Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 5

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 26

Hellraiser (1987- dir. Clive Barker) **

The premise of Clive Barker's adaptation of his own novella, The Hellbound Heart, is appropriately skeletal. Some dickhead stumbles into hell, and manages to escape and return to corporeal form by slaughtering the assholes his sister-in-law/sex monkey lures to him using her feminine wiles. Unfortunately, a band of mutant hell monsters miss torturing him so much that they go searching for him in the earthly realm. With its bad acting, leaden dialogue, and over-the-top gore, Hellraiser plays like a pre-teen goth's attempt to freak out his parents. Ooooh! Extreme!

Phenomena (1985- dir. Dario Argento) ***

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 4

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 19

Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter (1974- dir. Brian Clemens) ****

At a time when Hammer was doubling down on its exploitative rep, the studio produced this comparatively light-hearted romp in which a swashbuckler trots across the countryside looking for vampires to stab. Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter may be Hammer’s freshest film of the seventies. James Needs’s editing is very stylish (a pub swordfight is pricelessly executed), and Horst Janson is reasonably appealing as the vamp slayer (though his penchant for violent sex is a gratuitous capitulation to the era’s nastier ethos). Caroline Munro and John Cater as Kronos’s more personable sidekicks are better. It’s too bad this did not lead to the series it was intended to because it would have been great fun to watch this dynamic trio swashbuckle their way through other adventures.

Blair Witch (2016- dir. Adam Wingard) **

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 3

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 12

Straight Jacket (1964- dir. William Castle) ***

This is a minor William Castle shocker, but Joan Crawford makes her presence felt as a woman trying to put her life back together after a long stint in an asylum for offing her husband with a wire hanger an axe. The twist is so-so, but getting the chance to see Crawford ham it up in a Castle picture is enough. The picture loses half a point because Castle never actually appears on screen to charm us with a schlocky gimmick while sucking on a giant cigar.

October 13

It Follows (2014- dir. David Robert Mitchell) ****½

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 2

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 5

Mill of the Stone Women (1960- dir. Giorgio Ferroni) ***½

A young doofus goes to work for an artist famous for creating a gruesome carousel of infamous women condemned to death. The doofus has a fling with the artist’s daughter despite the warning that she’ll drop dead if she becomes slightly upset. Needless to say, this relationship does not end well. Despite a plot so similar to a couple of other movies that if I gave you their titles you’d have this one’s plot figured out lickety-split and heaps of exposition subtle as Nikolai Volkoff’s scrotum in your soup, Mill of the Stone Women is pretty exceptional. The creepy-sculpture-crammed windmill is an ace horror movie setting, and though the characters all start off pretty blah, they all go absolutely bonkers by the fiery, freaky climax. Poe would have been envious.

The Boogeyman (1980- dir. Ulli Lommel) **½

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 1

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 1

Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972- dir. Lucio Fulci) ****

Well, we’re off to a good start with a refreshing surprise. I’ve never been a fan of Lucio Fulci’s gory nonsense, so I wasn’t expecting to find anything appealing about one of his most famous flicks. Yet there is a quite a bit about the charmingly titled Don’t Torture a Duckling that is appealing, such as a central mystery—specifically, who’s murdering the kids in a little Italian village?— with a gaggle of suspects. This little village has the highest population of weirdos this side of Twin Peaks. There’s an accused witch, a hermit who practices black magic (and cut a police interrogation short because he has to “take a crap”), and Barbara Bouchet as a drugged up pedophile. Fulci keeps the excessive gore to a minimum, allowing it to shine in one scene that is genuinely disturbing and one that is unintentionally hilarious. I saw the culprit coming from a mile away, but the twist will be a neat one for those who aren’t programmed to look for that kind of thing.

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962- dir. Riccardo Freda) ***

Diary of the Dead: Spring 2015

The ice has broken. The snow has melted. The temperature has risen. All this can only mean one thing: I may now commence spending the next six months wishing all this wretched warm weather away so that Halloween season can make a speedy return. Since I’m impatient by nature, I will mark this occasion by starting Halloween season right now, or at least enjoying a taste of it with a mini-installment of one of Psychobabble’s triedest and truest Halloween Season traditions: Diary of the Dead.

The films I spent March watching were mostly recommendations culled from Christopher Workman and Troy Howarth’s Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the 1930s, which I reviewed last month, so you will notice a definite decade bias amongst the following selections. I also managed to sneak in a few flicks from other decades that had been haunting my movies-to-see queue for far too long.

