SANTO AND BLUE DEMON vs. DRACULA AND THE WOLFMAN (Santo y Blue Demon vs Drácula y el Hombre Lobo)

1973/ Director: Miguel M. Delgado/Writer: Alfredo Salazar

Cast: Santo, Blue Demon, Aldo Monti, Augustín Martínez Solares, Nubia Martí, María Eugenia San Martín, Wally Barron

A while back I got in a bunch of Santo and general Mexican horror films from Cinemageddon. I used up much of my precious ratio there to appropriate about a couple dozen films only to find out later more than half were not even dubbed or subtitled. I learned to read the little review section better after this. My ratio still has not recovered and I am sort of burned out with that place and how hard it is to maintain a good ratio. But they do have a great selection of Santos films and I even went back and got a few titles from the first batch over again and was careful to get them dubbed or subbed this time. One of the films I got in was the really great Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolfman. Blue Demon is Santo’s wrestling buddy and sometimes opponent in the ring, but always friend and equal in crime fighting and saving the world outside the ring. Both actors (who go by their wrestling names) are in their fifties in this 1973 film directed by Miguel M. Delgado and written by luchadora and Mexican horror veteren Alfredo Salazar. The version I have looks nice. It is shot in color but for some reason the later color Santo adventures look cheesier than the atmospheric ones from the 60’s. The old sets were reminiscent of early Universal horror films. Well with this film the fascination with Universal monsters has returned as Santo and Blue Demon face off against none other than Count Dracula (Aldo Monti who battled Santo in Santo and the Treasure of Dracula ) himself and his nefarious sidekick the Wolfman (Augustín Martínez Solares who also played the beast in Night of the Bloody Apes). Delgado would go on to direct the Santo and Blue Demon vs Frankenstein but I have not seen that one yet and not even sure if I have it. If I don’t I will have to get it (damn my CG ratio) and hope that it is as fun as this one was.

MORE SANTO AND BLUE DEMON WRESTLING WITH DRACULA AND THE WOLFMAN HERE >>

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo)

1966/Director: Sergio Leone/Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone

Cast/ Eli Wallach, Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Aldo Giuffrè, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Enzo Petito

I was living in San Antonio Texas where my dad was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base when The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was released. We all packed ourselves in his Valiant station wagon and went to the Valley-Hi Drive to see the film and it left an impression on me that was to linger for the rest of my life. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a film that falls into a very narrow category for me. Films that I feel are not only great films but films worthy of deeper introspection and multiple viewings and each viewing seems as fresh as the first one. It is a film I am not even comfortable commenting on here. There are a few others as well that would make me shudder to do a post here at my humble site about: Apocalypse Now, The Last Picture Show, Dr. Zhivago, Lord Jim and even Blade Runner and other films of the same caliber that have left such a lasting impact on me that I simply feel unworthy to expound on them in any fashion. And is another reason and that is that films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Apocalypse Now have been critiqued and reviewed to death on the net. I usually try to select more obscure and little viewed films of an often trashier variety here at the Café to pander. Also I try not to be too pretentious with my comments and speculations. I will leave all that to the experts. Certainly many films deserve deeper philosophical reflection but I am not the sort of person to publicly delve into all that sort of thing. In simple terms I like to proceed with my foot as much out of my mouth as possible. But when I watch a film like this one I am usually transported to another world all together. So with that as an introduction let’s take a look at this western masterpiece by maestro Sergio Leone.

MORE OF THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY HERE >>

GLI AMORI DI ERCOLE (THE LOVES OF HERCULES or HERCULES vs THE HYDRA)

1960/Director: Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia/Writers: Sandro Continenza, Luciano Doria

Cast: Mickey Hargitay, Jayne Mansfield, Massimo Serato, René Dary, Moira Orfei, Gil Vidal

AKA:
Hercules and the Hydra
Les amours d’Hercule (France)

