The Friday Night Horror Movie: A Haunting In Venice (2023)

a haunting in venice poster

I follow a lot of film critics and culture writers on various social media platforms. Most of them like to periodically complain about the state of the movies. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has created a seismic change in movies, and more specifically the way movies are shown in theaters. Or rather how many movies are no longer shown in theaters.

The MCU has made billions upon billions of dollars. Their method of interconnecting their films into one giant universe (and making piles of cash in the process) has made every other studio chase those billions. In doing so they are no longer satisfied with smaller movies, where they can only make millions of dollars instead of billions, virtually erasing mid-budget films in the process.

These film critics complain and complain about how adult-oriented dramas, mysteries, and romances simply don’t exist at the movies anymore. They wax nostalgic about times in the past, two or three decades ago, when they could go to the movies and watch something that wasn’t based upon a comic book or a part of a larger franchise.

Yet, when those types of films do get made and do get shown in the theaters, these same critics tend to pan them and encourage others not to go see them.

Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot films are a good example of this. Based upon the novels of Agatha Christie, Branaugh has directed and starred in three films in which he plays the famous Belgian detective. I won’t claim that they are great films by any stretch, but they aren’t big-budget superhero films either. They are well-told mysteries with terrific casts and are made for adults. In a word they are exactly the sort of films that these types of critics complain don’t get made anymore. Yet when the movies come out, those same critics do nothing but grouse about them.

And that’s enough grousing from me. The latest Poirot film is probably the best one. As the title implies there is a supernatural element to it, and while it isn’t a straight horror it certainly contains elements of horror and that means I get to talk about it tonight. It also means that my daughter is having a sleepover and me and the wife had a much-needed date night and this is as close to horror as she’d let me get.

Hercule Poirot has retired into seclusion in Venice, Italy. There has been too much death and misery in his life and he simply cannot stand to tackle another mystery.

When his friend, Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a novelist who writes thinly veiled Poirot mysteries, invites him to a seance he at first declines but her friendship wins him over.

The seance takes place on Halloween night in an old, decaying palazzo. It is being held by Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) who hopes to speak to her daughter who mysteriously killed herself in the palazzo one year prior. Also at the seance are an assortment of interesting people all of whom have a connection to Rowena and her daughter and, it will be found out, had a reason to murder her.

Poirot quickly exposes the psychic (Michelle Yeoh) as a fraud and is ready to leave, but when the psychic is murdered and someone tries to drown him in an apple bobbing bowl, he locks everyone inside the palazzo and finds himself once again back on a case.

This one is based on a much less famous book (Hallowe’en Party) than the other two films (Murder on the Orient Express & Death on the Nile). Apparently, it’s quite loosely based as well, which allows it to surprise you with its story rather than retell one that is quite familiar to casual fans.

The palazzo is reminiscent of all those gothic castles in those old haunted house movies that I love so much. It allows for plenty of creepy, atmospheric shots down long corridors, and shadowy rooms. The film has a lot of fun toying with whether or not the supernatural aspects are real or not, making it great fun to watch.

Kenneth Branagh clearly enjoys himself playing the famous detective and he’s become quite good at it. He’ll never replace David Suchet (who played Poirot in the long-running British television series) but he’s still quite entertaining. I love that he’s able to make these lavish adaptations with large, wonderful, casts. I hope he gets to make a dozen more.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The First Power (1990)

the first power

A crazy, satanic serial killer is on the loose in Los Angeles. Detective Russell Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) is on the case. Or rather he’s chilling at home when a psychic (Tracy Griffith) calls him up and tells him where the killer’s next victim is going to occur. But she makes him promise that he won’t kill the killer nor will he allow him to get the death penalty.

Our hero gets the killer but he reneges on the deal to not let him get the death penalty. After he gets the gas chamber Detective Logan starts seeing horrific images and hearing the killer’s voice in his head.

The psychic shows up in person to let him know that the killer’s soul is now inhabiting the bodies of others and the killings will continue until they can stop them.

It is Noirvember and as I noted in today’s Daily Bootleg Post I’m gonna be busy watching a bunch of kung-fu movies over the next week or two. It is also Friday and I’m definitely not giving up my Friday Night Horror Movie. So, I was trying to find a way to blend those two things together.

