Join the Misfits for an evening at the Oscars — or anyway in front of a big screen TV, watching the Oscars.  All the predictability and tedium of the original three and a half hour show in less than a third of the time.  It’s a show Lou enthusiastically describes as “nice.”

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Up.  Maybe we’re just a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies who missed the bandwagon, but even so, nothing is going to stop us from putting in our two cents about Up.  It’s great!  So there.

6 ‘n 90.  Da Man reviews six films in ninety seconds.

The Islander is where guests are interviewed by Nancy and asked to pick the ten films they would take with them to a desert island.  Nancy’s guest this week is character actor James Karen.  Among his many TV appearances are roles on Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show, and on the big screen he has appeared in Poltergeist, The Return of the Living Dead, Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster, and many other films.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.  What’s the point of being an Olympian if your kid can call you on the carpet for being busy with God stuff instead of being a good parent?  The only thing that could possibly be lamer is taking an elevator to Olympus.

The new Wolfman movie is an uneasy mix of yesterday and today.  Is it an effort doomed to leave gorehounds disappointed and fans of the original film frustrated?

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For the most part.

They loved Chaplin in The Kid, as well as Buster Keaton in Cops, Singin’ in the Rain, which I screened to illustrate the transition from silents to talkies, went over BIG, especially with some of the girls, who fell fast and hard for Gene Kelly.  My Man Godfrey was appreciated, and the film led to some interesting discussions about history as well as the nature of comedy.  When we got to the 1940s, I hit cinematic pay dirt with, of all things, Mildred Pierce.  While Some Like it Hot probably proved to be the class favorite, overall, the Joan Crawford tour de force ran a very close second.  There was not one snarky comment about her eyebrows or shoulder pads.  Those kids were IN!

My footing got a little unsteady when we hit the 1950s however.  I take the blame.  Somehow, I thought that I absolutely had to show a Hitchcock film…like there was some sort of law…and I chose one of my favorites, North by Northwest.

It was a mistake.  A really BIG mistake.

The students hated it, and I came to understand and appreciate their views.  The whole Cold War thing meant absolutely nothing to them, so there went that.  Cary Grant, while still absolutely dishy to me, was a little too craggy to draw in my girls…even those who had swooned over Gene Kelly (and would go on to swoon even more for Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate).

Then, there’s the technical aspects of the film.  Those of us who love Hitch have learned to overlook and forgive his lack of technical prowess when it comes to filmmaking.  We accept all of the tired rear projection and allow it for the sake of the storytelling.

But kids today?  Eh, not so much.  Most of them complained that the famous crop-dusting scene just went on too long.  I guess when you walk home every afternoon knowing you could be caught in the crossfire of some warring gang banbers, being trapped in some mid-western corn field doesn’t seem to pose a lot of peril.

There was, however, one reaction that caught me completely off guard.  It came from a charming young man named Juan Cortez.  Juan was a great student.  He started out more skeptical than any of the others, but got swept up in the films I showed and became my most avid film watcher.  When someone gifted me with a small stuffed animal early in the semester, it was Juan who insisted that I name it “Godfrey.”

Juan’s complaint with North by Northwest?  Why, that tramp Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), dontcha know.

“Miss, she sleeps with him on the first night she meets him!  She’s kinda…well…you know…”

“A what, Juan?”

“Well, Miss…Ummm…kinda a slut!”

We tossed this idea around a bit.  I brought up the fact that her actions were all done to keep America safe from the likes of James Mason and his evil, Communistic ways, but Juan was having none of it.  Nope.  Good women don’t do that sort of thing, and, clearly, Eve Kendal was not a good woman.

Juan did seem to have a qualm or two about the fact that Mildred Pierce hooks up with Monty Beragon on their first date, but, ultimately, Mildred got a pass…something about the fact that she had already been married.

Personally, I live in my own happy little world, where a one-nighter with Cary Grant completely trumps the same sort of fling with Zachery Scott…especially when I am protecting the world from the Red Menace.  Or even if I’m not.  I mean…c’mon!

