Spooks Run Wild (Phil Rosen, 1941)

Spooks Run Wild is a bad movie, a horror-comedy neither scary nor funny, a cheap production that, intentionally or not, saved money on film and lighting equipment by arranging the characters side by side in the majority of shots and letting some scenes play out in indiscernible darkness. Nevertheless, there's an endearing quality to the cheapness and incompetence, and I am never going to be mad about Bela Lugosi and Angelo Rossitto doing their thing in a spooky mansion. Still, I can only recommend this one to the hardcore Lugosi-heads.

I also feel some affection for the movie because scenes from it appeared in Horrible Horror, a VHS compilation of b-movie sci-fi and horror clips and trailers from the '30s through the '60s hosted by Zacherley, "the Cool Ghoul," which I received as a Christmas gift in fifth or sixth grade and watched at least 800 times. I already talked about that VHS compilation in my King of the Zombies post in April. (I claimed to have watched it 37,000 times in that post, but I've gotta come clean. It's closer to 800.) I was never able to properly learn geometry because so many scenes from Horrible Horror took up permanent residence in my brain. There was simply no room to introduce any trapezoid knowledge without evicting the trailer for The Alligator Man, and I wasn't going to let that happen ("I'll kill you, alligator man! Just like I'd kill any four-legged gator!").

Spooks Run Wild brings together Bela Lugosi (bounced from Hollywood to the Poverty Row circuit when his drug and alcohol problems became a studio liability) and the wisecracking, streetwise East Side Kids, who may need an introduction in 2026. In 1935, a Broadway play called Dead End, about Depression-era New York City street kids getting a second chance in reform school, became a huge hit. Hollywood producers saw dollar signs and turned the play into a movie. The movie was a hit, too, and the cast of young men became a '30s Hollywood franchise called the Dead End Kids (after a two-film rebranding as the Crime School Kids), with the series of movies quickly evolving from gritty dramas to goofy comedies of misadventure. Some of the original Dead End Kids appeared in their own imitation group, the Little Tough Guys, who had a similar run of movies from the late '30s into the early '40s. In 1940, low-budget Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures got in on the action and created a copycat gang called the East Side Kids. Eventually, some of the Dead End Kids became East Side Kids after the Hollywood output slowed, and the trend continued in the low-budget world into the '50s, with the East Side Kids morphing into the Bowery Boys in the late '40s. By the time the last Bowery Boys movie hit theaters in the late '50s, the scoreboard tallied one Broadway play, 89 films, and three serials, not even including other copycat ensembles such as the Gas House Kids and the Harlem Tuff Kids. Yowzah!

In Spooks Run Wild, the East Side Kids play a group of underprivileged NYC teens (though the youngest of them looks to be in at least his mid-twenties) on their way to a character-building wilderness camp in upstate New York (filmed on Monogram's sets in Los Angeles), under the supervision of engaged couple Jeff Dixon (Dave O'Brien), a condescending pipe-smoking law student, and Linda Mason (Dorothy Short), a plucky can-do nurse. Linda's too good for milquetoast dweeb Jeff, but what can you do? (O'Brien and Short were a real-life married couple, and they also acted together in Reefer Madness.) Jeff and Linda are the only characters with run-of-the-mill names (no offense to the Jeffs and Lindas of the world), with the exception of East Sider Danny (Bobby Jordan). The rest of our East Side gang includes Muggs (Leo Gorcey), Glimpy (Huntz Hall), Scruno (Sunshine Sammy Morrison, also a former Our Gang cast member), Peewee (David Gorcey, Leo's younger brother), and Skinny (Donald Haines).

When the bus driver transporting our characters stops in a small town near the camp to take a break and check the tires, the Kids play a prank on the driver, get yelled at by pipe-smokin' Jeff, and wander off to a soda counter, where they hit on the clerk Margie (Rosemary Portia) and hear a radio alert about a serial murderer on the run in the area. They brush it off, but the tough-guy act fails to convince.

