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 #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 #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.