Monster on Campus (1958)

You know the coelacanth, the prehistoric fish believed to have been extinct for 66 million years? It turned out that fishermen on the east coast of Africa caught them all the time. 

A specimen arrives frozen at a university. The frat-boy (Troy Donahue) bringing it there warns that it's starting to thaw. His German shepherd starts lapping up the water from the melting fish and turns vicious. His teeth appear longer like one of his prehistoric ancestors. Later, a dragonfly comes in an open window, lands on the fish and turns into a giant prehistoric dragonfly. And the professor (Arthur Franz) cuts his hand on the fish's teeth and----well, you can guess what starts happening. Like an early, less pretentious version of Altered States. They find the prof lying unconscious near the body of a co-ed hanging from a tree by her hair.

It was the opposite of Food of the Gods where people want to destroy the giant animals and pretend they never existed. In this, the professor is shocked by the giant dragonfly but wants to capture it for science.

With Joanna Moore the same year she appeared as Marcia Lennekar in A Touch of Evil. 

Well-made but not scary or especially gruesome. From Universal Pictures. 

Directed by Jack Arnold who directed Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man. He also directed 26 episodes of Gilligan's Island and 15 episodes of The Brady Bunch.  A surprising career arc. 

Free on Tubi.

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Another 1980's slasher movie. This one deeply offended Roger Ebert in part because one of the victims was a middle-aged woman. He only wanted to see YOUNG women killed. You really have to be careful what you're outraged by. 

There's town where there had been a serial killer twenty years earlier who left a warning that they must NEVER HAVE ANOTHER VALENTINE'S DAY DANCE. They decide twenty years was long enough, so they arrange such a dance, but people start being killed so they cancel it. Police are then alarmed that some people arranged their own big Valentine's Day party. 

Some of the ladies want to see the coal mine, so the coal miners sneak them in, go down a thousand feet into the mine. That's where the final showdown takes place.

It didn't especially like it. They put more work into it than they had to. I think Roger Ebert painted himself into a corner with his outrage at the genre; he just had to be outraged at a this movie when it wasn't that upsetting. Maybe it was a different time. Maybe I'm some kind of monster who doesn't know when to be offended. I hope it's not the COVID talking.

There was a 2009 remake, reportedly in 3D.

Free on Pluto.

The Devil's Mistress (horror, western 1965)

Four men on horseback and trying to hurry through Apache territory on the run from the law. One is especially distressed at the thought of being hanged. Some others can't stop laughing as they talk about raping and murdering Indian women. One is a nice guy who thinks they're kidding. They're out of food, haven't eaten in days. They spot a stone building and go there hoping to find food. 

A couple lives there, a man with a deep voice who has a beard and no mustache. The young woman living with him is mute. He explains that they fled Salem years earlier to escape religious persecution and finally found their way there.

One of them questions where the food came from. They aren't growing vegetables and they don't have any animals and the house obviously hasn't been lived in in years.

It was interesting. Only 66 minutes long, filmed on weekends, according to IMDb. For most of the cast, this was their only credit although one guy had been in other things.

Seemed to be dubbed which would make sense, but I've been fooled before. Almost every scene was outdoors. 

I didn't like the close-ups of those guys eating.

Just looking at the title, you can guess where it was going. The plot was a little thin but working in a subplot might have been a challenge. Obviously low budget, but I rather liked it.

Free on Tubi.

Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

It was a murder mystery. No crazy Columbo- or Monk-like murder methods. Mostly a matter of figuring out who had what motive. The detective keeps asking people whether they were in love with one person or another. It was great, but I couldn't see any deeper meaning.

As with other movies, I was disturbed by the implied nudity, in this case Clifton Webb sitting in a bathtub carrying on a conversation with detective Dana Andrews. 

Perhaps a noir alternative to Design for Living. Laura (Gene Tierney) works in advertising and is apparently successful. She has a lavishly decorated apartment in the city with a large portrait of herself over the fireplace, a household servant and she owns a house in the country. She's obviously rich but she doesn't come across as a businesswoman. And two or three men are fighting over her.

Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933)

The thing that came as a surprise to me was Edward Everett Horton in a supporting role. He had a distinctive voice and even though I hadn't seen it in years I realized he was the narrator of "Fractured Fairy Tales" on the old Bullwinkle Show. Thinking back, I remember his name being on there although it meant nothing to me until now.

