| Author |
 Topic  |
|
Joe Blevins 
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
 Posted - 06/29/2009 : 03:49:35
|
quote:
Originally posted by demonic
Thanks for the Lady Frankenstein link Joe - I will watch it at some point. For those interested - Driller Killer is available uncut on the same website.
I wonder how many of these movies are available on the Internet. I've started to hear about The Internet Archive on podcasts like the excellent B-Movie Cast With Vince Rotolo. I'm sure there's a mind-bending assortment of material available there. I've probably stayed away from the site for fear that I'll never be able to leave it. It's an incredible conduit of all kinds of audio and video. What times we live in! Lady Frankenstein and The Driller Killer just a click away.
|
 |
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 06/29/2009 : 04:23:35
|
quote:
Originally posted by randall
Keep it up, Joe: this thread is sublime.
Thanks so much! Glad you're following along! This project has been a mixture of pleasure and pain. Case in point:
32. Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory
With a title that outrageous, this picture should be a campy good time. But no. No indeed. This is a slow, somber, and inert film, originally titled Lycanthropus. The setting is not a college but rather a reform school for young women. The place looks pretty nice, actually, and seems more like a private boarding school than a correctional facility. The ladies seem to be in their early 20s, and they fit my image of what 1960s "air hostesses" must've been like, kind of vacantly pretty and polite. Anyway, there's a rash of werewolf attacks, and someone on the staff is responsible... but who? There's also a blackmail plot involving a cache of incriminating letters, but this mainly just eats up screen time that might be better occupied by further werewolf attacks. The thing I liked best about this one was that its supporting cast included obvious look-alikes for Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. The Price and Lorre doppelgangers have several scenes together, and I found myself wishing the actors doing the (noticably stilted) English dubbing had attempted to impersonate the voices of the two stars.
The romantic male lead here is a platinum-haired professor who is kind of stalwart and rugged in a not-too-exciting way. Of more interest is our female lead, Priscilla, played by lovely Polish-born actress Barbara Lass. She was married to Roman Polanski at the time she made this one, and it isn't difficult to see what attracted Polanski to her. That marriage didn't pan out, obviously, and Lass died mysteriously in 1995 at the age of 55. Since the performance is dubbed, it's difficult to tell how good Lass is as an actress, but the camera just loves her. Oh, those eyes!
As far as I could tell, the werewolf never actually enters the girl's dorm, a bland and functional locale which is shown several times to no great effect. Obviously, the schlockmeisters seized on that "girl's dormitory" angle in the hopes of convincing audiences this was some kind of sexploitation flick. Sorry, fellas. No luck. |
|
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 07/01/2009 : 03:49:21
|
Gotta keep movin' on:
33. Hands of a Stranger
In the words of Deniece Williams, "Let's hear it for the boy! Let's give the boy a hand!" Heck, let's give him two hands.
Horror movie screenwriters must have an absolute terror of transplant surgeries. Or maybe audiences fear transplants, and the screenwriters are just playing on that fear. In any event, Hollywood has churned out scare flicks about transplanted brains, eyes, heads, and even one -- The Amazing Transplant -- about a transplanted male member. This one, a noirish B&W thriller from '62, is about a hand transplant. A mysterious man, seemingly a criminal lowlife of some stripe, is shot by gangsters before the opening credits and winds up in the ER, where a brash young doctor labors mightily to save him but can only salvage... his hands! That very same night, up-and-coming concert pianist Vernon Paris is in a car accident and loses... his hands! This coincidence gives our doctor friend an idea -- a wonderfully awful idea. By now, you have probably guessed that there's a hand-related killing spree in Vernon's future once he gets those new, transplanted lunch-hooks. The minute the Ben Casey-ish doctor started talking about preserving human life "indefinitely," I knew it was only a matter of time before the casualties started piling up. In fact, in these movies, it's always a bad sign when a man of science uses the words "human life" in a sentence. I was kind of hoping Vernon's new hands would be demon-possessed and would force him to kill against his will, but it turns out Vernon's just kind of a sullen jerk who takes to murdering because he can't stand living with second-hand hands.
Hands of a Stranger is not terrible by any means, but the hammy and melodramatic acting got on my nerves fairly quickly. The actors spend too much time bickering with each other, and their characters all seem cranky and stressed-out, like they could all use a nice two-week vacation in some remote tropical location where playing the piano -- or even saying the word "piano" -- is illegal. Cameo-spotters may enjoy seeing a young Sally Kellerman in an early "girlfriend of a minor ancillary character" role, and there's a whole sequence given over to young (and prominently billed) Barry Gordon, the tyke who crooned "I'm Gettin' Nuttin' for Christmas." I guess signing the "Nuttin' for Christmas" kid was sort of a coup back then.
