The Amazing Transparent Man

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

Written by Jack Lewis

Starring: Douglas Kennedy
James Griffith
Ivan Triesault
Margurite Chapman

A former US Army Major arranges the prison break of a notorious safecracker. His need of the safecracker? He is to steal nuclear materials the Major needs, while invisible. The major has forced a scientist to build an invisibility machine and the materials are needed for it.

The Major’s need for an invisibility machine? To conqueror the world with invisible soldiers.

If that brief write-up of the movie seems off and non-seneschal to you, it should. If it doesn’t tell you enough about the film, your right.

Problem is, it makes more sense than the movie does.

The Amazing Transparent man is NOT a gem of ‘60’s sci-fi b-movies. In fact it is an argument against them.

With poor production values, a shoddy script, brilliant overacting and less than an hour running time, this barely qualifies as a film. A least a feature film.

The film left me with some serious question:

Who hires a crook and expects them to do as told?

How does someone control an army of soldiers he can’t see?

Did the producers use the invisibility machine to turn part of the script invisible? You know, the parts with the plot and story?



FINAL THOUGHTS:
The Amazing Transparent Movie!

RATING: 4

The Neanderthal Man

Directed by Ewald Andre Dupont
Written by Aubrey Wisberg
Jack Pollexfen

Starring Robert Shane
Joyce Terry
Richard Crane
Doris Merrick

A hunter claims to have seen a creature that resembles a Saber tooth tiger. The local Game Warden and a scientist investigate only to learn that the Saber Tooth tiger is real and that a local scientist has developed a formula that causes animals and humans to devolve, and turns himself into The Neanderthal Man!





If this movie had been made in 1963 (instead of 1953), I would say it was Way Out, Man. And that would be the best thing I could say.

‘Bummer,’ would be something else.

This is not a film that really goes anywhere. It is basically a creature feature that takes too long to show us the creature, and barely ranks as a feature. The running time is an hour and ten minutes.

The acting, scripting, directing and production values all have something in coming with the Neanderthal Man character . . . they devolved into something primitive. Well, honestly, they may have started out primitive and devolved from there.

Somehow I sat through this entire picture . . .

FINAL THOUGHTS
Not worth watching.

RATING: 2

The Brain That Wouldn't Die

Directed, Screenplay by Joseph Green

Original Story by: Rex Carlton and Joseph Green

Starring: Herb Evers
          Virginia Leith
        Leslie Daniels

‘Let me die . . . Let me Die,’ a female voice begs before the opening credits even roll on this claimed-to-be sci-fi classic.

A surgeon tires of losing patients by doing everything ‘in the books.’ He wants to do more, experimenting with immoral, unethical and thought-to-be-impossible procedures and transplants.

When his girlfriend is fatally injured in a car accident, he is able to save her decapitated head and bring her brain back to the living. Keeping her brain alive he searches for a suitable body to transplant her head onto. Not only to save his girlfriend, but to prove his ideas right.

A lot of people have great things to say about this film, some of them may be right.

For a low budget 1962 affair, the production values are very good. It is a very well made and directed film. The script is more inventive then it is good, somewhat lacking at times in depth and characterization.

The script feels more like a starting point, then a finished piece. It doesn’t really serve Evers and Leith that well. The story feels more like a concept then a fleshed out completed piece. The characterization isn’t as deep or complex enough for Evers as it should be, with his character being more of a stock ‘Mad Scientist.’ Other characters are more one-dimensional, mostly throw-away and barely in the film.

It is not that the script is bad, just average and needed some work.

The highlight of this film for me is Virginia Leith’s performance. For the majority of the film we only see her head on a table, after all she was killed early on. Leith had no use of her body, drastically limited mobility, and could only uses her facial expressions for her performance.

With these limitations put on her she does a very fine job of portraying a character who at first begs for death and then descends into madness and lust for vengeance and develops mental powers.

The biggest drawback with the film is its similarities to The Brain, released around the same time, and Donovan’s Brain, released a few years earlier and based upon the Clifford Sidomak Novel.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Is this a sci-fi classic? Not really. In the end it is an underwhelmingly average movie that doesn’t quite get to the level it should have.

RATING: 5.5

The Love of Jeanne Ney

The Love of Jeanne Ney

Director: G.W. Pabst

Starring: Edith Jehanne, Brigitte Helm

The Love of Jeanne Ney is another film from the German Silent era, by G.W. Pabst.

Jeanne Ney is a French woman who returns to France after her father is killed while being a political observer in Crimea (Russia), post-World War I. While in France she works for her uncle, is excited when the Bolshevik she loves comes to France and seeks her out, and her blind cousin gets involved with a scoundrel.

The sad part about this movie, is what I just wrote makes much more sense than the movie.

The script is all over the place, with many things happening at uneven pacing. There is no clear plot, theme, story or subplot. This is not an experimental or esoteric film, it is presented as a linear narrative, just not a good one.

