Truly, there can be no greater anguish for a father than what his poor precious daughter (whom he hasn’t seen in 10 years due to his boozing ways) is going through. Oh, not the anguish of everything just mentioned. Blackmailers can be bought off, secrets can be self-righteously uncovered at dramatic moments, and the juvenile court of the old days wouldn’t let some murderous teen be tried as an adult. No, the real, soul crushing anguish Luke experiences is when he is told that his daughter’s medical exam revealed she wasn’t a virgin anymore!

Please God let it be due to all that horseback riding she’s been doing while living with mom in San Francisco! But all of Luke’s hopes and dreams for having a non-slut daughter are crushed once he gets his hands on a letter she wrote to her mom’s boyfriend, Lazich. Oh, sweet, sweet hymen! We hardly knew you!

While Luke mourns the devastating loss of the skin the blocks the opening of his daughter’s vagina, it is important to note that these sorts of things don’t happen in a vacuum. There’s all sorts of hand-wringing backstory to be unspooled, complete with overbearing rich mother-in-law, tramp wife, aforementioned alcoholism, and most deliciously of all, Star Trek‘s DeForest Kelley as an amoral art critic prone to dirty talk and trying to get into Luke’s wife’s very busy panties.

Where Love Has Gone flashes back 20 years or so to World War II, where all the stars look exactly the same as they did 20 years in the future. Luke is a regular Captain America, having won the Congressional Medal of Honor, while Valerie Hayden (Susan Haywood) is a rich girl who is a gifted sculptor. They meet at one of her shows and her mother, Gerald, immediately sets about trying to match the two up.

Valerie isn’t interested in Luke until she hears him telling off her mother. A quickie marriage ensues and a hilarious montage follows where World War II is rapidly finished up by about four newspaper headlines interspersed with Valerie’s hard at work on her hideous sculptures as if to show that while Luke is risking his life for freedom, Valerie is keeping the American home front strong for pampered rich girls by carving ugly doodads for other wealthy morons.

Once back in civilian life, Luke sets about having his hopes and dreams obliterated by his pushy, scheming mother-in-law. Spurning her offer of a job at her business, Luke strikes out on his own with his dream of building homes to take advantage of the post-war demand for housing. Ultimately Gerald succeeds in emasculating the war hero by secretly sabotaging his efforts and forcing him to slink back to her and accept her job offer.

This begins the slow and fitfully funny downward spiral of Luke and his marriage to Valerie. He drowns his sorrows in booze, Valerie responds by becoming a slut, and it all explodes in domestic fights that are funny where the film probably meant them to be dramatic and shocking. (“You’re not a woman! You’re a disease!” Luke shouts at Valerie provoking unintended chuckles despite his icky attempt to rape her moments before and her equally icky response!)

Valerie’s mom forces them to get a divorce, Luke moves away, doesn’t get to see his daughter, dries out and becomes a successful architect. He comes back into all their lives once he receives word that his daughter has killed a man.

The remainder of the movie details Luke trying to reach his daughter to find out exactly what happened. The daughter, played as a pouting and vaguely creepy sexpot by Joey Heatherton, refuses to tell anyone anything, but it is clear that she is jealous of her mother and that her childhood with her mother, while well provided for financially, was lacking emotionally.

The movie though doesn’t actually detail any of this because it is obsessed with showcasing the screaming melodramatics of the mother, father and mother-in-law. In fact, other than a brief mention by Luke of the “baby” early in the marriage, the child is never seen or referred to until the divorce hearing that wraps up the flashback.

Presumably inspired by the real life events surrounding movie star Lana Turner and her boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, the film, from the writer and the director of the similarly salacious The Carpetbaggers, delights in throwing out its tawdry accusations and morally degenerate characters, but is hampered by its slapdash treatment of the effect such a life has on the child as well as its over-the-top histrionics that fail to resonate with modern audiences raised on afternoon talk shows, reality programming, and more generally, the immoral society we have today.

Whether it’s the garish self portrait the mother-in-law insists on hanging in the house she gave Luke and Valerie, the overbaked dialogue (“when you’re dying from thirst, you’ll drink from a mudhole!” Valerie tells her mom), the dirty letters both mother and daughter wrote their boyfriend, the smarmy art critic with the pipe, or the entirely gratuitous confrontation Luke has with Valerie in the courtroom climax that sets in motion another series of tragic events that couldn’t help but scar his daughter even worse than killing the man she shared with her mother, Where Love Has Gone is exactly the sort of outdated hypertrashy flick where you aren’t surprised that Luke threatens to spank his elderly mother-in-law played by Bette Davis, but only that it doesn’t actually happen!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

In an effort to distinguish itself from all the other movies about lost love on the English moors, this one begins in the middle of a driving blizzard instead of a driving thunderstorm.

I like watching people trudging through fake snow and looking at model houses in the background of the indoor set this was filmed on so I was immediately enthralled by it all and waited with baited breath to see whether this was the set up to a very long flashback. You could pretty much see it coming once this traveler showed up at Wuthering Heights and everyone inside was all morose and caked with old-guy and old-gal make-up.

