Get Christmas Over With in a BLAST OF SILENCE (1961)

Christmas is almost here, and if there's one thing nobody talks about it's that it's perfectly fine to not be in the Modern Christmas Mood.  Even though the stories of people getting trampled in a mad search for Tickle Me Biebers are exaggerated, there's a secret contingent of those who want them to be true in hopes that Kristmas Kommercialism will be shut down for good and they can get back to holing up next to the space heater with their complete series box set of Gilligan's Planet.  While Bad Santa is a logical choice for an anti-Christmas movie, it still manages to squeeze in the True Meaning of Christmas at the end, if only jokingly, so consider this movie an ode to the X-Mas Discontent.  A longtime staple of festival circuits and why-in-the-fudge-isn't-this-on-video-yet lists, Blast of Silence is a 1961 crime thriller shot in crisp B&W on the holiday decked streets of New York, and I couldn't think of a more black-hearted plot to garnish the birthday of Baby Jesus.

A train hurtles through a black tunnel towards the light as blacklisted actor Lionel Stander narrates:

"Remembering out of the black silence...you were born in pain.  Easy!  Easy does it, little mother...you've never lost a father!  You're job is done, little mother... You were born with hate and anger built in, with a slap on the backside to blast out the scream..."

Hitman Frank Bono (played by Allen Baron, the movie's writer/director) returns to New York after a stint in Cleveland, and though he hates Christmas decorations and music surround him at every turn.  A contact meets him on a ferry to tell him his instructions, reminding him not to be spotted or else the deal is off.  His target is a mob boss nestled in suburbia, and the narrator quips, "His neighbors will say 'But he was such a respectable man!'"  Beneath all the narration is a wild jazz score by none other than Meyer Kupferman, one of Classical music's great nutballs and an equally nutty Re-Composing subject.  Also a great subject of discussion is Larry Tucker, here supplying Bono his gun as Big Ralph, who you may remember as Pagliacci from Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor.  He was more notable as a writer, having worked on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (movie and series!) and I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, as well as developing The Monkees.  I'd like to think it was his idea for his character to hide his money in the oil well of a student lamp, or keep several mice as pets.

Much of Blast of Silence is made up of "Baby Boy" Frank Bono, in wait for his target to be alone, walking the streets of New York, dense with life and detail, a character in itself.  The narrator swings between Bono's internal thoughts and a persistently cynical micro-manager, and he may hate Christmas more than Bono himself.  It's more than just grinchiness, as Bono doesn't want to spend "another Christmas running from the cops," and Stander blows his mood out to searing existential bitterness.  The long and directionless waiting of a hired gun is a deft portrait of loneliness, and the extended handheld tracking shots of Bono make a grand spectacle of late-50's modern design, doubly gaudy with the multicolored (I assume) lights, with a reindeer merry-go-round as a capstone.  As much as we all love late-50's/early-60's design it's very easy for the look to turn tacky, and I can only imagine what a vacuum of taste it must have felt like to be trapped in Blast of Silence's Department Store Metropolis.

He is invited to a party by old friends, but the narrator reminds him how much he hates parties.  The mood is bizarre - a mixture of doped-up swing music and a guy with a conga drum, spiced up by a contest wherein Bono and his friend push peanuts across the floor with their noses.  The next day brings more bells and boychoirs, and Bono goes to see Lori, an old flame who he met at the party.  After a tense conversation about what Bono was doing in Cleveland, the two kiss and Bono gets a little too carried away; Lori asks him to leave, as well as why he doesn't have a girlfriend.  Perhaps it's because he spends all his time stalking murder targets, and having to kill Big Ralph for demanding more money after an accidental moment of exposure doesn't help things - there are only more people waiting in the wings to do Bono in.

The plot doesn't get any cheerier - people are going to die and nobody is going to be wished a Happy New Year*.  In many ways Blast of Silence is the polar opposite of a Christmas movie - it's every man for himself, eternal strife on Earth and ill will towards men.  The black & white cinematography makes Winter in the city especially bleak, all bare trees and bare asphalt.  Bono doesn't crack a smile the whole time, and he has no reason to.  The narrator is out for blood, his snide death rattle of a voice leading the audience to the spirit-crushing end with a twisted grin.  All of this is in the spirit of noir cinema, of course, and Blast of Silence was one of the last true noirs ever made, the end of an era kissing the fresh behind of 60's B&W underground cinema.  It's unblinking brutality and breakneck pace made it a sleeper classic, and much like the coming blogtraction A Cold Wind in August has been kept in a meek limelight by devoted fans of vintage independent rarities.  It didn't receive a video release until 2008, when the Criterion Collection added it to their ranks, complete with a comic book insert recreating the movie's opening with stark, pulpy glee.  I'm a bit mad as I write this, because while somebody had uploaded the whole thing to YouTube it was taken down, and so I can't be as generous as I'd like, but I do have the brilliant opening sequence, courtesy of another reviewer.  And hey, you've still got time to shop on Christmas Eve, so you've got a chance to make Blast of Silence an icy gift for that special, pessimistic someone.  See it ASAP, and blast out the scream of Yuletide Malice.

