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Archive for the category “Trillion Dollar Movies”

14 Dec 2012
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Sappho, Venus of Lesbos

Today’s Trillion $ Movie — Sappho, Venus of Lesbos — stars Ginger from Gilligan’s Island (Tina Louise) along with scores of scantily clad women. Now, if that’s not enough enticement to watch the movie, you’ve got ice water coursing through your veins, not blood.

Inexplicably released in the United States as The Warrior Empress, this 1960 Italian import was one of 300 sword and sandal epics rushed into production in a three-year span following the success of Hercules, with Steve Reeves. Sappho, Venus of Lesbos doesn’t boast any Hercules wannabes, let alone bare-chested men. But Kerwin Mathews, fresh from playing the lead in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,  resurfaces as an earnest and energetic hero, the type usually aided by Hercules. In the absence of same, Mathews’ Phaon relies for help instead from Louise’s Sappho, billed in the film’s tagline as “the world’s boldest beauty.” She doesn’t bear much resemblance to the historic poetess of yore, but who watches peplum classics for their intellectual content?

Warming up for Gilligan’s Island, she lives in an “island” along a seacoast, cut off from the mainland by a moat. Inside this protected enclave lives a sorority of fetching vestal virgins who parade around in sheer nightgowns. Again, little of this is historically accurate, but who cares?  Phaon literally falls into this compound, and falls in love with Sappho, pitting him in a grudge match against Hyperbius (an excellent Riccardo Garrone), the man to whom she is pledged.

Otherwise, this epic touches all of the expected bases. It’s got snarling lions, dueling chariots, an uprising against a greedy king, skullduggery at sea, and enough swordplay to fill an entire Star Wars trilogy. The lush musical score by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino adds grace notes. Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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07 Dec 2012

Little Red Riding Hood

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie is a dubbed fairy tale from Mexico that goes by two different titles in English, alternately known as Tom Thumb and Little Red Riding Hood or as Little Red Riding Hood And the Monsters. One thing’s for certain. You’ve probably never seen a fairy tale this cheesy or this much fun. It was one of three Little Red Riding Hood movies that writer-director Roberto Rodriguez made in the early 1960s at Mexico City’s Churubusco-Azteca Studios, all starring Maria Gracia, nicknamed “La Niña México,” as the fairy tale heroine.

An American producer, Kenneth Gordon Murray, bought the rights to distribute the pictures in the United States. Murray specialized in acquiring fairy tale and fantasy titles from Mexico, Germany and Eastern Europe, making cheap English dubs, and then marketing them for kids stateside. Some of his other titles included Rumpelstiltskin, Santa’s Magic Kingdom and The Golden Goose.

Little Red Riding Hood And the Monsters from 1962 is one of Murray’s weirder and more surreal releases, combining fantasy elements of the original fairy tale with campy slapstick comedy and Gothic horror. Little Red, her friend Tom Thumb and Stinky the Skunk embark on a quest in a haunted forest to defeat the Queen of Badness and her cadre of monsters, including Hurricane, Carrot Head, vampires, robots, witches, a fire-breathing dragon and a two-headed Siamese freak.

One reviewer succinctly captured its charms, “An awful, jaw-droppingly bad ‘kiddie’ movie where the beloved characters of Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Thumb are put into a creepy, disturbing monster movie with hideous costumes and terrible make-up and sets that fifth graders could make better with paper and scissors. The dubbing of this Mexican-made oddity is so off and so badly cast that when the creepy kid playing Little Red starts singing, the dubbed voice sounds like a cabaret singer in her late 50s. You just have to see it to believe it. Some of the animal costumes are so molting looking and gross, it actually looks as if the fur has fleas or scabies.”

Murray himself dubbed the voice of Stinky the Skunk, whose high-pitched squeaks sound an awful lot like Alvin from the Chipmunks. Sad to say, but the Internal Revenue Service put Murray out of commission. He got into tax trouble, and the IRS seized all of his movies, taking them out of circulation. Before the Feds could hear the case, Murray died of a heart attack in 1979.

