12 mini-reviews for the short attention span, taken from dark corners of stevenl's video vault:

Cookoo Cavaliers / directed by Jules White (1940, VHS). Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Curly Howard, Dorothy Appleby (uncredited), Lynton Brent (uncredited), Anita Garvin (uncredited), Bob O'Connor (uncredited), Blanche Payson (uncredited). The Stooges are fishsellers, attempting to market fish without the the benefit of ice. This affords them the opportunity for several smelly fish gags (Get it? Smelly fish gags? Nyuk nyuk nyuk). In true Stooge fashion, the plot somehow twists into their purchase of a hair salon in Mexico. Curly is in fine form. Larry is in Fine form too, but he is, after all, Larry Fine. This one is a bit different since the victims of their mayhem are beautiful women. The eyepokes here are more anemic than usual. Although other forms of violence are accompanied by sound effects, the eyepokes are strangely silent. Another odd few seconds on this short film takes place right after Moe uses a mallet to whack cement off someone's face, he celebrates by making an obscene gesture. Here are the statistics on injuries. As usual, head konks rank high: head konks 23, face slaps 5, hit with mallet 5, hit with mallet and chisel 4, hair pulled completely out 4, hit in face with fish 3, shot in butt by revolver 3, hair grabbed 2, eye pokes 2, jackhammer on cranium 2, and one each of double stomach hit, nose grab, pinched arm, stomach hit, both ears yanked, kicked in butt, peppered in face with small chunks of dry cement, ear pulled.

Sandwiches That You Will Like / directed by Rick Sebak (2002, VHS off-air). A fun documentary that skips around the United States in search of popular and unusual restaurant sandwiches. Interviews cooks, critics and customers in this culinary tour. I enjoyed hearing the different dialects more than the exposure to weird food. Sandwiches featured include the PB&J, roast beef, St. Paul, chipped ham, barbeque, pastrami. The Philly cheese steak rivalry between Pat's and Geno's caught my interest. In Maine there is a place that serves lobster sandwiches complete with the claws. The different regional words for a certain type of sandwich favored Back East was fun. Is it hoagy/submarine/hero/poor boy/Italian/grinder? When I lived in Vermont we called them grinders and I lived on them. The history of the sandwich was briefly covered. Sebak visited the town of Sandwich, Mass., and the sight of a law enforcement vehicle with the words "Sandwich Police" on the side made me laugh. The segments are put together like a crazy quilt and it works. Sadly, there is no mention of Marmite.

West Virginia / directed by Mark Samels (1996, VHS off-air). Richard Thomas (narrator). A profile of a state continually on the crossroads of history. Presented in a style that imitates Ken Burns, there is some amazing footage of West Virginia's natural settings. This was originally presented as a documentary mini-series, and my copy stops at 1865. Born out of the Civil War, West Virginia has seen conflict between the Shawnee and the Scot/Irish, German, Swiss settlers, the French vs. the English, Lord Dunmore's War, the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Hatfields vs. the McCoys, labor wars, and class conflict. Important characters like Chief Logan, John Brown, and Stonewall Jackson are presented. My own family lived just over the border in the very western part of Virginia, but they took part in the history of West Va., from my Shawnee forebears to the sawed-off Scotsmen who fought at Point Pleasant to the Germans who "went native." My great grandfather even named one of his sons after the head of the Hatfield clan during the big feud. Every now and then you read about parts of different states that felt disenfranchised enough to make noise about breaking away. Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Northern California, Eastern Washington/Northern Idaho/Western Montana. But West Virginia actually did it. There is something about the independent spirit of West Va. that I admire. It is a dangerous place to underestimate. Samels did an excellent job in telling the story and enabling us to be interested in history without falling asleep.

La Maschera del demonio = Black Sunday / directed by Mario Bava. (1960, VHS off-air). Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrea Checchi. This Italian Gothic horror film is noted for having been a major influence on American director Tim Burton. And you can see the proto-Tim in the black and white visuals and quality of lighting. So I'll give it its due in terms of importance. But I really didn't like this one. It was badly dubbed, a big chunk of the budget appeared to have been spent on dry ice, and it lacked a central hammy character like Vincent Price who in turn would've enabled us to connect with the story. The violence and gore seem especially brutal for the era-- in fact this movie was banned in England for 8 years. Barbara Steele, who had a real screen spark, plays two parts in what amounts to a sick and twisted version of the Patty Duke Show, where (sing the rest of the sentence) servants of Satan are two of a kind. There are a couple actors who are Dave Foley and Curly Howard lookalikes, but by the time they arrived I was hitting the fast forward button a lot. After viewing this I felt yukky and wanted to take a shower. If the object was to creep me out, it worked.

