Tag: Spooky

Finally!(?) Friday: Frankenstein: The True Story

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Why Finally? This 1973 version was recommended while I was in mid-rant about the odd Franken-kick I went on with last year’s Friday posts, during which I watched Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein (I didn’t write that one up), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I still haven’t seen the Branagh version…and just realized that it’s been *mumble* number of years since I took time from my college studies to watch Haunted Summer. At least we know what to look for in 2016…

The Premise: After his brother dies, Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Leonard Whiting, who was Romeo in the Zeffirelli Romeo & Juliet—many Americans will therefore recognize him as “the guy whose butt we saw in 9th-grade English”) is despondent. He decides to conquer the secrets of life, first being as snotty about it as possible to his fiancée Elizabeth. Even before he spends part of the movie reminding everyone he’s a doctor, you quickly realize this is the sort of man who reminds everyone he’s a doctor.

Victor hooks up with another mad scientist, Henry (David “Ducky on NCIS” McCallum), and together they plan to build their monster out of workmen killed in a building disaster.  Henry has a weak heart, however, so when a setback in their process manifests, he dies before he can tell Victor—and his brain is popped into the monster. Waste not, want not.

The overarching goal of the production, explained in a spoiler-filled intro by a gentleman standing at Mary Shelley’s grave, is to tell the story more as it appeared in the original novel and less like the 1930s movies. This it certainly does, and with a number of visual touches that would have fit perfectly into Ken Russell’s Gothic, even as it hits many stops familiar to fans of the old films. The cast is magnificent: Whiting and McCallum are joined by John Gielgud, James Mason, Agnes Moorehead, and Jane Seymour (I wasn’t familiar with Michael Sarazzin, who played the monster, but he gives a heartbreaking performance as the creation who falls from grace through no fault of his own).

The Verdict: To put it bluntly, this may be the only 3-hour film I’ve ever enjoyed that didn’t have a dragon in it somewhere. Yes, some parts are the purest fromage; it’s an old TV movie/miniseries. Nonetheless, if you’re interested in the Frankenstein lore—which I am largely not!—it’s very good and cheaply available on DVD.

Random Note: Judging by this film, being the Fourth Doctor was just something Tom Baker did in between playing rough-spoken, bearded sea captains. And I’m okay with that.

Might go well with: Tea, opera, any of the other five zillion Frankenstein movies.

Next time: Who needs a special-forces guard when you have a kid with a basket?

Finally! Friday: Scream Blacula Scream

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(Proofreader-brained side note: Do you know how hard it is not to put commas in that title every time I write it? Very hard.)

Why Finally?: Once I saw the first movie, there was no way I’d stay away from this one—especially once I found out Pam Grier was the heroine. And I’m a sucker for movie voodoo, even though I know it is to the real religion what exorcism movies and End of Days are to Catholicism.

The Premise: When the head of a voodoo-inclined family dies, two people are candidates for succession: the dying woman chooses her apprentice, Lisa (Grier), instead of her own flesh and blood, and the spurned Willis retaliates by acquiring Blacula’s (weirdly huge) bones and raising him from the dead. Willis is clearly pretty good at spells, but not good at calculating his own life expectancy after he raises a vampire.

Blacula, as Mamuwalde, uses Willis’s big old house as his HQ and infiltrates the surrounding community, meeting Lisa and her (partner? Romantic relationships never seem clearly defined in these movies) Justin. Justin collects African art, including artifacts from Mamuwalde’s past, and the vampire soon begins to see Lisa and her powers as a way to cure his bloodsucking habit and end his torment.

Remember when I complained about ‘Salem’s Lot and how you couldn’t have vampires multiplying at such a rate plausibly? Scream Blacula Scream is actually a bit of a field experiment in this regard: by the end of the movie, most of the secondary characters have been vamped, and there’s a shot of plywood coffin after plywood coffin in Willis’s basement by the end of the film. Just look at this!

The Verdict: Even playing on my pet vampiric peeve, though, the movie is great: the beginning harks back wonderfully to all the times the original Dracula has been raised again from movie to movie, and William Marshall brings his awesome performance to a film with a better budget—Blacula’s even had a cape upgrade! As in the first movie, there’s a genuine struggle to redeem himself that most movie vampires only experience if there’s a love interest in the, er, wings. Absolutely worth watching.

Might go well with: Love At First Bite, Taste the Blood of Dracula, étouffée.