The traveler is grudgingly given a room and it isn’t long before he hears a woman’s voice howling on the wind outside his room (the old bridal suite of course). Once the man of the house learns that this guy heard a chick yakking out in the storm, he hauls ass out of the house and into the blizzard.

The traveler looks at the old hag and asks what the dude’s problem was and who the lady was he heard. She opens her mouth and utters the words that must have struck fear into his heart and made his nads shrivel up into his belly button: “it all began forty years ago!”

The old lady starts in with some drivel about how Heathcliff (the guy who went charging out into the snowstorm) was brought back to Wuthering Heights by Cathy’s dad when he was just a smelly lad running the streets of Liverpool.

Cathy’s father explains to his two dubious children (Cathy also has a no-good brother named Hindley) that in life they must be prepared to share their good fortune with others and that Heathcliff is going to be staying with them.

The two boys don’t like each other and Heathcliff comes after Hindley, but Hindley picks up a good-sized rock and tells him to back off. Heath doesn’t and Hindley bounces the rock off his skull from about three feet away!

Heath is busted open, but swears revenge on Hindley no matter how long it takes. This sets up the lifelong feud between these two that really gets going once Cathy and Hindley’s dad croaks and Hindley takes over Wuthering Heights, demoting Heath from foster kid all the way down to stable boy!

In the meantime, Cathy and Heathcliff enjoy one another’s company pretending to be knights and maidens and stuff like that and even when they get older they are still enamored with one another and hang out on the moors just enjoying life.

Cathy is a woman, so you can imagine that that won’t be enough for her. Oh no. She’s got her eyes on a better life. You get the idea that it will be with Heathcliff if he can get his crap together and develop a taste for material wealth instead of just being happy with the person he’s with, but if it turns out that Heathcliff isn’t that shallow, she’ll find someone else.

The next thing you know, she’s hanging out with Edgar Linton at his estate and complaining to her housekeeper about what a loser Heathcliff is. Heathcliff overhears this and is pretty upset and goes so far as cut his hands up by punching out some windows.

Thus begins Heathcliff’s descent into a journey of self pity and fury that takes him all the way to America where he makes a bunch of money and allows him to come back and buy Wuthering Heights out from under Hindley and to hang around Cathy and Edgar like some type of broken hearted wraith.

The remainder of the movie isn’t very pleasant to sit through, chiefly because both Cathy and Heathcliff are self-centered, self-destructive boobs that ruin the lives of everyone around them in their efforts to abuse one another’s affections.

Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff is full of smoldering rage and intensity and Merle Oberon is a suitably insensitive bitch in her role of Cathy. You can’t really fault what they did in this film, but their characters never did much that engendered much empathy.

Cathy comes off the worser of the two, mainly because it’s understand how Heathcliff felt after being dicked around by Cathy. Heathcliff has given himself completely to her and for her to so arbitrarily reverse course and go with someone else merely because he could buy her better dresses and throw lavish parties goes a long way to explain his increasingly single-mindedly psychotic behavior. (He marries her sister-in-law merely to punish Cathy and tells her this to her face!)

The final scene warps us back to the night of the blizzard where the story began and I guess there’s some type of happy ending for Heathcliff and Cathy, but these are two people who just ooze poison and aren’t anyone you would want to be around. You only hope they end up together just to prevent them from screwing with anyone else’s head and heart.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The Hadley family is in the oil business and practically run the small Texas town that shares their name. The patriarch, Jasper Hadley, tries in vain to keep his kids in line while trying to run his oil business, but he’s an old, used up man, barely living with the disappointment of messed up kids.

Jasper has a son played by Robert Stack. His name is Kyle and he has a passel of issues that manifest themselves in highly dramatic ways. For instance, he’s a drinker who sleeps with a gun under his pillow and he hates himself for never being able to please his father.

He also hates his father because he always feels like Jasper liked his best friend Mitch better. And he hates his best friend Mitch because Mitch is more stable and had a regular old loving father. (We know that Mitch’s dad is one of those solid salt of the Earth types because he goes hunting with Mitch and is always asking Mitch if he needs to talk about what’s on his mind.)

In addition to these standard issue issues, while not exactly shooting blanks, Kyle’s gun that he’s hiding in his pants isn’t exactly fully loaded with buckshot either. You can imagine what that does to a fellow who already feels like a worthless piece of crap. But I’m sure the booze will make him feel better and think rationally about the problem. And the gun fetish should take his mind off things as well.

Jasper’s other kid, Marylee (Dorothy Malone), is acting out in her own way and causes him more trouble while he’s alive than Kyle does. (Kyle at least respects his dad enough that he waits to melt down until after Jasper croaks.)

Marylee is a nympho who throws herself at every guy in town and this usually results in Mitch and Kyle getting a phone call from the barkeep to come down and get her before she hooks up with some barfly. But it isn’t really all these losers she wants, but Mitch.