P.S. - If you happen to watch Hands of a Stranger some day, do yourself a favor and watch this Kids in the Hall clip immediately afterward.
|
Edited by - Joe Blevins on 07/01/2009 18:25:57 |
|
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 07/02/2009 : 03:35:38
|
Last review for at least a few days:
34. The Blancheville Monster
I'm about to travel out of state to spend the weekend with my father and sister for the Fourth of July weekend, so I guess it's appropriate that my last Chilling Classic before the trip is this one -- an early 1960s Gothic horror flick which also involves the reunion of a brother, sister, and father, albeit under gloomier circumstances. In short: comely young blonde Emily De Blancheville, about to turn 21, returns to the family estate in 1800s France after her father's death, only to find out from her brother Rodrigue that their dad is not only alive but has sworn to kill Emily in order to fulfill a family prophecy.
This one has all the proper Gothic atmospheric touches (horse-drawn carriages, dark and stormy nights, creepy servants, a forboding castle) and I desperately wanted to enjoy it, but I'll be damned if this flick didn't thwart me at every turn. The pacing is maddeningly lethargic, and the characters are so dull as to become interchangable. Even the sinister-seeming maid, a Frau Blucher-type named Miss Eleonore, turns out to be pretty boring. The "monster" is similarly a washout. For me, the main point of interest was a sequence involving a glass coffin. As we have seen in movies from Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the Bee Gees/Peter Frampton vehicle Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, glass coffins are best used during fake funerals for pretty girls who aren't actually dead.
By the way, I felt sorry for the cast of this movie. Wherever they were, it must've been freezing. The actors' breath is clearly visible during both indoor and outdoor scenes! Get these people some hot toddies, pronto!
|
Edited by - Joe Blevins on 07/02/2009 13:41:01 |
|
|
|
Larry 
"Larry's time / sat merrily"
|
Posted - 07/02/2009 : 11:41:22
|
I remember having the exact same reaction when I saw Blancheville at a drive-in theatre in the '60s. As I recall, it was the fourth of four horror films on the bill that night, so I might have been as lethargic as the film's pacing by that time.
Once, again, I'm having a GREAT time re-living these films with you, Joe. Have a safe trip, and I'm looking forward to the next round of reviews. |
Edited by - Larry on 07/02/2009 11:41:57 |
|
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 07/02/2009 : 16:45:11
|
quote:
Originally posted by Larry
I remember having the exact same reaction when I saw Blancheville at a drive-in theatre in the '60s. As I recall, it was the fourth of four horror films on the bill that night, so I might have been as lethargic as the film's pacing by that time.
Once, again, I'm having a GREAT time re-living these films with you, Joe. Have a safe trip, and I'm looking forward to the next round of reviews.
Glad you're enjoying the thread. I can't imagine seeing Blancheville as the fourth movie on the bill. I've been to a few Ed Wood marathons, and they always scheduled Night of the Ghouls last because it's a room-clearer. Blanchville is a much better picture than Night of the Ghouls, but they have that same energy-sapping quality due to some unfortunate pacing problems.
I initially called the movie The Blancheville Horror by accident. Here's the deal: this flick started out as Horror and was renamed The Blancheville Monster. The opening credits, confusingly, include both of those titles. The Horror logo is actually impressive, while the Blancheville logo looks cheap and last-minute. |
|
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 07/03/2009 : 02:28:37
|
Waitin' for a train, so I thought I'd list some random details about some of our past movies (before I forget 'em):
THE FIRST TEN FLICKS
Track of the Moon Beast: Featured the project's first of many (many) pompous detective/cop/investigator characters. These guys typically accomplish very little during the movie -- other than asking nosey questions and bothering the other characters -- but are always around for the finale and have an excellent chance of survival. Mickey Hargitay in Lady Frankenstein represents the textbook example of this character.
Demons of Ludlow: The trouble all started because some guy got his hands chopped off a few hundred years ago and therefore could no longer play the piano. Is this weird foreshadowing of Hands of a Stranger, which turned up 31 movies later?
Oasis of the Zombies: I have to give this movie some credit; its WWII flashbacks -- including a battle scene -- are actually somewhat credible. And, for what it's worth, you do get some nice desert scenery and even some footage of Muslim prayer ceremonies in this otherwise godforsaken picture. A caravan of real camels in a real desert cannot help but be an impressive sight. I'm reminded of Johnny Depp in Ed Wood, flummoxed by the sight of real camels on the studio lot.
