The 18th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was 1946’s The Chase, which turned out to be a pretty nifty little film noir. Did I actually just use the word nifty in a film review? Yes, I did but then again, everyone should use the word “nifty” at least once in their lives.
The Chase tells the story of Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings), whose life is anything but nifty. When we first meet him, he’s standing outside in the rain, staring into a restaurant, and enviously watching the people eating inside. Chuck is a returning serviceman. He helped to win World War II but he’s now returned to a society that has changed in his absence. He has no money, he has no home, and he suffers from what we would today call PTSD.
Things change for Chuck when he finds the wallet of a man named Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran). He returns the wallet, discovering that Eddie not only lives in a mansion but he also has a sinister henchman named Gino (Peter Lorre!). Eddie is so impressed that Chuck returned the wallet and didn’t try to steal any of the money that he offers to put Chuck on the payroll.
Soon, he is working as Eddie’s driver. Of course, Eddie has an accelerator installed in the backseat, so that he can control how fast the car is going. Eddie enjoys freaking Chuck out by randomly speeding up the car. Along with being a spectacularly bad passenger, Eddie also turns out to be a gangster.
When Chuck meets the mysterious Lorna (Michele Morgan), it’s love at first sight but there’s a big problem. Lorna happens to be married … to Eddie! Chuck and Lorna flee to Cuba, with Eddie and Gino in pursuit…
Or do they?
Chuck, it turns out, has been suffering from nightmares since he returned from the war. Often times, he wakes up with amnesia. Are Eddie, Gino, and Lorna real or are they just figments of Chuck’s dream state? Is Chuck really living in a film noir or is he just dreaming that he is?
The Chase is an effectively dark little film noir, one that will keep you guessing. Steve Cochran appears to be having a lot of fun as the cheerfully sociopathic Eddie (and it’s interesting to note that, in the same year as The Chase, Cochran had a supporting role in another film about the struggles of returning servicemen, the Oscar-winning Best Years Of Our Lives) and, of course, Peter Lorre is great as Gino. Michele Morgan is both sympathetic and enigmatic as Lorna and Robert Cummings does a good job of playing a man who is never quite sure whether he’s awake or he’s asleep.
The Chase is a classic mix of film noir and psychological melodrama. Watch it below!
If there’s anything that I’ve learned, from my long history of watching horror films, it’s that only fools go camping. Seriously, nothing good ever comes from wandering around in the woods or sleeping in a tent. Inevitably, you’re either going to attacked by a zombie while you’re skinny dipping in the nearby pond or a man with a machete is going to show up while everyone’s busy having sex in a tent. In short, nudity and the great outdoors equals death.
And really, it makes sense. When you’re camping, you’re in an isolated place and you are totally at the mercy of the elements, the killers, and occasionally the zombies. There’s a reason why so many horror films center around unlucky campers. Because, seriously, camping is terrifying!
Just check out My Little Sister, for instance.
My Little Sister is the latest film from directors Roberto and Maurizio del Piccolo. It opens in the wilderness, with shots of an old woman wandering through the woods. The old woman looks happy but it’s a disturbing sort of happiness. First off, she’s wearing a nightgown, which isn’t exactly the most practical wandering around in the woods outfit. Secondly, her wrists are heavily bandaged. And finally, she doesn’t really seem to have an easily identifiable reason for being out there in the woods. She spends a while picking up leaves and smiling at them. Occasionally, she crawls around in the dirty. As we watch her, we occasionally cut to black-and-white photographs of an unhappy looking family and headlines about missing tourists.
While the old woman plays with leaves, something far more disturbing is happening in a nearby house. In one room, a bound and terrified woman (Sofia Pauly) watches as her boyfriend is murdered and another woman is killed with a weed whacker. Doing the killing is a hunched over, grunting man (Saverio Percudani) who appears to be horribly disfigured…
In another room of the house, an unmoving figure sits in front of a TV and watches grainy footage of a young girl holding an older man a bottle of what appears to be water. The man pours the liquid on his face and suddenly starts to scream. Hmmm…apparently, it wasn’t water…
Meanwhile, in the woods, campers Sheila (Holli Dillon) and Tom (Mattia Rossellini) watch as the old woman plays with the leaves and they laugh at her, which may seem mean but I think most of us would probably do the same thing. Sheila and Tom are supposed to meet up with their friends but their friends are nowhere to be seen. Instead, there’s just an empty campsite and an eccentric woodsman (David White) warning them to beware of someone that he calls the little sister…
Of course, all of these storylines converge but I’m not going to tell you how. You may think that you’ve figured out some of it just by reading the review up to this point but My Little Sister has a few surprises up its sleeve. There’s a little twist at the end that my horror-loving soul absolutely loved. Let’s just say that, in this film, no one is every truly safe.
My Little Sister plays out like a mix of Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and — believe it or not — Sinister. At its best, My Little Sister achieves a dreamlike intensity. The wilderness is filmed to look both beautiful and threatening at the same time and the scenes in the house, in particular, are pure nightmare fuel. When it comes to a film like this, the effectiveness depends on how much you care about the potential victims and fortunately, both Holli Dillon and Sofia Pauly give totally believable, sympathetic, and relatable performances. As I watched them try to survive, I kept wondering what I would do if I found myself in the same situation. I doubt it would end well.
