Noirvember: Johnny Eager (1942)

image host

Johnny Eager (Robert Taylor) is an ex-con turned straight. At least that’s what he pretends to be. He walks around in a cabbie uniform and drives a taxi to his parole hearings. He swears up and down to all the right people that he’s given up his criminal ways. In reality, he’s still the head of a gambling syndicate.

One day, his parole officer pays an unscheduled visit to his home (which isn’t really his home, but he pays a couple of ladies to stay there pretending to be his mother and sister, and luckily he’s got someone on the parole board’s payroll who gives him a heads-up when an unscheduled visit is planned). The officer brings along a couple of dames, including Lisbeth Bard (Lana Turner), a socialite and sociology student interested in how former criminals live.

Naturally, they fall for each other. Unfortunately for him, her father is the prosecutor who put him away the first time and is gunning to do it again. Things are further complicated by the fact that Eager has dropped a lot of dough into a dog racing track he hopes to open, but is being blocked by Lisbeth’s father (he doesn’t know Eager is the actual owner of the joint, but he still doesn’t like it)

Jeff Hartnett (Van Heflin) is Eager’s friend and confidant. He’s also not so subtly in love with Eager. Naturally, being a film from 1942, they can’t come right out and say that, and the story existing in the same time period means Jeff wouldn’t say it anyway. But it is there just the same. To hide his feelings, he drinks a lot.

Heflin is so good in this. Jeff is an intelligent man, prone to quoting great literature, and cunning. But he’s terribly unhappy. He can’t stand to be with Eager (and not actually be with him, and see him destroy his life), but he can’t stand to not be with him either.

The plot isn’t really about them, but about Eager and Lisbeth. Once he realizes who her dad is, he manipulates things into blackmail so he can get his dog track going. But of course he’s really in love with her.

Eager is a curious character. He’s undoubtedly a bad guy. We see him straight up kill a guy. He treats his girlfriend terribly and ushers her away so he can seduce Lisbeth. He refuses to help someone he could easily help simply because he doesn’t want to be bothered. Yet, he’s also the hero of the film. We want to root for him and his relationship with Lisbeth.

Robert Taylor is good. He’s often stiff, but here he seems much more at ease, and he shows a range of emotion. Lana Turner isn’t given much to do. But really, this is Van Heflin’s movie. He won an Oscar for it, and you can see why. He steals every scene.

Hello friends, and welcome to Noirvember 2016. It is funny because by the time I actually get to Halloween, I’m usually sick of watching horror films, and I’m always excited to start Noirvember. Let’s get ready for a great month.

The Movie Journal: October 2026

image host

I watched 38 movies in October. Twenty-four of them were new to me. Fifteen of them were made before I was born. It was the scary month, and I watched 34 horror movies. That may be a record. It was nice getting back into the monthly theme groove, though as you can tell by the end of the month, I was starting to grow tired of horror. That always happens.

Unfortunately, I’m having trouble with my image hoster again. I used Imgbox for ages, and it worked really well, but a few weeks ago something happened, and it completely crashed. I lost all my images. They’ve made vague promises to bring them back but I’m not holding my breath. Then I started using ImgBB. They worked fine for a while, but they keep killing my images saying that I need to upgrade to Pro in order to embed them. But then sometimes they come back.

I’m trying Imgbox again because they really did work great, and they promise they are truly back this time. But I could really use a solid service. If anyone knows of one, let me know.

That’s a long way of saying that I don’t actually track my most-watched actors and directors. I always write about them, but I don’t keep a list of who is where. And with the images gone, that information doesn’t really exist.

I don’t think they’ve changed all that much. I’m thinking Donald Pleasence is the only person to show up new. But who knows?

image host image host

It was a good month, and now I’m ready for Noirvember.

