Snowbeast

Caution: Spoilers ahead!

Though not given a huge amount of respect from most aficionados of "les cinema du Sasquatch", Snowbeast is still a relatively well made, solid entry in the Bigfoot genre, even if it's not a beloved classic.  Written by The Outer Limits writer/producer Joseph Stefano--who also happened to write the screenplay for a little movie called Psycho--this 1977 made for television film follows the basic template set by Jaws a couple years earlier, with a bloodthirsty Yeti stepping in for the great white shark; instead of a quaint New England fishing village the setting here is a small ski resort town beset by increasingly frequent hominid attacks on the tourist population.

There are not a ton of monster scares in Snowbeast but what it does have are lots and lots of shots of people skiing and snowmobiling with just a sprinkling of sexual tension between the three leads (but unfortunately no fondue): Bo Svenson plays a down on his luck former ski champ; Yvette Mimieux is his long suffering wife who also happens to be a crack investigative TV news reporter who just recently did a story on the mystery of the Sasquatch; and Robert Logan plays her old boyfriend and manager of the local ski lodge that is under assault by the hairy creature.

Like a lot of other 'squatch flicks, the creature in Snowbeast is implied rather than shown straight out, mainly in first person view lurking behind trees and barns, backed by an ominous Jaws like score, with only an occasional glimpse of its great hairy hand.  I wasn't sure if they even had a full costume made for this movie until near the end when the beast is finally seen in its full glory and the film makers' restraint in showing only occasional glimpses becomes fully justified: that ain't no 100% yak hair, Peter Graves approved, The Mysterious Monsters Yeti costume, that's for sure!

And of course, Snowbeast doesn't let you down when it comes to the classic ol' hairy hand smashing through the glass window scene, an always appreciated stock-in-trade scene of 70s Bigfoot films, though instead of a log cabin bedroom or trailer home bathroom window, the Yeti in this flick smashes in a school auditorium window during preparations for the annual winter carnival celebration and the crowning of the new Snow Queen--though in a twist on the usual rite of the winter solstice, it is not the young and virginal Snow Queen that is sacrificed during this frenzied Bacchanalia but the driver of her chariot, the Snow Queen's very Mother that is the victim of the Snowbeast's pagan blood lust.  In the ensuing chaos of the monster's attack on civilization, the Snow Queen's silver crown is trampled and smashed and the owner of the ski lodge herself--the old Crone, previously an unbeliever in the very real and furry incarnation of unbridled Nature, red in tooth and claw--is violently knocked down by the mob, probably breaking her hip in the process (and we all know what happens then).

I must also mention the cinematography on this film is pretty damn decent for a low budget made for television film.  The commercial breaks fade to a bloody red instead of the normal black and there are some moody 70s style lens flares from shooting into the sun.  The natural scenery is also used to good effect: the location filming adds verisimilitude and it really does look cold, capturing the eerie, almost magical feeling during the short days of winter around daybreak or dusk, when the sun is low in the sky--just barely peeking above the tree line--and shadows are long, and you can see your breath, and you just don't know what strange thing might be watching you from the dark woods beyond.

Best line in the flick:
The manager of the ski lodge is about to identify a crime scene victim: "I must have seen her somewhere, maybe I'll recognize her when I see her face."

Sheriff (after a pause): "She doesn't have one..."

Here's a clip:



That's all for now--see you next time.

Here's "Snowbeast" by Gary Busey Community College to play us out:

The Hobbit 4: The Battle of the Two Hobbitses

The Hobbit (1977): Bilbo Baggins carries a big pipe

So I finally saw The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), the third and final installment of Peter Jackson's hobbit trilogy this week which inspired me to go back and revisit an old childhood favorite: the 1977 Rankin/Bass animated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.  This was originally going to be a simple review of that animated version but instead morphed into my thoughts about what I personally think the live action films failed to accomplish that the much maligned made for television cartoon actually got right.

