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Archive for the tag “Trillion $ Movie”

22 Feb 2013

Swamp Fire

Today’s Trillion $ Movie, Swamp Fire, pits two screen Tarzans — Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe — as Cajun rivals vying for the affections of the same girl (played by Carol Thurston) in the Louisiana Bayou. Crabbe plays the villainous heavy, while Weissmuller is the neurotic hero. He’s a veteran returned from service in WWII, damaged by having lost a ship he skippered.

This low-budget, 1946 meller-drama was the first time Weissmuller ever played a role where he got to wear civilian clothes as opposed to a loin cloth, and also the first time he had full lines of dialogue to recite. He needed the breather from playing Tarzan. By this point in his career, Weissmuller was beginning to hit the bourbon hard — a trait that might make him believable as a Cajun, but less so as the ape-man Tarzan.

Removed from the jungle or not, he still wrestles an alligator, engages in fisticuffs with Crabbe, smooches a couple of hotties, saves the day during a shipwreck and battles a monstrous swamp fire. There’s more than enough back-story and action to make this a decent-enough, solid B-movie. There’s even a lively cat fight between Thurston (later seen with Weissmuller in Jungle Jim) and a rich dame (Virginia Grey) making goo-goo eyes at her man. Paramount Pictures distributed the 69-minute feature, but the two Dollar Bills — William H. Pine and William C. Thomas — created it on Hollywood’s Poverty Row.

Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie from the vaults of YouTube.

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15 Feb 2013

Slave Queen of Babylon

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, Slave Queen of Babylon, stars Yvonne Furneaux as Semiramis, queen of ancient Assyria. Reputed to be the world’s most beautiful woman, all manner of myths and legends have been ascribed to her over the ages. Some credited her with designing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, although the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus noted they were built long after Semiramis reigned. It’s also been said she invented the chastity belt, while Protestant minister Alexander Hislop assailed her for fomenting deviltry by devising polytheism and “goddess worship.”

Her rare combination of beauty and power certainly made her a recurring figure in literature — ranging from works by John Milton to William Faulkner — and cinema, including this 1963 sword-and-sandal epic made in Italy but featuring an international cast. Born in France, but working primarily in Great Britain, Furneaux was always a stunning actress but this is perhaps her most alluring role. In some ways, she reprises her 1959 appearance in Hammer Films’ remake of The Mummy, where she played Princess Ananka, a High Priestess from ancient Egypt resurrected from her mausoleum. But Furneaux has more room to maneuver as Semiramis, plotting to seize the Assyrian throne by outfoxing all of the men around her, as well as defending the kingdom against a host of external enemies.

She’s devious, unscrupulous, manipulative, and also, ravishing enough to get away with it. Her one weakness: She falls in love with the rival King Kir of the Dardanians, played by German-born actor John Ericson, seen on scores of American TV shows including Rawhide, General Hospital, CHiPs and Fantasy Island. This costume adventure has largely been forgotten, which is a shame — because the action is fierce, the drama often sweeping and the costumes and sets quite opulent. Hope you enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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08 Feb 2013

Hercules in the Haunted World

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie is Hercules in the Haunted World, also sometimes known as Hercules in the Center of the Earth. This 1961 film, shot in Italy, is perhaps the most psychedelic Hercules movie ever made. That’s not surprising, considering it was directed by Mario Bava, Italy’s most accomplished horror filmmaker. Here, he places as much emphasis on sorcery as swordplay, mixing a healthy dosage of the macabre with the expected muscle-bound action.

Hercules’ mission: To journey to the underworld, Hades to be exact, to retrieve the Stone of Forgetfulness, so a curse can be lifted from the fair Princess Deianira. The diabolical sorcerer Lyco stands in Hercules’ way. He has placed the princess in a trance, so he could grab power and the throne. In a rarity for one of Bava’s low-budget features, he snared an A-list acting talent, Christopher Lee, to play the menacing villain. True, Lee’s voice is dubbed and he doesn’t get a lot of screen time, but when’s he on, he’s snarlingly good.

