Also known as Patlabor: The Mobile Police, this film depicts an alternate universe Tokyo of 1999, where the world’s industries receive a boost with the creation of “Labors”, robot mecha-suits used for everything from construction to crime fighting. Continue reading
The Omega Code stars Casper Van Dien as Dr. Gillen Lane, a dashing self-help guru whose public success – and habit of leaping over furniture – hides his private failure to keep his family together. He believes he can advance his career by making a deal with industrialist Stone Alexander (Austin Powers‘ Michael York), who has just been made president of the European Union as a result of his work in developing a world-feeding nutritional wafer (reminiscent of soylent green) and a new desalinization process. What the world doesn’t know is that Alexander’s rise to power has been guided by his secret efforts to unravel the prophecies of the Bible Code. Alexander rebuffs Lane, but later offers him a position as his prophet. Continue reading
Released as part of Image Entertainment’s “Euroshock” series, this DVD presents one of Spanish director Jess Franco’s earliest, most accessible features.
Franco had directed several musical comedies in Spain, but yearned for meatier work. A voracious film fan, he’d seen the horror films Hammer had been making, and since the government refused to let him make a project he had ready, he came up with a horror story over the weekend and started shooting.
Gritos en la Noche, as it’s known in Spain, begins with energetic music — staccato drumming, mixed with strings and horns and voices — juxtaposed with a quiet turn of the century city street at night. Despite the racket on the soundtrack, a woman prepares for bed after a long night of partying. To her horror, she finds a blind fiend hiding in her closet who abducts her, disappearing into the night.
The next morning we meet French police inspector Edgar Tanner (Conrado San Martin) who has just returned from his vacation where he’s met and become engaged to ballerina Wanda Bronsky. Having made a positive impression with his last case, Tanner’s assigned the case of 5 women who have disappeared recently.
At a cabaret that night Dr. Orlof (Howard Vernon) is in his regular box, romancing a beautiful chorine with soft words, large jewels and strong wine. By coach, they journey to a large mansion that Orlof says is his own, though it’s actually up for sale. Orlof locks her in this creepy, ominous house of shadows. As the girl wanders about, the blind fiend Morpho (Riccardo Valle) stalks her in the darkness and attacks, biting her to death in the throat.
The work done, Orlof appears to supervise. They take the corpse by boat down the canal to Orlof’s real house. On the way, the necklace Orlof gave her is lost, becoming a diverting clue.
Orlof’s girlfriend Arne (Perla Cristal, who returned in Dr. Orloff’s Monster and later starred with Paul Naschy in Fury of the Wolfman) consoles Morpho, whom she feels has been mistreated by Orlof. The mad doctor doesn’t care. He’s too consumed with using his fresh victim in yet another attempt to restore the face of his catatonic sister Millicent.
Tanner investigates the sixth disappearance, which the evidence says is also a murder. Much in the manner of “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, the witnesses all disagree about the appearance of the killer. On Wanda’s recommendation, he sets up a meeting with a sketch artist and the witnesses. Their descriptions seem to break down into two divisions, leading the detective to theorize that they’re actually after two suspects.
Meanwhile, Orlof’s efforts result in another failure. Orlof is shown to be not a soulless monster — he realizes his guilt, but can’t deny his obsession. A prison surgeon who dabbled in skin graft experiments, he’d retired and disappeared when his sister (and lover?) was disfigured and stricken by an accident. Obsessed with restoring her face, he’d faked Morpho’s death, making him a somnambulistic servant.
Believing he’s close to success, that night Orlof is on the prowl again. He spies Wanda in a coach as she waits for Tanner and is transfixed by her beauty. Wanda recognizes him from the police sketch, but manages to hide it. Arriving too late to see Orlof himself, chauvinistic Tanner makes light of Wanda’s claim.
Well, she’ll show him. While Tanner goes off to investigate a lead — the necklace has been found — Wanda plans her own bit of sleuthing. She dresses up cheap and sexy to act as bait for Orlof in the local nightspots.
Orlof is keeping busy. He and Morpho visit a café after hours, where a chanteuse is staying late for extra practice. Morpho practices his vampirism on the pianist (Franco himself), then attacks the woman.
