What was the last movie you watched?

[Charles Castle]

I was eight years old the first time I saw The Thing from Another World (1951, directed by Christian Nyby). It played in the middle of a Saturday afternoon block of science fiction films on an independent TV station out of Memphis. If memory serves (unreliable at this distance in my life), it was sandwiched between The Neanderthal Man and Tarantula. For all of Tarantula's virtues, The Thing was very much the cream of this crop. I knew its quality even then, and it's a film that rewards an adult viewer maybe even more than a monster kid. When I was talking about the film last year with a friend, we both were struck by the idea that all of the characters seemed to have a purpose in the film with their own motivations and inner lives. I went further by suggesting that, unlike the characters in many science fiction films, the characters in The Thing seem particularly adult to me. I take that to be the influence of Howard Hawks and Charles Lederer (and the unbilled Ben Hecht). This is a grim world of men--aviators and scientists--tasked with doing a job. Like Hawks's own films as a director, it's a film that builds communities in its shot compositions and compresses the dialogue in overlapping salvos that make its characters seem world weary and sly at the same time. The other thing that eight year old me noticed was that the monster wasn't so great. It seemed then and seems now to be a Frankenstein rip-off and not a particularly good one. It doesn't help that that's not the monster one finds in the film's source text, nor the one in the film's various remakes. That's why its star has dimmed over the years. Possibly, that's why it has been all but eclipsed by the 1982 remake. In common with the 1982 film, though, it is a portrait of its time etched in microcosm.

The story is familiar by now. Captain Patrick Hendry of the United States Air Force and his crew are assigned to fly to a research station above the arctic circle to investigate a phenomenon reported by the scientists there. Along for the ride is reporter Ned Scott, who is kicking around looking for a story. Upon their arrival, they discover that their instruments--particularly their compass--have become unreliable due to the presence of a mass of metal that has fallen to earth. The scientists point out to them that "fallen" is the wrong word. Piloted is more like it. They suspect a UFO. Also at the research station is Hendry's on-again off-again girlfriend, Nikki Nicholson, who delights in teasing Hendry unmercifully. She's the secretary for the head scientist, Dr. Arthur Carrington, who is brilliant but distrustful of the military. The crew and the scientists and Scott journey to where the UFO came down and discover that it has embedded itself in the ice. The part that protrudes from the ice is made from an alloy unknown to science. The crew endeavours to free the craft from the ice, but the thermite bombs they use to melt the ice set the ship ablaze and it explodes, leaving no trace. However, the pilot of the ship is also embedded in the ice, away from the vessel. The crew chops him out in a block of ice they can return to base. Carrington wants to thaw the pilot for immediate examination, but Hendry refuses and puts the base under military command. Carrington's colleague, Dr. Chapman agrees with Hendry, cautioning that the alien may be carrying pathogens against which humans have no immunity or that the alien may have no immunity to earthbound pathogens. Hendry tries to radio for instructions, but inclement weather interferes with the radio's ability to transmit. Meanwhile, one of the men tasked with guarding the alien leaves an electric blanket on the ice because he doesn't like looking at it. It thaws. The alien reveals itself to be hostile. Carrington demands to communicate with the alien because it must be wiser than humans to cross the gulf of space, and his research determines that it is a plant-like organism, carrying seeds that can be grown into new aliens when fed human blood. Meanwhile, Hendry and his crew fight a desperate battle with the alien, who seems both indestructible and capable of regenerating grievous harm to itself. When Hendry discovers Carrington's conclusions about the alien, he realizes that it is an existential threat to human kind. But Carrington believes the alien must be preserved even at the cost of their own lives. Science demands a sacrifice. And the reporter, Scott? He's on to the story of the millennium if he can ever contact the rest of the world to file it.

It's not hard to see the lingering trauma of World War II in The Thing From Another World, nor the paranoia that followed the U.S.S.R's detonation of a nuclear weapon in 1949, an event many Americans thought couldn't happen for decades, if ever. This is one of the first cinematic iterations of Cold War science fiction, a theme that would run through almost all of the science fiction movies that would follow. The central "heroes" of the film are military men. Like the heroes in other Howard Hawks films, they are cynical and pragmatic, under no illusions that their jobs will not get them killed and doing it anyway. This is an archetype that derives from WWII propaganda in films like Air Force and The Sands of Iwo Jima, and it's one that persists in films until the Vietnam war. The scientists are split. Carrington is the classic scientist as appeaser, maybe the scientist as traitor. He's styled differently from his peers, wearing a fur hat that looks vaguely Russian and a Van Dyke beard that's vaguely demonic. The urge to share military secrets--and the existence of a UFO and alien pilot in this film is absolutely a military secret during most of its length--plays to the grievance of a nation whose trump card, the atomic bomb, was given to its enemies by subversives. It's not hard to see the Rosenbergs in Carrington. At the very least, he's coded as a Communist. When Nikki tells Hendry that Carrington "Doesn't think like us," she's not just talking about his scientific genius. The film's counterbalance to Carrington isn't Hendry, though. It's Dr. Chapman, who is the voice of reason among the scientists. Like the military men, he's a pragmatist. He's the kind of man whose genius works on behalf of the state, on behalf of the military. I'd like to think that Chapman is a stand-in for Oppenheimer, maybe, but he could just as easily be Edward Teller. The film hand-waves Carrington's treason at the end with the excuse that he's overworked and hasn't slept in days, and the military grants him amnesty and forgiveness at the end of the film through their mouthpiece, the reporter, but is he really forgiven? The film exhorts the viewer to keep watching the skies, but we must also keep watching each other, too. It internalizes xenophobia in the best tradition of red scares throughout the 20th century and on into the 21st.

This film does not have an a-list cast, but it does okay. Part of this is the writing, which has snappy dialogue in the best traditions of screwball comedies. Director Christian Nyby, working under the gimlet eye of Hawks, overlaps and speeds-up that dialogue along the lines of His Girl Friday. I mentioned that the characters seem like adults, and that's definitely true of the relationship between Hendry and Nikki, whose romance is only barely chaste, and probably isn't really. At one point Nikki ties Hendry to a chair to keep his hands off of her, while teasing him with sexual banter and I'll be damned if I know how they got this overt bondage game past the censors. This is a relationship between people comfortable with who they are and with each other. You can sense a history extending before the start of the film in all of their scenes together, even without the film telling you about it (the film tells you about it anyway, just to make sure). This is surely Kenneth Tobey's finest hour in a long and distinguished career. He's affable and competent, the kind of commander who reassures his troops and gets the best out of them. This is certainly the role for which Margaret Sheridan is best known. She's a type in this film, the "Hawksian" woman who gives as good as she gets from the men. The film doesn't do her a lot of favors as far as her role in the story. I can envision a parody of The Thing in which all she does is show up and ask if anyone wants a cup of coffee. But she's not a shrinking violet. She never has hysterics. In her own quiet way, she's as competent as the men, which is something Hawks admired in women.

The supporting players--many of them unbilled--get their moments, too. The scene where MacPherson (Robert Nichols) reads the Air Force's official conclusions regarding the existence of UFOs is a droll bit of meta-commentary, as is his desire to read a "nice quiet horror story" while guarding the block of ice. Ned Scott (Douglas Spencer) is a familiar kind of character from Hawks's other films: the hard-boiled reporter on the trail of a scoop. He gets to be the audience's surrogate for receiving exposition, but he's cynical about it and none too happy about being silenced by the military. Still, he gets the film's most famous line as the movie comes to a close. Other character bits are sprinkled throughout (the general's repeated emphatic demand that his visitors close the door when they come for their orders; the ribbing Hendry's co-pilot gives him over his romantic foibles; even the soldier who puts the blanket over the block of ice because the alien gives him the creeps). It all makes for a world in microcosm, something the best science fiction films of the 50s learn from The Thing and an element that's often lacking in the ones that are less than good.

An audience seventy odd years later will find a lot to fault in the film's science fictional ideas, but even here, there are images that are indelible. The scene where the scientists and soldiers form a circle defining the shape of the flying saucer is so baked into the collective massmind that the 1982 remake restages it (Carpenter also included the scene on a television in Halloween). When I was a kid, I found the baby things that Carrington grows on a diet of human blood to be the creepiest damned things; they're still a thrill as an adult. The main creature, though? That hasn't aged well at all. Even in 1951 that was a design that was twenty years out of date, clearly plagiarized from James Whale's Frankenstein. There is a certain irony in the fact that in Frankenstein, it's lightning that gives The Creature life, while in The Thing, it is lightning that reduces it to ash. The science fiction writers of the day didn't much like The Thing from Another World, perhaps for the same reasons a contemporary audience is sometimes unimpressed. The monster doesn't hold up. The monster one finds in John W. Campbell's novella, "Who Goes There?," is a shapeshifting telepath, an alien that the filmmakers may have decided was too horrible and too technically complicated to create on screen. The 1982 film provides that monster, though, and shows up the 1951 film's paucity of imagination. It's also possible that the science fiction writers of the time were loath to get on John W. Campbell's bad side given his position as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, the preeminent sci fi market of its day. You never know.

