The Milla Jovovich Quarterly: Milla the Impersonator

Ladies and gentlemen... Milla Jovovich as President Barack Obama.

Photo by Vincent Peters

'Lost in the Stratosphere' is light but fulfilling

Lost in the Stratosphere (1934)
Starring: William Cagney, Edward Nugent, June Collyer, Frank McGwynn, and Hattie McDaniel
Director: Melvin W. Brown
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Two best friends and daredevil military pilots, playboy Lt. Tom "Soapy" Cooper (Cagney) and Lt. Richard "Woody" Wood (Nugent) see their friendly rivalry turn nasty when Tom unknowingly goes on a date with Wood's fiancee (Collyer) and subsequently steals her away when they fall in love. But when they are tapped for a dangerous test flight that will take them into the strasophere, they must set aside their grudges if they are to survive.



For about half of its running time, "Lost in the Stratosphere" is a fairly straightforward romantic comedy/buddy picture, with Soapy and Woody trying to outdo each other with bravery in the air, and by pranking each other on the ground. It's all fun and games, even if Soapy is something of a jerk and Woody is a bit of a dish-rag, until a girl they both truly love comes between them, Woody feels betrayed, and the film spends some time in melodrama territory. And finally, it becomes something of an action film in the third act, with Soapy and Woody struggling to save their lives in an experimental balloon.

This film belongs to William Cagney and Eddie Nugent in every sense. Not only are they equal co-stars, even if Cagney gets a little more scree time, but they are also the only performers who give truly colorful performances. June Collyer is her usual beautiful self, but she is really little more than window-dressing and her character has little definition beyond a vague sense that she was always a little too much woman (or maybe a little too much tomboy) for Woody to handle, even if she had never met Soapy. Aside from the characters portrayed by Cagney, Nugent, and Collyer, none of the others in the film rise above the level of stock figures. This isn't necessarily a negative, as it gives room for Soapy to be redeemed somewhat from pure jerkhood, but it would have been nice to see a little more of Collyer and her character.

One thing that works better in this film than many other flicks that are supposedly about pilots and high-flying action but end up being earthbound due to their low budgets, is that this film delivers just enough hint of aerial excitement to satisfy. Through the effective use of special effect model shots at the films beginning, and effective use of stock footage toward the end, as well as some nicely done sets, lovers of the old-time "men in their flying machines" will walk away from the movie just as happy as those who came for the old-timey buddy pic rom-com action.

Check it out. It's another fun little item that's laying neglected in Hollywood's ash-heap of history.

Robert E. Howard, 1906 - 1936

On June 11, 1936, writer Robert E. Howard took his own life in a fit of despair.












The preceding story was by Roy Thomas and Sandy Plunkett and it originally appeareed in "Epic Illustrated" #34. The scans were posted by Joe Bloke on his excellent Grantbridge Street & Other Misadventures blog, from where I grabbed them without so much as a "how do you do?".

Robert E. Howard has been one of my favorite writers since the early 1990s, when I first discovered his "King Kull" stories. I had been a fan of the "Conan the Barbarian" comic book from Marvel for years before that, and I'd tried reading some of the Conan paperbacks--where De Camp or Carter or someone revised and rewrote his stories but found I preferred the comics over the fiction. (Interestingly, the reverse was true when it came to King Kull.)

But the Kull stories, I loved. I later added "Solomon Kane" to that list and as the web came into its own, I soon discovered that Howard was not only more than Conan, he was more than fantasy fiction... he wrote lots of horror stories, adventure stories, and wild comedy stories.

Steve Costigan. Black Vulmea. Skull-Face. El Borak. Steve Harrison. Breckinridge Elkins. Cormac FitzGeoffrey. Bran Mak Morn. Red Sonya. And dozens more crusader knights, pirates, and hard-bitten men of action--fighting, and sometimes losing, against impossible odds. If you like action, you should like Robert E. Howard, because his stories are crammed with it from beginning to end.

Since reviving NUELOW Games last year, I have been putting together little anthologies of Howard's fiction, focusing on his mostly forgotten works... including some that he counted among his personal favorites. It's my small attempt to call more attention to his many non-Conan writings. It's also my way of sharing my love for the body of work he left behind when he chose to leave this world so early in his life.

At the moment, NUELOW Games' anthologies are available at DriveThruFiction.com (as well as RPGNow.com and DriveThruRPG.com where the entire NUELOW Games line of products can be had) and only in PDF format. This format works on just about any laptop or desktop computer, as well as most Kindle models, iPads, and iPod Touch.

For a broad sampling of what Howard's non-Conan work is like, check out "Oriental Stories, Vol. 2." The book contains a sample of just about everything he wrote, except the playful first person style used in the Steve Costigan and Breckinridge Elkins stories.

