Unclean Cults: Land of the Lost and Howard the Duck

This week, two attempts to translate cult favorites to the language of film, with gibberish the results.

When do you first get the feeling that Land of the Lost is in trouble? Not counting when you first saw the trailer. When? Immediately.

In the movie's first post-title scene, crackpot scientist Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell) is flogging his new book on "The Today Show" and his interview with Matt Lauer, playing himself, isn't going well. Lauer gets the movie's first laugh and I wondered if Ferrell and director Brad Silberling really meant for Matt Lauer to set the pace.

Dr. Marshall believes that movement between dimensions and alternate universes is possible, but he doesn't attempt a field test of his tachyon gizmo until encouraged by Holly, a hot young science student from England (Anna Friel). They experience "the greatest earthquake the world has ever known" and, along with a redneck doofus named Will (Danny McBride) wind up in a place where anything dreamed up by sitcom writers can happen.

After flopping down on a patch of lost-land desert containing a Viking ship and what could be Amelia Earhart's plane, they meet Cha-Ka, a Sleestak, sort of a 2001 australopithecine reject (Jorma Taccone). From there, the movie is essentially a series of sketches and concepts, most of which don't work very well stretched out over 93 minutes.

So what do we get? Lots of aimless running and screaming—the farce's traditional demand for "louder, faster, funnier." Two of out three, anyone? There are some CGI dinosaurs. Several gags based on bodily excretions, especially numbers one and two. Some of the throwaway gags worked for me. As the tachyon gizmo first hums to life we see Dr. Marshall looking down at it, his face lit by a soft blue light. "It's beautiful," he gasps in a moment that perfectly parodies Paul Freeman's Dr. Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark just before his head melts.

If only TV writers Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas could have come up with more stuff like that, Ferrell wouldn't have to fall back on re-cycling his standard movie persona. Yes, earlier movie comedians have mined one character for all s/he was worth, but audiences saw them only once or twice a year. With basic cable, On Demand and DVD, we can see Will Ferrell, or any movie star, so often it's easy for them to become over-exposed.

Matt Lauer ends the movie with another solid laugh. Who knew? Maybe Land of the Lost isn't really a Will Ferrell picture at all. Maybe it's a Matt Lauer movie and Ferrell just hogs most of it. Maybe theyshould have cut out all that unfunny Ferrell stuff for the DVD. That would leave us with a five-minute movie full of LOL material instead of an intermittently amusing 93-minute one. Sounds good to me.

And now for something almost exactly the same, the movie equivalent of The Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic, the non plus ultra of big budget bad movies, the one, the only . . .

Howard the Duck.

Re-visiting older films you once panned is good for the critic's humility. You frequently find that The Movie in Question isn't as bad as you thought it was. Maybe that's because you've seen so many even stinkier floppiles since the initial viewing. Maybe you're just mellowing. Maybe senility is taking over.

Well, I'm here to announce that I am not mellowing and senility is not yet my dominant mental condition. Howard the Duck is just as bad as it ever was. Time has not blossomed nor custom improved its unique blend of over-production and cheap-jack special effects, nor its lousy acting, insulting script, and hapless direction. If you were watching "Jeopardy" and the category was "Rotten Movies," the correct response to every clue would be Howard the Duck.

Adapted from the super comic book created by Steve Gerber, this mess of a movie was produced by George Lucas, who apparently learned nothing from the derision he received over the little people in teddy bear costumes in Return of the Jedi in 1983 and allowed Ed Gale, whose subsequent career included stunt doubling Chucky in the Child's Play series, to don a risibly unconvincing duck suit. Howard, who is transported against his will from the Duck Planet to Earth, is supposed to be a master of Quack Fu but can barely waddle around.

Arriving on Earth, he is abused, laughed at and smacked around—no one has sense enough to grab him and rush him to the nearest Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. Finally, he comes to the rescue of second rate rock singer Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson) who takes him home with her and, maybe, falls in love with him. Together, and with the help of lab tech Phil Blumburtt (a hideously overacting Tim Robbins) they save the world from an invasion of Dark Lords of the Universe, led by a possessed Dr. Jenning (Jeffrey Jones).

The opening getting-to-know-you segment lasts way too long, the Dark Lords section is played too straight, and the film's last two reels are nothing but explosions, screaming, and the kind of stop motion animation that was amazing in King Kong but was sadly antiquated by 1986. The picture was directed by Lucas' buddy Willard Huyck and written by Huyck and Gloria Katz. Why the hell didn't they get Steve Gerber to at least chip in? The man, who died in 2008, was a terrific comic book satirist. Maybe Lucas and Co. were just set on turning out a family comedy instead of the R rated burlesque of comics, movies and life in general the picture would have had to be in order to duplicate the real Howard. The missed opportunity is as painful as a kidney stone the size of a duck egg.

But one good thing came of it all. The film's box office failure was so severe it forced Lucas to sell the Lucasfilm animation department in order to keep the rest of the empire afloat. He sold it to Steve Jobs and it became Pixar.

Howard the Duck was such a massive flop it must be seen to be believed, so take a look next time it shows up on cable—but for the sake of your soul, don't buy it. People have gone to hell for a lot less. Poor Howard deserved better than this. You will believe a male duck can lay an egg.

Dark and Stormy Night (2009)

Charles Ludlam, late founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, once wrote a play the dialogue of which consisted of the punch lines of old jokes. No, I don't remember the title. Jeez, do I have to do everything around here?

