Sci-Fi & Fantasy

A Trip to the Moon (1902)

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With roughly 14 minutes, no sound and the barest of film technology, Georges Méliès sure did pack a ton of stuff into A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage Dans La Lune if you’re French), the world’s first science-fiction film.

After a wizard demonstrates via chalkboard the path their rocket will leave Earth and land on its near-instant journey to the lunar body, laborers build the metallic capsule. Once complete, with much pomp and circumstance, it’s loaded into a giant phallus of a cannon by chunky ladies in short pants and Buster Brown hats. With half a dozen rich, old white men as passengers, it lands with a bloody thud into the right eyesocket of that creepy, creepy moon face.

The would-be astronauts climb out — clutching canes, but no oxygen tanks — and wave to their friends back on Earth. Then, being white-haired and all, they bunk down and sleep, wake up to a storm of stardust, and climb into the moon’s underground garden of oversized mushrooms, where hopping demons scoot their butts across a log like a dog with troubled anal glands does to your carpet. Our Earth warriors beat the crap out of them (they go up in puffs of smoke) and high-tail it home, only to land in the ocean. They get a parade in their honor, and probably got crazy laid.

Kidding aside, Méliès’ imagination is as off-the-charts as his ingenuity. Repopularized by Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning Hugo, the cinema classic is best viewed in its 2011 restored form, containing its original, hand-colored images and with missing frames mimicked. It also now boasts a score by Air that’s — dare I say it — out of this freakin’ world. This Trip truly is one. —Rod Lott

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Western

Django (1966)

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Django: The “D” is silent; the movie is not.

Sergio Corbucci’s answer to Sergio Leone’s masterful Dollars trilogy helped entwine the spaghetti Western further into the DNA of world cinema. Starring as the title traveler is Franco Nero, the scruffy Civil War vet who pulls a coffin behind him as he drifts from town to town. As the film opens, he saves a perfectly lovely woman strung up for a good whippin’ from bandits.

She’s Maria (Loredana Nusciak, Gladiators 7), a prostitute fleeing from Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo, a fun name to say) and his band of red-hooded executioners who collect “protection money” from uncommonly muddy ghost towns that don’t need protecting from anything but more rain. Jackson follows her and Django to one of the saloons on his racketeering list.

Jackson finds out the hard way what’s in Django’s coffin: a Gatling gun, with which our protagonist easily kills all the baddies but Jackson himself, and that’s only because he has designs on Jackson’s bonanza of bullion. Only through joining forces with Mexican Gen. Rodriguez (José Bódalo, Companeros) can Django hope to snag it.

With more trigger pulls and resulting bullet wounds than the era was used to, Django shoots its way into your good graces. Corbucci (Super Fuzz) keeps the story going without losing steam, proving that an epic feel can be attained minus an epic length. Naturally, Nero is the big (and quick) draw as Django, a Western antihero who could use a good antidepressant. Often imitated, never duplicated, this is one quicksand-sinkin’, cork-spittin’, mud-wrasslin’, ear-shavin’, bottle-shootin’, hand-breaking good time! —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1974)

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As Gilles in The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, Paul Naschy finds himself in the middle of every hitchhiking ex-con’s dream: being hired as caretaker for three neurotic, not-ugly sisters living together in a huge estate. The one with the bum legs (Maria Perschy) is hot, the one with the gnarled monkey hand (Diana Lorys) is even hotter, and the one with the flaming red hair and big breasts (Eva León) is super-duper hot. You can tell it won’t be long before Gilles starts milking the udders, if you know what I mean.

No, I mean he literally is shown milking a cow’s udders. That’s part of his job duties. Another: listening to the two upright sisters talk smack about the others — says León: “They’re bitches who keep me isolated! And I don’t have defects!” A fringe benefit: bedding them both.