In actuality, I think that "Who Goes There?" is a terrible story. I mean, the raw material is strong, but that raw material was already out there in Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness and "The Whisperer in Darkness," among others. Campbell's prose is godawful and his characters are as deep as a sheen of water on concrete. Rarely has a piece of literature benefited so much from its film adaptations as this story. Even the much derided 2010 version is better. So make of that what you will.

For what it's worth, I think The Thing From Another World is a pretty good film in spite of its drawbacks. The strength of its filmmaking kept it in the bright circle of critical acclaim until well after the release of Carpenter's remake, until that film's reputation spread through the video revolution. It's certainly a film that fits into the canon of Hawks's films no matter the name on the director's chairs. Sometimes it's the producer who is the auteur, after all. In any event, it's a film I revisit with pleasure. It gets the human beings right and it has its finger on the pulse of its zeitgeist, and that's good enough for me.

[stethacantus]

After sending me a notice that the Loki Season 1 set I ordered would not be shipped until mid November, despite being bought through a Amazon Prime account, and being pre-ordered for its release date of September 26th, They decided to deliver it Saturday, giving me only a few hours pre-notice it would be arriving.  Since this is one of the chapters in the MCU, I will be watching two episodes a week for the next three weeks in my usual Saturday Night time slot when I watch films. I had also ordered some Chuck Norris films through that account also had a screwed up delivery dates. They said all the films would be delivered on the 3rd of October, then split one of the films off and delivered it early. Silent Rage which came in the highly coveted VHS collectors box(?) which a lot of Amazon reviewers had been complaining that they had been getting the standard box, so I assumed Amazon was out of them. The order was split again, and while Breaker! Breaker! showed up on the 3rd, the film set with his television movies was delayed twice, then was supposed to come on Saturday, and then I got an e-mail today apologizing and saying the delivery date will be pushed back until November 16th? So either they are getting the Norris films from a third party seller who is lying about having them in stock, or something is seriously wrong with Amazon Prime, because I never had such miscommunication with shipping when ordering from my standard account. Anyway, if the movies do not come by next Saturday, then for the next few weeks I will be rewatching films from my library already reviewed, and may not need to post on this thread for a while. In the meantime...


Breaker! Breaker!( 1977 )
I know I shouldn't complain. This is a Chuck Norris film, and he was notorious for having as little martial arts as possible in his films. And it was mostly a cheap independent studio film that exploited the CB radio fad of the mid 70s. So no, having very little martial arts, or having the martial arts hero so easily getting hit by a lot of redknecks with no fighting training, that's not my big problem with this film. It is how fast Chuck ends up in bed with the leading lady. We are barely introduced to her. Chuck and her barely interact. There are no scenes establishing that they are attracted to each other, nor that they like each other in any way. Chuck is on the run from the town's law. He goes to her house to hide out. She tells him she will help him because the corrupt judge who rules the town got her husband killed. And then cut to them naked in bed together. Not even having sex. Just them having a post sex sleep. I guess tat maybe the low budget forced the director to tear pages out of his script and not film anything that explained how we got up to this moment. But if that is the case, then just don't bother showing them in bed together. It's not like a bunch of women were going to buy tickets to see a Chuck Norris trucker film, and then become upset there was no romance in it.  This was the first time I noticed this plot hole because I previously had seen this film back in the 80s on television, and most likely assumed they just cut some scenes for adult content.

[Charles Castle]

I was having a discussion a few weeks ago with a friend of mine about Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). For a long time, The Day the Earth Stood Still was the touchstone for "thinking man's" sci-fi, and it's not hard to see why: it's sober, cerebral, and significantly lacking in bug-eyed monsters. Its plea for peace, too, is a refreshing change of pace for Cold War sci fi. But over the last ten years or so, I've kind of fallen out of love with that movie. The political undertones kind of bother me. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) strikes me as a neo-con alien, who is pursuing an intergalactic version of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. He brings "peace" with an ultimatum and a big goddamn stick. If I squint, I see the same kind of xenophobia in this film as I do in other fifties sci fi film, except for the fact that the movie has cast human beings in the role of monster. I'm also uncomfortable with the veiled religious allegory that casts Klaatu as a messianic figure, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

I find that I much prefer Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space (1953) as a paragon of "thinking" 50s sci fi.

I first saw It Came from Outer Space at a college film society showing. I never saw it on television when I was a kid that I can remember. I'm not sure how it escaped me, given that I was voracious when it came to sci fi and horror movies. The benefit of seeing it when I did was that I saw it pristine. Not only was it unmarred by commercials, it was a 35mm print rather than a battered TV print. And it was in 3-D. I'm a pretty vocal critic of 3-D these days, but I won't deny the thrill it originally gave me with this film. It doesn't hurt that there was no up-charge at the box office. Details. It Came from Outer Space is, perhaps, the most coolly rational science fiction film of the 1950s, and while that calm detachment tends to drain a little of the excitement out of it, it also comes as a relief when compared with its immediate cousins, which mostly provide eye-drugging fantasies of destruction.

It Came from Outer Space finds amateur astronomer John Putnam and his girlfriend, Ellen, witnessing a meteor strike out in the Arizona desert. Putnam hires a helicopter to take him to the crater, where he finds a crashed ship. A rock slide buries the evidence before the authorities arrive, and Putnam's story is dismissed as the rantings of a crank. But something crawled out of that crater, and soon, Putnam and Ellen witness an alien impersonation of a couple of telephone linemen. Putnam becomes increasingly desperate as he tries to convince the authorities of the danger. Finally, the sheriff (and rival for Ellen's affections) begins to listen when other people report strange behavior on the part of their loved ones, and once electronic equipment begins to vanish from around town. He forms a posse to investigate. Meanwhile, the aliens contact Putnam. They explain that the people they are impersonating are unharmed and that they are merely repairing their ship so they can continue on their journey. The impersonation is "necessary," they say, because humans would find their appearance horrifying. Putnam is now in a bind: having whipped the town into a frenzy, he must now defuse the mob he has inadvertently created long enough for the aliens to finish their repairs and leave.

This plot turns a nice trick, especially when you consider how early on in the cycle of 50s sci fi this movie appeared. It sets up all the xenophobic dogwhistles of the genre, including the disturbing notion that the commie aliens are corrupting from within, only to turn it all on its head. It anticipates the creepy takeover of a small town in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers by three years. In a lot of ways, it's forecasting the direction of the genre and gently trying to divert it at the same time. I think we have Ray Bradbury to thank for that. It's the sort of gentle, visionary sci fi that Bradbury was known for. This movie, along with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, cement the author as THE literary source for 50s sci fi. More than that, though, it assembles many of the iconic signifiers of fifties sci fi and places them in a foundation of Americana.

The desert is the setting for sci fi. It's where fifties sci fi was born when in July of 1945 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the atomic age was born. It is to the desert that the big bugs and the aliens of the 1950s would return again and again. Echoes of this heritage find their ultimate expressions on Dune and Tatooine. It Came from Outer Space isn't the first sci fi film to go out into the desert (Them beat Jack Arnold to the punch), but it's the first film to really make something of the alien-ness of the desert. At one point, Ellen mistakes a Joshua tree for an alien. At another point, Putnam points out that the desert is teeming with strange life. This is the film that establishes the iconic role of the desert for sci fi, just as Stagecoach established the Monument Valley as the backdrop for the epic western.

One of the things that I took away from this viewing of It Came from Outer Space is the fact that by the end of the film, you know what everyone in it does for a living. Putnam is an astronomer and writer. Ellen is a schoolteacher. Frank and George are telephone linemen. And so on. There's an underlying backbone of the American as worker in this movie, of the working man as the builder of the American dream. An interesting side note to this idea is the notion that scientists are another kind of worker. They aren't ivory tower elites here, as they are in so many other sci fi films. They come out and get their hands dirty with the rest of us: not just Putnam, but also Dr. Snell from the nearby University Extension. There's a subtle propagandist feeling to this, given that the US was building its supremacy in the Cold War on science and engineering, but it's also something that vanishes from more recent films (and even other films from the 1950s, where distrust of science--again, courtesy of The Bomb--ran high).