Larry Blamire, creator of one of this century's great cult classic films, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, pulls off something just as challenging and funny with Dark and Stormy Night, in which everything is a dark-old-house spook-movie cliché: plot, characters, props, setting — everything. The dialogue is a thing of beauty, comprised almost entirely of stream-of-unconsciousness non sequiturs. One character asks the butler to provide sherry for the guests, and "Bring me an iced tea sandwich."

The relatives — and assorted strangers, servants and one guy in a gorilla suit — have gathered for the reading of the will, then they start dropping like lead bon mots. Blamire's usual gang of thesps, with a quartet of guest actors who have been in movies you've actually heard of, deliver their senseless lines as if any of this had any meaning beyond tickling your nostalgia for Hollywood Poverty Row thrillers until it hollers, "Uncle!"

Blamire's talent for absurdist burlesque is immense and I'd like to see it rewarded with mainstream recognition, but if that meant he'd have to stop making these low-budget masterpieces, well, screw that. A wider multiplex audience could never love him like we do.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, working from his own story, combines the names of the Virgin Mary and Eva Braun (Frau Hitler) to create a character that one critic said represented the postwar Germany of the "economic miracle"—dragging itself up from the hideous and shameful disaster of war to an attractive creature wearing jewels and expensive clothes, but totally without a soul.

Maria (Hanna Schygulla) marries her German soldier Hermann Braun (Klaus Lowitsch) as the world turns to a blasted outhouse around them. The Justice of the Peace tries to escape the bombing but the almost-married couple runs after him through the street, tackling him as explosions go off all around them, and force him to sign the legal document. The next thing we know, it's the following day and Hermann has been sent to the Russian front. Maria will say later that she is fully married—after the ceremony she and Hermann had a half day and a full night before he was shipped out.

After the war, her best friend Betti's (Elisabeth Trissenaar) husband Willi (Gottfried John) returns with the news that Hermann was killed. Maria chooses to disbelieve this story and determines to prepare for the day of her husband's return by accumulating as much money as possible. To this end she buys the best dress she can and becomes hostess at a bar catering to American occupation troops. Having learned to survive the war, Maria now has to learn how to survive the peace. She takes up with Bill (George Byrd), a black soldier and becomes pregnant by him. This affair ends suddenly in a character defining moment when Hermann proves her right by showing up again.

Even with proof of Hermann's survival, Maria follows in the footsteps of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and continues to do what she needs to do in order to improve her situation and keep the money coming in. Brecht preached the gospel of survival at any cost—grub first, he wrote, and then morals—but even after she is able to support herself well, Maria seduces and then goes to work for half German, half French factory owner Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny) and becomes a partner with Oswald and his accountant Senkenberg (Hark Bohm).

Maria will be accused of cynicism, but in the world of German reconstruction cynicism is reality. "It's not a good time for feelings," she says. "And that suits me." Over lunch in a fine restaurant, Oswald fears she's grown bored and will soon leave him. She denies any possibility of unpleasantness. "You were brought up well," she says, "and I pretend that I was."

The film combines the rags-to-riches plot of American films like Baby Face with an eye for historical detail and the upscale melodramatics of Douglas Sirk, a German director who immigrated to Hollywood and made a series of silky women's pictures for Universal in the 1950s. That's not a criticism. Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows are as good as most other genre films of their time, and much better than most.

What Fassbinder and leading lady Schygulla add is a pinch of Dietrich from The Blue Angel. Maria only displays emotion when she wants to, whether she's actually feeling it or not. At one point late in the film, she shows up in her underwear, and it's an almost perfect dominatrix outfit. A touch of masochism has been noted in many of Fassbinder's men.

The Marriage of Maria Braun is the first movie in what is seen as a loose trilogy of pictures dealing with strong women finding out what it takes to live through Germany's 20^th Century, one hundred years of national horror, humiliation and hubris. It's a key film in the movement known as "New German Cinema."

Casino Royale (1966)

I have no cinematic guilty pleasures, so when I enjoy a movie like the absurd James Bond burlesque Casino Royale, I don't feel guilty about it. I feel stupid, sure, but not guilty.

Cooked up by six directors (Ken Hughes, John Huston, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, Richard Talmadge, led by Val Guest), and with three credited and seven uncredited writers — including such heavyweights as Ben Hecht, Woody Allen, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern and Billy Wilder — there's no way this could be anything but a train wreck, and that's what it is. But who ever said train wrecks weren't fun to watch? It's like that old Dennis the Menace cartoon in which the kid mixes root beer, ketchup, peanut butter, and assorted other gastronomic favorites into one concoction on the theory that if each one of them tastes good alone, blended together they must be super yummy. Sure.

Based on Ian Fleming's first 007 novel — yeah, like The Origin of Species is based on the Book of Genesis — the comedic premise is that Sir James Bond is called out of retirement to best SMERSH's financier, Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), at cards. Why? What, you're expecting a plot? Okay, if you insist: Le Chiffre has been gambling with SMERSH's money and British Intelligence wants to break him. Happy, now?

To confuse the enemy — not to mention the audience — just about everyone on the side of the good guys is called "James Bond," so David Niven, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen, among others, are all JBs. Sir James (Niven) also enlists the aid of his love-child daughter, Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet), and sexy spy Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress).

Hating each other, Welles and Sellers refused to be on set at the same time, so their scenes had to be shot separately and then welded together. It must have been pure hell. The enmity, at its core, seems to have been the result of Princess Margaret (the Queen's sister) visiting the set one day and fawning over Welles while ignoring Sellers, who would hold up filming by disappearing for days at a time and was finally fired before filming completed. He was replaced by a cardboard cutout.

