*. Back in 2010 DC Comics stirred up a bit of controversy by putting Superman in a hoodie on the cover of a new graphic novel series called Superman: Earth 1. A hoodie seemed not the kind of thing Superman would, or even should, be seen wearing.
*. I had a flashback to that cover when I saw the DVD box cover for this version of Frankenstein, which gives us the monster in a hoodie. That’s not false advertising either, as Adam (or the Monster) wears a hoodie through most of the second half of the movie. This conceals his decaying appearance and gives him street cred.
*. The tie-in to Superman also works because this monster is a superhero too. He actually hasn’t been put together out of spare parts taken from corpses but instead seems to have been turned out with a 3-D printer and then given an elixir of life. For some reason this gives him the strength of ten men and an accelerated life span. So he’s basically rotting daily.

*. Even if Adam isn’t a monster made out of bits and pieces the movie sure is. The gear shifts made my head spin. Things start out very low budget and almost art house in the scenes when Adam is brought to life. Then there is an eruption of splatter when he breaks free. Then it turns into an update of the classic 1931 film, including variations on the scene with the girl tossing things into the water and the Monster hooking up with a blind man. This leads into a bit of social commentary, as the Monster becomes a homeless version of the Elephant Man, living among L.A.’s down and out while looking to get his revenge on the corporate jerks who made him.
*. Some of it I rather liked but the whole thing doesn’t hold together at all. The narrative stitching is as loose as you can imagine, with several elisions where Adam just seems to wander from one part of the story to the next. The larger point of it all is hard to reckon. For example, Adam is fixated on his mother (the always cool Carrie-Anne Moss) but his feelings are not reciprocated. At least they don’t seem to be. But the door is left open I guess, and they do seem to achieve a kind of vision of reconciliation at the end.
*. It seems to have been a project that meant something to Bernard Rose (who did Candyman and Immortal Beloved) but exactly what I’m not sure. I appreciate the independent spirit with which it was undertaken, but I came away confused and underwhelmed.

*. In my notes on Grigori Kozintsev’s 1964 Hamlet I said it was a production that did a lot of little things well but was hit-and-miss on a few of the big things. I think his King Lear is equally good on the little things and only really muffs one big scene, which is the always difficult storm on the heath. There’s a great use of landscape throughout, and the heath looks like the surface of the moon, but the storm isn’t that impressive and the scene is undone by way of a distracting and totally unnecessary crane shot. Though I have to say that is one barren heath!
*. But first a checklist of the things I liked. Some of this might have been fairly routine stage business at the time, like Goneril wielding a whip when she confronts her husband Albany or, even better, Regan backing away in horror from the dying Cornwall when he asks her to give him her arm in support. Sorry Cornwall, but she’s already moving on! I loved it.

*. Other little things that show up big on screen come by way of quiet expressions. Regimantas Adomaitis plays Edmund and he’s very good. Watch for the subtle look of pain on his face in that opening scene where his father makes a joke out of his birth. Or notice the way Goneril looks at Lear as he’s sleeping across from her in the carriage and she pulls a blanket over him. That’s a woman with a lot on her mind (and it’s another great performance).
*. Then there are the things only a movie can do. Of course some of these are big things, like the battle scenes. You can always count on the Russians for delivering when it comes to epic battle scenes. But Kozintsev perfectly balances these big battles with the human journey of the major characters, much like Tolken did in Lord of the Rings. We get the sense of people whose tragic destinies are caught up in a larger tide of events. This is brilliantly captured in the scene where Lear is carried on a stretcher downstream past some rough water. That’s a perfect parallel. And elsewhere you get the same feeling of the war being a part of the landscape as well as a vital backdrop to the story, the characters swept along by its power in remarkable dolly shots that seem to almost ignore them.

