So, Sunday night I was in the mood for adventure. After pulling out several film from my collection for consideration I settled in 1999’s remake of The Mummy. In general I am not a  fan of remakes, but there is a statute of limitations and any film over 70 years old is not automatically off the remake list. (That doesn’t mean you should remake all good movies older than 70 years, just it is something that can be considered.)

The Original The Mummy, a vehicle for rising monster star, Boris Karloff. There are no historical myths about monstrous mummies. The process of mummification was one used in ancient Egypt to preserve the body after death because the owner of said body was going to need it in the afterlife, not to hunt down tomb robbers and look up lost loves.

In the 1920s and 1930s there was a veritable mania about Egypt going on worldwide and the script for The Mummy (1932) tapped into that mania for a new monster to be played by Boris Karloff and created by Jack Pierce. The film proved popular enough to spin off a chain of sequels  Only the first film starred Karloff and the sequels grew progressively  worse. At the end of the franchise all semblance continuity had been abandoned and little remained to recommend the movies.

In the 1990’s Universal wanted to launch their monster franchises and one of the film that sought to do it with was The Mummy. The projected bounced from production team to production team but none were able to crack how to remake the classic film. Director writer Stephen Sommers cracked the beast with two insights. First that it would work best as a period film, set in the 1920’s when the craze for Egypt was high and everyone and their brother dreamt of looting tombs and getting rich. Secondly, that the original film was not about a bandage wrapped limping monsters, but about a powerful priest and a love beyond time.

Armed with these two points Sommers gave us a film that fit perfectly into our time. The outstanding digital effects from ILM created a Mummy unlike anything we had ever seen before. A cast of talented actors including Brendan Fraiser and Rachel Weisz along with just the right amount of winking at the camera gave us an adventure film that was fun, exciting, and a little scary. (The need to keep the film a PG-13 rating prevented real horror for creeping onto the screen.)

Sadly, Sommers was not so good at crafting sequels. The Mummy Returns was a bland, bored mixture of camp and stupidity.  Sommers continued to disappoint me with the horrid film, Van Helsing. Only two things redeem the production of Van Helsing, one is the performance by David Wenham, who stole every scene he was in. The other was that is helped Universal release the Legacy Collections of DVD for their classic monster films.

We’ll see if the reboot of The Wolf Man matches the reboot of The Mummy, but I doubt it.

Because of the long weekend I did not watch a Sunday Night Movie as I typically do. I spent Sunday night playing board and card games with my sweetie-wife and friends. Then late into the night we played video games. In other words it was more like a Saturday night than a Sunday night.
On Monday my sweetie-wife and I watched the British television production of Macbeth from 1979. The production starred Ian McKellen and Judi Dench as Lord and Lady Macbeth. Sharp eyed genre fans will also spot a much younger Ian MacDiarmid (Senator and Emperor  Palpatine in Star Wars) as Ross.

Now this story has been around for nearly 400 years so I think I’m safe from having to worry about spoilers. However, if you know nothing about the story of Macbeth and don’t want anything spoiled, then read no further and only accept that this production is well worth viewing.

Macbeth is the story of a Scottish Lord, Macbeth whose ambition — with assistance from his wife — leads him to murder his King and kinsman, King Duncan, and seize the throne of Scotland for himself.  However, as such thing often go, he cannot stop at just one murder. He sees threats from all sides and murders kin and friend alike to protect his hold on the crown. His ascendancy to King had been foretold by three witches and when those same witches foretell that his rule shall not fall until Birnam Wood moves on Dunsinane Hill, Macbeth feels unbeatable. When the witches further say that no man born of woman shall harm him he feels invulnerable . Being Shakespeare there are of course quibbles around these prophecies that Macbeth fails to appreciate until it is too late.

