Snowbeast, 1977
This was in keeping with the Bigfoot theme started yesterday, and I might return to it in a week or two, but the rest of this week’s movies will be unrelated to cryptozoology. I think.
I tried several times to write a snarky, knowing, witty review of this, but I just can’t.
Because Snowbeast not a bad movie. It may not be a very good movie, but it’s nothing like bad, and does some pretty smart things.
The first smart thing it does might seem stupid, or at least annoyingly unoriginal: the story is Jaws, set at a ski lodge, with Bigfoot filling in on shark duty. But it took a lot of the right lessons from Jaws — you almost never see the menace directly, thanks to Point Of View shots, which saves us from a silly Bigfoot costume (and the few glimpses we get are enough to make you want to see more, which you don’t get — good job); and the characters affected are actual characters, who have functioning brains (mostly).
Of course, when I tell you that the screenwriter, Josef Stefano, also wrote the script for Hitchcock’s Psycho, you might start expecting too much. On the other hand, you at least know that some effort was put into the script by someone who, at the very worst, was pretty darn competent.
There’s not much more to say about it, other than it stars Bo Svenson, who kicks ass even when he’s bored stiff — which he’s not, here. He’s not really into it, but he puts forth some effort, more than just phoning it in.
All in all, pretty satisfying for what it is.
The Legend of Bigfoot, 1975
Recently there was another Bigfoot farce. The hoaxers held a press conference claiming they had a Bigfoot body1, but brought little to show — a couple blurry pictures, and DNA test results that led to some truly entertaining rationalizations.
I’ve always been fascinated by cryptozoology. When I was quite young, and gullible, I tended to believe such things. It was a thrill to think that dour, methodical authorities had missed something big, and that some upstart could prove them silly. I’m pretty sure this is a big part of the enduring allure of fringe science.
But as I matured and gained more experience in how things actually work in reality, I became more interested in the ways people tried to fake reality to serve their own emotional needs. It never works, and it’s almost always blindingly obvious that a hoax is occurring. Whether it be the endless shenanigans of L. Ron Hubbard, creationists trying to prove that men walked with dinosaurs, or a hick police officer trying to gain attention for bagging the body of a supposed Bigfoot, the mental gymnastics they must engage in to evade what’s really going on interest me greatly.
The surest sign that the recent brouhaha was a hoax was not the picture of the costume in a box, funnily enough. It was the involvement of Tom Biscardi.2
Mr. Biscardi is held in contempt even within the Bigfoot community (or rather, the community of people who believe that Bigfoot exists, and keep looking for actual proof of it). He was involved in a silly hoax just a few years ago, claiming to have a live Bigfoot in captivity, then forced to “admit” that he himself had been hoaxed by someone who had claimed to have the captive cryptid, which he claimed never to have seen himself3.
And Mr. Biscardi is the reason I decided to review this movie. It is available in the Mill Creek Entertainment Drive-In Movie Classics 50 Movie Pack4 — widescreen, even!5 — and others you can find links for at the bottom of the post.
Biscardi was mentored by Ivan Marx. And Ivan Marx is the star and narrator of this film. Not to mention a well-known Bigfoot hoaxer his own self. His widow, Peggy, was involved in Biscardi’s previous hoax in 2005, as well.
Ivan Marx, as you shall soon see, was a real piece of work.
Now, on to the review.
Oh goodness, what can one possibly say?
The Legend of Bigfoot is a towering work of intellectual genius, an example for the ages.
It demonstrates at excruciating length: how not to think; how not to analyze; and why, if you absolutely must have an entire film narrated by a single individual, you had damned well better get Morgan Freeman to do it.
It also shows you how not to fake a documentary.
Ivan Marx claims6 at the outset that he’s a nature boy7 and that he never believed in Bigfoot. You can listen to the opening minutes of the film here, including the oh-so-1970s opening credits music (dour, atonal flute solo!), played under still photos washed out in In Search Of… fashion:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
And right off the bat, post-credits, we get a sense of just what a muddle the movie is going to be. The pre-credit narration says that the story covers “the last ten years”. An early shot of life on Marx’s Bear Ranch shows a calendar from 1951. As the movie is copyright 19758, already there’s some funny business going on.
Time, in this movie, is a vague concept, a floating abstraction mostly unconnected to anything at all. This opening, in fact, is the only part of the movie that gives you any real idea at all of what time period it’s supposed to cover. And since “the last ten years” would mean roughly 1964 to 1974, but an opening shot tells us it’s 1951, you can guess how accurate, precise, and clear things are going to get later.
Then we get another claim from Marx:
“You see, I’m a tracker. And belieeeve me, I’m the last of a vanishing breed.”
That’s more or less how he intones it, too. In fact, he overemphasizes words all the time. It’s meant to come off as corny-but-sincere, I’m guessing. But after a while, it becomes “he doth protest too much”.
He claims to have been a tracker — “I know tracks like the FBI knows fingerprints” — who was paid to hunt renegades “so that innocent [animals] might be spared.”
We see him track and trap a bobcat.
He gets called up to Kodiak, Alaska (When? Unknown. We are only told “There was a time when…”) to take care of a bear that’s been killing cattle. Cue the wild bear stock footage. Marx doesn’t believe that bears are doing the killing, and a rancher agrees. Then the rancher tells him it was Bigfoot.