~PNK

* Rats, rats, double rats, of course I wrote that sentence before Lori wishes Bono a Happy New Year over the phone.

A Roaring Short-Order - LIONPOWER FROM MGM (1967)

You come up to a ramshackle treehouse with a rope ladder.  As you ascend the ladder, you notice a sign on the door:  "FANZ OF THE 60S ONLEE - ALL OTHERS R POOPOO HEADS!!!".  If you're not game for a blast of late-60's nostalgia, turn back now.  For those of you still left, come on in - the Cinerama is warm tonight.

Lionpower from MGM is an unusual entry for this blog - it's a 27-minute promotional reel of MGM's 1967-68 season, only shown to distributors and exhibitors.  I saw it as a filler short on TCM the other night and it blew me away, and I watched it again tonight with and equally wide grin fixed on my face.  I've always had a soft spot for late-60's movies ever since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this is one of the best payloads of late-60's Hollywood hooey I've ever seen.  The studio system was falling into a state of crisis, as the introduction of the ratings system, the growing counterculture, and the phasing out of short subjects were all radical changes to how movies were made and marketed.  One of the treats with these kinds of promotional reels is how well its content has dated, and this particular selection of films is heavily conflicted, at once readying for the future and clinging desperately to old models - and man is it a hoot.

The lineup is split into five seasons: the usual four of Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer, and a fifth "season" of roadshow movies, meaning they got a limited big-city release before a wide release and required reservations (a practice phased out in the 70's).  It's narrated with glorious cheesiness by Karl Weber (Search for Tomorrow, Perry Mason) and initially set to music from the 1950 movie The Magnificent Yankee, fixing MGM's grasp of promotion squarely in the past.  He boasts the most "creative filmmakers" and the "biggest stars", and doesn't lie in either claim - not only are directors like John Frankenheimer and Stanley Kubrick in the roster, nearly every movie has a huge, blockbuster star at the helm, some of them baffling in their combinations (two in particular I won't dare spoil, but be forewarned that David Niven and Raquel Welch are embarrassing themselves).  This short also makes for a fine drinking game, wherein the viewer takes a shot for every movie they've actually seen - the majority of them have fallen into obscurity, with a few popping up in the recent wave of big-studio on-demand DVD-R releasing catalogs (and a couple of those may show up on this blog in good time).  

The transitions from film to film are hysterical, such as the transition from Fall's Point Blank (a stylish thriller starring Lee Marvin) to Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Your Teeth are in My Neck: "From murder...to madness...and biting comedy at its best!"  A George Hamilton heist flick, Jack of Diamonds (never released to video, more common than you'd think in this lineup) has the narrator stating, "Excitement is another breed of cat - a cat burglar who dares danger at every height!"  Another fall movie, Our Mother's House, is another never-on-video movie that I've been seeking for ages, and if you know where I can find it I'd give you 12 million Mickey Mouse monies for the privilege.  Fall tops off with the bloated-looking Sophia Loren/Omar Sharif historical romance More than a Miracle, and then Winter "surges ahead on Lionpower!".  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton headline - "People...politics....passion...in heat...in Haiti...in Graham Greene's The Comedians!"  David MacCallum fires guns in the go-go-riffic Sol Madrid (which I've got to see, but is not on video, much to the dismay (or is it relief?) of fellow stars Rip Torn and Telly Savalas).  Dark of the Sun is the serious-sounding filling to an unbelievable dud sandwich of The Biggest Bundle of Them All (whose VHS is available for the low, low price of $84.99 on Amazon) and The Extraordinary Seaman (mercifully never released to video), both of whose segments must be seen to be believed.  Also MIA for the home market is another go-go inflected thriller, A Man Called Dagger, and the Charles Bronson co-starring-western Guns for San Sebastian has a VHS for the comparatively modest price of $47.96 when compared to the aforementioned Bundle.  

"Lionpower springs into Spring", and I'll bet that most of you forgot that Hermans' Hermits even had a movie, much less that it had the portentious title Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter.  If your eyes recover, the mysterious force of The Power, another George Hamilton flick but seemingly much better than Jack of Diamonds, will knock them right out (or turn them upside down, or whatever happened to that one guy strapped in the g-force chair...).  Once Lionpower "roars into summer" the viewer is subjected to an Elvis movie, Speedway, here paired with the comparatively poor singing voice of Nancy Sinatra in a year when these movies should have been dead for a long time.  Surprisingly, the Richard Burton-helmed Where Eagles Dare doesn't even have footage ready, and the spot is illustrated through delightfully cheesy "animation".

However, it's not nearly as cheesy as Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, with Doris Day heading up an embarrassed cast trapped in a chintzy living room and stock sex komedy krap.  Ice Station Zebra is another big hit in the lineup, but beforehand we get a glimpse of the Sunset Boulevard-esque psychological drama The Legend of Lylah Clare.  Now come the two Roadshow pictures, both well-known now: Far from the Madding Crowd, which gets the longest segment of them all, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, which the narrator doesn't elaborate upon in terms of plot or stars.  Instead, all we see is one of Douglas Trumbull's slit-screen effects and some stars while Karl Weber talks about "all the stars of the solar system".