So squirt that sunscreen down the commode, kick off those sandals, and slip on your hobnail boots, because spring has been cancelled and Halloween season has been green lighted all in the name of a fiendish feature I call Diary of the Dead.

I wrote it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

March 11

One Frightened Night (1935- dir. Christy Cabanne) ***

A cantankerous chap with a heart of gold and a bank account of gold announces his plans to hand out fat inheritances to a bunch of friends and relatives before a new tax law goes into effect at midnight. When a woman claiming to be his granddaughter shows up, he decides to give the whole fortune to her instead, and the jilted group’s greed takes over. Things get more convoluted when yet another alleged granddaughter arrives, and someone ends up dead. This is standard-issue old dark house stuff with an incessant lightning storm, a killer in a grotesque mask, and a mummy (don’t get too excited. It stays put). The patter is passable and the cast is very good, particularly the lovable Charley Grapewin (Uncle Henry of The Wizard of Oz) as old grampa moneybags.

March 14

The Drums of Jeopardy (1931- dir. George B Seitz) ***½

Diary of the Dead 2014

Every year I log my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October in a fiendish feature I call Diary of the Dead. This year I altered the scheme slightly for a single, season-ending post.

I wrote it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

Oct. 1

Rodan (1956- dir. Ishirō Honda) **

One of the most iconic giant Japanese monsters first appeared in a pretty boring movie. Miners discover a baby pterodactyl that looks and moves like a kite. It terrorizes Japan without a smidgen of the moodiness of its forefather, Gojira. Amazing that Ishirō Honda followed that masterpiece with such a lazy picture. Rodan would only become fun when paired with Gojira, as we shall soon see.

We Are What We Are (2013- dir. Jim Mickie) ***

I haven’t seen the Mexican film upon which this cannibal family flick was based, so I can’t make any unfavorable comparisons. Taken on its own merits, the American We Are What We Are is refreshingly atmospheric. It’s also deliberately paced, which I usually like, but this one’s a little too deliberate, bordering on tedious. It’s also a bit empty aside from its fairly subtle critique of the patriarchy. On the plus side, it has Michael Parks, which is worth at least half a star.

Oct. 3

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964- Ishirō Honda) ***½

This is more like it. Since Honda didn’t seem interested in/capable of recapturing the grimness of Gojira he took his kaiju franchise to its logical camp conclusion. Rodan is back and less turgid in mood if not motion. So is Gojira and giant bug Mothra. The old rampaging monsters experience a change of heart when faced with three-headed dragon Ghidorah. They actually have a conversation about whether or not they should assist humanity by offing the new menace! Plus there are those wacky fairy twins, who appear on a crazy TV talk show. Perhaps not great fun, but certainly good fun.

Oct. 4

Diary of the Dead 2013: Week 5

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 25

The Invisible Ray (1936- dir. Lambert Hillyer) ***½

In one of the last gasps of the first wave of Universal horror, the studio’s two biggest legends—Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff (or KARLOFF, as he’s credited here)—are scientists who form an uneasy alliance after Karloff captures a ray from the Andromeda nebula that leads him to a pre-historic meteor in Africa. The partnership gets a bit complicated when that meteor turns Karloff into a psycho King Midas in Reverse. The Invisible Ray is almost like a two-decades-early bridge between the Gothic horrors of the thirties and the atom-age paranoia of the fifties with lightning storm-soaked castles sharing the screen with radiation-derived monsterism. Needless to say, the African-native scenes are an uncomfortable watch today, but the variety in setting and action keeps the pace moving and the planetarium-esque outer space effects are magical. Also needless to say, you really can’t go wrong with a Karloff/Lugosi pairing (it’s always interesting to see the more sinister Bela play the good guy) even if The Invisible Ray can’t touch the dastardly duo’s greatest collaborations in The Black Cat, The Raven, and Son of Frankenstein.

I Sell the Dead (2008- dir. Glenn McQuaid) ****

Corpse-snatching comedy transforms into vampire-comedy into Martian-comedy into zombie-comedy without ever shifting from completely likable. Condemned grave robber Dominic Monaghan makes his final confession about his nocturnal transgressions to Father Ron Perlman. New director Glenn McQuaid draws on Amicus movies (his film is almost like a portmanteau with the same characters in each episode) and horror comics (there are some neat illustration effects) to invoke a colorful, lively, and funny film of his own distinct style. Monaghan and Larry Fessenden (who also co-produced) as his mentor in ghoulish crime are a charismatically grimy team, while the creatures they unearth and Phantasm’s Angus Scrimm as a nasty blackmailer supply some sincere creepiness. A groovy debut .

