Scarletfire-1

This one looked cool, had a lot of famous actors in it, but was marred by the disjointed storyline. Little explanation is given of who these people are and what is going on till a flashback almost an hour into a movie that is less than 90 minutes long.

It could have been a lot better.

Ordinarily I'd say the movie was good, but seeing it in May2020 made me feel it was really good. So much happens in this that is much like what is happening currently with COVID-19. It even has Sanjay Gupta playing himself being interviewed on TV, in conversations that are eerily similar to the ones we have all seen him do on CNN.

Check it out!

Knowing that, why would anyone waste their time with it?

I was hoping I'd enjoy this film, but I gave up after a while. It is just so sloooow that I couldn't get pad about 30 minutes o fit. I put it on fast-forward to see if things ever got better, but they didn't.

I'm sure the people who made it put in an incredible effort, but if you can't even enjoy watching the results, what's the point?

No explanation is ever given of the title and the ending makes no sense. I am not sure what more to say about this one.

This is a must see documentary on how fundamentalist Christians indoctrinate children into all sorts of nutty ideas and actions

Viewing this is very eye opening. For the first time you will understand that there really are people who think this way.

The subject matter is totally repulsive. I would compare this to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens (1935). Both are fantastic documentaries which give you insight into the perspectives and beliefs of the brainwashed.

This movie is well done and resents an amazing story of a hunter, his son and a massive and very powerful tiger. The great beast lives on a mountain and is almost ghostlike and very smart.

I usually don't watch foreign films w/ subtitles, but this one is an exceptional exception! The production values and photography are amazing.

Pay attention to what sections of the film are flashbacks and keep in mind the parallels between the life of the hunter and his family - and the life of the tiger and his.

Check it out - you will be glad you did.

The sequel is quite different than the first in the series. It is in B&W and is completely unflinching in its depiction of the inhumane treatment the main character issues to his victims. There is a level of shock, and yes revulsion, that you experience as you watch it that would be difficult to duplicate. You do need to be able to completely divorce yourself from what happens in a movie and in reality because what is depicted is nothing but the behaviour of someone who is truly mentally ill.

In its own peculiar way, it is a masterpiece - one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema. Very few people will be able to sit through it, yet one can only give it the highest recommendation to those who feel they are up to the challenge.

I remember watching TV in the early 1970's and seeing this silent comedy where an out of control car is driving around the block several times. In it are a girl who's clothes are coming off and some older guys. At one point they yell out of the car and the line shown on the title card is "she's stripped". The line "she's stripped" was funny because of the double meaning - the girl in the car and also the transmission of the car being stripped explaining why its out of control.

I thought it might have been one of Robert Youngson's compilations. I then found out it was part of "Four Clowns" (1970). So cool to find it at last after 40 years!

After doing some checking of old newspaper listings, this was on in February and March of 1974

I can now say I've seen every single Republic serial!

There really wasn't much plot to this serial - I can't even remember what it was that the bad guys were trying to do or why they were bad. Thats OK, because its a serial with nonstop action that never lets up.

Everyone in this serial seemed to have a lot of barrels lying around with "Explosives" or "Powder" written on the side. You know what that means! :-) There are some renegade Indians that are told one of the most outrageous lines I've heard in a serial: "Remember, white people must die". The fights seemed extra long in this serial as compared to other Republics. It contains that sequence where the wagon with the explosives goes off as it rolls down a path along a cliff side. Its contains the locked in the jail cell while the jail is on fire sequence. It also has two times where the pin comes out of that swivel thing on the front of a wagon so it ends up rolling off the edge of a cliff. I mean where you see it approach the edge and go over from the point of view of someone in the wagon. There's a cave with a fire pit and more too!

I can only hope that it will one day be available for home viewing.

I have always a vague memory of a movie I saw one afternoon back in the early 1970's when I was a little kid. I've been wondering for years what the name of it was and I finally found out what it was.