But, then again, I’m not wide-eyed and sixteen.  Nor would I wish to bel.  Still, I love to get their input.

Trailers.  The Misfits take a look at some coming attractions that just keep on coming and coming and…

6 ‘n 90.  Da man reviews six films in ninety seconds!

Bonus audio clip.  Early last summer, in another incarnation, the Misfits attempted to predict which 10 films would be nominated for Best Picture.  Do the hits outnumber the misses?  Listen and find out.

Edge of Darkness.  Mel’s back–but for how long?  Would a better pick for his return to the screen have been a buddy movie–maybe with a beaver as his buddy?

Legion.  Angels without wings.  The human race without a future.  Dennis Quaid without career options.

Without the benefit of a crystal ball or tea leaves, the Misfits do their best to predict the Academy Award winners.

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Across the Rio Grande,  film distributor K. Gordon Murray caught sight of the Santo phenomena and was inspired.  At that time in 1962, the Italian Hercules movies starring Steve Reeves were pulling in large young male audiences.  Murray bought the US rights to two Santo titles, Santo Contra las Mujeres Vampiras (Santo VS the Vampire Women) and Santo en el Museo de Cera (Santo in the Wax Museum).  He dubbed the films into English, and hoping to cash in on the Italian muscleman fad, changed Santo’s name to Samson.  Vampire Women soon became a local-TV horror favorite, in no small part because it is the stuff boyish dreams are made of (including mine),  especially when those dreams are populated by the sexy title villainesses.  Not surprisingly, hot vixens became a staple of future Santo films.

By the mid-60s, the muscleman genre gave way to the spy craze, and with this change in tastes, Santo’s cinematic adventures ceased being adapted for a US market.  In his native land, however, Santo’s reign as a Mexican movie hero continued unabated.  He appeared in movies with even larger-budgets, not only as a monster-alien basher but also as a suave superspy himself.  In Operation 67, for instance, Santo wore a very Bond-like tuxedo below his ever-present mask.  Some things couldn’t change.

A hero from a more innocent time, Santo found himself unable to compete with the rebel films of the late 60s and the Altamn-esque cinema of  the 70s. Santo’s pictures of that decade, although replete with monsters and sexy women, were mostly chaotic, directionless efforts that made even less sense than the earlier films while lacking their atmosphere and charm.  Sadly, Santo himself was in something of a decline by the late 70s, a time that would usher in a renaissance of traditional fantasy heroes like Luke Skywalker, Superman, Flash Gordon, and Tarzan.  The legendary wrestler would have fit right in among them, but he chose instead to retire in 1982, dying two years later in 1984.  Tens of thousands of fans turned out at his funeral.

Many of us baby boomers will never forget the late-night hours spent in front of a flickering rabbit-eared TV watching the masked champion  rescue a beautiful babe from the clutches of some madman or vampire queen.  Even as a kid, part of me knew this was silly.  Still, years later, that didn’t stop me  as a teen from going to the Spanish-language theater in DC to watch the latest Santo adventure in color.  Today we’re much too cinematically sophisticated and critical to enjoy such simple fare, and yet, when ever I think of Santo, I always smile at the memory of him.

SANTO (SAMSON) IN THE WAX MUSEUM.

One hero.  Three reviewers.  The Misfits take on Mexico’s famous masked hero in one of his most well known movies.  On a scale of 1 to 15 (15 being best), the Misfits give Santo in the Wax Museum a…

A brief look at the history of the Razzie Awards.

6 ‘n 90!  Da Man reviews six films in ninety seconds.

John Wilson, creator of the Razzies, shares the remainder of his movie picks to take with him on a desert island.  Will his luxury item be a wire coat hanger?

Up in the Air.  One of the biggest surprises of ‘09: a movie made for adults!

Third acts.  And how they went so very, very, very wrong.

