Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)

The 1936 British movie Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was the third film adaptation of the Sweeney Todd story, which originated as one of the Victorian “penny dreadfuls” under the title The String of Pearls (which is incidentally a great deal of fun) and later became a hugely successful play.

The plot adheres reasonably closely to the book although it had to be toned down somewhat given the incredibly strict film censorship in Britain at that time. Sweeney Todd has accumulated a fortune by murdering and robbing his customers, in league with Mrs Lovatt who runs the pie shop next door. The fate of the customers, who ended up as the ingredients in the pies, is alluded to but not specifically stated. Todd is also scheming to marry beautiful young Johanna Oakley, whose true love Mark Ingerstreet is trying to make his fortune as a seafarer and trader.

With the aptly named Tod Slaughter in the title role the movie plays the story exactly like a Victorian melodrama, which is of course exactly what it is. Tod Slaughter had played the role on stage literally thousands of times, and he overacts outrageously, and his excessively hammy and stagey performance works perfectly. In fact it has quite a bit in common with Tim Burton’s more recent version in that there is not the slightest attempt at realism. The audience is expected to respond the way an audience at a 19th century melodrama would react. The framing story reinforces the sense of unreality, and the feeling that it is all an elaborate joke in which the audience shares.

It’s a low budget movie but it has plenty of energy and it’s well paced for a 1930s British horror film. I found it a lot more entertaining than Burton’s version. Stella Rho is suitably creepy as Mrs Lovatt, Bruce Seton is a brave square-jawed hero and Eve Lister makes a likeable and resourceful heroine as Johanna.

Being a 1930s British horror movie there is of course no gore, but there are a few chills, there’s plenty of atmosphere and there’s a good deal of fun to be had.

It’s in the public domain and can be found online. It’s also available as part of the recently released Tod Slaughter DVD boxed set from Alpha

Twice-Told Tales (1963)

With Roger Corman enjoying great success in the early 60s with his series of Poe adaptations staring Vincent Price United Artists decided this was a good bandwagon to jump on. Twice-Told Tales was their answer to Corman’s Tales of Terror – an omnibus movie comprising three tales by a master of American gothic. Not Poe this time, but Nathaniel Hawthorne. Given that Hawthorne also wrote some wonderfully chilling gothic tales, and given that United Artists had secured Vincent Price as the star, you’d think they couldn’t lose.

Unfortunately, Twice-Told Tales just doesn’t quite make it. It looks terrific, with some glorious chocolate-box Technicolor cinematography, but the end result is disappointingly bland. Robert E. Kent’s screenplay lacks the sparkle of Richard Matheson’s screenplay for Corman, and director Sidney Salkow has neither Corman’s visual flair nor his instinct for pacing. The sets, although attractive enough, are also not especially inspired. There’s nothing wrong with Vincent Price’s performances (he appears in all three stories) but he’s really the only reason for watching this movie.

Another problem is that the characters portrayed by Price are all relatively straightforward villains. In the Corman Poe movies he had the opportunity to play more ambiguous characters, characters who were sometimes as much the victim as the villain, so while his performances were extravagant enough to be delightfully entertaining they also had a certain amount of depth, a depth that is completely lacking in Twice-Told Tales.

The first tale, Dr Heidegger's Experiment, is reasonably successful, with Sebastian Cabot proving an entertaining foil for Price. They’re two old men who accidentally discover the secret of eternal youth, but turning back the clock simply means replaying an old tragedy. Rappaccini’s Daughter is possibly my favourite Hawthorne story, a deliciously twisted little tale about a poisonous (literally poisonous) young woman. This screen version sadly falls very flat, and fails to capture any of the subtlety of the original tale. It isn’t helped by some exceptionally dreary performances by the supporting cast. The third tale is based on Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables, but the adaptation is too obvious and the ghostly effects too clumsy. In both this one and Rappaccini’s Daughter there’s a lack of any real chills, and it’s difficult to feel any real sense of tragedy or to care what happens to any of the protagonists.