The Falling Star (2023)
Cure (1997)
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
She-Wolf of London (1946)
The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)
The Merry Widow (1934)
Resident Evil (2026)
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)
The Monster Squad (1987)
I, Madman (1989)
Demonwarp (1988)
The French Sex Murders (1972)
Flic Story (1975)
Friday the 13th (1980)
Barton Fink (1991)
The Asphyx (1972)
Daughter of Dracula (1972)
The Tingler (1959)
Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)
I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
The Mad Magician (1954)
The Conjuring 2 (2016)
Die, Monster, Die! (1965)
Halloween II (1981)
The Nude Vampire (1970)
Sweet Sixteen (1982)
The Burning (1981)
Bluebeard (1944)
Let Us Prey (2014)
The Haunting (1963)
Alone in the Dark (1982)
The Conjuring (2013)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
Invaders from Mars (1953)
The Amityville Horror (1979)

31 Days of Horror: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Halloween Curse of Michael Myers

I imagine when you are creating an original horror film, you aren’t necessarily thinking about what will happen to your characters some 17 years and 5 sequels later. Certainly John Carpenter wasn’t when he made Halloween (1978). He wasn’t particularly interested in making Halloween II (1982). His villain, Michael Myers, was unknowable, pure and simply evil, as Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) calls him in the original film. He didn’t need a backstory. We didn’t need to know what made Michael Myers tick…and kill.

But sequels, especially horror sequels, have a way of trying to fill in those blanks, of explaining away every little thing that happens in the first film. Even Carpenter did a little of that in Halloween II by making Michael Myers the brother of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) – the final girl of the first and second films – and connecting him to Celtic rituals and the occult.

Horror franchises rarely have someone overseeing every film. There generally isn’t someone keeping up with the lore and guiding the mythology every step of the way. Producers, writers, and directors come and go. Carpenter basically bailed on this series after the third film. Which is how we wound up with this mess of a film. It creates a Cult of Thorn to explain why Michael Myers kills and how he is so indestructible. It is so hated that every subsequent sequel has basically pretended this film doesn’t exist.

Set six years after Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (another film that is basically ignored by all the other sequels), everyone in this film believes Michael Myers died in the fire that ended the last one. Well, almost everyone. Loomis still thinks Myers will show up sooner or later, as he always does (and he’s always right).

The town of Haddonfield, Illinois, banned all celebrations of Halloween after Myers killing spree, but there is a movement to bring it back. The kids think it is time to move on.

Relatives of Laurie Strode’s adoptive family have now moved into the old Myers house. This includes Kara (Marianne Hagan) and her young son Danny (Devin Gardner). Across the street lives Tommy (Paul Rudd in his first film role), the kid Laurie Strode was babysitting in the first film.

Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd (JC Brandy), the little girl from the last film, is now fifteen years old and pregnant. She’s kidnapped and impregnated by the Cult of Thorn for reasons I won’t spoil.

Michael Myers is, of course, not dead, but is connected to the cult. The mythology gets a bit confusing and silly, but the good news is he’s back to killing people in Haddonfield. The bad news is the kills are spectacularly ordinary.

This film is better than its reputation, but just. It brings all of the characters I just mentioned together to try and stop Michael Myers. I appreciate the attempt to tie together some of the mythology from the previous films. It makes sense that they would tie Michael Myers ‘ indestructibility to something supernatural. It reminds me a bit of what they did in the recent Crystal Lake series in explaining Jason’s inability to die. These villains are something more than human, so you have to find some way to explain that.

The Cult of Thorn is pure nonsense, and I’m glad it was dropped in subsequent films, but I at least appreciate the attempt to bring all those loose ends together.

For some reason, they often show Michael Myers in fairly bright lights. His mask looks awful. Famously, the original mask was one of William Shatner from Star Trek, painted white. But John Carpenter was smart enough to cloud Michael Myers’ face in darkness and shadows. His mask in previous films looks otherworldly. Here it just looks silly.

Donald Pleasence gives it his old, but he’s clearly an old man and tired (he would be dead a few months later). The rest of the cast does their best. This isn’t by any means a good film, but for the sixth film in a slasher series, it isn’t terrible. You could do worse with your Halloween horror viewing.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025)

The Conjuring Last Rites

When I wrote about The Amityville Horror at the beginning of this month, I noted that every October I try to watch every film in some horror franchise. That wasn’t 100% true. I do try to complete an entire horror franchise, but I don’t usually watch all the films within the month. What I mean is, I try to watch all of the films I haven’t seen within a certain franchise. I don’t always watch the ones I’ve already seen.

