October 19, 2014:
Here's Madhouse, the final Vincent Price movie in my li'l box set.
Not a Corman, not a Poe. BUT, it does have clips in it from a lot of the Corman/Poe/Price films, and even claims to guest-star Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff since they appear in clip form. (And, oh yeah, it reuses the fiery climax of ...House of Usher again.)What a weird movie -- an aging film star, suspected of murdering his wife, finally revives his most famous horror character but the shoot is marred by further murders. Is the film star responsible? He doesn't THINK so. Full of mid-70s British "contemporary" fashions, and even features Michael Parkinson for some reason.
We'll get into a few better movies, starting tomorrow...
October 20, 2014:
Immediately after they finished filming the original Cat People, but before it was released, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur made I Walked With A Zombie. It's a voodoo picture based, loosely, on Jane Eyre. And it's the best, least exploitative voodoo picture I've ever seen. Voodoo is shown to be merely a tool, one which can be used for good or evil, rather than a soul-sucking weapon used by the evil people of color against the innocent white folks.
This movie is really, really good, and for a movie made exclusively by white folks in 1943, the characterizations of people of color are really well-done: interesting, distinct, and realistic. (Plus, the movie's treatment of the effects of past slavery, while not up to our current standards, are also realistic and as honest as any white capitalist could be in 1943. I think it helps that Tourneur was French and Lewton was Russian -- that is, they hadn't been raised in a country only a few decades out of slavery.)
Like Cat People, this is haunting and perfect. It makes me want to seek out all the other movies Tourneur directed. Tomorrow, another Lewton-produced horror film.
October 21, 2014:
It's got Karloff! It's got Lugosi! It's got thorny ethical questions based on an original story by Robert Louis Stevenson! It's The Body Snatcher! Oh, and it's got some truly questionable accents. (For a movie set in Scotland in the 1830s, there sure were a lot of bit players sounding suspiciously like 1940s Americans...)
So, real-life Britain had a shortage of cadavers for medical study, which led schools to post a no-questions-asked bounty, which started out with grave-robbing and led a few enterprising businessmen to eliminate the middleman and kill their own.
Karloff is menacing as all get-out in this. There's one truly haunting sequence told entirely in the dark, with no dialogue. (The technical spareness of the scene, and the fact that the crime takes place only in our minds, feels as exciting to me as the first time Eisenstein realized he could use editing to tell a story in Potemkin.)
For the record, this is not the alien takeover film The Invasion of The Bodysnatchers (which I've never seen).
October 22, 2014:
So, a short time before he wrote I Walked With A Zombie for Val Lewton, Curt Siodmak made up all the things we think we know about werewolves for The Wolf Man. I'd never seen this movie before, or any sequels, remakes, or even specific parodies, but I knew every beat in this story. I think that tells you a little about how influential this monster movie was. You can read all the trivia about makeup and such on that Wikipedia page there, so let me just say this:
The Universal monster movies (the original ones, at least -- I haven't bothered to watch many of the sequels) are at their best in creating atmosphere. And this movie has tons of it. Graveyards, foggy moonlit Welsh forests, even the dusty old manor house.
Later on, once I've gotten some sleep, I'm planning to draw up a little Venn diagram for the three early 40's movies I saw (these last three) and their intersecting themes and personnel. [Note from 2015 Mark: I never did this. Just note that Bela is in this, and this also shares some interesting brother issues with I Walked With A Zombie -- what was Siodmak's relationship like with his brother, I wonder?]
Final thought: this one's okay. It's no Dracula, and it's no Bride of Frankenstein. But, if it's on TV and you've got two hours to kill, it's much better than that Nightmare on Elm Street installment on the other channel.
Okay, that's another day's worth. The next four capsule reviews include two movies with stop-motion animation, and two no-budget public domain movies, one of which I adored.
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