On the plus side the DVD release comes as part of a two-movie package in MGM’s Midnite Movies range (paired with the much better Tales of Terror), it’s fairly inexpensive, the DVD transfer is superb, and Vincent Price can never be accused of dullness. It’s worth buying in order to get Tales of Terror, and it does provide some entertainment.

The Horror of Party Beach (1964)

So what would the perfect cult movie contain? The obvious answers for me would be rock’n’roll, beach parties, cool sports cars, go-go dancing, very silly pseudoscience, girls and radioactive sea monsters. And Del Tenney’s 1964 classic The Horror of Party Beach includes every one of these features! So is it in fact the perfect cult movie? Maybe not, but it’s definitely a contender.
Radioactive waste being dumped into the ocean just off Party Beach has exactly the results that any serious scientist would expect - it turns human corpses into monsters that are part sea urchin and part human, with their internal organs replaced by protozoans, and unable to provide their own oxygen supply which means they must feed on human blood! That has to be the best cult movie science ever! While this is going on Party Beach is living up to its name, with the Del-Airs providing the music (including classic tracks such as The Zombie Stomp) for a major beach party. Trouble has already erupted with the arrival of a motorcycle gang. The girlfriend of the young clean-cut trainee scientist hero Hank has been flirting with the bikers (clearly announcing herself as the Bad Girl of the movie) and a fight between our hero and the leader of the gang soon turns into a full-scale rumble between the surfers and the motorcycle gang. This minor incident soon pales into insignificance when one of the girls becomes the first victim of the sea monsters.

Before long the monsters have claimed an impressive toll of victims, and the local scientist (Dr Gavin) and his assistant (our hero Hank) are baffled. There seems to be no way to defeat these deadly monsters. Dr Gavin’s housekeeper suspects voodoo, which is the kind of delightfully unlikely and irrelevant touch that makes this movie so much fun. Ironically it’s the housekeeper who eventually unwittingly finds the answer to combating these terrifying aquatic menaces. The problem with many low-budget sci-fi/horror movies of this era is that they are poorly paced and don’t have quite enough plot to sustain even a fairly modest running time. The Horror of Party Beach does not suffer from this problem. It has numerous sub-plots so that there is always something happening. There’s the biker/surfer rivalry. There are two interlocking romantic triangles. There’s a slumber party that becomes the slumber party from Hell, there are three out-of-town bad girls in a convertible looking for fun, there’s the frantic search for a source of supply for the only weapon capable of destroying the sea-monsters.

And Tenney doesn’t waste time getting the action moving. He introduces his characters and sets up the scenario quickly and economically. For a low-budget movie it’s quite competent technically, with some very effective editing - lots of cross-cutting to maintain a sense of excitement. The acting is pretty basic, but no worse than the average B-movie. There are a couple of surprisingly graphic scenes of slaughter by the rampaging monsters. The whole movie was conceived as a send-up, a spoof of both beach party movies and monster movies. These kinds of spoofs can easily go awry and end up being overly contrived and too clever and knowing for their own good, but that doesn’t happen here. This movie strikes just the right kind of tongue-in-cheek attitude.

And of course there are the monsters themselves, among the all-time classic guy-in-a-rubber-suit monsters. The special effects are in general not overly sophisticated but they have the right feel for the sort of movie this is. The Dark Sky Del Tenney Double Feature DVD (which also includes Curse of the Living Corpse) has some reasonably worthwhile extras. There’s an interview with director Del Tenney, a remarkably cheerful and likeable guy who obviously thoroughly enjoyed his career in movies, and a commentary track with Tenney himself and some guy from Dark Sky. The transfer is very good, with virtually no print damage. It’s silly campy fun but that’s exactly what it was meant to be, and it’s one of those fairly rare cases where intentional camp works perfectly. This is pure enjoyment.