“I checked the carcass and found the cow had died naturally.” How he determined that the cow died of malnutrition is weak — the grass is too wet, and therefore doesn’t have enough nutrients in it.
So the bears weren’t guilty, and neither was Bigfoot. Marx scoffs at “those crazies in Alaska.”
Off to Arizona to help his wife’s brother track a wild pig, and the brother in law believes in Bigfoot, too. Brother in law takes Marx to “what Indians called The Land Of Petrified Wood,” where there are drawings of creatures with big hands and feet. The drawings are supposed to be seven hundred years old, and “told a story” about how Bigfoot stole Indian babies, causing the village to be abandoned in fear. Gee, you would think that if this were some kind of sign of Bigfoot, anthropologists would have made some real hay with it by now, wouldn’t you?
Then he goes “up tracking a mountain lion” — time unknown, might be a day later, or a year — and finds bigfoot tracks in the snow, along with hair Marx cannot identify.
Here we get some humorous footage of Marx investigating the tracks. As his own voiceover tells you that the stride is too big for a man to have made — fifty inches versus thirty for man — we watch as Marx makes the strides himself (with some stretching). Even as he walks through the footprints without much effort, he asserts in the voiceover that for them to be fake, they would have had to have been made by a machine. Uh huh.
He also sees a “hand-print” that is “so man-like” and has no claws. He takes casts, then goes back home and returns us to stock footage of coyote pups9, for no good reason other than some folksy music to play under it.
Then it’s off again to track down another bear, and we are about to get more “evidence” that gets contradicted later on, but still is supposed to convince us that Bigfoot exists.
“Tests had shown the hair samples and tracks couldn’t be matched with any known animal!”
What tests? By whom? Against what 1960s (or earlier) database? He doesn’t tell us.
“The animals were even acting strange.” The reason why is the bear he was there to track down — shown with its lower half a bloody mess. Marx immediately concludes that it was killed by a broken neck. There’s a bigfoot track next to the carcass. And Bigfoot hair between its teeth.
Uh huh.
Marx decides to investigate Bigfoot, putting out advertisements for anyone with stories.
He then tells us, in a scoffing voice, about all the ludicrous stories he heard, how many kids he found with plywood cutouts making fake tracks, how scientifically impossible the creatures he heard about were — then says in a sober voice: “But four features all the reports shared were the dark hair, the domed head, the large footprints, and the glowing red eyes!” Glowing red eyes! Glowing red eyes! So help me God, Glowing Red Eyes!!! Okay, he doesn’t pre-quote A Christmas Story, but under his sinister intonation of “glowing red eyes” there’s a music stinger, the kind of thing you’d hear in a thriller.
“Nature’s my home. How could some missing link be wandering around up here without me knowing it?”
Marx again goes from vagaries like this to more specific anecdote, this time about his first encounter with Bigfoot directly, again without giving any clear indication of when this happened, either objectively, or even in relation to what has come before. Was it immediately after interviewing an unknown number of Bigfoot witnesses? How many? And for how long? Or was it years later? Or what? He gives no indication.
So we get a reeeeeeal authentic point of view shot10 of running through the woods and glimpsing a man in a monkey suit, uh, Bigfoot.
From here on, Marx “knows” that Bigfoot is real, and after a while, he’s going to stop even worrying about convincing everyone else. He simply adopts the presumption that Bigfoot is real, and there’s no argument — everything else is nailing down the details. This is about fifteen minutes into the movie.
This first encounter is also the first appearance of the soon-to-be-horrific phrase “time was growing short!”
It also seems that he meets Bigfoot more or less in his own backyard, but he never says it straight out.
Anyway, rain keeps him from getting the tracks11.
He then starts tracking Bigfoot in earnest. He finds tracks that turn out to be melted coyote tracks (!), searches caves in the roots of redwood trees for signs of Bigfoot — for no apparent reason. Except for a Bigfoot statue carved “nearby”. Um, okay. And he goes to the Oregon coast because it’s isolated and seems like a “perfect” place for Bigfoot. Until all kinds of people show up to fish. Ah well.
He laments that it was “one bum steer after another”, implying that he was following “leads”, but again giving the audience no idea of where the leads are coming from. (Except, of course, for the vague, non-specific advertisement for information, no specific instances of which he ever elucidates.)
At twenty-five minutes, we finally get Marx’s “actual” footage of Bigfoot. And it’s hilarious. It’s very clearly a man — most likely Ivan Marx himself — overacting a limp while dressed in an ape costume of some sort.
“But scientists challenged my film! It had stood up under every conceivable test!” Um, yeah, sure. He claims that some sort of test “revealed” Polio as the cause of the limp(!).
“But my documented evidence wasn’t good enough for the ‘experts’. Experts! Who still ask ‘How could such a creature survive?’, ‘Where does it live?’, ‘Show us its remains’, ‘What does it eat?’ Experts! Who challenged my word, but claimed credit for my film and profited by it on lecture circuits. Well, I didn’t care for these people.”