If you like low fantasy or historical fiction, "The Deadly Sword of Cormac" and "Oriental Stories" is for you.

If you're in the mood for straight-on, Yellow Peril-style pulp fiction, "Skull-Face" is a novelette you'll enjoy.

If you like hardboiled detective tales (with a touch of horror), check out "Names in the Black Book".

If you want horror with a Southwestern flavor, "Shadows Over Texas" is the book for you.

If you like werewolves, "White Fell and Other Stories" is a must-read.

And if it's comedy or stories about boxing you want, "Fists of Foolishness" and "Shanghaied Mitts" are were you should look. (These books also include a roleplaying game and a solo adventure, respectively. The publisher is NUELOW Games after all.)

There are further comedic antics, centering on Howard's dimwitted western hero Breckinridge Elkins in "Bath-time on Bear Creek," "The Misadventures of Breckinridge Elkins," and "Breckinridge Elkins Rides Again."

Finally, if you want pulse-pounding adventure "Oriental Stories 3: A Texan in Afghanistan," stories featuring Howard's last great series character, El Borak, will fit your needs exactly.

When reading the stories in "Shanghaied Mitts", "Shadows Over Texas", "Oriental Stories" and "Oriental Stories, Vol. 2", I can't help but mourn for what might have been. Howard too his life just as he was on the verge of leaving commericial hackery like Conan the Cimmerian behind and pursue his true literary passions. In the final five years of his life, which amounts to the second half of his professional career, Howard not only kept improving as a writer, but he discovered the types of stories he was most comfortable writing--stories of action and adventure that were grounded in this world and real history rather than made up universes.

The art of Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, one of the greatest writers to ever work in the English language, died on Tuesday. In honor of the literary legacy he left us, here is a small gallery of drawings inspired by his work.

By Craig Ashforth ("The Lake")

By Rachel Idzerda ("Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed")

By Craig Ashforth ("The Dragon")

By Dave McKean ("Skeletons")

Ernie Chan (aka Ernie Chua) has passed away.

Ernie Chan was 71. If you read DC Comics during the 1970s, you saw lots of his art, as he drew hundreds of covers for them. He was also a prolific inker for Marvel Comics, perhaps working over John Busema's pencils more than any other artist.

Here is a small sample of his solo work, focusing on fantasy art.

'Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster' review

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)
Starring: Marilyn Hanold, Lou Cutell, Robert Reilly, Jim Karen, and Karen Grant
Director: Robert Gaffney
Rating: Two of Ten Stars

A sexy alien queen (Hanold) and her pointy-eared second-in-command Dr. Nadir (Cutell) come to Earth to abduct bikini babes to replenish the breeding stock on their homeland. Unfortunately for them, their arrival on our world interferes with the test-flight of a cybernetic astronaut (Reilly), causing his ship to crash near the alien landing site.

Some movies derive their entertainment value from the fact that you will spend the entire time you're watching wondering if what you're watching was really that nonsensical on paper, and how one director could make so many bad decisions in the course of one movie.

Even in 1964, the "Mars needs women"-type scenario must have seemed silly, although it does provide an excuse to show attractive women in little bikinis so one can understand why the filmmakers and viewers ran with it. But one wonders what bizarre fetish the writers or director must have been trying to bring to the screen with the oddball "physical exam" that the aliens use to determine the fitness of the women for alien breeding stock.

That said, for a film that was clearly designed to show off fit birds (to borrow a phrase from Joe Bloke's excellent blog) the director made a bizarre choice in casting Playboy-Bunny-turned-actress Marilyn Hanold and yet hardly showing her body off at all. Viewers can see hints of a sexy costume, but she spends most of the movie seated, so it hardly gets shown off.

The only thing that makes the film mildly interesting, aside from the bikini babes if you're hard up, is when the heroine gets grabbed by the aliens and almost becomes chow for the Spacemonster of the film's title, and the runaway robot who stumbles his way through the movie to ultimately serve as something of a literal deus ex machina plot device. Unfortunately, he doesn't quite qualify as a "Frankenstein" in any sense, but instead serves as an illustration of the illiteracy that seems to have been a mainstay of the movie business from the get-go.





(By the way, if I had watched this this movie three-four weeks ago, "ROLF: Attack of the Commies from Jupiter" may have been an unauthorized adaptation of this film given there are some similarities content-wise. Heck... there may still be one forthcoming, given its mostly designed. :) )

If you're looking for that OTHER Shades of Gray (Grey)...

... here are some photos for your enjoyment.