Airport 1975 (1974)

Someone on another site was asking recently about movie guilty pleasures. One of my most shameful and embarrassing cinematic guilty pleasures is 1970s disaster movies. And they don’t come much more embarrassing than Airport 1975!

This is a movie that has everything you could ask for in a 70s disaster movie. It has a ludicrous plot. Cliché-ridden dialogue. Superannuated Hollywood stars. Overly dramatic music cues. Unbelievable characters. A cute little girl being rushed to LA for a life-saving operation. Nuns. And it has Chuck Heston! It’s like being in bad movie heaven.

It’s basically a much sillier but much more entertaining retread of Airport. This time the disaster threatening an airliner comes in the form of Dana Andrews in a small twin-engined Beechcraft Baron. He suffers a fatal heart attack and yes, you guessed it, his little airplane is now about to fly straight into the path of an oncoming 747 packed with Hollywood has-beens. The resulting collision leaves the entire flight crew of the 747 dead or unconscious. Surely nothing can save this doomed airliner now?

But chief stewardess Karen Black has other ideas. If everyone else is dead she’ll fly the damned plane herself. How hard can it be? I mean, it’s not rocket science, is it? And all those funny little dials must mean something. Luckily she just happens to be Charlton Heston’s girlfriend, and we know Chuck isn’t going to let anything bad happen to his gal. And he used to be a chief instructor on 747s, so all he has to do is tell her what to do over the radio.

Of course there are a few minor problems. Number 3 engine isn’t working, and most of the instrumentation was smashed in the collision. There’s a gaping hole in the cockpit. LA is fog-bound, so the 747 has had to be diverted to another airport, one that just happens to be completely surrounded by mountains with one of the most difficult and treacherous approaches of any US airport. So the obvious thing to do is to get another pilot aboard the aircraft. The fact that the aircraft is actually in flight is merely a minor inconvenience. And luckily the airliner now has a very large hole in the fuselage, a hole that could almost have been cunningly designed to allow another pilot to climb into the cockpit from outside. So it should be fairly easy really.

Among the many joys of this movie is the casting. The sick little girl is played by Linda Blair (yes that Linda Blair, the spawn of Satan from The Exorcist ). And sitting just a few seats away from her are two nuns! Maybe it’s just that I’m a bad person, but I kept wondering - do those nuns know who she is? And how much danger they’re in? When one of the nuns starts singing to her I was certain her head would start spinning at any moment. I know mine would have.

You can also play spot the has-been. There’s Myrna Loy, as a loveable drunk. There’s Dana Andrews as the poor sap who crashes into them (which pretty much sums up his career really). And there’s Gloria Swanson! Playing Gloria Swanson! After this movie Ms Swanson very wisely decided to retire permanently from acting. The bad acting is even more spectacular than the stunts. Chuck Heston is in full-on square-jawed hero mode. Karen Black (an actress I’ve always liked but who does have a tendency towards somewhat hysterical scenery-chewing in the wrong role) over-acts outrageously, although given the quality of the script she may have known exactly what she was doing and decided it was the only way to handle this movie. Or she may have been making an all-out attempt to avoid being cast in the next Airport sequel.

The Region 4 DVD is sadly lacking in extras. Perhaps it’s not altogether surprising - I can’t imagine anyone involved in this movie remembering it fondly as one of the highlights of their career and wanting to revisit what are undoubtedly painful memories.

Judged by any objective standards this has to be one of the worst movies ever made. It’s worse than Earthquake, and disaster movie aficionados will be aware that that’s saying a good deal. Every line of dialogue is a cliché. Every character is a stereotype. Every plot twist is clumsily telegraphed in advance. The plot is absurd. The acting is hammy to a degree that defies belief. And it’s enormous fun. I loved every minute of it.

