Tag Archives: Buster Crabbe

Gun Brothers (1956, directed by Sidney Salkow)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In this western, Buster Crabbe plays Chad Santee, a former Calvary officer who has traveled to Wyoming so he can visit his brother Jubal (Neville Brand) and see Jubal’s ranch.  Traveling by stagecoach, Chad meets and falls in love with a saloon singer named Rose Fargo (Ann Robinson).  When the stagecoach is held up by outlaws and one of them steals Rose’s broach, Chad decides to track the outlaws down.  What Chad doesn’t know is that Jubal is one of those outlaws.

Gun Brothers is an entertaining B-western.  There’s nothing surprising about the story but Buster Crabbe is a believable hero and Ann Robinson gets a chance to show off her saloon singing skills.  Neville Brand steals the film as Jubal.  Before going into acting, Brand was a highly decorated World War II combat officer and he brought his real-life toughness to every role that he played.  He could throw a punch and shoot a gun with an authority that few other actors could match.  Jubal, like Brand, has obviously seen and experienced things that his self-righteous brother will never be able to understand and, as a result, he’s not as tied down to the laws of society as everyone else.   Also turning in good performances are Michael Ansara as an outlaw and Lita Milan, as a Native American woman who is involved with the gang.

Not surprisingly, for a B-western, Gun Brothers is full of characters with names like Shawnee Jack, Yellowstone Kelly, Blackjack Silk, and Moose McClain.  It’s a simple movie but one that will be enjoyed by fans of old fashioned western action.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: The Alien Dead (dir by Fred Olen Ray)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This 1978 film takes place in Florida.

No, not in Miami.  Not Jacksonville.  Not Ft. Lauderdale.  Certainly not Orlando.  No, this film takes place off the back roads of Florida, where people are honest country folk and some folks live in a houseboat and you should always be careful when walking around the bayous because there might be some alligators lurkin’ about.  Of course, in this part of Florida, they call them gators.  Anyone who says alligator obviously thinks they’re too good for downhome country living.

Anyway, it turns out that there’s more to worry about in Florida then just alligators.  There’s also the chance that your houseboat might get struck by a meteor.  And then, everyone on the houseboat might be transformed into a zombie and, after they’ve eaten all the alligators, they might start eating all the humans.

When a sudden zombie outbreak occurs, you have to hope that you’ll get a good law enforcement response.  Unfortunately, law enforcement in these parts means an elderly sheriff and a bearded deputy who is always trying to catch a peek of the local women skinny dipping.  The sheriff, by the way, is played by Buster Crabbe.  In the 20s and 30s, Crabbe was an champion swimmer who won Olympic medals and went on to play Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers.  At the height of his popularity, he was known as “the King of the Serials.”  In The Alien Dead, the 70-something Crabbe plays Sheriff Kowalski and, if nothing else, it seems like he was enjoying himself.  Really, that’s important thing when it comes to a movie like this.

The Alien Dead is an extremely-cheap looking film and, with the exception of Crabbe, none of the actors appear to have done much before or after appearing in The Alien Dead.  There are some scenes that are so dark that it’s next to impossible to actually tell what’s going on.  Despite being a rather short film, the pace is still slow and there are certain scenes that seem to drag on forever.  There’s a lot of perfectly valid criticisms that one can make about The Alien Dead.

But you know what?

I like the film.

Seriously, in a strange way, the film actually does work.  Yes, the acting is pretty bad and the dialogue is often rather clunky and the plot doesn’t make sense and blah blah blah.  Those are all true facts.  But, there are isolated moments where The Alien Dead achieves a dream-like intensity.  For instance, there’s a lengthy scene where the zombies attack and all of the action is shown in slow motion.  I realize that may have been done to pad the film’s running time but strangely enough, it works.  Even more oddly, the film’s cheap gore effects add to the movie’s already dream-like feel. Finally, if nothing else, the film captures the humid atmosphere of the Florida bayou.  Watching the film, you can feel the sweat and hear the buzzing of mosquitos.  At its best, The Alien Dead works as a piece of outsider art.

Finally, The Alien Dead is one of those films that had been released and re-released a few times on video.  As you can see below, one of those releases was apparently inspired by the success of Evil Dead.

