Isle of the Snake People (1971)

 

ISLE OF THE SNAKE PEOPLE  (1971)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Jhon Ibanez

    Boris Karloff, Julissa, Carlos East, Tongolele,

    Quintin Bulnes, Rafael Bertrand, Santanon

Draggy, dreary horror about voodoo, snakes and zombies on a remote tropical island. One of four low-grade features Karloff appeared in shortly before his death. The movies were produced in Mexico, while Karloff, in a wheelchair except when the cameras rolled, did his scenes in Los Angeles. The films are a testament to the old man's work ethic, if nothing else. All were released posthumously. 

The Ghost In the Invisible Bikini (1966)

 

THE GHOST IN THE INVISIBLE BIKINI  (1966)  ¢ ¢

    D: Don Weis

    Tommy Kirk, Deborah Walley, Basil Rathbone,

    Boris Karloff, Susan Hart, Quinn O'Hara,

    Jesse White, Harvey Lembeck, Nancy Sinatra,

    Patsy Kelly, Claudia Martin, Francis X. Bushman

Boris Karloff comes to in his coffin and learns he's been dead for a week. Through a crystal ball, he watches a rat's nest of characters descend on his old haunted house for the reading of the will. They include a boy and a girl, a crooked lawyer, an assassin and his accomplices, a motorcycle gang, a truckload of kids just up from the beach and a gorilla. There are songs for the kids to gyrate to, and a lot of moronic slapstick as the characters chase each other through the house and into the chamber of horrors downstairs. The studio was American International, in case you couldn't tell. Boris seems amused by it all, maybe because he was smart enough to stay in his crypt, watching the nonsense from a distance, through his crystal ball.

The House of Rothschild (1934)

 

THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alfred Werker

    George Arliss, Boris Karloff, Loretta Young,

    Robert Young, C. Aubrey Smith, Arthur Byron

    Reginald Owen, Alan Mobray, Holmes Herbert

War and romance, banking and anti-semitism in a period piece set in Europe in the time of Napoleon. Produced while Hitler was seizing power in Germany, the movie has the eerie effect of looking back on the past while foreshadowing events that were just around the corner. Arliss gives a droll performance as the head of the Rothschild financial empire, and Karloff registers something close to pure evil as the murderous Count Ledrantz, a Prussian whose compulsive ruthlessness would not be out of place in the Third Reich.

Haunted Honeymoon (1940)

 

HAUNTED HONEYMOON  (1940)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Arthur B. Woods

    Robert Montgomery, Constance Cummings, Leslie Banks,

    Seymour Hicks, Robert Newton, Googie Withers

Lord Peter Wimsey (Robert Montgomery) buys an old country house as a gift for his bride (Constance Cummings), so what happens? The man he buys the house from turns up murdered. Not only that, but Lord and Lady Wimsey have sworn a mutual oath not to get involved in any more detective work. The mystery part of the story almost doesn't matter in this one. There are long stretches of the film where it disappears entirely, and nobody seems to care. Which makes you wonder: Suppose they made a movie like this where somebody gets murdered and the crime just never gets solved. Has anybody ever done that? And if not, how come?

The Gunfighter (1950)

THE GUNFIGHTER  (1950)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Henry King

    Gregory Peck, Millard Mitchell, Helen Westcott,

    Jean Parker, Karl Malden, Skip Homeier,

    Anthony Ross, Richard Jaeckel, Verna Felton

A gunfighter drifts from town to town, hounded by the law and challenged by every hot-shot kid with a six-gun. He'd like to stop drifting and settle down and not be a target everywhere he goes, but he can't escape his past or his reputation. He's Jimmy Ringo, "the fastest gun in the West," and he's doomed. A relatively low-key frontier drama, really a study in gunslinger psychology, that in a vague way reflects film noir, while anticipating an era of darker, more complex westerns that would follow in the decade ahead. Peck gives one of his best performances in the title role. Millard Mitchell plays his partner from the old days, now a town marshall. Karl Malden's a bartender with a sharp eye for business. Richard Jaeckel and Skip Homeier play young punks who don't think Peck looks all that tough. (They're wrong about that.) There are parallels to "High Noon", and it clocks in at a quick 84 minutes, thanks to Barbara McLean's editing and the efficiency of Henry King.

The Green Knight (2021)

THE GREEN KNIGHT  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 

    D: David Lowery

    Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton,

    Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie,

    Ralph Ineson, Barry Keoghan, Erin Kellyman

The young nephew of King Arthur takes up the challenge of a mysterious Green Knight, and embarks on a heroic quest involving bandits, a fox, some giants, Saint Winifred, a lord who's obsessed with hunting and the lord's seductive lady, all leading up to a second, climactic encounter with the Green Knight. The emotional payoff is limited, but the movie looks like a storybook come to life, and Lowery has a real instinct for how to tell an age-old tale cinematically. The script is literate, with moments of tongue-in-cheek humor - the potential for a Monty Python-style spoof is obvious - and the arboreal knight of the title bears an uncanny resemblance to Groot in the "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies. 