Pressure builds to solve the case, and the public is seeing fiends lurking everywhere. Wanda’s undercover work bears results — Orlof takes the bait and she’s abducted. She manages to send a note to Tanner before she’s taken captive, but the fool’s too busy tracking down leads to read it. While Wanda struggles with Morpho, Tanner goes to bed — finally reading her note before falling asleep. Will he find Orlof’s castle before it’s too late?
Borrowing heavily from Eyes Without A Face, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Edgar Wallace thrillers, Franco nevertheless managed to infuse the production with his own twisted style. This would continue to be his M.O. through over four decades and 160 features in every genre — probably a lot more, considering his high output of hardcore flicks in the ’70s, plus a lot of reworked and re-titled material, much of it done under any one of his dozens of pseudonyms. Orlof, Morpho, and Tanner would appear again also in many more of his films, if in name only. Franco, whose work is eccentric and highly idiosyncratic, is definitely an acquired taste. But it’s a taste that, once acquired, is hard to get rid of.
The atmospheric photography by Godofredo Pacheco recalls the classic Universal monster pictures, filling the frame with shadowy castle corridors and gas lit alleys. In places, Franco makes his input more apparent, such as in one handheld camera shot as the hero runs toward the castle.
The music, on the other hand, is anything but traditional. Later, Franco would mainly compose his own scores but here he used his musical/comedy collaborators, José Pagán and Antonio Ramírez Ángel. The weird score consists of organ, trumpet, strings, and even slide whistle, and recalls the work of Morricone from a decade later.
Image’s DVD, probably from a PAL master, is from a nice French print (the main title reads L’Horrible Docteur Orlof), and at 83 minutes is undoubtedly the most complete print ever released in the United States. It contains footage of nudity and gore not seen in the American cut, which ran on a double bill under Riccardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock. There are no subtitles, so French writing is left untranslated, and there are some instances of artifacting and unsteady backgrounds. The foldout case contains excellent liner notes by Tim Lucas.
Chain-smoking Hollywood action star Tony Markham may be losing his grip. His cigarette habit is slowing down his martial arts moves, which is starting to slow down the box office for his Feet of Fury series. His girlfriend Daphne Adrian (Griffin Drew) — and every other girl he knows — is only interested in him if he can get her a part in one of his movies. And worst of all, he’s been having strange visions — visions of beautiful girls wearing only skimpy furs (okay, relatively normal) mixed with those of huge scaly lizards (call the psychiatrist).
Desperate for answers, Tony consults a doctor — a paleontologist, to be exact. Dr. Benjamin Michaels (William Marshall) is only too eager to show his celebrity guest around the museum, even taking him on a tour of the “backstage” area. In a dusty storeroom, Tony picks up a mysterious stone idol with jeweled eyes that Dr. Michaels claims has stumped the scientific community. With the strange feeling that all these things are connected, Tony takes the joking suggestion that the idol comes with three wishes to heart.
He wishes he could be with the blonde beauty from his dreams — and instantly he’s transported to another time and place. Where? Why, to Dinosaur Valley of course, a twist in the timeline where things from different eras meet. Familiar terrain for anyone who’s ever seen an old caveman movie. From One Million B.C. to One Million Years B.C., and every caveman movie in between, all mixed our savage progenitors with more savage beasts, ignoring the many millions of years that should separate them. But hey, who’s complaining? The point is to get the dinos together with people they can eat. Now, that’s entertainment.
Before he can wish himself back to the 20th Century, Tony gets in a tussle with a hunting party of cave dudes, who take the idol away from him. Beeg-Mak (Harrison Ray) and his thugs move in for the kill, but are frightened off by a curious Allosaurus. Dazed, Tony is captured at spear-point — by the girl of his dreams. Hea-Thor (Denise Ames) takes him to her cave (the ever-popular Bronson Cavern) to meet her prehistoric sorority sisters, who have had a spat with the men and set up separate quarters.
Switching back and forth between the split tribe, we see that Chief Ur-So (Ed Fury) longs to reunite with his beloved Ro-Kell (Karen Black), while she’d like to bury the tomahawk and go back to him as well. But the memory of the men folk’s mistreatment is still too fresh. Tony, who is quickly adopted by the lonely Amazons, realizes that it’s only a matter of time before the men try to use force to take the women back. He does his best to teach the girls how to defend themselves.
