For the first part of our year-long celebration of our 20th anniversary, we tackled what we called our “core competencies”, that is, those topic areas we had in mind when founding our sites in the first place.
In this, not surprisingly, we dealt with material where there could well be overlap between our sites. For instance, El Santo reviewed From Hell It Came, a wacky walking-tree opus with plenty of mad science; so you would wouldn’t be surprised to find it over at AYCYAS! Likewise, Will tackled the first four parts of Shake Rattle and Roll, horror anthologies out of the Philippines, a country whose genre films Santo has examined on a fairly regular basis.
This time around, though, we’ll each be tackling what we’re calling our “special subjects”: those subgenres that each of us has pretty much entirely to themselves.
WEBSITE | FILM | PREVIEW |
1000 Misspent Hours and Counting | ||
And You Call Yourself A Scientist! | The Crowded Sky (1960) | In fact – in a 105-minute movie – the actual disaster in The Crowded Sky occupies perhaps 15 seconds of screentime, with its consequences and resolution occupying a mere 7 minutes more. And yet no-one watching The Crowded Sky would dream of classifying it as anything other than a disaster movie. In this, it acts as the perfect illustration of my seemingly reductive definition of a disaster movie as “a movie about a disaster”, inasmuch as the 93 minutes that precede this film’s 15-second disaster exist purely in order to get us to that moment. |
Braineater | La Maldición de la llorona (1960) | As I mentioned earlier, this is a film in which men have very little part. Even God is conspicuously absent from the movie, which is unusual for a supernatural vampire film of this vintage. Not even Satan dares risk his presence here: the Crying Woman wields an older magic. In this version of the story, la llorona is a sort of devil-figure from some ancient fertility cult: an evil deity who murders her own offspring and brings only death.
(Whoops! There I go with the undergraduate bullshit again…) |
Jabootu’s Bad Movie Dimension | ||
Teleport City | Wahan Ke Log (1967) | It’s a cause for celebration when a B movie delivers on its concepts as spectacularly as Wahan Ke Log does. Especially given Wahan Ke Log is an Indian B movie and must shoehorn in its disparate genre element alongside all of the requisite singing, dancing and romancing. For this, all it asks in return is that you suspend — or completely abandon — your disbelief and fill in the inevitable gaps left by budgetary shortfall with your imagination. Like the best Indian popular films, it exhibits an expansive generosity in its sincere desire to entertain. |
The Unknown Movies |