THE BLACK DOLL (1938) - Based on the novel by William Edward Hayes, THE BLACK DOLL was the second of Universal's Crime Club series, which ran for a total of ten films. Harold Buckley is credited with the screenplay, which is a standard murder mystery in a big house during a lightning storm. Unfortunately, the stupid sheriff, played by Edgar Kennedy, is so annoying that the simple pleasures of this kind of film are ruined. Nan Grey gets top billing, but she mostly just gets to be beautiful while Kennedy and Donald Woods do the comedic detective stuff. Grey's film career ended in 1941, but in 1950 she married Frankie Laine and how that resulted in her appearing on Rawhide in 1960 is a matter of conjecture.
THE ADVENTURES OF FLASH BEAVER (1972) - Reportedly director Gerry Edwards was actually prolific TV director and actor Richard Benedict. If that was true, he brought none of the professionalism to this project that he must have shown on his day job. Reportedly, star Brandy O'Toole was actually actress Alice Friedland, who also used the names Claudine Benet and Patti Kramer unless she was working with director John Cassavetes on THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE. In FLASH BEAVER, she was a secretary who became a Costumed Super Hero to assist couples that were having trouble having sex. Being 1972, the men finally have their underwear off, but still do not show their genitles. Most of the soft core sex scenes were shot in long master shots that were never erotic and mostly boring. For the final scene, she popped in on a guy masturbating under his bed sheets. The most interesting element of this movie for me was that our heroine was shown to work in the Guaranty Building on Hollywood Blvd. back when it had a Bank of America on the ground floor. Now the building houses the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition.
DANCE OF DEATH (1976) - The beautiful Angela Mao stumbles upon two elderly men who continually fight each other to determine who is the better martial artist. They ask Mao her opinion, and she counters by asking them to teach her their skills, with which she will venture out to battle others. Whose ever skills she uses to win these future fights will determine the better fighter. In flashback, we discover that Mao wants revenge on the villain who destroyed her clan. For the finale, the villain and Mao, plus the two elderly men, engage in a very long battle, with the elderly men keeping score on whose kung fu Mao successfully uses on the villain. However, it isn't until Mao uses her own unique style, based on female dancing, that she ultimately triumphs. Director Chen Jhy Hwa, aka Chi-Hwa Chen, had already dabbled in "kung fu comedy" with Jacky Chan in SHAOLIN WOODEN MEN, and would work again with Chan on SNAKE AND CRANE ARTS OF SHAOLIN and HALF A LOAF OF KUNG FU. For DANCE OF DEATH, Angela Mao shows off her amazing acrobatic skills while still looking beautiful.
DAY OF THE BAD MAN (1958) - Fred MacMurray is a judge planning to sentence convicted murderer Christopher Dark to hang. He is also planning to marry his sweetheart Joan Weldon. The day before sentencing, Dark's relatives and friends, Robert Middleton, Skip Homeier, Lee Van Cleef and Chris Alcaide, ride into town and begin a campaign of intimidation to convince the important people to pressure MacMurray to sentence Dark to expulsion, instead of hanging. MacMurray, who doesn't carry a gun, is going to stick to his guns even after Weldon confesses that she has fallen in love with Sheriff John Ericson, who had been keeping an eye on the woman while the judge had been away on business. Knowing that the town fears violence if he pronounces the death penalty, MacMurray arranges for Dark to be taken to another town for hanging, without announcing to what town it is. Unable to follow Dark being led away, the villains decide to murder MacMurray when he gets to the homestead he had been preparing to live with Weldon. As usual, the villains ruin their chance at surprise by firing a wild shot that misses our hero, so that he has time to prepare a defense. Old friend Edgar Buchanan figures what will happen, and when he asks Ericson to come along, the young sheriff refuses - which opens Weldon's eyes to his true character. It all comes to a happy ending, with Weldon going back to MacMurray, even though their house mostly burned up. Marie Windson also appears as Dark's girlfriend who also tries to convince MacMurray not to sentence the prisoner to death. John W. Cunningham, who wrote the magazine story The Tin Star that became the movie HIGH NOON, is credited with the story for DAY OF THE BAD MAN, while Lawrence Roman, who would go on to work on the script for RED SUN in 1971, gets the screenwriter credit.