Drive-In Massacre: Want to break your own brain? Try following the movies actually being shown on at this drive-in! They seem to be old "hillbilly" comedies in the Ma & Pa Kettle vein, which makes it all the more unbelievable when a female soon-to-be-victim emotionally describes one of the films as "beautiful" and one her favorites.
Horrors of Spider Island: I can't believe my review made no mention of the fact the movie's main "monster" is a guy who actually becomes a were-spider. How could I overlook that? Oh, right, the babes. Those wonderful, weirdly accented babes. Our first dubbed flick. Sooooo many more of those to come. I was so naive back then.
Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter: She's the granddaughter, actually. Like all mad scientists so far in this project, she has a nervous-nellie assistant (in this case, her brother) who begs her not to, you know, tamper in God's domain and stuff. She goes right ahead and tampers. Jesse James, meanwhile, seems like somebody's mean high school principal.
War of the Robots: The good guys in this movie wear jumpsuits with what looks like a brand name. The dubbing tries to play it off like it's the name of their ship, but I think some product placement was going on. (The end credits, I think, thank some sporting goods dealer.) Also, the message of this flick is a timeless one: Dames -- ya just can't trust 'em.
Snake People: The life of a voodoo zombie is rough. The ones in this movie have to toil on a sugar cane plantation. They definitely need to get a union going. On the whole, though, Boris Karloff does seem like that bad a boss. Someone should really write about the role of social class in horror movies. I swear, these movies are dominated by class politics!
I Eat Your Skin: The adventure novelist brings his literary agent and his literary agent's wife on the trip with him. The wife character is a pampered, useless ninny straight out of a 1960s sitcom, like Mrs. Drysdale from The Beverly Hillbillies, only somewhat nicer. She has a cherished pet poodle and a generous "charge account." Does anyone say "charge account" anymore? And what happens to that poodle, anyway?
Memorial Valley Massacre: Cameron Mitchell appears right at the beginning (as the rich industrialist who unwisely invested in this campground), says a few lines, then disappears from the picture entirely. I realize it helps the international sales if there are "recognizable" people in the cast, but how does hiring Cameron Mitchell help the movie's bottom line? At least Medusa and The Demon put him to use!
MORE TO COME...?
|
Edited by - Joe Blevins on 07/05/2009 15:43:06 |
|
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 07/05/2009 : 16:02:04
|
Back in Chicago now and waiting for another train home. Ah, home to my beloved 50 Chilling Classics!
Since the beginning of this project, I've watched almost no "outside" movies. One exception was seeing (and basically enjoying) The Hangover during a power outage and another was seeing (and, again, basically enjoying) Public Enemies over the Fouth of July weekend. I had to wonder, in both cases, whether this ridiculous project of mine affected the way I look at "regular" movies. We tend to take a lot of the nuts-and-bolts basics of filmmaking for granted, accustomed as we are to movies that are planned out to within an inch of their very lives. In movies like The Hangover and Public Enemies, everything we audience members see and hear is the result of at least some planning by somebody. I got the feeling that those movies both turned out pretty much the way the directors -- and producers, technicians, moneymen, etc. -- wanted 'em to. Nothing wrong with that. A raunchy buddy comedy? You got it, mister. A slick gangster drama? Comin' right up, sport. In both cases, I got exactly what I was expecting from those movies. No ripoffs there.
With these Chilling Classics, you never can tell how the movie's going to turn out because variables like Fate and Chance and Random Weirdness play much larger roles than they do in "normal" movies. When these low-budget horror flicks turn out well -- good enough to stand up against "real" movies -- it's one of the biggest miracles of moviemaking I can imagine. There's a good reason the movie geeks of the world worship films like Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Evil Dead. The odds against any of these movies turning out to be worthwhile were enormous. Any of them could have turned sour and been as worthless as, let's say, Cathy's Curse. Of course, talent and skill went into their making... but some Guardian Angel of Horror Cinema must have sprinkled some pixie dust on those flicks, too.
Forgive this addle-brained rant of mine. I'm not a good traveler, and my brain is fried. |
|
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 07/05/2009 : 22:35:37
|
Home again, and a shower and a meal have restored my equilibrium. Back to the task at hand:
35. Haunts
Hard to believe this movie beat out 34 others, huh? This is the last of the "4"-rated films, and it did not outclass its predecessors. While its title might lead you to believe it's a ghost story (which would've been welcome), Haunts is at heart a cheapie slasher flick set in a small rural community and starring -- goddamnit! -- Mr. Cameron Mitchell, back for an unprecedented FOURTH appearance. The acting, writing, and production are predictably slipshod, but there are a couple of clues that this one was aspiring to be something more. One is a classy score by Pino Donaggio, whose credits include Brian De Palma's Carrie and Dressed to Kill. Another clue is that the film's script deviates from the slasher formula in its second half with some game-changing plot twists, making Haunts feel a bit like a bargain-basement M. Night Shyamalan flick for the 1970s drive-in crowd. (And, boy, that crowd sure must've been disappointed with this one!)
