breaking bad: jesse and mike couldn't be jesse and mike

I've been thinking about Breaking Bad again lately, and specifically about the things in the show that don't make sense.

There are plenty of them. And, for the most part, I don't care.

The blue meth, for example. There's no particular reason extraordinarily pure methamphetamine should suddenly turn blue. I'm sure a chemist could make a very long list of other things Breaking Bad gets wrong. That's fine. I'm not watching it as a chemistry documentary.

I also never particularly liked Gus Fring's death. The image of Gus walking out of Hector Salamanca's room, straightening his tie, and then turning to reveal that half his face has been blown off always struck me as a little too cartoonish for a show that usually took itself seriously. But it's a few seconds. Someone thought it would look cool. Whatever.

And then there's Wayfarer 515.

I've never really bought the idea that one grieving air traffic controller could return to work, make a mistake, and cause two commercial airliners to collide over Albuquerque. Is the air traffic control system really so fragile that everything comes down to one guy having a bad day? There aren't redundant systems? Other controllers? Computers? Pilots looking at radar? Some enormous red light somewhere saying DON'T LET THE TWO AIRPLANES HIT EACH OTHER?

But again: whatever.

None of these things fundamentally changes the show.

There are two things that do bother me, though, because they're not really plot contrivances. They're characters. And they're two of the best characters in the Breaking Bad universe.

Mike Ehrmantraut doesn't make sense.

This actually bothers me more after Better Call Saul, because Better Call Saul tells us where Mike came from. He wasn't some former Green Beret, CIA operative or international assassin. He was a Philadelphia beat cop. A corrupt one, at least to a degree, and an alcoholic. He was a man beaten down by life and consumed by guilt over the death of his son.

Then he gets to Albuquerque and somehow becomes Batman.

Mike knows everything.

He understands surveillance, counter-surveillance, weapons, tracking, criminal organizations, security systems and police procedure. He can follow people without being seen and detect when he's being followed. He can infiltrate buildings, plan elaborate operations, outthink professional criminals and calmly improvise when everything goes wrong. He seems to know exactly how drug cartels work. He can be a sniper, a private investigator, a bodyguard, a fixer, a security consultant, an interrogator and a one-man tactical team.

Where did he learn all this?

Some of it makes sense. He was a cop, so of course he knows police procedure. He may have picked up some useful skills along the way. And Mike is obviously intelligent.

But the Mike we eventually get isn't merely an intelligent former cop with street smarts. He's an extraordinarily accomplished specialist in approximately everything.

I love the character. Jonathan Banks is magnificent. But I don't buy the résumé.

And then there's Jesse Pinkman.

Jesse's transformation may be even harder to believe.

When we meet Jesse, he's a screwup. He's an addict. He barely made it through high school. Walt remembers him as a lousy chemistry student. Jesse is already cooking meth, but apparently not particularly good meth. His big contribution to chemistry is adding chili powder.

Then he spends some time working with Walter White.

And somehow, by the end, Jesse has become one of the greatest meth cooks in the world.

This is especially important because the show repeatedly establishes that Walt's product isn't just good. It's extraordinary. His purity is so far beyond what everyone else is producing that it becomes his calling card. Gale Boetticher is an actual trained chemist with an advanced education, and even he is in awe of Walt's work.

Yet Jesse eventually becomes capable of reproducing it well enough that Gus is willing to send him to Mexico to teach cartel chemists how to do it.

That's quite a career trajectory for the guy who couldn't pass Mr. White's chemistry class.

And it's not only chemistry. Jesse becomes substantially smarter as the series goes along. Not more mature—smarter. He starts seeing things other people don't see. He comes up with plans. He understands people. At several points he figures things out before characters who are supposedly much more sophisticated than he is.

Again, I love Jesse. Aaron Paul took what could easily have been a one-note character and made him one of the emotional centers of the series.

I just don't entirely believe the person Jesse becomes was hiding inside the person we met.

Interestingly, I don't have the same problem with Walter White.

Walt makes sense.

From the beginning, we're told that Walt is brilliant. Not just smart. Brilliant. He helped found Gray Matter Technologies, and the company went on to become enormously valuable after he left. Whatever exactly happened between Walt, Gretchen and Elliott, it's obvious that Walt has spent years watching other people enjoy the success and fortune he believes should have been his.

So when the mild-mannered high-school teacher turns out to have an enormous reservoir of pride, resentment and rage buried underneath, I buy it.

Heisenberg didn't suddenly appear when Walt got cancer.

Heisenberg was already there.

Cancer just gave him permission to come out.

That's why Walt's transformation, outrageous as it becomes, works for me in a way that Mike's and Jesse's don't. The seeds are there from the beginning. Walt always had the intelligence. He always had the ego. He always had the resentment. The series is largely about watching circumstances strip away everything that had kept those qualities under control.

