A Separate Cinema

It's one thing for a "marginal cinema" to willfully want to exist on the edges of popular consciousness, quite another thing altogether for a cinema to be made by and for a people that have been pushed to the margins by racism and prejudice. Since 1976, The Separate Cinema Archives have been dedicated to collecting, cataloging and exhibiting the history of this latter brand of "marginal cinema". Their website contains a wide assortment of African-American movie posters, from "race pictures" from the early days of movies to '70s blaxploitation to current Hollywood hits. The Smithsonian has a cool collection as well. The Black Film Center/Archive is another excellent resource, which includes a fascinating (but also somewhat disturbing) collection of very early motion pictures (1890s) featuring African-Americans, or sometimes whites in blackface.

Meet the Monsters

No matter how incredulous the creature, or hamfisted the horror, poverty row moviemakers in the '50s knew that their audience dug monsters, sometimes the sillier and more ludicrous the better. How else to better explain the existence of the vegetable creature from It Conquered the World or the ridiculous giant buzzard from The Giant Claw, much less the killer tree from From Hell it Came ("...and to hell it should go!" was a common rejoinder by many a wag who reviewed the picture in newsprint). Although no one considers this films art, they are often recalled with some measure of fondness. It's almost as if these productions were, in the end, a shared joke between the makers and the audience, despite the fact that the movies were often played ramrod straight (dramatically, at least). Even without a self-conscious wink or elbow nudge, the audience roared (or at least tittered) at the appearance of these outerworldly beasts, and the producers didn't care. They knew they got away with it again.

Getting away with it was the secret to successful monster making back in those days. One guy who got away with a lot was Jack Kirby, especially in those days before he became "King" Kirby . Before the Fantastic Four took off, Kirby was busy grinding out monster comics for Marvel, all of which are detailed and celebrated at the Monster Blog. In the Meet The Monsters of the same site, you would glean through an index of Kirby drawn monsters such as Glob, the Menace from the Molten Depths, Gomdulla, the Living Pharoah (a giant mummy), Moomba, the Wicked Wooden Statue, and Shagg, the Killer Sphinx. And a whole lot more.

Lollywood Billboard Art

"Billboard painting takes place wherever there is something to advertise - but the best of the typical cinema style is created at the nerve centre, the heartbeat of Lollywood, - Royal Park within Laxmi Chowk in Lahore's busy old sector. This hub of narrow, overcrowded, filthy streets is a concentration of film trade offices and hardly an inch of wall space is to be found without some huge Technicolor superhero staring down at you, gun or dagger in hand!"

Lollywood is, of course, Pakistan's counterpart to India's Bollywood, and Lollywood movie advertising is as colorful, if not more so, than India's. Here's an excellent introduction to Lollywood billboard art, complete with two galleries. The site's proprietors (who include film historian Omar Khan, who provided the marvelous background and audio commentary to Mondo Macabro's excellent DVD edition of The Living Corpse, Pakistan's first and only vampire film) are also selling hand painted oil reproductions of the paintings. The site also includes an extensive collection of vintage printed Bollywood and Lollywood posters.

Weekend Poster Feast 9

Weekend Poster Feast 9. "Diabolical Vampire! More dangerous than Dracula!" You'd better believe it! Blacula's one of my favorite vampire films of the '70s, if only because of William Marshall's grand performance. Here's a classically trained actor giving his all in a cheap AIP vampire picture, lending the accursed Mamuwalde a pathos and nobility other actors (even the "classically" trained") rarely approach. No slumming for Mr. Marshall. Click on the image on the left for a much larger version. 537K.

Classic Experimental Films for Download

For your online viewing pleasure: while some of you may be familiar with the collection of Fluxus films at the Ubuweb (a repository of all things avant and all that), Ubuweb has now just launched a new section of classic avant garde films, including films by Buñuel, Man Ray, Kenneth Anger, Guy Debord, Jack Smith and many more. Dig the caveat: "We've mostly plucked these from file-sharing. As such, UbuWeb is not responsible for the quality of the films. Nor do we guarantee that each part will work. No complaints, please."

Also this: "If you have a better quality rip or other films that you'd like to donate to this collection, please contact us. We'd be happy to host it." All I have to say is, if you have 'em, share 'em.

