Marg: Batman & Robin (Naturally!)

Based on the absolute thrill of seeing Batman Forever for the first time, I could not delay in seeing the epic Batman & Robin. It did not disappoint - you know, except as a film.

So... it really is as bad as everyone always said it was. Did you watch the trailer? The movie is just... more of that! The terrible acting? Bingo! The bizarre sets? You betcha! The horrible even for 1997 special effects? Yes sir! The crotch shots? You just wait! 

It doesn't even have as good a poster has Batman Forever.

Joel Schumacher pointedly, directly, obviously intended for there to be an undercurrent of sexual tension between Robin and Batman - or rather, not even sexual tension as in the first of his films in the franchise, but actually a realized relationship between the pair who bicker like a married couple throughout the movie, but who love each other still. This is not a criticism, I wish that it could have been more than implication - if Batman has a Robin, and that Robin is a young attractive guy who lives with him, and they like to share secrets and wear matching outfits and serve their community - well, it isn't wrong to want to see them as being in a more-than-friends relationship. They sound like a couple to me, and it's pretty naive to assume that they aren't. But Schumacher, even though he clearly interpreted that relationship the same way I do, he wasn't allowed to say Batman and Robin have been dating since about 3 days after the last movie ended. So instead, he acted out by putting in even more crotch, nipple, and butt shots than last time! 

This video repeats pointlessly, but the first two shots are legit.

George Clooney took over from doughy Val Kilmer, finally giving Batman the jawline he deserves. But whoa, what a terrible job he does in the movie! This is a future Oscar winner, but he doesn't even change his voice to sound more Batmanish! Listen, he's third here in the "I'm Batman" supercut - He's not even trying!

   

Clooney seemed to adopt some of Kilmer's wardrobe from the previous film, even sporting an oversized turtleneck as Bruce Wayne.

Just going for a stroll with Val's turleneck.

Chris O'Donnell returns as Robin, and he's still young and cool... But you know, he was 27 when this thing came out. I'm not 27 yet and I am certainly no longer young and cool. I wouldn't be even if I did say things like cowabunga!

There is someone undoubtedly younger AND cooler on the scene in Batman and Robin though - it's Alicia Silverstone in the movie that demolished her career! She plays Alfred's niece, who according to the deleted scene "Alfred's Lost Love" isn't his niece at all, but his ex-girlfriend's daughter. His ex-girlfriend shown as a photo of the old lady from Titanic, so somehow Cher Horowitz's mother is a 90 year old woman. Alfred's "niece" is also Batgirl, for some reason? And as I said she is younger (but who knows how young, because she goes to "Oxbridge" but dresses like a schoolgirl) and also cooler, because in one too-long scene she street races, as you do.

Also, her "uncle" made her this costume.

It is also crucial to note, that because Batgirl is a teenager(?) in 1997, she is a master hacker. That's why when she had to hack into a password protected laser disc (1997!) of Alfred's, her first password choice is "Alfred". Later, she and Robin have a hacking race to reroute some satellites - it's all very Angelina Jolie and Sick Boy.

The villains in Batman & Robin are some of the worst I have ever seen committed to film. Uma Thurman in particular just shines at bad acting as the chemically seductive Poison Ivy. Before she is attacked with her own plant-and-animal based experiments which transform her into a poisonous evil-doer, she was a nerdy dishevelled scientist - just like The Riddler was... they might be the same person now that I think of it - both get transformed into green suit wearing red heads. Anyway! Uma's version of nerdy was just pointing her finger sharply and repeatedly. It was very distracting. Her version of the slinky and dangerous Poison Ivy was wildly inconsistent - she seemed unable or unwilling to hold the same inflection of speech scene by scene. An amateur move by an actress who should've done better.

Those gloves look like green dog boners.

As I noted in my The Dark Knight Rises review, the character of Bane, whom I had never even heard of before, made a great impact on me ("What a lovely, lovely voice") - I had to be warned going into Batman & Robin that this simply wasn't the Bane that I knew and loved. Nothing could have prepared me for what in the blue hell this was:

No.

The worst bit is that apparently Bane is supposed to be one of Batman's more brilliant matches, but instead, there was that guy, doofin' up the joint. 

I think that the Mr. Freeze character, played by the terrifically terrible Arnold Schwarzenegger was probably the most entertaining role to write - almost all of his dialogue is inane one liners all vaguely cold-themed. Someone clearly just wrote down all that they could think of, and used them in the script even when they didn't make any sort of sense to the plot. Or even if they didn't make any sort of sense for anything ever, like "What killed the dinosaurs? The Ice Age!!!" - no, Mr. Freeze, not even true. 

