The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (16 page)

Stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen created unique worlds and monsters on film one frame at a time. His work on film, inspired by seeing
King Kong
at the young age of 13, was honed by making stop-motion training films for the navy in World War II before creating Dynamation, a process that combined live action with live-action backgrounds.

His first feature,
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
, led to work on a series of eye-popping films based on Greek and Arabic myths that would redefine movie magic. The best known of these, 1958's
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
, was a box-office hit, leading to a series of sci-fi films like
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver
and
Mysterious Island
. In 1963 he returned to mythology, creating his greatest film,
Jason and the Argonauts
. In 1992 actor Tom Hanks gave tribute to Harryhausen, saying, “some say
Citizen Kane
is the greatest movie of all time, others say its
Casablanca
, for me, the great picture of all time is
Jason and the Argonauts
.” It's easy to see why the film would have captured Hanks's imagination, as it is a near-perfect blend of storytelling mixed with Bernard Herrmann's rousing score, manly-men Argonauts, and (for the time) mind-blowing special effects.

The story centers on Jason and his efforts to regain his kingdom by traveling on a death-defying expedition to acquire the Golden Fleece. He gathers the greatest heroes of all time, including Hercules, and sets out on a ship with the assistance of the gods. On the way they encounter a seven-headed Hydra; Titan Talos, a giant bronze statue come-to-life; and the evil winged Harpies.

The Hydra provides the film's greatest sequence, when Jason must battle the skeleton soldiers that grow from her teeth. It's a jaw-dropping scene that brings the film to an exciting climax. In the original myth the skeletons were the rotted corpses of the Hydra's victims, but the filmmakers decided that would be too gruesome an image for their film. Instead Harryhausen choreographed the live-action actors swinging the weapons at imaginary adversaries, and later, using his Dynamation technique, spent four-and-a-half months adding in seven sword-wielding skeletons. “The dueling scene in
Jason
with the skeletons had to be very carefully laid out,” he told
Animation World
in 2000, “because the touching of the swords and all that had to be perfectly synchronized or it wouldn't be convincing.”

Harryhausen went on to make films until 1981 — including
One Million Years BC
(1966), starring the genetically blessed Rachel Welch, a special effect all her own — when his stop-motion technique fell out of vogue. In his golden years the animation maestro found a second career when modern filmmakers paid tribute to him by casting him as an extra in films like
Beverly Hills Cop III
,
Spies Like Us
, and
Mighty Joe Young
. In 1992 Harryhausen's gifts to the art of special effects were rewarded with an honorary Oscar.

Robert Evans is the last of a dying breed. The kind of Hollywood mogul who calls women “broads” and hands out his phone number with the caveat “I'm only seven digits away, baby.” In other words, a real character. “Robert Evans is a Zelig-like figure of the latter half of the 20th century,” says director Brett Morgen. “He has dated some of the most glamorous women of the last 50 years, from Ava Gardner and Lana Turner to Kathleen Turner — you name them. His best friends over the past 50 years have been Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, and Henry Kissinger. He has written speeches for four presidents. There is no iconic figure that has lived over the past 50 years who Evans does not have an incredible story about — and it's not just ‘I met them at a party.' Beyond that he is responsible for bringing to the screen some of the greatest films made in the last 30 years.”

Evans' life is the subject of a documentary directed by Brett Morgan and Nanette Burstein, based on his autobiography. It's a stirring tale. “There are three sides to every story. My side, your side, and the truth,” he says in the film. “And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.” He tells of how he was offered his first movie role by actress Norma Shearer because she liked the way he looked in a bathing suit as he lounged by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. How he rose from B-actor status to become head of production for Paramount Pictures, putting films like
The Godfather
,
Love Story
, and
Chinatown
into production. He led a fairy-tale life — married to a movie star, living in a Beverly Hills mansion, hanging out with Jack Nicholson — until bit by bit his Hollywood dream turned into a nightmare.

