Adventures in Odyssey: The Knight Travellers (1991)

Adventures in Odyssey: The Knight Travellers (1991)

Directed by: Michael Joens

Starring: Tony Jay, Hal Smith, Jonathan Taylor Thomas

Before you start asking me, “where did you find a Christian-themed straight-to-video cartoon about time travel?”, let me just say that I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was watching when I popped this DVD in. My mom went to Italy a couple years ago and brought back this strange DVD that I hadn’t watched until today. The first movie on it was Totò a Parigi in the original Italian with no English subtitles, so it was just an hour and a half of some weird mystery thing that I couldn’t understand. After that came this cartoon, which was luckily (but also inexplicably) in English. What these two movies have to do with each other and why they were for sale in some Italian gift shop I have no idea. So lay off.

The Knight Travellers (sic) is about inventor John Whittaker (Smith) who has invented a machine that lets people think that they’ve traveled back in time… which is helpful somehow, I guess. It is, of course, stolen by an evil man named Freddie Faustus, voiced by voice actor extraordinaire Tony Jay, whom I’ll always remember as the devious Chairface Chippendale from “The Tick.” Anyway, Faustus steals the machine and tweaks it to make it a mind control device… that also still does exactly what it did before. With the “help” of a random kid off the street (JTT… he’s so DREAMY!), Whittaker defeats Faustus and gets his machine back. To do this, they travel back to the dark ages and joust for his magic hat that controls the machine and Whittaker eventually defeats him with the power of his faith. This is the first and only time that anything religious is mentioned in the movie.

Turns out there’s a bunch of these Adventures in Odyssey straight-to-video movies, and I’m sure each one of them has a blatantly obvious moral like “greed is bad” that the kid learns at the end. Tony Jay is probably not in any of the others, though, and therefore I’m not going to be going out of my way to find them (unless I get any more random cartoons from Europe, I guess). Life is just weird sometimes.

Revolt of the Zombies (1936)

Revolt of the Zombies (1936)

Directed by: Victor Halperin

Starring: Dorothy Stone, Dean Jagger, Roy D’Arcy

Well, there’s a frightening poster. You know, when I watched this movie, I didn’t notice Superman’s nemesis Braniac anywhere in it, but apparently he rates high enough to get on the poster. Between that and that woman’s strange breasts, I’m willing to believe the tagline that it’s the “weirdest love story in 2000 years.”

It’s during the World War (remember, 1936, there was still only one) and a French battalion has gone to Cambodia to discover the secret mind control technique that some of the high priests of the lost city of Angkor have. It gives the user the ability to control the person’s every motion and word and they are under their control; they are alternately referred to as zombies or robots throughout the film, which is pretty interesting seeing the divergence in terms nowadays. I’m glad I don’t have a zombie that cleans my carpets. Anyway, one colonel finds out the secret and uses it to enslave his entire garrison… all so he can marry the woman he loves who is already married to his best friend. There’s some pithy moral in there about going too far in taking the initiative, but it’s pretty lost in the slow pacing of the film. In the end, he gives up his power so she’ll actually love him, but she doesn’t love him and all the people who were his slaves turn on him and kill him, so… not the best plan.

One funny part of this movie is that all the actors are very much trained to be in silent films, and it shows. Though ‘talkies’ came around about ten years before Revolt of the Zombies, the motions involved in over exaggerating one’s emotions to show without pitch or inflection of tone are very present in this film and it just kinda looks weird. I mean, it looks weird in silent films anyway, but at least then there’s a reason for it. It makes me want to pick up a bunch more early 30’s films and see if that’s present there, because of the ones I’ve seen before, I haven’t noticed it. Another fun part of the film is the frequent scenes of eyes superimposed over the zombified people, which are obviously not from our hero, and turn out to be from an earlier film White Zombie (which is what the band took it’s name from, yes) where Bela Lugosi pulls the same trick whenever he hypnotizes someone into being his zombie. That darn Bela Lugosi, sneaking his eyes into everything.

