The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sidney Lanfield, 1939)

Though it's his biggest hit, The Hound of the Baskervilles is an outlier in director Sidney Lanfield's career. Lanfield, a jazz musician and vaudeville star turned gag writer turned filmmaker, mostly directed light comedies (many of them starring Bob Hope) and ended his career with TV sitcoms (McHale's Navy and The Addams Family were his most frequent employers). Baskervilles, though not without dry humor and sight gags, is a dark, atmospheric Gothic murder mystery with horror elements, and Lanfield proves himself surprisingly adept at handling the tone.

The first of fourteen (!) Sherlock Holmes adaptations to star the duo of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, respectively, and the first Sherlock Holmes movie to retain Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian setting (the previous Holmes movies updated the action to the present day), Baskervilles kicks things off with a bang with an eerie run through the foggy moors from an old Gothic mansion, the howl of a hound, a mysterious death, and a strange man hiding in the shadows who rifles through the dead man's pockets.

Though the Yorkshire moors here are just studio sets in Hollywood, they look spectacular, and set decorator Thomas Little and art directors Richard Day and Hans Peters deserve a lot of credit for the film's success. I'll spare you a lengthy list of Little's credits, but if you're a movie fanatic, you should check out his imdb page. The guy assisted in giving a lot of great films their visual presence and character, especially in a great run from the late '40s to the early '50s.

If you've read the Doyle novella or seen one of the many other film and television adaptations, you know the basics of the story. Several small changes and one major change have been made to the source material, but Lanfield retains the bulk of the story and captures its spirit. Rathbone and Bruce have great chemistry as Holmes and Watson, and Bruce is good at supplying the curmudgeonly exasperation, boyish excitement, and comedic facial expressions necessary to deflate any self-importance in the material with a delicate enough touch to avoid hamming it up. Rathbone is great at riding the line between smugness and likability. Holmes needs to be pleased with himself and a bit condescending to Watson, but he also needs to be a guy you want to spend the running time of a movie with, too. No wonder these guys clicked with audiences.

The supporting cast also supplies a lot of flavor. John Carradine and Eily Malyon play the Barrymans (changed from "Barrymore" in the novella to avoid the appearance of poking fun at the Barrymore acting family), the caretakers of the Baskerville estate. Carradine and Malyon are excellent at playing suspicious characters, and Malyon has one of the best menacing stares in the game. The always reliable Lionel Atwill plays a village doctor who "dabbles in the occult" with his wife, a medium (Beryl Mercer, in one of her last roles). Morton Lowry is suitably oily and unctuous as the oily and unctuous John Stapleton. The impressively mutton-chopped Barlowe Borland is an elderly man who is constantly suing his neighbors for minor infractions of the law, and Nigel de Brulier gets to act weird and look even weirder as the mysterious man hiding in the moors. The only real snoozes in the cast are the standard-issue milquetoast young couple (a surprising staple of '30s cinema), in this case Richard Greene as Sir Henry Baskerville and Wendy Barrie as Beryl Stapleton, the half-sister of the oily and unctuous John, though Greene does get a couple of decent moments where a little personality comes through.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the classic Hollywood equivalent of comfort food. Every location and its set decorations are a visual pleasure: the stones and landscapes of the moor, the sprawling Gothic mansion, the London apartment of Holmes, the city streets with hansom cabs, a comfortable train car. The narrative with its interconnected mysteries and Lansfield's visual realization of it are satisfying and expertly delivered, and the cast gives it personality and life. For what has turned out to be a week filled with difficult and disappointing news for my wife and me, this movie helped us relax and forget ourselves for a few hours, and that's a great thing.

In the 2020s, a time when studio executives have very little interest in, knowledge of, or affinity for the medium of film, when completed movies' releases are permanently canceled and the movies themselves deleted in order for their parent companies to receive tax write-offs, when shareholders are more important than the people who make the movies and the audiences who watch them, when craftsmanship and artistry are pushed aside in favor of dimly lit computer-generated slop, watching something from Hollywood's golden years is bittersweet but refreshing.

