Amanda's (1983)

Amanda's is the short-lived 1983 sitcom starring Bea Arthur that came between her 1970s success as Maude and her 1980s success as Dorothy Zbornak in The Golden Girls. The show is based on the British comedy Fawlty Towers starring John Cleese and centered around the owner and staff of a seaside hotel. Not one of the 13 episodes filmed (all available on YouTube) is particularly funny but if you are a Bea completist, it's worth checking out.

Episode 1

Episode 2

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Plague (2014)

Plague is not The Walking Dead or a Romero type zombie film. It's more about the disintegration of a marriage due to the circumstances of the unidentified (but zombie-creating) bacteria. The acting is decent and the script well-formed so if you're into a (Harold) Pinter-esque take on the zombie apocalypse then Plague is for you.

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Billy Club (2013)

Billy Club is not earth-shatteringly bad or resoundingly refined. It's a typical revenge slasher film with a denouement I've seen before. It wasn't badly filmed, kept my attention (especially the truck kissing scene with writer/director/actor Nick Sommer) and had a premise about bullying but that's all I got.

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Scourge (2008)

Scourge doesn't trod any new ground but it's decently involving and the titular corrigia, created using CGI, was well-done. For this type of B-movie the script could've been worse and the acting was decent; when the femme lead was fighting the corrigia she actually looked like she was fighting the corrigia - in spite of the fact that she was fighting nothing. It might've been better had the movie answered some of the questions asked by the characters themselves regarding the corrigia (which means shoelace while scourge means whip) but you can't have it all.

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Fedora (1978)

After watching Fedora I have no feeling that the title character, a famously reclusive movie star, had anything special because director Billy Wilder miscast the pivotal role - the film's downfall. The story is intriguing (and thematically ripe for a remake starring Renée Zellweger!) but I thank author Tom Tryon for that because the whole presentation feels like a B movie. It was interesting to see Stephen Collins (yes THAT Stephen Collins) play a young William Holden but Marthe Keller is just wooden and Hildegarde Knef is no Gloria Swanson ... or Greta Garbo.

Watch Fedora on YouTube now

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The Crowded Sky (1960)

In The Crowded Sky (based on the best-selling novel) every woman is a self-described tramp (except Hollis Irving as the virginal dog) and every man has a non-sexual flaw (except Keenan Wynn as the lothario). All of these peccadilloes are revealed in the first 90 minutes of the film which is followed by an exciting mid-air plane crash and its consequences. The crowd is populated by Rhonda Fleming, Anne Francis, Patsy Kelly, Troy Donahue, John Kerr, Dana Andrews and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (the latter two switching the pilot roles they played 15 years later in Airport 1975) but too many flashbacks and voiceovers make this precursor to the disaster films of the 70s unintentionally funny until the nicely filmed denouement.

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The Uninvited (1944)

1944's supernatural tale The Uninvited isn't the most horrifying ghost story but it does have the following things going for it:

• Charles Lang's Oscar-nominated cinematography
• Gail Russell's performance as Stella By Starlight (the pop standard based on the movie's theme)
• a story that engrosses up to the somewhat unexpected denouement
• a hint of mid-40s lesbianism offered up by Cornelia Otis Skinner

With Russell, Skinner and Ruth Hussey, Ray Milland comes off even more bland than usual, and frankly a little ridiculous. Fortunately though, we can watch Russell as she takes over the screen with her bedroom eyes, full lips and hauntingly delicate performance - 17 years before she died from alcoholism at the age of 36.

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A Taste Of Evil (1971)

If you're a Stanny fanny you could do worse than watching her give us A Taste Of Evil in this 1971 thriller from the ABC Movie Of The Week cannon, produced by Aaron Spelling. Not many TV movies start with the rape of a young girl but leave it to Barbara Stanwyck to notch up the evil even further as the cold matriarch Miriam Jennings. Barbara Parkins, Roddy MacDowell, William Windom and Arthur O'Connell join in the fun; yea, it's not that scary or thrilling but Stanwyck makes it fun.

Watch it now on YouTube

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Sugar Hill (1974)

Marki Bey sizzles the celluloid (bits?) as Sugar Hill in this 1974 voodoo-zombie-revenge thriller that reminded me of the structure of the female revenge thriller I Spit On Your Grave. And, of course, there's Zara Cully as Mama Matrisse the voodoo queen - a few years before hitting the big time as Mother Jefferson in the iconic television series. It's not bloody because the zombies are not the flesh-eating kind; that said, the zombies look kind of ridiculous but the movie is fun and well-acted and you might recognize a few other actors before they became more prominent in Hollywood pictures.

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The Conjuring (2013)

The Conjuring is an intriguing and (somewhat) engrossing take on demons and exorcism. The film makers did their home work in one respect because there are bits and pieces of every demonic possession movie I've ever seen integrated into this story. In another respect no homework was done: being a pastiche, the threads in the story should be invisible, not black.

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Coma (2012)

There was no reason to remake the 1978 movie of the 1977 book Coma because, though a groundbreaking theme in the 70s, torture porn has pretty much made organ theft a mundane topic. This mundanity, a pedestrian script and some (less than ground-breaking) CGI leave you nothing but Ellen Burstyn claiming These are mah babies. This one's Chinese. And this one is a mulatto. And although her part is a supporting role, it is ALWAYS a pleasure to watch Ellen Burstyn.