A struggling American playwright (Fredric March) and a struggling American painter (Gary Cooper) are friends living in Paris and are both in love with a commercial artist (Miriam Hopkins).  When the two men discover they were each pursuing the same girl, the three of them agree to live together as friends. She will help guide their careers. And "No sex," she tells them, which she could say because it was Pre-Code, but it didn't last.

They were sophisticated creatives. And they were fictional characters which gives them certain advantages. 

Written by Ben Hecht based on a play by Noel Coward. 

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Bert I. Gordon's Food of the Gods (1976)

Marjoe Gortner wasn't plausible as a football player, especially not as a genius football player who knows exactly what to do to defeat the giant rats. 

An elderly couple (Ida Lupino and John MacLiam) have discovered the Food of the Gods bubbling up from the ground. It was sort of white, but they thought it was oil. When they realized it wasn't oil, they fed it to the chickens and it turned them giant. 

Starts with a guy being attacked by giant wasps. He dies a horrble death. Marjoe runs to get help, finds a house and is attacked by a giant chicken. He stays focused and runs to the house and asks to use the phone, but they don't have one.  

It ends up with Marjoe and John Cypher returning to the island. They blow up the giant wasps nest. But there's also a pregnant young woman and her husband whose Winnebago has gotten stuck and Ralph Meeker and Pamela Franklin and rushing to the house to buy the Food of the Gods from the old couple.

One of these movies where people take it upon themselves to destroy a miracle of nature because their initial brush with it doesn't go well. Wouldn't all this stuff be of some scientific interest? Couldn't it be a boon to mankind?

The Winnebago appears to be a Tonka toy and I assume the Volkswagen was, too. In fairness, they used Star Wars toys as miniatures after the first Star Wars movie, too.

I don't know how much suffering they inflicted on the poor rats in this movie. I didn't see the Humane Society thing assuring us that no animals were harmed. 

I hadn't seen this thing since the '70's. I didn't think much of it back then but after Empire of the Ants made just a year later, I thought I should give it another shot.

It's not his fault, but I can't stand Marjoe Gortner.  

Empire of the Ants (1977)

People gather on an island where developer Joan Collins is trying to sell plots of land. Turns out the place is infested with giant ants.

Much better than I expected. Directed by Bert I. Gordon twelve years after Village of the Giants and a year after Food of the Gods. He liked making movies about giant animals. 

I don't want to give anything away, but I was reminded of the words of Kent Brockman:

"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves."

Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961)

Gidget was kind of a brat. She throws a tantrum because her parents surprise her with news that they're all going to Hawaii! Her boyfriend, Moondoggie, is home on vacation from law school in the east and she doesn't want to leave while he's back. Moondoggie, a frat-boy, tells her she should go because surfing in Hawaii is great, so she stomps off in a huff, goes home and tells her parents she'll go after all. Her father (Carl Reiner) sees how terribly unhappy she is without Moondoggie, so he pays for him to come to Hawaii, too, but she's already stolen another girl's boyfriend. We're supposed to side with Gidget because the other girl can't swim.

I assumed it was all filmed in California and part of it was, but they also used locations in Hawaii and New Zealand.

Free on Tubi. 

Train to Tombstone (1950)

Kind of Stagecoach-like. A number of train passengers heading for Tombstone. There's a prostitute, a clergyman, a corset salesman, a pregnant woman and her mother who complains about the corset salesman, perhaps mistaking him for a transvestite. And a gunslinger whose guns are taken away when he boards the train in motion.

I guess someone's getting ready to rob the train. It's carrying $250,000 for some reason.

They keep getting attacked by Apaches  or criminals disguised as Apaches.

On Pub-D-Hub. Maybe other public domain streaming channels.

Not great, but it was only 57 minutes.

I'm sitting here watching it after testing positive for Covid. Wear your masks!

Mesa of Lost Women (1953)

I liked the model airplane. One of the engines quits and it crashes on the Mesa in question.

They got good use out of models back then. Look at Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes or the cabin on the snow-covered mountain in W.C. Fields' The Fatal Glass of Beer.

It wasn't that terrible. Arty in its way. With former child star and one-time lynch mob participant Jackie Coogan as a mad scientist. He creates giant spiders he controls psychically, then starts churning out spider women.

With Ed Wood regulars Mona McKinnon, Delores Fuller and narrator Lyle Talbot. With 2' 11" actor Angelo Rossitto (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome). 

Free on Tubi. They also have the Rifftrax version.

70 minutes.  

