QUICKIE: Geeky proffessor who thinks he's inherited $750,000 hooks up with a vaudeville act and backs them to do a show on Broadway. His dangerous slapstick "accidents" ruin the opening night, but make it a hysterical success, saving the day.
PLOT: Naive, bookish Professor Post (of Potts College) inherits a huge amount of money and decides that now he can afford to go out and enjoy life. He falls for a dancer in a bad stage show, and with his new money decides to buy the show and take it to Broadway. Opening night is a disaster as the clumsy Professor continually ends up on stage trying to correct a mistake, but wrecking the scene. The story is ruined, but his antics make the "play" a success with the crowd.
SUMMARY: Wow, Buster Keaton movies scare me. I think it's that the stunts he does are so unbelievably dangerous, and sometimes border on violent. The most mesmorizing moment of this film is when he manages to get himself caught in a rope that spins him around a roatating scenery, slapping him into the curtains as he flys around the stage mid-air.
Throughout every slapstick film I find myself not believing that anybody could be THAT stupid and clumsy. How has he made it through life without dying? I never find people getting hurt being humorous and everything Buster Keaton does in a film would probably kill me. Maybe I should classify this as a horror film? But if you like slapstick films Keaton films are the best as he does amazing stunts and is unafraid to be an idiot for laughs.
The story is actually pretty good and Jimmy Durante is always amusing with a big screen presence. The scene where Keaton and Thelma Todd are drunk is very funny.
Speak Easily ~ 1932 -BW
Zis Boom Bah ~ 1941 -BW
QUICKIE: Tough broad leaves Vaudville to set her son straight while he's still at college. She turns an ice cream parlor into a nightclub and the spoiled college brats ruin the rest of the film with bad "entertainment" bits.
PLOT: A singer leaves Vaudeville to spy on her estranged son at college. She finds him a spoiled rich kid and decides to change him without revealing her identity as his mother. She buys the local ice cream parlor and turns it into a nightclub where she coaxes her son and his friends to perform. The college's football team has a miraculous winning year which saves the failing school from banckruptcy.
SUMMARY: Grace Hayes takes over the town by buying the college's most influential people off: her son who lives on credit and his gang of ingrate friends who are obviously just with him for his money. There's alot of mean biting comments flying around. It made me uncomfortable. People are better behaved today than they were in that movie. In the middle of the film she passive-aggresively, insultingly motivates them all into working for her and the whole rest of the film is ruined with bad musical bits. But apparently because of her and her money she gets the college football team to win. I didn't understand that bit, but let's just pretend she's actually that motivating. This saves the college from banckruptcy and the kid's entertainmaent is a hit. Her son somehow figures out she's his mother and they reunite with her a hero in the end.
This is one of those: "I want to work with my family" pictures. So the actors have great presence, but the film is so lacking that you wish there had been more meat to it. Apparently Grace Hayes was a headliner in vaudeville and the mother of actor Peter Lind Hayes who plays her son in this film. Her character is so awesome I wished for a long drawn out story of her controling everyone with her money. But we only get half of that picture and the rest is musical bits. The first half was great, but I started fast forwarding through the numbers. Seriously, this Mae-West-wanna-be should have done more movies.
Revolt of the Zombies ~ 1936 -BW
QUICKIE: Ostracised explorer-scientist discovers the secret to turning people into zombies and uses it to make people do his will and blackmails his love to marry him in exchange for not zombifying her true love. The woman flips it in the end and the dude is destroyed by his own zombies.
PLOT: After the war an expedition of representatives from Allied countries is sent to Cambodia to find and destroy the Secret of the Zombies. The group includes Armand Louque (Dean Jagger) and Claire (Dorothy Stone) who Armand falls in love with. Many accidents result in the natives refusing to work and the expedition returns to Pnom Penh. Armand finds a clue which he had overlooked before and returns to Angkor against orders. Eventually Armand gains the knowledge of how to make zombies out of people, and gets hundreds to do his bidding. Eventually he returns to make Claire his bride which brings about his downfall.
SUMMARY: How cool is that to just be able to look at somebody and they become your zombie servant? In the begining it seems to take some magical incense, but later it's just hovering eyeballs on the screen that zombify people.
