The Vikings (1958)

Warning: there’s more implied backstory and story rape in this one than on-screen in most pinkus

After Orson Welles and a pretty cool animation have schooled us about some Viking Facts™ – few of which were close to historical facts even when this was made – and the film has prologued us with fifteen minutes of information it’ll need to repeat anyway, because most of the characters have no clue about what’s going on in their lives, the film slowly comes to the actual meat of its tale.

Ragnar Lodbrok (Ernest Borgnine, I kid you not) rules a bunch of Vikings as their rapist king, helped out by his pretty-faced (and also rapist) son LL Einar (Kirk Douglas, who was actually a couple of months older then Borgnine, and not as you know not pretty). They rape, they pillage, they terrorize the British Isles, you know the deal. Three, ahem, I mean two decades ago, Ragnar captured himself a baby slave named Eric (now grown up to be played by Tony Curtis). Eric, as we know thanks to the pointless prologue but the characters will have to find out about throughout the film, is actually the product of one of Ragnar’s rape sprees, his mother being the former Queen of Northumbria. He’s also not at all friendly with his secret half-brother. Early in the movie, he’s going so far as attacking Einar with a falcon who comes from the Fulci school of falcons and promptly mutilates one of Einar’s eyes, also making him unpretty (the film indeed suggesting that Kirk Douglas was pretty before).

Attempts of getting rid of Eric afterwards are thwarted by Odin, who’d really rather want the film to be longer than fifty minutes. Relations do stay strained, though, and once Einar kidnaps Welsh princess Morgana (Janet Leigh) and both men fall for her, things certainly don’t improve. Morgana does prefer Eric (one supposes that him not wishing to rape her helps there too), even more so once he absconds with her in the direction of the British Isles. It could be the beginning of a wonderful love affair, if not for the fact that Morgana is promised to the – decidedly nasty – King of Northumbria, Aella (Frank Thring doing a wonderful Vincent Price imitation), and is not one to go back on the word of her father. Lots and lots of further melodramatic reversals of fate happen, until Eric and Einar even team up to rescue Morgana from Northumbria, before they go back to try and kill each other again.

After this, do I even have to say that Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings is a deeply silly movie, as well as the kind of film where playing a drinking game based on historical inaccuracies could be downright deadly? But then, who goes into a movie where Ernest Borgnine plays the father of Kirk Douglas, and all two, plus Tony Curtis (who is also meant to be kinda macho), are supposed to be Vikings expecting any kind of historical realism? This is the realm of pure adventure fantasy, and really needs to be approached as taking place on that much better plane.

Once you’ve put things into the proper perspective, you actually might get quite a bit of fun out of the whole affair. Sure, some contemporary tastes will certain shy away from the amount of sexual violence that must have happened in the backstory and which Einar would just love to commit onscreen. The film’s very heavily implying that Ragnar and Einar both can’t get it up properly with a willing partner and even have love and violence all mixed up in their tiny little brains. I’m honestly not at all sure how the filmmakers got away with that one.

However, the film is at least not pro rape at all (not necessarily a matter of course in 50s cinema), but clearly implying the problem with Ragnar and Einar isn’t that they’re not Christian, or barbarians (most Christian non-barbarians in the film are not much better going by modern, hell, even 50s morals than these two, in fact) but that they’re rapists.

This is of course all background matter for the film, and not even I would argue this is in any way, shape or form its main interest.

Which brings us to its main interest: rousing, swashbuckling adventure full of silly ideas (just look at the infamous boat rowing scene for the last one), cast with actors who really do know how to throw themselves into all kinds of on-screen derring-do. Fleischer does stage the big action set pieces very nicely indeed, making great use of the full Technicolor screen particular in the last half hour or so, and generally finds something interesting to film even when guys aren’t hitting each other with swords and axes.

The production design, while historically dubious, is often rather wonderful, too. There has clearly been some love put into the little details that make something look more impressive, so we get things like every Viking shield having its own, individual ornamentation and many other worldbuilding details hidden and not so hidden in the backgrounds. This helps make all the silly adventure and melodrama feel rooted, and provides The Vikings with quite a bit of visual magic even after all these decades.

In short: Center of the Web (1992)

Mild-mannered theatre teacher John Phillips (Ted Prior) is mistaken for a professional killer, nearly dies in a car chase, and is then thrown in jail for his trouble, quite to the displeasure of his girlfriend, assistant DA Kathryn Lockwood (Charlene Tilton).

Department of Justice agent Richard Morgan (Robert Davi) forces John to continue to play the role of the killer, because, umm, stuff. Of course, things get really dangerous (yes, more dangerous than a shoot-out and a car chase) for John real soon, because he's not only impersonating a killer, but impersonating a killer who is going to be made the patsy for the assassination of a state governor, a governor Kathryn has reason to despise.

