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arthel-1
Reviews
Dentist in the Chair (1960)
Very bad indeed.
Being an expatriate Brit, I watch quite a lot of vintage British movies of any genre. I watched this movie mainly because I had never before seen a movie with Bob Monkhouse appearing in it. However. it didn't take long to see that the movie was headed towards being inane and pathetic. I don't know whether the director thought "the more the merrier" but ninety nine percent of the movie showed large numbers of people crammed into small halls or rooms within the dental hospital. It was all too frenetic and random to be amusing. And the silly old-fashioned elevator was hopelessly over-used. Of course, the story line was limp also - not even worth recounting, indeed just like all the "Carry On" movies but this one fell short of even those, as if that was at all possible! No wonder Monkhouse made relatively few movies. As a scriptwriter, TV show host and stand up comic he was a bit (but not much) better. As an actor (in this movie at any rate) he was remarkably wooden and dull. As I mentioned at the beginning, my curiosity was that I not seen a Bob Monkhouse movie before. After having viewed this painful offering, I will not let my curiosity about Monkhouse movies get the better of me again!
The Creeping Terror (1964)
This movie sucks canal water - big time!
I usually get a kick out of watching science fiction movies made forty or more years ago, especially those where the inside of the spaceship is so spacious with an enormously large amount of headroom, the astronauts dressed like factory workers, the equipment on board looking hopelessly cumbersome gawky and ineffectual. The story line was usually lame and the special effects usually extremely amateurish and sometimes laughable. But to some extent or other they are good fun to watch and are funny since no sensible person could possibly take such movies seriously. One just sits back and enjoys the ride. There are exceptions, however. Those include movies which unabashedly demonstrate the lowest possible acumen in ALL departments namely plot, story line, quality of cinematography, editing, sound, special effects, props, acting, revealing mistakes etc. A lot of movies are deficient in all of these but most directors make some sort of attempt to ensure some sort of acceptable standard otherwise, why bother, right? The other night I watched TCT on the Drive-In channel and, as the movie progressed, I was scarcely able to really believe what I was looking at. It was rock bottom in ALL departments. It was almost as though the people involved in this movie did not really want to have anything to do with it but they were somehow or other obliged to persevere, to the detriment of the actors, crew and ultimately the audience. The Swiffer, Shag pile..no sorry I mean err umm Monster (yes, that's the word I was looking for), the absolutely superb acting, the incredibly high quality sound track, the really authentic looking spacecraft (later eagerly emulated by the producers of 2001 - A Space Oddyssey), the crack troop of soldiers with their pop guns and water pistols, the Oscar nominated editing work. All these facets were displayed and undertaken at the lowest possible standard. In fact, the producer of this movie must not simply have scraped the bottom of the barrel, he must have looked underneath it!
Whoever it was that conceived and executed this DUNGHEAP of a movie must be severely smitten with such a level of masochism as to warrant their being incarcerated into a lunatic asylum. When they had finished this movie, and then reviewed the pre-release pilot and agreed to circulate it, what on earth went through their heads? How ANYBODY in their right mind could POSSIBLY have thought that this movie had ANY merit whatsoever is mind boggling. Did anybody at the original review REALLY think "Wow, is this ever a GOOD movie. Can't wait to see how it is received!" No cinema that showed it could have possibly felt happy about doing so (the viewpoint that a movie is good because it is so bad did not have prevalence in those days).
A deserved career suicide for ALL concerned.