Talk about escapism! During the depths of the Great Depression, Columbia Pictures released THE AWFUL TRUTH a screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and top-billed Irene Dunn in which impossibly rich people laugh their way through an assortment of romantic trials and tribulations. The film seems to take place in a world free from economic troubles; Grant and Dunn’s characters appear very financially secure even though neither has a job. They live in posh hotels and frequent a gorgeous art-deco nightclub with a gigantic champagne glass centerpiece filled with balloon bubbles.

In this unstoppably charming film, Grant and Dunn play bored husband and wife Jerry and Lucy Warriner. Both flirt with infidelity more than with each other, and so when the subject of divorce is broached, neither much minds the idea, though they do have quite an argument over who gets custody of their dog, Mr. Smith. Lucy gets the dog, but Jerry is granted visitation rights. On his visits to see Mr. Smith, Jerry begins to see that he is still in love with Lucy, but she has already become involved with a boring oil tycoon named Dan Leeson (played by Ralph Bellamy, antagonizing Grant over a woman they both love as he would again a few years later in HIS GIRL FRIDAY).

Jerry tries to sabotage Lucy’s new romance in several hilarious scenes. At the night club with the giant champagne glass he reveals what a wonderful dancer Lucy is to Dan, after she is initially reluctant to dance. While she suffers through an unbearable number with her terrible dance partner, Jerry calls the maitre de over to his table, slips him a bribe and instructs him to have the band play the same number again as an encore. Naturally, Dan is all wrong for Lucy, and everyone except Dan knows it. Lucy loves the city and Dan hates it, and if she is really going to marry him she’ll have to give up the theater and the shopping and the nightlife and everything else. As a delighted Jerry reveals the gravity of her impending marital situation, he gleefully notes “If you get bored of Oklahoma City you can always go over to Tulsa for the weekend!”

Irene Dunn was a very famous actress in her day, nominated five times for the Best Actress Oscar but is almost completely forgotten today. She has tremendous chemistry with Grant and made numerous films with him (including 1941’s PENNY SERENADE) and if she is remembered at all today, it is in the context of these pairings with him. As an actress she has amazing comedic timing, great facial reactions, and a dizzying way of wrapping her lips around twisty 30s dialogue. In TRUTH’s final scene, she also happens to give Grant one of the sexiest come hither stares in the history of cinema. With the stiff Production Code in place you couldn’t have a woman invite a man into her bed, even if they were a married couple. Dunn says it all with one devilish glance. It’s a look that could shatter Plexiglass.

Despite the fact that it is old fashioned and hopelessly romantic, THE AWFUL TRUTH definitely holds up, still funny after all these years. It’s just a delightful film, the reason why movie theater attendance was so high in the Depression even though people didn’t have any money. However much you’re paying to see it, you’re getting your money’s worth. It may be a fantasy world, but what a fantasy.

IF YOU LIKED THE AWFUL TRUTH, CHECK OUT: ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944), another excellent Cary Grant screwball comedy. In ARSENIC, he brings his new wife home to meet his two aunts, only to discover that they are senile serial killers. Strange, but a lot of fun. Directed by Frank Capra.

THE BAD

There has been some confusion of late as to the difference between a “bad” movie and an “ugly” one and this is a good time to review the guidelines. Bad movies are bad for any number of reasons and therefore not worth your times. Ugly movies can be dumb, offensive, confusing, poorly made, incomprehensible but something in their flaws gives them a unique charm, which elevates them out of their badness and merits your attention. The 1956 film INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN is a bad movie lacking just about any redeeming characteristics other than a very silly, overwrought performance by Chaney.

His character is nicknamed “The Butcher” because he enjoys killing people and, perhaps, because he knows the difference between a sirloin and a rib-eye. The Butcher is imprisoned and awaiting execution, and possibly working on some choice filets, after the rest of his gang turned state’s evidence against him. The Butcher swears revenge, and considers making surf and turf for dinner, and is promptly executed by the California penal system. Eventually, his corpse winds up in the hands of a doctor in need of a freshly dead body to test a new potential cure for cancer on. No explanation why he would test a cancer cure on a dead man who didn’t have cancer, but it doesn’t matter because the damn thing doesn’t work anyway. Somehow this drug of his, mixed with a great deal of electricity, revives the dead Butcher. The “tremendous electrical voltage increased his cellular structure so he was no longer a man” giving The Butcher “almost inconceivable amounts of strength.” Inconceivable? I can conceive a lot of strength, doctor.

The now-mute Butcher (the electricity fried his vocal chords) heads to Los Angeles and carries out revenge on the men who sold him up the river. His story is narrated by the bland cop in charge of the case, played by Casey Adams. This is one of those movie narrations that tells you far more information than you want, or need, to hear. The guy just won’t shut up. When he’s on screen looking at a newspaper he feels the need to tell us, “I woke up the next morning and looked in the newspaper.” Well yes, officer, I can see that, it’s right there in your hands where a newspaper is generally placed in order to be read. When one of Butcher’s stooges begins to confess his crimes to the police and the scene dissolves into the next, the guy just has to say, “then Lowe continued his confession.” If what he said was so important, why did we dissolve away from him? Let’s hear what the man has to say! The movie’s only 70 minutes long, it’s not like we couldn’t have sat through another minute of him talking. In the film’s climax Chaney gets to rip-off the finale of the great gangster movie WHITE HEAT, and afterwards Narrator Man tells us that the electricity that explodes all around him brought him back to life and therefore killed him. The whole life/death dichotomy is not particularly hard and fast in this film.