Back at the camp and bedding down for the night, the Kids decide to sneak out and meet up with Margie. Their route will take them through a cemetery. Much of this will be too dark to see. It's like watching a radio play in certain scenes, I tell ya. Meanwhile, an odd man with the fantastic name of Nardo (Bela Lugosi) and his little person assistant Luigi (Angelo Rossitto) stop at a gas station for directions to an abandoned creepy mansion Nardo has inherited. The horror-obsessed gas station owner Lem Harvey (P.J. Kelly) knows he's looking at the murderer, but he plays it cool. He also recognizes his next customer, Dr. Von Grosch (Dennis Moore), from his occult reading material. The doctor tells Lem to keep his identity secret because he's on Nardo's trail.

Back to our dimly lit late-night wanderings. When Peewee gets hit with buckshot by a spooked cemetery caretaker who's already witnessed Nardo and Luigi disappear in front of his eyes, the other Kids carry him to Nardo's spooky mansion for help. Spooky stuff that's not that spooky occurs. Comedy that's not that funny also occurs, but I do love the way Lugosi says "Helloooo" and "Gooodbyyyye" and the way a skull prop bounces off his head during a pratfall.

The movie picks up whenever Lugosi and Rossitto are onscreen, and Kelly and Morrison also get a few decent moments, but this is otherwise pretty generic stuff, mostly poorly done, though even the weakest 20th century movie increases in interest for me the deeper we descend into our 21st century big tech hell. I also got a laugh out of the lack of urgency Jeff and the local constable show for the missing fish-out-of-water East Side Kids and Linda (who went off to look for the gang when Jeff was more interested in smoking his pipe and uttering condescending dismissals of Linda's concern) while a twisted serial murderer is roaming the same stretch of countryside. These guys do not want to get out of their chairs.

Well, there you have it. Spooks Run Wild. It's a movie (barely), but there aren't many spooks, and they could have run a whole lot wilder. I'll leave you with some Nebraska talk. Almost everyone in the East Side Kids cast was a native New Yorker except for Morrison (from New Orleans) and Haines, who hailed from my home state of Nebraska. He was born in Seward County, but his family moved to southern California when he was eight in search of work. He became a successful child actor beginning in the silent era, and Spooks Run Wild was his final movie. Enlisting in the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Haines was killed in action in Tunisia in 1943. Though he was only 23 when he died, Haines had at least 92 film credits. Film production workdays can be pretty nuts, but movie people in the '20s, '30, and '40s worked freakishly inhuman schedules.

Keeping the Nebraska connections flowing, it's time for some Angelo Rossitto talk. Rossitto, whose acting career stretched from the silent film The Beloved Rogue in 1927 to a 1987 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (he died in 1991), was born and raised in Omaha. Some notable credits in his lengthy acting career (he also owned a Hollywood newsstand to keep a steady income going between acting gigs) include Seven Footprints to Satan, Freaks, The Wizard of Oz (he was one of the Munchkins), Hellzapoppin', Samson and Delilah, The Baron of Arizona, Confessions of an Opium Eater, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Trip, Brain of Blood (OK, that one may be notable only to me), The Other, a Rockford Files episode, the animated Lord of the Rings, The Dark, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind (filmed in the '70s and finally released in 2018), the front cover of Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones album, and the back cover of Bob Dylan & The Band's The Basement Tapes. Another wild Nebraska-related fact about Rossitto is that his granddaughter is married to my preschool teacher's oldest son who moved from Nebraska to Hollywood to try to make it as an actor but, Seinfeld episode aside, ended up building a career as a propmaker for movies and TV shows. I did some benign Internet stalking to see what he was up to after reading his mom's obituary in my hometown paper (she was a great preschool teacher, by the way, and a very nice woman). It looks like he's retired from the film industry now and teaching jiujitsu in Hawaii. Some people know how to live.

