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 #3: Some capsule reviews, part one

So this blog really started last October, when I watched 20 horror movies and posted capsule reviews for my close friends on Facebook. I didn't actually start this blog officially till December, but the reviews of Christmas TV were inspired by my enjoyment of reviewing stuff again. So I'm gonna repost those here. These are all short, so I'll post a handful at a time till I run out.


Oct 15, 2014:

I've been watching a lot of horror movies this October. I'll talk about one a day till the end of the month. I finally rewatched The Cabin in the Woods, off my new Bluray of it, and I think the second viewing is just as good as the first. That's a movie that will live in my head forever. Is it a metaphor for our military complex, or just a loving hate-letter to slasher movies? Me, I think it's a metaphor for our stupid lizard brains, the ones that lead us to consistently hurt others, purposely and accidentally, in an attempt to follow our own desires. But for all that, there sure are a lot of huge snakes, evil demons, and bloodgushers.
I'm not a big haunted house guy, but last year this was turned into two different houses: one at Universal Orlando, and one at Thorpe Park, which had branching hallways, so you could choose your own destiny to a point. Damn, I wish I could've seen one of those.

     

Oct 16, 2014:

So the second horror movie I saw this month was Roger Corman's 1961 adaptation of The Pit and The Pendulum. Well, I say "adaptation." Really, it only contains 1) A pit, 2) A pendulum, and 3) An Inquisition-era torture chamber. All the rest is an invention of Richard Matheson, who also published his short story "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" the same year. It's barely related to Poe, but it's not otherwise bad: production values are pretty good. And, though his acting is far from subtle, this was before Vincent Price had descended into Shatnerian levels of self-parody. If you wanna watch a 1961 movie about torture and psychosexual horror, this isn't a bad choice.

While I don't like the style of the fantasy sequences much, I love that Corman shot them in black and white because he'd read that, at the time, psychologists believed most people dreamed that way.

 

Oct 17, 2014:

Corman's fourth Poe film, Tales of Terror, is a compilation of three short films, each starring Vincent Price. The first, "Morella," is a fairly straightforward retelling of that story, reusing (for at least the second time) the house-consuming fire footage from his first Poe film, Fall of the House of Usher. The second short is the best, entitled "The Black Cat" but much more inspired by "The Cask of Amontillado." It's great fun to watch Price and Peter Lorre have a wine-tasting competition, and you just know Lorre's breakdown at the end of the story is going to be big, big, big. The third, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," has Basil Rathbone as an evil hypnotist, changing the original story into a revenge tale (so all three stories share that theme.) I think this is the best of the three Corman Poe movies I watched this month. The digest format makes sure that things move along at a brisk pace, and there's very little slowness to it.

Oct 18, 2014:

Roger Corman's seventh (!) and penultimate Poe adaptation, The Masque of the Red Death, represented a change in production and style for the series. It was filmed in London (to take advantage of certain tax schemes) and credited a lot of British people who did little work on the actual movie. Like "The Black Cat" from Tales of Terror, Masque... interpolates another Poe story into the action. "Hoptoad" is a Poe story I was completely unfamiliar with until this film, and its inclusion is one of the best aspects of the script. For some unknown reason, the decadent Prince Prospero is a Satanist in this version of the story, and there's a lot of nonsense about worshiping The Dark One and "Your God is dead." The script for this wasn't written by Richard Matheson, but two other TV writers, Charles Beaumont (who wrote a lot of Twilight Zones) and R. Wright Campbell, who mostly worked on Westerns. I wouldn't bother with this, unless you're the most obsessed Poe completist in the world.
One footnote: the sweet, innocent ingenue of the movie is played by a young British model and actor named Jane Asher. The story goes that, during filming in '63, her boyfriend, a musician, was about to play his first London gig and he visited her on set the day prior. Corman met him, declined an invitation to attend the show, and wished him luck. That kid's name was Paul McCartney. So the story goes, but the story comes from Corman, and I suspect he's a bit of a fabulist and self-promoter above all else...

So the next four year-old reviews I'll post include one last Price/Corman film and three early horror films from the 40's. Stay, as they say, tuned!