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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Goofballs in Harem Pants, Part 2

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Goofballs in Harem Pants, Part 2

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Son of Ali Baba (Universal, 1952)

Including Arabian Adventure (1979) in last week’s article reminded me that there was a slew of films from Hollywood’s postwar spate of Arabian Nights-inspired B-movies that we hadn’t covered here yet. There were a lot of these, quickies shot in about a week apiece, mostly on the same Hollywood backlot. Though tedium reigns over most of the running time of these faux-desert adventures, there are nuggets of good fun scattered among the dunes. If only somebody would compile a half-hour supercut of the best bits from the films that follow, they’d be doing the 21st century a favor. Any takers?

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Goth Chick News: The Dead Travel Fast in Branko Tomovic’s Vampir

Goth Chick News: The Dead Travel Fast in Branko Tomovic’s Vampir

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Color me old fashioned, but there is something intriguing about a vampire story which comes straight from the region around the Carpathian Mountains. Granted, Serbia isn’t the original Transylvania. But due to the many regional conflicts dating back to the Middle Ages and their eventual land-locked status, Serbia shares quite a lot of folklore and traditions with its neighbors Hungary, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, and of course Romania.

Maybe because unlike Seattle, Serbia looks like a place where vampires would hang out; or maybe it’s the accent. But when I had the pleasure of visiting Hungary and Croatia, it seemed supremely likely that every local cemetery had a resident undead. It’s therefore no surprise that a new independent film from Serbia did so well at the Sitges International Film Festival, followed by Trieste Science+Fiction, and Raindance that it got snagged by Alarm Pictures for distribution in the US and UK.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Fables and Fairy Tales

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Fables and Fairy Tales

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Legend (Universal, 1985)

The fantasy film boom of the Eighties mostly drew upon pulp sword and sorcery tales, but some harked back farther to earlier traditions of myth, fables, and fairy tales, often because the filmmakers had a more vividly enchanted look in mind. Whether hit or miss, these movies and their typically rich visuals provided a welcome diversion from the then-prevailing norm of mounted barbarians thundering across windswept steppes.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Warmongers

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Warmongers

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Ran (1985)

History, bloody history. In this series we usually concern ourselves with the adventures of heroes, singly or in small groups, in quests or endeavors to right wrongs or win personal rewards on a medium or small scale. But sometimes our sword-wielders’ exploits are set against the backdrop of full-scale warfare, imminent or ongoing, and the sheer quantity of blood spilled in wartime adds serious stakes and grave overtones to even the most spirited adventures. We all enjoy light-hearted tales of derring-do, but it’s wise and useful on occasion to remind ourselves that open warfare is the greatest misery that humankind can inflict on itself. It’s an important message, perhaps none more so, and as such it’s also a theme that can inspire great art.

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Goth Chick News: Nicolas Cage Back from the Dead…? Maybe

Goth Chick News: Nicolas Cage Back from the Dead…? Maybe

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Sometime in the mid-90’s I was headed into one of my favorite shops for contraband Cuban cigars, located on the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans, when who holds the door for me but Nicolas Cage. I had literally loved him in everything he had done up to that point including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Cotton Club and Racing with the Moon. This wasn’t too long after Cage had appeared in Wild at Heart which was intensely sexy in the weird David Lynch kind of way. And though I desperately wanted to stop Cage (was he single at that time? I don’t remember), if you don’t want to look like an obnoxious tourist in NOLA, you let people go about their business. So, I said “thanks” while looking at him as long as I dared, and went on in the shop.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Fantasy Salmagundi

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Fantasy Salmagundi

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Krull (1983)

By the mid-Eighties, fantasy films for adults had become a legit commercial genre releasing around a dozen medium to high-budget titles a year. For fantasy fans who’d lived through the slim pickings of the Sixties and Seventies, this was an embarrassment of riches. The fact that about half of these movies were embarrassments in other ways was something one could overlook, because if this week’s fantasy film was disappointing, next week’s might show you things you’d never before seen on the big screen. Which brings us to our current decidedly mixed bag of flicks of the fantastic, offering equal amounts of thrills and cringes. Wizardry ahead!