To wit, a simple bedtime fairy story that Jackson and company spent nearly eight hours to tell was accomplished in an economical ninety minutes in the Rankin/Bass cartoon; granted the cartoon omitted a few important threads from the book that are fleshed out somewhat in the live action film, such as Beorn the shapeshifting bear-man and the Arkenstone of the dwarves, and there were some interesting creative choices in the 1977 version that some might not have agreed with, ie: Gollum looked like a big frog, Bilbo looked like my spinster aunt Grizelda, the wood-elves looked like goblins, and the dwarves other than Thorin were all relative nonentities, but I think the Rankin/Bass 'toon still managed to capture the spirit--the tone--of the original book, creating a feeling similar to that of listening to an enchanting fireside fairy tale in a way that the live action films are less successful at, as Jackson's trilogy seems to be more interested in large scale theme park ride-like spectacle and bloodless CGI battles to small character moments, though there are a few sequences of wonderment in the live action films I really enjoyed,  especially Bilbo seeing the butterflies fluttering amidst the tree tops of Mirkwood Forest in the second film and the dwarves singing the Misty Mountains song at Bag End in the first.

Though at this point it's become a cliche to compare The Hobbit trilogy to the Star Wars prequels I think it's actually a pretty fair comparison and a good warning to avoid any big budget prequels in the future: I dutifully went to the theater and watched both prequel trilogies, and can even say I really enjoyed parts of them immensely, but that is as far as my appreciation goes: I liked them, or parts of them.  They were okay... I guess.  But the original untampered with Star Wars (pre-Special Edition) and The Lord of the Rings trilogies?  Those I LOVED--it may simply be nostalgia talking but the earlier trilogy of both series seemingly captured both lightning in a bottle and my imagination; they made me think about them even after leaving the theater, looking forward to my next viewing.  In comparison, the prequel films remained in my mind only as long as I was watching them, and once the credits rolled were then jettisoned from my consciousness--like the recollection of ever having seen Caddyshack II or Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, any feelings of goodwill instantly evaporated upon leaving the theater.  Will I ever watch these films again?  Possibly, but I won't feel compelled to in order to find enjoyment in their predecessors, just as I don't need to watch the sequels to The Matrix to fully enjoy the original film as a standalone story.

My main gripe with The Hobbit trilogy is what I consider to be its major fatal flaw: the expansion of a small story of an unassuming hobbit's adventures in the larger world of Middle-earth that could have been a tight, focused narrative told in one or maybe two parts being stretched out into a trilogy of three extremely long faux-epic action films (see the Narnia films for another example of off-tone faux-epicness infecting simple tales for children) that at the end of the day feel overly padded and yet somehow still incomplete.  For whatever reasons, be they creative or financial, this smaller prelude of a tale should NEVER have been super sized to the epic proportions of the esteemed film trilogy that follows it if only for reasons of simple aesthetics: the smaller, shorter story of The Hobbit is simply out of all seemly proportion when placed next to the truly epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy and thus comes across as bloated and artificial, and the over reliance on CGI characters and scenery certainly don't do it any favors compared to the real life locations and prosthetics used in the earlier films.

A trilogy of butt numbingly long films worked beautifully for The Lord of the Rings trilogy since that story was already an epic saga of good versus evil taking place during war time and those films captured pretty well the tone of the books.  I'm certainly not a book purist and realize some things described on the page may need to be changed or adapted for film but in the expansion of the smaller quest tale of The Hobbit into the larger tapestry of Jackson's previous Middle-earth films, the personal story of Bilbo Baggins--the title character and the audience's entry into this magical world--is overshadowed in favor of the larger geopolitical threads Jackson was more interested in exploring, but giving the director the benefit of the doubt perhaps that was done purposefully?  And that's saying nothing of the addition of invented characters like Tauriel (who I actually thought was decent) and Alfrid (who I thought should have been cut entirely or at least saved for the extended editions) or what could have been exciting cameos for sharp eyed fans of Legolas, Radagast the Brown, or Azog the goblin, who although they are all Tolkien creations don't actually appear in the original story but who have more screen time than a character like Beorn who actually was in the book but barely included in the film.  Did we really need to see back story and character motivations for the orcs and goblins to know these were the bad guys in these films?

A three film telling could probably have worked out ok if planned that way from the start, but since it happened so late in the production the end result was, for this viewer at least, a disappointing albeit not entirely unsatisfying muddle.  I think if Guillermo Del Toro stayed on as director we may have gotten a better, shorter and more magical hobbit story (in one or possibly two parts) than the trilogy of missed opportunities from Jackson we ended up with...and maybe the dwarves could all actually have looked like dwarves with full on ZZ Top beards instead of the well trimmed goatees and fashionable stubble we got on the "hunky" dwarves?  And there could have been less use of CGI and more use of bigatures and prosthetics?  And it could have been filmed on actual good old fashioned two dimensional 24 frame per second film instead of being shot on the ugly high frame rate digital that ended up looking like a big budget 3D soap opera?  I could continue but I fear I'm starting to sound like a Neo-Luddite now.