October 28

The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988- dir. Wes Craven) ***

I wonder what Wade Davis thought when Wes Craven took his real-life account of Haitian zombification rituals and turned it into a horror movie with snake-vomiting corpses, supernatural punch-ups, and scrotum torture. Its see-sawing between the realistic and the outlandish does make The Serpent and the Rainbow an uneven movie even if it’s nicely shot and Bill Pullman is pretty good as Davis’s stand-in. Some of the horror works (the walking corpse in a bride’s veil; the torture and living burial) and some doesn’t (the soup zombie). While most of this stuff can be chalked up to tetrodotoxin-induced hallucinations, the goofy climactic showdown between jaguar-spirit-infused Pullman and a rival voodoo dude plunges the film fully into the fantastical. The Serpent and the Rainbow is most interesting as one of the last feature films to deal with the original Caribbean zombie variety before Romero’s living dead swarms took over the world for better or worse. Perhaps the political incorrectness of exoticizing other cultures is the reason the voodoo zombie is basically extinct, but after seeing one too many zombie-Nazi, zombie-girlfriend, or zombie-canary movies, you may start longing for a little dose of tetrodotoxin yourself.

The Old Dark House (1963- dir. William Castle) **½

William Castle did a wonderful job with The House on Haunted Hill, so the idea of him remaking the original “old dark house” movie was not a bad one, especially as it was a joint venture with Hammer Studios, the best remakers of Universal horror properties. Too bad this movie is so mediocre. James Whale’s movie was wonderful because it evenly balanced genuinely funny comedy with genuinely scary scares. Castle interprets The Old Dark House as a straight-up comedy with Robert Dillon’s script resembling The Cat and the Canary more than Whale’s picture. Tom Poston is forced to do quintuple duty by standing in for the entire array of stranded visitors whose interplay brought so much humor and warmth to the 1932 movie. Though Poston is likable, he can’t really carry a movie on his own. The Femm family does little to pick up the slack because the acting just isn’t wild enough. Plus, Castle’s charm depended on a deft balance of schlock and cinematographic artistry. Shot in color, The Old Dark House lacks the style and grace of House on Haunted Hill or Mr. Sardonicus, so the only thing left is the schlock, which isn’t even really schlocky enough to be interesting. Some of the jokes are mildly amusing, and the Noah’s Ark angle is novel, but Castle’s The Old Dark House just isn’t dark enough.

October 29

The Blood Beast Terror (1968- dir. Vernon Sewell) ***½

Peter Cushing is investigating a series of bloody deaths. The only witness is a raving fellow who claims he saw a winged creature hovering over one of the bodies. An etymologist may have more insight into what’s really going on. Despite the blood, hyperbolically bloody awful title, a pretty insane resolution, and Cushing’s well-known dislike of the movie, The Blood Beast Terror plays more like reserved mystery than grisly exploitation. If anything The Blood Beast Terror could have used a healthier dollop of schlock, because it’s a bit too low-key. At least it doesn’t take itself seriously. The self-parodying stage play sequence is neat, and several minor roles are very amusingly acted.

October 30

Son of Dracula (1943- dir. Robert Siodmak) ***

Perhaps we should call the final day of Diary of the Dead 2013 “Spawn of Dracula Day” or something, because our second movie features Van Helsing’s offspring and our first stars Lon Chaney, Jr., as the Son of Dracula. The Man of Four or Five Faces plays Count Alucard, and if you have a pen and paper, you can figure out his true identity pretty quickly. You might have more trouble if you simply look at and listen to the guy, because there’s nothing terribly Dracula-ish about Chaney’s San Clemente accent or his awkward posture in the cape. Lon had the honor of basically playing all four of Universal’s major monsters, but his turn as the vampire wasn’t much of a feather in his cap. Yet the miscast lead role isn’t that big of an issue since there’s so little of him in Son of Dracula. I get a kick out of how much Robert Siodmak abuses his bat privileges; it’s as if the director realized that the vampire was much more convincing as a flapping piece of rubber than he was as Lon Chaney, Jr. Nevertheless, I love Chaney’s entrance in which he shoots us-the-viewers a knowing glance over his shoulder. Siodmak also realizes the movie with good special effects and nourish style, and the swampy setting is very cool, as is the shot of Chaney wheeling through it. Louise Allbritton is eerie as a Goth groupie turned vampire and Robert Paige is totally nuts as her trigger-happy fiancé, but Evelyn Ankers is just as underused as Chaney. At least Bela Lugosi didn’t have to worry that the younger upstart might depose him as the greatest of all Draculas.

