'THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS'.......WHAT HAPPENS IN SPAIN, STAYS IN SPAIN......

They Came To Rob Las Vegas (1969)  is a prime example of one of the BQ's most beloved, but now vanished genres......the international co-production....

            We could never get our fill of these when they flourished from the mid 1960's to the early 1970's.....incredible projects that involved the collusion of filmmakers and actors from three or more countries. Mostly they were crime thrillers, James Bond imitations or the gory 'Giallo' slasher mysteries (another wacky genre we promise we'll dive more deeply into later..)

             The casts of these films usually sported a few familiar American actors leading a supporting bunch recruited from every European country involved in the film's production......with everyone delivering their lines in their original language. This literal tower of babble would then be completely post-synchronized with an English dubbed soundtrack......in which the primitive sound quality gave you the impression that they jammed the entire cast into one phone booth.....

              But for us, that became part of these movies'charms, along with the muddy, grainy color photography that came from their use of Techniscope, a cheapo wide screen process, sort of a supermarket generic version of Panavision.....

               "They Came To Rob Las Vegas", as you might have already guessed, is a cold-blooded 'impossible heist' caper, this one involving the hijacking and virtually magical disappearance of an impregnable armored car loaded with Vegas casino cash.  You could never get the United Nations to accomplish much,but Spain, France, Italy and Germany all came together to concoct this epic.

                Our mastermind, played by monotone hunk Gary Lockwood, fresh from his monotone hunk demise in '2001', is at least ahead of his time in the diversity of his gang.....most of them carry on gay banter like they're auditioning for a dinner theater revival of 'The Boys In The Band'.  Gary, however, in his studly function part of the plan,, has bedded and recruited the luscious personal assistant (Elke Sommer, with eye makeup always slathered on) of the armored truck company chief. (Lee J. Cobb)

                Cobb's been using his armored trucks, which look like RVs outfitted to vacation in Syria war zones, to also transport gold for the mob's Mexican branch.  Hot on his tail in this regard comes a relentless Treasury agent (Jack Palance), who maintains a steely composure until sometimes losing his temper.....then he looks like he's having a sudden attack of gas.....

                Now the real fun begins......Lockwood and his merry band seize one of Cobb's trucks and manage to shlep it into a big hole they've dug in the middle of the Nevada desert......well, actually the Spanish desert of Almeria, , that famously familiar landscape of a thousand Italian westerns. (Practically no one in this cast gets anywhere near Las Vegas)....But to the everlasting grief of the Gary gang, they discover one of Palance's Treasury agents parked inside the truck.....with a machine gun....

                You don't really root for anyone here......the gang  murders truck guards and Lockwood orders the execution of an innocent motorist who stumbles upon the truck burial operation. ...the movie, like its Italian western counterparts, casts a cold, distant eye on the proceedings, which makes perfect sense given its bitterly ironic, fatalistic conclusion.

                But it has a glossy, glitzy style to it that still keeps us riveted every time we watch it. The director, Antonio Isasi, abhors camera movement, so he accomplishes his action sequences with quick cutting and multiple camera angles.  And this movie's MVP is without a doubt composer Georges Garvarentz, who deftly scores the whole thing with a catchy mixture of jazzy pop and a memorable, haunting 'wordless song'. (Early in the film, putting this tune on a record player, Lockwood comments how it always gets to him......and we agree.)

               Yes, we do realize a film like this is a particular acquired taste.....but, hey that's why people start blogs, right?  And among the strange, odd collections of International Co-Productions.....this lists among our favorites.  For all its unique flaws and foibles, this mostly-made-in-Spain Vegas caper make for an entertaining couple of hours.....so we'll hijack 3 & 1/2 stars (*** 1/2).....we still can't get that damn wordless song out of our head.......
             

'BIGGER THAN LIFE'......DOES FATHER KNOW BEST IF HE'S MANIC-DEPRESSED?

Bigger Than Life (1956)  evolved over the decades into a significant landmark in the brilliant, turbulent career of director Nicholas Ray. One year earlier, his star burned bright with his and James Dean's explosive plunge into the teen angst of "Rebel Without A Cause"  (Before this film, Hollywood viewed teenagers the same way their parents viewed them......as potentially hostile alien invaders, incapable of rational communication with anyone but themselves...) Ray specialized in films that tore apart society's fabric, and unlike the hordes of stagebound directors who stumbled into films, Ray knew how to put across a story visually and wielded Cinemascope imagery like a master painter.....

            "Bigger Than Life" was every bit as urgent, ripped-from-the-headlines melodramatic and stocked with frenzied, memorable incidents as "Rebel Without A Cause" but Mr.and Mrs. Buttered Popcorn turned away from it......it had to wait a full generation before critics and film buffs rediscovered it. And what a film they found......Ray used "Bigger Than Life", technically a true life chronicle of the dangerous after effects of prescription drugs, to deconstruct and destroy the 1950's American family.  Almost bordering on horror during its final moments, it's 'Jeckyll and Hyde dropped down into picket fence suburbia.....

             James Mason plays a gentle hearted middle school teacher beloved by his wife and young son. (Barbara Rush, Christopher Olsen) Unbeknownst to his family, he's struggling to make ends meet by moonlighting as a yellow cab dispatcher, but suffering at both jobs when suddenly afflicted with bouts of physical agony.....

             After collapsing, his doctors hand him a death sentence with an escape clause......the rare inflammation of his arteries will kill him, but the new 'wonder drug' hormone Cortisone might save him. To no one's surprise, Mason opts for the Cortisone even with his doctors' dire warnings about the drug's tendency to cause wild mood swings.

            Apparently enjoying the 'up' part of the mood swings a little too much, Mason starts poppin' the Cortisone like Tic-Tacs.  (The scene where he easily tricks a druggist into selling him more pills reminds us of airport scenes in 50's movies.....where everybody easily breezes in and out of terminals, unfettered and unbothered...)

             Since he's an over-achieving intellectual and former college football star, the drug amplifies Mason into a sort of bullying, blustering Neo-Nazi with a God complex.  The unnerving sequences where he terrifies and torments his innocent family are among Ray's best work as a director and Mason's as an actor. You almost can't bear to look. (Although we found it a little hard to swallow the erudite, patrician Mason as a rip roarin' former football hero......but as a drug-addled psycho, he's superb....)

            Before the really disturbing stuff starts, Ray has a bit of perverse fun in a scene where Mason outrages and scandalizes Parent-Teacher night. Mason, clearly flying up in his Cortisone stratosphere, outrages his students' parents, calling the kids morons and apes, mercilessly mocking modern education's emphasis on student creativity and independent thought at the expense of hardcore learning.  One of the dads in attendance, probably a future Trump supporter, gives Mason's rants a ringing endorsement . ("He should be the Principal!")

              The film's dark climax provides Ray all he needs to fully tear apart what's left of  this once typical family structure. Mason, inspired by the bible's tale of Abraham and his son Issac, decides to rewrite the Old Testament and correct God's version by actually killing his own little boy. (which makes Christopher Olsen, who also played the kidnapped child in Hitchcock's "Man Who Knew Too Much", the most abused kid of l956)

               Brief at 95 minutes and brutal in its dramatic impact, 1950's audiences ignored the film. Way ahead of its time on multiple issues, you can see all its harbingers on display.......the economic struggles of  America's post war middle class, the dawn of drug abuse, and in the madness of Mason's drug-fueled egomania.....a harrowing glimpse of families undone by domestic abuse.  BQ declares it as a 'not to be missed' and we prescribe 4 stars (****)......you might find yourself listening more carefully to that litany of side-effects in the drug ads......

'DOC SAVAGE, THE MAN OF BRONZE'.......A DOOMED TEMPLE.....

Doc Savage, The Man Of Bronze (1975)  became the last produced film of legendary producer-writer-director George Pal, Pal was the Alfred Hitchcock of fantasy and science fiction films, with his filmography dotted with landmarks like "Destination Moon", "War Of The Worlds", "When Worlds Collide" and "The Time Machine".

               Unlike today's fantasy-sci-fi directors, who draw on untold millions of studio cash and command armies of computer animators for their projects, Pal created his cinematic wonders with threadbare, minuscule budgets and a hardy band of of two or three special effects guys.  Such was the lot of any 1950's producer who dared to make films of imagination.....

              At face value, the whole idea of 'Doc Savage' seemed delightfully irresistible,. Taken from a series of fantasy adventure novels ground out by pulp fictioneer Lester Dent, the stories followed the fantastic exploits of all-around super-guy Doc, a beefy, infinitely educated stud with a ripped open shirt and a severe white-blonde widow's peak. With the help of his Scooby-like gang, The Fabulous Five, Doc periodically emerged from his arctic Fortress of Solitude to take on archvillains and monsters with grim determination.......

