neighborhood book exchange box
approx km 8838 Charles at Lakewood
Movie #1850: The Last House On The Left (1972, Wes Craven)
This one is kind of a tie-in with last night's movie since this is the movie they watched when Roky Erickson and Daniel Johnston got together in Austin Texas.
Well, it's crap. There's lots of crappy singer/songwriter music used for padding. The police buffoonery really doesn't fit in with (for those times) the ultra-gore. The direction is hopeless. The acting is nothing much (David Hess is OK as the main sicko). The only thing it has going for it is a few scenes of perversion that nobody had dared to film before.
Movie #1851: Dark City (1950, William Dieterle)
A couple of surprises here. One, this film is available on Netflix. Two, there was closed captioning on Netflix. The search engine with Netflix Canada is pathetic so the only way to find films there is just to stumble over them. I hear that the hearing impaired were giving Netflix a hard time about no closed captioning. Looks like they were listening.
As for the movie: what a cast! Heston, Lizabeth Scott (although she sang too much), Begley, Webb, Jagger, Lindfors, DeFore, Harry Morgan and Mike Mazurki. It was fun but not first rate "noir". I assume that Dieterle wasn't quite in the same league as the likes of Mann, Siodmak, Mate, Huston etc.
Also interesting was an early use of Las Vegas as a setting. All the scenes there were kind of ruined because I kept looking at the background scenery instead of concentrating on the story.
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