The Old Scold and the Sea

In these two aquatic tales, our protagonist has found the object of his desire and the feeling's mutual, but both are hounded by some sex-negative femme d'un certain âge who -- contrary to the original connotations of the phrase -- believes il faut qu'on bloque le coq.

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Night Tide (1961)

Grade: C-

Dennis Hopper: a good actor, sure. A great actor? Maybe. But what he isn't is right for the part of Johnny, the ingenuous sailor smitten with mysterious carnie Mora (Linda Lawson), who may or may not be the mermaid she impersonates for a living.

Johnny insistently presses his attentions on Mora, who's standoffish at first but eventually caves and joins him for an awkward oceanside meal, complete with unexpected gull-stroking.

Soon enough the couple are lounging on the beach, with hugs, kisses, implied sex, and a bit of ass-gazing to boot.

But rumors of trouble persistently swirl around Mora, and local girl Ellen (Luana Anders) is only too happy to pass those rumors along, seeing as how she too wants to get some of that sweet Hopper ass.

Funny to see Anders, so sexy in Dementia-13, play mousy here, and quite convincingly too: whatever sensuality Ellen has is latent and implicitly mired in subservience.

Night Tide has good bones, but Hopper hits all the wrong notes, sorry to say. Instead of wide-eyed and open-hearted, he just seems confused and vaguely distracted -- like a stoner, or a recent TBI patient.

Or if he's trying for brooding and obsessed, that intensity isn't exactly apparent in his body language or line reading, so maybe the guy just needed better direction and more time to hone his acting chops. And if Hopper's Johnny is just meant to be yet another emotionally stunted child of WWII and the Fifties...well, who cares?

In the plus column, Night Tide is equipped with attractive scenery, evocative set-pieces, a decent script, and a plot which isn't altogether predictable. With one or two exceptions, it never embarrasses itself in the many ways such films often do.

But if it's trying to be one of those understated, haunting films whose imagery and characters stick with you for years afterward -- like, say, a Carnival of Souls -- well, that just didn't happen for Night Tide. In a way, it's a good reminder that plausible ingredients don't always yield a compelling result; not every record with Fender Rhodes and funky drums was a winner, after all, nor does every dish with truffle oil, crème fraîche, and chipotle win its chef a James Beard award.

But if blame for Night Tide's non-classic status has to be assigned, it must go squarely on Dennis Hopper's shoulders. His manly, massageable, yet curiously expressionless shoulders.

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She Gods of Shark Reef (1958)

Grade: D-



For its first few minutes, She Gods of Shark Reef conjures some real interest. The opening set-piece -- which features, among other things, an impressive-looking assassin who clutches his blade between his teeth as he swims toward his target -- is taut and intriguing, though a bit hard to make out.

Alas, these things don't often last in the land of Mill Creek box sets, and soon a bit of voiceover narration -- that dreaded saboteur of all things action -- escorts us to the small Pacific island where the remainder of She Gods of Shark Reef is to take place. True, we still have POC adroitly transporting blades in the water: 

But Corman et al. decided this Shark needed a WASP injection, provided in the form of recently shipwrecked brothers Chris and Lee Johnston (Bill Cord and Don Durant, respectively). No points for guessing that the blond is the good one!

This idyllic Pacific island -- which definitely isn't Hawaii, how dare you even think that? -- is populated exclusively by moderately attractive, intermittently Polynesian women of marriageable age. When they're not making a living as pearl divers for "The Island Company", they sing, dance, do crafts...

...and practice religious ceremonies involving various combinations of gods, sharks, human sacrifice, and underwater statuary.



If all this sounds like paradise, you haven't reckoned with the presence of Queen Pua (Jeanne Gerson), a hatchet-faced woman who makes some effort to accommodate the unexpected visitors, but whose dedication to the blockage of cockage is nonpareil.

Why, in the midst of all this swarth, she's also as white as baking soda is -- as far as we could tell -- left unexplained.



Does one of the natives (Lisa Montell) fall in love with the "good" brother? Of course she does!



