And so, too, the protagonists of these movies, all three of whom find themselves at odds with their fathers (or fathers-in-law). Can a non-Oedipal solution be found to bring peace and harmony to the unhappy home?
Vulcan, Son of Jupiter (1962)
(aka Vulcan, figlio di Giove)
Objective Grade: D-
Bouncy-Bouncy and/or Beefcake Bonus: B+
Pity poor Vulcan (Iloosh Khoshabe, here billed under the amazing pseudonym of "Rod Flash Ilush"). All he wants to do is make weapons and armor in his smithy and be left alone, but the other gods have different plans.
Most pressingly, they need to find a husband for Venus (Annie Gorassini), an attention-seeking troublemaker whose pastimes include making out with good-looking guys, flaunting her assets in public, and hanging out with Nicole Richie.
The two best candidates are Vulcan and hotheaded Mars (Roger Browne), but the latter is far more smitten with Venus's charms. Mars jealously picks a fight with Vulcan in his smithy, as a consequence of which -- "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- they're both temporarily banished to Earth.
This is fine with Mars, who schemes to depose Jupiter with the aid of King Milos of Thrace (Ugo Sabetta). They plan to build a Tower of Babel-like structure to reach the gods in their heavens, and hopefully get to whip some slaves along the way.
For Vulcan it's rather more inconvenient. On arrival he's wakened from unconsciousness by a group of Neptune's nymphs, but all are soon captured by an armada of dentally 'n' mentally challenged lizard-men.
These outcasts, cursed by the gods, relish the chance to get some revenge by imprisoning and torturing Vulcan. However, help comes in the form of the reluctant Geo (Salvatore Furnari), whom the nymphs are able to sneak out in a bundle of hay.
Once free, Geo blows a conch shell to summon a Triton, who drags him to the undersea kingdom of Neptune (Omero Gargano), kicking and screaming the whole time -- which is pretty much how Geo spends 90% of the film, at that.
Help is soon sent, and once the lizard-men are dispatched, everyone goes to visit Neptune, where Mercury brings news of Mars's plans. Vulcan vows to stop him, but not before enjoying a sexy, sexy dance from nymph Aetna (Bella Cortez), whose pendulous assets would put many Holsteins to shame.
("Pit bulls are just so misunderstood, you know?")
Meanwhile, Venus is bored with all this talk of war, and yearns for the simple life -- that is, the one where everyone constantly pays attention to her, despite the fact that she does nothing worthwhile at all. So she finds her own ways to cause trouble.
("Aetna knows what she did, and that's all I'm ever going to say about it.")
You can probably guess the rest: swordfights, impassioned speeches of love, bouncing bazoombas, cornball dialogue, and alas, the bald guy gets it.
Not the bald guy!
Of course it's all utterly, wonderfully ridiculous, with poor acting, gloriously misguided dubbing (an unequivocal plus in a film like this), and fight scene choreography that's akin to assisted cartwheel practice in grade-school gym class. There's plenty of firm and/or jiggling flesh on display if you like that sort of thing -- even middle-aged dwarf-flesh, offering a welcome opportunity for those curious souls who don't want to clutter up their browser search history. And while Mill Creek's print is far from pristine, with washed-out colors that vary wildly even within a single shot (and a perennial red line on the right-hand edge of the frame), it's still more than watchable.
So why not let Vulcan, Son of Jupiter be your companion for one of these lonely nights? It may not feed your head, but if someone denies the entertainment value in such a spectacle, we'll raise our heads in indignation and shout: "It's not right!"
("Well, I'm trying to get up that great big hill of hope.")
The Man with Two Lives (1942)
Grade: C-
Sometimes men wear tuxedos and bow ties. These are usually good men, like Philip Bennett (Edward Norris), one of two sons of wealthy Hobart Bennett (Frederick Burton), and his brother Reg (Tom Seidel), who bears a vague resemblance to Anna Paquin.
Other good men in The Man with Two Lives include family friend Dr. Richard Clark (Edward Keane), who's in the midst of conducting a series of highly successful experiments in reviving the organs of dead animals. He has big plans to start human trials, and conveniently, there's a convicted murderer due for execution that very night...at midnight. (Haven't you ever seen The Indestructible Man, bud?)
And then there's Professor Toller (Hugh Sothern), a buzzkill who keeps hinting that these experiments might be meddling with God's domain, and is particularly fond of talking about the transmigration of souls.
Well, there's an engagement party, a shocking turn of events, an unexpected tragedy, and a few suspenseful shots of a clock. Always a bad sign, that one.
Bottom line, Philip wakes up, and now he's wearing a necktie. And a hat. This can't be good.
"Surely," he says to himself, "I need some outside help on this." He seeks out Marcia Gay Harden, but since she hasn't been born yet, instinct directs him to Sporady's, a magical Irish bar that has a roughly 68% chance of existing on any given night.
Here he finds the next best option, Helen Lengel (Marlo Dwyer), a local specialist in funny hats with a heart of gold.
(I mean, she has the heart of gold, since you can't really wear a gold-hearted hat without hurting your neck.)
