MonsterHunter

This is basically just a limp rehash of the Jon Hall/Maria Montez Arabian Nights movie that Universal released the year before. That one apparently made them a bunch of money so they figured they could film it again with the same two stars and make even more money. And it really is the same film. Jon Hall plays the rightful ruler of Baghdad in both who is trying to regain the throne from some pretender, Maria Montez is the acting-challenged red head posing as an exotic beauty who really loves Hall’s character but is being forced to marry the usurper in both, and at some point in each movie the lovebirds have some mistaken identity problems which allows the director to drag out the story before the mistake is discovered. Read More »

The liner notes say that film scholars have re-evaluated this movie and whereas they originally dismissed it as simply a generic (albeit good looking) tearjerker of a movie, it has now been declared as being really important for some reason. I can’t recall why we’ve gone ahead and moved this one from the “crap” pile to the “art” pile, but I am here to say that another re-evaluation of this film is in order and that upon further review, the new conventional wisdom is hereby ditched in favor of the old conventional wisdom with a some modifications. Read More »

Legend has it that some evil genie was pissed because of the way this Universal movie portrayed the whole milieu of ancient Arabia (not enough emphasis on evil genies probably) and as a result he smote all those involved with the film. Star Jon Hall committed suicide after a battle with cancer, Maria Montez drowned in her own bathtub, and Sabu croaked before he was forty. I’m not really a big believer in this story (mainly because I made it up), but I always like to dampen your enjoyment of escapist fare such as this by dropping on you the fact that in spite of everyone’s broad smiles, derring-do, and happy endings, all these people were destined to terrible fates (well except Ms. Montez - after all, she could have lived to act some more). Read More »

Director Frank Capra, known for his movies about the great American underdog, war propaganda films, and for that one where Jimmy Stewart saves Christmas, explores the glorious American family in Arsenic And Old Lace and shows us that the violent, murderous society we pride ourselves on now, isn’t merely some recent invention of the absent parent, video game industry, and liberal media bias. Read More »

Two-time Academy Award winner Anthony Quinn barely registers here in this movie about the dude everyone picked over Jesus to be set free when it was time for the weekly crucifixions. Quinn has very little dialogue, very few scenes of dramatic impact and spends most of his time on the road to accepting the Christian faith, grunting and mumbling like he just woke up or something. Read More »

The Gilbreths, whose sole claim to fame is that they have never heard of birth control, stage an unwelcome return in this, the sequel to the insipid Cheaper By The Dozen and the results are more of the same: meandering stories that don’t hold your interest, moments designed to evoke laughs that succeed only in provoking yawns, and the complete downplaying of all but about two or three of the daughters. Read More »

Okay, I’ll admit it - I like Christmas movies. Or I guess I should say that I like the idea of Christmas movies. It seems like that a lot of times when I watch a movie that features Christmas prominently, it never fails to disappoint, substituting cheap platitudes and artificial sentiment for an interesting story or genuine feeling. Read More »

From self-important start to self-important finish, this movie runs on all cylinders, managing to tackle every single social ill of the early 70s that people pretended to care about. Vietnam, women’s rights, Indian rights, environmentalism, alternative education, bigotry, and half-breed green berets that try to reconnect with their Indian heritage, while practicing a unique mix of pacifism and whoop-ass. Read More »

Black Angel is based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich whose works have provided material for movies as diverse as the classic Rear Window to the atom bomb with Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie called Original Sin. As luck would have it, Black Angel falls closer to the Rear Window side of the coin than to the Original Sin side. Read More »

Back in olden times when dinosaurs still walked the Earth and everyone wanted a Teddy Ruxpin for Christmas, Noel Coward was supposedly this giant star. Author, singer, fancy lad - he did it all and did it in what us open-minded folk would call “British style.” What that means is that he was the sort of chap to smoke his cigarettes in those long holders that I thought were reserved for Eurobabes like Marlene Dietrich and vapid posers like Madonna. Read More »