Does Queen Pua do her best to raise a red flag against the indecent writhing of hips and commingling of fluids? Of course she does!



Is there pearl thievery, breaking of taboos, and other trouble in paradise? And is the fattest character the target of humor and/or comic violence? You'd better believe it!

Do these and other events lead to mounting tension, and ultimately violence, between the brothers? Of course they do!

And did we care? Eh, not really. Have a shark.

Get on with it!

Had we not already been the patient folks we are, trekking through the 250 movies of the Mill Creek Horror Collection would surely have taught us that virtue which is seldom found in humans (and never in a duck).

But these next two films stretched our virtue to its limit (leaving it, no doubt, slacker for the experience). For both make it pretty clear where they're going from the outset, and yet still take most of their running time to get there -- leaving us long minutes in which to await the incoming inevitability.

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Nabonga (1944)

Grade: D-

It's been a while since we first watched Nabonga, but we'd imagine that some minutes in, we turned to each other with a quizzical look: "What the...Haven't we seen this one before?"

And in fact Nabonga has a lot in common with The White Gorilla, that godawful piece of Crash trash that made our worst list a few entries back. Both involve primates (obviously), stock footage of African wildlife (hardly a surprise), Corrigan himself (in a gorilla suit, natch)...

...and white women worshipped and/or feared by credulous, stereotyped natives. Yep, that's a delightful panino of racism served up from Nabonga's grill, though it could be worse.

Of the two, Nabonga is clearly the better film (not that that's saying much). There's a pleasant edge to its MacGuffin -- a tale of stolen riches, a plane crash, and a crooked father (Herbert Rawlinson) willing to kill to protect himself, his daughter Doreen, and his ill-gotten gains (in whatever order). He may be a murderer and a fiduciary traitor, but at least he loves his kid, right?

You've probably already guessed most of the rest, like the noble explorer Ray Gorman (Buster Crabbe) who goes in search of a mysterious "house with wings" that fell from the sky, or the native Tobo (Prince Modupe) who bravely escorts him, despite his trepidations about the "white witch" living in the jungle.

(Poor Tobo: you behaved with honor and courage, but -- while facing your fears is always a good move -- in this case, sadly, you'll regret that decision.)

Naturally, there's also a cunning rival (Barton MacLane), a morally ambiguous femme fatale (Fifi D'Orsay) -- who wears Mexican peasant blouses, for some reason, and flowers that look like dollar signs --

-- and of course Doreen (Julie London), who's all growed up now and has swapped out her paternal protector for something a bit more...hirsute.

And if you've guessed that it's love at first sight for her and Buster, the answer is a resounding "Yes!"...

...uh, more or less, anyway.

All well and good, but did we really need 60+ minutes to chew on this meager plot before we get to anything resembling real action? Gorilla suits, smiling ladies, and fake crocodile fights aren't remotely enough to sustain Nabonga, which doesn't come close to fulfilling the promise of its initial hook. Some conflict between Gorman and Doreen's father would have given some teeth to proceedings, but as things stand, Nabonga's only real selling point is that it's not The White Gorilla.

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Midnight Phantom (1935)

Grade: F

As anyone who's ever watched Adam-12 can tell you, it's hard being a police chief (Jim Farley). You've got to be tough but fair, keep your integrity integrated and your wits about you, and hold the men around you to the highest ethical standards while living up to them yourself.

Oh, and occasionally you have to show off your nipples. There's that, too. (It's a union thing.)

"OK, I've had all I can take -- cover 'em up, Chief."

It's even harder, though, when you know you've got a lot of people who want to kill you -- and Midnight Phantom spends a good three-quarters of its running time making damn sure we know just how many people want to kill Chief Sullivan.

Some highlights from this long list include his own men, tired of getting one too many dressings-down. Several of them make not-so-veiled threats against him -- a serious thing in a tough town where "I'll get you!" isn't an invitation to carpool.

Or there's the sad case of his secretary Kathleen (Barbara Bedford), an attractive woman in the early stages of spinsterhood, who quietly harbors a flame of passion for her middle-aged boss.