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Conan’s Father: William Smith, 1933-2021

Conan’s Father: William Smith, 1933-2021

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William Smith

We all have our end-of-year rituals, those small ceremonies that prepare us to ring out the old year and ring in the new. For me, one of the most important is watching the current TCM Remembers, the annual short film with which Turner Classic Movies bids farewell to the film people that we’ve lost throughout the year. It’s always beautifully done, and it always makes me tear up, usually no more the thirty seconds in.

Some of its subjects — the more famous ones — come as no surprise, as I heard about their deaths when they occurred during the year. There will always be many people, though, that I only find out about when I watch the video, late in December. This year one of the people that I didn’t know was gone was William Smith, who died July 5th at the age of eighty-eight.

William Smith? Who was William Smith? Oh, you know him — I guarantee it. To say that he was a prolific actor is to greatly understate the case. He has two hundred and seventy-five movie and television credits listed on IMDB, the first a miniscule part in 1942’s The Ghost of Frankenstein when he was nine years old and the last in 2020, in the Steve Carell comedy Irresistible.

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The Last Wolf: Karl Edward Wagner is a Warts-and-All Look at One of the Exemplars of Sword & Sorcery

The Last Wolf: Karl Edward Wagner is a Warts-and-All Look at One of the Exemplars of Sword & Sorcery

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The Last Wolf (Knight Visions/Yellow Rose, December 12, 2020)

Documentaries seem to be sort of a thing right now. And they can be absolutely fascinating when the subject is something you’re into. The ones I most enjoy tend to be about my favorite bands, albums, or movies. But I especially like documentaries about my favorite authors, particularly when those authors are on the verge of being forgotten.

At Black Gate we often bemoan the neglect, or approaching neglect, of authors and works in the “speculative” field (broadly conceived). But that lament should be doubled when it comes to the late writer Karl Edward Wagner (1945–1994). Wagner was one of the greatest writers of horror and weird fantasy, in my humble opinion. And though he disavowed the term, I think he was also one of the greatest exemplar writers of sword and sorcery. (Wagner preferred the term “Gothic fantasy” to describe his own work.)

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Goth Chick News: The Cursed, a Werewolf Tale Coming in February

Goth Chick News: The Cursed, a Werewolf Tale Coming in February

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The Cursed (LD Entertainment, February 18, 2022)

Trust the Brits to create nightmares from nursery rhymes. You’re probably familiar with “Ring Around the Rosie” and its reference to the Black Death of the mid-seventeenth century. When children on the playground fall down laughing at the end of this rhyme, they are reenacting the plague in which a quarter of London’s population dropped dead. The “ring-a-rosie” referred to the circular rash appearing on the infected, and the pocket full of posies were the floral sachets people carried with them to mask the ever-present smell of death.

Charming.

However, I recently became acquainted with one I children’s rhyme I hadn’t heard previously. “One for Sorrow” is a well-known, traditional children’s nursery rhyme that relates to magpies. It describes a superstition regarding the number of birds seen at a single time and whether that number means good or ill.

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: An Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Age

Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: An Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Age

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Star Wars (Twentieth Century Fox, 1977)

In adventure movies throughout the twentieth century, swords had been losing ground to guns as the hero’s weapon of choice. Though films of knights, pirates, and cavaliers had a strong start in the silent era, they were gradually sidelined over the decades as Western, gangster, and war movies came to the fore. By 1971, Dirty Harry and his ultra-macho Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum seemed to have put the nail in the coffin.

Then came Star Wars. And suddenly, out of the left field of Japanese samurai movies via the imagination of George Lucas, swords resumed their prominence. In the decade that followed, they even dominated for a while, falling back again during the Nineties to second place before Peter Jackson brought them back, seemingly for good, with The Lord of the Rings trilogy. So, from those of us who are sword fanciers, a hearty thank you to George Lucas, Peter Jackson — and Akira Kurosawa.

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