Films Catch Up 9

Yet more films I watched earlier this year and have not yet written up. And we're not done yet. More to come.

1.At The Earth’s Core

Absent-minded Dr Perry (Peter Cushing) and his American student/financier Innes (Doug McClure) are testing Perry’s tunnelling machine the “Iron Mole” in the Welsh mountains. It goes wrong and they find themselves in an underground lost world* called Pellucidar.

How do they know it’s called Pellucidar? They fall in with some cavemen (both because Pellucidar is a cave and because they display classic movie caveman backwardness), especially Princess*** Dia (Caroline Munroe), who becomes Innes’s love interest. Unfortunately they are captured by hideous, hairy creatures, the Sagoth, and taken to the city of the Mahars.

The Mahars are evil Pterodactyls who dominate the Sagoth and the humans with telepathic powers. Sometimes they fascinate them in an arena and then fly down and eat them.

Innes and, to a lesser extent, Perry, figure some of this out and try to escape, have to return to rescue Dia, destroy the Mahar city. Then they return to the surface coming up by a well-known landmark. It’s a slightly silly but fun family adventure!

Watch This: Old-school science fantasy hollow earth adventure
Don’t Watch This: The cavemen are stereotypes, the Mahar unconvincing and the tunnel sets a bit set-like
Underground Adventure: It seems that this is a series now

* They are not at the Earth’s Core, as is made clear by the map the Iron Mole has in the cabin. This is entirely the fault of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose 1914 novel At The Earth’s Core, the first in his Pellucidar series** is the inspiration for this film. The book’s setting has a “hollow earth,” in this case an underground earth 500 miles down with a smaller earth beneath. Again, not at the core.

** The third series he’s famous for, somewhat lagging behind Tarzan and even John Carter.

*** Monarchy – the state – being a Neolithic invention of sedentary farmers, this raises a number of questions; on the other hand we do not see the Pellucidian human culture in any detail.

2. Frogs

Pickett Smith (A young, clean-shaven Sam Elliott) is taking photographs in the Florida swamp, mostly of the flora and fauna but also litter and pollution. His canoe is swamped by Clint Crockett in his speedboat, so they give him a lift to the Crockett mansion.

At the Crockett Mansion the family is gathered for the annual celebrations the next day. It’s Patriarch Jason Crockett’s birthday and the Fourth Of July (American holiday). But things are being disturbed by loud frogs everywhere*. Jason sends a man to deal with them, but he dies of snake bite and when Smith finds the body Jason asks him to keep it quiet.

The powerlines go down the next morning and Michael, a grandson, goes to deal with it. He decides to do some hunting, shoots himself, is strangled by plants and covered in tarantulas.

The Crocketts have a factory (paper mill?) that vents its waste into the swamp. This, it’s implied, is causing the ecology to turn against humans. Though both the ending and Smith suggest the problem is larger. It gets a lot of its creepiness during the early and middle sections by turning at the start or end of a scene and discovering lots of frogs sitting about. They’ve been there all along!

Watch This: Swamp-based eco-horror with a couple of good performances
Don’t Watch This: Frogs are our friends

* They brought in 500 toads not local to the area for the film, most of whom escaped. Thus the film itself is also an ecological disaster.

3. Deathsport

A thousand years from now, after the Neutron wars, the earth is populated by city states separated by wilderness. The wilderness is populated by mutant cannibals living in caves. Crossing the wilderness is dangerous, and most caravans or groups are led by Range Guides, legendary warriors.

The city state of Helix, led by Lord Zircola (supported by Ankor Moor), plans to attack the city state of Tritan, and capture their fuel. They have invented a new weapon, the Death Machines (dirt bikes with slow firing disintegrators). They’ve also invented Deathsport, in which criminals fight each other gladiator-style.

To prove the power of the Death Machines they capture some Range Guides, including Kaz Oshay, whose mother was killed by Ankor Moor, and Deneer, caught while trying to rescue a Tritan child from mutants. After some plotting and weirdness in the city they are put into the Deathsport Arena, defeat the Death Machines and escape.