8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE (1986) - When this movie was originally released, it was called "the AA mystery thriller". First lesson, don't be drinking alcohol on the job if you end up shooting dead a suspect unless you want to be fired from the LAPD. Second lesson, don't be hanging out in a bar with drug dealers and prostitutes looking for P.I. work. Third lesson, after the woman, the lovely Alexandra Paul, hires you as a bodyguard don't go on a black-out bender when she ends up dead. Fourth lesson, don't kidnap the dead woman's best friend, Rosanna Arquette, hoping to get evidence against her drug dealing boyfriend, Andy Garcia, and not expect her to fall back into the villain's clutches. Fifth lesson, don't be surprised if the trap you set for the drug dealer with your old LAPD buddies fails to capture the drug dealer. Eventually, it all works out, but I've never seen an AA meeting being held on a beach without some kind of tent. Where would you plug in the coffee pot? Plus how could anyone hear your over the sound of the crashing surf?
FIST OF DEATH, aka SHUANG BEI, aka JACKIE VS. BRUCE TO THE RESCUE (1982) - The opening credits for this movie reports that "Tong Lung" was the Korean martial artist who took over for the late Bruce Lee on GAME OF DEATH. Here he plays "Bruce" and even recreates the scene from FIST OF FURY in which Bruce returns to his martial school and finds out that his master had been murdered. The villains are after a secret document, and when Jackie Chang turns up doing a good impersonation of Jackie Chan in DRUNKEN MASTER, the villains decide to arrange for Bruce and Jackie to fight against each other. However, it turns out that Bruce and Jackie are working together to find out who the villains are. The villains even send out a ninja to kill Bruce in his sleep. Eventually Bruce and Jackie face off with the main bad guy, who turns out to also have ninja skills. Not surprising, our heroes figure out how to nullify his ninja tricks and kill him.
HIDING OUT (1987) - Known as one of the most successful commercial and music video directors, Bob Giraldi decided to get into feature film making with a pair of TV movies before making his theatrical feature debut with HIDING OUT. Half thriller and half high school high jinks comedy, the movie never settles on a consistent tone. Jon Cryer, with a beard, is one of three stock brokers who discover that a client is with the Mob and has been using them to launder money. The Feds want the three to testify against the gangster. When one of the three is murdered, the other two get picked up for protection. Going stir crazy, Cryer convinces his handlers to leave their safe house to get some food at a diner. Assassins show up, but Cryer escapes. Cryer decides to go back to his small town, where his grandmother lives, shave off his beard and give himself a sort-of punk haircut. Since as an adult he was still being carded for buying alcohol, Cryer decides to register at his old high school and pass as his younger brother's cousin. Gretchen Cryer, know best for her one-woman live show I'M GETTING MY ACT TOGETHER AND TAKING IT ON THE ROAD as well as being Jon Cryer's mother, plays Cryer's Aunt who is too busy to recognize our hero in disguise. All of the high school stuff is played as if it was a John Hughes film, while the gangster stuff looks like something from an Andrew Davis movie. However, Cryer begins a romance with Annabeth Gish which is rather charming.
THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960) - Reportedly Robert Towne began his career by writing the screenplay for FRATERNITY HELL WEEK for producer Roger Corman. That film was never made, but Corman hired him again to write THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH, which was made because Corman was already in Puerto Rico to make CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA. Towne worked as an actor in CREATURE, and did so again in LAST, which shared the same three actor cast - plus a few uncredited extras. Unlike THE WORLD THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, in which the woman resolved the conflict between the men by suggesting a threesome, LAST ended with a death in a church, which looked very much like the ending of THE LAST MAN ON EARTH. The intriguing mystery of why oxygen disappeared from the atmosphere to kill everyone in Puerto Rico, and perhaps the world, while our three characters were scuba diving was never solved. As with most low budget films, much of the running time of LAST was filled with rather pointless dialog punctuated by Towne's character making sarcastic comments.