A Move A Day #190: The Contender (1944, directed by Sam Newfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Gary Farrell (Buster Crabbe) is a widowed truck driver who wants his son to have a better life than his old man.  Good luck pulling that off on a salary of $45 a week.  Gary enters a boxing tournament, just hoping to win enough money to pay for his son to go to military school.  But, under the tutelage of veteran trainer Pop Turner (Milton Kibbee), Gary becomes a real contender.  He also becomes a first class heel, turning his back on his old, honest lifestyle and getting involved with fast-living socialite, Rita London (Julie Gibson).  Can Gary’s friends and newspaper reporter Linda Martin (Arline Judge) get Gary to see the error of his ways?

The Contender, which is in the public domain and can be viewed at the Internet archive, is a typical poverty row production, with all the expected boxing clichés.  Gary’s initial rise is just as predictable as his downfall and eventual redemption.  For fans of Buster Crabbe, though, it is a chance to see Crabbe playing someone other than Tarzan, Flash Gordon, or Buck Rogers.  (Crabbe was the only actor to play all three of these roles over the course of his long career.  He also appeared as Billy the Kid in several westerns.)  Though he was a swimmer and not a boxer, Crabbe’s natural athleticism made him a good pick for the role of Gary.  Julie Gibson is sexy and fun as the bad girl and be sure to keep an eye out for Glenn Strange, who plays Gary’s best friend.  Just as Crabbe was forever typecast as Flash Gordon, Strange will always be remembered for replacing Boris Karloff in the role of Frankenstein’s Monster.

The Fabulous Forties #25: Jungle Man (dir by Harry L. Fraser)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

 

40s

About a month ago, for reasons that I’m sure made sense at the time, I decided it would be fun to watch and review all 50 of the films included in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set.  If you know anything Mill Creek box sets, then you won’t be surprised to learn that the majority of these 50 films are public domain B-movies.  A few of them have been good, a few of them have been bad, and a few of them have been forgettable.

I have to admit that, as much as I love watching old movies, there’s a part of me that’s more than ready to move onto the next Mill Creek box set, the Nifty Fifties.  But, before I do that, I have to finish up the Forties.  Fortunately, I just watched the 25th film included in the Fabulous Forties and I am happy to say that I am now halfway done with this project!  Yay!

As for the film itself, it’s a 63-minute film from 1941.  Though it was later retitled Drums of Africa, it was originally called Jungle Man.

Jungle Man

As for what Jungle Man is about … well, it’s mostly about stock footage.

There is kind of a plot.  Wealthy Bruce (Weldon Heyburn) and his friend Alex (Robert Carson) want to go to Africa so that they can see the legendary City of the Dead.  Bruce’s fiancée, Betty (Sheila Darcy), decides to accompany them because she wants to visit her brother (Charles Middleton), a missionary.  Once they get to Africa, they also meet a doctor (Buster Crabbe) who is trying to find a cure for a fever that is wiping out the native population.

But really, the plot is mostly just an excuse for stock footage.  We watch as our explorers walk down a jungle trail.  Someone says, “Look up in that tree!”  We cut to grainy footage of a monkey in a tree.  Cut back to everyone looking upward.  Cut back to that monkey in the tree.  Suddenly, we hear a roar on the soundtrack.  Cut to slightly less grainy footage of a tiger running through a field.  Cut back to the explorers saying, “Look out, tiger!”  Cut back to the monkey climbing up higher in the tree.

(Of course, tigers don’t live in Africa but that’s just the type of film this is!)

Even when our heroes finally reach the City of the Dead, we don’t actually see them walking around the city.  Instead, we see them staring into the distance and then immediately cut to some still shots of what Wikipedia identifies as being Cambodia’s Angkor Wat.  Of course, no attempt is really made to match any of the shots.  If Jungle Man was made today, they could just CGI the Hell out of it.  But since it was made in 1941, audiences had to suspend their disbelief and accept shots that didn’t particularly match up with any other shots and a storyline that was pretty much determined by whatever stock footage the producers had available.

On the plus side, it’s only 60 minutes long and some of the stock footage is fun, particularly if you like cute monkeys or fierce tigers.  For the most part, it’s silly but inoffensive.

And you can watch it below!

(I should admit that, as I watched it, I kept thinking about those GEICO commercials where Jane and Tarzan are lost in the jungle and Tarzan refuses to ask for directions.  “Tarzan know where Tarzan go.”  “No, Tarzan does not know where Tarzan go.  Excuse me, do you know where the waterfall is?  The waterfall?”)