The movie was about this guy who had this magic coin that would make everything stop or move very slowly. I recalled a scene with him sitting in a bathtub and a scene where someone is falling off the roof of a building, but falls very slowly because of the magic coin. I also had a vague memory of someone firing a gun, but the bullet being stopped in mid-air by the coin.

Somehow I came across some info on IMDb for a William Castle film called Zotz! and realized that I had found it at last. I got a copy of it and watched it again after about 30 years. One thing that I had forgotten about completely was the scene where he is riding the bike with that bracket on the handlebars for reading a book. Strange how a long closed section of your memory banks can be reopened again years later.

Zotz! wasn't as good as I'd hoped. I can see how a little kid might think it was fun, but it didn't really hold up that well for an adult. Castle's movie called "13 Ghosts" on the other hand is one that can be enjoyed by kids and adults as well.

I found this movie to be very boring. Not sure what people could possibly see in it. I went with some friends who wanted to see it the 1st day it was released in the theaters. The whole first hour was just about this guy setting up a pots and pans factory. I was ready to just walk out at that point, but my friends wanted to stay so I was stuck there watching the rest of this.

I've seen many documentaries on A&E, History Channel, etc on the holocaust and I guess I just presumed that everyone else had too. Apparently a lot of people never have, never read about it in school or anything either. After it was over, these people in the theater were all sitting there like they were stunned or something. Like they just had no idea that stuff like that happened during WWII. I was thinking to myself "lets just get the heck out of here".

If you never get drawn into a movie at the beginning, it can sometimes be too late - no matter if it gets better later on you can just lose any interest in it.

I was profoundly disappointed in this film. It is 3 hour and 40+ minutes long and not much of anything happens in it. People just sit on the floor in various rooms and say things like what are we going to do, what does so and so think, I'm not sure, maybe we should ask someone else, I don't know, do you know, I'm so confused, etc. This goes on ad nauseum literally for hours.

Kenji Mizoguchi was a 1st class director who made such classics as Sansho he Bailiff and Tales of Ugetsu. Don't don't blame him for this one - he was supposedly commissioned by the Japanese government to make this.

Anju to zushio-maru (1961) is a very interesting children's animated version of the classic Japanese folk tale known as "Sansho the Bailiff". The first film version was Kenji Mizoguchi's classic Sansho Dayu (1954), based on the short story written by Ogai Mori.

It contains some songs sung by the characters. There are talking animals that follow Zushio and Anju around also. The storyline is a bit different than the 1954 film. The thing that got Zushio's dad in trouble was a dispute over hunting rights on land surrounding their home. Another official started a big forest fire out of spite and blamed him for it - that's why he is exiled. Sansho has several sons, including one who is very cruel and another who is very kind and spiritual. The rest of the main story details are fairly similar to the 1954 film. Although it is clearly a children's film, it was still entertaining. If you like the original film, you will find it interesting to watch another telling of this classic story.

The English language version of Anju to zushio-maru is titled "The Littlest Warrior". It runs for 70 minutes, while the complete Japanese version runs for 83 minutes.

Back in the late 1970's I saw a movie on late night TV that was really creepy. It has stuck in my mind for almost 30 years. I have been trying to find out what the name of it was and see it again for a long time. It was about a doctor that had testified in a trial years earlier and sent this creepy guy to prison. Now that he's out of prison he wants to get revenge on the doctor and proceeds to torment him and his family.

A few years later I watched a movie I'd never heard of before called Cape Fear, which was made in the early 1960's. Strangely enough it had the same exact storyline as that movie that had been haunting me. Obviously Cape Fear was the original and the one from the late 70s was a remake.

In the early 1990s I heard they were making another remake of Cape Fear. Maybe I'd finally find out something about my mystery film? With all the hoopla about the second remake, I never saw any mention of the first one from the 1970s. I realized that the film I saw was probably very obscure and was probably a made for TV movie.