Otherwise, there are several exciting episodes associated with Hercules’ quest. He consults with oracles, battles a sadistic rock creature and braves hellish lakes of fire, as he descends deeper into Pluto’s lair. Reg Park, the British bodybuilder and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s closest mentor, plays the hero. Park only appeared in five movies, four times as Hercules. He’s no match for Steve Reeves, but he’s not entirely wooden, either.

In the end, what distinguishes this film are Bava’s haunting visuals. Besides directing, he also served as cinematographer and special effects maven, so the look of the picture is entirely his doing. Enjoy and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/QO1nAmwltGTe/

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01 Feb 2013

Alice in Wonderland

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie is a story you’ve no doubt seen on film before, but not this version. We present W.W. Young’s 1915 silent adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s beloved fantasy, the third Alice to reach movie screens, combining scenes from both Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Considering this was decades before CGI and the film industry was then in its infancy, the movie remains quite enchanting, and moves at a brisk pace, encapsulizing the story in five reels, or 42 minutes. The Mad Hatter, Rabbit, Queen of Hearts, Smoking Caterpillar and Cheshire Cat are all portrayed by actors wearing costumes. Yes, it’s primitive in that sense, but nevertheless evokes Carroll’s surreal Dreamland just as surely as latter adaptations harnessing modern technologies. It goes to show: You don’t need elaborate special effects to conjure up magic, you just need an active imagination.

Viola Savoy, the 15-year-old actress playing Alice, certainly embodies the role: She’s gangly and giggly, and completely believable as a Victorian era ingenue. Much of it’s shot outdoors, showcasing the beaches and forests of California before everything under the sun got paved over. If it seems a bit rushed, plotwise, part of the reason lies in the fact that another 10-12 minutes of footage have been lost. Grosset & Dunlap published a companion book in 1916, and we know from the illustrated book that entire scenes are missing, including Alice’s initial meeting with the Mad Hatter and the definitive scene where she first grows big and then small. Too bad that’s gone. It would have been interesting to see how that got handled before special effects grew more sophisticated.

Fortunately, there’s still more than enough here to savor. Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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25 Jan 2013

The Devil’s Sleep

Tawdry. Trashy. Torn from the Tabloid Headlines. Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, The Devil’s Sleep,  blows the lid off the underworld of pill-popping in the 1940s. It’s the missing link between the hopped-up cautionary drug tales of the 1930s — Reefer Madness and Cocaine Fiends — and the hot-rodding juvenile delinquency melodramas that were all the rage in the 1950s.

Ex-con Humberto Scalli, distinguishable by his greasy, pencil-thin moustache, has cornered the prescription drug racket, pandering to the rich, fat dames who frequent his health spa and gym, the Diana Health Club. Now, to expand his market, he’s throwing wild parties aiming to induce naive teens to experiment with bennies, dexxies, goofies and other mind-bending pills.

A crusading lady judge vows to shut him down, but Scalli snaps a nude photo of her daughter, using this blackmail dodge to stop the investigation dead in its tracks. Undercover agents will need to get involved to crack the case, and they do go “undercover” in a cheesy picture that was quite risque for 1949, although relatively tame by today’s standards.

The Devil’s Sleep has some quirky casting. Charlie Chaplin’s ex-wife Lita Grey plays the judge, and silent comedian Harold Lloyd’s wife, Mildred Davis, has an unflattering turn as one of the patrons at the fat farm. Robert Mitchum’s brother, John, also shows up as a doctor. Despite this roster of “star names,” the acting is uniformly abysmal, including the grindhouse performance by Timothy Farrell of Glen or Glenda fame as the sleazy Scalli. The dialogue is equally inane and ludicrous.

Why watch then? In the words of one aficionado of this cult cheapie, “Its exploitation efforts are commendable. Women seem to strip down as much as possible at every given opportunity…It’s heroically bad acting is a delight to see, with some characters clearly reading their lines off bits of paper.” Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie straight from the vaults of YouTube.

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18 Jan 2013

It’s A Joke, Son!