If you had four minutes and you watched that (you should, it's great), you'll see Vivica A. Fox's one and only scene in the whole movie, playing a bimbo who for some reason wants to bone Mr. Freeze. Poison Ivy also wants to bone him. And he has a hot deadish wife. I wonder if that was all part of Schwarzenegger's contract?

For a guy who has a cyro-frozen wife and strong criminal desires, Mr. Freeze is having the time of his life. In spite of his situation (he really loves that wife), he constantly cracks wise throughout the movie, and enjoys a hearty chuckle. In one bizarre scene, he even attempts to lead is chilly minions in a sing along while wearing fuzzy slippers.

Mr. Freeze, by the way, is a doctor. I don't know why he isn't called Dr. Freeze. I feel like they really missed out there. He needs diamonds to stay cold because of this time he fell in a cold pond. Why diamonds, you say? Well diamonds are really cold, didn't you know that? Yeah, way cold, super cold. That's science. 

Wait a second, how are you going to light that cigar?

Obviously he wants to steal some diamond (a cold, cold diamond) and Batman needs to stop him, and Poison Ivy is around using poison-pheromones to convince Batman and Robin that they want to have sex with a woman, and Robin wears some rubber lips, and Batgirl tries to be cute and it doesn't work, and Alfred gets sick and scares me by taking off his glasses, and gets better, and Poison Ivy jealously kills Freeze's deadish wife, and Batman saves the day, and that's the plot of Batman & Robin in no particular order. At the end, Mr. Freeze is allowed to share a cell with Poison Ivy even though that is clearly a disgusting violation of every code of ethics because he is obviously going to destroy her. It's pretty gross.

It's a genuinely terrible film. At one point Batman & Robin surf though the sky on bits of rocket. And for the climax, the team changes into ice themed suits even though they didn't have time for that. And then Robin changes back. At one point Poison Ivy says "Come join me. My garden needs tending" and surely she is talking about her pubes.

It's a nuanced film.

Much like on the DVD of Batman Forever, there is a selection of excellent music videos included with Batman & Robin. The first:

This is R. Kelly with Gotham City. It is painfully clear that R. Kelly has never seen or read or heard of anything Batman related in his entire life. The lyrics indicate the opposite of anything that Gotham City has ever been described as. Also, nice hat. ALSO, I don't recall ever hearing this during the movie.

And the second, exactly as I am showing you here:

Yes, Jewel's Foolish Games. This video and song have even less to do with the movie. I didn't hear it in any scene or at least the first part of the credits. The music video contains no clips from Batman & Robin. She does look a little cold. I think Joel Schumacher just likes this song.

-Marg

@acuteinsomnia 

Marg: Batman Forever (of all things!)

I have such a lady-boner for The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers that I wanted you to know with confidence that I am not a tramp for just any ol' superhero movie suddenly. In earlier reviews, I touched on the fact that I had seen very few comic book films before - but I had seen Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns. I had not seen Batman Forever... that is until last night.

I like Robin in this.

For some, this film is nostalgic, but it was brand new for me. And more ridiculous than I ever suspected. I am not entirely sure what anyone was thinking in 1995 when the Batman franchise was spiced up with a new director, new lead actor, and an even firmer commitment to wackiness - apparently it had something to do with Burton's Batmans not being family orientated enough. Regardless, what occurred was something super campy - seemingly to the screaming delight of everyone involved.

Joel Schumacher took over the franchise with some wild changes to the gothy aesthetic of previous two films - it would be like if Adam Shankman took over from Christopher Nolan, now. That isn't to say that 1989 and 1992 editions weren't campy... after all, they included a human penguin and this version of the Joker:

Why so ser... oh wait.

But compared to Schumacher's version of the Gotham universe, Burton's is down right gritty. Collectively it was as if everyone on the set simply forgot the definition of subtlety, from the writers to the actors to the costume designer. It is so baffling as to be entertaining, for the most part. Not good, mind, but entertaining.

Val Kilmer took over from Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman. Keaton was an interesting choice in the first place, because he is Mr. Mom.

"Jack's going to have to start from the bottom up"

 But I guess Kilmer seemed like a nice choice in 1995. I mean, he was in Willow, after all. And had a sweet moustache in Tombstone. If the ability to grow facial hair and saving babies with a dwarf doesn't qualify you to play the Dark Knight of Gotham, than what will?