The most curious portion is a parade of cartoon teasers for movies yet to be produced, done in the same minimalist 60's style of the Where Eagles Dare bit, as nothing had been shot yet.  Some of them are remembered fondly, such as The Shoes of the Fisherman, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Phantom Tollbooth (not released until 1970 and done in a completely different art style from the one in the bit).

Some others are less well-known, such as The Fixer from the novel by Bernard Malamud, Tai-Pan (not released until 1986), James Michener's Caravans, released ten years later by a different studio, and The Appointment, an apparently terrible Sidney Lumet movie that features the funniest piece of animation:

The most unusual are a trio of movie that were never made, two of them: Cornelius Ryan's WWII history The Last Battle, James Eastwood's totally forgotten mystery The Chinese Visitor, and The Tower of Babel, a Middle East-set political thriller to be directed by Peter Glenville (whose last film turned out to be The Comedians).  Announcements rise and fall all the time, but it's odd to see promotion for movies that never came to be, and it's impossible to tell if those would have been any good.

Whatever your tastes, the short is a ton of fun, and most of the films will be new on you unless you're a near-masochistic freak for 60's pop culture.  If you've got TCM they may play it again as an interstitial, but I have no idea how often they do it.  It's the exact kind of thing that'll never get a video release, so don't hesitate if you get the chance to see it in high quality.  For those of you who don't care about clarity of picture, here's a generous YouTube upload, which is where I got all those screencaps.  I guarantee you'll laugh, cry, or puke no matter which movie you're rooting for.

~PNK

The Here of Over There - 1918 (1985)

It's easy to forget that our current distaste for war and gung-ho patriotism is a fairly recent one, due in no small part to the proliferation of global communication.  It's harder to kill somebody when you have the chance to talk to them, and many wars in the past had mutual isolation and disinformation for catalysts.  War is impossible for one person to fully comprehend - statistics and battlefield footage are mere suggestions of forces much greater than the individual, and if the battles aren't taking place in their own back yard they might as well not exist.  The problem is that a fantasy vision of war is essential for it to continue, as the general populace wouldn't want to throw anybody into battle if they experienced it firsthand.  World War I was a distant, incomprehensible mess to America, and we only got involved near the end after a great deal of resistance.  It never reached our soil, but another incomprehensibility did - the influenza epidemic of 1918, which took between 50 and 100 million lives, eclipsing the casualties of the war.  Mostly known as the screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird, playwright Horton Foote depicted the intersections of these two forces with meticulous detail and sensitivity in 1918, a slice of his massive theater trilogy The Orphan's Home Cycle and a reminder that excitement, values and delusion are closely related.

Set in a small Texas town in the fall of Guess When, 1918 follows the lives of the Robedauxs, including the tailor Horace (William Converse-Roberts), his pregnant wife Elizabeth (Hallie Foote, Horton's daughter) and his ne'er-do-well brother Brother (Matthew Broderick).  As the war draws to a close the pressure of joining the cause comes to the Robedauxs, and Horace is intent on taking an offer to hire a doctor to lie about his health so he can stay with his wife.  He's also trying to locate his father's grave - he lost a three-year-old daughter to the flu and he wants everybody buried together.  Brother is more enthusiastic about joining up, but most of his information comes from newsreels and he talks too much about German spies in neighboring towns.  His gambling debts make an uneasy garnish to his snideness.  A misguided group of good ol' boys march around town in makeshift uniforms, waiting for a tour that will never come.  Gossip spreads like wildfire, and debates spring up as to whether one can legitimately be a dual citizen (especially with Germany).  Everybody hears the wails of mothers who have lost their children, including Bessie, an emotionally challenged girl who visits tge Robedauxs from time to time.  None of this is helped by Horace getting the flu, of course.

The story keeps a real distance from the Big Parade overseas, and in reseaeching this film I found critics who were disappointed in the film's unwavering focus on uninvolved people.  I think that's what makes the movie interesting.  Everybody's afraid of the big dangers but they don't have enough distrust in others to peer behind the curtain.  Foote's interests lie more in exploring the attitudes and customs that kept such a proper face on things in disaster times, and the film's best moments of pathos come from characters trying desperately to maintain composure.  The acting is pitch-perfect, with the unfortunate exception of the eternally wooden Matthew Broderick, who was in the original stage production and may have been the reason the movie got financed.  Shot on location in Texas, director Ken Harrison opens up the landscape with enormous warmth and attention to shot composition and lighting.  The perennial problem with adapting plays to the screen, how to expand the setting, is dealt with elegantly and without force.  While I think the movie stands just fine on its own, it's good to keep in mind that it's only one ninth of the whole cycle, so I suspect I'd feel much differently about everything that had happened if the rest of Foote's magnum opus came to my DVD player.

The film is very, VERY small scale, so if you're not interested in a highly detailed period portrait you may end up ejecting the disc into the wastebasket.  The DVD is way out of print and used copies are expensive, so I'd try your local library instead of dropping $35 on a movie you may not like.  If you're game for it and you have a taste for modern theater you'll be just peachy, and perhaps an increase in fandom can bring more of Foote's Robedaux saga to the big screen.