Here’s a movie that’s signed onto the pro-orphan agenda that certain special interests groups continuously push in this country. It’s one of those do-gooder fairy tales where stuff like suicides and dead kids occur at convenient intervals just so that our heroine can be inspired to new heights of self-sacrifice while the audience is inspired to new depths of self-loathing for ever firing up a movie about a woman who crusades to have Texas’ law about illegitimate kids having to be identified as such on birth certificates and marriage licenses changed. Read More »

Fred MacMurray (Double Indemnity) and Claire Trevor both play undercover agents who go down to Mexico to infiltrate a drug smuggling operation. They arrive separately and unaware of one another’s occupation as drug agents. Of course, they are thrust together and each one thinks the other is a criminal and each one is determined to bring the other in without letting on that he/she is an undercover agent. Along the way they manage to fall in love which only serves to complicate things just long enough to stretch this potboiler out to a robust 88 minutes. Read More »

With his rakish grin, his prowess with his sword, and the slickest hairdo I’ve ever seen on a pirate, I would feel quite comfortable having Errol Flynn escort my voluptuous fifteen year old step daughter out for a night on the town. The guy just emanates “gentleman.” Besides, you actually have proof that Mr. Flynn was a gentleman as he was acquitted by an all-woman jury of the statutory rape of not one, but two young gals. Was there so little to do in the early forties that young women had to make up bogus sex charges against the screen’s biggest sex symbol? Luckily today, our top stars are too busy denying that they’re gay for us to take seriously the baseless charges of some trailer park hussy (we leave that to our presidents, I guess). Read More »

Anytime I fire up one of these hundred year old movies starring a little kid, the first thing I do once I’ve finished watching it is to check out what happened to the kid in real life. I’m always anxious to find out that the child actor in question ended up a drug addict, broke, crazy, washed up and/or suicided. It’s not so much that I wish ill on these people, it’s just that the movie is so much more enjoyable knowing that even though these little twerps are giving their all and holding their own with the likes of Spencer Tracy and Lionel Barrymore, that this is as good as they’re going to get. Can you imagine if the highlight of your life happened when you were ten years old? Ouch! Read More »

I’ve spent the better part of a day after watching this movie trying to figure out just what sort of life lesson I was supposed to have taken away from this tale of a gal from the wrong side of the tracks who hooks up with a guy from the rich side of the tracks. At first I thought it might have something to do with love overcoming the small-mindedness of the rich country club crowd. Then, I thought it could have something to do with that old chestnut that the only cages we inhabit are the ones of our own making. But at the last second, it seemed that there was some of that “you have to be true to who you are” malarkey that only really works in movies and with crazy and/or rich people. Ultimately though, deeper reflection revealed what this movie taught me was that there was reason you never hear about Lana Turner and Spencer Tracy being one of the Silver Screen’s great couples. Read More »

Cary Grant is pretty much on social security by this time and is merely phoning in the same performance that worked so well when he wasn’t 135 years old and when he had material that wasn’t intent on portraying him as a not very amusing dirty old man. Co-star Audrey Hepburn comes off as just a wispy thing with an accent who spends all her time chasing after Cary Grant even though she periodically suspects him of being a cold blooded killer. The supporting cast includes Breath-A-Sure spokesman George Kennedy as well as James Coburn and their villains appear closer to buffoons then to menacing and calculating thieves. And all the hoopla is over three rare stamps! I suppose the guys from my dad’s stamp club would enjoy it, but they do belong to a stamp club. Read More »

Right out of the gate this movie suffers from a major handicap: the suspension of disbelief that it requires as it relates to its casting is bigger than the size of the brood that is apparently supposed to be the major selling point of the film. First of all, am I really expected to believe that Myrna Loy would really let Clifton Webb touch her once, let alone a minimum of twelve times? Bickering with William Powell in between solving murder cases, I can buy, but any interaction with Clifton beyond a polite “how do you do” doesn’t really ring true. Read More »

