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I've only seen She Wolf of the SS. I think that was enough for me They always have that Harem one on the horror channel.
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Excellent 70s cop story starring Elliot Gould, and Robert Blake, with supporting roles from Antonio Fargas, Sid Haig, and Michael Lerner. Stylishly directed by Peter Hyams (with lots of cool tracking shots).
Busting is actually an early example of the buddy cop genre, which Hyams revisited a decade later with Running Scared (1986).
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Cool to hear that Busting rocks! I´ll try to make some time and check it out this coming weekend.
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Helen_S
Hiding behind the shower curtain.....
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I am beyond excited to be the proud owner of the Psychomania soundtrack! Posts: 4057 | From: uk | Registered: May 2007 | Site Updates: 0
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This weekend watched Bobby Deerfield w' Al Pacino...ouch...this was painful to watch! Very slow paced and dragged on and on...not sure why I didn't stop watching...
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Was there a more wooden actress in the 70s than Marthe Keller?
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I just think she had a hard time acting through her thick German accent.
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kevdugp73
He's eating after dark again....
Member # 5978
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Yeah...I think they were trying to be artsy...just didn't pull it off. I liked the look/feel of the movie and liked seeing Al in his prime...a movie I'll never see again...$3 dollars down the tubes!!
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Loads of pre-1970 movies over the past few months. Catching up will take a while, however the most recent was Two Weeks To Live from 1943, one of a Swiss starring radio comedy duo Lum & Abner. Very gentle comedy, as you'd expect from the wartime years. Available for viewing on your favourite video hosting site.....
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The Runaway Bus (1954) starring Frankie Howerd, Margaret Rutherford and a very young Petula Clark
Lovely little character-driven farce, with plenty of slapstick and lots of little twists.
As southern England lies fog-bound, a handful of passengers leave Heathrow by coach bound for Blackbush Airport and a chance of getting their flight to Dublin. All is not what it seems with them, however, as the bus holds Ł200,000 in stolen bullion, and someone on board is the villain! Frankie Howerd plays the unwitting, unassuming driver, and as such provides most of the comedy moments as he tried to unpick the plot.
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aTomiK
.... has green eyes as well....
Member # 6575
Watched the Ilsa sequel Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976).
"Finding a new employer, and looking not a day older since the end of World War II, Ilsa works for an Arab sheik who enjoys importing females to use as sex slaves. An American millionaire's daughter, a movie star, and an attractive equestrienne are among his latest victims." (IMDb)
Haha, this was still very enjoyable trash with lots of titillating nudity. Little less blood and sex this time compared to the first film because the company wanted an R rated movie. Dyanne Thorne is still in great shape and there´s many familiar actresses from Russ Meyer flicks. The ending was very similiar to She Wolf, there´s a mutiny and Ilsa falls for american fella. Can she ever learn? I guess i´ll find out when i check out The Tigress of Siberia Posts: 7054 | From: Finland | Registered: Feb 2008 | Site Updates: 7
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Harem Keeper is my favorite of the Ilsa trilogy. It has good production values for such trashy material and is more tongue-in-cheek than She Wolf. And, of course, you have the great Dyanne Throne in her career-defining role. Folks will be talking about her as Ilsa for as long as anyone talks about movies. She IS Ilsa.
The Tigress, as it was known most places, can best be described as Ilsa Lite. It's entertaining enough as Thorne and the Ilsa films can be, but there's a lot less of the sex, violence, and nastiness of the first two films. While some of the Canadian locations are nice, the whole thing looks a whole lot cheaper than usual. Clearly the least of the Ilsa films, it has been somewhat of a holy grail of exploitation films to see because apparently the guy who holds the rights won't license the film for anything. It never even had a VHS release in the US. I think that it had a tiny US theatrical release through Roger Corman's New World Pictures. I saw it once, many years ago, on the late, great subcription service SelecTV. Unless it is still up on Youtube, it has been almost impossible to see in this country.
For point of information, I have never considered Ilsa, the Wicked Warden to be part of the Ilsa series. The film was originally titled Greta, the Mad Butcher or Wanda, the Wicked Warden and was directed by Jess Franco in Spain. They just tagged on the Ilsa title in an attempt to squeeze some more money from the franchise. While Thorne plays her usual hard dominatrix character, in the English dub at least, "Greta" is always completely edited out so that her character doesn't even have a name.
Anyway, I'm glad that you are enjoying these films. They really don't make 'em like they used to. And there is no way they could make these films today. Only in the 70s.
