Dream Hospital (film #1816 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: News]

In this 40s newsreel story, we are shown an ultramodern hospital of the future, built by the Kaiser Foundation. Nurses submit charts through pneumatic tubes, patients get x-rayed on a huge moving table, new mothers pull their babies out of incubator drawers, and new fathers use an ultra-modern ashtray of the future. But the "answer to a doctor's prayer" is the swimming pool! That'll bring 'em in from the golf course.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ***.

Boys' Club Promo (recorded off of American Movie Classics). [Category: Public Service]

Bob Hope tells us all about the good works the Boys' Clubs are doing. We see some rather scrawny kids in Boys' Club t-shirts building models, playing basketball, and one kid learning the valuable lesson of "winner take all" in a checker game. A brief blip in the history of charitable solicitations.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: ***. Overall Rating: **.

Alone (film #4 in the Drama section of Brickfilms. Also, film #2 in the Horror section of Brickfilms). [Category: Outtakes & Obscurities]

A Lego guy dressed in a brown suit enters a Lego crypt and is attacked by a skull-faced Lego ghoul. This little horror flick is genuinely creepy, which is amazing for a brickfilm. This filmmaker really knows how to tell a story and create effective special effects. Shows what a little Lego and lots of creativity can do.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: ***. Overall Rating: ****.

America's Distribution of Wealth (film #108 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: Industrial]

An economist lectures us on how the American capitalist system is the best in the world, morally right, and according to God's law. He's pretty boring himself, but he is interrupted by a couple of jaw-dropping scenes of "foreigners" marveling at the American system. Especially amusing is a scene of a fake Englishman who looks like Terry Jones dubbed in by Bill Clinton trying desperately to fake a British accent going all ga-ga in a supermarket. The shortages the Englishman has to put up with are assumed to be a product of socialism rather than that recent world war that everybody in the movie seems to have forgotten about. The economist also has going for him an excellent audio-visual aid in the form of a 3-D chart containing stylized human figures that he can move up and down––I really want this one for the Film Ephemeral Museum of Quirky Devices. Actually, he doesn't do too bad a job of showing that the majority of the American people are pretty well-off, but then this film was made at the height of American post-war prosperity, when such things as the GI Bill were making it possible for millions of Americans to move into the middle class at a rate not seen before, and so far not seen again. One wonders what the figures were like during the Depression, which, by the way, was also a product of capitalism. A great example of 50s capitalist propaganda.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ****. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: *****. Overall Rating: ****.

Atomic TV extras (on Atomic TV (Video Resources, 1994). [Category: Military & Propaganda]

Video Resources added some extra goodies to the Atomic TV tape, including trailers from 50s science-fiction movies, an excerpt from an unidentified animated educational film about atomic energy that just had to be titled Our Friend, the Atom (NOTE: Since originally writing this review, I've discovered that the scenes are from A Is for Atom.), and excerpts from that bug-eyed-alien classic, Killers from Space. These extra items give the tape a nice Atomic Cafe feel.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ****. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

Admiral Dewey Receiving the Washington and New York Committees (film #5 on Edison Film Archive). [Category: Early Film & TV]

Admiral Dewey paces back and forth on the deck of a ship, probably mumbling to himself, “Where are they, already??" Eventually a bunch of top-hatted bigwigs arrive, including one guy wearing one of those over-the-top admiral's hats. Then some other stuff happens. The end. An 1899 Edison film.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: **.

Betty Crocker III (film #5 in the Commercial section of Movieflix (www.movieflix.com)). [Category: Commercial]

Betty Crocker guarantees a perfect cake every time you bake. Yeah right. The chocolate cake looks pretty yummy, though. Somebody ought to hand the kid who eats it a napkin.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: **.

Cherry Knight (film #292 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: Sleaze & Outsider]

Another stag film, this one with a music soundtrack and a rather cheap-looking stripper. There's lots of bouncing action and a couple of industrial-strength pasties, for those who are fans of that. It's a living, I guess.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: **.

Boy with a Knife (film #238 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: Public Service]

Chuck Connors plays a social worker who helps a group of troubled, potentially delinquent boys by forming them into a club at a youth center. The "boy with a knife" is Jerry, a kid with a bitchy stepmother and a wimpy father who won't stand up to her verbal diatribes against him. Jerry takes out his rage by periodically threatening other kids with a knife, when he's not using it to carve up other people's property. When he finds out through the grapevine that his stepmother is planning to send him away to live with his grandmother, he takes out his rage by carving up all the sofa cushions into ribbons. Somehow, this makes his dad finally stand up to his stepmom. "Jerry's not going anywhere," he says to her and this totally cures Jerry of his rage––he immediately goes outside and turns over his knife to Chuck. This is a well-intentioned film that makes a few valid points about delinquency, but mostly it's incredibly simplistic and cliched. Most realistic is how much time and patience it takes for Chuck to win the boys' trust, and how fragile that trust continues to be. Least realistic is the story about Jerry, especially the ending. Jerry has the classical cliched Hollywood Freudian version of a dysfunctional family––bitchy stepmom, wimpy dad who doesn't wear the pants in the family (though the actress playing the stepmom does do an excellent job of making you hate her). The ending is laughably pat and unrealistic––in any real situation like this, you just know that carving up the sofa cushions is just the thing that will get Jerry sent away, and probably to a place a lot worse than his grandmother's. And, of course, there's an instant cure––maybe the filmmakers were just running out of time after all the long sequences of Chuck's trust-building attempts. It all ends up being maddeningly unsatisfying––you want to like the film for its intentions, but it's just too much of a fantasy. For a much more realistic look at the problem of deliquency, and the "club" solution, see Ask Me, Don't Tell Me.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

