From: jack.bohn64@gmail.com   
      
   Summer hits!   
      
   In addition to summer things, which is among the reasons I'm posting this   
   late, there was a lot more than DVDs to watch.  Paramount unexpectedly put   
   season one of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds up for free for the month on   
   Youtube, and all the new classic    
   movies on TV caught up to me; I've been using a new method for watching and   
   deleting from the DVR, such that when it filled up about the middle of the   
   month (about 100 movies) I had the oldest thirty-some watched and could be   
   deleted and about half the    
   next thirty-some watched -- ideally it would have been every other one, so I   
   could watch one and delete two -- still working my way going alternately   
   between the oldest and the newest.   
      
   Working through my DVD collection, I watched:   
      
   The Ape (1940)  A Monogram Picture starring Karloff as a mad scientist -- as   
   he's a kindly old man, let's call him unconventional -- seeking a cure for a   
   paralyzing disease using human spinal fluid.  Meanwhile, a carnival ape has   
   killed its abusive owner    
   and escaped.  This was a rewatch from May, because when we came to the part   
   that tied the two plots together, I was lost.  Had I fallen asleep?  (I still   
   have 1953's "House of Wax" to rewatch after falling asleep, should have done   
   that closer to having    
   first seen it, now I'll probably have to go through the whole movie again.)    
   No, the first connection of the plots is given mostly by implication.  As most   
   of the other plot points are given by one character or another stepping   
   forward to state them in    
   short, declarative sentences, no wonder I missed it.  I wonder if the writers   
   were reaching for something more sophisticated than they were able to pull   
   off, or whether there was some last-minute censorship on the scene that would   
   have established this.     
   As this is a Public Domain film, it's possible that the parts of the movie   
   that would have made it clearer to me were lost.   
      
   Pardon My Sarong (1942)  The four boxsets of Universal's Abbott & Costello   
   movies are one line in my inventory, so dealer's choice, and I hadn't seen   
   this before.   Someone has doubtless traced the romantic subplots in this   
   series as it atrophied from A&   
   C being comic relief in "One Night in the Tropics" to it essential being   
   -what?- "plot relief?" to the comedy the audience came to see.  Here we take a   
   major part of the running time to get to the tropical island of the theme, as   
   we pause each step for a    
   comedy setpiece.  This is probably the only A&C I haven't yetseen that can   
   sidestream into sf, as nogoodniks on the island are pulling the god gambit   
   with a volcano.   
      
   The Skin Game (1931)  Alfred "The Master of Suspense" Hitchcock got his Public   
   Domain movies thrown into a horror megapack.  No, the title is not some   
   predecessor to "Psycho."  It's not a horror or suspense, or even mystery,   
   although there are some    
   family secrets, and a tense auction scene.  This is just a note.   
      
      
      
   And that seems to be it.   
      
   July is shaping up to be much the same, with activities and with cable   
   bringing me movies as fast as I can empty the DVR.   
   August will be a theme month on TCM, "Summer Under the Stars" with each day   
   devoted to one star.  I may have seen a lot of the major motion pictures they   
   might choose.   
      
   --    
   -Jack   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)