              We wish we could tell you that "Doc Savage"  served as a fitting farewell for Pal's long career. But the film, a cheap looking stillborn thing done in by its exhausted campy approach, opened dead-on-arrival in theaters, finding no audience.  George Pal continued to prepare future projects, even including a 'Doc Savage' sequel, but the studios were done with him.....and this sorry effort remained the last movie associated with his name....

             Doubly sad, because six years later, Steven Spielberg would essentially co-opt and alter the 'Doc Savage' template into Indiana Jones and 'Raiders Of The Lost Ark' and captivate and thrill the entire world with it.....Spielberg's film winked at the audience with the sheer silliness of Indiana's adventures, while at the same time making the thrills propulsive and adrenalin-fueled.....

             So what went wrong with Pal's own Indiana?  A terrible, terrible decision, done presumably in the script stage, to film the story in the same arch, wink-wink, it's-all-a-big-joke manner of the Adam West "Batman" TV series.  Turning Batman into a campy clown show tickled the nation's fancy during its debut year 1966.  But by 1968, it played like the same tired joke repeated over and over.....everyone yawned and the show simply withered and went away.....

             Why Pal decided, nine years later, to apply this completely worn out and now unfunny approach to 'Doc Savage......we have no idea.  42 years later, the movie's as much of a joyless chore to watch as it was in l975.....

             If nothing else, it's consistent in its wrong-headedness........in case anyone walked in not knowing the film was intended as a mockery, the music score consists of  a male chorus singing clumsy lyrics put to John Philip Sousa marches. When Doc (Ron Ely, a former TV Tarzan) appears, a cartoon gleam in his eye sparkles....a joke that Blake Edwards had already worn out with Tony Curtis in "The Great Race". The rest of the movie plods along like a dress rehearsal for a busted TV pilot, staged by British veteran Michael Anderson as if he were directing the movie from a hospital bed while on life support.....

               What seemed brilliant in 1966, when scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. lampooned comic book heroics in his "Batman" TV episodes, curdled badly in l975.  If  the 'Doc Savage' movie was conceived as nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek jape, then why would any of us sit through it?  The answer: no one did. Certainly not for the action sequences, poorly choreographed and resembling lame imitations of old movie serial fistfights.....and the only thing we smiled at was the sight of the movie's logo plastered on all of Doc's fleet of cars and planes.....we're not even sure the ham-fisted filmmakers even saw that as a joke......

               But we'll still always love and cherish George Pal for the classic sci-fi/fantasy films that became touchstones for baby boomer childhoods......as for Doc Savage, we last heard Dwayne Johnson, the Rock himself plans to revive the franchise. We don't doubt that Dwayne's Doc will indulge in a bit of sly self-mockery.....he excels in that regard....and we can only imagine how many hundreds of CGI artists are currently digitizing monsters and assorted catastrophic events for him to survive.  Well, he 's got nowhere to go but up.....since we can only give up 1 Fortress Of Solitude star (*) for the '75 Doc.  Here's hoping his next house call knocks us silly.....and not from campy jokes.

           

'A KISS IN THE DARK'......ROLL ME UP IN BREADCRUMBS, DADDY, 'CAUSE I WANNA GET FRIED.....

A Kiss In The Dark (1949)   The priceless subtitle of today's post is supposedly the name of a brassy jazz number blaring while bubbly fashion model Polly (Jane Wyman) enjoys a date with her potential boyfriend, a stuffy British concert pianist (David Niven)...;;;

             And thus we have a prime example of what you could call the dawn of the modern romantic comedy......a collision of opposites.....Wyman's perky ingenue humanizing Niven's impossibly inhibited fussbudget.....and the plot device that would survive decades.....in which a straight-laced, by-the-book character somehow inherits or collects a gang of lovable eccentrics who ultimately teach him (or her) valuable life lessons and change him ( or her) for the better......not to mention foster a romance with one of the eccentrics among them....

             In this one, Niven's business managers have beefed up his investment portfolio with an apartment building managed by a gently mumbling little elf played by Victor Moore. (Moore, the most sly scene stealer in classic Hollywood history never looks like he's doing much in a scene....until you realize you haven't taken your eyes off him). Niven promptly bumps up against the building's primary tenants  (for the purposes of this movie, anyway).....a brawling, hot-tempered lout (Broderick Crawford) and the too-spunky-for-words Wyman....

             Under Delmer Daves direction, only sporadic hilarity ensues.....Daves excelled in melodrama, but you can tell comedy eluded him.......he knew the melody to play but not the right notes to hit. Niven using his piano playing to drive the obnoxious Crawford out of the building becomes a laborious, endlessly unfunny sequence.  Every little slapstick moment gets held one or two beats too long......

            But every so often, there's stuff to enjoy here......mostly Jane Wyman. In these l940's and 50's romcoms, Wyman was the Sally Field of her era.......cute as a button but possessing some serious acting chops when given the chance.  She landed in this piece of fluff one year after breaking everyone's hearts (and collecting an Academy Award) for her wrenching portrayal of the abused mute in "Johnny Belinda".  So it must have been quite a change of pace.....as Niven appreciatively ogles her as she parades in front of him in shorts and heels.

             Not quite top of the line in studio produced comedies......but you can see in it all the characters and situations that screenwriters solidified in decades of future romcoms. For David Niven's always welcome sputtering bluster and Jane Wyman's huggable girl-in-the-apartment-next door, we'll scrape up 2 & 1/2 stars. (** 1/2)  And maybe someone should write a real song called "Roll Me Up In Breadcrumbs, Daddy, Cause I Wanna Get Fried"......we can't wait to hear Adele cover it......

           

DEPT. OF OUR LEAST FAVORITE THINGS....THANK-GOD-IT'S-ALMOST-MAY EDITION...

Before we plunge back into our piles of movies and books......a few thoughts......

The Invisible Border Wall    Forgive us if our memory's faulty......we dutifully watched all the rallies leading up to the election (they were like trailers for an upcoming horror movie...).....we recall the Kremlin Kandidate screaming out, "Who's gonna pay for the wall?", waiting for his hypnosis subjects to yell back a response.  Honestly, we don't remember the crowd yelling back, "WE ARE! WE'LL BE THRILLED TO FORK OVER BILLIONS FOR YOUR WALL.....UNTIL YOU EVENTUALLY FIGURE OUT A WAY TO GET MEXICO TO PAY FOR IT SOMETIME LATER ON!!"    We don't think that's what they yelled.....but, who knows, we could be wrong.....

Caitlyn Jenner  Go away. Now. Forever. (Why do we get the feeling that if she ever thinks media attention is dying down, she'll turn herself back into Bruce.....)

Kim Jong Un....reminds us of one of those obnoxious kids who got Golden Tickets to tour  Willie Wonka's factory....... If only Gene Wilder could come back from the dead and turn him into a giant blueberry and drown him in the chocolate waterfall......

Scott Baio   If anyone didn't realize why this bottom feeder was the closest thing to a celebrity that Trumputin could dredge up to appear at his convention.....it's crystal clear now.  Note to Scottie: when you finally pass away, here's an advance look at reactions to your obituary......Scott who?......

Bill Cosby says he's completely blind.....but we guarantee you he could still read the labels on the little bottles of stuff he tossed into women's drinks......

Tom Cruise in "The Mummy".....with the mummy now played by some hot starlet-du-jour.....anyone else see the irony? Tom facing off against a creepy remnant of a civilization that worshiped all sorts of wacky gods.....uh....like a crazy cult religion. Hmmm........well who should know that bunch better than Tom?

Ivanka Trump    We get it.....we're all supposed to be thankful that she serves as the closest thing to normalcy and sanity at the Halloween Funhouse on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue........we don't believe that horseshit for a minute......at the end of the day,  she's part of the ruling family junta that's seized the country, along with whats-his-face, Mr.Ivanka, who's been anointed with the job of General Supervisor Of The Entire World.......

Bill O'Reilly  What's interesting to us here: comparing today's TV personalities to those of generations gone by.....in the olden, Golden days, TV guys like Arthur Godfrey felt it necessary to hide their true, utterly abysmal selves with a phony, folksy persona. Not today......Bill O' Reilly never had to don a mask to cover his arrogance, and bottomless well of cruelty.  If Lonesome Rhodes, the Andy Griffith character from "A Face In The Crowd" were a cable news pundit today, he'd wouldn't need that joshing, cornpone disposition to fool anybody.........he could reveal his mean-spirited, empty soul to the entire world......and maybe have the Trumpkins love him for it.......

.......no wonder we can't wait to return to the comforting fictions of novels and films.........

'THEM!'.......THE ATOMIC AGE STARTS BUGGIN' US........

Them! (1954)   In 1945 Robert Oppenheimer, gazing in horrified wonder at the first flowering of his atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, supposedly muttered from Hindu scripture, "Now I am become death.....the destroyer of worlds."

            Nine years later, Warner Brothers gazed upon the same New Mexico desert......and translated Oppenheimer's dire warning about unleashing atomic power into something us popcorn munchers could more easily understand.....

