You'll Never Guess What I've Been Watching on Netflix Streaming...

...so I'll just tell you.  The Maze (1953) features a creepy old castle.  I'm a sucker for old movies featuring creepy old castles.  This castle is in Scotland.  The eponymous maze is part of the gardens and looks a lot like this one.

The family that has lived in the castle for generations has a terrible secret.  Many old families like this have a terrible secret, but this family's secret is goofy as well.  I will not reveal the nature of this secret; if you want to know it, watch the movie. (You could always fast forward to near the end.)

One Step Beyond  was a supernatural TV show running from 1959-1961.  I don't remember ever seeing it; perhaps it wasn't rerun the way Twilight Zone was.  (My parents wouldn't let me watch TZ when I was young. So they would've forbidden something as intense as OSB as well.)

Friends had suggested I watch Breaking Bad, since it was filmed in NM.  I put it in my Instant Queue, forgot about it, and remembered it last weekend.  I like it.  It's really dark humor.  For instance, in the second episode the main character has to choose between killing a drug dealer in cold blood or letting the guy go and risking his family's lives.  A lighter comedy would have him suffer moral pangs, abhorrence, and fear, but save him from making the decision by employing a goofy, unlikely accident to kill the drug dealer.  But BB doesn't coddle its characters.  It also does include bits of pretty NM scenery.

Winter Break Activities

I always think I'm going to get a lot done over winter break, then I mostly get a lot of nothing done.  Here's a list of this year's achievements.

I got my hair cut really, really short.

I watched several movies on Netflix streaming, including Gog.  I like 50s science fiction, and this one had the additional attraction of being in color.
The makers of Gog were in love with the prop machinery.  Throughout, the camera lingers lovingly on instrument panels, dials, warning lights.  The human characters were only an excuse for all-out techno-porn.

Weirdest anti-nuke film ever.

I watched some of the Syfy Channel's Twilight Zone marathon with Romeo (right).

Ghosts and Other Characters

On Sunday Laureen joined me for a viewing of the 1963 classic The Haunting. (See Laureen above with 2 of her fans, as well as Claire Bloom and Julie Harris.)  In a good (or even great) ghost story, the ghost is not merely something that says "boo," but a real (dead) character with psychological connections to the other characters.
 The Haunting is one of my favorite spook-flicks.  Every time I watch it I notice little things I'd missed before.  Of course, I can't think of an example now.

I continue to probe the mysteries of old TV shows.  I just finished seeing several episodes of Biff Baker, U.S.A. featuring character actor Alan Hale (aka "The Skipper").  Though still in his early 30s, Hale's signature character had already jelled into a hearty, jolly, joking, unpolished regular guy.  In this case, he was a regular guy defending American interests all over the world accompanied by his equally jolly wife.  It isn't very good, but it's a source for American post-war psychology.

Of course, when dealing with Alan Hale, the question that always comes up is whether he is related to Barbara Hale (aka "Della Street").  IMDB.com mentions nothing, but nothing mentioned is not proof of nothing being there.  The fact that they both appeared in The Giant Spider Invasion suggests a blood connection: why else would they act in that turkey of a flick?

Speaking of character, recently a research assistant approached our ref desk with a strange request.  Her boss wanted to do some kind of scientific psychological measurement of people who had just read various kinds of literature, such as fiction with characters and fiction without characters.  She needed to find some examples of fiction without characters: no human characters, no animal characters, no alien characters, and no anthropomorphized objects.  No characters.  Not surprisingly, she couldn't find any examples.

For the benefit of Science, I wish to fill this literary lacuna...

The House

A piece of fiction

There's a house on Maple St. with white aluminum siding and a dark green pitched roof.  It has a front door in the front and a back door in the back.  It has a front yard in front and a back yard in back.


Furthermore, it looks just like every other house on Maple St.  This house has no character.

Catching Up

Lately I've been watching old TV that I missed the first time around.  I was only 5 when the series Thriller started up; it's a good thing I discovered it on Netflix, because it had many good episodes.