Two things usually mark Christmas at the MonsterHunter household: someone always ruins it and the present opening lasts longer than Rip Van Winkle’s nap. The ruination of the holiday (and generally of all holidays) is covered in our look at The Man Who Came To Dinner , but I found myself reminded of the lengthy de-gifting process that goes on at my house as I watched Barbara Stanwyck valiantly (and vainly) try to get this Christmas-themed screwball comedy out of first gear. Like the last four hour long Christmas session under my tree, I was wondering when this would be over and who thought it was a good idea for me to drink so much soda before it started. (Trust me - this movie and opening presents isn’t anything you would want to pause.) Read More »

Holy crap, that was long! Such was my reaction after finishing this one about two days after I started it. Lumbering, plodding, crawling, rumbling, stumbling, and finally bumbling into the endzone after an eternity, this movie (and really, that’s probably too charitable a term for something more akin to second job) will sorely test the patience of even the hardiest of historical epic fans. Read More »

Robert Siodmak, who warmed up his film noir chops with Phantom Lady hits his stride in this crime melodrama starring Burt Lancaster, Yvonne DeCarlo, and Dan Duryea. Burt plays a regular guy whose heart still belongs to his ex-wife Anna. Burt’s character, Steve, is a square-jawed type who doesn’t really appreciate anyone telling him what to do and doesn’t appreciate the fact that tight, white, tank top undershirts are supposed be worn underneath something. Read More »

D.O.A. takes on its subject matter with a stark straightforwardness that literally shows the protagonist as a walking dead man. Frank Bigelow gets poisoned by some slow acting stuff that allows him to run around California for a week before croaking, all in an effort to find out who was behind his impending death. Is there a gimmick in the movies (well, short of 3-D or anything William Castle dreamed up) better than this? Shoot, is there a better metaphor for the futility of life than this? Even if the hero triumphs by solving the case, he still loses by ending up dead! All life is pain and suffering and this movie crystallizes the fact that even if you figure out why, it still doesn’t matter! You’re just as screwed! I suppose the case can be made that this movie shows us that its the struggle to understand things that is really the important thing, but I always got the impression that Frank was aggressively pursuing this case (instead of just loading up on chalupas, ice cream and Vanilla Coke until dying like I would have done) because he was pissed that someone messed up his San Francisco vacation. Read More »

This is a movie most famous for the make-up call the Oscar voters made for Bette Davis after they gave her the shaft the year before in the Best Actress race for her performance in Of Human Bondage (she wasn’t even nominated). I perused the archives in an effort to determine who, if anyone was hosed by Bette’s ill-gotten gains. I only recognized two of the actresses that were also nominated, one of them being Katharine Hepburn, who ended up with plenty of her own statues and the other was Miriam Hopkins. I suppressed a giggle in thinking that she might have been cheated out of the Oscar by Bette since her career would be headed down hill in short order and she would be forced to be Bette’s co-star in 1939’s The Old Maid. I wonder if she hated Bette back in 1935 yet or if she didn’t catch on until years later that it was Miss Davis that scuttled her shot at immortality. Read More »

All aboard for terror! Drop anchor on suspense! Prepare to walk the plank of total madness! Man the lifeboats…for mystery! It’s the most dangerous freaking crossing ever! Because the ship’s doctor is not adverse to slapping the taste out of unruly female passengers’ mouths! Read More »

Humphrey Bogart plays recently returned war vet Rip Murdock. He’s searching for the truth behind the death of Johnny, his best friend from the service. Rip knows that Johnny was a damn good paratrooper and he deserves his Congressional Medal of Honor, even if it has to be awarded posthumously. That’s not so much to ask for a guy who gave everything he had to kick the Ratzis in their Teutonic nads, is it? Read More »