Don Glut, writer and director of Dinosaur Valley Girls, is no stranger to fossils, though a quick peek at his resume doesn’t show it. As a youth, Glut made dozens of amateur films, the titles of some of which somehow snuck into books on genre filmmaking. His writing career spans comic books, novels, Saturday morning cartoons and monster magazines. As a director, he’s made films for Playboy, some video documentaries, and the upcoming films The Vampire Hunters Club and Scarlet Countess. But in other circles, Glut is a well-respected and knowledgeable expert on the subject of dinosaurs — or as expert as one can be without a Ph.D. in paleontology. Capping off a line of dinosaur books by Glut is his massive Dinosaur Encyclopedia, which took over a decade to write and was finally published concurrently with the release of Dinosaur Valley Girls.
So Glut knows his stuff, and took pains to make sure the dinosaurs — created through a combination of puppetry and old fashioned animation — were as accurate as possible. But Glut also appreciates cheesy show-biz culture and exploitation, and wants to make films that are fun. Dinosaur Valley Girls, despite its rampant nudity, reflects his devotion to the values of Old Hollywood. Glut shot a “family” version of DVG — which is also available on tape, and has played on the USA cable network uncut — and there’s hardly any difference between the two versions really. They’re both silly comedies in which a jaded star finds true love and happiness in a simpler time and place. Some of the inane comedy works (the loopy cave-talk language) and some doesn’t (too many cute sound effects), but there’s an overall spirit of fun-on-a-budget here that’s infectious.
Glut, who also wrote a book on the making of the film, provides a fine commentrak on the disc. He explains the subtexts of each scene and points out interesting details. Overall, he bemoans the fact that they couldn’t afford more time to shoot the film. One gets the impression that an extra day would have made a great deal of difference in how the film came out. At the same time, Glut’s complaints illustrate his versatility as a director, motivating the cast and crew, and making long master shots work where more coverage wasn’t available. However, many scenes still drag, and could’ve used some tightening up by editor Tony Malanowski (Dr. Alien, Mutant Species).
On the disc’s B-side, a 24-minute “Making of” featurette, made up of clips and interview footage of varying technical quality, covers the shooting of the film. It ain’t exactly slick, but has a pleasant home movie quality, especially during the genuinely funny blooper section. There are also seven minutes of deleted scenes and a collection of trailers for Seduction Cinema titles.
The casting of Dinosaur Valley Girls followed the old exploitation formula of mixing veteran name actors with energetic youngsters. Shakespearean William Marshall hams it up delightfully. He’s a respected stage and screen actor, but most of us know him either as the King of Cartoons on Pee Wee’s Playhouse, or from his roles in movies like Blacula and Abby. Ed Fury was a bodybuilding champion who appeared in the schlock classic Wild Women of Wongo before going to Italy to star in a string of muscleman pictures, including Colossus & the Amazons and Ursus in the Land of Fire. Here he displays an unsuspected flair for comedy. Karen Black is a film legend, enthusiastic about working in highbrow and low-rent projects alike. Here she proves that she still looks sexy in a swimsuit at 54.
Jeff Rector is a solid and likeable leading man, and has numerous genre credits, including Galaxis and The Darkening. He had to pretend to smoke. Erotic thriller queen Griffin Drew also appeared in Fred Olen Ray’s Dinosaur Island.
The disc also contains 25 minutes of screen test footage of many of the actresses, showing some very odd scenes in the Front Line Films office. As nice and professional as Glut is, this kind of thing comes off as hilariously degrading for everyone involved. Some of the girls forgot to bring a bikini, and have to make do with stalking around with a spear in their underwear. It’s weird, but it also shows that some are clearly better than others.
Some time in the mid-1960s, Herschell Gordon Lewis met James F. Hurley, a teacher at Triton College and a firm believer in psychic phenomena. Hurley wanted to promote his theories via film, and convinced Lewis to use his script for his next film. Lewis was looking for a second feature for A Taste of Blood and other features he had awaiting double feature drive-in release, and thought he could make Hurley’s story into something exploitable. What resulted is one of Lewis’ screwiest features — one that certainly lives up to its name. Continue reading
Sixty years later – a worthy sequel
As Steve Martin recaps for us as one of the hosts, the original Fantasia (1940) was planned as an ongoing “concert film” project, adding and subtracting sequences each time it was released. Though plans were put in motion several times, this plan was set aside all these years. Disney rechanneled this kind of idea into more narrative anthologies like Fun & Fancy Free. Other stabs at the form, such as the Italian Allegro Non Tropo, and the Japanese Robot Carnival, met with limited success.