This was an interesting film, but not really in the way where you enjoy it, haha. It certainly is a type of film that they just don’t make anymore, and I guess that’s worth something, right?

Dark Harvest (2004)

Dark Harvest (2004)

Directed by: Paul Moore

Starring: Don Digiulio, Jeanie Cheek, Jennifer Leigh

All right, look at that DVD box and tell me what it suggests to you. Silly font, scarecrow with a glowing eye and a scythe… Probably a cheap horror movie where an evil demon scarecrow kills a bunch of college kids, right? Yep, that’s exactly what it is. The biggest difference is that the scarecrow on the box cover is way better looking than the polyester halloween masks the scarecrows in the movie wear. Evil halloween scarecrows.

Sean (Digiulio) finds out that he has inherited a farm in West Virginia from his biological father that he’s never known. He and some of his friends decide to take a week long trip there from Arizona and scout the place out a bit. They get there the next afternoon (apparently by rocket car) and do the standard college age kids discovering an old house thing, where they go around saying “eww” and “no power?” and “where’s the fridge?” It never gets old. Of course, it turns out that the creepy old house is so creepy because Sean’s great-grandfather made a deal with the devil to grow his crops as long as he killed some vagrants and hung them up as scarecrows. Since the very next night happens to be a harvest moon (a white harvest moon, at that. The most rare of them all), the scarecrows come to life and start killing people.

Since this is a horror movie and these people are stupid college kids, they run around aimlessly, constantly telling each other what to do and then instantly telling each other to do the exact opposite. The scarecrows are pretty efficient, if really terrible looking, and manage to kill off half of the kids in about two minutes after they’re introduced. I guess when you wait an hour to get to the slasher part of your slasher flick, you have to run up the body count pretty quick to get people interested again. The kids end up killing the scarecrows by setting one on fire, pulling one in half, and… setting the third one also on fire. In the same building as the first one. In a similar vein, four of the six kids die, all from being sliced through the chest with a scythe. This is a slasher movie where everyone dies the exact same way. It defies all known laws of movies! The ONLY reason people keep making these shitty horror movies is to show off new and creative ways to kill people, and this totally fails at that, or even at the effort of that.

So yeah, a bunch of stoners sit around an abandoned farmhouse and get chased around by guys in plastic masks and oh my god this is an episode of Scooby-Doo. Only where people die instead of figure anything out. And there’s a black guy. And I would much rather watch Scooby-Doo than Dark Harvest. In fact, I’d much rather watch one of the really bad episodes of Scooby-Doo where they have the Harlem Globetrotters as special guests or something than watch Dark Harvest. It’s comforting to know that nobody involved in this movie ever did anything else.

Dementia 13 (1963)

Dementia 13 (1963)

Directed by: Francis Ford Coppola

Starring: William Campbell, Luana Anders, Bart Patton

One of Francis Ford Coppola’s first films, Dementia 13 takes a fairly basic (now standard) horror movie premise and presents it with a really creepy atmosphere and some good suspense. Why the movie is called Dementia 13 is completely unknown to me.

The film is about the Haloran family and their castle in Ireland where, several years ago, Kathleen Haloran drowned in the pond. Every year since then, the family has gathered to mourn her passing, and every year the Lady Haloran passes out because she’s been kinda crazy since her daughter died. As often happens in horror movies, people start dying off, at first due to a wife who wants a bigger cut of the family inheritance, and later turns out to be a crazy man wielding an axe to protect the body of the dead girl. I won’t say anymore than that because it’s actually pretty well written and I don’t want to give anything away (though it is kinda obvious who the killer is once you get into it).

It’s worth a watch if you’re into older 50’s and 60’s horror movies that can actually be kinda creepy, or if you’re a big Francis Ford Coppola fan, I guess. It was definitely worth it’s hour of playtime and I’ll end up watching it again, I’m sure. In fact, I think this is my second or third time I’ve seen it. Pretty good stuff. I just wish I could figure out why the hell it’s called Dementia 13.