October 31, 2014:
(big inhale) Okay. So, yes, Tower of Terror isn't very good. And yes, the nominal star of this made-for-TV movie is Steve Guttenberg. But, again, I'll try to be positive:
A lot of this, like a LOT of it, was filmed at the attraction in Orlando. It's great to see close-ups of that setting, from angles we can't get to as guests.
Melora Hardin gets to sing in this, which she never got around to as Jan Levenson.
It's always nice to see Mike McShane in anything, even if his '97 appearance in this can't make up for his complete lack in involvement in the US Whose Line.
Um... well, it starts with "Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)" which is a great song.
It's great that this film, while not officially related to the Twilight Zone in any way, adapts every other thing about the attraction, including dropping our heroes in a modern-day freefalling elevator, and even the random assortment of 1939 victims, who are all major characters in this.
Okay, enough positivity. I've been rewatching the first season of Twilight Zone this month, in between movies, and the writing on that is so damned adult. I just wish this had been written so adults, ones with full attention spans and active intellects, could enjoy this movie as much as their children would.
Well, it could be worse. It could be The Country Bears.
(And just in case you don't click through to that Wikipedia link, here's a neat piece of trivia. The writer/director of this is now a YA author, and he's written the bellboy from this film into his series as a very minor character. That's pretty cool.)
October 31, 2014:
The Astro Zombies: Whoo boy, now THIS is a bad one. I've only seen one other Ted V. Mikels film (Girl in the Gold Boots, on MST3K), and it was just as bad, but much more depressing. This one isn't depressing, just boring.
What's that you say? How can a film with reanimated solar-powered, radio-controlled corpses be boring?
Well, John Carradine can explain the process to us (and his greasy assistant) in minute detail. The film was written by Wayne Rogers, later to become TV's Trapper John, who is apparently the world's biggest electronics nerd (he's on the board of a company that makes semiconductors). I'm not smart enough to know why the technology in the film doesn't work in real life, but the film really really really wants us to believe it has scientific credibility. (The scientific equipment in the film was apparently scrounged from a dump. At one point, a body is stored in a freezer which is clearly a grocery-store frozen-food bunker.)
Not only is the mad scientist really boring, this movie has the world's worst spy. We see Tura Satana (Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill!) interrogate two people. The first one, she only asks him "Who are you?" (and her henchman has JUST read his ID from his wallet) and shoots him before he can answer. The second time, she's trying to recruit Carradine to reanimate corpses for her country's army, and shoots him less than two minutes into the process, after he's agreed to do so.
Starting in 2008, Mikels made three, count 'em, three sequels to this!
I have two more films (good ones, at least) to talk about tomorrow.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
November 1, 2014:
Eyes Without A Face, on the other hand, is really good. It's poetic and gorgeous, and the emotions in it are heartfelt. After the constant explanations of Astro Zombies, the almost underwritten script of this film (at least, the translated subtitles were pretty spare) is a relief. With that said, the director called it a movie of "anguish," rather than a horror film, and there's a surgery scene which is pretty hard to watch (at the Edinburgh Film Festival showing, reportedly seven people fainted).
Remember in my review of Shadow of the Vampire, which I compared to Night Tide, when I said I love genre films made by fine artists? This is another one of those, I think.
And, oddly enough, the plot for this is so obvious and horror-movie-like: a mad scientist, spurned by his colleagues, operating on humans, just like in The Atomic Brain and Astro Zombies, and several hundred other films (most better than those two examples).
We have one more spooky movie to talk about, and it's a pure delight. See ya tonight, folks.
November 1, 2014:
I Married A Witch: Here's a delightful piece of fluff to round out my month of spooky movies. It's a screwball romantic farce that begins with the eponymous witch being burned. She puts a curse on her accuser, and condemns his descendants to marry the wrong women, for all time.
Okay, so it's a little sexist -- the "wrong" women are pretty much all shrewish and controlling, as we see in a quick montage of 270 years, bringing us to the 1940s.
When the witch and her father are released from their eternal imprisonment by an errant bolt of lightning, she almost immediately decides to continue tormenting the latest descendant of the pilgrim who had her burnt, but her plan goes awry.
In the end, everything turns out for the best, despite the witch's vengeful father (played by Cecil Calloway, who I'd just seen that same day in a Twilight Zone episode, "Elegy," in which he plays a creepy caretaker and host to three astronauts millions of miles from Earth).
I think Veronica Lake is maybe a little too kittenish, even in the first part of this movie, to be truly believable as a vengeance-bound bride of evil. But those were different times, and it's hard to completely switch tones in a movie only 73 minutes long. Overall, good fun, even though I never cared for Bewitched (which, for legal reasons, was not based on this film.)
[So these last two movies I watched in conjunction with Greg Proops' other podcast, The Greg Proops Film Club. You can find those episodes here and here. He's been promising the Young Frankenstein episode, which I'm really looking forward to.]
Thanks for reading these old capsule reviews. All new stuff coming up, including some Halloweenish TV episodes and more movies and even more candy!
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