The Live Wire (1935)
2/10
Uggh!! Imagine if Popeye played lead in "Treasure Island" and you've got this film!!!
20 June 2010
"The Live Wire" is simply horrible--a low-budget film from start to finish. The acting is bad, the writing is bad and the direction is bad...and there is nothing positive I can say about the film. Yes folks, it IS that bad!! The film begins with a couple egg-head professors approaching a guy in a pawn shop about a pot for sale there. Apparently it's valuable and might lead them to some more cool ancient stuff--so they go in search of the sailor who sold the store this artifact. Eventually, when they do find him, they convince the guy to go with them on sea voyage in search of the island on which this was found. Along the way, a Bluto-like character leads a mutiny and the good sailor (who SHOULD have been named Popeye) almost single-handedly beats up the mutineers--and could have stopped the mutiny a lot faster had he had his spinach!! Believe it or not, when you watch the film you start to realize that it's actually a bizarre reworking of "Treasure Island". So, despite the stowaway girl posing as a male seaman, the black man who is the embodiment of every negative stereotype known in 1935 and a miraculous escape, the film is the Stevenson story---as played by Popeye!! It's dumb and my favorite dumb moment is when a sailor tosses a match carelessly next to cans clearly marked 'gasoline'!! Not only is this unbelievable but it takes seemingly forever for the cans to explode! Sloppy but that's par for the course in this dumb and horribly racist film.
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