With Mike and Jesse, I sometimes feel as though the writers fell in love with the characters—and with Jonathan Banks and Aaron Paul—and kept making them more capable because they were so much fun to watch.

Mike became cooler, so he had to become more formidable.

Jesse became more important, so he had to become more competent.

Eventually Mike became the guy who could do anything, and Jesse became the guy who could cook Walter White's meth.

Neither ruins Breaking Bad for me. Not remotely. It's still one of the greatest television shows I've ever watched.

I can accept blue meth. I can accept Gus Fring adjusting his tie with half a face. Maybe. I can even accept that Jane's grieving father can accidentally knock two airplanes out of the sky.

Those are things the plot asks me to believe for a few minutes.

Mike and Jesse are different.

The show asks me to believe them for years.

And I'm still not sure I do.

Did you like this feature?

Strengthen my Jesse argument against obvious objections

Sharpen my plot-versus-character thesis earlier

Trim my opening examples before Mike

cinema history class: weapons (2025)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3 (Ethan's  choice): Weapons (2025)
Directed by Zach Cregger

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I had seen it once before -- at home, with Ethan when he was trying to decide whether to bring it or something else.

Plot Synopsis:
When 17 children from the same elementary-school class mysteriously vanish from their homes at exactly 2:17 a.m., their teacher and the father of one of the missing children separately try to uncover what happened, gradually discovering a disturbing supernatural explanation.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
This was Ethan’s pick, and he made the somewhat risky choice of going with a recent release. There’s always a danger in doing that: with an older movie, you at least have some sense of whether it has stood the test of time. With something brand new, you’re going in with some doubt -- am I blinded by the newness of it?

In this case, the gamble paid off with some really enthusiastic praise for the movie and for Ethan's choice to bring it.

Weapons begins as a mystery. Seventeen children from the same class get out of bed at exactly 2:17 in the morning, leave their homes, and disappear. From there, the movie initially seems to be asking a fairly straightforward question: what happened to them?

But somewhere along the way, almost without announcing that it is doing so, the movie transforms. What begins as a mystery gradually turns into something much closer to a zombie movie. I liked that progression. The movie doesn’t suddenly throw out everything it has been doing and become something else; it feels as though the horror was lurking underneath the mystery all along and was simply waiting to emerge.

One thing I was less enthusiastic about was the way the story was told. We follow the events from one character’s perspective, then the movie jumps backward and begins again from another character’s point of view. Then it does it again. And again. Until I caught on to what the movie was doing, I found it confusing. Apparently I was in the minority on this one, because several of the others in the room really liked that structure. Once I understood the device, I appreciated it more, but I’m still not sure I would have chosen to tell the story that way.

Fortunately, even with all of that doubling back, the movie never dragged. That’s actually rather impressive. Replaying overlapping portions of a story from different viewpoints could easily become tedious, but Weapons keeps moving.

And once everything starts coming apart, the camera work does a terrific job conveying the chaos. The later sequences feel frantic without becoming visually incomprehensible. You know enough about what is happening to follow it, while still feeling the panic and disorder of the characters themselves.

There was also something about the movie that reminded me of Village of the Damned. The circumstances are obviously very different, but there is a similar unsettling quality to taking something as ordinarily harmless as a group of children and turning it into the center of something deeply wrong.

Most of all, I admired the decision not to force a happy ending onto the story. It was a bold move to end on such a depressing note, but by that point it was also the ending the movie had earned. A conventional everybody-is-okay-now conclusion would have felt false after everything that had happened, and how the explanation was unfolding. The ending is bleak, but it makes sense, and I think the movie is better because the filmmakers were willing to follow their story where it logically led.

Joe certainly thought so.

He gave Weapons a 10—but this time he made a point of distinguishing it from many of his other 10s. Some of those, he explained, are essentially genre-specific 10s: a 10 because the movie accomplishes exactly what that particular kind of movie is trying to accomplish. This one, according to Joe, was a genuine, real-world 10.

He has explained the distinction many times before, “some tens are tennier than others.”

Apparently this was one of the tennier tens.

malbone street and the true genius of vince gilligan

Great storytellers borrow from history. Great storytellers borrow so well that you don't even realize they're doing it. Which raises an interesting question: did Vince Gilligan draw inspiration for one of the most memorable tragedies in the Breaking Bad universe from New York City's worst transit disaster?

Hear me out.

On November 1, 1918, the deadliest subway disaster in New York City history occurred beneath what was then Malbone Street in Brooklyn. The official explanation is familiar enough: a strike left the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company desperately short of qualified personnel, so they put dispatcher Edward Luciano—a man with virtually no experience as a motorman—in charge of a rush-hour train. The train entered a sharp curve at roughly five times the speed limit. The result was catastrophic. More than ninety people died. Historians point to a perfect storm of bad decisions: inadequate training, poor management, an improperly assembled train, wooden cars, and an unforgiving curve.