Theoretically, that’s pretty easy to do. Film noir is hard to define and thus the definition is actually pretty flexible. Neo-noir is even more flexible. Both tend to involve crime, often murder. Sometimes serial murder. Horror films generally involve some murder and sometimes those murders are wrapped up in a murder mystery. A little Googling turned up a list of noir/horror hybrids and that’s how I discovered The First Power.

I wanna say I’ve seen this movie before but none of it rang any memory bells and I haven’t logged in on Letterboxd, so who knows. I definitely remember it coming out and wanting to see it.

It isn’t great. I love me some Lou Diamond Phillips. This film comes at the tail end of his first wave of popularity and it doesn’t work that well as a star vehicle for him. The script is pretty hokey, and it doesn’t lean hard enough on the whole satanic angle.

The killer carves pentagrams into his victims and they do bring a nun in at some point, but he’s never really involved in anything demonic. Most of it takes place in the city in broad daylight which is just weird for a horror movie about the occult. There are some scenes in dark warehouses and down in the bowels of the city’s water drainage. It does some nice things with light and shadow in those moments, but they don’t last.

The film posits that the killer’s soul is possessing various other people but it doesn’t really do much with that concept. Mostly we see him in the original body (played by Jeff Kober), but sometimes we see him in the body of whoever he’s possessing. But there are no scares involved in that. There is never any mystery of who he is possessing.

There are a few good, nut-ball moments like when a homeless woman floats in the air, or when the killer jumps off a ten-story roof and survives, or the fact that Los Angeles apparently has a giant boiling cauldron of flammable liquid in the bowels of their water drainage system, but mostly this is a by-the-numbers early 1990s horror/thriller.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Wicker Man (1973)

The Wicker Man

A very conservative and deeply Christian police Sergeant receives a letter stating that a young girl has gone missing from a small, remote island off the coast of Scotland. He travels there by himself and discovers a strange pagan community where the children are taught about the phallic symbolization of the May Pole, where teenagers dance naked around a fire, and adults openly fornicate in a park in the evening.

The Sergeant, Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is utterly shocked by all of this, but he’s a dutiful police officer and stays until he gets to the bottom of things. Not only are the villagers engaged in a litany of sins, but they are utterly unhelpful to his investigation. At first, they claim they have never seen the girl in their lives, but then it changes to how she was on the island but died tragically, and then…well it is best not to spoil things.

The Wicker Man has become a cult favorite and one of the premier films in the subgenre known as Folk Horror. It is also a truly strange little film. It is almost a musical as the villagers often break into goofy little folk songs and dance about (often naked). There is a very real sense of dread flooding the film. The camera is often tilted at odd angles making everything just slightly off. The villagers are ever so strange and are led by Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee is one of his most interesting performances) who seems to take glee in making the Police Sergeant feel out of sorts.

There is a scene in which a woman puts a frog inside a child’s mouth to help her with a sore throat. A shop owner has a bottle full of foreskins. Britt Ekland plays the pretty daughter of the pub proprietor and at one point she sings a silly song whilst dancing in her room stark naked as an attempt to seduce the Sergeant. She beats wildly on his wall while he, soaked in sweat attempts to resist.

It is all a bit off-putting at first, but if you can roll with what it’s doing it is a rollicking good time. Not at all scary in the traditional sense, but it creates a wonderful sort of mood.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

jason goes to hell

The thing about growing up in the late 1980s is that you didn’t have every film ever made available to you at the click of a button. In the early ’80s, you didn’t even have rental stores that you could drive to and pick up at least some of the films in existence. But by the time I was a teenager, we at least had those rental stores, and I visited them often. But until I got a driver’s license in 1990 I was at the mercy of what my parents would let me rent, and they did not let me rent R-rated horror films. At least Mom didn’t (Dad sometimes did when Mom was out of town).

I loved R-rated horror movies but until that plastic license was in my hand I mostly had to watch edited versions that ran on basic cable. I loved the Friday the 13th series at a young age, but I didn’t actually watch an unedited version until I went to college (by the time I did get a driver’s license and could rent those films, slashers were on their way out and I had gotten into films like Evil Dead II (1987) and Re-Animator (1985).