Of course at this point this is all academic since The Hobbit trilogy is finished and out there and is what it is, which for this viewer is an overlong bloated series slavishly bound to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, bogged down by endless CGI action sequences and full of missed opportunities to simply tell the story of The Hobbit yet--frustratingly--highlighted by occasional flashes of brilliance.  I think there was a potentially great film (or pair of films) hidden in this merely average trilogy.  It will be interesting to see once some time has passed if Peter Jackson ever decides to revisit the series and release an edited down one or two film version.

If that is not in the cards I unreservedly look forward to watching the inevitable fan edits that will trim away the excess fat to reshape the narrative so that The Hobbit is once again about a simple hobbit's adventure instead of what now appears to be the exciting action packed story of a vengeful one handed albino goblin, the forbidden love between a star-crossed dwarf prince and a she-elf warrior, and the greedy machinations of the cross dressing servant to the Master of Lake-town.  Oh, and the guy from the British Office guest stars as a hobbit too.

The Hobbit (2012): Bilbo Baggins carries a big sword

1/18/15 Update:
Well, that didn't take too long.  Some fine fellow has edited down Peter Jackson's three Hobbit films into one 4 hour long epic film, about half as long as the combined running time of the officially released films.  I haven't had a chance to watch it yet so would not be surprised if there are some parts that are a little rough around the edges due to having to work with whatever footage was available, but I imagine this will give a good idea of what a shorter one (or two if split) film Hobbit would have played like in an alternate universe.  Kudos to the phantom editor--I look forward to watching his take on the story.

Here's the link to The Hobbit: The Tolkien Edit:
https://tolkieneditor.wordpress.com

Viva Knievel!

"One fine day a man came to town, a king of the road with a helmet for a crown, a motorcycle bird who is never comin' down..."

--From the Ballad of Evel Knievel, Anonymous, c. 1776 BC, translated from the ancient Babylonian text by Abed "Fred" Alhazred

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Without resorting to hyperbole, Viva Knievel! (1977) is the greatest action-adventure film of all time.

My history with this film goes back to the spring of 1977 when your humble host was traveling in South America "researching" the hallucinogenic properties of certain psychoactive tree frogs of the Amazon rain forest.  On the return leg of one trip I had a five hour layover in Mexico City and eventually found myself in a small movie theater with a few hours to kill before my flight.  Sitting down in the cool dark of el cine, armed with a small popcorn and a large Sonoran desert toad, I was exposed that day to the magnificent glory of Viva Knievel! and the awesome healing light of the one and only Evel Knievel, and verily I came to accept Him into my heart and soul as mine own lord and savior.

When the credits finally rolled I felt like every single bone in my body, along with my mind, had been broken, and the only way to mend them again was to get back on my hog, lick the toad and watch the film again, and again, and again...which I did several times every day for the next few weeks, until some new sci-fi flick by the director of THX-1138 finally pushed Viva Knievel! out of the theater.

Eighteen grueling months later as a recently converted and fanatical orthodox Knievelist, rabidly and LOUDLY attempting to spread the gospel that "Evel is the reason!" at airports, church socials and county fairs throughout Mexico, I found myself disenchanted with the Church of the Holy Cape and Helmet and eventually hitchhiked my way back to the States in order to lick both my physical and psychic wounds and hopefully return to my former well paying job as astronomer in residence at Underwriters Laboratories, where I had previously worked on various projects under the auspices of an extremely generous MK-Ultra grant.

I have not seen the damned film since then.

Keeping my own personal experience in mind, I warn my readers to tread carefully when dabbling in the red, white and blue arts.  Evel is a charismatic showman and almost as hard a habit to kick as Mexican Coke.

