A Spoopy Month: Happy Halloween from Mysterious Mose!

Here it is -- my ultimate Halloween post for 2015!

If you've ever spent more than ten minutes with me in person during the month of October, I've probably made you watch this. If so, I implore you to watch it again. This is a 1998 film based around a 1930 novelty record, and I'd love this song even if the accompanying visuals weren't so great.

Sidebar: Why didn't the Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) band ever record this song? I love their Monster Mash, and even considering the low budget, their visual presentation of the song is ambitious and fun. I would love at least one more spooky, atmospheric song from them, and a cover of this would fit the bill and meet their early-years need for generations-old novelty songs.

I've always loved this film, since it uses puppetry and stop-motion animation and even some shadow animation to tell a weird, spooky, wacky story. There's a graveyard jamboree (you could almost call it a swingin' wake) and Mose has to round up (or dig up) all the musicians for the show.

Okay, so maybe it's light on plot, but each frame of this does something interesting, and it's obvious that each character and set was built by hand in the real world. In 1998, computer animation wasn't as advanced as it is now, but the love and hard work invested in this production clearly shine through as the textural opposite of that year's metallic, shiny CGI-fests Godzilla and Armageddon. In just a few years, CGI would've been an affordable method to remove all the visible rods from the puppets and special effects, but the directors don't care -- the handmade nature of this is an important part of the fun.

Appropriately, there are a few mysteries I don't get about this video: first off, do I know this guy from somewhere else? This weird green bird only has a few seconds of screen time, but he rang distant bells in my head I can't place. (Sure, he looks a LEEETLE like Jose Carioca, but not much.)

Secondly, the credits thank Don Sahlin. Everyone else in the thank you section (that a quick googly search will find, anyway) seems to have had something to do with the actual production, but Sahlin died twenty years before this film was made. He was, of course, enormously influential in the worlds of both stop-motion and puppetry, working with George Pal and Burr Tillstrom and designing/building most of your favorite Muppets in their first incarnations. At least one of the other credits appears to be a joke ("Costumes by Cesar Romero"), but this sticks with me.

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Looking back from the end of this month, I've certainly missed posting a few days, but I wrote more things than I did in December last year, and I consider that a win. I'm hoping to post more regularly (if less frequently) in the future, so watch this space! Thanks, all, for your kind attention. Have a great Halloween night!

A Spoopy Month: Happy Halloween from Betty Boop!

I've missed quite a few days this month, but I posted more times than in December, so I'll call that a victory. No matter what, I wanted to post on the day itself.

Betty Boop first appeared this same year, and she was less human and more dog in this, one of her very earliest cartoons. (Her best-known voice actor, Mae Questal, hadn't taken over the role yet.) In this cartoon, despite her high quota of screen time, Betty is nonetheless a second banana to the nominal star of this cartoon, Bimbo.

Betty is still not as grown-up sexy as she'd come to be shortly -- the joke about her shirt being literally scared off her is played entirely for laughs, and it doesn't feel particularly scandalous or titillating, which we always think coexists with the laughter in Betty's work.

So Betty's in bed late at night, and the wind is blowing, trees are rattling, animals are making spooky noises outside her window, and she's scared! It's so spooky that her hair goes white for a few seconds. Then, she meets a shadowy shape shifter, and he brings his bug and bat friends to serenade her with a strange, unearthly song.

This is more a weird romance cartoon (I'm trying not to think too hard of the creepy, Twilight-y implications of the girl falling in love with the guy who breaks into her house at night) than a straight-up scary picture. There are quite a few spookier Betty Boop cartoons, but the reason for my sharing this one will become clear later today, when I post my final Halloween thing.

Hard to believe, but I couldn't find a buy link for today's cartoon, so please just watch it on YouTube again...

A Spoopy Month #23: Grim Grinning Ghosts

Hi, and sorry again for the recent lack of posts. I had big plans for today, but no time to execute them. (Get it? Halloween? Murder pun? Never mind.)

So here is a link to my old post from 2008, wherein I talk a little about one of the catchiest ghost songs of all time, "Grim Grinning Ghosts" from Disney's Haunted Mansion.

The download link, like all the rest on that blog, is long-since dead, but I've once again made the songs available, for a limited time only. If you like what you hear, please go buy the songs from the copyright holders. And if you're reading this past, say, November 15th or so, don't be surprised if the link is down. Sorry.

Did you know that title comes from Shakespeare? In "Venus and Adonis," he wrote:

...Hateful divorce of love,'—thus chides she Death,—
'Grim-grinning ghost, earth's worm, what dost thou mean
To stifle beauty and to steal his breath,
Who when he liv'd, his breath and beauty set
Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet?''

And now that I've given you your culture for the day, get to listening! I've already got two posts in the pipeline for tomorrow, and one of them is, like, my favorite thing ever. See ya then!

A Spoopy Month #22: Keebler Pumpkin Spice Fudge Stripes

Holy cats, I'm waaaay behind. Here's a quick one for today - promise to make it up to you.

