2019 was for me a year of unwanted adventures, even leaving aside the whole “the world is on frigging fire, both figuratively and literally” thing. A slow downward spiral of depression and declining health during the first half of the year culminated in mid-summer with what didn’t feel at the time like a near-death experience, but absolutely was one, followed by a hospital stay of several days. The second half, consequently, was all about acclimating myself to some rather drastic lifestyle changes, some of which I’m still fine-tuning. And then there was a bunch of stuff that I’m not going to talk about for the sake of other people’s privacy; suffice it to say that it all sucked. So if anybody’s been wondering why I’ve been incommunicado lately, now you know.
All the foregoing also factors into a decision I’ve been wrestling with for a while. Now that my life is getting back into some semblance of order, I’m beginning to regain some of my enthusiasm for writing about weird movies on the internet, but the fact is I’m desperately tired of having my increasingly limited time and energy for doing so overshadowed by the requirements of the next B-Masters roundtable. So in the interest of keeping 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting alive and well, I’m going on sabbatical from the Cabal. I’ll be back once my batteries are recharged (I’m thinking roughly a year from now), and if nobody objects, I’ll keep announcing my updates here on the B-Masters blog. The reviews below will be my last roundtable contributions for a while, though:
20th Anniversary Roundtable, Part 1 (which you already know about, but just for the sake of completeness):
Black Emanuelle (1975), in which the title character is neither strictly speaking Emanuelle nor strictly speaking black…
Evil Dead II (1987), in which surviving the night in a demon-haunted cabin doesn’t actually improve one’s situation much…
From Hell It Came (1957), in which an isolated Polynesian tribe could use the services of a good lumberjack…
Goodbye, Emmanuelle (1977), in which our heroine starts to wonder whether this “free love” thing is all it’s cracked up to be…
and…
Martin (1977), in which George Romero gives us a much more satisfying answer to the riddle, “When is a vampire movie not a vampire movie?” than Val Lewton managed to.
20th Anniversary Roundtable, Part 2 (which you might already have seen on my site, but connectivity troubles prevented me from announcing here):
And Then There Were None (1945), in which Agatha Christie sure does know how to throw a party…
Get Crazy (1983), in which no show I ever booked went this far out of control, but most of them usually felt like they were about to…
Pink Flamingos (1972), in which you never can tell what some people will get ego about…
and…
Viva Knievel! (1979), in which a guy can’t even jump a Harley over 150 feet of lions and tigers in peace anymore!
20th Anniversary Roundtable, Part 3 (which I interpreted very narrowly to mean movies that I’d already tried to review, but never quite managed to make the words flow):
The Bat People (1974), which could almost have been mistaken for something from 1956, if you’d seen it on a black and white TV back when…
and…
The Dungeonmaster (1984), which has nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons, but oddly does tie in semi-subliminally with the early-80’s arcade boom.
20th Anniversary Rountable, Part 4:
A Cold Night’s Death (1973), in which even the best union can’t do anything about these working conditions…
The Eyes of the Panther (1989), in which there’s someone out there for everybody– even werecats…
The Seventh Curse (1986), in which our hero’s pecker arguably has the highest kill count in the film…
and…
Son of Samson (1960), in which Maciste returns to the screen after an absence of more than 30 years.
Meanwhile, I did manage to review a few other things, too, amid the scramble to keep up with the roundtables:
Blood Beach (1980), in which (say it with me) just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, you can’t get there…
It, Chapter Two (2019), in which splitting up the unreasonably huge book for translation to celluloid wasn’t such a good idea after all…
Rebirth of Mothra (1996), in which Toho’s other mon-star gets the Heisei treatment…
and…
Us (2019), in which some things really are better left unexplained– and the explanation had better be good if we’re going to get one anyway.
El Santo rules the wasteland-- and also 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.
#1 by RogerBW on January 13, 2020 - 3:10 pm
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Speaking as an enthusiastic reader, I think there’s no virtue in flogging yourself to write a thing that you’re not enjoying when enjoyment is one of the main things you get out of it. You do you, as the young people say; I’d rather read one piece you liked writing than ten written to meet an obligation.