A few points to consider before deciding to embark down the 106 minute long ramp of insanity that is Viva Knievel!:

• Evel Knievel is like Santa Claus, if Santa Claus only brought Santa Claus brand toys to distribute to orphans.
• Evel is the reason that lame children throw away their crutches and walk again.
• Lauren Hutton:  "I've had a front row seat at this ugly spectacle".  So true on so many levels!
• Evel is like a charismatic cross between Jesus, Elvis Presley and Superman, and like the latter two, he's one of the few Caucasian men that can really wear a cape and look good doing it.
• The Stratocycle is ah-mah-zing!  It has an American flag and a bald eagle on it (Stephen Colbert would love it).  And it sounds exactly like what I imagine Darth Vader's space toilet sounds like when he flushes in his executive bathroom/meditation chamber aboard the Super Star Destroyer Executor.

This:

Sounds like this:

• Leslie Nielsen plays a surprisingly great villain.
• Two words: Marjoe Gortner.  He's the standout in the film as Jessie the junkie; he was also disturbingly great as Jody the psycho from Earthquake (1974).  Really, Google this guy.
• Gene Kelly as an alcoholic ex-motorcycle jumper/deadbeat dad?...yes that Gene Kelly.
• There's a byzantine subplot involving the bad guys plotting to create an exact replica of Knievel's jumping cycle and tractor trailer in an overly complicated plan to smuggle cocaine out of Mexico.
• Mr. Kathy Lee "Frank" Gifford gets quite a bit of airtime as Evel's announcer.
• It could just be me and my ears but Gene Kelly's little bastard kid has a preternaturally deep voice; either the kid was going through puberty during filming or his voice was later re-dubbed by a young Don LaFontaine.
• Helmets had no straps back then, you just stick one on your head and hope it doesn't fall off.
• Instead of Viva Knievel! this film could almost be called Fathers and Sons.
• Again this may just be me, but I could swear Steven Spielberg ripped off several scenes for the truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark from the final chase scene in this movie.  There are several beats that look almost exactly the same!
• During the end chase scene, Evel Knievel and Leslie Nielsen ride into a small Mexican village, basically terrorizing the entire population of townsfolk, chickens, and goats.
• It's too bad there weren't any sequels; I would love to have seen a whole series of Knievel films that took place in different locales: Konichiwa Knievel!, L'chaim Knievel!, Da Svidaniya Knievel!

Here's the trailer:



And may Knievel have mercy upon your blasted soul if you do choose to look upon His Evel face with your puny mortal eyes.

You have been warned.

Ghosts That Still Walk

File Under: Winnebago Warriors/WTF?

For many years I regarded The Alien Encounters (1979) as some fuzzy childhood hallucination until I finally found a PAL VHS tape from Australia on eBay in 2013 and could finally confirm that this strange film actually did exist--but that's a subject for another post.  An earlier film written and directed by the same nigh forgotten low-budget auteur James T. Flocker was not as hard to find: some poor, demented soul has recently uploaded a copy of the 1977 film Ghosts That Still Walk on YouTube.

If you're unfamiliar with this flick, here's a fan made trailer to give you a taste of just what to expect:



The capsule review in John Stanley's Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (Fourth revised version) reads:

GHOSTS THAT STILL WALK (1977).  Young boy is possessed by an Indian medicine man spirit in this low-budget pseudodocumentary about ghosts and spirits.  It's terribly disjointed and hard to follow but does have one exciting sequence in which an elderly couple traveling in a rec vehicle is attacked by boulders rolling across the desert.  Otherwise, tedious going.  And boring.  Written-directed by James T. Flocker. (VCI: United)

Most people that recall seeing Ghosts That Still Walk on a late night or Saturday afternoon UHF airing in the late '70s or early '80s usually only remember that "one exciting sequence" of rolling boulders in the desert inexplicably attacking a couple of senior citizens in an RV.  This unnervingly bizarre action sequence is probably the second greatest chase scene involving a motor home in cinematic history, topped only by well, really the entirety of Race with the Devil (1975); it gradually builds to a point of High Strangeness to create an overwhelmingly oppressive mood of true otherworldly alien-ness impinging on the normal waking world, as giant square shaped boulders--seemingly alive and with malicious intent--bear down on the RV like a galloping herd of mammoth antediluvian beasts, a tableau certainly never witnessed by a sane mind before or since, unless in the fevered phantasies of some deranged eater of hashish.