Robot Monster.  Featuring an alien invader more gorilla than robot, this film was shot in four days for only sixteen thousand dollars.  Is this an example of scaled back, bargain basement movie making at its most ridiculous?  Or possibly, is what we see on the screen exactly what the screenwriter and director intended?

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Born in 1892 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Mitchell, the oldest son of immigrant Irish parents, got his start on stage after briefly pursuing a career in journalism.  For a while, he toured with a Shakespearean theater company headed by fellow character actor Charles Coburn.  He then turned his sights to Broadway and appeared in more than twenty plays between 1916 and 1960, some of which he also wrote and/or directed.

Sit around and watch enough TCM, especially the stuff that gets aired at five in the morning, and you might begin to wonder if Mitchell wasn’t legally mandated to appear in every third Hollywood film made between the mid-1930’s and mid-1940’s.  He wasn’t, of course, but he made nearly fifty films during that period.  By the time of his passing in 1962, his combined film and TV credits totaled 103, the first one being a breezy 1922 silent called Six Cylinder Love (one of his co-stars, also making his film debut, was Donald Meek, with whom Mitchell went on to make a cramped journey in John Ford’s Stagecoach).

If 1939 was a high point in American cinema, if was no less of a pinnacle for Mitchell’s film career.  He not only appeared in five of that year’s greatest films, but he displayed his awesome versatility as an actor in each one: as Gerald O’Hara, the proud but doomed patriarch in Gone With the Wind; in his Oscar-winning turn as the drunken but ultimately heroic Doc Boone in Stagecoach; as the sympathetic pilot whose shoulder Jean Arthur cries on in Only Angels Have Wings; as Diz Moore, the sympathetic, drunken reporter whose shoulder Jean Arthur also cries on in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; and in his rousing turn as Clopin, the King of Beggars, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

(In case you don’t recognize him, the idealistic young poet in that scene is none other than Edmond O’Brien, perhaps best known as the more severely doomed victim, Frank Bigelow, in the 1950 noir classic D.O.A.)

Seven years later, Mitchell played what might be considered his most memorable role, that of Uncle Billy, the well-meaning but scatterbrained uncle and “ol’ building  & loan pal” to Jimmy Stewart in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

With the rise of television in the early 1950’s, Mitchell took to the airwaves as effortlessly as he did to the silver screen.   He was a fixture in numerous anthologies and series.  He maintained a presence on Broadway as well, taking over the lead from Lee J. Cobb in the original production of Death of a Salesman and winning the Tony Award in 1953 for Best Actor in a musical for Hazel Flagg (a musical version of the 1937 screwball comedy, Nothing Sacred)…without ever singing a note.

(That’s Mitchell in the center of the picture, kneeling, looking after the supposedly infirmed Hazel).  1953 was also the year Mitchell won the Emmy for Best Actor (apparently, at that time, given for a body of work rather than one specific production).  The Emmy, the Tony, and his Oscar for Stagecoach made him the first actor to win the Triple Crown of the major acting awards.

Oh, and this…from the Little-Known Facts Department:  Mitchell’s last work was a stage play entitled Prrescription: Murder in which he played the secondary role of Lt. Columbo.  Yes, that Lt. Columbo.  The play’s leads were Agnes Moorehead and Joseph Cotten (with Mitchell, right), but Mitchell’s performance as the bumbling detective was key, thanks to his performance, and while the play was on the road, the role was expanded, ultimately becoming the character Peter Falk made famous in his T.V. role.

Mitchell did what all great supporting actors do…he supported.  While he may have sometimes moved menacingly close to the scenery, the flats ultimately never reveal any bite marks.  Between his elfish charm, his sparkling eyes, and the way he could toss out one-liners with ease…he never overwhelmed the frame, but you always knew he was there.  And that, in turn, made the scene, or even the film, better (except, perhaps, 1944’s Wilson.  No one could have saved that clunker).  While some of his films may have lapsed into obscurity, Mitchell never will.

