3-D Thursday: Jaws 3-D (1983)

I've never considered myself a particularly fussy or uptight movie watcher. As such, there are certain movies that I know are utterly terrible movies but that I absolutely love to watch. For instance, Ed Wood's notorious Glen or Glenda is pure movie crack cocaine, a movie so utterly confused as to what it's actually about that you after a while you just go along for the ride. Robot Monster is another one that you just watch in utter disbelief but can't help yourself in your daffy enjoyment. Face it, you know it to be true. I mention this as my segue in discussing Jaws 3-D, a movie that I know is a stinker but I'd buy it on 3D Blu Ray in a heartbeat.

I'm not convinced Jaws 3-D is quite as bad as the two movies I mentioned above. I do know that the movie has it's detractors and yes, there is quite a lot wrong with the movie. It's science is, at best, fishy if not quite as bad as the pun I just made. It's special effects are hilariously awful. It's story is utter nonsense and I'm not sure the dialogue is intended to be half as funny as it often is. So, yes, this is a bad movie. Like Amityville 3-D, it even made Siskel and Ebert's Worst of 1983 list, which as I pointed out last week is just silly. There were far worse movies in 1983. Siskel and Ebert just didn't see them. I, of course, did. Some of them have perhaps permanently traumatized me, too.

But despite everything that is wrong with the movie, I think it's a great movie. Okay, not great in the sense of Casablanca great. But great as in the sense of being a fun time at the movies, so long as you can check your brain at the door, which I happily do. And seriously, not everything needs to be Citizen Kane.

For this outing, the shark causes full blown chaos at Sea World. Now, I know the real Sea World is landlocked, so how could a Great White Shark invade Sea World, but I didn't know this in 1983, so I went with it then and I still do. Maybe this is another Sea World that's closer to the ocean. Don't know, don't care. Like Revenge of the Creature did for Marineland in 1955, this film acts as something of an infomercial for Sea World. A weird infomercial whose message apparently is "see the wonders of Sea World and get eaten by a 35 foot Great White Shark", but an infomercial all the same.

Working at Sea World as an engineer is Chief Brody's oldest son Mike, now played by a young Dennis Quaid. Younger brother Sean (John Putch) comes to visit from college. It should be noted that Brody's kids apparently had whatever disease most kids in soap operas have where one day they're eight, the next their 32. I say this since in the first Jaws Mike was 10 and Sean was about five, in the second one released 3 years later Mike is 18 and Sean is 10 and in this one, released a mere 8 years after the first one and five years after the second, they're both in their 20s.

Mike, for his part, is dating marine biologist Dr. Kathryn Morgan (Bess Armstrong) and Sean hooks up with Sea World entertainer Kelly Ann Bukowski (Lea Thompson in her debut film). All is happiness until a shark invades the Sea World lagoon and kills a worker. Mike and Kay go looking for the worker and find a shark, a mere 10 footer.

Big game hunter Phillip FitzRoyce (Simon MacCorkindale) wants to kill the shark, but Kathryn convinces Sea World owner Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett, Jr., fresh from An Officer and a Gentlemen) to capture it and put it on display instead. Since Bouchard is a well meaning but somewhat greedy clod, he moves the captured shark too soon--hilariously putting it in what looks like the type of display you'd expect to see otters in, not sharks--and ends up killing it. Then the worker's body turns up and everyone finds out they have a much bigger problem at hand--namely a 35 foot long shark.

One of the biggest problems with the film is bad science. I know, a lot of horror/fantasy/sci-fi films have bad science. You can't see explosions in space, DNA breaks down after 500 years, most movie monsters would be crushed by their own weight, etc. Movies like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Godzilla could never happen in anyone's lifetime. I'm fine with that. But sharks don't roar or growl. They also don't swim backwards. This one does both. Mind, it's growl isn't as silly as the shark in Jaws: The Revenge, but that's another blog post altogether. They still don't do that. And it's pretty silly to see.

But what does one expect from a movie with lines like "You tell Shelby Overman for me he can take a flyin' leap in a rollin' doughnut on a gravel driveway, you hear?" or "You talking about some damn shark's mother?". Or my favorite: "Get some lights down there! And get some shit down there! And get some medical attention". Yes, the dialogue's a pip. The script is credited to Richard Matheson and Howard Gottlieb, but I find it hard to believe either one of them was responsible for dialogue like that.  I mean, maybe they were. But one guy wrote for The Twilight Zone and the other wrote the original Jaws and neither one of those had such ridiculous lines.

Going hand in hand with the dialogue are the performances. Quaid, Armstrong, Putch, and Thompson are fairly sincere and actually pretty good. MacCorkindale and Gossett, however, are all over the place. Gossett actually gets two out of the three quotes in the previous paragraph and he's hysterically funny saying them. No, he doesn't get the "flyin' leap in a rollin' doughnut" line. That would have been awesome, though.

Actually, the acting is probably the best of any of the 80s 3D movies. Oh, sure, there's some bad performances--I defy you not to laugh at the wooden boat driver at the beginning of the film--but overall people seem to try. Dennis Quaid may well hate this movie now, but he's mostly decent in it. Indeed, the relationships between Quaid and Armstrong and Putch and Thompson are fairly strong and interesting enough that you kind of end up wishing the four actors got a chance to do it again in a non-shark film.