Finally, there’s no way I can finish this review without making a special mention of Lucia Castellano, who gives a really good and genuinely surprising performance as the crazy old woman in the wilderness. She is both frightening and sympathetic at the same time.
My Little Sister is a brutally effective and entertaining horror film. Keep an eye out for it!
Remember how, in the 1990s, every aspiring indie director tried to rip off Quentin Tarantino by making a gangster film that mixed graphic violence with quirky dialogue, dark comedy, and obscure pop cultural references? That led to a lot of terrible movies but not a single one (not even Amongst Friends) was as terrible as Mad Dog Time.
That Mad Dog Time was terrible should come as no surprise. Most directorial debuts are. What made Mad Dog Time unique was the sheer amount of talent that was assembled and wasted in the effort to bring this sorry movie to life. As the son of Joey Bishop, director Larry Bishop was Hollywood royalty and was able to convince several ridiculously overqualified actors to play the thinly drawn gangsters and rouges who populated Mad Dog Time. Much like the Rat Pack movies that his father once starred in, Larry Bishop’s debut film was full of familiar faces. Some of them only appeared for a few seconds while others had larger roles but they were all wasted in the end. Hopefully, everyone was served a good lunch in between filming their scenes because it is hard to see what else anyone could have gotten out of appearing in Mad Dog Time.
Mob boss Vic (Richard Dreyfuss) has just been released from a mental hospital. With the help of his main enforcer, Mick (Jeff Goldblum), and a legendary hitman named Nick (Larry Bishop, giving not only the worst performance in the film but also the worst performance of the 1990s), Vic is going to reassert his control over the rackets. Vic also wants to find his former mistress, Grace Everly (Diane Lane) but he doesn’t know that Grace is now with Mick and that Mick is also having an affair with Grace’s sister, Rita (Ellen Barkin).
(Grace and Rita are the Everly Sisters! Ha ha, between that and all the rhyming names, are you laughing yet?)
Ben London (Gabriel Byrne) has taken over Vic’s nightclub and, while singing My Way with Paul Anka, tells Vic that he should take an early retirement because he’s a paranoid schizophrenic. Before he can deal with Ben, Vic has to kill all of his other rivals, all of whom are played by actors like Michael J. Pollard, Billy Idol, Kyle MacLachlan, Gregory Hines, and Burt Reynolds. The bodies start to pile up but Jimmy the Undertaker (Richard Pryor, looking extremely frail in one of his final roles) is always around to make sure that everyone gets a proper burial.
And there are other cameos as well. Joey Bishop is the owner of a mortuary. Henry Silva is wasted as one the few gangsters to stay loyal to Vic. Christopher Jones, who previously co-starred with Larry Bishop and Richard Pryor in Wild In The Streets before dropping out of a society, plays a hitman who pretends to be Nick Falco. Even Rob Reiner shows up a limo driver who talks too much.
Almost every poorly paced scene in Mad Dog Time plays out the same way. Three or more men confront each other in a room. Hard-boiled dialogue is exchanged for an interminable length of time until someone finally gets shot. You would think, at the very least, it would be watchable because of all the different people in the cast but none of the actors really seem to be into it. Richard Dreyfuss and Jeff Goldblum resort to smirking through their scenes while Gabriel Byrne often appears to be drunk. Whenever he’s in a scene, Burt Reynolds seems to be trying to hide his face and it is hard to blame him. There were many terrible movies released in the 90s but none were as bad as Mad Dog Time.
Pro tip! Don’t stay up till 3 in the morning trying to figure out the locations used in a Hallmark movie. Sure, it means you can make some nice jokes, but the next few days you are exhausted. Plus, I was going to go hiking today. Now that’s shot. Oh, and so is some guy in a shack because boat guy, shown above, showed up while “haunting bluegrass music” played according to my captions.
Now we cut to San Francisco because of the Golden Gate stock footage. Inside we meet our interior designer named Sayre Hoyle played by Shenae Grimes-Beech. Hmm…I guess she got married. However, she”ll always be Darcy from Degrassi: TNG to me. While her name is Sayre, they just call her Sar throughout the movie, or at least that’s what my captions kept saying. She’s making a sales pitch. I’m not sure what Latin gibberish on her laptop has to do with interior design,…
but when her phone goes off, she simply says “cue music” and the deal is done! Good job on the phone too!
All the shots of cellphone screens are done well in this movie. Unfortunately, the call is from Beck Merchant (Sean Faris), her father’s lawyer, telling her that her brother Danny (Kelly McCabe) is dead. She is told that she has a message on her voicemail with the details, but we cut to her office to find out her brother has left a cryptic and foreshadowing message as well.
Now we cut to a swamp to establish they are in Louisiana before cutting to this…
to make sure we don’t forget that Camden, Maine exists.
Now we meet the family lawyer Beck Merchant who represents her dad’s company called Hoyle Enterprises. He invites her back to the family estate. By the family estate, I mean the house from Unleashing Mr. Darcy.
