Requiem for a Vampire (1971)

Were it not for all the skeevy sexual violence, I might be tempted to give this a qualified recommendation, if only for the fact that writer/director Jean Rollin seems to have finally realised that dialogue is the weakest part of his films and has responded by deleting as much of it as possible.  This script features only about one third as many lines as The Shiver of the Vampires did, and instead relies on visual story telling to a much greater extent.  Since the visuals have always been one of the stronger parts of Rollin's films (subject to the limitations of budget, at least), this is a smart play.

Rollin emphasises the sparseness of the dialogue by making the opening 12 minutes especially terse.  This period features exactly five lines, averaging 2-3 words apiece.

The plot is simple enough: two young women, apparently on the run from the law, and for some reason dressed as clowns, stumble across an apparently abandoned château and decide to hide out there overnight.  After dark, however, they discover that the place is the lair of a bunch of Renfields, all of whom serve the last "living" vampire.

The vampire's supernatural powers make it impossible for the women to escape, and he informs them that they must become part of his "family" and help acquire food for the group by luring men to the château to be eaten.  Implicit in this decision is the threat that if they don't comply, they will either become food themselves, or end up in the Renfields' rape dungeon.  Because ugh, there is a rape dungeon.

With more money for sets and costumes (the sparseness of both is very evident as you're watching), and a lot less sexual assault, there's the potential for a decently creepy little thriller here, but alas what we get is cheap and nasty instead.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

This is the first Marilyn Monroe film I ever saw, when I watched nearly twenty years ago as part of a university course.  I was pleasantly surprised at the time by how much I enjoyed it.

I'm happy to report that I enjoyed it again on the re-watch.  Monroe and Jane Russell work very well together, with Russell playing the more intelligent but also more idealistic of the pair to Monroe's apparently-dumb-but-sometimes-wickedly-perceptive blonde bombshell.

Monroe is Lorelai Lee, a voluptuous showgirl (not the naughty type) who plans marriage to a wealthy young man named Gus ... the only thing is that Gus's father is really the one who holds the purse strings, and he has no time for this gold digger.  And make no mistake, wealth is most definitely a factor in Lorelai's calculations.  Her affection for Gus is genuine, but as she tells her best friend Dorothy "It's easier to love a man when you're not spending all your time worrying about money".  It's not for nothing that she later sings "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend".

It's refreshing to see a 1953 film deal frankly - if humorously - with the romantic needs and aspirations of women, rather than simply having them as an ornament for the man to collect.  There's even some some evidence of catering to the (heterosexual) female gaze, as exemplified by the musical number "Ain't there anyone here for love?"

The near flesh-coloured shorts are not an accident, I suspect

Now not everyone is going to like this film, not least because it is a musical, with all the song and dance interludes that entails.  But I at least found it a breezy, charming bit of fun with several laugh out loud moments.  Check it out if you want to see a female buddy movie and don't mind that the plot is more or less all about their romantic aspirations.

Life in the Freezer (1993)

No, this series is not about the unidentifiable bag of green stuff in the back of your ice box.  The "freezer" in question is Antarctica, a place which makes the inside of your coldest home appliance look positively balmy.

David Attenborough's three previous Life series all had a pretty epic scope: life throughout time, life across the world, and life through the lens of the challenges all living beings must face.  This series narrows the focus in all three respects.  It deals only with the life that exists today, only within the Antarctic region, and (with a few diversions) only with the challenges of mating and rearing young.

I think the narrowed focus definitely makes this series feel less grand than those which came before.  Given that all the creatures described must face similar challenges - brutal cold, strong winds, and a largely shared group of predators - the material here definitely has less diversity than the series which preceded it.  This is not to say there aren't interesting parts: there are.  Attenborough's overview of Antarctica's dry valleys, for instance; or the all too brief aside about Mount Erebus; really give an insight into a part of our own world that still feels truly alien.

Most of the run time, however, is dedicated to more photogenic forms of life than the lichen and algae that endure in the two areas mentioned above.  The series spends a lot of time with various species of seals and penguins, including the emperor penguin, whose arduous breeding cycle later became the basis for the March of the Penguins documentary film.

This is a good nature documentary, well made and informative, with some wonderful footage of a deeply inhospitable part of the world that few of us will ever get to see.  While I do not think it is as compelling as the three previous Attenborough series, that is a very high bar to clear indeed.  If you have an interest in the world around you, it is definitely worth a look.

The usual content warnings for nature documentaries apply, of course.

Jason and the Argonauts (2000)

In the original myth, when the Argonauts come to Lemnos and find it populated only with women, they spend two years in romantic dalliances.  Jason himself fathers twins with the queen of the island.  After swearing to her his eternal love and loyalty, he then sails off in search of the Golden Fleece ... and more royal ladies to whom he can make empty promises.

In this version, the Argonauts flee the island because the queen and her subjects plan to murder them all.  Which is just one of the times I was actively angry while watching it.  I mean sure, I get that you don't want to make your protagonist into the kind of colossal ass most mythical Greek heroes actually were, but perhaps a better option than "evil wimmins!" would have been to omit the sequence entirely.  It's not like there aren't other segments of the journey you haven't skipped.  We could have had the Talos sequence instead, for instance.  What movie isn't improved by a giant bronze automaton?