As to the shark...well, none of the Jaws films had a particularly realistic looking shark. After all, the joke in Back to the Future II is "the shark still looks fake". The first film has the best looking of the sharks. But by this time, the studio wasn't willing to invest as much in making it look good. Think of the 1970s Planet of the Apes movies where the apes go from being well done make up to Halloween masks. The shark, especially the 35 footer, looks pretty ridiculous in this. And the 10 footer's head contracts into it's body when it hits the gate in one scene. Of course, as bad as all that is, it's nothing compared to the shot in the underwater tunnel where the studio forgot to fill in the green screen. That's a shot that needs to be seen to be believed.

After all this, you may be wondering why in the world I actually like this movie. Well, it partly has to do with nostalgia. Jaws 3-D was the first 3D movie I got to see in the movies. I was 12 when this came out and, in fact, it's the only one of the 1980s 3D films I saw in the theater on first run. So I have a bit of warm spot for it. I still remember sitting there and during the film's opening scene when a severed fish head floats out of the screen, a stoned guy in the back of the theater shouted "it's coming at you, man!". That, for me, was movie magic.

I recently got to see it again in 3D on the big screen at the World 3-D Film Expo III and loved it all over again. The 3D is actually mostly decent. There's a couple of shots--one in particular of a crab underwater--where you feel like your eyeballs are being ripped out of your head. But overall, the effect is not bad. And the movie thankfully doesn't succumb to overly silly 3D effects like straws and popcorn. That's not to say there aren't effects just thrown in there for being effects. All the 80s films had that. But at least these effects had more to do with the setting. The most gratuitous is when some teenage girls take a tour of the The Undersea Kingdom and various animatronic characters reach out of the screen. Gossett, Armstrong, and Thompson were all supposed to attend the showing, but all three mysteriously got work right before the showing. Hmm...

Still, I think Jaws 3-D is the best 3D movie of the 80s. It's goofy fun, sometimes funny, and definitely worth the trip in 3D. I won't watch it in 2D, but I'm that way with most 3D movies anyhow.  Universal truly needs to release this on 3D Blu Ray and they need to release it now.

Like I said, not everything needs to be Citizen Kane. Some things can  be Jaws 3-D or Robot Monster. And they should be, too.

Serial Saturday: Perils of the Wildernesss (1956)

In 1946, Universal Studios abandoned making cliffhanger serials with a production called The Mysterious Mr. M. The official word was that they were trying to upgrade their image, but it seems just as likely that they realized that the format couldn't go on for much longer. Indeed, shrinking budgets, competition from television and a total refusal to evolve seemed to doom serials and within 10 years, the last serials were released. Republic Studios, the studio that put out the most popular if not the best serials of the sound era, jumped ship in 1955 with the ultra-lackluster King of the Carnival. This left Columbia Pictures, the last of the big three of the sound era, releasing serials and they finally ended in 1956.

Perils of the Wilderness is the next to last of the Columbia serials and it's a complete mess. While it's true that all four of Columbia's final four serials show an appalling lack of effort on the part of the studio, this one may well be the most lackluster of the four. That took some doing on the studio's part, too, considering the existence of The Adventures of Captain Africa.

The serial's first major problem is that there is no discernible storyline to it. The villain (frequent 3 Stooges baddie Kenneth MacDonald) is riling up the local Indians, but we're never actually sure why. It may be because he's smuggling something, but what that something is we're not told. It may be because he wants to stop the railroad, but that's not clear, either. About the only thing we know for certain is that he appears to be a fugitive hiding out in Canada and being hunted by a U.S. Marshal. A Marshal that happens to be way out of his jurisdiction, but that's beside the point. The Marshal is sort of working with the Mounties, but not entirely. The Marshal, for his part, keeps trying to be undercover and joining the gang, but then he openly fights them, so his plans to join them don't work out.

To make matters even more confusing, we have no idea when exactly this is all supposed to be taking place. In one scene we see people flying hydroplanes, an invention of which not only are the Mounties aware of, they have a couple of their own. But then in the next scene, the Indians are attacking covered wagons taking supplies to the railroad camp. Wait, what?!

If all of that isn't convincing enough, then consider the fact that most of every chapter is stock footage from earlier serials, most notably Perils of the Royal Mounted.  How much stock footage is there? Well, let me put it this way: know those 3 Stooges shorts made with Shemp after his death? The ones that have 3 or 4 new shots per short and the rest of the short is stock? That's a pretty close description. Mind you, that can describe most new serials released in the 1950s, but at least most of them almost made sense. Even The Adventures of Captain Africa, bad as it was, almost made a modicum amount of sense. This one, the footage is so haphazard, one just keeps watching hoping to figure it all out in the end. It's like watching an Ed Wood movie without the loony fun. Pretty sad.

