The Red House (1947), Delmer Daves.

Forget what Leonard Maltin says, there are not three stars anywhere to be found here.  Yes, Robinson is a strong performer and so is the lovely Allene Roberts as Robinson's daughter Meg.  Yes, there's a disturbing bone-chiller under there somewhere but the execution of the film is so ham-fisted that the tension disappears, re-emerges, then goes slack again...etc.  The mystery is doled out in little bits then pours down in a torrent, making the final scenes redundant.  The version I watched was a terrible print from the Hollywood Tough Guys DVD series.  Avoid this version if you can, parts of the screen were entirely black for moments at a time.  The Red House is a prime candidate for a remake.  I suggest casting Alec Baldwin as the father!   

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream (2005), Stuart Samuels.

Daliesque scene from El Topo (1970).

Without Ben Barenholtz, would Pink Flamingos, Night of the Living Dead or Eraserhead be rotting in someone's basement in a dusty film can, forgotten experiments created by kooky rebels and students?   Barenholtz, owner of the Elgin Theater in New York, seems possessed of an innate ability to identify a special quality in a film, films that either tanked when shown in commercial venues or worse would never in a million years have been offered this opportunity.  In 1970, Barenholtz began the practice of showing offbeat films at midnight.  His theater found the perfect audience for these strange offerings, being located within close proximity of a number of universities and colleges.   Without his young audience, maybe nothing would have come of these films.  But Barenholtz's patience and willingness to show a film for weeks on end, confident that over time the word would get out and an appreciation would build, proved necessary in allowing these works to flourish.  

Midnight Movies focuses on ten films shown in the 70s, movies too weird to be shown during daylight hours. (The Harder They Come seems to be one exception, this sincere Jamaican film untouched by a major distributor got its foot in the door by being a Midnight Movie).   This documentary also celebrates the joyous relationship between films and their fans  -- all except that for Eraserhead which, as Barenholtz notes, is a film that produces a sense of isolation and loneliness.  Midnight Movies includes interviews with each of the filmmakers, each of whom had completely different motives for creating their works.  I love that John Waters just wanted to "shock hippies"!  With the now very mainstream Sundance Festival being in the news these past couple weeks, this film is a fun look at what really is independent.  Oh, and guess what?  Independent can also be the same thing as fun!  Riotous, cross-dressing, coprophagial fun! 

Divine and pal smelling their stash. 

Ankle Biters (2002), Adam Minarovich.

Oh, come on!  I had to see this and it only cost $3.  Ankle Biters is basically a super duper low-budget showcase for amateurish fight scenes propelled by a premise that borrows plot elements from the Wesley Snipes Blade films.  Except instead of a half-vampire half-human battling vampires, we have a half-vampire, half-human battling midget vampires.  Bonus:  it's filmed in the south and everyone has Bubba accents.  Let's take a look.

Ponytail dude in Tool t-shirt is cornered by vampires!  This is kinda 1992, eh?  

Unfortunately the vampire attack scenes are a little confusing and inelegant.  Dogpile! 

Next fight scene.  Let's punctuate it by cutting to an expressionless bartender!

Hm.  A little dark in here.  I think I see some roundhousing.

There's plenty of lovingly shot footage of motor vehicles.

To be blunt, at 81 minutes and without a lick of technical expertise, this thing is way too long.  We had ten minutes of Rip Torn style huge laughs and then seventy minutes where I realized there was no story, just a series of crappy fight scenes and Oh God, are they just walking down a hallway this entire scene?!  At first my gut reaction was a kind of misplaced pathos:  props to writer/director/star Adam Minarovich for getting some friends together and making it all happen, I thought.

Minarovich has not given up -- he's nudged himself into the industry, and was most recently seen in the AMC series Walking Dead playing Ed Peletier, an abusive, sexist-pig husband.  Not a bad trajectory for a DIY route.  But after a few days, my reaction has changed.  This is a terrible movie.  Minarovich is clearly the only one onscreen taking this movie seriously - way too seriously.  He's filmed from worm's eye view in heroic shots and gets all the "good" lines (including snapping at his Little Person sidekick pejoratively "Close your little mouth" - yech).  Minarovich appears motivated not to tell a unique story or contribute something to film.  He just wants to be part of the industry, which is what he has achieved - by making the film equivalent of Cheetos.

There is something missing from this trailer: oh yeah - the part where a midget punches another dude in the crotch.

Machine Gun Mama (1944), Harold Young.

This is nothing more than a sad little sausage cranked from PRC.  As the extensive introductory titles explain, we basically have two guys from Brooklyn in Mexico, trying to sell an elephant.  Let's look at that again on paper.  Is there a movie here?  Well, there could have been but seems they just started the cameras rolling with a few notes on the back of a napkin.  Oh, PS, this movie has nothing to do with gangsters:  the Machine Gun Mama of the title is a stereotypical Latina spitfire who gets a hold of a carnival airgun and shoots the bejeezus out of a rack of ceramic prizes.   I've been hornswoggled!

Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood (1999), Mark A Vieira.

Scene from Human Wreckage (1923), a film illustrating the hazards of drug addiction.

