After the failure of The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, it was a decade before the next attempt to bring the Oz stories to the screen. In 1924, silent comedian Larry Semon paid a small fortune for the rights to Frank Baum’s first Oz novel – and then proceeded to toss 99% of the book aside, creating instead a nightmarish pseudo-Oz tale featuring bottom jokes, sexual harassment and vomiting farmyard animals.
That whirring noise you hear is Frank Baum spinning in his grave.
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While we’re on the subject of horrors, I’ve also tried to fix up the screenshots in my review of ZOMBIE, although I think they’re still a bit dark.
#1 by Chad on April 13, 2009 - 6:37 pm
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That’s really interesting. I always heard a vague thing now and then about it, but didn’t know much more than that Laurel of Laurel and Hardy was in it.
I always take note of the bizarre motifs various writers and directors latch on to (like my own obsession with multiple personality disorder a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder) , but I can’t think of any off hand that are more esoteric than water towers and people falling off of them.
#2 by El Santo on April 13, 2009 - 7:52 pm
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How about long-haired men pissing on trees? Andreas Schnaas puts it in every single movie he makes. (Or at any rate, he’s put it in every one that I’ve seen. Anthropophagous 2000, Nikos the Impaler, and one or two others still elude me [although I confess that I haven’t been looking very hard…].)
#3 by Chad on April 13, 2009 - 9:46 pm
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I have to admit, that…is one hell of a unique visual motif.
#4 by lyzard on April 13, 2009 - 9:51 pm
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Is it Schnaas himself?
#5 by El Santo on April 14, 2009 - 9:55 am
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No, he’s usually the one sneaking up behind the tree-watering guy with a meat cleaver.
#6 by Blake Matthews on April 14, 2009 - 11:33 am
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Someone actually found it necessary to remake/update “Anthropophagous” 20 years later?
#7 by El Santo on April 14, 2009 - 2:48 pm
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Yup. And if you’d like some idea of what that remake/update might be like, go read my reviews of Zombie ’90: Extreme Pestilence and the aptly named Violent Shit trilogy. Same director as Anthropophagous 2000.
#8 by Blake Matthews on April 14, 2009 - 3:36 pm
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I’ve already read those reviews a few times and get the same deranged interest in watching them…and then I say to myself, “genital mutilation” and I revert back to normal sanity.
#9 by lyzard on April 14, 2009 - 6:33 pm
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There seems to me something oddly appropriate about a discussion of Larry Semon’s The Wizard Of Oz mutating into one about Andreas Schnaas.
#10 by Braineater on April 14, 2009 - 9:23 pm
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I think the projectile-vomiting duck makes the segue so much easier.
#11 by supersonic on April 19, 2009 - 11:55 am
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Let’s see if I can guess how you voted in the take-the-queen-off-the-money referendum. (I’ll bet I can get it in two guesses!)
#12 by KeithA on April 20, 2009 - 1:11 pm
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I’d love to have a picture of Queen on my money!
Oh wait. THE Queen. I still want my Freddie Mercury dollar.
#13 by supersonic on April 20, 2009 - 2:29 pm
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Obverse: left profile of Frederic Mercury. Reverse: the fireplace from which Brian May’s guitar was built.
#14 by Rel on April 20, 2009 - 3:07 pm
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You know, given the way things are over here with competitions to design coins right now… we could make that happen.
#15 by MatthewF on April 21, 2009 - 3:25 am
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In the UK we had a stamp with Freddie Mecury on it, and in the background a tenny tiny image of Roger Taylor, sitting behind the drums. This caused trouble as the only living person allowed on stamps is the queen.
The useless fact department.