I'm not a nostalgic person, and I don't fantasize about some mythical past when things were supposedly better, but I have a lot of aesthetic problems with a lot of 21st century filmmaking, especially mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. When people who run studios (and even some of the people who make movies) think of movies as just another piece of branded content that only has value if it increases profits for shareholders, we get the shit we've got now. When studios are run by people who love and value movies, we get movies like The Hound of the Baskervilles that look like they were made by human beings. To be clear, the old studio heads were profit-obsessed business jerks, too, who frequently butted in on creative decisions and exploited their workers, but they also loved movies, wanted to make good movies, and sometimes even trusted and respected the people who made those movies, and you can see it on screen. Now we live in a world where the profit and exploitation remain, but the good stuff has been discarded. Worst of both worlds.

I'm dangerously close to driving this post into the ditch, so I'll conclude by saying that The Hound of the Baskervilles is recommended to anyone who loves classic Hollywood, Gothic mysteries, character actors, Sherlock Holmes stories, and foggy moors. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

The Dark Side of the Moon (D.J. Webster, 1990)

Aside from a few narrative inconsistencies I'm still puzzling over, The Dark Side of the Moon is an effective, atmospheric, and well-paced sci-fi/horror film with strong performances and a wild narrative that ties together space travel, the Bermuda Triangle, and Satan (and a sexy robot). Sometimes the film's low budget is visible onscreen, but director D.J. Webster mostly does a lot with a little, and the screenplay by twin brothers Carey and Chad Hayes is pretty solid. (The Hayes brothers wrote several low-budget movies for years afterward until hitting the big time with the Conjuring franchise.)

Surprisingly, Dark Side is Webster's only film as director, though he also made several music videos. His most well-known work in this medium is probably 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry," but he also directed videos for The Alan Parsons Project, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, En Vogue, Amy Grant (in her brief secular phase), The Beach Boys, Smokey Robinson, Restless Heart, Nanci Griffith, Pam Tillis, Little Texas, and one-hit wonders Calloway. I can't find any credits past 1996 (his incomplete imdb page ends in 1993), and I have no idea what he's doing now. Internet searches haven't been any help, unless he became an actual dance music DJ or a biopharmaceutical communications professional, but I'm suspecting these are different D.J. Websters. The D.J. Webster mystery continues. (Podcast idea: Finding D.J. Webster. Get on it, people. I probably won't listen to it, but I'll read a synopsis.)

The Dark Side of the Moon takes place in the terrifying future of 2022. In these days of future past, NASA stopped operating in 1992. It's unclear whether American space travel has been privatized, partially privatized, or simply moved to a different agency. We need answers, Hayes bros. Anyway, our spaceship is operated by a maintenance crew sent out to do some upkeep on a nuclear-armed satellite. Most of this maintenance is automated (but still extremely dangerous), so the mostly sausage party crew consists of two pilots, a jarhead defense and security guy, a research scientist (she's a woman, so she also makes the coffee and tea and endures sexual harassment from at least two of the dudes; don't they know it's 2022?), a doctor, a ship expert and representative of the company who built it, and the ship's inexplicably sexy humanoid robot, who has eyeliner, bright-red lipstick, and a form-fitting S&M-lite outfit possibly made of latex or leather. There must be some technological reason for this. I have to give the spaceship creators the benefit of the doubt here. It's the high-tech future of two years ago. I'm a man of the present. I don't have their science to understand why the robot has to be sexy.

Playing this crew is a strong cast of mostly veteran character actors. "Hey, it's that guy from all those things," you'll say to yourself about two-thirds of these people. Robert Sampson plays veteran pilot Flynn Harding (a quality pilot name). Sampson was in at least one episode of every television show you've ever seen (including The Rockford Files) made between the mid-'50s and 2020 (the year of his death), and his movie credits include Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead and Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and Robot Jox. Younger co-pilot Giles Stewart is played by Will Bledsoe, who had a much shorter acting career but has some spectacularly blow-dried hair that's a bit '80s Brian Bosworth if he didn't shave the sides. Good to know there are blow-driers in space. The jarhead security/defense guy, Philip Jennings, is played by Miami Vice regular John Diehl, whose other credits include Escape from New York, Stripes, National Lampoon's Vacation, the egg-yolk-sucking prostitute killer in Angel, D.C. Cab, Gettysburg, G. Gordon Liddy in Nixon, Jurassic Park III, and Wim Wenders' The End of Violence and Land of Plenty. Huge-glasses-wearer Joe Turkel plays ship expert Paxton Warner. Turkel's first film role was in 1949, and he appeared in several cult classics for Sam Fuller, Roger Corman, and, on three occasions, Stanley Kubrick (The Killing, Paths of Glory, and The Shining). He was also in Blade Runner and episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, Kojak, Fantasy Island, Tales from the Darkside, and Miami Vice. He died in 2022. Ship doctor Dreyfuss Steiner is played by Alan Blumenfeld. If Robert Sampson was in at least one episode of every television show you've ever seen, Blumenfeld was in at least two. To prevent this paragraph from devolving further into a list of credits, I will simply direct the curious to seek out Blumenfeld's imdb page. The guy's been in everything.

