Fire Maidens from Outer Space (UK, 1956)

You know those movies where men find themselves shipwrecked on an island inhabited by sex starved young women who need men to mate? Pretty much what you had here except that it was on a moon of Jupiter. 

"You know. There could be humans on that planet," says a British scientist before the launch.

I don't know how the British felt about the stock footage of a V2 rocket as a US/British spaceship to Jupiter. The movie was made only eleven years after the Nazis were launching those things at London.

The Fire Maidens are all the offspring of one old guy. He's the only man there and couldn't very well breed with his own daughters, so it will be up to the Earthmen. 

Cat Women of the Moon was a better film with its references to genocide and the men and women hating each other. That movie had a giant moon spider. All this film has is a big dark complected caveman-like fellow they call "The Creature" who the Fire Maidens want the men to murder. The Fire Maidens were colonists from Atlantis. I guess he was an indigenous life form they wanted to exterminate. So there was genocide in this movie, too.

I'm making it sound more interesting than it is.

Made in the UK by an American director. 

81 minutes. Free on Pub-D-Hub.

Nero's Mistress (Italy, 1956)

Vittorio De Sica, Brigitte Bardot, Gloria Swanson. Alberto Sordi as Nero. 

Italian comedy. Nero is vacationing on the coast when his mother comes to visit. Gloria Swanson dubbed in Italian but acting much as she did in Sunset Boulevard was pretty good as the emporer's mother, Agrippina. Nothing was terribly funny, but it was amusing in its way. Nero keeps trying to murder his mother. When someone advises him to have a deaf-mute kill her because they can't talk if they're caught, he orders that a slave be taken away and rendered deaf and mute in a horrible way. You can't portray ancient Romans as normal people, but how should you react to that?

Directed by Steno. Cinematography by Mario Bava.

In color, available on Tubi and Amazon Prime. 

"The Face" (Poland, 1966)

Poor film students spend all their time studying feature films, but they're forced to make short films as their student projects. Short films aren't the same thing.

In this movie, future director Krzysztof Kieslowski plays a tortured artist. He expresses the depth of his distress by desperately lighting a cigarette. Both these things---the tortured artist and smoking as a sign of emotional distress---are widely ridiculed tropes in American student films, but if Polish film students do the same thing, there must be something to it.

Tortured artist examines his face in the mirror and goes nuts attacking his supply of self-portraits. Directed by Kieslowski's classmate, Piotr Studzinski. Kieslowski went on to direct such movies as A Short Film About Killing. 

Six minutes. Available on The Criterion Channel.

People really like Jaws

I've been looking around online and I keep seeing people who think Jaws is the greatest movie ever made. Maybe they haven't seen very many movies. On the other hand, I haven't watched it in years. My people, if we liked a movie, would see it over and over, so I had seen it several times when it came out and saw it on TV a couple of times. But I don't want to see the bloody death of a child again or the adults either, and you have to pay to see it on streaming video. Maybe I'd think it was the greatest movie ever if I saw it again but I doubt it.

Roger Corman recognized it as an exploitation film and was alarmed that a major studio figured out that they could do what he had been doing for years.

But, offhand, thinking only of American movies from the '70's that were better than Jaws---there was Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Chinatown. 

Spielberg himself had to be bothered that, in lists of the greatest films, other New Hollywood directors had far more grown-up movies while all he had was his big-budget gore film. Or maybe he thought he was brilliant, making a shark movie while those snotty auteurs made pretentious snooze-fests. If so, good for him. Let him have his high self-esteem, and his billions of dollars.

I know I've seen The Godfather and Apocalypse Now but I barely remember either one. Maybe I shouldn't have listed them above. I have no memory at all of Das Boot but I know I watched it. I had a friend who was taking German and was excited about it. The German teacher had been enthusing over it but hadn't said anything about The Tin Drum a year or two year earlier. So Jaws was at least memorable. 

Remember the scene in Ed Wood where 
Bela Lugosi rolls around pretending to be
killed by an obviously fake
rubber octopus?

Young, Violent, Dangerous (Italy, 1976)

I had seen this years ago on something called "The Movie Greats Network", a syndicated thing showing really awful movies they paid almost nothing for.

At the time, I thought Young, Violent, Dangerous was terrible. I kept watching, distracted by the dubbing. They did a pretty good job. It sounded dubbed, but they had the lip sync down. 

The movie starts with a girl reporting her boyfriend to the police. He and his friends were planning a robbery armed with toy guns. She didn't want him going to prison for anything that stupid. Police stake out the gas station they're going to rob. They apparently tell the owner they were going to have toy guns so he refuses to hand over the money. The guns turn out to be real. The owner is shot and the three of them shoot their way out when police move in. The race away in their stolen Fiat.

They pick up submachine guns from their gun source and rob a grocery store.

One guy keeps laughing and acting crazy and obnoxious. I kept wishing they'd shoot him. Made me think of the 1949 juvenile delinquency movie City Across the River. One member of the gang in that movie is nicknamed "Crazy". In his first scene he was flapping his arms saying, "Look, fellas! Look! I'm a boid! I'm a boid!" In Young, Violent, Dangerous, the boys stop and look at a TV playing in the window of an appliance store and he starts imitating a surfer on TV. Later, he throws handfuls of money out the window of the car. 

It wasn't as bad as I remembered. It was unmarred by the "three act structure", was made up of a series of sequences. The gas station robbery, followed by a sex scene at a gun dealers house, followed by a grocery store robbery, followed by some other sequences.

In one scene, the Italian detective berated the boys' petit-bourgeois parents. Their sons were in college but he thought they were negligent for not knowing where they were at all times. Maybe Italian children mature slower.

Free on Tubi.