As usual, my own pictures didn't look very good, so here's a picture I stole from someone else (sorry, Margaret!):

Wow. These were a lot better than I expected. They have the same consistency of regular Fudge Stripes, with a thin cookie and nearly as much "fudge" on the bottom. I was expected a graham cracker-style cookie, but the cookie is more like a ginger snap. It's not sharp, but there's a huge amount of ginger there, just perfect to balance with the creamy fudge.

There are a LOT of cookies in this pack, and I don't think I want more than two or three in a setting. Unless I have a cold glass of milk.  ... I just realized I should probably buy some milk after work.

A Spoopy Month #21: Newsradio "Daydream"

So, two weeks after their official Halloween episode, Paul Simms and his silly friends did another spooky thing, and it's just one layer of one of the best Newsradios ever.

The office A/C is out of order (Joe's working on it!) and it's leading everyone to have some strange daydreams. Bill, of course, is having fantasy makeout sessions with all the ladies, and Lisa is trying desperately to craft a proper verbal comeback to Dave.

Sidebar: Of course Lisa won't match Dave's quickness -- she enjoys fast-talking verbal barbs, My Girl Friday-style, but after one quick exchange she's usually spent. Why oh why isn't Maura Tierney still working in comedy? I haven't seen her current show (though I made the mistake of trying both of Dave's last shows), but I don't imagine it gives her much opportunity to make with the yuk-yuks.

Dave just wants people to do something (work would be nice). Catherine is imagining more people of color in the office (including her future Treme husband), but only ends up with poor Joe Furey, fresh off his triumph as the mime who wouldn't shut up in our last episode.

Beth is more out of it than most, since she and Matthew stayed up all night watching horror movies, so she keeps seeing Matthew as every scary movie. (He's Chucky! He's Jason! He's Dracula! He's Alien!) We spend a large portion of this episode as Beth relives the most iconic horrors of recent times.

Meanwhile, the A/C's still out, and Joe's still working on it! And he can only dream of the day he's converted everyone else into robots to do his bidding.

This won't be the first time I've mentioned my love for audio commentaries, and the one recorded for this episode is a doozy. It's got creator Paul Simms, along with Dave and Vicki Lewis and Andy Dick. And Andy Dick, predictably, doesn't remember much about the episode. (My friend went to the recent stage reunion of the cast and tells me this is still the dynamic among the cast: We love Andy, and he's special, but...)

This is the first "weird" Newsradio episode, and the first they filmed without a live audience. The writing is incredibly tight, but still has room for things like the daydream of Howie, the little old man who runs the snack cart and is never heard from again. The nesting daydream of Matthew with red "Thriller" eyes perfectly mirrors the inescapable dreamlike horror of the ending of that video.

And speaking of iconic endings of things, let's spend a second on St. Elsewhere, shall we? I've only ever seen one episode, but I know the ending is a direct lift from that, theme music and all. It's weird, but I still get a little emotional at this episode's end. He doesn't say it much, but we know (or at least desperately need to believe) that Jimmy truly loves all the nutballs at his radio station, and the sweet chiming music (no matter where it's from) can make me mist up a little. I'm really grateful for the joy this show has brought me (and I believe most of the cast and crew truly felt like a family during the production), and the ten seconds of elegy for the show, midway through its run, is both ridiculous and touching. When this show's actual end came, it was messy and disheartening, not at all what I hoped it would or could be. So, I'll take what I can get.


As an episode of Newsradio, I rate this 10/10. I'm tempted to go higher -- this is a paradigm-setting part of this show, and led to even higher flights of fancy later, but remains grounded and in-universe.
As a Halloween episode, I rate this 4/10. We don't spend a large percentage of our time on scary things (though I count Joe's cyborg fantasy in that), but it is solid and fun.

A Spoopy Month #20: Newsradio "Halloween"

Let's lighten up a little bit, shall we? Here's a great Halloween episode, from one of my favorite TV shows of all time.

Newsradio was on the air for too short a time, just one of the many casualties of our country's dearth of mental health care. (Wow, sorry, I really WANTED to lighten things up.) And in season three, they made two great Halloweeny episodes. This first one is set on the most wonderful day of the year, and actually aired on Halloween Eve, 1996. I hope you've seen it, since we're, as always, spoilertasmic from here on out.

As a Newsradio superfan (no, really, I have the costume and everything), I'm no longer capable of being surprised by anything in this episode, or even remembering my first impressions. But, there are a lot of great, memorable moments in this episode.

Probably most notably, this is the episode that let Dave Foley wear a dress. At the time, he was still best known for KITH, and the audience cheers at his reveal. Of course, it happens because Dave and Lisa are scrapping over who's in charge, and they have to outdo each other to impress Mr. James. (Jimmy's line about zig-zagging is still one of my twenty most-quoted sayings from the show, and his completely dry delivery is just another example of his brilliant, unpredictable characterization.)

The rest of the staff are in costumes too, and they're all reflections of their personalities: Beth's ballerina, Catherine's queen, Joe's doctor (how in god's name did Jimmy correctly guess he's an alien autopsy coroner?), and Matthew is ...not pulling it off. 