Vincent Price at the American Cinematheque

A heads up for L.A. dwelling horror fans: Tales of Terror: The Films of Vincent Price begins tonight with two of Price's best (and campiest) films from the '70s, Theatre of Blood (1973), and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971). Saturday features two Price-William Castle collaborations, 1959's The Tingler, and The House on Haunted Hill (1958) (probably not featuring wired seats or a dangling skeleton, but I can't be sure). Also on Saturday is a Corman Poe double feature with Tales of Terror (1962) and, possibly the best of the Corman-Price-Poe films, The Masque of Red Death (1964). And the brutal Witchfinder General, directed by Michael Reeves, ends the series on Wednesday, featuring a new 35mm print and with actor Ian Ogilvy and producer PhillipWaddilove in attendance. If you can only go to one showing, see Witchfinder General, which is one of the best horror films from the '60s, and a real nasty piece of work. It's very atypical for Price, and it may contain his best performance. It has yet to be released on DVD in the U.S., which is a horrible shame.

Turkish Movie Posters

Movie Posters from Turkey. An interesting gallery of posters from both Turkish and international films. They're also for sale.

Movie Gun Gallery

Guns! You can't make a movie without them (along with the requisite girl, of course). Here's an interesting collection of cinema firearms from Bond's Walthers to The Wild Bunch's Browning machine gun (although the site's proprietor states that the film took place a few years before the weapon was manufactured). From Long Mountain Outfitters, who specialize in "Machine Guns - Silencers - Destructive Devices".

Join the fun at our Children's Matinee!

Here was the scheme: buy the rights to a bunch of foreign fairy tale movies really cheap, dub them into English at the Coral Gables, Florida Soundlab studio, and then furiously market the hell out of them, insisting to theater owners on strict "weekend only" matinee showtimes. Then you sit back and watch the money roll in --which is what happened in the '50s through the early '70s to old school showman and huckster K. Gordon Murray (whom many of you know as the man who brought Mexican horror to the USA, turning El Santo into Samson). So successful was Mr. Murray's children's crusade that others followed suit with the weekend matinees, including the behemoth Disney. By the '70s, the big studios enforced exclusive contracts with the major theater and distribution chains that forbade "weekend only" engagements (which not only killed the kiddie matinees, but the midnight spook shows as well).

Most of the films presented at these matinees have drifted into dusty obscurity (except for the perversely bizarre Mexican film Santa Claus, which was Murray's biggest hit). Kiddiematinee.com is trying to remedy that, with an extraordinary database of almost every kid movie exhibited in the US, including some gems as Hershell Gordon Lewis' Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose, the weird Italian The Seven Dwarfs to the Rescue, and one I remember seeing in the mid '70s (on a double bill with Godzilla Vs. Megalon), West Germany's Superbug (which also holds the dubious distinction of being the first movie I ever walked out of).

Weekend Poster Feast 8

Weekend Poster Feast 8. "Filmed in BLAZING TROPICOLOR! A NEW Kind of Jungle Drama - Actually Filmed in Guatemala and Featuring Members of the Savage Vicuni Indian Tribe!" Perhaps they should have thrown in "Filmed in South America, Where Life is Cheap!" if the publicists had the wherewithal. I don't know much about this feature, except that Something Weird released it as part of a "Primitive Triple Feature" DVD (a review of the disc can be found at DVD Drive-In). The poster's striking enough, though, with its white man vs. "savage" knife duel and the heaving bosom of the bound "virgin" towering above them. And people wonder why they don't make "jungle dramas" anymore. Click on the image for a much larger version. (800 K)

The Irish in Film

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Here's a fine database of Irish cinema, of films made by the Irish, Irish-Americans, about the Irish, about the island itself, and everything in between. In short, movies to watch while pouring the black stuff into ye. Slainte Mhath! as the Micks would say.

TV or not TV

More TV Movie Thrills-- Possibly the most frightening thing I saw on screen when I was very young was the first segment of the Night Gallery TV movie cum pilot. Perfect nightmare fodder: Ossie Davis, in abject horror, recognizing the thumping footfalls of a vengeful living dead Roddy McDowell and recognizing the dead man's progression in an ever shifting painting on the wall. Christ, that scared the bejesus out of me. Night Gallery was a fairly successful series (at least in my eye, due not so much for the stories --although some like the version of Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" and that one with the giant white rat on the moon with the astronaut in the jumbo mousetrap gave me goosebumps-- but the very creepy paintings with which Rod Serling would introduce each story.