Die Sister, Die! (Randall Hood, 1978)

Die Sister, Die! is a quiet (except for a couple of nutty dream sequences), character-based, psychological horror/thriller that may disappoint you if you need the walls to be painted red, but the strong performances, aesthetically pleasing locations, relaxed pace, and complex and morally ambiguous characters really worked for me. I had a good time with this one.

For such a straightforward little movie with a small cast, Die Sister, Die! had a difficult, drawn-out production. Filming began in 1972, but financial difficulties and the cancer diagnosis of director Randall Hood slowed things down. More filming took place in the mid-'70s (the cars in the movie are mostly '75 and '76 models), but Hood died, aged 48, in 1976 before any post-production work could be done. One of the film's three leads, Jack Ging, made it his mission to turn the unedited footage into a finished product, and the movie was finally completed and released in 1978. Clint Eastwood, a friend of Ging's, is rumored to have helped with the film's completion, but that rumor has been neither confirmed nor denied. Despite the production troubles and Hood's health problems, the movie is consistent in tone and performance and doesn't look like a stop/start affair.

The movie opens with the wealthy Amanda Price (Edith Atwater) attempting suicide in her very distinctive-looking home (the Piru Mansion, more on that location later). Her doctor, Thorne (Kent Smith, Atwater's real-life husband), and her brother, Edward (Jack Ging), save her, which inspires only hatred from Amanda toward Edward. The doctor tries to get to the bottom of the siblings' enmity and the reasons for Amanda's multiple suicide attempts from an evasive Edward but fails. Dr. Thorne also fails to convince Edward to have his suicidal sister institutionalized, but Edward is open to the idea of paying for a live-in nurse.

A cocky Edward stops by a dive bar called Hank's to enlist the services of former nurse-turned-waitress Esther Harper (Antoinette Bower). Esther was a live-in nurse for an elderly millionaire whose family neglected him. Angry at his family and appreciative of Esther's help, the rich old man married Esther so she'd inherit his dough, but the family successfully stopped the will in court after the old man's death. The bad publicity forced Esther out of the nursing profession. Edward lets her know he knows all about her past and offers her the chance to make some big bucks. She's reluctant, but he leaves his card.

Esther shows up a few days later at Edward's office to get more information about the job. He gives it to her straight. He'll pay Esther a standard nurse's salary to look after Amanda and report back to him about whatever his sister tells her. There are some embarrassing family secrets he doesn't want the outside world to learn, you see. He then drops the bomb, though Esther already knows the score and is not surprised at what she's hearing. Edward tells her not to intervene when, not if, his sister attempts suicide again. Don't help her, don't save her, let her die. Once his sister is dead, Esther will get a $25,000 payment. She accepts the job.

Esther gets more of the family dirt from Amanda and the housekeeper, Mrs. Gonzalez (Rita Conde), once inside the mansion. The late Price patriarch, James Lendon (played in flashbacks and dream sequences by Robert Emhardt), still staring haughtily and imposingly down at his family from a huge portrait on the wall, doted on spoiled youngest sibling Nell (Peg Shirley) and despised his other two children, Amanda and Edward, who despised James and Nell right back. After the old man's death from a heart attack, Nell disappeared to Europe, never to be seen again. She even skipped the funeral. Not suspicious at all. Amanda inherited the mansion and gained control of the dispersal of funds, putting her brother Edward on a healthy but fixed income so he wouldn't blow the entire fortune. With Nell out of the picture, Amanda and Edward decided to despise each other, too, and Amanda became a depressive recluse, barely leaving the mansion.

