Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968)

CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR  (1968)  ¢ ¢

    D: Vernon Sewell 

    Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Mark Eden,

    Barbara Steele, Virginia Wetherell, Michael Gough,

    Ron Pember, Rosemarie Reede, Michael Warren

Karloff plays an expert on witchcraft and Lee plays the lord of an estate where there are decadent parties and other strange goings on. The stars notwithstanding, it's fairly routine horror, with silly-looking satanic rituals and tacky-looking psychedelic effects.  It's late-career Karloff, and he plays most of it in a wheelchair. Barbara Steele makes a colorful impression but gets relatively little screen time as (what else?) a witch. Alternate title: "The Crimson Cult".

Screen Test / Take 18

Match the following incidents with the movies in which they occur:

  1. Bill Murray joins the Army.

  2. Clint Eastwood paints the town red. 

  3. Louise Brooks has a date with Jack the Ripper.

  4. Max von Sydow plays chess with Death.

  5. Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn go for 

       a boat ride. 

  6. Sissy Spacek torches the prom.

  7. Lily Tomlin sings in the gospel choir.

  8. Janet Leigh takes a shower.

  9. Willem Dafoe throws Jeff Goldblum's cat out the 

       window. 

10. Lillian Gish rocks the cradle.

                        a. "Nashville"
                        b. "The Seventh Seal"
                        c. "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
                        d. "The African Queen"
                        e. "High Plains Drifter"
                        f. "Carrie"
                        g. "Pandora's Box"
                        h. "Psycho"
                         i. "Intolerance"

                         j. "Stripes"

1-j / 2-e / 3-g / 4-b / 5-d / 6-f / 7-a / 8-h / 9-c / 10-i

The Wave (2015)

 

THE WAVE  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Riar Uthaug

    Kristoffer Joner, Ane Dahl Torp, Eili Harboe,

    Jonas Hoff Oftebro, Edith Haagenrud-Sande,

    Fridtjov Såheim, Laila Goody, Arthur Berning

A suspenseful ecodisaster thriller from Norway, about a geologist whose job is to monitor the seismic activity on an unstable mountain and hit the alarm button if it looks like the mountain is about to crash into the fjord. Once the alarm sounds, the locals have exactly ten minutes to get to higher ground to escape a tsunami that will level everything in its path. Plausibility gets stretched pretty thin after a while, but the pace is efficient, the effects look good, and Kristoffer Joner has real charisma as the obsessive/compulsive scientist whose warnings (of course) go unheeded until it's too late. Viewers susceptible to claustrophobia should beware: The scenes that take place inside contracting cracks in the mountain are intense. Followed by a sequel, "The Quake", in which the same characters try to survive an earthquake in Oslo.

The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916)

THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI  (1916)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Lois Weber, Phillips Smalley

    Anna Pavlova, Rupert Julian, Wadsworth Harris,

    Douglas Gerrard, Jack Holt, Betty Schade,

    Edna Maison, Hart Hoxie, William Wolbert

A silent tragedy set in 17th-century Italy, about a mute peasant girl whose romantic encounter with a young nobleman helps trigger a rebellion. The broad-gesture acting and static camerawork tell you something about when the movie was made - it hasn't aged real well - but the production values are epic - a first for a female director. The only movie to star legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova, whose lively physical performance and bony physique stand out in a picture from the period. She does some dancing, too. 

Topkapi (1964)

 

TOPKAPI  (1964)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jules Dassin

    Melina Mercouri, Maximillian Schell, Peter Ustinov, 

    Robert Morley, Jess Hahn, Gilles Ségal, Akim Tamiroff

A crazy caper about a band of thieves trying to steal some valuable emeralds from an Istanbul museum. The template for this sort of thing is Dassin's French thriller "Rififi" from 1955. This one's a riff on that, but it's more of a lark. Ustinov won an Oscar playing the gang's least daring member. 

Tabloid (2010)

 

TABLOID  (2010)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Errol Morris

Toward the end of this documentary, a tabloid journalist sizes up Joyce McKinney this way: "She's not an evil person. I mean, she's just a bit crazy, eccentric, self-obsessed and self-involved and manipulative and barking mad." Which she certainly is. Unfortunately, she's also one of the most boring human beings ever to tell her story on film. The story involves beauty pageants, bondage photos, stalking, kidnapping, obsession, a pit bull named Booger and Booger's cloned offspring. McKinney herself makes an unconvincing witness, a compulsively superficial drama queen who's clever enough to think she can play the tabloids, but overmatched when the tabloids dig up stories she doesn't want to share. After two minutes, you're tired of listening to her talk. After four minutes, you wish Morris had made his movie about somebody - anybody - else. 

The French Dispatch (2021)

 

THE FRENCH DISPATCH  (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Wes Anderson

    Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Adrien Brody,

    Benicio Del Toro, Timothée Chalomet, Léa Seydoux,

    Tilda Swinton, Jeffrey Wright, Owen Wilson,

    Mathieu Amalric, Lyna Khoudri, Steve Park,

    Saoirse Ronan, Liev Schreiber, Willem Dafoe, 

    Edward Norton, Christoph Waltz, Bob Balaban,

    Henry Winkler, Jason Schwarzmann, Cecile de France

A Wes Anderson movie centered (or scattered) around a magazine that vaguely resembles the New Yorker. Anderson's style is so distinctive, and by now so widely recognized, that his movies are practically spoofs of themselves, and this one is unequivocally a Wes Anderson movie. Arty, literate, inventive and deadpan funny, it's a high-brow piece of work that both appreciates and punctures the pretensions of the intellectual elite. Who else would even make a  movie like this? Woody Allen maybe, but it wouldn't look the same. The ever-expanding Wes Anderson stock company turns out in force, and like some other Anderson films, it's one that might get better with repeated viewings. Whether you're a fan, or indifferent, or think he's finally just gotten too precious and cute, it can't hurt to be thankful that somebody so smart and idiosyncratic can get to make movies at all. 