Dracula A.D. 1972 (Duh- dir. Alan Gibson) ***½

It all ends in 1972, but first a romp to 1872 where Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing slays Christopher Lee’s Dracula in a Hammer movie for the trillionth time. We then zip ahead a century to when the world has transformed into a more superfly environment of hippie bands and outta sight young people like Caroline Munro, Marsha Hunt, and Van Helsing’s great great great great granddaughter Stephanie Beacham. There are also not-so young people like Lorrimer Van Helsing, Beacham’s granddad, also played by Cushing. Wait a minute! I have a better name for today’s line up! “Alucard Day,” because the hamtastic Christopher Neame plays another vampire who thinks he’s super clever by spelling the infamous count’s name in reverse! Not having Christopher Lee wander around in 1972 looking freaked out by costumes and customs weirder than his own is a major missed opportunity, but the new development that taking a shower kills vampires is utterly brilliant. Is Dracula A.D. 1972 effective horror? A respectable entry in the Hammer Horror canon? A dignified day’s work for the esteemed Cushing and Lee? No way, Jose. Is it retro-delic fun and a dy-no-mite way to end this year’s Diary of the Dead? Correctamundo!

Diary of the Dead 2013: Week 4

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 18

Phantom of the Opera (1943- dir. Arthur Lubin) **½

With the original era of Universal horror having its last hurrah with 1941’s The Wolf Man, the studio started dipping back into old properties in earnest throughout the forties. This usually manifested in sequels uniting the Wolf Man, Dracula, and the Frankenstein Monster in various configurations, but there were also a couple of Full-on remakes in order. The first was Charles Laughton’s reinterpretation of Chaney in 1939’s Hunchback of Notre Dame. The second found another formidable actor attempting to fill the Man of a Thousand Faces’ boots. No doubt Claude Rains is a superb actor and one of Universal’s most unforgettable horror stars, but the version of Phantom of the Opera in which he starred is utterly forgettable. Because of the U.S.’s recent entry into World War II, the studio got cold feet and decided to tone down too many of the elements that made the original so chilling, most notably doing a half-assed job on the Phantom makeup for fear of reminding viewers of those who’d been disfigured in the war. It gives the key unmasking sequence the impact of a soggy washcloth. The rest of the movie is pretty lame too, with an abundance of corny musical numbers that go on and on, soppy romance, and fatigued comic relief where the horror should be. Rains is very sympathetic but not at all menacing as the Phantom with none of the delicious mania he supplied in The Invisible Man. While the decision to shoot in color made commercial sense—and the film certainly looks sumptuous— it also made this Phantom the odd-man out from Universal’s greatest monster pictures. Tellingly, the other second-wave monster pictures would return to black and white. This is less essential than even the monster rallies, which are at least terrific fun.

Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula (1979- dir. Harry Hurwitz) *½

Nearly every detail of this soft-core disco vampire comedy seems consciously designed to make it rank as one of the worst movies ever made. The awful script. The cheesy, gratuitous nudity. The absolutely horrid acting. The rhythmically-challenged dancing. The sad appearances of John Carradine as the count and Yvonne De Carlo as his old flame. Brother Theodore’s hammy mugging as a werewolf/Renfield type character who longs for the title vamp. She is really the one who brings the terrible Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula to unprecedented heights of terribility. Crazy-eyed, perpetually grinning Nai Bonet must have taken a page from the Bela Lugosi book of acting by learning her lines phonetically, because there isn’t a trace of expression in anything she says. This would be prime stuff for at-home Mystery Science Theatre sessions if it wasn’t so boring. That half star is for some pretty good numbers by a disco group called Moment of Truth.

