Monday, January 30, 2012

Movie Monday: Island of Lost Souls

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This week's movie is the 1932 horror/adventure Island of Lost Souls!

I had not seen Island of Lost Souls in years, due to its generally unavailability on DVD or streaming. But now that the film is back (and by Criterion, no less), I took the chance to catch up with what I remembered as a grisly, creepy horror classic.
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A shipwreck strands traveler Richard Parker (Richard Arlen), and he finds himself on a freighter delivering supplies to a remote South Seas island. After Parker sees the ship's captain abusing a brutally ugly, almost animal-like crew member, they fight, leaving Parker stranded again.
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He ends up in the boat of two men, Montgomery (Arthur Hohl) and Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton). They take Parker to their island.
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It's pretty clear from the beginning that Moreau is n-u-t-s, but Parker is slow to realize this, even though Moreau's island crew seems to be staffed by frightening-looking brutes:
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He introduces Parker to a woman named Lota (Kathleen Burke, aka The Panther Woman), but not before delivering ominous threats to her out something called "The House of Pain." Lota takes an immediate liking to Parker, and tries to protect him when screams of pain draw Parker into a room where he shouldn't be:
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It's here that Parker finally realizes the trouble he's in, and attempts to escape with Lota. They make their way into the jungle, where they are stopped by an army of animal men, led by a being known as The Sayer of The Law (Bela Lugosi):
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Parker sees that Moreau rules these pitiful creatures with an iron fist (and a whip), who look up to Moreau as if a god. Back at the house, Moreau calmly explains how he experimented with plants back in society, but he felt his work was stymied, so he kept going, way past what any of us would consider sane, or humane, work: he has created an entire race of human/animal hybrids!

Charles Laughton's performance is simply outstanding. Sure, it's fairly hammy by today's standards, but there's a tone of relaxed geniality to Moreau that I find creepy. I love this little bit of inappropriately-casual body language as Parker confronts Moreau about his experiments:
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Lota has fallen hard for Parker, which delights Moreau, who is watching all this. Deciding to keep Parker on the island, the boat that was going to take Parker back home is found mysteriously destroyed the next morning, stranding him. Eventually, Parker begins to reciprocate Lota's feelings, somewhat, but then he realizes that she, too, is one of Moreau's experiments:
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Meanwhile, Parker's fiancee Ruth, tracking down Parker, makes her way to the island. When she arrives, Parker decides they have to get off the island immediately. The animal men, already an edgy, restless group ("Are we not men? What is The Law?"), revolt against Moreau's tight-fisted control and grab him. They drag him back to his lab and eviscerate him with his own surgical instruments:
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During the melee, Lota is killed by one of the animal men, and eventually the whole place goes up in flames. This gives Parker and Ruth the time to escape with the help of Montgomery. As the boat makes it away across the water, further and further away from the island, the film ends.


Island of Lost Souls was directed by Erle C. Kenton, who also helmed a lot of Universal's "Monster Rallies" of the 1940s, like House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. The staging here is more reminiscent of the time, with long stretches of silence and a leisurely pace, similar to Dracula and Frankenstein. There are a number of spooky shots where characters address or lunge right at the camera, which gives the whole movie a weird, off-putting vibe.
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Knowing what we know about Bela Lugosi's decision to turn down the role of Frankenstein's Monster, it's kind of amazing to think that he was willing to take this role, since it's much smaller and even more undignified, in terms of being buried under pounds of unflattering make-up (supposedly Lugosi's main reason for not taking the Frankenstein role).

Speaking of unflattering make-up, the make-ups/masks seen here are pretty basic, but it's that blunt roughness that gives Moreau's creatures an even creepier look; like they're all thrown together, hastily assembled. The final scene of them tearing into Moreau is, while not graphic, quite disturbing--the screams (from Laughton himself?) are the stuff of nightmares; you can just imagine what went on after the camera pulled away.

Considering how much of the horror market Universal had cornered in the 1930s, I have to force myself to remember this isn't from the studio; rather, it came from Paramount. In some ways, they did almost too good a job on Island of Lost Souls; it's so ghoulish and horrible that there was no way they could have kept up this level of intensity, with the Hays Code about to clamp down on the movie industry.


