Of course all that potential was fulfilled (and then some) once those five weeks in a balloon proved to include future Branson, Missouri headliner Fabian peforming the film’s odious theme song on a concertina during a pitstop at a desert oasis in a sequence that Jules Verne only wished he was imaginitive enough to concoct!

It wouldn’t be fair though to lay much, if any, of the blame on the awesome hair of Fabian for the film’s propensity to float aimlessly and provoke the nausea that such a real life balloon trip would surely entail.

Yes, the film saddled him with the role of the crabby professor’s assistant, Jacques, who was pointlessly Canadian, but little was demanded of him beyond putting wood in the balloon’s furnace and pulling a lever up and down. The guy who had the audience constantly wishing that Fabian would pull that lever in the wrong direction was Red Buttons as the scandal-plagued reporter Donald O’Shay.

O'Shay is an unfunny nitwit who is assigned to the balloon's crew by his newspaper owner uncle because he's always getting mixed up in something unseemly. When we first meet him, he's rescuing a gal from a bunch of slavers who want to auction her off. A lengthy chase through town follows with lots of guys falling down unconvincingly until O'Shay finally makes it to his appointment with the balloon.

O’Shay spends the rest of the film simultaneously attempting to be the comic relief and the hero and not succeeding too well in either category, coming off as merely obnoxious and making you feel bad for the classy Barbara Eden having to be anywhere near this moron.

O’Shay, Jacques, the professor, and stereotypical elderly British soldier more concerned with his precious teapot than anything else are aboard the balloon in an effort to beat a bunch of slave traders to western part of Africa. If they can get there first and plant the British flag, this will allow Britain to claim the area and somehow all the slave trading will cease.

As is to be expected, much of the film is made up of our heroes worrying about whether they are ahead or behind the slavers and whether they can make up a bunch of time after various disasters befall them. Needless to say, once you find out toward the end of the film that they haven’t even been flying during the night, you begin to question the true urgency of their mission.

The reason for the trip though isn’t really the point of these sorts of movies. It’s the crazy adventures that happen along the way that really matter.

With five weeks floating across uncharted lands, surely there are all sorts of amazing, hair-raising, and fantastical civilizations, creatures, and treasures to be had, right? Sure, if you think Peter Lorre and a wacky chimp qualify. For anything else though, you’d have to watch another movie.

Lorre as a captured slaver is largely wasted though he has about two funny lines (which is two more than anyone else), but it is the chimp who is the sole reason to watch.

She drinks wine, carries a rifle and walks guard duty, lathers up her face as if to shave and sports a monocle at one point! During one battle scene, she was even waving a rolling pin around prompting both chuckles and wonderment that a balloon expedition across uncharted Africa would pack a rolling pin!

Nothing much else of any interest transpires on this hot air trip. There’s escapes from angry natives of various stripes including one where Eden’s character Susan is rescued from slavers (not to be confused with Makia who was rescued at the beginning of the film and stowed away on the balloon), O’Shay and Jacques have to rescue everyone from imprisonment in Timbuktu, there’s an incident where O’Shay is chased by a lion, and a final crisis where everyone ends up at risk of being swept down a raging river. It’s all very repetitive, but even worse, what’s repetitive was dull to begin with.

Lacking any of the excitement of other Verne adaptations such as Mysterious Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, the film does feature sporadically passable special effects during some of the balloon action, though there are also several times where it is painfully clear a model is being used and characters are only reacting to stock footage of wild animals.

It should also be noted that while the balloon itself is a very stylish red and white striped affair, the gondola is an ugly thing dominated by a large unicorn head at the front of it, like it was some sort of fey viking air ship.

Director Irwin Allen rightfully began earning his nickname “Master of Disaster” with Five Weeks in a Balloon.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Perhaps the additional scenes could have fleshed out a few of the characters who were overshadowed by the movie’s obsession with promoting the producer’s singers. And maybe with the scenes put back in the correct order, Jackie Chan’s seemingly gratuitous cameo, wouldn’t have felt like a cheap publicity stunt designed solely so that his name and face could be shoehorned onto the DVD cover.

But I rather doubt it. I’m going to hazard a wild guess that all any of that would have done was make the movie nineteen minutes worse.

This was one of those movies that started out in fairly mediocre fashion and only got increasingly putrid as it went along. When I was watching the first fight between a vampire hunter (Reeve of the Anti-Vampire Federation) and some vampires, I thought that it was mildly entertaining in a “at least I’m not having to listen to Twins perform one of their signature Cantonese pop songs” kind of way.

Sure, a lot of the fighting was that ugly mix of Matrix-style slow motion and Hong Kong-style wire effects that succeeds more in looking incredibly fake than in anything else, but the important thing was that a lot of stuff was getting busted up. I never realized how much glass there could be in an underground train station until I saw all the really poorly computer generated glass go flying in all directions.

