Andrei Konchalovsky made a Christmas movie.

The same Andrei Konchalovsky who made Maria’s Lovers, Shy People, Runaway Train and, oddly, Tango & Cash.

This was his passion project for twenty years.

It is not good.

He was inspired to adapt it into 3D as he thought it “would be useful in conveying the fantastical nature of the material, capturing the emotions of CGI characters, and appealing to a family audience.

He also made The Nutcracker, a ballet, with no ballet sequences because, because he believed “ballet cannot work in cinema very well.”

It was primarily financed by VEB.RF, a Russian state development corporation chaired by Vladimir Putin, and at the time was the most expensive Russian film ever.

In 1920s Vienna, Mary (Elle Fanning) and her brother Max (Aaron Michael Drozin) are being babysat by their Uncle Albert (Nathan Lane) while her parents Joseph (Richard E. Grant) and Louise (Yulia Vysotskaya) go to a Christmas Eve party.

That’s Uncle Albert Einstein.

Einstein gives the kids a dollhouse and a nutcracker by the name of NC (Charlie Rowe, voiced by Shirley Henderson) who soon comes to life and introduces her to his friends Gielgud (Peter Elliott and Daniel Peacock, voiced by Alan Cox), Sticks (Africa Nile) and Tinker (Hugh Sachs). They climb to the top of the Christmas tree and meet the Snow Fairy (also Vysotskaya), who informs the children that NC is really Prince Nicholas Charles, who has been deposed by The Rat King (John Turturro) and his mother, The Rat Queen (Frances de la Tour) and turned from a boy into a nutcracker. He’s a real boy again, but not for long, because when he comes back home, he’s transformed and we learn that the rats are, well, all Nazis.

Look at that line again. A kid movie with Nazi rats — like Art Spiegelman’s Maus — that’s an adaption of the Nutcracker with no dancing and lyrics by Tim Rice that was funded by Vladimir Putin and it’s in 3D.

Roger Ebert said it best: “From what dark night of the soul emerged the wretched idea for The Nutcracker in 3D? Who considered it even remotely a plausible idea for a movie? It begins with an awkward approximation of the story behind the Tchaikovsky ballet, and then turns it into a war by the Nutcracker Prince against the Holocaust.”

Roger Ebert, suffering from cancer, had to spent time in his slowly dwindling life watching this movie.

A Nazi movie, yes, but set in 1920. This movie has destroyed my mind.

Let me just get this all out of my head.

The Rat King says that he will create an empire that will last a thousand years, as well as a scene where he electrocutes his pet shark. In a movie for children. For Christmas. About The Nutcracker. Yet also the rat people are also shown as being persecuted. Why am I wondering so much about the politics of a 3D CGI rat movie? Should I leave the house and finish my Christmas shopping?

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the November 12, 2024 episode of the Video Archives podcast. 

One of the things I’ve picked up from Video Archives is that Quentin Tarantino is from the era when Robert Mitchum was considered an action hero.

This was called “the meanest Mitchum movie yet” and has him playing former DEA Agent Quinlan, who was kicked off the force for stealing confiscated drug money. Now he’s using drug dealer Chung Wei’s (Keye Luke) tips to tell the DEA where to bust people. At least that was the plan but there’s a leak somewhere in the DEA.

Mitchum works with agents Howard Odums (Bradford Dillman, who only made this movie so he could take his wife Suzy Parker on a trip), Ridgeway (Richard Egan) and Riley Knight (Leslie Nielsen). Yuen Wah and Yuen Biao also show up.

Man, Robert Clouse made all over the place movies. Whether it’s Enter the Dragon, Golden Needles, Game of Death, The Big Brawl, Deadly Eyes, Gymkata or the two China O’Brien movies, he knew how to entertain. This was a Golden Harvest production and supposedly a remake of Jumping Ash. Editor Allan Holtzman would go on to direct Forbidden World and Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Holocaust.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the November 12, 2024 episode of the Video Archives podcast. 

Based on the 1961 book Car, Boy, Girl by Gordon Buford, this was the first of many movies that would feature Herbie the Love Bug, who is driven by Jim Douglas (Dean Jones) and worked on by Tennessee Steinmetz (Buddy Hackett), a mechanic who transforms used car parts into art.