Hope you enjoy the show, and return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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30 Nov 2012

Dr. Cyclops

The team behind King Kong, director Ernest Schoedsack and producer Merian C. Cooper, reassembled seven years later in 1940 to create today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, Dr. Cyclops. This is another tale of adventure in a far-off jungle setting, only instead of dinosaurs and king-sized apes, Dr. Cyclops explores the opposite end of the spectrum. It introduces a bald, brainy, but completely mad scientist who has devised a radium-powered beam that can shrink living creatures into Lilliputians. From his laboratory hidden away deep in the Amazonian jungles of Peru, the not-so-good doctor, Thorkel, has progressed from shrinking cats and dogs to trying out his beam on horses. Now, does he dare begin to experiment on human beings?

But, of course he does. His victims — er, subjects — include his servant Pedro, a prospector searching for the radium mine and three fellow scientists who make the mistake of traveling 10,000 miles to answer Dr. Thorkel’s request for a little lab assistance. It’s these scientists who come to dub him “Cyclops,” not only because he towers over them after they’ve been miniaturized, but also because he wears Coke-bottle eyeglasses to compensate for his poor vision.

Dr. Cyclops wasn’t the first film of its kind. That distinction belongs to Devil-Doll, the 1936 melodrama starring Lionel Barrymore as an escaped convict who uses miniaturized people to torment his enemies. Dr. Cyclops also isn’t as action-packed or as philosophically resonant as a movie that came later, 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man. Still, Dr. Cyclops is well worth-watching if for no other reason than Albert Dekker’s idiosyncratic portrayal of the mad scientist. He is a most sinister man but also strangely someone who arouses our sympathies.

The film looks like a comic book that’s sprung to life, having been shot in Technicolor, a rarity for sci-fi movies in the 1940s, or the 1950s for that matter. The special effects also are quite good, considering everything is achieved through trick photography –split-screens, matte work and scaled-down sets — as this was made well before the advent of CGI. None of the miniaturized humans face any foe as scary as the spider that battles Grant Williams, playing the diminutive hero of The Incredible Shrinking Man. But they must outwit a gargantuan crocodile, a voraciously hungry cat and a pesky dog, besides the bellicose Dr. Cyclops.

Hope you enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

 

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23 Nov 2012

Masque of the Red Death

 

SALUTE TO EDGAR ALLAN POE

The Masque of the Red Death, today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, is one of eight films that Roger Corman produced and directed in the 1960s based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. All but one of the films starred Vincent Price, the lone exception being Premature Burial from 1963 with Ray Milland. The Masque of the Red Death, followed closely by The Tomb of Ligeia, closed out Corman’s Poe series in 1964. Although the series remained popular at the box office, Corman felt he had run out of ideas on how to present Poe creatively, and decided after these final two features to move onto other themes and genres.

That’s unfortunate because Red Death and Ligeia rank among Corman’s best Poe’s adaptations. They certainly are the most stylish and visually impressive. Corman, for the first time, shot on location in Great Britain, rather than stateside. For Red Death, he collaborated with a dazzling, young cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg, who would later shoot Fahrenheit 451, before directing Mick Jagger in Performance and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

In an artistic conceit that works amazingly well, Corman and Roeg chose to use the most brilliant, psychedelic colors for this story, rather than the drab and dark hues so often associated with films based on Poe’s tales and poems.  As Irish blogger James Grancey has written, “The film unfolds within a number of opulently lit sets and thematically coloured rooms and chambers. This must surely be one of the most beautiful and lushly filmed horror movies and recalls the eerie beauty of work by the likes of Mario Bava and, eventually, Dario Argento.”

Price, as always, plays a villain, the debauched, power-mad, Satan-worshiping Prince Prospero. He not only mistreats and plunders from the peasants under his command, but also takes great amusement in demeaning the nobles who have gathered around him for protection.  Prospero has claimed a ravishing, redheaded Christian girl (Jane Asher) as his latest trophy and fully intends to corrupt her soul, defile her body and then offer her up as a bride to the Master. But while he’s involved in palace intrigues, revelries and masked balls, a plague has spread across the countryside, threatening the lives of thousands, even the wayward fools inside the castle who believe they are immune to its ravages.

The Masque of the Red Death is essentially a morality tale, pitting the pious against the profane, the good versus the evil, the rich against the poor. In the end, none can escape a macabre dance with Death in a work that is as philosophically rich and symbolic as anything by Ingmar Bergman and reminiscent of his The Seventh Seal with multiple Grim Reapers imposing a swift, merciless justice.