A meek scientist who's put off by everyone discovers the power to make everyone do his bidding and becomes a power hungry lunatic. Zombifying hundreds of people in order to get his way. In the end he gets to marry his love, but only if he gives up his power to zombify people. He relinquishes the power, his zombies awaken, get pissed and come to kill him, which they do. The moral of the story is again "crime doesn't pay". It's a decent story with the predictable "you should be more ruthless" comments leading to him becoming ruthless and everyone is soooooo surprised by it.
The Beast of Yucca Flats ~ 1961 -BW
QUICKIE: A boring, drawn out story of a crazy man killing everyone he can find in the desert while rangers try to find and kill him.
PLOT: A defecting Russian scientist (Tor Johnson) is transformed by an atomic test into a murderous monster. A couple is killed, boys get lost, their dad is shot at while searching for them. Rangers climb mountains searching for the monster and they eventually find and kill him.
SUMMARY: This begining of this film is for guys. It begins with a chick fresh from the shower wrapped only in a towel who promptly gets strangled. Then there's Russian spies, a shoot out and a car chase that ends in the desert. The big Russian spy with his briefcase chained to his wrist sets off into the desert to escape while the shoot out continues. Then boom! An atomic blast complete with historic mushroom cloud footage. And voila! Our Russian spy becomes a murdering psychopathic monster. Because as Hiroshima has taught us all, nuclear bombs do create psychopaths intent on murdering everything they can find.
The local cop goes to his buddy's house and we hear the caveman like mini-sentences while the whole scene focuses on his hot wife in low cut, high hitched nightgown sexily getting out of bed, bending over so we can oogle the hot clevage and then she gets back into bed so we can oogle her legs. Completely gratuitous boobie & leg scene, but I was so caught up with the sex appeal I didn't care. But I did laugh at this slow caveman dialogue:
Joe: Jim?
Jim: Be down in a minute Joe.
Jim: Yea?
Joe: Better come with me. Trouble up the road. Murder.
Jim: Be right down.
Jim: See ya later honey.
Boring reading, but funnier when dragged out for dramatic effect which it just can't deliver. I really expected the men to follow up with "ugga, ugga. me. man. fire. kill." The dialougue is generally sparse. There's long quiet stretches in the movie, punctuated by a narrator who makes comments like this:
Twenty hours without rest and still no enemy. In the blistering desert heat, Jim and Joe plan their next attack. Find the Beast and kill him. Kill, or be killed. Man's inhumanity to man.
A strange, boring film that leaves me saying yuck-a to "Yucca". heehee
The Terror ~ 1963 -colour
QUICKIE: Soldier hunts for a hot chick he meets on the beach and finds out she's a ghost haunting a Baron's cool castle. Jack Nicholson & Boris Karloff!
PLOT: France, 18th century. Lieutenant Andre Duvalier (Jack Nicholson) has been accidentally separated from his regiment. He is wandering near the coast when he sees a young woman. Eventually she takes him to the sea, where she disappears in rough water. Andre loses consciousness when he is trying to follow her and is attacked by a bird.
He awakes in a house with an old witch woman and a dumb man. She claims their is no woman. After he leaves, he sees the young woman again and when trying to follow her is saved by the dumb man from certain death. He learns that to help the girl, he must go to castle of Baron Van Leppe and find Eric. When the Lieutenant arrives he sees the woman looking from a window. Baron Van Leppe (Boris Karloff) is old and claims there's no woman in the castle, but shows Lt. Duvalier a painting which does indeed portray her. Lt. Duvalier learns that she is the baroness, who died twenty years ago at the Baron's hand when he returned from the war and found her in bed with Eric.
Eventually we learn the "ghost" is a girl who is being controlled by the witch woman who saved Lieutenant Duvalier earlier. The witch woman turns out to be seeking revenge against the Baron for killing her son Eric who was the Baroness' lover.
SUMMARY: A very good story line with great actors (of course!). The second time through it's a great movie to fall asleep to. I just love those old castles with HUGE ballrooms. WOW.
The Screaming Skull ~ 1958 -BW
QUICKIE: Newlywed couple returns home to a house haunted by the husbands first wifes' ghost.
