Creation of the Humanoids (1962)

Andy Warhol reportedly said it was his one of his favorite movies and underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar cited it as an inspiration for his movie, Sins of the Fleshapoids. 

Creation of the Humanoids was an odd, stagey, technicolor science fiction movie made up of long dialogue scenes. 

I had never heard of the director, Wesley Barry, but he was a major child star in silent film. He had red hair and in movies back then, they would cover kids with make up to cover their freckles. But in 1917, the director of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm filmed him without make-up and audiences were strangely charmed. After that, he would play disheveled freckle-faced country boys. He may have been a progenitor of the Little Rascals. I looked him up on YouTube and found a lot of old newsreel if him making appearances at public events.

He was born in 1907. His acting career finally petered out in 1938. He had one last acting job in 1943. I don't know how or if he stayed out of World War Two, but he began working as an assistant director starting in 1946. He worked in television and B movies. Also worked as a producer starting in 1950 and directed a few things himself. His last credit in IMDb was as assistant director on the '70's cop show The Rookies. Creation of the Humanoids was the last thing he directed.

The movie was obviously cheap, but it looked pretty good. It had an Oscar-winning cinematographer, Hal Mohr, and Jack Pierce who had done the make up for Frankensteiin and other Universal horror films, did the make-up. They were talented but at the end of their careers. 

The androids looked impressive, covered with green make-up, wearing bald wigs with their eyebrows concealed with contact lenses that made their eyes look metallic. 

Most of humanity has been wiped out in a nuclear war. Many of the survivors have been rendered sterile by radiation. The birthrate is extremely low and humans are expected to die out within two hundred years. 

To cope with labor shortages, the begin producing more and more advanced robots with vast knowledge downloaded from a master computer. 

Don Megowan playes Cragis, one od the leaders of an "ultra-right pressure group" called The Order of Flesh and Blood, an anti-robor hate group. They know humanity is on its last legs, but they don't want to be replaced by robots. They walk around wearing Confederate caps and pants with sparkly shirts as they harass robots on the street. 

But  Cragis' position in the order is threatened. His sister is in "rapport" with a robot. She had to get a permit to buy a robot boyfriend which is how the Order found out. 

One of his sister's friends visits her in her apartment.

"Pax, you're wonderful!" she tells the robot. "He's so glib! I'll bet he even has a sense of humor!:

"He'd better have! I paid extra for it. Say something funny, Pax!"

"Don't put me on, dear," Pax says. "I have a sense of humor bur I'm not creative."

Today, most people who form a romantic attachment to AI have psychiatric issues and fall into it by accident. In this movie, Cragis' sister lives with a robot programed to be her boyfriend, but she's presented as the normal open-minded non-bigoted one while her horrified brother is the screwed-up weirdo.  

Free on Tubi.

Bunny O'Hare (1971) Bette Davis, Ernest Borgnine

Bette Davis as widow whose savings has been depleted. The bank forecloses on her house and immediately bulldozes it. Ernest Borgnine lives in a camper and takes her sink and toilet to sell in Mexico. With nowhere else to go, she joins Borgnine, discovers he's wanted for bank robbery and the two commit a series of robberies disguised as hippies even though they're in their 60s.

The movie made an impression on me when I was eight, but I got dragged off to movies back then and had no idea what they were. I was haunted by it for years and finally found out its title when I came across it in The Golden Turkey Awards.

I saw it on broadcast TV in the middle of the night in Boston in the 1980s but slept through most of it. Finally found it again on MovieHub, an obscure streaming channel.

With Jack Cassidy as the hippie-hating detective trying to hunt them down. Bruno ViSota had a bit part as a lab technician, his final movie role.  John Astin as Bette Davis's parasitic son, Reva Rose as her daughter who needs money pay for her husband's psychoanalysis.

Ironically, Bette Davis says "No, thank you, I don't smoke," when offered marijuana.

A comedy with nothing funny. I thought it was a serious crime drama when I was eight. Just awful.

Ernest Borgnine was way too cheerful. 

The Black Bird (1975)

A bkack & white still but the movie was in color.

A sequel to the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon (there were one or two earlier films based on it). Someone owned the movie rights and wanted to make a straight sequel, but the writers just couldn't do it so they wrote it as a comedy. Made 34 years after the first movie. I saw it listed in an old movie-related edition of the Guiness Book of World Records as the longest gap between an original movie and its sequel, although, since then, there was a made-for-TV sequel to Gone with the Wind and probably several others.

Lee Patrick reprises her role as Effie, Sam Spade's secretary, and Elisha Cook returns as Wilmer. Humphrey Bogart was only a couple of years older than they were. He would have been 75 when this movie was released and probably could have starred in it if he hadn't smoked his way to an early grave. So George Segal starred as Sam Spade, Jr, still employing his father's old secretary. I was disappointed that Elisha Cook didn't have a bigger role.

You know in the old movie when Wilmer tells Sam Spade to "shove off" and Sam warns him that "People lose teeth talking like that"? That scene was in the novel, but Wilmer apparently said "Fuck you". The way Dashiell Hammett had to put it in the book was, "The boy said two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second 'you'." 

