EricJ

WOW! 😛 (It was Disney's first widescreen animated, which is why it was the first to go to Blu-ray, back in the early nervous days.) My problem is that I've not only already GOT all the good stuff on Blu-ray, but most of it was transferred over to VOD download for free when Disney linked that new system (which eventually became MoviesAnywhere) with the Rewards points. Now, I had a whole list of obscure 50's-60's live-action on Vudu's great download page that I was going to "get around to" renting, and hoped I could stream those for free on Disney+'s catalog, but FTM, seems to be just the best-known iconic video titles: Looked for "Watcher in the Woods"?--Nope. "Superdad"? "Sword & the Rose"? "Last Flight of Noah's Ark"? Aw, c'mon, they've got to have "Condorman"! Nope, nope, noop, and nope. Plus, many of the movies still contracted to Netflix, like "Solo", "John Carter", and "Alice & the Nutcracker" (or whatever the heck that was) are "Coming in '20", after rights expire there. Also, thanks to the local library, I was digging up the rare short-lived (and hard-to-find) complete TV disk boxsets of "DuckTales" and "Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers" that showed the episodes in broadcast order but...nope--We get the series here, but only in the random "Best-of" collections that came out on VHS in the 80's.

Playstation Vue was a disaster--an idea born back before the '10 streaming rush, when game consoles had their own private download stores, and thought they were offering streaming content "exclusively" because their consoles could stream the Internet--wasn't initially available outside of a few select cities, required high gamer bandwidth, and was already being pushed out by Sling and other Internet-TV companies. As for YouTubeTV...I can hope this will finally convince them that no Internet user who has ever used YouTube has ever had the slightest inclination of paying for it (which includes "Original YouTube programming", and studios offering VOD movies), but I fear that may be too unrealistically optimistic.

I can remember dozens of 80's action B-movie knockoffs that wished Walter Hill's Streets of Fire (1984) could have been as good as its title. At least it was better than the 80's-90's plague of "Quirky name" titles we got in the wake of Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986).

I see Buster Keaton on the cover, under "Old". Buster's spiritual link with Wile E. Coyote means you could show just about anything, and it would make converts, even more than Chaplin or Lloyd. (Especially among a demographic that thinks all silent movies have cops throwing pies at each other.) Sherlock Jr. gets a little too strange by the last reel--despite its Daffy Duck-homaged first half--but otherwise just about anything. Buster's coolness was ahead of its time. Not sure about Some Like It Hot on the cover ("Best"), as we live in a decade that wishfully takes everything out of context, but better than a cautious maybe on whether The Seven Year Itch would win over Marilyn-curious older teens for being its own over-the-top spoof on 50's toxic chauvinism. A best defense is a good pre-emptive offense, and Billy Wilder knew how to deliver comic offense.

Singin' in the Rain is a proven scientific fact: Think it's that young kids never quite expect an MGM musical to be as snarky and funny as a Betty Comden/Adolph Green script, so blitz 'em early--Then follow with Band Wagon. Rear Window, most kids have the funny pop-culture "Good evening" image of Alfred Hitchcock, so that movie's deceptive funny opening also lures them in...Heheh. 😈 Every time there's the B&W argument, I always bring up Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, although the first twenty poor-villagers minutes before the samurai show up can be a little slow...Once they do, though, I brag that it's another two hours before you even think of looking at your watch. If that's too long for their attention spans, I try the shorter The Hidden Fortress, saying it's the movie that Star Wars remade--Saying you know more about Star Wars than they do is an automatic CHALLENGE.

I remember one standup comic who joked about those registration letters he'd get from the DMV warning him to "SURRENDER YOUR PLATES". And imagined armed SWAT teams surrounding his house: "You'll never take 'em alive!...If my plates were in the oven, would I turn the gas on?" "Errrr, you might, rahbbit, you might." "You can get any kind of house you want. You can even get stucco...Ohh, how you can get 'stuck-o'!" - The Cocoanuts

Paint Your Wagon had a radically different plot onstage: Jean Seberg's part was divided between Lee Marvin's daughter, and the Mormon auction-bride, and Clint Eastwood's part was also divided between the daughter and a Mexican boy, which explains why Clint has to sing the Mexican-tinged "I Talk to the Trees". Also, the mining town goes bust at the end even without the 60's Western-Comedy climax of the mine-collapse. I realize that some musicals have to be changed for the movies, but some, like Bye Bye Birdie or the 80's Annie, just get steamrollered out of recognition.