If only the whole movie could have been welded together. It's truly a near-incomprehensible catastrophe, but it's saved by being so stupefyingly mid-1960s. Watch for a cartload of cameo appearances, including ones from Peter O'Toole and William Holden, and the score by Burt Bacharach fits the idiocy perfectly, especially in the Berlin section.

It's the Berlin sequence, directed b y Ken Hughes (who would soon do penance by directing the film of Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang two years later), that holds together best. In Berlin, Sir James visits the Mata Hari Dance and Spy School to see his daughter. The set design in the school is a pitch perfect parody of German Expressionism, as are costumes, makeup and (over) acting styles. Bacharach's bouncy Berlin theme sounds as if it would be right at home in a production of The Three Penny Opera. Such spot-on satire seems out of place in the middle of all this silliness, but it is a welcome moment of genuine comic filmmaking.

Maybe you had to be there in the mid-1960s to dig this psychedelic zaniness (one reviewer at the time called the film "an electronic vaudeville show") and if you were, you'll probably have fun going back for a couple of hours.

Brass Monkey (1948)

This is a Brit version of a type of movie that enjoyed a brief vogue in America—the filmed radio comedy show. Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen, Fred Allen, The Great Gildersleeve and Jack Benny all made movies like this, pictures that brought their radio personalities and supporting casts to the screen. They are almost universally disappointments to their radio fans, B movies with little of the charm that made the radio programs so much fun.

Brass Monkey stars "Britain's favorite Canadian," Carroll Levis. Levis moved to England in 1935 and ended up putting together and hosting talent shows for the BBC—"American Idol" in London for people who played Stephen Foster songs on the saw or "Flight of the Bumblebee" on the accordion. (In 1957, Peter Sellers played Wee Sonny MacGregor, host of a radio talent show in the wonderful farce The Naked Truth, aka Your Past is Showing. I wonder if the satire contained a poke or two at Levis.) Anyway, in this movie Levis, playing himself, and not too convincingly, is the stereotypical Canadian—colorless, boring, doughy, and totally lacking in anything that could even mistakenly be called charisma.

He's returning from a trip to the Far East when an old friend of his, Kay Sheldon (Carole Landis) gives him a brass monkey as a good luck charm. What we know and they don't is that the monkey is one of three from an ancient Buddhist temple in Japan that is worth a fortune. Kay got it from her crook fiancé Max (Edward Underdown). It's destination in London is a rare objects d'art shop from which it will be sold to a collector (Ernest Thesiger). It's all a farcical conglomeration of plot elements from The Moonstone, The Maltese Falcon, and probably half the Sexton Blake thrillers ever written.

The story is nonsense. If the movie has any interest for modern viewers it comes from the supporting cast. Herbert Lom is his usual dark and sinister gangster self, but without the comic edge he would display so well in The Ladykillers. Terry Thomas (without the identifying hyphen) plays himself, dropping in a couple of times to perform some unbelievably unfunny music hall turns. Levis-program regular Avril Angers is the funniest person in the movie playing her radio persona, a Dumb Dora whose dialogue is mostly malapropisms and non sequiturs.

This was American B movie actress Carole Landis' last film before her suicide at age 29. Landis was an attractive blond and the American performer who clocked more time entertaining the troops during the war than anyone else. She became depressed that her movies never seemed to rise above the B level or attract much critical respect. "You fight just so long and then you begin to worry about being washed up," she said. "You fear there's one way to go and that's down.
I have no intention of ending my career in a rooming house, with full scrapbooks and an empty stomach."

Directed by the American Thornton Freeland (whose only major credit is the Astaire/Rogers musical Flying Down to Rio from 1933), Brass Monkey is second rate in just about every category. When it isn't second rate, it's third. For the curious only.

Bugs Bunny Superstar (1975)

It's possible to be a movie lover and not like Greta Garbo or John Wayne or W.C. Fields, and still retain some credibility — but turn your nose up at Bugs Bunny and hell hath no depth too deep for you, you humorless poseur.

Too harsh? Not harsh enough, doc.

Director Larry Jackson celebrated all things wascally with the documentary Bugs Bunny Superstar. It contains live-action footage of the cartoonists and their staffs acting out stories before the animation began — Tex Avery was a hoot — but it's mostly long on cartoons (a good thing) by including nine full-length examples from the 1940s, only six of which star Bugs. It's short on documentary factoids about the history of the character and the gang who created and developed him in a creaky building called Termite Terrace on the Warner Bros. lot.

This anecdotal back story material is presented to us primarily by Bob Clampett, one of Bugs' papas. The picture's worth watching for Clampett's hideous hairpiece alone. It looks like something Elmer Fudd might have shot on one of his hunting expeditions when his rifle misfired. He explains that a major reason the cartoonists caricatured the Warner Bros. stars they did was that those were the guys who stopped by Termite Terrace pretty regularly to see what was going on and to shoot the breeze with the animators and their staffs. James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were favorite visitors.

Included also are snippets from vintage interviews with Friz Freling and Tex Avery. From Avery we learn where the question "What's up, doc?" came from—he was quoting someone he knew, just as a relative of his used to grumble, "Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin," which found its way into Daffy Duck's vocabulary.

It's these reminiscences, especially from Clampett, that generated some hurt feelings when this film was released. While Clampett had complimentary things to say about Chuck Jones, Jones — who could nurse a grudge like Silas Marner could nurse a nickel — accused Clampett of being a credit hog. The thing is, when this picture was made, almost everyone from the days of classic animation was looking for credit for the work he'd done for hire in the 1930s-1950s, so a lot of exaggeration was going around.

