October 23, 2002
by Matt Singer
What has my life come to? The last time I was at a video retail store, I bought two DVDs. The first is a double-feature of drive-in horror movies that capitalized on an all-but-forgotten nudist craze in the 1960s. The second is a DVD memorializing and propagandizing the career of Hulk Hogan, which I eagerly purchased for the hours of old matches it contains as extras. In one hand, you have cheesy childhood nostalgia; on the other embarrassing nudo-horror schlock. I think I need another hobby, maybe something simple like sewing.
Before you get excited, you won’t find nudist movies in this week’s column. But don’t worry. You will soon.
THE GOOD
CHARADE (1963)
Starring Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn
Directed by Stanley Donen
Unrated, 113 minutes
Available on VHS and DVD
Where does Stanley Donen get off making a movie as suspenseful as CHARADE? No one would deny Donen his place in American movie history; as the director or co-director of SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, ON THE TOWN, SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS (among others), he’s certainly an important person. But suspense? The director of nearly thirty films over the course of his career, Donen rarely strayed from the arena of musicals and comedy in which he made his name. CHARADE was his first thriller, and it happens to be one of the finest in the genre. The nerve of that guy!
Though Cary Grant has top billing, the real star is Audrey Heburn as Reggie Lampert, a lovely British gal on holiday. She returns home to find that her new husband, Charlie, is dead. More confused than upset, Reggie slowly learns that Charlie is not the man she thought he was. Apparently, poor Charlie (thrown from a train in the film’s ominous pre-credits sequence) had numerous identities, and was in possession of a quarter of a million dollars when he died. Now everyone wants Reggie to help then find the money, though she insists she has no idea where it is. CIA men like Walter Matthau want the money, because they say Charlie was a criminal. Shady guys like James Coburn and a one-handed George Kennedy claim it’s theirs. And then there’s handsome and mysterious Peter Joshua (Grant) who seems so innocent and kind that he most certainly has to be hiding something.
From there, the movie instigates a relentless chase for this most MacGuffin-like of moneys. There are numerous switch-ups and double- and even triple-identities. But CHARADE, from a sharp script by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, manages to turn the endless plot complications into a logical storyline. Nothing feels forced, and even the final twists make sense. For his part, the unfairly talented Donen provides a number of unforgettable visuals, from a corpse-eye view of a morgue drawer closing, to a climactic chase edited to and punctuated by the visual rhythm of passing pillars. In his finest moment, he culminates a very complex movie in a nail-biter of a standoff -- two characters, both holding a third at gunpoint for very different reasons. Every bad review cliché in the book applies to this sequence: “You’ll be on the edge of your seat!” or “Hold on for the surprise twist ending!” except here, the boisterous exclamations are rather appropriate. It’s really that good.
Grant was nearly sixty when he made CHARADE, though you’d be hard-pressed to guess it from the way he looked. He would retire after just two more films because, as the legend goes, he wanted to remain forever young in the minds of his audience. He does seem slightly uncomfortable sharing romantic scenes with a woman nearly half his age, but the film makes it pretty clear that he’s not particularly into her. Oh, how times change. Today, such May-December romances are common – 1999’s ENTRAPMENT featured a nearly seventy-year-old Sean Connery sexing up a thirty-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones. Then again, maybe that’s just her bag, since she married the almost sixty-year-old Michael Douglas a short time later.
Last weekend, my local newspaper highlighted the upcoming slate of movies, including CHARADE remake THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE, with the title “Hitchcock Revisited” going on to explain the origins of the new Mark Wahlberg / Thandie Newton picture as a remake of “Alfred Hitchcock’s CHARADE.” Just one problem – Hitchcock didn’t direct the picture. Clearly, in the Hitchcock vein, it’s easy to confuse its origin, especially since no one would guess the movie was directed by the guy who also made DAMN YANKEES. If you’re a fan, then you owe it to yourself to the best Hitchcock movie he never made. Curse that Stanley Donen and his wealth of talent!
IF YOU LIKED CHARADE, CHECK OUT: SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952), with Donen more in his element co-directing (with star Gene Kelly) one of the best musicals of all time. Even the most jaded of modern moviegoers would be helpless to resists this movies numerous charms.
THE BAD
THE CRAWLING EYE (1958)
Starring Forrest Tucker, Laurence Payne
Directed by Quentin Lawrence
Unrated, 84 minutes
Available on VHS & DVD
To see THE CRAWLING EYE is to hate it. The film is infamous as a funny, crummy science fiction film, even featured in an early episode of MST3K, but if that’s the case, I didn’t get the joke. Almost right away, I was bored, then extremely bored, then briefly suicidal, then inattentive, then finally interested when that titular eye makes its appearance on the scene. At that point, it was far too late to redeem a movie this terrible. This review isn’t even a paragraph old and already I know I’m gonna run out of synonyms for “bad” just talking about EYE. It’s just awful.
The wretched film follows the sad and meandering adventures of several dopes trapped on and around Trollenberg Mountain. Several travelers arrive at a remote mountain resort (a horror film location used in almost as many movies as “a remote cabin in the woods”), and almost immediately encounter strange problems that would have moved a sane person to leave the area. The nincompoops of THE CRAWLING EYE are too curious to leave well enough alone, and we know what curiosity did to the cat. That’s right, it made it watch THE CRAWLING EYE, thereby killing it.
For the rest of this abhorrent film, our none-too-intrepid cast of characters, led by doughy Forrest Tucker, stand around and stare out various windows at the ominous mountain in the distance, which, remarkably, looks exactly the same no matter what vantage point it is viewed from. Apparently there is a very mysterious cloud that is bothering people around the mountain, blocking out the sun, and making for very overcast German afternoons. Of course, this cloud is not the work of unfortunate weather patterns. Naturally, this is the work of a race of giant space testicles – er, eyes, sorry.
