Unfortunately none of these four films have any particular relevance to Thanksgiving -- no turkeys, no cranberry sauce, not even a flagrantly stuffed bra -- but they do share a common thread: all of them end by breaking the fourth wall, with a question left unanswered.
The Night America Trembled (1957)
Grade: C-
(Now Ecuador, that's a different story.)
Still, however the urban legend got started, it's been a persistent little cuss. In 1975, The Night America Trembled was evidently remade as the TV movie The Night That Panicked America, showing that two decades of "progress" hadn't dampened Hollywood's willingness to found their productions on falsehoods (or offer up old wine in new bottles).
Meanwhile, that "fake radio news broadcast that got everybody scared" has continued to pop up, unchallenged, in otherwise-clever films like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, though one hopes (no doubt in vain) that the Snopes era will put an end to the Welles-Wells panic myth.
Anyway, the whole thing is about what you'd expect from a 1950s TV movie: men, microphones, modest amounts of mayhem.
And -- perhaps surprisingly -- a makeout session from soon-to-be-married teenyboppers, in an era when Lucy and Ricky were still sleeping in separate beds.
For most viewers, half the fun of The Night America Trembled will be spotting future stars like Ed Asner and Warren Beatty in small supporting roles. For us, as always, it was trying to get unflattering screenshots of the principals.
The print that Mill Creek used is reasonably clear, but a faint overlay of some ghostly image is perceptible throughout. Double exposure? Interference during the transfer? Recycled videotape? Who knows -- we can't capture it in screenshots, but whenever the camera moves it's quite visible.
Either way, at least The Night America Trembled is pleasantly short, clocking in at well under an hour. As for the unanswered question, it's found in Murrow's closing words to us, the audience:
"Twenty years ago, the concept of an alien race was novel to us, hence alarming. Today, we realize that Mars is very near -- closer, perhaps, in time than we imagined. There is every reason to believe that long before the Martians come to us, we will go to them. I wonder if we'll panic them as they did us, on The Night America Trembled?"
Indeed, Eddie, my boy. Indeed.
The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)
Grade: B-
In making our way through the Mill Creek 250-pack, we've certainly seen some terrible prints, and overall The Amazing Transparent Man is far from the worst. But its first few minutes are surely among the most flagrantly damaged we've seen -- not in the "scratched and spliced print" sense, but in the "something went seriously wrong with this transfer" sense.
Dark areas of the image are filled with analog and digital artifacts, the picture itself has a sandblasted, wrecked quality, and the net result bears an unfortunate resemblance to late 1990s streaming video protocols.
All told, we'd imagine most non-completists took one look at the opening and bailed. And that's a shame, since what we have here is a tightly-constructed, punchy little B-picture that amply demonstrates that you don't need an hour of runtime to tell a complete story.
With a title like The Amazing Transparent Man, it's hardly a spoiler to give the basic outlines of the plot: master safecracker Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy) gets sprung from prison by bad girl Laura Matson (Marguerite Chapman), who spirits him away to a safe house in the boonies.
Now, Laura didn't just do this out of the goodness of her heart. She's in league with Maj. Paul Krenner (James Griffith), a treasonous criminal mastermind who wants Faust to steal nuclear material to further his clever schemes.
And how is Joey supposed to do that, given that (a) the material is under armed guard and (b) as a wanted fugitive, he'll be instantly recognized by just about anyone who sees him?
Enter Dr. Peter Ulof (Ivan Triesault), an "eminent nu-cu-lar scientist" (but not a balloonist) with piercing blue eyes, a Holocaust-haunted past, and -- oh yeah -- the ability to make small animals invisible, via exposure to just the right sort of radiation. (You know, the fancy kind.)
And who's to be the guinea pig for the first human trial?
You can probably guess most of the rest (hint: Dr. Ulof isn't helping Maj. Krenner of his own free will). But what sets The Amazing Transparent Man apart isn't the novelty of its plot, but the quick pace and strong momentum that it sustains throughout its 57 minutes.