Those of you hoping that this would be the kind of band infomercial for Twins like KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park was for KISS are going to be sorely disappointed. At the very least, a movie such as this should provide the viewer with silly moments designed to get over the band’s characters super powers (and for some reason these movies starring bands always imbue them with powers far beyond those of mortal bands), but Twins doesn’t even do a number for us!

Shoot, I didn’t even know that this movie was a plot by Twins management to promote them until after I had finished watching the movie and was doing a little background check on the principals. I mean, I knew the movie was also known as Twins Effect, but I just spent the movie waiting for some twins to show up and eventually just chalked the title up to some dodgy (or optimistic) translation issues.

Those of us who aren’t necessarily Twins fans are probably wondering why we shouldn’t just skip this movie altogether (aside from the fact that it’s a really bad movie). Emperor Entertainment Group was thinking about you, too! In addition to Cantonese superstar singing duo Twins, you can also admire the acting of EEG’s obscure Hong Kong pop idol Edison Chen!

Okay, so EEG put a bunch of their pop stars in a movie featuring vampires, but without any of them singing so much as a theme song. Now, what exactly is this movie about then?

One of the Twins is a realtor who sells a church to Edison and his vampire groupies. For some vaguely explained reason, Edison and company are going to be living in the church, though if you’re a bunch of vampires trying to blend in, I’m not sure why you’d be living in a house of God, but maybe some if it will rub off on them and if they aren’t exactly Strong Christians, they can maybe be Weaker Vampires.

Edison and his crew though aren’t the real bad guys. That role would fall to some Eurotrash bloodsucker who is intent on killing off all the members of the vampire royal family so that he can collect their something or other and use their essence or whatever to open up this ancient book that will give him the power to walk around during the daytime, thus making him master of the world somehow.

Helen (the Twins realtor) is the sister of Reeve, the vampire hunter. Reeve’s partner is killed at the beginning of the movie in the train station and his new partner is Gypsy. Gypsy turns out to the other half of Twins.

Gypsy and Helen don’t hit it off very well at first as they engage in a furious rooftop battle over a discarded stuffed animal. Um, wasn’t there a bunch of vampires running around trying to take over the world with a book of the undead or something? Couldn’t the fight over Teddy Ruxpin have waited?

Helen and Gypsy become close once Helen reveals to Gypsy that she has fallen in love with Edison even though Gypsy’s and Reeve’s job is to hunt down monster scum like Edison. She implores Gypsy to speak to Reeve on her behalf and Gypsy agrees.

I don’t recall that much ever came of this because by this time the Eurotrash guy was after Edison and Reeve ended up fighting Eurotrash instead of Edison. The whole movie is a bit like that. Things start up, go nowhere, and new things start up.

And none made anything approaching any sense at all. Why did we move into a church? Why did Helen and Edison crash a wedding on their first date? What’s the deal with all these vampires running around? Who thought it would make any sense for Helen and Edison to not only run into Jackie Chan at that wedding, but also to run into him at a hospital where he was employed as an EMT?

And to have him help fight off some vampires by stuffing them full of antidepressants and then turn up the music so the vampires would be in a better mood and just dance around instead of trying to kill Helen, Edison, and Jackie? Surely that’s not funny in any culture!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Even though you would expect a sissy babysitter to elicit a lot of laughs while trying to raise three rambunctious boys, Mr. Belvedere (Clifton Webb) is often reduced to sniping from the sidelines, delivering his catty lines to various members of the King family. (This usually seems woefully out of place in a domestic setting except when he’s putting the snoopy neighbor in his place.)

What’s that? Did someone say Mr. Belvedere? What? You thought that Belvedere was always some porky guy outwitting baseball hall-of-famer Bob Uecker? No, no, no, my sitcom-myopic friend. You see, long before the ABC TV show, there were three feature films starring Clifton Webb as the fastidious butler (he’s portrayed pretty much as a baby sitter in this movie though) who knew everything about everything!

Though Belvedere does have a few good lines, the movie resorts to some pretty unimaginative physical comedy to keep us awake.

There’s the time when dad comes home from the office and there’s a chair stuck in the middle of the staircase and you immediately start the stopwatch to see just how long it takes for him to go tumbling down the stairs with it.

You’ve also got the time when dad decides to climb a tree in the middle of winter to peek into Belvedere’s room to get an idea of what secret project Belvedere is working on. Guess what happens about twenty seconds into this scheme? As soon as he even mentioned going up there, I just had these images of Al Bundy falling off his roof on all those episodes of Married With Children. I guess the classic comedy bits can be re-used again and again – even if they aren’t funny and are telegraphed a mile away.

Maureen O’Hara plays the befuddled wife who is a stay-at-home mom, but still can’t handle her three brats, so she’s in the market for a new babysitter. She isn’t all that good in this movie and for whatever reason can’t seem to deliver her lines in a convincing manner. Several times her acting called to mind some modern parody of this type of bland domestic comedy like you might find on Saturday Night Live or Mad TV.