Actually, I find the whole end of the serial era to be fairly depressing. Never mind the sheer amount of stock footage cobbled together whether or not it makes any sense. Nobody puts any effort into any of these. The actors look either bored or like they'd really rather be anywhere else but here. Even the ones like this that managed to get a couple of veteran characters actors couldn't muster anything approaching entertainment value. It's not that Kenneth MacDonald or Dennis Moore (this serial's hero) could give Cary Grant a run for the money in the acting department. But these guys were dependable character actors who, in days past, gave the audience their money's worth. They showed enthusiasm and were fun to watch. Neither actor is even remotely fun to watch in this. I'd say they were going through the motions, but they don't even do that.  The only thing that keeps Perils of the Wilderness from being the worst serial ever made is the existence of couple of Independent serials from the 1930s that somehow manage to be even worse. Now that's a scary thought.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road Part II: The Rainbow Road To Oz

This is the story of the Oz movie that was never made. It is the story of a movie that could have changed movie history but was doomed from the start. It is the story of The Rainbow Road To Oz.

In the mid 1930s Walt Disney started looking for a follow up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A lifelong fan of the Baum books, he tried to get his brother Roy to obtain the rights to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to do as an animated film. But MGM had just bought the rights, deciding to do the film ironically enough due to the success of Snow White.

It took until 1954 for Disney to get the film rights to the Oz books. He ended up with the rights to 12 of the books, including The Patchwork Girl of Oz which became the first Oz project he decided on. Apparently the initial plan was to do it as a two part episode of the Disneyland TV show. TV writer Dorothy Cooper was hired to adapt the book. But when she finally turned in her script, Disney was so impressed with it he decided to do it as a feature film instead. Bill Walsh, producer of The Mickey Mouse Club, was given the job of Producer and Sidney Miller was slated for Director. As for the cast, it was decided that the Mouseketeers would play the characters. As a test, a ten minute segment was to be performed on September 11, 1957 on the fourth season opening of Disneyland. The segment would consist of a couple of the proposed numbers from the film and the kids in costume.

The episode, which is on DVD, starts with Disney explaining the history of the filming of Peter and the Wolf, followed by a showing of the short itself. Afterwards, as Walt is about to introduce a segment from Fantasia, Cubby O'Brien and a couple of the other kids invade his office and drag him off to the Mouseketeer Stage. There they celebrate the third anniversary of the opening of the Disneyland theme park by singing songs extolling the park's greatness. Then they hand him the script for The Rainbow Road To Oz and try pitching the film to him with them in the parts. Yes, the conceit of the segment was that they pitch it to Disney when in reality, he had been behind the idea the whole time.

After showing him sketches of the Scarecrow and the Patchwork Girl, Doreen Tracey (as the Patchwork Girl) and Bobby Burgess (in full Scarecrow makeup) do a number called "Patches". As a number, it's vaguely okay. Nothing particularly memorable, but nothing mind numbingly repulsive either. But Doreen and Bobby sing it well and actually look pretty great. It's a shame the footage is in black and white because I would have looked to have seen what the Patchwork Girl looked like in full color.  Unfortunately, the choreography comes off as fairly bland and Bobby himself is no Ray Bolger. That may not sound very fair to Bobby, but he sort of tries to do a little bit of Bolger's shtick but doesn't go as far with it as he perhaps should.

After the number is done, a couple of more sketches are shown, mostly notably of Ozma, to be played by Annette Funicello. What follows is an odd musical number called The Oz-Kan Hop. Let me put it this way: it's no Over The Rainbow. Come to it, it may not be as good as The Lollipop Guild number. Consider that for a moment. How bad does a song have to be to be not as good as one of the most hated sequences of the 1939 film? Pretty bad.

Darlene Gillepsie (who has been making most of the pitch to Disney during the skit) gets to play Dorothy and she looks okay in the part and really puts some enthusiasm into it. I actually wonder how she would have fared if the movie had gotten made. Annette looks fine as Ozma but doesn't do much in the sequence but stand around and look pretty. Overall, the choreography is better than in the "Patches" sequence, but the number is so bad that tends to cancel out the good will.

When this number is over, Walt tells the kids that he gives in and they'll get to do the picture. In response, the cast sings the best number yet, The Rainbow Road To Oz, in front of and on top of a giant prop cake. It is the one number that almost could have justified the whole project.

After the show, however, Disney backed off of the movie. To this day, nobody knows for certain, though at least three theories have been put forward. One has it that Walt thought the Mouseketeers couldn't sustain an entire feature film. Sure, they were on TV five days a week and had appeared in a 3D short for the Disneyland theme park, but a multi-million dollar film? That's a bit of a gamble that Walt might not have been prepared to take.

The second theory suggests that as he watched the sketches, he had a feeling that the songs weren't as strong as the ones in the original film. Truth to tell, they really aren't. Hand in hand with this is the fact that Bill Walsh apparently rewrote Cooper's screenplay to Disney's dissatisfaction.

The third and final theory has to do with CBS airing the 1939 movie on a yearly basis. They had just started in 1956 and it is believed that Disney didn't want or think he could compete with that. Personally, I suspect it's a combination of all three myself.

