Review – The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

This time around, Hammer tries its hand at movie-izing Gaston Leroux’s classic tale. Herbert Lom dons a one-eyed phantom mask to star, but for the most part this is a cheap British reheat of the plot from the 1943 version. Mildly amusing

Review – The Brides of Dracula

No Dracula. Not really much in the way of brides. Instead Hammer serves up a muddled mess of a picture, one of those things that looks like it was torn apart at some point in the production process and never sewed back together quite right. Ingénue gets stranded at an inn and then taken in by a baroness who keeps her handsome-yet-creepy son chained in his room. Do I even have to say that he’s a vampire? When our gullible heroine unchains him a festival of sucking (literally and figuratively) commences. Even Peter Cushing can’t do much to save this one. See if desperate

Review – Stephen King’s Thinner

Are you a successful lawyer with a weight problem? Have you recently killed the daughter of a fortune teller in an auto accident? If so, better take your punishment rather than walking free with the aid of a friendly judge and police witness. Otherwise you might end up with a terrible curse that makes you lose weight until you waste away to nothing. The movie follows the “Richard Bachman” source novel fairly closely, making an occasional improvement here and there. Overall the most interesting thing about the story (aside from the novel nature of the curse) is the conflict between ancient magic and modern, non-magical viciousness. Mildly amusing

Review – Haunted Boat

Ghost stories are entertaining. Sea stories are entertaining. But this sea ghost story is so far from entertaining it isn’t even funny. It starts out as a simple story of a guy who inherits a haunted boat (hence the title) and takes a group of his friends out for a cruise. But it swiftly degenerates into a meandering mess of barely-related subplots that serve no function beyond providing a handful of very cheap thrills. Even if this ever had a chance to be good, it’s too ineptly produced to have any entertainment value at all. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Letters from Iwo Jima

Here we have the other half of Flags of Our Fathers, the story of the battle for Iwo Jima told from the Japanese perspective. Overall this one’s the better of the two. It’s a straightforward war-is-hell account of the doomed efforts of a small handful of soldiers to defend positions in the face of overwhelming odds. Of course we also get plenty of cliché hapless-soldiers-versus-cruel-officers stuff. But overall this is a reasonably touching production, a nice blend of big budget and personal storytelling. Mildly amusing

Mixed emotions about the ninth plan

Last week I watched Plan 9 from Outer Space for the first time. I’m not quite sure how I managed to escape the experience for 42 years. I’ve seen scenes from this classic in any number of “worst movie ever made” shows. And of course the behind-the-scenes story is extensively, lovingly re-created in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood biopic. But whole nine yards of the plan eluded me – or I eluded it – until now.

I was surprised at the range of emotions the movie inspired. The most obvious reaction to it is a sense of derisive mirth. It is, after all, one of the worst movies ever made. That’s a hard-earned distinction based on an impressive uniformity of terribleness. The script is as bad as the acting, which in turn is as bad as the editing and direction. Awfulness on this level can’t help but be funny.

But the joke gets old after awhile. I suppose 10 or 15 minutes of this kind of thing would have been hysterical, but after more than an hour of it the incompetence gag wears out its welcome like a late-in-the-show sketch on Saturday Night Live. Indeed, it becomes downright monotonous.

I suspect I’m not alone in my opinion about the short-lived nature of the amusement. I note that most of the quotes and clips I’ve seen elsewhere were taken from the first 20 minutes or so of the picture.

But more than anything else – even more than the hilarity of its awfulness – this is a sad movie. Most obviously, it’s sad that this was the end of Bela Lugosi’s career. The poor guy was legendary for playing Dracula in the Todd Browning production that set the standard for all Draculas to follow. But by this point in his career, all he can do is stumble around a bit. He died before Wood could get anything on film beyond a handful of shots of Lugosi leaving his house, going back into his house, and briefly strolling in a graveyard. Kids, don’t do heroin.

But more than that, it’s Wood’s sincerity that’s the real heart-breaker. He obviously means to make a good movie, yet has no idea how to go about it. He isn’t like the hundreds – no, thanks to digital production, make that thousands – of crap-slingers who blithely churn out the worst kind of garbage without the slightest regard for what they do. He obviously cares. Frankly, that takes most of the sport out of picking on him and his compatriots.

I think Ed Wood has something to teach us about ourselves, the way we’ve become in the 21st century. But that will need to wait until a future entry.

Review – Night Creatures

Hammer serves up a little non-supernatural drama for a change. Peter Cushing stars as the parson of a small English coastal town. The locals make their living smuggling liquor in from France without paying the high taxes on it, a practice that catches the attention of the authorities, and a ship full of arrogant British Navy men show up to investigate. The plot twists and turns a bit before it’s done, making this an entertaining little picture but not much else. Mildly amusing