It's Cowboys vs. Robots and Mole People!

Radio Ranch
(aka "Men With Steel Faces") (1940)
Starring: Gene Autry, Betsy King Ross, Frankie Darro, Dorothy Christy, Wheeler Oakman, and Frank Glendon
Directors: Otto Brower and B. Reeves Eason
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

Western singer Gene Autry (Autry) and his teenaged friends (Ross and Darro) find themselves caught up in the middle of the machinations of a scretive, highly advanced underground civilization led by Queen Tika (Christy), a group of crooked scientists led by Prof. Beetson (Glendon) trying to ruin Autry's career so they can mine the land of Radio Ranch for the rare mineral Radium, and Tika's rebellious high priest, Argo (Oakman).


"Radio Ranch' is the sort of bizarre mix of pulp-magazine science fiction, singing cowboys, clever kids, and naked villiany that only children (or those with the hearts of children) can enjoy. A condensed version of a 12-part serial titled "Gene Autry and the Phantom Empire", this is a entertaining bit of nonsense that totally collapses if you think about the plot elements in the slightest. (Why can't the people of underground Murania breath surface air, but Autry & Friends have no problem breathing in Murania is but one of many questions that occured to me while watching.)

Despite many gaping logic holes (and three too many Gene Autry musical performances) this film remained an entertaining until the very end where the story went completely off the rails. I understand why the creators would want to wrap the story up in a neat little package, but I was dismayed they felt the need to go as far as they did. It's a fun romp and a crazy mix of genres that must be seen to be believed. Just know, that there's a part to the ending that will seem excessive.

'Notorious' is a great spy thrillerthat includes feeble romantic elements

Notorious (1947)
Starring: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Raines
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

After tough American Intelligence agent Devlin (Grant) forces Alicia Huberman (Bergman), a young woman whose father was a notorious Nazi sympathizer to use the fact one of her father's former associates, Alexander Sebastian (Rains), loves her deeply to infiltrate a suspected group of post-WW2 Nazis in South America. Unfortunately for himself and the mission, Devlin finds himself falling in love with her.


"Notorious" is part romantic melodrama and part spy-thriller. The romance part I never did buy--the love between Grant and Bergman's characters seems forced--but the thriller side works beautifully.

Hitchcock uses camera angles, lightings, and even extreme close-up shots to heighten tension masterfully. (Alicia's confrontations with Alexander's posessive, shrewish, and master-Nazi mother are most masterfully done, as well as the climactic scene, and the final shot in particular.)

With the exception of the weakly done romance between Devlin and Alciia, the characters are all excellently drawn and brilliantly portrayed by the actors. One can actually feel Alexander's heart breaking when he discovers the truth about Alicia.

"Notorious" is another Hitchcock masterpiece. It has some flaws, but those are outweighed the overwhelming number of good parts.

Picture Perfect Wednesday: A Little Color....

Okay, so it's shades of green instead of gray, but it's a nice picture.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Poe!

In observation of Edgar Allan Poe's birthday, I'm reposting this review from the companion blog The Bela Lugosi Collection.


The Raven (1934)
Starring: Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Irene Ware
Director: Lew Landers
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

After saving young dancer Jean Thatcher (Ware) from certain death through a miraculous feat of neurosurgery, the mentally unstable Dr. Vollin (Lugosi) becomes obsessed with her. When her powerful father makes it clear that Vollin is to stay away from her, Vollin forces a wanted murderer (Karloff) into assisting him in eliminating Jean, her fiance, and her father in hideous death-traps modeled after gruesome scenes from the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.


"The Raven" isn't really an adaptation of the Poe work by that name, but is instead the tale of a thoroughly evil and utterly insane man so rich and so obsessed that he's built a house full of secret doors, secret basements, and entire rooms that serve as elevators... all so he can reenact scenes from Poe's writings.

