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mst3kproject · 3 years

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Voodoo Island

Leonard Maltin thought this movie was boring, which is, honestly, kind of terrifying. Its ostensible star is Boris Karloff, who somehow managed to avoid ever being on MST3K, but it was produced by Howard Koch, the director of Untamed Youth, and was written by Richard Laundau, who did the same for Lost Continent (uhoh). It’s also got Jean Engstrom from The Space Children, and if the voice of the radio operator sounds familiar that’s because it’s 🎶 Adam Weeeeeest.

A hotel company wants to build a resort on a tropical island, but the scouting party they sent never came back – except for one guy, Mitchell, who has been reduced to a catatonic state by whatever it was he saw there. Worried, the hotelier sends renowned skeptic Mr. Knight to find out if it’s true that the island is under some kind of voodoo curse. After much wasting of the audience’s time, Knight’s party reaches the island and finds it infested with man-eating plants, coconut crabs, and unfriendly natives. I wish I could tell you more of the plot, but that’s basically all there is.

Voodoo Island is unusual as bad movies go, in that you don’t actually realize how bad it is until it’s over. Things that seem to be the plot move merrily along, always feeling like it’s building up to something cool… and then at the last moment it just deflates like a gas station tube man with his fan turned off. In hindsight, the audience realizes that very little of what they just saw had anything to do with what was supposedly going on. In many ways, you never do find out what was going on at all!

The middle section of this movie is not quite as obviously padded as Lost Continent with its endless rock climbing, but almost all of it is, retrospectively, pointless. On the first leg of their journey to the island, the party’s plane is caught in a storm and forced to make an emergency landing – only to find that the weather has mysteriously cleared right up! After repairing their radio they set off again, and nothing much comes of the incident. They stop on another island where they have trouble hiring a boat, and where somebody puts a curse of some sort on them. Nothing comes of this. Later still, their boat stalls out and refuses to start again, even after they’ve cleared a blocked fuel line. This has no real consequences, because the tide carries them in anyway, and the movie never deals with what happens when they try to leave the island again.

Along for the ride is Mitchell, the guy who was so terrified by what he saw on the island that he hasn’t moved or spoken since. He has a couple of medical emergencies that resolve themselves without long-term consequences, and then simply drops dead before they ever reach the island. They don’t learn anything from him or his condition. A similar fate later befalls another character, Finch, but this time the movie ends before he has a chance to either die or snap out of it. Mitchell is only in this movie to make it longer, and possibly so it could claim it had a zombie.

With the movie already half-over, we finally reach this mysterious island. The group are greeted by a trail of clues that make Knight thing somebody is trying to lead them somewhere… perhaps to answers, perhaps to a trap. Eventually they’re captured by the natives, but there’s no reason they had to be in a particular place for this to happen – the natives have been following them the whole time and could have intervened at any point. None of this stuff reads as padding because it feels like it’s going to lead to something. Again, it’s only when the credits unexpectedly start to roll that you realize almost the whole movie was irrelevant.

Padding is not Voodoo Island’s only problem – the dialogue is awkward at best. Most of it is on a Revenge of the Sith level, where characters just say exactly what they’re thinking in a way that might have sounded poetic on paper but just doesn’t work out loud. The boat captain, Gunn, gets a Gunslinger moment in which he narrates his traumatic backstory in a single talking head shot. Knight is forever going on about Rational Explanations and then suddenly declares his change of heart when confronted with a voodoo doll. There’s no meat to this arc at all, no sense of Knight questioning his worldview or coming to terms with anything – he just says I do believe! like he’s in a Santa Claus movie and then it’s over.

The worst of both the dialogue and the supposed character arcs occur in the love story. There are girls in this movie, so of course there has to be a love story, and it’s terrible. The lady half of this one is Knight’s assistant Miss Adams, who is very poised and professional and doesn’t smoke or drink, and spends the first half of the movie being tutted at by just about everybody. The other woman in the group, Claire, tells her she could just be so pretty if she’d only change the way she did her hair. Gunn calls her a ‘machine’ and asks if she even knows how to be a woman. This raises some hackles in the modern viewer, who wants to see Adams appreciated for what she is rather than what she has the potential to be if she changes everything about herself.