The Host of Thriller

Most of the plots had supernatural elements.  I've just finished season 1, in which I saw a very young William Shatner in  two episodes; but the fun doesn't stop there!  In The Hungry Glass Shatner played opposite Russell Johnson (a.k.a. the Professor on Gilligan's Island).  In The Grim Reaper Shatner was joined by Natalie Schafer (a.k.a. Eunice 'Lovey' Wentworth Howell on Gilligan's Island).  Small world!  What are the chances of running across two people from the same island?

So my Thriller-watching inspired me to seek out Thriller-host Boris Karloff's lesser-known films.  First I saw The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936), which was a classic mad-scientist story with the familiar theme of mind transplant.  By working really, really hard, Dr. Laurence manages to construct a machine that switches minds into different bodies.  But the scientific world won't even give him a chance to demonstrate his machine; they just walked away scoffing.  Then Laurence thinks of a practical use for his machine when his backer threatens to take away his lab...  Another noteworthy aspect of this flick is its strong female character, the lovely Dr. Clare Wyatt, who ends up saving the day at the end.

We Interrupt Our Regular Blogging For a Special Post...

I've been watching old movies again.  The Hideous Sun Demon confirmed my belief that the sun is our enemy.  But what a great surprise I had while watching Appointment with Danger, in which Alan Ladd played a hard-boiled postal inspector investigating the murder of another postal inspector.  In the opening scene, two very familiar-looking thugs lug the dead inspector to an ally.  They were the very young Jack Webb & Harry Morgan, who would later portray the iconic pair Sergeant Friday & Officer Bill Gannon in Dragnet!  Wow!  And what was really cool was what baddies they were is this film:

UPDATE:  Ranald has pointed out that bronzed baby shoes are not as heavy as this clip implies.  However, I'm willing to allow them poetic license.  The bronzed shoes are a load on the poor hood's heart.

This and That

I've been watching all sorts of stuff made before I was born.  Destination Moon was based on a novel by Robert Heinlein, my first favorite sci-fi writer.  Heinlein's stories aimed to educate.  He was always finding ways to slip in science facts.  DM used its comic relief, an ignorant engineer who had to replace a sick crew memeber at the last moment, as an excuse to explain things.  Joe Sweeney is always wailing variations on "What's happening?" in his heavy Bronx accent, so his crewmates can explain about weightlessness, outer space, and Newton's Laws of Motion.  Also, the guy who builds the rocket is a private businessman who has to raise funds for the project, so he shows the following cartoon to his rich prospects:





Very Educational.  (Though it implies that gravity is made by giant magnets.)

The other interesting thing I've been viewing is Tales of Tomorrow, a TV show that ran from 1951-1953. The DVDs include the advertisements, which were made in the same studio.  Live TV!  A couple of times I heard coughs or loud things drop while the end credits were rolling.  Perhaps they got sloppier as the night wore on.  Some good actors were in that series.  Burgess Meredith played the lead in the best one I saw: The Great Silence.  Most of the episodes were sponsored by Kreisler.

One Venus; Two Moons

Last Saturday I saw 20 Million Miles to Earth, one of those classics I hadn't seen, in a colorized version.  (There are many sci-fi and camp classics I haven't seen and some I'll never see.  I'm not a camp-expert manqué who needs to speak authoritatively on every flick in the genre.)  William Hopper, aka Paul Drake, crashes his rocket in the sea near a Sicilian village.

He and his plucky crew had been exploring Venus, but he and a Venusian creature are the sole survivors of the crash.  The creature is still in its egg, but it quickly hatches and grows to enormous size.  The action shifts to Rome.  The big green Venutian and the Italian army battle in the streets and do significant damage to the Forum and the Colosseum. Naturally, they had to kill the creature at the Colosseum.
I liked the colorization.  The olive green army cars were especially attractive.  William Hopper's hair was the color of ripe wheat.

