Showing posts with label Mad Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mad Science. Show all posts

Saturday, October 29, 2022

Can Betty Soothe the Savage Beast?

Betty Boop's Penthouse (1933)
Starring: Mae Questel, Jack Mercer, and Billy Murray
Directors: Dave Fleischer and Willard Bowsky
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Betty Boop is enjoying a quiet day of gardening and frolicking and singing in her penthouse garden when she attracts the lecherous attention of the proprietors of a mad science lab, Bimbo and Koko, in a neighboring building. Unfortunately, while the pair admire Betty, an experiment goes awry and a monster gets loose!


"Betty Boop's Penthouse" isn't the strongest of the Boop cartoons, but it's noteworthy for being one of a handful of times where Fleischer stars Bimbo, Koko, and Betty all appeared in the same short film. It has its moments, but the music is so-so and there's only one gag that is truly hilarious. Nothing here falls flat or is particularly bad--this just isn't as strong an effort as the best Boops.

I think Bimbo and Koko make a good pair of mad scientists, and I like the way they get their come-uppance... but the film seems to run out of steam in its final minutes, as the unleashed product of mad science goes after Betty. The ending is bad, but it lacks punch. In that way, I suppose it's matches everything else in this short--it's not bad but it's not particularly good either--but I still wanted more.

But you can take a few minutes to see whether I'm judging this cartoon too harshly by clicking below and watching it from this very post. (And if you have even more time, you can let me and everyone else know what YOU think of it, in the comments section!)


Tuesday, January 5, 2021

'As the Earth Turns' was decades in the making

As the Earth Turns (filmed ca. 1937, released 2019)
Starring: Alan Hoelting, Barbara Berger, Edwin C. Frost, and Richard Lyford
Director: Richard Lyford
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

The time is the near future. As war rages across Europe, a mysterious entity, Pax (Lyford), reaches out to world via a west coast U.S. Navy station, threatening natural disasters on a global scale if the war doesn't come to an end. The mysterious entity charges the U.S. government with seeing to it that its demands are carried out... and when peace does not come fast enough, Pax proves that it has the power to destroy mountains, move oceans, and ravage the world with earthquakes. A pair of reporters (Berger and Hoelting) and a physicist (Frost) set out to find Pax and stop his reign of terror.

Scene from "As the Earth Turns" (1938/2020)

"As the Earth Turns" was made in made in 1937 or 1938, but never released to the public until relatives of its writer/director/co-star connected with composer Ed Hartman. Hartman provided a wall-to-wall musical score for the film and became the driving force in getting it out into the world. 

Based on information provided by Hartman and extrapolating from Richard Lyford's IMDB entry, at least one reason why this film was abandoned was that was in final edits and assembly when Lyford went to work for the Walt Disney Corporation, leaving behind his troupe of fellow amateur actors and filmmakers in Seattle, WA, for a career in Hollywood. 

On the one hand, it's great that a talented filmmaker had the opportunity to make a living plying his craft--and even co-directing an Oscar-winning documentary--but, on the other hand, it's too bad it took ninty years for this fun sci-fi movie to see the light of day. (That said... if Lyford HAD finished and released his move, there might not have been the well-preserved raw material for Hartman and the restoration team to work with in producing what we now can watch today.)

As far as my purely superficial research has shown, the only person aside from Lyford who went onto a successful show-business career  was Barbara Berger--on Broadway and soap operas--and I think it was well deserved. Aside from Lyford himself, Berger gives the best performance in the cast and is responsible for two of my favorite moments of "As the Earth Turns" (and mentioning either would spoil parts of the movie, sadly).
 
As for the film itself, story- and pacing-wise is it's on par with the sci-fi films of the time, and the characters are also what you would expect. (Spunky, success-driven girl reporter. Heroic [more or less] male reporter. Wise scientist who happens to be a semi-mentor to one of the characters. Stark-raving mad scientist.) There are a couple of twists to how these standard figures are deployed within the story--one of which is borne from such pure plot convenience that it almost hurt, one which adds a little surprise to the ending. There are plenty of shaky parts in the plot, and the ending comes rather suddenly--but with a bit more of a denouement than many film of the period--but there is nothing worse that you don't see in professionally mounted low-budget films of the day. In fact, what we have here is superior to what you'd find in many of those films.

The Pax Plane from "As the Earth Turns" (2019)

Even more remarkable  are the special effects in this film. They are remarkably competent for an amateur film--from the construction of the models, through the filming of their eventual destruction through explosions and other mayhem. There's a plan crash that's especially impressive--and it compares well to what you might see in films from big studios in the 1950s or even the 1960s.