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Bonnie and Clyde (2013)

In the darkness of the first scenes of Bonnie and Clyde: Dead And Alive, the 2013 uninvolving and long television tale, I thought Clyde's mom was played by Mare Winningham. In the later, brighter scenes I saw it was Dale Dickey whom I had never seen before. After almost four hours, that's all I got.

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Thirteen Women (1932)

Thirteen Women (showing on WatchTCM this week) at its heart is a film about bullying in a girl's school and Irene Dunne is the bully! Myrna Loy and Peg Entwistle (who infamously jumped to her death from the Hollywood sign shortly after filming this, her only film) are some of the women in the cast (which never quite reaches 13). It's an interesting artifact to watch (and somewhat prescient) although it felt much longer than it's 59 minutes.

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Alien Trespass (2009)

It's amazing that some one somewhere found the 1957 presumed-destroyed film Alien Trespass and was able to release it in 2009. This pastiche of every 50s science fiction B movie you might have seen before it has not much more than that premise except a charming performance by Eric McCormack ... and color film! The movie is prepended with the newsreel that had been placed before it in 1957 which, coupled with Robert Patrick, gives the whole thing a family feel - although I'm not sure why.

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The Flapper (1920) and Olive Thomas

I have no idea why this film is called The Flapper because it has no flappers (or flapper dresses); in fact, it was made in 1920 before the term was even used on a regular basis. At the most, star Olive Thomas (a one-time Vargas and Ziegfeld girl) attempts to vamp her man as she acts like (and wears a dress similar to the one) Theda Bara wore in A Fool There Was. The story is a piffle about a teenager from a girl's school, the adult she finds exciting (silent child sex?) and a robbery, but it is fascinating to see Thomas whose death (from accidental poisoning shortly after this film was made) was the first of the Hollywood tragedies to be sensationalized by the media - which ultimately lead to the enactment of the Production Code.

See The Flapper in its entirety

See my Pinterest page for a slew of
pictures of Olive from throughout her life and career.

Olive Thomas in Love's Prisoner - unfortunately incomplete -
ends with a title card explaining the missing footage.

This episode of Beatrice Fairfax is Olive Thomas's first screen role.

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The Dolly Sisters (1945)

The Dolly Sisters starring Betty Grable and June Haver is 20th Century Fox's 1945 musical biography about the titular vaudeville performers from the turn of the 20th century. Although the music and dancing are enjoyable, the lack of any story on which to hang these musical numbers is clearly evident (although sometimes it plays like For Me And My Gal with a second gal added). Vaudeville performer Harry Fox (played by John Payne) is also part of the story (or lack thereof) as is a song performed by the sisters in blackface; the former I get, the latter I don't.

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Hedy Lamarr as a Nymphomaniac

Dishonored Lady is a 1947 potboiler in which the ravishing, patent-owning Hedy Lamarr, without so much as uttering the word, plays a nymphomaniac who seeks the help of a psychiatrist. Although timely in its themes (for example, Lamarr works in a man's job), the public domain movie plays out as one might expect from post-code Hollywood: love and marriage and murder (not in that order). The final scene almost plagiarizes the final scene of Casablanca - interesting considering the producers of the 1936 Joan Crawford vehicle Letty Lynton were convicted of plagiarizing the play version of Dishonored Lady causing the Crawford film to be pulled from circulation to this date.

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A 1956 Music Video by Gower Champion!?

While perusing the public domain site archive.org, I happened upon Once Upon A Honeymoon a fifteen minute music video directed by Gower Champion. À la Michael Jackson's Thriller, this video is a complete story about recently married (m)ad man Ward Ellis who works too much so has never had a honeymoon; Virginia Gibson is a standout as his lovely wife and the premier vocalist of the video's song, A Castle in the Sky. A few solid character actors (Chick Chandler, Alan Mowbray and a small yet pivotal turn from Leo G. Carroll) round out the cast in this lost (and now found) infomercial from the 1950s.

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Haunts of the Very Rich (1972)

Haunts of the Very Rich is one of the myriad Aaron Spelling productions aired as an ABC Movie Of The Week during the 1970s. This story of disparate people that find themselves questioning their lives and choices in a garden of Eden (actually Vizcaya in Miami, Florida) is interesting both for its uniformly good cast (Lloyd Bridges, Cloris Leachman, Edward Asner, Anne Francis, Tony Bill, Donna Mills, Moses Gunn, Robert Reed) and its denouement which may or may not be what it may or may not purport to tell. I've watched it a few times (on YouTube) and still can't figure out what's going on so that must count for something.

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Ted (2012)

If you can imagine a comedy in which overused 80s references masquerade as jokes, a romance in which Mila Kunis and Mark Wahlberg have no chemistry and a script which doesn't recognize that its story has two magical wishes (not one), you can imagine Ted, Seth McFarlane's attempt at something. If you can imagine characters having less substance than a teddy bear filled with cotton, Ryan Reynolds and Patrick Warburton as a gay couple and Norah Jones fucking, you can imagine Ted, Seth McFarlane's attempt at something. If you can imagine all this, you've got the most notable aspects of Ted, Seth McFarlane's attempt at ... oh, a first movie.

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