He loses the creature in a beaver swamp, where its tracks disappeared. This swamp will reappear at the end of the film. But for now, he finds tracks of several creatures, all heading north, and concludes that Bigfoot is migratory.
Plotting all “reliable” reports on a map, he finds a migratory pattern extending thousands of miles — all the way up to above the Arctic Circle!
Now Marx’s “logic” really starts getting … interesting. Bigfoot young, he tells us, have only ever been reported as seen above the Arctic Circle, in summer. Completely bypassing any consideration of where the young spend the rest of the year — or, perhaps even more stupidly, the notion that the young mature in a season or less — he leaps to the conclusion that the Arctic Circle is their breeding ground. So either they breed, birth, and mature all in the course of the very brief arctic summer, or else Lady Bigfoot walks around preggers for most of a year, walking all the way down to California, then all the way back the next year to give birth.
Oh, but it gets better. Just wait.
So Marx sets off on the road. Again, the voiceover and the footage we’re shown fail to match. We see shots of a red VW beetle driving back country roads, alone, while Marx tells us “Peg and I took our camper…”.
“If Bigfoot were a migratory animal, my theory had to hold up all along the way!”
He finds Bigfoot tracks in lava rock! Which leads, naturally, to two ground squirrels in love, then one gets hit by a car, the other is stricken by grief, and the hit one drags herself out of the road.
What does this have to do with Bigfoot, you ask? Well, it’s Nature’s way of reminding Ivan Marx that animals want to survive. It’s an instinct, you know.
“This same will to survive must have somehow kept Bigfoot going throughout all these years!”
Somehow.
The Marxes get to British Columbia, where people were different, taking the search seriously. Lumberjacks, it seems, took Bigfoot seriously.
Why? Because goats in the next valley over commit ritual suicide by eating dirt, then drinking water that turns the dirt to cement, killing them. Also in the valley is a “totally unexplainable natural phenomenon” — rock formations too large to have been made by man that kinda, sorta, look a little like Bigfoot. Proof!
Then on to the Yukon.
We get more folksy music, some rather neat pictures of the gold rush from the late 1800s, and then —
“Sure enough, an old miner’s story told how the glaciers up there were the burial grounds of the Bigfoot. That would explain why there were no remains — the creatures carried their dead over thousands of miles just to deposit them in crevices that opened up in the spring thaw.”
Wrap your mind around that, if you can. The reason that no Bigfoot body has ever been found is that each and every single Bigfoot that has ever lived and died has had its body carried by other Bigfoots12 thousands of miles, from northern California up to the Arctic Circle, in order to drop them into glacial crevices. No exceptions!
What about Stinky Mediumfoot, who died early in the season, just as they arrived in California? They just kept his carcass around for six or eight months, then carried it with them — along with each and every other member of their tribe13 that had joined the choir invisible in the intervening time — thousands of miles, bloated, rotting, and smelly, just to drop them into glacial crevices?
That’s another question Marx never even thinks about. Witness the power of rationalization — working overtime to try to hammer the facts into a shape that kinda, sorta fits your pet theory, and therefore “proves” all who think you’re nuts to be wrong.
Since each and every Bigfoot that ever died was dropped into glacial crevices, all their bodies conveniently get crushed and washed out to sea.
Oh, and since when did Yukon prospectors ever tell any tales about Bigfoot? The name “Bigfoot” didn’t even come about till 1959, for pete’s sake!
This is now 41 minutes into the “documentary”, a bit more than halfway through. Marx speculates that Bigfoot somehow survived small pox, measles, and tuberculosis, without ever explaining why he thought they’d be vulnerable to every disease of humanity in the first place.
Further north, he meets “Yukon Frieda”, an artist who paints Bigfoot from others’ descriptions. But she just gets a mention and a few shots, then is gone.
Marx relates an Indian story of Bigfoot channeling a dead woman’s spirit, speaking in a strange tongue, warning her family to move. How they understood the strange tongue goes unexplained, and the story has nothing to do with anything.
There follows more Indian hokum about Bigfoot. Complete with sinister piano music and crappy special effects.
“The fisherman said, ‘Bigfoot smiles upon you [Ivan Marx]. You will bring word of him to the people below.”
So apparently Ivan Marx was The Chosen One.
Marx follows more hokum to go meet Bigfoot, and sees some car headlights or, if you’re still buying this, the “glowing eyes of bigfoot”. Which, when dawn breaks, disappear behind a rainbow.14
Passing over moose mating habits, elk cleaning their antlers, and other nature footage that also has nothing to do with Bigfoot, we skip closer to the end of this beast.
Marx gets some distant footage of a young Bigfoot in the Arctic Circle, then heads back south.
‘Seeing the young Bigfoot confirmed my theory!”
Along the way, Marx decides that Bigfoot is a vegetarian.
He heads back to Beaver Swamp (apparently it is a proper name), using “every trick I learned in my years as a trapper” to set up a blind where he can observe the Bigfoots. We never get to see the blind, nor more than one bigfoot in a single shot15, but we do get to see more hilarious footage of Bigfoot. If Harry Knowles were reviewing this movie, here’s where he’d start chanting “MAN IN SUIT! MAN IN SUIT!”
The young one is supposedly five feet five and two hundred fifty pounds. But not fat. Wonder how Marx reckons that one out?