Femme Fatale (2002)

My love affair with the movies of Brian De Palma continues. I was a little concerned that Femme Fatale, being a fairly recent effort (made in France in 2002), might have shown evidence of a decline in his brilliance. I needn;t have worried. This is De Palma at the top of his form. In fact it’s now my second favorite De Palma movie, after Body Double.

Like all his movies this is one that his critics will love to hate, and he gleefully provides them with ammunition! For a director who has so often been accused (quite wrongly) of stealing from the work of other great directors, what better way to open a movie than with a daring theft at the Cannes Film Festival? Although this is not quite the very first scene - the first thing we see is a woman in bed watching Double Imdemnity on TV. Right from the beginning he’s letting us know that this is a movie about movies, and he’s not going to let us forget that we’re watching a movie.

The woman in the bed turns out to be a thief named Laure, and she’s a partner in a daring plan to steal a bra worth $10 million. The diamond-encrusted bra is part of the incredibly skimpy outfit being worn by the girlfriend of a famous film director. Laure lures her into the ladies’ room and seduces her, and as she removes the bra/top piece by piece and drops them to the floor her partner replaces the pieces with exact matches, but with glass in place of the diamonds. The plan doesn’t work out quite as expected, and Laure double-crosses her partners. The lengthy heist scene is another classic almost dialogue-free De Palma set-piece, beautifully filmed and intricately constructed.

Laure is now on the run from her partners, and they’re not well pleased with her at all. They’re also not very nice people. At this point fate steps in (as it will at several other crucial points during the film). A middle-aged couple are convinced she is their daughter Lily, and after she has been hurled over a balcony she wakes up in their apartment. While he’s having a bath Lily herself walks in. Her husband has died, she has decided to blow her brains out, and she just happens to not only look exactly like Laure but to have a passport and plane ticket to the US sitting on the table. This is Laure’s escape route. On the plane she meets a nice middle-aged businessman-turned-diplomat who falls instantly in love with her, and her new life is about to begin.

We cut to seven years later, and she’s back in France. Her diplomat husband is the new US ambassador to France, but being in France isn’t a healthy thing for Laure. Her erstwhile partners in crime still want to kill her. Her attempts to hide her identity come undone when paparazzi Nick (Antonio Banderas) snaps her photo. From this point on the plot becomes extraordinarily complicated and what seemed like a fairly straightforward thriller becomes anything but straightforward. We’re into classic De Palma playing games with the audience territory, in a big way, and nothing is as we thought it was.

De Palma uses lots of his favourite tricks. What’s interesting though is that they’re not used as tricks, but as ways of emphasising the points he’s trying to make. He uses the split-screen technique repeatedly, which reinforces the doubling effect of the two identical women, and most importantly it reminds us that we cannot entirely trust what we see. It’s all a matter of perspective, of selection, of viewpoint, of focus. The same scene does not always tell us the same truths, or even the same lies. And of course it reinforces the voyeurism that is important in this film, and in most of De Palma’s films. Everything is being seen through a lens. But a voyeur can only see what appears in his camera viewfinder, and cannot be sure he is seeing the thing that matters.

We’re also influenced in the way we look at the story through the title itself, and the use of the clip from Double Indemnity at the beginning. Like Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct the movie uses the conventions of film noir but as in that film we must be careful not to draw too many conclusions from the film noir trappings, or to draw the wrong conclusions. Just as we must be careful not to be taken in too much by De Palma’s homages to Hitchcock. De Palma doesn’t steal from either film noir or Hitchcock, he simply (like any great artist) takes the work of previous masters and uses it as a basis on which to build something new and distinctively his own. This is not Double Indemnity, just as Dressed To Kill is not Psycho and Body Double is not Vertigo. De Palma has his own agendas and his own obsessions.

Rebecca Romijn as Laure/Lily is clearly an Ice Blonde, but she’s a De Palma Ice Blonde not a Hitchcock Ice Blonde. She may not be the world’s greatest actress but her performance works, and she has the look and the presence that is needed. Antonio Banderas is, as always, extremely good. Again there are superficial similarities to the classic Hitchcock hero, caught up by fate in events he fails to understand and struggling desperately to understand both the situation and the woman with whom he has become accidentally involved.