Next I had dinner with Mary at the Café Luna, an appropriate choice since we were going to see Moon for the Misbegotten afterwards.  So we did see Moon for the Misbegotten afterwards, as per our plan, at the Central Square Theater.  We both enjoyed the performance and thought the acting was great.

Then it was about 11pm, and I was surprised to see the number of people standing in line for various restaurants.  But I am usually not on the street that late.  We saw some excellent costumes including a guy wearing a horse's head.  He was smoking, and the cigarette would light up the head.

Targets

JB urged me to watch Targets, a movie starring Boris Karloff.  It wasn't the usual Karloff fare.  Karloff plays an elderly horror-film actor who fears he is obsolete.  His story runs parallel to that of a young man who goes on a shooting spree.  Both characters feel an urge to completely throw off their former lives.  Of course Fate makes these parallel stories meet.  (You may think that parallel things should never meet; but Fate can do anything.)  As I suspected, the Texas Tower shooting inspired the story.
It was a pretty darn good movie, and it's available to watch instantly from Netflix.

An Ed Wood Clone?

Invisible Invaders and Plan 9 From Outer Space both came out in 1959.  If I hadn't known better, I would've guessed that II was some lost Ed Wood creation.  Perhaps Ed Wood had some influence on II director Edward L. Cahn or vice versa.  Certain similarities, such as continuity problems, generous use of stock footage, and recycling of shots can more easily be explained by low budgets.

However, a small purse cannot be blamed for both films using an omniscient narrator or the common theme of aliens who respond to earthlings's nuclear development by resurrecting dead humans, who then attack live humans.  No sir!

I do not believe that 1950s alien invasion films are really about Communism.  I believe that subconscious eruptions fuel our fear of both aliens and Communism (and a lot of other stuff).  The walking dead could be the return of the repressed!  I think of these films as modern folklore, that reveals our collective uncoscious.

In any case I videoed the opening scene of II, which I think is awesomely bad!  You can watch trailers on youtube.

A Nostalgia Fix

During my freshman week (1973) there was an outdoor screening of The President's Analyst at my dorm (Hanszen College).  I remember it being slow in the first half.  In the name of nostalgia, I decided to re-view it.  This time I enjoyed it all the way through.  Silly but fun. Perhaps my powers concentration have sharpened with age.  I did remember this part, presented below, that spoofed those Bell Lab films we used to see in school.  Enjoy!

Really False Advertising

We all expect a little exaggeration in movie posters.  For instance, in a Star Wars poster Princess Leia is pictured in a low-cut dress that she doesn't wear on screen.  But I have discovered a case that goes too far.  I recently purchased The Wasp Woman, a Roger Corman flick from 1959.  Please examine the DVD cover art below:

So you would assume from this picture that the Wasp Woman had a wasp's body and the head of a pretty woman and was significantly larger than the average human being.  But, when you watch the actual movie, what do you see?

The Wasp Woman has a woman's body and a waspy sort of head and is the same height as she is as a human woman. 

How Will We Hide From ET?

I recently watched Dangerous Crossing, a noir shipboard mystery which included Michael Rennie.  It was an excellent little mystery  wrapped in studio fog.  I then remembered that Rennie played the noble alien Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still.  He was one of the helpful aliens.  But now Stephen Hawking says we should avoid alien contact.  (Presumabley he's a fan of The Invaders or Robot Monster.)

OK, we could stop SETI, but what else are we supposed to do? Should we turn out all the lights at night, so it looks like nobody is at home?  While this would aid our environment, I don't think it would save us from alien invaders.   Presumabley these advanced aliens have super-duper telescopes or robot scouts who search out good planets for them to conquer.  If we are lucky, Jupiter and Saturn will hide us or at least divert attention by their bigness.  If we are not lucky, then we will probably have to just surrender.

Where can this lead but to a new government agency devoted to anti-alien affairs:  the Homeplanet dept. for Interplanetary DEfence (HIDE).  They will spend jillions of dollars developing a whole-Earth cloaking device.  