So who is this Mitch and what’s so danged great about him that Jasper wishes he was his son, that Kyle resents him for being an all-American man, and that Marylee lets herself get laid more times than reusable bathroom tile just to get his attention?

He’s Rock Hudson and once you get a gander at the square jaw and perfect hair, you’ll realize that skinny guys with wavy hair like Robert Stack will always be known as “that guy who hosted Unsolved Mysteries and appeared in a Rock Hudson movie.”

Rock plays Mitch Wayne, a geologist for Hadley oil (Rock as a geologist! These movies sure had a certain flair, didn’t they?) who is a decent, smart guy. He grew up with Kyle and Marylee and Jasper wants Mitch to marry Marylee, but Mitch only loves her like a sister.

And wading into this Texas-sized mess is Lauren Bacall as an executive secretary at some magazine. Her name is Lucy and Mitch falls instantly in love with her.

Even though Mitch is a great guy and looks like Rock Hudson, Lucy ends up marrying Kyle. This made little sense since Lucy knew Kyle all of about two days and what she knew of him was that he was a rather insincere, smooth talking operator who liked to throw his money around in an effort to impress women.

Maybe Lucy didn’t need to know anything about Kyle beyond the fact that he liked to spend money on her, but why then was Mitch in love with her? Being a good guy, he surely wouldn’t have taken a shine to her if he knew she was that shallow, would he?

That’s really the problem with a movie like this. You’ve got to set up a love triangle, but if one of the guys is great and one of them is a nutter, how do you make it so that the woman picks the nutter over the good guy and not make her look like a moron?

Luckily for us, the movie isn’t all that interested in fleshing out Lucy’s character, so we don’t have to wonder about her motivations. We can just pretend she was there as a catalyst for all the seething hate and feelings of inferiority of both Kyle and Marylee to come to the surface.

Early on in their marriage, Kyle cleans up his act by not drinking and losing his interest in firearms. Things start to come apart though once Kyle gets the news from the doctor that he’s a little low on his man juice and he does what any self-respecting half-man would do – BENDER!

He also allows himself to be manipulated by the insanely jealous Marylee into believing that Mitch and Lucy are having an affair, a belief only exacerbated when Lucy tells him that even though he’s kind of iffy in the bedroom, she’s white-trash fertile and pregnant anyway! Kyle believes this to be Mitch’s baby and goes insane!

Rock Hudson and director Douglas Sirk previously teamed up on All That Heaven Allows and Magnificent Obsession and if you’re familiar with those films, then whether you’ll find this one worth you time is an easy call to make.

You know how it works: Rock Hudson is the hunk you root for to triumph over various plot twists straight out of Days Of Our Lives. Every scene is played up with exaggerated emotion and import (movies like this have no time for subtlety – not when you need to move straightaway to the next crisis) and sometimes the characters suffer for it, seemingly only pieces to be moved through one situation to the next.

On the other hand, these movies are gorgeous to look at (it’s the kind of movie where leaves blow all around inside the beautifully polished mansion and where everybody drives brightly colored sports cars) and stocked with big time actors who don’t have any problems wringing as much as humanly possibly from the overheated script. (Both Stack and Malone were nominated for Oscars in this and Malone actually won.)

If lush, old style soap operas with bona fide movie stars are your bag, this one’s for you. I know I never turn down a chance to see guys with low sperm counts go on a rampage.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The way that Robert Newton wears the role of the one-legged pirate like the filthy three days growth of beard he perpetually sports throughout the film will leave you wondering why anyone else would bother tying their leg up for this part in the future.

He nails everything perfectly in this performance, from the sweaty greed to the snarling “avast ye mateys” blather you’ll be running around repeating for weeks to come all the way down to the way he squinted, winked, and bugged his eyes out depending on the situation.

If Newton was the only good thing about Treasure Island it would still be worth your time but this movie is an hour and a half of pirate action and treachery, with that dastardly Long John Silver seemingly always one step ahead of the game. Of course he’s not exactly going up against Rommel or anything.

In fact, the biggest competition he gets is from little Jim Hawkins. Hawkins (So Dear to My Heart‘s Bobby Driscoll) is one of the toughest little buggers you’ll ever see. He befriends pirates, goes on a treasure hunt, battles the pirates, single-handedly rescues the ship from them, takes a knife in the shoulder and shoots one pirate in the face! He’s like Rambo without pubes!

I should have guessed that this was a manly movie when right off the bat, some scalawag named Black Dog comes into Jim’s bar (don’t ask me how a ten year old is running a bar – this is the 1700s after all) and demands a double rum. I’ve seen enough bottles of Captain Morgan’s to know that rum is a pirate’s booze of choice.

Black Dog is looking for Captain Billy Bones (I think this movie had probably the single greatest collection of character names that I’d ever seen), but Jim plays dumb. Billy is really there and he’s an old timer that’s about to shuffle off to that big pirate cove in the sky, but not before he can give his treasure map to Jim.

Before he croaks, Billy Bones manages to warn Jim Hawkins about a one-legged pirate. Of course, once Jim runs into Silver, he doesn’t exactly trip over himself to tell his squire or captain that the dude they hired as the sea cook is actually a blighter who’s better at cooking up doublecrosses than ham and eggs.