The USA network always ran at least a couple of Friday the 13th movies late on Friday nights whenever the calendar matched the titles. But they were pretty random in terms of which films they’d decide to play. The point I’m belaboring to make is that while I did genuinely love the Friday the 13th movies growing up I never watched them unedited or in order. Because the plots are so similar I was never really sure which films I had seen and which ones I hadn’t.

I know I did watch Jason X (2002) and Freddy vs Jason (2003) in the theater, but the films before that are all jumbled together. A couple of years ago I received, watched, and reviewed the first eight films (which were all released by Paramount, after that, they sold the rights to New Line Cinema) in a Blu-ray set for Cinema Sentries. So, I’ve definitely seen all of those.

And now we finally arrive at the ninth film in the series, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Had you asked me if I had seen this film before tonight I would have told you that I had. I always assume I’ve seen them all, even if I have never verified that in any way. Since today is Friday the 13th I knew I wanted to watch one of the films and a quick look at Letterboxd indicated that I had, in fact, never seen this one. I still kind of assumed that I had and had neglected to log it, but I decided to give it a watch anyway just to check that box.

Generally speaking, this film is hated by fans. The main reason is that Jason is hardly in it. But that’s not really true. The plot of this film is that Jason is not a hulking, machete-wielding monster in a ski mask but an evil entity whose soul can pass from one body to the next. So, in fact, Jason is all over this movie, just not in the shape he usually comes in. Obviously, some fans want the hulking monster in a ski mask. But to me, Jason is one of the most boring entities in horror. He has no personality. He’s literally just a hulking mass in a ski mask. Even his back story is lame (he was bullied as a kid and died due to neglectful camp counselors). Allowing actors of various shapes and sizes to become Jason is kind of interesting.

Admittedly, building that kind of complicated mythology nine films into a franchise (when that ability had never been mentioned before) is a bit ridiculous, but this franchise bypassed ridiculous several films prior.

Don’t get me wrong, this film is dumb. But I quite liked it. There were two reasons for this:

My expectations were low. Really low.
I was really in the mood for it. It is Friday the 13th after all.

The whole Jason can transfer his soul into different bodies isn’t exactly original and they don’t do anything all that interesting with it, but at least it is different.

The film acknowledges the in-film infamy of Jason Voorhees. It begins with an undercover FBI agent going to Camp Crystal Lake and taking a shower (because as we all know, girls taking a shower are catnip to Jason). When he does show up the girl slips away and lures Jason to a trap where various agents shoot the living crap out of him and blow him to smithereens. Besides being a fun scene this indicates that Jason was a big enough threat to create such a trap.

Immediately afterward, there is a national news report discussing his death and recognizing the dozens of kills he chalked up over many years. I found it interesting that the films are finally acknowledging that a killer like Jason would draw massive attention.

Steven Williams plays a bounty hunter who agrees to hunt down Jason and kill him for a large sum of cash. He’s always enjoyable to watch and it’s a fun idea to have someone hunting Jason instead of Jason always doing the hunting.

Erin Gray plays the half-sister of Jason. I can’t remember if it is ever acknowledged that Jason has siblings, but I was happy to see Erin Gray showing up. Strangely, she isn’t the Final Girl which was disappointing.

Ok, I’ve just written nearly 1,000 words on a film that is admittedly bad, so I’ll wrap this up. If you are a fan of the series and haven’t seen this one based on its terrible reputation, I recommend you give it a try. It is dumb, and it doesn’t really pull off the new things it is trying to do, but at least it’s trying something new. That’s worth something.

The Friday Night Movie(s): Totally Killer (2023) & The Final Girls (2015)

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I’ve talked many times about growing up in the 1980s and my undying love of slasher movies. Now, we are all reasonable people here so I can admit that slasher movies are also really, really dumb. The plots are derivative, the acting is lousy, the writing is bad, and the direction is usually bland, and uninventive. But there is still a bad-movie charm to most of them, and some of them at least have found ways to inventively kill their awful characters.