Unleashing Mr. Darcy (2016, dir. David Winning)
Unleashing Mr. Darcy (2016, dir. David Winning)
I forgot to mention that the J.R. of the family, named Huff Hoyle, is played by John Schneider. If Schneider wants that house, then he’ll have it torn down and moved from New York to Louisiana piece by piece!
Next we meet Sar’s only surviving brother Chris played by Jeremy Guilbaut.
Am I the only one that thinks Jeremy could do a good impression of Kyle MacLachlan? Take a look at this shot.
See! Also, I’m sure Schneider imports cherry pie from Twin Peaks. Only the best for his family.
Now we go inside and meet Sar’s mother Alma played by Marilyn Norry. Then the cops come in to talk to her brother, Huff, and the lawyer.
They’ve come to tell them that frogs have entered town and appear to be headed for Huff estate. That’s my requisite Frogs (1972) joke. They have actually come to tell them that the dead brother named Danny appears to have died from an accidental firearms discharge. Old cop believes that determination, but young cop isn’t so sure. He raises some good points. To the best of his knowledge Danny was never an outdoorsman so why the heck would he be out fishing where they found him. There was also no bait. The whole thing smells funny to him. But Schneider is having none of this.
Sar then talks to the lawyer and an old boyfriend named Clark comes up. This is when we go to visit Danny so that we can meet the crazy guy from this movie.
It’s funny. I can totally see this guy in another movie warning kids not to go to Camp Crystal Lake. This is Slap Watkins (Primo Allon).
We now go to a school to meet Jessica (Kristen Comerford). She’s a former close friend of Danny’s. This scene exists to tell us in no uncertain terms that not only did Danny hate fishing, but also guns. It is suspicious that he supposedly was fishing at the time and found with a gun.
Now we cut to a shot to remind us that Telluride, Colorado exists,…
before cutting inside a clothing store so that we can find out she and Clark were an item in high school before the lawyer shows up. They decide to go and talk over breakfast.
They go to Schneider’s favorite diner. He saw Rae’s at 2901 Pico Blvd, Santa Monica, CA, and had a duplicate made in Louisiana, but with the generic name Diner. That was Rae’s one request.
All jokes and plot summary aside for a moment. Here is what the stock footage Hallmark bought for this shot from FootageBank actually looks like.
Look at how they changed the signs and added shadows to it. I’m not an expert in Photoshop so that may be incredibly easy for all I know, but I’m impressed.
Edit: Look to the comments section to find out how I was wrong to be impressed here. Chuck does a great job explaining why this doesn’t look right.
Back in the movie, the scene in the restaurant is there to tell us how the lawyer went to LSU with Chris, pledged his fraternity, and when the company lawyer retired, they hired him. The lawyer also drops the information that the father pushed for a thorough investigation after the recent death, but they found nothing so that it will be suspicious later when Sar instantly finds something the cops didn’t notice in plain sight.
Sar now goes to visit Jessica again to find out more information. We find out that Danny was well liked by the workers at Huff’s factory. She also brings up a recent accident at the plant. Apparently, as a result, Danny’s tires were slashed. Also, we discover that Danny cancelled plans for a picnic on the day he died.
Now we cut to a police station that I don’t know where it’s from, but they did the photoshopping thing to it too. This time you can actually see it just below where it says “Sheriff”.
Of course there’s an American Flag. There’s one inside too hanging on the wall. Sar’s not happy with the sheriff and neither am I. Look at that!
Guy gives Louisiana, British Columbian sheriffs a bad name. Just in case we didn’t know the sheriff isn’t on the level.
The young cop and Sar go to visit the fishing shack where they meet up with the lawyer. This scene is to tell us that her and Danny used to hide things in the walls. Sar also finds a nightclub matchbook meaning the cops didn’t do their job, or someone planted it. We go back to the house to remind us Schneider is the head of the family, wants this matchbook looked into, and we find out that Danny didn’t go to nightclubs.
Off to the family factory and we run into Clark (Sean Poague). The lawyer takes her on a tour of the factory. This is when we discover the recent accident that killed a worker is not what this cross is referring to.
A man named Sonny Holzer died a long time ago when the lawyer was a kid.
Next important thing is that we learn a reporter is saying that Danny might have been killed in revenge. Who am I kidding? It’s John Schneider going into his angry father mode again.
If the crazy guy in Hearts of Spring was the real highlight of that film, then Schneider’s outbursts in this make him the equivalent. After Schneider reluctantly leaves the room after finishing his dinner table scene, we find out from the lawyer about that recent accident. A guy named Billy Pollock died only a month prior. The story is that he was drinking a lot when it happened.
We go and meet Billy’s wife, but it really isn’t important. What’s important is that Sar appears to go onto some cross between Pinterest and Facebook.
Kind of weird, but it’s there because of the baseball photo. The people in the photo are tagged. The person in the middle is Danny and the person on right is Slap. That’s when who else but the lawyer calls her up. They go to a cajun restaurant.
You have no idea how much I searched to find where this was located. It’s a cajun food restaurant, appears to have the address 8667, and I knew the stock footage sites to search because they are in the credits of the movie, but nope. Even with all that info, this is still a mystery to me. Sometimes you have to let things go, or not because the lawyer and Sar now sit down to talk so we get some more details. Turns out that after information was leaked to the paper about the accident that killed Billy, Slap was fired and Pollack was “cut…from the payroll.” Danny was the one who had to give Slap his pink slip.