~PNK

Short-Order - HPYNEROTOMACHIA (1992)

The challenge of capturing dreaming through art is more than unique, and creating new dream art that draws inspiration from another is also challenging, requiring an intimate understanding of the structural and imagistic tricks employed by the original author to capture the stuff dreams are made of*.  This is easy enough to witness whenever a new Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass retread is unleashed and hardcore fans are sent gnashing into the shadows in argument over its Pros'n'Cons.  After witnessing Andrey Svislotskiy's 8-minute animated short Hypnerotomachia (literally "sleep-love-fight", or "The Strife of Love in Dream" in the usual English translation) I sat back in my chair wondering if something that unsettling should be unleashed to a general audience, and realized that something of its skill, passion and imagination should get as wide an audience as possible.  I also wondered what in the hell the short had to do with this:

This is part of a page from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an anonymously** authored allegorical tale published in 1499.  Widely considered one of the most beautiful books ever published, the tale follows the dream journey of Poliphilo ("Friend of Many Things") as he pursues his love Polia ("Many Things") through a series of densely described landscapes and kingdoms.  

The original publication features 168 exquisite woodcuts, simultaneously flat and crammed with detail, that became a major influence upon late-19th century Aestheticism.  The font is unusually clear and attractive for the time, and as can be seen on the above page the publisher found many creative new layouts for text.  Here's a page that looks like a vase:

All of this is written in a sui generis hybrid of Italian, Latin and Greek with a lot of Arabic and Hebrew text mixed in, along with some imaginary words for good measure.  The book is a masterpiece of aesthetic elegance and no translation can replicate its power of enchantment.  With all that in mind, be aware that I've been scared to attempt to read it in one of its English translations, primarily because it was written long before Modern conceptions of fiction writing were set and what I've read so far is anything but conventionally entertaining.  Its descriptions of monuments and buildings are so exhaustive multiple reconstructions, by hand and using computer modeling software, have been successful at making its dreams catalogable.  From what plot summaries I've seen the allegory does have a comprehensible and beautiful philosophical message, but I know it would take a Herculean effort to make it through the meat of the thing.  If you're interested, here's the whole book in digital photographs at the superb rarebookroom.org.  If you can't get the 1999 Joscelyn Godwin translation you can get the 1592 partial English translation here.

So once again, I have to ask - what does that have to do with this?

Made for Pilot Animation Studios in 1992, Hypnerotomachia may have been influenced by Dalí and de Chirico (or Krazy Kat considering the stark, off-balance landscape), but I highly doubt it sprang from the mind of Poliphilo.  My best guess is that Svistlotsky deconstructed the title to its three components - "sleep-love-fight" - and ran with the "fight" part as fast as he could through the hallways of the squirrel factory.  Shucking off the noble pursuit of lost love across a continent of classical wonder, the short enters the dream of a man who looks like a corpse made out of old raincoats.

The pupil of his eye is the sun.  It turns out there is a hole in his head, revealing the sun behind.  Then the tandem men appear (like those two pics above), and the perspective swerves so radically the hills appear gelatinous.  They screech and bicker, and small rooms float past like perverse votive scenes (like that Blood'n'Knife scene).  The scene climaxes inside the face of a woman, the other sleeper, and then focuses on a dog with shining eyes.  It produces tandem dogs - 

- that pass through the face of the male sleeper -

- and then more things happen, and I'm fine not describing them in detail, suffice to say I've never seen more animated ladders break before with such unsettling detail.


I read that this director also did animation for children.  I'll just have to take their word for it.

Joking aside, while this short may have a message, I was a little too shell shocked to want to think deep thoughts about what I'd seen.  The connection between the two dreamers is razor-thin, and an easily-noticeable arc isn't anywhere to be found.  I've seen a lot of animated shorts take place in dream landscapes, but this one is the most terrifying I've seen yet, and its homaging to Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is tenuous at best.  The animation is great, though, and its cumulative power can't be understated, so if you're interested in the art of animation you may want to give it a whirl.  I'd tell you to proceed with caution, but you could probably could have guessed that from the screencaps.

~PNK

*Apologies, apologies.

**Each chapter's first letter is of the enlarged, decorated style of ancient books -

- and putting them together makes an acrostic that reveals the author's name: Brother Francesco Colonna, an Italian Dominican priest.

The Devil is in the Trees: EYES OF FIRE (1983)

There's nothing more wonderful than finding an intriguing movie you've never heard of before by random chance and having your highest hopes come true.  Eyes of Fire is in the Top Three Random Finds for me (along with the priceless Paperhouse), and not only is it one of my favorite horror films of the 80's, it's one of my Top Five Favorite Horror Movies, period.  Never before or since have I seen a movie that so seamlessly blends fantasy, horror and history with as much skill, enchantment and tension, and the sad thing about it is that I've never met another person who's seen it.  It doesn't even have a legitimate DVD release (save for a suspicious-looking Brazilian release that may as well not exist for how much I don't want to waste money on it), and you'd think that with it being an 80's horror movie only available on VHS the horror tape crowd would have said something by now.  Get ready for a run through the woods, because it's going to be freaky.

