henri sauvage

I was going to begin this title with "Surreal", but if you're going to talk about a film that's clearly inspired by Phillip K. Dick's fiction that's kind of redundant. The basic plot bears quite a few points of similarity to one of the author's lesser-known novels, "Ubik"; there's even a major character named "Palmer Eldritch" -- as in Dick's novel "The Three Stigmata of". Which also featured an alien hallucinogen.

So the film isn't shy about acknowledging its antecedents. Along with lots of other influences from all over the place. Whether you'll like it or not probably depends on whether you enjoy that type of story. But seriously: "Worst movie ever"? No way. I really wish reviewers would stop using this as shorthand for "This was confusing/I didn't understand it."

Which is a perfectly valid opinion. I can't claim to have completely understood it, either, after one viewing. But I enjoyed it enough to think this is worth a couple more looks. Yeah, it's got its rough edges, but it also has real heart and creativity.

In all the films and TV shows I've rated here, I've only given a 1-star rating once before, for Robot Holocaust. In that steaming pile's defense, it was made on a nonexistent budget, with actors of -- shall we say -- obviously limited experience, and based on a story apparently inspired by drinking triple-distilled bong water.

I don't see how the BBC can claim any of these mitigating factors for this atrocity. Since others have gone into hilarious detail about the many, many shortcomings of this series and the all-encompassing hackery in its evisceration of a classic story, there's nothing to add on that score. If the ghost of H. G. nightly brought shrieking, sweat-soaked nightmares to each and every person responsible for this dreck for the next thirty years, it would be only a fraction of what they richly deserve.

I could definitely have done without quite so much of Jakob Dylan and friends. It's nice to know the music from that time can still find fans in younger generations, but please, please, PLEASE do not attempt to cover songs by the Mamas and the Papas if you don't have a vocal talent like Cass Elliot to lay the foundation for your sound.

And one thing I will never understand is why they made liberal use of clips from the 1968 film "Model Shop", including a bit where Gary Lockwood drops in on some musician friends -- who are in fact the group Spirit, and their music is featured in that movie. Yet not once are they mentioned in the documentary itself, even though they were arguably just as much a part of the "West Coast Sound" as any of the groups featured here.

... and that was for nostalgia's sake. Although I'm setting the bar so low it's somewhere down in the Earth's mantle, this one is actually pretty good -- for a Bert I. Gordon film. (Though I freely admit, the only way I can stand to watch this movie nowadays is with Joel and the 'Bots.)

I don't think it's possible for a contemporary viewer to appreciate what it was like, seeing this on the big screen back during its theatrical release in 1962. But at just barely 7, I was the perfect age to be enthralled by the cheesy effects and general silliness. For a kid flick, especially in the early Sixties, there are some surprisingly grim and gruesome goings-on. It was colorful, and even imaginative in parts. Sure, the comic relief the script tried to mine from Estelle Winwood's scatter-brained sorceress and her helpers often falls flat -- I mean, really, Bert: a chimp? Whose idea was that? -- but even so, she's still fun to watch.

Whether feeding princesses to his dragon puppet, or double-crossing a traitorous knight, Basil Rathbone was obviously having a blast as the coolly sadistic and sardonic sorcerer, Lodac. His performance deserved a much better-budgeted and directed film than this.

If you're a fan of Kobayashi's masterpiece of the supernatural, "Kwaidan", then this film will seem very familiar in its look and pacing, even to portions of the score. Speaking of which, it may appear strange that "Solveig's Song", a piece by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, opens a movie set in Edo period Japan, and returns as a theme throughout the soundtrack, but read the lyrics. Then you'll understand.

"The Haunted Lantern" is based on a classic Japanese ghost story, "The Peony Lantern", which, like the tales in "Kwaidan", was also translated by Lafcadio Hearn. So there's another parallel to the Kobayashi film. However, there's a bit more gore here than "Kwaidan" and the effects are flashier. Although I can't rate this quite as highly as its predecessor, it's well worth watching, being by turns eerie and gruesome and heart-breakingly tragic.

Since I don't speak Arabic, and the film wasn't subtitled, you'll have to excuse me if I may have missed some of the subtler points about "Journey to the Moon". Nonetheless, I believe I've caught the gist of the thing. It's basically a remake of "Cat Women of the Moon" featuring entirely too much of the antics of famous comedian Ismail Yassin.

This guy makes Jerry Lewis (when he was teamed with Dean Martin) look positively dignified, although it gives you some idea of how exponentially more annoying Lewis would have been if he'd delivered his lines in Arabic. And if his entire shtick were to consist of doing something idiotic and then blubbering interminably about it. It took only about ten minutes before I wanted to see this man-child offed, preferably painfully.

