorphs pursue them through a flooded kitchen and manage to kill a few mercenaries. Wren betrays everybody and shoots Call, then escapes through a door that requires authentication to open. Ripley manages to get the door open, and is surprised to find out Call is on the other side of it already. The rest of the group discover she's an android since her wound leaks white fluid instead of blood. Using her power to interface with the Auriga's controls, she sets it on a crash course with earth. If they're lucky, the impact will kill the aliens. She also locks all the doors on Wren's level and uses the ship's PA system to tell the aliens where he is. Ripley's clone gets captured by the xenomorphs while the others head for the docked spaceship. By the time they finally reach it, Wren has gotten there before them. He guns down Purvis and threatens to kill Call unless she changes the ship's course. A mortally wounded Purvis jumps on Wren just as the alien embryo infesting the former comes out of his ribcage, gutting them both. The other humans then kill the xenomorph. Concurrently, Ripley is taken to the area where the xenomorph queen is producing new xenomorphs. It hatches one which somewhat resembles a person, due to having Ripley's DNA. It kills the queen after recognizing Ripley is its true parent. While it's distracted, Ripley makes her escape to the Betty. The hybrid alien gets onboard the Betty before it has a chance to uncouple itself from the Auriga. It attacks Call, and decapitates DiStephano when he tries to save her. Ripley saves everyone by using her blood to melt a small hole in a window on the ship, exposing the interior to the vacuum of space. The decompression mangles the creature's body as it gets sucked through the opening and eventually dies. The Betty leaves the Auriga just as the latter starts to blow up. As the hulk of the ship crashes on earth and causes a huge blast, Ripley and the others land on earth, now an arid wasteland. Once again, the interstellar threat of the xenomorphs is contained, for the time being anyway. Originally, Joss Whedon wanted an extensive third part of this movie to take place on earth, but none appear in the film. Weaver apparently thought the concept (recycled from Alien 3) of her having just as much allegiance to the xenomorphs as she does to the humans was intriguing, as she felt it marked a return to what made the original movie so revolutionary in the first place. I can't imagine why she would think this, since Ripley 8 is a completely different character. She's more empathetic to the xenomorphs than the people she's trying to save, and her uncanny reflexes don't matter in the plot all that much. Sure, maybe it was cool seeing her make a perfect basketball shot while not even looking at the net (which was supposedly done in one take), but we all know the filmmakers aren't going to kill her off. Box office money brought her back after the last film, but I'm actually glad she's back. Resurrection is marginally more interesting than its predecessor simply because the characters have guns again. The prison setting of Alien 3 made sure this couldn't happen. Lastly, Ryder is pretty bad in this, which I guess can be excused because her character is a robot. I just don't like how they try to keep introducing androids into the story for no other reason than how Ripley was nearly killed by one in the first movie. Overall, Alien Resurrection is mostly a mess, but still somehow manages to be better than the third one. The characters are more likable (barely), guns are back, and the setting is more interesting in my opinion since it's in space again and not in a large complex. I'm just surprised HR Giger liked this movie when most people don't.
