31 Days of Halloween - Day 13 - Movie 3

Picking up right after the events of The Mummy's Tomb (1942) , The Mummy's Ghost (1944) is also set in Mapleton, Massachusetts 30 years after the events of The Mummy's Hand (1940) which makes this film set in 1970, where fashions, hair styles, cars, phones, and so on look exactly as they did in the 1940s. The college campus is free of hippies. No one says "far out."

Once again, Kharis needs a new high priest and handler, this time in the form of John Carradine whose task is to revive Kharis and to retrieve the body of Ananka from the museum in which it lays. When Ananka is found, her body disintegrates at the touch meaning that her soul has found a new body to inhabit. That body turns out to be the beautiful Ramsay Ames, who finds herself strangely drawn to Kharis, and upon each time of contact she gains a new birthmark, followed by a sexy streak of wuite hair, then a second streak of white hair, and then things get worse and Kharis and his recovered queen sink into the murk of a swamp.

Like its predecessors, this movie is about an hour long including recaps of what has gone on before, which is kind of strange since these movies play fast and loose with continuity anyway. There are also scenes of men creating a pit trap in which to capture the mummy which never comes into play. This is a much better movie than The Mummy's Tomb, though it suffers in the same regard as many of the Universal horrors in that it's leading man is a completely uninteresting character. I did spend a lot of time marveling at the dangerous feats that Chaney and his stunt double had to tackle in that costume, wondering how many times they tripped and fell while having to shuffle up and down steep inclines and ladders, often while carrying a woman in their arms.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 13 - Movie 2

The Mummy's Tomb (1942) takes place thirty years after the previous film, though the characters (played by the same actors) appear to have aged quite a bit more than that. The action is moved to Mapleton, Massachusetts as Kharis's new handler brings him to America to take revenge on those who defiled Princess Ananka's tomb in the previous film.

The Mummy's Tomb has an even shorter running time at just a few seconds beyond on hour in length, over twelve minutes of which are taken up by a recap of what happened in The Mummy's Hand. This movie is even more no frills than the last, but has some nice atmosphere to it, with Kharis's shadow passing over people in their homes and cars, and spooking the animals as he passes by in the night. The tone of the movie is much different, too. Gone are the humor and action, as we watch Kharis, now played by Lon Chaney, Jr., dispatch the previously likable cast one by one. The new characters introduced here are a bland lot, and fortunately don't have to do to much except find the mummy and destroy him. It's by no means a great movie, but thus far, the films don't feel repetitive. I'm going to assume that Jack Pierce also provided the old age make-up, which was well done, even though everyone seemed to have aged about fifty years instead of thirty. This little discrepancy is but the beginning of a whole batch of continuity blunders that affect this series.



 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 13 - Movie 1

I'm probably one of the few people who ranks the Kharis series of Mummy movies as among their favorite Universal horror films, but for some reason, possibly having to do with the Aurora model kit being my favorite as a child, I've always had a soft spot for Kharis.

The Mummy's Hand (1940) begins a four movie series separate from the Boris Karloff film, The Mummy (1932). In it, a down on his luck archeologist and his comic relief sidekick join forces with a stage magician and his daughter to search for the tomb of Princess Ananka. What they find is trouble in the form of the living mummy, Kharis and the high priest who controls him and instructs him to commit murder. The movie is just a bit over an hour long but moves along at a brisk pace mixing action, humor, and chills into it's short running time. The movie is clearly low budget and looks more like a serial than a feature film, but does a good job with what it has. Tom Tyler, who typically played heros, is great as Kharis, really bringing the living dead aspect of the mummy to his performance. A cheap visual effect amplifies his creepiness when his eyes were blacked out one frame at a time. I'm guessing this effect was touched up for the DVD release, because I recall in earlier prints, the inking wasn't consistent in size or shape giving a real strange crawling effect to his orbs. My biggest quibble with this film is that no one in the cast could pronounce the name Ali.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 13

Joyce Holden

31 Days of Halloween - Day 12 - Movie 2

In Oculus (2013), a brother and sister (Brenton Thwaites, Karen Gillan) decide to document and destroy a mirror that they believe is responsible for destroying their family eleven years earlier.