Richard Carlson is, for me, the face of fifties sci fi. Not necessarily because he played iconic roles--frankly, Gene Barry and Kevin McCarthy were better in essentially the same part--but because I see Carlson and I see the face of science education. This has nothing to do with It Came from Outer Space, mind you, but the film benefits from the association in my mind. Carlson was the star of a series of science education film by Bell Labs in the 1950s (produced by Frank Capra, no less!), and I grew up at the exact right time to see these in grade school. These films primed the pump for me. As John Putnam, he functions more as a kind of icon than as an actor, but he's not bad in the part. It's fun watching him play against himself when he confronts his alien doppelganger. Barbara Rush is my favorite of the heroes' girlfriends, in part because they've made her a school teacher, which suggests that she has agency all her own. I like that.

But the thing that really fires my imagination in It Came from Outer Space is its commitment to filming aliens that are really and truly alien. These aliens are ethereal gelid nightmares out of the darkest dreams of H. P. Lovecraft. They make no concession to anthropomorphism. They are not cute. They promote a kind of atavistic loathing just to look upon them. As a result, the fact that they're peaceful, that, in their own words, they possess souls and goodness, is the most subversive thing about the movie. This is a film that takes xenophobia to task in the most extreme way imaginable by providing an "other" that's as far from human beings as possible. More than that: the film promises the audience an "it" from outer space, and by golly, it makes good on its promise. The kid I used to be, who grew up disappointed by monster after monster in bad sci fi and horror movies, appreciates the payoff.

The 50s began with a warning: "Keep watching the skies!" But I like the way the end of It Came from Outer Space turns that on its head. Carlson's character declares that "It just wasn't our time to meet, but there will be other nights and other stars to watch." Which is one of the more hopeful endings in science fiction movies if you stop to think about it.

[Charles Castle]

It was my birthday today, and I wanted to watch something from the year I was born. As it is October and I am looking to pad out my October challenge numbers the choice felt obvious.

About half way through the film, and not for the first time, I started wondering why Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) is so different from any given New World Pictures eco horror film from the same era. I mean, it's the same damned thing, when you get down to brass tacks. Murray Hamilton's mayor is a character type familiar to just about any revenge of nature film ever made: the venal politician who values the tourist trade more than human life, to cite one familiar archetype. Why this film? It's tempting to chalk it up to simple craftsmanship, but I don't think that's it. The obvious answer is that it matches image and archetype brilliantly. Spielberg matches a prosaic reality against a destroying force to devastating effect, in part because his scenes of domesticity are so carefully observed. The scene where Chief Brody's son mimics his actions is one good example. Obviously, Spielberg is a filmmaker of immense gifts, who, like many of the other so-called movie brats, has synthesized everything he's learned from watching movies into a formidable cinematic vocabulary. You have a mastery of overlapping dialogue that's the equal of Hawks (and very similar to Altman), you have striking mise en scene compositions that use receding planes of action that recall Welles and Truffaut. You have a Hitchcockian attention to objects. Plus, there's a mean streak that Spielberg subsequently lost somewhere along the line. I mean, he was willing to kill off a dog and a little kid in the space of a minute and a half in this movie. All well and good, but it explains nothing, except, perhaps, that this is one of the movie-est movies ever made. And maybe that's the key to its initial popularity, but it's not the key to why it remains fresh while other big hits from the same era have fallen by the wayside over time.

Ultimately, I think there's a level of mythmaking in the second half of the movie that pushes it out of the realm of the stock eco horror film. It abandons the tropes of the horror movie once Quint, Brody, and Hooper set sail to hunt the shark, and suddenly we're in the neighborhood of Melville and Jack London. The shark hunt is a crucible, and we have three characters to test to destruction here. The heart of the movie is Quint's monologue about the sinking of the Indianapolis. Here, we find a character stripped bare and examined in a way that no film ever produced by Roger Corman ever managed. Each of the three is examined in turn--Brody's cowardice, Hooper's intellect, Quint's obsession, all measured against a shark that isn't even a natural creature. It's a variant, instead, of the White Whale, and the Orca is the Pequod writ small. It's a striking transformation for a film that stands as the original summer blockbuster. It's a legitimately great film.

[Charles Castle]

Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) is a pivotal movie in the history of horror movies. It is the first major horror film of the sound era. Without its success, the explosion of horror movies during the pre-Code era possibly doesn't happen, or maybe happens on a smaller scale or just differently. The movie studios of the day, big and small, were increasingly desperate for hits in 1931 as the Great Depression deepened and paying audiences evaporated. Anything that drew a crowd was all right by the heads of the studios. What drew crowds in those days was sin, salaciousness, violence, licentiousness, and sensation. Horror movies could provide all of that. The genre itself is built on transgression, after all. Moreover, the elements of what came to be defined as the Universal horror movie were already in place. Universal made big money on horror movies during the silent era. Two of Lon Chaney's biggest hits--The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1926)--were made at Universal, as was the John Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). Universal was also the landing spot for Paul Leni, the German director who had huge success for Universal with The Cat and the Canary (1927) and The Man Who Laughs (1928). So Universal, at least, was already in the horror movie business before Dracula.

Carl Laemmle Sr., the company's founder, did not want to make Dracula. He thought it was essentially demonic, unlike the studio's previous horror films, which he viewed as essentially humanist. Carl Laemmle Jr., however was keen on the property and only convinced his father to buy the rights to the play because MGM was ready to step in if Universal passed on it. It is likely that an MGM production would not have been very different from what Universal eventually made. Tod Browning was under contract to MGM, after all. Universal had to borrow him for their film. Browning, for his part, wanted Dracula long before Universal took an interest. He had already discussed the possibility with Lon Chaney. Chaney had already worked up a make-up look for The Count. He wanted it as much as Browning. Other filmmakers at Universal wanted Dracula, too. Paul Leni was keen to make Dracula with HIS frequent collaborator, Conrad Veidt, in the role. In some alternate universe, such a picture is one of the masterpieces of the genre. Veidt might even have made the film had he not gone back to Europe at the time, afraid that his thick accent would be a hindrance to his American movie career. If he only knew... Two things conspired to shape the film that was ultimately made: Leni died of blood poisoning in September of 1929. Chaney died of lung cancer in August of 1930. Without Chaney, MGM lost interest in the property. Browning, without a star for the project, decided to cast the relatively unknown Hungarian actor, Bela Lugosi, in the part. He had worked with Lugosi once before in The Thirteenth Chair (1929). Lugosi had drawn crowds to the theatrical version by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston on the stage and had a much publicized dalliance with Clara Bow, so he wasn't obscure, exactly. Just obscure in movies. The match was made and Dracula went into production on September 30, 1930.

The story opens on a carriage traveling through Transylvania. On the carriage is solicitor Carl Renfield. At the feet of the mountains, the carriage stops and unloads the other passengers, but Renfield insists that he must carry on to Borgo Pass, where he is to meet the carriage from his employer, Count Dracula. The locals urge Renfield to stay away from Borgo Pass and cross themselves at the mention of Dracula. Renfield dismisses this as a bunch of superstition and carries on. At Castle Dracula, Dracula and his brides rise from their sarcophagi to greet the night. Dracula assumes the guise of a footman to drive his carriage to Borgo Pass, where he meets Renfield and brings him back to his castle. The grand ballroom is a ruin, festooned with spiderwebs and vermin. Here, Dracula reverts to his guise as a noble Count and welcomes Renfield. He guides Renfield to the rooms appointed for him and invites him to dine. During the meal, Renfield accidentally cuts his finger, which draws Dracula's intense interest. He is repelled by Renfield's crucifix, though Renfield believes his host is squeamish about blood. When Renfield offers his host some wine, the Count tells him, "I never drink...wine." Their business concluded, Renfield retires for the night. But the denizens of the castle are not through with him. Dracula's three brides appear on the balcony intent on feasting on Renfield, but Dracula waves them away. Instead, Dracula himself initiates Renfield into his service. They take ship to England the next day on the ill-fated Vesta. Renfield is the only survivor of the trip, found in the hold barking mad. He likes to consume small lives--flies and other insects--with the intent of graduating to larger creatures. He's institutionalized at Dr. Seward's Sanitarium, which is conveniently next door to Carfax Abbey, where Count Dracula has taken residence. Dracula contrives to meet Seward and his daughter, Mina, socially at the symphony, and becomes an infatuation for Mina's companion, Lucy. Dracula visits Lucy at night and soon, she perishes from a wasting disease. Seward's friend, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing has his suspicions about Lucy, and about the rash of murders in the area where victims have been drained of blood. Against all modern scientific instincts, Van Helsing suspects a vampire. His suspicions are confirmed when Dracula comes to visit, and Van Helsing notices that the Count casts no reflection in the mirror of John Harker's cigarette case. Soon, Mina has fallen under Dracula's sway as well, and her fiance, Harker, and Van Helsing must rush to save her from a fate worse than death as one of Dracula's newest concubines.