Now someone pretends they are going to run into Sar’s car with theirs while she is parked.
That doesn’t faze a Shenae Grimes! The woman survived this creeper who was just as much of a threat many years prior.
Degrassi: The Next Generation
That means it’s off to the factory so Clark can drop some info. He had stumbled upon Danny and Chris arguing because Danny thought that Billy was murdered. Chris apparently didn’t care how he died. Don’t dig up info on the company. End of story!
Now the spotlight starts to turn on Chris. That’s when Schneider bursts into the room because John knows it’s been too long since he did his thing.
This outburst winds him up in the hospital because this time it was too much for his heart. They take him to the photoshopped version of the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center.
We really can jump over a lot now. Slap tries to kill Sar with a knife. We have a conversation between the lawyer and Sar that hints Huff may have had something to do with the really old accident that we now learned happened 20 years ago. After Sar talks with the wife of the guy who died 20 years prior, we find out his lawyer died too. Turns out also that Huff ordered Clark to be beaten. We saw him in the hospital looking pretty bad.
Now we can really really skip over things. Slap takes Sar hostage with a gun. He ends up getting shot by the cops in Mission, British Columbia where they shot this, which is close to where they did parts of Garage Sale Mystery: Guilty Until Proven Innocent.
This is when I say, if you don’t want the ending spoiled, then stop here. I recommend this one so you can stop here if you don’t want to know the ending. To separate this from the ending below, I have embedded the famous coffee scene from the Twin Peaks inspired game Deadly Premonition since I did reference Twin Peaks earlier.
Okay, here’s the deal. Huff killed the guy 20 years prior. We also find out that his lawyer didn’t die by accident either. It turns out Beck is the son of said lawyer. He got close to the family in the hope of exposing Huff for the murder of his father and Huff’s general corruption that lead to this whole string of incidents. As for the more recent murder, that wasn’t Huff. Well, not directly. Huff told his son Clark to deal with the issue with Billy Pollock, which he did. He got Slap riled up by making sure he got fired by Danny. Slap then went and killed Danny as a result. Danny caught it on a tiny camera, which Sar found in one of those hidden places I mentioned earlier. The matchbook was placed by Beck to help lead Sar while maintaining his cover with the family. So off to jail goes Huff and Clark.
Then even in this movie it ends with a kiss between Sar and the lawyer.
I already said it, but I do recommend this one. I’m not a fan these cozy mysteries that Hallmark is churning out lately. The Gourmet Detective being an exception. This, and Jesse Stone: Lost in Paradise, are just better. The cozy mystery ones tend to be too whitewashed, obvious, and sometimes they really don’t go for it. By that I mean like in Flower Shop Mystery: Mum’s The Word. They needed to cut a lot of the setup between the two crime solvers. Just let them do their thing. The acting here is good all around. I especially liked John Schneider and his over the top moments. It was also nice to see Shenae Grimes again. Those are my final thoughts. Check it out!
The 17th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties Box Set was the 1943 war film, Gung Ho!
Gung Ho!, which is filmed in a documentary style and features a narrator, opens with a series of job interviews. A tough lieutenant (J. Carrol Naish) is recruiting Marines to serves in a special unit, one which will only take on the most hazardous of assignments. The narrator reminds us that the interviews are taking place just a few weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor and we listen as each interviewee is asked whether or not he is okay with killing members of the Japanese army.
Some of the interviewees hesitate and some don’t but ultimately, all of them are okay with killing. One (Rod Cameron) explains that he’s already a murderer, having killed someone back in Kentucky. Another says that he fought in the Spanish Civil War and that he sees his service as being a continuation of the fight against fascism. Another Marine (Alvan Curtis) says that he’s an ordained minister but he’s willing to do what has to be done. A Marine named Pig Iron shows up and, since he’s played by a young Robert Mitchum, we know that he’ll get things taken care of.
And then we get to the final interviewee. He doesn’t have a big role in the film but his one line makes a big impression. When asked why he doesn’t mind the idea of killing, he replies, “I just don’t like Japs.”
AGCK!
That’s a line that would definitely not make it into a modern version of Gung Ho! Or, if it did, it would be followed by the interviewee being admonished and then kicked out of the office. But Gung Ho! was made in 1943, at the height of World War II and in the shadow of Peal Harbor. As uncomfortable as it may make us today, “I just don’t like Japs,” was probably Gung Ho‘s big applause line when it was originally released.
And really, that’s the main value of a film like Gung Ho! It’s a well-made but predictable war film but ultimately, it’s most important as a time capsule. If you want to know the truth about an era’s culture, as opposed to what you may want the truth to be, look at the art. Read the books. Watch the movies. You may not always like what you find but you owe it to yourself to do so.
Anyway, as far the rest of Gung Ho!, it plays out exactly as you would expect. Under the eye of Lt. Commander Thornwald (Randolph Scott), the men train for combat. They visit Pearl Harbor and see the sunken remains of ships that are still smoking after being bombed. And finally, the men fight the Japanese on an island. Some survive. Many more of them die. And the fight continues.
