Ask FlickChick

Question: When I was very young -- early 1970s -- I remember seeing a TV-movie that featured a man who turned into a sort of killing ogre because of a ring that he was wearing. What I remember is vivid if limited: There was a woman who crawled through a hole in the basement wall and found the man asleep in a secret room with the ring on his finger. In the end, the creature was lured into a house where gasoline or some other accelerant had been applied and then the house was set on fire. No one else remembers this. Do you have any ideas what this is or did I just have an active imagination as a child? Darin

FlickChick: Your timing is impeccable: You're remembering a 1973 movie called The Norliss Tapes, written and directed by Dark Shadows creatorDan Curtis (who had a hand in many memorable made-for-TV movies with supernatural elements) and starring Roy Thinnes and Angie Dickinson. The fortuitous part is that it's newly available on DVD from Anchor Bay Entertainment. The Norliss Tapes was Curtis' last variation on the theme of journalists vs. supernatural stuff. His big success was, of course, the series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974), which started life as two TV movies, The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973), and which Chris Carter always acknowledged was one of the primary influences behind The X-Files. But Curtis had tried the formula before, with a forgotten pilot called Dead of Night: A Darkness at Blaisedon, and he gave it another go with The Norliss Tapes, whose premise was that journalist David Norliss (Thinnes) disappears while working on a book debunking the supernatural. When his publisher goes looking for Norliss, he finds only a stack of cassette tapes, each recounting a supernatural experience Norliss was unable to explain away. It didn't go to series either, but Norliss is a pretty good spook tale in which a sculptor who began dabbling in the supernatural when he learned he was fatally ill comes back from the dead to uphold his end of a devil's bargain.

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Question: In the movie The Black Dahlia, there's a B&W film-within-the-film of the dead girl auditioning for something. There's a man's voice giving her directions, and it sounded familiar but I couldn't place who it was. Can you tell me? Kenny

FlickChick: The off-screen voice directing doomed Beth Short (Mia Kirschner) belongs to none other than director Brian De Palma.

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Question: Where did they shoot the exterior scenes in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead? It looks a lot like a mall I've seen in Tennessee, but the movie takes place in Wisconsin. Is it common for a movie to be filmed in a place that's not the same as where the movie actually takes place? Phil

FlickChick: Second question first: Yes, it's very common for a movie to be set in one place but shot in another. Most of The Black Dahlia, which is set in 1940s Los Angeles, was shot in Bulgaria. The movie version of The Honeymooners (2005) was shot in Ireland, with Dublin filling in for New York. And the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004), set in Wisconsin, was shot in Canada. Canada is hugely popular with budget-conscious American movie and television producers: It's close, largely English-speaking and offers the unbeatable combination of skilled craftsmen (from actors to grips) plus lower labor costs. Dawn's mall scenes were shot at the bankrupt Thornhill Square Mall, which was demolished shortly after the movie opened. Sharp-eyed movie goers have pointed out background glimpses of bilingual (French/English) signage that's a deal give away.

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Question: My father and I saw a trailer for the movie Flyboys, and he said there was another, much older movie about the same thing, and that the director was actually a WWI pilot. That made me curious, but he couldn't remember anything else. Do you have any idea what movie he was talking about? Oh, and did the real pilots really have a lion for a pet? Jack T.

FlickChick: Flyboys concerns the exploits of the famed Lafayette Escadrille, a corps of American pilots flying for France prior to the United States' entry into WWI, and I would imagine your father was talking about golden age Hollywood director William Wellman. Wellman was born in Massachusetts in 1896 and joined the French Foreign Legion after the outbreak of WWI; Wellman was not a member of the famed Lafayette Escadrille, but was a WWI fighter pilot. The distinction is that the Escadrille was a distinct unit made up of 42 flyers (four of whom were French), while the term "Lafayette Flying Corps" describes all the American pilots who flew for France  some 200. In any event, after the war Wellman went to Hollywood, directing his first film in 1920. He directed the WWI fighter-pilot film Wings (1927), whose aerial dogfight scenes are legendary; Wings won the first-ever best picture Oscar. Three decades later, Wellman directed Lafayette Escadrille (1958), by all accounts a vastly inferior film.

