A seedy bar. A phantom encounter. A dead wife. A husband wrongly convicted of her murder.
How far will one woman go to save the man she loves from the Electric Chair?
Today, we review one of the most striking movie masterpieces in the long-awaited return of the Film Noirchives — Phantom Lady, released by Universal Pictures in 1944, directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Franchot Tone, Ella Raines and Alan Curtis. Here’s more from RazorFist.
Universal Pictures’ new witchcraft movie Wicked has already stirred plenty of controversy owing to actress Cynthia Erivo complaining when a fan edited a promotional poster for the film. Erivo didn’t like the revised poster because it covered over her eyes, blurring Erivo’s identity, and thus, tweaking her bloated ego!
But now, a much bigger promotional snafu has emerged. Dolls produced by Mattel to promote the film come packaged in boxes that mistakenly list a pornographic website. That’s right. Instead of going to the Universal site to learn about the movie, children are directed to out-and-out, xxxx-rated porn!
The film, co-starring the singer Ariana Grande, is due for release next Friday, Nov. 22. It’s based on a 2003 Broadway musical, itself a reiteration of the many volumes surrounding The Wizard of Oz. The new take is rated PG, never mind the racy and obscene hubbub. Here’s more from Ryan Kinel on the RK Outpost.
EntertheStars Reloaded analyzes a 1960 low-budget, sci-fi movie called The Leech Woman, showing it is built upon the alleged mysteries of adrenochrome. The IMDB summary of the plot: “An endocrinologist in a dysfunctional marriage with an aging, alcoholic wife journeys to Africa seeking a drug that will restore youth.” The EntertheStars analysis shows this horrific Universal Pictures release is much more terrorizing than it might appear, as it conjures up dank visions of Molech and the vain effort to live forever. The original tagline for the movie: “Forever young! Forever deadly! She lived off the life blood of male victims.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE: YouTube has removed and censored this video, so in its place, we present another video exploring adrenochrome in The Leech Woman, plus sclips from the film.)
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Today’s Trillion Dollar Movie is the 1933 horror thriller The Secret of the Blue Room. If you like stories about haunted houses full of secret passageways and plagued by longstanding curses, give this one a try. The picture is a staple of that genre, first released by Universal Pictures and remade at least twice by that same studio as The Missing Guest and The Murder in the Blue Room.
The premise: Three different suitors are all in hot pursuit of Irene Von Helldorf, a rich, eligible debutante played by Gloria Stuart (seen some 50 years later as the old Rose in Titanic.) There’s a decorated soldier (Paul Lucas), a veteran reporter (Onslow Stevens) and a brash young man who isn’t as accomplished as the other two men, but is the most cocky in pushing his cause as Stuart’s best potential soulmate. To prove his mettle and courage, and also to show up his rivals, he issues a boastful challenge, that the three of them each spend a night in the ill-fated “Blue Room” on the Von Helldorf estate. It’s been locked up for 20 years for a reason — the last few people to stay there all died mysteriously.
I won’t give away the plot twists but the mysteries, the bodies and red herrings all begin to pile up. Some of this Gothic gimmickry has become so conventional, you can see where it’s headed long before it gets there. But considering its age, this isn’t as creaky as you might think. The cast is exceptional, including two of the most memorable characters actors from the 1930s, the urbane horror film fixture Lionel Atwill as Stuart’s wealthy father and the acerbic Edward Arnold as a police investigator poking around into eerie happenings in the Blue Room.
Enjoy and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.
All this month, we’re saluting the Kaiju, the giant monster movies of Japan. In case you’re thinking we’re unpatriotic, today’s Trillion Dollar Movie is the all-American-made Tarantula. This 1955 release from Universal Pictures wasn’t the first big bug thriller to come out of Hollywood. That honor belongs to Them!, the 1954 Warner Brothers’ hit that turned loose an army of giant, atomic-mutated ants in the deserts of New Mexico.
Tarantula lifted the same premise — oversized insects running amok in the desert — but gave it a different spin. The ginormous arachnid is the byproduct of a misfired scientific experiment with an altruistic goal. At a secret lab outside an Arizona town, researchers have been injecting animals with a nutrient serum in hopes of solving world hunger. With the serum coursing through their veins, the animals transform into king-sized grubsteaks. It’s never explained why the experiments involve creatures like tarantulas and rats instead of cows and chickens, but hey, why spoil the movie-making magic by insisting upon any adherence to standards of realism?
Tarantula has a few slow stretches and also asks us to buy the silly notion that a country doctor (John Agar) and his hot-looking girlfriend (Mara Corday) are best-equipped to stop the spider menace. It’s also funny how, even after it swells up to the size of a barn, no one ever seems to spot the tarantula on the prowl as it devours a pen full of horses and begins to feast upon human prey. These inconsistencies aside, this is one chilling creepy crawler spectacle, with top-flight special effects and dramatic shading by director Jack Arnold, who also gave us the Black Lagoon Creature movies as well as The Incredible Shrinking Man. As an added bonus, an uncredited and quite young Clint Eastwood appears as one of the fighter pilots assigned to blitzkrieg the rampaging beast.
Enjoy, and do return again next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.
Maria Montez as Scheherazade mesmerizes Jon Hall’s Haroun-Al-Baschid in Arabian Nights, 1942. Owing to her exotic looks and accent, Universal Pictures cast her in a series of escapist adventures that traversed the world, often with such sidekicks as Sabu and Turhan Bey. In real-life, she was the daughter of a Spanish diplomat, born in the Dominican Republic as Maria de Santo Silas. But in Hollywood, she came to be dubbed “The Queen of Technicolor.”
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