His films started losing money; he was kicked off his beloved Paramount's lot; his wife left him for Steve McQueen; and he started using drugs. His high-rolling life unraveled and it seemed he'd never eat lunch in Hollywood again. But to paraphrase the title, the kid stayed in the picture, and has lived to tell the tale. Evans narrates the film without a hint of self-consciousness, and entertainingly mimics everyone from Ali MacGraw to Roman Polanski. It's an absorbing look at a complicated, resilient man.

Clowns are creepy. Their grotesque shiny red lips, baggy suits, and weirdly colored tufts of hair really disturb some people. While most of us see Ronald McDonald as a nice corporate symbol, the 8% of the population that suffers from clownophobia (more properly called coulrophobia) view him as evil incarnate. The mere mention of the Insane Clown Posse — a mix of bad gangsta rap and grease paint — is enough to inspire nightmares in the clown challenged (and most music critics too, actually). Silent-screen horror legend Lon Chaney Sr. tried to explain the fear. “A clown is funny in the circus ring,” he said, “but what would be the reaction to opening a door at midnight and finding the same clown standing there?”

There is a history of disturbing clowns haunting the movies. Among the stand-outs in the sub-sub-subgenre of “clown horror” are Tim Curry as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in
Stephen King's It
, and
The Clown At Midnight
, wherein a number of attractive youngsters get hacked to death by a psycho in a Bozo costume. But the coolest clowns to terrify audiences didn't come from the circus — they came from outer space!

Fans of '50s horror will recognize the opening moments of
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
as a tribute to
The Blob
. Both movies begin with a young couple at the local make-out point spotting a shooting star and deciding to follow it. It is soon discovered that it wasn't a shooting star, but something much worse, something that the teenagers decide they must investigate. Here the two movies part ways.

Our lovebirds, Mike Tobacco (Grant Cramer) and Debbie Stone (Suzanne Snyder), discover their shooting star is actually an intergalactic circus tent filled with murderous mirth-makers. These Killer Klowns have come to the tiny town of Crescent Cove armed with circus-inspired weaponry — killer balloon animals, perilous puppet shows, and popcorn guns — to wreak havoc. Officer Mooney (John Vernon) believes the reports of homicidal clowns wrapping people in cotton candy cocoons are a prank and refuses to investigate. Meanwhile it is up to Mike and Debbie, armed with an ice cream truck, to save the town and their friends.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space
will definitely scare the hell out of coulrophobics. The alien Klowns are beautifully realized creations, reminiscent of the outrageous puppets from the British television satire
Spitting Image
. Beneath large painted-on grins are rows of yellowed sharp teeth, topped off with beady jaundiced eyes, oversized ears, and wildly colored hair. Every feature is madly exaggerated until you have a living caricature of a clown — something funny, but weird and scary at the same time.

That feeling is the film's greatest asset. The creative minds behind
Killer Klowns
, the Chiodo brothers — Charles, Edward, and Stephen — manage to strike a balance between camp and seriousness by playing it straight. The situation is bizarre and some of the dialogue is downright cheesy, but the actors never wink at the camera. Hamming it up would have made
Killer Klowns
just another jokey sci-fi take-off, a self-conscious look at a genre that is easy to poke fun at.

So when Grant Cramer as Mike says, “They're not clowns, they're some sort of animal from another world that look just like clowns. Maybe their ancients came to our planet centuries ago and our idea of clowns just comes from them,” he plays it straight, and his intensity makes the line funnier than it reads on the page.

The real scene-stealer here, the only human actor that can hold his own against the Klowns, is John Vernon. Trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Vernon has had a varied career working with some of the greatest directors in Hollywood — Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, and John Boorman — but is probably best remembered as Dean Wormer in 1978's
Animal House
. How he ended up in this low-budget cult film is anyone's guess; I'm just glad he's here. His Officer Moody is a treat, and his deadpan delivery creates some of the film's best lines.