One last thing: I can't be sure, but one of the masks used for the animal men looks, to me, pretty familiar. Check out the guy below at left, and then again sixth from the left at the bottom:
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That one guy's mask looks a bit like the ones seen in the classic Twilight Zone episode, "The Eye of the Beholder":
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Could a mask from Island of Lost Souls have somehow made its way to a warehouse somewhere, only to be re-used for The Twilight Zone? Paramount sold the rights to a bunch of their films (including this one) to MCA/Universal in the 1950s, so I guess anything's possible!


For the longest time, Island of Lost Souls was not available on DVD, but now its out via Criterion, and I really can't wait to get my non-genetically-altered hands on it!

If you want to pick yourself up a copy and throw a little money this blog's way, just click the, er, handy link below:


Monday, January 23, 2012

Movie Monday: Red Tails

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This week's movie is the just-released WWII drama Red Tails!

I had another movie lined up for this week's Movie Monday installment, but over the weekend I saw the George Lucas-produced Red Tails, a "passion project" if there ever was one--supposedly Lucas had been developing it for over twenty years. Unable to convince any studio that a war film with an all-black cast would be marketable, Lucas financed it himself--as well as doing some second-unit directing and (supposedly) working on the screenplay as well.
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Red Tails tells the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, a real-life all-black unit of fighter pilots, the first of its kind. Right from the first scene and the opening credits--which are done in an incredibly straightforward, almost plain (is that Helvetica?) style--the tone is set for an old school WWII adventure. I sat back in my seat, almost giddy with anticipation: I wanted nothing more than to be told a classic, rip-roarin' WWII adventure, but with an added dollop of real life social commentary.

Red Tails is old school all right--so old school at times that the film approaches Dada-esque proportions. The main characters are a handful of the airman, all with easy-to-remember code names: Easy, Junior, Joker, Deacon, and Lightning, who is the hot dog of the group:
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We learn from the get-go that the brass has no faith the Red Tails; they keep assigning them boring, almost useless missions, using ancient planes. Col. A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) is fighting an uphill battle getting his superiors to give the Red Tails a real mission, to show what they can do. One of the brass is played by Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston, who in no uncertain terms lets Bullard know that African-Americans are not fit, mentally or emotionally, for important missions.

But Bullard keeps fighting and arguing, and eventually gets the Red Tails assigned to a minor mission, which they perform spectacularly. This gets them assigned another mission, then another, and by the end of the film they are sent to the big show--Berlin, Germany.
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To say the characters in Red Tails are paper-thin would be an understatement. In many ways, its as if there have been no war films made in the last forty years--Red Tails feels like it was produced in the rah-rah, fight-the-good-fight era of the 1940s, its so unbelievably square. Cuba Gooding Jr. plays the Red Tails' immediate commander, Major Stance, whose main job is to chomp on his pipe.
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The only moments where Red Tails feels "modern" is in the scenes where the pilots encounter brutal, direct racism: at one point, Lightning enters a G.I. bar, only to be called a racial slur and pushed out (which he responds to with a series of punches). In fact, there are so many scenes like this it feels as though the entire U.S. Army is a bunch of racists--a stark contrast to how the veterans of WWII are generally portrayed in modern war films.

There are minor conflicts: the flight commander, known as Easy, drinks too much. Lightning refuses to follow orders; we also follow him into a small Italian town where he falls in love with a white girl (Daniela Rush), which seems to cause not a whiff of strife.

The dialogue in Red Tails is so basic its bewildering. At one point, after Lightning has defied orders (again!) and bombed a Nazi air strip, he flies by, close enough for one of the German pilots (whose cheek has a giant scar) to see him. After Lightning's plane whizzes by, the German yells "Those pilots are African!"

The dogfight scenes are well-staged (to be expected, considering who produced the film), but they rarely contain any tension: the Red Tails seem so brilliant as a fighting squad that they don't seem really at risk; no one seems to ever be scared, and when one of them does die in the line of duty, it makes the rest of the squad sad for a few minutes, and then it's over.
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The film's episodic nature also works against it: the Red Tails get a mission, then another, then another. It makes the two-hour film seem so much longer, and the final climactic mission doesn't feel any more important or tense than the ones that preceded it.