Dracula is a confounding film. What's good about it is very good indeed. What's bad about it is stagebound, unimaginative, and dare I say it? Dull. Almost a century later, it's easy to blame a contemporary sensibility for reacting to the deficiencies one finds in Dracula, but its flaws are by no means unique. The movies were still struggling with the switch to sound filmmaking and the limitations were more onerous to some directors than to others. Not everyone had the will or the wherewithal to rip the camera off its mountings to resume the techniques of the great silent films. Not everyone could be William Wellman. Browning certainly had no ambitions along those lines. His cinematographer might have had different ideas, though. Dracula was a chaotic production, and there are many reports from the people who worked on the film that Karl Freund was more than a cinematographer, he was a co-director. This may explain why parts of the film play more in the silent film's register and why most of the first act resembles the free camera techniques Freund pioneered with F. W. Murnau in Germany. There's not a lot of dialogue in this part of the film, which made it easier to strike silent prints for theaters that were not yet equipped for sound. This is the part of the film where the filmmakers lavished their production resources. Castle Dracula is a vivid piece of cinematic un-real estate, armadillos and possums and all. Even when the film seems like it's unfolding in slow motion, there's always something to look at. Other parts of the film--most of the scenes in Dr. Seward's sanitarium, for example--are slaves to the proscenium of the stage play. Rather than show a big wolf on Dr. Seward's lawn, for example, an actor describes it. The film uses a lot of bat props, but never finds a way to show Dracula transforming into one of them. Dracula's demise at the end of the film is famously disappointing for being off-screen. The film is light on special effects. Its best special effect is Lugosi.

In his early career in America, Lugosi spoke almost no English. One would think that that would be an impediment to an acting career, but Lugosi soldiered on by memorizing his lines phonetically. I do not know how much English Lugosi had picked up by the time he made Dracula, but however much it was, it was buried under an accent so thick that it's a distinction without difference. A great deal of his performance in Dracula is silent. His costars described his process of getting into character as a sequence of poses he assumed in front of a mirror before shooting his scenes, and that makes a lot of sense given the gestural nature of his performance. Beyond that, great whacks of his performance are enhanced by the way it was shot, often in shadow, often with an unearthly light spilled across his eyes. Not everything can be attributed to the craft of the film. There is a complete lack of sympathy in Lugosi's Dracula. He's a malevolent figure without the kind of humanity Boris Karloff would imbue into Frankenstein's monster later that year. And that inhumanity is compelling. When Lugosi is on screen, he draws the eye and holds it. It doesn't matter that his line readings are ornate to the point of parody. They're of a piece with the actors presence. It shouldn't work, but a lot of things in movies shouldn't work but for the alchemy of cinema. It doesn't hurt that almost everyone else in the film could be played by a floor lamp for all the impression they leave. Lugosi rides roughshod over David Manners and Helen Chandler and Herbert Bunston, who are all fine in the film. They just can't stick in the mind the way Lugosi does.

The two other actors who rise to the challenge are Dwight Frye and Edward Van Sloan. Van Sloan starred in the stage version as Van Helsing opposite Lugosi. His Van Helsing is the template for monster hunters in all of the horror cinema that follows. He's not my favorite Van Helsing--that would be Peter Cushing--but he's good enough. The cut of Dracula I originally saw as a kid had a coda in which Van Sloan turned to the audience and warned us that "there are such things!" which made an impression. Not every print of the film has this coda. The one I watched on Amazon for this review omits it. Dracula was recut a LOT to suit the whims of the Production Code when it was enforced. Then there's Dwight Frye, who plays Renfield. Frye was a go-to actor for twitchy secondary characters. In 1931, he was Wilmer Cook in the first version of The Maltese Falcon and would play Fritz, the hunchback assistant in Frankenstein, after Dracula. Frye is the first actor we meet in the film and the early part of the film features him as the audience's surrogate. This character is sensible and business-minded. Once Dracula has his way with him, he becomes unhinged and Frye plays his insanity to the rafters. His wide staring eyes are enhanced by the make-up department, and he adopts a distinctive mad laugh. You may not remember David Manners as Harker, but you damned sure remember Dwight Frye as Renfield.

I'll own up to the fact that Dracula is not among my favorite horror movies, even from the 1930s. I think it's a deeply flawed film that could use a more cinematic treatment (I should also mention that I don't believe that that "more cinematic" treatment is to be found in the Spanish language version of Dracula made alongside Browning's film). As is the case with many things in cinema, the broader culture doesn't care what I think. In Lugosi, Dracula finds an image to match the archetype and you just can't beat that. This is significant because the character one finds in Stoker is thoroughly unpleasant, more akin to how Murnau depicted Dracula in Nosferatu. Stoker's Dracula was an outlier. The image of the vampire in Victorian literature other than Stoker derived from Lord Byron, whose persona was mapped on to Lord Ruthven in John Polidori's "The Vampyre." With the success of Lugosi's Dracula on stage and on screen, we see the public voting with their wallets for the Byronic vampire. From the 1931 film onward, the archetype was set and fixed in the cultural massmind.

There are a lot of ways to read Dracula that explain its success in its particular place in time. 1931 found the world in free-fall as the worst of the Great Depression took hold on the economies of the world. The first stirrings of National Socialism were abroad in Europe. The Russian revolution had given way to the first of the Stalinist purges. The world was spinning into chaos. The vampire in Dracula could be a scapegoat for all of this. A blood-sucking aristocrat? Sure. A menace from Eastern Europe? Absolutely. A rebuke to the sexual profligacy of the 1920s? Maybe. It's probable that all of these things and more struck the chord. What was bubbling through the culture was fuel for the horror explosion of the pre-Code era. It doesn't really matter whether Dracula is a good film, because Dracula is essentially a match thrown into a room full of gasoline fumes.

[stethacantus]

About half way through the film, and not for the first time, I started wondering why Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) is so different from any given New World Pictures eco horror film from the same era. I mean, it's the same damned thing, when you get down to brass tacks. Murray Hamilton's mayor is a character type familiar to just about any revenge of nature film ever made: the venal politician who values the tourist trade more than human life, to cite one familiar archetype. Why this film?

The movie was an adaption of the best selling novel by Peter Benchley  of the same name published a year earlier. While there were some alterations made from the novel ( such as the shark dying from harpoon wounds and Hooper having an affair with Brody's wife ) it pretty much stuck to the story. And in the novel, the mayor kept the beaches opened and tried to cover up the shark attacks. he novel did give the mayor a motive for doing this. The mob secretly ran Amityville, and were threatening the mayor to keep the beaches open, or else. Universal didn't want the Mafia subplot in the film, so it and Hooper screwing Brody's wife was removed. A few years later when Universal decided to make a sequel, they gave the script to author  Hank Searls to write a novelization to be published a month prior to the film as promotion. Searls brought back the Mafia subplot ( which is not in the second movie either ) and made it the major focus of the novel, with a shootout between Brody and the mob where the mayor is killed, and it is revealed the Mafia's interest in Amityville was to turn the island into a casino resort. The novel also had the original premise that Universal wanted for the sequel. That the second shark was the wife of the shar from the first movie, and as it is dying, it gives birth to a third shark that would be the villain in Jaws 3.  It was this insistence by Universal that the sharks in the sequels all be the same family taking revenge on the island that had Spielberg refusing to return. Inevitably that subplot was removed from the sequel. However, Cracked Magazine, who wanted to beat Mad Magazine to the newsstands with a parody of Jaws 2, based their parody on the novel, and left in the mafia subplot and references to the shark being pregnant, which confused readers who only saw the film.

[Charles Castle]

Not many people like the sequels to Psycho. They intrude, after all, on cinematic holy ground and most film buffs find that sort of thing to be an unforgivable sin. All well and good, but I have to admit to a certain fondness for this third installment in the saga of Norman Bates. In fact, I like Psycho III (1986, directed by Anthony Perkins) a lot. It might be subtitled: "Norman Gets a Girlfriend."