Well made, ambitious, and clearly attempting to move away from the derivative nature of most of today's current horror movies, Oculus gets pretty far, but doesn't quite succeed in getting where it wants to. Jumping back and forth through time between the present and eleven years earlier, it seems like bits of consistent logic fall through the cracks, and hamper a true build up of suspense. In the sequences set in the past, Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan excel as the child versions of the siblings, conveying all of the fears and emotional distress of two children watching their parents change into violent strangers, while being helpless to save them, and perhaps themselves. Rory Cochrane and Katee Sackhoff, as the parents aren't given enough to do besides slowly grow more and more vacant and hostile, making it difficult to feel anything for their plight. Thwaites and Gillan are fine as the adult siblings, one clearly wanting to move on with their life and be no part of this, while the other is consumed with an obsession with revenge. The minimalist music by the Newton Brothers places an enormous part in creating the unsettling atmosphere of Oculus, probably more so than any other component of the movie.

While not quite a fully satisfying experience, I give it extra points for trying to become something more than it wound up being.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 12 - Movie 1

A witch uses her abilities through a magic mirror to try and protect her goddaughter from being murdered by her malevolent husband. When her attempts fail, she uses her abilities for revenge against the husband and his new wife.

El espejo de la bruja/ The Witch's Mirror (1960) is heavy on atmosphere, so heavy at times it's almost silly. The movie also has a bit of an odd structure to it. While the witch's vengeance drives the movie, it almost feels like two different movies joined together. The first third centers on the attempt, and subsequent failure, to save the life of the witch's goddaughter, followed by a successful bit of revenge. The remaining two thirds are essentially a more garish version of Eyes Without a Face (also 1960), as the wicked husband, who is also a doctor uses the bodies of dead women to try and restore the features of his disfigured second wife. The movie does create a disturbing look using the bandages to cover the second wife's face, giving her an unsettling gauze mask that's more horrible than what lies beneath.

This is a fun movie with it's spookhouse atmosphere, and gothic trappings, though it's constantly straddling a fine line between eerie and goofy. Your frame of mind will probably influence what side of the line you find yourself on. It's perfect for a rainy afternoon.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 12

Mary Pickford

31 Days of Halloween - Day 11 - Movie 2

Vincent Price's movies have always been the audio visual equivalent of comfort food for me. Even at a young age I recognized for all of his on screen villainy, there was a sly sense of humor, almost a wink to the audience to let them know it was all in good fun. Witchfinder General (1968) is a whole different animal. Set during the English Civil War, a time when the country was in upheaval, lawlessness reigned and unscrupulous men took advantage of the situation to carry out their own nefarious plans. A young soldier (Ian Ogilvy) and his fiance (Hilary Dwyer) find their lives irrevocably changed by self-appointed witchfinder, Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) and his sadistic assistant (Robert Russell).

This movie is extremely unpleasant and brutal, lingering on the tortures brought upon the innocent by Hopkins and his assistant. Price is not cuddly, or winking at the audience in this one. He is absolutely loathsome and irredeemable as Hopkins. This is one of his finest performances in one of his best movies, but this is no light romp through decaying manors and technicolor dungeons. This is an ugly movie that does not shy away from bringing its dark subject matter to light.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 11 - Movie 1

The Bat (1959) is the third movie incarnation of a 1920 play. It's an old dark house mystery involving a mysterious house being rented by a successful mystery writer (Agnes Moorehead), a missing million dollars stolen from the local bank (which is also owned by the owner of the rented house), and strange murderous figure known as "The Bat." There are also secret rooms, red herrings, mysterious noises and the usual trappings to be found in this sub-genre. It also features Vincent Price as a local doctor who is very interested in the unfolding mystery.

It's obvious that this movie is based on a play. The dialogue,staging, and some of the performances practically broadcast that fact. It's also quite a bit longer than it needs to be. The identity of the Bat is handled in a way that allows for some uncertainty. There's some nice misdirection here, too, but if you know how these things work, the identity will still be pretty obvious.

The Bat itself is the real disappointment here. You'd expect the character to at least dress in some manner that is suggestive of a bat, such as was done in the 1926 version, but instead we're given a man in a suit and hat with a black stocking pulled down over their head and black gloves with claws on the finger tips. You could call him just about anything for all he resembles a bat.

