Review: 'The 7th Voyage of Sinbad' Blu-ray set

In 1958, Ray Harryhausen stretched himself beyond pictures menaced by a single big octopus or space monster for a greater challenge and a huge leap into pure fantasy. With The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a whole menagerie of stop-motion creatures were required, and the master outdid himself with the film's towering cyclops, horned dragon, two-headed Roc, four-armed cobra lady, and swashbuckling skeleton. Perhaps the work wasn't quite a refined as it would be five years later in Jason and the Argonauts, and one skeleton is no substitute for a whole regiment of them, but with his first stop-motion-showcase mythological swashbuckler, Harryhausen virtually created a new genre of film that he and he alone would continue to master with Jason, Sinbad's two returns in the seventies, and Clash of the Titans.  If 7th is a bit primitive compared to those later entries, it is no less charming. 

Review: 'The Creature Chronicles: Exploring the Black Lagoon Trilogy'

The Creature from the Black Lagoon was made long enough ago that it is considered the final chapter of Universal’s monster movie golden age (by some folks, at least), but recently enough that most of its principal players were still alive for the Monster Kid age that continues to this day and hopefully will last well into the future. So unlike Dracula or Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon spawned a wealth of documentation about its making, as did its sequels Revenge of the Creature and The Creature Walks Among Us.

One of the highest-profile Monster Kids, Tom Weaver, conducted a heap of his own research to put together the lagoon-clogging The Creature Chronicles: Exploring the Black Lagoon Trilogy. His (and a clutch of guest contributors') gargantuan heap of cast-and-crew interviews, archive diving, and close attention to the films, themselves, makes this the definitive Gill Man document by an astoundingly long shot. Everything you’ve ever wondered about our beloved man-fish and his three movies—and probably a shitload of things that never even crossed your mind—are covered between its nearly 400 over-sized, hardbound, photo-splattered pages. Do you want to know the warts-and-all backgrounds of everyone involved in these films, including lecherous director Jack Arnold, beastly leading man John Agar, and Gill Man portrayer/right-wing nut job Tom Hennesy? They’re in here. Do you want to know who allegedly played the creature along with everyone officially identified? That’s here too. The weird promo campaign suggestions; the failed early story drafts; the daily production mishaps and triumphs; critical analyses; the long-teased but never produced remakes to which such names as John Landis, Peter Jackson, and Robert Rodriguez have been attached; and a really long introduction by Lagoon star Julie Adams are all here too. The only thing I thought was a bit underserved in The Creature Chronicles is the 3-D process, but in all honesty, I didn’t actually care that much about it. It’s just that this book is so exhaustive that when one of the films’ significant aspects isn’t explored from every possible angle, it sticks out a bit.

Weaver makes all the minutia readable with his smirking prose, and all of the films were produced under weird enough circumstances by wild enough crews that the whole damn thing will hold your attention regardless of your interest in Revenge and Walks (and if you’re not interested in them, shame on you). Really, this is both a book about particular movies and about the filmmaking process in general, so cinema professors may want to think about assigning The Creature Chronicles after boring their students with the usual Bordwell and Thompson textbooks.

Review: 'Michael Jackson: The Making of “Thriller”: 4 Days/1983'

Calling The Beatles pop’s all-time greatest band, Jimi Hendrix its all-time greatest guitarist, or “Thriller” its all-time greatest video isn’t terribly original. There’s still a reason such opinions are so persistent and pervasive: they’re true. “Thriller” may not be the greatest song—it’s not even the greatest song on Thriller—but a great video is equal parts striking music, visuals, and performance. “Thriller” married a singer/performer at his peak powers with visual artists John Landis and Rick Baker who’d just made the best horror film of the eighties, An American Werewolf in London. “Thriller” was a sheer “lightning in a bottle” moment.

We can’t get a super accurate representation of Michael Jackson’s gifts in Douglas Kirland’s new book Michael Jackson: The Making of “Thriller”: 4 Days/1983 since a book can’t move (though the moving-MJ hologram on the front cover is as close as it gets). The incredible visuals of Landis, and particularly, Baker are on full display though. The centerpiece of the book pores over the painstaking processes of Baker’s application of the iconic cat-man and zombie makeups. Yet it’s the small moments that really thrill: the nostalgia-defining shot of the eighties’ biggest star playing a Donkey Kong arcade game, Landis drinking a Tab and showing his star how to be a scary monster, and some shots of Jackson in cat makeup without his contact lenses that provide a peek at the man behind the monster. Most arresting of all is a sequence devoted to the removal of the zombie makeup. It looks really, really painful. Then in the final shot of the sequence, Jackson looks like he has simply shaken off the pain. His is the face of a true pro.