But director Carlos Aured’s Blue Eyes is more about a different kind of poking: that with a knife. As a Spanish take on the giallo, the film plops these characters within an environment where beautiful blondes have a peculiar habit of being slit and having their blue eyes plucked by a black-gloved killer. Being someone who’s spent time in the slammer, Gilles is under suspicion for the murders, and why not? After all, he’s the one who has recurring dreams of choking fine-looking women.

Better known under its unsubtle U.S. title of House of Psychotic Women, this Naschy vehicle spills plenty of the blood for which he is rightfully beloved. That much I expected. What I didn’t expect was the graphic slaying of a pig, steam and all, unfaked. It’s jarring, whereas the murder sequences unspool to some of the happy-go-luckiest music you’ve heard, and the nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” becomes a familiar refrain. “Din, dan, don” or “Ding, dang, dong,” it helps make the thriller with the masterfully macabre ending oddly irresistible. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Tenement (1985)

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Maybe I’ve seen too many gory horror flicks (guilty, your honor!), but Prime Evil director Roberta Findlay’s infamous Tenement didn’t quite strike me as the mega-disturbo flick it’s made out to be: “TOO VIOLENT TO BE RATED!” I mean, it’s no picnic in Central Park, but how could it mess up your mind when its jaunty hip-hop theme song reminds me of Mario Van Peebles in Beat Street?

On a hot August day in the Bronx, after threatening one of its own with a dead rat, a gang is removed forcibly from its home base(ment) in a two-bit apartment building, much to the rejoicing of the landlord and residents, who throw a party: “We won’t be seeing them again. Cheers!” They forgot to knock on wood, because elsewhere, high as a kite, gang leader Chaco (Enrique Sandino) vows, “I’m gonna get my building back! We’re gonna have some fun!” Watch out for their Wang Chung.

As night falls, the shit goes down. They assault the residents, taking a straight-razor to a neck or two. While getting raped, an African-American woman stabs her attacker in the eye with scissors. She’s rewarded with a pipe up the plumbing — implied, luckily. Our hooligans stop only to shoot up and, in Chaco’s case, knead the breasts of his gal pal with his bloody paws.

Eventually, the residents get all Howard Beale/Twister Sister on the scumbags, which gives the grimy film its cathartic kick. A granny delivers a baseball bat to the ‘nads; one tuffie is electrocuted via bed frame; and even the kids get in on the action, pouring pots of boiling water. Those aren’t spoilers so much as reasons for you to watch this relentlessly downbeat exercise in nihilism. —Rod Lott

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Action

Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970)

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Although often lumped in with the blaxploitation films of the period, Ossie Davis’ Cotton Comes to Harlem feels a lot less Superfly and a lot more like a classic ’70s buddy cop movie, albeit one set in a Harlem where the possibility of a race riot is always just a few minutes away. The result is one of the most entertaining films the period produced.

Based on a Chester Himes novel, Cotton stars Raymond St. Jacques and Godfrey Cambridge as Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, two police detectives whose detached cynicism is only matched by their sense of justice. Viewed by the black citizens they serve as Uncle Toms in cahoots with a racist police force, and by their white co-workers as black troublemakers who don’t know their place, they’re classic outsiders who aren’t above breaking the rules (and law) to do what they know is right.

In this case, it’s finding the $87,000 “stolen” from crooked Rev. Deke O’Malley (Calvin Lockhart), who has promised credulous investors that their funds are going to the construction of a boat to take them back to Africa and away from the racism they have to deal with everyday. Once it’s determined that the money has been hidden in a bale of cotton retrieved by kindly street person, Uncle Bud (Redd Foxx), the race is on between Johnson and Jones to find it before the bad guys.

Despite touching on some rather heavy social themes, director/co-writer Davis keeps the tone light and often comic, thanks to the efforts of his talented cast. The soundtrack also features standout work by Galt MacDermott and is worth buying on its own. Two years later, St. Jacques and Cambridge reprised the roles in Come Back, Charleston Blue, a sequel Davis on which chose not to work. —Allan Mott

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