Enjoy, and do return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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16 Nov 2012

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock

Italy in the 1960s produced two enduring classics of Gothic horror cinema — both starring Barbara Steele. One of those pictures, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, is today’s Trillion $ Movie. It’s got style and atmosphere to spare, over and above a controversial theme and the always-appealing presence of Steele.

In his book Cult Movies, Danny Peary described Steele as “The most fascinating actress ever to appear in horror films with regularity…Her beauty is mysterious and unique: her large eyes, high cheekbones, jet-black hair, thick bottom lip, and somewhat knobbly chin don’t seem synchronized, and as a result her face can be looked on as being either evil…or sweet.” Usually, she was cast as an evil figure, frequently a witch, as in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, the 1960 masterpiece that launched her career as an icon in Italian horror. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, made two years later, reveals her sweet side, although in a most macabre and sinister story, with echoes of Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe, touching upon the morbid and taboo subject of necrophilia.

Steele plays Cynthia, the second wife of Dr. Bernard Hichcock, a highly respected surgeon with truly perverse personal habits. His first wife dies satisfying his kinky whims. As part of their bedtime rituals, he injects her with an anesthetic that causes her heartbeat to drop, simulating death, before proceeding to make love with her limpid “corpse.” One night, he administers an overdose, and she doesn’t appear to regain consciousness.

A similar fate awaits Cynthia once Dr. Hichcock marries her many years later, spiriting her away to his same mansion that was the site of his original transgression. She does harbor premonitions of doom. Not only does the ancient housekeeper give her the chills, but she hears shrieks in the night, sees an apparition on the premises and pictures her new husband as an ogre. Is she neurotic and losing her mind? Or should she run for cover as soon as possible, perhaps enlisting the help of the doctor’s young, dashing assistant?

Much of what’s here is stock-in-trade for haunted house movies, but director Riccardo Freda (using the pseudonym Robert Hampton) kicks the visuals into hyperdrive, caressing each ornate fixture with his camera in a way that transforms the house into a delirious embodiment of the not-so-good doctor’s psycho-sexual fantasies. He’s called “Hichcock” for a reason — references abound to the thrillers of Albert Hitchcock, especially Rebecca, but also Suspicion. The performances by Robert Flemyng as Hichcock and Steele are powerfully expressive, even though some diehard Steele fans pooh-pooh her in this outing, because she does more screaming and batting her haunted eyes rather than flashing them in a menacing fashion.

One fun note of trivia: Harriet Medin, who plays the maid, moonlighted on the side as the English-language dialect coach for Italian starlet Gina Lollobrigida. Do enjoy, and return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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02 Nov 2012

Goliath and the Sins of Babylon

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, Goliath and the Sins of Babylon, stars muscle man Mark Forest as the heroic Goliath going up against the Babylonian empire on behalf of the enslaved nation of Nephyr. The Babylonians are pernicious conquerors. Each year, they demand that Nepyr surrender the kingdom’s 30 most beautiful virgins to serve as concubines and sacrificial lambs. This galls Goliath and his band of renegades, who lead a rebellion to free the virgins and overthrow Babylon’s evil King Calphus.

Goliath and the Sins of Babylon is one of the most lavish examples of the much-maligned “peplum” genre, consisting of Italian-made sword and sandal epics set in ancient times. Many of these movies involve mythological heroes and supernatural beasts. This 1963 picture doesn’t go down that path. Goliath is courageous and beefy, but otherwise, not endowed with unearthly strength.

Still, the action scenes are above-par, including a dangerous chariot race and a barnstorming naval battle. The Brooklyn-born Forest (real name: Lou Degni) is more charismatic than the stiff studs usually cast in this genre, and the film boasts other appealing elements — comic interludes with a dwarf and a tense rollout after Goliath is captured, pinned to a rack and forced to dodge a barrage of deadly spears.

Altogether, before building a new career as a fitness trainer and opera singer, Forest played in about a dozen “peplum” movies, among them Hercules Against the Mongols and The Lion of Thebes. One interesting aside: The character he portrayed was known as Maciste in the original Italian version but transformed into Goliath in the English-dubbed version, distributed by American International Pictures. Enjoy, and do return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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26 Oct 2012

New Adventures of Tarzan

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, The New Adventures of Tarzan, celebrates an important milestone. It was exactly 100 years ago, in October of 1912, that Edgar Rice Burroughs published Tarzan of the Apes — the first of Burroughs’ more than two dozen novels recounting legends of the fearless hero, born a British lord, but marooned in Africa at a young age and raised in the jungles by the Mangani Tribe of Great Apes.