The Night Stalker was another TV movie that spawned a sequel and a series. The monsters weren't all that scary, but Darren McGavin pretty much carried the show. Strangely, two "movies" were compiled from four episodes of the Night Stalker series, Demon in Lace and Legacy of Terror, which were usually shown on late night TV.

Dark Shadows was another popular horror series (a daily half-hour soap opera). The series also inspired two films, House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows, which were pretty gory drive-in and grindhouse fare back in the early '70s.

Extra bonus for you Dark Shadows fans! Here's an mp3 of Jonathan Frid's recorded thank you message for the Dark Shadows Vampire Fan Club in 1969. Also, a radio spot where we learn how the vampires "do it".

A tip of the hat to Mr. BaliHai for the post suggestion...

Made for TV

Due to Mature Subject Matter Parental Discretion is Advised: a common disclaimer in '70s' network television, particularly in the made for TV movies that popped up four or five times a week on a prime time schedule, and one that drew impressionable youngsters (like me) like the proverbial flies to dung. While '70s cinema was wild and wooly in the theaters and the drive-ins, that no-holds-barred sensibility was also mirrored (although toned down considerably) in the "World Premiere" productions that were broadcast.

While nostalgia can be a rosy colored thing, there was a certain quality to these films that warms the memories of those of us who lived through that era. I cannot forget the crazy surrealistic shock I felt watching Frankenstein: The True Story back on NBC in the fall of '73, when the Monster (played by Michael Sarrazin) pulls off the head of Jane Seymour (playing the Elsa Lanchester part), or the evil Polidori (James Mason), in the middle of a tempestuous storm, being hoisted onto the top of a ship's mast whimpering "I'm afraid! I'm afraid!" and then being struck by a bolt of lightning and turned into a skeleton! Or the slow-motion thumping and moans of the living Gargoyles. Or the voluptuous horror of the fantastic Zuni fetish doll that dogged Karen Black throughout her house in Trilogy of Terror. Or classic Shatner as a drunken ex-priest who regains his faith as he confronts a ancient Druid demon and is sent spinning into the glorious sunrise in The Horror at 37,000 Feet (a mash of possession/occult horror and Airport style disaster drama --both of which genres were extraordinarily popular in 1974, when this little shocker was done).

Certainly horror was a popular TV movie genre. Indeed, one can make the argument that TV movies were merely tamed exploitation films, and that the TV screen was just a surrogate drive-in screen. One can point to the panoply of teenage alcoholics, runaways, prostitutes, rentboys, dope fiends and bulimics that crawled and staggered across American TV screens in the mid-seventies. There was even a Women-in-Prison (WIP) entry in 1974's Born Innocent in which a post Exorcist Linda Blair (who was only 14) is subjected to all sorts of degradations including a graphic toilet plunger rape. Try making a film like that for television nowadays (not that anyone should).

But even in the harshness of the subject matter, they were not necessarily cynical. On the contrary, these films were quite earnest in their twisted way. These were "problem films", movies that dealt with social issues and tried to call attention to them as a call to action. The political climate in the '70s was such that such an undertaking seemed almost noble. Today, in our cynical and selfish age, taking such a tact seems quaint, even naive, wrongheaded, and foolish.

As an aside to this sketchy discussion of TV movies, it's interesting to note that the opening to ABC's The Movie of the Week (which you can see in real media in TV Party along with some vintage promos) was designed by none other than Douglas Trumbull, who designed the slit-scan process utilized in the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's quite easy to see the similarities.

Weekend Poster Feast 7

Weekend Poster Feast 7. Better late than never! This time we enjoy the cool, elegant, and sexy lines of an Art Deco fuselage in a sheet advertising the 1937 British thriller Non-Stop New York, which deals with the intrigue and hijinks in an 18 hour transatlantic flight. Apparently the plane in the movie doesn't resemble the one shown on this poster, but is instead the height of opulance and luxury, complete with two levels, sleeping berths, a dining room, and even an outside balcony in order to take in the sights. Quite unlike the comfort we take for granted in air travel today! The film stars the pretty and livacious Anna Lee, who later was featured in the soap opera General Hospital. Click on the image on the left for a larger version. (204K)

Bunny Buzz

Hey there googlers! I may have what you're looking for... The German blog Sin Alley has put up a bunch of screen shots from Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny. Yes, some of the images may not be worksafe, but there's nothing graphic from that scene with Chloe Sevigne, at least I don't think so. You regular movie mavens may want to check it out just to dig on Gallo's grimy and grainy mise-en scene. I haven't seen Brown Bunny yet, but it looks like Gallo wants to harken back to early '70s zoom lens, flattened washed out look (Buffalo '66 had the same), which is refreshing in this age of films that look like video games -sharp and shiny to the point of no return (or pointlessness, for that matter).