The Bat is a moderately fun and diverting movie, but there are far more movies of this kind that are superior.




 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 11

Pier Angeli

31 Days of Halloween - Day 10 - Movie 2

If pressed to provide a ploy synopsis of City of the Living Dead (1980) I don't think I could do it. The plot is some loose, not quite coherent, meandering thread between a lot of scenes of horror. It has something to do with a priest's suicide being a catalyst for a gate to Hell opening beneath the town of Dunwich, which was also apparently the original Salem, and yet just outside of New York City. Characters come and go with no real story purpose, as do concepts. Yet, this movie was compelling to watch anyway. You'll see rotting corpses (with really poor make-up) a hanging priest who appears and vanishes repeatedly, people having their brains squeezed out of their skulls, people bleeding from their eyes, a woman vomiting up her internal organs, a blizzard of maggots, and a number of other horrors, but not an ability to make sense of what it's all about. I found it difficult enough to determine the geography of the movie, let alone the plot. I don't feel that horror movies should explain everything, in fact I think there is a tendency to over explain these days, but movies like Phantasm and Suspiria, which just seemed to throw what ever they could think of on the screen felt like they were leading somewhere, and they were. I'm not sure where City of the Living Dead was going. I just observed it from the passenger seat and took in the scenery as it came along.



 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 10 - Movie 1

George Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007) follows a group of filmmaking college students immediately after the dead begin rising from their graves as we've seen in Romero's previous zombie trilogy. The entire movie focuses on their efforts to get home to their families and to document the events of the world as they travel to get there. This film is a real mixed bag. Romero is experienced enough to actually provide a story arc with something of a payoff to it to the found footage genre, which typically seems to be an excuse for avoiding a tight plot and any kind of ending. He also tries to imbue his film with the same sort of social commentary that featured heavily in his previous Dead films, and has kept them elevated above their imitators.

Here the commentary is on the digital world where everyone has a camera at all times and everyone also seems to have a blog. On one hand, bloggers are bringing unfiltered news to the world that major news outlets are diffusing in they way they cover it. On the other hand, so much of this coverage ends up being hard to filter through to find out what's genuine and instead of being informative, just becomes noise. There's also a criticism of experiencing the world through a screen and a new of some people to feel compelled to document everything, at the expense of experiencing what they document. This commentary is too central and up front in this story, making it seem a bit heavy handed.

The format also lends itself to some unbelievable moments where more than one character, in more than one scene, stands around filming a close friend being attacked by a zombie instead of acting in any helpful way that could save them. The characters themselves are too numerous and mostly indistinguishable, so it's tough to empathize with their plight. There are some nice moments in the movie and some arresting visuals such as where one of the characters has dumped the bodies of his household towards the end. Overall though, this ground has been trod on too many times, and even Romero is having a tough time finding new material to bring to the sub-genre he invented. In fact, without his involvement and this movie's connection to his other Dead films, this would be an easy film to overlook.



 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 10

Anita Page

31 Days of Halloween - Day 9 - Movie 2

A young woman travels to New York City to tray and find her missing sister. What she finds is a lot of intrigue, murder, and a cult of devil worshippers. The 7th Victim (1943) fits in perfectly with Val Lewton's other atmospheric horrors of the 1940s. Heavy on shadows and an atmosphere of mystery, this movie has a somewhat odd storytelling structure that makes it feel off kilter, reinforcing it's sense of unease and looming danger. Kim Hunter is perfectly cast as young Mary. Her innocence and vulnerability increases the sense that she's in over her head and out of her element, taken under the wing of a number of protective male characters trying to help her. Jean Brooks as Mary's sister Jacqueline is also perfectly cast. For about half of the movie, she's never seen, yet she fills every scene as a silent invisible specter touching the lives of everyone in unknown ways and driving the movie forward. Her first appearance is startling and only adds to the mystery. She presents a striking image with her pale hands and face framed by jet black hair with bangs and a black wardrobe, which allows her to completely vanish into shadows and emerge like a ghostly floating head. Her features also have an innocence to them that contrast all of the suggestions of the suggestions we are given of her leading a wicked lifestyle. This is an intriguing movie throughout.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 9 - Movie 1