The only time INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN flirts with ugly film territory is in a series of repeated close-ups of Lon Chaney’s sweaty, twitchy eyeballs. Since the filmmakers made the questionable choice to turn The Butcher into a mute once he’s brought back from the dead, he needs to communicate his emotions somehow, and to do so, director Jack Pollexfen frequently cuts in to extremely tight shots of Chaney’s face, where his eyeballs are wracked with tension and his face is covered in sweat. The man is supposed to be thinking about how to get to Los Angeles and he looks like he just ate a really spicy pepper. I looked all over the Internet to find a image of it but I couldn’t come up with one. I need to learn how to screengrab.

That’s funny, but it’s not so funny you should go out of your way to watch this otherwise drab and uninteresting film just to see it. So don’t bother with INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN. It’s bad, not ugly.

INSTEAD OF INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN, CHECK OUT: THE WOLF MAN (1941), Chaney in his best role, as Larry Talbot, a man who is bitten by a werewolf and cursed to become one himself. The best-kept secret of those old Universal Horror movies is how good THE WOLF MAN really is.

THE UGLY

“At the risk of sounding egotistical, I am stronger than anyone!” says Vlad, the evil villain of the film version of the horror comic VAMPIRELLA. Played by Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who, he is an unimposing villain to be sure, and his declaration of containing more strength than anyone (rather than, say, everyone, which would sound at lot better) is one that is hardly borne out in the film. Yes he kills a few people, and seduces others as rock star “Jamie Blood” but with his cheesy fangs and gauzy cape, he looks about as scary as a Teletubby.

Because he’s Roger Daltrey, Vlad gets to sing a really bad song as Jamie Blood. The heartfelt, penetratingly poetic chorus goes “Come on bleed for me/Come to me come to me come to me.” The verses include phrases like “I’m gonna make you bleed” and “Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed!” Daltrey’s terrible song makes you yearn for the profundity and social activism of C & C Music Factory.

While Vlad/Jamie Blood refuses to just stand there and busts a move, a woman from the planet Drakulon named Ella (Talisa Soto) comes to earth looking for him. She takes the name of Vampirella and dresses in a funky red bikini outfit that is either made out of leather or Fruit Roll-Ups. On Earth, she teams up with a guy named Adam Van Helsing and his crew of government sponsored vampire hunters. These guys have great uniforms; they wear baseball hats with big crosses on them like they’re from a church softball team. They are also, by and large, total idiots. Even after meeting her, learning her name, and seeing a display of her powers, Van Helsing is shocked - shocked! - to learn that Vampirella is, in fact, a vampire.

Just for the sake of clarification: HER NAME IS VAMPIRELLA!

I should go easy on the guy; he probably gets hit in the head a lot in his line of work. He spends the entire movie trying to kill Vlad, then when he has him at gunpoint he handcuffs him. I nearly lost my voice watching this movie I was yelling at the characters so frequently.

Maybe Adam Van Helsing ghostwrote VAMPIRELLA because, in general, it doesn’t make much sense, and is all the funnier for it. I have no idea what a “screen of bio-reflective plasma” is, but after watching this movie I know that there are ten Drakulonian satellites in orbit around earth covered in the stuff. I have no idea why you’d cast John Landis in the role of a Martian astronaut, but there he is, generally being John Landisian.

I do have a favorite minor character though, and when you watch the film look out for him. His name is Carlos (Lenny Juliano), and he has a couple of brief scenes with Vlad’s right hand man Demos (Brian Bloom). After Demos shoots all of Carlos’ men, Carlos starts snarling and growling like a dog. Then they hang him upside down from his feet and let the sunlight him him, and he makes more ridiculous angry noises. Then he starts cursing out Demos in a voice that may have provided the original inspiration for Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. “To hell with you Demos!” he howls to my eternal delight. “TO HELL WITH YOU!” I must have watched the scene five times it amused me so much. Bravo to Lenny Juliano, my new favorite ugly movie actor (for me to poop on).

The tagline to VAMPIRELLA is “Thirsty for justice, she’ll settle for blood.” Apparently, she’ll also settle for a really funny bad movie and a costume that would embarrass the most flamboyant stripper. Her loss, our gain. At the risk of sounding egotistical, VAMPIRELLA is uglier than anyone.

IF YOU LIKED VAMPIRELLA, CHECK OUT: THE FANTASTIC FOUR (1994), the unreleased low-budget slaughtering of the comic that began the Marvel Age of Comics. There’re a million bad ideas in the movie but the worst may be making Reed and Ben about twenty years older than Johnny and Sue. In the prologue, Reed and Ben go to visit Johnny and Sue when they’re little kids, then the Storms grow up and Reed wants to get in Sue’s pants. Um, gross, Reed.