Her formidable mother (Mary Foy), mistaking propinquity for iniquity, then proceeds to rain down holy hellfire on the poor chief's head.

We can't find it at the moment, but one site described Foy as "spectacularly butch" or something along those lines, and that's about right. One part Nona Gaprindashvili and one part Lawrence Dane, she's the sort of woman who says "You'll pay for that!" and leaves you no doubt that it will be so.

And then there's Lieut. Dan Burke (Lloyd Hughes), who's passionately in love with the chief's daughter, Diana (Claudia Dell). The chief even gives his blessing to their marriage, so it seems like blue skies for love, right?

Well, not so fast: there is the minor matter of Burke's criminal brother -- whose existence, once revealed, flits across the plot of Midnight Phantom like that bird what got hit by a baseball that one time. Which is to say, he goes splat, and that's his sole function in the film...

...except, of course, that the whole thing hits the newspapers, and gets poor Lt. Burke the Ted Knight treatment from the chief. Motive for murder? Maaaaaybe.

And then there are all the random criminals who get paraded through the screen at one point -- all so that the famed criminologist Professor David Graham (Reginald Denny, looking rather Scanavino-esque) can do the equivalent of a psychic's "cold reading" on them and suss out their particular brand of lawbreaking. Maybe one of them has manslaughter on the mind?

But one person it can't be is Prof. Graham, no way, no how. Nope. He's such a nice man, and so criminological, you know?

Why, he goes to great lengths to make it clear how OK he is with Diana's imminent marriage, even though he's in love with her! And when given an easy opportunity to undermine Lt. Burke, he doesn't take it, but instead supports Diana! Confronted by a wavering beauty who seeks permission to return to the arms of her beloved, he could've said "What are you, nuts?" but instead, he affirms their love. What a guy.

Anyway, with all these potential foes lurking around, you'd expect the Chief to think to himself "I'm dead meat!", and take appropriate precautions. Or maybe the film would bump him off about halfway through, and we'd have an elaborate series of revelations and counterrevelations to unravel. Right?

Well, no: Midnight Phantom just kinda putzes around for 45 minutes and then, like a college student who procrastinates on a paper until 2:00 a.m. the night before it's due, spends the last 12 minutes hurriedly trying to cobble together some sort of denouement.

Consequently, while any consecutive few minutes of the film are reasonable enough, Midnight Phantom is a complete trainwreck on a structural level, because its fundamental design is disastrously misguided. Its thesis statement is untouched until page 18 of 20; its bungee cord of salvation turns out to be a rubber band.

Such is the mark of a failed film. (It also has a stupid name: every time we've gone through the list of films in our backlog, we've looked at the title and said "Midnight Phantom? What was that?")

So if Midnight Phantom is the booby prize, it seems we are the winners. (Sigh.) But hey, at least it's got soul:

(I know, I know, I know...and now, you supply the other 23! See ya.)

Great Expectations

Two films that, alas, were not all that we hoped they would be.

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Day of the Panther (1988)

Grade: C-

Ozploitation -- that's a new one to me, which makes sense given the term's relatively recent coinage (for a 2008 documentary; wisely shortened from the previously tossed around Aussieploitation). Now, in my mind, this should really mean one of two things: either, the shameful peddling of over-the-top and not-actually-all-that-Australian stereotypes -- à la Outback Steakhouse and Crocodile Dundee -- 

I reckon I'd like a platter of shrimp on the barbie, a six pack 

of Foster's, two jars of Vegemite, and a kilo of fresh baby

for my dingo. Ta!

-- or, the shameful peddling of kangaroos, wallabies, potoroos, and their marsupial brethren for, shall we say, unsavory purposes. (Probably an especially bad idea when it comes to koalas, though.) 

Alas, Ozploitation films are simply schlocky genre flicks -- horror, biker, karate, sexploitation -- made in the 70s and 80s in response to Australia's newly minted R-rating. 

OK, that's not bad at all -- with Mad Max and its Gayboy Berserkers and Smegma Crazies counted among the genre's notables, how could a fellow Ozploit like Day of the Panther be anything less than a joyful, campy romp?