Jim shows the squire and the friendly neighborhood doctor the map and the squire immediately decides that he is going to launch a secret voyage to Treasure Island to recover the loot. The squire is a bit of a buffoon as he has a habit of babbling about how they’re looking for treasure as they stroll along the docks so that every shady character can hear.

Jim is taken in by Silver and he befriends the pirate. It probably helps that Silver gives him a gun to carry. What kid wouldn’t pal around with a guy that gives him a rod to protect himself on a long voyage in search of pirate treasure? Besides, it’s been my experience that you want to be on the good side of the guy that’s cooking your food.

Jim eventually hears of Silver’s plot to mutiny and take the treasure for himself and finally tattles to the captain, squire, and doctor. In spite of their efforts, the ship is taken over by the pirates and the good guys have to escape to a stockade on Treasure Island.

Since this was a Disney movie, the respect and buddy-aspect between Jim and Silver at the end is played up with Jim helping Silver escape and Silver not being able to shoot him in the face. It’s nice to see that a crusty old salt like Long John Silver deciding that he doesn’t have it in him to shoot an unarmed ten year old kid at point blank range in the head can pass for sentiment, but the fact that this is as close as the movie ever gets to slathering on the goody-goody stuff shows you that this movie was made before Disney became the bland Disney we know today.

The locations are highlighted by the early Technicolor effort and everything is just dripping with pirate atmosphere, with pirates drunk on rum, big ships, treasure chests of gold, and a seaside village. Unlike, the Sunday school version of the Revolutionary War presented in Johnny Tremain, Treasure Island has an ornery streak running through it that presents a fairly adult look at pirates and their penchant for treachery, drink, and booty. (Of course since this is a boy’s wish fulfillment movie and not a man’s, the only booty these pirates are interested in are doubloons.)

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Welles plays John, a young dude who decides to go off and fight in World War I. Claudette Colbert is his wife, Liz, who waits for him to come home and once the armistice is announced in November of 1918 she gets all giddy with excitement that John will be home by Christmas, but she gets a telegram saying that John had been killed in action.

After she gets back to work from lunch (people sure were dedicated to their jobs back then!) she promptly faints. It turns out that not only is she overcome by grief from the loss of her true love, she is also preggers!

Her boss at the chemical plant, (George Brent from The Old Maid and The Great Lie) has always had eyes for her and takes the opportunity to take her in and nurse her back to health. (Well, it really was his old maid aunt that did it, but he asked her to.)

Even though she will always love John, her boss Larry gets her to marry him and raises John’s son as his own, never telling young Drew that his real daddy was killed in the Great War.

And it’s a good thing that they don’t tell him that because they’d all be lying dogs if they did! See, what the surface-happy Larry family doesn’t know is that John was just wounded really bad. His face was shattered, but more importantly than that, his spirit was shattered. He knows that if he came back all gimpy and ugly that his lovely wife’s life would be ruined forever, so he lets everyone thinks he’s dead while some Austrian doctor fixes him up with a new face.

Even though John has made this sacrifice for her own good (at least in his mind), war again is rearing its ugly head in Europe and if anyone knows that war sucks ass, it would be John, so he hightails it out of Austria back to the good ole U.S. of A.

Somehow when he makes his triumphant return, he has now become Dr. Kessler, Austrian chemist, with cheesy looking beard and hair, limp, accent, and Natalie Wood! Kessler ends up in the same city as he and Liz were from and against all the odds in the whole universe also ends up working for Larry!

Next thing you know Larry is inviting Kessler out to his house to meet the family! When Kessler sees that Larry has gone and married his wife, he is a bit surprised to say the least.

Now then, I mentioned that there just so happened to be another world war getting fired up and guess who is now old enough to go and fight in it? Why Drew of course, but Liz has some problems with Drew wanting to go and get killed in a European war, just like her John did.

It isn’t long before Kessler figures out that Drew is really his son. It also isn’t long before Liz starts to suspect that this handicapped Austrian guy hanging out with Natalie Wood is really Orson Welles slumming in an effort to raise money for his real movie projects.

As unbelievable as all of this is, the ending is even better and features Kessler chasing after Drew who is trying to go Canada to join the RAF and bringing him back home and then convincing Liz that she needs to let the boy go and that she needs to forget their past together and stay with her family and then Kessler catches a cold and dies!

But wait! Liz then has to adopt little Natalie Wood for Kessler!

I like to think that at some point, enough crazy crap goes on in this that it crosses over from lots of coincidences into pure destiny. Questionable make-up job aside, Orson is able to get it done in this one, playing the haunted guy changed by unspeakable tragedy while Claudette’s sadness that lingers just below the surface of her placid home life is likewise very credible.

Tomorrow Is Forever has a bit of a film noir feel to it, what with the whole “returning soldier trying to reintegrate himself into his old normal life” angle. This time, it just happens to be from World War I, but like all great noirs, John is handcuffed by fate (though one he had quite a hand in since he decided not to come back which quite frankly smacks of being really selfish) and is never able to regain what he lost and gave up two decades before.