But Voodoo Island was made in the fifties, when changing yourself to please a man was what women aspired to! Miss Adams therefore swears off being a nerd and kisses Gunn, whose main personality trait is being a stunning asshole. He’s drunk and bitter, and earlier in the movie he tried to hit on Claire, who had to tell him to fuck off about four times before he got the idea. Later he insults and threatens Adams because her intelligence makes him feel like less of a man. Apparently one kiss from her completely undoes his PTSD and he’s a better person now.

These two getting together also totally dismisses the healthy and supportive friendship Adams has with Knight, who is not only her boss but has some fatherly affection for her. He praises her work ethic and tells her that she shouldn’t listen to people who think she’s boring. I guess we’re supposed to think it’s good that she quits working for him so she can run off with a drunk who’s threatened to slap her, because Gunn will make her life more exciting.

At the supposed climax, the natives (an assortment of ethnic-looking extras who never speak) take the group prisoner, and they are brought before the chief (a white guy in dark makeup), who tells them why outsiders aren’t allowed on the island. The prisoners are taken to a hut where they are tied up. One of them is possibly murdered by voodoo, and then the chief… just lets the rest of them leave. No conditions specified, although it’s implied that the islanders have more voodoo dolls and plenty of pins. We don’t even find out if they actually made it back. To get to their boat, the party will have to pass back through the carnivorous jungle without a guide, and once they reach the beach, they’ll have to fix their engine. It really feels like there ought to have been more of a climax, never mind a denouement. As the credits begin, I was just going, “that’s it?”

The actors are mostly mediocre. Boris Karloff tries really hard to rise above the material but never gets there, which is understandable when his lines are things like, “no, you fool, they’ll slaughter us to bits!”. All this badness really is a terrible shame, too, because Voodoo Island’s setpiece monsters, the man-eating plants, are actually incredibly cool. They never look real, but they’re much more creative than the standard giant Venus’ flytrap. There’s a thing that wraps long bean-like leaves around a swimmer and drowns her, another than catches its victims with a sticky bulbous stem, and yet a third that folds ferny fronds around prey and digests it! A movie that made proper use of these monsters would be a great time. I hope the prop people went on to the better things they deserved.

(At the other end of the effects scale are the coconut crabs I mentioned. These are not actual coconut crabs, but dead specimens of some other, much more gracile species. This, too, is unfortunate, because coconut crabs are living crustacean nightmares capable of killing and eating seagulls. One theory about Amelia Earhart’s ultimate fate is that she was devoured by coconut crabs.)

As for Voodoo Island having anything to say… it has some kind of muddled point about not dismissing the supernatural out of hand, but its ‘magic’ is pretty lame, and Knight’s arc is handled so badly that it passes by without making much of an impression. The story does seem to have another possible theme, though. As usual I can’t tell if this is intentional or not, but Voodoo Island seems to have something to say about concepts of ownership.

The hotelier has taken an interest in the island because he did an inventory of his properties and discovered he owned it. How he came to do so, we have no idea… it must have been sold to him by somebody else who’d likewise never been there, since the tribal chief tells us that Mitchell and his companions were the first white men to ever go there. What made that person think they owned it? Does the concept of ownership even mean anything when you don’t know that you own something? Does owning something entitle you to destroy it?

The natives own the island in the much less abstract sense that they live there. The chief tells the party that his people went to this island on purpose, because they thought its nasty flora would keep white people from following them there. They want no part of modern civilization, and seem completely unaware that somebody outside their community is claiming he owns this land. Whether the idea of ‘owning’ land is even a meaningful one to them, we can’t tell. When the Lenape allowed the Dutch to live on Manhattan Island, they probably had no idea the settlers would consider the land exclusively theirs.

