Yes, yes. A much more obvious choice this time. One might even say bleeding obvious…
Fun fact: deciding which of my embarrassing roster of unaddressed 50s SF films to tackle for this Roundtable took longer than writing this review.
…in which Mankind’s meddling with atomic power comes back to, uh, bite him…
Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
Aug 28
I’m one part behind in the anniversary roundtable, but…
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. At the time of Wahan Ke Log’s release, science fiction was an unexplored genre in mainstream Indian cinema and was, to the extent that it was seen at all, solely the purview of the country’s B movie industry.
How did it take me so long to get to this movie? The spaghetti western The Great Silence is considered by many to be one of the best efforts of the genre, and I think they’re on to something there.
This may not seem like an obvious choice to some of you, but trust me—this thing has been on my, ahem, “shortlist” of films to review since the silent movie Roundtable of 2008…
Overlong film + far too long to ponder it = massively overlong review; sorry!
WOMAN IN THE MOON (1929)
Hard science collides with pulp fiction in Fritz Lang’s last silent film.
Working in collaboration with “father of rocketry” Hermann Oberth, Lang succeeds in bringing to the screen a startlingly accurate prediction of mankind’s eventual journey to the moon.
Pity about the surrounding material…
Pssst: Please let me know if the images are too dark: I had a lot of trouble with the contrast in this one.
Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
Aug 16
John Wayne temporarily hung up his cowboy hat in the 1970s to ape Clint Eastwood in the tough cop movie McQ, and it worked as well as you can probably imagine.
I wrote a little something for the Diabolique website.
While living in France, and after having directed a British TV episode that resulted in him being surrounded by a yard full of chickens that went insane and dropped dead, director Samuel Fuller decided to write Brainquake, a bonkers pulp novel about a Mob bag man who finds himself on the run with a deadly dame.
“When he needed a little extra scratch, or maybe it was just because he was feeling inspired, he wrote Brainquake, a fever dream pulp novel that begins with a baby apparently murdering someone and includes, among other things, a former French Resistance fighter tormented in his dreams by the disembodied jaundiced head of Charles De Gaulle, screaming at him for being a coward.”
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The horror-comedy Motel Hell manages to mix the two different extremes into a pleasantly satisfying dish.
The third part of our year-long anniversary presents an opportunity that some of us are sorely in need of…
This time around, the Roundtable will be focused on those films that we always meant to get around to…that surely by now we should have gotten around to…that were THE ENTIRE REASON we founded our sites in the first place…
…but you know…it’s been a pretty hectic twenty years:
Please join us throughout August for Part 3 of our 20th anniversary celebration!
Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
Despite the talents of the leads, Ben Stiller and George Carlin in Working Tra$h are no Laurel and Hardy… or Abbott and Costello… or Hill and Spencer… or Farley and Spade.. or…
Jul 24
It’s been a hot, steamy summer of updates, repairs, and occasional new stuff. I can’t even remember which ones are which at this point, so let’s jump right in…
Back in action…
Somehow, the animated Ralph Bakshi feature Fire and Ice managed to slip through the cracks, though I can’t imagine it didn’t make the early 1980s cable TV rounds. It’s perfect late-night HBO fare. If I’d seen it back then, I would have embraced it whole-heartedly and probably proclaimed it the best thing I’d ever seen. Or something to that effect.
Judging Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much from its first scene, it would be reasonable to assume one was watching a Fellini movie, or at least a reasonable imitation of Fellini. The opening shot of a TWA plane in flight toward Rome, the bustling capital of high style, suggests the dawn of the age of the jet set
Hatchet for the Honeymoon is not the kind of film to watch for a kill count or ingenious murders. It is the kind of film to watch for paranormal and sartorial phenomena, ghosts, discotheques, mysterious deaths, horrifying old toys, and the narration of a “paranoiac.”
FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION
Even the most mediocre giallo film can serve as a kind of lifestyle guide—especially for those who pine for the life of a 1970’s era Eurotrash jetsetter. There is a downside to that lifestyle, of course, in that, like most of the characters in The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, you would be inherently unlikeable.