This film has the dubious honor of having remained in my draft folder the longest of any post draft ever. I would have to double check the date but I am sure it goes back to June or July. In fact the post was the last post I had made before my site was hacked back then and a three week nightmare began. I still have the PDFs and pics in a folder on my hard drive and tried to put the post back together and after I had finished this and a couple other posts lost during the hacker period I sort of forgot about them. The others have been completed and this is the last of the old posts that have been locked up in my draft folder since summer time. Another problem here is that I cannot find the movie file. It is burned on a DVD disc somewhere but I have so many I gave up looking for it for now. Typically I would prefer to fast forward through a film I have not seen in a while to refresh my memory before reviewing but in this case that will not happen. I will refer to the PDF files I made of reviews and my memory of the film, since it did leave and impression. In fact, I want to see it again as it is a fine camp classic and Mickey Hargitay’s beardless Hercules is one of the more unique Peplum/Sword and Sandal performances in the history of the genre. Couple that wit the fact that his co-star in the film is none other than Mrs. Mickey Hargitay herself, Janyne Mansfield, and how can a person go wrong if his inclination is to spend a lazy night on the sofa watching some fine Italian made cheese.

MORE OF MICKEY HARGITAY AND JAYNE MANSFIELD IN THE LOVES OF HERCULES HERE >>

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS

2009/Director: Quentin Tarantino/Writer: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl

I have to admit that I really did not enjoy this Quentin Tarantino film at all but I really, really wanted to. I waited for this with high expectations. In fact I still want to be able to write something about it and sound like I am one of the special people (one of the many people) who got the film’s ‘message’ and consider it to be Taratino’s best work to date. I read that the film got an eight minute standing ovation at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. From me it got shut off wit my remote and finished a couple nights later out of a sense of obligation (maybe to just write something abut it here, the worst reason to watch a film maybe) more than a passion to see the rest of the story. And while I am at it I will have to say I was let down, though much less so, with his Grindhouse Death Proof feature as well. The last thing I liked by the guy was Jackie Brown and just feel he has lost his once marvelous mojo since that film. I will be direct. Inglourious Basterds had too much banter and not enough gutsy action in it for me. Sure Tarantino could once create riveting dialog about Quarter Pounders in France but the dialogs in Basterds, a script he reportedly worked on for nearly a decade, simply drug on and on and lacked any of the wit and humor one watches his earlier films over and over for.

I really had my hopes up -maybe too high-for this film and so I probably am all the more miserable for having them dashed so unexpectedly. I had been reading about Tarantino doing a WW II combat film loosely based on The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare for a couple years now and could hardly wait. I imagined all the cool dialog and character conflicts and humor that such a story could allow but I also pictured actual combat. Guns shooting people. Of course that does happen here and there for tortuously brief moments but the actual combat and battles seems to be done with sly innuendos and witty jabs over the dinner table than in a battle field or shell blasted side-street somewhere. At nearly three hours long I kept losing interest in the characters. Brad Pitt as Tennessee born Lt. Aldo Raine (maybe a play on action character actor Aldo Ray) is the leader of the Basterds which is a group of specially trained commandos that have been raising hell behind enemy lines with the Nazis since the early days of the war. I am not sure how I feel about the idea that the group is made up solely of Jews, except for Raine,  bent on revenge and terror. I do not see it as remotely necessary to make the group all Jewish and if there is some message here I missed it. I also do not like the way the Basterds simply come into existence with little explanation of who they are as individuals. In fact the Basterds all but vanish from the middle part of the story while a series of painfully long and drawn scenes occur one after the other in restaurants and coffee shops between various Nazis and French citizens. And to add to the agony that the majority of the dialog occurs in German and French. That is okay for the most part but well over half of the dialog in the film is in French or German and the puns and clever Tarantino phrases that make the scenes in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill quotable and priceless are all lost here. There is, for an example, a scene of a group of spies in a tavern who have as their guest an uninvited SS officer who causes stress levels among the group to jump off of the chart. The problem is not that the dialog here is in another language than English but that it goes on for too damned long and when things finally erupted in gunfire I was in a state where I just did not care.