Gung Ho! will probably be best appreciated by fans of war films, which admittedly I am not. That said, it is an interesting time capsule of 1943 America. Plus, it features Robert Mitchum! Admittedly, it’s a small role but he does get two great scenes and … well, he’s Robert Mitchum! How can you not enjoy watching Robert Mitchum?
I recorded WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS way back in June, and haven’t watched it until just recently. It was well worth the wait, for this is one of the finest noirs I’ve seen yet. Director Otto Preminger reunited with the stars of his film LAURA, Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, to give us a bleak crime drama that more than holds its own with the best films noir of the era.
Police Detective Mark Dixon (Andrews) is a proto-Dirty Harry cop, a tough SOB not above laying the smackdown on New York City’s criminal element. Another assault charge leads to Mark being demoted by his superiors. Mark’s got a reason for his brutality tactics, though: his father was a criminal, and he’s psychologically compelled to clean up the corruption in his city.
He’s particularly got a hair across his ass about gambling czar Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill), who was set up in…
Without giving away the film, I haven’t much to say about Disney’s The Jungle Book other than I enjoyed it. Granted, it’s one that’s been done a number of times.
When the trailer for Disney’s The Jungle Book was released, I was happy for it. It was good to see Jon Favreau back to directing bigger productions. After the misstep of Cowboys & Aliens and the success of Chef , it seems like he’s really back on track in a big way. That was my reason for seeing the film this past weekend.
Note that I’ve never seen the Disney Animated Version of The Jungle Book. I can’t really make any comparisons, other than the music, having listened to songs as a kid.
The Jungle Book is the story of Mowgli (newcomer Neel Sethi), a young boy who lives in the jungle and is raised by both a pack of wolves (lead by Lupita Nyong’o and Giancarlo Esposito) & a Panther named Bagheera (Sir Ben Kingsley). Evil rears its ugly head in the form of a Tiger named Shere Khan (Idris Elba), who wishes to have Mowgli killed because he knows how dangerous he can become once grown. Can the pack protect him, or will have have to find a way to save himself? That is pretty much what you need to know about the plot. I felt the movie had a number of comparisons to the Lion King (and even one reference to Return of the Jedi). Still, it manages to move at a good pace. Unlike Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, I didn’t find myself rolling my eyes or counting the minutes until a bathroom break appeared.
Casting in the Jungle Book is pretty good. There’s hardly a cast member out of place, though not everyone is given a great deal of screen time. It is Mowgli’s story, after all. Idris Elba is menacing as Shere Khan. Scarlett Johannson (Chef, Iron Man 2)plays Kaa the Snake and has a song on the score. Bill Murray’s Baloo is cute and cuddly, but the biggest casting surprise has to be Christopher Walken as Big Louie. The film even manages to contain a few musical numbers, though I don’t know if it could be classified as a musical. Those moments are few and far between.
Visually, The Jungle Book is downright beautiful. The animals are rendered so well (in some cases) that one might suspect they had actual animals on hand for a reference or at least some on set. It’s still early, but this is a movie I’d tuck away until the next awards season, at least where the Visual Effects are concerned. The 3-D version of the film has some great moments, but I wouldn’t consider it a requirement to actually see it in this format.
Some elements early in the film may be frightening for the youngest of viewers. Tigers are meant to be scary, so Shere Khan definitely worked for me. The same goes with Kaa and with Louie. Overall, The Jungle Book is set to be a major hit and it’s nice to see Favreau with a directorial win.
The 16th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was 1940’s Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case. It’s about a doctor who investigates a medical case and wow, is it ever a strange case.
Apparently, there was a whole series of Dr. Kildare films that were released in the 30s and 40s. I guess the films were the cinematic equivalent of a TV show like Grey’s Anatomy or ER or Children’s Hospital or… well, every medical show that’s ever shown up on TV since the beginning of time. Dr. James Kildare (Lew Ayres) is a passionate young doctor who may break the rules but he gets results! His mentor is Dr. Gillipsie. Gillipsie is played by Lionel Barrymore and since the character is cranky and confined to a wheelchair, it was impossible for me to watch him without thinking about Mr. Potter from It’s A Wonderful Life. Whenever Kildare went to him for advise, I kept expecting Gillipsie to glare at him and say, “You once called me a warped old man…”
Anyway, Dr. Kildare works in a hospital and, when he’s not silently judging everyone else that he works with, he’s busy silently judging the wealthy Dr. Lane (Sheppard Strudwick), a brain surgeon whose patients keep dying. Kildare and Lane are also both in love with the same nurse, Mary Lamont (Laraine Day). Mary wants to marry Kildare but Kildare would rather be poor and single than compromise his medical principles. Lane, on the other hand, sends her a box full of silk stockings. Plus, he’s rich!
Seriously, how is this even a competition? Forget Kildare and marry Lane!
Except, as I mentioned earlier, all of Lane’s patients keep dying. Is Lane incompetent or, as Kildare suggests, is it possible that brain surgery is just really, really hard? I imagine it was even harder in 1940, when this movie was being made. While Kildare and Lane are operating on brains, Dr. Gillipsie is still using leeches to suck sickness out of the poorer patients.