And when I like a little cold malted chocolate on late summer evenings, I never make Ovaltine (the only malted chocolate on the drink-mix shelf, unless anyone knows of another brand)-- It instinctively always comes out as "...OOO-valtine?" "Mowe bwiefing?" "More briefing." (Not to mention that if I happen to think "Oho, so that's his little game, is it?", it's reflex-conditionally followed by "...Shoot the duck, shoot the duck!!")

If you followed them on Twitter, you wouldn't "wonder" whether Kino or Shout/Scream Factory had done a classic 70's-80's cult title on Blu-ray, you would just know it instinctively: https://www.amazon.com/Burnt-Offerings-Blu-ray-Karen-Black/dp/B012BUQOJM/

Given Branagh's recent steamrollering of "Sleuth", I suspect Kenneth, going into the project, may have wishfully fallen for the commonly mistaken trap of thinking Hercule as "gay" just for being foppish and fussy. Nope, Hercule has quite the romantic past, and still tries to charm the ladies when he mingles with the upper class, but most of that's behind him now, and his true passion is for his own private little-gray-cells obsessions. I liked Evil Under the Sun too, but by the time Peter Ustinov took the character to 80's TV-movies, the character was too much of a big lovable teddy-bear, and not the "Irritating little man" (as someone would always say in Christie's books) that Suchet nailed so perfectly.

If anybody's going to answer the OP's question, it's early (song-based) Looney Tunes "The Fella With a Fiddle". A parody of a song Jack Benny was popular with in his early stage act, and the stingy owner is...supposed to be parodying Jack Benny.

Except that the Suchet version ridiculously fiddled with one of the clues just to give Poirot some "personal drama" in the story-- In the Lumet version (and presumably the original Christie, although I hadn't read it in school because we had "And Then There Were None" instead), there's the clue about an "H", which might incriminate our good heroine...Or, as Poirot notes, is it actually a Russian "N", which would incriminate the old Russian princess? The Suchet version completely skips over the latter, and, instead of Poirot deciding to turn a blind eye at the end, has him basically hide the clue, out of respect and hidden affection for the girl, suggesting that it really WAS there to incriminate her, and we were supposed to be gullible enough to fall for it...Oh, and for some reason, the death-threat notes don't have twelve letters, either. Still, the Lumet version is one of the first three movies I picture when trying to imagine the 70's Golden Age. Every good reason for a mid-70's movie was there. 😁

- "It's symbolic of our struggle against oppression!" "It's symbolic of his struggle against reality." I find it more useful in its original context, ie. pointing out the hopeful weak point of something considered unkillable: If Trump loses his latest court battle, or the latest Terminator sequel flops in theaters, "If it bleeds, we can kill it." 😈

- "IIIII....shouldn'ta done that." - (loads gun) "I have given a NAME to my pain..." - "Remember, this school was here before you, and it'll be here after you leave!"

Someone online came up with the perfect mantra, during Facebook's troubles: "If it doesn't sell a product, YOU are the product."

In addition to the analysis of Robocop--which plays its R-rated bullet-count for offbeat satire, with weird Peter Weller giving it gravitas by playing it in dead straight perfect Marvel-type-hero character-- Mad Max plays more like the "Secret Origins" of Mel Gibson's better-known post-apocalyptic Road Warrior and Fury Road. (And "Beyond Thunderdome" which I happened to like more, and is a more mainstream PG-13 for those who want to dip their toes in the water first.) But the first Max isn't a particularly great film, as it was made back in the humble drive-in days of 70's Oz-ploitation, it's a pre-apocalyptic highway picture, and as Quentin Tarantino once put it, "You're know you're in Australia, when you're chased by a sadistic biker gang." As for Blade Runner, yes, it has special effects, but this would be one of the, er...artsier Ridley Scott films to hit the mainstream. Everything's so deeply buried in the look of neon stylizing, future-noir, and Philip K. Dick ruminations on robot identity, it's a bit impenetrable (I remember it flopping with puzzled theater audiences in '82), but it is, quite literally, worth a LOOK.

Oh, you mean The Ghost & Mr. Chicken--Watching it as a kid on TV, Don Knotts wasn't the only one freaking out when the haunted organ started playing.

