Movies

Il gatto a nove code (1971) Also known as The Cat O' Nine Tails, this is Dario Argento's second film, and the first I have gotten Donna to watch. Strangely, it is also the first of his films I ever saw, unknowingly viewing it in Buena Vista Colorado while on vacation with my mother. I don't recall what we thought of it at the time, but half a dozen scenes have stuck with me ever since, when many other movies have passed from my memory. Rather an over-elaborate muddle but filled with promise. Though his films came to indulge in far too much blatant stabbing and raping than I care for, one feature common to them all is that you can never, ever guess what will happen next. This one featured a baffling burglary at a genetics lab (and a completely off-the-wall "explanation" of the XYY chromosome idea) which leads to one murder after another, to be solved by blind puzzle-enthusiast Karl Malden and reporter James Franciscus. Argento movies often seem to be drawn out way too long, leaving one quite weary at the end, especially with the soundtrack (Morricone in this case) devolving into grating shrieks at tense moments, and there are plenty of tense moments. None of his movies are truly great, but all have a touch of greatness to them, being genuinely imaginative and innovative in both story and film technique. 7/10

Addendum: It should be noted that there is one scene shot in the composing room of a large newspaper, featuring dozens and dozens of linotypes. I always like to see linotypes in a movie.

Movies

The Time Travelers (1964) Directed by Ib Melchior, whose contribution to fantastic film ranges from Reptilicus to Deathrace 2000. This is another one I can't believe I missed out on for all these years. An experiment strands three scientists and their comedy relief assistant in the post-apocalyptic future of 2071, when the last unmutated humans, aided by their android robots, are desperately building a spaceship to Alpha Centauri. Standing the dictum, "a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," on its head, stage magic and sleight of hand tricks are used to depict advanced technology, like the removal and replacement of an android head in one unedited shot. I always enjoyed similar films, like Beyond the Time Barrier and World Without End, though they left me vaguely unsatisfied in their conclusion, but The Time Travelers extends its unique and extremely imaginative ideas to an amazing finale. Low-budget and deliberately silly at times it is also very colorful, and I cannot stress how important that is to me, especially in this modern age when advanced cinematic technology is used to make mediocre films look "serious" by dulling them down to muddy browns and greens, or creating "futuristic" effects (as in the soon-to-be-released Tron movie) which closely resemble archaic two-strip technicolor. For me this was an entirely enjoyable 10/10.

Movies

Mysterious Planet (1982) Ambitious amateur SF made in New Hampshire USA - it's Verne's Mysterious Island, only it's a planet instead. What it lacks in budget and finish it makes up in enthusiasm, with space models, stop motion monsters and full-size monster heads, matte paintings and every variety of old-school special effect. Director Brett Piper apparently went into the direct-to-video kitschy monster movie field after this, the kind of movie that has to pretend it's a joke because it knows it kind of sucks. This one is still naive enough to take itself seriously, even though they can't always keep things in frame or set the aperture right, and the final dubbing was never done properly in some sequences. Not entirely watchable, but interesting as an artifact and admirable for its audacity. 4/10

The Great and Terrible

UPSIDE DOWN CHIN WITH EYES DRAWN ON,

talking to a little model person.

Movies

Sei Donne Per L'assassino (1964) Directed by Mario Bava, also known as Blood and Black Lace. Masked leather-clad fiend murders beautiful women. A Bava movie is never truly great, but this is as good as they come - hallucinogenically colorful, with densely layered scenes and a forced shocker ending. If you need to see one, you might as well see this one. 6/10

Movies

The She-Creature (1956) Hypnotic-regression monster movie inspired by the Bridey Murphy craze. I expected more of a direct girl-to-monster transformation like that one where the woman turned into a gorilla, but this is some kind of manifestation of a soul, kind of thing. Directed by Edward L. Cahn, and written by Lou Rusoff, its badfilm pedigree is impeccable. Not extremely compelling or surprising except for how the ancient fishlike sea monster has long hair and big irrelevant boobs to show it is a female. Entertaining dialog at some points. Harmless. 5/10

Movies

Le beau Serge (1958) Claude Chabrol's accomplished first film. A young man returns to his hometown to find his old friend a cruel bitter drunk, and makes everything worse by trying to help. A movie of character, with the protagonist's errors encapsulated in the parish priest who blames the villagers for not letting him help them, instead of trying to find out what they really need. Has a fine nostalgic feel throughout, like a movie you have seen before but entirely forgotten. Just the thing for when you need to see a French semi-classic. 9/10

