PD Project Part 7

Disc 7
• Killers From Space (1954) runtime: 1:10:50

  Dr. Martin, the only survivor from a plane that was studying an atomic explosion, returns with no memories of the crash but with horrible visions of evil eyes.
  I take glee from the most random things in this movie: the plane is the Tarbaby 2, the main character's colleague is Dr. Kruger and the main character's name is "Doctor Martin." Hooray! He's also taller than everybody else in the movie so that's an added joy.
  Yes, the bug-eyed aliens are silly-looking and the cave sequence with ultra-close-ups of animals is painfully long, but otherwise it's an okay alien-invasion film. It's not clear why the aliens must conquer the Earth. It seems there'd be room enough for the new race, especially since they apparently live underground and have access to such advanced technology. It doesn't seem like there'd be much need for coercion. Pacing is a little off and the "revealed all at once" move is weak, but it's ultimately an okay old film. Ending takes forever though.
  Archive.org page
  Wikipedia article
  

• Phantom From Space (1953) runtime: 1:12:14

  An invisible monster descends from space and starts killing people.
  Painfully slow, lots of narration to--at best--negligible effect, and moments where the film will recap what just happened. When the invisible monster removes its outfit, there are multiple cutaways to the monster. The invisible monster. We're treated to cutaways to nothing.
  Archive.org page
  Wikipedia article
  

• White Pongo (1945) runtime: 1:11:49

  A safari sets out to find the missing link, a white gorilla, though tensions within the expedition may prove a bigger threat than any gorilla ever could.
  I apologize to any film I may be slandered by accusing it of having nothing happen. This movie's about a monstrous monkey but is more concerned with the trip's sole woman trying to seduce her guard. Then, fifty minutes in, the plot shifts and becomes about a mutiny, a lost field of gold and a secret agent--and it's still boring! The gorilla, which is of course in love with the woman, saves the day only to be captured and shipped back to the states for testing. Nice going monkey.
  Archive.org page
  

• The Snow Creature (1954) runtime: 1:10:46

  An expedition into the Himalayas to find new plant life goes off the rails when the wife of one of the Sherpas is kidnapped by a yeti and the crew sets out to rescue her.
  There's this weird conceit in the movie--the white guys leading the expedition are so pissed about having to save the Sherpa's wife, so angry that it could possibly take precedence over their search for plants. And the movie's conceit is that they're right. The "villain" of the piece is the Sherpa searching for his wife. Imperialism in a nutshell: screw your wife and town, a white man wants something.
  This film broke ground in finding new ways to be bad. The yeti's costume looks like a bunch of skinned teddy bears sewn together, there's basically one shot of the yeti walking out of the shadows which is repeated, paused and run backwards throughout the movie, and when the yeti does manage to attack someone, it looks like Fozzie Bear on a bender. That last part's fun, but otherwise the picture's drawing blood. Not only does it have the weird thing going on with the Sherpa, that's only the first part of the movie. The second part is about the head scientist bringing the yeti back to America where it's held up in Immigration (I'm not kidding), escapes and has to be chased through the sewer. You know what that means: more shots of the yeti emerging from a shadow along with repeated shots of cops running around a sewer set. They're not running over the same piece of set, they just repeat the shots of them running through the set. Oh God, there's an avalanche scene in the first part where one of the actors gets hit on the head with a giant prop rock, but no harm done.
  This film violates the Geneva Convention. It is a crime against humanity. Obviously I highly recommend it with a big bowl of popcorn and a pitcher of Margaritas.
  Archive.org page
  Wikipedia article
  

I'll be back next time with Disc 8: Half spawn of Hercules, half things from Venus, all PD!