October 21

Blackenstein (1973- dir. William A. Levey) **

Diary of the Dead 2013: Week 3

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 11

Seed of Chucky (2004- dir. Don Mancini) ***

…after taking two steps forward with Bride of Chucky we take two steps back on the third and final day of our Chucky-a-thon. In Seed of Chucky, Jennifer Tilly plays herself as the star of a new movie based on the real-life exploits of Chucky and Tiffany. Billy Boyd joins the family as the voice of Glen/Glenda, the dolls’ Pinocchio-esque (and rather incontinent) child. The problem is the movie is too mean to Tilly, who goes along with all the gags at her expense gamely enough that maybe we shouldn’t feel too sorry for her, but it still isn’t much fun to watch. There’s also a little too much truth in advertising. This isn’t just called Seed of Chucky because of Glen/Glenda; there is a lot of doll sperm in this movie from the bad CGI opening credits sequence to Chucky whacking off to an issue of Fangoria to a truly unpleasant scene in which Tiffany artificially inseminates Tilly. This must be the lazy influence of the gross-out comedies that There’s Something About Mary spawned, or perhaps it’s writer/director Don Mancini’s attempt to make a John Waters movie, since Waters is on board as a relentless paparazzo. I have no beef with a sperm joke as long as it’s funny, but Tilly getting sexually assaulted most definitely is not. I preferred Glen/Glenda, who brings a little heart to the series. He’s a good character that saves Seed of Chucky from being as blah as Child’s Play 2, and Mancini pulls a funny running gag from the dolls’ “Made in Japan” stamps and there’s a good Shining joke toward the end, so Seed of Chucky isn’t a total wash.

—And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973- dir. Roy Ward Baker) ***

The big gimmick of the delightfully titled —And Now the Screaming Starts! is that there’s no gimmick at all. Amicus, the studio best known for its portmanteaus, delivers a straightforward feature. Stephanie Beacham moves into her new husband’s old manor. The ghosts there would prefer she left. This starts as an old-fashioned old dark house movie with an eyeless ghost that emerges from paintings of Herbert Lom and a severed hand that keeps crawling around and grabbing people. Then it takes an unexpected turn from the cheesily generic to the rapey and serious. It’s OK stuff that gets a boost from Roy Ward Baker’s ever-fine direction and a geek-pleasing cast that includes Beacham, Lom, Peter Cushing, and Patrick Magee, although all but Beacham are underused.

October 13

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012- dir. Timur Bekmambetov) *½

Is it possible for a movie to not only be about vampires but actually be a vampire? I vote “yes,” because while watching Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, I felt like my brain was being sucked out of my head with the passing of every frame. I guess that would make it more of a zombie than a vampire, but let’s not get too nitpicky about a movie with such a complete disdain for history. A campy premise can be played without camp, as Don Coscarelli did so brilliantly with Bubba Ho-Tep, but it shouldn’t be played with a complete absence of self-awareness and humor… at least not with so much bad CGI. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is played so straight it ends up falling on its own stake. Indeed, the dumbest part of this symphony of dumb action and dumber editing is that it thinks it has something profound to say about human rights. You mean slavery is bad and slavers are like vampires? Keep filling my brain with knowledge! The best thing about watching Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is that my wife will now stop pressuring me to watch Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.

October 14

King Kong (1976- dir. John Guilermin) ****

It’s been a good three decades since I’ve seen Dino De Laurentiis’s infamous production of King Kong. As a kid, I didn’t think it was that bad. As an adult, this opinion holds true. I liked the updates, which both make it less demanding of comparison to the (obviously) superior original and made it very relevant to a 1970s audience with its recasting of Carl Denham as a greedy oil man (is there any other kind?), Jack Driscoll as an environmentally-conscious paleontologist, and Ann Darrow as a spaced-out Hollywood starlet whose life is saved by Deep Throat only so she can be abducted by a giant gorilla. While Rick Baker in a gorilla suit is no substitute for Willis O’Brien’s marvelous special effects, the animatronic mask is much more articulate than the usual ludicrous gorilla costume. Plus it’s satisfyingly self-conscious of its shortcomings (Jack: “Who the hell do you think went through there? Some guy in an ape suit?”). Thank Lorenzo Semple, Jr., for the persistent wit; he was also the screenwriter behind many episodes of “Batman,” the wittiest TV show of the sixties.  The cast is very good too with Jeff Bridges, Chuck Grodin, and Jessica Lange keeping you from shrieking “Bring on the goddamned monkey, already!” for the first 50 minutes of the movie. I really liked it. Sue me.