Disney turned to another fantasy property, a version of Victor Herbert's Babes In Toyland, for his first foray into live action musicals. This film had Annette as Mary Mary Quite Contrary and, in what seems to be a nod to Oz, Ray Bolger as the villainous Barnaby. Ironically, this film gets compared from time to time with the 1934 version that had Laurel and Hardy. And not positively compared at that.

It would take 28 years after the Disneyland broadcast for Walt Disney Studios to finally get an Oz project on the big screen. When they did, it was quite different from the one Uncle Walt had in mind.

3-D Thursday: Amityville 3-D (1983)

Amityville 3-D holds the distinction of being the last of the major 3D releases of the 1980s. A few more independent films limped out in 1984 and 1985, but this November 1983 release was the effective end of the road for the process for nearly 20 years (a couple of minor 1990s releases notwithstanding).

It also holds the distinction of being on Siskel & Ebert's Worst of 1983 list. I'm not entirely convinced I agree with that distinction, however. After all, 1983 also gave us The Man Who Wasn't There and Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn, both of which threaten to make this film look like Casablanca.

The funny thing about this is the fact that, like so many other bad movies, one watches Amityville 3-D and is left wondering just how it went so wrong. It shouldn't be as bad as it is. It has a decent enough cast, a pretty good idea for the story, and the director of such classics as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fantastic Voyage, and Tora! Tora! Tora!. Despite all this, the film manages to lay an absurdly sour egg.

The story has magazine journalist John Baxter (Woody Allen alumni Tony Roberts) buying the Amityville Horror house. As he makes his career debunking hoaxes, he doesn't believe in the stories about the house. So far so good. I can dig a guy with cajones buying up a haunted house. Of course it doesn't take long for weird stuff to happen and people to start dying. Baxter, for his part, just blows it all off.

The Realtor who sold him the place dies in the house? Happens all the time!
Baxter's photographer partner Melanie gets attacked by the house and later is burned to a crisp in her car? Mere coincidence!
Baxter's daughter drowns after a séance where the house threatens her? It's tragic, but what can you do? That's life!

Sheesh, is this guy boneheaded! In fact, Baxter is hilariously boneheaded even after he's attacked in an elevator. Me? I would have been suspicious after the realtor, concerned after the elevator, and convinced after my photographer died. But then, I'm not the victim of bad screenwriting.

The script is just one of the frustrating things about this film. There seem to be two types of people in this movie: stupid people and whiney people. As stupid as Baxter comes across, it can't beat the stupidity of paranormal investigator Eliot West (Robert Joy). This genius decides that the best way to save Loughlin's spirit from the demon in the well is to lean near the well and, when he sees the demon coming up yell to her spirit to save herself. That's it. Naturally, the demon gets him instead. Good plan, there, bub. Didn't think to bring any holy water or anything, did you?

While it's true that none of the 1980s 3D movies are what you would traditionally call "good movies", this one should have been. Besides Roberts and Joy, Candy Clark plays Melanie, Lori Loughlin is the daughter, and Meg Ryan her best (only?) friend. Yes, that Meg Ryan. So this isn't exactly the cast of a Friday the 13th movie. I know, I know. Someone is going to point out that some of those movies have good casts. They don't. What they usually have is one or two (if that) good actors and a bunch of nobodies. This cast isn't a bunch of nobodies. They're a good cast doing a lousy job.

The only one who almost acquits herself is Loughlin and she doesn't get much to do. Even worse, almost all of her scenes are with Ryan, who is embarrassingly bad here. How bad is Ryan? Her performance has all the subtlety of a nuclear explosion. It's bizarre to think that by the end of the decade she'd being doing movies like When Harry Met Sally. Watching her here, however, you would swear she was never going to be anybody.

You can almost excuse those two, however, since they actually were nobodies at the time. Candy Clark, on the other hand, had been in American Graffiti ten years earlier, so she has no excuse. She starts out okay but as the film goes on her performance gets steadily worse. Her next to last scene, where Roberts tries to find out what happened to her in the house is so bad it's painful. Her death by spontaneous combustion scene is so over the top ridiculous as to be unintentionally funny.

Roberts ex-wife is played by an exceedingly shrill Tess Harper. Literally, all she seems to do is whine her way through the part. In fact, she is so annoying, you actually wish she was in the car with Clark when it goes up in flames.

As far as Roberts goes, he plays Baxter in such a blasé manner as to defy belief. You would think that an actor who worked with Al Pacino and Woody Allen would be able to bring some life to his character. But he doesn't, which makes it impossible to feel anything for him but contempt for being so stupid and banal a character. Not good for an actor who has to carry a whole movie. It's like watching a Friday the 13th movie where the character stands by the open door screaming while Jason slowly walks over to them instead of running like hell. They literally deserve what they get.

True, it's not necessarily the fault of any of the actors as the characters themselves are written that way. But the fact that none of these people--except for Ryan who goes way over the top--can make their characters the least bit interesting damns the whole project. And Ryan isn't interesting, she's just goofy and over the top.

