Curtis was written in to help her career. Halloween was very successful but Jamie was still needing work.
Her character got more action scenes while Barbeau was stuck in the radio station, talking on a microphone.
Carpenter had to go back and reshoot several scenes. Make it bloodier and scarier.
Dracula 1931 Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler
The classic horror film.
Its terribly dated now. Especially seeing the female lead treated as a child. They even lock her in her room.
The director tries to create this suspenseful atmosphere around Dracula. He scared me when I was eight. But in todays world Lugosi comes off as Camp.
IIRC wasn’t some footage lost from the film? The old nitrate copies were dangerous. Restorers got sick handling them.
Imagine Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, or Bette Davis characters being treated like the female lead in Dracula… Nope. They took strong female roles.
Not so much the mistreatment of employees but overall lifestyle choices:
(sung by a man with a penis on his head holding a loaded pickle fork)
Time Cut
Not really recommended.
Netflix movie, shot in 2021 and released now. Last year, we had “Totally Killer” about a girl going back in time to save lives from a killer. This movie, shot first, is about a girl going back in time(all the way to…2003!) to save her sister from a killer.
This one is worse and was probably held in the can due to being quite forgettable.
Not terrible, just kind of bland.
Maybe one neat point is seeing how a 2024 girl(they added the date 2024 to the beginning of the movie, but I bet it was set for release in 2023 originally) sees 2003 and some kind of “long time ago” thing.
Anyway, it was OK.
Even Totally Killer was only OK.
The 1931 Dracula was a very odd flick in many ways. It’s a screen adaptation of a stage play, rather than a direct adaptation from the novel, and it keeps its stage roots – a lot of static, framed shots, and not enough camera movement for today’s tastes. When Dracula takes the form of a wolf and runs across the lawn, we know because the other characters tell us, although, this being a film, they could have shown it to us.
They tacked on an opening section set in Transylvania, which at least got us out of the drawing room set, and set the mood with its creepy web-infested castle, but the whole thing was still too slow-moving and static. The Spanish version, shot on the same sets but with a different set of actors, shows lot more creativity – the camera moves around. Dracula’s “brides” are scarier and more fluid.
The only footage I know of that was lost was an introductory statement by Edward Van Sloan (who played Van Helsing). It was much like the stil-extant opening he did for the same year’s Frankenstein – he came out from behind a curtain snd warned the audience about vampires “There are such things!”
They also changed the ending. In the original Broadway show you got to see a take driven into Dracula in his coffin, and his body dissolving into dust – a neat bit of stage magic using a gimmicked coffin. Apparently they thought this would be too intense for 1931 audiences. Not only is he staked off-camera, but it’s out of earshot, so you can’t hear the stake being driven in. (They also removed any of the story of poor Lucy Westernra, Dracula’s victim who becomes a vampire herself. A bit of it survives in the Spanish version, where we see Van Helsing and Seward or Harker coming back from having driven a stake into her (we know this from the dialogue), when they notice REnfield going into Carfax and follow him. In the English language version, they just sem to stumble on him.
The heavy accents (probably fake) bothered me. Several supporting actor playing characters from Romania have them
I expect Dracula to have a accent.
I agree the movie feels like a play. Including the use of obvious stage backdrops.
Watching Escape from New York now.
Not really a Halloween movie, but I always enjoy it. Ernest Borgnine is very good as Cabbie.
Adrienne Barbeau is so wooden and expressionless in Escape. Her acting skills are limited. She was a little better in The Fog.
I too watched the Bela Lugosi Dracula recently, knowing that it was essentially a filmed version of a stage play. The action was static and the women just helpless victims, but boy, Lugosi’s take on the Count is so suave and eerie that the movie is still worth seeing.
Also saw The Body Snatcher (1945) with Lugosi and Boris Karloff (thanks TCM). It’s from a Robert Louis Stevenson story, so it has an decent plot. The two actors have limited time on the screen together, but their big scene has Karloff saying the line “I have an idea, a splendid idea” in that great sonorous voice of his. It’s essentially the same line he says in the Grinch! That made me smile.
Smile 2( in theaters) Not completely awful, just a typical sequel whose producers don’t understand what made the first one good, so they make it gorier and add more jump scares.
Cuckoo (Prime) It feels very indie / low budget (I’ve not read about it so I don’t know). Set in the Bavarian Alps, it’s a about teen who recently lost her mother and is forced by her father and step-mother to accompany them to a German resort they are helping to expand. It’s weird a/f - mostly in a good way. A bit too much vomiting for me, though.