The Vulture (1967) Absurd British multigenerational-curse monster mystery, one of the few such set in Cornwall. After a vehemently unsuperstitious schoolmarm sees a human-headed vulture bursting out of an 18th century grave, brilliantined B-actor Robert Hutton, a visiting American Nuclear Scientist, comes to startling conclusions based on the scantiest physical evidence, bafflingly tying together teleportation by nuclear transmutation, and the bird-man worship of Easter Island. Broderick Crawford and Akim Tamiroff are the aging name actors dragged into this jaw-dropping, head-smacking absurdity. The script and dialog creep into the fringes of Ed Wood territory with their nonsensical non-sequiturs and bizarre leaps, as well as the dreadful acting from some tertiary characters. Tamiroff is one of my favorite unappreciated actors, and he certainly doesn't get much to work with here. They made the very wise choice of never providing a beauty shot of the idiotically conceived monster, but the attack sequences, when people get shoulder-grabbed by two big bird legs from above, are quite sufficient. Really quite astonishing at times, for all the wrong reasons, right up to the very last moment. Not a huge bulldada classic but definitely marbled with strong veins of it. Most normal people would not find it very watchable. 7/10 for screwiness.

HOW TO BUILD A PORCH

In case you are interested, you can see how a NON-DUMBASS builds a porch here. It's obvious from the first picture how different it is from the COMPLETELY STUPID way of building a porch.

HOW NOT TO BUILD A PORCH

I knew I was going to have to rebuild the porch because the boards by the front door were getting pulpy, and certain signs gave evidence of major construction errors. I opened it up today to take a look and it is even more absurd than I expected. Look at the picture below, and click on it if you want to see it real big. (I have no idea how the pictures here got saved as "j.w.howard" or who that even is but I am just going with it.) The bow you see in the 2x6 that forms the rail is not lens distortion. If I were building something to support a roof I would want one solid beam holding it up. These folks thought otherwise. They laid the floor down, then built the railing on top of it, then set the three support pillars on top of that. For some reason, each of the vertical members supporting the rail is made of one fairly recent 2x4, paired up with two short pieces of very old wood stacked on top of each other. I can't even imagine what the use of that would be. There is no wooden beam running along the front on top of the foundation, just old cinderblocks that they set the ends of the floorboards on. I don't know if there is even any kind of beam inside the three box pillars, or if they are the actual support for the roof.

Below you see what appears to be the primary support for the corner of the roof - one red brick standing on end, bolstered to some unguessable degree by the boards to the right of it, the inner one of which isn't even touching the foundation. See how the flooring is at least an inch lower at the end? The floorboards under each pillar are pushed down at least an inch, showing again that there is no single bottom-to-top support beam like any reasonably intelligent person would use.



Here is what's underneath, as viewed through an access portal at the end opposite the steps. Two long beams running the length of the porch, resting on one beam in the middle - not otherwise joined together except by the floorboards. That beam they are resting on is pretty rotted where it rests on the foundation, and it looks like it is just propped up with that pyramidal block sitting on the dirt.



Nothing about this, not one thing, is the way it ought to be. There should be a wooden beam running along the foundation where the cinder blocks are. There should be at least four support joists running from that beam to the front of the house. Those joists in turn should be tied together with two or three joists spanning the distance between them, making a solid framework for the floorboards to rest on. First and foremost there should be one solid vertical support beam at each corner and one in the center. That is what I am going to have to do.

Abbott and Costello Project Suspended

I have decided to end my effort to watch all the Abbott and Costello movies ever made, because the last four are just SO LOUSY that I absolutely cannot sit through them. I'm keeping them around for a while in case I suddenly have a head injury which will make them viewable. To replace this project I am doing something perhaps even more insane, watching all of the Joe Besser "Three" Stooges shorts. I started with the last few Shemps, three of which were partially filmed at the time of his sudden demise and crudely cobbled together with doubles hiding their faces behind things, and lines like "I sure hope Shemp brings back something good to eat!" It must have been rough having to finish those up with the guy dead like that. Anyway, I find I am one of the few people on earth who actually like the Joe Besser films. He himself considered them "The Stooges with Joe Besser" rather than actual Three Stooges shorts. I like them, because they are bizarre, nonsensical, and quite crudely made.