It's a ridiculous low budget post-apocalyptic adventure. The portentous dialogue and references to honour, codes and so on can’t stand up when there’s guys on dirt bikes doing jumps while explosions go off (the weird lighting and odd events inside the city work a bit better).

Watch This: David Carradine on a revenge quest, fighting with swords and blasters, riding bikes and horses
Don’t Watch This: As a post-apocalypse, it’s a bit half-baked

4. Treasure Island (1972)

Jim Hawkins works in the Admiral Benbow tavern with his widowed mother. An old sailor Billy Bones comes to live there, watches the sea, asks Jim to watch out for a one-legged man. One day a blind sailor, Blind Pew, comes and confronts Bones, handing him The Black Spot, a piece of paper with a black spot on that marks him for death. He dies and sailors – pirates – ransack the tavern but Jim has got away with the item Bones was hiding – a map to an island (Treasure Island where infamous pirate Captain Flint hid his treasure).

Taking the map to the indiscreet Squire Trelawney, he funds an expedition to this Treasure Island*, though the brains is Dr Livesey, who seems to be courting Mrs Hawkins (one of two named women in the film. Probably the book too.) They employ Captain Smollett to command Trelawney’s schooner Hispaniola and hire a crew, using a one-legged man Long John Silver (Orson Welles), a tavern keeper to recruit them. Silver comes along as cook, and runs afoul of Smollett who likes to keep things shipshape and doesn’t like the handholds on deck. He grows to suspect the crew may be a bit pirate-y.

In a famous scene Jim is inside the apple barrel when some of the crew come in and explain they used to be pirates under Captain Flint, and that Silver, who has befriended Jim, intends to mutiny and capture the treasure and ship for himself. Forewarned the mutiny doesn’t quite succeed, leading to two different armed groups on the island, and Jim getting lost and meeting the castaway Ben Gunn, who knows everything about the island.

Based on the 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stephenson, many of the linking, voiceover sections are taken directly from it. A fun, family-friendly pirate adventure, with perhaps a little too much violence and menace for little ones.

Watch This: An enjoyable adaption of the classic tale, where the pirates still have a few of the harsh and rough edges that modern fiction has rubbed smoother, also the Wikipedia plot section is both very sparse and inaccurate (for the version I watched, it was produced to be in several different languages)
Don’t Watch This: It’s a silly tale and you’re not interested in pirates and sailing

* Named after Captain Robert Treasure, the fact there is treasure buried there is a coincidence**

** I made this up 

5. The Day The Earth Caught Fire

Stebbings was a good journalist but after his divorce his drinking got out of hand and now he gets bad assignments. (It’s the Daily Express, using their offices, and with an ex-editor playing the editor). He finds himself on the science beat, and his lapses being covered by his pal McKern.

A variety of strange meteorological events have taken place and Stebbings tries calling up the met office, then barges in, and is told off, but he does learn that the high ups there are having some emergency meetings. He also meets Jeanie, who works there, and they banteringly insult each other; because we’ve seen a film before we know they will become lovers. London gets covered in fog, unseasonal heat on the sea covering most of the country.

A newspaper is an intelligence gathering organisation*. They acquire information from various sources, collate it, digest it into a suitable form for the consumer and then distribute it. So they put together several odd facts, the odd weather, the met office panic, a tip from Jeanie and what turns out to have been near simultaneous nuclear tests – a Soviet one in Siberia and an American one in Antarctica.

The earth’s off it’s axis, off it’s orbit. There are water shortages as well as the odd civil disturbance. Throughout it the press, led by the Daily Express, are always dogging the government’s heels, making them come clean about what’s going on.

Things break down, but thanks to the biggest story in history and his new lover Stebbings gets his groove back. In the final sequence (which follows on from the iconic yellow-tinged opening sequence) he dictates a portentous column, which will be the last of the old world, and perhaps the first of a new one.

Watch This: A classic science fiction film, heroizing the press, with the ending out of our hands and unknowable
Don’t Watch This: It’s a slow black and white film more interested in our journalists’ lives and loves than the ostensible plot, also the Daily Express has gone downhill since then

* I think Tom Clancy makes this point about CNN (or not-CNN?) in one of his novels.

6. Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Following the events of Hellraiser* Kirsty Cotton is committed to a psychiatric hospital. Dr Channard and his assistant McRae listen to her story and she begs them to destroy a bloody mattress that Julia Cotton, her mother, died on. Channard doesn’t, instead stealing the mattress and having another patient cut themselves on it; Julia returns bloodily from the Cenobite dimension.

There’s another patient, Tiffany, who is mute and good at solving puzzles. This fits in with the second visual hallmark of the series, the puzzle box** that grants you access to the Cenobite dimension, which offers you masochistic pleasures, also damnation.

When Kirsty and McRae try to find out what’s going on Julia and Channard kill McRae and knock out Kirsty. They get Tiffany to open the box and everyone finds themselves in the labyrinthine Cenobite dimension, ruled over by Leviathan, a big black diamond above the maze. The first visual hallmark of the series, the Cenobite Pinhead, explains a few things, then has his photo from when he was human shown him. Everything gets a bit confused, also bloody and weird.

Watch This: Gruesome horror with some striking imagery and ideas
Don’t Watch This: It’s confusing and bloody

* Which I’ve not seen for twenty years, making this a somewhat confusing viewing experience – even more confusing and disorienting than I think it’s supposed to be.

** It’s called the Lambent Configuration.

7. Charade

Reggie (Audrey Hepburn) is an American in France, working as an interpreter. After telling her friend that she intends to get divorced and meeting another American, Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) she returns to Paris and  discovers the apartment has been stripped. The police inform her that her husband is dead, murdered after selling everything and trying to leave Paris, giving her his travel bag. There’s a letter to her, a ticket to Venezuela, and four passports in different names and different nationalities.

At the funeral three men show up, one sticking a pin in the body to make sure he’s dead. Reggie is called into the American Embassy where she meets a CIA man who tells her the backstory. The three men, her husband, and a fourth, Carson Dyle, were in the OSS in WW2, tasked with delivering $250,000 in gold to the resistance. After a German ambush Dyle was killed and the money went missing, presumably stolen by Reggie’s husband. It seems that all three men, and the CIA, want the money back. The CIA man tells her she has it, though possibly she doesn’t know it.

Joshua helps her into a hotel, but then she is threatened by all three men, one of whom claims that Joshua is after the money. There follows some cat and mouse shenanigans, shifting between glamorous Paris and witty banter to lies, deception and frantic murder. There’s a moderately clever couple of twists.

Watch This: Convoluted mystery lifted by a superior and charming cast
Don’t Watch This: If you’ve watched one (non-)Hitchcockian caper you’ve watched them all

8. Tales Of Terror

In the early 60s Roger Corman produced and directed several adaptions of Edgar Allen Poe stories, many starring Vincent Price and often written by Richard Matheson. In this anthology film, there are three short films, inspired by three Poe stories, with some additions from other Poe work. Price’s voiceover introductions suggest that the linking theme is death, and it’s hard to disagree, but I also think that another is love. Love and Death as themes? It’ll never catch on.

The first section Morella has Lenora Locke (Maggie Pearce) travelling home to find her father (Vincent Price) drunk and haggard in his dilapidated mansion. He blames Lenora for the death of his wife, Morella, in childbirth. Lenora discovers her mother’s body; reveals she (Lenora) has a terminal illness. Then Morella rises from the dead and some macabre murder takes place.

In the second section The Black Cat, Montresor Herringbone (Peter Lorre), a drunk who hates his wife (Joyce Jameson) and her cat, stumbles into a wine tasting contest in which he goes drink for drink with Fortunato Luchresi (Price) an expert winetaster. Fortunato escorts him home and meets the wife; they start an affair aided by Fortunato’s money which Montresor uses unknowingly to go out and drink every evening. Then Montresor discovers he is being cuckolded and decides to take his revenge. As well as The Black Cat, there’s elements of A Cask Of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart to this.