But there is one detail that has always stood out to me.

Just days before the wreck, Luciano's three-year-old daughter had died during the Spanish influenza pandemic. He himself had recently been ill. Whether his grief affected his performance is impossible to know, and historians are careful not to overstate the point. It was one factor among many -- not the cause of the accident, but possibly a cause

Fast-forward ninety years.

In Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad canon, Jane Margolis dies of a heroin overdose. Her father, Donald Margolis, an air traffic controller, returns to work while still overwhelmed by grief. Distracted, he makes a catastrophic error that results in the midair collision of Wayfarer 515 and another aircraft over Albuquerque. It's one of the defining tragedies of the Breaking Bad universe.

Now ask yourself...

A transportation operator.

Grieving the recent death of a daughter.

Returns to work before emotionally recovering.

Makes a tragic mistake.

The mistake kills large numbers of innocent people.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

But what if Vince Gilligan was quietly borrowing a page from one of New York's greatest transportation disasters?

Gilligan is famous for planting obscure historical references and constructing elaborate chains of cause and effect. The Wayfarer crash wasn't just random tragedy—it illustrated how one seemingly private event could ripple outward until strangers paid the price.

That's also, in a way, the enduring lesson of Malbone Street. The wreck wasn't caused by one person's grief any more than it was caused by one curve in the track. It was a cascade of failures: corporate decisions, inadequate training, unsafe equipment, labor unrest, bad luck, and perhaps one exhausted young man who never should have been handed the controls in the first place.

So no, I'm not actually suggesting Vince Gilligan sat down with Brian Cudahy's The Malbone Street Wreck while outlining Season 2.

I'm just saying...

Has anyone ever seen Edward Luciano and Donald Margolis in the same century?

cinema history class: class of 1984 (1982)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2 (my  choice): Class of 1984 (1982)
Directed by Mark Lester

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I've seen it several times.

Plot Synopsis:
An idealistic music teacher takes a job at a crime-ridden high school and clashes with a violent student gang. As the gang's campaign of intimidation escalates, the conflict becomes increasingly personal, leading to a brutal final showdown.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Since this was my entry for Bring Your Own Movie Month, I was especially interested in seeing how the movie held up after not having watched it in quite a while. The answer, I think, is...not quite as well as I'd remembered.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I did. It's still an entertaining movie. But it also left me wondering why I instinctively separate "good movie" from "entertaining movie." If the primary purpose of a movie is to entertain, shouldn't succeeding at that be enough? I don't have a good answer, but somehow I still came away thinking that Class of 1984 is a fun watch without necessarily being a good film.

Keith observed that the acting was all over the map, and I think that's right. There are moments that really work. Timothy Van Patten's bathroom scene, where Peter Stegman brutally beats himself up to frame Mr. Norris, is remarkably convincing. Roddy McDowall is mesmerizing as the increasingly unhinged biology teacher, although he was such a gifted actor that I suspect he could have turned in that performance on autopilot. On the other hand, Merrie Lynn Ross never quite convinced me in her role, and some of the emotional scenes just didn't land.

It's also fun to see Michael J. Fox—still billed as "Michael Fox"—in one of his earliest film roles. He doesn't have much to do, but he's immediately likable, and it's easy to see why bigger opportunities soon followed.

Some sequences haven't aged particularly well. The gang fight beneath the highway, with everyone swinging chains and clubs while somehow forgetting that guns and knives exist, felt more than a little contrived.

The ending is especially odd. I did appreciate the final ironic title card explaining that Mr. Norris was never prosecuted because there were no witnesses—a neat callback to one of the movie's central frustrations, namely that the authorities were powerless because nobody would testify against the student gang. It's presented as a triumphant ending, but it's hard to ignore that Mrs. Norris has suffered an unimaginably traumatic ordeal and will almost certainly be dealing with those scars for the rest of her life. The movie seems eager to declare victory while quietly stepping around that reality.

All in all, I'm glad I picked it. It sparked a lively discussion, even if it didn't quite live up to my memories.

And, in a rare fit of real-world restraint, Joe gave it an 8.2.

what if -- tom lehrer version

History is full of little "what if" moments.

What if the Hindenburg hadn't caught fire? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if someone at Coca Cola headquarters had tasted New Coke and said, "Maybe let's not"?

Today I'd like to consider another.

What if Tom Lehrer had simply stayed a mathematician?

At first glance, it seems like the world wouldn't be all that different. Before he turned to musical comedy (or would "musical commentary" be more accurate?) Lehrer was a legitimate mathematician. He never earned a PhD (because of his foray into music), but he taught at Harvard, MIT, and UC Santa Cruz. He could have had an entirely respectable academic career writing papers that only six other people would ever read.