Some people have said the film was too violent but I feel it was not violent enough. There is not enough action and mayhem to make up for the long attempts at Tarantinoesque banter in German or French. While actor Christoph Waltz is simply great as the Jew Hunting Nazi Col. Landa I just was not excited by any of the other character’s or the actors performances. In particular I was utterly bored by Brad Pitt’s weary performance. He is one of my favorite actors and I was picturing some sort of Lee Marvin type character here and it was maybe the worst performance of this fine actor’s career. And like the joke from Annie Hall about the bad food at some restaurant in the Catskills (paraphrased): A: The food here is so bad. B: Yes. And such small portions. I did not like his performance and he was simply not on the screen enough. I though the film was about him and his elite squad of killer Jews but they the people one sees the least. Eli Roth as the baseball bat welding ‘Jew Bear’ is goofy at best. Definitely not imposing or larger than life. Tarantino has said that this was actually a Spaghetti Western with a WW II backdrop. Well crap man, just make a Spaghetti Western then. Or maybe not. Why muck that classic genre up as well. What the hell happened here? I wanted to see Nazis being blasted with a Tommy Gun and Panzer tanks terrorizing tough talking G.I.s from Brooklyn, instead I get to see Nazi’s put out cigarettes in cheese cake and wax philosophically about rats and squirrels. Hey, lots of people like this one. I would, and have, watched many previous Tarantino effort more than once. Including Death Trap. Hell I love that scene where that gal’s leg soars through the night sky. But, and say this with regret, this is one Tarantino film that I will not watch again.  Am I saying that it is totally terrible film and not worth a watching? No way and let me clear on that point before shifting gears for a bit.  It is, in the end, a Tarantino film and even a bad Tarantino film is better than most other films coming out of either Hollywood of the foreign market these days. And in the end will I probably give the film another go someday… yea I probably will. I am still in the bitter let down phase right now. Like the trusting girl who has sworn off men after she finds her boyfriend in bed with her best friend. But eventually we all regain some faith in men, humanity and Quentin. My opnion is just that, my opinion and is not the final word on anything.

But there are a couple other war dramas I have seen more than a couple times and will probably see again. These films may have inspired Tarantino’s war drama but his story falls way short of at least two of these great war epics, The Dirty Dozen and Iron Cross. The third film is not a great film but is notable in that it was the inspiration for the title of Tarantino’s dreary adventure. That film is called, with proper spelling, The Inglorious Bastards. Lets take a brief look at those films before leaving this subject behind. At the end of the article I hope I will have something positive to say about Inglourious Basterds. I may just need some time to reflect while saying  something about these other films.

READ THE REST OF THIS FASCINATING ARTICLE HERE >>

COLOSSUS AND THE AMAZON QUEEN

A brief mention here about this remarkably odd movie called Colossus and the Amazon Queen (La Regina delle Amazzoni) directed by Vittorio Sala who also co-wrote the script with six other writers. If you brave this piece of cheese you may wonder why it took a total of seven men to scramble this story up. The general gist of the story is about a couple heroes named Pirro (Rod Taylor from The Birds) and Glauco (body builder Ed Fury) who wind up being tricked into becoming house boys on the island of the Amazons. The woman of the island are led by the lovely Amazon Queen herself (Gianna Maria Canale) and her bevy of beauties (Dorian Gray and Daniela Rocca among them). The warrior babes are supplied by cunning rogues with unwitting men who eventually evolve into effeminate acting house slaves. Clashes develop between some of the gals over who will be queen and who get what man, especially hunky Glauco whose presence has set the cold Amazon hearts all a flutter. The usually macho acting Rod Taylor has one the strangest roles of his career here as he plays the prissy acting brains of the duo. His voice is dubbed by another English speaking actor who makes him sound like a real sissy boy.

MORE AMAZON QUEENS HERE >>

HERCULES UNCHAINED (Ercole e la Regina di Lidia)

1959/Director: Pietro Francisci/Writer: Ennio De Concini/Cinematography & Special Effects: Mario Bava

Cast: Steve Reeves, Sylva Koscina, Sylvia Lopez, Gabriele Antonini, Primo Carnera

Also Known As:
Hercule et la reine de Lydie
Hercules Unchained
Hércules e a Raínha
Hércules encadenado
Hércules y la reina de Lidia
Heracles y la reina de Lidea
Hercules and the Queen of Lydia
Hercules and the Queen of Sheba
Herkules ja Lyydian kuningatar
Herkules und die Königin der Amazonen
O iraklis kai i vasilissa tis Lydias