But you can ignore this backstory and enjoy the film for the comedy it contains. Especially fun are the undeniable classics The Wild Hare (1940), A Corny Concerto (1943), My Favorite Duck (1942) and Hair-Raising Hare (1946). The movie is narrated by an obviously-in-on-the-joke Orson Welles.

My favorite from this collection is the Clampett directed A Corny Concerto. It's one of those 'toons that is all jolly good fun on the surface, covering at heart a wicked satire of Disney's 1940 Fantasia—just the sort of thing you'd expect from a Frank Tashlin script. It is divided into two parts, each part introduced with a brief appearance from Elmer Fudd playing a combination of Igor Stokowski and Deems Taylor. Wearing an ill-fitting tux and sporting a five-o'clock shadow that looks more like 9:30, he leads us through the music with observations like, "Wasn't that wovewy?" just before his flapping celluloid dickey snaps up and smacks him in the face.

The first story concerns Porky Pig and a dog hunting Bugs Bunny to "Tales From the Vienna Woods," and the second is a variation of "The Ugly Duckling" to "The Blue Danube." It's the duckling segment that contains the most blatant moment of Disney satire. When one of the characters whooshes past a pair of weeping willows, their branches whirl around frantically before the anthropomorphic trees end up hugging each other, an image that could have been lifted right out of a Silly Symphony.

For some reason, this isn't one of Clampett's favorites from among his own cartoons. Granted, it isn't as funny as his toupee, but it comes pretty damn close.

He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

April 1, 1883, is the birthday of Lon Chaney, whose stardom in movies puzzles many film lovers. How, they wonder, could a man with average looks, who never won the gal in the last reel, and who specialized in characters who were physically and psychologically repugnant have remained a box office giant for a decade? He was only 47 when he died on August 26, 1930, still at the peak of his powers and popularity. He made only one sound film, The Unholy Three (1930), and that was a remake of one of his silent successes. His two most famous pictures—The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925)—are more "known of" than watched.

But his fans, even today, are legion, and I count myself among them. To celebrate his career let's spend a few days looking at three of his lesser-known movies. We'll start with a picture that answers a trivia question: what was the first movie that used Leo the MGM lion as part of the studio logo?

In He Who Gets Slapped, Chaney worked with the great Swedish director Victor Sjostrom (Victor Seastrom in America). The film is based on the symbolist drama by Leonid Andreyev.

Chaney plays Paul Beaumont, a research scientist who has spent years working on an outré theory as to the origins of life on Earth. He and his wife Maria (Ruth King) are supported by the patronage of Baron Regnard (Marc McDermott, who made 195 films between 1909 and his death in 1928). But what Paul doesn't know about the Baron is that he is having an affair with Maria, and when it is time to present Beaumont's theories to the Academy of Science, the Baron claims them as his own, dismissing Paul as a starving student who was hired as a research assistant.

When Beaumont objects, the Baron slaps him and the members of the Academy laugh at his humiliation. Beaumont's grip on sanity has never been too secure, and when Marie spurns him with the words "Fool! Clown!" his fingers finally slip away and the abject figure makes the connection between getting slapped and generating laughter.

Seastrom concludes this episode by cutting to a laughing clown who watches a spinning globe, an image he will repeat to separate the film's sequences.

"With a supreme gesture of contempt," the intertitles tell us, Paul becomes a circus clown. Several years go by and the scientist, now known as HE, the clown, has become an international success. His act? Pontificating about the nature of the world to an academy of clowns and being knocked to the ground for his profundity. His clown/friend is Tricaud (Ford Sterling, best remembered now as the perpetually harried chief of the Keystone Kops), who reminds him that "There's nothing makes people laugh so hard as seeing someone else get slapped."

A down-at-the-heels Count Mancini (that brilliant character actor and eventual veteran of 197 movies, Tully Marshall), who is as much scam artist and blackmailer as he is minor nobility, enlists his lovely daughter Consuelo (Norma Shearer, whose 25^th film and fourth pairing with John Gilbert this was) as an equestrian. She and her co-performer Bezano (a pre-Garbo John Gilbert) soon fall in love.

There is a visible ease to Gilbert's and Shearer's work together. Shearer was 22 but seemed younger; Gilbert was 27 but seemed older. Chaney was 41 but seemed older still. HE is also is love with Consuelo but the difference in their ages prevents anyone from seeing the depth of his affection for her. The theme of a psychologically or physically scarred older man in the thralls of unrequited love for a younger woman repeats itself in Chaney's films—Quasimodo and Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Erik and Christine in The Phantom of the Opera, Sgt. O'Hara and Nurse Dale in Tell It to the Marines, Alonzo and Nanon in The Unknown, Tito and Simonetta in Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Chaney's woeful characters in these films pined for actresses as young as the 22-year old Joan Crawford, and Loretta Young, who was 15.

Just as we think that the pain of love will be HE's alone, the Baron returns to the story. Of course, he finds Consuelo fascinating and, dumping Marie with a large check and no kind words, the Baron strikes a bargain with Count Mancini for Consuelo's hand. Bezano is furious, but seemingly helpless when faced with such a powerful class distinction. HE, unrecognizable in his clown makeup, torments the Baron. "I hate clowns," the villain snarls. "I hate Barons!" HE snaps back.

Alone with her, HE confesses his passion for Consuelo, who is stunned and a little repulsed by this news. But HE is so serious, the young woman assumes he must be joking. She gives him a playful slap and laughs at him. Knowing that life holds little for him, HE devices a plan to rid the young lovers of the Baron and the Count, and Chaney's character, as they did so often, sacrifices himself for the normalcy of romance.