Robert Young was clearly more at ease in this type of story than she and was a painless enough presence in the movie. Of course, this was just before Young became the quintessential fifties dad in Father Knows Best, so it was a bit like having Michael Jordan playing in the Special Olympics. That isn’t to say that Young’s character wasn’t a total boob, because, well, he was.

If you’ve got some sissy middle-aged babysitter living with you who hates kids and dogs, wears pajamas, and takes a “morning constitutional” every day, are you ever going to worry that Maureen O’Hara is going to have an affair with him? Heck, Maureen ought to have been worried that he was going to have an affair with her husband! Yet, not once, but twice, does this whole “Belvedere is pumping my wife” angle intrude in on the movie and unfortunately becomes a main plot point toward the end of things.

Once Belvedere shows up, he gets the kids and the family dog whipped into shape in short order. The movie never really explains how he is able to do this, but just writes it off as simply another thing that he’s an expert on. When asked by the parents what it is that he does, he replies that he is a genius and leaves it at that.

Belvedere is also working on a very special and very top-secret project that requires him to be locked in his room for long periods of time. The King family is naturally very curious about what their mysterious male babysitter is doing in the spare room, but other than trying to unlock the door and peek in his window they don’t really put much effort into finding out if he’s part of some terrorist cell or running a moonshine still or who knows what in there.

So what is he up to? He’s writing a tell-all book about the town he’s living in!

When the book comes out, the townspeople who are savaged in it are pissed and it causes Robert to lose his job at his law firm. His boss was portrayed as a skirt chasing dog and since it was Robert’s babysitter that wrote the book, well, you know how the business world is!

Somehow or other all this commotion causes Robert and Maureen to get back together (yes, they had broken up at some point due to Robert being convinced that she was having an affair with the gay babysitter) and also allows Robert and his best friend to finally start their own law practice after Belvedere hires them to defend him in a libel suit filed by pretty much the whole town, even though Belvedere spent the whole movie telling Robert what a moron he was.

By this point in time, the whole babysitting angle had been forgotten and once they got around to it again at the very end of things by announcing that Maureen was preggers and that Belvedere would be staying because he had two more books to write in his trilogy and was an obstetrician in one of his former jobs, you’re breathing a sigh of relief that the other two Belvedere movies aren’t available on video yet.

Not funny, clumsily plotted, and the main character is such a cold unfeeling jerk, you have no desire to see his further adventures. The concept of the small town tell-all book and its fallout was handled with more hilarity in the melodrama Return to Peyton Place.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Roxie Hart was a wannabe show girl whose husband shot and killed a talent scout who was in their apartment making a pass at Roxie. A reporter and another talent scout know what type of town Chicago is – the kind of town where violent chippies like Roxie never swing for killing a man. In fact, they not only beat the rap, but they also become celebrities!

The reporter realizes that with her looks, this could be the biggest story he’s ever covered while the talent scout suddenly realizes that she might have enough talent to be a star. They just need her to admit that she’s the one that killed the guy!

Roxie, recognizing a sweet deal when she hears it, eventually agrees to have the murder beef pinned on her in hopes that it will launch her career. The talent scout produces a piece of paper and tells her to sign it so that she’ll be under contract. She looks at it, discovers that it’s completely blank and says that there’s “not even any fine print” on it. The talent scout tells her that he’ll fill that in later thus setting the tone for a film that’s a farce of epic proportions full of bitterly funny commentary on the press, the legal system, and the ego of people who seek fame.

Roxie owns up to the crime she didn’t commit and is taken to the county jail, becoming the celebrity she and her advisers (the reporter and the talent scout) had hoped for.

Billy Flynn (Adelph Menjou) signs on to be her defense attorney. He’s a complete operator and you just know that some of the stuff he engages in with his client, is exactly the sort of thing that a lot these lawyers do with their high-profile celebrity customers. He tells her what their defense will be before even knowing the facts (it’s self defense – we’ll figure out why later) and instructs her on how she should act around the press.

Roxie wants to be a star even though she is in lockdown and in another funny scene she allows herself to be talked into demonstrating some dance she’s well known for and the next thing you know, she and all the reporters with her at the jail, break out into a big dance number!

Everything is going swell for Roxie until Two Gun Gertie is captured. She’s a rough and tumble blonde that is all attitude and Roxie is quickly relegated to yesterday’s news!

Roxie is determined to be the biggest name in the biz though, so she announces she’s pregnant! This immediately brings the press back to her side and whips everyone into a frenzy of pro-motherhood sentiment. Flynn wonders how the state can charge one person with a crime, but try both Roxie and her unborn child for it!

The reporters even decide that the trial should begin on Mother’s Day to maximize the publicity. Meanwhile, Flynn gets Roxie’s husband to divorce her in an effort to further portray Roxie as a hapless and helpless victim of a cruel and unfeeling male-dominated world.

