The Pit (Canada, 1981)

Canadian kid actor Sammy Snyders stars as a weird, friendless, perverted tween who starts killing his enemies by luring them into the woods and shoving them into a pit he discovered. When his parents go out of town, they hire a psychology major working her way through college babysitting, specializing in problem children. He gets advice from his teddy bear. People are terribly unkind to him. The elderly, younger children, classmates, teachers. 

I wasn't sure what to make of it. The kid either has a very serious mental illness or he was in touch with supernatural forces and an unknown species if man-eating hominid living in the pit. The filmmakers weren't sure themselves or they were trying to have it both ways. We can hear the Teddy Bear speaking to the kid. It seems to have his voice and it knows what he knows and no more, but we see the bear's head turn when no one is there.

It was rather grim until they started playing "funny" music as he murdered people by knocking them into the pit.

Produced by Canadians, filmed in Wisconsin. Reportedly has developed a cult following.

Free on Tubi.

Mark Cousins' The Story of Film: A New Generation

A follow up to The Story of Film: An Odyssey, looking at movies from 2010 to 2021. Starts with clips from superhero movies and one of those computer animation movies, stuff I haven't seen and have no curiosity about. Watching this didn't make me want to see them. I watch so many terrible movies, you'd think I'd be more open-minded. If Mark Cousins can appreciate them, shouldn't I make an effort?

But feeling guilty for not forcing yourself to watch more TV seems crazy. 

Discusses foreign films from India, France, Philippines, Nepal and elsewhere, documentaries, slow cinema, mostly movies I'd never heard of.  

Free on Tubi, Plex and Xumo, Prime Video for $1.99; free on Fandango, Apple TV, Hoopla and something called Free Movies+.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey is free on Tubi, Roku Channel, Criterion, Plex, Xumo, Prime Video, Filmzie, and Freevee. 

Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

I've heard of people reporting monstrous crimes who, afraid the police wouldn't believe them, lied to make sure they'd investigate or punched up the story a bit so the press would take interest. This happened in one horrible police torture case in New York and a case of farmers murdering farm workers. The lesson of Attack of the Puppet People is not to tell police crazy stories you know full well they'd never believe even if they're true. A young woman goes to police to report that her boyfriend had been turned into a doll.

A lonely doll maker takes to shrinking people. Uses them as puppets in a little puppet theater he plays with at night. The puppet people never really "attack". 

I'll give away the ending. A couple of his victims escape and use his device to return to their normal size then they shove him out of the way and set off to report him to the police. Like that would do any good. 

Stars John Agar, John Hoyt and June Kenney.

With Hank Patterson (Fred Ziffel on Green Acres) and Bill Hickman (the stunt driver in the Dodge Charger in Bullitt).

Directed by Bert I. Gordon.

Storm Warning (1951)

Something from Counterpunch.com.:

As a parable from the past to help us come to grips with our perilous present, you could do worse than screen Storm Warning, the 1951 noir that may be the most unlikely Klan movie ever made. It features Doris Day as the pregnant young wife who works in a bowling alley that just happens to serve as the local Klavern, but is clueless about everything going on around her; Ginger Rogers as her fashion model sibling who drops in for an unnaounced visit to check on little sister and exposes DD’s husband as a member of the KKK; and Ronald Reagan as the smalltown prosecutor who ends up pursuing the Klan for lynching a…reporter! Reagan and Rogers were two of Hollywood’s most prominent right-wingers. In fact, the film was shot during the time when Reagan (FBI Confidential Informant T-10), as president of SAG, was secretly snitching out members of the actors’ union he led to the Feds as suspected Reds. The theme of the Storm Warning isn’t that the KKK is racist or hates Jews (those details are taken as a given), but that it is…corrupt. A great film if you’re in the right state of mind. I watched it under the influence of a bottle of Côte du Rhone and Oregon’s most profitable agricultural product…You can find it on TCM and Criterion.

I checked the Criterion channel and didn't see it on there. Maybe it was just me. I never heard of the movie. I didn't know that Ginger Rogers was a right-winger but I don't know much of anything about her.