Anyone who has watched a few slashers (or has seen a film in the Scream franchise) knows that there are rules. The number one rule in all slashers is that the one person to survive, the hero who will kill the killer will be a good girl. This “final girl” will usually not do drugs or get drunk and she will always be a virgin. To have sex in a slasher movie is to die.

Slashers were made on the cheap and were designed to make a quick buck before disappearing and being forgotten. Like a lot of low-budget genre films, they were filled with gratuitous sex, nudity, and violence. That makes them more than a little problematic for today’s audiences.

For tonight’s Friday Night Horror film, I watched two recent movies that attempt to modernize the slasher while still trying to hold onto its roots. The results are decidedly mixed.

Totally Killer is a recent Amazon Prime release from Blumhouse Studios. Like a lot of Blumhouse pictures, it is well made, and quite a bit of fun, but also soulless and without a true directorial voice.

Kiernan Shipka stars as Jamie a teenager who has lived under the over-protective thumb of her mother (Julie Bowen) who survived the Sweet 16 killer when she was a teen. Three of her friends were not so lucky.

Through a series of events too silly to explain Jamie finds herself time-travelled to 1987 where she then tries to stop the killings from ever happening.

Jamie spends much of her time in the 1980s gasping at the racism, casual homophobia, complete lack of security, and the endless smoking/drunk driving. As someone who grew up in the ’80s I recognize that yeah, all of that totally existed, but maybe wasn’t that grotesque. I mean the homophobia was rampant, and there was a kid in my high school who showed up in full KKK regalia, but the dangers of smoking were known and I remember plenty of lectures about drunk driving (including multiple presentations from M.A.D.D.)

It is a fun film. Shipka is terrific, as is Olivia Holt as her teenaged mom. The gags are good, the kills are entertaining (if a bit bloodless) but it also feels very much like it was made by a committee. Almost all of the Blumhouse films I’ve watched feel this way. It is as if Jason Blum has created a database of every horror film ever made, broken down the details of each film into categories, and then sorted by box office receipts.

Totally Killer is like if you fed the scripts of Back to the Future and Scream into an AI bot and had it write you a movie based upon them. It seems funny to say that a slasher homage has no directorial voice, but I just wish the filmmakers had something more to say, or at least a more creative way to say it.

The Final Girls stars Taissa Farmiga as Max. Her mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) starred in a Friday the 13th-esque slasher called Camp Bloodbath. When a fire is started at a retro screening of that film Max and her friends tear through the movie screen to escape and find themselves stuck inside the movie.

It is much more clever than Totally Killer, finding fun ways to both skewer the tropes of the slasher genre, while still keeping things exciting and well within its confines. It is very meta in that the main characters all know they are in a movie, know its tropes, and try to subvert them.

While watching both films I kept thinking about Stranger Things, the Netflix series. While not perfect, that series understands the 1980s – its horror movies, Stephen King, John Carpenter, etc. – deep down in its bones. It has found a way to create something new and interesting while still being steeped in nostalgia.

Totally Killer and The Finals Girls both feel like they were made by people who have a casual knowledge of slasher films. Like maybe they’ve seen a few of them (and most of the Scream franchise) and have subscribed to a slasher subreddit, but those films aren’t part of their DNA. They are films that have fun (and are fun to watch) with the tropes of the genre but don’t necessarily love them.

If you are a fan of the genre, even casually, I think you could have fun watching these films. But keep your expectations low.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Infinity Pool (2022)

infinity pool poster

David Cronenberg is one of the most interesting directors of the last few decades. He began by making low-budget body horror flicks (a genre that he essentially invented) and grew into one of the more intellectually stimulating horror directors ever with occasional stints into science fiction, crime, and straight dramas.

His son, Brandon has recently started directing films and so far he hasn’t strayed far from his father’s roots.

Possessor from 2020 was a film about an assassin who is able to take control of people’s bodies with some kind of brain implant technology. I quite liked it.

Infinity Pool is weirder and far less interesting.

James (Alexander Skarsgård), a failed writer looking for inspiration, and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) the rich daughter of a book publishing mogul take a holiday at a resort in a vaguely Asian, and apparently backward and rather hostile country.