            Giant ants. Bigger than Ford Broncos, hungry for humans and generally more pissed off than Donald Trump on an all-night twitter rant......

             A genuine classic was born, despite every effort of mogul Jack L. Warner to strangle it  in its crib (or nest.) Keep in mind, this is 1950's Hollywood we're talking about.......big studios treated their science fiction films the way Harry Potter's mean aunt and uncle treated the boy wizard....mocked, abused.locked in a closet and barely taken care of.  No 150 million dollar budgets for these movies......their budgets hovered slightly above the cost of a tuna fish sandwich at the Warner Brothers commissary....

             "Them!" and its rampaging jumbo ants had been planned for Technicolor and 3-D.....Jack Warner, already mortified at the idea of making such a film, vetoed spending the extra money, condemning the film to black and white.  Warner didn't realize how much his decision enhanced "Them!"......the sturdy B-movie journeyman assigned to direct it, Gordon Douglas, took a straightforward intelligent approach to its fantastic storyline. . Making use of the full ominous visual power of black and white photography, Douglas shot the film as a kind of semi-documentary sci-fi noir......complete with a hellish noir showdown between the military and the ants in the storm drains of Los Angeles....

              Like Steven Spielberg's famously malfunctioning Bruce The Shark, the ants of "Them" are full sized props. They probably didn't work any better than Bruce, so Douglas wisely makes sparing use of them for maximum impact. But when he does......the sight of one the ants crushing one of the beloved lead actors in its pincers still remains every bit as horrifying as Robert Shaw getting chomped on in "Jaws".

              63 years later, "Them!" still exerts tremendous power. Our favorite moments:  Composer Bronsilau Kaper's pounding piano chord for the Warner Brothers logo.....child actress Sandy Descher as the traumatized ant attack survivor wandering in the desert (her screams of "Them....them!" can still chill you to the bone)......Fess Parker's good ole Texas boy comedy relief bit, which tickled Walt Disney enough to award him the part of Davy Crockett.......the long roster of familiar faces popping up throughout the film - Leonard Nimoy, Richard Deacon, Lawrence Dobkin, William Schallert, Dub Taylor and premier scene stealer Olin Howland ("Make me a sergeant in charge of the booze!")......female lead Joan Weldon's impatient snap at James Arness when he unwisely tries the typical 1950's 'this is no place for a woman' shtick on her...... .Gordon Douglas's skilled handling of the ant attack sequences, freely mixing terror and suspense together.....from the brief but unforgettable scene of the storm tossed battleship infested with ants to the pure unadulterated nightmare of the storm drain battle.....

            Despite all the contempt Jack Warner felt for "Them!", the movie stunned him by becoming Warner Brothers number one box office performer for 1954. But it didn't lessen his embarrassment for having produced a giant ant movie and studio moguls, with rare exception,  continued to treat science fiction movies like bastard mutant stepchildren they kept chained in the basement.

           Though few of its imitators ever came close to the slick professionalism and artistic prestige of "Them!", the movie opened the floodgates for hordes of mutated insects and dinosaurs spawned by wanton nuclear testing. These giant roaring, scuttling, stomping crawling metaphors-for-atomic-armageddon (led by Japan's Most Valuable Destroyer, Godzilla) invaded our neighborhood theaters to remind us of the unimaginable power we'd liberated from the universe......

            While Ishiro Honda's original version of "Godzilla" resonated with it evocation of atomic horror, these movies mostly remain what they were at the time of their release.....laughable, ridiculous, shoddy, and guilty fun to watch.  "Them!", however, stays as strong as ever, with all its dread, scares and powerfully disturbing sequences still intact.  For the BQ, it's forever a 5 star FIND OF FINDS (*****)......stay out of those storm drains.....


           

'CLOSE ENOUGH TO TOUCH'......WHEN A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND IS HER EPI-PEN........

Close Enough To Touch by Colleen Oakley (2017)   We very rarely venture into heart-tugging weepy territory in our reading, but having scooped this one up during the weekly plunder of the our little library's new release section, we gave it a glance.....

          Okay, more than a glance.......okay, we scarfed up the whole thing in a matter of days, seduced by the book's movie-ready high concept hook.....a girl deathly allergic to the touch of human skin.

           If you ached for John Travolta's poignant plight in 'The Boy In The Plastic Bubble', you'll swoon for this book's heroine,  Jubilee Jenkins, a young woman who breaks into ugly rashes and seizes up in anaphylactic shock if she comes in contact with anyone else's skin.....or even accidentally wears someone else's unwashed sweatshirt.

            Which, of course, would make any romantic entanglement.....uh.... how can we put it...problematic. Not to mention, lethal.

            Forced to live the secluded life of an isolated outcast, she grows up untouched by her mother as her malady grows more severe.......while in high school,a popular boy's kiss almost kills her, a kiss not given out of affection, but nothing more than a cruel prank committed on a dare......

            Feeling the tugs on the old ticker yet?  Wait.....this book's just getting started. After nine reclusive years, Jubilee's finances run out and she ends up working in the library of her small town in New Jersey. Once there, she crosses paths with Eric, a divorced dad with an adopted little boy, a deeply troubled tyke whose hidden grief over the loss of his real parents has led him into bizarre,  near suicidal behavior.

              The boy, sensing a fellow outcast, quickly bonds with Jubilee.....his father, confounded by this beautifully eccentric woman who never takes off her gloves and flinches at any contact,  falls faster for her than if he'd  bungee'd off the Grand Canyon.....

          And now prepare yourselves, for this is where author Oakley proceeds to mercilessly play your heartstrings like a virtuoso violinist....by the time you reach the final pages, the book will have wrung you out like a dishrag that's been squeezed by the Incredible Hulk in full 'smash' mode.  Corny, blatantly obvious, maudlin, manipulative......all that, and we wallowed in every moment of it.  If they ever get around to making a movie of this, the theaters would have to replace the tubs of butter popcorn with piled high boxes of Kleenex.....

             We've done our due diligence here and given you fair warning. If you pick up "Close Enough To Touch", the BQ takes no responsibility if you fall its under spell.  And we first thought we'd be allergic to this book's mixture of seemingly star-crossed romance, pathos and surprising amounts of witty humor......foolish us. 5 stars, an official FIND OF FINDS (*****)

'THE IMPOSSIBLE FORTRESS'.....AN 80'S NERD PRAYS FOR VANNA FROM HEAVEN....

The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak (2017)   We'd been planning a post to overview the slew of 1980's movies in which bullied, outcast nerds emerged triumphant....winning a variety of contests, schoolyard fights and oh yes......the prettiest girl in school.....

          And then along came this gem of a novel, which condenses all of those films and their various characters, tribulations and victories into one entertaining package........it's like reading the novelization of the ultimate 1980's teen comedy romance that somehow no one ever got around to making......

            Everything's in place for a fantasy-film that might have been produced by Spielberg and directed by Robert Zemeckis.......starting with our fourteen year old dweeb hero, Billy Marvin and his two equally dweeby sidekicks, Alf and Clark...

            Like many 80's film nerds, Billy's an underachiever at school but a wiz on his Commodore 64 console, struggling to create his own game, "The Impossible Fortress".  His buddies have an altogether different agenda.......breaking into the local office supply store to swipe off its magazine stand their personal holy grail, the current 'Playboy' featuring nude photos of 'Wheel Of Fortune's Vanna White.....

             In joining this ludicrous caper, Billy reluctantly becomes an inside secret agent.....in order to learn to the store's alarm code, he befriends the owner's daughter Mary Zelinsky, who turns out to be a kindred spirit and expert computer game aficionado. Puberty hormones rage and puppy love blossoms.......but dramatic storm clouds gather and we'd rather not tell you the details and spoil the fun of finding out for yourself.   Take our word for it, the plot swerves into some wild ups and downs for Billy, Mary and friends,  with a few major poignant twist reveals.

             Taken strictly as a novel, none of what unfolds in the book's second half is all that believable......but if you envision it in your mind as a snappy, feel-good mid 1980's movie with River Phoenix, Corey Feldman or Corey Haim, it's damn near perfect. Laughs, heart-tugs and the Jurassic age of computer technology.....and ending as all such stories should, at a hotly contested computer game contest judged by a master gaming guru.

              We promise to get around to that BQ view of the films that inspired this book.....but in the meantime, we recommend you take the impossibly engaging "The Impossible Fortress" for a spin, one of the best reads we've come across this year.  4 Megabytes (****)  We almost felt like playing an upbeat Huey Lewis song as we finished the last chapter.....
           

'THE KIND WORTH KILLING'......STRANGERS ON A PLANE....CORPSES ON THE GROUND....

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson (2015)  We love talking up a page-turning thriller like this.....for the simple reason that we dare not waste a lot of time and verbiage on blah-blah-blahing about the plot.....

           We dare not do that......'cause once you get past the story's initial set-up, the book becomes a non-stop, murderous funhouse ride of twists and turns.....none of which, we promise, you're going to hear about in this post......