In this, Batman looks like an angry girl.

Even in the mid-nineties, though not as shockingly bloated as he is today, good ol' Val was in the early stages of Fat Head syndrome, and his marshmallow-soft face was, while just sweet in a turtleneck, decidedly un-Batman-like.

Clenching your jaw doesn't make it more manly, Turtles.

The usually reserved Tommy Lee Jones did his best Jack Nicholson as the Joker impression while playing one of the main villains of Batman Forever, Harvey Two-Face Dent... or rather, Harvey Two-Face as they kept calling him in the movie, as if Two-Face were his surname. It cannot be denied that Jones obviously had an absolute ball while not giving one solitary fuck about the quality of film he was participating in. No, not one fuck! And he's gleeful about it.

Acid dyed my hair pink!

Jim Carrey was at the height of his wacky-comedies career, and brings everything you'd expect to the table. I remember when I was a kid, my mother saying that she couldn't stand Carrey's Fire Marshall Bill character... this might have been why we never watched Batman Forever... he uses the same inflections repeatedly. But to be fair, his Riddler character is just a mash up of all his other characters, different scene by scene.

Nicole Kidman plays Dr. Dogname Meridian, an extremely horny criminal psychologist who wants to bone Batman... so... bad. It is a wonderfully wooden performance by Kidman, who tries to just breath all of her lines, and who is clearly having trouble feigning attraction for Val Kilmer - their lack of chemistry is the cherry on top of some awkward scenes where Bruce Wayne decides it must be love. 

We're very uncomfortable.

Someone not having any sort of difficulty with their Batman related chemistry is Chris O'Donnell's Robin aka Dick Grayson because the world is cruel. Oh they are so into each other it is the best! Twenty-five year old O'Donnell assumes the role originally created for a minor, but instead of trying to explain that away, Batman Forever just convolutes the whole situation. He's constantly referred to as "young" with no specific age given, he's told that he should go to college, but for some reason after his family dies he is brought by Commissioner Gordon (who in this film only has two jobs - delivering orphans and manning the bat signal insufficiently) to be taken care of by Bruce Wayne, "once social services is done with him". Very little of that matters, I suppose. All you really need to know is that Dick is cool (he wears an earring), and wild (he rides a motorcycle), and he and Bruce Wayne become very committed to each other.

Even before I saw the film, I remember that just historically, the costumes in the Schumacher Batmans were supposed to be quite kinky. I wasn't disappointed:

Mercy!

 I decided that while I could go into the plot line of Batman Forever, literally everything that happens in the movie can be found in its theatrical trailer:

And no, not jut the best parts... everything! 

Actually, the best parts of my Batman Forever watching experience were found on the DVD extras. Two things spring to mind, specifically the scene starting at around 2:55, after Bruce Wayne discovers in a cave that he need not blame himself for the death of his parents:

What the... they paid money for that thing!

And of course the next best thing on the DVD extras is this:

Word on the street is that Batman and Robin was somehow an even worse movie than Batman Forever. Suddenly, I can't even wait. 

-Marg

@acuteinsomnia

B-Movies with Marg: Dementia 13

Watch this trailer:

Based on that, it is pretty obvious that Dementia 13 is pretty terrifying. Yes sir, you could become so shocked by the experience of watching the film that you go on a killing spree yourself! And since I've seen the film, I guess everyone is lucky that I haven't tried to axe everybody I see. Frankly, I waited a few days to write this review just so that I wouldn't make a liar out of myself in saying that. I certainly didn't want to claim to be unaffected only to have the influence of Dementia 13 hit me seventy-two hours later in the grocery store. 

Oh, but of course Dementia 13 is just nothing like that preview at all! Not a bit! It's an attempt at a horror movie, sure, and certainly lacks the tongue-in-cheek appeal of the films directed by Roger Corman himself - this wasn't one of his directorial projects however - Dementia 13 belonged to none other than the eventually great Francis Ford Coppola. Only in his early twenties, this was Coppola's first time in the director's chair for a mainstream film, and he was basically hired by producer Corman to make a Psycho-esque picture. 

Coppola had yet to find his feet as a director, and was not in love with the material. There is little indication that the director of Dementia 13 could go on to achieve The Godfather less than a decade later. It wasn't an entirely clunky film, with a few skillful shots:

Wasn't raining.