Director Richard Fleischer had worked in 3D 30 years earlier with a movie called Arena, so he was better qualified to work with the process than any other director of an 80s 3D movie. He knows plenty about depth and it shows since the depth in the movie is fantastic, far better than most 3D movies today. But the film suffers from what all 80s 3D movies seem to suffer from: so many gimmick shots that many of them are just plain silly. Clark's charred corpse is pretty effective but it's hard to take a movie seriously that spits straws and Frisbees at you. Especially when the Frisbee effect is handled pretty clumsily. Still, if you have a 3D TV and are going to watch this movie, the 3D Blu Ray is the way to go.

In the end, Amityville 3-D ends up being only moderately better than most of it's contemporaries. This, Jaws 3-D, and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone remain the best of the 80s 3D movies. But that's not really saying much.

Though I will give the movie this: there is at least one effectively creepy scene in the movie. Harper is in the house and she sees a very wet (and silent) Loughlin walking up the steps. She follows her right up to the attic and gets the door slammed on her. What she doesn't know is that outside at that very moment, Roberts and some paramedics are trying desperately to revive the already dead girl. It's a well done sequence which shows what the movie could have done with a little more effort. Shame there weren't more scenes like it.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road Part I: The Wizard of Oz

A week and a half ago a friend of mine and I went to see Warner's limited release of The Wizard of Oz in Imax 3D. I had heard it was a great 3D conversion and wanted to see it for myself. It was, but more on that later.

The theater had a decent crowd, including a lot of little kids. In fact, sitting next to us was a mother with two little ones no older than three or four years old I would guess. My friend surmised that it might have been the little ones' first time seeing the movie, a thought that is pretty cool. Looking back, I wish my first experience with Oz was in the movies.

It's a curious thing, however. When I was a kid, I turned against Oz. You see, though I religiously watched it for a few years, round about the time I was ten The Dukes of Hazzard was on and it was my favorite show. They took it off one Friday night for Oz and I got so mad that for years afterwards I refused to watch the movie. Funny thing is, I can't stand The Dukes of Hazzard now. Trying to watch it now, it feels like my brain will implode and my childhood will be ripped asunder. But Oz? I happily rediscovered it in my 20s.

It was at a theatrical showing, a one night only thing at a theater known as The Ritz (very classy theater in Philly, btw). It was a packed house. In fact, I was one of the last six people admitted. I ended up in the third row right by the wall. But as I watched the movie that night, I was blown away by what I saw. I finally got it. And I felt kinda stupid for turning against the movie fifteen years earlier, especially for something as awful as The Dukes. I'll say it now. As a kid, I had rotten taste in movies and TV for the most part. Rotten.

I've seen Oz twice on the big screen since then, the most recent being the Imax showing. I know some people are upset about this most recent release, calling it a desecration of a classic motion picture. It isn't, folks. The 3D, in fact, merely adds to the wonder of the movie. It's very well handled. Not overdone, but with some good layers of depth and a couple--but not too many--pop outs. In fact, if you didn't know the movie was shot flat, you might well mistake it for being a movie shot in 3D. Almost. As good as it looks--and it looks great--it does highlight one of the problems with 3D conversions. Which is that there isn't quite as much depth as one might get with a native shot 3D film. The biggest highlight of this problem is during Munchkinland. Apparently the computers used to convert these things can only break things down into so many layers and the munchkins go back further than that. On the other hand, they do manage to break some of the matte paintings into layers. So that's kinda neat, too.

Of course, the movie is still the movie. And the movie is one of those rare breeds: a near perfect movie. If you look back at the past 120 years or so of movies, there's not that many that truly are near perfect. Casablanca would be one. Singin' In The Rain might qualify. The Maltese Falcon--the Bogart version of course. Arguments might also be made for It's A Wonderful Life, Jaws, E.T., and the original Star Wars. Oz, however, may tower above them all.

Think about it for a moment. Is there anything inherently wrong with the movie? There isn't a bad performance in it. Every cast member is great, starting most importantly with Judy Garland as Dorothy.  Shirley Temple lobbied hard to get the part of Dorothy and was the bigger star at the time, but I'm not convinced she would have worked. Judy brings a naturalness to the character. She doesn't actually seem to be acting, a feat that isn't always easy. I've seen her in other movies, but I really think this is her best performance ever. You really do feel for Dorothy during her journey. She makes you laugh and cry in all the right spots. That was the genius of Judy Garland. Nobody else--then or now--could do with this part what she does.

Of course, there's also her co-stars. Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr as the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion (respectively) were three old vaudeville hams--and I mean that in the nicest sense--support Garland beautifully, even if they do occasionally try taking the film away from her. Frank Morgan did the playing five distinct parts in the same movie thing twenty some years before Peter Sellers and he rivals Sellers in that department. And he totally sells it. Especially if you count his wizard as two separate performances--the big, scary disembodied head and the humbug with a heart of gold. And of course, we have Margaret Hamilton as Elmira Gulch/The Wicked Witch of the West. As scary as the Queen in Snow White might have been to kids, Hamilton is positively Evil Personified in both performances.

