YouTube Movie Roundup

I enjoy watching movies on YouTube for the same reason I enjoy searching thrift stores for physical media. It’s like a treasure hunt. You never know what you’ll find. Sometimes it’s garbage, but other times it may be a lost gem or a new favorite. There are tons of obscure movies to uncover from YouTube. Here are reviews of some recent movies that I’ve watched.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

I remember watching these ’70s Sinbad movies as a kid and this one is still enjoyable. Sinbad and his crew have to retrieve three golden tablets so that they can gain access to the ancient temple of the Oracle of Knowledge. While the story itself isn’t memorable, or even intelligible, future Dr. Who Tom Baker is wonderfully evil as the magician Koura and Caroline Munro has never looked sexier. But the best parts of the movie are the Ray Harryhausen creations. My personal favorite is the Shiva-like statue with six arms each holding a sword. Directed by Gordan Hessler, who also did Scream and Scream Again.

Man With A Camera

This was a TV series with a young Charles Bronson that ran from 1958 to 1960 before he went on to star in big-budget movies like the Great Escape and the Magnificent Seven. Bronson plays a freelance photographer who goes on dangerous assignments to get the shot no else can. Each episode is a stand-alone. I watched the first one, which has Bronson helping out an old boxing friend get away from a corrupt manager. There’s nothing exceptional about the series for its time, but its still entertaining. It’s also neat to see young Bronson flex his acting muscles.

 

Detour

Highly-regarded low-budget B-noir is an intense, 67 minute film that still packs a punch. The movie centers on Tom Neal, who hitchhikes from New York to Los Angeles to meet with his fiance. He gets picked up by bookie Charles Haskell, Jr., who dies during their cross country ride. Neal decides to take Haskell’s identity and quickly finds himself in over his head. The dialogue is sharp, the pace is quick, and the movie keeps you guessing as the plot twists. Ann Savage is especially compelling as the shrill-voiced femme fatale who knows that Neal is an imposter.

Lepke

Biopic of 1930s gangster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter was directed by Mehenlan Golan and is fairly pedestrian. I turned it off about 50 minutes through. It seems like it was a longer film that got gutted. The rise of Lepke from average thug to head of Murder, Inc. took five minutes of screen time. WTF? Curtis is good, but the rest of the film feels like a cliched rehashing of the age-old tale of the gangster’s rise and fall. Plus, the director seems to relish every opportunity to unnecessarily remind the audience that Lepke was Jewish.

Money Movers

Gripping ozploitation movie about security guards at an armored car company planning an inside heist. There are too many characters for such a short film, and they tend to all look alike, so the script could have been tighter. But the action scenes are exciting and well-directed. It also has an infamous and ghastly scene where one of the robbers refuses to share his loot with local gangsters and gets a toe cut off. The film remains an overlooked, excellent caper movie.

Reincarnation of Peter Proud

I didn’t like this one very much despite positive user reviews on IMDB. Many of the reviewers called it creepy. I don’t know what film they were watching, but the one I saw felt like a melodramatic TV soap opera. A young man, Michael Sarazin, begins to have dreams about his past life as a rich, unfaithful 1940s tennis-playing WASP who ends up being murdered by his wife. For inexplicable reasons, Sarazin decides he needs to reconnect with his past life. He’s a boring lead and the story feels contrived and pointless. The one fun part is Margot Kidder’s hammy performance as an elderly woman who masturbates in a bathtub.

Return of the Evil Dead (AKA Return of the Blind Dead)

Not as good as its predecessor, Tombs of the Blind Dead, but the second entry in the Blind Dead series is lots of grisly, creepy fun. The village hunchback murders a young girl in the Knights Templar’s monastery bringing them back to life. They wreck havoc on the village during a feast killing many of the locals. From there, the movies becomes a Night of the Living Dead rip-off as survivors are holed up in a local church. But who cares? It’s still fun as the film changes from being grisly to silly to suspenseful. Perfect entertainment for Halloween.