I got another silly kung fu movie from Arrow Video and reviewed it for Cinema Sentries. This one loses some of its silliness with a rather graphic and overly-long rape scene for some reason. Viewer beware.
But the big fight scene at the end is totally worth it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Black Christmas (1974) is a seminal film in the horror genre. It is considered one of the earliest (if not the earliest) slasher films, and it still stands as one of the best. It highly influenced John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) which became the Big slasher film, inspiring countless others over the next decade.
It makes perfect sense then that they would remake it in 2006 (I’m actually surprised it took them that long – they remade it again in 2019 as part of what is now being called the “Black Christmas Series”.)
I typically stay away from horror remakes (I say with a straight face after having just sat through two remakes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers), especially remakes of slasher films as they tend to be rather terrible. But this one has a great cast including Katie Cassidy, Michelle Trachtenberg, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Andrea Martin so I gave it a go.
It has been far too long since I have seen the original to do any kind of plot comparison, but I think the basics are the same. A group of sorority girls are systematically killed by a deranged killer in their sorority house.
I do remember that in the original the girls keep getting obscene phone calls on their landline and that creates tension every time the phone rings. In this version, they get phone calls but they are less obscene and more like someone screaming at them in an incomprehensible voice. This being 2006 everyone has cell phones and caller ID. The killer keeps stealing his victim’s phones to make the calls confusing everyone.
The characters in this one are all kind of obnoxious. They are either catty, or drunks, or sullen and angry. None of them are particularly likable and so I didn’t really mind when they got killed off.
The biggest problem with the film is that they spend a whole lot of time with the killer’s back story. Nobody in the history of slasher movies has ever cared about a killer’s back story. Who cares if his mommy was mean to him, or his daddy was an abusive drunk? Just let the guy be a psycho and let him kill everybody in interesting ways.
The kills, frankly, aren’t that interesting either. They are gruesome and bloody, but not particularly inventive. I mean when one character gives another one a glass unicorn for Christmas, you know how that’s gonna end up. But maybe I’m just getting too old for this stuff.
Stick to the original kids, it is much more fun.
As an aside, I have to say that I work in construction in the house building industry. I now notice goofy movie things involving construction scenes or just the ways houses exist in movies. In this one, the killer does a lot of crawling in between walls and underneath floorboards. Nobody builds spaces between walls big enough for a person to crawl through. It would be a waste of space and money.
There is a scene here in which the killer is underneath the bathroom floor spying on a woman taking a shower. He’s cut through the very thin plywood and lifts up each piece of tile. That’s not how that works. The wood has to be thick in order to support the weight of everything on top of it, including people walking around. Tiles are stuck to the floor, otherwise, they would get kicked around, broken, and lost.
Sorry, that stuff just drives me crazy anymore.
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