A child murderer brings fear and suspicion to the city of Berlin, as the police, the citizens, and even the criminals try to uncover his identity before he can strike again. M (1931) may technically be more of a crime thriller than a horror movie, it is saturated with dread and terror. The opening sequence in which children play in the street while singing a gruesome rhyme about the murderer, and a mother anxiously waiting for her young daughter to come home, which she never will, is a masterful bit of filmmaking, particularly editing, building up the fear and anxiety of the mother as the murderer takes her daughter away to meet her fate. The rest of the movie is filled with such moments as the impact of the murderer causes the citizens to suspect anyone and everyone of being the killer, the police grow more and more frustrated at not being able to find him, and the criminal underworld decides that the killer must be caught because he's affecting their own trade, by bringing the police down on them instead. There's plenty of suspense here, and even though Peter Lorre portrays the killer with a layered performance, he features in very little screen time. His character's shadow however, blankets the entire movie. M is a true masterpiece.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 9

Esther Williams, 1943.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 8 - Movie 2

In The Mutations (1974), Donald Pleasance plays a mad scientist intent on creating monstrous plants and human-plant hybrids using his college students to experiment on. He's aided by Tom Baker as a hideously deformed co-owner of a traveling carnival who is bringing Pleasance his victims and then hiding them, post-experiment, in his freak show. Baker is doing all of this because Pleasance has promised that in the end he'll be able to cure his deformities and make him normal looking.

I'd been wanting to see this movie since seeing photos of the venus flytrap man in the pages of Famous Monsters decades ago. As with so many film stills seen in Famous Monsters, the promise of what the movies they represented held far outweighed what they actually delivered. Directed by award winning cinematographer, Jack Cardiff, this movie is a slow moving exercise in stretching out a very thin premise into a narrative in which nothing is really happening for most of the movie. On the monstrous front, Pleasance's plant creations are nice and weird in all their rubber glory, and Baker's make-up is well done. The result of the first human-plant hybrid that we see looks like a bad fish mask, and the venus fly trap man doesn't look too bad when we a re first introduced to him, but looks like a Power Rangers monster on the next view when he's in full on plantman mode. The cast of students are forgettably indistinguishable from one another. For the freaks, real genetically handicapped individuals are brought in. There's an effort to make them seen as real, individual people, which is successfully done, but there are more than one scene directly borrowed from Tod Browning's Freaks (1932). Baker's partner in the carnival, and reluctant partner in crime is played by Michael Dunn, and accomplished actor and little person, who gives a fine performance here. Also padding out the movie is a lot of time lapse photography of plants growing, and for the first few minutes, before even the credits begin, you would be forgiven if you thought you had put on a nature documentary by mistake. The Mutations is a really poor movie, punctuated by periodic moments that will captivate you enough to keep going with it, but once it's over, you'll never want to watch it again.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 8 - Movie 1

Michael Nouri and Kyle MacLachlan play law enforcement officers on the trail of an thrill seeking, intelligent, alien parasite that maintains its crime spree by jumping from one human host to another whenever its host body becomes too damaged. To complicate matters, it can only be killed when it's between hosts.

When it was a brand new movie, The Hidden (1987), had this hip coolness to it, which now seems  dated. A genre stew of cop buddy movie, action thriller, science fiction, and horror, this movie starts with a bang and keeps its fast pace moving with car chases, shoot outs, explosions, the body jumping alien, and MacLachlan's intentional odd performance. There's even an early appearance of Danny Trejo as a prisoner. This movie is still a lot of fun to watch, and the host to host alien transfer is well done. I'm actually surprised that this movie hasn't been remade in the new digital era.

This weekend...

