Movie Review: Man Hunt (Blu-ray, Twilight Time)

Reviewed By: Hal Astell

I've seen a lot of Fritz Lang movies, having been stunned by M and Metropolis and so deliberately seeking out as many more as I could find. I was impressed to no small degree by films like Hangmen Also Die!, Scarlet Street and The Big Heat. I even thoroughly enjoyed 1956's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, the most recent film of his that I've seen thus far, though the quality of his films generally decreased as time went on, other films from the fifties like The Blue Gardenia, Moonfleet and While the City Sleeps leaving me surprisingly disappointed. The problem is that while some of his films are perennials on TV, my supply of Fritz Lang movies dried up at sixteen and I've only managed to see one more since 2007: Human Desire, again not one of his best, especially now I've seen the far superior original French movie that it remade. This one thankfully is much better.

Shortly before the war, as close as late July 1939, a British hunter called Alan Thorndike is holidaying in Bavaria and there is gifted with the biggest game of them all: Adolf Hitler, right there in the sights of his Hammond & Hammond. He even shoots him dead from 550 yards, or at least would have done had he a bullet in his rifle. When he loads that bullet, he's still only doing it to play the game, because it's the thrill of the chase that drives him. If he can get close enough to a game that doesn't want him to get close enough, then he knows he can kill and so actually doing so isn't necessary. Given what we know from history it won't surprise you too much to find that Hitler lives and we'll never know if Thorndike could have made the shot or not because he's interrupted by a patrolling German soldier, this being one of the most guarded buildings in the world, after all, and he's promptly delivered into the care of George Sanders.

Cinematic Hell: The Terror of Tiny Town (1938)

by Hal Astell

Director: Sam Newfield

Stars: Jed Buell's Midgets

Buy The Terror of Tiny Town on DVD

You knew this was going to turn up sooner or later, right? There's just no way I could resist adding to the ranks of Cinematic Hell something that the title card suggests is supposed to be 'a rollickin', rootin', tootin', shootin' drama of the great outdoors,' but patently isn't, at least not how you expect. It was produced in 1938 by Jed Buell who owned Jed Buell's Midgets (given that this was the golden age of the studio system, 'owned' probably had many meanings), who constitute the entire cast. Yes, folks, this is a musical western with an all midget cast, many of whom you'll recognise because they went on to play Munchkins the following year in The Wizard of Oz.

Cinematic Hell: Reefer Madness (1936)

by Hal Astell

Director: Louis Gasnier

Stars: Dorothy Short and Kenneth Craig

Buy Reefer Madness on DVD

Somehow I've managed to avoid seeing Reefer Madness up until now, even though I probably own half a dozen copies of it in various public domain box sets and I have seen a number of its peers. It's an important film, generally seen as the benchmark of the educational exploitation films of the thirties and forties, the standard by which they're judged. Unfortunately it's somehow neither particularly good or bad and so has attained its lofty and legendary status through a salacious history and a particularly delicious form of irony. Financed as a cautionary tale by a small church group, it is most popular with the very people it warned against, thus it amazingly achieved the precise opposite of what it aimed at and continues to do so over seventy years after its initial release. Beyond that irony, it apparently improves in quality the more stoned you are. To be truly entertained you need to be so high that it becomes topical humour.

Cinematic Hell: Child Bride (1938)

by Hal Astell

Director: Harry J. Revier

Stars: Shirley Mills and Bob Bollinger

Buy Child Bride on DVD

I knew that Manos: The Hands of Fate had been referenced by many people in the know as the real worst film of all time, including the writers of Mystery Science Theater 3000 who had effectively rescued it from cinematic oblivion. However when researching that film I found tantalising snippets about another movie that they declined to screen on their show, one that they once threw out in answer to a convention Q&A question as to whether they had seen anything worse. That movie was 1938's Child Bride, so naturally I had to add it to my Cinematic Hell viewing list. It was a US government funded movie intended to be shown as an educational piece in the Ozarks and other areas of the American deep south where it was seen as acceptable for grown men to marry young girls. And by young, I don't mean seventeen. This is a film that's in the public domain, available on cheap box sets everywhere but is still categorised at Wikipedia under 'films with a pedophile theme'. Be warned.

Cinematic Hell: Maniac (1934)

by Hal Astell

Director: Dwain Esper

Star: Bill Woods

Buy Maniac on DVD

There are exploitation films that surprise because of what they are or what they contain, and then there are exploitation films that continue to surprise so much that the most surprising thing of all is that they're not far more famous than they are. This little picture from Dwain Esper pulls out all the stops, with almost everything you could possibly imagine from exploitation cinema except garish colour, all stuffed into a mere 51 minute running time. What's more it was released in 1934, which seems unbelievable given some of the things that go on, though others are admittedly staples of thirties horror. Sourced primarily from Poe, it was ahead of Roger Corman by a quarter of a century. The eyeball eating scene feels like it should be in a Fulci movie half a century later. The personal take on zombies is a very modern one that writers are only now starting to get back to, three quarters of a century later. Talk about ahead of its time. Every 25 years someone catches up to something else in this film.

Cinematic Hell: Life Returns (1935)

Director: Eugen Frenke
Star: Dr Robert E Cornish

Buy Life Returns on DVD

Horror in the early thirties belonged to Universal. Already established in the silent era with Lon Chaney vehicles The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, amongst others, they hit the sound age running. In 1931 they released both Dracula and Frankenstein, making icons out of Béla Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the process, then followed up with The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and more. By 1935, they were the undisputed genre kings and to celebrate they released what may be the best and the worst pictures in their entire horror run, films that shared a theme and an actress but otherwise couldn't be more different. The best was James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, the worst Eugen Frenke's Life Returns, a partnership with the newly formed independent Scienart Pictures to spin a hokey yarn around the true story of a real Dr Frankenstein, Dr Robert E Cornish, who killed dogs and brought them back to life.