For a few years now I’ve been keeping track of my film viewing, and as I do most years I have chosen to spotlight a few movies from previous years that I watched for the first time. This year I finally began a Letterboxd account, which I am using almost entirely as a diary of first-time watches; that makes it a little easier to review my list and decide what is worthy of comment, but it also means you can visit my diary and see the complete list of what I watched this year (more or less: there are a couple of movies I saw that weren’t listed on the service, including one I’ve written about below). Plus it’s fun to see all the posters as little tiles you can group and organize, but that’s neither here nor there. As always, not all of the films I discovered this year were masterpieces, but all of the ones I’ve chosen to highlight are at least interesting enough to spark a conversation.

The Magician (Rex Ingram, 1926)

In this silent film (based on a novel by Somerset Maugham), a deranged alchemist (Paul Wegener) uses hypnotism to steal a beautiful artist (Alice Terry) from her fiancée in order to sacrifice her in an experiment to create life. The simple premise goes to some strange places, and the end result is a kind of Ur-gothic romance complete with a big climactic fight in the “Sorceror’s Tower.” By coincidence, I had just read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, which uses the novel’s “Oliver Haddo” as a stand-in for Aleister Crowley.

Elstree Calling (Adrian Brunel et al, 1930)

This is a series of sketches and musical performances similar to Paul Whiteman’s movie King of Jazz (which I also watched this year) or any number of Hollywood revues. Since it was made in England (at Elstree Studios), however, the cast and crew are predominately British and many of the numbers are influenced by the English music hall tradition. (An exception is a performance by the Three Eddies, a rambunctious black American song-and-dance act, part of a successful revue touring England at the time.) I sought this out for footage of the English xylophone virtuoso Teddy Brown, one of the featured performers, but it is interesting in other ways: some of the sketches were directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and a running gag has it that the whole thing is being broadcast on that futuristic device, television. It’s very much of its time, but of great interest to my corny, Vaudeville-loving soul.

The Penguin Pool Murder (George Archainbaud, 1932)

Hildegarde Withers is a character who was played by both Edna May Oliver and Zasu Pitts (among others); in this first outing, the schoolteacher-turned-detective is played by Oliver as a stern busybody who won’t take no for an answer, inserting herself into a murder case (first as a witness, then defending herself as a suspect) alongside exasperated police inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason). Still, more is made of Withers’ soft side than in later installments, and to my surprise it ends with Withers and Piper impulsively getting married! (Later installments walked that development back.) There’s not much to these comic mysteries: they’re more about the characters than the puzzles, but it’s always fun to see character actors getting to play the lead.

Queen of Outer Space (Edward Bernds, 1958)

Has the “space Amazon” subgenre, with its alien planets stocked with beauty pageant winners and brainy women scientists who need to be taught how to love by red-blooded American astronauts, ever been completely serious? If there ever was a version of this premise that played it completely straight, it was long before the thoroughly ironic Queen of Outer Space, starring Zsa Zsa Gabor as the rightful ruler of her interplanetary sorority. I fell in love with this movie when, in the first five minutes, the scientist who developed a space station has to be reminded not to light up a cigarette onboard a spaceship while they’re refueling. That sets the tone, which is far more “Zapp Brannigan” than Star Trek ever was. There’s a bunch of ’50s gender conformity as our rugged heroes wind up on a planet of beautiful women, but at least 50% is tongue-in-cheek. It’s a movie that knows how silly it is.

In the same vein, Invasion of the Star Creatures (Bruno VeSota, 1962) spoofs the spoof, reviving the two-man comedy of Abbott and Costello (in the form of Robert Ball and Frank Ray Perilli as a pair of bumbling privates) and sending up Army life, beatniks, and fan clubs in addition to showcasing its statuesque female invaders.

Two on a Guillotine (William Conrad, 1965)

Cesar Romero plays a famous stage magician who promised to come back from the dead; when his estranged daughter (Connie Stevens) inherits his mansion and fortune, unscrupulous reporter Dean Jones insinuates himself into her life to get the story. Then strange things begin happening: is the house really haunted, or is someone trying to get rid of the young heiress? This is a tight little jewel box of a thriller, and one that deserves to be more widely seen.

