31 Days of Horror: The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

phantom of the opera hammer horror poster

Hammer Studios became well known for their horror output. This is mostly due to the way they remade all the classic Universal Monster movies – Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, etc., though they did make a great deal of other films, some of which were not horror-related at all.

In 1962 they adapted another famous horror story, The Phantom of the Opera, with mixed results. The Gaston Leroux book has been adapted numerous times and, of course, was turned into a Broadway Musical. I loved the book, and have seen at least a couple of those cinematic adaptations (though I’ve never seen any version of the musical, much to my wife’s surprise.)

Directed by Hammer stalwart Terrence Fischer the action is moved from Paris to London. Quite a few other things have been changed as well, but my memory is too faulty to lock those down for you.

The basics are the same. A pretty opera singer named Christine (Heather Sears) gets a chance to sing the lead in a brand-new opera. Producer Harry Hunter (Edward de Souza) takes a liking to her. Meanwhile, the Phantom (Herbert Lom) keeps causing problems.

There is a different backstory for the Phantom and Harry takes a much more active role and is more of a hero here. The Phantom spends a great deal of time training Christine to be a better singer than she already is. The real villain in this story is Lord Ambrose D’Arcy (a wonderful Michael Gough) who stole the opera from the Phantom (which we see in a flashback). And most of the really horrible things the Phantom usually does is given to a henchman to do.

All of this is fine, if a bit staid and clunky. The story never has any real oomph to it, and the ending is a dud. Lom is good and the sets have that usual Hammer charm to them. There are definitely better adaptations of the story than this one, but if you are a Hammer aficionado then you’ll probably like this just fine.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Salem’s Lot (2024)

salems lot poster

‘Salem’s Lot was not the first Stephen King book I ever read (that honor would go to the short story The Langoliers) nor was it the one that turned me into a lifelong fan (that would be Mr. Mercedes) but it was the one where I realized how good of a writer he is and that I should maybe start paying attention to him (I wouldn’t do that for a few more years, but the seed was planted then.)

It remains one of my favorite King books.

The story’s basic idea is: what if a vampire came to a small town? But like so many of King’s books, it is so much more than that. It follows Ben Mears, a writer who has returned to the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot, where he grew up, to write about the Marsten House. That’s your classic old spooky mansion on top of the hill, where he saw a ghost as a child.

Naturally, that’s where the vampire lives. But before he gets there Ben makes a friend with a schoolteacher and falls in love with a girl, and meets lots of interesting people. That’s what I love about Stephen King. Sure, he’s written a terrifying story about an ancient vampire taking over a small town, but it is really a story about small-town living and the characters that fill it up.

Tobe Hooper directed a two-part miniseries of Salem’s Lot for CBS in 1979. It is far from perfect, but Hooper understands the heart of the story is its characters and the scares should be built around that. But he also creates some truly memorably scary images.

TNT adapted a version of the story with Rob Lowe in the lead in 2004 but the less said about it the better.

When I heard that had made a new adaptation for Max I was excited. I’m always excited to learn about new Stephen King adaptations. Then I watched the trailer and that excitement flew right out the window. It looked cheap. Worse than that it looked like it was going to rely too heavily on violence and jump scares. Then the reviews started coming in and they were not good.

But it is spooky season and I’m still a sucker for King adaptations so I crossed my fingers and pressed Play.

My friends I am happy to report it is not that bad. It is a long way from great, and you won’t exchange this for the Hooper version in your collection, but it is worth the watching.

They say writer/director Gary Dauberman has a three-hour cut but Max made him edit it down to just under 2 and you can feel it. The movie plays like the greatest hits of the story. It isn’t so much that it jumps straight to the action, but that it shortcuts through everything.

We meet Ben (Lewis Pullman) as he’s driving into town (the soundtrack plays Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” which is a great choice) he meets Susan (Makenzie Leigh) at the real estate office. She’s reading his book but doesn’t recognize him. But by the next scene, she’s inviting him to the movies, and we learn both their stories within a few minutes. Movies always have characters falling in love way too fast, but here it is even faster.

The realization that the weird stuff going on in this town is caused by vampires happens extraordinarily fast as well. Ben’s newfound friend, Matt (the always great Bill Camp) sees a friend in a bar looking a little pale and pekid. He takes him home and notices the guy has a couple of little scars on his neck. Later he thinks he sees the guy scurrying into an upstairs window.