Hanyeo (1960)
"I deserve to be treated better than a maid"
We hear a lot of Japanese movies even in the west, but a place in East Asia doesn't get enough recognition when it comes to movies: South Korea. Although this doesn't really count as noir, I think noir is the most apt term to describe it since it has one of the hallmarks of that genre: a woman destroying the life of her love interest. In this film, the titular character is so evil she goes above and beyond just inflicting torment on her boyfriend, and seemingly makes it her mission to send him to a dark place and have fun doing it. Her will for chaos, similar to her instability, is endless. The story focuses on a piano teacher who gives music lessons to factory workers, Dong-sik Kim. He reads a newspaper to his wife, Mrs. Kim, about someone who fell in love with his maid and how dangerous this is. At the factory where Kim works, he is popular with the primarily female piano students. One of them, Kyeung-Hee, wants her friend to write Kim a letter saying how much she likes him. This ends badly since Kyeung-Hee's friend ends up fired. Kyeung-Hee tries to spend as much time with Kim as possible by going to his house to learn piano, which also helps Kim since the money she pays supports his pregnant wife. Kim soon relocates his wife and two children to another, much bigger house. His wife, who also works with a sewing machine, gets too tired to clean the house, so Kim asks Kyeung-Hee to find a suitable girl from the factory to be a maid for them. She returns with Myung-Sook, a cleaner. She starts acting bizarre right away: catching rats bare-handed and then proudly showing them to Kim, as well as teasing his children. At work, Kyeung-Hee finds out the friend that she had indirectly gotten fired has killed herself. Ridden with guilt, Kyeung-Hee tells Kim she's the one who loves him, not her friend. Kim rejects her. Myung-Sook watches this through a sliding glass panel, then enters the room. She threatens to tell Kim's wife about his affair with Kyeung-Hee unless he starts a relationship with her instead. She also intends to lie and tell people Kim raped her. Things boil over when Myung-Sook reveals she is going to have a child: Kim's child. When Myung-Sook's sick behavior becomes too obvious to ignore, Kim tells his wife about what he did. Initially disgusted, she has the maid fling herself from the stairs so that she kills Kim's unborn baby. After this, her mental state rapidly deteriorates. Once Mrs. Kim has her child, Myung-Sook threatens to kill it, saying it's only fair since her baby is now dead. She then offers Kim's older son water, which she has supposedly poisoned. She doesn't tell him this until after he drinks it. Kim's son panics and kills himself by falling down the stairs. As it turns out, it was just normal water and the maid lied. A furious Kim tries to get Myung-Sook executed for what she did, but Mrs. Kim now wants to support her so she doesn't lose her job. There's only one thing Myung-Sook wants: Kim. While Kim and her live upstairs in her room, Mrs. Kim toils over her sewing machine every day, always falling asleep. Hating this new arrangement, Mrs. Kim and Kim's crippled daughter try to kill Myung-Sook with poisoned soup, but she isn't fooled. Knowing she will continue to harm other members of his family unless he gives himself to her, Kim is persuaded by the maid to kill himself by drinking the poison. She will do the same thing simultaneously. As they both swallow it, Kim says he wants to die next to his wife, and attempts to walk down the stairs, Myung-Sook clinging onto his leg. She eventually dies and is left on the stairs. Kim on the other hand manages to make it to his wife's room before dying. The movie then returns to the setting we saw at the beginning. The man reading the cautionary tale of the guy and the maid in the newspaper tells the person watching that it can happen to anyone if you're not careful. If it can be called noir, this is one of the most disturbing one's I've ever watched. In the hellish domain that is Kim's house, Myung-Sook is the very essence of Satan. Only the lowest these types of films have to offer would be ok with killing a kid. Myeung-Sook is a certified sociopath, and doesn't care about how much misery she introduces to Kim, so long as he is drawn to her. One thing I noticed when I saw it is how claustrophobic it makes you feel, both in terms of the house's rather small rooms and the feeling of knowing that Kim will have to interact with this crazed girl sooner or later. The part where she causes Kim's son to die was so horrendous I could barely look at it. Even though there's not many characters here, the ones that are part of the film are memorable. When I watch noir movies from now on that feature evil women, I will probably have the maid at the back of my mind and think "at least she's not as bad as her." Overall, this is one of the most unique and intense foreign movies I know of, and without Martin Scorcese's great preservation efforts, it might have been totally unknown here.