And no, the real life pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille did not have a lion. They had two lion cubs, named Whiskey and Soda; the cubs were eventually given to the Paris Zoo.

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Question: I saw a movie maybe 15 or 20 years ago about a guy who finds some sort of alien weapon. To make this thing work, however, he has to wear an amulet around his neck that he found near the weapon. But the amulet is doing something strange to him. For the life of me I cannot remember the name of this movie. Can you help? James

FlickChick: I can. The movie is Laserblast (1978), a favorite of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans. I found it dull beyond words.

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Question: I can't remember the names of these two movies. One was about a woman who was lost on an island but then comes back to her husband and finds him engaged or married and they have two girls. The other is about a brother and sister and their mom. I think they were adopted, but all I really remember is that the boy was tied up to the bed and the mom was really mean. These are both old movies. Tala

FlickChick: The first is some version of My Favorite Wife, a "risqué" comedy by the husband and wife team Bella and Sam Spewack. It was first filmed with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant as My Favorite Wife (1940), and then remade as Move Over, Darling (1963), with Doris Day, James Garner and Polly Bergen. Move Over, Darling was actually a redo of Something's Got to Give (1962), Marilyn Monroe's last film; she played the wife who returns after a seven-year absence to find her husband (Dean Martin) has remarried and her children don't remember her. Though the film was unfinished at the time of Monroe's death, you can now get a rough version on DVD that was cobbled together from existing rushes. The other sounds like Mommie Dearest (1981), though it's hard for me to imagine not remembering that the mean mom is world famous movie star Joan Crawford (wickedly impersonated by Faye Dunaway). But that's the nature of memory, I suppose; what strikes one person as an insignificant detail is everything to someone else. In any event, it focuses on her awful relationship with her two adopted children, Christopher and Christina, and Christopher is tied to his bed at night to keep him from wandering.

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Question: I've been trying to remember the name of a movie I saw on TV when I was young, maybe in the 1970s, and it's driving me nuts! All I remember is something about a plane crashing, probably in a jungle, and the blind survivors have to find their way to civilization. I seem to remember a scene where they have to cross a rickety rope bridge over a very deep valley. Does this ring any bells? I've been trying to figure this out for months! Laurie

FlickChick: This could only have been Seven in Darkness (1969), which happens to have been the very first "ABC Movie of the Week," and based on the 1963 novel Against Heaven's Hand, by Leonard Bishop. The stars include Milton Berle, Alejandro Rey, Dina Merrill, Barry Nelson and Lesley Ann Warren. Unfortunately, it isn't available on VHS, let alone DVD; in fact, I've never even seen a bootleg advertised for sale.

Question: What is the origin of "Tinseltown" as a name for Hollywood [it's for a new section on cultural references in Veronica Mars]? I've looked and looked everywhere but can't find a thing. I know this is cheeky (yes, I am in England and no, we won't talk about how I manage to watch VM contemporaneously), but nothing ventured, nothing gained! Love to you all. -- Inigo

FlickChick: I believe the term "tinseltown" has its origins in Oscar Levant's (1906?1972) splendidly embittered witticism in observating that if you "strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood... you find the real tinsel underneath." Levant was an actor and musician -- he was both a composer and an accomplished pianist -- and his best-known roles, in An American in Paris (1951) and The Band Wagon (1953), were in musicals. But Levant, like fellow Algonquin Roundtable wit Dorothy Parker, was better known for his sharp tongue than his work in movies. And also like Parker, he had absolutely no compunction about biting the hand that fed him. I haven't been able to determine exactly when Levant made this particular remark, but it was before 1965. That was the year Alvah Bessie 's Inquisition in Eden was published, and Levant's epigram appears on the title page; Bessie, a screenwriter, was blacklisted during the HUAC era and Levant's jaundiced view of the business clearly spoke to him.

