Reuters Reports:
Don’t know how the movie will turn out but the publicity pictures of Sherawat that accompany the article are pretty amazing. See also: Lynch’s uber-flop Boxing Helena. What’s that you say? You didn’t see it? That’s okay, neither did anyone else.
I do wonder if a snakewoman would really have webbed fingers….
The original post is on the BollywoodBuzz Blog, but be warned the site features annoyingly loud ads that yell at you as soon as the page loads.
The Sunday night double-feature was Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and the original Haunting.
The Haunting is every bit as good as when it came out. Beautiful cinematography filled with shadowy depth, a stellar cast, solid writing, amazing sets, and jolts and scares that come from subtle sound effects rather than flashy visuals that would look tired and dated 40 years later.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman grapples with eternal questions, such as, “What in the hell is going on in this movie?” and “I wonder when dinner’s going to be ready,” and “Did I take the clothes out of the dryer?” It’s the wolfman’s picture, the Monster is only in a few scenes. Although this one picks up where Ghost of Frankenstein left off (sort of), different actors play some key roles. Lon Chaney, jr, who played the Monster in Ghost, is, of course, Larry Talbot, the beleaguered Wolfman who wants nothing more than to end his eternal life. Bela Lugosi plays the Monster now, since Ygor died at the end of the last film but lived on in the body of the Monster thanks to a brain transplant. If you think too much about the continuity issues in this movie you’ll need a brain transplant by the end of it.
This afternoon’s double-feature was Curse of the Demon and The Haunted Palace.
In Curse of the Demon, Dana Andrews must save himself from certain death at the claws of a demon that would have been much scarier if it had been kept off-camera.
Despite the Edgar Allan Poe title, Haunted Palace is actually based on the H.P. Lovecraft story, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” It stars some of our old friends: Vincent Price and Elisha Cook (seen together last week in House on Haunted Hill), plus Lon Chaney, Jr.
Neither required any actual thought – the perfect Sunday afternoon double feature after a grueling morning of Meet the Press, poll-watching, and newspaper reading.
So far, Husband has missed every movie in the Halloween marathon. He was sad to miss the Frankenstein fest so I put on Son of Frankenstein so he could catch up – it’s his favorite of the post Bride-movies and all. (The things we do for love). While he watched, I looked up the annoying kid, Donnie Dunagan, to see if he ever worked again. Would you believe he was the voice of Bambi? After that – a lengthy career in the Marine Corps.
At one hour and 40 minutes, Son is, in Husband’s words, “a bit of a trial.” I wandered off for about 30 minutes and baked pumpkin cupcakes. I’m so tired I didn’t bother to make any frosting. They came out quite well, regardless. I didn’t pay attention to the cupcake liners I bought, I just grabbed the last package on the shelf. They seem to be comedy cupcake liners, they’re twice as tall as normal ones. When I first put them into the pan I thought I’d grabbed an extra-shallow pan from the cabinet. We have a lot of pans, and, like I said, I’m really tired.
After we ate cupcakes, we forged ahead to the mercifully shorter Ghost of Frankenstein. Bela returns as Ygor, who you only thought died at the end of Son. At the end of Son, the Monster had been thrown into the sulfur pits. At the beginning of Ghost, he’s accidentally freed. All that time encased in sulfur was good for the Monster’s wardrobe. In Son he shuffled around in some of sort of nasty fleece vest, but when he’s freed from the sulfur he’s wearing the ill-fitting jacket from the first two films.
Just don’t think too much about these things, they’ll make your brain hurt.
Our – if by “our” you mean “my” – goal tonight is to get through Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, but I suspect we’ll be throwing in the towel after the first two. Besides, Ben Affleck is supposed to be playing Keith Olbermann tonight on Saturday Night Live and I’d like to catch that before I lose consciousness. We’ll see….
I had this delusion I was just going to spend most of the day vegetating and alternating between reading Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts and watching movies. Didn’t quite work out, although I did manage to combine a run and The Devil Bat (1941) – one of the few times I was glad the gym has installed individual tv’s on some of the treadmills. I had someone else turn it on, because most people watch CNN at my gym and I didn’t want to take the chance on a random sighting on day 2 of my CNN detox.
Devil Bat is so hilariously bad it was almost dangerous to watch while running. I love the opening sequence, where Mad Scientist Bela works to perfect his species of Giant Devil Bats using electrical manipulation of their glandular processes. He does this when he’s not busy inventing a new aftershave. His conversation with the stock footage bat before he carries the completely unconvincing rubber model into the laboratory is priceless. I mean that literally, it couldn’t have cost anything to produce that scene. And if it did, someone should have been fired. I swear the actual plot of this movie is: Mad Scientist hates his employer, develops a shaving lotion that causes Giant Devil Bats to attack whoever wears it, commits mayhem.
I’d planned to make tonight a triple-feature: The Haunting (1963), Evil Dead and the 1st Halloween, but those best laid plans and all. It’s okay, I’ve already decided that Halloween is going to last through election-day this year so that I have time to get through everything left on the Tivo, finish the Frankenstein marathon, and read the Joe Hill short stories and David J. Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween. Both of those books have been sitting on the coffeetable mocking me ever since the start of the 10 day migraine that kept me from reading.
I was so tired tonight that I decided to postpone the movies and watch Halloween episodes from Buffy. I haven’t seen any of them in ages, they’re funny, and they don’t require much attention span. I picked season 2 (where everyone becomes their Halloween costume) after realizing I was too tired to even watch more than one tonight. I never mentioned it here, but I kicked off the 13 Days of Halloween fest with the Halloween episode from the final season of Angel, “Life of the Party.”