Some people in later years have taken the Witch's side and said that in the end Dorothy was the evil one, but I'm not certain they get the movie. One might make the argument that the Rudy Slippers are stolen from her, but Dorothy doesn't do that. Glinda the Allegedly Good Witch of the North (a delightful Billie Burke) does. Note I say Allegedly Good. Glinda says she's a Good witch, but I find her behavior pretty specious for a Good Witch. She steals the Slippers and puts them on Dorothy, thereby putting a bulls-eye on the poor kid's back. She sends Dorothy off to see the Wizard in the Emerald City without any mode of transportation even though it's a really long walk, knowing that the Wicked Witch wants to do terrible things to Dorothy. Of course, once safe in the Emerald City, the Wizard sends Dorothy off to kill the Witch, which makes me suspect him and Glinda were co-conspirators. And then, when all is said and done, Glinda shows back up and tells Dorothy "you could have gone home at any time you wanted, kiddo". No wonder the Scarecrow calls her out on that!

Actually, if you stop and think about it, the only thing that makes the Wicked Witch worse than Glinda is the fact that she's so hell-bent on killing Dorothy and her friends. On the other hand, Hamilton plays the part for all it's worth and then some. She looks like a nightmare, talks like a nightmare, and most of all acts like a nightmare.  There are few, if any screen villains, that can come close to the delightful terror Hamilton inspires in the film. Ironically, she was one of the last of the original main cast to pass away.

The special effects, like in the 1933 King Kong, still hold up amazingly. I know, I know. Some too cool for his or her own good kid is gonna say that the special effects suck, especially compared to the CGI of today. But that kid is a tasteless moron and doesn't deserve to be listened to. The effects are amazing, even more so on the big screen. The tornado is particularly impressive. The rear screen shots, again like in King Kong, fool you since you don't even realize you're looking at rear screen and mattes. Matter of fact, not all the matte paintings look like paintings.

Hand in hand with this is the set design, which is absolutely stunning. Kansas looks appropriately gray and dusty and really kinda barren while Oz itself pops with color and design. It's a beautiful place, albeit one with a veneer of evil lurking just underneath. Much like the real world, if you think about it. But the film is optimistic since in the end beauty and goodness rise above evil, a timeless message and one which the world needs as much today as it did in 1939.

As for the music, is there a better score to a musical? Maybe Singin' In the Rain comes close, but let's be fair. That was a songbook musical which cherry picked the best tunes from earlier musicals. There's not a bad song in Oz, starting with Over The Rainbow, which may be one of the ten best songs ever written. The fact that MGM wanted to cut that song from the film for being too long shows that not even the studio knew quite what it was doing. Thank goodness they listened to Producer Mervynn Le Roy and left it in. It's an emotional and beautiful song and Garland sings it fantastically. Going back to Shirley Temple, I just can't hear her singing that song.  The Munchkinland song is as memorable as it is long. And it is a long song.

One of the crimes against the film, however, is the cutting of Ray Bolger's dance sequence at the end of If I Only Had a Brain. MGM cut it for being too long. I've seen the footage--it's in one of the documentaries on Oz in one of the previous DVD releases--and the sequence is one of the most amazing dance sequences on film. Anyone who's seen Singin' In the Rain and marveled at Donald O'Connor's Make 'Em Laugh would be equally blown away by this sadly cut sequence. How long is too long anyhow? Goofy studio heads.

Of course, as beloved as Oz is, not everyone gets it or likes it. Beyond the tasteless person who doesn't watch anything older than The Dark Knight--a person not really worth mentioning in my opinion--there are the people who look at the fact that it's a fantasy film with witches and wizards and automatically lump it with Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Now, I like the latter two series as much as anyone else, but the people who does this don't understand the point of the film, which is markedly different from the latter two. Oz is about discovering who you really are. This applies to all four main characters and even, to an extent to the Wizard himself. And not just the film's famous last line "there's no place like home". It's about discovering that the thing you really want, sometimes you had all along and just didn't know it. The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion all had brains, a heart, and courage to begin with. They just didn't realize it. And Dorothy had a home and people who loved and cared about her.  The Witch isn't so much a witch as she is an obstacle the characters need to overcome to realize the truth about themselves. Of course, there's also the fact that the whole thing is a dream (something the sequels tend to miss out on, too). A dream designed to help Dorothy realize the truth, but a dream nonetheless.

Wizard of Oz is not just a movie for kids either--nor was it ever just for kids. Like many great movies, it packs an emotional punch. I watched it the day after my brother died in 2010 and openly wept during Over the Rainbow. Once you get it, once you look past the candy coated sets and fantastic make up, you realize these characters and the world they inhabit are close to the real world. The film strikes several truths, some wryly--the Scarecrow's line about "some people without brains do an awful lot of talking"--some more gently.

It is ultimately an honest film, unashamed of it's own sentiment, much like kissing cousin It's A Wonderful Life. Oh, yes, I did go there. Let's be blunt about this. Both films are fantasies that deal with a desire to go somewhere else but characters who realize that home is where the heart is at the end. It's A Wonderful Life trades out Oz's sugar coated world for Bedford Falls, USA, it's Wizard and Dorothy's companions for a Guardian Angel, and the Wicked Witch for the Wicked Banker. But in some ways, the two films are not so far apart as you might imagine. Which may be why they both endure. Interestingly, both films were flops until rediscovered on TV years later.

