Alright, everybody, if you’ll take your seat, your B-Movie Enema historical lesson can begin.
Today, I’m reviewing 1985’s Mata Hari from our good friends at Cannon Films. This was during a time in which Cannon was raking in money from the Chuck Norris action flicks, but also was luring a lot of directors with a great deal of artistic talent. A lot of people think it was those Norris action exploitation films, or the authoritarian, at least semi-right-wing coded crime thrillers that Charles Bronson was making, that brought Cannon low. No, what led to Cannon’s demise was a combination of overpaying Sylvester Stallone for two films that didn’t really do the gangbusters that the company expected, and the big time swings for the fences that were utterly destroyed by critics. These were your Brooke Shields vehicle, Sahara, The Wicked Lady with Faye Dunaway, Bolero from John and Bo Derek, Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, and Mata Hari. There were others, but these were the large productions that had massive scale and looked beautiful, but ultimately were not much more than sex and exploitation films that were just never going to sell to mainstream audiences the way Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus expected. I’m probably not really describing all these films in the best, most detailed or nuanced light, but that’s what more or less happened.
With Mata Hari, they did have a very capable director, though, brought in to tell a war epic. Curtis Harrington was no hack job. Harrington was an experimental filmmaker in the 50s and 60s, but his career actually began as a film critic. In the mid 60s, Roger Corman brought Harrington to make Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Queen of Blood. He also made Whoever Slew Anutie Roo. He also worked on well-known TV movies like How Awful About Allan and Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell. Most importantly, though, Harrington, himself a gay man, was instrumental in two things related to James Whale (most famous for Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein). He was instrumental in rediscovering and recovering Whale’s thought-to-be-lost film The Old Dark House. He also served as an advisor on Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters about Whale in his later years.
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