Sidebar: This is the first time I've seen this episode out of context, without other episodes around it, and I was really struck by the gay jokes. Even considering Andy Dick's complex sexuality, I'm surprised how casually the writers threw around stereotypes for a quick and dirty laugh. (I expect Joe to say thoughtless things, but Jimmy's almost dismissive description of Matthew's costume feels out-of-place, both from his character and on this show.)

Oh, but Bill's not interested in costumes. He's doomed, y'see. In retrospective, one of the show's creepier moments is when the psychic predicts Bill's death. (I know, I know, I'm sorry! Lighter and funnier! I promise!) So he meets a woman who helps him put things in perspective and live one day at a time.

So the older lady (the actress is best-known from Donnie Darko) reminds Bill, and all of us, what Halloween's about -- death comes for us all, which is why "tonight, we dance!" And, fittingly, the episode ends with a quick moral lesson for Bill, and then a funny dance. (Why, it's like Matthew put himself into the mind of a robot.)

As an episode of Newsradio, I rate this 8/10. Everyone has something to do, and most of it's both in-character and funny.
As a Halloween episode, I rate this 6/10. Sure, it's a Halloween party, and everyone's in costume, but there's nothing scary and not even a spooky song (sorry, Jimmy, but The Hokey-Pokey will never be spooky).

A Spoopy Month #19: Apt Pupil (audiobook version)

The next novella in Stephen King's Different Seasons collection is Apt Pupil. This was only my second time reading this story (and, until last week, I'd never seen the movie, but more about that later). I remembered the basic bones of the plot, but none of the details.

This is deeply disturbing for me, and I'm used to being disturbed by fiction. I can easily imagine some people, who view King as a populist genre hack, looking down on his retelling of some of our worst atrocities as a species. I personally love Stephen King as a storyteller -- even when his plots are formulaic, his people almost always shine (no pun intended originally, but I kinda like that double meaning upon reflection). He is at his best writing people, and it's hard to take when the people I'm feeling for get eaten by monsters or tortured or evilly enabled by Nazis.

Apt Pupil isn't King's best work, but it includes some great characters (I love the characterizations of Monica and Rubber Ed) and some of his most grisly portrayals of cruelty. The narrator of my audiobook edition, Frank Muller, again does honor to the story and characters. In Muller's tones, Denker steers clear of stereotyped speech patterns. It would be tempting for a reader to soften the hard edges of this story, to add warmth and humanity, but Muller also avoids that temptation.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about the regrettable film of this book.

Once again, the CD version of this audiobook is much cheaper, so the link goes there.

A Spoopy Month #18: The Wasp Woman

It's my last Corman of this October. It's 1959's The Wasp Woman.

To be completely honest, this was a much better movie than I expected. Well, let me rephrase. The story, and implications, of this film were much better than I expected. The film shows all the hallmarks of early low-budget Corman productions, the science makes no sense at all, and the monster makeup at the end of the movie is truly laughable. But the meaning of the film shouldn't be laughed at, not at all.

First off, this is a unique type of mad-scientist-makes-monster movie. To start with, the scientist isn't mad at all. As this article points out, our Dr. Zinthrop is cautious and methodical. Unique among movie scientists, his experimental documentation is painstaking and complete. The monster only happens because Dr. Zinthrop is required, for plot purposes, to stagger into traffic before he can stop the abuse of his method.

And why is our heroine, Janice Starlin, abusing his method in the first place? Well, she's a woman who got ahead in business using the only tools available to her in 1940's and 50's America: her youth and beauty. Since she abdicated her role as spokesperson for her cosmetics company, sales have been dropping. And she only abdicated because -- horror of horrors -- she's starting to look like she's on the far side of 30! So when Dr. Zinthrop's youth restoration method isn't working fast enough for her, Janice goes behind his back to multiply her personal dosage of his untested drug, a drug he didn't want to give her in the first place.

Don't get me wrong -- Ms. Starlin is far, far more than just a pretty face. The movie goes out of its way to show us she has a keen business sense and a strong grasp on the whims of the market. But she's lost confidence in her physical appearance. The age-makeup worn by the actress is fairly good for a film of this era and budget, but the youth makeup, when Janice starts to feel 20 again, is only part of the bargain. When the treatment has finally taken hold, Janice feels 20, and that gives her a bounce in her step and a huge smile. More importantly, it makes her once again feel confident that she can not only run her company, but serve as the trusted public face. 

On the other hand, now she's some kind of monster who kills people, drinks their blood, and (thankfully offscreen) is probably eating every bit of their bodies. She's going through at least one a day by the end, and no amount of market share is worth that.

In the end, this monster is made not by the evils of science, toying with things man was not meant to know, but by internalized sexism. The female voices in this movie are strong, and mostly admirable (or at least relatable), but it's clear that AMERICAN INDUSTRY is still very much a man's man's man's world. 

We all see what we expect to see -- it's part of the human condition. When the male board members of Starlin Cosmetics see Janice Starlin showing doubt and weakness, it never occurs to them that they might play some part in her self-doubt. When Janice looks in the mirror near the end, and sees herself looking 20 years younger, it never occurs to her that her smile and wide-open eyes have so much to do with it. And when we look back on a movie with this title, made by Roger Corman in this era, with this budget, we don't expect to have to think much about it. It's so easy to write it off as another cheapy monster exploitation movie (it even quotes the previous year's The Fly, as Janice screams "Help meeee!"). But we're better off if we don't. 

This film is, again, in the public domain, so you can watch it (or download it) at archive.org, which includes the ten minutes of extra padding added to the film (the loooooong opening sequence, where Dr. Zinthrop walks through fields and gets fired from his previous job, and the looooong search scene, where police drive around and around, looking for him since he was foolish enough to wander into traffic without carrying ID). I can't find a release of the film with that stuff taken back out, but here's a buy link for you anyway, just in case:

A Spoopy Month #17: Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption

Uh-oh, missed a day there. I'll try to get an extra post in here sometime soon.

Starting this summer, I've been enjoying the audiobook versions of all of Stephen King's short fiction. I made it through all the short stories in about six weeks, and I've finally started the novella collections. The first one in his first collection is probably the best-known, and quite possibly just the flat-out best.

Of course I've seen, and of course I truly love, the film version of this story, and of all the King adaptations I've seen, it's not only the best but also the most faithful to the source material. If you've seen the film, 90% of what you saw on screen is from this novella (apart from the great PA classical music scene), and 90% of the important parts of the novella made it into the movie.

If you've watched the movie more than once, and will gladly watch it again, why not try the novella? You can get a paper copy for cheap, and this audio version, read by Frank Muller, is great. Muller doesn't spend too much time giving particularly unique voices to the characters (does it mean I'm 3 years old if I prefer that in my audiobooks?), but he acts each part to the fullest.

I've linked you to the CD version, as it's cheaper, but if you prefer the digital download on Audible, it's just a click away:

A Spoopy Month #16: Charms Candy Corn Super Blow Pop

I tried to take my own picture of this tasty piece of sugar, but it didn't come out well at all. So here's picture I stole from a quick Google Image search:

When you open a Candy Corn Blow Pop, the first thing you get is the smell. This sucker SMELLS like candy corn. If you opened two at once, your whole house would smell like Halloween for an hour.

And it tastes fantastic, like candy corn and a little bit of butterscotch. That might seem like a low bar to set, but after the disappointment of the Candy Corn Peeps, I'm really enjoying this sucker. This is a nice big lollipop, and as you can see from the picture up there, it looks good and candy-corn-ish. This is the third blogpost I've written while working on this Blow Pop, and I've just now gotten into the bubblegum center, which is... interesting. It's just standard bubblegum, which you wouldn't expect to work with the candy corn, but it's great for the few minutes the sugar sticks around.

Anyway, this cost me under a buck at a local gas station, and you can probably find them at any number of random places near you. OR, if you wanna go all in, why not buy 48 of them?

Charms Candy Corn Super Blow Pops - 48 Pack

A Spoopy Month #15: The last of the leftovers, warmed over and with some kinda weird sauce on top. What IS that?

It's time for the last batch of movie reviews from last year, and it's a weird mix indeed.

October 31, 2014:

(big inhale) Okay. So, yes, Tower of Terror isn't very good. And yes, the nominal star of this made-for-TV movie is Steve Guttenberg. But, again, I'll try to be positive:
A lot of this, like a LOT of it, was filmed at the attraction in Orlando. It's great to see close-ups of that setting, from angles we can't get to as guests.
Melora Hardin gets to sing in this, which she never got around to as Jan Levenson.
It's always nice to see Mike McShane in anything, even if his '97 appearance in this can't make up for his complete lack in involvement in the US Whose Line.
Um... well, it starts with "Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)" which is a great song.
It's great that this film, while not officially related to the Twilight Zone in any way, adapts every other thing about the attraction, including dropping our heroes in a modern-day freefalling elevator, and even the random assortment of 1939 victims, who are all major characters in this.

Okay, enough positivity. I've been rewatching the first season of Twilight Zone this month, in between movies, and the writing on that is so damned adult. I just wish this had been written so adults, ones with full attention spans and active intellects, could enjoy this movie as much as their children would.

Well, it could be worse. It could be The Country Bears.

(And just in case you don't click through to that Wikipedia link, here's a neat piece of trivia. The writer/director of this is now a YA author, and he's written the bellboy from this film into his series as a very minor character. That's pretty cool.)

October 31, 2014:

The Astro Zombies: Whoo boy, now THIS is a bad one. I've only seen one other Ted V. Mikels film (Girl in the Gold Boots, on MST3K), and it was just as bad, but much more depressing. This one isn't depressing, just boring.
What's that you say? How can a film with reanimated solar-powered, radio-controlled corpses be boring?
Well, John Carradine can explain the process to us (and his greasy assistant) in minute detail. The film was written by Wayne Rogers, later to become TV's Trapper John, who is apparently the world's biggest electronics nerd (he's on the board of a company that makes semiconductors). I'm not smart enough to know why the technology in the film doesn't work in real life, but the film really really really wants us to believe it has scientific credibility. (The scientific equipment in the film was apparently scrounged from a dump. At one point, a body is stored in a freezer which is clearly a grocery-store frozen-food bunker.)
Not only is the mad scientist really boring, this movie has the world's worst spy. We see Tura Satana (Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill!) interrogate two people. The first one, she only asks him "Who are you?" (and her henchman has JUST read his ID from his wallet) and shoots him before he can answer. The second time, she's trying to recruit Carradine to reanimate corpses for her country's army, and shoots him less than two minutes into the process, after he's agreed to do so.
Starting in 2008, Mikels made three, count 'em, three sequels to this!
I have two more films (good ones, at least) to talk about tomorrow.
Happy Halloween, everyone!