One curious choice was Lyford's decision to make it a silent movie. Maybe he did so because of technical and resource limitations, because I can't think of many silent movies being produced in 1937. Even cartoons had become more or less dialogue-driven by this point in time, so making a silent film seems a bit odd. (Although since people are still making silent movies today, perhaps I am making a bad assumption. Perhaps Lyford choosing to make a silent film is like someone today choosing to make a sci-fi film using practical effects and models instead of lots of CGI--he had a creative reason for rejecting the most recent technology of filmmaking. 

Another curious choice was for Lyford to present the film's final scene in color. Maybe I missed something along the way, but I didn't get the sense that there was anything in the resolution of the story to support such a change--especially given the "throwback" nature of the picture. Maybe the final bit was shot in color because Lyford gained access to a color camera and film and wanted to try it out? (This color portion is among the worst preserved bits of the film... the colors are so faded that this colorblind viewer didn't even see them. A friend who had also watched "As the Earth Turns" asked me what I thought about the film turning color at the end, and my response was, "It turned color?" I thought it was suddenly tinted blue ala some scenes in the silent Fantomas films or "This is the Night" (1932).

Despite some technical gripes and questions I have with the film, I recommend it to anyone who likes early sci-fi pictures and silent movies; you'll find plenty to enjoy here--including the excellent score by Ed Hartman. (More modern composers who try to score silent films should be like Hartman and actually pay attention to what's happening on the screen and match the music accordingly.)

As of this writing, "As the Earth Turns" available for viewing on Amazon Prime.


(Trivia: "As the Earth Turns" star Barbara Berger is remembered primarily for recurring roles on soap operas during the 1960s through the late 1990s. Under the name Barbara Berjer, she made her television debut with appearances in the landmark "The Edge of Night" through "As the World Turns" (funny coincidence there) and ultimately a 12-year stint on "Another World" (1985-1997).

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Happy birthday, Georges Méliès!

On December 8 in 1861, Georges Méliès, the father of movie special effects and first person to make sci-fi and fantasy films, was born. Join me in celebration by enjoying this 1901 masterpiece of sci-fi/fantasy and dark humor.


The Man with the Rubber Head (1901)
Starring: Georges Méliès
Director: Georges Méliès
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

A scientist creates a living, inflatable copy of his head. Why? Because he can!

"The Man with the Rubber Head" probably had audiences in 1901 gaping open-mouthed and then oooo-ing and aaah-ing and laughing. Even now, nearly 120 years later, this goofy little special effects spectacle  is very entertaining. (Interestingly, the only thing that doesn't work for me is the make-up job on the scientist's assistant. There doesn't seem to be a reason for him or her to be wearing such an obvious mask.)

I encourage you to take a couple minutes and enjoy the silent movie madness of Méliès, right here!

Saturday, January 26, 2019

'Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man' is a flawed film but still lots of fun

Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)
Starring: Lou Costello, Bud Abbott, Arthur Franz, William Frawley, Nancy Guild, Gavin Muir, Adele Jurgens, Sheldon Leonard, Paul Maxey, John Day, and Syd Saylor
Director: Charles Lamont
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Tommy (Franz), a professional boxer framed for murder by a mobster (Leonard), hides from the police by using an invisibility serum. He teams up with a pair of rookie private detectives (Abbott and Costello) in a desperate gambit to prove his innocence.


In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Abbott & Costello made a series of comedies that incorporated Universal's classic monsters from the 1930s, like Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster, and, the Invisible Man. Universal had revived the properties in a series of mostly serious sequels, several of which were crossovers with the Larry Talbot, the Wolfman, who encountered Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster while searching for a cure to his condition. (Larry Talbot's character was itself a revival of a 1930s horror character, the Wolfman of London, but it been the success of the other Universal horror films, so it was "rebooted" rather than being subject to sequels.)

Unlike some of their monster comedies, "Abbott & Costello Meet the Invisible Man" is established as a true sequel to previous films in the series with references to the origins of the invisibility serum. For viewers familiar with "The Invisible Man" (1930) or its sequels ("The Invisible Man Returns" and "The Invisible Agent"), this tie-in lends a sense of urgency as the longer a person has the invisibility serum in their bloodstream, the more likely it is that he or she will be driven insane by it.

Unfortunately, that sense of urgency never becomes what it should be, because Tommy, our invisible man wanting to prove his innocence comes across as a total jerk and more than just a little crazy from the moment he is first introduced. There is literally not a moment where he isn't rude and abrasive to everyone he interacts with. Even in scenes where he is interacting with his girlfriend and the scientist who are risking imprisonment themselves to help him--scenes where there was an opportunity to make him more sympathetic--he is so obnoxious and paranoid that one wonders why the girlfriend even wants to be around him. (There are also a couple of plotting issues--big, gaping holes in the story that leads one to wonder if a scene or two were cut... because it's hard to imagine that any script could be so sloppily written and no one noticed as the film was being made.)

