Ryan Watches 50 Movies

Still jumping around in the Drive-in Classics 50-movie pack, I selected 1977's Prime Time as my next "classic." It's a sketch film, a subgenre of comedy that inevitably yields mixed results. Kentucky Fried Movie and Amazon Women on the Moon are both full of funny moments, and they take advantage of having a larger budget and more production time than a TV sketch show would have... but they also both have their share of stupid segments. Loose Shoes , on the other hand, doesn't have a single sketch that's amusing enough to justify its existence. I had never heard of Prime Time before I got this DVD set, but I was eager to see if the funny outweighed the stupid. And, well... I don't want to ruin the suspense, but I'll just go ahead and tell you that this movie sucked. THE MOVIE As Prime Time begins, a high-ranking military officer named Bill settles down to watch TV somewhere in Washington, D.C. He sees a commercial for "Trans Puerto Rico,...

Is Roger Corman's 1960 film The Little Shop of Horrors really a horror movie? If you have one, two, or more functioning eyeballs, you should be able to read the tagline on the poster over there: "THE FUNNIEST PICTURE THIS YEAR!" So no, it's not intended as a serious horror movie. There's a monster, and death and stuff, but the movie doesn't take itself seriously for a minute. In fact, it's so amusing that Howard Ashman and Alan Menken turned it into a very funny musical comedy (efficiently dropping the " The " from the title) in 1982, which was later turned into another (highly entertaining) movie. Perhaps someday there will be a serious horror film based on that version, but for now, let's talk about the Corman incarnation of the story. Synopsis The film is narrated faux-noirishly by Sergeant Joe Fink, a no-nonsense cop. He tells us about a case he worked on involving Seymour Krelboin, a sad sack who works at Gravis Mushnick's flower sh...

First of all, I want to say that I discovered something very cool while watching this movie. But I'm not going to tell you what it was until my "comments" section, so keep reading. Now, here's something odd. Before this week, I'd seen the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu once, on Turner Classic Movies, and in the version I saw there, the vampire in the film was named Count Orlok. In the version included on the 50 Movie Classics: Horror DVD set I'm trudging through now, that character's name is Count Dracula. Apparently the Bram Stoker novel Dracula was still copyrighted in 1922, which explains why the German filmmakers changed the villains name and many other details. But I wonder, at what point did somebody create a new English print of the film in which his name was Dracula instead of Orlok? And if the film is in the public domain, does that mean I could take the film, add new titles establishing his name as Dr. Macadamia van Goofberry, and sell cop...

Two weeks ago I watched a Lon Chaney, Sr. movie. Last week I watched a Lon Chaney, Jr. movie. This week it's the elder Chaney's turn again as I watched 1923's The Hunchback of Notre Dame . I've never read the Victor Hugo book, and the only other adaptation I've seen is the Disney musical which I assume took one or two liberties with the original story. But I do happen to own a copy of Marvel Comics' The Incredible Hulk versus Quasimodo from 1983: Is that cool or what? It was written by longtime Hulk writer Bill Mantlo, with art by Sal Buscema and Steve Mitchell, and features the Hulk actually fighting the hunchback in the cathedral of Notre Dame. But of course, I'm here to talk about the classic movie, not some silly comic book, so let's proceed. Synopsis The Notre Dame cathedral is a big ol' church in Paris. It serves as a sanctuary for many of the city's impoverished, and today it's the site of the Festival of Fools , a big ol' party ...

First of all, I want to mention that I just spent 20 minutes wandering around my apartment looking under things because I could not find my notes on this movie, before finally finding them in an unlikely place. Now, it may just be that I misplaced them, but I don't think that's the true explanation. I'm almost certain that my notes were, in fact, stolen and hidden from me by... THE PHANTOM ! The Phantom of the Opera is a 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney (Senior), based on the 1909 novel by Gaston Leroux, which was of course based on the Twiggy episode of The Muppet Show , in which the theater is haunted by the Phantom of the Muppet Show. These days, of course, when most people think of the Phantom story, they think of the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. I've seen the musical, but fortunately I had forgotten enough of it that I didn't know everything that was going to happen in the movie. Synopsis The Paris Opera House is enormous, and grand, and palatial... and...