Usually, I spend Saturday at the Grand Illusion, which has quirky charm and an offbeat sensibility – but a small screen. On this Saturday, we are at the Cinerama, which is more of a bigass screen experience.
As I understand it, back in the 1950s and 1960s, theater owners decided that the way to fight tv was with big screens and wide screen movies. Makes sense, especially when the tvs of the time were 18 inch diagonal and black and white.
The Cinerama has other enticements. They make a chocolate covered popcorn. The smell wafts all though the building.
Right now, we’re in line for the sffsff– which stands for something. We go most years. At first, we could just show up, but for the last few years, it’s been sold out in advance. This year we came early in hopes of a good seat.
These are awesomely comfy seats, btw. There is room to just walk in front of people to get to your seat.
And the Cinerama has something else – a display of movie costumes in the lobby. These are on loan from Mopop, which is the new name for EMP.
This year, we have Darth Vader, a viper pilot, Captain Sisko, and a Cadassian (Kim, I think).
Vader is the stunt costume from episode 5 and the cape from episode 4.
On the other side, we have a spice girl, Rachel (from Blade Runner, not Friends), Lost in Space movie, and Katness.
So, we are now in our posh seats and hanging out and everything is right with the world.
That’s right – Crash! Corrigan was seen, last time, falling down an elevator shaft – but that must have been some other person wearing a black cape, because this week’s chapter starts with Crash! grabbing an elevator cable and climbing down, down, down the shaft!
But wait – Unga Kahn’s henchman calls down to the stables to tell the guards to get Crash! Corrigan’s body from the elevator shaft. Funny, by the way, that the henchman specifies Crash! Corrigan by name – it’s almost as if the henchman knew that Crash! was really important.
Crash! gets the jump on the black-cape soldiers, and manages to give them the airplane spin and escapes on horseback.
Meanwhile, Unga Kahn has mind-controlled the professor into working for him – using the smokey room – instead of just lying to him a little. Soon, Unga Kahn will have rocket engines to lift his tower to the surface to Destroy! the Upper World!
Crash! rides to the temple of the white capes, where, after some other stuff that, frankly, was kinda dumb, he is forced to fight against three of the black capes – cue the Star Trek fight music. It didn’t look anything like this:
Tossed into the titular Arena of Death, Crash! promptly knocks two of the black caps out and fights the third until he falls under Crash!’s mighty blows.
Then the high priest comes to congratulate Crash! and offer him the sword to kill the three vanquished foes.
As no surprise me – or, I guess, anybody – Crash! contemptuously tosses aside the offered sword, because, doggone it, no good, upright hero just kills a helpless opponent!
The High Priest is upset, but has no time to deal with that, since two of the three black cape prisoner’s weren’t really knocked unconscious, but were scheming to take a chariot and escape!
And in the confusion, they grab the high priest, and make a run for it!
What will happen next week?
Will Crash! go and find them and rescue the High Priest?
Will Salty and Briny be goofy? (I swear those are their actual names.)
Will the plucky reporter pluck?
I’ll never know – Gotta miss this week’s matinee, but I’ll be back and ready for more!
For once, the exclamation points are not just me getting excited. That was the title for the original U.S. version.
Sometimes painters would re-use a canvas – paint right over some picture they didn’t care about. Art supplies can be expensive, and they didn’t care about the first picture and they probably just want to practice drawing another bowl of fruit and bottle of wine. The wine bottles are always empty in still-lifes, by the way.
But for real pictures, you’re not supposed to do this because, over time, the original picture shows through.
A few years back, one of the features in the matinee series was called Queen of Blood! from 1966 (no exclamation point – just me getting excited, again.) This was a B-movie built on a Soviet movie from 1963. I can’t tell you much about that movie. It was called Mechte Navstrechu (perhaps translated as “A Dream Come True”). The original was never subtitled into English.
Queen of Blood, apparently, took just the special effects and some minor plot points. Scenes with actors were reshot, using American actors. And Basil Rathbone. I enjoyed QoB!, especially the titular Queen and a great scene, where she slowly approaches a sleeping crewman, who is unable to rouse himself due to her mind control:
But what was the original about?
Some things did show through. The first half of the movie was getting to Phobos, where a visitor from outside our solar system had crashed. That, apparently, was the same. The same number of people were there, to match the space walk scene on Phobos.
Beyond that, I couldn’t say.
I would make a better guess, I think, at the original Rodan!
For one thing, in making an American version, they kept the actors, but dubbed them. They dubbed them, btw, with actors who had thick Japanese accents. One of the voices was George Takei, who is Japanese-American, but who was born in Los Angeles. Dubbing with Japanese accents is a weird choice, if you think about it, but that was the movie convention – if you spoke with an accent, you were actually speaking some other language.
(Was it a Mel Brooks movie where a (French) character says, “We don’t even have our own language! All we have is this stupid accent!”)
Second, there was a prolog about how hydrogen bomb tests might awaken beasts of the ancient world. This could have come straight out of last week’s movie, It Came from Beneath the Sea!