Of course the drama of whether the wrongfully accused man gets cleared of murder before the serum drives him insane or not is basically just an excuse to get us from comedy bit to comedy bit. Most of the routines in the film revolve around characters reacting to seeing--or rather NOT seeing--the invisible man, or boxing gags. The former gets a little old, with the callbacks later in the film being more tiresome than funny (although the spin-off gag involving hypnotism and half the officers and support staff at a police precinct is one of the film's comedic highlights). The latter, however, keeps getting funnier and more involved as the film unfolds, with Costello cartoonishly throwing punches that are actually being landed by the invisible pro-boxer--in a bar fight, in a boxing gym, and ultimately in a the boxing ring. Costello gets to to the physical comedy and pratfalls that he so excelled at, and he does it brilliantly. Meanwhile, Abbott is also very funny as a fundamentally self-centered and greedy huckster who wold probably sell out his own mother for a buck... but he is a charming rogue and you can't help but like him even while thinking he's being a bastard.

While this isn't the strongest of Abbott & Costello's efforts, it has enough going for it that I am giving it a very high Six rating. It might have been a low Seven if the filmmakers hadn't decided to end it on gag that's nonsensical and completely illogical and out-of-step with the rest of the movie. While the supposedly romantic lead being an unlikely jerk hurt the film, it's final 30 or so seconds nearly torpedoed it the material is so bad.


Monday, May 23, 2011

'The Amazing Transparent Man' not worth seeing

The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)
Starring: Douglas Kennedy, James Griffith, Marguerite Chapman, Ivan Triesault, and Red Morgan
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Major Krenner (Griffith), the insane commander of a mercenary army forces an ex-Nazi scientist (Triesault) to perfect a process to turn living things invisible. He breaks Joey Faust (Kennedy), a famed bank robber out of prison to use him to do double-duty as a final field test and to steal an unstable radioactive isotope that will make the invisibility process more effective. But the psychopath failed to take into account the stubborn nature of the sociopath... and the now-invisible Faust runs wild.


"The Amazing Transparent Man" is a title that reflects more the hopes of the filmmakers than the actual end result. Joey Faust is one of the least amazing invisible men I've come across, being devoid of imagination or ambition and merely setting his mind to using his invisible state to resume his career as a safe-cracker. In some ways, Faust's lack of ambition seems to mirror that of the screenwriter behind this film. The script offers a constant promise of better things to come, yet the writer never manages to capitalize on those ideas.

This is a film that could have successfully merged sci-fi with film-noirish crime thrills in a way similar to the classic "The Walking Dead", or it could have heighten the horror present by bringing to the fore the darkness in the soul of an otherwise good person with the captured scientist becoming as ruthless as the heroine in "The Man Who Changed His Mind" in an attempt to save a loved one. At the very least, director Ulmer could have tried to live up to his own proven ability to direct movies that take full advantage of the darkness within the characters featured, like he did with "The Black Cat" and "Strange Woman".

I mention those films, because they all came to mind while I watched "The Amazing Transparent Man" as I saw opportunity after opportunity for some good slip by. The actors all give performances better than the script deserves and the same can be said of the technical crew, but nothing they do can make up for the fact that the film's story only works because the main characters behave the way they do or the story would fall apart, and the police are so dumb that even Inspector Clouseau would be embarrassed on their behalf.

What really does the movie in, though, is the inability of Ulmer or the writer to take advantage of the horror situation they've set up. Neither Major Krenner nor Joey Faust are used to their fullest potential as characters... neither exhibiting the dark and foul nature that their dialogue implies they possess and that other characters claim they have. Faust ultimately emerges as an interesting character because he takes on the hero mantle for no reason other than Krenner has ticked him off, but Krenner comes across as idiotic rather than evil; he's the leader of a mercenary army who is supposedly adept at forcing others to do his bidding by knowing their weak spots and exploiting them ruthlessly, yet he picks a man with no attachments to speak of and no concerns beyond fulfilling his own desires to be the subject for the ultimate trial of the invisibility process. That's the act of someone who is not crazy, but stupid.

The ultimate demonstration of incompetent story-telling in this film comes when the secret behind a locked door around much build-up has taken place is revealed. Supposedly, Krenner is keeping the young daughter of the ex-Nazi scientist prisoner in the room, but he forbids anyone to enter it. When Faust finally does break it open, there could have been an opportunity for tragedy, horror, or even pathos. Instead, it's anti-climactic disappointment. The gun over the fireplace might have gotten fired, but the only thing that came out of the muzzle was a flag with "Bang!" written on it.

