If I remember well enough, it had sound being the big trigger for them, and also they could open car doors at one point which I think is a pretty big leap for the dead zombies rather than the crazy zombies (which tend to be alive and can).
I finally watched “Lifeforce” and “America 3000” which really show the spectrum of Cannon films.
Lifeforce is still a B movie but it looks like an A picture…and America 3000 looks like a C movie at best.
The Night House
Creepy in a few parts, but really a forgettable horror movie. A woman’s husband dies and she finds out his ghost or something may still be out there. It’s about as interesting as that description. It kind of holds back from being really intense or interesting. It’s “R” rated, but is PG-13 throughout except a couple swear words here or there. It’s really mild and disappointing.
So, what is it? A ‘real-time’ shot of a crew digging a hole in the ice for an hour or so?
Still probably better than most shit out there.
Stealth prequel to the Looney Tunes franchise. Every time you see an animal cartoon character get runover trying to outrun a truck or something rather than step off to the side? They’re doing an homage to the Vickers character. Glad they finally depicted an origin story for that gag–and in live action no less!
Lamb
A couple discovers a half-lamb, half-human baby is born on their farm. They decide to keep it and raise it. The premise is much more interesting than the entire movie, which held my attention all the way up to a very disappointing ending. I mean, I had kind of high hopes for this movie, but it is honestly a disappointment. I have several questions if anyone else has seen it.
- Was there any point to an early mention of time travel? I saw nothing come of it.
- Their brother Peter visited. He left later. Did anything really come of that?
Gets kind of a shrug from me. The poster is better than the movie.
Completely with you. Take it as a straight depiction of the supernatural/extraordinary, take it as a metaphor for something fully natural and mundane, either way it fails. It would have perhaps made a good episode of the twilight zone or similar anthology series, suitably cut down to a one-hour total runtime, with a good chunk of that being commercials.
Don’t Breathe 2
It’s competently made, but it doesn’t have any of the surprises or slickness of the first one. I liked it OK and I am glad they made it since the first one is really good, but this is hardly the type of premise that feels like a series.
I swear that old guy ain’t blind some of the time in this movie. I get that he is a former marine, but nobody moves like that when blind. Well, Daredevil. But no one else.
We finally got around to watching The Witch (or “The VVitch”). I liked it a lot, Anya Taylor-Joy did a great job carrying the action in what was her first speaking role in a film. And I liked the ending, which like its A24 cousin Hereditary, went straight to “yeah, this shit is actually real” instead of leaving it as ambiguous psychological horror.
I’ve been watching the Universal Frankenstein films from the 1930s and 1940s for the past couple of days, in honor of Halloween.
I’ve remarked before about how messed up the sense of time and continuity ios in these, but it bears repeating. The films really don’t make a lot of sense, considered as a whole. Of course, the other Universal films don’t either. The whole point was for each movie to be financially successful on its own – that was why they were made, after all. If they’re artistically successful, that’s a plus. Who they hell cared about continuity. It’s not as if people had video players back then and would catch all the weird details.
A few comments
Frankenstein – it’s not at all faithful to the book, or even the Peggy Webling play it’s nominally baseed on, but during the silent era films rarely bore more than a passing similarity to their inspirations. With the introduction of sound and long-running films people began expecting more from the films, but it hadn’t quite taken yet. So view this more as “inspired by” than “adapted from”. There were so many hands working on the film (Webling, Baldeston, Florey, Whale, and the studio heads, all pulling in different directions) that it’s amazing that a consistent story even emerged. They do get credit for coming up with a look for the creature that became so iconic, it’s still with us today. Nothing like the flat-topped bolt-necked creature is in Shelley’s work, or any of the stage versions in the century preceding the film, but the look says “Frankenstein” as nothing else does. They clearly set the story in the modern day. It’s also clear that they were hampered by the mores of the time. The Monster was obviously supposed to have attacked and probably killed Elizabeth, butshe’s fine. FRankenstein himself was pretty clearly supposed to have been killed in his fall from the windmill at the end, but the relented on that, too, giving us a Happy Ending.