Once that was, over, we got to the main thing they added to the American version – tiresome narration.
Looking through that, the movie was really two smaller stories – first, a mine safety engineer at a mine where they had dug too deep. The thing they awakened was an ancient insect about the size of bear, I guess. There was some more drama leading up to that reveal, but that was essentially it.
Of course, a giant bug is a giant among bugs, but this is a GIANT MONSTER MOVIE – hence there were the Rodans – plural – that rose up out of the sleeping volcano to tear down the cities.
This part of the movie worked really, really well. I mean, it’s obviously models and a man in a suit, but all the explosions and missile launches and jet planes really kind of worked.
Next week, I will miss the matinee, but I may have something else to blog about!
It is week 2 of the Secret Matinee at the Grand Illusion, and this week we have Episode 2 of Undersea Kingdom: Undersea City!
I know, the title didn’t have an exclamation point, but I get carried away.
PIAS
The White Cape Atlanteans see the visitors from the upper world and decide they must be in league with the evil Unga Khan. They take our heroes prisoner on a chariot race, but Crash! breaks free, only to have Unga Khan’s Volkites capture Professor Norton and Plucky Diana. Crash! pursues them back to the titular Undersea City! and rushes to rescue them. Meanwhile, Salty and Briny are hilarious!
So, it doesn’t surprise anyone when, as soon as Crash! Carrigan knocks out one of the Black Cape guards, the first thing Crash! does it take off his clothes.
When you say it like that, it sounds wrong, but, no, that’s it, because Crash! is about to participate in the Trope of Tropes, which is stealing the uniform of an enemy in order to infiltrate the enemy’s base –
This serial was made before the Wizard of Oz, and I’m sure it goes back further, and it comes down to us through countless World War 2 movies and Cold War movies. James Bond did it, Jim Kirk did it, and Hogan’s Heroes did it. By the time Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones did it, we didn’t even notice.
But here it is – in 1936. Crash knocks out a Black Cloak and grabs is funky fin cap. The next time we see him, he is jumping to the rescue!
Also on tropes this time, Unga Khan is going to use his mind control technology to force Professor Norton to create a rocket engine that will lift Atlantis out of the water and bring it back to the upper world.
Funny thing – he didn’t, really, have to.
You see, when the professor asks why Unga Khan wants the rocket power, what Unga Khan doesn’t say is this:
“I want to bring Atlantis back to the light, and bring its history and glory back to the upper world!”
He says something closer to this made up quote:
“I want to destroy the upper world and kill all the puppies and rule the whole world and laugh!”
Do you see the difference, there? It’s kind of subtle, but I’m suggesting that Unga Khan should have given his goals a little better spin.
Fortunately, Crash! crashes in, hand gun in hand, cross dressing as an Atlantian, ready to save the day!
Next time: I don’t think Billy just went back to the submarine, like he was ordered.
This week’s matinee feature is It Came from Under the Sea, a notable early Ray Harryhousen project. If you take a look at this trailer, you’ll get the idea that there’s a giant octopus that ravaging the world – with lots of destruction and explosions –
The film, not so much –
You see, the hydrogen bomb disturbed the titular giant octopus in its garden in the shade, making the beast radioactive. The giant monster would ordinarily eat regular fish, but fish have built in Geiger counters, which allow them to avoid the octopus, forcing it to switch to other food, like people.
I’m not being snarky, by the way, about the explanation of why the giant octopus is attacking. This is literally how one of the scientists explained it – natural Geiger counters. You can’t make this stuff up – well, I guess the filmmakers could, and with a straight face, to boot.
There’s always a bait-and-switch for these movies. Stop motion animation takes a lot of time. Ray had to move each tentacle 32 times to get a second of film. So, we’re only going to get a few minutes of monster. This isn’t as bad as last week’s movie, where we got maybe two minutes of dinosaurs and two minutes of Acquanetta, mixed in with an hour of rock climbing.
OK, there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, how much did we get to see the shark in Jaws? We saw a fin and heard some scary music. Then we saw the fake shark for a couple of minutes at the end, and that worked great.
So, what else do we have to fill in while the giant octopus floats around?
Footage of navy ships blowing up water, which is more interesting than it sounds, and a creepy romantic pursuit of the only female in the movie by a natural born horn dog, which is exactly as cringe inducing as it sounds. If I’d been watching this at home, I would have fast-forwarded to the next octopus attack instead of cringing in my seat. Seriously, what year is this?
This week saw the inaugural episode of the serial at the Secret Matinee – Undersea Kingdom:
And it started with a lot of cat-saving.
Not like that!
There’s a technique for writing screenplays called Save the Cat! It’s named after its first element, which involves something catty –
The technique is a beat-by-beat checklist of things to do to write a successful screenplay for a successful movie. For each item on the checklist, you fill in something – like a movie-madlibs – until you are rich and famous!
The Save the Cat! beat is something to do in the first scene or very early. The hero does something clearly good and helpful, early on in the film, so that the audience sympathizes with him.
Like saving a cat. Hey, if it’s good enough for Mr. Incredible –
So, what does Crash Carrigan do in the first five minutes of the film?