"The Amazing Transparent Man" can be found in several sci-fi and horror-oriented DVD collections of old movies. You should save it for a time you've watched everything else whatever set you encounter it in has to offer.



Friday, April 8, 2011

'They Saved Hitler's Brain': A bad movie
that didn't improve when expanded by 30 mins

They Saved Hitler's Brain (1974 (?))
Starring: Lots of mustaches and a couple of blondes.
Director: David Bradley and someone working for "Paragon Production"
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

"They Saved Hitler's Brain" is a television edit of "The Madmen of Madragor", a film about a clumsy international conspiracy orchestrated by Nazis and Hitler's head-in-a-jar from a diamond-rich South American country. For the bulk of the details about the film, read my review of the original version by clicking here.


When producers looked into selling the film to television in the late 1960s, they discovered it was too short for the two-hour programming time block occupied by movies--which needed to be 92 minutes, with the remaining 28 minutes being occupied by commericals.

So, they shot an additional 30 minutes of film, expanding the original plot of "The Mad Men of Madragor" to inclue a spy-vs-spy angle with intelligence agencies from around the globe (I think) shooting at each other and performing asassinations in order to make sure that only they have the secret of the super nervegas at the center of the story.

The filmmakers charged with expanding the film TRIED to make their new material match the original footage, but I think budget and time conspired against them. Basically, the agents from the new storyline sport 1970s hairstyles and clothing styles, and they clash when they are intercut with the cast with their 1960s crewcuts and fashions. Government agents cruising around in a VW Bug is a particularly amusing aspect of the additions to the film, even if it wasn't intended to be amusing.

A worse slip-up made in the efforts to expand the film is a continuity gaffe of such epic scale that one wonders if whoever scripted that new half-hour bothered to sit through the original movie; a big deal is made out of the fact that only two scientists know the formula for the deadly nerve gas that Nazis are threatening to unleash on the world. However, in other scenes, the gas formula has already been acquired by "foreign powers", but the antidote is still a well-guarded American secret which makes it useless as a weapon (or so the filmmakers believed, in an innocent time before Islamic suicide bombing psychos started making Nazis look like choir boys).

All in all, the 30 minutes of additional material neither adds or subtracts particularly from the film. It doesn't fix any of the problems with the original, and while it offers a bit more action up front than the film contained originally, it creates new continuity flubs.

"Mad Men of Madragor" still has a slight advantage, though, as it's shorter. Unless you REALLY want to torture yourself, go with the original instead of "They Saved Hitler's Brain"; it may have a sexier title--which I remain astonished that they didn't use on the original film--but "Mad Men" is more to the point.



Tuesday, August 24, 2010

'The Werewolf' is decent Halloween fare

The Werewolf (1956)
Starring: Don Megowan, Steven Ritch, Harry Lauter, Joyce Holden, Ken Christy, S. John Launer and George Lynn
Director: Fred F. Sears
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

A pair of amoral scientists (Launer and Lynn) subject an accident victim with amnesia (Ritch) to radiation that causes him to turn into a werewolf when he is frightened, angered or in pain. When their test subject escape from the lab, and starts menacing a small mountain town, they set out to kill him before the local sheriff (Megowan) catches him.


"The Werewolf" is a surprisingly effective low-budget horror film that brings the werewolf legend into the 1950s era where radiation was the answer to everything, good and bad. The pseudo-scientific explanation for the werewolf in this film is pretty much the same origin that Stan Lee's Incredible Hulk would have some ten years later, but it's used with greater effect here.

Although it has many monster movie standards--the rugged sheriff who saves the day, the evil scientists, the hapless unwilling monster that is doomed to be hunted to death despite himself--they are deployed with greater effect than one might expect from a film of this caliber. The complete amorality and naked evil of the two scientists in the film is of a nature that I don't think has been seen in a film since the mid-1940s, and the sympathetic nature of the monster/victim is more complete than any other werewolf film I think I've ever seen. There's even a (for this kind of movie) very unusual scene whee he gets to say his final goodbyes to his wife and son.

Whether you're looking for a funky monster movie to show at a Halloween party, or whether you're a fan of werewolf movies or the Science Gone Bad themed films of the 1950s, this will staged and well-acted little film will fit your needs.

"The Werewolf" is available on DVD as part of the "Icons of Horror: Sam Katzman", together with three equally offbeat low-budget sci-fi/horror-hybrids from the late 1950s. All of the movies included in the set make great Halloween viewing you can enjoy with the entire family.)