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Topic: Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 04-09-2004 01:55 AM
quote:
Back in the days of 16mm film on TV, we ran nearly all of the AIP library. Except for a select few, where are these films today?
Besides the Dr. Goldfoot titles, most of the Annette & Frankie Beach Movies ( ruled by Harvey Lembeck & Buster Keaton), & things like Tommy Kirk in Mars Needs Women are out.
MGM's released on DVD probably all the best of the AIP Corman horror flicks. They're fun to look at again, but really reinforce what you remember about them: often draggy, budgets usually show, with a few cool gags & sometimes an incredible shot or two. The early ones just seem mostly long & painful, there's some fun in lots of them besides watching Vincent Price prop up a whole cardboard movie alone:
"Masque of the Red Death" has about three knockout visuals in it, "Tomb of Ligiea" is surprisingly good overall, "Haunted Palace" has a nice, effective score. The Les Baxter scores for AIP always seemed to me thin & careless. Surprises in the series are that "The Raven" is actually pretty dull, for all the people who remember it as being very funny; "Comedy of Terrors" is a gem with the whole AIP/Poe stock company from screenwriter to actors showing their chops & obviously having a great time - the Jacques Tourneur direction is a little bare bones (schedule!), except for a moment when it has to turn on a dime & Tourneur gives one of the few real goosepimply moments in any AIP film.
They also released the wonderful non-Corman AIP "Phibes" movies - the epitome of megalomaniac mass murdering anti-heroes, & what I remember one reviewer calling "the only horror movie that feels like a musical."
One of the DVD's had as an extra an interview with scriptwriter Richard Matheson who tantalizingly revealed that after "Comedy of Terrors" the AIP folks were very pleased & wanted another sort of in the same vein. He had these great actors that were starting to loosen up & show how to make things work as the productions started to get less rigid in the genre, & Matheson was plainly hitting a high point in inspiration & craft. The new one he put together had as its concept a theatrical family: Boris Karloff as Uncle Dudley, the sweet host of a children's show who actually HATED kids, Peter Lorre as a stage magician who had a bad record of accidentally burning down theaters during the pyrotechnic part of his show, Tallulah Bankhead as a, umm, Talullah Bankhead-type self-obsessed hammy actress, & Basil Rathbone as a still-out-there-swinging ex-vaudeville song & dance man. "Everybody loved it & wanted to do it, but it didn't get done, well, the REASON it didn't get done was about half of them DIED..."
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