Unknown Films

Twice in twenty four hours I've experienced the frustration of coming into a film part way through on a streaming channel that has no listed schedule (that I can find, anyway) and having missed the opening titles.  Consequently, I had no idea what I was watching but kept watching regardless, in the hope that I could figure out what was going on and what film I'm watching.  Usually, the key to identifying a film is recognising one or more of the actors, making it possible to look up their filmography on something like IMDB and by a process of trial and error, work out which of their movies you are watching.  Unfortunately, in the case of the first of the two films in question - which was playing on the streaming version of ConTV - it was one of those very low-budget b-pictures featuring a no name cast of (judging by the performances) semi-professionals.  So plan B came into play: using search terms based on what I was seeing on screen to try and find out via a search engine what the film was.  This can be surprisingly effective, as I've identified many films that I came in part way through in this way.  This time, though, it drew a blank.  The film looked like it was shot in the sixties (judging by the fashions, cars and the colour quality), possibly in Florida and involved a group of archeologists discovering some kind of living mummy which, when revived, turned out to be some kind of hairy flesh eating monster.  (Before you say it, no, it wasn't Face of the Screaming Werewolf, a feature cobbled together from a pair of unrelated Mexican movies and some new American footage).

No combination of these elements yielded anything.  Indeed, trying any kind of search involving the words 'Mummy' and 'Florida' just kept turning up results for a roller coaster ride at Universal's theme park.  I did, however discover that there had been a faux Laurel and Hardy movie made in, I think the eighties, featuring lookalike actors, in which they battle a mummy in Florida.  You learn something new everyday.  I eventually had to concede defeat on identifying this film, even the end titles didn't help, simply featuring the words 'The End' with no date or studio information.  The second film, which I stumbled into on Fright Flix this afternoon turned out to be far more straight forward to identify: the first actor I saw was Klaus Kinski, speaking Italian and coughing up blood (just an average day for him, I guess).  Despite the late Klaus having made over 130 films, the fact that it was Italian, clearly made in the early seventies and, judging by the character names, set in Russia, made it relatively easy to identify it as The Hand That Feeds the Dead from 1974.  As it turned out, I'd wandered in close to the end, so was confronted by a flurry of action involving decomposing walking corpses, secret basement laboratories and the inevitable climactic fire.  So, I can rest easy, knowing what I'd just watched.  But that other film still bugs me - it is like an itch I can't scratch.  Knowing what I'm watching is something of an obsession with me.  This one is particularly frustrating as, despite some resemblances to those 'Aztec Mummy' films, this clearly wasn't a Mexican production, but a US one - but a B-movie whose elements are totally unfamiliar to me.  Which is unusual.  But I'll get these eventually - the next strategy will be to start investigating the output of directors who specialised in Florida shot B-movies during the sixties...