The plot has Norman and the Bates Motel open for business again after the events of the second movie. When we first see him, he is happily murdering birds in order to stuff them. As he sews one of them up, he has a nasty flash of sewing up mother's arms. It's a good image. We like Norman, even though we know what he is. It's his mother that's the monster, after all. Mother's hobbies have resumed, too, and director Perkins has a lot of fun with them. There is a sequence in this film in which Norman has a body hidden in the hotel's ice machine as the local sherriff questions him that is so morbidly funny that it is worthy of Hitchcock himself (it is strongly reminiscent of the potato truck scene in Frenzy, actually). Norman's delicate relationship with Mother is threatened by the arrival of a suicidal ex-nun (played by Diana Scarwid), and by the arrival of a snoopy reporter who thinks Norman might have picked up his old ways in the wake of a few unexplained disappearances. The nun has come to the Bates motel to kill herself. She bears a striking resemblance to Marion Crane (Janet Leigh's character from the first film), which sets Norman to obsessing over her. Mother will have none of that and decides to wait until she takes a bath to kill her. Perkins restages the shower scene at this point, but ambushes the viewer's expectations. When Mother pulls back the curtain, she finds the nun in a pool of blood already, her wrists slashed. This confuses Norman mightily and he calls for an ambulance instead of finishing the job. Norman begins to be attracted to the girl as she is nursed back to health and, shock of shocks, begins to split from Mother. Mother has other ideas. The nun is killed in a nasty accident that Norman will never be able to explain away and what remains of Norman's delicate sanity splits apart as his Norman side becomes Mother's active antagonist. Meanwhile, the reporter has made it to the bottom of things and confronts Norman with her knowledge in the film's climax.

Obviously, any film that bears the title Psycho III is going to dwell in Hitchcock's shadow. Perkins, directing himself, realizes this and does his level best to honor the first film even as he subverts its best sequences toward his own purposes. Perkins knows Norman inside and out and, as a director, plays with this knowledge in ways that other directors couldn't even conceive. There is a danger of self-parody in the approach that Perkins adopts in this film, but he is too sympathetic to the character to cross that line in earnest. And there are a couple of humdinger sequences here: the ice machine scene I mentioned earlier is one, the film's opening line (in which a distraught voice screams from a distance that, "There is no God!" ) is another, and the film's final confrontation between Norman and Mother is memorably grotesque. I like the way the film ends, with Norman being driven away in the back of the sherriff's cruiser. The sherriff tells Norman, "I'm disappointed in you Norman, very disappointed." Norman replies,"Yes, but this time I'll be free of her, really free..." As the car pulls away, Perkins repeats the final shot of the original, with Norman smiling enigmatically. He pulls Mother's mummified hand from beneath his jacket. He begins to stroke it as the audience realizes that he'll never be free of her. Ever.

[Charles Castle]

The first point of comparison that came to mind as I watched Popcorn (1991, directed by Mark Harrier) was The Phantom of the Paradise. It doesn't have that film's cruelty (or misogyny, for that matter). Another point of comparison is Joe Dante's Matinee, what with the deadpan send-up of old school creature features, but it doesn't have that film's innate sweetness. Unfortunately, comparing Popcorn to other, frankly better, movies may be kind of inevitable given both its choice of subject and the way it's filmed.

The story here follows a high school film club that aspires to become a full-fledged department. To that end, they've concocted a horror movie marathon at a local movie palace as a fundraiser. When asked how they plan to compete with 99 cent video rentals and with the sketchy quality of their films, their teacher vows to stage them all with their original William Castle-ish gimmicks. Meanwhile, one of the students, Maggie, is having dreams about a human sacrifice. Among the fragments of film contemplated by the club is The Possessor, which was made by a Manson Family-knock off film club led by one Lanyard Gates, who many years earlier had staged the film complete with on-stage murder and an attempt to burn the audience alive. On the eave of the film marathon, Gates appears to have come back from the dead, as mysterious misfortunes begin to happen to the members of the club. Maggie, for her part, discovers something about her own past, and begins to smell something fishy about everything that's happening around her.

The main charm of Popcorn is its genuine love of movies. You can see that love in every frame of the fake films it has made to show during its movie marathon. In "Mosquito," the film presents a credibly awful 50s-style big bug movie, while "The Incredible Electrified Man" is a terrific impersonation of late-period Universal sci-fi horror a la The Neanderthal Man or Monster on Campus. And "Stench" seems like a genuine Japanese schlock classic. Each of these films is accompanied by a gimmick that is surely more elaborate than their role models. Certainly, the giant mosquito they fly over the audience is better than anything that William Castle would have built, while the scheme to shock the audience is the same one from The Tingler, only on a more ambitious scale. I have no doubt that Castle would have done the smell effect in "Stench" had he thought of it, though it properly derives from the scratch and sniff cards distributed with John Waters Polyester (in "smell-o-rama"). This is all designed to cater to an audience hip to movie history, to a generation that has grown up with the movies.

It's less sure-footed with its central plot. This is basically a slasher movie that utilizes movie gimmicks as murder set-pieces. While I think William Castle himself would have approved, it's kind of disappointing. I mean, if you're going to do a slasher movie, you need to make those kinds of themed deaths positively baroque, and Popcorn's deaths seem kind of timid, actually. Anton Phibes and his plagues of Egypt apparently rose again in vain...

Additionally, this is burdened with excess back-story. I've described this as "the classic mistake of the slasher movie" in the past, and it's just as vexing here as it is in every other slasher movie. This turns itself inside out with red herrings and shocking revelations, much to the detriment of its own credibility. The shocking film made by Popcorn's film cult cries out, too, for the same kind of loving mimesis one finds in the movie's other fake films--a forgery of a Kenneth Anger movie, for instance--but instead, it comes off as depressingly lame. Maybe that's the point.

Still, this has an appealing cast, starting with Jill Schoelen, this film's final girl, and Dee Wallace as her mom. You also get frequent Woody Allen buddy Tony Roberts and a sinister Ray Walston as a horror memorabilia dealer. The cast goes a long way toward making this go down easily, but I wish the movie they were in was better. But then, I think that about a lot of movies.

[stethacantus]

This is a rare off week. Wednesday I get an e-mail from Amazon telling me the Chuck Norris television movie collection that I had ordered  a little more than a month and a half ago would be arriving on Saturday.  You know, the set where the delivery date was continuously being moved back, and as a week ago would not be arriving until mid November. So this Friday I get the email saying it should arrive between 12pm and  4pm. 3pm came, the time I usually watch a martial arts film as tradition to the 80s when a local station aired martial arts films every Saturday, and the DVD set still had not arrived. Checked my email account, and Amazon said it would now be arriving by 8pm. I should have known something because it was not yet listed as shipped. About 7:45ish I get an email from Amazon apologizing and saying the set will be delivered NEXT SATURDAY! Of course by then I had been sitting around all afternoon waiting for a delivery that Amazon assured would be at any minute. Realized that Saturday Night Live returns this week from it's longer than usual strike recess, so watched the next two episodes of Loki Season 1 instead of an evening movie.

So here is what I am guessing, as this was ordered through an Amazon Prime account and not my own normal account. Originally Amazon listed this as "In Stock", and still does. However, if you were to take a closer look, you would see that it ships from another seller. This is all part of Amazon's policy of using third party sellers to claim they still have an out of stock item in stock. The problem is that many third party sellers do not actually have any inventory. They are resellers. Basically someone orders an item from them, and they in turn order that item wholesale from a distributor, and upon receiving the item, ship it to the customer. In this case, the customer is Amazon who allows them to sell their items through their website as long as they ship any items listed on their site to Amazon when Amazon has them out of stock. I don't know how many times I have ordered from third party sellers on Amazon, only for them to cancel the order weeks later when they found out the item was out of stock with the distributors, and could find the item new on eBay. Often these sellers would lie about the item being shipped so that the payment for it would go through, believing they would get a copy of that item from somewhere before the shipping due date. In the case of the Chuck Norris films, after the delivery date was first pushed up, I checked the third party seller.  The third party seller changed when Amazon sent the second email pushing back the delivery date. When the delivery date was moved up to this Saturday, another seller was listed. That same seller is listed for the pushed back date to next Saturday. My guess, none of these sellers have this item in stock, each tried to get it from distributors, eBay or local stores, and then were forced to admit to Amazon they didn't have it in stock, perhaps claiming a clerical mistake, or the item being stolen from them. I am betting this new seller Amazon thought would deliver the item by this Saturday also does not have it in stock. I am sure that right now they are combing the local Dollar Tree stores to see if they could find it in their dollar DVD bins, having had no luck form their distributors or eBay. The thing is, on my normal account, Amazon would have just said they don't have it in stock.  But for the Amazon Prime customers, they go to the bitter end trying to track the order down.  So we will see if I actually get it this Saturday or if Amazon finally admits that they themselves sold something they didn't have in stock.