LEGEND (1985) - I've only seen the U.S. theatrical version with the Tangerine Dream music score on VHS and I found it a dull experience. The film opens with The Lord of Darkness, played by Tim Curry, ordering a goblin to kill the two unicorns that bring Light into the world. It soon becomes apparent that director Ridley Scott is more interested in the bad guys in this "fairy tale" and the fantastical sets they inhabit. Knowing that purity attracts the unicorn, the goblins stake out Princess Mia Sara and see Jack, the forest child, played by Tom Cruise, introduce her to the horned creatures. The goblins attack, cut the horn off one animal and kidnap the Princess. With the aid of a group of annoying elves and dwarves, Cruise goes on a quest to save the good Light and prevent the Princess from being seduced to the darkside. Like BLADE RUNNER, this film exists in at least three different versions. The "Director's Cut" of BLADE RUNNER salvaged that film for me. Will the "Director's Cut" of LEGION doe the same trick?
MEAN STREETS OF KUNG FU, aka INVINCIBLE HERO (1973) - There's nothing unique or surprising in this routine Chinese action picture. The bad guy figures to take control of the town by getting rid of the master at the local kung fu school. The school's best student is Wei Tzu-wen, aka Barry Chan, whom the villain frames for murder in order to get him out of the way. After the master is murdered, Chan gets out of the clink and, eventually, he and the villain meet for one of those incredibly long battles that starts on one location, fights up and down walls, and finally ends on a cliffside. Our hero's best buddy, whom the villain previously wounded with a knife, keeps insisting to the master's daughter that he will get revenge for her. When the villain is knocked down, the buddy stabs him with the same knife, before the villain kills him with a blow. Not surprisingly, this helps to spur our hero to finally deliver the death blow. If you think that real kung fu involves incredible high jumping flying kicks, then you might enjoy this. Dao Yang gets writing and directing credit.
PASSIONATE LOVE - This isn't listed in the IMDb that I can find. That title was was what the English subtitles on the Chinese video tape said the film was. Another softcore Japanese sex film about two high school girls who are having a lesbian relationship that decide to experiment with boys, PASSIONATE LOVE is rather run-of-the-mill for this kind of film (of which I have not a lot of exposure). Naturally, they find that being with boys is too much trouble, so they end the film back in a same sex relationship.
THE SAPHEAD (1920) - THE HENRIETTA by Bronson Howard originally played on Broadway in 1887. Winchell Smith and Victor Mapes revised the play to THE NEW HENRIETTA which opened on Broadway in 1914. Douglas Fairbanks was a success in the new version, so he made it into a movie called THE LAMB in 1915. When Metro decided to do a new version of the show, Fairbanks suggested that they get Buster Keaton to play the role, thus beginning Keaton's career in feature films. When Keaton was on the screen, the film was fun, but so much of the running time was taken up with a Wall Street based melodrama featuring William H. Crane as a rich man trying to figure out what to do with his simple minded son, Keaton. Meanwhile, Crane's son-in-law, Irving Cummings, was trying to figure out how to steal the ownership of the Henrietta Gold Mine from Crane. Cummings was also trying to deflect the responsibility of fathering a child with a dancer named Henrietta, played by Katherine Albert. All Keaton wanted to do was to marry Crane's ward, Beulah Booker. Crane succeeded in putting the blame for the bastard child on Keaton and nearly succeeded in getting control of the gold mine with a stock market scam. Unexpectedly, Keaton became a new member of the Stock Market and ended up, unintentionally, saving his father's fortune. Who ever would have expected working on Wall Street would be so violent?