(You don’t actually see it happen in the movie but Gillipsie comes across as being a leech man.)
Anyway, eventually, Kildare has to cure a schizophrenic and it turns out that he can do this by putting the man into an insulin coma. As is explained in great detail, forcibly putting a patient in a coma will cause that patient’s mind to go back to a reset point. It’s kind of like how Windows sets up a restore point before doing a major update.
And that therapy sounds so crazy that you just know it had to be based in an actual practice. I checked with Wikipedia and I was not shocked to discover that apparently Insulin Shock Therapy used to be a thing!
Anyway, Kildare’s gets into a lot of trouble for putting his patient into a coma and attempting to erase a huge part of his mind. Will Kildare’s results vindicate his methods or will Gillipsie have to use leeches to suck the crazy out of the patient’s brain?
Watch the film to find out! Or don’t. Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case was directed by Harold S. Bucquet, who did a pretty good job with The Adventures of Tartu. His direction here is flat and uninspired, which only serves to make this entire film feel like an old TV show. I’m tempted to recommend the movie just because of the scene where it’s explained that insulin shock therapy causes patients to devolve so that they can re-evolve but otherwise, Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case is forgettable.
If you want to see it, you can watch it below!
Or you can just watch this classic episode of Children’s Hospital!
Let me address the mystery first. Just like with Valentine Ever After, there is something of that nature to discuss. Hearts of Spring premiered on April 9th. I didn’t get around to watching it till April 17th. Even by then, Comcast had already marked it as not available for mobile viewing. I thought that was weird. It also bothered me because it meant that I might not be able to provide you with screenshots. Obviously based on the one above, I found a way. As far as I can tell, Hallmark re-aired the movie a couple of times after the original premiere, but have no showings of it as far out as two weeks at the time of writing this. That’s not normal. I first watched the version on my DVR, which is the version they originally aired. I then dug up a copy to give you screenshots. Luckily, the person must have recorded one of the re-airs so I was able to compare the two. They have a good reason. It has nothing to do with censorship of content in the film. It has nothing to do with people like myself who use screenshots in reviewing their films. I have every reason to believe the movie will reappear on the network. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
Let’s talk about the movie now.
The movie opens up and we meet Carly played by Lisa Whelchel.
We meet her during a montage of her daughter growing up that is supposed to establish her credentials for being able to write a blog about raising children. We are also introduced to her daughter played by Whelchel’s real life daughter Clancy Cauble. Her big worry is that her kid is planning for college. That will be her main problem with her kid. She also has a close friend because this film is all about balancing characters on her end with the same characters on his end. Mom tells her that she can go to a movie without question. Just that she needs to be home by 11.
Now we cut Daniel Jackson played by Michael Shanks. Yes, he’s called Dr. Andy Sommers in this movie. Do you care? He’s Daniel Jackson to me.
He’s here so we can have his son enter the room looking for money because he has blown through his allowance. His dad says no because the kid needs manage his money more responsibly. He sulks off sarcastically saying he learned an important lesson. I sure did. It means that Jackson wants his kid to learn how to manage his money responsibly before going to college, which he gives us no reason to believe he is doing since he mentions parties as a reason for needing more money. What does this mean?
He immediately goes out to the waiting room and gets money from his “fun aunt.” You see that kind of thing in a lot of movies. It lets the main family members teach good parenting lessons, but allows the kids to have a bit of a safety net in relatives who occasionally will slip in to soften the blow.
Now that we have established the kind of parents they are, we need to see that she really does enjoy blogging, but has probably only been doing it for a short time.
She has nothing but kind comments left on her blog. We also find out her blog is called “Parenting From the Soul”. She writes the blog as “Bestie Mom”.
That’s why I am officially announcing that I am no longer writing my blog entries as Valerie Troutman. I am now called The Cinema Friend. She likes that having connections online means she’s not alone. I know how she feels. I have numerous chronic illnesses which leave me all but entirely house bound. Even writing that short sarcastic review I did yesterday took a toll on me, which I won’t mention explicitly otherwise I get anonymous hate in the form of thumbs down for daring to mention that kind of a film during a Hallmark review. Go check out my review of Love On The Sidelines to see when that happened to me. Then go read my review of Angel. It took a couple of days and drained every last bit of energy or health I was clinging too at the time. I’m just saying, I get her love of reaching out to people on the Internet and why she will react the way she does later in the film. I’m also saying Hallmark needs to make more of these movies cause some of their audience doesn’t seem to understand courtesy online. I’ve had numerous people ask me questions on my Hallmark reviews, but have only really had one person actually say thank you for me bending over backwards to help them out. Check out my review of Valentine Ever After and scroll down to the comments section for that person. I won’t bring up the black hole ones. But getting back to the movie.
We see her daughter get home. They have a little mother daughter talk. By that I mean Carly tries talking to her but beeping sound sounds come out of her daughter’s cellphone meaning she needs to leave the room immediately. Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Someone probably just sent her a picture of Logan’s Hacking Screen from Garage Sale Mystery: Guilty Until Proven Innocent, which is why she laughs. I still can’t thank whoever let that slip into the movie enough (no sarcasm intended).
Now we learn the truly dark side of blogging.