I also don’t write about them all. With The Conjuring films, I decided to watch and review them all. Even though there are only four films in this series (well, there are technically nine films within the Conjuring universe, but I decided to just concentrate on the main films), I already understand why trying to review them all was a mistake. Like all horror franchises, there is a definite diminishing of returns with each sequel.

Last Rites purports to be the final film starring Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), and it definitely feels like it’s time to put them to bed.

In all of my reviews, I’ve talked about the real-life Warrens. I’ve called them charlatans. And they were. They made up stories about hauntings and possessions and presented them as truth. It is unclear if the families supposedly investigated by the Warrens were in on the scam or not. It seems likely that many of them truly thought they were being haunted, and the Warrens took advantage of that, wrote a book about it, and cashed the checks. But there were also allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse.

The Warrens were not good people. While watching the first movie in this series, you can kind of overlook that. There is a sort of tacit agreement that you are watching a movie. It isn’t real. It has ghosts, after all. It helps that it is a very good movie.

But each subsequent film works on beautifying the Warrens. It portrays them as loving, kind Christians out to help these poor people beset by demons out of the kindness of their hearts and at great personal peril. That makes the films more and more difficult to take. It is harder to separate who they really were and how they are portrayed on screen. Also, the filmmaking gets increasingly worse.

Last Rites begins with the Warrens’ first case. They are faced with, um, a haunted mirror. Yeah, these films deal in haunted objects; they make a big deal out of the Warrens’ museum of the occult. They made a whole film series out of a haunted doll. But at least that thing looks scary (the real Annabell looks like a Raggedy Anne doll, which is just hilarious). A mirror is, well, it’s just a mirror.

Anyway, the demon mirror forces a very pregnant Loraine into labor. Their baby comes out stillborn, but a little fervent prayer brings her to life. Flash forward a couple of decades, and the Warrens are taking a break from ghost busting due to Ed’s bad ticker. That daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), is all grown up and engaged to Tony (Ben Hardy).

Meanwhile, the Smurl family has somehow wound up with that demon mirror, and it’s causing all sorts of horror in their household. Naturally, the Warrens get drawn into the case. This time, they bring their daughter and her fiancé. That brings an extra layer of family into the mix.

James Wan directed the first two Conjuring films, and he has a kinetic energy that makes the scares truly terrifying and an adept ability to make the character stuff work. This film is directed by Michael Chaves, and he’s not nearly as good.

The script does him no favors. It relies far too heavily on the relationship between the Warrens and, as I’ve already stated, I can no longer separate what I know about the real family and this fictional one. The stuff with the Smurl family isn’t all that interesting or scary. A mirror just isn’t intrinsically frightening (although they did a pretty good job of making one scary in Oculus). There is also a really fake-looking ghost with an axe and an old lady ghost with some terrible makeup.

The film does a lot of that thing where a horror movie will set up a scene like it’s preparing you for a jump scare, and then it will be something mundane, only to really throw the scare at you a moment later. That sort of thing has become tedious on its best days, and here you get it far too many times.

With a runtime of 2 hours and 15 minutes, it is entirely too long. This is mostly due to this being the last film and them needing to wrap some things up for the Warrens. I was ready to turn the thing off way before then and say goodbye to the whole franchise.

31 Days of Horror: The Conjuring – The Devil Made Me Do It (2021)

The Conjuring The Devil Made Me Do It

The first two Conjuring films followed a pattern. They began with Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) on a case. It won’t be the case that consumes the rest of the film, and they don’t actually show us much of it. But it does show us a bit of who the Warrens are and what they are about. It also sets up the villains for some side-quels.

Then we’ll shift to the family who will be haunted for the rest of the film. For half the film, it will cut back and forth between the Warrens doing their thing and the haunted family getting increasingly haunted.

There isn’t anything special about that setup, but it worked. It helped develop our characters and slowly ramped up the hauntings. For this, the third film in the franchise, they switched things up a bit. It does begin with the Warrens on a case. A young boy has been possessed; the Warrens are doing their best to free the child from the demon. Things go haywire. The demon nearly kills Ed. He has a heart attack.