Romy Schneider (1938-1982)

"I am nothing in in life, but everything on the screen," admitted Austrian film actress Romy Schneider in a moment of heartbreaking candor. Never a marquee player in Hollywood (she is possibly best known in the states for her roles in What's New, Pussycat, Otto Preminger's The Cardinal, the 1964 Jack Lemmon vehicle Good Neighbor Sam, and her turn in Orson Welles' production of The Trial), she was huge in Europe. She began her career playing royalty in German language films, and garnered her greatest fame and adulation playing Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria in the "Sissi-films", a series of three films made in the late '50s, a storybook history of the romance of young 'Sissi' and the dashing Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. With this stardom also came the freedom to try more challenging projects, such as working with Luchino Visconti on film with Boccaccio '70 and also on the Parisian stage, where she receives some critical kudos. Her work with Visconti will also allow her to reprise her "Sissi" role in Ludwig. Romy Schneider becomes a much in demand actress. In 1971, Paris Match emblazons this headline: "Forty years after Greta and Marlene, fifteen years after Marilyn, the cinema discovers a new star."

But this success belied a deep personal dissatisfaction and profound sadness. After a series of failed marriages and relationships, compounded with the accidental death of her son in 1981, Schneider reached this horrible conclusion: "It seems to be impossible for me to live with myself - let alone for anyone else." Also this: "Sissi ? I?ve not been Sissi for a long time now ? I am an unhappy 42-year-old woman and my name is Romy Schneider." She smoked three packs of Marlboros a day, drank heavily, and popped barbituates and stimulants. In May of 1982 she died in her Paris apartment at the age of 43, officially due to "natural causes".

There are plenty of interweb shrines celebrating this enigmatic and beautiful actress. The best is Das Romy Schneider Archiv (in German), which collects a ton of images, including portraits, posters, and an excellent collection of German magazine covers. Plus, an assortment of wallpapers for your desktop.

There's also the Romy Schneider Bilderseite, which has a lot of images not found on the Archiv, including a gallery of cardboard picture discs and 45rpm picture sleeves (like most stars of the time, Romy tried her hand as a pop songstress). Also this series of screenshots from The Trial, especially those of a young Romy babying a prone Welles. You go, Orson!

The Magnificent Ambersons

Here's a fantastic resource for images and info on Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. The site includes the requisite posters and lobbycards, but also included are magazine ads and scanned articles from fan magazines, including one entitled "Is Orson Welles a Menace?" There's also a trailer that gives us just a taste of the footage that was ultimately edited out (the final scene where Joseph Cotten visits Agnes Moorehead in a cheap boarding house --a scene that Welles thought was the best in the film and possibly the best he ever directed).

Cinema Diabolico

Very cool collection of Mexican horror and wrestling movie posters and lobby cards, part of Pulp Morgue, a repository of pulp art and ephemera. One of many wonderful finds divined from Bibi's Box.

Death at Disneyland

The Happiest Place on Earth? A detailed and sad history of fatal accidents at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim by John Marr, publisher of the zine Murder Can Be Fun.

Weekend Poster Feast 6

Weekend Poster Feast 6. Not a movie poster, per se, but what looks like a crazily hyperbolic newspaper ad for a double feature of Keep Talking, Baby (Cause toujours, mon lapin) (1961), and Ladies' Man (Lemmy pour les dames (1961), both starring the great Eddie Constatine. Constatine is best known as tough guy Lemmy Caution in Godard's Alphaville, the craggy faced throw-back alpha-male pitted against the cruelly efficient Alpha 60 supercomputer, the Tarzan against IBM, as it were. Constantine made his name in Europe as a cabaret singer and then moved on to play hardboiled American heroes like Lemmy Caution and Nick Carter in French films in the '50s. Constantine's new bride said, in an interview in 1977 (when Eddie was 62, mind you): "I've had five husbands, and Eddie is the best lover of them all." Who needs James Bond or Our Man Flint? Yes indeed!

Online Viewing Tips

Some online viewing tips. A series of five minute cartoons from Cartoon Network Mexico featuring masked wrestling superhero El Santo. Pretty nicely done, in a sleek Batman and Teen Titans sort of way. Santo battles mummies and clones in Mexico, D.F. In Spanish (as if that would stop you).