Otherwise, the film is standard stuff: Astronauts go to the Moon, where they find a bevy of stunning young women who -- judging from their costumes -- while away the lonely hours playing tennis. (All their men seem to have been killed or horribly maimed in some silly old war.) The romantic lead falls in love with one of the moon-ladies, there's some complications and a robot, and then everyone goes back to the Earth.

Of some slight interest, if your hobby is obscure sci-fi flicks.

Not being all that familiar with Indian cinema or pop culture, I really didn't know what to expect when I added this to my Netflix queue, just that it looked colorful and might be entertaining. Being not all that fond of musicals, I almost bugged out of the movie about fifteen or twenty minutes in.

But something made me stick with it, and I'm glad I did.

Take one part "Machiste" muscleman sword-and-sandal flick, one part "Lord of the Rings", add a liberal dose of Shakespearean tragedy, and season the result a bit too heavily (for my taste, anyway) with lavish musical numbers (Okay, I did like the Mahishmati anthem: It's a stirring and very catchy composition.) Garnish with some jaw-dropping wackiness -- from a Western perspective, anyway -- and you've got "Baahubali".

I have to admit I found the second movie somewhat better than the first, but by the end of "Baahubali: The Beginning" I was captivated by its larger-than-life characters and epic storytelling. This and its sequel are well worth watching, even if like me you're not a big fan of Bollywood films.

I've watched almost all these episodes, and I have to say that although some of them are quite good, this is one of the most eminently forgettable ones I've seen so far, even though Richard Matheson did this adaptation of an August Derleth story. The problem is, John Newland is a terrible actor -- and not a particularly good director, either. Far from being frightening, the titular character swans around in a black cape that makes him look like a Dollar Store Dracula. If anything, he reminds me of the chiropractor Ed Wood, Jr. Got to substitute for Bela Lugosi in "Plan 9 from Outer Space". Bentley's demon "familiar" is a nice effect, but the creepiness is quickly squandered because all it can do is stand around and make groping gestures. Even the presence of stunningly beautiful Antoinette Bower can't salvage this tripe.

If you've ever seen the movie "Hangover Square", you'll find this episode of "Thriller" strangely familiar. They even use the same aural cue -- a ringing bell -- to trigger the protagonist's psychotic blackouts, and the same sort of camera tricks to show he's about to have one of his nasty spells.

Unfortunately, the 50+ minute running time of a TV show doesn't give the story the time the feature movie had to make the title character sympathetic. In fact, Vaughn's 'Dr. Cordell' comes across as something of an idiot as well as a jerk: After the first murder, he had to have strongly suspected he was the perpetrator when he found that he'd kept one of the victim's earrings. Yet not only did he not turn himself in to the police, but he insists on working alone in the lab with his fiancé, at the same time he must be aware there's a chance that at any moment, without warning, he could become a maniacal killer. It's even more gob-smacking that he doesn't appear at all concerned that he might have one of his fits while working with the components of nerve gas. On a crowded college campus.

Rather negligent of him, if you ask me. And considering that the items he keeps from his three victims are all *bells*, but despite this blindingly obvious hint, he decides to have one last meet-up with his lady friend in a church -- which he knows has a bell tower -- it seems pretty obvious that that unknown gas to which he was exposed significantly lowered his I.Q., too.

Unless you're a Robert Vaughn fan, there's really not much to recommend this episode. Definitely one of the weakest entries in the series.

This one gets off to a cracking good start, as Robert Penrose (Ronald Howard) and the manager of Penrose's estate 'Blackmoor', Jeremy Teal (the inimitable Torin Thatcher) are on their way to Robert's bachelor party when they're waylaid at night out on the fog-shrouded moors by the sinister Squire Moloch (Henry Daniell) and his excessively large henchman, Master Styx (Richard "Jaws" Kiel). Styx disposes of the chauffeur, while the Squire holds Robert and Jeremy at early-19th-Century pistol point. They're then marched off to a deserted building. When Jeremy tries to make a break for it, Moloch appears to kill him by merely pointing his finger at the fleeing man.

My only quibble -- and admittedly, it's a minor one -- is that after a great buildup, the story clues you in that there's nothing at all supernatural going on here a bit too soon. I mean, seriously, someone who implies he's Satan or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, a demonic character who just supposedly killed someone with a gesture, is doing all this to force the hero to sign away his power of attorney? At that point, you'd have to be pretty dim not to guess what's going on and who's really behind it.

But Daniell's performance is what makes this story eminently watchable from the moment he appears. He plainly revels in his role as the seriously weird and menacing Squire Moloch, whose costume and makeup must have been inspired by Lon Chaney's character in the lost silent horror film "London After Midnight".