Much of the film was over dubbed in post production at Corman's insistence, along with additional footage which Coppola had no part in directing. The story itself was infuriatingly convoluted, full of plot holes, and all sorts of other typical B-Movie junk. For example, the film is set in Ireland, and the main characters are an Irish family - and yet, not an accent to be heard. Not even a shitty attempt at an accent!

Essentially, the plot is that the Irish family (a mother and her three sons) gather together every year to mourn and recreate the funeral of the daughter who died years ago as a little girl. This year, one son brings his scheming, greedy wife, who covers up his unexpected death by heart attack in a bizarre attempt to convince his mother to change her will or something? Another son is about to be married, so he brings his fiancee along even though the two young women look basically identical, so it's very confusing to people watching the film nearly 50 years later. And the youngest son is a little... off. And the mother is a little... also off. Her daughter-in-law (the scheming one) tries to convince her that the little girl is a ghost now. And then a bunch of people get axed. 

Spooky stuff. 

Picking her right up by the noggin!

My favourite continuity goof (of which their are many) in the movie is during a scene where the daughter-in-law, in an attempt to trick everyone into believing that the little girl ghost is sending messages from beyond, dives into the pond where the girl died to plant haunting evidence (some dolls on strings). She strips down before going into the water and is wearing white underwear and bra. She jumps in the pond, and in the underwater scene, is clearly wearing darker under garments. I get it, the white would have been too naughty looking while wet... but why on earth didn't they think of that before giving her a white costume for the dry part of the scene? 

Taking a huge note from Psycho, she gets bumped off quite early too, despite being the character followed from the start. Also like Psycho, we immediately pick up with another blonde (the other son's bride-to-be), and the story goes on except she's not trying to convince anyone that they're being haunted. She just wants to get married to her haggard ol' boyfriend but also spend altogether too much alone time with his younger brother who keeps having murderous flashbacks. 

Although chaste by today's standards, Dementia 13 is more explicit than the other Corman movies I've reviewed, with far more ax-gore and ladies in their knickers. This can be explained by a number of factors, not exclusive to the shifting mood of the 1960s, its young director's desire to shock, and Coppola's work on girly-movies even earlier in his then-short career. 

-Marg

@acuteinsomnia

B-Movies with Marg: The Terror

Welcome to the latest installment of B-Movies with Marg. Tonight, I bring you the 1963 horror film "The Terror" staring two actors you've actually heard of for once: Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson! Based on the poster below, I'm sure you can tell that in "The Terror", spooky screen legend Karloff played some kind of spider monster, trapping his victims in a horrifying web of death! 

Nope.

Actually, Karloff was not even remotely creepy, and quite unlike a spider monster. He played a reclusive Baron, mourning his long deceased bride, haunted by her ghost. His derelict castle is in... some country, maybe on an island. His only companion is Walter from Bucket of Blood, who plays his butler. One day, a Napoleonic soldier played by Jack Nicholson is riding along the beach near the castle when he sees a beautiful young woman sort of... in a cavern in the sea. It's boner city when he sees her, and she tells him her name is Helena before disappearing into the surf. 

There is he on the beach.

He tries to save her, nearly drowning, eventually being saved by a mute named Gustaf who isn't so much a mute as just a guy who whispers. Gustaf takes Andre (that's his name) to be fixed up by an old crone named Katrina. She's a witch, with a bird. Katrina tells him that the bird's name is Helena, but there are no girls in these parts. Of course, something spooky is afoot. Andre eventually ends up at the Baron's castle, sees a portrait of the dead Baroness and it looks exactly like the girl he saw! (Or Cher. I thought it looked like a portrait of Cher.) Apropos of nothing (he seriously didn't even seem interested), the Baron reveals to Andre that he killed his young wife 20 years before in a jealous rage after finding her in bed with some other man, a dude named Eric who he had his butler then dispose of. Anywho, Andre doesn't really believe in ghosts but eventually figures out that creepy Katrina is controlling the girl, and making her haunt the shit out of the Baron. 

She's hangin' around in a crypt. 

 It is very obvious that Katrina must have some kind of vested interest in the Baron and that whole situation to be going to such witchy lengths to torture him, and they wait far too long to reveal (shockingly? no...) that she is Eric's mother, set to take her revenge on the man she believes killed her son.  The real twist (spoiler!) comes at the end of the film, when the butler reveals the absolutely ridiculous truth. Two men fought over the Baroness that fateful night 20 years earlier, yes, and only one man survived. However, that man was not the Baron! Boris Karloff was in fact playing Eric the other man all along! Tipped crazy by the guilt of defending himself, Eric's mind decided that he was in fact the Baron. For some reason, the Baron's loyal manservant thought this was an okay deal and stood by the insane imposter ever since.