Well, despite the impressive variety of fight sequences crammed into its 84 minute run time, along with a fair sprinkling of laughable fashion and period haircuts, Day of the Panther was no Twister's Revenge. 

That is to say, despite its undeniable 80s-ness and low-budget appeal, it just didn't have the joy we've found in the box*'s other modern offerings, be they low-budget, off-the-rails regional fare, or made-for-TV no-holds-barred cheesefests. 

*Just to be clear, mate, by "box" we mean the Drive-In Movie
Classics, and not our normal 250 Horror Collection stalwart.

It's not without its moments, and it certainly doesn't take itself completely seriously -- how could it with those bumbling, why-the-hell-are-they-even-in-this-movie detectives?

It just tries a bit too hard to be a real kung-fu movie. 

Day of the Panther really wants to wow us with its fight scenes; it only succeeds in making each of them go on for so long that we completely lose interest.

Where is that shadow coming from?

Since the plot is already bare-bones, and the protagonist not terribly compelling (a perpetually-bemused mash-up of Roger Federer and Mario Lopez), the boring action simply drags the entire thing down.

Plus, what's the point of being an Ozploitation film if it doesn't really even look like you're in Australia? Sadly, this one was shot in and around Perth (nothing against you Perth, I'm sure you're a lovely city). No fights on the steps of the Sydney Opera House with the Harbour Bridge in the background, or dune buggy chases around Uluru, pursued by dingoes -- just vaguely tropical scenes that could easily be mistaken for somewhere in south Florida (unless you happen to notice the eucalyptus). 

No kangaroos? That's not alright, mate.

That's not to say that all Australian films should trade on stereotyped Oz-ness (crikey, that would get old). But, if you're going for schlock -- and want to peddle your schlock to the international market -- better to use all the tools at your disposal. Eh, at least there was a snake. 

(Just stay out of the drainpipe, Petey!)

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The Creeper [aka Rituals] (1977)

Grade: C+

This one had all the trappings of something we were bound to love. A bunch of our favorite films from the 70s (or at least ones we remember fondly) are set in the great outdoors -- Idaho Transfer, They, Beartoo(t)h, Snowbeast -- so a group of middle-aged doctors heading out into the remote wilderness is a very promising start.



And, not just regular wilderness: majestic, Saint-Ongeian, Canadian wilderness.



That they're going to a place called the "Cauldron of the Moon" is gravy on the poutine: now we have two movies set in places "of the Moon" (though sadly, irl it's just Batchawana Bay, Ontario).



Finally, Stephen King gave The Creeper a plug in Danse Macabre, which is usually a fairly reliable source of good horror from the era.



However, The Creeper just never really seemed to click with us. It may have been the terrible print from Mill Creek, which left a lot of scenes either washed out or completely dark -- a bit of a problem when the setting is supposed to be one of the main sources of menace.



The beginning third was intriguing and suitably scenic, with a fair bit of character building and some witty lines (along with a wonderfully unexpected, 30-years ahead-of-its-time, not-at-all-story-impacting reference to a character being gay, as though it were completely ordinary and not at all taboo -- bravo, writers). The middle third started to drag terribly though (still not helped by the bad print), which made the somewhat muddled and confusing ending seem like even more of a let-down.



Why the disappointment? Well, as alluded to earlier, a lot of these great outdoors horror films use the environment as a central -- if not the central -- source of terror. The Creeper started out this way, and it worked rather well; eventually though, it was as if the writers decided that this wasn't enough, and they cooked up an antagonist with a truly far-fetched backstory, and pinned the whole thing on him.



Thus, it becomes another movie about a completely insane, yet somehow devilishly clever and completely omniscient serial killer (much like the worst episodes of Criminal Minds). I think we both had higher ambitions for how this one would end up, and The Creeper simply fell short.

Don't get me wrong, The Creeper is still worth watching -- especially if you can track down a nicer copy than what Mill Creek offers -- if only to catch a nice performance by Hal Holbrook, and to look at some nice forests in Canada. 

Just don't forget your extra set of boots.