While I'd like to join Lawrence in putting Haxan (the Criterion silent version, not the cool hipster Burroughs/sound version) on a list, I'm guessing the list is for favorite scary horror movies, not for best movies in the field of monsters or demons. Good, though. 👍 In alphabetical order, and using everyone else's list as memory jogger, as there aren't many long-term horror keepers on my disk shelf: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)- or "Fu Manchu meets The Avengers '67"...Showed it to a friend who was convinced the "Nine Plagues murders" was a Poe story just because of cool Vincent Price. I went to iTunes and dug up an organ cover of "War March of the Priests", so that I can play it when I'm working on a big project at my desk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OM18mJwMDM The Company of Wolves (1984) - Didn't like it when it first came out, since it was too ungracefully freakin' weird to be the post-Howling werewolf movie Golan/Globus was pitching in the lurid marketing. Until Roger Ebert's review gave me the "oh, duh" thump on the head, by pointing out that Neil Jordan was deliberately trying to capture the original story's symbolism by "Technically recreating a nightmare on screen". And yeah, Neil's been taking notes, he can do it...I don't consider "Eraserhead" a "horror" movie, so I'm putting this one on the list instead. Curse of the Demon (1957) - Dang, forgot to watch it again this Halloween! Where is that Blu-ray? Dawn of the Dead (1978) - George Romero's little B&W 60's backyard film hinted at worldwide catastrophe, but seeing it on a color late-70's feature-film budget has always pushed my buttons of seeing one mistake go permanently apocalyptic. I have no taste for current zombie culture that's only expressing one of two different hipster grudges, and remember back when they weren't cool and lovable high-school Halloween costumes, or new cosplay-convention versions of Marvel and Disney characters. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) - Once we learn our villain's motivation for Stonehenge-enabled masks--thus explaining the vicious sarcasm of the commercials--who doesn't feel some faint urge to sympathize, when reading current headlines about "rescheduling" the holiday to make it more "convenient" for candy-seekers? Well, whatever, just keep the John Carpenter synth-music coming... 🎃 The Leopard Man (1943) - Val Lewton specialized in pushing buttons, and I would make any young would-be horror fan watch the "Mama, open the door!" scene as example of what really gets underneath. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) - Yes, I know, I'm "supposed" to mention the first one...But frankly, even the creepy scenes in the first one--like our heroine nodding off at school--are ruined by Wes Craven's attempt to make Freddy a "Freudian" foul-mouthed (of course) killer who's more tongue than mouth. Whine all you like in "New Nightmare", Wes, somebody not only salvaged 1985's "Dreamscape" and made your own franchise a lot more FUN, but kicked the energy into high gear and finally gave us the smart teenagers that increasingly hipper slasher fans had been asking for. The Sixth Sense (1999) - I don't care about the ring, or that Bruce Willis didn't pick up the check...I had a misunderstood childhood full of counselors and psychologists, and I know that look on Haley Joel Osmont's face, in a world where live grownups are scary enough. Tales of Terror (1962) - I want to like Price's other Roger Corman Poe movies, but "House of Usher" and "Pit & the Pendulum" don't quite have it, and "Masque of the Red Death" comes close but has too nasty a streak. The mix of straight Corman-Poe with a dose of funny Peter Lorre just captures the macabre mix of Poe perfectly. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) - I've already mentioned the "I've had dreams like that" quality of the general air of creepiness, so won't go over that again--When we see Leatherface burst out of the door at the end of a long hall, drag the victim in and shut the door, okay, somebody's been taking notes. Hon. Mention: Bride of Frankenstein (the essential Universal Monster movie, if we could just have a little less Ernest Thesiger?), Let the Right One In (every kid wishes they knew a vampire), Something Wicked This Way Comes (not sure whether to call it a "horror" movie or a kids'-goosebumps movie), Tales From the Crypt (the one time Amicus Brit-anthology clicked, and sneaked some real disturbing moments into its usual cutesy-clever sketch punchlines, but is that orange paint supposed to be blood?)