I agree. Several years ago I watched as many Dracula films as I could one Halloween, and, I have to admit, he was the only one who convinced me that he was Magyar royalty turned to a vampire. All credit to the acting skills of Gary Oldman and Christopher Lee and Frank Langella, but only Lugosi could pull that off convincingly. As Martin Landau as Lugosi says in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood “…you have to be Hungarian.”
Halloween Jamie Lee Curtis
Definitely in the top 5 best horror films ever made. With Janet Leigh and daughter Jaime in two of those films.
I love the suspense as Jamie Lee spends time babysitting. Without a clue whats happening to her friends.
Then it’s Jamie’s turn with Michael and she’s still stuck taking care of yhe kids.
I’ve always thought it was odd that an older Donald Pleasence is running around, at night looking for Michael Myers. Donald seems like an unusual choice for that role. Especially to face off against a psychotic killer like Michael Myers.
Last night I watched The Other (1972), based on the novel by Thomas Tryon. The TCM hosts mentioned at the outset that there’s a twist, and the modern viewer will catch it right away. They weren’t wrong. But I still enjoyed watching it unfold. My husband was bored. It’s a Bad Seed kind of story, with boys instead of a girl. I thought the kids were well cast and did a great job. John Ritter had a small part also.
The Seventh Victim (1943) Part of TCM’s “creepy cinema” Halloween build-up. I was intrigued by the description: a young woman goes in search of her missing sister and finds a satanic cult…and thought: wow, that’s pretty outré for 1943. Satanic movies were as common in the 1970’s as comic book superheroes are now, but 30 years prior this was out-there.
But not really. We never see the cult (called “Palladists”) engage in any rituals. No chanting, no sacrifices, and certainly no conjuring of demons. They might as well be Nazi spies or a bridge club.
There is one scene where we see the cult engaged in Eeee-vil: they try to badger the missing girl into committing suicide. “C’mon, drink the poison. We want you dead, you want to die…” “Nope. Don’t wanna.” End of scene.
And otherwise, it’s extremely boring and pointless. Lots of wandering around looking for the sister but nothing really happens.
There’s a final confrontation between our heroes and the Palladists, where the good guys get to sneer at the bad guys by reciting part of The Lord’s Prayer: “…and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Powerful stuff, huh?” And the satanists look abashed, like they’d totally forgotten that Christianity was A Thing.
Two of the good guys are played by Hugh Beaumont (Beaver Cleaver’s dad, Ward) and Tom Conway, more famous as George Sanders’ brother. They do resemble each other facially and sound identical – a good thing, because they possess one of the best voices in cinema history.
Here for Blood on Prime
A group of masked killers break into an isolated house to kidnap and kill the pretty young college babysitter and the little girl she’s looking after for the night. Sounds pretty formulaic, right?
The problem is, the killers don’t know that she convinced her boyfriend to take the night shift with the kid so she could study. So instead of a wiry sophomore, the killers find out a 6’0, 230 lb pro wrestler is home. Much punching, kicking, and dropping of elbows ensues. Not the tightest plot or best acting, but the fights and gore are pretty decent.
We finally got around to watching this, and we really enjoyed it. The preface felt a little long as it was happening, but I understand it was immersing us in the era, and it did that quite effectively.
Having just seen it, I must say that I completely agree with this analysis, including about the excellent acting by both of the mentioned stars.
Just to add a few more comments, this is in no sense a biopic but rather an examination of Trump’s early years being mentored by Roy Cohn, a notoriously corrupt sociopathic lawyer. And while it doesn’t reveal anything new to those familiar with the broad outlines of that period of Trump’s life, roughly 1973 to 1986, it does make it come to life with a lot of smaller details and an atmospheric recreation of those events.
The tone of the film at some points reminded me of the movie Scarface, chronicling the rise of a ruthless and ambitious mobster. A major difference is that Scarface came to a dramatic conclusion, while this real-life story is still ongoing. It ends with the death of Cohn in 1986 and with Trump talking to his ghostwriter about writing “The Art of the Deal”, which was published the following year.
Recommended as a well-made film if you can tolerate the depressing aura of corruption that permeates everything.
I can’t believe that no one else has done this, so Welcome to the Boards!
Dream Scenario, starring Nicholas Cage as a mild-mannered professor who starts to appear in people’s dreams. Harmlessly at first, then more aggressively. An odd movie, but Cage does a pretty good job with it.
I liked Conclave a lot too. Very interesting twist at the end. I knew something was coming with that character, but my guess wasn’t even close.
I liked that movie until about the last 20 minutes. The ending made no sense to me.
Yeah, that was my take, also. Seemed like the writers ran out of ideas.