Eventually I got on the internet and found out about IMDb. Surely I could finally find out about that creepy movie that I saw so many years ago. I looked up Cape Fear and only the remake from the early 1990s was listed. That seemed really strange, because Cape Fear was a well known film and I thought some movie buff would have already put a connection to the remake I saw under "Movie Connections". No such luck.

A few years ago I was looking through the catalog of a company that sold rare VHS tapes and I read the description for something called "Force of Evil". I realized at once that I'd found it! This was that movie that I had been searching for, for almost 30 years. I got on IMDb again and saw that it was a made for TV movie as I had thought. Interestingly enough it was a Quinn Martin production and was narrated by William Conrad. That made sense as I recalled the distinctive narration it had when I originally saw it. It starred Lloyd Bridges and even had one of the Brady Bunch girls in it - Eve Plumb.

I managed to get a copy on VHS and re-watch it again at last. It was as cool as I had remembered it. It does indeed have virtually the same exact storyline as Cape Fear, even down to the houseboat near the end.

So cool to know the name and see it again after all those years!

**Warning** This Comment contains Spoilers

When I was about 7 years old in the late 60's or perhaps 1970-71 there was an old movie on television that sticks in my mind. I probably watched it after falling asleep on the couch and waking up in the middle of the night. I don't think I saw the beginning and didn't ever know the name of it.

It had to do with a guy that has an affair on his wife and near the end he gets into a terrible car accident. I remembered this scene after the accident where the father is all bandaged (almost like in the invisible man movies) - and he has hospital bedside conversation with his son. He may have told his son to pass along a message that he still loved the girl he had the affair with.

I saw this on a local station in Rochester, NY as part of a series hosted by local news reporter Joel Loy called "Unforgettable Movies" or something like that. So I was thinking that this might be a somewhat famous film. I thought it was probably from the 1940's, though it could have been from the 50's or early 1960's.

Being only about 7 years old, I was used to seeing cartoons, TV shows, and movies with happy endings. But this was a movie where everything went bad and had a really sad ending. I'd never seen anything like that before and it was creepy - very disturbing. It left me almost as stunned as the old Vincent Price movie House On Haunted Hill once did. That one scared the heck out of me – I had a few nightmares because of it. Little kids can have a very different perspective on things. Another factor is that I watched this movie in B&W, since we never got a color TV set till about 1973.

There was a group of movies that I remembered from my childhood that I didn't know the name of and always wanted to find out the titles and see them again. This particular one always stuck in my mind more than the others. Whenever I thought of it, I got a cold chill. It still scared me after all those years. It was nagging at me, but I didn't know how I could possibly track it down based on my vague memories. In 2004 this film came to mind again and I realized that it probably was a relatively well known film. There would probably be some film buffs that could identify it or give some suggestions based on a description. I posted what I could recall about it on the IMDb Classic Film message board and quickly received a couple replies suggesting it may have been Back Street (1961). I got a copy of it on VHS and watched it. Sure enough, Back Street was the movie I saw that late night so many years ago.

My memories were a bit different than the video - in my memory of the accident the car enters the screen from the left and hits a tree or something in the middle of the screen and ends up in a heap. I do remember actually seeing the car hit. That picture is so clear in my mind that I was a surprised not to see it on the videotape. My memory of the hospital scene was very accurate, but I remembered the father's head being all bandaged up. I noticed when watching the videotape that his head was not bandaged. He was dressed in white as he lay on the bed and looked almost like he was wrapped in sheets. Maybe that is the cause for the confusion? Sometimes 34-year-old memories of late night TV don't exactly match up.

My current evaluation after watching it is that Back Street is a classic of sorts, yet it's way too much of an old-fashioned romantic chick flick type movie. The production standards are top notch and it just looks really good, yet I can't rate it higher than maybe a 6 or so. The storyline and the tragedy in it are what make this one stand out for me. They make it more realistic, because that's how life can go sometimes. People are drunks, spiteful, etc as the wife was in this film. She was a nasty drunk tramp who fooled around on her husband with no apologies. The line "its fun for them and fun for me too" showed just how selfish she was. Didn't seem to care about her kids much either.