As funny as the first part of the movie was, the last part is what really brings everything home. This is where Roxie goes on trial for murder and it is probably one of the funniest trials you’ll ever see. No one involved is spared satirical dissection and this is another one of these ancient movies that still works because they were on the money with so much of their material.

The trial is being covered by a radio guy doing the play by play and a crime reporter providing color commentary and it’s all brought to us by some quack doctor selling some kind of home remedy decades before cable channels did basically the same thing!

The filmmakers engineer a constant barrage of biting humor throughout the trial, with Roxie flirting with the jury, the reporters stopping the action at dramatic moments so they can photograph Roxie who is posing on the witness stand, right down to the publicity-hound judge that always rushes from his chair to pose majestically in the back of the photos with Roxie.

The reporter who is giving the color commentary probably has the best line in the movie when Roxie testifies that she tried some liquor and that it must have been whiskey because it tasted so yucky. “It’s loose talk like that that gives whiskey a bad name,” he intones to his listeners earnestly.

The trial continues until finally Billy gives his closing argument and eventually has to tell Roxie to shut up because her fake crying has gotten so loud that nobody could hear his impassioned plea for mercy. By the time he turns to the judge, holding the by-now passed out Roxie in his arms, and tells the Court that the defense rests, you’re worn out by all the hi-jinks.

There is a rather half-hearted attempt at a love story and the very end of the movie that takes place years later back at the bar doesn’t really work, but that’s the only quibble with this picture and I only note it, because they could have just ended it all with the verdict.

That unnecessary padding notwithstanding, this movie is one of the funniest parodies of our legal system to ever grace the big screen. An underrated screwball classic that will leaving you shaking your head in laughter as well as disbelief at how little has changed in the ensuing years.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

J.D. was of course the country hick who pined away for the girl next door, Willadean. Though he would no doubt chalk up his inability to even get a whiff of Willadean to the unfair competition provided by the city slicker who just moved into the neighborhood, an impartial observer would surely have no choice, but to lay the blame squarely at J.D.’s watermelon-stained feet.

J.D. and his younger brother Freddy maintain a super cool bachelor pad tree house they use to spy on Willadean, her dad’s melon patch, and the new kid (Harley) from the city they immediately tag as a sissy, probably because of his fancy shirt and tie and over-moussed hair.

As all us real American folk from the Heartland are prone to do whenever we see a wimpy kid from the city, J.D. & Freddy set about giving him a good old-fashioned country welcome. By pummeling him with rocks and dirt clods!

They all become fast friends though once J.D. sees that Harley has a horse. And while J.D. is always eager to scheme against Harley in an effort to secure the affections of Willadean, he doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of “paybacks are a bitch.”

Thus we are treated to the scene of Harley hitting his horse in a sensitive spot while J.D. is riding it causing the horse to throw J.D. in a bunch of mud while Harley, Freddy and Willadean laugh uncontrollably!

But like all great clueless virgins everywhere, J.D. has that never say die attitude that is usually quite misplaced. The remainder of the film details the two cunning plans J.D. has to win over Willadean while simultaneously destroying any chance Harley has with her. Proving that the trickery he fell for with the horse was no aberration, J.D.’s plans are notable for one thing: backfiring badly.

His first plan is clearly the stupider of the two (mainly because no sane person could ever believe the second plan even qualified as a plan at all) and involved Willadean’s father and his gigantic seed melon.

A seed melon is apparently a large watermelon that is grown for the purpose of harvesting all the seeds so that you can grow a whole field of freakishly large melons the next summer. It’s guarded day and night by Willadean’s dad, so J.D. figures that if they can steal it, Willadean will be impressed. Because nothing impresses a girl like ruining her father’s livelihood.

J.D. though eager to look awesome in Willadean’s eyes, is not so keen to actually do any hard work or take any risk on her behalf.

He goads Harley into stealing the melon, but shockingly the theft goes horribly wrong when the next morning arrives and Willadean’s father goes into a psychotic rage in front of everyone when he sees the melon is missing. He screams, stomps melons, kicks melons and even bashes them with his rifle before his fury is spent.

Harley proves that big city kids are no good at pulling off big time heists when his conscience and good upbringing get the better of him and he owns up to what he did to Willadean’s dad. He even produces all the seeds from the melon in an attempt to make amends. Willadean is impressed by his courage so the crafty J.D. devises a final stunt to become Willadean’s favorite.

He’s going to make Harley spend one hour in a haunted house that he’s rigged up with all sorts of scary tricks. And he also makes Willadean go up to the second story of the house and back in order to allow her to join his club. Yup, definitely still a virgin.

J.D. gets hosed again when Freddy and Willadean catch on to his game and warn Harley which allows Harley to turn the tables on him. But just as another idiotic plan of his is looking like its going in the opposite direction of Pantytown, the kids discover a bunch of money in the house!

And they discover a tramp with a Chihuahua also in the house! And the tramp used to be millionaire! And none of it had anything to do with anything! At least it wasn’t actively ruining J.D.’s chances with Willadean. Like everything J.D. did!