This movie teaches us the hard way that the only thing worse than a film ending with a big cello concerto is a film that drones on with lots of talk ten minutes after the big cello concerto. Watching Paul Henreid sitting there with a big violin between his legs while he makes all these “either I’m a musical genius or I’m in need of some serious fiber” faces while he plays some obnoxious dirge that composer/rival Claude Raines dreamed up in between bouts of surly self-pity at having lost the affections of Bette Davis, made me realize why you don’t see a lot of love triangle movies involving classical musicians these days. Read More »

Nine months after Richard Burton was harassed into becoming a Christian by a red beach towel in The Robe, Hollywood decided it was time to take Jesus’ favorite outfit out of mothballs for another go around and sicced Demetrius And The Gladiators on us. Since this whole Christian thing worked out so well for Burton and co-star Jean Simmons (you might recall they ended up on the wrong end of the archery field at the end of the last episode), it was left to Victor Mature to run around squawking about this robe and how it can just butt out of his life when things get rough. Read More »

Back in the days before there were television miniseries that stretched out over the course of several nights, the only way to tell a really long, bloated story was to make a really long, bloated movie. These movies were called epics and they ranged from the very good like Ben-Hur, to the really awful, like Hawaii. Doctor Zhivago falls somewhere in the middle of the pack, in spite of what all the Zhivago zombies will tell you. It’s a good movie, but not great. Read More »

You don’t have to go any further than the opening credits of this one to know that it’s one of the titans of film noir. Based on a novel written by James M. Cain ( The Postman Always Rings Twice), the film was directed by Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard) with a screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep). The only thing you may wonder about is that it stars Fred MacMurray. If you only remember Fred from his days inventing Flubber and advising My Three Sons what to do about their gender confusion, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that Fred makes a very convincing murderer, schemer, and dude who was a little too smart for his own good. Read More »

It’s a tale as old as time itself! British kids are out on the marshes playing with a scarecrow when one of them puts a magic top hat on him and the next thing you know, he’s come alive, dancing and singing! Scarecrow then leads his merry band of kids on numerous adventures, teaching them valuable lessons along the way about loyalty, doing what’s right, and how to smuggle the King’s brandy without hanging for it! But alas, all good things must come to an end, and so it is with Scarecrow once spring arrives and he melts all over the swampy marshes! Or am I thinking about somebody else? Read More »

Were this any other horror movie where the characters stood around and unconvincingly spewed forth lines and plot points while periodically swiping haplessly at oversized rubber bats suspended on wires as visible as in any Godzilla movie, I would complain about problems involving bad acting, unimaginative direction, a barely explained villain, and an actor playing the villain with such laughably exaggerated gestures and mannerisms that you wonder if he thought this was a Mel Brooks comedy and file it away as just another low budget terror flick that had neither the talent nor the inclination to be anything else. Read More »

This is another one of those screwball comedies they made in the thirties where regular folk are thrown into the strange and kooky world of rich folk. I never tire of seeing the filthy rich act like boobs while falling in love with lower class types. This time the results are very satisfying chiefly because of the witty, if mechanical, script from Preston Sturges and the peppy efforts of Jean Arthur. Ray Milland is also along for the ride as her love interest and watching the young Milland makes you cringe when you remember that thirty years later he would end up in such fare as X - The Man With X-Ray Eyes and Frogs. Cringe because of how long it would take him to get around to making cool movies! Read More »

Elmer Gantry is based on a book by Sinclair Lewis. You may have a hard time believing this but Sinclair Lewis is actually a different person than Upton Sinclair, though Sinclair Lewis once worked on Upton Sinclair’s commie commune. Both of these folks are also separate from that C.S. Lewis guy who wrote those Narnia books about the talking lion. Anyway Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature, was ripped off of a Pulitzer by the Columbia University trustees, won it for real later, declined it, wrote Babbitt, and eventually hired secretaries to play chess with him until he croaked from the effects of alcoholism. Somewhere in all this, he found time to pen what has to be regarded as the definitive novel about the nature of religion as Big Con. Read More »