This is where we're at when Esther meets Amanda. The two women don't trust each other, but a slowly growing oddball mutual admiration society eventually develops. Is Esther really going to help Edward let Amanda die, or is she going to form an alliance with Amanda? Maybe she'll double-cross both of them? What is Edward's real goal, and does he plan to do more than wait for Amanda to kill herself? Will he kill Esther, too? What really happened to Nell and James? We in the audience and pretty much every other character already know that Edward is a greedy and conniving guy who wants his sister dead, but we don't know what else he's up to, and Esther's and Amanda's motivations are also murky and unknowable. None of the characters trust each other, all of them have secrets, and the audience is never sure of anyone's motives or plans, other than Edward's obvious ones. I love these kinds of stories, and the cast members, made up of veteran actors with much theater, episodic television, and character actor and day player film experience, deliver naturalistic, understated performances that kept me invested.

The location shooting also contributes to the movie's flavor. The dive bar, Edward's office, a nearby Catholic church, a late-night diner, all these places are complementary to the film's tone, but the mansion itself is the star of the show. The Piru Mansion (also called the Newhall Mansion and the Cook Mansion) is a Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion in the small town of Piru, California, about 48 miles from downtown Los Angeles. The crazily distinctive home, built in 1886 by a wealthy fundamentalist Christian businessman from Illinois attempting to create a second Garden of Eden, sold to two more wealthy families over the ensuing years, entirely rebuilt in 1982-3 after a devastating 1981 fire, and currently owned by a private investment company that rents it out for events, corporate retreats, and vacations, pops up frequently in movies and TV shows. Before Die Sister, Die!, my most recent sighting of the mansion was in the absolutely bonkers 1973 drive-in exploitation movie Pets, and it's also appeared in Desert Fury, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Terror at Red Wolf Inn, and episodes of Charlie's Angels, Mannix, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, The Incredible Hulk, Highway to Heaven, Murder, She Wrote, Melrose Place, The X-Files, and Monk. A new Garden of Eden, indeed.

The hardcore horror nerds may not be wild about Die Sister, Die!, but I truly enjoyed its performances, '70s locations, morally dubious characters, and low-key charm. It's somewhere between a Columbo episode and a Tales from the Crypt morality play of comeuppance, and I like hanging out in that space.

   

Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death (James Wood, 1979)

I don't know what I was expecting from a 1979 movie about the great-grandson of Dr. Jekyll conducting experiments in his San Francisco mansion, but I was certainly not expecting a movie that mostly consists of long stretches of exposition and lengthy karate fights between Bay Area black belts. Seriously, this movie is mostly just Dr. Jekyll explaining what he wants to do in one of the biggest, hammiest performances I've ever seen punctuated by lengthy karate fights in his basement lab. Is it terrible? Yes. Are the karate fights pretty good, though a bit repetitive? Yes. Is the movie inexplicably set in the '50s despite all the women sporting long, straight hair or Farrah Fawcett feathered layers and the men sporting afros, curly shags, and porn 'staches? Oddly, yes. Was I glad I saw it despite it being mostly terrible? Of course.

The only non-porn film directed by James Wood in his brief movie career (his other two directorial efforts are the porn flicks A Game of Love, starring The Last House on the Left's Fred Lincoln, and The $50,000 Climax Show, a porn parody of game shows with the tagline "She came to hit the jackpot!"), Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death is a mystifying attempt to marry the long-out-of-fashion mad-scientist horror flick with the much-hotter-in-'79 martial arts movie on an extremely tiny budget. The cast is small, the story makes little sense, the period details are all wrong, and no one involved in the production seems to have read more than a one-sentence synopsis of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel or any of its film or television adaptations.

Dr. Henry Jekyll (James Mathers, who also wrote the screenplay), the great-grandson of the infamous Dr. Jekyll, continues his forebear's experiments in the basement lab of his posh San Francisco home, though unlike Jekyll's original experimentation, which attempted to separate the virtue and vice that exist within us all, '79 Jekyll just wants to create an army of unstoppable killing machines to fight America's battles. 