There is plenty of potential in this B-movie, but tepid direction and mostly uninspired lighting and set design leave most of it unrealized. Lugosi is completely over the top in this film, taking center stage as the perfect image of a raving madman. He is ably supported by co-star Karloff who plays the role of the tortured, remorse-filled murderer trapped into serving Vollin with the promise of a new life in the exact opposite direction of Lugosi--remaining subdued as he slinks through each scene he's in. Ware is very attractive in the scenes she's in, but that's about all she is. In fact, the only actors in the film who aren't just so much set decoration are Lugosi and Karloff.

The "torture room" is nifty, and the climax where Dr. Vollin has house guests trapped in a Poe-world of his making is excellent. All in all, an entertaining film, but it would have been much better with a more inspired supporting cast and more creativity on the technical side of the camera.

'Tarzan's Revenge' is not as bad as They say

Tarzan's Revenge (1938)
Starring: Eleanor Holm, Glenn Morris, George Meeker, George Barbier, Hedda Hopper, Corbit Morris, and C. Henry Gordon
Director: D. Ross Lederman
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

Eleanor Reed (Holm) is on a safari with her parents (Barbier and Hopper) and her fiance Nevin Potter (Meeker) are on an African safari to capture animals for a zoo, except the shiftless,gun-happy Nevin is more interested in shooting everything he sees. When a villainous Arab sultan (Gordon) who rules a feifdom deep within the jungle decides he wants to add Elanor to his large harem by any means necessary, it's up to Tarzan to rescue her.


"Tarzan's Revenge" has been labeled by some critics as the worst Tarazn movie ever, As usual, critics who engage in such hyperbole are wrong and the truth of the matter is that it's not a bad little movie.

Yes, it tries too hard to copy the vastly superior MGM series of Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O'Hara (even the point where it gives Tarzan a chimp sidekick, copies the scene where Tarzan and Jane first meet, and also tries to copy the famous underwater shots of Jane and Tarzan swimming--with Elanor standing in for Jane. The film fails miserably at copying these scenes and instead just manages to call attention to the fact that it is NOT as good as the MGM-produced Tarzan films.

What is also not as good as the MGM films is the actor playing Tarzan. Glenn Morris certainly has the physique to play Tarzan, but he was an athelete and not an actor... and, boy, does that show! He hs virtually no screen presence whatsoever, only generating a little bit of excitement in the scene where he rescues Elanor from the fortress of the evil Sultan Ben Alleu Bey (played with plenty of smarminess by C. Henry Gordon. Otherwise, everyone else outshines Morris in every scene he's in, even Elanor Holm who was just as inexperienced (also an athelete, hired mostly for her good looks and physical ability) but who shows far greater talent than Morris... which is probably why Holm is the defacto star of the movie with Tarzan getting less screen time in this flick than perhaps any other Tarzan film I've seen.

There is one exceptional element to the film, and it's one I wish more Tarzan movies would do more with. (Joe Kubert would occassionally explore this side of Tarzan's personality in his run on the Tarzan comic book in the 1970s, but I've rarely seen it portrayed as clearly and charmingly as it is in this film. In "Tarzan's Revenge", Tarzan's actually a pretty peaceful man, a man who is concerned first and foremost with the happiness, safety and well-being of the animals in his jungle, and he only gets into fights when he absolutely has to. The gentle-demeanored Tarzan is a pretty cool take on the character, and it's one that makes this relatively dismal movie interesting to watch.

In fact, the biggest dissapointment in the film is that Tarzan is so gentle that he doesn't even give Nevin Potter the thrashing is so richly deserves. If there ever was a character in a movie who deserved to be tossed off a cliff by the Ape Man (or otherwise meet some horrible fate), it's this guy. Cowardly, stupid, and so bloodthirsty he guns down any animal he spots without even making an effort to collect a trophy, my disgust with him grew as the film unfolded. I really hoped a native would spear him, or a hungry crocodile would kill him. But, alas, not even Tarzan would finish him for me. (At least Elanor develops enough sense to not marry him.)

By the way, this film is completely revenge free, despite the title. As mentioned above, Tarzan doesn't even give Nevin Potter the asskicking he so richly deserves, and he even gives Tarzan plenty of reason to want revenge.