B-movie composer John Massari supplies a great score, but it is the Dickies performing the title track that really kicks butt. It's a great slice of mid-'80s punk rock from a band best known for songs like “I'm Stuck in a Pagoda (With Tricia Toyota)” and “Where Did His Eye Go?”

There aren't many scary moments in
Killer Klowns
, although a scene involving a little girl and a Klown with a mallet is pretty intense. The film's mood is more light-hearted, and keeps the nudity and gore down to a minimum. Director Charles Chiodo keeps the pace up, and at an economical 88 minutes,
Killer Klowns
leaves you wanting more.

The Chiodo brothers never made another feature film, although they have supplied the special effects for everything from
Critters
to the Power Rangers movies.

Alec Guinness is probably best known in North America as Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, a role he regarded with contempt. He reportedly thought George Lucas's script was nonsense and claimed that Obi-Wan's death was his own idea as a way to get out of his contract. “What I didn't tell him was that I just couldn't go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines,” said Guinness. “I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo.” As beloved as that character may have been, it was just one role in a long and distinguished career that dates back to the years immediately following the Second World War. Despite his first acting couch's opinion that “You'll never make much of an actor, Mr. Guinness,” he began making films in 1946. Acclaimed performances in two Charles Dickens' adaptations,
Great Expectations
(1946) and
Oliver Twist
(1948), led to a string of comedies made for the now legendary Ealing Studios. The first of these was
Kind Hearts and Coronets
, an acerbic farce that made him a star. Years before Eddie Murphy or Mike Myers would take on multiple roles in films, Guinness played an astounding eight (count 'em, eight) roles, including a woman.

The movie opens with Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) in prison penning his memoirs. He's an elegant, well-dressed fellow, who tells his story through a series of flashbacks. Born to the disowned daughter of a duke and a destitute Italian singer, Louis is raised in poverty. When he is denied permission to bury his mother in the ancestral vault, he vows revenge on the well-bred family who turned their backs on him and his mother. Once they are gone he'll be able to take his rightful place as the next Duke. One by one he offs members of the d'Ascoynes kin — the Duke, the Banker, The Parson, the General, the Admiral, Young d'Ascoynes, Young Henry, and Lady Agatha — all of whom bear an uncanny resemblance to, you guessed it, Alec Guinness.

When not plotting revenge, Louis is pursuing a complicated love life. On one hand there's Sibella (Joan Greenwood), a childhood love who spurned him to enter a loveless marriage with a wealthy man; on the other, Edith (Valerie Hobson), the widow of one of his victims, and his true love. A twist at the end is unexpected and hilarious.

Even though the story is told in flashback — usually the kiss of death for any narrative — the movie flies along at a gallop. Slick, witty dialogue cuts through the heavy English accents and is buoyed by fine performances all round. As the vengeful cool-as-a-cucumber heir, Dennis Price brings charm, wit, and elegance to his role. Similarly the two women in his life, Greenwood and Hobson (the latter of whom would later marry British Secretary of State for War John Profumo and become embroiled in the call-girl scandal that led to his resignation), hand in lively quintessentially English comedic performances.

It is, however, Guinness in the flashy multi-role routine that brings the house down. While easily recognizable in each part, he doesn't repeat himself from character to character, carefully constructing each d'Ascoynes from the happy-go-lucky young photographer to the window-smashing suffragette Lady Agatha. Even though some are only on screen for a few minutes, he inhabits each persona, including subtle mannerisms that add up to fully rounded portrayals. It is an acting tour de force — comedic or otherwise. Guinness stayed with Ealing until 1951, making two more comedy classics,
The Lavender Hill Mob
and
The Man in the White Suit
, before branching out to an international film career. He later won a Best Actor Oscar and Golden Globe for his performance in
Bridge Over the River Kwai
and earned a reputation as one of Britain's best actors of all time.