I'm currently rewatching all the movies I remember fondly from the 1970s, '80s, '90s, 2000s, and '10s, and also and always anything else that's smart, subversive, and/or simply strange in a good way. Anything you'd recommend?

Today movies are Assault on a Queen (1966), Blood Beast from Outer Space (1965), The Bug (2016), Collapse (2009), The Last House on the Left (1972), The Man from Snowy River (1982), and Zardoz (1974).

The winner is Collapse, but if for any reason Collapse cannot complete its duties, 1st runner up The Man from Snowy River shall be given the crown.

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Assault on a Queen (1966)

Frank Sinatra cool, in a heist film set at sea. Or, more accurately, on sets floating in a Hollywood mock-up of the Atlantic Ocean.

It's the 1960s, and deep-sea diver Frank Sinatra has found a sunken WWII-era German submarine in remarkably (and unlikely) good condition. Richard Conte, a familiar face from film noir, plays the mechanic who's supposed to make the sub's engines purr after twenty years on the ocean floor. Clear the corpses out and lube the engines, and Sinatra and his cohorts have a navigable, functional military submarine.

With their new toy, their plan is to hold up the titular queen — the Queen Mary, a passenger ship carrying 2,600 rich passengers across the ocean. Nobody will expect a stick-up in the high seas, right?

This is based on one of Jack Finney's better non-sci-fi novels, with a screenplay by Rod Serling. It's not nearly as good as the novel, and you'd never guess Serling was involved if his name wasn't on-screen in the credits. It's awfully dry for a story set at sea.

In the novel, I loved the main character, but in the movie Sinatra is playing Sinatra. Pretty sure the ending was altered too. It's been ages since I read the book, but I don't remember thinking, No, man, that's impossible.

Music by Duke Ellington, which might be the best reason to see Assault on a Queen. It's delightfully unlike the ordinary cues of an ordinary movie score, and like the novel, it's music that deserves a better movie.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Blood Beast from Outer Space (1965)

A strange but mostly boring science fiction piece, about a space alien that comes to Earth and starts attacking women. Fuckshit, we have more than enough loutish human men attacking women, who needs space aliens for this?

The movie does have a point to it, and eventually it get a little brainier than just "space alien wants earth women'. What it never gets, though, is interesting.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Bug (2016)

You're thinking this'll be a monster movie from Roger Corman, but no, it's a documentary about Volkswagen Beetles.

It's structured like most documentaries, with talking heads over mood music and clips, but everyone agrees that Beetles are cool. I learned a little about the history of the Beetle, or Bug: No, Hitler didn't design it, and neither did Ferdinand Porsche. According to The Bug, the Beetle's earliest design came from Josef Ganz — a Jewish man living in Germany.

The Bug is a pleasant enough low-key look at what's probably my favorite car, but it spends way too much tome with smiley movie star Ewan McGregor. A puke-green Beetle was his first car, he says, and no doubt he loves his Volkswagen collection, but to me the classic Beetle was a car for ordinary folks. In a documentary about VW Beetles, I wasn't expecting to spend twenty minutes with Ewan McGregor.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Collapse (2009)

In the 1990s, Michael Ruppert published a zine called From the Wilderness, which I remember as top-notch wingnut stuff — one breathless story after another, exposing scandals nobody else was covering — and by top-notch I mean that Ruppert's reports and analysis always seemed plausible. It was smarter than ordinary conspiracy theory crap, but still, I read the zine skeptically, and eventually my subscription lapsed.

Well, here's Mike again, in a movie. His theories are the central focus of this documentary, which is almost entirely comprised of Ruppert talking and chain-smoking on camera. What he's saying ranges from bad news to catastrophic, but it still sorta makes sense.

The "infinite growth paradigm" of capitalism isn't workable. We are facing industrial and societal collapse, our leaders are corrupt, we are running out of oil, and it is going to be a disastrously different world for the next generation when the pumps run dry, as the effects of climate change accumulate. It'll be worse still for the generation after that, and pretty soon each generation will be smaller than the previous. Yeah, that's the bright side — climate change and peak oil will solve the population explosion.

Ruppert comes across as intelligent, but his background is a Bachelor's degree in poly-sci, and some years as a narcotics cop in Los Angeles, until (I think he said) he was fired from that job.

The movie is 13 years old, and some of Ruppert's dire warnings haven't yet emerged as big problems. A lot of them have. He was an alarmist, but there's plenty to be alarmed about, and he was mostly right. When he was wrong it was about the details, not the general thrust of current events, which is of course a knife to the heart of humanity.

Ruppert was full of himself, but he's worth listening to for an hour and a half. You will not be whistling Dixie when it's over. It was over for Ruppert in 2014, when he killed himself.

"We have waited so long for somebody to listen to us. When the mainstream press and the government says nobody could've predicted this, they are lying through their fucking teeth."

Thanks, Mike. You were right about most of it.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Last House on the Left (1972)

Written and directed by Wes Craven, this was his first big success, long before A Nightmare on Elm Street. I liked Craven's Nightmare enough to see it several times, and I've heard of this movie for years. I was expecting monsters, and there are monsters, all right, but not the kind I'm willing to watch in a movie.

Two teenage girls get kidnapped and raped, and probably beaten and killed, but I didn't stick around to see.

Wes Craven got better than this, but this is shit.

Verdict: BIG NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Man from Snowy River (1982)

Tom Burlinson plays an 1880s "high country" man whose father dies, so he has to go to work for a rancher. The rancher is a prick (Kirk Douglas, sneering) with a lovely daughter, and a long-estranged brother (Kirk Douglas, bearded). There's an escaped stallion that needs to be chased down, and Burlinson's the man to do it.

This is a big happy Australian western based on a poem, with plenty of adventure and romance and horseplay with real horses. It's sweet but not too sweet, romantic but not too romantic, and it has no missteps along the way.

Never heard of him before, but one Banjo Paterson (1864-1941) wrote the poem behind the movie, and he's a very big historical Aussie. In my hemisphere he's best known for writing "Waltzing Matilda," which seems about as beloved down under as Americans love "God Bless America." Paterson's face is on the Australian ten dollar bill.

This movie is a fine old-fashioned western. You'll cry when it wants you to cry, and you'll hate pricky Kirk, love bearded Kirk, and want Burlinson to catch the horse and kiss the girl.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Zardoz (1974)

Trippy sci-fi, set in the 23rd century, and impossible to summarize but I'll try:

There's a big blockhead floating in the sky, and a pasty-faced god called Zardoz lives inside the blockhead. Most people are Brutes, which is actually what they're called. Sean Connery wears a one-piece bikini and plays Zed, an Exterminator, which seems to be a cop-type position but without any pretense of "protect and serve"; his job is killing any troublesome Brutes.

There's a lengthy discussion of what causes erections, and for Zed the answer seems to be nothing. Then he finds a children's alphabet primer, and teaches himself to read, which, in this movie's future, leads to trouble.

Zardoz was written, produced, and directed by John Boorman, so it's exhilarating to look at, but it's a lovable mess and I'm still baffled.

Verdict: MAYBE.

10/3/2022
There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever's on Netflix or playing at the twentyplex, you're missing out.
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