A Movie a Day 2: Movie Harder

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The Sign of Four (1932)

I have a book about Sherlock Holmes movies which claims that when making the films starring Arthur Wontner, they rarely did retakes. If takes like the one pictured below made it into the movie, I'd love to see one of the takes they considered too f**ked up to use.



There are four Holmes movies starring Wontner (there were five, but one of them is lost), and they all have the same strength and weaknesses. That's strength singular, not plural, because Wontner is pretty much the only good thing about them. He's a terrific Holmes, even though he was about two decades too old to be playing the part, but he was always much better than his material. These movies are so cheap that calling them b-movies would be an insult to the Holmes b-movies that Basil Rathbone made in the 1940s, the writing always managed to turn whatever story was being adapted into an incomprehensible mess, and good luck finding an actor other than Wontner who isn't completely embarrassing.

The movie's only 75 minutes but it feels longer than The Godfather Part II. Aside from Wontner, the only good thing I can say about it is that it manages to get some creepy atmosphere out of the villain and his peg leg. There's a good scene in which someone hears a tapping sound and he thinks the villain is coming to kill him, and something completely mundane turns out to be making the noise. But everything else sucks. Wontner's co-stars are terrible, every one of them. There are action scenes but they're ruined by the baffling decision to speed up the film, making everything look like a Benny Hill sketch.

The script sucks. It's at its best when it's sticking close to the book, but when it makes changes, everything goes to hell. There's a character who isn't in the book, an escaped convict who disguises himself by getting tattoos all over his body. "Nobody will recognize me," he says. Why not? The tattoos don't cover his face, and he works in public in a circus sideshow. Also, the poison dart was in the book, but the movie explains that it was made from a tattoo needle, so all Holmes and Watson have to do is look for the tattooed man who's displaying his tattooed body in public, along with his uncovered face. I normally criticize adaptations for sticking too close to the book, but knowing what kind of stupid crap the screenwriter added to the story, sticking as close to the book as possible is exactly what he should have been doing.

And why the hell do so many of these early Holmes films arrange the events in chronological order? Those flashbacks in the books were flashbacks for a reason. Letting the audience know the who, why, and how of the crime before we're even introduced to Holmes makes the second half of the story incredibly tedious since we're waiting for him to discover what we already know. Even if you already know the story like the back of your hand like I do, it just doesn't make a satisfying narrative.

I've seen four filmed versions of this story. The only thing keeping me from calling this the worst is that awful animated version from 1983 with Peter O'Toole. The 1968 version with Peter Cushing is a little better, but the only really good one is the 1987 version with Jeremy Brett. I would recommend that one even to someone who doesn't give a crap about Holmes.

By the way, that title pisses me off. The book was first titled The Sign of the Four, not The Sign of Four, but most editions of the book and pretty much every movie based on it use the four-word title. The five-word version sounds better, doesn't it?

I think that's the end of Week 3. I think this is a new low record. Only eight movies, two of them I gave up on, and one of them was just the second half of a three-hour movie. Oh well, f**k it. Here's the recap: Frankenstein (2004, Part 2 of 2), Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula (2000, gave up), The Thing (1982), The Thing: Terror Takes Shape (1998), The Giant Gila Monster (1959, gave up), Highlander II: The Quickening (1991), Highlander (1986), The Sign of Four (1932)

The movie Legacy is pretty awesome

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1981) Part 1 of 2

You again? Yes, I keep saying that I never want to see another version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, but my Sherlock Holmes obsession keeps pulling me back in. I watched this one because I've heard plenty of good things about the Russian series starring Vasilij Livanov, and someone was decent enough to upload the film to YouTube. There are no English subtitles, but it's not like I need them. I've read the book and seen five other film versions, so I know the story like the back of my hand at this point.

It's not perfect. It's so long (about two and a half hours) that they had to break it up into two movie-length episodes, and it sticks way too close to the book. After seeing six versions of this story, I'm craving one that changes the identity of the killer or introduces new characters or something. Hell, I was craving that three versions ago. I don't know why every adaptation feels the need to follow the book like it's the f**king Bible. This one doesn't even take place in Russia. Why not at least change the setting to give the movie its own identity? Maybe the strict Victorian English class structure wouldn't have come across well in a communist country, but isn't that what adaptation is all about? I've read that the movie makes fun of British customs, but if that kind of humor exists here, it didn't really come across to me.

