Just a good song.
Tag: review
29NOV2025 – Country Song for the Morning – Aaron Lewis – Sinner
The Black Cat (1934) – An OCF Classic Movie Review
To call this a horror movie would be kind of absurd. Whatever value this movie possesses stems from the enjoyment of imagining the quaint innocence of the audiences in the 1930s being frightened by the silliness on screen. Reviewing this movie, I will not worry about spoiling the plot twists. They are too ridiculous to consider.
Peter and Joan Alison are an American newlywed couple inexplicably celebrating their honeymoon in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary. They meet Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) on the Orient Express and all three leave the train to take a bus to their destination. But the bus crashes during a rain storm and Joan is injured so Werdegast takes them to the home of his arch-enemy Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) whom Werdegast believes has stolen his wife while Werdegast was imprisoned in Russia for fifteen years after WWI.
Werdegast treats Joan for her injury and injects her with a powerful sedative so she will sleep the night. Peter Alison sees that Werdegast and Poelzig are foes but he bides his time to leave the house the next morning when his wife is well enough to travel. Meanwhile Werdegast confronts Poelzig and demands to know where his wife Karen is. Poelzig brings him down into the subterranean fortress under his house (the one still wired with dynamite). Here he is shown Karen’s embalmed body in a giant bell jar. And he is told that his daughter (also named Karen) is dead. Slightly later on we find out that Werdegast’s daughter isn’t dead but instead is married to Poelzig and that she believes her father died in prison.
The next morning, we learn that Poelzig is a Satanist whose cult is about to celebrate the new moon by sacrificing a female victim. Poelzig wants Joan to be that sacrifice. Werdegast agrees to play a game of chess against Poelzig to decide Joan’s fate but he loses and so Werdegast seems to acquiesce in her role as victim and allows his man-servant to obey Poelzig and render Peter unconscious with some Hungarian karate chop and imprison him in a round room with a rotating tube as its wall. Don’t ask me why such a room is part of the story. The whole house is full of goofy modernist architectural features. Meanwhile Joan is being prepped for her role as sacrifice at the satanist ceremony.
But at the last second Werdegast rescues Joan and while leading her to escape they find the body of his daughter Karen that Poelzig has just murdered. Through a series of fight scenes Werdegast and his man-servant manage to manacle Poelzig and Werdegast uses a scalpel to skin Poelzig alive. Joan sees this and starts screaming. Peter finds a gun that Poelzig’s dead servant dropped and thinking that Werdegast is harming Joan, he shoots him. While dying of his gunshot wound, Werdegast orders the young couple to flee the house as fast as possible while he triggers a five-minute timing device that will set off the dynamite under the house killing himself, Poelzig and the whole satanic cult gathered at the house.
O, brother! Well, on the positive side the architecture in Poelzig’s house has some interesting German Expressionist touches. And the dialog is sometimes hilariously over the top. There is Karloff reciting a two-minute incantation in Latin which is quite absurd. And then when Lugosi is supposedly flaying the flesh off of Karloff’s face, they show Lugosi’s shadow and the way his hand is moving it looks like he is scribbling on him. This movie is a museum piece of what a 1930s horror movie might be. And there is just enough atmosphere to make watching it silly fun. Only for fans of the genre.
Going My Way (1944) – An OCF Classic Movie Review
“Going My Way” is a comedy drama that took a bunch of Oscars and was the biggest box office draw in 1944. And since it starred Bing Crosby it unsurprisingly had several musical numbers spread through the movie. It’s the story of Father Chuck O’Malley (Crosby) a Catholic priest sent by the bishop to rescue a New York City parish; St Dominic’s, from the overwhelmed exhaustion of its present elderly pastor; Father Fitzgibbon (played by Barry Fitzgerald). With a supporting cast that includes such veteran character actors as Gene Lockart, Timothy O’Dowd and William Frawley the film drops any pretense at reality and has Father O’Malley manage to reform a local gang of New York City teenagers and converts them into a church choir. He manages to raise enough money to pay off the mortgage by selling a song to a music producer. He saves a runaway teenager from trouble with the police and even manages to reunite Father Fitzgibbon with his ninety-year-old mother by finding a way to pay for her trip from Ireland.