But just as things are getting truly terrifying, a man named Arne (Ruairi O’Connor), who is the boyfriend of the possessed boy’s sister, demands that the demon leave the boy alone and enter him. It does, and things return to normal. For a while. But then Arne kills his landlord. At his trial, he pleads not guilty due to possession.

The formula has changed. The opening case isn’t tangentially related to our main plot; it is the main plot. In addition to that, whereas in the first two films we spend a great deal of time with the family as the haunting ramps up, this film is about a guy in prison. We get a few spooky scenes in the prison, but mostly this is the Warrens’ film.

They find a totem underneath the possessed kid’s house. That’s the sign of a devil-worshipping cult. The film then becomes a mystery. The Warrens try to figure out who put the totem there and what for.

All of this throws the balance off. What made the first two films work so well is that you got to know these characters. Not just the Warrens but the other families too. That made us care about their spiritual plight. We don’t get that with Arne or the rest of the family.

We’ve already spent two films with the Warrens. We’ve gotten to know them pretty well. Wilson and Farmiga are good actors, and they make the Warrens come alive. The central theme of these films is how their love for each other transcends all of the horror. But the more I watch these films, the more the real Warrens slip into my mind, and they were charlatans. That keeps tainting my feelings toward the films. Keeping the focus on them doesn’t help matters.

Neither does this satanic cult story. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t all that interesting either. There are some decent scares throughout, but it doesn’t build the tension like the other films did. And thus it becomes just another standard horror film without anything that makes it stand out.

Show Review: Van Morrison – Vienna, Austria (12/29/01)

Van Morrison
2001-12-29
Museumsquartier – Vienna, Austria

01 – Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart #1
02 – Celtic Swing
03 – Whatever Happened To PJ Proby
04 – Meet Me In The Indian Summer
05 – Naked In The Jungle
06 – Days Like This
07 – Have I Told You Lately
08 – Satisfied
09 – In The Afternoon > Ancient Highway > Joe Turner Sings > Louis Prima Sings > Raincheck > Hamlet
10 – Stop Drinking
11 – Jackie Wilson Said
12 – Jump Jive And Wail
13 – And The Healing Has Begun
14 – All Work And No Play
15 – It’s All in the Game>You Know What They’re Writing About>Rainbow 65>Make It Real One More Time
16 – Star Of The County Down
17 – Brown Eyed Girl
18 – Gloria

 

Comment: 1h35m

Lineup: Richard Dunn, Ned Edwards, Lee Goodall, Matt Holland, Pete Hurley, Bobby Irwin, Martin Winning

Guest: Candy Dulfer

Lineage: ? > CD trade > EAC > FLAC > SBE check > you

The Midnight Cafe Review 

I’ve posted a Youtube clip of this show and more over at my Substack.

Several reviews ago, I noted that my reviews come slowly because I just don’t have that much time to listen. I do my best listening in my car to and from work. I do listen at home, but usually when I’m doing something else and thus not paying close attention. This means it usually takes me the better part of a week to listen to an entire show.

Well, I’m getting better at listening but worse at writing. I don’t know if I’m riding around more for work, or more likely I’m not letting myself pause the music for any reason. Often, when I have something on my mind, I’ll talk it out to myself (and yes, I really do talk to myself). Usually, when I do that, I’ll stop the music because I know I won’t be paying attention. But for the last couple of weeks, I’ve forced myself to listen and not talk.

I now have a couple of shows fully listened to with notes, but I haven’t taken the time to review. If I get good at this, I might get two or three reviews in a week, which would be cool.

In my last Neil Young review, I complained about crowd noise. For that recording, there were a few folks talking rather loudly through the entire show. And the mics picked them up. For this recording, there is still some crowd noise, and it has that typical audience reverberation where it sounds like the show is happening in the next room, but I can’t hear any specific people talking (except for the occasional shout). I don’t know why that is. I do know there are directional mics that are designed to only hear sounds coming from one direction, which should help cut out crowd noise from around the microphone (except from directly in front, I guess).