 Klaatu and his Earthling helper

I'm hoping Hawking's comments will revive the long-defunct Extraterrestrial Anti-Defamation Organization (ETADO).  I used to enjoy their website.

It Was Christmas Day in the City

And everybody went to the movies...

So I knew that Sherlock Holmes had the now seemingly compulsory action hero stuff:  slow motion fights with acrobatics, bodies flying everywhere, and ridiculously loud punch-thwacks, but even so, I was surprised by its overuse.  They also had a fair amount of building destruction and explosions.  I did like Robert Downey Jr. a lot.  And the filming and computer animation was beautifully done.  Too bad there wasn't a wee bit more character development.

My apologies to Sue, Julie, and Dave.  I was going to save SH to see with youse guys.  But Mary wanted to see a movie, and she's already seen Up in the Air.

Science Fiction Past

I recently watched Colossus:  The Forbin Project, made in 1970, for the first time.  This computer-overthrows-its-masters flick impressed me more than I thought it would. The acting, music and camera work were all pretty good, at least according to my untutored taste.  At the time this movie came out, I was satisfying my science fiction needs with grade B Tokyo Monster Mashes and radiation-enlarged bug invasions.  (John Taine's The Iron Star, 1930, started the rage for mutations in sci-fi, which became very popular after the atom bomb.*)

I was a science fiction fan from early youth to High School.  I remember the Space Cat series of books from my youth: Space Cat Goes to Mars; Space Cat and the Kittens.  Robert Heinlein then Isaac Asimov were the favorites of my mature years. I got very picky about the kind of sci-fi I'd read.  No spells or wizards allowed; I wanted hard science.  Hard, but not too hard.  I hated stories wherein interstellar travel took years and years, and the crew was either in suspended animation or was spending their whole lives in space so their grandchildren could get to a new planet.  Screw that!  There had to be warp drives.

Another rebellious-computer movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, came out a couple of years before Colossus.  The technology in 2001 thoroughly awed my 13-year-old self.. The stuff that should have awed me didn't.   The black monolith, the space baby, the philosophical implications of HAL's rebellion passed through me like water in a sieve.  Here was a serious sci-fi movie showing me, as accurately as it could, what space travel would be like in my lifetime.  Sure, they didn't have warp drives, but at least a person could get to the moon in relative comfort.  My future in space looked bright.
My sci-fi bug died off in college.  I no longer want to go to the moon.  An interesting article from the Guardian of London talks about the psychological problems the moon astronauts had after returning to Earth.**  After, all going into outer space is heaps different from going to sea.  Living in a space station would be like living in a very small shopping mall with no stores and really bad food.  And taking a walk on the deck requires a spacesuit.

*Brian Stableford Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature, The Scarecrow Pr.: Lanham,MD, 2004. p.243.
**The Guide: Lost in Space: Space it's big and scary and does funny things to your brain. Andrew Mueller blasts off in search of the astronauts who left their marbles somewhere in the upper atmosphere. The Guardian (London) - Final Edition, March 31, 2007 Saturday, page 10.

Forecasting Interior Decorating Trends

The other day I watched The Illustrated Man, adapted from the Ray Bradbury collection of the same name.  A crazy bum, who is covered with tatoos, tells a young man he meets that a woman from the future did the "skin illustrations," which "come alive" if you look at them long enough.  This coming alive involves diversions to 3 short sci-fi stories.  It's the first story that concerns me here;  in it, the tatooed man and future woman live in the future in a futuristic house.  The scenery people for IM made the then-common assumption that future interior decorators would work entirely in white.  White walls. White floors.  White ceilings.  White furniture.  Why this whiteness?  One theory:  people in the future will like to show off the fact that they needn't opt for the darker colors that don't show dirt, since they have robots to keep everything spick and span.