Coincidentally, Levant figures into this next item:

Question: I remember a movie, I think in black-and-white, that I saw when I was younger -- that would have been in the 1970s or '80s. In it, a young girl is sick in bed and gets sicker as the leaves on the tree outside her window blow off. She says she'll die after the last leaf falls, so her neighbor crawls out and paints a leaf on the wall by the tree so she doesn't give up hope. She clings to that last leaf and lives. Do you know this movie? I'd like to see it again. Thank you! Jackie

FlickChick: I imagine you're thinking of one segment from the 1952 omnibus film O. Henry's Full House. It dramatizes five stories by O. Henry, the master of the twist ending, the third of which is "The Last Leaf." It's about two Manhattan sisters, the younger of whom (Anne Baxter), gets pneumonia during a blizzard. Feverish, she becomes convinced that her life is bound up with that of the dried-out tree whose leaves are dropping rapidly. By consensus, this segment and the adaptation of the much-filmed "The Gift of the Magi" are the film's strongest, but coincidentally, Oscar Levant is in one of the others ? a version of "The Ransom of Red Chief." Another of Henry's most popular tales, it's about unfortunate crooks who kidnap a child so exhaustingly bratty that they wind up paying his family to take him back. Like "The Gift of the Magi," it's been filmed several times, but people are probably most familiar with 1986's Ruthless People, which spins the story so the kidnapped horror is an adult harridan (Bette Midler).

Question: I know you get a lot of e-mails in which someone only remembers a few small details of a movie, but how about answering one more? Back when I was 10 or so, which would have been in the early 1990s, there was a movie on ABC during the Wonderful World of Disney time slot. It was about a kid who finds a paintbrush and the painting made with it could be entered into, like crossing over into the canvas. Do you know what it could possibly be? Travis

FlickChick: Readers asked me this for ages, and I was baffled until I finally tracked down The Peanut Butter Solution (1985), a completely bizarre Canadian made-for-TV movie with more plot than I can begin to recount. But the parts people usually remember are the paintings you can walk into, the kid who loses all his hair after seeing something scary in the local rundown spook house, the ghosts who subsequently tell him that if he rubs a gross mixture of stuff (including peanut butter) on his scalp his hair will grow back, and the fact that it then grows so fast and so long he starts to look like The Addams Family's Cousin It and some creepy guys starts stealing it to make paintbrushes, which brings us full circle to the paintings. It's not commercially available, but I got my hands on a copy and have to say that it's not good, although it's unforgettable.

Question: My sister and I are trying to find a movie from the late 1970s or early '80s. We don't know the name, but it had a little girl who, in the end, turned out to be a clone. She played the cello and had a big brother. At the film's climax, she's at a secret facility where other girls with her same name are all being held behind closed doors. Any help would be appreciated. Jenni

FlickChick: Again with the coincidences! Speaking of Canadian made-for-TV movies that perplexed me for years, I started getting e-mails about this one after the first airing of the "Eve" episode of The X-Files, which, in case you don't remember, revolved around a secret government-run cloning experiment and a hidden facility full of identical young girls named Eve. I stumbled across the answer when a local video store was going out of business, and there, in their stack of inventory for sale, was Anna to the Infinite Power (1982). Like The Peanut Butter Solution, it's a deeply flawed little film, but I see exactly why it stuck with everyone who ever caught it unawares. Copies of the out-of-print video are thin on the ground, but, like the truth, they are out there.