Surprisingly fun and entertaining, For the Love of Willadean is highlighted by Sammy the Way-Out Seal stars Michael McGreevey as J.D. and Billy Mummy as Freddy.

J.D.’s desperation to please Willadean is portrayed in amusing fashion as he constantly shifts his views to mirror hers while Freddy hilariously complains and disagrees with all the stupid stuff J.D. gets him involved with because of J.D.’s infatuation with Willadean.

The suspenseful watermelon theft is worth a viewing all by itself! It’s like watching The Great Escape in a vegetable garden!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

You’ve got Elsa Lanchester who plays the nosy landlady that doesn’t like dogs. Thirty some odd years prior to this, she was the Bride in Bride Of Frankenstein. Dwayne Hickman, who is best remembered as Dobie Gillis and the younger brother of Daryl Hickman, is the star. There’s also Mary Ann Mobley who was Miss America once upon a time!

There’s even a guy in this movie that was in McHale’s Navy! Are you salivating yet?

The first thing you notice when the feature begins is this astoundingly un-catchy theme song that goes on and on and on, describing what a thief this dog Barabbas was. I couldn’t make out half the lyrics to this one because some guys were doing a bad impression of the Beach Boys while a woman’s high pitched voice caterwauled, apparently indifferent to whatever the guys were trying to accomplish.

To its credit, the song managed to set up the fact that this dog is a kleptomaniac since it played during a montage of him stealing lunches, golf balls, gloves and sexy panties (okay, I made that last one up, but you know that’s what the dog was really after) while all the townspeople rose up against him and finally forced the owner to ship his thieving ass back to the pound.

En route to the dog pound, Barabbas (named after the thief in the Bible) runs his big jailbreak play and bolts for the airfield just outside of town.

He hitches a ride with mild mannered traffic reporter Jack Crandall and foam-mouthed hilarity ensues!

Watch as Barabbas tries to crash the helicopter! Squeal with delight as Barabbas sneaks a donut from Jack’s lunch! Piss your pants with laughter as Barabbas tries to choke out Jack with the microphone cord!

As you might have guessed, Jack and Barabbas become instant celebrities. The station manager tells Jack that he and Barabbas are partners, so Jack goes to the pound and grudgingly adopts Barabbas, but not before being informed that Barabbas has been adopted and returned eight times before!

Now, just adopting a delinquent dog isn’t the only problem that Jack faces. He happens lives in an apartment building where dogs are strictly prohibited because the old landlady’s cat is allergic to them. You know what this means, don’t you? A really huge box that gets put over top of Barabbas as Jack attempts to smuggle him in like a pack of cancer sticks into the county jail!

So with Barabbas in this box and riding the elevator up with the landlady and Jack’s new neighbor, Miss America, the dog starts whining and Jack has to play it off like he was yawning.

This is just about as close as My Dog, the Thief gets to comedy. You’re not going to actually laugh, but if there was a moment in the movie where you theoretically might have thought about laughing, this one would probably be that time. But it really isn’t funny.

During one of their traffic reports, Barabbas lets on that he needs to take a whiz. So Jack sets the copter down in the boondocks and Barabbas runs off to do his business.

This is when the bumbling jewel thieves that everyone in the audience knew had to be in a movie like this finally make their appearance. They’ve stolen the Cosgrove necklace and are en route to their leader to turn it over to him. Suddenly a tire blows out and they end up right smack dab where Barabbas was going to drain the lizard!

The necklace is in a lunch pail and Barabbas snatches it and hightails it into the weeds. He returns to the copter and Jack and he take off, with Jack none the wiser as to Barabbas’ latest felony theft.

The standard kidnap and ransom demand follow as the thieves try to recover the necklace. Jack is lured to some out of the way place where he gets held at gunpoint and is made to fly the copter to where Barabbas last had the lunch pail.

This is pretty shoddy, even by late sixties live-action Disney standards. That should be obvious from the odd collection of ex-movie stars, child actors, and beauty queens, but it’s all run through the bland Disney machine so that there isn’t even anything remotely campy or kitschy about it.

Hickman isn’t particularly memorable like Dean Jones or even Tommy Kirk. He stands around looking a bit constipated most of the time and is forced to make dog noises once in awhile to cover up for Barabbas. (Though I think it’s obvious those dog noises are dubbed in, so he’s really just pretending to make dog noises. Does that make it better or worse?)

There’s nothing surprising about this one and it’s merely a particularly anemic version of the “wacky animal and stupid criminal” movies the Disney company seemed to have a fetish for during this time period.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

This is a relatively early live action film from the Walt Disney Company and it’s notable for how little drama – real, imagined, or even forced, it contains. I’m still not sure how it managed to accomplish this since the movie involved a chimp, a reluctant astronaut (Tom Tryon), a sexy alien chick, and a gruff Brian Keith.

