Haunted House meets Mystery meets Western love watching these films from the early thirties. Rarely are they good in the way that I need as a modern viewer. But the story is not the one the movie directly delivers, but the larger story of movies...
A young woman turns to Holmes for protection when she's menaced by an escaped killer seeking missing treasure. However, when the woman is kidnapped, Holmes and Watson must penetrate the city's criminal underworld to find her.
Displaced Mind and Eye form — at least as established in the Holmes stories and subsequent early detective fiction, has the reader experience things in the order the detective does. In the best, there is some tension as we know the detective is ahead of...
In a future where a failed global-warming experiment kills off most life on the planet, a class system evolves aboard the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe via a perpetual-motion engine.
In Front of your Face mystery the way they used to make them, full of clues, an onscreen detective and the expectation that the audience is working hard to make sense of everything. Near then end, they stop the film and an announcer appears to...
Philo Vance, accompanied by his prize-losing Scottish terrier, investigates the locked-room murder of a prominent and much-hated collector whose broken Chinese vase provides an important clue.
Surprised trying to find where film audiences started to accept the mystery as merely a surprise ending. You know that the successful mysteries for many decades were “detective stories” that had very clear rules about how the viewer could outwit the writer and guess, actually...
A producer puts on what may be his last Broadway show, and at the last moment a chorus girl has to replace the star.
In and Out am convinced that you cannot really understand yourself unless you understand (among other influences) the movies out of which you make the movie of your life. And you cannot understand the stuff of movies unless you’ve experienced those that invented the form,...
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...
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...
In coastal Cornwall, England, during the early 19th Century, a young woman who's come there to visit her aunt, discovers that she's married an inkeeper who's a member of a gang of criminals who arrange shipwrecking and murder for profit.
Piracy eventually made some transcendent films. But that would be way later than this period, where he did his work as instructed and on time. His contribution to cinema was the invention of the camera whose awareness deviated from the narrative bound in the actors. In...
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...
Schlitz is a tourist in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Ignoring posted warnings which say that you shouldn't climb Mount Washington (the tallest mountain in New England) in bad weather, Schlitz pushes onward up the mountain, briefcase in hand. He gets lost in the snow, becomes entangled in mischief spun by a quirky hermit, and finally ends up skiing down Tuckerman's Ravine at perilous speeds, losing his briefcase several times.
Benny Hill’s Slippers would have been one of the shorts on a program designed to fill out a date night. It is just filler, basically slapstick on skis. The joke is that the performer is an extraordinary expert to be able to appear so clumsy....
