The Return of Dracula (1958)

 

THE RETURN OF DRACULA  (1958)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Paul Landres

    Francis Lederer, Norma Eberhardt, Ray Stricklyn,

    John Wengraf, Virginia Vincent, Gage Clarke

The count turns up in a small California town, still looking for necks to bite and still averse to mirrors, crucifixes, daylight and wooden stakes through the heart. An effective, low-budget creepshow, in black and white except for a momentary splash of blood-red color. Lederer makes a menacing Dracula, and the Dies Irae from the old Latin funeral Mass figures prominently in the musical score. 

The Road To Hong Kong (1962)

 

THE ROAD TO HONG KONG  (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Norman Panama

    Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Joan Collins, 

    Robert Morley, Walter Gotell, Dorothy Lamour

Ski Nose and the Groaner travel to India, Tibet, Hong Kong and the moon in their last itinerant adventure, a comedy that's just as laid back and disposable as all the other "Road" movies. The boys are looking older, still playing vaudevillians in the space age, trading wisecracks and recycling material they'd been doing together for years. There's even an eating-machine gag that's a direct steal from Chaplin's "Modern Times". Joan Collins supplies most of the eye candy, but Dorothy Lamour appears briefly, too, and the cameos are fun.

Showdown At Boot Hill (1958)

 

SHOWDOWN AT BOOT HILL  (1958)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Gene Fowler Jr.

    Charles Bronson, John Carradine, Fintan Meyler,

    Robert Hutton, Paul Maxey, Argentina Brunetti

This is exactly the kind of movie that would've slipped through the cracks in the 1950s, playing on the bottom half of a drive-in double feature. Charles Bronson, still doing mostly secondary roles and television work, plays a U.S. marshall who rides into town to serve an arrest warrant and wears out his welcome instantly by killing the wanted man - a respected local citizen - in a gunfight. The townspeople want the marshall dead or worse, but he sticks around because there's a pretty young lady serving meals over at the hotel, and because he still wants to collect the $200 reward. There's a showdown at Boot Hill eventually, but it's not what you'd expect in a movie called "Showdown At Boot Hill". The underlying themes - fear and loneliness - are not what you'd expect, either. Bronson, who was a commanding screen presence long before he made the A list, has the lethal restraint of a coiled rattlesnake, while John Carradine, doing brisk business as the community's  barber, doctor, preacher and undertaker, provides colorful and (for him, anyway) understated support.

Permissive (1970)

PERMISSIVE  (1970)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Lindsay Shonteff

    Maggie Stride, Gay Singleton, Gilbert Wynne,

    Alan Gorrie, Stuart Francis, Debbie Bowen

Groupies and rockers hook up and mope around without seeming to care much about anything. Then one of the rockers gets hit by a car and there's a catfight and one of the groupies kills herself. The folk-rock music on the soundtrack is incessant and repetitive and gets kind of old. At least the groupies are cute. 

Among Those Present (1921)

 

AMONG THOSE PRESENT  (1921)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Fred C. Newmeyer

    Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Aggie Herring,

    James T. Kelley, William Gillespie, Vera White

Harold Lloyd crashes a society event and encounters a fox, a lion, a dog, a cat, a skunk, a snake, a bear, a horse, a bird, a goose and a goat. He also loses his pants. Any resemblance between Mildred Davis in this film and Mary Pickford in most of hers is probably not coincidental.

Das Boot (1981)

 

DAS BOOT  (1981)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Wolfgang Petersen

    Jurgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, 

    Klaus Wennemann, Hubertus Bengsch, 

    Martin Semmelrogge, Bernd Tauber

The best submarine movie ever. Period.

Wolfgang Petersen

(1941-2022)

Volcano (1997)

VOLCANO  (1997)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Mick Jackson

    Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, Don Cheadle,

    Gaby Hoffman, Jacqueline Kim, John Carroll Lynch,

    Keith David, John Corbett, Laurie Latham

Angelenos run for their lives when a volcano erupts under the city, fireballs rain from the sky, skyscrapers collapse and lava bubbles up out of the La Brea Tar Pits. The effects are decent, the pace is relentless, the laws of thermodynamics and narrative plausibility are flagrantly ignored, and the actors manage to deliver their lines without laughing out loud at the silliness of it all. A disaster movie that's as entertaining as it is insane. A guilty pleasure.

