The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)

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As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been slowly working my way through the classic monster series from Hammer Studios. This is the second film in the Frankenstein series. The first film, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) very loosely adapted the novel from Mary Shelley. Apparently Universal Studios was all too ready to sue them if they adapted it too closely, or if they copied any of their designs for the castles or the monster so it is a very loose adaptation, but a good one.

At the end of that film, Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is set to face the guillotine for his crimes. At the beginning of this film, we learn that with the help of a hunchback named Karl (Oscar Quitak) a priest was executed in his place and he escaped. Three years later we find him living in Carlsbrück, Germany as a successful doctor named Victor Stein.

He’s become very popular amongst the rich (much to the chagrin of the medical council (as he refuses to join their club), but he also runs a clinic for the poor. Naturally, he’s also continuing his experiments into creating life (and probably hacking off a few body parts from the poor for that purpose.)

He teams up with Doctor Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews) a man who recognises him from his past and is excited about the work he did with reanimation. They will successfully remove Karl’s brain and implant it into a much healthier body. Things go pretty well, until of course they don’t. It wouldn’t be a Frankenstein film if he didn’t wind up going at least a little bit crazy.

The thing I’ve learned about Hammer Horror, especially their early entries, is that they are all about setting a mood. They have these wonderful sets and costumes that look both real and artificial. They create scenes that feel like they take place hundreds of years ago, yet there is an artificiality to it as well. Like you know you are watching a movie, but are still transported anyway.

The plots are often convoluted, and if I’m being honest, a little dull. And it often takes a while for the action and horror to take place, if it even comes at all. This film is like that. There is very little action or violence. It takes an incredibly long time for the monster to do anything. Instead, we spend time with Dr. Stein and Kleve talking about what they are going to do. Stein shows off his lab, which had a rudimentary experiment in it (there is a severed hand in one box of water, and a floating pair of eyes in the other, and they respond to one another).

There is a potential love interest, and some complaining by the board. Etc. It is more like a drama that just happens to have a reanimated corpse in it rather than a straight up horror film, but I still completely dig it.

I find I have to be in a certain mood for these films. You have to let them wash over you and enjoy what they are doing instead of what you might expect. But when you can’t, they are a lot of fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Nocturne (2020)

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I don’t know why I keep watching films made under the Blumhouse banner. They are all well made. They have good production values. They look great. They are often very well-acted and usually the direction is handled well. But there is something so slick, so generic about them that I find almost all of them instantly forgettable. They feel as if they are made by a committee in a factory instead of by a passionate creator with a specific point of view.

Nocturne is a perfect example of this. It has a decent story and it was obviously made by good craftsmen. But it feels like a retread of Black Swan with a bit of Whiplash thrown in but with no interesting ideas of its own.

Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) and Vivian Lowe (Madison Iseman) are twin sisters who have been training to become concert pianists from a very young age. Vivian is the prodigy having just been accepted to Julliard while Juliet did not get accepted, and as it was the only school she applied too will be taking a year off. They are both seniors at a prestigious music academy.

The film begins with another student, the best in her class committing suicide by jumping off a balcony. She was set to star in the senior showcase and now there is an empty spot. All seniors are welcome to apply.

Juliet accidentally discovers the dead girl’s theory notebook which is full of all kinds of mystical horror movie drawings. Naturally, she starts using it and naturally her musical skills improve dramatically.

The sisters don’t seem to like each other very much and their rivalry skyrockets now that they have the chance to star in the senior showcase.

All of this is a good setup for something interesting to happen. But it never does. I expected the notebook angle to go into supernatural occult territory. It seemed to think about doing exactly that, but then pulled back. Juliet keeps studying and playing the songs inside it. Her skills improve and her life begins mimicking the weird drawings inside. But she never takes it too far.

The sisters fight. One of them gets hurt. One of them cheats with the other one’s boyfriend, but again the film never really runs with these ideas. A film like this should take extremes. It doesn’t need to be sort of realistic.

It is a Blumhouse film so the production values are high. It looks good. I think Sydney Sweeney is a very fine actress, but there is nothing for her to really bite into here.

Two months from now I’ll be scrolling through Amazon and I’ll see this film pop up. I’ll have to look it up on Letterboxd to see if I’ve seen it before and I’ll be surprised by the answer.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Last Matinee (2020)

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In an old movie theater in Uraguay, a group of horror movie archetypes watch a low-budget horror movie whilst a black-gloved killer slashes them in incredibly gory ways.