PD Project Update

Now available from the Internet Archive:
Hercules Unchained
Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon

PD Project Part 6

Disc 6
• The Lost Jungle (1934) runtime: 1:08:32

  An expedition to the fabled island of Kamor shipwrecks. Ruth, the true love of animal trainer extraordinaire Charles Beatty, is among those shipwrecked so Beatty sets out in a dirigible to save her.
  Another serial cut into a movie. Dirigibles! Wild animals! Bold expeditions! It has a tendency to be generic. Every trope that people think of when they think of 1930's pulp stories is here: the brash youth, the scheming assistant, even the tooth-sucking ad-man who knows all the angles. It's not without its charm though.
  The film is all about Beatty and his trained animals--and Beatty ain't the one carrying the show. It's a nice snapshot of the period, an example of how animals were treated back then. That's the odd thing about these films, the unintentional revelation about the world the films were made in, the assumptions operating in the films.
  I think this film is PD, but it's not yet on the Internet Archive. I'll update if I get more details.
  Wikipedia article
  

• Mesa of Lost Women (1952) runtime: 1:08:53

  Two people are found wandering across the Muerto Desert telling a tale of a mad scientist conducting horrible experiments involving humans and spiders.
  The entire movie is done in flashback for no particular reason and there are long periods of voice over telling you what's happening and what the characters are thinking. That could have proven useful in some scenes since the producers apparently forgot to light portions of the movie. Anything could be out in the jungle--anything except a light bulb.
  The movie's surprisingly sedate for a horror/sci-fi pic. No one gets too excited about anything--a madman holding them at gunpoint, a plane crash, even the horrible death of their friend. Nothing elicits much of a reaction. It's not that nothing happens, it's that the characters act as though nothing happens.
  I should be fair, this is an awful print. There are a lot of bad cuts where something happens, but it's been edited out. I don't know if it's on purpose or just a coincidence, but the cuts add a touch of unintentional comedy. "Well, I don't know." CUT "What was that?" An edit. They're not supposed to be that noticeable.
  This movie is under copyright: V2369P077-84/1988-04-25
  Wikipedia article
  

• Assignment: Outer Space (1960) 1:12:39

  Reporter Ray Peterson hitches a ride on a space mission to disable a rouge spaceship that's about to destroy the Earth.
  Another batch of awfulness. The movie takes thirty-forty minutes to arrive at the actual plot and until then it's mostly disconnected events and aimless moralizing. Top unintentionally funny moment: the report has disabled the death ship, but his oxygen system is out of control. He says, "What's the point of saving the Earth if I myself have to die?" Nice priorities.
  Archive.org page
  Wikipedia article
  

• Laser Mission (1990) 1:24:16

  A terrorist with plans for world domination steals the world's largest diamond and kidnaps the world's foremost theoretical physicist to build a giant laser. Mercenary Michael Gold must team up with the physicist's daughter to save the physicist and thwart the terrorist's plan.
  The film is called Laser Mission and opens with a montage of a shotgun being loaded and fired repeatedly. This was a nice counterpoint to Assignment: Outer Space. Whereas nothing happened in that movie, this one is packed with the absurd. It's one of those odd flicks that, if you were to make a spoof of it, you'd make the exact same film. Fun little revelation: the producers only paid for one song so they just repeat it throughout the movie. The film is unrelentingly stupid, even through the end credits which have spelling errors. A masterpiece of badness.
  This movie is under copyright: V2636P080/1991-02-22
  Wikipedia article
  

I'll be back next time with Disc 7: four films, all public domain! Rock! Two are totally from space and two are the missing link. Brace yourself though, barely anything happens in any of them. Yay!

