Another Shaw Brothers kung fu movie released on Blu-ray, another review by yours truly. You can read it over at Cinema Sentries.
The Righteous (2021)
One of the joys of reviewing movies for Cinema Sentries is that I sometimes get a chance to see something I might not have watched were it not for them. Our cinematic world these days is so filled with multi-film universes and blockbuster franchises that smaller, independent films often get blocked out, when they are even made at all.
I recently got to see The Righteous, a movie I’d never heard of before the Blu-ray landed in my mailbox. I’m glad it did. Not because it is perfect, but because it at least tries for something different. Anyway, click here for my review.
Planet of the Vampires (1965)
Mario Bava is one of the all-time great horror directors. He basically created the Giallo subgenre and was a master visualist. He also directed lots of other genres, including sword and sandals movies and science fiction. Planet of the Vampires is a bit of a genre blend including both sci-fi and horror. Kino Lorber recently released a nice copy of it on Blu-ray and I wrote a review which you can read here.
Salem’s Lot (1979)
I was slow coming ’round to Stephen King. Growing up I was more of a Dean Koontz man. I read the short story The Langoliers when I was in high school and loved it, but for some reason didn’t even bother finishing the other short stories in the book, much less read any other King. In college, I read Dolores Claiborne and loved it, and then didn’t get around to reading any other King books until a few years later. And so it went for a long time. I’d read a King book, love it, and then not pick one up again for many months or years. And then four or five years ago I got a copy of the Mr. Mercedes audiobook from the library and really dug it, then picked up the sequel, Finder’s Keepers, and I was off to the races. I’ve been reading him steadily ever since.
I read ‘Salem’s Lot about 12 years ago and absolutely loved it. I’m a sucker for vampire stories, and King tells a really good one. It remains one of my favorite novels of his. Tobe Hooper directed a two-part TV miniseries back in 1979, and I decided to rewatch it this week. It is surprisingly good.
The story concerns Ben Mears (David Soul), a writer (the first of many times the protagonist in a King story would have that occupation) who grew up in the small town of Salem’s Lot but moved away as a boy. He comes back to write about a spooky old house up on a hill that has a sordid history and is rumored to be haunted. He plans on renting it, but as it turns out, the house has just been purchased by the mysterious Richard Straker (James Mason, completely enjoying himself) and his absent partner Kurt Barlow.
Turns out Barlow is an ancient vampire, and Straker is his familiar. But the movie takes its time getting to that part. First, Ben has to meet Susan (Bonnie Bedelia), the romantic interest, plus other assortments of characters. It isn’t until the second part of the movie, more than 90 minutes into its three-hour runtime, that we actually see the vampire. Mysterious things do happen—people get sick, a kid dies, a dog is murdered, etc., but Hooper keeps the pace slow and the eeriness high.
There is quite a lot of padding, as one would expect from a TV movie made in 1979. And the production values fit within that genre as well. But Hooper gives some good jump scares and several truly spooky scenes. There’s one in which a vampire kid floats into another kid’s room, which is an all-timer. The look of the main vampire is very Nosferatu-esque and pretty darn terrific.
It is a film that, if you consider the budget and its limitations, comes across as surprisingly great and well worth watching.
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow: The Seventh and Final Season
We’re big fans of the Arrowverse in my house. My favorite show in that universe is Legends of Tomorrow. It started out kind of slow, but eventually realized that it could lean into the inherent ridiculousness that a series about b-level superheroes flying through time is about and in doing so it became kind of awesome. Anyway, I reviewed the final season of the series for Cinema Sentries and you can read it here.
Flying Guillotine Part II (1978)
I’ve recently started getting into old kung fu movies again. I loved them as a kid, but then grew out of the genre for a while. But boutique Blu-ray labels such as Arrow Video and 88 Films have been releasing some really terrific sets of all the Shaw Brothers films and I am here for it. I reviewed Flying Guillotine II (also known as Palace Carnage) over at Cinema Sentries. You can read it here if you like.