In brief: a masked killer (his budget-conscious ensemble: ski mask, jeans, denim jacket) is terrorizing some hick town, and the sheriff (Aldo Ray) is trying to get to the bottom of it. This particular town is running over with creeps, so there are more than enough suspects. Meanwhile, a Swedish lady named Ingrid is having some disturbing flashbacks to her childhood and fears she may be the slasher's next victim. This is yet another flick in which blood starts pouring out of a faucet (yawn!), but I've got to give the filmmakers credit for an earlier scene which does a novel variation on that same gag. (It involves milking a goat, in case you're curious.)
SIDE NOTE: When you think of the film editing process, you might imagine directors asking that brutal age-old question, "Do we really NEED this scene?" Low-budget horror movie directors do not ask this question, I can assure you. Anything that comes back from the processing lab goes directly into the final print, up to and including uneventful footage of people simply driving or walking from place to place. Let's say you're a horror director, and your plot calls for the Sheriff to interview the family of a victim. You're going to want to get plenty of footage of the Sheriff: getting into his car and starting the engine, carefully merging into traffic, driving to the house, parking in front of the house, walking from his squad car to the house, etc. That's how you get a film to feature length. Leave absolutely nothing to the audience's imagination. |
|
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 07/06/2009 : 03:21:01
|
Oh, the things I do for you:
36. Naked Massacre
This was a tough one to get through. Not because of technical incompetence -- it's actually fairly well-made, though with some rough edges -- but because of its exceedingly unpleasant subject matter. Originally titled Born for Hell, this is a fictional variation on the Richard Speck case. For those who don't know, Speck was a psychopath who killed eight student nurses in Chicago one July night in 1966. He was later identified by the lone survivor and spent the rest of his life in prison, dying at the age of 49 in 1991. The film's original title is a reference a tattoo worn by the real Richard Speck which read "BORN TO RAISE HELL." This film can be considered speculative fiction, as it relates the story of a Speck-type character who breaks into a house full of nurses and proceeds to kill them over the course of a night.
Released ten years after the Speck murders, Naked Massacre moves the action to Belfast during a time of intense sectarian violence. Its fictionalized protagonist is a disgruntled Vietnam veteran, Cain, who fled to Ireland after coming home to find his wife pregnant by another man -- one of his Army buddies, in fact. This film was released the very same year as Taxi Driver, and it's not difficult to see the parallels between Cain and Travis Bickle. They're two disturbed vets adrift in violent cities, both still wearing their green Army jackets and neither particularly comfortable around other people -- especially women, whom they fear.
Like Driller Killer (another film sometimes compared to Taxi Driver) this is a grindhouse movie with some arthouse aspirations. The director clearly wants to place the murders of the nurses into historical context, seeing them as symptoms of a sick and corrupt world (hence all the news footage of Vietnam and scenes involving Ireland's troubles). But it also rather shamelessly exploits the violent and sexual aspects of the story, lingering on the humiliation and suffering of the women in a way that would cater to the men in the audience. Is Naked Masssacre, perhaps, an indictment of its own audience? Is it just crass expoitation? Should I be ashamed for having sat through it?
Naked Massacre is nowhere near the worst film in this project, but it's the one I'm least likely to revisit. I renew my hope that the majority of the remaining films will be supernatural and/or Gothic in nature. |
|
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 07/07/2009 : 00:44:15
|
Ho ho ho! It's Christmas in July:
37. Silent Night, Bloody Night
Oh, what a terrible burden the past can be! In these films, characters are constantly being bothered by Ancient Curses, Dark Family Secrets, and other Historical Bummers. Take this movie, for example. There's a creepy old house which was once the site of some very nasty business indeed, and now someone wants to sell the place for fifty grand and demolish it. Of course, an ax-weilding mental patient might have something to say about the matter. This is one of those movies that proves the old adage about two wrongs not making a right. Neither do seventeen wrongs. Or fifty. Or a hundred. It's telling that two of the sturdiest horror franchises -- Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street -- are based on characters settling decades-old scores. In horror movies, we just can't escape the past.
