Reviews

Disappointing biopic of a legendary actor. How could Chaney's life translate into such a generally dull movie? Way too much emphasis on boring aspects of his personal life and not enough time devoted to what it took to create Chaney's landmark, classic movies. More behind-the-scenes looks at the making of and business aspects of silent pictures would also have been appreciated.

Cagney seemed miscast, both by appearance and acting ability. He was also hampered by makeup that fell far short (in some scenes) of the masterworks created by Chaney. The laughable Hunchback imitation reminded my of the makeup in "I was a Teenage Frankenstein." To be fair, the script gave Cagney limited opportunity to delve into the psychology of the "Man of a Thousand Faces." Some scenes were sadly lacking in closeups, significantly reducing the impact of the drama/horror depicted.

Too bad this picture weren't made around 1940 at the height of Lon Jr.'s prowess as an actor. Not only did he look more like his dad, but he had the skill to mimic the tragic nature of many of Sr.'s roles and personal life. He may have had a greater insight into his dad's personality. From what I've read, Chaney Jr. also had a wider range of acting ability than is generally known since many of his (especially later) movies didn't give him the chance to showcase his abilities (that's in addition to Chaney's alcoholism hampering his abilities).

Family (dad, mom, four boys) heading for Australia from England during the early part of the 19th century are shipwrecked on an island in the south Pacific and do their best to survive. Concentrate on Thomas Mitchell's usual fine performance and less on the 1940 vintage special effects, and very poor print quality (typically available) and there is some entertainment to be had of here. The lush "island" surroundings would have been enhanced by filming in color...but I have a suspicion this was not a very big budget picture and it would have been more obvious how many of the scenes were filmed on a sound stage in front of a rear projection screen. Even the island looks like a matte painting. Don't look for bedraggled, miserable Robinson Crusoes either, for generally, the Swiss Family have most of the comforts of an Andy Hardy home...so much for hokey 1930's family film realism.

If you think its funny watching a lot of pop-eyed mugging by the Ritz Brothers, see the Gorilla. If you enjoy the raspy screeching of Patsy Kelly, and watching Bela Lugosi with little to do but make faces at the behavior of his fellow "stars," by all means see the Gorilla. I like Lugosi, but found this film to be quite annoying and boring simultaneously. Why the Ritz Brothers only made a few other films is no mystery to me. The master for the DVD I purchased had excellent picture and sound quality...probably because it had been screened so few times since 1939. Spend the time you would have wasted screening the Gorilla watching Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, even Abbott & Costello...if you want to see talent.

Bela and Jerry Lewis clone Sammy make this oddity worth watching at least once. This film was made for DVD...so you can rapidly forward through some boring romantic scenes. Amazingly this silly film sort of grows on you like a fungus with multiple viewings; somehow it is goofy-innocent in all its dumb or dumber glory. "Gorilla" kind of reminded me of Lugosi's early 1940's hammy Monogram films despite the lack of musical numbers in the earlier films; not that anyone needs Duke Mitchell's singing (which reminded me of Elvis with a chest cold). This is one of the few non-European films of Lugosi's I had never seen, so it was a fresh experience. The DVD I bought had amazing picture clarity and sound quality; just the opposite of what is usually released at $6.99. Still, without Lugosi, the "Gorilla" probably would have decomposed in its film can long ago, and I'll admit the film is primarily of interest to bad film fans.

Marvelous set design almost makes-up for tedious plot and super 1930's-style sentimentality. Not enough Stan and Ollie for my taste, and too many dull musical numbers and much padding with what should have been the lesser characters. The boys seem secondary again, as occured with their several operetta movies. The razor thin story of the lecherous Barnaby trying to steal-away Bo-Peep from the virginal TomTom made me thank-goodness for the fast-forward ability of the DVD format!

The film is really more of a fantasy than a comedy, so don't expect much L & H fun-making. I fail to see the child-like charm of some of the scenes: there are some ugly scenes of equally ugly Bogeymen writhing with pain as they run about with several darts hanging from their bodies, and Barnaby looks like a pervert and molester as he clutches the barely legal(?)screaming BoPeep.

Amazingly, I think the colorized and digitally restored version enhanced the the viewing experience for a film that should have been filmed in color in the first place(I don't praise colorization lightly; normally I despise it).