Friday Double Feature: Be Kind Rewind & Taxi to the Dark Side

Be Kind Rewind is the latest from writer/director Michel Gondry (director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind --which had a notably disappointing ending--and writer/director of The Science of Sleep --a notably beautiful and affecting film whose ad campaign mistakenly pushed it as a romantic comedy). The story centers around Be Kind Rewind video in Passaic, NJ. The owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) is being forced out so the city can tear down his store/home and replace it with upscale condos. He leaves his one employee, Mike (Mos Def), in charge while he takes a week to see how the competition runs their stores. While he's gone, Jerry (Jack Black), a local mechanic and yahoo who hangs out at the video store gets electrocuted while trying to sabotage the power plant. He becomes magnetized and inadvertently erases every tape in the store. Mike and Jerry shoot their own version of Ghostbusters in the hopes of delaying Mr. Fletcher finding out what happened to the store--only the people in the neighborhood like Mike and Jerry's versions better than the originals.
The movie's sweet without overdoing it. It reminded me of '80's movies where the community has to come together to save the old store or help someone out. If you want to get into meaning, the movie's a portrait of how people draw sustenance from narrative and fold stories into their own lives and expand their lives through the stories they consume. They are telling stories based on the stories they've been told and then laying claim to the telling of the stories, not to the stories themselves. That's an important distinction. When the inevitable foil shows up and ruins everything just as things are starting to work out, what stands out is the community's reaction. They protest that the videos are “our movies.” The conclusion then becomes an act of seizing a story and the telling for themselves.
Gondry has more than a knack for producing visually stunning, dreamlike images. In Be Kind, however, he seems a step removed from their creation. While still inventive, charming and occasionally stunning, they seem to spring from the minds of the characters instead of from him. The piece feels more organic, more real than his previous films. The two I mentioned above, Spotless and Science explicitly occur within characters' dreams. This time he's created a world where the characters can make these images for themselves, and that's a little more satisfying, a little more hopeful. It's one thing to say you can dream whatever you want, it's another to show people making a world that matches their dreams.

Taxi to the Dark Side proved to be a major disappointment. I expected some grand condemnation of Bush's torture policy and his abrogation of powers that have led us to the point we're at today--the President of the United States, whoever they may be, currently has the legal right to order anyone anywhere in the world, American or foreigner, seized, tortured and killed without any sort of trial or review. Taxi, which is supposed to be an eye-opening documentary outlining the current policy, doesn't even go as far as the sentence I wrote. In fact it seems to portray some of the soldiers who beat, tortured and murdered Dilawar, an innocent Afghan taxi driver, as victims.
Granted, it's trying to show that the soldiers are scapegoats and it is rewarding to see people from inside the situation speaking frankly about what went on, but what they say seems removed from what the movie is talking about. There wasn't any flow to the film, no sense of a rising action or argument being made. The film felt sloppy, scattershot and that made it feel slow. I started drifting off to sleep at one point. During a film about torture. That had graphic images of torture. And I don't see gory things that often.
Much of my disappointment comes from my expectations going into the film. I wanted to learn something. It is the height of grotesque absurdity that this nation has a “debate” about torture. There is no debate--no torture is acceptable. Yet here we are. And I learned nothing mostly because I've been paying attention the past seven years. I've read Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib and I listen to Democracy Now!. Part of my disappointment stems from the fact that I feel like I've only paid cursory attention. I haven't been trying to learn everything I can and still this movie had no revelations for me. Nor did it explore a media environment so craven and uncritical of executive power that it doesn't even raise questions about torture.
Maybe it's also the issue of relevance. It's incredibly crass to say, but the general feeling is so what if our soldiers are torturing people “over there.” After all, it's not “us,” it's “them.” The threat of torture needs to be made relevant to Americans--and not just in portraying the fate of those few who were scapegoated for the decisions from the top. Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy, noted in a recent interview in Harper's that torture always comes home. To put it more bluntly, as Jello Biafra said after Abu Ghraib broke, the soldiers who were charged were prison guards back in the states. If they thought what they were doing to prisoners over there was “funny,” what are they doing to us over here? The issue of torture, and the dangerous idea that excuses it, is the strange dualism that says there is good and there is evil, and they are not matters of action or choice. There are no evil deeds, just evil men and anything done to them by “good” men is therefore justified. President Bush has decided that he is one of the “good” men and Congress has given him authority to seize any person, anywhere in the world, to have whatever he wants done to them. The President, who cannot talk about the Iraq War without giggling, has the authority to order your child raped with hot irons. This is the issue, this is the concern.
And that is why Taxi--which has John Yoo, author of the so-called “Torture Memo,” on tape saying it's okay for the President to order the testicles of a detainee's child crushed, but does not take the final intellectual step of saying we are threatened with the same depredations we inflict upon others--ultimately fails. It imagines itself as highly critical even though the harshest criticism it can muster of the Bush administration is that they are a bunch of bad leaders even though they're committing crimes against humanity.

PD Project Part 5

Behold: Hercules!
Or don't. You know. Whatever.

