Posters of my yoot’: trick? Or treat?

Click to enlarge

Endless thanx again to the curator(s) of Wrong Side of the Art, this time for posting a beloved relic from 1965. Sitting here forty-four years later, the lettering, the side of the astronaut’s face, the ‘See! See! See!’ doodads… all of it sucks me right in. For a lot of you, I’m sure it just sucks, period.

    It’s not my earliest moviegoing experience (that golden moment belongs to the 1961 Steeve Reeves Thief of Baghdad), but Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster is the first movie I saw repeatedly in the theater. Sure, I’d seen some movies on TV over and over (our New York Chiller Theaters and Creature Features had limited selections), but the theatrical experience was a different gig. By 1966, I believed that The Bellmore Playhouse bought a print for their Saturday matinees, they showed it so often.

    But not with Curse of the Voodoo. I never saw the bottom quarter of the poster until I bought the one-sheet in 1979 for ten bucks from a memorabilia dealer in San Francisco. Back in ‘65 and ‘66, the Playhouse (and, once or twice, the The Merrick Mall Cinema) paired Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster with anything but Curse of the Voodoo, and covered up that portion of the poster with a half-sheet from another movie. I remember seeing it with World Without End, Attack of the Giant Leeches, Terror from the Year 5000 and Horrors of the Black Museum. (FYI, the star of Curse of the Voodoo was Bryant Halliday, co-founder of Janus Films.)

    On one occasion, the newspaper ad for the Merrick Mall Cinema said they were showing Frankenstein on Saturday. I got all excited, because I’d never seen the Boris Karloff Frankenstein. On TV I saw Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein, but not the original. When I got to the theater, there was this one-sheet staring me in the face again. Eegah!, thought I. By that time I could recite the dialog in Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, and I knew all the words to the song “To Have and to Hold” by the Distant Cousins:

    You can read a review of the movie on my website. Please note that the actor who plays the head Martian (Nadir) is Lou Cutell, who essayed the role of Assman on Seinfeld:

    As if to screw with my head, the frikkin’ Museum of Modern Art will be showing Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 1:30pm (matinee hour!) as part of their series, Nuts and Bolts: Machine Made Man in Films from the Collection. Unbelievable.


“He wasn’t a million dollar man, he was a three-ninety-nine special”
Meeting the Space Monster, Michael Zimmer’s short interview with Robert Gaffney, director of Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster and Stanley Kubrick’s Monument Valley DP on 2001 (!):

Part One

Part Two

The original trailer:

Halloween housecleaning, by George!

Via Looker.

A trixie Halloween treat

It moves at a pace that’ll have the Ritalin generation upping their meds, but Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (1981) works as both a remembrance of 1950s lily-white idealism and a component of late-70s/early-80s New Wave. It was originally (and barely) released by the short-lived World Northal Films. I caught it in first run, prompted by enthusiastic notices in The Soho Weekly News and The Village Voice, along with its snazzy poster art (see below). Twenty-eight years later I finally revisited the bugger, on widescreen DVD from Synapse Films, and it hasn’t lost any of its fractured charm. Laughlin co-wrote the screenplay with a young Bill Condon (later of Gods and Monsters fame), resuscitating the mad scientist genre with an actor (Arthur Dignam) who had me thinking of J. Robert Oppenheimer. As far as I’m concerned, the rest of the cast — Dan Shor (from the little-known Kubrick valentine Strangers Kiss), Dey Young, Louise Fletcher, Michael Murphy, Charles Lane, Scott Brady and an intoxicating Fiona Lewis — are close to excellent. There’s a Halloween party, tacky costumes, a Tor Johnson mask, and a choreographed dance number set to Lou Christie’s “Lightening Strikes,” all of it unspooling in a quiet Midwestern town… filmed in New Zealand, many years before hobbits and rings. It’s also worth watching with the lively DVD commentary by Condon, Dey and Shor. (You may want to avoid Laughlin and Condon’s très cheesy follow-up, Strange Invaders [1983]; it received some positive reviews back in the day but time has dimmed its gaudy sparkle.)

Available from Amazon


Original poster art; click to enlarge

Flickhead's lysergic driver's manual (in German)

New in print

Robert Altman: The Oral Biography



Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber



The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies

Love and Death off Long Island

“Leafing through some of Irene Dobson’s papers recently, I came across a 1998 review of The Daytrippers (1995), an American independent feature which, like so many of those little movies, seldom gets shown on British television these days and even more rarely written about. It was a lackluster review. It was not that Dobson didn’t like it; she did and wrote in glowing terms of the acting and the richly observed conceit which propels its day-long tapestry of familial dynamics and lovers’ betrayals. It was lackluster because, as she leant over and confessed to me that afternoon, she hadn’t actually seen the film before she reviewed it.” Read the new piece by Richard Armstrong now on Flickhead.