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, It’s a Joke, Son!, shouldn’t be half as funny as it is. Besides being about as politically incorrect as a film could be nowadays, this 1947 comedy essentially has one punchline that it replays over and over again for the duration of its 63-minute running time. But the joke never gets stale when delivered by Kenny Delmar, starring as Beauregard Claghorn, a blustery and unrepentant Southern sympathizer who might be the last man on the planet willing to invest in Confederate Army Victory Bonds.

Just how ironclad is Claghorn’s allegiance to Dixie? Well, besides slugging down mint juleps like they were 64-ounce Cherry Slurpees, he adamantly refuses to eat Boston baked beans, or even apples grown north of the Mason-Dixon line. He hails from South Carolina, and argues that its sister state, North Carolina, should be rechristened as “Upper South Carolina.”  When he hears “I Wish I Was In Dixie,” Claghorn salutes the National Anthem.

It’s a Joke, Son! has a silly plot, tangling Claghorn up against a Northern-mob outfit that wants to sabotage the state senate campaign of his strong-willed wife, Magnolia, who has the backing of the patriotic women’s group, the Daughters of Dixie. Claghorn is playing out of his league, but he has a motley crew of allies, including a wonder dog named Daisy and an ice cream truck man who’s sweet on his daughter. No, none of it’s believable, but it’s often hilarious — a valiant attempt to re-create on the screen a beloved comic character that Delmar perfected on the radio as announcer for Fred Allen’s Alley Show. Delmar bears a distinct resemblance to Jon Stewart, and like him, seems to have mastered the art of doing befuddled double-takes.

If you think you recognize Claghorn’s daughter, you probably do. She’s played by a very young June Lockhart, years ahead of her appearances on Lassie or Lost in Space. It’s a Joke, Son! proved to be a one-hit wonder. Dreams of serializing the comedy never came to pass. But Delmar’s character gained immortality through the cartoons. The bombastic Warners Brothers rooster, Foghorn Leghorn, is a thinly veiled copycat of Beauregard Claghorn. Enjoy, and do return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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11 Jan 2013

Vermilion Pleasure Night

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie isn’t a movie per se, but a full one hour’s worth of highlights from the truly eccentric and original Japanese comedy and variety show called Vermilion Pleasure Night. We present this collection — in its entirety, with English subtitles — because so many of you seemed to enjoy the surreal VPN skit “Cathy’s House” that we featured a few months ago. In fact, our “Cathy’s House” post still is attracting new readers, and ranks among the most-viewed Call Me Stormy posts of recent months — although nothing can outpace the popularity of the  all-nude Femen activists staging an anti-Sharia protest outside the Egyptian embassy in Sweden. Go figure!

Getting back to Vermilion Pleasure Night, the late-night show is akin to  SCTV, with all of the skits either taking shape as parodies of existing TV programs or conjuring up bizarre, hypothetical programs that might air in some alternative universe or at some point in the distant future. VPN does differ from SCTV, though, in some key respects. It has the kind of visual quirkiness you often see in Asian movies or TV shows, but not so much in North America. Also, nearly all of the cast members are women, and gorgeous ones at that.

Besides “Cathy’s House,” recurring skits that have proven VPN staples include “Midnight Cooking,” a “torturous” cooking show, “The Fuccoon Family,” revolving around the adventures of a family of mannequins, and “One Point English Lesson,” full of risque jokes about pickup lines. Twenty-five episodes of Vermilion Pleasure Night got produced, each 25 minutes long. This compilation, thus, is roughly equivalent to two back-to-back episodes. Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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04 Jan 2013

Jazz Ball

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, Jazz Ball, is a compact celebration of American jazz, taking less than an hour to survey the jive artists, crooners, bebop hipsters and musical innovators who made jazz a crowning success from the 1930s through the 1950s. The documentary revue was put together in 1956 and originally made for broadcast on television. The archival clips vary greatly in quality — some are dynamic, others more mundane and static.

But the music is always hot and jumping, and there’s an impressive collection of greats given the spotlight — Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Louis Prima, Gene Krupa, Peggy Lee, Duke Ellington and many others. The narration, written by Charles Leonard, also is quite informative.

Some of the more cerebral jazz musicians are conspicuously missing.  Where is John Coltrane in this assemblage? Or Thelonious Monk? So there’s a skew more toward vocalists and the pop side, say Sammy Davis Jr. or Rudy Vallee, over instrumentalists making transcendental sounds.