Marx views this truly awesome footage as unchallengeable proof, indisputable evidence, so that now we can try to understand this creature’s place in nature.
Given that Bigfoot is still a cryptid, and the recent hoax, you can reckon how well that prediction turned out.
Anyway, the film ends with a shot of the limpy Bigfoot limping off into the sunset. Yes, really. With no indication of whether the shot is meant to be real, or what.
So there you have it, one hour and fourteen minutes of genius, courtesy hoaxmaster extraordinaire Ivan Marx.
He rationalizes, leaps to conclusions based on scant or nonexistent evidence, he expounds in very annoying, hammy, over-emphatic voiceover, and he cobbles together a bunch of stock footage that bears, at best, only the most tenuous connection to the subject at hand. The whole movie is like a primer in what not to do, and how not to do it.
- Which was clearly a costume in a box with some entrails thrown on it, even before they were forced to admit it. [back]
- Another excellent sign of a hoax — the story kept changing, seemingly every time the “discoverers” opened their mouths. [back]
- Contradicting his own earlier claims. [back]
- The name of the pack is something of a misnomer. There are, indeed, several movies in it that are pure drive-in fare. But there are also television pilots for series that never got made. [back]
- But not anamorphic, of course. [back]
- Ivan Marx made a lot of claims, apparently. Given how he makes them in this movie, it’s a wonder that anyone ever took him seriously about anything. [back]
- Not a nudist, just someone that prefers nature to civilization. If you get to the end of the movie, each subsequent assertion of this “fact”, overt or implicit, becomes more and more comical. [back]
- Which is the reason that I give that as the year of the movie, rather than IMDb’s 1976. We’re both right — I’m using the year of copyright, and IMDb is using year of release. [back]
- Yes, those coyote pups from the beginning are still pups, meaning Ivan Marx would have us believe that he made three significant tracking/hunting journeys in a short amount of time. Except that the footage in Alaska was anytime but winter or late fall — and that trip was first, remember — and the mountain lion tracking, location unstated, is in the snow. OK, it could have been higher altitude than in Kodiak, but it’s rather suspicious. [back]
- Actually, you get many, many POV shots, cut together. With footsteps foleyed into the soundtrack. [back]
- Which would, he tells us, keep his friends from laughing at him — but since they washed away, I guess his friends could laugh at him. [back]
- What is the plural of Bigfoot? [back]
- Or whatever you call a group of Bigfoots. [back]
- I only wish I was kidding. [back]
- Gee, think that’s a sign of a hoax? [back]
That’s been obvious since the mid-’90s, at least
Quoth Furious D:
[T]he problem Mike Myers has is Mike Myers.
D is, as always, deeply insightful into the Hollywood mindset.
Rage
First, look into these eyes:
Just keep looking for a few moments.
Now read how her own mother treated her. (þ Herself)
If your reaction is other than murderous rage, or an intense desire to take that poor little girl in your arms and do anything to make things better, there might be something wrong with you.
Read to the end, and witness the ghastly evasions the human mind is capable of — her mother is free, and convinced that she has been wronged, that she treated her daughter perfectly well.
Free Books!
Wowio disappeared for a month or so, and I thought the company was going under. Instead, they were going global.
Wowio.com will now give free PDF books to anyone with an email address, anywhere in the world. And not just public-domain texts either. They get copyrighted works, and sometimes damn good ones1 — for example, two of the new books they’re offering when they go live in less than thirty minutes: Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout, a wonderful Nero Wolfe mystery (reviewed on this blog years ago), and The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna, made into a Steve McQueen film in the 1960s.
So hie thee hence and procure some lit’rary comestibles!
- Paid for by ads at the beginning and end of the files. [back]
Lost, now found?
Jeez, and we just had a full-length print of Metropolis turn up.
I’m not sure how much to credit this story, but it’s got my hopes up that the number one most sought after lost film in history might have actually turned up:
Yes. It is true. For those who scoff and doubt (I’m sure you will be legion) that the most notorious lost film of all times was located, I will say it again with authority and conviction…
I, Sid Terror, saw Lon Chaney’s lost classic London after Midnight with my own eyes. Without a doubt. No I am not talking about a recreation made completely from still photos, I’m talking about the entire long-lost motion-picture!
It is not, yet, actually found. But if this guy and the other guy he references in the article are on the level, then it is almost certainly at the UCLA Film Archive.
Go read the whole thing. And if you have any connection to Warner Bros. or the UCLA Film Archive at all, see if you can help out.
Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, 1950
I think I’m getting a little overdosed on Bud and Lou. The more I watch, the less I seem to have to say, despite this being one of the stronger entries in the collection I bought.
At the opening of Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion, Bud is a wrestling manager in New York in the beginning, running two wrestlers through the script for their next fight, bringing Lou in to be their punching bag pretty quickly. This whole sequence is fun, having both the beat-on-Lou physical comedy, and the fun of Bud orchestrating a really authentic1 wrestling match from a script.