Young Jekyll dilutes and changes Great-grandpappy Jekyll's serum to such an extent that anyone injected with the stuff becomes a mindlessly enraged vessel of ass-kicking violence who is inexplicably excellent at karate. The only experiments Jekyll ever seems to run are karate battles to the death in his spacious basement. Stupidly, his serums and test tubes are set up right next to the karate-fighting area with no barrier between, though he does have a 'fro and porn 'stache armed guard, Malo (Tom Nickelson), at the ready to shoot the winner of the karate battles, just like we did it in the '50s.

Besides Malo, Jekyll is aided in his work by his mute, deranged sister, Hilda (Nadine Kalmes), who handles the servant and housekeeping duties and is constantly bugging out her eyes to show us just how deranged she is, and his assistant, Boris (Jake Pearson), a former colleague Jekyll was insanely jealous of who suffered brain damage in an accident. Boris is a lab assistant/butler who also kidnaps all of Jekyll's test subjects, presumably from a nearby karate school.

Another former colleague, Julia Atkinson (Dawn Carver Kelly), is chained up in Jekyll's bedroom until she'll consent to falling in love with him. (Jekyll also mentions having the hots for his own sister because she looks just like his mother, but this weird incest angle is dropped shortly after it's introduced.)

Jekyll tells Julia's father, Professor Atkinson (John F. Kearney), a former teacher of Jekyll's, that his daughter was killed after being thrown from a horse. The professor arrives as a guest at Jekyll's home to attend the funeral, unaware that his daughter is still alive and that her kidnapping is a blackmail tool Jekyll is planning to use to enlist the professor's assistance in his experiments (again, the only experimentation we ever see is post-injection karate fights). Jekyll has a chip on his shoulder about the old professor. Jekyll respects the elder man's scientific prowess but blames him for being one of the instigators of Jekyll's expulsion from medical school.

What we get from all this raw material until the ridiculous conclusion is Jekyll explaining his plans to his household staff, Julia, Professor Atkinson, and no one in particular in spectacularly hammy style (you've never seen someone do so much acting with his face, and that includes heavy competition from Nadine Kalmes) in between karate fights. It's a long 92 minutes, despite the plethora of unintentional laughs and excellently choreographed fight scenes. Wood the director is no great shakes, but Wood the cinematographer is pretty good with lighting and crispness of image.

Most of the cast didn't do much in movies either before or after Dr. Jekyll's Dungeon of Death, but, surprisingly, walking ham sandwich Mathers, making his film debut here, had a lengthy career in film, television, and theater right up to his death in 2014. He was active in San Francisco and New York theater as both an actor and a playwright, and he popped up in many bit parts and small roles in movies and TV shows, including The Right Stuff, Guilty by Suspicion, MacGyver, L.A. Law, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, ER, Ally McBeal, Me and You and Everyone We Know, and Ray Donovan. Maybe he knew exactly what kind of movie he'd written/starred in here and amplified every move by 120.

The Smiling Ghost (Lewis Seiler, 1941)

The Smiling Ghost is both a charming and silly little movie with some excellent comedic zingers and another peek into the disturbed and contradictory psyche of the average white American. A horror-comedy-mystery-romance about an aw-shucks cornpone goodie-two-shoes living beyond his means and his black valet who are taken advantage of by a decadent wealthy family in an attempt to end a murderous ghost curse afflicting a string of fiancés of the family's granddaughter, the movie accurately depicts the wealthy as selfish, demented, careless, exploitative, cold, drunk, and/or living in their own little bubble. However, its treatment of the sole black character is racist and stereotypical, using him as a wide-eyed, knee-knocking, teeth-chattering, fast-running cowardly comic relief figure who's saddled with a subplot about an elderly member of the wealthy family wanting to collect and shrink the valet's head because he doesn't yet have a "Negroid" in his collection.

