(1951)
Dir - Seymour Friedman
Overall: MEH
Columbia Pictures finally gets around to taking a stab at adapting The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with The Son of Dr. Jekyll. Well, as the title would dictate, it is in fact not a direct reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson's frequently filmed source material but a sequel existing in the same universe while not being a direct follow-up to a previous cinematic version. The new story by Mortimer Braus and Jack Pollexfen focuses on the public paranoia brought on by Henry Jekyll's initial experiments, a paranoia and distrust that runs down to his offspring who spends most of the entire film being manipulated and misunderstood by nearly everyone around him. It is an interesting angle to be sure, but also one that leaves literally no room for even a single transformation scene, (outside of a lone shot of a hand going all hairy), let alone any of Hyde Jr. running around terrorizing people. While that would have been the more predictable if mundane route to go down, it also would have given the movie some much needed excitement. Instead, it ends up being just a simple conspiracy melodrama that only uses the Jekyll name for genre recognition, a genre the movie ultimately does not belong in.
(1956)
Dir - Virgil Vogel
Overall: MEH
Another late entry in the Universal horror cycle was The Mole People. Promising on paper with an underground ancient civilization that worships a Mesopotamian god and the title monsters that are successfully teased by grabbing their victims spontaneously through the ground, the presentation and look of the film is a mixed bag of acceptable to laughably goofy. The Sumerian albinos implausibly speak perfect English and are adorned in high school play/pajama level Peter Pan/Trojan warriors outfits and why wouldn't they also have slaves at their disposal who look like Hollywood-primed glamour queens? The actual mole people masks and costumes are about as convincing as the least convincing Doctor Who monsters, certainly a far cry from The Creature from the Black Lagoon per example which the studio produced a mere two years prior. While the set design clearly utilizes matte paintings to convey the vast, underground kingdom, they are used adequately well enough considering the B-movie template. The first act is a detrimental crawl though, ending with a near silent spelunking sequence that seems like it lasts six hours. Being both too ridiculous and too slow, it is quite low on the essential list.
(1958)
Dir - Irvin Yeaworth
Overall: MEH
One of the most successful independent B-movies of the drive-in era and one that has endured in pop culture ever still, The Blob is a largely detrimental offering. One would have to struggle to find any intended subtext in a story about cranberry jelly that grows larger as it eats people, try as some film scholars might to consider it yet another sci-fi metaphor for communism. In reality, it is directly targeted at the teenage audiences of the day what with the movie's catchy title, no nonsense premise, famous movie theater scene, and a then twenty-eight year old Steve McQueen and his twenty-five year old ladyfriend Aneta Corsaut both playing high schoolers. The problem is a common one though where long, long scenes trudge along with characters talking about what happened to other characters that the viewer already knows have been absorbed by the title creature. In other words, too much talky and too little blobby. Said characters are remarkably unremarkable and the acting is routinely stiff. Since there is really no point or joy in waiting around for eons for everybody in the movie to both catch on to what the audience already knows and start believing the characters trying to convince everyone else, it cannot help but to become a snorefest throughout most of its running time. Once things finally pick up, it is a bit fun to watch the blob destroy property and murder people though.
No comments:
Post a Comment