Had this guitar music playing constantly which got really annoying. 

The Duellists (1977)

Ridley Scott's first movie after a career directing TV commercials. Based on a story by Joseph Conrad which was based on real events. A deranged officer (Harvey Keitel) in Napoleonic France insists on fighting repeated duels with another French Army officer (Kieth Carradine).

Back then, if you were an army officer and you refused to fight a duel when challenged, you'd be forced to resign your commission. I don't know if they'd kick you out of the Army completely. If they did, it'd get you out of the Napoleonic Wars which would be a good thing obviously. At one point, the two guys are with the Army fleeing Russia as winter sets in.

The movie looked great. Filmed entirely in existing locations. 

This movie was playing at the university here when I was in high school. There was a line of people in front of the classroom where it was showing. I asked someone what was playing. He told me and said it was a great movie if you like fencing. I was into kung fu movies at the time and thought maybe this would be a new martial art I would enjoy watching people kill each other with, but I passed on it. I felt guilty for not sharing that poor guy's enthusiasm for fencing, but I don't think I would have liked it at that stage.

It was interesting. They used some of the same stupid-looking but apparently authentic techniques they did in Royal Flash.   

It also had a sword fight where the guys got really tired and were staggering around struggling to lift their swords.

Gore Vidal worked on the script to Ben Hur. In that story, a Roman gets into a thirty second argument with Ben Hur and spends the next twenty years persecuting him and his family. Vidal had to add a gay backstory for it to make any sense. But this movie made that sort of thing seem plausible. Harvey Keitel spends decades trying to kill Kieth Carradine.

They only fight six duels in the movie. In real life, the French guys fought thirty duels in twenty years.

Free on Pluto.

Baywatch

Pluto has a Baywatch channel now. I still haven't sat through a full episode. It wasn't very good.

Long ago, I saw an  episode of a show, maybe Entertainment Tonight, which had a story on one of the producers of Baywatch. The reporter was weirdly impressed that the guy had written the script to an episode. The producer was dismissive. A script is made up of three minute scenes, he said. "I can write a three minute scene."

Now that I've seen it, writing an episode doesn't seem impressive at all. If you can't think of what to do next, just cut to a montage or rescue a swimmer in distress.

It's an even bigger mystery to me why this thing was so popular in Europe.

Prom Night (Canada, 1980)

Slasher movie. Probably not a lot you can say about it. Violently bratty kids play a form of hide & seek in an abandoned school. They gang up on a girl who falls out a window to her death. 

Six years later, it's Prom Night! 

This had a couple of plot twists, I guess. A relatively innocent sex offender was wrongly accused of the crime and hospitalized, but now he's escaped. The former children receive threatening phone calls.

It goes for an hour before the slashing begins. The prom has a disco theme, so there are dance sequences that drag on. Jaimie Lee Curtis was a trained dancer so she's the John Travolta of her high school.

Something about a ruffian taking the prom king crown from the rightful winner. The masked slasher goes around doing what you expect him to do.

Eve Plumb, TV's Jan Brady, was reportedly set to star until Jaimie Lee Curtis cruelly stole the role from her. I would have loved seeing a slasher movie with Eve Plumb.

With Canadian star Leslie Nielson. Some sex. More smoking than you'd probably see now. They reportedly had to beef up the violence to avoid a PG rating. 

I didn't watch slasher movies in the '80's, but the few I've now seen weren't that bad. I'm sure I've said this before. There weren't that many people killed compared to some movies, and because they focused on random or somewhat or seemingly random murders, the non-murder scenes were relaxed laid back. They weren't straining to create an intricate, logical plot. 

Available on The Criterion Channel, but I don't imagine it'll be there very long.

Airport 1975 (1974)

Wasn't up to the standards of the first. There was hardly any adultery, just Charleton Heston and Karen Black. I assume their relationship was adulterous. I wasn't paying close attention. 

I wondered how Myrna Loy felt about Gloria Swanson playing herself with people gushing over how good she looked at 75. Swanson wrote her own lines. Myrna Loy was just five years younger and played an aging alcoholic, perhaps a callback to her role in The Thin Man films.

With Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller, Conrad Janis, Helen Reddy, Erik Estrada, Larry Storch and Sid Ceasar, Large Marge (Alice Nunn) from Peewee's Big Adventure, Sharon Gless from Cagney and Lacey. Linda Blair as a girl being rushed to get a kidney transplant; played much the same sickly sweet character she did in early scenes of The Exorcist. Former Roger Corman regular Beverly Garland just three years after her role as Fred MacMurray's second wife on My Three Sons.