Lucky Downing (Wayne Morris) is a recent college graduate and aspiring engineer in an unnamed big city, though he's the kindhearted but naive small-town rube type. He's sort of like a composite of every character on Leave It to Beaver except Eddie Haskell. Despite his intense devotion to the study of engineering, he's unemployed and hiding out in his office/apartment with his pet cat, dodging the group of bill collectors who have amassed outside his door, waiting for him to step outside. Lucky's loyal valet Clarence (Willie Best), despite not having been paid for several months, continues to help Lucky by delivering provisions and correspondence through the window awning.

Lucky finally gets to leave his abode when he's summoned to a job interview at the office of the wealthy Bentley family's attorney. Grandmother Bentley (Helen Westley) wants to hire a handsome and strong young man who's willing to do "anything legal" for a mysterious purpose. Lucky says he's their man, but the old woman puts him through the paces, barking orders at him, telling him his haircut "was an inside job," looking him up and down, and making him turn around and walk back and forth like a movie producer auditioning an aspiring actress for the casting couch. After some negotiations about retaining the valet services of Clarence, Lucky gets the job, which consists of a month's work pretending to be the fiancé of Bentley's granddaughter, the heiress Elinor Bentley Fairchild (Alexis Smith), and staying at the Bentley family mansion a few hours from the city. He will be paid $1,000 for his trouble, which gets you a half a loaf of bread in our current Trumpconomy but is nearly $23,000 in 2026 bucks. Lucky doesn't bother to ask why the family needs someone to pretend to be Elinor's fiancé because he's a city version of a hick from the sticks and he's just happy to get some cash.

After a comedic misunderstanding at the train station leaves Lucky worse for wear, he meets Elinor and newspaper reporter Lil Barstow (Brenda Marshall), who covers the Bentley family as part of her beat. Elinor breaks Lil's camera and tells Lil to send her the bill, but Lucky apologizes and attempts to answer the reporter's questions before Elinor shuts it down. Lil takes an immediate romantic liking to Lucky, but he's too simple to realize it.

Elinor's private car delivers our gang to the Bentley mansion, where Lucky meets the rest of the family. Besides Grandmother Bentley, the only family member who's in on the ruse besides Elinor, the mansion's dwellers include Elinor's aunt Rose Fairchild (Lee Patrick), an acid-tongued seen-it-all type who is quick with a dryly withering putdown and jealous of Elinor, uncle Hilton Fairchild (Roland Drew), a cold man who immediately loses interest in Lucky when he finds out Lucky doesn't have experience owning and shooting guns, cousin Tennant Bentley (Richard Ainley), an alcoholic and nasty drunk, and great-uncle Ames Bentley (Charles Halton), a demented old freak obsessed with his collection of shrunken heads. To quote a Mr. Show sketch, what a collection of assholes. Helping Clarence in his valet duties is no-nonsense butler Norton (Alan Hale). Hale's son, Alan Hale Jr., played the Skipper on Gilligan's Island. Confusing Hale Sr. for Hale Jr., I spent the whole movie thinking, "My God, this is the oldest-looking twentysomething I've ever seen." In my defense, the Hales look very much alike and I'm a dumber man than I used to be.

Why would a rich and attractive young woman like Elinor need her grandmother to pay someone to pretend to be her fiancé? Lucky may not be curious about such things, or anything not related to engineering (Elinor: "What kind of a kiss do you prefer?" Lucky: "You mean there's more than one kind?"), but after he switches rooms with Tennant and someone attempts to murder Tennant in the night, he gets the inside dope from Lil, who's sneaking around outside the mansion trying to get a scoop. Lucky was so engrossed in the study of engineering that he failed to follow the hot local news, but Elinor's family fortune isn't the only thing bringing her local fame. She's known in the press as the Kiss of Death Girl because fiancé numero uno, Johnny Eggleston, drowned. Fiancé two, Paul Myron (David Bruce), is still alive but living in an iron lung after getting his chest crushed in a car accident he claims was caused by a creepy smiling ghost. Apparently, Elinor dropped Paul like a hot potato once he was disabled. The third time was not the charm for fiancé three, Alan Winters, who died after a cobra bit him on the 18th floor of a Boston hotel. Classic 18th floor Boston shit, am I right?