#2 by RogerBW on January 13, 2020 - 11:39 pm
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The Bierce story seems very likely also to have been the inspiration for Sayers’ short The Cyprian Cat, in which an ailurophobic man takes a pot-shot at a cat and finds his friend’s wife with a bullet in her.
I get the feeling that Asian filmmakers are just as willing as Western ones to say “well, the classic [monster] does this, but our version is different” – to the point that there may sometimes be very little connection to the original legend, if any. To me as a gamer it’s important to build a consistent setting, but sometimes “it’s just darn weird” is good enough.
#3 by DamonD on January 15, 2020 - 6:08 am
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Hope you get the time and space you need, thank you for all the reviews (especially linking so many ones here I haven’t caught up on) and just take care of yourself.
#4 by Blake on January 15, 2020 - 8:30 am
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Glad to see you reviewing SEVENTH CURSE, which I haven’t seen yet.
You talked about the division of labor between director and action director. I can tell you that a fight choreographer is more or less a mercenary for hire, while an action director has a more active role, working with the director, even suggesting script changes to fit his ideas for action scenes.
It’s like Yuen Cheung-Yan working on CHARLIE’S ANGELS (2000). He has said in interviews that he was hired to make the girls copy the moves from IRON MONKEY (1993) and that’s it. That’s purely a choreographer gig.
Now Yuen Bun was in the early years of his solo career in 1986. He had cut his teeth working for the Shaw Brothers under action director Tong Gaai in the early 80s (You would be familiar with Tong Gaai for his work on SUPER INFRA MAN). With regards to Yuen Bun (who studied at the same Peking Opera School as Jackie Chan), I’m not sure if he would’ve had a lot of say in the directions the film would go in at that point in his career. I think he was still finding his voice (“You need me to do a heroic bloodshed/bullet ballet film? Ok. You want me to do a Girls n’ Guns film? Alright.”). By 1992, he had set up a partnership of sorts with Tsui Hark that lasted more than two decades. Nonetheless, those late period Shaw Brothers films he worked on had some very complex wirework in them (especially SHAOLIN INTRUDERS), so he was definitely up to the challenge of choreographing that Old Ancestor fight.
#5 by blake on January 15, 2020 - 10:21 am
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Also, I have a collection of Ambrose Bierce stories. My absolute favorite one is about a guy who has a duel of wits with a snake under his bed.
#6 by El Santo on January 15, 2020 - 10:41 am
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Which turns out to be a toy snake in the end! “The Man and the Snake” is one of my favorites, too. For absolute favorite, though, I think I’d go with “Moxon’s Master,” the one about the guy who builds a chess-playing automaton (inspired by a real-world hoax– look up Wolfgang von Kempelen’s mechanical Turk sometime) in order to demonstrate his theory of machine intelligence, but comes to a bad end because the automaton is an extremely sore loser.
#7 by Blake on January 15, 2020 - 2:51 pm
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“Mind you, I count it a worthy subject for adaptation for that very reason, especially since its author has been all but ignored by commercial filmmakers despite a sizable body of memorable and groundbreaking work.”
It kind of makes me wonder why Amicus never based on anthology film around his work.
#8 by Richard on January 15, 2020 - 4:35 pm
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El Santo:
I do wish you all the best in 2020. And I thank you for your many fine reviews over the years.
I do understand the need for a sabbatical; as we get older, our interests change – and even when they do stay the same, our bodies don’t often allow us to pursue them with the same energy.
Having seen many of the Cabal depart over the years for various reasons, I have to wonder if there has been any attempt at recruiting new members. This place has become an invaluable index to the genre of “disreputable” and “cult” movies. It should keep going as long as filmmakers around the world keep producing schlock.
#9 by Tangerine Python on January 16, 2020 - 8:34 am
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Comment…
#10 by Chris on January 18, 2020 - 8:56 am
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El Santo,
Thank you for what you do. It sucks getting old. Look after yourself, and write what you like. Your style will continue to find ears here, and I look forward to your reviews as they come. Best of health to you, sir.
#11 by goddessoftransitory on January 20, 2020 - 2:04 am
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I wish you every good thing in 2020.