Diary of a Madman (1963- dir. Reginald Le Borg) ***

Vincent Price holds down the fort in this adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s story “Le Horla.” A condemned man is under the influence of a murderous entity called the Horla. When he suddenly dies in the presence of Price, our star becomes the new host. Because it’s a period spook story from a literary source starring Vincent Price, it’s hard not to compare it to Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe pictures of the same period. The relatively style-less, chintzy, and talky Diary of a Madman suffers in that comparison, but Price puts his customary all into the role of the tortured magistrate and Nancy Kovack is very watchable as a gold-digging yet conflicted model. There’s also a pretty neat animated effect in which Price’s sculpture transforms from a smiley Nancy to a frowny Nancy. That statue is also involved in the movie’s one truly effective scare.

October 15

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012- dir. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman) **

Poor Katie Featherston. She’s a good actress. Must she be forever doomed to skulk around in sequel after sequel after sequel of the Paranormal Activity series? As was the case in part 3, Katie is actually a minor player. The main characters are a bunch of kids, and since this latest installment is set in the present instead of the halcyon days of 2006, there’s no need to explain why everything is being filmed even before the weird stuff starts happening, because kids (and most adults) today just live their lives through their cell phone viewfinders. Progress! The Paranormal Activity movies, however, have not progressed. Shadows dash in the background. Doors move. Stairs thump. Chandeliers sway. People sleep. The most significant addition is the reliance on fake-out scares, which occur at a truly absurd rate. What started as a really, really scary little movie has become just another formulaic horror franchise. And there’s no end in sight! Paranormal Activity 5 is in the works for 2014! At least we all get a break this year.

October 16

The Hands of Orlac (1924- dir. Robert Wiene) ***

Five years after making The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the first feature horror film and the paragon of German Expressionism, Robert Wiene adapted Maurice Renard’s perennial terror tale about Paul Orlac, a pianist who loses his hands in a train crash and receives a transplant from a deceased murderer whose extremities have not lost their yen for killing. While the subject matter is wackier than that of Caligari, the visual style is much less phantasmagoric. Wiene only really lets his imagination loose during Orlac’s dream of his hands’ former owner, and even that sequence does not approach the nightmarish distortions of Caligari. Comparison to Karl Freund’s frothing 1935 remake Mad Love also makes Orlac seem tame. On its own merits, The Hands of Orlac is a good shadow-submerged creeper and Conrad Veidt does his usual wonderfully weird work as Orlac. However, the nearly two-hour version of this originally ninety-minute film is unnecessarily drawn out and the ending is disappointing.

Zombie High (1987- dir. Ron Link) **½

An awesome cast (Virginia Madsen! Sherilyn Fenn! Paul Feig!) attends a high school academy where everyone listens to the worst generic pop songs in the world and their classmates get transformed into brain-dead conformists in the bio lab. What starts as tongue-in-cheek, retro-eighties fun turns turgid once that cast starts going under the knife and Madsen turns into Nancy Drew. Ultimately, Zombie High makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously, and what could have been a cool paranoid horror satire ends up being a bland paranoid horror movie. The true story of Aziz Ghazal—a guy who killed himself, his wife, and his daughter—is much more horrifying than anything in Zombie High, the movie he wrote and produced.

October 17

Attack of the Puppet People (1958- dir. Bert I. Gordon) ****

The cigar-sucking execs at AIP suss that if the kids will turn out for an Incredible Shrinking Man they will surely quadruple their numbers for a whole crowd of Incredible Shrinking Men and Women. John Hoyt commits himself delightfully to the role of Mr. Franz, a lonely doll maker who miniaturizes folks to add to his collection. Few villains are so endearing. Bert I. Gordon’s Attack of the Puppet People most certainly is not the profound classic that Jack Arnold’s film is, and the “dolls” in suspended animation are clearly two-dimensional photographs, so it doesn’t always wow on the special-effects front. Big deal! Attack of the Puppet People remains one of AIP’s most charming and poignant B-horrors. You’d have to be a super-sized ass wipe to not want to get shrunk down so you could dance to Rock & Roll on Mr. Franz’s desktop. What fun! Director Gordon was really into this kind of stuff. His other films included such size-shifting epics as The Amazing Colossal Man (which June Kenney and John Agar watch at a drive-in in Puppet People!), War of the Colossal Beast, Village of the Giants, and The Food of the Gods. His nickname “Mister B.I.G.” was not unearned.