Okay variation on the "What Happened to Everybody?" sf genre. Though it loses steam about two-thirds of the way through, it starts off well enough, creating a fairly eerie and desolate atmosphere as a small group of survivors copes with the usual issues, after a mysterious event has killed off most of the human race.

The actors are competent enough, although Dennis Price is sadly wasted in his role as "Taggart", the obligatory rotter. (Am I the only one who thinks of Slim Pickens and "Blazing Saddles" whenever I hear that surname?) As always, the aliens -- actually, they're robots who for some inexplicable reason wear spacesuits, complete with backpacks and helmets -- have an easily exploitable Achilles heel. Their ability to revive the dead as mindless zombies is rather creepy, though how the zombies are supposed to see where they're going when their eyes have supposedly "turned to gray goo" is a bit hard to fathom. (Those contacts look really uncomfortable.) Worth a look, though it's not up to Terence Fisher's usual standard.

That is, a familiar theme for the director, Luc Besson. Lucy, the protagonist, is very much a cross between Nikita and Leeloo the Fifth Element, with a touch of the anime 'Akira' and Chayefsky's 'Altered States' thrown into the mix. There were some great moments in this movie, but, on the whole, I have to say it wasn't as dark and intense as 'La Femme Nikita', or as entertaining as 'The Fifth Element'.

Don't get me wrong: Johansson gives an excellent performance, as an initially carefree student who through a very nasty set of circumstances is trapped into serving a drug kingpin as a mule, carrying a surgically implanted packet of a new drug with some ... shall we say ... remarkable properties.

When she resists a rape attempt by one of his goons, this suicidally stupid henchman kicks her in the stomach several times, rupturing the packet. Since unless they just hired him that day, you'd think this flunky should have some inkling of what his sadistic, cold-blooded killer of a boss would do to him if he found out -- and he pulled this stunt in front of another henchman -- all I can say is, the guy must have had a major death wish. Or very poor impulse control. Or the IQ of something from the back of the refrigerator. Or all of the above.

Anyway, through the miracle of scientific-sounding mumbo-jumbo (as tediously expounded by Morgan Freeman -- what a terrible waste of a fine actor!) we find out that the drug which has leaked into Lucy's bloodstream is expanding her consciousness and giving her superhuman abilities. This leads to lots of special effects and general mayhem, as well as the obligatory car chase.

I don't mean to sound dismissive of this movie: far from it. Generally, anything Besson directs is well worth a look. There are some marvelously trippy sequences showing the effects of the drug on her perceptions, and some humorous moments, like when her body tries to rebel while she's on an airliner. Johansson deftly manages her mental transformation into something both more and less than human, making her performance chilling and touching, sometimes both at once.

A slight correction to the IMDb blurb: it's true that at first, the drug turns Lucy into a ruthless killer. But as her consciousness progresses to a higher level, she stops killing, even though it would have been easy for her to squash people like bugs.

Not Besson's best, but still a nice alternative to your usual mindless summer blockbuster. Worth seeing.

Although the basic plot is straight out of P. G. Wodehouse -- wealthy relative threatens to cut off playboy's allowance if he doesn't get married to one of the "acceptable" girls on her list, so he sets out to preemptively marry them off to someone else -- along with its leisurely pacing, "Wedding Rehearsal" is something of a hit-and-miss affair. This is more a pleasant comedy of manners in the British mode, with a dollop of social commentary, than a romantic farce. If you approach it as such, it has its small rewards, some nice comic characterizations and occasionally witty dialog.

You certainly can't fault the quality of the actors, or the production values, not to mention the location shots of London in the early 30s. There are some great moments, such as when the dowager steels herself to give her twin daughters the "what to expect on your wedding night" speech on the eve of their double wedding, while the twins try their best to look innocent.

I wouldn't recommend "Wedding Rehearsal" to most modern viewers, but if you're a fan of actors like Roland Young and Merle Oberon, and like that between-the-wars British aristocratic milieu, you might find yourself enjoying the film. I did.

For about the first forty minutes or so, this wasn't a bad movie at all. Neve McIntosh plays the distraught mother convincingly and Shaun Dooley does a fine job as a one-night stand who winds up really regretting that impulse. Despite a few minor stumbles, the film develops an engrossingly claustrophobic atmosphere of terror and paranoia.

Which then crumbles under the weight of its muddled storyline and pedestrian plotting. For example, one particularly annoying "twist" occurs when they have Dooley attacked and pulled out of sight by the (still-unseen) monster while he's trying to climb into the attic, only to pop back up outside a few minutes later with no visible injuries and only a slight limp to show for the encounter.

I guess mutant hell-beasts are like bears: play dead and maybe they'll leave you alone.