These are some things that still need thinking about in the twenty-first century, and if you’re going to watch Voodoo Island do it for that and for the fun monsters. Even then, you’re likely to be disappointed.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #voodoo island #tw: abuse #humanitarian vegetables #50s

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photographerguide-blog · 5 years

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Photography legend Joel Meyerowitz: phones killed the sexiness of the street

New Post has been published on https://photographyguideto.com/must-see/photography-legend-joel-meyerowitz-phones-killed-the-sexiness-of-the-street/

Photography legend Joel Meyerowitz: phones killed the sexiness of the street

He chased parades, ambushed hairdressers and refused to leave Ground Zero. Over PG Tips and ricotta at his Tuscan barn, Joel Meyerowitz relives his most stunning shots

One day 55 years ago, Joel Meyerowitz was roaming the streets of his native New York with a 35mm camera when he glimpsed something through an arcade window that stopped him in his tracks. A young woman was standing with her back to him, tenderly grooming her boyfriends pompadour with a comb, just as Meyerowitz imagined she had curled the hair of dolls when she was a girl.

As we sit in front of the log fire in his converted barn in Tuscany in the February dusk, Meyerowitz remembers what happened next. I snuck up as close as I could and tried to capture the intimacy of that moment. I was very shy and it took all my courage if the plate glass hadnt been there, maybe I wouldnt have dared get so close. In the resulting print, the boy glances from the shadows into the camera with furrowed brow, a moment of pure vulnerability that a split second later might have curdled into rage at Meyerowitzs intrusion. And, just possibly, the photographer might have got his ass kicked.

Tender grooming New York City, 1962.

This was one of the American street photographers first images. Whats striking about it is not so much the bravura seizing of the moment. Cartier-Bresson, after all, had already made his name doing that and Meyerowitz was following the Frenchmans lead. Rather, it was that the seized moment was in colour. In art photography, there was still this huge prejudice against colour as if only black and white were aesthetically justifiable, he recalls. I never bought that: for me colour is essential; I instinctively felt I needed it to give my work force. Just as we have smell memories, we have colour memories. I mean the world is in colour, right?

Meyerowitz was seduced into photography earlier that year when, as a young art director, he witnessed an ad agency shoot by the great American photographer Robert Frank for a booklet he was designing. The way he weaved in and out of the girls he was shooting, my God, that was a revelation to me. You could move while working the camera. Wow! I wanted to do that, too.

Until that epiphany, Meyerowitz hadnt been sure what he wanted to do with his life. He was studying part time for a masters in art history and dabbling in abstract painting. After seeing Frank at work, however, he went back to the ad agency office that afternoon and quit. Harry, my boss, couldnt believe me. Later, though, he bought me a camera.

How much is that tiger in the window? New York City, 1975

From the start, Meyerowitz and fellow street photographer and friend Garry Winogrand sought to explore the erotics of the street: The heat of the gazes between people, the charged mystery that arises from capturing chance moments on the fly, he says.

In his new autobiographical photography book Where I Find Myself, Meyerowitz writes of those heady days: We loved watching the play of light on Fifth Avenue and how it gave meaning to things. We watched the seasons change and with it womens clothing getting lighter and sexier. We were living and breathing photography We felt we were part of a movement that was making photography more interesting than it ever was before.

But first he had to overcome his shyness. He did this with his initial project taking shots of bystanders at street parades. Nobody thinks theres anything odd about a photographer at a parade, so that gave me invisibility. One particularly successful image taken in New York in 1963 depicts a relaxed, smiling, cardigan-wearing African American man standing with his dog on the pavement next to a tightly wound white man in a suit who is holding his hand to his heart and glaring past the black man.

Seize the chance moments New York City, 1963.

Hes saluting the flag thats off camera, explains Meyerowitz. Its a superbly unresolved image but sets up all kinds of dual tensions black/white, genial/fraught, patriotic/not so much. You need to get on the streets and seize the chance moments, he says.

Of his street images, my favourite depicts a Frenchman who has fallen outside a Paris Mtro station one day in 1967. By this stage, Meyerowitz had started to take longer shots moving back from eight to 20 feet from what he sought to capture. Its a shift from chamber music to symphony. Everybody is looking at the fallen man, the chic young woman descending the station steps, the delivery guy pushing boxes on a trolley, a cyclist swivelling to get a better look at a strangers misfortune. A worker in overalls even steps over the prone man, carrying a hammer that takes on sinister import. Those fuckers, laughs Meyerowitz. Not one of them helps him up.

The image is an absorbing network of gazes and furtive glances. In the 60s and 70s you could look at my street photographs and trace lines from the eyes of people connecting with other peoples eyes, setting up these force fields.

As exotic as a tropical fish Sarah, Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1981

Today, what entranced Joel Meyerowitz about the street is all but dead. Nobodys looking at each other. Everybodys glued to their phones. But street photography still exists? Its thriving but not in the way I used to do it. The best street photographers now show humans dwarfed by ad billboards. The street has lost its savour.

As his work evolved, Meyerowitz became a tougher, indomitable street presence, and yet one like the best photographers able to charm his subjects into giving him what he wants. You can see that in the way he got swimsuited young women to pose guilelessly near his summer home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a series of early 80s pictures that prefigured Rineke Dijkstras similar subject matter. How, for instance, he inveigles a red-headed young woman as exotic as a tropical fish to pose for his camera, exposing her freckled arms.

You can see this process most clearly, though, in the pictures Meyerowitz took at Ground Zero. On 9/11 he was out of town, but headed home bent on the idea of photographing the aftermath. When I got to Ground Zero, I had my Leica out and then I got a thump in the back from a cop. They said: You cant take a picture here, buddy, this is a crime scene. Well, I argued with them its a public space, my city, I can do what the fuck I want. And I did.

His subsequent photo essay was a charged memorial to the grandiosity of the ruin, and the people who worked in it, hunting for teeth, bones, anything that might identify victims. The care they invested in this task brought to the vast physical dimensions of the site an intimate, spiritual dimension, he says.

Smoke Rising in Sunlight, New York City, 2001

The following spring, he was in Italy. The world had changed because of 9/11 and so when I saw the thousands of years of continuous cultivation of Tuscan landscape, it was great solace. In Where I Find Myself, Meyerowitz juxtaposes photographs of Ground Zero with the cypresses and fields of Tuscany theres a spiritual dimension to these rural images, too, a renewal by means of natural goodness in the aftermath of evil.

Today, the photographer has definitively swapped the street for the farm, the Bronx for a home in the hills south of Siena. He and his English second wife, the novelist Maggie Barrett, have spent the past four years converting a barn to a rural retreat. Weve uprooted from everything and settled here without family or much in the way of friends, but with each other. Its an experiment in intimacy. We drink tea (his wifes PG Tips) and he serves me week-old ricotta made by the farmer who lives next door.

Meyerowitz has described his urban photography as jazz, a sinuous dance through the streets with a handheld camera. Only later in his career did he add landscape to his repertoire. It happened in Provincetown in the late 70s. I moved every summer to somewhere where life was simple and I started to see differently. And what I saw, I needed to capture with a view camera, an 8×10 camera. With that you dont riff, you dont do jazz. You do what it tells you. So what was the appeal? Everything was rendered with this incredible visual acuity. It blew me away. His Bay/Sky series from the late 70s and early 80s, in particular, purge humans for the essentials of sky, sea and land.

Longnook Beach, Truro, Massachusetts, 1985.

For the past four years, Meyerowitz has retreated from the world into his studio, where he has been photographing humble objects hes picked up from Provenal brocantes and Tuscan junk shops. His work, he thinks, riffs on Czanne and Giorgio Morandis still lifes. Im obsessed with these pictorial puzzles. He started with two or three objects and has now moved on to grand arrangements that remind me of the complicated positioning of humans in his street photos.

Bald, sinewy (half a lifetime ago he missed becoming a US Olympic swimmer by thousandths of a second), and brimming with life, Meyerowitz turns 80 on 6 March. Any plans to retire, I ask, as he shows me out? Artists dont retire. We just move on to new creative obsessions. Well, thats what I do.

Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself is published by Laurence King on 12 March.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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