Category: Found-Again

I know, I know. It’s a new year! you’re saying. Again with the monsters! you’re saying. You had two thirds of a post about season 1 of Picket Fences in your drafts, all good to go…I’m saying, to myself, because you people didn’t know that. But then I rewatched Canadian werewolf movie Ginger Snaps and here we are.

Why Found-Again? Several reasons, but mainly that kind of ambient noise that often brings selections to my Netflix queue: a friend mentioned they hadn’t seen Ginger Snaps, the movie was discussed on some horror-themed podcasts I’ve been listening to—and, of course, I’ve been watching an unusual number of non-vampire “monster” movies this year. I don’t think Lawrence Talbot and Wilfred Glendon would invite Ginger to their parties, though.

The Premise: Morbid, disaffected teen sisters Ginger and Brigitte despise life in their nice, normal suburban community, and not because some creature is devouring the neighborhood pets. Things take a turn for the worse when delayed puberty and a werewolf both attack Ginger at the same time. Soon she’s growing a tail, tiny sharp teeth, and a taste for boys that alienates her younger sister.

I consider myself enough of an expert on watching horror movies without seeing gore that I am literally trying to write a little book about it, but this movie is meatily disgusting and there’s no real way to avoid it. (I’m guessing the folks behind the Does The Dog Die? website would be hospitalized after seeing this, assuming they were foolhardy enough to do so in the first place.)

I’m a bit leery of movies and stories that equate werewolfism and female cycles—perhaps because it’s closer to my demographic than, say, vampires, about whom I will swallow, no pun intended, the most on-the-nose lore you can imagine.  But this equation is the central idea in Ginger Snaps, which under its constant thin layer of blood is really a movie about female roles in society: both sisters fear falling unaware into stereotypical “girly” behaviors, and Ginger’s reluctance to be cured clearly stems from her fear of being metaphorically devoured if she stops literally devouring. Their mother (a hilarious performance by Mimi Rogers), when she finds out her daughters are responsible for a classmate’s death, makes plans to blow up the house and run away with the girls because everyone will blame the murder on her parenting. You can’t win, the movie seems to say, so why not lycanthropy?

The Verdict: Mixed. I enjoy this movie now, writing and talking about it, more than I do when it seems like wading through a sea of deceased Rottweilers. I do love some of the details, though—the tail, the claws, the little teeth that no one but Brigitte seems to notice—and the idea of becoming a werewolf as a painfully slow and capricious transformation. Worth re-viewing, and one of these day I will get around to seeing the sequels.

Might go well with: Because I am still trying to use up the Christmas food, I actually ate summer sausage while I watched this. You probably shouldn’t.

Hey, look what doesn’t have a crack in it!

I was about to make a “Who’s on first?” joke before I realized this is the…fourth, I think?… Frankenstein(‘s monster) movie I’ve watched this year. And Branagh’s version is in the queue. Now I’m just tired. (There’s also nothing like the Christmas holiday to remind me why I’m uncomfortable watching the Frankenstein monster: either I have an abnormal brain, or some of my relatives do.)

Why Found-Again? Because I am undereducated in the ways of old comedies not involving Rosalind Russell and/or Cary Grant, this is the only Abbott & Costello movie I’ve ever seen, so saying it’s my favorite is essentially meaningless.  It is true that I’ve seen it several times, though, guy with bolts in his neck be damned—and is anyone reading this really going to venture that the one with the vampire isn’t going to be my favorite when all is said and done?

The Premise: Baggage handlers Chick (Costello) and Wilbur (Abbott) are tasked with taking boxes containing Dracula and the Frankenstein monster to McDougal’s House of Horrors, but set off an insurance investigation when the monsters escape and McDougal is out two exhibits. Turns out Dracula is in league with Wilbur’s girlfriend Sandra, who is secretly a mad scientist planning to use Wilbur’s simple brain to make a user-friendly version of Frankenstein’s creation. Meanwhile, Lawrence Talbot from The Wolf Man and associated films is trying to stop the dastardly plot, but keeps turning into a werewolf at inconvenient times.

