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TCM Genre movies schedule...

Just watched The Deadly Mantis. It's an odd little Cold War artifact -- it's basically an extended propaganda piece promoting the efficacy of the United States' network of radar warning lines and ground observers meant to watch out for Soviet bombers and missiles, but substituting a giant prehistoric praying mantis as the aerial threat so they wouldn't have to actually mention the USSR. There's practically a whole newsreel's worth of exposition about the radar "fences" in Canada and the Distant Early Warning Line in the Arctic before the story actually starts (narrated by Marvin Miller, aka Robby the Robot's voice), the first act or so is mostly set on the DEW Line, and the third act focuses on the Ground Observer Corps of civilians trained to recognize the silhouettes and engine sounds of enemy planes, here repurposed to watch for the mantis. Beyond all that, it's a pretty run-of-the-mill, languidly paced monster movie.
 
I tried watching Empire of the Ants, but I gave up halfway through. I was interested mainly because of the Star Trek guests who starred in it, Joan Collins and Robert Lansing -- plus Robert Pine, a Voyager/Enterprise guest who's also Chris Pine's father. But it was a boring, dreadfully written movie. Collins plays a real estate scammer taking potential investors on a visit to a fake housing development site on an island, and her broad Noo Yawk accent periodically slips and lets her real posh English accent through, which sounds really incongruous. Lansing is the grouchy boat captain who doesn't think much of the endeavour, and Pine is a member of the tour group who attempts to rape one of the female leads, which is treated as no big deal since it was 1977. Basically, the first 20 minutes or so of the movie are devoted to making us look forward to seeing this odious bunch of people get eaten by giant ants, but when it actually starts happening, it's no more interesting, and the ant attacks punctuate tedious scenes of bad and disconnected dialogue and long silences. And the music sting for the gi-ants is a blatant ripoff of the Jaws theme.

The ants are mutated by leaking radioactive waste, but while the giant ants in the seminal Them! mutated gradually over generations, these turn giant in a matter of minutes. They're a mix of microphotography of real ants split-screened against the actors and dummy giant ants used for close-up interaction shots, and it's not very well-done. In the first big ant attack, Lansing's character blows up his boat when the ants board it, and there's no clear reason why he did that, except as a plot contrivance to strand the cast on the island. I mean, what, did he think the ants would pilot the boat back to the mainland if he didn't stop them?
 
The Giant Claw wasn't as bad as Empire of the Ants, but man, it wasn't good. The main reason it failed was the ridiculous puppet used for the giant alien bird monster -- it's supposed to be this terrifying thing, but it's about as intimidating as Beaky Buzzard. Given that there are many large bird species that are genuinely frightening predators (they are dinosaurs, after all), I wonder why they went for something this gawky-looking. It's like they took one character's facetious reference to it as a big buzzard and took it literally. Not only that, but the wires are often visible, the rest of the miniature effects are crude and toylike, and the bird's caws are just annoying.

The script isn't much better. The writer apparently read some magazine articles about cutting-edge particle physics, e.g. antimatter and "mesic atoms," but wasn't as well-versed in writing witty dialogue that wasn't painfully stilted and overwritten. Most of the film's dialogue scenes fall flat, and it doesn't help that most of it was delivered by Jeff Morrow, whose voice and accent reminded me very much of Alan Reed, the original Fred Flintstone.

Mara Corday's role is an interesting glimpse into the role of women in science in the '50s -- she's there as a mathematician, and there's none of the usual '50s B-movie talk about how unusual it is for a woman to be in a scientific or scholarly field, because (as seen in Hidden Figures) it was a pretty normal role for women at the time to be "computers," the people who did the mathematical drudge work to support scientific, engineering, and military projects. Or "calculators," as her role in the final attack sequence was described. Both those terms were originally job titles for human beings before those jobs were rendered obsolete by electronics, and they were traditionally "women's work."
 
Christopher, I don't think you understand that these movies were never meant to stand up to close critical scrutiny. They were cheaply made and hastily written. It's patently absurd for you to spend so much time reviewing them. Either watch them and enjoy them, or don't--no one is forcing you to spend your spare time watching endless streams of film and television in lieu of living something resembling a real life..

TC
 
TalonCard said:
Christopher, I don't think you understand that these movies were never meant to stand up to close critical scrutiny. They were cheaply made and hastily written. It's patently absurd for you to spend so much time reviewing them. Either watch them and enjoy them, or don't--no one is forcing you to spend your spare time watching endless streams of film and television in lieu of living something resembling a real life..

TC
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Are you cyberstalking Christopher in all the threads he posts in?
 
sojourner said:
Are you cyberstalking Christopher in all the threads he posts in?
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I don't like the phrase "cyberstalking". Christopher was kind enough to provide a lengthy analysis about a post I casually made in another thread that did not meet his high standards for Trek BBS posts. I'm just returning the favor where ever I can.