 At the end of the day, Oz is a film that speaks to audiences. It has for nearly 75 years now. I suspect it will continue to do so until this world of ours comes to an end. It is a magnificent movie, and a journey everyone should take from time to time, if only to remind ourselves of it's gentle message.

More 3D Classics Come To Blu Ray (UPDATED)

Last year(!) I blogged about the 3D Blu Ray releases of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder and the horror classic Creature From The Black Lagoon. Jump forward a year, and we finally have two more classic 3D movies released on 3D Blu Ray. Some may take exception at my listing one of these as classic, but I'll explain my logic when I get to it.

First, and most importantly, is the movie that, for many people is The 3D Movie of all time. Before Avatar, before The Avengers, there was 1953's classic chiller House of Wax starring Vincent Price. If your only familiarity with this particular title is the so-called "remake" that is best remembered for the death of Paris Hilton, then you need to see some better movies. I can't even call this the original since a)it's actually a remake of a 1933 movie called Mystery of the Wax Museum and b)the 2005 debacle has nothing at all to do with this movie. But, this is one of the films that made Vincent Price a superstar (which realistically didn't happen until he started doing the Poe films in 1960) and is one of the most famous 3D movies of all time. With good reason.

Price plays Professor Henry Jarrod, a brilliant but not terribly successful sculptor of wax statues. Price prefers creating beauty and history over violence and mayhem. His partner (Roy Roberts) wants out and decides that the fastest way to do so is to burn down the museum. Jarrod is scarred in the ensuing fire but apparently escapes.

Not long after that, a ghoulish figure starts murdering people, starting with the ex-partner, who he hangs in an elevator shaft (a fairly gruesome murder for a 1953 film, btw). The partner's girlfriend Cathy Gale (a wonderfully ditzy Carolyn Jones) is next. When Jones's roommate (Phyllis Kirk) walks in on the killer, a foot chase through the fog shrouded streets of New York ensues. Kirk just barely escapes the ghoul.

Not long after this, Price reappears, set to open a new wax museum. Kirk's boyfriend (Paul Picerni of TV's The Untouchables) gets a job there and that's when Kirk notices that Joan of Arc looks an awful lot like Cathy. That's okay, since Price decides that Kirk looks an awful lot like Marie Antoinette. The cops and Picerni dismiss Kirk's ideas about the museum as crazy, but she decides to carry on and prove she's right, hopefully not becoming a wax statue in the process.

As I say, for many people, House of Wax is the greatest 3D movie of all time. While I prefer Kiss Me Kate a bit more myself, I get where they're coming from. The 3D in the movie is amazing, and I don't just mean the gimmick shots. This is an insanely deep looking 3D movie with the shots composed for maximum depth. Totally unlike most of the 3D movies made today. And this from a director who famously only had one eye and couldn't see 3D but, as legend has it, mathematically worked out every single shot. Incidentally, Andre De Toth wasn't the only one eyed 3D director of the 50s. Raoul Walsh also had monocular vision and also knocked one out of the ballpark with Gun Fury. But that's for another blog.

There isn't a ton of gimmick shots, either, but what ones there are, are amazing. There's a reason the paddle ball sequence is so famous. It's one of the all-time great gimmick shots and a perfect way to bring the audience back into the film after the intermission. For years, people just looked at it as a stupid gimmick shot and that's because the intermission card was gone. Once you realize there was an intermission and the scene's placement in the movie, it makes a little more sense. Plus, Price gets in a jab at it by commenting "once we're established, we won't need that sort of thing".

Mention also needs to be made of the supporting players. Frank Lovejoy and Dabs Greer are the cops trying to figure the case out. Lovejoy was a radio actor who was trying to make it into movies. He gets a decent part in another Warner Brothers 3D film, Charge at Feather River, where he famously spits at the audience (Lee Marvin does the same thing in The Stranger Wore a Gun and the gimmick is done again in the next film in this blog's entry). Sadly, he died a few years later without ever becoming a major star. As for Dabs Greer, try finding something he wasn't in. He's Shaky in the 1950s Dick Tracy show. He's one of the cops that harasses Richard Kimble in the pilot episode of The Fugitive. And modern audiences will recognize him as old Tom Hanks in The Green Mile. The guy got around.

But the most notable supporting player is a fairly young actor named Charles Buchinsky. He plays Price's creepy deaf mute assistant Igor and gets the films most notable 3D effect shot. He kept that name for another 1953 3D movie, the Rita Hayworth starrer Miss Sadie Thompson before changing it to the name we all knew him as. Fellow did some real good movies after that like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape and even when he started doing mindless crap in the 1980s, he still pulled off a couple of good movies like the TV movie version of Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. I refer, of course, to Charles Bronson, who does a good, creepy job in this.

My friend Bob Furmanek of the 3D Film Archive stated that for all the times and ways he's seen House of Wax, this blu ray restoration is the best the film has looked. I've seen this a few different ways and times myself and I wholeheartedly agree. Warners did scans from the original YCMs---that's six different scans, three for each eye. This is one gorgeous blu and a showcase 3D blu. Writer R.M. Hayes in his infamous book on 3D movies wrote that if you were going to see only one 3D movie in your life, it should be Treasure of the Four Crowns. R.M. Hayes was a moron. If you see only one 3D movie, House of Wax is the one. And if you haven't seen it in 3D, you haven't seen it.