Bride of Frankenstein – made a couple of years later by the same team, except that Mae Clarke as Elizabeth was replaced by Valerie Hobson. It opens with Mary not-yet-Sheeley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron talking while staying in a grand building that the financially-strapped bunch couldn’t have afforded, but it looks great. The entire previous movie is revealed to have been Mary’s work, and she goes on to tell the sequel, in what would definitely be science fiction, since it’s obviously set in some future time. But what time? There are friction matches that can be struck to produce flame in common use – something not available at the time of the Shelley-Byron party. They became common after 1850 (and a blind hermit couldn’t be expected to have the latest technology). On the other hand, there aren’t any telephone – Pretorious invented his own. Pretty perceptive of Shelley to foresee the 1876 invention.
The movie’s a lot more fun that the previous one, and takes itself less seriously. The musical score is extravagant, and one of the prevailing themes makes me think of “Bali Hai” – I wonder if Richard Rogers was inspired by it? Ernest Thesiger hams it up as Doctor Pretorius, who appears to genuinely enjoy being a Mad Scientist. His sangfroid when he discovers the Monster in the same crypt where he’s eating a picnic is one of the most wonderful bits in the movie. But, again, the ending makes not a bit of sense. The Monster lets Henry and Elizabeth go and condemns Pretorius for no more reason than that the Bride rejected him. As it was originally filmed, Henry Frankenstein dies, too (you can see him in the shots of the exploding room), but the Powers That Be insisted upon his removal to allow that Happy Ending. Were I the Monster, I’d be more inclined the let Pretorius go.
The laboratory equipment looks completely different from the equipment in the first movie. In fact, it changes with every film, despite the presence of Kenneth Strickfeld making it.
A question – the Frankenstein monster survives being blown up, of course, as he always does. Universal monsters have the same self-healing ability as Wile E. Coyote, Wolverine, and Deadpool. But why not the Bride? Once she gets blown up, she stays blown up. I suggest, not entirely facetiously, that this is the implied sexism of an earlier age. By the logic of Universal Monstef Movies The Bride ought to be just as invulnerable as the original monster, and ought to persist, rejecting him all the same as she goes on to her own adventures. But, of course, she didn’t. In fact, in every movie that I’m aware of where a Bride of FRankenstein is created, she ends up being destroyed while he isn’t. It ain’t fair.
Son of Frankenstein – For some reason, this one didn’t get shown on TV with the others, and I didn’t get to see it until it came out on VHS. I don’t know why – it was part of the original 1957 “Shock Theater” package that released these films to syndicated TV. Maybe the people putting together the Creature Features in my area didn’t care for it as much.
Son of FRankenstein is a weird flick, no question about it. There had been a regime change at Universal, so most of the team that made the first two movies was gone. They still had Karloff to play the creature and Jack Peirce to do the makeup, but Dwight Frye (FRitz in the first film, the virtually identical Karl in the second) was gone, replaced by Bela Lugosi as Ygor with his twisted neck (but no hunchback). Colin Clive had died two years before, so no Dr. Frankenstein. So they got Basil Rathbone (not yet typecast as Sherlock Holmes) to play his son, Wolf von Frankenstein. So this clearly takes place some thirty years or so after the previous film. That’s corroborated by Inspector Krogh having been a child when his arm was torn off by the Monster.
In fact, the world is completely different for this film – the first two movies were set in a un-named village near Ingolstadt, or possibly in Ingolstadt itself. The third is set in the village of Frankenstein, of which the Frankenstein family are the hereditary barons. The Baron’s house in the first movie in no way resembles the one in the sequel, but both look like believable domiciles. In Son of FRankenstein the house looks like an Expressionistic Germamn movie set, with bare walls and floors and meandering staircases and absurd balconies projecting into the dining area, and dramnatic shadows on the walls. Yet there are also secret passageways accessible through the decoartive elements in the walls. But this need for hidden passages accessible through decorative elements is severely at odds with the stark, bare Expressionistic overall design. They seem to solve it by having the needed decorations there when they need to be, and everything as barren as Scandinavian Modern at other times.
Not only that, but the Frankenstein laboratory is in a domed building on the next pinnacle, not a distant watchtower. And the explosion that completely destroyed the watchtower in Bride only blew off the roof in Son. And there’s an anomalous pit of boiling sulfur under the operating theater. This seems geologically improbable, and would have made the laboratory stink something awful. Heck, the Frankenstein Castle is so close, it would be filled with the smell of brimstone, too. But it provides a convenient way to dispose of the Monster at the end, like the pool of molten metal in Terminator 2. Ygor gets shot multiple times in the stomache, so he’s dead, too.
