Author: Mat Brewster

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Connections

I’ve always loved the idea of sharing shows with some connection to each other. An obvious and easy connection are shows within the same time period – a year, or a tour, or a run of shows at the same venue. But I really love trying to find slightly more obscure, or at least different connections.

Mainly I get bored throwing up random shows and I like to find ways to make this blog interesting (at least to me anyway).

Trouble is all of that takes time and a little research.

I have a terrible memory. Unlike some folks in this hobby, I don’t have an immediate recollection of who played bass guitar for Bob Dylan in the fall of 1982. I don’t even know if he played a show in the fall of 1982. I don’t know what Neil Young was doing in the spring of 2001, or if Van Morrison was at the top of his game (or the bottom of it) in 1994.

I’m probably most knowledgeable with the Grateful Dead and even then I can only speak in generalities. I know about the tour of Europe in 1972 and the Wall of Sound in 1973 but I can’t tell you which shows are best.

That’s just the way my dumb brain works (or rather how it doesn’t work.) That means I have to do a little thinking and a little research to find some connective tissue for shows I might want to post. Then I have to actually try to find recordings of those shows.

All of this takes time which is why I’ve talked about this idea fairly often, but very rarely actually done anything about it.

I’ve been feeling antsy lately so I thought I’d give this a go. Obviously, I did Bob Dylan’s Fastbreak Tour yesterday. I’m working on a short tour Jerry Garcia did in 1994 right now.

I’d definitely love to hear any of your suggestions. It can be a time period or a bunch of shows from throughout an artist’s career at the same venue, or anything really. I’m just trying to mix it up a bit.

Lorna the Exorcist (1974)

lorna the exorcist bluray

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last couple of days. I had a really lousy weekend and that bled into Monday. And then I got some really great news Monday night. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it all.

I took a break from writing my 31 Days of Horror reviews because of this and now I’ve got to get back into that groove. Noirvember is coming soon and I do want to write a lot about it.

I also decided to change things up a bit with my bootleg posting. I’m not sure how long it will last, but I’m hoping to do something slightly different that will also be fun, but will also mean maybe I don’t post every day. But we’ll see how it goes. I may go right back to my old ways after a week or two.

Anyway, I wrote a review of this weird little horror film for Cinema Sentries and you can read it here.

31 Days of Horror: Castle of Blood (1964)

castle of blood

Alan Foster (Georges Rivière), a journalist meets Edgar Alan Poe (Silvano Tranquilli) at a pub. In the film’s reality, Poe is not a writer of fictions, but a documentarian of actual supernatural occurrences. He tells Foster this, but the journalist is a skeptic. Poe makes him a bet that he cannot spend the night in a haunted castle. Foster agrees.

Once there he is accosted by the usual haunted house trappings – spooky noises, candles getting blown out, strange sounds, and paintings that seem to stare back at him.

Then the ghosts come.

Luckily two out of the three ghosts are beautiful women (Barbara Steele and Margarete Robsahm), the other is a handsome, musclebound man. They were each murdered on the premises sometime in the past and now, once a year they must take the soul of a living human in order to remain in existence.

Ah, but Barbara Steele’s character falls in love with our hero and decides to help him survive the night, even though that will mean her own destruction.

Castle of Blood is pretty light on plot, but oh is it heavy on atmosphere. The camera investigates and lingers on every gothic inch of the castle. It is cobweb-filled, shadow-dense, and incredibly creepy. It longingly gazes at Barbara Steele who has a face custom-built for films like this. She is both incredibly beautiful and eerily terrifying.

This is the type of horror film my squeamish wife can watch with me. It is exactly the type of film I love.

31 Days of Horror: Murders in the Zoo (1931)

murders in the zoo

Here’s another Pre-Code film that couldn’t have been made just a few years later. Murders in the Zoo is an astonishingly violent film for its time, I’m rather surprised it got a full release even if it was made before the Production Code was in full effect.

It begins with a man getting his mouth sewed closed (and as you can see the film delightfully gives us that image) because he dared kiss another man’s wife. Several other people are murdered by snake bite and one woman is tossed into an alligator pit where she’s ripped to shreds.

still from murder in the zoo

Obviously, there isn’t a lot of gore in this film made some 90 years ago, the blood and guts are decidedly off-screen, but that’s still a lot of violent deaths for such an early Hollywood film.

Lionel Atwill is Eric Gorman, our murdering psychopath. He’s a big game hunter and zoo owner who is insanely jealous of his wife Jerry (Gail Patrick). Admittedly, she regularly seems to have affairs and wants to divorce him, but that doesn’t quite call for brutally murdering everybody who looks longingly in her general direction.

Randolph Scott is the doctor who comes up with an antidote for the snake venom (something that will come in handy when he gets bit). Oh, the snake is a super poisonous mamba. Gorman brings one back from Africa and uses it to kill a couple of his wife’s suitors.

Charlie Ruggles is Peter Yates a newly hired press agent who is scared silly of pretty much all the animals in the zoo. He’s ostensibly our hero and very much the comic relief.

The story is mostly silly, and the comedy mostly didn’t work for me, but it gets good use out of its animals. There are big cats, and alligators, and snakes, and the film gets its money’s worth out of them.

What really makes the film worth watching is just how much they got away with. I’m not a big fan of acting like modern audiences are more sophisticated, or intelligent, or even less prudish than audiences from times before. There were intelligent, sophisticated people 90 years ago. They understood violence. The papers were full of it. And yet, the violence on screen in this film does seem shocking. That opening scene where the guy gets his eyes sewn shut is wild. You know it is happening off-screen and watching it I sat there wondering if they would actually show it, thinking there was no way we’d get something like that in a film from 1933.

And then he came out, eyes shown shut.

That’s one of the many reasons I love Pre-Code cinema.

Barbie is the Pick of the Week

barbie

My wife is obsessed with dolls. It began with our daughter when she was young. We’d buy her baby dolls, Monster High Dolls, My Little Pony Dolls, etc. and so forth, and yes we bought her lots of Barbie dolls. My wife always enjoyed playing dolls with our daughter (whereas I always tended to make them fight each other) and the obsession grew out of that.

My wife also enjoys sewing. She used to sew for herself and then when our daughter was born she’s make all sorts of cute dresses for her. But my daughter no longer likes dresses. She’s more of a cargo pants and sweatshirt girl these days. So, the wife started sewing for the dolls. At first, it was just a few dresses for fun and then it turned into something else.

She makes all sorts of amazing outfits for the Barbie dolls, then poses them and takes some really cool photos. She got herself an Instagram account and posts the best ones there. Apparently, there is a whole doll world on Instagram (called Dollstagram naturally) where fans create stories, and swap ideas and whatnot. It is all beyond me, but she loves it and I think that is awesome.

Naturally, we went to see the Barbie movie in the theaters. I gotta admit, I really enjoyed it. The film is clever and funny and it has something to say beyond “you should buy more dolls.” Some of its messaging is a little on the nose and that monologue everyone is talking about felt a little too preachy to my ears (though admittedly it is all true), but mostly it is quite good.

It came out on Blu-ray today in a variety of formats and versions and it is absolutely my Pick of the Week.

Also, out this week that looks interesting:

The Last Voyage of the Demeter: Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been adapted, remade, and reimaged a million times. What this film does is it takes one tiny part of the story (Dracula’s voyage from Carpathia to England) and makes an entire movie of it. Results are mixed.

Haunted Mansion: A Disneyland ride is turned into a kid-friendly, star-studded, and somewhat enjoyable movie.

Todd Browning’s Sideshow Shockers: The Criterion Channel is releasing three early films from Dracula (1931) director Tood Browning. The films are The Mystic (1925), The Unknown (1927), and Freaks (1932). I’ve only seen Freaks but it’s terrific.

The Way We Were (50th Anniversary Edition): Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand star in this Sydney Pollack-directed drama about two people in love who are driven apart by their political convictions.

The Walking Dead Complete Collection: This show should have been right up my alley. I love zombies. I’ve read (some of) the comics. I enjoyed the first season but found the second one a dreadful bore and couldn’t make it through the first half of the third season. I’m surprised it was so successful and launched so many spin-offs. Obviously, some folks love it and now you can have the entire series.