The Twilight Zone: Twenty Two (1961)
Go to sleep
While Twilight Zone was a show that had many episodes that were simply beyond the realm of what humans could logically explain, some of them (like this one) have more plausible storylines that show how strange coincidences aren't always the work of supernatural forces or other anomalies. The episode starts with a dancer who has been hospitalized due to stress, Liz Powell (Barbara Nichols), waking up in her room next to a glass of water. As she gets up, she knocks it over and it breaks. She then spots a tall, dark haired nurse step into an elevator that goes to the hospital's basement. She follows her down to the entrance of room 22, which is the morgue. The nurse comes out of the morgue, looks at her and says "room for one more honey." This causes Liz to scream and run back the way she came. It's revealed that she was having a bad dream. Her agent Barney visits her in her hospital bed, and even though he remains sceptical of the dreams, Liz insists they're really happening to her. Liz's doctor brings in Ms. Jameson, the night nurse assigned to the basement where the morgue is. Liz says this isn't the same woman that appears in her nightmare, causing her doctor to say that's proof that the dreams are fake. Liz still holds onto hope that she can somehow prove the nightmares are taking place in reality. The doctor wants Liz to do something in the dream next time she goes to sleep: Liz mentions that the nightmare always follows a specific course of events. First she breaks the glass, then sees the nurse, and then runs to the elevator. The doctor says that maybe if she refuses to do one of these actions, the nightmare won't proceed as normal. The dream version of Liz tries to light a cigarette instead of reaching for the water, but she ends up accidentally breaking the glass anyway. The nightmare ends in the same way, and and Liz has to be drugged by the doctor since she can't calm down. The doctor then tells a nurse how strange it is that Liz instinctively knows the morgue's room number is 22, given that she has never been to it. Finally appearing to get over her hysteria, Liz is allowed to leave the hospital. She travels to the airport to get to her next gig in Miami. After getting her ticket, she is told the plane she will be on is called Flight 22. She starts to have deja vu about all the details from the dream she experienced, such as bumping into a woman and making her drop a vase, wanting a glass of water, and hearing a very loud clock. Liz still decides to get on the plane and starts climbing the boarding stairs. Upon getting to the top, she sees a stewardess who looks exactly the same as the nurse from her nightmare, clear as day. The woman repeats the same line as the nurse, causing Liz to run away in total fear back to the terminal. Liz knew she was right to listen to her instincts regarding whoever this woman is: as the plane gets ready to take off, it blows up violently for no discernable reason. Being one of a measly 6 TZ episodes made on videotape (in a failed bid to make things cheaper), Twenty Two has a foreboding and creepy feel to it which is only enhanced by the story, but it doesn't hold up as well as I remember. I think the plot is fine, but the problem arises when you realize Liz talking with her agent and doctor take up half the runtime. There's just not much going on in the first half besides her discussing what the nightmare possibly means. Because this episode just doesn't have the type of magnetism or fulfillment a lot of the others have (even director Jack Smight said so), I will instead briefly go over the inspiration behind it. Serling got the idea for this from a short story published in the 40s. In the original, a city girl visits her relatives on a southern plantation, and sees a horse drawn carriage outside her bedroom window right as she is going to sleep. The coachman points at her and says that there's room on it for one other occupant. The girl is so uneasy about this that she decides to head back to New York, but as she gets on an elevator, the operator of it is the same man. The elevator cables then snap and both of them fall to their deaths. Not really a great episode, but I'll always remember it for its weirdness.