That little bit of information convinces him that the town is full of vampires. He quickly convinces Ben and Susan of this information. Then the alcoholic priest (John Benjamin Hickey). The new schoolboy in town, Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter) doesn’t need to be convinced, he already knows. He’s an old-school horror nerd who doesn’t take crap from nobody.

This happens throughout the film. Relationships deepen and plot points happen offscreen, in the cuts. Before I realized that they were literally happening in the cuts, that more details had been shot and then edited out at the last minute I thought it was an interesting story choice. Now it just seems distracting.

But what is left is well done, if a little disjointed. The editing is interesting. There are a lot of shots like one in which a man is alone on a bed. The camera moves slowly to look under the bed, then it moves upward and the room is full of people – a great deal of time has shifted while the camera was under the bed. Or the camera will focus on an object and then it will cut to a similar object in a different scene.

When the violence comes it comes with that frantic modern style of scaring you with jumps, and quick edits, which is not to my liking at all. They changed the ending quite a bit. Some of it I liked – they moved it from the Marsten House to somewhere interesting. Some of it I did not – far too much generic action. But more or less it worked for me. Or perhaps my expectations were so low that anything not terrible would have been enjoyed by me at this point.

31 Days of Horror: The Retaliators (2022)

the retaliators bluray

My goal for 31 Days of Horror is to write about a horror movie at least once a day. Honestly, my goal for the blog is to write something every day, but this is especially true during Horror Month.

But sometimes (or maybe even often) life gets in the way. I have work, a family, and another blog to run, and I just don’t always have the time or the energy to review something.

So it is tonight. Work was long and full of sawdust in the face. We decided to run to a nearby (relatively larger) town to look for a manga for my daughter and then we had supper. Now I’m home, in my pajamas, and too tired to come up with actual thoughts about a movie.

Luckily, I still have loads of reviews I’ve written for Cinema Sentries and not posted on this site. Some of those reviews are for horror movies. And here we are.

I barely remember watching The Retaliators. In my review, I can see I didn’t much like it. The film follows a man of the cloth and his crisis of faith. Also zombies. You can read my full thoughts here.

Bring Out the Perverts: Who Saw Her Die? (1972)

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I’ve seen all but one of the Giallos on the Criterion Channel. That is to say almost all of the films that will make up this series. I own quite a few of them on Blu-ray and reviewed most of them for Cinema Sentries. I’ve enjoyed rewatching these films thus far and writing new reviews. It is fun to read the old reviews and think about how my opinions have changed.

The thing with Who Saw Her Die? is that my opinion has stayed pretty much the same. Reading over my review from 2019 I find myself nodding along, pretty much completely agreeing with my thoughts from back then.

So what do I have to say about it now? Not much, really.

Like a lot of Italian films from this period, the actors all spoke whatever language came naturally while they were on the stage and then their voices were dubbed in post-production. They created two soundtracks for the film – one in English, one in Italian. In the English dub star George Lazenby used his own voice. In the Italian version, some Italian actor spoke his lines.

The Arrow Video Blu-ray has both soundtracks. I previously watched the English track. Criterion only has the Italian one. Lazenby once played James Bond. It was weird watching him act but hearing someone else’s voice come out of his mouth.

That really affected my view of his performance. In my review, I praised his acting, this time around I was less impressed.

The plot is pretty standard-issue Giallo. The visuals aren’t all that stylish, and the kills are pretty tame. But it does look lovely. It uses the Venice setting wonderfully and has that warm feel that only an excellent film and a good cinematographer can provide.

I’m making it sound worse than it is. It’s really fine. The mystery is interesting, and it has a good collection of weird characters. There are perhaps a few too many of them, and the plot gets a little too complicated, but it is still enjoyable to watch.

And that Ennio Morricone score is wild.

31 Days of Horror: Mimic (1997)

mimic poster

There is a cockroach infestation in New York City. Well, I guess there has always been a cockroach infestation in New York City, but this time they are carrying with them some kind of terrible disease that’s killing children. Our hero, Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) is a bug scientist and she’s genetically mutated a superbug that’s a cross between a mantis and a termite that will eradicate the cockroach problem.

It has been engineered into sterility and thus it will die out in one generation and everything is groovy. Except, of course, it isn’t. The bugs don’t die out but rather breed at an exceptional rate, undergoing multiple mutations. Three years later they’ve turned into the kind of nightmare fuel only Guillermo del Toro could create.

There is nothing particularly new or inventive about Mimic, we’ve seen this type of film a thousand times from 1950s monster movies to Alien and its countless ripoffs. But del Toro is too good a director not to make it interesting. He’s such a wonderful visual stylist that he’s turned what could be another hacky, schlocky, forgettable b-picture into something really quite good.

Much of the film is set underground, in the bowels of the city’s sewers and forgotten subway systems. This gives the film a claustrophobic feeling, while also enabling the characters freedom to run. In a similar manner the film is often quite dark and full of shadows, but but he allows light to creep in through grates and lanterns so that you can always see what you need to see.

The creature designs are great and there is a lot of slimy, disgusting goop. The characters are pretty basic but well done and well acted. Charles S. Dutton plays a subway cop who gets to yell and scream about how crazy everything is. Josh Brolin is a goofy scientist guy and F. Murray Abraham shows up at some point as Dr. Tyler’s mentor.

It is a big, dumb horror film that knows it’s a big dumb horror film and doesn’t care. With del Torro at the helm, it becomes one of the best big dumb horror films I’ve seen in a while.

31 Days of Horror: The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

the invisible man returns poster

It wouldn’t be a proper 31 Days of Horror unless I watched at least one classic Universal Horror picture. I have a lovely boxed-set collection of most of the classic Universal Monster movies so I like to whip it out periodically through spooky season.

Over the last few years I’ve made my way through most of these films, and the many sequels, but I’d only ever watched the original The Invisible Man. So I was excited to start working on its sequels.

The Invisible Man Returns takes place sometime after the original film. Since the main character (spoiler!) died in that film they couldn’t bring him back (or Claude Rains who played him) so they have to make do with his brother Dr. Frank Griffin (John Sutton) but he isn’t really our main character. That would be Geoffrey Radcliffe (Vincent Price – who spends almost the entire film wrapped up in bandages or invisible) a man sentenced to hang for a crime he didn’t commit.

Naturally, Dr. Griffin sneaks in some good old invisibility liquid into the prison and helps Geoffrey escape. The catch, of course, is that there is no cure for the invisibility potion once you’ve taken it. And sooner than later it will turn you into a crazy, murderous nutter. Griffin works tirelessly on making the antidote while Geoffrey gets into various invisible misadventures.

With an 80-minute runtime, The Invisible Man Returns moves at a pretty fast clip. There isn’t much to it, really, and the story never goes anywhere particularly interesting. But the special effects are terrific. So many times I kept looking at what they were doing and wondered how in the world they pulled it off in 1940.

It is worth watching just for that.

31 Days of Horror: The Grudge (2004)

the grudge poster

I didn’t really mean for this year’s 31 Days of Horror to become a Ju-On festival, but here we are. Each year I try and work my way through at least one horror franchise. There is something fun, I think, about watching every single movie in a series, even when they get rather ridiculous towards the end.

But again, I didn’t really plan on Ju-On being the franchise I watched this year. Admittedly, I’m only three films into what is really a rather extended franchise so I may not make it all the way through, especially since I’m already growing tired of it. But three films is more than I had planned so we’ll see how it goes.

Because Americans can’t read subtitles popular foreign language films are often remade by American studios. This was very much the case with the J-Horror craze of the early 2000s. Numerous Japanese films got American remakes. Some of them were actually pretty good.

Some of them weren’t. As is the case with The Grudge. Directed by Takashi Shimizu, who created the entire Ju-On series and directed quite a few of them, The Grudge sticks pretty close to the plot of Ju-On: The Grudge, but with a lot of Americanizations.

Almost all of the main characters are American and they all speak English. The plot retains the same sort-of disjointed chronology, but here it is easier to follow. It helps that they’ve given one character more of a through-line allowing us to follow her through the film’s timeline.

Most of the big horror sequences are the same in both films, though I’d give the scary edge to the Japanese versions (though that may be because I watched it first.) The American remake has a much bigger, more bombastic finale. The American version is much slicker as well.

I wonder what my feelings on this one would be if I’d never seen the Japanese original before, or if I’d seen it after I’d watched this one. With this type of thing, there is always a feeling that the first one you watched is better, kind of like how the first version of a song you hear is always the best.

Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Karen Davis an American foreign exchange student. She volunteers for a care center and she becomes tasked with visiting an elderly woman who needs regular care because the normal caretaker has not shown up to work.

She’s basically the same character from the first film who is tasked with the same job. Like in the original, she finds the old lady nearly comatose and the house a mess. Ditto the closet with the tape all around it and inside a cat and then a creepy boy.

The film sticks with her more, giving us that through line. We get flashbacks to the parents of that old lady (William Mapother and Clea Duvall) and to the original murdered family (featuring a brief performance by Bill Pullman).

If you’ve seen the original there isn’t much need to watch this one. But if you haven’t seen it then I suppose this is a perfectly good watch. Like I say it is hard for me to judge which one is “better” because they are so similar, but I’m gonna give the edge to the Japanese version. It feels much creepier and scary to me.

31 Days of Horror: House of the Long Shadows (1983)

house of the long shadows

I’ve talked about Hammer Horror numerous times in these pages. Clearly, I’m a great fan and one of the things that makes me a fan is the actors the studio used over and over again – namely Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Those two actors make even the silliest, most ridiculous films worth watching. I don’t think Vincent Price ever made a picture for Hammer Studios, but he was starring in a lot of similar horror films around the same time. I feel the same way about him as I do about Cushing and Lee. Adoration is the word.

Put the three of them into a film together and let’s just say you have hit my horror sweet spot. It is then tough to admit that the final results of House of the Long Shadows just aren’t very good.

The setup is intriguing enough. Kenneth Magee (Desi Arnaz, Jr.) a successful young writer who is only in it for the money bets his publisher that he can write a novel of the caliber of Wuthering Heights in less than 24 hours. He only needs a secluded and quiet spot in which to do the writing. The publisher just so happens to know a manor in the Welsch countryside that will do just nicely. Upon arriving he finds the manor not so much quiet and empty as crowded with an eclectic and possibly insane, and murderous collection of weirdos (guess who plays those guys?)

But the film takes entirely too long to get going. We spend a while with the setup, with Kenneth and his publisher working out the details of the bet. Then there is a long drive (through a dark, stormy night of course) to get to the manor. We stop off at a train station to ask for directions where some strange things occur (all to establish mood of course). Then he finally arrives at the manor and it still takes far too long for everybody to be introduced. Christopher Lee doesn’t show up until 49 minutes after the opening credits.

Oftentimes the film seems to be winking at the audience as if to say “Isn’t it so cool we have all these horror legends in one place?” This is especially true at the end when it pulls a bit of a trick switch on the audience. But the film isn’t a comedy, there aren’t any jokes. It plays it all straight, but just with a slight knowing smile. As such I couldn’t take it particularly seriously, but neither was it fun to watch.

The actors, too, seem a bit bored. In the IMDB trivia, it notes that John Carradine (another great horror actor from the period) fell asleep during one of the scenes. From what’s on the screen it feels like he slept through most of them. Peter Cushing’s performance is limp. Part of that is the way the character is written and part of it is most likely Cushing was in ill health at the time. But none of the main characters give their best performances. Dezi Arnaz, Jr. is way out of his depth.

It is not that it is a terrible film for there are a few moments of interest, and it is wonderful to see those three actors working together, but it is a disappointing one. With those actors you want the film to be memorable. Instead, in a week I won’t remember I’ve seen this at all.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003)

ju on the grudge 2 poster

The Criterion Channel is featuring a plethora of horror movies this month. They have at least three different horror themes going on, one of which is Japanese Horror. Naturally, I’ve seen almost all of them, but I’d never watched this sequel. I try to watch the originals again before I watch the sequel which is why you were treated to my thoughts on Ju-On: The Grudge yesterday.

This sequel is basically the same film with different characters. Once again it acts like a series of vignettes in which a bunch of people are haunted, terrified, and murdered by some evil spirits. The same evil spirits that haunted the house in the first movie (er, the third movie as there were two films before Ju-On: The Grudge). There is the creepy kid and the freaky girl who can twist her body in extreme ways.

