If there’s a more deserving fellow to wish a very Happy Birthday to today, I can’t think of him.  Actor/director/producer/author Bruce Campbell, born 52 years ago today, is a real pro, a Hollywood survivor and one of the most delightful onscreen personalities around today.  I just finished watching his 2008 feature (as director and star) My Name is Bruce — really, just now, on Netflix streaming, it’s beautiful! — and his spoof on his own image, that of a cowardly, horn-dog, B-Movie actor, is hilarious.  Though I looked on Rotten Tomatoes and it only has a 38% rating, there are plenty of laughs and I highly recommend it.  Even better, there’s a lot of talk in the movie about it being Bruce Campbell’s birthday, so it’s perfect viewing material for today! 

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After recently reading and writing about Peter H. Brothers’ book Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men: The Fantastic Cinema of Ishiro Honda, I was motivated to watch one of Honda’s lesser-known films that I hadn’t had the opportunity to see yet, Dogora (1964). I’m not sure how I managed to overlook this little gem involving a giant jellyfish from space with an appetite for diamonds but I’m glad that I finally caught up with it on DVD. It’s undoubtedly one of the oddest monster movies produced by Toho Studios in the ’60s and it has quickly become one of my favorite Ishiro Honda films.

Dogora or Dagora, the Space Monster stars the Japanese actor Yosuke Natsuki (Yojimbo; 1961, Chushingura: 47 Samurai; 1962, Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster; 1964, etc.) as a detective named Komai who is investigating a rash of strange diamond thefts plaguing Tokyo. He enlists the help of an aging scientist (Nobuo Nakamura), his female assistant (Yoko Fujiyama) and an American G-Man named Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham) but things take a strange turn when it’s discovered that creatures from outer space are responsible for many of the thefts. The monsters apparently feed on carbon-based matter and they soon begin to inhale Tokyo’s coal supply while causing massive destruction throughout the city. Naturally the military fights back but these bizarre events don’t slow down a group of jewel thieves who are desperate to get their hands on some diamonds. Detective Komai is forced to do battle with organized criminals as well as space monsters in this entertaining and unusual movie.

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Some films start out with the best intentions but due to budget cuts, editing, crew conflicts, miscasting and other factors, the final product ends up being much less than the sum of its parts. Over time the good intentions of all who were originally involved in the film are forgotten and we’re left with the remnants of what could have been a great movie full of unrealized potential and untapped possibility. The Navy vs. The Night Monsters (1966) is a movie that should have been better than it is.

This low-budget science fiction thriller began life as a novel called The Monster from Earth’s End written by the award-wining author Murray Leinster (aka William F. Jenkins). The story revolves around an expedition in Antarctica where some strange tree specimens are found and shipped to an isolated US Naval base. Soon afterward the trees begin to kill anyone who has the misfortune of coming into contact with them. As the film develops it becomes clear that these monstrous trees have the ability to destroy the world but the US Navy is determined to stop them.

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“The director who, hands down, helped me the most was George Cukor. He didn’t just help me do better in the films he directed me in, but he helped me be me. His words stayed with me always, so he was actually directing me later when I did films with lesser directors, and everyone was a lesser director compared to Mr. Cukor. I heard his words in my head, even words he never said, but which I thought he would have said…He had a profound effect on me.  If I could have selected a man to be my father, he would have been George Cukor.” ~ Joan Crawford

On Saturday, April 24th at 3:30 PM at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, the audience at the TCM Classic Film Festival will have an opportunity to see director George Cukor’s effect on Joan Crawford when A Woman’s Face (1941) is introduced by Illeana Douglas, the granddaughter of Melvyn Douglas, and Casey LaLonde, the grandson of Joan Crawford. For those of us who won’t be able to make it that day, this movie may still be worth exploring on DVD and whenever it appears on the TCM schedule.

Seeing A Woman’s Face (1941) for the first time a few years ago made me realize all over again why Joan Crawford was–like her or not–more than a movie star: She could act. The actress cited this film as one of the performances that ultimately helped her to earn an Oscar as Best Actress later in this decade for Mildred Pierce (1945). A Woman’s Face may be her among her best films. It deserves a bigger audience.