The Sinking of the 'Lusitania' (1918)
No warning given, no mercy shown
The RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner laid down in 1904, but achieved worldwide notoriety after it was attacked and destroyed by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland during World War I. This short film by famed American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay briefly goes over what happened in a dramatized way in order to basically serve as propaganda. By this point, the german empire had publicly declared unrestricted submarine warfare, meaning that any non-military ships carrying harmless supplies like food or oil can and will be sunk without any warning. Like in 1914, the germans feel that stating their intentions acts as a disclaimer to any destruction they cause. They even go to the extent of publishing warnings authored by their embassy in New York newspapers, as the short says. The ship had just left here and was supposed to be arriving in Liverpool soon, but this was not to be. While cruising at 18 knots near southern ireland, the Lusitania was hit just behind its bridge by a torpedo launched by the U-boat U-20. While the order was given to abandon ship, the lifeboats were only about halfway lowered when a second torpedo slammed into the engine compartment. Like a knife to the heart, the Lusitania was shook like never before. After this, the ship stabilizes itself but begins to sink, starting with its bow. Just 15 short minutes after it was first hit, the Lusitania disappears under the sea. According to the short, the Kaiser gave the captain of the submarine a medal for his heinous act. Although the Lusitania's loss was a serious shock all over the world, one thing allowed McCay to dramatize and animate it the way he did: the sinking wasn't photographed. The ending of the film is pretty disturbing, as it shows a woman trying to keep her baby on the surface of the water as the ship sinks nearby. A few years before this, McCay had completed Little Nemo, his first animated film which he made from 4000 individual drawings on rice paper. For this film, he would use over 6 times that number, which just makes my mind go numb thinking about how someone can commit themselves to that. Interestingly, papers owned by William Randolph Hearst (McCay's boss) tried to make the Lusitania event seem not that bad, as Hearst did not want America in the war. However, McCay was obligated to draw pro-isolationist cartoons for Hearst's publications. To demonstrate how insanely slow this style of animation progressed, it was said that it took McCay 2 months just to make enough film to last 8 seconds. For someone like McCay who was mostly known for funny cartoons, this is undoubtedly his most serious production, and it still angers and shocks people today to learn about what germany was doing in the first world war. Gas attacks, flamethrowers, this, list goes on and on. It's also pretty realistic looking, such as when you see people jumping over the side of the ship or the U-boat cutting through the waves. As important as this film is (it's probably the world's oldest animated documentary), Hearst was not happy with what McCay was doing a few years later. In the early 20s, when he discovered that McCay was more concerned with animation than his papers, he ordered him to give it up. While the new process of utilizing cel animation with a static layer underneath might have made things easier, it still took McCay a huge amount of time to make this relatively short movie. Because of its historic status as the oldest animated documentary, I think this is something all people interested in history should see.
How to Sleep (1935)
Sweet dreams
It might sound like an oxymoron, but doing something as simple as going to sleep isn't always so easy. This short from the 1930s shows how even back in these times, people had problems going to bed, even if you just lay there thinking about how tired you are. In fact, this issue was probably worse in the past, as people didn't have access to white noise or other calming sounds whenever they wanted on the internet. The short starts by saying sleep is induced when blood circulation slows down in your brain. Oftentimes what happens is you'll hear something in the middle of the night and you don't know what it is. This will in turn most likely make you spiral into an array of thoughts about what the sound could have been, and those thoughts lead to others. Your mind is now wide awake and it is impossible to go back to bed. Constantly worrying about things is also a good way to keep yourself up. Some people suffer from a form of sleeplessness in which they are not only unable to fall asleep, they cannot remain in bed. It is often accompanied by feelings of suffocation, and happens if you drink too much. The only way to get around this is to not go to sleep at all. We then see a series of photographs taken during a study, where it is shown that a man changed his sleeping position over 50 times during an 8 hour period, which believe it or not is normal. In a comical time lapse, we see the guy sleeping changes positions unconsciously about every 10 or so minutes. It almost defeats the whole reason of going to bed. Lastly, we see how important it is to not become fully conscious if you get up in the middle of the night to drink something. On his way back to bed after getting some water, the man trips over his shoes and lands in the bed, causing him to become wide awake. Once you're in this mental state, you will most likely not be able to get back to bed (until 20 seconds before you need to get up for work, that is). As somebody who is in the habit of rarely willing to go to bed (since there's not enough time in a day to do everything you want), I thought this was a good short. It actually won an Oscar for best comedy short. Robert Benchley had plenty of experience with this as his contract mandated he make a bunch of shorts for Metro Goldwyn during the 30s. The part where he goes over how you are destined to fall asleep right when you're supposed to get up couldn't be more accurate, as sometimes, even going to bed early will not save you from feeling horrible in the morning. Being woken up from a deep rest early in the daytime is such an awful feeling since you're going from one extreme (total lack of senses) to another way too fast, and I never got used to it. Overall, this short shows how important sleep is, since without it, not only does your mind not match up with what you're doing, but you can't really do anything effectively. Not sleeping completely screws with your behavior and well being.