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. 

The Badge, the Bible, and Bigfoot (2019) Ashley Hays Wright

I fell asleep with the TV on. Woke up some time later to find this playing, The Badge, the Bible, and Bigfoot. I backed it up to I could see the whole thing. It was 66 minutes. It had five actors playing six characters.

The mayor and police chief of a small coastal town go into the woods looking for three missing girls. There've been a lot of bigfoot sightings, so they naturally assume they were abducted by bigfoot.

Made by the Wright family, Ashley Hays Wright, David Owen Wright and their daughters, Jaina, Scout and Cadence. They've made over 60 movies in less than seven years, most of them filmed around their home in Texas. They took a trip to Maine, apparently. 

We see shots of the town of Eastport. They have a town council meeting which is just a close-up up the police chief as he hears it announced that the police department is being disbanded to give more money to the fire department. The sheriff will take over policing the town. 

The sheriff was played by David Owen Wright who also played the police chief, but all the shots of him as sheriff are either from the neck down or with the brim of a large hat hiding his face and he speaks in an odd cartoon-like voice. They could have avoided all that and it might have been better if the sheriff had been the police chief's estranged, perhaps evil twin brother. 

The bigfoot was one of them in an inexpensive gorilla costume, which is ironic since they made an anti-Halloween movie.

It started out looking pretty good with shots of the town, old wooden and brick buildings. The locations later in the film were less interesting. The editing became choppy toward the end.

And, I'll give away the ending here. Don't read if you want to be surprised.

It ends with the couple in their living room. The husband had fallen asleep watching TV and dreamed the whole thing, He watches violent movies to help cope with his war trauma. He resolves to stop watching violent movies which seems reasonable. I don't know if it means anything that he dreamed he was single and that his children were strangers to him.

I've seen only a small part of their body of work, but I would encourage the Wrights to take more trips. Airfare is going up with the war of aggression against Iran, but they could be European filmmakers. They could film in western Ukraine if they wanted. The other movie I saw of theirs, Exorcism in Amarillo, was just the five of them filmed around their house. It couldn't have cost anything. They could make a movie anywhere in the world for cost of airfare and the price of an Airbnb. 

Teenagers Battle the Thing (1959)

This was reportedly a regional horror film that was only shown locally. Filmed in Ontario, California. I don't know what it cost. It's possibly it still made a profit. Years later, they shot more material, added narration and released it as Curse of the Bigfoot (1975). which is sort of interesting because Curse of the Bigfoot was in color and the version of Teenagers Battle the Thing on Tubi is black & white.

Teenagers looked really old in the 1950's and the boys in this movie were taller than the adults. High school kids go with their teacher to help out on some archeological excavation which leads to the discovery of a mummified ape-like creature that comes to life. 

They should have had the creature kill a few teenagers. The poor thing didn't seem like much of a threat. It was an astonishing scientific discovery far beyond anything they could have ever imagined, and I won't give it away, but look at what they did to it.

The landscape was impressive.

Free on Tubi.