Harlock: Space Pirate is our first selection. It's a 2013 computer generated anime reboot of the Captain Harlock series from the 1970s. I hadn't seen that series, except for snippets of video and some stills, but I don't feel I missed anything. The movie plot has Captain Harlock and the crew of his ship, the Arcadia, planting some special bombs. He wants to fix the state of the human race by destroying them all and sending the universe back in time. The Earth had been destroyed, by Harlock, one hundred years ago. He'd unleashed some dark matter and made the place unlivable. The ruling body in the universe, the Gaia Sanction, covers the planet with a hologram and does not allow anyone to live there. The dark mater also made Harlock immortal and his ship invincible. He's been running about the universe for the last 100 years planting the bombs he hopes to use to reverse time by destroying the time nodes. Now as the movie starts there's a secret Gaia Sanction spy among his crew and it might be the end of Harlock. It just goes on and on for what seems like forever. The space action and the fighting isn't too bad but the script is filled with yakkin' and backstory. That drags the whole thing down. The story has been changed from the older TV series and not everyone who commented on the various websites was appreciative. It's not something I would bother with again. I doubt that I'll bother with the original cartoon either. So many other things to watch as it is, so tossing one aside for better material just makes sense.
There's not too much sense going on in our second feature but at least The Neanderthal Man was more fun to watch. It's a 1953 low budget horror film written by Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen. I didn't recognize either man but I see from the IMDb that Audrey wrote a bunch of films and a bit of TV. In the 40s he wrote some series films, a Boston Blackie, A Falcon and a Whistler. He wrote The Man From Planet X and others I haven't seen. His last feature was the 1969 Hercules In New York with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arnold Stang. That's quite a film. Worth seeing but not because it's great or anything. Jack wrote a lot of the same films as Aubrey and together they produced a bunch more. The Neanderthal Man was directed by Ewald André Dupont. I didn't know anything about him but his bio on the IMDb is interesting to say the least.
German film director E.A. Dupont an influential critic and newspaper columnist before breaking into the film industry. He wrote several screenplays and worked as a story editor for Richard Oswald before turning to directing in 1917. Over the next eight years Dupont became a respected exponent of the German expressionist movement. He was particularly acclaimed for his film Jealousy (1925), which stood out for brilliant lighting effects and fluid camera work. Encouraged by his success, Dupont left Decla-Bioskop and joined Universal in Hollywood, but only completed one film. Crossing the Atlantic again, he signed with British National Pictures in 1928. He briefly became their leading director, again demonstrating his visual flair with two prestige productions: Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929). The latter was BIP's most expensively made picture up to this time.
After the advent of sound Dupont's career began to falter. His first "talkie", the "Titanic" story Atlantic (1929)--shot in both English and French--was an expensive flop, due mainly to poor dialogue and stilted performances. His next two ventures, respectively in France and Germany, had an even worse critical reception. Dupont next tried his luck in Hollywood. After 1933 he worked at different times for Universal, Paramount and Warner Brothers. Critical success proved elusive, as almost all of his assignments were low-budget second features. After being fired from the set of Hell's Kitchen (1939) for slapping a junior member of the cast who had mocked his accent, Dupont spent most of the 1940s in Hollywood as a talent agent and publicist. He eventually resumed his directing career with an offbeat minor film noir, The Scarf (1951), and a watchable precursor to The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Steel Lady (1953). Among his last films was the notorious sci-fi stinker The Neanderthal Man (1953). He died of cancer in December 1956.
The Neanderthal Man is a bit of a stinker but we got a laugh. The story is set in a small town in northern California. A tourist sees what he thinks is a saber toothed tiger out on the mountain. No one believes him but a farmer has had some cattle killed and mauled by something pretty darn big. The local game warden finds a big foot print and a scientist identifies it as from the cat family. Another scientist has a home lab where he's been working on a serum that causes animals to revert to primitive versions of themselves. Now we know where the saber tooth tiger came from. He tries it on himself and that's the result above. Of course the primitive versions of the injected are prone to kill things and they become the hunted themselves. These type of science meddling stories often end in disaster for the experimenter and that's the case here. The cast was about average, keep an eye out for Beverley Garland in her first SF/Horror film. The only other people I recognized were Richard Crane and William Fawcett. The plot is simple, scientist invents a problem and people die, sadly there's some awful dialog to tell the story. There are scenes to marvel at. The outdoor locations aren't to bad but the sets are kind of sad. The make up effects were beyond sad, in fact, they made us happy, judging by the amount of laughter in the room. The saber tooth tiger is a normal tiger in most shots. In a close up they use an obvious fake head with tusks. We could only laugh. It's a short film, only 78 minutes, but there's plenty going on, even if it is kind of goofy. The YouTube version in the link in the title above is only 64 minutes. The Scream Factory release restores the movie to it's original 78 minute version and packs it with The Beast Of Hollow Mountain.
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