Question: Sometime in the 1980s I watched a movie about two people with mental disorders who fall in love and try to prove social and familial expectations wrong by getting married and living successfully on their own. I've never forgotten it, in part because I believe it was based on a true story. The characters were named Roger and Virginia (nickname Ginnie Rae), but that is all I have to go on. I have been trying to identify this movie for many years, and I know you are the movie-master! Kim

FlickChick: That would have been the made-for-TV Like Normal People (1979), starring Shaun Cassidy and Linda Purl as young adults Roger Meyers and Virginia Rae Hensler, both of whom are marginally mentally challenged and get married over the well-intentioned objections of medical professionals and their respective families. It was, as you say, based on a true story, though I couldn't say how closely. In one of those weird entertainment-industry confluences, a second film called No Other Love also debuted in 1979, starring Richard Thomas and Julie Kavner (yes, John Boy Walton and the voice of Marge Simpson) in a very similar story. Neither is available on video or DVD, but I've seen bootlegs of both on eBay from time to time.

Question: I'm looking for what I believe was a French film set in Paris. It's about an aging man who's down on his luck and is struggling to outwit the greedy landlady who wants to evict him and his dog from her building. He struggles to hold onto both his home and his dog, then spends some time in a veterans' hospital, where he's befriended by a young girl. His pride and desire to maintain a front of respectability and solvency get in the way of his efforts, and the last scene takes place in a park. Any ideas? Thanks. ? Rick

FlickChick: It's not French, it's Italian. But otherwise, this is an admirably clear description of Vittorio De Sica's heartbreaking Umberto D (1952). I recommend it highly, though it undid me so completely that I doubt I'll ever sit through it again.

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Question: I've been reading about the new movie The Black Dahlia, and I could swear I've seen another movie with the same story. I know it's based on a true case, but was there another movie (not a documentary)? Tom P.

FlickChick: Quite frankly, I'm surprised there haven't been more movies inspired by the grotesque and unsolved "Black Dahlia" murder case, but I suspect the one you're thinking of is True Confessions (1981), based on the novel by John Gregory Dunne and adapted by Dunne and his wife, fellow writer Joan Didion. Like the new Black Dahlia, which was directed by Brian De Palma and adapted from a novel by James Ellroy, True Confessions uses the 1947 mutilation murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short as a jumping-off point for a cynical story of power, money and pervasive corruption. In True Confessions, the investigation focuses on a real-estate tycoon with powerful connections within the Catholic Church; the story revolves around two brothers, a damaged cop (Robert Duvall) and an ambitious priest (Robert De Niro). In The Black Dahlia, the investigation keeps circling back to the daughter (Hilary Swank) of a shady real-estate mogul, and focuses on two cops (Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart), each obsessed with the killing for his own twisted reasons.

There was also a 1975 made-for-TV movie called Who Is the Black Dahlia? (1975); I've never seen it, but apparently it sticks very close to the facts of the case  it was made with the cooperation of LAPD detective Harry Hansen, who was in charge of the original investigation  and it features a strong performance by Lucie Arnaz as Short. In both True Confessions and The Black Dahlia, the murder victim is almost an afterthought (that said, Mia Kirshner of TV's The L Word gives a surprisingly touching performance as Short in The Black Dahlia, though her screen time is limited to short segments of film-within-the-film footage), but Who Is the Black Dahlia? is as concerned with her short, sad life as it is with her bizarre, brutal death. The Dahlia murder is also alluded to in Fleshtone (1994) and Toolbox Murders (2003), but in both it's just grisly window dressing.

New Line recently acquired the rights to former Los Angeles homicide detective Steve Hodel's nonfiction book Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he alleges that his father, a doctor with close ties to the LAPD, not only killed Short but a series of other women as well. I came away from it convinced that his father was a very, very bad man and may well have gotten away with murder, but I'm not so sure he killed Short. For my money, John Gilmore's true-crime book Severed puts forth the most convincing solution to the crime. Gilmore began researching it in 1963, when actor Tom Neal (of Detour fame) was trying to put together a Dahlia film; Gilmore grew up in Hollywood, and the fact that his father had been an LAPD police officer gave him an in. The movie project fell through when Neal was arrested for murdering his wife, but Gilmore kept digging and eventually wrote a book. Originally published in 1994, Severed points the finger at a nobody named Arnold Smith/Jack Anderson Wilson, who was considered a major suspect at the time of the original investigation but died in 1982. The film rights to Severed were sold to producer Edward R. Pressman in the late '90s and there was talk that David Lynch was interested in the project, but nothing seems to have come of it.