The director was certainly smart not to show us much of the creature -- because what you do see isn't particularly frightening. (In fact, it reminded me of nothing so much as one of the boogeymen in the old Laurel and Hardy film, "March of the Wooden Soldiers".) But that's forgivable, so long as you don't climax your story by having your fearsome super-fast, super-strong monster -- which in the last hour and ten minutes has offed several of her neighbors and made mincemeat out of some heavily-armed special forces dunderheads -- summarily dispatched by a fireplace poker!

I get the "frantic mom protecting her cub" angle, but it has to make you wonder what all the fuss was about. Maybe they should have equipped those SAS guys with sticks with a nail in them instead of assault rifles.

And I know people don't always act reasonably when they're under extreme stress, but a daughter who looks her mother square in the face while deliberately locking her outside -- when she knows a savage, murderous creature is lurking about -- then just turns and walks away, all on account of some abandonment issues? That's cold. It completely destroyed any sympathy I might have had for the selfish, spiteful little drama queen.

This was a good try. I'd have no hesitation about checking out another film by this director. It's not so bad that I'd urge people to give it a miss entirely, but it's disappointing to see a movie which initially had so much going for it end up missing the mark so badly.

This adaptation of the long-running, highly influential French comics series is a visual and intellectual treat. Although the story line differs in major details from the comics which inspired the series, it retains many of the marvelous, sometimes hilariously off-kilter concepts and alien creatures (like the Grumpy Convertor) which made the series so immensely popular.

The animation -- a combination of hand-drawn and computer graphics -- is well-executed, in a mostly faithful reproduction of the richly textured universe created over four decades by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières.

This is light-hearted space opera, with plenty of action and humor, and yet surprisingly sophisticated for family fare, with a strongly humanistic -- though never preachy -- point of view. Highly recommended.

Kyunosuke, a farmer's son and descendant of samurai, dreams of leaving the farm and winning fame and fortune as a renowned warrior. When a retainer of the ambitious Lord Yasutaka shows up one day and offers to employ Kyunosuke, even advancing him money for clothing and weapons, it seems his fondest wish will be fulfilled.

But this apparently lucky turn of events conceals a less palatable reality: Kyunosuke was hired only because he bears an uncanny resemblance to Lord Yasutaka. He is to be the third of the lord's "shadow warrior" doubles. Although he receives samurai training, it's only to make his impersonation of Yasutaka more effective. The pay is good, but since his existence must be kept a secret he gets few opportunities to enjoy his new station in life.

When at a critical moment in a battle Lord Yasutaka is wounded in his left eye by an arrow, Kyunosuke takes his place and wins the day. His reward: he and the other doubles get to lose their left eyes,too. As the distinctly unpleasant side of his duties makes this indelible impression on the Third Shadow Warrior, he begins to rue the day he left his father's farm.

Shortly after his eye is removed by the court surgeon, a sneak attack by a treacherous ally throws the lord and Kyunosuke -- now the only surviving double -- together as the two flee for their lives. Yasutaka is wounded again in the desperate fight to get away from the castle, receiving a cut which nearly severs his left arm. In terrific pain, he orders his double to finish the job and strike off his arm.

Kyunosuke reluctantly complies, then realizes that if he succeeds in getting Yasutaka alive to the castle of another ally, he'll have to have his arm amputated, too. He naturally rebels against this prospect, and tells Yasutaka so. Raving and cursing, Lord Yasutaka tries to cut him down for his disobedience; Kyunosuke kills his master in self-defense and leaves his body for the crows.

But Kyunosuke will not escape his fate so easily. While trying to flee the province, he's recognized on the road by another fugitive, the same retainer who first hired him. Kyunosuke is given a choice between immediate death, or taking Yasutaka's place for real.

The Third Shadow Warrior understandably chooses the latter option, but again, he will live to regret it. In the Japanese tradition of "cruel histories", maintaining this illusion will cost him everything: his identity, his family, his love. Though he is supposed to be a lofty samurai lord and commander of an army, every attempt to take charge of his destiny ends with Kyunosuke further ensnared and confined, a puppet dancing to another's tune.

Besides having a very Buddhist take on the nature of illusion, the film has quite a bit to say about class distinctions as well. Beautifully shot in black-and-white in a widescreen format, with an excellent cast -- particularly Ichikawa, who provides two very convincing performances as both the arrogant, brutal Lord Yasutaka and conflicted Kyunosuke -- Third Shadow Warrior in no way deserves its apparent obscurity.

Shintaro Katsu plays blind masseur Suginoichi, a character who in this earlier film is, aside from his affliction and occupation, the complete antithesis of Zatoichi the honorable and big-hearted Blind Swordsman. An outcast born in poverty, even as a young boy he's an accomplished extortionist with big plans for his future. The film then follows Suginoichi as an adult, when a chance meeting with an ailing traveler who's carrying a large sum of money launches him on a Grand Guignol spree of murder, theft, betrayal, blackmail and rape.