All these comment come from a big fan of the boys...sorry they were so wasted in some of their later films.

I've tried watching this movie three times, and can never get all the way through it. Big Top Pee Wee is as bad as Pee Wee's Big Adventure was good. Other than some imaginative effects, Pee Wee looks like he fell out of the sky and landed in this movie. I think Bill Murray would have been better cast in a movie with this plotline, especially in the scenes where Pee Wee is acting like a dog in heat. Murray would make a convicing "hayseed" and slob on a farm. Reubens seems to strain in his attempt to make something of the unfunny material he's given...the characters around him are generally unfunny as well. How anyone came up with this farm, then circus plotline is beyond me. The film is generally devoid of laughs. An overall waste of the Pee Wee Herman character and one of the worst "comedies" I've ever seen.

The Lost World is typical juvenile Irwin Allen in the same realm as Lost in Space...but the Lost World doesn't have Dr. Smith! We have all the cookie-cutter plot elements you see in countless other films: the love triangle, the cranky professor types, the naysayers who say something can't be done, the cheap monsters effects, ad nauseum. The paper thin plot concerns an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon by a professor who claims there could be dinosaurs found there. An expedition is financed and staffed by a bunch of stereotypes. They find dinosaurs, 1940's serial-style cave people, the plateau blows up, they flee, the end.

Way too much time is spent on the boring love interest plot...probably as a way to pad the running time and avoid costly special effects and use of additional sets. A couple of pet store lizards are modified to look only vaguely like dinosaurs. The script is banal and performances are lackluster except for the florid Professor Challenger (Claude Rains) and the twitchy, sneaky Jay Novello.

This film seemed quite good when I used to see it on "Family Classics" on WGN-Chicago in the 1960's on a yearly basis. I was also less than 10 years-old. But as I matured, I gave up childish things, and I think the Lost World is one of those things.

I bought the video originally because the box said that Lon Chaney and John Carradine were in it. Well, Lon was nowhere to be found and this flick is not part of his filmography. However, John's head was in it, so that's no lie! The box art was also exciting-looking as it proclaimed the flick was titled "Horrors of the Red Planet." Well, its really "Wizard of Mars," but I would have called it "The Insomnia Cure of the Red Planet." "Wizard" resembles a large budget student film of wannabe filmmakers who must have been using this production for practice and who may (or likely did not) go on to better things. An amateurish looking drywall "spaceship," Death Valley-style desertscape, Carlsbad caverns, and what looks like a warehouse set the scene. Our band of high school play dropout explorers land on Mars and discover an ancient civilization replete with aliens housed in tubes (that have mud packs for makeup) and eventually the alien disembodied "Wizard" image of a John Carradine (desperate for work). The Wizard's "city," as depicted in miniature, looks like an aquarium castle, with a sun shining over it as if with a flashlight shot through a bedsheet in a darkened room. I could go on for several paragraphs with descriptions about the almost scene by scene mistakes of logic, science, bad acting/script/staging, etc...ad nauseum. Perhaps thats why I find this film so fascinating...it has so many mistakes, its an adventure to find them. Only the atmospheric photography in a few scenes and the sci-fi-weird music was really of note.

Probably the best Laurel and Hardy film since 1939's "The Flying Deuces", and their last motion picture appearance. Better than the generally unfunny Fox studio films of the 1940's. Its a somewhat underrated European-style farce with a mild social commentary about taxes, governmental control/interference combined with plot about Stan inheriting an island and eventually trying to setup an island country lacking in governmental controls. There are gags that will remind you of earlier L & H films and you can forward through the tedious love interest plot which seems tacked-on and is thankfully short. Overlook the generally annoying Euro-cast (though Max Elloy as the stateless man is OK), terrible dubbing, and Stan's haggard appearance and there are some laughs to be found. Get the DVD put out by Platinum Corp., which is way better in picture quality than the SLP mode public domain videos that have been available to this point. Just the improvement in picture quality was enough to make this film a lot more enjoyable.

One of the surprisingly realistic dramas that Hollywood created in the early 1930's has teenagers hitting the road during the hard times of the Great Depression.

