Donna Hall Movies

Cult director Frank Henenlotter does the seemingly impossible by breathing new life into this horror-comedy series about the twisted escapades of the Bradley Brothers: the deranged but sensitive Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck) and his monstrously-deformed former Siamese twin Belial. The previous installment had the siblings settling a nasty dispute in a particularly grisly manner... but appearances can deceive, as the original Basket Case proved with its similar denouement, which the director casually ignored in order to move things along. This time, Duane and Belial are still a bit miffed at each other but eventually make cute when it's learned that Belial is going to be a daddy -- thanks to a stomach-churning tryst with the similarly-shaped mutant Eve in the previous chapter. Things seem to be returning to relative normalcy in their newfound home -- considering that said home is Granny Ruth's sanctuary for "Unique Individuals" whose curator (Annie Ross, reprising her role) offers bed and board to an ensemble of freaks with cartoonishly-large deformities. It is only when the entire group sets out for the Georgia clinic of Uncle Hal -- a specialist who is capable of delivering Eve's plentiful offspring -- that their revels come to an end, thanks to a redneck sheriff and his thick-headed deputies, who don't exactly take a shine to their kind. It's up to Belial to save the day, which he does with bloody gusto thanks to a mechanical exoskeleton built by Uncle Hal's ingenious multi-armed son. Despite falling into some of the same pitfalls as the previous film (namely the slightly-too-outrageous mutant makeup), this is a stylish coda to the series, with strong and very funny performances from the leads and some memorably grotesque moments -- especially a bizarre road-trip sing-along by the freaks and the jarring air of "cuteness" in the disgusting birth scene. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

John Ford's last western film, Cheyenne Autumn was allegedly produced to compensate for the hundreds of Native Americans who had bitten the dust in Ford's earlier films (that was the director's story, anyway). Set in 1887, the film recounts the defiant migration of 300 Cheyennes from their reservation in Oklahoma territory to their original home in Wyoming. They have done this at the behest of chiefs Little Wolf (Ricardo Montalban) and Dull Knife (Gilbert Roland), peaceful souls who have been driven to desperate measures because the US government has ignored their pleas for food and shelter. Since the Cheyennes' trek is in defiance of their treaty, Captain Thomas Archer (Richard Widmark), who agrees with the Indians in principle, reluctantly leads his troops in pursuit of the tribe. While there was never any intention to shed blood, the white press finds it politically expedient to distort the Cheyennes' action into a declaration of war. Thanks to the cruelties of such chauvinistic whites as Captain Oscar Wessels (Karl Malden), the Cheyennes are forced to defend themselves--and whenever Indians take arms against whites in the 1880s, it's usually misrepresented as a massacre. Only the intervention of US secretary of the interior Carl Schurz (Edward G. Robinson) prevents the hostilities from erupting into wholesale bloodshed. Based on a novel by Mari Sandoz, Cheyenne Autumn is a cinematic elegy--not only for the beleaguered Cheyennes, but for John Ford's fifty years in pictures. It is weakest when arbitrarily throwing in a wearisome romance between Richard Widmark and pacifistic schoolmarm Carroll Baker, who out of sympathy for the Indians has joined them in their 1500-mile westward journey. When the Warner Bros. people decided that the film ran too long, they chopped out the wholly unnecessary but very funny episode involving a poker-obsessed Wyatt Earp (James Stewart). Contrary to popular belief, this episode was included in the earliest non-roadshow prints of Cheyenne Autumn; the scene was excised only when the film went into its second and third runs in 1966 (it has since been restored). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

By virtue of the popularity of his TV series The Range Rider, Jack (later Jock) Mahoney is afforded almost as much screen time in Hawk of the Wild River as the film's official star Charles Starrett. In fact, since Mahoney doubles for Starrett in certain sequences, it could be argued that his part is larger. This 53-minute "Durango Kid" western finds Starrett adopting his "Durango" disguise to find out who's behind a series of stagecoach holdups. The miscreant turns out to be "The Hawk" (Clayton Moore, the "Lone Ranger" himself!) Mahoney plays a deputy sheriff who helps the Durango Kid bring The Hawk to justice. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide