[6] Dorothy Malone and Errol Flynn play father and daughter John and Diana Barrymore, real-life members of Hollywood’s famous Barrymore family, both of whom suffered famously from alcoholism. Flynn is very good here in the final noteworthy role of his career. Malone, two years after her Oscar win for Written on the Wind, is hit and miss — less convincing as the younger Diana but …
[3] The Gill Man’s second sequel starts off okay and gets progressively worse. It’s cool enough while a team of scientists are hunting the Creature, especially when they catch him on fire (the highlight scene of the movie), but once they capture him and begin experimenting on him, the movie takes a nosedive. You’ll have to forget that genetic mutation doesn’t happen overnight. And then …
[4] This sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon finds the Gill Man captured and put on display in a Florida theme park. Before long, he escapes, takes a woman hostage, and terrorizes the local community. Away from the darkness and depths of the Black Lagoon, the Creature is far less intimidating. I mean, how hard is it to spot an amphibious mutant on …
[8] Pools of water are often used as symbols of our collective subconscious. Since Creature from the Black Lagoon is about a humanoid creature who emerges from the depths to kidnap a beautiful woman, you might then say the Creature is a symbol for male sexual desire. And then you might have a B-movie monster I can really sink my teeth into. Sure, it’s just …
[4] Just six years after directing The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, director Eugene Lourie goes back to the well for another giant lizard movie, only this time the monster is radioactive. While production values are high for a low-budget British production (British B-movies put American B-movies to shame, really), the resulting film is a far less successful one. Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion animation in the last …
[6] Bette Davis stars as a washed-up Hollywood actress desperate to revive her career. You might think the film would be a bit autobiographical, but the screenwriters actually patterned it after Joan Crawford. (And Davis no doubt found some amount of joy in portraying her adversary.) When Davis’ character hits rock bottom, getting jailed after drunk-driving with her Oscar statue, Sterling Hayden pops up playing …
[4] Around the World in 80 Days is a three-hour-long, episodic adventure that’s high on spectacle and low on story or character. I wager it played better to a 1950s audience interested in seeing a cliche-ridden “It’s a Small World”-like pastiche of world cultures. I wish leading actor David Niven had more to do in his role — it could have really helped the film …
[3] What a shitty Best Picture winner Gigi is. It’s a musical about an unhappy playboy (Louis Jourdan) and an unhappy debutante (Leslie Caron) who fall in love, but then out of love, and back in love, and out, and finally in again. Apparently neither one feels right playing by the rules of Parisian upper-crust society and doing what is expected of them, so they …
[4] Errol Flynn clings to the last few years of his good looks in Montana, before his opium and alcohol addictions sent him to an early grave at the age of 50. Montana seems unintentionally silly to me — it’s all about cattle herders vs sheep herders, a sort of West Side Story for the northern plains. Alexis Smith plays Flynn’s love interest (making you …
[4] Frank Sinatra stars as a US army captain in charge of helping Kachin natives in WWII Burma defend themselves against the Japanese. Never So Few divides its attention between the gun battles in the jungle and Sinatra’s makeout sessions with Italian beauty Gina Lollobrigida. As a result, it excels in neither area — I didn’t much care about the troops or the lady, and …
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