In a way, I was wrong when I made that remark above about old comedies: anyone who has ever seen an episode of Scooby-Doo (or, from the other direction on the timeline, silent mystery/horror/comedy Cat and the Canary) will recognize the secret-door hijinks in the old castle. The semi-animated quality of Dracula’s transformation into a bat was probably the best SFX 1948 had to offer, but it also seems fitting for what is in some ways a live-action cartoon. (The only one who doesn’t seem to be a little aware they’re living in a comedy is Lon Chaney Jr.’s Talbot, whose intensity will knock your socks off. Poor guy.)

The Verdict: This is still good fun despite the corniness, and it may be the only Dracula movie I’ve ever seen where a chair is used to fend of the vampire and doesn’t end up being used for stakes at any…um…point.

Demerits for the part near the end when the Frankenstein monster walks into the fire, the most unFrankenmonsterlike thing ever; this is made up for by the Vincent Price “cameo” at the end, though.

Might go well with: Party food, red punch.

As I noted in my post on Frankenstein, Universal’s opening-credits typography and design are great—for a fan of Disney’s Skeleton Dance like yours truly, even better than the “straight” movies being mocked, in fact. But whoever came up with the narration and captions for the trailer above was overdue for a date with a monster himself.

 

 

Everything I thought I remembered from the original Frankenstein should be in here. Let’s find out, shall we?

Why Found-Again? This is part of my push to rewatch a bunch of old horror movies, Universal and otherwise. In addition to Frankenstein and Werewolf of London, which I wrote about here, I’ve also watched the Lugosi Dracula and The Wolf Man, as well as a few less well-known titles.

The Premise: The climax of the original movie must have involved a grossly incompetent angry mob, since both the monster and Henry Frankenstein survive their windmill adventures. The friendless monster stumbles through his surroundings, rejected by all but a blind man; after getting a taste for spirits, cigars and human companionship, he runs into Henry’s old mentor Dr. Pretorius, who promises him the titular mate. It all goes as well as you’d think. (Warning: if you don’t know how the movie ends, don’t look at that. But is that even possible?)

Pretorius is to a large extent the “…and now we can start the party” character in this film. A gin-swilling, grave-robbing unrepentant weirdo with a nose that can seemingly act all on its own, he out-mad-scientists the actual Dr. Frankenstein handily, almost as an afterthought.

In a sequence near the beginning, Pretorius shows Henry a collection of tiny, indignant people he has apparently grown in bell jars, which seems to serve as this movie’s equivalent of Asta’s marital troubles in the second Thin Man movie—presumably comic relief, but to whom? It should be horrifying, but a tiny Henry VIII-style king squeaking away just…isn’t.

The Bride of Frankenstein also has one of my favorite things: an Exposition/Greek Chorus character, a meddling maid called Minnie. She turns up in the very first minutes and just keeps going, keeping people abreast of the monster’s movements and/or yelling at them to shoot it.

The Verdict: The only real thing I have against this movie is that I always hate seeing people be mean to Karloff. The monster may hate fire, but by the time Bride of Frankenstein is over, he probably doesn’t feel warmly toward sticks, chains or ropes, either.

It lags a little in some places, and some of the musical cues during the actual making of the Bride are downright odd in their cheerfulness—see the clip above—but on the whole, this is quite good. (Additionally, if any of my readers are undergrads in need of paper topics, I’ll point out that a search for “Frankenstein movies language acquisition” yields fewer Google hits than you’d think.)

Might go well with: Roast anything, but Cornish game hens would be creepy.

 

Next time: More desert intrigue with Jonny Quest.

Why Found-Again? Like Vertigo from earlier this year, it’s hard to tell—given the combined forces of old Saturday movies, horror documentaries and Mel Brooks parodies—whether I’ve actually seen Frankenstein before. I’m not going to let that stop me, though. I can “IT’S ALIVE!!!” with the best of them.

The Premise: Blah, blah, body-snatching, meddling with blah that man was never meant to blah, neglecting the love of your life for MAD SCIENCE!, mayhem, fire bad, blah.

You may gather from the above that I am not completely happy with my viewing, or indeed with the Frankenstein(‘s monster) idea in general: like Romero-style zombies, it’s a horror genre for which the symbolic richness of the idea far outweighs any interest I have in watching the actual product. I haven’t even seen the Kenneth Branagh adaptation, and that was made when I still thought of Branagh as a minor deity.