[Charles Castle]

My wife was out-of town on Friday, so I opted to rewatch something she would not be interested in seeing again. My wife hates Night Train Murders (1975, directed by Aldo Lado), and I can't say I blame her one bit. Yet, here I am, like a moth to a flame. I wrote this in 2011, but if I posted it here at the time it has managed to elude my search.

Lisa and Margaret are on holiday from their school in Munich. They decide to take the train to Lisa's home in Italy. Unfortunately, the train is host to a pair of young hoodlums, Blackie and Curly, on the lam from roughing up Father Christmas in the street and looking for more trouble. Blackie has the swagger; Curly has an arm full of hop. Also on the train is an upper class woman. She looks prim and proper, but the predations of Blackie and Curly unleashes something within her and she is soon their partner in crime, slowly taking control of their activities. Unfortunately for Lisa and Margaret, the trio has fixed on them as their victims. At the upper class woman's behest, Margaret is raped by a passing peeping tom and Curly deflowers Lisa with his knife. The shock kills Lisa, while Margaret flees in terror, out the window of the bathroom and onto the rocks below. The killers stuff Lisa's body out the window of the train and get off at the soonest stop, where the woman seeks medical attention for a laceration she suffered in the commotion. Unbeknownst to them, the doctor is Lisa's father, who discovers exactly who he is treating.

If you have even a cursory knowledge of the horror genre, a synopsis of the plot will ring bells. Night Train Murders takes its plot from Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. The Italian title of the movie tips its hand (The Last Night Train). But before we take the film to task for being a rip-off of a seminal genre film, there are some things to keep in mind here. Italian cinema is littered with movies that are "borrowed" from other sources. The most famous of these is probably A Fistful of Dollars, which is an unattributed, almost shot-for-shot remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Is A Fistful of Dollars a rip-off of Yojimbo? Absolutely. Is it a bad film? Not hardly. Kurosawa thought it was a terrific film, though he qualified this by noting that it was his film. No one is going to suggest that Sergio Leone wasn't a formidable talent. So being an Italian rip-off of a genre classic doesn't automatically disqualify Night Train Murders from discussion as a film unto itself. And given the source material--a problematic genre classic that is, itself, a remake/rip-off of Bergman's The Virgin Spring--we might do better to consider the film as a riff on the material. Especially since The Virgin Spring is an interpretation of an ancient ballad its ownself. The contents of that ballad filtered at fourth hand, are interesting, and I'll get to that later.

A comparison of Night Train Murders and The Last House on the Left is inevitable. It's instructive, though, because these films approach the material from two radically different perspectives. Craven's film is crude. It's an ultra-low budget film made by amateurs. I doubt even Craven would have disputed this, given that it was his first film. Last House is a blunt instrument. It intends to shock and it does so by the most brutal methods available to it. It shows everything. It withholds nothing. Night Train Murders is made by seasoned professionals. Director Aldo Lado cut his teeth working for Bernardo Bertolucci and made several films prior to this one (including the well-regarded giallo Short Night of Glass Dolls, which shares some auteurist similarities with Night Train Murders). Lado's films tend to avoid the savagery common to the Italian genre films of the period. His gialli are largely free of on-screen violence. He prefers to insinuate than to overwhelm. That characteristic informs the way Night Train Murders plays out. Place them side by side, and the two films become archetypes of two different schools of horror: explicit or implicit. Which hurts the audience more? I suppose that's a matter of taste, though the films that know the value of BOTH schools of thought often have an uncommon power to them (examples would include Eyes Without a Face and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). In the case of Night Train Murders, I suspect that less really IS more, because it is altogether nastier than its American progenitor. Lado is deadly serious. The tone of his movie is completely unleavened by humor or cathartic release. Apart from the absolutely horrid folk songs over the opening and closing credits, Lado has created a nihilist microcosm that trumps Craven's version at every turn. This, in spite of the fact that Lado humanizes his band of murderers in a way that never occurs to Craven. Even as early as Last House, Craven is interested in film as postmodern metacinema--at a very basic level, his films are abstractions about film itself. Lado is interested in context, in politics, and in the human cost of violence. The conclusions he draws are particularly misanthropic.

The main thrust of The Virgin Spring is the terrible, dehumanizing cost of vengeance. Last House takes the idea and turns it into a portrait of society devouring itself, like Saturn devouring his children or Ouroboros devouring his tail. Night Train Murders has hints of both of these themes, but it develops them in an entirely different manner. In the interview with Lado provided on the Blue Underground DVD of Night Train Murders, the director notes that the main action of the film is bracketed by the actions of the upper class woman (who is never named by the film). She wears a hat with a veil. When we first see her, the veil is drawn. It is still drawn when she discusses the merits of totalitarianism and why the common man can't be trusted to govern himself with her bourgeois acquaintances on the train. This is the first glimpse behind the veil. The second is the accident that spills her purse revealing sadomasochistic pornography, which she quickly hides again. When Blackie and Curly come on the scene, she lifts the veil, symbolically revealing her true nature. Blackie corresponds roughly to David Hess's Krug in Last House on the Left (Flavio Bucci even resembles Hess). Krug is the central villain in Last House. There is no comparable character for the upper class lady in Last House. Here, the Krug surrogate is a pawn for upperclass exploitation of the lower classes. Given that a huge chunk of Italian cinema is overtly Marxist in its orientation, one might mistake Lado's intentions as Marxist, though I would suggest that Lado is actually a left leaning democrat based on the exploration of class and power in his first film, Short Night of Glass Dolls. But I digress. At the end of Night Train Murders, after Lisa's father has done his Straw Dogs rampage (the movie presents him as a pacifist early in the movie, and a doctor sworn to "first do no harm," to boot), the upper class lady pulls the veil back down, hiding behind respectability once more. The movie hints that she will suffer no consequences. It hints that the old, rich, and corrupt will always exploit the young and disenfranchised, and dupe the middle class into unwitting participation in their atrocities. There is an interesting geo-political angle to this, too: Blackie's tee-shirt bears an American Eagle. Is Lado suggesting that America--represented by Blackie--is being duped into the kind of fascism it detests by a plutocracy? There is a telling scene early in the film where Blackie tricks a group of German passengers into a "seig heil," only to pull his arm back in an attitude of "fuck you." Blackie is shown to be unwilling to go the extra mile in the lady's atrocities until he's cornered into participation when circumstances get out of hand.

This is all considerable food for thought for a film intended as a rip-off. It works because Lado pays attention to craft. He's studied Hitchcock--as evidenced by the vague reworking of the opening of Strangers on a Train, and by the appropriation of Hitch's favorite favorite visual pun of a train going into a tunnel right before a sexual act). He's also deployed considerable thought to the look and feel of the movie. In this regard, his actors are well chosen. The film is like a yearbook full of Dario Argento's favorite actors. Certainly Ennio Morricone's harmonica themes are deployed with subliminal cunning. The real key to the movie is its understanding of violence though. While the film isn't loaded with gore and violence, when violence IS depicted onscreen, Lado makes damned sure it hurts. The shot of the handle of the knife poking out from under Laura D'Angelo's miniskirt is as unpleasant a sight as one is likely to see in movies, in spite of the relative absence of blood. In part, this is because of the sexual nature of the image, but mainly it functions as a realization of our worst fears following a careful build up in menace and threat. The mood of the film is what makes the violence hurt.

Nasty piece of work, this movie.

[Charles Castle]

I suggested to my wife while watching, that you could probably stage The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023, directed by André Øvredal) as a play. Find a production of The Pirates of Penzance that's closing, mooch on their sets and you're all ready to go. She asked if I would make it a musical. I absolutely would. It would be the off-off-Broadway hit of the season. Buy your tickets now.