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Okay, they're not. But the release of a handsome new DVD of Gojira — Godzilla before he got sliced and diced and reconstituted as Godzilla, King of the Monsters — reminded me that I gave the big guy a shout-out in my new book, Movie Lust: Recommended Viewing for Every Mood, Moment and Reason. And it seemed a good time to talk about both.

Movie Lust is me between covers... at least, it's me when people ask my opinion about such-and-such a movie or what they should rent this weekend. I recommend more than 1000 movies in Movie Lust, which is not to say I think everyone should see everything I mention — that's why they're grouped by theme and subject and director and anything else I could think of. Interested in film noir, the chapter "Edge of Night" will direct you to what I think are the ten essential titles. Loved This Is Spinal Tap? "F for Fake (and Funny)" is my take on the cream of the light mockumentary crop, from Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver, about the unknown New Zealander who single-handedly invented movies, to Christopher Guest's Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, which skewer the worlds of dog shows and folk music. I think you get the picture.

Movie Lust's official publication date was August 28th, and you can buy it at bookstores nationwide and from online retailers, including the TV Guide Store. I spent the better part of last year writing it, and I'm pretty thrilled that it's finally here. Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog says it's "clever [and] personality-driven," and "a book [that's] as much for lovers of language as for film hipsters; most every paragraph is like a carefully crafted bonbon that can be quickly sucked down to a rich bon-mot center." (More.) If you pick it up, I'd love to hear what you think. And thanks, Tim!

And I highly recommend taking a look at the two-disc Gojira Deluxe Collector's Edition (Classic Media/Sony Wonder, $21.98): If you think of Godzilla movies as greasy kid stuff, it's because you've never seen Ishirô Honda's 1954 100-minute original in all its untampered-with glory. It's dark and disturbing, and believe me, you don't have to dig for the nuclear-trauma metaphor: The scenes of irradiated sailors on a fishing boat, makeshift hospitals filled with victims of Gojira's radioactive breath and human silhouettes flash-fired onto Tokyo walls are chilling. And the ending is, at best, cautiously optimistic: It concludes with the warning that "If we continue testing H-bombs, another Godzilla will appear." In all, the original contains about 40 minutes of footage that isn't in the 1956 U.S. version. The Collector's Edition includes it, as well, the better to compare and contrast. It incorporates about an hour of the original, heavy on the mass destruction and chaos Godzilla leaves in his wake, intercut with some 20 minutes of new footage that revolves around "United World News" foreign correspondent Steve Martin (Perry Mason's Raymond Burr), reporting from devastated Tokyo. The old and new footage work together surprisingly well, but the film is lighter and less resonant. Not a lot of extras, and I got very bored very fast with the second-channel commentaries, but a package well worth having.

PS: I got to interview the gracious, dryly funny, 75-year-old Haruo Nakajima, who wore the 200-pound Godzilla suit form 1954 to 1972, in 2004, when the original version played at New York's Film Forum. I treasure his answer to my question about the heated debate over Godzilla's gender (think about it: there's a baby Godzilla — the much-hated, smoke-ring blowing Minya — but no Mrs. Godzilla, and the big G has serious back). Nakajima — who seemed not to have heard a thing about any of this, didn't miss a beat before replying, "[Toho effects wizard] Mr. Tsuburaya created Baby Godzilla because [1967's Son of Godzilla] was aimed at children. As to the gender of Godzilla, I do not know!" He was a kick.