Movies

El hombre perseguido por un Ovni (1976) Also enigmatically known as The Man of Ganimedes, this thrifty Spanish-made story of a man persecuted by a UFO is full of fun. Trippy light and film effects, NASA stock footage, gratuitous nudity and automotive excitement. Biomechanical humanoids from a flying saucer want to abduct this guy, so they steal his little grey Simca sedan and shove it off a cliff, then hoist it up with their saucer and ditch it IN SPACE, then chase him around and he fights with the yellow-blooded monstrosities a few times and eventually the silver-handed Master Controller in the motorcycle helmet with lights on it gets him on board the saucer to explain it all to him. Full of incident and bright color, wildly varying film quality and also some gratuitous nudity, which I may have mentioned, but pretty irrational plotwise. It's very important for this sort of film to have lots of extremely colorful bits, even if they are irrelevant or nonsensical - I mean ESPECIALLY if they are irrelevant or nonsensical. Just the type of movie that has me chortling with glee and exclaiming, "This is SO GREAT!" I salute semi-professional director Juan Carlos Olaria for a real good effort. Not really watchable by normal folks though, so 6/10.

He won't escape us with his car IN SPACE like this!

Movies

ZOTZ! (1962) Offbeat comedy with a jingoistic cold-war twist. Tom Poston is an absent-minded professor who comes into possession of an ancient coin which gives him magical powers. I was old enough to see it in the theater when it came out but not old enough to remember much but a couple of the more spectacular scenes, though anyone who was a child at that time probably has the word burned into a secret part of their brain. The comedy is on a very basic level, so I found it quite amusing. Includes a cat being chased by a toupee, Margaret Dumont getting a cake in the face, Mike Mazurki as a Russian thug, and a surprise appearance by Louie Nye as the inventor of a death ray. Fun for the whole family. 8/10

Movies

El planeta de las mujeres invasoras (1966) A flying saucer from the Planet of the Female Invaders lands at an amusement park in Mexico which has a Flight to the Moon ride that looks exactly like the flying saucer of the Female Invaders, so they replace it with their flying saucer to capture people to take back to their planet so they can use their lungs to make some kind of breathing machine which will allow the women to live on Earth because they can only breathe Earth air for a limited time, and eventually they find that adult lungs are too old so they have to capture a lot of Earth children to use their lungs for their nefarious purposes, but the wicked Queen of the planet has a twin sister who is as good as her sister is wicked (both played by the statuesque and leggy Lorena Vasquez) who helps the Earth people in their efforts to escape. Gloriously inexpensive, it shows how much use you can get out of a hallway set with a rear-projection screen at the far end - just change the background to a different piece of fantastic architecture and it's a whole different scene. The film is enhanced by subtitles which translate the dialogue, but not always entirely into English. I don't know why I ever bother trying to better myself watching highbrow intellectual stuff or even things that are supposed to be moderately good, when this sort of absurd primitive fantasy makes me SO HAPPY. This is perfectly wonderful throughout. 10/10

Off to Planet Sibila!

Throne Room of Queen Adastraea

Welcome Earth Man!

Movies

The Guatemalan Handshake (2006) A Quirky Independent Film (QIF). I ordered this from the library because I saw a review that said it embodied everything that's wrong with Indy Film. I'd go even farther and say that it is the standard by which all QIFs should be judged. It has more quirk in the first five minutes than most other films have in their whole runtime. Doofy looking goobers with bad haircuts who dress funny and stand, squinting. An Eccentric Vehicle. An inexplicably multi-ethnic family. Hyperactive and/or deranged secondary characters. Voice-over by a child. 1970s furniture. Abrupt insertion of a plaintive duet. Incident and oddity instead of story and character. I admit I quit after half of it had wandered aimlessly by, because it really didn't matter whether I finished watching it or not. Comes in a two disc set, the second being short films by the filmmaker, and by people in the movie who were either into filmmaking before, or got into filmmaking after being in this movie. I didn't watch any of them, or read the booklet either. 10/10 but not in a good way, just because it is the absolute ideal of its kind.

Oh look. Trading Cards.

The Human Bomb

The Human Bomb is the title of an episode of the true crime radio drama Calling All Cars from December 20th 1933. A masked man carrying a box full of dynamite forces his way into the office of the Chief of Police and threatens to blow up City Hall unless the owner of a local railroad is brought to the office to promise to raise wages for his employees. The bomb is so arranged that the bomber's hand is holding a detonator inside the box which will set off the bomb if released. The bomber is depicted as a deranged German named Karl (or Carl) Weiss.

The Human Bomb is also the title of a short film made in 1939 by a production company in Astoria, Queens, New York as part of a series called Your True Adventures. In this version the bomber demands $200,000 from the director of a streetcar company.

The seventh episode of the Dragnet radio drama, aired July 21 1949, seems to be untitled but is generally known as Attempted City Hall Bombing. In this extremely tense version, the bomber (ably played by Parley Baer) is named Vernon Carney, and his incoherent demand is for his brother to be released from jail.