A Case of Spring Fever (film #3 on Assignment Venezuela and Other Shorts (Best Brains, 2001). Also, MST3K Episode #1012: Squirm. Also, film #276 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: Industrial]

Hey, msties! Remember the linking bit with Crow playing Willie the Wonderful Wisecracking Waffle? It turns out that character was a direct reference to Coily, the incredibly evil sprite in this film. A poor shmoe repairing a sofa wishes he would never see another spring again. Suddenly, Coily appears and answers his wish. Now his watch doesn't work, the dial on his telephone won't function properly, and he can't even close the doors of his car, much less get it to start. Each time he discovers the consequences of a missing spring, Coily taunts him in an incredibly annoying voice. Finally, the guy cracks and apologizes to Coily, who relents and returns springs to the world, but only in exchange for the poor guy's soul. The guy becomes an insufferable spring promoter, talking endlessly about Coily's kin until he drives all his friends away. This film was sponsored by GM, but it's hard to tell why, unless they too were victims of demonic possession. Willy the Waffle appears in Season 3 of mst3k, meaning Best Brains probably had possession of this short at least as far back as that. Perhaps they couldn't find a film that was just right to pair it with. Eventually, they found themselves making the very last episode and they just couldn't pass it by. They certainly saved the best for last in that case.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *****. Weirdness: *****. Historical Interest: *****. Msting: ****. Overall Rating: *****.

Alligators Like Canoes (film #7 in the Comedy section of Brickfilms). [Category: Outtakes & Obscurities]

A couple of hapless Lego guys go canoeing and get attacked by a pretty cool-looking Lego alligator. They escape to an island where they find a bunch of Lego skeletons––are those for real or were they created for the film? Some scenes, including the ending, are kind of confusing. Still, it's not bad for an amateur effort.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ***. Overall Rating: ***.

Bicentennial Celebration (film #4 in the Patriotism in America section of WPA Film Library). [Category: News]

A short clip of silent raw tv news footage of various Bicentennial celebrations that took place on July 4, 1976. A little carousel riding, a little watermelon eating, a little Uncle Sam, a little fireworks, a little hippies in sandals listening to an outdoor concert, and you're done.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: ***. Overall Rating: **.

Boo! (extra on Frankenstein DVD (Universal, 1999)). [Category: Hollywood]

Now this is a really fun and unusual short. Somebody at Universal took footage from several of its classic horror films, cut and pasted it together, and dubbed in a new silly soundtrack about how lobster gives you nightmares. This was back in the 30s, when the Universal horror films they stole footage from were at their height of popularity, making this even more of an oddity. Great fun and an excellent extra to throw on the Frankenstein DVD. Kudos to Universal for digging this up.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ****. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

Amphetamines: Case Study (film #8 on The Educational Archives, Volume One: Sex & Drugs DVD (Fantoma, 2001)). [Category: Educational]

A 60s speed freak tells us what it's like to be a 60s speed freak, using lots of cool druggie lingo like "rap" and "wired." The scene of him trying to fix radios while high somehow reminds me of Dick York and his radios in Shy Guy. All that's included is this self-narrated segment about his feelings while on speed, making me think that this might be an excerpt rather than a whole film.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: *****. Overall Rating: ***.

American Women: Partners in Research (film #135 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: Industrial]

This 50s film, sponsored by Corning Glass, is purportedly about market research in consumer products, but it's really one long, oppressive collection of gender-role stereotypes. It starts with a campy sequence of head shots of housewives expressing their preferences, though for what, we don't know. Then our manly host Chet Huntley appears and over scenes of women shopping and drinking coffee in a kitchen says, "These women are doing research." Chet then tells us all about how companies like Corning are using the opinions of women to design household products, in a tone similar to one an animal behaviorist might use when presenting his paper on the social behavior of some rare species of jungle fauna. He does this while stroking a large phallic-looking rocket nose cone on his desk, and he is careful to specify that all the designers and engineers are MEN. He also mentions that although they are all great designers, all their hard work could come to naught because "women have minds of their own." Then we get to see the step-by-step process Corning uses to design a new coffee percolator. This includes lots of fun scenes of industrial machinery exposing Corningware dishes to various kinds of abuse. The only women employees shown are one woman whose job it is to test the coffee pot to see if it makes coffee that meets the standards of the Coffee Institute, and, of course, the "girls" in the test kitchen. All these women probably got home economics degrees from Iowa State College. In the end, the percolator is put to the ultimate test by being offered for sale in a department store. Husbands are informed that due to the sophisticated mind-control, er, I mean, "market research" techniques by Corning, their wives will demand the coffee pot despite all logic. This film is a must-see for a "ladies night" of msting––you hardly know where to start with it. Though no one instance of sexism is particularly jaw-dropping, it has a cumulative effect that just doesn't quit.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *****. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: *****. Overall Rating: *****.