I do think that Back Street contains a kernel of a great storyline and that it could be remade as a new movie. I would really play up the total tragedy aspect - have the daughter also die in the car crash for instance. Add in 3 or 4 more things like that. Make it so you are just sitting there totally stunned - thinking to yourself "Oh wow - this is just awful! How could all these bad things happen to one person?" Something *way* beyond any weepy tearjerker. I'd reduce the hokey romance aspects, so it's not too much of a chick flick. I would like to see something that would recreate that feeling of total dread and horrible tragedy that I felt when first watching it years ago. I saw Eraserhead at a midnight showing while I was in college. The feeling that I had when I left the theater would be what I'd try to recreate - I needed a couple aspirin after watching that one.

This film is very special to me. About 30 years ago I saw the beginning of it on TV. I was only able to watch the first half of it. I never saw the ending and didn't know the name of the movie. It was always nagging at me. I finally determined to find out what it was. I did searches on various possible spellings of the character "Zushio" till I found it. Yes! At last I knew what the film was called. I would have never guessed "Sansho The Bailiff". I did not recall whatsoever the bailiff character or his name.

I managed to get a copy of it recently and re-watched it. Its a really well done movie. SO cool to see the ending after all these years. I can say that this is one of the best films I've ever seen.

I've always liked the spy and detective type of serials more than the westerns - and this one is a good example of why. Production standards were quite good and it had all the usual serial excitement, fights, and cliffhangers. Lon Chaney Jr. plays a small part as one of the bad guy's heavies. The crown jewels of Belgravia are worth millions, and are sought by the crooks. Secret Agent X-9 is out to stop their nefarious plans!

This particular title was unavailable until recently. The film print that was used for the DVD is extremely sharp and clear. Its refreshing to see a serial this old and realize that they all looked this good when first shown in the theaters. Its a shame that more of the cliffhangers aren't available in this quality.

Batman is not technically as "good" as other serials such as most Republics, but I do like it better and enjoy it more than most others. Sure it is too long in the middle with 15 chapters and all, but there is just something about it that really appeals to me.

First of all it is Batman. Second, it just drips with atmosphere. All of the scenes in Daka's hideout are done so well that I can hardly imagine them being improved on. There is a darkened smoky atmosphere to the hideout with its walls covered with Japanese paintings and designs. Can anyone possibly think of a better way to have that set look? The theme music and the scraping sound heard when the door to the hideout opens are very distinctive - though minor elements of the serial, they add incredibly to the sum total of my evaluation.

J. Carrol Naish's portrayal of Dr. Daka is amongst the best acting ever done on film. The character and his dialog are just so fitting as the epitome of a villainous "jap" spy. Credit needs to go to the scriptwriters for dreaming it all up and to Naish for the brilliant execution of it. His lines and the trance like expression on his face as he talks about the emperor being the "heavenly ruler and prince of the rising sun" and freeing the "enslaved people of America" are just unbeatable acting.

Some of Daka's underlings are "zombies". They wear a radio headset receiver which has a wire connected to their spine so he can control them. Sure - that makes sense. This is the best example of serial logic and science I've ever seen. Its the perfect thing to describe to people in order to explain how things work in serials.

Of course Daka's scientific devices are powered by radium! Is it just me or do a lot of super scientific devices in serials run on radium? Saying its powered by radium somehow makes it all make sense.

Daka and Emperor Ming are the two ultimate serial villains. Sure there are some others that were really cool, but no one really even come close to them.

Nuff said!

I was hoping that Pulp would be a interesting movie, but was profoundly disappointed.

Pulp has very little storyline, and what there is never holds your interest. It was a real struggle to keep watching it. When its over you say to you self "huh? that's it?!?". This is one where you think after watching it - why did they ever bother?

Its too bad since Michael Caine is a good actor. I was also hoping to see the great Lizabeth Scott in this, but she only appears on screen for a total of perhaps one minute. Scott is one of the all time great film noir femme fatale girls and this was her last film.