Much like the similarly boring First Men In The Moon, this movie seemingly starts out with a bang as we are in the midst of some space mission, where a capsule is orbiting the moon and everyone at mission control (three or four guys in front of about two banks of blinking lights) is really nervous about the mission as we were in a space race with the Soviets back then.

On the ground you’ve got General Vanneman (Keith) who we know is gruff because he is constantly barking out his lines and chomping a cigar. Also present is Senator McGuire who is there to provide failed attempts at comedy involving how clueless our elected officials are. Almost without exception, these bits fall flat and you’re just hoping that the General will start growling and snorting again to fill the silence that follow these bombs.

One almost wonders if there was some half-assed effort with this movie to poke fun at the space race and the obsession our government had with it, but it’s a one note joke that is played so broadly and unimaginatively that it’s an utter failure.

The space mission turns out okay and we meet Captain Talbot (Tryon from I Married a Monster from Outer Space) and he gets a little woozy when he’s in the airplane trying to recover the space capsule, making him the best candidate to go to the moon because of the hi-jinks involving barf in a zero-g environment.

Another wacky moment comes when Talbot fishes the astronaut out of the capsule and it turns out to be Charlie the chimp!

Later at a dinner party celebrating the mission’s success, the General tells all the pilots in the program that they are going to move on to the next phase of the project – sending a man up. He asks for volunteers, but it turns out that no one wants to go! These guys aren’t obviously from the Right Stuff school of kick ass test pilots, but are closer to college kids that sit in the back of the lecture hall.

This is where Charlie comes in. He’s been out of control the whole night, making farting noises, putting his bowl on his head, and smoking cigars. Heck, he’s been up there and back, so he’s the Man!

He stabs his buddy Talbot in the butt with a fork and this is mistaken by the General for a volunteer. Why the General thinks a guy jumping up, screaming, and holding his ass is someone volunteering for anything is probably best left to his therapist to figure out.

Talbot flies out to see his mom before his mission and on the plane a sexy chick named Lyrae starts talking to him and Talbot thinks she is some type of spy. He ditches her once he gets off the plane and gets a ride back to his mom’s house with his kid brother (Tommy Kirk in a pointless cameo).

Once home, Talbot discovers that Lyrae is still pursuing him and he does everything he can to avoid it. She says that she only needs to tell him something important, but Talbot is a spaz and has been conditioned to fear strangers by his superiors even if they are hotties with French accents!

For some reason, Lyrae is described by Talbot to the General as a Beatnik despite looking like a fashion model. This allowed them to parade a bunch of Beatnik chicks in a police line-up later on in the movie when the Feds were trying to find this girl. Heh. What happened to that chimp again?

Lyrae is not a spy, but is from an advanced race who already know all about space travel and she’s just trying to warn Talbot that he needs to put some different shielding on his space ship so he doesn’t go bananas like Charlie did when he returned from his mission. (You mean sticking that fork in Talbot’s butt wasn’t part of his training?)

Once Talbot finally gets around to getting launched, the shielding doesn’t matter since Lyrae teleports onto his ship and they decide to go to her planet thus ending the film in a rather abrupt fashion.

Edmond O’Brien shows up as an FBI-type guy who is kind of protecting Talbot from Lyrae, but his role is little more than crabbiness and befuddled incompetence. The French chick that plays Lyrae doesn’t bring much to the table beyond the expected girlish surprise all aliens have at how humans kiss each other.

A plodding, earthbound sci-fi flick that made you wish you had left with Tommy Kirk when he quickly exited things after doing nothing more than driving Talbot home.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

When we last left Merlin Jones, he was embroiled in some legal controversy that ended up with his chimp Stanley having to testify on his behalf. Somehow that all worked out for him and now we find ourselves back in court with Merlin, his girlfriend Jennifer, Stanley, and Judge Holmsby.

This time Merlin is attempting to adopt Stanley as his kid. The judge won’t allow Merlin to adopt the chimp, but the judge isn’t the kind of heartless judiciary type to get in the way of some crazy-assed plot possibilities, so he does grant Merlin status as Stanley’s guardian, which I think means that Merlin can steal Stanley’s Social Security checks.

Merlin goes home and immediately begins his latest experiment on Stanley. He tries to get Stanley to brush his teeth. But after Merlin leaves Stanley alone to answer the door, somehow or other that rascally chimp knocks a bunch of bubble bath into the sink with the water running and the next thing you know there’s something like fifty thousand cubic feet of bubbles filling Merlin’s bathroom!

Merlin follows that blazing success up with a more involved experiment that has him hooking up curlers to Stanley’s head at night that are also connected to a record player. The record being played is the smah hit “Merlin instructs Stanley on his morning chores.”

Yes, Merlin has concocted a way to get people to learn by listening to instructional materials while they sleep. This dovetails nicely with the latest crisis that Midvale’s football team is experiencing. This time, their dire circumstance is that they have to pass their classes if they want to play football! Egads! This sounds like the machinations of some faculty member who hates football just because he didn’t make the team years ago!