Disc 5
• Hercules Against the Moon Men (1964) runtime: 1:26:13

  Hercules is summoned to defeat the mountain-dwelling monsters that are oppressing the people of Samar, but Queen Samara has her own deal with the monsters and opposes Hercules' meddling.
  Part of the Queen's deal with the moon men is to let them sacrifice her sister to resurrect their queen. Hercules is curiously slow to stop the kidnapping of the Queen's sister preferring to use subterfuge to defeat the threat because, yeah, that's what Hercules is known for, his exquisite mind. Hercules is actually kind of heroic in this one--mostly because he's not invincible. He takes risks for principled purposes. And the movie has some nice action sequences--almost all ruined by the pan-and-scan. There is one odd plot point. Herc has to drink a mind-control potion. Rather than pretend to drink it or switch the cups, he's simply unaffected with no real explanation. Honestly though, there are only two things to watch this movie for: the sandstorm sequence (Deep Hurting for all the MST3K fans) and the line, "Under the evil influence of Uranus." So funny.
  Archive.org page
  Wikipedia article
  This was episode 0410 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be purchased as part of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Vol. 7.

• Hercules and the Captive Women (1961) runtime: 1:34:03

  The kingdom of Thebes is menaced by an unknown enemy so the King sets out with Hercules to defeat the threat. Their quest uncovers the hidden kingdom of Atlantis, but there is strange doings afoot.
  These films neither translate nor age well, which is a shame. Even with the dreadful pan-and-scan you can tell these used to be splendid epics--visually stunning and sumptuous.
  This one has a long opening and, in general, is campier than Moon Men above. The odd this is the film is patently ridiculous and then gets good. The plot moves from silly to epic and action-packed. All the sub-plots, so awkwardly introduced, end up being relatively nicely resolved. I should be making fun of this movie, but honestly, MST3K's pretty much covered it. This would almost be worth watching in widescreen if that were in any way an option.
  This film was public domain, but is now actually back under copyright, which sucks: V8004P757/1997-01-21. There are still copies out there though.
  Archive.org page
  This was episode 0412 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be viewed on YouTube (in 10 parts) or downloaded from the Digital Archive Project.

• Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon (1964) 1:25:07

  After a three-year absence, Hercules returns to find his home conquered by the Babylonian empire and his queen enslaved. He must free her before the three rulers of Babylon find her and use her to their own evil purposes.
  Herc doesn't have a beard in this one and his weapon of choice is a giant club. The overall effect is to make him look like a college-bred caveman. Not my favorite Hercules. He simply doesn't look, well, Herculean. However, the movie, unlike the previous two, is pretty good throughout. It a semi-epic tale of empires whose histories will be shaped by Hercules' actions rather than being all about Hercules. I have to wonder if that isn't exactly what makes the movie good.
  I am in the process of adding this film to the Internet Archive right now.
  Wikipedia article
  

• Hercules Unchained (1959)

  Hercules returns to Thebes to find the land on the brink of civil war. While trying to deliver a treaty to prevent the war, Hercules drinks from the fountain of forgetfulness and is ensnared by the evil Omphale who plans to kill him and turn him into a statue for her garden.
  Most random Hercules movie yet. Nothing that happens in this movie has anything to do with anything else. It's so random as to be nigh-dada. The only character that does anything that ties the disparate elements together is Ulysses, friend of Hercules. He's the one who figures out what' happening and takes action to save the day. I think MST made fun of this one for Hercules always taking a nap. I think he was trying to lead by example.
  I am in the process of adding an MPEG of this film to the Internet Archive right now.
  AVI Archive.org page
  Wikipedia article
  This was episode 0408 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be purchased as part of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Vol. 7.

I'll be back next time with Disc 6: four more films including two about perils faced by stranded peoples, a spaceship coming to destroy the Earth and Brandon Lee in a film that will destroy your mind! Sadly only two are PD.

PD Project Update: Teenagers From Outer Space

Teenagers From Outer Space is now available as an MPEG2 (aka DVD) from Archive.org here.