But then one of the wrestlers bugs out for his home in Tangier, taking Bud’s (borrowed from the mob) money with him, and getting Bud and Lou on the mob’s shortlist. So they follow the wrestler to try to convince him to go back, and eventually end up getting suckered into a five year stretch in the French Foreign Legion. But not before Lou has inadvertently won the bidding on six beautiful girls in a slave auction, of course. And being wholly unable to pay for them, naturally.
Once in the Legion, they get involved in intrigue — the Legion has been losing battles with local arab tribes lately, and there’s a mole. Bud and Lou deal with a very cute member of French intelligence (Patricia Medina, very easy on the eyes and Joseph Cotten’s future wife, the lucky dog) to try to ferret out the mole.
The two bumblers get lost in the desert, of course, and there are some quite wonderful mirage and oasis gags, and the whole thing leads to a rather spectacular climax at a Legion fort in the desert.2
There’s an actual story here, not just a setup as in so many of Abbott and Costello’s lesser and later movies. Once the boys are put in hot water, things actually escalate, and even if there are extended digressions, they at least focus on the stars of the show.
The really impressive thing here, though, is not something you’d notice just watching it. According to the production notes on the DVD, which are backed up by the movie’s entry on WikiPedia, production began on 28 April 1950, and the movie was released on 24 July 1950. From the first day of lensing to release was only three months. And there were, as noted, some special effects in this film, it wasn’t just a shot, chop, and release job. That’s just an amazing timeframe for a feature film, even for a comedy.
(Okay, guess I had more to say than yesterday. Still, feels thin.)
All in all, another excellent reason to get this set, especially now that it’s out of print. Lots of laughs, lots of fun.
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948
Arguably, this is it — the very best Abbott and Costello movie there is. The boys are in top form, and they get to play off a scenario that is not, at least at the time of the making of this film, threadbare. They get an actual story, into which their antics fit naturally.
It may seem weird, but I really don’t have a lot to say about this one. It’s very funny, there’s some good scares (of the old, Universal Horror type, not the bloody dismemberment type), and all in all a great deal of fun. (Especially Vincent Price’s cameo at the end.) Bela Lugosi plays Dracula for the second and final time and, despite looking incredibly old (it is some seventeen years after Dracula, after all), acquits himself as well as ever, with class and some very dry humor.
This movie, if nothing else, is the reason to by the Best of Abbott and Costello, Vol. 3 collection. It works on every level.
Who watches the Watchmen? I sure as hell do!
Know how I said I was going to see Watchmen opening night?
Now I’ve seen the trailer.1
Ho-lee [CENSORED]!
I could quibble with a few small things. But really, why? It’s showing in front of The Dark Knight, and it’s either going to A. blow your mind (if you’ve read the graphic novel) or B. make you quite, quite curious about what the heck you just saw.
- So can you —
go here, look for Rorschach throwing flames, then save the link with the QuickTime logo that’s next to him.Go see it on Apple.Com. [back]
Quote of the moment
Phallic worship, in some form or other, has been practiced by almost every race under the sun. Indeed, among primitive peoples, those who do not practice this cult are so few in number that they have, practically, no weight whatever in a discussion of this subject. Moreover, those primitive peoples who do not worship the generative principle, either directly or indirectly, are without any religion whatsoever, and are the very lowest of all mankind in point of intelligence.
— James Weir, Religion and Lust, or, The Psychological Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire
It made me laugh.
Comin’ Round the Mountain, 1951
Talk about your mixed bag. There are moments here that rank right up with almost any routine Abbott and Costello ever did.1 And there are interminable stretches of deadly dullness, punctuated by deadly dull songs. Seven (!) of them.
But all in all, certainly worth watching.
After Comin’ Round the Mountain opens a Manhattan nightclub, which introduces the female lead, who sings all seven (!) of the songs in this not especially long movie, as well as Bud as her manager, and Lou as an escape artist, we learn that Lou is the descendent of hillbillies from Kentucky, where the female lead is from (they’re cousins, turns out), and is heir to a fortune.2
So they pack up and take the lady to Kentucky to meet the family, get involved in the McCoy-Wakefield feud3, make some creaky (but still funny) hillbilly jokes and, oh yes, meet up with a hillbilly witch, played by Margaret Hamilton — the Wicked Witch of the West, herself.
That meeting is definitely the best part of the movie. In order to prove to Bud and Lou that she really does have supernatural power, she makes a voodoo doll of Lou and keeps poking it with a needle. She keeps it up in order to make them pay for what they want, too. Then, while she’s getting it, Lou fashions a doll of her, and they get into a very, very funny standoff against each other, using the effigies.
All in all, if this had been a two-reeler, or a bit longer, it would be classic. At feature length, it goes on too long, puts A&C in the background too much, and has way too many songs. Apart from those weaknesses, though, it’s great fun.
- Nothing is as good as “Who’s On First?”. Nothing. [back]
- Yes, a hillbilly fortune. Don’t sweat it, it’s just the setup for one of the most groaningly obvious gags in the history of cinema, which they save for the very end. It’s so obvious that I seriously did not believe they were going to do it until they did. Which is kind of admirable, in its way. [back]
- why they kept the McCoy, but changed the “Hatfield” part, I don’t understand, but oh well. [back]
Permalinks are hosed fixed
No idea why, but nobody can see individual posts or make comments right now.
Will look into it.