The sequels are awful, but the original is a classic if you know the secret: Writer Ed Neumeier wanted to adapt the violent 80's-satirical black-humor of DC Comics' "Judge Dredd", but couldn't get the license, so he just changed Dredd's origin, gave him a different costume/setting, turned his "I am the Law!" into Robocop's three Directives, and made him an original character, but kept the funky tone of the cult comics. (Which, to be fair, Steven DeSouza at least tried to capture in the tongue-in-cheek 1995 Sylvester Stallone movie, a lot more than the grim blood-soaked '12 Karl Urban version.) And thanks to Paul Verhoeven's taste for inappropriately black-humored action, the resemblance is often uncanny...

They occasionally think it's clever to release two thematically similar titles at the same time to complement each other (eg. "Topsy Turvy" and the 1939 "The Mikado"), and, to bring it full circle, the Criterion edition of Valley of the Dolls was an excuse to release the Criterion edition of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Or vice versa, we'll never know for sure. 😕 And just why Armageddon--and "The Rock"--got Criterion editions back in the '99-'00 birth-of-DVD days has a lot to do with the days when only the ex-Voyager Laserdisc company understood what DVD would be for, and most studios didn't have the faintest clue. MGM and Disney didn't want to bother, so Criterion not only cleaned up on what was available, but directors like Michael Bay (before the Transformers movies, when we still took him semi-seriously) and David Fincher were such Voyager LD fans, they could license their movies to Criterion personally, and their studios wouldn't even bother to complain. Which is how we got the OOP Criterion editions of Fincher's "The Game" and "Se7en" at the time as well. Once stubborn studios woke up and started smelling the money by about '01-'02, that didn't happen anymore, and Criterion was no longer allowed grabsies. As the studio cornering the market on the birth of DVD, they also had a rush for releasing titles that MGM didn't want to bother with, giving us the now long-missing Criterion editions of Time Bandits, Life of Brian, This is Spinal Tap, and Robocop. Many of those Orion movies are now back in public-domain MGM Orphan status twenty years later, so, if we could get a Criterion of Princess Bride, it's not out of the realm of hope that they could bring Spinal Tap and Robocop back too.

Actually, it's the only "true" version of the Washington Irving story, which teasingly hinted (hint-hint) that there was no Headless Horseman, but only bully Brom Bones up to his tricks again, to scare his annoying but superstitious rival out of town. Whereas every other version of Sleepy Hollow (ahemburton) tries to create a horror/ghost story of the Horseman attacking, 40's-50's Disney had a surprising talent for "getting" the elusive source of a classic story despite the cute trappings And who probably got the role for playing the same mad Bradbury-babbling eccentric as the dockside prophet in John Huston's 1956 "Moby Dick". And whose creepy presence stole that entire movie as well...It's not easy to fluidly spin off Ray Bradbury's gushy poetry and still have it sound relatively plausible. (Is there an "edited" version? The theatrical's pretty widely available on disk.) This was 1982, back when studios still released re-issues in theaters when things got slow, and for four years, Universal had relied on putting John Carpenter's original Halloween in theaters every 31st...Even the poster for Halloween II had to put "All new!" on the front, so fans wouldn't think it was the annual reissue again. But Carpenter hated sequels--not even bothering to direct #2--he'd had enough of Michael & Dr. Loomis, and pitched the idea of a Halloween anthology if Universal wanted to keep that money-making October brandname slot. That's usually what confuses most of the fans, ie. "Wait, Michael isn't in this one? Boo, ripoff, laaaame!" And what story did Carpenter want to tell first? As the biggest fanboy of "Quatermass & the Pit" (now available on Blu-ray), he hired Nigel Kneale to write another Quatermass story of ancient forces and near-apocalypse. The studio tried to Americanize it and turn it into another "slasher" film so teens wouldn't be confused, Kneale objected and took his name off the story, but there's still that neat British Quatermass-ishness lurking somewhere in the background to lay eggs in your brain. Fans also snicker at the World's Most Annoying Commercial Jingle ("Eight more days till Hal-lo-ween..."), if that was supposed to be part of the movie's Boo-Ripoff-Lame fault, but once the plot thickens, we appreciate the creepy value. ("Don't forget to wear your masks for the Big Giveaway...The clock is ticking...It's almost tiiiime...") 🎃