They are not supposed to leave the gated resort, but when they meet Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert) they are talked into sneaking off to a beach for a bit of fun and drinking.

I don’t know how to talk about this film without spoiling some of its central concepts so be warned.

On their way back James, driving a bit drunk, hits a local man killing him instantly. The next morning he is arrested and told this country has very strict punishments, but a rather unique way out of it. For the killing, he is to be executed, but if he can pay a large fee they will clone him and it is the clone that will be killed.

He does just this and is forced to watch the son of the man he killed take a knife and stab his clone to death.

That night Gabi and Alban introduce James to a group of people who have all been through the same ordeal. But rather than be devastated over this, they have found it freeing. Here is a country that will literally let them get away with murder, as long as they can pay the fine. Having to watch their clones get executed afterward is just a bizarre perk.

The film has a lot to say about nepotism (which is really interesting since Brandon is a nepo baby) and how the rich can get away with anything. Both Goth and Skarsgård give really good performances. But it all left me wanting for more, or at least something different. It is an unsettling film, I felt very uncomfortable while watching it, but I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why.

Some films give you a feeling of dread – they make you feel like something terrible is going to happen to their characters and you dread the moment it comes. This had that same feeling, but all of the characters in Infinity Pool are terrible people, I was kind of hoping the bottom would fall out.

Cronenberg disorients us on several occasions. It begins with idyllic scenes of the resort with his camera turning upside down, making you feel a little seasick. There are several drug-induced hallucinations where he quickly cuts a lot of different images, many of which are flooded with psychedelic lighting that did nothing to help the film but did make me dizzy.

In the end, it felt like a film with some interesting ideas, some good performances, but the messy filmmaking dropped it all on the floor.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Countess Dracula (1971)

countess dracula

I don’t remember the first time I became aware of Hammer Horror. They seem to be a part of my forever memory, but I suspect I actually came to know them rather late. Presumably, I heard some chatter about Hammer Horror after I became a fan of the Univeral Monster Movies, which would put it sometime after college. But it was years later that I actually watched any of their films. Letterboxd notes the first Hammer film I ever watched was Dracula (1958) in February of 2014. I watched The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) not long after that, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I watched a third film and from there I started watching Hammer Horror with some regularity.

What I’ve come to realize is that I tend to find Hammer films to be rather dull. Their stories often have a staid quality about them. Oh, eventually there is some bloodletting, some murders, maybe a monster or two, and a bit of horror. But they often (not always) take their time getting there. They tend to be very British in their melodrama. There are a lot of costumes, and talking, and ideas of decorum before the horror begins, and even then it always comes back to the drama.

But the thing is, I still kind of love these films. They are gorgeous to look at. The set designs – mostly creaky old castles, and magnificent gothic mansions – are impeccable. Their cinematographers are genius, filling each scene with color and shadows, fog and light. And those costumes, my goodness those costumes are simply fabulous. So, while I am sometimes a little bored with the stories, I never grow tired of just watching these films.

Despite its title, Countess Dracula has nothing to do with the Dracula legend, (and Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are nowhere to be found) but is a loose retelling of the Countess Báthory story. She was a real person who lived in the late 1500s, was accused of killing hundreds of young women (and of bathing in their blood). Her story influenced a great many of the Dracula stories over the years so in that way you can consider this film a Dracula movie.

Anyway, in this story Countess Elisabeth Nádasdy (Ingrid Pitt, sadly dubbed for some dumb reason) discovers that drinking the blood of young women will restore her to youth and beauty. She does so and then must pretend to be her own daughter so as not to cause a stir in the village.

The real daughter, Ilona (Leslie-Anne Dow) was sent away when she was very young. When she returns to the castle, Elisabeth has her kidnapped and held captive so as to not be found out.

Meanwhile, Elisabeth seduces a young Lieutenant (Sandor Elès) all the while continuing to murder young maidens from the village (after killing a prostitute and bathing in her blood she realizes for the magic to work they must be virgins). In case you are wondering, all of the main servants in the household seem perfectly okay with their mistress regularly murdering people.