This week, Canadians were told that commercial radio stations would no longer be allowed to play the 26 year old Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" because its lyrics contain the word "faggot."  I just about fell off my couch when I heard on the news that the word "fudger" may be an acceptable alternative -- really!?  Oh, censorship!  The players and motives may change but it's a perennial.

Sin in Soft Focus is a beautiful thing.  It's a Harry N Abrams publication, akin to a coffee table book though calling it that seems ungenerous.  The format is a perfect showcase for the black and white images, but Mark Vieira's thoughtful analysis of the time period now known as "Pre-Code" ensures that the words carry equal weight.  He tackles tropes thematically, working through the early 30s year by year.  His tight timeline allows him the time to look at individuals advocating both for and against cuts with a little more nuance than other works that span decades.  Those responsible for enforcing censorship are not all drawn simply as villains, but are shown doing a lot of in-fighting and compromising.  Joe Breen is quoted writing to a snarky Philadelphia priest dissatisfied with the International Federal of Catholic Alumnae thusly:

My dear Bozo.  I respectfully suggest that both yourself and Dr. Pace are fat-heads.  I don't even hope that you are well.  But I do hope that you get fired out of that soft job at the Seminary and have to go to work.  I say again, you are a fat-head.

Major forces in film censorship, Vieira frankly calls these Catholic political bodies on their underlying motive, anti-Semitism.  Yet this is balanced by examples of filmmakers' opportunism and audacity.

The book's larger format works perfectly, because the only evidence of scenes that were excised and forever lost exist today only as still photos.  And what photos!  These stills show what masters of light were at work in Hollywood during this time period.  A book to drool over, for sure.

Scene designed for Susan Lenox:  Her Fall and Rise.  As Mark Vieira notes, "Since most of the film was reshot, the scene exists only in this photograph by Milton Brown."

The Brute Man (1946), Jean Yarborough.

The Brute Man has a clunky storyline, weak supporting acting and some chestnuts of dialogue ("because, you see, I'm blind"), but the approach to the material creates a sufficiently creepy atmosphere.  Rondo Hatton plays a disfigured man who ekes out an invisible existence in a small town --  until he goes on a murder spree that seems rooted in revenge.   Hatton, who suffered from acromegaly (a disease that produces bone malformations) is a quiet, awkward presence.  The fact that this is not a makeup job lends a sense of sadness to the role.   The movie was promoted as a "revenge" story, but the indiscriminate choice of victims and method - back breaking - deepens the revulsion.  

A grocery boy spies on The Creeper in his wharf-side shack.

Dressed to Kill (1980), Brian De Palma.

Oh, dear!  The festival of films Michael Caine did to make a mortgage payment continues.  Dressed to Kill is quite the steaming pile.  Where to start!  Well, the first scene features Angie Dickinson's body double in the shower, and then she goes on a ten minute quest for a missing glove in an art gallery.  They told Dennis Franz:  you're a crass caricature of an Italian-American cop -- run with it!  Rodney Dangerfield's son fron Back to School is channeling Harry Caul and the chubby faced female cop from Robocop is supposedly a sexy young hooker.  All I can conclude is:  I just wanna feel Michael Caine's monohair!   

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), Blake Edwards.

Freaking hilarious.

Lady in the Death House (1944), Steve Sekely.

Slightly preposterous PRC prison movie has Jean Parker playing prim bank clerk Mary Kirk Logan whose terrible past consists of her father's running of a legal pinball business.  When Logan's blackmailer, a character named Willis Millen (say that ten times), is killed she is sent to prison for his murder.  Lionel Atwill plays a criminologist who attempts to free her.  Jean Parker is lovely but once she's in the slammer this movie takes a dive; Atwill just can't keep the movie going.  The narrative structure doesn't help: Atwill statically reads Mary's last letter to the world before her execution and the entire film is told in dreary flashback.  We have no more dreadful villain than circumstance as once again in a classic poverty row film, a virtuous young person is erroneously sent to jail for a crime he or she didn't commit.  The audience knows this, and even the characters say so!  In fact, there's almost a fist fight over whether or not to throw the switch on the electric chair!  Note the use of the word "almost" - once again, an opportunity for a lively moment of action is lost.

Manny Farber had it right when he pinpointed the problem with B-movies.  In his 1943 essay Our Town, he wrote: "since we find that the B picture is not experimental, we might then expect, because censorship and box-office decree that no one's feelings be either examined or hurt, that is at least be a fairly innocuous picture of an average American family."  Often Bs attempting to be noirs fail because they are ultimately crime pictures without criminals and all the gooey good stuff that comes along with crime - betrayals, secrets, motives and antagonists - is missing!  In any B without a Lugosi or a Karloff, the perpetrators only pop up in the last minute to tie a bow on the whole thing.   

The film's weakest link is Marcia Mae Jones who appears as Suzie Kirk, Mary's dissolute sister who brags that Atwill will probably need a lot more paper if he wants to write down the names of all of her boyfriends!  Though her character is pivotal to the plot, we never really understand Suzie's motivations aside from the fact that she's dippy and a bit of a nymphomaniac.  This lack of understanding just creates more slack in what should have been a taut thriller! 

Problems with the chafing dish at The Grotto