Perhaps he'd have solved the Four Color Theorem decades early. Maybe Fermat's Last Theorem would have been known as Lehrer's Last Theorem, depriving Andrew Wiles of his greatest achievement and forcing him to become an accountant. Entire graduate seminars would now begin with the phrase, "As Lehrer showed in 1958..."

But mathematics never happens in isolation, and neither does music.

Without songs like The Elements, chemistry students would have had to memorize the periodic table the old-fashioned way: by crying.

Without New Math, the "new math" movement might actually have succeeded. Millions of parents would have nodded knowingly as their third-graders explained why 7 + 5 equals 12 only in a culturally oppressive base-ten framework. There would be no backlash. By 1983, the IRS would require tax returns in base eight.

The ripple effects continue.

Without Lehrer proving that intelligent people could also be funny, generations of mathematically inclined undergraduates would conclude that humor was simply not an available elective. College campuses would become eerily silent except for the occasional muttering of eigenvalues.

This leaves a vacuum in satirical music.

Someone has to fill it.

Allan Sherman becomes far more influential than anyone intended. By the early 1970s, every political scandal is explained through novelty songs set to public-domain melodies. Congress establishes a standing Committee on Musical Parody.

The Beatles never notice Lehrer, and without his example of sophisticated topical satire, they decide there's really no point in getting terribly serious. "Revolution" is replaced with a cheerful tune encouraging everyone to remember their library books. John Lennon never writes "Imagine" (admittedly, a positive, since that is probably the most overrated piece of crap in musical history). Instead he records "Perhaps," a song about maintaining reasonable expectations.

Bob Dylan, finding himself without intellectual competition, decides he's done enough for folk music and enrolls at MIT to finish the topology degree he never knew he wanted.

Meanwhile, mathematics is advancing at an alarming pace.

Professor Lehrer solves the Poincaré Conjecture during a faculty meeting because the discussion about parking permits is moving too slowly. He casually jots down a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis on the back of a departmental memo, but the memo is accidentally recycled, forcing humanity to rediscover it seventy years later.

The Clay Mathematics Institute quietly disbands due to lack of unsolved problems.

With every famous theorem conquered, mathematicians turn their attention to more practical questions.

Can a sock truly disappear in the dryer?

Is there an optimal strategy for choosing the fastest supermarket checkout line?

Exactly how many cats is too many cats?

These, too, fall within a decade.

By the 1990s, with mathematics effectively completed, every former math department is converted into an escape room.

Artificial intelligence develops much earlier because the necessary mathematics already exists. However, lacking Tom Lehrer's satirical warning that brilliant people are perfectly capable of making terrible decisions, nobody sees any reason to be cautious.

The first AI immediately announces that the mathematically optimal form of music is a continuous 11-hour recording of an oboe tuning to A-flat.

The public accepts this without complaint because, remember, the Beatles never became philosophical.

Eventually historians identify the exact point where our timeline diverged.

Not the invention of the computer.

Not the moon landing.

Not the Internet.

Just one graduate student deciding, "You know...I think I'll write a funny song."

Sometimes civilization really does hinge on a rhyme scheme.

cinema history class: the invisible ray (1936)

The session: Bring Your Own Movie Month
The annual session whe5re everyone in the class takes a turn presenting a favored movie

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1 (Bobbo's choice): The Invisible Ray (1936)
Directed by Lambert Hillyer

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I'd never heard of this

Plot Synopsis:
A brilliant but unstable scientist discovers a mysterious radioactive element in a meteorite that grants him the ability to kill with a touch. As the deadly radiation slowly drives him mad, his quest for scientific glory turns into a tragic spiral of obsession, jealousy, and revenge.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Bobbo got Bring Your Own Movie month started with the 1936 Universal horror/science fiction film The Invisible Ray.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of watching a movie like this is seeing science fiction in its formative years. The basic premise is genuinely intriguing: a scientist discovers a strange radioactive element from a meteorite that grants him deadly powers while slowly destroying his sanity. It's an idea that feels surprisingly modern, even if the film's understanding of science is firmly rooted in 1930s movie logic.

The execution, however, is... unusual. The story takes some unexpected turns, and the pacing can feel uneven. The expedition to Africa, in particular, was one of those sequences that had us alternating between laughing at its sheer absurdity and cringing at the period stereotypes that were all too common in Hollywood films of the era. It's a reminder that older movies are products of their time—for better and for worse.

The real attraction, of course, is seeing Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi together. Karloff gives a wonderfully expressive performance as the increasingly unstable Dr. Janos Rukh, conveying both his initial excitement and his gradual descent into obsession and madness. Lugosi, meanwhile, gets a comparatively sympathetic role, and it's simply fun to watch these two horror icons share the screen. Their scenes together are easily the highlight of the film.