This one does have more of a semblance of a plot and there is a bit of a through line, but it still jumbles up the chronology. It, more or less, follows horror film actress “Horror Queen” Kyoko Harase (Noriko Sakai) who is given a role in a paranormal television show. They “investigate” haunted houses and the like. For this episode, they visit the house from the last film.

Naturally, things do not go well. Nearly everyone involved in the shoot is haunted by the curse and killed. The kills remain quite effective and creepy. I might even give the ones in this film a slight edge over the last one.

There is an excellent sequence in which a woman keeps hearing a banging on her apartment wall at a certain time at night. The reasons behind it are quite clever and scary.

The way this film moves back and forth in time is much more effective than the previous one. I was often confused during the previous film, but here they will show a snippet of the same scene, albeit from a different character’s point of view, before moving on to something we haven’t seen before. Those connecting points allowed me to understand what was happening at all times. That worked for me much better than in the previous film.

But really, much like the other film, the plot in this one is just an excuse to move us from one creepy scene to another. And again this worked completely for me.

31 Days of Horror: Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)

ju on the grudge poster

A title card tells us that a Ju-On is a curse that is born when a person dies in a deep and powerful rage. The film will then spend the next 90 minutes showing us exactly what it means.

Ju-On: The Grudge was part of a cycle of Japanese horror films (collectively known as J-Horror) that came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike their American counterparts (which were mostly self-aware slashers and other schlocky, gore-inflicted films) J-Horror tended to focus more on mood, and the psychology of fear, with plots that revolved around Japanese folklore. The violence was usually off-screen and not very graphic (though there were exceptions – I’m looking at you, Takashi Miike).

For a few years, J-horror became quite popular in America and several of them were remade by Hollywood. Someday I may do a theme where I review the Japanese horror films alongside their American remakes, but for now, we’re just talking about this one.

Ju-On: The Grudge was actually the third film in the Ju-On franchise (the previous two were straight-to-video releases) but it was the first one most of us watched (I’ve only seen this one and the first American remake).

The film is really a series of vignettes, each focusing on a different character, most of which are set in the same house located in Nerima, Tokyo.

I’ll be honest here, I just watched the film but if you paid me $1,000 to explain who each character was and what their relationship to each other is, I’d still be broke. Each vignette is so short, and each character is given so little to distinguish each other from each other I’m at a loss to tell you who is who.

They all do seem to be related to one another either by family or friendship or work. It begins with Rika (Megumi Okina) a social worker volunteer being tasked by her boss to visit an old lady at the cursed house (though neither of them realizes it is cursed at this point.) She enters to find the old lady in a daze, lying in bed. She picks her up to find that she has soiled herself.

After cleaning her up and doing a little housekeeping she hears a noise upstairs. In the bedroom, she finds a closet that has been taped over and she hears a cat meowing inside. Opening it she sees the cat and then a small, pale boy. She goes downstairs to call her boss and witnesses a black fog kill the old lady. Rika then passes out.

Others come to the house and most find themselves infected by the curse. They’ll become haunted by the boy, the cat, and the boy’s parents. Sometimes they’ll be killed inside the house, other times they’ll take the curse with them infecting their homes.

The film jumps around in time, making it a bit disorienting.

We will learn more about the boy and his family, and why they are haunting this house, but it really doesn’t matter. The plot isn’t really the point. Scaring the bejeebus out of us is the point and this film does that really well.

There are jump scares aplenty, and all sorts of creepy noises and visuals. These evil spirits appear out of nowhere – sometimes they attack, sometimes they just scare the characters, and sometimes they aren’t even seen by the character but by the audience giving us a jolt of fear. This happens so often that you’ll find yourself tensing up in anticipation, looking in corners and backgrounds half-expecting to see a ghost.

Quite a few of these sequences have become iconic for horror fans. The girl walking on all fours, contorting herself in unusual ways, the hand in the shower, the girl under the covers, etc. have all become part of our communal horror fabric.

I can’t say that Ju-On: The Grudge is a great film in any sort of artistic, cinematic sense, but it is a great one to put on late at night when you are all alone and scare yourself silly.