November 1, 2014:

Eyes Without A Face, on the other hand, is really good. It's poetic and gorgeous, and the emotions in it are heartfelt. After the constant explanations of Astro Zombies, the almost underwritten script of this film (at least, the translated subtitles were pretty spare) is a relief. With that said, the director called it a movie of "anguish," rather than a horror film, and there's a surgery scene which is pretty hard to watch (at the Edinburgh Film Festival showing, reportedly seven people fainted).
Remember in my review of Shadow of the Vampire, which I compared to Night Tide, when I said I love genre films made by fine artists? This is another one of those, I think.
And, oddly enough, the plot for this is so obvious and horror-movie-like: a mad scientist, spurned by his colleagues, operating on humans, just like in The Atomic Brain and Astro Zombies, and several hundred other films (most better than those two examples).
We have one more spooky movie to talk about, and it's a pure delight. See ya tonight, folks.

November 1, 2014:

I Married A Witch: Here's a delightful piece of fluff to round out my month of spooky movies. It's a screwball romantic farce that begins with the eponymous witch being burned. She puts a curse on her accuser, and condemns his descendants to marry the wrong women, for all time.
Okay, so it's a little sexist -- the "wrong" women are pretty much all shrewish and controlling, as we see in a quick montage of 270 years, bringing us to the 1940s.
When the witch and her father are released from their eternal imprisonment by an errant bolt of lightning, she almost immediately decides to continue tormenting the latest descendant of the pilgrim who had her burnt, but her plan goes awry.
In the end, everything turns out for the best, despite the witch's vengeful father (played by Cecil Calloway, who I'd just seen that same day in a Twilight Zone episode, "Elegy," in which he plays a creepy caretaker and host to three astronauts millions of miles from Earth).
I think Veronica Lake is maybe a little too kittenish, even in the first part of this movie, to be truly believable as a vengeance-bound bride of evil. But those were different times, and it's hard to completely switch tones in a movie only 73 minutes long. Overall, good fun, even though I never cared for Bewitched (which, for legal reasons, was not based on this film.)
[So these last two movies I watched in conjunction with Greg Proops' other podcast, The Greg Proops Film Club. You can find those episodes here and here. He's been promising the Young Frankenstein episode, which I'm really looking forward to.]

Thanks for reading these old capsule reviews. All new stuff coming up, including some Halloweenish TV episodes and more movies and even more candy!

A Spoopy Month #14: Mad Monster Party?

Well, I made it 13 days before running out of pre-written posts. This post is going up late in the day, not my usual schedule at all, but I've watched a lot of stuff I'm excited to write about, so I hope to get a few more posts in the pipeline today. Here's another Karloff movie, 1967's Mad Monster Party?

As you can see, it's stop-motion, and it's another Rankin-Bass spectacular. What you can't see, and might not guess, is why that word "Mad" is in the title. It was produced by Mad Magazine's publisher, and the characters were mostly designed by Mad artist Jack Davis. The movie was also co-written by Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman. (It's not important to this movie, but pretty important to me, that around the time Kurtzman was working on this movie, he'd just finished several years as Terry Gilliam's boss at Help! Magazine.)

I don't feel like this movie reaches the dizzying absurdist heights of humor that Mad could go to, though there are plenty of familiar touches (the characters are named things like Yetch and Felix Flanken). It's consistently amusing, though most people agree it's too long. (Apparently the producer/distributor wanted it to be 90 minutes, so a handful of extraneous scenes were added and filmed. This would benefit greatly from removal of those scenes, and a general tightening of atmosphere and chase scenes.) And while we're on the subject of the script, my DVD contains a special feature in which Arthur Rankin himself takes credit for my favorite joke in the movie: our hero and his lady are running from the monsters, trying to escape off the island, and she's unable to run any more. She begs the hero to save himself: "Go on, Felix. Just leave me something to read."

Karloff plays Dr. Frankenstein for a change in this one, and Phyllis Diller is immediately recognizable as herself (they even renamed Frankenstein's Monster to "Fang," in honor of her act). Most of the voice duties, though, fall to Allen Swift, who plays Felix as Jimmy Stewart (his job is as a pharmacist's assistant, and frankly I can't NOT think of It's A Wonderful Life in those scenes). Swift also makes The Invisible Man into Sydney Greenstreet and Yetch into Peter Lorre (what, no one could sound like Bogart?).