My work will be featured as part of October Shadows VII at Creature Features. The show opens this coming Saturday. More information can be had here.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 8

Grace Bradley, 1933.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7 - Movie 2

The Navy searches desperately for a giant octopus that's attacking ships, and finally San Francisco in It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955). I've seen this movie a number of times in my life and there's nothing really wrong with it. It's well made. It has a good cast. Ray Harryhausen's special effects are as awe inspiring as always. For some reason though, I found it really hard to get through this movie on this viewing. It suffers from the same trappings that plague a number of genre movies from this period; unnecessary narration and a really long process before the story gets underway, and once it does, it's just about over. It's military organization vs monster procedural on display here. In order to spread the special effects out through the whole movie we're given brief octopus attacks followed by a long sequence of scenes of investigation, hypothesis, and arms akimbo discussion followed by another octopus attack and more of the same intercut with stock footage of navy planes searching, and ships dropping depth charges on the ocean, followed by more waiting discussion, etc. It does give the movie a documentary like feel, as if this is really the Navy at work trying to take care of this giant octopus threat, but boy is it dull. The scenes featuring the stop motion animated giant octopus are still great though.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7 - Movie 1

An exterminator and a security guard team up to try and stop an ever growing spider before it can lay its eggs in downtown Los Angeles in Big Ass Spider! (2013). It sounds like one of those crap movies made for the SyFy channel, but Big Ass Spider! has a number of things going for it that the SyFy channel movies don't. First of all it's intelligently written. Second of all it's funny -- on purpose, and in a smart way that elevates it beyond camp. Greg Grunberg as the exterminator and Lombardo Boyar as the security guard are a very funny team. It's played straight, but there is a lot of good comedy happening in this movie. Most of the cast, including Ray Wise, do a really good job here, but Grunberg and Boyar would be great playing these two characters against any monster, or even with no monster. Overall, the production values here are also far better than the SyFy fair. Yes, there are some shots where the spider looks more cgi than at other times, and the movie has the bland daytime outdoor lighting that you'd expect from a low budget movie, but it doesn't matter. This movie is a lot of fun. This is my third viewing of this movie and I can still say that.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7

Ann Miller, circa 1949.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6 - Movie 2

Shortly after a ventriloquist doll named Billy shows up at the doorstep of a young married couple, the wife winds up dead. The husband, naturally, becomes the primary suspect in her murder, but in an effort to prove his innocence turns up a back story involving a poem about Mary Shaw, a creepy old lady who was buried with her collection of ventriloquist dolls -- 100 of them. There are other mysterious murders, both in the past and the present, connected with Mary Shaw and Billy. The closer the husband gets to unraveling the mystery, the closer he comes to becoming a victim himself.

Dead Silence (2007) is a diverting enough movie with lovely production design and an an effective music score, but as the mystery behind Billy is gradually revealed, it becomes more and more convoluted, and feels like its made up as it goes, instead of being something really effective. It's essentially a revenge from the grave story and less a creepy doll story. The dolls, in fact, are really not that creepy and do nothing more than roll their eyes to the side and turn their heads, very loudly. It's clear that James Wan wanted to create a classier horror movie that harkens back to a time before heavy reliance on gore effects, but he fails to create any sense of dread and no real scares. The movie is stylish looking, but bland as can be. There are no stand out performances, and star Ryan (True Blood) Kwanten continues to distract me by reminding me of George W. Bush.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6 - Movie 1

According to Stephen King, the notion behind his 1983 novel, Christine, is that some things are just born bad. In this case that something is a 1958 Plymouth Fury christened "Christine." John Carpenter's movie adaptation, Christine (1983) is a heavily condensed version of the novel, with all of the character development truncated down to some effective high notes as nerdy Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) grows suave, cool, and finally murderously deranged, as his co-dependent relationship with his lovingly restored car grows more and more unhealthy. The movie alternates its story between a number of couples; Arnie and his friend Dennis, Arnie and his girlfriend, Leigh, Leigh and Dennis, and mostly Arnie and Christine. The movie effectively uses music to accompany its story, from carefully selected classic rock and roll of the same vintage as the car which expresses Christine's emotional state, to the electronic score by Carpenter and Alan Howarth. Christine's ability to repair herself is also done so with some pretty impressive pre-CGI practical effects. The real problem is that it's not very scary. Overall, the people killed off by the sentient car are presented as people who deserve it, and because the rest of the characters are presented in a very shorthand fashion, there's no way to effectively build up a sense of suspense. When the climax comes, it's rather matter of fact and has no suspense at all. Like Christine, this movie is well put together and nice to look at, but when you open the door, no one is inside.



 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6

Paulette Goddard

31 Days of Halloween - Day 5 - Movie 2

When a warlock is burned at the stake by the Inquisition, he vows to return along with a comet in order to destroy the descendants of those who punished him. He returns in 1961 in some sort of space rock as a shape shifting monster who sucks the brains of his victims out of the back of their heads using his long forked tongue.

