Month: October 2021

A collection of stories written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, all three feature our man Vincent Price. The first Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment was probably my favorite of the set. Price and Sebastian Cabot are friends who meet up for dinner one evening. Secrets are revealed and regrets are made. Vincent as a controlling father standing in the way of his daughter’s romantic life in Rappaccini’s Daughter is creepy and has some wonderfully dated color effects that I still enjoyed. The last is a version of The House of the Seven Gables, about a cursed home and the feud that caused it. The story is told a bit differently than the full length feature from 1940, also featuring Price. It’s also creepy, but a bit too condensed to give the story justice.  

Rocky V is bad fan fiction that any Rocky fan can just ignore exists. Instead after Rocky IV, turn this one on instead. A retired and widowed Rocky is challenged by the current and unpopular heavyweight champion after Rocky is shown to beat him in a simulated fight. The side stories regarding Rocky Jr.’s daddy issues and the young girl from the original Rocky are wholly filler and unnecessary, but the rest of the film is an almost perfect conclusion to Rocky’s character arc as a boxer. 

Vincent Price is perfectly evil as1600s witchfinder Matthew Hopkins who is more than happy to use the powers given to him to get and do whatever the hell he wants. He terrorizes the residents of a few villages, particularly one young woman whom he fancies until she becomes tainted in his mind. There’s not much to the story other than constant brutal torture, but Price is capable of encapsulating the character perfectly. 

This offers the best of Pre-Code films: philandering, drug use, and ‘bad’ people not getting their comeuppance. William Powell is a gentleman robber who catches the already wandering eye of rich and married Kay Francis. She is beautiful, he is oozing charisma, and together they have wonderful chemistry. There’s not much to the story, but it doesn’t overstay its rather short runtime.

I’m pretty sure I watched this before if only because the personality quirk of being into building Civil War battlefield models seemed familiar and unique. It’s a fairly middling thriller with Wesley Snipes as a Washington DC detective paired with Diane Lane’s Secret Service agent to solve the murder of a White House staffer. It’s entertaining enough and has a cast that includes Alan Alda, Dennis Miller, and Tate Donovan, but it’s not particularly memorable or ground breaking. The twists and turns are fairly expected, it’s just a matter of watching them play out.

I’ve owned and enjoyed the soundtrack for this film for more than twenty-five years. It’s disappointing how bad this film is in comparison. I might have even watched this a number of years ago but made myself forever almost every thing about it. It’s another Bonnie and Clyde rehash that were so popular in the 1990s, this one starring Gil Bellows and Renée Zellweger. It’s very dumb with completely useless antagonists; there are dozens of similar films that are better in quality and entertainment value. The really sad thing is the opening scene sets up a lot of promise. It should have just ended it at that scene.

Though my love for Vincent Price could have me writing many more entries on his behalf, it didn’t seem necessary to have separate entries for this somewhat ridiculous but still awesome film series. Price’s brilliant, mute, and presumed dead Dr. Phibes first is set on avenging the death of his wife by murdering those he feels were responsible, finding inspiration in the ten plagues of Egypt. Unfortunately for Joseph Cotten, he is at the top of Phibes’s list. In the second film, Dr. Phibes travels to Egypt in search of the one thing that can resurrect his dead wife. Unfortunately for Dr. Phibes, there are others on the same quest. The deaths in both films are wonderfully and memorably over the top. The visuals are fantastic, particularly in Phibes’s lair and the Egyptian temple. In both films, Phibes is partnered with the mysterious Vulvania (though I prefer the actress in the first film over the second) and an orchestra of clockwork musicians. In an admirable note to continuity, they are pursued by the same pair of detectives.  

Portraying the meteoric rise and fall of a New York attorney, Lawyer Man has a threadbare story and is really a waste of the talents of William Powell and Joan Blondell. Powell is the titular lawyer. His charisma is present as always but he’s just going through the motions that has him beginning and ending at the same exact place. Blondell is his long-suffering, but loyal secretary who follows him on his journey to nowhere.