Luckily, Judge Holmsby is an alum and football player and is determined to find an “honest way to cheat” so that his players can stay on the team. How ever will they get all that English literature into their stupid jock heads? If only there was a quick and easy way to upload it all into the smooth surface of their brains.

So Merlin hooks up two football players that need smartening up to his sleep-learning device, including the ape-like Norman from the previous movie, and it works! Of course everyone thinks they cheated and there’s a little drama where the board of regents has to decide whether to expel Merlin and the two football players.

It doesn’t take a Merlin Jones to know that the regents will somehow decide that “an honest way to cheat” is just fine, so long as it is all done in time for bowl season. The football team is saved!

But the football team is still in danger! You see, this guy who hates the team has come up with a donor who will donate a million dollars to Midvale, but only on the condition that they disband the football team. Can even the unholy alliance of Merlin Jones and Judge Holmsby figure a way out of this one?

They don’t have to because a guy shows up willing to donate ten million dollars to Midvale if someone can prove his grandfather wasn’t nuts when he wrote a children’s book about flying without mechanical assistance. I’m starting to think that in this case, screenwriters Alfred Lewis Levitt and his wife Helen Levitt weren’t using their pseudonyms Tom and Helen August just because they were blacklisted.

Merlin is put in charge of coming up with a contraption that he can pedal and fly and you get the added bonus of him inventing a drink that gives him a burst of adrenaline-fueled power. (Thankfully tried out on Stanley first who promptly goes ape and destroys the lab single-handedly.)

Merlin’s oblivious enthusiasm for every idiotic scheme he gets roped into carries the movie along which is really a credit to Tommy Kirk who has an ability to make swallowing all the poorly thought out and written material easier than it really ought to be.

Annette is still relegated to the role of flummoxed gal pal in this one, even more so than in the previous one. The Judge’s character though actually gets expanded and moves from grumpy establishment guy to Merlin’s partner in crime, his love for college football an understandable impetus for turning to outlandish pseudoscience.

If you’ve seen the first one, you know exactly what you’re getting this time around. Except less Stanley and more Beach Boys. Which is precisely the sort of experiment even Merlin Jones wouldn’t be gullible enough to undertake.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Based on the comic strip no one has ever read, Modesty Blaise is a thief of exceptional talent who is recruited by the British government to find out who is trying to steal some diamonds that are being sent to some fictional Arabian nation.

Despite selecting Modesty for the job, the government has its reservations and so fails to tell her the real location of the diamonds, instead giving her some snow job about them being transported by plane when in fact they are going by boat. They do this in spite of the fact that she was a world class thief and has told them that they have to be straight up with her or she will steal the diamonds for herself.

But would she have really? In one of many scenes that goes on too long and isn’t remotely amusing, it turns out that she and the Sheik of the country the diamonds are going to are such old pals that he refers to her as his son. That’s freaking hilarious because she’s a woman! And sons are usually boys!

The film also show the Sheik’s relatives and compatriots in his London headquarters enamored with all the products of western culture, surrounding themselves with boxes of stuff including pinball machines, cameras, and scooters. That’s funny because Arabs are a primitive people that are easily impressed with white man’s shiny beads!

Modesty hits Amsterdam since the diamonds are supposed to be leaving by plane from there, but as she takes a scenic tour of the canals by water transport, she catches on that the diamonds will in fact be aboard the cargo ship, Tyboria.

Her friend Willie provides an assist with a mine and the rest of her time in Amsterdam passes like a bad case of the DTs, with various characters appearing and milling around at various apartments and bars. Willie in particular doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing as he’s hanging out at magic shows in an effort to collect information about something.

Somewhere during all this we are finally introduced to the only character who is even momentarily entertaining. He is as he refers to himself later in the film, “the villain of the piece” and his name is Gabriel. He appears to be another world class thief who inhabits an island hideaway and silly silver wig.

There are moments with Gabriel where he manages to be quite good at playing off the Bondian stereotype of the melodramatic villain and provides the movie’s only fleeting smiles, but so often they overdo it and we’re left with Gabriel merely looking like he’s straining to be weird.

Gabriel invites Modesty over for lunch which she accepts. He promptly takes her prisoner and also manages to get Willie as well. Gabriel explains his big plan to steal the diamonds. He is going to make Willie go on the mission and it will involve some underwater gizmo that will cut a hole in the bottom of the boat and Willie will slip into the ship’s cargo area, steal the diamonds and slip back out.

Why Gabriel needed either one of these two is never explained. The plan didn’t take any special skill, so what was the point of involving Modesty and Willie? Maybe the superfluous flourishes to his scheme were all a part of the mocking of the generic spy movie villain. Or maybe it makes perfect sense in a movie where the good guys are captured after having lunch with the bad guys.