The Invisible Ray isn't one of Universal's undisputed classics, but it's an interesting entry in the studio's horror catalog and a fascinating glimpse into early cinematic science fiction. Even when it doesn't quite work, it's never dull.

And finally, one thing is certain: had Joe been there, he would have given it a 10.

cinema history class: helga, she wolf of stilberg (1977)

The session: Don't Make Ilsa Angry
Having shown us the original Ilsa movie, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, over ten years ago, Keith decided to show us some follow-up movies 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg (1977)
Directed by Alain Payet

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I knew there were a few Ilsa follow-up movies, but I wouldn't have been able to name them for you -- especially this, which doesn't even have the Ilsa name in its title.

Plot Synopsis:
A cartoonishly evil commandant spends most of the runtime proving she's the worst boss in history, while everyone else waits for the script to remember that revenge is a thing. It's less a war movie than a checklist of exploitation clichés with swastikas stapled to them.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
After four Ilsa movies, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would decide to make a fifth without actually making a fifth. So instead of Dyanne Thorne's infamous torture queen, we get Helgaa new blonde sadist played by a different actress, in what is essentially an Ilsa knockoff wearing a fake mustache. And to complete the identity crisis, Ilsa -- I mean Helga -- spends almost the entire movie in a bright red blouse that makes her look less like the commandant of a brutal prison camp than like she's on her way to Studio 54. It's the cinematic equivalent of changing one letter on a bootleg action figure and hoping nobody notices.

Unfortunately, this one makes even the weaker Ilsa sequels look respectable. The story is barely there, the acting is uniformly awful, and the soundtrack consists largely of atonal noise that seems less interested in setting a mood than in testing the audience's patience. Most scenes exist for one reason: to get another group of women out of their clothes before moving on to the next bit of cruelty.

One moment in particular perfectly captured how bizarre the whole production was. Two women are escaping, yet the soft-focus photography and syrupy music make it look less like a desperate jailbreak than the beginning of a romance. I honestly wasn't sure whether the filmmakers had become confused about which movie they were making.

Then there is the war sequence at the climax. The movie cut to stock footage of tanks and flamethrowers that make no sense in the context of the rest of the scenery or story. It went from tiny prison camp in South America to major battle in Vietnam and back. The scene arrives out of nowhere,  and disappears just as abruptly. And leave no impact whatsoever. It's as if someone found an old reel of old war footage in the editing room and thought, "Sure, why not?"

And just when I was ready for the ordeal to be over, the movie ends with an irritating tease that promises...something. I have no idea what. It felt less like an ending than the filmmakers saying, "Wouldn't it be funny if we implied there was more of this?"

Seriously...WTF?

As a final bit of trivia, Joe gave this one a zero. That's unexplored territory for him (for the class, honestly), and honestly, I can't say I blame him.

cinema history class: ilsa the wicked warden (1977)

The session: Don't Make Ilsa Angry
Having shown us the original Ilsa movie, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, over ten years ago, Keith decided to show us some follow-up movies 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3: Ilsa the Wicked Warden (1977)
Directed by Jess Franco

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I knew there were a few Ilsa follow-up movies, but I wouldn't have been able to name them for you. 

Plot Synopsis:
Apparently someone thought the previous movie had far too much plot, so this time it's mostly an excuse to string together prison torture, exploitation clichés, and the occasional reminder that Nazis are, in fact, the bad guys.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
In the lush jungles of South America, Ilsa—this time calling herself Greta—runs a psychiatric hospital for political prisoners. That's the premise, anyway. In practice, it's mostly an excuse to string together scenes of sexual violence, torture, and spectacularly excessive gore, with only the thinnest excuse for a plot.

This is widely regarded as Jesús Franco's bloodiest film, and it's hard to argue with that assessment. The makeup effects are impressively well done, even if they're deployed almost entirely in the service of making the audience squirm. Franco certainly wasn't aiming for subtlety here.

Ironically, the movie briefly threatened to become interesting near the end. There's a sequence where the imagery takes on an almost zombie-movie atmosphere, with some genuinely striking visuals that suggested Franco might finally be building toward something memorable. Then came the finale.

The climactic cannibalism sequence is genuinely horrifying. Franco intercuts the human carnage with footage of big cats devouring their prey, clearly hoping to elevate the scene into some sort of artistic statement about humanity's animal nature. For me, it didn't work. It was certainly disturbing, but disturbing isn't automatically profound.

To the film's credit, I did appreciate the twists in the closing minutes. They were clever enough that I wish the screenplay had spent more time constructing an actual story around them. As it stands, they feel like an unexpectedly solid ending attached to ninety minutes of exploitation set pieces.