 

 

 

 

Finally! Friday: Blacula

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Why Finally? Like a surprising number of Hammer films* and (until last year) Universal horror pictures, 1972’s Blacula was one of those glaring gaps in my education—and this despite years of being told how good it is. A viewing was overdue, probably by decades.

The Premise: In the late 18th century, African prince Mamuwalde (the splendid William Marshall) goes on a diplomatic mission to Castle Dracula in an attempt to curb the slave trade. This goes badly, as trips to Castle Dracula tend to do, and Mamuwalde is cursed with vampirism, christened Blacula by Vlad himself, and locked in a coffin for 190 years. When the castle’s furnishings are bought by some decorators and shipped to Los Angeles, the vampire rises—and quickly finds a woman who looks just like his late wife.

Failure of diplomacy.
Negotiations aren’t going so well.

There follows a game of cat and mouse—once the police finally realize a series of exsanguination deaths deserves fuller investigation—led by a romantically partnered pair of scientists. Are they too late to defeat the forces of the undead, or will Blacula reclaim his bride?

Let’s get this out of the way: the vamp makeup in Blacula is often distracting. Some of his victims are completely green, and there’s a wide range of fangs at varying angles on display. Our titular villain gets bizarre facial hair when he vamps out: I enjoyed this, since it seems closer to the hairy-palmed Dracula that Stoker originally dreamed up, but it can be startling.

It shouldn’t detract from the story, though, which gives us an excellent antihero in Blacula. He’s been genuinely mistreated, had everything he valued taken away, and despises his own nature; it’s just not enough to stop the body count from rising, or to stop him from fighting back. And did I mention William Marshall is magnificent?

Readers, if any, know how much I enjoy tracing influences among movies/TV/books, and Blacula is a gold mine. It may be the first movie in which a vampire is haunted by the reincarnation of his lost love (though TV’s Dark Shadows seems to have done it first), an idea by now endemic to vampires generally and Dracula stories in particular. There are tiny details that were lifted almost verbatim by Love At First Bite. And there’s even an appearance by Elisha Cook (credited without his Jr.) as a hook-handed pathologist who suffers the eventual fate of most characters played by Elisha Cook.

My only problems with Blacula, apart from the terrible makeup effects, are ones I have with a number of old horror films—especially the syndrome I like to call vampnesia. (Vampnesia is, of course, a disease common to characters in horror movies in which “everybody’s heard of Count Dracula!”—at least enough to make fun of the people claiming they just saw him— but the good guys still must find an occult expert or make a trip to the local library’s folklore section in order to beat the baddie. I will never understand this.) The movie also has a case of “things spontaneously burning” reminiscent of the flammable stone mansion in The Haunted Palace, but hey, movie fire is fun.

The Verdict: All those people I mentioned above were right: Blacula is an excellent horror movie as well as an interesting cultural artifact. Even while rooting for the mortals, I was sad to see him go (is that a spoiler in a vampire movie, really?) and glad that there’s Scream Blacula Scream to bring him back.

Might go well with: rare steak, good music, anything crocheted.

 

*At least the ones not called [Something Something Something] Dracula.

 

Next time: The Quest(s) for the temple.

Found-Again Friday: Legend

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Can we start a new rule that watching movies with lots of fire will melt actual snow?

Why Found-Again? Here are the things I remembered about Legend before rewatch:

  • Tim Curry as the devil (yes, technically he is “Darkness,” but if you go around with red skin and giant horns and evil schemes, these little mistakes of identity are bound to occur);
  • Unicorn maiming!;
  • Still less frightening than The Dark Crystal.

I’m not so sure about that last part anymore.

The Premise:  Mischievous (read: a jerk) princess Lili (Mia Sara) spends all her free time with half-feral forest boy Jack (Tom Cruise). When a unicorn viewing goes horribly awry and allows goblins to kill one of the beasts, winter falls upon the land, and a separated Jack and Lili try to undo the damage she caused. Jack joins in with a mob of capricious faeries, while Lili is captured and slated to become the bride of Darkness.

I sometimes wonder if I’ve become more susceptible to background music as I get older, because I was keyed up through most of Legend in a way I didn’t remember from my youth, even knowing what was going to happen. (It’s doubly odd because I could have sworn the unicorn maiming was more graphic than we actually see here; if anything, I had less to worry about.) I also didn’t remember Lili being as irritating as she proved to be, which improved the story; her temptation by Darkness, perhaps the most famous part of the film, isn’t the attack on an innocent girl I recalled so much as a logical attempt to play on Lili’s character flaws.