Now clearly this movie has nothing to do with reality. Having grown up in a New York City Roman Catholic parish I can assure you that no priest of Father O’Malley’s caliber has ever been seen. But treat the movie as a fantasy from a much more innocent time and enjoy it for its virtues. Crosby comes across as eminently likeable and the whole movie is a feel-good experience that can be watched around the holiday season to try and believe that there are still good people walking this Earth.
Now the interesting thing is this movie has the distinction of being one of only a very few good movies that had an even better sequel. The next year (1945) Crosby returned as O’Malley, paired with Ingrid Bergman as a nun in the movie, “The Bells of St Mary’s.”
But with or without the sequel, “Going My Way” is a heartwarming and well-made film that I can highly recommend to anyone who still wants to believe in the possibility of human goodness and hope. There is comedy, human feeling and a sense of optimism in the face of hardship. A classic.
Invaders from Mars (1953) – A Science Fiction Movie Review
It is entirely possible that this is the first science fiction movie I ever saw. I seem to remember seeing this on tv as a pretty young kid (maybe seven or eight years old). For that reason, it had a huge effect on my perspective on entertainment. Of course, watching this movie after all these years is a shock from seeing just how ridiculous the whole production is. But at the same time there is a fondness based on the nostalgia it inspires in me, even after all this time.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
David MacLean is a young grade school boy whose father is an engineer at a local factory doing top-secret government work. He’s also friends with the local astronomer Dr. Stuart Kelston. David has a small telescope in his bedroom. One night he is awakened about four thirty in the morning by what looks and sounds like a thunder storm but as he watches out his window, he sees a flying saucer land in a sand pit located adjacent to his family’s property.
David runs into his parents’ room and tells them the story. Out of a desire to find out what had scared his son George MacLean goes outside to the sand pit to investigate. And the aliens open up a hole in the sand pit and capture George. When George does not reappear by daylight Mary MacLean calls the police and reports her husband missing. Two patrolmen in a squad car show up and while searching the sand pit area they are also captured by the aliens.
A little later George returns to his house and we immediately see that he is no longer the same man. Whereas previous to his disappearance he was a friendly husband and father, now he is a surly abusive man who backhands his young son for insisting that he saw the space ship land. Also, David discovers that George has a small X shaped wound on the back of his neck near his shirt collar. After a few minutes the two patrolmen appear at the house and they obviously behave just as George is.
And this pattern repeats as through his telescope David sees a little neighborhood girl Kathy Wilson being captured. Later George pushes his wife Mary into the sand pit. And off camera, the town’s Chief of Police also ends up captured too. With all these people now controlled by the saucer-men, their diabolical plan begins to unfold. They are trying to sabotage the nearby factory that is building an atomic powered rocket along with the other plants that are supplying components. Kathy Wilson’s father; Dr. William Wilson is a physicist who is designing the atomic rocket (although how a physicist becomes a design engineer is beyond me). So, she attempts to kill her family by burning down their house. George works in the factory creating the rocket engine so he and his wife attempt to assassinate Dr. Wilson with a high-powered rifle. And the two police officers successfully burn down the engine plant.
At first no one believes David when tells his story and the Police Chief has him imprisoned in a jail cell awaiting his parents’ appearance and probably his subsequent death. But the desk sergeant is disturbed by his obvious fear and calls a medical doctor to look at him. Dr. Patricia Blake listens sympathetically to David’s crazy story and when she finds out that they both know the astronomer Stuart Kelson, she calls him up and is told that David is a very honest and serious child. And when his parents arrive to get David, she notices that they really are behaving abnormally and so she makes up a story about David having symptoms of polio to prevent them from dragging him away.
Now Dr. Blake takes him to Stuart Kelston and we get a crash course on the latest theories on Martian biology. And somehow Kelston intuits that Martians have gotten wind of the atomic rocket project and they are here in their flying saucer to sabotage the project. And Kelston trains his enormous observatory telescope on the sand pit across town just as George MacLean pushes General Mayberry, who is in charge of security for the whole rocket project, into the sand pit.