Boy, I’ve been waiting to start this new sword and sandal category for a long time. Also called peplum or pepla as a term that covers the entire category, the Sword and Sandal genre is one of the most ridiculed and maligned in the whole film division of cult cinema. The overly harsh criticisms range from everything like worst movies of all time, inept and amateurish to just downright being ‘homoerotic’. It is as if a film being homoerotic means it will be a bad film. I have seen plenty of great homoerotic films but maybe we can go into that another day. Well, who knows, maybe all these criticisms are true to some degree or another but I have found these films to be some of the most entertaining low budget B-films, long with old serial westerns, I have ever sat down to watch and I have seen quite few. Lately I have been able to locate scores of these online and have around a dozen or so queued up for viewing. I actually began watching these as a wee lad in the late 60’s on Saturday afternoons, at about the time the movement was losing its steam to new genres like Spaghetti Westerns and spy films. They were shown on a afternoon show that was called The Mighty Sons of Hercules and I can still hear the macho theme music in my head as I type this. We had a crappy b/w TV with ‘rabbit ears’ back then and I never saw any of these films until only recently in color.

MORE OF MARIO BAVA AND HERCULES HERE >>

Until I watched the Sam Katzman (Earth vs the Flying Saucers, The Giant Claw, Zombies of Mura Tau) production of The Killer Ape with Johnny Weissmuller I had never seen a Jungle Jim feature in my life. Weissmuller began making the Jungle Jim features in 1948, the same year he played in his last Tarzan movie for RKO, Tarzan and the Mermaids. TATM is the only Weissmuller Tarzan feature I have yet to watch over (I of course saw it repeatedly on Saturdays afternoons as a kid) but I have it and need to get around to that some night. Some stories seem to suggest Weissmuller switched contracts from RKO to Columbia because Columbia agreed to let him wear clothes for his Jungle Jim character. Weissmuller was no longer the lean young man he was in Tarzan the Apeman, and had not been for sometime. Basically the Jungle Jim character, based on the Alex Raymond comic strip of the time, is Tarzan with clothes. At least in the one episode I watched here, and I will see others if I can find them, Weissmuller still seems a little too monosyllabic and spacey to be considered a man of civilized culture. He walks around the jungle with a knife and holding the hand of his pet chimp Tamba. But instead of a loin-cloth he wears a safari hat and uniform. You could almost image that it is a middle aged Tarzan who was giving a job by the local game commission because he is too old and heavy to swing through trees anymore. I saw a site that ranks the Jungle Jim movies, and along with The Lost Tribe, The Killer Ape is one of only two on the list to receive a one star rating. I guess I would be one of the few people to consider myself lucky to have began my exploration of the series with this feature.

I have done about three Weissmuller Tarzan features here at the Café and I am a huge fan of the films and in particular the early ones with Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane. I am not sure what the Jungle Jim series is all about yet. I do not know if he has a female partner or Boy type character but he does Tamba the chimpanzee who gets Jim out of many sticky situations as Cheetah ever did Tarzan. The story in The Killer Ape starts off with Jim and some of his park warden pals commenting on how strange the crocodiles have been behaving lately. Seems they have lost any will power and resistance and have become uncommonly docile. We are treated to some stock footage of “natives” beating crocs with sticks and paddles to confirm this. Jim is of course concerned about the wildlife’s health and welfare. We are made aware of this in the following scene where he pounces on a sluggish, land bound crocodile that startled Tamba and kills it with his hunting knife Tarzan style. Later a Mexican looking girl dressed in a South Pacific patterned skirt walks upon Tamba and throws a net over him and Jim runs to the rescue. In one of many attempts through out the film she tries to stab him but he subdues her by grabbing her wrist. Jim proves to Shari (Carol Thurston) and her tribe, the Wasulis, that Tamba is his pet by making him do a back flip. That’s is settled but Shari and her fiancée Ramada (Burt Wenland) still do not trust him very much. Shari’s brother Mahara (Paul Marion) seems to trust more when he warns them not to trap animals in The Canyon of the Ape which, according to local legend, is inhabited by a monstrous half man half ape creature with a really bad temper.

MORE OF JUNGLE JIM AND THE KILLER APE HERE >>