There are songs, too, which I personally didn't care for at all, since they had almost no jokes in them, though apparently the cult following for this film is at least partly due to the soundtrack. One person's meat, and all that.

You can find this on DVD most anywhere this time of year, and I'm honestly surprised I hadn't ever bothered to watch it before now. I doubt I'll see it every year, but it's a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes and has a handful of really funny monster jokes.

A Spoopy Month #13: The Terror

So what, you're asking yourself, is with all the Roger Corman movies? To be honest, it's just a coincidence. The Poe movies I watched last year were in the $5 bin. The Cormans I'm watching this year were too. Here's the next one, 1963's The Terror.



For all his business savvy, Corman wasn't the sharpest legal guy. He left copyright notices off a lot of his movies, which is why you can watch this and things like his original Little Shop Of Horrors for free, or even sell copies yourself.

This movie is kind of a mess. The script was hammered together by Jack Hill, who ten years later would be the king of a different type of exploitation movie (he directed Coffy and Foxy Brown), and Leo Gordon, who was much better known as a cowboy actor (that same year John Wayne famously punched him in McLintock!). The plot is needlessly complex and twisty (I must admit I kept being surprised by the ambitious plot), but the dialogue is frequently clunky.

It took five directors to film this mess, too, including Corman himself and Jack Nicholson and even one F. F. Coppola. Karloff only had three days to film all his scenes, and quite a few establishing shots reuse footage I saw in one of the Poe films last year. (I also feel like all the sets are leftovers from those films too.)

So here's the plot: Karloff, using his natural British accent, is a German baron hiding from the world in his rotting castle. Nicholson, using his own personal American accent, is an occupying French soldier during the Napoleonic era, who's been separated from his regiment. Karloff is being tormented by a terrible secret from his past, and a neighboring witch is trying to gaslight him into committing suicide, with the unwitting help of a hypnotized girl. (The girl is hypnotized with the same lamp Basil Rathbone used the previous year to hypnotize Vincent Price in the final third of Tales Of Terror, and I assume her gruesome end is achieved the same way as Price's dissolution in that film.) (Oh, and did I mention that the girl, who's presumably German but has an American accent, was Jack's real-life wife at the time?)

Jack Nicholson's character, showing characteristic American French bravery and nobility, tries to get to the bottom of the mystery, foil the witch's evil plans, save the baron, and make out with the girl. While each of his goals is temporarily achieved, he barely escapes with his life, and at the end of the film he's even lost his horse, and still hasn't met up with his regiment.

In the end, this film is long on "spooky" atmosphere and short on, well, most other things. I'm glad I've seen it, though, which I can't always say for these things. (I'm looking directly at you, Masque of the Red Death!)

A Spoopy Month #12: More reheated leftover reviews

October 27, 2014:

I don't enjoy poetry. Let me explain: I can understand the technical merits of poetry, and appreciate the artistry in a well-turned verse. I will gladly read poetry, and listen to it read by someone else, but I don't enjoy it. I realized, during my viewing of Nosferatu, that I feel the same way about most silent films. I can recognize that this film is important, and influential, and technically brilliant. I can enjoy a few scenes for what they are, but there's something missing from the equation for me personally to enjoy a 90-minute silent film.
With that said, this is one to watch if you care about horror. It was nearly lost forever, as the producers failed to get proper rights to Stoker's Dracula book, and the version of the film we have now is cobbled together from sources scrounged from hidden vaults and archives all over the world. You've seen a few images from this before, through cultural osmosis, and they're the most haunting parts of the movie. It's in the public domain in this country, so you can find it everywhere online for free, but there's a definitive version on Netflix that's closest to the original presentation, if those things matter to you.

October 28, 2014:

So naturally, after Nosferatu, I had to watch the movie about the making of Nosferatu. And boy, is it fun. It's funny, and gripping, and absolutely gorgeous. (Like Night Tide, this film was directed by an artsy-type guy who just dabbled in genre film, and both movies are wonderfully human and haunting.)
So besides Willem Dafoe as the vampire, the movie stars John Malkovich as a silent-film director, which gives him plenty of opportunities to go Malkovich Mad like no one else can. (Also, Eddie Izzard is hilarious in his minor role. I suppose I should also mention Mr. C. Elwes...) Oh, and this was the first movie ever made by Nicolas Cage's production company, but luckily he doesn't appear in the movie. According to the DVD's special features, he was personally responsible for the casting of Malkovich and Dafoe, so I guess he gets a lot of credit for that at least.
This won all kinds of awards, and rightly so. I kinda wish the director returned to making more mainstream films, so I could watch more movies like this one.

October 30, 2014:

So, I finally saw the Haunted Mansion movie. It came out the same year as the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and this is the one that fulfilled all the doubts and inferior predictions people made about POTC.
Rather than tell you all the bad or mediocre things about it, here's a list of the things I liked:

• Wallace Shawn is always funny, in everything.
• A lot of the art direction and set design is gorgeous.
• The idea to show a suicide onscreen, and make the dead people really grisly and realistic, while misguided, was at least ambitious.