Eventually, things come to a head, but it takes its time to get there. I think I’ve made the plot sound much more exciting than it actually is. There is a lot more romancing than I’ve let on, and palace intrigue. There are a lot of scenes of people sitting around talking, and far too little bathing in blood.

But again, I still kind of loved it. I’m a big fan of Ingrid Pitt. She’s a marvelous horror icon and despite the painful voice dubbing she does some good work here. The sets are fantastic and the lighting is superb. There is a scene where Elisabeth is despairing over once again turning into an old hag. She wanders around her fabulously large, and perfectly lit bedroom in a flowing white gown and it’s like a dream.

The Friday Night Horror Movies: The Purge: Anarchy (2014) & The Purge: Election Year (2016)

the purge

I’ve watched several old British films for my Friday Night Horror the last few weeks so I wanted to watch something more modern and the first two Purge sequels fit the bill.

So, The Purge Franchise is set in a dystopian future. At some point in the past America was overrun with crime and violence. To curb this violence it was decided that one night a year, for a 12-hour period all crime, including murder, will be made legal. The thought is that this will allow everyone to get it out of their system, and for the rest of the year everyone will be chill.

Though the films lean on the idea that we aren’t all that far off from something like that actually happening, the concept is actually completely ridiculous. For real life I mean. For a movie, it’s really pretty cool.

The first film, simply titled The Purge (2013) focused on one (rich, white) family trying to survive the night. Things get complicated when they allow a stranger into their home and give him protection and a group of crazies come to say he is the very person they want to Purge. It isn’t a bad little thriller but it tends to lose focus on its conceptual idea and winds up focusing on the more generic base under siege aspects of the story.

I had minor hopes the sequels would spend more time on the bigger ideas. They sort-of do. While The Purge focused on one family inside their house The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year expand the stories to larger groups of people and allow us to see more of the outside world.

The problem with all three of these films is that they all have a vague political message that boils down to The Purge is run by rich white people who benefit from the violence, while poor people of color suffer the most. A relevant message, but not one they hit on very hard, nor make very specific.

A concept like The Purge could make for a really great science fiction film with all sorts of allegories, but these films want to be money-making franchise machines in the horror genre and they don’t seem to have the stomach for more direct political messaging.

Yet they rarely nail the thriller/horror aspects either. If you are going to make a horror film about a period of time in which all crime is legal, then you should really go all in. Give us some Tobe Hooper-style insanity.

There is one really great scene during The Purge: Election Year that nails what I’m talking about. A car decked out in Christmas lights pulls up to a locked-up and barricaded convenience store. A group of women dressed in sexy Halloween costumes and carrying swords, saws, and machine guns get out and demand they be let inside, for the leader of the gang wants a candy bar. The subsequent battle is just as nuts. It is a well-staged sequence and it totally worked for me because it leans into the absolute insanity of the concept. The rest of the film doesn’t work nearly as well.

Thus far, the films have only had one character carry over from one film to the other. In The Purge: Anarchy we find Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo) on a mission to seek out some revenge on Purge Night. Along the way, he stumbles on several people who are clearly out of their depth and need help. By the film’s end, he’s become a reluctant hero.

In The Purge: Election Year he’s become head of security for Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) who is running for President on a ticket that promises to outlaw The Purge. Honestly, he’s kind of a generic action hero which is kind of my problem with the whole franchise thus far. My problem with most of the Blumhouse films I’ve seen, to be honest. They lack a specificity that can turn a high concept like this one into something great. Movies need a particular point of view, they need to find interesting ways to tell their stories. Otherwise, they wind up feeling generic, and just like a million other films.

These three The Purge films lack that specificity, that point of view. They take an interesting idea and turn it into something just average. That doesn’t make them bad films. I mostly enjoyed watching them. But it keeps them from being truly great or interesting.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Island of Terror (1966)

island of terror

On a remote island off the coast of Ireland, a man is found dead with his bones missing. He’s all squishy flesh. The film’s budget doesn’t allow us to see much of that but what we get – a rubbery, flabby face – is pretty great. Constable John (Sam Kydd) calls the island’s physician Dr. Reginald Landers (Eddie Byrne) but his skills are limited and after an autopsy doesn’t pull up much in terms of answers he scurries to London to discuss the matter with imminent pathologist Dr. Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing), who in turn calls on bone specialist Dr. David West (Edward Judd). He’s busy with his lady friend Toni Merrill (Carole Gray) who as luck would have it happens to have access to a helicopter that can take them to the island straight away (although it must return to London immediately after thus stranding them on the island for a few days.