At the end, Wolf von Frankenstein gives the castle to the inhabitants of Frankenstein, which might explain why the locals don’t lynch him as he’s trying to board the train out of there.
It’s impossible for me to watch this without thinking of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein , which parodies it right down to the name. There’s even the game of darts between Krogh and Wolf Frankenstein!
And they didn’t even try to shoehorn this into the Mary Shelley timeline.
Ghost of Frankenstein – well, we killed off the monster, killed off Ygor, got rid of the Frankenstein estate, and packed Wolf von Frankenstein off to the States. Guess there’s no way they could make another sequel, right?
Hah! Did they stop making Planet of the Apes sequels after the second movie? They destroyed the entire world and killed off the main characters, but they didn’t let that stop them! Three apes managed to raise one of the ships, got it flying, and came backwards through time. And if you won’t buy all of that, you have no right to watch Escape from the Planet of the Apes. It’s creative thinking like this that gave the Star Trek franchise the annoying concept of “Katras” and made Vulcans effectively immortal. But, hey, it let them make another sequel.
So for Ghost of Frankenstein it turns out there’s yet another son of Frankenstein, this one named Ludwig (Ludwig, Wolf – these excessively Germanic names make you wonder why they changed “Victor” Frankenstein to “Henry” for the first two films. In these later ones, they call him by the more Germanic “Heinrich” when they mention him.) and played by the 49 year old Cedric Hardwicke. And he looks like he’s almost 50, too. If he was really Henry Frankenstein’s son, there been a lot of water under the bridge. That would explain why the boiling pit of sulfur has cooled and congealed. Ygor, it turns out, isn’t dead (although that death is what sent the Monster on his revenge killing spree. Guess he was just mistaken.) His survival isn’t explained except to note that they couldn’t kill him by hanging, either. As I say, Universal monsters are regular Deadpools at survival. The locals decide they want to destroy castle Frankenstein because of all the bad memories. Why they took so long isn’t explained – it has to be some twenty years since the previous film, giving little Ludwig time to grow up and the sulfur time to harden. But logic has no place here. It’s the beginning of the next film, so it’s the first cinematic chance they had. The dynamite blasts open the sulfur pit, and Ygor frees the Monster. Together they go to the made-up-but-real-sounding country of Vasaria, where Ygor just happens to remember that Ludwig lives. Luwig is a Doctor, too, specializing in mental cases. He must charge a fortune, or have an unseen benefactor, because his home and laboratory are immense, and he has special controls that let his release anaesthetizing gas to put unruly patients to sleep, something that seems a little more in the line of Henry H. Holmes than a medical doctor (I was so disappointed when I grew up and became a scientist and learned that nobody would spring for a lab like this for me.) Ludwig captures the Monster with his anaesthetizing gas and resolves to dis-assemble the monster, a rare spark of intelligent decision-making in these films. But he encounters the titular Ghost of [Henry] FRankenstein, played in fuzzy double exposures by someone not Colin Clive, who persuades Ludwig that he can redeem his father’s work by making the creature Not Evil, by putting in a Normal Brain instead of the Abnormal one (one shard of continuity through the series). You gotta listen to the ghost, so he does. Only Ygor has shiftily arranged for his brain to be implanted instead. Only the blood types are incompatible, and the Ygor-Frankenstein ends up blind. The entire House-Laboratory burns down.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman – Kurt Siodmak always claimed that he suggested the title as a joke, but they took him seriously. Well, if they’re going throw money at the project, why not?
Whenm last we left Larry Talbot, AKA The Wolfman, he was dead. But, as noted above, this isn’t a handicap for Universal monsters (except the Bride of Frankenstein). In the near future, even Dracula will recover from being lethally staked. In this film, it rurns out that graverobbers break into the Talbot family crypt at the worst possible time – Full Moon. If they’d broken in any other time, Larry would’ve stayed dead. But the rays of the moon fall on him and he kills one of the graverobbers, and comes back to life. It’s a brand new feature of Werewolves. Prior to this, once they were killed in Universal movies, they stayed dead.