*. I wonder how many directors at the time had made Poor Tom one of a whole traveling troop of refugees, with the hovel turning into a hostel for the homeless. I don’t remember seeing it played like that way anywhere else, but I thought it worked well here.
*. Other nice movie touches include the opening scene, which has a small army of peasants coming to Lear’s castle to watch the show. It’s sort of like the audience gathering at the Globe in Olivier’s Henry V. Then the first appearance of Lear has him screwing around with a chambermaid, underlining what an old fool he is. To turn to stronger stuff, Gloucester’s calls to Edmund as he’s getting blinded are answered by a cut to Goneril’s bedroom, where Edmund can hear his dad screaming just as he’s pulling on his pants after servicing her. And marvel at the way Cordelia is revealed at the end hanging from the battlements. Stark, and tremendously effective.

*. You’ll have gathered by now that I’m a big fan of this film. I think I was smiling in wonder and nodding my head throughout the whole thing. I don’t think there are many creative decisions that go wrong. Having the Fool pipe us out at the end made perfect sense, for example, even though the character had disappeared from the play. And while Jüri Järvet’s voice was dubbed as Lear, he’s such a striking visual presence, with the wildest hair-do since Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein, that you hardly notice (especially if you’re reading subtitles). It’s a great performance, capturing the full sense of an old man in ruins.
*. The rest of the cast are excellent too. Valentina Shendrikova debuts as Cordelia, and she’s stunning. Goneril and Regan look like they could eat her for breakfast. That’s Donatas Banionis, who you’ll remember as Kris Kelvin in Solaris, playing Albany, and he fits the part perfectly with those sad eyes but sense of inner strength (his voice is dubbed as well). I’ve mentioned Adomaitis as being excellent, and he’s complemented nicely by Leonhard Merzin as Edgar. When we see Edgar stalking toward his revenge it’s hard not to think of Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya. You almost expect him to say “You killed my father. Prepare to die” at the end.
*. The play was set in pagan Britain, but it feels totally at home in Orthodox Russia. It also feels at home in black and white. Kozintsev was making this movie at the same time Peter Brook was making his King Lear and they corresponded with each other while filming. They were on to something.
*. King Lear is a giant, spectacular, sometimes messy play and this is a film version that fully does it credit. It may even be my favourite film adaptation, and the fact that it stands alongside such versions as Brook’s Lear and Kurosawa’s Ran is all the argument you need for Shakespeare as a universal genius.

*. Some interesting credits, even before you get to the cast. A Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheiser film. I guess they were having a Christmas break or something from shoot-’em-ups. Though Simpson said he could relate to this project as its “biting and sarcastic” tone was up his alley.
*. And then we have the cast. This was very much a vehicle, close to a launch, for Denis Leary. He was the main attraction and was set up to do his thing, playing a break-and-enter man who takes a bickering couple hostage on Christmas. They proceed to drive him crazy.
*. Unfortunately, as many critics were quick to point out, Leary’s stand-up persona didn’t translate that well to such a property. To my eye, he always seems waiting for a punchline that he isn’t being allowed to deliver. I blame the script, which isn’t funny at all and even finds itself recycling a number of old jokes. Before too long I was wishing Leary had just been left to improv the entire thing. He looks like he knows he’s dying (in the stand-up sense) and it’s killing him.
*. The couple are played by Kevin Spacey and and Judy Davis, talented actors not known for their work in comedy. Sometimes casting this way works and you get revelations like George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, but here it’s a flop. Again I think the script is mostly at fault, but Spacey and Davis can’t even sell the mediocre parts.
*. OK, I didn’t like it. The premise is really simple and gets increasingly strained as things go along. Then it’s wound up in the most predictable and feel-good way you could imagine (and likely were). It did poorly at the box office and some people thought that was because it was too dark. I think it needed to be a lot darker. I don’t know what Simpson saw in it, because for me it wasn’t nearly biting and sarcastic enough. Everybody knows married couples bitch at each other, that holidays with family can be hell, and that letting it all hang out can be a kind of therapy. So what?
*. Apparently the original ending, with Leary getting arrested, didn’t work with audiences so they reshot it and didn’t end up releasing the movie until March. Which I’m sure didn’t help the box office for what was clearly meant to be a Christmas movie. Honestly, they didn’t get anything right here. There are Simpsons Christmas specials with more laughs and social insight. It might have had a shot at attracting a following if it had been a little more perverse, but as it is I think it’s justifiably forgotten.