Phase IV (Saul Bass, 1974)

There have been many cautionary films about animals or other forces of nature turning against humanity, including many made in the ecologically-conscious 1970s, but few are as chilly as this tale of a pair of researchers matching wits with an unusually intelligent ant colony. It’s implied that the ants have been touched by an alien intelligence, but it’s just as likely that they’ve made a spontaneous leap in evolution. The shadow of 2001 looms over Phase IV, especially in the Kubrickian sterility of the researchers’ self-contained base and the eerie monoliths that the ants have started building. The close-up footage of ants for which the film is famous might as well take place on a distant planet, and the effect of alienation is complete in a stunning finale (trimmed down in the film’s theatrical cut, but the full sequence can be seen online) that suggests the ants are no longer part of our ecosystem: we’re part of theirs.

Habfürdő (Kovásznai György, 1979)

In this Hungarian animated film, a man gets cold feet on his wedding day and confides in a nurse who happens to be friends with the bride. The farce elements suggested by the frothy title (which translates to “Bubble Bath”) are at odds with a realistic investigation of marriage and childbearing, and the whole thing seems rather ambivalent about marriage. The mixture of tones suggests a state directive at odds with the filmmakers’ inclinations, or at least people with different perspectives working on it. But the style is the real draw, and still pictures don’t do justice to the constantly fluid, expressionistic animation, in which classic squash-and-stretch is taken to cubist extremes and no technique is off the table. On top of that, it’s also a musical with a groovy soundtrack.

Death Nurse and Death Nurse 2 (Nick Millard, 1987 and 1988)

Nurse Edith Mortley runs a clinic with her brother, the doctor, but patients keep dying. It seems like the doctor has lost his mind (the sequel reveals that he’s actually a veterinarian), but Edith just likes killing, and a flashback (which looks like it was edited in from a different project) reveals that she has a history of murder. Both films were shot-on-video cheapies meant to satisfy video stores’ voracious appetite for genre content, but “cheap” doesn’t even begin to state how bare-bones these films are. They’re also only 60 minutes long each and the first one has a hilariously abrupt ending, so it just seems greedy that Slasher//Video packaged Death Nurse 2 separately instead of issuing them together. Call it “so bad it’s good” if you must, but there’s something captivating about how dopey these movies are: Priscilla Alden, who plays the title character, would have fit perfectly in a John Waters film.

Brainscan (John Flynn, 1994)

A horror-obsessed teenager gets his hands on a new video game that promises to be the most immersive experience yet; but when the murders he commits in the game turn out to be real, is there any way out but to eliminate the witnesses? I loved everything about this: the WarGames-style paranoia about hackers and home computers updated for the CD-ROM era; Edward Furlong as the creepy-yet-sympathetic Michael (although considering that he is supposed to be burdened by a dead mother and absent father, he makes being a latchkey kid look pretty sweet); Frank Langella as one of his patented enigmatic, slightly sinister authority figures; even Trickster (T. Ryder Smith), a transparent Freddy Krueger knock-off who dresses like Adam Ant, worked for me in this because everything is just so, so ’90s. It winks just enough, and there is humor, but I loved how it leans into its dreamy, slo-mo screensaver aesthetic, the opposite of what we usually think of as ’90s filmmaking, aided by George S. Clinton’s moody score: Wes Craven by way of Twin Peaks.

Remote Control Grandpa (Matt St. Charles, 2006)

I thought my days of “this is so ridiculous I have to buy it” were behind me*, but when I found a DVD called Remote Control Grandpa for 99 cents, I couldn’t resist. And it was actually pretty good! A video game wiz and his stoner buddy discover that the kid’s overbearing drill-sergeant grandfather has a chip implanted in his brain that makes him follow orders. At the same time, the kid is trying to win a video game competition sponsored by the U.S. Army. In addition to having some amusing gags, this has a very pointed view of the military and government (its comparison of the then-current Iraq War to Vietnam is not exactly subtle), and it’s got a few things to say about those violent video games, too.

* my ownership of two Death Nurse films notwithstanding

Thanks for reading! My best of 2019 post will appear closer to the end of the year.