Kelston springs into action. He calls the Pentagon and a Col. Fielding orders a mechanized brigade of tanks and other weaponry to descend on this little town. Orders are given to arrest the MacLeans, the Police Chief, the two patrolmen and General Mayberry. Only David’s parents are captured alive and are sent to a hospital to attempt to remove the control devices in the back of their necks. The army surrounds the sand pit and eventually finds the saucer and use explosives to open up a tunnel leading to the ship. Fielding and his men descend down and attack the “mu-tants” that serve the super-intelligent Martian. The servants are about seven feet tall covered with green skin and have bug-eyes. They shamble around so slowly it’s amazing they get anything actually done. The master is this little homunculus in what looks like a glass bell jar that the mu-tants carry around. He’s got a humanoid face on top of a body that’s an immobile lump with a few tentacles sticking out here and there. He seems to have been spray-painted with bronze colored paint. He controls his servants by telepathy which we observe as him furrowing his brow. At some point, David and Dr Blake are captured when a hole randomly opens in the ground below their feet. And they have to be rescued by the army and Dr. Kelston (he seems to be in love with Patricia Blake).
The last scenes are of the whole human team running away from the sand pit as the space ship begins to depart with a bomb that the army planted in it about to explode. In the last scene David wakes up and runs into his parents’ room to discover that the whole thing was a nightmare. He goes back to his room and falls asleep. But at four-thirty he’s awakened by noise and sees exactly the same sight of the saucer landing in the sand pit. The End.
My thoughts on this movie. Where to begin? Okay, so the whole movie drips with 1950’s cold-war paranoia. Every character portrayal is over the top and the dialog is pretty hokey. The astronomer’s explanation why the Martians are aware of this atomic rocket project makes no sense at all. And the idea that a local astronomer can summon an army by calling the Pentagon is pretty hilarious. As for the aliens, the costumes and the scenery in the tunnels are laughably bad and the space ship looks like a 1950’s set designer’s idea of a 2000’s manufacturing space. The special effects, mainly, an infra-red “ray gun” is pathetic. On the other hand, the personality of the boy; David is sympathetic and Dr. Blake comes off as a compassionate woman which is always attractive. And the whole action of the army in their “war” against the aliens is ridiculous. The colonel leads his troops into the tunnels and he’s firing machine guns at mutants instead of his gunners doing that. But it’s a great bit of nostalgia. The terrible special effects and the vintage military clips from WWII training footage is wonderful. And all the B-movie and television actors like Leif Erickson, Hillary Brooke (The Abbot and Costello Show), Barbara Billingsley (Leave it to Beaver), Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson on the Superman Show) and Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley on the Dick Van Dyke Show) are so familiar and comforting. I highly recommend this movie for anyone who loves schlocky old sci-fi.
Back to the Horror
For a truly lazy man nothing is worse than hyperactivity. And so, my current frenetic schedule has rendered me borderline despondent. But the mail must get through! No, wait. The show must go on. So, let’s do this thing.
Let’s start with the government shutdown. I think the Democrats are crumbling in real time, before our eyes. Most of the people impacted by programs that are about to run out of money, (e.g., Snap) vote for Democrats. So, they’re going to be hurting really soon and that is going to be bad for Democrats running for office. I read an article that said Schumer is already dealing with a bunch of Democrat Senators who are frightened that they’re going to be blamed for poor people going hungry. My guess is things will come to a head in about a week. Well, good. Anything that makes Chuck Schumer look bad is by definition a wonderful thing. So, yay!
Next, the Mamdani ascension to Gracie Mansion looks poised to happen in two weeks. And both Democrat and Republican establishment figures are petrified that this guy is going to reduce New York City to a Mid-Atlantic version of Mexico City. Basically, a bankrupt madhouse run by gangs and beyond the control of the police. And I think they’re right. I read that a large number of the NYPD are going to retire if he wins. I don’t think you need anything more than that to tell you where the city will be next summer. Bedlam.
On a personal note, I received a detailed proposal for the marketing of my book, “The Sniper.” Currently I haven’t had a chance to even look at it yet. I’m bogged down in Dunwich civic life to such an extent that I lose track of the day of the week. But as soon as I can I intend to study it intensively and make up my mind on whether I think I should pursue a commercial plan to market it. By the way, if any more of you folks have finished reading it, please pass along your criticisms to help me weigh the value of going forward with a structured commercial release of the book. Well, to be continued.
