Tag: Spooky

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.

I’m a bit deficient in the old Universal horror movies, so I selected a few to visit and revisit—including this one, the favorite horror film of one of my non-horror-watching, no-you’re-a-nerd acquaintances.*

The Premise: Botanist Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) has a manor but not much of a manner, to the dismay of his lovely wife. On an expedition to Tibet to collect a night-blooming flower, he’s attacked by a wolf-creature; after he returns to England, Wilfred begins to experience certain…urges. You know the drill. The flower can stave off his transformations, but only if Wilfred can get it to bloom and keep the flowers out of the hands of a rival (Warner “Charlie Chan, for some reason” Oland).

I haven’t been so conflicted about a Found-Again entry since the Beauty and the Beast TV show turned me into a 14-year-old girl again. Rated purely on a scale of “How’s the werewolf story?,” Werewolf of London is okay, a solid 5–7 out of 10. It is, however, highly entertaining for the following reasons:

• A marvelous cast of minor characters, including a haughty lab assistant who looks exactly like Arte Johnson in Love At First Bite, a snooty butler with a combover, and an assemblage of gin-swilling old ladies. There is also the wife’s old boyfriend, who at one point dons a leather trenchcoat and looks as much like Black Adder’s WWI Lord Flashheart as it is possible to do unironically.

• We can see that Wilfred is already well on his way to villainy thanks to a tour of some really evil plants at the beginning of the movie. One appears to be a shoggoth, in fact, or some sort of shoggoth/sea anemone hybrid.
• This is, hands down, the most stereotypically British horror movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve certainly put in my hours watching Hammer films. There’s something so endearing about a ravening monster who stops to put on his scarf and hat before he goes out to eat pedestrians.
• Our protagonist is at one point warned that “the werewolf seeks to kill the thing it loves best.” Based on our actual body count, it would appear that what Wilfred really loves is blondes with good screaming voices.

The Verdict: As long as you don’t pin your hopes of entertainment on the actual werewolf, Werewolf of London is an awful lot of fun. If only someone had explained about the shoggoth.

Might go well with: Carpaccio, edible flowers, Bombay Sapphire.

 

Next time: Cartoon characters with frickin’ laser beams.

 

*To whom I may or may not have been married at one time.

We lost one of the greats with the passing of Sir Christopher Lee last week. Since most of the things I own featuring Lee are much beloved and rewatched—The Last Unicorn, The Wicker Man, even Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow—I’m going to turn to the one that isn’t.

Why Found-Again? I’m not sure why Satanic Rites of Dracula is the only Hammer Dracula film I own, mind you; a list of my favorites could easily consist of the words “any I’ve seen except this one, really.” (After Taste the Blood of Dracula, it’s all downhill for me.) Though it’s been sitting on my shelf for years, I still have vivid memories of buying this DVD at Wal-Mart for 88 cents, watching it, and deciding I’d paid too much.

The Premise: If you’ve ever seen a Hammer Dracula film, you know the drill: a bunch of mortals end up raising one of the better-known vampires from whatever fate befell him in the previous Hammer Dracula film. At least in this case it’s deliberate, and done before the movie starts.

Dracula is kind of a corporate overlord this time, which may explain why he’s trying to destroy the world through germ warfare (a super-strain of good old bubonic plague) instead of confining his depredations to filmily clad women and their would-be rescuers. The women are there, of course; they’re just not the focus. This time, the Count is thinking big.

I’ve read that this is a sequel of sorts to Dracula AD 1972, but music notwithstanding, Satanic Rites lacks a lot of the fun counterculture vibe of its predecessor. (It also lacks Stephanie Beacham, a favorite of mine ever since she was on the ill-fated Dynasty spinoff The Colbys in the ’80s.)

The Verdict: You’d think mixing a Pendergast-novel-style thriller with vampires and Christopher Lee would be right up my alley, but no.  Intellectually, there’s nothing wrong with Dracula being in a modern setting, but I’ve never quite been able to get over it, or over Peter Cushing’s psychiatrist van Helsing expounding on Dracula’s death wish. Lee as always knocks it out of the park, as does most of the cast—including Cushing, Joanna Lumley, and character actor Freddie Jones, who appears in my movie collection even more often than Christopher Lee. It seems odd to say that never has a movie that opens with a black-magic ceremony so disappointed me, but…

And, of course, this is the one where Dracula gets defeated by a hawthorn bush. As Opus the Penguin once said, I can’t support that.

Bonus Points For: The Freddie Jones character has his own institute, complete with a plaque: “The Keeley Foundation for Science.” What science? Evil, nihilistic science! I guess that wouldn’t all fit on the sign, though.

 

Might go well with: Bloody Marys, Gummi rats, English food, The Day of the Jackal.

 

Next time: The very, very end of Highlander. Not quite the end of me writing about it, though.