"I'm Eric!" (he never admits this in the film, it is all told by exposition)

The icing on the cake is when you realize that director Roger Corman and writers Lee Gordon and Jack Hill expected anyone at all to buy that Katrina played by the then 49 year old Dorothy Neumann was the mother of 76 year old Boris Karloff. I simply howled with laughter at the reveal.

The trailer, as you can see above, is just delightfully inaccurate. Those are the best kinds. The scene with the corpse falling out and scaring someone? That's part of the opening credits. Someone - poor whispering Gustaf - does get their eyes pecked out by Helena the bird, but of course, the Baron didn't send her to do any such thing. He's just a man... not even a real Baron!

I've spent a great deal of time dissecting the plot, mostly to make sense of it in my own head. There are still unanswered questions, like what exactly Helena/The Baroness really was... she was some girl possessed by the dead as per Katrina's powers, but she was also a ghost... and at the end, a decaying corpse. 

Gravy = decay. 

There's a lot of great campy moments, like when Andre tells the Baron, in a very American accent, "I'm a soldier of France!" Suuure you are, Jack. Also, for those with a keen eye, some nice historical inaccuracies - such as the use of a revolver in 1806 (No, I admit it, I am not that clever, Ben spotted it, and I looked up the history of those guns). Jack Nicholson did a serviceable job as Andre, though without much indication of the performances to come later in the decade. His then-wife (then-pregnant, as well) Sandra Knight was equally okay as the girl - the two show little chemistry. Boris Karloff has a tragic story of type-casting (which while not demonstrated in the film itself, certainly showed up in the marketing), but the most notable thing about him in "The Terror" is the realization that how he moved (especially going down flights of stairs), truly did make him an inspired choice to play Frankenstein. 

 As a fascinating note on the production itself, Corman filmed principle photography with Karloff in his trademark way, just four days. Filming continued for several months afterward however, and Corman allowed several others to sit in the directors chair for different scenes. They included screenwriter Jack Hill (he went on to direct exploitation pictures), star Jack Nicholson, and none other than Francis Ford Coppola.

Marg
@acuteinsomnia

Previously in this series: The Last Woman on Earth, A Bucket of Blood,  Creature from the Haunted Sea, The Wasp Woman, and Attack of the Giant Leeches

B-Movies with Marg: The Last Woman on Earth

That knife looks like a long thin penis.

The Last Woman on Earth has a genius premise if you need to film something crazy cheap - that was what Roger Corman was (always) looking for - here, he hit solid gold. Three people, two men and one woman, end up being the last human beings on earth after all the oxygen is temporarily (inexplicably!) gone from the air. Conveniently, Evelyn (the titular woman), her husband Howard, and Howard's lawyer Martin, are all on a scuba diving adventure while on vacation in Puerto Rico when this happens - being underwater and then using their oxygen tanks is what saves their lives. Surviving comes with it's own set of problems however, as Evelyn (already neglected by her money laundering husband) is now the proud owner of the only living ladyparts on the island, and by all indications, the entire World.

Really, The Last Woman on Earth is just an extreme version of any love triangle. Howard treats Evelyn like his property, and Martin listens to her - there was attraction before the end of the world, and it is heightened by the isolation and bizarreness of the whole situation. He's a bit younger than her husband too, and has a certain nebbish charm - how could she resist?

I actually adore that when the extra-martial digression (what would that piece of paper mean in such a non-society, anyway?) is revealed, Evelyn treats it all very matter of factly with her husband. She's not apologetic, and although Howard assumes that Martin must have taken advantage of her, Ev makes it very clear that he did nothing of the sort. She boned him, she felt like it, and that's that. Of course Howard banishes Martin from their Apocalypse acquired vacation villa, which came as no shock to me, but really seemed to surprise Evelyn and her lover : "You'd exile one third of the human race?" Martin asks.

You can't just do that, though - exile 1/3 of everybody - so Ev runs away too, and Howard and Martin end up having one of the most bizarrely filmed fights I've ever seen - they hit each other with guns, and dive into water after each other, there is a prolonged chase scene that looked like they were running through an Escher painting.

If I were rewriting the film, I'd have Evelyn take off all of her own, but the script as is presents her as really just having the two choices, it's one man or the other. The poor woman's options are terrible though! Howard is an insensitive, possessive, craggy-faced crook who cares more about money (even in a world where money means nothing!) than he does about feelings. Martin is a depressive, weak, pessimistic wiener - and he sees (rightly...) no point in two people trying to repopulate the human race. Ev really thinks a baby is a great idea (it's not, given the situation), and in her mind, a point for Howard is that he agrees. 