Halloween-Viewing Edition: Halloween is my second Old-Movie holiday along with Christmas (celebrated with two weeks of appropriate specials, rarities and traditional Blu-rays), but, now that the years are going by too quickly, and it seems like we just had one last year, I try to rotate my viewing to just a few titles bi-annually, and mix in a few ephemera dug up from the public-domain backwaters of Amazon Prime. Now, every year, I separate it into categories-- Amazon Ephemera - For a warmup opening-act, I'd noticed that free Amazon Prime had dug up the Paul Lynde Halloween Special (1976), originally produced on Donny & Marie's variety-show assembly line, and with a reputation as the second most cult-kitsch remembered 70's network variety special ever made, behind...y'know, that George Lucas thing. Chiefly remembered not so much for Lynde's Hollywood Squares-era "How did we not notice?" following, or for Margaret Hamilton giving the Wicked Witch a sporting comeback on 70's TV, but for being the first national TV appearance of rock group KISS...Which, back then, marketers only knew 10-yo. kids were into, because we were naive about that back then, too. Funny Universal Monsters - Rotating every year between "Young Frankenstein", and this year's turn, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) 👍 (Ch...Chhh....Chhhhiiiiick!...) 70's Horror Icons - Even when we had an actual working drive-in in the town where I grew up, and a theater in walking distance, I was too young to get into the great mid-70's R-rated horror icons, and too chicken to try. So now I dig up disk or Amazon to educate myself on one thing I missed, every year--"Carrie" two years ago, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" last year, and this year, Black Christmas (1974). 👎 There's a 70's generation that considers Bob Clark a "genius" for this film, and a 90's generation that remembers Clark only for A Christmas Story marathons, but in between, there was our generation that remembered Clark only as the goofball director-from-Mars of the Porky's and Baby Genius movies, and this movie did little to change my view. It's hailed as a historical classic for singlehandedly inventing the 80's-slasher tropes--even John Carpenter confessed to homaging it--and it's got some creepy imagery (the closing scene is a horror icon), but the word "Subtle" does not now nor has ever existed in Clark's dictionary. Keir Dullea is so outrageously over-the-top suspicious as Olivia Hussey's artistic controlling boyfriend, we think he has to be a red-herring, and the twists here are that there are no twists. Also, while Clark wanted his killer to homage Tony Perkins having conversations with his "mother", scenes of the killer's psychotic terrorizing phone calls shrieking entire nonsensical dramas with himself in four or five different voices is surreal enough to be creepy, but also a bit too comic. Ray Bradbury - While the '83 Disney version of "Something Wicked This Way Comes" has October gloominess creeping every pore, there is also the not-too-darn-bad '93 Hanna-Barbera kids-animated version of The Halloween Tree to rotate with, thanks to Warner Archive DVD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be8vfy2pOcY Two of the three best versions of Bradbury on film, if you count "Moby Dick". Disney - While the Ichabod half of The Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad (1949) 👍 is required every year (those who only associate the Headless Horseman with Johnny Depp, the cure is available), the feature rotates every year between my 3-D copy of "The Nightmare Before Christmas", and my jealously guarded steelbook DVD of what used to be the Halloween night staple of the Disney Channel, back in those golden days when it still was the Disney Channel: Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1963) 👍 . Patrick McGoohan's raspy voice as the feared Halloween-costumed Scarlet Pimpernel of the 18th-cty. English smugglers' seacoast used to scare the fertilizer out of me as a kid, but this is right up with Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues as one of the best-darn looking and everything-clicks examples of 50's-60's live-action Disney period-epic...Even McGoohan comes off remarkably game, restrained and mannered in his dual-life role, with none of the smugness or bully-barking that made his "The Prisoner" role occasionally hard to take. Of course, it's one of the all-time impossible-to-get Holy Grails of DVD if you missed it--and no sign of showing up on Disney+--but that's what YouTube is for: The Usual Cartoons - The Great Pumpkin (and Snoopy's annual battle with the Red Baron). Donald Duck in "Trick or Treat". Bugs Bunny & Witch Hazel, for a warmup (*zoom!* *hairpins*). And an unusual choice here, as an odd, but sacred tradition--I try to work one Japanese-anime episode into every video holiday, but Halloween episodes tend to be rarer than Christmas ones, since the Japanese famously have no clue what the holiday is about or how to follow the rest of the world's lead in being peer-pressured to celebrate it. But one exception was an 80's-anime episode of Dirty Pair, where our pair of cute collateral-damage-heavy space mercenaries have to track a Terminator-style robot through the big-city Halloween party, unwittingly stopping other costumed criminals in their capers as well. Special fondness for this episode, since you not only wish every big-city Halloween party looked like this one, but this episode was also the very first bit of Japanese anime I saw ever, at a comic convention. (In those days, struggling laserdisc fans spread the word in the marketplace, and knew that this show made newbie converts overnight.) Fortunately, for those who don't travel in those circles, there's YouTube for that, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz-Sr5J4mTI At that point, however, I'm usually holiday'ed out, and just look forward to a month of fall viewing (and the weather getting too cold to go next door to the library), before the sacred rotation of Christmas movies...Darn, and I still haven't upgraded my "Curse of the Cat People" DVD to Blu-ray yet.