Don't let the title of this one fool you, by the way. This isn't really a Christmas-themed horror film like the similarly-titled Silent Night, Deadly Night (whose sequel gave us this). Rather, this is a horror movie which happens to take place during the Christmas season, but the very same thing could be said about Hitchcock's Psycho. There is a neat, minor-key version of "Silent Night" which plays over the credits and some Christmas decorations in the background, but that's about it. All in all, this one is nicely atmospheric and twisty, but the film is hurt somewhat by its draggy pace and lack of action. Let's call it a silver medal effort, huh? It doesn't suck out loud, which really is saying something.
For me, the real focal point here is that... MARY WORONOV IS IN THIS MOVIE!!! Artist, Warhol superstar, B-movie legend, and all-around Hell of a Gal, Mary Woronov is on my short list of celebs I'd love to have lunch with someday (even though I'm still kind of scared of her). She's smart, she's tough, she's sexy in an unconventional way. She's Principal mother-bleep-ing Togar in Rock 'n' Roll High School, for God's sake! Mary's trapped in sort of a conventional "girly" role here, but at least she's brought along two of her fellow Warhol stars: Candy Darling and Ondine, both of whom appear in a long, artsy, tinted-B&W flashback sequence set in a posh lunatic asylum. (Not too much of a change from The Factory, I'll assume.) Mr. John Carradine is in this one, too, as a grumpy newspaper editor who communicates only by ringing a bell. He's like a depressed, elderly Harpo Marx. Frankly, I'm surprised John didn't show up in this project until Movie #37. |
|
|
|
Joe Blevins
"Don't I look handsome?"
|
Posted - 07/08/2009 : 03:51:42
|
Oh, yes. Oh, hell yes:
38. Devil Times Five
Where have you been all my life, Devil Times Five? This is exactly the kind of movie I was hoping to find in this collection: cheap, effective, shamelessly exploitative, and thoroughly tasteless in the best sense. We've already seen the "evil kid" plot done in the most boring way possible (Cathy's Curse), but here is an absolutely berserk, go-for-broke approach to the same theme. The setup: six extremely "1970s" adults (including Sorrell "Boss Hogg" Booke, who is top-billed for perhaps the only time in his career) are gathered in a remote ski lodge for some kind of business-mixed-with-pleasure weekend retreat, only to become victims of a roving group of five escaped mental patient children, the oldest of whom dresses like a nun and semi-successfully passes herself off as a novice! Among its many other charms, this movie finally gave me the "killer nun" action I was hoping to get from Sisters of Death.
Citizens, I won't lie to you. This one starts out slow and clunky -- just more of what we've already seen dozens of times in this project (a group of people in a remote location being picked off by psychopaths) -- but by the middle it has somehow turned into a wonderfully vulgar dark comedy with shades of Female Trouble/Desperate Living-era John Waters. Troubled teen idol Leif Garrett gives what must be the performance of his life as David, the preternaturally smart and vicious leader of the killer kids. There are so many joyously appalling scenes in this movie -- including a totally random and inexcusable scene involving David -- that I don't dare to spoil any of the fun. The production values are above-average here (by Chilling Classics standards, anyway), but there are still some obvious filmmaking blunders, too, including several prominent boom-mike shadows and some laughable fight choreography. To me, these gaffes only enhance the pleasure of watching Devil Times Five. Another on my short list of favorites.
|
|
|
|
randall 
"I like to watch."
|
Posted - 07/08/2009 : 18:39:22
|
quote:
Originally posted by Joe Blevins
Oh, the things I do for you:
That statement reminded me of a book I edited which you, Joe, *must read*. It's by a guy who decided to see a movie a day for a year. That simple, and that difficult. But wait till you see what he came up with!
If you remember the TV series MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, he played "Tom Servo." His name is Kevin Murphy, and this is his book. I think it will particularly resound for you, based on this most excellent thread. |
|
|
|
demonic 
"Cinemaniac"
|
Posted - 07/08/2009 : 21:07:11
|
And don't forget http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/ - not just one mainstream release a day for a year for this guy... he's been watching only horror films every day for the past three years...  |
|
|
|
RockGolf
"1500+ reviews. 1 joke."
|
Posted - 07/08/2009 : 21:59:01
|
quote:
Originally posted by Joe Blevins
Hollywood has churned out scare flicks about transplanted brains, eyes, heads, and even one -- The Amazing Transplant -- about a transplanted male member.
That sounds like the same plot as Percy which was advertised as "The story of a very... personal transplant". Even as a 14-year-old back in tha day, I could figure out what they meant in the ads. |
|
|
|
Topic |
|
|
|
My summer film project: 50 Chilling Classics