Another portion of the film involves a teenage boy's astral projection and his mommy's mummy (don't ask) and a few scenes of transcendent weirdness could be compared to a primitivist version of cult film maker David Lynch in the use of light and sound, sharing Lynch's predilection for sharp crackling sound bursts of electrical current and bright stroboscopic flashes of light as signifiers for a rent in the fabric of everyday reality.  These fleeting peeks of otherworldliness are contrasted with stultifyingly mundane scenes of middle class suburban normality, presaging the settings typical of late '70s to mid '80s Steven Spielberg classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Poltergeist, Gremlins, Back to the Future, or The Goonies that take place in one version or another of Spielburbia, USA.

That's not to say that Ghosts That Still Walk is by ANY stretch of the imagination as inherently "good" or well made as any one of those films, but it is as fascinatingly bizarre and eminently watchable as anything created by the man-god Ed Wood and does deserve to be seen again on DVD or Blu-ray disc by any fan of good old fashioned low budget schlock.  Just file it under: What the Flocker?

First Post/The Alpha Incident

First post!

Why?  I've got several cheap 50 movie DVD sets filled with public domain film titles so needed a place to keep track of what I watch since I probably won't want to revisit too many of them more than once, hence this blog--which I had originally thought should be named Death By Television but ultimately decided on the more life affirming Obscurantist Drivel; the check is in the mail Mr. Ellison.  I love these 50 movie collections because you really get a lot of bang for your buck.  Of course they are mostly filled with forgettably crappy films but there are usually at least a few really interesting gems in each set.

These were the types of odd, low budget films that would pop up on Saturday afternoons or at half past two in the morning on local/independent UHF TV stations in the 1970s and early '80s back when I was a kid living in rural New Jersey--before the rise of the nefarious and soul blasting infomercial and 24 hour a day narrow interest pay cable channels that killed this type of more free form programming.

Obscurantist Drivel and the accompanying YouTube channel for WODS-TV will attempt to recreate a similarly eclectic UHF channel format, with a specific emphasis on the fantastique and outré films of the 1970s to mid '80s, but we will undoubtedly explore content from other eras and genres as well; please feel free to view and comment on the movies (and commercials) "aired".

Disclaimer: Obscurantist Drivel is a 100% fan made, not-for-profit blog so the titles that will be discussed are not offered for sale by your humble host; you will have to locate and purchase these titles on your own dime and your own time, so don't bother asking!

The Alpha Incident (1979)

First up on WODS-TV late night (You'll love the way we smell...W...O...D...S!): Mill Creek Entertainment's Sci-Fi Classics collection and the made-in-Wisconsin The Alpha Incident directed by Bill Rebane, produced by "Studio Film Corporation" (!) and released in 1978 according to IMDB and John Stanley's Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (fourth revised version), though the Mill Creek set lists it as 1977.  The blurb from the booklet reads:

THE ALPHA INCIDENT
Starring Ralph Meeker, Stafford Morgan, George "Buck" Flower
(1977) Color Rated PG 

A Mars space probe returns to Earth and brings with it a microorganism from the red planet.  While transporting the microscopic alien life form by train, there is an accident and the microorganism is unleashed.  Exposure to the alien virus forces four strangers into quarantine while government scientists rush to find a cure.

Here's a clip:



Around 20 minutes in and as I always suspected, it looks like the end of the world will inevitably be brought about by a dumb redneck in overalls and a trucker hat.

Best quote: After the four strangers are quarantined for exposure to the deadly Martian microorganism and informed they'll all die if they fall asleep, Jack Tiller (John Goff)-a good ol' boy train depot worker-turns away from the camera and mumbles under his breath: "It's a bunch o' shit."

Here's an exchange I especially enjoyed:

Jack: "What I need right now is a drink!  Every good party needs some booze...Hey, I bet Hank had some stashed out in that caboose o' his."
Dr. Sorensen (Stafford Morgan): "That's not a good idea...stick to the amphetamines!"

Sound advice Doctor Sorensen...don't mind if I do!

This one ended up being more grim than I expected, and there was some minor profanity (and brief nudity which I wasn't really expecting in a PG rated film) along with a decent sense of '70s flavor with a healthy dollop of paranoia and post-Nixon government mistrust.  Also kind of amazing to think this low budget throwback to Night of the Living Dead was released the year after Star Wars; though if the good Mr. Ellison thought Star Wars and Close Encounters were dreck, what would he have thought of something like The Alpha Incident?  

Together dear reader, we shall strive to explore more of such odious drivel and nonsense on our fictitious late night UHF channel, so don't change that dial!