             Here's as far as we go....(we'll wisely follow the hardcover book flap description, which doesn't stray any farther either...)...the kick-off: a clever variation of the classic Patricia Highsmith novel 'Strangers On A Train' (and later the equally classic Hitchcock film)....Rich executive Ted meets knockout redhead Lily in an airport bar, waiting for the same flight. He's itching to bump off his wife Miranda who's canoodling with the contractor building their spiffy new coastal Maine mansion. Ted's in luck meeting Lily, since she's a fully functioning sociopath who doesn't think killing people is such a big deal.  And. in the spirit of their new found friendship, she offers to land Ted a helping hand.....

            Storywise, that's all you'll get out of the BQ, other than to say author Swanson will regularly make your jaw drop with one outrageous twist after another.  You won't take too much time questioning the overall craziness of it, you'll be having too much fun as the body count climbs.  The cast of characters?  A delightfully nasty rogue's gallery of psychos, suckers, and stalkers.....and you'll barely tolerate pausing between chapters to see what Swanson has in store for them.

            BQ says pick this one up immediately...... from the in-flight conspiracy to its delicious last paragraph kick-in-the-ass twist, "The Kind Worth Killing" is so worth reading.  An easy call....4 big stars (****)......watch out who you talk to in the airport....although, these days, your flight attendants pose a more lethal threat......

'CASINO ROYALE' (1967).....THEY WON A LOT OF MONEY AND A GAL......

Casino Royale (1967)   We asked ourselves, on the eve of this movie's 50th anniversary..........50 years later, is there anything at all redeemable about it?

              Not much......and you'd need tweezers and a microscope to pluck out still watchable moments in this notorious James Bond mega-spoof.

               This isn't a movie born of writers and directors, though there's six credited directors and possibly a phone book full of uncredited writers who worked on it. The true auteur behind "Casino Royale" was high-powered talent agent Charles K. Feldman.  This legendary wheeler dealer managed to snag the movie rights to the one Ian Fleming Bond novel that somehow eluded  Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, the producers of the Sean Connery Bonds.

               With the entire world consumed with Bond-mania, Feldman decided not to make an actual movie out of 'Casino Royale'......instead he convened a three ring cinematic circus.....multiple directors, untold amounts of writers, a huge cast of international stars.....all of these elements then randomly thrown together in a series of barely connected set-pieces lampooning all the usual Bond tropes, gorgeous girls, karate fights, car chases, explosions and idiotic secret agent gimmicks. A recipe for a nuclear level disaster....130 minutes of senseless, shapeless gobbledegook that, for sheer filmmaking folly, has rarely been equaled......

              But did we mention Bond-mania?  Arriving a few months before the next hotly anticipated Connery Bond, "You Only Live Twice", "Casino Royale", rotten to its very core, still made some big box office bucks anyway.  As a counter-attack in June, United Artists triumphantly emblazoned their "You Only Live Twice" posters with the slogan 'Sean Connery IS James Bond!'  This didn't sit well with Connery, already unhappy with his type-casting and itching to break the chains of his Bond-age.....which is exactly what he did for a few years......

               Watching 'Royale' again, we struggled mightily to find something we could still enjoy.....if nothing else, it increased our admiration for British director Val Guest. Out of the director platoon deployed to make this movie, Guest took on the impossible assignment of linking the other directors' sequences together to try to make a coherent whole....they might as well have asked him to sculpt a replica of London using jello.....

                Here's a the quick breakdown:  The Scottish countryside stuff at the beginning, with David Niven and Deborah Kerr......beyond tedious, it takes over twenty minutes to set up a lame pun for Kerr to deliver.  Then we lurch into long, long scenes with Peter Sellers and Ursula Andress......Andress sounds comatose and Sellers had crawled so far into his own ego that he appeared disconnected from any film he starred in.  Even for chaos ringmaster Charles K.Feldman, Sellers became too problematic.....Feldman fired him, which did no damage to the continuity of the movie since it had no continuity of any kind to begin with. ....

              But wait.....by law of averages, we stumbled on a watchable part, the Berlin 'school for spies' sequence. The superstar here was production designer Michael Stringer......with his East Berlin bathed in deep red and his spy school done up in expressionistic  Cabinet of Caligari twisty shapes. And while we're in this brief generous mood, a word of praise for Burt Bachrach's bouncy, jokey score.....he's the only creative contributor to the movie who displayed an honest sense of humor.  We wish the music could have been applied to a better film......

              The rest of it.....a plunge into Bond spoof hell, a well long sucked dry by dozens of competing imitation tongue-in-cheekers. Woody Allen looks positively agonized as he desperately improvises his own dialogue while intentionally bumping into things.  Mercifully, the movie puts everyone out of their (and our) misery with its throw-in-the-kitchen-sink finale.....the casino brawl featuring  cowboys on horseback, parachuting disco Indians, the Keystone Cops, barking seals, a bubble machine and George Raft and Jean Paul Belmondo.  Woody Allen,in a way, a living symbol of the film, self-detonates, blowing him and the cast to smithereens.

               As a backhanded compliment, we'd consider "Casino Royale" as a glowing tribute to the Connery Bond films.  Those films held moviegoers' imaginations and world popular culture in such a powerful grip that a bloated atrocity like Charles K.Feldman's Bond circus seemed inevitable.  And some 30 years later, Mike Meyers sifted through the wreckage of the '67 'Casino Royale' and other similar misbegotten Bond wanna-be's to craft his Austin Powers spoofs.  But unlike the massive crew recruited by Feldman, Meyers remembered to make his movies funny.......

              So the BQ bids a final farewell to 'Casino Royale', we doubt we'll ever torture ourselves with it again.....unlike Scotch and wine, the passage of time hasn't made it any better than it was in 1967.   1 star (*)......it still stinks.

'GREEN MANSIONS'.......IS AUDREY OUT OF THE WOODS YET?

Green Mansions (1959)   We deeply treasure the oddities that sometimes rolled off the Hollywood studio assembly lines, despite the concentrated effort to make smoothly machine-tooled entertainment.......and here's one of the oddest.....

          When running high fevers (or egos), studio bigwigs would contemplate the impossible task of making a coherent movie out of William Henry Hudson's ethereal novel about Rima, the mysterious, other-worldly 'bird girl' of the Venezuelan jungle. First problem: who the hell could play such a role....a nymph-like wild child who comes across as the spawn of Tarzan and Tinkerbell.....

           MGM decided to take a crack at it in l959.....with the only major actress at the time whom audiences might conceivably believe as such a fantasy conception of womanhood.....Audrey Hepburn.  On the down side, they turned direction of the film over to Hepburn's husband Mel Ferrer, never anything but a journeyman actor and certainly no great shakes as a director.....

            A wifty movie like this cried out for some kind of flamboyant visualist at the helm, someone who'd stay in touch with the lighter-than-air source material (an Orson Welles, maybe)......but Ferrer's only talent here was making sure his wife looked stunningly beautiful.  At least he got that part right.....

            The rest of the movie remains.....just odd.  Anthony Perkins, in usual confused nervous twitch mode, has just fled a late 19th century rebellion in Caracas in which his father was killed. Into the Guyana jungles he goes, looking for gold but stumbling on to Audrey, who climbs trees and mimics bird calls.....and generally radiates pure wistful Audrey-ness while maintaining perfect hair and makeup.

            The movie offers a few scenic South American vistas.....but most of it transpires on a sprawling, well appointed MGM sound stage jungle......imagine a Rainforest Cafe with all the tables taken out. More nutty stuff follows: at one point, the film has Perkins warbling a title song like Elvis. Lee J.Cobb, outfitted like a grumpy skid row Santa Clause, wanders around as Hepburn's grandfather.....but he looks more like the grandfather Heidi was sent to live with.  Supplying the villainy.....the always exotically malicious Henry Silva as a loin-cloth'd tribesman who's out to make Audrey an extinct jungle species.....

            Perkins becomes predictably smitten with Audrey (who wouldn't?)....you can tell because he twitches a little less. The script remembers to follow the Golden Rule of all how-to-write-your-screenplay manuals......remember to chase your lead character up a tree. The books spoke figuratively in accentuating this rule,  but the movie does this to Audrey literally, as she's besieged by torch-bearing natives who don't have her best interests at heart.....later on, Perkins and Silva take their death struggle into the idyllic MGM rainforest pond....they resemble two guys horsing around poolside at a Vegas spa. 

            Under Mel Ferrer's unsteady hand, "Green Mansions" emerged as an incomprehensible whatsit, premiering along side Radio City Music Hall's Easter show......the only place you could see Audrey's jungle girl followed by the Rockettes. It died an immediate death, forgotten by everyone except the hardy band of Audrey Hepburn completists.....of which the BQ is a proud member.  Hence this post....  we wouldn't miss taking any steamy, dreamy oddball cruises with one of our faves......  2 2 &1/2 stars (**1/2) Not quite Tiffany's.....and you have to watch where you step.....

