Review – Horror Express

This shares some plot elements with The Thing and some actors with classic Hammer productions, but that’s as close as this gets to being good. Christopher Lee plays a scientist who digs up an ancient, semi-human “fossil” (looks more like a partially mummified corpse) and crates it up for shipment to England. Unfortunately, thanks to some meddling from a rival scientist (Peter Cushing), in a baggage car along the Trans-Siberian Railway the thing wakes up and goes on a rampage. Turns out it’s actually an alien that can move from body to body, leaving a trail of blank-eyed, brain-absorbed corpses in its wake. Though it occasionally manages to border on spooky, for the most part it wears out its welcome long before it departs. Mildly amusing

Review – The House of the Dead (1980)

Fleeing a torrential rainstorm, a guy enters a seedy business. The place turns out to be a mortuary with a creepy undertaker and four closed coffins. Do I even need to tell you that it turns into a horror anthology piece? Evil children attack a crabby teacher, a serial killer films his crimes, two investigators vie for the title of world’s best detective, and a guy is tortured for no apparent reason. The fourth segment was in some ways the forerunner of torture porn, but it didn’t have anywhere near enough gore to qualify as a direct ancestor. Though I usually get a kick out of vignette movies like this, for some reason (cheap production? bad script? lame stories?) this one didn’t do much for me. Mildly amusing

Review – Oasis of the Zombies

Some oasis. Very few zombies. The thing that stood out the most about this picture was the soundtrack music. It sounded like it was being performed by an unsupervised eight year old at the Wurlitzer organ store at the mall. A British officer survives a fierce fight that kills all his men as well as the treasure-toting Nazis they ambushed at an oasis. Years later the officer’s son leads an expedition of his lame-brained friends to find the six mil in gold that should still be there. Unfortunately for them (not to mention a film crew and a band of crooks), the place is bigger on the walking dead than it is on the bullion bricks. The make-up for some of the briefly-appearing zombies is a little ahead of its time, but otherwise this is strictly amateur hour. See if desperate

Review – Pippi in the South Seas

Sweden’s most famous superhuman brat is off on another adventure with her two sidekicks and menagerie in tow. This time she’s learned that her long-lost father is being held prisoner by pirates. After journeying across the sea and kicking much pirate ass, our heroine is reunited with papa and on her way back home. The ludicrous story and dreadful voice-overs are in perfect keeping with the other movies in the series, so if you liked them then odds are you’ll like this one too. Mildly amusing

Review – A Shot in the Dark

This is the only Inspector Clouseau movie that technically isn’t a Pink Panther picture. And though it’s not officially part of the set, it has all the elements. The physical comedy here is great stuff, which is a good thing because the picture depends heavily on it. Peter Sellers does his usual terrific job as the bumbling detective, this time trying to prove that an attractive woman is innocent of murder despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Mildly amusing

Review – The Fly 2

This is much more of a standard horror movie than its predecessor. The kid Geena Davis’s character was pregnant with at the end of the first one is born and immediately “adopted” by an egomaniacal corporate executive who ensconces him in a lab. Eventually daddy’s turning-into-a-fly curse begins to overtake him, sending him scrambling to find a cure. Because this movie predates the fancy computer graphics they would doubtless have used had they been available, it ends up depending heavily on latex puppets that don’t always hold up, especially in close-ups. Otherwise, however, it’s standard movie monster fare with just enough anti-animal-testing rhetoric stirred in to make it worthwhile. Mildly amusing

Review – Lust for Life

This filmed version of Irving Stone’s biography of Vincent Van Gogh is both far less grandiose and far more depressing than the tale of Michelangelo painting of the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel. Kirk Douglas plays the tormented painter, receiving the role based either on his superficial resemblance to the artist or to his eager desire to overact every single scene. A lot of the drama focuses on the relationship between Van Gogh and Gaugin (Anthony Quinn), which means that much of the dialogue is devoted to arguments about the finer points of painting. The life story of anyone this crazy should have made a much more interesting movie. Mildly amusing