It's not bad at all, though. The actors are what make it worth watching. From the main characters to the most minor of secondary characters, everyone is excellent. The actors seem to have a passion for the material that gives the movie energy even when it's just a bunch of people sitting around talking. The production values are also terrific, much better than what you would expect from a Russian TV movie from 1981. It's like a Russian version of the Jeremy Brett series that started three years later: the stories stick too close to the source material but the actors and production values are superb. I'm now interested in seeing more of these Russian films to see if they ever branch out from the original stories like the Brett series occasionally did.

But seriously, no more Hounds. Why in the f**king hell are there over 20 film versions of this story? It's not even remotely the best Holmes story. I know that the general public tends to hype up certain stories that don't really deserve it...



...but this is ridiculous. Luckily, there hasn't been a film version since 2002, so apparently filmmakers have finally realized that the world doesn't need any more versions of this story. The BBC show Sherlock will be adapting it next year for Season 2, but based on what they did with Season 1, it'll probably be reinvented beyond recognition. Good. If the villain turns out to be the same f**king person, I'm going to send the BBC a box full of dog turds.

Highlander III: The Sorcerer (1994)

Also known as Highlander: The Final Dimension, also known as Highlander 3: The Final Conflict, also known as a complete waste of time. It's not as unrelentingly terrible as Highlander II, but at least that movie tried something new. Highlander III plays it safe by just copying the first movie. The plot is the same, right down to individual scenes, and Mario Van Peebles even copies the voice and mannerisms of the first movie's villain.

Once again we have a plot that contradicts and disrespects the first movie's ending, but that wouldn't be so bad if the acting or directing were any good. They're not, and the cheap production values make it feel like an episode of the TV show. I've now seen all six Highlander movies. I would recommend the first one to anyone, but the only sequel that isn't a complete embarrassment is the anime Highlander: The Search for Vengeance, and even that one is barely above average. The TV show sucks, too. Highlander is like The Matrix – it's best to completely ignore everything that came after.

Dracula (1973)

Today is Halloween, so what better movie to watch than another shitsucking version of Dracula that nobody asked for? This one's a TV movie starring Jack Palance. It was directed by a guy named Dan Curtis. He created a TV show that aired in the 60s and 70s called Dark Shadows. I've never seen it, and I never want to see any show that Wikipedia describes as a "gothic soap opera." It's apparently pretty popular, but so is Twilight, so forgive me for not trusting the general public on this one.

What was I expecting? A TV movie from 1973 to have acting worth a damn? Production values better than a typical episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood? A director willing to do anything at all stylistically interesting? There's just nothing going on here. It's all bland and routine. How do you f**k up the opening scenes in the castle? Dracula is supposed to have an imposing presence, but Palance's goofy villain in Batman was more intimidating than this. He seems bored and there's no life to his performance. Even Louis Jourdan's French Dracula from the 1977 movie Count Dracula was more threatening.

I've been giving up on a lot of movies lately, and I wanted to make it through this one, but I only lasted about 20 minutes. Everything was so bland and boring that I wasn't sure if I wanted to continue. I stopped the movie and looked up some reviews to see if critics thought it was any good. Who knows? Maybe it gets good in the second half. One of them mentioned that Lucy turns out to be the reincarnation of Dracula's lost love, and...

GODDAMNIT.

No, no, no, no, no. I'm not doing this again. I'm not watching another Dracula movie in which Lucy (or Mina) is the reincarnation of Dracula's lost love. Does every goddamned Dracula movie have to turn him into a romantic antihero? Can't villains just be evil? I'm sure this was a novel idea in 1973, but it would have pissed me off just as much back then as it does today. It utterly ruins the most threatening aspect of vampirism in the book: the fact that you're not who you used to be. You'll attack and kill anyone for blood, even someone you've known and loved for years. Why would anyone even consider an idea like this for more than five seconds before realizing how awful it is?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

There may only be three movie versions of The Thing, but there are certainly plenty of other movies about people being taken over by alien duplicates. There are four versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and I assume countless rip-offs) but the only one that I had seen until now is the 2007 movie The Invasion. It's not bad, but it's nothing you need to see. This one's better. The sound and music are the best thing about it. It's hard to describe, but this is one of the creepiest sounding movies I've ever seen. The actors are good, the effects are good, and it does a good job of ramping up the paranoia and tension. Thanks, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for not sucking like most of the crap I've been watching lately.

Who was in that version? I tend to mix up the various films, except the original of course.

Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, and Veronica Cartwright. I haven't seen the original with Kevin McCarthy, but I'll get around to it.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1981) Part 2 of 2

Same as before.

I feel like crap today.

Ah yes, the Donald Sutherland version. That's where they keep doing meth to stay awake, but the pod people catch them anyway. It's also the one where they 'howl'.