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Ever wonder if the universe might be sending you a secret message? I’m not one to read tea-leaves or Tarot cards, but sometimes think numerology can be fun. So today I woke up wondering if there could be any significance to it being the first day of the eleventh month of the year. Taking a cue from the popular internet meme that asks people to turn to a specific page in the book nearest them to share an excerpt, I decided to see what films the cosmos might be suggesting I add to my Netflix account by pulling down from my bookshelf all the film books I had that I figured would have plenty of poster art. Then I counted the stack. I’m not making this up: there were exactly eleven books! I was off to a good start. How to proceed? Since it’s the first day of the eleventh month of the year I went to page 11, and from there let my finger fall on the very first film image that followed. With that in mind, I now dedicate the following eleven films to the month of November: READ MORE

As TCM winds down a month featuring one of the greatest character actors who ever stole a picture, (Claude Rains, the September Star of the Month),  my appetite for  character actors in the spotlight has been whetted. Partly in response to repeated requests from those interested readers who frequent these pages, I thought a deserving glimpse of more supporting players might enliven the month of October. Each week this month, I’ll focus one of those actors who may not have been the stars of the show, but whose work invariably stood out from the crowd of “5000 others”. This week, I thought I’d tip my hat toward at least one of the gifted Russian émigrés who trained at the Moscow Art Theatre.

Maria Ouspenskaya, whose talent came out of that creative seedbed for some of the finest actors and boldest hams, stands out among them, despite being under five feet tall. Many of her colleagues lent their credibility and indelible gifts to Hollywood, but she may be the most readily identifiable of the bunch. While hightailing it away from the Cossacks, the Whites, the Reds, the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, the anarchists and the fascists who made life a bit too “interesting” in the first half of the 20th century from Siberia to the shores of Ellis Island, several of these actors found a pretty fair living in Hollywood, among them Akim Tamiroff, Olga Baclanova, Vladimir Sokoloff, Leonid Kinskey and Konstantin Shayne. They may never have felt completely at home in what sometimes seemed the Babylonian splendor of “barbaric” American culture in the studio era. Cut off from their cultural roots and often having lost their families and nearly their lives during the revolutionary times they lived in, these actors often proved their strength of character and professional versatility when asked to play characters of almost every class and ethnicity in American movies.

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I really should be talking about Summer Storm, a rare Douglas Sirk film from 1944 that only has one small capsule review to represent it on IMDB. Instead, I feel like weighing in on District 9 which, as of this writing, already has 121 film critic posts, close to 400 customer reviews, and God knows how much else out there amassing itself to the IMDB ballyhoo. Adding to the craziness is the fact that you can’t have a party this size without breaking some chairs and tipping some bikes. Not that brawling film geeks can quite summon forth the fury of Altamont, but I still have to admit to being a tad bit mesmerized by it all. READ MORE

Set your home-viewing systems for 9:45 am on March 13 (Friday the 13th) because one of my favorite movies from childhood is showing on TCM. This little comedy features one the best one-word titles in all of film history simply because it is fun to say — Zotz!

This comedy-fantasy stars Tom Poston, television actor par excellence, as Professor Jonathan Jones who comes into possession of “zotz,” a coin that has three magical properties. If the coin’s owner points an accusatory finger at an intended victim, the coin causes intense pain; another command causes everything to move in slow motion; finally, if the accusatory finger and the command are used simultaneously, the victim dies. Released in 1962 during the height of the Cold War, Zotz! is an obvious product of the times. Professor Jones tries to involve the Department of Defense in his discovery, but they think he is a madman. Then Communist agents plot to get possession of the coin from Professor Jones.

I was surprised to discover that promotion king William Castle codirected Zotz!, because with its wacky naïve professors, crazy antics, and bureaucratic government officials, this kids-oriented movie is more like The Absent-Minded Professor or Son of Flubber than Castle’s usual schlocky horror-film fare, such as 13 Ghosts, The Tingler, or Macabre. As a matter of fact, both Absent-Minded and Flubber follow Zotz! on the TCM schedule on March 13. But, Zotz! does share something with Castle’s other films — a gimmick, albeit a little one. During the initial theatrical run, the movie’s patrons were rewarded with a plastic replica of the Zotz! coin. According to the Internet (now, there’s a reliable source), the Zotz! coins are highly sought after by collectors. Well, eat your hearts out sci-fi buffs, because I own a Zotz! coin. A gold-colored hunk of hard plastic with a zany design on the front, the coin is one of my prized possessions.

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The Norwegian horror film about Nazi Zombies, Dead Snow, had it’s U.S. premiere at Sundance. I always try to make at least one midnight screening at Park City’s Egyptian theater so as to be able to tap into the rowdy revelry of the late-show crowd, and the filmmakers for Dead Snow knew how to pack ‘em in. According to staff this sold-out screening was their busiest one in five years. Small wonder… the viral marketing for Dead Snow was so successful that I’d gotten three different trailers forwarded to me by friends who didn’t even know I was at Sundance. The filmmakers also know how to have fun with their screening in a way that would make William Castle proud; they had two guys dressed up as Nazi zombies playing to the ticket holders and, later, the crowd inside. The film was preceded by Treevenge, a disturbing and amusing Canadian short film about killer Christmas trees. READ MORE