The Friday Night Horror Movie: Two Evil Eyes (1990)
When my daughter was much younger, and we were living in a little apartment we used to have what we called sleepover nights. Regularly, on a Friday night, my wife and I would drag our mattress into the living room and we’d make up the couch into a little bed for the girl. We’d make some popcorn and stay up late watching movies. Then we’d all sleep together in the living room. It was always a very fun time.
Then we bought a two-story house. The bedrooms were all upstairs so it was impossible to drag a mattress downstairs to the living room. Luckily, we have a television in our bedroom so we’d make a palette for the daughter on the floor and continued our sleepovers there.
Eventually, my daughter decided my wife and I snored too loud and she stopped sleeping in our room. But we’d still stay up late on Friday nights watching movies. One Friday night I realized our local college TV station was playing Tom Baker-era Doctor Who stories and I started watching them each week. My wife likes classic Doctor Who as well so she’d join me. My daughter loves Nu-Who, but she’s never quite got the appeal of the classic series. Still, she’d bring in her toys and play while we watched the TV show.
Eventually, this turned into us just watching the new series so my daughter could enjoy it with us. At some point, I started going downstairs after the show was over and my wife and daughter would stay in our bedroom watching YouTube videos.
I’d usually turn on a movie downstairs, usually falling asleep on the couch. Eventually, random movies turned into horror movies. Friday has become my favorite night of the week as we order a pizza, watch Doctor Who and then I watch a horror movie late into the evening.
I thought it might be fun to make a regular post of my Friday Night Horror Movies, so here we are.
The thing is, I haven’t actually watched the movie yet, and this will be true of every Friday night posting. Like I said I usually fall asleep on the couch watching the movie and so I won’t be able to actually talk about what I’ve watched until Saturday. But it seems silly to have a post called The Friday Night Horror Movie when I’m writing it on a Saturday morning.
What I’d like to do is start the post on Friday Nights and then maybe sometime on Saturday edit in a review.
This week’s movie is Two Evil Eyes, which is actually two movies in one. Originally planned as an anthology movie with multiple directors it turned into two one-hour films with Dario Argento and George A. Romero taking a stab at adapting an Edgar Allan Poe story. I’ll let you know what I think of it tomorrow.
Ok, it is Sunday now, so obviously I forgot to tell you what I thought “tomorrow.”
And now I’ve seen like five movies since watching this one so my memory is a little blurry. Basically, I liked this movie pretty well. I’m not well read in Poe’s books. I’ve read one or two stories and of course “The Raven” but that’s about it. I have seen several different cinematic adaptations of The Black Cat, two of which were adapted by Argento’s Italian compatriots Sergio Martino and Lucio Fulci. So that story is quite familiar to me even if I haven’t read the book.
The Romero story, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdem, is completely unfamiliar to me. It involves a woman who married an old, rich bastard in order to get his money. But he’s taking too long to die so she and an ex-boyfriend hatch a plan to hypnotize him, get him to sign over all his wealth to her, and then murder him. Everything goes to plan except after he’s dead he keeps on living.
Or something. It isn’t very clear whether he turns into a zombie or a ghost or something else. It has Romero’s typical social commentary (rich people are both horrible and weird), some nice gore, and little else.
Argento’s Black Cat adaptation doesn’t do anything new with the material. A crime scene photographer (played with gusto by Harvey Keitel) kills his girlfriend, ties her corpse to some coat hangers then builds a wall around her. A black cat helps get him captured by the police.
It has some of Argento’s typical style (there is a POV shot of the cat and some great extreme close-ups) and lots of blood-soaked violence. The opening scene is basically the aftermath of Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum.
All in all neither film is particularly great, but if you are a fan of either director there is enough here to make it worth your time.
The Burned Barns Blu-ray Review
I wrote a review of a pretty good french film starring two of their finest actors: Alain Delon and Simone Signoret. You can read it over at Cinema Sentries.