PLOT: Newlyweds Eric and Jenni Whitlock retire to his desolate mansion, where Eric's first wife Marianne died from a mysterious freak accident. Jenni, who has a history of mental illness, begins to see strange things including a mysterious skull, which may or may not be a product of her imagination. Suspicion falls on Mickey, the estate's mentally challenged gardener, who seemingly was very attached to his former mistress.
SUMMARY: You know you're in for a goodie when the movie opens with the promise that you just might die of fright from watching the following movie, and if by chance you do die, you are promised free burial services by the movies' producers. Haw! I'm sure my family would appreciate that. So, was I frightened? I'll admit I turned the sound down a few times because I hear creaking wood floors enough from my upstairs neighbors. Now, if you want a real fright we can discuss the noises they make in bed, but I'm digressing. The screaming gets tiresome too. Why must every female in every B&W movie try to destroy our hearing with that shrieking?
The story had a few twists and I suspected the gardner, the husband, the wife, and then the ghost. You never know in some movies untill they're over. The end was predictable, but what do you expect? The floating skull harassing the husband was just too far from reality for me to buy any of it. But who cares! I don't watch for realism, I watch for laughs. Generally at the end of this movie I was laughing more than being scared to death as the opening cautioned us. But I suppose one could die from laughing while choking on their popcorn. That'd be scary.
It was interesting enough to keep me watching although I knew it would be the skull knocking on the door. How predictable was that? Very. Also predictable that the husband would die the same way his previous wife had. The nice thing about these classic films is that every bit of dialogue is significant. So if they go into great detail about the 1st wifes' death, then you can bet it's some type of forshadowing. But again, a strong grown man couldn't stop a skull from biting his neck? & a female skull at that? I guess it was the power of vengance that fueled the skull to murder? Letting go of reality is a requirement in these films.
The Attack Of The Giant Leeches ~ 1959
QUICKIE: Giant leeches live in the local swamp and are eating people.
PLOT: In a community nearby a swamp, after moonshine-swilling-trapper Lem Sawyer sees a giant creature, people start disappearing. While searching for illegal traps nature preserve/game warden Steve Benton (Ken Clark) and his girl-friend Nan Greyson (Jan Shepard) find Lem dying with giant sucker wounds on his body.
The cuckold Dave Walker finds his wife Liz Walker cheating on him with his friend Cal Moulton. He chases the couple through the swamp, and forces them to jump into the water. The leeches attack them, and the shocked Dave is arrested, accused of murder. When police refuse to believe Dave's story, he hangs himself in his cell.
Two other locals decide to look for the bodies of Liz and Cal to get the prize of US$ 50.00 per body, and also vanish into the swamp. Game Warden Steve Benton and Nan's father, Dr Greyson realize that the people were taken by the leeches and conclude they live in caves under the swamp. Using dynamite, the 4 missing bodies are discovered. Game warden Steve Benton organizes a patrol to investigate the caves under the swamp, finding the lethal giant leeches and then destroys them.
SUMMARY: If just the title of this movie makes you giggle then you will laugh outright when you see the "giant leech" is a man dressed in a black garbage bag. Classic special effects! The other gem in this movie is the scuba scene where the leading man Ken Clark is clad in the current fashion swim trunks which are slim fitting, tight and sexy! And look at those muscles and that chest hair!
The plot is silly. As radiation from nearby Cape Canaveral has caused leeches to mutate and grow big enough to devour everything in the swamp including crocodiles and then start in on the humans. One part that bugs me is the leeches put the people into underground caves, keeping them alive until the leeches want to eat again. I've kept pet leeches before, and once they get a food source they don't let go of it until it's drained of blood. But we'll ignore that venture from reality. As well as the typical classic movie dumb down that a group of 3 or more intelligent people won't gang up against the single stupid enemy and kill it.
They also don't explain that before the leeches arise from the water they create a bunch of bubbles which seem to render the humans unconscious. I can only guess it's the worst case of leech farts ever. But I suppose on a diet of swamp creatures you'd have bad gas too. They also emit strange sounds whenever on screen. I can only surmise it's the leech mating call, as well as a cue for the viewer to suspect leech danger. All in all, a fun romp, and the story was believable enough to keep me interested throughout.