I suppose he redeems himself to some extant since he is able to play father figure to Drew when he needed it most and is able to finally free Liz from his memory by babbling incoherently to her about the past and the future and somehow managed to work in the title of the movie.

Her conversion from being obsessed with John to liking her second-best husband was really fast and not at all convincing, but by this time it seems a bit silly to start complaining that the movie doesn’t really resemble reality, since the whole thing played like some romantic daydream where there’s all this nobility in suffering and denying your heart’s true desire.

It’s a wholly contrived affair designed to push your emotional buttons, but does so with an A-list cast and with great aplomb. When it’s all said and done, you’ll finally realize that love means never having to drop your Austrian accent no matter how much Claudette Colbert cries and pleads for you to admit that you’re really her long lost husband!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

After he makes it disappear, his friends are amazed but not convinced that there has been any time travel. They all leave and his good friend Filby makes George promise that he won’t go and get any himself involved in any time-space distortions. He swears that he won’t go out of the room, but then he goes to where he’s been storing the full sized time machine!

It’s pretty pimped out as far as temporal vehicles go. For instance on the time machine’s control panel consisting of a lever and an odometer that listed dates instead of speeds was a nifty little brass plate affixed to the center of it. Engraved in fancy cursive was the phrase “Manufactured by H. George Wells”! How many times have you ever seen a mad scientist go to the trouble of putting a label on his gizmo before?

He gets in and fires it up, but he doesn’t do it like a real man would. Any other guy would get in and immediately pull the lever all the way forward or all the back, instantly transporting themselves to the very beginning or end of time. No guy is going to get in there and just sit there watching the flowers in their lab bloom and un-bloom while the sun and moon fly by over head. We’d get in there and see what this baby can do!

George on the other hand is content to sort of putter along watching weeks and finally years go by all the while marveling at the mannequin across the street and how the fashions it displays change over the years. I was amazed that a department store would be so dull it would have the same mannequin and window display for sixty years.

Grandma George finally kicks it out of first gear and the next thing we know, he’s wrecking his time machine in the year 800,000 give or take several centuries!

Everything he recognizes is gone, replaced by wilderness. He wanders around and locates some people by a river. They, like most futuristic types are all young, blonde and dressed in pastel colored togas. Yes, this is one of those sci-fi movies that thinks being evolved means dressing up like you were Aristotle and hanging around in the woods.

George notices that one of these future saps is trying to drown in the river. No one around helps her out so George takes off his jacket and dives in and saves her. He tries to lay a guilt trip on everyone for not trying to save her, but even the girl he rescued isn’t too put out about it. I would have just thrown her ungrateful ass back in, put the time machine into fifth gear and gone on to an era more appreciative of my super heroics, but George is determined to learn about these people.

He tries to get information out of them, but no one has anything to say. Soon it becomes clear to George that these people are all dull-witted (they’ve let all their books turn to dust for heaven’s sake!), but since the girl he rescued is a good looking blonde he decides that these people just need to have someone like him to rekindle that spark in them to make them upstanding citizens.

These people are called the Eloi and they don’t do anything but lay around and periodically get harassed by an underground race of slugs called the Morlocks. There is some connection to these people that is so heinous it’s virtually unspeakable except to say that the Morlocks herd these dumb blondes around and use them as food.

George learns that during the last great war, the survivors split into two groups, the dumb blondes and the man-eating subhuman freaks. You can practically see George licking his chops when he hears this – he’s been looking for something concrete to do to show these blondes how to be men again.

Plus he needs to kill some time since the Morlocks car jacked his time machine and hid it in some temple he can’t get into. Do I even need to go into how something like the Club should probably be standard issue on a rig as sweet as a time machine?

Once George’s girlfriend gets captured by the Morlocks, George climbs down into the Morlocks’ lair, lights up a torch and opens up a can Victorian whoop-ass (Manufactured by H. George Wells!) on those cave scum.

The Morlocks are pretty cool as monsters go. They have this blue skin, long stringy white hair and their eyes light up which is a nice effect in the dark caves. Since they live underground they can’t stand light and even more importantly they don’t like to be set on fire!

There are nice touches throughout the movie about the significance of time travel such as when he meets up with the son of his friend Filby at different times. George sometimes talks about how he wants to go back and tell everyone what he’s discovered about the future. But will he tell them everything? Will he tell Filby that he is destined to die in the War?

The movie doesn’t really address these moral dilemmas with any depth and you wish that maybe they could have explored what the weight of all that knowledge, of the wars to come, his friends’ fates, presumably even his own, would do to an ordinary man. Time travel isn’t all just sightseeing and picking up future babes.

You do admire George for putting his money where his mouth is at the end of the film by returning to the future to help the Eloi out. The prospect of starting over is probably both simultaneously daunting and exhilarating. With the time machine though, I suppose he could just go back and forth until he gets it right.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

But perhaps that’s why the film is such a cautionary tale about our entry into the atomic age – if the unlocking of the atom can turn man and his close relative, the ant, against one another, can there really be anything good to come out of all this atomic insanity?

