TheFearmakers

Anything featuring Carmen Miranda is interesting, and when it comes to this particular wartime propaganda by Busby Berkely titled THE GANG'S ALL HERE, it's lightly entertaining as well...

Meanwhile, for story's sake, a bland and breezy romance encroaches upon the fantastical, borderline psychedelic (way before there was such a thing) first act combining a popular nightclub run by Phil Baker and where Benny Goodman and his band play, as a show's taking place on stage before a dinner theater crowd...

And the camera pans around to other characters spouting random expository between various hallucinatory avenues in what's the biggest, most spectacular, memorable and downright outrageously insane musical number concerning Miranda's Brazilian import Dorita, who begins as the movie's headlining talent/showcase...

But when the rudimentary aspect turns talky and somewhat sappy, Carmen winds up the cocky-friend-of-the-vulnerable-leading-lady played by Alice Faye opposite boorishly handsome James Ellison...

With a rich father, he's the partial boyfriend of pretty and equally rich Sheila Ryan in a runaround "misunderstanding" love triangle (he's pretending to be someone else to Faye): all taking place at Ryan's parent's house where... since the nightclub is closed for rehearsals... the big, final show takes place...

Weaving through the song and dance numbers, Faye does drama pretty well - getting prepared for FALLEN ANGEL which would be her last movie - and sings the blues with style and feeling... although her slower songs seemed more beneficial to the screen than a live audience... but let's end with two scene stealers...

First, lanky, middle-aged character-actress Charlotte Greenwood ("you do very well what you do do" she tells Miranda): A rich lady with a cool and sleazy, progressive European past (clashing with her uptight husband, the film's only foil, both parents of Sheila Ryan), legs that kick up higher than John Cleese imitating the goose-step, and, thankfully, once the surrounding love-triangle softens, the show's on again...

And last but certainly not least, this GANG features uncredited "Specialty Performer" Aloysio de Oliveira, spinning, bounding, turning, toppling whilst flying across the stage in an amazing enough matter that the movie could've ended with her and her alone...

But what's left is just as weird and spectacular in a musical that doesn't weigh itself down with that annoying thing called, plot...

This is, after all, a wartime lunch break for the boys to keep their mind off war. And if they happened to be a little "stoned" it's that much better.

Hammer's third Peter Cushing Frankenstein THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN is a kind of throwback to director James Whale's second starring Boris Karloff, but instead of Cushing having a BRIDE he seeks help from a small village's carnival sorcerer/charlatan named Zoltan the way Colin Clive needed Doctor Pretorius... both involving two mad scientists reanimating/controlling the one monster...

Here thinned from ice in an old cavern that Cushing and his normal/classy assistant Hans not so accidentally find... with the help of one of the prettiest Hammer starlets: which is saying something for a production company that churned out some of the prettiest faces on the big screen...

In that, young scene-stealer Katy Wild (who would later work for the same director Freddie Francis in THE DEADLY BEES) plays a mousy, mute, red-haired Beggar Girl that led Frankenstein to find the monster that, through flashback, he lost before banishment from the same town he's returned to...

As Hammer pushes the franchise forward with a brand new creature... swapping a bandaged Kiwi Kingston for previous co-star Christopher Lee... and a lower-budgeted lab that's equally antique and ominous...

Nicely progressed by that trickster magician (Peter Woodthorpe) turning Frankenstein's otherwise trudging, moaning, brain-dead monster into what's basically a hired-for-vengeance assassin...

And overall making EVIL both the usual Gothic Victorian Horror and (since the monster basically resembles primitive versions of Leatherface and Michael Myers) a proto-slasher body-count exploitation.

One of the worst aspects of these new GODZILLA and KING KONG or GODZILLA and KING KONG movies are the humans, and someone must have sent a memo to the director, because people take the backseat here...

But this is not really a GODZILLA picture despite him getting first-billed... it's really a KING KONG adventure as he traipses around Hollow Earth (which is basically the same deep-underground/inner-earth portal from the original LAND OF THE LOST), trying to survive a horde of competing apes before finding one youngster he can partner with... while leading to the main "titan" antagonist, which is a let-down, only because it takes over half the screen-time to anticipate what's basically a red-headed Kong on ozempic (with an angry expression like Caesar from the new PLANET OF THE APES franchise), trashing a magical whip with an enslaved giant dragon-like creature and...

Well the main plot's that these monstrosities could make it up to our own earth, and if that happens, like every James Bond villain, they'll not only take over the world, but just being their powerfully trudging selves, completely destroy it...

Keeping GODZILLA on the peripheral throughout because, as the same human duo of Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry... joined by Dan Stevens as a kind of cross between brave JURASSIC PARK hero Sam Neill with brainy/sarcastic Jeff Goldblum... are helping with Kong's injuries and overall stranger-in-a-stranger-land plight, the nuclear lizard only sporadically battles various arctic creatures to gain more power for... well... the same thing Kong eventually fights and what everything and everyone (including a hidden tribal native KINGDOM that worships the peacenik-creature Mothra) is leading to...

Meanwhile, the returning Hall and Tyree are a buzzkill since one's too serious with her adopted deaf child (a McGuffin of sorts) while the other tries way, way too hard to be funny in overplaying the "I'm in over my head" comic relief...

Making Stevens, also similar to GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Star-Lord with his constant jukebox of classic rock deep tracks, the most important person but, again, this is mostly about the monsters... and Kong has so many human expressions and qualities, he might as well start speaking English at this point...

Overall what works for ALL characters is not only the sense of adventure but the flowing style of exploring new worlds (or various areas of that world), making what's unknown/right-around-the-bend more important than the inevitable titan smack-downs: one surrounding the pyramids, the other on the beaches of Rio...

Wherein THE NEW EMPIRE is almost too good to be true being overloaded with tons of practically nonstop CGI-action: but it's not a terrible way to relax and let the creatures do all the work since, after all, it's THEIR movie.