Anne Heche

(1969-2022)

Obit. (2016)

 

OBIT.  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Vanessa Gould

A documentary look at the people who write obituaries for the New York Times. A few things you notice about them right away. They're all white. They're mostly men. And they're all veteran journalists who love their uniquely demanding work. On the day the film zeroes in on them, one is researching and writing the obit of the political adviser who made sure JFK looked better than Richard Nixon in their crucial first debate. Another's trying to come up with a catchy way to capture the life of an ad man whose main claim to immortality is a famous Alka-Seltzer commercial. They talk about the rewards and pitfalls and tricks of the trade, and how important it is to verify that the subject is actually dead (which seems obvious, but get it wrong and you're in serious trouble). There's even a tour of the newspaper's morgue, a vast labyrinth of file cabinets and aging clips, presided over by a guy who would probably know where the bodies are buried, if bodies were buried there. You'd expect some morbidity in this, but surprisingly, there's almost none. As one writer explains it, every obit is the chance to tell somebody's story at the exact moment their story becomes history. They aren't writing about death nearly as much as they're writing about life. 

Quote File / Take 22

          "We need to laugh, we need to be scared, 

            we need to hug our girl in the theater. 

            It lightens the load of this crummy life."

Clu Gulager

(1928-2022)

Murder Most Foul (1964)

 

MURDER MOST FOUL  (1964)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: George Pollock

    Margaret Rutherford, Ron Moody, Charles Tingwell,

    Stringer Davis, Allison Seebohm, Windsor Davies,

    James Bolam, Francesca Annis, Dennis Price

A man goes on trial for murder in what appears to be an open-and-shut case. One member of the jury, Miss Marple, isn't so sure, and joins a theater company to investigate. Whodunit?

Murder Ahoy (1964)

MURDER AHOY  (1964)  ¢ ¢

    D:  George Pollock

    Margaret Rutherford, Lionel Jeffries, Charles Tingwell,

    Stringer Davis, Nicholas Parsons, Joan Denham

A man who's about to address a charity board meeting takes a bit of snuff and promptly drops dead. The board's newest member, Miss Marple, suspects foul play, and goes on board a navy ship to look for clues. Whodunit?

Murder At the Gallop (1963)

 

MURDER AT THE GALLOP  (1963)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: George Pollock

    Margaret Rutherford, Robert Morley, Flora Robson,

    Charles Tingwell, Stringer Davis, Robert Urquhart, 

    James Villiers, Katya Douglas, Finlay Currie

An old man tumbles down a flight of stairs and lands at the bottom, dead. The doctor's sure the cause was a heart attack, but Miss Marple suspects something more sinister. Whodunit?

Murder She Said (1961)

 

MURDER SHE SAID  (1961)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: George Pollock

    Margaret Rutherford, James Robertson Justice, 

    Arthur Kennedy, Charles Tingwell, Stringer Davis,

    Muriel Pavlow, Thorley Walters, Peter Butterworth

Miss Marple observes what she believes to be a murder through the window of a train, but she was reading a mystery novel at the time and nobody believes her. Whodunit?

Night Moves (1975)

NIGHT MOVES  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Arthur Penn

    Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns,

    Melanie Griffith, Susan Clark, Harris Yulin,

    Kenneth Mars, Janet Ward, James Woods

Gene Hackman plays a private eye hired to track down the runaway daughter of an actress who made up for a marginal career by marrying well. The detective has issues of his own, involving an adulterous wife (Susan Clark) and some longstanding emotional baggage connected to his father. His obsession with solving the case is matched every step of the way by his failure to do that, and the ending leaves him literally at sea.The runaway teenager is played by Melanie Griffith in her first movie role. The story goes that when the movie started filming she was underage and the producers waited till she turned 18 to shoot her nude scenes. The exposure got her noticed, but she's good in the part, too, jailbait personified, a wounded Lolita with a seductive pout, a killer body and a little-girl voice.