The two women in the cast, like the blow-dried Will Bledsoe, had shorter showbiz careers. Wendy MacDonald plays scientist Alex McInny. She was in several erotic thrillers, low-budget action movies, and TV movies in the late '80s and '90s before quitting the business. I reviewed her second movie, the slasher movie Blood Frenzy, on this site several years ago. That one was made by porn director Hal Freeman, who was then being targeted by the state of California in '87 in an initially successful but ultimately failed attempt by the state to destroy the adult film industry using Freeman as the scapegoat/precedent. He decided to make a horror movie while being prevented from directing porn. His conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, and he went back to crankin' out the smut. But I digress. Sexy robot Lesli is played by Camilla More, who was in a Doublemint gum commercial and the fourth Friday the 13th movie with her twin sister Carey, the second twin named Carey to be connected to this film. Both sisters also played the same character on Days of Our Lives, Camilla from 1986-'87, Carey from '87-'88.

Back to the movie. The spaceship inexplicably loses power as it nears the nuclear satellite (located near the titular dark side of the moon), though the sexy robot says everything is functioning normally. The backup generator power comes on, but several of the ship's electronics mysteriously short out, and the temperature plunges. The crew members know they're going to run out of oxygen and power eventually and either suffocate to death or crash into the moon (or both), but they're pros, so they attempt to fix the problem. While they're troubleshooting the entire ship, one of the crew notices a floating NASA shuttle heading their way, which is odd since NASA closed up shop three decades ago. They dock their ship to the shuttle, pump the shuttle's air over to the ship to fix the running-out-of-oxygen problem, and send the pilots in to see if anyone is on board.

The pilots find a mostly empty shuttle except for the dead body of an astronaut that lands on top of them. They move the body to their ship so the doctor can perform an autopsy. He can't find a cause of death, other than the bizarre triangle-shaped incision on the astronaut's stomach. Guess what, everybody? That incision was put there by ... the devil.

We eventually discover lots of entertaining mumbo jumbo about the connections between space travel, the Bermuda Triangle, 666, and Satan's plan to steal heaven from God, but first, our blow-dried hero Giles has to convince Paxton to give him access to the sexy robot, who functions as a sort of distractingly attractive World Wide Web/Wikipedia/Ask Jeeves/spaceship owner's manual. The robot was supposed to be accessible to the entire crew, but Paxton added a security feature giving him sole access. It's heavily implied that Paxton designed the robot, and since we already know Paxton was creeping on Alex, we finally understand why the robot is so sexy. It's because Paxton is a dirty old man. I won't spoil any of the other reveals in case you check this one out, but I will tell you that we get lots of demonic possession in space, which is always fun.

Some of the spaceship's interiors look a bit low-rent, but the exterior shots (which I'm guessing are of handcrafted miniatures) have a suitably awe-inspiring visual presence. The characters and their relations to each other have a natural and lived-in feel, the story remains compelling throughout the running time, and the narrative inconsistencies didn't bother me much, though I'm not someone who really cares about that anyway. I think of each movie as its own dream, with its own dream logic (yes, even The Garbage Pail Kids Movie and Hollywood Hot Tubs 2: Educating Crystal).

The Dark Side of the Moon is a solid, enjoyable movie about Satan taking over a spaceship with help from the Bermuda Triangle, and we all need a little of this kind of thing in our lives, don't we? Think about how much better the world would be if we had five movies a year about Satan taking over a spaceship with help from the Bermuda Triangle instead of all that superhero shit. I had a good time with this one.