October 7st
Alice (1988- dir. Jan Švankmajer) ****
Alice begins with the title tot intoning, “Now you will watch a film made for children… perhaps.” Yeah, perhaps you want to stay up all night consoling your hysterical child who’d just been traumatized by Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion animal skeletons and taxidermied carcasses. Perhaps not. No filmmaker has ever really been able to capture the quizzical humor of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Švankmajer doesn’t really try. His Alice is more of a minimalistic nightmare. The repetitious scraps of dialogue mock Carroll’s copious wordplay. The googly-eyed, chisel-toothed White Rabbit splits open and bleeds torrents of sawdust blood. The sets are dank and derelict. The film reeks of mildew and formaldehyde. This is not horror in the sense that anyone gets hunted by a monster or hacked up by a mad man, but Alice may do nastier things to your psyche than any of those kinds of movies. Patience is required, though.
October 10th
Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968- dir. Vernon Sewell) ***½
This nonsense loosely based on Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” is an excuse for naïve images of sex, drugs, and ritual sacrifice. Boris Karloff was winding down and wheelchair bound when he made Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka: The Crimson Cult), but he remained consummately committed. Throwaway lines like “All the best things in life are short lived” take on unintentional
