31 Days of Halloween - Day 8

The Halloween season requires at least one visit by the headless horseman. Here are three:

"The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane" (1858) by John Quidor

Illustration by David Levine

Art by 4gottenlore

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7 - Movie 2

Duel (1971) a made for tv movie, which really launched Steven Spielberg's career as a director, has the simplest plot. A businessman (Dennis Weaver) is on his way to a meeting is chased and terrorized by the unseen driver of a malevolent looking oil truck. That's it for the full 90 minute running length.

The attacks from the truck run from nuisance danger such as not letting Weaver pass him on the highway and tailgating him at 90 miles per hour, to more direct attacks such as trying to push Weaver's car into a passing train, or trying to run him over while he tries to phone for help from a pay phone.

Other than his arm, and in one case, his boots, we never see the driver of the truck except as a suggestion behind the dirty windshield, making the truck itself seem like some sort of supernatural menace. We also have no idea why he's after Weaver's character, or if he's done this sort of thing with randomly chosen drivers in the past.

Spielberg successfully manages to continuously ratchet up the suspense and provides a variety of shots to keep things interesting in this mostly dialogue free movie which spends most of its time with Weaver behind the wheel of his car as he races for his life through the California desert.

This is well worth watching if you've never seen it before. If you've only ever seen it on tv with commercial interruptions, as I had before today, then it's worth revisiting on DVD where the movie is allowed to build without tension breaking interruptions for furniture polish.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7 - Movie 1

The Giant Gila Monster (1959) is one of my guilty pleasures. The movie which mixes rock n roll, hot rods, and a giant lizard may be cheap, but it's actually it's fairly entertaining and has the town sheriff actually being very respectful towards the town teenagers, especially superteen, Chase Winstead (Don Sullivan who would go on to invent hair conditioner) who works hard, supports his mother and sister, is polite, helpful, honest, can write and sing his own songs, keeps the town's cars running and the local kids out of trouble, and even defeats the giant lizard.

I watched this with my son today and we both noticed that the score was reminiscent, alternately of the spooky episodes of Jonny Quest and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The no frills dvd I have is from one of those enormous Mill Creek sets and has worse picture quality than my old vhs copy which I recorded off tv, which allowed you to see Director, Ray Kellogg reflected in the windshield of a truck  giving instructions to one of the victims. That bit is not visible on my dvd.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7 - Mask of the Day

What could be creepier than the face of Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman? Not much, which is why he's today's print and cut out paper mask.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7

These three photos are of my mother, at age nine, wearing her home made bat costume. The year is 1954.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6 - Movie 2

The Crater Lake Monster (1977) is almost hypnotically bad. Concerning a plesiosaur-type lake monster feeding off the cattle and humans who live along the lake the movie is just a mess of subpar acting, writing, directing and editing in particular. There is no way whatsoever to tell what time of day any scene is occurring at. Scenes filmed in bright daylight contain owl hoots and comments about how many stars can be seen in the sky. Other scenes seem to occur in all lighting and weather conditions which change between cuts. The one good thing about the movie is the cool Dave Allen stop-motion creature which in no way resembles to immobile and lifeless full size monster head prop used for close-ups.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6 - Movie 1

I've grown a bit weary of the whole "found footage" type of movie. Yes, it's a great way to make a movie  for very little movie, but it also allows the filmmakers to present something that thin on story development and lacking an ending. Having said that, Trollhunter (2010), a found footage movie,  completely won me over.

College students out to film a story about dead bears and a possible poacher, instead find themselves in the company of Norway's officially sanctioned troll hunter, sent to kill them whenever they stray out of their territory and start causing problems in the human world. The movie is clever, playing against fairy tale expectations and providing scientific explanations for troll behavior, while being playful, particularly when setting bait for a troll that lurks under a bridge.

The cast is good, and the trolls, of which we are shown four varieties, look really cool. Overall, the movie feels really fresh, and gives a sense of what it would be like if all those tv shows like In Search of... and Monster Quest actually found the monsters they were looking for. This was a really fun monster movie.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6 - Mask of the Day

For today's print and cut-out paper masks, I present two kings...

...and one Queen.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6

There are a few things not specific to the holiday that I associate strongly with Halloween. One of them is Vincent Price. The late actor may have been criticized for a seeming lack of discrimination in some of the projects that he attached himself to, but he not only stayed busy as an actor for over sixty years he became relevant to successive generations of movie and tv viewers by making himself ever present in a  wide variety of movies, television shows, commercials and print advertisements. Among many of the wide variety of products that Vincent Price shilled for in magazines are these:

Price also had a long association with Sears. An avid art collector, Price partnered with the homegoods company to bring affordable art to the masses, but it wasn't just art that Vincent Price lent his name to for Sears. 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 5 - Movie 2

In my previous post I watched a movie that proved I shouldn't go by whether I liked a movie or not when I saw it as a kid. This post is about a movie that I hated as a kid and an instance when I should have trusted my younger self's judgement.

I first saw Tobe Hooper's Funhouse (1981) when it debuted on cable probably that same year, so I would have been about 14. I didn't like it then. I felt it was just plain stupid.