Unfortunately, my copy of El baron del terror (1962) is the dubbed into English version known as Brainiac. You can tell things are going to be bad right away when the head of the Inquisition's American voice sounds more at home selling luxury cars than torture, and it only gets worse from there. I don't know how much better the original dialogue is in Spanish, or if the performances are more nuanced, but even if they are, the quality of this movie can only go up so much. I don't care if the monster's mask is really poorly made, it's still pretty uncanny looking and the actor wearing it can get it to look like it's throbbing, so it gets a pass in my book. The big problem is that this movie essentially has two types of scenes, ones in which nothing is really happening, and scenes in which the Baron is hypnotizing, then killing his victims which are incredibly repetitive. Even a truncated 8 minute long Super 8 version of this movie would probably have room for some editing without the viewer being at a loss as to what the movie is about.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 5 - Movie 1

The legend of the crying woman meets luchadore super heroes in Santo y Matequilla Napoles en La venganza de la llorona (1974). This time Santo teams up with boxing champion Mantequilla Napoles to obtain a medallion  worn by the mummy of the crying woman. The medallion contains clues leading to a treasure that the heroes want to use to benefit local children, but that a group of criminals want for themselves. More danger arises when la llorona comes back to life seeking vengeance against the ancestors of the family she originally opposed.

This is one of the lesser Santo movies. The plot is too thin to carry its running time, so there are more breaks for televised fights featuring both stars, and plenty of padding as the groups wander through caves and warehouses, fighting henchmen as they go. Mantequilla and Santo do have some good onscreen chemistry and make for a good team. Sadly, all of their combat skills go towards warding off human foes and not the supernatural menace.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 5

Cyd Charisse, 1940s.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 4 - Movie 2

In The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) Boris Karloff plays Dr. Savaard, a scientist who invents a machine that can bring people back to life, the idea being that complex surgeries could be performed on patients with greater ease and success by causing the patients to die first, then revive them after the surgery was completed. His first attempt to do so on a human volunteer ends in tragedy when the police stop his experiment before he could bring his volunteer back to life. No one believes Savaard's claims, and he is sentenced to death. Savaard's assistant revives his corpse, and the resurrected Savaard carries out a plot of vengeance and murder against all parties involved in his conviction.

This low budget film moves along at a pretty brisk pace. The opening is appropriately tragic, and Karloff does a good job in the short amount of time allowed to take his character from benevolent man of science to madman of vengeance. The sequence where he traps the people he wants dead in his own home is a clever sequence involving inventive death traps and mounting tension. This second tier Karloff vehicle is a perfectly enjoyable viewing experience.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 4 - Movie 1

Despite it's title, Corridors of Blood (1958), and that it stars Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, this is more of a Dickensian crime thriller than a horror movie. There are murders committed so that the bodies can be sold to doctors, but the real horror is the vast difference between the world of the privileged and the decaying underworld of the poor. There's also the horror of surgery before the invention on anesthesia, which is what this movie is really about. Karloff plays a scientist who is determined that a way can be found to create a means for patients not to have to suffer through surgery and feel what's being done to them. He experiments at creating various gases which he tests on himself. While trying to perfect his anesthesia, he finds himself becoming addicted to his drug, drummed out of his profession and mixed-up with a group of criminals who blackmail him into signing false death certificates for men they've murdered, so they can sell the bodies for medical research. It's an engaging movie with impressive sets and colorful characters, but in the end is really more of a tragedy than a horror movie.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 4

Claudia Dell, circa 1930.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 3 - Movie 2

Upon his death, Dracula's daughter, Nadja decides that she's now free of her father's curse and decides to make a new life for herself and her ailing twin brother, who has already found a life for himself away from the family curse. Nadja's desire is at odds with her nature which is more similar to her father than she realizes. Instead of breaking free from her old life, she brings ruin to the lives of couple of innocents, her brother and the woman he loves, and to herself.