TC
 
The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues was another monster movie I was tempted to give up on halfway through, but this time I managed to slog through it all a little at a time. It just couldn't sustain my interest for all that long. It's a lackadaisical, poorly paced monster movie with no suspense or tension and awfully clumsy, hokey dialogue -- and not even enough to be inadvertently funny, just tedious. It fully reveals the monster in the opening moments, and it's a terrible monster, virtually immobile and doing little more than just floating in the water. The attempt to show it attacking and killing a fisherman at the start is hampered by the fact that the suit's mouth barely moves. Then, when the main protagonists of the film come upon the fisherman's corpse on the beach -- and a never-identified person who's kneeling over it and runs away when they approach -- they react with a total lack of urgency or even much evident interest. So it's hard to get engaged with their investigation into moviedom's blandest mad scientist -- or rather, misguidedly well-intentioned scientist who, for nebulous reasons, knowingly allows the monster he created to kill people because of something to do with Science. And then there's the other bad guy, his assistant played by Philip Pine (Star Trek's Colonel Green), who spends most of the movie lurking in the bushes with a speargun and turns out to be such an inept and unthreatening murderer that, when he finally succeeds in killing someone after two complete whiffs and then leaves his fingerprints all over the murder weapon, the cops actually remark on what a dumb criminal he is. Practically nothing here has any suspense or consequences; every potential problem is resolved with absurd ease or never seems that big a deal to begin with.

Even the title is silly. It's clearly imitating two films that came out the previous year (1954), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (the primary influence on the story) and Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (which has no evident influence except maybe the involvement of atomic power in the plot). But it doesn't make any sense. A league is about 3 miles; the Verne title refers to the total distance the Nautilus travels over the course of the book, rather than its depth below the surface. The entire Earth is only about 2,640 leagues in diameter, or 8,290 leagues in circumference. So there's no way a sea creature could be from 10,000 leagues. Even if you disregard that and take the title to be just hyperbole for "the extreme depths of the ocean," that still doesn't work, because the "Phantom" spends the whole movie in the shallows near the shore, preying on fishermen and scuba divers.
 
TalonCard said:
Christopher, I don't think you understand that these movies were never meant to stand up to close critical scrutiny. They were cheaply made and hastily written. It's patently absurd for you to spend so much time reviewing them. Either watch them and enjoy them, or don't--no one is forcing you to spend your spare time watching endless streams of film and television in lieu of living something resembling a real life..
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Um, this is a thread about old genre movies on TCM, but we're not supposed to discuss them at length or even, God forbid, waste our time watching them?

Am I missing something here?

For what it's worth, I grew up watching these movies and I'm curious to hear what other people, including Christopher, have to say about them. Which was, I thought, kinda the point of the thread . . . . .

EDIT: I actually recorded THE PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES, since I hadn't seen that one before, but Christopher's review has me wondering if it's worth watching. Lord knows there are plenty of other old monster movies in my library . . . .
 
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Greg Cox said:
Um, this is a thread about old genre movies on TCM, but we're not supposed to discuss them at length or even, God forbid, waste our time watching them?

Am I missing something here?

For what it's worth, I grew up watching these movies and I'm curious to hear what other people, including Christopher, have to say about them. Which was, I thought, kinda the point of the thread . . . . .

EDIT: I actually recorded THE PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES, since I hadn't seen that one before, but Christopher's review has me wondering if it's worth watching. Lord knows there are plenty of other old monster movies in my library . . . .
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TalonCard got banned, no need to reply to him.
 
Greg Cox said:
EDIT: I actually recorded THE PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES, since I hadn't seen that one before, but Christopher's review has me wondering if it's worth watching. Lord knows there are plenty of other old monster movies in my library .
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Yeah, it's barely even a monster movie. It spends more time being a half-hearted spy-ish non-thriller about various people vying to discover the scientist's secrets. Heck, after the protagonist discovers the monster, he barely even bothers to tell anyone, and when he does, it's practically as an afterthought.
 
Christopher said:

The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues was another monster movie I was tempted to give up on halfway through, The attempt to show it attacking and killing a fisherman at the start is hampered by the fact that the suit's mouth barely moves.
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That's sad--it seemed to be based a bit on the Wolf eel: https://themarinedetective.com/2013/02/17/wolf-eel-no-ugly-fish/
http://www.thehulltruth.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=85967&stc=1&d=1253211639
The moray is scary, but at least looks cool. I remember seeing footage of a wolf eel charging a diver (can't find it on youtube)--ugh--what a fish.
 
I watched Swamp Thing for old times' sake. It had been a few decades. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I did back in the day, but the South Carolina location shooting was nice and the core story is interesting. It was not the international cut; it was 91-ish minutes, and you'd need a magnifying glass to spot the nudity.
 