[ 31. March 2016, 11:20: Message edited by: Crash ]
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One more note: They actually announced another Ilsa film at the time, something like Ilsa Meets Bruce Lee in the Bermuda Triangle--there was even a small poster ad in Variety--but nothing ever came of it. And final aside: A few years ago, I was on a website that reviewed lost and obscure B-movies that claimed, unbeknownst to many, that the film had almost been completed but had been held up in a lab somewhere, and a bootleg version was making the rounds. It starred George Kennedy along with Dyanne Thorne! I read the review, shook my head in disbelief, and then realized that it had been posted on April 1, April Fool's Day! Almost taken in for minute there... LOL I wonder if there ever was even a script to Ilsa/Bruce Lee/Bermuda Triangle. Posts: 2008 | From: Dixieland | Registered: Oct 2008 | Site Updates: 0
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aTomiK
.... has green eyes as well....
Member # 6575
posted
That would´ve been awesome film! So, George Lazenby/James Bond wasn´t the only one who nearly made a film with Bruce. Then again, it would have most possibly been Ilsa meets Bruce Li or something like that
I also own The Wicked Warden and i´m going to check it out after the Siberian adventure.
Funny how it goes. With all the video censorship we had during the late 80s-early 90s, they sold these Ilsa films in grocery stores here in the 00s and at the same time you can´t see them in the US Posts: 7054 | From: Finland | Registered: Feb 2008 | Site Updates: 7
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You hit it on the head! After Bruce Lee died, Thorne and her husband were going to do the film with Bruce Li.
I remember when I was a teenager in the 70s reading about the the first two Ilsa films (and the upcoming Bruce Lee one) in Variety but not really knowing anything about them. It wasn't until the 80s when they became more above ground and accessible on VHS that I then understood what their notoriety/allure was all about. (How can gutter trash like this boast Dean Cundy from Halloween as a cinematographer and J. Michael Riva of Buckeroo Bonzai as production designer? I realize that the greats all had to start somewhere, but I still can't rap my mind around it.) There was a special edition DVD box set released later with She Wolf, Harem Keeper, and Warden (still no Tigress), but I think that the films are still fairly underground. I'm surprised that you folks had them in grocery stores, and Helen in the UK reports that Harem Keeper plays all the time on their Horror channel.
[ 31. March 2016, 11:21: Message edited by: Crash ]
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Helen_S
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Watched The Night Porter, billed as a horror but it was more a really depressing Nazi drama. Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling were fantastic.
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Helen_S
Hiding behind the shower curtain.....
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Haha, just seen the dvd cover for it. Makes it look like an Ilsa film.
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Yeah, I saw The Night Porter years and years ago right after it was first released. I agree with you, great acting, depressing film.
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Here's a round up of some recent highlights...
Too Many Women (1942) starring Neil Hamilton, June Lang, Joyce Compton and Barbara Read.
Nice little farce with shades of Wodehouse, starring a very young Neil Hamilton (who went on to play Commissioner Gordon in the Batman TV series) as a man suffering form too much female attention. Two girls are both convinced he's the one for them, without knowing that he's already secretly engaged to a third. When he digs himself out of a situation with a persistent estate agent by pretending he'd inherited a bunch of cash from a rich uncle, the situation quickly escalates into a world where he's being held up a gunpoint, he loses a job he 'no longer needs', and his actual fiancee dumps him when she thinks he's playing the field. With a pushy grandmother, various would-be benefactors and a bunch of ineffective but well-meaning friends, Hamilton has a very tangled web to un-weave....
UFO : Target Earth (1974) is possibly unique in being a UFO-themed movie made so cheaply that there are actually no UFOs in it. It's dull, semi-documentary style does nothing to lift the rather dreary story of a guy investigating strange sightings and turning out to be the saviour of an alien race, at the cost of his own life. Poor effects and a jarring soundtrack that makes Ladyhawke seem perfectly scored...
Atom Age Vampire (1960) was better, but not by much, seeing as it once again talks of vampires but there's no vampire in the film. A scientist creates a serum, which he uses to rejuvenate the appearance of a singer badly burned in an accident. During the process he alls in love with her, but when she needs more serum to prevent the process reversing, he needs to kill other women to provide it. By injecting a different serum, he becomes a Hyde-like character to complete the nasty business of murder.
The Naked Truth (1957) starring Terry-thomas, Dennis Price, Peggy Mount, Peter Sellers and Shirley Eaton. When his victims realise that they are not alone in being blackmailed by Price, they abandon their individual efforts to kill him and band together. All of the actors play their roles wonderfully, as, in turn, a womanising peer (Terry-thomas), a blackmailing journalist (Price), a once-promiscuous writer of crime fiction (Mount), a tv star who owns seedy tenement hovels (Sellers) and the beautiful model girlfriend of an oil heir (Eaton). The only plot hole in the excellent script is that it's never really revealed what Eaton's character was being blackmailed for. But that's a very minor gripe and never spoils what is a truly engaging and funny film.