The second "classic" isn't quite in the same ballpark as House of Wax. Oh, hell. It's not even in the same universe. Nonetheless, as the first of the 1980s films to get a proper 3D Blu Ray release, Amityville 3-D deserves a little love, too. The third of the Amityville Horror films, this one comes to us in a box set with the first two from Scream Factory. I have no particular interest in the first two, though I may end up watching them. I did read the book and found it to be, by and large, a load of crap. Okay, let me clarify that. The book by Jay Anson, like Oliver Stone's JFK is a decent work of fiction. It is, at times, even moderately scary. But anyone who believes that it even remotely happened...well, I got a bridge to sell you as they say.

The third film advertised itself as "not a sequel" which basically translates to it being a movie designed to cash in on the success of the earlier films but having nothing to do with the characters in those films. At the very least, it's the first film to outright admit it's a fiction, so I give it points for that. The movie's tagline was also "In this film, you are the victim", so I also give it points for truth in advertising. I tend to remember Siskel and Ebert listing this on their worst of 1983 list (along with Jaws 3D). I'm not certain I would go quite that far. I tend to remember Deal of the Century and The Man Who Wasn't There being quite a bit worse from that year. Just saying.

Anyhow, the plot has a journalist (Tony Roberts) who makes it his career to debunk paranormal claims deciding to buy the infamous house on 112 Ocean Avenue. Problem is, the damn house actually is haunted. He ignores that fact, even when people start dropping dead left and right around him, starting with the realtor who sells him the house and has an encounter with the flies in the attic. Then his partner (Candy Clark) meets a particularly gruesome end in a burning car. Then his daughter (Lori Laughlin from TV's Full House) drowns. It's only when his daughter's ghost is spotted that he starts thinking there might be something to the stories and calls in his physic investigator friend, who ends up meeting the most ridiculous looking demon you ever saw.

Reading the above description and then going back a few paragraphs and reading about House of Wax, you may be wondering why in the world I'm including this movie in this particular post. It's not that Amityville 3-D is a good movie. None of the 1980s 3D movies are, realistically. This is one of the better ones, along with Jaws 3D and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. But that doesn't say much, now does it? I mean, Plan Nine From Outer Space and Bride of the Monster are Ed Wood's best movies, and they still stink.

Still, this is a worthy enough purchase, if only for the fact that it's a pre-2003 3D movie released on 3D Blu Ray. Somebody is gonna cite Friday the 13th Part 3 being on Blu Ray in 3D, but that's in the anaglyph format, which frankly sucks compared to 3D Blu Ray technology. I know since I released two shorts in anaglyph and ran tests for an over under version compatible on 3D TVs and it's night and day.  If supporting films like this means we could potentially get more, then good.  And regardless of what you may think of the movie, the 3D is actually pretty good. There's some decent depth. And one of the fun things about the 80s 3D movies is the fact that they weren't ashamed to jab the audience in the eye. Again, mostly the antithesis of what we see today. Oh, sure, a number of the gimmick shots in Amityville are corny as all get out--Meg Ryan blows a straw at the audience and someone tosses a Frisbee out of the screen among other things.

But let's be fair, here. Gimmick shots, corny and otherwise, are part of what has made 3D fun over the years. Even the 50s films, which rarely went overboard with the gimmick shots, knew that and would stick them in, sometimes organically and sometimes just out of left field. Again I cite the paddleball sequence in House of Wax, which is arguably as goofy a gimmick as the ones in Amityville 3-D or Friday the 13th Part 3 which had it's infamous eyeballs, but also had weed joints, wallets, yo-yos, and popcorn tossed at the audience. Most modern 3D films are terrified of gimmick shots, so it's kinda fun once in a while to toss something like Amityville 3-D on and grin like a little kid at the stuff flying out of the screen. In recent years, Spy Kids 3-D, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Hugo, and Oz the Great and Powerful are most noteworthy for gimmick shots and are probably the films least terrified to actually be in 3D.

In other words, don't watch Amityville 3-D for great cinema. Watch it for being a goofily fun 3D movie.

By the way, you did not misread. A very young (and cute) Meg Ryan plays Loughlin's friend. She gets the obligatory scene where she describes in detail the real life DeFeo murders from 1974. Her future ex-husband Dennis Quaid, of course, was in Jaws 3D. I understand they argued frequently over who made the worse 3D movie. (For those who don't get my humor, I'm kidding).

So we now have four pre-modern era 3D movies on 3D Blu. Thank goodness for that much. 2014 promises at least four more, including the recently announced Man In The Dark coming out in January from Twilight Time. It is also to be hoped that Warners makes good on releasing Kiss Me Kate next year and hopefully Universal will get off their butts and get It Came From Outer Space, Jaws 3D, and Revenge of the Creature out, too.

At any rate, now is a pretty good time to be a 3D fan indeed.