The Brute Man (1946)

There's a Sherlock Holmes movie from 1944 called The Pearl of Death, which featured a villain played by Rondo Hatton called the Creeper. Hatton suffered from acromegaly, the same pituitary disorder that Andre the Giant had. The Creeper was apparently so popular that Hatton got a couple of spin-off movies, House of Horrors and The Brute Man. He also showed up in The Spider Woman Strikes Back, which was another Holmes spin-off featuring the villain from The Spider Woman. He's technically playing different characters in these various movies, but it's sort of like Jason Statham playing different characters. You can change the names, but he's always the same guy.

His appearance in The Pearl of Death is kind of strange. I'm talking about the way he's portrayed, not what he looks like. He lurks in the shadows and every time a character gets a glimpse of his face, they act like it's the most horrifying thing they've ever seen. It makes the audience think, "Jesus, how revolting does this guy look?" We finally see him at the end of the movie when he confronts Holmes, and he just looks like Andre the Giant. Maybe it was more shocking in 1944, but it's kind of anti-climactic, especially since he just gets shot and killed before he even gets near Holmes. It's also funny that they wait so long to reveal his face and yet he's right there on the poster like he was just another actor in the movie. Which he was, really.

I watched the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of The Brute Man, because I need all the help I can get to make it through movies like this. I enjoyed The Pearl of Death, but I knew that The Brute Man wouldn't be up to that level. The 1940s Holmes films are often called b-movies, but they're more like "a minus" movies. Cheap but professional. The Brute Man is closer to what you expect from b-movies: bad acting, bad writing, and scene after scene of nothing really happening.

Hatton wasn't a bad silent villain in The Pearl of Death but he speaks in The Brute Man, and it's clear that he has no acting ability whatsoever, and the story doesn't even try to be plausible. At one point Hatton breaks into a girl's apartment, and he admits to her that he's being chased by police. He runs off, and when the police show up to look for him, she tells them she hasn't seen anyone and goes back to playing the piano like nothing happened. This is also one of those movies in which men in hats are angry at each other and yell for no reason because the filmmakers didn't know how to create genuine drama.

And of course, like every single movie ever made that involves someone with a (supposedly) hideous appearance, there's a blind person who treats him with kindness, because she doesn't judge people by their looks and she sees the inner beauty and all that BS. Oh, and Hatton gets shot twice in the abdomen and it apparently does no damage at all. Is he supposed to be superhuman, like Michael Myers? If that's the case, why is he easily tackled to the ground by a few cops? Did this movie even have a screenwriter, or did the director and actors just show up every day and improvise? The editor must have been pissed when they unloaded this footage on him.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary is good. I wouldn't have been able to stand this movie without it. Thanks to whoever keeps uploading this stuff to YouTube illegally. Breaking the law is cool. I think we can all agree on that. My personal favorite way of breaking the law is buying hookers and cocaine. I do it almost every night. It's the best!

Sincerely,
Charlie Sheen

Gamera vs. Zigra (1971)

The Gamera movies made before 1995 are so f**king horrible that I refuse to watch them without the Mystery Science Theater 3000 commentary, so that's the version of Gamera vs. Zigra that I watched. It's the same BS you get in almost every movie about the fire-breathing, fart-propelled giant turtle: aliens plan to conquer Earth with a monster, Gamera shows up to stop them, the most annoying children in the world yell "GAMERAAAAA!" about 75 times, it takes way too long to get to the giant monster battle, and when you get there, it's completely embarrassing. I don't know what the budgets were on these movies, but they all look like crap. Imagine what a Godzilla movie would be like if a little kid shot it on an iPhone in his back yard with puppets and hired his next door neighbor to dub the dialogue, and that's about what these pieces of sh*t are like. The worst and cheapest Godzilla movie I've seen was better than the best of the pre-1995 Gamera movies.

The Omega Man (1971)

Three movies have been officially based on Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend – The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price, The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend with Will Smith – and countless others have ripped it off. If the rip-offs count as adaptations, then Night of the Living Dead is easily the best of them. If rip-offs don't count, then it's hard for me to choose between The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man.

The Omega Man has more action and it's better at showing how isolation and loneliness destroys the main character's sanity, with him constantly having conversations with imaginary people and watching the same movie over and over again until he can quote every word of it, but The Last Man on Earth is more effective at creating a good horror atmosphere. The zombies in The Last Man on Earth are creepy, but they're pretty silly in The Omega Man. And no disrespect to Charlton Heston, but I'll take Vincent Price any day.