Number Seventeen / directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1932, DVD). Leon M. Lion, Anne Grey, John Stuart, Barry Jones. A confusing film that will befuddle all viewers. If seen in the spirit of Dada it becomes fun. The whole story (such as it is) basically takes place in two locales: a deserted house and a train. My copy (Diamond Entertainment) was not able to clean up the muddy soundtrack on this public domain film, so a lot of the dialogue was garbled to boot. Yet the first few minutes of the story have no spoken words at all, and the actors, apparently all veterans of the silent era, know how to visually overplay their their roles. Leon M. Lion plays his part for laughs in a macabre setting that provides us with an early demonstration of Hitch's warped sense of humor. The fight scenes are pretty basic. Guys hitting each other in the face without fancy choreography or exciting action music. The film is sped up a bit in order to add some pizazz to these action scenes, and the result is unintentional humor of the Stooge kind. There is one helluva rip-roaring runaway train sequence at the end that was impressive considering it was filmed over three quarters of century ago. An interesting movie oddity.

Genuine, die Tragödie eines seltsamen Hauses / directed by Robert Wiene (1920, VHS). Fern Andra, Albert Bennefeld, Lewis Brody, John Gottowt, Ernst Gronau, Harald Paulsen, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski. Fresh on the heels of Caligari, director Wiene brought forth another expressionist horror film and it is weird with a beard, man. Actually, I'm not being fair, since my version (Kino Video) is only a 19 minute excerpt. But somehow I suspect the full-length movie isn't much more coherent. Hopefully they made this as a comedy and not some sort of serious artsy-fartsy allegory because it is pretty funny in places. And, unlike Caligari, the sets and costumes in this one are very playful. According to the Internet Movie Database, "The full-length version can only be viewed at the Munich City Film Museum archive in Germany." Why?

Dances With Wolves / directed by Kevin Costner (1990, VHS). Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene, Rodney A. Grant, Robert Pastorelli, Maury Chaykin. If this could be classified as a Western, I'd call it one of the best Westerns ever made. As the Sioux shaman Kicking Bear says, "I was just thinking that of all the trails in this life there is one that matters most. It is the trail of a true human being." And this movie is about human beings, not typical Celluloid stereotypes-- almost. Plot in (very) short: a decorated Civil War vet asks to be stationed on the frontier and finds himself isolated at a deserted fort. During this vision quest, he adopts a lone wolf as his totem and extension of self. He also gets to know a neighboring Sioux tribe and eventually becomes a member of their community. But "civilization" eventually catches up to all of them. The film is long, an epic 3 hours. I had to watch it in segments over the course of a few days. The canvas on which this story is painted is open and stunning, making me sorry I never saw this on the big screen. The Sioux speak their lines in the native language, so most of the tale is subtitled. This was a brilliant choice. Just hearing the cadence and feel of the words can say a lot about a culture. As Costner's character leaves the Anglo world, he is basically a straight man in an existential Western comedy. Chaykin and Pastorelli have brief but memorable roles as fringe people on the edge of Western civilization. But I do have some issues with this great movie. Although Costner has shown he is a great director, someone else needed to be the leading man here. As actors, I always confuse Costner with Gere and Cruise. It isn't fair, I know. But the three of them seem interchangeable somehow. Costner used a device where the narration came from his diary, but he read it as if he was a 7th grade student reciting an essay in monotone in front of class who could care less. I'm sure this was deliberate, and if the tone had evolved or gained more passion in the course of the story I'd understand. But it didn't. We also were never given a backstory on where his character's character came from. He just is. I guess that's OK but the historian in me wants to know. He was still good in the role and maybe it was a positive thing that the leading man was really a supporting actor for the scenery and concept. The idea of Western culture trivializing and wrecking anything beautiful was pretty blatant here-- to the point where the story started slipping into TV bad guys. But, as if to confirm Costner's point, when the Internet Movie Data base assigned keywords to this spiritual, moving, sensitive, brilliant motion picture, the first one on the list is "Male Rear Nudity." Nice. All in all, an amazing and impressive movie in spite of the flaws.