Once the diamonds are stolen, Gabriel provides a key to aid Modesty’s escape. It comes on a key chain with the word “perhaps” written on it – a response to her earlier question to Gabriel after he says that because he’s the bad guy he has to condemn them to death and she asks something like,”but I’m the heroine so don’t I escape?” Just keep reminding yourself that it took two guys to come up with the story and an additional guy to write the screenplay.

The Sheik comes to Modesty’s aid and a long, drawn-out clash between the Sheik’s forces and Gabriel doesn’t even put an end to this fiasco, because once that’s done, we have to go back to the Sheik’s kingdom to see Willie and Modesty enjoying their victory and to see Gabriel getting rescued by his financial advisor.

Just an awful exercise in self-conscious excess, this bloated pile of failed jokes and concepts doesn’t even get the whole “it dates badly” pass that some movies of the period might rate, mainly because it’s hard to believe that audiences seeing it in 1966 actually found it entertaining.

Aside from the horrid story and the lazy way the film was put together, Monica Vitti isn’t particularly memorable as Modesty. Even more forgettable is the character of Modesty Blaise herself. Sure, she karate chops a few guys, but the character doesn’t do anything except get into trouble through her own stupidity and only gets out of it with help from all her male friends.

The fact we didn’t see another Modesty Blaise film until a failed pilot in 1982 goes to show that the old gal probably needs to stay a retired world class thief and quit stealing audiences’ time and money.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Mrs. Hobbs has secured the use of a house out on the west coast and everyone is coming along whether they like it or not. The Hobbs family still has two ungrateful and moody brats living at home with them. There’s the girl who is very self-conscious of her new braces. We’ll call her Metal Mouth. Then there’s the boy who is addicted to TV. We’ll call him America’s Youth. Also joining them once they get out to the coast are two grown daughters and their families.

Each family comes with its own problem, but the most interesting thing is that one of the daughters is married to America’s favorite flesh-eating G.I., John Saxon! John amazed us when he went nuts in Cannibal Apocalypse and he amazes again as the uppity egghead college professor who has a hankering for the dumb, foreign blonde gal that’s malingering on the beach the Hobbs’ vacation home is perched upon.

The movie focuses on Roger’s reaction to the insanity that constantly assaults his senses during the time when he’s supposed to be relaxing. The house is one source of trouble the film weakly attempts to mine for laughs. There’s the expected problems such as the water not working correctly (this usually involves someone getting sprayed with a geyser of water from the kitchen sink), an impossibly complicated pump that Roger can’t figure out how to work, but the plumber fresh out of the neighbor’s cesspool has no problem with (cesspool is funny, right?), and various stairs, banisters, and doorknobs breaking off at inopportune times.

The problems with the house though are merely background noise on this vacation when compared to what a dysfunctional load of Hobbs DNA the rest of the family turns out to be.

Roger stands around trying to puzzle out what’s up with the failing marriages of his two grown daughters that includes one husband being unemployed and the grandchildren being undisciplined brats.

Roger also has to find a way to reach out to his young son and does so by taking him on a sail boat ride and getting so lost at sea that they almost die. That particularly uninvolving scene went on for so long that I was hoping they’d both start gulping ocean water until their tongues swelled up and they suffocated.

Roger also manages to solve Metal Mouth’s problem of not being liked by boys by forcing her to go to a dance and then paying every guy there five bucks to dance with her. One guy turns out to be Fabian and after taking Roger’s five bucks, discovers that he likes Metal Mouth enough to sing the hit song “Cream Puff” (a singularly hideous bit of tuneless trash) with her and return Roger’s five bucks!

Roger’s next problem to solve is the unemployed husband’s situation. Even though Roger’s son-in-law bailed out and went home earlier, he somehow has landed a job interview with General Research.

The only hitch is that the head of General Research himself has to okay him before he can get the job. This means he has to come down to Roger’s vacation house to hang out for a few days to see if the kid is suitable – even though the kid isn’t even there!

Roger goes bird watching with the guy and ends up beating him up later that night due to a misunderstanding involving this guy’s wife, Roger, and a steam valve in the bathroom. After this guy leaves in a huff the next morning, guess who calls up later to excitedly announce that he’s landed a job with General Research? Roger, your crazy scheming has paid off again!

Roger’s simple-minded and unconventional solutions to vexing and deep-seated issues are annoying partly because of how unrealistic they are, but mostly because they just aren’t that funny!

And is watching Jimmy Stewart walking weirdly while looking for birds supposed to get me to do anything more than marvel that a legend like Stewart had no problem looking stupid in a pallid movie, all in an attempt to throttle a laugh out of a script already choking on predictability and poor pacing? (John Saxon’s story line was particularly woefully underdeveloped and totally forgotten about for a good chunk of the movie and only explained away as things were wrapping up.)

Stewart and co-star Maureen O’Hara give the film a level of professional respectability it otherwise wouldn’t be worthy of, but in the end, this vacation is no more fun than the one you’d likely have to endure with your own family.

© 2010 MonsterHunter