Yes, this is the strangest, and only worthy, element of THE CRAWLING EYE. The devilish cloud is, in fact, shielding the identities of the numerous alien beings the title alludes to. These beasts crawl, and each contain a single eye, yet they bear the unmistakable appearance of that particular element of the male genitalia. More specifically, they look like giant, slimy, veiny parts of male genitalia, with one wandering eye and a vast array of tentacles (testicle tentacles, say that five times fast) that allow it to grab people or open doors or cause general chaos amongst the rubes of Trollenberg Mountain. There’s more than one of these things, and the eye is clearly not the dominant feature of each but I guess THE CRAWLING BALLS would probably have met with censorship issues in 1958.
Oversized junk aside, there is little else to enjoy in THE CRAWLING EYE. Horror film convention requires that a movie monster be left unseen for as long as possible, so that the viewer creates a mental impression of the beast far scarier than the real thing. This technique worked well in JAWS because the actual shark in the movie was so chintzy-looking. But those crawling aliens actually look really scary. One scene in which the lumbering beasts break into a human stronghold could genuinely frighten someone, if it was in a movie that had been made with any attention to pacing or tension whatsoever. In this case, we should have seen the monster right away, since delaying their entrance forces us to look at these miserable cretins who seem downright excited about impending death. Giant eye-popping testes, now THAT’S scary.
The eventual demise of the juevos-monsters is as uninspired as the rest of the film (egad, fire hurts them! Sheer genius!). Perhaps with the quick-witted assistance of Joel and the rest of the Mystery Science Theater crew this film can be seen as a light-hearted romp. Without them, THE CRAWLING EYE is akin to the sort of torture I imagine prisoners of war are subjected to. Then again, the Geneva Convention disallows soldiers be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. Bad movies have never seemed so bad.
INSTEAD OF THE CRAWLING EYE, CHECK OUT: TARANTULA (1955), a monster movie that has the good sense to be campy and silly. The final attack on the Tarantula (which is also, amazingly, vulnerable to fire) will have in stitches.
THE UGLY
PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
Starring Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi
Directed by Edward W. Wood Jr.
Unrated, 79 minutes
Available on VHS & DVD
“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future -Criswell
With that most declamatory of declarations, one of the finest crappy movies in the history of cinema begins. I have been writing this column for nearly three years now, and I’ve yet to review watershed ugly movie PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. Well, my friends, now it is truly the future, and we shall spend the next fifteen minutes of our lives discussing future events such as this movie, which is, we learn, based on sworn testimony from people who lived the actual events this movie is based upon. PLAN 9 is so good, it is both a true story and a cautionary tale of a possible future.
Original title “Grave-Robbers from Outer Space” made more sense than PLAN 9, but it had to be changed after the original backers for the film were offended by the title and refused to allow it. One wonders why people would fund a movie about grave-robbing in the first place if the subject matter upset them, but I digress. Lazy aliens with half-baked plans of global conquest become convinced that the secret weapon that could be exploited against the human race is the reanimated corpses of their recently deceased. To that end, they begin to terrifyingly transform the film’s slowly rising body count into an unholy army of evil. And by unholy army of evil, I mean three people consisting of a large former wrestler who can’t speak English, a waistless Elvira knockoff, and a stand-in for an actually dead formerly famous actor turned heroin junkie. I know it sounds impressive on paper, but you should see the way these guys lurch around like they just took a dump in their pants – a truly shiver-inspiring sight.
If the absurd plot was not enough, PLAN 9 is shot by Ed Wood with an incompetence worthy of the infamy it has garnered in recent decades. Bela Lugosi, who played Dracula in the classic Universal version and then couldn’t get a gig doing anything but vampires and mad scientists the rest of his life, died shortly after filming began, forcing Wood to shoot most of his part with a replacement who was taller, younger, and skinnier than Lugosi. The difference is disguised by having the pseudo-Lugosi hold the character’s cape in front of his face. No explanation is given why Lugosi’s character wears a cape, but no matter. The graveyard in which much of the movie takes place features cardboard gravestones that have a habit of teetering over when the actors don’t watch their step. Judging from the alien’s spaceship and attire, they come in peaceful flamboyance from the planet Ikea.
Wood made a lot of terrible movies like PLAN 9, but this film was really the apex of his career in terms of hilarious stupidity. From the pie-tin flying saucers, to the aliens deriding humans and their “stupid minds. Stupid! Stupid!” this movie has everything except a kitchen sink. It even has solorbumite (my spelling), an element so powerful that, once we humans discover it, we’ll use it to destroy the entire universe. All along I thought these aliens were content to conquer Earth and subjugate us and enslave our women, but it turns out, there was a method to their madness. These satin-garbed aliens are actually saving us from ourselves! You know the government has the solorbumite. They’ve had it for years. It’s all a big conspiracy.
When Criswell, the narrator and owner of the worst haircut in movie history, returns to eulogize the passing of this great movie, he provides arguably the greatest justification for cinema I’ve ever heard. “Can you prove,” he yells at the camera, “it DIDN’T happen?!?” And indeed, we cannot. Perhaps Wood, loon that he was, did indeed stumble upon the greatest plot by retarded aliens our universe had ever seen. If this is the case, my friends, viewing PLAN 9 can be considered a national service. We’ve got to be prepared for the grave robbers, after all. As Criswell warns, someone could pass us, in the dark, and we would not know it! “For they would be from outer space!” Makes you think, doesn’t it?
IF YOU LIKED PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, CHECK OUT: ED WOOD (1994), Tim Burton’s terrific biopic about Ed Wood, the greatest bad movie director of all time. And he wore women’s clothing.
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