*. Disney gets criticized a lot for the way it’s tried to adapt its brand to a changing audience (and changing world), but I can appreciate the jam they’re in. Things were simpler fifty years ago. Today, animated features, even those primarily directed at kids, have to appeal to adult audiences as well, creating the bastard genre of “kidult.” Such films are then marketed as being “for kids, but parents will love them too!” I wonder if either audience is satisfied.
*. It’s refreshing then to go back to a time when a movie for kids was just a movie for kids. The only “adult” moment that registered for me here was Thomas O’Malley’s double-take when, in full PUA mode, he realizes the sexy Duchess is actually a single mom with three kids in tow. But he rolls with it and I’m sure kids at the time thought it was all good. What self-respecting man-on-the-prowl would balk at taking on three adorable toddlers?
*. Of course, the downside of Disney sticking with what Disney does (or did, back in the day) is that their productions became formulaic. The Aristocats is a feline Lady and the Tramp (1955), and Phil Harris (voicing O’Malley) was criticized for just redoing his turn as Baloo from The Jungle Book. There are no surprises in the plot, which had to be stretched as it was just to make 78 minutes. But it’s good clean fun, and the cats are posh without being snobs. I don’t think I saw it as a kid, but I had a picture book of it that I loved.

*. The story has a rich ex-opera singer living in Paris living in a mansion with a pampered cat who has three kittens. One day, her bumbling butler overhears her making her will and leaving all her money to the cats, with the estate then reverting to him. Impatient (and poor at math) he decides upon the time-honored expedient of dumping the cats out in the country. This may be taken as kinder than actually killing them outright, and he will be served much the same way at the end, but having lived in the country most of my life and had plenty such cats show up in my barn I can tell you that most don’t make it and it might be less cruel to just put them down.
*. Critics carped that the animation wasn’t up to the classic, lush Disney style, but I think it works well with the material. I especially like the sketchy effect of the hair. The music, however, is a bit disappointing. There’s only the one good number (“Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat”) while the rest of the songs are disposable. The lyrics are good enough but the music is pedestrian and won’t be having you singing or humming along with any of the tunes. Even Maurice Chevalier coming out of retirement can’t save the title track.
*. The other issue with old Disney movies is that they don’t play as the most politically correct flicks today. The Chinese swinger has even been cut from some versions, and I don’t think that’s any loss at all. And there are gender stereotypes too. Today I don’t think you’d see the boy kitten wanting to grow up to be a rough-tough alley cat and the girl kitten being such a princess. And Duchess would have more “agency” (to get the lingo right) instead of having to be saved all the time by O’Malley. Really, she doesn’t do much by herself except make sure the kittens are bathed and put to bed.
*. The voices are hit and miss. Eva Gabor struck me as a bit old for Duchess, but then I guess she’s a mature feline. Harris I didn’t think added much as O’Malley. He’s a bland bit of rough, but cleans up well. Scat Cat was supposed to be voiced by Louis Armstrong but Satchmo was ill and Scatman Crothers filled in, playing Louis Armstrong nicely. Hearing Sterling Holloway made me think of Winnie the Pooh and not Roquefort the mouse detective. I wasn’t sure what two Southern bloodhounds were doing in the French countryside, but they’re just extras anyway.
*. Granted this is vintage Disney in a minor key, it still seems to me to be better children’s entertainment than most of the Pixar/Disney product on offer today. It doesn’t carry any message except the importance of not judging others too quickly. And of course there’s also the old myth being recycled of a “natural” social order, which holds that abandoned nobility will always re-ascend to its rightful place one way or another. This is the tale of Oliver Twist and King Arthur and Sargon of Akkad. The aristos being placed in a basket and tossed in a stream makes the point pretty clear. That’s an enduring fantasy though, and after 3,000 years of continual use it’s probably pointless for even the most progressive among us to complain about it now.