Great cast and locations, but lackluster direction

The Green Glove (aka "The Gauntlet") (1952)
Starring: Glenn Ford, Geraldine Brooks, and George Macready
Director: Rudolph Mate
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

A down-on-his-luck US Army veteran (Ford) returns to France in the years following WW2 to retrieve a gem-encrusted relic he left behind in a villa on D-Day. But he is soon framed for murder by an unscrupulous art dealer (Macready) who is also trying to recover the artifact, and treasure becomes secondary to dodging police pursuit.

"The Green Glove" should have been much better than it is, given the great cast (which, in addition to the stars listed above include such genre-picture stalwarts as Cedrick Hardwicke and Gaby Andre) and the spectacular settings it was filmed in... and that doesn't even take into account the smorgasbord of thriller conventions that are crammed into the story, what with it being a man wrongfully accused on a treasure hunt with a good-hearted woman while being pursued by mysterious forces.

But, despite all the potential here, the director seems incapable of generating any real suspense, squandering almost every build-up with a confrontation that is either badly staged, too abrupt, or both. In fact, the part of the film that works best is a comic relief sequence where Glenn Ford and Geraldine Brooks' characters spend the night at an isolated country inn. But I think that part of the movie shines mostly because you've got two good actors doing their thing without clumsy staging getting in the way... and because everything else around them is lackluster.

The director's insecurity with his subject matter (or maybe the producers recognizing the dog they had on their hands) is made painfully evident right up front, with an over-use of narration, setting a stage that the film itself was setting far more effectively as it unfolded.

Although... the "insta-romance" that develops between Ford and Brooks isn't as hard to swallow as it is in several other films of this kind. This is both because there seems to be real chemistry between the two performers, but also because everything else around them is so unconvincing that the you'll find you'll want something to hand onto as the film unfolds.

For this kind of story done right, you should check out "The 39 Steps" or "Young and Innocent" from Alfred Hitchcock.






Note: One of the things that attracted me to this movie was a half-remembered comic book series that I read as a kid. I think it, too, was called "The Green Glove" (or maybe just "The Glove") and it was a quirky horror strip about a cursed, jewel-encrusted gauntlet that entered the lives of the characters and caused some even of poetic justice or transformation before being lost again until the next episode. From the art style, I think the series must have originally been English or Spanish in origin, even though I was reading them in Danish translations.

Does anyone else remember these comics?

It's the Final Battle (#4)!

Every month this year, until the Mayan-predicted End of the World, I am producing a ROLF! Final Battle product for NUELOW Games.

Given that the world has survived yet another month, the fourth one just saw release. The cover for it, by Darrel Miller and Karl M., is on display below. Click here for more information, or to download your very own copy from RPGNow.

Jess Franco at his near-best

The Awful Dr. Orlof (aka "Screams in the Night") (1964)
Starring: Howard Vernon, Diana Lorys, Conrado San Martin, Ricardo Valle, Maria Silva, and Perla Cristal
Director: Jess Franco (as "Jess Frank")
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

A former prison doctor turned mad scientist (Vernon) is abducting party girls with the intent of grafting their skin onto the body of his daughter who was horribly burned in a fire. A none-too-bright Police Onspector (San Martin) is assigned to catch him, but it's the Inspector's lovely girlfriend (Lorys) who does much of the detective work to break the case... and then falls into the maniac's clutches.

If you've ever wondered what Hammer Films' celebrated gothic horror flicks would have looked like without the touch of an brilliant director like Terrence Fisher, you don't have to look any further than "The Awful Dr. Orlof".

What we have here is a film that's pretty damn good by the standards writer/director Franco sank to later in his career, but when compared to other entries in the gothic horror genre from the late 1950s and early 1960s, it's visually flat, unevenly plotted, and generally un-engaging due to the fact that we never get a real sense of how the various characters in the film fit together. Sure--we know the Inspector and his ballerina girlfriend are soul-mates, but why on earth do Dr. Orlof's henchmen stick with him? Why did he break them out of prison in the first place? And why is he using a blind man to help him with the killing--it's a creepy twist, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Without knowing the answers to these, we never really understand what motivates half the film's main characters... although it's clear Franco thinks we should empathize with them for some reason or another.

This film could have been a crushing bore if not for some fairly effectively staged murder scenes (featuring hints of the gratuitous nudity and sadism that is a hallmark of most of Franco's and the occasional visual flourish where Franco takes full advantage of the black-and-white medium. (The still above is taken from the very best of these... a scene so effectively lit and staged that it's what made me think of Fisher's efforts for Hammer Films.)

"The Awful Dr. Orlof" was not as bad as I had expected it to be, but there are far better films in this genre to check out before you get to this one. That said, I suspect Franco fans will love it, if they haven't already checked it out.