After learning that a cancer specialist had set up shop on the island they go to visit him hoping to gain his help as well, but find him dead and boneless like the other guy. His lab assistants are all squishy as well. But the dude had a really nice lab which allows our heroes to do some nice science-y stuff. They do some autopsies and look at things under a microscope and say a lot of words that don’t make much sense even if you have a medical degree.

Eventually, they find the monsters. They look like slimy Jell-O molds with tentacles. They are impossible to kill and use the tentacle to inject their victims with bone-dissolving liquid. Our guys chop them with an axe, shoot them with rifles, torch them with Molotov cocktails, and even throw dynamite at them, but like I say those creatures are indestructible.

To keep the rest of the islanders safe they lock them all into one room which only causes mass panic when the lights go out. Meanwhile, these brilliant scientists finally decide that they should inject some cows with some radioactive fluid (I told you that the cancer guy had a well-stocked lab) figuring that the monster will eat the cows and then die of radioactive poisoning.

All of this is taken absolutely seriously by our actors and filmmakers. I love these old British horror films from the 1960s. They are so full of absolute silliness with ridiculous plots and poorly built monsters, but the actors perform like they are doing Shakespeare (and no doubt many of them are trained Shakespearean actors). It is wonderful. Just wonderful.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Innocents (1961)

The Innocents

Based upon The Turn of the Screw by Henry James The Innocents stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens a young woman who takes her first job as a governess for two children at a large country estate.

At first, things seem absolutely perfect. The estate is wonderful, the house is beautiful and there are lovely gardens and a pretty little lake that you can take a rowboat out on. Mrs. Grose (Megs Jenkins) the housekeeper is kindly and the children – Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin) are adorable.

She actually doesn’t meet Miles at first for he is away at school but Flora seems like an angel. They get along marvelously. Flora keeps saying that Miles will return home soon, but that can’t be correct for the term has just started. When he does arrive shortly thereafter – expelled from school – we know strange things are afoot.

Miss Giddens never seems to sleep well, she tosses and groans all night. She hears whispers echoing through the house. She sees visions of a man and a woman wandering about the grounds. When she describes them to Mrs. Grose she finds they look just like the former governess and groundskeeper both of whom died at the estate.

I won’t spoil where it goes from there, but it does go to some very interesting places. But what makes The Innocents so wonderful isn’t just the story but the filmmaking. It is shot in beautiful black and white that often uses a deep focus allowing people and objects in both the foreground and background to remain sharp. Director Jack Clayton uses this to great effect often placing a character very close to the camera while allowing someone much farther back to react.

It makes great use of light and shadow. The house is both enormous and claustrophobic, enchanting and terrifying. It has some of the best sound design I’ve ever heard in a movie. The musical score consists mostly of a hauntingly beautiful little melody that is played over and over, and sometimes sung and hummed by the children. The house is full of strange noises. There are footsteps and whisperings, creaks, and insects buzzing, and the constant howling of the wind. I’d love to see this film in a large theater with a great surround sound system for I know these noises would come from everywhere to great effect.

It isn’t a particularly scary film, but it is full of dread and a sinister mood. There is a lot of bubbling beneath the surface of the film. Miss Giddens comes from a small home in the country. Her father is a minister and she’s been quite sheltered. When she learns about the former governess having an affair with the groundskeeper she is quite shaken. When she finds out it was the children who caught them in the act she is completely shocked.

Quite a few people have pointed out that her visions of ghosts and her fear that the children are being possessed and need to be protected at all costs come from her own repressed sexuality.

I’m not smart enough for all of that, but I can say there is a lot to come away with and unpack.

This was a wonderful way to start my Great British Cinema month.