The B-Masters Cabal

It’s time for another chapter of That Was Then, This Is Now, in which Chad Denton of The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and I take a look at Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel, The Lodger, and some of the films adapted from it.

Warning: All three reviews plus the discussion that follows contain explicit spoilers of the novel and the films. Proceed at your own risk!

The Lodger (1927) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

The Lodger (1932) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

The Lodger (1944) at The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The discussion….with special guest literary critic!

Todd chimes in with the first of Teleport City’s contributions to the Rubber Soul roundtable:

HANUMAN AND THE SEVEN ULTRAMEN
When I’m writing about a movie, I’m much less interested in telling you how good or bad it is than I am in justifying the time I spent watching it. As such, I’m looking for those points of interest–either contained in the film itself or in the circumstances of its production–that will make the whole endeavor seem worthwhile. Providing a break from the rigors of that approach are those occasions on which I encounter films whose WTF quotient is so high that they exist on a plane beyond simple judgments of good or bad–the mystery of whose very existence overshadows any questions of quality. Hanuman and the 7 Ultramen is such a film. And like another fine example of the species, the Turkish superhero mash-up 3 Dev Adam, Hanuman achieves that rarified WTF air by means of positioning some very familiar elements within a very foreign context. It’s just hard to dismiss a shockingly gory movie that teams the world’s most beloved giant Japanese superhero with the Hindu monkey god for not measuring up to some notional standard of “coherence” or “watchability”.

May is another B-Masters’ Roundtable month! Drop in over the next 31 days – particularly on the 31st day – as this time around we pay tribute to some of the most important people in B-Movies. Directors, writers, stars— Bah! Where would any of us be without – the guy in the suit !?

It’s RUBBER SOUL: all this month at the B-Masters’ Blog.

If I wanted to craft the worst metaphor you’d see all week (on this site, at least), I’d say the following:

“Dark Corners (2006) demonstrates that now matter how gorgeous and durable your collection of yarn is, it doesn’t mean a damned thing if you don’t knit the stuff into a sweater.”

But, of course, I have no ambition of presenting you with a really bad metaphor.  So that comment above?  I never said it.  Must have been a bad dream.

Be-Sharam
If you wanted to, it seems like you could draw up a sort of family tree of the films Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan made during his late seventies to mid eighties prime, tracing each of those movies’ origins along three very distinct lines, each leading back to a particular career-defining blockbuster that provided the template for much of what was to come. Of course, while Bachchan would star in films that were virtual remakes of Deewaar, Sholay and Don over the course of his career, the lines leading back to those three classics would not always be perfectly straight. For one would also have to consider films like 1978’s Be-Sharam, which draw upon elements of all three.

Casus Kiran
It’s hard to write about these old Turkish superhero movies–especially those directed by Yilmaz Atadeniz–without making reference to the Republic serials of the 1940s. The problem with doing so, however, is that many of you young people out there, with your newfangled transistor radios and souped-up hotrods, will have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. I suppose the appropriately curmudgeonly response to that would be to refuse to continue this review until you’ve educated yourselves on the topic, instead filling space with horrific, Andy Rooney-like ruminations on how butter doesn’t taste the way it used to and why on earth is the print in Reader’s Digest so small until you return with at least one complete viewing of The Perils of Nyoka or some-such under your belts. But, as much as the thought of such an exercise appeals to me, I’m afraid I can’t do so in good conscience. The fact is that those serials were meant to be seen in a very specific context, a context which simply doesn’t exist anymore.

For the few of you who keep track of such things, I am phasing out updating the Leisure section of Teleport City in order to focus the site on the reason everyone comes to it: film. The Leisure material is being migrated, along with a bunch of new stuff, to The Astounding Cabinet of Wonders:

http://teleport-city.com/wordpress/

Click on it now and you can see pictures of me climbing, which looks bad-ass as long as you don’t know that 1) that’s a picture of me realizing I have nowhere else to go, and 2) some barefoot little Bad News Bear looking kid scurried up the same route immediately after I dropped down.

But none of that will prepare you for A-Chan, the little girl who makes me hate not liking children, because she reminds me that some little kids are beyond awesome and at like age 7 have the climbing skills of a fearless gibbon.

And now, back to trying to finish my review of Pepe Le Moko and Algiers.

Paid to Kill (1954) a Hammer film noir with some actual noir content!  Also suspense, betrayal, and a huge company with a meaningless name!

I’m really starting to like this website…

Ten Scenes of Brutal Violence Guaranteed To Make You Laugh

The 30 Most Ill-Conceived Monsters

Hey, you know those horror movies where six idiots manage to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, and then they get gruesomely slaughtered one by one, and then the director and the screenwriter look at each other and realise they still have half an hour’s footage to shoot, and then all of a sudden more characters turn up out of the blue complaining about engine trouble?

It is in this spirit that we warmly (if a tad belatedly) welcome into the B-Masters fold Steve Billups of Gangrene Widescreen. Play friendly, children!