Is that what happened on the Neil show? Were the talkers directly in front of the mics? Or did the taper have bad mics? Or maybe this crowd at the Van show was less talkative? I don’t understand any of that. Maybe our good friend OldNeumanntapr can explain the details. His recordings always sound wonderful.

The show begins with two instrumentals. Van apparently doesn’t come out until after “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart #1” as he gets announced just before “Celtic Swing.” “Whatever Happened To PJ Proby” and “Meet Me In the Indian Summer” are well played. They are very mellow and laid-back.

“Naked in the Jungle” is killer. Big jams, high energy. The audience recording doesn’t do it justice. He’ll do this several times throughout the night – play a couple of laid-back, mellow, or soulful songs and then just absolutely let loose.

“Days Like This” is very good. “Have I Told You Lately” is very jazzy. “Satisfied” has a great little groove. The whole show is very well played. The band and Van are syncing really well. “Jackie Wilson Said” is big and jazzy.

“Jump Jive and Wail” is fine. It is one of those songs that was probably a lot of fun to listen to if you were in the audience, but on tape you lose some of that energy. But it’s perfectly fine.

“And the Healing Has Begun” is gorgeous. So soulful. In the middle, there is this section where the strings solo for a bit, then the guitar, then the piano all get solos, and it’s just wonderful. Sometimes when they trade solos like that, it gets a little tedious, but here it works. Then they come together to create a wonderful groove. You know Van is into it because he does his whole “Digga Digga Dig” thing.

“All Work and No Play” is light and jazzy. It makes for quite a contrast to the soulfulness of “And the Healing Has Begun.” “It’s All in the Game” is wonderful, then he slips into a medley of several songs. All of which are sung very soulfully, but they wind up taking away from the beauty of “It’s All in the Game.”

“Brown Eyed Girl” is spirited. Van’s voice is in such fine form here. “Gloria” has some great sax from Candy Dulfer and a fun little outro. I’m thinking Dulfer being present all night added to that jazzy feeling I keep mentioning on several songs.

This really is a great show. The sound is quite good, and the performance is wonderful.

31 Days of Horror: The Conjuring 2 (2016)

The Conjuirng 2

I often lie in bed at night thinking about a movie I just watched. I’ll think about the things I want to say about it and mentally compose a review. Normally, the next day I’ll sit down and actually write that review. Every now and again, I’ll wake up thinking that I actually did write the review instead of just thinking about it. This is one such occasion. I would have sworn I wrote and posted a review to The Conjuring 2, but no such luck. It has now been a couple of weeks since I watched the movie, so my memory of it has faded a bit. Normally, I’d just let it go and not write a review, but I made a promise that I’d review all the Conjuring films this scary season, so here goes (being that it is October 24 and I haven’t watched the two other films in the main series, I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to keep the promise, but I’ll try).

The first time I watched this sequel, I was disappointed. It wasn’t nearly as scary as the first one, and the family being haunted wasn’t nearly as interesting or well developed. But on this watch, my appreciation grew.

Plot-wise, this film is very similar to the first one. It begins with a story that is mostly unrelated to the main plot. This one begins with the haunting at Amityville. That’s an interesting choice, for before these films, the Warrens were best known for participating in The Amityville Horror. But that story has been told a couple of times before, and in truth, the Warrens didn’t show up until after the Lutz family had split. So here we get just a bit of a séance and indications that the horrors of that house are some of the most intense the Warrens have ever dealt with (that will be a recurring theme with these films, every story is the most crazy story they ever experienced.) Also, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) gets a vision of an evil nun.

Later, Ed (Patrick Wilson) will get some visions of that same nun and will paint a horrifying picture of her (one that he’ll hang in his office for some reason).  The Nun will, of course, be the antagonist of a series of sidequal films.  We’ll see more of her in the Warrens’ part of this film before they meet up with our family.

That family is the Hodgsons, led by Peggy (Frances O’Connor ) and her four children. They live near London in a rundown house. The oldest girl, Janet (Madison Wolfe), plays with an Ouija board and accidentally summons a demon.  We get the same sort of jump scares as in the first one, though they amp them up a bit here. There are a variety of demons at play in this one, including an old man, The Crooked Man, and something else. Like most sequels, everything gets jacked up a bit.