Via WFMU's blog, a preview of The Found Footage Festival, a compendium of stupid home videos, foul mouthed outtakes and tantrums, and incredibly violent training tapes. Entertaining and enlightening.

And lastly, one definitely not for the kiddies. Via Warren Ellis, a cheaply and crudely animated version of a Tijuana Bible, featuring a third-rate Bugs Bunny rip-off, cartoon animals as sailors and pirates, naked cartoon women, moronic racial sterotypes, and a whole bunch of squishy sex. Who the hell made this cartoon? It looks like it was made in the '60s or '70s, probably made for stag parties or smokers. Despite its crude look and sub-Hanna-Barbara animation, it looks somewhat professional -perhaps a lark produced by easily amused (or bored) animators in between jobs. An interesting cultural artifact, I suppose. Probably not worksafe.

Up the Academy!

Henceforth, let it be known (at least by me) that the Oscar known as the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Direction has no grounding in even the most objective criteria of what can be considered "good direction". This so-called "award" shall not be considered in any way a yardstick of cinematic quality or artistic vision, but instead something akin to a Hollywood Chamber of Commerce "Good Citizenship" award. Considering the background of many of the recipients in the past 20 years, perhaps it should change its name to the "Actor Does Good" Award.

Let it also be known that for a filmmaker to be shunned or snubbed by the so-called "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" is not a detriment, but, instead, a credit to an artist's worth. Let it also be understood that the collective work of those not worthy enough to be so "honored", by any qualitative measurement, is far, far superior to the collective work of those who have won (and in this case -if it's close at all- it's because of the heavy lifting of a few: like Ford, Wilder, Huston, maybe Coppola, Bertolucci, and Polanski, and maybe Spielberg on a good day).

While all this may painfully obvious to many of you, this bite-sized piece of rancor was mainly created to assuage those (like myself) who had hoped against hope that perhaps this was the year the Academy would bend to finally honor America's Greatest Living Filmmaker. That Martin Scorsese, despite his outsider status, used every culinary trick and ingredient in his filmic kitchen to appeal to Academy tastes in his last two outings (historical feasts: grand, epic, sweeping, with big stars, and even bigger budgets), still he fell short of garnering the prize. Maybe it was a cynical attempt by Scorcese to rig the game, knowing that a movie like The Aviator had Oscar written all over it, and that this was his best shot. All the undeniably great films he made that had never won were much too raw, violent, and strange for the Academy, so he may have tried to smooth this wrinkles out in The Aviator. It could have worked, but, the problem remained: he's still Martin Scorsese. The Aviator, grand mess that it is, still had as its core, a morally ambivalent and somewhat unsympathetic main character. Howard Hughes is a classic Scorsese hero in much the same vein as Johnny Boy and Charlie, Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta, Rupert Pupkin, or even Jesus Christ. And the Academy doesn't like weird characters... give them a gruff old boxing trainer with a heart of gold anytime.

Like the scorpion in Welles' Mr. Arkadin, it's in Scorsese's nature to have such uncompromising aspects in even such a compromising effort. And it's also in the nature of the Academy (the Hollywood elite, if you like... dull and conservative to a fault) to shun such irregularities, to turn their heads away from the weird and the colorful. If you're going to have to have a kink in the proceedings (such as euthunasia), at least let it be stately. One thing Scorsese is not, is stately.

So, once again, the asthmatic kid from Little Italy is uninvited to the big party. Well, Marty, if they don't let them play in their yard, fuck 'em. There's nicer fields all around.

Deutsche Kinostars

More film ephemera... Photos and info on Postwar German movie stars(in German). I've always been fascinated by this kind of international pop cinema that flies under the North American radar (our cultural NORAD?), and ends up in the sad margins of recollection, barely on the tip of the tongue of dumb memory. Most of the films featured on the site appear to be melodramas or comedies, movies that would not have easily translated to American tastes (unlike the fantastical Krimis, which at least showed up as second features at drive-ins or downtown fleapits or on late night television). The stars themselves were attractive enough, although they didn't seem to make much of a splash outside West Germany (or German speaking environs), unlike, say, Curt Jurgens, Hardy Kruger, Gert Frobe, or Karin Dor (although a lot of these aforementioned actors made their transatlantic bones on Bond films, oddly enough). Another chapter in the secret history of cinema.