The Last Matinee takes its influences from such art-house films as Goodbye Dragon Inn and Cinema Paradisio and the stylish Gialli of guys like Dario Argento and Mario Bava.

It looks great. Director Maximiliano Contenti and cinematographer Benjamín Silva make great use of the cinema’s lighting. The movie screen glows on the audience’s faces, while an usher beams his flashlight across the room. In other spaces, neon signs and popcorn machines add ambient light. The camera moves fluidly across these interesting closed spaces.

The main set consists of the movie auditorium. It is an old theater with a huge seating space and a large balcony. It is the kind of theater I wish still existed instead of the generic multi-plexes we’ve had for decades. In addition to this is the projection room, a dirty old bathroom, and lots of long hallways. The film makes great use of its single-setting.

Once it gets going it is great fun with the killer getting in some gruesome kills with stylish gore. But boy does it ever take its time getting there. It is a good hour before anything happens. Until then we spend time developing the characters.

The characters are your basic slasher film stock characters. There is the horny couple, the little kid, the old man, the punk teens, and our nice final girl.

I appreciate that the film fleshes these characters out a bit. I’ve seen slashers where the characters were nothing but cannon, er knife fodder, and that gets boring. If we don’t care about the characters just a little bit then the film becomes nothing but an exercise in gore effects.

But here we spend a little too much time developing them only to watch them get slashed and stabbed before the credits roll. Those early scenes have style, but not much else. But once the killer lets loose in that last half hour it turns into something quite fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Needful Things (1993)

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Stephen King is one of the world’s most popular authors. His works have been adapted into movies more than just about anyone else. On paper that makes sense. Beyond his immense popularity, his books are full of well-drawn characters, plots that generally swing, and all sorts of killer clowns, small-town vampires, the living dead, rabid dogs, and murderous cars. That should easily translate to the cinema.

More often than not it doesn’t. Movies based on Stephen King’s books are usually pretty bad. Needful Things is no exception. My continuing theory is that the movies tend to focus on those crazy monsters and the supernatural, but as any fan of King’s books can tell you, you might come to King for the killer clowns, but you stay for his descriptive abilities, and the way he fully draws his characters. The movies tend to shorten the character development in order to focus on the monsters and other craziness.

I’ve not read Needful Things, but I can feel the filmmakers doing that with the story. The basic outline is that a strange character named Leland Gaunt (Max Von Sydow) opens a shop called Needful Things in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. He’ll sell you the thing you most desire. And he’ll sell it to you for cheap. A little cash and maybe a favor or two.

The favors, of course, are of evil intent. He’ll get you to do something bad, but not too bad. At least it doesn’t seem that bad to the person doing it. He gives a young boy a Mickey Mantle baseball card and in return asks him to smear some mud on a lady’s clean sheets, hanging out to dry. That’s mean, maybe, but not evil. Except what the boy doesn’t know is that this lady will blame Nettie Cobb (Amanda Plummer) a waitress she’s been feuding with. Someone else will be tasked to do something against Nettie who will blame the sheet lady. On and on it will go until the two women are coming at each other with knives and a cleaver. Soon enough the entire town is at each other’s throats.

But the thing is in the King novel (I presume, still haven’t read it, but I’d be willing to bet money this is true) he plumbs into the details of each character’s desires and what makes those favors so disastrous.

For example, there is one character who is sold an old high school athletic jacket. One imagines that in the book King spends multiple pages telling us about this guy. Digging into how his best days were in high school, playing sports, getting the girl, and exceeding at life. About how every day after that has been a steady series of letdowns. We’d understand who this guy was, and why that jacket means everything to him. In the movie, we get a ten-second flashback of him riding around in a convertible with his jacket on and a girl at his side. That gets the point across, but not enough to make me actually care.

That happens over and over in the film. There are a lot of characters who buy a lot of things from Gaunt and have to perform a lot of favors for him. We get the gist of everything, but none of the details. And it’s the details that make us care.

The cast, including Ed Harris as our hero the sheriff, and J.T. Walsh as an asshole businessman are all good for what little they are given. Max Von Sydow is clearly having a wonderful time. He’s worth the price of admission alone.

In the end it isn’t the worst Stephen King adaptation, but it is far from the best.