Bare-chested Crash gets a medical exam.
Two senior officers comment on how great Crash was here, at Annapolis.
Crash plays in the Army-Navy game, and wins, and this isn’t some pussy football game where they play on grass. These guys are covered in mud.
Crash wrestles with another bare-chested, hunky guy, while a bunch of other guys cheer them on.
In the wrestling scene, two well-muscled men are dressed in ass-tight black trunks. They circle around each other, grab at each other, try to wrestle each other down, you know, to pin the other.
Now, you don’t have to be gay to appreciate this brazen homoerotic display. Just imagine that you’re gay and imagine how hot this all is. I think I’ll do that right now.
Ok, back now.
But he hasn’t saved a cat – and where is the cat? There is no cat!
But there is Billy Norton, the adorable blonde little boy with the sailor’s cap. When he isn’t allowed into the homoerotic floor show – er – wrestling match, he decides to climb up a ladder and into a high window. There, as he’s watching the homoerotic floorshow – er, wrestling – he slips and almost falls!
But Crash is on the case!
He leaps out of the wrestling ring, grabs a hanging-ring-thing, swings to the wall, and up, up he climbs! Before you know it, he’s got Billy on his back and he’s climbing down!
So, let’s review:
Crash is fit, patriotic, wrestling-ready, and he saves adorable kids! All while bare-chested!
On July 17, 1921, a baby girl was born, and that’s all we can really be sure about.
According to her, she was named Burnu Acquanetta, which means Burning Fire/Deep Water, but she is known to history simply as Acquanetta. She was born to Arapaho parents, but became an orphan at age 2. She was raised to age 15 by an artist and his wife and then moved from Wyoming to New York to become a model. Later, she was billed as the Venezuelan Volcano, I assume through a mixture of sexism and racism.
In the 1940s and 1950s, she appeared in a few movies, usually playing someone exotic, like Luani, a beautiful girl in the south seas in Rhythm of the Islands or Queen Lea in a Tarzan movie, where she wore a leopard skin skirt.
She was also the titular character in Captive Wild Woman and Jungle Woman, where she plays a woman who was a gorilla turned into a woman but still imbued with great strength and animal instincts. I’ve only seen clips from these two movies, but I feel a little queasy just typing this summary.
And in 1951, she showed up in The Lost Continent, this week’s Secret Matinee at the Grand Illusion. The movie starred Cesar Romero, best known for playing the Joker on the old Batman series. Also recognizable was John Hoyt, who played the ship’s doctor in the original pilot of Star Trek, The Cage.
PIAS
(Which stands for Plot in a Sprint):
Air Force major leads a team to recover the MacGuffin rocket from an uncharted island where dinosaurs still exist. They climb a long way, talk a lot, and smoke cigarettes before finding the rocket and retrieving its MacGuffin circuit. The island blows up.
Usually, when I do PIAS, I have to struggle to keep it short, but, no, this is pretty much it.
We spend the first half an hour with a stock footage V2 rocket launch, followed by meeting characters and flying half way around the world.
There is a scene where Romero flirts, badly, with Hillary Brooke. She offers him another coffee, but he says it’s bad for him and pours himself a whiskey, instead. About two minutes into this clip, he calls her fat and she likes it.
None of her walking around in a tight, backless dress contributes anything to the plot, but nothing else does, either.
So, they go to the island and meet Acquanetta, the convenient islander (first cousin of the magical negro). She tells them about the firebird that scared everybody away and the sacred mountain that is (gasp) TABOO.
Then they climb rocks for half the film before seeing a couple of herbivorous dinosaurs, and the movie is over. Oh, the filmmakers knew brontosaurus and the triceratops were plant eaters because they show them eating plants. None the less, the dinos charge our heroes every chance they get, perhaps not realizing that people are made of meat.
By the way, I’m not just talking about Acquanetta because it gives me an excuse to link to pictures of a pretty woman. The fact is, this movie was dreadfully dull. I was nodding off in my seat and blaming the two negronis I’d had that afternoon, but this movie was so dull that even MST3K couldn’t get it to move any faster.
Acquanetta was in this movie for only a couple of minutes, but the dinosaurs were only in the movie for a couple of minutes. Both she and they were on the movie poster. She and the dinosaurs were about all this movie had that was worth looking at.
Acqaunetta didn’t appear in many more movies. She retired, moved away from Hollywood, did commercials for her husband’s car lot, and appeared in her own local TV show where she introduced the movie of the week. She wrote a well-liked but long out of print book of poetry called “The Audible Silence” and she raised money for a variety of causes.
(All this information is from Wikipedia or her IMDB bio.)
At the start of this post, I said that, on July 17, 1921, a baby girl was born, and that was all we knew for sure. You see, there’s another version of her life where she was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, named Mildred Davenport. And she was African American, not Native American.
I guess we do know other things for sure. People believed that she was Arapaho and Venezuelan. She played Africans and Pacific Islanders – people from that region called Exotic. And she brought a little life to an otherwise leaden movie.
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