In the end, I can't recommend this one. There are flashes of interesting imagery, some effective makeup work, and a surprisingly decent final twist, but they're buried beneath an avalanche of gore and cruelty that never develops into much of a narrative.

And joe...he gave it a 2! Which puts it among the lowest ratings he ever gave. He gave El Topo something in that neighborhood, but he actually missed that class, watched that movie on his won and delivered his rating after the fact. So that's non canon. He did give The Woman in Black a 2. But, three years later he retroactively revised it to a 9. I don't remember why. So I have no frickin' clue what to make of that.

cinema history class: ilsa, the tigress of siberia

The session: Don't Make Ilsa Angry
Having shown us the original Ilsa movie, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, over ten years ago, Keith decided to show us some follow-up movies 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977)
Directed by Jean LaFleur

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I knew there were a few Ilsa follow-up movies, but I wouldn't have been able to name them for you. 

Plot Synopsis:
A sadistic prison commandant escapes postwar justice by relocating to Siberia, where she discovers that the best way to rehabilitate criminals is apparently through forced labor, torture, sex and elaborate catfights. When a revolutionary hero shows up to challenge her reign of terror, the movie remembers it needs a plot and lurches toward an ending between bouts of exploitation and fur hats.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia gives us a pretty good idea of what we're in for right from the start. That occurs by way of a bullet in the frozen north. The trailer proudly quotes Oui magazine. If your marketing campaign begins with the endorsement of a men's magazine best known for articles that nobody read, subtlety is probably not on the menu.

I went into this one wanting to dislike it. The previous Ilsa films haven't exactly convinced me that the franchise has hidden depths waiting to be discovered. And for the first half of the movie, I felt completely justified.

The Siberian section is, for long stretches, little more than an exercise in increasingly elaborate cruelty. Plot seems almost optional. Instead, the filmmakers appear to have sat around a table brainstorming ways people could be tortured, maimed, or killed in creative fashion. Some of these ideas are admittedly inventive. The arm-wrestling match over running chainsaws certainly leaves an impression. But it's hard to shake the feeling that the movie is less interested in telling a story than in seeing how far it can push the audience's tolerance for gratuitous violence. At times it feels like a proto-Saw film, only with fur hats.

The sex scenes don't help much. One sequence featuring Dyanne Thorne, her real-life husband, and another man manages the impressive feat of being more vulgar than erotic. By this point I was pretty sure I knew exactly what kind of movie I was watching, and I wasn't especially impressed.

Then something unexpected happened.

The movie moved to Montreal.

At first I assumed the Canadian material would be a brief epilogue after the Siberian story wrapped up. Instead, it gradually became clear that Montreal was going to occupy roughly half the running time. And the longer it stayed there, the more interesting the film became.

I didn't notice the transition immediately. It sort of snuck up on me. Scene by scene, the movie started developing an actual plot. Characters had agendas. There were competing factions. People were spying on each other, betraying each other, and occasionally shooting each other. I often found it difficult to keep track of exactly which side was scoring points at any given moment, but that confusion was preferable to the straightforward sadism of the earlier scenes. At least now there was something happening besides torture.

The second half becomes a surprisingly entertaining mix of action film, espionage thriller, and double-cross-heavy adventure story. And interestingly, a number of scenes felt almost like spaghetti westerns transplanted into a Cold War setting. The sequences in Gulag 14 in particular had that familiar atmosphere of armed men facing off in dusty compounds while shifting loyalties determine who survives. Swap out the snow for desert landscapes and some of the scenes wouldn't feel entirely out of place in a Sergio Corbucci film.

By the end, I found myself admitting something I hadn't expected to admit: this was actually much better than I thought it would be. That's not the same thing as saying it's a great film. It's still exploitative, frequently ridiculous, and often unpleasant. But somewhere along the way it transformed from a plotless parade of atrocities into a reasonably entertaining action-and-espionage picture.

As for Joe, he once again found a way to keep us all on our toes. He awarded the film a real-world score of 8.9. He then clarified that, symbolically, it was a 10. I dutifully acknowledged this distinction at the time. Unfortunately, a few weeks later, I can no longer remember what on earth he meant by it.

cinema history class: ilsa, harem keeper of the oil sheiks (1976)

The session: Don't Make Ilsa Angry
Having shown us the original Ilsa movie, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, over ten years ago, Keith decided to show us some follow-up movies 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976)
Directed by Don Edmonds

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I knew there were a few Ilsa follow-up movies, but I wouldn't have been able to name them for you. 

