Sort by
Listing Movies
Display Movies
Jungle Jitters (1938)
Filmmaker(s): Friz Freleng

Starts out with a tribe of African cannibals imitating Native Americans. After this, they do the new Warner Bros. Looney Tunes theme "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down." Then a sloppy stuttering salesman knocks on their doors, and they bring him in and put him in a pot of boiling water. The queen of the tribe wants to see the man. She falls in love with him. They get married, but when the salesman sees he has to kiss the bride, he decides he'd be better off being dinner for a tribe of hungry cannibals.

Bamboozled usually see these “banned” things and react variously. I think Amos and Andy, for instance is ennobling, and the often respected “Song of the South” disgusting in it racial typing. This one seems pretty offensive too, especially at the beginning where multi-hued cannibals prance around...


Published November 24, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Ones |
Tagged: , ,
Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938)
15 Sensational Sense-Staggering Episodes!
Filmmaker(s): Ford Beebe, Robert F. Hill

When a deadly Nitron ray strikes Earth, Flash Gordon and his friends travel to Mars to battle Ming the Merciless and his new ally Queen Azura.

Magical think I’d take a dozen of these for one Star Wars sequels. When you get down to it, Star Wars was four things: Kurosawa, Williams and Campbell folded into science fiction, but it was quite thin scifi. It posited a Manichean world — at least...


Published November 28, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
I Cover the War! (1937)
DRAMA FOR HIS NEWSREEL CAMERA!
Filmmaker(s): Arthur Lubin

Bob Adams, ace newsreel cameraman, is told by his boss, "Get the picture---we can't screen alibis." He heads for Samari, a desert hot-bed of tribal unrest in Africa, to do just that, which includes getting footage of El Kadar, bandit and rebel leader. He gets his pictures but only after a romance with the Colonel's daughter Pamela, saving his wimpy, hacked-off brother Don from being a dupe of the gun-runners, and run-ins with spies and throat-cutting tribesman. For a finale, he saves the British Army.

Picture Snatcher ‘Stagecoach’ turned John Wayne into a celebrated wooden actor, he was a an ordinary uncelebrated one in a series of odd projects. Probably the most interesting of these odd deals is this movie. It doesn’t seem to be rentable. In terms of the actual...


Published November 28, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
A Night of Terror (1937)
Caught in the web of a madman!
Filmmaker(s): Rowland V. Lee

Ann Harding plays a lovely but somewhat naive young woman who goes on a European vacation after winning a lottery. Swept off her feet by charming Basil Rathbone, Harding finds herself married before she is fully able to grasp the situation. Slowly but surely, Rathbone's loving veneer crumbles; when he casually asks Harding to sign a document turning her entire fortune over to him, she deduces that her days are numbered.

Talking while Leaving Theater I heard that 3D would be going mainstream a few years ago, I hoped for a revolution in what we think films are. I believe we are seeing some radical rethinking, because with 3D and CGI, we get a less encumbered...


Published February 27, 2023
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
Alibi Mark (1937)
Filmmaker(s): Joseph Henabery

When an out-of-work Chicagoan travels west as a hobo on a freight train, he finds himself falsely accused of murder.

Signs of Trauma, Film as Meal what a strange film. My interest in these comments is in the qualities of introspection: where the viewer is placed in the narrative and how different layers of that stance are manipulated. The CCC, as duly described in this...


Published October 2, 2022
| Categorised as New Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The Happiest, Dopiest, Grumpiest, Sneeziest movie of the year.

A beautiful girl, Snow White, takes refuge in the forest in the house of seven dwarfs to hide from her stepmother, the wicked Queen. The Queen is jealous because she wants to be known as "the fairest in the land," and Snow White's beauty surpasses her own.

Stained Glass have a lot of complaints about Disney; what he made personally and the lumbering beast his studio has become. In particular, he murdered one of the most precious literary structures we have in Alice. But in his first big project, he did well enough...


Published December 10, 2024
| Categorised as Fours, IMDB Comments |
Tagged: , ,
Jim Hanvey Detective (1937)
Sly but not slick - Jim Hanvey tops them all! Guy Kibbee ....his most loveable role!
Filmmaker(s): Phil Rosen

Jim Hanvey is a genial but top-notch detective who has retired to his country home. An insurance company hires him to find a missing emerald so they won't have to pay out the $100,000 for which the jewel is insured. It doesn't take him long to find the emerald, but he discovers that finding it was the easy part; the difficult part is getting it back to its rightful owner, and he winds up involved in a murder in which an innocent man is framed.

Straw Dogs can do better than watching most current movies by noodling around with old detective movies from the 30’s. They are generally not very good, but collectively they defined the base for our most common idiom. This one, thankfully, has no racist comedy player....


Published May 13, 2022
| Categorised as New Comments, Ones |
Tagged: , ,
After the Thin Man (1936)
Continuing the fun in their NEW hit!
Filmmaker(s): W.S. Van Dyke

Nick and Nora Charles investigate when Nora's cousin reports her disreputable husband is missing, and find themselves in a mystery involving the shady owners of a popular nightclub, a singer and her dark brother, the cousin's forsaken true love, and Nora's bombastic and controlling aunt.

Walk this Way conventional wisdom is that a classic is something that is so well formed initially that it serves well for a long time. So classic films, for instance, are seen like classic car engines, well engineered things that still work. But I think with...


Published April 4, 2023
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Threes |
Tagged: , ,
Bottles (1936)
Filmmaker(s): Hugh Harman

A dark and stormy night in a drugstore. The druggist mixes a potion and falls asleep. The skull-and-crossbones on the bottle comes to life and drips the potion on the druggist.

A Mind Ajar seems that one major theology of animation concerns the animating (meaning coming to life) of normally inanimate objects. It is one strain worth tracing, because with today’s film technologies, animals can easily be seen to talk and even wear clothes and such....


Published April 2, 2024
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,
36 Hours to Kill (1936)
Filmmaker(s): Eugene Forde

Duke and Jeanie Benson, an outlaw couple hiding out under assumed names. Duke realizes that he has a winning sweepstake ticket and will win $150,000 if he can cash it in without getting apprehended

Making Your Bed watched this in preparation for “Europa”. Both are essentially railroad movies. This is about a gangster who has come out of hiding to take a train trip to from Los Angeles to Chicago to collect on a sweepstakes ticket. On the train, several...


Published December 8, 2022
| Categorised as IMDB Comments, Twos |
Tagged: , ,