I have (finally) got my main blog, Benevolent Misanthropy, back up and working, with lots of old data restored. Today I ported all the posts from this backup blog over there, so this particular URL is going silent until needed again.

With a title like Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, you rather expect something. Cheese, camp, Ed Wood-level silliness, something. But no, you basically get the title. And, okay, two reasonably-attractive female leads (who offer more variety than anything else in the movie — one’s a bona fide Cuban, the other is actually Eastern European), who aren’t given much to do.

This flick was shot in eight days, and it really shows. I mean, come on, The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (”The First Movie Ever Rated Z!”) had a nine day shoot! The actors mostly phone in their performances, the director sets the camera down and doesn’t do anything interesting with it, the location scout found sets and locations that more or less fit the story, even the screenwriter seems to have knocked this out without much interest or care. (He does make an effort to fit the story into the timeline of the real Jesse James’s life, which he would, since he made a mini-career out of writing or producing Jesse James films, but beyond that he just coasts. The Wild Bunch has its name from history, and nothing else. Information is delivered in gobbing expository lumps. And so on.)

It’s basically a nothing movie, made to fill out a double-feature bill (paired with, of course, Billy the Kid meets Dracula), and almost instantly forgettable.

If you want it, it’s available on its own, or on the Chilling Classics 50 Movie Pack.

This was neat.

It’s a precursor to spaghetti westerns, being an Italian-made western featuring American leads, but predating Sergio Leone’s definitive ripoff of Kurosawa, A Fistful of Dollars, by a year or more. It’s stylish, but not excessively so. It features far less moral ambiguity than most Italian oaters. And the story is interesting pretty much all the way through.

Then there’s the soundtrack. Morricone it ain’t. (Well, actually, it is Morricone under a pseudonym, but not hitting anything like the operatic heights he soared to in the following few years.) But it fits the movie, and the damned theme song sticks in your head for days. Here’s the opening three minutes or so of the film, where the music under the dialog makes you think the theme is going to be one of the coolest themes ever.

Then Dicky Jones begins to sing.

From that brief setup, you know that the Martinez family is successfully prospecting gold (from a stream on their property). They also have a wayward adopted son, “Gringo”, who is off in Mexico fighting in the civil war there. All of his men get killed, and he makes his way back across into Texas, going home and swearing off violence.

Until he actually gets home to find his adoptive father shot, and all the gold in the house stolen. His dad dies in his arms, and he spends the rest of the movie hunting down the men responsible, one by one, with no help from the local Sheriff, who blames it on Mexicans who have probably already gone back across the border.

There is, of course, the final showdown, over the very end of which the end-title music struts in:

The producers were afraid, apparently, that your auditory centers were not scarred quite permanently enough by Dicky Jones’s warbling, or that you might have forgotten that key-change that he managed so artlessly.

Anyway, it’s a neat film, with excellent music apart from the singing. It moves along and never really gets boring. Plus, there’s two major female roles performed by lovely women, and some more lovelies in the background here and there. If nothing else, Italian filmmakers sure have an eye for women.

It’s available in a muddy, scratchy, full-frame print (which is simply fair warning — no better print seems available on DVD) on three different Mill Creek Entertainment collections:
the Spaghetti Westerns 20 Movie Pack,
the Western Classics 50 Movie Pack,
and the Western 250 Movie Pack.

If you want my advice, skip the 50 pack unless you really, really want a lot of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and other singing cowboys. Go instead for the Spaghetti Western collection and, if you really love westerns in general, the 250 pack. (The Spaghetti Western collection has at least ten movies not available on any other Mill Creek collection, so it’s a must-buy, regardless.)

(Also known as Born for Hell.)

Vile. The kind of movie you need to take a shower after… with a wire brush, just to make sure.

An American veteran of Viet Nam ends up in Belfast, Ireland, waiting for a ship that can take him back to the US. He is, of course, a sociopath and a misogynist, and ends up spending his time in a house full of ten nurses (or about that many, anyhow), torturing them, raping some, humiliating them all, and murdering them. He gets away, but one survives, he finds out that he can be identified, tries to kill himself, ends up in the hospital, and the doctor cleaning him up sees his tatoo, says “You’re the one,” and that’s it.

Slasher movies aren’t my thing, but this isn’t even a slasher movie. In a slasher film, there is some sort of morality at play, wherein the victims are doomed by their flaws.