Update:
Switched to the WordPress default permalink style, and that works. It’s ugly, but it works. Will try tonight to go back to the old style.
Update II:
Oh, great, another bug in the 2.6 release. Well, at least Otto isn’t trying to claim it’s a feature (which he did with the login nonsense until called on it).
However, true to his condescending manner, Otto’s first suggested fix fails to tell you some crucial information1: You can’t “just” remove the “index.php” from your permalinks if you’re on Linux with Apache. To do that, you have to edit your htaccess file, which he clearly knows since he references mod_rewrite. But he doesn’t actually say it. Twit.2
I guess I’ll take back my backtrack — do NOT upgrade to 2.6, wait for the bugfix release.
I’ve had beta software that worked better than this. Reeeeeeeal professional, guys. Sheesh.
(I have never, not once, had a problem with WordPress. This release, I get two in two days. Oy.)
UPDATE III:
If your server is running Apache on Linux (look at the bottom of your cPanel, it should tell you), then copy and paste this into your blog’s .htaccess file (the one in your blog’s root directory):
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
Found here.
Anyway, everything seems to be fixed now. Until the next bug crops up, anyhow.
- This is how he shows you he’s ever-so-much-smarter than you — leave out important info, then insult you for not knowing what he should have told you to begin with. Again, he expects everyone to have programming knowledge, and holds anyone who doesn’t in contempt. Real nice guy. [back]
- And he just yesterday told someone that it couldn’t be WordPress, it was the user’s fault. Bet he never apologized for that, either. [back]
Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, 1951
Dang, this one was good.
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello are graduating Detective School at the beginning of this one.1 They get hired by a private detective agency and work the night shift alone in the office. Their first night a man walks in with a case. He’s a boxer who’s been framed for murder.
And his girl happens to be the daughter of a doctor, a doctor who inherited the formula for invisibility from Claude Rains! 
Before long, the boxer goes transparent, Lou goes into boxing (as a cover to smoke out the real killers), and Bud keeps trying to turn the boxer in for the reward.
The climax is a hoot, Lou in the boxing ring with some invisible help.
And what’s really neat, apart from all the gags that they worked out involving invisibility — and they worked out quite a few, not repeating any one to death — is how this movie keeps tossing off references that, if you miss them, do not undermine your enjoyment of the movie.
There are at least two moments in the film where Lou is clearly scared because of something that happened in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (even though he’s technically playing a different character here), and there’s the aforementioned direct link to James Whale’s original The Invisible Man, including a prominent portrait of the great Claude Rains.
All in all, most satisfactory.
This is another movie that is only available on DVD in The Franchise Collection: The Best of Abbott and Costello, Volume 3 (which, for some reason, Universal has let fall out of print, though you can still get it second-hand with little trouble). And it’s such an excellent comedy that you can buy the set for just this one movie and be satisfied that you spent your money well.
- Bud has bribed the dean of the school twenty bucks to graduate Lou. [back]
Just a thought
A man was arrested for taking a picture of a cop. (þ InstaPundit)
Cops should have nothing to fear from cameras — if they’ve got nothing to hide.
(Did you know that the lead officer in the arrest of Rodney King, Sgt. Stacey C. Koon, was happy that someone caught the arrest on video tape? He was.)
WordPress 2.6 — don’t upgrade [UPDATED]
That’s it. Tried it one one of my other blogs, and it refused to let me log in.
And the one moderator I’ve interacted with at the WordPress support forums is not only being unhelpful, but kind of a jerk as well.
Wait for 2.6.1. Do not, under any circumstance, upgrade to 2.6.
That is all.
UPDATE: OK, there’s actually a fairly simple fix, but it’s still scary to not be able to log in. After you install the update and upgrade your database, clear the cookies from your browser (just the ones from your site, if you know how to do that). Then you should have no problem.
And if you go on the WordPress.org support forums, be aware that Otto42, while he knows what he’s talking about, holds the rest of the world in contempt if they’re not with-it programmers. He’s also not above Soviet revisionism to make his earlier comments look more helpful than they initially were.
Lost in Alaska, 1952
Unlike Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, this is the bottom of the barrel as Abbott and Costello movies go. But the great thing is that with A&C there’s a baseline of quality to their work. However bad the script, low the budget, or awful the cast, Bud and Lou are pretty much always Bud and Lou, and in any movie they did, there is always something worth watching.
The things worth watching in Lost in Alaska include Lou winning and losing tens of thousands of dollars at roulette and then losing them, all without having a clue that he’s doing so, Tom Ewell, and the studio sets masquerading as the frozen north.
Which, as reasons to stick with a movie go, really aren’t much. But I watched it all the way through. Without skipping. And I more or less remembered it in outline from when Channel 7 in Detroit ran Abbott & Costello movies every Sunday morning. So something kept me watching. Probably nostalgia.
The bit with the roulette wheel is classic, and I won’t simply rehash it. But there’s another gag early in the film that some consider classic, but which I considered simply mean when I was a kid, and still do. For reasons I won’t go into, Bud and Lou agree to sleep in two hour shifts, one sleeping while the other stands watch. Despite the fact that Lou is falling down tired, Bud sticks him with the first shift. Then Lou wakes him, and gets in bed. Bud then sets the clock two hours ahead, gets Lou back up, and goes back to sleep. This goes on all night and into the morning. Granted, the ways Bud talks his way around the difference between the clock in the room and the town hall clock are clever, but at no point does he cut Lou a break or let him get any sleep.