The movie is certainly heavy-handed in some respects, but the only real weak point in my re-viewing was the final fight…though the swordplay seems like a good, solid background for building an interest in Highlander later on. Even the music is different in those scenes, as if Jerry Goldsmith had stepped out for coffee and John Williams started doodling on his paper, and I found myself looking around for Indiana Jones when I should have been watching evil get defeated.

Legend was the first role I ever saw Tim Curry in, and I managed to become a fan without knowing what he actually looked like for a good two years. As attractive as the unicorns and candy-colored forests are, his Darkness makes the movie…and, disturbingly, no small amount of sense sometimes. In the ’80s, the parochial-school kid in me thought of him only as the devil, but the performance never lets you forget Darkness’s bullish aspect—even in the final fight, his neck is pierced with arrows like picadors’ lances.

Random Notes:

  • We have a credit at the end for “Unicorn Master”; I wonder if that’s higher, professionally speaking, than the Unicorn Wrangler for Cast A Deadly Spell. At any rate, it’s something that would never leave my resume, even if I were interviewing to become a bank president.
  • Was there any “fancy” little girl who didn’t dream of owning Lili’s evil dress?
  • It never occurred to me to make comparisons between this and The Last Unicorn, one of my favorite movies, before now—possibly 12-year-old me wasn’t prepared for a story where The Red Bull struts and talks (and the bull and Prince Lir are the same guy…and Haggard is a fireplace… Hm. Maybe I’m still not ready).
  • While this was one of my earliest encounters with the idea that faeries aren’t all Tinkerbell and flower costumes, there was also this, one of the most feared objects of my childhood:
From The Golden Book of Poetry: illustration by Gertrude Elliott for the poem "Little Orphant Annie"
From The Golden Book of Poetry: illustration by (the unintentionally terrifying) Gertrude Elliott for the poem “Little Orphant Annie”

The Verdict: Still a nice, solid fantasy film, even though the end wobbles far more than I’d remembered. It’s a movie that doesn’t seem to want to end, and maybe that’s why director Ridley Scott seems to understand Lili’s fascination with pretty things so well.

(It may also be time to admit that I’m into guys who wear a little chain mail. There. I said it.)

Might go well with: Mead; Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood books, which are myths and lore with the pastel stuff brushed off; and Cold Comfort Farm, since I spent the first three minutes of the movie thinking of Lili as Elfine.

Found-Again Friday: Ginger Snaps

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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.

Found-Again Friday: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein

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

FinallyDVD

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.

The mummy slept in, sadly.
The mummy slept in, sadly.

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.)

And he sensibly starts undressing when the moon-fit is upon him. Talbot is like the anti-Wilfred Glendon in this picture.
And he sensibly starts undressing when the moon-fit is upon him. Talbot is like the anti-Wilfred Glendon in this picture.

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.

The lab is state-of-the-(dark) art.
The lab is state-of-the-(dark) art.

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.

"Look deep into my eyes...and apologize for ever putting the word "Scare-ewy" on a screen."
“Look deep into my eyes…and apologize for ever putting the word “Scare-ewy” on a screen.”

 

 

Apropos of Nothing: December Reading And Attendant Guilt

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…A look at what I’ve been doing in my free time this month, as compared to the vision in my head of some perfected J.A.:

The Thing I Read: Don’t Dare a Dame by M. Ruth Myers

This is the third book in a hard-boiled detective series starring young Maggie Sullivan, a P.I. trying to make her way in 1930s Dayton (at some point, Ohio seems to have become the new Chicago as far as the detective novels I read are concerned). Maggie and her friends and helpers are beautifully written, the historical setting is interesting, the mysteries are excellent, and if she doesn’t give her possible love interest a break I am going to explode from frustration. The man can play a penny whistle and catch bad guys, for god’s sake.

What I Should Have Been Reading: I just bought a three-in-one volume of Philip Marlowe novels after seeing The Big Sleep for the first time this summer. Until then, I’d just assumed there were Hammett people and Chandler people in the world and I was clearly Team Dashiell; if I can ever stop reading about Maggie Sullivan, I’m going to put that hypothesis to the test.

Chandler even seems to be looking at me reproachfully from the book jacket.
Chandler even seems to be watching me reproachfully from the book jacket.