I have to hand it to Katsu: Suginoichi has to be one of the most fascinatingly repellent characters I've ever seen. He has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He hates the world and everyone in it, especially women, and they'll all be made to pay. The lesson he's taken from life is that if he can rise fast enough, he'll be able to keep one step ahead of retribution for his evil deeds. And for a time, a long time in fact, he prospers, but in an ironic and highly appropriate twist, Suginoichi's comeuppance arrives when a nasty trick he played on the occasion of his first murder backfires at the worst moment.

If you watch this film expecting something like the Zatoichi series, especially if you're looking for dazzling displays of sword-play, you'll be sorely disappointed. If on the other hand you like dark period dramas, shot in the starkly beautiful black-and-white in which Japanese cinematographers once excelled, I recommend checking this one out.

In letterbox, in a near-pristine print, in the original Japanese (with subtitles) I have to say this is a much better film than the one most of us saw on TV, back in the day.

For one thing, the line "Monsters have rights, too!" is never uttered. even in translation. (Although -- now that I think of it -- some people might prefer the dubbed version precisely because of its goofiness.) Of course, that's just the dialog, and even the most handsome presentation of this film can't obscure its marvelously wacky weirdness.

The miniatures and effects are kind of a mixed bag. The space-related sets and models are actually fairly well executed, but the monster effects are often sub-Toho, sometimes hilariously so, like when an absurdly out-of-scale F-101 Starfighter crashes into the X and just sort of hangs there for a few seconds. I think that's more from a lack of experience with kaiju flicks on the part of the studio and its technicians than penny-pinching. In the Criterion edition, at least, it's obvious that Shochiku put a not inconsiderable amount of money into this production.

Silly as it undeniably is, there are in fact some very creative moments in this movie, such as when the monster absorbs too much energy from a nuclear reactor and turns into a gigantic, red-hot sphere which bounces around Tokyo, wreaking fiery havoc until it plunges into a lake.

When you look at the competition, stuff like "Gappa: The Triphibian Monster" and "Yongary", in its very odd and quite unique way this is clearly one of the most entertaining of the Toho-wannabe giant monster films of the 60s.

Some day, film historians who have entirely too much time on their hands might attempt to settle the question of which is Bert I. Gordon's "best" cheesy sci-fi film -- which would require hair-splitting on such an infinitesimal scale that in the end it could probably only be resolved by gladiatorial combat.

On the other hand, there should be near-universal agreement that this is hands-down his worst. "The Cyclops" is just plain dull, even though it at times rips off -- er, I mean, echoes -- the Greek legend of Ulysses and Polyphemus. Gloria Talbott is literally this movie's only redeeming feature: she's the reason I give it two stars out of ten, instead of one. Well, her and the classic Stinson Voyager monoplane.

She certainly emotes her heart out, during that forty-minute scene -- OK, maybe it was only ten minutes, but it sure seemed much, much longer -- in which she and her mates have been trapped in a cave by her radioactively-enlarged, brain-damaged, horribly disfigured fiancé. Ever-versatile Paul Frees supplies the monster's voice, in what may be the longest continuous series of inarticulate grunts and growls recorded outside of a Screamin' Jay Hawkins session.

One way you could look at this movie is as a test-bed for plot elements of "The Amazing Colossal Man" and especially its sequel, "War of the Colossal Beast". My advice to anyone who isn't a Gordon complete-ist, though, would be to skip this one and go straight to the other two, which despite their ultra-cheap special effects and lower end of the B-list actors are still somewhat entertaining.

This bizarre hybrid of film noir, Two-Headed Thing yarn and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has its share of flaws, there's no denying that. Between its obviously limited budget, cheap sets, a cast of no-name American and Japanese actors and some awkward dialog, it's a bit of a wonder that "The Manster" turned out to be such an effective little nightmare.

The movie begins with the shocking murders of three Japanese women by a dimly-seen, Yeti-like monster, in a bath house, concluding with the obligatory splash of blood on the shoji, over which the opening credits run.

Next we see "eccentric" Dr. Suzuki, played by Tetsu Nakamura -- who in fairness was a pretty well-known actor at the time in Japan -- trudging up a mountain slope to his residence. You have to hand it to Dr. Suzuki for choosing such an inaccessible spot: not only is it likely to discourage Jehovah's Witnesses and suchlike nosy parkers, it's got a great view of the neighboring volcano -- even if it's only a model.

Arriving at his hideaway, Dr. Suzuki is warned by his beautiful and mysterious assistant Tara (Terri Zimmern) that Kenji is waiting for him in the lab. (Suzuki has a basement laboratory where he grows giant fungi, keeps his insane and hideously deformed wife Emiko -- Toyoko Takechi -- in a cage, and conducts his horrific experiments.)

