DUNE PART ONE (2021) * ½

Despite the fact that it simultaneously premiered in theaters and at home on HBO Max, Dune Part One director Denis (Arrival) Villeneuve was adamant that people see his film in a movie theater, the way he intended.  I wound up watching it the way I usually watch movies:  On my couch late at night while nodding off to sleep.  In fact, I had to eventually watch it over the span of a couple nights because this dreary bore kept putting my ass to sleep.  

David Lynch’s Dune was bad, but this is something else.  At least Lynch’s version was so spectacularly bad that it was an unforgettable mess.  Villeneuve’s Dune is like watching someone throw sand on monochromatic paint and then spending hours watching it dry.  Neither the action nor the drama is compelling.  Lynch’s picture was an assault on the senses.  This one would make for perfect ASMR background noise.

The best moments come early on and are staged almost exactly like the original.  Both highlights revolve around the training of Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet).  Once the action switches its focus to the desert planet Dune, the pace gets stuck in the quicksand (slowsand?).  The big issue is the ending, or lack thereof as it’s just half a movie.  (Villeneuve puts the subtitle “Part One” front and center in the opening credits as a way to let himself off the hook.)  Like Halloween Kills, it doesn’t mean a whole lot as it’s only leading to another movie.  It's all set-up and no payoff.  I don’t know about you, but it’s a little irksome to spend nearly three hours on something that forgets to have a climax.  Like the original, it ends with a knife fight, but it’s poorly staged and it’s hard to care what happens because we already KNOW what’s going to happen.  I mean if Paul DIES, there won’t be a Dune Part Two.  

The performances are a mixed bag.  Chamalet looks like a wax sculpture of Tim Burton that went Pinocchio on us.  Everyone was hard on Hayden Christensen in the Star Wars prequels, but he is positively Shakespearian compared to Chamalet.  The villain is even worse.  Having Stellan Skarsgard play The Baron as Col. Kurtz was… a choice.  He’s pretty awful and isn’t given a whole lot to do.  Heck, even the usually engaging and energetic Oscar Isaac looks bored here.  It’s not all bad though.  I’m curious to see whatever movie Jason Momoa and Josh Brolin thought they were acting in as they seem like the only ones who are half awake.  Rebecca Ferguson isn’t bad as Paul’s mother, although she and Chalamet have no chemistry together.  (Then again, it’s hard to have chemistry with a wax figure.)

The droning soundtrack and bland visuals put me to sleep three nights in a row.  Even during the occasional fight scenes and battle sequences, the music is curiously apathetic and doesn’t do anything to heighten the action on screen.  I can’t imagine paying money to see this in the theater.  I would’ve been asleep by the first hour.    

AKA:  Dune.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #16: MIND OVER MURDER (1979) ***

(Streamed via The Film Detective)

Deborah Raffin stars as a dancer who begins having strange premonitions.  When she has her visions, the world stands completely still around her while she receives flashes of the future.  A creepy bald dude is often in the center of her premonitions, and she teams up with an investigator (David Ackroyd) to put together the pieces of her mental puzzle before it’s too late.

This Made for TV movie has a pretty good cast.  In addition to Death Wish 3’s Deborah Raffin we have ‘70s staple Andrew Prine as the bald psycho, X-Men’s Bruce Davison as her uncaring boyfriend, and Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund as Akroyd’s partner.  Raffin does a solid job in the lead, and her invested performance keeps you watching, even when the plot begins to chase its tail.

Director Ivan Nagy (who would later gain notoriety as a one-time boyfriend of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, and eventually wound up directing porn by the end of his career) creates a modicum of atmosphere during Raffin’s prolonged slow-motion visions.  The problem is these sequences get a little repetitive as the film is entering the homestretch.  There’s probably about two too many of these long scenes, but I guess he had to do what he had to do in order to fill a two-hour time slot.

The good news is just when you think you’ve had it up to here with the psychic shit, the movie switches gears from an ESP drama to a full-blown woman in peril movie.  The last act gets a real shot in the arm thanks to Prine’s intense performance as the sketchy, sweaty psycho.  His crazed theatrics help push Mind Over Murder over the top to become a first-rate TV thriller.  

Naturally, Prine gets the best line of the movie when he asks Raffin, “What do you want to do first?  Make love or DIE!”

AKA:  Premonitions.  AKA:  Psychomania.  AKA:  Deadly Vision.

EROTIC PASSION (1981) ***

Young Della (Monika Nickel, from Mandinga) lives with her uncle in a fancy villa.  She catches her sexy aunt Marsha (Femi Benussi) banging a doctor, so she decides to seduce him as well.  Frustrated that her aunt is controlling her inheritance, Della takes off to visit a friend.  When she isn’t home, Della takes to seducing a criminal named Haris (Dimitris Tsaftaridis) who’s staying at the house.  Before long, his partner in crime (trans exploitation star Ajita Wilson) shows up and they form an uneasy alliance to help Della bump off her aunt and take off with her money.  Naturally, double and triple-crosses ensue.

