The Island Monster (1954)

There's no actual monster in this film, just the metaphorical one of a wicked man.  One might suspect that part of the title is an attempt to cash in on the fact that Boris Karloff is in the picture.

The film does take place on an island though, so that puts it one ahead of Kong Island.  Alas, that's the only measure by which this movie gets ahead of any other film.  Because this, my loyal readers (both of you!), is terrible.

I've said before that just about the only sin a film can commit which I cannot forgive is to be boring, and my word, The Island Monster is that.  Unremittingly tedious, with long scenes of absolutely zero interest being interrupted with brief snippets of nothing much going on.  Even scenes that in principal ought to have some excitement - the kidnap of a child, and a car crash - are rendered soporifically dull.

And that dullness is quite the shame, because with the hysterically bad dubbing and the egregiously awful child - seriously, kid characters in films are often painful, but they're nothing on this singularity of annoyance - this had the potential to good-bad, rather than just bad.

The plot?  An undercover policeman is assigned to investigate a drug smuggling ring.  He's terrible at his job (not an intentional aspect of the script, as far as I can tell), and the bad guys work out who he is and kidnap his daughter to get leverage on him.  Frankly, he should be thanking them for getting rid of the brat, but he doesn't, he just very slowly looks for her for a very long time.  The bad guys do nothing about this, because ... because it was the 1950s and you couldn't chop a kid's fingers off on screen back then, I guess.  Eventually the kid is saved and the useless cop gets his just desserts by having to spend time with her again.

Boring, boring, boring.

The Vikings (1958)

A couple of years before making Spartacus together, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis played the rival leads of this period piece.  They're joined by Curtis's then wife Janet Leigh, and a scarily young Ernest Borgnine.  The latter plays the father of Douglas's character, despite Douglas actually being older than Borgnine in real life.  Ahh, the movies.

Not many films can be a Spartacus of course, and this isn't one of them.  Borgnine is pretty entertaining as the bluff viking chief Ragnar, and Douglas has all the swagger necessary to play his bloodthirsty son, Einar.  But things are not so rosy on the 'white helmet' side of the equation.  Curtis and Leigh are capable enough performers, but the script gives them nothing much to work with.  In particular, their romance is laughably thin.

The movie begins with the crowning of a new king in Northumbria.  The previous king was killed by the vikings, and his queen raped by Ragnar.  She is secretly with child, and after the boy is born she sends him off to Italy to be raised.  Then twenty years go by.

The current Northumbrian King, Aella, arrests one of his nobles as a spy for the vikings, but the man escapes and - his treachery being real and not just the king's imaginings - runs off to Ragnar.  There he meets Einar and the slave, Eric, who he recognises as the former Queen's missing son due to a stone the young man carries.

Einar and Eric don't like one another very much, of course, and that rivalry escalates to attempted murder in very short order.  It escalates still further, if such is possible, when the vikings kidnap King Aella's intended bride, Morgana.

I've already identified one of the weaknesses of the film, which is the blandness of Eric and Morgana.  There are two more.  The first of these is the relative weakness of the climactic battle scenes.  There's a lot of 'I will stand here awkwardly with my sword raised until you turn around, and then I will attack you'.  It's probably harsh to criticise the film for this, given its age, but if you're used to the much more slick choreography of modern films, you'll notice it.

The other weakness is a lot less excusable: the film can't decide who its bad guy is.  It starts out as Aella, becomes Ragnar and Einar, then just Einar, then Aella again, before Einar gets a last hurrah as the antagonist ... followed by a heroic burial.  I guess if you squint you could see this as an attempt to portray a more complex ethical situation than we normally see in films, but it comes across as a muddle in execution.

This isn't a bad film by any stretch, but there's really nothing especially memorable or interesting about it.  Not something you need to seek out.

Prison Shadows (1936)

A boxer accidentally kills an opponent in the ring and is sentenced to three years in the Big House.  Upon his release, he hopes to be met by the woman he loves, but we in the audience know that she does not reciprocate his feelings.  It's cold hard cash that she loves.

Our hero is met at the prison gates by another woman, however.  She brings his dog along with her, so even if she wasn't clearly besotted with him, you'd know this was who he was going to end up with.

Lacking any skills other than his killer right hand (and yes, they go there in the film). he heads back to the boxing ring.  Unfortunately for him, not everyone involved in the fights is on the level, and their plans might cut short his chances of a new start.

This is a pretty slight film, as you might expect for an eighty-year old B movie with a sub-70 minute running time.  The plot is pretty ropey, and the re-use of sets perhaps more obvious than the film-makers had hoped.  The boxing sequences are also ... well, this is no Rocky, you know what I mean?

Is there anything to recommend the film?  Well, the love interest has a good rapport with the leading man.  They actually come across as two people who like each other's company.  So yeah, the romance (though a bit rushed at the end) is a highlight.  Not enough of one that I would actually recommend the film, but with films in these cheapo packs, you have to savour every glimmer of quality you can find :)

Savage Journey (1983)

So this film depicts an account of the foundation of the Mormon faith.  A little googling suggests it is not endorsed by the Mormon church, though it certainly does seem pretty positive toward the founders of the religion.

How accurate is it?  I don't know.  I suspect it is fairly fictionalised though, since it does depict Brigham Young as a rather saintly fellow.  It also lets him get the last word on the contentious subject of polygamy ("It is better for a woman to be the third wife of a loving husband than the only wife of a man who beats her.").

For the record, despite claiming that he didn't like the idea of polygamy, Young ultimately accumulated 55 wives.  Fifty-five.  Not a typo.  I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that some of them were far, far younger than he.  The movie doesn't mention that.  Nor the fact that Young banned people of African descent from the church.

