It is simply a mistake to take this film seriously – Mikels is rushing this product through to the drive-in circuit targeting a teen-age audience (hence the lack of nudity or really gory effects), giving them moments allowing them to exclaim “oh, gross!” or “wow, that’s weird” while they take a breather from necking in the back-seat. So instead, Mikels treats his low-life characters like refugees from a ’30s comedy short who drank their brains out and ended up in a Skid Row production of a ’40s gangster film as it might have been directed in the ’50s by Ed Wood trying to make a ’60s kids’ film – huh? All right, another way to say this is that Mikels is basically saying, “ok, we have no budget, only two more days to shoot the thing, and our audience won’t be paying attention anyway – so let’s have fun!” Of course, then, the only issue is, what would Mikels mean by having fun here?
I’ve watched this film several times – it’s actually difficult to watch, the scene where the young boy gets wasted by Japanese machine gun fire is not fun. But the images keep pulling me along.This is a great film, for two reasons. But so much of this is rich in construction and detail that I insist it remains a classic – unrecognized but undeniable. I am an admirer of many of Billy Wilder’s movies – Stalag 17, Days of Wine and Roses, Some Like it Hot – and other wonderful, trend-setting, sophisticated, stylish films. It opens well; the title sequence is basically a snapshot of Dean Martin’s Las Vegas act of the time, and his twisted turn playing someone who might be himself has an undeniable fascination.Unfortunately, he is not the male lead of this film – RAY WALSTON is!
There is no way else to explain the opening wherein the male lead introduces his supporting cast.There are a number of pilots for unsold TV series still available, including a Sherlock Holmes pilot from the same era. There was even a brief series shot on film along similar lines (I think it was Boston Blackie). In any event, the interesting thing here is that some studios thought they could produce television shows the way they had produced theatrical B-movies. Of course, the broadcast network owners knew better (they knew that TV audiences had a lower “lowest common denominator” than film, and that less money could be spent accordingly).AS a TV pilot, this is actually not so bad – cheap, quick with an interesting twist at the end. The actors are certainly trying their best, and – for television – it is more than competently made. For some reason this fine old Joseph Kuo feature disappeared for a while.
- I’m not sure it is, but not from want of trying on Ms. Zellweger’s part.
- Infinite Quest – does not.In fact the narratology of Infinite Quest is very similar to that of The Pescatons, jumping and skipping over essential details.
- All right, another way to say this is that Mikels is basically saying, “ok, we have no budget, only two more days to shoot the thing, and our audience won’t be paying attention anyway – so let’s have fun!” Of course, then, the only issue is, what would Mikels mean by having fun here?
- Once Walston appears on screen, the film goes straight to hell.
- It’s very fast paced, and moves well between episodes of fighting, occasional fits of comedy, and there’s even a touch of drama in the relationship between one of the monks and an old friend who has since become a nasty Ching general.
That makes sense in a film made at the end of the ’60s camp fad; by the time Mikels made this film, the notion that cat-food could make monsters of little kitties could be recognized by many of the more ‘hip’ at the drive-in as a humorous excuse, after a few puffs on a doobie, to go back to necking in the back-seat.Ten stars for this bad movie because it is truly one of a kind. I’m not going to talk about the admittedly silly premise of the film, because it happens to be similar to the premise on which Val Guest built “The Day the Earth Caught Fire,” a very good sci-fi/disaster anti-nuke drama from the early ’60s. Guest demonstrated that the way to deal with a silly ‘scientific’ premise was to unravel it gradually, having no one accept it on face value, until it could no longer be denied; while concentrating your film-making abilities on the dramatic interaction between well-developed characters, supplying them with a convincing visual backdrop of the world eroding into chaos.Well that certainly doesn’t happen in this film. Actually, it’s a joke.Here’s the tell-all moment about the budgeting of the film and the incompetence with which it is made – I think it half, but I remember the percentage higher, of the shots used to depict the effect of Miami’s freezing and the response of the population there are localized on a single hotel swimming pool. That’s right, a swimming pool, and a rather small one (low budget hotel for a low budget movie).
That could be interesting if Walston had been directed against type – but he isn’t – he is directed to be a character actor – in a leading role? Once Walston appears on screen, the film goes straight to hell. In fact it is hell, a weird kind of wigged-out Nevada version of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry – why? To provide a small enough stage to make small characters look large, I guess; doesn’t work.
But Once the film returns to Miami for the remainder, it sinks to a level of casual incompetence that only television allows for.Not even a decent time-waster; I stayed just to see how dumb it could get. Daphne Du Maurier’s work largely falls into he category of ‘gothic romance’ – not the kind that has glutted supermarkets since the ’50s, her best known books really hark back to the genre’s roots in the 19th century. Her short story, “The Birds,” is something of an anomaly in her work – on the surface its a sci-fi/disaster story that ends grimly (the farmer’s family is pretty much doomed); but it is also clearly an expressive allegory for what it must have felt like for many British during the Battle of Britain – the description of an army of seagulls appearing on the horizon could easily be that of a fleet of German bombers. The giveaway line comes from the farmer’s wife when she remarks that “surely the Americans will do something.” Of course they did, and they and the British went on to defeat the Germans, which makes the post-war publication of the story a little out of date.Hitchccock had gotten one of his most successful films from Du Maurier’s work – Rebecca – as well as one of his least successful, Under Capricorn. Deciding to take one of her most popular but least typical short stories as source for The Birds may have involved some risk – especially considering what he added to the original material.
But it is available on DVD, and if you enjoy old-school kung-fu flicks, I think you will find this highly entertaining. The characters are all likable, the martial arts exquisite, the endangered-princess storyline a classic. It’s very fast paced, and moves well between episodes of fighting, occasional fits of comedy, https://www.gclub.co/gclub1688-entrance-register-free-24hours/ and there’s even a touch of drama in the relationship between one of the monks and an old friend who has since become a nasty Ching general. The final battle is a wild mêlée and the ending teeters on the tragic without falling over the cliff. I’ve seen reviews of Dreamland that complain of the animation.
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He doesn’t play a stereotypical Chinese according to Hollywood formula (and neither does Keye Luke in a later film in the series). Karloff brings a wit and a quiet air of command to the character, he is always moving steadily toward a solution to the crime at hand. He presents Wong as quite the most intelligent character in every film. The mysteries themselves are about average for the period. In most of the Wong films the clues are there for the audience if they care to look for them.