Attack on a China Mission (film #35 on The Movies Begin, Volume Two: The European Pioneers (Kino Video, 1994)). [Category: Early Film & TV]

This film was a recreation of an actual event which took place during the Boxer Rebellion in China. A happy European family frolics in the front yard of a Victorian home when they are assaulted by a few Chinese rebels in traditional garb wielding swords. The family runs indoors in fright. Suddenly a huge group of European soldiers armed with guns appears. They kill the Chinese rebels with dispatch but go on firing at the house for some reason. One wonders on the accuracy of this recreation. A 1900 James A. Williamson film.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: **.

Classic Sci-Fi Trailers, Vol. 8 (Sinister Cinema). [Category: Commercial]

Some more trailers from science fiction movies from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Lots of giant Japanese monsters on this one, plus both The Thing With Two Heads and The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant! Gets 5 extra points for throwing in some drive-in ephemera.

Highlights:

• Gimmick Alert! Teenage Caveman was filmed in Superama! Godzilla vs. the Thing is in Eye-Jolting Color and Terrorscope!
  
• Island of Lost Women stars John Smith!
  
• War Between the Planets is "great family film fare from Fanfare!"
  
• The Navy vs. the Night Monsters was released by the Standard Club of America. Cyborg 2087 was released by Feature Film Corp. of America. Such memorable names!
  
• "Boys! Here's a chance to see if your GHOUL friend can take it!" Yup, it's another great spook show promo for the Giant All-Color Spook-a-Thon.
  
• Mysteries of the Gods gives you William Shatner and Eric Von Daniken's theories all in one movie! How can you miss?
  
• At the end of the tape, Sinister Cinema thanks Steve Bishop for some of the trailers. My guess is that Steve was responsible for all the giant Japanese monster trailers, which are in truly stunning condition. Thanks again, Steve.
  
• Msties, take note: contains the trailer for Teenage Caveman.
  

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ****. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ****.

How to Undress (film #3 on Exploitation Mini Classics, Vol. 1 (Sinister Cinema)). [Category: Sleaze & Outsider]

This most ridiculous example of a "Goofus and Gallant" film purports to teach wives how to undress in front of their husbands. Slinky Ethel is compared with fat Trixie, which allows the smarmy narrator to drool over one and humiliate the other. Of course, the real purpose of this film is to have a scene of a pretty woman stripping, which makes me suspect that very few women saw it in its day. Appalling.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ****. Weirdness: ***. Historical Interest: ****. Overall Rating: ***.

The Ed Sullivan Show (film #1 on Toast of the Town (Shokus Video)). [Category: Outtakes & Obscurities]

This 1956 episode of "The Ed Sullivan Show" is a real hodge-podge from the days when tv was supposed to be for one mass audience. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz plug their movie Forever Darling, Desi and the Ames Brothers sing the title song from same (with Lucy trying to butt in, as usual), the Ames Brothers go on to do some impressions of 50s pop singers, Rodgers and Hammerstein are interviewed and the Broadway cast of Pipe Dream (one of the lesser Rodgers & Hammerstein efforts) sings some songs from the show, Orson Welles does a scene from King Lear, Ed introduces some celebrities in the audience, and ends up not having enough time for a rather lame ventriloquist to perform. Most of the stuff is only mildly entertaining, but it does have a real 50s feel, giving you an education in what 50s audiences liked to see on tv. The most appalling part is the Pipe Dream sequence––despite the assertion on the show that this show was incredibly popular and sold out the first night, it seems to be unknown today, and frankly, the scenes here explain why. The appalling part was that this musical was supposedly based upon a John Steinbeck novel, perhaps not the top author on the should-never-be-turned-into-a-Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-musical list, but certainly in the top ten. Still, Ed almost makes up for it by cutting the ventriloquist short. Extra highlights include commercials for big ugly 50s cars and a really cheesy "next week" promo.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: **. Weirdness: **. Historical Interest: *****. Overall Rating: ***.

Admiral Dewey Leading Land Parade No. 2 (film #4 on Edison Film Archive). [Category: Early Film & TV]

This gives you some idea of what a military parade was like in 1899. Mostly it involved lots of horse-drawn carraiges, marching bands, and marching soldiers. Lots and lots of them. An 1899 Edison film.

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *. Weirdness: *. Historical Interest: ***. Overall Rating: **.