In 1975, Wilmer could have said what he wanted, but the movie would have gotten an R rating. Ted Turner colorized The Maltese Falcon in the '80s, but if he really wanted to modernize it, he should have dubbed in the obscene language. 

Not really funny. It had a running gag about Sam Spade's last name being a racial slur. 

Free on Tubi.

The Hunt (Spain, 1966)

Never go rabbit hunting with pro-Franco Spaniards. 

If you want to see poor, innocent rabbits horribly killed and a lamb being skinned, this is the movie for you. It looked like a nice place. They go into a Spanish town that looked beautiful except they were skinning a lamb. 

Three middle age Spanish Civil War veterans and a younger fellow with a Polaroid go rabbit hunting. They were friends before this but don't seem to like each other.  

It was refreshing to see a .22 rifle as a murder weapon. People kill each other with them all the time in real life, but you never see that in movies.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Life for Ruth aka Walk in the Shadow (UK, 1962) Patrick Magoohan

Cretinous Christian Scientist (Michael Craig) lets his daughter die because he doesn't believe in blood transfusions. His wife (Janet Munro) wants to save her but they let him murder her. The doctor (Patrick McGoohan) was going to do the transfusion anyway but the guy in charge of the hospital stops him. 

"She CAN'T be," the Christian Scientist says confusedly when told she's dead.

The doctor wisely gets him prosecuted for manslaughter. You could do that in Britain apparently, hire a solicitor to have a guy prosecuted.

Set in the UK when the place was finally starting to claw its way out of post-war poverty.  The place looked a lot better than in more recent movies. 

Well-made but a bit mealy mouthed. It showed both sides, why we should be open-minded about a callous simpleton murdering his daughter although it did tend to side with the doctor.

Free on Movie Vault and YouTube.

Konga (UK, 1961) Directed by John Lemont

Dr Charles Decker (Michael Gough) invents a serum that turns an adorable baby chimp, Konga, into a hulking killer gorilla. One of those movies where people use miracles of science and nature for stupid things. The professor uses the gorilla to kill the university president who demands that he stop his crazy experiments and to murder college boy Bob Kenton (Jess Conrad) who has become his romantic rival when the prof shows an inordinate interest in Sandra (Claire Gordon), a perky co-ed. In fairness, the young fellow tried to strangle the prof and would have killed him if hasn't snapped out of his murderous rage. But the prof smacked him first.

I think this is more teaser than spoiler so I'll give away the ending. Decker's wife, Margaret (Margo Johns), overhears her husband hitting on Sandra. She hypnotizes Konga to follow her commands, injects it with more growth serum and turns the gorilla into a giant monster who walks through the streets carrying terrified Dr Decker in its sweaty fist.

"KONGA! LET ME DOWN! HELP! HELP!"

At the police station, the chief hangs up the phone and tells the two detectives, "Fantastic! There's a huge monster gorilla that's constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose on the streets! He's moving toward the embankment area." He shouts into the intercom. "Contact all available patrol cars! Have them come into headquarters and equip them with arms immediately! Get my car ready! I'll be right down to issue further orders!" Then to one of the detectives: "Contact Commissioner Garland at his home. Notify him of the emergency! Then call the War Office! Tell them what's happening and request they rush armed troops to the embankment area! I'll give them the position on radio telephone!"

British cops were much more decisive than Americans would be.

In color. It was great.

The Reckless Moment (1949) Max Ophuls

In 1949, I don't know what your best bet would be if you found a dead guy behind your house. I assume police weren't that smart back then. Even if you did nothing wrong, you might be better off dumping the body somewhere. 

The mother (Joan Bennett) in a fairly wealthy family drives to Los Angeles and to confront her 17-year-old daughter's middle-aged criminal boyfriend (Shepperd Strudwick). I don't know what the laws were back then, but statutory rape wasn't mentioned. The criminal offers to break up with the girl if the mother pays him off. 

The daughter (Geraldine Brooks) doesn't believe it when the mother tells her what he said. The daughter meets him in the boathouse. He doesn't deny telling her mother this but says it was just a ruse to get money out of her. The girl struggles with him and wisely hits him on the head with an object and runs back to the house. The geezer falls through an inadequate railing and is impaled on an anchor. The mother finds him in the morning, drags his carcass to the family's small boat and dumps him in a swamp.

The body is quickly discovered and identified. A young James Mason soon appears with a stack of love letters the daughter sent the dead fellow and threatens to hand them over to police. He'll sell them to the mother for what was then a very large sum of money.

What follows could have been an expose on sexist 1940's lending practices. Her husband is away on business and she has to scramble to raise the money. It would have been cheaper and within her means to send her daughter out of the county, send her to Berlin where her father was. She could lie low for a while.

It's a Christmas movie set during the holiday season with an important lesson for teenage viewers.

Even in a wealthy family, the tween son (David Bair) had to share a room with his grandfather (Henry O'Neill). 

The film reportedly got bad reviews at the time but is now considered one of Ophul's best movies.

Free on Tubi.