(On a side note, any fellow mystery/movie buffs who are reading this: isn’t The Big Sleep odd? I can’t think of any other movie I enjoyed so much that seemed so much longer than its actual runtime.)

The Thing I Read: Weird Romance: A Sparrow & Crowe Anthology by various authors, including the creators of the Wormwood podcast that originated the characters

I came late to podcasted dramas after a few years of subscribing to the driest “Boring Fact of the Day”-type podcasts you could imagine.  I was therefore probably the last to know about Wormwood, a sort of supernatural(…er) Twin Peaks in which a vision leads booze-swilling former psychologist/current sorcerer Dr. Xander Crowe and his technomancer assistant Sparrow to the titular town. When I did find the 2007 series, I promptly put off listening to the last season for months on end because I didn’t want Wormwood to stop. Fortunately, there’s also a comic book series and two short-story anthologies to keep fans of Crowe and Sparrow from languishing. The book badly needed more proofreading, but the stories are often excellent as two of the most entertaining misanthropes in fiction take on demons, mythical creatures, themselves and each other.

What I Should Have Been Reading: I’ve been on a weird-fiction kick of late and took a chance on a book of Thomas Ligotti stories. I’ve paused halfway through, but the man is a master of elegant prose about horrible things, and I can’t believe I’d never heard of him before this year. I suspect this is how I’m supposed to feel about Raymond Carver but don’t.

I should also start re-listening to Wormwood, for that matter.

The Thing I (Re)Read: Various portions of the Addison Holmes mysteries by Liliana Hart

These books have a special place in my heart—extra-special, considering I’ve read four of them and can’t decide if I like them, and I’ll probably buy the next one and feel the same way. It might be more accurate to say they have a special place in my wallet. But the Addison Holmes books are the story of one woman, not particularly suited for the job, becoming a private investigator—a subject I’m currently trying to write about myself. Watching Addison train and deal with an increasingly demanding vocation when she starts out as a schoolteacher is, dare I say it, educational.

What I Should Have Been Reading: Oh, maybe something from this nice collection of mystery-writing books I have?

Is there a group called "People Who Haven't Worked Out Which Gun Their Fictional P.I. Carries Anonymous"?
Is there a group called “People Who Haven’t Worked Out Which Gun Their Fictional P.I. Carries Anonymous”?

Additional Warning About The Dangerous Ease of Buying E-books: I own Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead on Nook? When the hell did that happen? You should pick it up, though; it’s really good.

 

Next time: What anybody who was all Frankensteined out for the year would do: watch Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein for the first time since the oughts.

 

Found-Again Friday: Friday The 13th: The Series, Seasons 1 & 2

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Why Found-Again? Friday the 13th: The Series was my favorite of a trio of shows I watched as a teen with the express purpose of scaring myself witless at one a.m. (the other two were Monsters and Freddy’s Nightmares, the Nightmare on Elm Street anthology series). When I found out Amazon has the show streaming for Prime members, I knew two things:

  1. This would more profitably use time spent on my other weird Amazon streaming interest, which is finding the cheesiest made-for-TV detective movies I can and watching them anyway;
  2. This was going to be a Found-Again Friday post in a hurry—better yet, a Found-Again Friday post about something I don’t hate. Whew!

The Premise: Cousins Ryan and Micki find that they’ve inherited their creepy, evil uncle Louis’s* cursed antique store. Not being evil themselves, they embark on a quest to retrieve all the murderous antiques Louis sold over the years and store them safely (we hope) in the store’s vault. They’re hindered in this by both the artifacts and the occasionally not-dead-enough uncle, and helped by Jack Marshak, a man who never lets the fact that he is an actual SORCERER get in the way of being overpowered by bad guys at dramatically appropriate moments.

Aside from the quality issues inevitable for a show in a then-undervalued genre made in the weird dark age right before CGI started catching up with the human imagination, Ft13:tS has only one problem: the character of Ryan. He’s a lot like his partial namesake Richie from Highlander: The Series—so much so that I find myself wondering if all Canadian shows were once required to have an annoying, supposedly street-smart guy as a main character. (Both shows still beat Forever Knight, in which I’m pretty sure that guy is the titular protagonist, but that is a Found-Again Friday for another time.)