Erotic Passion is a solid skin flick through and through.  The crime-centric sequences towards the end are perfunctory, but fortunately, don’t get in the way of the nearly non-stop softcore sex sequences.  The bouncy, upbeat Euro Pop music is good for a chuckle too.  

The trio of ladies in the cast get naked a lot and all look great doing it.  Nickel is particularly hot as the young and frisky Della.  She gets a terrific striptease on the beach that culminates with her getting pawed by a dirty old man, who then bones her in the sand.  Benussi is sexy too as the hot to trot aunt.  Whenever Nickel isn’t off banging someone, Benussi is, so there’s always some action going on.  Wilson doesn’t have a lot to do, unfortunately, until the second half, but the three-way between her and Nickel and Tsaftaridis, while short, features some near-hardcore action.  The finale, where Nickel rides Tsaftaridis for all his worth on a rocky shore, ends things on a fine note.

Director Ilias (Emanuelle, Queen of Sados) Mylonakis gives the softcore scenes a touch of class, but just a touch, as they are at their best when the performers are getting down and dirty.  He also keeps the plot (what little of it there is) moving at a decent clip too.  One or two talky stretches aside, Erotic Passion is action-packed in more ways than one.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #15: THE HORROR HALL OF FAME (1974) **

(Streamed via YouTube)

Vincent Price hosts this silly shot on video look back at the Golden Age of Horror.  He sits down and reminisces about horror films and stars with the likes of Frank Gorshin (who does a good Karloff impression), John Carradine (who discusses silent horror films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Golem, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and The Phantom of the Opera), and John Astin (who helps plug Famous Monsters of Filmland).  Later, he goes down into “the dungeon” where a make-up man transforms Candy Clark into a witch.  A vampire expert also shows up to talk about Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.  It all ends with a tribute to Price complete with clips of House of Wax, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven, and his (then) latest film, Madhouse.

The Horror Hall of Fame was co-written by Famous Monsters’ Forrest J. Ackerman who I’m sure supplied as much information about the movies as he did the bad puns.  That’s kind of the problem, as there’s more time devoted to unfunny shtick (the comic relief hunchback sidekick is rather unbearable) than an actual informative exploration of the subject. The constant use of phony canned laughter and applause gets irritating after a while too. 

Since it was made in ’74, they spend more time talking about the then-current horror films like The Exorcist and Blacula and briefly talk about the “new popular stars” like Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.  While there are brief segments on Boris Karloff (Die!  Die!  My Darling), Peter Lorre (Mad Love), and Bela Lugosi (Mark of the Vampire), there really aren’t as many clips as you’d think.  I did like seeing part of the Schlock trailer though.  

The best part is when Price talks about how big-name movie stars often get their start in monster movies and shows scenes of Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Steve McQueen in The Blob before introducing clips from Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them.  While this sequence is little more than a greatest hits compilation, at least it’s better than all the comic relief shit.  It’s also cool seeing Price showing off props from Ackerman’s memorabilia collection and hocking Godzilla model kits, but ultimately, connoisseurs of the subject will find little of substance here.  Kids might get a kick out of it though.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #14: NIGHT OF THE WITCHES (1970) ** ½

(Streamed via Drive-In Classics)

A conman dressed as a preacher (Keith Larsen, who also co-wrote and directed) on the run from the authorities goes to a small island inhabited entirely by witches.  Their leader is the sultry Cassandra (Kathryn Loder from The Big Doll House), who has a pretty sweet deal going on as she lives in a castle full of hot women who perform rituals that require them to execute intricately choreographed dance moves while wielding samurai swords.  The preacher sets his sights on fleecing the women for all their worth, but he soon learns they have other plans for him.

Night of the Witches starts off with a great, surprising, and funny scene where the phony baloney preacher threatens a woman’s soul with damnation for fornicating on the beach.  He then conveniently gets rid of her boyfriend before worming his way into her pants.  Every time he rants and raves about Jesus, a hilarious sound effect of a choir chanting, “AMEN!” is dubbed into the action.  (Remember the “Randolph Scott” chorus from Blazing Saddles?  It’s kind of like that.)  That’s your first tip-off this won’t be your average run-of-the-mill horror flick.  

The movie works in fits and starts, but it’s pretty amusing and memorable, even if the seventy-four-minute running time sometimes feels much longer.  Some of the subplots bog things down a bit, like when Cassandra and her minions off a Sydney Greenstreet impersonator in a witchy ceremony.  The humor is a little uneven too.  While Larsen’s antics are funny, the supporting comic relief characters and fast-motion scenes are lame and ill-fitting.  