THE SEARCHING WIND (1946) - Lillian Hellman's play was produced on Broadway in 1944 and helped to make Montgomery Clift a star. The story is set at a dinner party being held by a former ambassador whose son has returned from World War 2 with a destroyed leg. When news comes over the radio about the death of Benito Mussolini, the guests begin to talk about their failure as diplomats to prevent the rise of Fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany. The son finally realizes that the loss of his leg is partly due to the previous generation's capitulation to evil. Producer Hal Wallis reportedly wanted to make the film at Warner Bros. before he was forced to move to Paramount, where the film was made. There has been criticism of Wallis' attention to setting this "talkfest" in such opulent surroundings, but that doesn't mute the forceful criticism Hellman makes of appeasement to Fascism. The writer is later quoted as saying, this was the "nearest thing to a political play" she had written "which is probably why I don't like it much any more. But even there I meant only to write about nice, well born people who, with good intentions, helped to sell out a world". A subplot about the diplomat, played by Robert Young, in love with an idealistic journalist, played by Sylvia Sidney, but convinced to marry socialite Ann Richards seems intended to show that not only have these people been failures in the public sphere, but also in the personal.
SORORITY BABES IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-O-RAMA (1988) - Andras Jones, Hal Havins and John Stuart Wildman hear that it is initiation night at a local sorority, so they sneak over for a peek. They get an eyeful of Brinke Stevens taking a long shower before they are found out. The three guys and two pledges, Stevens and Michelle Bauer, are ordered to sneak into a bowling alley and steal a trophy. There, they run into Linnea Quigley, who is trying to rob the place of money. The largest trophy available is chosen and soon breaks open when it is dropped. Out pops an Imp who turns the three elder sorority girls into demons bent on killing everyone. Thankfully, janitor C.C. LeFleur (aka George "Buck" Flower) is there to explain the back story of how the Imp was imprisoned in the trophy thirty years ago. If you like people running around in poorly lit shopping malls, then maybe you won't find this movie as sleep inducing as I did. Director David DeCoteau sets up various scenes that promise to pay off with sex or gore, but the sex and gore is not delivered.
STARLET! (1969) - I'm only used to seeing a producer credit for David F. Friedman on the gore films of director Herschell Gordon Lewis. Well, it turns out that he made a number of softcore sex films with other directors like Richard Kanter. For a fellow known for making low-budget flicks in Florida, it is a surprise to see this movie begin with aerial views of the studios in Hollywood. For a script, Friedman gets sole writer's credit for the usual story about young women hoping to get into the movies and being sexually exploited by men. Deirdre Nelson, aka Dee Lockwood, stars in this unerotic softcore film in which the women get fully naked, but the men keep on their underwear.
THE TEACHER (1974) - Considering that the title role is played by Angel Tompkins, it is not surprising that everyone lusts after her. However, we never see Tompkins in a class room. The film opens with Anthony James playing another weirdo. He hangs out in an abandoned factory with a red casket, from which he can watch, with binoculars, Thompkins when she goes out on her boat to sun bathe topless. Driving around in a hearse, James also watches as Tompkins leaves school, and becomes jealous when he sees her talking to two students - former TV Dennis the Menance Jay North and Rudy Herrera Jr. The latter is also James' brother, so he knows about the casket in the factory. Herrera takes North to the factory to spy on Tompkins sunbathing, which pisses off James, who pushes Herrera off the staircase to his death. James threatens to tell the cops that North killed Herrera if he goes to the police. He also says that he's going to kill North for paying attention to Tompkins. However, Tompkins is a neighbor to North, and soon decides to introduce him to sex since her motorcycle racing husband is never around. There are a number of lovely shots of Tompkins topless, but putting up with the dialog written by producer/director Howard Avedis isn't compensated. Being a low-budget film from 1974, it is not too surprising that the movie has an unnecessarily downbeat ending. Interestingly, in a restaurant scene, two of the patrons are Katherine Cassavetes, the mother of John Cassavetes, and Lady Rolands, the mother of Gena Rowlands.
VEGETABLE HOUSE (1985) - This is sort-of a Chicago based version of THE GROOVE TUBE, in which vegetables, with taped on human eyes and mouths, watch unfunny sketch comedy bits featuring talents like Ron Dean and Joseph T. Doyle that never made the "big time".
