A GIRL IN EVERY PORT (1928) is another silent Howard Hawks films, wherein swabbies Victor McLaglen and Richard Armstrong go from brawling adversaries to best buddies only to risk falling apart when McLaglen falls for Louise Brooks, whom Armstrong knows from experience is No Damn Good. The male bonding makes this feel more Hawksian than the other silents I’ve caught recently, but it’s still not very good. The homoerotic overtones had TYG snickering when she caught part of it while I watched. “It’s ten after nine.”
THE SOFT SKIN (1964) is the first film in my Truffaut-a-thon that I haven’t seen before, though it turns out I wasn’t missing much. While well-made, this is a surprisingly conventional married-boy-gets-girl, married-boy-loses-girl, wife-gets-a-gun,drama that could easily have been made by a half-dozen other creators (something I wouldn’t say about Jules and Jim). I do, however, like Roger Ebert’s observation that most of the protagonist’s problems come not from adultery but from being a half-hearted, inept adulterer. “I’d rather save that for my talk so as not to reveal myself.”
THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970) isn’t as arty an adaptation of Carmilla as Vampyr but it’s much more faithful. Then newcomer Ingrid Pitt plays a beautiful, stranded noblewoman taken in by Peter Cushing’s family, after which Cushing’s daughter suffers a strange, wasting disease — and then it appears the same fate will befall Pippa Steele (above right, with Pitt). While sex and blood were always part of Hammer’s appeal, like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, this film shows them getting much more explicit, with nude breasts, vampire bites on breasts and lesbian scenes that must have been eye-popping at the time; that said, it’s tame compared to the lurid AIP poster below (AIP released this and Sister Hyde in the US). The box office was good enough to generate two sequels, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil; Kate O’Mara (later the Rani on Doctor Who) plays a discarded lover. “The trouble with this part of the world is they have too many fairy tales.”
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That said, I think they stuck the landing: Kelsey, once again unattached to a guy, heads out to LA to start fresh in a new job (there were hopes for a spinoff but Duff picked another show); Charles and Liza break up (but Liza’s last-minute rush to the airport to encourage him to marry someone else was a great twist on the cliche); and Liza (now promoted to publisher) and Josh maybe start over. I’m not sure that resolves anything given Josh wanted to marry her too (the sticking point for Charles was Liza ruling out getting married again) but nonetheless it worked for me. “He’s iconic — like, genuinely iconic, not millennial-stanning-kombucha iconic.”
speed from a freak accident, dons a costume and goes to work against the nihilist reptilian terrorist the Python. On the level of the 1970s TV pilots I watched as a teen, then again for 
PAID TO LOVE (1927) is the earliest extant film by future Thing from Another World director Howard Hawks, a silent comedy in which a banker agrees to invest in a struggling postage-stamp kingdom if he and the monarch can convince the car-crazy heir to the throne (“He won’t even look at a girl if she doesn’t have eight cylinders and a carburetor.”) to find a woman and ensure continuation of the dynasty. The solution is to hire an actor to seduce him but on the way to court the woman falls in love for real with a man she thinks is but an ordinary member of the royal guard.
based series with no Scooby? — but there have been equally implausible prequels I’ve enjoyed. And I do think that diversifying the cast makes good sense (Velma’s Indian-American, voiced by show co-creator Mindy Kaling, and Daphne is Asian-American). However the story of how Velma brought the human members of the team together has the same kind of meanness I despise in Rick and Morty, generally unlikable characters, and the first episode felt blandly, generically edgy. Learning the second episode has a bad #metoo joke (Velma claims she says the truth without filters, “like comedians before metoo!”) killed what interest I might have had. If I get the itch for Scooby Doo material there’s no shortage of better out there. “Have you ever noticed how pilot episodes of TV shows always have more gratuitous sex and nudity than the rest of the episodes?”
Producer Howard Hawks liked stories about tough guys, and Hendry and his crew are plenty tough. It’s not emphasized, just taken as a given that they’re willing to go up against this alien menace and fight to the last man to save the world. Scotty, the reporter (Douglas Spencer) establishes his bona fides easily: when Hendry says he should be away from the front lines, Scotty replies he shouldn’t have been at El Alamein or Okinawa during WW II, but he was there. ’nuff said.
team (Jesse Ventura) carries a massive gun way too big to lug for jungle fighting; there’s the early scene where we watch Carl Weathers and Ah-nuld arm-wrestle with an emphasis on their muscles.