It’s trying to be something else, probably something “important”, but who freaking cares? There’s no one to sympathize with, the sociopathic vet (a cliché, even in 1976) is our viewpoint character and thus the one with whom we’re supposed to identify, and the victims are attempts (pretty sad ones, at that) at real characters, instead of simple characteristics that do something to deserve their fate.

There is absolutely nothing redeeming or worthwhile in this film. Even the nudity is put into a repugnant context, rendering it despicable rather than enjoyable. It is grim, bleak, and pointless. Avoid it at all costs.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, it’s on the Chilling Classics 50 Movie Pack — and nowhere else. Mill Creek Entertainment couldn’t even see their way to including it on one of their 250 movie packs, and that’s got to tell you something. (There are other, pretty good, reasons to pick up the Chilling Classics pack, but boy oh boy is this not one of them.)

As Ken Begg wrote:

It’s all there, isn’t it? In terms of boiling down the traditional lures of violence and sex into one short formulation, [the title is] perfect.

And it is. It’s got to be one of the classic titles of all time. You know instantly whether you want to watch it or not.

It is, in fact, a fairly innocuous little film, shot in Italy in the early sixties. There’s not much to recommend it beyond the title, per se, except supposedly the opening theme song (which I didn’t hear, because the print on the Chilling Classics 50 Movie Pack does not include the opening credits), and a couple of smoldering-to-smoking-hot Euro babes.

A new teacher, a doctor with a shady past, comes to teach in a girls’ reform school. Just as he arrives, girls start getting killed by wolves… or a werewolf. Everybody (at least, everybody male) is made to be suspicious, more girls die, men are picked off one by one, until the real werewolf is revealed and dealt with. Not a deep movie.

But who cares? Look at these babes!

Priscilla, our heroine:

And then there’s the best-looking of our minor characters:

If you prefer to see her in a more vertical position, with more emphasis on her rather lovely face, then there’s this:

Anyway, as I say, it’s not an awful movie, but it’s nothing like good. It’s not painful, nor offensive, and it gets its job done. Had it been made just a few years later, yeah, there would have been some actual nudity, but there also would have been gore, and I wasn’t in the mood for the later when I watched this.

It kept me watching, it amused me somewhat, I’ve no complaints.

And the babes were, as noted, smokin’ hot.

As I said above, it is available on the Chilling Classics 50 Movie Pack, which, while not the best of the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 movie sets, is none too shabby. And the price is right, too.

Found, lost for over 150 years, then found again:

SAQQARA, Egypt - Egyptian archaeologists unveiled on Thursday a 4,000-year-old “missing pyramid” that is believed to have been discovered by an archaeologist almost 200 years ago and never seen again.

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities chief, said the pyramid appears to have been built by King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh who ruled for only eight years.

In 1842, German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius mentioned it among his finds at Saqqara, referring to it as number 29 and calling it the “Headless Pyramid” because only its base remains. But the desert sands covered the discovery, and no archaeologist since has been able to find Menkauhor’s resting place.

Right out of an H. Rider Haggard book, or an Indiana Jones movie.

I’ve been watching about a movie a day for a while (I’d gotten out of the daily habit for various reasons), but it seems I’m back on the horse.

So I thought I’d turn that into a way to keep up blogging more regularly. So I’ll bank up posts on what I’ve already watched, and start them daily. Some will be just a few words, at least one will be a full-blown multimedia extravaganza (well, music and pictures, anyway).

I’m not going to write a full-blown review every day, but I’d kind of like to document what I’m watching and whatever each one makes me think of.

First up, later today: Werewolf in a Girls Dormitory.

It looks like D.C. Thornton is un-retiring himself, and resuming blogging tomorrow.

I haven’t been reading as many movie scripts as I really should, but thanks to Simply Scripts, I came across a gem and I’ve got to share it.

I’ve only read most of the first act, but even just that far, I can tell you that Roughshod is very well-written, keeping you interested scene by scene and moving right along. The film is unavailable, so far as I can tell, and that’s a shame, if for no other reason than that it stars Gloria Grahame.

(IMDB doesn’t even have it listed to run on TV(!).)

But anyway, it’s a smooth read, it’s something most people have probably never seen (and won’t have a chance to anytime soon, darn the luck!), so you can read it fresh and just see the movie in your mind. And, while it has some formatting differences from modern scripts (modern scripts are not supposed to call shots, it’s perceived as impeding on the director’s job), it reads very, very well and will give you an idea of how these things work.

They’re big on omertà on the left. It’s part of how they survive.

— Peggy Noonan, 30 May 2008