If you do it too much then text will appear next to you spelling out your thoughts. I’m only half kidding here. You do it enough and against your will, your mind will start doing this kind of thing. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve finished watching a movie and need to sleep, but can’t stop thinking of how I’m going to write the review. She makes a baseball analogy here so that Jackson can diss her on it later.
Cut to stock footage of a town to I guess show there is a church even though the church they go to is so not the church in the overhead shot.
I couldn’t figure out where this church actually located. I would say it’s obviously in Canada, but after All Yours used an exterior shot taken in Denmark, all bets are off. Inside, Carly’s friend, whose name is Ryder (Miranda Frigon), says that she should attend a bloggers convention so that I can point out a reused set from another Hallmark movie. They also talk about her daughter having registered for classes at a community college so she will stay close to home. She then makes sure Carly knows that when Jackson comes into her life, she shouldn’t just brush him off. She also tells us that Carly’s husband walked out on her a long time ago. Carly tells her it’s not easy meeting new people. That’s not true. She’s got the creepy guy after her soon. We’ll get to him later because now we have to meet Daniel’s own creepy friend and her annoying kid who really is the cause of all this movies’ problems if you think about it.
Fun Aunt, played by Anna Balvin who appears to not exist in IMDb yet, comes in to actually let this annoying lady and her more annoying kid know where Jackson likes to hang out. Thanks, Aunt!
Meanwhile, over at Carly’s Flower Shop,…
which is not the flower shop from Flower Girl. I only mention that because I noticed someone tweeting Hallmark to ask them that question so I answered her myself. She thanked me, which I could have used on my review of 12 Gifts of Christmas when I went out of my way to help someone figure out the music from the film, but instead only found a thumbs down on the review the very next day. Anyways, I know nobody asked, but this is actually Tracycake’s Bakery Cafe at 21594 48 Ave in where else but Langley, British Columbia. Langley and Fort Langley really do seem to be the capital of Hallmark movie production. If I ever go to Canada, then I’ll have to swing by.
The scene inside the place exists to remind us this was made around Spring. It’s like the pink bunny cellphone case from All Yours. We also cut to Jackson’s office to see him going home. They both go home to find that their kids aren’t going to be there for dinner. They go to the park so we can get a humorous little scene where she notices that Jackson doesn’t know how to eat a taco.
Now we cut to-oh, no. Oh, no! Run, Daniel!
After Daniel is done reminding Carly he exists, we cut to the dinner table to introduce the guy who is even weirder than creepy stalker lady with the nightmare child.
Hitched For The Holidays (2012, dir. Michael Scott)
I think this guy has him beat even though he doesn’t come with his own theme music like the foot fetish guy did. That actually was a thing in that movie. They are saying Amen so he starts to sing the word “Amen”. Then he starts hitting on her. Carly’s friend invited him to dinner because she must have had a brain fart. Everyone looks at him like “where the hell did this guy come from?” He also says he hopes she isn’t spending so much time writing her blog that she doesn’t neglect her real duties. What? Doesn’t amount to anything. Oh, but Henry, played by Andy Thompson, makes sure once again that she knows he’s creepy, in case she didn’t already know, by following her home. He sings too! Thank you, Andy! Thank you for selling this performance so well. He helps to provide the comic relief here.
Meanwhile, Daniel is on a date with crazy lady who had brought her kid because otherwise the main plot of this movie might not have come into existence. They went to Porter’s Coffee & Tea House at 21611 48 Ave, Langley, BC. It’s actually just on the other side of the roundabout from where the flower shop is really located.
The kid gives Daniel flashbacks to when the SG-1 team were replaced by robots. Then the mother tells him about Carly’s blog, which apparently advocates a hands-off approach to parenting. He asks for Daniel’s fries, then squirts mustard on him.
After the annoying dinner that Daniel had to suffer through to advance the plot, he goes right home to find Carly’s blog. I disagree that she should change her name to Beastie Mom as he suggests, but I do love the user name he goes with.
Forget what I said before, I am now officially JugglingCelluloid. He kind of vents about what happened at dinner because of a lady who needs to find a compromise between Carly and Daniel’s parenting styles in order to handle her child. By the way, that’s about the whole movie in one sentence. Of course Carly is new to the Internet so she actually tries picking a fight with Daniel instead of just deleting the comment. In fact, she’s quite satisfied with herself about it.
That’s enough plot for the moment cause we need more creepy.
I think the preacher at the church is saying something, but who cares? The characters sure don’t. This is where we find out the daughter doesn’t want to go to college first, but just travel. She suggests going to Africa or Indonesia.
Carly’s friend now tells her that Daniel’s advice isn’t the worst in the world. Carly’s friend tries to tell her that if she doesn’t want her daughter to go away, then to put her foot down. She says she wants to stick to the way she has always done things. By that she means trying to be her daughter’s best friend. Hence her screen name.
You’ve got the plot now. Let’s hit the high points.
They obviously run into each other because we need them to bicker online while getting close in real life. Then we get a great split screen.
I love this because they do it in a way that makes it look like they are sharing the same room going back and forth how to handle their kids like they’re a married couple. It was a nice touch. They continue to get closer including returning to the taco scene earlier, but she teaches him how to do it without the taco falling apart. Then daughter notices Daniel’s comment on her blog.
