Movies off my Netflix list

With Netflix ending DVD service, I’m prioritizing older movies in the list that might be harder to find on Amazon Prime or any of the many apps. This week, however, reminded me that a number of movies on the list are the equivalent of impulse purchases rather than Must See films.I could quite happily have gone without seeing THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN (1966) in which small-town newspaper typesetter Don Knotts hopes his story of spending one night in the local haunted house will get him a byline, and possibly the attention of local cutie Joan Staley. While the house shows every sign of a real ghost, when the owner challenges him to prove it, all the evidence has vanished — can Knotts prove it or is he permanently condemned to be the town laughing stock?

This is nothing Scooby Doo or Abbott and Costello didn’t do better; curiously, like The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, it has a lot of TV faces including Dick Sargent and Sandra Gould from Bewitched (second Darren and one of the Mrs. Kravitz), Reta Shaw from TV’s Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and music by Vic Mizzy (TV’s Addams Family and Green Acres) which is better than this film deserves. “Do haunted houses scare you?”

Mascot’s 1931 serial KING OF THE WILD probably got on the list as Boris Karloff’s last chapterplay; like a number of his pre-Frankenstein films, he plays a sinister Easterner, an Arab  working with the eponymous animal trainer to gain control of a diamond field in Africa. I’m not sure if the problem is that as an early talky they hadn’t got the dialog/action pacing right or (more likely) that Mascot was a crap studio that made crappy movies. While I’d have sat through to the end in other times, I opted to send it back and get something else.I do know THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS (1959) got on the list because the commentary track for Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde mentioned it as a earlier film using Burke and Hare (details such as Hare getting blinded in both films convince me the earlier movie was an influence on the later). Peter Cushing plays Knox, an Edinburgh doctor and medical school teacher who needs corpses for anatomy class; when Burke and Hare (Donald Pleasance, giving a wonderful l0w-comic performance) start bringing in fresh bodies that they assure him they just happened to stumble across — well, no need to ask questions, is there? This is a good movie with an excellent performance by Cushing as a cold-blooded bastard about one step away from full-on mad science. For that reason his repentance at the end is the film’s weak spot: sure, he’s wracked by guilt but does that really excuse turning a blind eye to multiple murders? “Ain’t he got a mean face? No wonder he died owing me money.”

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