Diary of the Dead 2013: Week 2

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 4

Hollywood Boulevard (1976- dir. Allan Arkush and Joe Dante) ***

Producer Jon Davison bet that he could make the cheapest movie New World Pictures ever made. Roger Corman took that bet, hence the existence of Hollywood Boulevard, a $60,000 crazed-killer flick/clip show littered with bits from eleven previous Corman pictures. Davison guaranteed he’d have more than a bet-winning turkey on his hands by hiring the future directors of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and Gremlins to get behind the camera and Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, Dick Miller, and the deputy from Jaws to get in front of it (plus bonus cameos from Robby the Robot and Godzilla!). As a result, Hollywood Boulevard is a cartoon-come-to-life parody of movie making from a bunch of people who’d reduced movie making to a cartoon parody. Unfortunately, attempts to mine laughs from rape keep derailing the fun. Exploitative, sleazy, self-aware, and mostly entertaining. It’s a Roger Corman movie.

Konga (1961- dir. John Lemont) ***½

AIP gives King Kong a mad scientist twist in Konga. Michael Gough is the doc who gives his chimp, Konga, a dose of giganto serum he picked up from an old witch doctor buddy. Soon the cute little guy is a hulking gorilla loose in London and smiting Gough’s enemies. I get why Konga gets bigger, but there’s no explanation for why he becomes a totally different species of primate. Whatever. It’s pretty stupid tp split hairs about a movie starring a guy in a gorilla suit. Gough is pretty psycho, so Konga isn’t totally devoid of menace, and the ease with which his sweet girlfriend (Margo Johns) goes along with the killing is kind of chilling, but the bottom line is that this is schlock, which becomes wildly clear when Konga starts treating Gough like Fay Wray in the final reel. I like schlock, and it sure isn’t boring, so I’m not complaining.

October 5

World War Z (2013- dir. Marc Forster) **

Despite being the most limited monsters, zombies continue to get more play than vampires, werewolves, and Frankensteins combined. World War Z is well made and well acted, but you’ve seen 100 other movies just like it and there will be 100 more before this year is over. The only things that distinguish it from other zombie movies are its globetrotting and its refusal to criticize the military. Otherwise, World War Z is purely generic. Panic in the streets, martial law, flesh eating, metaphor, metaphor, blah, blah, blah.

October 6

Scream Pretty Peggy (1973- dir. Gordon Hessler) ***½

Donald from “That Girl” is a sculptor who hires a college kid to do his housekeeping. His mom is Bette Davis, who flounces around the house in her nightgown drunk. He keeps his sister locked up above the garage to keep her from hacking up the neighbors with a kitchen knife. Co-writers Jimmy Sangster and Arthur Hoffe rip limbs off of three well-familiar Gothic and horror stories, piece them back together like a couple of little Dr. Frankensteins, and end up with a made-for-TV horror flick that goes down as easily as a fistful of Velveeta. Plus, you can never go wrong with Bette Davis. That’s currency you can put in the bank.

October 7

Pumpkinhead (1988- dir. Stan Winston) ****½

Special effects and makeup whiz Stan Winston (Jurassic Park, Aliens, The Star Wars Christmas Special) takes a crack at directing his own film and cracks it wide open. At a time when cynical slasher movies and ironic horror-comedies were king, Winston made an old-fashioned monster movie with a fairy tale-like atmosphere. Pumpkinhead is a wonderful creation, not unlike the Gill Man but still very original, which is the least we should expect from Winston. The real surprise is how much humanity, sincerity, and willingness to confront moral complexities he brings to his first picture. Lance Henrickson gives a restrained yet emotionally intense performance as a grief-stricken father who makes a demonic deal of love and revenge. Winston makes some concessions to contemporary tastes with the systematic slaughter of a bunch of teens, and the killings are the least interesting parts of Pumpkinhead. Fortunately, Winston populates his film with enough witches, monsters, owls, spooky old graveyards, and real people with real feelings to distinguish his film from its era.