Still, glad to see this compilation posted on YouTube, as the VHS version has long been out of print. Watch and prepare to be transported back to an era when music not only had swing to it, but also sass and scat. You’ll get to visit the Cotton Club and sway to the rhythms of “Stormy Weather.” Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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28 Dec 2012

Vampire Circus

Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie, Vampire Circus, marked the end of an era. This 1972 release wouldn’t be the last picture from Hammer Films, but it was the last vampire movie from the British studios that gave us The Horror of Dracula, Dracula Prince of Darkness, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and so many other vampire titles with a rabid cult following.

Vampire Circus differs from its predecessors in that no one as well-known as Christopher Lee stars. Hammer Films, being on its last legs, went with a no-name cast, and also made a more exploitative and disjointed film. But Vampire Circus isn’t without its attributes. The scenes of vampire seduction are among Hammer’s sexiest ever. And there are plenty of kinky twists, centering upon the arrival of a freakish circus in a Serbian town under quarantine and suffering from a devastating plague.

A generation ago, the town’s fathers destroyed a rock star-handsome vampire count named Mitterhaus. On his deathbed, before shriveling up in his crypt, he vows revenge. Now, payback has come in the form of the plague and the strange circus, run by a Gypsy woman (Adrienne Corri) whose minions include a malevolent midget, a dancing naked tiger girl and a panther that can shape-shift into a human. Plotwise, the story covers familiar ground, but the visuals are quite overheated and often erotic. One thing’s for sure: These vampires have longer and more glistening fangs than any I can recall seeing on the screen.

Lynne Frederick, playing the young rose of a heroine, subsequently caught the eye of comedian Peter Sellers, who married her. She ruined the promise of a budding movie career through a wicked drug habit that left her dead at age 39. The strongman of the circus is David Prowse. You probably don’t recognize him, but you assuredly have seen him act — as he appeared, under mask, as the villain Darth Vader in all of the Star Wars adventures.

Do enjoy Vampire Circus, and be sure to return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/PfDh6cXO3ZNU/

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21 Dec 2012

Santa Claus

Today’s Trillion Dollar, Santa Claus, might be the silliest Christmas movie ever made — yes, even more bizarre than Santa Claus Conquers the Martians or Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. Made in Mexico, this 1959 movie portrays Jolly Saint Nick as you’ve never seen him before. He doesn’t live at the North Pole, but in a floating castle in Outer Space. Instead of calling upon elves to create toys, he employs the services of a sweatshop full of conscripted children he has “adopted” from around the world. The reindeer are robots, whom Santa considers replacing with “Sputniks.”

Santa also has a magical observatory to spy on children the world over. As the narrator describes the premises, “What wonderful instruments! The Ear Scope! The Teletalker, that knows everything! The Cosmic Telescope! The Master Eye! Nothing that happens on Earth is unknown to Santa Claus!”

The film follows Santa as he makes his rounds in Mexico one Christmas Eve, keeping a special watch on a poor little girl named Lupita who wants a doll, and a rich boy who wants nothing more than the love of his neglectful parents. Lucifer, the Devil himself, has laid out several obstacles to block Santa and sent a personal emissary — the impish Pitch — to pull pranks on the fat, bearded dude and to entice bad boys and girls to misbehave. Pitch prances around a lot, but he’s pretty inept, and Santa has his own magical ally — Merlin the Wizard.

This truly strange and subversive feature — yet one that’s a hoot to watch — is the handiwork of writer-director René Cardona, a prolific filmmaker who created nearly 150 titles, many of them cheap Westerns, wrestling movies, horror flicks and Santo superhero adventures. Cardona lets his imagination roam wildly here, and gets a nice assist from José Elías Moreno cast in the title role. You might remember Moreno from the Dec. 6 Trillion Dollar Movie Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters, where he appears as the Red-Headed Ogre.

Much like that film, Santa Claus was imported to the United States by Florida-based producer Keith Gordon Murray, appearing not only in theaters but on television as a holiday special through the 1960s. Enjoy, and do return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.

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