The Verdict: With a few exceptions, Friday the 13th: the Series is one of the purest monster-of-the week shows ever—I’m hedging only because Kolchak might have an unbeatable lead there. Yes, it’s cheesy—among other things, you’ll encounter a creepy doll, voodoo snakes, a riff on The Phantom of the Opera, chanting Satanists, Jack the Ripper’s blade, and an amusing reference to Boris Karloff.  But the show is also great fun, even when the plot is so obvious you could swear it was lit by a cursed antique lamp.

 

Might go well with: Red wine, anything you have to cut up with a knife.

*His last name is Vendredi, the French word for “Friday.” What is it about the name Louis that brings out the scamp in some writers?

 

Found-Again Friday: The Bride of Frankenstein

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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.

The daily grind.
Pretorius’s daily grind.

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.

...And yes, I think she's better at it than Ramirez from Highlander.
…And yes, I think she’s better at it than Ramirez from Highlander. Happier, too.

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.

Mrs. Elizabeth Frankenstein seconds that thing about ropes.
Mrs. Elizabeth Frankenstein seconds that thing about ropes.

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.

Found-Again Friday: Dead Again

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Writing my post last week sent me off on a tangent, so this time I’m changing the plan slightly and going back to what, in 1993, was one of my favorite movies.

Why Found-Again? Honestly, talking about my love for Kenneth Branagh/Emma Thompson makes me feel like I’m about a thousand years old. (Imagine the Highlander posts I could have written if I were! Speaking of tangents….)

I was fifteen when Siskel & Ebert reviewed Branagh’s Henry V and vividly remember the discussion about how Branagh might be the next Olivier and was otherwise an up-and-coming cinematic Big Thing. For some reason—I’m not a huge fan of the play even after several Shakespeare classes, so it wasn’t Henry as such—I found this very exciting. Two years later, I was also watching Siskel & Ebert when Dead Again, Branagh’s new movie with his then-wife Emma Thompson, got worse reviews.

I didn’t see it till I was nineteen, but once I did, I was hooked. The apparent king and queen of movies in a noirish supernatural thriller—how could I be anything but smitten?

The Premise: A mute, traumatized woman (Thompson) shows up at an orphanage with no apparent memory of who she is;  the nuns turn to one of their former charges, hard-boiled PI Mike Church (Branagh), for help. The further Mike digs into the case, however, the more it seems the trauma might have its roots in a famous murder from 1948, linked to the woman’s past life…or his own. But will forgotten crimes be reincarnated as well?

DeadAgainNoirDuo

From a stylistic perspective (which readers have probably deduced I have little ability to analyze, but onward!), Dead Again hits all the classic noir beats: the LA setting, the Old Hollywood glamor of the flashback sequences, the dark corners and plot twists and dramatic camera angles.

Andy Garcia, noiring even harder than Alec Baldwin.
…and Andy Garcia, noiring even harder than Alec Baldwin.

The cast is likewise great, with the two leads joined by Derek Jacobi as a chiseling antique dealer/hypnotist, Wayne Knight as Church’s friend, Andy Garcia as a 1940s reporter who gets too involved,  and a great turn by Robin Williams as a cantankerous ex-shrink who works in a grocery store. You shouldn’t have slept with that patient, pal.

That said, rewatching Dead Again is a little like rewatching Highlander for me: once there’s enough distance from the initial adrenaline rush, doubts begin to creep in. Some of the events seem a little disconnected from each other, in that way where the story makes more sense when you describe it aloud than when you’re watching it on the screen. And then there’s the plot twist, which is not quite as twisty in 2015 as it was in the early 1990s.

The Verdict: Be aware that it comes from someone who fretted over the Branagh-Thompson divorce in a way I’ve never cared about famous people before or since when I say that Dead Again is… just a little goofy. It seems to have moved into that category of movie that I don’t mind watching alone, but am slightly embarrassed to show to other people; the very things I love about it are all a bit embarrassing to explain, and the whole thing seems so dependent on mood.

Parts of this movie are none too subtle on the symbolism, either.
Parts of this movie are none too subtle on the symbolism, either.

I’d hoped a re-viewing after several years’ abstinence would put me back in touch with everything I adored about the film, but it didn’t quite happen.

On the other hand, the movie and even the trailer still give me chills. I suppose for a movie about reincarnation, hope really might spring eternal.

 

Might go well with: Little hors d’oeuvres. You thought I was going to make a twice-baked potato joke, didn’t you?

Next time: Curses!