The introduction by journalist Nancy Griffin, who wrote a far more extensive and revealing piece on the video-shoot for Vanity Fair in 2010, and her interview with on-set photographer Kirkland are nice, but a video with such a complex production and far-reaching history could have used more text. However, Griffin and Kirkland are determined to keep the focus on the photos and can’t be blamed for allowing such unforgettable images to howl for themselves.

Review: The Criterion Edition of ‘Island of Lost Souls’

Ask a classic monster fanatic what the most unjustly unavailable movie is and that nut would likely respond, “Island of Lost Souls.” Why Erle C. Kenton’s brilliant 1932 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau has been out of print for so long has never been satisfactorily answered. Fortunately, that question is no longer relevant since Criterion has now given this overdue movie its due. We can finally revel in Charles Laughton’s dastardly portrayal of sadistic vivisectionist/mad scientist Moreau and Bela Lugosi’s desperate Sayer of the Law (“Are we not men?!?”) and Kathleen Burke’s sexy, tragic Lota the Panther Woman and Kenton’s enthralling atmosphere and pre-code edginess on DVD and Blu-ray any time we please.

Criterion’s transfer is a composite of several sources of varying quality. The restoration is not immediately striking because the film is front-loaded with the rougher bits. The daylight scenes that dominate the beginning of the film are gauzy, giving the false impression of weak images. The actors almost seem to glow. Once the picture moves into the shadowy, higher-contrast nighttime scenes that dominate it, the restoration looks very, very good. The composite also includes passages of dialogue censored since the film’s original release. They most likely include Moreau’s “Do you know what it means to feel like God?” which closely resembles a similarly censored line from Whale’s Frankenstein.

We get an audio commentary from the charming horror historian Gregory Mank and four very different video commentaries. The most traditional is a scholarly analysis by David Skal, our best monster movie documentarian and author of the absolutely essential Monster Show. He discusses Wells’s novel and the film’s themes and sources, the most-revelatory suggestion being that Laughton may have based his Moreau on Oscar Wilde. I’m not convinced of his claim that the film reflects co-screenwriter Philip Wylie’s misogyny, though. Both female characters are sympathetic and both are responsible for rescuing the men. Only villainous Moreau expresses any contempt for women. Compared to something like King Kong, Lost Souls is practically progressive.

Next up is a fun roundtable with John Landis, Rick Baker, and Bob Burns, who geek out about the performances, makeup, and atmosphere. Burns also gets off the best comment on the DVD when Landis asks him why he likes Kenton’s schlocky House of Frankenstein. Burns responds, “It has Frankenstein and the Wolf Man.” Hear, hear.

We also get a talk with director Richard Stanley, who was let go from the disastrous 1996 adaptation starring Marlon Brando and completed by John Frankenheimer. Stanley goes in depth about Wells but is fairly dismissive of all the film versions and could have provided more information about his ousting from his own project.

The oddest extra in the bunch is a discussion with Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale of Devo, who talk about the film’s influence on their image, philosophy, and songs (“Are we not men? We are Devo”). The talk leads them on some fascinating tangents about Ohio horror host Ghoulardi, who’s show introduced the guys to the movie, and the infamous Kent State protest/cop-shooting-spree that inspired Neil Young’s “Ohio”. Also included is a valuable Devo short film from 1976, which is basically an edit of music videos for “Secret Agent Man” and “Jocko Homo” that doesn’t quite look like the union of German Expressionism and McDonald’s commercials the guys intended it to be.

Review: John Landis's 'Monsters in the Movies'

John Landis made terrific monster movies such as An American Werewolf in London and Innocent Blood by not taking the genre very seriously. However, Monsters in the Movies: 100 Years of Cinematic Nightmares proves he is nothing less than awestruck by monster movies. You will be too as you peruse the spectacular array of photos he collects in this new coffee table book.