Set in the Appalachians around 1750, the film is told via flashback, a story told by two young Colonies girls who were found wandering through French Territory with no parents.  They were among a group of people who left their village with the charismatic and smug "preacher" Will Smythe (Dennis Lipscomb, Retribution).  He was accused of polygamy and was strung up to hang, but the mysterious, red-haired Leah (Karlene Crockett, Dallas) appears to free him by breaking the rope with magic powers.  His "followers" set off down the river on a patchwork raft, and all seems well until the party is attacked by the local tribe, as they're on Native land.  They're met by Marion Dalton (Guy Boyd), the father of the young girls who was previously out hunting, and I won't dare spoil his entrance (and you won't guess it in a hundred years).  At first they have no destination in particular, until they see this:

It's at this tree where the Natives stop - they believe it's a sign that the land is possessed by evil.  Marion is wise enough to heed their fears, but Will Smythe won't let that get in the way of Manifest Destiny.  They also ignore another bad sign, an abandoned fort in the middle of a field, and they make it their new home.  And then the strange things start to happen, things that I can barely even describe without spoiling the shock and wonder they inspire.  Perhaps the broken tablet they find in a river describing the unspeakable horrors that descended on the previous residents of the fort have something to do with it, or maybe the little girl who appears in their camp one day with no speech capacity or recognizably human qualities.  Maybe the naked people who appear and disappear have something to say, but the sounds that come from their mouths seem more like pained wails.  Or perhaps the answer lies in the Native legend Marion tells his family about how the Devil isn't a human-like being but rather a condensation of death and evil that grows out of nature - as Marion puts it, "The Devil is in the trees."

While these descriptions may seem vague, you should know that the latter half of this film is defined by fascinating concepts, mounting insanity and mind-blowing special effects.  The writer and director is Avery Crounse, a native of Kentucky who has only directed two other films as of now (the excellent Cries of Silence and the vomitous, made-for-a-paycheck The Invisible Kid*).  It's easy to see his photographic experience in the film, as the compositions and lighting are fantastic and the special effects utilize simple, recognizable photographic tricks to incredible effect.  Mostly shot in the Missouri countryside, the movie's forsaken woods are dark and enveloping, fractalling into corners we'd rather not explore.  The setting of pre-Declaration America is fresh and inviting, opening up interesting doors not just confined to horror**.  Eschewing conventional violence entirely, the terror is drawn from the dark magic and sheer presence of its villain, a truly original and intimidating monster that continues to surprise throughout the film.  The film collages disparate mythological tropes, bridging gaps of legend and magic for an utterly fascinating, self-contained world.  The soundtrack swings between Celtic folk music and hair-raising tape effects, blending seamlessly with the imagery to rip you into the action.  The performances are exemplary for the mostly no-name cast, especially from Leah's actress - her character alone could have made the movie, and Karlene Crockett can make a cocked eyebrow and quivering lip into a force to behold.

All of this is told through fractured narration from a bewildered child, and so some things in the movie may seem confusing at first view.  Fuggedaboudit.  Eyes of Fire is more than the best campfire story ever - it's a singular sight-and-sound experience that begs for repeated viewings.  There's so much detail and passion on screen that the proceedings nearly fall apart under their own Weight of Awesome.  The film's limited theatrical run and under-the-radar video release four years later have kept it from the spotlight, and I'm a little stunned it hasn't been picked up for a DVD release by now, what with Shout! Factory running wild with 80's horror in the past few years.  The VHS tapes are out there if you're interested, but you don't even have to bother - somebody uploaded the whole shebang to YouTube at this convenient link.  It's the kind of movie that inspired me to search for the Great Unknowns in the first place, a daring feat of imagination and the most accomplished debut horror film since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  You've still got time to plan for a viewing, so let it inspire you this Eve, and watch out - this Devil grows out of the Earth itself, and could take you when you least suspect it.  From View from the Paperhouse, Happy Halloween.

~PNK

*Please, PLEASE don't watch it, even if you like bad invisible man comedies.  Just don't.

**Is The Blair Witch Project really the only other horror movie to make use of early America?  For shame.

The American Dream Is Alien - INVADER (1992)

There's two kinds of direct-to-video product: theatrical movies that sat on a shelf before being pooped out onto video to avoid massive losses, and movies made to be direct-to-video.  It's uncommon for the latter to appear on recommendation lists, and often there's good reason, but some transcend their supposed limitations and become classics in the field.  For my money, Philip Cook's Invader is not only my favorite DTV sci-fi flick, it might be my favorite move ever made to premiere on video.  It's fast-paced, wickedly funny and very smart, featuring impressive special effects and good performances all around.  After I tell you all of this in more detail it may be time for you to dust off your VCR and give this one a go-round.  (Don't expect the guys on the poster to show up, though; they're not in the movie).

