VANISHING ON 7TH STREET (2010)

My pal Schifty recommends the strangest movies.  If I've never heard of it and he tells me to watch it, then it's a Schifty's Pick.

Well this is unusual.  Schifty recommending a film that was actually released in theaters?  That can't be right.  Hmm...  Well, it was only in six theaters in America.  Wow that's not very wide.  And it was only for four weeks.  Wow that's not very long.  And it only earned 22,917 dollars during that time.  Holy shit.  That's pretty goddamn low, especially for a real studio movie with three headline stars (John Leguizamo, Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton) not to mention a ten million dollar budget and a talented director, Brad Anderson (Session 9, The Machinist).  This movie could have earned more money if instead of making it they just had one guy work at McDonald's for a year.  I hope they didn't blow all that money on something extravagant like a Ford Focus.  Is this movie as bad as its limited release/immense box office failure would suggest?  Nope.  Don't get me wrong, it's not very good.  But it's not infamously shitty or anything.  Just run of the mill 'meh.'

THE CONSPIRATOR

This historical drama directed by Robert Redford from earlier this year demonstrates why you should always give the accused the full benefit of their constitutional rights even if they killed President Lincoln.  Oh Captain My Captain, not Lincoln!  Abraham Lincoln is so beloved in this country that we could never get rid of the penny because we couldn't bare to part with Lincoln's sturdy visage.  Other (older) countries have swallowed their pride and retired their smallest unit of currency, but we just love Honest Abe too damn much to attempt life without him.  Anyway the plot concerns the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination when the conspirators, who planned a larger attack that would topple the federal government, were hunted down and those that survived were tried not by a jury of their peers but by a secret military tribunal.  Ohh.... I get it.  It's topical!

DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

The monsters hiding in the vast darkness of the spooky, abandoned Blackwood Manor of spooky, abandoned Providence, Rhode Island are revealed very early on to be somewhat similar to the fairy tale of the 'tooth fairy' in that they desire children's teeth.  Later on we learn from a helpful librarian (who is a young man and not an old woman) that Pope Sylvester II negotiated a peace treaty with the prehistoric 'fairy folk' that set the terms we are all most familiar with: tooth goes under pillow, gets replaced with a coin, nobody eats any children.  Well that's plenty interesting, but the more we learn about these little devils, and the more we see of them, the less menace they provide.  They terrorize the central little girl endlessly, but since they always surround her and dance around instead of inflicting any harm, we start to doubt their bona fides.  Eat somebody already, ya little bastards!

FROM BEYOND (1986)

After director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna made the cult hit Re-Animator, the studio gave them a larger budget to adapt another H.P. Lovecraft short story, back when his best known creation Cthulu wasn't yet a household name.  The plot is a mix of pulpy B-movie mad science with other-worldly cosmic horror of the mutant monster variety.  Dr Crawford Tillinghast perfects the Resonator device designed by his mentor Dr. Edward Pretorius, which stimulates the pineal gland in the human brain allowing subjects to perceive indescribable monsters all around them, but unfortunately also allowing the monsters to see the heretofore unnoticed people all around them.  Before you know it, tentacles are exploding out of places and people are sucking one another's brains out through their eye-sockets.  Damn you science!

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956)

Looking over the list of the top ticket-selling films of all time, I counted that within the Top 50 I had seen all but 5 films.  So now I'm going to watch them.  This is # 2 of 5.  Ticket Sales: 64,615,400  It ranks #46 on the list just ahead of Bambi and just behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

This film is big.  It used the brand new wide-screen Cinerama format and ran in some New York theaters for 3 years?  Bigger than that.  The internets claim that the 1000+ credited extras are only for the scenes shot in Hollywood, and that all the international extras are uncredited, leading some estimates to climb as high as 65000+ people!  Holy shit!  In one movie?  Well I guess way back in 1956 the world was still pretty exotic and strange to Americans, cursed as they were with only three television channels, so a three-hour slap-stick comedy semi-educational travelogue bursting with 40+ cameos from fading/shining stars and 8000+ animals of all shapes and sizes means a little something for everybody.  If you have to find something for the whole family to enjoy, and it happens to be 55 years ago, this is the ticket.