Oh well...

Back in the 1970's, showing monster movies on Saturday afternoons was a tradition on many local TV stations. In Rochester, NY they always began at 2:00 PM.

I have always had a vague memory of a horror movie they used to show ever so often on those Saturday afternoons. I only remembered a few bits of it, but it was a movie that really gave me the creeps. It seriously spooked me out.

I just remembered a woman is driving her car in a rural area, getting lost, and ending up being kidnapped. This guy holds her captive in an underground cavern - where he also keeps some sort of monster. The guy gives the girl a tray with a silver lid on it - obviously there is supposed to be some food on it. But when she lifts the lid off, there is just a dead mouse on the plate! It as just like that scene in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)". I remember someone begging their captor to release them and saying something about doing it for science or the good of mankind. The evil captor just snickers.

After many years of wondering, I finally found out that it was called "'It's Alive!' (1969) (TV)" and that it was made by low-budget Texas based director Larry Buchanan. From reading all the commentary and reviews on it on IMDb and elsewhere, I had the feeling that it would be a real disappointment if I watched it again. Well I got it on DVD and sat back to see how accurate my memories were and to see how well it held up.

Oh wow was it cool! It does have a weak soundtrack, but the actual filming of it was very professionally done. The actors were all perfect in their roles. They didn't even seem to be acting, it was more like you are watching the events happen in front of you. I was surprised to see that Bill Thurman, the nutty reptile/monster keeper was the guy who played the coach in "Last Picture Show, The (1971)". The whole experience of watching it was a real blast from the past.

I rated this as an "8" in my IMDb voting. I know that many people will think that is way too high a rating for this film, but I was impressed by the effort that went into it and the results that were obtained when working on such a low budget. The storyline was so cool too, though I would have liked to have seen a better monster costume - and more of the monster too.

This will always have a special place in my movie memories - I would have never guessed that I'd ever find out what the title was, let alone have it on DVD.

Please check it out for yourself!

Fantastic film! Wow - this is really a treat. I can't believe that I discovered such a gem of a movie.

A pretty young girl traveling south to Florida meets a friendly older couple with an RV, after she has a flat at a rest stop. However she learns that things aren't as they seem and the couple gets a bit creepy after she spends some time on the road with them.

Everyone in it was just so perfect for their parts you just about believe that you are watching this happen in real life in front of you.

Newcomer Emily Grace did a fantastic job as the really cute, yet somewhat shy Alice. Emily gives you the feeling that you can understand what she is experiencing and you can see just how she got into the situation that develops in the film. I'm sure we'll be seeing Emily in more films in the future.

Contrary to what some others have said, the lighting and photography in this were just perfect. The editing was done well too - just the right way to put together images of the highway to give you the feeling that you are traveling along with the cast on their road trip.

I didn't see it on the big screen, but I can only urge everyone to go out and see it. More films like this are *exactly* what we need.

SF

The Seven Samurai suffers from several near fatal flaws that make watching it very tedious. Most foreign movies are so bad that this may be better by comparison, but its still a bad movie.

One of the most ridiculous things about it is the way many of the actors are wearing really obvious skin head wigs. They look so fake you can't help but but focus on them. Why not have the actors all shave their heads for a while during filming? I don't understand why they couldn't find some Japanese guys with shaved heads to act in the movie? Weren't there tons of people in Japan who already had their head's shaved like that? Why not just get them instead? Who knows? Nobody knows...

The whole thing about the villagers eating millet and guarding a bowl of rice like it was made of gold was just silly. These are farmers that are growing rice - why wouldn't they have tons of it? Another unanswerable question.

Why do the villagers need these Samurai anyways? Do they really need someone to teach them to sharpen some sticks and use them as spears against the bandits? The idea that they are oh so helpless and need the Samurai to protect them is the key to the whole movie - and its such a poor premise that you wonder why they made the film in the first place.

Perhaps its surprising that a movie of this length would be made in postwar Japan, but that's no reason to say its a really good movie. Anyone looking at it objectively will agree that it is not - not even close.