Fate is a key element in this movie. There are many outrageous coincidences, which could be regarded as a flaw in a movie that was aiming at realism. But Femme Fatale has no such aims, and the coincidences and the ways in which fate operates strengthen rather than weaken the movie.

As you expect in a De Palma movie, there is plenty of sleaze and plenty of eroticism, done with immense style. He's one of the few modern directors who can do sleaze and somehow make it classy as well, and the sex never feels like it's just tacked on for the sake of the box-office. The entire movie is permeated with out-of-control eroticism. The whole movie is wonderfully stylish, a movie made by someone in complete control of their creative powers. It’s much more than an exercise in stye and technique however. It’s a provocative examination of the consequences of fate, of choices, of what we perceive as reality (which may or may not correspond with what may or may not be actual reality). There are moments of tremendous excitement and suspense but this is mostly certainly not a thriller. It is however always entertaining. Unquestionably one of the best movies of the past decade.

The Phantom (1943)

I’ve been slowly developing an appreciation for the old-time Hollywood movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s. So far the best I’ve across is a delightfully camp offering from 1935 called The Lost City but most of them are fun in their own way. The Phantom, dating from 1943, is one of several originally based on a comic.

In my opinion the best of the serials are the ones that combine adventure with some science fictional elements but The Phantom is basically straight adventure. Although the hero is also know as The Ghost Who Walks and the Man Who Cannot Die there are actually no supernatural elements. The Phantom is immortal purely in the sense that whenever he dies his place is taken by his son or another member of the next generation of the family but as far as his followers are concerned it’s always the same Phantom.

The Phantom rules over a huge jungle territory in Africa and is a kind of overlord to whom the various native chiefs and petty kings owe allegiance. You just have to try to ignore the fairly outrageous colonialist assumptions behind the idea that these African chiefs are pathetically grateful to have found a wise white man to rule over them! The Phantom is a benevolent despot who maintains peace throughout his domain through a mixture of awe, superstition and fear.

It goes without saying that at regular intervals some villain emerges to threaten the peace of the jungle. In this case it’s a nefarious Nazi agent with plans to find the fabulous lost city of Zoloz and turn it into a secret air base. Exactly why the Germans would want a secret air base in the middle of the African jungle isn’t entirely clear, but logic isn’t this serial’s strong point! This Nazi spy has decided that the Phantom must first be eliminated before his plans can be carried out, and the serial opens with the death of the Phantom at the hands of an assassin with a blowgun. His faithful native assistant conceal his death and sends a urgent message to the Phantom’s son informing him that the time has come for him to take up the mantle of his father and become the latest incarnation of The Ghost Who Walks. The son is Geoffrey Prescott, at present part of an archeological expedition searching for the very same lost city of Zoloz, a city rumoured to house a fabulous treasure.

Of course the kindly professor who leads the expedition isn’t interested in the treasure for its monetary value, his motivation being purely to further the cause of knowledge. To find the city the seven segments of an ivory map have to be found and assembled, and there are others also searching for his lost map, but their interests are purely selfish - they just want the treasure. Naturally the professor has a beautiful daughter (all scientists in those days had beautiful daughters) and her admiration for the Phantom knows no bounds.

By 1943 the conventions governing serials were well and truly established, and each installment ends with our hero making a miraculous escape from almost-certain death. And naturally it never occurs to the bad guys to kill the Phantom in an obvious way, like for example shooting him. No, they always come up with some ingenious indirect method like dynamiting a narrow mountain pass so the Phantom will get buried under the rubble, and of course every attempt fails.