Fortunately, Lloyd has a plan.  He hits the streets with an acrobatic friend who has agreed to fake a series of spectacular falls.  After each fraudulent accident, Lloyd rushes forward and administers a series of bizarre chiropractic twists and stretches.  When the acrobat springs up and walks away good as new, Lloyd immediately hands out cards with the doctor’s name and address on them to a receptive crowd that has gathered.

Later in the film, Lloyd mistakenly believes his fiancée no longer wishes to marry him and he decides to take his own life.  Although each effort meets with failure, he continues to try and commit suicide in a series of increasingly complicated attempts.  Not surprisingly, Lloyd eventually finds himself high above the city (as he so often does) in a precarious situation–in this case, the skeleton of a high rise building under construction.  With his life in imminent danger, all thought of suicide vanishes as he desperately clings to a suspended iron girder.

Now what about this mildly criminal, suicidal, cowardly character makes him a silent comedy hero?  While he doesn’t evoke the sympathy felt for Chaplin’s tramp, or demonstrate the amazing athletic abilities of a stone faced Keaton,  Lloyd still possesses the one quality  that a silent comedian must have if he’s to become a hero:  he challenges the status quo in some way (even if it’s inadvertently, completely by mistake) and upsets the apple cart of daily routine.

Silent comedy, with its gag-driven imperative and its sense of economy and rhythm, demands that every situation be mined for every possible variation and laugh before moving on to the next set up.  An unintended by-product of this structure is that everyday situations are injected with a dizzying kind of possibility, revealing in the dull routine of life a world that is more playful, dangerous, interesting, and surprising than most people have the courage to challenge or even acknowledge.

The joke-driven logic of silent comedy also expresses itself in a kind of spontaneous, rapid-fire karmic justice.  The relentless set up/payoff, set up/payoff rhythm creates a world of instant reward and punishment.  Every action has a reaction.  Bad actions are ultimately punished.  Good actions rewarded.  Joke after joke after joke drives this point home.  Occasionally, there’s even a pause for a kind of comedic grace.

You know Harold Lloyd is the hero in Never Weaken because he’s the one moving forward, meeting each new twist and turn with ingenuity, giving himself over to the spontaneous, but always thinking on his feet–adapting, reacting, always moving forward.  At the end of the film, it really doesn’t make much sense that Lloyd gets the girl.  He really hasn’t done anything in a narrative sense to deserve it.  But by his ingenuity, his inventiveness, and his insistence on never giving up, of hanging in there until the seemingly arbitrary casino logic of the possible finally pays off, Lloyd reveals himself to be a classic silent comedy hero.

And so he gets the girl.

But make no mistake about it.  Never Weaken isn’t about anything but being funny.  It has a single, burning question at it’s center: how many jokes can be crammed into a single 40 minute film?  Still, like all good silent comedies, Never Weaken can’t help but also reveal a world of unlimited possibilities, surprises, and laughter.

6 ‘n 90.  Da Man reviews six films in ninety seconds.  And this time, it’s a festival of “outs!”

The Giant Claw.  It’s a blur!  It’s a bird!  It’s a puppet!

The Islander.  Guests are interviewed by Nancy and asked to pick the ten films they would take with them to a desert island.  Nancy’s guest this week  is John Wilson, creator of the Razzies, an award that celebrates the worst  Hollywood has to offer.  Will a Pia Zadora film be among the movies he would take with him?

Horror has many faces.  For Lou, it’s the face of Sam Mendes.

Daybreakers.  Is a spoiler warning really necessary?  A film so bad, it’s not possible to spoil it.

The Golden Globe Awards.  Let’s hear it for the winners!  And if you don’t feel like clapping for them, don’t worry.  They’re more than ready to give themselves a round of applause and a standing O.  Hey, they deserve it.

Lionel Barrymore rides a horse!  What else do you need to know?