The filmmaker divides the book into the various familiar categories to provide brief overviews of vampires, werewolves, mummies, space monsters, and the rest before inundating readers with the photos that are its reason for existing. A fabulous double-page, behind-the-scenes shot of the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth. A creepily eroticized picture of little Linda Blair in her demon makeup that says as much about the subtext of The Exorcist as any extended analysis. An ultra-rare image from the 1863 photomontage “Henry Robin and the Specter.” From the classics to the cheap-o exploiters, the most ancient relics to the most recent CGI pot boilers. Some 1,000 films are represented in this gorgeous, gorgeous book.

Landis’s text initially seems disappointing. His opening chapters on vampires and werewolves are primers that will reveal nothing to faithful horror hounds and lack the cheeky, sometimes curmudgeonly, irreverence that has made him such a welcome talking head in horror documentaries. But he quickly loosens up to crack wise about the Resident Evil movies (“You could take random scenes from each of these films and cut them together and I don’t think anyone would notice”), the unseen genitals in Zemeckis’s Beowulf, and other flicks that don’t quite rise to his standards.

Landis’s writing gets even more intriguing when he allows his personal politics to come into play, as when discussing the conservative nature of mad scientist films and the need to suspend his own atheism to appreciate The Exorcist. Best of all are his interviews with Christopher Lee, Joe Dante, David Cronenberg, Sam Raimi, Guillermo Del Toro, Ray Harryhausen, Rick Baker, and John Carpenter. Because he’s on chummy terms with these various actors and filmmakers, the conversations are casual and provocative. He gives Cronenberg a hilariously hard time regarding the unintended reactionary nature of his films. Someone needs to give Landis his own talk show!

October 6, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #9

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty-palm panic. In this ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I've been reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

Case Study #9: The prologue of Twilight Zone: The Movie

In keeping with the ongoing Twilight Zone 50th Anniversary festivities here at Psychobabble, I’m going to delve into one of the more embarrassing installments of “Things That Scare Me.” “Embarrassing?” you ask. “But I too found the opening sequence of Twilight Zone: The Movie terrifying when I was five-years old!” OK. Mistake number one: I was not five-years old when I saw Twilight Zone: The Movie. I was nine or ten, which is well out of the range of acceptability. I mean, this sequence is surely one of the better things in the very hit-and-miss big screen adaptation of Rod Serling’s great series (George Miller’s remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”? Hit! Steven Spielberg’s remake of “Kick the Can”? Great big stinking miss!). But scary? I don’t know. Judge for yourself with your jaded, 21st century eyes.

The scariest thing about this is the build up: Dan Aykroyd asking Albert Brooks if he wants to “see something reeeeally scary.” Nice establishment of suspense, director John Landis! Too bad you didn’t bring a similarly deft hand to your lame full-length segment in the film, which finds racist Vic Morrow trotting through history as the victim of various violent bigots (I’m not getting into the whole death controversy thing here, though). The problem is that the pay-off is weak: Aykroyd turns into a demon, growls like a cougar, and strangles Brooks. Thud. Still, many people profess to having been scared by this scene as kids, so perhaps I shouldn’t flagellate myself too much.

But then again, maybe I should. And this brings us to mistake number two: I wasn’t actually scared by watching this scene. You see, my mother was the one who watched it. I asked her what happened in the movie, and she began to explain this opening sequence in intricate detail. Once she got to the “You wanna see something really scary” part, my terror had apparently become so palpable that she halted the story, perhaps out of concern that I might piss the bed that night. But that was a bad move on her part, as my overactive nine-year old imagination commenced completing this scene with every horrible horror it could conjure. Had she simply said “Akyroyd turns into a cougar monster and throttles Albert Brooks,” I think I would have slept quite soundly that night. Instead, I had the fear something awful.

The Verdict: Obviously, I lose considerable points for being frightened of something I hadn’t actually seen. But let’s not underestimate the power of oral-storytelling, which utilizes the listener’s imagination in a way that no film could (The Blair Witch Project excluded). The fact that my mother didn’t finish telling me what happened at the beginning of Twilight Zone: The Movie left even more room for my imagination to go nutty. When I finally watched the movie, I was pretty unaffected by it, so I think I score some points for that. Perhaps the bottom line is that I was nine, though. That’s too old to get spooked by an unfinished story told by my fucking mommy. What a wiener.