The Yesterday Machine (1963) told the story of an escaped Nazi scientist working on a time machine, with the aim of bringing back Hitler and resurrecting the Third Reich. The premise is good, but they focus on a cheesy subplot about local girls getting kidnapped, allowing the local cops and a newspaper reporter to become heroes. A better director could have made it so much better.
Things To Come (1936) starring Raymond Massey and Ralph Richardson. Based on H G Wells' classic, this is a dark, depressing and thankfully not prophetic view of the future. War starts in 1940 and lasts for three decades, bringing disease, devastation and a return to feudalism and robber barons. Only when an independent organisation of scientists take the lead in ending the fighting and rebuilding society along clearly socialist lines do things start improving, but by the year 2036, this utopia is showing the same signs that heralded the war a century before. I can see that it's very well made, and the performances are good. However, it's just too black for my taste.
Passport To Pimlico (1949). Superb Ealing comedy starring Stanley Holloway and Margaret Rutherford. If I need to remind anyone of the plot, the unplanned detonation of a WW2 bomb uncovers a whole heap of treasure, along with documents that prove that the area around a few streets in Pimlico is actually sovereign territory of Burgundy, after it was ceded to the then Duke by King Edward IV. The locals realise they are rich, and no longer subject to rationing, licensing laws, and other restrictions. However, the area becomes a beacon for spivs and black marketeers, and to stop this, the British close the border. Solving the problem of what to do with the locals becomes harder, as the representatives of the various Government officials and the new Burgundians become intransigent. The arrival of the current Duke of Burgundy just adds to the locals' sense of freedom and privilege. Cue water and food shortages, and tube trains being stopped at the border. Something needs to be done... There's a charm and an innocence about this endearing comedy, with some very funny moments, and some sparkling dialogue, such as when the local copper declares "Blimey! I'm a foreigner!" Quite simply one of Ealing's finest.
The World of Henry Orient (1964) starring Peter Sellers, Tom Bosley, Angela Lansbury and Paula Prentiss in a strange little film. It's billed as a comedy, but there's more a feel of pathos and pain, as Val and Marian, two young teenage girls growing up in New York, work through teen crushes, first love, and the disappointment of imperfect adults.
Romance with a Double Bass (1974) is a nice comedy short starring John Cleese, Connie Booth, June Whitfield, Freddie Jones, and a host of other names, based on a novel by Anton Chekov. On his way to play at the engagement party of the Princess Costanza to the far older Count Alexei, Smychkov takes a swim in the castle lake. Unbeknownst, the Princess also takes a swim to retrieve a prized fishing float. When their clothes are stolen, they meet and need to work out how to get back to the castle, get inside, and find some clothes, without being seen. Of course, two naked people discover they have more in common than just their lack of clothing. It's a far cry from Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, but it manages to find humour by not chasing it too hard. An enjoyable 40 minutes, with some great situations and plenty of shots of the leading pair au naturelle...
Finally for this very long post, Play It Again Sam (1972) is Woody Allen's homage to the heroic figure of Bogart, and shows the clumsy, self-conscious Allan Felix coping with his wife's departure and his subsequent failure to date any woman, imagining advice from the star of Casablanca himself. Excellently supported by Diane Keen and Tony Roberts, this is a funny, poignant gem.
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I've clearly seen far too many pre-80s movies over the past few months...
Irma La Douce (1963) starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.
Wonderful farce set in the seedier side of Paris, with Lemmon's honest, naive cop becoming bewitched by streetwalker MacLaine's charm and character. A delight from start to finish.
The Cockleshell Heroes (1955)
Great war film based on the real-life Operation Frankton, where Royal Marines attacked ships in Bordeaux harbour in canoes. Brilliant performances by Jose Ferrer, Trevor Howerd, Anthony Newley, and a bunch of character stalwarts in Victor Maddern and David Lodge. Also, look out for a small role for Christopher Lee as the submarine commander.
Interesting, farcical comedy surrounding a young married couple, a bunch of rival criminal gangs, and the dog that entwines the lot in a maze of mistaken identity and murder. Watching this, it's a little known movie that would be ideal for a remake, because the main plot elements would definitely transfer to the modern day. It's funny, the characters are likeable, and the plot twists just keep coming.
Princess Of The Nile (1954)
So-so yarn about a Prince (Jeffrey Hunter) falling for - and therefore committing to save - an Egyptian Princess (Debra Paget) from the clutches of the Bedouin overlord Rama Kahn (Michael Rennie) and the evil Shaman (Edgar Barrier). Help arrives in the guise of a band of thieves, who know the princess as her secret alter-ego, a tavern dancer. Yeah... It's a strange old story and the script isn't great, however that having been said, there are some fun moments, although the fight scenes are contrived and need some work.
