It’s been an… odd couple of weeks here at Casa del Santo. Can-can dancers have a way of showing up in the damnedest places:
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), in which scientists stranded in Southern California– er, I mean, on a romote South Pacific island– are stalked by giant, brain-eating land crabs…
Bare Behind Bars (1980), in which we learn that Brazilian women’s prison movies are sort of like Brazilian Mardi Gras– weirder, raunchier, and more obsessively stylized than everybody else’s…
The Bowery at Midnight (1942), in which somebody looks to have decided halfway through shooting a crime programmer that they’d really rather be making a horror flick instead…
The Clairvoyant (1934), in which a phony psychic accidentally discovers that his powers are real after all, and that turns out to be about as much fun as such things usually are in the movies…
Cry of the Werewolf (1944), in which you might as well just watch Cat People instead…
Fairy Tales (1978), in which the Handsome Prince will understandably settle for nothing less than Linnea Quigley…
The Mistress of Atlantis (1932), in which the world’s most famous lost civilization isn’t remotely where you’d think it would be, and its immortal sorceress-queen has an origin story you’ll never believe even after you’ve seen it…
and…
Salon Kitty (1976), in which Heinrich Himmler goes BIG PIMPIN’.
#1 by lyzard on December 16, 2007 - 3:28 pm
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Hot damn, boy! I was coming back to say something to you like, “Okay, now you’ve had time to read the rest of the J&H reviews….” Now I’d be surprised to hear you had time to breathe!
Bowery At Midnight is a scream, isn’t it?? We only just watched it a few days ago. So, are the guys the basement undead? – is John Archer undead at the end? – or do we just have some spectacularly lousy shots in this film?
#2 by HP on December 17, 2007 - 12:10 am
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Re. Georg Pabst: You must see Die Buechse von Pandora/Pandora’s Box. It’s a silent, so it doesn’t suffer from the multiple-cast issues you describe. It’s based on Franz Wedekind’s Lulu cycle of plays. Louise Brooks will make you forget every other woman who has ever lived. It’s got comedy, drama, spectacle. It’s got sex and violence. And there’s a “special guest” in the last reel who, IMO, qualifies this movie as an honorary horror film.
#3 by KeithA on December 17, 2007 - 11:00 am
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Is there a tradition of thinking that Atlantis is under the Sahara rather than under the ocean somewhere? Because I’ve seen a lot of Italian films that assume the location to be under the Saharan sand.
#4 by El Santo on December 17, 2007 - 11:04 am
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I don’t know if it’s a tradition so much as just the makers of those Italian movies ripping off the novel on which The Mistress of Atlantis was based. For example, if I’m remembering correctly, Hercules and the Captive Women even has Atlantis being ruled by a queen named Antinea.
#5 by El Santo on December 17, 2007 - 11:05 am
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Oh– and there’s at least one Italian movie (The Siren of Atlantis, I think it’s called) that’s a direct remake of The Mistress of Atlantis.
#6 by Blake Matthews on December 17, 2007 - 11:20 am
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I’ll probably get blocked from the blog for this, but my favorite movie about Atlantis so far is the Disney cartoon. I love that movie. Granted, I haven’t seen “Conquerors of Atlantis” or “Raiders of Atlantis”, but the Disney cartoon sure beats “Atlantis the Lost Continent” and “Hercules and the Captive Women”, at least.
#7 by KeithA on December 17, 2007 - 4:30 pm
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But Hercules and the Captive Women affords you so many Uranus joke opportunities!
Regarding Salon Kitty — I have a guy who persistently emails me from time to time to remind that I’m a philistine for not understanding how powerful the movie’s message of “power corrupts” truly is. When I tell him that Caligula taught me that lesson much better, he doesn’t seem swayed. I place the blame for the 80s d-rock image of Nazis as frail, pale shirtless SS boys who have pricked their finger on the thorn of a black rose squarely on the shoulders of this film. Just once I’d like to have seen Goring stumble onto one of those inevitable “Propaganda” magazine photo shoots meant to accompany “sad concentration camp guard” poetry and bellow “vat ees dis???”
Man, have I really wandered off into bizarre reference with that one? I’m counting on El Santo sagely going, “Ah yes, Propaganda magazine. Where else would I have learned so much about Death in June?”
#8 by lyzard on December 17, 2007 - 7:56 pm
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I think that may come from Pierre Benoît’s novel, on which most of these films are at least putatively based. It’s the case in the first filmed version of the story, Jacques Feyder’s L’Atlantide (which, a propos of little, was at one point released in the US under the title Missing Husbands!!).
#9 by El Santo on December 17, 2007 - 8:28 pm
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“Man, have I really wandered off into bizarre reference with that one? I’m counting on El Santo sagely going, ‘Ah yes, Propaganda magazine. Where else would I have learned so much about Death in June?'”
Yeah, I know Propaganda, although I’ve never learned anything at all about Death in June from it (or from anywhere else, either, for that matter). It’s like the opposite of the cliche about Playboy— I merely thumb through it once in a while to look at the pictures. What? Goths are sexy. More irritating than a persistent earache, mind you, but sexy. Propaganda pictorials offer the opportunity to ogle them without running the risk of actually having to speak to them.
By the way, what’s “d-rock?” I’m familiar with “d-beat” (the annoying new name for bands that sound exactly like the second Discharge album), but I’ve never heard that term before.
#10 by supersonic on December 18, 2007 - 1:55 am
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Fun facts about the Tuareg, according to a book I once picked up at random in the library:
– If you want them to respect you, you should wear your fanciest clothes.
– They like to raid each others camps, and extract toll charges from anyone crossing their territory.
– The highest valued target of a raid is camels. The number two target is fine clothing.
– They make iridescent blue cloth by pounding blue dye into it, dry, with a hammer. This rubs off on their skin and makes them turn bluish.
– The color is enhanced by the fact that they do not bathe. Ever.
– They’ve been nominally Muslim for a long time, but never took it all that seriously until it became a rallying point for anticolonial fervor.
– It is claimed that homosexuality is completely absent from their culture.
– And not because they’re uptight. In fact, the standard Tuareg marriage is an open marriage.
– Respect for women’s rights is high. They are probably the least patriarchal of Muslim peoples.
– Almost no contagious diseases occur in the dry desert. The only widespread diseases they have are the sexually transmitted ones.
– When they raid each other, women are considered noncombatants, and don’t fear what the other side will do to them if their men lose the fight. (This can lead to trouble if they’re raided by non-Tuareg.)
– Traditionally, they regard everyone else as grossly inferior to themselves.
#11 by JessicaR. on December 18, 2007 - 1:56 am
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Well in the Atlantis is actually underneath Africa stakes you can’t forget that beloved family classic “Alien in L.A.” which posits further that Atlantis is populatied by Australians. I myself have had my suspicions for years of such.
#12 by lyzard on December 18, 2007 - 3:29 am
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Gasp!! She knows….too much….
#13 by KeithA on December 18, 2007 - 10:45 am
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D-rock is what people called the stuff that other people called darkwave, and that everyone thinks of as Goth now. D for Death, of course. But specific to the 80s, so Bauhaus, Christian Death, Cocteau Twins, so on and so forth.
Oh, and buying Propaganda just to look at the purty girls — I, of course, have NO idea what you are talking about.