Remember Captain Blood ? That was the movie from 1935 where Errol Flynn played the outlaw Peter Blood. Peter was really only an outlaw because of the injustices some pretender to the throne kept laying on his subjects and deep down, Peter was a good guy who only wanted to serve his true king. He also wanted Olivia de Havilland to walk his plank, if you catch my meaning. Three years later, Warner Brothers decided that we had waited long enough and decided that what we needed was a remake of Captain Blood. Read More »

The shocking conclusion you come to after watching Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, and Barry Sullivan cavort around in one of these typically self-loathing movies about the movies is that no matter how bad someone hosed you in the past, if there’s a hit picture to be made with them again, no professional or personal vendetta you have against him or her is so great that it couldn’t be put aside for at least the duration of shooting. As Kirk’s reviled producer John Shields tells Dick’s author James Bartlow, some of the best movies have been made by people that hate each other. That’s a fascinating concept and must make for some fun days at work, but I’m not sure that it adds up to much of anything beyond the film industry’s obsession with itself. Read More »

Going My Way dominated the Oscars in 1944 and more importantly, it made a lot of cash at the box office. Thus, in 1945, The Bells Of St. Mary’s was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. It went on to be the top grossing movie of 1945, but it didn’t quite dominate the Oscars like the first rock-and-roll-priest flick did. Oh, it got eight nominations, but it only brought home one for Best Sound Recording. I guess that means that the movie sounded like a good idea. But Ingrid Bergman won a Golden Globe for her work in the film. Remember the 1945 Golden Globes? Read More »

When I saw Joan Crawford on the phone with a plaintive expression on her face adorning the cover, I figured that I was in for another Torch Song-style epic marked by Joan’s descent into the cartoonishness that seemed to define the later stages of her film career. While the movie has a few moments where she snarls and nips at people that are younger and better looking than her, the cover is quite misleading. Read More »

The most interesting thing surrounding the dull murder melodrama The Big Clock is that director John Farrow and star Maureen O’Sullivan were the husband and wife team that gave filmdom Mia Farrow and more importantly for us, her Zombie star sister Tisa. Other than that, this movie stands out as a creaky, talky, uneventful double cross that for some reason was emblazoned with Universal’s “Universal Noir” packaging. Read More »

The Big Combo desperately wants to be a dark and violent film noir, but it merely succeeds in being a rather unmemorable crime melodrama, though it is fairly violent. This movie was sold as film noir, had a name that lead me to believe it was film noir, and even featured Brian Donlevy. Donlevy starred with Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd in The Glass Key , a decent film noir, but here he’s purely the second banana and all the fog, shadows, and tough talking can’t disguise this movie for being the pretender that it is. Read More »

I don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to feature a picture of Gregory Peck lazily leaning over a fence on the front of the DVD. This is, after all, an almost three hour long western that also stars Charlton Heston as the ranch foreman who is quite the arse hole. I don’t know about you, but Gregory Peck isn’t my president. Read More »

I’ll confess that I was a bit skeptical when I began watching The Birds. I was thinking to myself, “this is a two hour movie about a woman being pecked by some whacko birds. How interesting can that be? Sounds like a bunch of bird doody to me!” And as is usually the case, I was right! The Birds is all about the world turning to bird doody as Alfred Hitchcock unleashes a very effective apocalyptic vision of nature rebelling against man! And by nature, I mean some stinky birds. Read More »

You would think that this has all the makings of a film noir to end film noirs, what with the teaming up of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake with a script by mystery impresario Raymond Chandler. Instead, the thing shoots craps at the end and sort of leaves you feeling cheated. I will have to say though that it took no less than the United States Navy to ruin this movie. Read More »