June:

FRI 6/2
Noon: Rasputin, the Mad Monk ('66): Not exactly genre, but it's a Hammer film made back-to-back with their third Dracula movie, shot on the same sets and using several of the same lead actors, primarily Christopher Lee in the title roles. So might be of interest to Hammer horror fans.

SAT 6/3
4:15 PM: Frankenstein ('31)
5:45 PM: Clash of the Titans ('81)

MON 6/5
10:45 AM: House on Haunted Hill ('58)
12:15 PM: The Face of Fu Manchu ('65): First of Christopher Lee's five turns in the title role.

TUE 6/6
8:00 PM: The Black Cat ('34): Karloff/Lugosi Satanism film.

WED 6/7
12:45 AM: The Man from Planet X ('51): Stranded alien on Scottish moors runs afoul of evil William Schallert. One of several '50s alien movies where humans are the real villains.
5:15 AM: The Amazing Transparent Man ('60): Invisible gangster.

THU 6/8
7:15 AM: The Horn Blows at Midnight ('45): Jack Benny's infamous angel comedy (infamous mainly because he spent the rest of his career making fun of it).

FRI 6/9
6:30 PM: Topper Takes a Trip ('39): Ghost-comedy sequel.

SAT 6/10
6:00 AM: Doctor X ('32): Borderline-genre horror about a cannibalistic killer, with Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray.
7:30 AM: Invisible Invaders ('59): Invisible aliens conquer Earth cheaply using reanimated corpses and stock footage. Pretty lame. (I reviewed it and The Man from Planet X in this post.)

WED 6/14
6:00 AM: Island of Lost Women ('59): Borderline-genre adventure/romance about pilots downed on an island inhabited by a reclusive atomic scientist (Alan Napier!!) and his lovely daughters. Sort of an atomic-age The Tempest or an Earthbound Forbidden Planet.
1:00 PM: Creature from the Haunted Sea ('61): Roger Corman spy/monster spoof.
2:15 PM: The Devil-Doll ('36): Lionel Barrymore in an early entry in the "mad scientist shrinking people" subgenre. Also has Maureen O'Sullivan.
3:45 PM: From Hell it Came ('57): Bizarre... A murdered South Seas island prince is atomically reanimated as a vengeful tree monster (as in, a monster that is a tree).
5:00 PM: I Walked with a Zombie ('43): Atmospheric Val Lewton chiller.

SUN 6/18
3:45 AM: Killer Party ('86): Demonic sorority-slasher comedy. Less nudity than you'd expect, judging from IMDb's Parents' Guide.

TUE 6/20
6:00 PM: Harvey ('50)

WED 6/21
10:00 AM: Brigadoon ('54)

TUE 6/27
8:00 PM: Rollerball ('75): Dystopian future killer-sports movie with James Caan.

WED 6/28
11:45 AM: White Zombie ('32): Lugosi as "zombie master."
1:00 PM: The Most Dangerous Game ('32): It's humans.
2:15 PM: Island of Lost Souls ('33) Charles Laughton as Dr. Moreau.
3:30 PM: The Lost Continent ('68): Hammer thriller about the Sargasso Sea and carnivorous seaweed.
5:00 PM: Isle of the Dead ('45): Vampire film with Karloff.
 
Anyone familiar with Green Mansions with Audrey Hepburn? TCM is showing it on June 5 and it looks like it might have some of those Tarzan-type tropes: jungle girl, lost city of gold, (not quite PC?) exotic native tribes and so on.
 
Mr. Adventure said:
Anyone familiar with Green Mansions with Audrey Hepburn? TCM is showing it on June 5 and it looks like it might have some of those Tarzan-type tropes: jungle girl, lost city of gold, (not quite PC?) exotic native tribes and so on.
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I've never actually seen the movie or read the original novel, but my impression has always been that it was borderline genre. Believe it or not, it actually inspired a short-lived DC comic-book series, Rima the Jungle Girl, and, according to Wikipedia, the DC version of the character even appeared in an episode of Super Friends!

More recently, Rima popped up (along with several other public-domain heroines) in Kim Newman's novel Angels of Music, in which she was a secret agent recruited by the Phantom of the Opera. Really!
 
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It's been ages since I've seen Green Mansions. I think the most exotic thing about it is seeing Audrey Hepburn as a jungle girl, but probably worth watching for that alone.
 
Greg Cox said:
I've never actually seen the movie or read the original novel, but my impression has always been that it was borderline genre. Believe it or not, it actually inspired a short-lived DC comic-book series, Rima the Jungle Girl, and, according to Wikipedia, the DC version of the character even appeared in an episode of Super Friends!

More recently, Rima popped up (along with several other public-domain heroines) in Kim Newman's novel Angels of Music, in which she was a secret agent recruited by the Phantom of the Opera. Really!
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Is that the one that's basically Charlie's Angels with literary characters?
 
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