"The Anniversary" (Fawlty Towers) / directed by Bob Spiers (1979, VHS). John Cleese, Prunella Scales, Connie Booth, Andrew Sachs, Ken Campbell, Una Stubbs, Robert Arnold, Pat Keen, Roger Hume, Denyse Alexander, Christine Shaw, Brian Hall. One of the more overlooked of the episodes, this one is unusual in several respects. We have a glimpse at Basil and Sybil's social circle, and you have to wonder why these people put up with the Fawltys. In addition we see, for a brief tiny iota of a nanosecond, Basil actually planning something selfless for his spouse on their 15th anniversary. But then he gets into a situation where he piles on lies upon lies as usual. Polly actually tries to extract a price for her enabling this time, and we see very little of hotel guests here. This is the only episode I'm aware of where we see the lobby for a brief moment from the point of view of coming in through the front door. BBC character actor Ken Campbell plays a Fawlty friend who is apparently in this social group for the entertainment value, poking at Basil with little cynical observations. As it turns out, that is a very good defense after stepping into the world of Basil Fawlty.

House of Frankenstein / directed by Erle C. Kenton (1944, VHS). Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Anne Gwynne, Lionel Atwill, Glenn Strange, J. Carrol Naish, Elena Verdugo. A much more coherent movie than Kenton's subsequent House of Dracula, but that isn't saying a lot. Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein's monster, a hunchback assistant, and a mad scientist are crammed into the story. The thread here is Karloff as the crazed and revenge-driven scientist. All the other monsters react to him, not too much with each other. Carradine once again plays Dracula and once again the most frightening thing about him is the fact he wears a bowtie. By the way, did you know that when the sun hits a vampire they turn into a skeleton and their clothes also disappear along with the flesh? Why is that? And when he turns into a bat, what happens to his clothes? Chaney brings back his role as Wolfman, the poster boy for obsessive/compulsive disorders. Naish brings more complexity to the hunchback stereotype than we are used to seeing in these B-horror films. Oh, I forgot, there was another monster in here. The torch-bearing mob of angry villagers. This needs to be considered as a single entity and also as a monster, in many ways more horrifying than supernatural ones.

Kids in the Hall. Season 1, episode 9 (1990, DVD). Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, Scott Thompson. A Place to Die (running joke), Secretaries, Preacher Character, Weston the Confidant to the Stars, Teddy Bear's Picnic. A quote I enjoyed from the workplace-based "Secretaries" sketch: "There's gossip, and then there's common knowledge." McKinney's preacher-like sermon on the validity of the use of the preacher character by comedians is the gem in this episode, "Televangelists and preachers are fast eclipsing rock and roll musicians as the drug popping, tax weasling, prostitute pumping bad boys of pop culture. It's Bible Belt Babylon down there." What happened to McDonald in this one? He has one walk-on.

"The Solitary Cyclist" (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) / directed by Paul Annett (1984, DVD). Jeremy Brett, David Burke, Barbara Wilshire, John Castle, Michael Siberry, Ellis Dale. For whatever reason, Holmes and Watson get a bit tetchy with each other. Watson is sent on an errand and when he returns Holmes goes through a long list of what was bungled. Watson, looking wounded, asks the Great Detective, "Did I really do remarkably badly?" Holmes gives him a direct and candid affirmation, "Yes." The tavern scene, where Holmes asks the owner for information and then finds himself in a bout of fisticuffs was, as Sherlock himself later tells Watson, "Absolutely delicious." In a couple spots the soundtrack nearly kills the story. At the conclusion Holmes' use of cocaine is noted. John Castle gives his role the usual gravity we are accustomed to seeing no matter what or who he plays. BBC trivia: director Annett is the father of Red Dwarf actress Chloë Annett.

The Painted Desert / directed by Howard Higgin (1931, VHS). William Boyd, Helen Twelvetrees, William Farnum, J. Farrell MacDonald, Clark Gable. Giving us a black and white movie after presenting a title like "The Painted Desert" seems like some sort of cruel joke, but those were the limitations of 1931, and the scenery is still amazing. The lack of a real soundtrack and the mostly wooden yet somehow strangely melodramatic performances make me think this story would been better as silent picture, as it would've been just a few years before. The two most interesting actors in here represent the distant past and future of 1931 thespianism. William Farnum, who was born in 1876, is very over-the-top but it is easy to imagine him on stage, acting alongside one of the Booth brothers. Clark Gable, making his first appearance in a talkie after a few years of being a supporting actor in silents, plays a villain. His distinctive growl and star quality presence on film is already apparent. There is excellent crowd murmuring in this one. I kept rewinding and playing it over and over since it was as pleasant as hearing the ocean tide. Boyd was later known to a couple generations of us as Hopalong Cassidy. I even had a white Hopalong hat, just like the one he wore all through this movie. The great thing about his character in this story is that he promotes peace, man. And, thank God, he doesn't sing.