Heck yeah, there can! How about a movie starring James Arness, James Whitmore, and a bunch of huge ants? Once Them! was finished, I was hoping for some more atomic tests so I could get more cool movies about its dangers!

The desert holds many mysteries in its mysterious sandy depths! Like, why is it that only the ants took a hankering to all that radiation? What about the scorpions? Oh yeah, they have their own movie, The Black Scorpion. Well then, the Gila Monster sounds like it would be really cool if it got huge. The Giant Gila Monster you say? Okay, then surely the king of the desert beasts, the tarantula, deserves some recognition since it’s super-icky looking. Already at least two movies from the period starring them, Tarantula and Earth Vs. The Spider? Remind me to never visit the mysterious desert.

The state police are baffled by the discovery of a young girl in a state of shock, the disappearance of her tourist family, and the death of a local yokel. Throw in some strange tracks and sugar cubes and you’ve got yourself a clear cut case of giant ant rampage.

Somehow or other the state police can’t connect these dots and call in the FBI as played by James Arness. In real life Arness is the brother of Peter Graves which made me wonder whether they sat around at Thanksgiving dinner comparing giant ant stories and giant grasshopper stories since Peter starred in Beginning Of The End. Somehow though I imagine they preferred to focus on their roles in Gunsmoke and Mission: Impossible.

Both the state police and FBI are stumped until they call in the father-daughter team of doctors, the Medfords. The father is played by Edmund Gwenn who won an Oscar for playing Santa in Miracle On 34th Street. The doctor is played by Joan Weldon who should have won some kind of award for traipsing around the desert after giant ants in heels. And also for wearing a pair of silly goggles that made her look like a refugee from Speed Racer.

Using all of their scientific expertise, they uncover the shocking fact that it is giant ants that are responsible for these shenanigans. And by “scientific expertise” I mean that Joan gets herself attacked by a giant ant resulting in the guys having to demonstrate their crack shooting ability by shooting off the ant’s antennas because as all of us learn from the time we’re knee high to a giant grasshopper, the only way to stop a giant ant is to bust up its antennas. Well, that or take a flamethrower to them. That works pretty well, too.

This brings up one of the reasons why Them! is top notch big bug action: the frequent use of flamethrowers. I love flamethrowers. There’s something very satisfying about watching a dude with a fuel pack strapped to his back shooting a stream of flame and just setting crap on fire.

When a guy (or giant ant) gets shot with a gun, he might groan, stagger and fall down. But light his butt up with a flamethrower and he writhes around while someone is probably telling the guy with the flamethrower, “give him some more!” Plus, can you imagine what a cooked giant ant must smell like?

Fans of oversized creature drama are well served by Them! in all departments. You get a good dose of ant attacks, you get the eerie ant sounds that precede each attack, you get the short educational film about how tough and ruthless ants are that Dr. Medford shows the military brass, you get tense scenes of people putting little flags on a map marking the sightings of giant ants, you get some little brats trapped by ants and you get to see a guy get crushed to death by ant mandibles! (There’s a lot of talk about the killer mandibles. That’s money, just like flamethrowers!)

Them! also doesn’t resort to some silly extermination plan like Peter Graves’ Pied Piper routine in Beginning Of The End, or the gimmicky electrocution bit in Earth Vs. The Spider.

How does Arness and company dispatch his bugs during the final showdown? Him and a bunch of army guys go into the L.A. storm drains, locate the nest with the queen and from there it’s just a matter of “flame on, you six-legged bastards!” They’re even torching egg sacs! Egg sacs? They’re just as good as flamethrowers and killer mandibles!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Right from the beginning, the movie demonstrates how desirous it is for our sports heroes to not be forced into off season employment when we meet up with Gene Kelly and Old Blue Eyes as they perform their vaudeville routine that revolves around a lot of singing and dancing to the title song.

The offseason should be dedicated to hitting the weight room and getting stabbed outside strip clubs, not going on tour with dancing bears and circus strongmen. I mean, that’s just humiliating. How am I supposed to be worshipping someone for hitting homers when they’re out doing soft shoe at some run down resort in the Catskills?

Kelly plays the shortstop on the champion Wolves, while Sinatra is the second baseman. There is also a first baseman named Goldberg, but they only trot him out for stuff like the embarrassing dance number they do at dinner in front of the whole team about their double play combination.

Spring training finds our boys off the dinner theater circuit and down in Florida gearing up for another run at the pennant with the Wolves. After a decent song and dance number where the two regale their teammates with all the women they’ve run into over the course of the off-season, the team gets some startling news. They’ve been inherited or sold or lost in a poker game or something to some person named K.C. Higgins!

The team immediately begins to speculate about what a know-nothing loser this guy must be while the audience immediately begins speculating about how it must be Esther Williams and that the hijinks are only a train ride away!

