One of the challenges you face when watching old movies is butting heads with some of its outdated morals. I always find it tough to watch films that portray the slave-owning confederates as heroes. Torch Singer doesn’t have any of that, in fact, it is fairly progressive in its point of view, but I still wrestle with how best to watch it in my review.
I love a good Pre-Code movie (movies made after the advent of sound in 1927 and before the Production Code went into full effect in 1934). While often tame by today’s standards these films often dealt with taboo subjects and could be quite racy.
Hot Saturday is a film that couldn’t have been made just a few years later. It also stars Cary Grant in one of his earliest starring roles (and it’s also before Cary Grant became “Cary Grant” the star we all love and adore).
Kino Lorber released a nice Blu-ray of it a few months ago and I wrote a review for Cinema Sentries.
This is film #2 of Arrow Videos Italian Gothic Horror boxed set. I’ll be reviewing the entire thing soon so I won’t say much about it here. The Italians were great at taking successful American genres and making them their own. When Roger Corman found success with several Edgar Alan Poe adaptations the Italians started adapting his stories. The Blancheville Monster (also known simply as Horror as seen from the poster) basically rips Corman’s adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher. The story, about a woman who returns home to her family castle, discovers that everything has changed and that someone (possibly a ghost) is trying to kill her before her 21st birthday, is pretty standard gothic horror story stuff.
But it looks great and contains everything you want – a spooky old castle, creepy shadows, flowing white gowns, and a monster in the attic – from this sort of thing. It isn’t a great film, its own director essentially disowned it calling it “a little film of no importance” but I found it quite enjoyable.
It is almost October which means it is almost Halloween which means I’ll be watching a lot of horror movies. I should be creating a list for my #31DaysofHorror and #Hooptober hashtags (more on that later) but for today I just watched an old Italian horror. Lucio Fulci was an Italian director who made lots of films in lots of genres but is mostly known today for a series of Giallo and Horror films, most of which included high levels of graphic violence (he is sometimes called the “Godfather of Gore”.)
The House by the Cemetery is not his best work, nor his worst, but it is a pretty good example of what he is about. The story is hard to follow and mostly nonsense. The screenwriter, Dardano Sacchetti, says he was inspired by Henry James and Fulci says he wanted to make a Lovercraftian story. I’ve not read anything by any of those authors so I can’t comment on that, but I can say little of what’s on the screen makes much sense.
The story involves an intellectual, Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco) who moves from New York City to a small town in New England. He takes his wife Lucy (Catriona MacColl) and young son Bob (Giovanni Frezza) with him. He’s there to continue the research of his mentor Dr. Peterson, who previously went a little crazy and killed his mistress and then offed himself. All of this was done in the titular house by the cemetery, the house Norman and his family are moving into.
It is a creepy old horror movie house – big and dilapidated, filled with shadowy corners and a scary basement. It is not only located next to a cemetery but also on top of one. Or at least when they pull back a rug they find a tombstone in the middle of one of the rooms. Norman says that lots of homes bury their loved ones inside their houses because it gets cold up there in the winter and the ground is too hard. Sure Norman, whatever you say. There are lots of cold places in this world and I don’t think any of them keep grandma’s corpse in the basement.
People keep telling Norman that they’ve seen him before, that he must have been up in that town a few months prior. Norman keeps denying this. The librarian is a creepy dude who seems to know more than he lets on. A babysitter (Ania Pieroni) shows up and is found trying to get into the locked basement. Then she gets brutally murdered down there. Bob befriends a young girl who no one else can see and who may actually be a ghost.
None of these things are connected very well. It feels like several scenes are missing. Or the screenwriter got drunk and forgot to write a few pages. But it doesn’t really matter. Nobody watches a Fulci film for a great story. They watch it for the gore and this film gives you plenty.
It is the type of film that not only includes a dungeon filled with bodies chopped into pieces but that quick zooms into the viscera and lingers on the gore. In the very first scene a woman gets a knife stabbed through her skull. If you enjoy handcrafted gore effects, and I certainly do, then Lucio Fulci is your man, and The House by the Cemetery is not a bad place to start.
It isn’t just blood and guts though, that make this worth watching. The story is a bit bewildering but Fulcio does a nice job of creating an eerie atmosphere and keeping things just enough off balance that your left feeling on edge for most of the film’s runtime.
This was the first kung fu title I reviewed for 88 films which means it will be the last one I’ll post for a while (at least until they release another one). It was a good movie and you can read my (hopefully good) review here.
Sergei Eisenstein was one of the most important of the early directors. He’s someone I’ve heard about many times but until I watched and reviewed these two films back in November of last year I’d never actually set down and watched anything from him. I’m glad I finally did. You can read my reviews here.
There are a lot of boutique labels putting out all sorts of movies on Blu-ray these days. All the recent blockbusters get releases, of course, and the certified classics. Companies like Arrow Video and Severin and releasing cult films and old schlock horror movies. Kino Lorber continues to do a magnificent job of releasing what I like to call Almost Classics. These were mainstream movies with A-list directors or actors that were aiming for greatness and somehow fell short. They usually aren’t bad, sometimes they’re even quite good, but for one reason or another they never quite attained classic status.
I’ve reviewed quite a few of these over the years and Counterpoint is one such example. It stars Charlton Heston and Maximillian Schell and has an interesting WWII era plot. But it has largely been forgotten and with good reason, as it isn’t really very good. Anyway, you can read my full review here.
Two more kung fu flicks for today and then I’m done (until tomorrow. Click here to read my review of these two films.
And the kung fu flick hits keep a-rolling. I reviewed these two movies for Cinema Sentries back in March and now you can read them here.
Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors. It was my absolute pleasure to watch and reviews Stage Fright (1950) one of his lesser-known films for Cinema Sentries. You can read that review here.
themidnightcafe.org 