One of the legends that has grown up around Chaney's body-twisting performances is that the actor tortured himself to get just the right look. Certainly the legless Blizzard in The Penalty required some painful contortions, but stories about the weight of Quasimodo's hump and the hooks that were used to flare Erik the Phantom's nostrils are exaggerated or false. Perhaps these yarns were originated by studio publicity men, but I suspect they have been so readily believed because of the connection made by audiences between their entertainment and the masochism endured by Chaney's characters. He Who Gets Slapped is a clear statement that someone else's pain can be our pleasure, and that we are fascinated by the misfortune of others. To a large degree, isn't that the appeal of many movies?

Yojimbo (1961)

There is a sort of perverse existentialism at play in Yojimbo. A lone ronin (masterless samurai) walks into a small town. The buildings are just barely hanging together and the streets are dusty. If the place reminds viewers of the hardscrabble hamlets of the Old West, that's because American westerns, especially those of John Ford, were a powerful influence on director Akira Kurosawa's approach and visuals. The samurai, who, after looking out a window at a field of mulberries, will tell someone his name is Kuwabatake Sanjuro ("Mulberry Field thirty-year-old"), learns that the town is ruled by two criminal families. They are equally matched in strength and fighting ability—not to mention brutality, arrogance and stupidity—so their constant skirmishing prevents any kind of real progress, but keeps the coffin maker busy.

It's not hard to tell what kind of a place this is. One of the first things Sanjuro and we see is a dog running down the street with a human hand in is mouth.

Sanjuro realizes that he can rent himself out as a bodyguard (yojimbo), first to one family and then to the other, playing both sides against the middle until the two families wipe each other out. At first glance we may think he is doing this to free the town of its merciless bosses, but it quickly becomes apparent that his real goal is his own amusement. There is a tall guard tower in the center of town, with a warning bell at the top, and Sanjuro likes to climb to the top so his view of the stabbings and fist fights will be unimpeded. Like any good existentialist, he knows that any meaning he can find in life is merely in the living—but the only meaning that means anything to him is the macabre pleasure of siccing two rabid dogs on each other. As Popeye's pal J. Wellington Wimpy used to say, "Let's you and him fight."

He does perform on good, altruistic deed. A farmer and his wife have been separated by one of the clans and the wife turned into a pleasure girl for one of the sparing punks. The farmer and his son (maybe four or five years old) can only watch this happen for fear of death. Despite an apparent lack of affection or respect for this couple, and an equal disgust at the blubbering of the traumatized child, Sanjuro kills six men who have been guarding the woman, thereby allowing her to reunite and skip town with her family. When the villains discover what they consider to be his treachery, he is beaten almost to death.

When Sanjuro causes trouble resulting in people killing each other—and most of these minions seem far more stupid than evil—all goes well with him and he enjoys himself immensely. When he does a good deed, he gets the crap beaten out of him. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

Toshiro Mifune is Sanjuro, and he delivers the most natural performance in the film. Everyone else exists in the realm of caricature, but that may be due to conventions of Japanese comedy—it could even be a sly parody of John Ford's penchant for broad comic interludes in his westerns.

Yojimbo is Kurosawa's most popular movie in Japan. He and Mifune followed it up with a sequel, Sanjuro, which is even more a recognizable comedy. And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Yojimbo was unofficially remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars. Leone's film looks like a blatant steal, but Kurosawa admitted that he had taken the plot from Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op detective novel Red Harvest. There is nothing new under the sun, whether it's a Son of Italy or the Rising Sun.

Obsessione (1943)

Being a long time fan of James M. Cain, I don't know why it has taken me so long to watch Luchino Visconti's adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Obsessione. Made in 1943, it beat Hollywood to the punch, the John Garfield/Lana Turner version of the novel not coming out until 1946.

Here's the plot: Giovanna lives in a shabby restaurant with her husband, the gruff and not terribly bright Bragana (Juan de Landa). One day a hobo named Gino stops in and cons Giovanna out of a meal. When Bragana catches him, the bum offers to perform some repairs around the place. He stays and he and the wife fall for each other, hard. He asks her to run off with him; she refuses; he leaves without her. They meet again in the city, decide they can't live without each other, and plan to murder Bragana. Nothing good comes from their crime.

Neither this nor the American movie packs the wallop the novel does, but the American film comes a little closer. Visconti's seediness is seedier than Tay Garnett's seediness and the garage/hash house in which the lovers meet is certainly hot and dusty, but leads Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai, as Gino and Giovanna (Frank and Cora in the book) are not convincing as a pair so desperately in lust they are willing to do whatever it takes to stay together. Cain called it "the love knot" and it was the plot device that drags his protagonists to hell in this story and its literary doppelganger Double Indemnity, both of which were based in part on the Judd Gray/Ruth Snyder murder of Snyder's husband in 1927, a stupid crime so ineptly carried out, Damon Runyon dubbed it "the dumb-bell murder case."

Whether or not you believe in the kind of blind, ravenous passion that rips its victim's guts out is entirely up to you, but I didn't see it in Girotti and Calamai. Calamai is certainly an attractive woman and was a big star in Italian cinema of the time, but we see nothing in the way Gino reacts to Giovanna that is a convincing motive for murder.

I suspect part of the problem may be that Visconti wasn't particularly interested in the sordid crime part of the story. While Gino is separated from Giovanna he meets lo Spagnolo (the Spaniard), a street vender who preaches Marxism—but subtly enough to get around Fascist censors—and appears to have more than a fraternal interest in Gino. I sense that Visconti, a homosexual Communist, would rather have spent more time with Spagnolo (Elio Marcuzzo), a character who has no equivalent in Cain's novel.