              

'THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS'.......ONE ROGUE IN CAR WARS.......

The Fate Of The Furious (2017)    Enduring the visual and audio assaults of a brand new multi-plex blockbuster is something the BQ would normally experience only when held at gunpoint......

            This also almost always holds true for the BQ's beloved daughter......except for any bloated tentpoles that might include her current crush, Scott Eastwood, the young actor who looks like he was cloned directly from one of his father's cheekbones......

             So off we went together to a late afternoon screening of "The Fate Of The Furious", the 8th film in the fabulously successful action of series about street racing car thieves turned international world-savers......

              It mattered not that the heavily attended matinee unspooled for dozens of families who brought along screaming, squawking infants......the film's soundtrack, consisting of revving engines and massive explosions, easily drowned them out......shriek all you want, you little bastards, you're no match for Vin Diesel in a nuclear souped-up sportscar.......

               Before the movie even started, the AMC multiplex exacted its stern punishments on its helpless patrons......a large selection of commercials we'd already seen a hundred times on television.....and then the multiplex version of waterboarding, a non-stop assault of summer movie trailers, all of them interchangable in their display of computer generated monsters, robots, explosions and general destruction......the only thing missing from them....a huge 'wait for Netflix' tag at the end of each one.....

               We were just about to drop to our hands and knees and scream "Mercy!" to the projectionist when the movie itself started.   We won't make any attempt to rationalize what we saw in terms of movie criticism.......it would as useless as applying artistic standard to an oncoming tsunami.  You simply sit back and let it wash over you......

               A few random BQ observations:

               A moment of silence for the passing of innocent New York City drivers......who no doubt were crushed to death or burned alive in their cars during the film's riotous first apocalyptic demolition derby in Manhattan......I know we're not supposed to give them a moment's thought...it's their own damn fault for getting in the way of our Furious gang trying to corral their wayward leader Diesel, who's fallen in with fast-typing arch-hacker Charlize Theron.....

                Speaking of Charlize.......We suppose Cyber-Psychos are the last politically safe villains that action movies can employ......we can feel free to despise them regardless of their race, nationality or gender. Not only soulless killers.....but killer keyboardists, too. If we typed as fast as Charlize when doing our Amazon order, we would have accidentally ended up with 300 copies of the 'La La Land' blu-ray....

                  Kurt Russell as 'Mr.Nobody'......the annoyingly jocular government operative gets a much-insulted mini-me this time around, played by Eastwood The Younger. As for Russell, if his character appeared in a Quentin Tarantino movie.....Samuel L.Jackson would have already shot him dead just to shut him up......

                We thought we heard Fidel Castro rolling in his grave.....at the sight of a Fast and Furious car chase careening through the Cuban streets.  JFK and the CIA couldn't quite bring off invading Cuba......but leave it to Vin Diesel and Universal Studios to bring good old-fashioned kickass American chaos to those commie streets overloaded with '58 Chevy Impalas......

                 When does the Rock Vs. Jason Statham movie happen?  Now there's a 'Clash Of The Titans' we'd pay to see.......even if does greatly tick off a jealous Vin Diesel.  And don't forget to throw in Dame Helen Mirren and Luke Evans as Statham's mum and bro......the three of them together make the Krays look like the Teletubbies......

                 The multiplex house lights finally brightened.....and the film's eternal credit crawl commenced..(for all we know, it might still not have finished...)....sorry, but we left the theater before reading the names of the 6,000 CGI people who sent digital cars flying around like Times Square confetti.  But the BQ did laugh and smile frequently......which is what we think the 'Furious' franchise really wants out of its audiences now. The films have become like a higher-tech version of the Roger Moore Bond movies, with increasingly ridiculous, guffaw-inducing stunts. We can't wait to see the 9th movie stage its car chases on the moon.....perhaps crashing into the International Space Station on their way there.......in the meantime, we'll rev up 3 Guilty Pleasure stars for 'Fate' (***).....we love that these guys never have to whip out their AAA road service cards......

               

               

'DOCTOR STRANGE'......AN IDIOT'S GUIDE (AND BY THAT, WE MEAN THIS BLOGGER..)

Doctor Strange (2016)    We consider ourselves only casual tourists through the ever expanding cinematic superhero universes of Marvel and DC......it's getting to the point where you need something like a March Madness bracket chart to keep them all straight in your head. Not that we want to put out that much effort.......

           But we freely admit, we had a fine old time with "Doctor Strange", even if we only mildly understood what the hell was going on it at any one time.  Not a boring moment in it.....and the nutso eye-candy stuff took us back to the days of sitting up close to the wrap-around screen at '2001' showings......yes, we still remember the 60's.....

           For anyone (including the BQ) who develops a blinding migraine at the thought of the interlocking rivalries, powers and opponents of movie superheroes, here's a fundamental breakdown, at least of this particular movie....

            Our Hero:  Brilliant, arrogant surgeon (Benedict Cumberbatch). Preening, egotistical jerk in love with his own life-saving prowess.....and begging for a takedown. (Movies love to pull the rug out from snotty medicos like this. Very similar to William Hurt's character in "The Doctor", a self satisfied prick who gets humbled by throat cancer)

            His huge effin' problem:  Nerve-damaged hands from a car accident. Solution......a standard comic book remedy.....travel to The Mysterious East (which is probably the destination stamped on his boarding pass).......and absorb the mystical, magical teachings of a Mysterious Eastern mentor, The Ancient One ( a title, until she passed, previously held by Zsa Zsa Gabor)

             The Ancient One....also known as The Sorcerer Supreme (which sounds like a chocolate dessert we ordered at Applebee's)....played by Tilda Swinton, looking like a slightly older version of the kid Eddie Murphy had to protect in "The Golden Child".  And by the way, shut up, you politically correct whiners about Tilda not being Asian......it's a frickin' comic book movie,kids, and besides, Tilda's perfect for the role.......having landed years ago from Planet Tilda in a far off galaxy where everyone's blindingly blonde......

             Magic Stuff  Our ears glazed over during the expository dialogue explaining why Tilda and her acolytes can make all manner of bright yellow animated shapes, like birthday clowns fashioning really cool balloon animals.  Who cares when it's this much fun to watch......Tilda, Benedict and the gang can make swords, shields, lightning bolts, doorways into multiple locations......and also employ their CGI for the workaday task of all superheroes...mainly hurling  supervillains into walls or breakables......

            Bad Guys (Boo!)   Led by a snarky, raccoon-eyed ex-student of Tilda's (Mads Mikkelsen) who's cut a deal with a world-gobbling deity name Dorammu in return for immortality. He's wields all the magic swirly stuff too, but when it comes right down to it, he needs a good, old fashioned Marvel-ized hurling into a wall or pieces of breakable furniture, preferably with a lots of glass........

             Bend 'Em, Fold 'Em Cities  Far and away the movie's best feature. All these folks may have studied ancient magic, but what really floats their boats is the artwork of M.C. Escher.  While everyone runs after each other, streets and buildings regularly change shape and direction, as if the whole city was inside a pop-up book being manipulated by an ADD afflicted toddler.  We had the same experience once, trying to find an off-broadway theater without a map.......

            Favorite Moment  Doc Strange floats out to the nether-nether galactic world and pisses off that  all-about-the-Bass entity Dorammu by trapping them both in an endless 'Groundhog Day' loop moment. The evil God doesn't want to end up repeating himself over and over, like a perpetual Sean Spicer press conference, or Adam Sandler's career.....and neither do we.

            2nd Fave Moment  We love that the writers went there.....throwing in an exchange where Cumberbatch testily yells "It's Strange!" when Mikkelsen can 't get his name right.  Mikkelsen, of course, thinks Benedict's just commenting on the general proceedings.  Call us corny, but that 'name' gag has made us laugh ever since "Who's On First?".....

             So there's our quick handy guide to the good Doc's first adventure......and a thoroughly good time was had by us. We mystically swirl up 4 magical stars (****)......and circle this one high up on our Marvel Madness bracket chart.....and watch out for calorie count on that Sorcerer Supreme dessert.......

FAREWELL, SHERIFF PEPPER......R.I.P. CLIFTON JAMES (1921-2017)

           Reliably excellent character actor Clifton James was on our radar long before he officially entered cinematic immortality playing the buffoonish  J.W. Pepper, the outraged sputtering Louisiana sheriff futilely pursuing Roger Moore's James Bond in "Live and Let Die".....

           The role was ridiculous, but James recognized a scene-stealing opportunity when he saw one (which most character actors rarely get) and turned the last third of the movie into a live action Road Runner cartoon......when finally told he was chasing a secret agent, James howled on behalf of everybody whose property was ever destroyed in a Bond chase....."On whose side?!"