Also, I couldn't help but notice that, like The Corpse Bride, this movie features a wedding ceremony wherein a dead person marries a live person, and the live person is expected to drink poison wine so the marriage can work.
I can only hope that, one day, Guillermo del Toro will make good on his Mansion movie.

October 20, 2014:

I'll try to keep this short. I'd never read It before last week, or seen the TV adaptation. The book is good, of course, but it's also long. Turning an 1,100 page book into a three hour movie is nearly impossible (the audiobook version I listened to ran nearly two days!), but the adaptation is mostly efficient.
The problem is, Stephen King can be an efficient storyteller, but he's at his best when he's rambling. Some of my favorite parts of It are his long divergent interludes, wherein we find out about the historic evils of the town and Pennywise's past doings, which barely rate a mention in the TV film.
The cast is pretty good, and it's nice to see, for example, Harry Anderson and a young Seth Green play a grown-up and teenage version, respectively, of the same character. Of course, Tim Curry is indelible as Pennywise.
The adaptation's biggest crime, and to me it ranks fairly low on the list of book-to-film adaptation crimes, is that it makes the story much simpler. This focuses our attention on the more mythic, Campbellian parts of the battle between good and evil, while losing so many of the character details which make our seven heroes real to me. The two climactic battles, one in each time-frame, have lost the metaphysical parts of the battle, becoming almost entirely real-world and physical fights.
But, both book and film have enduring, horrifying scares I'll remember pretty much forever, and if I only have three hours to spend on this story, I'd watch the film version again.

In a few more days, we'll see the last batch of these reviews, with another Disney family horror comedy, one of the worst movies I've ever seen, one of the most grueling horror movies I've ever seen, and a fluffy witch comedy.

A Spoopy Month #11: More Halloween Peeps

I don't like the other two flavors of Halloween Peeps as much as Caramel Apple, but they're both decent.

The Candy Corn Peeps are... not much. The candy corn flavoring isn't great. (In the past, I've loved other candy corn flavored items, like the original Jones Candy Corn soda, until they switched to cane sugar and ruined the recipe.) In fact, it kind of just tastes like a marshmallow, until you hit that white fudge. It sounds silly to say that anything could be overwhelmed by white fudge, but there it is. I've never been impressed by any other attempts to marry candy corn and white chocolate. (This may be controversial, but I didn't like the Candy Corn M & Ms AT ALL.)

On the other hand, I didn't expect to like the marriage of pumpkin spice and white fudge either, but that's really good. On opening the package, you get a nice whiff of nutmeg and cinnamon and such. Though the spices are a little too subtle for my personal taste, I can easily imagine polishing off this pack in a few minutes (though, as previously mentioned, my bathroom scale wouldn't appreciate that).  I've always passed when I saw actual pumpkin-spice-flavored-fudge, but this has changed my mind and I'm onboard with that concept now.

This Halloween season has been my first exploration of the specially-flavored Peeps, and when Easter rolls back around I'm excited to try some of those new ones. Let's see: orange, probably watermelon, I think I remember cotton candy, was there blue raspberry?

Candy Corn  ---  Pumpkin Spice

A Spoopy Month #10: Doombuggies Spook Show Podcast!

Hey, there's a new episode of the Doombuggies Spook Show! It's been a while (the last episode was several months ago), but this more than makes up for it.

Doombuggies.com is, as you may know, a model fansite and probably the oldest really, really good Disney fansite. Like a lot of people, I came upon the website at a time when I wasn't a big fan of Disney parks. And like a lot of people, I give at least partial credit for my current Disney Park fandom to Chef Mayhem, the owner and proprietor, for continual enthusiasm and excellence in showing what Disney attractions are capable of. (His similar site for Pirates of the Caribbean is also good, but not nearly as deep or wide-ranging.)

If you like the Haunted Mansion, but aren't familiar with this site, you should of course spend a few hours in its winding passageways, but the first thing you should do before that is buy their audio drama, "Nuptial Doom." It's just a buck, and well worth your time.

So the podcast in question is, in particular, about The Haunted Mansion in all its incarnations around the world. (The fifth episode features an interview with Imagineer Rolly Crump, who helped design huge chunks of the attraction, along with several hundred other important Disney things.)  But in general, it's also about horror and Halloween and other scare attractions too. I feel like the new episode is a good representation of the breadth of the podcast, but there's another reason I've chosen to link you directly to it.

Mr. Mayhem had the opportunity to interview several Disney voice actors, including the second-most-famous Ghost Host Pete Renaday, and managed to talk them into reenacting the fantastic old LP The Story And Song From The Haunted Mansion. I'd heard the raw version of this recording on Mr. Mayhem's other podcast Mousetalgia a while ago, but this version is more tightly edited and adds a lot more atmosphere and sound effects.

If you care about The Haunted Mansion or Disneyplaces in general, this podcast is highly recommended. If you're a general horror or Halloween fan, it's also recommended for you. If you don't care about any of those things, I thank you for reading this far, and kinda wonder if you have too much time on your hands.

A Spoopy Month #9: More rehashed reviews

October 24, 2014:

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.