Once Esther reveals her true identity as well as her expected personality (cool with a surprising knowledge of baseball) and Frank falls in love with her because of how she fielded a grounder, you begin wishing for the Wolves to be quickly eliminated from playoff contention so that all of us can get back to our off season jobs.

After a rather pointless scheme that saw Kelly trying to use Frank’s interest in Esther to get around their curfew (it didn’t work – Esther’s the kind of girl after all who goes swimming with a cap on!), the season finally begins wherein nothing much happens other than a montage of wins for the Wolves. They look just as good as they did last year and are poised for another pennant winning season.

So just how is it that the gambler, Joe Lorgan, is going to ensure that his bet against the Wolves pays off? It’s a simple plan really. He knows that Kelly is the best player the team has, so he offers him a job singing and dancing at this new club he’s starting and at twice the pay of his current baseball salary!

The money is certainly attractive to Kelly, but he’s not about to quit on his team in the middle of a pennant race. Lorgan agrees to let Kelly have the job as long as he’ll practice at night after he’s done playing that day’s game. Kelly agrees, little realizing that Lorgan’s sinister to plot is to have Kelly so tired that he’ll make a lot of errors and single-handedly cost the Wolves the pennant!

I’m not entirely sure if this actually qualifies as a plot by a gambler to influence the outcome of a season. First of all, how is that no one in management notices that this guy is always gone? There was a passing reference to Frank “covering” for him, but I think hiding the fact that the biggest star in baseball has a second job working for a gambler’s new nightclub goes a little bit beyond mere “covering.”

Second, and most importantly, has anyone ever watched an entire baseball game? Have you ever noticed how little physical activity it involves when you aren’t the pitcher or the catcher? How many times is Kelly going to have even move during a game? I would think that the game would be a good time for him to get his wind back for the nightclub practice later that night.

And third, isn’t it really optimistic to think that one guy on a team who is sort of tired is going to screw things up so badly that his whole team’s season is going to collapse? I thought the whole point of a gambler fixing things is that they were fixed into a sure thing. Doesn’t anyone stop to consider that if Kelly quits, he can just go to the cops if the gamblers get rough on him? After all, he did nothing wrong.

The weak story combined with the weak production numbers combine to make this the cinematic equivalent of a ground ball rolling under Bill Buckner’s glove into the outfield. With legendary musical guru Busby Berkeley directing and with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra starring, you would expect at the very least, some astounding dance sequences, but none of them are particularly eye catching or choreographed in any memorable fashion.

In a movie with this pedigree, you could probably excuse (or even expect) a flimsy story since it should all be just an excuse to showcase everyone’s song and dance talents, but outside of the initial “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” number, nothing close to rousing occurs. Major league talent produces strictly minor league results.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

A slow moving film that never amounts to much and frequently languishes on the shoals of extraneous plot points, A Stolen Life seems to be scripted without any concept of what a Bette Davis movie involving dirty tricks and silly plot twists is all about.

One need only to look at films such as The Great Lie and The Old Maid to see how these things should at least be attempted (actual execution is another thing entirely). The dirty tricks in the movie aren’t terribly dirty and the silly plot twists, while silly, don’t carry all that much in the way of high stakes consequences.

The movie though is such a plodding affair that we don’t even get to the underwhelming evil twin stuff until about a half hour into things.

Kate (she’s the mousy twin) comes to an island off the coast of Massachusetts to visit her sister, Patricia. She manages to miss the last ferry of the day, but is able to cajole Glenn Ford’s Bill into giving her a lift to the island. He usually doesn’t carry passengers, but he makes an exception in her case and doesn’t mind it all when she uses the two hour trip to sketch his portrait.

You see, Kate is an artist in addition to being a repressed plain Jane with a whore for a twin sister. I’d like to say that the whole artist angle really added some vital moments to the film, but that would be my evil twin talking. It did manage to add a good fifteen minutes to things that were quite needless.

Kate’s relationship with Bill progresses, but for some reason she never wants him to go to her place. I’m guessing it was because she was afraid that Patty would steal this guy away from her. Of course, the beauty of evil twins is that even when the good twin knows the other one is prone to nefarious activities, all it takes is a moment alone with their target and all the precautions in the world can’t save you.

So it is that even though Kate has done her best to not only keep Patricia out of the picture, but also to hide the fact that there even is a Patricia, it’s a chance meeting on the docks while Bill is waiting on Kate that vaults Patty into the picture.

By the time of the local barn dance, it’s pretty clear where his intentions lie when he dances with Patty while Kate is left to fume with her cousin. But why the switchover to the other twin?

It’s like Bill explains to Patty. You see, Kate is like a cake. Sure men like cake, but you know what makes cake even better? No, not more layers you fools! Frosting! A cake needs a little frosting to make it really appetizing and guess whose cake is all slathered up with Bill’s favorite flavor, Vanilla Hussy Creme?

As boring as the first part of things was, you could at least understand that they were attempting to set up the story for the rest of the flick. This middle part where Kate becomes a success, has an art show at a gallery, and runs into a really grubby, intense artist prone to hypercriticism has nothing to do with either the beginning part or the last part of the movie.