Jones claimed that this film was so good with the fact that it was made when Walt Disney was still invovled with his films. It was released just two years after Walt’s death. I would also say that having Robert Stevenson as director — he also made Mary Poppins, That Darn Cat and Old Yeller — helped.

Douglas has big dreams of racing, but all he gets to do is compete in demolition derbies. After racing and crashing another car — an Edsel, no less — our protagonist comes across a car dealer named Peter Thorndyke (David Tomlinson, Mary Poppins) abusing a Volkswagen Beetle. The next morning, the car just so happens to show up at Douglas’ house and he’s nearly arrested until Thorndyke’s sales assistant and mechanic Carole Bennett (Michele Lee) convinces her boss to sell the car.

Herbie — so named by Tennessee — seems to have a mind of his own, but he’s able to help Douglas win several big races, to the continual chagrin of his former owner. Much like nearly every Dean Jones character, Douglas is a jerk and just wants a Lamborghini 400GT instead of the heroic little VW Bug. Herbie responds by running away, damaging big stretches of Chinatown and nearly driving himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in his depression. Yes, back in the day, live action Disney got dark.

Of course, not so dark that a small Volkswagen can’t win a race against cars with much more horsepower, like Thorndike’s Apollo GT (the avergae VW bug had 40 hp while the Apollo GT had 225 hp).

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Directed by Roger Corman, written by Jack Nicholson and released by American-International Pictures, The Trip cost $100,000 to make and brought in $6 million dollars. Hollywood was listening, because within the next year, movies for the love generation were all over the place*.

In fact, seven years after this movie, AIP’s Samuel Z. Arkoff said, “Everybody else picked it up; and as late as last year they were still coming out with dope pictures. And there isn’t one single company that made a buck on dope pictures. The young people had turned off.”

You know what makes Paul Groves (Peter Fonda) try LSD? He gets his heart broken by his wife (Susan Strasberg) and joins John (Bruce Dern) to take his first trip. He runs in fear from John as the trip over takes him, wandering through a nightmare world of sex, death, commercialism and mental transformation.

Corman took LSD himself to understand what it should look like on film, which ends up being quick edits, paint on nude women and small people trying to frighten the viewer.

While you can see the International Submarine Band, with Gram Parsons on vocals, the music in the movie comes from The Electric Flag. Music is a big part of this movie, as Dern’s line “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream” comes directly from The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Other folks to look out for include Salli Sachse (How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Wild in the Streets), Judy Lang (Count Yorga), Luana Anders (The Pit and the Pendulum), Dick Miller (I mean, it is a Corman movie after all), Michael Nader (so many beach movies), Michael Blodgett (Lance Rock from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), Sunset Strip tastemake and KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, Peter Bogdanovich, Randee Lynne Jensen (so many bikers movies), Joyce Mandel (Return of the Ultra Vixens) and Angelo Rossitto (everything from Freaks to playing The Master in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome).

The Trip attempts to film the unfilmable and for that, we should celebrate it.

*For example, the next year, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Luana Anders would all appear in Easy Rider.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Thana (Zoë Tamerlis, who also wrote director Abe Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, is a mute seamstress working in New York City’s Garment District.

After she’s assaulted twice — once at gunpoint in an alley by a masked man and then again in her own apartment by a burglar — Thana lives up to her name, which is inspired by Thanatos the Greek god of death. She attacks the second man with a glass red apple and then beats him to death with an iron and leaves him in her tub. After dealing with her horrible work situation, she cuts her rapist apart and dumps him all over the city.

She keeps the man’s gun and soon uses it on another man who corners her, then runs up her steps and throws up in an echo of Paul Kersey’s first night of vigilantism in Death Wish.

Soon, she’s a literal Angel of Vengeance, which was the film’s other title. She targets a series of men who have treated women wrong and even causes one of them to kill himself when her gun jams. Finally, her vengeance reaches the point where she unleashes her full fury on her horrible boss and every man who attends her party as she whirls around, full action heroine, repeatedly shooting everyone while dressed as a nun.

Ms. 45 is better regarded than I Spit On Your Grave, perhaps because it doesn’t dwell in its rape scenes or have them take up much of the movie’s running time. Or maybe, just maybe, because it’s a much better movie.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Zack (Tom Waits) and Jack (John Lurie) have been set up and landed in jail, where they’re doing time alongside Bob (Roberto Benigni) an Italian tourist who barely understands English and is in jail for accidental manslaughter. Zack and Jack want to fight almost immediately, but when Bob is able to break out — the movie is more about these men than how they jailbreak, the mechanics aren’t important — they stay with the foreigner because he can always find food.