Happy Birthday, Dr. Sporgersi

The Phone Call (2013)

 

THE PHONE CALL  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Mat Kirby

    Sally Hawkins, Jim Broadbent

A woman working in a crisis phone-line center fields a call from a man who's in the process of killing himself. An Oscar-winning short film that's marginally more uplifting than that plot description probably suggests. Sally Hawkins plays the woman who answers the phone. Jim Broadbent plays the voice on the other end of the line. 

Grand Central Murder (1942)

 

GRAND CENTRAL MURDER  (1942)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Sylvan Simon

    Van Heflin, Sam Levene, Patricia Dane,

    Connie Gilchrist, Tom Conway, Virginia Grey,

    Cecilia Parker, Samuel S. Hinds, Mark Daniels,

    Betty Wells, George Lynn, Millard Mitchell 

An ensemble whodunit with a gallery of suspects comparing notes and alibis in the case of an obnoxious Broadway star found murdered in a railroad car. My colleague Ms. Applebaum figured out who the killer was long before I did, but there are a lot of potential killers to choose from. Van Heflin as a wise-cracking private eye may or may not be the murderer, but he's definitely having the most fun.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jason Reitman

    Mckenna Grace, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard,

    Paul Rudd, Logan Kim, Celeste O'Connor,

    Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson,

    Annie Potts, Sigourney Weaver, J.K. Simmons

The spirit of Harold Ramis hangs over everything in this spectral comedy, as Egon Spengler's 12-year-old granddaughter (Mckenna Grace) heads up a new, young generation of ghostbusters. CGI allows Harold himself to make a posthumous appearance, while still-breathing colleagues Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson step in to help the kids blast the ghosts at the end. The movie's neither deep nor full of surprises, but it's a lot of fun, and Grace, who's on screen much of the time, grounds it in a way most actors her age couldn't dream of doing. She's a cool kid who loves bad jokes, and as the nerdy, brainy, self-contained heir to Egon, she's perfect. Egon would be crazy about her, and somewhere in the afterlife, Harold Ramis is smiling. 

The Gay Divorcee (1934)

 

THE GAY DIVORCEE  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Mark Sandrich

    Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton,

    Alice Brady, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes, Betty Grable

Fred woos Ginger, but she resists. He persists, and she gives in. They do "The Contintental", too. The song won an Academy Award.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

 

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE  (1973)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Peter Yates

    Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan,

    Steven Keats, Alex Rocco, Joe Santos

A low-level Boston hoodlum who makes his living selling guns to bank robbers tries to cut a deal with a government agent in exchange for a break on a prison sentence. Mitchum gives one of his best performances as a guy who's fucked and knows it, but it's really an ensemble piece, with Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats and Alex Rocco all scary good as the kind of "friends" you'd be better off not knowing. Yates' direction is low-key and functional, and the world he creates is a self-contained nightmare that plays by its own crooked rules. And the masks, one of the few things in the movie that comes close to comedy: You can't rob a bank in this movie unless the robbers are all wearing matching masks.

The Flesh Eaters (1964)

 

THE FLESH EATERS  (1964)  ¢ ¢

    D: Jack Curtis

    Martin Kosleck, Byron Sanders, Barbara Wilkin,

    Rita Morley, Ray Tudor, Christopher Drake

Five characters stranded on a tiny, remote island battle a flesh-eating parasite in a surprisingly artful drive-in flick. There's the alcoholic actress, the heroic, he-man pilot, the evil Nazi scientist, the crazy beatnik, and the girl who surrenders her blouse when somebody asks for strips of cloth to make bandages - all of them watching the water and hoping to survive without having their bones picked clean. There's some fun in the script and the overdone performances, and Curtis clearly has a sense of what to do behind the camera. The editor was Radley Metzger, who would make his mark with a series of sometimes inventive porno movies. 

Deluge (1933)

DELUGE  (1933)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Felix E. Feist

    Peggy Shannon, Sidney Blackmer, Lois Wilson,

    Fred Kohler, Ralf Harolde, Edward Van Sloan

A pre-Code disaster adventure that begins where most disaster movies leave off (or never get to) - the end of the world. After that's all over - it takes a reel or two for all those model skyscrapers to topple over - it's up to the survivors to figure out how to carry on. This looks a lot like an early-'30s serial, with close calls and narrow escapes and music in the background that never shuts off. Long considered a lost film, it's also a strange one that always seems about to go off in some unexpected direction, and does, with a final existential image that, under the circumstances, feels just right.