The story of Macbeth is not the story of witches and mystic powers to lead men astray. Macbeth himself confesses that murder was already in his mind before the witches spoke their first prophesy to him. Macbeth is a study in power and in ambition and in the ragged madness that lies for men when they are commanded by the lust for power and give their ambition reign over their souls. This is a timeless story that has been told and re-told over and over. It has been told as a mafia story and, in my favorite reiteration, as a Samurai action film, Throne of Blood. It is the basis for not my next novel but the one after that where I take the same basic story and set it in the far future. I hope I can do it some justice.

This production is quite startling and much to my tastes. The thing with plays is that every production is invited to reinvent the look of the play without changing the text of the play. Sometimes this leads to very historical with everyone in period garb and gear, and sometimes it leads to most fantastic productions such as the Fascist vision for Richard III. (One I liked very much.) For this production of Macbeth the production designed was very minimalist. There were no sets and the costumes were quite un-period. The stage was blank and bare. All atmosphere for the scenes were created by the use of light and smoke. While this sounds rather droll and dull it was quite the opposite. This production was tense and suspenseful. The director also made excellent use of the medium of television. He did not simply photograph the stage play. he used the camera and the frame to compose shots that heightened the tension, and emphasized the dramatic in the text and in the performance. For the soliloquies the actors delivered their lines directly into the camera lens, breaking the fourth wall and inviting us, the audience, into their thoughts.

This was a treat and one I may very buy on DVD as I saw it via my Netflix account. Man, I love my Netflix account.

Not everything I watch is a classic film and I don’t always choose something for serious viewing.
When I want to have fun it rarely gets better than watching Joel (or Mike) and the ‘bots having at some terribly directed, written, and produced movie. I was not disappointed by MST3K’s take on Attack Of The Giant Leeches.
In the swamps of Florida, near Cape Kennedy, giant leeches are attacking people and making off with them. The leeches keep the people alive in a cave as sort of a blood larder. No one believes the survivors when they tell of monsters and soon it’s up to a local game warden, his lovely wife, and her father the doctor to prove what is happening and save the day.
This episode turned out to be one of the funniest I have seen. There was a moment when we had to pause the DVD while I recovered from laughing and my sweetie-wife recovered from pushing water through her sinus cavity. (German expressionistic humor does that to us.)

This was an early season where they still did invention exchange and the chemistry still worked like a charm.

If you are a fan of the show and haven’t seen this one, by all means get it.

Sorry for being a little late with my Sunday Night Movie Feature, but I didn’t finish my Sunday Night movie until tonight, Tuesday night.
Exhaustion on Sunday prevented me from watching the film in a single seating as I prefer to do, and a migraine on Monday prevented me from doing anything at all except dragging myself through my day job.
So, onto the review and comments.
This week’s movie, Red Planet Mars (1952) I found what cruising through the list at Netflix. I’m a big fan of Netflix and especially of the instant-view capability through my Xbox 360. I saw the description and thought that this might be a campy movie worth a spin.
The film stars Peter Graves as scientist Chris Cronyn. Chris along with his fellow scientist wife Linda (Andrea King) have built a transmitter using new technology — the hydrogen valve — and are now attempting to contact the advanced civilization they believe is on the planet Mars. The world is thrown into panic and chaos by the messages they receive.

The film starts off strong, keeping fairly close to the science and paying attention to details such as the speed-of-light lag between Earth and Mars. It deals lightly, but does not ignore, the issue of finding a common means of communication between two beings without a common language. The characters are presented with consequences of the results of their messages. As Mars tells of fantastic life-spans and limitless energy whole industries panic and threaten to topple the economy of the west. There is a parallel story line about a German scientist working on his own hydrogen valve transmitter who is intercepting the messages for his Soviet masters.

This film did not work for me, but in order for me to tell you why it didn’t work I will have to deal in spoilers. Even though the film is 57 years old I’m going to put the rest behind a break for anyone who wants to avoid those mentioned spoilers.
Continue reading →

I have a confession, I like disaster movies. I guess part of it comes from the fact that came of age as a movie watcher during the 1970s when the disaster film was created as a genre. Oh before the seventies there were films that had disasters in them and films about the Titanic, but as its own genre the disaster film dates to the 70s.