The problem with these serials is often that there’s not quite enough plot to sustain anywhere from twelve to fifteen episodes. This one actually maintains the viewer’s interest reasonably well. It’s all very silly, but it’s fun. And of course there’s the joy of watching the Phantom confront the most feared beast of the African jungles - the tiger! There’s plenty of action, lots of double-crossing and the plot gets enjoyably convoluted. The diabolical criminal mastermind isn’t really quite diabolical enough - he’s sinister and sneaky but in a subdued way. There’s a complete lack of any romantic sub-plot which is a pity because it would have added a bit of variety to the overall plot, but the serials were aimed largely at kids which may explain the lack of romance.

Tom Tyler makes an acceptable hero as the Phantom. The acting is mainly standard B-movie stuff, and if you’re a fan of this sort of thing you wouldn’t have it any other way. The settings are also wonderfully wrong. We seem to be in Africa, but then suddenly we’re in a castle that looks like it belongs in central Europe with soldiers who look decidedly like they belong in medieval central Asia.

The Region 4 DVD release is very good as far as sound and image quality are concerned. The Phantom is fun lightweight entertainment.

Oasis of the Zombies (1981)

Oasis of the Zombies (L'abîme des morts vivants) was also released at one stage under the delightfully lurid title of Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies. And while this isn’t always the case, this title is in fact completely accurate. This 1981 Jess Franco film really is about bloodsucking Nazi zombies.

In 1943 somewhere in the North African desert a German convoy transporting a hoard of gold runs into an Allied ambush. The resulting battle (told in a flashback that features a surprising amount of action for a Franco movie) leaves only a single survivor on each side. Years later the German survivor sets out to retrieve the treasure, but he has a rival, the son of the Free French officer who led the Allied force. The young man’s mother was the daughter of an Arab sheikh who cared for his father after the battle.

Finding the gold doesn’t prove to be an easy task, the chief obstacle being that the oasis where the ambush was laid was cursed and the German soldiers killed there are now zombies guarding the gold. Unfortunately neither of the treasure-hunting parties knows about the zombies. Not yet anyway, but they’re about to find out. The young Frenchman is accompanied by several of his friends as well as a slight;y mysterious professor the picked up in a bazaar. The professor has as a companion an attractive young blonde woman, but she soon decides she’s more interested in one of our young French hero’s friends.

That’s pretty much it as far as plot is concerned. There is the expected mayhem when the zombies appear, and there’s a rather enigmatic ending.

Many online reviews will tell you this is the worst zombie movie ever made. These people have clearly seen very few zombie movies. I must admit to a personal bias here - I generally dislike zombie movies quite a bit. This may be the reason I found myself enjoying this one more than I’d expected to - at least Jess Franco can be relied upon not to make a stock-standard zombie movie. The budget was minuscule and the special effects are basic to say the least, but the rotting zombie makeup looks reasonably good given the fact that this is not a movie that anyone is expected to take all that seriously. If you take it as a slightly campy romp then it’s fun.

It’s difficult to recall another Jess Franco movie with so little in the way of sex and nudity. Unless it existed, like so many other Franco films, in alternate cuts than my presumption would be that the director or the producers felt that the audience for a zombie movie would probably not be interested in anything other than gore. An assumption that sadly probably contains a certain amount of truth. A Jess Franco movie without eroticism is a bit like a Hitchcock movie without suspense. It could be done, but it just isn’t the same. Thankfully this appears to have been Uncle Jess’s only foray into the world of zombie movies.

The scenes of the zombies appearing from under the desert sands are quite well done and are really the highlight of the movie. There are a couple of moments with ghostly hands groping their way out of the sand that are moderately creepy.

The acting doesn’t reach any great heights but it’s adequate for the sort of film this is. I don’t think Franco’s heart was really in this one and it lacks his usual touch. It’s not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s nowhere near as bad as you may have been led to expect. It’s not a movie I’d recommend anyone to buy on its own but if like me you got it as part of a boxed set then it’s worth a look as an oddity. The Image Entertainment DVD contains no extras at all.