What is going on in this film is never quite clear. What is also muddled is if Jeanne knows the man she loves killed her father. I say yes, which makes things more confusing.

The filming and style of the movie is solid. The acting is passable, with only Brigitte Helm delivering any real quality.

G.W. Pabst fails to make a compelling film with Jeanne Ney, instead allowing the film to fall into the darkness of the noir he tried to invoke.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Thoughts hurt here.

RATING: 4.5

Diary of a Lost Girl

Directed by G.W. Pabst
Screenplay by Rudolf Leonhardt
From the Novel by Margarethe Bohme
Starring Louise Brooks

Dairy of a Lost Girl is an odd film. A silent film out of the great German silent era, it is supposed to be a drama about Thymain Henning, a young women struggling to make her way in life after being disowned by her Pharmacist father. However, there are elements in the film that take away from the drama and drag the film down.

The strong point of this film is the characters, at least they are defined and strong.


Overall though the script and story are thin, barely enough to carry a film of 113 minutes in length. After the character of Thymain (Louise Brooks) has a child out of wedlock and is disowned by her father, she is sent to a reformatory.

It is this thirty minute chunk at the reformatory that the film isn’t just lost, but destroyed. The acting is overwrought and terrible, everything is robotic and monotonous and it slows down the pacing and plot of an otherwise already slow drama.

I get what Pabst was going for – to show reformatories as stifling in nature – but it could have been done a lot better.

Dairy of a Lost Girl never recovers from this point on, in fact it seems to try too hard to get to the end.

Pabst employs a number of different techniques to this film, but none seem to work. Indeed there are moments that seem like they were intended to be comedic, but fall flat and are out of place.

Dairy of a Lost Girl has a lot in common with its main character: Lost, unsure of itself and at best hoping to be a good film.

FINAL THOUGHTS
This is supposed to be a classic of the German Silent era (my favorite era in film), but isn’t. It doesn’t rank against the best of that era, and by itself it is barely average at best.

RATING: 5

HELLRAISER

The First time I watched HellRaiser was 1994/95. I watched it for three reasons.

• I had always heard how awesome of a movie it was.
• I was, and am, a big Andrew Robinson fan due to his work as Garrick on Star Trek Deep Space Nine.
• I wanted to see it.

I remember not liking the movie. I had not watched it since, nor seen any of the sequels. Over this past Halloween I decided to give HellRaiser a second chance, in fact I planned on watching all the movies over a few days.

I have written this before, and am sure I will again: BAD MOVE. BIG MISTAKE.

A lot of people are not going to like this!

I remembered very quickly why I didn’t like the film the first time. Not just didn’t like, hated. In fact, I didn’t then, and still don’t today, understand why it I held up in such high esteem.

Hellraiser is just not very good. It is a very amateurish looking film. It has poor acting, bad pacing and non-existence characterization. The script is very lacking and Clive Barker’s direction is nowhere to be found.

Yes, there is some decent effects and nice gore value (for the ‘80’s), but those do not a film make. Not even a horror film.

I know the argument that this is existential horror. Nope. Doesn’t fly. Surreal, maybe. Existential. No.

To be blunt, HellRiaser is a piss poor, amateurish, badly made film.

• Bad Acting
• Bad Characterization
• Bad Directing
• Bad Filming
• Bad Movie
• Unwatchable

FINAL THOUGHTS:
HellRaiser puts the ‘Horr’ in Horrible.

RATING: HELL

THE KEEP

Is the Keep an actual movie? I’m serious on this question. From what I understand the movie was never actually finished, at least not to director’s Michael Mann’s satisfaction. There are at least three different versions out there of varying length and different scenes.

I have only recently watched the Keep, in what I found out was the studio cut 96-minute version . . . something which is almost unreviewable.

Because of the troubled history of this film, multiple reshoots, FX Supervisor dying during production and talk of Michael Mann constantly changing his mind, it is hard to really review this film with taking them into consideration.

I will try though.

The 96-minute cut of the film is not very good. This cut seems unfinished and as if half the movie is missing, and indeed that might be true. Mann’s original cut was reportedly 210 minutes long – with another cut being 120 minutes.

This 96-minute cut was apparently done by the studio without Mann’s involvement, so the poor editing and presentation can’t be solely credited to Mann. However, what is in the scenes can be.

The 96 minute cut is a glimpse of what could have been, and what is. The ‘what is’ part tells us certain things: such as poor editing, poor direction, lackluster acting and mediocre script. It is more of a template for a longer film, then a film itself.

Indeed, the 96 minute cut feels like outtakes cobbled together to make a film.

There could be a good film in here somewhere. There might actually be a film in here somewhere. I am interested in one day seeing the longer cuts, but am not sure if that is a good idea.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Only if you have nothing better to do.

RATING: BARELY A FILM