And now that I’ve finished it, I think I must not have watched the 1931 Frankenstein before after all: finding out that the brain-stealing scene in the Mel Brooks movie was lifted nearly wholesale came as an almost physical shock.

Even so, I found the monster’s electric birth and subsequent misery very moving…only to run up against the angry mob at the end. Like the brain theft, it was familiar—but it seems it’s a lot harder to get the mood back from memories of Transylvania 6-5000.

Other random thoughts:

• I love the futuristic font the movie title is written in at the beginning, even though most of the rest of the film seems terribly old-fashioned by comparison.
• Remember when I said that if you don’t love the character Rachel in Highlander, you are a terrible person? The same goes for Boris Karloff. I don’t even hold a grudge over the very misnamed The Man They Could Not Hang. (They definitely did, to death and possibly beyond; it just didn’t take.)
• Henry Frankenstein—Henry??—seems like a man who could profitably take relationship advice from Werewolf of London’s Wilfred Glendon. It’s that bad.
• For a guy getting choked to death, Fritz (known to the popular consciousness as Igor) sure can scream.
• I am half-convinced that after his collapse, Henry goes to the same sanitarium James Bond repaired to after the unfortunate genital incident in Casino Royale.
• Imagine a mob of angry villagers, each wearing my grandfather’s hat.

The Verdict: It’s not Frankenstein, it’s me. I made it through Halloween even though I’d seen it all before, Charade wasn’t ruined because American Dreamer ripped off its beginning, but I had a very hard time with this one. It’s a shame—this is the only Frankenstein movie I’ve ever watched that wasn’t a bride-of movie or a parody of some sort—but it just isn’t my cup of tea.

Might go well with: Bratwurst, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, millinery.

 

Next time: The monster hits keep coming when The Quest for Monday returns!

Are you really going to pretend this is “Found-Again” for you? In October?? Nah. Turns out I miss writing about horror movies, and it’s the season, so.

The Premise: Charles Dexter Ward (Vincent Price) and his wife Ann (Debra Paget) inherit a spooky house in Arkham, complete with undead caretaker and a painting of Ward’s ancestor, the sorcerer Joseph Curwen (played, after his inevitable revival, by Vincent Price looking even hotter).

Curwen, before he was burned to death in his own yard, ran what could euphemistically be called a captive breeding program between hypnotized women and Elder Gods. As a result, the townspeople of Arkham suffer from strange deformities and are understandably afraid that lookalike Ward might be going into the family business.

The Haunted Palace is nominally one of the Poe adaptations Roger Corman made with Vincent Price back in the 1960s, and it does begin and end with readings from the poem. Really, though, it’s H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward novella run through a sort of Poe/Gothic filter of creaky castles, velvet coats and women in distress. It’s also my favorite of those adaptations*—but we all know I’m a little weird.

I vacillate as to which version of this villain is worse: the mad-scientist cannibal necromancer Curwen in 1991’s The Resurrected (which I now own on DVD! One more for Unwanted Eyeball Violence Row…) or this one, who sneers so well and just digs up one old girlfriend and only kills people in a straightforward, laws-of-physics kind of way. But the premise of The Haunted Palace is thoroughly nasty, even though the nastiness is obscured by the lack of gore and the Silly-Puttyesque special effects, so I’m tempted to give 1963 Curwen the advantage.

The Verdict: I’m not going to say that this is perfect: I never make it through the movie without joking that the casting call for the role of Ann should’ve said “Must be able to yell the word ‘Charles!’ upwards of 20 times a minute.” Then there’s the painting, which is supposed to be 18th century but appears to be a self-portrait by Vincent van Price.

Also, what kind of stone can be set on fire by angry villagers?

Even so, it’s well-done and genuinely creepy at times, with a great performance from Price in which you can easily tell which character he is at any given moment. Heck, he’s worth watching for the evil Latin recitations alone.

Might go well with: Red wine, The Resurrected, Tales of Terror, the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast.

*For those of you keeping track of such things, I’ve seen seven of the eight and would rank them in this order: 2) Masque of the Red Death; 3) Tales of Terror; 4) Pit and the Pendulum; 5) tie between Fall of the House of Usher and Tomb of Ligeia, mainly due to poor Price’s costume in Usher, which is sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy via the ninth circle of Hell; 6) The Raven.