The real attraction of the film is its look and feel. It is one of the earliest examples of neo-realism, the style Visconti pioneered and championed before moving on to the romantic luxury of films like Senso and The Leopard.

Violette Noziere (1978)

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about Violette Noziere (Isabelle Huppert) as a character in Claude Chabrol's film is that she is so ordinary. As you can see from her photo, the real Vilolette was no beauty; as you can tell from her story, she was no evil genius. She was just a plain girl in her mid-teens who lived a somewhat awkward life with her lower-middle class parents in Paris in the early 1930s, who slipped out and pretended to be older so she could carry on with older men. She met a slick, useless young man with whom she fell completely in love and to whom she gave money and emotional support. When he threatened to leave her, she poisoned her parents, killing her father and nearly killing her mother.

Her story is the kind of sordid affair that frequently inspired fiction by James M. Cain, whose protagonists also found themselves tied up with emotional Gordian Knots. But Cain's hapless lovers/killers were snakes, beguiling us with the intensity of their stares as they looked in each other's eyes—Violette is a lizard, a colorless Gila monster crawling along from moment to moment. She fascinates us not because we wonder how she can escape her fate or what will happen when her passion finally bursts forth, but because we know that she is neither imaginative nor smart enough to avoid slouching toward the guillotine.

The film moves along with the same relentlessness. The crime is not presented in the larger than life manner of a Bonnie and Clyde shootout, but just as another episode in another day in another life of silent desperation. Mother Germaine (Stephane Audran) seems to be always on the verge of admitting to herself that something is wrong in the way her husband, Violette's father Baptiste (Jean Carmet), relates to the girl. (We see Violette and Baptiste chatting casually as she is topless and he has a hard time controlling his eyes.) Violette visits her doctor, who tells her she has syphilis. When her parents find out about it, she convinces them that the only way she could have contracted the disease was by inheriting it at birth from them. They swallow her story and what she tells them is medicine. It's the poison.

We also spy on Violette with some friends of near her own age. They claim to be students but they do have plenty of time to hang out at cafes—the mall?—sipping drinks and conversing about nothing in particular. This is how she meets Jean Dabin (Jean-Francois Garreaud), the counterfeit millionaire who soon reveals his need for money and his entire lack of interest in earning it. Violette supplies it by stealing from her parents and blackmailing older men of her acquaintance.

It's remarkable that Chabrol is able to bleach all the sensation from what was one of the most sensational crimes of the Parisienne1930s and still keep us fascinated. Written by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, and Frederic Grendel, based on the book by Jean-Marie Fitere, the film is not the overheated crime, but the clinical autopsy. Director of photography Jean Rabier and production designer Jacques Brizzio remind us that things and places are not colorful and exciting merely by virtue of being historical.

There's a creeping ennui to Violette, a lethargic dullness which allows us to see life through the girl's eyes. Before she meets Dabin she feels trapped in her parents' bog of an existence and nothing really seems to matter to her. After she falls in love—if that is really what it is and not just a desire for love that is so strong because everything else is so weak—she has to follow the path of least resistance because that is the only way she knows how to go.

It's a fine and observant film, and an exhausting one.

A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)

I suspect that the very first joke about marriage went like this: Two cavemen met one day and the first one said, "Who was that giant ground sloth I saw you with last night?" and the second one answered "That was no giant ground sloth; that was my wife."

Well, it used to slay the boys at Lascaux.

The movies have provided a means of relating the marriage joke from the earliest days of fictional one-reelers. The image of wife-dom usually suffered most through these quick anecdotes, which is only to be expected since men were telling the stories. The onscreen husbands, played by almost every silent and pre-code talking comedian at one time or another, were just regular guys looking for a little extra-curricular fun. Their wives were the spoil sports, taking the idea of being a civilizing influence way too seriously.

The screen's first comedy team specialized in these mini-situation comedies. John Bunny and Flora Finch made something like 100 shorts for Vitagraph between 1910 and Bunny's death in 1915. Only a handful of these pictures survive. They weren't all domestic comedies but that genre dominated their output with titles like And His Wife Came Back, Mr. Bunnyhug Buys a Hat for His Wife, Thou Shalt Not Covet, and Which Way Did He Go? (in which Bunny's character is named "Mr. Henpecko")..

Bunny, a native New Yorker, was short and heavy while London-born Finch was tall and thin. After Bunny's death, Finch stayed in movies—her last role being an uncredited bit in The Women (MGM, 1939) before her passing in 1940—but she never again achieved anything like the popularity she'd garnered as Bunny's screen wife. Her post-Bunny comic chops are on display as Aunt Susan in Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (Universal, 1927)..

Bunny and Finch mark a good place to start looking at the marriage joke in early films because in at least one way they lived the joke themselves: they weren't really man and wife, but they hated each other anyway..

In the best known of their few surviving one-reelers, A Cure For Pokeritis (1912), they are George and Mary Brown. George enjoys a weekly night out with the boys for a poker session. Their meeting place is the clichéd masculine den of impropriety: guys are sitting at tables shuffling and dealing, their shirt sleeves rolled up and ties loosened. Many wear eye shades; cigars and cigarettes are plentiful. All the place lacks are a pool table and a sinister coachman to be Pinocchio's Pleasure Island..