Between the tight time constraints and tight budget, there really isn't room to screw around, and the movie's brisk professionalism -- light on exposition, heavy on schemes and counterschemes -- is refreshing.
The characters in The Amazing Transparent Man also spend a surprising amount of time assaulting one another, with nearly every member of the cast receiving at least one nasty blow to the head.
Small wonder, then, that they're constantly brandishing guns -- that is, when they're not angrily telling each other to "lay off the giggle water": if drinking alcohol is incompatible with their schemes, why do they have so much of it around?
Of course, any "invisible man" film lives or dies by the effectiveness of its special effects, and for a low-budget movie, The Amazing Transparent Man delivers quite well on that front -- especially the scenes where Faust partially reappears, which manage to be both vaguely comic and kinda cool.
But the film certainly isn't flawless. There are minor stupidities in the exposition, but those are to be expected; more damaging, though, is the miscasting of James Griffith, whose stage presence is evocative of, say, Don Knotts, rather than the saturnine, dangerous menace the role ought to have.
Still, it's worth sticking with The Amazing Transparent Man, if only to reach the final scene, in which Dr. Ulof delivers a peroration upon the dangers of powerful technology falling into enemy hands -- "It's a serious problem" -- only to interrupt himself and, unexpectedly, turn to the audience:
"What would you do?" he asks -- and the film fades to black and ends just like that.
Twister's Revenge (1986)
Objective Grade: who cares
All Aboard for Fun Time Grade: A-
So Twister's Revenge -- which has naught whatsoever to do with tornadoes, in case you're wondering -- brings the following to the table:
- Twister, a sentient monster truck that talks;
- Dave, a wisecracking cowboy hero (Dean West);
- and Sherry, a brilliant, wealthy, sexy damsel in distress (Meredith Orr).
(Well, she starts out as a damsel, but becomes a married woman about 17 minutes in.)
Sounds like a murderer's row of leads, right? But in this wonderfully stupid, sprawlingly ridiculous Bill Rebane feature, none of those elements gets the spotlight.
Instead, the center of our attention, and our sympathies, is right here:
Fact is, these three goofballs -- ostensibly the villains -- are really the protagonists of Twister's Revenge. We never really know why, in the face of repeated, humiliating disasters, they're so determined to pull off a heist at the expense of the happy couple. But like Wile E. Coyote, they just keep trying and trying.
Truth be told, the whole movie is like a Looney Tunes cartoon writ large --
-- but one in which it appears that any idea that passed through the makers' heads, no matter how random or outlandish, was kept in. For instance, how about we spend several minutes of screentime on a New Wave group at a dive bar --
-- but have them be fronted by three writhing, dancing girls, including a pointedly plus-size lead?
Sure, why not? And why not have some people bopping in gas masks for no reason? We've got gas masks, might as well use 'em!
Hey, did you say you could get a tank? Then I guess we'll have a tank!
And wait, there's a parade going on? Let's put that in too!
This gloriously half-assed approach to filmmaking -- not worrying whether anything is good or bad, but merely plowing ahead with enthusiasm and conviction, using whatever resources are at hand -- is one of those things not everyone can embrace. And that's fine! We gather that quite a few people find Twister's Revenge an excruciating experience, but not us: we've enjoyed everything we've seen by Rebane so far, and this perhaps most of all.
If any one actor deserves credit for the infectious charm of Twister's Revenge, it's R. Richardson Luka as Bear, a good-natured, rubber-faced lummox who seems devoid of malice, but still agreeably goes along with his friends' plans. There's something intrinsically likeable about him, and surely without Bear the movie wouldn't be remotely as fun.
We took a break from the 250-pack to watch Twister's Revenge on Mill Creek's Drive-In Movie Classics 50-pack. Unfortunately long stretches of Mill Creek's transfer suffer from weird audio dropouts that sound a bit like a CD struggling to track properly. It's not intolerable, and thankfully the sound doesn't drift out of sync, but it's a shame that an otherwise OK transfer is marred by this annoying defect.