And for years, we've lived under the delusion that it was "Orson's Halloween Prank" because he said it was--Uh-uh. Orson was consciously saying that to keep from being fired by the network. The Mercury Theater was still one of the most progressively leftwing in NYC, and only the left was supporting the idea that Germany was a threat during the isolationist 30's--Welles had already gotten praise on stage for resetting Julius Caesar in Weimar Germany, and you can guess where he got the idea of resetting HG Wells as a real radio-news bulletin of invading armies on the eastern Atlantic shore...And history has theorized that that's what broke everyone's psychological dam of subconscious war panic, even though they thought they were panicking over little green Martians with heat rays. At the end of the show, after reports that his stunt had backfired, bad-boy Orson could have done a victory-lap by delivering a stinging lecture about the perils of head-in-the-sand isolationism with our enemy right across the sea, and that Martians don't sign nice paper peace treaties and go home...And guess how the higher-ups in Rockefeller Plaza would have reacted. So instead, Orson adopts his usual bad-boy chuckle, says "Fooled ya, didn't we, destroying New Jersey in your imaginations?", he sticks to that story in front of the reporters, and all the newspapers wag their finger at him for being naughty. But on the show, he makes an odd Freudian slip in his disclaimer speech, as he asks everyone to "remember the lesson we have learned tonight...That glowing thing in your living room isn't a Martian, it's just Halloween." Okay, the "lesson" is, radio can fool us? That doesn't exactly sound like the 30's pre-Kane Orson we know. (And, of course, most of the newspaper "Mass PANIC!" was flat-out exaggerated or made-up: The newspaper industry was growing increasingly afraid that the immediacy of radio news would drive print news out of business, and tried to play up horror stories about how "irresponsible" and "unreliable" that no-good radio was--And Orson's stunt was made to order.) (They won't let you say "Hinder"? "Fanny-perpendicular"?) 😁

Also, it's technically a Disney/Touchstone movie, do the math. Still, the movie is so Turkey-centrically focused on "How Ed Made Bride/Plan 9", Ed's entire delinquent-drama career seems to have gone the way of his partner...Not even one mention of "The Violent Years", which usually gets a few clips homaged in Ed Wood gigglefests.

In addition to the complaint about Bela's rant, much of the rest of the "facts" are painfully inaccurate*, as, despite a bio-book credit, the script seems to have been cribbed wholesale from the same three or four pages of the Medveds' "Golden Turkey Awards" that everyone else first heard about Wood from, Tim Burton included, like a fourth-grader writing his school report off of a Wikipedia page. (The Meds failed to mention Wood's partner Alex Gordon, who not only co-wrote "Bride of the Monster" but was also the one who introduced Ed to Bela Lugosi, so Alex is Sir Not-Appearing-In-Tim's-Film.) -BUT- Martin Landau is incredible. He was just in the middle of a comeback string of Best Supporting Actor nominations for "Crimes & Misdemeanors" and "Tucker: the Man and His Dream", but this is the one he earned. Where Burton goofs off every movie and tries to lowbrow amuse himself with them, Landau has an intense old-school doggedness about all his roles, even when he's fighting the Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island--Landau is the Anti-Burton that makes this film. ------ * - Wood was already an in-demand screenwriter by the time of Glen or Glenda?, as his script for "Jail Bait" was a big enough hit at the drive-ins to make him the on-schedule go-to guy for girl-delinquent B-movies. Also, Wood didn't do the home movies of post-rehab Lugosi to make him feel better; in real interviews, Lugosi claims they were ready to shoot "The Ghoul Goes West", before the project apparently fell through.