Whoops, I missed my movie review yesterday. I'll try to squeeze in two today. The good news is, you've at least heard of both of them! In fact, we watched The Corpse Bride at Movie Night ages ago, though I didn't remember much of it. So I rewatched it.
I think I liked it a lot more the second time, though I still won't give Tim Burton any more credit as an original filmmaker, since this one is so incredibly similar to Nightmare Before Christmas.
I can't help but watch this and think of Tim Burton's personal life -- I'm surprised he didn't cast Helena Bonham Carter as the living girl, and Lisa Marie as the title character...
October 25, 2014:
So speaking of stop-motion animation, I next decided to rewatch one of the first stop-motion movies. King Kong wasn't the first (the same effects team worked on a 1925 film of Doyle's The Lost World), but it was the best. And, in many ways, it's still one of the most ground-breaking effects films ever. The team invented several important processes to marry stop-motion to live action film, in several different ways.
You all know I'm a big audio commentary nerd, and this was the very first movie ever to have a running audio commentary, thirty years ago! I haven't seen either of the remakes of this, but I'm strongly considering the 2005 version.
...and ten years later, the same studio, RKO, was still using a lot of the painted jungle backdrops from this movie. At least one appeared in I Walked With A Zombie.
October 25, 2014:
The Atomic Brain (AKA Monstrosity) is currently rated on IMDB as the 98th worst movie of all time. I think that's about right. [This is 2015 Mark breaking in to tell you this is no longer true. It's been upvoted in the last year, and no longer appears on the Bottom 100.] The movie concerns a prototypical mad scientist, who wants to expand the field of human transplantation, so he's been putting animal brains into people. He's got a guy with a dog brain, a lady with a cat brain, and at the end a cat with a lady brain (the physical size of the brain doesn't appear to matter -- he's such a good doctor he can fit a whole human brain into a cat's skull!). His old, rich employer, has hired three unsuspecting young ladies to have her brain implanted into them -- um, to clean her house.
This movie completes my trilogy of films featuring Americans doing horrible British accents -- the lady in this movie appears to forget at times she's supposed to be British. Really, the old lady from this movie was in Mary Poppins the next year, and Dick Van Dyke seems like a master of dialect compared to the actress from The Atomic Brain.
I'm kind of embarrassed, actually. I watched this whole thing without realizing it was on Mystery Science Theater. And that I'd seen the MST3K version. And that I owned it on DVD. And so I rewatched the MST version, and could only remember having seen a few of the host sequences... Anyway, it's in the public domain, so if you wanna watch it, there's a link at the bottom of that Wikipedia page.
October 26, 2015:
Night Tide. He was a sailor; she was a mermaid. Well, maybe she was.
This is the most surprising movie I've watched all month: it's certainly atmospheric, and it has a few "eerie, strange, macabre" scenes (to quote the poster), but it's neither a horror movie nor a monster movie. It's a pretty effective story, methinks, and this is one of the two new-to-me movies from this month I'll gladly watch again (the other is I Walked With A Zombie).
This has a few familiar faces in it: besides a young, fresh-faced Dennis Hopper, the evil old lady from The Atomic Brain plays a really sympathetic (and really accurate) fortuneteller, and Vincent Price's sister from Pit and The Pendulum is a sweet merry-go-round operator and dispenser of endless cups of coffee.
Almost the entirety of the action takes place on the Santa Monica Boardwalk, so this movie acts as a great time capsule of that place and time. Again, this one is in the public domain, and the bottom of that Wikipedia page has a link to watch it. This one's worth it.
Stay tuned, folks: our next capsule reviews include two vampire movies, a dreadful Disney family film, and a killer clown.
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