I was shocked to see Tom Ewell in this. Just a couple years later he was co-starring with Marilyn Monroe and being directed by the great Billy Wilder in The Seven Year Itch, but here he is not long before, playing second fiddle to Abbott and Costello in one of their worst movies, and he not only makes the most of it, he might even be the best thing in the movie (partly because he assuredly does not try to steal scenes or expand his one-note part; he just plays it very, very well).
A&C are volunteer firemen in San Francisco and, one night during an alarm, Costello sees a man standing on the docks and somehow knows he’s trying to kill himself. The man jumps in the water, Costello jumps in and saves him, even though the man objects strenuously that he wants to die.
That man turns out to be “Nugget” Joe (Ewell), a guy who struck it rich in the Yukon, but who has nothing to live for since the love of his life (Mitzi Green) won’t marry him. The boys save him, keep him from offing himself long enough to receive a letter from the gal asking him back, and accompany him back up north on a steamer. (The time period of the tale is unclear, but certainly not contemporary to the film.)
When they get to Alaska, the town on the border of the Yukon where the gal can be found, it turns out that lots of people want Nugget Joe dead. He used to be sheriff, see, and the relatives and friends of all the guys he hanged want revenge.
Plus there’s all the old-timers he willed his gold strike to. They can’t wait to see him pushing up daisies, either.
Plus… well, let’s just say that he can’t show his face much of anywhere. Everybody but his gal wants him dead. She doesn’t hate him, she just doesn’t love him.
From that point there’s a lot of chasing about in the snow, ice fishing gags, dog sleds, igloo jokes that are just plain silly, eskimo jokes, and so forth. In the end the gold is lost, robbing everyone of their reasons for wanting Joe dead, and the gal decides for no reason at all that she really does love the sad sack. (Joe, not Lou.)
All in all, below-average Abbott & Costello. Which is better than most of the “comedy” put out these days, and no kind of a slam. But, if nothing else, it is absolutely not the place to start with their movies.
Oh HELL yeah!
I’m beginning to think that Watchmen will, against all odds and logic and sense, do justice to the book. If the trailer is as good as claimed, I am officially stoked.
I’m there. First night. Fully geeked out.
Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, 1953
This movie was probably a huge influence over who I am. Frightening thought.
As Abbott & Costello movies go, it’s really not that great. Better than the worst, certainly watchable with moments that are genuinely funny, but hardly top of the line. (We’ll be getting to the top of the line next week.)
But if it isn’t that good, it’s still worth watching. In fact, I ostensibly bought the Best of Abbott and Costello — Volume 3 for Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein… but once I saw that this was in the collection, it was an automatic buy. I bought the collection for this, and the other seven movies are just bonuses. Wonderful bonuses, in at least three cases, but not the main entree for me.
Why in the world would I buy the admittedly mediocre Abbot and Costello Go To Mars, then?
Well, first, the production design. Universal spent some money on this flick, and it shows. It’s got the 1950s science fiction esthetic down cold. The silver rocketship, the planetary vistas, the Flash Gordon-inspired costuming, this movie is a visual joy.
And speaking of visual joy, there are the girls. Because A&C do not go to Mars, they go to Venus, and Venus is populated exclusively by women — most of whom are portrayed by 1954’s Miss Universe aspirants. And Anita Ekberg. Who, to give you just a small idea of how much visual joy there is, does not stand out from the crowd(!).
But that’s the end of the movie.
Leading up to that, Bud Abbot is a delivery driver for a scientist, and Costello, due to rather silly circumstances, stows away in the delivery truck. Abbot returns to the scientist’s secret research station, where a rocket has just been completed.
The scientist is meeting with several others in order to determine their destination (the moon is too boring, so they’re going to choose between Mars and Saturn) and which of them will be the crew. This part is a riot, and I wonder how much of the comedy is intentional, and how much was simply that nobody making the movie cared to think things through. When discussing their potential destinations, the scientist points at a wall-size painting of outer space that looks nothing like the solar system, pointing to a cluster of stars for Mars, and a nebula to indicate Venus. Even when I first saw this movie, and I was no older than five, I knew there was something wrong with that.
And the scientists who are meeting were sent from Central Casting, who got a request for a half-dozen or more scientist and professor types. These guys could easily have played the background staff at Huxley College, and none of them (excepting the rocket designer) look fit for accelerations that would take them out of the gravity well. Where the previous bit I’m willing to count as intentional, this casting of minor players was probably happenstance. But it’s funny, nevertheless.
Even funnier, they’re taking off once the rocket is supplied, seemingly that afternoon, even though the crew hasn’t been selected (let alone trained!), and the rocket hasn’t even been tested!1
Anyway, Bud and Lou load supplies into the rocket, Lou pushes some buttons, and — whoops! — they take off.2 The rocket zips and zooms through New York City, buzzing the Empire State Building, going through the Lincoln Tunnel, and generally raising havoc, before finally settling down in the bayou near New Orleans. No, I don’t know how they got from NYC to N’awlins in the matter of a few seconds, either, but it’s that sort of a movie.