Widely considered as superior to its predecessor, The Bride of Frankenstein is one of those movies that is probably as great as many will tell you and is not nearly the dreary, serious meditation on the folly of playing God you may have been lead to believe nor is it an old and creaky monster movie that modern audiences will yawn during. In fact, watching this, I was reminded a tad of the Re-animator movies, what with the off-hand treatment of the Monster and the various shenanigans he gets into along the way. Read More »

This movie confirmed to me what I always suspected. Namely, that I have really bad taste. How else can I explain that despite the fact that this film was two hours and twenty minutes of silly soap opera trash, I had little problem sitting through all of it? The story of Jonas Cord was little more than incident after incident of him bullying his way through some business deal or other and treating everyone around him like dirt. I didn’t really mind any of it, even though it never amounted to much and was neatly tied up in one of the most simplistic and least believable endings you’re likely to see. (The movie purports to be a thinly-veiled take on the life of Howard Hughes, but doesn’t have the guts to let Jonas Cord have the same finish as the reclusive tycoon.) Read More »

This has to be my favorite movie about the Crimean War! It certainly leaves all those other movies like um, the, uh, one where those guys were fighting Crimeans or something, in the dust. Obviously, this movie had a giant strike against it as soon as it was mistakenly sent to me (that Crimean family across the street is probably wondering why the heck they got that Complete Planet Of The Apes Television Series DVD set) since it involved a war I had never heard of. I didn’t even know where this Crimea place was. I assumed that it was probably some country in Africa that changed its name every time some new guy took office after the old guy got hacked up or deported to France. Read More »

The Clock stars Judy Garland and Robert Walker as a couple of horny dopes who fall in love and get married in two days. In case any of you are under the assumption that this happy little film is anything remotely resembling real life, the following information will be quite depressing. As most of you know, Judy croaked in 1969 from an accidental barbiturate overdose. She was married five different times and her body stayed in a mini-storage facility for a whole year because no one would pay to bury her. Robert Walker was a mental case who suffered anxiety attacks and died five years after making this movie, apparently from a bad reaction to prescription drugs. Before taking a dirtnap, he was married twice, once for only six weeks and he eventually was in the nuthut for over a year after suffering a nervous breakdown. Hollywood is indeed the Dream Factory! Read More »

If you have any education at all, you know that this movie is based on a novel written back in 1845 by Alexandre Dumas. Since this is one of those hundred-plus year old books and is French, it is a classic. This means that you were assigned to read the thing in school, but didn’t, content to rely on the smart kid with atrocious breath to fill you in on the details. I didn’t come into the game with zero knowledge of the subject matter though. As most you know, I spent a good portion of the early 1990s at opening night of every new Van Damme flick. We all recall Van Damme’s Double Impact where he played twins for the first time. It was based on this Corsican situation so I have a pretty good idea about what’s going on here. Read More »

Is there anything better in life than watching scrappy American G.I.s outwit bumbling Nazis in WWII? Outmanned and outgunned against the German war machine, only unshaven dogfaces stand between freedom and a world where everyone would have to speak the ugliest language on the planet. Besides, can you imagine the humiliation of being ruled by the Italians of all people? Read More »

It usually starts the day after Thanksgiving. Well, to be completely honest, it actually starts pretty much as soon as Thanksgiving dinner is over: the debate over which family member will be ruining Christmas this year. The only reason is doesn’t start sooner is because the month of November is consumed by speculation over who is going to be the one that ruins Thanksgiving. You see, in our family, ruining a holiday is just as much a tradition as opening up Christmas presents on Christmas Eve or going to church on Easter is for regular families. Read More »

This one basically boils down to a story of a boy and his blankie. Now, it’s a very important blankie, but still a blankie nonetheless. In this case the guy is Richard Burton and he develops a fetish for the robe that Jesus wore up on the cross. I’m a fairly strong Christian around Easter time and such, but I wasn’t really familiar with this story from the Good Book. They might have had to leave it out of the Classics Illustrated Bible that I regularly consult when I don’t like what my horoscope says, so my ignorance is really not only understandable, but probably expected. Read More »