As for the film's unanswered question, well, this is a bit of a stretch. But the above woman in the yellow dress -- Bear's main squeeze -- is terror-struck when Twister attacks her home (and outhouse) in an effort to seek revenge for Sherry's abduction.
So naturally, she runs...and runs...and runs, all to the tune of a silent-era-style piano accompaniment (which is sped up, as is the footage, with obvious and perhaps tasteless comic intent). She runs through fields, meadows, parking lots, and even makes a pit stop at Arby's:
And for the movie's very last shot, instead of showing us the happy protagonists, a triumphant Twister, or even Bear, we get this hapless woman sprinting through Wisconsin snow in the dead of winter, still only barely clothed:
That's right -- even though Twister's gotten his titular revenge and everything's been set to rights, she's still running. The poor thing.
And hence, the unanswered question: did she ever stop?
("Some say she's still running to this day," intoned the camp counselor.)
Grade: C-
No one is apt to accuse Grave of the Vampire of being an unmemorable film. In fact it's one of the few on this box set that we can truthfully say has had a handful of genuinely disturbing images -- though it wasn't the 7+ onscreen murders (some of them quite brutal), but rather the film's penchant for blood play, that had us twitching in our seats.
And the screenshot above, of blood dripping on an infant's face (in case you hoped it was just cranberry sauce)? That tasty treat, we'll have you know, comes courtesy of Mom, who just wants to feed her sweet baby James as best she can. Mmm, Thanksgiving.
However, memorable imagery can't rescue Grave of the Vampire from an unexpected, disastrous left turn -- whether the result of budgetary limitations, or simply misguided ambitions, we don't know. But after spending nearly half its running time in the late 1930s, the movie suddenly drops a ton of voiceover exposition on us, and teleports forward three decades' time --
-- whereupon little James Eastman is now a strapping full-grown man, played by William Smith, who manages to look remarkably ill-at-ease in nearly every one of his scenes.
Now, if the cause of his discomfort were overtly spelled out -- say, if he were Native American (as he sort of appears to be) in a WASP environment, or clearly marked as working-class at an affluent college -- then we might have an interesting fish-out-of-water subtext going on.
But instead, he just seems incredibly, weirdly uncomfortable with the whole thing, for reasons only known to Mr. Smith and his otherwise-storied career.
Of course, it's always weird to begin with, going to night school...
...but it's doubly weird when you're planning to kill your professor (Michael Pataki). And he's a vampire. And a rapist. And, uh, your dad -- he's that too. That's right, your dad is Professor Rapist Vampire, Ph.D.
For some reason, Eastman doesn't fast-track his patricidal ambitions, but seems content to hover around until a sufficient threshold of murders has been reached. Meanwhile father and son are both attracted to Anne (Lynn Peters, in her last film role), an "instructor in English literature", who to the film's credit is an approximately age-appropriate pairing for both of them (i.e. not a 21-year-old ingenue).
The first and second acts of Grave of the Vampire feel spliced together from two completely different films, but we held out some hope that the third act would, somehow, bring its narrative arc to a convincing conclusion.
No such luck, as the movie's concluding minutes feel just as uncertain and cobbled-together as the rest of it. Characters are brutally murdered, and their friends seem wholly unfazed; the protagonist continues to hang out with his dad for no discernible purpose; and when things finally erupt into overt violence, while we were pleased to see some eye-gouging (always an underutilized resource), there's still no sense of rhyme or reason to any of it.
That said, we'd love to be able to show you the movie's penultimate shot, as it's another memorable (and absurd) image that epitomizes our theme of breaking the fourth wall. But, it'd also be one hell of a spoiler. So, sorry, kids, you'll have to watch this one for yourselves.
We will, however, show you the haunting question that follows that shot, and concludes the film:
Uh, okay. Shades of "Tabled, this motion is" -- or, perhaps more appropriately, "Break me a fucking give."