As sad as it is to say, I have to think the rumors that Lucas had a hand in the screenplay are true; and the evidence is the final film. As I mentioned above, the dialogue at times is so bizarrely simple and so unlike how people talk that parts of it reminded me of some of the groaners heard in the later Star Wars films.

Entire sequences go by with so little drama invested that its startling--one Red Tail is taken prisoner, sent to a POW camp, escapes, and makes his way back to his unit, all in about five minutes of screen time. The aforementioned Bryan Cranston is completely wasted in a cardboard role; he's a racist, that's it. Some of the actors fare better, but with a screenplay like this its hard to say how good or bad any of them are at their roles. David Oyelowo, as Lightning, comes off best, but that's probably because he gets the most to do. We see him fall in love with his Italian bride, but we don't know why (I mean, she's gorgeous, but surely there had to be more than that...)


All that said, I cannot completely dismiss Red Tails--the film is so earnest, so guileless in its desire to tell the true story of these brave men that I came away liking it, even though as I watched it I knew that it was failing as a film in almost every way (it was hard to judge the acting; since even the finest actors look weak when reciting bad dialogue).

Many reviews of the film have said this story, because it is so important, deserves a more realistic approach, and I can't argue with that (I haven't seen the 1995 HBO film about the same subject, The Tuskegee Airmen, which featured, among others...Cuba Gooding Jr.), but dammit, I still kinda liked Red Tails.

Maybe because I went into Red Tails wanting to like it so bad that I'm simply blinded to how weak the film is. I have to admit, when I saw this promo poster for it (by my former art teacher, the legendary Joe Kubert), I started to get my hopes up:
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...sadly, nothing in Red Tails matches the grit and gut-level, you-are-there drama seen in the poster above. I hate to say this, but I have to wonder what kind of film we would have gotten if George Lucas had turned it over to someone else.

His heart was clearly in the right place, and Lucas deserves all the credit in the world for putting his money where his mouth is, getting the film produced (and, in my theater at least, he was right about how marketable Red Tails is--the screening I attended was packed). But the results are sadly reminiscent of what (to me) marred the Star Wars prequels--clunky pacing, leaden dialogue, and nearly transparent characters. The Red Tails--both the real men and the movie versions--deserved better.


Monday, January 16, 2012

Movie Monday: The Time Travelers

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This week's movie is the 1964 sci-fi extravaganza The Time Travelers!

Okay, "extravaganza" might be a bit much, but how can you not be excited over a movie with a poster like that?!? It was the poster (by the great Reynold Brown) that made me want to track this movie down...let's see what it's all about, eh?
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After a very Irwin Allen-y credits sequence, we meet our main characters: a bunch of white-coated scientists hard at work at time travel experiments. Once glance at the equipment shows us this is high-tech stuff:
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The scientists (which consist of two men and a woman, plus a male technician played by ubiquitous TV character actor Steve Franken) are working on a "time screen", which allows them to see into the future. Suddenly, the whole room seems to be filled with shadows, and soon they see the screen is showing them some bleak future Earth, which is just a desolate landscape.

The mechanic (named Danny), leaps into the screen and is somehow transported out of the room and into the future! Amazed, the scientists follow:
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Our heroes wander around a bit, and there seems to be no civilization. But there is life: a horde of mutants who chase after them!

Sadly, director Ib Melchoir--who was multi-talented--simply plants the camera and lets the mutants slowly make their way forward, kinda robbing the scene of any real drama:
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The scientists end up in a cave, where they meet another group of mutants--the only survivors of some horrible future war and their robot assistants, who also look vaguely, disturbingly close to human:
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Okay--as is clear from these shots, the budget for The Time Travelers was obviously very, very low (it was made by AIP, after all). The scientists' lab looks like a TV set, and all the monsters are clearly just wearing masks. But there's a stark simplicity to these designs that keeps you from getting too bogged down with these details. I find the above make-up kinda creepy, actually.