Jack Webb liked the story enough to use it as the pilot for the television version of Dragnet, titled The Human Bomb and originally aired as an episode of Chesterfield Sound-off Time, Hosted by Bob Hope, on December 16, 1951. In this version the name and motivation of the bomber are the same as the radio episode.

Who was the original Human Bomb, and where did his bombing attempt take place?

Movies

Lilly Turner (1933) Surprisingly unsentimental downbeat melodrama of a woman trying to grab a bit of happiness between tough breaks, wandering through life in a cheap magic act and a crummy traveling Health Lecture show. Star Ruth Chatterton (best known for her role in Dodsworth) temporarily left the stage for the movies in the 1930s and I was startled to find that she was 41 when she made this - she looks a decade younger at least. She was an outstanding actress. Frank McHugh goes beyond his usual comedy relief role to become a genuinely sympathetic yet flawed character, Guy Kibbee is borderline repulsive as the perpetually ailing quack pamphlet-peddler, and unfamiliar face Robert Barrat as the deranged and obsessed strongman is both frightening and pathetic. I was victimized by my lifelong exposure to Hollywood cliches and so was startled by the unusually grim events of this fascinating story, which would have been heavily sanitized only a few years later. Donna and I both enjoyed it quite a bit. 9/10

Movies

Human Highway (1982) Eccentric improvisational amateur comedy following the antics of the denizens of a roadside diner on Earth's last day. Musician Neil Young said, "I know what, let's make a movie!" and got his chums Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, and DEVO and they all made a movie. Some parts are very funny, some parts require patience. I found the bits featuring Young and Tamblyn as a dopey duo the most entertaining. Had only an extremely limited theatrical release and was only released to VHS years later, but it is available and anyone who really needs to see this (mostly DEVO fans) probably already has. Wells from the same font as Timothy Carey's The World's Greatest Sinner, but it's the sort of thing that if you aren't really sure you want to see it you probably ought to get some reading done instead. 5/10

Movies

The Woman Eater (1958) British-made shocker in which a mad scientist seeks a serum to bring the dead back to life, using the fluids of a carnivorous plant (a big hairy heap with three pairs of waving arms) which feeds on attractive young women. You'd think with a premise like that you could get some sort of thrills out of it, but sadly no. 3/10

En Effuillant la Marguerite a.k.a. Mademoiselle Striptease (1956) Crude "comedy" of errors in which teenage Brigitte Bardot must secretly win a striptease contest. This is one of the lousiest French movies I have ever seen; as bad as an American movie, but with naked women. They did have a brief scene in a newspaper composing room with numerous linotypes, and I liked that, but you need more than linotypes and naked women to make a good movie. You can quote me on that. I have seen a half dozen Bardot movies from throughout her career but have never appreciated her appeal. She was a star, but never an actress, and she was wise to get out of the business. 2/10

Movies

Rebirth of Mothra (1996, 97, 98) Three children's fairy tale movies - the giant moth is removed from the Godzilla cycle and made into a goddess with magical transformation powers. Each film has three components - the combat between Mothra and another giant monster; conflict between her two priestesses and their wicked, robot-dragon-riding elder sister; and children in varying degrees of peril and self-development. In the first story the tricephalous flying quadruped Desghidora, who long ago destroyed all life on Mars, kills Original Cute and Furry Mothra and her caterpillar progeny becomes the new furrier, more powerful Mothra with the ability to split into thousands of normal-sized moths. In the second story, the foe is a nondescript product of Lemurian genetic engineering gone awry, who must be destroyed by the submarine four-winged flying fish transformation of Mothra, with the aid of three children who must find the secret treasure of the vast Lemurian Pyramid. In the final film, Mothra must travel 130 million years into the past to fight three-headed King Ghidora (who sucks up children and deposits them in a throbbing terror dome to kill later) back when he was still a prince, stomping around gobbling up dinosaurs like they were rats, then return transformed into a super-beautiful armored Mothra, but only by the aid of a brave boy and the three sisters who must learn to work together despite their differences. As an amateur of the fairy tale I enjoyed seeing this adaptation of the monster movie to the fairy tale form, and was interested to see that each film was placed in a different rural or island locale in contrast to the exclusively urban settings of older monster films. Each movie has colorful and imaginative spectacle as well as a certain amount of tedium. Unless one really enjoys children's movies, fairy tales, or giant monsters, this probably won't be of much interest. I found it fairly entertaining overall, and learned that Mothra, like other deities, gains her power from the hearts of those who love her and believe in her. 6/10