She suggests that he return home and consult his fiancée, Louise (Eleanor Lawson), and even provides a funny hat for her on the house. The results aren't good, however.
Having enraged his father, he returns to Sporady's (which luckily happens to exist) and barges in on a roomful of gangsters in a desperate attempt to find a new foster father. They're sympathetic, but deeply uncomfortable with both the form and content of his request, and encourage him to find other ways to resolve the situation.
Ultimately Philip and his dad come to terms when they discover that Reg is deeply in love with his fiancée. Together, as father and son, they beat the younger brother to death, affording them a much-needed opportunity to reconnect -- and conveniently simplifying the wedding plans, since Louise didn't have a good candidate for maid of honor.
In the closing scenes, local policeman Lt. Bradley (Addison Richards), a compulsive eater, is discovered in the final stages of consuming the couple's entire wedding cake. "We never should have trusted that necktie-wearing bastard," says the ensemble in unison, before promptly descending upon the hapless cop. After asphyxiating him on the remaining cake and severing his man-parts, they throw his body into the Seine, in a beautifully choreographed scene set to the strains of the Moonlight Sonata.
If you're wondering how all this could've passed the Hays Code, never fear, disaster is averted: at the last minute, we learn that practically everything since the engagement party was all a dream.
So all the asphyxiating, hat-wearing, and sibling-beating? None of that was true, none of it happened. And if you feel cheated, well, so did we -- but hopefully it was entertaining while it lasted.
Scared to Death (1947)
Objective Grade: F
Hungarian Hue Honorarium: D
This, friends, is the protagonist of Scared to Death, one Laura Van Ee (Molly Lamont). She spends most of the film with rage, fear, and contempt etched on her face, fulminating with hatred of her husband and father-in-law (and they're none too fond of her either), with whom she lives in a spooky old house -- and whom she suspects of wanting to kill her.
But when we first see her, she looks more like this:
No spoiler, that, since it's how the film starts: with Ms. Van Ee on a slab in the morgue, and two coroners about to go to work on her.
As they prepare to undertake (!) their gruesome necessities, they note that "one hates to perform an autopsy on a beautiful girl", leaving us to wonder whether they're lamenting the death of someone attractive -- always more tragic than when ugly people get snuffed, as is well-known -- or whether they're simply sad to spoil an aesthetically pleasing object which would otherwise offer intriguing possibilities.
Either way, it's probably the only genuinely creepy bit in the film. But before they start carvin', they pause once more to speculate about her final moments:
"And yet...one often wonders: what could have caused the last thought that was cut off by death?"
Well, Scared to Death is here to tell us. Thanks to the magic of corpse narration, the whole film is recounted from Mrs. Van Ee's point of view, more or less, tracing her descent into paranoia as her mysterious persecutor draws the noose tighter and tighter.
While this is a clever gambit in principle (put your pants back on, Nacho), in practice it means that, every 10 minutes or so, the film is suddenly interrupted by the following sequence:
- a still shot of the corpse that fades in, underscored by "woo-woo" spooky music that amounts to a wordless vocalise and a couple of augmented chords;
- Molly Lamont delivers a line or two in voiceover, usually meaningless expository filler in the White Gorilla "As I watched..." vein;
- and the shot fades back out, accompanied by the same musical cue.
These cornball tactics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Scared to Death's problems, as many factors sink it beyond all hope of redemption. Despite a few vague signs of greater ambition, the plot is incoherent, full of red herrings and loose ends, and generally feels like it was being made up as the filming went along. Characters' motivations are unclear, their behavior often makes no sense, and none are remotely sympathetic. And the final twist, revealing the culprit at last, amounts to a cheap trick that doesn't even play fair.
Then you've got Nat Pendleton as Bill "Bull" Raymond, a disgraced cop turned private investigator who inserts himself into proceedings in hopes of redemption. The relentless "comic" patter of this bumbling idiot is like nails on a chalkboard, and it's hard to imagine any of his one-liners eliciting anything but a groan and a sad shake of the head, even in 1947.
The film's one saving grace is Béla Lugosi as Professor Leonide, an enigmatic mesmerist and cousin of the elder Van Ee (George Zucco). In the midst of all this domestic turmoil, he arrives unexpectedly in the company of his diminutive manservant Indigo (Angelo Rossitto), though his visit isn't exactly welcome.
Lugosi's performance is exactly what you'd expect, but allows for a bit more range and playfulness than most of the pseudo-Drac dreck he slogged through in the last decades of his career. Genteel, urbane, but unequivocally dangerous, he easily steals every scene he's in.
And, as every review on the Internet notes, this movie is your only chance to see Lugosi in color. At least in Mill Creek's print, the film uses a funky, not-quite-right palette that initially made us suspect it was one of Ted Turner's misguided colorization efforts. But nope, it's every inch the real thing.
("Really, you met Milton Berle?")
But let's be clear, Scared to Death is an utterly regrettable movie with absolutely nothing else to offer save Béla's presence. If seeing him is enough to please you, by all means; otherwise, steer very clear of this abrasive, half-assed trainwreck.
(Nice tie, too.)
