NEVERENDING FILM FESTIVAL #394
every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the I’s, with random anti-alphabetical cheats)

The Illustrated Man (1969)

Carl (Rod Steiger) is a haggard old bum, the kind of character you keep away from on the bus or sidewalk. In the woods, he encounters a young drifter named Willie (Robert Drivas), and tells him he’s looking for a particular house where there’s a particular woman he wants to kill (Claire Bloom). Willie is wisely perplexed and afraid at this, then dazzled when Carl takes off his shirt, revealing his body is covered with tattoos.

There are four stories here, counting the couple-of-hobos story that frames the other three. They’re all based on Ray Bradbury’s collection of short sci-fi published as The Illustrated Man, and the stories feature Steiger, Drivas, and Bloom in different roles. Any of the stories could stand alone, and would probably be better alone than repeatedly coming back to the man covered in many tattoos, er, skin illustrations, which isn’t as jawdropping now as it might’ve been in 1969.

Bradbury wrote brilliantly of bleak futures, with a touch of wistfulness or nostalgia even when the stories were fresh from his typewriter. The author was alive and well when this movie was made, but didn’t write the screenplay. Instead they turned to Howard B. Kreitsek, best known for Country Music Holiday.

As a film, The Illustrated Man flexes now and again, but like Steiger’s elaborate fake tattoos it never quite comes alive.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975)

Ilsa is the crazed commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, where the prisoners are mostly young, weight-proportionate-to-height women, who get tortured and raped a lot. Ilsa enjoys her work, which includes overseeing the rapes, killing prisoners via a decompression chamber or being boiled alive, ample human experimentation, electric cavity probes, etc.

Carnage and cringe, followed by carnage and cringe, with the only plot twist being more carnage and cringe. It’s a slightly more sadistic remake of Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage, with swastikas but sadly without Pam Grier.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Ilya Muromets (1956)
a/k/a The Epic Hero and the Beast
a/k/a The Sword and the Dragon

Here’s an ancient epic poem, re-told in the ’50s as a fantasy fairy tale. It’s Soviet, so the message is “power to the working people” and all, but I don’t have a problem with working people having power.

Like most fairy tales, it boils down to hokum. Ilya is a big guy but a weakling, unable to defend his wife when the marauding hoards do their marauding and hoarding. Whatever’s ailing him is miraculously cured when he’s gifted a magical sword, and goes galloping off to Kiev to defend the homeland. Dude’s Russian and Kiev is Ukrainian, but such distinctions worth dying for these days mattered less in the ’50s.

He rides a dumpy-ass mini-horse, but like Ilya’s own transformation, the horse becomes a gallant steed. Ilya and his hallucinated equine sidekick battle the hoards and monsters and eventually a dragon, all while occasionally bursting into Russian song.

The coolest thing about Ilya Muromets is how it looks — very different from what we’re accustomed to in American action movies. It’s got the sweeping vistas filmed on location in the mountains and forests, and it’s obviously a big-budget flick filmed on location with a cast of thousands on horseback, but intermingled with that authenticity are clumsy greenscreen shots and very-fake miniatures and action scenes obviously filmed on sets and then superimposed over the grandeur. Even the lighting and colors seem peculiar, but not because the movie’s old and faded — indeed, the copy I watched is freshly restored, with extra credits in Russian for the modern technicians.

This is a kooky flick, acted at about 150% ham levels, with everyone’s makeup smudgy and rosy, and lots of working people getting empowered. Best of all, unlike your average Russian epic it’s not stretched to the length of War and Peace. It’s barely an hour and a half, coherent for some stretches, often beautiful, often laughable, and in too much of a hurry to ever be a yawn.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’m a Recovering Racist (2023)

Nidel Branken is a middle-aged white South African man who sees the injustice in his country, and wants black and white citizens and society to evolve beyond their somewhat unfriendly past toward genuine equal opportunity.

Toward this goal, Nigel has moved himself and his family from an affluent and thus white part of Johannesburg to a much poorer and blacker neighborhood. This is a ten-minute short about Nigel’s move, narrated and probably financed by Nigel, and I like the guy. I’ll buy him breakfast if he ever comes to Seattle.

But I don’t like the film. Nobody but Nigel speaks, and the black slum he calls home is shown only in passing. Its point is further dulled by the excessive use of music and photographic effects. In particular, there’s a tech trick early on to makes the images look like they’re being projected on fabric that’s waving in the breeze. Why?

If you have ten minutes to tell a story, it’s a mistake wasting three of those minutes on arty photography, and nobody needs sad music playing loudly over the sad parts to make it extra clear when we’re supposed to be sad.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

Ana is a cute kid of five or seven years, and she’s never seen a movie. The original Frankenstein (1931) is coming to town for one showing only, and the town doesn’t even have a moviehouse, so it’s screened on the wall, with the audience on rigid chairs in an otherwise empty storefront. The film and especially the monster makes a big impression on the girl, but she doesn’t understand it, so she asks her sister to explain why the monster killed the girl, and why the townsfolk killed the monster.

Only a couple of years older, big sister doesn’t understand it either, but she loves teasing the gullible Ana with deceptions, like your older siblings teased you, or you teased your kid brothers or sisters. Their father is an intellectual sort, who reads books and writes poems and keeps bees for a living, which provides scenes of paternalistic symbolism. Their mother is having an affair, but only in her mind, writing letters to a long-ago ex-lover who might not even still be alive. All four in the family are lonely, and inhabit a house that seems empty even when they’re in it.

There’s a rebel or enemy soldier, stranded and starving in an abandoned shed near the family’s home, and through the older sister’s trickery and the younger sister’s imagination, Ana decides he’s the friendly side of Frankenstein’s monster. Whether he is or isn’t is up for discussion over pastries and coffee after the movie.

All this takes place in an impoverished region of Spain circa 1940, an era when now-still-dead Generalissimo Francisco Franco was very much alive, and Spain was a fascist state. The film is famously filled with political symbolism, but I’ve just told you everything I know about Spain in the ’40s, so such symbolism is only up for misconstruing, and I didn’t try. The only aspect of The Spirit of the Beehive I’m certain of, is that it’s terrific.

Like childhood itself, it’s dreamy, stunning, strange, mean, funny, bewildering, and exactly what you make of it.

Verdict: BIG YES.

7/5/2025

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.

Neverending Film Festival

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