Good advice. It’s a nice compromise. Now we just need to sell it to Carly and get Daniel to calm down when it comes to his son.
We go to the Mommy Blogger Convention being held at the beginning of I Do, I Do, I Do.
I Do, I Do, I Do (2015, dir. Ron Oliver)
Creepy guy!
The rest is what you expect, so let’s jump to the almost end of nearly every Hallmark movie. At this point Carly and Daniel are at his place and she bumps his computer, which turns on, so she can discover JugglingDad is him.
The way they get over the romantic speed bump this time is because Carly’s daughter gets sick for the sake of the plot. It really does come out of nowhere. Daniel also happens to be at the hospital so he is the one to treat her. They now both have a heart to heart with their kids. Their kids also finally stand up to them to tell their parents what they really need from them. Carly and Daniel both understand.
Creepy guy again!
Now Daniel gives an apologetic speech about something and who cares? What really matters is that crazy mom and crazy guy have finally found each other.
Daniel and Carly now walk out, and the credits roll.
Also, for people on Twitter, here’s the mint chocolate chip milkshake.
For people who came looking for the songs, I’m sorry, but they didn’t include them in the credits. I refer you to my instructions for figuring this stuff out at the end of my review of Valentine Ever After.
For people who would like my final thoughts on the film. Yes, we have seen this plot a few times in past year from Hallmark (and as far back as The Shop Around The Corner (1940) in general). This is probably the one I enjoyed the most. Yeah, I’m a big fan of Michael Shanks’ work on Stargate SG-1. I’m a little biased. To my knowledge, there were other actors from it in here, but I didn’t notice them. I never watched The Facts of Life, but Lisa Whelchel was good here too. It’s simple, they balanced the characters well, the actors who played their kids did a good job, and I liked this version of the same plot better than the others. Catch it when it shows up again.
The 15th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was The Adventures of Tartu, a British film from 1943.
The Adventures of Tartu opens during the Blitz and follows Captain Terrence Stevenson (Robert Donat), a British explosives expert, as he defuses an unexploded German bomb in the ruins of London. He does it without breaking a sweat or showing the least bit of hesitation. With his clipped accent and his perfectly trimmed mustache, he’s a British hero through and through. He’s so perfectly British that you expect him to start singing the entire score of H.M.S. Pinafore. He’s the epitome of unflappable resilience.
And he’ll need all of that resilience to survive his next mission! It turns out that, as British as he may seem, Captain Stevenson was originally born in Romania and is still fluent in both his native language and German. Because of this, MI6 recruits him to parachute back into Romania, which is now under the control of the Nazis. Stevenson will assume the identity of a recently assassinated Nazi chemist, Jan Tartu. As Tartu, he will then make his way to Czechoslovakia where a member of the resistance will arrange for Stevenson to get a job at a secret Nazi chemical factory. Stevenson will destroy the factory from within.
Unfortunately, Stevenson’s contact is arrested before he can arrange for job to be assigned to Stevenson. When Stevenson (now pretending to be Tartu) arrives in Czechoslovakia, he is instead assigned to work in a munitions factory. In order to eventually win assignment to the chemical factory, Stevenson now has to win the trust of the Nazis without losing the trust of the resistance. That turns out to be more than a little difficult because, as Stevenson quickly discovers, he is now living in a world where no one can be trusted and everyone is paranoid.
(In one of the film’s best sequences, Stevenson is captured by a group of men and struggles to figure out whether he is now a prisoner of the resistance or a prisoner of the Gestapo.)
I’m not going to go into too many other details, beyond saying that The Adventures of Tartu is an effective and twist-filled work of wartime propaganda. What’s interesting is that when the film starts, it almost feels a bit comedic. Stevenson is so extremely British and the initial Nazis that he meets are so extremely buffoonish that it’s hard to take them seriously. But, as the film progresses, it gets more and more serious. In order to accomplish his mission, Stevenson is forced to make some difficult decisions and likable characters suffer as a result. As Stevenson himself spends more time with the Nazis, both he and the viewer discover just how evil they truly are. (Technically, the viewer should already know that the Nazis were evil but it must be remembered that The Adventures of Tartu was made during World War II, at a time when it was still difficult to get accurate information about what was happening in Nazi-occupied Europe.) By the end of the movie, the Nazis are still buffoons but it’s impossible to laugh at them.
I imagine that wartime audiences left The Adventures of Tartu feeling even more committed to destroying the Nazi regime. Meanwhile, modern audiences will watch The Adventures of Tartu and, once again, be reminded of how fortunate we are that the Allies won the war.
The 18th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was 1946’s The Chase, which turned out to be a pretty nifty little film noir. Did I actually just use the word nifty in a film review? Yes, I did but then again, everyone should use the word “nifty” at least once in their lives.
Remember how, in the 1990s, every aspiring indie director tried to rip off Quentin Tarantino by making a gangster film that mixed graphic violence with quirky dialogue, dark comedy, and obscure pop cultural references? That led to a lot of terrible movies but not a single one (not even Amongst Friends) was as terrible as Mad Dog Time.