The genre started with 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure. Based on a novel by Paul Gallico that film became an enormous success and in Hollywood that means one thing, imitations.

The Towering Inferno for me represents the apex of the disaster genre. Made and released in 1974 the film boasted an all star cast, was the first film that required two studios to produce it and made a vat-load of money at the box office. (the film cost 14 million to make and grossed 116 million at the box office.[Domestically])

I was thirteen when The Towering Inferno hit the theaters in the winter of 1974 and I saw it at the Sunrise Theater in Ft. Pierce, Fl. The film was thrilling and action packed and a good staple of the disaster film genre. You didn’t know who was going to live and who was going to die.

The Towering Inferno is the story of the world’s tallest building — a fictional one set in San Francisco — that catches fire on its opening night. With an all star cast, led by Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, it is the story of people trapped far above the ground with a deadly and uncontrollable fire racing up the floors of the tower.

All through the 70’s other producers tried to follow in Irwin Allen’s footsteps. There were all sort of disaster movies and some were better than others, but I think that the ones made by Irwin Allen have survived the test of time over the imitators for a simple reason. The two films that represent the high budget big-star disaster movie made by Irwin Allen, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno were not cynical movies.

The films of the 70’s were very much drenched in cynicism.  People are no damn good, governments are no damn good, companies are no damn good, and it’s all going to end in nuclear holocaust. While in Irwin’s films there are nasty and greedy men who cause terror and death by their greed, there are also heroes. Even when the heroes do not get along and snap and fight with each other, their core motivations are good and they look out for those who cannot look out for themselves. That is the polar opposite of the cynical outlook.

An example of this is the character of Gary Parker, a US senator . If this film was made today the senator would be a self-centered egotist who only cared about saving his own hide and about not looking like he was scared. It would be a character of image and lies. This is not the character played by Robert Vaughn in The Towering Inferno. This Senator is heroic, works to help save others, and never seems to be motivated by his own self-interest. We would not expect such behavior because we are too cynical now, and it was worse in the 70’s.  Then as now too many people mistook cynicism for wisdom.

It’s really interesting how quickly this film was made. The production company started filming in late spring on 1974 and the prints were released to theaters nationwide, not in a limited grab-the-Oscar-nomination but a wide release, in December of the same year. A film of this scope and complexity simply could not be done that quickly today.

The disaster movie is not for everyone, but if it’s is your taste or you want to see a good example of this genre rent The Towering Inferno.

Last night I was in the mood for something classic and genre so I popped into the player my favorite of the original Universal Frankenstein films, Son Of Frankenstein.
Son Of Frankenstein was the last film in which Boris Karloff played the creature. The story follows Frankenstein’s son as he arrives at the family castle with wife and son in tow and becomes seduced by the brilliance and madness that destroyed his father.
This film is a joy to watch if you are fan of the comedy, Young Frankenstein. It is clear that Gene Wilder loved the original Universal movies and many of his gags work best if you have seen these movies.
Basil Rathbone plays Wolfgang Von Frankenstein — and I think this is the first film to give him the title of Baron, but I could be wrong about that — and the performance is really one to watch. Wolf is a man for whom nature holds no terrors. In his book fear exists where there is ignorance and misunderstanding. Armed with knowledge a man fears nothing in nature. Naturally a man with this sort of hubris is heading for a fall. Wolf’s life takes a turn for the worse when he meets Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi, a criminal who’s survived a hanging and now uses the Frankenstein monster to visit revenge on the men who sat in judgement on him. Ygor manipulates Wolf into restoring the monster to health. (It was only wounded by the fantastic explosion at the end of the last film.) Countering these two conspirator is the police inspector Krogh, played by Lionel Atwood, who would in the next film in the series be a scientist that causes the tragedy to continue. Krogh is a wonderful character and he is lampoon marvelously in Young Frankenstein by Kenneth Mars.
This is a Frankenstein movie where the monster is an invalid for two of the three acts, yet it is my favorite. I particularly like watching Rathbone’s performance as Wolf cracks as the situation spins dangerously out of control.