Anyway, the scientists learn that they have traveled (a-ha!) to the year 2071, and the human race has been reduced to a small band of humans, including their leader, played by the great John Hoyt:
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John looks like he's in space jammies here, like this is some weird sci-fi version of Playboy After Dark. But I don't care! Hoyt was in my all-time favorite Twilight Zone, "Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?" and I loved seeing him here, even though the proceedings are quite silly.

Turns out the remaining humans are frantically working on a spaceship that wiull take them to a more hospitable world, so the scientists agree to help. Its here that the movie really kinda bogs down, with lots of talky scenes and silly sit-com music played over lame jokes. At one point, Danny the mechanic looks directly into the screen and talks to the camera.

But there is some fun stuff to look at--the matte paintings are classics of the genre, making the film look more big budget than it really was:
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Genre fans will enjoy the scene featuring a bunch of workers building various parts for the rocket, and one of them is played by none other than Forrest J. Ackerman, who even gets a a couple of lines:
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There's some romantic sub-plots, all of it right out of other, non-genre films of the time. The women spend some time luxuriating in what was AIP's take on the future of the boudoir, complete with slightly smutty sax music:
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But all this lounging around stops when the mutants break in to the cave, and try and kill the humans and their robot assistants before they can launch their rocket. For a film that was very cheap-looking and sit-com-y, the final battle scene is surprisingly bloody and violent:
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The above scene, where the mutants rip apart one of the robots, is actually pretty well done. And while there's no blood, there's a brutality to it that reminded me of the better zombie movies where screaming humans get ripped apart before our very eyes. Don't get me wrong--this scene is no classic or anything, but for a movie with such a low budget, it was kind of impressive to see the robot flailing around even as its lower half is ripped to bits.

With the rocket destroyed, the scientists and some of the survivors return to the time lab to try and go back to the past. But due to some damage the lab suffers in the melee, they find themselves stuck in time, watching events go by at an accelerated rate, meaning they will all age nearly instantly. They immediately decide to go into the far, far future--100,000 years in the future!

And this is where the film gets really weird: we see everyone arrive at what looks like a leafy paradise. They all walk through the portal into the new world, and then the film loops back to the beginning, showing us clips of the movie we've just seen, but sped up, faster and faster and faster until the screen grows dark:
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...The End!


I'm not sure what the ending means, exactly--it seems to be a happy ending, with our heroes safely in a more hospitable future. But you can't quite be sure.

As I said above, most of The Time Travelers is very silly, and it looks like an Irwin Allen sci-fi show of the time. There's nothing in it as captivating as the poster (nice job, Mr. Brown!), but there are little moments here and there that are unique enough that it made me glad I saw it.


Monday, January 9, 2012

Movie Monday: Wonder Woman

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This week's "movie" is the unaired 2011 TV pilot Wonder Woman!

News of the Wonder Woman TV pilot burned across the internet last year, and I had every intention of hunting the show down and checking it out, but somehow I just forgot about it. After watching Doc Savage last week I was reminded of it again, so here we are!

The show opens with a teenage boy, who just got a college acceptance letter. Its clear he and his family are fairly poor, so this is a cause to celebrate even more than it normally would be. But, seconds later, the boy starts convulsing and bleeding from his eyes and ears. The family starts to scream.

After this strange, kinda gruesome opening (am I watching the right show?), we cut to a guy running down a city street, clearly away from something. He's running faster than any normal person could, and then we see who is chasing him:
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That's Adrianne Palicki (Friday Night Lights) as Wonder Woman. She catches up to her prey, and jabs him with a hypo, drawing blood(?). The cops catch up, and take the guy into custody...much to Wonder Woman's displeasure.

Later, at the high-rise offices of Themyscira Industries, a company run by Diana and her business partner Henry Johns (Cary Elwes) and executive assistant Etta Candy (Tracie Thoms). Themyscira makes a mint off of Wonder Woman's image, funneling the money into charitable works and Diana's crime-fighting efforts.

The next morning, Diana as Wonder Woman calls a press conference, and publicly accuses pharmaceutical manufacturer Veronica Cale (Elizabeth Hurley) of creating a killer steroid, responsible for several teenage deaths (like what we saw at the top of the show). This despite the fact that, as far as we've seen, Wonder Woman has no evidence. There's also a moment where someone refers to other supposed victims of Cale's being from "ghettos", a word still in use only to super-wealthy white people who only know of them from that one Elvis song.