Frank McCall (Hans Bachmann) is an ace reporter at the National Scandal, an Enquirer-styled rag that specializes in flying saucer and mutant baby fare.  He stumbles across a bizarre multiple homicide scene where soldiers were fried to a crisp while on a routine bus ride.  He is met by Capt. Harry Anders (A. Thomas Smith) of the Department of Defense, and Col. Faraday (Rick Foucheux) who operates the Air Force base the murdered men were stationed.  The incident couldn't come at a worse time, as Faraday is unveiling a new fighter jet at a show that night, which McCall sneaks in to.  During the test flight, the autopilot switches from normal flight mode to attack mode, and eventually crashes, killing the pilot.  As people scramble, McCall gets whisked to a back room by robotic men in sunglasses, who strap him into a chair with the intention of injecting a green glowing liquid into him.  They're stopped by Anders, and the three men convene to hear the truth: the ship's onboard computer, A.S.M.O.D.S (Asmodeus), was recovered from a crashed alien vessel, and now has grown a mind of its own, taking over the base's men and working tirelessly on a sinister plot to take over America's defense systems for a hilariously unwise ambition.

While this may seem a bit boil-in-the-bag in its setup, Invader is far more intelligent, funny and accomplished than the majority of its peers.  The dialogue is hilarious, containing some of the best one-liners I've heard in a DTV flick ("Why is it that every time somebody tries to photograph something spectacular it's with a shitty camera?!").  The odd couple of the snarky, disobedient McCall and the no-nonsense, bureaucratic Anders is a joy to behold, with both actors nailing the parts and making the film's glue.  While the concept of an alien ship gone rogue isn't new, the payoff is, and the film transforms from routine sci-fi popcorn-muncher to freewheeling satire on military excess and unchecked nationalism.  It's one of the few movies I know of that exposes the bureaucratic red-tape of the military, making it a surprisingly comedic environment.  The special effects are excellent for a low-budget movie like this, featuring some impressive stop-motion and some of the most vast and detailed models I've seen since Total Recall.  WARNING: the DVD special edition decided that the accomplished practical effects of the original release weren't good enough for the 21st century and revamped the film Lucas-style with hideous CGI monstrosities that would cause Douglas Trumbull to dig himself a grave and roll in it.  Let's pray for a re-release of the original, at the very least for the legacy of practical effects.


Either way you see it, Invader is a wild ride, full of laughs, action and satire, a shining beacon for B-moviedom.  If you're going to make something entertaining this is how you do it, and the flick far outshines its DTV limitations (or assets, depending on how you're counting it).  This is the kind of movie that Saturday nights were invented for, so get out the VCR, snag a copy and get to watching.  If you're disappointed you may as well be shuttled off to Asmodeus for "retraining".

(Ignore the CGI!)

~PNK

Crisis of Interfaith - ETHAN (1964)

Look at that.  Just look at it.

It won't take long for you to notice how repellent that cover is to anybody looking for a serious dramatic work.  Genesis Home Video was a semi-obscure '80's VHS label that mostly offered cheap genre pictures with even cheaper licenses.  Rather than use the posters for their movies, Genesis opted to make new art in-house, setting up hilarious photo shoots like this one.  Their transfers were some of the worst around, blown out and cropped and often drowning in soundtrack noise.  These qualities have endeared the company to me greatly, and I jump at any chance to get a hold of their stuff - I've got their releases for Haunts and Slipping into Darkness (aka Crazed aka Bloodshed) upstairs as we speak.  All of this is what makes Ethan such an anomalous release, and also helped ensure the film's tenure in purgatory. The Genesis release is the only video release, and the film is so obscure I wasn't able to find the original poster anywhere online.

After playing host to a number of revolutions and counter-revolutions, the Philippines of 1964 was a nation still reeling from overarching American colonial influence and was just breaking into the film industry.  The majority of Filipino movies that made it to the states were B-grade war and horror movies, which makes Ethan, a religious-themed romantic drama, such an interesting piece of its film history.  Ethan's title character, played by Robert Sampson (Bridgite Loves Bernie, Re-Animator), is an American Catholic priest stationed in a primarily Muslim community.  The town seems tolerant enough of his presence; while they take their faith seriously they see him as a good man and not a threat to their way of life.  There is also the artist Carlos (Jennings Sturgeon), the only other white man in the film and possessed by a crippling alcohol dependency, and Ethan's friend Mobien (Eddie Infante).  He strikes up a friendship with Andai (Rosa Rosal, I believe), and their relationship moves gradually from understanding and emotional support to romantic, a clear violation of Ethan's role in the church.  Andai confides her feelings with Yakoub (Joseph de Cordova), who believes that Ethan is a bad influence in the community and convinces Andai to seduce Ethan as a way to tear down his reputation.  She approaches him in his sleep, and though he is flustered and shocked they make love (a scene featuring some surprising nudity for the time).  Questioning his actions and his faith, he is soon tracked down by Andai's father, who has vowed to kill him in revenge.  Just before he is about to die, he is called out to by Carlos, and the assassin gets into a fight with Carlos, killing him instead.  Ethan runs away, shucking off his priestly garments and unsure of where to go or what to be.  Through all of this, an internal scriptural monologue anchors the film with dignified pathos.