*. Monster on the Campus (I really wonder at that definite article) had barely begun when I was struck by a sense of déjà vu. As we scroll along the plaster reconstructions of the faces of earlier hominids in Professor Donald Blake’s lab we see one labeled Piltdown Man. This immediately made me think of the scene in The Neanderthal Man where Piltdown Man shows up on a chart of our ancestors. The thing is, Piltdown Man was a hoax that was only exposed in 1953, the year The Neanderthal Man was released, so I gave them a pass. Five years later it’s less excusable. Professor Blake should know better.
*. Or is that fleeting reference to Piltdown Man a conscious borrowing? That’s not an incredible suggestion. The thing is, this movie is so similar to The Neanderthal Man you have to think they had it in the back of their heads. Even the cheap mask the monster wears looks like it was borrowed from the earlier film.
*. As I said in my notes on The Neanderthal Man, what we’re dealing with here is the usual Jekyll and Hyde story, with the scientist who is transformed into a bestial, atavistic creature after being infected by the gamma-radiated blood of a coelacanth (honest!). It’s “evolution in reverse,” and there’s even a suggestion of sexual repression right from the opening lines of dialogue, with Dr. Blake standing over his girlfriend Madeline, whose face he is making a cast of: “There she is. Female in the perfect state: defenceless and silent.” She’ll be in that state again at the end.
*. But if Monster on the Campus is mostly stale and unexceptional, it does have a number of moments that make you raise an eyebrow. Like the first murder victim being hanged from a tree by her hair. Or like Madeline lying to the police about Blake’s whereabouts on the night of the murder and trying to get him to do the same, when in fact he is the murderer. Or the way Blake accidentally re-infects himself with the toxic blood by stabbing a giant dragonfly that had bitten the coelacanth and then having the blood from the dragonfly trip down into the bowl of his pipe, which he later smokes. Honest!

*. I love how the straw that breaks the administration’s back with Dr. Blake is when he makes an 88-minute long-distance call to Madagascar. That’s $400! He is told he has to go on leave after pulling a stunt like that.
*. I always enjoy campus movies that take us into the lecture hall. I can’t think of any that have struck me as being even remotely probable. It’s an interesting glimpse into what Hollywood thinks audiences believe university lectures are really like. This goes for both sciences and the humanities. Here’s how Dr. Blake wraps up his biology class: “Man is not only capable of change, but man alone, among all living creatures, can choose the direction in which that change will take place. In other words, man can use his knowledge to reduce all spiritual values and reduce the race to bestiality. Or he can use his knowledge to increase his understanding to a point far beyond anything now imaginable. Think it over. That’s all for today.”
*. Directed by Jack Arnold. Not one of his more celebrated credits, as he would admit. My own feeling is that Arnold could do good work with good material, but he was no magician. Apparently he shot this in twelve days, and from the looks of it that was plenty of time.
*. Well, it was cheap and shot quickly and didn’t have a script that makes much sense, even given its crazy premise. Nevertheless, it does have a weird-looking fish with radioactive blood and a giant dragonfly and a guy in an ape mask. It’s a joke, but at least it’s not dull.

*. This adaptation of Macbeth is part of the BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told line-up of four of the bard’s most popular plays. The tetralogy consists of Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Taming of the Shrew.
*. Now which of one of those plays is not like the others? Well, they all have their unique qualities but Macbeth is the only tragedy while the other three are all comedies. And early comedies at that.
*. There’s a bit of a challenge here then, because while Macbeth has been adapted many times in modern settings the spirit of these ShakespeaRe-Told productions is far lighter. Just take the set-up here. Joe Macbeth (James McAvoy) is a chef in an upscale eatery that I believe is supposed to be in Glasgow. The culinary setting recalls the Britcom Chef! from the 1990s, so we’re already primed for some laughs. Ella (Keeley Hawes) is Joe’s wife (she “has massive bollocks” and sings “Lord won’t you buy me a Mercdes Benz”), while Billy Banquo is a fellow chef. Duncan is the owner of the establishment, where his two sons also work.
*. One night Joe and Billy are met by three bin men taking away the garbage in the alley behind the restaurant. They make some enigmatic pronouncements on the future of both chefs and then drive off. Macbeth and his wife decide to kill Duncan and take over the restaurant, and soon find themselves wading into blood so deep there’s no going back. Finally, Macbeth is killed by Macduff when a seemingly impossible prophecy comes true.