Lucky is the expendable bait, hired to lure the killer, possibly entrap him, and see if Lucky will be, to quote a Bob Dylan song title, the fourth time around. When Lucky hears this inside dope (that would have been outside dope if he'd read the damn papers), he decides he's going back to (unnamed) city, he do believe he's had enough. But ain't it just like Lucky's blues, Elinor tells him she's fallen in love with him for real, and he doesn't think twice, it's alright. He decides to stick around and give this thing a shot, but will he be knockin' on heaven's door before he can even cash that thousand-dollar check? It's not dark yet, but it's getting there. Oh mercy.

All kinds of shit goes down after this, including attempted murders, midnight crypt explorations, midnight weddings, love triangles, creepy smiling ghosts, iron lung bitterness, quality wisecracks, casual racism, hidden passageways, secret caverns, surprise twists, and more. I'm halfway shocked we didn't get a guy in a gorilla suit.

So, The Smiling Ghost. Willie Best is a talented performer, but he's stuck with another dumb racist part despite getting a few good comedic lines, though he and Morris have a genuine rapport. The rest of the movie holds up a lot better. It's hardly a classic, but the one-liners are funny, the killer is creepy, and the cast is charming and has good chemistry. I can't say this is a must-watch, but it's a fascinating curio of early '40s Hollywood.

   

 

Die Hard 2 (Renny Harlin, 1990)

In my Die Hard post last month, I urged all of us to get past the question of whether Die Hard is or is not a Christmas movie (it is and it isn't) and asked people to instead consider whether Die Hard is a slasher movie and, by extension, whether action movies are slasher movie subgenres in which the action hero is a version of both the slasher movie killer and final girl. Let's see how these questions apply to Die Hard 2.

Die Hard 2, like its predecessor, takes place during the Christmas season, and, also like its predecessor, was released in theaters in the summer (July 4, 1990), but Die Hard 2 looks a lot Christmas-ier than Die Hard. The setting changes from a skyscraper office party in sunny Los Angeles to Dulles Airport in snowy Washington, D.C., during a blizzard. The airport is covered in Christmas decorations, the luggage carousel is full of wrapped gifts, everyone wears winter clothing, eggnog is mentioned, and one of the action sequences involves a snowmobile chase. It's a freakin' winter wonderland over here. The Christmas spirit permeates Die Hard 2. On the other hand, most of the plot has nothing to do with Christmas, other than the holiday season making the airport and flight schedules busier. They could've done this same story on Thanksgiving or spring break or at any airport in any city that was hosting the Super Bowl or the Olympics.

My conclusion: Die Hard 2 is a Christmas movie, and Die Hard 2 is not a Christmas movie. Embrace the contradiction. You accept that this movie takes place at Dulles in D.C. even though it was filmed at various airports, military bases, and studio sets in Colorado, Michigan, and California. You accept that the terrorists shutting down the airport's communication system leaves the planes in the air helpless even though they could get information from hundreds of other nearby radio signals. You accept that John McClane faces a crazy madcap terrorist Christmas season showdown for the second time in two years in two completely different cities. Give that same leap of faith to a Christmas movie that is not a Christmas movie but is a Christmas movie but isn't a Christmas movie. Do it.

Admittedly, my slasher movie hypothesis is pretty shaky when it comes to Die Hard 2, despite John McClane (Bruce Willis) stabbing one of the baddies through the eye with an icicle and (accidentally) crushing another one. McClane does a hell of a lot less skulking around in this one, he gets a lot more help, and most of the villains are dispatched en masse in gun battles and explosions. Not very slasher-y, am I right? My larger point stands, but Die Hard 2 is not a shining example of action movie as bizarro-world slasher.

