arsonplus entertainment

"The natives, they have a curious ceremony. Mr. Parker has witnessed it. "

Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton) performs hideous experiments upon animals on a dank, remote island; one of his creations, Lota (Kathleen Burke) is a gorgeous woman Moreau has fashioned from a panther. When a shipwrecked fellow (Richard Arlen) becomes an unwilling guest, Moreau seizes the opportunity to see if his panther-woman can seduce a human male. “How that scene spurs the scientific imagination onward,” Moreau muses as he observes Lota and the man in full embrace.

Later, Moreau crows, “Do you know what it is to feel like God?” But he’s a cruel, inept God, and when his tormented “manimals” rise up in revolt and spirit their creator off to his laboratory--the House of Pain--to exact an awful revenge, your skin crawls. This is a highly disturbing film; darkly shot and carefully edited. Interestingly, there is no musical score, so although the film’s tension is not underscored, neither is it relieved.

Posted by Peter Collinson at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments

300 based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name tells the story of the legendary Battle of Thermopylae, (480 B.C.) during which Leonidas, one of the two kings of the bad-assed Greek city state of Sparta, led an army of 300 Spartans and fewer than 3,000 allies against an advancing Persian army that numbered into the hundreds of thousands in a narrow pass known as the "gates of fire;" where, like the later defenders of The Alamo, they perished to a man. The Battle of Thermopylae is generally considered to have inspired the world's first democracy.

"The forerank of the enemy collapsed immediately as the first shock hit it; the body-length shields seemed to implode rearward, their anchoring spikes rooted slinging from the earth like tent pins in a gale. The forerank archers were literally bowled off their feet, their wall-like shields caving in upon them like fortress redoubts under the assault of the ram.... The valor of the individual Medes was beyond question, but their light hacking blades were harmless as toys; against the massed wall of Spartan armor, they might as well have been defending themselves with reeds or fennel stalks."

-- Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire

Posted by Peter Collinson at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments