King Kelly of the USA. Leonard Fields. 1934.

I remember saying to somebody like five years ago “I’ve never seen a movie from the 30s or 40s I haven’t enjoyed”. But of course that was massive survivorship bias: The movies I had seen from that era were the ones that were the ones that were good enough to be in circulation eighty years later.

So watching the movies on the two public domain DVD box sets has been an eye-opener. There’s no filtering for quality here, but instead just whatever the people making the sets were able to get their hands on — for free.

In conclusion: They sure made lame movies back then, too.

But this isn’t one of those movies.

This is weird.

On a scale of “that’s a weird movie” this scores a “whaaaa…??”

I’m not sure whether they were all eating peyote in their omelettes by mistake or they were just insane.

The director made four movies in the early 30s, and then no more, which is understandable.

But I kinda love this, because it’s just so weird. Well. Bits of it. It’s not a good movie, but it’s something to behold.

Gremlins 2. Joe Dante. 1990.

This is a lot funnier than I remember! I sort of remember this as a horror movie. Or perhaps I’m misremembering.

I think I must be.

There’s a bunch of fun, goofy scenes here, and a huge number of incidental sight gags, but it doesn’t quite hang together. It’s very 80s, which I like: The plot starts off very slowly and sort of congeals. Or escalates. It feels Xmas-ey in the formless way the movie happens.

This sounds very stupid, but I hadn’t considered 80s American entertainment movies to have a specific aesthetic in this way: But they’re basically movies made by people who are nostalgic for the screwball comedies of the 40s and the monster movies of the 50s. It works beautifully, I think, but this sort of thing hasn’t been possible since.

So it’s a bit bewildering that there weren’t more sequels to this franchise, but perhaps time had just passed for this sort of thing.

Reet, Petite, and Gone. William Forest Crouch. 1947.

This, uses, the, Oxford, comma. Which is quite unusual in titles. I means, most of them don’t use commas at all.

Anyway, this is one of them there very low budget movies that has a nonsensical kinda-plot in between a lot of musical performances: It’s like the MTV of its time. It’s amateurishly shot: whenever there’s two people talking (and there’s a lot of those scenes) you can never see both of their faces, for instance.

The director has a pretty odd CV:

It’s a super-long list of shorts from the 40s, and looking at the list of performers in each, I’m guessing that they’re all basically music videos.

So this is one of the two featureish-length movies he made, and it shows.

I bailed on this movie after twenty-five minutes.