Waits calls this “a Russian neo-fugitive episode of The Honeymooners.” Jarmusch listened to Waits’ songs and based a lot of the film on how they made him feel, yet Lurie and his band The Lounge Lizards recorded the soundtrack.

Bob, as an innocent, is able to take these broken and fighting men to the promised land, where he stays with Nicoletta (Nicoletta Braschi, who would later marry Benigni). As for Zack and Jack, they go their separate ways.

I love that this movie’s most heartfelt line, “It’s a sad and beautiful world,” was misspoken by Benigni.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Inspired by the real-life murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in 1906, which was followed by Gillette’s execution by electric chair in 1908 as well as the book An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, this is one of the best American movies of all time, winning six Academy Awards and the first-ever Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama.

George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) has come to work in his uncle Charles’ (Herbert Heyes) factory. Co-worker Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters) romances him in the hopes that Eastman’s last name will get her ahead in life. But George has also met socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor) and falls in love. But he’s already gotten Alice pregnant, so he can’t forget his past and can’t truly be part of Angela’s world.

George and Alice go to get married, but the Justice of the Peace is closed. Instead, he plans on drowning her and takes her out on a boat, but he decides to let her live. At that moment, she stands up and the boat capsizes. She drowns as he swims to safety. In truth, he killed her, as he never tried to save her and saw this as a way of getting the life he wanted. He’s charged with murder just as he’s been accepted into Angela’s family and ends up going to the electric chair.

Directed by George Stevens and written by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown, this may be too slow and melodramatic for modern audiences, this movie had an impact on fashion, as Taylor’s white lilac gown inspired prom and wedding dresses for a decade.

Stevens spent $2.3 million on this movie and shot more than 400,000 feet of film. It took over a year to edit it. In case you think you’ve seen the Eastwood mansion before, it’s a recycled set from Sunset Boulevard.

Somehow, I’ve watched four movies written by and starring Simon Phillips this month. He’s in this as an evil one-eyed Santa Claus, who has arrived in a small town called Woodbridge along with an equally horrifying and Harley Quinn-ish Mrs. Claus (Sayla de Goede, Silent Bite) to commit a series of murders based around the twelve days of Christmas.

Directed by Paul Tanter, who also made the sequel The Nights Before Christmas and who wrote this with Phillips and Christopher Jolley, has Sheriff Mitchell (Barry Kennedy) and Deputy Sam Fullard (Jeff Ellenberger) trying to solve the case before anyone else gets killed. Jennifer (Laurel Brady) have some connection to these killers, who are axing strippers — nine ladies dancing — and killing off a bachelor party — ten lords a leaping — when they’re not smashing milking machines to make sure they get all the lyrics into their kills.

Barry Kennedy was so good in some scenes that I forgot how silly this script is, but it does have some wild moments like five FBI agents all being killed and their wedding rings being taken. Five golden rings. Yes, this gets in all of the song and you’ll catch on way before the police. Defund the giallo, slasher and holiday horror police! Also: These same cops open packages without calling for the bomb squad and yell, “Call for backup!” when they get there and not on the way there.

This is also the kind of movie that has someone throw a grenade at someone and just duck a few feet away and be surprised when it just puts off smoke. No one coughs. No one’s eyes hurt. Yes, I know I shouldn’t worry about goofs like that in a movie where the twelve days of Christmas end on December 25 instead of starting on that day, but what do I know? I just watch these things.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Jack Starrett knew how to make dependable and entertaining movies. Nam’s Angels, Slaughter, Race With the Devil, Hollywood Man, Kiss My Grits, The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie and Run, Angel, Run! He’s also a fine actor, enlivening Blazing Saddles, The Girls from Thunder Strip and First Blood.

Cleopatra “Cleo” Jones (Tamara Dobson) is the coolest. She’s an international supermodel who drives a ’73 Corvette Stingray, volunteers for the B&S House — love that name — which is a street help group run by her lover Reuben Masters (Bernie Casey) and, oh yeah, she’s also a secret agent.