            Bond producers brought James' Sheriff Pepper back in "The Man With The Golden Gun", having J.W. and his wife improbably pop up as tourists in Thailand.....but we always thought of J.W. as strictly an 'American First' guy who'd take his vacations in either Vegas or Disney World......

            James, who passed away April 15th at age 95, enjoyed a long movie career, but sometimes his typecasting was as rigidly enforced as any 1940's Warner Brothers contract character guy. When producers needed a vaguely menacing Southern cracker, a barrel-chested, bigoted good ole boy, they sent for James. And he duly delivered in films like "Superman II", "Silver Streak", "tick, tick tick", "The Reivers" such...(he was among the trio of hometown thugs who pound Marlon Brando into rasberry jam in  one of the BQ's favorite guilty pleasures, "The Chase")

              James had an acting range capable of much better things, and when given the chance could bring more nuance and subtext to the one note stereotypes that scripts often called upon him to play....whatever he played in whatever film.....you sure as hell didn't forget him....

              The BQ will miss Mr.James, a gifted craftsman who created a gallery of memorable characters. His presence in films was always welcome. Rest In Peace......

           

'MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 - THE RETURN'.....THE GEEK SHALL INHERIT THE MOON.....

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - The Return (2017)   Having spent a huge chunk of our childhood  hurling insults at irredeemably laughable sci-fi-horror movies unspooling at our neighborhood theater's 'kiddie matinees', the BQ's thrilled to see this show back in action. And binge-able on Netflix, though we personally have only gotten through the first three episodes.......we worried that sustained exposure to movies this bad, even while they're being relentlessly ridiculed, could lead to serious brain damage......

              Do they still bring the funny?  At the risk of infuriating hardcore MST3K'ers, we always felt the show's success rose or fell in relation to the cheese factor of their targeted movies. The simple equation: the more the movie flew out of control and plumbed untold depths of awfulness, the funnier the episode was going to be.....

             If the Satellite Of Love crew got stuck with a film that settled into simple, uninteresting mediocrity, it didn't make any difference how many up-to-date meta gags they peppered it with.  Despite the best efforts of Joel Hodgson and his team of writers, some of these movies would forever remain a tedious chore to sit through.......with or without the barrage of insults...

             From the first three stanzas we've viewed, that still holds true.....so here's the rundown on the movies we've endured so far, along with robots Crow, Tom Servo, Gypsy and Gizmonic Institute's new jump-suited patsy Jonah.....all of them marooned on the dark side of the moon with films that should have been left......on the dark side of the moon.....

             Reptilicus  (1961)  An inspired choice to kick off the show with a full speed ahead, belly laugh first episode....... outside of Ed Wood Jr., movies don't come any hilariously worse than this one.  The first and decidedly last monster movie from Denmark......featuring a rampaging reptile marionette clumsily dragged by a string through Fisher-Price toy cities.  With Danish actors who sound like they've been dubbed in by the guys who do your local used car dealership commercials....

            Cry Wilderness (1987)  Another winner....and understand, by 'winner', we refer to its perfect suitability as red meat for the MST3K grinder. The world's most annoying child actor (second only to the little blonde puppet George Lucas inflicted on "The Phantom Menace") runs away from school and bonds with Bigfoot.....who looks like a very tall guy draped with brown bathmats......

             The Time Travelers (1964)  Sorry, but this one stayed boring even accompanied by the Jonah and the robots' non-top heckling. A dull group of lab-coated scientists step through their freshly invented time portal into a typical sci-fi post-apocalyptic future........with spindly mutants battling well-spoken, civilized, cave dwelling nuclear war survivors. Yawn. No amount of well aimed barbs could lift this up into something watchable......Better luck next time, guys......

             Despite "The Time Travelers", we still gave ourselves cramps laughing through the first two episodes and we can't wait to dive back in......we highly recommend you blast off for the newly reconstituted MST3K.....4 stars (****)

'DEMETRIUS AND THE GLADIATORS'......EASTER, SHMEASTER....BRING ON THE PAGAN DANCING GIRLS...

Demetrius And The Gladiators (1954)   The BQ grew up watching 1950's biblical epics.....and except maybe for this one, there's hardly any of them we could tolerate today.  With their smarmy fake piety, glacial pacing and morose actors draped in bedsheets while spouting stilted dialogue, these movies now play like literally ancient museum pieces, exhumed artifacts....

            'Demetrius' was 20th Century Fox's quickly made sequel to its introductory Cinemascope church picnic,  "The Robe" a ponderous slog through ancient Rome, the Crucifixion and assorted martyring of the lead actors. Only one element of this film kept you from slipping into a coma......Jay Robinson's beyond crazy, take-no-prisoners performance as mad Emperor Caligula.  Most actors quickly learn to dial down their technique for the camera.......not Robinson. Sneering, skulking, and shrieking, Robinson carried on like he was performing for the upper decks in Yankee Stadium.....while standing somewhere in the last rows of the parking lot.....

            Jay didn't get a whole lot of screen time in "The Robe", but "Demetrius And The Gladiators" became a rip roarin' showcase for his Caligula and he eats the movie for breakfast. It's a Saturday morning cartoon show performance, but it energizes this movie and turns it into one hell of a pulpy good time.

            Our hero, of course, is the prime side of beefcake Demetrius (Victor Mature), ex-slave, devout Christian and BFF to the Big Fisherman himself, Peter. (Michael Rennie, very uppercrust for a guy who fishes) They've been closely guarding Christ's robe, but Demetrius brawls with the Centurions and gets shipped off to Gladiator Camp run by the fight-well-or-die drill instructor. (Ernest Borgnine). Never a good career move......but things are lookin' up, cause Empress-in-training Messalina (Susan Hayward) wants Big D for a boytoy, generally ignoring her wussy hubby Claudius.(Barry Jones).

           All of these folks,in the course of the film, are routinely browbeaten, insulted and threatened with execution by our favorite preening, toga'd psychotic Caligula. Halfway through the story, Caligula's convinced himself he's a god and wisely, nobody disagrees. Like Trump advisors, they say incredibly stupid patronizing things to save their own skins....
   
            In the film's most riotous sequence, he finally gets his hands on that Robe and can't wait to give it a proper consumer field test. He races downstairs to what looks like his personal combination man-cave dungeon, stocked with only one prisoner. After he has the poor shlub put to the sword, he clutches Christ's robe and commands the skewered sucker to rise up from the dead.  You can imagine his frustration as he howls louder than an infomercial customer whose set of ginsu knives won't cut properly.

             Eventually Jay Robinson's glorious ranting pisses off his own guards....and,what can we say, he was fun while he lasted. But what a ride through his demented reign......including Victor Mature single handedly killing hordes of fellow gladiators and wrestling three tigers and the requisite pagan dancing girls, kickin' their legs up at Hayward's depraved Temple of Isis......

             Ultimately, hunky Demetrius regains his lost faith and the Franz Waxman's choral music swells up to heavenly stereophonic heights. We say to hell with "Ben Hur", "King of Kings" and "The Greatest Story Ever Told"......give us crazy Jay, beefboy Vic, red hot Redhead Hayward and those dancing girls any day. Now that's an Easter movie we never fall asleep through. 4 reverent stars. (****)

         

'THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL'.....RISE, KLAATU....LIKE YOU-KNOW-WHO....

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)   We always found it hard to believe that nobody, including Robert Wise, the film's director, picked up the film's Christian parable until several years after it was released.....

             The BQ always thought this immortal classic was perfect Easter weekend viewing.....a benevolent fatherly figure arrives from the heavens above, preaching universal peace and understanding. Walking among us, he goes by the  name of....."Carpenter".

              Fearing him and distrusting his message, we shoot him down like a dog. But later he is resurrected to full life, still counselling us to embrace peace. Otherwise...(and here's where the film shifts more into Old Testament).....otherwise his benevolent alliance of peace-loving planets will go all Death Star on our ass and reduce the earth to....as Klaatu aptly puts it, 'a burning cinder'.

                Definitely a film to ponder again as we're engaging in a global pissing contest with the malignant little troll who runs North Korea......

                Looking back on the movie's religious underpinnings, casting the tall, gaunt Brit  Michael Rennie as the alien emissary Klaatu was inspired. The sharp planes of his face at times seem to cast shadows across his cheekbones.....he's forceful, gentle, stern and rational all at once. And distinctly unknowable......the perfect intergalactic Savior.

               Supposedly Spencer Tracy and Claude Rains were considered for the role. Spence would have certainly laid down the law to us earthlings good and proper, like his final summation in "Inherit The Wind"  Rains? Don't think so......he would have sounded like a cranky college professor lecturing us like a group of 'C' students.....

               We won't attempt to figure out where Gort, Klaatu's massive, impassive enforcer robot fits in this interpretation. But more than ever, we doubt the wisdom of Klaatu's planetary NATO turning over complete peacekeeping authority to Gort and his robot buddies.  In essence, they've put themselves at the mercy of laser-armed machines with the unforgiving power of the Ferguson Police Department.