The Desperate Hours: Humphrey Bogart stars in this terrific crime flick as a desperate convict on the lam who hides out inside a house owned by Frederic March.

The Wicker Man: Best Buy recently announced that they will no longer be selling movies of any sort in their stores or online. With this package, they are going out with a bang. This classic horror film is being exclusively sold by Best Buy in a new 4K edition chocked full of extras.

31 Days of Horror: Murder Rock: Dancing Death (1984)

murder rock

Lucio Fulci is often called The Godfather of Gore, and it is true, he did make a lot of horror films with copious amounts of violence, buckets of blood, and tons of gore. But he worked in many other genres throughout his long career including westerns, sword and sandal epics, and even comedy. What one would not expect from him is a musical, which is exactly (well, more or less) what he made with Murder Rock: Dancing Death.

It isn’t technically a musical since the characters don’t actually sing, but there is a lot of music (which was written by Keith Emerson) and a whole lot of dancing. But it is really a horror movie. Actually, it is the best-looking Giallo Fulci ever made.

It takes place at a New York City dance studio where one by one the female dancers are being stabbed through the heart with a long, needle-like hairpin by a black gloved killed. The studio is so hardcore that after the first girl is killed, the instructor basically tells the other dancers to stop whining and get back to work.

Meanwhile, Candice (Olga Karlatos) begins having dreams of being murdered by a man she’s never seen before. When she sees the dream man’s face on a billboard she tracks him down only to discover he’s a disheveled drunk. Instead of shrugging it off or running away in terror, she decides to sleep with him.

The film is filled with red herrings and a cop (Cosimo Cinieri) who is both lackadaisical about the whole thing and rather sadistic. It is all a bit complicated and rather silly, but I really kind of loved it. I mean most Giallos are complicated and silly, but this one pushes it to the edge and then some.

But it is stunningly gorgeous to look at. Fulci and his cinematographer have lit the heck out of it and filled it with beautiful, colorful images. The music and dancing give it an unusual energy and it’s just a lot of fun to watch.

31 Days of Horror: Nothing Underneath (1985)

nothing underneath

Much like film noir, the Italian giallo is a genre without a clear-cut definition. There is a specific time period in which they flourished (the 1940s-1950s for noir and the late 1960s to the early 1980s for giallo) and certain stylistic certainties in which they operate, but there are so many outliers within each genre that pinning down an actual definition is nearly impossible. The later a film is made within their respective time periods the more fuzzy they tend to exist within the genres.

Nothing Underneath came out in the very late period of gialli, you might even call it post-giallo (although Dario Argento made Opera in 1987 and it is one of the very best gialli ever made, so go figure.) Even within the very fuzzy confines of giallo definitions, it remains a very fuzzy example of the genre.

It begins in the most unlikely of places for a giallo – Yellowstone National Park where we find our hero Bob (Tom Schanley) a ranger. He has a psychic connection to his sister, Jessica (Nicola Perring) who is a fashion model in London. While walking amongst the mountains and the trees he has a vision that Jessica is being murdered by a black-gloved killer with a pair of scissors.

Bob immediately flies to London and attempts to warn his sister of her impending doom but she’s gone missing. There is no evidence of murder, but nobody seems to know anything about where she might have gone. His investigations find that she was at a party hosted by fashion designer Giorgio Zanoni (Cyrus Elias) where he bribed several models (including Jessica) to play a game of Russian Roulette for a cache of diamonds.

Soon enough some of the women at that party start getting murdered with a pair of scissors just like in the vision. Bob teams up with Inspector Danesi (Donald Pleasence sporting a terrible Italian accent) to solve the case.

The black-gloved killer, the fashion models (providing ample excuses for casual nudity), and the killer’s point-of-view shots are all classic gialli tropes. It actually reminded me quite a bit of Brian DePalma’s work in the 1980s, but of course, he was highly influenced by the giallo genre. It lacks his formal command and the genre’s sense of style. It definitely feels like giallo-lite, or that it has outgrown the genre in some way. Or, more than likely, it just isn’t very well made.