Weird terror in small packages

Attack of the Puppet People
(aka "Six Inches Tall" and "The Amazing Puppet People")(1958)
Starring: John Hoyt, June Kenney and John Agar
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

Mr. Franz (Hoyt), a demented puppeteer turned dollmaker invents a machine that will shrink living beings to the size of dolls. He uses it on anyone he likes who appears to be exiting his life and keeps them in his workship. When his secretary (Kenney) prepares to leave his employ to marry a likeable traveling salesman (Agar), the couple become his latest victims.


As the title of "Atack of the Puppet People" implies, the main storyline of this film involves a small group of shrunken men and women attempting to escape their captor, and, hopefully, return to their full size. It's an engaging movie--assuming you can buy into the whole "puppeteer shrinking people with mad science wonder-tech" aspect of the story--that is fast-paced and well-acted. Unfortunately, the script isn't quite up to snuff, and it features a number of plot threads that don't go anywhere and an ending that not only just sort of peters out but which leaves the fates of the majority of the puppet people a mystery.

(Even more annoying, for me at least, was that we never got to see the Jekyll/Hyde marionnette in action after all the talk that revolved around it. The scene with the tiny John Agar trashing the marionette was pretty cool, but I still would have liked to see the supposed transforming puppet actually tranform.)

'Beast of Berlin' offers negative 1930s view of Hitler's Germany

Someone call Oliver Stone and/or forward him a link to this post.

As he sets about showing us how Hitler has been unfairly slandered by history and how we can't judge him to be "good" or "bad," he might want to take a look at "The Beast of Berlin." (For background on what I'm referring to, click here.

It's a film made while Hitler was laying the foundation for the death camps and the purges. It's a film that shows that, while many Americans and Britons were turning a blind eye to the evil of Hitler and his National Socialist Party, a few filmmakers were trying to call attention to the truth of Germany and to the evil growing in strength there.

It's too bad that Oliver Stone is apparently committed to be on the side of history's idiots. He could actually do some good with his movies instead of white-washing evil movements and men of the past and lending support to their equals today.



The Beast of Berlin (aka "Hitler: Beast of Berlin" and "Hell's Devils") (1939)
Starring: Ronald Drew, Steffi Duna, Alan Ladd, Hans von Twardowski, Walter Stahl and Henry von Zynda
Director: Sam Newfield
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

A German veteran of WWI and civil engineer (Drew) works quietly with other intellectuals resisting the oppression of Nazis and trying to spread the truth to the people about Hitler and his evil regime. When his wife (Duna) becomes pregnant, he struggles with the choice of continuing his resistance efforts or flee Germany to raise the child in freedom.


"The Beast of Berlin" was one of the very first American movies to present the full truth about Hitler's Germany to the public. It showed the Nazis as a mixture of mindless brutes and embittered soldiers who were still smarting from the humiliation that was dealt Germany by the world following WWI. It also showed that Hitler and his goons were successful to a large degree because the European nations and America were ignoring Hitler's evil or trying to appease him.

Like with Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" from 1940, Nazi sympathizers and appeasers on film boards in New York and elsewhere tried to prevent this film from being seen. The excuse used in both cases was that the films were inflammetory and would be insulting to Germans in general and Hitler in paticular, but the truth is that the only people who would be insulted by this movie or Chaplin's film would be admirers of the Nazis who wouldn't want the truth spoken about them and the world they were attempting to usher in.

It's a rather a shame that no one seems to have learned the lessons that Hitler and WWII in general tought us.

Today, we have people bending over backwards to appease Muslim fanatics and to avoid insulting them and their admirers by calling them what they are: Brutal subhumans who are bent on imposing a murderous dictatorship on all but themselves. Just like Hitler's Nazis. Hell, they even want to kill the Jews and Catholics, just like Hitler's Nazis. Unfortunately, we're even worse off today than we were in the 1930s, because it isn't censorship boards chaired by Islamo-fascist appeasers and admirers, but the creative community itself who is too stupid and ignorant to see the truth that is taking shape before their very eyes, playing out on cable TV, twenty-four hours a day.