Since this was the late ‘60s/early ‘70s after all, there’s a lot of astrology-inspired horse hockey involved as the witches refer to the men by their zodiac signs.  Loder, who has a sexy Barbara Steele quality about her, makes all the stuff with the witches work.  Whenever she and Larsen are on screen, it’s fun.  Too bad there’s a boring third-wheel romantic lead who kind of mucks thing up about halfway through.

Overall, Night of the Witches is just weird enough to be memorable.  It’s not necessarily weird enough to be good, however.  It didn’t exactly cast a spell over me, but I enjoyed myself most of the time.

THE CLASS REUNION (1972) * ½

Marsha Jordan, Rene Bond, Sandy Carey, and a bunch of others gather at a hotel for their class reunion.  (“The Class of ‘69”.)  One guy invites everyone back to his room to watch old footage of them partying it up and having sex in their old college days.  (It’s just footage from College Girls and is only meant to pad out the running time.  Plus, it’s tinted red for some reason.)  The classmates get so turned on watching the movie that they decide to have an impromptu orgy right then and there.  Afterwards, the friends pair off for more fun.

Directed by A.C. Stephen, and co-written by Ed Wood, The Class Reunion is seriously lacking the hallmarks you’d expect from the duo.  Sure, we do get the obligatory scene that goes from day to night and back again (courtesy of some random footage of a hippie peace protest), and a couple of boom mike shadows, but that’s about it.  The most memorable thing about it is how progressive it is as it contains a love scene between two gay characters (both of whom are portrayed as over the top stereotypes).  I guess it earns points for inclusiveness, but the fact remains, it’s still not very good.  (I can only imagine the audience reactions this scene caused among the raincoat crowd back in ’72.)

I’m a fan of Stephen and Wood’s adult features, but even this one was kind of a test of my patience.  For starters, the sex scenes are filmed in a sloppy manner.  The camera is usually placed too far away from the action and/or zooms around listlessly.  Many scenes also suffer from awkward framing and indifferent editing.  The biggest miscalculation was having the lovely Bond sit and watch from the sidelines instead of participating during the big orgy scene.  At least she gets a decent scene where she seduces her married girlfriend, which is about as tantalizing as the film gets, which is to say… not very.

The film has a disjointed feel as stuff just sort of happens at random.  Maybe it was just me, but it felt like the orgy scene belonged at the end of the movie and not the beginning.  I know I shouldn’t be thinking so hard about this as Stephen and Wood were only using the (very) thin premise as an excuse to show some skin.  That wouldn’t matter if the sex scenes were any good, or if the filmmaking was up to their usual WTF standards.  In the end, The Class Reunion isn’t a worthy reunion between Stephen and Wood.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #13: ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES (2008) **

(Streamed via Fawesome)

Since so many movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s have lapsed into the public domain, virtually anybody can remake them without paying for the rights.  Because of that, I’m surprised many fledgling low budget horror directors don’t take advantage of the opportunity to remake a film with a recognizable title and release it.  You’re almost guaranteed that some sucker (like me) will stumble upon it and watch it.  

The great thing about remaking an old (I say “old” and not “classic”) horror movie like Attack of the Giant Leeches is that you can update it to fit the modern times.  And by “update”, I mean you can put things in your film that just wouldn’t fly during the time of the original’s release.  For example, this version of Attack of the Giant Leeches contains a slow-motion water gun fight between sexy girls wearing cutoff shorts and bikini tops AND a part where a guy gets bitten on the dick by a giant leech… all BEFORE the title card appears on screen.  If you can’t already tell, writer/director Brett (Raiders of the Lost Shark) Kelly knows how to get things started off on the right foot.  

From there, the film follows the basic outline of the original.  A sleazy restaurant owner (Jody Hauke) is constantly bickering with his much-younger, hot-to-trot wife (Shawna McSheffrey).  Meanwhile, giant leeches are in the swamp killing off wildlife before setting their sights on humans.  A young game warden (Mark Courneyea) is baffled by the sudden appearance of corpses drained of all their blood, and because he didn’t see the first part of the movie (or the 1959 original), he doesn’t know that the leeches are the ones responsible.  

Speaking of leeches, the rubbery leeches are OK, I guess.  They look more like tentacles than the creatures from the first movie, which for me was a bit of a miscalculation.  I for one kind of miss the monsters from the original that looked like stuntmen wearing trash bags.  At least Kelly resisted the temptation to make the creatures CGI.

I have to give it to Kelly.  The stuff that hews closest to the original movie is pretty dull and talky.  (Just like the original.)  However, whenever he’s doing his own thing (the aforementioned bikini girls getting into water gun fights), it’s not too shabby.   I imagine if he added some gratuitous sex and gore into the mix, it would’ve been even better as this version is just about as chaste and bloodless as the original.  Ultimately, Attack of the Giant Leeches isn’t all that great, but at least it doesn’t completely suck.