The third and final section is The Facts In The Case Of M Valdemar, in which Valdemar (Price), dying of a painful disease, has himself eased by the hypnotist Carmichael (Basil Rathbone). Coming to the point of death Carmichael is able to preserve him in a state between life and death, despite Valdemar’s wish to be released. All comes to a head when Carmichael tries to sexually assault Madame Valdemar (Debra Paget).

The Black Cat is fun, with the contrast between Price at his most fussy and elegant and Lorre as a vulgar drunk, plus a wine-tasting contest. Why aren’t there more of these in films? M Valdemar is one of the more interesting Poe stories, here turned a bit towards melodrama, but still engaging with questions like what is death. Morella is fine, a gothic horror, and thanks to the anthology format one that doesn’t outstay its welcome. All three are slight and don’t add up to anything, but it moves quickly and has some things to enjoy.

Watch This: For some scary loose adaptions of Poe stories and Price doing his thing
Don’t Watch This: The adaptions are very loose and you don’t like gothic melodrama

9. Bulldog Drummond’s Revenge

Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond is intending to marry Phyllis Clavering in Switzerland. On his way to meet her he encounters a suitcase dropped from an aeroplane. Despite promising to his fiancé to give up adventures he attempts to discover what is going on, with the assistance of his dim-witted friend Algy Longbottom and his valet Tennyson (“Tenny”).

They travel by boat train to France, accidentally taking Algy with them (he’s supposed to be with his wife Gwen). They spot the case but not the man – because he’s travelling in drag. I’ll note that the models of the train and ferry are pretty good. The plot revolves around theft of a new and extremely explosive compound hexanite (real) invented by Sir John Hexan (fictional).

This is an old-fashioned adventure story, based loosely on the novels of H C “Sapper” MacNeill. There’s a fair amount of just missing people by a few seconds, mistaken identity, piling into train compartments for a fight, being held at gunpoint and so on. Also straight up murder – the plane the case was dropped from has dead bodies in. It’s part of a surprisingly extended series.

Watch This: Fun, slightly ridiculous 1930s adventure film
Don’t Watch This: Spies bad, Brits good, lots of coincidence and nonsense, also revenge doesn’t really come into it

10. Mountains Of The Moon

In Aden in 1854 John Henning Speke (Iain Glen) meets Richard Francis Burton (Patrick Bergen) and they go on an expedition to explore Somaliland. They’re attacked by locals; Speke retreats at one point to reload which Burton thinks made their enemies press the attack. Burton is hit by a javelin that passes through both cheeks (this really happened). Speke is captured, tied spreadeagled and stabbed with a spear before escaping (this really happened). Later, encouraged by this adventure, the two men decide to try another expedition, this time to find the source of the Nile (locally suggested to be within the Mountains Of The Moon).

(In between they spend some time in England, Burton gets engaged, Speke signs a deal to publish with Laurence Oliphant, though some doubt his writing ability. All this lays the ground for the final act).

Speke and Burton travel from Mombasa into the interior. Both fall ill at various times. They find a lake they think isn’t the right one. Burton, falling ill, is left behind as Speke travels to another lake, further north. On returning Speke is confident he’s found the source, his evidence being that the thermometer (their last scientific instrument) showed water boiled at a lower temperature; proving that this lake is higher, high enough to be the source. Burton disputes this, saying he’s not done enough to prove it, not found an outlet, not got any real evidence.

They return to England, Speke first, and he announces his discovery and publishes while Burton is still ill and away. The two of them have a public quarrel. Oliphant claims that Burton wrote a damning report of Speke in Somaliland, but he (Oliphant) destroyed it. Speke goes on another expedition, discovers the outflow from Lake Victoria and travels north along the river. But due to local conditions he has to depart from it at points, so although Speke is in fact correct, he still hasn’t proved it.

There’s going to be a dramatic confrontation when the two men have a debate at the Royal Geographic Society but fate intervenes. Despite some effort from the filmmakers, because the central conflict of the story is between two European explorers, the views of the Africans on all this are somewhat secondary.

Watch This: A look into how Victorian Britain thought about exploration and discovery, with some lovely scenery and some exciting action sequences
Don’t Watch This: Two explorers have colonial adventures in Africa, feud about it; read the histories if you want to know about it