It is a shining example of the big-budget '80s/'90s Hollywood action movie. Despite repeating the first film's formula with a much stupider terrorist plot, the sequel is almost as fun. The action scenes are legitimately suspenseful and exciting, the returning actors retain their chemistry and charm, and director Renny Harlin (taking over for the first and third installment's John McTiernan, who was busy making The Hunt for Red October) has a real gift for handling big scenes in large locations with hundreds of individual moving parts. (I also love the scenes in all the weird airport nooks and crannies us passengers never get to see.) Especially in the hustling, bustling airport scenes, Harlin shows masterful skill at gracefully controlling a busy, chaotic visual space. It's thrilling stuff, enhanced by the shots of the empty, still expanse of the darkened runways after the landings are delayed.

Alan Rickman and his crew of Eurotrash hair-metal muscleheads are sorely missed, replaced in this installment with a gang of character-acting heavy hitters who don't get enough personality-defining moments, except for William Sadler's naked martial arts workout while watching the news. You know a guy's a coldblooded psycho in an '80s or early '90s movie when you get a scene of him exercising in the nude. While Die Hard's villains were thieves with vague ties to Communist revolutionaries, Die Harder's bad boys are an anti-Commie far-right ex-military militia planning to save their newly arrested anti-Commie drug lord boss from the plane transporting him to Dulles. Ah, Hollywood, always having it both ways.

Leading the operation is Stuart (the aforementioned Sadler, of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Trespass, various Tales from the Crypt movies and TV episodes, and The Shawshank Redemption fame), and his crew includes Don Harvey (The Untouchables), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2), and a blink twice and you'll miss him John Leguizamo. '60s and '70s spaghetti western and giallo star Franco Nero, who's worked with almost everyone from Fassbinder to Tarantino, plays the drug kingpin Esperanza. The returning cast besides Willis includes Bonnie Bedelia (this time given a much better role with zippier dialogue despite being stuck on a plane), William Atherton (also stuck on the plane) and Sheila McCarthy (their journalist characters are both working in D.C. now in one of many plausible coincidences), and, in a cameo, Reginald VelJohnson. What about Argyle, man? Joining the cast as McClane's allies, foils, secret enemies, or eventual allies are Dennis Franz, John Amos, Art Evans, Fred Thompson, and Tom Bower. This is a solid group of character actors who have been in a dizzying array of high-quality (and low-quality) projects, and they get a lot more to do than Sadler and his boys.

Sadly, Die Hard 2 really drops the ball in the zinger department. John McClane in the first movie was loaded with action-movie quips that hit the sweet spot between dad-joke stupidity and screenwriter cleverness, and Willis knew how to deliver the goods. The quips in Die Hard 2 are so lame, tired, try-hard, and dumb-bad (as opposed to dumb-good) that even Willis can't get some of them over. Not even the return of "yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker" can save it. The best McClane dialogue is the simplest. When he launches himself out of an ejector seat into mid-air as a plane explodes underneath him, he drops a well-timed, humorously delivered "oh shiiiiittt." When "oh, shit" is your funniest quip, a dialogue punch-up is sorely needed. It's a minor complaint overall, but a missed opportunity to capture more of the first movie's flavor.

Die Hard 2 was director Harlin's first big Hollywood job and second hit. After making short films and TV commercials in his native Finland, he moved to the U.S. and debuted with low-budget action thriller Born American, followed by low-budget horror movie Prison (reviewed on this site many years ago) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. His other credits include The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (starring the insane lineup of Andrew "Dice" Clay, Wayne Newton, Gilbert Gottfried, Priscilla Presley, Morris Day, Vince Neil, David Patrick Kelly, Ed O'Neill, Robert Englund, Sheila E, Pamela Adlon, Kurt Loder, and Tone Loc), Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight with his then-wife Geena Davis, Deep Blue Sea, 12 Rounds (with John Cena), and The Strangers trilogy.