Larry wakes up and has a series of misadventures, and eecides he needs Dr, Frankenstein;s help to finally and really die. Only there aren’t any more sons around (I guess Universal felt that a third son would be stretching it too much). He finds the body of the monster, however, who conveniently isn’t Ygor any more and can’t talk again and isn’t blind anymore. So much for continuity (they reportedly wanted to have the monster do some of these things – Bela Lugosi was playing him this time, after all – but apparently decided it was just too confusing. Larry has the4 monster show him where the records were kept, hoping to find Frankenstein’s notes. Alas, they’re not there. But Ludwig’s Daughter, Baroness Elsa Frankenstein and Dr. Kettering, both from the previous movie, are still around and might know (Elsa and Kettering are played by different actors this time around. They do have the notes, and they prepare to drain the life fromthe Monster, but Kettering, showing one of those lapses in judgement typical of these films, makes the moster strionger, just in time for a full mooon to tturn Talbot into the Wolfman again. The villagers destoy a dam that is convceniently upstream from the lab (it wasn’t in the previous film), and all are apparently destroyed. Well, bot the monster or the Wolfman – they’d be back. And Else and the idot Kettering make it to high ground in time.
That’s it – I didn’t have time for the others.
I just got back from No Time to Die; liked it, but didn’t love it. Lots of great throwbacks. I thought it was interesting that they would make such heavy use of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which is probably the least well known Bond Film. A friend of mine used to have a Land Rover just like the one in the film, so that was fun to see. And three generations of Aston Martins.
But I’m still not exactly sure what the bad guy’s plan was.
I prefer Sorcerer, myself. I think Wages of Fear is from a different era of filmmaking; the suspense comes from watching the faces of the people involved, and the ending just comes out of nowhere. Sorcerer shows what’s actually happening to the characters; the the trucks going over unstable bridges, or wheels that are just inches away from precarious drop offs. If gives backstory on just how the characters came to be in such a desperate place, and how the past comes back to one of them.
An Arclight cinema opened in Boston, right near TD Garden, in November of 2019. They promised a premium viewing experience; the best projection and sound equipment, that sort of thing. I saw a couple movies there and it was a nice place.
They closed for the pandemic in March 2020, and will not reopen. Somebody lost a fortune on that place.
I just watched a short titled “Fist Of Jesus”-best zombie movie ever.
Falling for Figaro (Netflix) - romcom about a woman who quits her job as a fund manager to go train as an opera singer. It’s pleasant enough, has a few good jokes and an enjoyable turn from Joanna Lumley, and gets bonus points for having a main protagonist who, shall we say, doesn’t look like your usual romcom female lead, but it’s also guilty of the usual “if you know anything about the subject (in this case, opera) the whole premise is profoundly silly and everything they say about the subject is wrong” thing. As romcom’s go, it’s fine but not memorable.
Where do we see this? What is it from?
X-files - streams on Hulu
I mean the movie that is sometimes called “Fight The Future”. My wife and I are rewatching X-files and we got to the point of the show where this movie came up. You know what? It’s not that bad. I’m not totally sure it makes complete sense. I mean, X-files core story is so weak, my wife and I are watching almost exclusively the non-story episodes, which make up the vast majority. The movie is cute, actually very well directed, and is a very strange concept. A feature film that takes place between seasons of a show that is currently running.
What other shows have done this? Had a movie during their run and still produced full seasons of the show around it. You can really tell in Season 5 that some episodes lack Duchovny and some lack Anderson because they are filming. One whole episode doesn’t feature either outside a voice-cameo. Anyway, the movie is fine, but hardly astounding.
I can see how back in 1998 when people thought a major story would be developing, the movie drops some mythology bombs and payoffs. Spoiler: None of it goes anywhere and there is no reason to care about any “alien mystery”.
In terms of regular movie, the stand-alone called “I Want To Believe” is much better.
Saw the new “Dune” on HBO Max this past Saturday. I never saw the original, so I can’t make any comparisons, but I can say that I like it and am looking forward to the next installment of the franchise.
It was either on Otherworlds TV or The B-Zone, both are on Roku.
I finally saw The Fly (1958). It was a different feel from a different era. The special effects of the machinery and flashing lights were a bit cheesy but adjusting for the era were pretty good. Couldn’t figure out why they made such a big deal about finding a fly with a white head when they should have been looking at a fly with a human head.
I recorded Exorcist II: The Heretic. Could not finish. Holy fuck what a terrible movie. Quite possibly the worst I’ve ever seen. How could Linda Blair be so good in the original and so terrible here? How did they get Richard Burton to sign on for such a turkey? This film is to movies what Call Me Kat is to television.
It would’ve been kind of awkward to ask the kid to find the fly with Daddy’s head. 