It's available on other streaming channels such as Max with a subscription or on Apple TV, Prime or Fandango for three bucks.

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

When I first saw this movie at eleven or twelve, I didn't understand how Marlon Brando kept getting beaten up. Karl Malden plays a priest who knocks him down with one punch, then he was barely a match for Lee J Cobb. There's no way he could have been a contender.

Elia Kazan's excuse for testifying before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. I don't know what it tells you that he picked Marlon Brando to represent him in the movie. Any analogy between the Communist Party and organized crime was absurd

Available on the Criterion Channel, free on Tubi, or you can pay $4 and see it on AppleTV, Fandango or Prime.

Kurosawa's Roshomon (Japan, 1950)

It wasn't so much a story from different points of view as it was people lying to make themselves look good, although one of the guys hearing the stories keeps commenting that people even lie to themselves. The people in this thing couldn't have been THAT self-deceiving.

Three people get out of the rain at the ruined Roshomon gate and talk about a recent murder case, A samurai and his wife were traveling, the husband on foot, the wife on sitting side saddle on a horse. A bandit (Toshiro Mifune) offers to sell the husband items he looted from a grave but jumps him, ties him up and rapes his wife. Then, depending on the version, the bandit fights to the death with the husband, the husband commits suicide or a third thing.

If you ask me, the wife was the real hero. 

I once read the short story by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) sitting in the university library. It was fairly short if I remember correctly, just the testimony of the witnesses in the case including the victim who testified through a medium. It's surprising it could be stretched out into a 90 minute movie although they re-enacted the same events about four times.

If the film is to be believed, fake laughing was common in Japan back then.

It might make a good double feature with John Huston's Freud (1962). There was at least one sequence where we see two versions of the same event. 

The Loveless (1981) Willem Dafoe, directed by Katheryn Bigelow & Monty Montgomery

I liked the odd 1950's biker slang. "He's allergic to electricity," one says, referring to one who apparently committed a murder they show in a confused flashback at the end. He's distressed at the thought of the electric chair. His friends weren't very sensitive.

Like a cross between The Wild One and some of the films of Kenneth Anger but with implied incest. It didn't have much plot. Bikers arrive at a roadside restaurant. They meet up there so they continue to Daytona to see the races, but they're delayed when one of them needs a repair on his motorcycle. Willem Dafoe briefly befriends a girl in Corvette. They get a motel room, but they shouldn't have parked the Corvette in front because her wealthy, heavily armed father sees it and stops to investigate.

I see bikers now riding around on their stupid-looking choppers. There's one guy in town who has to ride with both arms raised straight over his head to reach the handlebars. Is that comfortable or enjoyable? The big giant motorcycles they ride in this movie looked much more comfortable, like driving an extremely dangerous convertible. The bikers dress in black leather but don't wear helmets. 

Dafoe's first starring role. Katheryn Bigelow and Monty Mongomery's directorial debuts.

Available on The Criterion Channel and is free on Tubi, Freevee, Pluto, Xumo, Plex and Roku Channel.

Maniac (1980) Joe Spinell, directed by William Lustig

I clicked on an "article", little more than a list of movies that Gene Siskel walked out on. I knew about a couple of them. There was Disney's The Million Dollar Duck, an inoffensive movie I liked when I was nine. There was nothing upsetting in it, nothing that might cause a mentally unbalanced person to do anything awful. It wasn't war propaganda or sexually perverse. Nothing abnormal or a danger to society. It may have been a little sexist. It probably had an all-white cast but wasn't explicitly racist otherwise. Couldn't Siskel just relax and watch a movie about a duck that laid eggs with yolks made of gold? Is that any worse than the other crap they have in movies? I thought the fact that only the yolks were made of gold gave it scientific credibility.

Well. I looked on streaming video. Found a morally objectionable movie Siskel walked out on, Maniac, about a gross guy who goes around murdering people. It was bloodier and gorier than other such movies. Nothing really going for it. The star was a hemophiliac in real life so the bloodiness of the movie may have had some personal meaning to him. No offense to hemophiliacs. The poor guy died of a heart attack in his 50's. 