Things also aren't perfect within Themyscira: Diana is uncomfortable with how she is portrayed in her own company's merchandise; specifically, the anatomical excesses of the new Wonder Woman doll:
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Johns manages to argue her down, but Diana takes a stand.

After a scene where we learn WW has a third identity, a secret one as Diana Prince (who has a regular old apartment, a cat, and watches The Notebook while pining after lost love Steve Trevor), she goes back out as Wonder Woman to interrogate the guy she arrested earlier.

After openly flaunting her physique to get past the guard, Wonder Woman basically tortures the guy for information, breaking his hand, and looking positively gleeful over doing it:
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We get some flashbacks to Diana's relationship with Steve Trevor, who is now working in federal law enforcement and has taken over the Cale investigation. Diana learns that Steve is now married, which clearly upsets her.

Later, Wonder Woman makes a full-on assault on Cale's headquarters, which is populated by your standard Hollywood goons. Surprising for a David E. Kelley show, its this action sequence that, to me, shines above the rest of the show--its a well-staged, tough, and exciting set-piece, showing Wonder Woman's powers off to dynamic effect, even working in the bullets-and-bracelets bit:
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Wonder Woman confronts Cale, knocking her out. Later, back at Themyscira, Wonder Woman gets a round of applause from all her employees, including the prickly Johns.

But despite this this triumph, we see that Diana is still lonely. Back in her apartment, she logs onto Facebook, and chooses to list her only friend as her cat, Sylvester:
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...with this downbeat scene, Wonder Woman ends.


When I first heard this pilot was rejected by the network, meaning A)it wouldn't be turned into a series, and B)wouldn't ever be aired, I was really frustrated and disappointed: I'm always up for a comic book-based superhero series, and I think Wonder Woman in particular deserves more attention in pop culture.

But now that I've seen the show, I can sort of see why NBC dropped it: the show, as evidenced by the pilot, is a mess. While
Adrianne Palicki...er, fills out the role well, the script really lets her down: this Wonder Woman is constantly complaining, moping, frowning, and being kinda petulant...when she's not whining about being single (ye Gods, are we back to the 1967 Wonder Woman mini-pilot?).

Maybe this would be more palatable if they had cast someone intriguing as Steve Trevor. But as played by Justin Bruening, who seems straight from the CW, Trevor is a dull hunk who makes me doubt Diana's character that she's so hung up on him.

On top of that, watching Wonder Woman so blithely--happily, even--torture someone was quite troubling. Maybe that would be the kind of mature theme a well-written show could tackle, but nothing else in this show makes you think its capable of really engaging such a serious topic. It comes off more as macho preening, totally at odds with a show featuring Wonder Woman.

Diana having three identities is just confusing, and seems like the kind of thing that would have been jettisoned early into the series. Both Elwes and Hurley are mugging for the back rows; it seems like once they were told this was a comic book-based show, they figured it was okay to play every scene in the most cartoony manner possible. Elwes' character in particular talks down to Diana like she's an errant child, as opposed to a fearsome Amazonian warrior. Sure, this is early in her career, but in some ways we have to see that this is a god walking among us.

(One small but annoying detail: you don't "list" your friends on Facebook by just typing in a bunch of names. If you're going to bother using the brand name of Facebook, at least try and get how it works correctly)

But as I said above, Palicki is good at Wonder Woman, and the action sequence is just great--it was kinetic and fast but never confusing (do you hear that, Mr. Nolan?). Wonder Woman seems genuinely tough, a nice contrast to her general ineffective mopiness throughout the rest of the show. Since this pilot was not finished, you can still see some of stunt harnesses, and there are even a moment or two when a graphic comes up telling us that some FX shots are still to come.

That suggests that Wonder Woman will never surface officially, since someone would have to spend the money to clean it up and finish the effects, and that seems unlikely. Which means Diana still has to wait for a proper, 21st Century live-action worthy of the name Wonder Woman.


