We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
A World War II heist, the Munsters, and animated sorcery.
KELLY'S HEROES (1970)
Directed by Brian G. Hutton from a screenplay by Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly's Heroes is one of many World War II "men on a mission" movies, but the tone and style of it make it sort of an odd one in the bunch. I think I've seen it described as a World War II movie with a Vietnam War mentality, which absolutely makes sense - and does so as soon as a 1970s folk song kicks in over the opening title sequence, which shows American bombs accidentally raining down on an area occupied by American Army soldiers. The first of multiple instances of friendly fire in this movie.
Soon some of the soldiers will become aware that 14,000 bars of Nazi gold are stored in a bank thirty miles behind enemy lines - and they decide to carry out their own extremely dangerous side mission and pull off a gold heist.
This is a rather irreverent movie overall, with some incongruous moments where things get serious. The men on this mission are not portrayed as being the best and brightest. One of them is called Crapgame and is played by Don Rickles, another is called Oddball and is played by Donald Sutherland... and this tank-riding fellow seems very much like a 1970 character and not so much like someone from 1944, which is when the events of the film take place. The men at the head of the mission are Telly Savalas as Master Sergeant "Big Joe" and Clint Eastwood as the titular Kelly, who has been demoted from lieutenant to private. Carroll O'Connor is in the cast, but he's not on the mission. He's General Colt, who is completely clueless as to what his own men are up to.
Kelly's Heroes has a running time of 140 minutes, which was too short as far as Eastwood was concerned. MGM hacked 20 minutes of the movie before they sent it to theatres, and Eastwood felt that it had been better at 160 minutes than it is at 140. I don't know if all 20 of those minutes really needed to be in there, but apparently there was a deleted scene where Kelly and Big Joe have a discussion about "their disillusionment with the war" and how Kelly had been treated poorly when the higher-ups demoted him. I can understand why Eastwood would be upset that wasn't in the movie, as he felt it gave the characters more depth. Which they don't seem to have much of in the cut that was released, despite its length.
There's some fun to be had with Kelly's Heroes, but the movie definitely doesn't feel like it's all it could have been. It probably could have used a more substantial re-edit; it needed those moments that gave it more substance, but it's also too long as it is. I don't know if it would have been possible for it to be shorter and quicker while also having more depth, but that would be the ideal version of this story. Which was based on a true story to some degree. In 1945, U.S. soldiers and German civilians did rob the German National Gold Reserves in Bavaria. But the details were covered up, so the movie just had to imagine how things might have gone.
THE MUNSTERS (1964 - 1966)
Ever since I was a little kid, I have been fascinated by monsters. The characters were intensely interesting to me, and I loved just looking at their images, from the Universal monsters to the slashers of the time. I have also always had a soft spot for old school sitcoms. There is a show that mixes together those two loves of mine: The Munsters. And I watched reruns of this classic quite often when I was a child.
The Munsters is a sitcom about a very quirky family, and they're quirky because they happen to be versions of the Universal monsters. Herman Munster (Fred Gwynne) is Frankenstein's monster, and his wife Lily (Yvonne De Carlo) is the daughter of Count Dracula (Al Lewis), who is primarily referred to as "Grandpa" - even by his daughter and his son-in-law. That's because the Count is now a grandfather; Herman and Lily have a little wolfish son named Eddie (Butch Patrick). Grandpa is not only a vampire, but also a mad scientist, and helped Doctor Frankenstein put Herman together 150 years ago. Which makes Herman quite a bit younger than his 400+ year old wife. It must have been odd for the Count to see his daughter marry his creation, especially since Herman often behaves like a giant kid.
The Munsters live in a crumbling mansion in a regular small American town called Mockingbird Heights. Their home is located at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Also living in their mansion is their attractive college-age niece Marilyn (played at first by Beverley Owen, who is rather seamlessly replaced by Pat Priest after thirteen episodes), who is considered to be the "ugly duckling" of the family because she looks like a regular person. Occasionally we'll meet other relatives, including Uncle Gilbert, who flat-out states that he is the Creature from the Black Lagoon. They also have a giant, fire-breathing pet that lives under the staircase and is called Spot, but is basically Godzilla.
This show only ran for two seasons, but thankfully it aired in the 1960s, when seasons were super-sized compared to later eras and especially compared to most shows today. From those two seasons, we got seventy episodes of The Munsters. The show was a hit at first, but then its popularity declined, and the 1966 Batman series has been blamed for taking away a large portion of its viewership. There were other issues, though. Like the fact that the owner of CBS, The Munsters' home network, was put off by the show's "low-brow humor". The president of the network loved the show, which caused such a rift between the two that the owner ended up firing the president. And then the show was cancelled.