Howard made a point of telling Ev "this is fish" during this awkward dinner scene.

Corman filmed The Last Woman on Earth at the same time as he filmed the comparatively sprawling Creature from the Haunted Sea while on location in Puerto Rico. The main cast is the same, with stars Betsy Jones-Moreland, Antony Carbone and Robert Towne appearing in both pictures. Robert Towne used a stage name for Last Woman however, as he was also the writer of the script which was unfinished at the start of filming. This saved money, one of Corman's favourite things to do.

I have no proof, but I am convinced that both films used the same footage of people scuba diving. It makes sense, as filming underwater would have been quite expensive. I kept expecting to see the Creature float by, however. Last Woman absolutely did repeat some of it's own shots - reusing footage of a fishing net being thrown into water at least three separate times.

The editing on this movie was delightfully choppy, but one of my favourite things was a continuity error - in at least two scenes, Evelyn has what looks like quite dark hair, despite being blond throughout the movie. Now, this could even have been a white-balance error, and sometimes shades are hard to determine in black & white movies - but it stood out enough to me to question how no one caught this at the time. You can see what I am talking about in this collection of screen capture, her hair looks clearly brown at the 43:42 capture:  

Click to enlarge.

There was one particularly shocking implied moment in Last Woman. Midway through the film, after demonstrating Martin's loneliness and third-wheel-being (this is before Ev and he sleep together), a shot opens on a woman's body lying on the beach. It lingers long enough that I expected her to start moving, but she doesn't. She's dead, just like everyone else on Earth. The camera pulls out, and we see Martin walking away from the body down the shoreline - and the backside of his pants is soaking wet. He walks along the beach, and finally runs into Ev and Howard (who are looking like a couple of 1950s greasers for some reason). Martin says he just had a blind date.

So... let that sink in for you.

Yeah.

The trailer there is in colour, but the version I saw (and all the full versions I've found online) are in black and white. Perhaps seeing it in colour would solve my own personal hair shade mystery. 

The Last Woman on Earth was an entertaining B, which never bothered to explain it's own disaster, and may or may not have included some necrophilia. Fun for the whole family! 

Marg
@acuteinsomnia

Previously in this series:  A Bucket of Blood,  Creature from the Haunted Sea, The Wasp Woman, and Attack of the Giant Leeches

B-Movies with Marg: A Bucket of Blood

Another Roger Corman directed picture, 1959's A Bucket of Blood is a more cohesive movie than some of the others I've had the privilege of seeing while writing this series. That isn't to say that it is particularly good or even makes a great deal of sense - BUT, Corman knew that what he wanted to do was make a dark comedy, and unlike with say, Creature from the Haunted Sea, he didn't attempt to spoof or satirize monster movies (and spy movies, and mobster movies!). This cohesiveness serves the plot well - it's a straight forward story set in the world of beatniks, of all things.

Walter Paisley is a busboy in a beat-club. He is also a simpleton who dreams of being a great artist, but who is without talent or brains. One night, he accidentally stabs his landlady's cat through a wall (really!) and to hide the evidence, covers the cat's corpse with clay - thus creating his first ultra realistic statue. The artists at the club and their sycophants become obsessed with Walter's new found artistic genius. One further unplanned killing, this time of a human being, leads Walter down a path of artistic fame, murder, and enlarged ego, as he continues to create his exhibition.  

I love this. Walter isn't well, Igor. Also, no bats.

The late 50s saw the rise of the beat generation, and although I don't feel that Roger Corman or writer Charles B. Griffith would have hung out with too many poets in berets, they knew enough about the culture to make some interesting commentary in A Bucket of Blood. The poets are verbose and exhausting, they see themselves as outsiders but before the success of his statues, they treat Walter like a quintessential "other" without a second thought. The same can be said for most any sub-sect of society - they celebrate the different, but only their version of it. Sound familiar?

Under the surface, the film asks some other lofty questions: What is art, anyway? And why are we attracted to the gruesome side of human nature? Why would someone want a statue of a murdered man in their gallery? Well, why would we want to watch a film about a murderer?