Her goal is to stop drugs from destroying her community and she starts by burning the poppy fields owned by drug lord Mommy (Shelley Winters). Mommy might run the cops and have drug dealers like “Doodlebug” Simpkins (Antonio Fargas) on her side, but she can’t even match up to Cleopatra.

Unlike so many blacksploitation films, Cleopatra never gets naked. There’s a lot of equality in her relationship with Reuben, but there is an evil lesbian obsessed with sex role for Mommy, so it’s not all forward thinking.

The cops in this are at war with the black community, while Cleopatra, working as a Special Agent to the President, seeks to lift people up and help them to improve their station in life. She’s the authority figure we wish we had. Plus, she wears ten different Giorgio di Sant’Angelo outfits, so she’s always at the front of fashion.

Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

In the days before the internet, we could build our own cults. Amongst my family, we were obsessed with Pee-Wee Herman. Just imagine, in a time that could only be predicted by TV Guide, Pee-Wee would randomly show up in movies like Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie and Nice Dreams, here he was only known as “The Hamburger Guy.” As the 80’s began, Pee-Wee started by performing five months of the live The Pee-wee Herman Show at the Roxy Theater in LA and getting a taped special on HBO.

That special dominated my eight-year-old mind, presenting a world that at once childlike and at the other end, strangely sinister and adult. I watched it so many times that I could recite every single word and still can. The end, where Pee-Wee finally learns to fly, can often reduce me to tears.

In the five years between that special and this movie, Paul Reubens pretty much became Pee-Wee, even asking his parents to go by the names Honey and Herman Herman. His David Letterman appearances — major surprises, as we stated before — were riotous bursts of anarchy on a show that was already breaking nearly every rule of television. So when a Pee-Wee movie was announced, we lost our collective minds.

Somehow, Pee-Wee Herman is the rarest of cases of someone who became famous without losing a single ounce of his weirdness. And much like the HBO show that came before, I can still recite every word of this movie, quote it at will throughout the day and get misty-eyed just thinking of moments within it.

The story is incredibly simple: Pee-Wee’s most prized possession — his bike — has been taken by Francis. Now, he must get it back. A psychic tells our hero that his bike is in the basement of the Alamo, so we’re off to adventure.

That’s it. It’s that easy.

From wrestler Silo Sam chasing Pee-Wee around dinosaurs to his speech to Dottie (I actually gave this exact same “I’m a rebel, a loner” speech to a date once and was convinced she was going to slap me; she cried and told me it was the saddest thing she’d ever heard, somehow never seeing this movie before), dancing to “Tequilla” at a biker bar while Satan’s Helpers (look for Elvira) look on and so much more, there are so many moments in this film that simply listing them would take on the feel of Chris Farley talking to Paul McCartney.

I mean, without this film, you may not have Danny Elfman and Tim Burton making big budget movies.

To write the film, Reubens, Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol purchased the book Syd Field’s Screenplay and were as literal as possible. “It’s a 90-minute film, it’s a 90-page script,” said Ruebens. “On page 30 I lose my bike, on page 60 I find it. It’s literally exactly what they said to do in the book.” In my crazed mind, I also wish that Ruebens had followed through with his plan to remake Pollyanna with Pee-Wee in the lead.

There are so many easter eggs in this film, like the magic shop owned being named after Mario Bava, the Chiodo Brothers animating Large Marge, the Aleister Crowley head in the aforementioned magic shop, James Brolin playing Pee-Wee, the start of my crush on E.G. Daily, Professor Toru Tanaka as Francis’ butler and even the first acting role for Darla the dog, who was Queenie in The ‘Burbs and Precious in Silence of the Lambs.

There are so many lines in this, too. I leave you with my favorite:

Simone: Do you have any dreams?

Pee-Wee Herman: Yeah, I’m all alone. I’m rolling a big doughnut and this snake wearing a vest…

PS: I have just one more ridiculous Pee-Wee story to tell. In 1989, Pee-Wee exchanged fake marriage vows with Chandi Heffner — the adopted daughter of Doris Duke, the richest little girl in the world. Chandi was a Hare Krishna devotee and sister of the third wife of billionaire Nelson Peltz and all of 35-years-old when she was adopted, as Duke believed that she was the reincarnation of her only biological child Arden, who died days after being born. Chandra and Pee-Wee were “married” by Imelda Marcos at Duke’s Honolulu mansion Shangri-La. If you think the world is not amazing and special, you’re a fool.