               So it's always comforting to spend Easter weekend wtih Klaatu (aka "Carpenter") and watch him rise up again after Patricia Neal delivers the magic 'Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto' password to the robot. (Which we think means, "Forgive them for acting like dicks and perforating me like swiss cheese, Gort, for they know not what they do...")  Whether you buy into the faith-based aspect, the movie forever earns the BQ's 5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS. Peace be with you....and step away from Klaatu's flying saucer while it's heating up to take off......

             

               

'INVASION U.S.A' & 'RED NIGHTMARE'........THE RUSSKIES ARE COMING!

Invasion U.S.A. (1952)   You know by now we do love us some 'Red Scare' movies.......designed to leave us in quaking fear of the Godless, eastern-Europe-enslaving Russian communists and their goal of world domination......To be fair though, nobody could conceive of a time when these metastasizing totalitarians would eventually implode and collapse on their own.......

            Everybody on the Hollywood food chain had a shot at using 'the Reds' as surefire villains to terrify audiences......from the top Hollywood studios all the way down to.......well, all the way down to the crew who concocted this priceless wingding of hysteria....

            This one starts out like a staging of a joke that begins...."five people sit down in  a bar."  In strolls a TV newsman who starts pestering them with the question 'what you think of a Universal draft?'  Meaning: the dad-gum Guv'mint drafting men, women and corporations for the war effort....

           The bar crowd turns their collective noses up at that idea.......no doubt an early version of the Tea Party, they want to go about their damn business with no government rules, regulations and requests to help defend the country.  Their motto: 'let George do it'....an ancient phrase meaning 'the other guy'. This doesn't sit well with the one guy at the bar who's actually named George.  Heh, heh...that's as far as we go in this film for comedy relief.....

             A quietly mysterious character sits at the end of the bar with a brandy snifter, Mr. Ohman...(take note of that name, folks....this movie is anything but subtle)  Mr. Omen...oops, Ohman, swirls his brandy around dramatically, hypnotizing the bar bunch en masse......with the exception of the bartender who's too busy shaking up cocktails....(somebody at the bar must be James Bond...)

           In their mesmerized state, our collection of would-be libertarians experience a group hallucination in which the sneaky Russkies stage an all-out invasion of our Homeland. Atom bombs blossom freely over the skyline and aerial combat rages across the heartland.,....

            Since this movie's budget barely covers one bulb to light the set, all of this spectacular Armageddon is depicted with generous chunks of old World War II battle footage. But hold on....these filmmakers, exploitation hucksters at heart, come up with a doozy of their own....Russian paratroopers drop down to the U.S. Capitol building and machine-gun  congressman and senators, who in the spirit of bi-partisanship, run like hell together......

            It gets better.....after nuking Manhattan, slobbering Russian soldiers commit their worst atrocity.....pawing over the movie's blonde bombshell. ("You be my woman now!" gurgles a stocky commie sleazeball)   But rest easy.....our lovely flaxen-haired sweetheart, rather than submit to this monster from Moscow, hurls herself out the nearest window.

           At this point, Mr. Ohman (remember him?) stops swishing his brandy and everybody at the bar wakes up.......sadder, wiser and more willing now to pitch in and help the U.S. of A. fight the relentless Reds. Lesson learned.  (Personally, the BQ would have added a scene where after Mr.Ohman leaves the bar, everyone else discovers their wallets are missing.....)

           With the Cuban missile crisis almost bringing us to the brink of extinction, Warner Brothers and the Defense Department joined forces with Red Nightmare (1962)....produced, according to the credits, under 'the personal supervision of Jack L.Warner'.  Introduced and narrated by another Jack, the ever-monotoned Mr. Dragnet himself, Jack Webb, this 30 minute horror film opens in the appropriately perfect setting.......a Russian fake-Americana town used to train deep cover commie spies. Why, it looks just like Main Street , USA.....except for the barbed wire and guards at the end of the street...and everyone at the soda shoppe calling each other comrade while they sip their malteds.

            The plot has an all-American family guy waking up one morning in this nightmarish imitation village......maybe he spent the previous night hoisting a few drinks with Mr. Ohman. He quickly learns hard brutal lessons about life in a communist dictatorship......he oldest daughter ships herself off to stack wheat on a collective farm, his wife and two young kids might turn him over to the KGB and worst of all, the town church now houses a museum where visitors can view the wonders of Soviet technology....like the telephone. Before you can say 'Nyet!', all-American Dad is seized, convicted of 'deviation'  in a show trial and shot.    Thank God our family guy wakes up......sadder, wiser and thrilled to be back in the U.S.A. Once again, lesson learned.....

             Sure, we admit to enjoying these films as strange little artifacts of history......but they're not quite that funny if you realize that Russia is no less threatening now than it was then.  They may no longer embrace idiotic ideology, but they're still run by a professional thug with assassins at his command. The only difference is the sophistication of their propaganda........in the 50's and 60's it was utter bullshit, Now it comes over the internet disguised as news......and enough people swallowed it to help the Russians elect their personal choice for U.S. President......

               The vintage Red Scare movies are indeed silly and crude and we can only hand out 2 stars (**) to each of them.  But laughable as those films are now......the Russians remain scary, dangerous, and never any friends of ours.......which hopefully may soon dawn on our so-called Chief Executive....
         
         

'I'M NOT ASHAMED'.....THE IMPURITIES IN PURE FLIX....

I'm Not Ashamed (2016)  In a previous rant, we did a bit of bitchin' at faith-based movies.....and we do know whereof we speak, since BQ's beloved daughter is a yuuuuge fan of these films......and the BQ is frequently drafted as an unlikely co-viewer.

              Why unlikely?  In college, some 120 years ago, we encountered Eric Hoffer's slim little book "The True Believer", a bone chilling treatise about what happens to mass groups when they surrender their free will and individuality to a belief system.....(and the charismatic leaders who represent those systems.)   What it boils down to......true believers never tolerate unbelievers.....which has forever stained the history of mankind with war, barbarism and  bottomless wells of cruelty and misery.

               We took Hoffer's book to heart and lived out our subsequent days with a healthy suspicion and general disrespect for true believers of every stripe. And so far, recorded history hasn't changed our minds......

               Before anyone starts getting hot and bothered, the purpose of this post is not a knock on Christianity......we churched up our daughter just fine, thank you......and the BQ has been on this earth long enough to know it's a better idea to embrace compassion, kindness, generosity, love of friends and family and tolerance for others.....all that good stuff.

                But true believers, even the ones who purport to do good in this world, still confound us with double standards and hypocrisy.  No one has been able to rationally explain to us why Evangelicals embraced a crotch-grabbing philanderer who worships only two things....money and himself. And installed him in the White House as the leader of the free world.....

                Which brings us to why our skeptical radar went into overdrive as we sat down with beloved daughter to watch "I'm Not Ashamed", the story of Rachel Joy Scott, the first of the twelve victims of the Columbine high school shooters.

                Produced by the Christian film outfit Pure Flix, this is their best attempt yet at crafting a film that, on the surface at least, resembles a mainstream Hollywood movie. It looks professionally photographed and edited and most of the time, competently acted. (They've cut way back on their biggest flaw - casting church-volunteer non-actors who sound like they're reading off of cue cards...)

                But the Pure Flix gang still hasn't solved their fundamental problem.......they're not cinematic storytellers, they're proselytizers, preachers. For them, the message comes first, the art of moviemaking comes second.  And in service  to their agenda,  their films invariably collapse into numbing tedium, a collection of prosaic scenes randomly stitched together to hammer home points to the faithful.

                "I'm Not Ashamed" spends almost two hours preparing us for its penultimate moment.....Rachel Scott dying as a Christian martyr at the hands of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who were well aware of her faith. (Some would find it offensive that the movie expresses little or no interest in the deaths of the other executed victims......but then again, Pure Flix has enough trouble trying to fashion a coherent story out of Rachel Scott's life.......)

               Before arriving at this scene, the movie spends an eternity aimlessly wandering through the teenage angst of Rachel's last few high school years.  The shapeless, scattershot script slowly trudges from one min-drama to another......self-worth issues, peer pressure issues, boy-crush issues, bullying issues...and winding up her judged an outcast for fully embracing her faith. But as we already pointed out, none of this is edited together for any dramatic impact......it's just a long pile-up of teachable moments, sometimes interrupted by ominous vignettes of Klebold and Harris reading 'Mein Kampf' and playing shooter video games.  The movie might as well have dressed them up as Roman Centurians from 'Ben Hur'......

               The atrocities of school shootings open up a fully stocked Pandora's box  of societal ills and evils that need urgent addressing...(but not by Congress, who still think it's okey-doke for nutcases to have assault weapons) ,,,so for Pure Flix to simply isolate and pluck Christian martyrdom out of this terrible event to serve their film's purpose......sorry, but to us, it seems more than little exploitative and self-serving. Rachel Scott's death was profoundly tragic.....but so were the deaths of the other eleven innocent victims. A better group of filmmakers would have included all of their stories....and that approach might have been a far better representation of Christian ideals than what's in "I'm Not Ashamed".

