Tag Archives: movies

Halloween is now Totally over (John Carpenter's Halloween)

I think we’re ready to declare Halloween officially over – we’ve now watched John Carpenter’s indie classic, Halloween. We’ve still got 5 or 6 movies sitting on the TV that are worthy, but they can wait a while.

I haven’t see Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween and while I agree that the original Halloween looks pretty dated, it’s still a fun, fast-paced, creepy movie. Plus, Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode is so adorable in this movie that you just have to make sure she gets through it all in one piece.

Although the movie is focused on Laurie, her sidekicks, Annie and Lynda, are expertly used to reveal many facets of Laurie’s character without the cheap (in more ways than one) fallbacks of either narration or wordy exposition. The acting isn’t all that great, but it’s a pretty smart script with a lot of creepy scares but very little actual gore. I’d forgotten how many times Lynda utters the word, “totally” – if you made it into a drinking game you’d be unconscious before the end of the first act.

One of the most amusing elements is the Halloween night movie that plays on the television throughout the last half of the movie – The Thing. Carpenter of course remade the thing just a few years later. For some reason I find that more amusing than the fact that Curtis is the daughter of Janet Leigh, the original Psycho scream queen. Okay, I think the fact that the killer’s iconic mask is an altered William Shatner mask is amusing, too. And that Laurie nearly kills the killer with a knitting needle. I’m sure there are other things, but you should just watch it yourself if you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it in a while.

Hocus Pocus! (Halloween film fest, redux)

The animation that transformed the top-hat wearing Count Dracula into a bat in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula reminded me of my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon, Transylvania 6-5000. I hadn’t seen it in years, maybe since I was a kid, so I was excited to find it online in it’s entirety.

Bugs Bunny – Transylvania 6-5000

About House of Dracula – Glenn Strange returns as The Monster but footage of Lon Chaney (Ghost of Frankenstein) and Boris Karloff (Bride of Frankenstein) are used to pad the movie. Chaney also has a starring role as Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man who’s despair is at the heart of many of these movies. The poor immortal bastard just wants to quit chasing cars and howling at the moon, but every scientist he finds who’s willing to try to cure him turns out to be mad. Plus, they always turn out to have a fetish for reviving Frankenstein’s Monster that screws everything up by the final reel and leaves Lawrence Talbot once again in need of some new clothes and a case of flea collars. Poor WolfMan, he’s got the worst HMO ever.

"Simon Pegg argues for a return to traditional zombie values"

The BBC recently ran a 5-part horror/comedy-type series about Zombies called “Dead Set.” The series has been well-received and also go lots of critical acclaim. I haven’t seen it, but I still enjoyed the piece Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) penned for the Guardian regarding the fact that the “Dead Set” zombies can run:

I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can’t fly; zombies do not run. It’s a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I’ll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It’s hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

Reservoir Carl and a few others in the know recommended some quality Zombie films for my Halloween fest, and I’ve noted the titles for a Thanksgiving marathon.

I always forget to recommend the podcast MailOrderZombie to Carl, so I’ll do it now.

House of Frankenstein (13, etc. etc. ad infinitum)

Last night we only had time for one (so-called) fright flick – House of Frankenstein. Boris Karloff is back, but now in the role of mad scientist Dr. Niemann, who got in deep trouble with some villagers for transplanting the brain of a man into a dog. Or the brain of a dog into a man. Or something. Ygor seems to have stayed dead after Ghost of…but Bela is nowhere to be seen. The role of Dracula is now played by John Carradine, who can keep a straight face through pretty much anything. This one must have seriously tested his limits.

House of Frankenstein is where the Frankenstein mythology picks up a hunchback, who Karloff’s Niemann takes with him in the most improbable jailbreak ever and then forces to do his bidding by promising a new and improved body.

Niemann and his sidekick get control of a traveling Horror Show and cart their skeleton of Dracula to the Village that threw Niemann’s ass in the dungeon in the first place. Niemann removes the stake in Dracula’s heart and then wanders off to chip the Wolfman and Frankenstein out of the ice they’ve been preserved in since the end of Ghost. Lon is back as the Wolfman and Glenn Strange makes his debut as the Monster.

Intent on reviving the Monster, Niemann promises to cure the Wolfman by transplanting his brain into a new body. How that’s going to cure a werewolf is never explained, especially after we get the latest twist on the werewolf mythos – that it’s not enough to shoot him with a silver bullet, the gun needs to be fired by a woman who loves him. Luckily there’s a love triangle between a beautiful gypsy girl, the hunchback and the Wolfman, and Pretty Girl is quite the expert ammunition forger.

I won’t spoil the ending, mostly because I have no idea what happened at the end. Also because these movies are good goofy fun and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. But mostly because I have no idea what was going on.

Then we watched Countdown, The Daily Show, Colbert, and skipped through the Saturday Night Live special, which wasn’t especially special. I’m still agitated by this chilling Sarah Palin monologue.

One last thing – Hooray for Samer, who was featured as the DCist Election Day photo of the day!