Americans have a very skewed view of what it is to be Muslim, specifically the notion that all Muslims live in the Middle East and live Fundamentalist lifestyles.  On the contrary, the majority of Islam's followers live in Southeast Asia, with Indonesia containing the bulk of its population.  The relationship between Catholicism and Islam is very intelligently and carefully handled in Ethan, as the Filipino populace can retain their faith and dignity just fine without having to drive out the tiny sphere of influence the Catholic church has carved out in their land.  The landscape and culture of the nation is a fascinating counterpart to the central drama - the mixture of urban and rural, Western and Eastern, secular and sacred paint a picture of a country coming out of strife and occupation with varying results.  The relationship between Ethan and Andai is delicate and deeply written; any push in either direction would have destroyed the dramatic thrust of the film and made for a hackneyed viewing experience.  The other personal relationships, such as between Ethan and Carlos (especially a powerful early scene when Ethan talks a drunken Carlos out of dancing on a bar) and Andai with her fellow townsfolk are equally well-explored.  The acting is excellent, not only from Sampson but from everybody, turning surprisingly good performances from Filipino actors I've never seen before or since.  Shot in Technicolor-Technoscope, the light and color of the Philippines shine quite beautifully, and the soundtrack has some richly beautiful moments in the spirit of great dramas of the '50's and '60's, despite a few goofy moments.

There aren't enough films (that I know of, anyways) that seriously examine the lives of the clergy, and so Ethan is a welcome addition to the genre, anchored by a powerful performance by Sampson and saturated with culture and conflict.  Its video release is a sham; the print is blown out and cropped, and the soundtrack is ripped across with crackling noise.  The climax takes place in a day-for-night shot, and the poor transfer makes the characters hard to make out.  Regardless, there are copies of the VHS out there (and for very cheap), so if print is no object you can have a field day.  The product review on the Amazon page is the most detailed information I've found on the film, and another version of the review can be read here at Bamboo Gods and Bionic Boys, a blog on Filipino cinema.  A comment on the latter implies that a DVD may be available if you do a bit of searching, and hopefully that release restores the film to its former visual and aural glory.  If you've got a hankering for a serious, mid-century Hollywood-styled drama with a downbeat touch, Ethan's got you covered, no matter how crummy the presentation.

~PNK

A History Oral and Lived - THE MAN FROM EARTH (2007)

In Shadow of the Vampire, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe) recites from Tennyson's poem "Tithonus", a monodrama of the Greek mythological figure who is immortal but continues to age physically.  He yearns for death because it will release him from his ever withering state, and the poem is a reminder that immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be, mirroring Schreck's own unfortunate existence.  There have been many works exploring the dark side of eternal life (Highlander), but only one of them can be categorized with My Dinner with Andre.

The Man from Earth was written by the late Jerome Bixby, a talented and lauded science fiction screenwriter who authored episodes of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek.  The script was found among his papers after his death in 1998, and this film makes one wonder why it wasn't produced earlier, or at least performed as a play.  It's a deeply written, heartbreaking work, a confession of a hidden life that throws everything the listeners believe in out the window.


John Oldman* (David Lee Smith of CSI: Miami and five seconds of Zodiac) is a professor at a California college, and invites his fellow profs over for drinks as he is leaving town the next day.  The peanut gallery (including Tony Todd and William Katt) covers a wide swath of disciplines from anthropology to art, and Oldman has been careful to assemble great minds for what he has to say.  The rest of them came by to drink and hash out the past, not aware of what past Oldman is referring to.  After some pleasantries and puzzlements, such as the discovery of a seemingly caveman-era tool and an authentic-looking Van Gogh, the real subject reveals itself, though at first as a hypothetical.  What if a prehistoric man simply didn't die, avoiding war and discovery through  history and surviving until the present?  At first the conversation is jovial, with theories of perfectly replicating cells and shifting identities put forth, but people are puzzled as to why he didn't pose the question as a normal hypothetical, saying "I" instead of "he".

As the "game" drags on further, his friends have caught on and the tone turns from lighthearted to frustrated.  His story, while unbelievable, is at the very least well constructed - he was a Cro-Magnon (a fact he had to figure out much later), and when his tribe shunned him for possessing evil magic and stealing their life to lengthen his, he wandered across the land, falling into whatever company would take him and leaving when they found out the truth.  Each logical query, such as how he knew where he came from and whether or not he remembers his first language, have plausible explanations offered, though coolly received.  Some are more angry than others, and eventually a psychologist is called in.  And everything that happens after that isn't mine to spoil.

All the acting is pitch-perfect (well, except for a woman who has a crush on Oldman, but whatever), and the dialogue is extraordinarily intelligent and well-researched.  Bixby has accomplished a difficult task: make the absurd not only believable but engrossing.  Oldman's life is not only exceptional but ultimately tragic, and the intellectual, and in some cases moral, trials posed to the listeners are equally heart-wrenching.  Set almost entirely in Oldman's living room, the script is a shining example of how science fiction doesn't need to have flashy special effects or expansive locales in order to provoke thought and discussion - it's a triumph of pure storytelling.  A couple of wrinkles do trip up the film, though - shot on a pair of Panasonic DVX100 camcorders and processed through Filmlook, the viewing experience is particularly grainy, especially when the conversation drags into night and pixels the size of postage stamps dominate the frame.  Also, the ending's a bit shaky, and the fact that it hinges on that female character I mentioned earlier doesn't help.  All of these are, of course, minor details.  The movie is not even 90 minutes long, an economic detail passed down from TV writing, so if you think for a second this movie will waste your time those thoughts should be put to rest.  Don't believe me?  The DVD company put it up on YouTube for free:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAarR4tVEHU (no embedding, sorry)

~PNK

*Get it?  Get it?!  LAUGH, CLOWN! LAUGH!!!