The story of the Demeter is from Dracula, of course. It occupies chapter seven of Stoker's novel, represented as news clippings pasted into Mina Murray's journal and as the logbook of the ship as reported in those clippings. The Demeter is usually seen at the end of its journey in movies. In the Tod Browning film, the sole survivor is Renfield (he is not on the ship in the book), with Dwight Frye's mad grin staring up at the investigators when the Demeter drifts into harbor. In Murnau's film version, there's an abbreviated version of the voyage. The first still from Nosferatu I ever saw was of Max Schreck standing on the deck of the Demeter. This was years before I ever saw the film. The most indelible version of the Demeter I ever saw was in John Badham's 1979 version of Dracula in which Harker joins the rescuers for the wrecked ship only to discover a man lashed to the wheel with his throat ripped open. A version of this image appears in Jon J. Muth's graphic novel, Dracula, A Symphony In Moonlight and Nightmares. The final voyage of the Demeter from Varna, Bulgaria, to Whitby, United Kingdom is such a vivid part of the Dracula story that it's shocking that no-one has made a film of its voyage until now. It's been, what? A hundred and twenty-six years at this point?



Dwight Frye's mad grin



Max Schreck on the deck of the Demeter



John Badham's Dracula (1979)



Dracula, A Symphony In Moonlight and Nightmares

A lot of the imagery from previous versions makes it into this new film, but most of that imagery was already there in Stoker's book. It's a rich novel for interpolations.

The story here begins with the wreck of the Demeter as one finds it in Dracula, and the men who are shaken by what they find on board. The ship's log is intact and offers a dire warning to England if the crew of the Demeter fails against the evil that has come on to their ship. Four weeks earlier, in Varna, the Demeter takes on its cargo and three new crewmen. Among these is Dr. Clemens, a black man who was unable to find employment in England after earning his medical degree. Clemens is initially passed over for the job, but when he saves the life of the Captain's grandson and when one of the new hands freaks out when he sees the crest on the cargo boxes, he's taken on. The captain's grandson, Toby, befriends Clemens and gives him a tour of the ship. Toby has been given responsibility over the ship's livestock. The journey from Varna to London will take several weeks, and that's the meat on board. The ship's mate, Wojchek, doesn't trust Clemens, and the other crewmen range from indifferent to hostile. Things begin to go sour once the Demeter is out of easy range of port. First, all of the livestock die, savaged by some unseen thing. Next, one of the boxes of their mysterious cargo is jostled out of its berth and breaks open. Inside is earth and a woman, near death. Clemens determines that she's lost a lot of blood and gives her a series of transfusions. Then the crew begin to die, one by one. When the stowaway woman wakes up, she tells them that they are all prey to the evil that has dominated her village in Transylvania for centuries. Dracula, she names him. The dwindling crew organize to find this fiend, but it soon becomes clear that if they can't defeat him, they must prevent him from ever reaching London.

Norwegian director André Øvredal has two modes of filmmaking, it seems: He is the maker of eccentric high concept horror movies like Trollhunter and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Mortal. These are films that have a touch of whimsical absurdity to them. He is also the maker of grim, unrelenting horror movies like The Autopsy of Jane Doe and today's specimen. In this mode, Øvredal has an instinct for the jugular that's rare in commercial mid-budget horror movies. That category of film would rather reinforce a nuclear family uber alles ideology than discomfort their audience in any meaningful way. Øvredal has a gleeful disregard of the taboos of middlebrow horror movies. This film does not award any of its characters a plot immunity idol or a hero's death-battle exemption. In the grand tradition of the grindhouse horror of another era, this is a film where anyone can die at any moment. This is entirely appropriate for a story where the audience, if it knows Dracula at all, knows that the Demeter reaches its destination without a crew, save for the man lashed to the helm with his throat ripped open. Everyone on board at the beginning of the journey is a dead man walking. Øvredal and his collaborators oblige the material. They provide the audience with scenes that are every bit as horrific as the R-rating allows.

Which isn't to say they don't take some liberties with the material. They do.

The obvious model for The Last Voyage of the Demeter, per the director himself, is Alien, in which a blue-collar crew must hunt for a monster that is picking them off one by one. And that's fair. A number of scenes are closely analogous, particularly one scene at dinner in which the crew complain about the division of shares for the voyage. Alien is still scary after all these years, and this film manages to capture part of that scariness. But this isn't an Alien rip-off in the traditional sense. There's an element of contagion in this film, too, and of paranoia, both well beyond the singular influence of one film. This is a film that finds many of the trends of contemporary horror movies already there at the roots of the genre. It is particularly concerned with the taboos about death and how we deal with it. In this, there is something of the rawness of Night of the Living Dead. How do we deal with loved ones who become monsters? How do we burn the bodies of those who are close to us without the benefit of a Christian burial? How do we let go? This roots its horror, as Dracula does, in ideas about a bad death and a bad afterlife. It salts this with a dash of eschatology. It's the end of the world for the Demeter. It might be the end of the world for England, should Dracula make landfall.

In spite of its familiarity, this version of the story finds great latitude for storytelling in what scant information Stoker provides. We never know the crew of the Demeter in the literary Dracula or in previous films. We meet them here for the first time. The film adds an interesting wrinkle as to why Dracula has to chow down on the crew (he's deprived of the midnight snack he's smuggled aboard). This version of Dracula is one of the most inhuman versions ever put on screen. There is no romance involved in this Dracula. No glamour whatsoever. He's a monster, full stop, and a terrifying one at that, well beyond the versions in Nosferatu and its remake. We also get as heroes characters who have no idea of how to slay a vampire. Indeed, the word "vampire" is never spoken in the film. There is no Van Helsing character, not even Dr. Clemens, who is an educated man. There is no savant with deep knowledge of the enemy. This puts stresses on the characters that other versions of Dracula don't and adds to their desperation. The scenes all of this generates are striking. The murder of the film's livestock at the outset foretells darker scenes, and the film delivers, whether it's a burial at sea with a victim who isn't quite dead yet, or Dracula alighting on the end of a lifeboat to forestall any attempts to escape him, or the fate of one of the hands who has been bitten and lashed to the mast as the sun comes up, or even the glance of the vampire at our heroes through a broken timbers of a locked door. If a horror film relies on good set-pieces for its scares, then this film has some doozies. The images put on camera here are indelible.

The film also has a conversation with the plight of The Other, though it takes The Other out of the hands of the vampire as allegorical figure and places it with the humans. Clemens is thoroughly distrusted by the crew of the Demeter, both along racial and class lines. Woycheck belittles his book learning as useless for a sailor, though Clemens points out--rightly--that a knowledge of astronomy might be handy for a navigator. It's the color of his skin that puts Clemens outside the circle of the crew, and Clemens has a list of grievances for that which he enumerates in due course. Ana, too, is an outsider, both because of her gender--women were accounted as "unlucky" on ships well into the 20th century, and as a harbinger of the monster. This is a role that is often played by a mad old man (see, for instance, the drunk at the start of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or the old coot at the start of Friday the 13th), so it's an unusual framing. This is a film that understands the axes of oppression, and suggests that those divisions will destroy us all. Dracula still functions as a political metaphor. A hundred years later, he's no longer the menace of the Russian empire or the unwashed Slavic east (Dracula is a pretty racist text after all), but can rather be viewed as the resurrection of a predatory aristocracy who, having consumed the resources at hand, looks covetously at the West. Dracula doesn't look exactly like Vladimir Putin, but there's a familial resemblance. The book tipped its hand along these lines by naming one of Dracula's victims "Lucy Westenra" or "Light of the West," but this film doesn't need to be that cute.

The producers of The Last Voyage of the Demeter have spent their resources wisely. This is a film that understands that the genre is the star here, and they've cast the film full of familiar character actors rather than springing for movie stars. The ostensible star of the film is Corey Hawkins as Clemens and he's fine in the role. Best of show is probably Liam Cunningham as Captain Elliot, though, who brings the same gravitas and kindness to his character here that he brought to Davos Seaworth in Game of Thrones. He's the moral heart of the film. David Dastmalchian and Aisling Franciosi have less-well developed characters to play. Dastmalchian's character, Woychek, exists as a secondary antagonist for Clemens, while Franciosi's character, Dracula's midnight snack, largely exists to deliver exposition. It's her mouth that first utters the name, Dracula, after all. All of these actors are good even if their parts are often under-written. The concept of the film is the star, here, and the setting. This is an unusually handsome movie that manages the tricky feat of providing environments that are both pleasing to the eye and unassuming enough to not call attention to themselves. It has a lived-in naturalism to it that a more Gothic minded film might exaggerate. Dracula himself is mostly created using practical effects and prosthesis and the benefit of having an object that bounces actual light adds a level of realism to its monster that would escape a monster created in a computer. The filmmakers have gone the Nosferatu road for designing their Dracula, but they've gone beyond Max Schreck or Klaus Kinski and created something entirely devoid of romance or sympathy.