Phil Lesh & Wilco – Bridgeview, IL (08/26/22)
Philco (Phil Lesh and Friends with Jeff Tweedy and Nels Cline)
2022-08-26
Sacred Rose Festival, Canopy Stage
Bridgeview, Il
Set I
- Intro
- Dire wolf
- Doing that rag
- Mr Charlie
- Jack straw
- Airline to heaven
- US Blues
- Not Fade Away
Set II
- Intro
- Shakedown
- Viola Lee Blues
- Pride of Cucamonga
- New Speedway Boogie
- Franklin’s tower
- Via Chicago
- Ripple
Hardcore (1979)
Hardcore (1979) stars George C. Scott as Jake VanDorn a conservative, Calvinist, businessman from Grand Rapids, Michigan. When his teenage daughter goes missing while on a trip to California he hires a sleazy private detective (Peter Doyle) to find her. The detective turns up a short pornographic reel with the daughter in it, but when he is unable to locate her Jake flies to Los Angeles to do the job himself. Once there he journeys through the seedy underbelly of the city talking to strippers, prostitutes, and porno hustlers.
It covers similar territory as the Martin Scorsese-directed Taxi Driver (1976) which Schrader also wrote. Except in that film, Travis Bickle lived in the dark spaces and seemed to thrive there. Jake VanDorn is from the midwest. He is a moral man. A good churchgoer. He is unmoved by all the sex and unseemliness. He is propositioned several times throughout the movie but only offers back a scoff. As if sex doesn’t interest him. His disgust and anger come out only when dealing with his daughter – while watching her perform sex acts on camera or dealing with someone who put her in that position.
Schrader himself was from Grand Rapids and was raised as a Calvinist. He’s on record saying that the Jake VanDorn character was modeled after his father and it is hard not to see the daughter as a symbol for himself. He did leave Grand Rapids for Los Angeles after all to make a living making movies, something his father no doubt would have abhorred. Yet it is interesting to see how the film is from the father’s perspective. We rarely see the daughter at all, nor do we get her side of the story. Make of that what you will.
Jake wanders around the seedier sections of Los Angeles. He walks into porno shops asking the clerk if he’s seen his daughter. He wanders into makeshift brothels where one can wrestle nude with a pretty young woman and negotiate with her for anything else he wants. He pays these women but all he wants is answers. He doesn’t get very many. While pornography has become essentially legalized, this world is still full of secrets, it lives by a code and Jake is clearly not part of it.
He changes tactics. He puts a classified ad in a local newspaper stating that he is a porno producer looking for male studs. He’s hoping to find the young man who was in that porno clip with his daughter. He dons a cheap wig, a cheaper mustache, and clothes that make him look like a narc with no clue as to how to blend in.
He finds the guy but only plunges deeper into this world which includes underage prostitution and snuff films. In parts, it reminded me of several Brian DePalma films. Movies like Dressed to Kill and Body Double also delve into these unseemly sides of a city, but DePalma fetishized them whereas here Schrader looks at them with a detachment. Jake digs deep into this world that he only ever feared existed but he is not part of it. He is a watcher.
George C. Scott is a fascinating choice for Jake. He’s such a square. I mean I don’t know what the actor was like in real life, but his characters are often very straight-laced, or at least unsentimental. While diving into the underside of Los Angeles and San Francisco, he walks through it as if a robot, almost emotionless. He does break down a few times, but each time it is only due to his feelings for his daughter. He meets a young hustler who says she started hooking up when she was very young. Jake is happy to take care of her while she’s helping him find his daughter, but unlike Travis Bickle, he never seems all that bothered that she’s been abused her entire life. It is almost like this is a completely different world to him, to his world back in Grand Rapids, and he’d just assume it doesn’t exist once he gets his daughter out of it.
Schrader is a director whose work I’ve almost always enjoyed. This was the second film he ever directed and the sixth film that he had written. Hardcore isn’t his best work, but it is an interesting film, and it makes for a very interesting companion piece to Taxi Driver.
themidnightcafe.org 