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Reviews
Der schweigende Stern (1960)
Problems And All
I loved this movie! And you can love it too, IF you ignore a few problems. One, I can't think of anything more idiotic than having to break glass to turn something on in a spaceship. 2, what could look more ridiculous than the "Crawlicopter?" Krollikopter? whatever it was. 3, Professor Sikarna was such a grouch it's hard to imagine someone didn't throw him off the ship. 4, it drove me nuts the way they kept mispronouncing "Omega". 5, the vitrified forest really did look a lot more like petrified seaweed than a mechanism for directing radio-activity toward Earth. 6, it is a little amazing that on a planet slightly larger than Earth, they managed to land pretty close to the Venusian command bunker. 7, when they looked down into the command center...what the heck was that? 8,kicking a rock into the "slime" made it attack them? 9, the whole planet's gravity reversed itself? 10, if the gravity pushed them all away from Venus, why didn't they just pick everybody up in space? 12, why did they pitch a tent? 13, it made no sense whatever that the Venusians made those jumping, metallic bugs to store information. Those problems and a lot more were a little hard to get around, but I managed.
I did notice though, that there seemed to be a lot of ideas there that "Star Trek" borrowed just a few years later. The ship vaguely resembled the Enterprise, (although I admit, the Enterprise looked a lot cooler). Even the control console on the bridge vaguely resembled the bright red console on the Enterprise. And an internationally diverse crew? "Star Trek" gets a little too much credit for being the first to do that.
Maybe I'm too forgiving, but I still liked it, and I could well imagine looking out a porthole at those storms that occurred throughout the "long Venusian nights".
Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952)
Not So Bad
It's easy enough to take pot-shots at a movie like this, especially if you try stacking it up against other stuff. It's a long way from the best or worst I've ever seen. Of course, Bela Lugosi can do no wrong. Just watching him laugh, or hearing the line, "What an unusual cranium." makes the movie worth a look. Obviously, Petrillo did an excellent take on Jerry Lewis, and his repetition of Lugosi's line about the "unusual cranium" was my biggest laugh in the movie. Duke Mitchell's task of imitating Dean Martin has taken a lot of hits, but it had to be harder to do Martin without going "over the top" than it was to do Lewis, where going "over the top" was exactly what was called for. Personally, I could care less whether I was listening to Martin or Mitchell sing, but that brings up another point. For decades Hollywood mindlessly insisted that movies include musical numbers and romantic sub-plots that nobody could possibly care less about, as anybody who's ever watched a Marx Brothers movie can relate to. OK, it's not great, but it's fun.