Trim and athletic, handsome and tan, courageous and loyal to a fault, a defender of women and children, blessed with the ability to communicate with animals and master any human language in a matter of days, Tarzan quickly became one of the most popular pulp fiction idols the world over. The visionary Burroughs built a lucrative franchise around Tarzan. The feral super-hero not only appeared in Burroughs’ novels, but also serialized magazine stories, films, radio plays, comic books and comic strips.

Unfortunately, owing to copyright restrictions, none of the classic Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies made by MGM can be viewed in their entirety online. Burroughs personally produced The New Adventures of Tarzan in 1935, hoping it would prove as popular as the MGM releases and he could keep more of the profits himself. He also was motivated by another desire — to present a Tarzan who more closely embodied the Tarzan from his books: Intelligent, capable of speaking in complete sentences, and noble in character, befitting his bloodlines as John Clayton, Earl Greystoke.  Did Burroughs succeed? Yes and no.

Herman Brix and Ula Holt

As played by Olympic shotput Silver medalist Herman Brix, the Tarzan from New Adventures is every bit as buff and virile as Johnny Weissmuller’s, as well as being more literate and well-rounded. But Brix was stiffer in delivering his lines (and his signature yell), and Burroughs’ indie production team didn’t have nearly the same budgetary or technical resources as MGM, so New Adventures wasn’t quite the financial windfall that Burroughs intended. The film you’ll see here is actually a much condensed version of the original, which was shown in a 12-chapter serial form, cumulatively lasting more than four hours. As such, there are some gaping plot continuity issues, but never mind the story: Sit back and soak up the barnstorming action as Tarzan wrestles lions, jaguars, panthers, alligators and scores of Mayan natives.

How, you might ask, did Mayan natives land in Africa? They didn’t. Instead, Tarzan goes to Central America to help find a lost friend and to retrieve the Green Goddess, a talisman full of priceless jewels as well as a vial of the most explosive compound known in the world. Filming took place on location in Guatemala.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Two sidenotes: 1. Brix got over his shyness in front of the camera, and went on to act in 147 films under the pseudonym Bruce Bennett. Most notably, he starred in Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Mildred Pierce. 2. Ashton Dearholt, who plays the villain Ragland, fell in love on the set with Ula Holt, who portrays the heroine Ula Vale. One complication: He was married at the time to former actress Florence Gilbert. She divorced Dearholt upon learning of his affair, and who should she remarry but Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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Here is the infamous nude swimming scene from Tarzan and His Mate. The MGM film came out in 1934, just ahead of the Hollywood Production Code, which banned any subsequent scandalous displays of this ilk. Maureen O’Sullivan played Jane opposite Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, but she refused to go skinny dipping: The lithe beauty appearing here is body-double Josephine McKimm.

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And no remembrance of Tarzan would be complete without paying homage to Cheetah, who outlived Weissmuller by a good 25 years, dying in 2011 at the ripe old age of 80 — the longest living chimpanzee in captivity. Wonder if his well-known taste for alcohol contributed to his longevity.

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19 Oct 2012

Phantom of the Opera

Today’s Trillion $ Movie, Phantom of the Opera, is the signature film of Lon Chaney, “The Man of a Thousand Faces.” Both of his parents were deaf and mute, so Chaney developed uncanny, non-verbal communication skills, rivaling comedians Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin as the silent era’s most expressive pantomime. Making the most of his mastery of makeup, Chaney gravitated toward horror. He personally created the hideous, skeletal look of the Phantom he portrays here. The original came out in 1925, but this trimmed-down 1929 restoration is less clunky, with fewer distracting sideplots.

Owing to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, and scores of remakes and parodies, most everyone knows the story. A physically deformed, emotionally stunted beast dwells in the catacombs below the Parisian Opera House. The arrival of a radiant understudy named Christine (Mary Philbin) brings the Phantom out from the shadows. He dotes obsessively on her, and is determined to make her a star. But he also wants her as a lover — a prospect that repulses her no end, leading to great melodrama and tragedy.