*. I think you can tell from this that there was a lot of comic potential. The witches as bin men, for example, with the local landfill standing in for the heath. And the Britcom qualities of some of the kitchen dialogue. At one point someone mentions Gordon Ramsay and they are warned not to mention his name but only refer to him as “the Scottish chef.” Which is a play on the idea that you’re not supposed to say “Macbeth” in a theatre but instead refer to it as “the Scottish play.” So that was cute, and news to me since I didn’t know Gordon Ramsay was Scottish.
*. But then things take a darker turn. This isn’t a comedy. The drunken porter turns into an exterminator, which seemed like a joke that I wasn’t getting. There are are the killers, who have been imported from the 11th century, meaning Yugoslavia. I wasn’t sure what was up with that. Of course people get killed, albeit offstage, and there are bloody visions. Most bizarre of all, we find out that Lady Macbeth did have a child that she lost, which is another down note.
*. Along with the shift in tone there’s a loss of energy. The movie feels like it’s running out of gas in its second half. The ways they update the play don’t work as well. Having Banquo’s “ghost” appear at the feast by way of a video message he recorded on his phone must have seemed like a clever idea at the time, but it doesn’t play well. And the prophecy that comes true is such a stretch I wasn’t even sure what was going on.
*. McAvoy is quite good. In fact, his performance made me think he’d probably do well playing the role straight. He’d look interesting in the part anyway. But the rest of the cast don’t stand out and the production itself feels quite constrained. In the end, I don’t think the kitchen setting was a wise move, as it’s too big a stretch to have key plot points make sense and it’s too limiting in terms of the action. Every modern re-telling of Shakespeare is a roll of the dice, and while there have been many that have turned out worse than this, I don’t think they did anything that stands out as special here either.

*. In the wake of his aphasia diagnosis and subsequent announcement of his retirement, I think everyone wanted to cut Bruce Willis some slack for what had been a remarkable string of bad performances in worthless films.
*. I’m not as charitable. He still took these roles, and worked at a frantic pace churning out garbage. In 2022 alone I believe he appeared in an even dozen (!) direct-to-video releases, for which he was well paid. I like Willis, as he was an iconic star when I was a young moviegoer, but I don’t feel that sorry for him. Cognitive impairment is a terrible thing to suffer through, but he should have hung it up before it came to this.
*. Which brings us to Gasoline Alley, though I suspect that much of what I’m about to say could be said of the rest of Willis’s 2022 production. Gasoline Alley is a cheap (and worse, cheap-looking) piece of crap, apparently shot in eleven days. I think they might have had a couple of weekends off in there.
*. Devon Sawa plays Jimmy Jayne, a tough ex-con who drives a hot rod and a motorbike and runs a tattoo parlour. It’s a “rock-and-roll life.” A girl he meets at a bar ends up being murdered alongside a bunch of other girls and Jimmy becomes the prime suspect. Two detectives, Freeman (Willis) and Vargas (Luke Wilson) start to lean on him, so Jimmy sets out to solve the case on his own.
*. I guess they were going for some kind of neo-noir vibe, but nothing works. Though I have to throw some praise in Sawa’s direction. He’s really doing his best here and he’s not bad. Given that nobody else even seems to be trying, that’s worthy of respect.
*. Wilson is just picking up a cheque and Willis is noticeably not well. He’s actually only on screen for a few minutes, and his dialogue mainly consists of saying “Yeah” when someone else says something to him. He really looks much worse here than he did in Breach and Cosmic Sin, movies that glow in comparison to this.
*. He dies at the end (I’m not giving you any spoiler alerts), with one of his last lines being “It wasn’t supposed to end like this.” Then Sawa soaks him in gasoline and tosses a flaming $20 in his direction. It’s hard not to read something into that. Sorry Bruce.