Mars Needs Women (1967)
Martians come to Earth in order to recruit / snatch five human women, so they can attempt to correct a genetic fault which has tilted the Martian birth rate 100% in favour of male children. Very much a B-movie, with the attraction of a starring role for the lovely Yvonne Craig. It's enjoyable enough, but the two-day shooting schedule and $20,000 budget slap you right in the face all the time.
The Big Job (1965)
A Carry On in all but name. Starring Sid James, Jim Dale, Joan Sims, Lance Percival, **** Emery, Sylvia Sims, Derek Guyler and a host of recognisable faces, this product of Gerald Thomas and Peter Rogers was scripted by Talbot Rothwell and its pedigree shines through every scene. Sid, **** and Lance pull off a bank robbery, and are caught during the getaway, but not before Sid manages to stash the loot in an old tree. Fifteen years later on their release, they discover the rolling fields have given way to a new town, and their tree is now in the yard of the local police station. Taking lodgings over the road, the film charts their attempts to retrieve the money before the local police catch on to them. It's a lovely little film, with some great comedy moments.
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) starring Paul Mantee, Victor Lundlin, and a certain Adam West...
This one was a good retelling of the classic shipwreck movie, with a spaceman forced to abandon his craft after a near miss with a meteor. His co-pilot dead, his only companion is a monkey that came along for some unspecified tests. The movie does a good job of covering the traditional story, although a lot of the science is, of course, hooky.
War Of The Worlds (1953). The George Pal version starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson.
What is it with George Pal? He's great at making movies that are visual feasts, but he leaves gaping holes in the plot. As in The Time Machine (where the entire reason for Rod Taylor going time travelling is glossed over) The way this one ends is over in about fifteen seconds. It's really "we're all doomed, we're all doomed, we're all... oh, they are dead." Knowing the story, this could have been presented far better, and really lets the rest of the movie down for me.
Doomsday Machine (1972)
Life on board a spaceship to Venus for the astronauts after they witness the Earth being destroyed... For early seventies, the effects are shockingly simplistic.
4... 3... 2... 1... Mission Stardust (1967)
On a lunar mission to secure rights to a new element. a ship is diverted to a different landing spot on the dark side by aliens who need help. Meanwhile, a crime boss has planted a spy amongst the ship's crew in a bit to benefit from the new element's discovery.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Kubrick's opus could, and possibly should, have been no longer than an hour, once the Kubrickesque longshots and panorama elements that he was so fond of are ignored. In an IMAX this will be superb. On a tv screen, it quickly gets boring. The middle bit's OK, but the bookends are tiresome after a few minutes.
Futureworld (1976) with Peter Fonda, Blythe Danner, and - apparently - Yul Brynner as 'The Gunslinger'
Interestingly different sequel to the brilliant WestWorld, where the premise of a chase movie is replaced with that of a reporting team under attack for exposing a global conspiracy. Set once more in the robot-inhabited holiday world of Delos, Fonda and Danner are good enough as the two reporters, and the premise is a good one. The disappointing bit is the big sell of Yul Brynner's return. He was central to the story and really menacing in WestWorld, but in this it's a blink-and-you-miss-him dream-sequence. Still, laying the lack of Brynner aside, it's a good bucketful of intrigue.
The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1963)
More sci-fi b-movie fare, as energy beings from Mars travel to Earth and snatch some bodies in order to keep their identity a secret...
Meet John Doe (1941) with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck
After a corporate takeover, a freshly fired newspaper reporter tries to gain favour with the new owners. She fakes an article about an 'ordinary Joe' who vows to commit suicide as a protest against the breakdown of American values. The article goes (the 1940s version of) viral, and now they have to produce the guy, and the media frenzy explodes nationwide. An interesting concept, played pretty straight, but never really grasping the meat of the plot with enough gusto.
Cat Women Of The Moon (1953)
A moon expedition finds a sub-lunar atmosphere which sustains a colony of young women who have developed the ability of telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis and a desire for the domination and subjugation of the Earth. D-movie dressed up as a B-movie. Nearly so bad it was good, but not quite.
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kevdugp73
He's eating after dark again....
Member # 5978
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Wow Paul...you're on a roll. Any time to have a pee in there?! *Hoping someday I can vamp up my movie watching, though I am progressively getting better...slow and steady....
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quote:Originally posted by kevdugp73: Wow Paul...you're on a roll. Any time to have a pee in there?! *Hoping someday I can vamp up my movie watching, though I am progressively getting better...slow and steady....
The majority of these are on YouTube. Best place for old movies...
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They always have that Harem one on the horror channel.
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