With their east coast (New "Yawk?") accents, and rough around the edges "Bowery Boys"-style (harken, Leo Gorcey!), Frankie Darrow and a gang of displaced down-on-their-luck (formerly middle class?) teens band together and roam the countryside on foot or by rail, getting into hot water seemingly everywhere they go. Amazing graphic scenes for 1933 include a kid's leg being amputated by a train and an attempted rape scene.

Miserable living conditions and hunger are also depicted with kids lying cheating and stealing to stay alive, but willing to straighten themselves out when given a chance.

You'd think Warner Brothers was taking a risk financing a film that was so bleak and lacking in entertainment value for people that may have been LIVING the kinds of scenes shown, but the film also seems like a propaganda piece for Roosevelt's New Deal. There's a Roosevelt look-alike judge who places his hand, almost in a blessing, on poor Frankie's head and says "things are going to get better very soon".

Overall, Wild Boys of the Road is an interesting social drama that deserves more exposure and recognition.

A low budget trip in time results when researchers at a university create a portal (window with rear projection screen view) that is able to transport them far into the future. They meet technically advanced survivors of a world-wide nuclear war living in (painted burlap) caverns beneath a barren earth. The survivors are assisted by some freaky looking androids. The surface dwelling populace are "mutants" (of various appearance) that result from genetic damage from radioactive fallout. The "normal" survivors are in a race to construct a spaceship to take them to another planet before the mutants overtake their subterranean world.

Like producer David Hewitt's other films, this is from the gee-whiz school of sci-fi. Barren scenery in a western locale substitues for a planetscape, high tech labs are brightly painted drywall, space ship looks like a space toy from the mid-1960's. Script is uneven and some overacting is evident.

Still, Time Travelers is somewhat entertaining like an old- fashioned serial crossed with a 1950's sci-fi film...complete with histrionic acting and lots of scientific looking gadgets demonstrated. John Hoyt and comic Steve Franken are standouts and Preston Foster is a perfectly acceptable scientist.

Above average, often underrated low budget film noir of a somewhat pleasantly restrained Rooney who finds himself in escalating hot water stemming from his "borrowing" $20 from his employers cash register. (He's a mechanic at a car dealership)

Instead of a comedy of errors, the film is rather a thriller of errors with Rooney making honest and dishonest mistakes/decisions that build on each other from scene to scene to a point that Rooney is desperate to get out of the hot water he finds himself in at every turn. He's in trouble with his nasty boss, his money hungry girlfriend (Jeanne Cagney), the police, a sleazy (Peter Lorre)amusement park gameroom owner, etc...

He's caught in a whirlpool of lies, deceit, and lust (for a snobish/vampish girlfriend who is never satisfied) and a hunger for the money that he feels will get him out of all his trouble. He doesn't appreciate and is callous toward the wholesome girl (ex-girlfriend ??) who seems to want him despite his faults. He's a lot more interested in the allure of the bombshell Jeanne Cagney instead and is bored by Ms. Wholesome.

Rooney biographies claim that Mickey didn't think much of this film since it didn't do much to revive his sagging career in the early 1950's. Still, there's a lot to recommend it...with solid acting, atmospheric black and white photography and staging, especially of the amusement park and oceanside locale.

Desperate people set in desperate Great Depression times try to eke out a living on an abandoned farm. Rousing for its "back to the land" pioneering spirit of people from all walks of life forced to help each other start a new life (or starve). The film preaches self-reliance (away from expecting government assistance), yet encourages people to help each other (in a somewhat Socialistic sense), so there are mixed messages here. There seems to be an undercurrent not to trust the various forms of government either.

Parts of this film are greater than the whole, with uneven performances and some hackneyed "girl tries to steal husband" scenes that make you want to fast-forward... Director King Vidor managed to get "OK" performances out of some of the lesser (amateur?) performers (some of which never made another film).

I've seen this film dozens of times for its most interesting scenes, tops of which include the famous ditch digging scene at the films end.

Unlike Grapes of Wrath, Our Daily Bread is overall optimistic that the individual can rise above dire straits to triumph through "work, work without stopping." Unfortunately, this film has enough flaws in story and acting to keep it from anywhere near the masterpiece status Grapes of Wrath has achieved.