I can't recommend it. I didn't watch slasher movies back when they were popular, but seeing them now, years later, most of them seem okay. They're about random murders, so the non-murder scenes are sort of laid back. They weren't straining to create an intricate plot. The death tolls were fairly low compared to things made since then. 

They stole a scene from If.... In that movie, Malcolm McDowell sat in his dorm with a CO2 pistol shooting darts into the pictures he had taped up on the walls. Joe Spinell did the same thing in this movie, but he had fewer darts. He should have put on safety goggles.

I can't fault Siskel for walking out.

The star said that if you don't like horror movies, don't see it, which seems sensible but not really a defense of its content.

I read someone else's review of Rust

I haven't seen the movie Rust but I read a review of it on the Variety website. Turns out it's two hours and thirteen minutes long and they called it an "indie art Western". The plot doesn't sound promising but I don't think any Western plot sounds like it'd be any good. I guess there was Stagecoach which started out as a drama and didn't turn into an action film until the last reel, and there was A Fistful of Dollars only because it was a rip-off of Yojimbo. But there's just not much you can do with such a stupid genre. I became weirdly fascinated with westerns because they're so popular outside the U.S. Both the Dalai Lama and Josef Stalin liked them. I can't imagine what they saw in them. It seems crazy that Alec Baldwin and the director, Joel Souza, had any enthusiasm for this thing.

I'd see westerns as a kid and was always on the Indians' side. They had long hair, looked like hippies and their shoes looked really comfortable, not like the stupid-looking high heeled boots the cowboys lumbered around in. The whites just looked like stodgy 1950s people. I think there was more than one episode of Gunsmoke where they talk about what a nice guy someone is and say, "Why, he doesn't even carry a gun!" Are these people you'd want to be around?

In pretty much any Western. if you see someone in jail, you know full well you're going to see them break out. In Rust, Baldwin breaks his tween grandson out of the slam to save him from being hanged. Maybe they do it in a way that's fresh and original, but I doubt it. 

But I should watch it before I express any strong feeling about it. An "indie art Western" actually sounds interesting. 

They're charging $6.99 to see it on streaming video. I'm going to have to give it a while. 

"Christopher and Me" (1960) D.A Pennebaker, Shirley Clarke

A sort of cute film about little twin boys who sail out on a lake alone on a sailboat that was left floating around. At least they put on life jackets. They sail around. One falls overboard but somehow manages to get back on the boat although it couldn't really stop. They find themselves in the middle of a sailboat race.

I know I recently disapproved of this sort of thing in Ordinary People, but it turned out there was some false memory syndrome involved.

16 minutes. 

Available on the Critereon Channel.

X The Unknown (UK, 1956)

American Dean Jagger got top-billing just a year after Bad Day at Black Rock, with a young Leo McKern and Anthony Newley. Scientists and a small number of British troops fight mud brought to life by radiation. I watched a lousily colorized version. 

The movie looked kind of nice, kind of Scottlandy, driving English cars through the Scottish countryside. We see people in an old church and a hermit living in a medieval tower. 

But there's not much to tell. Leo McKern had a much higher-pitched voice in his 30s than he had later in life. No one sees the monster but scientist Dean Jagger comes up with a crazy theory. Includes the death of a child (Michael Brooke), something most movies have the good taste to avoid.

Available on Pub D Hub, free on Classic Movies and TV and Momentu.

Reportedly, blacklisted American director Joseph Losey was set to direct, but Dean Jagger got his panties in a bunch because he didn't want to work with a Communist. So Losey was replaced by Leslie Norman. 

Reminded me of The Blob or "The Chicken Heart" in some respects. The living mud gets bigger and bigger looking for radiation to feed on. But we don't see it until we get toward the end. Until them, we just get close-ups of people staring into the camera looking terrified even though what they were looking at was probably surprising but not really scary. Maybe some of them would be frightened, but others would just be confused.