PD Project Part 4

Disc 4
• Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) runtime: 1:19:54

  The children of Mars have forgotten how to play so the Martian leader kidnaps Santa Claus and two children from Earth to bring them Christmas. Only some of the Martians don't like the idea.
  I'm not watching this again, I'm not even kidding. I've watched the MST3K version at least 1 1/2 times (fell asleep) and saw it twice on The It's Alive Show so I'm not going through that again--the messed-up bear suit, the stupid robot, the god-damned kids, Droppo, oh sweet mother of Christ, Droppo. No, I'm not watching this again.
  Classically bad cinema though that has the potential to be fun in a jaw-on-the-floor sense of horror at what you're seeing. The MST3K version has been officially released as a two-pack with Manos: the Hands of Fate which I think has surpassed Plan 9 From Outer Space as officially the worst movie ever made. The two-pack's a one-two punch of pain and a great present for people you hate.
  This film was already on the Internet Archive which means I didn't have to think about it beyond writing this little review.
  Archive.org page
  Wikipedia article
  This was episode 0321 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be purchased as part of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, The Essentials.

• Teenagers From Outer Space (1959) runtime: 1:25:28

  Aliens come to Earth in hopes of using the planet to breed their Gargon herds, but one alien falls in love with humanity and rebells.
  There's not a whole lot to be said about this movie apart from it being a cheeseball classic. Apart from being a surprisingly well-shot low-budget film, it is full of cost-cutting maneuvers that just ratchet up the pathetic nature of the piece. The story is trite, poorly acted and the characters are just dumb, dumb, dumb.
  The Wikipedia article has some nice details about the movie including the fact that the director/producer/whatever-no-one-else-would-do went insane after the film tanked and declared himself the second coming of Christ, which might explain the almost non sequitur transformation of the main character into a Christ figure at the end of the film. This looks like one of those cases where the story of the film is far more interesting and compelling than the film itself could ever be.
  This film was already on the Internet Archive which means I didn't have to think about it beyond writing this little review, but there was only an avi. So I added the full DVD.
  avi Archive.org page
  DVD Archive.org page
  Wikipedia article
  This was episode 0404 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be purchased as part of The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Vol. 6.

• Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Crash of the Moons (1953) 1:11:57

  Rocky Jones, representative of the United Worlds, must convince the ruler of the planet Officious to evacuate her people before another planet crashes into it. She has a better idea though--blow up the other planet, whether it's been evacuated or not!
  Rocky Jones was an old Saturday morning serial TV series that ended after one season because it was "too expensive to produce." That's Hollywood for "nobody was watching." So the producers re-cut each three-episode story arc into its own film and tried re-distributing them that way. So instead of a mediocre half-hour of television, they decided to produce a mediocre hour-and-a-half of film. Thanks guys.
  Ignoring the complete ignorance of planetary physics at work in the movie, I found it wasn't so bad. Certainly not as bad as I remember it being when I saw it on MST3K. The story itself is okay and the acting is a hair better than bad, but you don't sit with any one group of characters for too long so you're not beaten over the head with their uselessness. While there's a bit of a rough start (you're just dropped into the on-going conflict between Officious and the United Worlds), the story arc is cut together pretty well and is largely self-contained. It at least feels like a complete story.
  This is still under copyright: PA0000104610/1981-06-08
  series Wikipedia article
  This was episode 0417 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and can be viewed on and can be viewed on YouTube (in 10 parts) or downloaded from the Digital Archive Project.

• Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Menace From Outer Space (1953) 1:15:30

  Missiles originating from one of Jupiter's moons strike Earth and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, is dispatched to see why.
  This is not Crash of the Moons. Every scene feels as long as a movie, the acting is awful and it's in a tight race with the plot to see which is worse. The other movie was at least less busy--one plot, just one. This one has constant b-stories and plot twists and it was only three episodes of the series! Relax, you have a whole year to write disappointing stories.
  There's a sense the writers were trying to create a world, a setting populated with sundry elements that could interact in all sorts of ways. That's to their credit, but they tried to throw all those elements together at once instead of letting them arise as necessary. Of course none of that matters if the hero's a dick. Which he is. Not as big a dick as Superman, but still a pretty big dick.
  This is still under copyright: PA0000104627/1981-06-08
  series Wikipedia article
  

I'll be back next time with Disc 5: All Hercules all the time! Thrill as Hercules takes a nap! Gasp as women throw themselves at him even though he's a dick! Stare in amazement at pecs, pecs and more pecs!