A Spoopy Month #8: Caramel Apple Halloween Peeps

First, an apology: I know that candy isn't, technically speaking, media. But I'm trying to post every day, and I like these candies a whole lot.

So on the back of the review over at Dinosaur Dracula (and if you can't get enough Halloween, please go over there -- it's like the official internet home of the Halloween season), I picked up the Halloween Peeps and I'm eating one a day. (If you know me in person, I've already mentioned my reduced-sugar diet and consequent tiny weightloss. If you don't know me in person, maybe now is a time to count your blessings.)

Anyway, I really enjoyed the apple. It is, as mentioned in that review, very candylike, but it's just tart enough (my favorite real apples are very tart, and I prefer apple candy that's almost sour), and by no means too sweet. The caramel is more than sweet enough, and the pairing of the two is exactly to my taste.

It's been years since I've eaten an actual caramel apple, but my favorite Halloween candy last year was the caramel-apple Twizzlers (they were sweeter than this, not tart enough). Though I haven't seen them this year, the caramel-apple Oreos were waaaaay too sweet for my taste. So, to sum up, this is the most enjoyable caramel-apple snack food I've found so far, though I'm more than willing to try more as they come across my desk.

The cost to buy these online is silly (I paid a buck less per 3-pack at Target, and the shipping is high) but, as always, I like to give you a buy link:

Buy from the Peeps Online Store.

A Spoopy Month #7: A Bucket Of Blood

So here's our next full film review of the year: Roger Corman's low-budget nasty, A Bucket Of Blood. It's from 1959, and was Corman's first attempt at comedy (that Wikipedia link there is full of great info and background, and you should definitely read it if you're interested). More importantly, the success of this film led to Corman's next production, probably his best-known film, Little Shop Of Horrors. 

This is set in the world of the beatniks, and apparently is well-regarded as a fair, honest portrayal of the beatnik (though some of the jokes feel a little mean-spirited to me these days). It opens with a lengthy poem, recited over a saxophone, as the credits roll, but don't be fooled: The literary ambitions of that poem don't indicate that the movie is equally inaccessible.

Our protagonist, poor sweet-natured Walter the waiter, isn't particularly smart or creative, and sadly for him he's living in the beatnk world, which values smarts and creativity above all else. A series of accidents leads Walter down a dark path, and he learns he can exploit others to get acclaim and money for his "art". He's a sweet schlubby guy, with very little ambition in that direction, so it's a wild ride when we see him turn. (The screenwriter, Charles B. Griffith, also used that character arc to make Little Shop.)

In the long run, this movie is about artistic vampires: for centuries, artists have worried that the only way to make relatable, human art is to cannibalize their own lives and the lives of their friends and loved ones. (My first exposure to this concept is an essay by Neil Simon, wherein he tells us that he's always observing, never participating in life, since he's concerned more with getting things down to make his plays more real. He tells us that he worries his friends and family will complain about his use of their personal lives to further his career.) I can just imagine Griffith churning out these scripts, despairing that they'll always be low-budget triple-bill exploitation fare, wondering what he has to do to make the scripts more human, more real. It's, by this point, an old horror trope for an artist to sacrifice others for his continued efforts, sometimes quite literally like here or House Of Wax, but those stories rarely turn out well for the "hero" artists. Luckily, we know the ending of Griffith's story, and it's a lot happier than Walter Paisley's.

This movie has lapsed into the public domain, and if you want to spend the time, you should definitely feel free to watch the archive.org version embedded above, but the official DVD release linked down here is well-reviewed and will be a nice clean copy to own forever. I like to give you a buy link for everything I can, you know.

A Spoopy Month #6: More reposted reviews, repeated for your repleasure

Right. Four more capsule reviews from last year. Here we go!

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.

A Spoopy Month #5: What We Do in the Shadows

Here's my first new movie review of the year! First off, watch that trailer there. If you're not interested in a satirical mockumentary about vampires trying to share a small flat and make it in the modern world, you might as well not bother reading the rest of the review.

So back in 2006, Jemaine "Conchord" Clement and his friend and comedy partner Taika Waititi made a short film named "What We Do In The Shadows," which served as the template for this feature-length version. 

Somehow, when this one came out back in February, I managed to read two bad reviews running and decided I didn't need to see it right away. The odds against that seem fairly high, since it's currently sitting at 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Luckily, a good friend (the one who got me watching "Flight of the Conchords" in the first place) gave me a positive review, so I finally got around to it.

I loved an awful lot of things about this. First, I watch a fair amount of mockumentary stuff (have I told you personally yet how much I'm enjoying the new Muppets show?) and I can't imagine a wholly new mockumentary joke that hasn't been done yet. This movie has one I can't remember seeing before, where a character spends nearly a full minute onscreen brushing his shirt and making a huge noise with his clip-on microphone.

Second, this has a great low-budget indie feel to it, and sometimes that genre can be my favorite in the world (I love, for example, Fido with all my heart.) It lets the characters breathe and be, for lack of a more precise term, human.

And of course, it's pretty funny. So, to sum up: vampire mockumentary. Roommate tension, werewolves and humans (and witches and zombies) all trying to coexist. Well worth your time.