Us was a mind bender for me because it was basically watching a film fail utterly on the logical level while the symbolic level soared. The emphasis on Hands Across America and how it leads to the final shot of the film underscores what I think is the overall theme of the movie–The Futility Of The Gesture.
The rebellion of the Tethered, while horrifying and inexplicable to the “normals” on the surface, pays off in–the literal enactment of what was largely a feel-good, sporadic exercise in pandering to a cause in reality. Hands Across America never actually conjured up a human chain of happy people who somehow, through this, were supposed to cure world hunger. Symbolically it’s a genius move to have this little girl, thrust into a nightmare world, cling to the last thing she remembers from it and somehow manage to corral this entire warped population into producing what she thought was a real thing that never actually existed.
Logically, of course, you’re spending your time going “who feeds the rabbits? Who cleans these tunnels? Who makes the beds? What the hell’s going on?”
#12 by ronald on January 23, 2020 - 5:15 pm
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Type your comment here
One of the really annoying parts is how public figures (actors, rock stars, etc.) who were young when YOU were young insist on getting old right where everybody can SEE them. It complicates self-imposed obliviousness immensely. 😉
#13 by ronald on January 23, 2020 - 5:09 pm
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I’d like (“”I’d like”? I’d LIKE a trip to Europe…”) I’ve done a fairly good job of educating myself about exploitation films over the years, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the word “fadsploitation” until reading it in your review of “Viva Knievel!” (1979). Hopefully, when you return, you’ll expound further on the subject. I’m here not to just to have fun but to LEARN as well and IMHO you’re one of the top three most entertaining AND informative of the B-Masters. 🙂 Take care,
#14 by El Santo on January 24, 2020 - 5:05 pm
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To the best of my knowledge, “fadsploitation” is a term of my own invention, so I’d be surprised if you’d encountered it anywhere else. I use it to mean movies that exist almost entirely to cash in on the sudden, overwhelming, and generally short-lived popularity of some phenomenon from elsewhere in popular culture. Like, do you remember back in 1990, when American news media and culture pundits were breathlessly freaking out about this Brazilian dance called “the Lambada” that was supposedly becoming the hip new thing all over the country? And then nobody gave thought one to the Lambada ever again after another couple months? Well, there were two competing Lambada movies rushed through production and into theaters before the craze ran its course. That’s fadsploitation in action.
For some reason, the 1970’s were a bit of a golden age for that sort of thing, and the specimens from that era (Viva Knievel!, for example) tend to be consistently weirder than their counterparts from most other decades.
#15 by blake on January 28, 2020 - 10:39 am
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Did you ever see Handle with Care (aka Citizens Band), a 70s film about the CB radio craze?
#16 by ronald on January 23, 2020 - 11:41 pm
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“The ending doesn’t merely raise questions that the rest of the movie can’t answer; much worse than that, it raises questions that writer Christopher Knopf and director Jerrold Freedman don’t seem to have understood that they were raising in the first place.”
Sounds kind of like one of those EC Comics horror stories in which an abuser of animals ultimately meets the same fate to which he’s been subjecting those animals. In those stories, as in select episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” what’s important is that a character’s comeuppance be suitably ironic. Whether or not it makes sense is optional.
#17 by dawn on February 7, 2020 - 3:10 pm
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I’m so glad you reviewed “A Cold Night’s Death”. I saw it years and years ago on tv, and I’ve never remembered the name of it. I just remembered the final ending (SPOILER ALERT), where you see a small skinny hairy hand locking the door, and a simian’s face looking in through the door window. It scared me to death back then.
#18 by Supersonic Man on February 11, 2020 - 6:10 pm
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My favorite review phrase of 2020 so far is “what he did with his determination was to woo death with all the misplaced ardor of Pepe Le Pew.”
I can relate to having one’s year ruined by health issues and random catastrophes. Hang in there and take care of yourself.
#19 by maggiesmith on July 30, 2022 - 11:36 am
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Whenever Agatha Christie adapted one of her novels for the stage, she always made changes in it. In one instance, the killer turned out to be a different person. She said it was so people who had read the book would not take what they saw for granted.