Turns out Kenji is the monster. He attacks Suzuki and starts wrecking the lab, but the not-so-good doctor manages to dispatch him by shooting him several times and giving him a dose of radioactive(?) steam for good measure.

Shortly afterward, dull, strait-laced reporter Larry Stanford (Peter Dyneley) shows up on Dr. Suzuki's doorstep to interview the doctor about his oddball theories on evolution. Larry's not all that interested in the assignment: he's just marking time for a couple of weeks before he gets rotated from his syndicate's Far East bureau back to the States and the arms of his loving wife. So he's easily persuaded to have a drink with the jovial doctor.

Bad move: Suzuki drugs Larry's drink, then injects him with the latest version of his experimental enzyme. When Larry wakes up, he chalks the whole thing up to fatigue and bad Japanese liquor, and heads back to Tokyo.

The first effect of the enzyme is to turn Larry into a jerk. Instead of going home, he starts partying hearty and taking in the bright lights of Tokyo. Dr. Suzuki -- who wants to observe the effects of his latest experiment at first hand -- turns up again and befriends Larry, promising to show him "the real Japan". He persuades Larry to be his guest at a hot springs and mountain resort where he's introduced to Tara. Larry and Tara begin a whirlwind affair, while his increasingly frantic wife wonders what's happened to delay him.

Then the plot switches from "Lost Weekend: Japan Style" into something much darker, as the enzyme triggers more intense mental and physical manifestations. Larry's right hand mutates into a hairy claw, and he takes to prowling the deserted streets and back-alleys of Tokyo at night, compulsively murdering first a Buddhist priest at his prayers, and then a couple of young women. As the changes become more pronounced and grotesque (including one of the most memorable images in the film) Larry leaves a trail of corpses behind him, until the final confrontation back at -- you guessed it -- Dr. Suzuki's volcanic hideaway. While the volcano explodes, naturally.

This is one of those rare movies where the tight budget mostly works in its favor. It's shot in black and white, in sparsely furnished interior sets. The exterior shots take place mostly at night, in dark streets and alleys, a temple and a graveyard. The cinematography is pretty good, at times even atmospheric and disturbing. Dyneley does a fairly passable job as a hapless guinea pig for Suzuki's mad science, going from nice guy to abusive alcoholic philanderer to monstrous serial killer with an extra head growing out of his shoulder. Setting the story in Japan only adds to the weirdness and disorientation, as well as nicely emphasizing Larry's isolation.

I wouldn't call this a masterpiece of horror cinema, but more like Early Grindhouse. Nonetheless, it's in many ways a profoundly strange little movie, well worth a viewing.

During the Hundred Years' War, in the aftermath of the English victory at Poitiers King Edward the Third (Michael Hordern) lays down the terms of his truce to a group of captured French nobles: If they promise to submit to English rule in their province of Aquitaine, they'll be released and allowed to keep their lands and titles.

Although the nobles are at first inclined to tell the King what he can do with his truce, even at the cost of their lives, the wilier Comte de Ville (Peter Finch) persuades them that the wiser move would be to appear to accept the truce while working on the sly against their English overlords.

So the stage is set for nasty plots and feats of derring-do, as the King leaves his son, Prince Edward (Errol Flynn) to rule the barely-pacified province in his stead, while he returns to England. When Edward's widowed cousin and romantic interest Joan (Joanne Dru) is kidnapped by the Comte de Ville and held hostage, this hands-on monarch embarks on a quest to rescue her and her children.

Flynn the actor doesn't seem to have much zest for this production, no doubt regarding Allied Artists as a B-list outfit (as they generally were) compared with the major studios for whom he'd once worked. The romancing here is decidedly muted, compared to the classic swashbucklers of his early career. But even though his years of high living have obviously told on him, Flynn's still a commanding presence, and this role as a middle-aged warrior prince suits him well.

The story is nothing remarkable, with its share of duels and disguises and battles and hair's-breadth escapes. Although there's an interesting ambiguity to its being set during the Hundred Years' War: Here the conquering English prince is the hero, while the Comte de Ville and his French compatriots are the villains. Yet barely ten years prior to the release of this movie, who would have questioned the morality of resisting an invading army by fair means or foul? At least as regards Europe, and by this time colonialism had mostly fallen out of favor, too. So it seems to me a bit hard to believe that most viewers then or now wouldn't feel at least a little sympathy for the French conspirators, even if Edward's claim to the Aquitaine had some foundation in medieval law and custom.