Plot Synopsis:
An American woman is swept into the orbit of a cruel harem mistress who treats human rights the way most people treat parking regulations. Somewhere beneath the whippings, scheming, and general depravity, there may be a plot, but it's keeping a very low profile.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
More than a decade ago, Keith introduced our group to the notorious torture queen with a screening of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. For reasons known only to him, he recently decided that one Ilsa movie wasn't enough and embarked on a mission to show us the sequels. Thus...here we are.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a young woman who finds herself caught up in the depraved world of a harem overseen by Ilsa. That's really all the plot you need. The movie isn't particularly interested in story, character development, or even coherent narrative progression. Instead, it mostly functions as an excuse to move from one scene of sexual violence to the next. As Keith put it, this falls into the category of a "roughie," and if you're familiar with the term, you'll know exactly what you're getting.

That isn't to say the film is entirely devoid of entertainment value. There are occasional flashes of humor, some ironic revenge elements that work reasonably well, and a surprisingly amusing Henry Kissinger impression. One particularly memorable scene involves a young boy being sent to "service" Kissinger. The sequence somehow manages to be simultaneously creepy and funny, which is not an easy tonal balance to achieve. Whether that's a compliment is another matter.

The production values are actually better than one might expect. The sets look respectable, the makeup work is quite good, and the movie generally appears to have had a budget larger than whatever happened to be found under the producer's couch cushions. Near the end, the film abruptly shifts gears into a series of gunfights that felt oddly reminiscent of a spaghetti western, albeit one populated largely by nude Black women. That's not a sentence I expected to write today.

Joe described the movie as "squirmy," which is difficult to argue with. There is an unpleasantness to much of the proceedings that never really goes away. At the same time, Keith made an observation that helped me appreciate the film a little more than I otherwise would have. He suggested viewing it as a comic book rather than as anything resembling reality. Through that lens, some of the exaggerated villains, improbable situations, and over-the-top revenge scenarios become a bit easier to accept.

In the end, I gave it a 5. Left entirely to my own devices, I probably would have settled on a 4, but Keith's "comic book" interpretation earned it an extra point.

And finally, in perhaps the strangest twist of all, Joe appears to have made brief contact with the real world when assigning his score. Rather than his customary 10, he awarded the film a mere 7. Frankly, that may be the most shocking thing in the entire movie.

cinema history class: love brides of the blood mummy (1973)

The session: I Want My Mummy!
We revisit our bandaged buddies

Note: IU could not find a legitimate trailer. This is a fan trailer.
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: Love Brides of the Blood Mummy (1973)
Directed by Alejandro Marti

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Hadn't heard of it. 

Plot Synopsis:
A lovestruck mummy rises from the dead, convinced he's finally found his long-lost bride in modern-day Turkey. Unfortunately, his courtship style involves murder, kidnapping, and a complete disregard for personal boundaries.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Love Brides of the Blood Mummy has a title that promises mummies, brides, blood, and presumably some combination thereof. What it actually delivers is something much closer to a vampire movie. The title character isn't really a mummy at all. He's essentially a fully intact ancient Egyptian who happens to have been dead for a few thousand years. Replace the Egyptian headdress and garb with a cape and you'd have a fairly standard vampire plot.

The story concerns a resurrected ancient Egyptian nobleman who becomes obsessed with a modern woman he believes is the reincarnation of his long-dead bride. This leads to a great deal of stalking, biting, kidnapping, and sexual assault. Unfortunately, the repeated cycle of rapes and blood-drinking becomes tiresome long before the film reaches its conclusion. There are only so many times you can watch the same sequence play out before it starts feeling less like storytelling and more like a contractual obligation.

Speaking of repetition, the filmmakers become oddly enamored of iris-outs during the final stretch. By the end I felt as though I was watching a silent movie that had wandered into the wrong century.

Not everything was unsuccessful. The severed arm crawling around on its own is a genuinely effective horror element and probably the film's most memorable visual. The musical score also deserves some credit. Whatever the movie's shortcomings, the music does a surprisingly good job of evoking both the time period and the setting.

One of the movie's stranger choices is its reliance on narration to explain plot points that probably should have been dramatized. Rather than trusting the audience to piece things together, the film repeatedly stops to tell us what's happening. Equally puzzling is the presence of an Egyptologist who appears to possess important knowledge about the situation, yet whose existence and involvement are never satisfactorily explained.

At one point Ethan remarked that the whole thing felt like purgatory. He wasn't wrong. The film settles into a strange repetitive rhythm where the same events seem to happen over and over, trapping both the characters and the audience in an endless cycle of pursuit, assault, and exposition.

Still, it has a certain dreamlike weirdness, a memorable crawling arm, and enough odd decisions to keep a bad-movie crowd engaged.

And, of course, Joe gave it a 10.

cinema history class: the curse of the mummy's tomb (1964)

The session: I Want My Mummy!
We revisit our bandaged buddies

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 3: The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)
Directed by Michael Carreras

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Hadn't heard of it. 