It was already nearly 40 years old when I first got the chance to see it, but it still blew me away. It was a legend that inspired generations of animators to push a little bit harder. A work of art that has achieved legendary status is a difficult act to follow, but Disney was brave enough to give it a try. To make up for lost time, this new Fantasia recycles only one of the previous edition’s selections (the popular “Sorceror’s Apprentice”). Thank goodness – as amazing as the original still is, and despite several remasters and restorations, animation has come a long way in 60 years. Add to that the fact that Fantasia 2000 is being shown in many IMAX theaters and the original is looking a bit shabby by comparison.
Of the new selections, all are good and some are magnificent. There’s a nice range of styles in both music and visuals, which I hope they continue to experiment with if the series goes on. Probably the weakest pieces are a short bit about a flamingo with a yo-yo set to Camille Saint-Sans’ “Carnival of the Animals”, and a longer sequence about life in New York set to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” using drawings by Al Hirshfeld, which was reportedly pulled from the Disney archives at the last minute, is pleasant enough but annoyingly predictable in comparison to its companions.
A surprising willingness to set imaginations free marks one of the features best attributes, some amazingly charming juxtapositions of theme. The old favorite sequence with Mickey Mouse is followed by the wilder idea of placing Donald Duck on board Noah’s Ark set to Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March”. Stravinsky’s “The Firebird” is literalized as an erupting volcano threatening the surrounding ecosystem. The strongest sequence features Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and is about migrating whales – that can fly, and make it look quite natural.
If there’s a crutch that will date this feature it would be a noticeable over-reliance on herds, swarms, flocks, schools and other large groups made manageable by recent developments in computer animation. It’s an obvious, natural choice, which makes it a slightly disappointing one when used so many times. Also, there’s the matter of the linking host sequences, which are hit-and-miss and may lead future audiences wondering, “Who the heck is that guy that sounds like Darth Vader?”
I have to confess that the artistry displayed by the Disney animation department, combined with the musical prowess of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as seen on the gigantic IMAX screen and heard in full multidirectional stereo, was enough to overwhelm me at times. Most people throw around references to having their breath taken away by performances, but this picture did the job for me for real. I was left gasping at beauty several times and it took awhile afterward for me to recover. Perhaps the IMAX is just too strong a presentation for this, or maybe I’m too sensitive, but it might be a good idea to take along a tank of oxygen. It’s that good.
The past year has brought a widening and expansion of the field in animated features – from Tarzan to South Park, from Iron Giant to Princess Mononoke, from Pokémon to Toy Story 2. It’s fitting to cap this year, and take a step into the next century, with a great show like Fantasia 2000.
George Romero caused a sensation with his first feature film, Night of the Living Dead, and changed horror films forever, but he and his partners failed to receive the financial rewards due them. He went on to a variety of projects, including straight drama. Itching to get back into features after making sports documentaries for a while, he wrote this vampire film Martin. Typically, Romero made it a vampire film unlike any other — one which touched on issues of the day, and changed the way we looked at vampires forever. Continue reading
I was disappointed in Mission: Impossible, mainly because it tossed aside most of what made the original TV series great, replacing it with an overcomplicated plot and action movie heroics. So I went into the sequel expecting little.
Well, what can I say – this one succeeds by throwing out even more of the TV series. Only pone-bred rednecks would have trouble following this plot. Continue reading
Action!
Tucked somewhere in my files is a stapled sheaf of Xeroxed pages I call The Reject Rules, which I found on the floor in the film department while attending college. No doubt dropped by an angry young film student, it’s composed of a list of whiny fanboy proclamations (in all-caps type). For example: WE REJECT THE CINEMA OF STEPHEN SPIELBERG! and WE REJECT THE COMMERCE-DRIVEN FASCIST HOLLYWOOD STUDIO SYSTEM! I take it out once in a while for a chuckle. Continue reading
The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse DVD
Deserves more eyes on it
CBS’ late, unlamented TV show Big Brother ain’t got nothing on Dr. Mabuse. Fritz Lang’s return to the character he made famous in a series of German films reflecting the methods of the rising Nazi threat in the ’20s and early ’30s, The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse served as an inspiration for Alphaville and Sliver, as well as recent “reality” television programs. Continue reading →