A Bucket of Blood is hardly some intellectual thought provoker, however, not really. The ideas are there, but they go unexplored - this is a good thing. With a Corman-Classic 5 day production schedule and a minuscule budget, deeper exploration of artistic merit and the like could have easily slowed the pacing of the film to an unacceptable degree. Unlike say, The Wasp Woman, A Bucket of Blood is swiftly paced by comparison, save for the extended pieces of un-examined beat poetry.

Some of the bizarre promotional material for the film.

The tiny budget lead to some amusing visuals, which are always something I delight in seeing in a B-movie. All of Walter's victims get turned into statues by the artist/killer - the result is mannequins painted white. Certainly, not very convincing, but nothing compared to the fate of Walter himself - not to spoil the ending, but lets just say, apparently a dead man can't cover himself in clay, artistic intent or not. Also, when Walter first stabs the cat, he removes it from the wall immediately, yet the animal is completely stiff. During the stabbing through the wall, his knife bends, too.

Also, it absolutely must be said, there were no buckets of blood in the film A Bucket of Blood. None. A cooking pot is used to catch drips of blood after a body is hid in a ceiling, but that's it.

A Bucket of Blood was the best intentionally funny Corman B-movie I've seen thus far - its production values would have been improved by a real budget, and unlike many films in this series, the script had enough going for it that it wasn't just the kitsch faction that made it worth watching. For example, there was some hilarious dialogue about organic food from one of the beatniks that wouldn't be out of place in a conversation today:

Will: Have some breakfast, man.
Walter Paisley: What're ya' having?
Maxwell H. Brock: Some soy and wheat germ pancakes, organic guava nectar, calcium lactate and tomato juice, and garbanzo omelets sprinkled with smoked yeast. Join us?
Walter Paisley: No thanks... Sounds great, though! 

My favourite line in the whole movie? A sexy model, unimpressed with Walter and his new found fame tells him "Nobody asked your opinion, Walter! You're just a simple farm boy, and the rest of us are sophisticated beatniks."

-Marg, Sophisticated Beatnik.
@acuteinsomnia




Previously in this series:  Creature from the Haunted Sea, The Wasp Woman, and Attack of the Giant Leeches

B-Movies with Marg: Creature from the Haunted Sea

Needless to say, none of this happened.

"You don't shine a tennis shoe!" I exclaimed in the first moments of this film. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Roger Corman's Creature from the Haunted Sea was an actual comedy. I didn't know what to expect, but the all-wrong shoe-shining was the first thing to tip me off that this was not going to be like the other Corman movies I've reviewed. Where his other pictures try to thrill with their top of the line monster effects and daring social commentary, Haunted Sea looks at the lighter side of life, and the result is a pretty amusing and weird little movie. 

Much of the plot line is murky at best - the gist of it is, a secret agent (Code Name: Sparks Moran) infiltrates an eccentric group of gangsters who are aboard a small yacht, trying to transport a colonel, a group of Cubans, and part of the Cuban national Treasury out of Cuba. For some reason. 

Eventually, the leader of the gangsters, I guess wanting the treasury all for himself and his gang, decides that killing off the Cubans is the only way to go - but not wanting to get blamed for their murders, invents a sea monster as a cover up.

Obviously, there turns out to be a real sea monster. 

He looks like a turd with googly eyes.

Or, a little like Cookie Monster.

 The production of Haunted Sea is particularly interesting, as it was filmed in 1959 on location in Puerto Rico alongside two other Corman movies "The Last Woman on Earth" and "Battle of Blood Island". Essentially, they found that they had extra footage and could quickly adapt an existing script from horror to comedy. In fact, the source material for Haunted Sea actually had already been made into two other movies, "Naked Paradise" and "Beast from Haunted Cave" - some humorous tweaks and there's a brand new movie (sort of!). Those rewrites took screenwriter/script doctor Charles B. Griffith three days to do, and the total filming time only took 5 days!

The low budget and rushed schedule shows, of course, as the editing is as delightfully jumpy as you'd wish to find in any B-movie. There is an entire scene where for absolutely no good reason, characters play touch football with a coconut. And the creature itself! It really did resemble a poo, and was made of a wetsuit, Brillo pads, moss, and oil cloth.

I am pleased to report that no quick investigation on my part into the lives of the stars of Creature from the Haunted Sea resulted in me learning of any particularly horrific demises. Robert Towne who played Sparks Moran even went on to have an extremely successful screenwriting career, winning an Oscar for 1974's Chinatown. 

