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Netflix has been trying to get me to watch 7 Faces of Dr. Lao forever. Lets find out why. Oh wow. That's not offensive at all. Let's put Tony Randall in really bad Old Chinese Dude makeup and have him light a pipe by sparking up his magic flaming thumb! Anyway, this is apparently an anthology sort of deal, with the main character disgusing himself as various historical figures and then going all morality play on people. According to the opening credits, these include Merlin, Pan, and Medusa. Now... it seems to me that if you're going to have some magical shapeshifter teaching people about things by appearing as various greek and British folk heroes, it's kind of weird to have him be a mystic old chinese guy in the old west. Also, HOLY FRELL does this lay the "Herro prease, me so solly!" on thick. We aren't even five minutes in and it's already getting to be a bit much. For what it's worth, this is a movie from 1964 by the way, which I think was recent enough that that shouldn't really fly.
So, we have a goofy racist caricature over here, and we have some random jerks over here. And uh... I'm fairly confident that if I wait patiently, something will happen in this movie that isn't fully summarized by the previous sentence. Well, that took a while, but here's some guy trying to convince the population of this town to sell it to him, because their main water pipe is too expensive to practically repair. It has very much the tone of having sold monorails to Ogdenville and North Haverbrook. Someone says "Uh, so why are you willing to pay so much for what you admit is a totally worthless town in the middle of nowhere?" but is shouted down. Oh and someone else is all "Won't someone think of the poor injuns!" Also, the rich dude who I guess knows there's oil or gold or unobtainium or whatever under the town is called Mr. Stark so I'm vaguely tempted to make an Ironman joke. Oh hey, maybe there's a huge deposit of iron under the town!
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After the meeting, a couple rednecks start arbitrarily beating up the Injun, but Dr. Lao wanders by and uses his magic powers to paralyze them, says "Excuse prease!" and blows on them knocking them over. Dear gods. Oh and then he passes out fliers for his circus. And... that's a random yeti. They just showed the circus tent being put up, and there is a yeti pounding the spikes in. This is followed by someone coming by from the newspaper, I guess, so Merlin appears in a puff of smoke to talk to him a bit. And uh... this is, hands down, the most pathetic appearing in a puff of smoke ever. See, it's kind of windy here, so the smoke is really getting blown away very quickly. So... it's more like a clearly visible smoke canister appears instantaneously, and then Merlin appears in front of that. Then Dr. Lao comes over after that and gives some big speech about how he's all made of magic and whimsy. He gets called out for dropping his accent completely, so... apparently he just does that to be funny. So it's in-character racism which makes it... marginally more acceptable?
So anyway, yeah. It's circus time. And all of the sudden all the bloated corpse gas powered robot legs are up on the trapeze doing fl- no wait that was Gyo. Here we just have some ditzy old lady talking to a fortune teller. Oh, and we still have that random yeti going on. The fortune teller is a bit of a downer. He's just all, yeah, nothing good is ever going to happen to you again, you're going to have a totally meaningless and pathetic existence and die loveless and alone, not mourned by anyone. That'll be ten cents. She gets her denial on pretty darn quick though. And now we're just moving on to our Pan segment. Here's someone in halfway decent makeup by way of making damn sure he's only filmed from the waste up unconvincingly playing an unconvincing prop of a pan flute. And here's the nice young single mother school character getting quite frankly way too visibly turned on by this given the tone of this movie. Right before they're about to start making sweet love down by the fire though, the official tour group comes in, so, that's just plain embarrassing right there. Especially since they point out that, you know, he IS a goat from the waist down and all.