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Review: Like any good exploitation film, The World’s Greatest Sinner is a mix of low budget technical compromises, lurching story lines, ham-fisted visual metaphors, and odd, unpredictable moments.  During Clarence Hilliard’s first speech about the “Immortal Man,” he steps up onto a pile of what looks like sandbags to make his pitch.  The camera then slowly tilts down to reveal him standing on bags of manure, a sign reading “4 for a dollar.”  On stage with his rock ‘n roll band, Clarence doesn’t resemble a twitching, gyrating Elvis so much as he does a man having an epileptic fit.  Then there’s the 50-state, stock-footage campaign for president, where vaguely familiar newsreel shots cheer on intercut snippets of Hillard exhorting his followers to become gods!

But for every ridiculous moment, there’s also something a little disturbing or surprising.  One of Clarence’s first converts is an elderly woman who tells him he makes her feel young again.  He replies that she reminds him of his mother, and then the two embrace, sharing an uncomfortably passionate kiss.  The flip side of this decidedly twisted sexual coin is when a young girl tells the-soon-to-be-president that she can deliver the youth vote to him.  At first, Clarence seems a little more savvy than might be expected, getting the girl to admit she’s not 18, and that she is actually 14.  With this fact firmly established, he then proceeds to have sex with her.

An unsettling scene of a different sort occurs after a rock ‘n roll concert/rally, where the all-white male audience decides to demonstrate its godhood by rioting.  Where actual newsreel footage later used in the run for the presidency looks creaky and unconvincing, the riot looks all too real, as if shot during an actual rampage.  I’ve seen crowds like this in big budget movies and it’s not unusual to see a laughing extra or someone going lamely through the motions, but this group of young men seems to be deadly earnest as they swarm over cars in a frenzy of destruction.  In this instance, the film’s low budget actually works in the picture’s favor, with it’s harsh lighting and handheld camera creating a surprising sense of reality.

Many of the indoor scenes have an odd aesthetic all their own.  Either by intention or because the lighting kit only included a couple of spots and a reflector, many of the interior shots have two or three characters illuminated against a completely black background.  It’s like a minimalist play: this desk will now represent a room: this door is the entrance to a house: these silly Greek/kitsch statues represent a grand presidential candidate’s strategy room.

This reductionist idea carries over to the characters as well.  Hilliard eventually ends up wearing a coat with the word “GOD’ embroidered in large letters on either sleeve.  The people who have bought into his “immortal” agenda wear a patch with an F on it to let us know they are “Followers.”  I was half-expecting a character to show up with a sign around his neck that proclaimed “Reporter” or maybe for another character to walk in wearing a T-shirt that read “Plot-Twist.”

The ending to The World’s Greatest Sinner is satisfyingly strange and unexpected — and visual.  All good things, especially since, at one point, it appeared as if the final revelation might depend on the emotional attachment Clarence still feels for his family, something the film never really pulls off.

I’ll end this review with a description of one of the first images in the film.  Clarence, in what I guess is supposed to be happier, simpler days, piles his family up on a horse.  Clarence, his wife, and their two small children — everyone gets on.  And they look a little precarious.  You half expect someone to fall off before the shot ends.  Here’s another detail: the scene takes place in the rain.

Did it just happen to rain that day, but the schedule and low budget demanded they had to get the scene in the can — rain or no rain?  Was is serendipitous?  Or was it intentional?  It doesn’t really matter.  This idiotic staging of the family pretending to be happy, when everyone is obviously miserable, not even able to go through the motions of being a normal family, is the perfect image to begin this twisted and singular film.

Some stuff worth knowing: Timothy Carey is probably best known for his role in Kubrick’s Path’s of Glory.   He’s one of the three soldiers being executed for cowardice and not following orders.  In the film, he is sarcastic and somehow both intense and laconic at the same time.  And, of course, there are dark circles under his eyes.  Does this man ever sleep?

Ray Dennis Steckler (director of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies!!?) was the cameraman, and there are some genuinely striking images mixed in with the more pedestrian and low budget aesthetic stuff.

Finally, Frank Zappa did the music, and the title song is a classic.