Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Raiders of the Lost Franchise


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Looking for adventure, or Return of the Raiders of the Lost Franchise

One of the (moderate and amply tolerable) down sides of co-hosting a podcast about horror is that sometimes you get to watch some pretty bad movies. Doing Paura & Delirio with my accomplice Lucy, we usually stick to movies we like, or at least we find interesting and worth a re-watch, but sometimes this comes with some less-than-welcome attachments (like when a pretty good movie suffered through an unnecessary remake). And after all, “horror” is such a wide and old genre, that you really get a huge variety of films, from straight-up ghost stories (that I like), to disturbing science fiction flicks (that I also like), to slashers and gorefests (that I like a lot less).

So, I was coming out of the viewing of a pretty boring and blood-drenched horror, and in need of a good palate cleanser, and I decided to look for a good adventure movie, possibly with some pulp-ish vibe. Is there anything new (or old but I missed it) that could help me spend a nice after-dinner and make me forget the dog I’ve just watched?

And it turns out that the label “adventure” is being attached, on IMDB and on streaming service catalogs, to a wide variety of stuff that… hmm…

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Silverado (1985)

My late father loved westerns and war movies. He’d re-watch Shane (Alan Ladd was his favorite actor) or From Here to Eternity whenever he had the opportunity, often providing a running commentary for the annoyance of anyone sitting there with him.
You know, the classic “Oh, and now watch what’s coming up…”

Growing old, I find there’s movies I re-watch in the same almost-compulsive way – but mine tend to be adventure movies (Romancing the Stone), spy thrillers (IPCRESS), comedies (Animal House), fantasies (Dragonslayer, or Ladyhawke)… but there is one western I’ll always re-watch with great pleasure. It’s not one of my dad’s faves, but it’s a western that hit the theatres when I was 18. It’s called Silverado, and I re-watched it last night.

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Modesty

Today is Monica Vitti’s 88th birthday, and I decided to celebrate by watching again the 1966 movie Modesty Blaise, based on Peter O’Donnell’s character of the same name.
Now two things I need to make clear: I always loved Monica Vitti, and I always found the Modesty Blaise movie hard to digest.

Monica Vitti

And it is weird, because we are talking a film directed by a giant of British cinema, Joseph Losey, and featuring a cast that includes not only Monica Vitti, but also Terence Stamp, Dirk Bogarde, Harry Andrews and Clive Revill. The problems are others. First, much as Monica Vitti’s voice has always been one of her assets, her accent stops very soon being exotic, and turns out to be just irritating (but that’s just me). Much more important, to me, is the general campiness of the set-up. Now the Modesty Blaise comics and novels were never high literature, but the movie does at time try too hard.

But hey, celebration day, so on we go with Modesty Blaise, 1966.
Or not.

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Raiders of the Lost Franchise: The People that Time Forgot

I first saw 1977 The People that Time Forgot at the local parish cinema. It was probably 1979, I had not yet seen the previous movie in the series and yes, I was thirteen and I was quite impressed by Dana Gillespie’s, ehm… presence.
So sue me.

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Raiders of the Lost Franchise: The Land that Time Forgot

My friend Lucy is doing a Halloween-month series of posts about the Amicus anthology horrors from the ’70s, and talking about the Amicus films, I remembered a pillar of my young education – the Amicus productions of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Novels, The Land that Time Forgot and The People that Time Forgot, plus At The Earth’s Core.
All three movies were directed by Kevin Connor and featured Doug McClure.

So I went and re-watched The Time that Land Forgot, the first and certainly the best of the three movies.

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Raiders of the Lost Franchise: The Phantom (1996)

After The Shadow fizzed at the box office, the hopes, for lovers of old time adventure and pulp-ish entertainment, rested on the Paramount production of The Phantom, based on the classic comic strip by Lee Falk, featuring a stellar cast: Billy Zane, Treat Williams, Kristy Swanson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, James Remar and Patrick McGoohan.
What could ever go wrong?

And really, based on the trailer, one could dream…

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Raiders of the Lost Franchise: The Shadow (1994)

This is one of the two movies that really got us all excited when we learned they were in the making, one that we expected with increasing trepidation. And it is really one of the great missed opportunities of franchise-making cinema – in a parallel universe somewhere, the Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t exist, and kids go crazy about the Shadowverse.
Or something.
But this is not that universe.

And if I have to explain to you who and what The Shadow is, you are on the wrong blog. One of the most iconic and long-lived pulp characters, The Shadow has been a radio drama host/character, the hero of 325 novels, and has appeared in comics and films for almost a century.
When the 1994 movie was announced, the fans went in overdrive.

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