"Beast of Berlin" is a film that actually casts a good light upon the German people; it shows the majority of them as being held captive by Hitler's jackbooted psychos. It shows their brutality and evil for what it was... it even soft-pedals it, as I don't think anyone in America truly believed the depths of evil and depravity that Germany was reaching by 1939.

This is a film that's a bit too preachy at some points and almost laughably melodramatic at others, but, like Chaplin's "The Great Dictator", it's a heartfelt work of art about a subject too few people were willing to discuss at the time it was created. That passion shines through, and it makes the film worth seeing even today.

(Trivia: Ben Judell, the producer of this movie, was forced out of the film company he founded due to the distribution problems the film suffered because of censorship boards nervous about offending Nazis. He went onto independently produce other films geared toward showing the true face of Hitler's Germany, such as the comedy anti-Nazi films, such as the comedy "Hiter, Dead or Alive.")





"Beast of Berlin" is avaliable from Amazon.com for less than $9. It's interesting to see what the contemporary thought was among those who recognized the evil of the Nazis early on. And it might even be interesting for Oliver Stone to see. Maybe someone can buy him a copy of the film as a present?

Don't duck 'Shoot to Kill'

Shoot to Kill (1947)
Starring: Edmund MacDonald, Russell Wade, Luana Walters and Robert Kent
Director: William Berke
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

A corrupt Assistant Distric Attorney (MacDonald) starts to aspire to true political and criminal greatness when his new secretary (Walters) encourages him to think big. But, she has an agenda of her own, and even as the ADA is playing various criminals against each other so he can emerge as the last man standing, other plans are being set into motion.


"Shoot to Kill" is a fairly standard crime drama that's made interesting by some nice plot twists and a Big Reveal that is actually rather surprising. (I spent most of the film thinking that it was borrowing from Shakespear's "MacBeth", but it turned out I was wrong.)

With fine performances by all actors (MacDonald and Walters in particular excel as a pair of devious, two-faced schemers that can't be trusted under any circimstances), and a fast-paced, clever plot where the standard issue wise-cracking reporter (Wade) has mercifully little actual screen-time, I think fans of classic crime dramas and film noir will find this a nice way to spend an hour.

Picture Perfect Wednesday: Ninjas...

This image was borrowed from motivatedphotos.com. Click on the link to check out thousands of similar amusingly captioned photos.

Bates Motel is a little like Hotel California

Psycho (1960)
Starring: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, John Gavin and Vera Miles
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Rating: Ten of Ten Stars

Marion Crane (Leigh) steals $40,000 from her employer and heads off to start a new life with her lover, Sam Loomis (Gavin). Before she can meet up with him, however, she vanishes without a trace. Sam and her worried sister, Lila (Miles) track her to the isolated Bates Motel, where a soft-spoken young man named Norman (Perkins) struggles under the heavy hand of his shrewish, possessive mother. But Norman is a man who has many dark secrets....


I think everyone reading this knows what Norman is hiding, as well as where Marion and the $40,000 vanished to... but in case someone hasn't seen one of the greatest horror films ever made, I'll keep to my policy of not offering any spoilers.

Suffice it to say that I think this movie must have been absolutely, jaw-dropping in its audacity with the plot-twist that happens about 15-20 minutes in. I doubt anyone could have been prepared for it, and "Psycho" is still remarkable for flawless way it pulls it off... few films can take such a shocking left turn and not spill the audience on the curve. Instead, after the shock wears off--and it IS shocking if you aren't expecting it, even in this day and age when movies go back for reshoots to add violence and nudity--the audience is even more captivating. Where can the movie go from there, they're asking themselves.

"Psycho" is one of Hitchcock's finest movies. The cast is perfect; the script is perfect; the sets are amazing; the camerawork and creative use of lighting is astonishingly creative and effective; and the Bernard Hermann score is absolutely mindblowing (even if I'm not as fond of the "Murder Theme" as so many others are... there are far better bits of music in the film).

If you haven't see it, or if you've seen the pale imitation that was released in 1998 under the guise of a "remake" (and it was an imitation... to call that travesty a "remake" is an insult to genuine remakes, no matter how bad they might be), you need to see "Psycho". It's a film every movie lover should experience.