The only real problem with the movie is that it completely falls apart in the last 15 minutes. It's like they weren't even trying to have the scenes make any sense. Every 30 seconds I was asking nobody in particular, "Why did she do that?" or "Why is that happening?" And just to be nitpicky, the Christ imagery is pretty ridiculous. Heston's blood will supposedly be the salvation of mankind (GET IT?! LIKE JESUS!!) and he dies in a crucifixion pose after getting stabbed with a spear (GET IT?! LIKE JESUS!!).

Minor complaints aside, it's good. Better than the Will Smith version, that's for sure. Funny that the only movie to keep the book's title is the one that's least deserving of it.

Operation Double 007 (1967)

Imagine if Matt Damon's brother starred in a cheap rip-off of the Jason Bourne movies and the filmmakers convinced some of Matt's co-stars to be in it. That's pretty much what happened here. Operation Double 007 (also known as OK Connery and Operation Kid Brother) stars Neil Connery as the younger brother of England's best spy, as well as some Bond movie actors like Lois Maxwell, Bernard Lee, Adolfo Celi, and Anthony Dawson.

The most surprising name in the credits is Ennio Morricone. He's like the Samuel L. Jackson of composers; he'll do music for some of the best movies ever made but he'll also do crap like this and Exorcist II.

I've heard that this movie is supposed to be a parody of the Bond films, but I didn't recognize anything that was supposed to be funny. By 1967, the Bond films had sort of become a parody of themselves anyway, so it would probably be impossible to tell a parody apart from a serious knock-off. Most of the actors seem to have been (poorly) dubbed for no reason.

I've been cheating lately by watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 versions of movies, but their commentary keeps me from losing my sanity with movies like this. It's not as bad as Secret Agent Super Dragon, but that's not saying much.

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

I hadn't seen this movie in awhile, but watching The Omega Man made me want to see it again. A critic from Film Threat called it "the best Vincent Price movie ever made." I haven't seen enough Price movies to confirm this, but it's certainly the best of the ones I've seen. "Subtlety" isn't a word that usually comes to mind when you think of Price, but this is the best acting I've ever seen from him. I love the scene in which he watches some old home movies and starts to laugh at them, and the laugh slowly turns into a sob.

This movie also has a genuinely creepy moment, which is rare for any movie, let alone one made in 1964, when Price's zombified wife returns to their house after he buries her and you hear her outside whispering, "Let meeeee in. Let meeeee in. Let meeeee in." It sort of fizzles out at the end, but not as badly as The Omega Man, and not as f**king horribly as I Am Legend. This movie was ripped off four years later with Night of the Living Dead, and the rip-off managed to knock the rip-ee (?) out of the water, but The Last Man on Earth still kicks ass.

This is the end of Week 4, I think. I don't know. I've lost track of when the weeks begin and end. Anyway. Recap. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1981) Part 1 of 2, Highlander III: The Sorcerer (1994), Dracula (1973), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1981) Part 2 of 2, The Brute Man (1946), Gamera vs. Zigra (1971), The Omega Man (1971), Operation Double 007 (1967), The Last Man on Earth (1964)

Ripley's Game (2002)

In his review of Ripley's Game, Roger Ebert wrote, "John Malkovich is precisely the Tom Ripley I imagine when I read the novels." I wonder if Mr. Bean is precisely the James Bond he imagines when he reads those books, because it makes roughly the same amount of sense. Malkovich is no more the Tom Ripley of the books than the bastardized version played by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Tom in the novels may be a con man and occasional killer, but he's also a genuinely polite and likable person who dislikes violence and considers it a last resort. Tom in this film is a prick who I would cross the street to avoid, a condescending bastard who always has a look of contempt on his face, a total psychopath who at one point threatens to kill everyone on a passenger train if his watch breaks. The Tom of the novels would find this guy repulsive.

But on its own terms, the movie is decent. Malkovich may be playing Hannibal Lecter instead of Tom Ripley, but he's very good at it, and none of the other actors are bad. It's well directed, the Ennio Morricone music is good, and it's got a good balance of seriousness and humor. It's an entertaining couple of hours, better than most crime dramas being made today.

It's just disappointing compared to The American Friend, which was based on the same book. Dennis Hopper was a much better Ripley, Bruno Ganz was certainly better than Dougray Scott, and the earlier movie has a terrific style and atmosphere that Ripley's Game lacks entirely. The only improvement in the remake is Ray Winstone, who has more fun with his part than Gerard Blain ever did. The remake has a lot of good scenes, particularly the one in which multiple mob hits are carried out in secret on a moving train, but again, the first movie did it better.