I watched it again tonight and my opinion hasn't changed. This movie barely has the most rudimentary plot, which turns out to be that four unlikable teams on a double date to a carnival and for some reason decide to spend the night in the funhouse, where they fool around and then witness a murder, steal money and are stalked by the freak and his carny worker dad. It takes about 45 minutes before this starts to happen. There's also some business with the little brother of one of the "characters" (and I use the term loosely since I've seen furniture polish commercials with better developed characters than any you'll find in this movie) that serves no purpose whatsoever other than to pad out the running time of this movie into something feature length. The movie has no suspense whatsoever, and no scares. It's just completely pointless.

It has a few decent props in what must be the most elaborate and largest traveling carnival funhouse on the planet, especially the giant King Kong mouth. The mutant freak designed by Rick Baker and executed by Craig Reardon was a pretty cool looking monster and gets extra points for hiding his horrible, cleft features from the public by wearing a Frankenstein monster mask. But these are not enough to recommend sitting through this. You can save yourself the trouble by looking at the image that opens this post. There. You've seen the best part.

As a note of coincidence, William Finley, who played the title character in the other movie I watched today, Phantom of the Paradise (see previous post) was featured in this movie as a carnival magician who's scene was somewhat fun, but served no function in the movie as a whole.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 5 - Movie 1

I tried to watch Phantom of the Paradise (1974) back when I was about twelve and saw it on tv. I hated it. Essentially a blending of The Phantom of the Opera and Faust set within the decadent world of the music industry in the 1970s, the movie was too garish and stylized, and the contemporary musical aspect of it was too big a part of it for my taste and expectations for what a monster movie should be. I've avoided it ever since.

Until now.

I'm not sure of what drew me to try it again, but I'm glad I did. All of the things that turned me off about it as a kid are what I think are the strengths of the movie now. The artifice and stagey aspects of it really  work for the story, and some of it is rather funny. Plus, I've got to say, the Phantom is a really strong image with his bird-like mask, bulging, bloodshot eye, and steel teeth.

Clearly I was too young for this movie the first time I tried to watch it. This is one case where my much younger self had no idea what he was talking about.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 5 - Mask of the Day

Today's print and cut out wearable mask is the devil.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 5

For those of you in the NYC area looking for something to do, The Bottleneck Gallery in Brooklyn will be opening their new show "Can's Beat Em, Join Em: The Zombie Show" from 7pm - 10pm. Proceeds from the show will benefit the American Red Cross. The show itself runs through October 28. For those of you who can't make it in person, the artwork from the show will be made available on the gallery's website tomorrow.

My piece for the show, "George Dakei" rendered as a cut paper collage can be seen above now.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 4 - Movie

I hadn't planned on watching so many alien parasite movies this year, but here's another one; Night of the Blood Beast (1958). An astronaut crash lands on earth and is found dead by the team of scientists sent to retrieve him. Oddly, when his body is examined, even though all of his vital organs have shut down he maintains the blood pressure and temperature of a living man and his blood cells go on living, even though he now has a foreign, non-human blood cell in addition to his normal red and white blood cells. He also has crescent shaped lesions, from where something apparently broke out of his body. The  team of scientists find themselves isolated as magnetic interference cuts off their power and ability to contact the outside world. There's also a strange, monstrous creature on the loose, and then when things  seem to be unable of getting any stranger, one of the team members is found with his head torn off, and the dead astronaut is back on his feet, alive, and harboring gestating alien parasites.

For some inexplicable reason I've been wanting to see this movie for some time. While I don't regret watching it, it was not a good movie, and was bad in that frustrating way that occurs when the movie has a germ of intelligence and originality in it, but can't rise to serve that glimmer of hope.

The characters in this are the most jaded people I've ever seen in a movie, taking everything in stride. One of the medical personnel in charge of examining and monitoring the dead astronaut is the woman he was engaged to, though she doesn't display any grief over his death until well into the movie, and her colleague's attempt at comforting her was bizarrely inadequate. The rest of the scientific team are a bunch of hot heads who approach every task through clenched teeth and an urge to destroy.

The movie actually becomes compelling once the dead astronaut returns to life and pleads for the others not to destroy the alien parasites growing inside of him, and also not to destroy the related hideous monster roaming around, but to try and communicate with it and find out what it wants. In spite of his physical predicament, he's the only one who has a sense of optimism about what's going on, and seeks out the monster to find out what it wants. The monster says it's on earth for benevolent reasons, but is it?

Unfortunately a lot of time goes by before the astronaut's resurrection, and not much really happens until that point. At least not much interesting. With a little more effort this could have been a minor classic instead of the mostly forgettable b-movie that it is.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 4 - Mask of the Day

Ocular Invasion has a trio of free print and cut out masks  including the Studious Werewolf above.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 4

Here are two werewolf stories for your entertainment.

The first tale comes from the October 1976 issue of Boy's Life. Click each image to avoid eye strain.

The second story comes from the the October 19, 1973 issue of Read.