             We can only pray Pure Flix gets better as they go along.....2 stars (**)

'COME FLY WITH ME'.....WAY BACK BEFORE AIRLINES DRAGGED YOU OFF THE PLANE....

Come Fly With Me (1963)  Watching air travel in old movies never fails to tickle us.......yes, loyal BQ visitors, once upon a time, long long ago, travelling by plane was considered an exciting, fun-filled, delightfully adventurous experience......honest.

            So of course we all snort out disbelieving, derisive laughter at the sight of these films today, knowing what air travel has devolved into......one of the closest things to hell on earth that one can endure.

              The 9-11 terrorists couldn't quell the resilient American spirit even with the horrific loss of precious lives they inflicted on us. But their one monumental victory,  their lasting legacy, was the conversion of air travel into a nightmarish ordeal.  Our flights now commence with a TSA hazing ceremony.....running a gauntlet of poorly selected, poorly trained ex-junior high school bullies. These woeful characters, their egos pumped up with uniforms, excel at security groping of children and grandmothers while routinely allowing guns and knives to slip right past them....

            The airlines, ever greedy and incompetent, chipped in to all this misery, packing fliers into seating space not much larger than the overhead compartments for the carry-ons. And...oh yes....the overbooking of flights.....a lovely little airline 'screw you' to its customers that finally blew up in United Airlines corporate face like an exploding cigar.

            The spectacle of seeing a paying passenger yanked from his seat and dragged down the aisle may have been the inevitable destination of our society's steady breakdown of civility.....especially the rapidly deteriorating civility between air travel personnel and air travellers.  You hear the phrase 'de-escalate the situation' a whole lot, but nobody seems interested in doing that anymore. Instead of rational discourse.......authority figures choose chaos as a solution, even if everyone around them posts their misjudgments on youtube three seconds later.  Everyone expresses outrage, but what the hell does it matter and why does any of this shock us anymore......didn't we just install a chaotic ignoramus to run our country?  Chaos rules, folks.....it's a wonder there aren't regular Wild West saloon brawls between passengers and flight attendants.

             Return with us then, to MGM's "Come Fly With Me", to the light, Technicolored romantic world of 1963 air travel, where three adorable stewardesses (Dolores Hart, Pamela Tiffin, Lois Nettleton) juggle boyfriends while fluffing passenger pillows and pouring coffee....

             In this long ago dreamworld, you can dash through the airport and hop right on your plane....and everyone has enough space to stretch their legs out and enjoy sumptuous meals served by primly uniformed starlets.

             Our trio of in-flight babes bounce effortlessly from New York to Paris to Vienna while Frankie Avalon croons the title song (made much more famous by Frank Sinatra's version.) Hart, in her last film before she ditched Hollywood and got thee to a nunnery, takes up with a suave, bankrupt Baron (Karl Boehm) who's making ends meet by smuggling diamonds. And we're talking serious suave here......when this guy takes Hart on a water-skiing date, he skims across the water with his business suit still on. (And we don't think it's meant as a gag, either....the Baron is simply....a real formal guy. Memo to Daniel Craig: let's see you top that one in the next Bond, buddy....)

             Pamela Tiffin, the chattering dim bulb of the trio, sets her sights on the studly co-pilot (Hugh O'Brien) whose having an on-and-off affair with an old girlfriend (that classy Brit redhead, Dawn Addams)  Lois Nettleton, the designated grown up the bunch (we guess because she's in her mid- 30's, which in a 1963 romcom, constitutes 'older woman' status) catches the eye of a lonely, kindly Texas millionaire played by Karl Malden. (This leads to our favorite moment: during a flight, Malden has to step in and gently strong-arm a drunken sleaze who's sexually harassing Nettleton.....Nettleton's such a vulnerable sweetie, we almost wish Malden could apply the current on-board punishment..... zap him with a fully charged taser and duct-tape him to his seat. Come to think of it, don't flight attendants do that now if you complain the pretzels aren't fresh?)

            You can easily tell this all takes place in a kinder gentler age.......the husband of the woman O'Brien's carrying on with complains to the airline. The movie's mythical carrier, 'Polar Atlantic' doesn't fire O'Brien, preferring to punish him by exiling him to Middle East flights.  That'll teach him! In another rib-tickling sequence, the practical joker flight engineer tells the brainless Tiffin that she can remedy the airplane's dangerous 'cavitation' by running the length of the plane and repeatedly flushing the toilet. Luckily, the passengers don't panic, no doubt expecting this wonderfully wacky behavior from their cutie stewardess......

              With our girls' romantic pickles resolved one way or the other, the movie ends with some majestic shots of the Polar Atlantic jet ascending into the clouds......a perfect visual conclusion because we know this plane and everyone in it won't really land anywhere......we'd like to believe it's flying permanently into the clouds of our fond memories.....where it'll stay in flight forever, until we pop in the DVD again.

              Air travel may have shifted in flight even worse than our battered carry-ons, but up in the clear MGM skies, Delores, Pamela and Lois are still smiling and serving coffee.....we'll hand out 2 & 1/2 frequent flyer stars. (** 1/2) for a look back at the once  friendlier skies......

       
           

'PRETTY GIRLS'.....BREATHLESS SUSPENSE OR LITERARY TORTURE-PORN?

Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter (2016)  Seems like we've spent a lifetime passing over all the Karin Slaughter thrillers we've noticed in bookstores and airport newsstands....we just never got around to her. We're ashamed to admit there's other authors in this same category.......we probably continued to ignore Slaughter after we finally picked up a book from another thriller writer who forever flew under our radar, Iris Johansen.

            How come?  The sheer awfulness of Johansen stunned us....endless pages of redundant overwritten, soap opera-like dialogue that made our eyes cross. ....we couldn't comprehend a thriller where all the characters sit around blabbing like " Days Of Our Lives" denizens mulling over their problems at the coffee shop.

          But like Slaughter, Iris Johansen sells millions of books, so what do we know?  Well, just like paintings, we know what we like.   Sorry to say......the terrible experience of plowing through the Johansen book  may have sub-consciously continued to push us away from Slaughter......until we lost our Slaughter virginity with her best seller from last year, "Pretty Girls"......

           While reading this gore-drenched horrorshow in which abducted young girls are tortured and hacked apart with a machete, we recalled the disgust and outrage that surrounded Eli Roth's two "Hostel" films. Roth's unapologetic depictions of  women tortured for the sheer thrill of it (and the inevitable imitations) coined the the phrase 'torture porn'.  There was no other purpose to the Roth films and the entire "Saw" series than to serve up the sight of human beings in agony for entertainment.......

            That begs the question......is there any difference between movie torture-porn and Slaughter's book?  Both feature lengthy sequences of unspeakable, unimaginable violence committed against innocent women. In fact, Slaughter's detailed descriptions of the anatomical damage wreaked on the book's victims exceed anything Eli Roth's make up staff could come up with.  In this case, the pen is bloodier than the sword.

            But there is a difference.......Slaughter writes with empathy for the victims. (In movie torture-porn, that's non-existent. Victims are stick figures meant to die horribly to give us our jollies....)  Like all skilled thriller writers, Slaughter understands you have to care for, to worry over, and to fear for the safety and lives of sympathetic characters put in harm's way. Otherwise you wouldn't spend all night furiously flipping the pages to see what happens to them next. And going one step further, she breaks your heart with the diary entries of a father who has never given up on the search for his abducted daughter.

             Slaughter's plot and its far-fetched structure are, however, open to debate. Simply put, it's a painful account of a horrendously unlucky family whose three sisters are preyed upon and victimized by a monstrous split personality scumbag. You'll have to swallow the idea of this hellhound having quite an efficient infrastructure........he videotapes his torture-murders, marketing his snuff films to a worldwide network of like-minded soulless deviates. A jumbo twist halfway through the book reveals the identity of this loathsome creature, but that's relatively unimportant. What counts the most here......the book's second half, a traditional ticking clock cat-and-mouse countdown between predator and prey.  And when Slaughter reaches her ultimate showdown between the two, you can bet she leaves no bones unshattered and no veins unopened.....

             You'll have to decide for yourself whether Slaughter's aching pity for her victims and passionate affection for her heroines justifies the book's continuous onslaught of ghastly atrocities. If you haven't figured it out already from this post, know this:  do not go anywhere near this book if you're not able to stomach its epic levels of misogynistic violence......it ain't for sissies.  If you do jump on Slaughter's Halloween funhouse rollercoaster, she'll suck you in allright.  You'll  tear through the final pages into the middle of the night.......but some of you may experience a morning-after assessment......was that entertainment or what?

             Moral questions aside, judging "Pretty Girls" as a thriller, we'll bleed out 3 stars (***)....but the BQ urges caution. Know what you're getting into.......