Monday, January 2, 2012

Movie Monday: Doc Savage

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This week's movie is the 1975 action adventure Doc Savage!

Doc Savage, of course, is a legendary pulp hero, a contemporary of The Green Hornet and The The Shadow, both of whom received film adaptations in the wake of the massive success of 1989's Batman. But poor ol' Doc Savage's timing was off--but more on that in a moment.

Doc Savage was released in 1975, a production of the legendary George Pal (in what would be his final completed film). Directed by Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days, Logan's Run), the film announces its tone right from the very beginning:
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Under a John Philip Sousa score (whose last three letters are spelled out in red, white, and blue), we see Savage (Ron Ely) approach his Fortress of Solitude hidden in the Arctic. Ely takes off his hood, and turns toward the camera. He smiles, and an animated twinkle in his eye appears, complete with matching sound effect. Oy vey.
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Luckily, this moment is the most in-your-face piece of "camp" humor. After this, Doc Savage maintains a slightly more serious feel than the 1960s Batman TV show, but not by a lot. Doc learns that his father has died under mysterious circumstances, and heads back to his HQ in New York, where he meets up with "The Fabulous Five", his specialized team of agents (Long Tom, Renny, Ham, Monk, and Johnny, as played by Paul Gleason, William Lucking, Darrell Zwerling, Michael Miller, and Eldon Quick, respectively). Doc is almost assassinated by some sort of loincloth-wearing jungle warrior, who dies in the attempt.
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Doc's fathers papers have been destroyed by intruders, so Doc and his team travel to the Republic of Hildalgo, where Savage Sr. was killed. On the way they meet Captain Seas (Paul Wexler), who tries to kill them all on the voyage to Hidalgo, but fails.
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Doc learns about a secret cache of gold hidden in a remote valley, and discovers the existence of The Green Death, an airborne plague that killed Doc's father and keeps the locals in line, who believe it is some sort of supernatural curse. Captain Seas kidnaps The Fabulous Five and Mona, a local woman who wants to help Savage. Doc and Seas have one last fight, leading to the latter's capture.
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Some of Seas' men try and steal the gold, causing an explosion that melts the gold and covers them all in molten metal. Doc performs brain surgery(!) on Seas to cure him of his criminal ways. Shortly thereafter, we learn that this has worked, and Seas now does charity work. Lobotomies: not all bad!

At the end of the film, Doc Savage gets another message about a grave threat to the world, and takes off for another adventure. Doc Savage will be back in...Doc Savage: The Arch Enemy of Evil!
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...okay, not really. Apparently Producer Pal was so sure this film would be a hit that they filmed a large chunk of the sequel simultaneously, only to see this film get ripped apart at the box office and become a massive flop. Plans for the sequel were scrapped, and Doc Savage has not been seen on movie screens again.

Doc Savage, the film, was the last gasp of the dreaded "camp" approach that was pioneered by Batman and engulfed every comic book project that followed it. In just two short years, director Richard Donner and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz would completely reject that approach with Superman, ushering a new era of superhero comic book movies, ones that (for the most part) respected the characters and didn't think of the thing as a big joke.

That said, Doc Savage isn't all that bad--the art direction is pretty nice and there are some fun sequences. Ely is pretty bland as Doc, but he's miles ahead of blocks of wood like Miles O'Keefe (Tarzan) and Reb Brown (the Captain America TV movies). One of the areas the film is surprisingly weak in is the effects--when The Green Death attacks, for instance, its just some animated snakes that look mighty lame:
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...considering this came from George Pal, you're expecting something a lot more interesting.

The film, overall, looks fairly cheap, like it was shot in California on standing TV sets (which it mostly was). The actors playing The Fabulous Five acquit themselves well enough (Quick and Lucking both appeared in guests spots on M*A*S*H, so I kinda enjoyed seeing them together here), but they mostly run around like a goofy mob. With Doc supposedly being a genius-level expert at almost everything, its kinda hard to believe he feels the need to hang with these guys.

It's been almost forty years since Doc Savage, so its high time the character got dusted off and tried again. I've read that Sam Raimi has been working on an adaptation, but I haven't heard much other than that. Let's hope The Man of Bronze gets his chance to, er, shine once again!

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