Questions of bias and historical accuracy aside, however, is the movie any good?

Nope.

For one thing, the guy playing Brigham Young simply isn't up to the task.  This needs to be compelling performance - after all, this is the guy who led the trek to Utah - and he's not able to muster much more than amiably pompous.

He's done no service by the script, either, which is basic in the extreme.  People are mean to the mormons for no good reason, so the mormons move on to somewhere they will not be persecuted.  New people turn up and start to persecute them.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Not much to recommend here folks.

Queen Margot (1994)

This film opens with an opulent wedding and the revelry that follows it, then descends into a brutal orgy of killing.  This is the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre; an orchestrated wave of violence against French Huguenots (Protestants) by the Catholic majority.  It is also the grand set piece of the film, a shocking and unrelenting assault that remains with you well after the film has moved on.  Certainly, when I first saw this film over a decade ago, it was the part that I best remembered.

As fine (if unpleasant) a piece of film-making as it is though, the massacre also ties into the movie's biggest flaw: once it is done, two-thirds of the movie still remain, and they're simply not as memorable as that first act.

Don't get me wrong, there is still plenty going on, from the efforts of the King's mother to murder Henri of Navarre - the man she fears will take her son's throne - to the plans of Henri's followers to spirit him and his wife out of the King's clutches.

Henri's wife is the titular Margot, played by the luminescent Isabelle Adjani.  Margot is a Catholic, and her relationship with the Huguenot Henri is a reluctant one.  But having been forced to marry him, she works to preserve her husband's life.  This seems to come from a mixture of reluctant admiration for his comparatively ethical behaviour, and a belief that it would be a sin for her to do otherwise.

None of which stops her (or Henri) from taking lovers.

This is a well-staged costumed drama.  It's violence and sexuality will mean it is not to all tastes, and the lower-key plotting of the later parts of the film did not hold my interest so well on this second viewing as they did on the first, but if you've got an interest in one of the more turbulent periods of French history, it is worth seeing.

Lady Gangster (1942)

I did not buy this pack simply to get a copy of the 1932 version of Scarface, as I already owned that on DVD.  I did buy it hoping to find at least one other movie that was half as good, though.

Lady Gangster is not that movie.

It starts off promisingly enough, with a well-dressed and apparently respectable lady operating as a 'stool pigeon' for a group of bank robbers.  Their plan to get into the bank before it opens and rob the place relies an awful lot on luck and the lady's charm, but I'm willing to go with it.

Alas the plan doesn't seem all that well thought through in the post-robbery execution, and the cops aren't as dumb as they usually are in the movies.  They cotton on to the weaknesses in the story of this supposed 'innocent bystander' and she finds herself in custody.  The police only release her when a radio journalist - and old flame of hers - accepts responsibility for her.

Once released, the woman tricks her accomplices (who were planning to split without giving her a share of the loot) and gets all the money from the robbery.  She hides it for safe-keeping, and then - because old passions have been reignited - confesses to her former flame that she was involved in the robbery.

So he sends her to jail, because he's a morally upstanding sort of fellow, and it apparently doesn't occur to him to get her to cut a deal with the cops.

Once our heroine (I guess that's the right term, even if she is a bank robber) gets to jail, the movie's plausibility, already slight, is completely thrown out of the window.  There's a lot of bickering and double-crossing, a rather random moment of cross-dressing, and the least likely prison break this side of Prison Break before the rather rushed ending.

So ultimately, a bit of a disappointment, especially after the reasonably entertaining start.

By the way: if you've never seen it, make sure you track down the 1932 Scarface.  I'm a pretty big Brian De Palma fan and I still think the original is a far better film than his remake.

Rattlers (1976)

A year or two ago, I saw the movie Sssssss.  That film had a mad-science main plot, but was enlivened mostly by the many scenes of snake-handling, which were kind of nerve-wracking even if you have no particular fear of snakes, and would have sent any ophidiophobe into the screaming meemies.

I mention Sssssss because of the contrast with this film: the snake scenes here simply aren't scary.  I mean, if you have a thing about snakes they probably are, but only because there are snakes on screen, not because the film does any kind of decent job of establishing a sense of menace.  The closest it gets is ironically in a scene featuring a cobra, rather than rattlesnakes.  A lack of scary snake scenes is kind of a big flaw for a movie about scary snakes, you know?

Rattlers kicks off with a trope that will be familiar to anyone who's seen a few killer critter movies: a rash of deaths all attributable to a specific kind of creature.  The animal in question is obvious from the title.  The local sheriff hires a herpetologist to investigate the snakes' sudden aggression, as well as a female photographer to assist him.

This being the 70s, the photographer's gender is the trigger for a tiresome subplot about women's liberation.  Tiresome because of course (a) the herpetologist is a sexist ass and (b) when the snakes turn up the woman is going to freak out and need to be rescued by the big strong man.  There's no guarantee a movie today wouldn't be just as filled with patriarchy, but it might not be quite so aggressive about it.

So anyway, they conduct their investigation, and begin to get an idea of why the snakes' behaviour has changed.  This is interspersed with various rattler attacks.  Those are probably an attempt to prevent tedium from setting in.  With the exception of a couple of inadvertently comical moments, they fail.

Eventually the cause of the trouble is confirmed, but the movie takes a sudden turn into shoot-outsville and the actual threat of the snakes, nor the reason for that threat, is ever actually addressed on-screen.  It's like the film-makers forgot they were making a killer critter movie.  But then, their critters were kind of forgettable.

There are much better options for 'when animals attack!'.  Heck, even Giant Spider Invasion is a step up from this.  Don't bother.