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And now here's a very disturbing human faced snake puppet. It really is freaking creepy looking. It's just talking to Ironman there about how humans really get the shaft evolutionarily... except, like all snakes, it's all "wow, god gave you sucky eyes, a lack of in-built insulation and awkward feet. You guys suck." Now we're into our official Merlin segment, which is just a straight up magic show sort of deal, full of bad and obvious editing cuts. Not even all on stuff where you need it, they used a jump cut to hide totally being unable to toss something to a kid. Despite his clear actual magic powers, people find the show totally unimpressive. He causes a guinea pig to spontaneously burst into existence sure, but it's supposed to be a rabbit! WTF man! You suck! Oh, and now Dr. Lao is spontaneously doing a bad SCOTTISH accent instead of Chinese while talking about how the goldfish he has in this bowl is actually a baby sea serpent. He further explains that their full size really isn't much bigger than this underwater, it's just when their stick their face out, much like a blowfish, it expands from the pressure difference and is totally freaking huge. This movie sure has a lot of scenes that totally don't go anywhere.
Here's another! Medusa! We totally get that particular myth totally wrong, and then we have this whole explanation that the medusa in question (because we're calling this a race) has to be viewed only through an elaborate series of mirrors and you so totally shouldn't look behind that curtain there. So someone does because they're a jerk. But then since this isn't the sort of movie that'll off jerks on principle, Merlin comes back to cast stone to flesh on her. Oh and now here's the child of teach-mom wanting to join the circus and getting a sappy speech on why he can't. This gives us a nice close up to see how that Dr. Lao make-up's eye-shape prostheses are really freaking creepy looking. Teach-mom herself, later that night, is creeping her mother out by still being pretty seduced from before. This whole notion is really just way too creepy. Also some random goons of Ironman smashed the local paper up but Dr. Lao came along in the middle of the night to hit the magic undo button.
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Oh, and the editor of the paper apparently delivers it personally, by... OK, it's not a motorcycle. It is, flat out, a bicycle, which has a tiny little motor attached. And... now here's more racist clowning. And uh... circus day 2 is just the same bits with different characters slotted in? Ironman is getting his fortune told. Ah. There's a rairload being built that'll come through town. Someone remarks that this tent "seems to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside." Aha! Dr. Lao is a time lord! The circus is his TARDIS! Oh and now all the various freaks are kinda parading around. This includes Medusa with hand mirror which really just seems kinda pathetic. And... now here's a magically projected play within the play just saying "Don't sell Ironman your town dudes!" with... really pretty much no metaphor to it at all. Pretty amusingly heavy-handed though. "And when the people sold their town to the mysterious stranger, GOD APPEARED, SCREAMED AT THEM FOR SQUANDERING HIS GIFTS, AND RAINED DOWN HELLFIRE, COMPLETELY OBLITERATING THE VILLAGE!"
So then they vote down the notion of selling the town, and Ironman is all "Congratulations! I've just been on a spree of totally frelling people over because I was convinced that everyone in the world was a gullible jerk who'd let me totally frell them over! As reward for restoring faith in my humanity, let me tell you all how your town will be saved when a railroad gets built here in a few months." Wow. That right there is what we call good spin. So then just for full closure, Ironman's goons get drunk and start smashing up the circus tent when nobody's around except for the kid. They shoot the goldfish bowl, causing the fish inside to weirdly grow into a stop motion plesiosaur... actually it's more like a straight up dragon with a catfish face. Also? There's atonal bagpipes during its rampage. Because by sea monster we really meant loch ness monster. It goes on a pretty awesome rampage... and then it suddenly goes all hydra, growing extra heads of all the other circus folk to shout at the dudes to go away. Then finally Dr. Lao and kid uses his emergency weather machine to summon rain, thus reverting it to a goldfish.
THEN we get around to the whole circus disappearing over night. Because there is a frelling LAW that that is how you end a movie like this. Then non-racist Lao voice narrates one of them heartwarming life lessons for the kid, while his racist visage disappears over the hill on donkeyback. By the way, did I mention that the town in this movie is called, for some reason, Abalone, but not one person in the movie seems to know how to pronounce abalone? It's not Ab Alone, it's abalone. Like, abalone and cheese would probably be a creepy sandwich. So there Netflix. I watched your movie. You'll have to find something else to be your new only sci-fi/fantasy recommendation for me now. "How about the original theatrical cut of Blade Runner, which we only have available streaming?" NO! I've seen that dagnabit!