High Spirits (1988)

 

HIGH SPIRITS  (1988)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Neil Jordan

    Peter O'Toole, Daryl Hannah, Steve Guttenberg,

    Beverly D'Angelo, Jennifer Tilly, Peter Gallagher,

    Liz Sinth, Liam Neeson, Donal McCann

Peter O'Toole's the lord of a haunted castle in a comedy that plays like a sitcom pilot. It's an awful lot of silliness, but Daryl Hannah makes an attractive ghost, and O'Toole's in fine form, never far away from a bottle of something and playing nonsense as if it were Shakespeare at the Old Vic.

Lycanthropus (1961)

LYCANTHROPUS  (1961)  ¢ ¢

    D: Paolo Hausch

    Barbara Lass, Carl Schell, Curt Lowens

    Maurice Marsac, Grace Neame, Luciano Pigozzi,

    Annie Steinert, Mary McNeeran, Michela Roc

The U.S. title for this is "Werewolf In a Girls' Dormitory", and while it has both a werewolf and a girls' dormitory, you never actually see the werewolf in the dormitory, which is kind of too bad, because that's a pretty good title. Also, there's a little too much talk and not quite enough werewolf, though some of the camerawork's not bad. Luciano Pigozzi, who plays the devious caretaker, looks like he's maybe watched too many Peter Lorre movies. Or not enough.

Hairspray (1988)

 

HAIRSPRAY  (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: John Waters

    Ricki Lake, Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono,

    Jerry Stiller, Leslie Ann Powers, Ruth Brown,

    Shawn Thompson, Ric Ocasec, Pia Zadora,

    Colleen Fitzpatrick, Mink Stole, John Waters

Hey, kids. Remember the pony? The twist? The bird? The mashed potato? The fly? John Waters does, and they're all in this movie about the teen dance scene in Baltimore in 1963. Ricki Lake plays Tracy Turnblad, an infectiously cheery bundle of adolescent energy whose fondest dream is to be a star on "The Corny Collins Show", a sort of localized "American Bandstand". It's a throwback to a more innocent time, or it would be, if the time was really more innocent. (Segregation was a thing back then, and the movie, for all its silliness, doesn't shortchange that.) According to IMDb, this is the only John Waters film to get a PG rating, but that doesn't mean it's not funny. In fact, it's (sometimes literally) a scream. Waters makes a cameo appearance as a crazy doctor, Debbie Harry models a colossal beehive, Pia Zadora recites Allen Ginsberg, and Divine plays two roles, only one of them female.

Hot Saturday (1932)

 

HOT SATURDAY  (1932)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William A. Seiter

    Cary Grant, Nancy Carroll, Randolph Scott,

    Edward Woods Lillian Bond, Jane Darwell,

    William Collier Sr., Grady Sutton, Rita La Roy

Wild times, bootleg booze and reckless romance among the younger set, starring Nancy Carroll as a bank clerk attracted to both a wealthy cad played by Cary Grant and a straight arrow played by Randolph Scott. There's a cavalier cynicism to Grant's performance that would surface only occasionally during his career. He was 28 and outwardly relaxed and impossibly handsome, but his screen persona was still a work in progress. He was still playing whatever the studio gave him to do, still learning how to be Cary Grant. He and Scott were longtime pals and sometime housemates who met while making this film.

Killing Car (1993)

KILLING CAR  (1993)  ¢ ¢

    D: Jean Rollin

    Tiki Tsang, Jean-René Gossart, Pascal Montsegur,

    Barbara Annovozzi,  Pascale Lemaire, Samuel Tastet

A down-market slasher thriller from France about a serial killer who leaves a calling card - a little toy car - next to the bodies of her victims. Her motive is revenge, and there's an old American car involved - an Edsel - and most of the people she kills she shoots, except the one who gets impaled with a pitchfork. Also, most of the female characters end up in a state of not having very much on. The first ten minutes are the best - a nightmare that begins in a scrapyard and shifts to an amusement park - but then the plot thickens, as much as there is one, which slows things down. Cool, laconic performance by Tiki Tsang as the killer. Effective, low-key support from the Edsel.

Milius (2013)

 

MILIUS  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joey Figueroa, Zak Knutson

A documentary portrait of John Milius, gun-loving right-winger, free-wheeling contrarian, unabashed fan of bears, surfing and Theodore Roosevelt, and according to just about everybody in the American movie industry, one of the best screenwriters ever. Milius directed some films of his own, most notably "The Wind and the Lion", but really made his mark writing them. "Dirty Harry", "Jaws", "The Hunt For Red October" and "Apocalypse Now" all came out better because of his involvement. He and fellow USC classmates George Lucas and Steven Spielberg even swapped points on their movies once. (Lucas is still waiting for a return on Milius's "Big Wednesday".) The industry's response to his commie-invasion fantasy "Red Dawn", followed by a stroke, left him diminished both physically and professionally. But for all his eye-poking jingoism and larger-than-life bluster (and partly because of those things), he was a Hollywood character unlike anybody else. American movies, in the '70s especially, wouldn't be the same without him.