But this time I found the slower parts with the Hodgson family to be good. They are a kind, working-class family just trying to get by. The father left some time ago, and Peggy is struggling to keep everything afloat. There are some nice character moments with the children and we get a real sense of who they are as a family before all hell breaks loose. I was less enthused about what the Warrens are up to at home. The nun stuff has some good scares, but isn’t all that interesting (and definitely doesn’t make me want to watch those films). And I’m already growing tired of them wrestling with whether or not they should continue this line of work. Here, Lorraine has visions of Ed being killed, and so she doesn’t want to take the case, but of course they take the case because there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. I don’t need that constant drama.

Once the two families get together, the scares get crazy. But like the first film, they are dolled out slowly at first. The two families get to know each other. WE once again see how kind and loving the Warrens are. Ed will help fix a leaking pipe, etc. All of that stuff works for me. I like the smaller scene and the smaller horror. Once things reach a fever pitch it starts to fell like so many other horror movies at the end.

It isn’t quite as good as the first film, but I’m still on board with this franchise.

 

The Friday NIght Horror Movie: I, Madman (1989)

I Madman (1989)

Virginia Clayton (Jenny Wright) is an aspiring actress who works at a used bookstore. She likes horror novels, and one night she scares herself while reading an obscure book by the deceased author Malcolm Brand. She calls her detective boyfriend, Richard (Clayton Rohner), over to comfort her and have a little sexy time. While the book did scare her, she liked it and attempts to find the only other book Brand wrote, I Madman. She has no luck finding it for herself, but one night it shows up on her doorstep.

The book is about a crazed man who decides the best way to express his passion for the woman he loves is to cut off his ears, nose, and lips. When she rejects him, he begins murdering people to get those body parts back. His first victim is an actress whom he stalks, murders, and cuts her hair off.

Back in reality, a woman in Virginia’s acting class has been brutally murdered; her hair was cut off. Virginia becomes obsessed with the book and believes the killer to be its author. He has come back to life and is enacting the murders he wrote about. She begins seeing him on the street. She thinks he believes she is the girl from the book that he was obsessed with.

Meanwhile, more folks are getting killed and facially mutilated just like in the book. When she witnesses one murder that happens across the street from her apartment, she calls the police. She tells her boyfriend everything. At first, they are excited to have a witness, but when she starts talking about characters jumping out of a book, they think she’s crazy. The film plays it close to the vest for a while as to whether or not she is crazy, or if this madman has come to life.

I’ve watched quite a few dumb horror movies lately. Movies that felt like the filmmakers were searching for a quick buck rather than any sort of artistic vision. Movies that give the audience some gore and boobs and call it a day. That might have caused me to rate this one a little higher than it perhaps deserves. I really appreciated that I, Madman was actually trying to make an interesting movie. It put in an effort.

I do, genuinely, think it is a good movie. Director Tibor Takács, fresh off making his cult classic The Gate, infuses the film with a wonderful sense of dread. We spend a lot of time in Virginia’s (really quite spacious) apartment, lit with nothing but lamps, giving it a cavernous feel full of shadows. He blends fiction with reality, creating an eerie dreamscape. Jenny Wright is quite good as Virginia, giving her an innocent quality that makes her feel quite vulnerable.

It isn’t a perfect film. The ending is a little silly, and Takács falls back on some of the special effects he used in The Gate. But I came to this knowing absolutely nothing about it, and I came away more than pleasantly surprised.

 

The Complete Kubrick is the Pick of the Week

cc The Complete Kubrick

A little late with this, but Criterion has just released a massive Stanley Kubrick boxed set that looks amazing. Right after it came out, they did a little 24-hour flash sale, and the sucker sold out.  Not permanently; they will make more, but that’s pretty amazing.  It is rightfully my pick of the week, though honestly it is a little more expensive than I can justify purchasing at the moment.  Maybe on the next sale I can find some coupons.  You can read about it and everything else coming out this week over at Cinema Sentries.