Not only do they land near New Orleans, but Mardi Gras happens to be in full swing. In an example of extremely lazy writing, there is no explanation of what Mardi Gras is, why anyone would be celebrating it, or anything. The only exposition we get tells the audience that nobody will notice the two guys in space-suits, because everyone is dressed up for Mardi Gras. As far as this movie is concerned, it’s just a time when people in New Orleans put on huge papier maché heads, and it allows that much simply to carry on a not horribly funny gag.
See, Bud and Lou think they’ve landed on Mars (without having been in space at any time between NYC and N’awlins!). So when they encounter people with big heads who do strange things, they think they’re Martians. Har har. This also gets them into their space suits, which are kind of nifty.
And while they’re exploring “Mars”, two escaped convicts get into the rocketship and don space suits as well.
After too much business in New Orleans, the two cons force Bud and Lou to launch the rocket, and they end up on Venus. You know, by accident. (!) Their trip to Venus is monitored on a TV screen by the rocket’s designer and his secretary, through some means for which no explanation is even attempted.
And once on Venus… whoah, baby! The Venusians banned men four hundred years ago, and also have the secret of eternal youth. (Not to mention eternal hotness.) The queen wants the four men who have landed to be sent right back up into space, because all men are the same — lecherous cheats with no faithfulness or loyalty.34 But the rest of the girls want a king, it’s been four hundred years since they’ve even seen a man, and they’ve mostly forgotten what men are like.
And that’s more or less how Lou Costello becomes King of Venus. Oh, sure, the ladies notice the other three males, and pay them attention, but they’re all hot for Lou. Including the Queen.
Is this a great movie, or what? 
There are some great gags as the boys are forced to leave Venus and go back to Earth (and again, their takeoff and journey are monitored on a TV screen by the scientist and his secretary, through no means that’s ever explained), and when they get back, they get a stock footage ticker tape parade, and one final gift from the Queen of Venus.
As stated, the bulk of the movie is rather slow going, though there are funny bits along the way. But once the ship gets to Venus, even if it weren’t funny (it is) it would be worth watching for the various sorts of eye candy.
Definitely worth seeing, if only for nostalgia’s sake, and the whole set is a must-buy, if only for the premiere title on it.
- Other funny and/or silly mistakes or gags include the fact that the Venusians are supposedly hundreds of years in advance of Earth technology, but discarded “that model” rocket only twenty years ago; and the fact that the rocket is established as having a nuclear reactor providing its thrust, but having all the famous scientists standing about fifteen feet away from it as it launches and being bowled over, but otherwise unharmed, by its thrust. [back]
- There is, however, no accidental miscommunication or misunderstanding between the words “lunch” and “launch”. That would have to wait for Sid & Marty Krofft’s late, unlamented Far-Out Space Nuts TV series more than twenty years later. [back]
- Sorry, but if your entire planet is populated by nothing Miss Universe contestants, with the occasional Anita Ekberg thrown in for good measure, and there are only four males to go around, then expecting said males not to notice any of the other females at all is remarkably silly. [back]
- Queen of Venus does not use these words, but that’s what her complaint amounts to. [back]
Trip with the Teacher, 1975
Sleaze. Pure 1970s drive-in grindhouse sleaze.
And I enjoyed it, without even a slight inclination to shower afterward. Mostly because, while Trip with the Teacher certainly strives to be dark, it’s rather hard to take seriously.
The parents of four female students1 have convinced one of their teachers to take them on a learning vacation over the summer. To that end, they have chartered a shortbus (No, seriously) which takes the women through the California desert to go to unspecified historical places, the only one really discussed is some kind of Indian ghost town. Don’t worry about this, it’s never important.
Elsewhere on backroads in the California desert, two brothers are having some problems. One of their motorcycles has blown a tire, and they’re nowhere near anywhere that can repair it. Plus, they never think to ride two on the one good bike to get to a garage.
But that’s okay, because a handsome stranger stops by and has a kit that will let them hotpatch the innertube and reinflate it enough to get to a garage.
One of those brothers is played by Zalman King2, who does a really good psycho, by way of James Dean, and for the first half of the movie hides his eyes behind some Bono-style sunglasses, making his off-kilter performance even more creepy.
Anyway, the three bikers and the shortbus brigade end up at the same gas station at the same time. By this point, all thought of fixing non-psycho-brother’s tire has been dropped, never to be mentioned again. The girls flirt with the bikers, the bikers harass the proprietor, the bus gets gas, and the bus driver acts all bumbly but protectively over the girls. The shortbus leaves, and the bikers get guff from the gas station proprietor, but they get the gas the need. Psycho brother then goes in to pay the guy, does, and then we find out how psycho he is. The station owner is in the garage, working under a car on a hydraulic jack, his legs sticking out. Psycho bro drops the jack, and the guy gets crushed. His scream of agony is covered by the two other bikers revving their motors (they have no clue what’s going down).
Down the road, the bus has broken down. Of course.
Then the three bikers pass by. They stop to “help” the damsels in distress, though they mostly seem interested in how the damse