The bum/future-man, played by Rod Steiger, complains about the economic necessity (in the future)of allowing people to work only six months out of the year.  What is he to do with that other six months?!  Why couldn't he brighten up his existence with some color?  Hook a red rug.  Buy a blue couch.  If he had invited his young son to help him paper the walls and paint the furniture, maybe they would have bonded.  And his wife and daughter could also have bonded while looking through decorating samples and buying fancy pillows. Interior decorating could have brought this family closer and perhaps the kids wouldn't have set the parents up to get killed.  Just a thought.

Give the Devil his Due

Some Christians believe that today is Satan's birthday.  Actually, nobody knows when Old Scratch was born, but there is a 1 in 365 chance that it was on October 31.  So I am willing to celebrate it today.

Satan is a complicated character: adversary, light-bringer, composite of older repressed gods.

What actor would turn down a chance to play the Devil?  Have you seen the original Bedazzled with Peter Cook playing George Spiggot, Prince of Darkness?  (I didn't see the remake, so I don't know if it was any good.  Anyway, I don't think you should remake good movies.  Remake bad movies and do a better job.)  He buys Dudley Moore's soul, then puts him through a series of hilarious mishaps.  So if you haven't seen it, get it now and spend this evening watching it.

Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!

These famous words are from The Day the Earth Stood Still. Noticing that a remake is coming out, I was reminded of the demonstration of alien strength in that flick. Klaatu has come to warn us Earthlings to mend our nuclear ways, or our planet is toast. To demonstrate the aliens's awesome power, he arranges to have all machinery on Earth (excluding that in hospitals and suchlike places) stop functioning for half an hour. The aliens don't have to go to the power plants; they have power over all machines: cars, telephones, watches, electric lights. The indwelling spirits of machinery* are in the power of the aliens. Bad-guy aliens, such as those in It Conquered the World, also have this power. Like Klaatu, the ICTW aliens could make exceptions to the general disablement of world machinery; they allowed the cars and jeeps of their Earthling allies to work.

Perhaps my readers can supply other examples of this power.

Please enjoy the picture of my new MacBook Pro.
* Such as Coily the Spring Sprite.

Down-Memory-Lane Monday

Mardi Gras Party my Freshman Year

The other day I was remembering Sally Cruikshank's short cartoon Quasi at the Quackadero, which I saw some 30 plus years ago and thought, "Gosh, everything's available on the web these days. " So I found SC's blog and ordered a DVD of her films. She likes pulsating things that change into other, not necessarily related, things, over and over again. It's like when you're nearly asleep, and you see all these shifting images underneath your eyelids. I often wish I had movie cameras on the underside of my eyelids to record them.

50s Sci-Fi Interpretation

A former co-worker told me, when she noticed I had checked out the video I Married a Monster From Outer Space, "You know, that was about Communism." I had heard that interpretation before. Hostile 50s movie aliens, especially those who assumed human form, were supposed to be a veiled reference to Communists. (They look just like your neighbor, but they are evil and aim to take over.) Of course, there were also wise, nice aliens that the ignorant earthlings, especially belligerent small-town sheriffs, wanted to destroy. I suppose those films could represent the viewpoint of Communist sympathizers, the sheriff character being a veiled portrait of Joseph McCarthy. I've never heard it suggested, but it might appeal to proponents of the first theory.
But the whole theoretical edifice topples when we consider Red Planet Mars (1952). The Martians in this flick are born-again Christians! An American scientist (Peter Graves) gets Bible quotes in messages from Mars. There is an evil Nazi who claims to be sending all the messages--which inspire the Russians to abandon Communism--but it actually turns out that the Martians really are Christians. (Don't worry that I've spoiled the movie for you; it is so bad that it's beyond spoiling.) The Martians destroy Communism. Everybody wants to be Christians, just like the Martians.

I Finished my Canadian Rockies Web Album

Please check out this selection of the 200+ photos I took in Canada. Let me also take this opportunity to strongly recommend the film Bottle Shock, about the rise of the Napa Valley vintners in the 70s. It's hilarious.