Although newer versions have boasted more gore and special effects, the Chaney classic remains the definitive screen adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s Gothic tale. It’s not just his macabre performance that towers above all others, but also the spectacular sets — the eight-ton chandelier, subterranean torture chambers and hidden lairs — that still command our attention.

The feature racked up $2 million at the box office, such a boffo hit that its studio, Universal Pictures, became Hollywood’s horror specialists. Truly, without Phantom of the Opera, we might not have Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man or The Invisible Man. Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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12 Oct 2012

East of Borneo

The jungle adventure, East of Borneo, is today’s Trillion Dollar Movie. This 1931 film has been largely forgotten, overshadowed by King Kong, the Tarzan movies, Island of Lost Souls, The Most Dangerous Game and other escapist jungle fare that Hollywood created in the early years of the Depression.

Prince Hashim (Georges Renavent) woos stunner Linda Randolph (Rose Hobart)

That’s unfortunate, because East of Borneo is well worth watching.  It’s not as epic as King Kong or as tightly scripted as The Most Dangerous Game, but the wild animal thrills rival any from the Tarzan flicks. Witness the scene of a condemned prisoner forced to swim in a lagoon crawling with ravenous, flailing crocodiles. This was before CGI, so these humongous crocodiles were real, and altogether terrifying. Director George Melford filmed the perils with such realism that he came to be typecast, following this assignment with East of Java as well as Jungle Menace and Jungle Terror.

The tale takes a little while to pick up speed, but stick with it — the second half rocks, including a magnificent volcano eruption that rains down fire and brimstone on the jungle kingdom of Marudu. That’s where an alcoholic doctor played by Charles Bickford has gone to lick his wounds, after mistakenly presuming that his wife (Rose Hobart from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) has been cheating on him. She tracks him down, hoping to patch up their estranged marriage, but he wants nothing to do with her. Of course, he has a change of heart after Marudu’s impervious and Sorbonne-educated rajah, Prince Hashim (Georges Renavent), starts making a play for his woman. The jealous doctor snarls, “White women are bad enough in their own environment, but when you get them into the jungle…”

It’s a little melodramatic by today’s standards, but not so much to be relegated to the scrapheap. One side note: The servant girl Neila is portrayed by Lupita Tovar, fresh off her appearance in the Spanish-language version of Dracula, directed by Melford and filmed at nights on the same set as the Bela Lugosi version. This Mexican-born beauty, the mother of actress Susan Kohner, is still alive and kicking, having celebrated her 102nd birthday earlier this year. Enjoy, and do return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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05 Oct 2012

White Zombie

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, White Zombie, holds the distinction of being Hollywood’s first zombie picture. It’s much different in tone, though, than contemporary zombie thrillers –achieving its chilling impact through atmosphere, rather than gore. Released in 1932, White Zombie has more in common with Universal Pictures’ horror classics of that era, beginning with its star, Bela Lugosi, fresh from his success playing the title role in Universal’s Dracula.

Lugosi made a monumental career mistake by appearing in this low-budget feature by Amusement Security, a small indie company. He only got paid $900, and because he was tied up with this role, he had to turn down Frankenstein, paving the way for the rise of his longtime rival Boris Karloff.  While Frankenstein became a staple of the genre, revived often on television, White Zombie disappeared from view and, owing to legal complications, didn’t resurface again until the 1960s.

Too bad, because in White Zombie, Lugosi delivers the best performance of his career, truly a menacing turn as “Murder” Legendre, a voodoo high priest in Haiti who can raise the dead using black magic. He runs a successful sugar plantation and mill staffed solely by working zombies. But now he wants a bride, and finds the ideal candidate when the virginal Madeleine Short (Madge Bellamy) arrives on the island for a planned wedding with her fiance. Instead, she’s spirited away by Legendre with help from a rich baron who also is carrying a torch for her.

White Zombie not only boasts creepy sets, but also many eerie Gothic touches — from the natives’ chanting to the shrieking vulture that’s always hovering around Lugosi. The fluid cinematography evokes the great Expressionist thrillers of the silent era, surpassing the static camerawork that prevailed after the first “talkies” hit the screen. Among the uncredited musical contributors was Xavier Cugat. Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

P.S. In case you’re wondering Rob Zombie did name his first band after this movie.

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