I’ve been following Trump’s press releases and moves on the Ukraine War. He was talking as if he would provide Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles. But when Zelensky showed up in Washington to receive them it didn’t happen. Some outlets are saying he told Zelensky he no longer believes Ukraine can win and they should negotiate seriously with Russia to find a ceasefire and a peace plan. I have to confess I’m not sure whether Trump has a plan or is just trying to keep both countries at arms’ length. Russia has made some significant (albeit glacially slow) gains on the battle field. The cities of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk are teetering on the edge of complete capture and several others (Kostyantynivka, Myrnohrad and Lyman) are not far behind. Pretty soon the Russians will accomplish through arms what they are telling Ukraine they demand for a peace settlement. What happens then is anybody’s guess. The NATO countries are stating they are getting ready to send their troops into Ukraine. But I have a hard time believing that England, Germany and France will get their people to agree to this. Well, maybe Trump can broker a deal that’s not too disastrous for Ukraine. We’ll see.
Well that enough for now. Back to the horror.
Life over Art
Thomas Mann was a famous German author whose heyday was the first half of the twentieth century. He had a Nobel Prize in literature for one of his novels and a reputation for writing psychological stories that were full of melancholy and longing for lost happiness.
In addition to his novels which were too long for my liking he wrote a handful of novellas that were collected in an English translation under the title “Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories.” One of these stories is named “Tristan” and is the story of a sanitarium up in the Alps that especially treated people suffering from tuberculosis which is never actually named in the story but only hinted at when a patient would cough and then check a handkerchief for blood. But in addition to the actual patients at this sanitarium called Einfried there was one resident who stayed there for the atmosphere; a “novelist” named Detlev Spinell. And novelist would be an exaggeration. No one has ever read his book and even letter-writing is an enormously slow and painful exercise when performed by him. In the story, this writer is the cause of the death of a woman who is attempting to recover from a mild case of tuberculosis which is several times emphatically stated to be only affecting “the trachea, and not the lungs, thank God.” He is a malevolent force that insinuates into the young woman’s mind that she is the victim of a crass, plebian existence that sacrificed her health and artistic spirit at the altar of mundane human activities, specifically; marriage and childbirth which was the event that sapped her strength and weakened her body sufficiently to allow the wasting disease to get the upper hand with her.
And this unhealthy influence by Spinell eventually causes her health to completely break down. And so, the doctors call for her husband to return to the sanitarium before her incipient death. And while this catastrophe is occurring Spinell takes it upon himself to write a letter to this husband who at this point is occupying a room in the same building. He painstakingly writes the letter, mails it, smiles at the husband in the hallways when they meet and gives no thought to what will happen when the letter returns from the post office to the building that they both reside in. The letter is an insulting and disparaging polemic attacking the husband for his “plebian” tastes and lack of artistic feeling. And he announces that he has awakened the wife to her true spiritual stature and thereby causes her to renounce her allegiance to ordinary life (and by that choice, life itself).
Now all of this is quite bizarre but Mann paints the personalities of husband, wife and Spinell very skillfully. And this allows the personalities and their relationships to each other to make sense. The husband is a very plain and “normal” individual. A businessman who embraces the life of a husband and father along with his hard charging life as a capitalist. He loves his wife and child but he isn’t above pinching a maid in a hallway when the opportunity arises. The wife loves her husband and child but she has the artistic side to her personality and she can be influenced into believing that the prosaic life of a housewife and mother is a demeaning occupation for someone as sensitive and with such an elevated soul as herself. And then there is Spinell. He is an abnormal spirit of the “artistic” type who sees life through a prism that only values the spiritual and pure emotions and sensibilities of the artist. All ordinary things like the normal male/female relations are fraught with unacceptable amounts of inartistic reality. Thus, his hatred of the husband in the story and his beatification of the wife.