Special Report - THE TURN OF THE SCREW (1959, episode of "Startime")

One of the benefits of living in Seattle is the blessing of Scarecrow Video, the largest video store I've ever seen and widely considered one of the best in the world.  If you can think of a movie, they've got it as well as a dozen others like it you didn't know existed, or were even possible under the current understanding of quantum mechanics.  They've even published a mammoth review book, and many big film names have visited the place and signed their own work's boxes.  Having recently revamped the portion of the store previously reserved for selling used videos, Scarecrow has started hosting events (including the upcoming VHS Swapmeet, where I'll have a table (!)), and this month is VHS month in honor of their large collection of such and the current retro-craze for the obsolete and less-than-snuff format.  Though later in the month we'll get to see such treats as the ultra-obscure kung-fu-and-magic headscratcher Furious (1984) and the legendary shot-on-video anthology baffler Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987), Monday night's screening was much different - John Frankenheimer's The Turn of the Screw.

The concept of "made-for-TV movie" wasn't always a simile for "forgotten stool sample on the bus"; in the 50's and 60's there were programs dedicated to high-quality 75 minute adaptations and originals, with big names in front of the camera and talented workhorses behind.  Robert Altman started out in these productions, as did John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate and Seconds.  His name wasn't the least bit recognizable when he helmed Turn, but his work is exemplary, and it's a shame this version of Henry James's novella is so hard to find because it's a surprisingly scary, visually engrossing piece of film-making brevity.

I've never had the pleasure of reading the story, and haven't seen any other adaptations (with The Innocents being a shameful hole in my horror-viewing repertoire).  No matter - Startime makes it easy for us.  A young governess (Ingrid Bergman) has been hired by a London-based man who has been charged with taking care of his nephew and niece whose parents have just died.  He has no interest in looking after for them himself, so the governess makes for their country mansion, Bly (which has its own carriage bearing its seal).  The niece, Flora (Alexandra Wager) is chipper enough, with far too many teeth visible at a time, but the nephew Miles (Hayward Morse) has been expelled from his private school, and will be home any day now.  The governess and their maid surmise that the only cause (because none is stated) would be causing harm to others, though what harm that is we may never know.  Plenty of creepy harms are implied, though, as well as many other phantomic creeps (faces in the window, songs from distant rooms).  When he does return he meets his sister's cute precociousness with an unsettling precociousness, and the governess's grip on the children and reality start to spiral out of control.

Horror fare from this time period can usually be shelved under quaint anti-fright, but Turn has far too much going on to be punted to that oubliette.  B&W fullscreen has never looked better, as Frankenheimer takes a fluid, askew method to filming a deeply shadowed house.  There are many small uniquities, my favorite being a panning shot across a staircase that ends looking down a hallway, the camera tilting slightly at the entrance to uproot the Earth in wait of Bergman's discoveries.  Anybody who has seen the Shining-centric documentary Room 237 will remember the observation that during the first half of The Shining Kubrick transitioned between scenes with very slow dissolves, so slow they forced you to study the superimposition.  While Kubrick may not have meant anything like that, Frankenheimer certainly does, pulling out double- and triple-exposures to great effect (my favorite being the Bly house seal over a doll in a pond).  

Production designer Warren Clymer utilizes the handful of sets offered to him to great effect, allowing period design to fold into darkness and creating some of the most unsettlingly fake exteriors I've ever seen.  Flying in the face of 50's TV, the soon-to-be-accomplished classical composer David Amram supplies a hair-raising Avant-Garde soundtrack, terse and shrieking with a healthy supply of alien clangs and burbles.  It's always nice to see that quirk of Victorian wear in film whereby too-tight dresses make the wearer look like a gliding bobblehead.  As for the actors, Bergman is excellent, steadily mounting upon a professional manner with nervous terror.  The two child actors are unbelievable, displaying a creativity and control beyond their years; Hayward Morse is so precocious in his performance it makes his later scenes downright chilling.

I've never been much of a fan of ghost movies, mostly because ghosts, by design, shouldn't be scary.  When you get down to their motivations and what they were like alive the darn things just don't make any sense, and all the frights come from what might be there rather than what's actually there.  If there's a lesson we learned from The Blair Witch Project it's that suggestion is far more fear-inducing than explanation.  The Turn of the Screw renews my faith that a traditional ghost story can induce frights if done properly, and much like the classic Witchboard the usual logistical issues are sidestepped via careful details.  At the end of the 75 minutes I was invigorated and a little spooked, and if you can track it down you won't be disappointed.  I have to emphasize the "if" here, because this movie is so rare that Scarecrow's copy was hand-donated by Frankenheimer himself (!) and comes with a hefty rental deposit.  That screencap standing in for a poster was on YouTube, so there must be a torrent floating around there somewhere.  Hopefully it looks better than Scarecrow's copy, which had a slow warble and seemed to have grown a coat of cheesecloth.  For my money, a smudgy presentation may have helped the experience, as the shadows are that much more concealing.  Get it ASAP.  Don't wait.

~PNK