If you are a fan of the genre and have seen all the classics then this one is worth watching. All others need not apply.

31 Days of Horror: Waxwork (1988)

waxwork

I have a habit of following various cinematic rabbit holes when it suits me. Sometimes I’ll watch a bunch of movies with the same actor in it, or from the same director. Other times I’ll watch movies set in the same city, or that tell similar stories. Those are the most fun to watch. Sometimes that means I’m watching sequels or remakes, or whatever, but other times films will just tell similar stories that have actually nothing to do with one another.

The other night I watched Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and enjoyed it. This afternoon I was flipping through my unwatched horror queue and came across Waxwork. That’s a film I’ve known existed for some time in that I’d probably seen its cover art in some old video store back in the VHS days but had never been all that interested in watching it. But now that I was connecting it with Mystery of the Wax Museum I gave it a go. I’m glad I did.

Waxwork has nothing to do with that old film except that it is a horror film set in a wax museum. This one stars Zach Galligan as Mark a bored, rich kid. He and a few friends get invited to a secret opening of a waxworks by a creepy dude who appears out of nowhere (David Warner).

The waxwork has various displays of classic horror characters (Dracula, a werewolf, the Marquis De Sade, zombies, etc). The thing is if you step inside the display you are transported to a pocket dimension where you are a character in that particular display’s story.

One by one the kids get picked off except for Mark and his friend Sarah (Deborah Foremen). They escape and spend some time figuring out exactly what is going on. I won’t bore you with those details except to say they are pretty boring.

What makes the film worth watching is the adventures inside the displays. The film has a lot of fun playing inside the various horror subgenres and updating them to the 1980s. There are slices of Hammer Horror, Universal Horror, and George A. Romero Horror and they are a treat to watch.

I enjoyed Zach Galligan in the Gremlins films but here he can’t cut it as the leading man (it doesn’t help that he’s sporting an atrociously bad haircut) and the rest of the cast isn’t much better. Everything outside of the display scenes just isn’t that interesting.

But those display scenes really are worth the price of admission.

31 Days of Horror: Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

Mystery of the Wax Museum Poster

Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill) is a sculptor of immaculate wax sculptures of historical figures, living in London. Apparently, immaculate sculptures of historical figures don’t draw a crowd. Hence, his investor decides that the only way to get his money back is to burn the gallery to the ground and collect on the insurance. When Igor balks, the investor lights the match with him inside it.

Flash forward 12 years and we’re in New York City. Intrepid reporter Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell) is about to be sacked from her job unless she can come up with a story, and that fast. Being that it is New Year’s Eve she hits up her cop friends to see if there are any interesting crimes to write about. Turns out George Winton (Gavin Gordon) a rich socialite is being held for questioning over the death of his girlfriend Joan. Her death was originally deemed a suicide, but new evidence indicates it may have been murder.

By the time she gets there the body of Joan, which was slated for an autopsy, has been stolen. She learns that other bodies have mysteriously disappeared as well.

About this time our old friend Igor shows up in New York preparing to open a new wax museum. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how these two things connect.

After the success of Doctor X, director Michael Curtiz teamed up once again with stars Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray (she plays the girlfriend of someone who works at the wax museum – but she’s mostly there to scream).

Like Doctor X it also used a two-color Technicolor system (and was the last film to use that system from Warner Bros.) giving it an interesting green hue.

The plot is very silly. Though Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray get top billing it is Glenda Farrell that steals the show. Her reporter is a fast-talking, wise-cracking dame. The best scenes all involve her and her editor (Frank McHue) who toss one-liners at each other as if they were in a screwball comedy instead of a horror-mystery.

The set design is fantastic, especially the wax museum in New York. The showroom is beautifully balanced, but it is the basement areas where the work is done that come in looking like something out of Frankenstein’s castle. The wax sculptures themselves look wonderful, even if a great many of them are actually real-life actors standing still.

Once considered a lost film Mystery of the Wax Museum has been lovingly restored (with a generation donation from George Lucas) and it looks fantastic. It isn’t a great film by any means, but it is a fun one, and historically important.