Flickhead's psilocybin flashback

Hat tip: Seth B.

Three women

I was going to extol the merits of Stephan Elliot’s Easy Virtue (2008), but the good Film Doctor has jotted down nine reasons for liking the picture, winning my agreement on most points. Critically and commercially unnoticed, it’s that rare thing, an improvement on a Noel Coward original boasting a superlative lead performance by Jessica Biel (yes, that Jessica Biel), to say nothing of excellent work by both Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth. Hitchcock made a version of it in 1927 — a silent film of a Coward play — and I must admit that Elliot has indeed bested The Master.

I’ve long wondered why Maria Bello’s career hasn’t generated any heat. Mostly relegated to secondary parts since making her film debut in 1992 at the age of twenty-five (she initially studied to become a lawyer), Maria didn’t catch my attention until A History of Violence (2005) and The Jane Austen Book Club (2007). She’s capable, talented, attractive… so where’s the beef, the money shot? I thought I’d find it in The Sisters (2005), Arthur Allan Seidelman’s film of Anton Chekov’s The Three Sisters as reinterpreted by playwright Richard Alfieri. Not only was I wrong, but I found the thing to be depressing evidence of her thespic limitations. Alfieri’s dysfunctional family drama is ridiculously overwrought and artificial on its own, owing less to Chekov than to All About Eve, but Maria has been disastrously cast adrift in the Margot Channing part. Alfieri is no Joe Mankiewicz and Maria is most assuredly no Bette Davis. To borrow from the haughty vernacular, what’ta dump!

Above: Angie distracts Flickhead, Nelhydrea Paupér and Newton C. Smildge at their favorite diner

Needing a fix for my Angelina Jolie jones, I checked out Mojave Moon (1996). It’s a variation on the Something Wild formula, a square dude (Danny Aiello) swept up in the maelstrom of twenty-one-year-old free spirit Angie (as ‘Eleanor Rigby’). Michael Biehn overplays the Ray Liotta part, and lovely Anne Archer wanders about in a haze. It’s nothing special, but AJ shines in three or four choice moments, going the distance for her art by appearing gloriously topless in a shower scene. Her mountainous orbs are truly magnificent and without peer. On a related note, I’ve never been blown away by tattoos, but hers interest me. Here’s a site which deciphers them all!

Something’s happening but I don’t know what it is

“I’ve just been introduced to an incredible band,” someone emailed me. “I haven’t heard anything this good since the 60s.”

Any thoughts?

Farmgirls and hitmen

Among their free movies on demand, our cable company has been offering Burt Reynolds in Malone (1987). Throughout the 70s, his mustached grimace was on display seemingly every other week when pictures like Shamus, Fuzz or The Longest Yard played on the second half of any given twin bill. Ten years later, after double features limped off into extinction, I rarely bothered with his new films, so I missed Malone until now.

    It could be interpreted as an existential parable concerning a lost soul searching for inner peace, or a pleasant reminder of when movies — even action movies — moved at a casual pace with fully rounded scenes and professionally composed shots instead of frantic jump cuts and blinding image snaps, those inane gimmicks any good filmmaker should outgrow by sophomore year in film school… but which have recently, and most regrettably, become de rigueur.

    Malone’s plot is simple: stalled in a jerkwater town with his car under repair, gunman Burt (sporting a weighty tar-helmet toupee) ferrets out a sleeper cell of conservative fascists led by laconic Cliff Robertson, fighting to protect their purity of essence from non-whites and liberals. Filmed during Burt’s Lauren Hutton phase (the gap-toothed beauty plays a kindhearted assassin), Malone’s platonic love interest is Cynthia Gibb as the jailbait daughter of local grease monkey Scott Wilson. The wholesome tomboy falls for Burt and, unless I was imagining things, so does her crippled, misty-eyed dad, humbly hobbling about on his long, hard, phallic cane.

    Essentially a variation on Shane and a dozen samurai films, Malone is based on the novel Shotgun by William P. Wengate. Christopher Frank adapted the screenplay for director Harley Cokliss, with Rudy Wurlitzer allegedly helping out on the script without credit. Mr. Cokliss’s career fails to inspire, but props to Mr. Frank for writing and directing the softcore wonder, L'année des méduses (1984). As for Rudy, the world waits with bated breath for the arrival of Candy Mountain on DVD.

    I don’t know who to credit for Malone’s one odd, prophetic element, the use of a prehistoric internet for the invasion of North America. In the catacombs ‘neath Cliff Robertson’s sprawling ranch is a nerve center, PCs lining the walls, each connected to terror cells across the continent. When Cliff says, “I’m online,” the words went out to an audience blind to their meaning, still several years shy of the Information Superhighway.