They really should have done a major rewrite to the script before going ahead with filming.

Strange Illusion is a movie I tried to watch, but just couldn't make it all the way through. It comes off as an extremely poor attempt at a Hitchcock type movie.

The storyline itself is kind of interesting, but several factors really overwhelm that and drag the movie down:

1) the bad acting of the lead character and his teenage friends 2) the unrealistic old fashioned gee-whiz dialogue 3) simplistic camerawork 4) inappropriate and dated music in a number of scenes

There were some scenes where the music was appropriate and added a lot of tension of the situation. However, too often you were subjected to some very annoying violin music that was not needed and detracted from the experience.

I gave it an honest try, but never bothered watching it all the way through. It really was that bad...

The Trail Of The Octopus is a silent 15 chapter cliffhanger serial starring Ben Wilson and Neva Gerber, released in October of 1919.

The production standards of the sets and the camerawork in this serial were top notch. There were a number of scenes that I would say were filmed with the best use of light and shadow I have ever seen. Visually, Octopus was fantastic, but they seemed to make the story up as they went along, with the plot and locations often changing suddenly in a completely different direction. This is the trail that is the subject of the title.

The storyline was rather complicated compared to the serials made by Republic or Columbia in the 1930?s through 1950?s. The location of the action changes from an unnamed city, to San Francisco, to the orient, to Paris France, back to the original city and then to San Francisco again.

This serial revolves around a group who are trying to obtain a professor's ancient talisman, for some nefarious reason, and the various murders, fights, chases, and cliffhangers that ensue. There are some really fantastic scenes where ghost like hands come out of walls and other creepy stuff - better than the best horror movies you have seen. There is a fight on a balcony in a rainstorm that is just amazing - some of the best camera and lighting work ever. There is another fight that starts in a room and then the lights go out. The combatants begin shooting at each other in the darkened room - and as each gunshot goes off we see where everyone is for an instant before it goes back to black. This is an effect much like a strobe light - but the flashing light from each gunshot only flickers on when triggers are pulled, with the actors seen in different places as they scramble about the room between gunshots. I have never seen anything like it before and thought that a scene like this has probably never been topped yet.

The exotic Mme. Zora Roularde, played by the excellent silent actress Marie Pavis, leads a group of devil worshiping kidnappers. The coven is shown looking rather evil in their satanic costumes. Especially chilling are the scenes that take place in their underground devil-worshiping chamber. I have never seen anything like that in a serial, or any old movie for that matter.

The scene eventually changes from the unnamed city, to San Francisco, and then to the orient (is this supposed to be China?) as hero Carter Holmes follows the trail to get kidnapped Ruth Stanhope and her father the professor back.

Carter manages to free Ruth, and the action then moves on to Paris France where the kidnappers have taken her father. In Paris the storyline takes a science fiction twist all of a sudden, as we encounter a mad scientist who uses a ray gun device to cause asteroids to strike the earth. We see the asteroids falling from the sky and wrecking havoc. Also in Paris, the bad guys try to cut the skin off the arm of the kidnapped professor. They want to do this so they will have the tattoos on his arm that supply further clues to the location of a set of daggers they are all trying to obtain. They fail in their nasty skin removal attempt and the professor is rescued by the Carter and reunited with his daughter Ruth.

The head back to America, where another sci-fi storyline pops up out of nowhere. The heroes battle a villain who has a replicator machine he uses to create numerous zombies that do his bidding. The automatons are shown walking out of his replicator machine, which is a big metal box in his mad scientist laboratory.

The search for that talisman winds down when the heroes finally obtain the complete set of daggers they have been looking for and retrieve the professor?s ancient talisman. When we finally get a chance to see the talisman, it seems like an afterthought.

The story then shifts to showing Carter and Ruth getting an award from the President for their efforts. The President states how thankful he is that they brought about the end of such a far reaching organization - this octopus of crime.

***** 5 Stars!