Nadja (1994) is stylish with a dreamlike quality to it that makes it mesmerizing and a film that is able to overcome its small budget and occasional flaws. Portions of the film feel particularly ethereal due to their being filmed with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera. The performances occasionally have a somewhat unreal, almost theatrical, manner to them that sometimes distracts, but generally fits the material well. Elina Löwensohn is captivating in the title role, and Peter Fonda makes a great somewhat deranged Van Helsing. Like Byzantium (see previous post), Nadja, is more interested in the mundane existence of the vampire than the predatory horror. When it was first released to movie theaters, I saw it at least twice, captivated by the hypnotic quality of the film. In the twenty years since I last saw it, I'm happy to discover it hasn't lost its charm.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 3 - Movie 1

A mother and daughter pair of vampires (Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan) are forced to flee to a coastal town where after 200 years on the run they attempt to begin new lives for themselves. Quiet, introspective, daughter, Eleanor, who uses her cravings for blood to release the elderly longing to die is at odds with her more predatory mother, Clara, who forced into a life of prostitution at a young age, preys on those who benefit from the suffering of women. Eleanor's desire to bring honesty to her new life leads to their possible destruction.

Byzantium (2012) focuses more on the existential crises of its characters than on the horror (though there is plenty of that), and what it means to be locked into performing the same roles and being fugitives for two centuries. It's a lovely looking movie that really holds the viewer's interest as the story gradually unfolds. The characters are more complex than they at first appear to be, and can't seem to help keeping their lives tragic. I really enjoyed this.


 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 3

Anne Nagel, 1940

31 Days of Halloween - Day 2 - Movie 2

Caleb Landry Jones plays Syd March, an employee of the Lucas Clinic where celebrity obsessed fans can go to have themselves injected with viruses which have come directly from the celebrities they worship. Syd's also injecting himself with these viruses in order to smuggle them out of the clinic where he can tamper with their copy protection and resell them on the black market. One of the diseases he takes on proves to be lethal, and time is running out for him to uncover its secret and possibly find its cure.

No matter who made Antiviral (2012), comparing it to a David Cronenberg movie would be inevitable. With its sterile clinical art direction, weird culture of obsession and body modification, and details like also being able to buy steaks culture grown from celebrity muscle cells it all feels like a David Cronenberg movie. The movie was written and directed by Cronenberg's son, Brandon, who has clearly absorbed his father's sensibility. It's not as nuanced as one of David Cronenberg's movies, but it does fill a void of horror/science fiction films spun out of smart, unique ideas, that are presented without dumbing down. As far as I'm concerned that's a welcome return, and I really enjoyed Antiviral.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 2 - Movie 1

A small island community, cut off from the mainland, finds itself overrun by huge unicellular organisms which digest the bone matter in their victims. Doubling their population every six hours by cellular division, these slow moving silicates are seemingly impossible to destroy and lethal to the touch. Peter Cushing and Edward Judd race to find a means of eradicating the creatures before it's too late.

Island of Terror (1966) was one of my favorite movies as a kid, appearing on television at a fairly regular rate. I haven't seen it in decades and wasn't sure how it was going to hold up. Terence Fisher's direction is unusually matter of fact here without his usual flair and use of depth within the scene. Cushing, unfortunately, plays back-up to the less charismatic Judd, and winds up with little to do in the movie except react to things, and even less in the final act. It does contain some slow spots, but the movie doesn't waste a lot of time getting underway.

The silicates appear pretty unthreatening with their slowly sliding lumpy green bodies and it's single tentacle like stalk which latches on to their victims. They also move so slowly that even slow moving zombies could easily outrun them. Having said that, their design is a unique change of pace and when they are shown attacking their victims and we see the results, the threat seems pretty real. The silicates are also given a distinctive sound to indicate they are nearby. This sound effect does amplify the notion of the creatures being a threat.

It's far from a classic movie and would be pretty far down on a list of Cushing's greatest performances, but I still found it entertaining with a tone and feel to it not dissimilar to Fiend Without A Face (1958). My only real quibble is one that I even had as a child. There is a scene where a silicate drops out of a tree onto one of its victims. Why, or How the silicate got up that tree is certainly the question here. It seems like a completely inefficient way to ambush prey which is also unlikely to happen to stand under that single tree containing a silicate. Obviously this plan paid off in the movie, but it still feels completely out of place in a movie that is otherwise played completely straight.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 2

June Marlowe, 1930s.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1 - Movie 2

Lon Chaney, Jr. plays Bruno, the caretaker of the three Merrye children, and their uncle and aunts, all of whom suffer from a disorder that causes them to mentally regress starting in late childhood. When distant relatives and a lawyer arrive in order to secure the valuable estate and institutionalize the Merrye family, they discover more than they bargained for. 