For an Allied Artists flick, though, this has unusually good production values. (I was lucky enough to catch it on TCM, in letterbox format in a near-pristine print.) Besides Flynn himself, and a brief role for stunningly beautiful Yvonne Furneaux, the best things about this film are the cinematography, the fine British actors, the sets and costuming, and the staging of the battle scenes, especially de Ville's assault on the castle where Edward and Joan take refuge. For once, the armor is appropriate to the era and in a scene that's pretty unique for the genre, a pair of authentically primitive-looking cannon (yes, they had them back then) protected by a kind of giant shield-on-wheels known as a "mantlet" are used to shatter a castle gate.

This is the sort of movie that used to be called a "popcorn cruncher", before the reign of the frenetic, bloated, CGI-saturated summer blockbuster. It makes no pretense at being anything but what it is: A passable way to spend a rainy afternoon.

Six desperate men are hired to transport a dangerous cargo over a rough desert road, lured by the promise of a big bonus -- if they survive the trip. The main protagonists are a tough, cynical womanizer (Brian Keith) and a late-middle-aged failure (Dick Foran) who's at the end of his rope.

Does any of this sound familiar? The movie -- just like a certain classic foreign film which will remain unacknowledged by the parties responsible for this turkey -- even begins with a literal bang, as an out-of-control rocket takes out a schoolyard full of kids and moms. (Which is probably the one-and-only truly shocking moment in this entire movie, mostly due to its gratuitous body count.)

Unfortunately, comparing "Violent Road" to "Wages of Fear" is a bit like comparing a bottle of stale malt liquor (with a couple of cigarette butts floating in it) to a shot of Casa Noble crystal tequila. OK, I exaggerate: Watching "Violent Road" wasn't nearly as unpleasant as downing said bottle of stale malt liquor, butts and all, would no doubt be. But the fact remains this could serve as a primer on how to take the elements of a classic thriller and botch every single one of them.

Instead of a series of fiendish obstacles which will test the limits of the drivers' ingenuity, courage and endurance, they're challenged first by a remarkably goofy sequence involving one of the phoniest boulders in cinematic history.

When they reach a spot where a landslide has almost completely blocked the road, as the first truck negotiates this narrow pass, the vibration dislodges some gravel, a few rocks and a paper-mache boulder -- just one, mind you. As this massive rock is bounding like a jackrabbit with its tail on fire down that near-vertical slope one of the drivers comes out of nowhere and *deflects it* with a brilliantly-executed flying kick!

Now that was a pretty amazing stunt, but from the size of the boulder, if it had been the real thing it would have weighed at least half a ton. Can you say "shattered kneecap, tibia and fibula"? Boy howdy, but those 50s-era fuc -- er, truckers were REALLY tough.

Note also that unlike "The Wages of Fear", instead of nitro, these guys are transporting the separate components of rocket fuel (hydrazine, concentrated hydrogen peroxide, and nitric acid) which means if even one of the trucks doesn't get through, the whole exercise will have been pointless. So you can safely bet all the trucks will reach their destination, because if there's one thing that's certain about this film it's that it will remain uncontaminated by any trace of that wimpy, Frenchified bleak existentialism.

So much for suspense, then.

Although just as in "Wages of Fear" they kill off Dick Foran's character near the end of the film, here it's done in a way which mostly makes him look like an idiot, while leaving Brian Keith's character entirely blameless. (No moral ambiguities here, Bub!) Seriously: Foran discovers a cap on a nitric acid tank that's been jarred loose and is leaking, yet despite having been warned about how nasty and corrosive the stuff is, he tightens it with his bare hand? Don't truckers who transport hazardous cargo have toolboxes, maybe with a pipe wrench or even some heavy-duty rubber gloves?

The boys encounter their next big challenge when the brakes fail on an oncoming school bus -- yet it still manages to negotiate several hairpin turns as it barrels down a steep mountain road. Just in the nick of time, the skilled and courageous drivers pull their trucks off the road. Whew!

Then the brakes fail on one of the trucks, but Keith wrastles it down from on top of a mountain. Wotta man! And no one will leave their seats during the protracted towing sequence.

Don't get me wrong: I admire Brian Keith as an actor. That still doesn't make the way this ends any easier to take. I wanted to go all Elvis on the TV screen, for the blatant thumb-in-the-eye they give to the original.

But if you have some time to kill and this is your only option versus, say, a documentary on antique Serbo-Croatian mustache cups, hey, go for it.

Second in Ivan Tors Productions' "Office of Scientific Investigation" (O.S.I.) trilogy, "Riders to the Stars" belongs to that sf sub-genre of straightforward space exploration epic -- no ray guns and bug-eyed monsters allowed. Which is no doubt why I found it so boring, when I caught it on the afternoon Big Show back in the 1960s.