The lead characters may be monsters with a taste for the macabre, but there is absolutely nothing dark or scary about The Munsters. This show is as family friendly as it gets, and the stories are really silly. Much of the humor comes from how different the Munsters' view of the world is from the regular people around them, like when Herman accidentally terrifies the neighborhood by taking walks at night while dealing with insomnia. There are a lot of mix-ups like that. There are also a lot of episodes that deal with Grandpa's crazy inventions, which usually don't work like they're supposed to. Herman works at a funeral home, but there are also several episodes about him trying out other professions. He becomes a wrestler, a private investigator, a singer, a baseball player, a basketball player, etc. For a small town, Mockingbird Heights has a shocking amount of crime. The Munsters cross paths with criminals many times during these seventy episodes, from people running insurance scams to bank robbers (more than once!). And this being a sitcom, there are episodes where Herman and Lily have misunderstandings about their marriage.
The Munsters is a goof of a show. They weren't trying to do anything with this series but give people a nice, amusing way to spend 25 minutes or so each episode. It's incredibly pleasant to watch, and it's made all the greater by the fact that we get to watch a family that features familiar monsters do all this ridiculous stuff. This show ranks highly as one of the most entertaining sitcoms ever made. We should have gotten more than two seasons out of its initial run, but The Munsters endure to this day and the seventy episodes that were made are still great to return to all these decades later.
THE SPINE OF NIGHT (2021)
A tribute to the works of Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta, the animated fantasy film The Spine of Night was a labor of love for writers/directors Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King that took them the better part of a decade to complete and push out into the world. It's quite impressive that they were able to pull this off, and they packed an epic story into a running time that falls just under 94 minutes.
The movie lets the viewer know right up front that this animated film is not for children: the first character we see is a fully nude woman, trudging up a mountainside, seemingly unaffected by the cold and the snow falling around her. This is the film's heroine Tzod (voiced by Lucy Lawless), and she will never decide to start wearing clothes. Tzod has climbed this mountain to find a Guardian (Richard E. Grant) who stands watch over a bloom of blue flowers, keeping the outside world safe from the power this flower holds. Or so he thinks. He is unaware of the fact that spores from the flower blew away and took root in the swamp Tzod used to dwell in. Tzod is there to tell him of the horrific events that have occurred as a result of that flower falling into the wrong hands.
The Spine of Night then plays out like an anthology film, with Tzod and the Guardian catching each other up on world events, all of which revolve around this flower. We see how the flower was first discovered, in the aftermath of a massacre of gods. How it was stolen from Tzod by a scholar named Ghal-Sur (Jordan Douglas Smith), who used it to turn himself into a ruler with god-like powers. The story of Tzod and the flower being taken out of the swamp also involves a hapless would-be ruler called Pyrantin (Patton Oswalt) and his lackey Mongrel (Joe Manganiello). We hear the story of the conflict between noble scholar Phae-Agura (Betty Gabriel) and another scholar who was corrupted by the flower, Uruq Il-Irin (Malcolm Mills). And we see a trio of people who make themselves up like birds and have names like Kestrelwren (Abby Savage), Falconhawk (Tom Lipinski), and Sparrowcrow (Nina Lisandrello) take to the skies with their glider capes to sabotage Ghal-Sur's steampunk flying war machine and attempt to assassinate this power-mad villain.
There are definitely some very cool ideas in The Spine of Night. There are awesome visuals, and it's entertaining to see the amount of animated blood and guts that get splashed across the screen. The movie worked best for me when I was able to just sit back and let the visuals wash over me. The problem was the dialogue; there's so much exposition and overwrought lines with mention of things like "the spine of night", I started to find it maddening whenever I had to listen to the characters talk for too long. And they talk a lot. Hardcore fans of this brand of fantasy will probably get into the vibe of the dialogue, but I wanted these people to pull it back a bit.
The voice cast did well delivering the lines they were given, with Lawless and the writers/directors managing to make the naked swamp witch Tzod someone who is actually very likeable, the best character in the movie. Gabriel's character Phae-Agura also stands out as one of the best, but she's only in the movie for a very short period of time. While I wasn't sold on Smith's earliest lines as Ghal-Sur, I found that he got better the more evil his character becomes.
The rotoscope animation approach was perfect for bringing these stories to the screen, allowing Gelatt and King to show the viewer some spectacular things. Thanks to the animation, we can see things like that aforementioned flying war machine, a villain with a giant eyeball opening in his abdomen, massive gods being slain, and people getting hacked to pieces. This movie couldn't have existed in live action, it would have been too expensive.
The Spine of Night is worth checking out to see the blood-soaked insanity that Gelatt and King put so many years into creating. If you enjoy movies like Conan the Barbarian and its knock-offs and/or the Bakshi/Frazetta collaboration Fire and Ice, you'll probably have some fun while watching this one.
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