Red Eye

The first Wes Craven film that I remember seeing was Deadly Blessing.  I saw it at the Plaza East and really enjoyed it.  It was very well made and sufficiently creepy.  Later on I saw Hills Have Eyes, Nightmare on Elm Street and many other Craven films.  I enjoyed almost every one of his films that I saw.  When Red Eye came out to theaters, I missed it.  I wasn’t really going to many films at the time, so it wasn’t as if I was purposely shunning the film.  When it came out on DVD, my daughter wanted to see it, but I wasn’t ready to plop down $20 for it, so I waited for a copy to come in to the pawn shop.  When Wills got a copy, I bought it and added it to the collection, but I never sat down and watched it.  I’m not sure if my daughter did or not.

I have been trying to check out some horror movies since Halloween in so close, and I decided that even if it is a thriller more than an actual horror movie, Red Eye was a Wes Craven film and that was good enough for me.  Plus it was around 90 minutes.

Red Eye takes place almost entirely on an airplane.  Young hotel employee on her way up, Lisa Reisert played by Rachel McAdams, is on her way back to work after attending a funeral out of state.  On her way to boarding she meets Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) and is surprised to find herself sitting beside him on the flight back home.  Unfortunately as she soon learns, his presence there as her seat mate was not a happy accident.  Jackson works for a group that specializes in political assassinations and the like.  He has one of his men stationed outside the house of Lisa’s dad, Joe (Brian Cox), and plans to kill him if Lisa doesn’t call and arrange to have his political target moved to a different hotel room where he can be more easily disposed of.

The plane ride becomes a contest between the two with Lisa wanting to save her father’s life, but not wanting to play any part in having politician Charles Keefe (Jack Scalia) and his family killed.  Craven does a wonderful job of creating tension using the screenplay written by Carl Ellsworth to great effect.  For a film that seems inherently limited by its own structure, Red Eye proves to be a surprisingly effective thriller. 

The DVD provides a couple of well done featurettes on the making of the movie as well as a gag reel.  Many of the behind the scenes folk have cameos as airline passengers or hotel guests and the featurette points out many of them.

I really enjoyed Red Eye and give it 3 stars.  It’s very simple, but very effective.

The Mandarin Mystery

I used to love watching The Ellery Queen Mysteries on NBC when I was a kid.  Mom and I would watch as Jim Hutton and David Wayne portrayed the father and son pair; one a police inspector, the other an amazing detective.  Each episode would end with Ellery solving the case and just before the reveal, he would break the fourth wall and talk to the audience, pointing out important clues and asking leading questions.  It was a lot of fun to watch and to play along.

The Mandarin Mystery was billed on box as an Ellery Queen mystery.  I was curious how a cinematic Queen might turn out, so I decided to pop the disc into the player and check it out.  The disc was part of a 2 disc, 4 movie set in the AMC DVD collection.  This collection was Great Detectives and included Sherlock Holmes along with Bulldog Drummond and Mr. Moto.  The character of Ellery Queen was played by Eddie Quillan and he plays Queen as a very confident, and very excitable young man.  He’s also very intelligent and has an eye for the ladies.  He immediately takes notice of Josephine Temple (Charlotte Henry) a young woman who has arrived to sell a very rare and valuable stamp to a collector named Dr. Kirk.  Dr. Kirk collects stamps and has been investing his ward’s inheritance into the hobby since the values continue to rise.  This allows him to pursue his hobby while investing her money as well.  The problem is she doesn’t approve, and she has others in the Kirk family that don’t feel this is a proper use of her money either.  When Josephine gets to the hotel where Dr. Kirk is staying, the stamp is stolen from her.  Soon a murder has taken place as well, and it is up to Ellery and his dad to figure it out.  

One way to make a mystery harder to figure out is to throw in a large collection of suspects, and that is what the writers do here.  They provide a few clues and a bunch of red herrings before eventually Ellery puts all the pieces together.  I enjoyed the film, but I do wish they had cut back just a little on the peripheral characters.  We not only have Miss Temple, Dr. Kirk, and the two Kirk girls, but there’s a boyfriend, a forger, and a stamp expert.  It soon becomes hard to remember everyone’s purpose and motive.

The print from which the transfer was made had some issues as well.  One scene jumps around like the print had sprocket damage when it went through the machine.  Still for $3, I don’t feel I got burned too bad.  The film plays fairly well with the exception of that one spot.  It still would have been nice to have had a cleaned-up and remastered print.

I give The Mandarin Mystery 2 1/2 stars.  I wish Quillan had done some other Queen films, but sadly this appears to have been his only outing as Ellery Queen.  Most of the other Queen films I have looked up feature Ralph Bellamy.  On a side note, I also just saw where the Ellery Queen Mysteries television show with Jim Hutton is coming to DVD this month.  Looks like I have something to shop for.

Room Service (1938)

I love the Marx Brothers, but the two films I watched earlier, Go West and The Big Store, were disappointments.  I also had a double feature DVD with Room Service and At The Circus on it.  Having just watched Trinity at the circus in Boot Hill, I opted for the shorter Room Service.  This was more like the Marx Brothers I enjoyed.  Groucho is a penniless theater producer looking to stage a play at the hotel his brother-in-law manages.  Unfortunately an efficiency expert has shown up to audit the failing hotel and he wants the money Groucho owes the hotel, and he wants Groucho and his entourage out of the hotel as well.

Groucho’s girlfriend Christine (played by a very young Lucille Ball) has secured a backer for Groucho’s play, but they must figure out a way to stay in the hotel room in order to meet the backer and collect the check.  Since Groucho’s entourage consists of Harpo and Chico as well as the naive author of the play Leo Davis (played by Frank Albertson),  there is plenty of craziness afoot as well.

Room Service was based on a Broadway play and you can feel the stage in the way the most of the action is confined to the hotel room.  Never the less the film is still fast paced and very funny.  Harpo’s attempt to bring them a turkey dinner, a live turkey dinner, is a highlight as is the scene where the extremely hungry men sit down to a fast, noisy and chaotic meal.

Having really only known Lucille Ball as Lucy, it was interesting to see her as the comedic love interest.  The hero’s love interest is played by a 15-year-old Ann Miller looking much older and wiser.  Donald MacBride as the efficiency expert was a wonderful foil for the brothers. 

Room Service was fast and fun and I give it 3 stars.  The DVD also included Party Fever, an Our Gang short, and The Daffy Doc, a Porky and Daffy cartoon.  I hadn’t watched an Our Gang comedy since I was a kid, and I really enjoyed this one.  Butch, Alfalfa and Waldo all want to take Darla to the Strawberry Festival, so she decides that the boy who wins the Mayor For A Day contest will get to take her.  Alfalfa and Butch start trying to outdo each other.  Alfalfa cleans the street;  Butch comes behind him and trashes them again.  Butch has a marshmallow roast;  Alfalfa does skywriting in a balloon basket.  Waldo of course ends up winning because he wrote an essay about government.  Oh and the mayor just happened to be his uncle.

The Daffy Doc is a mixed bag as far as cartoons go.  The opening bit with Daffy assisting a Doctor Quack is pretty funny, but Daffy is much more crazy in these early cartoons and his voice doesn’t even try to match his mouth.  Porky is merely incidental to the storyline, but at the time he was a much bigger name than Daffy.  It’s worth watching just for the nostalgia/history lesson on the old Looney Tunes.