Consequently John, who is quite a natural when it comes to shooting, chasing, etc., finds himself on the run from the police, the people who wanted to Lee Harvey Oswald him, and possibly other factions. I foresee plot twists, betrayals, and Tony Curtis in his future.

Ah, the glories of David A. Prior's conspiracy thriller phase, which sits, if you're not up on your Prior studies, shortly before and after the end of Action International Pictures, and at a point in time when Prior planted his various obsessions and weirdnesses in hard-earned technical competence. Seldom will you find conspiracies less believable, more peculiar accidents, and more stupid plot twists than in the director's conspiracy thrillers. Of course, if you just go with the flow and interpret "conspiracy thriller" to mean "film consisting of a series of illogical developments which enable a near-ritualistic repetition of chases and gestures you know well from the best and worst films of the genre", you can have a lot of fun with Prior's films. I certainly do.

In Center's particular case, you can look forward to the cheap yet effective car chases, shoot-outs, Charlene Tilton over-emoting quite painfully, dialogue that comfortably drifts in and out of tough guy talk and sense, Tony Curtis slumming, various Prior mainstays doing what they do best (in fact, there are so many of them in the movie there's hardly enough time even for Charles Napier), and an exploding school bus. The last of these excellent things is of course for urban set action movies what the exploding bamboo hut is for jungle action. I'd imagine school buses to be rather more costly to explode, but then the USA are often strange, so I may very well be wrong and there might be a group of car dealers specializing in hawking used school buses to filmmakers to explode. Actually, this does rather sound like the set-up of a David A. Prior movie he never got around to make.

As a weird-ass conspiracy thriller (that is an existing sub-genre, right?) Center of the Web doesn't quite reach the heights of Prior's later Felony with which it shares a few of its central plot twists, particularly the one concerning the nature of its hero, yet it still is a pretty enjoyable time. Where else, after all, can you see Tony Curtis aggressively feeding pigeons, diagnosing pigeon psychology and human psychology to be quite alike?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,thriller,david a. prior,robert davi,charlene tilton,ted prior,tony curtis

In short: The Manitou (1978)

One day, Karen Tandy (Susan Strasberg) discovers a strange growth on the back of her neck. It is growing at an inexplicable rate, much faster than Karen's doctors are able to understand. What's even more strange - the growth doesn't seem to be a tumor but a fetus.

There's nothing strange that couldn't be cut away with a scalpel, of course, but the first try at cutting the thing off ends with Karen murmuring something in Hollywood Injunese and poor Dr. Hughes (Jon Cedar) cutting into his own hands.

Karen had at this point already gotten back in (very close) contact with her ex Harry Erskine (Tony Curtis), a professional tarot reader and wearer of fake facial hair. Harry's next tarot session with one of his elderly clients ends with the old woman murmuring the same Hollywood Injunese words, levitating along a hallway and falling to death down a flight of stairs.

While Karen lies unconscious in her hospital bed, Harry does a little research on their problem. A séance and a visit with guest star Burgess Meredith later, he is convinced that Karen is possessed by the spirit of an ancient Hollywood Injun medicine man trying to get reborn through a nice female neck.

Logically minded as he is, Harry seeks out the shaman John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara) and talks the man into helping him to fight the dead medicine man. All is set up for an awesome duel of occult powers in Dr. Hughes hightech hospital.

One of the great mysteries in my career as an observer of the weird, the crappy and the outright insane has always been the question: why did people give William Girdler money? The Manitou doesn't really answer that question, but deepens it to "why did people give a director as talentless as William Girdler money to adapt a book written by as terrible a hack as Graham Masterton?".

I certainly don't know the answer to that one, grasshopper. Well, at least the film's an entertaining catastrophe, full of the sort of bullshit everyone should love.

Of course, The Manitou suffers from every problem it could possibly suffer from - there's absurdly bad acting from Strasberg, alternating bored and scenery-chewing acting from Curtis, a script in total ignorance of actual Native American culture and reality, Girdler's "let's point the camera at it and wait" style of directing, puzzling dialogue, etc.

The first hour is also more than just a little boring, but at about the hour mark something strange happens - the idiocy and the silliness turns from boring to fun, the cliched stupidity turns into creative stupidity until we are bombarded with awesome stuff like the evil ancient midget bodybuilder form the evil spirit takes and a scene in which a naked Susan Strasberg floats on a hospital bed in space and shoots laser beams at Yog-Sothoth while meteorites whoosh in the direction of the camera.

The latter is one of those pictures that will stay with me for the rest of my life, at least I hope that it will, forever being an irrefutable proof of the genius of humanity.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,wtf,william girdler,tony curtis,susan strasberg,in short