Spider Baby (1967) is demented and a whole lot of fun. Whenever you watch a movie and the character on the screen is watching a late night horror movie, the clips should all come from Spider Baby. The whole cast is really good in this, but Beverly Washburn, Jill Banner, and Sid Haig as the Merrye siblings really stand out as innocently dangerous mental degenerates. Ronald Stein's score is also wonderful here, and includes a terrific title song "sung" by Lon Chaney, Jr.. 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1 - Movie 1

In desperate need of cash in order to move into her new apartment, Samantha answers a baby sitting flyer finding out that the job may be more than she bargained for. That in a nutshell is the plot for The House of the Devil (2009). This movie has a very small cast, with star, Jocelin Donahue in almost every shot. The movie builds very slowly, taking over half an hour before Samantha even gets the job, and then the bulk of the rest of the movie alone in the huge house with spoken of, but not seen, old woman sleeping somewhere above. The suspense builds nicely with the anticipation of something terrible about to spring at any moment keeping that suspense tight. But, like Ti West's other, and similarly structured film,  The Innkeepers, by the time that something happens it feels like too little, too late. The danger, when if arrives carries with it none of the suspense, or tension that the build up to the danger did.

The movie is clearly about the anticipation about what's going to happen, than what actually happens. I admire West's willingness to build slow, as well as his direction, but if the payoff doesn't live up to the build to it, it makes everything feel like a waste of time. The film features a fine cast which also includes Mary Woronov and the always watchable Tom Noonan, but really needed a worthy finale to make the movie feel rewarding.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1

Veronica Lake, 1942.

31 Days of Halloween - Welcome

Welcome to my 9th Annual Halloween Countdown, during which the entire month of October will be dedicated to my favorite holiday. This year my countdown is very simple. I've stuck to a single theme for my daily posts which will be apparent once the first one appears a few minutes after Midnight, tonight.

I am maintaining my  tradition of watching at least one horror movie per day throughout October. I will be posting what I watch as I go along with some basic observations for each movie. You'll find links to Amazon at the bottom of each of these pages. Even if you're not interested in purchasing the featured movies, please consider visiting Amazon via these links to purchase something else. By going through my blog, your purchase will provide me with some income which goes to defraying the cost of buying dvds to present you with each Halloween.

Beyond what you see here, my companion blog, The Grim Gallery, will be supplying visual tricks and treats throughout October, and each day for the rest of the year as well. Those of you who follow me on facebook will find further treats dropped into your buckets via regular posts of videos and other goodies.

Of course I'm not alone in my month long celebration of Halloween. To find out what other blogs are celebrating the season, please visit the Countdown to Halloween where you can also find out how to become a participant yourself.

Now is the time to don your costume and let the Countdown begin...

It's Coming

Join me here at Midnight on October 1st for my 9th annual Halloween Countdown.

Can't wait? Visit the ghosts of countdown's past by looking in the archives to the right of this post. Every October, beginning with 2006, is chock full of tricks and treats.

Museum of the Weird Closing Today

If you are a Disney Imagineering fan, or a fan of weird art, and live within driving distance of Burbank, California, be sure to visit Creature Features today for the final day of The Museum of the Weird show. The show is a tribute to the work of legendary Disney Imagineer, Rolly Crump, see above with two of my pieces in the center background. The photo came courtesy of the show's curators, Rebecca Lord and Ken Daly who will both be on hand at the gallery today. Be sure to thank them for doing such a great job.

The Foundation Sold to Fox

Somehow I was remiss in posting the news that Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights to adapt The Foundation, published by Boom! Studios. This series was created by Cody Chamberlain and written by me with art by Chee. The series focused on a group originally created by Nostradamus with the mission to keep his visions of the future from taking place.

This deal does not involve me, and I will not be privy to any information on the production should it move forward.

You can read about the announcement here, here, and here. You can order a copy of the trade paperback collecting the series at the link below.