Creature from the Haunted Sea isn't a particularly popular B-movie, particularly because audiences didn't quite know how to react to the film which was marketed (when finally released in 1961) as a straight up monster movie. In reality, it proved to be a mish-mashed send up of the monster genre, as well as spy and gangster movies. To be shown on television, further scenes were filmed in 1963, adding more of a spy framing device (this is the version I saw) - as well as an inexplicable title song sung by lead actress Betsy Jones-Moreland. These additions helped with the secret agents aspects (without them, those viewing the original version must have been so lost!) but added to the disjointed and bizarre mood of the movie. 

-Marg
@acuteinsomnia 

 

B-Movies with Marg: The Wasp Woman



Nope. She has the head of a wasp, body of a lady. 

 Second in my B-Movies series is Roger Corman's The Wasp Woman from 1959. Going into it, I naturally believed this to be a straight up "creature feature" but was surprised to find that in fact, Wasp Woman spends much more time exploring the pseudo-tragedy of lost youth and beauty, than it does trying to thrill you with a lady-insect hybrid.

Janice Starlin (I thought her name was Starling, my boyfriend heard Darling) is the founder and CEO of her own cosmetics firm, Starlin Enterprises (so yes, her surname was repeated multiple times, yet we both got it wrong til the credits rolled). She has always been the face of the company, but after 18 years, her looks have naturally faded. Losing sales and desperate to regain her beauty, Janice is all too eager to try out clearly mad scientist Eric Zinthrop's new miracle cure - an extract from the Royal Jelly of the Queen Wasp. I don't think I need to tell you that too much of the injections cause poor Janice to turn into a Wasp Woman. 



I can't even remember what wasps look like anymore.



Except the thing is, she barely does!

Most of the film is spent with an excruciatingly slow build to the inevitable transformation. First, Janice needs Zinthrop (who we know is mad, by the way, because he talks to wasps) to prove his formula works. He demonstrates by injecting a guinea pig with his "cure" and turning it into a white mouse, and then injecting a cat and turning it into a kitten. Despite that every sign points to either Janice becoming a baby or becoming an entirely different species (what? Guinea pigs aren't just old mice?), she goes ahead with the treatment and quickly becomes a super-fox. Or well, they washed off the amusing aging make-up that they put on then-32 year old actress Susan Cabot. Anyway, all this only took a few sentences for me to write, but takes up well over half the film to establish. There is even a montage in there made up entirely of footage found earlier in the film, Zinthrop doing sciencey things, the Starlin Enterprises executive board looking at each other and smoking pipes, Janice being injected, mice.

Eventually, Zinthrop (who all of Janice's employees think is a quack) gets hit by a car for some reason. He spends the rest of the film incapacitated, which leads Janice to finally start injecting herself. Which finally turns her into the dreaded Wasp Woman - inconsistently. Unlike a The Fly sort of situation where once Brundle becomes Brundlefly, there is no turning back - Janice only has a wasp's head and hands (?) when she is about to suck a victim's blood (like... a wasp?), but otherwise she is still hot-Janice. And this is only for the last 10ish minutes of the movie. 

As I indicated above, much of the film is really about appearances more than monsters. It is an interesting set up to have an unmarried woman in the 1950s presented as the CEO of a major cosmetics company. All the other women in the film are secretaries and assistants, each one making some direct or indirect mention of a boyfriend or husband, and all of them are younger than Janice is supposed to be. They seem happier too, and don't become wasp women, so the movie certainly doesn't rewrite the book on sexism in the 50s - but, it is a credit to the film that it's never presented that if only Janice had a man to take care of her, she never would have gotten into this mess. If anything, I think that her situation is presented as really being the only option she truly had to save her company, because as the face of the organization, her worth is literally tied to her appearance. It may not be perfectly executed, but I do think The Wasp Woman is a pretty clear social commentary. If a woman's worth is linked to her looks (and still today, as a society that is how we continue to measure women!), her desperation to grasp onto that worthiness will surely lead to her downfall.

Clever stuff, Roger Corman, clever stuff indeed.

All in all, The Wasp Woman offered some interesting social reflection, but it is poorly paced, and aside from a few nice moments of absurdity (why would a guinea pig turn into a mouse? Why?) doesn't offer enough wild kitch for a classic B-movie. Since Roger Corman directed and produced, I really was expecting more. 
 
In keeping with Attack of the Giant Leeches trend of lead actresses meeting with gruesome ends, I shouldn't mention but I just have to tell you that Susan Cabot's son suffered from dwarfism and mental illness, and bludgeoned her to death with a weightlifting bar in her sleep in 1986. What the... You can't make this stuff up! 


-Marg
@acuteinsomnia