George consistently loses at cards. This night, he even has to borrow trolley fare home. He staggers in late, disheveled and looking like he's on the far side of a two-week drunk. Mary is sitting up waiting for him, growing angrier each minute she's forced to wait. He arrives and swears contrition. He'll never play poker again..

A week later, one of his friends comes up with a plot. George will pretend to join a lodge called "Sons of the Morning" that meets every Wednesday night. Mary believes him—not the first mistake she's made in this marriage, including answering "I do." The scheme would work well if George didn't talk in his sleep. We are to assume that a) he's never done this before, b) Mary has never noticed it before, or c) we're not to think about it..

At this point, the second familiar element of the marriage joke becomes apparent: the wife's relative. Be they lazy, inept, greedy, vice-ridden, unemployable, smarmy, or just plain stupid, wifey's relations are the stuff of domestic misery. In this case, the bane is Cousin Freddie, a dandified wuss who flutters his hands and rolls his eyes as Mary fills him in on George's skullduggery. To make all husbands in the audience like this guy even less, he enlists the aid of his Bible class in spying on George. How much less of a real man can you be than a Bible study participant?.

The dénouement arrives after heaping helpings of deceit, disguise and distrust. Apparently George has learned the lesson Mary set out for him. All will end well with George and Mary embracing. What hubby doesn't know is that Mary is responsible for breaking up his poker gang by uncovering his deception and then going him one better. Each of them is a trickster and neither really has any reason to believe the other. The loving clinch at the end is merely convention. We all know that if George can come up with another trick, he'll use it to reorganize his poker night..

We're also left to ponder this question: why does Mary go to such lengths to break up George's fun? Yes, he loses every week but we see nothing that indicates his poker losses are doing anything to undermine the Browns' financial stability. He's not stealing to cover his debts. He's not contemplating taking any winnings to run off with the office steno girl. The missus seems to want to put a halt to his night out just because it is his night out. Maybe she wants to make the emasculation complete by having him take up studying the good book, like Cousin Freddie..

Just as with a stand-up joke, there is no back story to this little movie. Mary does what she does because it is in the nature of wives to prevent their husbands from having any fun that doesn't include them—which from the male point of view is no fun at all.

Sweeney Todd (1936)

The world-sweeping rage of Sweeneymania that Warner Bros. hoped for with the 2007 release of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street didn't occur. The film's mix of black humor, unhumable melodies and blood-drenched melodrama didn't attract either the audience for musicals or the fans of gore. Perhaps the DVD availability of a solid 2006 BBC production starring Ray Winstone was another trip wire on the stairway to paradise.

But there was an earlier movie version of the story, much different in detail than the Tim Burton film. Its star was Tod Slaughter, Britain's answer to Karloff, Lugosi and Hollywood's other actors of the macabre in the 1930s. The puzzlement of Tod Slaughter's films, as even his most enthusiastic fans have to admit, is this: are his peculiar performances enough to let us recommend his movies when "by any objective standard they are cheaply-produced rubbish." (britishpictures.com).

If you want to try one, Sweeney Todd should be it. The long journey of Sweeney Todd from blood and thunder stage melodrama to Broadway musical began in an urban legend. One of Sweeney's stops along the way was a "quota quickie," a movie made in England on the cheap with at least 75% of the paid cast and crew being English. These came about because of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which was enacted to help the British film industry compete with American movies at home.

Slaughter was born in 1885 so by the time he made Sweeney Todd in 1936, just his third picture, he was already in his 50s. He'd spent his early years on the provincial stage, touring England in the kind of be-whiskered melodramas much beloved by the Victorians and kept alive by shamelessly barnstorming theater companies. George King, a producer and later director of quota quickies, discovered Slaughter and decided that he would be as successful in films as he was on stage if he performed in the same kind of story, and so cast his new aging star in Murder in the Red Barn. It clicked with less demanding audiences and Slaughter began his cinematic reign of terror.

In Sweeney Todd, Slaughter plays the title roll of a demented barber in Victorian London who uses a tricked-out barber's chair to "polish off" his wealthier customers. A gentleman sits in the chair, Todd pulls a lever, and the chair and platform on which it rests swivel backward dropping the victim through a hole in the floor and into the cellar. If the fall doesn't kill him, Todd soon will.

The barber shop shares its cellar with the shop next to it, Mrs. Lovatt's bakery of meat pies. The movie never explicitly points out that Mrs. Lovatt (a deliciously pinched-face Stella Rho) cuts up the bodies of Todd's customers and bakes them into her pies, but several hints are dropped along with the corpses. In one scene, a supporting character is eating one of the pies as he ponders on why the corpses of the murdered men are never seen again. Either cannibalism was a taboo that could never have gotten past the censor or it was assumed that the British public already knew what the Todd/Lovatt connection was.

As the film opens, a solid British sailor named Mark Ingerstreet (Bruce Seton) is being greeted on his return from the sea by Johanna, his one true love (Eve Lister). Unfortunately, Mark sails for Johanna's father, one of those Victorian paters who would never consider a mere employee to be an acceptable suitor for his daughter's hand (D.J. Williams). Yes, dammee, it's too bad. We see Todd standing in the shadows, watching for a likely customer he can murder and rob. "I love my work," he cackles, slapping his hands together and wringing them. "Money!" he hisses with all the subtlety of an ocean liner hitting an iceberg when he sees a wealthy nabob come ashore.

Todd invites the man into his shop for a close shave and before dropping him through the hole in the floor, he sends his young apprentice Tobias (Johnny Singer) next door for a pie. As fate, and melodrama, would have it, Todd knows Johanna's father and wants to invest in his next voyage. Of course, he also has his beady eyes on Johanna and determines to win her either through wooing or through skullduggery, preferably the latter. (I am reminded of the fella in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man who asks Larson E. Whipsnade (W.C. Fields) if he wants to earn an honest dollar. "Does it have to be honest?" Whipsnade replies.)