They probably skipped it because they didn't want to be shown up by this guy.

The mishandling of the Lemnos sequence is far from my only complaint with this miniseries, however.  Its selection of leading man leaves a lot to be desired.  Perhaps Jason London has qualities to recommend him other than sharing a first name with his character, but if so, this is not the script to show them.  He comes across as a weak and ineffectual person for much of the first half.  I know that "the hero growing into his responsibility" is a common arc, but it's a badly bungled one in this instance.

Also badly bungled is the skeleton warriors scene.  They were always going to struggle to measure up to the sequence from the 1963 film, but it's like they didn't even try.

My advice is to stick to the Harryhausen version.

The Demons of Ludlow (1983)

From 1974 through 1988, Bill Rebane directed a movie roughly every 18 months.  Which is pretty impressive.  Doubly-so when you consider he did it from his own film studio on a ranch in Wisconsin, without any kind of major studio backing.  It would be triply-so if any of the movies were actually any good, but frankly they peaked at "so bad it's good" with the 1975 release, The Giant Spider Invasion.

Like a lot of the other Rebane films I have seen, The Demons of Ludlow feels very familiar in its basic plot concept, though it's not as obviously "inspired" by a specific work as say The Alpha Incident obviously is by The Andromeda Strain.

Ludlow is a small town - basically just five families - and like a lot of small towns it is slowly withering on the vine.  There's no new development and few jobs, and most of the younger generation have left for greener pastures.  The mayor's not willing to give up without a fight though, so he's arranged a big (by the standards of a town of 40 people) celebration for the town's bicentennial.  He's even managed to track down and retrieve an antique piano that belonged to the town's founding father.

Which is going to turn out to be a mistake, because the founding father had rather a falling out with the other townsfolk, back in the day.  The piano is inhabited by his vengeful spirit, and it's perfectly content to get revenge on the descendants of the folk who wronged it, now that it has the chance.

There is some fun to be had here mocking the terrible lighting, "unconventional" camera work, and dreadful scripting (not to mention the premise of a killer piano), but ultimately this film boils down to a bunch of scenes where characters we're given little reason to like are killed off by clumsily executed hauntings.  It's likely you'll be tired of mocking well before the film has had the decency to reach its muddled and arbitrary conclusion.

The Shiver of the Vampires (1970)

Jean Rollin's 1968 film The Rape of the Vampire was an evocatively shot but incomprehensible mess of a film, and to describe some of the sets as looking "horribly cheap" would be to insult most horribly cheap films.

Two years later, more richly financed - one suspects because "lots of attractive naked ladies" was a sure fire way to win eyeballs, at least before the internet came along - Rollin came up with this offering.

Le Frisson des Vampires, as it was known in the original French, is certainly a more visually opulent movie than its predecessor, not least because Rollin now has access to colour film.  This is something he's clearly quite excited about, as he frequently drenches his shots in blood red lighting.

Such as here, in one of the few shots of these two characters that is appropriate for all ages

There's also a lot more set dressing in evidence this time, though it remains rather amateurish on the whole.  Crudely constructed demonic faces and skulls don't really impress.

Plot-wise, it's more or less your usual "arrive at the old family estate, get seduced by vampires" thing.  The narrative is a lot more comprehensible than that of the earlier film - it's hard to imagine how it could not be - though still plagued by an excess of clumsily portentous dialogue and deliberately odd delivery.  And it is certainly not short of perplexing script moments.  For instance, the vampires are killed by sunlight, but their leader keeps her coffin outdoors.  If this somehow was relevant later I guess I could accept it as clumsy foreshadowing, but it is not.  And then there's the scene where the minion vampires rape their boss - an event which is never mentioned again, and which does not result in any apparent change in their relationship in later scenes.

You probably only need to see this it if you have a thing for crushed velvet outfits or French bosoms, as it offers plenty of both.

We're Not Married! (1952)

A bumbling justice of the peace conducts six marriage ceremonies before he is actually empowered to do so.  Two and a half years later, his mistake comes to light when one of the six couples attempts to divorce.  As a consequence, the governor's office dispatches a letter to each of the remaining five couples, advising them that legally speaking, they're not married.

So what we have here is basically an anthology piece, where we meet each couple, see the state of their current relationship, and then how they react to the news that they aren't husband and wife in the eyes of the law.  Each couple basically gets 10-15 minutes for us to be introduced to them and learn how things unfold.  That's not really enough to get very invested in any of them on an emotional level, of course, so the tone is definitely light and comic.

Or at least it's intended to be light and comic.  Some of the intended humour hasn't dated well.  The segment involving Marilyn Monroe, for instance, attempts to get laughs from the fact that her husband is the one doing the house work and raising their baby while she pursues a career.  A career as a beauty contestant, mind you.  Hysterical, it really isn't.  Though at least it is better than the segment with the guy who apparently decides to stay married because dating is too expensive.

There are some mildly amusing elements of farce in the other three segments, but on the whole this is a film that stretches its premise mighty thin by the time it is done.