The climax of the story, to my mind is the collision when the husband reads the letter and confronts Spinell down the hall from him. He reads parts of the letter to the author and then rains verbal abuse on the head of his frightened and contrite adversary. But just as his screaming abuse reaches its crescendo, from out in the hall, comes news that his wife’s lungs have collapsed under the ravages of her ailment, causing her to cough up an enormous quantity of blood and that she is on the edge of death. The husband shifts his focus onto the bearer of bad news:
‘“Is she dead?” yelled Herr Klaterjahn. As he spoke he clutched the Rätin by the arm and pulled her to and fro on the sill. “Not quite? Not dead; she can see me, can’t she? Brought up a little blood again, from the lung eh? Yes, I give in, it may be from the lung. Gabriele!” he suddenly cried out, and his eyes filled with tears; you could see what a burst of good, warm, honest human feeling came over him. “Yes, I’m coming.” He said and dragged the Rätin after him…’
Mann shows us the reality of life and compares it to the shadow of life that Spinell hides in. He uses art to hide from life. As for the husband, who really was a crass, plebian individual full of crass plebian faults, he is also a living, breathing human being. Spinell is a wraith. His artistic sensibilities and motives are pathetic and infantile. Now this is coming from Thomas Mann who embraced art as the central motive of his life. What I find interesting is that he so clearly shows us the primacy of life over art. I find that powerful.
Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 16OCT2025 – Something for the Pot
May I offer up this the 1985 SciFi Enemy Mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Mine_(film) )? It is an excellent adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s novella of the same name, Directed by Wolfgang Petersen (of Das Boot fame). It had a low budget (40 Million) and its special effects are well, dated even for 1985. Excellent acting by Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset as the principals. Bombed at the box office as it was Neither Star Wars, Dune, nor Wrath of Khan.
I would also like to add in the war film department the 1969 film Battle Of Britain . To say the storyline is weak is an understatement (although it is briefly redeemed by Susannah York prancing about in her knickers). The killer here is the aerial fight scenes. These involve LARGE numbers of actual Spitfires, Me109 and Heinkel 111 aircraft (Me109 and Heinkels being part of the Spanish Air Force). They are well scripted and had input from Douglass Baeder and Air Marshall Dowding. It has a G rating but some scenes are almost too realistic and freaked out the 8-year-old me, who dunned my dad into taking me to the movie.
The Nine Billion Names of God (2019) – A Movie Review
I always thought this was a great short story. What a perfect subject for an easily made mini-movie. No super complicated special effects. Some old clothes and props. I like it.
Barry Lyndon (1975) – A Movie Review
I watched “Barry Lyndon” for the first time last night. I read that it was one of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpieces. And I do respect Kubrick’s art. But after watching it I realize that a masterpiece can be terrible entertainment.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
The movie is the story of the career of Redmond Barry an Irish man who allowed his passions to dictate his fate to a degree that is painful to watch. He gets into a duel over a girl (his cousin) and this forces him to flee his home to avoid legal prosecution and then he joins the British Army during the Seven Years’ War and by deserting his service he ends up in the Prussian Army and after that he becomes first a spy and then a crooked gambler. And finally, he marries a rich English widow and attempts to become part of the nobility. And while attempting this he allows his philandering to alienate his wife and step-son and eventually lands him in a duel with this step-son in which Redmond loses a leg. Along the way his wife presents him with a son of his own and the little boy is tragically killed in a riding accident. He ends his life in exile returning to Europe to attempt to live off his ability to cheat at cards.
If this sounds like a ridiculous plot for a movie, it’s because, it is!
Ryan O’Neal plays Redmond and Kubrick directs the film as a straightforward narrative with very little dialog and only a few scenes that provide much in the way of emotional discovery. What this movie provides is cinematography. Beautiful landscapes, remarkable palaces and estates, perfectly lighted and photographed interior shots; all of the products of a master cinematographer. As a photographer myself I can appreciate the care with which the shots were set up and displayed for the viewer. And the costumes and battle scenes and rural settings are amazing. But that’s all you get. The story moves forward at a glacial pace and there really isn’t anyone in the story (except the six-year-old little boy who dies) that you care about at all. Redmond himself is a selfish, dishonest man. And he is surrounded with mostly the same kinds of people. Who can I recommend this movie to? I guess photographers, cinematographers and diehard fans of Stanley Kubrick. It’s just too slow and empty and bleak for a general audience. It’s visually beautiful and emotionally empty. Sorry.