Grim Prairie Tales (1990- dir. Wayne Coe) *

A couple of great actors anchor this direct-to-video portmanteau, but there’s no getting around how insubstantial it is. Menacing James Earl Jones and city slicker Brad Dourif tell each other a quartet of horror stories around a campfire in frontier times. There’s so little to the first tale about a man passing over an Indian burial ground that the most shocking moment is when it ends so abruptly and anticlimactically. The second one about a sexual encounter is the best of the lot for its utter weirdness, but again, it’s all over too quickly. The third tale, in which a girl discovers that her dad (William Atherton) is a member of a lynch mob, is actually genuinely horrifying, but not for the usual horror movie reasons. This story raises some serious issues, and its refusal to deal with them more directly may have worked in a better film, but it feels downright offensive in this perfunctory piece of crap. Finally, there are some gunslingers and a ghost. In the spirit of the movie I’m reviewing, I’m not going to bother thinking about that final story, and I’m just going to end this review in the sloppiest, most sudden way I can. Fart.

October 8

Room 237 (2012- dir. Rodney Ascher) ***

If any filmmaker constructed his images so meticulously that even his background props deserve closer study, it’s Stanley Kubrick, but Room 237 is not really a documentary about interpretations of The Shining. It’s about how that invitation to study closer can be a slippery slope to the kind of madness Jack Torrance might think is a bit much. Not every interviewee is a total crackpot. The guy who reads themes of Native American genocide into The Shining brings up some interesting ideas before going off the deep end, and hats off to the eagle eye who somehow spotted that Jack is reading a Playgirl while waiting in the Overlook lobby. However, the woman who sees Minotaurs in every frame takes overreaching to new lengths, as does the guy who’s convinced the movie is about the holocaust. The one who believes Kubrick faked the Apollo moon landing footage is flat-out nuts. A little of this stuff goes a long way, and Room 237 could have earned itself another half-star by losing a half-hour. That footage of The Shining superimposed forwards and backwards over itself is pretty cool though.

October 9

Child’s Play 2 (1990- dir. John Lafia) **

When I began Diary of the Dead (and Psychobabble!) five years ago, the biggest and most delightful surprise was how good Child’s Play is (which, quite coincidentally, I watched precisely five years ago today). In tribute to that momentous discovery, I’m going to be hitting a Chucky adventure a day for the next three days. First up is John Lafia’s Child’s Play 2, in which Grace Zabriskie places the kid from the first movie in Jenny Agutter’s foster home. Brad Dourif returns as Chucky, who possesses a Good Guy doll left by one of Agutter’s former charges. Mayhem ensues. As I’m, sure you’ve already detected, the cast of Child’s Play 2 is very cool. Dourif still delivers some foul-mouthed fun, but there’s not nearly enough Zabriskie. That’s not the only issue with Child’s Play 2, which just isn’t imaginatively written or directed. There’s none of Child’s Play’s social criticism and too little of its humor and outrageousness. I have a feeling that’s going to change tomorrow, though.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995- dir. Mel Brooks) **

Why oh why would Mel Brooks make a movie that so welcomes comparison to his greatest parody? His love for the subject matter is just as on display in Dracula: Dead and Loving It as it was in Young Frankenstein (no doubt horror historian and co-screenwriter Steve Haberman can also be thanked for a lot of the specific references to Tod Browning’s movie), and the cast is good, but they have nothing to work with. Brooks’s best films—Young Frankenstein, The Producers, even Blazing Saddles—each had an emotional core that is totally absent from this cold corpse. Even worse, there isn’t a single funny gag. You know the screenwriters are desperate when they start stealing jokes from “The Groovie Goolies.”

October 10

Bride of Chucky (1998- dir. RonnyYu) ****½

After a genuinely clever and pointed opening act, a lazy Part 2, and a third act that I haven’t seen, Chucky is back and realizing his full high-camp potential in the post-Scream era of self-aware horror. The winking nods to horror films past come furiously. Psycho, sexy, hilarious Jennifer Tilly is here to carry the first half of the picture as Charles Lee Ray’s former murder-mate, Tiffany. She then resurrects Chucky with a handy copy of Voodoo for Dummies and gets transformed into a devil dolly herself. Bride of Chucky is the most fun installment so far. Director Ronny Yu and cinematographer Peter Pau animate it with wonderful style that often resembles panels from an E.C. horror comic, and the doll effects are rad. Tilly and Brad Dourif are a killer team whether in the flesh or in the plastic. I even liked the teens’ funny “accidental Bonnie and Clyde” parallel plot. But what would happen if Tiffany got her wish and this terrible two had a baby doll?

To be continued…