Weeks pass and Mark sets out on the very voyage in which Todd has invested. The film now offers a diversionary segment in which the captain of the ship is killed by rampaging natives and Mark assumes command. When he returns to London he has with him a sack of pearls (hence the story's title, The String of Pearls, in its original penny dreadful incarnation in 1846).

Todd sees him disembark, lures him to the shop and attempts to kill him. This time, the fall doesn't "polish him off" and, after Mrs. Lovatt spies Todd stealing the pearls so he won't have to divvy up with her, she helps Mark to escape. Mark then decides to disguise himself as an old country farmer and goes back to Sweeney's shop. He's dropped into the cellar again and with the assistance of another sailor he figures out exactly how Todd performs his evil deeds.

Now we get to the wild-as-a-March-hare conclusion. Johanna discovers what Mark is up to so she disguises herself as a young boy and goes to Todd's in case she needs to rescue Mark. Todd figures out who she is, knocks her out, and locks her in the closet. He has already killed Mrs. Lovatt, offstage, and in order to cover up his crimes, he sets fire to the shop. Back rushes Mark and smashes his way into the building to look for Johanna. As he pulls her from the closet, Todd returns to kill him. Todd ends up in the blazing cellar, Johanna ends up in Mark's arms, and the ill-gotten gains end up spilled in an alley.

It's been said that if the Victorians could have made movies, the product would have looked like Tod Slaughter's pictures. Obviously, there isn't much in the plot to attract anyone born after 1902 and the production values (except for the costumes) are laughably low. The acting from the supporting players is actually a notch above what you find in poverty row American films of the era—but then there's Slaughter.

He's so hammy his performances should have been condemned in Leviticus. His smile is so wide you know his characters have to be faking their bonhomie, and the smile is never reflected in his eyes, which are unmoving and dead. He does a great deal of acting with his hands, double gesturing, wringing, and rubbing palms together. He often speaks in a throaty, raspy whisper that makes him sound like the host of a radio horror series. He doesn't seem to have figured out that you don't have to play everything so broadly in front of a camera.

But there's no denying that Slaughter is a one-man time machine. Watching him transports you to another era. In fact, you may find yourself hissing the television. I suppose, though, that the real pleasure comes from watching a performer who seems to genuinely love what he's doing. I know a critic shouldn't try to slide by with saying, "I can't explain it any better than that," but hell, I can't explain it any better than that.

Let me go out quoting britishpictures.com once again. "A new generation of fans have stumbled onto his work [seeing it on late night British TV] and asked the question 'What the bloody hell was that!'"

What indeed. So is this version of Sweeney Todd's gruesome journey a good movie? Oh, hell no. As a work of cinema, it's abysmal. Okay, do I recommend it? I just can't. I want to, but I can't. But if you've read this far, you know I recommend Tod Slaughter. Forget what I say and read what I mean. Seek him out.

Bubba Ho-tep (2002)

"Come and get it, you undead sack of shit."

If your taste runs to oddball concepts but away from horror movies, go with this one anyway. There isn't that much in it of a horrific nature—there's a re-animated mummy who sucks the souls out of aging convalescent home patients through their assholes (yes, another one of those movies), but the soul-sucking takes place off screen. Bruce Campbell stars as an old Elvis Presley, probably, although he could be an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff, and Ossie Davis co-stars as Jack, who thinks he's John F. Kennedy dyed black and hidden away in an East Texas nursing home by Lyndon Johnson. When the home both men live in becomes besieged by the mummy, these guys know they have to protect the defenseless.

Written for the screen and directed by Don Coscarelli, and based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, the picture is as peculiar as it sounds, but it isn't a horror satire a la The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It's mostly humorous, but it's also a study of aging, missed opportunities, and the shabbiness of pop culture celebrity.

Both leads are terrific and they work together wonderfully. Davis was 84 when he made the film, which alone proves the movie's point about the retention of value in old age, and Campbell is so good as a grouchy King it makes you wish the guys who hand out acting awards weren't such clutch-butts.

Re-Animator (1985)

"Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow."

I don't know what was in the water in 1985, but I could sure use a glass of it now. Come on, August 16 brought us RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and two months later RE-ANIMATOR came along. Laugh? Brother, you'll just die.

Herbert West is a third-year student at the Miskatonic University Med School. His specialty is death—or more correctly, the reversal of same. His roommate Dan Cain agrees to help him with his experiments but things get out of hand and pretty soon the rest of the cast is killed and brought back to life, and killed again, and so on.

Jeffrey Combs became a horror icon as West, Bruce Abbot is a wonderfully frazzled Dan, Barbara Crampton enters the Scream Queen Hall of fame as Dan's girlfriend (the Dean's daughter), and David Gale becomes the maddest scientist of all time.

Written by Dennis Paoli, William Norris and director Stuart Gordon, the film has everything from a dis-embodied head going down on a bound, naked coed to a cameo by James Cameron's father. It's a high-gore-level gumbo of sick humor and creepshow parody served up by those mad missionaries from the Church of Splatter Day Saints.

Fans of ZOMBIELAND should definitely check it out, but don't think that the relatively tame gore of the newer film will in any way prepare you for the floor-to-ceiling ick of this masterpiece. And there's the added bonus of the scrumdiddilyumptious good-sport nudity of Ms Crampton.