Dana Andrews flying a small plane crashes into a 747. Everybody is sucked out of the cockpit except pilot Efrem Zimbalist, Jr, but he was hit in the face and is blinded so plucky stewardess Karen Black takes charge.

George Kennedy plays the same character he did in the original Airport although he's had a promotion. Susan Clark from Webster and Brain Morrison, the grandson from Maude, play his wife and son on the flight. 

Free on Tubi.

It was huge in its day. If you haven't seen it, it will explain some of the jokes in Airplane! 

I don't think I'm spoiling anything, but these movies have surprisingly low death tolls considering everything.

Airport (1970)

I watched this in a theater when I was seven or eight. The MPAA rating system was very different in those days. The movie was rated G in spite of Dean Martin talking with a stewardess about flying to Sweden for an abortion. And there was the bomb of course. The first in a wave of big disaster movies with all-star casts.

Jean Seberg looking very conservative as the airline's head customer relations agent who is sleeping with married airport manager Burt Lancaster.

The movie is surprisingly pro-divorce. Van Heflin plays a down-on-his-luck demolitions expert and psychiatric outpatient. He's going to kill himself and blow up a plane full of people so his absurdly devoted wife (Maureen Stapleton) can collect on his flight insurance. Before he leaves for the airport, she tells him that she married him for better or worse implying she would never leave him, thinking she was such a good wife when she was actually driving him to an early grave and endangering scores of airline passengers. More explicitly, Burt Lancaster and his wife (Dana Wynter) agree to end their marriage for the sake of the children. Dean Martin's wife (Barbara Hale) knows her husband is a swinger but thinks if she sweats it out long enough, he'll stop doing that and come back to her. She sees him walk right past her in the end heading for the hospital with his injured pregnant stewardess girlfriend. 

Helen Hayes as a cute old lady who sneaks onto planes without a ticket. I always took the old women Robert Hayes sits next to in Airplane! to be a reference to her.

It looked like a movie from 1970, everything nicely lit, realistic but not enough to fool anyone. Do they make big movie soap operas anymore?

Free on Tubi.

The Quick and the Dead (1995)

I've written about this before, but the most violent play I ever watched was one written and performed by the first and second grade classes at my school. A king wants to find a husband for his daughter, so he has all the potential suitors fight to the death. The last one left alive will marry her. Most of the kids played the men fighting to the death, others were given the task of dragging the corpses off stage. I was a little surprised that the kindly old teachers let them do it, but it's not that easy writing a play with roles for forty or fifty children.

It was like this movie. Gunslingers come to a town run by Gene Hackman for a big contest, murdering each other in the street. The winner is supposed to get a vast amount of money, and Hackman arranged the whole thing to kill off his enemies. 

I'd heard of the movie but knew nothing about it and never had any interest in it. It's on the Criterion Channel along with other westerns that focus on women characters. I was surprised it was directed by Sam Raimi. 

There were Samurai movies where Samurai would fight duels and kill each other for no reason, just to show that they could. I hated those.

And I don't like ubermenschen. I just want a movie about regular people with normal human abilities who murder each other for some logical reason. 

But it was better than I'm making it out to be. Stole the ending from Once Upon a Time in the West.

Starring Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Leonardo DiCaprio back when he was cute, Russell Crowe. With Pat Hingle and Woody Strode.

Bankman-Fried convicted

That was fast. The wretch was convicted of all seven charges. Jury deliberated for four and a half hours. There are more charges he'll be tried for in March, apparently. 

Well, good luck to him in prison. Maybe he can teach math. Poor devil.

From an article in The New Yorker from September. The reporter talked with Bankman-Fried's mother, Barbara Fried:

I asked whether she had ever felt compelled to ask her son if he’d done any of the things he’d been charged with. She replied no—she didn’t need to ask. Her son was incapable of dishonesty or stealing, she said. “Sam will never speak an untruth,” she went on. “It’s just not in him.”

I am reminded of the words of comedian Andy Kindler when he was the judge on Kids Court.

"Kids!" he said, "You've got to work on your lying!" 

Sam Bankman-Fried grew up without ever learning that people may not believe him whether he's lying or not. It may explain why he was blathering away in interviews long before the trial. He said in one that his lawyers were pleading with him to shut up.