Category Archives: Reviews
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
Robert Lewis Stevenson was one of those rare good writers lucky enough to be famous in his own time. I may not like Treasure Island but a lot of people do and even more did at the time of its original publication. They got Stevenson over his inevitable Sophomore Slump (a Romance named Prince Otto that not even English teachers read anymore) and on to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Among English language horror classics it has the benefit of being short and Stevenson’s Presbyterian countryman immediately seized on it for a parable for sin, full stop. Using it in sermons as A Cautionary Tale without the slightest of Spoiler Warnings helped to make the book a best seller. Stage adaptions sprang up immediately, becoming their own worldwide sensation. At least five film versions preceded this one, two of which are lost to us by the time of this writing.
So why ignore the three we have in favor of 1920’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Well, because this is the one I own. And it’s the one with John Barrymore in the title role(s). His name recognition alone should make up for everything…including the film’s problems. Great casting has carried it down through the decades but it shares more with Thomas Russell Sullivan’s stage adaption than with its Stevenson’s novel. Making this a prime example of how Adaption Decay bowdlerized good stories long before the dawn of cinema, and will probably continue to do so until the sun goes nova. So down your mysterious potion of choice, people. This will probably get depressing. Continue reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
The Traumatic Cinematic Show: Ep. 54 – Groundhog Day
A holiday so insignificant that most people forget when it even is but that didn’t stop the @TCPodcastCrew from featuring it for an episode. The guys discuss one of Bill Murray’s best films so tune in and find out if any of the guys see their shadow or if an early spring is on it’s way.
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Groundhog Day (1993)
Some sci-fi films are aggressively marketed as such with stirring trailers and boastful news stories about how good they are, how much they cost, or some conflation of the two. Others sneak into the movie dead zone of early February, marketed as comedies from the team that brought you Ghostbusters and Caddyshack. Groundhog Day‘s not generally regarded as a sci-fi movie, but it introduced more people to the idea of stable temporal loops than anything outside of Star Trek. Sci-fi fans should totally claim it while the claiming’s good. Comedy fans (assuming such people still exist) don’t seem to be using it.
Anyway, it’s a classic that hasn’t aged a day in the years since its release…apart from a minor point about long distance telephone lines sure to confuse anyone would can’t do research or remember the early 1990s. Technical stuff aside, Groundhog Day‘s still a frighteningly accurate portrait modern ennui and its dozens, if not hundreds (or three hundred millions) of permutations. It’s not as “funny” as some entries on the resumes of its director or its headliner, but it is more human. We would also accept “humane” as a descriptor, since the movie goes out of its way to ground its Out There, SF ideas in the simplest terms. Every age needs that. Everyone needs a Groundhog Day.
Not that I’m advocating everyone go out and start acting as if there were no tomorrow. That would be silly. That’s at least half the reason Goundhog Day exists. It’s a very silly film, knows this, and uses that as a stalking horse. We go in thinking this is another Bill Murray vehicle, an industrial strength delivery system for his jokes. Inevitably, we lower our emotional defenses, allowing the movie to sucker punch us by making us feel something, the shady bastard. What gave it the right? Continue reading Groundhog Day (1993)
Cosmopolis (2012)
This Island Earth (1955)
…is another sci-fi film eclipsed in fame by a fragment of it’s own iconography. “Everyone” “knows” the image to your right; you’ll have “seen” it in a thousand places. Possibly a thousand-thousand if you go to any decent number of sci-fi conventions. But can you name that man-in-suit monster without resort to Wikipedia? I couldn’t, until I watched the film again for the first time in far too long…and remembered why it’d been so long in the first place. I’ll take it over Lady and the Tramp or fucking Oklahoma! any day, but as paragons of its era go, it’s no Day the Earth Stood Still. Or Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Technical movie nerds remember it primarily as one of the last films to use three-strip Technicolor, but as far as technicolor SF goes, War of the Worlds will give you more bang for your buck (literally). So what is it about This Island Earth that I like so much? All the pretty, pretty colors? Am I that shallow?
Cameras that printed color on one strip of film were available as early as 1941, which is where Ken Burns found all that color battlefield footage from World War II. If you watched The War you probably noticed how grainy and soft-focus everything looked. It took almost fifteen years to refine that out of the process, but it happened. That’s why movies from before 1954 look the way they do – all the colors are brighter – they “pop” at you – and I’m willing to bet that was this movie’s primary selling point. It looks, in almost every detail, like a parade of pulp magazine covers. Continue reading This Island Earth (1955)
Django Unchained (2012)
It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)
Columbia Pictures should give us all hope that we can rise above our station in life. This little Poverty Row studio, which made a name for itself producing comedy shorts in the 30s (including The Three Stooges’ most famous works) had, by the mid-50s, replaced RKO as a member of the Big Studios Club. With everything from Superman cartoons to Marlon Brando Oscar winners in their catalog, its seems only natural Columbia would try to field a giant monster movie for 1955.
You have to give them credit for going about it the right way – hiring two of Them!‘s writers and a man (now) more famous than either of ’em – the stop-motion animator behind The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Ray Harryhausen. If this film’s remembered for anything, it’s remembered for Harryhausen’s effects. This is the mid-point between his career-defining turn in Beast and the next year’s State of the Art showcase, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. But Art doesn’t come cheap, so I shouldn’t be surprised all of Harryhausen’s contribution’s are crammed into the film’s last 15 minutes. I was. Unpleasantly so. But I shouldn’t have been.
It Came from Beneath the Sea fired its first warning shot right off, beginning with a Bad Movie Double Down: droning narration played over military stock footage. It’s 1955, after all, one year after the successful launch of the U.S. Navy’s first nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus. This is meant to make the move Relevant to a distracted audience who may not give a crap about anything outside their pathetic little lives. It ends up pointing towards a theme that might’ve ameliorated the many failings of this film, had anyone cared to play that theme out. As Our Humble Narrator says,
“The mind of man had thought of everything – except that which was beyond his comprehension!” Continue reading It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)