Plot Synopsis:
After an archaeological expedition uncovers the tomb of an ancient Egyptian prince, the mummy is brought to England as part of a lucrative exhibition. When a series of murders follows, it becomes clear that the curse of the tomb has crossed the Mediterranean—and the mummy has come to reclaim its vengeance.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
In Hammer's second foray into mummy territory, an archaeological expedition uncovers the tomb of an ancient Egyptian prince. The mummy is transported to England for a publicity-driven exhibition. Predictably, this proves to be a poor decision for everyone involved.

I wanted to like this one more than I did. There are certainly some good moments scattered throughout. The film opens with a memorable severed-hand sequence and neatly bookends things with another hand removal at the end. There are flashes of atmosphere, and the story moves along well enough.

But ultimately, the movie feels content to do exactly what is required and nothing more. The plot hits the expected beats, the mummy stalks his victims, people die, and the story reaches its conclusion. There's nothing particularly wrong with any of it, but there isn't much that elevates it above the ordinary either. It's competent, professional, and generally watchable—just not especially memorable.

One thing that did strike me was Fred Clark's character who comes across as a sort of 1900s Geraldo Rivera. He turns an archaeological discovery into a publicity spectacle, eagerly promoting the exhibit and cashing in on public curiosity. In retrospect, it's hard not to think of Geraldo's infamous televised opening of Al Capone's vault—lots of hype, lots of promotion, and ultimately rather less payoff than promised.

In the end, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb isn't a bad film. It simply never quite becomes a good one.

As for the ratings, Joe gave it a 10. Because of course he did.

cinema history class: the mummy (1959)

The session: I Want My Mummy!
We revisit our bandaged buddies

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: The Mummy (1959)
Directed by Terence Fisher

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I'd known that there were a bunch of movies titled "The Mummy." 

Plot Synopsis:
An archaeological expedition uncovers the tomb of an ancient Egyptian princess. After the tomb is desecrated, a resurrected mummy, Kharis, is sent to England by a fanatical guardian to take revenge on those responsible. As the killings mount, the surviving archaeologists discover that the mummy's relentless quest is tied to a tragic love story from thousands of years earlier.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
I went into this one with modest expectations. Egyptian-themed horror and historical curses have never really been my thing. But this was better than expected.

One thing that immediately stood out was Christopher Lee's performance. The man spends almost the entire movie wrapped head to toe in bandages and makeup, yet somehow manages to convey emotion, determination, anger, and even sadness almost entirely through his eyes. It's an impressive piece of acting when you consider how little of his face is actually visible. Lee's Kharis isn't just a shambling monster; there's a sense of tragedy underneath all those wrappings.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the verbal sparring between Peter Cushing's John Banning and the villainous Mehemet Bey. Every scene between them crackles with tension. Cushing, as always, brings intelligence and stubborn determination to his role, while George Pastell's Bey is cultured, polite, and quietly menacing. Their exchanges are often more entertaining than the action scenes.

One aspect of the story left me scratching my head. Did they ever actually explain why Banning's wife looks exactly like Princess Ananka? The resemblance is central to the plot, but I don't recall the film ever providing a clear explanation. Are we supposed to assume reincarnation? Some mystical connection across the centuries? Admittedly, that's a common enough trope in mummy movies that perhaps I shouldn't hold it against them, but it still felt like the screenplay skipped over a detail that might have deserved a little more attention.

The version we watched also reminded me how much censorship could affect these older horror films. Several bits of gore that were present in later restorations were absent here. We hear about the severed tongue but don't actually see it. Likewise, the climactic destruction of Kharis is much less graphic than in the restored versions, with much of the footage of him being riddled with bullets removed. The movie still works perfectly well, but it's unfortunate that audiences for years saw a trimmed-down version.

The title itself is a little misleading. This isn't really the traditional "Mummy awakens and stalks modern victims" story that most people think of when they hear The Mummy. The real driving force of the plot is Mehemet Bey, the loyal guardian carrying out a mission of vengeance. In some ways, Guardian of the Mummy's Tomb might actually be a more accurate title. Kharis is certainly important, but he's essentially the weapon wielded by someone else. And, of course, there's the tragic love story which adds an interesting element.

Beyond all that, the film benefits enormously from Hammer's production values. The rich color cinematography, atmospheric sets, and strong performances elevate material that could easily have become routine monster fare. It's easy to see why so many fans consider this one of Hammer's best horror films.

Overall, this was much better than I expected. Not one of my favorite horror films, and not enough giant radioactive insects or vicious murderous gangs for my tastes, but an entertaining and surprisingly thoughtful monster movie with strong performances from both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

As for Joe, nothing would stop him from giving it a 10. Rumor has it he was preparing to award it an 12 before remembering that ancient Egyptian mathematics had not yet invented that number (and Bobbo wouldn't let him anyway).