*. A movie with a title like Blackenstein, with all that it connotes, coming in at only 87 minutes, has no excuse for being this dull and plodding. It could at least have been campy or shlocky fun. Instead it is simply inept and almost impossible to watch.
*. It was obviously made to cash in on the success of Blacula, which had come out the previous year, but it’s actually worse than that because a different producer wanted to beat Blacula‘s Sam Arkoff (who was thinking along similar lines) to the punch so he turned out this piece of shit in great haste and at no expense.
*. Just how cynical a move was this? Almost as cynical as re-releasing Blackenstein as The Return of Blackenstein after its initial run. The same movie. That cynical.
*. It might have been interesting. The basic premise is actually something a bit different. Dr. Stein has developed two new procedures: DNA injections and the use of lasers to fuse new limbs on to amputees. He doesn’t seem to be a bad man, and has a couple of patients he’s treating and keeping comfortable in his mansion. Then an old student of his named Winifred shows up on his doorstep with a problem: the man she was going to marry has been blown up by a mine in Vietnam and lost his arms and legs. Dr. Stein thinks he can help, but his program for Eddie’s treatment is undercut by his other assistant, who has fallen in love with Winifred.
*. So instead of being a corpse (or collage of corpses) brought to life, Eddie is someone who was alive whose brain is killed by the doctor’s treatment so he shambles through the rest of the movie as a powerful, bloodthirsty zombie.
*. That’s not an idea without potential, but it all goes unfulfilled. Even the lab equipment from the 1931 film goes to waste. Nor is it much of a blaxploitation movie as there is no racial angle to it at all. Despite Eddie being a vet, and the doctor being a white man, there’s no attempt to politicize anything. It’s just a dumb movie. So dumb that in the final ten minutes the Monster chases after a woman we haven’t seen before, and is then killed by police dogs, leaving Winifred to wander off with one of the detectives who had been tracking the Monster. It’s a ludicrous attempt at wrapping things up.
*. Before we get to that end the 87 minutes start to feel very well padded. There are lots of shots of the Monster’s shiny shoes. There’s a night club scene. There are several lab scenes when we really only needed one.
*. It’s interesting to note how, in their Golden Turkey Awards volume, the Medved brothers nominate Blackenstein in the Worst Blaxploitation Movie Ever Made category. I would question this just because it only narrowly qualifies as blaxpolitation and, as noted, there is no racial angle at work in the film. But even assuming it fits the bill, what they say about it gives every indication that neither of them had seen the trailer much less the movie.
*. They call it out for “overacting,” for example, despite the fact that it’s woefully underacted by almost everyone. John Hart’s Dr. Stein never becomes the deranged mad doctor, Roosevelt Jackson as Malcolm is a wallflower, Ivory Stone is a physics Ph.D., not a scream queen, and Joe De Sue as Eddie (latterly the Monster), in what I believe was his only movie, seems well aware of his limitations as an actor and so decides to just show no emotion at all.
*. Then — I’m still talking about the Medveds now — Dr. Stein is described as “a young black medic” when he is actually an older white man. Then they talk about how the doctor grafts zebra legs “onto his unsuspecting female victims,” but he only has one female patient and she is receiving the DNA therapy, not one of the grafted limbs. Really, even by the sometimes very shoddy standards of the Medveds this is embarrassing.
*. But I suspect Blackenstein, despite its well-known title, is a movie very few people have actually seen. There’s certainly little to say about it. In Nightmare Movies Kim Newman gives it a single reference where it is written off as “atrocious.” Let’s leave it there.