Luckily, all of this filler was promptly forgotten once Kate goes back to the house on the island thinking that Patty would be gone.

But Patty is home and she and Kate decide to go out in a boat for a little sailing. A storm is promptly whipped up complete with embarrassing special effects (in contrast with the special effects used to composite two Bettes in the same shot which were okay) and it isn’t long before Kate’s yelling “evil twin overboard!”

While Kate is unable to save her sister, she is able to save her sister’s wedding ring, which allows everyone who finds her to think that it was Patty that survived and not Kate.

Confronted by this case of mistaken identity, Kate does the only thing a twin would do in such a situation and plays along thinking that she’ll move in on Patty’s sweet life.

This was all based on a book by a Czech author so I’m going to be charitable and just assume that pretty much everything was lost in the translation. Let’s see if I have this straight: the only reason that Kate decided that maybe impersonating her dead sister and tricking Bill is wrong is because it turned out that her sister’s life sucked? If Patty had a perfect marriage, are we to assume that Kate would have never had a sudden attack of conscience?

But Kate isn’t the only worthless slug in this mess. Bill is a piece of trash himself. Even aside from his boorish behavior toward Kate at the beginning of the movie (dumping Kate for Patty just because Patty wore more make-up), his reaction to everything at the end of the movie was quite suspect as well.

Since it turned out that not only was Patty a piece of crap to be married to, but now also quite dead, you’ve suddenly realized it was Kate you loved all along? Even though she didn’t have enough frosting for you earlier? Even though she lied all about who was really dead? And even though Kate was clearly second choice, she’s more than willing to let this guy back into her life? Ugh. These two deserve one another. As far as the rest of us, I think we can all do better. This movie won’t steal your life, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be giving those 107 minutes back any time soon.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The Spiral Staircase is based on a novel called Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White (she also wrote the novel that Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes was based on) and in the more than capable hands of director Robert Siodmak, it’s bathed in darkness and shadows and the black and white photography only enhances the increasingly mounting terror that the mute servant girl feels as the killer stalks her in the country mansion where she works.

It shouldn’t be that surprising that the movie should have such a distinctive, almost noirish look since Siodmak was behind the camera for the great film noir Phantom Lady as well as Burt Lancaster’s Criss Cross. Siodmak takes this expressionistic aesthetic and grafts it onto a story that’s basically a primitive slasher movie.

And it’s a pretty good primitive slasher movie, too since you’re left with the distinct impression that the killer could potentially be any of the male characters.

Is it the hunky new doctor in town that has a thing for the mute servant girl? Is it George Brent, the professor who owns the house with the spiral staircase? (Was he finally driven over the edge after appearing in not one, but two ridiculously silly Bette Davis vehicles – The Great Lie and The Old Maid?)

Is it his half brother (he refers to him as a step brother, but they share the same father), a slimy womanizer who just recently returned from Europe when the murders started? Is it the scuzzy and crabby caretaker? Is it the old doctor who doesn’t like the competition from the hunky new doctor? Or could it be the constable on whose watch this is all going down on? And just why is the killer bumping off broads with handicaps of one variety or another?

This being 1946, you’re not going to have the explicit violence and gore that you would get later on in such films, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some rather jarring violence in it. In one scene, darkness fills the center of the shot and all you see are the victim’s hands writhing in agony at each edge of the shadow.

Throw in the close up and zooming shots of the killer’s eye as well as a fairly disturbing moment where the servant girl looks into a mirror and realizes she has no mouth and you can tell that you’re not in for some pansy murder melodrama. Likewise, once the identity of the killer is revealed, his earlier comments take on a new light and seemingly innocent happenings earlier in the evening turn out to have quite sinister motives.

While all the guys are milling around taking turns as the prime suspect, the women in the cast are able to add more to the film than just be potential victims. Dorothy McGuire in particular is quite effective as the mute with a haunted past whose handicap ends up threatening her life.

Even a dream sequence where she thinks about what her wedding to the hunky new doctor would be like isn’t just filler like it might be in other films, as it drives home just what a great problem being speechless can be.

Ethel Barrymore plays the bedridden mother of George Brent’s half-brother and she periodically says scary things to the mute girl about how she needs to leave the house because it isn’t safe and how she saw a murder years ago and the victim was the mute girl!

Punctuated with the big thunderstorm, people coming and going in and out of the rain, doors being mysteriously left open, and an oblivious bulldog named Carlton, and you’ve got the perfect atmosphere to compliment both the story and the technique exhibited here.

The only drawback is that at 86 minutes, it was just too short. When the killer revealed himself to the mute, I was thinking that it was just a false alarm because there was no way it could be concluded so soon. We had just gotten all the red herrings revved up! Let them play out some more. Let’s see a few more people disappear in the basement or the attic or wherever. As it was, it felt like it was missing part of the middle act. Despite its fleeting presence though, I wouldn’t hesitate recommending that you start your next dark and stormy night with a trip down The Spiral Staircase!

© 2010 MonsterHunter