If the film has a flaw, it comes at the end, when we meet Dracula in a London pub. While there is certainly justification in the book for this scene, the way it's framed seems like naked franchise building. It's as if Universal can't get over its dream of launching a "Dark Universe" on the Marvel model. If they had any brains, they would have launched this film in October rather than early August. I'm almost happy that the film's business didn't reward them for their incompetence. Almost. Because this is a film that really ought to be seen with a receptive audience. We were fortunate that our local theater brought this back for one October viewing. It's definitely a film for the the big screen. When I was walking to the parking lot after the show, I tried to remember the last time a Dracula movie was legitimately scary and came up blank through several decades. This film stages scenes that are well beyond the imagination of the vampire cinema of the past. Hammer films only dreamed of making a film this mean.

[Edward J Grug III]

I liked but didn't love Last Voyage. It's obviously constricted by the fact that we know Dracula survives, and that's fine, but what hurts the film is it's very obvious what the crew need to attempt to do, and they never do it.

You can't kill Dracula - fine - but if you witness multiple times the thing that kills vampires and you don't at least try to do that to the vampire and fail, it makes the back half of the movie frustrating.

Their ultimate plan was quite stupid.

[Cyrusso]

I saw The Equalizer 3 a couple weeks ago. Mister Denzel Washington delivered one hell of a performance. Unfortunately, the movie has a very strong "been there, done that" vibe, that makes me feel like I've seen the same exact thing several times before. It was enjoyable, but it also felt like a very empty experience.

It was kind of weird to see a red band trailer for the upcoming Eli Roth movie "Thanksgiving" preceding the start of the movie.

[Charles Castle]

It had been a while since I last saw The Last House on The Left (1972, directed by Wes Craven). Fresh off my viewing of the Italian remake of sorts, Night Train Murders, and my wife again out of town for the evening -- she hates Last House even more than Night Train Murders -- I thought I might finally take a look at the unopened 2002 DVD of the film that I bought some 20 years ago. This isn't anything like a definitive version of the film and director Wes Craven even admitted that no such thing actually exists. Thirty years after the fact, he still wasn't sure what was supposed to stay in and what was supposed to stay out. One wonders if he knew even when the film was new. I've struggled with this film for a long time. Many people whose opinions I respect love this film, but I've never warmed to it. Every once in a while, I'll try to put myself in a mindset to understand the film's appeal. I continue to fail in this pursuit. I just don't get it.

The story here has two teen-aged hippie girls, Mari and Phyllis, headed to the city to see a concert. On a side trip into the woods to find some marijuana, the girls run afoul of Krug, a recently escaped convict who we first see delighting in popping the balloons of children. Krug kidnaps the girls, rapes and humiliates them, then kills them. Krug and his gang then take refuge at a nearby house. The owners of the house are Mari's parents, who discover what Krug and his friends have done. They wreak a terrible vengeance upon them.

In discourse that treats horror films from a sociological viewpoint, The Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are often grouped together like conjoined twins at the freakshow. Both of them are vivid and angry movies. Both of them, it so happens, are first features by first-time directors. In interviews Craven described Last House as "a young man's movie," and wondered at the rage that gave it life. Both films inhabit the "rural massacre movie," as pioneered by Herschell Gordon Lewis in the 1960s. Both comment on the zeitgeist of the times with images borrowed from television news. But from there, they part company. Where The Texas Chainsaw Massacre puts down deep roots into the hindbrain and occupies terrifying archetypal landscapes, Last House struggles with its ambitions. A lot of this has to do with the approach of its director.

The Last House on the Left is an easy film to intellectualize, since it spends a fair amount of time reflexively intellectualizing itself. We also have the long career of its director to provide signposts. In Kim Newman's superb overview of the horror genre, Nightmare Movies, he notes of Craven's The Hills Have Eyes: "The Hills Have Eyes is to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as Rio Bravo is to High Noon." This is a statement describing the the central themes of Craven's early films, in which would-be victims commit attrocities in the name of survival that are as violent and as inhuman as the actions of the degenerate forces arrayed against them. This is a central theme in The Last House on the Left. In The Hills Have Eyes and, later, in The People Under the Stairs, there is a strong theme of class warfare. This is ALSO a central theme of The Last House on the Left. But Craven is an inconsistent auteur when it comes to these textual and subtextual elements, because he drops one, the other, or both in many of his films, and didn't really explore these themes in the final two decades of his career. The element of his films that did endure even to his late projects, though, is the idea of the horror film as meta-cinema. The Last House on the Left is a reflexive film that comments upon itself (mainly in the guise of pretending to be a remake of The Virgin Spring). Commenting in The American Nightmare, a documentary about 70s era horror films, John Landis noted that this film is genuinely transgressive (he uses the phrase "genuinely perverted," in point of fact), and further notes of its modus operandi: "In a Hitchcock movie, we are reassured because we are in the hands of a master filmmaker; in Last House on the Left, we're in the hands of a maniac." The way in which Last House on the Left transgresses the boundaries of good taste and civilized behavior is instructive, because it is ALSO a reflexive commentary on the conventions of the subgenre. Additionally, the film is very conscious of its portrait of the young and the old devouring each other as a reflection of the times during which it was made.

In other words, the film is over-intellectualizing itself, long before critics and apologists get a crack at it.

Where Last House on the Left fails is precisely where The Texas Chainsaw Massacre succeeds so spectacularly: it fails to match image with archetype. In fact, I would suggest that The Last House on the Left rarely occupies an archetype in any meaningful way and that the archetypes it trades in are too obscure to function in the way horror movie archetypes should function. There are hints of Saturn devouring his children in the movie, and The Virgin Spring elements resemble the story of Theseus and Protrusces, in which a madman murders those to whom he has extended his hospitality. But none of the archetypal figures--if we can call them that--referenced by the film really resonates deep in the reptilian hindbrain where primal experiences dwell, because the film never provides an image to match them. To an extent, this is a function of the slipshod filmmaking on display here. The film is grotty and unpleasant to look at and features none of the visual and epistemological flourishes that characterize Craven's later films. Purely in terms of the visual image, the film is MUCH closer to the sensibilities of Last House's OTHER creative force, Sean Cunningham, who would later father the Friday the 13th movies. As a measure of the laziness behind the camera, it should be noted that almost every structure of any significance is on the right of the characters as they approach them. The end result is a film that subverts its own cleverness with its sneering bad taste. As John Waters once noted, there is "good" bad taste and "bad" bad taste. I would place Last House on the Left in the latter category.

[stethacantus]

Thursday I got this e-mail from Amazon:

So, basically it only took them two month and going through every third party seller claiming they had the Chuck Norris television movie collection in stock to admit that they did not have it in stock. Okay, you would think Amazon would take some sort f action against these resellers who don't actually have stock in their online  stores, but moments after I received that Amazon email, I went to their site and found this:

Really Amazon?

BTW.  This seller....

...is one of the sellers who a few weeks ago wasn't able to fulfil the movie to Amazon. So what did I do? I ordered it again. A few reasons. One that I actually want this collection if it actually exists, and if one of these sellers actually has it.   Two, the person who's Amazon Prime account I used to order it,  was given a $20 gift certificate as an apology from Amazon for not having a DVD they claimed was in stock. That's not fair. I was the one who actually ordered it. So if Amazon screws up again, this is an easy 20 bucks. Perhaps more if they realize I was the same customer from the previous order. Third, I am curious as to see where this goes. But that also means I need to go into my library to watch a movie already reviewed here.

The Villainess ( 2017 )
I have a bunch of DVDs and Blu-rays on the shelf next to the television. Almost all are movies I liked enough that I wanted to watch them again. One of the movies was a Korean action film called The Villainess..

I had remembered what a kickass film it was, so put it in the queue for this Saturday. Funny thing happened while watching the film. The plot I was so sure it had, about a woman rescuing her daughter from a gang that took her, didn't happen. The heroine of the story did give birth to a daughter that was roughly the same age as the daughter taken in the plot I remembered. But by the time the film got to it's final 20 minutes, I began to realize I was probably thinking of a  plot from a completely different film. After a bit of research, I began to realize  I had somehow in my memories, merged the plot for The Villainess with the plot for a Vietnamese film called Furie ( 2019 )

This was actually the film I wanted to see. Not that The Villainess wasn't any good. It has a lot of great action scenes, and a great opening scene shown entirely from the heroines POV as she kills an entire army of thugs. But I was looking forward to a different film.

So, this week I watched the last two episodes of Loki Season 1 instead of a movie, as the Disney+ MCU series are basically extended MCU films. I will have time for my regular movie schedule next week. As for Loki Season 1, review will be in the Television section.