Thanks to TCM, I've had a chance to see it again, and while it's undeniably leisurely-paced in parts and suffers from a tragically inadequate effects budget, it's still a far better film than I remembered. However, much of my appreciation comes from the fact that it tickles my nostalgia nerve and has some nifty stock footage from the early days of America's space program, which at the time mostly consisted of shooting off captured V-2s out at White Sands. So viewers who don't have the fond memories of and/or historical interest in this era of the Space Age will probably find this pretty dull stuff.

The writer -- Curt Siodmak -- deserves high marks for doing his research on the subject, thereby making the section of the film depicting the painstaking selection process and rigorous training of our trio of astronauts remarkably prescient at times. The science behind their dangerous mission isn't so well-thought-out, but it provides for some minor thrills as the astronauts attempt to chase down and retrieve a meteor from low Earth orbit.

Worth watching, especially if you consider it as a companion film and precursor to "Gog", the third and final entry in the O.S.I. series.

This is in fact an unusual Western for its time, or for that matter, any other. I have to give the makers high marks for original thinking and a certain audacity for transplanting the 1941 film version of Jack London's famous story from its original salty environs to the bleak Southwestern desert, in this often scene-for-scene remake.

Instead of a seal-hunting ship crewed by the scum of the sea, this time the action takes place at a mine worked by outcasts and fugitives from the law, kept in line by the brutal discipline of the owner, thoroughly detestable "Boss" Kruger (Raymond Massey) and his henchmen. All the characters from the 1941 movie are here, with minor changes, even down to the disgraced alcoholic judge who fills the same role as the ship's doctor in the previous film.

There are some worthwhile things about this version, including the Technicolor desert scenery and performances which range from at least adequate to quite good. But any viewer who's familiar with 1941's "The Sea Wolf" will find themselves making unfavorable comparisons. The director, while certainly competent, is no Michael Curtiz, and Dane Clark and Raymond Massey -- although fine actors in their own right -- just aren't a John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson. Clark lacks Garfield's raw presence,and Massey never displayed the kind of edge Robinson could bring to a dramatic role.

However, Ruth Roman is a fairly passable substitute for Ida Lupino. Robert Douglas ("The Fountainhead", "King Richard and the Crusaders", "The Prisoner of Zenda") gets a rare break from his typical personification of a slimy, aristocratic villain when he recreates Alexander Knox's character from the 1941 film, but the script never allows him to develop the more complex relationship with Kruger that his counterpart had with "Wolf" Larsen.

Which I think gets to the heart of what went wrong here: Despite its 77-minute running time, "Barricade" is nonetheless rather slow-paced and talky for a Western. But compared to "The Sea Wolf" -- which clocked in at 90 minutes, not a one of them wasted -- the characters aren't given enough time to become fully fleshed-out. Particularly Kruger, who as a petty Lucifer ruling his own private Hell should have a certain shabby yet tragic magnificence to counterpoint his ruthless thuggery.

I still recommend "Barricade" as worth a viewing, even if this abbreviated remake doesn't quite measure up to the original.

This is an almost unbearably tragic story, in my opinion one of the very darkest in the entire hour-long series.

'Driver' Arthur (Robert Loggia) has just returned from military service, bringing home with him his young Asian wife, Mickey (Pilar Seurat) and some severe psychological problems.

To pay off the debt on the family farm, he takes a job in the local sawmill. Stopping off one evening at the local tavern for a drink after work, Driver runs into an old flame, Betty Rose (Carmen Phillips), who clearly wants to turn the heat up again. He tells her he's married now, that it's all over between them, but Betty Rose isn't about to let him go. She follows Driver as he walks home through the woods, confronts him and swears she'll destroy his marriage. Big mistake: In a sudden explosion of insane rage Driver kills her, just a few hundred yards from the lonely farmhouse where Mickey waits for him, worried because he's usually not this late coming home from work.

And because he tries to hide what he's done, Driver ends up destroying everything he holds most dear.

What makes this episode truly poignant are Loggia's and Seurat's performances. Even though he's just committed a brutal murder, Driver's love for Mickey and desire to protect her are evident. But his good intentions are no match for his rising panic, as the lies he tells her quickly fall apart. Ms. Seurat invests her character with marvelous dignity and a sweet vulnerability; she's a stranger in a strange land, a woman very much in love with her husband, whose only friends are the little dog who's her constant companion, the storekeeper Mrs. McCleod (Kathleen Freeman) and Mrs. McCleod's mute, half-wild daughter, Ruby (Sondra Blake).

And of course, the original Bernard Herrmann score elevates this story to a whole new level. I know I'm getting kind of monotonous about this in these reviews, but there is simply no composer remotely comparable to him working in this medium nowadays. For my taste, the music he wrote for these episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour embody some of his best work, and this is no exception, evoking shades of mood and moments of emotional intensity which perfectly complement both the horror and the terrible pathos of this prime slice of Appalachian Gothic.